ABSTRACT
During the first British embassy to the court of Jahangir, a series of paintings were offered to the Mughal emperor by Thomas Roe and the East India Company (EIC). Moreover, Roe uses paintings as a way of inserting himself into the complex power and representational networks of Jahangir's court; more precisely, they are attempts to impose a representational or symbolic order onto India that is favourable to the goals of the company, and by extension the English state. Jahangir's refutation of the painting's accuracy depends on the immutability of his own lineage: to accept a painting of an ancestor that looks nothing like the current ruler is to put all the iconography of the emperors into question, undermining their claims to an unbroken lineage back to Tamburlaine. However, the political motivation behind the choice of subject may very well have been not Jahangir but the European competitors at his court.
