The Emperor Who Never Was

by Supriya Gandhi

  A story in a much later source, most likely apocryphal, relates Dawar Bakhsh’s calm courage in accepting what was in store for him. Apparently, in captivity, he was playing chess with his brother Garshasp when he heard the infamous Raza arrive. “It isn’t contentment (raza) that has come but fate (qaza),” he remarked, punning on his assassin’s name.89 Raza was soon amply rewarded with a ceremonial staff and the rank of Mir Tuzuk, or master of ceremonies, at the court. Later he would be known by a special title—Khidmat-parast Khan, “the khan for whom service is worship.” Asaf Khan was granted the title of Yamin-ud-Daula, “right hand of the state,” for his crucial role in settling the question of Jahangir’s succession.

  Earlier Mughal emperors had also dealt severely with their brothers and rebelled against their fathers. But in terms of the sheer number of princes killed, Shah Jahan’s route to the throne set a new standard for bloodiness. For Timur’s descendants in India, the problem of succession had never found a single, easy solution. Humayun, son of the dynasty’s founder, Babur, began the trend away from a concept of shared rulership to that of a solitary sovereign ruling over an indivisible kingdom. This new practice served well a young dynasty seeking to consolidate its power in the subcontinent. As time went on, claimants to the throne had to actively find a way to suppress other contenders. A prince with Khurram’s persistence and valuable connections at court and beyond would have had a good chance of prevailing over the others. One could argue that the disarray and violence that succession struggles wrought on the empire were perhaps unavoidable evils that ultimately produced strong rulers. This approach to succession that allowed the ablest prince to rise to the top may indeed have been advantageous to the state.90 But Mughal rulers often ended up undermining this system by seeking to anoint their own successors. Jahangir and Nur Jahan’s support of Shahryar in the emperor’s last years is a case in point; here, the matter is complicated by Nur Jahan’s understandable reluctance to cede her own authority.

  Dara Shukoh and his brothers were now finally reunited with their parents and siblings after a tumultuous year and a half of confinement and uncertainty. Their grandfather Asaf Khan took them from Lahore on the long journey to Agra, with a massive entourage befitting the emperor’s children. Shah Jahan was already there. On the day of the killings in Lahore, he had alighted nearby, waiting for the astrologically determined auspicious time to enter the capital. The new emperor joyfully received his father-in-law, Asaf Khan, who presented to him his three eldest sons.

  Shah Jahan at his accession meeting sons accompanied by Asaf Khan.

  Only two years later, the artist Bichitr enshrined this scene in a lustrous illustration. It would eventually adorn the imperial copy of the Padshah-nama, an official chronicle of Shah Jahan’s reign. The inscriptions above Shah Jahan’s head announce him as the sahib-qiran, master of the astral conjunction, as potent as the prophet-king Solomon who commanded men, jinn, and animals. In the canopy above, a sun radiates directly over the emperor’s head which itself shines with the luminous halo of kingship. Shah Jahan sits on the pinnacle of the world, directly above the pole of the globe guarded by two ulama. The image of the singular pole draws directly on the cosmic language of the qutb, or axis of the universe, popular amongst both kings and mystics.With the others standing some distance behind him, Dara Shukoh bows low before his father, while Shah Jahan clasps his shoulders in an embrace, as if to lift him up.91 A new phase had begun for Dara Shukoh. Once the hostage son of a rebel prince, he had now become the favored heir of Hindustan’s emperor.

  3

  YOUTH

  1628–1634

  WHEN SHAH JAHAN MOVED his court and household to Burhanpur in March 1630, Dara Shukoh was about fifteen, the age when Muslim jurists say a boy is mature and able to discriminate between right and wrong. The imperial family settled into one of their former homes: an old, labyrinthine palace-citadel on the bank of the Tapti. It was built by the Faruqi sultans who ruled Khandesh for over two hundred years until Akbar annexed the kingdom in 1601. Colorful glazed tiles clad the stone fortress, which faced the city on one side, and on the other side, across the river, overlooked expansive gardens and hunting grounds with pleasure houses.

