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  Empress

  THE ASTONISHING REIGN OF NUR JAHAN

  Ruby Lal

  W. W. NORTON & COMPANY

  Independent Publishers Since 1923

  New York | London

  To the Ancestors of India’s Women

  And to Our Plural Heritage

  CONTENTS

  Dramatis Personae

  ONE: Queen of Queens, an Introduction

  TWO: Miracle Girl

  THREE: Al-Hind

  FOUR: The Cupolas of Chastity and the Perfect Man

  FIVE: The Wak-Wak Tree

  SIX: The Mirror of Happiness

  SEVEN: Grave Matters

  EIGHT: A Key for Closed Doors

  NINE: Ascent

  TEN: Wonder of the Age

  ELEVEN: Veils of Light

  TWELVE: The Light-Scattering Garden

  THIRTEEN: Fitna

  FOURTEEN: The Rescue

  FIFTEEN: Angel of Death

  SIXTEEN: Beyond 1627, an Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Note on Transliteration and Terminology

  Key Biographical Details

  Notes on Sources

  Notes

  Illustration Credits

  Index

  DRAMATIS PERSONAE

  THE MUGHAL RULERS

  Akbar: the third Great Mughal emperor, son of Humayun

  Babur: the first Great Mughal emperor

  Dawar Bakhsh: Mughal ruler with the shortest reign, son of Khusraw, used to forestall Shahryar’s bid for the crown

  Humayun: the second Great Mughal emperor, son of Babur

  Jahangir (né Prince Salim): the fourth Great Mughal emperor, co-sovereign with Nur Jahan

  Nur Jahan (née Mihr un-Nisa): co-sovereign with Jahangir, the first and only female ruler of the Mughal Empire

  Shah Jahan (né Khurram): the fifth Great Mughal emperor, son of Jahangir, rebelled against his father

  NOTABLE WOMEN

  Arjumand Banu (Mumtaz Mahal): wife of Shah Jahan, in whose memory the Taj Mahal was built

  Asmat Begum: Nur/Mihr’s mother

  Dai Dilaram: Nur/Mihr’s wet nurse and mentor, prominent harem officer

  Gulbadan Banu Begum: daughter of Babur, led a royal women’s pilgrimage to Mecca, author of the Ahval-i Humayun Badshah

  Hamideh Banu Begum: revered mother of Emperor Akbar

  Jagat Gosain: mother of Shah Jahan, rival of Nur Jahan

  Ladli Begum: only daughter of Nur Jahan and Sher Afgan, married Shahryar

  Ruqayya Begum: Akbar’s childless wife, key matriarchal figure for Mihr/Nur as well as Jahangir

  Salimeh Sultan Begum: senior wife of Akbar and later mentor to Mihr/Nur

  NOTABLE MEN

  Asaf Khan (né Abul-Hasan): son of Ghiyas Beg, brother of Empress Nur, father of Arjumand Banu, loyalist of Shah Jahan

  Ghiyas Beg (I’timad ud-Daula): Nur/Mir’s father, wazir of the Mughal Empire under Jahangir

  Jadrup: Vaishnavite ascetic and spiritual mentor of Jahangir

  Khusraw: Jahangir’s eldest son, rebelled against his father

  Mahabat Khan (né Zamana Beg): fought to quell Prince Khusraw’s rebellion, then turned against Jahangir, kidnapping him

  Shahryar: son of Jahangir, married Ladli and was favored to rule by Nur, as opposed to Shah Jahan

  Sher Afgan (né Ali Quli): Mihr/Nur’s first husband, a functionary under Akbar

  SCRIBES, ARTISTS, AND HISTORIANS

  Abdal-Qadir Badauni: historian at Akbar’s court

  Abdur-Rahim Khan-i Khanan: poet, military general and translator of the Baburnama, loyalist of Jahangir

  Abul-Hasan: painter and portraitist favored by Jahangir

  Farid Bhakkari: financial officer in the time of Jahangir, author of Dhakhiratul Khawanin

  Khafi Khan (Hashim Ali Khan): military figure and chronicler of the Mughal Empire, author of Muntakhab-ul Lubab

  Niccolao Manucci: military figure, quack doctor, and author of Storia Do Mogor

  Muhammad Hadi: contemporary of Aurangzeb, contributed late sections of Jahangirnama

