How Mughal Emperors Used Manuscripts as Political Instruments
The illuminated manuscript was not a luxury object in the Mughal court. It was a technology of power. The emperors who commissioned them — Akbar above all, but also Jahangir and Shah Jahan — understood that a manuscript was not simply a record of something. It was an argument, a performance of sovereignty, a claim about who the emperor was and what kind of world he presided over.
Akbar’s great project, the imperial library known as the Kitabkhana, was a manufacturing operation as much as a cultural institution. At its height it employed hundreds of artists, calligraphers, and bookbinders working under the supervision of court painters who had trained in Persia and been systematically exposed to European visual sources brought by Jesuit missionaries. The synthesis that emerged — Persian compositional conventions fused with European spatial illusionism and indigenous naturalistic detail — was not aesthetic accident. It was policy. A visual language that could absorb multiple traditions and subordinate them to a single imperial vision.
The Akbarnama, the official chronicle of Akbar’s reign illustrated with more than a hundred full-page miniatures, makes the political function explicit. Its images depict battles, court ceremonies, architectural projects, and the emperor’s personal acts of justice and mercy. Each is a document of legitimacy, a claim that Akbar’s rule was divinely ordered, historically grounded, and militarily unassailable. The text and image operated together. Neither was sufficient alone.
Jahangir pursued a different strategy with the same medium. Where Akbar commissioned historical narrative, Jahangir commissioned observation. His court painters produced detailed naturalistic studies of animals, birds, and plants — some of them species encountered for the first time through the expanding trade networks of the early seventeenth century. The famous studies of a zebra, a turkey, and a dodo by the painter Ustad Mansur were not scientific illustrations in the European sense. They were demonstrations of imperial reach. To depict a creature was to possess it. To possess it was to mark the edges of an empire that extended to every corner of the known world.
The manuscript as political instrument did not disappear with the Mughals. It survived in altered forms — in the propaganda of European monarchies, in the illustrated press of the nineteenth century, in the state-commissioned photographic surveys of colonial territories. The specific technology changed. The underlying logic did not. Whoever controls the image of a world controls, to some meaningful degree, the world itself.
What the Mughal case makes visible is how little distance separates the aesthetic from the political in the history of visual culture. The beauty of a Mughal miniature is real. It is also inseparable from the purpose it was made to serve. Reading one without the other produces a diminished account of both.