Empress
Page 15
Abul-Hasan, the celebrated court painter and Nur’s contemporary who had seen her remarkable life unfold, faced a challenge: how to create a portrait of Empress Nur Jahan that captured her unusual rise to prominence and did justice to her power and presence.
Though Jahangir doesn’t mention Hasan in his memoir until 1618, the artist had long been connected with the court. As Prince Salim, he employed Hasan’s father, the masterly Iranian painter Aqa Reza, in his atelier. Reza had a strong affinity for the Safavid style of painting, characterized by an emphasis on human figures in natural settings, illumination in the margins or borders of the painting, and a playful approach to lines, shadows, and light. He was adept at classic Persian images—courtiers at leisure, strong natural backdrops, allegorical scenes. Reza also illuminated manuscripts, specializing in border decoration, and was one of the first artists in the Mughal world to blend European and Indian styles of painting. He trained a number of Mughal artists, including a woman, Nadira Banu, and his son, Hasan, a slight young man who started painting in his early teens.31 One of Hasan’s earliest known paintings was a copy of a work by Albrecht Dürer.
Eventually the son surpassed his father in renown and range (and, according to Jahangir, in skill). Hasan developed an eclectic body of work that drew upon a wide range of sources, including European and Persian imagery, and he experimented with color. He understood the expressive potential of drapery—the way carefully rendered folds could bring humans to life as full-bodied individuals rather than flat figures—and he had a gift for capturing with deep perception the essence of his subjects’ personalities.32 He painted sages, pilgrims, and, many times, the emperor himself. Jahangir’s first written reference to Hasan marked the artist’s presentation of a painting depicting the emperor’s accession. That work would eventually serve as the frontispiece of the Jahangirnama. In his memoir, Jahangir declared Hasan the nadir uz-zaman, Wonder of the Age, the Zenith of the World.
Hasan came from an established artistic tradition in which young Mughal women were regularly presented as stunning, bejeweled beauties in an idealized rather than realistic style, what art historians call the nayika mode, after the Hindi word for heroine. Commoners in the court—singers, dancers, servants—were painted in the same way, their faces identical and ritualized. Hasan would also have been familiar with other kinds of portraits in the imperial library. Along with these fanciful depictions of stylized young ladies were more realistic portraits of matriarchs—for example, an aging imperial woman giving advice to her son or brother during his visit to the women’s quarters. There were also detailed scenes of the births of Akbar and of Jahangir, and many other paintings of the birth chamber, the postnatal care between mother and infant, the wet nurses at work—all signs celebrating the privileged act of birthing royal children.
Hasan understood that none of these conventions—women as stylized ornaments, as aged advisers, or as vessels of royal birth—would be right for Nur Jahan. The Mughal world had never known a royal woman like her. How could he represent not only Nur’s beauty and charisma but also the growing boldness of her leadership, buzzed about in the bazaar and among officials and visiting diplomats? As he launched his daunting work, probably sometime between 1612 and 1617, according to art historians, he knew he would have to experiment.33
This was Hasan’s challenge: Which of Nur’s impressive imperial activities would best represent her in a portrait? Which one spoke to him most? Which might best convey her combination of delicacy and strength?
He decided to present Nur in a way that told her story beautifully without obscuring her accomplishments in conventional stylized notions of glamour. His portrait of her in watercolor and oils was groundbreaking in both style and content.
The empress stands confidently loading a musket. She’s dressed in hunting attire—a knee-length tunic tied with a sash, tightly fitting trousers, and the kind of regal turban usually worn by men—and she wears her famous ruby and diamond earrings.34 Her chin is up, her slender shoulders are back, and her chest is rising slightly. She seems to be focusing on the horizon. She’s regal and commanding; the portrait is radiant with energy.
We don’t know whether Nur posed for Hasan or he painted the Portrait of Nur Jahan from occasional sightings and knowledge of her sterling acts of leadership. What we do know is that the work is unique. The artist played with several Mughal artistic traditions. A new kind of woman required a new kind of portrait.
