Embarrassment of riches: South Asian Miniature Painting, at MK Gallery, reviewed

In 1633, British merchants travelling east were issued with a royal command from Charles I: ‘As the king has considered that there is a great deal of learning fit to be known written in Arabic, and great scarcity of Arabic and Persian books in this country… every ship… at every voyage shall bring home an Arabic or Persian manuscript book, to be delivered to… the Archbishop of Canterbury, who shall dispose of them as the King shall think fit.’

One suspects that a hunger for learning wasn’t the whole story, and that the sight of the exquisite illustrations adorning books sent from India as diplomatic gifts had whetted Charles I’s collector’s appetite. He wasn’t alone. Over the next two-and-a-half centuries British collectors amassed tens of thousands of South Asian miniatures as gifts, acquisitions, commissions or loot. The majority filtered through to museums and libraries. Archbishop William Laud, the beneficiary of that royal command, deposited more than 250 volumes in the Bodleian; 350 rescued from the destruction of Lucknow royal library by East India Company troops in 1858 entered the collection of the British Museum to form the basis of its Department of Oriental Manuscripts. The V&A, relatively late to the feast, snapped up 273 folios of the 16th-century Akbarnama manuscript in 1895 for £100.

Then the craze went cold. Modernism shifted the dial to African ‘primitivism’ and South Asian miniatures began to look fussy and quaint. On the Indian subcontinent, where artists working for patrons in the East India Company had already adopted a westernised ‘Company School’ style, government art schools taught a European curriculum. So when the young Gulammohammed Sheikh from Baroda and Zahoor ul Akhlaq from Lahore won scholarships to the Royal College in the 1960s, they arrived expecting to join the School of London.