The Study of Mikhail Bakhtin's Concept of Polyphony and Dialogism in Reza Abbasi's Paintings

Reza Abbasi, a prominent painter of the Isfahan painting school, is one of the few Persian painters who attends to the general public and society as a "public painter" and illustrates court orders and figures of kings and nobles as a "court painter" in the Safavid court at the same time. This change in the tradition of Persian painting at the end of the tenth and the eleventh centuries AH, for the first time, enabled Persian painting to have the same and equal reflection of different social voices. Until then, due to the dominant presence of the upper class in the paintings, monophony and social centralism in Persian painting was common and obvious.
On the other hand, Mikhail Bakhtin, a twentieth-century Russian theorist, proposed the idea of “Dialogism and Polyphonic texts” as opposed to “Monophonic texts”. According to Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory, dialogism and polyphonic texts are often created in the context of authoritarianism and suffocation in society in order to critique the authoritarian, totalitarian and monolithic reality that has caused the destruction of dialogue in society to temporarily suspend such social and class conflicts. Thus, in some works of Reza Abbasi, it is possible to see the interactive, polyphonic and dialogic atmosphere that appears in the tradition of the Persian painting for the first time. Therefore, it is necessary to study the works of Reza Abbasi from this perspective, which has not been done so far. The subject of this study is to investigate the polyphony and dialogism concept of the Mikhail Bakhtin's theory in Reza Abbasi's paintings, and the aim is to identify Persian painting's capability to be adapted and interpreted based on contemporary philosophical theories and concepts. Research questions are: 1. What is the polyphony and dialogism in the works of Reza Abbasi? 2. How did the social situation of the Safavid era affect the nature of polyphony and dialogue of Reza Abbasi's works? 3. What is the purpose of Reza Abbasi in presenting polyphonic and conversational images? According to the aim, this research is a developmental one, and based on essence and methodology, is descriptive-analytical. The method of data collection is documentary (library based). The method of data analysis is qualitative with the approach of polyphonic and dialogic texts in the theory of Mikhail Bakhtin. Considering what Mikhail Bakhtin offers in describing polyphonic and dialogic texts, we can consider the number of these images in the total works of Reza Abbasi to be approximately equal to 15 paintings. Therefore, the statistical population of this study is 15 images by Reza Abbasi, which is in harmony with the concepts of polyphonic and dialogic texts in Mikhail Bakhtin's views. Due to the small statistical population, the total statistical population is considered as a sample community.
This research shows that the most important polyphonic and dialogic feature of Reza Abbasi's works is the contradiction and duality that emerges in the structure of the simultaneous public and courtier figures. The untimely and sudden departure of the court of Shah Abbas I in 1011 AH / 1606 AD, and joining to the common people, is the most important effect that the social conditions of the Safavid era had on Reza Abbasi. According to the three great historians of the Safavid era, Munshi Qomi, Iskandar Beyk Turkman and Valeh Isfahani, this group of people either did not have a special and important social position in the Safavid era society or were completely rejected due to social and political conditions. They were hated. These social groups lived in the more hidden layers of society and their voices were not the dominant voices in the common and official discourse of Safavid society. In other words, the time periods of Reza Abbasi's artistic activity, which are influenced by the social conditions of his time, can also affect the polyphonic nature of his works. The number of polyphonic works of Reza Abbasi in the third period of his activity is more than his first and second periods and is equal to 80%. After that, the highest number of polyphonic images is related to the first period of his artistic activity (20%), and the number of images in the second period is as low as possible (0%).
Reza Abbasi's goal in creating polyphonic images and juxtaposing court figures with public figures has been to express opposition to the government and the dominant power. In this way, he uses discourses outside the dominant language to critique the structure of the hierarchy and the dominant power. Just as Bakhtin considers polyphonic texts as a sign of suffocation in society and considers the time of the emergence of such works in authoritarian, monolithic and totalitarian conditions, artists such as Reza Abbasi seek to create a dialogue and interactive structure by creating their works, and temporarily suspend this class and social supremacy.