Empress

by Ruby Lal

  Leaving 30,000 cavalry and 7,000 infantry musketeers in the occupied territories, the prince departed, accompanied by 25,000 cavalry and 2,000 musketeers. Asaf Khan hosted a celebration as he awaited the return of Khurram, his triumphant son-in-law. During the party at Asaf’s area of the tented camp in Mandu, shaded by verdant mango trees and overlooking waterfalls, intimates and courtiers raised many a glass to the absent hero.7

  Khurram arrived in Mandu on October 1, 1617; he had been gone eleven months. His new daughter with Arjumand was nearly a month old when he returned. Malik Ambar still commanded strategic forts and was recruiting other chieftains as new allies, but overall Jahangir still considered the Deccan project a great success.8 There was much jubilation when Khurram kissed the imperial ground of the Camp of Good Fortune. Jahangir summoned his treasured son up to the jharokha, the imperial balcony of the tent-palace, then rose and embraced him. Khurram presented thousands of coins as an offering to his father, and gave the same amount in alms. Also among the prince’s many gifts to Jahangir was the elephant Sir-nag, the finest beast in the stable of the conquered leader of Bijapur, and a chest of precious stones.

  At this victory celebration, Jahangir presented his son with a robe of honor; a gold embroidered jacket edged with pearls on the collar, cuffs, and hem; a jeweled sword; and a jeweled dagger. Then he scattered a tray of gems over his head, just as he showered Nur Jahan with coins when she shot four tigers six months earlier.9 But perhaps the most potent public demonstration of praise that night was the emperor’s giving his son the title Shah Jahan, King of the World, the name by which the world would come to know him. The emperor strongly suggested that he was moving toward what a historian has called “a system of quasi-designated succession,” and that Shah Jahan was the anointed one.10 British Ambassador Thomas Roe, dazzled by the victory celebrations for the prince, wrote that while Jahangir was the emperor, Shah Jahan was the ruler.

  Jahangir’s acknowledgment of the prince’s recent victories was only part of the courtly recognition Khurram, now Shah Jahan, would receive. Of late, every momentous event in the life of the Mughal Empire was heralded by dual recognition—from the emperor and from the empress: two sets of celebrations, independently organized. A week after Jahangir’s celebration, she honored Khurram’s rise as a brilliant warrior-prince with an event memorialized by an unnamed court artist in a miniature painting, Jahangir and Prince Khurram Entertained by Nur Jahan. The empress is dressed in a delicate light-ochre top and mauve trousers, a transparent stole thrown over her shoulders, and she wears pearl-and-ruby earrings, bracelets, and a necklace. She sits across from the emperor, looking directly at him, in an open courtyard lined with carpets into which are woven mythic imagery and decorative motifs of birds, trees, and plants. Khurram, Nur, and Jahangir sit together on a raised carpeted platform with Khurram a bit below his father and stepmother. The prince resembles Jahangir, with the same long sideburns and tapered mustache. He is confident in his posture, yet smaller than the emperor and the empress.11

  Nur bestowed on Khurram a robe of honor adorned with jeweled flowers and precious pearls, a jeweled turban ornamented with rare gems, a pearled turban, a waistband with pearl beading, a sword with a jeweled scabbard strap, a band of pearls, two horses, one of which had a jeweled saddle, and a royal elephant. She then gave his wives and children gold ornaments and nine pieces of cloth each, and his key officers robes of honor and jeweled daggers.12 Khurram’s mother, Jagat Gosain, wasn’t present at Nur’s gathering, nor is she known to have hosted her victorious son separately.

  Khurram, now Shah Jahan, was aware that although his father had made the final decision about his command of the Deccan campaign, Nur Jahan, along with Ghiyas and Asaf, had been central to orchestrating the plans. Not only that, the prince knew that Nur and her family had ensured that there was no princely machination against him by Khusraw while he was away in the south. In this world of symbolically laden exchanges, Shah Jahan now owed Nur a public show of acknowledgment, as he well understood. Three weeks after his return, following Nur’s feast for him, Shah Jahan presented his own offerings, which endorsed Nur’s ascendancy. In the courtyard below the royal balcony, he displayed for the emperor gems, jeweled items, fine textiles, 150 elephants and 100 Arabian and Persian horses adorned with gold and silver trappings. Jahangir came down and examined the items with great attention. Among the presents was a ruby that was the heaviest in the emperor’s vast collection; a large, valuable sapphire (Jahangir said he’d never seen one of such good color); and the Jamkura Diamond, found, legend said, by royal women in the Deccan state of Berar, resting in the middle of a plant called sag jamkura.13

