Jahanara had suffered a terrible accident. The princess was walking to her bedchamber at night when her robes brushed against a burning lamp. Her clothes, made from the lightest muslin, were drenched with the oils of flower, especially the “Jahangiri” perfume that her great-aunt Nur Jahan had concocted. This made them fragrant as well as highly flammable. The flame licked her hem and then immediately swallowed her up. Four of Jahanara’s nearby attendants rushed to help, but the fire engulfed them as well. The princess barely survived. Her torso and hands were horribly charred. A week later, two of her attendants died.13
Another version of this story eventually reached Mulla Shah. Tawakkul Beg reports that the garments of a dancing girl employed in Jahanara’s quarters burst into flame during a performance. Her clothes, “in the manner of the Indian fairy-born,” were doused with perfume oil. When the princess went to rescue her, their clothing touched. Jahanara immediately caught fire and fell unconscious. The emperor shed tears of blood on seeing her condition. He abandoned all affairs of the state to tend to his daughter.14
Jahanara’s recovery was far from smooth. Shah Jahan gave away enormous sums of money in charitable donations, in the hope of a divine cure. Eminent physicians sought to heal her, including Hakim Daud, a Safavid court physician who had migrated from Iran.15 After five months her wounds started to fester again. Eventually a servant in the imperial household named Arif prepared an ointment that gave her some relief.16 At the end of July, Shah Jahan suggested that she move temporarily to Dara Shukoh’s waterfront mansion for a change of scene. In an unusual step, the emperor, who could not bear separation from his daughter, himself stayed for a couple of weeks in his son’s residence, which Dara had completed building only the previous year.17
Tawakkul Beg suggests that Mulla Shah had a hand in Jahanara’s recovery. Marhamat Khan, Shah Jahan’s servant with Qadiri ties, had written Mulla Shah informing him of the accident. The shaikh’s reply arrived, and Marhamat Khan shared it with the emperor. “God has two attributes,” Mulla Shah writes, “beauty (jamal) and majesty (jalal).” At times the Almighty displays one; at times the other. He prays that in Jahanara’s case, this divine majesty would be transformed into divine beauty.18
Upon reading the letter, Shah Jahan took it up to Jahanara’s apartments. She felt rejuvenated after merely listening to it read aloud. After this, says Tawakkul Beg, God granted her the strength to read and write.19 Jahanara might have written to Mulla Shah, for she then received a personal letter from him. “May you have the fortune of the divine vision,” he begins, asking that God grant her a speedy recovery. He speaks of the “heart’s sickness,” which he explains as “distance from the divine.” He prayed that Jahanara’s own physical affliction be transformed into suhbat, an intimate nearness to the divine. After receiving this letter, Jahanara regained complete health, according to the Nuskha. Marhamat Khan sent Mulla Shah a message from the emperor to the effect that the princess’s health had turned around.20
But this story finds no mention in the official chronicles. Shah Jahan’s historian, Lahori, makes not a single reference to Mulla Shah’s contact with the imperial family during this time. Of course, as Mulla Shah’s disciple, Tawakkul Beg had a vested interest in extolling his pir. His report of the princess’s miraculous healing should be read with this in mind.
Nonetheless, if we take at face value the fact of letters being exchanged and the interpenetration of Mulla Shah’s circle with the royal servants, fissures appear in the personas that Dara Shukoh and Shah Jahan created for themselves. Dara’s writings thus far show him to be the ideal Qadiri disciple. Based on these, one would imagine that of the three—Shah Jahan, Dara, and Jahanara—it was Dara Shukoh who was most attached to the Kashmir Qadiris. Shah Jahan’s glittering self-presentation in the paintings and histories he commissioned does little to show his devotion to Sufis or other holy men. But this Qadiri chronicle of Tawakkul Beg opens a door onto the Mughal sovereign’s domestic sphere. Here we glimpse imperial servants who might otherwise have no mention in histories, the princess and emperor in her private quarters, and Mulla Shah acting very much as an advisor and guide to the emperor along with his two eldest children.
While Jahanara recovered bit by bit, Shah Jahan and Dara Shukoh faced another series of anxieties. Aurangzeb, who had been away serving in the Deccan, sped north to visit his sister upon hearing the news of her illness. He arrived with impressive alacrity in May, bringing with him his eldest son, Muhammad Sultan, who had not yet met his grandfather. But within a month, the emperor had stripped him of his official rank and governorship of the Deccan. This was an act almost equivalent to disowning him.
