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.