The Raja’s daughter, born with three breasts, accompanies her blind husband and his hunchback guide on a journey, from a Tuti-nama (Tales of a Parrot): Forty-second Night (c. 1560): Art, History and D
The Raja’s daughter, born with three breasts, accompanies her blind husband and his hunchback guide on a journey, from a Tuti-nama (Tales of a Parrot): Forty-second Night at the Cleveland Museum of Art: c. 1560, gum tempera, ink, and gold o
The Raja’s daughter, born with three breasts, accompanies her blind husband and his hunchback guide on a journey, from a Tuti-nama (Tales of a Parrot): Forty-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:
The blind man clutches tightly to the hunchback’s staff with one hand and his wife’s arm with the other. At the front of the group, the hunchback points ahead to their ultimate destination—a city far from where the raja’s daughter was born. This image represents a story within the story that is being told by a parrot to the merchant’s son ‘Ubaid in order to cure his infatuation with his wife.
Object facts
- Title: The Raja’s daughter, born with three breasts, accompanies her blind husband and his hunchback guide on a journey, from a Tuti-nama (Tales of a Parrot): Forty-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: 9.2 x 10.4 cm (3 5/8 x 4 1/8 in.)
- Collection: Indian Art
- Department: Indian and Southeast Asian Art
- Accession number: 1962.279.271.a
A detail from the museum
The woman was forced to leave home after soothsayers predicted that she would someday harm her father.
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.
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.
Sources
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