Also known as qalam-i-siyah, and siyah qalam, Persian for ‘black pen’, nim qalam is a drawing technique utilising monochromatic tones with highlights of colour or gold. It is similar to the grisaille technique of line drawing. The name is derived from the Persian nim, meaning ‘half’ and qalam, meaning ‘pen’.

The origins of the term and technique are not precisely known. Scholars speculate that it developed in sixteenth and seventeenth-century South Asia as court artists were introduced to European prints. The artists may have attempted to replicate the hatching, lack of colour and subdued shades in the prints by creating line drawings with tonal washes, adding highlights and shadows for emphasis and depth respectively. 

The technique may have been first used by Basawan — a master artist in the court of Akbar — in the latter half of the sixteenth century, and is believed to have been his specialty. His execution of the technique is best seen in a series of European-style images based on the Polyglot Bible. Akbar commissioned many such works during his reign in the early seventeenth century. A number of court artists employed by Jahangir used the nim qalam technique to create paintings as well as to decorate the margins of their paintings. 

Dying Inayat Khan; Balchand, India; c. 1618–1619; Ink and light wash on paper; 10.3 x 13.3 cm; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Buffaloes in combat; Miskin, India; c. late 16th century; Ink, watercolour, and gold on paper; 17.5 x 24.1 cm; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Akbar hawking on an elephant; Mughal, India; c. 1600; Ink and paint on paper; 17.3 x 13.2 cm; Victoria and Albert Museum, London
The world of animals; Miskin, Mughal, India; c. 1590; Ink, watercolour, and gold on paper; 33.8 x 21.7 cm; National Museum of Asian Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.
The virgin and child attended by angels; Manohar; c. 1600; Brown and blue ink with gold on paper; 32.1 x 23.3 cm; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Akbar mounting his horse; Sur Das Gujarati, Mughal, India; c. 1605–1607; Gum tempera and ink on paper; 23 x 12.4 cm; Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio
Equestrian portrait of Rana Amar Singh II; Stipple Master, Rajasthan, India; c. 1705; Opaque watercolour on paper; 37 x 23.5 cm; National Museum of Asian Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.
Portrait of the aged Akbar; Govardhan, Mughal, India; c. 1640–1650; Gum tempera and gold on paper; 25.2 x 16.8 cm; Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio
Apparatus of power; Shahzia Sikander; 2013–2015; AAN Collection, and Google Arts & Culture

The technique began to be used in the Deccan in the latter half of the seventeenth century, possibly due to an influx of European engravings from the port in Goa. By the end of the century, it had spread to present-day Rajasthan, as exemplified by the work of the Stipple Master of Mewar, an anonymous painter who pioneered the use of the technique in Udaipur. 

Some scholars have argued that nim qalam may have had precedents in Persian painting. In Ilkhanid courts in the thirteenth century, line drawings were used to imitate Chinese woodblock prints. By the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, Persian artists had begun to produce line drawings in European styles — a phenomenon that the Mughals and the Deccan sultans would have been aware of even before the arrival of printed European manuscripts in their courts. 

The nim qalam technique continues to be used by contemporary South Asian artists working on manuscript paintings, such as Shahzia Sikander.