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.