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

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01-05-2025

' 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 #TopPicks for @Londonist >> https://t.co/NmcCowqd0j #LondonArtCritic #LondonExhibitions pic.twitter.com/W3ioYkXuWt
— Tabish Khan (@LondonArtCritic) April 28, 2025
Structurally, the exhibition is organised around the conventional imperial triad of Akbar, Jahangir, and Shah Jahan – figures who have long dominated narratives of Mughal art. Yet this familiar periodisation reproduces a monolithic view of dynastic succession, marginalising other regions, actors, and modalities of artistic production.
Moreover, the geographical framing remains opaque: a gesture toward Gujarat by dedicating a section on objects that point towards the proliferation of trade and cultural exchange in this region during the Mughal period, for instance, acknowledges the region's importance in early modern global trade but fails to meaningfully connect it to the broader Mughal visual economy. The result is a fragmented inclusion that appears more curatorial convenience than conceptual necessity.
The exhibition design, while visually restrained, offers little in the way of critical provocation. A linear spatial logic and uneven lighting suggest an aestheticised encounter rather than an interpretive one. While many of the objects on display – albums, textiles, architectural fragments – are remarkable in their own right, the interpretive framing tends to rely on their intrinsic beauty rather than on a nuanced curatorial argument.
This places undue weight on the objects themselves to 'speak', without sufficient engagement with the methodological questions their display should raise.
More of the The Great Mughals: Art, Architecture and Opulence show at the V&A. Pieces of the pietra dura panels from the Taj Mahal show this arduously intricate technique of filling carved surfaces of marble panes with semi precious stones. pic.twitter.com/uu8kP07WlZ
— Nasser Rabbat (@nasserrabbat) January 5, 2025
Notably absent are holdings from major collections of Mughal painting and manuscript culture in Iran and Russia, which could have complicated the national and imperial boundaries often presumed in exhibitions of this kind. In this sense, 'The Great Mughals' presents a selective and at times insular vision of a profoundly transregional empire. The absence of such material not only limits the exhibition's scholarly reach but also undermines its claim to comprehensiveness.
For audiences in the Global North, the exhibition may pass as a well-appointed foray into South Asian splendour. But for scholars attuned to the politics of cultural representation, the elisions are conspicuous.
As decolonisation becomes a watchword across museums in Europe and North America, it is no longer sufficient to mount exhibitions that celebrate aesthetic brilliance while leaving intact the systems of knowledge that rendered those aesthetics legible through colonial frames. To do so is to focus on cosmetic changes instead of questioning the underlying structure.