Indian court painting: how India's royal courts portrayed their rulers

India's royal courts paid artists to paint and carve their rulers. This guide is about how they did it: the poses the rulers took, the objects placed around them, and the small signs that told a viewer "this is the king". It covers the Mughal emperors, the Rajput kings of Rajasthan and the hills, the Deccan sultans, the Sikh court at Lahore, the rulers of Mysore, the Maratha kings and the Chola kings of the far south. Each court has its own page, listed further down. This main page explains what the courts shared, how to read one of their portraits, and how that history connects to the nine Indian styles on Purrealism.

What a court portrait is

A court portrait was a picture made for a ruler by artists he employed. India's National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT) describes how the sultans of the Deccan hired and trained artists and ordered works that suited both their own taste and the needs of governing. The same was true at the other courts. A portrait recorded what a ruler looked like, but it also told everyone who saw it that he was the one in charge.

That second job explains why the portraits look the way they do. Painters placed the ruler higher than everyone else, surrounded him with objects that only a ruler could use, and often wrote his name and titles on the page. A royal pet portrait borrows the same signs. When your dog wears a jewelled turban or your cat sits on a gold throne, the picture uses the language these court painters built up over centuries.

How the courts painted their rulers, in order

Each court took ideas from its neighbours and added its own.

The Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) in London says the practice of taking likenesses of people at the Mughal court began under Akbar, who ruled from 1556 to 1605, and reached new levels of accuracy under his son Jahangir. Our page on Mughal royal portraits follows the emperors from Babur to Aurangzeb.

In Rajasthan, NCERT says Jodhpur painters began to record their ruler and his court in portraits in the 1640s, under Maharaja Jaswant Singh, and kept doing so until photography took over that task in the 1800s. The page on Rajput court portraits covers Jodhpur, Bundi, Kota, Mewar, Bikaner and Jaipur.

In the Deccan, in south central India, NCERT says the kingdoms of Bijapur, Golconda and Ahmadnagar each built their own school of court painting. It adds that Dutch merchants carried portraits of the Golconda sultans to Europe in the late 1600s. The page on Deccan court portraits looks at the sultans' portraits.

In the hill kingdoms of the western Himalayas, NCERT says the artist Nainsukh painted his patron, Raja Balwant Singh of Jasrota, on every possible occasion, and that this gift for individual portraits became a mark of later Pahari painting. Read more in portraits of the Pahari hill rajas.

In the Punjab, the V&A says Ranjit Singh was the first Sikh maharaja of the Panjab and ruled from 1801 until his death in 1839. His court painters gave him a halo and a royal parasol. The page on Sikh and Punjab court portraits carries this story on to Patiala.

In the south, the V&A holds a portrait of Tipu Sultan, ruler of Mysore from 1782 to 1799, that the museum dates to around 1790. It also holds an oil portrait of a later Maharaja of Mysore painted in 1906. The page on Mysore court portraits covers the Mysore rulers. The Maratha king Shivaji was painted in his own century: the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam holds a portrait of him made in Golconda, which the museum dates to between 1675 and 1685. The page on Maratha court portraits picks up from there. For the Chola kings of the far south, see Chola royal portraits in bronze and stone.

The poses

A small number of poses appear again and again across the courts.

The strict profile

The most famous Mughal pose shows one person standing, face in pure side view, against a plain background. The V&A describes a portrait of the emperor Aurangzeb shown full length, in profile, against a plain pale green background, and says this continued a tradition in Mughal portraits that began in the late 16th century. A side view shows the nose, beard and turban clearly, so the sitter is easy to recognise.

The jharokha window

A jharokha is a balcony window in a palace or fort wall. The Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) in Toronto says the daily practice of appearing at the window and giving an audience to the public was adopted from medieval Indian kings by Mughal rulers from Akbar onwards. The ROM holds two late 18th century portraits, one of Jahangir and one of Aurangzeb, each framed in a jharokha with white marble inlaid with stones in flower patterns and a red curtain with gold embroidery. The Aurangzeb portrait shows him holding a book that the museum says is most likely the Koran.

The Aga Khan Museum, also in Toronto, holds a large album page showing Jahangir in a jharoka looking down at Agra Fort. His highest officials stand on a marble terrace just below him, and lower officials and the public fill the courtyard beneath. The museum explains that darshan, the act of seeing and being seen, began as a Hindu religious and political ritual, and that under Jahangir it became a grand public show. The jharokha puts the ruler above everyone and frames him like a picture inside the picture.

On horseback and at the hunt

Riding and hunting portraits show a ruler in action. The V&A holds a painting from Lahore, dated by the museum to between 1835 and 1840, of Ranjit Singh riding a white stallion decorated with gold chains and turban jewels. It also holds a drawing of Akbar, which it dates to around 1600, hunting from an elephant with a hawk on his outstretched right hand. The V&A calls hawking a kingly sport. The page on animals in Indian court painting explains what the horses, elephants, hounds and hawks in these scenes tell you.

Seated against a bolster

Rulers are often shown seated on a carpet, leaning against a long round cushion called a bolster. The V&A's portrait of Tipu Sultan shows him resting against a red bolster on a blue background, with a gold sword at his hip. A 1721 painting of Thakur Padam Singh of Ghanerao, by an artist named Manna, shows him seated against a magenta and green bolster with his sword and his katar, which the V&A calls a punch dagger, laid in front of him.

Facing the viewer

Later portraits often turn the ruler toward us. The V&A's oil painting of the Maharaja of Mysore, made in 1906 by the artist K. Keshavayya, is a half-length portrait of the maharaja facing to the front, in a pink satin brocade coat and a pink and gold turban.

