The Chinese influence on Indian art: Deccani paintings

Clockwise from top: Chinese porcelain vases on a book cover; Chinese-inspired clouds and peacocks; flowers modelled on the floral art of China.

At their zenith, the princely courts of the Deccan plateau attracted visitors from all over the world.

Many came as traders, eager to sell exotic luxury goods to a court known for its love of fashion. (Indeed, fragments of Chinese porcelains can still be found in the ruins of these ancient cities.)

Others — the Portuguese mostly — came to partake of the lucrative diamond trade from the nearby Golconda mines (long the only known source of diamonds in the world).

And still others came as artists, hopeful of patronage from a kingdom famed for its refined sensibilities.

One of these artists, a Dutchman by the name of Cornelius Claesz Heda, wrote in his letters of markets "filled with rare goods, such as are not seen or heard of in any other town."

The Deccani kingdoms were the New York or London of their day--attracting young artists from the periphery with the promise of cosmopolitan delights and great renown. 

The art of the Deccani courts was a skilful amalgam of global influences--Persian, European, and even Chinese.

The last one has not been written about much, but one only has to look at these paintings to see that the Deccani artists admired and adapted elements of Chinese art into their own. 

For example, in the painting of the Yogini with the Mynah bird, the enlarged flowers on either side of the ascetic woman are clearly inspired by the paintings on Chinese porcelains.

The porcelains themselves sometimes made their way onto paintings — as can be seen in the book cover with an image of a tree flanked by two porcelain vases.

And then there are the paintings in the book of Pem Nem, a tale of love popular in the Deccani courts.

These paintings show a pair of lovers pining for each other under a canopy of storm clouds and peacocks, both traditional Indian symbols of the rainy season and associated with love and longing.  

But here, these traditional symbols are depicted in a distinctly Chinese manner.

The peacocks, in fact, look rather like cranes, a bird associated with persons of the highest distinction in China; and the clouds look exactly like those embroidered on the robes of the emperor in far away Peking.

Artists have always engaged with other cultures and novel ways of looking at things.

Truly, it's silly to call an artist "inauthentic" simply because her art engages with forms that are not of her place.

Sources:

Deborah Hutton in Art of the Court of Bijapur,2006.

Navina Najar Haidar and Marika Sardar in Sultans of Deccan India: 1500-1700: Opulence and Fantasy, 2015.