A traveler persuades Lorik to return home (top); Chanda objects (bottom), from a Chandayana (Story of Chanda) (c. 1540): Art, History and Details

A traveler persuades Lorik to return home (top); Chanda objects (bottom), from a Chandayana (Story of Chanda) (c. 1540) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

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

Chanda is the heroine of a Sufi romance. The Sufis are a mystical branch of Islam whose followers cultivate love for the divine. This painting is from a dispersed manuscript of the Chandayana painted in a style that was an important source for Mughal painting. Its artists integrated Persian colors and delicate vine motifs with figures presented in profile, within flat, compartmentalized registers, which are horizontal divisions of space. The drama of their interactions is conveyed by means of animated gestures.

Object facts

• Title: A traveler persuades Lorik to return home (top); Chanda objects (bottom), from a Chandayana (Story of Chanda)
• Date: c. 1540
• Culture: Sultanate India
• Type: Painting
• Technique: gum tempera, ink, and gold on paper
• Dimensions: Image: 19.7 x 14 cm (7 3/4 x 5 1/2 in.); Overall: 25.5 x 20 cm (10 1/16 x 7 7/8 in.)
• Collection: Indian Art
• Department: Indian and Southeast Asian Art
• Accession number: 1981.55

Collection credit

Gift of D. J. R. Ushikubo, The John Huntington Art and Polytechnic Trust, and Bequest of James Parmelee by exchange

Further reading listed by the museum

• Lee, Sherman E. “The Year in Review for 1981.” The Bulletin of the Cleveland Museum of Art 69, no. 2 (February 1982): 39–82.
• Leach, Linda York. Indian Miniature Paintings and Drawings. Cleveland, OH: Cleveland Museum of Art in cooperation with Indiana University Press, 1986.
• Rice, Yael. The Brush of Insight: Artists and Agency at the Mughal Court. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2023.

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.