The Emperor Who Never Was

by Supriya Gandhi

  Whatever he retrieved from his heart’s ocean, Dara adds, he planned to put into written form. He would then send this to the shaikh for amplification. This suggests that he had already begun thinking further about the Haqqnuma but might not have completed it at the time of his correspondence with Muhibbullah.

  Muhibbullah’s reply to the prince sugarcoats rebuke with blandishment. After the usual praise of God, he expresses thanks that a few words of his letter were acceptable to the prince’s sensibilities. Quoting the verse rejecting book-learning at the end of Dara Shukoh’s letter, the pir tells the prince that he has erred. He cites Quranic verses invoking the idea of the revelation as contained on a celestial “preserved tablet” and others about God’s omnipotent power. Muhibbullah then refers to Dara’s comment about preferring the ecstasy that did not accord with the Quran and the Prophet’s sayings. “This would be a good determination,” the shaikh says kindly, instead of dismissing Dara’s declaration outright. But, Muhibbullah asserts, “The truth is that people’s words and chatter about the knowledge of spiritual mysteries and divine unity have no credibility.” Indeed, the shaikh continues, it is forbidden for a perfect gnostic (arif-i kamil) to describe these matters to just anyone. All perfect gnostics have their own special connections with God. Continuing in this vein, Muhibbullah gently attempts to nudge Dara Shukoh away from his provocative remark toward a deeper understanding of spiritual states in Islamic mystical thought.43

  This marks the end of their preserved correspondence. When he wrote Muhibbullah, Dara Shukoh was already well set on the path he illuminates in his Haqqnuma. As his epistle shows, at this point in the prince’s spiritual evolution, he privileged the experiential religious quest over book knowledge. He remained open to new techniques and ways of soaring to further spiritual heights. The prince’s impatience with formalized religious learning may indicate Dara’s growing interest in exploring Indic thought. But the painstaking study of Ibn Arabi’s philosophy was now increasingly less appealing to him

  Dara Shukoh’s rather grandiose self-assurance in his spiritual path echoes his father’s large gestures of power on the world stage. Now that Shah Jahan no longer had to fear for Jahanara’s life, the emperor turned his attention to fulfilling some political ambitions that he had long nurtured. Mughal rulers had, since Humayun, aspired to recapture the Central Asian territories associated with their fourteenth-century ancestor, Timur. But they were too preoccupied with invasions, rebellions, and the endless efforts to subdue the subcontinent’s southern kingdoms to actually do so. Now the time seemed ripe. Nazar Muhammad, ruler of Balkh, faced a rebellion led by his own son, Abd-ul-Aziz, who had proclaimed himself ruler in Bukhara. Shah Jahan, who had been preparing for this campaign for over a year, first stationed Ali Mardan Khan in Kabul to assess the situation. Nazar Muhammad was eager for the Mughals to help him recover his kingdom, though Shah Jahan’s motives, of course, were hardly altruistic.

  Shah Jahan and his courtiers were well aware that the economic benefits of capturing the Uzbek lands, with revenues equal to only a small portion of Indian territories, would not have offset the huge cost of the campaign.44 There may, however, have been strategic reasons to annex, or at least weaken, Balkh and Badakhshan, whose recent rulers had raided Mughal territories.45 And the symbolic value was high. Shah Jahan identified more closely with Timur than either his father or grandfather. Timur’s famed astrological epithet, “Sahib Qiran,” the Lord of the Auspicious Conjunction, affirmed imperial rule through the divine destiny of the stars. Shah Jahan used this as part of his own title; he appeared on coins, in paintings, and in the imperial chronicles of the day as the second Sahib Qiran.46 Timur conquered vast swaths of territory comprising today’s Iran, Iraq, and parts of the Levant and north India. Shah Jahan’s Central Asian campaign would now be enacted on a world stage with the Safavids and Ottomans as a suitably awed audience.

  Such grand moves also accompanied an increased emphasis on Timur in Shah Jahan’s court. Recently, in 1637, a new book had reached the emperor—a rather obviously spurious autobiography of Timur. Supposedly translated from the Chaghatai Turkish, the collection celebrated the exploits of the progenitor of the Mughal dynasty. From Qazwini’s telling, it was clear that the emperor realized the translation was actually a recent composition. Shah Jahan nonetheless greatly appreciated the work and had a copy sent to Aurangzeb for his edification.47