Hasan honored some conventions of Mughal painting. He worked in a very small space, using just 17 inches by 12 inches of paperboard to present the full figure of the empress and surround her with 14 delicate flowers in red, black, yellow, and blue.35 But in most other ways, he was daringly experimental, beginning with his decision to represent her as an actor—a doer, a defender, a predator.
Showing Nur loading the musket is a rare example of action in the portrait of female royalty or nobility. Neither of the other two Islamic empires of Nur’s time, Safavid Iran and Ottoman Turkey, could boast of such graphic evidence of an empress engaged in intrepid imperial action. Hasan’s choice of action says a great deal. Nur’s confident stance suggests that she’s skilled with this weapon used in hunting and war, that she has technical and military know-how usually reserved for men.36 The gun is taller than she is, but Nur handles it with ease, tamping down gunpowder with her raised right arm. She looks into the distance “with an appearance of pride, vigor, boldness and freedom,” notes Sanam Ali of India’s Rampur Raza Library, where the painting is kept.37 Showing a woman alone and not in a group was another break with tradition. Nur occupies the entire canvas, just as she increasingly filled the canvas of imperial life.
Jahangir once wrote in his memoir “my liking for painting and my practice in judging it have arrived at such a point that when any work is brought before me, either of deceased artists or of those of the present day, without the names being told me, I say on the spur of the moment that it is the work of such and such a man.” Chances are that the emperor closely inspected the Portrait of Nur Jahan, as he did other works. There was more than one occasion when he showed his great “desire for accuracy in the portraits he commissioned …”38 If there had been anything he didn’t like about Hasan’s portrait of Nur, he’d have intervened, as he had done many times before with other artists when he had any misgivings about the execution or appropriateness of a painting. It is a sign of his approval of Hasan’s painting of Nur with a musket that in 1618 the emperor not only dubbed him the Wonder of the Age, but also declared his work in general to be “perfect.”39
Hasan gave to posterity a rare picture of Nur Jahan’s power, and he put his name on the painting, unusual for Mughal artists, who didn’t always sign their work. The Wonder of the Age validated what everyone was seeing. The remarkable Nur Jahan, a woman who’d only been the emperor’s wife since 1611, one of many, was now the empress of Mughal India, a Wonder of the Age herself.
She demonstrated this again in 1618, when she commissioned and designed her first public building, a traveler’s inn, the Nur Mahal Serai in Jalandhar, on the Grand Trunk Road between Agra and Lahore. According to one estimate it could hold up to two thousand guests, along with their camels and horses. It had a separate area for the imperial couple—they stayed several times—and its own mosque. On the gateway of the serai, adorned with sculpted animals and mounds of lotus, Nur ordered an inscription in four rhyming verses. The last line was: This saray was erected by Nur Jahan Begum.
In commissioning a lodging for male travelers in which international traders would spend time and having her name engraved on its gateway, Nur turned architecture into statecraft, ensuring that visitors would know that she, the empress, was the patron and creator and not just another member of the royal family.40 Royal women had previously conveyed their ideas about architectural works only by suggesting specific styles and plans. Nur knew that there was a history of overlooked Mughal women: too many names missing from the documents. Her mother-in-law had give
n the Mughal Empire the precious gift of an emperor, Jahangir, but was left out of the official record. Jahangir never officially noted the name of the concubine who gave birth to his son Prince Shahryar, or mentioned his wife Jagat Gosain in the context of her son’s successes. Nur overrode this tradition of silence. In act after act—hunting, advising, issuing imperial orders and coins, designing buildings—she ensured that her name was etched indelibly in public memory and in history.
ELEVEN
Veils of Light
In the autumn of 1618, on the way back to Agra after his first sight of the sea, the emperor rejoined Nur Jahan at her estate in the Malwa region. The empress had been very ill, Jahangir recorded in a November journal entry, though he didn’t describe the cause or nature of her distress. “Nur-Jahan Begam had been ailing for some time,” he wrote, “and the physicians who had the good fortune to be chosen to attend on her, Musalmans and Hindus, perceived no gain from all the medicines they gave her, and confessed their helplessness in treating her. At this time, Rahim Ruhullah began to wait upon her, and undertook [to find] a remedy. By the aid of God (glory be to his name!), in a short time she quite recovered. In reward for his excellent service I … bestowed on the hakim three villages in his native country … and an order was given that he should be weighed against silver, which should be given him as a reward.”1 Nur remained grateful to Ruhullah for restoring her health; when she found out later that two of the three awarded villages hadn’t been delivered to him, she immediately issued an order directing a Mughal loyalist to make amends.
