Enrica Medugno
Senior Sale Coordinator
Lot 197
Two folios from an illustrated Persian treatise in Urdu on ragas, depicting fakirs seated in landscapes North India, probably Lahore, the illustrations perhaps from the workshop of Imam Bakhsh Lahori, circa 1830s(2)
12 November 2024, 11:00 GMT
London, New Bond Street£2,500 - £3,500
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Oliver White
Head of Department
Two folios from an illustrated Persian treatise in Urdu on ragas, depicting fakirs seated in landscapes
North India, probably Lahore, the illustrations perhaps from the workshop of Imam Bakhsh Lahori, circa 1830s
North India, probably Lahore, the illustrations perhaps from the workshop of Imam Bakhsh Lahori, circa 1830s
gouache and gold on paper, inner margins ruled in colours and gold, the first with outer margins decorated with scrolling floral motifs in gold, one lacking outer borders and trimmed just outside ruled inner margins, Urdu text verso consisting of seven and six lines respectively written in two columns in large nasta'liq script in red and black ink within cloudbands on gold ground, borders decorated as recto
leaf 424 x 265 mm.; trimmed leaf 267 x 160 mm.(2)
leaf 424 x 265 mm.; trimmed leaf 267 x 160 mm.(2)
Footnotes
Provenance
Formerly in a private collection, Isle of Wight, UK.
The subjects of the text and illustrations are: Bangala, son of Phrun Rag [i.e. Bhairav Raga]; and Devgandhara, son of Sri Rag. (Persian and Urdu texts always spell raga as rag without a final 'a'). The text further describes the place where the Hindu sits, busy remembering his mighty God; the other describes a landscape with a man sitting on a deer skin beside water.
An illustrated leaf from the same manuscript was sold in these rooms, Islamic and Indian Online Sale, 20th October 2022, lot 143. The same figure of the clean-shaven fakir in the second of our leaves appears in the 2022 lot. The text on the reverse of that leaf appeared also related to a ragamala, with part of it reading Bangla Hariyaval, her son Malkos Raga. In Urdu, Hariyaval means 'verdure' and is the name of a raga typically sung in the spring (though it was not clear if this related to the painting on the other side of the leaf). Bangala is the name of the wife of Bhairav Raga.
It is possible that these two leaves (and the third offered in 2022, referred to above) derive from a dispersed high-quality manuscript, a Persian treatise on Indian classical music. Lahore was known for its flourishing school of manuscript production, particularly under the direction of one of the city's most successful 19th-century booksellers, Muhammad Bakhsh Sahhaf.
The style of the paintings in our leaves can be compared with the illustrations to a manuscript of Naz u Niyaz by Mir Muhammad Zaman Rasikh of Multan, Lahore, circa 1835, in the New York Public Library, as well as another text, Qissa-i Kamrup va Kamlata, Lahore, circa 1835, in the Bibliotheque Nationale de France (both of these illustrated in Lafont, Schmitz (op. cit. below, p. 91, fig. 13, and p. 95, figs. 15 and 16).
For discussion of the work of Imam Bakhsh Lahori, see the note to lot 196, and see in general J.-M. Lafont, B. Schmitz, 'The Painter Imam Bakhsh of Lahore', in B. Schmitz (ed.), After the Great Mughals: Painting in Delhi and the Regional Courts in the 18th and 19th Centuries, Bombay 2002, pp. 74-99.