Featuring several objects of exemplary quality, the latest Mohatta Palace Museum exhibition in Karachi, titled “Paradise on Earth: Manuscripts, Miniatures and Mendicants from Kashmir”, is a superb piece of museum craft. By showcasing masterpieces of Kashmiri artistry, Museum Director Nasreen Askari and co-curator Fatima Quraishi provide visitors to the show glimpses of the extraordinary work produced by master-craftsmen in this famously lush and beautiful, but tragically troubled, conflict-ravaged land.
Displayed in this bijou exhibition are what have been poetically called ‘Pages of Perfection’: splendidly illuminated Qurans and lavishly-illustrated manuscripts. Also to be seen is intricately handcrafted silverware, woodcarving, metalwork, and the unique lacquer and papier-mache products for which Kashmir is renowned.
Cashmere, the 19th century spelling of Kashmir, is today a term for fine sheep’s wool. Kashmir’s own Cashmere is pashm, from the soft, downy undercoat of the Himalayan mountain goat, Capra hircus. Persian for wool, pashm becomes pashmina in its woven form. For most people, finely woven embroidered shawls are synonymous with Kashmir. Surprisingly, in this show the focus is not on Kashmir’s ‘woven legends’ such as shawls of shahtoosh and pashmina, and its hand-knotted quality carpets, but on its decorative arts.
A new show celebrates Kashmir’s staggeringly rich artistic tradition and the amazing creativity of its craftspeople
Most of this show’s stunningly executed manuscripts —sacred, devotional and non-religious — are from the antique book collection of the National Museum of Pakistan. For the Kashmiri silvercraft, copperware, woodwork and papier-mache items in this “loan exhibition,” the curators had to delve into private collections.
The most enlightened of Kashmir’s pre-Mughal Muslim rulers was Sultan Zain-ul-Abidin (1420-1470). A lover of literature and learning, he was instrumental in promoting and nourishing not only his country’s crafts but also the finest of fine Islamic calligraphy. Under this celebrated king’s artistic patronage, the production of fine paper burnished and sprinkled with gold and a distinctive style of illustrating manuscripts developed in Kashmir.
After the Mughal conquest of Kashmir in 1589, emperor Akbar (1556-1695) relocated the finest Kashmiri calligraphers, artists and craftsmen to the imperial Mughal atelier in Agra. Several noted calligraphers such as Muhammad Husayn al-Kashmiri, acclaimed as Zareen Qalam (“Golden Pen”), became celebrities in the royal entourage.
The “arts of the book” were the pre-eminent art form in the early Mughal period. Akbar loved illustrated books and ordered some 1,400 spectacular illustrations for his favourite epic, the Hamzanama, which took his artists more than 15 years to complete. Jahangir was a keen naturalist and a connoisseur of portraiture. Unlike his father he had little interest in the production of large historical or poetical manuscripts but insisted his artists embellish the manuscripts in the royal library with exquisite miniature paintings. Shah Jahan, obsessed with gemstones and monumental architecture, wrote no memoirs but did commission the Padshahnama, an extensively illustrated history of the early years of his reign. Forty-four paintings of this sumptuous manuscript are now in Windsor castle.