The Emperor Who Never Was

by Supriya Gandhi

Though family relations between siblings and co-wives were potentially fraught, it is not unheard of to see expressions of love and loyalty for a spouse. It would not be an overstatement to say that anyone growing up in Jahangir’s India would be familiar with the idea of romantic love, ishq, in Persian lyric poetry. Passionate and unrequited, ishq is frequently likened to a malady. It is also a central metaphor conveying the soul’s yearning for divine union. But there was also room for another understanding of love as the companionship and intimacy of a married couple. Jahangir writes that he did not think anyone in the whole world was fonder of him than his wife, Nur Jahan.13 Later chroniclers would celebrate the deep bond between Arjumand and her husband. At the time of Dara Shukoh’s birth, Khurram and Arjumand had not spent time apart since their marriage; indeed, they never did. Their “mutual friendship and rapport,” remarked the court historian Mirza Amin Qazwini (fl. 1645), “reached such a height as was never found between any husband and wife in all the classes of sultans or other people.” Their love was not based merely on “carnal desire,” but on their “inner and outer good qualities,” as well as on “physical and spiritual harmony.”14

  Such conjugal attachments, though, were not predicated on monogamy. Mughal royal men not only had access to concubines, but they also married multiple times, a practice sanctioned by the Quran and the Prophet’s personal example as well as by the courtly cultures of India, Central Asia, Iran, and beyond.

  Indeed, while still betrothed to Arjumand, in November 1610, Khurram first wed the daughter of another Iranian nobleman, Mirza Husain Safavi.15 The wedding was celebrated with pomp. Qazwini later described the festivities as rivaling the beauty of the famous gardens of Eram in ancient Iran.16 The bride’s father was a descendant of Shah Ismail (d. 1524), the founder of the Safavid dynasty in Iran. Most marriages in the royal family were to some measure informed by political expediency, and this was no exception. There is good reason to suspect that Jahangir arranged this match after Arjumand’s paternal uncle, Muhammad Sharif, was implicated in a conspiracy to assassinate Jahangir and was subsequently executed.17 The plot’s mastermind was Jahangir’s eldest son Khusrau, who harbored hopes of the throne.

  In August 1611, ten months after their wedding, Khurram’s wife, who was known as Qandahari Mahal in the chronicles, gave birth to a daughter named Purhunar Bano.18 Had she delivered a son, she would probably have had a more prominent role in Khurram’s life. By now, the young prince was already making arrangements for his marriage to Arjumand, which would take place early the next year.

  The fortunes of Arjumand’s family had brightened dramatically. In the same year, 1611, Jahangir married her paternal aunt Mehr-un-Nisa, “Sun among Women,” a recently widowed thirty-four-year-old. After Mehr-un-Nisa’s husband Sher Afgan, the “Lion Tosser,” was in 1607, she had attached herself as attendant to Ruqaiya Begam, Jahangir’s elderly stepmother, who, being childless, had raised the future emperor. Mehr-un-Nisa won the emperor’s heart four years after the death of her husband, when he spotted her at a court bazaar to celebrate the Persian new year.19 He renamed her Nur Mahal, “Light of the Palace,” after his own given name Nur-ud-Din, “Light of the Faith.” Later, in 1616, he would give her the more grandiose appellation, Nur Jahan, “Light of the World.”20 Shortly after their wedding, her father Itimad-ud-Daula, who was Arjumand’s grandfather, was brought out of house arrest and appointed minister in charge of the kingdom’s finances. Arjumand’s father, Abu-l-Hasan, became the Khan-i saman, the head chamberlain responsible for the imperial household’s intricate workings, a position that required great managerial finesse. Jahangir later granted him the title Asaf Khan. With all these pieces in place, it was only fitting that Arjumand and Khurram’s wedding soon be finalized.21

  Three years after the wedding, celebrations were warranted once more with the birth of Dara Shukoh, Khurram’s firstborn son. As the first son of a third son, Dara was merely one of several male children in the extended Mughal family. Yet, after fathering a son with Nur Jahan’s niece, and winning a splendid victory in Mewar, Khurram’s status soared even higher, especially in contrast to that of his brothers. The eldest of his half-brothers, Khusrau, born of the Rajput Raja Mansingh’s daughter, had disgraced himself years earlier by scheming against his father, in a bid for the throne even before the death of his grandfather, Akbar. During the end of his life Akbar favored his grandson Khusrau as the heir apparent in direct opposition to his son Jahangir, who had him all but imprisoned. Sensing a potential threat from Khusrau, Jahangir had already made his second son, Parwez, the heir apparent. Parwez was half-brother to both Khurram and Khusrau. His mother, Sahib Jamal, was herself a cousin of Akbar’s foster-brother Zain Khan, who bore the Turkish sobriquet Koka, indicating his status as a brother through milk-kinship.

