‘Born in the mid-sixteenth century at Harar in Ethiopia, and known simply as “Chapu”, he was sold by his poor parents to an Arab slave merchant, landed up in Baghdad, and from there, in the early 1570s, in the Deccan – known for its polyglot and tolerant culture which included many blacks or ‘Habshis’ as they were called (from the Arabic word ‘Habsh’ for Abysinnia, the older name of Ethiopia) – where he was sold again to a prominent noble at the troubled court of the Nizam Shahs of Ahmednagar.-’

B.N Goswamy

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This picture which Chelby Diagle , cultural critic and blogger who calls herself the ‘Funky Ghetto Hijabi‘ points to in a radio series she works on on the history of ‘other’ Black narratives in South Asia strikes me for the reading that she, a Nigerian French Canadian Anglophone Muslim brings to it, and the reading that I can bring to it after reading her.

This wonderful picture is to me about the complexity of being a post-colonial South Indian Muslim, and reading histories that were not once accessible and looking at these images from my historical point of view.

When you put this image through the digestive lens which I’m wearing then it becomes frightfully and delightfully confounding.The Emperor who is depicted in many paintings as an incarnation of God or even as an immortal viceregent, (a trend which the later Mughal miniatures were given to) stands on a globe and the iconography which is used is to me very layered and not simple by any means.

At the outset this work could easily be labelled blasphemous even by me, for  it’s blatant racism.

Scattered over the painting, in a very minute hand, are also verses in Persian, like: “The head of the night-coloured usurper is become the house of the owl”, or “Thine enemy-smiting arrow has driven from the world (Ambar) the owl, which fled the light“.

But look at the imagery.The globe stands on a bull which stands on a fish.It takes us back to an ancient tribal or even neolithic imagination of the universe.