Khurram, however, was not content to rely solely on his father’s favor. Thinking ahead to secure his future, he appointed the venerable Abd-ur-Rahim, “Khan of Khans,” as his deputy in the Deccan. Abd-ur-Rahim was not only an experienced military general who had served in the region since the time of Khurram’s grandfather Akbar; he was also a polymath and an ardent patron of the arts and poetry; he even composed his own verse in Hindavi.80
To further bond the alliance, the following September Khurram wedded his third wife, Abd-ur-Rahim’s granddaughter and daughter of Shahnawaz Khan. Arjumand had only recently given birth to her fifth child, a daughter, Roshanara. With this new familial tie sealing his relationship with Abd-ur-Rahim, Khurram aimed to solidify his network of support in the Deccan. His later chronicler Qazwini, however, insists that this marriage, as was that with Qandahari Mahal, was a union in name only, lacking the intimacy that Shah Jahan shared in abundance with Arjumand. According to Qazwini, the marriage to Shahnawaz Khan’s daughter was contracted on Jahangir’s orders. It resulted in one offspring, a son named Jahan Afroz or “World-Illuminating.” The infant was handed over to the care of his relative, Janan Begam, but he died when he was just one year and nine months.81 Again, Jahangir’s memoirs record the emotional toll that the high incidence of child mortality took on the ruling elite.
Soon the imperial family set off for the north. Jahangir’s entourage followed a meandering route to Agra via Gujarat, as the emperor had expressed a wish to hunt elephants there and to see the coast. It is also likely that Jahangir and Khurram sought to strengthen trading interests in the face of competing Portuguese and English mercantile activity.82 Meanwhile, from afar, Khurram planned his next campaign. He took control of the imperial effort to defeat the small hill state of Kangra in the western Himalayan foothills—another territory that had stubbornly eluded Mughal control. For this pursuit, the prince sent his trustworthy courtier Raja Bikramjit to lead the new Kangra expedition.
During the following year, in October 1618, Arjumand bore another son in the province of Dohad. Jahangir recorded his name in his diary as “Aurangzeb,” meaning “adorner of the throne,” along with the conventional good wish: “It is hoped that his imprint on this dynasty conjoined with eternity will be blessed and fortunate.”83
Before Jahangir returned to his court in Agra, after an absence of half a decade, he had at least two other meetings with Chidrup, both in late 1618. A year later, he again met him twice, this time at Mathura, the northern Indian temple town, where the ascetic had moved from Ujjain. Jahangir’s diary entries record his delight in Chidrup’s lofty words and his marvel at the ascetic’s abstemious habits. Other chroniclers, though, hint that Chidrup was roped into playing a more political role. Mutamad Khan, a chronicler from Jahangir’s court, reports that Khan Azam Koka, who was both late emperor Akbar’s foster brother and Khusrau’s father-in-law, paid a visit to the ascetic with an agenda in mind. Khan Azam had a tense history with Jahangir after Khusrau’s rebellion in 1606 and thus had every reason to scheme against the emperor. Prince Khusrau had been imprisoned for too long, Khan Azam told Chidrup. Would the ascetic persuade Jahangir to release his son? In Mutamad Khan’s account, Khan Azam apparently had to overcome his own “religious bigotry” (taassub-i dindari) to approach Chidrup. The ascetic complied, successfully arousing in the emperor sympathy for his son. The emperor, records Mutamad Khan, “washed the marks of that ignorant dimwit’s crimes with the pure water of forgiveness.”84 Jahangir’s next diary entry, mentioning his meeting with the sage, announces that he has decided to pardon his son Khusrau and free him from prison.85 In reality, though, the prince was kept in the custody of the nobleman Abu-l-Hasan Turbati, known as Rukn-us-Saltanat or “Pillar of the empire.”86
What implications did Khusrau’s release have for Khurram? The elder prince was still a threat despite his near total blinding, as long as he had backers. Khusrau’s son Dawar Bakhsh, who was now a grown man of seventeen, was another potential contender for the throne. Nur Jahan must have been perturbed as well. Of late, Khusrau had been imprisoned in the custody of her own brother Asaf Khan. As the emperor aged, she sought to secure her own position under the next ruler. Nur Jahan had a daughter from her first marriage who was referred to by the affectionate name Ladli Begam, through whom she could potentially influence the next ruler. She had earlier been unsuccessful in arranging a marriage alliance between her daughter Ladli and the hapless Khusrau. The empress now set her sights on Shahryar, Jahangir’s youngest son, for Ladli. Both Khusrau and Khurram increasingly appeared to be obstacles to Nur Jahan’s plans, as she turned her favor to Shahryar.
