Empress
Page 27
26.Raychaudhuri, Bengal Under Akbar and Jahangir, 173, 213, 198. I construct the landscape of Ladli’s childhood on the basis of the information on 206–20.
27.M. N. Pearson, “Recreation in Mughal India,” The British Journal of Sports History 1, no. 3 (1984): 335–50.
SEVEN: GRAVE MATTERS
I use the following documents to chart Khusraw’s rebellion: Hindi text and translation: Mukund Lath, The Ardhkathank, cited in chapter 3; the Akbar Nama, cited in chapter 2; the Tuzuk-i Jahangiri, cited in chapter 1; the Dhakhiratul Khawanin and the Maathir-ul-Umara, cited in chapter 2; Muntakhab-ul Lubab, cited in chapter 2; Ni’matullah Khan Harvi, Tarikh-i-Khan Jahani wa Makhzan-i Afghani, ed. S. M. Imam-ud-Din, 2 vols. (Dhaka: Asiatic Society of Pakistan, 1960); and Hyder Malik Chadurah, Tarikh-i Haidar Malik, Razia Banu (ed.), History of Kashmir (Delhi: Bhavna Prakashan, 1991)
1.Munis D. Faruqui, The Princes of the Mughal Empire, 1504–1719 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 31.
2.Tuzuk, (1):113–14.
3.When the news of this event reached Akbar, he “uttered a cry and became insensible. After a long time, he recovered. For several days in succession he had moist eyes and a sorrowful countenance because of the sacrifice of that excellent companion, that prince of loyalty, that interlocutor or lofty intellect, that friend of the private meeting and that faithful confidant and counseller.” Akbar Nama, 3:1219.
4.Tuzuk, 1:114
5.Faruqui, Princes, 161.
6.Akbar Nama, 3:1217.
7.Ibid.
8.Faruqui, Princes, 33.
9.Ardhkathank, 165.
10.Ibid.
11.Michael H. Fisher, A Short History of the Mughal Empire (London: I. B. Tauris, 2016), 149.
12.Tuzuk, 1:114.
13.Ibid., 113.
14.Fisher, Mughal Empire, 150.
15.Akbar Nama, 1:129.
16.Faruqui, Princes, 223. W. H. Moreland and Peter Geyl (eds.), Jahangir’s India: The Remonstrantie of Francisco Pelsaert (Cambridge: W. Heffer and Sons Ltd., 1925), 36.
17.Tuzuk, 1:53; Thackston, Jahangirnama, cited in chapter 1, 49; Harvi, Tarikh-i Khan Jahani, 674.
18.Richards, Mughal Empire, cited in chapter 4, 94.
19.Tuzuk, 1:51.
20.Faruqui, Princes, 224.
21.Tuzuk, 1:54, 55–56, 122.
22.Ibid., 57.
23.Jahangir nowhere says that Khusraw was blinded, but his memoir from a few years after these events indicates that something was done to Khusraw’s eyes. According to a later entry in the Jahangirnama, an impostor created a lot of disturbance in Patna, claiming that he was Khusraw. In proof of his identity, he showed marks around his eyes, which he said had been caused by the application of a hot bowl to them. It is clear that Khusraw’s eyes were tampered with in some way, and that he was partially blinded.
24.Tuzuk, 1:65.
25.Ibid., 114.
26.Tarikh-i Haidar Malik, 96.
27.Tuzuk, 1:114–15.
28.Maulawi Abdul-Wali, “The Antiquities of Burdwan,” Journal and Proceedings of the Asiatic Society of Bengal 13 (1917), 185.
29.Latif, History of the Panjab, cited in chapter 6, 154–56.
30.At the commencement of Jahangir’s reign, Yusuf Khan Kashmiri, in charge of the rural areas of Bukyanah and Duabah in Kashmir, was invited to join the new emperor’s services. Malik was Yusuf’s trusted faujdar. When Sher Afgan rebelled, Yusuf Khan was assigned to the province of Bengal. Malik accompanied him, and along with Yusuf was in the retinue of the murdered governor of Bengal in 1608.
31.Tarikh-i Haidar Malik, 95–96.