  Abd-ur-Rahim, the Khan of Khans, who earlier lived in Burhanpur as governor and military chief, had left his imprint on the palace complex, setting up luxurious bathhouses painted in the Iranian style, gardens with crisscrossing water channels fed by the Tapti River, and a library housing hundreds of books populated by the many writers and poets he sponsored.1 Here, Dara, now old enough to have his own residence within the fort, learned to manage a princely household.2

  Until recently, Burhanpur hummed with trade, especially in textiles—satin, wool, velvet, and calico, as well as in such metals as lead, tin, and mercury. But toward the end of Jahangir’s reign, the administration of the territory had grown lax under Parwez, who reportedly never paid his troops on time and generally let the city decline and trade suffer.3 Shah Jahan’s arrival brought a new phase of stability and renewal to Khandesh, though his main purpose in coming to his kingdom’s southern frontier was to put down the second rebellion of his rule. The first, by the Bundela ruler of Orccha, Shah Jahan had easily quashed. This he managed with the help of Mahabat Khan and Khan Jahan Lodi, the Afghan noble whom Jahangir had adopted and also made his son-in-law. But in October of the previous year, Khan Jahan fled south from the court at Agra. After Jahangir’s death, he had unwisely hedged his bets and held back from supporting Shah Jahan’s bid for the throne.

  Now, barricaded in the Asir Fort, Khan Jahan escalated his earlier recalcitrance into a full-scale revolt. The emperor swiftly left Agra for the Deccan and pursued him with the hope of also eventually making inroads into neighboring Ahmadnagar. Not that this rebellion was a great cause for alarm. In a Mughal emperor’s life, the crushing of uprisings was par for the course, along with defending and expanding the kingdom’s borders. The frequent movement of the peripatetic court that this required had some very practical benefits for the state. It kept the armies in good working order and the courtiers at the ready. It also relentlessly reminded the kingdom’s subjects of the emperor’s power and presence.

  During the heady days after Shah Jahan seized the throne, Dara Shukoh, Shuja, and Aurangzeb enjoyed a reunion with their parents and siblings after a long separation. The boys joined their sisters, Jahanara, the eldest, Roshanara, who was a year older than Aurangzeb, and young Surayya Bano, as well as their brothers little Murad Bakhsh and baby Lutfullah, whom they had not yet met, as he had been born amid the stress of the battle at Thatta. Now, in Burhanpur, future joyous events beckoned. Dara and Shuja were of marriageable age, so brides had to be found and wedding arrangements made.

  But soon after Shah Jahan’s accession, the family began to suffer a string of losses. First, in April 1628, Surayya Bano died at age seven. Only days earlier Arjumand, now known as Mumtaz Mahal (“elect of the palace”), had given birth to an infant boy, Daulat Afza (“fortune increaser”). Less than a month later, death’s shadow fell on the nineteen-month-old Lutfullah. Then shortly after reaching Burhanpur, in May 1629, the infant Daulat Afza passed away. Mumtaz Mahal, by now nearly forty, continued to bear children. The following year, in April 1630, she had a daughter who died immediately after she was born, even before she could be named.4

  On the seventeenth of June 1631, the Burhanpur summer was at its burning peak when Mumtaz Mahal experienced the throes of labor for the fourteenth time. Jahanara was with her. At the mature age of seventeen, she had likely assisted with her mother’s deliveries before. This time, something was wrong. Mughal doctors believed, following the ancient Greek physician Galen, that the body was made up of four humors that had to be perfectly balanced for optimal health. In Mumtaz Mahal’s case, these elements slid rapidly into disequilibrium.

  The empress delivered a baby girl, but she bled heavily and her condition swiftly deteriorated. She probably suffered from what modern medicine would call a postpa
rtum hemorrhage.5 Still conscious, she asked Jahanara to send for Shah Jahan. Distraught, he came and sat by her pillow. There was no time for Dara Shukoh and his other siblings to come to her side, but she told the emperor that she entrusted their children and her mother into his care. Then she left this world.

