Unfortunately for Bourgeois, the court had changed considerably since she had first earned the position of royal midwife. Most of her original supporters were dead or no longer in positions of influence. The king was no longer Henri IV but the icy young Louis XIII; the queen mother, Marie de Medicis, had been sent into exile. She had served as regent for Louis since 1610 when he was not yet nine years old. Marie was from Florence, and she had fallen increasingly under the influence of an Italian couple, the foppish Concino Concini and his wife Leonora Galigai, Bourgeois’s champion. Even after Louis reached majority at age thirteen, Concini and Galigai, through Marie, continued to exert control over the young king. In 1616, supporters urged Louis to assert himself. Concini was assassinated the following spring — the citizens of Paris expressed their loathing for the foreign schemer by digging up his body, tearing it apart, and eating it. Galigai was arrested and put in the Bastille. Hebrew texts found in her apartment were taken as proof at least of black magic if not outright Judaism. Witchcraft would explain her hold over the queen, though Galigai claimed, “My spell was the power of a strong mind over a weak one.” Taking no chances, the authorities beheaded her and then burned her body at the stake.
Louise Bourgeois at Age Forty-Five, 1608. Engraving from Observations diverses sur la sterilité, perte de fruict, foecondité, accouchements ey maladies des Femmes et Enfants nouveaux naix (Various Observations on Sterility, Loss of the Ovum after Fecundation, Fecundity, and Childbirth, Diseases of Women and of Newborn Infants; 2nd ed., 1626). Medical Library, University of California, San Francisco.
The royal midwife’s “wide pratice, she claimed, would show up the mistakes of Physicians and Surgeons,” writes Natalie Zemon Davis in Society and Culture in Early Modern France. “She looks out with poise from her engraving at the reader, this skilled woman who corrected men, publicly and in print.”
In this way Louise Bourgeois had lost an important champion, and she was forced to defend herself to the dramatically changed court. The male doctors fired back against Bourgeois’s charges, attacking not just her conclusions but also her presumption in overstepping her place as a midwife and a woman in criticizing male doctors. “You should rather have passed the rest of your life without speaking,” the response read, “than to suggest … that the great princess had not been helped as well as she should have been…. Contain yourself within the limits of your duty. No longer involve yourself in responding to doctors, because … you are not capable of judging them…. All learned men who have seen your book and practice know and reject them, and it would be very good and useful if France never again felt the effects, as the princess has.”
No one came to Bourgeois’s defense in the face of this onslaught, and she was forced to withdraw from service to the court. Five years later Martin died, and Louise followed in 1636. She had had a long and distinguished career, and through her prominent service and her publications had helped to raise the profile of midwives and promote the role of women in medicine. But, at the same time, her fall from favor contributed to the marginalization of midwives, who were to be constrained to a more limited role, as France became one of the first European countries to insist on the regulation of midwives by male authorities.
It was difficult for women to compete in struggles of power as independent players. Most built instead upon their roles as wives, mothers, daughters, or consorts (the most notable exception was Elizabeth of England). One of these was a woman whose birth name was Mihrunnisa (“Sun of Women”). In March 1616 she acquired a new name — henceforth she would be known, and become famous, as Nur Jahan (“Light of the World”). The name was given to her by her husband, Jahangir, ruler of the Mughal empire. Jahangir left much of the day-to-day governance of the empire to his favorite wife. A Dutch observer at the Mughal court went so far as to claim that Jahangir was “King in name only” and that “misunderstandings result, for the King’s orders or grants of appointments, etc, are not certainties, being of no value until they have been approved by the Queen.” Another Dutch observer, no better friend of the queen, claimed that Jahangir “suffered in his mind because he found himself too much in the power of his wife, and the thing had gone so far that there were no means of escaping from the position. She did with him as she liked, his daily reward being pretended love and sweet words, for which he had to pay dearly.”
