Empress
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9.Muzaffar Alam, The Languages of Political Islam in India, c. 1200–1800 (New Delhi: Permanent Black, 2004), 124–25.
10.This was a powerful contest of Irano-centrism, a rejoinder to the claim of those Iranians who looked down upon the Indian style of Persian poetry, or the so-called Sabk-i Hindi. Muzaffar Alam and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Indo-Persian Travels in the Age of Discoveries, 1400–1800 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 177.
11.Beveridge, Babur-nama, 202, 338–39. Details of caravans and caravanserai are drawn from Edward Grey (ed.), The Travels of Pietro Della Valle in India: From the English Translation of 1664, by G. Havers: In Two Volumes (London: Printed for the Hakluyt Society, 1892); William Irvine (tr.), Storia Do Mogor or Mogul India 1653–1708 by Niccolao Manucci Venetian, 4 vols. (London: Murray, 1907); E. Denison Ross and Eileen Power (eds.), Jahangir and the Jesuits: With an Account of the Travels of Benedict Goes and the Mission to Pegu (New York: Robert M. McBride and Co., 1930).
12.Bento de Goes, a Jesuit missionary of the Society of Jesus who traveled through northern Afghanistan and Central Asia in the first quarter of the sixteenth century, was robbed more than once as he passed through upper northwest Afghanistan. Ross and Power, Jahangir and the Jesuits, 145–46, 151–52. In the 1630s, an Iranian poet ‘Abdullah Sani traveled through the same parts as Ghiyas and Asmat. His caravan was robbed just beyond Qandahar; Alam and Subrahmanyam, Indo-Persian Travels, 224. The next two paragraphs that follow are based upon these texts.
13.Henri Masse, Persian Beliefs and Customs (New Haven: Behavior Science Translations, 1954), 7, 12. Details of the rituals of birth on 13–14.
14.Storia Do Mogor, 1:159. Starting as an artilleryman in Mughal prince Dara’s services, Niccolao Manucci (1639–1717), subsequently succeeded in attaching himself in disguise to the army of the last grand Mughal, Aurangzeb. He then became a physician to a provincial governor, and afterward a plenipotentiary of a Portuguese viceroy. Manucci gained fame as a (quack) “doctor,” and also worked as a foreign correspondent to a British governor at Madras. Eventually he began writing, and the product in 1705 was the Storia Do Mogor (The first English translations of this work appeared as early as 1708 and 1722).
15.Susan Stronge, Painting for the Mughal Emperor: The Art of the Book, 1560–1660 (London: V&A Publications, 2002), 137.
16.Khafi Khan, Muntakhab-ul-Lubab, 1:264. Only the dates of his death are available, 1732 or 1733.
17.Willem G. J. Kuiters, “Dow, Alexander (1735/6–1779),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: OUP, 2004); online edition, January 2008, http://www.oxfordnb.com/view/article/7957, 1–2.
18.Alexander Dow, The History of Hindostan (London: J. Walker, 1812), 3:19–20 (1735–1779). The work was written between 1768 and 1772.
THREE: AL-HIND
1.Anonymous, Nushka-i Jahangiri (Mss. no. 831, Patna University), mentions October 1578 as their date of arrival. In addition to the texts and manuscripts cited in chapter 1, here I have consulted the following records. Akbar Nama, cited in chapter 2; Tarikh-i-Khandan-i Timuriyyan, manuscript of the Khuda Baksh Oriental Public Library, Patna, India; Muhammad Arif Qandahari, Tarikh-i Akbari, eds. Muin ud-Din Nadwi, Azhar Ali Dihlawi, and Imtiyaz Ali Arshi (Rampur: Rampur Raza Library, 1962); Chandarbhan Brahman, Chahar Chaman, British Library, Persian Ms. Add. 16863; And, George S. A. Ranking, W. H. Lowe, and Sir Wolseley Haig (trs. and eds.), Muntakhabu-t-tawarikh, 3 vols. (1884–1925; reprint Delhi, 1986).
