Mughal Padshahnama (India)

• Imperial Chronicle of Shah Jahan, Mughal India

Thinking Through Michel Foucault (1926-1984)’s Philosophy on the Art Essence

The Padshahnama is not simply a grand historical record—it is a visual regime of sovereign selfhood. Through Foucault’s perspective, it can be read as an archive of “subjectivation” where the figure of the Mughal emperor is not merely narrated but produced—discursively, aesthetically, and ethically—as a sovereign subject of power and a model for the governed. The opulent illustrations, spatial choreography of court scenes, hierarchical placement of figures, and richly gilded miniatures of ceremonies and wars enact a genealogy of imperial power—one not derived from natural law, but performed through aesthetics, ritual, and visual technologies.

In The Care of the Self, Foucault explores how subjectivity is shaped not just by repression, but through positive practices: writing, bodily disciplines, rituals of self-fashioning. The Padshahnama functions as a sovereign “mirror” of such care—not personal but imperial: the emperor Shah Jahan is constructed as the ethical center of a moral cosmos. His body becomes a political text, adorned with meaning: radiant, central, disciplined, always in harmony with the cosmological and administrative order. The manuscript is thus an aesthetic technology of imperial self-care—for Shah Jahan, the imperial court, and the empire itself.

Moreover, in Foucauldian terms, the Padshahnama illustrates the logic of governmentality—that is, how power operates not solely through law and force, but through the shaping of conduct. The aesthetic layout of the manuscript guides vision, defines legitimacy, teaches comportment, and displays the sacred protocols of governance. Through its interweaving of calligraphy, miniature painting, and court protocol, the text operates like a visual discipline, producing both subjectivity and order.

In this Foucauldian reading, the Padshahnama is not a passive record—it is an active site where history, ethics, and power converge. It shapes how rulers ought to govern, how bodies should appear, how memory is to be preserved, and how the courtly subject should behave. Its beauty is not decorative but disciplinary, not ornamental but ontological. The imperial self is not born but crafted—through ink, color, protocol, and spatial pageantry.