When Akbar was offering patronage and support to artists in north, a parallel art movement developed in the Deccan plateau, which stretches from the Narmada River in central India to Krishna River in the south. From 1347 until late in the 15th century, the Deccan was ruled by Muslim Afgan rulers the Bahamani Kings during the reign of Mahamud Shah (1482-1518), the provincial governors of the Bahmani kingdom declared their independence and set up five sultanates, viz. the Imad shahi dynasty of Berar, the Nizam Shahi of Ahmednagar, the Adil Shahi of Bijapur, the Barid Shahi of Bidar and the Qutab Shah of Golkunda. Out of these Golkunda, Ahmednagar and Bijapur were centers of painting.

In mood and manner, Deccani painting, which flourished over much of the Deccan Plateau from at least the last quarter of the 16th century, is reminiscent of the contemporary Mughal school. Again, a homogeneous style evolved from a combination of foreign (Persian and Turkish) and Indian elements, but with a distinct local flavour. Of the early schools, the style patronized by the sultans of Bijapur—notably the tolerant and art-loving Ibrahim 'Adil Shah II of Bijapur, famous for his love of music—is particularly distinguished. Some splendid portraits of him, more lyrical and poetic in concept than contemporary Mughal portraits, are to be found. A wonderful series depicting symbolically the musical modes (ragamala) also survives. Of illustrated manuscripts, the most important are the Nujum-ul-'ulum (“The Stars of the Sciences,” 1590; Chester Beatty Library, Dublin) and the Tarif-e Huseyn-Shahi (Bharata Itihasa Samshodhaka Mandala, Pune), painted around 1565 in the neighbouring state of Ahmadnagar.

Deccani art form evolved in the beginning of the 15th century. It is a sort of fusion of Islamic idiom with the art tradition of Deccan. In the 18th century, some Mughal artists migrated to the Deccan and they blended stylistic elements and refinement of Mughal art with the romantic fervour of Golconda school. This rigorously immobile human figure with distinct features stands erect with his hands crossed over a stick. His religious bent of mind is evident from the rosary that wraps itself around his wrist. He wears layers of robes, each different in colour and design. These robes are conspicuous by the absence of embroidery and embellishments so frequently associated with the Deccani style. There is an overpowering sense of stillness yet the face radiates the gentle mood of reflection. The vacuous eyes are staring into space. The turban covers most part of his forehead. It has a stiff, conical shaped protuberance, with fanning edges all around. There is a halo around his head signifying his royal status.
Owing to its stiffness, there is plasticity in the painting lacking warmth and emotion. The sharp lines of the fully profiled pose are highly legible, but very little modeling is used. Subtle allusions to western art can be detected although they are so skilfully integrated into the overall aesthetics that they are barely noticeable.

Woman Raising Her Hands Toward the Sun
Opaque watercolor on paper
Deccan (Golconda), 1650-60
Museum Purchase, The Kathleen Boone Samuels Memorial Fund 83.62
The Deccan’s sophisticated combination of Persian, Turkish, Indian, and Western cultural elements pervades this opulent painting from Golconda. A stately woman with a doll-like Persian face and a European ruff collar stands beside a chair, her hands raised toward the golden sun. The picture’s meaning is not clear, but its composition was probably adapted from European prints of Christian saints having divine visions. The flamboyant palette- combinations of orange, reds, blues, and greens-is an Indian contribution to this eclectic style.

