The Emperor Who Never Was

by Supriya Gandhi

  The beginning of the campaign was the easy part. Astrologers fixed the auspicious time for the siege on May 15, 1653.47 The commander Rustam Khan went on ahead with an Uzbek contingent for reconnaissance. Dara Shukoh camped nearby for about a week before the appointed time. His men plundered nearby farms for provisions. Local chieftains made visits to pay their respects. On the thirteenth of May, he came to the outskirts of Qandahar and deputed his men to different gates of the fortress. Then came the digging of trenches and other elaborate preparations for the siege. The challenge was to accomplish this while the Safavids fired from the great height of their citadel. Meanwhile, Rustam Khan worked to capture the nearby fortress of Bust, which was easier to take, so that its loss would lob a psychological blow to the Safavids.48

  But by far the Mughals’ most pressing difficulty was their deficient artillery. This had been Aurangzeb’s single greatest problem at Qandahar as well. First of all, they had to wait endlessly—four months—for the arrival of the two heaviest guns, named Fath-i Mubarak (Blessed Victory) and Kishwar Kushai (Clime Destroyer). Without these, there was no realistic hope that the Mughals could breach the citadel walls. In the meantime, they had to figure out how to make cannon shot locally. Thirty thousand cast iron cannonballs had been left behind in Lahore, as they were deemed too heavy to bring. The stonecutters accompanying the army were forced to use trial and error methods to figure out how to make cannonballs that did not immediately crumble when fired.49 This also cost valuable time and led to missed opportunities. The Safavids easily spotted their enemy’s vulnerabilities and exploited them with relish.

  In the course of jotting down his diary, Rashid Khan mentions that various sorcerers frequented the Mughal army camp. As with astrology, the occult arts were cultivated as an accepted body of practice and knowledge throughout the period, both in Hindustan and among the neighboring Muslim dynasties. The author of the Lataif does not make too much of these episodes—he casually weaves them into a larger mass of detail on the day’s happenings. One Indian sorcerer, named Indarkar, traveled with the army from Lahore, and managed, through well-placed contacts, to secure an audience with the prince. In Qandahar, he brazenly approached the besieged fort and asked to be let in so that he could smoke a tobacco chillum from the top. The Safavids played host to him there for some days. However, when Indarkar asked for permission to return, they tortured and killed him.50

  A yogi and his disciples also lived off Dara Shukoh’s largesse, without apparently doing much to earn their keep. But it was Jafar (fl. 1671), Dara’s head of artillery, who fell for the claims of a certain Hajji, a sorcerer and illusionist. The Hajji wandered into the camp, claiming he had the power to command jinn.51 He performed various rites for Jafar involving dancers and sacrifice of a dog, but the demons he controlled failed to quell the fort’s cannons and guns. The Safavids heard about this Hajji’s necromancy and retaliated with a magic rite of their own, stuffing a dog’s carcass with boiled rice and flinging it into Jafar’s trench. This, explains Rashid Khan, was a means of canceling out the Hajji’s incantation with their own spell.52 At the embattlements, as Mughal soldiers fell under torrents of artillery, high-ranking officials commanding artillery as well as footmen in the infantry wove spells, recited auspicious suras from the Quran, and invoked the sublime names of God. They sought to harness the influence of celestial powers so as to subjugate demons into their service, just as they sought to subjugate the citadel.53

  It would be a mistake to view such appeals to divine and occult power as merely limited to the fringes of society. Mughal elites were intimately familiar with the occult arts and continually cultivated them. Take, for instance, the warrior, scholar, and man of erudition and taste, Muhammad Baqir (d. 1637). He came from the aristocratic family known as Najm-i Sani, the “Second Star.” At least two members from the Najm-i Sani clan of Iranian émigrés fought alongside Dara Shukoh at the walls of Qandahar, including Muhammad Baqir’s son, Fakhr Khan.

  Muhammad Baqir migrated from Savafid Iran as a child, with his father. He entered Akbar’s service in his youth and continued his illustrious career in the courts of Jahangir and Shah Jahan. A renowned archer and battle-tested commander, he was also a talented calligrapher and poet. With his skills on the page and the field of battle, Muhammad Baqir rose from commander of the garrison in Multan to governor of Orissa, then Gujarat, and finally Allahabad. He cemented his alliance to the royal family by marrying Nur Jahan’s niece.54 Muhammad Baqir is well known for a treatise on moral philosophy and the discipline of the soul, which he dedicated to Jahangir.55 Much less remembered is his mastery of physics and observational astronomy, which had direct bearing on the military arts.56 He also pursued an abiding interest in occult learning.

