In the 100 years since Ananda Coomaraswamy wrote his seminal Rajput Painting, the field of Indian painting studies has gone from a period of explosive discovery to a deepening of knowledge about individual artists and workshops. More recently, scholars have also begun to probe artists’ and patrons’ creative decisions and have entered into extensive conversation with South Asian cultural studies in general. They reconsider Coomaraswamy’s distinction between “Rajput” and Mughal painting and focus more on the connections between these two worlds, analyzing the complex meanings these paintings might have held for their artists, patrons and viewers.
This celebratory volume probes the cultural preoccupations of 16th- to early 20th-century Rajput, Mughal and Deccan India,and provides delightful new insights into the magic world of Indian painting.
Molly Emma Aitken is Associate Professor in the Art Department at the City College of New York and the Art History Department at the CUNY Graduate Center. She has published extensively on Mughal and Rajput painting.