  Next, the prince displayed his gifts for Nur Jahan, his valida-i khud, “his own mother,” as Jahangir put it in his journal. The emperor noted that gifts worth 200,000 rupees—an astronomical sum—were given to Nur Jahan alone, followed by 60,000 rupees’ worth “to his [Shah Jahan’s] other mothers and the Begams.”14 Shah Jahan gave Nur three times what he gave all the other elder women, including his biological mother, combined—a very clear sign of Nur’s distinction. “Such offerings had never been made during this dynasty,” Jahangir emphasized. By contrast, during Jahangir’s reign, harem women received annual cash allowances ranging from about 2,000 rupees to 3,400 rupees, according to a woman’s status and her relationship to the emperor.15

  Courtiers and intimates of the Mughals were certainly aware of Nur’s growing role in state decisions, administrative and military. Queen Mother Harkha had every right to be proud of the guidance she’d given her daughter-in-law when Nur first entered the harem. The Mughal princes, especially the ambitious Shah Jahan, felt it was important to forge a strong bond with their influential stepmother. Insiders in the royal retinue such as the longtime courtier Inayat Khan, addicted to alcohol and ailing but considered by the emperor as one of his “closest servants and subjects,” knew her eminence. So did Aqa Aqayan, who had been in charge of Jahangir’s harem since his youth, and was a member of the party on every royal journey or expedition until her retirement.16 Dai Dilaram, who would soon take over harem affairs from Aqayan and had known Nur since she was born, must have been delighted by Nur’s accomplishments.

  Some members of the court, however, took issue with Nur’s ascent. As early as 1612, one of Akbar’s foster brothers had written a letter to Jahangir condemning his policy of favoring the Indian Muslims and Khurasanis (Iranians from Khurasan) over Hindu Rajputs and Chagatai Muslims from Central Asia. The letter targeted the dominance of Nur and her family.17 Another person troubled by Nur’s rise and her family’s high-ranking government positions was Mahabat Khan, a military commander who’d served Jahangir loyally since he was still Prince Salim. He too was uncomfortable with the eminence of the empress and the Iranian faction that had coalesced around her. Mahabat held back his reservations about the empress, but not for long.

  In the portable Mughal bazaar, set up at a decorous distance from the entrance to the lashkar, the imperial encampment, people spoke—and wrote—about Nur’s growing influence at court. One of them was Thomas Roe, the English ambassador, sent by King James I to secure trading rights in India. Roe, a man with a receding hairline, the full mustache of a Rajput warrior, and an incomplete understanding of Mughal culture, was having trouble gaining access to Jahangir and Nur. He decided to tag along with merchants and other followers who erected a tented bazaar near the Camp of Good Fortune wherever Jahangir’s traveling court pitched its tents for an extended stay. In the bazaar were barbers, physicians, tailors, launderers, blacksmiths, weapons dealers, musicians, food vendors, tea shops, and tented guesthouses. More distinguished visitors, such as Roe, stayed at inns close to the bazaar or in nearby towns.

  Prince Parvez, Jahangir’s middle son, had been Roe’s first point of contact as he sought an introduction to the court. But Parvez was more interested in alcohol than diplomacy. Evidently Roe wasn’t well informed about the workings of the Mughal court. He expected the Great Mugha
l to be at the helm of affairs. It was months before he understood that he had in fact missed the most crucial connection for acquiring trade privileges: Nur Jahan.18

  Roe needed someone who could help him reach the empress, and he turned to a fixer and translator in Ajmer whose name, Jadu, literally meant magic in Hindi. The magic began to work, according to Roe’s journal: “Hee [Jahangir] sent a gentellman for my Commission to show his queene the seale, which he kept one night …”19 But Roe was miffed that his official seal—his diplomatic credential—had been kept overnight and returned without the expected official invitation for an audience, and he blamed Nur for what he considered a disrespectful and arrogant act. Roe wrote disapprovingly of her power:

  At night hee [Jahangir] descends into a court; on a throne hee discourseth and drincketh with much affability. To this place are none admitted but with leave and of eminent quality. This course is infallibly kept, except sickness prevent yt; for which alsoe the people will exact a reason, and endure not long the absence of their king. The rest of this motion is inward amoung woemen, of which sort, though he keepe a thouwsand, yet one governs him, and wynds him up at her pleasure.20

  The British ambassador also wrote in detail about his face-to-face encounters with Jahangir—but there’s no evidence in the Mughal court records that they ever met. The emperor made no mention of Roe in his exhaustively detailed memoir. Furthermore, there’s no evidence that Jahangir ever granted the trading privileges to England that Roe would claim to have negotiated. European observers of the Mughal court often embellished (and sometimes invented) stories of their dealings with the emperor.

  Nur’s next public move suggests that this woman of verve and imagination definitely had state power on her mind: She issued her first royal order. Its vocabulary, and that of the orders that followed, revealed her deep engagement with her sovereignty and her subjects.

  In December 1617, the Mughals were considering returning to Agra. But Jahangir decided that since he’d never seen the ocean he would visit the coastal state of Gujarat before heading home to the capital. His mother, and the rest of his traveling harem, “baggage and extra establishment,” went on to Agra.21

  Nur Jahan didn’t accompany Jahangir to Gujarat, but she didn’t go back to Agra either. Instead, she seems to have gone to Toda, one of her Ajmer estates, to rest, perhaps to hunt, write poetry, and supervise the officers who looked after her properties.22 The treasurer of the estate, a man named Baroman, was owed money being withheld by an officer of the raja of Bikaner, in India’s western desert. On behalf of Baroman, Nur directed the raja to ensure that payment was made immediately. The official order—an irrefutable sign of sovereignty—read:

  The chosen of the peers, worthy of favours and obligations, RAJA SURAT SINGH, hoping for the sublime favours, should know that a sum of money … is due, to Kishandas and Baroman his son, the treasurer of Her Majesty … he is ordered to pay off the said debts … He should not disobey the orders, and should regard it his duty.

  Written by a scribe on a paper scroll, the order was crowned by the sacred invocation Allahu Akbar in cursive script, and adorned with a beautiful arch-shaped wax seal on which was stamped the following legend: By the light [nur] of the sun [mihr] of Jahangir—and the Divine Grace the signet of Nurjahan has illumined the world like the moon.23

  Another translation has the final clause as “the seal of Nur Jahan, the Empress of the Age (Nur Jahan Padshah Begum), has become resplendent like the Moon.”24 On the order, the word nur, “light”—part of the names of both emperor (Nur ad-Din) and empress (Nur Jahan)—stands out, as does mihr, sun, part of Nur’s former name. Also worth noting is the clever (and politic) play on the relationship of the sun and the moon—one secondary to the other, but both heavenly eminences.

  The Mughals inherited from their Central Asian forebears two terms for edicts issued by women. Orders from a sovereign’s mother were called hukm, while those from a royal consort, princess, or prince’s wife were called nishan. An emperor’s orders were called farmans, and carried the imperial seal and tughra, the emperor’s calligraphic signature. Jahangir’s imperial orders, many of which still exist, covered such issues as instructions to an officer to measure and consolidate lands, military appointments, and the protection of peasants from landlords. Hukms and nishans were much less authoritative; they covered very small local matters or simply reemphasized an order that had already been issued by the emperor. Mughal women had issued hukms at least twice before Nur’s time. Jahangir’s mother Harkha, and before that, Akbar’s mother Hamideh Banu Begum, had issued an order each, both implementing religious and agrarian policies of their reigning sons. Hamideh reiterated her son’s declaration that a certain pious man was exempt from taxes and his cows were allowed to graze uninterrupted.25 Such matriarchs were often consulted for their accumulated wisdom; for example, Emperor Babur wrote in his memoir that “for tactics and strategy there were few women like my grandmother Esan Dawlat Begim. She was very intelligent and a good planner. Most affairs were done by her counsel.”26

