Chinese+and+Moghul+gardens

//[|Depicting the 'Imperial garden'] [|Eternal beauty of Mughal gardens]//

//Depicting the 'Imperial garden'//

By the late Tang dynasty, landscape painting had evolved into an independent genre that embodied the universal longing of cultivated men to escape their urban world to commune with nature. Such images might also convey specific social, philosophical, or political convictions. As the Tang dynasty disintegrated, the concept of withdrawal into the natural world became a major thematic focus of poets and painters. Faced with the failure of the human order, learned men sought permanence within the natural world, retreating into the mountains to find a sanctuary from the chaos of dynastic collapse.

During the early Sung dynasty, visions of the natural hierarchy became metaphors for the well-regulated state. At the same time, images of the private retreat proliferated among a new class of scholar-officials. These men extolled the virtues of self-cultivation—often in response to political setbacks or career disappointments—and asserted their identity as literati through poetry, calligraphy, and a new style of painting that employed calligraphic brushwork for self-expressive ends. The monochrome images of old trees, bamboo, rocks, and retirement retreats created by these scholar-artists became emblems of their character and spirit.

Under the Mongol Yuan dynasty, when many educated Chinese were barred from government service, the model of the Song literati retreat evolved into a full-blown alternative culture as this disenfranchised elite transformed their estates into sites for literary gatherings and other cultural pursuits. These gatherings were frequently commemorated in paintings that, rather than presenting a realistic depiction of an actual place, conveyed the shared cultural ideals of a reclusive world through a symbolic shorthand in which a villa might be represented by a humble thatched hut. Because a man's studio or garden could be viewed as an extension of himself, paintings of such places often served to express the values of their owner.

The Yuan dynasty also witnessed the burgeoning of a second kind of cultivated landscape, the "mind landscape," which embodied both learned references to the styles of earlier masters and, through calligraphic brushwork, the inner spirit of the artist. Going beyond representation, scholar-artists imbued their paintings with personal feelings. By evoking select antique styles, they could also identify themselves with the values associated with the old masters. Painting was no longer about the description of the visible world; it became a means of conveying the inner landscape of the artist's heart and mind.

During the Ming dynasty, when native Chinese rule was restored, court artists produced conservative images that revived the Song metaphor for the state as a well-ordered imperial garden, while literati painters pursued self-expressive goals through the stylistic language of Yuan scholar-artists. Shen Zhou (1427–1509), the patriarch of the Wu school of painting centered in the cosmopolitan city of Suzhou, and his preeminent follower Wen Zhengming (1470–1559) exemplified Ming literati ideals. Both men chose to reside at home rather than follow official careers, devoting themselves to self-cultivation through a lifetime spent reinterpreting the styles of Yuan scholar-painters.

Morally charged images of reclusion remained a potent political symbol during the early years of the Manchu Quing dyasty, a period in which many Ming loyalists lived in self-enforced retirement. Often lacking access to important collections of old masters, loyalist artists drew inspiration from the natural beauty of the local scenery.

Images of nature have remained a potent source of inspiration for artists down to the present day. While the Chinese landscape has been transformed by millennia of human occupation, Chinese artistic expression has also been deeply imprinted with images of the natural world. Viewing Chinese landscape paintings, it is clear that Chinese depictions of nature are seldom mere representations of the external world. Rather, they are expressions of the mind and heart of the individual artists—cultivated landscapes that embody the culture and cultivation of their masters.

//Eternal beauty of Mughal gardens//

Zahiruddin Muhammad Babur founded the Mughal Empire in India after defeating Ibrahim Lodhi in the Battle of Panipat in 1526.

At the age of 14, Babur ascended the throne of the Central Asian kingdom of Farghana. His greatest ambition was to rule Samarkand. He fought many battles in the pursuit of this goal, winning and losing his kingdom many times in the process. In 1504, he ventured into what is now Afghanistan and conquered Kabul.

