Thus the“nocturnal lament”of the string, inducing sleep like Plato’s
music, also suggests death, with the“dart transfixing the heart”of“prey.”
If the animals in the painting appear sleeping to the point of death–
tongues hanging out, eyes wide open, and one near the top left even with
the mark of an arrow on herflank–it may be because the sleep induced by
a music resonant with divine ecstasy enables knowledge that transcends
life. The animals, merely pacified by Orphic song in Ovid’sMetamorphosis
(Book 11), here gain his ability, unique among mortals, to freely cross the
boundary between life and death through the‘spell’of music. Just as Plato
playing music in Nizami’s poetry enables an oblique, crooked-hatted
critique of rationalism, Khazanad’s inclusion of the animals extends
Nizami’s critique to the rationalism embodied in visual verisimilitude.
Music wins over painting because, in directly touching the soul, it trans-
cends the boundaries between life and death that distinguishes the mortal
from the divine.^32 Yet the subtle sophistication of Khazanad’s painting
obliquely suggests that painting also holds its own in transcending mere
forms to produce true meaning.
Discursively engaging in the manner of modern critical prose, the painting
visually suggests that European practices of representation can be subsumed
into a powerful existing canon of mimetic representation in which sensory
perception, poetry and painting, image and sound, animal and philosophy,
wakefulness and dreaming, life anddeath, Muslim and European coexist
through their essential similitudes. The selective appropriation of European
verism emerges not as an accidental appropriation of a supposedly advanced
European practice, but as a considered incorporation of European techniques
within a Mughal mimetic order.^33 Far from representing only a geographically
and temporally bounded Mughal perspective, its expressiveness depends on a
powerful legacy of aesthetic discourse articulated through antique Greek
philosophy dissolved within Islamic discourses.3.3 The Simurgh
The animals surrounding Plato in the painting are not simply exotic, but
include the mythical Simurgh, also among the birds framing Jahangir’s
throne. Yet the Simurgh is irrelevant to Nizami’s text. Why is the Simurgh
sleeping in this painting? Although subtle, its appearance is replete with
meaning. The Simurgh often appears where it does not belong,floating(^32) Northwood, 2015. (^33) Singh, 2017 :9.
88 The Insufficient Image