as in Mughal court paintings. A remarkable example is an allegorical painting of the Mughal emperor, Jahangir, embracing the Persian monarch, Shah Abbas, both standing on a terrestrial globe (on the cover of this book), as way of contextualizing the “Global Renaissance” via an affective imagery of Islamic rulers beyond Europe. Painted by Abu’l Hasan, the painting seems geographically accurate, according to some critics who suggest that it is “based on European allegories and probably on English models introduced at court by [the English Ambassador] Sir Thomas Roe” (Okada, 55). Azfar Moin interprets the “message” of the painting, often titled “Jahangir’s Dream,” from a Mughal perspective in his study of kingship, The Millennial Sovereign: Sacred Kingship and Sainthood in Islam (2012). As an allegorical representation of Emperor Jahangir and Shah Abbas of Persia, Moin describes it “as a unique cultural artifact of the period” that defines the mystical power of the Mughal kings, and the painting itself explains its genealogy:
According to the commentary on the painting Jahangir saw a dream in which Shah Abbas appeared in a wellspring of light (chashma-i nur). He ordered his artist to paint the dream quickly before the approaching Persian New Year … the painting is also marked by a verse that spontaneously came to Jahangir’s “miraculous tongue:” “Our Shah came in our dream, and so gave us joy / The enemy of my dream is the one who woke me up.”
(204)
Some critics view this imperial embrace within the allegorical “dream” as a reflection of Jahangir’s anxieties about actual Persian incursions into the western border of the Mughal territory (Okada, 54–55). Moin counters this view of Jahangir’s “anxiety over losing the border province of Qandahar in … Afghanistan, to the Safavids” (204), arguing that these “political and psychological interpretations overlook the important fact that in Jahangir’s time the dream was a medium of miracles and prophecy” (206). However, it would be fair to assume that while the painting depicts Abbas in a brotherly submission and Jahangir proclaims it gave him “joy,” he is perhaps aesthetically eliding the political rivalries between the two kingdoms. And, from a historical perspective, the political implications of the painting are evident in the placement of the figures, as Sumathi Ramamurthy (Going Global in Mughal India) interprets it. Identifying the motif of the lion and the lamb on the painting, dad-o-daam, “a ferocious beast of prey, usually a lion (dad) … lying peaceably with its potential victim, generally a lamb (daam),” she goes on to unpack what these images reveal about the relationships of the monarch:
In “Jahangir’s Dream” the lion on which he [Jahangir] stands sprawls across a good part of his rival’s domain … as well as extends into what we would today call central Asia … that [would] have been under the sway of his ancestor Timur [Tamburlaine]. In turn, the vast Safavid empire is reduced to some paltry territories that the lamb is made to rest on, east of what we recognize today as the Mediterranean Ocean. Europe hardly matters in this vision, barely visible as it is on the left margins of the globe – and the painting.
(65)
Ramaswamy also goes on to observe:
[What is particularly remarkable] is that both sovereigns are shown standing on a large terrestrial globe … the general configuration of territories shown on the globe are clearly derived from European maps although the level of detail on the map of India exceeds anything known about the sub-continent in the West. Many places are clearly named, including Agra, Delhi, and Lahore, and Iran, and Portugal.
(65)
Based on this painting, she also suggests that Jahangir must have owned a terrestrial globe.
Overall, it seems, with the two rulers standing on a swathe of territory stretching from the edge of Europe over the land mass of India, this painting evokes a range of associations about the close relationships and rivalries in the Islamic world, which included the Ottomans, Persians, and Mughals while implicitly excluding Europe. The painting depicts Jahangir claiming the world in terms that would have been familiar to the peoples of the Islamic kingdoms, both the internal rivalries as well as the exclusions of Europe.
I invoke the portraits of the two early modern rulers, Elizabeth and Jahangir, not quite contemporaries, here facing each other, symbolically, if not literally, in order to show how their claims of world domination (though with a differing sense of the frontier) were ideologically inscribed via the globes represented in these paintings. Like Elizabeth I claiming the globe after the defeat of Spain in the Armada portrait or towering over the globe with her feet firmly planted on the map of England in the subsequent Ditchley portrait, this image of Jahangir by his court painter Abu’l Hasan represents the power politics of his region, authorizing a view in which the Safavid ruler is shrunk in the Mughal’s dominant embrace, although they both seem to be claiming the same global territory. And the name Jahangir itself, which literally means “World-Seizer” – a name chosen by the emperor on his accession to the Mughal throne – signals a self-aggrandizement that befitted the large Mughal empire in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, though their “notions of a frontier of expansion largely seem to have been southwards and eastwards” to the “ancestral homelands” of their ancestor Timur (Tamburlaine), and Europe held little interest for them (Subrahmanyam 2006, 72). Jahangir was not alone in projecting an image of himself as a “‘World-Seizer’ and successive Mughal emperors in India used similar titles … Shahjehan (World-Emperor) and Alamgir (World Seizer)” (Subrahmanyam 2005, 29).
Similar to Renaissance representations, and evidently influenced by Western iconography and art forms, Mughal paintings frequently deployed the image of the globe or an orb denoting the world or “Jahan,” which the particular ruler grasped or held under his feet. The socially affective power of the image of the globe in the two cultures suggests, perhaps in an uncanny way, that they were a part of a gradually emerging “global cultural economy.”4 Here the implied presence of European artistic conventions behind the representation of Jahangir and the looming presence of England’s tussle with Spain over the Americas in Elizabeth’s image both implicitly gesture at this widening of the horizons. And it is also noteworthy to recall, for instance, that in the period between the Armada portrait of Elizabeth (c. 1588) and the allegorical image of “Jahangir’s Dream” (c. 1618–1622), England expanded its influence and trade in East India, as evidenced, among other sources, in letters exchanged between the Mughal rulers and Elizabeth and James, before and after the formation of the East India Company in 1600. Elizabeth’s formal letter to the Mughal ruler, Akbar (Jehangir’s father), in 1583, describes how her English subjects have “great affection to visit the most distant places of the world” and calls the king to allow “mutual and friendly trafique of marchandize on both sides” (Hakluyt, V 1904: 450). And the reply received by her successor King James I from the Emperor Jahangir (1618) to his “letter of friendship” assures access to English trade: “I doe command that to all the English marchants in all my Dominions there be given freedome and residence” (Foster, 559). These exchanges offer one instance of the mid-seventeenth-century globalizing trends, whereby the European imagination was being stimulated by increasing trade and cross-cultural interactions across the globe. Richard Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations (1589, 1598–1600), for example, not only offers ample testimony of England’s increasing engagement with different parts of the globe – the Americas, Africa, East Asia, and even the North seas – but in the process also incorporates European forays into travel and trade, as England’s competitors, while offering ethnographic accounts of non-Europeans kingdoms, rulers, and societies.
II The Global Renaissance
Traditionally, the term “Renaissance” has been deployed to denote a revival of classical antiquity and to valorize this revival in European art and culture of fifteenth-century Italy – of Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, and Michelangelo, for instance – as the birthplace of the “Renaissance Man” (Burckhardt, 303–352). He was labeled the precursor of the “modern man,” a term whereby the white, European man served as a universal embodiment of superior civilization and culture, coming out of the nineteenth-century colonial worldview.5 Furthermore, if on one hand humanists of the period (exemplars of the “Renaissance man”) were typically represented