Court & Courtship Indian Miniatures in the TAPI Collection is a study of Indian paintings in which the author J.P. Losty explores the well-trod highways and the lesser-known byways of miniature paintings put together by the well-known textile collectors, Praful and Shilpa Shah.
Starting with a splendid 16th-century painting from the early Rajput Bhagvata Purana, readers will savour the variety of Mughal and other portraits of emperors, princes, courtiers, and of royal elephants and horses. Courtly pictures include several from the Deccan, Rajasthan, Central India, and the northern hills. Resplendent ladies in 18th and 19th-century attire adorn the pages, as do paintings acquired for the textiles and costumes they illustrate jamas, paijamas, angarkhas, turbans, odhnis, patkas, canopies, and qanats.
Representing the classic texts of Sanskrit and Hindi literature are sturining examples from a 17th-century ragamala, the Shangri Ramayana, the Gita Govinda, Harivamsha, and Rasikapriya. Two of the most impressive paintings ever to come out of Nathdwara are featured here, from the hands of master artists Sukhdev Gaur and Ghasiram Sharma.
JP Losty was the curator of Indian manuscripts and paintings at the British Museum and British Library in London for 34 years until his retirement in 2005. He has published extensively on illustrated Indian manuscripts and painting in India from the 11th to the 19th century. Some of his most important books include the groundbreaking The Art of the Book in India (1982), Calcutta: City of Palaces (1990), The Ramayana: Love and Valour in India's Great Epic (2008), and Mughal India: Art, Culture and Empire (with Malini Roy, 2012). More recent publications include catalogues of two important Indian collections of Company paintings, in the Jagdish and Kamla Mittal Museum in Hyderabad (2016) and in the TAPI Collection (2019).
Praful and Shilpa Shah are co-founders of the TAPI Collection (Textile and Art of the People of India): Established in 2001 and comprising works acquired from the 1980s, the collection has evolved into one of the pre-eminent private collections of Indian textiles and art Committed to restoring, researching. publishing, and exhibiting facets of their collection, their approach remains eclectic and personal.
Praful is a textile industrialist and painter Shilpa is an advertising professional and freelance writer..
You might be an admirer of one or another facet of Indian art, but you are less likely Y to be one who can resist the appeal of its miniature paintings. This was certainly so for us. Over the past 40 odd years, though collecting textiles has remained our primary focus, the march of decades has seen us picking up paintings occasionally. In many of these paintings, textiles of every kind were there to seejamas, paijamas, angarkhas, turbans, odhnis, patkas, qanats, floorspreads, and sunshades, woven in jamdani, muslin, brocade, mashru or painted in kalamkari, hand-block-printed or embroidered in styles of the time.
Though there is no dearth of publications featuring important examples of Indian paintings from distinguished museums and private collections in India and abroad, we felt convinced that no two collections are ever alike, and in this lay the rationale for a catalogue of the TAPI collection of paintings. The critical impetus to bringing this catalogue to light came in the guise of Jerry Losty, our hugely knowledgeable art historian and author to whom we owe the selection, scope, and shape of this catalogue. We are immensely thankful to him for his scholarship.
Among the paintings we acquired in the last few years, there have been those on the subject of elephants. It is to the memory of our late artist friend Howard Hodgkin that these must be dedicated. Sitting on the verandah of Wellington Mews during one of his winter visits to Mumbai, he told us why in his collection of Indian miniature paintings he was so partial to the theme of elephants, saying that 'the elephant is to Indian art what the nude is to Western art. The artists were such keen observers of their physicality.
Some of the pleasures in describing a hitherto unpublished collection of Indian miniatures include finding out what treasures there might be and working out the rationale behind the acquisition of what it contains. There are different types of collections, of course. Some aim to be comprehensive, encompassing examples of every style, but that was only possible in earlier decades when there was a glut of paintings in the market as the princely collections were dispersed. Others seem more random at first sight, collected according to a particular individual's taste. Praful and Shilpa Shah have collected miniatures bearing in mind their other passion, that for Indian textiles, which broadly informed their decisions about acquisitions in this field as it did their other collection of trade pictures from the 19th century. They have also explored some of the byways of miniature painting in India, including some examples of rarer sets and styles.
The TAPI collection is not and was never meant to be a comprehensive collection of many and varied styles. Not to be found here are examples of some of the most sought-after areas of Indian miniatures such as early Mughal or Rajput paintings or masterpieces by Nainsukh and his immediate family. There is only one 16th-century painting, but that a splendid one from the early Rajput Bhagavata Purana (Cat. 1). There are 17th-century Mughal portraits of elephants as well as courtiers and princes, and indeed portraiture remains a theme throughout the collection, illustrating the many and varied costurnes worn in different centuries. There are many paintings of wormen, which we are not supposed to call portraits, but which no doubt illustrate generically how they appeared in the 18th and 19th centuries. Portraits of horses and elephants too appear, illustrating their varied caparisons and apparel, including two horse portraits by the fascinating mid-18th-century Jaipur artist Ramjidas (Cat. 32, 33), known hitherto in publications only by his animated studies of men.
No collection of Indian paintings can fail to have examples illustrating the classic texts of Sanskrit and Hindi literature. The Rasikapriya is, of course, present in a beautiful floriferous page from one of the courts of Bundelkhand (c. 1680) (Cat. 6). The earliest Pahari painting in the collection is a stunning example from a dispersed Basohli/Nurpur ragamala from the 1680s (Cat. 12), in which the implicit erotic charge simply takes the breath away, now as when I first saw it in London years ago. Another raganala series from the Deccan in the early 18th century of great decorative beauty is here, I believe, published as part of a collection for the first time (Cat. 18, 19). One of the most important paintings Is by the master of Style III of the Shangri Ramayana series (Cat. 13), and is in fact the very first painting from the 'Kishkindha Kanda' that sets the tone for the appearance and costume of the exiled brothers and of the monkeys throughout the book and probably for other early 18th-century Pahari series as well. A beautiful moonlit page from the 'Lambagraon' Gita Govinda (Cat. 54) is made more memorable by the sumptuous costume worn by Radha. In one of the greatest banquet scenes in Indian painting, we can see Krishna with heavenly help entertaining his family, their wives, and countless apsaras by the seashore from a Harivamsha series attributed to Purkhu (Cat. 55). Other fine Pahari paintings illustrate not classic texts as such but variants on the themes of erotic seduction propounded in the Rasikapriya, and introduce some welcome innovation at this stage in Pahari painting.
The collection and catalogue end with two of the most splendid paintings ever to escape from Nathdwara. The two master artists under Tilakayat Govardhanlalji's cultured sway, Sukhdev Gaur and Ghasiram Sharma, hitherto represented in publications by mostly smaller works, are here in two large, all-encompassing, panoramic paintings illustrating the Budhwa Mangal festival in Varanasi in 1886 (Cat. 73) and the Gopashtami festival in Nathdwara itself from around 1905-10 (Cat. 74). The Budhwa Mangal festival is Sukhdev's earliest known work and shows him to be already a master of topographical painting.
With such a collection deciding on the order for the catalogue was doubly important and meant much communication between England and Mumbai. The normal one based on stylistic criteria - Mughal, Deccani, Rajput, and Pahari, each arranged according to different schools - seemed inappropriate, since the collection was never intended to represent examples of different styles and schools. It also had the disadvantage of placing some of the early paintings and all the late 19th-century ones in the middle of the sequence.
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