by Raza Rumi
Jahanara remained loyal to her father and remained imprisoned with him until he died in 1666. She died sixteen years later and bequeathed all her property to Khwaja Moinuddin’s dargah, but, using the pretext of Islamic law7, Aurangzeb permitted only one-third to be gifted for this purpose.
Each time I was at Hazrat Nizamuddin’s dargah, I stop at Jahanara’s small, serene tomb-chamber with delicately carved latticework on white marble that has become pale and brownish with time but marks her beauty and soulfulness. The tomb has no ceiling and fuses with the open skies in deference to her wishes. The inscription says it all:
Let naught but green grasses cover my grave,
For mortals poor, it’s a grave-cover brave.
Hindi cinema dwelt on Jahanara’s unfulfilled love for her childhood companion, Mirza Yusuf Changezi, in Vinod Kumar’s 1964 hit film, Jahan Ara. This was a doomed romance as the dying Mumtaz Mahal reportedly made Jahanara promise that she would never leave her father. A heartbroken Yusuf wandered the country sick with love as did Majnu of another Arabic tale. However, this may well have been fictionalized and not much can be said with certainty.
However, chroniclers have written extensively about the special bond between the Emperor and Jahanara which, if true, was out of bounds in the Mughal-Islamic milieu of the day despite the secularism and hedonism of the ruling dynasty. Several European chroniclers suggested that Shah Jahan had an incestuous relationship with his daughter Jahanara. Joannes de Laet, Peter Mundy and Jean Baptiste Tavernier hinted at such allegations. Francois Bernier, a French physician and traveller, wrote:
Begum Sahiba, the elder daughter of Shahjahan was very beautiful… Rumour has it that his attachment reached a point which is difficult to believe, the justification of which he rested on the decision of the mullahs, or doctors of their Law. According to them, it would have been unjust to deny the king the privilege of gathering fruit from the tree he himself had planted.
Tales of Shah Jahan’s promiscuity were also picked up by other travellers.8 However, historian K.S. Lal pointed out that his son, Aurangzeb, may have been involved in ‘magnifying a rumour into a full-fledged scandal,’ and that ‘Aurangzeb had disobeyed Shah Jahan… he had him incarcerated for years, but if he really helped give a twist to Shah Jahan’s paternal love for Jahanara by turning it into a scandal, it was the unkindest cut of all his unfilial acts.’ He remarked that under ‘these circumstances, it is not possible to say anything with finality.’
Nevertheless, this was a unique relationship as Jahanara spent the best years of her youth with her father, and also the miserable years at Agra fort under imperial custody. This was also the place where Dara’s head was sent to the royals as a present from Aurangzeb. Many of these anecdotes have been distorted over time through oral histories or the accounts of semi-reliable European travellers. As with so much else, it is difficult to determine their veracity.
But the Mughals were extraordinary in most respects—not only in their ‘outer’ life of buildings and symbols through which they aimed at immortality, but also in their unconventional personal lives.
As I wander through the old city, I look for any little sign of Jahanara’s tasteful contributions to Shahjahanabad. Little is left of her sarai or the gardens gifted to her by the Emperor or the haveli that she is reported to have commissioned. Even if they remain, time has changed their face making them unrecognizable.
Chandni Chowk is home to silversmiths, repair shops, clothiers, spicy street-food vendors and traditional sweet shops. We visit Dariba Kalan (silver market), Kinari Bazaar (wedding market) and Paranthewali Galli (lane of parathas).
Preservation of heritage is not much emphasized in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. Much of old Dhaka and Lahore also faces the same fate as Shahjahanabad. Erasure of memory seems necessary for the nation-state’s exclusivism.
