Visual Strategies of Imperial Self-Representation: The Windsor Pādshāhnāma Revisited

The history paintings created for Shah Jahan (r. 1628-58), the builder of the Taj Mahal, emerge as highly complex creations, which in their ambition and dialectic reach far beyond their apparent function, which was to illustrate a historical narrative in the tradition of Islamic and Indian book painting. Programmatic political statements were made with differing aesthetic modes, which contrast Persianate abstract linearity with Europeanizing illusionism within the space of a single image.