PRECEDENTS FOR MUGHAL ARCHITECTURE

Many of the monuments cited in this chapter as well as subsequent ones are discussed and illustrated in the two classical sources: Percy Brown, Indian Architecture, Islamic Period, 5th ed. rev., Bombay, 1958, and John Marshall, "The Monuments of Muslim India," in The Cambridge History of India, Vol. in, Cambridge, 1922.' While monographs and books concerning more limited areas or single sites have since been written, these two texts remain the best sources for comprehensive treatment of architecture in the pre-Mughal period and should be consulted for many works discussed here. John Hoag, Islamic Architecture, New York, 1977, is useful for placing the material in a greater Islamic context.

Other sources for material discussed here as well as in subsequent chapters include Alexander Cunningham (ed.), Archaeological Survey of India Reports (ASIR) , 23 vols., Calcutta, 1871-87. In addition there are numerous reports and series issued by the Archaeological Survey of India which will be cited in specific contexts throughout this essay. However, of particular value for historical inscriptions on these monuments are the Annual Report of Indian Epigraphy (ARIE) and Epigraphia Indica: Arabic and Persian Supplement (ElAPS). These sources are invaluable, but for descriptive rather than analytic material.

Upon the death of Akbar in 1605, Muhammad Sultan Salim assumed the imperial throne. He took the title Nur al-Din Muhammad Jahangir Badshah Ghazi, hence the name Jahangir by which he is most commonly known. It is generally believed that during Jahangir's 22-year reign, half as long as Akbar's, patronage for buildings declined because of his enthusiasm for painting. Further, common belief credits Jahangir's influential wife, Nur Jahan, a leading taste setter of the time, with stimulating the construction of buildings later in the emperor's reign. Her role as patron cannot be denied, but Jahangir continually refers in his own memoirs to his patronage of tombs, pleasure pavilions, forts and gardens as well as to the restoration of older structures. In fact, Jahangir in his memoirs refers more often to architecture he found pleasing or to buildings he ordered than to paintings he commissioned, even though he is regarded as a great connoisseur of painting. During Jahangir's reign the realm was secure. Thus the nobles were encouraged to embellish cities, construct serais, gardens and dwellings and endow shrines – all concrete manifestations of a prosperous state.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT

Salim was the name given to Jahangir by his father, Akbar, in honor of Salim, the Chishti saint of Fatehpur Sikri who had predicted his birth. He was Akbar's oldest son and heir-apparent. Akbar gave the young prince an education befitting his rank. The leading nobles and scholars such as the great littérateur, Khan-i Khanan cAbd al-Rahim, and the leading theologian, Shaikh cAbd al-Nabi, were charged with responsibility for educating the future emperor.

If the title Mughal and Rajput Painting suggests a simple historical tradition to be investigated through its year to year development, then it is misleading. The subject is, instead, a rich interweaving of varied and sometimes contradictory interests and traditions.

An initial unity is provided by format, for the earliest paintings to concern us were book illustrations. This means that the works were small (although books can, of course, vary dramatically in size), usually on paper, and closely linked to a literary narrative. The physical arrangement of volumes, however, evolved from two quite distinct sources: the cultural traditions that surrounded Hinduism and Islam. These were the major religious systems in India during the years included in this study, approximately 1500–1850. The earliest Hindu books, and related Buddhist and Jain volumes, were usually on pages made from leaves of the talipot palm; long and horizontal in format, the pages were pierced and threaded onto cords tied between wooden covers. The occasional illustrations were small and usually square. Islamic books, on the other hand, were on paper, bound along a spine, and often encased in leather covers. They were almost exclusively vertical, and were close to left – the reverse of the European system. While paper became plentiful in India after about 1400, so entrenched were traditional attitudes that Hindu artists and craftsmen only slowly took advantage of the freedom that the new material allowed, to vary the size and shape from the severely restricted palm-leaf format. And even then the folios were seldom bound. Kept in stacks, the loose paper pages were wrapped in cloth and tied in bundles.

