Prince at Rest

Imagine a hot afternoon, around 1600. A young prince has been out hunting and stops to rest among golden rocks and hills. He is probably Prince Salim, the future emperor remembered as Jahangir and his horse stands nearby, and a servant steps forward to hand him a bow and arrows. But the prince is not looking at his horse or his weapons. He is looking at a dog, a slim hunting dog called a Saluki, that lies dying or already dead. An overturned water bowl sits close by. The museum that holds the drawing offers two possible stories. The water may have been poisoned, or the prince may have lost his temper and struck the dog down for spilling it. The artist does not tell us which, so we are left to wonder. Look around the edges and the world keeps going. Two European scholars talk while a young boy listens. A man blows on a small fire. Holy men sit outside a temple and a cave, and another climbs steps to a little shrine. Antelope graze on a far hillside, and a large city sits in the haze. The prince’s moment of trouble happens in the middle of a busy, mixed-up world. The artist is Miskin, one of the most respected painters at Emperor Akbar’s court. He is best known for lifelike animals. The drawing is done in a style called nim qalam, or “half-pen.” It uses delicate ink lines with only a light wash of colour and gold. Because there is so little paint, you can see Miskin’s skill with the pen and his sharp eye for how people and animals look and move. Why does it look so personal? Prince Salim had set up his own court and his own painting studio, away from his father’s. He loved hunting and wanted painters to record animals accurately. European prints brought by Jesuit visitors had also given Mughal artists new ways to draw people and space. The European scholars in the corner may be a sign of that, though that is only my guess. What does it mean? Akbar once said that a painter drawing a living creature must remember that only God can give it life. The dead dog may remind us of this. It may also hint at Salim’s own nature, which one historian describes as a mixture of kindness and cruelty. These are readings, not facts the artist wrote down. The page itself has a later story. Around 1608, it was set in a gold border of flowers and strange animal faces which became part of a dictionary presented to Jahangir. Someone also made a copy of it in the early 1800s, so people clearly loved the picture long after it was drawn.