by Christiane Kalantari, Simone Wille, Corinna Forberg, and Christine Bruckbauer

15 March 2024 - Austrian Academy of Sciences, PSK (Vienna)

On March 15, 2024, the symposium in honour of Professor Ebba Koch took place at the Austrian Academy of Sciences (OeAW) on the occasion of her 80th birthday. At the same time, photographs, floor plans and drawings from her field research, often made together with the architect Richard Barraud, were shown in an exhibition (curated by Christine Bruckbauer and Christiane Kalantari). Ebba Koch has played a key role in shaping research on art, architecture, and culture of the Mughal Empire since the 1970s. Her art historical studies span painting as well as palace architecture and garden art. Her transregional approach transcends the borders of the Mughal Empire and takes into account the former Empire’s cultural exchange with Europe, but also with  Central Asian countries. From the beginning, she has attached great importance to close collaboration with architects, linguists and historians.

Her focus on transcultural and interdisciplinary research was reflected in the contributions of the international experts who came to this special symposium. The first of the three panels - chaired by Markus Ritter, University of Vienna - was consequently dedicated to the enormous impact of Mughal art on distant cultural spheres - both spatially and temporally. Right at the start, Partha Mitter, Sussex University, discussed the survival of aesthetic principles from Mughal painting in the new medium of Indian photography in the 19th century. The close interweaving of aesthetic form and political iconography, which Partha Mitter explicitly pointed out in his paper, also marks one of the research fields within Mughal studies that Ebba Koch has co-established with her work like no other. This complex of topics also includes religious formulations and legitimizing constructs, which are inscribed in the complexes of palaces and gardens, among other things. The paper by Florian Schwarz, OeAW, made it clear that there were parallels between Mughal and Bukhara palace and garden art in the 16th and 17th centuries. Sara Mondini, Ghent University, looked from the north to the south of the subcontinent. She examines the legacy of mosque buildings from the 16th and 17th centuries in Kerala, which are formally defined by local and Mughal elements. Their existence is threatened by demolition and new buildings, which are now increasingly based on a West Asian design language. The tension arises here between the (legitimate from the historian's point of view) claim to preservation and the contemporary urge for change and redefining identity.

The second panel - chaired by Simone Wille, University of Innsbruck - went from the temporal and spatial periphery to the heart of the Mughal Empire and its research. The subject of the contributions was the architecture in and around Delhi, literary sources and their stylistic development and the reports of contemporary European witnesses. The first part of the panel in particular provided deep insights into the practical work of the researchers and the dependency between the conservation work on site, architectural survey and the expert's interpretation - a dependency that only matures into a fruitful collaboration if it is based on mutual respect and trust, as the contributions by Ratish Nanda, Richard Barraud and Ebba Koch impressively illustrated. The fascinating report by Ratish Nanda, Aga Khan Trust, on the conservation of Mughal buildings in Delhi's Nizamuddin district and the introduction of Ebba Koch and Richard Barraud to the exhibition will be further described and presented below in more detail and with photographic reproduction.

The exhibition, accompanying the symposium, displayed some of Ebba Koch’s extensive archive material, including architectural drawings and photographs, some unpublished. Ebba Koch has built an archive of approximately 80,000 black-and-white and color slides, along with 40,000 digital images. A major part of this collection consists of high-quality medium format (4x4 cm) images taken with a Rolleiflex camera and 35mm films shot with a Nikon FS Photomic camera, using Agfa film. The exhibition successfully showcased the meticulous and comprehensive methods used by Ebba Koch and Richard Barraud in their architectural surveys, highlighting some of the depth and breadth of Koch’s archive. It offered new insights into the methodology of analysing historical monuments through a combination of precise measurement, detailed drawing, and extensive photographic documentation. The high quality of the photographs, as taken by Koch, further illustrates the art historian’s eye for details as well as her explicit understanding of the cultural context.

The scholar of Iranian studies Stephan Popp, University of Vienna, continued the second panel by offering a perspective extension, using selected prose to trace the literary-stylistic development from the time of Mughal Emperors Akbar to Shah Jahan and offering points of reference to other aesthetic genres through characteristic comparisons for example between subjective experience and commonplace knowledge or eloquence and stiffness. His critical eye fell not only on the style of the author of the letter but also on the writer himself. Historical evidence as well as stylistic errors indicate that one of the authors, Harkaran, did not live during Jahangir's time. Jorge Flores, University of Lisbon, similarly critically analyzed two Portuguese travel reports from the 17th century, which in part seriously contradict each other and challenge not only historians when dealing with contemporary sources.

A major theme in Ebba Koch's work is the trans- and inter-cultural dialogue between the Mughal Empire and Europe. The last panel - chaired by Corinna Forberg, formerly of the University of Göttingen - was therefore dedicated to this topic and approached from very different perspectives, which tie in with important studies by Ebba Koch: the sun cult, the Jharoka and the Million Room at Schönbrunn Palace. Jos Gommans, Leiden University, pointed out a parallel and complex development of Neoplatonic sun cult in India and Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries, which cannot be proven to have a mutual influence, but a common source. Corinne Lefèvre, FNCSR Paris, ventured a partially hypothetical connection between the presentation of the Mughal emperor in the Jharoka and the British monarch on the balcony of Buckingham Palace, in which the British royal family continued an originally Hindu and later Muslim tradition under the Great Mughals. It is well known that the art and culture of the Mughal Empire was not only taken up by the British royal family, but also reflected in other parts of Europe. Elfriede Iby, Schönbrunn Palace, Vienna, focused her attention on the collages of Indian miniatures in the Millions Room at Schönbrunn Palace and the question of the actual motive for this unusual, unique decoration of the room. She suspects that behind the representative splendour and contemporary fashion taste of chinoiserie is a very personal motive of Empress Theresa: based on the assumption that the collages were put together by family members, the Million Room served her as a memento of happy days with the Royal family which had lost many members in the 1760s and 70s.

With this intimate insight into Vienna's history, which was then directly linked to the history of the Mughal Empire, we concluded our symposium in honour of Professor Ebba Koch, who, no matter how far and how long she traveled, always returned to Vienna, where she passed her fascination for Mughal art on to many students, including us former doctoral students. She inspired her students with her innovative research approaches. It was a great honour for us to organize this conference in cooperation with the Institute of Iranian Studies to recognize her extraordinary life's work. We thank Ebba for the stimulating enthusiasm, astute and critical analysis, and the friendship that she offered to each of us. We would like to thank all the guest speakers who came from near and far, who have known and appreciated Ebba for many years, some decades, and who made this symposium a lively and stimulating event at which new and groundbreaking positions in the study of Mughal culture were presented and discussed. We would like to thank the audience for their interest and active participation in the discussions. And we would especially like to thank the generous sponsors, without whom the symposium could not have taken place: the Austrian Academy of Sciences, the Cultural Department of the City of Vienna, Schönbrunn Palace and the Austria Pakistan Society. Our special thanks go to Bettina Hofleitner and Nurdan Sentűrk, employees of the Institute of Iranian Studies at the OeAW, for their excellent and most professional collaboration.

Below you will find the summaries of the individual papers in the order in which they were presented during the symposium. They are intended to serve as a reminder to those who took part and to give those who could not be there an overview of the content and the variety of topics.

The organizing committee: Christiane Kalantari, OeAW Vienna; Simone Wille, University of Innsbruck; Corinna Forberg, formerly of the University of Göttingen; Christine Bruckbauer, Vienna

Early Indian Photography and the Complex Legacy of the Mughal Empire
Partha Mitter | Sussex University

Architectural forms and identities: the case of Malabar mosques
Sara Mondini | Ghent University

Conserving Mughal Monuments of Nizamuddin
Ratish Nanda | Aga Khan Trust for Culture

Introduction to the Exhibition: Field and Archive or Field as Archive
Ebba Koch | University of Vienna
Richard Barraud | New Delhi

Insha in the reign of Jahangir: the development of epistolary style under Jahangir
Stephan Popp | University of Vienna

From Capital to Capital: Shah Jahan on the Move through the European Lens (1638, 1648)
Jorge Flores | University of Lisbon

Only Connect: Neoplatonic Sun Worship in India and Europe
Jos Gommans | Leiden University

The king at the window: origins and circulations of a visual topos of Mughal majestas
Corinne Lefèvre | CNRS Paris

A new interior in memoriam – the so-called Millions Room of Schönbrunn Palace
Elfriede Iby | Schönbrunn Palace

Final Remarks: an excerpt
Ebba Koch | University of Vienna