Victoria and Albert Museum , London , United Kingdom
Location History:
The painting belongs to what's generally regarded as the earliest illustrated copy of the Akbarnama commissioned by Akbar himself and produced in his royal studio, probably somewhere between Delhi, Agra, and Fatehpur Sikri, sometime around 1592 to 1595. At least forty-nine court artists worked on the project, and several of them, Kesav Kalan and Dharmdas among them, are individually named in small red-ink inscriptions beneath their paintings. That detail matters — it's what tells us this wasn't just any copy, but one made specifically for the emperor's own library.
After Akbar died in 1605, the manuscript didn't leave the family. It passed to his son Jahangir, and later to his grandson Shah Jahan, staying within the royal household as an inherited object for close to a hundred years. Then, like a lot of Mughal manuscripts once they slip out of direct royal hands, the trail goes cold for a while. It doesn't turn up again until colonial-era Britain.
The next solid record we have is of Major-General John Clarke acquiring it in India while serving as Commissioner of Oudh, sometime between 1858 and 1862. That timing isn't incidental — it puts the manuscript's departure right in the aftermath of the 1857 uprising and the British annexation of Awadh, a period when an enormous amount of court material left Indian hands under circumstances that were, to put it plainly, far from equal. After Clarke died, the manuscript went to his widow, Frances Clarke, and it was from her that the Victoria and Albert Museum bought it in 1896.
It's been part of the V&A's collection ever since, now catalogued under accession number IS.2:117-1896, held within the museum's South and Southeast Asia collections.
Created for the illustrated first edition of the Akbarnama, painted around 1590 to 1595, this folio titled Dancers from Malwa Perform before Akbar was executed by Dharmdas working from a design laid out by Kesav Kalan. It captures a moment just after the 1561 Mughal conquest of Central India, when Baz Bahadur fled Sarangpur and left behind his court dancers and musicians, arguably the most celebrated performers Malwa had to offer. They were handed over to the nineteen-year-old Akbar as part of the kingdom's surrendered spoils. And there's something worth sitting with in that detail that even in defeat, what gets recorded as tribute isn't gold or land. It's culture. It's people who could dance and play music better than anyone else in the region. That's really what's being surrendered here, alongside the throne itself.
As for the composition, it's staged inside a multi-tiered palace courtyard, and the viewpoint is elevated, looking down at an angle a choice that gives the whole scene a slightly theatrical quality, almost like we're watching from a balcony seat above a stage. In the upper corner, Akbar sits on a carpeted platform beneath a heavy red-and-orange canopy, with court attendants gathered nearby and a fly-whisk bearer stationed close at his side.Below him, the courtyard has become an active performance space two female dancers mid-spin, backed by musicians on double-headed drums, frame drums, cymbals. Along the bottom edge, courtiers, guards, horsemen all watching. It doesn't feel like a private moment. It feels like an occasion, something meant to be witnessed.
Structurally, this comes down to Kesav Kalan's design work. He uses sharp architectural diagonals, tiled walkways, framing walls all of it quietly steering the eye through what could otherwise be a fairly chaotic amount of activity packed into one frame. Dharmdas then takes that framework and fills it in, and honestly, it's careful, patient work: lapis blue, malachite green, vermilion, gold leaf burnished rather than laid flat. What I keep coming back to with Dharmdas, every time I look at this folio, is his shading he concentrates it just inside the contours of the drapery, which gives the fabric real weight and volume without the surface ever feeling heavy or overworked. He also puts real effort into individual faces. These aren't stock expressions repeated across the crowd; there's genuine variety here.
The costuming is where his attention to detail is most obvious. The Malwa performers wear specific regional dress muslin turbans wound tight, fitted bodices, stiffened three-tiered skirts that flare outward dramatically over churidar. That's not incidental decoration. That's the artist marking these figures as visibly, unmistakably not of the Mughal court, which, given what the painting is actually about, is precisely the point being made.
What carries the sense of motion, more than anything else, is those skirts the layered fabric catches something close to centrifugal energy as the dancers spin, and it works remarkably well at suggesting real speed on a completely flat surface. Akbar's stillness reads almost like a deliberate counterpoint to that. He doesn't lean in, doesn't move, doesn't participate in any of the visual noise happening below him. His posture stays grounded, his position stays elevated, and together those two choices do a lot of quiet work he becomes the fixed point the entire courtyard seems to revolve around, a center of imperial calm holding steady while everything else spins around him.
And what's genuinely interesting, I think, is what Dharmdas and Kesav Kalan chose to leave out. There's no battlefield here, no depiction of the actual fighting that brought Malwa under Mughal control. Instead, the whole episode gets reframed as something closer to political ordering than conquest — absorption rather than destruction. By staging this regional performance directly under Akbar's gaze, the two artists are essentially putting Abu'l-Fazl's own account of the reign into visual form: that Akbar's authority didn't simply crush difference wherever he found it, but folded it in instead, turning what had been a scattered patchwork of regional identities into something that could hold together as a single imperial order.
The point of interest in this painting are the Malwa dancers who are dressed in three tiered flared skirts in the folio. They are centralized as the point of focus along with Akbar who is at the center. The composition and vivid hues are unique to the Mughal style of painting.
