Purchased from Mrs. Clarke, The Dingle, Sydenham Hill, S. E
The Victory of Ali Quli Khan over the Afghans on the banks of the river Gomti, c. 1592-95, composition attributed to Kanha (active c. 1580s-1590s), painting by Khiman Sangtarash (16th century) (Far left panel)
The ground does not breathe. There is no sky worth calling a sky, no landscape that permits the eye to rest in open air; every square centimeter of this folio is occupied, pressed upon, filled to the point of organised tumult and yet it does not read as chaos. It reads as Kanha – a painter whose principal gift, attested across his contributions to the V&A Akbarnama, was the ability to impose invisible order upon scenes of extreme physical violence, to hold dozens of bodies, horses, weapons, and standards simultaneously in motion without a single figure losing its integrity or becoming merely decorative noise.
At the very summit of the composition, calm asserts itself one last time. To the upper left, a white architectural mass – domed, crenellated, its coursed masonry rendered with the patient precision of an architectural survey – sits behind a high terrace wall on which standard-bearers and trumpeters gather in composed formation. Their flags, in deep red and saffron, extend leftward into the pictorial space above the battle below, functioning not as decoration but as markers of legitimate Mughal authority presiding over the violence beneath them.
To the upper right, a hillside dense with dark trees presses down into the composition; more cavalry gathers there, helmeted, armed, poised at the margin between preparation and action. Between these two stable poles, the Persian text panel floats, its nastaliq script in black ink on a cream ground, recording the episode from Abu'l Fazl’s chronicle – the victory of Khan Zaman Ali Quli Khan over the Afghan forces on the banks of the River Gomti in 1561. Below that cartouche, the painting dissolves into a river of bodies.
Kanha constructs the battle not as a legible narrative sequence but as a compressed simultaneity: every moment of combat – the charge, the fall, the pursuit, the death – occurring at once across the full width of the folio. Horses in striped caparisons of tawny gold, deep brown, and vivid orange wheel and rear and collapse. Their riders – turbaned, helmeted, armed with lances, swords, and shields – are locked in encounter at every point. The compositional logic, invisible but absolute, runs in a broad diagonal from upper right to lower left, the Mughal forces pressing the Afghan resistance downward and toward defeat, gravity and geometry made to coincide.
At the centre of this middle register, a white horse carrying an elaborately dressed rider in a floral white coat commands attention by stillness alone. This is not stillness of inaction but of authority – a figure around whom the battle orbits rather than through whom it passes. The horse's caparison is extraordinary: white ground covered in dense red floral work, the embroidery of the imperial stable rendered with such loving specificity that one feels the touch of the craftsmen who produced it. Kanha, noted in the atelier for his facility with natural observation and material precision, brings that same attentiveness to the decorated surfaces of warfare – to the patterned textiles, inlaid shields, and gold-worked harnesses that distinguish Mughal cavalry from the more plainly equipped Afghan forces around them.
Below, the composition descends into the painting's most unsparing passage. Decapitated heads, trampled bodies, and fallen soldiers litter the lowest register – a frieze of the defeated rendered without theatrical excess but without flinching, either. Three severed heads cluster near the lower centre. A fallen warrior's orange robe bleeds into the dust. The river, implied rather than painted, runs beneath everything.
This folio was produced within the imperial kitabkhana as one panel of a double-page composition, a format reserved for the most consequential episodes in the chronicle. Kanha drew the tarh - the compositional outline - while Khiman Sangtarash executed the amal, the finished painting; both names are inscribed below in red ink by the atelier's contemporary librarian. The pigments are mineral throughout: lapis lazuli from Afghanistan for the costumes' blues, malachite for greens, cinnabar for reds, orpiment for yellows, lead white for the floral caparisons, gold leaf burnished with agate for the metalwork and armour highlights.
The collaboration of designer and colourist was not division of labour in any diminishing sense but a system in which compositional intelligence and painterly execution were understood as distinct and equally honoured skills.
The painting's cultural meaning is inseparable from its function as imperial testimony. Abu'l Fazl understood the illustrated Akbarnama as evidence - not merely record - of divine favour expressed through military triumph. The Gomti victory confirmed Mughal authority over the eastern provinces and, briefly, the loyalty of the Uzbek nobility. Kanha, working thirty years after the event itself, translates that political moment into something stranger and more durable: a vision of battle as cosmic pressure, bodies moving like water finding its level, the Mughal order asserting itself not through heroism alone but through the sheer, overwhelming weight of historical necessity.
At first glance this painting seems overstacked, visually jarring. However, when we carefully inspect each and every aspect of a war is cleverly depicted in this single painting. It is not only the victory of Ali Quli Khan celebrated through this artwork but also the other consequences such as the legitimate authority of Mughals is quietly hinted beneath the surface of this painting. A war won is also a battle lost which is clearly evident through the lying bodies below in the river. The loss of life and chaos are skillfully stroked on the paper. This illustration from an episode of the Akbarnama is a quiet reminder of a victory plus the brutal ramifications one has to witness during a battle.
