The Emperor and the Zebra

This is a tale almost 400 years old. Mughal emperor Jehangir’s zoo had a brand new visitor — the zebra. And the emperor could not believe his eyes at the sight of this unusual, striped animal. So surprised was he that he wrote about it in his memoirs. He spoke of it as a very strange animal. So strange that some people imagined that the animal’s stripes had been painted!

The emperor decided to find out whether the zebra was indeed coloured or not.

After much investigation, he made it public that the zebra, too, was a creature created by god. The stripes were natural, they had not been painted upon!

The emperor then asked one of the two most famous artists in his empire to paint the animal. Ustad Mansur was the artist. Most Mughal paintings have great details of the rich flora and fauna of the time.