  In the spring of 1646, Shah Jahan dispatched Murad Bakhsh to Balkh via Kabul at the head of sixty thousand soldiers. He accompanied Murad to Kabul in order to more closely oversee military operations. En route, Dara Shukoh, as usual accompanying his father, halted his own journey northwest of Lahore, in the town of Sheikhupura, which was apparently named after the young Jahangir whose father would affectionately refer to him as Sheikhu Baba. Here Jahangir had built a striking tower, over a hundred feet tall, which in Dara Shukoh’s time may have been adorned all over with deer antlers embedded in its stonework.48 Dara would remain here, rejoining the emperor’s party in Kabul after only four months. According to Lahori’s Padshah-nama, Nadira was seriously ill and needed time to recover. It would be eleven months before she fully regained her health.49

  Sometime in 1056 AH (1646 / 7), Dara gifted his wife Nadira the richly illustrated album of paintings and calligraphy that he had earlier assembled as a young prince. The loving inscription he pens for her does not mention the month. Yet we can imagine that he might have made this gesture on a particularly momentous occasion, such as her recovery from illness, or that she leafed through it during her convalescence.50

  During the same year, Dara Shukoh finished the Haqqnuma, which he had first conceived of in Kashmir. He may have penned the treatise in Sheikhupura during his months of relative respite from travel and state duties. Unlike Dara’s previous writings, this was not a book about the lives of Sufis or their comparative excellences. Neither was it an encyclopedic compilation based on the major writings of the Sufi canon. Rather, the Haqqnuma served as a guide to the techniques of cultivating the heart so that it “blooms” in divine union.51

  Dara Shukoh is critical of the famous Sufi writings and manuals that had become standard fare for those wishing to advance their spiritual journey. These books are very difficult for people to understand, declares the prince; he lists such foundational works as Ibn Arabi’s Futuhat and Fusus, the Sawanih-ul-ushshaq (Intuitions of Lovers) of Ahmad Ghazali (d. 1126), the Lamaat (Celestial Flashes) of Fakhr-ud-Din Iraqi (d. 1289), as well as the Lawaih (Rays of Light) and the Lawami (Heavenly Beams) of Abd-ur-Rahman Jami (d. 1492). The Haqqnuma distills the truth of these writings into an easier to imbibe “pure font of divine unity.”52 Dara Shukoh adds a quatrain to further illustrate his point: “If for you the inner essence of the law is abstruse / And to really criticize Sufi texts you’re far too obtuse // Know the One and no other in this world and the next / This is the truth taught in the Futuhat and the Fusus.53

  The prince’s verses condense Ibn Arabi’s complex meditations into an utterly simple dictum: “Know the One.” They simultaneously elevate and diminish the importance of the Futuhat and the Fusus to centuries of Islamic thought. In the passages that follow, Dara Shukoh quickly proceeds to once again privilege the experiential over the study of books. The Haqqnuma’s sources of authority are not books; rather, they are the spiritual practices in which Miyan Mir and Mulla Shah trained their disciples. The prince attributes their origin, however, to Prophet Muhammad. As though anticipating objections, Dara Shukoh is quick to add that nothing in his treatise contravenes the words and deeds of the Prophet himself.54

  The Haqqnuma traces the mystical path through four successive realms: it starts from the human realm (nasut) and proceeds through the realm of sovereignty (malakut) and the realm of divinity (lahut), to the final destination of the realm of omnipotence (jabarut). This idea of four states of existence is a common one in Sufi writing.55 But here, for the first time in Dara Shukoh’s works, we see small hints that he might have expan
ded his spiritual investigations beyond more mainstream Islamic sources.

  It is often hard to distinguish, though, the Indic ideas and practices that Miyan Mir’s Sufi order might already have appropriated from those which Dara Shukoh might himself have recently come across. For instance, Dara’s discussion of the first realm lists three types of hearts that the spiritual seeker possesses: the “fir-tree heart,” located behind the left breast; the “mind’s source,” inside the brain; and the “lotus heart” in the center of the buttocks.56 The descriptions of these hearts echo the concept of chakras, literally “wheels,” or “centers” of energy in the yoga tradition, which are located in similar areas of the body. Although Dara does not explicitly compare these hearts to chakras, other Sufis in India have been known to develop this concept, identifying the chakras with the Sufi notion of subtle centers. In a work called Yoga Qalandar, Dara’s contemporary, the Bengali Sufi Sayyid Murtaza (d. 1662), maps onto the chakras four realms: the human realm and those of sovereignty, divinity, and omnipotence.57 The Haqqnuma indirectly participates in these dialogues with the yoga tradition.