For the architectural, social, and economic history of Akbar and his capital city, Fatehpur-Sikri: S.A.A. Rizvi and V.J.A. Flynn, Fathpur-Sikri (Bombay: D. B. Taraporevala Sons Pvt. Ltd., 1975); Michael Brand and Glenn D. Lowry, Akbar’s India: Art from the Mughal City of Victory (New York: The Asia Society Galleries, 1986); Michael Brand and Glenn D. Lowry (eds.), Fatehpur-Sikri (Bombay: Marg Publications, 1987). For scholarly sketches, among others, Alam, Languages of Political Islam; Iqtidar Alam Khan (ed.), Akbar and His Age (New Delhi: Northern Book Center, 1999); Ruby Lal, Domesticity and Power in the Early Mughal World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), chapter 6.
2.For historical details of Lahore, see, M. Baqir, Lahore: Past and Present (Delhi: Low Price Publications, reprint 1996), 309, 363, 364.
3.Such a sense of shared community and spaces is brought out in the memoir of the Jain merchant Banarasi, written in 1641 during the reign of Jahangir, the fourth Mughal. For the Hindi text and translation, Mukund Lath, The Ardhkathank: Half a Tale (New Delhi: Rupa and Co. 2005).
4.Masud and Murtaza are figures exclusive to Khafi Khan’s history, the first narrator of Mihr’s abandonment on the road.
5.A’in-i Akbari, cited in chapter 2, 2:317.
6.Alam, Languages of Political Islam, 123.
7.Ibid., 121, 123, and 135.
8.Akbar Nama, 2:503, 530.
9.Brand and Lowry, Akbar’s India, 44.
10.For jharokha darshan, see, A’in-i Akbari, 1:165; Brand and Lowry, Akbar’s India, 47–48; Glenn D. Lowry, “Urban Structures and Functions,” in Fatehpur-Sikri, 48.
11.One of the descriptions of the darshan comes from the records of Akbar’s grandson Shah Jahan, who aspired a great deal after the emperor. The way the majesty of the moment was captured would be accurate for both Akbar and Shah Jahan. Brahman, Chahar Chaman, folio 20a–21a.
12.Akbar’s court physician, accompanying the imperial camp in Punjab at one time, wrote a letter to a friend who was looking for a job, suggesting that he make his way straight to Fatehpur-Sikri. “If you have the ambition of seeking His Majesty’s service, you will—God Willing!—be appointed to a distinguished position; if you wish for madad-i ma’ash [revenue-free grant of land], that too is procurable; and if you are inclined towards commerce (tijarat) that too is better pursued at Fatehpur-Sikri …” Irfan Habib, “The Economic and Social Setting,” in Fatehpur-Sikri, 78. In 1574, Mulla Badauni, the emperor’s future critic, and a little later Abul-Fazl, were introduced. S.A.A. Rizvi, “Philosophical Traditions at Akbar’s Court,” in Fatehpur-Sikri, 190.
13.A’in-i Akbari, 1:166
14.Khafi Khan, Muntakhab-ul-Lubab, 1:264–65.
15.Confirmed details of Ghiyas Beg’s first encounter with Akbar: that it occurred at some point between late 1578 and early 1579, and that following the audience he was given employment in the service of the Grand Mughal. For a detailed record of mansab holders and their evolution in the ranks of the nobility, M. Athar Ali, The Apparatus of Empire: Awards of Ranks, Offices and Titles to the Mughal Nobility, 1574–1658 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1985). For the information on Ghiyas’s ranks, see xii, 19, 25, 42. It is unlikely that he received an audience with Akbar in Lahore. Akbar held two public meetings in the Hall of Audiences of the Lahore fort. The first, ten years after Ghiyas and Asmat were in Lahore; and the second, ten years later, following the repairs of the hall that had been damaged in a fire. By the latter date, Ghiyas Beg was a well-placed noble in the Mughal Empire.
16.Abul-Fazl, who wrote about Akbar’s daily meetings, describing the conventions of such gatherings for posterity, does not mention Ghiyas Beg. Ghiyas’s introductory rank (mansab) in Mughal service is unrecorded. This may have to do with gaps in the main document from Akbar’s reign that gives us a list of mansab holders of 200 and above. Abul-Fazl’s voluminous gazetteer of Akbar’s empire, the A’in-i Akbari, does not include names of mansab holders who died before the system was instituted in 1575. The list also does not include a number of persons granted a mansab before 1596. For Ghiyas Beg’s titles and ranks, Ali, The Apparatus of Empire, xii, 19, 25, 42.
