At least some Muslim scholars of Shah Jahan’s era would have frowned on Abd-ur-Rahman Chishti’s openness to using Indic texts in order to explore the histories of revered Islamic figures. The Naqshbandi followers and successors of Shaikh Ahmad Sirhindi, the Mujaddid, or Renewer, offer perhaps the sharpest contrast with Chishtis such as Abd-ur-Rahman. In multicultural India, many of them sought to follow the model of Muslim-majority Central Asia, where in the second half of the sixteenth century, Naqshbandi shaikhs such as Khwaja Hasan closely counseled the Kabul ruler Mirza Hakim.26
Sirhindi uses strong language to admonish Shaikh Farid Bukhari, a high-ranking noble and religious scholar under Akbar and Jahangir, over the presence of Hindus in the Mughal administration. If employed at all, he argues, they should be given insignificant jobs; indeed they should be avoided like dogs, taxed and disgraced. Such vitriolic bigotry, though, does not encapsulate the whole of Shaikh Ahmad Sirhindi’s attitude toward Hindus. In other letters he writes of Hindus who were capable in his eyes of achieving a certain level of spiritual experience, and he addresses at least one letter to a Hindu. But in Sirhindi’s ideal world, sharia-observant Muslims would have far more political power and freedom to observe practices like cow slaughter or eating when Hindus were fasting, without being hemmed in by the majority of the population.27
In the past, there was a point at which the lineages of Shaikh Ahmad Sirhindi and Abd-ur-Rahman Chishti had intersected. Sirhindi’s father had in fact studied with Abd-ul-Quddus Gangohi. Moreover, Gangohi’s attitude toward non-Muslims was complex; in a letter to the emperor Babur, he voices sentiments that sound similar to those of Sirhindi, if a shade less harsh. These prejudices did not prevent him, however, from taking pleasure in Hindi poetry and music.28
Though Sirhindi’s imprisonment weakened his authority and his claims of being the Renewer attracted derision, his influence spread posthumously during Shah Jahan’s rule. In 1623, the year before his death, Shaikh Ahmad Sirhindi appointed as his successor one of his sons, Muhammad Masum, whom he also identified as the Qayyum, the Sufi who acts as the world’s central pole, through whom God reaches other human beings.29
Like his father, Muhammad Masum wrote copiously and persistently to religious scholars, Mughal officials, and members of the imperial family. His collected letters include one to Janan Begam, who was the daughter of Abd-ur-Rahim Khan of Khans and the fourth wife of Jahangir’s brother Daniyal. Here, he refrains from discussing social and political issues, meditating instead on the Islamic mystical notion of love for the divine. This letter is replete with couplets from Persian love poetry such as this one, which evokes an image of the lover ineluctably drawn by the beloved’s tresses: “I don’t go to the neck’s nape of my own free will / those two amber lassoes take me, pulling, pulling.30
But in a letter to the nobleman Shamsher Khan, who later became governor of Ghazni, Muhammad Masum champions his view of correct religious observance. He had heard about Shamsher Khan’s kindness to Sufis, he says, from Maulana Muhammad Saif. Masum writes about the importance of subduing the carnal soul, the correct creed of the people of the Sunna, the five pillars, the desirability of Sufi practice, and the superiority of the Naqshbandis.31
While Naqshbandi leaders cultivated contacts among the Mughal governing elites, prominent Chishtis maintained their order’s longstanding relationship with the state. Several years later, in an addendum to a collection of Sufi biographies, Abd-ur-Rahman Chishti writes of his association with Jahangir and Shah Jahan. He praises Jahangir highly and notes that he spent time with him when the emperor visited the Ajmer shrine; later, he met Shah Jahan as well. Abd-ur-Rahman criticizes Nur Jahan severely for her “misbehavior” and hints that she threatened the Sunni order—after all she was known to be Shia. We do not learn the full extent of Abd-ur-Rahman’s association with courtly circles, although in this work as in others, he refers to one Shaikh Sufi whom he knew and who was very much in the ranks of both Sufi scholars and court nobility.
