The Parrot Addresses Khujasta at the Beginning of the Fifteenth Night, from a Tuti-nama (Tales of a Parrot) (c. 1560): Art, History and Details

The Parrot Addresses Khujasta at the Beginning of the Fifteenth Night, from a Tuti-nama (Tales of a Parrot) (c. 1560) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection.

The work and its context

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

Panels of bold color are closely reminiscent of local Indian painting traditions, as seen in the page to the left. The artist here is experimenting with depicting three-dimensionality in the angled rendering of the bed, the placement of Khujasta’s feet on the plane of the floor, and the parrot who stands in the space of his cage. In comparison to the figures in The Sage Narada tells King Kamsa of Vishnu’s Impending Incarnation to the left, Khujasta’s gesture is less pertly angular, and her face has smaller features and gentler contours. Falsely encouraging her to go meet her lover, the parrot tells her that if she doesn’t go, and her husband returns, she would regret not having gone to see him just as the cat repented having killed the mice. She must then hear the story of why a cat would regret killing mice.

Object facts

• Title: The Parrot Addresses Khujasta at the Beginning of the Fifteenth Night, from a Tuti-nama (Tales of a Parrot)
• Date: c. 1560
• Culture: India, Mughal court, 16th century
• 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: 7.6 x 10 cm (3 x 3 15/16 in.)
• Collection: Indian Art
• Department: Indian and Southeast Asian Art
• Accession number: 1962.279.112.a

A detail from the museum

The stacked red jugs on the left are water pots.

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, OH: The Cleveland Museum of Art, 1976.
• Nakhshabī, Z̤iyāʼ al-Dīn, and Muhammed Ahmed Simsar, translator and editor. Tales of a Parrot = The Cleveland Museum of Art's Ṭūṭīnāma. Cleveland, OH: The Museum, 1978.
• 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.