Empress
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As in the permanent palaces of Agra and Lahore, the main entrance was the naqqar-khana, the Drum Room, where the arrivals and departures of important people were announced by the beating of drums. To the left of the entrance stood the imperial stables, with open-air enclosures for the horses and elephants, and tents for the supervisors and staff, and for saddles and other tack. To the right of the Drum Room was the imperial office, the daftar, where officers managed accounts and detailed revenue matters, daily expenses, and pay. Next to the daftar were tents for palanquins and carts for heavy artillery and hunting leopards.
Visitors passed through the Drum Room into the Great Camp Light—a corridor filled with lamps—and from there to the Hall of Public Audience, where Jahangir handled routine matters of government: granting promotions, for example, and awarding ceremonial robes and gifts. Behind it was the Hall of Special Audience, where the emperor dealt with confidential affairs of state, drafted edicts by his own hand, and met with the great nobles. Both audience halls were canopied spaces furnished with red and gold tapestries and rich rugs. Jahangir’s traveling Hall of Private Audience was similar to that of his father, described in the Akbarnama, which contained 72 rooms decorated with 1,000 carpets, and had proper doors with locks. The structure was held up by ropes that stretched 350 yards and were fastened to poles set 3 yards apart.
Behind the audience halls was the harem, with a tent for each of the royal women traveling with the encampment. (Jahangir wrote collectively of “royal women,” but only mentioned by name Nur; his mother, Harkha; his daughter-in-law Arjumand; and Asmat.) The imperial guard protected the harem, as well as the emperor’s tent, to the right, and the princes’ tents, to the left. Tents of eminent nobles such as Nur’s father and brother Asaf were pitched in the vicinity of royal quarters, but at a distance; officers’ tents were farther still, and no tent could be taller than the emperor’s.
Beyond the quarters of the elite were the areas of the camp allotted to the rest of the imperial establishment. These sections included more stables and arsenals, treasuries, storerooms, workshops, kitchens, and quarters for artisans, laborers, servants, cavalrymen, foot soldiers, artillerymen. On the periphery of the rectangular camp were tents that served as guardhouses.1 The Camp of Good Fortune probably held 300,000 people—royalty, courtiers, soldiers, and servants.
In February of 1614, twenty-one-year-old Prince Khurram arrived at the Camp of Good Fortune in Ajmer, accompanied by the elephant of victory, Fath Gaj.2 In the Hall of Special Audience, Khurram greeted his father by touching his feet, a sign of respect. Jahangir, surrounded by nobles, welcomed his son and praised him for having led imperial forces and princely troops to conquer the long-recalcitrant kingdom of Mewar. Several earlier attempts to subdue Mewar had been unsuccessful, including one led by Jahangir himself, when he was still Prince Salim. But this time, after a few months of brutal fighting, Mewar capitulated.
The prince, the emperor, and key courtiers moved on to the harem, where Nur applauded her stepson and presented him with a “rich dress of honour, a jewelled sword, a horse and saddle, and an elephant.”3 Nur understood that Mughals cared deeply about precision in the preparation of gifts and the manner of presenting them. Royal gift exchanges served as public declarations of who was backing whom in this world of ever-shifting political alliances. She’d picked up the subtleties of the performance from her experienced father, from her mother, and from the elder Mughal women who were her mentors in the harem.
Two things were especially notable about the harem ceremony. The first is that it was Nur and not Khurram’s mother, Jagat Gosain, who greeted and honored the prince; in fact, it seems that Jagat Gosain wasn’t even part of the royal entourage traveling with the Camp of Good Fortune. After three years of marriage to the emperor, Nur had risen to preeminence in the harem. Khurram paid formal respects to both his father and his stepmother, almost as if he were reporting to a pair of sovereigns.
Nur had devoted the early years of her second marriage to building politically astute alliances and observing affairs of state with close attention. But when her influence first began to grow in the harem, it was built upon acts of kindness. Nur’s generosity was “boundless and unlimited,” according to Farid Bhakkari, who served the Mughal court during Jahangir’s reign (and after) in various financial and military capacities.4 Bhakkari was the author of a noted biographical dictionary of nobles, scholars, and other influential Mughals. In the chapter he devotes to the empress, he notes that she bestowed gifts of clothing, jewels, horses, elephants, and cash on the royal men and women around her, and gave plenty of money to the poor. Whenever Nur learned through one of her attendants that a destitute orphan girl wished to wed, Bhakkari noted, she helped organize the marriage and provided a portion of the dowry. In this way she supported the weddings of five hundred orphan girls, and even designed an inexpensive style of wedding dress, still used today by brides of poorer families and called a Nur Mahali.
