The Emperor Who Never Was

by Supriya Gandhi

  7

  CONFLUENCE

  1654–1656

  A DECADE AND A HALF after its plans were first laid out, Shahjahanabad was a thriving urban complex. The city was dominated by the imposing red sandstone palace-fortress where Shah Jahan, his household, and his army lived. Today, what remains of Shah Jahan’s fort flanks the traffic-clogged Ring Road, one of Delhi’s main arteries. In Dara Shukoh’s time, though, the river Jamuna flowed picturesquely by the citadel’s eastern ramparts. But the city in 1654 was still a site of ceaseless construction. The emperor had recently commissioned a massive wall to be put up around Shahjahanabad, which on completion would eventually measure twelve feet in thickness and almost four miles in length.1 Sadullah Khan was supervising the ongoing building of a resplendent congregational mosque on a ridge in the walled city’s center. Fazil Khan, now back from Qandahar, would also assist. Five thousand workers had already been toiling on it for four years; it would only reach completion in 1656.2

  The founding of a new city gave the imperial women opportunities to shape their own architectural legacies. By 1650, several projects that they sponsored were completed. Jahanara was already a well-established patron in Agra, Kashmir, and Ajmer, and here too she created some of the city’s most distinctive landmarks. West of the fort, she constructed a wide avenue running almost the full breadth of the city. It was lined on either side with arcaded markets and a canal coursed through it, the Nahr-i Bihisht (Stream of Paradise). Just north of the avenue, Jahanara laid out a vast garden, intended primarily for women and children of the imperial household. However she also included a caravanserai for traveling merchants, and a public bathhouse.3

  Other women of the emperor’s family too participated in molding Shahjahanabad and its environs. Dara Shukoh’s other sister, Roshanara, built a garden northwest of the city, as well as a grand tomb for her eventual interment. Akbarabadi Mahal, one of Shah Jahan’s nursemaids (parastar), erected a mosque, a caravanserai, a bathhouse, and a grand market known as Faiz Bazaar, running from the southern end of the fort to the city wall. It was said to have had 888 shops, and its very own Stream of Paradise. She also built a garden outside the city.4 Sirhindi Begam, another esteemed woman of the household, constructed a mosque and a garden tomb, near Roshanara’s. Fatehpuri Begam, a wife of the emperor, built a mosque and a caravansarai.5 These examples reflect the clout and wealth that elite Mughal women possessed. But they also show how Shah Jahan’s capital city was in many ways an extension of his household.

  High-ranking nobles and their households commanded a good part of Shahjahanabad’s real estate. According to the French physician and natural philosopher François Bernier, who arrived in India in late 1658, the city, as a whole, had a population of close to four hundred thousand, almost the same as Paris.6 Shahjahanabad spilled out of the walls over to its suburbs, as its elite inhabitants required labor sourced from outlying areas to maintain their lifestyles. South of the new imperial center lay what Chandarbhan Brahman, Dara Shukoh’s household superintendent and a noted Persian litterateur, called Delhi’s “old city.”7 The landscape here was dotted with Sufi shrines that over the years constituted an integral part of the city’s identity, such as the tombs of the thirteenth-century Chishti Sufis Nizamuddin Auliya and Qutbuddin Bakhtiyar Kaki. These flourished as vestiges of an authority rivaling that of the emperor—the charisma of these saintly intercessors with the divine.

  The prince’s own waterfront mansion lay just northwest of the fort, in a choice area reserved for the most elite nobles, such as the former Safavid governor Ali Mardan Khan. Soon after his arrival, in mid-March 1654, Dara made elaborate preparations to receive his father there with appropriate pomp and ceremony.8 His mansion originally comprised two buildings, next to each other. Only a fragment of one building still stands, now known as the Dara Shukoh Library.

  Since the seventeenth century, the structure has had many incarnations. It was the residence of Juliana, a Portuguese woman who eventually wielded great influence at the court of the eighteenth-century emperor Bahadur Shah.9 Later, in the nineteenth century, it became the home of David Ochterlony (d. 1825), the first British resident in Delhi in the court of Shah Alam II.10 Ochterlony completely remodeled the facade to make it resemble a neo-classical mansion. Today it houses the Archaeological Survey of India.

