An Ambassador’s Astonishment
During the 17th century, Sir Thomas Roe — one of the most successful and well-traveled English diplomats of his era, and the first official English ambassador to India — wrote to Charles I from Agra about the Mughal empire, which was not only known for its wealth and military strength, but also for its cultural influence, art and finesse.
Sir Thomas Roe — the official English ambassador sent by the King of England to talk to India’s rulers and secure trade deals for British merchants.
Roe was completely amazed by the incredible wealth, luxury, and artistic culture of the royal court. This court belonged to Jahangir, an emperor who ruled a massive, growing empire that reached from the northern mountains all the way down to the bottom of India. Beyond their massive armies and money, Roe saw that the Mughals had created stunning art. Their beautiful carpets, fine jewelry, elegant handwriting, detailed paintings, decorated weapons, and luxury fabrics were better made than almost anything else in the world at that time.
Jahangir — the powerful fourth Emperor of the Mughal Empire, famous for his massive wealth, his love of fine art, and his deep interest in science and nature.
Akbar the Great and the Empire’s Foundation
Jahangir inherited this incredible empire from his father, Akbar, who ruled for fifty years starting in 1556 and was widely praised as an excellent king. Even though the Mughals were Muslim conquerors who came from the northeast and took control of a population that was mostly Hindu, Akbar ruled with a surprisingly open mind toward different religions. He didn’t just rely on winning wars to grow and unite his kingdom; he also used clever political deals, financial persuasion, highly organized government systems, and efforts to keep peace and compromise with the many different cultures he had conquered.
Akbar the Great — the grandfather of the empire’s golden age. Taking the throne at just 13 years old, he became one of India’s most famous rulers, known for ending discriminatory taxes on non-Muslims, marrying Hindu princesses to build alliances, and hosting debates between Muslims, Hindus, Christians, and Jains.
A Global Workshop: Persian Masters and Indian Traditions
Akbar also strongly supported and funded the arts. Art from this time shows his massive grand construction projects, and his royal workshops began creating high-end luxury goods, fine fabrics, and woven rugs using rare, expensive materials. Highly skilled artists gathered from all over the empire—including rug makers from Central Asia and experts from Gujarat who decorated items with shiny seashell pieces. Most importantly, masters came from Iran. This Persian cultural influence was incredibly strong in every piece of art, and blending it with local Indian traditions, especially Hindu ones, created a totally unique and recognizable Mughal style.
The painting styles of Akbar’s court show similar influence, but with a distinctive twist — one illustration from an 11th-century Persian epic shows a beautiful princess welcoming her lover by letting down her long hair for him to climb up. Above in the clouds, all is swirling fantasy and romance, but below in the real world the depiction of a garden with its watering system and the ducks on a pond is powerfully realistic.
In fact, we glean information about everything from clothing, jewellery and meals to tilework and building techniques from the detail in the pictures here—and the growing extent of international cultural links that mirrored the political climate. Portuguese traders from Goa imported gemstones along with European thinking, and Akbar invited European craftsmen to teach foreign techniques such as enamelling on gold and silver, which quickly became established in the Mughal skillset. A glorious thumb ring, of gold set with rubies and emeralds and enamelled inside, is one of the almost impossibly intricate pieces shown here.
The House of Books
Most important to Akbar was his House of Books—perhaps oddly, since he could neither read nor write. Yet he built a library of incredible magnificence, judging from the elaborate and intricate calligraphic art on display here, much of it in Persian (the lingua franca of the court) and drawing on the skills of Iranian masters.
Shah Jahan and a World in One Court
This outreach to the world grew even further in the reign of the third king featured in this show, Jahangir’s son Shah Jahan. Paintings show European traders carrying a box of Japanese lacquer, an emerald from Colombia; one intriguing image of a princely garden picnic includes wine poured from a Persian ceramic ewer into Venetian goblets, with Chinese porcelain on a Japanese table, while a guest sports a robe of Chinese brocade. Yet all this cultural input is melded into what is now, by the first decades of the 17th century, a firmly established Mughal style, one that had begun to astonish the world.
The Court at the Water’s Edge: The People of the Lakeside
Nowhere was this established Mughal style more vibrant than in the grand depictions of lakeside leisure and imperial gatherings. These paintings are not mere artistic fantasies; they are dense, visual historical documents. Near the shimmering waters of Dal Lake in Kashmir or the artificial lakes of Rajasthan, the Mughal court re-established its ancestral love for nature.
In these scenes, we see a bustling cross-section of imperial society. Flanking the emperor are the mansabdars (military nobles) and viziers (ministers) in stiff, formal profiles, their hands respectfully folded, wearing turbans bound with rows of pearls.
Beside them stand the complex network of people who kept the empire breathing: court musicians tuning stringed rababs, royal fan-bearers holding massive morchals (peacock-feather whisks) to keep the flies away, and dark-eyed attendants bearing trays of roasted meats and figs. At the edge of the water, common fishermen, boatmen rowing royal barges (bajras), and local ascetics or Sufi dervishes are painted with raw, uncompromising realism.
The water itself is alive—painted with silver leaf that has oxidized over centuries into a dark, metallic sheen, dotted with meticulously detailed lotuses, diving ducks, and the rippling reflections of weeping willows and chinar trees. It was an earthly paradise, precisely engineered and exquisitely recorded.
The End of an Era
During Shah Jahan’s 30-year reign, the Mughal court became a magnet for foreign ambassadors and potentates and visitors of all sorts, drawn by its magnificence, its riches, its lucrative market opportunities. Under his rule, the arts flourished accordingly. So how does this story end? The empire still had a long way to go, after Shah Jahan’s son Aurangzeb seized power in 1658 while Shah Jahan was ill, and initiated another 50-year reign.
(Shah Jahan recovered, but Aurangzeb imprisoned him for the rest of his life and clung on to the throne himself.)
Conclusion: The Mughal Legacy and the Global Web
Ultimately, the story of the Mughal Empire is not one of isolation, but of unparalleled global convergence. Though the empire’s political center began a long, slow fracture after the rigid reign of Aurangzeb, its cultural footprint remained indelible. The Mughals did not merely sit at the crossroads of history; they actively reshaped global taste.
By commanding the wealthy ports of the Indian Ocean and the crucial overland arteries connecting the subcontinent to Central Asia, the Mughal Empire functioned as the ultimate southern terminal of the Silk Road network. Through these routes, Chinese artistic motifs—like the swirling clouds seen in Akbar’s miniatures—traveled west, while European perspective techniques and Colombian emeralds flowed east.
The true genius of the Mughals lay in their ability to absorb these disparate global fragments—Persian poetry, European enamel, Italian glassware, and Central Asian architectural symmetry—and meld them into a singular, breathtaking aesthetic. Long after the last emperor left the throne, the Mughal style continued to astonish the world, leaving behind a legacy where art, trade, and international diplomacy were permanently woven into the fabric of human history.
