The Wine-Cup in Mughal Court Culture—From Hedonism to Kingship

Abstract

This article traces the trajectory of a commonplace object, the wine-cup in Mughal court culture, using painting as a source. Initially associated with hedonistic pleasure alone, the wine-cup came to be represented, in allegories of ‘wine and verse’, as a locus for the realisation of ‘divine reality’, having gnostic values. The imagery of mystical intoxication further imbued the object with a political meaning, in which the cup became a ‘world in miniature’ and the wine in it, the elixir of life, thereby legitimising the Mughal monarchy in a cosmological framework of universal and immortal rulership. However, the imagery came a full circle, when in the course of the eighteenth century, from its association with male rulership, it came to be exclusively associated with female eroticism and pure hedonism.

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