  But another instance in the Haqqnuma suggests that Dara Shukoh might have also begun to add to what his teachers imparted to him, using concepts drawn from Indic thought. He describes the second realm, in which he cautions the seeker not to stay for long, no matter how appealing this station is. Here the traveler on the mystical path must buff away the rust from his heart so that it can reflect the Divine Beloved’s beauty. This is accomplished by softly repeating Allah’s name in the heart, without moving the lips—a practice that Miyan Mir disclosed to select disciples. Dara then reveals the mystical secret of the name: “My friend, this name is extraordinarily great. It contains infidelity and Islam. It gathers into unity all the divine names. Apart from this name, nothing exists. The inner meaning of this greatest name is this: It possesses three qualities: creation, sustaining, and annihilation.”58

  Sufi writings commonly invoke the coincidentia oppositorum of infidelity and faith, while still emphasizing a devotion framed by Islamic paradigms. Dara Shukoh goes further. Not only does he suggest that Allah’s name encompasses what is not Islam, that is, kufr, or infidelity, he also identifies as divine characteristics that could only be the key attributes of the Indic trimurti—a triad of divine manifestations in the forms of Brahma, the creator; Vishnu, the preserver; and Shiva, the destroyer. Here, Dara Shukoh treats them as attributes of a single divinity instead of as separate deities.

  The prince does not disclose how he started engaging with Indic ideas. In fact, he does not even acknowledge them as Indic. While discussing the realm of sovereignty, Dara describes a breathing exercise that closely resembles a technique of hatha yoga. Sitting in the manner of the Prophet, the seeker seals his ears and eyes with his fingers, placing his middle fingers on both nostrils. Alternately blocking and releasing one nostril after the other, he utters the first half of the Islamic witness to faith, “There is no God,” while inhaling. He then gently exhales out the second half, “but God.” Cultivating this technique, Dara recounts, together with focusing on the heart, leads to a heightened state of divine remembrance, the sultan-ul-azkar, which he had obtained through a vision of Miyan Mir five years earlier.59

  Dara Shukoh likens this practice to the Prophet Muhammad’s own account of the moment before receiving a revelation. He reports the Prophet saying, “A sound comes to me sometimes like the boiling of a large vessel, sometimes like the buzzing of a honeybee, sometimes in imaged form as an angel in the shape of a man who speaks to me, and sometimes I hear a sound like a string of tinkling bells.”60

  Though the Haqqnuma establishes impeccable Islamic credentials for the sultan-ul-azkar, similar practices of breath control and the subsequent auditory experiences have an important place in hatha yoga traditions.61 The account in the Shivasamhita (c. 1300–1500), an influential work of hatha yoga, is particularly close to Dara’s description: “When the yogi restrains the wind by tightly closing his ears with his thumbs, his eyes with his index fingers, his nostrils with his middle fingers, and his mouth with his ring fingers, and intently carries out this practice, then he immediately sees himself in the form of light.… And moreover, through its practice, nada (sound) gradually arises. The first sound is like a line of drunken bees or a lute. After practicing thus there is a sound which is like the ringing of a bell and destroys the darkness of samsara (transmigratory existence). Then there is a sound like thunder.”62

  But the Haqqnuma makes no mention of an overlap between the sultan-ul-azkar and Indic practices. It does not tell us whether Dara’s description of this practice arises from his association with the Qadiri order or reflects the seeds of his interest in yoga, broadly defined. We do know, though, that Sufis in the Indian subcontinent have a long history of engaging with and appropriating yogic techniques of breath control. For some Sufis, the techniques of hatha yoga became part of the available repertory of esoteric knowledge passed down through a chain of spiritual masters, whose lineage was traced back to the Prophet himself. There are several examples of texts describing Indic bodily techniques of liberation and then furnishing them with Islamic antecedents.63 Dara Shukoh, consciously or not, enters into conversation with this body of practices and writing.

  Though we may not have a precise record of Dara Shukoh’s interactions with Hindu religious figures during this period, we know that Shah Jahan’s court continued the earlier Mughal tradition of hosting Sanskrit scholars and employing Hindus. Chandarbhan Brahman, a skilled writer in Persian, had been in Shah Jahan’s employ since 1639.64 He would eventually join Dara Shukoh’s household staff. In 1643, Malajit, Shah Jahan’s chief Brahmin astrologer, composed a lexicon of astronomical terms in Sanskrit and Persian to present to the emperor. Shah Jahan himself had awarded Malajit the august title Vedangaraya, “Lord of Vedic Sciences,” an honorific that surpassed the title Jyotisharaja, “Lord of Astral Knowledge,” which had been conferred upon earlier chief Brahmin astrologers in the Mughal court.65

