The Mughal empire that controlled northern India and the five sultanates that ruled the Deccan plateau of southern India during the late 16th and early 17th centuries maintained strong ties, both political and cultural, to Iran. Many of the noblemen at these courts were, in fact, recent immigrants from such places as Hamadan, Shiraz, and Astarabad. A continuous flow of immigrants brought Persian people, products and ideas to India. Over time, the local cultures that developed in these regions interwove Persian and Indic cultural practices in varied and complex ways. This paper will offer a preliminary discussion of a largely unpublished, richly illustrated manuscript of the Shahnama in the courtly style of the early 17th century sultanate of Bijapur. Although no colophon has yet come to light, it is likely that the manuscript was produced at the court of the Adil Shahi sultan, a major center of artistic production in this period. Its illustrated pages and text pages - four of which are now in the San Diego Museum of Art - are today spread among museums across the world and thus have eluded comprehensive study. Using close analysis of the illustrations and their relationship to the text, as well as comparison with illustrations from Shahnama manuscripts produced for the Mughal emperors, the paper will elucidate how the Shahnama was understood within Bijapuri society at this time. The way in which Bijapuri artists approached this quintessentially Persian text will be taken as suggestive of how they conceived of the role of Iran in their local society. Ultimately, it will be demonstrated that the reception of the Shahnama in India in this period was far from consistent. While the Mughals adopted the Shahnama as their own story and retold it in a local pictorial language, the Bijapuri manuscript conveys a more ambiguous message in which the Shahnama is both foreign and familiar, novel and classic.