Empress

by Ruby Lal

  Elizabeth of England had died two years earlier; the Spanish had conquered Mexico and Peru. European sailing ships explored the world, returning from the East with wondrous tales, half-invented, of the alluring Mughals. Some voyagers declared that the Mughal dominion extended a thousand miles south from the capital, to the tip of the subcontinent. This wasn’t accurate; Jahangir controlled the vast northern Gangetic belt and several regions of eastern and western India. But he certainly fancied expanding southward.

  Once he ascended the Mughal throne, Jahangir, secure in his new majesty, set out to attain the excellence that a cultivated emperor must embody. He had his great-grandfather Babur’s curiosity, his grandfather Humayun’s love of animals and sense of justice (though perhaps erratically dispensed), and his father’s energy. Akbar left his son a well-established government and a royal treasury worth approximately 150 million rupees in cash, or about 150 percent of the empire’s total annual income.11 Jahangir also inherited his predecessors’ codes of law; a fine military; the excellent administrative, tax, and revenue systems that his father had arranged; and a rich and distinctive artistic tradition of court histories, miniature paintings, and architecture. He would go further and expand the philosophical and aesthetic accomplishments of his kingdom.

  Six months after Jahangir took the throne, Ali Quli once again appeared in the imperial chronicles, under the protection of the new emperor. Jahangir forgave what he saw as Quli’s desertion and noted, “After my accession, out of generosity I overlooked his offences.” Jahangir ordered a revenue grant for Quli in Bengal.12 But his detailed description in the memoir of Quli’s behavior three years earlier—his “natural wickedness and habit of making mischief,” suggests that the emperor still mistrusted him.13 And according to one colorful nineteenth-century account, Syed M. Latif’s 1889 History of the Panjab, no sooner did Akbar die and Jahangir become sovereign than his passion for Mihr revived.

  Flamboyant visual markers of his power were of great importance to the new emperor. He traveled in resplendent royal cavalcades that stretched for miles; he ordered supersized coins struck bearing his image (Jahangir designed the largest ever Mughal gold coin, used mainly in his elaborate ceremonies), and he increased by 20 percent the size of silver coins minted for general circulation, an act that disrupted the economy. Six years later he realized that he had overstretched, and returned to his father’s standards.14

  Along with ceremonial matters, Jahangir took on more routine political affairs. He bestowed or enhanced revenue grants for many officials of the Mughal state. Perhaps feeling guilty about the murder of his father’s favorite courtier, he employed Abul-Fazl’s son as the governor of Bihar. He awarded scores of nobles with court and provincial positions, confirmed the ranks of several, and promoted many others. The emperor also honored Mihr’s father, Ghiyas Beg, with the title I’timad ud-Daula, the Pillar of the State.

  Jahangir considered himself blessed when a fourth son, Shahryar, was born the year he ascended the throne, his mother a concubine unnamed in the records. The imperial rejoicing, however, couldn’t conceal troubles that had been brewing in Agra. Jahangir’s son Khusraw, once his rival for the throne, was now eighteen, and relations between them were tense. Though Akbar’s desire for his grandson to succeed him wasn’t fulfilled, Khusraw had nonetheless quietly continued to build independent support, just as Jahangir had once done. By late 1605, the handsome and temperamental prince was playing out an oft-repeated imperial saga. Jahangir had rebelled against Akbar; now Khusraw was about to take up arms against his father.

  Before his accession, Jahangir had agreed to give Khusraw the governorship of Bengal. A few months into his reign, however, the emperor changed his mind. Khusraw had supporters in Bengal, wealthy men with militias of their own, who might help the prince challenge his father.

  To discourage support for Khusraw, Jahangir removed the prince’s maternal uncle, Man Singh, from the governorship of Bengal. His replacement was one of Jahangir’s foster brothers. In Mughal culture, the wet nurses of a prince were known as foster mothers and their sons were the prince’s foster brothers, or kokas. Highly respected, the foster mothers were carefully chosen and had to be “even-tempered and spiritually minded” women married to men from noble families.15 A prince and his kokas spent their childhoods together, and when a prince went on to become emperor, his kokas usually enjoyed career advantages.

