The Met’s Wonder of the Age show has a dazzling range of Indian masterpieces from Siyavash faces Afrasiyab across the Jihun River painted by the Master of the Jainesque Shahnama (above) in the Sultanate period to the Portrait of Jaswant Singh II of Jodhpur (top), which is a photograph overpainted by Shivalal in the 19th century Courtesy The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

It is the dazzling culmination of almost 30 years of dogged detective work. New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art has just thrown open an extraordinary exhibition of Indian art from the Medieval Era — the likes of which has seldom been seen before. The works have come from all corners of the world and pieces have been loaned by notoriously cautious owners like the Queen of England.

The works on display at Wonder of the Age: Master Painters of India 1100-1900 include a spectacular 200 of the finest masterpieces created during that period. They include incredibly beautiful Buddhist and Jain palm-leaf manuscripts to Mughal miniatures and stunning Raj-put works to the exquisite outpourings of the Pahari masters.

But behind the glittering exhibition is a tale of relentless detective work combined with incredible scholarship.

Three men have combined forces to unravel some of the greatest secrets of Indian art. Their goal: to rewrite Indian art history and to discover the Rembrandts and the Da Vincis who splashed their colours about and created the exquisite miniatures and the vivid hunting and court scenes that Medieval Indian art is famous for.

The three world-renowned academics turned sleuths are B.N. Goswamy, Eberhard Fischer and Milo C. Beach, all now in their 70s, who have doggedly pursued their quest to uncover the mysteries that have whirled around Indian art.

“It’s the most comprehensive show of Indian painting ever. And it’s concentrated on individual artists and not on their patrons be it Akbar or Jehangir or the Maharaja of Udaipur,” says Beach, who’s renowned for his pathbreaking work on Mughal miniatures and who was director of the Smithsonian Museum’s Freer and Sackler Galleries in Washington from 1988 to 2000.

“The exhibition is a celebration of the achievements of some of the greatest masters of Indian painting who were forgotten by history,” adds Fischer, the former director of the Museum Rietberg in Zurich who’s internationally known for his work on Pahari and Orissan painting and who first came to India in the 1960s and was closely associated with the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad.

The three men set out to destroy the prevalent belief that Indian art “is all anonymous” and was created by unknown hacks toiling in workshops who simply followed a set pattern or painted according to their patron’s dictates. “If you don’t have names, it’s taken for granted that the painters are hack artists with no individual creativity credited to them. But we wanted to persuade people to think of them as thinking persons who evolved and grew as artists,” says Goswamy, who has made his name as one of India’s foremost art historians and is acclaimed for his work on the Pahari painters.

Chameleon (left) by Mansur, the foremost Mughal natural history painter, is drawn from the Queen of England’s collection while Akbar Presenting a Painting to His Father Humayun (above) by Abd al-Samad was borrowed by Museum Rietberg from the Golestan Palace Library in Tehran Courtesy Museum Rietberg, Zurich, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

So there are stunning works like Two Fighting Camels painted by the Mughal painter Abd Al-Samad, who came from Iran and painted at the courts of Humayun and Akbar. Then, there are spectacular works by Mansur, who was Jehangir’s favourite natural history painter and who was given the title of Nadir al-Asr or Wonder of the Age by the emperor. His delicate Chameleon is a rare work on display from the Windsor Castle collection.

The Met has actually taken Wonder of the Age on loan from Zurich’s Museum Rietberg, where it first opened this summer and where it was titled ‘The Way of the Master: The Great Artists of India, 1100-1900’. The Zurich show — put together by Jorrit Britschgi, curator of Indian art at the museum — was, in fact, even bigger in scale with 248 works on display, including paintings from even more inaccessible collections like the Golestan Palace in Tehran and the Institute of Oriental Manuscripts of the Russian Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg.

Strictly speaking, Fischer, Beach and Goswamy first conceived of the exhibition — and began to work on it — four years ago. But you can trace its genesis back decades ever since they began researching deeply into Indian art. In fact, exactly 20 years ago Fischer and Goswamy held a breakthrough exhibition on Pahari Masters at the Rietberg. “That stirred up a great deal of interest because for the first time, we had named the individual painters,” recalls Goswamy.

The three scholars decided four years ago that it was time to extend their original idea across the board to cover Mughal, Jain, Deccani and Rajput painters and to identify the individuals involved in all these schools of painting. “We realised that none of us liked this idea that you divide Indian painting into areas like Rajput and Mughal,” says Beach, who did similar research on Mughal painting to identify individual painters.

But, as they were aware, it was easier said than done to put together such an exhibition. The three art historians along with Britschgi and John Guy, the Met’s curator of Asian art, enlisted scores of scholars to pour over hundreds of paintings and artists before selecting 40 of the foremost painters. They decided to get a representative four to eight works for each painter. And they also put together a scholarly two-volume survey of Indian painting with essays on each painter.

Raja Balwant Singh of Jasrota Viewing Painting Presented by Artist (above) by the celebrated Pahari painter Nainsukh and (left) Krishna Playing Blindman’s Bluff by his brother Manaku Courtesy The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Then, they moved into action, using their extensive networks to beg, borrow and cajole paintings from over 30 private and public collections around the world. So, for instance, they managed to convince the Queen’s Windsor Collection to send a miniature by Abid from Shah Jahan’s monumental Padshahnama for the exhibition. In fact, the Museum Rietberg’s show even had works from reluctant lenders like the St. Petersburg Institute.

