Empress

by Ruby Lal

  Celebrations followed Nur’s renaming. A week afterward, Shahanshah Jahangir and Nur Jahan Begum—effectively the emperor and the empress—visited Asaf Khan’s tent-mansion, roughly two and a half miles from the imperial lodgings. For half that distance, Asaf covered the road with velvet and brocades to honor his elevated sister and her emperor husband. He presented them with gifts: jewels, gold vessels, fine textiles, four horses, and a camel. Immediately after this event, Jahangir raised Ghiyas’s rank yet again, and granted him a tuman tugh, a horsetail banner, a custom begun by the Mughals’ Central Asian ancestors and a prerogative reserved for royalty—an extraordinary sign of imperial favor.34

  Jahangir turned to Ghiyas for advice on a matter with which he was obsessed: trouble in the Deccan Plateau, the vast expanse of territory to the south of the Mughal Empire that today constitutes large parts of the states of Maharashtra, Karnataka, and Andhra Pradesh. Throughout Mughal history, the sultanates of the Deccan had successfully resisted takeover by their northern neighbor. Even Akbar had been able to win only a tiny corner of the Deccan, the fort of Ahmadnagar. And now the chief minister of the independent Ahmadnagar state, a former slave from Ethiopia named Malik Ambar, skilled as a soldier and politically adroit, was rallying other Deccan states to win back the fort and resist Mughal incursion into the south.

  Ambar had been bought as a slave years before and pressed into service as a soldier by the chief minister of Ahmadnagar. Freed by the minister’s widow, Ambar married and became a lancer. In 1595, when Akbar’s forces attacked the fort and city of Ahmadnagar, aiming to annex the whole state, Ambar and the small contingent of troops he headed broke through the Mughal lines but were ultimately overpowered. Ambar and his men withdrew deep into the countryside to regroup.

  The Mughal Army fought the soldiers of the sultan of Ahmadnagar intermittently for the next five years, but the best they could do was capturing the Ahmadnagar fort and taking the sultan prisoner in 1600. They failed to conquer the rest of the state. When the fort fell, Ambar, who now headed a 7,000-man army in the independent part of Ahmadnagar, successfully pushed for a twenty-year-old member of the royal family to become a replacement for the imprisoned sultan. The young man married Ambar’s daughter, and Ambar became his son-in-law’s regent and the chief minister of Ahmadnagar.

  Since becoming emperor in 1605, Jahangir had dispatched general after general to do away with Ambar and the puppet sultan, without success. Jahangir believed that because Prince Khurram had been victorious in Mewar, he was the commander best suited to lead a campaign to the Deccan and finally defeat Ambar. Ghiyas, Nur, and the rest of the imperial inner circle of advisers agreed. Khurram said he would go on one condition: that his eldest half-brother, Prince Khusraw, still a darling of the harem women, be placed in the charge of Asaf Khan, a form of house arrest. Khusraw had been making overtures to the emperor, hoping for a complete reconciliation, and Khurram feared that while he was away, Khusraw could work his way back into their father’s good graces and become a rival for succession.

  On the day that Khusraw was handed over to Asaf Khan, surrounded by soldiers, according to Thomas Roe, “divers weomen in the seraglio mourne, refuse their meate, crye out of the king’s dotage and crueltye … The king gives fayre words, protesteth no intent of ill toward the Prince … and sends Narmahall [Nur] to appease these enraged ladyes; but they cursse, threaten, and refuse to see her. The common people all murmer.”35 Harkha, Jahangir’s mother and Khusraw’s grandmother, strongly opposed handing the prince over to Asaf Khan, arguing that physical harm might befall him. Nur managed to calm Harkha’s fears. Other high-ranking supporters petitioned the emperor to grant more freedom for Khusraw, but Jahangir remained, as one historian put it, “steadfast in his commitment to punish his son … [which] Nur Jahan and Khurram undoubtedly encouraged.36

  After Khurram departed for the Deccan states in October 1616, the traveling court returned to activities more congenial than preparing for war and arguing over Khusraw’s ongoing house arrest. Jahangir ordered repairs on two large, deteriorating reservoirs and a broken dam. He and Nur made nine visits to the tomb of a revered Sufi saint in Ajmer, and traveled to Pushkar Lake, a Hindu sacred site, fifteen times. The imperial encampment moved, stayed in one place for a short while, and moved again.