Shaikh Sufi had studied under the Chishti scholar Nizam-ud-Din of Amethi and later went on to read the major writings of Ibn Arabi with Wajih-ud-Din Gujarati of the Shattari order.32 Subsequently he joined Jahangir’s court, and tutored the prince Shah Jahan in works of history, theology, and mysticism.33 Like other scholars at the time, the shaikh was expected to also demonstrate military prowess in the emperor’s service and was attached to the imperial campaign in Telengana. Once Shah Jahan ascended the throne, he rewarded Shaikh Sufi with a mansab, a rank with the right to the revenues of a particular region.34 But his official roles aside, Shaikh Sufi, too, was greatly interested in Indic thought. A number of Persian renditions of Indic works bear his name. These tend to be brief and didactic, lacking Abd-ur-Rahman’s colorful equivalences between Indic and Islamic concepts and figures.
The contrast between the broad-based eclecticism of some Chishtis and the Naqshbandi promotion of a narrower, more tightly bounded view of religion might very well have widened as the two orders grew in prominence. At the heart of this divergence lay the notion, which Abd-ur-Rahman and Shaikh Sufi would have held, that all wujud, or existence, including God and God’s creation, was ultimately one; this was an idea that Ibn Arabi’s later followers distilled from the great shaikh’s thought, and they felt that a Sufi might actually experience this unity with God. In contrast, Shaikh Ahmad and Muhammad Masum believed that the wujudis, as they called such thinkers, fundamentally misinterpreted Ibn Arabi. “Saying ‘All is God’ … [refers to] the various manifestations of God, not that it is the Essence of God in Reality,” Shaikh Ahmad argues.35 He wrote a letter to Shaikh Sufi on this very issue; however, the latter did not convert to the Naqshbandi leader’s view.36 But there is no straight line of causality or even correlation between the study of Ibn Arabi’s thought and the openness of early modern Sufis in South Asia to Indic forms of knowledge. Many wujudi Sufis felt no need whatsoever to learn from Indic texts or practices.
It is hard to measure the precise influence that Shaikh Ahmad Sirhindi and Muhammad Masum had on the Mughal administration. Though their followers collected and carefully preserved their letters, we do not have records of the responses they might have received from Mughal officials. It would seem, though, that like Sirhindi, some of Shah Jahan’s courtiers envisioned a more central role for the sharia, the normative basis for Islamic legal authority. While the Quranic revelation together with the Prophet’s words and deeds are at the core of Islamic legal reasoning, the significance and scope of these two scriptural sources have been inextricably bound to the authoritative interpretations of jurists over the centuries.
Early in 1633, these defenders of a more exclusionary idea of governance achieved a small victory. The planning and building of Mumtaz Mahal’s tomb in Agra had barely begun when Shah Jahan ordered the razing of all temples in the kingdom that were currently under construction. He focused especially on halting the building of temples in Banaras, the ancient city on the Ganga that Lahori’s Padshahnama describes as “the great stronghold of infidelity.” No fewer than seventy-six unfinished temples were destroyed. “In accordance with the edict of the infidelity-scorching, faith-nurturing emperor,” writes Shah Jahan’s court historian Qazwini, “they were returned to dust, and a strong foundation made for constructing the manifest religion.”37
If it had been routine for Mughal rulers to trample on the religious expressions of the kingdom’s Hindu majority, Hindus would have thought twice before building so many new temples in one city alone, even though it was an important pilgrimage site. For generations, the Mughal state had offered financial support to Hindu and Jain places of worship. What, then, brought about this destruction?
Qazwini explains that religious scholars had issued a fatwa, or legal opinion, regarding these unfinished temples. The document was intended to ensure the kingdom’s protection from calamity. Shah Jahan then acted upon the ruling, though as ruler he was not compelled to do so, as a fatwa is not legally binding. Spies and investigators,
part of the state’s vast information machinery, were sent out to report which temples in Banaras would fit this category.