  Dispatched by his father, Jahangir, at the age of sixteen, Parwez set out on an ill-fated expedition to Mewar. Khusrau, resentful, was upset that Jahangir did not install him as governor in Bengal, where he would have had a measure of independence. So the elder prince surreptitiously left Agra for the Punjab with his men. Meanwhile, Jahangir had Khusrau followed in hot pursuit, instructing that he be captured, and killed if necessary. While recounting this episode in his memoirs, Jahangir quotes a line of verse: “Sovereignty brooks no bonds between fathers and sons; an emperor has no relatives.”22

  Though the emperor does not tell his readers, the line is taken directly from the Iskandar-nama, a famous Persian narrative poem celebrating the heroic exploits of Alexander the Great, by the renowned Persian poet Nizami Ganjawi (d. 1209). Written as a masnawi, a poetic form used, above all, for epics, mystical allegories, and romances, the poem chronicles how Alexander fused his quest for mystical knowledge with his vast ambitions to rule the entire world. Alexander, styled here as a pious conqueror and the quintessential philosopher-king, had long been a model for Muslim royal authority even before the storied days of the Abbasid caliphs. The verses from this particular passage reflect the sublime and terrifying power of kings. They conclude with the charged observation that “toward his own son a king shows no love.”23 Jahangir’s vast collection of illuminated manuscripts included a prized copy of Nizami’s quintet, in which the tale of Alexander can be found. This text, he notes, contained exquisite miniatures executed by the “great masters.”24

  Khusrau was eventually defeated in Lahore and was apprehended while trying to ford the Chenab River. Jahangir, reluctant to put him to death, had him blinded instead. Over the next few decades, several European visitors to Mughal India reported different versions of the gory punishment. An anonymous Persian source, evidently witness to the events, mentions that Khusrau was blinded with a sharp wire. This is reminiscent of an episode in which Jahangir’s grandfather Humayun had the eyes of his brother Kamran Mirza scratched out with a needle. The emperor reportedly later softened toward his son, sending physicians to attempt to partially reverse the damage to his vision. Jahangir also met Khusrau in Agra before the move to Ajmer, after being encouraged to do so by his wives and daughters. The disabled prince was compelled to accompany the emperor’s retinue as a hostage wherever they went, though he did not fully abandon his own imperial ambitions.25

  It was impossible to predict at Dara Shukoh’s birth what his future might hold, though the victory against Mewar had solidified his father’s position now as the favored prince. At the time of Khurram’s campaign in Mewar, his elder brother Parwez headed the Mughal armies in the Deccan. Stationed on the banks of the Tapti River in Burhanpur, the capital city of a region in central India dotted with Chishti Sufi shrines, Parwez supervised the war against the neighboring sultanate of Ahmadnagar. Before the emperor Akbar’s death in 1605, it had looked as though Ahmadnagar might slip easily into Mughal hands. But just two years later, a powerful former slave and military officer from Abyssinia, Malik Ambar (d. 1626), had propped up the reigning Nizamshahi dynasty of Ahmadnagar, resisting a Mughal takeover. Nevertheless, years later when Parwez reached Burhanpur, he had a
good opportunity to make a name for himself as an administrator and military commander. Though the emperor was in his prime, the question of succession could come up at any moment. With no established rule determining who would succeed the throne, it behooved a prince to rack up military experience and consolidate his power and influence.

  * * *

  DARA SHUKOH WAS STILL AN INFANT in Ajmer with his family, when in the third week of December 1615, two Englishmen residing in the city made their way south. They were a rather oddly matched pair. One, William Edwards, was a merchant adventurer who had been serving as the East India Company’s agent at the Mughal court since February of that year and had styled himself as King James’s envoy.26 The other, Thomas Coryate, was a traveler who had walked all the way from Jerusalem to Agra and then had turned around and gone to Ajmer when he discovered that the court of the “most mighty Monarch, the Great Mogul” had shifted base.27 There he fell in with a group of nine compatriots, all affiliated with the newly formed trading company.28

  The loquacious Coryate wore the garb of the places he lived in, and had acquired a smattering of languages, including Arabic, Turkish, Hindi, and Persian. He published two detailed accounts of his journeys while abroad. The travels were as much for the benefit of an audience back home as for his own pleasure.29 He was ever eager to hobnob with distinguished people from his country. In a letter from the Ajmer court, Coryate addresses his “fraternity,” a salon of regular drinking partners who frequented the Mermaid Tavern in London and whose members included the likes of the English bard William Shakespeare. Coryate mentions that he and Edwards were en route to receive “a very generous and worthy English Knight,” whom Coryate described as a “deare friend.”30 News of the arrival uplifted Coryate, who was already enjoying the most “pancraticall and athleticall” of health in Ajmer.

