On another occasion, the Company chaplain Edward Terry witnessed Coryate climb up onto a platform during the call to prayer. He answered the muezzin with a garbled twist on the Arabic formula: “La alla illa alla, Hasaret Easa Ben-alla,” which Terry translates to “There is no God but one God, and the Lord Christ is the Son of God.” Coryate added in Hindi, “Mahomet was an impostor,” speaking loudly so that all would understand. To the chaplain’s relief, the locals ignored the entire provocation as the rant of a madman.49 Coryate felt comfortable enough in Mughal India to behave this way. Describing an earlier disputation with a Muslim in Multan, he pronounces “in the Mogol Dominions a Christian may speake much more freely than hee can in any other Mahometan Country in the World.”50
Modern European ideals of religious tolerance were still in their infancy when Coryate and his compatriots traveled to India. But these English visitors were struck by the religious diversity fostered by the Mughal state. Back in Europe, devastating sectarian wars still raged, ignited by the Protestant Reformation.51 The Englishmen would comment on Jahangir’s respect for their messiah, whom they heard the emperor call Hazrat Isa, “Lord Jesus.” They also repeated among themselves the rumor that Jahangir, son of a Rajput princess, was uncircumcised, like his non-Muslim subjects. In their view, the emperor embraced “no certain religion,” as he showed equal affection for Christians and for “Mahometans and Gentils.” The English commonly referred to the “heathens of India,” their other appellation for Hindus, as Gentiles.52 Roe recounts a drinking session with the “good King,” where Jahangir, in the warmth of wine, crooned that “Christians, Moores, Jewes” were all welcome and that he did not meddle in their faith: “they came all in loue, and he would protect them from wrong, they liued under his safety, and none should opresse them.”53 In contrast to Jahangir, Prince Khurram greeted Roe with complaints of the “abuses and drunckeness” of his factors in Surat.54
There was no way to foretell, in 1615, that the East India Company would come to rule large portions of India less than a century and a half later. Jahangir did not find it worth his while to even mention the English ambassador in his journal. Yet Roe’s anxiety about upholding his status as an ambassador of King James percolates throughout his writings on India.55 In Ajmer, though, Roe enjoyed several favorable audiences with the emperor. In his telling, Jahangir took him as a boon-companion, with frequent drinking sessions that lasted well into the night. The English ambassador nurtured his budding relations with the ruler through a gift-giving spree of gem-encrusted gold goblets, strong wine, and dainty feathered hats for the harem. Along with the chaplain and Coryate, Roe had with him a band of musicians and merchants, seeking to dazzle the court with their looking glasses and strange maps of the world. But no matter how close he got to Jahangir, Roe was repeatedly frustrated in his efforts to better secure the East India Company’s interests. Khurram, Nur Mahal, and Asaf Khan enjoyed the wonders on display, but they were less sanguine about committing themselves to exclusive trading relations with the English.56
Roe’s journals record sumptuous meetings in a pleasure palace outside Ajmer with the erudite Mir Jamal-ud-Din Husain Inju (d. 1626). An émigré from Shiraz, Jamal-ud-Din served as an ambassador for Akbar and a governor of Bengal for Jahangir. Like Roe, the Iranian aristocrat in the Mughal service kept a personal journal with a daily record of memorable events. And, just the year before, he had finished compiling a massive Persian dictionary dedicated to the emperor.57
At this palace, which was lavishly decorated with murals, Roe saw panels painted with “copyes of the French kings and other Christian Princes.” In a mirror image of Roe and his compatriots, who sought the East’s wonders and packaged them as books and illustrations, the Mughal artists conjured up images of firangis in their native attire.58 These murals, unfortunately, have not survived. But we might imagine that they were similar in ideological weight to the splendid wall paintings adorning the Chihil Sutun, the forty-pillared palace in Iran’s Isfahan. There, the portraits of other rulers, aristocrats, foreign diplomats, and merchants serve only to underscore Safavid might and glory.59
