Empress

by Ruby Lal

  JAGAT GOSAIN (D. 1619)

  Wife of the Mughal emperor Jahangir, and the mother of his successor, Shah Jahan, she was a Rajput princess of Marwar (present-day Jodhpur). After submitting to the Mughals, her father decided in 1586 to give Jagat Gosain in marriage to Jahangir, then Prince Salim. Their son was named Khurram (“joyous”) by Akbar. Ruqayya Begum, Akbar’s childless wife, assumed the primary responsibility for Khurram’s upbringing and he grew up under her care. Legends depict immense tension that Jagat Gosain displayed toward her archrival in the imperial harem, Nur Jahaṇ, co-sovereign, indisputably the emperor’s favorite wife. Jahangir noted Jagat’s passing briefly in his memoir.

  JAHANGIR (1569–1627)

  Born Prince Salim, Jahangir, Seizer or Conqueror of the World, was a much-coveted son of Akbar the Great. Although he built his rule upon the groundwork established by his father, Jahangir gave it a more intimate and experimental character. He looked up more to his great-grandfather Babur as a model rather than the indomitable Akbar. His memoir, the Jahangirnama follows the style of Babur’s writing, famous for unusual detail. Among other records, it is in the pages of the Jahangirnama that we best meet Nur Jahan, the emperor’s last wife, with whom he shared the Mughal imperium and power. Art, especially portraiture and Mughal albums with portraits became a landmark contribution of his reign. The last years of his and Nur’s reign were marred by an open crisis when his son, Khurram, fearing that he would be excluded from the throne, rebelled in 1622. The rebellion and court intrigues that followed took a heavy toll on Jahangir’s health, and he died in 1627.

  KHAFI KHAN (D. ~1732–33)

  Muhammad Hashim, also called Hashim Ali Khan, is known as Khafi Khan—Khafi means “concealed”—the chronicler of the Mughal Empire. He worked as a trade agent in Surat, and in the last years of the reign of Mughal emperor Aurangzeb (r. 1658–1689), and into the time of Muhammad Shah (r. 1719–1748), he served in various military capacities. He then served under the first Nizam of Hyderabad, who employed him as a revenue officer. His invaluable work, Muntakhab-ul Lubab, details the history of Nur Jahan’s birth and life and also records her poems.

  KHUSRAW (1587–1622)

  A solemn figure in Mughal history, the eldest son of Jahangir and his first wife, Man Bai, Khusraw was a beloved grandson of Akbar, as well as of several imperial women. Deeply disappointed with Jahangir toward the end of his reign, Akbar had wanted Khusraw to succeed as the next ruler. Upon Jahangir’s succession, Khusraw went into rebellion. Partially blinded, he was imprisoned in Agra. He remained under the watchful eyes of Asaf Khan, and was later under the similarly watchful eyes of his younger brother, Prince Khurram. He died in the Deccan in 1622.

  LADLI BEGUM

  The only daughter of Nur Jahan (then Mihr un-Nisa) and her first husband, Sher Afgan, Ladli Begum was born in Burdwan, Bengal. The date of her birth and death is not recorded. She married the Mughal prince Shahryar, according to the wishes of her mother, Nur Jahan. There are stray references to Ladli in the Mughal records. The two descriptions in the memoir of her stepfather, Jahangir, are the lengthiest and detail the moment of her betrothal and wedding with Jahangir’s youngest son, Shahryar.

  MAHABAT KHAN (D. 1634)

  From a family in Shiraz, Zamana Beg (entitled Mahabat Khan by Jahangir) joined the service of Prince Salim as a trooper. When Jahangir became the emperor, impressed with Mahabat’s loyalty and service, he repeatedly increased his ranks and deputed him against the rebellious Prince Khusraw. Mahabat also joined Khurram’s campaign against Mewar, and was posted in the Deccan along with other officers. His relations with the family of Nur Jahan were strained. He took Jahangir into custody in 1626. Nur Jahan fought a battle to rescue Jahangir, and initially lost, but was later able to free him. Mahabat was sent to Sind, but he joined Shah Jahan.

  NICCOLAO MANUCCI (1638–1720)

  Born in Venice, he left for Corfu in 1651. With the help of an Englishman, he then went to Persia and on to Delhi in India. Under the tutelage of Jesuit fathers, he learned Persian, and dedicated himself to studying medicine. By 1656, he was employed as an artilleryman in the service of Prince Dara Shukoh, the son of Arjumand and Shah Jahan. At different points he attempted to serve as an intermediary between the Mughals and the Portuguese. From 1707, until his death, he spent time between Madras and Pondicherry. Written in five parts, his work Storia Do Mogor was first translated in three volumes by William Irvine of the Indian Civil Service.

