It is a great pleasure to preface this volume of Yves Porter’s Yarshater Lectures, which reflect decades of pioneering scholarship on the arts of Iran and South Asia. Porter is one of few scholars to move easily between these worlds. It may be surprising, therefore, to see that he explicitly rejects the rubric of the “Persianate” under which the arts of both regions are often grouped, but this eschewal reflects an admirable skepticism about monolithic categories that permeates all four essays in this volume. Indeed, one of the most original contributions of the four essays is their insistence on the need to pay attention to regional conditions and traditions.
The essays offer a range of original observations concerning the arts of the book, ceramics and architectural ornament across a geography stretching from Fars to Bengal. They are peppered with reflections on historiographic anomalies, methodological peculiarities, and the gaps in the material archives that shape our capacity to reconstruct historical, social, and technical processes. The appendices, which range from a record of Persian poetry on ceramics to a comprehensive catalog of glazed ceramics documented in India’s Archaeological Surveys, are a contribution in their own right.
The commitment to empirical research as the foundation of technical and theoretical insights is a cornerstone of Porter’s methodology. This ranges easily between micro- and macro-aspects of art making, whether considering the economics of artistic production, manuscript production as a total process, the socio-cultural connotations of Kashan luster tiles, or the aesthetic valences of glazed tiles in the sultanate architecture of the subcontinent.
Along the way, we are treated to novel observations regarding a wide range of canonical and non-canonical topics. In Chapter 1, these include the kitābkhāna as network vs. place, the role of geometry in creating harmonious manuscript layouts, the ways in which artisans may have deployed embodied knowledge of mathematical principles without knowledge of their theoretical underpinnings. Chapter 2 extends the discussion beyond manuscript production, considering figurative and textual narrative allusions on Kashan wares. The discussion inverts the privilege often afforded canonical texts, speculating on the ways in which non-canonical or non-textual variants of known tales drawn from the Shāh-nāma and other epics may have coincided in the creation of visual palimpsests, products of multiple narrative strata coinciding in the space of a single image. Additional asides on intermedial connections between narrative luster tiles from Kashan, wall-painting and textiles offer suggestive directions for future research.
Chapter 3 presents us with a highly original analysis of the reuse of luster tiles following the Mongol conquest of Iran. Beyond the obvious interest for a moment in which questions of reuse and spoliation loom large in art historical studies of many sorts, the chapter tackles the likely relationship between the use of figurative luster tiles in palatial architecture and their reuse in mosques and shrines. Against a contemporary tendency to emphasize the transregional circulation of commodities, a particular insight of the chapter is its suggestion that the rather limited circulation of Kashan luster tiles (despite a few outliers found in East Africa and elsewhere) may reflect the fact that their value was constituted not in general economic terms (as luxury goods) but by the specificity of their sociocultural connotations in Ilkhanid Iran.
The final chapter considers questions of rarity and value from another angle, moving us from Ilkhanid Iran to the sultanates of north India. Analyzing the remarkably scattered evidence for the production and use of glazed tilework in the sultanates of three distinct regions – Delhi, Malwa, and Bengal – the chapter offers the first comprehensive survey of an ornamental medium often seen as a hallmark of Islamic architecture in general but used selectively in the subcontinent and with considerable regional variations.
In keeping with the iconoclastic tone of all the essays, which tilt at established orthodoxies even as they propose new ways of looking, this final essay is replete with challenges to scholarly shibboleths. Seen through Porter’s eyes, the architecture of the Lodi period (1451–1526), so under-researched that it rarely merits more than a passing mention in surveys of Sultanate architecture, emerges, for example, as the apogee of architectural tilework in India.
Similarly, a priori assumptions that glazed tile technology was an import to north India from Iran fall by the wayside. Paying close attention to questions of fabric and technique, Porter demonstrates the lack of material evidence for the eastward diffusion of Iranian tile technology. Challenging diffusionist stories of transmission, with their implied hierarchies and unidirectional flows, the chapter marshals the evidence for local production of glazed ceramics. Raising the possibility of a palimpsest technology forged from the meeting of local and trans local ceramic traditions, Porter signals the likely existence of inter-regional aesthetic and technological connections; between the tilework of Mandu in central India and Bidar, capital of the Bahmanid sultans of the Deccan region of the south, for example. Similarly, rather than linking the (rather sparing and selective) use of glazed tilework in the sultanate monuments of Bengal to Iran and Central Asia, we are invited to look east to Burma as a potential source of inspiration.
Such a sensitive reading of the material evidence is, perhaps, to be expected from a scholar whose knowledge of ceramics is more than theoretical, informed as it is by practical experience of the highs and lows of the ceramicist’s craft.
The cumulative force of these engaging and provocative essays is to compel a rethink of much of what we imagined we knew. Which is surely the aim of the very best of scholarship in any field.
Finbarr Barry Flood