Disaster at Sea

By a provincial Mughal artist
India, late 17th century

Opaque watercolour and gold, a catchword inscribed at lower left, in a Qajar period blue album page with gul and bulbul decoration; a cursive note in Persian inscribed: 'Number sixteen inspected by (?)Reza Urdubadi' on the reverse, along with three seal impressions, one perhaps dated A.H.1222/1807-8 A.D.

32.2 by 20.7 cm., 12 5/8 by 8 1/8 in. page; 22 by 14 cm., 8 ¾ by 5 ½ in. miniature

This highly interesting page, at once spirited and stylised, is the product of an unknown Indian manuscript atelier fusing Indian and Persian styles, possibly in Kashmir. Its subject seems unique. A sea-monster similar to a crocodile has opened its jaws and is swallowing a ship, whose crew either jump into the sea and fight back with their weapons or else are chewed and swallowed alive. Indian tales are full of sea-voyages where the hero has to undergo trial by shipwreck, such as the story of Kamrup told in the Dastur-i Himmat, of which a lavishly illustrated Murshidabad manuscript, circa 1755-60, is in Dublin, see Leach, L.Y., Mughal and other Indian Paintings in the Chester Beatty Library, London, 1995, vol.II, pp. 623-654, but it contains no miniatures similar to this.

On the other hand, a splendid page from Akbar’s great Hamzanama seems relevant, in which Hamza and his companions, on their way to the kingdom of Ahras by sea, have to fend off an attack by a giant leviathan of the deep (Seyller, J., The Adventures of Hamza: Painting and Storytelling in Mughal India, Washington and London, 2002, no. 27). Hamza there has let fly an arrow into the eye of the monster, while Umar wields an axe and a sling: the bow and the axe are echoed in our paintings, as is the arrow piercing the monster’s eye. Both monsters are based on the Gangetic crocodile or ghariyal.

Robert Skelton suggests that the painting may relate to an episode in Firdausi's Shahnama, when Sikandar (Alexander) planned to leave India to sail on the western ocean. A mountain rose out of the sea which turned into a giant fish. When some of his people set out to investigate, the giant fish swallowed them and the ship (Firdausi, Abu al-Qasim, The Shah Nama of Firdausi, done into English by Arthur George Warner and Edmond Warner, London, 1905-25, VI, p.147). As against this identification, the battling soldiers seem heroic rather than simply victims as in the epic, while there is no sign of Alexander and the watching army on the shore as in the four known paintings of this episode in the manuscripts in the Cambridge Shahnama project. It is unlikely that a late seventeenth century painter would have invented a new iconography for this scene.

Provincial Indian manuscripts of Persian texts often retain an archaic fondness for Persian costumes and somewhat outmoded styles, as can be seen for instance in the Kashmiri school of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. For a survey of painting in Kashmir, see Pal, P., "Painting and Calligraphy" in The Arts of Kashmir, New York, 2007, pp.147-173. There is a strong possibility that this page is also Kashmiri, and it retains some of the idioms seen in the work of Muhammad Nadir al-Samarqandi done in Kashmir, such as his mid-seventeenth century Yusuf u Zulaykha of which some pages are in in Dublin, see Leach, vol.II, pp. 927-93.

Provenance

Private collection, London