The Emperor Who Never Was

by Supriya Gandhi

  The new emperor made sure to stifle all remaining potential threats after Dara Shukoh’s execution. Murad remained imprisoned in Gwalior, until Aurangzeb charged him with the murder of Ali Naqi. He was then swiftly executed in December 1661. Sulaiman Shukoh took refuge with the raja of Srinagar while on his journey westward to join his father. Jai Singh applied pressure to induce the raja to betray him. In January 1661, Sulaiman Shukoh, too, was incarcerated in Gwalior, and, after a year, strangled to death. After Aurangzeb defeated Shuja at Khajua, near Agra, the prince had retreated eastward until he crossed the boundaries of the Mughal empire into the kingdom of Arakan. There, Shuja sought refuge at the court of the Mrauk-U ruler Candasudhammaraja, but died mysteriously around 1660. His daughter, Gulrukh Bano, Aurangzeb’s daughter-in-law and Muhammad Sultan’s wife, joined him in death. Only Sipihr Shukoh, sent to the Gwalior jail after his father’s execution, managed to survive.134

  Portrait of Dara Shukoh’s head brought to Aurangzeb.

  Yet, Aurangzeb consciously ensured that the bloodlines of his and Dara Shukoh’s descendants mingled in successive generations. He eventually had Sipihr Shukoh released in early 1673 and married to Aurangzeb’s daughter Zubdat-un-Nisa. Jahanara may have played a role in this reconciliation.135 Around the same time, the emperor freed his eldest son Muhammad Sultan and wed him to Murad Bakhsh’s daughter.136 Sulaiman Shukoh’s daughters were raised in Gauharara’s care. One married Aurangzeb’s youngest son, Muhammad Akbar.137 Dara Shukoh’s youngest daughter, Jahanzeb or Jani Begam, brought up by Jahanara, wed Aurangzeb’s third son Muhammad Azam.138

  Colophon of Jahanara, Ayat-ul-bayyinat, dated 1663, autograph copy.

  Jahanara tended to her father in his last years, until his death in 1666. A material remnant of her life survives from this time—an autograph manuscript completed in 1663, which contains select Quranic verses with interlinear translations in Persian and short glosses on piety, devotion, and forbearance. It is written in her generous, clear hand, matching that of her copy of the Munis-ul-arwah. She signs it as a humble servant (khadim) and faqir. One of the passages includes this Quranic admonition about treating family elders with respect: “Your Lord has decreed that you worship none other than Him, and that you be kind to your parents. If either one or both of them grow with you, do not speak disrespectfully to them nor repulse them, but speak to them with kind words.”139 Amidst an array of verses on other topics—exhorting believers to patience, for instance, or describing the divine attributes—the princess slips in a subtle critique of her brother’s actions.

  CONCLUSION

  IF DARA SHUKOH HAD SURVIVED and managed to rule, he would have had his own mausoleum. He would have built it in Lahore, perhaps, alongside Nadira’s tomb, close to the resting place of his late pir, Miyan Mir. The sources are unanimous in saying that Dara Shukoh was buried in the precincts of Humayun’s magnificent red sandstone tomb. But he was neither conferred the dignity of a ceremonial washing and burial rites nor granted a marked grave.1 No inscription identifies his gravestone. According to the Alamgir-nama of the court chronicler Muhammad Kazim, Dara Shukoh was interred in the vaulted plinth (tahkhana) of the tomb complex.2 His is only one of many marble cenotaphs strewn across the area, including those of Emperor Akbar’s sons, Murad and Daniyal. Unlike the tomb of the mystic Sarmad near the congregational mosque of Delhi, which today attracts throngs of devotees, Dara’s grave would not become a popular shrine.

  There is no consensus on precisely where Dara Shukoh is buried. One grave is popularly considered to be his—its cenotaph has a deliberate cleavage along its width, suggesting that it shelters a body split asunder.3 But according to another view, his grave is one of three grouped together, each adorned with Quranic inscriptions.4 We cannot, of course, definitively identify that either grave is that of the prince. Moreover, a nineteenth-century account in the Tarikh-i Farah Bakhsh, claiming to be based on reliable sources, states that a Quranic verse was carved on Dara’s grave: “So learn a lesson, O you who have insight!”5

  Some of those who were Dara Shukoh’s closest associates carefully proclaimed their allegiance to the new emperor. Mulla Shah sent Alamgir a poem. Once again, murmurs of blasphemy arose against the Sufi, just as they had after Shah Jahan’s accession. Alamgir ordered the governor of Kashmir to dispatch Mulla Shah to court in Delhi. The governor pleaded for lenience on account of the Sufi’s age and declining health. Jahanara also intervened. Mulla Shah sent these lines of verse, which include a chronogram for the date of Alamgir’s accession:

  At dawn my heart bloomed like a sunflower

  Truth has manifested, purging the dust of falsehood.