  Later, in 1651, at the court in Lahore, Shah Jahan awarded fifteen hundred rupees to the renowned Sanskrit intellectual from Benares, Kavindracharya Saraswati.66 There are indications that Kavindracharya interacted with the emperor and other members of the imperial family. Kavindracharya composed a series of poems in Brajbhasha, a form of literary Hindi, which he called Kavindra-kalpalata (Wish-Fulfilling Vine of Kavindra). About half of these extol Shah Jahan, while others praise Dara Shukoh, Jahanara, and Murad. The emperor, says Kavindracharya, knows not only the Quran and the Puranas; he knows the secret of the Vedas too.67 Dara Shukoh, in the poet’s estimation, was “Indra-like, moon-like, Macchindra-like in yoga.”68 Here, Kavindracharya lauds Dara for his knowledge of Indic traditions, comparing him to the Hindu deity Indra as well as to Matsyendranath, the perfected master (siddha) revered amongst yogis. Kavindracharya even mentions Dara’s wife Nadira, likening Dara and Nadira to the legendary and revered lovers of the Ramayana, Rama and Sita: “Dara and Nadira are made thus, just like Sita and Ram / Image of renown, great wisdom, abode of supreme bliss.”69

  The Kavindra-kalpalata also includes a series of philosophical meditations on tattvajnana, the knowledge of reality or truth. Here, Kavindracharya elaborates the positions of various Indic schools of philosophy regarding the world and the nature of its cause. Kavindra himself firmly avows a non-dualistic position. For the poet, the world itself is brahman, the ultimate reality, a claim which he exhorts his listeners to repeat: “Say again and again, the world itself is brahman.”70 This concept of the unity of existence would have resonated with Dara’s Sufi proclivities. But, Shah Jahan, too, would have been its intended audience. As Kavindracharya’s primary patron, the emperor played an important role in hosting the Sanskrit pandit.

  Persian writers at the court also attest to Dara Shukoh’s public persona as a philosopher-prince. Shah Jahan’s chronicler, Qazwini, repeatedly distinguishes Dara with such honorifics as “prince of wisdom,” “nurturer of
the arts,” and “seeker of knowledge.”71 This is also the image cultivated in a massive Persian medical encyclopedia completed in 1646 / 7 by Hakim Nur-ud-Din Shirazi, a physician in Shah Jahan’s court. Its title, Ilajat-i Dara-shukohi (Remedies of Dara Shukoh), derives from Dara’s name.72 Its opening dedication celebrates Dara as a philosopher-prince—an Alexander, a Solomon, a second Plato. Shirazi identifies Dara Shukoh as the rightful “heir apparent” and a champion of universal knowledge.73

  Echoes of the intellectual and spiritual legacy of Dara Shukoh’s great-grandfather Akbar resound throughout Shirazi’s collection. Opening verses praising the prince gush, “We’ve drunk at the font of universal peace (sulh-i kull).”74 The phrase identifies Dara and the Mughal court as a source of universal or total peace. Sulh-i kull was a key concept in Akbar’s political theology.75 Moreover, the eclectic purview of Shirazi’s encyclopedia evokes Abu-l-Fazl’s Ain-i Akbari (Institutes of Akbar), a work that similarly presents the emperor as tending to the collective health of society and the state.76

  These allusions to Akbar were not accidental. The Indian-born Shirazi hailed from an illustrious family of doctors and bureaucrats who had long served at the Mughal court. Nur-ud-Din Shirazi’s father was a physician, while his maternal uncles were the famed historian Abu-l-Fazl and the poet Faizi. All three brothers worked in Akbar’s service. Shirazi celebrated the literary heritage of his uncles, who had both developed notable interest in Indic philosophy and learning, by editing and publishing volumes of their letters. But, like his father, Shirazi dedicated his life to tending the soul by curing the body.77

  The philosophical system that Shirazi advanced in Dara Shukoh’s name was remarkably ambitious. Shirazi’s encyclopedia spans an ethical universe centering on the perfection of the human body and the mind, though the bulk of the work focuses on cures to physical ailments. Yet, both the opening and conclusion engage explicitly the fields of philosophy and mysticism, with extended commentaries on sundry topics such as anatomy, music, mathematics, numerology, physics, geography, astronomy, and language. The collection culminates with a treatment of occult knowledge and power. Shirazi’s detailed instructions for preparing drugs and various medicaments transition almost seamlessly into recipes for magical spells and charms, many of which the author confirms he tested himself. One of the most important sources that Shirazi cites for his knowledge of the occult is the Zakhira-i Iskandarani (Treasury of Alexander). This collection of spells and talismans, originally written in Arabic, was particularly well known within the Mughal court during Dara’s time. Even more noteworthy for Dara Shukoh’s interests during this period, Shirazi integrates into the concluding chapters a detailed account of yogic practices of breath control and meditative practices developed by the sages of India as a form of obtaining occult power and knowledge.78