  Only a few remnants survive of the building’s original form; these include a series of small red sandstone arched chambers at the rear that might have been stables, and other arches and columns in the interior. But we can imagine that Dara Shukoh’s mansion would have been an even grander version of the stately Shahjahanabad homes. They were set in the midst of gardens, Bernier recounts, which were laid out with waterworks and fountains. Open courtyards allowed air to freely circulate, while subterranean chambers provided a cool respite from the summer heat. Little niches perforating the inside walls held lamps and decorative artifacts. The ceilings of the mansions glittered with intricate floral designs embellished with gold leaf.11

  The new city of Dara Shukoh, Shah Jahan, and Jahanara was lacking in one aspect. It was bereft of their spiritual guide’s physical presence. The emperor wrote Mulla Shah asking why he would not now come to Shahjahanabad instead of Lahore. “When you see this grand place, with its agreeable climate, you will forget Lahore,” Shah Jahan declared to the shaikh. But the aging Mulla Shah was now too weak to make the grueling journey from Kashmir.12

  * * *

  ENSCONCED IN HIS PALATIAL QUARTERS IN SHAHJAHANABAD, Dara Shukoh had some respite from the frenetic life of the past year, when he went to Qandahar and back. By his father’s side, he was closely involved in the inner workings of kingship. One of Dara’s tasks was to mend and strengthen his own networks, some of which had suffered during the rancorous Qandahar campaign. With Shah Jahan’s blessings, no doubt, he sought to build an alliance with Jai Singh, whom he had alienated in Qandahar. Late in 1653, probably after returning from Qandahar, he sent a princely decree to Jai Singh, assuring the raja that the emperor often spoke highly of him and considered him amongst his best generals.13 At the beginning of February 1654, he sent another decree acknowledging a letter from Jai Singh and praising his loyalty to the court.14 And on April 14 that year, he celebrated his son Sulaiman Shukoh’s marriage with the daughter of the late Rai Amar Singh, a Rajput nobleman and Jai Singh’s nephew.15 This alliance had been in the works for some time, but now was a fitting occasion to seal it.

  Shah Jahan too needed Jai Singh’s help to deal with trouble brewing in the Rajput state of Mewar. Rana Raj Singh, grandson of Shah Jahan’s loyal vassal, Karan Singh, had started to restore the fortifications of Chittor in violation of an agreement with the Mughal sovereign. In October 1654, Shah Jahan and Dara Shukoh set forth on a pilgrimage to the Chishti shrine at nearby Ajmer. The proximity of the imperial presence would deter Raj Singh, they hoped. They pitched camp at nearby Khalilpur. Dara Shukoh mediated between Raj Singh and the emperor, at the Rajput ruler’s entreaty. The prince sent Chandarbhan, the superintendent of his household, along with a high-ranking imperial servant, Shaikh Abd-ul-Karim, with an ultimatum to Raj Singh. It was probably a deliberate choice to send Chandarbhan, a Brahmin, as the envoy to a Hindu ruler. Chandarbhan wrote a detailed report for the emperor, describing his successful coercion of the rana. Raj Singh was now obliged to send his six-year-old son to the imperial presence, and dispatch a contingent to serve in the Deccan. After conveying this threat, Shah Jahan and Dara Shukoh paid their respects at the Chishti shrine.16

  Soon afterward, Shah Jahan commissioned a lustrous illustration of his visit to Ajmer for the official chronicle of his reign, the Padshah-nama. Like most Mughal paintings of forts or cities, it has a flattened, aerial perspective. At its center is the walled city, all sandstone and marble, with the shrine nestled within. Rolling hills stretch beyond it. In the foreground, the emperor, seated on a brown horse, is resplendent in golden attire with a glowing nimbus behind his head. Facing him, a green-robed Sufi, the legenda
ry Khizr, offers him a globe. Dara Shukoh is close behind, mounted on a gray horse. The emperor and his heir bask in the embrace of both spiritual and political power.17

  Aurangzeb’s agent at court had informed him of the imperial plans in Mewar, and the third-born prince referred to this episode while writing his father from the Deccan. Ever since he heard of these preparations, Aurangzeb wrote, his “anxious desire to serve” left him restless night and day, so he petitioned the court, “exalted as the firmament,” to summon him to join the expedition. Aurangzeb had not seen his father since his own ignominious campaign to Qandahar in 1652. He expressed his wish to be received at court. “I had already submitted to Your Majesty my desire to gain the honor of entering the luminous presence, and [I have heard that] it has fallen from the tongue, speaking words of grace: We shall summon him to wait upon us.”18 But the summons did not come.

