Indian Painting under the Mughals, A.D. 1550 to A.D. 1750 c19.55

c19.55

was personally interested in their appearance and habits. His memoirs contain constant references to his study of any unusual species, and in rare birds he took a keen delight. Of these he frequently ordered his artists to make paintings, and of some we have descriptions and pictures combined. There is the now well-known one of the turkey-cock on Plate LIII, an account of which occupies two pages of the memoirs, including the circumstances by which the emperor became possessed of this bird, hitherto unknown in India. And apart from the picture of the turkey itself we have also a miniature of the occasion in the year 1612 on which it was brought to the court by a faithful emissary of the name of Muqarrab Khan.¹ It is to be regretted that the picture of this durbar scene is too obliterated to be reproduced, for it makes an attractive composition. Muqarrab had brought a collection of curiosities from Goa, where he had been sent by Jahangir, exactly as Akbar had sent his own agent some years previously for a similar purpose. On his return the emperor received him at one of his midnight séances, as the moon is visible showing through a murky sky, and lighted candelabra are much in evidence. Jahangir is seated in his *jharokā* (window seat), and the emissary is shown making a low obeisance before him; below is a large table, or stand, on which it is possible to discern the ‘rareties’, consisting of the turkey-cock and hen and also a ‘monkey of a strange and wonderful form’. The painter of this miniature has not been identified, but there is little doubt that the artist responsible for the companion picture, that of the turkey on Plate LIII, was the famous animal painter Mansur. It seems that Jahangir had a number of pictures of this kind prepared, representations of living creatures all similarly embellished and bound up in one volume, for there are fragments of this work still in existence. And he no doubt did the same with Mansur’s studies of the flowers of Kashmir, to which reference has been already made. If the picture of the turkey-cock is an example of what these works of art were like, such volumes must have been sumptuous records, and important additions to the imperial library. It is difficult to imagine a more brilliant effect than the miniature here reproduced, particularly in the galaxy of colour in the border; as a whole this picture in its richness has probably rarely been excelled in any branch of oriental graphic art. We see in these borders, conventionalized and outlined with gold, the flowers of the tulip, poppy, strawberry, guelder rose, jonquil, lily, iris, and marguerite, all fairly common plants and shrubs but few of which are indigenous to Hindustan. Most of them are natives of Kashmir, while some are drawn from a still more distant source, the motherland of the Mughals, Farghana, watered by the Gir, with its ‘ beautiful gardens of Usk gay with violets, tulips, and roses in their seasons ’.¹