The Book of Emperors: MA alumna Ashwitha Jayakumar on her new book

The Book of Emperors: An Illustrated History of the Mughals narrates the rise and fall of the Mughal Empire, an early modern political entity that stretched across parts of India, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Bangladesh for about three centuries. Beginning in 1526 with the arrival in India of the Timurid warrior-adventurer Babur, the book examines the lives of the people who shaped the empire and created a uniquely syncretic culture drawing on Mongol, Indian and Persian traditions.

It's a narrative history that's meant for readers of all ages, and offers a look at how the Mughals strove to capture power and carve out a place for themselves in history, not just in the administrative or economic spheres but also through their patronage of the arts. Unlike a lot of books that focus only on the 'great Mughals', the first six emperors, our book includes the history of the empire's long decline, and the chapters on the emperors are interspersed with lavishly illustrated double-page spreads that show what the Mughal world looked like, from the quiet gardens the Mughals built, to the vast tent cities they travelled with, to the bustling marketplaces that attracted traders from all over the world.

I've loved history for as long as I can remember, but it was always the history of somewhere far away from India, which is where I'm from. When I was a child, I loved British and European history because there were lots of well-written and beautifully illustrated books that made history accessible through humour and wit, or simply through telling a very good story. So, I grew up knowing a lot more about the Roman emperors or the Plantagenets, for instance, than any of India's emperors or dynasties. My only knowledge of Indian history came from textbooks that approached the subject with little thought or nuance in them or books written for children that were written in a patronising and simplistic way that I found off-putting.

When I returned to India after my MA in Medieval Studies, I found that while there was a new wave of writers producing really well-written narrative history for adults, history written for young readers still tended to be stodgy and dull. I wanted to change that and that's why I wrote this book. 

The Mughal period is among the best-documented periods of Indian history, so we were lucky to have a wealth of primary sources (in translation) and secondary sources to draw on, including Persian court chronicles, European traders' accounts, and memoirs and letters written by members of the royal family as well as scholarly works written about the Mughals from the British colonial period onwards. The enormous quantity of material available was actually a bit daunting, because we had to find a way to write about three very eventful centuries in less than 150 pages! It took us a while to distil all of our research into prose that was both comprehensive and enjoyable for our readers. For the art, we looked at dozens of digitized miniatures and manuscript illuminations from the period, which were of great value in helping us decide how to design and illustrate the book.

I came to the Institute for Medieval Studies with a background in English literature, so I was already familiar with close reading and textual analysis, but what I learned was how to apply those skills to historical texts.

For instance, having studied how medieval romances and Norse sagas can tell us about a particular community's chivalric or heroic ideals definitely helped me see how the emperor Jahangir uses his memoirs to present himself as a just king according to the ideals set out in Islamic theology and Persian literature.

Similarly, my dissertation on the performative violence of chivalric culture in Chrétien de Troyes's romances and the Histoire de Guillame le Maréchal and having studied medieval tournaments and their place within courtly culture proved very useful when I was reading about Mughal courtly culture. Much like the medieval tournament, the qamargah, an elaborate Mongol-style hunt, functioned as a performative arena within which both emperors and the aristocracy displayed their capacity to inflict violence. The historical contexts are different, of course, but the skills I learned at Leeds while studying the courtly culture of medieval Europe helped me navigate the courtly culture of the Mughals as well.

I certainly hope so! For my next history project, I'm working on putting together a comics anthology that focuses on women's roles in different periods in Indian history. As with the history of women elsewhere in the world, I believe there isn't enough work that spotlights women's active role in politics and governance, trade and military campaigns across historical periods in India, and I'd like to change that. I'd also like to write about the many traders, mercenaries, refugees and others who travelled to India from the Near East, Africa and Europe in the early modern period because I'm fascinated by how people engage with each other across cultures.