Radha and Krishna Dressed in Each Others Clothes. Kangra, Himachal Pradesh. C.1800-1825. Credit: Los Angeles County Museum of ArtAfloatIn a classic Piloo thumri, ‘Ji na maaro pichkari’ (do not shoot colours at me), the inimitable Siddheshwari Devi, laments the affliction caused by colours- ‘rang ki chot lagat hai’. Siddheshwari, in singing this phrase, musically embodies the wound. The feather-light and ephemeral tactility of the traditional colours, both in the form of dry powder and dyed water, is invoked through synaesthetic imagery. This tactility alludes to the pain of love in treating the colour as a metaphor. Yet another composition from Banaras plays with the spatial context of the colour play- ‘Kanhai mai ankhiyan hori machawe, ankhiyan mein anuraag arunayi’ (O mother, Krishna plays Holi in my eyes, my eyes redden in love).Also Read: Discovering Jashn-e-Chiraghan, the Mughal Festival of LightsThe eyes of the narrator then, become the theatre of Holi, the gaze turns inward and acquires a voice. The word ‘arunayi’, crudely translated as ‘reddening’, has its origin in arun or the rising sun, a sacred repository of masculine power. The use of ‘arunayi’, however, leaves an erotic aftertaste in this Hori thumri. In the literature of Holi, the visual titillates the tactile, encoded in vocal performances, creating a synaesthetic play of pain and pleasure. Jahangir Playing Holi. c. 1635 CE Folio from the Minto Album. Credit: Chester Beatty Library, DublinTouching the shore afarThe visual archive of Holi from the early modern period is rich in narrative styles. Paintings produced in the courts of the Mughals, Rajputs in Rajasthan and the Punjab Hills, the Deccan sultanates, and subsequently in the Company schools, image the festival of Holi in their immediate historical context and add new colours to it. One particular painting from the Minto album, now in the Chester Beatty Library, Dublin, depicts the Mughal emperor Jahangir playing Holi in the zenana. Painted in c. 1635 CE, the painting depicts the emperor being led by the ladies of the harem to the site of celebration, where we see singers and dancers, inebriated women drinking from wine flasks, smearing colours in intimate togetherness, in a homosocial space. The emperor is an exception in this celebratory homosociality, by the virtue of his “patrimonial” powers, as the ruler of the realm. This powerful ‘other’ is part of the festival of colours in the Mughal harem, the only man in the world of the feminine, much like Krishna in the cosmic love games played in Braj, or the Sheikh in a Sufi Khanqah, the lover amongst beloveds.Also Read: Onam, Mahabali and the Narrow Imaginations of the Right The Mughals have drawn from a range of sacred kingship traditions, including the Jharokha-i Darshan instituted by Akbar, building on Indic traditions of beholding the divine, and fusing it with the Solomonic ideal of just rulership in the architecture of the Jharokha (Koch: 2001). The Mughal cosmopolitanism comes out vibrantly in Jahangir’s paintings, where allegories from European texts brought by the Jesuits like the Royal Polyglot Bible and Achaemenid metaphors like the chain of justice figure with ease in an Islamicate setting. Art historian Ebba Koch notes that in a painting currently in the Museum für Islamische Kunst, Berlin, Jahangir had himself “represented as an Indian deity or ruler”, with a solar and lunar halo, scantily clad in a dhoti, seated in the lotus position. Jahangir seated with his wife Nur Jahan on a terrace. c.1620 Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Credit: Museum für Islamische Kunst / Georg NiedermeiserThe cultural memory of Jahangir’s cosmopolitanism was re-inscribed almost two centuries later, in a provincial painting from the Faizabad atelier in Awadh. Painted in c. 1800, it depicts the Mughal emperor playing Holi with the women of the zenana, this time the emperor smearing colours on the cheeks of a woman, in close embrace. Women of different skin tones, clad in different fabrics appear in different formations, as in the previous painting. They are seen loading their squirt guns or pichkaris from a pool or hauz of saffron and yellow water, what could have been a concoction of the tesu or palash (butea monosperma), flavoured with the intoxicating zafran from Jahangir’s Kashmir Jannat Nazir (Kashmir that is paradise like), a politico-literary imaginary explored by Anubhuti Maurya. The Emperor Jahangir Celebrating the Festival of Holi. c. 1800 CE. Faizabad, Awadh. Credit: National Gallery of AustraliaHoli paintings from the Mughal court, like many other transcultural expressions of the Mughal imagination, point to the nature of early modernity, the existence of multifarious identities, albeit not without confrontation and conflict but with a fluidity that is quite unimaginable today, despite constitutional provisions that mandate co-existence.Also Read: A Touch of Tradition and Nationalism in the Celebration of a Popular FestivalThe celebration of Holi has been integral to Islamicate North India since at least the 12-13th century, primarily in the hospices and tomb shrines of the Chishtiya silsila. With the onset of the spring, the courtyard of the dargah of Hazrat Nizamuddin Auliya (now a cult site of neo-orientalism), reverberates with compositions on Basant and Holi, many attributed to Amir Khusraw. Take, for instance, this verse from a traditional holi sung at the dargah:Khelo re chishti holi khelo, Khwaja Nizam ke Desh mein aayo,sheesh mukut haathan pichkaari, more aangan holi khelan aayo(O Chishti, play holi with abandon in the land of Nizamwith a crown on your head, and squirt gun in your hand,come to my courtyard to play)The Sufi aangan is a contact zone. Pilgrims from different religions seeking the barkat (blessing) of the Sheikh, merging into a community of hamdardi, across lines that determine their other disparate identities. The image of a Chishti playing Holi, crowned with a headgear and armed with a pichkari, and the emphasis on the metaphor of khel, brings to my mind the Holi played by the Pushti-margis, with their worldly, erotic-aesthetic practices in service of the divine, raging from darshan (beholding the lover/God, adoration) to shringar (toilette of the divine), which informs much of our imagination of Vaishnavism. In the early 1900s, the prima donna of Hindustani music, Gauhar Jaan,