  Nur was the first Mughal woman to issue orders in her own right, orders not very different from her husband’s farmans— about debt and revenue collection, land grants, military matters, criminal cases. She couldn’t have done this without some precedents—not just the earlier hukm orders of the two queen mothers, but also long-held political traditions of the Mughals and their nomadic Mongol and Turkic ancestors that made a place for female power, at least in principle. Among the Mughals and their nomadic ancestors from the Central Asian steppes, female sovereignty was a theoretical possibility. Since divinity resided in the monarch, and since it could not be transferred except through direct descent, the possibility of a daughter succeeding her father could not be excluded, though it never actually happened in the Mughal world. Still, Nur’s advance toward co-sovereignty was groundbreaking: born to foreign parents, she was no daughter of the dynasty, and yet no other woman in Mughal India had embodied power through official signs of sovereignty such as issuing important orders under her own signature.

  And that signature speaks volumes. In the past, hukms and nishans were signed “mother of,” “daughter of,” or “sister of” the emperor. But Nur signed her own name, and she signed as sovereign: Nur Jahan Padshah Begum. Padshah, meaning sovereign or monarch: the same term that appeared alongside Jahangir’s name. This signature was a public announcement that she was assuming the role of co-sovereign, with her husband’s tacit approval.

  Nur issued several edicts. Ten survive in museums, the majority dating from 1622–27, when she was at the height of her power as the de facto ruler of the realm. The imperial orders of Her Majesty, the Empress Nur Jahan were a unique blend: the ornamental signature on the top of Nur’s orders identified them as hukms, while the body of the text took the form of a nishan.27 Nur drew on traditions of Mughal matriarchy as well as those of royal consorts and princesses in order to create a new form of power, a “third space”—technical proof of her reign, to which even the most diehard jurists would bow.28

  Nur paved the way for later Mughal women to issue wide-ranging orders, though not as co-sovereigns. After her death, a number of orders were issued by her grandniece Jahanara, Arjumand’s daughter; and by Nadira Banu, the wife of Nur’s grandnephew, in the latter half of the seventeenth century.

  Issuing orders was one of the three legally acknowledged privileges of Mughal rulers—the official signs of Islamic sovereignty. The other two were being named in Friday prayers and the striking of coins that bore a monarch’s name. In 1617, gold and silver coins began to circulate bearing both Nur and Jahangir’s names—the emperor’s on the front and the empress’s on the reverse. It was the first time that a woman’s name had appeared on a Mughal coin; there were even some coins with Nur’s name alone. The new power of the empress would be obvious to those in the emperor’s household who received these coins as gifts. Ordinary folks would notice too, such as salt makers or cumin traders who brought their pr
oducts to the Mughal court from far away and received these coins in payment.

  Both royal names appeared on a coin marked with the following inscription:

  By the order of Shah Jahangir

  The gold got a hundred honors added to it

  By getting impressed on it, the name of Nur Jahan Padshah Begum

  And a half-ounce gold coin, measuring nearly an inch in diameter, now housed in the Lucknow Museum, reads:

  By order of Shah Jahangir, gained a hundred beauties

  Gold by the name of Nur Jahan Padshah Begum29

  Numismatists have studied the size, weight, and composition of the eleven existing coins with Nur Jahan’s name, held in museums in India and elsewhere.30 Historians and non-experts are more interested in their symbolic significance. Today, at the Agra fort, both tour guides and local visitors still proudly recall the only moment in Mughal history when coins carried the name of a woman.

  Though Jahangir still devoted a great deal of time to state matters, he was increasingly involved in observing nature and pursuing philosophical questions. His entries in the Jahangirnama show that he was drawn to anyone or anything that brought him wonder: a conversation with an ascetic; rubies and sapphires; seedless grapes from Kabul; a rare turkey-cock delivered to the emperor by Muqarrab Khan, a surgeon and governor of the Cambay region in western India. On the way back from Gujurat to Agra, Jahangir hunted and stopped with his retinue in the town of Dhar, an ancient city that, he noted, was the home of the great scholar-king Raja Bhoj a thousand years earlier. Jahangir traveled with a pair of domesticated cranes named Layla and Majnun after a pair of famous Persian lovers, and he employed a eunuch who would inform him when the cranes were about to mate. Every day, Jahangir would head out to observe the cranes and make detailed notes. Jahangir had more and more time to indulge his curiosity and his admiration of the natural world as his empress took on more and more matters of governance.