The Central Indian manuscript, The Book of Delights, is a cookbook written in Persian and Urdu and illustrated in the South Asian Sultanate miniature painting tradition. In the manuscript—also known as the Ni‘matnāma—African, Arab, Turkic, and Central Asian women dutifully serve and surround the bon viveur Ghiyath Shah of Malwa. During his reign, 1469-1500 CE, Sultan Ghiyath commissioned the cookbook in Shadiabad, his City of Joy. The manuscript includes detailed cookware, flora, and pastel- vibrant illustrations that border the Sultan. Demure and dutiful attendants, frozen in time, skillfully prepare spice laden foods, medicinals, attars and aphrodisiacs. At the behest of the Sultan, the women also hunt, fish, and engage in culinary, philosophical and religious debates.
The illustrated cookbook demands a reimagination, and a new playful visual critical fabulation. Food historians focus on the recipes of rich savories, medicinal remedies, perfumes, and hunting practices with slight notice—if any—to those in the background, who harvested, hunted, prepared, cooked, and served in infinite ways. The ordinary women’s lives depicted remain unexplored. Originally painted with a range of skin colors, the women-identified individuals worked, created, served, and most likely serviced the Shah. Yet from where, in that vast Central Indian and Indian Ocean World, did they come? What were their names and nuanced narratives? Did they consider the work a delight? Did they define the city as joyous?
In this second iteration, femmes untethered thaw from their frozen stances. The eighteen, now, fully frontal femmes armed with WMD—rolling pins, knives, swords, a German Lugar, rulers, spoons, spears, wine glasses, fire and blow torches—arise patterned and bejeweled. Conjured from the wakes in the ocean, the primordial expanse and the galactic star formations, they emerge unbound with the right to narrate their own stories. They array into an untethered ancient talismanic formation and in some instances surrounded with a geometric pattern and/or a recurring map of the world from the 12th Century. Named and free from service to the Sultan, they materialize from the fertile firmament. Adorned with words, patterns and shapes that confer magical blessings, they rejoice in radically boundless ways. Invoked into the past, their bright futures are guaranteed to sparkle.
(Marked Prices are for unframed works)
