The Mughal Album Page

Mughal court painters did not paint reportage. They painted arguments about power dressed up as scenes. Jahangir Preferring a Sufi Shaikh shows the emperor seated on an hourglass, handing a book to a ragged holy man, while an Ottoman sultan, a European king, and the painter Bichitr himself stand in a line beneath him, smallest and lowest at the bottom. None of these men ever stood together like this. The picture is allegory: it ranks spiritual legitimacy above military or diplomatic rank, and it ranks Jahangir above every other ruler on earth by giving him the top of the vertical axis.

The hourglass throne does double duty. Sand runs through it, and tiny angels write Jahangir's name on its surface, so the throne becomes a reminder that worldly time is short even as the emperor's reputation is written down for eternity. Read the page from top to bottom and you get a map of priorities: God's light haloing Jahangir's head, the shaikh receiving the book, then the Ottoman and European kings waiting their turn, then the painter's self-portrait at the very bottom, holding the smallest place because he merely records the vision.

An album page is never just the painted scene. A border of gold floral or figural decoration frames it, and the back of the page often carries calligraphy, a poem or Quranic verse mounted with just as much care as the image. Painting and calligraphy were pasted together and collected into bound albums called muraqqa for royal viewing. European putti and haloes entered this vocabulary because Jesuit missionaries and traders brought engravings to the Mughal court, and painters borrowed the motifs that suited their own claims about sacred kingship.