Hansraj Joshi
A tiger hunt
Kotah, Rajasthan; dated 1777
Opaque watercolor and gold on paper
Cynthia Hazen Polsky Collection (2086-IP)
Prince Ishvari Singh hunting crocodile
Uniara or Southern Jaipur region, Rajasthan; mid-18th century
Opaque watercolor on paper
Max Polsky Collection (3090-IP)
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The Hunt
Hunting has always been the sport of kings as well as a substitute
or training for warfare. In the time of Akbar (1556–1605),
great hunts, sometimes lasting for days, were conducted on a grandiose
military scale. Contemporary paintings show that the bold and energetic
emperor participated in this carnage with gusto. Many kinds of hunting
were popular under the Mugal rulers, including hunting deer with
trained cheetahs. For the Hindu Rajputs, hunting (shikar) had an
even stronger ritualistic social importance. The coming of spring
was celebrated with a royal hunt for wild boar, which, if successful,
would be a good omen for the coming year. Game of every kind was
pursued by the Rajputs, but killing a tiger was a royal prerogative
seldom granted to others. Depictions of tiger hunts in dense forests
by eighteenth-century Kotah artists are among the most powerful
of Indian hunting pictures. The most detailed and comprehensive
shikar scenes were those of the Udaipur painters, who maintained
an almost continuous pictorial record of royal hunts, from the early
1700s until as late as the 1940s.
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