  MUHAMMAD HADI

  Muhammad Hadi Kamwar Khan, an eighteenth-century court historian is well known to modern historians as Muhammad Hadi, the man who added a continuation to Emperor Jahangir’s memoir from 1624 (where Mu’tamad Khan stopped; see below) and brought it to the point of Jahangir’s death in 1627. Author of several other chronicles, he was a contemporary of the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb, and in the fifty-fourth year of Aurangzeb’s reign, he went to Ahmadabad in the company of the paymaster general. Not much is recorded about his life other than the facts associated with his writing.

  MULLA KAMI SHIRAZI (D. ~1635–36)

  Very little is known about the life of Mulla Kami Shirazi, a Shi’a Muslim from Shiraz, who served the Mughals in various capacities and traveled with the court in 1626 when Jahangir was kidnapped. He lived for some time in Ahmadnagar, then Sind, and Agra during Akbar’s reign. Part of the royal retinue, Shirazi saw Nur lead her men into battle in 1626. He wrote a long composition in rhyming couplets called Waqi’at uz-zaman (The events of the time), which he dedicated to Nur Jahan. Included in it was a long segment entitled Fathnama-i Nur Jahan Begum (Chronicle of the victory of Nur Jahan Begum). Shirazi’s account of Nur’s victory is the only part of his larger composition that survives. In 1976, an officer of the Archaeological Survey of India located the epitaph that noted his death from a graveyard in Hyderabad, likely where he lived after Jahangir’s death.

  MU’TAMAD KHAN

  He served as the paymaster of troopers before receiving higher offices from Jahangir. His fortune rose when he looked after the Mughals Nur Jahan and Jahangir on their first journey to Kashmir, making arrangements in the midst of a heavy spring snowfall. In 1622, Jahangir instructed him to continue the writing of his memoir because the emperor fell rather ill. Mu’tamad did so, regularly submitting the memoirs to Jahangir for editing and correction until 1624. Mu’tamad Khan wrote another account, called the Iqbalnama-i Jahangiri, which drew heavily from the emperor’s memoirs. We do not have the precise dates, but Farid Bhakkari notes that Mu’tamad died in the reign of Shah Jahan.

  NUR JAHAN (1577–1645)

  Daughter of Ghiyas Beg and Asmat Begum, she was born on the road outside Kandahar, as her parents fled Persia. They called her Mihr un-Nisa—Sun of Women. She married Sher Afgan in 1594 and lived in Burdwan in Bengal until 1608, where her only daughter, Ladli, was born. In 1611, Nur married Jahangir, and rose to be an astute politician, governing as co-sovereign along with her husband. She acquired new names symbolic of her rise and shared sovereignty: Nur Mahal upon marriage (Light of the Palace) and Nur Jahan (Light of the World). As co-sovereign Nur issued imperial orders over her signature, coins of the realm bore her name, and she gave audience from an elaborately carved balcony high up in the palace. An ingenious architect, she innovated the use of marble in her parents’ tomb, the jewel-box mausoleum on the banks of the Yamuna that inspired her stepson’s Taj Mahal. She fought hard to retain her imperial rights after Jahangir’s death, but lost to Shah Jahan’s faction, whom her brother Asaf Khan backed strongly. She would live to be sixty-eight.

  SIR THOMAS ROE (~1580–1644)

  Born in Leyton, Thomas Roe entered Magdalen College in Oxford in the early 1590s, eventually becoming an esquire of the Body to Queen Elizabeth. In 1603, he was knighted by James I. Although he became Member of Parliament for Tamworth for the year 1614, his resources were threadbare. He went to India on the Lion in February 1615 and reached Ajmer in December 1615, having made acquaintance with Prince Parvez in Burhanpur. He went b
ack to England in February 1619. Later he reentered Parliament for Oxford and served in a variety of other political positions. He wrote an account of his embassy to Mughal India.