  A month after Khurram’s departure, the emperor and empress left the encampment for Ramsar, with a small party of royal women, courtiers, officers, and servants. Ramsar, a jagir twenty miles southeast of Ajmer, was the first of two large estates, encompassing whole villages, that the emperor would bestow upon Nur Jahan. Estates were usually given to nobles with rank; a jagir came with lucrative fiscal rights—to tax revenues, a share of profits from goods sold, and taxes on goods coming in. Not only was Nur given her own estates, but her holdings were mentioned in lists of landowners counted as imperial officeholders.

  The party spent eight nights in Ramsar; Jahangir fished and hunted—gazelle, antelope, and waterfowl—and Nur looked after estate business, conferring with her treasurer. On the last night of their stay, she ordered a feast. “On all sides and in the middle of the lake, which is very broad, lamps were displayed,” Jahangir wrote. Gems, jeweled vessels, fine gold-beaded textiles, and a variety of other offerings were displayed before the emperor. The next day the royal entourage moved on.37

  Jahangir and Nur spent the rest of 1616 in this itinerant mode. Among their many stops was the village of Lasa, in the conquered kingdom of Mewar, which would also become Nur’s property. There, Jahangir hunted and he and Nur arranged to send twenty-one winter robes of honor for amirs—top commanders—assigned to the Deccan. On the road, they celebrated Khizri, the feast-day honoring Khwaja Khizr, a saint considered to be immortal and revered by both Muslims and Hindus. The figure of Khizr was an amalgam of the prophet Elijah, who appears in the Old and New Testaments and in the Quran; the Mesopotamian demigod Gilgamesh; and Alexander the Great’s legendary love, his cook Andreas, who accidentally fell into the fountain of youth and gained eternal life. Associated with water, fish, and rejuvenation, Khizr roamed the world invisible, at times appearing to mortals to impart wisdom. For Sufi mystics, he was the repository of the mysteries of the universe. The festival of Khizri would have a special meaning for Jahangir, for he too was one who wandered, and loved probing the mysteries of nature. After Khizri festivities in the tents of Nur’s father, Jahangir issued an order that the harem women were not to veil their faces from Ghiyas. There was nothing to hide from this elder, he said, who, like a wise Sufi, was a model of the art of living and being.

  Through much of the spring of 1617, the Mughal camp traveled in Malwa, a temperate region five hundred miles southwest of Agra dotted with lakes, green valleys, stately palaces, and 360 notable Hindu shrines and temples, as noted in the gazetteer of Akbar’s reign. Willows and hyacinths lined the banks of calm rivers; wheat, poppy, sugarcane, mangoes, melons, and grapes grew in abundance. By late 1617, the Mughal camp was set up outside of the fortress town of Mandu in Malwa. A celebrated and solitary ascetic named Jadrup was staying nearby. After many years of religious retreat in a far corner of the desert, the venerable hermit had returned to a spot near the ancient city of Ujjain. Jahangir decided to visit him.

  Jadrup lived in a tiny cave dug into the middle of a hill. The passage leading to the small pit where he sat, Jahangir reported, was six feet long, three feet high, and just under two feet wide. The emperor seems to have braved the passage in order to talk with Jadrup in his cave. There was no mat, no straw. Jahangir wrote:

  In the cold days of winter, though he is quite naked, with the exception of a piece of rag that he has in front and behind, he never lights a fire … He bathes twice a day in a piece of water near his abode … He takes by way of alms five mouthfuls of food … which he swallows without chewing, in order that he may not enjoy their flavor … he has thoroughly mastered the science of Vedanta, which is the science of Sufism. He spoke well, so much so as to make a great impression on me. My socie
ty also suited him.38

  Through Jadrup, a noted Vaishnavite—a Hindu who worships Vishnu as the supreme god—Jahangir came to believe that the Vedantic philosophy of Hindus and the beliefs of Muslim Sufis were “more or less identical.” Based on the Vedas, the sacred scriptures of India, Vedanta affirms the divinity of the human soul and the harmony of all religious traditions, and is one of the ancient philosophical foundations of Hinduism.

