Empress Read online

  Persians had long had a place in Mughal courts. In 1540, Emperor Humayun, Akbar’s father and the second Great Mughal, was driven into exile by an Afghan ruler. Akbar was born on the road after the emperor, his family, and his retinue fled. Eventually they were given refuge in Persia by Shah Tahmasp. When Humayun successfully fought to reclaim his throne fifteen years later, he was accompanied by a number of Persians. And when Akbar succeeded his father, he welcomed Persian artists, craftsmen, poets, scholars, and philosophers to his court, and encouraged Persians to join his imperial service.

  Though people moved from India to Persia, most migration was in the other direction (and there’s no evidence that any Indian gained a significant position at the Safavid court). One good reason for the discrepancy was that Mughal India, Hindustan—today’s north and central India, modern Pakistan and Bangladesh, and parts of Afghanistan—was one of the world’s wealthiest states. Its fertile agricultural lands supported nearly 100 million people in the 1600s, a population matched only by Ming China. A range of export commodities brought a flow of foreign currency into the Indian ports.8

  The Safavids, on the other hand, controlled a massive swath of rugged land—the territory of modern-day Iran, northwest Afghanistan, and parts of Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan—that was populated by no more than 10 million people and not terribly productive. Though silk and silk thread were the region’s principal and greatly valued exports, basic food items such as rice and sugar and spices, as well as cotton and indigo, came to Iran from India.

  At the time Ghiyas and his family left Persia, migration to India had become even more attractive. Akbar’s court had acquired the distinction of being dar-al-aman, the abode of peace, a place of refuge. In the second half of the sixteenth century, leaving Persia for India meant not only material comfort but the hope of freedom of thought.9

  While the move might have offered better prospects, it must have been wrenching. To ease the anguish of farewells, a very pregnant Asmat, a concerned Ghiyas Beg, and their anxious but supportive friends and relatives would have shared a ritual series of elaborate meals, discussing the journey and expressing faith in the divine as the children played and servants scurried about. Ghiyas’s cousin Shapur, who had visited India twice on business, would have been present, describing the atmosphere and promise of the Mughal world. The couple wouldn’t find it such an alien place; Persian culture and customs thrived in Al-Hind. Akbar’s poet laureate Abul Faiz “Faizi” claimed that Mughal mastery of Persian language and culture rivaled that of Persia itself.10 In Al-Hind there would be relatives and associates to help Ghiyas; an uncle of Asmat’s had already distinguished himself by fighting an important and successful campaign on behalf of Akbar against local rulers in western India, and he’d put in a good word for his nephew-in-law. But first, the couple had a journey of several months ahead of them.

  Caravans were a common mode of travel in sixteenth-century Iran, Central Asia, and India. The cavalcades of kings stretched over several miles and included family members, courtiers, soldiers, and servants, with camels, horses, and elephants by the thousands carrying tents and provisions for huge encampments that replicated the royal court. Traders carried goods by caravan, and sometimes travelers joined those commercial caravans. That’s what Ghiyas, Asmat, their children, and their servants did.

  According to Khafi Khan’s eighteenth-century account of Mihr’s birth, a merchant named Malik Masud led the caravan in which Ghiyas and Asmat traveled. Horses, mules, and camels carried saddlebags or pulled carts packed with merchandise as well as tents, supplies, and grain for the animals. Travelers replenished their store of water along the way. Masud probably followed one of the well-known trade routes established by Arab explorers between the eighth and eleventh centuries. The most conspicuous indicator of the route that Ghiyas and Asmat took is the one detail of their journey that contemporary and later historians agree on: Nur Jahan was born outside the city of Kandahar, 350 miles southeast of Herat.

  Herat was surrounded by a wall with five gates. The caravan led by Masud no doubt exited from the Kandahar Gate to the south, crossed the Hari Rud River, then moved through low hills and gently sloping valleys with springs and rivers, vineyards, cotton fields, and farms and orchards that supplied melons and apples to India.11

  Anyone who encountered Ghiyas, Asmat, and their children on the road would know they were aristocrats. If their formal dignity, elegant clothing, and soft, nimble speech didn’t make that clear, their status would be obvious from the presence of the attendants who would have traveled with them.