Until the eighteenth century, painting for Rajput patrons was almost completely confined to the illustration of familiar, traditional texts - although we have already seen exceptions. Ragamalas, together with episodes from the god Krishna’s life (usually adapted from the Bhagavata Purana), were the most popular subjects for Rajput painters. The standard Ragamala (garland of ragas) is a set of thirty-six paintings depicting possible relationships between a man and a woman, categorized according to the emotional potential of different times of day (for example dawn or sunset) or seasons of the year (pre-monsoon heat, for example, or the rainy season). Each of these is a separate raga, or its variant, a ragini. Vasanta Raga (Plate H), for example, shows the man and woman dancing together in spring. Their physical union is foreshadowed by wild jungle plants, whose rich buds and blossoms are emblems of divine creativity. Nature is still used in such works to intensify the human situation, not to provide a spatial backdrop.

The text of the Ragamala illustrates an element of Hinduism known as bhakti, devotionalism. This is a system whereby the worshipper exists in a direct relationship with a god possessing personal attributes. In both literary and visual presentations, as noted above, this takes the form of romantic, often explicitly sexual, imagery: the worshipper (Lover) longs for union with the divine (the Beloved), and the obliteration of all sense of individuality. By the sixteenth century, numerous bhakti texts had been written in vernaculars, for this was a reactionary movement against priestly control of access to the gods through rituals in Sanskrit.

MUGHAL THEORIES OF KINGSHIP AND STATE POLITY

Akbar is generally recognized as the greatest and most capable of the Mughal rulers. Under him Mughal polity and statecraft reached maturity; and under his guidance the Mughals changed from a petty power to a major dynastic state. From his time to the end of the Mughal period, artistic production on both an imperial and sub-imperial level was closely linked to notions of state polity, religion and kingship.

Humayun died in 1556, only one year after his return to Hindustan. Upon hearing the call to prayers, he slipped on the steep stone steps of the library in his Din-Panah citadel in Delhi. Humayun's only surviving son and heir-apparent, Akbar, then just fourteen years of age, ascended the throne and ruled until 1605 the expanding Mughal empire. Until about 1561, Akbar was under the control of powerful court factions, first his guardian, Bhairam Khan, and then the scheming Maham Anga, a former imperial wet-nurse. Between about 1560 and 1580, Akbar devoted his energies to the conquest and then the consolidation of territory in north India. This he achieved through battle, marriage, treaty and, most significantly, administrative reform. Concurrent with these activities, Akbar developed an interest in religion that, while initially a personal concern, ultimately transformed his concept of state. Many of the policies he adopted, such as the renunciation of the poll-tax (jiziya) for non-Muslims, had a solid political basis as well as a personal one, for Akbar, much more than his Mughal predecessors, saw every advantage in maintaining good relations with the Hindu majority.

IMPERIAL PAINTING AND THE RISE OF LOCAL WORKSHOPS

The Akbarnamas were official state documents meant to dazzle with their splendour, and to create, uphold, and reinforce tradition. Other works, made for private imperial appreciation, therefore introduce more clearly and easily the new concerns that will dominate Mughal painting during the first three decades of the seventeenth century, and which are only hinted at in the later Akbarnama. These tend to be books of poetry, such as the Nafahat al-uns, dated 1604–1605 (fig. 46). As with the circa 1588 Diwan of Anwari (fig. 34), with which it is closely linked in format and taste, the paintings of this book are smaller in size than those of the historical manuscripts or the majority of known Lahore period volumes. They contain far fewer figures and descriptive details, and here too illustrations are by individual artists rather than being the result of shared workmanship. And more than ever before, they have become revelations of personal artistic sensibility. It is no longer the narrative or the sheer quantity of visual material that attracts us, but the profound interest in individuals and their interaction. A badly creased page inscribed to Balchand, The Donkey’s Refusal (fig. 46), exemplifies this. The story is about a Shaikh who tried to take his donkey to fetch wine, but the animal refused to move until his master had renounced such pleasures. This potentially lively story is not what interests Balchand, however; the donkey is outside the main area of interest and obviously incidental. Instead the artist concentrates on a drinking party, and among the five seated men - the others are servants - the emotions are almost palpable.

Shah Jahan's third surviving son and successor, Aurangzeb, is generally considered the last effective Mughal ruler. Under his successors the Mughal domain diminished. Even in Aurangzeb's reign, persistent warfare in the Deccan and increased factionalism among the nobility had an impact on the empire's stability. Most believe that a lack of vitality in artistic production paralleled this military and political instability. As a result, the architecture of Aurangzeb and the later Mughals has largely been ignored. It should not be.