  The chronogram of my Shah of the Throne (aurang)

  It coined “Shadow of Divine Truth,” it said; indeed, it spoke the truth (haqq).

  The quatrain suggests that the chronogram came to Mulla Shah in a burst of divine inspiration; the term “haqq” in the last line is also synonymous with Divine Truth, so it could also mean “Divine Truth said this.” According to Tawakkul Beg, Alamgir was well pleased with the verse.6 The emperor asked the Sufi to go to Lahore instead, where Mulla Shah lived briefly until his passing in 1661–1662.

  The prince’s household superintendent, Munshi Chandarbhan Brahman, twice wrote the new emperor. Once to convey his praises after Aurangzeb acceded to the throne and then again to beg for leave to retire, on account of his advancing years.7 Toward the end of Shahjahan’s reign, Chandarbhan had begun to compose his magnum opus of Persian prose, called the Chahar Chaman, or Four Meadows. This work takes the reader on an elegant stroll through Shahjahan’s empire and Chandarbhan’s inner self. It describes Shahjahan’s sublime court and the emperor’s daily routine, along with the wonders, delights, and characteristics of the empire’s regions; it also includes, among other matters, the author’s memoirs and spiritual autobiography as well as scholarly and ethical advice to his son.

  During Dara Shukoh’s last years, Chandarbhan played an important role in the prince’s quotidian life and very likely aided his religious explorations. The Chahar Chaman refers to the Mughal princes, collectively and individually, by name, but there is not a single mention of Dara Shukoh. Chandarbhan made sure that if Dara made any appearances in the Chahar Chaman, not one remained.8

  The munshi was a seasoned Mughal bureaucrat, experienced enough to take in his stride the vicissitudes of imperial power. We do not have insight into his personal feelings about Dara Shukoh. After Aurangzeb came to the throne, he was happy enough to take a post-retirement position overseeing Mumtaz Mahal’s tomb in Agra.9 But our knowledge that the Chahar Chaman must have been reworked under Aurangzeb’s rule potentially changes how we see it. It can no longer remain just a celebration of Shah Jahan’s court at its pinnacle. It now also reads like an elegy to a time suddenly gone. Its injunctions to look inward, to further refine the self the way Chandarbhan polishes his exquisite prose, are part of an ideal munshi’s ethical shaping. But they might also point to a refuge from the turmoil of the troubled years after Shah Jahan’s illness.

  Unlike Chandarbhan and Mulla Shah, Sarmad Kashani paid dearly for his brazenness. Regardless of how close he was or was not to Dara Shukoh, he was a symbol of the profligate age Alamgir sought to stamp out. Aqil Khan Razi approvingly records Sarmad’s execution. He notes that the guardians of the sharia “denuded” Sarmad of “life’s garment” because of his nakedness. Without a trace of sorrow, Sarmad laid his neck down, says Razi, and then recited this verse: “The body’s nudity is dust on the path to the Friend / This too they severed from my head with the blade.” Razi also mentions Dara Shukoh’s arrest but not his killing. Here, Sarmad, the naked faqir, stands in for the ill-starred prince.10

  Alamgir managed to stain his brother’s image for posterity. This stain was long-lasting but not indelible. The Alamgir-nama’s portrait of Dara Shukoh as a scheming, power-hungry infidel bent on destroying his brothers became quite influential. It informs several late seventeenth- or eighteenth-century chronic
les composed toward the end of Aurangzeb’s reign or after his death. Bakhtawar Khan’s Mirat-i Jahan-numa (World-Revealing Mirror) reiterates the Alamgir-nama’s phrasing while discussing Dara Shukoh. The widely read Khulasat-ut-tawarikh (Epitome of History) attributed to the Hindu writer Sujan Rai Bhandari, is more favorable to Aurangzeb than to Dara Shukoh. Khafi Khan’s Muntakhab-ul-lubab (Selections of the Pure) takes a similar line.11

