Babur Entertains in Sultan Ibrahim Lodi's Palace from a Baburnama

Babur Entertains in Sultan Ibrahim Lodi's Palace, ca. 1585, by Farrukh Beg (active early 1580s–1619). Painted in opaque watercolour, ink, and gold on paper at Lahore, in the earliest years of the artist's Mughal service. This folio is dense in the manner of the Safavid ateliers that trained him, i.e., every surface wants filling, every plane wants pattern, the discipline of Farrukh Beg's Khurasani training pressing outward against a new Indian environment he has not yet fully absorbed. The palace rises across the right side with two-thirds of the composition in blushed salmon-pink, its façade organized with an almost obsessive Persian logic. A green-canopied pavilion crowning the roofline on slender colonnettes, a filigreed wooden jali screening an upper window through which no figure looks, a lower archway opening onto the reception itself. Beneath that arch, Babur stands attended, a tall-capped presence receiving covered trays borne forward by kneeling servants; the gesture is one of hospitality performed as diplomacy, gift exchange staged as the visual grammar of alliance. Below and to the left, in an open garden bounded by a slim grey-trunked tree whose foliage climbs unevenly into the gold-washed hills above. A second group of courtiers, robed in muted blue and cream, sits cross-legged in quieter conversation. While in the foreground a solitary figure in vivid red kneels on a carpet patterned in a dense. A single note of saturated colour set deliberately against the architecture's coral and the garden's grey-green hush. The faces throughout are for the most part round, idealized, interchangeable in the manner Farrukh Beg brought with him from Safavid Mashhad; but look at the black-robed elder just to Babur's left, and the difference is an immediate softer modeling, an individuated slackness at the jaw and brow, the first faint concession to the more psychologically alert portraiture already practiced by the Hindu and Iranian masters absorbed earlier into Akbar's atelier. The roughly painted melons heaped at the foot of the throne, coarser in handling than anything around them, are very possibly not his hand at all, but a colleague's addition. A small, ordinary fact that opens onto the larger truth of how this picture and other pictures like it, were actually made. Not by a solitary genius working in isolation but by a workshop of specialists, a senior designer's composition finished, elaborated, and occasionally corrected by other hands moving across the same sheet. This folio belonged to the first illustrated copy of the Baburnama, the memoir the Mughal emperor Babur wrote in Chagatai Turkic and which his grandson Akbar, some six decades after Babur's death, ordered translated into Persian by his khan-i khanan, Abd al-Rahim; the translation was presented at court in November 1589, and the imperial kitab-khana had already begun illustrating it in anticipation. But the scene painted here answers to no single sentence in that text. Babur's memoir describes receptions at Kabul and at Delhi, not this specific palace, and it is now understood that Farrukh Beg adapted a composition made for some earlier, unrelated commission, reworking it only slightly to serve a new narrative purpose. This is worth sitting with, because it unsettles the assumption that a manuscript illustration simply transcribes its text. Here the image precedes or at least floats free of the words it has been made to accompany, a generalized vision of princely reception pressed into service as a specific historical memory. It does not document an event; no one who made it had witnessed Babur's court, dead before any of them were born. It manufactures a memory on behalf of an empire that needed one by staging its founder, two generations retrospectively, in the act of gracious and legitimate sovereignty at the very moment his conquest of Hindustan was being consolidated into dynastic myth. The palace Farrukh Beg paints is nowhere. This is like every Timurid-Persian reception hall he had ever studied, assembled from memory and convention rather than observed from any single building in Delhi or Lahore. Its very generality is the point. This is architecture built for ideology, not documentation. The folio's later history compounds this strangeness. Removed from its binding when the manuscript was broken apart and dispersed across the European art market in the early twentieth century, it passed through a London dealer to the collector Henri Vever in Paris, and was at some point remounted within the decorative borders of an entirely unrelated manuscript, a copy of the Persian universal history Rawdat al-Safa, so that the object one now sees is itself a palimpsest, a sixteenth-century Mughal image floating inside a foreign fifteenth-century frame, a border with no relationship to the picture it now encloses beyond the coincidences of the twentieth-century market that joined them. Farrukh Beg, an émigré himself, arriving in Lahore only shortly before this was painted, produced here an image of hospitality extended to a foreign presence and could hardly have known how thoroughly his own painting would later wander inside borders not its own.