The symbols, and what each one tells you

Halo and parasol

The V&A says the halo marked imperial figures from the reign of Jahangir. It also says the painters of Ranjit Singh's court borrowed the halo from Mughal painting, and that the parasol shading his head is the ancient emblem of kings. In the same picture, his companions carry weapons wrapped in cloth, another sign of royalty.

The chauri

The V&A describes the chauri as a plume of yak tail hair in a decorated holder, and calls it the emblem of royalty that was used and pictured most often across the Indian subcontinent. It says ceremonial flywhisks marked royalty whatever the ruler's religion, and also marked gods: early Hindu and Jain sculptures show attendants holding them beside a deity. The Cleveland Museum of Art holds a stone attendant bearing a chauri from Mathura, made between 100 and 150 CE, and says such figures once stood on either side of a king, the Buddha or another royal or holy figure. In the V&A's painting of Jahangir in a garden, one servant behind the emperor holds his dagger and another holds a flywhisk.

The turban jewel

The V&A says turban jewels in the Mughal tradition from the 16th century were worn only by the emperor and his sons. By the 18th century, as Mughal power declined, the rulers of regional kingdoms, Hindu and Muslim, took them up as signs of rank. So a turban jewel in a Mughal portrait of the early 1600s means something stronger than the same jewel on a Rajasthani noble a century later. The V&A also holds an 18th century portrait of a Rajasthani princess seated on a golden throne and holding out a sarpech, the Persian word for a turban ornament, in her right hand.

The throne

The V&A holds the gold throne that the goldsmith Hafiz Muhammad Multani made for Ranjit Singh, probably between 1805 and 1810. The museum says it is covered in thick sheet gold, and that its base is made of two rows of lotus petals, a flower long used as the seat of Hindu gods and a symbol of purity in Sikh scripture.

Reading a court portrait, step by step

You can read most Indian court portraits with five questions.

1. Who is highest or largest? The ruler usually stands above the crowd, sits on the throne, or looks down from the jharokha.
2. Where is the gold? In the V&A's drawing of Akbar hawking, made in the pale style called nim qalam (Persian for "half pen"), the artist used gold only on the parts closest to the emperor.
3. What is around the head? Look for a halo and a parasol.
4. Who stands behind? An attendant with a chauri or a covered weapon marks the person in front as royal.
5. Is there writing? Many portraits name the sitter. The Aga Khan Museum says most of the officials in its jharoka painting are identified by tiny inscriptions on their collars or belts.

The Aga Khan painting holds one more detail worth finding. Near the red canopy on the left hangs a golden chain with golden bells. The museum quotes Jahangir's memoirs, in which he calls it the chain of justice and says his first order as emperor was to hang it, so that anyone denied justice could shake it and be heard. In the painting the chain is guarded, and a man trying to reach it is being pushed away.

Common mistakes when looking at these portraits

Treating the portrait as a photograph. Court painters shaped the image to suit the ruler. NCERT says Shah Jahan's painters preferred an ideal, polished image over accurate detail. Some portraits were made long after the sitter's death: the V&A says Delhi artists painted Tipu Sultan in the decades after 1799, copying a Mysore portrait that the V&A dates to around 1790, and the ROM's portrait of Jahangir, whose reign ended in 1627, was painted in Lucknow or Faizabad in the late 18th century.

Reading the halo as a sign of a saint. At these courts the halo marks a ruler. The V&A says the Mughal artists took it from Western art, that it had appeared much earlier in Buddhist paintings in India, and that Rajput painters then borrowed it from the Mughals.

Assuming every turban jewel means an emperor. It did in the early Mughal period. By the 1700s, as the V&A explains, regional rulers wore them too.

Assuming every court portrait is tiny. Many are small. The ROM's jharokha portraits measure 18.8 by 12 cm and 18.4 by 11.75 cm, and the V&A's drawing of Akbar is 17.3 by 13.2 cm. Others are larger: the Aga Khan Museum's page of Jahangir at the window is 56 by 35.2 cm, and NCERT says the Jaipur court produced life-size portraits. The page on how Indian miniature portraits were made explains the paper, pigments and gold.

The courts compared

The Maharaja and Maharani styles take their names from royal titles, explained in what Maharaja means. The guide to Indian royal pet portraits goes through the nine styles one by one.

From court portraits to your pet's portrait

Each of Purrealism's nine Indian styles takes its name from these courts: Indian Royalty, Maharaja, Maharani, Patiala Royalty, Chola Warrior, Mysore Royal, Mughal Emperor, Rajput Warrior and Maratha King. The gallery shows what several of them look like. The Mughal Emperor portrait shows a grey cat wearing a jewelled crown and pearls. The Maharaja portrait shows a golden retriever in a red jewelled turban, seated on a gold throne, and the Patiala Royal portrait shows a Pomeranian in a blue coat and jewelled turban on a red throne. The studio examples add others, including a Rottweiler and a Siamese cat in the Chola Warrior style and a German Shepherd and a Persian cat in the Maratha King style.

The signs above can help you choose. If you like jewels, the Mughal Emperor portrait in the gallery wears a jewelled crown and pearls. If your dog is always on the move, the riding and hunting portraits of the Rajput courts sit behind the Rajput Warrior style, whose gallery portrait shows a dog in armour with a fort at sunset behind it. A calm pet who likes to be admired suits the throne portraits: the gallery's Maharaja and Patiala Royal portraits both seat the dog on a throne.

The profile portraits above depend on a clear face, and so does a pet portrait, so choose a photo where your pet's face is sharp and well lit. The portrait studio takes one photo of up to 5 MB. If you still cannot decide, the style finder further down this page asks whether your pet is a dog or a cat, a word that describes it, its colours and a scene, then suggests one of the nine Indian styles and shows an example portrait. For help across all 15 styles, including the European ones, read how to choose a royal portrait style.