by Ruby Lal
No official records suggest resentment on Jagat Gosain’s part, and it may be that her absence from the passages in Jahangir’s memoir celebrating their son Khurram are simply the result of his general disinterest in writing about any wives except Nur. But this lack of documentary evidence didn’t stop later historians of Mughal life from embracing popular legends of a rivalry between Nur and Jagat Gosain. Khafi Khan, writing in the eighteenth century, presented Jagat, not Nur, as the favored wife. He tells the tale of a hunting trip that Jahangir took accompanied by Nur; her mother, Asmat; Jagat Gosain; and servants. While the hunters were in the process of guiding a lion within range of imperial guns, the emperor fell asleep with the women by his side. Suddenly the lion emerged, roaring. Nur was paralyzed with fear, Khafi Khan writes. Jagat Gosain picked up the emperor’s gun, fired, and killed the lion. This roused Jahangir from sleep. Seeing the dead lion and Gosain with a gun, he applauded her bravery. But he was displeased, Khafi tells us, with the terror-stricken Nur. Asmat quickly intervened, stressing that the use of arms was the function of men who had to display their bravery on the battlefield. Women were meant for soft words.16
Are we to believe that Nur, the best shot in the empire, was stunned at the appearance of a lion? Or that Asmat defended her powerful daughter by invoking women’s softness? Khafi admired Nur, but he was drawing upon anti-Nur stories that had begun to circulate when Prince Khurram became Emperor Shah Jahan, long after the alliance between Nur and her stepson went sour.
According to an even later story, on one occasion Nur noted the sweet smell of Jahangir’s mouth. He was delighted and mentioned the comment to Jagat, who said: “Your Majesty, the woman who has smelt the mouth of only one man in life cannot appreciate it. It can only be differentiated from bad odour by a woman who has seen more than one man. So only Noor Jahan can judge it.”17 In such legends, rivalry among harem women is imagined as inevitable, and the Hindu and Muslim wives of the emperor expected to be deeply antagonistic to one another.
Perhaps the biggest problem Nur faced had nothing to do with her co-wives. A twenty-first-century translator of Jahangir’s memoir wonders “whether he ever drew a completely sober breath.”18 The emperor himself provided a comprehensive history of his lifelong drinking habit. When he was eighteen, still Prince Salim, he accompanied his father, Akbar, to the Punjab region, where the emperor was fighting Afghans of the Yusufzai clan. One day while hunting near the Indus River, Salim felt weary. A gunner suggested that a cup of wine would perk him up. The ab-dar, water carrier, brought a half cup of sweet yellow wine.
After that, Salim gradually increased his intake until wine ceased to intoxicate him. He then turned to spirits—probably arrack, a popular liquor made from fermented rice and date-palm juice. Slowly he moved up to “twenty cups of doubly distilled spirits, fourteen during the daytime and the remainder at night.” All he ate was fowl, bread, and radishes. No one was able to control his drinking, and “matters went to such a length that in the crapulous state from the excessive trembling of my hand I could not drink from my own cup …” The seasoned royal physician Hakim Humam eventually spoke up. In 1600, five years before he ascended to the throne, Salim cut down on alcohol, ordering that his drinks should be two parts wine and one part spirits, and brought his intake down to six cups a day. “It is now fifteen years,” he wrote in 1615, “that I have drunk at this rate, neither more nor less.”19 In order to re-create the intoxication he no longer experienced from alcohol, he began taking a substance called filuniya, which he described as a sedative derived from a Greek drug. He soon became addicted. At some point he began to take opium instead of filuniya, mixing it with spirits or wine.
Alcohol and drugs were common in the Mughal world. Wine and poetry were central to gatherings of men; drinking together was a sign and seal of loyalty and royal favor. Babur, the first Mughal emperor, wrote extensively about his drinking parties. In fact, he chided his son Humayun for being aloof and reluctant to drink (though he was a self-proclaimed “opium eater”) and suggested that he socialize more with his followers.20 Jahangir’s two brothers died of alcoholism.
