Nicolas: 
 

'Samsam al-Dawlah Khan Dawran watching a fireworks display, Delhi

c. 1719-1725' 

This painting - though it inserts a specific figure - is really an example of an eighteenth-century genre scene of courtly women celebrating the Muslim festival of Shab-i Barāt. Most versions have just the women, but there are various ones that insert a historic or mythological figure where Samsam al-Dawlah sits here - even one from Kishangarh where it is Krishna and Radha that join the women, which Kavita Singh has written about at some length. Not surprisingly, that one is  glossed as them celebrating Diwali or just watching fireworks, but I am actually not so sure if that was the sole intention - I think to an educated eighteenth-century audience it would have been pretty clear that it was the standard Shab-i Barāt scene. Much like for Diwali, lighting lamps and fireworks are central to the way Shab-i barāt was historically celebrated in many places, so the conventions associated with the representation of the two holidays in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century painting can be quite interchangeable.

There are other paintings of people lighting catalogued as depictions of Shab-i barāt which I suspect might actually represent Diwali. Iranian traditions associated with Shab-i barāt - which may have still been followed by Iranian immigrants and Persianized elites in South Asia in the eighteenth century, especially in places like Avadh and Hyderabad - also involve the burning of isfand or wild rue (Peganum harmala). The censor could potentially be a reference to that. The floral inlay on white marble - or frescoes of flowers on white stucco meant to evoke white marble - are pretty standard for post-Shah Jahan Mughal architecture, and its representation in painting I would argue quite typical of the obsessive recording of “ideal” Mughal architecture that I write about in that Journal18 article (building on the wonderful work of Chanchal Dadlani in her book From Stone to Paper: Architecture as History in the Late Mughal Empire). Also note what I think are supposed to be real bouquets in some of the niches though, and the fruit (apples?).