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were specifically meant for the eyes of the king or the members of the royal family whom the king wanted to see them, but later on they became fairly universal and we find the same painting or similar paintings in albums and in other books. It does have a specific message to convey, because when Akbar started his great empire-building process there were wars, but at the same time he sent the message that he was not open to war but open to friendship; and there were matrimonial relationships between the Hindus and other princes and that is something very unusual for a Muslim ruler of the sixteenth century. Some of his closest nobles and his principal courtiers were Hindus, and they remained Hindus. There was no animosity between the faith of the king, the ruler, and them. So the message is that here is one king who is not only going to be tolerant but also be very friendly and coexist in peace and harmony.

In India this sort of encounter, in which a powerful ruler humbles himself before the wisdom of a holy man, has a very long history. The tradition of these meetings interacted with another tradition, that of religious tolerance, which was perceived as a legacy of the Mughals’ great ancestors, Genghis Khan and Tamerlane. It was one of the distinctive features of their conquests and differentiated the Mughal Empire from other Islamic states. In the opening section of his autobiography, Jahangir celebrates the tolerance of his father Akbar in contrast to the attitudes of his contemporaries in Turkey and Iran. In Akbar’s India, Jahangir writes,

There was room for the professors of opposite religions, and for beliefs, good and bad, and the road to altercation was closed. Sunnis and Shi’as met in one mosque and Christians and Jews in one church, and observed their form of worship.

Britain’s first ambassador to India, Sir Thomas Roe, who arrived in 1617, memorably recorded Jahangir’s own affirmation of religious tolerance, voiced during what was clearly a not unusual drunken evening:

The good king fell to dispute of the laws of Moses, Jesus and Muhammad; and in drink was so kind that he turned to me, and said: ‘Am I a king? You shall be welcome.’ Christians, Moors, Jews, he meddled not with their faith: they came all in love and he would protect them from wrong: they lived under his safety and none should oppress them; and this was often repeated; but in extreme drunkenness he fell to weeping and to divers Passions and so kept us till midnight.

Whether drunk or sober, Jahangir was a strikingly tolerant ruler. As he travelled through his empire, thousands would have been present to watch his visits to holy men and to their shrines, and to witness the public demonstration of a multi-faith society in action. But Jahangir seems also to have been driven by a personal desire to explore the spiritual truths of other religious traditions. He had many private meetings with a renowned Hindu hermit, Gosa’in Jadrup, and describes one of them in his autobiography:

The place he had chosen to live in was a hole on the side of a hill which had been dug out and a door made … In this narrow and dark hole he passes his time in solitude. In the cold days of winter, though he is quite naked, with the exception of a piece of rag that he has in front and behind, he never lights a fire … I conversed with him and he spoke well, so much as to make a great impression on me.

The tone of Jahangir’s narrative suggests that such encounters were spiritually as well as politically significant in the life of the Mughal ruling elite; and certainly meetings like these showing the powerful and the rich learning from the holy poor are hard to match elsewhere. It is almost impossible to imagine a European ruler at this date, or indeed any date, being represented so submissively taking instruction in faith. The Indian historian Aman Nath reflects on the encounters between politicians and holy men in India across the centuries:

Born in India and being part of its culture, civilization, history, it seems to me a very normal scene. Even