FOUR: THE CUPOLAS OF CHASTITY AND THE PERFECT MAN
1.For a detailed discussion of Gulbadan’s hajj, Lal, Domesticity and Power, cited in chapter 3, 208–13; also, Akbar Nama, cited in chapter 2, 3:205; Muntakhabu-t-tawarikh, 2:216, 320.
2.For Akbar’s marriages and sources for Mughal marital alliances, Lal, Domesticity and Power, 166–75.
3.Allison Busch, “Hidden in Plain View: Brajbhash
a Poets at the Mughal Court,” Modern Asian Studies 44, no. 2 (2010), 271.
4.Kishori Lal (ed.), Acharya Keshav Das, Jahangir Jas-Chandrika (Allahabad: Sahitya Bhavan Pvt. Ltd., 1998, 1st ed.), 11–12. The raja referred to is Raja Indrajit.
5.Scholarly writings on Akbar’s religious and ethical life are extensive. See, as examples, S.A.A Rizvi, “Dimensions of Sulh-I Kul (Universal Peace) in Akbar’s Reign and the Sufi Theory of Perfect Man,” in Alam, Akbar and His Age, cited in chapter 3, 17; Irfan Habib, “Commemorating Akbar,” in Alam, Akbar and His Age, xii, xiiii, xiv; S.A.A. Rizvi, Religious and Intellectual History of the Muslims in Akbar’s Reign (New Delhi, 1975); Muzaffar Alam et al. (eds.), The Making of Indo-Persian Culture: Indian and French Studies (New Delhi, 2000); more recently, Anooshahr, “Shirazi Scholars and the Political Culture of the Sixteenth-Century Indo-Persian World,” cited in chapter 2, 342–43.
6.Widely in circulation was also Firdausi’s twelfth-century Shahnama, the Book of Kings, which referred to the “Sun of Iran” and the “Moon of Turan”—highlighting different principles for cycles of time. Zodiacal signs, astrological symbols, the sun on a lion’s back were signs of a prosperous kingship. For an excellent discussion of the themes of time and the millenarian philosophy of Akbar, Moin, The Millennial Sovereign, cited in chapter 2.
7.Michael Brand, “The City as Artistic Center,” in Fatehpur-Sikri, cited in chapter 3, 98, and fn. 41.
8.Muntakhabu-t-Tawarikh, cited in chapter 3, 2:253.
9.John F. Richards, The Mughal Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 40; S. Nurul Hasan, Religion, State and Society in Medieval India, ed. Satish Chandra (Delhi: OUP, 2005).
10.Moin, Millennial Sovereign, 9.
11.What a modern historian describes as his “autocratic centralism.” Richards, The Mughal Empire, chapter 3, with the title above.
FIVE: THE WAK-WAK TREE
1.Asmat gave birth to two more children, a boy and a girl. There is no information on the place or time of the births or the age difference between them. Muhammad Sharif, the eldest boy; the second, Abul-Hasan (the future Asaf Khan); and Manija, the eldest daughter, were born in Iran. Little companions of their parents on that arduous journey from Iran to India, they had witnessed the birth of their little sister Mihr on the road near Kandahar. Khadija, the youngest girl, and Ibrahim Khan, the youngest boy, were born in India. Mirza Abul-Hasan came to be referred to as Asaf Khan in most histories. In 1611, he was given the title Itiqad Khan, and in 1614, Asaf Khan, the name by which he is remembered. Ibrahim Khan Fath-jang was given the title Itiqad Khan sometime before 1615. For biographical details and titles, A’in-i Akbari, cited in chapter 2, 1:575–76; Dhakhiratul Khawanin, cited in chapter 1, 9–14, and 68–69; Maathir-ul-Umara, cited in chapter 2, 1:287–95 and 657–59. P. N. Ojha discusses the ranks and titles of Ghiyas’s sons; Asaf Khan and His Times (Patna: K. P. Jayaswal Research Institute, 1986), 31–35.
