SULTANATE INDIA, 15TH CENTURY

Charting the turbulent romance of Khusraw, the illegitimate son of the King of Rum, and Gol, the daughter of the King of Ahvaz, ‘Attar’s Khusraw-nama has much in common with Nizami’s Khusraw and Shirin and was written around the same time. The fact that the two works share many episodes and ideas reflects how they both drew on the same substrate of Iranian folklore and legends (B. Reinert, ‘Attar, Shaikh Farid al-Din’, in Encyclopaedia Iranica, Volume III, New York, 2000, p. 21).

The square format of this painting and the style of the figures is similar to four Indian Shahnama illustrations, dated to the second quarter of the 15^th century and kept in the National Museum of Asian Art, Washington DC (S1986.144; S1986.145, and S1968.146). A copy of the Javami’ al-hikayat dated to 1438-9 in the British Library (Or.11676) also has square illustrations in a similar style, of which one (f. 46) has similar gold spandrels in the top corners to those on the present lot. The fact that both these manuscripts have at times in their past been attributed to Southern Iran is a result of the fact that the Delhi Sultans encouraged artists from Tabriz, Shiraz, or Herat to move South and settle in new ateliers on the Indian subcontinent, encouraging a period of artistic exchange over the Indus river which would culminate in the age of the Great Mughals.