6. Jahangir's Art

Jahangir's love for the art of painting was no less, and for realism it was more. Under him, Akbar's energetic naturalism was refined into a calmer and intensely realistic style capable of revealing not only the outer appearance but also its unique inner spirit.

Actually, as a rebel prince, he set up his independent studio at Allahabad much before he ascended the Mughal throne under the Persian painters Aqa Riza and his son Abu Hasan. He had equal appreciation for both, the simple version of his father's court art and the precise, flat and highly decorative style of Persian art, which Aqa Riza and his son practiced. After he ascended as the Emperor of Hindustan, he inspired his artists to develop their own individual styles, traits and talent and each to have a specialized area, Abu Hasan the court scenes and official portraits, Mansur nature study and history, Daulat all kinds of portraits and so on.

He favored elegant, small works with fewer illustrations worked singly by an artist. There was a shift in choice of themes also. Pleasures and pastimes of court life, portraits, studies of birds, animals and flowers, scenes derived from reproductions of European art, studies of holy men and so on were now the more favored subjects for painters. This suggests that Jahangir used art as both, as a thing of aesthetic beauty delighting the senses and heart, and as a record of those days, something that stored a thing or a moment for the concurrent human intellect as well for future

In fact, Jahangir's most valuable contribution to the knowledge of zoology was a portrait of the Mauritian bird, the dodo (Raphuscucullatus). An important link in the evolution of ducks, this flightless, primitive bird had become extinct by the end of the seventeenth century, "thanks to the active gastronomic interest taken in it by visiting European soldiers."

Modern scholars wishing to know its features had to depend for long on a not very accurate drawing by the Flemish artist Ronald Savery, made at Amsterdam between 1626 and 1628, while a Mughal depiction (attributed to the great artist Mansur) lay in oblivion. Dr. A. Ivanov of St Petersburg (Leningrad) discovered it in the collection of the Institute of Oriental studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences. His paper created a sensation at the XII International Ornithological Congress at Helsinki in 1958; for this painting was found to be the most correct representation of the dodo. It was correctly made from a live specimen which seems to have been presented to Jahangir by a foreign visitor.

Professor Erwin Stresemann has dated this miniature to the last years of the emperor's life when ill-health had stopped his pen, and thus deprived the world of an eyewitness account of an exceedingly curious bird by one of the most interesting figures in Indian history and a naturalist par excellence.

Human portraits define another aspect of Jahangir's quest for record, this time to record the likeness of human world. Islam did not approve, or even his father Akbar did not favor portrayal, but for Jahangir it was no more a prohibited area, as without it the likeness of so many distinguished and great, would be lost. He was mad for the exceptional beauty of his queen Nurjahan.

He had exceptional regard for a 'sufi', a saint, or divine, and paid visit to his seat. He allowed Nurjahan to be portrayed and brought 'sufis', saints and divines, of course in the form of their portraits, to the walls of the chambers of household. One may not identify the portrayed figures today but at one point of time they existed and were before the eyes of the painter. Jahangir favored his artists inscribed their names on their works.