The Emperor Who Never Was

by Supriya Gandhi

  2. Mohsin Hamid, Moth Smoke (New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 2000); Akbar Ahmed, Two Plays: The Trial of Dara Shikoh, Noor (London: Saqi, 2009); Ishtiaq Husain Qureshi, The Administration of the Mughal Empire (Karachi: University of Karachi, 1966), 196–197.

  3.“Tukhm-i ilhadi kih Akbar parwarid / baz andar fitrat-i Dara damid / shama-i dil dar sina-ha raushan nabud / millat-i ma az fasad aiman nabud,” Muhammad Iqbal, Ashar-i Farsi-i Iqbal Lahuri, ed. Muhammad Darvish (Tehran: Sazman-i Intisharat-i Javidan, 1991), 149.

  4. “Haqq guzid az Hind Alamgir ra / an faqir sahib-i shamshir ra / az pay-yi ihya-yi din mamur kard / bahr-i tajdid-i yaqin mamur kard,” Iqbal, Ashar, 149.

  5. Ishtiaq Husain Qureshi, Muslim Community of the Indo-Pakistan Subcontinent (The Hague: Mouton, 1962), 180.

  6. Ashok Malik, “The Month We Lost Dara,” Daily Pioneer, August 11, 2009, accessed October 8, 2018, archived at www.defence.pk/pdf/threads/the-month-we-lost-dara-shikoh.31550.

  7. Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, Sufi Sarmad Shahid (Hyderabad: Abul Kalam Azad Oriental Research Institute, 1986), 20.

  8. Kenneth W. Jones, “Two Sanatan Dharma Leaders and Swami Vivekananda: A Comparison,” in Swami Vivekananda and the Modernisation of Hinduism, ed. William Radice (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999), 224–243, 227.

  9. Cross-reference the Epilogue.

  10. Saeed Naqvi, Being the Other (New Delhi: Aleph, 2016), 114.

  11. Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New York: Hill and Wang, 1975), 151. For myth as ideology in narrative form, see Bruce Lincoln, Theorizing Myth (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), xii .

  12. Shahid Nadeem, foreword in Nadeem and Ronder, Dara.

  13. Adrija Roychowdhury, “Dalhousie Road Renamed after Dara Shikoh: Why Hindutva Right Wingers Favour a Mughal Prince,” Indian Express, February 7, 2017, www.indianexpress.com, accessed October 8, 2018.

  14. Kalika Ranjan Qanungo, Dara Shukoh (Calcutta: S.C. Sarkar, 1952); Bikrama Jit Hasrat, Dārā Shikūh: Life and Works (Calcutta: Visvabharati, 1953).

  15. Hasrat, Dārā Shikūh, 103.

  16. Qanungo, Dara Shukoh, 271.

  17. Hasrat, Dārā Shikūh, 6–7.

  18. A recent study of Mughal sacred sovereignty is Azfar Moin, The Millennial Sovereign (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015).

  19. An overview of Persian translations in South Asia, including during the Sultanate period, can be found in Carl Ernst, “Muslim Studies of Hinduism? A Reconstruction of Arabic and Persian Translations from Indian Languages,” Iranian Studies 36.2 (2003): 173–195. For a recent study of the Mughal court’s engagement with Sanskrit knowledge, see Audrey Truschke, Culture of Encounters (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016). See also Abu-l-Fazl, Ain-i Akbari, ed. Heinrich Blochmann, 2 vols. (Calcutta: Calcutta Baptist Mission Press, 1872–1877), 1: 51–52; translated as The Āʾīn-i Akbarī, trans. Heinrich Blochmann, ed. Douglas Craven Phillott, 3 vols. (Calcutta: Asiatic Society of Bengal, 1927–1949), vol. 3.

  20. Svevo D’onofrio and I have been independently researching Shaikh Sufi’s writings. I am grateful to him for sharing details of his unpublished research on Shaikh Sufi.