  Mulla Kami Shirazi: poet whose works celebrate the life of Nur Jahan

  Mu’tamad Khan: Jahangir’s paymaster of troopers and memoirist

  Sir Thomas Roe: British ambassador to Mughal India who wrote a detailed account of the empire

  Empress

  ONE

  Queen of Queens, an Introduction

  In the autumn of 1619, when the days were clear and cool, perfect for travel, the royal cavalcade of Emperor Jahangir and Empress Nur Jahan, his twentieth and favorite wife, set out from Agra, the capital of Mughal India, headed for the Himalayan foothills. The people of Mathura, a popular pilgrimage site along the emperor’s route, were anxious for his arrival. For months, a tiger had been attacking villagers and visitors, then disappearing into the forest, evading local hunters. No divine intervention seemed to be forthcoming from Lord Krishna and his consort Radha, the Hindu deities worshipped in Mathura’s temples. But the emperor could solve the problem. Killing tigers had long been a royal prerogative.1

  Jahangir—his name meant Conqueror of the World in Persian, the language of the court—was the fourth of the Mughal emperors, a Muslim dynasty established by invasion early in the sixteenth century. Descendants of the Central Asian nomad kings Chingiz [Genghis] Khan and Tamerlane, the Mughals ruled much of Hindu-majority India for more than three hundred years.

  According to one excited observer, the imperial procession included “fifteen hundred thousand” people—men, women, and children; courtiers, soldiers, and servants—along with ten thousand elephants and a great deal of artillery.2 The procession halted near Mathura, and attendants began erecting hundreds of magnificent tents, with the harem quarters marked with intricately carved red screens. While the traveling court was still being set up, a group of local huntsmen appeared and begged Jahangir to do something about the tiger.

  Unfortunately, the emperor was obligated to decline. Several years before, Jahangir had taken a vow to give up hunting when he turned fifty. After that, he’d promised Allah, he would injure no living being with his own hands. He was two months past that milestone birthday, and had recently renewed the vow as an offering on behalf of a favorite four-year-old grandson, traveling with him, who suffered from epilepsy. Shooting a tiger was now out of the question for Jahangir. The empress, however, was there to protect her subjects.

  Beautiful and accomplished, Nur Jahan was the daughter of nobles who’d fled persecution in Persia. She was also the widow of a court official implicated in a plot against Jahangir, but that didn’t stop the emperor from falling hard for her. She was thirty-four when they married, nearly middle-aged in the Mughal world. Since their wedding in 1611, the same year that Shakespeare premiered The Tempest, Nur Jahan (Light of the World in Persian, the name bestowed by her husband), had proved to be a devoted wife, a wise and just queen, a shrewd politician—and an expert markswoman. Her shooting skills were already legendary. A few years earlier, she’d amazed her husband and his courtiers by slaying four tigers with only six shots.

  On October 23, 1619, Nur Jahan mounted an elephant and settled into the howdah, the elaborate litter on the animal’s back, holding a musket. The mahout, the elephant handler, led her along the sandy track toward the forest. Nur Jahan accompanied her husband, Jahangir, on his own elephant, and they were followed by a long line of courtiers, some on superbly ornamented elephants and horses and others in red and gold jeweled palanquins with silken seats, decorated with garlands of flowers and carried by attendants. Portraits of Nur Jahan from the period suggest that she was wearing a regal turban, much like the ones favored by the emperor and distinguished noblemen, but highly unusual for a woman; a knee-length tunic with a sash around the waist over tight trousers;
and earrings and a necklace of rubies, diamonds, or pearls. Her shoes were open at the back, exposing the henna designs on her feet.3 At forty-two, she was still praised by her contemporaries for her luminous beauty.

  Local hunters on foot guided the party past fields of barley, peas, and cotton, lush from the recent rains. Along the way, they spotted herds of cattle, goats, and blackbuck with long corkscrew horns. When they reached the forest, the emperor and empress could barely see beyond the dense wall of creepers, bushes, and trees—lofty nim, thorny babul, and many others.4 The hunters showed the empress and her retinue the spot where the tiger was likely to appear, and they waited.