If he so wished, the émigré nobleman Jamal-ud-Din could have talked with Roe about Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, or about Euclid, Hippocrates, Galen, and Ptolemy, all of whom he addresses in his massive lexicon as well-known figures in Persian and Arabic learning. He could converse on the Greek origins of the words for geography, astronomy, and theology; wax eloquent about Hindavi poetics; engage in religious polemic by claiming that Muhammad appears foretold in the Psalms; or explain how an astrolabe worked, tracing its origin to Greek learning and citing from the astronomer Nasir-ud-Din Tusi (d. 1274) on its proper use. He could turn to zoology and ponder the pairuj, that giant fowl, also known as the “elephant chicken,” which changed color annually and, he explains, lives in the “jungles of the Portuguese” and at the “edge of the west,” by which he meant peru, the Portuguese word for the South American turkey.60 He could also present Roe with an entire word list of ancient Persian terms used in the Zand and Pazand, the Zoroastrian commentarial tradition on the Avesta, which he knew was still very alive among Parsi merchants of Gujarat.61
But of the many areas of knowledge shared between the two ambassadors, one of the more meaningful for the Indian context was their equal grasp of the story of Alexander the Great, which offered them a basic template for imperial rule. Jamal-ud-Din knew the story of Iskandar Zu-l-Qarnain well, foremost through the Persian poetry of Firdausi and Nizami. In the Persian romances, we encounter Alexander as the son of a royal Persian princess who, in a dramatic turn, discovers that he is the half-brother of Darius, the ruler of ancient Persia. Iskandar and Dara, as they are known in Persian, were familiar figures in the Mughal court. Since the time of the Delhi Sultans, Muslim potentates in India sought to emulate Iskandar’s glory. In letters and paintings, Jahangir’s father, Akbar, very consciously styled the world-conqueror in his likeness.62 In his famed quintet, Nizami sings of Iskandar as a world-traveling king (shah-i jahan-gard) who captured the throne of Khusrau and battled darkness with light the globe over, from the Chinese and the Zanj to “the black Hindus and the yellow Rus.” In the Mughal court, Iskandar came to represent the model of a sage-king who set his aspirations beyond earthly glory toward the lofty heights of heavenly wisdom and divine knowledge.63
Our European travelers also brought with them their own stories of Alexander’s conquests of India. From the beginning of their journeys, they saw in the Indian landscape traces of Alexander’s feats. Coryate himself even claims to have seen a pillar in Delhi with Greek inscriptions. The pillar, he explains, was a column erected by Alexander to commemorate his victory over India. This story, which features throughout early European accounts of the subcontinent, likely drew inspiration from one of the pillars on display in Delhi that Ashoka, the ancient emperor, had originally erected across his vast domains some hundred years after Alexander’s demise.64 The firangis also shared with their Muslim hosts the story of Alexander’s philosophical correspondence with the Brahmans. The imperial image of the emperor Alexander, as a philosopher-king in dialogue with Indian ascetics, was similarly well known in the Mughal court.
By the spring of 1616, Dara Shukoh was now a toddler, with his elder sisters, three-year-old Hur-un-Nisa and two-year-old Jahanara, to keep him company. Their new sibling was due to arrive soon as Arjumand’s pregnancy advanced. On the last day of May that year, little Hur-un-Nisa came down with a fever. This, in itself, should not have been cause for concern, except that within three days her skin also broke out in pustules, perhaps from smallpox. She died on a Wednesday in the middle of June.
