"Krishna Holds Up Mount Govardhan to Shelter the Villagers of Braj", Folio from a Harivamsa (The Legend of Hari (Krishna))

This painting is so much more than a painting; to me, it’s a coming together of traditions, showing the Muslim imagination is greatly open-minded. This is a folio from a manuscript which illustrates a Hindu epic, the story of Krishna, the blue god in the middle of the painting. Krishna is lifting a mountain in order to shield the villagers of Braj from Indra, the king of gods, who’s raining down the storm. This painting was actually made for a Muslim patron, Akbar, the emperor of Mughal India at the time. There was tremendous curiosity about the culture of the Hindus, so he set up a translation bureau and there, all through the 1580s, systematically, all the great Hindu epics were translated from Sanskrit and other Indian languages into Persian, and many of them were illustrated. And this was illustrated in that great translation effort. This painting is filled with detail, and in those details you find sensitive observation of just the simple life of the Indian villager, rather than the great courtly style. It’s this feeling of eternal India, the villagers who have been there while the kings have come and gone. I mean if you go to India today, you see almost the same faces, the same scenes: the little man who’s fallen asleep with his turban over on one side, or the child who’s looking at his mother, or the holy man, who is so arresting with his long hair and his earrings and is looking in wonderment at his deity. I do feel that they’re not just minor details, they really carry the main story, that the Muslim patrons respected the intellectual and spiritual tradition from which this image springs. You see little touches of European influence as well: the figure of a woman who is draped in green recalls figures of Madonnas that were being circulated at the court at the time. We live in a world right now where the daily politics and the newspapers give us the impression that the Islamic tradition is rather rigid, but one of the great masterpieces of world art was really given rise to by the openness of the Muslim mind. It’s a lot to put on a little picture like this, but in fact it was that culture of freethinking, of exchange, that in the end created this cultural fabric that is very strong 'til today.