Inside Akbar's Painting Factory

Akbar couldn't read. Possibly dyslexic, definitely uninterested, the most powerful man in sixteenth-century Asia preferred to be read to. So he did the next best thing: he had the world's stories painted.

His grandfather had imported two Persian masters — Mir Sayyid Ali and Abd al-Samad — from the Safavid court. Akbar handed them a workshop and a mandate: train Indian painters, and make something nobody had seen before.

The first great project was the Hamzanama, the adventures of Amir Hamza, painted across roughly 1,400 pictures over some fourteen years, on cloth large enough to hold up to a crowd while the tale was recited aloud. Think prestige television, if each episode took a month to hand-paint.

A Muslim emperor hired mostly Hindu painters to illustrate a Persian translation of a Sanskrit epic. The Mughal style was a negotiation before it was a style.

The studio's brightest star was Daswanth, son of a palanquin-bearer, 'discovered' after Akbar spotted his drawings on a wall. The court chronicler Abu'l Fazl rated him the finest painter in the realm. He took his own life in 1584 — one of art history's earliest recorded tragedies of the kind.

Out of this factory came a genuinely new language: Persian elegance, Indian colour and energy, a pinch of European perspective. Empires are usually remembered for what they conquered. Akbar's is remembered for what it painted.