by Ruby Lal
In answer to Jahangir’s order, Mahabat sent back one of the royal nephews. Regarding Asaf, he was candid in telling the messenger: “Since I have no assurance of my security from the begam [Nur], I fear that if I give Asaf Khan up, she will send an army down on me. In this case, since I am proud to perform any service to which I am assigned, when I am past Lahore,” he added, he would “gladly and willingly” send Asaf Khan to court.17 Nur flew into a rage over these words, Hadi wrote. She sent the messenger back to Mahabat with a final order. “It is not in your best interests to delay in sending Asaf Khan, and do not allow yourself to think otherwise, for it will result in regret.”18 Mahabat knew that Nur was a force to be reckoned with. He released Asaf immediately, holding on to one nephew for insurance. But he knew that his days of rising ambition and command were over. A few days later he sent the second nephew back to Nur.
Emperor Jahangir and the victorious Empress Nur Jahan returned to Lahore on October 18, 1626. The elite of the city lined the road to the palace. In a few weeks, Nur and Jahangir resumed the regular business of the court—administrative changes, new appointments, the shuffling of provincial governors. Jahangir appointed Asaf imperial deputy and governor of Punjab.
Although the empress had restored the Mughal order, her prominence in strategic and military planning caused much consternation. For many observers, the idea that Nur had fought Mahabat’s men, suffered defeat, risen again, strategized, and ultimately rescued the emperor only proved that Nur had brought the Mughal world to chaos—fitna—as had happened centuries before when Ayisha fought the Battle of the Camel to protect the Prophet’s line of succession. A few, like the poet Shirazi, recognized that Nur had preserved the Mughal dynasty. He wrote in his victory poem,
King Jahangir whose abode is exalted and elevated as the sky and who is King through the wise advice of the Queen.…
Never was witnessed in the region of my King such a fortified system (refuge) for the kingdom as the Queen.19
FIFTEEN
Angel of Death
At an auspicious hour on March 1, 1627, a departure time determined by the royal astrologers, the imperial cavalcade once again embarked from Lahore for the valley of Kashmir, banners high. Once again, as they did nearly every year, Nur Jahan and Jahangir endured the difficulties of the road to visit the delightful gardens of the north, where the emperor could find relief from his escalating breathlessness and the empress could enjoy a few moments of leisure. Among the royal retinue were Nur’s brother Asaf Khan; her son-in-law Shahryar, presumably with her daughter, Ladli; and the late Prince Khusraw’s son Dawar Bakhsh, who was under Shahryar’s supervision, as ordered by Nur. If there was even a small chance that Dawar’s growing popularity among some Mughals could block Shahryar’s path to the throne, she wanted him where she could keep an eye on him.
Meanwhile, in the province of Sind, the commander of imperial troops in the town of Thatta, Sharif ul-Mulk—the same man who headed Shahryar’s household when the prince married Ladli—prepared to fight Shah Jahan. He’d gathered 3,000 horsemen and 12,000 foot soldiers, and added more cannons in the Thatta fort. According to partisans of the prince, Shah Jahan forbade his men from storming the fort, to keep them from becoming cannon fodder. A small contingent launched an attack, but advance was impossible. Shah Jahan’s official chronicles aren’t clear on exactly when Sharif ordered a cannon attack on Shah Jahan’s encampment outside the city of Thatta. Firing near the tent of Arjumand, pregnant with her eleventh child, was a “crime of violating the imperial person” that Shah Jahan wouldn’t forget.1 Soon after, Shah Jahan fell ill.
While he was recovering at his camp, Nur Jahan sent Shah Jahan a message reminding the prince that harboring any imperial ambitions would be pointless: He had no backing, no men, no power; she was in charge. “It would be wisest to return to the Deccan and submit to your fate …” she wrote.2 Shah Jahan did as she suggested, and was joined by Mahabat, who realized that after the kidnapping fiasco, his only political option was casting his lot with Shah Jahan, to whom he wrote, “If you will pardon the offenses of this sinful slave, I will turn towards your threshold.”3
The air of Kashmir seemed to have lost its magic; paradise on earth failed to restore Jahangir’s vigor. The emperor wasn’t himself. His breathing troubled him and he felt immensely weak. He couldn’t ride a horse and had to be carried in a palanquin. By early September 1627, he was gravely ill. The royal physicians offered no hope of recovery.
