The Windsor Padshah-nama

The Windsor manuscript is the most famous imperial illustrated copy of Abd al-Hamid Lahori's Padshah-nama, kept in the Royal Library, Windsor Castle. ¹ Its illustrations are almost all darbars, processions and military campaigns, as one would expect of an official state biography. ¹

The writing-out of the Windsor volume was completed at the end of Shah Jahan's reign (1657–58), and Lahori could not have begun his text before 1646. Yet three dispersed pages bear execution dates that seem to read 1628, 1635 and 1639, each just after the event shown, so Milo Cleveland Beach thinks the text was illustrated with existing paintings, perhaps made for a copy of Muhammad Amin Qazwini's earlier history, and that the copy may never have been properly finished amid Aurangzeb's seizure of the throne. ¹ He suggests Shah Jahan may have pieced it together during his imprisonment in Agra Fort. ² Some illustrations have long been thought eighteenth-century insertions made at Lucknow while the manuscript was there. ¹

It includes pages by Payag, among them his foppish self-portrait at a darbar (fol. 194v), inscribed as the brother of Balchand, and pages by Balchand (fols. 43v, 72v, 134v), who painted himself in two of them. ^{3 4 5}