  RUQAYYA BEGUM (D. 1626)

  One of the longest living matriarchs of the Mughal Empire, she was the first wife of Emperor Akbar. She was also the emperor’s first cousin, a Mughal princess by birth. She had no children of her own and raised Akbar’s grandson, Khurram. As a senior Mughal woman, she was instrumental in forging peace between Akbar and her stepson, Jahangir, paving the way for his accession to the throne. Ruqayya was an important Mughal guide for Mihr un-Nisa when she came to the harem. Jahangir wrote fondly of Ruqayya in his memoirs and recorded her death. Her burial place is in the Garden of Babur (Bagh-e-Babur) in Kabul, Afghanistan.

  SALIMEH SULTAN BEGUM (D. 1613)

  Salimeh was the granddaughter of Babur. In 1557 she accompanied Gulbadan and Hamideh Banu to Agra and she was married shortly after that to Akbar’s regent, Bairam Khan. After Bairam’s death in 1561, Salimeh married her first cousin Akbar. A senior wife of Akbar, she was central in pleading forgiveness on behalf of Prince Salim and wielded much influence in his eventual succession to the throne. She was one of the senior women who accompanied Gulbadan on the hajj. Along with Ruqayya, she guided Mihr un-Nisa upon her arrival in Agra. There is some uncertainty about the date of her death. Jahangir records it as 1613 in Agra. Mentioned repeatedly as a cultured and wise woman, Jahangir notes particulars of Salimeh’s birth and ancestry, her marriages, and her death.

  SHAH JAHAN (1592–1666)

  Son of Jahangir and Jagat Gosain, his grandfather Akbar named him Khurram (“joyous”). Khurram emerged as a successful young prince, heading major campaigns in Mewar and the Deccan, outshining his older brothers Khusraw and Parvez. Things turned around when Jahangir married Nur Jahan, a central figure in the empire. The relations between Nur and Khurram were cordial and close by all accounts: both were ambitious and politically astute. They were both part of an intricate family web, given that Khurram married Nur’s niece, Arjumand, his second wife. When Nur had her daughter, Ladli, marry the youngest Mughal prince, Khurram, fearing his future was in jeopardy, went into rebellion. Asaf Khan was central in securing Khurram’s accession in 1627. Shah Jahan built the Taj Mahal, one of the Seven Wonders of the World.

  SHAHRYAR (1605–1628)

  Jahangir’s youngest son, he was born to a concubine, unnamed in the emperor’s memoir or in other records. Nur Jahan arranged his marriage to her daughter, Ladli. In the battle for succession after Jahangir’s death, he lost to his elder brother Shah Jahan. At Shah Jahan’s orders, along with other princes, he was executed.

  SHER AFGAN (D. 1608)

  Ali Quli Istajlu, well known by his later name, Sher Afgan, or Tiger Slayer, that Jahangir gave him, was a table attendant of Shah Isma’il II of Iran (1576–78). He fled Iran when the shah was murdered at the end of his brief reign. Abdur-Rahim, who commanded the Mughal army in Sind, employed Quli and later recommended him for a position at the Mughal court. He married Mihr un-Nisa and lived with her in Burdwan till 1608. They had a daughter named Ladli. Implicated in a plot against Jahangir, he was killed in a brawl with the Mughal governor in 1608. His tomb is in Burdwan.

  * Only the dates confirmed in the historical records are noted next to each entry. Biographical details of historical figures (such as Asaf Khan) are given only as far as the reigns of Jahangir and Nur Jahan.

  NOTES ON SOURCES

  My work as a feminist historian has focused on two interrelated questions: First, how can I best tell the stories of women and girls, which are largely missing from the precolonial and colonial history of South Asia? Then, what counts as evidence, and therefore as history?

  One answer to both questions has involved using sources that other historians have ignored. In my first book, Domesticity and Power in the Early Mughal World, I delved deeply into the memoir of the elderly sixteenth-century Mughal princess Gulbadan Banu Begum—Princess Rosebody—daughter of Babur, the first Mughal. Scholars have long been aware of the memoir, written when Gulbadan was seventy at the behest of her nephew Akbar (and translated into English in 1902), but had used it only peripherally. I decided to read it line by line in the original Persian, and found it to be a treasure, an astute and detailed account of the daily lives of women in the Mughal court, yielding information otherwise effaced from the official record. In my second book, Coming of Age in Nineteenth-Century India: The Girl-Child and the Art of Playfulness, my aim once more was to illuminate a feminine world missing from the record, again using sources, some untranslated and some unknown or disregarded by earlier historians, which provided depictions of domestic spaces in fiction, textbooks, ethical treatises, and oral histories.