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AMID THIS THICK WEB OF COURT INTRIGUES and the inner workings of statecraft, glimpses of the lives and experiences of Mughal children are few. Visual representations of Mughal children were also fairly uncommon, though there were a number of them made at Jahangir’s court. Three paintings made during this period stand out for their depiction of Khurram’s sons. We have already heard of Jahangir’s deep attachment to Shuja. In the spring of 1620, the emperor writes, that to his immense relief, his four-year-old grandson survived a dangerous fall from an upper-level open door. This episode may have spurred him to commision a portrait of the boy.87 Shuja, with his childlike proportions, stands in three-fourths profile, holding a flower, with a nimbus glowing gently around his head. Pearls adorn his neck, wrists, and ankles, and drop from his earlobes. A gold string of talismanic amulets hangs across his torso, visible under his fine, translucent upper garment. He wears a turban with a feathered ornament and gilded slippers. His bearing and posture are like those of an adult of the imperial family, and the contrast with his juvenile features would seem incongruous were it not for a softness that suffuses the entire portrait.
Another painting survives of Khurram with a young Dara Shukoh.88 A gilded divan with an enormous gold brocade bolster leaps out against a turquoise background. On it sits Khurram with his eldest son facing him, nestled close. Like his father, Jahangir, Khurram is clean-shaven, except for a curved mustache. The elder prince lifts a tray of jewels from which he picks out a splendid ruby to admire. Dara, perhaps four years old here, is a miniature version of his father in dress and posture, down to the tiny sword wedged into his sash. He grips peacock feathers in one hand and a turban ornament in the other. The rich gemstones that both father and son hold are at once symbols of power and sparkling playthings. Below, an inscription in Jahangir’s distinctive hand records the artist’s name—Nanha. This painting was in Jahangir’s collection, either gifted to him or commissioned by him, at a time when, we may surmise, he enjoyed a better relationship with his son.
Portrait of Shuja as a child.
Shortly after this painting was completed, Khurram’s appearance changed. He grew a beard, which neither his father nor his grandfather ever sported. In a painting with a toddler, likely Aurangzeb, the prince sits in a tented pergola; the beard strikingly frames his profile. With his right arm, he clasps his little son tenderly to his side, dandling him on his knee. The child’s arms embrace his father’s neck. Khurram points with his left hand at a vase of flowers brought by a female attendant. Two other women fuss over the royal duo.89
Khurram’s new style of facial grooming may seem like an insignificant change. However, many historians have argued that it reflected his growing orthodoxy, in which he followed the Prophet Muhammad who was said to have kept a beard. They read this gesture along with his abstention from alcohol, as a move toward religiosity. In contrast to Jahangir, who himself frequently admitted to his weakness for wine, Khurram long remained a teetotaler. Early in 1616, on his twenty-fourth birthday, a cup of wine touched his lips for the first time. On that occasion, Jahangir repeatedly urged his son to drink, citing Ibn Sina, the famed Iranian physician and philosopher, on the health benefits of wine.90
Beards, however, signified more than just religiosity, just as shaving a beard, in the Mughal context, did not necessarily indicate the abandonm
ent of religion. In neighboring Safavid Iran and within the broader zone of Persian speakers and readers, beards connoted masculinity, a way of distinguishing oneself from young boys and eunuchs.91 And, for Jahangir’s father Akbar, shaving the beard was a means to identify with the Rajputs he wished to absorb into his empire. The clean-shaven look then became a way to signal allegiance to the emperor.92 Khurram began cultivating his beard at a time when subtle rifts with his father and Nur Jahan began to emerge. Jahangir’s memoirs hint at a cooling relationship with his son, for in the summer of 1619, the emperor began referring to him as Khurram instead of Shah Jahan. Khurram’s beard is a visual marker that he was beginning more and more to assert his independence from his father.
Khurram with young Dara Shukoh.
Khurram with young son and attendants.