  Moving south, the caravan would cross the Great Salt Desert, blistering during the summer and desolate all year. Its scorching winds would have given them a preview of India’s summer heat. Eventually they’d come to the town of Adraskand, a well-cultivated area with plenty of sweet water—an excellent resting place. Caravan travelers determined their halting points by how far a camel could go in a day. A decade or so after Ghiyas and Asmat’s journey through these parts, the next Persian monarch built a number of caravanserais, roadside inns, on the way to Kandahar. Given the importance of this trade route, some caravanserais likely existed even at the time of Asmat and Ghiyas’s passage. But most often travelers camped in open country, pitching their tents near water, under the shade of trees or in a garden, depending on the season.

  The caravan probably passed alongside the lakes and marshes of the fertile Sistan region, where the travelers would have seen, in the distance, houses made of clay. Masud may have led his party on through Bust, a depository for wares in transit to India, and found a camping spot close to the Helmand River, not far from Kandahar, a pleasant area but dangerously isolated. Attacks by thieves were not uncommon on these journeys. Caravans were often robbed of supplies, merchandise, and animals by bandits armed with swords and known to wound and even murder travelers. Father Bento de Goes, a Jesuit missionary, wrote in the early sixteenth century that while traveling on horseback through Northwest Afghanistan, he lagged behind his caravan and was approached by four riders. When he realized they were robbers, the missionary tossed a costly turban as far away as he could. As the thieves quarreled over this prize, Father de Goes spurred his horse and sped away. A little farther on, his group was attacked again, by a different set of robbers. That time, several travelers were killed.12

  Everyone in the caravan with Ghiyas and Asmat, the aristocratic men, women, and children who rode and the servants and tradesmen who walked, would be tired and their animals exhausted. As remedies for fatigue, travelers ate garlic, onions, and dried apricots, and fed them to their animals. Sometimes burdened horses and mules in a caravan suffered to such an extent that they collapsed on the journey. Spare camels and horses traveling without loads came in handy.

  Just before Masud’s caravan crossed the Helmand, legend has it, they were set upon by brigands, and Ghiyas and Asmat lost everything they owned except for a couple of mules. The historical records don’t say whether Masud’s caravan traveled with guards who fought the thieves, whether anyone died in the skirmish, or whether there was a skirmish at all. If there was an attack, a shaken Ghiyas would have had to restock supplies along the way.

  Asmat’s due date was approaching, making the journey potentially more perilous. As an Iranian saying had it, “From the day of conception on, a woman has one foot in this world and one foot in the other.” To ward off accidents during pregnancy, folk wisdom suggested, women should sew a few seeds of wheat or millet and a gold coin into a piece of cloth, and keep the sachet with them all the time.13

  Somewhere just short of Kandahar, Asmat delivered her baby, a girl. The birth was most likely attended by a small band of servants, including a midwife, perhaps Dai Dilaram, the woman who would serve as Mihr’s wet nurse and remain with her when she became Empress Nur Jahan. The servants would have erected a separate tent or enclosure to ensure privacy for Asmat. Men weren’t allowed to view or help with the birth of a child; the code of modesty required that only wome
n be present.

  If she followed the custom of the day, Dai Dilaram would have asked Asmat to squat facing in the direction of Mecca with a large copper platter containing a little dirt beneath her, so that the newborn child would immediately come into contact with the earth. Asmat, already a mother three times over, would be familiar with all the necessary rituals of birth. Dai Dilaram would tie the umbilical cord with a thread and cut it, then clean and purify the baby with a ritual bath and wrap her in a white cloth, as prescribed in Islam for both male and female newborns. (In death too, the body was covered in white, marking the completion of a life cycle.) Dai Dilaram would then assure others outside the tent, Ghiyas and well-wishers, that mother and baby were fine. Hearing the news, Ghiyas would have offered prayers of thanks for the safe arrival of his new daughter, Mihr un-Nisa. A beautiful infant in all legendary accounts, she surely brought a moment of pleasure to the caravan community amid the hardships of the road.

