‘Great Mughals’ show in London reinforces colonial perspectives that museums claim to be questioning

“The Great Mughals: Art, Architecture and Opulence”, on display at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum until May 5, reanimates a familiar narrative in the historiography of South Asian art: one centred on visual luxury, courtly grandeur and imperial aestheticisation. While these themes are undoubtedly central to the Mughal repertoire, their uncritical recapitulation within the framework of a major museum exhibition invites serious scrutiny.

The continued privileging of opulence – isolated from the complex political, intellectual, and religious histories that undergird it – risks reiterating the very colonial imaginaries that museums now claim to be interrogating.

The exhibition’s title alone signals a retreat into a historiographical mode that foregrounds aesthetic excess as the defining feature of the Mughal period. This is, of course, not without precedent. British colonial scholarship long deployed the visual richness of the Mughal court as a rhetorical device to simultaneously admire and diminish – to portray it as decadent, ornamental, and politically effete.

By reproducing this frame without critical engagement, the Victoria and Albert Museum misses an opportunity to reframe Mughal visuality within the evolving debates around decolonial museology and postcolonial historiography.

Closing soon - The Great Mughals: Art, Architecture and Opulence @V_and_A and The 80s: Photographing Britain @Tate Britain, both in my...

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