As far as Jahangir’s own piety was concerned, two encounters with influential Islamic scholars stand out during this period. On a trip to Delhi in late 1619, Jahangir made time for a short audience with Shaikh Abd-ul-Haqq, a distinguished religious scholar and Sufi. The emperor squeezed this meeting between several official and personal duties, including a visit with his sons and the harem ladies to the tombs of his grandfather Humayun and the Chishti saint Nizam-ud-Din, where he circumambulated the shrine of the holy man.93 Abd-ul-Haqq of Delhi was in his late sixties, born into a family of scholars with ancestors from Bukhara. When he was only nine, his father, Saif-ud-Din, a Qadiri Sufi adept, initiated him into the order.94 At twenty-seven, Abd-ul-Haqq had already been teaching for some years in his father’s madrasa when Saif-ud-Din introduced him to Shaikh Musa, another Qadiri teacher. Shaikh Musa had connections at Akbar’s court in Agra and, at some point, Abd-ul-Haqq gained an entry into imperial service.
We do not know much about Abd-ul-Haqq’s time in Agra, as he later became reticent about this period of his life. It seems to have been an unhappy, even humiliating, experience. Abd-ul-Haqq’s oblique allusions in an autobiographical sketch suggest that he felt deeply alienated by the atmosphere of intrigue and competition at court.95 Eventually, he left the way a man in his circumstances could without burning bridges: by making the slow, arduous pilgrimage to Mecca. There, in his mid-thirties, he met a mentor, Shaikh Abd-ul-Wahhab Muttaqi from Burhanpur. Under him, Abd-ul-Haqq not only acquired profound expertise in the study of hadith, the reports of the Prophet Muhammad’s words and deeds, but he also deepened his knowledge of Qadiri practice.
After returning to India, Abd-ul-Haqq emphasized a more sober form of mystical piety, one circumscribed by scholarship in the traditional Islamic sciences. He wrote prolifically and, upon hearing that Jahangir was in Delhi, decided to present him with a work that he considered to be one of his finest: the Akhbar-ul-akhyar (Reports on the Righteous). This large compendium evenhandedly assembles short biographies of Indian Sufis from all the major orders. By ascribing Chishti lineages to important Qadiris, the collection situates the Qadiri order very much within the mainstream of Sufi practice in the subcontinent.96 Jahangir rewarded Abd-ul-Haqq suitably and remarked on the significant labor that the Sufi scholar had devoted to the task, cloistered away in solitude, while relying on God for sustenance.97 The Akhbar-ul-akhyar became an influential model for many subsequent Sufi biographies. Abd-ul-Haqq would also become so renowned for his hadith studies that when one spoke of Delhi’s muhaddis or hadith scholar, it could only mean him.
Though Abd-ul-Haqq abjured the court, he hoped to influence the emperor by directing his attention to the lives of pious Muslims.98 Years earlier, when Jahangir ascended the throne, Abd-ul-Haqq had written a treatise on governance, directly addressed to the emperor, entitled Risala-i Nuriya-i Sultaniya (Epistle on Splendid Sovereignty). In another history on kings, Abd-ul-Haqq had declared, “When recalling those who have passed, the aim of those with insight / is to edify with life’s lessons both pauper and emperor.”99 The muhaddis also maintained a habit of writing letters to various notables of his era, including the empress Nur Jahan.
With Abd-ul-Haqq, Jahangir discharged a ruler’s duty toward the religious scholars he was meant to nurture, but Shaikh Ahmad of Sirhind (d. 1624), another prominent Sufi with a similar background, made him bristle. Born in 1564, thirteen years after the Muhaddis of Delhi, Shaikh Ahmad Sirhindi also studied under his father first and then spent some time at the court in Agra where, like Abd-ul-Haqq earlier, he met the court poet Faizi (d. 1595) and his brother Abu-l-Fazl (d. 1602), Akbar’s historian and confidante. Sirhindi also left, disillusioned, though in his case he was probably more clearly uneasy with the generously eclectic religious atmosphere at Akbar’s court. Returning to his father, he received Chishti and Qadiri initiation and then also eventually set out for Mecca. He did not have to go far to find a spiritual guide. Stopping in Delhi, on his way, he met the Afghan master Baqi-billah who was working to establish the Naqshbandi order in India. Sirhindi swiftly became his chief disciple, branching out independently to recruit other Naqshbandi followers in and around Sirhind.
