narendra raghunath
(forms part of the artistic research on skin and skin cover)
A Battle scene from Razmnama, Persian translation of Mahabharata
The history of Indian art is often narrated through categories that appear, at first encounter, to be self-evident: Hindu art, Buddhist art, Jain art, Islamic art, Mughal painting, Rajput painting, Deccani art, temple architecture, courtly art and traditional craft. Such classifications have considerable descriptive value, particularly when they help us identify specific religious institutions, artistic conventions, patronage systems or historical periods; nevertheless, they become considerably less adequate when we examine the objects themselves, the circumstances of their production, the people who made them, the patrons who commissioned them, the markets through which they circulated and the intellectual worlds in which they acquired meaning. A Mughal manuscript, for instance, may contain a Persian text with illustrations produced by Indian painters, informed by the visual conventions of earlier Persian manuscripts or naturalistic techniques derived in part from European prints, and narratives originating in Sanskrit literature. A Deccani painting may bring together Persian poetry, Indian landscape traditions, the adaptation of Central Asian courtly aesthetic conventions, African political presence, or European visual references. A textile may have been woven by hereditary Indian artisans, commissioned by a Muslim court, sold by a merchant through an Indian Ocean trading network, and eventually acquired by a European consumer whose understanding of its imagery was entirely different from that of the people who produced it. The object, in such circumstances, persistently exceeds the cultural category that later historians attempt to assign to it.
The encounter between Islam and the artistic cultures of India should therefore not be understood simply as a process in which an externally constituted "Islamic culture" exerted influence upon an otherwise stable and self-contained Indian artistic tradition. Such an interpretation is too linear to accommodate the evidence and, more importantly, obscures the reciprocal and transformative character of the historical processes involved. What developed over several centuries was instead a complex field of movement, translation, adaptation, negotiation, appropriation and reinvention, in which political rulers interacted with artisans, merchants with artisans, scholars with translators, religious communities with one another and regional courts with artistic practices originating in distant parts of Asia. The resulting culture was not a simple synthesis in which the original identities of the participating traditions disappeared. Rather, it was an evolving field in which differences remained visible even as practices, techniques, images, languages, and ideas crossed the boundaries separating communities and institutions.
The term Persianate is particularly useful in understanding this history, provided that it is not treated as a synonym for either "Persian" or "Islamic." Persianate culture was a trans-regional formation in which Persian language, literature, administrative practices, courtly conventions, political ideas and aesthetic forms circulated across an enormous geographical area extending from the Iranian plateau and Central Asia into South Asia. Once established in India, however, these cultural forms did not remain unchanged. They were progressively indigenised and transformed through sustained interaction with Sanskritic intellectual traditions, regional languages, local artistic practices, established systems of craft production and the particular social and political circumstances of the Indian subcontinent. Richard M. Eaton's account is particularly valuable because it places the emergence of Persianate culture within a prolonged encounter between Persianate and Sanskritic worlds, while also emphasising that Persianate culture itself became progressively Indianised. Its consequences extended beyond court art into language, literature, political culture, science, music, architecture, dress, cuisine and religious life.
This distinction becomes even more important when the history is extended beyond the political centres of northern India. Islam did not enter the subcontinent through a single route, nor did it arrive as a single cultural package. Muslim merchants and communities participated in Indian Ocean networks that connected the western coast of India with Arabia, the Persian Gulf, East Africa and Southeast Asia. At the same time, the subsequent establishment of Muslim-ruled states introduced a different set of political, institutional and cultural relationships. The history of Muslim presence in India must therefore be understood through several overlapping processes: maritime commerce, migration, religious exchange, political conquest, courtly patronage and intellectual circulation. These processes frequently intersect, but they should not be collapsed into one another.