Breathless and suffering severe chest pains, Jahangir developed an aversion to opium, his drug of choice for forty years.4 He lost his appetite and would take only a few bowls of grape wine each day. To Nur’s alarm, he went in and out of lucidity, sometimes speaking gibberish.
With the emperor failing, Nur’s son-in-law, Shahryar, gave her another cause for worry. The prince had developed a severe case of Fox’s disease, a kind of leprosy, and was badly disfigured. He lost his hair, beard, eyebrows, and eyelashes. The royal physicians weren’t able to help except to suggest that if Shahryar left the cooler temperature of Kashmir and went to warmer Lahore, he might recover. Early in October, Shahryar asked the empress for permission to travel; she immediately agreed. Before leaving for Lahore, presumably with his wife Ladli, he transferred Khusraw’s son Dawar Bakhsh to the charge of an imperial officer. For Nur, the outlook was grim. Her husband was dying; the son-in-law she hoped would succeed him was threatened by disease.
Soon after Shahryar’s departure, Jahangir also decided to return to Lahore. Perhaps it was Nur’s idea. She had good reason to feel that with Parvez gone and Shah Jahan in the Deccan, it was imperative to have Shahryar close to the emperor, whose health was failing. The Mughal cavalcade began the long return journey.
On the way, they stopped at Bahramgalla—a sweet, green spot near a peak with a waterfall called Chitta Pani, or “White Water,” a forceful cascade that foamed gloriously.5 Jahangir had always enjoyed hunting there. For the first time in weeks, the emperor’s condition improved a little; he said that he felt like hunting. Preparations began at once. Servants set up a platform at the foot of the mountain, from which Jahangir could shoot with a musket. The plan was that local landlords and soldiers would drive antelopes to the top of the peak. Once they were in sight, the emperor would aim his musket and fire; the antelopes would fall from the pinnacle and hit the ground near the shooting platform.
The hunt began. A soldier chased an antelope toward the summit, but the animal stopped on an outcropping that didn’t offer a clear shot to the emperor below. Attempting to get the antelope to move, the soldier stepped onto the ledge and lost his footing; the bush he grabbed for support came out by the roots. The man plummeted to his death. Jahangir, horrified, asked to be taken from the shooting platform. Later, he summoned the soldier’s grieving mother to the imperial pavilion and paid her generous compensation, but his distress couldn’t be lightened. “It was as though the angel of death had appeared in this guise to the emperor,” Mu’tamad noted in his Iqbalnama.6
As the cavalcade advanced, Jahangir, now sixty, deteriorated. On earlier trips, he’d relished making notes about the changes in customs and terrain he observed as he traveled from Kashmir to lower lands. He customarily stopped near the village of Thana, the place where, Jahangir had recorded in his journal, Kashmiri culture ended: “A great difference was apparent in the climate, the languages, the clothing, the animals, and whatever properly belongs to a warm country …”7
Late in the day on October 28, as the party set out from the town of Rajaor, modern Rajori, the emperor called for wine. His attendants brought him a cup, but he was unable to swallow. By the time they reached the imperial resting house at Chingiz Hatli, fifteen miles to the south, the emperor’s breathing was increasingly ragged.8 Jahangir had once praised Chingiz Hatli’s stone walls carved with floral patterns and its fine terrace, and rewarded a builder named Murad for his excellent work.9 Now the brick gateway, shielded with weeping grass, gave passage to an emperor clearly fail
ing. The empress, her brother, important nobles, physicians, and servants, gathered around their monarch to wait for the end. At dawn on October 29, 1627, as the light changed, Jahangir died.
In the Mughal camp, still more than a hundred miles from Lahore, the battle for succession began at once. As with other momentous events, Mughal chroniclers have different points of view about exactly what transpired immediately after Jahangir’s death. Bhakkari says that Nur Jahan, determined to promote Shahryar as successor, wanted to arrest her brother, Asaf, who favored his own son-in-law, Shah Jahan. No other court historian mentions this episode. The imperial history commissioned by Shah Jahan many years later portrays Nur as “scheming to install her son-in-law Shahryar on the throne” in the aftermath of Jahangir’s death.10 Most accounts, however, agreed on the following events.
