Lovers and beloveds

'Lovers and Beloveds: A Composite of Scenes from Persian, Urdu, and Sanskrit Literature', attributed by the Cleveland Museum of Art to circa 1735 and to the artist Chitarman II (ca. 1680 to ca. 1750). It's catalogued as gum tempera and gold on paper, a tall sheet of some sixteen by eleven and a half inches now held in the Indian and Southeast Asian Art department, Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, USA. Chitarman II's name has never fully settled in scholarship. Since he is also called Kalyan Das and Rai Kalyandas and it remains unresolved whether all these names belong to one single artist or to a workshop tradition. Though it can be said securely that he worked in the court of Emperor Muhammad Shah (1719 to 1748). The court that had lost much of its military and territorial reach yet gained a reputation for music and poetry and refined leisure. Painters there turned away from imperial campaigns toward gatherings and portraits and the interior life of courtly feeling, and this sheet belongs to that turn. It passed through the Walter Randall Gallery in New York to the Beverly Hills collection of Ralph and Catherine Glynn Benkaim in 1969 before Cleveland acquired it in 2013, though its history before 1969 is not recorded. The image refuses the single stage that most Mughal pictures offer. Instead the sheet is stacked in tiers of white pavilions and terraces and carpeted gardens in which a dozen separate stories unfold at once. Along the top a haloed youth sits composed on a platform among crowded balconies of women who raise knives and fruit in astonishment, and at the upper corners swimmers struggle with animals in dark water. Through the middle runs a pink rocky wilderness where a fallen body lies beneath a white bearded elder and a cascade of milk-pale water while women watch from above. Below this a court of couples and attendants fills the lawn, and at the lower right an emaciated figure with matted hair squats half naked holding a small page toward a woman who raises a fan. Everything is rendered with the flat luminous colour and fine gold patterning of late Mughal work. Costumes carry tiny floral repeats and the architecture is washed in cool grey so that the warm figures press forward from it. There is no vanishing point and no horizon, only a rising vertical order in which the eye climbs from one lover to the next. The sources behind these scenes were gathered from very different shelves. The enthroned youth with the astonished women is the Joseph of Persian poetry and the Qur'anic tale in which Zulaykha's guests cut their hands while peeling fruit. The fallen body in the rocks is Farhad whom Cleveland identifies from the story of Khusrau and Shirin, and the wasted wanderer at the lower right is Majnun who in the painted captions holds a page bearing the Qur'anic chapter of divine unity. Further vignettes draw on Persian romances of the same family and on Sanskrit and regional Indian tales of separated lovers, all labelled in Persian inscriptions that name each pair. The act of gathering itself is the central plot here. Any Delhi patron would recognise Persian classics and Indian epics side by side and to read them as one shared inheritance of longing, and the painter honoured that expectation by letting no tradition dominate the page. The philosophical weight of this sheet lies in this crowding of devotion. In the Persian and Indo-Persian imagination, love for another body was held to be a first schooling in love for the divine. Since, a beloved human was never merely a person and the lover who wastes away or dies was admired as one who had let the self dissolve. Majnun reading the verse of God's oneness is the plainest sign of that reading, because the page tells us his madness is also a discipline. Read such that the composite is less a catalogue of tragedies than a ladder, each tier offering another stage of surrender from the dazzled guests at the top to the corpse among the rocks. The unbroken gold and pattern refuse to let suffering look bleak. They hold everything in a single glowing order which suggests that the painter and his patron saw longing as the one faculty shared by Persian poet and Sanskrit bard and Delhi courtier alike, and that to arrange these lovers together was to claim for that faculty a quiet and enduring authority.