Inlaks Research and Travel Grantee 2020: Mrinalini Sil
Mrinalini Sil is a 2020 Inlaks Research and Travel Grantee. She is a PhD student at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Through her research she aims to better understand the transition of power, politics and culture from the Mughals to the East India company via the Murshidabad paintings from Bengal.
Visual Nodes and Aesthetic Modes : A Study in Murshidabad Paintings from Early Modern Bengal
My PhD thesis, Arts in the Age of Transition : Power, Politics and Culture in Murshidabad Paintings from Early Modern Bengal studies the way diverse cultural players such as the Nawabs of Bengal and their courtiers, French and English officers of the East India Companies, local educational institutions and Jain mercantile communities, were involved in the production and circulation of Murshidabadi paintings and artistic sensibilities during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Murshidabad, the center of power of the Bengal Nawabs, offers a window into the waning of the imperial Mughal control, the flourishing of the Nawabi sociability, and the eventual emergence of the colonial presence. By studying the various, distinct kind of paintings emanating from Murshidabad, what I essentially do in my thesis is to shift the frame from “Murshidabad Painting” to “Painting in Murshidabad” tracing multiple strands of art-making, sometimes with the same artists adapting to different demands and patronage levels. Trying to understand painting in Murshidabad during the eighteenth century thus essentially involves sketching a picture of a site of art production that reflects the complex, variegated nature of society, in its layering of classes and through its historical changes over time.
Study Room Appointment to study the Ousley Album at Bodleian Library, Oxford
Many British collections like the British Library, the Victoria & Albert Museum, the British Museum, the Bodleian Library in Oxford contain some of the richest materials for research on Murshidabad and related eighteenth-nineteenth century Indian courts. This is due to the long legacy of colonialism and the widespread circulation of art made for the East India Company. British and French officers, merchants and diplomats received or exacted important gifts, commissioned entire libraries of manuscripts and purchased artefacts to furnish their Indian homes or to take back to Europe as souvenirs or as tributes for their own sovereigns.
A crucial aspect of my research endeavors has been to locate and bring together a wide range of paintings, illustrated manuscripts, muraqqas, and painted scrolls, most of which remains hitherto unknown and unpublished, to highlight the incredible cosmopolitanism of paintings that were produced and circulating through Murshidabad during the long eighteenth century. Understanding the meaning and use of cultural assertions during a time of flux mainly through visual sources can only be achieved by engaging with the historical context, economic situation, community dynamics, and religious and literary histories that bring a multi-dimensional understanding to the works of art.
A Ramayana Painted Scroll from 18th C Murshidabad in the British Museum Collection
This requiring a very close engagement with the collections and the archives, the IRTG Grant enabled me to access a wide corpus of visual as well as textual material from these Collections with which I intend to highlight the complex, dynamic and cosmopolitan context of artistic production through Murshidabad paintings. By bringing to the fore a substantial corpus of paintings and illustrated manuscripts, my thesis will thus chart out a ‘heteroglot’ art history of this site and this time that will widen our lens onto the various cultural agents and socio-political factors surrounding the making of art in early modern India.
Cover Photo: Mrinalini with a Hamzanama Folio from Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge.
