Mughal art comes alive at Kabul exhibition
kabul — An exhibition that reproduces the precious treasures of Mughal art in their original setting in Kabul’s Babur Garden opened this weekend, bringing a rare moment of cultural relief to a city pounded by war for decades.
“King Babur’s Kabul: Cradle of the Mughal Empire” displays a selection of high quality reproductions of some of the masterpieces of the Timurid and Mughal periods from the mid-16th century, one of Central Asia’s richest cultural eras.
Using state-of-the-art printing techniques, dozens of miniatures have been reproduced on metal and put on display, showing a fabled world of poets, rulers, hunters and scenes of court life and making clear the considerable interplay that existed between European and Mughal art had an opportunity to see them,” said Thomas Barfield, President of the American Institute of Afghan Studies, which oversaw the organization of the exhibition.
“People may remember poetry but they cannot see the art.”
It follows a similar exhibition in December held in the historic citadel of the western Afghan city of Herat, at one time the seat of the powerful Timurid dynasty .
At the Kabul exhibition’s launch on Saturday, Michael Barry, a world authority on Afghan art and culture who curated the exhibition reminisced about a visit he made to the city at the height of the brutal 1990s civil war.
The Bagh-e Babur or Babur’s Garden, one of the oldest surviving Mughal gardens, was named after the first emperor of the Mughal dynasty, which came to rule over much of India in the following three centuries.
Babur loved Kabul and was buried in the garden which he ordered to be created after he conquered the city in 1504. It was largely destroyed in the 1990s but was restored with the help of the Agha Khan Foundation in 2008.
The garden remains a popular picnic spot with Kabul families but the artistic riches of the Mughal court have disappeared from the city, with not a single original painting from the period known to be left in Afghanistan.—