  Numerous manuscripts survive in Muhammad Baqir’s name dedicated to observing the movement of the stars, crafting sundry talismans, fashioning pin dolls, and casting spells, all promising the power to summon demons and jinn. Here are charms for lovers, enemies, emperors, and battles against invading armies, illuminated with fine talismanic figures.57 Muhammad Baqir’s occult writings draw inspiration from the Hermetic quest for universal knowledge and take as models for the hidden arts Aristotle, the paragon of sages, and his famed disciple, the world-conquering hero Alexander.58 For many Muslim intellectuals of the day, steeped in Avicennian neoplatonism on the emanating power of the soul, both magic and miracles formed part of a larger body of legitimate knowledge on the nature of existence. In the Mughal court, much of this material also overlaps directly with earlier spellbooks by the likes of the great Ashari theologian and philosopher Fakhr-ud-Din Razi (d. 1210) and Siraj-ud-Din Sakkaki (d. 1229), a highly influential statesman at the Mongol court whose name has long been associated with the occult science. Muhammad Baqir, master of the sword and pen, produced a Persian rendition of Razi’s book of astral magic, al-Sirr-ul-maktum (The Hidden Secret), and a translation into Persian of an Arabic collection of spells, Zakhira-i Iskandarani (The Alexandrian Treasury).The powerful Iranian aristocrat went on to compose and dedicate to Shah Jahan a Persian encyclopedia of theology and jurisprudence, which also touched on the occult arts, all filtered through a devout Shii perspective.59

  All of this goes to say that Dara Shukoh was by no means unique in his willingness to entertain sorcerers during the Qandahar campaign. The imperial library was itself replete with manuscripts on occult learning, many of which were drawn from earlier Arabic and Persian manuals.60 In addition to a lasting engagement with Indic astrology, the learned of the Mughal court browsed Indrajala works on illusionism and incantations produced in various vernaculars of India.61 The elites sanctioned their embrace of magic through the precedent of the Prophet Solomon who commanded armies of jinn, mastered the speech of animals, and possessed knowledge of the unseen. The seal of Solomon, known as the quintessential master builder, features throughout Mughal architecture and serves as a lodestar for both Jahangir and Shah Jahan.62 It was also common for Mughal warriors to wear under their armor talismanic clothing woven with Quranic verses, sacred sayings, and occult designs, as they outwardly decorated their shields, swords, helmets, banners, and guns with tightly woven calligraphy meant to protect them on the battlefield. In this, they shared much in common with their Timurid predecessors and their Ottoman and Safavid contemporaries.63

  Waiting for reinforcements, dependent on an unstable supply chain, and in search of any means to breach the walls at Qandahar, Dara was forced to improvise. And so, apart from enchanters, he also called upon the practical knowledge of engineers from the Deccan to design mechanical cranes (jarr-i-saqil) that could launch missiles from above down onto the battlements.64

  Given the inherently weak position of the Mughal army at Qandahar, it is not surprising that personalities clashed and tempers frayed. It did not help that, according to Rashid Khan’s digest of the events, the prince’s head of artillery, Jafar, made up for his inexperience with overenthusiasm, regularly promising more than he could deliver. Dara Shukoh, firm
ly set on reversing the previous Mughal losses at Qandahar, was inclined to listen to Jafar over the more measured judgments of others. At the beginning, too, it seemed that Mahabat Khan also had confidence in Jafar. “If there were ten people like him, we would take the fort in two or three days,” the khan told Dara Shukoh. “O Lord of the World,” Jafar would say, “why are they sitting heedlessly today when a hundred and fifty gaz of the city wall have fallen into the ditch and the Sher Hajji wall is more delicate than paper?”65 But to inflict sufficient damage on the Sher Hajji wall was easier said than done.

  Beneath the veneer of a united front, tensions brewed. Sectarian and ethnic strife mingled with personal animosities. Jafar and Mirza Abdullah, a paymaster (mir bakhshi) whom Dara put into the service of the infantry, bickered frequently. Jafar carped that Mirza Abdullah’s sympathies, and those of his men toward the enemy could not be fully trusted: “He is Irani and I am Turani, there can never be friendship between the two of us. Between these factions of ours are essential disagreement, religious enmity, and external and eternal contradictions that have always endured and will continue to do so.”66 Mirza Abdullah was from the same family as the commander and occultist Muhammad Baqir Najm-i Sani.67 Many Iranian émigrés rose to prominence in India making careers for themselves through the patronage of local potentates, and several served directly in Dara’s retinue.68 Yet, the incident with Jafar suggests that their status as outsiders came into focus during this war against Iran.