Nur Jahan summoned key nobles to a conference. But Asaf Khan, usually discreet and diplomatic, promptly took charge and preempted his sister’s command. He came out forcefully in support of his son-in-law Shah Jahan. Asaf sent a man named Banarasi, celebrated as a swift messenger, to deliver the news of Jahangir’s death to Shah Jahan in the south. According to the Shah Jahan Nama, the official chronicle of Shah Jahan’s reign, Asaf gave the messenger his signet ring and personal seal to convince Shah Jahan that the news was true.
The problem Asaf faced was how to hold the Mughal throne until Shah Jahan arrived. He decided to summon Khusraw’s son Dawar Bakhsh, still under the watchful eye of a Mughal officer, and promise the young man that he would be the next king. This was, in the words of the Shah Jahan Nama, “an expedient maneuver” meant to prevent upheaval and thwart the ambitions of Prince Shahryar, who still thought himself the son most suitable for kingship.11
Dawar was a pawn in a plot: he would be a placeholder until Shah Jahan returned. Mu’tamad Khan wrote that Dawar had little confidence in Asaf’s proposal, and agreed to the offer of the throne only after Asaf professed loyalty to him.
Nur Jahan, mourning her husband and fearing for her position, sent messenger after messenger summoning her brother to meet her, but Asaf made one excuse after another. He isolated her, sending away her eunuchs, companions, and past supporters, and stopped visiting her himself. Court chronicler Farid Bhakkari wrote of Nur’s fate: “You shall be treated as you have treated.”12
Within days of the emperor’s death, all the men who had bowed before Nur deserted her. Almost unanimously, the nobles in the imperial camp endorsed Asaf’s strategy of using Dawar in order to secure the accession of Shah Jahan. With her husband gone and her brother opposing her, none of Nur’s maneuvers was likely to succeed. At a rather astonishing speed, the old order was restored, as if these men had simply been waiting for the emperor’s passing so that they could override the empress.
Nur made preparations to send the emperor’s body to Lahore, so that he could be buried with full imperial honors. The imperial cavalcade split into three groups. The first carried Jahangir’s body, escorted by servants and attendants; the second included Asaf, Dawar, and important nobles and dignitaries; and the third, a day’s ride behind the others, was Nur’s. She was under Asaf’s control: he had carefully chosen the servants now attending her. She followed far behind her husband’s body, riding an elephant.
Along the way, funeral rites were performed for the late emperor—his last wash; the removal of the entrails to save the corpse from early decomposition. A man’s closest male relatives usually tended to these rites, so Asaf and Dawar may have supervised. In this way the royal body was prepared for burial, which would take place, as the emperor had wished, in a place called the Heart-Contenting Garden, designed by Nur in Shahdara, just outside Lahore.
Meanwhile, a mullah in Punjab read the khutba in Dawar’s name, officially but not very publicly proclaiming him the Mughal king.
According to Mu’tamad, and later the eighteenth-century historian Hadi, the mourning Nur was unaware of her brother’s schemes and still thought that Shahryar could attain the throne.13 But the Shah Jahan Nama tells a different story. In that version, when Nur Jahan learned about Asaf’s plans for Dawar—from whom it does not say—she was dumbstruck, then panic-stricken. In a confused state of mind, that royal history says, she forced the three sons of Arjumand and Shah Jahan to join her on the elephant following behind the cortege bearing the emperor’s body, their presence ensuring her safety.14 According to the Shah Jahan Nama, she continued to keep Shah Jahan’s young sons with her. “At this point, it was practically impossible to remove the august princes from the confines of the seraglio of Nur Jahan Begam; and moreover, she was already scheming to install her son-in-law Shahryar on the throne.”15
In Lahore, when Shahryar got the news of his father’s death, he raided the treasury and took goods from the imperial workshops, distributing these riches to win supporters. He gathered troops and seized the imperial departments within easy reach—those dealing with elephants, stables, and armory. Mu’tamad Khan notes that Ladli, perhaps thinking of her mother’s safety and her husband’s fortunes, urged Shahryar to take charge of the empire. Within a week of the emperor’s demise, according to Hadi, Shahryar gave large amounts of money to numerous officers and nobles, and promised money and royal appointments to others. A nephew of Jahangir took command of Shahryar’s forces.
