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  The Mughal family into which Nur married had a tradition of strong and prominent elder women—assertive royal wives, influential mothers and aunts whose opinions were valued. But no woman had ever openly and fully taken charge of the empire. It would be another 350 years, when Indira Gandhi became India’s first female prime minister, before another woman ascended to such heights in Indian statecraft.

  Many of her male contemporaries were in awe of Nur, whom they saw as a person of uncommon political and cultural acumen, and a remarkable leader. But in a conservative patriarchy, they had trouble accepting, despite empirical evidence, that she could be both womanly and a sovereign. Some commentators pronounced her cunning and conniving, precisely the way certain authoritative women are described to this day. Thomas Roe, the British ambassador to Jahangir’s court, saw Nur as manipulative and mysterious: “[Jahangir’s] course is directed by a woeman, and is now, as it were, shut up by her soe, that all justice or care of anything or publique affayres either sleepes or depends on her, who is more unaccessible then any goddesse or mistery of heathen impietye.”10 In the view of Peter Mundy, a merchant with the British East India Company who visited Agra in 1630, Nur was “hautie and stomakefull”—that is, stubborn.11

  Europeans like Roe and Mundy seemed especially bewildered by the phenomenon of Nur Jahan. She hadn’t inherited an empire, as had Queen Elizabeth I of England, crowned twenty years before Nur’s birth, nor was she exactly a favorite, the familiar adviser-minister figure they knew, a staple of European courts but always a male. They couldn’t quite wrap their minds around a woman’s coming to power because of her own talents, but they could understand a wily consort winning the indulgence of a love-blind emperor.

  Jahangir’s marriage to Nur in 1611, the critical moment thought by many to explain her rise, launched a multitude of legends about every phase of Nur’s life—her birth, her first marriage, harem life, an alleged early affair with Jahangir when he was a young prince, her meeting and marrying Jahangir, her power over her husband. The legends soon engulfed the truth, overshadowing her actual personal history. Narrations of the royal romance became more extravagant in nineteenth-century British colonial histories that were steeped in the orientalism of the day, embracing exoticized stereotypes of Asia—depraved despots, a shockingly sensual harem.12

  Historians writing in the 1960s and ’70s (and even in the early 1990s, after an extensive gap), strove to cast Nur in a fuller biographical mode, as a distinguished queen on par with great rulers such as Elizabeth I or Indira Gandhi. Unfortunately, these studies offered only bullet-point synopses of Nur’s life: she issued orders, coins were struck in her name, she designed clothes and gardens. There is no palpable sense of the anger or playfulness we’d expect of a living woman, no details about her support of Jahangir, her deep investment in the life of the empire, her political maneuvers and countermaneuvers, her raw ambition, her vulnerability as well as her strengths, or the very human way in which she fought to build and preserve her husband’s and her own sovereign rights. Little in these biographies suggest that royal women played any crucial role in Mughal imperial life, let alone that one of them, Nur Jahan, was rewriting history.13

  Even into the late twentieth century, academics disparaged the legends about Nur as gossip, and leaned on love as the explanation for her extraordinary rise rather than attributing it to her talents. They dismissed Jahangir as an inebriated, ineffectual king, interested only in aesthetics, philosophy, and mind-altering substances, so besotted—with alcohol, opium, and Nur Jahan—that he handed over the running of his realm to her. Yes, the emperor was a drinker and he smoked opium. Yes, he was deeply in love with this wife. But that’s not why she became a ruler to be reckoned with.

  A key problem for twentieth-and twenty-first-century scholars has been that they’ve had no model for producing a layered social history of the Mughal world. They inherited a widely accepted caricature of a mysterious and unchanging harem that was supposed to represent the sum of Mughal private life. The following remarks on the Mughal harem and Nur Jahan, taken from a serious and sympathetic biography of the empress that came out in 1993, demonstrate the pervasive hold of that skewed representation:

  Finding a productive and satisfying place in a society where pleasure (in all its forms) was the main competitive commodity was a substantial task [for Mughal women] … the enjoyment of palace life was enhanced … by the frequent use of drugs and alcohol. Intemperance was the Mughal family’s main affliction, and despite public abjurations and the clear ban on the use of liquor by Islam, it remained not only a private curse but a public habit … Jahangir’s harem was, from all accounts, a rowdy and exuberant place to live and Nur Jahan’s fulsome charisma played out profitably against its many walls.14

  The more deeply I investigated the life and times of Nur Jahan—you can learn more about my methods and sources in the note at the end of the book—the more clearly I saw that the reasons for her rise were intriguingly complex, and that neither the popular legends nor conventional scholarly works fully tell her story.