  Besides her parentage and her name, only one thing is certain about Mihr’s birth: She entered the world outside Kandahar in the winter of 1577, on the road to India. During her time as empress and after, in chronicles and legends, several key embellishments were added to the tale. By the eighteenth century, three fascinatingly different versions of her birth story had been published, each revealing a great deal about the teller and his times (the writers were all men), including prevailing attitudes about politics, gender, and religion.

  Niccolao Manucci was an Italian who came to India in 1653, eight years after Mihr/Nur’s death, and spent nearly sixty years there as an artilleryman, foreign correspondent, linguist, and quack doctor; he claimed to have been the chief physician of the last Great Mughal, Aurangzeb, though he had no formal medical training. Fascinated by tales of Nur’s birth and accomplishments, Manucci decided that the model for the narrative of Empress Nur’s nativity should be nothing less than “The Flight into Egypt,” the famous story of Jesus’s infancy told in the Gospel of Matthew and employed as a potent motif by European painters. In Manucci’s 1705 Storia Do Mogor (History of the Mughals), he wrote:

  I was anxious to find out about the descent of this queen, and I came to know for a certainty that she was the daughter of a Persian who arrived from Persia as a camel-driver in the service of some Armenian merchants. He brought with him his wife, who was enceinte. On the way, near the fortress of Candar [Kandahar], she was delivered of a child, and one of the merchants lent him an ass on which to convey the woman in that state of distress. The child that was born in that miserable plight came to be this famous queen (Nur Jahan).14

  The image of Ghiyas leading a donkey bearing a pregnant Asmat brings to mind the biblical passage in which Saint Joseph, fleeing the murderous King Herod, guides the Virgin Mary and baby Jesus to safety in Egypt. Lively, shrewd, and observant, Manucci, a devout Catholic, was aware that this episode in the life of Jesus was well known in India. Not only did Jesuit visitors to the Mughal capital tell the story, but artists in the court of Jahangir copied the engravings and woodcuts of Albrecht Dürer, including Flight into Egypt, which depicts the scene.15

  More than 150 years after Nur’s birth, the rather eccentric, quick-witted trade agent turned Mughal chronicler, the aforementioned Khafi Khan, popularized a more melodramatic version of Nur’s birth, adding a shocking detail. In his telling, Ghiyas and Asmat made a desperate decision when their daughter was born. Fearful that they wouldn’t be able to provide for the newborn because they’d been robbed, they abandoned her by the roadside in the dead of night. In the morning, the caravan leader Masud, wandering up and down to oversee arrangements, spotted her by chance. Struck by her beauty and moved by her helplessness, he picked her up. Then, searching for a nurse in the caravan, he noticed Asmat, and (knowingly or unknowingly) gave Nur back to her mother.16

  Khafi’s vivid tale of abandonment resonated with readers of his day. Other writers picked it up, adding flourishes with each new telling. One such embellishment came from Alexander Dow (1739–1779), a Scottish sailor who was five years old when Khafi died in India. Dow made his way to Bengal, serving on a private warship. Charmed by the eastern world, he wrote a history of India, based upon a well-known Persian text, to which he added a dissertation on the Brahmanic religion, an ancient form of Hinduism, and an appendix on the last forty years of the Mughal Empire. These works shaped early British views of India.17

  In the third volume of his History of Hindostan, published in 1772, Dow presented the story of Nur’s birth for the first time in English, adding new details to the account of her abandonment. Dow was heir to traditions in which great historical figures showed signs of distinction from the cradle, accompanied by miracles and marks of wonder:

