India: Art and Culture 1300-1900

India: Art and Culture 1300-1900 is the catalogue of the exhibition INDIA! held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York as part of the Festival of India in the United States in 1985-86; its originator and author was Stuart Cary Welch, then special consultant in charge of the museum's Department of Islamic Art. ² The director's foreword records that the government and museums of India lent sixty-five paintings and sixty objects. ²

The book has five parts: "The Great Tradition", "Tribe and Village", "The Muslim Courts" with its three chapters on the Sultanate period, the Mughals and the sultans of the Deccan, "The Rajput World" with the Punjab plains and hills, and "The British Period", followed by a chronology, glossary and bibliography. ³ Each exhibit has a numbered entry giving its material, size, date and present home, then a short essay and a list of earlier publications. ⁴

The part opens with a historical introduction to the Delhi Sultanate (1192-1526), the Mughals (1526-1857) and the Deccani sultans: the arrival of Islam in Sind in the eighth century, the campaigns of Mahmud of Ghazni, the establishment of the sultanate at Delhi, the holding back of the Mongols, and the sultans' welcome to scholars, poets and craftsmen fleeing Khurasan, Iran and Iraq. ¹ The book holds that the sultans brought the arts of calligraphy and manuscript illumination and new architectural forms — the dome, the arch and the minaret — and that a fusion of local and imported forms followed, reaching its height under the Mughals. ⁵ It then presents Sultanate works, among them a Bahmanid Qur'an in the Archaeological Museum at Bijapur, an ivory chess piece signed by Yusuf al-Bahlili, a mosque dedication slab from Gaur and manuscripts from Mandu. ^{6 4 7 8} The Mughal chapter follows the art of the book from the arrival with Humayun of the Safavid court painters Mir Sayyid Ali and Abd al-Samad. ^{9 10}