The Emperor Jahangir Power and Kingship in Mughal India

248 Pages·01.881 MB·English

by  Lisa Balabanlilar

Introduction
Until very recently, the Timurid-Mughal emperors of India were routinely
dismissed by scholars as too peripheral to be representative of early modern
Islamic world ruling systems and imperial culture. In the last several years,
however, studies of the Mughals’ own prolific writings, and those of their
political and economic rivals, have affirmed that the Mughal dynasty was
firmly positioned in the early modern mainstream and served as a partner and
a model for rulers across the Islamic world. Rather than continue to treat the
Mughals as outliers, there is growing recognition that their understandings
of culture and kingship can offer dramatic testimony to not only regional but
global trends and adaptations.
Yet even as the dynasty finds its place in the historical narrative of Islamic and
South Asian kingship, the reign of the emperor Salim Muhammad Nuruddin
Jahangir (1569–1627; r. 1605–27), fourth of the six so-called ‘Great Mughals’,
continues to be disregarded, even disdained.1 There are many reasons for this,
among the most obvious being that Jahangir had the misfortune to reign between
two of the most successful scions of the dynasty. His father, the emperor Akbar,
had been able at a very young age to seize control of what was a tenuous and
fragile patrimony and expand it into one of the world’s largest and wealthiest
empires. Following Jahangir’s death, his son and successor, Shah Jahan, would
also overshadow his father’s memory, proving to be among the dynasty’s gifted
military leaders, his legacy assured by his architectural manifesto, the Taj Mahal.
It is true that Jahangir’s historical reputation as little more than a weak
placeholder cannot be blamed entirely on the conditions or timing of his
inheritance. In a dynasty known for its expansionist kings and empire builders,
notably Chingis Khan and Tamerlane, Babur and Akbar, Jahangir’s own military
adventures were few, resulting in no dramatic gain of territory. Furthermore,
as he readily admitted, Jahangir was known to be a heavy drinker and drug
user who publicly agonized over his own health and sobriety. His reputation
2 The Emperor Jahangir
was further marred by violent rebellion against his father. Even the ability and
influence of his powerful wife, Nur Jahan, would be used by historians and
chroniclers to diminish the prestige of her husband – her strength cited as
evidence of his ineffectual indolence. The emperor’s biographer, Beni Prasad,
represented the conventional understanding when he wrote that Jahangir had
‘suffered from weakness of will and resolution, from a lamentable propensity to
surrender himself to the mercies of superior talent’.2 Yet just as the previously
marginalized Mughal dynasty is becoming more generally recognized as a
powerful and influential model of court culture and kingship, scholars must
re-engage the question of Jahangir, whose reign demands a more thorough
intellectual inquiry.
There are many ways in which his tenure can be counted a success. In a rare
break from his father’s policies and approach, Jahangir retained a minimalist
military profile and demonstrated no ambition for extensive territorial
acquisition. All the same, not only was there no significant loss of imperial lands
during his reign but he managed to successfully conquer the territories of local
kingdoms whose submission had long stymied his father. In addition, Jahangir’s
adept handling of the imperial elites and his attentive diplomacy established
a period of political and cultural equilibrium. Apart from a brief failed
insurrection by a disgruntled courtier in 1626, the only real threats to his throne
or his empire would be the two princely revolts which bookended his reign.
Both were successfully put down. In the twenty-two years of relative peace and
stability represented by his rule, Jahangir’s greatest personal legacy was two-fold.
His lifelong and passionate patronage of the arts resulted in an innovative golden
age of Mughal painting, and his composition of a regnal memoir explored and
reinforced the sophisticated and globally influential complex of ideas and values,
social and political models that represented Mughal rule. Both of these creative
productions identify him as a powerful advocate for the cultural understandings
and values of his ancestors but also of his ruled territories in South Asia, all of
which he deliberately reinforced and passed on to the generations that followed.
