Ibrahim Adil ShahII, Gulshan-e-Ishaq andRare Adil Shahi Kings from Clockwise direction

Bijapur Art History - Deccani Painting

Miniature Paintings

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 theearlier 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”.


Farrukh Baig – the famous Adil Shahi and Mughal painter

Farrukh Beg was a Mongol artist who was in Khorasan until 1585 with artists who had been in the atelier of Ibrahim Mirza in Khorasan . He spent 1585 to 1600 at the the atelier of Akbar. Farrukh Beg was downsized in 1600 in the same design shift in which Miskin fell out of favor. He was in the Deccan until 1608 and this shows the style he used when he returned to the court of Jahangir in Mughal India. While the realistic detail in Mughal Shrub Carpets may derive from European botanicals the rows of clumps of flowers appears to have entered the Mughal design repertoire from the work of Farrukh Beg upon his return from the Deccan.
It is commonly written that Farrukh Beg was a Persian born artist but I have decided that that is unlikely. Farrukh is a very talented artist and there is no other Farrukh who was of similar stature at the court of Akbar. So when we look at Abu'l Fazl list of the most important artist I believe that Farrukh Beg is the Farrukh the Qalmaq listed ninth. A Qalmaq or Kalmuck as it is often written refers to a member of the Oirat tribe. The Oirat were a Mongol tribe that in 1453 assassinated the Chingizi Mongol Khan Toqtoa-buqa and became vassals of China. An extremely important and powerful tribal nation- state the Oirat held the land from the upper Yenisi to the valley of the Ili. For a discussion of the Oirat in this period see Rene Grousset's
JVS Wilkinson referes to Farruk Beg as "the Khalmuq Painter" In describing how Jahangir rewarded him with 2000 Rupees.


Farrukh Baig - The Famous Adil Shahi Painter

(Dated after 1615) Persian painter, active in India. He went to India at the age of 39. His year of birth, AH 954–5 (AD 1547–8), has been calculated from an inscribed painting, executed when he was 70 in AH 1024. His ethnic origin has been given by Abu’l Fazl as Qalmaq and elsewhere as Qaqshali (a misreading of Qashqa’i). He evidently received his training in Khurasan, probably from artists associated with the production of a manuscript of Jami’s Haft awrang for Prince Ibrahim Mirza, governor of Mashhad 1564–77. His earliest surviving work comprises four miniatures in a simplified Khurasani style in a manuscript of Amir Khusraw’s Khamsa (‘Five poems’; Cambridge, King’s Coll.) dated AH 978–9 (AD 1571–2) at Herat. This manuscript evidently travelled to India because the attributions include the title Nadir al-`Asri (‘wonder of the age’) bestowed on him by the Mughal emperor Jahangir (reg 1605–27) before AH 1024 (AD 1615). Farrukh Beg went to Kabul and entered the service of Muhammad Hakim, half-brother to the Mughal emperor Akbar (reg 1556–1605). On 13 March 1580 he negotiated the sale, to Akbar’s library, of a manuscript, recently illustrated with two miniatures in Khurasani style, possibly by him. After the death of his patron in July 1585 he travelled with Muhammad Hakim’s son and others to the court at Rawalpindi and entered Akbar’s service.


Work of Farukh - Miniature Painitng of Ibrahim Adil Shah II

He was commissioned by Emporer Jahangir for serveral Books. For one these books he travelled to Bijapur to make portraits of the contemporary Adil Shahi King Ibrahim Adil ShahII.
He probably impressed by Ibrahim Adil Shah II and stayed in his court upon his invitation for some years before he went back to Delhi Mughal court.

Later he joined to the courts worked

Notes Sources:

Calligraphy and Islamic Culture (New York: New York University Press, 1984), p. 174, n. 99.