Jahangir was not someone to take lightly, and Nur Jahan had to have possessed considerable resources of courage and cunning to gain such control over him. Normally mild, and often accused of passivity, the Mughal ruler was capable of erupting in flashes of cruelty. He had men killed for breaking a china dish. He killed servants who he thought had got in the way of a good hunt. He order the thumbs of a man cut off who had taken down some trees he happened to like. He had a woman who had been caught kissing a eunuch buried up to her armpits and kept without water in the hot sun (she died in less than a day). When his first-born son, Khusrau, unsuccessfully attempted to overthrow him, Jahangir had the leaders of Khusrau’s revolt beheaded or impaled. Then he placed their heads on stakes on either side of a road and personally led his son, strapped to an elephant, between them, “introducing” each head to him in turn.
The Decapitation of Leonora Galigai, 17th c. Engraving. France. Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris.
Leonora Galigai, the queen regent’s favorite, and her husband, Concino Concini, were, like the queen herself, originally from Florence. They were resented by the citizens of Paris as rapacious outsiders who were mainly interested in converting assets of state to personal wealth. Galigai’s influence over the queen was attributed to witchcraft. In 1617, after Louis XIII had at last asserted himself and taken over rule from his mother, Galigai was decapitated and her body burnt.
Nur Jahan was one of the most powerful women of premodern India. She had coins minted in her own name, collected duties and tariffs, and engaged in international trade. She owned a line of ships that carried pilgrims and cargo to Mecca. Her patronage was often sought and often needed. She amassed considerable private wealth and ruled with a firm hand.
She was a Persian, born in Kandahar, now the second-largest city in Afghanistan but at that time a trading town on the border between Persia and the Mughal empire. Her parents were on their way to India, fleeing difficult economic circumstances in Persia and hoping to gain favor at the Mughal court, where Persian learning and sophistication were held in high esteem. The family lost most of their possessions to thieves during the journey, but were favorably received in Jahangir’s court. They prospered, and Nur Jahan’s father rose to a position of prominence.
Nur Jahan’s story has fascinated many people in South Asia and elsewhere, and as a result a great deal of legend has surrounded her; it is difficult to be certain of the historical truth of many aspects of her life. A story has it that Jahangir and Nur Jahan fell in love as teenagers. Unfortunately, she was to be wedded to another man, and only after his death, when she was in her thirties, would she and Jahangir finally marry. How might the young lovers have met? Jahangir, then merely Prince Saleem, was walking, so the story goes, through a garden. As ruler he would be famous for his fondness for beautiful things, and already he displayed his aesthetic inclinations. He was carrying two pigeons as he walked, when he noticed some beautiful flowers that he wished to pick. As chance would have it, the young Nur Jahan — herself celebrated for her beauty — was passing by just then, and Jahangir asked her to hold the pigeons so that he could pick the flowers. But when he returned to the girl he found her with only one of the birds. “How did that happen?” he demanded. “Like this!” she replied, releasing the second pigeon into the air, and Jahangir was captivated by the young woman’s wit and charm.
All such stories probably belong to the realm of legend. In 1594, when she was seventeen, Nur Jahan was married to a young man of the Persian community, and it is doubtful that she had had significant contact with Jahangir before that time. Many of the expatriate Persians, including most of Nur Jahan’s family, w
ere then viewed with suspicion as a result of having placed their bets on the wrong horse in the inevitable conflicts that always seemed to rise up over issues of succession among the Mughals. Nur Jahan’s husband was given an undesirable post in Bengal. Not long after ascending the throne in 1605, Jahangir became suspicious of him and sent a delegation to check up on him. Somehow a melee resulted in which Nur Jahan’s husband killed the leader of Jahangir’s party and was himself killed in response.
Some say that Jahangir had arranged Nur Jahan’s husband’s death because he was already in love with her, but there is no evidence for this among documents of the period. Now a widow with a young child, she returned to the Mughal court (then in Agra) and entered the zanana, the community of the harem, as a lady-in-waiting to one of Jahangir’s stepmothers. It was the custom of the Mughals to care for the widows of courtiers, and they were often adopted by women of influence.
