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Rembrandt’s two dozen copies of Mughal paintings that he created between the years 1654 and 1660, remains an obscure collection of drawings within the artist’s extensive body of work. In the scholarship, these drawings are usually framed as his interest in costumes and gestures. This interpretation, however, does not fully take into account Rembrandt’s sensitivity towards cultural and religious tolerance, as exhibited in all aspects of his artistic practice. Prior to his Mughal drawings, Rembrandt already exhibited a curiosity for foreign peoples and places. As a resident of Amsterdam, the global epicenter of Europe, he took advantage of his cosmopolitan atmosphere by actively collecting objects from Asia and the New World brought in by the Dutch East India Company. His art, moreover, did not remain impervious to this dynamic and diverse environment, as evinced by the numerous drawings Rembrandt made to document the different sights and peoples that he encountered in the city. His Mughal copies, moreover, do not resemble the sketches that scholars consider as exhibiting the artist’s curiosity for Oriental attire and distinct body language; instead, they closely parallel the kinds of drawings he made after works of art he found visually appealing. Rembrandt experimented with different kinds of lines and contours to imitate and adapt the Mughal style to diversify his artistic repertoire. His thoughtful engagement reveals that Rembrandt viewed Mughal art style as legitimate forms he could utilize to develop new compositions, or even to challenge and correct existing pictorial traditions. Rembrandt’s Mughal drawings, rather than being an obscure collection, demonstrate instead his unique ability to craft works of art to be reflective of his rich, diverse environment. This strong artistic desire for pictorial experimentation, in addition to his sensitivity for acute narrative interpretation, coalesces to form a more unified portrait of Rembrandt as an empathetic, albeit ambitious, artist. / text

Paintings of women as individual subjects were a popular theme in the Mughal court during the mid-seventeenth century, or the Shah Jahan period (ca. 1628-1658). These portraits depict idealized archetypes with subtle differences in facial and bodily features. The same portrait conventions were used for both historical and imaginary women. This thesis has three aims: (1) identify and explain the significance of three elements that visually represent an ideal Mughal woman using a case study from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts called Page from the Nasir al-Din Shah Album: Portrait of a Mughal Woman (ca. 1630-45), (2) combine visual and textual sources to further the study of Mughal women, and (3) reinsert the portraits of Mughal women within a larger scope of female imagery in Indian art to show that Mughal paintings encompass just one part of a much bigger story. Paintings of Mughal women are not only aesthetic works of art—they are historical artifacts.

This dissertation studies certain Hindi and Persian narratives of the War of Succession (1658) to succeed Shah Jahan (r.1627-1658). All the narratives under study were written during the reign of Aurangzeb (r.1658-1707), the successor of Shah Jahan. The study evaluates the significance of the War as a landmark moment in the social history of India, especially in the formation and inter-relationships between religious communities. The dissertation demarcates the larger epistemological and ontological canvas on which these communities took shape and interacted with each other. The research outlines the ways and the contexts in which terms such as Hindu, momin, musalman, Islam, din and Rajput were deployed in literary texts. It asks whether Hinduism and Islam were two disparate traditions, as previous histories of the War and Mughal India had contended. The dissertation argues that social communities of Hindus and Muslims were mutually and similarly circumscribed within an Islamic worldview and concept of din. Hindu traditions could portray Muslims in concepts and terms borrowed from Indian epics but within an over-arching Islamic cultural dispensation. The War was not a moment of evolution between two independent Hindu and Muslim traditions. Rather, the War was a moment that saw the evolution, even if it be of an antagonistic kind, of Hindu and Muslim traditions within a larger Islamic framework. Besides the above primary focus, the dissertation provides the reader with important insights and overviews regarding allied subjects such as the literary histories of Persian and of Hindi/Urdu, especially in the Dingal and Khari Boli dialects, the political culture of Hindu India, Rajput political culture, Mughal political culture, patronage networks in Mughal India, notions of soldierly duty in seventeenth century India, language and status, preaching in the Hindu and Islamic traditions, the sociological ideas of acculturation and Islamisation, and twentieth century history-writing.

