The Mughals weren’t just obsessed with empire, they were obsessed with arranging it beautifully. From gemstones to elephants, rifles to rugs, this was a world painstakingly curated into visual harmony. But this obsession with ordering things wasn’t limited to royal courts and imperial showpieces. A closer look at lesser-known sources reveals that even the everyday world of the Mughal middle ranks was a spectacle of deliberate, sensual design.

Art historian Gregory Minissale calls the Mughal world a ‘society of spectacle’ governed by ‘an almost limitless ordering of visual experiences’. In the Ain-i Akbari, composed by Akbar’s court chronicler Abul Fazl, Akbar’s courtly order reads like a material archive of taste. Rubies were prized for their blood-red hue, pearls graded for how perfectly spherical they were, and jade classified by the subtlest shifts in color. Shawls were sorted in a chromatic sequence: off-white, red-gold, blue, lilac, and finally dove grey. Even muskets were inlaid with gold and enamels and categorised by origin and craftsmanship. Everything had its place and to live beautifully was to live with order. And that order extended well beyond emperors and courtiers.

Take the Mirzanamas, conduct manuals for the Mughal gentlemen (read my published academic work on these texts here), for instance. Less known than the imperial chronicles, these are aesthetic how-to guides for aspiring mirzas, offering advice on how to curate life down to the last goblet. A mirza is told to ‘keep his feast colourful’, and to ensure that ‘whoever departs from it may feel that he has been to the feast of a mirza … bearing the fragrant smell of scent and flower’.

Elegance, here, was not ornamental. It was performative, social, and seasonal. The advice is precise: ‘If he cannot afford a cloth of gold … he should use a good white linen dinner-cloth, provided it is not spread repeatedly’. Crockery must match: ‘drinking glasses, plates, pots and demi-pots … of the same colour and of the same kind’. Even spoons get a moment of scrutiny: ‘well-chiseled white spoons’ were preferred, with china or glass being the superior option. No oily stains. No garish gold. Just good taste. Perfumes matter too. A winter house should be scented with fitna, argaja, and aloe wood; in summer, fans, floral vases, and gangajal sitalpati mats are recommended. The sensory world is tightly curated. Even the monsoon has its own aesthetic: split-reed mats or woolen broadcloth, depending on mood and means. This wasn’t about wealth; it was about discernment. The Mirzanamas suggest that beauty was not just to be admired, but cultivated.

Gardens weren’t just for emperors. ‘A house which does not have a pond and a fountain surrounded by flowerpots… is a house without enjoyment’. If a palace like Shah Jahan’s Red Fort was imagined as a giant chahar bagh, even a modest home was meant to echo that ideal in miniature. Fashion followed similar logic. In winter, a mirza should wear a dutahi (a garment with two folds) and use ‘pearls for buttons, for pearl is natural while other jewels have to be cut’. In summer, he should don ‘a silver-threaded cap’ and avoid ‘embroidered and gold-threaded’ garments that reeked of poor taste. This was a code of elegance that blended seasonal appropriateness with social signaling.

Clearly, Mughal refinement wasn’t confined to the elite. It trickled down and was emulated, imitated, not to mention, idealised. The Mirzanamas reflect a chain of taste stretching from the emperor to his middling officers, each link trying to match the polish of the one above.

If Mughal palaces were conceived as gardens, then a gentleman’s feast was curated like a courtly tableau. This was the Mughal eye at work of not just seeing, but staging, scenting, and styling. Not just looking good, but living right.