  21. Kalika Ranjan Qanungo, Historical Essays (Agra: Shiva Lal Agarwala, 1968), 129.

  1. Empire, 1615–1622

  1. Nur-ud-Din Muhammad Jahangir, Jahangir-nama (Tuzuk-i Jahangiri), ed. Muhammad Hashim (Tehran: Fahrang, 1980 / 1), 144–145; translated as The Jahangirnama: Memoirs of Jahangir, Emperor of India, trans. Wheeler M. Thackston (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 153.

  2. Catherine Ella Blanshard Asher, Architecture of Mughal India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 122.

  3. See the observations of the English merchant William Finch (d. 1613) in Samuel Purchas, Purchas his Pilgrimes: In Fiue Bookes (London: Henry Fetherston, 1625), 1: 428 (bk. 4, ch. 4, §5); quoted in Sayyid Akbarali Ibrahimali Tirmizi, Ajmer through Inscriptions (New Delhi: Indian Institute of Islamic Studies, 1968), 17–18.

  4. The submission of the Rana Amar Singh to Prince Khurram is illustrated by Lalchand in Abd-ul-Hamid Lahori (d. 1654), Padshah-nama, Royal Collection Trust, MS 1367, fol. 46b; reproduced in Milo Cleveland Beach and Ebba Koch, King of the World. The Padshahnama: An Imperial Mughal Manuscript, the Royal Library, Windsor Castle (London: Thames and Hudson, 1997), plates 6–7.

  5. Jahangir, Tuzuk, 147; translation, 167.

  6. Anand Pandian, “Predatory Care: The Imperial Hunt in Mughal and British India,” Journal of Historical Sociology 14.1 (2001): 79–107, 89–100.

  7. Jahangir, Tuzuk, 164; translation, 174.

  8. Indian Museum, Calcutta, Indian Museum Art Section, No. 316. Printed and discussed in Asok Kumar Das, “Mughal Royal Hunt in Miniature Paintings,” Indian Museum Bulletin 2.1 (1967): 19–23.

  9. Mirza Amin Qazwini, Padshah-nama, British Library, MS Or. 173, fols. 42a–43a. I have benefited greatly from the unpublished edition prepared by the late Dr. Yunus Jaffery, kindly shared with me by the late Dr. Majid Ahmady. As the basis for his unpublished edition, Dr. Jaffery took the British Library manuscript and a handwritten copy made in Aligarh of Rampur Raza Library MS 2091 / 495m. I have also benefited from discussing the text’s provenance with Stephan Popp, who is preparing a partial translation of the text. For the two copies in the British Library, see Charles Rieu, Catalogue of the Persian Manuscripts in the British Museum, 1: 258–259. For the Rampur copy, see Fihrist-i nuskha-i khatti-i farsi-i kitabkhana-i Raza Rampur, 3 vols. (Delhi: Diamond Printers, 1996), 1: 621.

  10. Jahangir, Tuzuk, 160; translation, 172.

  11. See also chap. 4, 103.

  12. Avner Giladi, Infants, Parents and Wet Nurses: Medieval Islamic Views on Breastfeeding and Their Social Implications (Leiden: Brill, 1999), 21, 55.

  13. Jahangir, Tuzuk, 151; translation, 161.

  14. Qazwini, Padshah-nama, fol. 233a.

  15. Qazwini, Padshah-nama, fol. 47a.

  16. Qazwini, Padshah-nama, fol. 47b.

  17. Jahangir, Tuzuk, 70–71; translation, 84; for a discussion of the plot, see Beni Prasad, History of Jahangir (London: Oxford University Press, 1922), 164–165; Fergus Nicoll, Shah Jahan: The Rise and Fall of the Mughal Emperor (London: Haus, 2009), 69; Munis Faruqui, The Princes of the Mughal Empire, 1504–1719 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 221–223.

  18. Qazwini, Padshah-nama, fol. 47a.

  19. Ellison Banks Findly, Nur Jahan: Empress of Mughal India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 36.

  20. Jahangir, Tuzuk, 181; translation, 190.

  21. Jahangir, Tuzuk, 148; translation, 157.

  22. Jahangir, Tuzuk, 31; translation, 49.

  23. Hakim Nizami Ganjawi, Sharaf-nama, ed. Hasan Wahid Dastgirdi (Tehran: Armaghan, 1937), 181, lines 1–3. For a recent account of the Alexander romance in Persian letters, see Haila Manteghi, Alexander the Great in the Persian Tradition: History Myth and Legend in Medieval Iran (London: I. B. Tauris, 2018), esp. 71–127.

