While Britain has the largest collection of South Asian miniatures across public institutions and private holdings in the world, a vast majority of these treasures of a shared colonial past have rarely been exhibited. This wealth of artistic heritage remains on the fringes of British public imagination, appreciated as a practice that is ‘historic, ‘oriental’ and ‘ornamental’, but not for its rigour, material intelligence, groundbreaking inventiveness, and contemporary influence. It is this gap that the exhibition Beyond the Page: South Asian Miniatures and Britain, 1600 to Now addresses over 170 historical and contemporary art works from Britain, India, and Pakistan.

The exhibition is groundbreaking in showcasing the thematic and stylistic diversity and longevity of the miniature tradition, Jain miniatures from Western India dating back to the 15^th century to paintings from the Mughal, Deccan and Rajput courts and Pahari paintings from the foothills of the Himalayas, dating from the 16^th to the 20^th century. The exhibition extends the influence of miniature paintings in the works of artists Abanindranath Tagore and Abdur Rahman Chughtai at the helm of the modern era. In its mapping of the lineage of miniature paintings, the exhibition’s journey culminates with works by contemporary South Asian, British and European artists who have studied, and incorporated elements of the miniature language to transform the visual landscape of global art.

Curators Hammad Nasar and Anthony Spira, with advice from historian Emily Hannam, have pillared the exhibition on two South Asian artists—Zahoor ul Akhlaq (1941-1911) from Pakistan, and Gulam Mohammed Sheikh (b. 1937) from India—and three institutions, The National College of Art in Lahore, The Faculty of Fine Arts, Maharaja Sayajirao University in Baroda (now Vadodara) and The Royal College of Arts, London. The curators propose that Akhlaq and Sheikh’s studies at the RCA in the 1960s lent the opportunity for the close study of the miniature collection at the Victoria and Albert Museum, shaping their syncretic practices influenced by European and Asian art histories. With subsequent illustrious careers as artists and professors in their respective institutions, Akhlaq (NCA, Lahore) and Sheikh (M.S.U, Baroda) have established legacies of art training and practice rooted in traditional and modern principles amongst successive generations of artists.

Miniature paintings continue to be taught in art schools in Pakistan and thus, serve as a formal painterly practice, whereas in neighbouring India it is self-taught, primarily studied and incorporated for its narrative potential. Artists Shahzia Sikander, Imran Qureshi, Rashid Rana and the Singh Twins all use and transform the language of the miniature as a powerful medium to challenge the expectations of South Asian artists by the world to ‘paint their heritage’. Sikander and Hamra Abbas both employ metaphors of memory, erasure, iconoclasm, displacement and migration, to challenge the act of ‘othering’ and an inherent hierarchy in the broad brushstroke, applied to the global South vis-a-vis Western modernism .

Indian artists learnt from the storytelling strategies of miniature paintings to engage in a dialogic exchange with audiences. Thus, where Nilima Sheikh narrates domestic or inter-communal violence episodically, Arpita Singh uses multiple distorted perspectives and references drawn from childhood memory, maps and popular culture to create a universal layout. Taking another approach, Bhupen Khakhar merged the bright palette of calendar art and the flattened plane of the miniature to present a world observed through a deeply personal lens.

The exhibition is thematically dense, ranging from portraiture to nature studies, from court scenes to contemporary communal engagements, from materiality and narratives to abstraction. Spira and Nasar aim to make unfamiliar material accessible to audiences by juxtaposing motifs. For example, we observe the ubiquitous courtyard in multiple paintings and sculptures across time, which variously enclose personal moments, contain violent encounters or delineate the picture plane to portray movement in time and space. They replicate this strategy with portraits, flora and fauna, and romantic entanglements, but they problematise each one, adding layers of complexity through precise curatorial work. Royal mediaeval portraits are seen alongside five studies of facial hair by Ahsan Jamal or Nusra Latif Qureshi’s nine metre film scroll of passport photos with fanciful juxtapositions of those typically forgotten from history.

The inclusion of Western artists Howard Hodgkins, Olivia Fraser, Jess MacNeil, and Alexander Gorlizki, among others, acts as a reminder of a shared transnational visual heritage. With the steady influx of miniatures into the island over several hundred years, it is a history that is woefully understudied, still approached as an artisanal novelty, a rare exception being the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, which rotates its collection on display every few years. Informed by past and present collaborations and exhibitions, the curators have generated an immense response from the audience, especially artists, in their framing of miniatures as an ongoing, dense and diverse transhistorical and transnational artistic practice. Nasar and Spira hope for the exhibition to be catalytic, for it to lead to further mainstream and equitable studies and investigations.