Kaiwan, Latif, and Sharif arrive at a house of worship, where they seek help from Khurshid who has become a mystical healer, from a Tuti-Nama (Tales of a Parrot): Thirty-second Night (c. 1560): Art, H

Kaiwan, Latif, and Sharif arrive at a house of worship, where they seek help from Khurshid who has become a mystical healer, from a Tuti-Nama (Tales of a Parrot): Thirty-second Night (c. 1560) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

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

Khurshid, kneeling on the right in the blue dress and orange cloak, has shaved her head and donned the robes of a holy man. A group of supplicants sit behind her. Below, the three men who wronged her seek cures for their ailments: Kaiwan holding a staff, has gone blind, Sharif has lost a hand to leprosy, and Latif has developed a palsy.

Object facts

• Title: Kaiwan, Latif, and Sharif arrive at a house of worship, where they seek help from Khurshid who has become a mystical healer, from a Tuti-Nama (Tales of a Parrot): Thirty-second Night
• Date: c. 1560
• Culture: Mughal India, court of Akbar (reigned 1556–1605)
• Type: Painting
• Technique: gum tempera, ink, and gold on paper
• Dimensions: Overall: 20.3 x 14 cm (8 x 5 1/2 in.); Painting only: 14.3 x 10.1 cm (5 5/8 x 4 in.)
• Collection: Indian Art
• Department: Indian and Southeast Asian Art
• Accession number: 1962.279.213.b

A detail from the museum

The planet Saturn, called Kaiwan, is often depicted in South Asian imagery with a staff.

Collection credit

Gift of Mrs. A. Dean Perry

Further reading listed by the museum

• Chandra, Pramod, and Daniel J. Ehnbom. The Cleveland Tuti-Nama Manuscript and the Origins of Mughal Painting. [Cleveland]: Cleveland Museum of Art, 1976.
• Seyller, John. “Overpainting in the Cleveland T̤ūtīnāma.” Artibus Asiae 52, no. 3/4 (1992): 283-318.

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.