But Dara Shukoh’s life story, set in the religious and political landscape of seventeenth-century India, is a far more intricate and complex mosaic. Dara’s spiritual journey was integrally linked to his role as ruler. He was a prince brought up to think of himself as a future emperor; indeed, he might very well have become one. Dara Shukoh developed sustained religious and intellectual interests, perhaps to a greater degree than any other Mughal prince before him, though his elder sister Jahanara accompanied him in exploring Sufi devotional practice. He very consciously sought to advance spiritually, first under the tutelage of his Qadiri Sufi teachers and later by engaging with a range of religious figures and books. However, his foremost concern was how to weld the life of a prince, enmeshed in the material world, with the cultivation of his inner self. His writings show that he viewed his spiritual activities as inextricably linked to his role as a royal. For him, these two goals did not clash; indeed, they were inseparably connected.
Dara Shukoh was not a misfit in the Mughal court. He tapped ingredients of political authority—asceticism and piety—that sovereigns in the subcontinent had long used. For example, both his great-grandfather Akbar and his grandfather Jahangir made public decisions to abstain from animal flesh. They each made barefoot pilgrimages to the shrine of the twelfth-century Iraqi Sufi Muin-ud-Din Chishti in Ajmer. They also met with non-Muslim religious figures, including Hindus and Christians, and had artists memorialize these encounters. Of course, Mughal emperors were not primarily humble devotees. They were seen foremost as divine sovereigns. A distinctive notion of divine kingship arose in Mughal India, gathering up a profusion of symbols and idioms of power from Greco-Persian, Central Asian, and Indic traditions.18 Dara Shukoh engaged with these ideas and practices. Instead of rejecting rulership, he sought to define Mughal sovereignty in his own way.
The prince’s interest in Indic religions continued a legacy fostered by Muslim rulers before him. Dara Shukoh was never a liberal, nor did he promote interfaith harmony in the modern senses of these terms. Yet he oversaw an extraordinary exercise in cross-cultural understanding, particularly during the last few years of his short life. The intellectual fruits of this period form his most enduring bequest.
The courts of Muslim rulers the world over had long nurtured a tradition of translation. In Baghdad, the Abbasid caliphs ordered masses of Greek works to be translated into Arabic. Even before the Mughal conquest of Hindustan, at the time of the Delhi Sultans, Muslim rulers and aristocrats in the subcontinent fueled a hugely generative encounter between Sanskrit and Persian knowledge systems. They mined Sanskrit learning for manuals on topics such as music, astronomy, and the care of domestic animals, which they rendered into Persian. This process gained a new momentum when, under Akbar, in the 1570s, the Mughal court started to commission Persian translations of several Sanskrit works, including the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. Akbar’s court also produced writings such as the Ain-i Akbari, which surveys the subcontinent’s terrain, peoples, and practices.19
Through the works he authored or sponsored, Dara Shukoh gradually went beyond many of these previous projects to advocate a notion of religious universalism. He came to believe that a common core of truth underlay traditions as different as Islam and Hinduism. Non-Muslims too, embraced various means to contemplate and grasp God’s oneness or even the oneness of all existence. Indeed, some of their texts and techniques, he felt, were even more effective than abstruse discussions of Islamic theology and mysticism. Like other Muslims of the time who were intrigued by Hindu thought, Dara never renounced Islam. His universalist position allowed him to embrace ideas from other traditions while remaining a Muslim.
The prince was not alone in advocating the idea of a universal font of monotheism. By the time Dara Shukoh began his own study of Indic religions, the court, which still supported Sanskrit scholars, was no longer driving the projects of interpretation and translation that had once thrived under its canopy. Other Muslim and Hindu scholars, on the fringes of the court, or far removed from court patronage, composed Persian works based on Sanskrit or Hindavi texts. For instance, one Shaikh Sufi produced at least six renditions of Indic treatises on subjects such as yogic breath control, and techniques of liberation from the material world.20 Like Dara Shukoh, such writers and translators often treated their Indic sources as repositories of an esoteric wisdom, equivalent to the truth revealed in Sufi works. These short tracts traversed the subcontinent. Their paths were carved by the increasing numbers of people, Hindus as well as Muslims, who could read Persian. Dara Shukoh’s studies were thus part of a larger conversation spanning time and geography. He popularized an idea that was by no means uniquely his. After his death, the texts that he composed and sponsored continued to find readers.
