Physiognomy (Firâsa) and Likeness (Tasvîr): The Inscribed Portrait at the Court of Jahangir

As critical attention has fixated upon the particularly European character of Mughal painting, for deriving an understanding of portraiture, the role of the inscription has remained obscured. Although ubiquitous and very often in an imperial hand, inscriptions identifying depicted subjects have been ignored, at worst, and interpreted merely as labels, at best. With very few exceptions, the significance and potential effectiveness of inscriptions, which can be found accompanying the vast majority of portraits produced by imperial commission, has been disregarded. The integral role played by inscriptions in these cases has perhaps been obscured by the predominant view that Mughal portraiture of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries was meant to depict subjects naturalistically, as seen from life. An artistic practice concerned with observation would seem to be compromised by the ubiquitous presence of text on the surface of portraits, the black or red ink serving rather to distract the viewer from the illusion rendered in paint. While Mughal portraits are covered (sometimes literally) with text, scholars have focused on this large body of works strictly from the point of view of representation. That is to say, Mughal portraits have been conceived as products of a painting process solely. Yet the process of figuration practiced at the Mughal court involved the pairing of pictures with inscriptions, a fact that necessitates a new appraisal of how these portraits functioned. This paper sets out to examine what precisely constituted a portrait and how such portraits worked, in the context of painting production and reception at the court of Mughal Emperor Jahangir (r. 1605-27). As case studies, this paper will take up the so-called Salim Album folios, genealogical portraits, illustrated colophons from poetic manuscripts, and paintings from the now-dispersed Jahangirnama.