  Some of the earliest portrayals of Dara Shukoh crystallized a little more than a decade after his death. Francois Bernier had only that one encounter with Dara in Gujarat, when the prince was in a miserable and desperate state. But Bernier stayed on in India after Alamgir’s accession, in the service of the nobleman Danishmand Khan. During his years in the subcontinent, he sent regular dispatches to Europe about his travels and adventures. These he later compiled into four volumes, which included an account of the war of succession. Here, he assesses the prince’s character: Dara Shukoh, though “not deficient in good qualities,” had a rather “high opinion of himself,” was not amenable to taking advice from others, and often grew quickly irritable.12 Bernier’s assessment of Dara gained currency. It is repeated, almost verbatim, in the travelogue of Niccoló Manucci and reappears in the early twentieth century, in the Indologist Vincent Smith’s History of India.13

  Such representations of Dara, both European and Indian, eventually fed the modern memory of the prince, especially when taken up by nineteenth-century colonial historians. This memory—forming the portraits of Dara Shukoh today etched in the public imagination—is powerful and, of course, still mutable. But there is a difference between memories that are alive and memories that have been archived.14 If traces survive of lesser-known people who wrote about the prince before the modern period or who engaged with him and his works in some way, chances are they remain buried in the stacks of a library or in the internet’s ether.

  Alamgir’s long rule guided the erasure of Dara Shukoh’s memory in very tangible ways. The new emperor was likely responsible for having his brother’s name scratched or blotted out from the valuable manuscripts that bore his autograph, including the jewel-like album that Dara Shukoh gifted Nadira and calligraphy panels that Dara himself inscribed. Though a manuscript of Dara’s earliest work, the Safinat-ul-auliya, still survives, written and corrected in the prince’s distinctive hand, there do not seem to be any remaining autographed manuscripts of Dara’s Majma-ul-bahrain or Sirr-i akbar. Of course, vast numbers of Persian manuscripts in collections across South Asia and the world remain inadequately catalogued. A Majma or Sirr-i akbar manuscript from Dara’s lifetime might well exist somewhere. If Alamgir had anything to do with the loss of the imperial copies, he certainly did not halt their circulation beyond the court.

  But for all the chronicles, travelogues, and other writings that show the prince in a somewhat negative light, the archive holds no dearth of sympathetic and affectionate portrayals. In contrast to works like the Khulasat-ut-tawarikh, the later Tarikh-i Farah Bakhsh (Joy-Granting History) by the Muslim author Muhammad Faiz Bakhsh, criticizes Alamgir for his hypocrisy: “that one who clothed himself as Aurangzeb did, with a cloak of godly reverence, piety, devotion, consistency, sanctity and moderation, should treat his own father and brothers so foully as he did; should murder Dara Shikoh pleading the law of the Muslim faith as his authority … all this is certainly inconsistent with piety and the love of God.”15 The religious identities of these chroniclers did not alone predict their attitudes toward Aurangzeb Alamgir and Dara Shukoh.

  Ironically, Alamgir’s administrative policies may have inadvertently helped more people gain access to his brother’s writings. The emperor’s expansion of the bureaucracy greatly increased the number of Hindus working for the imperial government.16 These Hindus cultivated Persian learning and often accessed their own devotional texts through the medium of the Persian language. Many were interested in improving themselves ethically and spiritually while also conducting the duties that bound them to this world. Questions that absorbed a would-be king were relevant to others as well: How can I be liberated? How ought I to live in this world? Short tracts detailing steps to liberation were a popular genre. The flourishing of Persian among Mughal Hindus generated a demand for works in the very fields that Dara explored.17

  Dara Shukoh’s prolific writings thrived after his death, taking on lives of their own as they acquired new readers outside his own circles. All the works that can be clearly attributed to him are available in multiple manuscript copies. The wide circulation of these manuscripts before, and even during, the age of print points to the enduring centrality of Dara’s project in the arena of Indo-Persian letters.18 These hand-copied texts are material testaments to the diverse range of readers that the prince posthumously acquired. They offer us clues about their production and context of use.

