Two shows that further our love of India

‘Killing Game’ (2002) and ‘The Greatest’ (2002) by The Singh Twins

London’s galleries have been caught up in a love affair with Indian art for the past year. First came the British Museum’s Garden and Cosmos: The Royal Paintings of Jodhpur, then the V&A’s Maharaja, followed by the Saatchi Gallery’s contemporary Indian art The Empire Strikes Back and the Whitechapel’s photography from the subcontinent, Where Three Dreams Cross – not to mention excellent exhibitions at independent galleries. And now a cracking pair of new shows at the National Portrait Gallery. India-fatigue? Not me. There’s such a range, in all this richness, that more is definitely more.

The Indian Portrait is a deceptively simple title for an exhibition. Our western eye is so attuned to the notion of a recognisable likeness, of an individual whose name we can know, that it seems straightforward. But as the idea of such a portrait – which came to India through influences from Persia and Europe – meets a tradition of highly stylised and idealised art, in which the portrait plays a range of other roles, the way we “read” the picture is going to be different.

Take the very oddest example in this show. It is a likeness of 18th-century Mughal emperor Muhammad Shah making love, a compliant anonymous beauty lying beneath him, his sword, jewels and hookah carefully placed on the floor beside the bed. But there is nothing erotic about this formalised scene. Rich, patterned hangings and carpets neatly surround a terrace in a lush garden, but there is no attempt at privacy or intimacy; two female servants stand by, rigid as statues. It is almost like any courtly Indian scenes – except that the emperor’s manly attributes are on display, in the very centre of the picture, and visibly in excellent working order.

This is nothing to do with sex: it is a display of power and virility, his prowess in bed an echo of his prowess in war (the sword) and in business (the jewels). It’s an Indian version of the European “swagger portrait”, in which western noblemen showed off their finery, slender fingers and elaborate hairdos, with their houses, horses and broad acres behind them.

Elsewhere in this fascinating show, things are more relaxed. Starting with the Mughal emperor Akbar, at the time of Elizabeth I of England, the portrait-as-likeness became established when Akbar commissioned a set of paintings of all his many courtiers. Although the poses are in the formal mode, the faces are recognisable; he wanted to know them, and so can we. Artists from Persia trained the Hindustanis in this new tradition, and Akbar was also fascinated by the European traditions he encountered in his military campaigns – interested enough, indeed, in Christianity to invite a Jesuit mission from Goa to the court; the lifelike images they brought with them had a startling impact.

From this date, and as the show progresses through its 300-year compass (1560-1860), an emotional humanity illuminates even the most formally arranged portraits. Along with the princely images the curators have made sure to include a falconer and a musician, a skinny Jain ascetic and a tubby African eunuch, a grizzled scribe hunched over his writing, his scrunched, worn face bringing to mind Dutch genre pictures of the time.

‘John Wombwell smoking a hookah’ (c1785)

The fascinating collision of traditions continues, a pick’n’mix that produces such unexpected images as the one the curators claim as the largest known Mughal portrait, “Jahangir holding a globe”. In this 1617 watercolour on cloth, Jahangir (Akbar’s grandson) is shown life-size, still in traditional profile with traditional halo, but seated western-style on a chair with a half-turned, realistic body. And this very big picture must have been intended as a framed image to be hung on a wall, in the foreign manner – most works here, on paper and no bigger than the page of a book, were made to be bound in volumes or shown as folios.

By the late 18th and 19th centuries, Indian artists began to be commissioned by European incomers and to create works adapted to please western tastes – the so-called Company school of painting. Some were intended to record what was happening and to be sent home, which was essential in a pre-photographic era. There is a touch of Orientalism too, as shown in a group portrait of the bare-chested, armed and turbaned men recruited to join Skinner’s Horse, an irregular cavalry regiment in the service of the East India Company.

Meanwhile Lady Impey, a society figure in 1780s Calcutta, is portrayed “supervising her household”, seated (on a low stool, in profile with turban-like head-dress) in her grand drawing room surrounded by her Indian servants at their tasks – the tailors sewing, the musician with his pipe. William Fullerton and John Wombwell, however, both Company men, had themselves painted with Indian accoutrements, Indian servants splendidly clad, and hookahs at the ready.

