Empress

by Ruby Lal

  A Key for Closed Doors

  When Mihr returned to Agra in 1608 after more than a decade in the wild and open spaces of distant Bengal, the capital was even grander and more crowded than when she left. Along the banks of the Yamuna River stood many more mansions than before, surrounded by luxuriant gardens and groves. “Everyone has tried to be closer to the riverbank,” a visiting Dutch trader wrote, “and consequently the waterfront is occupied by the costly palaces of all the famous lords, which make it appear very gay and magnificent.”1 The sleepy village of Sikandara, just outside of Agra, was now bustling with workers completing the tomb of Akbar. It had been renamed Paradise Town in honor of its new status as the Great Mughal’s burial place.

  The Agra Fort, on the western bank of the Yamuna, was as imposing as ever. A drawbridge over a moat led to the fort’s front entrance, Akbari Darwaza, or Akbar’s Door, a colossal spiked gate richly decorated with golden loops and rings. That would be the first halting point for an entering regiment, where imperial orders would be presented to the guard. The equally magnificent Elephant Gate (Hathi Pol) to the west served as the public entrance; from there, an open bazaar led to the courtyard of public audiences with the emperor.

  After passing through Akbar’s Door, Mihr and her young daughter were taken to the harem, called the Jahangiri Mahal, though it was built by Akbar. A grand garden marked the entrance of this multistory palace for royal women, dominated by high domed turrets and separated from the rest of the fort complex by thick walls. The harem, viewed from the public courtyard, or from outside the walls of the fort, was visible only as a succession of rooftops and cupolas.

  Mihr was thirty-one years old, attractive, dignified, and well trained in the behavior and duties required of noblewomen connected with palace society. She had visited the harem as a girl, and knew she would soon be part of a restrictive existence very different from her relative independence in Burdwan. But she had no idea what her precise role there would be.

  The guardian of Jahangir’s harem, a well-educated and reliable elderly woman named Aqa Aqayan, would have led Mihr and Ladli to its labyrinthine inner precincts.2 Lavish relief carvings in floral patterns decorated the walls; vases were carved into niches and etched with leaves and flowers. Blue and red chandeliers hung from the cupola ceilings.

  Numerous entrances and passages connected a series of open, paved quadrangular courtyards lined with trees and pots of plants and flowers, surrounded by verandahs behind which apartments were set. The roofs of verandahs and passageways were supported by slender, finely carved columns of red sandstone. Some split-level apartments had narrow winding staircases and densely carved balconies overlooking the courtyard.

  Every apartment was spectacularly embellished with motifs from Hindustan, Central Asia, and Iran: stucco domes, lotus domes of sandstone, arches so intricately carved they looked like netting. Verses from the Quran may have decorated some walls. Although each passage, courtyard, and set of rooms had a distinct style—some with arches, some with carved pillars in arabesque designs, some with extended balconies—they formed a harmonious whole.

  Mihr was no longer the head of her own household, but submerged in a sea of women, many of them remarkable, and all but the elders without full autonomy. Mihr was now living with the former emperor Akbar’s elderly wives, among them Jahangir’s mother and stepmothers, and the current emperor’s wives and concubines from aristocratic families all over the empire and neighboring regions: Central Asia, Iran, Afghanistan. A grid of matrimonial alliances was crucial to any emperor’s ambitions and authority. When the daughters and sisters of regional and international rulers entered the harem, an extensive network of loyalty was set in place. The emperor’s wives included the daughters of noble Indian Muslims, of a Rajput chieftain from northwestern India whose family had maintained a strong alliance with Mughals, and of the rulers of Kashmir, Khandesh, Kabul, Bikaner, and Ghakkar.3 One of Jahangir’s wives was the daughter of a Tibetan raja. Many of the harem women had backgrounds as illustrious as Mihr’s and all of them served the needs of the emperor and empire in some way, by producing sons, by giving counsel to the king and his court, by helping govern when menfolk were away, or by being good company.

