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Princess
Asleep in a Pleasure Garden An inscription in the top left corner identifies the slumbering princess at the centre of this painting as Zib al-Nisa’ Begum, the daughter of the Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb. While the princess lies, stretched out beneath a canopy, attendants and companions play music, dance and carouse around her. The figure on the right, with her sleepy expression and arms draped around the shoulders of her two companions, is particularly effective in conveying the languor of the scene. Man and nature are show to be at harmony in the painting: the playful herons flitting through the sky and the storks strolling through the dense beds of roses mirror the light-hearted nature of the main action. Both the sensuous subject matter and delicate palette of mauve, lilac, green and white are typical of Hyderabadi painting of the first half of the eighteenth century. Mark Zebrowski, with reference to this painting, has attributed the popularity of such lyrical scenes in the period to a desire to escape from the harsh political realities of the day. In contrast to the rather indolent depiction of her here, Zib al- Nisa’Begum in fact lead a remarkable life: a poetess, calligrapher and patron of the arts, in 1702-3 she ended her life in prison after being implicated in a plot against her father, Aurangzib. An inscription on the right hand margin also reads ‘Zib al-Nisa’ Begum’. This enchanting vision of cultivated leisure set in a luxuriant garden exists in earlier Deccani painting, such as the miniature of Sultan Ali Adil Shah II with a courtesan painted at Bijapur around 1660-1670. On the reverse of
the painting is a sixteenth- or seventeenth-century calligraphy page
bearing the following verses in Persian: Provenance Literature |
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