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Cet ouvrage a pour objet l’étude de différents peintres moghols ayant exercé leur activité au XVIII° siècle, c'est-à-dire entre la fin du règne d’Aurengzeb et le début de celui d’Akbar II. Il s’attache à établir, pour chaque peintre, des catalogues de l’œuvre peint, et, partant, à définir les caractéristiques de chacun, en analysant le style et l’approche iconographique des peintures. Jusqu’à présent, la méconnaissance globale des collections de peintures mogholes du XVIII° siècle a désigné cette période comme une phase de recul qualitatif des peintres et des peintures, ces dernières étant généralement considérées comme peu nombreuses, stylistiquement faibles et limitées à des sujets galants, courtois ou érotiques. C’est en analysant ces collections peu étudiées que nous avons tenté d’améliorer la connaissance de cette période, à travers la vie et l’œuvre des peintres moghols face aux bouleversements qui surviennent dans l’Inde du nord tout au long du XVIII° siècle. Ainsi, nous nous sommes attaché à montrer, qu’après une première phase où prévaut, chez les peintres, une forme de classicisme, les membres de l’académie impériale ont tenté de rénover l’esthétique moghole face à l’émergence d’ateliers régionaux concurrentiels. Nous avons ensuite suivi le parcours des peintres qui s’installèrent en Oudh, amenant, sans rupture, le mouvement appelé Company Paintings, tandis qu’à Delhi, les membres de l’académie impériale s’orientaient vers une forme de néoclassicisme pictural. Ce travail permettra de jeter un regard nouveau sur les peintres moghols au XVIII° siècle, en montrant l’évolution donnée à l’esthétique classique dans un contexte de régionalisation de la peinture. / This work is a study on Mughal painters who were active in the 18th century, between the end of Aurengzeb and the beginning of Akbar’s rein. The intention is to establish a catalogue of painted works for each painter, thereby defining the characteristics of each one through an analysis of the style and different iconographic approaches within the paintings. Until recently, the global lack of knowledge of Mughal eighteenth century painting collections defined this period as one of decline in the quality of painters and their works, the latter being generally considered to be small in number, stylistically weak and limited to gallant, courtly, and erotic subject matter.Through an analysis of these rarely studied collections that we have broached a renewal of our understanding of this period through the lives and works of these Mughal painters who were facing the political and economical disruptions that took place in the North of India throughout the whole of the eighteenth century. Therefore, our work has been focused on revealing that after an initial phase, when a form of classicism prevailed in the painters’ works, the members of the imperial academy aimed at renewing a Mughal aesthetic as the concurrent regional workshops emerged. We have then followed the direction of the painters who settling in Oudh, took with them, the movement known as Company Paintings, whereas in Delhi, the members of the imperial academy orientated themselves towards a neoclassical pictoralism. This work, by showing in particular the evolution of a classical aesthetic, will therefore allow us look anew at Mughal painters of the eighteenth century, within the context of the regionalisation of painting in India.

This thesis argues that the ornament of Fatehpur Sikri, imperial city of the Mughal emperor Akbar, was created by and for a transcultural audience as a subtle means of unification. Scholars have largely characterized Fatehpur Sikri as a site that epitomizes the blend of Hindu and Islamic architecture. Inherent in this description is the assumption that these visual elements are distinctly religious and mutually exclusive, identified as solely Hindu or Islamic. Yet the integration of various types of imagery is indicative of more dynamic cultural interactions. I have used photographic documentation to classify and analyze the ornamental elements present in three structures at Fatehpur Sikri. My analyses of these elements’ usage and placement, in conjunction with those from surrounding Indian structures, suggest not only a unique Akbari repertoire but provides insight as to the structures’ purposes.

This dissertation examines three contemporaneous religious philosophers active in early modern South Asia: Muhibb Allah Ilahabadi (d. 1648), Madhusudana Sarasvati (d. 1620-1647), and the Safavid philosopher, Mir Findiriski (d. 1640/1). These figures, two Muslim and one Hindu, were each prominent representatives of religious thought as it occurred in one of the three pan-imperial languages of the Mughal Empire: Arabic, Sanskrit, and Persian. In this study, I re-trace the trans-regional scholarly networks in which each of the figures participated, and then examine the various ways in which their respective networks overlapped. The Chishti Sufi Muhibb Allah, drawing from the Islamic intellectual tradition of wahdat al-wujud, engaged in "international" networks of Arabic debate on questions of ontology and metaphysics. Madhusudana Sarasvati, meanwhile, writing in the Hindu Advaita-Vedanta tradition, was busy adjudicating competing interpretations of the well-known Sanskrit text, the Yoga-Vasistha. Mir Findiriski also took considerable interest in a shorter version of this same Yoga-Vasistha, composing his own commentary upon a Persian translation of the treatise that had been undertaken at the Mughal imperial court. In this Persian translation of the Yoga-Vasistha alongside Findiriski's commentary, I argue, we encounter a creative synthesis of the intellectual contributions occurring within Muhibb Allah's Arabic milieu, on the one hand, and the competing exegeses of the Yoga-Vasistha circulating in Madhusudana's Sanskrit intellectual circles, on the other. The result is a novel Persian treatise that represents an emerging "sub-discipline" of Persian Indian religious thought, still in the process of formulating its basic disciplinary vocabulary as drawn from these broader Muslim and Hindu traditions.