Rustam Lassos his steed Rakhsh

A Mughal-period painting by Muhammad Sharif, painted around 1591, shows a moment from Firdausi's Shahnama, where the main character Rustam catches the horse Rakhsh, and ends up keeping him as his companion for the rest of the story. My first impression looking at this painting was that it clearly belongs to the Islamic period, and this belief comes through in the inscriptions, the attire style, and especially the horses. The painting's focus is primarily on horses, who are in different sizes, from young foals being fed to full grown adults, which makes sense to me given how central horses were to mobility and status during this era. The main character, who I take to be Rustam, is trying hard to get hold of a horse using a rope, the horse closest to him is a pale pink or mauve color, tied to another rearing yellow horse just behind it, both caught mid-motion as if startled or resisting. He has a bow and arrows strapped to his left side, which signals to me a sign of nobility or his warrior status rather than an ordinary herder. The setting feels like an open field out in nature, and while the main action happens in the center, other figures around him seem to be going about ordinary tasks, tending horses, standing around. There's also a figure seated higher up among the rocks, wearing a red cap and dark robe, who appears to be holding a long thin object, possibly a pipe, staff, or tool, I couldn't identify exactly what it is, but it adds another small human detail to the busy scene. What's actually going on in the story is that Rustam's adventures come from the Shahnama, which is basically one of the biggest names in Persian literature, kind of like an epic every artist wanted to paint scenes from. There's also a documented precedent worth mentioning: an earlier version of this exact same episode exists from the Safavid period in Tabriz, around 1525, attributed to the painter Mir Musavvir, made for Shah Tahmasp's own copy of the Shahnama. Comparing the two versions is useful, the earlier Safavid painting reflects the Persian court tradition that Muhammad Sharif's own father, Khwaja Abd al-Samad, trained in, while this later Mughal version, made roughly 65 years afterward in India, shows how the same literary moment was reinterpreted once it moved into the Mughal atelier. You can see that Persian influence in the rocky, decorative landscape and the strongly outlined horses, while the sheer density of detail, all the animals, plants, and small human activities, feels distinctly Mughal, since that court favored busy, richly populated compositions. This kind of manuscript illustration was standard practice for the period, since most Mughal paintings were commissioned specifically as book illustrations rather than standalone works. In the end, I don't think this painting is really about catching a horse. It's about the beginning of a relationship that runs through the whole epic, and the artist uses the landscape, the surrounding animals, and the small human moments happening around Rustam to help tell that larger story.