Before the Mughals arrived in the Deccan in 1320, painting was well established. There were ancient frescoes in the Ajanta cave temples in the northern Deccan, and frescoes in Lepakshi temple in the south. For many centuries the Jains had sponsored palm-leaf books and illustrated scriptures, and Buddhists, Jains and Hindus all used characteristic kalum-kari ('drawn-with-a-pen') wall hangings in their temples.
In 1320, Sultan Tughlaq from Delhi established the first Muslim court in the Deccan. After the Muslim Sultanates developed at Golconda, Bijapur and Bidar, they rapidly became quite independent of the remote Delhi court. In 1565, these Sultanates joined forces to sweep south and conquer the enormously powerful Hindu kingdom of Vijayangar, taking the captured Hindu artists back to their Deccani courts.
The Deccani Sultans traded with Persia and Turkey through western Indian ports and the princesses they married from those countries often brought their own artists with them. The Deccani studios therefore maintained a closer link with the pictorial and compositional elements of Persian painting than the Mughals in Delhi, but after 1565 they also incorporated the sensuousness and brilliant colours of south Indian artists. The Deccani Sultans chose different subjects from the histories and court scenes favoured at the Delhi court, preferring illustrations of love poems, Ragamalas or self-portraits. The portraits indicated imposing presence and Indian opulence better than any other painting school.
Golconda and Bijapur both produced famous paintings but Bidar's artists faded, though Bidar maintains to this day craftsmen who make a Persian-style metal work with silver inlay called Bidri ware. Towards the end of the 17th century the city of Hyderabad carried on the painting tradition started in nearby Golconda. Hyderabad paintings use blues and greens extensively with finely painted detail. Ragamalas were popular. In 1689, both Golconda and Bijapur were sacked by the last of the Great Mughals, Aurangzeb. He established a capital at Aurangabad in northern Deccan and, for a short time, paintings were produced at this court.
Deccani Schools represented within the Sainsbury Collection
Golconda
Golconda was ruled by the Qutb Shahs, 1527-1687. From its foundation, the legendary fort at Golconda was trading with Persia both via Goan ports and by overland camel trains. The Qutb Shahs traded iron, cotton and the much sought after Kalamkari hand-painted cloth for which the area still remains famous. When diamonds were discovered at the Golconda mines in the 17th century these were also traded and the court became very wealthy. This is reflected in the extensive use of gold for painting and in the jewellery worn by the figures in the paintings. Most subjects were Hindus but the Muslim sultans showed complete religious tolerance so their paintings reflect all aspects of Persian and Hindu art.

Miniatures are intricate, colorful handmade illuminations or paintings, small in size, executed meticulously with delicate brushwork. The colors used in the miniatures were derived from minerals, vegetables, precious stones, indigo, conch shells, pure gold and silver. Many of the miniature paintings of the period were based on ‘Ragas’ or musical codes of Indian classical music. Some of the noted miniature schools were those of Mughals, Rajputs and Deccan.

Bijapur School of Ragamala paintings which flourished under the liberal patronage of Ibrahim Adil Shah II, a contemporary of Akbar and Jahangir. Ibrahim Adil Shah II took great care to the effect that the Bijapur School depicted the distinctive Deccani nuance. Moti Chandra, a pundit on the Bijapur School of Ragamala paintings, paid homage to Ibrahim Adil Shah II by saying that “if Akbar gave a new direction and outlook to painting in the North,

it was Ibrahim who brought Deccani painting to a perfection which could claim for it an important niche in the temple of Indian art”.

The Deccani painting style, though miniature, was not entirely similar to the Mughal dominated north, but assimilated influences from Iran, Europe and Turkey through the sea trade routes with the Indian style (largely from Vijaynagar) to evolve a more elaborate, and decorative style i.e. more opulence and less technique. One of the earliest recorded amongst these Deccani miniatures are the illustrations for the Persian epic Tarif i Hussain Shahi. Here the style and execution were deeply influenced by the Deccan and resembled the illustrations of a famed cookery book Nimat Nama (Book of Delicacies), an earlier manuscript from Central India.

The most magnificent and unparalleled artistic creation of the historic miniature are the famous Ragmala series of paintings. Several of these are reported to have originated at Bijapur during Ibrahim Adil Shah’s reign. Ibrahim Adil Shah himself was an accomplished painter and supposedly a patron of music too. The earliest Ragamala paintings are from the Deccan and were probably painted for Ibrahim Adil Shah 11 of Bijapur, who was an authority on painting and a fine artist and illuminator himself. Unusually for a Muslim leader, he actively encouraged the artists in the royal studios to explore this relationship between sound and sentiment through Hindu themes, depictions of court life, nature and the performing arts. Hence, the ragamalas of Deccan were produced in a variety of styles.
Among the architectural relics of this region from the 16th century is the Bijapur Gol Gumbaz (erected about AD1656) in the memory of Mohammad Adil Shah, which though not very majestic on account of being unfinished, is one of the worlds largest domed spaces.