The empress also initiated the marriages of her women companions, saheliyan, under the age of forty to Jahangir’s troopers and attendants. She gave the saheliyan between the ages of forty and seventy the choice of either leaving the palace to look for a husband, or remaining with her.
All were outstanding interventions. By offering choices to the underprivileged and to the most vulnerable inhabitants of the harem, she had what we might call a “feminist” moment into which she folded the message of Bahram Sakka, the holy man she followed in Burdwan, who urged the rich to help orphans, beggars, and the homeless. Nur accomplished all of this charity work, Bhakkari wrote, with humility and courtly conduct, which were her forte.
Nur’s acts of generosity earned her goodwill and admiration from many, but most important, from Jahangir. As Jahangir’s favorite wife, Nur became a force within the harem. He was so infatuated with the “strength of her personality,” said Bhakkari, that the fabled Islamic lovers Majnun and Khusraw paled next to him.5 By the time Jahangir first mentions Nur in his memoir, in July of 1614, his affection and trust in her are clear, and seem to be fully reciprocated. She first appears in a passage describing a bout of illness three years into their marriage, before they began traveling with the Camp of Good Fortune, a time when the emperor was “seized with fever and headache,” but told no one. “For fear that some injury might occur to the country and the servants of God,” Jahangir wrote, “I kept this secret from most of those familiar with and near to me, and did not inform the physicians and hakims.” A few days passed in this state. “I only imparted this [the news of his illness] to Nur-Jahan Begam than whom I did not think anyone was fonder of me.” Later, as part of his regular royal routine, he entered the jharokha, the viewing balcony, before proceeding to the ghusl-khana, the parlor where he held top-secret meetings. His weakness was evident and the royal hakims were called. “As the fever did not change, and for three nights I took my usual wine, it brought on greater weakness.” After lighter meals and treatment with powders and syrups concocted according to his physicians’ secret formulae, the emperor improved, though from then on, he suffered periodic bouts of ill health.6
Nur’s influence—in the harem, with her husband, and, ultimately, in governance—also grew through her family connections. The year 1611 “when Nur Jahan married Jahangir, and I’timaddudaula [Ghiyas] was appointed diwan-i kul [chief imperial fiscal minister] appears to make a real change in the fortunes of their family,” notes an eminent Mughal historian.7 In 1612, when Ghiyas’s granddaughter Arjumand became Prince Khurram’s second and favorite wife, Jahangir appointed the bride’s father, Nur’s brother Asaf Khan, imperial steward, in charge of the royal household, treasuries, mints, and construction projects. The emperor also granted Ghiyas Beg another raise in numerical rank. A few years later, the governorship of Lahore would be added to Ghiyas’s portfolio, and Asaf Khan would be named Wakil-i Hazarat, the highest minister at the imperial court without a designated department and one of the three principal positions at the court. (His fat
her held the top post of wazir, and the third vital position was dispenser and overseer of mansab, numerical rankings.) Nur’s younger brother, Ibrahim, would become provincial governor of Bihar.