  Soon Nur’s elephant, in the lead, began groaning and stepping nervously from side to side; the mahout couldn’t make it stand still, and Nur Jahan’s howdah lurched precariously. From his own elephant, Jahangir looked on, silent and focused. Later, he would recall the moment in the Jahangirnama (The memoirs of Jahangir), a journal he began when he ascended to the throne in 1605 that would serve as the public record of his reign. “An elephant is not at ease when it smells a tiger, and is continually in movement,” he wrote, “and to hit with a gun from a litter is a very difficult matter.”5

  The tiger emerged from the trees. Nur lifted her musket, aimed between the animal’s eyes, and pulled the trigger. Despite the swaying of her elephant, one shot was enough; the tiger fell to the ground, killed instantly. Jahangir was delighted. A woman shooting publicly was rare; a woman shooting with such expertise was unheard-of.

  Nur’s shooting skill wasn’t the only thing that made her highly unusual. She held a position in the empire never before filled by a woman: co-sovereign. For more than a decade and a half, from a few years after their wedding until Jahangir’s death, Nur Jahan ruled along with her husband, effectively and prominently, successfully navigating the labyrinth of feudal courtly politics and the male-centered culture of the Mughal world. She issued her own imperial orders, and coins of the realm bore her name along with her husband’s. In Islamic thought and practice, the edicts and the coins were convincing technical signs of sovereignty. Furthermore, Nur sat where no other Mughal queen had sat before or would after, in the jharokha, an elaborately carved balcony projecting from the palace wall, from which government business was conducted.6 Subjects gathered below the jharokha to pray for her health, and getting a look at her was considered auspicious. More important, nobles sometimes presented themselves below the imperial balcony “and listen[ed] to her dictates,” according to a contemporary historian. “At last her authority reached such a pass that the King was such only in name … Repeatedly he gave out that he bestowed the sovereignty on Nur Jahan Begam.”7

  A generation earlier, Jahangir’s father, Akbar the Great, had ordered all royal women—wives, daughters, and concubines—to be sequestered behind harem walls. He called them “the veiled ones.” But three decades after Akbar’s dictate, Nur Jahan was on view in the most male and public of places. A new kind of power was on display.

  Nur Jahan was the only woman ruler in the long dynasty of India’s great Mughals. How did she do it, in that time and that place? How did the empress’s extraordinary strengths, the emperor’s lamentable weaknesses, the twists and turns of seventeenth-century politics, and the power of their love combine to defy a time and a culture that ought to have made the reign of Nur Jahan impossible?

  I first met Nur Jahan when I was a restless nine-year-old growing up in Dehradun, India, 150 miles north of Delhi. I loved stories, and my mother had a bagful of wondrous tales for my two younger sisters and me. She would dish out selections as she played with us on hot summer afternoons, oil our hair, or put us to bed, even when she was tired after a long day of running the household.

  Though some of my mother’s stories were about animals—a parrot who advised its owner; a clever fox that fooled some peasants—most were about unusual women, though I didn’t notice this at the time. We heard about the brave Rani of Jhansi who fought against British rule, and also the British Queen Victoria; Heer of the eternal love story Heer-Ranjha, India’s Romeo and Juliet; the goddess Parvati, who stood up to her husband, the terrifying Shiva; and Sita, the dutiful princess at the center of the Hindu epic Ramayana, admirable in her own way. Mother sang songs based on the epics, and reminded us to behave more like these amazing women when we got overly mischievous. On weekends, my father, a civil engineer, often listened from the sidelines, hidden behind his newspapers.

  One afternoon, my mother and I were sitting on the floor playing gaind-gitta. Similar to the American game of jacks, gaind-gitta involves bouncing a small ball with one hand and moving five dice into prescribed arrangements with the other hand while the ball is in the air—creating, for example, a cave with the left hand and placing one die at a time in it with the right as the ball danced up. A game of fine balance, gaind-gitta required close concentration. Still, at some point, I grew bored. “I want a story,” I said to my mother. I can’t remember whether we finished the game, but she did tell me a story, one I hadn’t heard before, about Nur Jahan, wife of the seventeenth-century Mughal emperor Jahangir.

  My mother called her Maharani, Queen of Queens in Hindi. Though some of the details of that day’s story are hazy, what stuck with me was that while Nur ruled the empire alongside her husband, dispensing justice and masterminding daring rescues, she also wrote poetry and designed clothing, gardens, and buildings. Still vivid are the glint in my mother’s eye as she spoke, and the spark ignited in me by Nur’s accomplishments and allure. She felt more real to me than other heroines my mother spoke about. I turned to my father, seemingly immersed in his reading, but eavesdropping on my mother’s story. “I am Nur Jahan.” I declared. “You are Jahangir!” He laughed and on many occasions repeated my words to others.