Sadia escorts me through the colourful bazaars of Old Delhi. Yes, the jeweller’s lane that still survives close to Chandni Chowk bears faint stamps of Jahanara, though she would be quite cross to see the open drains and untamed sewage not to mention the milling crowds—not quite royal! But then Jahanara was also a Sufi, a peoples’ princess, so she may have actually enjoyed the throngs of people. The lanes are still enchanting. Some of the streets have old construction; little crumbling bricks and stonework at the edges about to enter the drains. We take a turn and enter a lane exclusively selling Old Delhi snacks—baqar khanis and knick-knacks made out of myriad dals (lentils). Long before the advent of branding and intellectual property, Baqar Khan of Delhi had named the small bread after himself. These small flat cakes were a preserved form of bread used with meals. Now this is a tea-time snack.
A long morning walk has left us exhausted, so we stop for chai. We sit at a dhaba facing the Jama Masjid—a poetic vision blurred by a plethora of electric poles and hanging wires that put the intricacies of this cultural relic to shame. I am filled with a disconcerting and nagging feeling, and want to vent. Sadia is attentive like most times and grants me the chance to speak in neurotic frenzy. I shout, ‘The tales of Mughal history are biased in favour of kings, courts and men and by narratives of power and war! What about the women?’
I want to draw her attention to the other ‘invisible’ princess of the Mughal era. Finding an audience, I begin with verses composed by Aurangzeb’s exceptionally gifted daughter Zebunissa:
No Muslim I,
But an idolater,
I bow before the image of my Love,
And worship Her.9
Princess Zebunissa, the eldest daughter of Emperor Aurangzeb, was close to her father. Her remarkable story has been overshadowed by the political turmoil that led to Aurangzeb’s capture of the Mughal throne and what ensued later. Zebunissa was a favourite of her father and received much exposure to the affairs of the court. Having received a sound education in the arts, languages, astronomy and sciences of the day, Zebunissa turned out to be a highly sensitive princess. She never married and kept herself occupied with her poetry and spiritual quest.
This is perhaps the greatest of ironies—Aurangzeb’s daughter was an antithesis of her father’s personality and politics. Zebunissa was a Sufi and a gifted poet. In 1724, after her death, her scattered writings were collected under the name, ‘Diwan-i-Makhfi’, a metaphor for her invisibility in her father’s court and, at the cosmic level, the invisibility of God. Given her father’s dislike of poetry she could only be makhfi or invisible. And, like all rebels, she was subversive as well. She attended and participated in the literary and cultural events of her age dressed in her veil and also had a string of lovers, admirers and protégés.
We have to leave so our conversation is unfinished. Later in the evening, we sit in Sadia’s Hazrat Nizamuddin apartment where her evening durbar has swelled with ‘young friends’, the literati of Delhi, the Urdu-walas and, of course, the visiting white people. So I continue with my stories; indeed, there cannot be a better audience. Luckily, there are others who add to what I know. Alas, in spite of all this, I have yet to find a single sign of Zebunissa in Delhi.
Zebunissa did not share her father’s orthodox views on religion and society. Steeped in mystic thought, her ghazals sang of love, freedom and the inner experience:
Though I am Laila of Persian romance,
my heart loves like ferocious Majnun.
I want to go to the desert
but modesty is chains on my feet.
A nightingale came to the flower garden
because she was my pupil.
I am an expert in things of love.
Even the moth is my disciple!
No moth am I that in impetuous fashion
Fly to the flame and perish. Rather say
I am a candle that with inward passion
Slowly and silently consumes away.10
Zebunissa held a separate court, and was a patron of the arts and letters as well as of many poets of the era. One of her longtime companions was the emigré Iranian poet Ashraf. It is said that t
here was more than friendship in this literary association and there were several rumours of other indiscreet liaisons as well. However, there is a paucity of direct evidence on this subject. Zebunissa is also said to have been excessively fond of one particular kaneez or servant girl. This intimacy was also the subject of gossip. Perhaps it was the same Mian Bai who was gifted the beautiful Chauburji garden in Lahore.
Somehow, Zebunissa managed to retain her individuality and Independence. She established many libraries and arranged for the translation of several classical Arabic and Sanskrit texts into Persian—a clear sign of the influence of her aunt, Jahanara and uncle, Dara Shikoh. Anecdotal accounts also tell us how Aurangzeb tried to undermine Zebunissa’s poetry and interest in astronomy.