This is particularly important because it prevents the history of Islam in India from being reduced to a narrative of military conquest. The establishment of the Delhi Sultanate and later Muslim-ruled states certainly transformed political structures, patronage systems, and the organisation of urban and monumental architecture. Still, the longer history of Muslim presence in India also includes merchants, sailors, scholars, Sufis, artisans, migrants and communities whose lives were embedded within existing commercial and social structures. Cultural interaction consequently took place not only in imperial capitals but also in ports, markets, workshops, religious institutions and domestic environments. The Indian Ocean was not merely a route through which commodities travelled; it was an infrastructure through which languages, technologies, religious practices, artistic preferences and professional knowledge were transmitted.
At the same time, it would be equally misleading to minimise the consequences of the political transformations associated with the Delhi Sultanate, the Deccan sultanates and the Mughal Empire. New political institutions generated new forms of patronage, new architectural requirements, new systems of manuscript production and new demands for luxury commodities. Persian became an important language of administration and elite literary culture. At the same time, Islamic religious institutions introduced architectural and decorative requirements that differed significantly from those associated with many earlier Hindu, Buddhist and Jain institutions. Mosques, tombs, madrasas, palaces, gardens and fortified complexes became important architectural forms, while calligraphy, geometric ornament, vegetal decoration and manuscript painting acquired new relationships with architecture and patronage. These developments were neither merely foreign additions to an existing Indian culture nor complete replacements of earlier traditions. They became part of a new historical environment in which several traditions operated simultaneously.
Architecture as Cultural Translation:
Architecture provides the clearest material evidence of this process because a building necessarily brings together ideas, materials, technologies, labour and political intentions. Architectural forms associated with the wider Islamic world entered India. Still, they had to be constructed with Indian stone, brick, timber, and other locally available materials, under particular climatic conditions, and drawing on the knowledge of artisans whose technical traditions had developed within the subcontinent. The result was therefore not simply an imported architecture. The form might have originated elsewhere, but the building had to become materially possible in India.
This is one reason why the development of Indo-Islamic architecture is better understood as a process of translation than as an act of transplantation. The architectural vocabulary of arches, domes, vaults, courtyards, minarets, mihrabs, monumental gateways and calligraphic decoration interacted with established Indian traditions of stone carving, structural construction, ornamentation and spatial organisation. For example, the Islamic monuments of the Deccan used locally available materials and building traditions while also drawing upon architectural ideas that had developed under the Delhi Sultanate, and over time, Persianate influences introduced through religious, political and commercial connections with Iran were gradually adapted to local conditions and combined with existing practices, giving rise to distinctive regional architectural forms. The Deccani architecture, therefore, illustrates how new artistic ideas were not simply imported and reproduced, but were interpreted and transformed through local materials, skills, traditions, and social conditions.
The same principle can be observed in Bengal, Gujarat, Kashmir and other regions, each of which developed its own relationship with Islamic architectural forms. It is therefore misleading to speak of a single "Islamic architecture of India" as though the subcontinent had reproduced a single coherent foreign model. The architectural traditions of Bengal emerged from different material and environmental conditions from those of Delhi; Gujarat developed within a powerful mercantile and Jain-Hindu urban environment; the Deccan was connected to Iran, Central Asia, Africa and the wider Indian Ocean; Kashmir possessed its own distinctive architectural history. The resulting regional variations are not peripheral details but central evidence of the process through which Islamic architectural traditions became embedded within Indian society.
The Qutb complex in Delhi, the development of Sultanate architecture and the later architectural synthesis of the Mughal period should therefore be understood within this broader history of interaction. Scholarship comparing Indian and Iranian architectural traditions has increasingly emphasised not only the movement of forms but also the collaboration of Indian and Persian artists, regional variations in ornament and construction, the role of architects and craftsmen, and the participation of women in the development of courtly architectural culture. The significance of this approach lies in its refusal to reduce architecture to a catalogue of stylistic features. Architecture becomes evidence of social organisation, technological exchange, migration and political imagination.