EIGHT: A KEY FOR CLOSED DOORS
1.Pelsaert, Jahangir’s India, cited in chapter 7, 2. To understand the philosophy and planning behind the architectural spaces in Agra, I have drawn a great deal from the writing of Ebba Koch, especially her Mughal Art and Imperial Ideology: Collected Essays (New Delhi: OUP, 2001); The Complete Taj Mahal and the Riverfront Gardens of Agra (New Delhi: Bookwise India Pvt. Ltd., 2006); Milo Cleveland Beach and Ebba Koch (new translation by Wheeler Thackston), King of the World: The Padshahnama, An Imperial Mughal Manuscript from the Royal Library, Windsor Castle (London: Azimuth Editions Ltd., 1997), among other writings listed in chapter 3.
2.On Aqa Aqayan, cf. chapter 10, note 16; and Tuzuk, cited in chapter 1, 2:110.
3.Tuzuk, 1:325–26; Tuzuk, 2:86, 159–60; Ain-i Akbari, cited in chapter 2, 1:323, 533n, 686.
4.For an excellent discussion of princely households, see Faruqui, Princes, cited in chapter 7, ch. 3.
5.The Tuzuk, the Dhakhiratul Khawanin, and the Iqbalnama-i Jahangiri, for example, suggest it was Ruqayya, whereas the Maathir-Ul-Umara suggests it was Salimeh Sultan Begum.
6.For a brief biography of Salimeh, see Annette S. Beveridge, The History of Humayun, Humayun-Nama (New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal Publishers Pvt. Ltd., 2001 rpt. Originally published in 1902), 276–80.
7.Foster, Embassy of Sir Thomas Roe, cited in chapter 1, 270.
8.Edward Terry, A Voyage to East India (London: J. Wilkie, rpt. from 1655 edition), 406.
9.Clements R. Markham (ed.), The Hawkins Voyages During the Reigns of Henry VIII, Queen Elizabeth, and James I (New York: Burt Franklin Publisher, n.d.; reprint from Hakluyt Society Series), 421.
10.R. Nath, Private Life of the Mughals 1526–1803 A. D. (Rupa Publications, India, 2004), 15, 17. A fiction writer gives nineteen as the number of the emperor’s women: Mihr becomes his twentieth wife; Indu Sundaresan, The Twentieth Wife: A Novel (Penguin Books, India, 2002).
11.From his account, and a variety of other sources, we may glean the order of some of his marriages. Tuzuk, 1:18–20; Ain-i Akbari 1:323, 533n, 686; Akbar Nama, cited in chapter 2, 3:561; Markham, The Hawkins Voyages, 399–440 (names spread across discussion of events). Aside from the wives discussed above, here are the details of other wives of Jahangir: In 1592, Jahangir had also married the daughter of Ali Rai, ruler of Tibet. Jahangir notes his marriages to several other women. Malika Jahan, the daughter of Raja Kalyan of Jaisalmer, a Rajput chieftain whose family had maintained a strong alliance with the Mughals, was wedded to him while he was still a prince (before 1605). Nur un-Nisa Begam, sister of Mirza Muzaffar Husain (married to Jahangir’s sister) also married the emperor, an exchange of sisters on both sides. Saliha Banu, another wife, the sister of a man named Abdur Rahim (titled Tarbiyat Khan), was said to be from a house that had served the Mughal court for generations. Jahangir’s other wives were: the daughter of Mubarak Chak of Kashmir; the daughter of Husain Chak of Kashmir; the daughter of Raja Ali Khan, king of Khandesh; the daughter of Khwaja-i Jahan of Kabul; the daughter of Mirza Sanjar and granddaughter of Khizr Khan Hazara (Khizr Khan was married to princess memoirist Gulbadan, Jahangir’s great-aunt, so this wife would be Jahangir’s second cousin); the daughter of Rai Singh of Bikaner; and the daughter of Said Khan Ghakkar. A possible daughter of this union, ‘Iffat Banu, is mentioned.
12.Tuzuk, 1:56. Man Bai and Raja Man Singh (sister and brother) were (Tuzuk, 1:15–16) children of Raja Bhagwan Das (their grandfather was Raja Bihari Mal). Man Bai, Jahangir’s first wife, was also his first cousin. Jahangir was a grandson of Raja Bihari Mal through his mother Maryam-uz-zamani, sister of Raja Bhagwan Das.
