The Dodo and the Mughals
Asok Kumar Das describes how Mughal miniatures illuminate the flightless bird from the Indian Ocean, extinct since 1681.
There are many birds and animals that have become extinct or are on the verge of extinction, but none has evoked so much interest as the Dodo.
It caught the fancy of European travellers and authors and found a permanent place in popular imagination since it represented one of the last successors of a rare group of birds inhabiting the ancient world.
Dodo is the name of a strange bird found only in the Mascarene islands of Mauritius, Rodriguez and Reunion in the Indian Ocean. The islands are extremely remote, the nearest land being Madagascar, lying nearly 550 miles apart to the West, separated by a stretch of Indian Ocean more than 2,000 fathoms in depth.
Dodos were noticed by early European sailors and travellers to Mauritius; they were found in large numbers and their giant size called for immediate comparison with birds like the ostrich or crane.
It was easy to catch them, for they could not fly and moved very slowly. The first recorded account of the bird is found in the Journal of Van Neck’s expedition to the Mascarene Islands in 1598. It was, however, known in Europe from the early years of the sixteenth century.
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