The Emperor Who Never Was

by Supriya Gandhi

  The military preparations leading up to the siege of Qandahar consumed Dara. But he made time for another project that he had recently started. In 1652, sometime after he turned thirty-eight, the prince began to compile a book of ecstatic sayings by notable Sufis, both past and present. He would call it Hasanat-ul-arifin (Fine Words of the Gnostics). There is a special term for this kind of utterance in Persian and Arabic—shath, which connotes bold, even shocking, speech that only a mystic in a state of ecstasy might get away with. The poet Farid-ud-Din Attar (d. 1221) included in his memorial on Sufi saints an influential telling of a story about the master Mansur Hallaj (d. 922), who was executed by the ruling Abbasid regime in Baghdad. Hallaj famously equated himself with God, declaring “ana-al-haqq” (I am the Divine Truth). Attar vividly describes Hallaj’s brutal execution, after which even his ashes continued to cry out his shath.17 Hallaj’s crime, the Persian poet Hafiz explains, lay not in the idea he expressed but in his divulgence of a secret so momentous it ought to be revealed only on the gallows.18 Such revolutionary utterances, by Hallaj and others, came to be themselves (paradoxically, perhaps) institutionalized. Four centuries before Dara Shukoh, the Iranian mystic Ruzbihan Baqli (d. 1209) collected several of these aphorisms, which he then annotated with commentaries, first in Arabic and then an expanded version in Persian. In his own collection, the prince freely borrowed from Baqli, simplifying the renowned Sufi’s ornate prose, and supplementing the entries with other material such as Jami’s magisterial Nafahat-ul-uns (Breaths of Intimacy) as well as with expressions relating his own personal experience.19

  However canonical these ecstatic utterances had become, though, Dara Shukoh used his project to draw a line between mystics immersed in divine unity and advocates of a more sober religiosity. The prince had grown weary of the usual Sufi literature, he confesses, in the Hasanat’s introduction. Nothing but “pure unity” (tauhid-i sirf) would suffice for him.20 Dara began to gush lofty verities and spiritual mysteries in his states of ecstasy. Then, he says, some “base-natured people of low aspiration, and dry, insipid ascetics” set about slandering him, accusing him of blasphemy, and rejecting him, all because of their short-sightedness. For this reason, Dara Shukoh relates, he decided to collect the exalted sayings of the great mystics that he had read and heard to serve as definitive proof against those “Christ-faced imposters, those Moses-resembling Pharoahs, those Abu Jahls of the Muhammadan flock.”21

  Should we conclude that Dara Shukoh’s religious inclinations invited the ulama’s wrath? Certainly here, as in his earlier writings, there is a rhetorical function to framing his own work as a riposte to opponents. This is a way for the prince to build himself up and use the weight of leading Sufi authorities on his side. Moreover, it was common in Persian mystical texts to preemptively criticize one’s adversaries.

  It is also quite possible that the prince’s detractors were not just imaginary concoctions. Dara paints them colorfully, but their identities remain blurred. We do not know what public roles they may have inhabited. They might have been Sufis, or individual scholars also affiliated with a Sufi order, or even rival factions within the court who sought a pretext to defame. Regardless, the stark social division between Sufis and ulama is a very modern notion in South Asia. And the idea of an Islam bereft of mystical piety or devotion was not even conceivable.22

  But in neighboring Safavid Iran, a clerical elite was gradually gaining ground over the eroding power of Sufi shaikhs, in their own attempt to claim the mantle of divine knowledge and authority.23 It is possible that Dara heard murmurs of opposition to his newfound proclivities, though it is hard to imagine an open campaign against the prince, given that he had the full backing of the state apparatus for his spiritual explorations. One of the most frequently cited poems from Dara’s diwan, reflects his disdain for custodians of religious orthopraxy, known in popular parlance as mullas:

  Paradise is where no mullas are found,

  Where there is no bickering and clamor from the mullas

  May the world be free of the mulla’s noise

  May no one care about their fatwas …

  In the city where a mulla has his home

  There isn’t a wise man to be found

  Don’t gaze, O Qadiri, upon the mulla’s face!

