Ebba Koch | University of Vienna

Final remarks: an excerpt

It was fascinating to listen to the great presentations! Becoming 80 years is quite something, people are right when they speak of a milestone birthday. And, of course, when I began my work on the Mughals, I never imagined I would reach such a biblical age. But here we are and when I look back these were amazing years which brought me from my native provincial Austrian town Klagenfurt to Paris where I met my husband Benno, to Africa where I had our first son Sebastian in the Kongo, back to Austria where we had our second son Johannes, then to Thailand, India and the USA. Especially our years in India were a turning point in my life. Since then, I have been devoted to the Mughals and can only say with the American art historian Cary Welch: “What would our lives be without those fascinating Mughals?!”

I got my art historical formation at Vienna in the 1970s. The circumstances of my life had brought me to India, and I wanted to write my dissertation on Mughal architecture. When I asked Dr Herbert Fux, then curator at the Museum für Angewandte Kunst (Museum of Applied Arts), today called MAK, who taught Aussereuropäische Kunst (non-European art), his reaction was rather discouraging: “Da is nix und es wird schon an Grund geben, das da nix is.” (There is nothing about it and there must be a reason why there is nothing about it). I found a more open ear in the architectural historian Professor Wagner-Rieger. She encouraged me in my plan to work for my doctoral dissertation on Mughal architecture because she thought it important to revive the largely abandoned tradition of studying the arts of Islam in Vienna. They were associated with the controversial art historian Josef Strzygowski who had after World War II become persona non grata. Strzygowski and his circle had in the 1920s first ‘discovered’ and published the Mughal collections at Vienna, the Hamzanama at the Museum of Applied Arts (MAK) and the collages of the Millionenzimmer of Schönbrunn Palace. Professor Wagner-Rieger agreed to supervise a dissertation on Mughal palace architecture.

Previous stays and journeys in Asia had wakened my interest in Asian art but when I began my investigations in Delhi I knew little of Indian and Islamic art. In an autodidactic enterprise I began to read, to study Persian and to survey buildings, as explained in the introduction to the exhibition. As a historian of European art I was fascinated by the deep engagement of the Mughals with European art. As to methodology, I developed an integrative approach. I believe that combining purely art-historical methods, such as the analysis of forms, with the information generated from the literary sources can provide the key to the political and ideological concepts of the historical period being studied. This approach has eventually uncovered aspects of Mughal history which were never recorded in textual sources, but expressed only in architecture and the arts.

Even though in recent times art historians have increasingly addressed broader cultural issues than the past, art history is not yet sufficiently appreciated by political, social, and economic historians dealing with Mughal India. This disciplinary schism has been addressed by Sanjay Subrahmanyam in 1992, he confined his remarks to the Mughal state, they are still valid and can be applied to a wider context:

Most writers on art-history and architectural history accept in a relative unquestioning manner the basic postulates on the nature and history of the Mughal state set out for them by political and social historians, on the basis of chronicles and documents; political and social historians, for their part seem to have disdain for art-history and allied disciplines. (Subrahmanyam 1992, 292-293)

Fortunately this is not true of the speakers of our symposium, the aim of this meeting was to show that the disciplines can be bridged successfully. I have fruitful exchanges with all of them since many years, my longest acquaintance is with Partha Mitter whom I first met in London in 1977. I am glad they all could come to Vienna, my esteemed colleagues and old friends and companions on the road. Thank you!

Bibliography

Subrahmanyam, S. (1992). ‘The Mughal State – Structure or Process? Reflections on Recent Western Historiography’. The Indian Economic and Social History Review, 29 (3), 291-321.