Deccan art's syncretic touch

Navinda Hajat Haidar is the curator and the guiding force behind New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art’s, better known as the Met, newly renovated Islamic art wing. Previously known as the Islamic Art galleries, the new galleries opened to the public 10 years after the 9/11 attacks to wide public approval. An Oxford-educated art historian, 48-year-old Haidar was in Delhi, taking part in a symposium on the arts of the Deccan, organised by the Aesthetics Project, that dovetailed into an exhibition currently being held at the National Museum. She spoke to Mannika Chopra on Islam’s rich and diverse cultural heritage.

What was your role in transforming the Met’s Islamic galleries and was there a political message in their opening on the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks?
The refurbishing of the Islamic gallery was a 10-year project that involved many people and many departments. I want to stress that such a huge project is a galaxy of many ideas and many approaches, which I had the privilege of synthesising and bringing to bear.
The Islamic wing was last renovated in 1975. In 2003, two years after the September attacks, we took those galleries down and we ended up opening the reinstallation on the tenth anniversary of 9/11 in November 2011. We were doing this work in the politically charged atmosphere of New York. Having said that, the new gallery was at its heart, despite any political context of the moment, an academic and scholarly art historical project.
The political dimension really came up after the concept was outlined; when we had to figure out the selection of the works and their spaces. We had to face up to the fact that a person who opens a newspaper today, wherever they are in the world, and reads something about terror, immediately associates it with the traditions of Islam. But the wonderful surprise was that we found that people are so tired with this point of view that if they got a chance to approach the Islamic world through achievement, through brilliance, through artistic expression of the highest order, they were so grateful.
We have had more than three million visitors to our galleries and, I feel, a lot of them changed [their views]. The fact is the new gallery was a healing touch for everybody.

Was renaming the galleries a part of the healing touch or was it a logical consideration?
It was a bit of both. The earlier gallery was called Islamic Art. It was called that at a time when the idea of Islamic Art was confined to the Islamic lands in the Middle East, the Arab world, Iran, Turkey and some parts of North India. They really didn’t take into account the traditions of South East Asia, parts of Africa, and most of Sub-Saharan Africa. If you go to the modern period you have to see Islam as a global expression; the old definition of Islamic art didn’t seem adequate for a new globalised world.
So we turned the word Islamic Art into a very wordy ‘Art of the Arab Lands, Turkey, Iran, Central Asia and later South Asia’— we got hell for it—but it was an accurate geographical description. There is a unity and diversity of Islam. You can say in the old model they stressed the unity, in the new model they are stressing the diversity. A monolith called Islam is not what the world needs right now. It’s inaccurate; it creates a sense of otherness. What we wanted to do is ask a fundamental question: is Islamic art the heritage of the Islamic world or is it the heritage of the world?
I have seen the power of art to bring people together. On one given day, I had to take Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu in the morning and the former President of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in the afternoon around the Islamic galleries and both left with smiles on their faces!

The Met is organising a major exhibition on the Deccan.
Yes, we are holding a major exhibition from April 20 to July 26, 2015 called the ‘Sultans of Deccan’s India: Opulence and Fantasy’. We are sourcing about 70 lenders globally and are borrowing numerous objects from India. One of the highlights will be some miniatures from a famous Iranian artist, Farooq Hussain. The reason he came to the Deccan, as so many Iranians did in the 17th century, was because there were great cultural links between these two countries at the time and Indian courts were very receptive to the best artists of the time. He produced works in the Deccan which are unlike Safavid art or Mughal art.

We will show three incredible masterpieces by Farooq: one is from the Welsh collection in America. The other is in Prague which shows Ibrahim Adil Shah playing his favourite instrument. This miniature has never been to America. From that painting we understood, that Ibrahim was probably left-handed. A Sultan playing an instrument is a very rare sight and playing it with the 'wrong' hand, besides singing about a Hindu Goddess, Saraswati, is a very big deal. The third painting is a small picture of a horse

And the objects from India?
Well there are the six pages of the Kitab-i-Nauras (Nine Rasas, a treatise on music written by Ibrahim Adil Shah II). Unfortunately, you can’t see them very well. It’s hard to light them up. But these are very important pages. Then there are the Deccani copies of the Ajaib–al- Makluqat (Book of the Wonders of the World).
There will be two works by someone who is just known as the ‘Bikaner painter.’which show Ibrahim Adil Shah as a very young king, just before Farooq Hussain saw him. He has a completely Indic approach to the body. Ibrahim is a monument of a man but here he is moving about, he has rosy cheeks, he has a wispy beard at a young age: indeed, the ‘Bikaner painter’ is showing us the promise of what is going to come.

What do you think of the quality of museums in India?
It’s a very exciting moment because there is a thirst for knowledge here. Museums, in India, want scholarly, knowledgeable people. Art is damaged in Indian museums all the time and they are not generally very cheerful places but I feel that this is changing. And you have amazing people like Dr Venu Vasudevan (Director-General, National Museum) who are bringing about that change and they are doing it in a proper way.
This Deccan exhibition, currently on in the National Museum, is a step in the right direction. You have a collaboration with the excellent Aesthetics Project and a respectable university (Jawaharlal Nehru University). It’s a wonderful start.

Are small museums, private collections the answer?
It’s great that they're happening. But the answer lies in dialogue. Because you don’t want two separate thoughts — that the private museums are amazing and the public ones are terrible. The public museums are where the great treasures lie. We want to foster partnerships between them and partnerships where the government of India is in a good, solid position. It can’t be that the partner takes over and the government is weakened in the whole process.