During the first New Year celebrations after his accession, despite Islamic prohibitions, Jahangir encouraged the revelers to indulge in drinks and drugs. To justify his embrace of intoxication as a Muslim, he quoted the famous Sufi poet Hafiz:
Cupbearer, brighten my cup with the light of wine;
Sing, minstrel, for the world has ordered itself as I desire.21
Jahangir’s continuous drinking exacerbated his chronic respiratory troubles, which may have been asthma. Only Nur was concerned and commanding enough to intervene. In 1621, the emperor wrote that “Nur Jahan Begam, whose skill and experience are greater than those of the physicians,” refused to approve the prescription of his attending physician and “by degrees, lessened my wine, and kept me from things that did not suit me, and food that disagreed with me.”22
Though Jahangir himself never portrayed Nur as angry about his addiction and wrote only about how she helped, apocryphal reports popularized by European commentators insist that Nur was enraged by Jahangir’s drinking. A famous fight scene, first recounted by Niccolao Manucci in his Storia Do Mogor, sixty years after Nur’s death, was encoded in public memory, and is still recounted today.
Nur had succeeded in making Jahangir agree to drink no more than nine cups in the evening, and only served by her. One evening, while listening to his musicians, he came to the end of his ninth cup and wanted more. Nur refused. “When he saw that the queen wouldn’t give ear to his words, he fell into a passion, laid hold of the queen and scratched her, she doing the same on her side, grappling with the king, biting and scratching him, and no one dared to separate them,” Manucci wrote. “The musicians, hearing the noise going on in the [other] room, began to call out and weep, tearing their garments, and beating with their hands and feet, as if someone were doing them an injury.” Nur and Jahangir, “who had been struggling together,” came out to find out the reason for all the cries. “Seeing that it was a pretendeed [sic] plot of the musicians, they fell a-laughing, and the fight ended.”
But Nur’s ire lingered, Manucci continued. She informed her husband that the only way she would forgive his excessive drinking was if he threw himself at her feet. “The king,” Manucci wrote, “who could not live without Nur Jahan, was willing to carry out her wishes, but feared to be blamed for such an act, which would give rise to a great deal of talk among his people.” He consulted a wise old woman, who advised that when the queen was walking in the garden on a sunny day, “he should place himself before her in such a way that the shadow of his body should reach the queen’s feet; then he could beseech his loved one as if he were at her feet.” Jahangir did just that, approaching Nur until his shadow lay before her. “Then he said to her, ‘Behold, my soul is at your feet!’ and thus peace was made.”23
Manucci gathered this information, he wrote, from “a Portuguese woman called Thomazia Martins.… She had charge of the royal table and was much liked by Roshan Ara Begam [Shah Jahan’s daughter, who was twenty-eight when Nur Jahan died] … through the affection she had for me … she informed me of what passed inside the palace.”24 Of course, the servant who gave Manucci this information was retelling a story from years earlier—a story that, even then, was likely to have been more palace gossip and invention than hard fact. As time went by, such imperial tales were passed along with embellishments, persisting because they were sensational and excited public imagination, because they brought historical characters to life, and because they suited the politics of the moment.
Despite Nur’s interventions, drinking and drug-taking sometimes impaired Jahangir’s ability to conduct imperial business. This was noted in accounts written by the British ambassador to the Mughal court, Thomas Roe, by Roe’s chaplain, and by two representatives of the Dutch East India Company who had dealings with the Mughal Empire in the 1620s. All of these men felt that Jahangir’s addictions allowed Nur to assume mor
e and more power. One of the Dutchmen, Pieter van den Broecke, who established a textile factory in western India, went so far as to say that Jahangir “gave himself up to pleasures, allowed himself to be misguided by women, and became addicted to drink, caring very little about his kingdom … when he had drank [sic] his last cup [and] all men had departed, the queen came out in all her splendour, undressed him and put him to sleep in a hanging bed, which was constantly rocked otherwise he got no sleep. His wife knew well how to use her opportunities for he always said ‘yes’ and scarcely ‘no’ to whatever she asked or desired …”25
Mughal chroniclers who were members of the court, like Bhakkari, the biographer of Mughal nobles, would have regarded Jahangir’s drinking and other excesses, even when they were occasionally disabling, simply as expected kingly behavior. Unlike van den Broecke and other Europeans, Mughal observers didn’t connect Nur’s ascent to her husband’s use of alcohol or opium. Instead, they ascribed her rise to her own ambition, manipulation, and “mischief-making,” as Bhakkari would describe it. They would find Jahangir’s later delegation of some sovereign tasks to his wife problematic not because it signaled that he’d succumbed to indulgence, but because they felt that a woman shouldn’t have such power.