Reading through Zebunissa’s poetry, one can understand why Aurangzeb had reservations about her verse. Her inclusive vision ran against the puritanical state and society that Aurangzeb cherished. Look at these lines from a poem in Diwan-i-Makhfi called ‘I Bow Before the Image of my Love’:
No Brahmin I,
My sacred thread
I cast away, for round my neck I wear
Her plaited hair instead
Like most Mughal nobility, Zebunissa loved Lahore. The famous Chauburji was an entrance to a vast garden (that no longer exists). The Chauburji building had the Arabic ayatul-kursi (an important Quranic verse, literally the verse of the [Divine] Chair) inscribed on the main gate and the date of its completion was recorded as 1646. S.M. Latif, the famous historian of Lahore, translated another Persian verse carved at the entrance as follows:
This garden, in the pattern of Paradise, has been founded,
The garden has been bestowed on Mian Bai
By the beauty of Zebinda Begum, the lady of the age.
According to Latif, Mian Bai was Zebunissa’s favourite female attendant. The Shahjahannama also throws some light on the gift of the gardens to the lucky bai. Since Mian Bai had supervised the laying out of these gardens, the local people called it Mian Bai’s gardens. One view is that Zebunissa is buried in Nawankot in Lahore.
Latif also records how Zebunissa used to sit in the marble pavilion of the Lahori Shalimar Gardens and enjoy the soothing rhythm of the waterfall. It was also a place that provided her with inspiration for her poetry. Talking to the waterfall of the Shalimar Gardens, she composed this lyrical quatrain with passion and longing:
O waterfall! For whose sake art thou weeping?
In whose sorrowful recollection hast thou wrinkled thy brows?
What pain was it that impelled thee, like me the whole night,
To strike thy head against stone, and to shed tears?11
The Chinna Katha (discourses of Sathya Sai Baba) cites a telling incident that reveals Zebunissa’s personality. Aurangzeb had gifted her a beautiful mirror. One day while Zebunissa was combing her hair, the mirror slipped from the hands of the maid who was holding it. Seeing the mirror break into pieces, the mortified maid offered herself to be punished. However, Zebunissa remained calm and said how happy she was to see the ‘instrument of flattery’ broken. She took it as a lesson in detachment.12
Only a fraction of Zebunissa’s poetry has been translated into English and Urdu. It is a shame that we have rendered her invisible from mainstream accounts of the history and the arts of the Mughal era.13
Eventually, it was not her eclectic pursuits but the rebellion of her brother, Akbar, who proclaimed himself emperor in 1681, that hastened the undoing of Zebunissa. While the rebellion was short and unsuccessful, Zebunissa’s exchange of letters with her exiled brother caused her to be imprisoned in the Gwalior fortress until her death in 1702. There are many other possible reasons, mainly extrapolated from her poetry. A recent book, Captive Princess: Zebunissa, Daughter of Emperor Aurangzeb, by Annie Krieger Krynicki and translated by Enjum Hamid, attempts to examine the causes of her imprisonment and her worldview, as well as to reconstruct her life. Such works have highlighted her political differences with her father and shows how alien Aurangzeb’s style of governance was to her soul.
Eminent educationist and historian, Sir Jadu Nath Sarkar, writes that Zebunissa died in Delhi and was buried in the garden of the Thirty Thousand Trees outside Kabuli Gate. It is believed that when the railway line was laid out in Delhi, her tomb was demolished and the coffin and inscribed tombstone were shifted to Akbar’s mausoleum at Sikandra in Agra.
A poet versified her chronogram in the following words:
A fountain of learning, virtue, beauty and elegance
She was hidden as Joseph in the well
I asked reason the year of her death,
The invisible voice exclaimed: ‘the moon became concealed’.14
Mir’s pensive verses on Delhi contain descriptions about the ups and downs of the Shahjahanabad that was. When he wrote these lines, the Mughal Empire was nothing but a trapped figment of lost grandeur; centripetal forces on the rise were giving way to another relentless spate of foreign invasions. During his exile from Delhi, Mir recited these verses in Lucknow describing the splendours of Delhi that had been ravaged by political events:
Why do you mock at me and ask yourselves
Where in the world I come from, easterners?
