The Parrot Addresses Khujasta at the Beginning of the Sixth Night

“The Parrot Addresses Khujasta at the Beginning of the Sixth Night” is a page from the Tuti-nama or Tales of a Parrot attributed by a Persian inscription in its lower margin to the painter Dasavanta and dated by the Cleveland Museum of Art to about 1560. It is catalogued as gum tempera and ink with gold on paper and the painted field measures only about three and a half by four inches within a folio of some eight by five and a half inches. The leaf came to the museum in 1962 as a gift of Mrs. A. Dean Perry after passing through a diplomat’s estate and two American dealers and it is now held in the Indian and Southeast Asian Art department of the Cleveland Museum of Art although it is not currently on view. The scale is the first fact worth holding. This is a picture made to be read at arm’s length by a single viewer and every effect in it depends on a few inches of paper carrying text and image together as one act of reading. The text above the picture comes from a Persian work compiled in 1329 and 1330 by the Sufi cleric Ziya al-Din Nakhshabi who reshaped an older collection of Indian tales into fifty two stories told by a parrot over fifty two nights. A merchant has left on a long journey and his wife Khujasta longs to join a lover. The bird cannot forbid her and so it tells her a story each night that holds her at home until the dawn has passed. On this sixth night the parrot begins the tale of seven men who fall in love with the statue of a woman that comes to life. The painter ignores the statue and the seven men and shows only the frame in which the telling happens. That choice is the quiet intelligence of the page. The picture divides itself into a room of flat colour. A red wall carries a dark green panel in which a gold cage hangs from a ring with the green parrot perched on its lower tier. Khujasta stands at the right in a patterned garment with a veil falling from her head and one hand raised in the open gesture of someone listening or about to speak. At the left a low bed with floral cushions and a pale green coverlet waits unused. The floor is a golden carpet scattered with tiny blossoms and a pink eave edged in blue and white runs above while a white dome and a panelled door close the scene on the right. Nothing in the room moves except the hand. The bird and the woman face each other across an empty stretch of carpet and the whole drama of persuasion is held in that gap. The attribution to Dasavanta deserves the care that a scholar would give it. The inscription names him and the museum records it as the basis of its attribution. He is the one painter of the early imperial workshop whose life reached the written record. The chronicler Abu’l Fazl described him as the son of a palanquin bearer who covered walls with drawings until the emperor noticed his gift and placed him in the royal atelier where he rose to be counted among its foremost masters before his death in 1584. Study of the manuscript has also shown that more than half of its pictures were reworked in the Mughal manner over an earlier layer of painting and so the soft modelling and the dark ground of the surface seen today may belong to more than one campaign. The page is therefore a record of a style in transition as well as a work by a named hand and the viewer is looking at the moment when the courtly idiom of the new empire was being formed from older Indian habits. The manuscript belongs to the first years of Akbar’s reign when the young emperor gathered painters and calligraphers to make books that could speak to a court of mixed language and faith. A Persian text built on Indian fables was an ideal subject because it already joined two worlds. The stories are frank about desire and deceit and they were prized for exactly that reason. The museum’s own account stresses that each tale is meant to instruct Khujasta and distract her from her affair and the book thus becomes a lesson in the ethics of speech. The philosophical meaning lies in the cage. A caged bird is the least free creature in the room and yet it is the one that governs the woman who walks beside it. Her body is free to leave and her will is held by a voice. The painter sets the two figures at the same height and gives the bird a place of honour against a dark panel that frames it like a small shrine. Narrative is shown as a form of power and delay as a form of care. The parrot does not condemn or command. It offers one more story and each night’s gift of attention steers a life away from ruin. In this small page the Mughal court found an image of its own faith in counsel and patience and in the idea that wisdom works best when it arrives as a tale and leaves the listener free to choose.