At the end of December, the Mughal cavalcade reached the outskirts of Fatehpur-Sikri, twenty miles from Agra. For the third year in a row, an outbreak of bubonic plague had swept through the area, killing up to 100 people a day, but that danger was now over. The emperor’s mother, Harkha, came from Agra to greet him; he was shocked at how “decrepit” she seemed.
Though astrologers had established that January 1619 would be the auspicious time for Jahangir and Nur’s return to Agra, Jahangir kept the royal party in Fatehpur-Sikri for three months, for reasons unknown. In early April, news came from the capital that Jagat Gosain, Shah Jahan’s mother, had passed away. Jahangir doesn’t record his own response to the death of this senior wife; he writes only that he went to his son’s quarters to offer consolation and sympathy and took Shah Jahan back with him to the palace. The next day, the Mughals, including Shah Jahan, entered Agra.
When Nur’s health improved, she sat in the jharokha so that she could be seen by the people, like a goddess on display. Darshan, the traditional practice of viewing Hindu deities and holy people, had been adopted by Jahangir’s father Akbar, and adapted to include displaying the person of the monarch. Nur Jahan: Portrait to Be Worn As a Jewel, a seventeenth-century image, shows that Nur, too, boldly followed the tradition of darshan; her upper body is framed in the window, one arm resting on the sill, a classic posture, in profile.2 Akbar no doubt believed that to be viewed by the masses was a kingly—that is, male—prerogative, to be kept alive by his successors. He could never have expected that a successor could be kingly and female.
Nur Jahan was now the de facto co-sovereign, the backbone of Mughal government. Mu’tamad Khan, the paymaster who would take over the task of maintaining Jahangir’s journal a few years later when the emperor became too ill to do it himself, maintained that Jahangir had granted the rights of sovereignty and government to Nur Jahan. She sat in the jharokha, he wrote, while the nobles presented themselves “and listen[ed] to her dictates … At last her authority reached such a pass that the King was such only in name. Repeatedly he gave out that he bestowed the sovereignty on Nur Jahan Begam.”3
Despite the edicts, the coins, the jharokha, and the sovereignty her husband publicly bestowed upon her, one technical, legal prerogative of a Mughal ruler eluded Nur: the mention of the monarch’s name during the khutba, the central sermon of Friday prayers. Yet several court historians noted that even though the khutba was not read in her name, it was Nur who directed the affairs of the realm. “Except for the fact that her name was not recited in the sermon, whatever other requisites of kingship there are were performed by her,” wrote the historian Bhakkari, an eyewitness to her co-sovereignty.4 The matter of the sermon wasn’t straightforward, anyway; its importance in establishing sovereignty had always been a little ambiguous. As a rebellious young prince, Jahangir had his name read during a khutba to challenge his father. In time to come, his son Shah Jahan would revolt in exactly the same way. Nur Jahan wasn’t a rebel or a dissenter—and she wasn’t a man. She would have accepted that the world she had come to co-rule was an emphatically patriarchal one.
Rather surprisingly, the ulema—Muslim theological jurists—of the day didn’t object to her increasing power. Technically, the ulema were the arbiters of the legitimacy of monarchs, but they never had full control; Mughal sovereignty remained a delicate balance between the ruler and the nobles on the one hand and the jurists on the other. As a prince struggling to win the Mughal throne, Jahangir had bestowed favors on theologians and elite Muslims learned in law in order to earn their support. As emperor, he confirmed all existing religious grants due to the ulema. Unlike Akbar, he didn’t go so far as to issue an edict publicly declaring himself the ultimate authority in religious matters, but neither did he ask directly for religious intervention or political advice from theologians. In Jahangir’s memoir, notes a scholar writing about the emperor, “references to Islam as a driving force behind political thought and action are actually very scarce.”5 The jurists’ acceptance of Nur’s co-sovereignty had a justification; as early as the twelfth century, the revered Muslim theologian Al-Ghazzali had declared that stable rule was more important than a sovereign’s legitimacy.6 Jurists often cited this maxim: “Sixty years of tyranny are better than an hour of civil strife.” Numerous sayings of the Prophet Muhammad and legal judgments that condemned social conflict and disorder suggest that Islam encouraged unconditional obedience to a ruler.7
As soon as the royal couple returned to Agra, the emperor began thinking about a pleasure trip to Kashmir, likely as a restorative for Nur and perhaps his mother, Harkha. Jahangir had been there with his father, and he was quite smitten by the place he often described as the garden of eternal spring. We can imagine Jahangir telling Nur about the beauty of Kashmir, its countless waterfalls, the sweet-smelling roses, violets, and narcissi, the views of lofty peaks.