Shaikh Ahmad Sirhindi wrote letter after letter to his deputies, instructing them in contemplative practices. He also corresponded with Mughal nobles, to whom he liberally dished out advice on the correct interpretations of God’s shariat (divine law), and the Prophet’s sunnat (legal precedent). The second millennium of the Islamic calendar had begun, and some, like the philosopher Abd-ul-Hakim Siyalkoti (d. 1656), thought that Shaikh Ahmad was the divinely appointed “Mujaddid,” the revitalizer of the age.100
In mid-1619, a collected volume of his letters reached Jahangir, who was already perturbed about Sirhindi’s growing and well-organized following fanning out from Sirhind across the country. He scathingly describes the book as an “anthology of drivel (jung-i l-muhmalat)” which would “lead to infidelity and apostasy.” Jahangir took particular exception to one letter. In his reading of it, Sirhindi dares to recount a celestial journey past the sun and the moon. There, he paused at discrimination, truth, and love to reach a level even higher than the abode of God’s caliphs, Abu Bakr and Umar. Then he witnessed the highest level of gnosis obtained by Muhammad, the seal of the prophets. Jahangir cites this specific passage as proof that Shaikh Ahmad Sirhindi was guilty of ridda or apostasy, evoking the “Wars of Apostasy” after the death of the Prophet Muhammad, when Arab tribes who had once converted to Islam, turned back and rejected the rule of Abu Bakr, the Prophet’s successor. Sirhindi’s celestial vision was dangerous, as it could appear to impugn Jahangir’s universal authority as emperor and God’s caliph. Sirhindi composed his missives in extraordinarily difficult Persian prose, and in this letter to his teacher Baqi-billah, he discusses spiritual states in a coded vocabulary that only initiates would understand well.101
The emperor summoned Sirhindi to court and interrogated him. Finding him to be arrogant and unrepentant, he had him imprisoned in the Gwalior fort, where prisoners of rank had been sent since the time of Akbar’s reign. Jahangir was concerned about the charismatic shaikh’s popularity. Within a year, though, Jahangir released the shaikh and gifted him one thousand rupees. Thereupon, Sirhindi remained in Jahangir’s entourage, chastened, until he died in 1624.
In late 1620, Khurram and the Mughal forces finally secured the Kangra fortress. Shortly afterward, the emperor celebrated the marriage of Nur Jahan’s daughter Ladli with his own son Shahryar.102 All the while, it was becoming clearer that Nur Jahan, at least, would not back Khurram’s bid for the throne.
Almost immediately after the wedding, Jahangir dispatched Khurram to deal with a crisis in the Deccan. Malik Ambar, reneging on his earlier agreement, had joined forces with the states of Bijapur and Golconda to reclaim several of the territories he had earlier been forced to cede, and was now marching into Mughal territory with an army of sixty thousand men. Khurram, with his prior Deccan experience and several military victories, was the most qualified of all the princes to deal with the threat. Before leaving, however, Khurram imposed a condition. He would bring Khusrau along with him in his entourage. The elder prince
now became his brother’s prisoner. Jahangir, who leaves this incident out of his memoirs, had little choice but to acquiesce.
Before the battle began, Khurram staged a spectacular public act, one that chroniclers and poets would eventually celebrate. It was his thirty-first lunar birthday. Arriving at the banks of the Chambal River, he prostrated himself in repentance (tauba). Then he ordered for all the wine casks that he had brought with him to be emptied into the river. He also had the royal wares of feasts crushed to pieces, including silver and gold wine pitchers and goblets, some of which were encrusted with gems. This pulverized metal was then distributed to the needy.103
Years later, the imperial poet laureate Kalim Kashani penned several lines commemorating Khurram’s “act of repentance,” as he termed it. The prince only ever drank on special occasions, at his father’s insistence, remarks the poet. Yet, Kalim argues, Khurram’s renunciation of wine, when he was at the height of his youth and vigor, had a special significance. Abstinence in old age did not carry the same weight: “The old man withdraws the hand of desire from wine / Not because of repentance, but out of shame for his white hair.”104
Kalim explicitly recalls a similar act that Babur, the progenitor of the Mughal empire, had carried out, before his battle against Rana Sanga. At the Chambal River, Khurram powerfully evoked Babur’s deed. But, says Kalim, there was a significant difference between the two events, in that Babur was forty-five and Khurram only thirty (he takes a modicum of poetic license with the prince’s age). For Kalim, Khurram surpasses even Babur. The poet also vividly describes the river’s turbulence once it mixed with the wine. All of its waves became “spears of war.” Such a fire arose from the ignited alcohol that when the fish washed up on shore, they were already charred into kababs.105 In Kalim’s account, the prince would achieve a stunning victory.
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