Indian Painting under the Mughals, A.D. 1550 to A.D. 1750 c15.9

c15.9

These gave him that untiring physique which enabled him to undergo with ease the most desperate hardships, and that strong spirit, originally inclined to brutality, but refined by several generations of civilized life, which showed itself in his chivalrous attitude towards his enemies. Jahangir’s breeding was much the same. He was a descendant of the same stock, but with one all-important difference—his mother was an Indian, a Rājput princess. Blended with his Mongol and Timurid blood was this entirely new strain, bringing with it characteristics that reveal themselves plainly in his mode of thought—that imagination, that sensuousness, that dreaminess which influenced all that he did, and which reflect so clearly the abstractions of the Hindu mind. But above all it gave him a temperament more sensitive than that of his somewhat forceful forbears. This Rājput infusion accounts for many things that would be otherwise difficult to understand in Jahangir’s mental outlook, but it specially helps to explain, in pleasing contrast to Babur, his sympathy for his subjects, his keen interest in their pursuits, and his marked attachment to the country of his birth—truly his motherland.