  24. For a royal copy of the collection originally produced in Central Asia with seals from the Mughal holdings of Jahangir’s court, see Nizami, Khamsa, National Library, Kolkata, Buhar Collection, MS 296, dated 940 AM (1534 / 5). This may well be the gift to Jahangir of an illuminated copy of the Khamsa done by “the masters,” referred to in Jahangir, Tuzuk, 392; translation, 378. For an exquisite copy already in the court of Jahangir during this period, see British Library, MS Or. 6810, discussed in Rochelle Kessler, “In the Company of the Enlightened: Portraits of Mughal Rulers and Holy Men,” Studies in Islamic and Later Indian Art from the Arthur M. Sackler Museum (Cambridge: Harvard University Art Museums, 2002), 17–41, 19–21.

  25. As recorded in the anonymous collection entitled Intikhab-i Jahangirshahi, written by a courtier, translated in Henry Miers Elliot and John Dowson, The History of India, as Told by its Own Historians, 8 vols. (London: Trübner and Co., 1867–1877), 6: 448. The differing European accounts of the blinding episode and the variants are treated in Findly, Nur Jahan, 33�
��34. For the blinding of Kamran Mirza, see Gulbadan Begam, Humayun-nama, in Three Memoirs of Humáyun, ed. and trans. Wheeler Thackston (Costa Mesa, CA: Mazda Publishers, 2009), 73 (Persian), 67 (translation); Jawhar Aftabchi, Tazkirat-ul-vaqiat, in Three Memoirs of Humáyun, 193 (Persian), 158 (translation). The ongoing unpublished research of Emma Flatt treats the topic of fragrances and sociability in Persianate South Asia.

  26.Letters Received by the East India Company from Its Servants in the East, ed. William Foster et al., 6 vols. (London: Sampson Low, Martson and Company, 1896–1902), 2: 297, letter of Thomas Keridge, January 20, 1614.

  27. Thomas Coryate, Traueller for the English Wits: Greetings from the Court of the Great Mogul (London: William [J]aggard and Henry Fetherton, 1616), b 1. See, broadly, Dom Moraes and Sarayu Srivats, The Long Strider: How Thomas Coryate Walked from England to India in the Year 1613 (Delhi: Penguin, 2003).

  28. Coryate, Traueller, 18–19; Purchas, Pilgrimes, 1: 593–594 (bk. 4, ch. 17).

  29. For a brief account of Thomas Coryate’s life and travels in India, see William Foster’s note in Thomas Roe, The Embassy of Sir Thomas Roe to the Court of the Great Mogul, ed. William Foster, 2 vols. (London: Hakluyt Society, 1899), 1: 103–5n3.

  30. Coryate, Traueller, 35; Purchas, Pilgrimes, 1: 595 (bk. 4, ch. 17).

  31.Letters Received, 1: 256, letter of Thomas Keridge, March 12, 1612.

  32. In 1612 and again in 1615, the East India Company withstood pitched naval battles at the port of Surat against the Portuguese.

  33. Roe, Embassy, 1: 103–105.

  34.Letters Received, 4: 13–14, letter of Roe, January 25, 1616; cited in Findly, Nur Jahan, 157.

  35. Roe, Embassy, 1: 43–44, 67–68. On the episode at Surat, see Michael Brown, Itinerant Ambassador, The Life of Sir Thomas Roe (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1970), 39–44.

  36. Description drawn from Francisco Pelsaert (d. 1630), Remonstrantie, edited in De Geschriften van Francisco Pelsaert over Mughal Indië, 1627: Kroniek en Remonstrantie, eds. D. H. A. Kolff and H. W. Van Santen (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1979), 245–335, 310–311; translated as Jahangir’s India, the Remonstrantie of Francisco Pelsaert, trans. W. H. Moreland and P. Geyl (Cambridge: W. Heffer and Sons, 1925), 62. For more on Pelsaert, see chap. 2, note 6.

