Saru Taqi, a Safavid courtier

'Saru Taqi, a Safavid courtier', dated 1618, is an opaque watercolor, ink and gold on paper piece now held in the Freer Gallery of Art, National Museum of Asian Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., USA made by Bishandas (active 1590-1640). Set against an even, featureless green that fills the sheet like still water, Bishandas has set Saru Taqi's standing figure in profile, turned to the right and three-quarters at the shoulders, with his head floating rigidly at the middle of the strict side view which Mughal portraiture had inherited from Persian tradition. Like the sheet of green, paint itself shows the suffering of four centuries: though the white jama slopes down towards the ankle in long tapering pleats, faint crazing and flaking exposes bits of the yellowish underlayer; these losses are not to be read as disfigurements, but rather, perhaps, as the gradual reversion of pigment to its constituent materials. Even the fragile turban is more intact: wrapped in cream cloth and crossed by a band of brocaded green and gold, from it rises a small black feather held aloft by a jeweled aigrette - and it is this headgear, not his face, that demonstrates the sitter's high rank, for the height, the volume, and the richness of a Safavid courtier's headdress were apparently indicators of office at this time. Bishandas has painted his features with a somewhat precise hand: jaw somewhat heavy, mustache and beard shaved to fine hatchings, eye placed with a special care dear to Jahangir's preferred artist. The right hand is raised in front of his chest, two fingers extended in a gesture of address or explanation, a figure of speech borrowed freely from the rhetoric of Persian manuscript illustration. Interpreting speech in progress, the gesture lends the rigid profile an air of animation, as if captured mid-sentence in some unpermitted negotiation. A dagger with a spotted hilt resides in his girdle, an item that at this date is more typical of Safavid than Mughal dress, and provides further confirmation that Bishandas drew his models from direct observation, not from secondhand imagery or invention, during his residency at the court of Shah Abbas. To the left, the figure's name - Saru Taqi - is scrawled in short strokes, while to the right, a tiny gold cartouche bears the painter's signature, gazing at him like a chum in a common field of gold. The fact that Bishandas knew who this man was adds gravity to the image. Born in Tabriz around 1579, he was castrated as a youth in circumstances in which his sovereign would later find them unjust; Saru Taqi would serve his entire life on nothing but administrative excellence, earn the position of governor of Mazandaran, and ultimately the grand vizierate to Shah Safi and Abbas II. He administered a financial administration that was likely to have transformed the Safavid coffers, and yet his controlling mind and the enemies it created ultimately resulted in his murder in 1645. Bishandas could not have known how this would come to pass when he painted this state portrait in 1618, and there is room to wonder at the asymmetry: the painter images a man at the height of his provincial power, a courtier yet to reach his apogee, while the viewer has knowledge of the whole, not yet, when the painter was present, a closed chapter. As such, the viewer reading this characterless portrait witnesses not a certainty but a snapshot of an ongoing story, made all the more poignant by its endurance through the centuries when its patronage endures. That it was done in this context, elevates the sheet above anything like cross-cultural reporting. Bishandas was on the journey to Persia in 1613 along with the embassary that Khan Alam led, 'secretly sent by Jahangir' on the ground that a reasonably faithful portrait of a foreign ruler or minister could thus possibly reveal personality traits otherwise hidden in reports. The Mughal court extended its older persianate faith in physiognomy as a special knowledge into portraiture. Here then, the painting becomes an instrument of statecraft, veiled as an art object, designed to cross diplomatic frontiers and to carry home to a ruler, who would never meet the subject, information about the character of a person unknown. Yet, the decision that Bishandas had to make in formulating his portrait seem to work against the notion of pure documentary transparency: the green ground eliminates any spatial or narrative context, leaving the sitter desolate and, like an specimen on a mounting board, and the profile face erases the individuality that was meant to distinguish the man, now designated in the royal archives, from thousands of other faces in album leaves. Paradoxically, the difference between face and dress on the one hand and ground and composition on the other hand, is not that between varied artistic objectives, but between two different expressions of theory: the Mughal court's obsession with naturalism that was partly diffused through the impact of European prints on painters, and the older courtly tradition that a portrait was a statement of dignity before being a likeness. Saru Taqi finds itself, then, between these two demands: it is both an individual face, shown with elaborate care, and a representative face, as he is conserved in an imperial archive of foreign potentates.