The royal cavalcade set off for Kashmir from Agra in October of 1619. That city on the move included Nur and Jahangir; Queen Mother Harkha and other royal women; Shah Jahan, Ghiyas, Asaf, and their families; nobles, officers, stewards, attendants, servants, and soldiers, all of them on horseback or on elephants. Traveling one stage behind the main convoy was Prince Khusraw, with whom Jahangir had reconciled at the urging of Nur and Harkha; the holy man Jadrup may also have interceded.8 Shah Jahan would have been watching his older half-brother closely for any sign that he was seriously interested in succeeding to the throne. Mahabat Khan, Jahangir’s loyal general, recently appointed governor of Kabul, accompanied the royal cavalcade part of the way to Kashmir. He thought that Khusraw should have been left behind in the capital under the watchful eye of a dependable courtier. Mahabat’s opinion carried weight because he’d proved his loyalty to Jahangir in the extreme. A decade earlier, Mahabat’s brother had been arrested for his part in the assassination plot against Jahangir planned by supporters of Khusraw. When Mahabat arrived at the spot where his brother was about to be hanged, Jahangir offered him the chance to save his brother’s life. But in a show of fealty, Mahabat Khan drew his sword and cut off his brother’s head. After that, he became one of Jahangir’s closest confidants.9 Khusraw was for some time in his custody.
Short, stocky Mahabat, a man whose soft facial features belied a sternness of intent and action, found an opportune moment to share his opinion of Khusraw’s presence with the emperor, in front of other nobles. He also went on a tirade about the empress, complaining t
hat Nur’s control of imperial affairs wasn’t an appropriate arrangement. According to the poet and writer Shaikh Abdul-Wahab, often a member of the imperial retinue, Mahabat said to the emperor, “His Majesty must have read … the histories of the ancient sovereigns … Was there any king so subject to the will of his wife? The world is surprised that such a wise and sensible Emperor as Jahangir should permit a woman to have such great influence over him.” For a few days after Mahabat’s tirade Jahangir remained reserved toward Nur. But when Mahabat left the cavalcade, the emperor softened. “Nur Jahan Begum had wrought so much upon his mind,” wrote Wahab, “that even if two hundred men like Mahabat Khan had advised him … their words would have made no permanent impression upon him.”10
The royals camped first near Mathura, not far from the cave of the ascetic Jadrup, whom Jahangir was keen to meet with again. It was here that villagers entreated the emperor to kill a marauding tiger, and the empress skillfully dispatched the beast, earning the gratitude of her subjects and the admiration of her husband. Then it was north to Delhi for a stopover that lasted two and a half weeks. The royal couple paid their respects at the tombs of Jahangir’s grandfather Humayun and a revered thirteenth-century Sufi saint. They visited Aqa Aqayan, the former chief supervisor of the harem, who had retired in Delhi after returning from western India.11 Aqayan was so weak that she “did not have the power to move about,” the emperor wrote. Even so, she was overseeing the construction of a garden, a serai, and a tomb near her home. Jahangir directed the governor of Delhi to serve and guard her “in such a manner that no dust from any road of vexation might settle on the hem of her contentment.”12 Jahangir noted in his journal that at seventy-one, Aqayan was the same age his father would have been had he lived. The Mughal party stopped at various places along the way to Kashmir, visiting the tombs of saints and receiving distinguished nobles. Arjumand gave birth to her seventh child, a boy.13