'Birds in a coconut grove'

Birds in a Coconut Grove, folio from the First or "South Kensington" Baburnama, ca. 1589, designed by Miskin (active late 1570s–ca. 1604) and painted by Bhura (active mostly in the 1580s). This is a single sheet of paper, opaque watercolour, ink and gold, its modest page barely the span of two hands and yet it carries within that small compass both a block of black nasta'liq calligraphy and a fully realised landscape, text and image sharing one surface the way memory and observation share a single mind. The upper register is given over to script: eight or so lines of Persian prose, translated from Babur's own Chagatai Turki, cataloguing the coconut tree with the appraising precision of a man used to writing down what he sees before deciding what he feels about it. Its leaves shinier than the date palm's, its husk fibrous enough to be twisted into the ropes that seam boats, its water "not bad," rather like liquefied date cheese. Beneath and around this panel of text, the painting opens outward: two coconut palms rise from the lower left, their trunks bowing very slightly against each other in the way palms actually do, their crowns loosely fanned rather than symmetrised, hung with the rounded green weight of the fruit Babur is, at that very moment, describing above them. Small birds move through the fronds and along the trunks in pairs- spotted doves, hoopoes, black ibis, the more stylised birds of imagination mixed frankly among the observed ones. Each pair given a male and a female, a convention Akbar's illuminators reached for reflexively in manuscript margins wherever the natural world needed a shorthand for completeness and increase. In the lower right a small stream carries three ducks, and beyond them the ground rises in soft planes of ochre and sage-green hill, one behind another rather than in front, so that distance is suggested by stacking rather than by the vanishing lines a European eye would expect; a patch of blue sky, thinly clouded, opens at the upper left as if the picture had briefly forgotten it was mostly page. At the very foot of the sheet, almost too small to read, a line of red-inked Persian records the studio's own bookkeeping: tarh Miskina, amal Bhura,i.e. design by Miskin, execution by Bhura. It is the same formula the kitabkhana's librarians used across dozens of leaves in Akbar's ateliers to divide a single image between the artist who invented its structure and the artist who gave it colour and finish. It is a system that treats a painting less as the signature of one hand than as the output of a small, disciplined workshop, and Bhura's own signed passages elsewhere. The mined ramparts of Chitor, the gun emplacements below Ranthambhor, the crowded rejoicings at Fatehpur for the birth of a prince, all show a painter regularly trusted with exactly this kind of animated, many-figured, high-incident composition, useful to Miskin precisely because he could fill a design with convincing motion and left the finer portraiture to specialists like Basawan. This folio itself belongs to the first of what would eventually be at least seven illustrated copies of the Baburnama made in Akbar's workshops, commissioned the moment 'Abd al-Rahim Khan-i-Khanan finished his Persian translation of Babur's memoirs and presented it to the emperor on his return to Agra from Kabul in November 1589. This gesture that converted a grandfather's private, often wry Turki diary into an official, circulatable, illustrated Persian chronicle of dynastic origin, the empirical curiosity of Babur's prose given a second life as an act of imperial memory. That original manuscript did not survive intact: by the early twentieth century it had been broken apart on the European art market, dispersed, by the Sackler Gallery's own account, in 1913, its leaves scattering into private hands and public collections alike, a portion reaching the museum then still called South Kensington and lending the manuscript its alternate name. This particular folio surfaced only much later, through the London dealers Oliver Forge and Brendan Lynch, entering the Smithsonian's collection in 2009 through the fund established in honour of Elizabeth B. Moynihan, the garden historian whose own decades of fieldwork retracing Babur's gardens across Iran, Central Asia, Pakistan, and India gives the acquisition an unusually apt provenance, as though the fund had been waiting for a leaf devoted to Babur's own attentiveness to the natural world. What the painting finally offers, beneath its bookkeeping and its dispersal history, is a portrait of a particular kind of looking: Babur's own, first, turned on a tree he had never seen before and measured anyway by comparison, texture, taste, and use; and then, eighty years on, his grandson's court painters turning that same attentiveness back into pigment, pairing every bird as if pairing were itself a form of care, and letting the coconut grove stand not for conquest but for the sheer, recorded strangeness of a new world worth writing down.