  Shah Jahan’s chronicler, Abd-ul-Hamid Lahori, writes in the Padshah-nama that, in her death, she dutifully heeded the Quranic injunction, “Return, to your lord, content and offering contentment.”6 She was in her fortieth year. The baby daughter survived and was named Gauharara, “Jewel-adorned.” Qazwini, one of the earliest authors to chronicle Shah Jahan’s reign, lauds her procreative accomplishments: “When she adorned the world with these children / like the moon, she waned after the fourteenth // When she brought forth the last single pearl / she then emptied her body like an oyster.”7

  Shah Jahan’s historians focus on describing the emperor’s grief, though the children must have been deeply afflicted as well. Lahori in the Padshah-nama uses elaborate metaphors to contrast Shah Jahan’s usual resplendence with his current state: “From the steam of sighs and the moisture of tears, the mirror of the sun gazer’s mind, which, like the sun’s looking glass had never seen the face of darkness, acquired turbidity’s rust.”8 The emperor filled oceans with his tears and donned white clothes; all the children, courtiers, and servants, too, wore mourning attire. For a week, Shah Jahan did not appear at his balcony or carry out the affairs of state. Though before his wife’s death he had no more than twenty white hairs, he soon acquired many more. For a while he was unable to control his weeping.9

  Later writers recounted the scene at Mumtaz Mahal’s deathbed with even more detail. An anonymous writer in Persian relates that her unborn child, called Dahrara according to one manuscript of his work, let out a loud cry while still in the womb. Upon hearing this, Mumtaz Mahal knew that her life was drawing to a close.10 He also reports that the empress’s last words to Shah Jahan were that eight children were enough of a legacy, and he says she extracted from him two promises: he would never father children with other women and he would build a magnificent, unique structure in her memory.11 While no contemporary source attests to its veracity, this anecdote, and others like it, powerfully shape the memory of Shah Jahan and Mumtaz Mahal.

  The emperor had lost not only his “longtime confidante,” as Lahori refers to Mumtaz, and the mother of his children, but also an advisor and a true partner in the daily business of governance. A hukm, or edict stamped with her seal, remains until this day. Here she addresses the state’s deputies in Erandol, a Marathi-speaking district of Khandesh. She endorses the new deshmukh (headman), named Kanoji, and advises him to take care of the populace’s well-being so that they would feel grateful to the emperor.12 This edict was likely only one among many that the empress sent out. Her trusted assistant, Sati Khanam, who had been Jahanara’s governess, acquired an official position as her seal bearer. Sati Khanam drew up lists of deserving cases from the petitions that women in financial trouble sent her; Mumtaz Mahal then brought them to the emperor’s attention. The empress also interceded in death-penalty cases and often procured Shah Jahan’s pardon.13

  The sixteen-year-old Dara saw his mother buried near the palace in the Zainabad Gardens, on the banks of the Tapti. Shah Jahan would visit the canopied grave every Friday, likely with Dara Shukoh and some of his brothers accompanying him. The poet Kalim describes the emperor’s grief: “As soon as he cast his shadow on that grave / the moisture of his weeping would penetrate her shroud.”14

  But the emperor never intended Burhanpur to be his favorite wife’s final resting place. He had his eye on a picturesque location in Agra, on the banks of the Jamuna River, southeast of the citadel. The land was an ancestral tract belonging to Raja Jai Singh, a fourth-generation vassal of the court, on which the raja’s grandfather’s house once stood. Shah Jahan exerted his royal prerogative to seize it from Jai Singh, eventually gifting him four grand houses from the imperial estate in return.15 Raja Jai Singh dared not openly express his disgruntlement. Though he did his best to impede the construction, he was was compelled by his position to cooperate.16

  In December 1631, Mumtaz Mahal’s body was exhumed, and Shuja traveled with her bier to its new burial spot in Agra. Sati Khanam accompanied the young prince. Along the way, the procession flung coins to the crowds and distributed food. Once the body was interred in Agra, Shah Jahan had a small domed structure built over the grave as a kind of shield from the gaze of outsiders. Even in death, too, as befitted an elite royal or noblewomen, Mumtaz Mahal’s seclusion had to be guarded.17

  The grieving emperor, who had honed his interest in architecture during his princehood, plunged into the project of building a magnificent tomb. He summoned a bevy of architects, including the Iranian-born Makramat Khan, Jahangir’s architect Abd-al-Karim, and Ustad Ahmad of Lahore. They drafted plans that Shah Jahan would regularly pore over, discuss, and alter. The cost, two decades later, ran up to fifty lakhs. Shah Jahan knew that this was not just a memorial to his beloved consort but also his own enduring legacy and future mausoleum. He planned to eventually relocate the Agra tradespersons nearby, so that the tomb, even during his lifetime, would attract a steady crowd of pilgrims and travelers.18 It is now famous the world over as the Taj Mahal.19