In the course of this book, Bahri writes: ‘God's knowledge has no limit ... and there is not just one path to him. Anyone from any community can find him.’ This certainly seems to have been the view of Bijapur's ruler, Ibrahim Adil Shahi II. Early in his reign Ibrahim gave up wearing jewels and adopted instead the rudraksha rosary of the sadhu. In his songs he used highly Sanskritised language to shower equal praise upon Sarasvati, the Hindu goddess of learning, the Prophet Muhammed, and the Sufi saint Gesudaraz. Perhaps the most surprising passage occurs in the 56th song where the Sultan more or less describes himself as a Hindu god: ‘He is robed in saffron dress, his teeth are black, the nails are red ... and he loves all. Ibrahim, whose father is Ganesh, whose mother is Sarasvati, has a rosary of crystal round his neck ... and an elephant as his vehicle.’ According to the art historian Mark Zebrowski: ‘It is hard to label Ibrahim either a Muslim or a Hindu; rather he had an aesthete's admiration for the beauty of both cultures.’ The same spirit also animates Bijapuri art, whose nominally Islamic miniature portraits.

This creative coexistence finally fell victim, not to a concerted communal campaign by Muslim states intent on eradicating Hinduism, but to the shifting alliances of Deccani diplomacy. In 1558, only seven years before the Deccani sultanates turned on Vijayanagar, the empire had been a prominent part of an alliance of mainly Muslim armies that had sacked the Sultanate of Ahmadnagar. That year, Vijayanagar's armies stabled their horses in the mosques of the plundered city. It was only in 1562, when Rama Raya plundered and seized not just districts belonging to Ahmadnagar and its ally Golconda, but also those belonging to his own ally Bijapur, that the different sultanates finally united against their unruly neighbour.

Yet there is considerable documentary and artistic evidence that the very opposite was true, and that while some of the city's craftsmen went on to to work at the Meenakshi temple of Madurai, others transferred to the patronage of the sultans of Bijapur where the result was a significant artistic renaissance.

The remarkable fusion of styles that resulted from this rebirth can still be seen in the tomb of Ibrahim II, completed in 1626. From afar it looks uncompromisingly Islamic; yet for all its domes and arches, the closer you draw the more you realise that few Muslim buildings are so Hindu in spirit. The usually austere walls of Islamic architecture in the Deccan here give way to a petrified scrollwork indistinguishable from Vijayanagaran decoration, the bleak black volcanic granite of Bijapur manipulated as if it were as soft as plaster, as delicate as a lace ruff. All around minars suddenly bud into bloom, walls dissolve into bundles of pillars; fantastically sculptural lotus-bud domes and cupola drums are almost suffocated by great starbursts of Indic deco ration which curl down from the pendetives like pepper vines.

There evolved the second Mughal School of Ragamala paintings during the reign of Akbar (1542-1605) which was the product of a fusion of the Rajasthani School and the Mughal School. Basil Gray explained why the fusion took place during Akbar’s time: “Akbar was the real creator of the School of Mughal painting as of the Mughal empire. The Rajput Rajas had a special position in his administration. The Rajas of the Rajput states now helped the vernacular renaissance by supporting the poets, musicians and painters, while through them the Hindu and the Mughal made contact”. 0. C. Gangoly felt that “after the development of Mughal School of Portrait in the early l6th century, the two schools, the earlier indigenous Indian and the later Mughal, got entangled and influenced each other. It is now, therefore, difficult from the products of the fusion of the two to recover the outlines of the
earlier Hindu traditions and the few surviving examples seem to prove that the pure Rajasthani idioms have been practised side by side with mixed Mughal style”.

Before coming to the Bengal School of Ragamala paintings known as the Murshidabad School, this writer would like to refer to the Bijapur School of Ragamala paintings which flourished under the liberal patronage of Ibrahim Adil Shah II, a contemporary of Akbar and Jahangir. Ibrahim Adil Shah II took great care to the effect that the Bijapur School depicted the distinctive Deccani nuance. Moti Chandra, a pundit on the Bijapur School of Ragamala paintings, paid homage to Ibrahim Adil Shah II by saying that “if Akbar gave a new direction and outlook to painting in the North,it was Ibrahim who brought Deccani painting to a perfection which could claim for it an important niche in the temple of Indian art”.

Notes

RefrencesSources:
Alfieri, Bianca Maria. 2000. Islamic Architecture of the Indian Subcontinent. London: Laurence King Publishing, 168, 169.
Verma, D.C. 1990. Social, Economic and Cultural History of Bijapur. Delhi: Idarah-i Adabiyat-i Delli, 157, 158, 159.
Volwahsen, Andreas and Henri Stierlin (Ed.). 199-. Islamic India. Lausanne, Germany: Benedikt Taschen Verlag GmbH, 86, 87, 88.
Mark Zarboski