  Don’t go where there is no madness for love!24

  In the world of the ghazal, the literal-minded mulla or the puritanical ascetic (zahid) did not have a very high standing. So, for this particular poetic genre, Dara Shukoh’s statements are not particularly shocking. Moreover, in his own daily life, Dara Shukoh constantly engaged with Islamic religious scholars. Mulla Fazil, who had once signed a fatwa against Mulla Shah, now accompanied the prince to Qandahar. Qazi Aslam, the jurist with Qadiri connections, had long been part of Dara’s intimate group. Further, many of the nobility were trained in the Islamic sciences, just as many of them also held Sufi affiliations.

  But then, who precisely was a mulla or, to use a term without such derogatory connotations, an alim? Surely village judges or provincial bureaucrats were not worthy of Dara Shukoh’s ire. In the mid-1630s, the scholar Muhammad Sadiq of Kashmir compiled a biographical anthology of learned men from the time of Timur to Shah Jahan. For each era, he further divided his compilation of lives into: (1) sayyids, namely descendants of the Prophet, along with leading Sufi authorities; (2) ulama, who generally focused on jurisprudence, together with physicians and accomplished scholars of theology and speculative philosophy, referred to as fuzala; and finally (3) poets. There are subtle hierarchies here, to be sure, but also a remarkably capacious understanding of who an alim or learned scholar might be. And within these classifications lie tangles of further complexity. Qazi Safa, a jurist, is listed as a poet. Shah Jahan’s minister and confidant, the courtier Afzal Khan, has pride of place among the ulama.25 Mulla Abd-us-Salam, who wrote on Islamic law, was also classified as an alim, though he possessed a “dervish-like disposition.”26 As for Muhammad Sadiq, the compiler of this collection of biographies, he was associated with Shaikh Ahmad Sirhindi, as well as with the famed hadith scholar, jurist and Qadiri Sufi Abd-ul-Haqq of Delhi, both of whom occupied many of these categories as well.

  Shah Jahan’s reign thus did not have anything resembling a homogeneous group of conservative clerics. Dara’s censure of literal-minded conservatives certainly functions as a rhetorical device designed to lend authority to his own enterprise. But as with the fatwa that once threatened Mulla Shah over his own ecstatic utterances, there were clearly factions who also sought to police the boundaries of probity. Were the critics whom the prince ridicules, then, closer to home—the more soberly-inclined scholars and Sufis of the empire’s highest echelons? The ranks of Shah Jahan’s nobility had been expanding for some time. Men with some formal religious training thickly populated this elite group who held imperial assignments. The prince might have been justly wary of some sections of the noble classes. In response, rather than quelling his spiritual explorations, he sought to strengthen his position by collecting the testaments of canonical authorities.

  Moreover, Mulla Shah, too, was suspicious of those religious authorities who, he felt, did not fully appreciate the higher stages of esoteric knowledge. As the Sufi master rose in stature at the court, prominent religious figures flocked to see him. Among them were the scholar Mulla Abd-ul-Hakim Siyalkoti and the Naqshbandi Sufi Khwaja Khurd Dihlawi, neither of whom managed to achieve a deep spiritual intimacy with Mulla Shah. In Tawakkul Beg’s words, they merely “thirsted after literal knowledge,” the kind found in books of theology and philosophy, rather than the inner wisdom that Mulla Shah imparted to a select few.27

  Dara felt comfortable sharing his own ecstatic declarations with another Sufi to whom he had become very close—the Qadiri Shah Dilruba, whose honorific means “heart robber.”28 Six of the prince’s letters to Dilruba survive, unfortunately without the shaikh’s replies. Dara Shukoh’s correspondence with Dilruba effervesces with passionate devotion to God and lov
e for the shaikh. Though they are not dated, the ideas they convey are in line with the prince’s remarks to Muhibbullah. These letters, which express mystical secrets, were probably not meant for the general eye. There is no mention of them in Dara’s books, though he would include a section on Shah Dilruba in his Hasanat-ul-arifin.29

  Dara’s first letter expresses thanks for a letter and a poem the Sufi had sent. He laments that they have not met—it is not clear if they had not met for a while or if they had never met in person. “Wherever I am, whether Agra or Lahore, my heart is fettered to you.”30 His missives to the shaikh are letters of deep affection, replete with longing. One of his letters ends with this couplet: “Why have you become estranged from me? / You and I are but old friends.”31