The basis for these jurists’ ruling, though Qazwini does not mention it here, was a document concerning the religious rights of non-Muslims purportedly written in the time of the Caliph Umar, in the seventh century. Though it almost certainly dates from a later period, Umar’s edict enjoyed a lasting canonicity in some Muslim legal circles. The text frames itself as a letter detailing a pact between the Christians of Damascus and the caliph, which included the condition that they would not establish any new places of worship but could keep the ones that existed before the Muslim conquest.38
Who were these ulama? Did the emperor placate a lobby of religious scholars who, like Ahmad Sirhindi, were more sharia-minded and felt that Hindus had been given too much of a free rein at the expense of Muslims? Or did Shah Jahan himself engineer the fatwa to justify a move aimed at Hindu rulers, just like Jahangir’s desecration of the temple at Pushkar? The pragmatic emperor must have realized that he could reap both effects from this act, to mold his image as a sovereign guided by religion and assert his power in the empire’s heartland.
But Shah Jahan continued to support those existing temples that already received state assistance. On the thirteenth of August 1633, a few months after the Banaras temples were demolished, an imperial farman confirmed a tax-free grant, originally bestowed by Akbar, to the temples of Gobind Rai. A line on the reverse of the edict states “it is not the rule (hukm) to make grants in the name of temples,” suggesting that there might have been misgivings about supporting non-Muslim places of worship. Later that year, on the thirtieth of October, a decree was issued ordering compliance with an earlier imperial edict that had given a grant of land to custodians of the temple of Madan Mohan, which the sevak of the temple, a certain Sri Chand, had held previously.39 Evidently the emperor had no intention of obliterating all the existing temples of the subcontinent or of denying his Hindu subjects access to worship.
* * *
WHILE THE CHASE FOR THE REBEL Khan Jahan dragged on and the kingdom’s religious scholars debated theological positions, in Burhanpur, Dara Shukoh worked on cultivating his aesthetic sensibilities, as befitting a Mughal prince. Court records do not offer many details of his activities, but one splendid record endures: a muraqqa (album) that the prince compiled, even now nearly intact, containing miniature paintings arranged in pairs, interspersed with doubled leaves of calligraphic panels. Dara Shukoh also composed an introduction to his album, which today survives only separately, as a copy.40 Here was an opportunity for the emperor’s eldest son to raid the imperial collection of paintings and calligraphy produced by past masters, commission new images of his own, and display his own penmanship and literary finesse.
Dara’s father, Shah Jahan, a consummate connoisseur, had also acquired considerable skill in calligraphy in his youth, and he too assembled an album while he was a prince.41 We do not hear of Mughal princes or princesses learning how to paint; however, like Salim, as Jahangir was known before he became emperor, they could be closely involved in the details of an image’s production.42 But the art of beautiful writing was a crucial part of Mughal elite education. Indeed, calligraphy was considered to be superior to painting. Abu-l-Fazl, court chronicler of Akbar, Dara Shukoh’s great-grandfather, calls the written letter “the source from which the light confined within it beams forth”; it is “a world-revealing cup” just like that of the legendary emperor Jamshed of ancient Iran, and it is “spiritual geometry” and the “portrait painter of wisdom.”43
In fact, going by Dara Shukoh’s preface, we could be forgiven for thinking that the album’s sole purpose was to showcase the young prince’s calligraphy. Here, the young prince exhibits his mastery of the ornate Persian language typically used in formal prose writing. He adorns the obligatory praise of God, the Prophet, and the first four caliphs of Islam with metaphors about writing. Here, he often plays on the double connotations of the word khatt, which means both writing or calligraphy and the downy fuzz on the upper lip of an adolescent boy. The reason for the latter being that, in Persian literature, particularly poetry, the ideal beloved is not a woman but a young lad.
Frequently the earthly beloved is a substitute for God—the true object of a lover’s devotion—but here the divine is the supreme calligrapher, who brings forth “the adolescent beard’s soft down.” When it comes to introducing his own project, Dara Shukoh’s tone is bold, even boastful:
I have crowned the pen with writing’s spear, and conquered the realm of calligraphy. The calligraphers of the seven climes have with one pen bowed their heads before the writing … I’ve tied down the hands of this craft’s masters, and with folded hands, I’ve accomplished the hand’s work, and adorned this collection with my own flowing writing. To this bright meadow I’ve granted lushness from the exudations of my own pen.44
This kind of hubris is often part of the album-preface genre, in praise of the riches within the covers.45 After next writing of the pleasing complementarity of the paintings and the calligraphy, the prince then showers tributes on his father. “The coronet-possessors wear a picture of his likeness on their heads, and the mirrors of the mind guard his image in their hearts.” Here he refers to the practice, carried on from the time of Akbar, in which select imperial servants placed a small painted likeness of the emperor in their turbans to signal their relationship to the sovereign as disciples. He also alludes to the anxiety about visual representation that pervades some Muslim approaches to figural art as well as to his father’s attempts to fashion himself into a more Islamic ruler than his forefathers: “Under [Shah Jahan] the work of the sharia has taken shape and through him the designs and paintings of Islam have acquired rectitude.”