  Carefully assessed, the unusual sources I used have yielded details that allow me to offer plausible answers to the two questions that come up again and again. How did she do it? I’m asked each time I teach or give a talk about Nur Jahan—the same query that was already familiar four centuries ago; the same sense of puzzlement at a woman’s supremacy. How did it happen back then, and in India? Many people—students, audiences at my public lectures in the West and the East, an enthusiastic undergrad who waited on me at a restaurant, friends in private discussions—find it difficult to picture a powerful woman rising in a seventeenth-century Muslim dynasty.

  But the common conception of past times as always more repressive and unenlightened than today is a misjudgment. Seventeenth-century India—the empire that called itself Hindustan, known to Persians and Arabs as Al-Hind, the land beyond the Indus River—had a surprising openness and diversity of religion and thought, despite the weight of patriarchy. During his reign, Akbar forcefully set in place an ethos of coexistence. The highly plural culture of Akbar’s India was one in which you could be Shi’a or Sunni Muslim and yet marvel at the esoteric messages of Sufi mysticism or Hindu asceticism, question Jesuits about the life of Jesus, or tease a youthful monk about the pleasures of the flesh, all of which Nur Jahan did. Nur, a Shi’a Muslim woman, married a Sunni king who had a Hindu mother and both Hindu and Muslim wives and concubines.15

  Of course, not all of Mughal life was benign; arbitrary rule was accompanied by acts of ferocity that would make subjects shudder with fear. A young Emperor Akbar, for example, dispatched a rebellious foster brother by having him tossed off a building, And in 1573, a year after Akbar had conquered and annexed the sultanate of Gujarat, he quelled a revolt there and ordered his men to make a minaret out of the heads of a thousand rebels who’d fallen in battle, as a warning against further insurrection.

  But Akbar’s general commitment to tolerance enabled the advent of new styles of sovereignty on which Jahangir and Nur would build. Ironically, though Akbar was the first Mughal to sequester women in a grand palace harem, his policies of openness allowed Nur to flourish.

  The personalities and circumstances of the people close to Nur helped shape her unprecedented rise. She became the ruler she was because of Jahangir’s strengths and weaknesses—and yes, his capacious and abiding affection and admiration for his wife. I certainly don’t intend to undo the imperial romance; Nur and Jahangir earned their love story. But other factors are just as important, perhaps more so. Nur’s parents were enlightened nobles who took great pains with their daughter’s education, which continued in Jahangir’s harem, where elder women mentored Nur. Life there was far richer and its matriarchs more politically astute than most accounts suggest. Her leadership skills deepened and broadened on the road. Jahangir admired the wandering lifestyle of the first Mughal emperor, Babur, and emulated it. He believed a sovereign should be constantly on the move throughout hi
s realm—observing, interacting, making notes, and taking stock—and Nur traveled with him on most of his journeys between 1611 and 1627. Jahangir’s penchant for the itinerant life meant more liberties for Nur and other women of the Mughal household. They came out of the walled quarters to which they’d been relegated by Akbar and into open country, where the tented harems of the royal encampments afforded them more freedom of mind and body.

  Jahangir’s mobility contributed to Nur’s co-sovereignty. Making his wife increasingly responsible for governing released the emperor from state duties and freed him to pursue his interest in nature, geography, art, and philosophy, though he remained the de jure ruler. Thomas Roe wasn’t terribly approving of the arrangement, which allowed Nur more power:

  I am yet followeing this wandering King over mountaynes and thorough woods, so strange and unused ways that his own people … blaspheame his name and hers that (it is said) conducts all his actions … I feare hee will not long stay any wher, whose course is directed by a woeman.16

  Perhaps it happened because the stars were aligned. In Nur and Jahangir’s world, all of human existence was bound up with the movement of the planets and other celestial objects. Royalty and common folk alike consulted seers and stars, judging auguries before embarking on journeys, scheduling weddings, naming newborns, and making peace with the end of a life. Mystics, dream interpreters, seers, and astrologers shaped Nur’s universe. According to these oracles, the planetary conjunctions seem to have been on her side from the moment of her birth.