  Jahangir appointed other loyalists to posts in Bengal and bordering areas, and as a final step against rebellion by his son, placed Khusraw and his wife under house arrest in a palace tower in Agra. One historian notes that after he was confined, Khusraw increasingly expressed his fury and disrespect to his father’s closest advisers. A European representative of the Dutch East India Company wrote that the final straw for the prince was receiving word from one of his partisans that Jahangir was considering blinding him.16 Khusraw, fearing for his life, made plans to escape—and once again, Mihr’s husband Quli was drawn into the fierce contest between an emperor and his son.

  On April 6, 1606, Khusraw managed to flee Agra Fort at night on the pretext of paying a visit to the tomb of his grandfather. The number of men who accompanied him is disputed. Jahangir wrote that Khusraw left with 350 horsemen; another source puts the number at 150, and still another speaks of a small band of men.17 According to Jahangir’s memoir, Khusraw and his men looted sections of the city for money, horses, and supplies, then headed for Lahore, a more accessible staging ground for rebellion than distant Bengal.

  Along the way, Khusraw and his band robbed travelers, attacked traders, burnt caravanserais and pillaged the town of Mathura. Landowners provided him with funds and soldiers, either willingly or under duress. According to one estimate, he collected 12,000 men and paid them cash that he’d seized from an imperial treasury caravan.18

  Jahangir was enraged by his son’s revolt, repeatedly noting in his journal that his fatherly affection had kept the prince in comfort and ease, and that there was no reason why Khusraw should have become his enemy. Jahangir evidently forgot, or chose to ignore, the example of his own rebellion, and the fact that Akbar had nurtured hopes of succession in Khusraw when he was a boy. The insurgency occurred, Jahangir declared, because of Khusraw’s “lack of experience,” which allowed him to be misled by “worthless companions” who failed to understand that “throne and diadem are not things of purchase.”19

  Whatever the causes of the rebellion, Jahangir took steps to stop it. He made sure that custodians of Sufi shrines were on his side, split his son’s supporters by offering them money, and tapped men familiar with the geography of the Punjab to lead the pursuit of the prince.20 By late April, however, Jahangir saw clearly that he would personally have to march against Khusraw in Lahore.

  Khusraw’s mother, the Rajput princess Man Bai, Jahangir’s first wife and sister of ousted Bengal governor Man Singh, feared the fate awaiting her son. As far as Jahangir was concerned, Khusraw had repeatedly done wrong and deserved “a thousand kinds of punishment.” Man Bai knew her husband, and knew that emperors could be merciless when someone challenged their authority. Anguished at her son’s rebellion, distraught over what might happen to him, she killed herself with an overdose of opium. Jahangir deeply lamented the death of his wife:

  Her devotion to me was such that she would have sacrificed a thousand sons and brothers for one hair of mine.… What shall I write of her excellences and goodness? She constantly wrote to Khusrau and urged him to be sincere and affectionate to me. When she saw that it was of no use and it was unknown how far he would be led away, she from the indignation and high spirit which are inherent in the Rajput character determined upon death … such feelings were hereditary, and her ancestors and her brothers had occasionally showed signs of madness …21

  When Jahangir left for Lahore with his troops to quell Khusraw’s rebellion, he appointed men he trusted to secure the Fort of Agra, which encompassed the imperial treasury and the harem. He put Ghiyas Beg in charge of the c
ity, and asked loyal nobles to keep an eye on his cousins and other male relatives. “When such proceedings manifest themselves in the sons of one’s loins what may one expect from nephews and cousins?” he reasoned.22 From Agra to Delhi, and on to Panipat and Karnal, Jahangir and his men marched toward Lahore. He stopped at the tombs of his ancestors and those of Sufi saints, gathering blessings. All along the way, provincial officers promised to support the emperor. He promoted many and raised the ranks of others, bringing them securely into his fold.