  One Persian copy of the Majma-ul-bahrain finds its way into an eclectic collection of texts compiled by a Hindu only shortly after Dara’s death. Debi Das, a Kayasth from Sandila writing in Persian, with apparently no direct connection to the court or to Dara, included the Majma along with a version of the Dara Shukoh’s dialogues with Baba Lal in a compendium of Indic knowledge that Sandilwi called Khulasat-ul-khulasa, or Quintessence of the Quintessence. The author completed this work in the thirteenth year of Aurangzeb’s reign. In an autobiographical sketch, Debi Das relates that in his youth he sought the company of “pure Brahmans” and studied the Puranas, Vedas, Smriti, and Shastras. He finally achieved a this-worldly liberation under the guidance of his spiritual teacher Swami Nand Lal. Debi Das is only one of several Hindus who composed Persian works on Hindu themes while Aurangzeb ruled.19

  Another example is a manuscript of the Majma-ul-bahrain in an Arabic translation. A date on its frontispiece informs us that it was sold in March or April 1771 to one Hajji Salih Effendi Qadiri Naqshbandi.20 We can infer from the owner’s name that he had been to Mecca for the pilgrimage—a significant journey in those days—that he had some Turkish or Ottoman connection or ancestry, due to the title of “effendi,” and that he had both Qadiri and Naqshbandi Sufi affiliations. Other inscriptions on this page, as well as on the end flyleaves, record more names of the manuscript’s owners, indicating that it had been passed down through a lineage of Qadiri-affiliated Sufis.21 The marginal notes also include prayers, recipes for healing potions, a hadith on the permissibility of striking a drum, and much else, all in Arabic. This Arabic translation reflects the transregional reach of Dara’s reputation among early modern Qadiris. The text must have fed the curiosity of Arabic-speaking migrants or travelers to India about Indic religious thought, as its readers or their forebears would have arrived from outside the subcontinent.

  The Sirr-i akbar enjoyed an impressive audience in the Indian subcontinent, especially among Hindus for whom Persian was the main language they used for reading. I have encountered nearly eighty manuscript copies of the text, which, for a manuscript, would make it a veritable bestseller.22 My own enumeration is hardly exhaustive and is only an indication of what its actual circulation might have been.

  Some of the Sirr-i akbar’s scribes were Muslim, but they might have had Hindu patrons. Such is the case with one Ashraf Ali who copied the text for Rai Sankat Prasad, the rais of Benares in 1875.23 At times, the manuscripts are marked with signs of Hindu scribes or readers, such as the opening invocation to the elephant-headed deity Ganesha, “Om Shri Ganeshaya namah,” seen in multiple copies.24 The Sirr-i akbar was especially widespread in Kashmir. Several manuscripts are either located in libraries there or bear the names of Kashmiri Pandit copyists. The figure produced in this chapter depicts Dara Shukoh with Sanskrit scholars in the style of Kashmiri painting under Afghan rule (1753–1819).25

  The text’s reach goes beyond its manuscripts. We hear, for instance, that Nand Lal, a prominent nineteenth-century poet in Kashmiri, first cultivated his interest in Vedanta through reading Dara Shukoh’s Persian Upaniṣads.26 By virtue of being in Persian, the Sirr-i akbar also gave non-
Brahmins, who would not typically learn Sanskrit, access to the Upanishads.

  Dara’s Sirr-i akbar introduced Europe to the Upanishads. Its first translator was the British orientalist, Nathaniel Brassey Halhed. He initially encountered the text while working for the East India Company in Bengal. After returning to England, armed with two copies of the Sirr-i akbar, Halhed completed in 1787 a full English translation of the work, which he never managed to publish.27 In a short piece on Vedic horse-sacrifice, drawn from his Upanishad translation, he equates this ritual to the scapegoat ceremonies recorded in the Hebrew Bible.28 Halhed’s basic assumption underpinning this comparative activity was the superiority of Christianity and European civilization.

  Soon after Halhed completed his translation, many British orientalists came to see Mughal Persian translations of Hindu works as derivative and impure. The scholar and pioneer Sanskritist William Jones (d. 1794) warns against following “the muddy rivulets of Muselman writers on India, instead of drinking from the pure fountain of Hindu learning.”29 Such a scant appreciation for these texts led Jones’s good friend Sir John Shore, governor general of India (1793–1798), to destroy his own three-volume translation of the Persian Jog Basisht, which he had so painstakingly prepared.30

  The French orientalist, Abraham Hyacinth Anquetil-Duperron (d. 1805), had a more sympathetic view of the Persian Upanishads and of Dara Shukoh’s project. He spent nearly two and a half decades working on his translation of the Sirr-i akbar. Anquetil first rendered it into French but then found that version to be not literal enough for his tastes. He then retranslated it into Latin, publishing the latter in 1801. Anquetil’s view of the Persian language accorded with the manner that learned Indians used it—transcending both region and religion. For Anquetil, Persian’s status was akin to that of Latin within European letters, as the language of the intellectual elite.31