  TWO

  Miracle Girl

  When a large comet passed startlingly close to Earth in the autumn and winter of 1577, astronomers, astrologers, philosophers, and monarchs all over Europe and Asia, including the Mughal emperor Akbar, were spellbound. The distinguished Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe made precise measurements of its path, findings later used by his student Johannes Kepler to formulate the laws of planetary motion.

  Known for his curiosity and open mind, thirty-five-year-old Emperor Akbar was in the twenty-first year of his reign when a comet, Zu-Zanab—literally, “possessed of a tail”—became visible in the skies over India, bright enough to be seen in daylight. The celestial body that Europeans called the Great Comet provoked intense discussion in Fatehpur-Sikri, then the Mughal capital. Akbar invited astrologers to give their opinion on the form, appearance, and effects of Zu-Zanab’s flight.

  Ancient Indian astrology books described more than a hundred kinds of comets, some possessing tails, others forelocks, that could herald both good and bad fortune in the countries they crossed. Akbar’s royal astrologer, Jotik Rai, informed him that Zu-Zanab had traveled over Tibet, western China, Turkestan, Farghana (a principality in Uzbekistan), and Khurasan province in northern Persia, modern-day Iran, where it was observable for eighty-five days. The comet would produce serious disturbances in those lands, Jotik Rai said. Persia especially would suffer. The astrologer’s predictions were confirmed early in the new year, when trusted visitors reported to Akbar that the Persian monarch Shah Tahmasp had died and his kingdom was suffering economic woes and bloody political upheaval.1

  What Akbar didn’t know was that the season of the comet had brought another momentous event, one that would someday affect the fate of his empire. On the road outside Kandahar, in what is now Afghanistan, a girl had been born to a couple leaving repressive Persia for Akbar’s empire, a land they hoped would be more welcoming to their liberal views on politics and religion. They were part of a caravan making the long and arduous journey to India along a stretch of the Silk Road, the ancient web of trade routes linking East and West. The baby arrived before the turn of the year, a Sagittarius or Capricorn entering a world where people believed that comets, eclipses, and arrangements of the zodiac shaped an individual’s disposition and attitudes. They called their daughter Mihr un-Nisa, “Sun of Women.”

  The Great Comet was glowing overhead when Ghiyas Beg and his wife, Asmat Begum, pregnant with Mihr, left their home in Herat, the capital of Persia’s Khurasan province, a vibrant commercial center at the crossroads of several major trade routes.2 Both were educated people from noble families, liberal members of the ruling class in a Persia where liberality went in and out of fashion and often contended with fundamentalism. Ghiyas, a trim man of twenty-two with gentle brown eyes, was considered exceptionally wise and open-minded, an expert letter-writer who loved poetry and historical prose. He and his wife, Asmat, described later in Mughal records as a lively, large-spirited woman, already had two sons and a daughter.3

  In India, the couple would become luminaries, with Ghiyas prominently discussed in the official archives of Akbar’s son, the Great Mughal Jahangir. (The first six Mughal emperors, through the end of Aurangzeb’s reign in 1707, are known as the Great Mughals, and the kings who followed and ruled until 1858 as “the later Mughals.” Europeans sometimes used the term Grand Mughal to describe each of the Greats.) Jahangir would praise his trusted and admired finance minister Ghiyas as capable, generous, and sincere, and bestow upon him the title I’timad ud-Daula, Pillar of the State. But when Ghiyas and Asmat left Persia, the future was uncertain.

  Mystery surrounds the precise troubles that forced their departure. Several sources echo the eighteenth-century account of a Mughal chronicler named Khafi Khan, who wrote, “After his father’s death, as a result of unfortunate circumstances, Ghiyas started for India as a fugitive …”4 What exactly were these unfortunate circumstances? We can’t be sure, but the historical evidence suggests several credible reasons for his departure.