But Dara Shukoh has not finished talking about himself. For quite a while now, he says, with the aid of a pen, he has “made calligraphy’s territory flourish.” Through prose and poetry he exalts his own calligraphy: “Sight becomes drunk on the bounty of viewing it / for its script is intoxicating like the line on a goblet” and the “stars’ eyes grow bright from its dark kohl.”46
One might be surprised, then, to find not a single leaf of Dara Shukoh’s calligraphy in the album’s current form. This does not mean, however, that the prince’s decorative writing was never part of the collection. There are actually fifteen folios missing from the album. One of these, facing a painting of a bustard, was in all likelihood an illustration of a bird, if it followed the pattern of all the other image pairings in the album. But some or all of the others may very well have contained the prince’s calligraphy, later excised or defaced like so many other surfaces that his pen had touched. We know that Dara practiced calligraphy in Burhanpur, because some surviving folios of Persian verses written in his skillful hand date to the period in 1630–1631 while he was there. Painted between the lines are decorative gold clouds, birds, and flowers, much like those adorning other calligraphic panels from that time in an album that Shah Jahan assembled.47
The pictorial contents of Jahangir’s and Shah Jahan’s albums were often complex mosaics of symbolic references that served above all to accentuate the emperor’s power in relation to rival rulers, vassals, holy men, and courtiers. What, then, were appropriate subjects for a teenage prince, who was also constrained by the lack of an atelier that was his alone?48 The first priority of the court artists was, of course, to work for Shah Jahan.
But Mughal albums tended to juxtapose the old with the new. The young Dara Shukoh selected from a vast storehouse of images and examples of beautiful writing that Shah Jahan had inherited. He chose, for example, a couple of European engravings in black and white, one of St. Catherine of Siena and the other of the Virgin Mary and infant Jesus. These were set into a wider frame of calligraphed Chagatai Turkish and Persian verses, finished with a thick, lustrous border adorned with gold flowers that was common to all the album’s folios.
The prince also included at least thirteen
calligraphy panels by the renowned calligrapher of Jahangir’s era, Muhammad Husain Kashmiri, known as Zarrin-qalam, “Golden Pen,” as well as several earlier Mughal and Persian pieces of writing. He obtained two earlier portraits of Hindu ascetics in the nim qalam technique, which involves a light wash applied over a pen-and-ink drawing, with results remarkably similar to lithographed engravings. These long-bearded yogis, with matted hair coiled in turbans atop their heads, sit cross-legged on craggy rocks. The one on the left fingers his prayer beads; his counterpart on the right lifts his hand in discourse. The city’s domes and turrets in the distant background bring into focus the wilderness of their surroundings.
Dara also had court artists paint several new images especially for his album. The folios are profuse with pairs of blooming flowers, sometimes with butterflies, and several facing paintings of birds, alone or coupled. Though these themes were common in Mughal albums, some scholars describe the contents of Dara Shukoh’s album as being particularly “feminine.”49 There is a note of dismissiveness in such remarks, the implication being that the paintings have lighter, less serious themes. This is uncalled for; such simple, single-subject images were common in the princely albums of Dara’s father and grandfather as well.
But at first glance, there appears to be good reason to believe that the album was assembled for a woman. On the album’s flyleaf is an inscription, signed by Dara Shukoh and dated almost a decade after this period in Burhanpur, to the year 1646–1647. It mentions the album’s recipient—his wife. “This precious album was given to his most intimate companion and sharer of secrets, Nadira Bano Begam, by Muhammad Dara Shukoh, son of Shah Jahan, emperor and conqueror.”50
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