  The prince then concentrated his efforts on another goal. He had been eyeing the southern kingdom of Golconda, famed for its diamonds, fertile fields and delicately hued chintz fabric. Aurangzeb saw an opportunity to deepen the influence of the Mughal state there. He had established clandestine ties with the Qutbshahi sultan’s powerful minister, the Iranian-born Mir Jumla, a former diamond merchant who had his own army. Soon Aurangzeb pressed Shah Jahan to lure Mir Jumla to Mughal imperial service. The minister, though, cleverly ensured that both the sultans of Golconda and Bijapur also competed for his loyalty. Mir Jumla was “twisting and turning … while disclosing his true intentions to nobody,” wrote Aurangzeb to his father.19 The prince awaited more opportune circumstances that would allow him to invade Golconda. With his father now approaching sixty-five, the prospect of succession could not have been far from Aurangzeb’s mind. The more military victories he racked up, the better he would be placed to make a bid for the throne.

  Shah Jahan and Dara Shukoh meet Khizr en route to the Chishti shrine at Ajmer.

  Even as Shah Jahan sidelined Aurangzeb in the display of Mughal might at Mewar, the prince shrewdly nurtured his relationships with prominent Rajput rulers. That year, 1654, he twice sent Jai Singh a gift of five matchlock muskets.20 He also arranged an additional land assignment for Jai Singh, and added some of the raja’s soldiers to his own Deccan campaigns.

  Aurangzeb benefited from not representing the imperial position in the Rana Raj Singh affair. He used this opportunity to forge his own independent ties with the rana. In November of that year, the prince sent a Hindu envoy, named Indar Bhatt, to Raj Singh. The servant, whom Aurangzeb called a “palace of reliability,” brought along for the rana a diamond ring and a special robe (khilat). The exchange of envoys and gifts between Aurangzeb and Raj Singh would continue into the near future.21

  * * *

  BACK IN SHAHJAHANABAD, DARA SHUKOH used this spell of relative stability to focus on an important aspect of Mughal kingship—the continued refinement of his inner self and his intellect. These months in 1654 afforded him the time to surround himself with interlocutors of his choice, to summon the presence of whomsoever he wished to see, in short, to behave like a sitting emperor. The prince’s mansion in Delhi now functioned like a secondary court, a salon for dialogue and learning. His meetings with Baba Lal fresh in his mind, Dara Shukoh applied himself to a study of religious thought beyond Islam, in a far deeper manner than he had pursued before.

  We know that Dara had been especially interested in Indic systems of learning for a while. He did not have to go far to find teachers, for Shah Jahan’s court had continued the Mughal tradition, since the time of Akbar, of hosting and interacting with Sanskrit scholars. For some time now, Shah Jahan had been regularly rewarding Kavindracharya Saraswati for his musical compositions as well as for his writings.22 Kavindra is one of the few pandits whom we can plausibly identify as one of Dara Shukoh’s interlocutors and instructors. After Dara’s return to Shahjahanabad, in February 1654, Kavindra again received his usual gift of one thousand rupees.23 This would be his tenth such honor in a period of three years.24 Few scholars at Shah Jahan’s court were so generously and so frequently rewarded. But Kavindra would have to wait almost two years until his next gift at court, in the third week of January 1656.25 We might surmise from this that Dara Shukoh had decided to branch out more in his choice of guides to Indic thought, or that he took a more independent approach to his explorations.

  Kavindra seems to have introduced Dara to another Benares-based pandit known as Brahmendra Saraswati, who was a noted author on Advaita Vedanta. A letter, written in Sanskrit, has come down to us, addressed to Brahmendra (or rather, to Narasimha Goswami, his other appellation) and purportedly written by Dara Shukoh.26 The prince must have had a pandit help him compose this, because it is laden with lavish, ornate expressions that would have taken years of Sanskrit learning to produce. According to this letter, the addressee was a recipient of Kavindra’s praise. The author signs off as “Mohamad Dara Shukoh, who has ascended the seventh plane made possible through the driving away of the great delusions by the knowledge of reality in which the abundance of supreme bliss is revealed.”27

  There is also some evidence that the celebrated Sanskrit poet Jagannatha was associated with both Shah Jahan and Dara Shukoh. Jagannatha was a Brahmin whose roots lay in the southern region of Telangana. According to one Telugu account, he made his way to Delhi only to find it in chaos, during the turbulent period before Shah Jahan’s accession to the throne. Undeterred, he changed course and headed for Udaipur, to the court of Jagat Singh, the ruler of Mewar. There Jagannatha wrote a paean in praise of his new patron, called Jagadabharana (Ornament of the world), with a play on the Udaipur ruler’s name “Jagat,” which means world or universe. The pandit also wrote a praise poem for Shah Jahan’s father-in-law, Asaf Khan. The colophon of this work mentions that Shah Jahan bestowed on the poet the title of Panditaraja, literally “king of the pandits,” an honor somewhat like the title of poet laureate.28