  Men loyal to the emperor were already on their guard in Lahore. Although Khusraw had hoped to take the fort by surprise, imperial orders against him had reached Lahore before he did. Accordingly, the guards had strengthened the towers and the walls, repaired broken sections, placed cannons and swivel guns on the citadel, and prepared for battle.

  When Khusraw’s forces reached Lahore, they burned one of the gates to the fort without breaching the walls, and looted Lahore for seven days. During the disorder, Khusraw got regular updates from his spies on the approach of the royal army. Racked by increasing doubt, he nonetheless decided to fight his father’s soldiers. Armed with a spear and a sword, Jahangir followed rather than led his troops into battle, as was customary for an emperor. The imperial soldiers prevailed, and Khusraw’s men scattered. Several escaped toward Kabul. A box of jewels and other precious things that the prince always carried with him fell into the hands of the imperial forces.

  Men stationed at ferry crossings and on major roads in Punjab were on high alert, watching for Khusraw or his fleeing soldiers. The streets of Lahore were lined with the impaled heads of hundreds of the prince’s followers.

  Eventually, a party of the emperor’s men found the prince. Hands tied, chains fastened from his left hand to his left foot—in keeping with the law of Mughal forbear Chingiz Khan—Khusraw was brought before Jahangir along with his key allies. The prince began to weep, trembling in fear. Royal servants wrapped and tied two of his men in fresh animal skins, one in the skin of an ox and the other in the skin of an ass, put them on asses with their faces to the tail, and led them around the city. Since the ox-hide dried more quickly, the man in it died from suffocation. The man in the ass’s skin survived. Jahangir spared Khusraw’s life, but entries in the emperor’s memoir suggest that at some point Khusraw’s eyes were damaged in retribution for his rebellion.23

  In writing about Khusraw’s actions, Jahangir reflected on his own behavior as an ambitious prince, here presenting a different view of his rebellion against Akbar. Looking back, he blamed some “shortsighted men” who urged him to defy Akbar, and noted that an empire couldn’t successfully rest upon a foundation of hostility to a father. He even wrote of Akbar as his “visible God.”24 Now that he’d assumed the throne, he could see his father’s point of view.

  The saga of Khusraw’s revolt didn’t end with his capture. In August 1607, Khusraw’s supporters in the imperial court, possibly without the prince’s knowledge, plotted to assassinate Jahangir. Mihr’s oldest brother, Muhammad Sharif, was part of this conspiracy. Ghiyas Beg—elevated as Pillar of the State—was put on probation immediately after the conspiracy was discovered, undoubtedly because he was under suspicion as Muhammad’s father.

  Jahangir went after as many conspirators as possible. Mihr’s brother Muhammad and several other prominent conspirators were executed; her father was demoted, fined, and temporarily imprisoned. Hundreds of lower-ranking supporters of the prince were speared or hanged; others were given jail terms, or exiled to Mecca for penance. Some suspected of participation in the plot were put under house arrest in Agra and Lahore.

  The emperor set out to win over Khusraw’s remaining supporters, making conciliatory gestures toward some who had indirectly sided with the prince and demanding expressions of loyalty within the court. He distributed images of himself to his supporters—most likely in the form of pendants that could be pinned onto turbans, as well as coins or lockets—and addressed them as his disciples, emphasizing that in serving him, they served the empire.

  Court records suggest that Quli was suspected of complicity in the 1607 plot against Jahangir, and that his lands in Burdwan were confiscated. Loyal courtiers advised the emperor that “it was not right to leave such mischievous persons there [in Bengal].” So Jahangir instructed the new governor to bring Quli to the Agra court, and if he “showed any futile, seditious ideas, to punish him.”25

  The governor traveled to Burdwan by elephant with a detachment of soldiers on horseback. Hearing the news of their arrival, Quli rode on his horse to greet the dignitary, as would be expected of a provincial officer, even one whose lands had been taken away. He was accompanied by two men. According to eyewitness Haidar Malik Chadurah, an imperial soldier and administrator, as soon as Quli entered the governor’s camp, soldiers surrounded him. Quli’s hand went to his scabbard. He and Haidar fought with swords, and Haidar was badly injured. Then Quli attacked the governor’s elephant, but he lost control of his horse and had to dismount.26 The governor’s soldiers finished him off.

