"Squirrels in a Plane Tree? Mughal Painting and Islamic Ontology"

Islamic art is often misrepresented as an iconophobic tradition. As a result of this assumption, the polyvalence of figural artworks made for Hindustan’s Muslim audiences has remained hidden in plain view. By combining an art historical survey with an analysis of primary Indo-Persian literature, this lecture takes one Mughal-era artwork to show how figurative painting was intimately linked to a unique Indo-Muslim religious expression that had a wide circulation across South Asia. In the process, the lecture also presents a new methodological approach for the study of Islamic art.

Murad Khan Mumtaz is an associate professor of Art History at Williams College. He examines historical intersections of art, literature, and religious expression in South Asia, with a primary focus on Indo-Muslim patronage. By combining art history with textual analysis, his recent book, Faces of God: Images of Devotion in Indo-Muslim Painting (Brill, 2023), examines the cultural contexts within which these Islamicate images of devotion were made and viewed. Murad is also an artist trained in traditional Hindustani painting techniques and continues to exhibit his work internationally.

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