All the same, under Aurangzeb and his successors the framework of earlier architectural patronage was changed. That is, under the earlier Mughals the emperor was the model patron. The nobility generally regarded the type of structures he built and the styles he favored as the ideal to emulate. Under Aurangzeb, and especially under his successors, that changed. There was no dynamic imperial patron, so the nobility and other classes built independently of strong central direction, often employing styles and motifs that still echoed those established in Shah Jahan's reign.

HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENTS DURING AURANGZEB'S REIGN

When Shah Jahan became ill in 1657, most believed that he would not survive. This sparked a war of succession among the imperial princes with Aurangzeb emerging as victor. He first celebrated his coronation in Delhi's Shalimar garden in 1658 and again the same year in the palace of Shahjahanabad, then adding to his name the title cAlamgir (World Seizer). Although Shah Jahan recovered and lived until 1666, he remained a prisoner in the Agra fort for the rest of his life.

BABUR

Babur before his conquest of India

Born in what is today the southern Soviet province of Uzbekistan, the Timurid Babur inherited the throne of a small principality known as Ferghana in 1494. He was then eleven years old. By the time he was twenty-one, he twice had held neighboring Samarqand, albeit briefly. For two years after his second loss of Samarqand, Babur, homeless and supported only by a tiny band of loyal followers, sought a principality. In 1504 his luck improved, and he captured Kabul and surrounding territories. In 1511, Babur tried for a third time to extend his rule to Samarqand, this time with support from the Safavid king Shah Ismacil. The Safavid extended his support only because Babur, a Sunni, had agreed to adopt trappings of the Shia creed, a heretical notion to the orthodox Sunni Muslims of Samarqand. Babur was able to enter the city and establish himself as its ruler. But within less than a year, the Sunni subjects of Samarqand withdrew support from Babur. After unsuccessful attempts to gain Bukhara, Babur returned to Kabul in 1512, once again holding only this province, nothing more.

While Babur's tenure in Samarqand had been short, the city's impact upon him was profound, shaping his attitude toward architecture and, even more significantly, toward landscape. Samarqand, embellished by Timur and his immediate successors with splendid char bagh gardens, mosques, madrasas and tombs, was one of the wonders of the fifteenth century. Babur was also deeply impressed by Herat, the seat of most cultured Timurid princes, which he had visited in 1507.

PAINTING BEFORE I540

Few recent studies of Indian painting have considered the established traditional Indian styles out of which Sultanate, Rajput, Mughal, and Deccani painting developed and in the context of which they should more frequently be seen. Douglas Barrett and Basil Gray, Indian Painting, Geneva, 1963, did discuss the earlier traditions of wall-painting, and their discussion provides a framework for very necessary future studies; otherwise, however, their survey study - although the best currently available - has long been out of date. Ajanta Murals, edited by A. Ghosh, New Delhi, 1967; C. Sivaramamurti, South Indian Paintings, New Delhi, 1968; Amancharla Gopala Rao, Lepakshi, Hyderabad, 1969; and C. Sivaramamurti, Vijayanagara Paintings, New Delhi, 1985, all provide important information about and reproductions of earlier wall-paintings at major sites.

Several studies provide an overview of the various regional styles of manuscript painting that immediately preceded the advent of Mughal influence. The most thorough survey, and the best introduction to the subject, remains Karl Khandalavala and Moti Chandra, New Documents of Indian Painting-A Reappraisal, New Delhi, 1969. Many of the ideas presented there are further expanded in Moti Chandra, Studies in Early Indian Painting, London, 1974. Pramod Chandra, The Tuti-Nama of The Cleveland Museum of Art and the Origins of Mughal Painting, Graz, 1976, thoroughly discusses how these pre-Mughal styles affected and directed early Mughal manuscript illustrations. It is essential reading.