What had caused such a sudden change in Aurangzeb’s relationship with his father? The official sources are deliberately vague. Lahori lays the blame on Aurangzeb and the bad company the prince fell in with: “Owing to the company of some rotten-minded ignoramuses and short-sighted fools, Prince Aurangzeb Bahadur decided to withdraw his hand from matters of state and retire from the world.”21 The prince had “determined, without any apparent cause, to resign from worldly occupations and lead a secluded life,” Inayat Khan explains in his later abridged history.22
Aurangzeb’s purported desire to become an ascetic recluse was of a completely different order from Dara Shukoh’s own journey on his spiritual path. His threat to withdraw from the world and evade his own princely duties hinted at a deeply held resentment, one strong enough to make him stand up to his father. Shah Jahan construed it as open disobedience. We can only infer the layers to this story that the bland euphemisms of chroniclers conceal. Whatever role Dara Shukoh played in all of this remains unmentioned in Shah Jahan’s official histories. Regardless, the extended spell in Agra during long months of disgrace would have weighed heavily on Aurangzeb. Bereft of his position and much of his household in Burhanpur, Aurangzeb surely seethed at Dara’s comfortable status in the court.
Jahanara took on the role of Aurangzeb’s confidante and consoler. From her own sickbed, she sought to assuage her father’s anger at his third son. Eventually, in February 1645, a mellowed Shah Jahan reinstated Aurangzeb’s rank and assigned him the jagir of Gujarat, where he would serve as governor.23
By the following year, 1645, Jahanara had recovered enough for a journey to Kashmir to be deemed safe. She would accompany her father, Dara Shukoh, and Murad Bakhsh, together with their mammoth entourage. Dara Shukoh’s immediate family was joined by an infant son, three-and-a-half-month-old Sipihr Shukoh.24 The imperial family decided first to visit Ajmer, to honor a vow that the emperor had made while Jahanara was ill, that he would go on pilgrimage there when she recovered. But they were quickly forced to put the Ajmer trip on hold when the strain of the journey caused Jahanara’s wounds to fester again. This time, in Mathura, a mute mendicant named Hamun prepared a healing poultice, which helped her greatly. After a rest in Delhi, they proceeded slowly to Kashmir, arriving at the end of April.25
By this point, Aurangzeb had parted from the imperial family to take up the governorship of Gujarat. He approached his new role zealously. One of his most memorable acts, soon after he took charge, was to desecrate a temple built by the Jain merchant Shantidas and his brother in Saraspur, outside Ahmedabad. The temple was dedicated to Parshvanath, the twenty-third tirthankara, one of the ancient teachers, or “makers of fords,” of the Jains who taught how to transcend the cycle of birth and death. A German adventurer, Johann Albrecht von Mandelslo (d. 1644), visited it a few years earlier in 1638, describing it in great detail. Two elephants hewn from black marble guarded the temple’s entrance; on one of them sat a statue of the patron Shantidas himself. Inside, rows of alcoves framed a courtyard, each with a statue in black or white marble, which von Mandelslo mistook for sculptures of naked women seated cross-legged, but which were far more likely to have been representations of tirthankaras.26
The French traveler Jean de Thévenot (d. 1667), writing over two decades later, recounted that Aurangzeb, “who has always prof
essed an affected devotion,” had a cow killed in the temple. This was in order to defile it so that no worship of the “Gentiles” could take place. The prince then had the noses of all the statues lopped off, and converted the temple to a mosque.27 The structure, though, was still intact for Thévenot to see—replete with figures of men, animals, and naked women “seated in the oriental manner.” Judging from this account, most of the damage seems to have been confined to defacing the statues.
Aurangzeb’s action was evidently taken independently of his father. It served to assert his authority in a new territory. The prince mirrored, on a small scale, his father’s attack on Benares temples early in his reign. But Shah Jahan and Dara Shukoh had earlier gone out of their way to protect Shantidas’s business interests.28 By desecrating Shantidas’s temple, Aurangzeb also struck a blow at his father and eldest brother.