  Jahangir would seek out Jadrup many times.39 For the emperor, part of the joy of wandering was nourishing his soul and mind in the company of ascetics, poets, scholars, and artists—masters of penance, scriptures, art, thought, and the turmoil of human existence.

  After the first entry about Nur in Jahangir’s memoir, his admiring references to her began to proliferate. Many of the most appreciative passages deal in detail with her hunting prowess—a subject deeply meaningful to Mughal rulers. When Jahangir praises Nur’s skill as a hunter, he is not so obliquely endorsing her ability to rule.

  Hunting was much more than a leisure activity. For Mughals, hunting symbolized imperial dominance, as it had for their Mongol and Turk ancestors. Stalking and shooting allowed a ruler to display his ability to tame the wild and to publicly assert his bravery in the open theater of the hunting grounds.40 In addition, hunting served some of the same vital purposes as royal travel in general. The emperor and his officers could gather local intelligence and amass data about land revenue, trade, and production. A ruler had the opportunity to meet his people—peasants or traders, who might appear to pay respects or make complaints—and form close ties with local chiefs. Sometimes the appearance of a Mughal hunting party might cause a disobedient or rebellious landholder to back down. An expert on Mughal warfare notes that hunting was “an essential instrument of Mughal government. Under the veil of hunting, the Mughals both rallied and suppressed the enormous military potential of the country surrounding the imperial hunting grounds. Hunting expeditions were often organised to inconspicuously mobilise troops … [and] for practising cavalry manoeuvres … hunting remained one of the cornerstones of sixteenth—and seventeenth-century Mughal rule.”41

  When Jahangir, as Prince Salim, sentenced to death a servant who made noise and scared away prey during a royal hunt, his act was not the rash behavior of an out-of-control autocrat, but the enforcement of a vital institution, albeit in a startling way. When Jahangir meticulously listed in his journal the animals he killed—in one stretch of 1616, the take was 1 cheetah, 1 lynx, 15 tigers, 33 gazelles, 53 nilgai (large antelopes), 80 boars, 90 antelopes, and 340 waterfowl—he was asserting his majesty. And when he wrote rapturously about Nur’s hunting, he was asserting hers.

  On April 16, 1617, Nur Jahan set out on elephant-back to hunt in Malwa using the “battue” method of stalking, a regular practice among the Mughals. With the help of dogs, four tigers spotted by scouts were surrounded by beaters, men who pounded the bushes with sticks in order to drive the game into a small, open area. The empress fired six shots and bagged all four tigers.

  Jahangir was hugely impressed. “Until now, such shooting was never seen, that from the top of an elephant and inside of a howdah (‘amari) six shots should be made and not one miss, so that the four beasts found no opportunity to spring or move.” In sheer delight, the emperor scattered coins over Nur Jahan. Impromptu, a poet recited this couplet

  Though Nur Jahan be in form a woman

  In the ranks of men she’s a tiger-slayer.42

  That a woman could aim and shoot with such accuracy stunned this poet. He was not alone in his awe.

  TEN

  Wonder of the Age

  As the Camp of Good Fortune moved through western India to the north and south of Agra, Nur Jahan’s dominance was on the upswing. She was involved with Jahangir and his inner circle in ongoing deliberations about the campaign in the Deccan, and in assessing requests from foreign diplomats for trading privileges with India. Her husband sought her counsel when he honored and increased the ranks of deserving officials and noblemen and gave directives for local administration. Nur was making decisions having to do with her jagir at Ramsar, about commerce and taxes, and the concerns of her poor subjects. She intervened, for example, to protect peasants from harassment or overtaxation by provincial authorities. The empress also supervised the care of little Shuja, the epileptic son of Khurram and Arjumand, who was pregnant for the fifth time. And Nur was beginning to think over Ladli’s marriage prospects, an issue of great political as well as personal import. An alliance that strengthened Khurram’s claim on succession would be best.

  Nur and Jahangir engaged in standard courtly activities, recreational and official. The emperor wrote busily through this period, about his intense conversations with the ascetic Jadrup and the splendid buildings of Mandu. In March 1617 he issued an order, prompted by a similar ban in Iran, that no one in his realm was to smoke tobacco, because of its ill effects and the possibility of addiction.