2.Mohammad Yasin, A Social History of Islamic India, 1605–1748 (New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal, 1974, 2nd ed.) 61, 62.
3.Maathir-ul-Umara, 2 (2):1077.
4.Akbar Nama, cited in chapter 2, 3:614–15.
5.Yasin, Social History, 48, fn. 2.
6.Simon Digby, Wonder-Tales of South Asia: Translated from Hindi, Urdu, Nepali and Persian (New Delhi: OUP, 2006), 286.
7.For an excellent discussion and detailed references to artistic productions of the Wak-Wak tree, Marcus Fraser, Deccan and Mughal Paintings: The Collection of Catherine Glynn Benkaim and Ralph Benkaim 2 vols. (England: Pureprint; Private Research Document, undated). These volumes are a private gift to me.
8.G. M. Wickens (trans. and ed.), The Nasirean Ethics (London: George Allen and Unwin Ltd., 1964), 167–68.
9.Tuzuk, cited in chapter 1, 2:117–18.
10.Shaykh Mushrifuddin Sa’di of Shiraz; Wheeler M. Thackston (tr.), The Gulistan (Rose Garden of Sa’di): Bilingual English and Persian Edition with Vocabulary (Maryland: Ibex Publishers, 2008).
11.Nasirean Ethics, 173.
12.Reuben Levy (tr.), A Mirror of Princes: The Qabus Nama by Kai Ka’us Ibn Iskandar (New York: E. Dutton and Co., 1951), 119–25.
13.The literature on women’s literacy in the Islamic societies is extensive. The following books are good examples: Hambly (ed.), Women in the Medieval Islamic World, cited in chapter 2; D. Fairchild Ruggels (ed.), Women, Patronage, and Self-Representation in Islamic Societies (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000); and more recently, collected essays on women’s education in the Muslim world, especially Nadia Maria el-Cheikh, “Observations on Women’s Education in Medieval Islamic Societies,” in Francois Georgeon and Klaus Krreiser (eds.), Enfance Et Jeunesse Dans le Monde Musulman: Childhood and Youth in the Muslim World (Paris: Maisonneuve and Larose, 2007): 57–72.
14.Nasirean Ethics, 169–70.
15.K. M. Asharf, Life and Conditions of the People of Hindustan (New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal Pvt. Ltd., 1988, 3rd ed.), 269.
16.A’in-i Akbari, 1:287.
17.Maathir-ul-Umara, 2(1):497.
SIX: THE MIRROR OF HAPPINESS
1.Gulbadan, Ahval, cited in chapter 2, folio 28b; Masse, cited in chapter 2, Persian Beliefs and Customs, 46–47.
2.For wedding clothes and jewelry, see Gulbadan, Ahval, folio 28b; A’in-i Akbari, cited in chapter 2, 1:96.
3.For wedding descriptions, Gulbadan, Ahval; Masse, Persian Beliefs and Customs, 42–56. For the above quotation, Masse, Persian Beliefs and Customs, 45. Descriptions of weddings among aristocratic household are often noted in tales that are grounded in the oral Indic renditions, such as Inshallah Khan’s Hindi-Urdu story of 1801, Rani Ketki ki Kahani; Ruby Lal, Coming of Age in Nineteenth Century India: The Girl-Child and the Art of Playfulness (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), ch. 2.
4.Although Mu’tamad Khan, the compiler of Maathir-Ul-Umara, and Hadi note that Mihr and Quli’s wedding took place immediately after the victory over Sind in 1593, the location of the wedding is not discussed. Since Ghiyas Beg became the diwan of Kabul in 1595, it is likely that the wedding did not take place there.
5.For details of various kinds of Muslim marriage legal arrangements and practices, John L. Esposito, Women in Muslim Family Law (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1982), 24–26.
6.Beni Prasad, cited in chapter 2, History of Jahangir, 160.
7.For Abdur Rahim Khan-i Khanan and the capture of Sind, see Maathir-ul-Umara, cited in chapter 2, 1:50–53, 62.
8.For a sketch of Ali Quli, and Abdur Rahim’s help to him, Maathir-ul-Umara, 2(2): 837–39.