  If Jafar optimistically boasted of imminent victory, Raja Jai Singh made up for him in his reluctance to fight. The prince had more than an inkling of this, for early in the campaign, he addressed the raja harshly. Jai Singh was “honored with the felicity of the kornish obeisance,” reports Rashid Khan, and then Dara Shukoh gave him a tongue-lashing. “This is the third time you’ve come to the fort. If this time too, you do nothing and go back, what are you going to tell the servants of the venerable Shadow of God [Shah Jahan]? And how will you show your face before the women of Hindustan? Truly, women are better than men who repeatedly return unsuccessful.…” This dig at the raja’s manhood must have rankled. “Even though there is no path open to the fort yet,” retorted Jai Singh, “order us to attack, so that our manliness or unmanliness can become apparent.” But, for all Jai Singh’s bravado, he still defied the prince’s commands whenever he could.69

  By the end, morale was so low that even Jafar’s motivation vanished. It was already the third week of August. Dara Shukoh and his commanders had planned a last-ditch attack in the hope of finally invading the fortress. They managed to breach the wall. But the hordes of Mughal soldiers who rushed to enter were shot down by Safavid gunners. In this crucial moment, according to Rashid Khan, rumor spread that Jafar sat down to enjoy a meal of bread with onion and watermelon. Another of Dara’s commanders, Izzat Khan, indulged in some personal grooming, sprinkling himself with rose water.70 The Safavids, who had furnished the citadel with reinforcements, were able to easily withstand the onslaught. All the Mughal efforts were ultimately for naught, as the siege reached its bloody end and the Mughal forces, overstretched and undersupplied, were forced to retreat.

  In Iran, court poets exulted. The famous Saib (d. 1676) of Tabriz had spent seven years of his life in India. He had served Zafar Khan, governor of Kabul, when Shah Jahan came to the throne. Now, he wrote a panegyric for Shah Abbas, celebrating Dara Shukoh’s retreat. Though the Mughal rulers were also Muslim, albeit mainly Sunni, Saib speaks of the tussle over Qandahar as a religious war:

  Shah Abbas the second, the Sahib Qiran’s manifestation

  Became victorious in the greater jihad against the commanders

  Once again, from beneath the Indian crows’ feathers and wings

  Appeared the egg of Islam like the sun

  …

  Like the Shah’s standard, the faces of the fort-commanders whitened

  The Indians all at once grew yellow-faced and ashamed

  Even though no color is deeper than black

  In their flight, yellow-face overcame those black people.71

  Not only is the Mughal-Safavid war termed a jihad, it is the “greater jihad,” more commonly understood as a spiritual struggle against the baser self.72 And here, Shah Abbas is the true Sahib Qiran, possessor of the felicitous astral conjunction and master of the world. The image of the Indians as crows fleeing to expose the shining sun anticipates Saib’s description of them as “black.” The pairing of black and Hindu with white and Turk in Persian poetry has many complex connotations, and darkness is not necessarily always a negative quality.73 Here, though, it is. Only the yellow of liverless cowardice is worse.

  * * *

  AFTER THE DEMORALIZING FAILURE ON THE AFGHAN MARCHLANDS, Dara Shukoh stayed at least two weeks in Lahore before reaching the outskirts of Shahjahanabad on January 4, 1654. When he had arrived in Lahore a little over a year earlier, the emperor treated him like a victor. But now the prince moved swiftly to other pressing concerns. He needed to finish the new book that he had started. We know from Dara’s own account that he began the Hasanat-ul-arifin in 1652, before the Qandahar expedition, but different versions of the text give varying dates of completion. One manuscript used in the modern edition of the collection has the date as Muharram 7, 1065 AH (November 17, 1654).74 It is certainly possible that Dara started the project, halted it during the war, and then finished it almost a year later. But especially since the Hasanat is a brief work—only thirty-odd pages in an earlier nineteenth-century lithographed edition—an earlier date is also quite plausible. The manuscript used for the lithograph has Rabi-ul-Awwal 1, 1064 AH (January 20, 1654) as the Hasanat’s date of completion.75 This timeframe still gives Dara roughly two and a half weeks after arriving in Delhi to finish the Hasanat, add and insert final entries and updates.

