Navigating Paradigms of Chastity and Sensuality in the Mughal Court, by Saleema Waraich

This presentation explores how female representations encountered in Western prints, Persian painting, and South Asian sculpture were re-contextualized in Mughal environments of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries and re-imagined in Mughal paintings. Mughal patrons and artists negotiated elements from these bodies of visual material as they explored possibilities for fashioning Mughal models of female chastity and sensuality in service of the court. In addition to adapting various stylistic techniques and symbols, this process involved locating synergies between Islamic, Timurid/Mughal, Hindu, South Asian, Christian, and European beliefs and practices. In this way, Mughal artists and their patrons cultivated links and located points of convergence between a variety of belief systems and cultures