Historical sources and the story of Jahangir
In the year of his accession to the throne of the Mughal Empire of India, Jahangir
began to record the events of his reign.3 For seventeen years, Jahangir wrote
in the form of a chronological diary, beginning each year with the Persian
festival of Nowruz. Although many contemporary scholars refer to the complete
Introduction 3
manuscript as the Tuzuk-i Jahangiri, The Regulations of Jahangir, the emperor
himself called the memoir Iqbalnama, The Auspicious Story, or simply, and
most often, Jahangirnama, The Story of Jahangir. His entries were not composed
daily, yet the events of his reign seem to have been recorded soon after they
occurred. While Jahangir included dense descriptions of the regulations and
routines of his royal court, the manuscript was far more personal than a simple
record. The Jahangirnama offers detailed and intimate ruminations on kingship
and justice, the emperor’s struggles with alcohol, his passion for the hunt and for
his family, his intellectual curiosity and the depth of his concern for establishing
the legitimacy of his rule. It is a comprehensive and at times stirring account of
the emperor’s life, but more importantly it supplies a rich context for his reign.
In 1622, five years before his death, he would turn over the task to his munshi
(secretary) Mu’tamid Khan, yet even then, although in failing health, Jahangir
continued personally editing the pages until work on the memoir completely
and suddenly stopped in 1624. Almost a century later, Muhammad Hadi, who
was probably a courtier of the emperor Muhammad Shah (1653–1707, a great-
grandson of Jahangir), claiming to have become ‘enamored by the science of
history and the craft of biography’ and basing his writings on other manuscripts
in the Mughal imperial library, wrote an additional few chapters, offering a brief
description of Jahangir’s youth and of the events leading up to his death.
Apart from Mu’tamid Khan and Muhammad Hadi’s attributed additions, and
a single entry in the emperor’s eleventh regnal year when his granddaughter’s
death left him so grief-stricken that he asked his father-in-law to briefly write for
him, Jahangir’s authorship of the work is not in doubt. Other writers of the period
acknowledged the presence of the emperor’s memoirs, and on a few occasions
Jahangir presented his work to his sons and noblemen, describing the memoir
as advice literature for those who would inherit his throne. In his thirteenth year
on the throne, he gave a bound copy, representing twelve years of rule, to his son
Khurram, the future Emperor Shah Jahan (1592–1666, r. 1628–59), writing on
the back of the manuscript that he hoped the contents would be acceptable to the
God and receive praise from its readers. He later sent copies to rival kings, which
he suggested could serve as manuals for ruling.
Historical writing had been a regular feature at the royal courts of Jahangir’s
ancestors in West and South Asia. The founder of their dynasty, Timur (Tamerlane),
had been deeply involved in the production of his royal court chronicles and
they would prove both popular and influential.4 Timur’s descendants continued
to produce court chronicles, treating their dynastic histories as a model for
rule and an assertion of their own inherited dynastic political charisma. Five
4 The Emperor Jahangir
generations later, Jahangir’s great-grandfather, Zahiruddin Muhammad Babur,
wrote what is often described as the first autobiography of the pre-modern
Islamic world, and certainly the most important and influential of the imperial
histories of the Timurid-Mughals.5 He named it the Vaqa’i-i Baburi (although
it is commonly referred to as the Baburnama). Likely influenced by his uncle,
with whom he spent some years, Babur’s maternal nephew, Mirza Muhammad
Haydar Dughlat (1499 or 1500–51), composed the Tarikh-i Rashidi of which one
half was a history of the Mongols and the other half a personal account.6 The
emperor Akbar so valued Babur’s Vaqa’i that he had it translated into Persian by
his polymath stepson and courtier Abdur Rahim, so that its audience could be
broadened. His court painters illustrated it on at least four separate occasions.
Akbar would later request memoirs from all those who had memories of his
father or grandfather. As his aunt, Babur’s daughter Gulbadan Begim explained,
‘An order was issued, “Write down whatever you know of the doings of Firdaus
makani and Jannat ashyani [Babur and Humayun].” In obedience to the royal
order, I set down whatever there is that I have heard and remember.’7 Also at
Akbar’s command, Humayun’s ewer-bearer, Mihtar Jauhar, who had spent
twenty years at the emperor’s side, including the period of his exile in Safavid
Iran, composed the Tazkirat al-vaqa’i, and Bayezid Bayat wrote the Tarikh-i
Humayun, covering the years 1542–91.8
Professional historians and courtiers also continued to chronicle the reigns
of the Mughal kings. Babur’s eldest son and successor, Humayun (1508–56/
r. 1530–40, 1555–56), retained the famed historian Ghiyasuddin Khwandamir
at his court, officially inviting him to compose a history of his rule, the
Humayunnama, although the result is more panegyric than memoir.9 In the
next generation, Akbar’s close friend and advisor Abu’l Fazl composed multiple
volumes on the life of the emperor, as well as a detailed compendium on the
ideological underpinnings of his empire, known as the Akbarnama and the
A’in-i Akbar respectively.10 In addition, Akbar commissioned dynastic histories
such as the Chingisnama (History of Chingis Khan), the Timurnama (History of
Timur) and the Tarikh-i Alfi (History of a Thousand Years), which asserted the
dynasty’s Mongol and Timurid ancestry, claiming to have ‘inaugurated a new
millennium’ with the foundation of the South Asian Timurid (Mughal) Empire.