9.Among others, Dhakhiratul Khawanin, cited in chapter 2, (2):83–85; Maathir-ul-Umara 2(2):837–38. References to Quli from 1605 until his death are available in Jahangir’s memoir, the Tuzuk-i Jahangiri and several other Jahangiri sources cited in chapter 1.
10.Masse, Persian Beliefs and Customs, 46.
11.Ibid., 51.
12.L. Tessitori, “A Progress Report on the Work Done During the Year 1917 in Connection with the Bardic and Historical Survey of Rajputana,” Journal and Proceedings of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, New Series, 15 (1919), 58.
13.Khafi Khan, Muntakhab-ul-Lubab, cited in chapter 2, 1:265–67.
14.Dow, The History of Hindostan, cited in chapter 2, 3:20–22.
15.Azad, Darbar-i Akbari, cited in chapter 1, 187–88.
16.Syed Muhammad Latif, History of the Panjab: From the Remotest Antiquity to the Present Time (1889; New Delhi: Eurasia Publishing House, reprint 1964), 154–56. Several editions of this book are available in print and online. The author’s first name is variously spelled: Syad, Syed, Saiyid.
17.For charting the travel route from Agra to Bengal, I use the writings of Sebastien Manrique; C. Eckford Luard (tr.) and Father H. Hosten (assisted), Travels of Fray Sebastien Manrique, 1629–1643, 2 vols. (Oxford: The Hakluyt Society, 1927), 125–243. For the quotation, 135. And of Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, William Crooke (ed.), Travels in India by Jean-Baptiste Tavernier (London: Oxford University Pres
s, 1925; 2nd ed.), especially 92–115; Mirza Nathan, a Mughal general who took a leading role in campaigns in Bengal and Assam—and collaborated with Emperor Jahangir’s son Shah Jahan when he was based in Bengal as an insurgent prince; M. I. Borah (trans.), Baharistan-i-Ghayabi: A History of Mughal Wars in Assam, Cooch Behar, Bengal, Bihar and Orissa During the Reigns of Jahangir and Shah Jahan by Mirza Nathan, 2 vols. (Guwahati: Pratilipi Printers, reprint 1992), (2):711.
18.John R. McLane, Land and Local Kinship in Eighteenth-Century Bengal (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 127.
19.Ibid., 129; Tapan Raychaudhuri, Bengal Under Akbar and Jahangir: An Introductory Study in Social History (Delhi: Munshiram Manohar Lal, 1969, rpt.), 176.
20.Raychaudhuri, Bengal Under Akbar and Jahangir, 226.
21.For information on Mughal Bengal, I rely on the definitive work by Raychaudhuri, Bengal Under Akbar and Jahangir. For a description of Mughal Burdwan, McLane, Land and Local Kinship, chapter 6. For the quotation, Raychaudhuri, Bengal Under Akbar and Jahangir, 85. Mirza Nathan boasted of his ruthless exploits. During a campaign in southeast of Burdwan, his brother captured 4,000 women, old and young, and stripped them of their clothes. At the same time, Nathan had sent 42,000 rupees to the court in anticipation of a promotion.
22.Raychaudhuri, Bengal Under Akbar and Jahangir, 193.
23.Ibid., 169, 171–73, 175.
24.Ibid., 148.
25.An eyewitness of a dramatic moment of Mihr’s last years as Empress Nur Jahan notes her daughter’s name as Bahu Begum. This may well have been an honorific, “the honorable bride,” given to her in the aftermath of her marriage to a Mughal prince. Mulla Kami Shirazi, Waqa-iuz-Zaman, ed. W. H. Siddiqi. (Rampur: Rampur Raza Library, 2003), 12, 196. I have also consulted the Aligarh copy, Fathnama-i Nur Jahan Begum, Center for Advanced Study Library, Aligarh Muslim University, Rotograph 10. References to the wedding of Ladli and Shahryar are to be found in Jahangir’s memoir. Ladli’s absence in the historical record is immense. No details, no sense of her person, only stray references. This is glaring namelessness compared to other women of the time, who somehow crawl into the records. Even when Ladli appears in the historical record, she is noted as her mother’s daughter.