Department of Islamic Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, USA.
Location History:
[1] ~ 1924
Reiza Khan Monif, Paris and New York.
[2] 1924 - Present
sold at AndersonGalleries, New York, February 29, 1924, lot 165, to MMA)
“Misbah the Grocer Brings the Spy Parran to his House” is a folio from the Hamzanama made for the Mughal emperor Akbar and attributed by the Metropolitan Museum of Art to the painter Daswanth working with a second hand named Mithra. It is dated around 1570 AD. The MET records have catalogued it as ink and opaque watercolour with gold on cotton cloth later mounted on paper. The painting measures some twenty seven and seven eighths by twenty one and five eighths inches and is now held in the Department of Islamic Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York having entered the collection through the Rogers Fund in 1924. A Persian caption on a small panel below the picture names the episode and tells the viewer that Misbah has led Parran into his own house. This particular folio belongs to an undertaking of quite a reckless ambition. Emperor Akbar had commissioned a Hamzanama of some fourteen hundred paintings on cloth rather than paper and the work absorbed the young imperial workshop for roughly fifteen years. The pages of this books were large enough to be held up before a court audience while a storyteller would recite the tale. Hence, the scale allows the image to speak so directly and so loudly across a room.
The attributed painter Daswanth is one of the few figures of that workshop whose life reached the written record. Abu’l Fazl the emperor’s chronicler recorded him as the son of a palanquin bearer who covered walls with drawings until Akbar noticed them and placed the boy under a Persian master of the atelier. From that humble beginning he rose to be counted among the foremost painters of the reign and his hand is credited with some of the most restless and imaginative compositions of the age. His life ended in 1584 when the chronicles say that madness overtook him and he took his own life. Because no folio of the Hamzanama carries a signature every attribution rests on a reading of style and the museum rightly gives the credit with a measure of caution and shares it with Mithra. What can be said with confidence is that the Persian taste for jewelled surface and the Indian appetite for bodily energy met in this workshop and that the present folio is a fine product of that meeting.
The scene itself is built as a stage set seen from the front. The grocer Misbah dominates the upper centre of the sheet in an orange robe and a tall turban and he is by far the largest and stillest person in the picture. Facing him on a patterned carpet crouches the spy Parran whose tiger skin cloak and fur cap and golden ornaments and animated hands mark him as a man of secrets who cannot stay quiet in the telling of them. Behind the pair a white wall bristles with swords and shields and arrows and animal pelts while banners and long spears cut diagonally across a dark blue sky. These weapons are the surprise of the page. Nothing in the house suggests a shopkeeper and everything suggests a man who plays a second and more dangerous part. Below them servants bend over a red cloth spread across a tiled floor and set out covered dishes while attendants and armed men watch from the side in rows of pink and blue and saffron. The architecture is flattened into a decorative grid of tile and brick and arched niche and the colour is kept bright and almost enamelled so that no part of the surface is allowed to rest.
The meaning of this image lies in the gap between what the house shows and what it conceals. The Met catalogue notes that the surviving text gives little help but that the caption points to a plan to free a prisoner and the painting therefore pictures a conspiracy conducted inside a scene of ordinary hospitality. A grocer who is secretly a believer in a city of unbelievers must dress his loyalty in the furniture of trade and the painter makes that doubleness visible by letting arms crowd the walls of a domestic room. A recent reading suggests that the setting may be less a shop than the lodge of a wandering ascetic since spies in the Indian world often passed as holy men and this adds a further layer of disguise. There is a philosophy in the picture that belongs to the whole epic. Faith and cunning and generosity and friendship are shown as values that must work together in a hostile world and the courtly audience that watched the folio lifted before it would have understood both the thrill of secrecy and the comfort of a table shared among allies. In this sense the painting is a quiet lesson in appearances. It reminds the viewer that the loudest display of arms may hide the gentlest purpose and that the most calm and heavy figure in a room may carry the most daring plan.
This painting shows a secret plan hidden inside an ordinary house scene. Misbah the grocer sits calm and large in the middle, while the spy Parran crouches in front of him talking with his hands. The walls behind them are full of swords, shields and spears, which do not look like a shop at all, so the room itself tells us this man is more than a grocer. Servants setting out food below add to the picture of friendly hospitality, which makes the plot feel even more hidden. The bright flat colours and the patterned tiles keep the eye moving over the whole page. For me, the message is that appearances can be misleading: a calm host in a welcoming room can be the one carrying the boldest plan.