Finally, for Jahangir’s own period, in addition to his own memoir, two important
accounts are the Iqbalnama, by the emperor’s secretary Mu’tamad Khan, and the
Maasir-i Jahangiri by Khwaja Kamgar Husaini.11
The Mughal dynastic memoirs were highly prized and influential, representing
the voice of the ancestral founding fathers. The expectation that autobiography
Introduction 5
brings the reader closer to truth has been shattered in the modern period but to
these early modern state-builders, having access to highly personal, even intimate,
texts that sprang directly from the foundational sources of dynastic power surely
added to the frisson of intergenerational connection. That the manuscripts were
read by every generation in the royal family is clear from the commentary and
autographs in the margins of those volumes housed in the imperial library. These
powerful and authoritative texts would form the base of a canonical dynastic
narrative with which the Mughals justified their ambition and success, carefully
positioning their ruling legitimacy in the political charisma of their Timurid
ancestry and the sovereignty of Islamic kingship. Within the royal family, and
in the close circle of the nobility, the unified and comprehensive story created
by their imperial predecessors affirmed across the generations the history, the
values and the meaning of the Mughal heritage.
The Vaqa’i and the Jahangirnama
Biographical writing in the medieval Perso-Islamic world has been described
as having a ‘timeless pattern’ with no real interest in chronology but instead
imagined and organized around events or moods, eliding individual
personalities and erasing the idiosyncratic in favour of identification with ideal
types.12 Meaning and importance were assigned to a life, a battle, a spiritual
revelation, a pilgrimage, a death, as it met and fulfilled or illustrated an expected
moral and symbolic outcome, within traditional conventions. That the ideal
was drawn with familiar codes and markers is of course still the norm on some
level – Foucault wrote that history bequeaths the range of options we draw upon
to conceive of ourselves. We can see these tropes as representing that range: a
particularly inelastic and narrow one, perhaps, by modern standards but which
offered shape and consistency to the world of the medieval observer for whom
it was intended.
The Timurid princely courts and their successors, on the other hand, are noted
for their demonstrated willingness to broaden this classical structure to include
expressions of individualism through evocations or depictions of idiosyncratic
personalities in the place of bare impersonal stereotypes.13 An example is that
of the evolution of the traditional tadhkira, the classical Persian professional
biographies of renowned poets and literati, which have been shown in the Timurid
period to have begun exploring contemporary lives, rather than historical types,
the authors even including themselves in their encyclopaedias and writing what
6 The Emperor Jahangir
are described as truly autobiographical sketches.14 In the same period, elements
of the individual and the naturalistic began to slip into the visual arts. Late
Timurid artists began signing their work, which illustrated increasingly secular
subject matter. Timurid portraiture had begun to demonstrate a new ‘tension
between individualizing and stereotyping conventions [which traditionally had
relied] on a canonical language of power, whose subtly differentiated visual
elements had to be decoded in order to interpret their iconography’.15 With so
much evidence of artists, literary figures, and politicians of the Timurid Mughal
world engaged in examining the individual self, scholars must reject the notion
that these many ‘distinctly personal voices’ were entirely atypical for their time.16
Babur’s memoir is tangible evidence of the Timurid intellectual exploration
of the individual. The Vaqa’i did not reject the traditional tropes and classical
models of medieval biography but made critical additions to them, as Babur
successfully located the exemplary and the heroic in his own contemporary
personality. Not every facet of Babur’s life and literary career are equally well-
known, but at least it is possible to see his literary life as both stereotypical and
idiosyncratic, and as both formulaic and inimitable.17 He was a typical royal
poet in many respects, in his regard for classic exemplars, his emulation of
traditional genres, and his desire for literary fame and cultural legitimacy. He
was also a unique royal poet in his relative freedom from the stylistic constraints
of court culture and his frank willingness to use traditional genres to express his
feelings. Babur’s use of his own name as the takhallus, for which poets generally
chose pen names, may be one measure of the degree to which he was prepared
openly to reveal his emotions in verse. Using his own name was an egoistic
act, reflective of the compelling, self-assured personality that he revealed in
the Baburnama. He favourably compared himself to the greatest Timurid ruler
of the day, Sultan Husain Baiqara of Herat, and felt confident enough of his
literary skills to claim superiority for his essay on prosody to that of the great
Ali Shir Nava’i, whose work on metrics Babur dismissed as ‘full of mistakes’.18
In the absence of literary models, why would he have come to write
a memoir? Babur may have been driven by the obstacles he faced in the
traditional succession practices of the Timurid dynasty, which allowed every
male member of the royal family to be considered a viable contender for rule.