Gujarat provides an especially revealing case because it brings together several dimensions of this history that are too often separated in conventional accounts. Its ports connected the subcontinent with the wider Indian Ocean, while its cities were inhabited by Hindu, Jain and Muslim communities whose economic activities frequently intersected. The region's textile production, architectural traditions, mercantile culture and religious institutions therefore developed within a social environment in which commercial and cultural boundaries did not necessarily coincide with religious boundaries. Here, the history of art becomes inseparable from the history of commerce, because the textile was simultaneously an aesthetic object, a commodity, a marker of social status and an instrument of international exchange.
Bengal presents a different but equally important example in which the development of Islamic architecture cannot be understood simply as an extension of Delhi's architecture, because the region possessed different materials, ecological conditions, construction practices, and historical connections. The resulting forms demonstrate how Islamic architectural requirements could be interpreted through regional Indian traditions rather than mechanically reproduced from elsewhere. S ch regionalisation is among the strongest pieces of evidence against the idea that the Islamic presence in India produced a single, homogeneous artistic style.
The Artisan and the Material Transformation of Culture:
The artisan occupies a particularly important position in the history of India because artisans were among the principal agents through whom cultural differences were translated into material form. Political rulers could commission buildings, manuscripts and luxury objects, but it was the artisan who had to make those commissions materially possible. The mason understood the behaviour of stone; the metalworker understood alloys and techniques of inlay; the dyer possessed knowledge of fibres, mordants and colour; the weaver understood the relationship between pattern, structure and repetition; the painter understood pigments, paper, brushes and methods of representation; and the calligrapher possessed an embodied knowledge of proportion, rhythm and disciplined movement.
When local craft traditions came into contact with new demands from Muslim or Persianate patrons, artisans generally adapted those demands using the skills, materials and techniques they had developed within their communities over generations, rather than simply abandoning their existing practices and copying unfamiliar models. In this way, new ideas and local knowledge gradually came together to create new forms of craft that reflected both the changing demands of patrons and the traditions of the artisans who made them.
This process meant that the artisan was not merely an executor carrying out a patron's wishes, but an active participant in translating new cultural and aesthetic requirements into locally meaningful material forms. The distinction is important because conventional histories of art often give greater attention to the intentions of rulers and patrons or to the individual style of celebrated artists, while giving comparatively less attention to the collective technical knowledge of artisans, workshops and hereditary communities through which buildings, textiles, paintings and other objects were actually made.
The movement of artisans and other specialists between regions further complicated this process. The Deccan provides especially strong evidence of this phenomenon. From the fifteenth century onward, Iranian poets, scholars, merchants, politicians and artists increasingly moved into the Deccan, creating networks connecting cities such as Bijapur, Golconda, and Biar with centres in Iran. The resulting cultural environment was not simply Persian culture transplanted into southern India; rather, the movement of people created new forms of cultural translation, adaptation and response. Recent scholarship on Iran and the Deccan explicitly places mobility and cultural translation at the centre of this history.
The significance of mobility extends beyond individual artists. When people move, they carry with them techniques, memories, aesthetic preferences, literary traditions, professional networks and expectations about patronage. When those resources encounter another cultural environment, they inevitably change. The history of art is consequently also a history of migration, and the resulting artistic traditions often reveal the traces of several geographical histories simultaneously.
Bidri metalwork gives us a useful example because its significance lies not merely in its appearance but in the specialised technical knowledge required to produce it. The distinctive darkened metal surface and contrasting inlay depend upon sophisticated processes of casting, engraving, insertion and chemical treatment. Such knowledge cannot be transmitted simply by looking at an object; it requires apprenticeship, repeated practice, and embodied technical understanding. Caft history, therefore, allows us to see cultural exchange at a deeper level than the movement of motifs alone. A motif can be copied relatively easily, whereas sophisticated technology requires the transmission of knowledge.