  37. See William Harrison, India at the Death of Akbar: An Economic Study (London: Macmillan and Co., 1920), 14–15; Shireen Moosvi, The Economy of the Mughal Empire c. 1595, rev. ed. (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1987), 405–416. Moosvi reviews several attempts, including Harrison’s, at calculating the population for the region, and produces an estimate of roughly ninety-five million for the Mughal empire during the reign of Akbar and a hundred forty-five million for the entire subcontinent. See, however, Prabhat Patnaik, “Review: Shireen Moosvi, The Economy of the Mughal Empire,” Studies in People’s History 3.1 (2016): 100–106, 102.

  38. Figures from Athar Ali, The Apparatus of Empire: Awards of Ranks, Offices and Titles to the Mughal Nobility, 1574–1658 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1985), xiii (table showing mansabs in Akbar’s reign); 3–33 (list of Akbar-era nobility); and 41–90 (list of Jahangir-era nobility).

  39. Shireen Moosvi, “The Evolution of the Manṣab System under Akbar until 1596–7,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 113.2 (1981): 173–185.

  40. Masashi Haneda, “Emigration of Iranian Elites to India during the 16th–18th Centuries,” in L’heritage timouride: Iran, Asie Centrale, Inde, XVIe–XVIIIe siècles, ed. Maria Szuppe (Aix-en-Provence: Édisud, 1997), 129–143.

  41. Quote from Iqtidar Alam Khan, “The Middle Classes in the Mughal Empire,” Social Scientist 5.1 (1976): 28–49, 29. See also Muzaffar Alam and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Writing the Mughal World: Studies on Culture and Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), 397.

  42. Muzaffar Alam and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “Frank Disputations: Catholics and Muslims in the Court of Jahangir (1608–11),” Indian Economic and Social History Review 46.4 (2009): 457–511.

  43. Jahangir, Tuzuk, 153; translation, 162–163.

  44. Pelsaert, Remonstrantie, 297n373; translation, 48.

  45. On the institution of the abdar-khana, see Abu-l-Fazl (d. 1602), Ain-i Akbari, ed. Heinrich Blochmann, 2 vols. (Calcutta: Calcutta Baptist Mission Press, 1872–1877), 1: 51–52; translated as The Āʾīn-i Akbarī, trans. Heinrich Blochmann, ed. Douglas Craven Phillott, 3 vols. (Calcutta: Asiatic Society of Bengal, 1927–49), 1: 57–59.

  46. Pelsaert, “Remonstrantie,” 321; translation, 72.

  47. For the original Persian transcription followed by translation and commentary of the speech, see Thomas Coryate, Mr. Thomas Coriat to his Friends in England (London: J. Beale, 1618), B2a–B3a, B3b–4b (paginated by alphabetized quire signatures). The following is a modernized re-transcription of the phrasing quoted above from Coryate’s introduction to his Persian speech:“faqir darwesh wa jahan-gashta hastam ke man amadam az wilayat-i dur yani az mulk-i Inglizan …”

  48. Roe, Embassy, 1: 108; Purchas, Pilgrimes, 1: 542 (bk. 4, ch. 16, §2); cited in Jonathan Gill Harris, “Becoming Indian,” in Modern Theatricality, ed. Henry Turner (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 442–459, 447.

  49. Edward Terry, A Voyage to East India (London: John Martin and James Allestrye, 1655), 58–59, 270–271.

  50. Coryate, Thomas Coriat, D1b.

  51. Terry, Voyage, 271; compare with Purchas, Pilgrimes, 2: 1476 (bk. 5, ch. 6, §3).

  52. Coryate, Traueller, 23; Roe, Embassy, 2: 313–314; Letters Received, 6: 184–185, letter of Joseph Salbank to the East India Company, November 22, 1617.

