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The Raja’s daughter, born with three breasts, accompanies her blind husband and his hunchback guide on a journey, from a Tuti-nama (Tales of a Parrot): Forty-second Night

Unknown

1560

unspecified

From the collection of Cleveland Museum of Art

Mughal Painting Renaissance Renaissance

Dominant colour

The Raja’s daughter, born with three breasts, accompanies her blind husband and his hunchback guide on a journey, from a Tuti-nama (Tales of a Parrot): Forty-second Night is a 1560 unspecified by Unknown, a Mughal Painting work, held at Cleveland Museum of Art.

Who painted this?: Unknown
When & what style?: 1560 · Mughal Painting
Where can I see it?: Cleveland Museum of Art

About this work

You see a woman with three breasts walking beside a blind man who holds her arm and a hunchback’s staff. The hunchback leads them toward a distant city under a flat, golden sky. This painting comes from a book of parrot tales told to a lovesick merchant’s son. The story was meant to distract him from his wife—each night, the parrot spun another tale, and this scene is one of them. To see more paintings like this, look up Mughal India, court of Akbar (reigned 1556–1605).

The story of this work

Overview

The blind man clutches tightly to the hunchback’s staff with one hand and his wife’s arm with the other. At the front of the group, the hunchback points ahead to their ultimate destination—a city far from where the raja’s daughter was born. This image represents a story within the story that is being told by a parrot to the merchant’s son ‘Ubaid in order to cure his infatuation with his wife.