The same principle applies to textiles. Indian textile production possessed a long and sophisticated history before the establishment of Muslim-ruled states, and Muslim courts and merchant networks did not create Indian textile expertise. They nevertheless participated in the transformation of its markets, consumption patterns, designs, institutional organisation, and international circulation. Curiously, demand for luxury fabrics coexisted with commercial demand, religious consumption, and overseas trade, creating several overlapping economies of production.
Consequently, the craft of textile making may have become one of the most important artisanal practices in which aesthetic demands and economic realities converged to strengthen tradition. A piece of cloth could simultaneously embody the technical knowledge of a hereditary craft of the community, the aesthetic preferences of a court, the commercial calculations of a merchant, and the consumption patterns of a distant market. This is why the history of Indian craft cannot be adequately written as a history of royal patronage alone. In fact, some of the most significant transformations took place in the spaces between court and market, where artisans adapted their work to changing demands, merchants connected centres of production with different groups of consumers, and techniques and skills gradually travelled beyond the institutions and communities in which they had originally developed.
The Mughal atelier represents one such evolution of sophisticated institutional expression. The Ateliers were not simply the places where Persian paintings were reproduced in India. They were places where artists, scribes, materials, literary texts, and artistic conventions from different cultural backgrounds were brought into sustained contact. The resulting visual language incorporated Persianate conventions while also drawing upon Indian practices of representation and, increasingly, European pictorial devices.
The importance of the Mughal atelier, therefore, lies not merely in the beauty of the paintings that emerged from it but in the institutional conditions that made such cross-cultural production possible. Manuscript production required an extensive infrastructure involving paper makers, scribes, illuminators, painters, binders, pigment specialists and administrators. The finished manuscript concealed this network of labour, presenting the viewer with an apparently unified object that was in reality the product of collaboration among many specialists.
The translation of Sanskrit literature into Persian under Akbar makes the intellectual dimension of this process even more significant. For example, the Persian translation of the Mahabharata, known as the Razmnama, was not simply an act of simple linguistic substitution; it represented the movement of a major Sanskrit literary and intellectual tradition into the Persianate environment of the Mughal court, where Hindu scholars, Persian-speaking intellectuals, scribes and painters participated in a complex process of cultural translation. The illustrated manuscripts that resulted from this process are consequently among the most powerful material manifestations of a historical world in which traditions that are retrospectively placed into separate religious categories could operate within a shared institutional environment.
The significance of such encounters lies not in proving that one culture in a linear fashion "influenced" another but in demonstrating how cultural forms acquire new possibilities when they enter a different environment, such as a Sanskrit epic becoming a Persian manuscript without ceasing to be an Indian epic. A Persian literary convention could become part of an Indian court culture without remaining culturally foreign. A Rajput painter could adopt a Mughal pictorial convention without turning Rajput painting into Mughal painting. Cultural transmission was therefore not necessarily a process of replacement; it was frequently a process of re-articulation.
The interaction between Mughal and European visual cultures demonstrates this point: European prints and images reached the Mughal court through Jesuit missions and other channels, and Mughal artists studied and adapted elements of European pictorial practices. Why were these elements incorporated selectively into an already sophisticated visual system rather than copied? Perspective, modelling, shading, and particular modes of representing the human figure could be transformed within Mughal painting and given meanings appropriate to the court's own aesthetic and political purposes.
This episode is particularly revealing because it demonstrates that the Persian world itself was not culturally isolated. By the seventeenth century, Indian courts were participating in an increasingly interconnected world in which Persianate, Indian, European, Central Asian and African cultural elements could coexist within the same artistic environment. The Mughal court was consequently not merely an Indian court influenced by Persia; it was one of the major nodes within a much larger trans-regional cultural network.
