A night scene of Shiva puja (recto); Calligraphy (verso) (c. 1760–70): Art, History and Details

A night scene of Shiva puja (recto); Calligraphy (verso) (c. 1760–70) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Muhammad Rizavi Hindi (Indian, active mid-1700s); Ahmad al-Husaini.

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

Under golden stars and a crescent moon, a royal woman offers a flower garland at an open-air shrine to the Hindu god Shiva. Installed on a platform under a sapling, the stone linga believed to contain Shiva’s presence bears the bright orange traces of devotional anointments. Orange kumkum (red turmeric powder) and yellow saffron are in tiny trays before her, and she has used them to mark her forehead with the signs of her piety. The small brass ewer would contain purified water to bathe the linga. On the platform are offerings of fragrant blossoms and the light of clarified butter lamps.

Object facts

• Title: A night scene of Shiva puja (recto); Calligraphy (verso)
• Date: c. 1760–70
• Creator attribution: Muhammad Rizavi Hindi (Indian, active mid-1700s); Ahmad al-Husaini
• Culture: Mughal India, Lucknow
• Type: Painting
• Technique: Gum tempera and gold on paper
• Dimensions: Page: 28.2 x 24.1 cm (11 1/8 x 9 1/2 in.)
• Collection: Indian Art - Mughal
• Department: Indian and Southeast Asian Art
• Accession number: 2013.350

A detail from the museum

The linga is a stylized phallic symbol denoting the creative capacities of Shiva.

Collection credit

Gift in honor of Madeline Neves Clapp; Gift of Mrs. Henry White Cannon by exchange; Bequest of Louise T. Cooper; Leonard C. Hanna Jr. Fund; From the Catherine and Ralph Benkaim Collection

Further reading listed by the museum

• Mace, Sonya Rhie, Mohsen Ashtiany, Catherine Glynn, Pedro Moura Carvalho, Marcus Fraser, and Ruby Lal. Mughal Paintings: Art and Stories: the Cleveland Museum of Art. London: D Giles Limited, 2016.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.