Meanwhile, once in Kashmir, Shah Jahan and his two eldest children once again enjoyed the company of Mulla Shah. Dara Shukoh’s writings do not record this trip in detail, though Tawakkul Beg, who was in the prince’s entourage, filters into his chronicle events that he considers significant. Soon after arriving in Kashmir, Tawakkul Beg relates, the emperor sent his chief steward Sadullah Khan to invite Mulla Shah to court. The Sufi acquiesced. The night that Mulla Shah was expected, Shah Jahan had already retired to his private quarters, instructing one Hayat Khan to alert him to the Sufi’s arrival. Mulla Shah greeted Shah Jahan with a “Salam alaikum,” to which the emperor replied, “Salam.” Out of respect, the Sufi sat a short distance from the emperor, who then pulled him near by the arm so that they could have “warmer companionship.”29
There is no mention that Mulla Shah performed obeisance to the ruler. Moreover, none but a religious recluse or the closest of family members could even sit by an emperor. Shah Jahan then commented on their similarity, “You are a servant of God, and I am a servant of God. We do not depend on anyone external.” Mulla Shah did not wholeheartedly agree. He pointed out that the emperor only occasionally occupied himself in God’s remembrance. In contrast, Mulla Shah’s main task was to lead people to God. But the emperor silenced him, declaring, “Yes, that is true … but you and I have no need of any other than God the Most High, and that is why it is appropriate for us to commune.” Shah Jahan then offered the Sufi a bolster pillow that had belonged to his great-grandfather Humayun, saying that it was a fitting gift for one who was indifferent to money. Mulla Shah accepted it and took his leave. Shah Jahan returned to the inner apartments and told Jahanara about the meeting.30
The anecdote highlights the Sufi’s independence—he comes when he pleases and does not hesitate to voice his opinion. It also displays Shah Jahan’s desire for Mulla Shah’s company. There is something self-serving in it, as with many of Tawakkul Beg’s anecdotes about his spiritual master. But here Tawakkul Beg’s account is more than a mere formulaic component of a Sufi hagiography as it does not show Mulla Shah simply triumphing over the emperor.
In Kashmir, Jahanara continued to cultivate her bonds with the Qadiri order in a manner that befit her rank and gender. Mulla Shah’s disciple, Muhammad Halim, was getting married, and she sent lavish gifts—money to the house of the bride, a headdress made with strings of pearls for the groom, and a present for the bride’s mother so that she would not feel left out. All of Mulla Shah’s disciples participating in the wedding received perfumes as well as tobacco leaves.31 Tobacco was a luxury reserved for the aristocracy; European merchants had introduced it in India only a generation or two earlier.32 These gestures, reminiscent of the ways Jahanara funded and organized the weddings of her brothers, signal that she forged kin-like relationships with her Qadiri brethren.
We hear little about Dara Shukoh’s own encounters with Mulla Shah on this visit, though the prince visited his spiritual master frequently. Tawakkul Beg writes that he had received the opportunity to serve both Mulla Shah and the prince during these months. Tawakkul Beg also carried messages between Mulla Shah and the imperial siblings Dara and Jahanara.33
But the prince would soon write about an episode that took place four months into his stay in Kashmir. Here, on the eighth of Rajab (one of the four months designated in the Quran with special sacred status) Dara Shukoh experienced another mystical vision.34 Unlike his first visionary experience with Miyan Mir, Dara now saw the Prophet Muhammad. An unbroken chain of spiritual descent immediately became apparent to him. From the Prophet Muhammad, most beloved of God, the “line of leadership” went straight to Abd-ul-Qadir Jilani, founder of the Qadiri order, eventually reaching Mulla Shah—and through Mulla Shah to Dara Shukoh himself. In the vision, the prince was then appointed to write a treatise showing the path to the divine. He writes that as he opened the Quran at random, to take an augury (fal), as was his custom before starting a book, the title of his new book entered his mind: Risala-i Haqqnuma (The Truth-Directing Treatise).35
The precocious prince of the Sakinat-ul-auliya had become a teacher in his own right. He had long believed that he had been uniquely gifted with spiritual powers, but now he had been commissioned to instruct others as well. Would he still require his pir, Mulla Shah? Who were the intended readers of his book? He had yet to begin the project, though, for soon after his vision he set off for Lahore from Kashmir.
