Empress

by Ruby Lal

  Mughal officers went to great lengths to ensure that the royals found nothing but comfort as the road began to climb through the Himalayas. An officer from Agra went ahead of the cavalcade with a group of stonecutters, carpenters, and shovelers to fix bumps, ruts, and potholes in the roads and make the way easier for wagons and animals carrying loads. Along the way, local grandees extended hospitality. In the first week of March 1620, the cavalcade arrived at Pakhli, the beginning of Kashmir territory. The zamindar, the local landlord, hosted the royal party, proudly commending the breathtaking vista, mighty mountains in every direction.

  Advance scouts reported to Jahangir that because Kashmir’s harvest of wheat and other grains had been disappointingly meager that year, villages on the road ahead wouldn’t be able to supply enough to feed the large train of royal elephants traveling with them. Jahangir noted that he sent all but seven hundred of the animals back to Agra.

  Jahangir had larger issues of state power and territorial consolidation to address. Troubles were escalating in the Deccan, where Shah Jahan had gone to war only three years earlier.14 Ambar was still resisting Mughal rule. Deliberations on the Deccan problem would have included Jahangir, Nur, Shah Jahan, Ghiyas, and Asaf, considering again the steps to be taken, useful tactics, fine details of operations. Shah Jahan, they decided, would march again to the south.

  But the prince agreed to head the military operation only if he could take along his older brother Khusraw in order to keep an eye on him. Jahangir acquiesced. Shortly before the royal party reached Hasan Abdal, Shah Jahan left with his four sons and Khusraw to gather his troops for a Deccan campaign. On February 22, 1620, after four months on the road, the royal cavalcade arrived at Hasan Abdal, where the most treacherous part of the journey began. By this time, shortages and high prices were making it difficult to feed not only elephants but humans too—the huge numbers of courtiers, workmen, servants, and soldiers traveling with the royal party. Jahangir ordered hundreds of people in the retinue, both nobles and servants, to return to the capital. Only those absolutely necessary would go forward with the royal party.

  At a spring and waterfall near Hasan Abdal, they halted for two days. It was becoming difficult for the entire camp to travel together, so Jahangir ordered the cavalcade to split up. Harkha, some of the harem women, and their attendants were to stay on a few days longer while the rest of the royal party traveled on in smaller groups. An advance camp—a few nobles, the chief steward and workers—would cross the mountain passes first, preparing the way. A second set of imperial nobles would follow, which may have been the group Ghiyas traveled with, followed by the core Mughal camp—Nur, Jahangir, Asaf, Mu’tamad Khan and some other nobles, a few harem intimates, servants, and select attendants. Eventually, Harkha and her band of women caught up with this third group. They stopped in villages along the way, where subjects paid homage to the emperor. The road was rocky, the areas surrounding full of langur monkeys, peafowl, and black quail.

  Jahangir accompanied some of his men as they cut through a high pass, the Pim Drang, and arrived at a waterfall on the Bahat River, where they drank wine in the shade of the trees. Akbar had built a bridge across this swift and deep waterfall, and a stone hilltop rest house that was still intact. The management of the journey from here on was entrusted to Mu’tamad Khan. The hundreds of elephants still remaining with the cavalcade were most likely sent back to Agra just before Pim Drang; they were too precious to risk on such a dangerous road. The party proceeded on horseback. Mahabat left the group on March 1, heading off to Kabul. Two weeks later, the core party of royals stopped in the village of Bhuliyas. From here on, the passes became even more troublesome. Up ahead loomed the Bhuliyas Pass, one of the toughest and narrowest of the journey. Jahangir gave orders that the camp should split again. Nur, Jahangir, Asaf, and Harkha and the ladies of the harem went on together, with the necessary attendants. The rest, including Mu’tamad and Ghiyas, came one stage behind. Mu’tamad sent some men forward with a message directing his advance men to pitch tents at whatever place they had reached, which they did at the foot of the Bhuliyas Pass.

  As the royal contingent, dressed in warm sheepskin coats, neared the pass—the men on horseback, the women carried in palanquins—they ran into a spring snowstorm and sheltered in tents erected by the advance party of Mu’tamad’s men. Mu’tamad, in the group one stage behind, hurried to join the emperor. He entered the royal tent, paid obeisance and, worried that he hadn’t prepared comfortable enough accommodations, spoke thus:

  Your image came to me at midnight.