  * * *

  IN THE SAME YEAR THAT DARA SHUKOH and his siblings mourned their mother, and the emperor his wife, a Sufi scholar in his mid-thirties, living in the north Indian town of Rudauli, finished writing a short treatise in Persian. He was known as Abd-ur-Rahman (d. 1638) and he belonged to an offshoot of the famous Chishti order named after Ala-ud-Din Sabir. The work he had just composed was no run-of-the-mill tract on Muslim piety or the Sufi path; instead it was based on an Indic book that he had discovered, written, he says, by Basisht.

  Basisht, or Vasishtha in the Sanskrit version of his name, was one of the seven legendary sages of ancient India, but Abd-ur-Rahman Chishti calls him a prophet of the community of jinn. Muslim tradition holds that God created the jinn many years before creating Adam, the first human and the first prophet. Though the jinn are created from “smokeless” fire and humans from clay, they are very much like us, except for the fact that we cannot see them. The jinn whom Abd-ur-Rahman identifies here belong to the past; they were the people who lived in India before the coming of Islam.

  Abd-ur-Rahman had read several books on the history of the Hindus, though they did not interest him because, unsurprisingly enough, they had no mention of Adam. But Basisht, he explains, was an exception, an author who actually wrote a book describing the greatness of Adam as well as the Prophet Muhammad. Basisht received much of his learning from Mahadev, another name for Shiva, the leader of the jinn, whom they called their father and considered a divinely appointed messenger. The jinn did have their own prophets; even authoritative Muslim texts, like the world history by Abu Jafar Tabari, attest to this, writes Abd-ur-Rahman.20

  Some ignorant people, the Chishti scholar adds, think that Ramchandra, Krishna, and Arjun were children of Adam, but they are absolutely wrong. Rather, these three were born in the treta jug, the second of four cycles of time in Indic tradition, just like Mahadev, whom the Almighty brought into being not from a father and mother but from light and wind. Adam, on the other hand, was created at the end of the dwapar jug, the third era. The current era, kal jug, is due to last four hundred thirty thousand years, out of which 4,733 have already passed.

  According to Abd-ur-Rahman, the Prophet Muhammad’s migration to Mecca happened in the kal jug too, 1,040 years ago. He thus inserts the Islamic calendar into a Hindu notion of time. There are no more jinn left in India, he says. Long ago, as the Mahabharat describes, there was a war between the angels and the jinn. All the jinn were wiped out and then the children of Adam came and settled in the clime of India.21

  During the rest of this short work, Abd-ur-Rahman intertwines even more Hindu and Islamic narratives about the cosmos, in the form of a dialogue between Mahadev an
d his consort Parvati. In writing this book he does not see himself as deviating from the Prophetic example, which all believing Muslims are meant to follow. Indeed, he says, citing the Prophet’s own words, it is a Sufi’s spiritual duty to learn good things from every religious community.22 Abd-ur-Rahman was not particularly concerned with studying Indic religious concepts on their own terms. If he were, he would not have turned deities into jinn and sages into angels. But in the process, a double transformation occurs, as the jinn and other Islamic figures also acquire new meanings.

  Abd-ur-Rahman’s particular cosmological project appears to be original and uniquely his own, though his engagement with Indic thought followed the example of many other Chishti Sufis before him. There are texts on yoga attributed to the order’s founder, Muin-ud-Din Chishti (d. 1236), regardless of whether he actually wrote them.23 Abd-ur-Rahman traced his spiritual lineage to Shaikh Ahmad Abd-ul-Haqq, who had died in Rudauli a couple of centuries earlier and who very likely learned yogic practices from Nath ascetics in Bengal.24 Later, around 1480, the Chishti Abd-ul-Quddus Gangohi (d. 1537) composed the Rushd-nama (The Book of Correct Conduct), a multilingual work of Islamic mysticism. Drawing on materials in Persian, Arabic, and Hindavi, this work also incorporates discussions of yogic breathing practices. Here Gangohi assembles Hindavi verses alongside Persian couplets, interspersing these with Arabic quotations from the Quran and the Prophet’s sayings.25