  53. Purchas, Pilgrimes, 1: 564 (bk. 4, ch. 16, §7).

  54. Roe, Embassy, 1: 137.

  55. Pramod Nayar, “Colonial Proxemics: The Embassy of Sir Thomas Roe to India,” Studies in Travel Writing 6 (2002): 9–53.

  56. For reference to the famed Mercator map presented by Roe, see Roe, Embassy, 2: 413–414, 416–417; Purchas, Pilgrimes, 1: 569–570 (bk. 4, ch. 16, §8); Terry, Voyage, 368. For further information, see Irfan Habib, “Cartography in Mughal India,” Proceedings of the Indian History Congress 35 (1974): 150–162, 154–155; Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Europe’s India: Words, People, Empires, 1500–1800 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017), 300–301. See also Simon Digby, “Beyond the Ocean: Perceptions of Overseas in Indo-Persian Sources of the Mughal Period,” Studies in History n.s., 14.2 (1999): 247–259, 255–256.

  57. Colophon of Jamal-ud-Din Inju, Farhang-i Jahangiri, 2 vols. (Mashad: Danishgah-i Mashhad, 1972–1973), 2: 699–700. For more on this work, which was originally composed for Akbar, and the broader context of Persian philology in the Mughal court, see Rajeev Kinra, “Cultures of Comparative Philology in the Early Modern Indo-Persian World,” Philological Encounters 1 (2016): 225–287, 263–278.

  58. Roe, Embassy, 2: 334; Purchas, Pilgrimes, 1: 558 (bk. 4, ch. 16, §6); cited in Harris, “Becoming Indian,” 449.

  59. On the phenomenon, see Ebba Koch, “Jahangir and the Angels: Recently Discovered Wall Paintings under European Influence in the Fort of Lahore,” in India and the West, ed. Joachim Deppert (Delhi: Manohar, 1983), 173–195; Koch, “Diwan-i ‘amm and Chihil Sutun: The Audience Halls of Shah Jahan,” Muqarnas 11 (1994): 143–165.

  60. Drawn from his section on foreign words: Jamal-ud-Din, Farhang, 2: 625–699; on the pairuj, see 693. In Goa, Muqarrab Khan bought for Jahangir rare animals that the Franks had brought from their travels, including turkeys from America. Jahangir was so impressed by the strange rarity of the bird, “whose name no one knows,” that he dedicated several lines to its description in his memoirs: Jahangir, Tuzuk, 123; translation, 133, with a print of Victoria and Albert Museum, IM 135–1921.

  61. Jamal-ud-Din, Farhang, 2: 553–623, with equivalents in Book Pahlavi given in the marginal notes.

  62. See Akbar portrayed as Alexander visiting a sage: Nizami, Sharaf-nama, School of Oriental and African Studies, London, MS 24952, fol. 48b; reproduced in Gregory Minissale, “Piecing Togeth
er the Emperor Akbar’s Lost Sharaf-nāme,” Oriental Art 44.1 (1998): 67–71, 70, fig. 4. For more on the Alexander Romance in the Indian context, see Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “Connected Histories: Notes toward Reconfiguration of Early Modern Eurasia,” Modern Asian Studies 31.3 (1997): 735–762, 755–757. See also Blain Auer, Symbols of Authority in Medieval Islam: History, Religion, and Muslim Legitimacy (London: I. B. Tauris, 2011), 29, 123–124.

  63. Nizami, Sharaf-nama, 70, lines 11–12; 71, lines 1–3.

  64. See Coryate, Traueller, 29; Roe, Embassy, 1: 102–103n2; Purchas, Pilgrimes, 1: 541, 579 (bk. 4, ch. 16, §§1, 10); Terry, Voyage, 81–82; Joannes De Laet (d. 1649), De imperio Magni Mogolis (Leiden: Elzeviriania, 1631), 53–54; translated as The Empire of the Great Mogol, trans. J. S. Hoyland (Bombay: D. B. Taraporevala Sons, 1928), 48n64. See also B. Finbarr Flood, “Pillars, Palimpsests, and Princely Practices: Translating the Past in Sultanate Delhi,” RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics 43 (2003): 95–116, 111n62.