Mughal Painters and Their Work: A Biographical Survey and Comprehensive Catalogue.

• Author: Koch, Ebba

In this substantial volume, S. P. Verma presents us with a bibliographical dictionary of 327 Mughal painters and a catalogue raisonne of their works. The author feels rightly that Mughal painting as an art-historical discipline has until now lacked such a basic reference tool. However, in carrying out this labor for Mughal art history, Verma shows little faith in the discipline itself. As he tells us in his introductory remarks (pp. 3-4) and in his later discussion (p. 17), his sole criterium for establishing the oeuvre of an artist is a signature or a contemporary ascription. Verma's skepticism vis-a-vis art history's own methodological tools - such as analysis of style and stylistic comparison - is derived from instances where attributions of Mughal art critics do indeed differ considerably with regard to one and the same painting (p. 17) or the oeuvre of one painter (the famous issue of Farrukh Beg, p. 16). This does, however, not necessarily imply that art historical methods are unreliable but, rather, that they are harder to use than the reading of inscriptions (given that one has a command of Persian and Hindi, the languages used by Mughal painters and those who inscribed their works), the more so since - and this has as yet not been sufficiently considered - Mughal painters would, at times, change their mode of expression according to what they represented, or the context in which they worked. That Verma prefers, in the face of such difficulties, to rely on "facts and figures" seems to reflect also the concerns of his academic milieu, the Centre of Advanced Study of the Department of History at Aligarh Muslim University, whose historians have for so long taken a highly positivist approach to the study of Mughal history, focusing on economic factors, in particular.

The catalogue is preceded by eleven brief chapters (pp. 3-35) that discuss (1) the aim of the catalogue; (2) general tendencies of Mughal painting, where the author adduces new, as yet unpublished source material testifying to emperor Jahangir's (r. 1605-27) involvement in...