The Emperor Who Never Was

by Supriya Gandhi

  The city we know today as Srinagar was then usually referred to simply as Kashmir. It spread out at the foot of the hilltop Koh-i Maran fortress, alongside the Dal Lake, which shimmered silvery blue and green. Ever since Shah Jahan’s grandfather Akbar had annexed Kashmir in 1586, Mughal and Iranian writers and poets never tired of comparing Kashmir to paradise. In Dara Shukoh’s time, one never spoke of it as just “Kashmir”; it was always “paradisical Kashmir” (Kashmir-i jannat nazir) or “matchless Kashmir” (Kashmir-i benazir). Despite the difficulties of the journey, the emperor took time to appreciate the natural beauty along the way, inhaling the fragrance of jasmine or stopping to sit and gaze at a giant, roaring waterfall. Qazwini describes the reason for the imperial visit to the spectacular mountainous region as “sightseeing in Kashmir’s eternally vernal rose garden.”5

  By idealizing Kashmir through language, or by constructing elaborate gardens there, Mughal elites tamed and possessed its landscape. Kashmir was not an unknown, wondrous territory in a strange realm; it was the emperor’s own pleasure ground, the empire’s jewel. Akbar laid out a garden in his citadel on the Hari Parbat mountain. Jahangir, Nur Jahan, and Asaf Khan built gardens that channeled bubbling springs into orderly tree-flanked waterways. These streams divided the ornamental grounds vertically and cross-sectionally, with the water cascading down inclines carved out of stone or shooting up in jets as fountains. When Shah Jahan was a prince, he had designed one such garden around a mountain spring, known as Shalimar, and now it was ready, with thousands of flowers in bloom and trees laden with fruits and nuts about to ripen. He renamed it Farahbakhsh, “Granter of joy,” to commemorate his arrival in Kashmir.6

  The emperor cultivated this Mughal paradise and gifted shares of it to his family. Three gardens went to Jahanara, including one that had formerly belonged to Nur Jahan. Dara Shukoh, Jahanara, and Murad Bakhsh each received gardens built on islands in the midst of the Dal Lake. Shah Jahan also gave Dara a garden named Karna, which had been his as a prince. Aurangzeb was granted his first estate, a village near Achabal, in the valley’s southeast, though his father does not seem to have bestowed on him a garden.7

  Apart from partaking of the valley’s scenic pleasures, Dara Shukoh was eager to meet Mulla Shah to further deepen the Qadiri connections he had recently made in Lahore. Dara treaded cautiously. He did not wish to upset the famously aloof Sufi, and he also wanted to show that he was a sincere supplicant and not a mere dilettante. Tawakkul Beg relates that the prince had made up his mind to perform the kornish obeisance before Mulla Shah. This show of respect was generally reserved for the emperor. Dara pitched camp near the Sufi teacher’s home and waited to catch a glimpse of the master. But Mulla Shah was away in the wilderness on a spiritual retreat. When he finally returned home, he was told that Dara had been there for some days. His disciples coaxed him into allowing the prince to pay his respects. The Shah graciously agreed. As Dara’s forehead touched the ground, he felt a desire arise in him to serve the pir as a disciple. But for now, the two seem to have had no further interaction during Dara’s time in Kashmir.8

  During this same year, a Hindu youth called Banwali, sometimes also known as Banwalidas, also made his way to Kashmir. We know of his journey through the Dabistan-i mazahib (The School of Religious Sects), a Persian work from the mid-seventeenth century. Authored by one Mubad Shah, a disciple of the Iranian “freethinker” Azar Kaiwan, the Dabistan sketches colorful accounts of various religious traditions in South Asia and the people associated with them.9 It related that from a young age, Banwali had a penchant for dervish assemblies. He had heard of the Kashmir-based Qadiri mystic, Mulla Shah Badakhshi, and acquired an overpowering wish to see him. In accordance with the dictum, “A Sufi has no religion,” says the Dabistan, Banwali “is well acquainted with the idol and the idol temple, neither is he a stranger to the mosque.”10

  Banwali was the son of one Hiraman Kayasth. The Kayasths were a caste of scribes who traced their origin to Chitragupt, son of the god Brahma. Associated with justice, Chitragupt constantly records the actions of every sentient being in his role as secretary to Yama, the god of death. By Shah Jahan’s time, many Kayasths had come to work in the administration as record keepers, letter writers, and accountants. Persian was the language in which they most easily wrote, and young Kayasth boys would study the classics of Persian prose and poetry with the hope of securing government employment.

