Indian Miniatures: Delectable Medley

By R.H.

The bigger its scale, the more "important" the picture: so a common American reflex goes. Indian art never shared it. The proof is India's most developed form of painting: the miniature. Commissioned by rajahs, Moguls and well-off merchants, bound in albums and luxuriously scrutinized, these tiny images were as important in the East --from the 16th century onward--as panel painting in the West. The spring exhibition at Manhattan's Asia House is "A Flower from Every Meadow," a selection of 86 Indian paintings ranging in date from about 1520 to 1900. Chosen and elegantly catalogued by Art Historian Stuart Carey Welch, the 86 miniatures from American collections constitute one of the year's more delectable shows. The word Mogul has come, for us, to signify gross, unvarnished power: the beefy hand on the limousine telephone. But the Mughal emperors, the Muslim despots who left their dynastic name to the English tongue, lived within a structure of taste so exquisite that there are few Western parallels to it.

All Indian court art, whether Muslim or Hindu, was permeated by a meticulously apportioned lavishness. Adjectives tend to buckle under its splendors. One chubby royal playboy, Jagat Singh II of Mewar, spent -L-250,000 -- at a time when a field peasant might hope to earn seven shillings a year -- building and embellishing pavilions on the islands of his private lake, be fore he died at the tender age of 18 in 1752. Because miniature painting was the court art par excellence, a distillate of countless man-hours for people with infinite leisure, it provides a spyhole to the detail of this vanished culture.

All the nuances of custom, dress and etiquette are preserved on those brilliantly colored and gilded scraps of paper. An 18th century rajah, ensconced on a swing, conducts an orchestra of stiffly profiled girls against the beautifully austere background of his black and white marble palace (see color page); a Mughal potentate presides over the fertility celebration of Holi, while the white-robed members of his court play at a mock battle, squirting each other with red dye from syringes.

Though the historical divisions of Indian miniature painting are bewildering to most viewers, a medley of schools and styles, the pictures themselves are not. Their message is hedonism, raised to the nth power.

Saris. It was an art with no dark corners. The most extreme emotion that miniaturists normally allowed their figures was the decorative loneliness of palace ladies waiting for their lovers, as in the late 16th century Deccan painting of Girls in a Wood. Pattern is all: gold-spangled meadow and oddly scal loped red rocks; the delicate twist of tree trunks echoing the borders of the girls' saris. Indeed one of the pleasures of Indian miniatures lies in how nature is formalized while losing none of its vitality. In that flattened space, each shape presses up to the eye as firmly as in any Matisse. But the energy remains. The rolling, sinuous line of one great Deccan miniature, Subduing an Enraged Elephant, becomes a short hand for movement; every detail, from the trampling caparisoned beast (whose wicked eye occupies the center of the page) to the Persian curves and rhythms of poppy stems and rocks behind it, writhes with force.

In this balance of what is organic and what is structured lies the unique freshness of classical Indian miniature painting -- a microcosm in which a complicated, beguiling and larger world exposes itself for one's delight. How else could an art form be so intimate in one way, and so suavely aristocratic in another? "R.H.

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