  I offered my soul but I was ashamed

  A poor man is embarrassed when a guest arrives unexpectedly.

  Calming his fears, Jahangir responded: “What value have the goods of this world in our eyes? We purchase the gem of loyalty at high price.”15 And the arrangements were fine; there were enough tents, warm blankets, cooking utensils—everything the royals required. Nur, Jahangir, and their companions spent a comfortable night in Mu’tamad’s quarters. The next morning Mu’tamad received the honor of the gift of the emperor’s own cloak, and a rise in numerical ranking.

  After traversing passes for four days, the royal retinue came to broad roads leading to the meadows of the Kashmir valley, exuberant with blossoms—roses, sandalwood flowers, violets, hollyhock, narcissus, and unusual flowers like the bulanik, which had green leaves growing in the middle of its blooms. Jahangir was ecstatic: “The flowers of Kashmir are beyond counting and calculation. Which shall I write of? And how many can I describe? I have only mentioned the most remarkable.”16

  Once they reached Baramula, a major port on the river Bahat, they were only fifty-six kilometers away from Srinagar, the chief town of Kashmir. It is said that Nur Jahan bathed here before moving on, in a waterfall that Jahangir named Noor-e Chamb—Nur’s Waterfall, in the local dialect.17

  Soon they approached Srinagar, perfumed with the refreshing scent of clover. Peach, almond, pear, and apple trees were beginning to blossom; gateways, walls, courtyards and houses blazed with tulips and jasmine. The trip from Agra had taken 168 days.

  Jahangir’s father had built a sturdy stone palace-fort in Srinagar on a hill called the Hari Parbat, overlooking the lovely Dal Lake, approximately four miles long and three miles wide, fed by a channel that brought water from the mountains. In the spring of 1620, the royal party settled into the Hari Parbat palace.

  Kashmiris traditionally planted tulip bulbs on the roofs of buildings, including garden pavilions. The palace garden was dilapidated, “out of order and ruinous,” but tulips flowered luxuriantly on the roofs of its buildings. Mu’tamad immediately began repairs. In a short while, a new charm engulfed Hari Parbat. A lofty three-level platform in the middle of the garden was redecorated. Mughal master painters adorned the buildings with works that “would make the painters of China jealous.”18 Jahangir announced that the restored grounds would be called the Nurafza bagh, the Light-Enhancing Garden.

  To Jahangir, light was more than a metaphor. The loftiest ambition of a Mughal king was to be seen as the ruler of two worlds: the imperial and the sacred, the visible and the spiritual. Order and harmony, a reflection of divinity—a force of light—resided in the king. When Jahangir gave himself the imperial name Nur ad-Din, the Light of Faith, and when he renamed his new wife, Mihr un-Nisa, the Light of the Palace, then Light of the World, he was participating in this tradition.

  The Mughals had long associated themselves with the “great light” of the sun. Jahangir was also drawn to the famous Verse of Light in the Quran cited by many Sufis and Neo-Platonist philosophers, declaring that “God has seven and seventy veils of light. Were these to be stripped from His face, the majesty of His countenance would consume all that He beheld.”19 Even the chosen ones, including sovereigns, were only intermediaries—receiving a touch of the grace of light.

  Nur and Jahangir entered into this open philosophical ground, creating a realm of light, even in the names they gave to the gold, silver
, and copper coins of various sizes that they struck: Light of Sovereignty, Light of Kingship, Light of the Court, Light of the Sun, Light of the World.20 The Light-Enhancing Garden of Srinagar became another emblem of the emperor’s connection to Nur, a way for Jahangir to honor their common name and joint rule. And the trend would continue. Already Nur was contemplating the design of another garden in Agra, which she would name the Light-Scattering Garden.

  A visit from someone connected to Nur’s past continued this link with light. Twenty-four years earlier, Haidar Malik had served Nur Jahan in the immediate aftermath of her first husband’s murder: She had spent the forty obligatory days of mourning in his house before proceeding to Agra. Now living in Kashmir, Malik came to renew his loyalty to the emperor and empress. The trio went partridge hunting among the flowing streams and lofty trees near the village of Chahardara, Malik’s home, ten miles south of Srinagar. The imperial couple was very pleased with the place. Seized by their delight, or simply to honor the felicitous moment of their visit to his home, Malik asked that the name of Chahardara be changed. Jahangir renamed it Nurpur, City of Light.