His position in Central Asia was precarious at best. In order to consolidate his rule, he invaded India five times, crossing the River Indus each time. The fifth expedition resulted in his encounter with Ibrahim Lodhi in the first battle of Panipat in April 1526. Babur's army was better equipped than Lodhi's; he had guns while the sultan relied on elephants. The most successful of Babur's innovations was the introduction of gunpowder, which had never been used before in the Sub-continent. This combined with Babur's newer tactics gave him a greater advantage. Babur's strategy won the war and Ibrahim Lodhi died fighting.

Panipat was merely the beginning of the Mughal rule. Akbar laid its real foundation in 1556. At the time of the battle of Panipat, the political power in India was shared by the Afghans and the Rajputs. After Panipat, the Hindu princes united under Rana Sanga, the Raja of Mewar, resulting in a sizable force. Babur's army showed signs of panic at the size of the huge opposing army. To prevent his forces retreat, Babur tried to instill confidence in his soldiers by breaking all his drinking cups and vessels, and vowed never to drink again if he won. His soldiers took heart, and when the armies met in the battle at Kanwaha, near Agra on March 16, 1527, Babur was able to win decisively. Kanwaha confirmed and completed Babur's victory at Panipat. Babur thus became the king of Central India.

Writing of the new country that he had conquered, Babur complained of its lack of beauty, of its absence of fruit trees. In the same breath he recalled the flowering blossoms in the gardens of his beloved Farghana. When he defeated Rana Sangha in battle Babur celebrated the victory by establishing a garden, a charbagh, on the east side of the Yamuna. As his grandson Jehangir was to record in his autobiography. "He gave it the name of Gul-afshan, and erected in it a small building of cut red stone, and having completed a mosque on one side of it he intended to make a lofty building, but time failed him and his design was never carried into execution."

As a victory memorial, or as a welcome oasis of beauty in the hot dry plains of the north, the garden aroused the imagination of poet and king alike. In purely visual terms, it reached its apotheosis in miniature painting.

For the painter of the Mughal or Pahari miniature, the garden presented irresistible possibilities. In both traditions the garden becomes a metaphor for life. It personifies the seasons, the emotions, love in separation and fulfilment. As a life force it enhances the poetic and formal potential of the painting. It is the place which tempts the gods with its beauty, which invites their trysts and dalliance. For the Mughal rulers as patrons, the garden was the symbol of a settled empire, of their presence in India with a distinct sense of aesthetics and culture. In the Hindu kingdoms of the hills and Rajasthan, the garden enabled the enactment of myths, the celebration of festivities, it provided the backdrop for the appearance of the nayika, whose beauty is enhanced by the birds, the profusion of flowers and plants.

The presence of the garden in Mughal painting had much to do with the personality of the successive emperors. Akbar's interest lay in realistic portraits of noblemen and court grandees. In the era of Jehangir, who frequently sought the company of religious men, paintings of the King meeting with a religious man in a forest amidst trees and flowers is common to the Jehangir era. Jehangir, the aesthete had a predilection for a beautiful environment, for the exquisite and the unusual flora and fauna of India. The fact that he assiduously nurtured an aesthetic environment, is seen in his court painter Aqa Riza's portrait of Salim's Gardener (c.1600). Jehangir's court painter Farrukh Beg used the garden to create rich vegetation so typical of Deccan painting that appears as fanciful as it is colourful. The emperor's taste for flora and fauna is also seen in works like Squirrels in a Plane Tree (c.1610) painted by Abul Hasan and Mansur, from the India Office Library collection. In the Tuzuk-I-Jehangiri there are numerous instances of Jehangir admiring the symmetry of gardens laid out by his noblemen, of Noor Jahan hosting Shahjahan's victory in the Deccan in lavishly appointed gardens in which even the bushes and leaves are emblazoned with gold and silver. This preoccupation with aesthetics translated directly into representation in painting. The Mughals had an almost scientific curiosity in rare flora and fauna and pressed the artists of their atelier to copy such rarities. When Muqarrab Khan, the Mughal governor of Surat, found a rare turkey cock in Goa, Jehangir instructed his favourite artist Mansoor to draw a likeness of the bird, now preserved in the Victoria and Albert museum. Shajahan as patron who had a more formal concept of aesthetics commissioned the Gulistan or garden of Sadi, which Milo Beach describes as the "greatest of the poetical manuscripts." One of the works in the manuscript, Sadi in the Rose Garden, demonstrates the philosophical symbol of the garden itself. In the work one friend admonishes another for gathering in his skirt roses which have such a short life span. "Then what is to be done?" I replied: "I may compose for the amusement of those who look and for instruction of those who are present, a book of a Rose Garden, a Gulistan whose leaves cannot be touched by the tyranny of autumnal blasts, and the delight of whose spring the vicissitudes of time will be unable to change into the inconstancy of autumn . . . ." The permanence of the painted garden then, as demonstrated by this painting by Govardhan, symbolised a lasting, eternal beauty, far beyond the temporality of human experience.

