The Royal Mughal Dodo

In 1958, a group of Soviet ornithologists stumbled across something extraordinary in the vaults of the Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg: a Mughal painting of a dodo.

The painting, dated to around 1610 was swiftly attributed to the master painter Ustad Mansur, and when it was unveiled at the International Ornithological Congress in Helsinki, it caused an academic frenzy.

These tragic flightless birds had long intrigued scholars, having been made extinct by hungry European sailors in the 1660s.

Yet only one other painting of a live dodo had ever been discovered, and that only depicted its head. With Mansur's painting, however, scholars could see how a dodo actually looked in life!

The reign of the Mughal Emperor Jahangir is often overlooked between the more militaristic rules of Akbar and Shah Jahan. Yet it was, in many ways, the Golden age of Indian science and observation.

Jahangir wanted to understand the natural world, catalogue it, and revel in its strangeness. He was a man who built tombs for antelopes, named cranes after tragic lovers, and recorded in great detail the romantic lives of birds.

His memoir, the Jahangirnama, reads at times like a scientific journal, at others like the fever dream of a crazed Victorian.

We often think of the scientific study of nature - careful observation, classification, and documentation - as a project born in Enlightenment Europe.

But here in India, decades before Linnaeus began sketching his taxonomies, at a court that Enlightenment thinkers dismissed as 'Oriental despotism', we see an emperor commissioning painstaking studies of flora and fauna.

Here, we glimpse a very different image of the Mughals: of a scientific and not just military power.

-Sam Dalrymple.

(I do think ive posted this before)