  Younger sons and daughters, such as then three-year-old Prince Shahryar, the son of Jahangir and an unnamed concubine, lived with their mothers. Teenage boys had their own apartments within the harem. Some moved out when they reached maturity—marked by either marriage or the assignment of administrative rank—and established their own households. Some, like Prince Khurram, the son of a Rajput princess married to Jahangir, stayed on; he was sixteen and had adult status when Mihr arrived, but he lived in the harem for five more years. Older wet nurses of the emperor, the foster mothers, and their families also dwelled in the harem.4

  Within the Agra harem lived an immense staff that attended to the needs of royalty: midwives, scribes, lamplighters, pages, stewards, doorkeepers, oil keepers, cooks, tasters, tailors, palanquin bearers, tanners, water carriers, bookbinders, astrologers, perfumers, weavers, and masons. Also, throngs of saheliyans, companions, looked after the intimate needs of royal women and their younger offspring—nursing, bathing, and dressing children and keeping them from bodily harm, preparing the ladies’ baths or filling their hookahs. The women of the harem often formed close bonds of friendship with their companions. And aristocratic women like Mihr’s mother, Asmat, could visit the harem, according to rules put in place by Akbar.

  In some ways, the harem offered women surprising opportunities—wide horizons behind high walls. Senior women were called upon by the emperor and court officials for counsel on matters of diplomacy. These matriarchs also instructed younger royal women, and intervened to protect young princes, as they did with Salim. Political ambition, intrigue, and aspirations cultivated in the harem were tightly entwined with courtly matters. Here, rebellious foster brothers could hide, as happened in Akbar’s time; here, plots were hatched and sometimes botched, as when young Khusraw unsuccessfully rose up against his father, Jahangir.

  Potential ways to thrive were available to all of the women. Treasured manuscripts celebrating the empire were housed within the harem’s guarded confines; royal women read them and enjoyed the sublime illustrations. Some even inscribed their names on manuscripts as signs of ownership. Women wrote poetry and prose; they discussed matters personal and political. The harem was a diverse and dynamic place engaged in the affairs of the world in a deeply personal way, and its women lively and conflicted human beings with strong interests and desires. Although the emperor was meant to be at the center of harem life, he was not the only point of initiative, control, or imagination. The harem was not a space meant to enhance the individual ambitions of women, certainly not those of innovative younger women. But it was a place where women could take pleasure in everyday exchanges, in watching the stars, in gazing at the flow of the Jamuna below, in smoking a hookah as they dipped their feet in water in a cooling fountain.

  Three elderly Mughal women, the mother and stepmothers of Jahan gir, became Mihr’s guardians and protectors.5 One of them was Salimeh Begum, already part of Mihr’s story. She was the stepmother of Rahim, the first employer of Mihr’s husband Quli. The granddaughter of the first Mughal emperor and Akbar’s cousin, she married Akbar after the death of her first husband, his regent.6 A wise, sensitive, and charming peacemaker, she helped guide Mihr.

  Ruqayya Begum, Akbar’s first wife, was another harem elder who protected and counseled Mihr. Ruqayya had no children of her own. Later, she would help raise Khurram, Jahangir’s favorite son.

  A late section of Jahangir’s memoir notes that Mihr was entrusted to the care of Jahangir’s mother, Harkha, a sage and reserved Rajput queen. She emerges now and then in her son’s memoir, especially on formal occasions such as the celebration of his birthday or accession ceremonies, and sometimes when the women of the harem traveled.

  The senior Mughal women’s protection elevated Mihr; it signified im
perial acknowledgment of her standing as the daughter of Ghiyas. She was no “lady-in-waiting,” as some European authors have described her over the centuries.

  What mattered greatly to men and women of the court was the preservation of the spectacular Mughal Empire. Even during the nomadic reigns of the first two Mughal rulers, before a formal, physical harem existed and women sometimes accompanied the emperor on his journeys, they were meant to be separate and subordinate. Any anomalous behavior was remarkable. In 1519, when Babur, the first Mughal, was camped with his cavalcade near Kabul, a woman named Hulhul Anika, a member of the royal entourage, visited his tent and had a drink with Babur and his men. The emperor noted in his journal that he was doubly astonished—at her appearance among men, and at her actions; he had never seen a woman drink wine. He may have been an open-spirited poet-wanderer, but he still expected women to keep their place—cloistered in the company of other women.

