Looking at Persianate Subalternity Through the Lens of Painting

A look at painting for the purpose of recovering the lost voices of the subalterns in Persianate societies from the thirteenth-century to the Modern period will lead, not to the recovery of any loss, but to the rediscovery of the most ‘visible-vocal’ faces in this visual material, namely the subalterns’ faces. To clarify the terminology, in the pictorial domain the term ‘subalterns’ stands for the represented individuals of all social ranks united except for the ruler, its relatives and the nobility that form the opposite iconographic category of ‘royalty’. The latter is obviously dominated by the king's figure, while subalternity appears in the multiform of not only the royal entourage of courtiers, army officers, clerics, administrators, etc., but also of the court's servants, artists, domestics workers of all kinds, in sum the commoners.

At no time in the history of Persianate painting did the subalterns ever lose their voice. Always conspicuously visible in the iconography, they served as the primary site of pictorial experiment with human representation. In the highly stylized and otherworldly framework of Persian painting, namely the common lore of the diverse Persianate pictorial schools, the subalterns actually constitute the most ‘vocal’ presence in the sense that they consistently present the most tangible and palpable figures, by contrast with the ethereal archetypal princely figuration. (Fig. 1) These qualities of tangibility and palpability of subaltern imagery are the product of a form of individualisation of the figures, and of an intent to vary their facial expression so as to reflect in a certain manner the natural versatility of the human body and mind.

This dichotomic plastic treatment of subaltern and royal iconography began to be challenged with the emergence of the quasi-physiognomic and full-fledged physiognomic princely portrait in the early Modern period. (Fig. 2) However, in this period, this novelty whereby the topoi of subalterny and royalty entered into a kind of aesthetic competition, only concerns Mughal and Ottoman art. It is only at the end of Shah ‘Abbas I's reign that the Safavids slowly began to depict the physical appearances of the sovereign. Until then, they applied the concept of natural imitation only to subaltern imagery, thus maintaining for some time, in Modern Iran, the pre-Modern partitioned figurative order.