The constellation of power was unlike any the Mughal world had seen. Jahangir was putting the most important court offices in finance, intelligence, and military appointments into the hands of Nur’s father and brothers. In the 1620s, members of Nur’s extended family would also govern in Lahore, Kashmir, Bengal, Orissa, and Awadh.8
Nur became more and more involved in an important royal observance, the ritual weighing of the emperor, a ceremony of charity that took place twice a year in the harem, on the birthday of the emperor as reckoned by both the solar and the lunar calendar. (For all other official purposes, the Mughals used the solar calendar, based on the revolution of the earth around the sun, rather than the Islamic lunar calendar, keyed to the cycles of the moon. Year One on the Islamic calendar was 622 CE, when Muhammad emigrated from Mecca to Medina.) In 1613, the ceremony took place in the Agra harem apartments of Jahangir’s mother, Harkha, before the royal retinue began their travels. Jahangir was weighed against articles piled on a huge balance scale—gold, quicksilver, silk, perfumes, copper, drugs, ghee (clarified butter), iron, rice-milk, seven kinds of grain, salt, fruits, mustard oil, vegetables; the goods were then distributed to the needy, to holy men, and to courtiers. In addition, sheep, goats, and fowl in a number equal to the emperor’s age were given to some lucky farmers.9 Sometimes harem women were shown special favor with presents bestowed after the imperial weighing. Jahangir showered Nur with such gifts. Eventually she took charge of the biannual event. In 1621, Jahangir would write in his memoir, “Nurjahan Begam has made suitable arrangements for every solar and lunar weighing ceremony since she entered into marriage with me—and she has considered it a pleasure to do so.”10
As Nur closely watched the flow of everyday life and of grand happenings, the women of the harem were closely watching her. She was a new kind of royal wife, embodying the experiences of a full and unusual past. Nur arrived in the harem widowed and already a mother, having looked after an extensive estate in Bengal, likely picking up a gun many a time during her stay there. In that turbulent land, she’d witnessed the troubles that arose when the capital and the province knocked against each other, when an emperor and his son collided, when ambition, ego, and factionalism tangled. She seemed more canny than other royal women her age about the workings of the empire, exhibiting the knowledge expected of esteemed elder women like her harem mentors.
The winter after Khurram’s wedding to Arjumand, Nur lost the guidance of one of those revered matriarchs. Jahangir, Nur, and other royal women had set up a hunting camp in the Dahra Garden, on the outskirts of Agra, when a messenger arrived with the news that Jahangir’s ailing stepmother Salimeh Begum had passed away at the age of seventy-four. Ghiyas Beg looked after the transfer of the body to the burial ground.11 The death of Salimeh would have been painful for Nur, but it seems to have coincided with the reemergence—at least in written records—of Nur’s mother, Asmat, as a force in her daughter’s life.
Asmat made her first appearance in the Jahangirnama the same year as Nur. One day when Asmat was making rosewater, Jahangir noted in early December 1614, “a scum formed on the surface of the dishes into which the hot rosewater was poured from the jugs.” Asmat skimmed this oily froth and realized that it emitted a lovely concentrated scent. This was the perfume or ‘itr that she presented to her son-in-law, who was much taken by it. “It is of such strength in perfume,” Jahangir wrote, “that if one drop be rubbed on the palm of the hand it scents a whole assembly, and it appears as if many red rosebuds had bloomed at once.” He recalled that it was Salimeh, present when Asmat offered the attar to Jahangir, who “gave this oil the name of ‘itr-i-Jahangiri, Jahangir’s perfume.”12
Jahangir’s memory of the perfume’s discovery was prompted by another poignant recollection. Merchants had brought him delicious pomegranates and melons from Persia, which he shared with nobles and servants of the court. Growing nostalgic, Jahangir wrote of his father’s great fondness for melons, and grieved that such fruits had not come from Persia in Akbar’s time. “I have the same regret,” he wrote, “for the Jahangiri ‘itr (so called otto of roses), that his nostrils were not gratified with such essences. This ‘itr is a discovery which was made during my reign through the efforts of the mother of Nur-Jahan Begum.”13 To reward Asmat for her creation, Jahangir had presented her with a string of pearls. In little ways like this, the connection between Nur’s family and the emperor was further strengthened.
The perfume was more than just an experience for the senses. Its invention, presentation, name, and magical aroma deepened the intimacy among Jahangir and the women who watched him take the first delighted sniff—Asmat, Nur, Salimeh, and other harem ladies—all breathing in the intense scent. Among the poems that Nur wrote using the pseudonym Makhfi, the Hidden One, the following verse may well have been inspired by her mother’s distillation of roses:
If the rosebud is opened by the breeze in the garden
The key to our heart’s lock is the beloved’s smile
The heart of one held captive by beauty and coquetry
Knows neither roses, nor color, nor aroma, nor face, nor tresses.14
Like most of the poetry of Sufi Islam written in Persian (and later Urdu), Nur’s poem expresses love’s splendors on both worldly and otherworldly planes.
