An Uzbek prisoner, an Indian copy after a Safavid original

Punjab, attributed to the artist Kehar Singh, second half of the 19th Century

Footnotes

The Persian inscription reads: navab alimardan khan.

This sketch can be compared with another by Kehar Singh, namely the study of Ajab Singh Nihang (Government Museum and Art Gallery, Chandigarh, acc. no. 1701), which features similar colour notations in Gurmukhi and title information in Persian nasta'liq (published in R. P. Srivastava, Punjab Painting (1983), plate 49).

Kehar Singh (1820-82) was one of the most famous Sikh artists of the 19th century. His artistic career led him to the royal court of Lahore, where it is said that he painted the picture of a dead sparrow and coaxed a sweeper of the court to place it on Maharaja Ranjit Singh's throne. The trick worked and Kehar Singh was hired as a court painter. Kehar Singh later became influenced by European watercolours, oil paintings and photography. In his series of painted sketches done around the 1860–70s, Kehar Singh portrayed men and women occupied in different trades and professions in great detail, even naming many of them as part of his accompanying notes, which were often inscribed on the face of the artworks in both Persian and Gurmukhi.

Portraits of Uzbek prisoners in yokes appeared in Persian painting as early as the 16th century, and the motif continued as a theme into the 19th. The prisoner depicted here, as in all such representations, is fettered by a palahang, a device made from a forked branch, to which one wrist is attached by an additional band of wood or metal, and with a crossbar at the back of the prisoner's neck. Based on the Persian poetry that surrounds some of these paintings, it is possible to suggest a less literal meaning for this imagery. The verses give voice to the torments of unrequited love, a common theme in classical Persian poetry. Claiming to haunt the street of the beloved by night, the lover moans, 'Happy is that prisoner who has someone to come to his rescue'.

For a late 17th Century Deccani example of this figure, with the same weapons in the same positions, see Sotheby's, Fine Oriental Manuscripts and Miniatures, 10th October 1977, lot 35.