13.Tuzuk, 1:19.
14.Ain-i Akbari, 1:323.
15.Tuzuk, 1:18–20.
16.Ibid., 144, 145, 160; Ain-i Akbari, 1:323.
17.Jahangir notes Ladli’s betrothal to Shahryar and mentions that the wedding took place from her grandfather Ghiyas Beg’s house. I discuss Ladli’s wedding later in the book.
18.Though five hundred years divide Mihr’s sensibility from ours, a painting comes in handy in conveying the spirit of this time. Chiterin (Lady artist and her model), a painting included in this book’s photo gallery and housed in Bharat Kala Bhavan of the Banaras Hindu University, is drawn in subtle tones. The foreground of the painting has four women and a small girl seated on the floor of a terrace in front of a palace-apartment. A handsome lady ar
tist is seated on the left with her sketchboard resting on her right knee, painting in the tradition of Mughal artists. Behind the artist sits an attendant: the artist’s elegant clothes and confident demeanor show the difference from her escort. In front of the artist is a young woman (seated in the center). Her head, the lower half of her face, and the rest of her body is covered in an orhani (a long cloak or veil). Behind her is a small girl with a lotus blossom in her right hand, and behind the girl, an older woman, seated, watching the painting session. On the extreme right of the terrace, a maid stands at a half-open door, looking out on the ongoing scene. For a reproduction and discussion of the painting, Vijay Krishna, “Chiterin (Lady-Artist and Her Model): Identified as an Illustration of the Nurjahan Episode,” in Journal of the Indian Society of Oriental Art, New Series, 10, (1978–79): 60–63.
19.Tuzuk, 1:118, 119, 120.
20.Ibid., 132.
21.Ibid., 197, 199, 200. For the details of the presents sent by Shah Abbas, Thackston, Jahangirnama, cited in chapter 1, 121–22, note 2.
22.For an extended discussion of the year 1611, Tuzuk, 1:191 onward.
23.Jahangirnama, B. M. Ms. Or. 3276, folio 314.
24.Hadi, Tatimma-i Vaqi’at-i Jahangiri, cited in chapter 1, 398.
NINE: ASCENT
1.For a chart that shows the imperial camp and its layout, see, Ain-i Akbari, cited in chapter 2, 1:48, on the plate facing this page. And for a discussion of Mughal tent cities, Stephen Blake, Shahjahanabad: The Sovereign City in Mughal India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), especially, 83–99. For a discussion of the architecture and meanings attached to tents in Central Asia, Afghanistan, and Iran, past and present, Peter Alford Andrews, Nomad Tent Types in the Middle East (Wiesbaden, 1997), 13.
2.Jahangir Receives Khurram on His Return from the Mewar Campaign, by painter Balchand. The Windsor Castle Padshahnama, folio 43b, ca. 1635.
3.Tuzuk, cited in chapter 1, 1:277, 278.
4.Dhakhiratul Khawanin, cited in chapter 2, 15; See also, Iqbalnama-i Jahangiri, cited in chapter 2, 405.
5.Dhakhiratul Khawanin, 15.
6.Tuzuk, 1:266–67.
7.Irfan Habib, “The Family of Nur Jahan During Jahangir’s Reign,” in Medieval India: A Miscellany (Delhi: I.M.H. Press for Aligarh Muslim University, 1969), 78.
8.For the evolution in the ranks of the nobility of Nur Jahan’s family, Ali, The Apparatus of Empire, cited in chapter 3, and Habib, “The Family of Nur Jahan,” 78, fn. 22 and 79.
9.Ain-i Akbari, 1:276–77 and note 1 and 2; Tuzuk, 1:239.
10.Tuzuk, 2:214–15.
11.She was born in 1539. There is some uncertainty about the month of her death. According to the authors of a couple of other chronicles, she died in January 1613. Tuzuk, 1:232, fn. 2, for a discussion of the death of Salimeh. See also, Annette Beveridge, The History of Humayun, cited in chapter 8, 276–80.