  In July of 1617, the summer after the tiger hunt that made Nur’s reputation as an extraordinary markswoman, an emissary from Khurram arrived at the Camp of Good Fortune, which was pitched near Mandu. The Deccan campaign was going well. Several leaders of the Deccan region had surrendered, turning over to the Mughals the keys to their strongholds. Imperial forces had captured the Ahmadnagar fortress, which had changed hands several times since Akbar first conquered it. The only troubling note: Malik Ambar hadn’t yet surrendered.

  Nur brought the encouraging news to Jahangir, who wrote in his journal, “Thanks be to Allah that a territory that had passed out of [our] hand has come back into possession of the servants of the victorious State, and that the seditious … [have] become deliverers of properties and payers of tribute.”1 If all went according to plan, the Deccan could become the crowning glory of the empire.

  As a reward for bringing him the felicitous news of Khurram’s victories, Jahangir gave Nur another jagir, a tract of land in Ajmer province called Toda, which included several villages and at least one large town.2 Over time, revenue from Toda would earn Nur a great deal of money.3 Ramsar, her other estate, was also profitable, thanks in part to Nur’s share of the duty collected on merchandise brought into the area.4

  When the monsoon came to Malwa in late July, buildings collapsed under the powerful winds and old men said they’d never seen such downpours in their lives. Nevertheless, Jahangir wrote, “it is not known if in the inhabited world there exists another place as Mandu for sweetness of air and for the pleasantness of the locality … especially in the rainy season.”5 Perhaps Khurram’s victories had so buoyed his spirits that he wasn’t troubled by the deluge.

  Jahangir and Nur visited the courts and buildings of the Shankar Tank, a large, impressive reservoir built by the rulers of Malwa. The rains lessened in August, and soon it was time for the feast of the Shab-i barat, the commemoration of the first revelation of the Quran. The stars had aligned in such a way that this year the holy day was also the anniversary of Jahangir’s accession, as well as the Rakhi festival when Hindu women tied threads around the wrists of their brothers or elder men to symbolize the strength of their bonds. To celebrate the three coinciding holidays, the empress arranged a feast at the lakeside mansion on her Ramsar estate. Male guests were fed and entertained first at the lavish event, which honored the emperor and confirmed Nur’s social primacy. Increasingly she was at the center of state and private ceremonies—the ritual weighings, holiday celebrations, seasonal festivals, imperial bazaars, weddings. She would preside over some and give gifts at many; always, family and courtiers would pay their respects to her.

  At this triple-holiday party, each guest sat according to his rank and station, served by footmen who offered fruit, roasted meats, and various intoxicating drinks. As evening fell, servants lit lanterns and lamps around the reservoir and nearby buildings. “The lanterns and lamps cast their reflection on the water, and it appeared as if the whole surface of the tank was a plain of fire …” Jahangir wrote. “Drinkers of cups
drank more cups than they could carry.” The entertainment went late into the night, and then the men left. After that, royal women joined the merriment until only three hours of the night remained.6

  Jahangir grew impatient for news from the Deccan; a month had passed since Khurram’s emissary had reported imperial victories. Nur and Jahangir knew the danger that Ambar posed. The emperor’s anxiety was palpable as he wrote about “the ill-starred Ambar,” “the rebel Ambar,” “Ambar, the dark face,” “that disastrous man.”

  Jahangir knew that in the time of the Abbasid caliphs, famed rulers of Baghdad from the eighth to the thirteenth century, pigeons were trained to fly long distances carrying messages. He already had royal pigeon keepers in his employ; when he was a boy, his father had kept pigeons that did flying tricks, and Jahangir, too, kept a flock. The emperor instructed his pigeon keepers to teach carrier pigeons to fly in the early morning from Mandu to Burhanpur, in the Deccan, with messages. If the weather was clear, the birds reached that distance of one hundred miles away in three hours; if it was raining, the trip took up to seven and a half hours.

  On August 14, perhaps a few weeks after the pigeons took the imperial message to Burhanpur, the birds brought back promising news. Though Ambar hadn’t yet been defeated, Khurram had gathered plenty of local support. He had assigned lands to loyal and reliable men of the Deccan, and made arrangements for local administration. The prince requested permission to appoint the governors of various Deccan provinces, and said that he’d soon be traveling north.