Imperial Sultanate Albums

About the Project

This research focuses on Deccan muraqqas (albums) as a repository of literary, pictorial, and calligraphic innovation and studies the ways they were assembled and incarnated for different audiences. In particular, it will explore the Indo-Islamicate albums made for a Dutch clientele in Golconda—the Rijksmuseum’s Witsen (ca. 1670s) and Adrianus Canter Visscher (1728-1740) albums-- and demonstrate the ways in which these artifacts were a continuation of the Deccan’s innovative album culture.

Aims of the Project

The goal is to incorporate this research into a larger project that displays the crucial interplay of materiality and aesthetic content in the forging of early modern literary cultures in South Asia. Thus, this project seeks to augment our knowledge of the underexplored field of early modern South Asian manuscript and book culture. Moreover, it will be one of the few to argue for the centrality of the physical book to formation of a courtly literary culture as well as to this literature’s interpretative and performative functions. By doing so, it seeks to expand the contours of the study of the field by adding methodologies beyond the text critical approach used hitherto by scholars of Dakani literature. Thus, the project aims to mediate between three disciplines: literary studies, social history, and art history.

Related Publications

• Navina Najat Haidar and Marika Sardar (eds.). Sultans of the South: Arts of India’s Deccan Courts, 1323-1687. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2011.

• Deborah Hutton and Rebecca Tucker. “The Worldly Artist in the Seventeenth Century: The Travels of Cornelis Claesz. Heda.” Art History 37.5 (2014): 860–889.

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

Partners and Sponsors

This Fellowship is made possible by the Andrew W. Mellon Fund, and is part of the Rijksmuseum Fellowship Programme.