  Both Dilruba and Dara share a mutual reverence for their Qadiri teachers. In one letter Dara Shukoh rains countless supplications on “Miyan sahib.”32 In another, he mentions “Miyan Jio” in the context of the Sufi’s relationship with his addressee.33 But Dara and Dilruba themselves also seem to share the closeness of master and favorite disciple. Dara holds his addressee in high regard, referring to his joy upon receiving a “letter of forgiveness” from the sheikh absolving the prince of any personal faults. In his correspondence, Dara reiterates the point he had earlier made to Muhibbullah, but phrases it differently. He declares, “Praise God, praise God, that from the blessing of love of this noble, revered, great community (taifa), insincere (majazi) Islam has fled the heart of this faqir, and true infidelity (kufr-i haqiqi) has shown its face.”34

  Is Dara really saying that he has renounced Islam to become an infidel, a kafir? Some modern readers, focusing on the second part of his utterance, believe so.35 But one key to understanding the statement lies in its first part, where Dara gives credit to a “noble community,” which can only be identified as the Qadiri order (he uses the same term, taifa, to refer to it in his Sakinat-ul-auliya). Dara Shukoh’s commitment to the Sufi order into which he was initiated has not wavered. Instead, through his mystical practice, under the tutelage of his pir, new worlds opened up to him.

  Dara now knows more palpably that God and the universe are one. Rather than preparing to leave Islam—the insincere, superficial, or external Islam that he contrasts with the real—the prince clings tight to a dominant strand of Islamic devotional thought that might be thought of, if imperfectly, as “mystical infidelity.”36 Dara draws on the juxtaposition of true infidelity (kufr-i haqiqi) and insincere Islam (islam-i majazi). This pairing was famously advanced by the renowned mystical poet Mahmud Shabistari (d. 1340) and championed earlier by the famed Sufi martyr Ain-i Quzat al-Hamadani.37 The vocabulary of infidelity had been well-ingrained in Persian poetry for centuries. For a mystic, claims of embracing infidelity were often a means of conveying the extent of one’s passionate love and longing for the divine. Underlying such utterances is the recognition that God transcends all duality, including the duality of faith and infidelity. Unlike God, faith and infidelity are created and therefore transient. Thus the seeming rejection of faith is actually a way to get closer to God’s unity.

  The prince’s critique of “insincere Islam” also had a longer history at the Mughal court. Dara’s great-grandfather Akbar instituted a special mode of imperial discipleship called the din-i ilahi, which in modern times has often been misunderstood as a newly invented religion.38 One of Akbar’s courtiers, Abd-ul-Qadir Badayuni (d. 1605), secretly poured out his critique of the goings-on at court in a chronicle revealed only after his death. Here, he reports that new initiates in Akbar’s circle of devotees took vows promising to renounce the “religion of insincere (majazi) and derivative (taqlidi) Islam which they have seen and heard from their fathers,” and to embrace the “divine religion” (din-i ilahi).39 In the structure of imperial discipleship, the emperor became the supreme religious authority of esoteric knowledge. While Akbar’s din-i ilahi did not continue beyond his reign, the practice of imperial discipleship very much shaped the hierarchical relationships governing the court. Dara’s denunciation of “insincere Islam” echoes Akbar, without acknowledging his influence.

  At this point in his religious trajectory, it was not enough for the prince to verbally embrace infidelity as a mark of his adherence to the ultimate truth of divine unity. He stretched out to explore new spiritual territories, though he always stayed rooted in the vocabulary of Islamic monotheism. From the Hasanat-ul-arifin, which Dara Shukoh finished in 1654, we gather that the prince had begun to delve even deeper into Indic thought. Other sources indicate that he read as widely as he could; his studies included the Ramayana, the stories of Krishna, and likely Abu-l-Fazl’s writings on Indic religions.40 He would have had access to the Akbar-era Persian translations adorning the imperial library and to people at court, like the pandit Kavindracharya Saraswati, to guide his explorations of Hindu learning. Shah Jahan gladly aided Dara Shukoh’s new studies. In fact, between January 1652 and March 1653, Kavindra received no less than six handsome awards from the emperor, ranging from a thousand to fifteen hundred rupees.41

