Bahram Gur Sees a Herd of Deer Mesmerized by Dilaram' s Music

"Bahram Gur Sees a Herd of Deer Mesmerized by Dilaram's Music" from a Khamsa of Amir Khusrau Dihlavi by Miskin (active ca. 1570–1604), 1597–98 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. The animals are at a pause, suspended between step and turn, mid-grazing; even they stand quite still in their wonderment. Stillness is the painting's theme. Though small (the main support hardly longer than a hand), Miskin has packed it with an impossibly ambitious spatial vista. A rocky, desolate plain covers the entire frame, its ochre and grey boulders appearing warmly and roundly solid as if they had been perceived at close range rather than based on distant Persian conventions. Vibrant greenery fills the land, dotted with the gold of turning grass. A narrow stream is seen running through the lower centre, glinting between the stones. Seated in the middle register, casually talking, are Bahram Gur and Dilaram. The former wears a turban of orange, a brick-red tunic over blue trousers; with a curved sword resting across his knees as though as an after-thought. Bahram Gur isn't here to hunt, but to listen. Dilaram, in rose and white, sits to his left, composedly presenting the instrument which emits the melody causing every creature on the hillside to pause. His right hand is extended toward her, somewhere between beckoning and asking. Dilaram’s gaze is unwavering and focused on the strings of her lute. What they have in common in this painting is an invisible thing the artist seeks to reveal. In essence, sound as a force of nature, bent to human will. Miskin is among seventeen master artists identified in the court historian Abu’l Fazl’s n-i Akbar, an administrative and cultural record which constitutes the third volume of Akbar's Biography, the Akbarnama. Although not among the earliest painters in the karkhana ( atelier), by the time of Akbar's biography illustrations in the early 1590s he was already among its most important designers, especially skilled in animals and landscapes. It’s no wonder, then, that he should be tapped to capture an episode when animals themselves act as protagonist. The spotted deer on the right, paused midway in a walk at lower left-center; the gazelles crouched at the stream, the swimming birds; and, in arrest, both a white and a vividly decorated bay horse at lower and upper right; each animal is delineated in such unique fashion that Miskin clearly separates himself from artists that place decorative repeat animals in these settings. Indeed, the white horse in the upper right has been particularly painstakingly rendering in both bridle and crimson saddlecloth, silhouetted against warm rock. The scene illustrated from the Haft-Bihisht, the fifth of the masnavi narratives within Amir Khusrau Dihlavi's Khamsa, or Quintet (completed in 1298), which in turn responded to Nizami Ganjavi's Haft Peykar. Nizami, for his part, gave his female musician the name, Fitna and made this event the center of a contest in archery with a grim conclusion, whereas Khusrau adapted the core idea but neutralized its dramatic, if immoral logic; his slave girl is called Dilaram (one who soothes the heart), and her instrument’s power lies not in its challenge, but in its music, so supreme that animals-emblems in the Indo-Persian tradition of nature’s wildness, its lack of submission to human authority - yield in awe. Miskin illustrates just this instant. Bahram Gur is not hunting; he is observing, and in Khusrau’s reading, the witness to the event is perhaps of greater consequence than the deed itself. This folio was produced in the royal library in Lahore in 1597–98 for the emperor Akbar's personal copy of the Khamsa, whose calligraphy was the work of Muhammad Husain Kashmiri, who won renown with the epithet of Zarrin Qalam (“Golden Pen”), and whose twenty-nine extant illustrations were executed by fourteen specified painters. The manuscript eventually found its way into the collection of Alexander Smith Cochran, who donated it, together with twenty-three other Persian manuscripts, to the Metropolitan Museum in 1913; today the folios are shared between New York and the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore. Akbar's interest in this particular text was not solely based on aesthetic principles. His court represented a crossroads of Persian culture, local Indian practices, and an intellectual quest (embodied in his own Din-i-Ilahi ) for spiritual harmony across diverse traditions. A painting like this one-in which the immateriality of art, music, momentarily dominates the animal world-arguably embodies something of this aspiration: the belief that art, employed with grace and power, could transform not only individuals, but nature itself, through harmony and beauty rather than coercion.