Balchand (Mughal painter)

Folio 72v of the Windsor Padshah-nama shows that Balchand had duties at the Mughal court besides painting: in a darbar datable as an event to about 1635 he presides over jewels and precious objects being distributed or received by the emperor. On folio 43v he attends as Jahangir bids farewell to Prince Khurram setting out against the Rana of Mewar in 1614 — a man of about thirty in modest Hindu dress — while on the other leaf he is elderly, white-haired and in Mughal dress; Milo Cleveland Beach notes that Hindus tied their coats under the left arm and Muslims under the right, evidence of the painters' care for historical correctness. ^{1 2}

For Beach his main interest is the intensity of human relationships, presented in a quiet, unobtrusive style: in Royal Lovers on a Terrace (about 1633), probably painted for the marriage of Shah Shuja, he opens up the background for a romantic mood, whereas Bichitr sets a solid plane of colour behind his figures. ^{2 3} Before the 1630s almost all his works are coloured drawings; afterwards richness of technique becomes expressive, perhaps from the formal darbar commissions or renewed contact with his brother Payag, whose Padshah-nama and Gulistan pages his own come to resemble. ² Among his earliest attributed works are the Baharistan of Jami dated 1595 and the Akbar-nama of 1604. ⁴