While their shared Chinggisid-Timurid genealogical charisma supported the
case for a common dynastic legitimacy, it did nothing for the ambitions of
a specific individual. Written in the very moment of the dynasty’s transition
from Mawarannahr, the autobiographical Vaqa’i made a claim to leadership of
the Timurids that went far beyond the power of Babur’s royal bloodlines. The
Introduction 7
greater dynasty was vitally important to Babur – after all, his powerful lineage
was the foundation for his political claims – but in composing a personal
memoir he actively differentiated himself from those other ambitious princes
with whom he shared his elite lineage. Presenting himself as complex, creative
and idiosyncratic, Babur made an argument for power that was highly specific
and personal. Augmenting and elaborating traditional tropes and classical
models of medieval biography, Babur so distinguished his singular self that
even modern readers claim to come away from his memoir with a sense of
personal recognition.19
While it is true that he did not engage in a great deal of self-examination,
Babur’s memoir is at times startlingly frank, as he composed poetry in a
youthful flirtation with a boy in the bazaar, described his own tears at the loss
of an important battle and narrated with barely suppressed hilarity a drunken
return to his tent after a particularly wild party. Babur claimed to be writing
advice literature, using his own personal history as a model for their sons and
rival princes, but his writings – even in describing his weaknesses, failures and
misjudgements – built a case for his own personal leadership over the Timurid
community. Struggling to seize control in an anarchic and uncertain landscape,
Babur emerges in his own pages as drunken, sarcastic, embarrassed, sometimes
cruel, but always redeemed, at least in his own telling, by his personal attributes:
political charisma, ambition, bravery, immense reserves of loyalty, a degree of
poetic talent and a very human pathos.
In the spirit of his writings, this poet-warrior and founder of empire would
come to be celebrated precisely for his personal particularities rather than any
adherence to conventional standards of heroic leadership. Among his followers
and their descendants Babur’s Vaqa’i not only heightened recognition of the
individual personality but also reinforced the value of self-representation. While
they would never entirely forego the traditional tropes and models of the greater
Islamic world, the Mughals would continue to construct their presentations of
kingship from across the variety of sources available to them, including pre-
Islamic Persian, Turco-Mongol and increasingly South Asian.
Seventy-five years after Babur’s death, the newly and as yet insecurely
enthroned Jahangir seized on the device of personal memoir as a part of his
larger effort to re-invent himself and justify his ascension. Rejecting his father’s
model of encouraging a devotee to create the record of his reign, Jahangir chose
to follow the precedent of the Mughal founding father, Babur. Notably he even
emulated the tone of Babur’s Vaqa’i, which is not only written in clear and
unadorned language but is famously direct and personal, even intimate.