  Dara Shukoh was not the only one balancing military and administrative work with ambitious literary endeavors. While the prince was leading his men to war, his deputy in Ghazni, Tawakkul Beg, also used his time in the Afghan city to engage in literary activity, though his primary duties—writing news reports and administering revenues—no doubt kept him busy enough. Shamsher Khan, Shah Jahan’s governor in the province, had charged him with an additional task. The governor desired to read a history of the past kings of Iran. He had in mind the famous Shah-nama of Firdausi, the renowned poet who claimed to have labored for thirty years on his epic poem peopled with ancient Iranian rulers and demons. But the governor was put off by the effort required to plow through the Shah-nama’s ornate and lengthy verse in order to access the moral of each story.42

  So, Tawakkul Beg condensed Firdausi’s epic into easily digestible prose, and also summarized its main lessons at regular intervals. He named the abridgment Tarikh-i dilgusha-yi Shamsher Khani (The Heart-Pleasing Shamsher Khani History), after his patron. Tawakkul Beg completed the work in 1063 AH (1652 / 3), in the same year when the Qandahar campaign was unfolding. Though Firdausi’s poem did not, of course, treat contemporary Iran, it is hard not to see parallels between the war in Qandahar and Shamsher Khan’s interest in Iranian history.

  Tawakkul Beg could not predict how popular his prose version of the Shah-nama would be in years to come. There are hardly any manuscripts left of the Nuskha, his personal account of Mulla Shah and the imperial family. But over 150 copies of his Shah-nama still exist, and this figure does not account for those in private or uncatalogued collections or the many that must have decayed or disappeared over the years.43

  * * *

  BY THE END OF APRIL, Dara Shukoh’s men had taken up positions by the city’s gates. Qandahar was set in a fertile oasis watered by the Arghandab River and its tributaries. The garrison city lay on a steep, rocky ridge rising sharply up from the plain. At the uppermost levels of the ridge, several peaks soared above the fort. Lakah, the highest, was used to store precious water reserves for the citadel’s use. Massive ramparts enclosed the city, constructed from a mixture of clay, stones, and straw so solid that a British colonial officer in the nineteenth century reported that a bullet could only pierce its outer surface.44 Halfway down the northeast side of the ridge lay a memorial to the conquests of Dara Shukoh’s ancestor, Babur—a vaulted chamber hollowed out of the mountainside, with inscriptions on its walls praising Babur and his son Humayun. It acquired its name, Chihil Zina, from the forty steep steps leading up to it. Below the fort, the city with its large trading market straggled up an elevated plateau. A moat with a complex system for controlling the flow of water around the citadel added a further layer of impenetrability.45

  The Mughal army hoped to breach the ramparts by blasting their way through the walls with an onslaught of cannon fire. They also had their eyes set on Chihil Zina. If this could be captured, its
height would give them a strategic advantage for attacking the fortress.

  The broad contours of how the Mughals fared at Qandahar are easy enough to discern, but the finer points vary depending on the different accounts. Shah Jahan’s court historians dutifully reshaped and abridged whatever Dara must have sent to court by way of letters and the reports of his news writers. In contrast, Rashid Khan’s far more detailed account, which circulated after the events, is colored by the author’s primary loyalty to his patron, Mahabat Khan. The discrepancy between these versions hints at tensions between the prince and the khan during the campaign. The few modern historians who discuss Rashid Khan’s Lataif-ul-akhbar (The Choice Reports) consider it a complete indictment of Dara Shukoh’s military abilities.46

  Yet the often bitter and partisan character of the work, with its focus on incriminations, makes it a difficult source for assessing the situation on the ground. Rashid Khan records the excruciating infighting between various nobles often in an effort to paint himself in a favorable light. The work narrates each day’s events and conversations from the author’s perspective. It is so detailed that its original form must have been Rashid Khan’s own journal, which he made public only later. In this way it shares a similar form with Tawakkul Beg’s own personal observations recorded in the Nuskha of his time in the service of Mulla Shah and the imperial family.