ABSTRACT
Art production in the central Islamic regions from the post-Mongolian period onwards offers regular examples of the trope of the breast-feeding mother, whose meanings can be read in conjunction with texts and oral narratives. The search for the affective, cultural and iconographic underpinnings of the Mughal image will be a starting point of a non-linear transcultural journey across space and time. By transcending its identification with a single community of belief, the use of image as icon can both become a source of and mobilize a range of emotions. In the context of the Indian subcontinent, the appearance of certain Christian images within an emergent court society offered one way of finding cultural points of anchorage through an opportunity to draw these into a dialogue, wherein they entered into a fresh set of transactions with different local contexts and visual practices.