  Coryate’s guest was none other than Sir Thomas Roe (d. 1644), the first ambassador from England to the Mughal court. Roe had landed in September at the western port city of Surat, where four years earlier Jahangir had allowed the English to establish a trading factory.31 From this toehold, English merchants battled the Portuguese to cut into their trading monopoly over large sections of India’s western coast.32 Roe’s predecessor, Edwards, had recently obtained a formal, if temporary, farman, an imperial decree that secured the East India Company’s trade at Surat. This move was designed to protect English trading interests against competing interference from the Portuguese and the Dutch. Traveling north via Burhanpur, where he met Parwez, Khurram’s elder brother, Roe hoped to prevail upon Jahangir to grant more permanent trading privileges and autonomy to the English to pursue their mercantile interests.

  The ambassador arrived, ill and exhausted, accompanied by a group of English attendants. He was in his mid-thirties, and bearded. While in India, Roe always wore the full dress of an English aristocrat, complete with starched ruffled collar and cuffs. Coryate immediately welcomed him with an “eloquent oration.” For Roe, Coryate would cut an eccentric figure, not entirely flattering to English interests before the Mughal emperor. The men spent the night in tents pitched in a field before proceeding to Ajmer. Once there, Roe collapsed and took to his bed, where he remained for several days.33

  Roe’s journey from Surat had been trying. He felt harassed by the governor of Surat, Zulfiqar Khan, who confiscated gifts meant for the emperor and sought payment for their return. Importantly for Roe’s relations with the court, Zulfiqar Khan served as Khurram’s deputy. The prince had recently been granted control over Gujarat. Khurram maintained investments in the Indian Ocean and the Red Sea, as did the Queen Mother, known as Maryam Zamani, “Mary of the Age,” and the powerful Nur Mahal, soon to be titled Nur Jahan.34 Throughout his dealings at the court, Roe would meet the most resistance from Khurram, his aunt Nur Mahal, and her brother Asaf Khan. The English ambassador set out for the Mughal court, aiming not only to secure trading rights for the East India Company but also to redress his humiliations at the hands of the local governor.35

  The town that murmured and bustled beyond Roe’s walls in Ajmer had swelled considerably since the emperor’s arrival two years earlier. While there were the several noblemen and women who accompanied Jahangir, there were also the thousands of others, seldom mentioned in histories, who provided the elite with services needed to maintain their lavish lifestyles. Tent-pitchers, horse-groomers, camel-drivers, torch-bearers, palanquin-lifters, and elephant-mahauts toiled along with water-carriers, maidservants, and cooks. Messengers, with bells on their belts announcing themselves, ran miles every day, many fueled with stimulants and soothed by opium. Jugglers, musicians, and dancers entertained; among them were Persian-crooning lolonis and domnis who sang in Hindavi. Petty shopkeepers sold provisions, often at the mercy of government overseers who extracted their commissions.36 But the soldiers and those responsible for feeding and housing them would have been the most numerous of all Ajmer’s temporary residents. And we can assume that those whom we would today call sex workers, though marginalized and vilified, plied their trade to locals and outsiders alike.

  In many respects, Ajmer was a microcosm of the kingdom. The entire population of the subcontinent was nearly one hundred and fifty million according to one estimate, second only to China. European travelers frequently commented on both the opulence of the Indian elite and on the immense population of Indian cities. Exaggerated accounts of population size could act as metonyms for the subcontinent’s wealth and fecundity; yet they also point to the sheer magnitude of a thriving society that flowed with people.37 The ranks of the Mughal ruling elite, however, were much smaller. Akbar had over seventy five thousand nobles at the very lowest ranks of the aristocracy. At the highest echelons, there were about one thousand, while, during Jahangir’s reign, that number expanded to roughly fifteen hundred.38

  Each nobleman commanded a fixed number of horsemen according to his mansab, or rank, in a formalized hierarchy. Depending on his pay grade, which was granted by the emperor, a nobleman drew income from the taxes on lands allocated to him. He used these funds for his own expenses and to support an army placed at the emperor’s disposal. Many émigrés and local elites sought to enrich themselves through the mansabdari system, which reached its classic form during the bureaucratic reforms of Akbar’s reign.39