  Jahangir wrote with great enthusiasm about the trip to Kashmir with his beloved Nur: where they stopped, the distances they traveled, the flora and fauna, who came to pay obeisance, the offerings, his excursions with her, their gardens, the ease of the times. He mentions honoring Talib Amuli, a Persian poet who had been a regular presence at gatherings in Ghiyas’s home since Nur’s childhood, now one hundred years old and living in Kashmir. Jahangir named him Malik us-Shu’ara, the King of Poets, and bestowed on him a royal robe. This was a real pleasure trip after the years the couple had spent in western India, almost like a much-delayed honeymoon. Present-day tour guides in Kashmir note that the waters of Dal Lake repeatedly reflected the fantastic fireworks arranged in Nur and Jahangir’s honor, and they recount the (debunked) legend that Jahangir brought Kashmir’s massive, maple-like Chinar trees from Iran and planted them in Kashmir to please Nur Jahan.21

  In September, Jahangir and Nur visited the Vernag springs at the foot of the mountains southeast of Srinagar, the source of the Bahat River, which would later play a role in determining the royal couple’s fate. Pine trees, Chinars, and aromatic greenery abounded, reflected in the deep green Vernag waters. On visits to Vernag when he was a young prince, Jahangir had ordered the construction of arched walkways around the springs and a pavilion, in front of which a large garden was now nearing completion.

  As soon as they arrived, Jahangir instructed that servers fill the wine cups of his attendants. The party drank wine and ate Kabul peaches; later, the men returned drunk to their tents.22 In these sensuous surroundings Nur may have first read to Jahangir a flirtatious poem attributed to her:

  There is a ruby button on your silken robe

  You have been afflicted by a drop of my blood!23

  Francois Bernier, a French physician and natural philosopher was the first European to visit Kashmir, in 1665. In his Travels in the Mughal Empire, he added a legend to Nur and Jahangir’s earlier visit. In Vernag, Bernier was especially charmed by one of its ponds, which contained “fish so tame that they approach upon being called, or when pieces of bread are thrown into the water. The largest have gold rings, with inscriptions, through the gills, placed there, it is said, by the celebrated Nour-Mehalle, the wife of Jehan-Guyre …”24 Perhaps Bernier saw fish with gold rings, or perhaps he intended the tame fish as a metaphor for a compliant emperor.

  Little Prince Shuja, the fourth son of Shah Jahan and Arjumand, was a darling of the emperor. One day the boy was playing in a room of the Srinagar palace that had a low door, screened but not shut, facing Dal Lake. When Shuja ran toward the door to look out, he hurtled through it and fell fifteen feet. Luckily, he landed partly on a rug heaped below, and partly on the shoulders of the servant bent to spread it. Shuja’s head fell on the carpet and his feet on the shoulders of the man. “God, the Great and Glorious, came to his aid,” Jahangir wrote, “and the carpet and the farrash [carpet-spreader] became the means of saving his life.” When the farrash raced inside carrying the little prince, who was weak and not speaking, “my senses forsook me, and for a long time holding him in my affectionate embrace I was distracted with this favor from Allah.”25 Shuja recovered, but a dire prediction by Jotik Rai, the court astrologer, came true. A few months earlier, he’d announced “that one of the chief sitters in the harem of chastity would hasten to the hidden abode of non-existence.”26 Saliha Banu, one of Jahangir’s senior wives, passed away. The emperor didn’t say in his journal whether she was part of the royal group in Kashmir or back in Agra, but he noted that “the grief for this heartrending event laid a heavy load on my mind”—more emotion than he recorded at the death of Jagat Gosain. The emperor expressed his sorrow sincerely but briefly. His polygamous household was by this time a somewhat distanced, symbolic presence. Nur was his daily companion.

  However pleasing Nur may have found the sojourn in Kashmir, she had a serious matter to deal with, the question that had long weighed on her mind: Which of the Mughal princes should marry her daughter, Ladli Begum? Shah Jahan, Jahangir’s favorite and the presumed successor to the Mughal throne, was politically perceptive, accomplished, and fiercely ambitious. Of the four princes, he was most likely to succeed his father. But he was already married to Nur’s niece Arjumand and two other women. Nur would certainly have noticed that since his marriage with Arjumand, Shah Jahan had fathered all but one of his children with her; she was his favorite. Ladli would become a subordinate wife.