Dara Shukoh’s life also offers an intimate glimpse into his father’s reign. Many historians understand the period of Shah Jahan’s rule (1627–1658) as a time of creeping conservatism. They often view it as a transition from the rule of his more liberal predecessors, Akbar and Jahangir, to that of Shah Jahan’s successor Alamgir, regarded as a bastion of orthodoxy. On the one hand, Shah Jahan is known for the glittering perfection of his miniature paintings as well as for the luxurious artifacts and opulent architecture he commissioned. On the other hand, Shah Jahan underwent periods of abstinence, kept a beard, and abolished the full prostration from his court ceremonies. In Qanungo’s words, “The character of Shah Jahan partook of a double nature, a combination of Muslim orthodoxy and the profane tradition of the age of Akbar.”21
This assessment is problematic, because the polarized categories of orthodoxy and profanity do not accurately reflect the attitudes that prevailed during Shah Jahan’s reign. These labels stem from decades of colonial historiography that privileges the study of the lives and larger-than-life personalities of Mughal rulers. However, Shah Jahan, too, is responsible for shaping his later memory. The emperor became renowned for the tight control he exerted over his image. For instance, he carefully supervised the work of his painting ateliers. He had the official histories of his reign revised when they did not meet his satisfaction.
Today Shah Jahan is not known for his mystical proclivities or deep ties to Sufi personages beyond the routine patronage expected of a ruler. His public image did not appear to have much room for displays of devotion to Sufis. But what is often ignored in histories of Shah Jahan is how closely the lives of the emperor and his two eldest children, Jahanara and Dara, were aligned. The three lived and traveled with each other throughout almost the entirety of Shah Jahan’s reign. It was Shah Jahan who first introduced Dara Shukoh to the Qadiri Sufi Miyan Mir, a figure who would have a lasting impact on the prince’s trajectory. Later, the emperor, of his own accord, maintained close relations with Miyan Mir’s order, and his successor, Mulla Shah. Indeed, with her father’s blessings, Jahanara kept up her relationship and patronage to Mulla Shah over the years. Though Dara Shukoh remained Mulla Shah’s disciple, he would later turn his attention to other Sufi teachers and to Hindu religious figures. For a better understanding of Dara Shukoh’s project of rulership, we must study, in tandem, Shah Jahan’s intellectual and spiritual activities and those of his favorite son and heir. And to fathom the story of succession in which Dara was entangled, we must look also at the rocky path by which his own father, Khurram, became the “king of the world.”
A close look at Dara Shukoh’s life and times—for our own times—is overdue. It is impossible to escape its implications for the present. But we can still choose to situate the prince in his own context, exploring the diverse voices and perspectives from the period. And we can step away from the shadow of Dara’s tragic end, approaching his story without assuming that his fate was predetermined. When we evaluate Dara primarily as a failed statesman, we overlook his contribution to ideas of Mughal kingship. The institution of kingship in Mughal India was not static. It was constantly being remade. This more generous view no longer dismisses his activities as beyond the permissible bounds
of behavior for a Mughal royal. It allows us to then gain a deeper perspective on Mughal sovereignty.
1
EMPIRE
1615–1622
JAHANGIR, THE “WORLD CONQUEROR,” had barely finished moving his court from Agra to Ajmer when he decided to go hunting. It was the end of November 1613. The forty-five-year-old emperor mounted his horse and rode with his entourage to a large water reservoir some seven miles away at Pushkar, which was surrounded by sandy, undulating plains. They crossed two ridges of the Aravalli foothills before the sacred lake, rimmed with temples both recent and old, came into view. The settlement at Pushkar was small, populated mainly by Brahmin households. Throngs of pilgrims flocked to visit its temples and holy men. The emperor’s servants set up camp on the lake’s shore.
