This dissertation is a distinct reflection on Shāhnāma manuscripts and their making in the Sub-continent. It offers the first in-depth discussion on Ḥūr Shāhnāma manuscript and categorizes it as an example of Sub-imperial Mughal art. It also objectifies peculiar characteristics of Sub-imperial Mughal art of painting. In doing so it denotes a marked sophistication and creativity in Sub-imperial Mughal art. It also significantly alters prevailing understanding of the production of the manuscripts in the political, social and aesthetic milieu of the Mughals. Sub-imperial Mughal art needs to be explored on its own terms as a response to immense socio-political and cultural changes as well as the religious sensibilities. Examples of Sub-imperial art evoke multiple references to their mixed cultural and aesthetic heritage. Most scholarship on the Mughal art of the book in general and the Sub-imperial Mughal in particular has described these manuscripts as a result of the transmission of a powerful influence firstly from Iran to the imperial Mughal and from imperial Mughal to the Sub-imperial. Such an assessment firstly acknowledges the hegemony of Persian visual traditions in Mughal manuscripts and paintings and secondly it lends an air of supremacy to prevailing Mughal aesthetics over the Sub-imperial inclusive of Rajput, Deccani and or Kashmiri etc. It oversimplifies the nature of these artworks, means of their production and the context in which they were created. In addition, it misrepresents the systems of knowledge in India, diversity and electicity of Islamic epistemology, role of the artists as well as the patron involved in the creation of these masterpieces. It has been identified that there is not just a singular, linear trail of stylistic development in terms of Sub-imperial Mughal aesthetics rather it involves a complex, interrelated mode of several aesthetic and epistemological theories that too are a product of a long and laborious journey of human development spanning over the centuries and regions. Thus the Sub-imperial Mughal art celebrates its independence from the earlier established conceptual and theoretical practices. As a matter of fact it should be realized that in Sub-imperial Mughal art several modes of expression were standardized, attuned and adjusted towards various goals. In such a laborious process sometimes common forms and visual vocabulary, borrowed from Persian culture, were used. Thus the Persian trends in book art served as a platform from which numerous ways of constructing and illustrating narrative and poetic texts sprouted, while this common Persian tradition also provided a base for making claims of cultural sophistication or for the legitimating of new and local cultural phenomenons. In such an effort the old historic texts like that of Shāhnāma-i Firdausi gets a complete make over allowing a whole new meaning to it. In it’s broader scope and through Shāhnāma manuscripts this study traces the development of Persian, Mughal and Sub-imperial Mughal aesthetics and ultimately compares these aesthetic concerns within East and with that of West in a particular period of time.