Another such east-west mélange is a real rarity: the portrait of a lady, an Indian Mona Lisa with her face to the world and a don’t-mess-with-me expression. Again it is watercolour and gold on cloth, again of European proportions, and shows Sahib Jan, the mistress of Nawab Shamsher Badahur. Made in 1809, it shows a growing European influence; its sitter looks straight out at us, luxuriously clad and bejewelled, her hookah pipe halfway to her lips, cool and proud, a powerful figure. Yet even so this probably could not have been painted if Sahib Jan had been a wife rather than a consort – almost all portraits of women were confined to servants or dancers. One 19th-century group here depicts flashily dressed young courtesans relaxing with their older female attendant. It is a sophisticated work, with its naturalistic poses, its restrained use of the traditional paraphernalia – an image that shows how far the real and the ideal (here, of female beauty), the natural and the stylised, had by this date become skilfully entwined.

Portrait of Sahib Jan (c1809) by Uday Ram

A treasure-trove of a show, and one that repays careful looking. So why, with all these exhibitions pulling in the crowds, do the British have such a taste for Indian art? The obvious answer is the fascination with the colonial past that all ex-colonisers have. Beyond that, we seem to scan these images for echoes, traces of ourselves, and are happy when we find them. Perhaps they didn’t hate us after all? Perhaps the enduring legacy of that time was a rich one? And perhaps this world is knowable, perhaps we can learn to read it, and the people who made it, and live well together in our own times.

Downstairs in the NPG, we can indulge all these questions, and more. A pair of contemporary sister artists, whose work is devoted to exploring the meeting of cultures in the modern world, gives a whole new spin on the traditional work we’ve just seen. The Singh twins, British-born, in their mid-forties, tiny and disturbingly identical, create highly detailed paintings that play with the conventions of Indian miniatures. As in “The Killing Game”, its composition a close copy of a famous image but its content thoroughly reworked, the paintings are crawling with brilliant and witty detail, upfront with their message, occasionally almost cartoon-like.

Their theme, most often, is the painful rub of empty but alluring commercialism against the richness and human comfort of tradition and family. A teeming family barbecue in their Liverpool garden celebrates togetherness, while the industrial skyline looms bleakly beyond. An allegory of modern fame called “The Greatest” (2002) shows a gleaming and muscled Mohammed Ali as an archer, bow drawn, poised in formal profile on a globe while cupids rain blessings on him from above. We are oddly close to pop art here. Yet we are also very close to the Mughal tradition; upstairs in The Indian Portrait a 1625 image of “Jahangir triumphing over poverty” shows the emperor in the classic royal pose – as an archer, bow drawn, in profile ...

Not surprisingly, the Singhs’ modern miniaturism is easier for us to read. In our age of icons, we know the shorthand by heart. All it needs is for the Singh sisters to place a tiny discarded Barbie doll at the feet of a little girl dressed in shalwar kameez, and we can save ourselves hundreds of words about gender stereotyping and the collision of cultural norms; in the older pieces, most of us do not immediately know that a leopard-skin as a seat or a shawl indicates a holy man.

Here, a picture of Marilyn Monroe pouts above the sisters’ bedroom in “Les Girls” (1993), but a Byzantine madonna stares out at us too. The Beckham family ascends heavenwards on a sort of swing-throne (more angels, more blessings) in “From Zero to Hero” (2002), and in “Thwarted Love” a young couple in Shakespearean dress echo the classic Indian lovers in their bower, while film posters, crashed cars and empty bottles orchestrate the theme.

There is a risk of feeling a little chastised by the Singhs’ work, but it is witty and light enough not to be preachy. And complex enough, too; perhaps the ultimate image of cultural crossover is that of the twins’ father, splendidly moustached, at the head of his table and surrounded by his variously sari’d, turbaned and denim’d family, carving the Christmas turkey.

‘The Indian Portrait 1560-1860’ and ‘Contemporary Connections: The Singh Twins’, National Portrait Gallery, London, until June 20, www.npg.org.uk