  At some point, that fascination with Nur’s story translated into my love for the history of the Mughal world—for Mughal women, to be precise. In time I became a feminist historian. After I’d published two books that examined duty, aspiration, and degrees of freedom among women in premodern and early modern India, both of which challenged conventional notions of what constitutes historical evidence of women’s lives, I was invited to write a biography of Nur Jahan.

  Hers is a household name in South Asia. Nur Jahan has been the subject of at least eight movies, several plays, an opera, and numerous historical romances in Hindi, Urdu (the national language of Pakistan), Punjabi (spoken in both India and Pakistan), English, and other languages of the subcontinent.8 Travel to India or Pakistan today and you’ll find tour guides, custodians of Mughal tombs, and local visitors to these sites who delight in recounting legends of Nur. As I began researching this book, one of my first tasks was to explore that oral tradition: what exactly the public knows (or thinks it knows) about Empress Nur.

  I engaged a graduate assistant in Lahore, Pakistan—once part of the Mughal Empire—who asked thirty men and women ranging in age from twenty to thirty-five what they knew about Empress Nur. The majority responded enthusiastically with a famous legend about how Nur and Jahangir met. So did a comparable number of Indian tourists, tour guides, and history buffs I interviewed myself in Agra and Delhi. Every retelling of the tale was similar to the version published by the nineteenth-century Urdu writer and critic Maulana Muhammad Husain Azad:

  In the prime of his youth, Mughal Emperor Jahangir [then, Prince Salim] strolled into a garden. He had just been to the Meena Bazaar, the renowned market in the capital where royalty and nobility wandered among merchants displaying the curiosities of the world. Jahangir had a pair of invaluable pigeons in his hands. He saw a flower he wanted to pluck, but his hands were not free. Just then a young woman passed by. Asking her to hold on to the pigeons, he turned to pluck the flower. On turning back to the woman, he saw that she had only one pigeon in her hand. He asked about the other. She replied: “Your Highness, it has flown away.” “How did that happen?” the astonished Prince asked. She stretched her hand, loosened her grip and let the second pigeon g
o. “Like this,” she said. The prince was stunned: he lost not only his rare pigeons, but his heart as well.9

  Only two of the young Pakistanis knew that Nur had been a politically powerful queen, and an accomplished poet—and they, too, began with the pigeon story said to have launched a royal romance. Both in Pakistan and India, the people we talked to generally invoked two dates—Nur’s birth in 1577 and her marriage in 1611—and explained their importance in a few lines: She was born on the road outside Kandahar [in modern-day Afghanistan] as her destitute parents made their way from Iran to India. They abandoned her; then she was restored to them. Jahangir and Nur Jahan met in the Meena Bazaar. He fell in love with her. They married. Popular works about the empress focus on this imperial love story, and Nur’s birth on the road is the favorite opening scene of films, plays, and novels. Most of them revel in her use of feminine wiles to gain influence in the harem and the court, and nearly all of them end, as did the interviewees’ responses, with Nur’s marriage.

  Though modern South Asians embrace the legends of Nur with affection, gusto, and pride, the emphasis on her romance with Jahangir truncates her biography in a way that diminishes her. In the popular imagination, Nur’s story seems to stop at the very moment when her life’s best work began.

  Between 1614 and 1627, the year of Jahangir’s death, Nur served as her husband’s co-sovereign, a decisive player in courtly and succession politics, and a commanding strategist. She defended her subjects against oppressive landlords and otherwise championed social justice. At the height of her power in the 1610s and ’20s, princes and courtiers sought her advice and followed her commands; she had the faith and trust of her husband. In 1626, when Jahangir was taken prisoner by a rebellious nobleman, it was Nur who led her imperial troops to rescue him. Amar Chitra Katha, a popular comic-book series read by Indian children and adults, highlights that episode on the cover of an issue about Nur; the illustration shows her astride a war elephant leading the battle to save the captive emperor. But inside, the narration of her bold military and political endeavors is sketchy and tepid; more of the comic is devoted to Nur’s romance with Jahangir. Secondary school textbooks mention Nur briefly, but they don’t discuss her as a leader.