In 1526 a descendant of the Iranian house of Timur, Zahir al-Din Muhammad Babur, better known today simply as Babur, defeated the last ruler of the Lodi dynasty in a battle at Panipat, about 90 km north of Delhi. The Lodis were one of many short-lived Islamic houses that had ruled over much of the Indian subcontinent since the Islamic conquest of this area in 1192. Babur and his successors, who continued to rule north India until 1858, were known as the Mughals, a term Babur would not have liked, for originally it had a pejorative connotation. In contemporary eyes Babur's victory over Ibrahim Lodi was no more consequential than the frequent campaigns that brought changes in ruling power. However, well before the year 1600, during the reign of Babur's grandson, Akbar, it was clear that Mughal rule made a substantial impact on the cultural, economic, and political development of the lands it controlled – an area then called Hindustan. In the realm of architecture, the Mughals achieved master-builder status, producing monuments such as the Taj Mahal, which even today is considered one of the world's most magnificent buildings.

Unlike the contemporary and powerful Islamic rulers of Iran and Turkey, the Safavids and Ottomans, the Mughals ruled a land dominated by non-Muslims, largely Hindus. Just as indigenous religions and traditions were tolerated and in many cases even respected by the Mughal rulers, so, too, they incorporated in their patronage of the arts, literature and music many indigenous elements. Over their 300-year rule, Mughal attitudes toward the indigenous Indian population – Hindu and Muslim – varied; so did Mughal adaptation of earlier Indian art forms.

SOME PRELIMINARY REFERENCE POINTS ON THE SUBJECT

Autonomous, independent, spontaneous foundation of knowledge, understanding, feeling, imagination? Alienating, idealist, bourgeois humanist, phallogocentric delusion? Does the subject lie between these two polar opposite descriptions of it, does it span them and, like a Pascalian paradox, fill all the space between, or does it lie elsewhere entirely, perhaps in a Utopia? Is belief in the subject a necessary alienation, an alienation heureuse, a transcendental illusion of the Kantian kind? Is the subject an outmoded peg on which humanism used to hang its credentials and which can be abandoned along with the rest of the humanist paraphernalia? Or, to change metaphor, would such a rejection involve throwing the baby out with the bathwater? Is the concept of the subject necessary to any meditation on ethics, and, if so, need it be more than an “operational concept”? Or should this idea be shunned as a manifestation of the worst kind of paternalism? Contemporary French philosophy returns incessantly to the subject - recent thinking on ethics and politics, and in particular on Auschwitz and on Heidegger, has made the issue a burning one once again - "through flame or ashes, but. . . inevitably, " to use Derrida's concluding words in De l'Esprit. Having deposed the subject so firmly and with such apparent haste and delight in the 1960s and 1970s, French philosophers are now seeming to repent at leisure. The "death of man" (Foucault) and the "ends of man" (Derrida) are now seen to have lacked the radical finality with which their celebration endowed them twenty years earlier.

In Sartre's ontology what differentiates human being from all other being is precisely nothing. Or more accurately, it is a nothingness. In rewriting the sentence I have subtly changed it. Human being is not the same as the rest of being but is distinguished from it by a separating nothingness. Have I merely effected a sleight of hand? Is this nothingness a futile hypostatization? Or is it in reality a disguised something?

When the Greek Atomists declared that reality consisted of atoms and void, it was easy to grasp that the void was real without being a substance. We can see a hole. Clearly, emptiness was necessary if atoms were to group and regroup themselves in the forms that make up the universe. But the Atomist's nonbeing does not do anything; it is being in the form of self-moving atoms that is responsible for both relative permanencies and change. By contrast, Sartre puts all signifying activity where there is nothingness. And where is this nothingness? He tells us that "Nothingness lies coiled in the heart of being-like a worm" (p. 56). But this metaphor is something of an enigma and requires explanation. One thing is sure: Where there is nothingness, there is consciousness, but the two are not quite synonyms. And in one context Sartre speaks of "little pools of nonbeing" existing out there in the world (p. 53). Consciousness and nothingness are dependent on being, but they are not being. Sartre's ontology is a phenomenological description of the relation of this no-thing, which is consciousness, to the being on which it depends.

The purpose of this essay is to reflect on Sartre as a philosopher of the imagination in order better to describe and assess his approach to the philosophy of history. Sartre was, of course, an existentialist and we shall consider what it means to formulate an “existentialist” philosophy of history. But his was equally a philosophy of consciousness and the paradigm of consciousness for him was imaginative consciousness. Realizing this fact will open the door to a more adequate comprehension of his work as a whole, but especially his social thought, including his theory of history. For a basic thesis I wish to defend is that Sartre likens the intelligibility of history to that of an artwork because he considers the former as much the product of creative freedom as he does the latter. So we shall begin with a reading of major theses from his Psychology of Imagination and move through his posthumously published works, The War Diaries and the Cahiers pour une morale, in order to observe their expansion and application in both volumes of the Critique of Dialectical Reason and The Family Idiot. In so doing, we shall try to make sense of Sartre's claim that history in general and his Flaubert study in particular constitute “a novel that is true” (un roman vrai).