As a rule, nobody thought to hunt in the lake’s inviolate precincts, but the emperor spent a couple of days shooting waterfowl. He also inspected a particularly magnificent temple, which, he was informed, had cost a hundred thousand rupees to build. Its patron was a certain Rana Shankar, the uncle of the neighboring kingdom’s ruler Rana Amar Singh (d. 1620). Upon seeing the statue of black stone venerated there, Jahangir shuddered in revulsion. That “loathsome statue,” he wrote later in his memoirs, “had the shape of a pig’s head, while the rest of it resembled the body of a man.” This was, of course, the Hindu deity Vishnu in the form of Varaha, the Grand Boar. Jahangir remarked that devotion to the statue was a “deficient creed of the Hindus.” Before returning to Ajmer, Jahangir ordered that it be smashed and thrown into the sacred lake. For good measure, he also drove away a yogi who frequented a nearby shrine and had the idol held there destroyed.1
Jahangir did not usually go about desecrating temples, but this was an exceptional situation. The province to which Ajmer lent its name was a frontier of sorts. Though the empire’s borders extended much farther north and west—sweeping up Qandahar, Kabul, and Swat—Ajmer adjoined Mewar, the last Rajput state to stubbornly hold out against Mughal annexation. Crushing the Varaha idol served as both a threatening provocation and a warning to Rana Amar Singh. It inaugurated the final phase of a long drawn-out war between the Mughals and the Mewar Rajputs.
Jahangir then headed back for Ajmer. Upon returning, the emperor and his entourage ascended a hill alongside the fourteenth-century Taragarh Fort perched on Ajmer’s southwestern edge. Nestled in a valley between two parallel hilltops, Ajmer was further fortified by a rampart with an adjoining moat installed by the emperor’s late father, Akbar. Known as the Daulat-khana, “fortune’s abode,” Akbar’s red sandstone fortress edged the northeast portion of the walled enclosure. The fortress where Jahangir now stayed faced the city with an enormous gate, where the emperor made daily public appearances at a latticed balcony called a jharoka. Inside, the fort concealed a lofty, airy, pillared audience hall in a walled garden. Farther north, behind the ridge, the town bordered the expansive Anasagar reservoir with lapping waves. On its shore was a landscaped garden, where Jahangir spent candlelit evenings with the women of his household.2 But the city’s real hub was in its southwest, on the banks of the Jhalra spring—the well-tended dargah of Khwaja Muin-ud-Din, an Iraqi Sufi who, four centuries earlier, established the Chishti order in the subcontinent. Jahangir’s own father, Akbar, had walked here all the way from Agra to pray for an heir. Visitors would cross three large paved courtyards to pay their respects at the saint’s shimmering marble tomb inlaid with gold and mother of pearl.3
A fortnight or so after arriving in Ajmer, the emperor dispatched his third son, the twenty-one-year-old Khurram, to Udaipur so that the prince could conclude the ongoing military campaign against Rana Amar Singh. Khurram pitched camp at Lake Pichola with his armies, sending a steady stream of soldiers to chase the Mewar rana out from his capital Udaipur, farther and farther into the hills.
With his kingdom ravaged after more than a year of grueling warfare, the rana finally capitulated in February 1615. Arriving to meet Khurram with whatever gifts he could muster, Amar Singh grasped the prince’s ankle in an extravagant performance of surrender. Khurram, in turn, reportedly lifted the rana’s head and pressed it to his breast, in order to console him—a gesture both benevolent and patronizing.4 Mewar was now a vassal of the Mughal state. The contract between them spared the rana the further humiliation of submitting before Jahangir. Instead, Amar Singh sent his son Karan as his envoy to accompany Khurram back to the court at Ajmer.
Submission of Rana Amar Singh to Prince Khurram.
