By Ritambhara
Ustad Mansur’s Siberian crane painting, a signed study held at the Indian Museum, Kolkata, records a bird that India has since lost. The Convention on Migratory Species records that the last pair to winter in India was seen at Keoladeo National Park, Bharatpur, in 2001-02. Mansur made his study for the Mughal emperor Jahangir, more than a century before the naturalist Peter Simon Pallas named the species in 1773.
A court painter who studied animals
Ustad Mansur joined the Mughal court around 1590 and worked on illustrated histories for the emperor Akbar. Under Jahangir, who ruled from 1605 to 1627, he turned to single studies of birds, animals and flowers. Jahangir gave him the title Nadir al-Asr, “Wonder of the Age”. In his memoir, the Tuzuk-i-Jahangiri, the emperor ranked Mansur and the painter Abu’l Hasan as the two best artists of his own and his father’s reigns.
Jahangir wanted the animals he collected recorded. Mansur painted a turkey brought from Goa, now in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. In 1619 a falcon sent by Shah Abbas of Persia was mauled by a cat and died within a week. Jahangir admired its markings and ordered Mansur “to paint and preserve” its likeness.
Ustad Mansur and the bird in the Kashmir stream
In 1620 Mansur travelled with Jahangir to Kashmir. At the spring of Sukh Nag the emperor watched a bird diving in a stream. “In this stream I saw a bird like a saj,” he wrote, in the translation by Alexander Rogers edited by Henry Beveridge. Jahangir had two caught to check their feet and wrote: “Its feet were not webbed like a duck’s.” He then “ordered Nadiru-l-`asr Ustad Mansur to draw its likeness.” The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, quotes this passage beside a Mansur folio titled Diving Dipper and Other Birds.
Jahangir’s memoir also records the Kashmir flowers. “The flowers that are seen in the territories of Kashmir are beyond all calculation,” he wrote, adding that Mansur had painted “more than 100” of them. The memoir dates Mansur’s natural history commissions closely:
- 1618: Mansur named Nadir al-Asr in the emperor’s memoir
- 1619: Persian falcon painted after its death
- 1620: Kashmir diving bird drawn at Sukh Nag
- 1620: more than 100 Kashmir flowers painted
What the Siberian crane painting records today
The Siberian crane once wintered in flocks at Keoladeo National Park in Bharatpur, Rajasthan. The Convention on Migratory Species records a steady fall in winter counts there and a final pair in 2001-02. Deccan Herald also dates the last Indian sighting to 2002. The IUCN Red List classes the Siberian crane as Critically Endangered. Its surviving eastern population winters in China, chiefly at Poyang Lake. The International Crane Foundation put that population at almost 7,000 birds in December 2024.
Ustad Mansur’s Siberian crane painting is now a dated record of a bird that India lost within living memory. Mansur drew what was in front of him with exact care, a habit later Indian naturalists such as Salim Ali carried into field ornithology. His studies ask readers today to record the birds and plants around them in the same way, while those species remain.
