Nasiri Khan Directing the Siege of Qandahar, May 1631

'Nasiri Khan Directing the Siege of Qandahar, May 1631', ca. 1633–1640, by Payag (ca. 1595–1655). Folio from the Windsor 'Padshahnama'.This is the painting in which Payag stops being a court artist and becomes something else, a witness. In all the other folios in the Padshahnama, the depiction is that of a celebration but in this one its that of a reckoning. The painting is created as a landscape tilted at an angle that feels less like pictorial convention and more like the earth listing under the weight of what is happening on it. In the lower right corner, A'zam Khan sits on a white horse; bejeweled, magnificent, his right arm extended in the grand gesture of command, directing the eye upward toward the walls of the Deccan fort of Qandahar. He is the painting's nominal subject: the Mughal general who as per the Padshahnama text, arrived at the siege and in whose presence the three gunpowder mines were ignited. His gold-worked jama, his black shield with gold bosses, his feathered helmet rendered with the care of a court painter fulfilling his obligation. Behind him, his retinue presses forward in a cluster of coloured jamas, dark shields with gold stars, turbaned helmets. Two great red imperial pennants with gold-bordered lions lie fallen in the dust of the hillside, their poles broken, their fabric pooling in the ochre earth, the standards of command, momentarily earthbound. Occupying the upper left area, is the Qandahar Fort itself. Its massive terracotta walls rendered in warm umber, their solidity the only stable element in a picture otherwise given over to dissolution. Against those walls, the mines have detonated. And here Payag does what no other Mughal painter of his era attempted: he paints the explosion itself. Not its aftermath, not its consequence, the event, in the instant of its happening. A great column of smoke and fire erupts from the base of the left wall, rising in a voluminous billow of blue-black that Payag renders with the same formal authority he brings to everything else, each convolution of smoke distinct, lit from within by the gold and orange of fire at its core, the column darkening as it ascends into a sky that is already nearly as dark as the smoke. Above, a sky of Prussian blue, dense and storm-coloured, pressing down on the whole scene. There is no clear air in this painting. The sky offers no relief. Within the explosion, and scattered across the slope between the fort and the trench, are the bodies. Some are freshly dead, bloodied, lying in the attitudes of men who fell without time to arrange themselves. Others are barely visible, rendered in the palest, most translucent strokes, half-absorbed into the earth they lie on: these are the decomposed. Skeletons that still grimace, still seem to writhe, their bones the colour of the dusty hillside. The RCT's own curatorial note confirms what the eye finds almost too difficult to hold: Payag painted the stages of death as fresh, recent, and long past, simultaneously present on the same hillside, as though time itself has been compressed into a single mortal accounting. No Mughal painter before or after attempted this. Mughal battle paintings recorded victories, this painting records what victories cost. The trench is full of soldiers pressed close, waiting. They are painted in the striped and quilted armour of Mughal infantry, their faces calm with the particular blankness of men who have decided not to feel anything until it is over. In the middle ground, three soldiers look down at fallen comrades. One turns his head away. Another places a hand to his chin. In a painting commissioned to celebrate an imperial triumph, Payag has highlighted grief. The right edge of the composition is lined with more soldiers, filing up the hillside toward the breach, their spear tips catching what light there is, their black shields closing into a dark mass that absorbs rather than reflects. At the far upper right, beyond the fort's walls, a town burns. Buildings glow orange-gold against the night sky; smoke rises in spirals, different in character from the mine explosion's massive column — smaller, dispersed, the kind of fire that burns for days. Between the armies and the fire and the fort, the landscape offers nothing, just the tilted ochre earth. And then the lower left corner, after the fort, the explosion, the bodies and the trench and the commanders and the burning town; Payag paints two rabbits beside a small pond edged with grasses and reeds. One turns toward the noise, the violence, the smoke. The other faces us, facing the still water, contemplating its own reflection. They are caught in no heroic posture. They are simply alive, in the ordinary way that creatures are alive when there is no reason left to be. The green of the grass around them is the only pure, untroubled colour in the entire painting. Prof. Kavita Singh of JNU, writing on this painting, asks: in these rabbits, in the stillness of this quiet corner, is the artist not asking us to reflect upon the hollowness of power in the face of the fragility of our lives? The question is unanswerable, which is perhaps the point. The rabbits do not belong to the imperial record, they belong to Payag, placed at the furthest possible remove from the general on his white horse, at the bottom of the composition, outside the arc of command and consequence, watching their own reflections in still water while the world above them burns. This is what Payag understood that the Padshahnama project could not officially accommodate, that war is not only a demonstration of power. It is also the smoke, the skeletons half-dissolved into earth, the grief in a soldier's turned head, the two small animals by the water who will outlive everyone in this painting except the fort's walls, which will outlive them too.