12.Jahangir wrote about Asmat’s invention of the rose perfume in 1614. Clearly, Asmat had found the rose scent when Salimeh was alive. Tuzuk, 1:270–71.
13.Ibid.
14.
Nur Jahan’s poems are reproduced in Khafi Khan’s Muntakhab-ul-Lubab, cited in chapter 2, 1:270–71. A Mughal officer in Bengal, Shir Khan Lodi completed a short tezkerah or a memorial of poets compiled in the form of a biographical anthology in which he listed Nur Jahan, who used the popular pseudonym Makhfi (The Hidden One). The first monumental tezkerah, Valeh Dhagestani’s Riaz al-sho’ara, compiled around 1747 with 2,500 entries, included Nur Jahan’s name. For Valeh, a successful female poet was one who wrote like a man. In his compilation, Nur’s poetry was subsumed within the frame of Jahangir’s entry. Azar Begeli’s Atashkhand, completed in 1760–61 in Iran included Nur Jahan. For a history of these compilations, see, Sunil Sharma, “From A’esha to Nur Jahan: The Shaping of a Classical Persian Poetic Canon of Women,” Journal of Persianate Studies 2 (2009): 148–64.
15.Beveridge, Humayun, 130–31; Gulbadan, Ahval, cited in chapter 2, folio 30a–30b.
16.Khafi Khan, Muntakhab-ul-Lubab, 1:289–90.
17.Noted in Shujauddin and Shujauddin, The Life and Times of Noor Jahan, cited in chapter 1, 95.
18.Thackston, Jahangirnama, cited in chapter 1, xxiii.
19.Tuzuk, 1:309; for the above details, Tuzuk, 1:307–9, and fn. 3.
20.Beveridge, Humayun, 130–31; Gulbadan, Ahval, folio 30a–30b.
21.Tuzuk, 1:48, 49.
22.Tuzuk, 2:214.
23.Manucci, Storia Do Mogor, cited in chapter 2, 1:158.
24.Ibid., 2:35.
25.Brij Narain and Sri Ram Sharma (trans. and ed.), A Contemporary Dutch Chronicle of Mughal India (Calcutta: Sisil Gupta Ltd., 1957), 5, 91–92.
26.Corinne Lefevre, “Recovering a Missing Voice from Mughal India: The Imperial Discourse of Jahangir (r. 1605–1627),” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 50, no. 4 (2007), 469.
27.Mohan Lal Dalichand Desai, Bhanucandra Carita: By His Pupil Gani Siddhichadra Upadhyaya (Ahmedabad-Calcutta: The Sanchalaka-Singhi Jaina Granthamala, 1941), 56. I am grateful to Audrey Truschke for bringing this text to my attention and for sending me the Sanskrit text as well as her writings on Siddhichandra. Siddhichandra, a Jain monk, and his guru Bhanuchandra spent twenty-three years at the courts of Akbar and Jahangir. Siddhichandra’s account Bhanuchandra Carita is a biography of his guru, but toward the end he also writes a fair bit about himself. The episode seems to have taken place, according to Desai, 52, between 1611 and 1616. According to Truschke, the exchange took place just before 1616; Truschke, Culture of Encounters: Sanskrit at the Mughal Court (New Delhi: Penguin, 2016).
28.Nur ad-Din Muhammad Jahangir, Tuzuk-i Jahangiri (Tehran: Buni adi Farhangi Iran, 1980); citation in Lisa Balabanlilar, Imperial Identity in the Mughal Empire: Memory and Dynastic Politics in Early Modern South and Central Asia (New York: I. B. Tauris, 2012), 56.
29.Gommans, Mughal Warfare, cited in chapter 1, 109.
30.Tuzuk, 1:239, 241.
31.Ibid., 318–19.
32.Akbar Nama, cited in chapter 2, 2:86; Maulawi, Akbarnamah, cited in chapter 2, 2:54–57. Nizam al-Din Ahmad records the same event, and uses the following expressions: “Khalifa-i Ilahi” for Akbar, “Pavilion of Chastity” for women, and so on. See B. De and Baini Prasad (trans.), The Tabaqat-i Akbari of Khwajah Nizammudin Ahmad, 3 vols. (1936; rpt Delhi, 1992), 2:222. For a detailed discussion of practices of naming among Mughals, Lal, Domesticity and Power, cited in chapter 3, ch. 8.