Even more amazing was the story behind the rarely seen pieces from the Muraqqa-e-Gulshan, an album of paintings and calligraphy, which is owned by the Golestan Palace in Tehran. The works from the Gulshan were also on show at the Rietberg. The Gulshan created in Jehangir’s court, is regarded as one of the most important works of Mughal art and was taken to Iran by the raiding army of Nadir Shah almost 300 years ago. It lay there practically undiscovered for several centuries and has never been fully exhibited — and in recent decades has almost vanished from view.

Beach has spent nearly 40 years trying to persuade the Iranian government to allow him to study the work. He finally succeeded around 2000 but he’s tightlipped about his work on it and only says: “It remains as one of the next biggest discoveries. It’s an extraordinary work and will help to illuminate a lot of aspects of Indian painting.” He was finally able to influence the Iranians to show the work at the Rietberg.

The greatest dilemma facing the panel of curators and art historians was which pieces and artists to put on show. “Some artists elected them- selves they’re so obviously great,” says Goswamy. One such is the celebrated Pahari master Nainsukh, who’s known for his acute observation of the minutiae of life around him. Then, there was the still anonymous artist who is known as the Master who created the Devasano Pado Kalpasutra, a stunningly lavish Jain manuscript from Gujarat (though his name has been lost in the mists of time, his work can be identified by its style). There are other similar artists whose names are not known and who have been identified by their work or style or even their patron court.

So how have the art historians identified the artists? “It’s a process that goes along slowly,” says Beach, who’s also a keen follower of Rajput painting. And it entails years of seeing the paintings and pouring over brushstrokes, inscriptions and historical records.

Indeed, much of the detective work rests on sheer knowledge about the period and the works of that time. And also an incredible attention to detail. For instance, the painter Nainsukh always painted a hookah with ‘two-and-a-half-curves’ points out Goswamy.

“What one makes sure is that one sees as many paintings as possible whether they’re in private or public collections in India or Europe or America,” says Beach.

The Met show is attracting scholars and art lovers alike

Then, there are clues in inscriptions — the miniatures were embedded in manuscripts with inscriptions — and references in historical texts. “In the early days, nobody paid any attention to inscriptions and very little interest was shown in the way a particular painting related to a text,” says Beach. That changed after historians like Beach identified painters by deciphering the inscriptions and finding references to them there. For instance, Beach discovered a number of new inscriptions like on the painter Abid in the Padshahnama.

Now, the historians are hoping the Wonder of the Age exhibition will spur more scholarship into each painter too. “The idea is to pass on this knowledge to future generations of scholars and researchers,” says Britschgi. Adds Guy: “I thinks it’s a coming of age exhibition. It’s going to raise people’s understanding of the study of the field.”

The three doyens of Indian art history, (from top) B.N. Goswamy, Milo C. Beach and Eberhard Fischer, are spearheading the quest to identify the painters behind India’s greatest masterpieces

In an attempt to make people look at the period differently, the paintings have also been presented differently. So, the paintings have been hung according to broad time periods. This means that a Pahari painting might be next to a Mughal miniature or a Rajput painting. Guy and the others hope that this will also enable visitors to see how painters from different regions influenced each other.

The Met show has a dazzling display by the Rajput masters too such as Ram Singh I of Kota Hunting Rhinoceros, attributed to the Kota Master (top), and Rawat Gokul Das at a Hunting Party (above) painted by Bagta

The Death of Khan Jahan Lodi by the Mughal painter Abid is from the Padshahnama manuscript and it is borrowed from the Queen of England Courtesy The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

At the Met, for instance, Guy has constructed a series of six period rooms such as the Early Hindu-Sultanate Painting, 1500-1575, or the Late Mughal Painting and the Renaissance of the Hindu Courts, 1650-1730. “We have tried to present the complexities in six sequential time frames. Just as the history of Europe is not one history, India also has multiple histories and I wanted the exhibition to reflect that,” says Guy.

This arrangement of works is throwing up interesting insights. For the greatest Indian painters weren’t working in isolation or in a vacuum. Many of them moved from court to court, imbibing new influences and evolving too.

“One of the most important things about the exhibition is that you’re able to see how the painters moved around and how they were exposed to different styles,” says Britschgi.

So, you have Nainsukh, who moved from Guler in Himachal to Jammu and then back to Guler. “The traditional system of classifying Indian art according to region and period is not as correct for the highest quality of Indian painting because a Rajasthani painter could move to a late Mughal court and then come back to Rajasthan,” says Fischer.

Also, at the Met it’s possible to look at the differences between painters from the same family as in the case of Nainsukh and his brother Manaku and their six sons. Similarly, there’s the Persian painter Aqa Riza and his sons Abu’ Hasan and Abid.

Unfortunately, the exhibition won’t be travelling to India. However, the Swiss government’s Pro Helvetia-Swiss Arts Council is hosting a six-city lecture series “Nainsukh” by Goswamy and Fischer which will be accompanied by the screening of Amit Dutta’s critically acclaimed biographical film on the Pahari painter through November.

A few Indian art lovers have already feasted on the exhibition. Take Bangalore-based art collector Abhishek Poddar, who’s known for his Contemporary art collection and who’s been studying Indian miniature for the last six-seven years. He did a day trip to Zurich this summer just to see the exhibition at the Rietberg and he did three rounds of the galleries that day. “The depth and breadth of the exhibition was so huge that you could swing in any direction and be mesmerised by the work. It left you thinking that we had achieved much greater heights in the past,” he says. Certainly, the world’s getting to savour not only the finest Indian painting but discover the masters who painted them too.