The most famous example sits under a page every survey of Mughal painting reproduces: young Akbar riding the maddened elephant Hawa'i across a bridge of boats. The inscription assigns the tarh — the design, the drawing of the whole composition — to Basawan, and the amal, the painted work, to Chetar. One page, two masters, each named for his part.

This was the workshop's normal arithmetic. A senior artist drew; a colourist built the painting on top of the drawing; and on pages where likeness mattered, a third specialist could be brought in for the faces alone. Face-painting was its own trade, with its own reputations.

A designer's line under a colourist's judgement, agreeing about a picture. Where the credit survives, we can hear who is speaking. Abu'l Fazl, Akbar's minister, documented the studio around 1590 and ranked its painters by name; the inscriptions are that bureaucracy reaching the page itself.

Most pages carry no credit at all, and some credits were added later by album-keepers tidying history. So the honest reading treats every inscription as a claim, not a verdict. But the habit itself — a court that wrote its painters' names down, four centuries ago — is the whole reason this magazine can exist.