33.For a detailed discussion of the titles of the Mughal emperors, W. E. Begley and Z. A. Desai (ed. and comp.), The Shah Jahan Nama of ‘Inayat Khan (Delhi: OUP, 1990), 3–4.
34.Tuzuk, 1:319–20.
35.Foster, Embassy of Sir Thomas Roe, cited in chapter 1, 256.
36.Faruqui, Princes, cited in chapter 7, 35.
37.Tuzuk, 1:341–42.
38.Ibid., 355–56.
39.Alam, Languages of Political Islam, cited in chapter 3, 95; on Jadrup and other ascetics and Jahangir, apart from the Tuzuk-i Jahangiri, see also, Nazr Ashraf (ed.), Dabistan-i Mazahib (Calcutta, 1809); David Shea and Anthony Troyer (trans.), Oriental Literature or the Dabistan (New York: Tudor Publishing Co., 1937).
40.Balabanlilar, Imperial Identity, 84–85.
41.Gommans, Mughal Warfare, 110–11.
42.Tuzuk, 1:375 and n1.
TEN: WONDER OF THE AGE
1.Tuzuk, cited in chapter 1, 1:380.
2.Its size then was 443,028 bighas: 1 bigha was five-eighths of an acre, so in acres it was 276,892.5. The revenue that came from Toda in Akbar’s time was 5,859,006 dam: a dam was one-fortieth of a rupee, so the total revenue amount would be Rs. 146, 475. Ain-i Akbari, cited in chapter 2, 1:280. Computation of modern numbers based upon equivalents given by Thackston, Jahangirnama, cited in chapter 1, Appendix A, 473–74.
3.Tuzuk, 1:380.
4.S. A. I. Tirmizi, Edicts from the Mughal Harem (New Delhi: Idarah-I Adabiyat-I Delli, reprint 2009), xii.
5.Tuzuk, 1:383.
6.Ibid., 385–86.
7.Ibid., 388.
8.The final victory over the Deccan wouldn’t take place until later, during the reign of Shah Jahan.
9.Tuzuk, 1:394, 395.
10.Faruqui, Princes, cited in chapter 7, 34.
11.Most art historians agree on this one painting as portraying the “real” Nur Jahan, chiefly because the depiction directly illustrates an event recorded in the Jahangirnama. Copies of Jahangir and Prince Khurram Entertained by Nur Jahan is held at the following locations: the Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, 07.258; the Victoria & Albert Museum, London, I.M. 115–1921; and the Maharaja Sawai Man Singh II Museum, City Palace, Jaipur, A G 823. Among others, the following scholars have discussed this painting: Juan R. Cole, “The Imagined Embrace: Gender, Identity and Iranian Ethnicity in Jahangiri Paintings,” in Michel Mazzaoui (ed.), Safavid Iran and Her Neighbors (Salt Lake City: The University of Utah Press, 2003): 49–61; Ellison Banks Findly, “The Pleasure of Women: Nur Jahan and Mughal Painting,” Asian Art (Spring 1993): 67–86.
12.Tuzuk, 1:394, 395.
13.Ibid., 400.
14.Ibid., 399–401.
15.Ibid., 401; Tirmizi, Edicts from the Mughal Harem, xi.
16.Tuzuk, 2:110. In 1619, Jahangir noted Aqayan’s “hereditary attachment to this illustrious family,” and her placement by Akbar in Jahangir’s harem at the time of the latter’s marriage in 1585. “It is 33 years from that date that she has been in my service, and I esteem her greatly, for she has served me with sincerity.” However, as she grew older, Aqa Aqayan requested Jahangir to allow her to remain in Delhi. Her induction into Jahangir’s harem in 1585 and the note about her thirty-three years of service helps us to establish that she would have left the imperial service in 1618, perhaps just after the Mughal cavalcade returned from Malwa and Gujarat. Perhaps it was in 1618 then that Dai Dilaram was appointed as the harem-in-charge. Her appointment is noted in Mughal biographies and other chronicles.