Dara Shukoh’s divine vision appeared against the backdrop of some recent political developments. For one, he had recently come into a new position—his first governorship. In June of that year, 1645, Shah Jahan appointed him his deputy in the province of Allahabad, with the additional charge of two important forts—Chunar and Rohtas. Ordinarily, the emperor would have dismissed the prince from the court, and sent him on his new task, as he had done with his other sons. But this time, Shah Jahan maintained his policy of keeping Dara close by his side. Instead, they sent Baqi Beg, a trusted member of Dara Shukoh’s household, to oversee the actual governance of the province. Baqi Beg was the tutor and guardian of Dara’s eldest son, Sulaiman Shukoh, who was now ten years old. According to Mughal custom, Baqi Beg was bound by ties of loyalty to his charge and Dara Shukoh’s family.36
But before he completed his book, following his appointment as governor of Allahabad, Dara Shukoh spread the wings of his intellectual and religious explorations even wider. Though he did not actually go to Allahabad, he initiated a correspondence with a famous Chishti Sufi who lived there—Shaikh Muhibbullah Mubariz (d. 1648). At the time, Muhibbullah was one of the empire’s preeminent and most prolific commentators on Ibn Arabi’s writings.37 He also happened to be a close associate of Abd-ur-Rahman Chishti, who, in a decade or so, would include Muhibbullah in a collection of biographies entitled the Mirat-ul-asrar (Mirror of Secrets).38
Dara wrote to pay his respects to Muhibbullah, and referred to himself as a faqir and as a “lover (muhibb) of the faqirs,” in a word play on the shaikh’s name that emphasizes Dara’s devotion. The prince expresses great happiness about Muhibbullah’s presence in Allahabad and offers the services of his representative Baqi Beg, should the shaikh require anything for the sake of the “believers” there. Then Dara lists questions, sixteen in all, for Muhibbullah to answer. They cover sundry topics: What is the beginning and end of the task on this mystical path? Did prophets of an earlier age know of God’s unity and of divine gnosis? When might one perform the ritual prayer without being distracted by stray thoughts? Does the mystical seeker become annihilated or does he become that which he seeks? What is the distinction between love and pain?39
In reaching out to Muhibbullah, Dara was not disavowing his Qadiri teachers. It was not uncommon for Sufis to seek more than one teacher, even to take initiation in multiple orders. Recall that earlier, in a conversation with Mulla Shah, the prince had expressed anxiety that some jealous people would accuse him of seeking other teachers.40 But through this letter, Dara, flush from his latest experience of revelation, is making himself known to other accomplished mystics. His questions stem from curiosity, but also from a desire to show Muhibbullah how spirit
ually advanced he had become, because he was not particularly interested in the shaikh’s answers.
In his reply, Muhibbullah praises the prince to the heavens, humbly referring to himself as an “insignificant speck.” He expresses great joy at Dara Shukoh’s connection with Allahabad and he addresses the prince’s questions in great detail, dwelling, in his answers, on the themes of God’s unity and that of the individual with the divine, as well as the proper conduct for a faqir. All the while Muhibbullah quotes profusely from two important works of the Andalusian mystic Ibn Arabi: the Fusus-ul-hikam (Bezels of Wisdom) and the Futuhat-ul-Makkiya (Meccan Revelations). He takes care to cite the exact chapters in these works whenever he refers to a point in them. Muhibbullah also sprinkles his replies abundantly with quotations from several other Sufi authorities and Persian poets—such early mystics as Abu Bakr Wasiti (d. circa 928) and Abd-ur-Rahman Sulami (d. 1021). Also featured are the influential martyr Ain-i Quzat al-Hamadani (d. 1131) and the commentator of Ibn Arabi, Sadr-ud-Din al-Qunawi (d. 1274), along with the famed poets Rumi (d. 1273) and Hafiz (d. 1390).41
In his lengthy response, Muhibbullah seeks to meticulously address the prince’s queries touching on various fine points of spiritual perfection and divine gnosis. Although Dara expresses tepid appreciation for some of Muhibbullah’s answers, he is hardly impressed by the shaikh’s erudition:
Regarding the replies in which [Muhibbullah] everywhere referred to the sayings of the ancients and considered them to be true, according to this faqir the ecstasy that does not accord with the words of God and the Prophet is much better than that which is written in books. For [this faqir] has spent much time studying books about the saints. But because so many discrepancies became apparent, he completely abandoned the study of books, and engaged in the study of the heart, which is a limitless ocean from which fresh pearls emerge: Do not refer me to any book / For I know my own inner truth to be a book.42
The Emperor Who Never Was Page 17