  The Mughal nobility did not hail from a single group or clan. It was an ethnically diverse aristocracy, claiming members with Indian Muslim, Rajput, Maratha, Afghan, Iranian, and Turani (i.e., Central Asian) backgrounds. From the late sixteenth to the mid-seventeenth century, immigrants from Iran or their descendants came to take an increasing share of these positions.40 Apart from the Mughal nobility, there were elites affiliated with other Indian kingdoms, vassals to the Mughal court. Other powerful figures included religious authorities, such as ulama and Sufis, some of whom presided over large endowments, as well as wealthy merchants and bankers. Nevertheless, their numbers, too, were relatively small compared with the masses who populated the subcontinent. Like other urban centers in India, Ajmer also had a thriving population that was neither destitute nor exceedingly wealthy. “Middle class,” however, is perhaps too homogenizing and anachronistic to refer to the myriad professional groups of scribes, accountants, revenue collectors, and other employees of the vast and expanding Mughal bureaucracy, as well as the merchants, money changers, physicians, and others whose means of sustenance were “independent of feudal property.”41

  Jahangir’s kingdom was a busy crossroads for overseas and domestic traders traveling by land and sea. The imperial family had financed their own trading ventures with ships ferrying pilgrims and merchants across the Indian Ocean for the annual pilgrimage to Mecca. Though the English agents—called “factors” after the factories they established for trade—were conspicuous by their dress, they were by no means the only “firangis” to visit Ajmer. Portuguese merchants and Jesuit missionaries had been frequenting the Mughal court since the days of Akbar.42

  The emperor’s lengthy halt in Ajmer
attracted sellers of rare and luxury goods. Jahangir praises the delectable pomegranates of Yazd and the melons of Kariz that Iranian merchants brought to Ajmer, remarking that “it was as though I never tasted a melon or pomegranate before.”43 These foods arrived in such abundance that the courtiers and nobles got a share of them too. Oftentimes melons made the long journey from Badakhshan, while pomegranates and other fruits and nuts, like apples, pears, quinces, almonds, dates, raisins, hazelnuts, and pistachios, came from Qandahar or Kabul.44 Packed snow and crushed ice were brought in from the steeps of the Himalayas, while porters lugged Jahangir’s drinking water all the way from the banks of the Ganges on their shoulders in large sealed copper pots suspended on poles. Hindu royalty, too, regularly imbibed this holy water that the less privileged carefully hoarded for end-of-life rituals. From Akbar’s time onward, it became an imperial custom to import drinking water from the sacred river, which was referred to in Persian as ab-i hayat, the “elixir of life.”45

  But even without the influx of aristocrats with their servants and soldiers, Ajmer had its own local economy centered around Khwaja Muin-ud-Din Chishti’s shrine. Pilgrims visited regularly; their numbers rose during the annual urs, the celebration of a saint’s death anniversary when he was thought to be united with the divine. The infirm, the needy, couples wishing for children—people of all sects and persuasions—jostled with magicians and acrobats, ascetics and paramours. Vendors moved through the crowds on foot, peddling their sweets, toys, and sundry trinkets; as a contemporary Dutch merchant observed, no one who visited these shrines returned without having bought something for their children.46

  Coryate, who was sharing quarters with Roe, made himself quite at home, studying Persian and busying himself with his travelogue of curiosities. Never one to miss an opportunity for virtuosic displays of showmanship, Coryate once stood below Jahangir’s jharoka window, wearing a mendicant’s garb. There, he delivered a Persian oration to the emperor. Coryate called himself a faqir darvesh (poor dervish) and a jahangashta (globetrotter) who had come from a faraway kingdom (wilayat). Over time, this Persian term for dominion, or region, would become synonymous with Europe in general and England in particular. Coryate’s reasons for coming to India were to see His Majesty’s “blessed face,” His Majesty’s elephants, and the Ganges River, and, lastly, to obtain a letter of recommendation from His Majesty to visit Timur’s tomb in Samarqand. The emperor, much amused, tossed him a hundred silver rupees and warned him that as a Christian, he would not be safe in Samarqand. The impecunious Coryate was well pleased to receive the money, to Roe’s consternation. Roe deemed the gift a humiliation, as though Coryate were a beggar. Always the hero of his own stories, Coryate retorts that he ordered the ambassador to “cease nibling” at him.47 In his journal of the embassy, Roe describes life at the Mughal court as a continual performance, sharing “soe much affinitye with a Theatre” particularly in “the manner of the king in his gallery, the great men lifted on a stage as actors, the vulgar below gazing on.”48