Yoga: The Art of Transformation

an exhibition at the Freer and Sackler Galleries, Washington, D.C., October 19, 2013January 26, 2014; the Asian Art Museum, San Francisco, February 22May 18, 2014; and the Cleveland Museum of Art, June 22September 7, 2014

Catalog of the exhibition edited by Debra Diamond Freer Gallery of Art/Arthur M. Sackler Gallery/Smithsonian Books, 328 pp., $55.00

by James Mallinson

Routledge, 299 pp., $49.95 (paper)

by David Gordon White

University of Chicago Press, 352 pp., $29.00 (paper)

by William R. Pinch

Cambridge University Press, 280 pp., $36.99 (paper)

Around 1600, a dramatic shift took place in Mughal art. The Mughal emperors of India were the most powerful monarchs of their dayat the beginning of the seventeenth century, they ruled over a hundred million subjects, five times the number administered by their only rivals, the Ottomans. Much of the painting that took place in the ateliers of the first Mughal emperors was effectively dynastic propaganda, and gloried in the Mughals pomp and prestige. Illustrated copies were produced of the diaries of Babur, the conqueror who first brought the Muslim dynasty of the Mughal emperors to India in 1526, as well as exquisite paintings illustrating every significant episode in the biography of his grandson, Akbar.

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Under the Spell of Yoga