On the first of March, Khurram headed a victory march through the city. He then made a grand entry into the Daulat-khana’s audience hall, bringing with him the rana’s gifts as well as charitable offerings, including a thousand gold coins for the shrine of Khwaja Muin-ud-Din Chishti. In his memoirs, Jahangir writes of the pride that he felt upon seeing his victorious son. He was so overjoyed to see Khurram, he broke with protocol to hug him and shower him with kisses. The emperor’s immediate task, though, was to win over Karan. It was not enough to crush Mewar. Karan Singh, its next ruler, Jahangir writes, “had a savage disposition and had never seen a royal assembly, having grown up in the mountains.” The Rajput prince had to be groomed in Mughal etiquette, tastes, and ways so that he could become a trustworthy ally.5
Over the next several days, Jahangir treated Karan lavishly. Both he and his favorite wife, Nur Mahal, bestowed the Rajput prince with elephants, jeweled daggers, rich textiles, falcons, and gemstone prayer beads. These gifts not only showcased the emperor’s wealth and magnanimity; they also burdened Karan with obligations to the emperor. Before Karan returned home, Jahangir took the Rajput hunting. The emperor explains in his memoirs that he wanted to show off his skill in shooting with a gun. Since the time of Akbar, the hunt also had a symbolic value as a Mughal practice of taming recalcitrant nobles.6
The emperor’s men had spotted a lioness, and though Jahangir preferred to shoot only male lions, he decided to go ahead with the pursuit. Despite gusts of wind that could have interfered with his bullet’s course and an elephant who took fright upon seeing the fierce animal, Jahangir shot the beast straight between the eyes. Karan Singh was impressed. The emperor celebrated his success by chronicling the event in his memoirs.7 Jahangir also thought the event important enough to be illustrated. A miniature painting survives from the time; in it, the emperor appears in the upper left center, sitting cross-legged atop an elephant with his rifle poised upward. He turns to face Karan who is following behind on another elephant, his right arm crooked at the elbow, lifted behind his head in amazement. Flanked by others on elephants and a horse, the two face a clearing in the midst of which the dead lioness lies, belly exposed, by a stream. The viewer’s line of sight is directed to the emperor, as nearly all the men portrayed look up at him, pointing or gesturing in wondrous awe toward his prey.8
* * *
ON THE THIRTIETH OF MARCH, around the same time of the month as Jahangir and Karan Singh’s hunting expedition, Khurram’s second wife Arjumand Bano went into labor. The twenty-two-year-old princess was of Iranian origin, the daughter of Asaf Khan, brother of Jahangir’s wife Nur Mahal. She was thus Jahangir’s niece through marriage as well as his daughter-in-law. Arjumand and Khurram were betrothed in 1607. His father, the emperor, placed the ring on her finger himself.9 Five years later, in 1612, the couple celebrated with a glittering wedding.
Dara Shukoh was Arjumand’s third child in as many years. The first child was born a year after their marriage—a girl named Hur-un-Nisa, “Houri among women.” Arjumand gave birth to their second-born child, also a girl, almost exactly a year later in March 1614, and called her Jahanara, “Ornament of the world.” This time, she delivered a boy after the second of the night’s four watches had passed. Soon after the birth, the emperor himself named the baby Dara Shukoh, meaning “Majestic as Darius,” after the legendary ruler of ancient, pre-Islamic Persia.10
In his memoir, Jahangir mentions visits to Khurram’s house in Ajmer during this time. This indicate
s that at the period of Dara’s birth, Arjumand must have been staying there and not in one of the elaborate tents in which Mughal elites often led their migratory lives. She would have had with her some senior women of the household. A certain Huri Khanum, wet nurse to her daughter Jahanara, may have been among them.11 To breastfeed the newborn prince soon after his birth, there were other noblewomen too, as it was customary for Mughal princes and princesses to have wet nurses. Sometimes more than one would be employed, chosen from among the wives of high-ranking noblemen. Arjumand could thus regain her fertility early and focus on producing more children. But apart from being a means of nourishing the baby, this practice stemmed from the idea, present in the Quran and early biographical accounts of the Prophet, that milk and blood were parallel ways of creating kinship ties.12 Through one act of suckling, the newborn Dara Shukoh could instantly acquire a whole other “milk” family. The infants of the royal Mughal family were linked through ties of milk to the children of their nurses, who were considered to be their foster siblings. In fact, one should not imagine that in the Mughal imperial household, blood generated a comparable emotional bond. Princes vied with their own brothers and half-brothers for the throne, while their foster families very rarely posed such a threat. As a result, milk brothers became crucial members of a grown prince’s entourage and occupied positions of power and responsibility. Wet-nursing also gave the foster mothers a way to gather wealth and political influence.
The Emperor Who Never Was Page 2