Writer William Dalrymple is a sort of honorary Hyderabadi. He knows the city well, and has written about it with great feeling. In fact, his most famous work, The White Mughals, was based on a romantic little episode of Hyderabadi history.



Dalrymple is outspoken about the sorry state that Hyderabad’s great cultural heritage has fallen into: its historic architecture is crumbling (if not being actively torn down), and its art treasures are falling to pieces, through a lethal combination of carelessness and callousness. As Dalrymple pointed out on a recent visit, it’s tragic that while cities like Jaipur and Jodhpur have done such a great job of conserving their heritage, in Hyderabad – which had so much more to offer – nobody really gives a damn.



But, ironically, halfway across the globe somebody evidently does give a damn:



In New York, this is going to be the summer of the art treasures of the Deccan. The Metropolitan Museum is hosting an exhibition titled, Sultans of Deccan Indian: Opulence and Fantasy, which is going to be the big cultural event of New York between now and August.



Pre-eminence of Golconda



I first heard about it three years ago when one of the exhibition’s curators, Marika Sardar, was in Hyderabad on a research trip. The exhibition finally opened a couple of days ago: a showing of rare miniature paintings, calligraphy, textiles, jewels, metal work and stone carvings from the Deccan – about 200 items in all – created during the golden age between 1500 and 1700, when the patronage of the local kings attracted some of the finest artists, craftsmen, poets and musicians, not only from India, but from as far away as Persia, Turkey and Ethiopia, thereby creating a unique Indo-Islamic fusion of art, literature and music.



While the exhibition includes art from Bijapur, Ahmednagar, Bidar and Berar, the majority of it comes from Golconda – which reflects the position that the region held in the world of medieval Indian art.



Some of the great Golconda treasures on display are its legendary kalamkari textiles, some of them almost 10 feet in height, which originated as the backdrops for the recitation of temple narratives, and acquired an artistic life of their own through the genius of the qalam-kars – literally pen wielders – who took them to a whole new level, by infusing into them a profusion of intricate details, rendered in rich, glowing colours.



But if the kalamkaris on show are huge in scale, many of the other treasures are miniature. The exhibition begins, for example with a display of Golconda diamonds, including the Shah Jehan diamond, which we’re told the emperor wore as a taviz tied around his left arm – a small human touch that suddenly brings the stone to life. (Trivia byte: Golconda was not merely the fort, as many people assume; it was the name of the entire kingdom, which stretched all the way to Odisha. So when one talks of ‘the great diamond mines of Golconda’, one must realise that they were located on the Coromandel coast, 350 miles away.)



To enable visitors to luxuriate in the details of the miniature treasures, the museum is handing out magnifying glasses. One of the highlights of the exhibition, worth dwelling upon, is a delightful example of medieval magical realism: a painting of a luminous scarlet parrot in a mango tree, gorging on a mango, while a ram is tied to the tree trunk below – except that the artist has playfully, magically, made the parrot almost double the size of the ram.



Celebration or artists



However, perhaps the single most telling item on display is a painting, titled “Portrait of a Ruler or Musician”, depicting a man, probably from Golconda, seated by a veena, enjoying a paan, and being fanned by his attendants.



So is he a ruler? Or is he a musician? Nobody knows for sure. The painting thus gives us an insight into the cultural milieu that made all these art treasures possible: a milieu in which the arts were so celebrated that you couldn’t tell a veena player from a king.



The treasures on display have come from collections in India and around the world, and this is apparently the first time that such a collection has been put together. Also, it may well be the last time, especially considering the degree of difficulty involved: the curators of the exhibition have worked on the project for about three years, going to remarkable lengths to make it happen. To cite just one example, they managed to reunite the eight metal finials of a palanquin that belonged to a Hyderabadi nawab in the 1920s, but had been dismantled and disposed of, piece by piece. The curators retrieved these eight finials from five different collections in New York and London!



The curators had a hard time persuading some of the owners of the treasures to lend them for the exhibition; the hardest, sadly, was with museums in India, some of whom offered the ironic excuse that their treasures might get spoiled during the course of the Met exhibition.



The Opulence and Fantasy exhibition has just opened to rave reviews in the US. Meanwhile, in Hyderabad, the original home of many of the treasures, delicately wrought palaces have been rudely turned into grungy government offices; fabulous miniature paintings in the museum are getting oxidized beyond redemption; and ancient crafts like nirmal, bidri and himroo have become virtually extinct.



William Dalrymple was right. Nobody here really gives a damn.



