Illustration from the Baburnama by Devji Gujarati
| Support Type: | Paper |
| Paint Type: | Watercolor |
| Current Location: | Victoria & Alberta Museum, South Kensington |
| Location History: | The painting is a detached folio from Babur Nama. Babur Nama, in Chaghta'i Turkish was an absorbing interest for the Indian Timurids. The Indian period of Babur's autobiography had already been translated by his sadr, Zainu'd Din Khwafi, into Persian. In 994/1584 Mirza Payandah Hasan Ghaznavi commenced its translation at the insistence of Bihruz Khan, but he could not translate the account beyond the first sixth and a part of the seventh year. Subsequently one Muhammad Quli Mughal HIsari continued the work and brought it down to 1528-29. Akbar ordered Mirza 'Abdu'r Rahim Khan-i Khanan to translate it again and he completed the work in 1589. Finally, the painting was purchased from Messrs luzac & Co., 46 Great Russell Street as part of a 2023 provenance research project by V&A South Kensington Museum (RP 1912-6290M). |
Mughal paintings play a careful role in the practice of making subjects by means of objects. Under Akbar’s reign, sovereignity was an ordinary, everyday implementation through court patroned artists. The material sign of sovereignty almost invisibly was present through multiple webs of time-space continuums. This particular folio painted by Devji Gujarati is a part of Baburnama, a manuscript deeply invested in establishing Mughal dynastic memory of Emperor Babur’s era. The painting depicts a Central Asian military ritual near Yakshent in 1502 where soldiers are united by a shared performance of loyalty. However, when painted in a much later time by Devji in 1590, the aesthetic develops through a regional indigeneity, changing facial structures from Mongolian to Hindustani (Mughal India) standards. Political allegiance of the Mughal ancestry was stabilitised and eventually legitimisated through a material affiliation of Akbar’s contemporary Hindustan. Through painting, the distant Timurid past was made politically meaningful as a more durable claim to authority beyond a mere military conquest. The role of artists such as Devji Gujarati is crucial to this process. Working within Akbar's cosmopolitan atelier, local Hindustani artisans translated a wider Central Asian past into the visual language of Hindustan (Mughal India). The painting is therefore a reconstruction of Timurid political memory to a closer personal (emotional) world of Hindustan. Thereafter, the legitimacy of Mughal power visually embeds itself within a continuous narrative of sovereignty stretching from Central Asia to India.