The Three Indian Illustrators of the Rubaiyat: A book transcending cultures and time

Who was Omar Khayyam?

Omar Khayyam was an 11th-12th century Persian mathematician and astronomer. He created the Jalali calendar, a version more accurate than the later Gregorian counterpart (1582) we use today.

Khayyam was only a minor poet in his life, but FitzGerald’s verses made him extraordinarily popular. Deeply philosophical, the four-line verses or rubai emphasise the fleeting nature of human life, where death is not an end but a process of regeneration. Among many epithets, we find his reverence for dust. The poet claims dust is everything that once was around us—among them the noblest of rulers and the most precious stones—and therefore should be treated with care.

India Connection to the Rubaiyat

FitzGerald was friends with Edward Cowell, a Victorian Englishman in India who could read and write Persian. Cowell came across a manuscript containing 158 short-format Persian verses at Oxford’s Bodleian Library, which was taken by FitzGerald as a primary source of the English Rubaiyat.

When FitzGerald was writing the first edition during 1857-59, Cowell was teaching at Presidency College, Calcutta, as a professor of English History. He found a second document, famously labelled the ‘Calcutta manuscript’, containing 516 verses at the city’s Asiatic Society library, and sent it over to FitzGerald. While FitzGerald ended up using some of the verses from this manuscript, its authenticity has been highly contested.

The Rubaiyat became a global phenomenon towards the end of the nineteenth century. In 1892, the Omar Khayyam Club was founded in his and FitzGerald’s honour, and continues to function today. Even consumer items—tooth powder, perfume and tobacco products—shared the Persian poet’s name due to his immense popularity. The concluding phrase from the book, ‘tamam shud’ (meaning, ‘it is ended’) is also associated with an unsolved Australian mystery dating back to 1948.

Abanindranath Tagore

Abanindranath Tagore (1871-1951) is one of India’s nine National Art Treasure artists. An artist and teacher associated with Calcutta’s Government College of Art and Craft and Santiniketan’s Visva-Bharati University, he was the founder of the anti-colonial art movement is now identified as the Bengal School.

M. V. Dhurandhar

Possibly the most popular academic Indian artist after Raja Ravi Varma, Kolhapur-born Rai Bahadur M. V. Dhurandhar (1867-1944) was associated with Bombay’s Sir J. J. School of Art. Dhurandhar joined the institution after graduating as an art teacher and gradually ascended different administrative ranks. At the end of a long and illustrious teaching career, he became the school’s first Indian Director in 1930.

M. V. Dhurandhar’s single-tone images were published by Bombay Thacker & Co. in 1944—incidentally, the year of his death. Priced ‘Rs. 1-8’ (one rupee and eight annas), it contains eighteen illustrations in black ink. Each engraved image is accompanied by an excerpt from the rubai that inspired it.

M. K. Sett

Very little is known of Mera Ben Kavas Sett. The first page of his Rubaiyat introduces him as an artist of great repute in Europe and as an interior decorator, but evidence is few and far in between.

Originally, M. K. Sett had privately published a Rubaiyat in 1914 through Galloway & Porter at Cambridge in a limited edition of 250 copies. Sometime following World War II, a folio edition was printed by Bombay’s D. B. Taraporevala. This edition begins with a ten-page booklet containing Sett’s introduction as well as the 75 quatrains. 31 unbound cards follow the text. The first 16 cards present the same quatrains, but engraved from Sett’s own handwriting, which are printed in green with red illumination. The remaining 15 cards contain full-page monochrome illustrations, with appropriate quatrains on their verso. The visual style of these illustrations is reminiscent of Art Nouveau and Art Deco.

Tagore’s Illustrations of the Rubai

Tagore was able to evoke the philosophical meaning of the verses. His full-colour plates show solitary figures lost in thought at dusk or night. When couples are present, they do not speak among themselves. The wash technique that he used caused colours to diffuse within the finished painting, a style that complemented the ethereal nature of the rubai.

Dhurandhar’s Illustrations of the Rubai

In Dhurandhar’s drawings, the narrative of the verses is objectively represented, even though Omar Khayyam’s rubai were greatly metaphorical. Tagore and Dhurandhar take different approaches in illustrating the 46th rubai: while the shadow in Tagore’s illustration is cast by the poet sitting beside the light, in Dhurandhar the poet is presented watching a hanging lantern. His image for the 75th rubai presents a woman pouring wine from a cup, but for Khayyam ‘wine’ referred to the Spirit and the winecup the vessel for spiritual guidance.

The edition with Tagore’s drawing was published as a collector’s folio edition, and therefore utilised full-colour plates, gold foil and a combination of different papers. The images (measuring 7.5 x 5.2 in. each) were printed on glossy paper and mounted on thick cardstock (measuring 12.5 x 9.5 in.). Sett had privately published his first edition. The reprint was made into a folio, which used dichromatic red and green colours, followed by monochrome black ink illustrations. The pages are relatively the same size as the Tagore edition, and measure 11.0 x 8.7 in. each. Unlike the Tagore and Sett versions, Dhurandhar’s paperback copy was cheaper at the time of publication and therefore meant to have a wider distribution. At 7.2 x 5.0 in. (closed size), it was also much smaller in size than the others.

Given the differences in the materials and printing technology used, what kind of audience do you think each publication catered to?

Looking Back at the Rubaiyat Now

In a letter addressed to Cowell, FitzGerald had stated, ‘It is better to be orientally obscure than Europeanly clear.’ Through him, we can see a larger problem that plagued Western viewership of non-Western culture: a gaze that romanticised non-Western nations as having antiquated perceptions of science and logical thinking, but celebrated their supposedly ‘mystical’ belief-systems. Since the time of the text’s first publication, have changes occurred in the way we perceive different cultures?

However, FitzGerald’s Rubaiyat is undoubtedly charming. The verses act as timeless adages that invoke in the reader the spirit of carpe diem. In specific instances, quatrains show the ability to transcend cultures and Orientalist politics. An example is verse 37, from the first edition:

Ah, fill the cup: what boots it to repeat
How time is slipping underneath our feet:
Unborn tomorrow and dead yesterday,
Why fret about them if today be sweet!