ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the process of full incorporation of foreign forms, which enables the ontological slippage from hybridity to non-hybridity, during the period of Shah Jahan. During the reigns of Akbar and Jahangir, Mughal pictorial hybridity expanded its registers with a frank, unrestricted, and playful appropriation of European art forms against the well-prepared backdrop of cross-pollination between late Timurid-Safavid imports and local Indo-Sultanate heritage. The chapter shows that probing the art's aesthetic logic is the surest path to illuminate the Persian politics of human figuration. It refutes the various belittling presentations of this phenomenon that sprinkle the historiography or that can be heard in academic lectures. The chapter contends that psychological rendering was not neglected in Mughal portraiture, in privileging the profile; the Mughals seem to have conferred special significance upon the individual's most external physiognomic traits.