For Arjumand and Khurram, the loss of their firstborn was devastating. Jahangir was inconsolable. Unable to write in his journal, he commanded Itimad-ud-Daula to record the tragedy. Wednesday, the day of the week on which the little girl’s soul fled its earthly cage to settle in paradise, was to be renamed the “Day of Loss.” On the third day after her death,
Jahangir went to Khurram’s house where he stayed for some days. He departed from there to Asaf Khan’s residence and then to the Chashma-i Nur palace gardens. During this time, he was easily moved to tears. Itimad-ud-Daula, Hur-un-Nisa’s great-grandfather, hints that the other members of the family were affected as much or even more: “If the soul of the world is treated such by her custodian, then what would befall those other servants whose lives depend on that possessor of sacred attributes and the knowledge of inner states?”65
After a fortnight, Arjumand delivered a “precious, noble pearl into the world of being”—a baby boy.66 The emperor was overjoyed and promptly named his grandson Shah Shuja, “the brave king.” Jahangir took a special liking to the infant, and Nur Jahan, it seems, took over his care. It was not uncommon for small children to be given to the care of women who had finished rearing their own, as was the case with Nur Jahan, or to those who did not have children. We have no record of what Arjumand felt about giving her baby Shuja over to her aunt and the emperor. Jahangir came to love this grandchild deeply, writing that the boy was dearer to him than life itself. Later, in 1618, when Shuja was two and a half, the boy would fall violently ill. In a vow that he kept for some time, the emperor swore to stop hunting, his favorite pastime, should Shuja recover.67 Meanwhile, with Hur-un-Nisa no more and Shuja now being raised in the emperor’s apartments, the young Dara Shukoh and his older sister Jahanara had all the more opportunity to form a close bond, one that would endure throughout their lives.
Back in Ajmer, Jahangir recalled Parwez from Burhanpur and sent Khurram to take over the campaign against Ahmadnagar in his stead. The court would be stationed in Mandu, north of Burhanpur, to oversee the operation. The disgruntled Parwez left for Allahabad, where he had been sent to keep watch while the imperial court was occupied in the south.68 Sir Thomas Roe, who accompanied the emperor to the Deccan, reports that the emperor had been warned by one of his “Khans” that removing Parwez would lead to discord between the brothers. According to Roe, Jahangir retorted, “[L]ett them fight: I am well content; and he that prooues himselfe the better Captaine shall pursue the war.”69 The ambassador, who did not know Persian, relied on multiple levels of hearsay and translation. Whether or not these were Jahangir’s own thoughts, this statement speaks to an emerging Mughal attitude toward succession.
As the imperial entourage wound its way toward Mandu in February 1617, Jahangir decided to visit Chidrup, a Hindu holy man who lived near the ancient pilgrimage town of Ujjain. Jahangir had heard of Chidrup from his father and had desired to meet him for a while, but he hesitated to call him over to the court in Agra. It would have been too much trouble to expect from the ascetic, who was getting on in years, and moreover, there was always the danger that he would rebuff the emperor. People who had truly renounced the world often did not pay heed to those with power and wealth.
The emperor halted a short distance from Ujjain, at a garden palace in Kaliyada, which had been constructed in the fifteenth century for the sultan of Mandu before Akbar had annexed the kingdom. As it was built into a river, the edifice rose out of the water, making it a cool summer retreat. From here, Jahangir took a boat to visit the ascetic. After disembarking, the emperor made the last part of the journey on foot, out of respect for the holy man.
With a keen eye for detail, Jahangir records the astonishingly tiny dimensions of the hollow, set into a hillside, in which Chidrup lived. He spent over two hours with the ascetic, noting the fine points of Chidrup’s austere habits in food and clothing. The two likely conversed in Hindavi. In the emperor’s telling, they enjoyed each other’s company. Jahangir describes Chidrup as occupied in worship of the divine reality (haqiqat), immediately identifying the ascetic as a monotheist and not an idolater. The emperor reports that Chidrup was well versed in the “science of Vedanta.” He explains to his reader that this is the same as “the science of tasawwuf.” Here, Jahangir probably means that Chidrup believed in an ultimate reality that, at some level, was identical with the individual soul–an idea familiar to those steeped in Sufi metaphysics.70 In a later account of the exchange, Jahangir’s close courtier, Mutamad Khan (d. 1639), elaborates that Chidrup “equated the vocabulary of the tasawwuf of the people of Islam with the practice of his own tasawwuf.” That is to say, the ascetic explained concepts from his own tradition by likening them to the Islamic mystical ideas with which Jahangir was conversant. Mutamad Khan also remarks that “these days the science of Vedanta is taken to mean tasawwuf,” suggesting that this equivalence was, for him, a fairly new concept.71 Clearly, there was quite a bit of oversimplification involved in equating an Indic philosophical system of intricate complexity with the variegated discourse of Islamic mystical thought and practice. But such efforts to draw equivalences filtered away the clouded waters of difference and allowed Chidrup and Jahangir to find common ground.