Religion, Power and Cultural Exchange
The emphasis upon cultural exchange should not, however, lead to the opposite error of imagining that religious differences ceased to matter. They remained significant. Islamic religious architecture operated within particular theological and ritual frameworks, while Hindu, Buddhist and Jain traditions possessed their own systems of sacred images, temples, ritual spaces and philosophical meanings. Quranic calligraphy cannot be reduced to ornament, just as a Hindu image cannot be understood merely as a decorative object. The religious function of an artistic object remains essential to its historical interpretation.
At the same time, religious identity not necesarily determine every aspect of artistic production in India as a Muslim ruler could employ Hindu craftsmen; a Hindu court could adopt Mughal visual conventions; a Jain merchant could participate in an economy operating under Muslim political authority; a Sanskrit scholar could participate in a Persianate intellectual environment; and an Indian artisan could produce objects for patrons whose religi us identity differed from that of the artisan. The relationship between religion and artistic production was therefore real but not mechanically deterministic.
Nor should the history of cultural exchange be romanticised. The political histories of Muslim-ruled India included conquest, warfare, dynastic competition, political displacement, and episodes of temple destruction and appropriation. These realities must remain part of the historical narrative. At the same time, they should not be transformed into a universal explanation for every aspect of Muslim political or cultural history.
For example, the history of Temple destruction requires careful contextualisation. Such acts of vandalism occurred in different political circumstances. They could be connected with warfare, dynastic rivalry, sovereignty, religious patronage, and the symbolic destruction of institutions associated with rival political authority. A historically responsible account must therefore distinguish between documented episodes and sweeping claims about the motives of all Muslim rulers. The same caution applies in the opposite direction: the existence of cultural collaboration does not mean that religious or political conflict was insignificant.
The best historically convincing position may lie between these extremes. In reality, medieval and early modern Indian society could contain religious conflict and artistic collaboration, political conquest and commercial cooperation, and cultural appropriation and genuine intellectual exchange. These phenomena are not mutually exclusive, and they are often different dimensions of the same historical world.
Cultural exchange did not necessarily always occur between equal participants, so the question of power is equally important in this discussion. The relationship between an emperor and an artisan was structurally unequal; so too was the relationship between a conquering state and a local community. A court could absorb a community's technical knowledge while leaving few records of the community itself. An artist might gain extraordinary opportunities through court patronage while remaining economically dependent upon the institution that employed them. Cultural entanglement, therefore, does not imply equality.
Recognising the existence of such an inequality, however, does not make cultural exchange unreal. It makes them more complex. The task is to understand how people negotiated unequal structures and how their practices nevertheless produced cultural forms that could not have emerged from either tradition in isolation.
Toward an Entangled History of Indian Art
This is perhaps where the historiography of Indian art has undergone one of its most important transformations. Other accounts frequently described cultural interaction in terms of "influence," as though one culture possessed a complete artistic vocabulary that another culture subsequently borrowed. Such language remains useful in certain circumstances, but it becomes inadequate when dealing with several centuries of sustained interaction.
The concepts of circulation, translation, adaptation, and entanglement offer a more precise vocabulary. Circulation asks how people, objects, texts and techniques moved. Translation asks what happened when an idea or image entered a different linguistic or intellectual environment. Aaptation asks how local practitioners transformed what they encountered. E tanglement asks how these interactions eventually altered the cultural structures within which both traditions subsequently operated.
This approach also makes it possible to recognise that cultural exchange was multidirectional. I dia did not simply receive Persian, Central Asian or European influences. Indian artistic practices, commodities, textiles, technologies and intellectual traditions also travelled outward. The relationship between India and the wider Persianate and Indian Ocean worlds was consequently one of continuous circulation rather than one-way transmission.
A manuscript can preserve the encounter between languages and intellectual traditions; a building can record the meeting between political ambition and local construction knowledge; a textile can reveal the relationship between craft, commerce and consumption; a metal object can preserve the movement of technical knowledge; and a painting can embody the simultaneous presence of several visual traditions. S, a historical object can therefore be understood almost as a map of these movements. The object does not merely become an illustration of history alone; it becomes historical evidence.