8 The Emperor Jahangir
In both cases, the occasional revelations of startlingly personal detail were
very likely to have been made deliberately. From their inception, the Vaqa’i and
the Jahangirnama were created as public documents. Both authors remained
fully aware of their readers and their personal exposure was self-serving,
deliberate and tightly managed. In Babur’s case, this is indicated by his use of
Chaghatay Turkish rather than court Persian, allowing him to speak directly to
a Central Asian constituency made up of the Timurid and Chaghatayyid elite
who represented the followers and supporters of Babur’s imperial ambition.20
That a copy of Babur’s memoirs was sent back to his base in Kabul as early
as 1529, where nearly one hundred years later Jahangir would read it in the
original Turkish, confirms that Babur had a very particular audience in mind
as he wrote.21
Jahangir would be no less deliberate, publicly sharing early versions of his
own memoir. In 1618, Jahangir had copies of his Nama bound, intending to
distribute it to his intimate companions and even send to foreign countries
as a manual for rule. The first bound copy was given to his third son and
successor, Khurram, in late August. By mid-September, two more copies had
been produced, which Jahangir gifted to his father-in-law I’timaduddawla and
brother-in-law Asaf Khan. A fourth copy was sent to his second son, Parvez,
from the emperor’s temporary camp at Fatehpur Sikri, in January. While these
earliest manuscripts chronicled Jahangir’s first twelve years as emperor, the
writing continued until 1624.
He was deliberate in pairing his work with that of Babur, while expressing
self-conscious pride in his innovative illustration of the memoir. As a devoted
patron of the arts, Jahangir had as early as 1612, if not before, begun ordering
paintings to accompany his text. Early in 1618, before the first copy was bound,
his favourite painter, Abu’l Hasan, who he had honoured with the title of Nadir
al-Zaman, the Pinnacle of the Age, had painted a picture of Jahangir’s accession
to serve as the frontispiece of the Jahangirnama. Although Jahangir had
modelled the writings of his imperial memoir on those of his great-grandfather,
he relished an opportunity to surpass Babur by adding illustrations to his own
work. He wrote: ‘Although Firdaws-Makani [“He who is in the place of paradise,”
i.e., Babur] wrote in his memoir about the shapes of some animals, he does not
seem to have ordered artists to depict them … I both wrote about them and
ordered the artists to draw them for the Jahangirnama.’22
Unfortunately, there is no extant Jahangirnama with a complete set of
illustrations, and it is not at all clear that an illustrated manuscript was ever in
fact completed. Certainly the earlier versions of the memoir, including the copies
Introduction 9
gifted to his sons in 1618, likely did not include any of the miniatures that were
intended for it. Even the Abu’l Hasan frontispiece had been commissioned only a
few months earlier, and it would eventually be discovered in a separate album of
paintings from the Mughal imperial atelier. Other individual pages of illustration,
seemingly intended for the Jahangirnama, have appeared in various collections,
showing no evidence of having ever having been bound into a manuscript.23
Many are so damaged that their production date and artist are in doubt. Yet
within the text of the Jahangirnama itself, the emperor explicitly described
several commissions of miniatures, sketches, nature studies and portraits, and
there is no doubt that many extant imperial miniatures were originally produced
to illustrate his memoir. A North American turkey and an African zebra, brought
to Jahangir from the port at Goa, were ordered painted by Jahangir’s master
painter, Mansur, specifically as an illustration for the Jahangirnama, ‘so that
the astonishment one has at hearing of them would increase by seeing them’.
Affirming the inherently political nature of the manuscript, individual folios
that were likely intended for the pages of the Nama include a painting of the
submission of Rana Singh of Mewar, which retains marks that indicate it was
intended to illustrate an album. That it was meant to corroborate his written
text comes as no surprise – the conquest of Mewar had been one of Akbar’s rare
military failures, and Jahangir would proudly memorialize it in multiple formats:
memoir, painting and even in rare Mughal sculpture.
Jahangir intended his illustrated memoir to fit neatly within the larger
dynastic project of narrative and remembrance, even as he continually
returned to themes of kingship and affirmations of his own personal political
legitimacy. In his discourses on inheritance and power, he continually
reinforced his identification with and loyalty to Akbar, nostalgically referenced
his ancestry and dynastic legacy, elaborated his performance of Persio-Islamic
kingship and asserted the inherently sacred quality of kings – making use of
a dynastic literary tradition to confirm the legitimacy of his own individual
inheritance, sanctioned, as Jahangir would claim, by both the dynastic and
the divine.
Intensely loyal to his dynasty and its values, Jahangir used the device of
memoir to affirm his position as a conduit of the powerful ideas of his ancestors,
offering detailed and explicit descriptions of Timurid-Mughal courtly traditions;
understandings of kingship, law, religion, succession and inheritance; and ideas
of beauty, poetry, gardens and architecture. His memoir also details the workings
of the seventeenth-century royal court of India, including rich descriptions of the
monarch’s relationship with his diverse nobility as well as the steady stream of