The emperor was so impressed with the Hindu ascetic that two days later he made another trip to meet him and spent a couple of hours. He also ordered that his encounter with Chidrup be illustrated.72 In its most famous version, the image has two distinct parts. The bottom half is crowded with portraits of several members of Jahangir’s retinue, in the midst of which is the emperor’s riderless horse. The top half has more open space. It separates the bustle below from the contemplative exchange above. Here, Jahangir sits facing Chidrup in an archway forming the entrance to the sanyasi’s cave. The emperor, on the left, is larger and bejeweled, wearing a halo representing kingship’s radiant glory (farr). But he sits in a deferential posture with his feet tucked under him, at the same level as the ascetic. Indeed, a Mughal emperor was hardly ever portrayed sitting alongside someone else, unless he happened to be a holy man. Chidrup, with a shaved head and clad only in a loincloth, gesticulates while speaking. In the far left, the domes and gates of a city emerge faintly from the horizon.73
The painting is more than just an unmediated visual record of the encounter. It also contains several symbolic references. The motif of a ruler meeting an ascetic in the wilderness is itself an old one, well established in Persian miniature paintings and seen in images from fourteenth-century Mongol Iran. It gains masterful expression in the sixteenth-century paintings of Kamal-ud-Din Bihzad (d. 1535 / 6), the renowned artist from Herat. Jahangir had in his collection a portrait attributed to Bihzad of Alexander in the audience of a hermit. In the Persian pictorial tradition, such encounters often took place in a cave, which was seen as a place of spiritual enlightenment and also associated with the Prophet’s first revelation on Mount Hira. Mughal artists and patrons used a sophisticated visual vocabulary that imbued miniature paintings with allegorical import. For instance, the horse often connoted the carnal body. The distant palatine city served as a reminder of the temporal world. For now, both were left behind. Though in his memoirs Jahangir mentions taking a boat to visit Chidrup—not riding—the horse here helps construct a larger allegory of kingship.74 The painting projects an image of Jahangir as a philosopher-king, wearing the trappings of royalty lightly as he journeys on his spiritual quest. It also offers a glimpse of Jahangir’s almost ethnographic interest in capturing what, to him, seemed curious and memorable, whether through writing, collecting precious objects and rare animals, or commissioning paintings.75 Jahangir also had his father Akbar’s visit to Chidrup memorialized in a painting.76
Jahangir converses with Chidrup.
Here Chidrup also evokes earlier Mughal courtly depictions of the legendary Hindu sage, Vasishtha, a figure well known to Jahangir. While still a prince, Jahangir had commissioned a Persian translation of an abridged Sanskrit text called the Yogavasishtha, in which the guru Vasishtha tells the divine prince Rama a series of interconnected stories. Through these teachings, the prince transforms from being weary of the world to being a spiritually liberated ruler.77 Jahangir also had in his possession a gorgeously illustrated Yogavasishtha, that had been translated for his father in 1602. The Chidrup of Jahangir’s atelier strongly resembles the paintings featur
ing Vasishta in this manuscript.78 Dara Shukoh would have been too young to know directly of his grandfather’s dialogues with Chidrup, but he no doubt eventually saw the paintings, which survived to reinforce the Mughal ideal of the ruler who cultivates himself by associating with high-minded ascetics.
On the military front, by the middle of 1617, Khurram had made significant headway in his Deccan campaigns. Building on Parwez’s prior work, Khurram captured the fort at Ahmadnagar and secured the allegiance of the neighboring state of Bijapur. Jahangir received him warmly at Mandu, swooping from his throne to embrace his victorious son. He granted Khurram a significant raise in rank: the prince would now command the equivalent of thirty thousand foot soldiers and twenty thousand cavalry. Khurram also gained the right to sit on a chair by his father’s throne during court assemblies—an unprecedented privilege for a Mughal prince. In addition, he would henceforth be known by the title “Shah Jahan,” or “world ruler.”79
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