Indian Painting under the Mughals, A.D. 1550 to A.D. 1750 c15.15

c15.15

designs on his coinage, which not only exhibit portraits of himself—in the strict sense an offence in itself—but in the act of drinking wine, a flagrant breach of the law of the Prophet. On the whole his religion partook more of the nature of a philosophic fatalism, while freedom of thought and toleration were also included in his creed. But although he sympathized with the faith of his Hindu subjects, often conversing with pandits and ascetics, on occasion he could show the iconoclastic spirit of the zealous Musulman, as when he caused the image of Vishnu as the boar *avatar* (incarnation) to be broken and flung into the Pushkar lake. He was fond of shooting, but on account of a vow gave this up. He abstained from it for five years but eventually returned to his favourite sport. He was, however, invariably kind to animals, excessively so in one case, as when he pitied the royal elephants because they shivered in winter when they sprinkled themselves with cold water. ‘I observed this,’ he writes, ‘and so I ordered that the water should be heated to the temperature of lukewarm milk’, adding ‘this was entirely my own idea; nobody had ever thought of it before’. Yet, as he himself tells us, he could put a man to death, and have two others hamstrung, because in ignorance they exposed themselves inopportunely and frightened away his game.