There was a city famed throughout the world,
Where dwelled the chosen spirits of the age:
Delhi its name fairest among the fair
Fate looted it and laid it desolate
And to that ravaged city I belong.
In the eighteenth century, Delhi stood out as the finest of cities between Constantinople and Canton. Its mosques, and its literary and artistic fame were widely known and acknowledged.15 However, this was to change because of the decline that set in after Aurangzeb, the rise of the East India Company in Bengal and other provinces of northern India. Until 1739, when Nadir Shah ravaged the beauty of Delhi, this city was referred to as the ‘Jewel of the East’. Little wonder that, a century later, the city was the jewel of the British Crown.
This was an unsparingly insecure age. Nadir Shah’s looting incursions were met with little or no resistance. He plundered Delhi and accumulated the treasures of eight generations of Mughal Emperors with relative ease.16 The decline had actually set in during Jahangir’s reign when the excesses and opulence of the state combined with overspending was gradually turning the core rotten. The decline of Delhi became a cultural metaphor and affected the poetry of Mir Taqi Mir and Mirza Mohammed Rafi Sauda (1781)—two great masters of Urdu poetry.
The Persian poetic form, also adapted by Urdu, the ‘Shahrashob’ (cities under distress) was a type of satire that depicted a dark vision of a crumbling urban society, the tumult of daily commerce and social hierarchies that had gone topsy turvy.17 Nadir Shah’s invasion of Delhi and the twilight of the Mughal Empire were the political impetus for a depressing worldview reflecting itself in nostalgic verse. Such poetry satirizes brilliant professionals who are now sad caricatures hankering for a little money, willing to undermine their skills and self-respect. The Urdu ‘Shahr-ashob’ satires comment on political events without naming the rulers unlike its Persian counterparts that addressed specific rulers. Sauda mourns the loveless state of Delhi:
Delhi, did you deserve all this?
Perhaps at one time, this city was the heart of a lover,
It was wiped out as if it had been an ephemeral drawing.
Thus the poetry of Mir, Sauda and others18 talks of the economic downturn, pressured societal networks and, most importantly, the dwindling poetics and language betraying a damaged link with the past.
Mir is to Urdu what Shakespeare is to English. A few generations before Ghalib, Mir traversed between the two centres of Urdu poetry, Delhi and Lucknow, but he is identified with Delhi and its crumbling soul during the late eighteenth century. The corpus of his verse, diverse and laden with themes of love, loss and spirituality also provides a poetic commentary on the times:
Don’t think me a mere poet—no, my verse
Is mad
e of pain and grief more than you know19
Three decades of living in Delhi—from 1740-1760 and later, between 1772-1782—made Mir a poet of the age. The interlude was spent in Lucknow. His verses speak of Delhi’s decline. The city’s lost glory turned into creative imagination upon which an immortal reservoir of verse was built. So, in the tradition of the Urdu ‘Shahr-ashob’, he remarks:
This age is not like that which went before it
The times have changed, the earth and skies have changed.
After Shah Jahan, the monarchy lost its rapport with its subjects. Internal conspiracies within the palace led to infighting and the breakdown of governance. Increased taxation imposed on the peasantry after Akbar, increased further by Shah Jahan to finance cities and monuments, left the subjects reeling under an extractive mode of statehood. Aurangzeb broke—at least in the public perception—the compact between a plural state and its subjects. His weak successors could not hold the centre and their extravagance meant that regional defiance of central rule was now a real possibility.
The emergence of small autonomous kingdoms, a replay of Indian history since ancient times, meant that ‘Imperius Mughalus’ became more of a symbolic signature of Mughal rule rather than actual governance. The absence of a clear law of succession meant that there was a free-for-all competition among crafty nobles. Civil wars were common. Plebeian revolts, lawlessness and land-based struggles also weakened the Mughal Empire.20