On the verso a blank panel surrounded by margins with floral illumination and an outer border with gold flowers on beige
Provenance:
Collection of Mark Zebrowski, London
European Private Collection
A group of drug users is portrayed outside a hut and on the terrace in front of it. Two are engaged in mixing together the ingredients for the narcotic drink bhang, one with a parrot on his shoulder, while alongside another man is smoking opium or marijuana from a nargila, or hand-held hookah. On the tiled terrace two men have got into a fight. One grabs the other’s beard and threatens him with a water pot, while a third man tries to stop them.
The long jamas, turban types, and neat and elegant figural drawing suggest the painting, itself, is Mughal from Jahangir’s reign (1605-1627). Comparable stylistic traits are found in Jahangir’s slightly earlier manuscripts, such as the dismantled Gulistan of circa 1610-1615 (Beach, M.C., The Grand Mogol, Clark Art Institute, Williamstown, 1978, nos. 16-20) and some of the paintings in the Divan of Hafiz of circa 1611 (Losty, J.P., and Roy, M., Mughal India: Art, Culture and Empire – Manuscripts and Paintings in the British Library, British Library, London, 2012, figs. 53-60). However, the lavishly-colored illumination around the painting seems from the Deccan. An album of calligraphic specimens from Golconda dated to 1604-1605 in the Mittal Museum in Hyderabad has similar illuminated borders (Seyller, J., and Mittal, J., Deccani Paintings, Drawings and Manuscripts in the Jagdish and Kamla Mittal Museum of Indian Art, Hyderabad, 2018, no. 33).
Apart from pictures of yogis or holy men meditating or telling their beads, another strain of Indian pictures of holy men shows them intoxicated with drugs and often fighting among themselves. A large Deccani painting on cloth from the 1670s is such a one in the Mittal Museum in Hyderabad (ibid., no. 30) that has some of the same motifs that are found in this painting. The genre continued into the 18th century, with several paintings depicting drugged and fighting ascetics in rows as in the Cowasji Jehangir collection in Bombay (Khandalavala, K., and Chandra, M., Miniatures and Sculptures from the Collections of the late Sir Cowasji Jehangir, Bombay, 1965, no. 3) and in the Chester Beatty Library, Dublin (Leach, L.Y., Mughal and Other Indian Paintings in the Chester Beatty Library, Scorpion Cavendish, London, 1995, no.4.40).
J.P. Losty
