It looks like a pretty enough vase. You might stop by briefly to admire the silver bidri work before walking on. But under the guidance of art historian Dr Preeti Bahadur Ramaswamy, it explodes with stories and myths — of lovers in love and kings in battle. Firstly, it is no vase. It is a figurative hookah base made from an alloy of zinc and copper dating to Hyderabad of the late 17th century or early 18th century. The intricate silver inlay spells out the trysts of Ratan Singh, ruler of Chittor, and Padmavati, daughter of the King of Ceylon.

Pointing to a tiny parrot on the surface, Ramaswamy says that Ratan Singh came to know of Padmavati’s beauty through her parrot, which frequently plays the role of the interlocutor. The hans (swan) hangs its head in submission to Padmavati’s allure. Snakes slithering up the surface of the base marvel at the length of her tresses. The branches of trees and vines frame the lovers and indicate the breaks in the narrative. Fish swirl at the bottom, hinting at the waves of Ceylon. Kneeling in front of the vase, Ramaswamy painstakingly takes the viewer through each sequence, and slowly the pretty-enough-vase unfurls into a historic record.

This hookah base is just one of the many ‘speaking objects’ at ‘Nauras: the Many Arts of the Deccan’ showing at the National Museum. The exhibition features over 100 exquisite items — paintings, manuscripts, metalware, textiles, and arms — from the cosmopolitan Deccan of the 17th and 18th centuries, and has been organised in collaboration with The Aesthetics Project. Dr Ramaswamy and Dr Kavita Singh have curated it.

The arts, nay, the very history of the Deccan has been all but ignored. And this is an attempt to correct that oversight. As Ramaswamy explains, “Deccan, as an area, has long been overshadowed by the Mughals. It was an accident of a number of things. The Mughals were better chroniclers, keepers of historical narrative. They kept accounts of their life at court and dealings with neighbours. These are absent in the Deccan. But the Deccan was an area for great refinement and a cosmopolitan culture.” This exhibition is part of a larger scholarship and project to place the history of the Deccan squarely on the map and bring it out of the shadows of the Mughals. Later this year, a version of this exhibition will travel to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

The hookah base itself tells a larger tale of tobacco and how it first came to India through the Portuguese. A series of paintings and artefacts show the spread of tobacco — from ‘hookah bars’ presided over by women and packed with crowds of men including Persians and Turks, French and Dutch and even an Abyssinian holding aloft a falcon, to high Mughal officials of the Deccan enjoying a quiet smoke. Such kingly portraits made their way to the North and all the way to the Pahari region.

The exhibition pivots around the cosmopolitanism of the Deccan. The syncretic nature of the peninsular arose because of its location along the coast, which allowed for trade and social links to be established with Southeast Asia, the Persian Gulf and even Iran. The name of the exhibition pays tribute to the high aesthetics of the region. Nauras is after all the nine emotions that form the bedrock of all Indian arts. But it was Ibrahim Adil Shah II (1556 –1627) of Bijapur who initiated a cult around Nauras as he was a great patron of the arts and generous to various religions. He wrote in the Kitab-i-Nauras (1617), ‘Turk or Brhamin: our languages differ / But our feelings are the same’. The spirit of the region at the time is embodied in the opening verse of the book which invokes not only Saraswati, but also Prophet Muhammad and the Sufi saint of the Deccan. Nauras also means ‘newly arrived’ in Persian, so the term syncs perfectly with the theme.

The ‘Music room’ is a series of fascinating paintings called the ragamala, dating to the 16th century. Here, ragas are personified as women and men, sons and daughters, and the mood of the raga is captured in verse. Sindhurag, for example, is shown as a warrior on a horse; ghambir raga is more whimsical and is represented by a man astride a fish! A single ragamala painting can evoke fragrance and melody, companionship and love. Music might be ephemeral, but this exhibition is testimony to how the transient can be everlasting.

(The exhibition runs till March 20, at the National Museum, Delhi)

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