  Banwali might well have arrived in Kashmir with the emperor’s entourage. At some point, he became associated with Dara Shukoh’s retinue and may have acquired his devotion to Mulla Shah through contact with the prince. Tawakkul Beg discusses Banwali in his chronicle of the Kashmiri mystic: “A Hindu named Banwalidas was a seeker of God. He performed a lot of ascetic exercises, always practicing mystical wayfaring and breath control. One day, he was ennobled by the service of Mulla Shah. He revealed his search for the divine truth, spending day and night at the threshold.” In this telling, the Sufi teacher was not one to accept disciples easily. “Become a Muslim,” ordered Mulla Shah. Banwalidas replied, “I’ve gone past infidelity and Islam, and broken both the sacred thread and the rosary. No shackle remains on me.” During this occasion, however, Banwalidas affirmed the shahada, the Islamic testimony of faith. As he grew more absorbed in his spiritual practice, he left Dara Shukoh’s employment and moved to the wilderness, where he lived in solitude. For a while, we hear nothing more about him, though later it becomes apparent that he would keep up his ties with Dara Shukoh. Immersing himself in the practices of Sufi devotion, Banwalidas would one day become an accomplished poet and author.11

  * * *

  IN MID-DECEMBER 1634, after the Kashmir trip, the imperial family returned to Lahore, where they remained for the rest of the winter. Shuja was still away in the Deccan. The sixteen-year-old Aurangzeb had just received his first rank of ten thousand horsemen. This was an intimation that he, too, would soon be called to the line of duty away from the court. Dara Shukoh and his father once again met Miyan Mir, as we heard in the previous chapter. Upon impressing the aged Sufi with his devotion, Dara dived headlong into the company of the Lahore Qadiris. Though he was not yet formally inducted into the order, he became Miyan Mir’s de facto disciple for a brief but intense period.

  From Dara Shukoh’s later recollections, we gather that he must have had several further meetings with Miyan Mir, enough for the Sufi to entrust the prince with special mystical knowledge. Dara would practice a Sufi technique of gazing upon his master, called tawajjuh, which literally means facing or confronting. During these sessions, Miyan Mir’s divine grace, focused on his disciple, would enter the young prince. Though the prince does not use quite this simile, this process of charismatic transference may have felt like a shaft of light piercing through a windowpane. Dara engraved Miyan Mir’s physiognomy on his heart. Years later, writing in the Sakinat-ul-auliya, he would recall his master’s light-filled eyes; his wheat-like complexion; his strikingly high nose and wide forehead; his beard, which was the length of four fingers and completely white; and his frail body, weakened by years of ascetic rigors and exertions.12

  Miyan Mir was too feeble to perform the movements of the namaz even from a seated position, so he offered his prayers lying down. “Most of this group [of Sufis] constantly suffer from afflictions,” remarked Dara, but the truth was that Miyan Mir did not have much longer to live. On the eleventh of August 1635, he closed his eyes to the world for the last time.13 The prince made sure to build a mausoleum for his pir near Lahore. A square structure, raised on a plinth amid a spacious courtyard, the tomb still attracts throngs of devotees today.

  But Dara received most of Miyan Mir’s instruction through visionary experiences after the Sufi teacher’s death. Such visions, the prince referred to with the word waqia, literally meaning an incident, event, or occurrence, using a term drawn from the name of the Quran’s fifty-sixth sura. As a technical term of Sufi practice, a waqia means a mystical vision witnessed either while awake
or while dreaming. In one such vision, on a Monday night, Dara found Miyan Mir in repose, outside his house. When he approached him to pay his respects, Miyan Mir grasped the prince’s hand and asked him to come close. In Dara’s words, “He exposed my chest, and having pulled the clothing away from his own chest under the left nipple, rubbed it against my nipple on the same side, and declared ‘Take that with which I have been entrusted.’ And such a multitude of dazzling lights from his blessed chest entered mine that I cried, ‘Enough!’ ” After this overwhelming event, Dara says, his heart became “pure, luminous, and imbued with the taste of mystical experience and ecstasy.”14

  A modern reader might see homoerotic tinges in this episode. But for a seventeenth-century Sufi, it would have represented a very literal heart-to-heart transmission of divine grace and mystical insight from a pir to his disciple. Sufis tend to view the heart as the locus of mystical knowledge and experience that the mind cannot comprehend. Dara’s anecdote also evokes a well-known incident in the biography of the Prophet Muhammad. Before the Prophet set off on his night ascent into the heavens, the angel Gabriel, who had been the bearer of the divine revelations, opened his chest and took out his heart. Gabriel then cleansed it with water from the Zamzam spring in the Meccan sanctuary before returning it to its place.15

  Several years after Miyan Mir’s death, in December 1641, Dara Shukoh sat, facing west in the direction of the Kaaba. It was no ordinary day. By the Islamic calendar, it was the twenty-seventh of the sacred month of Ramazan: the Lailat-ul-Qadr, the Night of Destiny or Power, when more than a millennium earlier the first verses of the Quran were revealed to the Prophet.16 A restlessness overcame the prince and he sprang up. Suddenly, a large building appeared before his eyes, which he soon recognized as Miyan Mir’s tomb.

  Miyan Mir emerged, saying that he had something to teach Dara, and proceeded to thrust his index fingers into each of the prince’s ears. Dara Shukoh was immediately overpowered by a sound that he called sultan-ul-azkar—an expression which literally means the “emperor of divine remembrance,” and here reflects a Sufi practice associated with higher states of divine gnosis. Miyan Mir embraced the prince, held his chest close to his, and then let him go. Upon this, relates Dara, “I then lost consciousness. He gave me a spiritual elixir, and intimated to me something which neither speech, writing, verbal expression, nor allusion could express. My object had been attained. Pleasure multiplied upon pleasure; victory upon victory was fulfilled, and the distinction between proximity and distance from God vanished.”17 The prince’s euphoric account of his initiation by Miyan Mir into a powerful, secret meditation practice announces his arrival at an elevated spiritual plane. Just as the Prophet Muhammad was gifted the divine revelation, Dara, through Miyan Mir’s mediation, becomes the recipient of an esoteric truth.

  But in 1635, Dara Shukoh was still very much a novice on the Sufi path. It was some years before he would fully immerse himself in the Qadiri tariqa or order. For now, he had a new opportunity to savor the life of a householder. Before his pir’s death, he had become a father. In March, as the imperial camp stopped at Sultanpur on the way to Agra, Nadira gave birth to a son. He was named Sulaiman Shukoh, meaning “one endowed with the glory of the prophet-king Solomon.” Festivities ensued, and Dara gifted his father jeweled weapons and luxurious textiles.18 This was Shah Jahan’s second living grandchild. Shuja and his wife Bilqis already had a little daughter named Dilpazir Bano, born in 1633. For Dara and Nadira, after the loss of their first child, the birth of a male heir would have been an occasion of immense relief and comfort.

  With his wife, Nadira, Dara shared the joys of family life, but his eldest sister Jahanara remained a cherished confidante. They had been close since early childhood, and as they matured, they cultivated a mutual interest in seeking nearness to the divine and finding an appropriate spiritual master. Since the age of twenty, as she tells us in a short autobiography that she later penned, she had been especially drawn toward the Chishti order. In Dara Shukoh’s company, she could open her heart:

  For my brother, Sultan Muhammad Dara Shukoh Qadiri, victorious, powerful, gnostic of secrets, master of spiritual experience and divine presence, the eye’s light and light’s vision, possessor of inner meaning and glorious deeds, heir to the inner and outer kingdom, felicitous God-seeker, of high dignity and exalted rank—may God increase his shadow’s glory and ease his deeds—I have and have had the utmost personal love, the highest notional affection, perfect religious and worldly accord, and a unity of form and meaning. We are both one spirit, blown into two forms. One soul come forth in two bodies. As my brother, the perfect gnostic, has acquired complete benefit from knowledge of spiritual mysteries, and ineffable fortune from divine truths, he has always conveyed to me truth-pointing utterances, and described the spiritual states and stages of the great ones, the shaikhs and the friends of God—may their secrets be sanctified.19

  In the summer of 1635, Jahanara, at twenty-one, was one of the wealthiest persons in the empire, and by far the most powerful woman. She was still single, and she must have sensed her father’s reluctance to arrange a match for her. There was no man whose rank could equal hers, and moreover, if she had children, they might one day compete for the throne with young Sulaiman Shukoh and other future grandchildren of Shah Jahan. Unmarried, she could, and would, carve out an enduring role for herself at her father’s court. But the project that consumed her during these years was her own spiritual fashioning.

  * * *

  FOR THE NEXT FEW YEARS, Dara Shukoh would be at his father’s side, witnessing closely the tasks of imperial rulership, which included defending and expanding borders, and constructing extravagant edifices as symbols of power and majesty. Only a week after his grandson’s birth, at an auspicious time arranged by prior notice, the emperor entered Agra. This date, the twenty-second of March 1635, was the eighth anniversary of his accession and a rare conjunction of the two major festivals celebrated at the court: Nauroz, the Persian New Year, and Eid-ul-Fitr, which marked the end of a month of fasting. In a court where astrology and religious calendars ruled supreme, this was no doubt seen as an especially felicitous moment. Dara Shukoh and his siblings accompanied the emperor to Agra.20 The chroniclers do not reveal if Nadira accompanied the others; if she did go, she would not have had much of a chance to rest after Sulaiman Shukoh’s birth.

  It was a fitting time for Shah Jahan to inaugurate an opulent new throne, which had taken seven years to build, at a cost of over ten million rupees. This replaced the simple black stone slab that Jahangir had proudly used.21 Here, from a gold platform encrusted with innumerable jewels, twelve pillars rose gracefully to support a canopy, all of which were made of solid gold. The throne glistened with rubies, garnets, pearls, emeralds, and diamonds. Lustrous tapestries and fabrics cushioned and draped the seating area. Atop the canopy, two delicately fashioned peacocks faced each other, each holding a glowing ruby in its beak. Though these birds gave it its later appellation of the Peacock Throne, Shah Jahan’s chroniclers referred to it simply as the Jeweled Throne (takht-i murassa).22

  The emperor, who had a shrewd sense of how to craft his image for the present day as well as for posterity, would have realized how strikingly this new throne framed him as he sat for his daily audiences. It resembled the jharokha window at which Mughal emperors sat daily in a practice dating from Akbar’s rule. However, this entire edifice served to encapsulate the emperor in a golden blaze. Poets like Kalim and Qudsi rhapsodized about the Jeweled Throne—indeed Qudsi’s verses were carved on it—and it would often appear as a central compositional element in paintings of court scenes. In Qudsi’s words, “Hail, auspicious throne of the emperor! / Completed by divine assistance // The day the firmament made it / It first melted the sun’s gold.”23

  Shah Jahan had news writers regularly document major events taking place in the court and empire, but in 1636 he asked the Iranian man of letters, Mirza Amin Qazwini, to chronicle his reign from the time of his acce
ssion. We may recall that a few years earlier the emperor had seen and approved of a piece that Qazwini wrote on Aurangzeb’s encounter with the elephant Sudhakar. Unlike his father, Jahangir, Shah Jahan was not much of a memoirist. The emperor had in mind a sweeping, panegyric history. Qazwini embarked on this lengthy project that would later take shape as the first version of the Padshah-nama (The Book of the Emperor). Other litterateurs had written earlier accounts of Shah Jahan’s reign. For instance, Jalala Tabatabai, soon after arriving from Iran in 1634, had already chronicled the first years of Shah Jahan’s rule. But now he had been displaced by Qazwini, who, however, drew on Tabatabai’s chronicle among other sources for his new history.24

  The three oldest princes, who were boys when the emperor first ascended the throne, had come of age. It was an appropriate time for the emperor to delegate more responsibilities to them, though he keenly supervised their every move. He had recently dispatched Shuja on what would eventually become an unsuccessful campaign in the Deccan, to capture the Parenda Fort now occupied by the Bijapur rulers. In September 1635, Shah Jahan sent the seventeen-year-old Aurangzeb on his first campaign to head an army sent to quell the rebel Jajhar Singh of Orchha, a densely forested state in the subcontinent’s central region. Jajhar Singh’s father, Bir Singh Bundela, had been a Mughal vassal. But the son, who since Shah Jahan’s accession had exhibited rebellious tendencies, attacked and killed another raja. Now, along with his heir Bikramajit, Jajhar Singh openly resisted the emperor.25