www.outlookindia.com | Faded Leaves From A Mughal Spring

A family album may not seem much of a prize, but when Nadir Shah plundered Delhi in 1739, it was not only the Peacock Throne that caught his eye. Lying in the Mughal royal treasury was a Morocco-bound volume of 300 pages that he considered valuable enough to cart away to Persia. And no wonder: it was art connoisseur Emperor Jehangir's only surviving album of paintings and calligraphy. Acknowledged as the most important work of imperial Mughal art in the world, the Muraqqa-e-Gulshan (The Rose Garden Album) has been lying for the last 262 years in the Persian royal collection. It was shifted to the 19th century Golestan Palace in Teheran, almost untouched, unseen and miraculously intact. Nadir Shah's loot is now art historian Milo Beach's bounty—the 'Muraqqa-e-Gulshan', Emperor Jehangir's unseen opus, disinterred from Iran's cloistered royal galleries.