Nur’s preeminence in the harem, her husband’s admiration, and her family’s domination of the highest levels of government allowed her to begin shaping matters of state through alliance-building. Bhakkari wrote that Nur’s graciousness and generosity “elevated and honoured” the entire house of Ghiyas Beg. She became part of an inner circle of increasingly influential imperial advisers; it included Ghiyas Beg and his son Asaf Khan; the harem elders Harkha, Ruqayya, and Salimeh, until her death; and perhaps Nur’s mother, Asmat, and her lifelong supporter Dai Dilaram.
Prince Khurram and Arjumand, his wife, would soon join this group. Nur certainly helped Khurram’s rise by publicly celebrating his military successes, beginning with the victory in Mewar. But her influence probably began even earlier: Jahangir had likely discussed with Nur whether to send Khurram to Mewar as commander in the first place. The emperor certainly would have consulted Nur’s father and older brother, his chief advisers, about the matter, and it’s not a stretch to imagine Nur, the trusted and admired wife, as part of the conversation.
Jahangir had the highest expectations for Baba Khurram, Dear Khurram, the third prince. Khusraw, the rebellious eldest, had essentially been removed from the political scene. Second son Parvez continued to receive military and administrative assignments, but he hadn’t impressed Jahangir, and he drank excessively. Shahryar, the fourth son, was still young, nine years old in 1614. Khurram was emerging as a strong and artful prince whose rapidly increasing rank allowed him to expand his financial base, increase his household troops, and build a strong core of loyalists.
Khusraw’s rebellions had shaken the emperor, leaving him emotionally fragile and worried about the future of the Mughal dynasty. By supporting Khurram, Nur perhaps hoped to reassure her husband that the dynastic transition after his death would be smooth. She was probably also being shrewd about her own future. As the most astute and competent of the princes and the favorite of his father, Khurram was the presumptive successor. Someday, Nur might continue her influence on government as his wise adviser. Nur feted the prince repeatedly, and he, understanding that Nur was likely to be a key player in Mughal succession, extended respect to her in unprecedented ways. For example, after Khurram married Arjumand in 1612, royal women sometimes spent the night in the prince’s mansion, among them his mother, Jagat Gosain, and his stepmother Nur. When they did, the prince gave presents to them all. Nur was soon among the most highly favored. And by the time of his triumphant return from Mewar to the Camp of Good Fortune in 1614, it was Nur and not
his mother who received him—a rather spectacular demonstration of the ways in which the emperor’s favorite son and his favorite wife would honor each other. Nur seems to have hoped that her close association with Khurram, the handsome, motivated, and ambitious prince, would be the axis of a new order. With Ghiyas, Asaf Khan, and Nur, the emperor’s “first family,” by Khurram’s side, the prince’s future, and thus the future of the Mughal dynasty, would be secure.
During the three previous Mughal reigns, many royal women had wielded authority obliquely—by providing wise counsel to the emperor and his officials, and intervening to reconcile rebellious princes with their fathers. Nur was moving toward a more direct and visible kind of power. Attuned to whatever Jahangir required of her at any particular moment, Nur eased his concerns about his health, the safety of the empire, and his sons; she anticipated his needs. Though it may be that other wives were as conscientious, caring, and intuitive as Nur, only her attentions are recorded in his memoir and only she is hailed as the one most fond of him.
As the mother of the presumptive heir to the throne, Jagat Gosain might well have felt that her own position had been usurped by Nur. Jahangir’s great-aunt Gulbadan made clear in her keenly observed memoir that sharing a husband wasn’t always easy for royal wives. Two generations before Nur’s, Emperor Humayun’s wife Bigeh Begum complained that he had been neglecting her and other royal women. “For several days now, you have been paying visits in this garden,” Bigeh Begum said, “and not one day have you been to our house. Thorns have not been planted on the way to it. How long will you think it right to show these disfavors to us helpless ones … ?” Later that day, the emperor sent for his wife and the other women.
He said not a word, so everyone knew he was angry. Then after a little while he began, “Bibi, what ill-treatment at my hands did you complain of this morning? … That was not the place to make a complaint … You … know that I have been to the quarters of the elder relations … It is a necessity laid on me to make them happy … If there should be delay on my comings and going, do not be angry with me. Rather, write me a letter and say; “Whether it please you to come or whether it please you not to come, we are content and are thankful to you.”15