The court chroniclers recording events in seventeenth-century India acknowledged that Jahangir, like many other monarchs, was mercurial—sometimes sensitive and civilized, sometimes tempestuous and ill tempered. They accepted that his style of kingship was different from that of his father, Akbar. Though Jahangir embraced and enhanced the Mughal ideal of cosmopolitanism and ecumenism promulgated by his father, he was more interested in the ceremonial, aesthetic, and philosophical aspects of Mughal kingship than in being a conqueror. He’d inherited a well-organized empire, one that had expanded enormously during Akbar’s reign. Though Jahangir would succeed in getting Mewar to submit and keep continuous pressure on the Deccan, his imperial project was hardly the “conquest state option favored by his father.”26 Only once did he go to war himself, to protect his throne from Khusraw’s rebellion. He had commanders to battle on his behalf.
Jahangir was more interested in the grand ritual acts of ideal Mughal kingship: holding weighing ceremonies, bestowing charity, encouraging courtly etiquette, offering his subjects glimpses of his semi-divine person from the imperial balcony. He exercised his majesty not as a warrior but as an enthusiastic and knowledgeable patron of the arts; an avid traveler through every region of his realm, and a naturalist absorbed in studying the land, its people, its flora and fauna. Jahangir loved books, illustrated or calligraphic, and gems, especially rubies. Obsessed with gathering statistics, he ordered the measurement not only of the Mughal territories but of a great range of things animal, vegetable, and mineral. The series of discussions Jahangir convened with clerics, astrologers, and poets right after he became emperor set the tone for his reign. He eagerly consulted with learned men and ascetics, and would always be something of a mystic and a seeker. Jahangir had numerous conversations with a brilliant young Jain monk named Siddhichandra, who grew up in the Mughal court. Jainism is an ancient Indian religion that emphasizes non-violence, non-attachment, and asceticism. In the Agra palace, before they set out for their travels in the west, Jahangir, Nur, and Siddhichandra were chatting and Nur teased the monk by asking whether the pleasures of flesh are important. A congenial but heated debate followed. The emperor used the Jain metaphysical doctrine of syadvada, or relativism, as his argument. “There is nothing in itself either good or bad, meritorious or sinful, but our thinking makes it so,” he said to Siddhichandra. “Syadvada … is applicable everywhere for those who believe in it. Absolutism … would amount to heresy.”27
Though her husband’s drinking and his many intellectual and spiritual preoccupations may have given Nur unusual opportunities to exercise her gifts of leadership, Jahangir never considered his approval of her growing power as abdication. Any observer who concluded that his indulgences and interests, or the growing involvement of Nur in governance, signaled Jahangir’s lack of interest in ruling would have been greatly mistaken. His habits and enthusiasms never interfered with his commitment to kingship. Jahangir directed and closely monitored his generals and administrators. He put in a full imperial workday even when he was drinking or using drugs in the evening. He’d forcefully quelled Khusraw’s rebellion against him, and made sure there were no others. His sovereignty was never in doubt to him, to his family, or to his courtiers and officers. The words he inscribed in the copy of the Jahangirnama that he presented to his son Khurram in 1618 is a candid assertion of his sovereign rule. He calls himself “a just and equitable monarch … upon whose worthy form He (The Distributor of Justice) draped his khilat [robe of honor] … Imperial rule had been given to this supplicant at the divine court.”28
A striking mark of Jahangir’s reign was the mobility of his court, and that, too, worked in Nur’s favor. The emperor and his retinue traveled almost constantly, even when he was based in one region for a long spell and made a series of shorter trips. Babur, the first Mughal, inherited the tradition of a traveling royal camp from his nomadic Central Asian ancestors, and his successors kept up the practice of kingship on the move even as they settled into grand headquarters in Agra, Lahore, and Fatehpur-Sikri. Akbar had traveled only for hunting, pilgrimages, and war, but, from the time he was a rebellious prince, Jahangir was the most mobile of the Mughals. He had the wandering spirit of his great-grandfather Babur, who often took his whole court on the road to live in tents. Jahangir traveled for many reasons: to follow military campaigns like the one in Mewar, to hunt, to observe and catalog the characteristics of his country, to experience the pleasure of novelty. Perhaps most important, however, the moving imperial camp served as a formidable sign of royal power.
