Abdur Rahman Chughtai: Cosmopolitan Mughal Aesthetic in the Age of Print

The Lahore-based artist, Abdur Rahman Chughtai (1897–1975) is generally considered the first significant modern Muslim artist from South Asia. His art developed with an awareness of the early modern Islamicate cosmopolitan world, especially with Safavid Persia and Mughal India. But this relationship was also shaped by nineteenth- and early twentieth-century factors – the loss of symbols of political power in South Asia to colonialism beginning in the late eighteenth century, reaching its full dismemberment in the wake of the 1857 mutiny, and the further loss of the external identificatory symbol of the Ottoman Caliphate, which was dissolved in 1924. Chughtai