  Ghiyas’s father died in 1576, the same year as Shah Tahmasp, whom Ghiyas had served as a highly valued revenue collector. Histories written long afterward suggest that without the financial support of his father, the young man had gone into debt. And without royal protection from Tahmasp, the freethinking Ghiyas most likely worried about the disfavor of the intolerant new shah, Isma’il II, son of Tahmasp. Imprisoned for years by his father, Isma’il II had succeeded him through murderous machinations in a short reign with a high body count. He died not long after Ghiyas left Persia, poisoned, some suspect, by rivals for the crown.

  When Isma’il II became shah, a centuries-old tradition of religious pluralism and harmonious coexistence, maintained to some degree during most of Tahmasp’s fifty-two-year reign, even in periods of repression, gave way to ever more rigid official intolerance. Ghiyas’s leanings were liberal and rational. He might reasonably have thought his life was in danger, debt or no debt.

  An acceptance of diversity had marked the first three hundred years of Persia’s Safavid dynasty, which evolved from a thirteenth-century order of Sufis, tolerant Muslim mystics. The rulers who descended from the order’s founder respected a variety of faiths, and all had prospered: mystics, Sunni and Shi’a Muslims (differing then, as now, over who were the rightful heirs to the Prophet Muhammad and thus the appropriate leaders of the Muslim community), Turkish tribes that practiced animism, and Armenians and other Christians.

  Gradually, however, the Safavid rulers became less accepting and more militant. Shah Isma’il I, who ruled during the first two decades of the sixteenth century, proclaimed himself to be divine, a rightful successor to Muhammad, and established Shi’ism as the only legitimate basis for the kingdom’s social-political order. Sunni religious institutions weren’t entirely wiped out, but they lost their endowments from the state, and many Sunni clergymen and legal experts were executed or exiled. Over time, Isma’il I became so severe about what he considered to be the principles of righteousness and lawfulness that he cut off the hands of anyone playing a musical instrument.5

  The Safavid state under Isma’il I singled out anyone sympathetic to religious practices other than Shi’ism and punished them with public chastisement, prison, or death. Sufism, which emphasizes a direct, personal experience of God, was officially discouraged, though its practice continued in private. Since the founding of the Safavid dynasty, rigidity and freedom had always existed simultaneously,
though the ratios were sometimes wildly skewed toward repression. A town would have its mosques—and its opium dens. A mullah might denounce Sufism from the pulpit, then debate one of its practitioners over coffee.

  Under Isma’il’s successor, Tahmasp, Persia offered more opportunities for experimentation in literature and thought, despite some official intolerance. Ghiyas and Asmat, born into cultured and educated noble families, were raised in an atmosphere of intellectual pursuit and inquiry, where reflection and interpretation were valued. Men of the upper classes gathered to eat, drink, recite poetry, and talk politics. Aristocratic women, highly accomplished in the arts of reading, writing, and calligraphy, were also likely to share with one another poetry they had composed. In groups they might shop for clothing and lace in the marketplace and visit the hammam, the bathhouse, where they could laugh together, share secrets, mull over marital problems, and speak frankly about sex. Men and women would discuss literature: epics, fables, poetry, accounts of travel, stories of territorial rivalry and battles among the rulers, with their claims and counterclaims of cultural supremacy. Although social interaction was largely segregated by sex, respectable men and women might mix at family dinners, picnics, or musical gatherings at home, with wine and song.6

  With both his father and Tahmasp gone, however, Ghiyas appears to have felt this way of life was threatened. An understandable next step would be to head for India. For more than two hundred years, Persians seeking economic opportunity or protection from persecution had left for wealthier, more tolerant Al-Hind. Adventurers sought their fortunes in the diamond mines of the Deccan, the plateau between northern and southern India. Traders sailed between ports in the Indian Ocean; Sufis practiced in peace; poets composed eulogies for Indian patrons from Bengal to Kashmir. The transplants also included craftsmen, soldiers, sages, theologians, physicians, calligraphers, musicians, dramatists, and dignitaries. According to one scholarly estimate, from 1501 to 1722, 750 Persian poets relocated to India.7 During that same period, Persian migrants with expertise in mathematics, astronomy, history, ethics, logic, metaphysics, and statecraft advised Indian monarchs.