  Once Akbar ordered that royal women be secluded in a harem, only the occasional matriarch’s name would appear in official documents. The sanctity and invisibility Akbar attached to royal women extended to keeping them anonymous in imperial records. In the Akbarnama, the chronicle of Akbar’s reign, the passage that notes the birth of his longed-for son Salim doesn’t mention the name of Harkha, the wife who produced him. Instead, it makes metaphorical references only to her womb; she is the nameless vessel that bore the long-awaited heir. Erasure was common for a woman of Harkha’s time, a tradition in the Rajput region she hailed from as well as the Mughal dynasty into which she married.

  Jahangir was attached to a number of women, and wrote about them in some detail and by name: among them, Harkha, Ruqayya, Gulbadan, and Salimeh, whom Jahangir portrays in his memoir as proactive and engaged in Mughal life. All had intervened on his behalf when he was estranged from Akbar. Among his wives, he was fond of his first, Man Bai, and wrote about his melancholy when she died, and his second, Jagat Gosain, mentioned in legends as an intimate.

  The exact number of Jahangir’s wives was a subject that preoccupied many writers. Thomas Roe, the English ambassador to India during Jahangir’s reign, thought the emperor kept a thousand wives.7 Roe’s chaplain, Edward Terry, put the number at “four wives, and … concubines and women beside … enough to make up their number a full thousand.”8 William Hawkins, a sailor who accompanied Roe, recorded that the emperor had “three hundred wives, whereof foure be chiefe as queens.”9 A twentieth-century historian wrote that Jahangir, “a sensuous person … had nearly 300 young and beautiful women attached to his bed, an incomprehensible figure in the modern age.”10

  Jahangir himself made a list of his wives and children, emphasizing the political importance of his marriages.11 By his count, the number of his wives was nineteen. The first was his cousin Man Bai of Amber, the Rajput princess he married in February 1585 when he was sixteen and still Prince Salim.12 They had a daughter and a son. Three years before Mihr’s arrival in Agra, Man Bai committed suicide during the last month of her son Khusraw’s rebellion.

  Jagat Gosain, also a Rajput princess, wed Jahangir a year after his first marriage and gave birth to Jahangir’s favorite son, whose “advent made the world [so] joyous” that they named him Khurram, which means “joyous.”13 That very year, Jahangir also married the daughter of the ruler of Tibet.14 Another wife, Sahib Jamal, whom Jahangir called Mistress of Beauty, was the mother of his son Parvez. A Rajput wife gave birth to two daughters. Though several of the children from Jahangir’s many relationships died in infancy, two sons born of unnamed concubines survived. One of these was Shahryar, born in the year of Jahangir’s accession.15

  In 1608, either shortly before or soon after Mihr came to Agra, Jahangir married two more women: the granddaughter of Man Singh, whom he’d removed from the governorship of Bengal; and the daughter of the head of the Bundela clan, who ruled several small Rajput states and requested the alliance after he capitulated to the Mughal government following a revolt.16

  The one-line entries in Jahangir’s memoir covering many of the women he married confirm the extreme restrictions of their lives. They had no control over which of them the emperor visited and when, with whom he had children, to what extent he supported one or another woman—or whom he loved. Though Gulbadan wrote eloquently about the strains and jealousies of harem life, and the search for love, influence, and peace of mind, what women in the harem felt is something we will never fully know.

  Whether Mihr felt stimulated by the social, intellectual, and cultural life of the harem, after her relative isolation in Bengal, or, after the relative freedom of her life in the hinterland, imprisoned—or perhaps a bit of both—is impossible to say. Nor is it possible to know how harem life affected her daughter, Ladli, who lived sometimes with her mother and sometimes in her grandparents’ haveli.17 And exactly how Mihr rose from being one among many to become the favored wife of the emperor too remains a mystery.18

  What is known is that on May 11, 1611, in Jahangir’s sixth year of rule, the emperor married Mihr, upon whom he bestowed the honorific Nur Mahal, Light of the Palace, the first of her two royal names. Many published accounts of their courtship and marriage exist—but none comes from Jahangir. He makes no mention in his journal of those events, though at the time the emperor was obsessively detailing most of his activities in the Jahangirnama. He noted, for example, that supplicants had brought him offerings of a peach “as big as an owl’s head” and “a ruby the color of an onion.” He spent a lot of ink describing a “very hot hunt” for red deer.19 He wrote about increasing his son Khurram’s rank, and about inspecting gems. But not a word of his wedding to Mihr.