  In writing this book, I revisited Gulbadan’s rarely consulted memoir for insights into the world that Nur Jahan and Jahangir inherited and inhabited. In order to advance our knowledge about the women of the Mughal harem and their essential role in politics and empire formation, I had to challenge a commonly held belief summed up by a male colleague: “How are you going to write a history of Mughal women, their relationship with the court and empire?” he asked me. “There are no sources for it!” It was to counter that belief that I returned to Gulbadan. What she wrote wasn’t a standard encomium; it doesn’t fit into any recognized genre of her time. Her memoir covers Mughal women’s multifarious concerns and negotiations: the difficulties of childbirth, unfulfilled desires, anticipation, marriages, love and death, war and peace, ritual and celebration. This compelling piece of writing helped bring to view a polychromatic women’s world. Momentously, in the light of her memoir, the standard, dry Mughal chronicles appeared multidimensional. Events that earned only a single line in official (male) records sometimes acquired a different significance thanks to Gulbadan’s wide-ranging discussions of exactly the same occasions.

  I also turned to other primary sources in Persian, foremost among them Jahangir’s memoir, the Jahangirnama, which he wrote himself between 1605 and 1622, then turned over to a trusted noble when he fell ill. In Jahan gir’s accounts, Nur Jahan emerges as a sensitive consort, a skilled politician, and a talented woman. The emperor made his first entry about Nur Jahan in 1614, and over the years he included more than thirty discussions of the empress that include praise of her many talents and descriptions of personal moments—a vivid record depicting an outstanding royal woman and her actions.

  Mu’tamad Khan, who took over Jahangir’s memoir when the emperor became ill and wrote it until 1624, also composed the Iqbalnama-i Jahangiri, a history of Jahangir’s reign, drawing heavily from the emperor’s memoirs. In the eighteenth century a court historian named Muhammad Hadi added a continuation of the Jahangirnama from 1624 to the point of Jahangir’s death in 1627. The Jahangirnama of Jahangir—and to a certain extent the Iqbalnama of Mu’tamad Khan—are, in a sense, the only “official” history of Jahangir’s reign. Jahangir did not commission professional chroniclers to record the events of his rule, but did so himself. A fascinating change, given that his father, Akbar the Great, had initiated the imperial practice of recording the life and history of his empire: commissioning official histories, gazetteers, and innumerable other reports and accounts of the empire, including the first Mughal painting atelier.

  Nur Jahan herself left no memoir or diary. But ten of her imperial orders survive, and so do several lines of her poetry. Artists painted her portrait; curious observers, diplomats, court visitors, tradesmen, chroniclers, and critics of the empire wrote zealously about her; each, of course, observing and assessing through his—it was always a he—own cultural lens. Mulla Kami Shirazi, who served the Mughals in various capacities and traveled with the court in 1626 when Jahangir was kidnapped by a disaffected noble, wrote a lavishly laudatory fathnama—a proclamation of victory—about Nur soon after her rescue of her husband. Persian writers documented Nur Jahan’s achievements in the form of biographical entries in encyclopedic works. Notable among these
is one transcribed in 1650, in which the author discusses 368 Mughal male nobles and only one distinguished woman—Nur Jahan. Carefully read and interpreted from a feminist viewpoint, these sources—only a handful of examples of the wide range of the archives I’ve used for this book—yielded provocative and extensive evidence of the forces that formed Nur and allowed her to flourish, and allowed me to fill in the daily details of her private and public life.

  I dived deeply into the Persian court records. Nur is there, it turns out; all we have to do is to look for her, which sometimes entails peering around the towering figures of men. For example, to tell the story of Nur’s parents’ migration from Iran to India during the time of Akbar the Great, her father’s employment at the court, and Nur’s upbringing, I’ve used a number of Akbari court chronicles, and a three-volume history written in secret by a severe critic of Akbar’s policies. To re-create the details of her girlhood, I looked into conduct books—guides to childrearing in the Islamic world that were used at the time she was growing up.

  I also consulted later court histories, written after Nur’s death in 1645, which often conflated the historical and the legendary. In the eighteenth century, for instance, Khafi Khan, an agile writer who served the last grand Mughal, Aurangzeb, drew inspiration from works written during the reign of Jahangir and his successor, Shah Jahan. Khafi Khan embellished Nur’s history, shaping the most magical legends of Nur Jahan’s birth and life. It was he who first published the story of the infant Nur’s abandonment by her parents. He also sketches an intense rivalry between Nur and another of Jahangir’s wives, complete with detailed scenes worthy of Real Housewives of the Harem.