Jahangir and Prince Khurram with Nur Jahan, ca. 1624. India, Mughal dynasty. Opaque watercolor and gold on paper, 14.2 × 25.2 cm. Freer Gallery of Art, Gift of Charles Lang Freer, F1907.258.
This scene is probably set in the Ram Bagh garden, which the empress Nur Jahan, a great patron of gardens, had remodeled in 1621, not long before the painting was made. According the the Freer Gallery of Art, “The Ram Bagh epitomizes the imperial Mughal (1526–1858) garden aesthetic that thoroughly integrated nature and architecture. Carpets like fields of flowers, wall paintings of cypresses, open porches with blossom-adorned columns, and water channels that ran from exterior to interior contributed to a fluid, delightful whole. Delicately scented breezes and burbling fountains further set the stage for royal pastimes.”
The idyllic setting, however, disguises underlying tensions. The power of Nur Jahan, wife of the Mughal ruler Jahangir, is indicated by her position as the second most prominent figure in the painting. Waiting in the wings, however, is Prince Khurram (later Shah Jahan, famous for building the Taj Mahal), who was not Nur Jahan’s choice to succeed his father. With his accession Nur Jahan would be stripped of power and effectively kept under house arrest for the remainder of her life.
It is unclear how many women were resident in Jahangir’s zanana; the likeliest guess seems to be a thousand or more. Besides his wives and concubines there were the female members of his family and their children, as well as ladies-in-waiting, servants, guards, entertainers, and many other women, from all ethnic groups and levels of society. The community was in effect a largely self-governing city. It was guarded by women armed with daggers and bows and arrows; the guards were changed every twenty-four hours to maintain vigilance and protect against intrigues. (Nur Jahan herself was said to be the most accomplished archer of Jahangir’s court; she was equally adept with firearms, once, it is said, bringing down four tigers with just six bullets.) Because of the practice of parda, or seclusion of women, very few men were ever allowed inside, although the higher-ranking women would have two or more eunuchs as attendants. The main exceptions to the exclusion of men were visits from husbands, who could also sometimes bring fathers and brothers with them. After his marriage to Nur Jahan, Jahangir would grant the extraordinary privilege of access to the zanana without the women being veiled to her father, a clear sign of the powerful role she wielded.
As a woman of the zanana, Nur Jahan met Jahangir at the Nouroz festival of 1611. Nouroz is the traditional Persian (originally Zoroastrian) festival of the new year, which occurs on the first day of spring by the solar calendar. It was also one of the two main festivals observed by the Mughal court (the other being the emperor’s birthday). Nouroz was a particularly festive time for the women of the zanana, for a bazaar was then set up in the emperor’s palace compound where they were allowed to shop at stalls, almost as if they were out free in the world. The stalls were operated by the wives of the merchants. The emperor would also go from stall to stall, chatting and flirting with the women. As he made his rounds during the 1611 Nouroz, he chanced upon Nur Jahan and was startled by the beauty of her unveiled face. The two were married two months later, in May 1611. She was the last of the emperor’s wives.
Jahangir’s line was vulnerable to alcoholism. Two of his brothers died at an early age from the disease. Jahangir compounded the effects of heavy alcohol use through the addition of opium, which he also consumed in large quantities on a daily basis. In this stupefied (and probably constipated) condition, he became disinterested in, and perhaps incapable of, tending to the details of governance. It was Nur Jahan who triumphed in the struggle to fill this vacuum, and who became in many respects the de facto ruler of the Mughal empire.
