Padshahnamah fol. 205v
(plate 41)

The allegorical appearance of the Sufi saint Khizir during Shah Jahan’s journey to Ajmer.

This double page illustration is placed alongside a passage in the Padshahnamah text describing Shah-Jahan’s visit to Ajmer in 1636, when the Emperor was forty-five years old, but his elderly appearance painting suggests it was intended to commemorate the later visit he made with his son Prince Dara-Shukoh in 1654.

Ajmer in Rajasthan was important to the Mughals as the site of the Dargah Sharif, the tomb of the revered Sufi saint Muin al-Din Chishti. The Mughal Emperors visited the Dargah to receive his barakat (blessings) and in 1627 Shah-Jahan stopped there on his way to Agra to claim the throne after his father’s death. The Emperor is shown on horseback, facing an apparition not of Muin al-Din Chishti but another Sufi saint, the mythical Khizr, associated with immortality and the waters of life. He presents Shah-Jahan with a globe, the symbol of universal kingship, an image also depicted in another of the manuscript’s paintings (RCIN 1005025.an).

The painting is not signed but the pair are ascribed to the artist Jalal Quli, the ‘Kashmiri painter’, and the background hills may be inspired by the landscape of Kashmir.

Bibliography:
Milo Beach and Ebba Koch, King of the world : the Padshahnama, an imperial Mughal manuscript from the Royal Library, Windsor Castle, 1996
Saqib Baburi, Beyond the Akbarnamah: Padshahnamahs and Official Regnal Chronography for Shah-Jahan Padshah (r. 1037/1628-1068/1658), 2010.