In the painting of Rajasthan and the Pahari schools, the illustration of Krishna myths, of Vaishnava poetry were to have a profound influence. The beauty of the natural surroundings in the hills found a natural mirror in paintings of the bara masa, or the change of the seasons. The presentation of the nayika in attitudes of waiting for, or in union with, her beloved, often within the confines of her royal residence allowed for endless representations. Krishna, dancing the rasalila with the gopis, often in the phosphorescent light of the full moon is a subject that is endlessly repeated in the idyllic gardens of Pahari painting. Krishna's name as Madhava (drinker of honey) and Vanamalin (wearer of a garland of forest flowers) emphasises that the context for Radha-Krishna love is often spring and the associative beauty of landscape.

Hindu and Islamic myths alike make glorious and imaginative use of the garden in painting. The Ashoka vatika of Sita's incarceration in Lanka, the swan's meeting with Nala in his royal garden, the first meeting between Shirin and Farhad, the endless trysts of Radha and Krishna all find their natural apotheosis in the layout of the garden. Kings and their consorts assumed many of the same poetic and visual metaphors. Describing the beauty of Padmavati, the parrot says to the King Ratnasena: "rays were emanating from her red lips which looked like newly grown rose leaves. Her face was fragrant like a blossoming lotus, and when she breathed it seemed as if flames of perfume emanated from her . . . Her shut eyes appeared like two black bees lying quietly within two closed blue lotuses" (Jaisi's Padmavati).

The garden, with its distinct uses of palette and modes of representation became one of the principle means of recognising a school of painting. In the paintings of Bundi, the water birds, lotuses and plantations are depicted with a refined beauty, in contrast to, say, the prominent colours and the sharp stylisation of the Jodhpur school. In some painting folios, such as the Gita-Govinda of Mewar (17th Century), the Radha-Krishna narrative unfolds through their meetings in flower-decked bowers in an extended garden. In this series, each of the bowers in the garden serves as a frame, for the lovers to meet. Several such "frames" in each painting allow for the unfoldment of a narrative.

Vaishnava poetry of the medieval period particularly highlighted the beauty of the garden as a meeting point for lovers. The creeping vines, the red bimba fruit, the noisy black bee, the fresh green shoots, the soft pink of the emergent lotus, the dark of the night, all become metaphors to describe beauty in the hands of poets like Jayadeva, Bihari and Keshavadas. The banks of the Yamuna as described by Jayadeva, or the Betwa of Keshavadas' Rasikapriya are the natural meeting ground for the divine lovers. In the hill schools, the strong colours of Rajasthan are transmitted to the lyrical pastels of the Kangra school, or else the brilliant primary colours of Basohli and Mankot. The gentle floral blossoms of Guler painting, Radha and Krishna flying kites, feeding pigeons or listening to quawwalis on moonlit nights, or royal lovers watching a fireworks display in a moonlit garden are some of the common themes.