Deccani painting

Mark Zebrowski defines Deccani painting as that made for the sultans of the Deccan, the vast plateau south of the Vindhya mountains, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in at least three kingdoms: Ahmadnagar, Bijapur and Golconda. Before the 1930s major Deccani schools were hardly suspected, and their masterpieces were called Persian, Indo-Persian or Mughal. ¹

Muslim rulers held the Deccan for some six centuries, from the early fourteenth century until 1950, when the last nizam of Hyderabad gave up power. In 1347 Bahman Shah founded the Bahmanid sultanate, from whose break-up the Deccan sultanates emerged. Persians were the most favoured group, their language that of administration and court etiquette. ^{3 4} Deccani art, the author writes, is not exactly South Indian though made there, nor Iranian though Iran inspired it, but a pungent amalgam of both worlds. ²

Deccani paintings are rarely signed or dated, and invasions and upheavals scattered or destroyed local collections, making it the rarest of the Indian schools; the author counts about two hundred important paintings. ⁴ When the sultanates fell to the Mughals in 1686–87 many painters moved to provincial patrons or to Rajasthan, and under the Hyderabad state a new idiom of portraiture, and later of the female figure, arose. ^{5 6 7}