Portrait of an Indian prince with a falcon

Within a discreet rectangle of color and gold the size of the page of an ordinary letter, Khem Karan's falconer is standing and still, and the artist has elicited all the force Mughal portraiture knew how to impart in 1580: a body captured between motion and repose, one hand lifted to adjust an insecurely balanced turban, the other extended calmly and evenly toward the bird perched on the wrist. The paper beneath it all has, with age and the floral muraqqa borders which frame it all out to the edges like window-sills of blossom, turned to the color of a watered tea, bearing the opaque pigments and gilded details with the very particular heft Akbar's karkhana always managed to confer upon what they wrought - the color built in faint layers until the hot pink of the jama attains the clarity of porcelain; the white of the jama so finely colored as never to be chalky in hue; the individual strokes that describe the falcon's breast plumage, not as a uniform color wash. Even the ground beneath Khem Karan's feet has been given a almost extreme and understatedness – its expanse, nothing but a few washes of green against an indeterminate horizon and a sky washed in pale rose and blue, offered no spatial distraction between the eye and the composition's singular argument: between two bodies – one human and one avian. But such a restrained and unadorned backdrop carries its own implications. For instead of situating him as part of a larger narrative action, such as hunting the falcon, the backdrop presents the falconer as an isolated specimen in an action that is past: the lift of one arm seems the almost finished remnants of an attempt to secure his garment, while at the same time it mirrors and balances the gesture of his other arm which is held still with only a subtle upward tilt as his bird, balanced on its jesses, sits, expectant and unresisted, upon his wrist. Such a poised and undemonstrative quietude is all the more notable when taken against the backdrop of certain material signs: a pearldressed throat, a damascened dagger and scabbard hung on a richly embroidered girdle, red slippers and sandals planted firm on the green ground. All of them speak of rank: indeed, his accoutrements may bespeak rank just as eloquently as do those of any man in any court but still none speak more plainly or profoundly than the stillness shared with his bird, a stillness achieved through discipline perhaps acquired over a lifetime-a discipline all his own and to be recognized as distinct from, if in service to, his master's service. But in rendering Khem Karan with an animal poised with such unnerving calm, and holding an unconcerned gaze fixed on what looks like absolutely nothing in the world, one is given insight beyond an examination of merely a period garment and costume piece. While falcons at the Mughal court were indeed kept as objects of entertainment, they represented something far greater. According to an entire tradition from the Turco-Mongol past of the Persian court, dominion over a creature of wildness could be interpreted as proof of self-mastery as surely as control over men. One cannot truly force a falcon – as one might an ox – to accept mastery or to obey one’s command of its trained reflexes. That acquiescence has to be earned through an accumulation of small, gradual processes that are, to the outside eye, tantamount to its voluntary surrender to an idea – or rather, to an idea of surrender, of an assumed freedom-while actually in fact being nothing short of utter submission induced by painstaking self-mortification. To accept the patient presence of such a bird on one's wrist was to assert not only one's inherited status and mastery over the other subjects of one’s realm, but rather a particular kind of sovereignty: not one that is asserted through fear but one that is confirmed by a serene acceptance of the natural order of wild things integrated into one's own world. That Abu’l Fazl was devoted enough to include falcons, described with the exact precision he devotes to describing states and princes, suggests a profound conviction held about falconry as being nothing other than a learned model for disciplining, or training, the wild heart of both animals and men alike. And yet the most arresting characteristic of Khem Karan and his companion may be the quiet, almost melancholy irony revealed by a modern scholar’s investigation into a notation made in the painting’s lower margin by some unnoticed servant – something about its ranking, "Third Class". The repose of this magnificent creature, so confident as it settles in for the long wait – and it is the waiting that constitutes the visual argument of the composition - could be said to be a silent reproach to all such rankings: indifferent to the hierarchies of art history, patiently waiting and eternally at ease; a bird more sure of its freedom than its keeper is, though so convincingly loyal-for now-to the notion of its having been captured for an aesthetic display.