  He did, however, mention several interactions with Mihr’s family. Khusraw’s rebellion had posed a major challenge to Jahangir’s reign, but it was clear that Jahangir held nothing against Ghiyas or his family for his son Muhammad Sharif’s betrayal. In fact, as early as 1607, Prince Khurram was betrothed to be married to Mihr’s niece, Asaf’s daughter. Mihr’s presence in the harem was a further sign of reconciliation. Another was a visit that Jahangir made in late 1608, accompanied by some royal women, to the home of Asaf Khan, now considered a relative on account of the betrothal, where he spent the night. Asaf presented him with offerings worth several hundreds of thousands of rupees—“jewels and jewelled things, robes, elephants and horses. Some single rubies and jacinths [a gemstone] and some pearls, also silk clothes and some pieces of porcelain from China.…”20 Jahangir increased Mihr’s father’s rank twice in 1611 and gave him 5,000 rupees as a gift “on account of the sincerity of his friendship and his old services.” The emperor later recorded Ghiyas Beg’s promotion to wazir—minister—of the empire, in charge of imperial finance, land assignments, and revenue collection, the post Ghiyas would hold until his death.21

  Shaken by Khusraw’s revolt, Jahangir had set about building or repairing strategic alliances and consolidating his power. Maintaining good relationships with eminent families such as Ghiyas’s was critical. He limited the prerogatives of his officers, issuing an imperial decree prohibiting provincial governors from engaging in practices reserved for the monarch—no blinding as punishment, for example.22 Jahangir mended his relationship with Khusraw, but he still kept his son under surveillance.

  In his memoir, the emperor recorded the particulars of urgent imperial matters, described his social engagements, listed the political advantages of his previous marriages, poured out his grief about Man Bai’s death, and made lengthy observations of the natural world. Yet he seemed unwilling to record his most intimate thoughts about his final and favorite wife. No mention was made of Mihr, by then Nur Jahan, Light of the World, until 1614, when his journal took a new turn, launching into a remarkable record of Nur’s actions, one of the finest surviving testimonies of her career and achievements. He paints an admiring portrait of Nur Jahan as a sensitive companion, superb caregiver, accomplished adviser, hunter, diplomat, and aesthete. Everything that he wrote about Nur Jahan from 1614 onward confirms a very
special and unusual relationship. No other Mughal record gives such a rich and full depiction of a royal woman.

  In a British Library manuscript copy of the Jahangirnama, there is an added note in the margins of a folio, stating simply that Jahangir married Nur Jahan at the end of May 1611, though there is no telling if it was the emperor himself who made the note.23 Whatever the case, more detailed descriptions of Mihr and Jahangir’s union do exist, like this vivid account by eighteenth-century court historian Muhammad Hadi:

  … the days of misfortune drew to a close, and the stars of her good fortune commenced to shine, and to wake as from a deep sleep. The bride’s chamber was prepared, the bride was decorated, and desire began to arise. Hope was happy. A key was found for closed doors, a restorative was found for broken hearts; and on a certain New Year’s festival, she attracted the love and the affection of the king. She was soon made the favourite wife of his majesty.24

  NINE

  Ascent

  The lashkar, the royal encampment, stretched for nearly three miles in open country outside the town of Ajmer, in northwestern India. Embroidered awnings, some worked in gold thread, shaded the entrances to magnificent trellis tents—hundreds and hundreds of them, round, arched, and rectangular—erected on supple wooden frames covered with waxed cloth, then hung with brocade or velvet. Screens of carved wood and felt pieced in floral patterns separated one section of the camp from another, and high red screens clearly marked the harem tents.

  This was the Camp of Good Fortune, the Mu’askar-i Iqbal, which would be the home of Jahangir, Nur Mahal, and many members of their court for most of the next six years as it moved from place to place in western India, beginning in early 1613. The Camp of Good Fortune was an elaborate portable city suited to the tastes and inclinations of a monarch with a wandering spirit.