[It was] a permanent reminder of Mughal sovereignty … a constant threat to any obstreperous zamindar [landowner] considering disobedience or revolt. Since the camp showed the imperial grandeur on permanent display all over the empire, actual fighting could often be avoided … [furthermore, a] camp in open fields was the ideal setting for stately ritual … welcoming ceremonies (istiqbal), paying homage (kornish), grand receptions and banquets of reconciliation …29
Jahangir married Nur during an unusual period of repose in Agra. For nearly two years after the wedding, the couple undertook a range of short, festive outings in the area. One day, the emperor, Nur, and other royal women went by boat to visit a melon garden downriver, planted and tended by Khwaja Jahan Kabuli, a distinguished man renowned for having guarded Agra from attack during Khusraw’s rebellion. The boat reached the garden at dusk, and while servants set up the tents where the royal party would spend the night, the emperor and company spent the evening walking among the melon beds. Suddenly, sharp winds sprang up; the tents and the screens surrounding them were blown down. Jahangir, Nur, and the other women slept on the boat. They spent part of the next day again strolling in the melon garden before returning to the city.30
By late 1613, Jahangir, motivated partly by a wish to be closer to the Mewar campaign but mostly by his wanderlust, was eager to tour his territories in western India, accompanied by his favorite wife, Nur. In the early days of the dynasty, the Mughals’ peripatetic culture allowed women greater freedom than they might have had otherwise, and than they would during the reigns of later emperors. This freedom lingered as independence of mind even after Akbar sequestered women in the grand harems of the imperial palaces. Now travel with her husband brought Nur out of confinement; by the end of her life, she would travel the breadth of the empire. It was from a tent that she would, in the not-too-distant future, issue her first imperial order.
After having moved several times, the Camp of Good Fortune was back in Ajmer on March 20, 1616, when Jahangir honored his wife in a novel way. The emperor, Nur, and a group of royal women paid a visit to her father’s tent, “in order to add to his dignity,” Jahangir wrote. Ghiyas presented “exceedingly rare” offerings to the emperor�
��pearls and rubies worth a fortune, and elaborate clothing. “A pleasant assembly was held,” wrote Jahangir; nobles and servants drank cups of wine. After the festive gathering, Jahangir begged Ghiyas to excuse him. He went back to his imperial tent and issued an edict: “I ordered Nur-mahall Begam to be called Nur-Jahan Begam,” changing his wife’s name from Light of the Palace to Light of the World.31
Names had a very special significance among royalty of the Islamic world. Monarchs regularly conferred exalted and poetic titles and names upon members of the family or court as indications of status and privilege. Akbar and his court historians, for example, favored senior women of the harem with epithets that spoke of purity and sanctity, such as the Abode of Mary, the Great Lady of the Age, Liberality of Good Things, Bounty of the House, and Wisdom of the Court.32 Though Jahangir called some royal matrons the Fortunate Lady, the Exalted Queen, and the Powerful Lady, most of the names he gave to his wives, concubines, and entertainers suggest his taste for beauty and opulence, like his wife Sahib Jamal, Mistress of Beauty, the concubines he called Bold-Eyed and Pretty Body; or dancers and singers he dubbed Pearl, Ruby, Diamond, Rose, and Saffron.
When Jahangir renamed his wife Nur Jahan, Light of the World, he moved onto a loftier plane, linking her name to his by references to illumination and strength. The emperor’s full name was Nur ad-Din Muhammad Jahangir. Nur ad-Din, Light of Faith; Jahangir, Seizer or Conqueror of the World.33 Jahangir’s father, Akbar, subscribed to the Persian Neo-Platonist notion that all life came into existence by the constant blinding illumination of God, the Light of Lights. In Persian, nur means “light,” and in Pashtu, a language of Afghanistan familiar to the Mughals, it means “rock.” The name the emperor gave to his newest wife embodied both meanings: brilliance and solidity. The Light of the Palace was elevated to Light of the World, and the honorific Begum clinched her status as a highly exalted woman.