This collection of essays, by some of the foremost interpreters of Sartre from Europe and the United States, was composed specifically for the new series of Cambridge Companions to Major Philosophers. None of the essays has been published previously elsewhere. The contributors range from the most senior and established Sartrean scholars to some of the most promising and lively of the younger generation of critics. As editor, my task was to commission a broad range of essays, covering the major aspects of Sartre's philosophical work and its implications, in line with the purpose of the new Cambridge series. What struck me most forcibly on receipt of the typescripts, was the originality, density, and cohesion of the interpretations. They not only present a generous and balanced view of the wide variety of Sartre's philosophy, but also all make a contribution to the “new” Sartre, that is to the view of Sartre which has been gradually emerging since his death in 1980, as a figure whose diversity was far from being mastered, who could not, without distortion and impoverishment, be identified with the “classical existentialist” of the 1940s, and whose relationship to Structuralism and Post- Structuralism, as well as to psychoanalysis, Marxism, and literary theory, was far more complex than had been generally supposed. Suffering, since the 1960s, from the backlash of rejection that exceptional popularity and fame brings in its wake, Sartre was commonly used as the humanist target against whom nascent Structuralist, Marxist, and Deconstructionist critics could test their arms.

The title of the present study represents a philosophical wager. After all, Sartre never produced a completed ethical system even though his entire work is shot through with the ethical problematic. It will consequently be necessary for this study to account for the insistent recurrence of the moral question in Sartre's works as well as for the reasons why he was never willing to answer this question in any definitive manner.

To be sure, Sartre did, in fact, write on ethical questions. His Notebooks for an Ethic (1947) are subsequent to Being and Nothingness (1943); two other texts (1964 and 1965) are subsequent to the Critique of Dialectical Reason (i960). The first of these are notes for lectures given by Sartre at the Gramsci Institute in Rome (1964); the second (1965) are notes intended for a lecture at Cornell University canceled at the last moment by Sartre in protest against American bombings in Vietnam. The Notebooks for an Ethic, published posthumously in 1983, are a collection of fragmentary comments or aphorisms without any single emphasis. The two other texts (1964 and 1965) remain unpublished. I shall refer to these latter works as The Rome Lectures and The Cornell Notes. These are coherent texts that set forth fully developed lines of reasoning. Moreover all three of these texts have in common the fact that they were never published by Sartre and consequently, in Sartre's eyes, offered no satisfactory philosophical solution to the ethical question.

“A life develops in spirals: It always passes through the same points, but at different levels of integration and complexity” (CRD I, p. 71). This observation, which underpins Sartre's synthesis of biographical and historical methods in studying the individual and society, might also apply to the preoccupation with committed writing that characterized his own life and work. The reader cannot fail to note the persistence and the far from linear development of the concepts and methods which articulate that preoccupation. The range of concepts itself promises complexity. Psychological, moral, social, political, historical, linguistic, literary, and aesthetic issues must all be integrated through a correspondingly intricate method that draws its inspiration, without lapsing into eclecticism, from a number of different intellectual traditions. The tracing of the spiral is fascinating, frustrating, and exemplary - fascinating because of the commitment and tenacity of Sartre's arguments, frustrating because those arguments reach no conclusion, exemplary because the inconclusiveness is itself inherent in the problem analyzed and in the method of analysis: Sartre's open-ended writing itself enacts an open dialectic.

Two of the major theoretical points through which Sartre's spiral passes are Qu'est-ce que la littératuie? (1947), usually taken to offer the classic description of "committed" literature, and "Questions de méihode" (i960), which presents a more complex view of the interaction of individual, society, and history, prescribes a method for revealing the dialectical relationship of social conditioning and individual project, and prepares the reader for the potentially surprising claim that a writer as apparently uncommitted as Flaubert may be considered to be "engagé."