  To carry the child was impossible [because of their circumstances].… A long contest began between humanity and necessity: the latter prevailed and they agreed to expose the child on the highway. The infant, covered with leaves, was placed under a tree; the disconsolate parents proceeded in tears. When they had advanced a mile from the place … [Asmat] gave way to grief; and throwing herself from the horse on the ground, exclaimed, “My child! My child!” … [Ghiyas] was pierced to the heart … He promised to bring her the infant. He arrived at the place. No sooner had his eyes reached the child, than he was almost struck dead with horror. A black snake … was coiled around it … extending his fatal jaws to devour the infant. The father rushed forward. The serpent, alarmed at his vociferation, retired into the hollow tree. He took up his daughter unhurt, and returned to the mother. He gave her child into her arms; and, as he was informing her of the wonderful escape of the infant, some travellers appeared, and soon relieved them of all their wants.18

  The snake survived as a popular ingredient in most of the colonial writings about Nur that followed Dow’s. In movies made before and after Indian independence from British colonial rule, Nur’s abandonment, the snake, and her rescue, became enduring motifs.

  An Italian quack doctor, an Indian courtier, a Scottish adventurer—each wrote of Nur Jahan’s remarkable birth. The Catholic mercenary Manucci was interested in an imitation of Christ. For Khafi, the Indo-Persian tales of migration and a man’s compassion for his wife were dominant. Alexander Dow and the early colonial writers who followed him were enchanted by a romantic image of India, that land of wonders, surprises—and snake charmers. In our time, tour guides from Lahore to New Delhi bring additional elements to the saga of Nur’s birth—for example, that light radiated from her baby face, in keeping with both her birth name and the one Jahangir would give her.

  THREE

  Al-Hind

  Several months after Mihr was born outside Kandahar, the family crossed the Indus River into Al-Hind. In late 1578, Ghiyas, Asmat, baby Mihr, and her siblings reached the city of Lahore, the major entry point to the Mughal Empire for those coming from the northwest.1 Then, as now, two major routes led from Kandahar to Lahore, one via the Khyber Pass through the Spīn Ghar Mountains; the other via the Bolan Pass through the Toba Kakur range.

  Ringed by the river Ravi in the agricultural region of Punjab, Lahore, today part of modern Pakistan, was earning a reputation as a grand and prosperous Mughal city. Akbar sometimes used it as a seat of government; he’d ordered the fort rebuilt in brick and stone on the foundations of an older mud structure, and other splendid buildings, guesthouses, and pilgrimage centers were erected. Lahore’s bustling bazaars and delightful gardens, the potpourri of languages and cultures, added to its appeal.2

  Newcomers to Lahore commonly found temporary lodging with relatives or others from their country. In most Indian towns and cities of this time, nobles and landlords opened their homes not only to visiting relatives and friends but also to travelers, merchants, workers, job seekers, servants, and the poor, though the patron’s family usually reserved a substantial part of the residences for private use.3 Some lodgers stayed for free, some paid rent, and some worked for their room and board.

  Ghiyas and Asmat were introduced by their caravan leade
r to a Persian man living in Lahore who made arrangements for the family to stay in a mansion near the fort.4 That would be their home until the time was right for the final leg of the journey to Emperor Akbar’s court in Fatehpur-Sikri, 350 miles to the southeast, near Agra, the former capital.

  Merchants congregated outside the fort—some who plied the Agra-Lahore axis, a lucrative route, and some who came in caravans from the northwest selling Iraqi horses, silk thread, and muskmelons. An official in Akbar’s court called Lahore a “resort of people of all countries whose manufactures present an astonishing display and it is beyond measure remarkable in populous-ness and extent.”5 Asmat and Ghiyas would have walked along streets crowded with houses, perhaps exploring the bazaars that pulsated with energy, packed with buyers, sellers, and passersby exchanging greetings and news. One section of the bazaar, a series of intricate lanes, was set aside for women only. Women took their time gazing at the bold patterns and colorful embroidery on the finest muslins, silks, and velvets. Many wore flowers in their hair, and toe rings and anklets with charms or little bells, and chewed betel leaf to redden their lips. Married women wore maang, red color in the parting of their hair; or the sekra, seven or more strings of pearls that hung from a band at the forehead; or the laung, a clove-shaped stud ornamenting the nose.