A Princess Visiting a Forest Shrine at Night

The artist Mir Kalan Khan was trained in the imperial workshops under Muhammad Shah, in Delhi, during the last real flourishing of that court's artistic patronage. Then, in 1739, Nadir Shah invaded and sacked the city and with it, the elaborate ecosystem of artists, materials, and imperial commissions that had sustained painters like Khan for generations. A lot of his contemporaries simply scattered, and many workshops never really recovered. Khan, though, adapted. That move matters for understanding his style. Khan didn't just transplant a Delhi idiom onto a new city. He experimented with the play of light and shadows mostly while painting nocturnal scenes. His faces tend toward a three-quarter turn rather than a strict profile. And running through all of it are clear traces of European painting, linear perspective, chiaroscuro absorbed into a visual vocabulary still grounded in Mughal, Deccani, and wider Indian painting traditions. The figures worth lingering on are the Kanphata ascetics near the shrine, female devotees of Shiva, identifiable by the heavy rhinoceros-horn earrings that give the sect its name ("split-ear"). Elsewhere in the composition, other Hindu ascetics have settled at the base of a structure built in clearly Islamic architectural style, a tomb or mosque form repurposed as a site of Hindu devotional practice. Khan was a brilliant artist who brought novelty and nuances to the contemporary Mughal art and he deserves more attention to his work.