When examined closely, Indian art reveals a society in motion: artists moving between courts, merchants moving between ports, manuscripts moving between languages, technologies moving between workshops, motifs moving between religious communities and commodities moving between continents. The resulting artistic culture cannot be adequately understood as the product of one tradition acting upon another. It emerged through prolonged encounters in which the participants themselves were transformed.
The deeper significance of the Islamic and Persianate encounter with India, therefore, lies not simply in the introduction of particular motifs, architectural forms or techniques. Its importance lies in the creation of new conditions under which artistic knowledge could circulate, be translated, and acquire new meanings. A Persian architectural idea could become an Indian building; a Sanskrit epic could become a Persian manuscript; an Iranian artist could become part of a Deccani artistic world; a Mughal pictorial convention could become part of Rajput visual culture; an Indian textile could become a global commodity; and an Indian painter could transform a European print.
What emerges from this history is consequently not a simple story of one civilisation influencing another, but a history of shared making, albeit under conditions that were frequently unequal, contested and politically charged. Indian visual culture became what it became not because its traditions remained untouched, but because those traditions possessed the capacity to encounter difference, negotiate with it, resist it, absorb elements of it and transform those elements according to their own material and intellectual circumstances.
As patrons did not simply import culture but reconfigured it for a new political and social environment, the artisan did not merely receive the foreign form; the artisan changed it to adapt local sensibilities. The merchant did not merely transport an object; the merchant extended its geographical and cultural life. The translator did not merely reproduce a text; the translator created a new intellectual relationship between traditions. The object itself did not remain culturally fixed; it travelled, changed hands, acquired new meanings and entered worlds that its original maker could scarcely have imagined.
The history of Islam and Indian art should therefore not be reduced to a history of separation between "Hindu" and "Islamic," "Indian" and "Persian," or "local" and "foreign." These distinctions describe important identities, institutions, and historical experiences, but they do not adequately capture the movement of people, knowledge, materials, and objects through which Indian society actually developed. A more compelling history is one in which difference remains visible. At the same time, interaction becomes equally visible: a history of encounter rather than replacement, of translation rather than simple borrowing, of adaptation rather than passive reception and of cultural entanglement rather than isolated traditions existing in parallel.
Seen in this way, Indian art is not simply a record of different traditions existing side by side. It is a record of what happened when those traditions met, sometimes peacefully and sometimes violently, sometimes through conscious collaboration and sometimes through unequal structures of power, but repeatedly through the movement of people, ideas, materials and objects across cultural boundaries. It is precisely this long history of encounter that helps explain the extraordinary diversity, resilience and continuing capacity for transformation that characterise the artistic and material cultures of the Indian subcontinent.
Further reading :
Asher, Catherine B. Architecture of Mughal India. The New Cambridge History of India, I.4. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992.
Beach, Milo Cleveland. Mughal and Rajput Painting. The New Cambridge History of India, I.3. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992.
Irwin, John, and Margaret Hall. Indian Painted and Printed Fabrics. Vol. 1. Ahmedabad: Calico Museum of Textiles, 1971.
Koch, Ebba. Mughal Architecture: An Outline of Its History and Development (1526–1858). Munich: Prestel, 1991.
Seyller, John. Workshop and Patron in Mughal India: The Freer Rāmāyaṇa and Other Illustrated Manuscripts of ʿAbd al-Raḥīm. Artibus Asiae Supplementum 42. Zurich: Artibus Asiae Publishers, Museum Rietberg, 1999.
Rather, Zubeer A. "Beyond the Himalayan Borderlands: Indian Textile Production and Trade with Central Asia during Mughals." South India Journal of Social Sciences 22, no. 1 (2024): 47–59. https://doi.org/10.62656/SIJSS.v22i1.82.
Truschke, Audrey. Culture of Encounters: Sanskrit at the Mughal Court. New York: Columbia University Press, 2016.