  Furthermore, it had become increasingly clear to Nur that if he were to become emperor, the ambitious Shah Jahan, already looking forward impatiently to claiming his patrimony, might not welcome Nur as any sort of counterpower. With him on the throne, she might have no imperial future at all. Nur’s musing on that strong possibility may have accounted for the cooling of her formerly cordial relationship with Shah Jahan. She eventually reached the conclusion, says one modern Mughal scholar, that Shah Jahan “would undermine her power in a post-Jahangir dispensation.”27 She needed to think carefully about choosing a royal husband for Ladli who might become the next emperor instead of Shah Jahan, someone who would preserve something of his mother-in-law’s power.

  In early October 1620, the imperial banners turned toward Lahore, where the party would stop on the way back to Agra. The return march began from outside the Kashmiri city of Pampur, where as far as the eye could see, there stretched a natural carpet of saffron. Along the way to Lahore, the cavalcade stopped at some of the same spots where they had paused on the journey to Kashmir. As before, the core camp halted at passes that were exceptionally difficult and rough to cross. Jahangir had difficulty breathing.

  In early November, the royal party reached Lahore, where they got some good news. Shah Jahan had taken a break from the Deccan campaign to head north and score a victory at Kangra, in the Himalayan foothills; he and his men had taken the fort, subdued a raja fighting Mughal rule, and returned to the Deccan.

  In early December, messengers brought news far less cheering. In the Deccan, enemy assailants were destroying fields and pasturelands. Mughal forces had fought a heroic battle, but exhausted and short of resources, they retreated. In early December, Shah Jahan traveled from the Deccan to Lahore for a brief visit, probably a strategy session, with Jahangir, Nur, and their inner circle.

  Jahangir’s shortness of breath continued to worsen, making the question of Mughal succession seem increasingly urgent. No documentary evidence suggests that Nur ever broached the subject of Ladli’s marriage with either Shah Jahan or Parvez, the alcoholic son on the margins of Mughal political life. Khusraw, the partially blinded prince, wasn’t a good prospect either, although the Italian traveler Della Valle, who visited India three years before Jahangir’s death, but never met him or Nur, assumed that Khusraw would succeed his father to the throne. In order to “establish herself well,” Della Valle wrote in his book The Travels of Pietro Della Valle in
India, Nur Jahan “frequently offer’d her Daughter [to Khusraw] … but he, either for that he had another Wife he lov’d sufficiently and would not wrong her, or because he scorn’d Nurmahal’s Daughter, would never consent …” The fact that Khusraw was in the Deccan during this period suggests that Della Valle was writing from hearsay. Thomas Roe, the British ambassador, speculated similarly about a supposed proposal of Ladli’s marriage to Khusraw.28

  Ultimately, Nur chose Jahangir’s youngest son, Shahryar, as her daughter’s husband and the potential preserver of her power. He was a long shot to succeed—Jahangir seemed set on Shah Jahan as his heir—but a possibility. Shahryar was known for his good looks, patience, and restraint—and for being easily manipulated.

  Mughal princes could be groomed as successors. If the right steps were taken and a prince had enough support, if he skillfully accomplished military and political assignments well, he could become a contender for the throne. Nur decided she would take a chance and campaign for Shahryar as successor to Jahangir, knowing full well that it would be hard to keep Shah Jahan from the throne.

  Just before the royal party started the journey from Lahore to Agra, the emperor formally approached Ghiyas. “I asked for the hand of I’timaduddawla’s grand-daughter in marriage to my son Shahryar,” Jahangir wrote, “and a lac of rupees in cash and goods was sent as a sachiq [a gift sent from the prospective bridegroom’s house to the bride’s]. Most of the great amirs and important courtiers accompanied the sachiq to I’timaduddawla’s quarters, where a large celebration of utmost elaborateness was held. It is hoped the marriage will be blessed.”29 Also attending the celebration at Ghiyas’s impressive Lahore residence of the diwan of Punjab—one of Ghiyas’s many titles—were Nur, a coterie of royal women, and the newly engaged pair themselves, Ladli and Shahryar.