  Jahangir’s memoir offers a slightly different version of the encounter, presumably based on reports from provincial administrators. In this account, Quli mortally wounded the governor, whose men then cut Quli to pieces and “sent him to hell.”27 Whatever the details, Mihr became a widow.

  A description of the event in an eighteenth-century compilation of Mughal biographies had Quli returning home despite terrible wounds, bent on killing his wife to save her from violence or disgrace. His weeping mother (a character who appears in no other history or legend) saved Mihr by claiming that she had already thrown herself into a well. Quli then expired. For some time, according to this telling, Mihr was in disgrace, because the governor her husband had killed was the emperor’s foster brother.

  In the early twentieth century, three hundred years after Quli’s death, an Indian historian of antiquities, Maulawi Abdul-Wali, writing in the Proceedings of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, repeated this version and noted in addition that Mihr, “the real cause of the tragedy, took shelter, out of fear, in the house of Ashqa Jolaha [a weaver], in Burdwan.” From there, she made her way, or was escorted, by stages to Jahangir’s court.28

  Syed Muhammad Latif, in History of the Panjab, had elaborated the notion that Mihr was “the real cause” of her husband’s death, with as much brio as in his invented conversations between Mihr and her parents at the time of her betrothal to Quli. After Akbar’s death, determined to get rid of Quli, Jahangir ordered him to fight a tiger barehanded. Quli prevailed. After that, Jahangir commanded forty assassins to attack Quli in his bedroom, but he vanquished them. Then the emperor appointed his foster brother, the governor of Bengal, “to induce Sher Afgan [Quli] to divorce his wife, and, in case of his refusal, put his hated rival to death.” Quli rejected the proposal “with disdain,” and was killed by the governor. “The lovely widow was sent under custody to Agra, as an accomplice, but was not prosecuted.”29

  Perhaps the most trustworthy account of Quli’s death and its consequences for Mihr comes from Haidar, the military officer wounded by Quli, who wrote in detail about what happened to Mihr immediately after her husband was hacked to pieces.30 Soldiers went to Quli’s residence to check for any supporters he may have been harboring. The household staff had already been instructed by imperial representatives to bring Mihr and Ladli to the home of Haidar, who was charged with watching over them until they were summoned to Agra. “I did not spare any moment in honouring and serving her,” Haidar wrote. For forty days, the prescribed period of ritual mourning, “that ‘Bilqis [Sheba] of the Age’ stayed in my house.” Then an imperial order arrived, summoning Mihr and Ladli to Agra. That was common procedure: when a Mughal officer was killed, the emperor took charge of the surviving wife and children, and the man’s property was forfeited to the treasury of the emperor.

  Haidar and his brother accompanied Mihr and Ladli as far as Rajmahal, the capital of Bengal, and men sent by the emperor guided them t
he rest of the way.31 Although Dai Dilaram isn’t mentioned in the chronicles covering the events of this time, she would have accompanied Mihr and her daughter as they sailed westward on their way to the center of Mughal affairs in Agra. Twelve years had passed since Mihr had arrived in Bengal as a newlywed, with her relatives in positions of power in the Mughal court. Now she was a widow; one of her brothers had been executed as a traitor, and her father had been placed under house arrest. Her own fate was uncertain.

  In Agra, the mourning Mihr was sent to the imperial harem rather than to the home of her father or one of her brothers. Ghiyas was released and reinstated in his position after paying a fine of 200,000 rupees, an astronomical sum for the times—a sign of imperial benevolence, or perhaps a way for Jahangir to earn Mihr’s gratitude.

  After defiant regional rulers or landlords surrendered to the Mughals, often they pledged their daughters in marriage to the emperor as a sign of peace and submission. Many of the royal wives in the harem had married Jahangir as part of political negotiations. Ghiyas and Jahangir may have made such a marriage arrangement—the fulfillment, if legend and later accounts have any grain of truth, of a desire long held by the emperor.

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