  Jagannatha was not averse to reusing his earlier compositions for new patrons. In a reworked version of the Jagadabharana, he inserted the name of Dara Shukoh in place of the Rajput ruler. Some years later, when forced to leave Delhi, he sought refuge at the court of the Koch Bihar ruler, Prananarayana, and once again modified his Jagadabharana accordingly.29 But these praise poems were but drops in the ocean of the panditaraja’s oeuvre, as he focused his energies on producing a monumental work on Sanskrit literary aesthetics, or rasa, entitled Rasagangadhara (The Ganga-bearer [Shiva] of Rasa), in addition to several poems.30

  In later accounts of his life, we find a tragic story about Jagannatha’s illicit love. His grand-nephew related an early version, dated to 1673, fairly soon after the poet’s demise. This account notes tersely that Jagannatha married a Shah’s daughter, meaning a Muslim, and immediately found liberation in the Ganga, that is, through death by drowning.31 There are also verses attributed to the panditaraja about his Muslim beloved, for instance: “That Muslim girl has a body soft as butter / and if I could get her to lie by my side // The hard floor would be good enough for me / and all the comforts of paradise redundant.”32

  An unattributed story links Jagannatha and his doomed romance more directly with Dara Shukoh. The panditaraja was regaling a salon with his poetry at the prince’s house. A Muslim noblewoman listened in the women’s quarters behind a screen. At the end of the evening, the prince, pleased, asked Jagannatha what reward he would like. Jagannatha replied that all he wanted was to marry the aforementioned lady. Upon enquiries, the noblewoman revealed that she too reciprocated these feelings. Dara Shukoh made arrangements for the two to go to Benares at the dead of night. Their union was too scandalous for the Brahmins of Benares to condone. All temple doors were closed to Jagannatha. The two made their way to Durga-khoh on the Ganga’s banks where they lived out the rest of their days.33

  This is all hearsay; we have no proof that this incident actually took place. True or not, these stories suggest that, in this period, the divide between the Sanskrit universe and that of the Mug
hals was more porous than it had ever been. But they also reveal a brewing unease about such interactions, which was expressed as gossip and rumor. Today, this anxiety manifests as complete denial, with scholars arguing that Jagannatha’s romance was a fabrication concocted by his rivals.34

  Dara Shukoh may also have had a more targeted political reason for pursuing his studies of Indic thought. After all, a potential revolt had recently been averted in Mewar. The Hindu rulers formed an important part of Shah Jahan’s nobility. Their support, together with the troops they commanded, was crucial for any serious military action. Even Bernier comments that Shah Jahan had granted a pension of two thousand rupees to a certain pandit of Benares, likely Kavindracharya, partly as a reward for his great learning and partly so as to “please the Rajas.”35

  The workings of Mughal alliances and networks were highly complex. It is far too simplistic to assume that Dara’s study of Hindu sacred texts, or Shah Jahan’s rewards to a Brahmin scholar might in themselves guarantee the Hindu rulers’ undying loyalty. After all, Dara’s prior interest in Indic religion did not prevent his acrimonious spat with Jai Singh at Qandahar. Nevertheless, as for previous Mughal rulers, Dara Shukoh’s universalism was an important ingredient in his idea of a perfect ruler, one who was also the perfect philosopher. So there were political implications to Dara’s wide-reaching philosophical investigations.

  Furthermore, Dara Shukoh’s activities paralleled those of Jaswant Singh, the ruler of the Rajput state of Marwar. Despite being his father’s third son, Jaswant Singh had inherited the throne in 1638. Now, in January 1654, Shah Jahan granted him the title Maharaja.36 It was his niece whom Sulaiman Shukoh married that spring. The Rajput ruler was a prolific author, whose numerous works include the Advaita-inflected Anandvilas, Aparokshasiddhant, Anubhavprakash, Siddhantasar and Siddhantabodh, all in Brajbhasha, a literary form of Hindavi. He also commissioned translations of Sanskrit texts into Brajbhasha, such as the Gita Mahatmya, the Bhagavad Gita, and the Prabodhachandrodaya, a Sanskrit allegorical play.37 Many of these works are hard to date precisely, so we cannot trace any direct links between the cultural activities at the Marwar and Mughal courts. But the broad themes here, of non-dualism, coexisting with a tinge of devotion to Krishna, avatar of Vishnu, mirror Dara Shukoh’s own intellectual excursions in the 1650s. So did the sponsorship of translations. These similarities suggest that particular Indic texts and branches of knowledge were becoming associated with kings and emperors, forming a kind of spiritual and intellectual practice of rulership.