  But before he signed off on the compilation, Dara Shukoh accomplished another important task. He met a new religious teacher. This time, he was a Hindu named Baba Lal who lived in Dhyanpur, roughly a hundred miles northeast of Lahore. Some texts call Baba Lal a gosain, and others call him a bairagi, both terms that denote Hindu ascetics. We do not know when exactly Baba Lal visited the prince, but they seem to have had several meetings. Evidence from the manuscript tradition suggests that they met after the Qandahar expedition.76 The shrine of Baba Lal in Dhyanpur also holds this view. Its modern custodians claim that the prince met the ascetic there, though they incorrectly say that Dara also avoided facing his father, out of humiliation after the defeat.77 Even if the prince and Baba Lal had not met before Qandahar, there would have been ample opportunity for talks during Dara’s fortnight in Lahore. It is most likely, as some Persian sources suggest, that rather than go to Dhyanpur, the prince requested Baba Lal to visit Lahore.78 But these were not just casual meetings or sessions of private tutoring in Indic thought. Just like the earlier encounters between Akbar and then Jahangir with the ascetic Chidrup, these conversations became an event, for posterity if not for the public, shaped over time by several hands.

  A particularly evocative imperial painting of an encounter between a young Dara Shukoh and a Hindu ascetic lends insight into how such encounters were portrayed and imagined. The art connoisseur Stuart Cary Welch has attributed this painting to the master artist Govardhan, who worked in the ateliers of three Mughal emperors: Akbar, Jahangir, and Shah Jahan.79 The scene takes place in front of a pillared, carved pavilion, located in a verdant blossoming garden on a terraced platform. At first glance, the setting seems very much like the Pari Mahal in Kashmir. But the Shalimar Garden in Lahore too has terraces and similar pavilions made of marble. The miniature could just as well depict another Mughal garden in Lahore, even Dara’s own.

  Mughal prince converses with Hindu ascetic and other holy men.

  On a platform before the pavilion, seven men are seated in a circle. Their faces are detailed so sensitively that they seem to be the likenesses of actual individuals. The eye is drawn to the saffron-robed ascetic in the center right.
A wooden platform elevates the serene sage slightly above the others. He gently holds a wooden armrest of the type Hindu sadhus use. His eyes are distant, gazing outward; in Mughal figural art this often implies a detachment from the material world.80 The prince, shown in profile, kneels respectfully beside the ascetic. The two form a dyad on the same horizontal axis, though not directly facing each other. The prince’s gilded sash and turban lend him a glow, though without the nimbus that portraits of his father include. Two religious scholars, identifiably Muslim from their garb and beards, refer to books. A musician plays the santur, while a supplicant in the patched robe of a Sufi mendicant bows down before the ascetic.

  The miniature appeals to a type of naturalism in its treatment of flora and physiognomy common to the tastes of the time. It would be misleading, though, to view the painting as a window onto a concrete event, such as Dara’s encounters with Baba Lal. For one, Baba Lal, as portrayed here, bears a striking resemblance to figures in two of Govardhan’s other paintings—a tanpura player in one and a Muslim ascetic in another.81 Moreover, the miniature recalls previous iconic Mughal paintings: Jahangir meeting Chidrup, as well as Narsingh’s famous depiction of Akbar leading a discussion among scholars from diverse religious traditions.82

  There is also a discrepancy between the portrait of Dara here and what his appearance must have been at the time as a thirty-eight-year-old, when he is known from the literary record to have held his famous dialogues with Baba Lal. For years now, Dara Shukoh had sported a beard, just like his father Shah Jahan. In the painting, the prince’s youth and beardlessness lend him an aura of wholesome purity. The painting thus may belong to an earlier set of dialogues with Hindu ascetics.

  Dara Shukoh’s encounter, or meetings, with Baba Lal later became such an enduring literary and visual motif that it is hard, if not impossible, to tease out what transpired during their encounter. Manuscripts and then lithographs of their dialogues offer extremely different versions. These divergences far exceed the minor discrepancies common to hand-copied texts. There is nothing resembling a stable text. One version is concise and so highly stylized, written in often-rhyming, alliterative prose, that it seems more like a crafted literary piece than a dialogue that might have actually taken place: