Victory of Qutb ad-Din and Azim Khan over Muhammed Husain Mirza and Sher Khan Fuladi (Left)

'Victory of Qutb ad-Din and Azim Khan over Muhammed Husain Mirza and Sher Khan Fuladi', c. 1590-95, painted by Mani after a composition (tarh) by La'l, the left half of a double-page folio from the Victoria and Albert Museum's Akbarnama. Opaque watercolour and gold on paper. There is little pale blue sky remaining, just across the top of the page, crossed by the black curve of a war-horn and the red fringed tip of a standard, and everywhere else there is simply no space allowed to be blank: in the upper left a pair of grey elephants ascend one upon the other’s back their mahouts sound two long bent karnas and hit on two baring drums, hooked onto the rail of theirhowda, a blast blown as if to scare, to welcome, to intimidate; in upper background rocky outcrops, arranged as layered, facet stonewere more imaginedthan observedrise and form a background to a walled town dotted with the finials of temples and tieredrooflines – Patanitself perhaps, distant and thus far from the violence; a trident topped standard and a horse-tail standard act like punctuation in the mid-ground to an argumentthat cannot stop and then below filling almost two thirds of the folio plate, the fight: armoured men whose armour has striped black scales ride on black scaled[war-horses’backs, their drawn bows and drawn swords mid-stroke, crossing lances’ blades at every available angle so that no single line of sight can traverse the folio from one edge to the other without passing over some crossing weapon, some horse’s head on a rein; horses adorned with orange, with blue and with cream canter about and topple and one has alreadyfallen, its legs collapsed beneath it on the white, splashed surface; at the bottom of the page a turbaned rider lies face-down across the page among scattered shields and a discarded sword at last the muddle and turmoil of the mêlée spending themselves in the stillness and the body laid to ground. Thisisthe working mode of Akbari battle illustration, an approachwhich experts on Akbar's illustrated books have named “whatitdoes”-preferring diagonality to horizontality or verticality and deploying small narrative event to populate a crowded pictorial field and create through sheer aggregate force the speed and violence that any single character could not generate. Thisisthe way that Mani paints what La'l draws (the latter's composition as tarh laid out below the text below in red ink as if to confirm the authority of each element of this particular transaction-this piece has been amalassignedto the hand of Mani for its competent application), not La'l's invention but mani's skill and yet Mani is not mentioned elsewhere in the scholarly texts-he does not have a birthplace, or a teacher, or an acknowledged rise within Akbar's workshop, he is only known to us through a name associated with diligent, subordinated action, and, at most, a series of competent and modest drawings of birds and ascetics which connoisseurs in later years have deemed deserving of notice because they score well on a (rediscovered) chart of the relative merits of line and modest modeling that does not rate these works particularly high. In fact,the greatest subject of this folio is not, perhaps, either Qutb ad-Din Khan or the doomed rebel Muhammad Husain Mirza-no particular figure is emphasized over other mounted nobles struggling on the page-so much as what it tells us. While Nainsukh’s genius, employed with such mastery on works in the Pahari tradition, derives its emotional impact from a deliberate isolation, from the clarity of a single beholder, in the Mughal court painting it gains its potency from its radical opposite-from an organized drowning of any hero's story into a collective, almost unreadable, mass of imperial power in motion. The Akbarnama, conceived as Abu'l Fazl's chronicle of legitimate dynastic descent commissioned by Akbar then inherited by Jahangir and then Shah Jahan, illustrates the spread of imperial control not by spotlighting individual achievement but by summarizing (within the common framework of the visual language of crowding and diagonal dynamism) all episodes in the expansion and maintenance of empire, each individual engagement folding into the sheer overall breadth of imperial experience, mani's work in painting this subject an important part of that language of anonymity in expression, which nevertheless gives specific credit in performance. The terror vacui of this picture is not a decorative failing, as against the spareness of Nainsukh, but a very clear-cut aesthetic statement about what painting is and ought to do – namely, to hold steady and allow to be seen, on the page, the whole of what looks like such chaos from close-up, the collective, if disarray, of empire.