Nur Jahan was thirty-four or thirty-five years old when she married Jahangir (who then called her Nur Mahal, “light of the palace”). Women over thirty were considered in the Mughal court to be of advanced years, and the Mughal emperor rarely had sexual relations with them. An English visitor reported that the nobles of the court never “came near their wives or women, after they exceed the age of thirty years” and such women were never “much regarded by those great ones, after the very first and prime of their youth is past.” Nur Jahan had no children by Jahangir — nor did any other woman of the zanana after their marriage — and it is possible that his heavy consumption of alcohol and opium rendered him impotent. Although there is little doubt that it was her beauty that first inflamed the emperor’s passions, her relation to him seems quickly to have become mostly maternal in character.
The mother-son relationship was particularly valued among the Mughals, according to Nur Jahan biographer Ellison Banks Findly. “Given the structure of Mughal households, where religious custom obligated providing shelter for any older unattached women and where ‘multiple mothers’ (wet-nurses, barren aunts and foster mothers of all types) were the norm, Jahangir found it easy to feel strongly for the older women around him.” Jahangir had observed of a couple such women that they were as dear to him as his own mother, and he seems easily to have projected a maternal role onto his final wife. His reverence for mothers caused him to collect Western Madonna-and-child paintings. Thomas Roe, who established the first official English embassy to the Mughal court in 1616, was constantly writing home for more and better paintings on this theme, and images of the Madonna appear in the Mughal court paintings sponsored by Jahangir.
Jahangir was aware that his drug use was affecting his health, but he could not control it. Only Nur Jahan was able to instill a degree of moderation, reducing his intake by degrees and then rationing his usage at a still high but somewhat less excessive level. By controlling Jahangir she effectively held the reins of power, although, because of the practice of parda, she was often forced to govern from behind a screen. Visitors would hear a whispered voice giving directives to Jahangir during their audiences. Her father and brother completed the ruling junta, and after her father died she teamed up effectively for a time with her brother. But as Jahangir’s health continued to decline, the empire’s attention turned increasingly to the troubling matter of succession.
The Mughals did not subscribe to the practice of royal inheritance by birth order. The eldest son had no automatic priority over other male descendents. Jahangir’s father, Akbar, had for a time favored his grandson Khusrau over Jahangir, and Jahangir had led an army against his father’s forces before reconciling with him. Jahangir later had Khusrau blinded (some say with an herbal concoction, some with a glass held to the sun, some by sewing patches over his eyes, some by puncture with a wire — the last is unlikely, since physicians later sought to restore his sight). Unrestrained by the mediation of their father, Nur Jahan and her brother began to vie with each other for power, and a complicated tangle of deceptions and treacheries ensued, as each promoted a different candidate to succeed Jahangir.
It was a long struggle well fought, but one that Nur Jahan finally lost, and her brother’s candidate, Jahangir’s third son, assumed the crown as Shah Jahan. He would be best known in the West for building the Taj Mahal in honor of his wife, a niece of Nur Jahan. Desp
ite Nur Jahan’s years of effective governance, as a woman her power was still in some sense by proxy, and without her husband she could not hold on to it. She was forced to retire to Lahore where she lived under guard on a pension provided by her triumphant brother. It was said that she “never went to parties of amusement of her own accord, but lived in private and in sorrow” for the next eighteen years until her death in 1645.
Then as ever it was a world of suffering and illusion, as the Buddha had long ago observed. The Japanese called this ukiyo, or “sad world.” But in the seventeenth century the phrase ukiyo got rebranded. Cessation of warfare had brought with it a new spirit of optimism. Now it would be written with characters that were pronounced the same but meant “floating world.” Around the middle of the century a popular writer, who happened also to be a Buddhist monk, explained what he understood as the “floating world”: “Living only for the moment, devoting our attention to the pleasures of the moon, snow, cherry blossoms, and maple leaves; singing songs, drinking wine, diverting ourselves by merely floating, floating, unconcerned at the prospect of poverty, never losing heart, floating like a gourd on the river currents — that is what we call the floating world.” The concept of the floating world is strongly associated with the pleasure district of Edo, called the Yoshiwara. It was formalized as a government-sponsored district as one of the final decisions of the shogun Ieyasu, founder of the long-lived Tokugawa shogunate, who died in 1616.
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