Foreword (2008)
Molly Emma Aitken Ph. D.
Between the late-15th and the mid-19th centuries, the Hindu courts of present-day Rajasthan, which were ruled by a warrior caste calling themselves Rajputs or “sons of kings,” patronized an extraordinary tradition of paintings on paper. Executed in mineral and vegetable pigments, these paintings were characterized by richly saturated colors, exuberant patterns, buoyant but often exquisitely precise lines, and extravagant visual metaphors. Communities of painters under the patronage of individual dynasties produced regionally distinct variations of this tradition, from the cool, enameled precision of paintings for the Jaipur court, to the luminous translucencies, imaginative stylizations and infinitely delicate refinement of paintings for the Bikaner elite.
The study of Rajput paintings has traditionally been the work of connoisseurs, who have focused on dating and on the assignment of paintings to particular regions. Their labors have been extremely useful, but scholars have more recently begun to turn their attention to textual sources in order to understand better how these paintings were made and how they were perceived in their day. To our knowledge, the Rajput tradition inspired no art treatises, nor has anyone found—or does anyone expect to find—a painter’s or patron’s personal accounts of this art, for such writing was not part of Rajput court culture. Instead, inscriptions, inventories of painting stores, documents of land grants and other forms of payment, as well as genealogies have begun to shed some grudging light on the world of the Rajput court painter and the assumptions that shaped his tradition.
Few scholars have the language skills to tackle these documents, the connections necessary to gain access to them, or the time away from home that is necessary to develop such relationships, for, understandably, it requires a great deal of trust for a family, or even an institution, to share precious historical materials. Among those few who have been able to gain extensive access to primary textual sources are B. N. Goswamy, who has documented the genealogy of an important family of painters in the Pahari region, Naval Krishna, who has located and translated numerous archival documents from the Bikaner court, and Tryna Lyons, who has traced the genealogies of several of Nathdwara’s families of painters, and published invaluable pages from their notebooks.[1] These scholars and other colleagues who have published similar materials are trained art historians. Therefore, it was quite astonishing and delightful to meet Shanane Davis, who, though she is outside the field, has translated, studied and organized extremely valuable documents on the Usta artists and artisans of Bikaner, as well as bringing to light numerous, previously unknown Bikaner paintings. Her work will make very important contributions to our understanding of Bikaner painting, in particular, and of Rajput painting, more generally.
Davis’s family has a long history in trade on the sub-continent, and she currently resides in Rajasthan. In the 1950s, her family enjoyed a friendship with the last of Bikaner’s Usta painters. Several years ago, Davis sought these painters out to reestablish the old family friendship, and was rewarded with access to a wealth of documentation still in the Usta family’s possession, including drawings, land grants, and royal documents confirming special privileges given to the Ustas over the centuries in recognition of their service to Bikaner’s royal family. Davis can read seven languages, including Peshto, Burushashki, Urdu, Hindi and the dialect used by Bikaner’s painters. She has consulted language specialists, throughout, for, as scholars well know, Rajasthani court documents employ highly erratic spellings and archaic formulations that make their translation anything but straightforward. Equally valuable to this project was Davis’s access to an extensive private collection of Bikaner drawings and paintings, many of which bear inscriptions. These include pounces, to facilitate reproduction of valued compositions, and Siyah Kalam (finished drawings) from as early as the late-16th century. The
publication of these pictures substantially increases our knowledge of the Bikaner tradition, while the correlations Davis has been able to draw between
these pictures and the documentary material she has studied constitute one of the most significant contributions of knowledge to the field in recent years. In the following pages, readers will gain a far more precise picture of who Bikaner’s painters were, how they were rewarded, how they worked, and what their relationship was with their patrons.
The Bikaner royal family was unusually committed to the art of painting. As Naval Krishna has pointed out, they offered unusually substantial rewards and symbols of status to their painters. Krishna refers to documents that equated the painters’ land grants with those of the nobility, and states that their status was “not inferior to that of some Thakurs [landowners] of the court.”[2] Davis offers important new data to this effect, including one document that grants the Usta painters the privilege of building a high-profile mosque in the city and another that records the gift to a painter of an astounding 800 acres of land. The latter document is also of the utmost importance because it documents the presence of the artist Nathu ji with his patron, Maharaja Anup Singh, in the Deccan. It is generally accepted that Bikaner painters paid close attention to Deccan conventions. Catherine Glynn has recently traced striking similarities between specific Bikaner and Deccan compositions.[3] However, Davis presents the first documentary evidence of Bikaner painters in the Deccan.
Arguably, Davis’ most important contribution will be the publication of a full genealogy of the Usta Umrani and Lalani clans of Bikaner painters. In a 2000 article, Naval Krishna wrote: “So far a few modern scholars have made useful though fragmentary attempts to reconstruct outline genealogies of the Umrani and other Bikaner painters, on the basis of inscriptional information from court paintings available to them, but without being able to consult the written genealogies formerly found in various old Usta households.”[4] Davis has been able to consult precisely those genealogies, bequeathing future scholars a treasury of material with which to build future studies.
I will not give away all of Davis’ surprises. Suffice to say these range from the documentary to the technical. Scholars will find her discussion of the importance of drawings and Siyah Kalam, and of the high regard with which painters stored their ancestors’ creations extremely illuminating. In addition, Davis introduces us to gold lacquer work techniques called Naqqashi and Manoti, which were another specialty of the Usta artisans of Bikaner. If the author’s claims to be able to recreate the famous yellow pigment gau-goli prove correct, that information too will solve a major mystery in the field. As exciting as what Davis has published here is the prospect of what scholars will make of this material in the future. Nor has Davis’ font run dry. This book represents a first compilation of much of what she has discovered, but there will be more. My discussions with her assure me that she will be a presence in the field for as many years as she chooses. I trust the field will welcome her as a colleague and embrace her findings as the grounds for much serious,
productive debate.
Molly Emma Aitken is a specialist in Asian art history, in particular the arts of South Asia. She received her Ph.D. in art history from Columbia University in 2000 after which she served a two-year stint as a Mellon Fellow at Columbia’s Society of Fellows in the Humanities. She has curated traveling exhibitions on South Asian jewelry and contemporary folk quilts, and has published numerous articles on Mughal and Rajput painting. Aitken received CAA’s Charles Rufus Morey book award in 2011 and the AAS Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy Book Prize in 2012 for her book The Intelligence of Tradition in Rajput Court Painting (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010.) She currently is an Associate Professor at the City College of New York.
You Can Buy or Read This Book From Amazon Kindle- The Bikaner School: Usta Artisans and Their Heritage
