Sultanate portraits from Dutch-Deccan albums

Posing commandingly in an earth-toned silk gown against a cool mint backdrop of a painted page, the figure of Sultan Abul Hasan Tana Shah (r. 1672-1687) from India’s Deccan kingdom of Golconda stares serenely into the distance. You may normally expect to find this image in a South Asian royal album or a painting collection. Yet, what if I told you it was destined to grace the pages of an album commissioned by a seventeenth-century Dutch collector. In this article, I detail how this painting found its place in this Dutchman’s collection and the crucial role he played in the new European incarnation of a classical Islamicate album tradition.

Sometime in the 1670s, the mayor of Amsterdam, Nicolaas Witsen (1641-1717), commissioned the album to satisfy his curiosity for the history and culture of Asia. Known currently as the Witsen album, this collection is a series of individual portraits of 49 kings, princes, and nobles from the Deccan and Mughal world created for European consumption. In essence, these paintings assumed the role of sources of knowledge for the collector, who himself was an upper-class world traveler. Along with becoming a VOC administrator, he was sent to the English court as an ambassador in 1689. In his spare time, he took up cartography and wrote authoritative texts on ship-building and was one of the first to write on Siberia and Central Asia in his work Noord en Oost Tartarye.

Traditionally, such portraits featured in Persianate painting and calligraphy albums called muraqqaʿs. In Arabic, this term literally means a “patched garment” or something that is mended. The word was applied eventually to albums because of the manuscript’s patched or pieced together format. Each album consists of folios made of thick layers of paper and contains a mélange of separate pieces of paper. Connoisseurs across the early modern Persianate world—which comprised Iran, India, Central Asia, and Ottoman Turkey—often commissioned contemporaneous calligraphic and painted samples for their albums or collected works of past masters. These albums were often used for personal perusal and were often handed down to the next generation. Yet, with the defeat of Sultan Abul Hasan by the Mughals in 1686, Golconda’s royal ateliers dissolved and painters commenced searching for new clients. Thus, a new market of European collectors, spearheaded by the Dutch, emerged for these albums.

The arrival of the Dutch East Indies Company (VOC) on Golconda’s Coromandel coast in Masulipatnam in 1605 coincided with the emergence of a Republic of Letters, an early modern epistolary community engaged in gathering knowledge and art objects. With Amsterdam as its dynamic epicenter, the Dutch Republic emerged as the premier site for the import and global dissemination of albums, manuscripts, and curios from Asia. Shipments of art objects from Indian shores was made possible not only by VOC officials but a network of trusted local and Dutch intermediaries. The latter group, in fact, often emerged from well-integrated Dutch communities composed of VOC and non-VOC traders who had served long periods in Golconda and, in some cases, brought their families along. Thus, when Nicolaas Witsen started to enquire about the acquisition of fine arts objects from India, he contacted the Golconda-based VOC polymath Herbert de Jager (d. 1694). ¹

Although currently found in an unbound state, each folio of the Witsen album encloses an image of an individual Mughal or Deccan monarch, prince, or nobleman pasted on the centre of the page. Glued above the image is a curt Persian description of each figure whereas a Portuguese inscription just with the figure’s name is attached at the bottom. The latter inscription suggests that the Portuguese were either the original intended consumers of the album or the middlemen acquiring the portraits on behalf of the Dutch. Moreover, Witsen had Hendrick Francken, a Protestant minister who had lived for several years in Smyrna (now Izmir), translate the Persian text into Dutch, which is inscribed in pencil on the main folio.

Yet, an interesting aspect of this album is that it captures the main political event in the Deccan in the late 1600s. By commencing with portraits of the mighty Mughals, an empire that had gained control of Golconda from 1636 and conquered the sultanate in 1686, and following with the vanquished Deccan kings and nobles, the Witsen album bears testament to the shift of power in Golconda.

The Witsen album thus reveals important aspects of Dutch-India relations. In what other creative ways did Dutch officials respond to and record the shift of power from the Qutb Shahis sultans to the Mughals? Additionally, in terms of the albums’ reception in Europe, what kind of relevance were these albums assigned once they reached the continent? How did the albums shift European perceptions of South Asia, especially in relation to images about India created by individuals who had never traveled to the subcontinent? In the end, this album lies crucially at the intersection of art, history, and global commerce and reveals as much about the European collectors as its royal subjects.

Further reading

Gommans, Jos J. L. The Unseen World: The Netherlands and India from 1550. Amsterdam: Rijksmuseum, 2018.

Roxburgh, David J. The Persian Album, 1400-1600: From Dispersal to Collection. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Namrata B. Kanchan is a PhD candidate at the University of Texas at Austin. Her dissertation examines the interconnected and multilingual literary and visual spheres of the seventeenth-century Deccan sultanate of Golconda in South Asia.

More information on the research project.

Citation

To cite this article please use the following citation:
Kanchan, Namrata B. Sultanate portraits from Dutch-Deccan albums. Published 07/21/2021, Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, Stories: Connecting Objects, [URL], [last visited: MM/DD/YY].