After the emperor’s burial, Asaf and the puppet king Dawar battled Shahryar’s men on the outskirts of Lahore, while Shahryar himself remained in the Lahore fort. Mounted on elephants, Asaf and Dawar fought alongside seasoned nobles such as Mu’tamad the paymaster, as well as another of Jahangir’s nephews. Shahryar’s undisciplined troops soon scattered in all directions. A messenger raced from the battlefield to bring Shahryar the bad news. The next day, Asaf, Dawar, the nobles, and the imperial army entered the Lahore fort. Most of Shahryar’s men deserted him and joined Asaf’s camp. Shahryar hid in a corner of his late father’s harem.
A trusted eunuch brought Shahryar out of the harem, his hands bound with the sash from his waist, and led him to Dawar, who sat on the throne inside the citadel of Lahore, surrounded by courtiers under the control of Asaf. When Shahryar’s hands were released, he offered the emperor taslim, placing the back of his right hand on the ground, raising it gently as he stood erect, and placing the palm of his hand upon the crown of his head. But the obeisance did Shahryar no good. At Asaf’s orders, imperial guards imprisoned the prince in an isolated section of the fort. Two days later he was blinded.
Asaf sent a second message to Shah Jahan, begging him to proceed to Lahore “on wings of haste to rescue the world from fitna.”16 Dawar was doing his job as a stopgap, but, Asaf feared, a shake-up was still possible while Nur Jahan was near and Shah Jahan was absent.
Nur Jahan almost certainly would have prolonged the struggle for the Mughal throne if she could have, but she was left with no options. All the leading nobles and military leaders had joined her brother’s camp. There’s no record of her whereabouts during Shahryar’s uprising, imprisonment, and blinding and Dawar’s very short reign. She wasn’t in the Lahore fort: more likely, she was a political prisoner in Shahdara, where she would build the tomb of her late husband.
Shah Jahan got the news of his father’s death in the third week of November. After four days of mourning and consultations with astrologers, he set out for Agra. On the way he received his father-in-law Asaf’s second message telling of Shahryar’s defeat and urging Shah Jahan to hurry. The prince sent a reply ordering Asaf to execute his half-brother Shahryar, the pretend king Dawar, the cousin who’d supported Shahryar, and the cousin who’d fought with Asaf—a command his court chroniclers later described as decisive and forceful. Having thus eliminated all other possible contenders for the crown, Shah Jahan marched north in a triumphal procession. Along the way, regional landlords and grandees professed loyalty to the prospective Mughal emperor. In return, he promised new appointments and future honors.
On January 19, 1628, while Shah Jahan was still en route, Asaf consulted with other nobles an
d had the khutba read in Shah Jahan’s name in the Hall of Public Audience in Lahore. Dawar, the king with the shortest reign in Mughal history—less than a month—was arrested. He, his brother, Shahryar, and the two cousins Shah Jahan had singled out were executed.
Less than a month later, on February 3, 1628, the day of his accession to the throne, Shah Jahan mounted an elephant and rode through Agra scattering heaps of coins to his right and left. He entered the fort, and sat upon the throne in the Hall of Public Audience. At the same time, he ordered the treasury to strike coins bearing the name of the new emperor of Mughal India.
Shah Jahan rewarded his supporters handsomely. His father-in-law Asaf, the central player in ensuring his accession to the throne, received the highest numerical rank that had ever been given to a noble. In addition to becoming the wakil, the highest minister without a specified portfolio, he held the governorships of Lahore and Multan. Shah Jahan bestowed upon him the title Yamin ud-Daula, Right Hand of the State, and he was put in charge of the special imperial seal. Mahabat Khan became the commander-in-chief of the army, and the new emperor replaced several provincial governors with his loyalists.
Besides executing his half-brother and other princes, Shah Jahan ordered the death of Nur’s loyalist Sharif ul-Mulk, the defender of Thatta. The new emperor still bore a grudge against the man for once having shot a cannon near the tent of his favorite wife, Arjumand, who was pregnant at the time. Shah Jahan’s chroniclers describe these executions as “blessing[s]” rooting out any chance of future “contagion/corruption.”17 Although at the time he rose to power Shah Jahan’s attitude toward defeated rivals was harsh, the records show no widespread execution of opposing factions. Like other freshly enthroned Mughal emperors before him, Shah Jahan valued alliance-building with old and new nobles and officers. “The Ancient world turned young again,” the chronicler Hadi wrote of the regime change; peace and security prevailed.18