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  Rahim, whose father once served as Akbar’s vice regent, was a poet, translator, courtier, and commander. After the death of his father, Rahim’s stepmother, Salimeh Begum, married her cousin, Emperor Akbar. A woman of distinguished lineage—she was the granddaughter of the first Mughal—Salimeh was sensible and savvy. Rahim and Salimeh Begum would become important figures in the lives of Mihr and Quli.

  The Mughal Army prevailed, but the defeated ruler of Sind delayed his formal capitulation. Then the rains came, and the Mughal Army ran short of provisions. In battle and afterward, a modern historian writes, Quli distinguished himself by his “valor, courage and intrepidity.”6 The Mughal forces finally consolidated their victory and headed for Lahore, by then the new Mughal capital.7 Rahim recommended the heroic Quli for a government position.8

  Around this time, mentions of Quli’s political career began to show up in public records.9 Ghiyas probably took note of the young man’s rising prospects. He would have heard about Quli’s bravery in Sind, and may have felt sympathetic toward a Persian adventurer who had escaped the dangers of persecution in Iran and sought a better life in India, as Ghiyas and his family had done fifteen years earlier.

  The daring Quli seemed a suitable match for a bright and accomplished young woman like Mihr. Ghiyas would have first broached the subject with Asmat and then proposed it to Mihr. When Mihr accepted her parents’ wishes, Ghiyas, or an intermediary, spoke to Quli.

  On the night before the wedding, women of the family and neighborhood would color Mihr’s hands and feet with henna designs. They would then lay a white cloth on the floor, east to west, facing Mecca. On it would be placed a mirror sent by Quli—“the mirror of happiness.”10

  With no relatives nearby, Quli would come to Ghiyas’s house the next day accompanied by friends, advisers, and associates, most of them likely fellow members of the migrant Iranian community. Ghiyas would receive the prospective husband, embrace him, and lead him to a large room lined with divans and gold-embroidered cushions where other male guests had assembled. Men and women sat in separate areas of the room, with the carved screen between them. On the women’s side, a platter sent by Quli to Mihr would display wild rue, incense, sugar, a small sack of henna, a cake of soap, and a loaf of sengek bread—leavened dough made on a bed of stones, inscribed in gold or red with a wish for happiness. Asmat would have added a handful of nuts.

  The Quran, a prayer rug, the platter, and the mirror of happiness set the stage for the marriage contract. Two mullahs, one representing Quli and the other Mihr, would come in and sit in the men’s section of the room. Addressing Mihr through the screen, one of the mullahs would ask if she consented to the marriage. Asmat and her sisters, sitting close by, would provide moral and, if necessary, physical support. After a prescribed modest pause and polite prompting, Mihr would say “yes,” or simply nod. The women sitting next to Mihr would serve as witnesses, confirming her assent. Then the mullah would ask Mihr whether she had received the agreed-upon marriage settlement. When Mihr uttered the word “yes,” the mullah would have asked her whether she authorized him to marry her to Quli. Once she said yes again, the two mullahs would face each other and pronounce blessings; all the guests, women and men, would express joy and bless the newlyweds, sitting across from each other with the screen still between them. Women would immediately offer sugared almonds to Mihr, which she would crunch and swallow with her eyes closed. When she opened her eyes, she’d make sure to look upon a little boy among the guests, a ritual meant to ensure that her firstborn would be a boy.11

  The screen would be taken away, and Mihr’s mother and sisters would formally introduce her to Quli. He would sit next to her, gazing at her reflection in “the mirror of happiness” rather than looking at her directly. With wild rue burning in a brazier in a corner of the room to ward off evil, the family and guests would shower the couple with handfuls of sugared almonds and coins; women would rush forward to retrieve the coins. Quli would honor his first direct look at his wife by presenting her with a jewel.

  Legends and later histories suggest an interesting twist in the story of Mihr’s marriage, involving an alleged attraction between the young Mihr and the future emperor Jahangir, then Prince Salim.

  A seventeenth-century khyat, a genre that blurred the court chronicle with the katha or popular tale, written in the land of the raja of Jodhpur in western India, had this to say: “The emperor Jahangir, when still a prince, had an amour with Nur Mahal [Mihr un-Nisa], a daughter of Itmad Dola and sister of Asap Khan.”12 (The writer used a local version of the title that Ghiyas was later known by, and Mihr’s brother’s name, Asaf.)

  In the early eighteenth century, when Khafi Khan was at the forefront of retailing magical versions of Mihr’s birth, he wrote that she had often visited the Mughal palace with her mother. Prince Salim, Khan said, pursued Mihr relentlessly during these visits. Once he found her alone in a secluded corner and caught hold of her hands to express his love. Taken aback, she freed herself and complained to royal ladies of rank. Learning of the episode, Emperor Akbar instructed Ghiyas to marry off his daughter immediately, and suggested the bridegroom—Ali Quli. As soon as the wedding took place, Akbar granted Quli land rights in Bengal and dispatched him to that distant province.13

  The nineteenth-century British sailor turned Mughal historian Alexander Dow told yet another variation in his History of Hindostan. One day, wrote Dow, Salim visited Ghiyas’s home. Honored guests were invited to dine. “Wine was brought on the table, the ladies, according to custom, were introduced in their veils.” As soon as Mihr appeared, Salim was taken by “her stature, her shape, her gait …” Mihr sang, and Salim was enraptured. “When his eyes seemed to devour her, she, as by accident, dropt her veil; and shone upon him, at once, with all her charms.… her timid eyes … fell upon the Prince, and kindled all his soul into love.” He was silent for the remaining part of the evening, “distracted with his passion.” He didn’t know what to do. Mihr had already been betrothed to Quli, a “nobleman of great renown.” Salim pleaded with Akbar, who refused to undo Mihr’s engagement, even in favor of the heir to his throne. The prince “retired abashed,” concludes Dow, and Mihr became the wife of Ali Quli.14

  As these legends have it, Salim’s passion for Mihr, established in his youth, remained unquenchable. Mountstuart Elphinstone, an administrator in the government of British India, repeated this assertion in his 1858 History of India, including the story still told in India today, about Prince Salim giving Nur two pigeons to hold, which she frees, thus capturing his heart.15 Another volume published in the late nineteenth century, Syed Muhammad Latif’s History of the Panjab, presented the most elaborate retelling of the legend—full-blown episodes that included animated discussions between Mihr and her parents at the time of her wedding to Quli.

  Asmat, Latif wrote, was in favor with Prince Salim’s mother and often visited the palace accompanied by her young daughter. Mihr, “happy in mind, and endowed with all the charms of beauty and unstudied grace of movement, used to amuse the kind-hearted queen with the dances of her native land and the songs … [she had] a thousand charms, a thousand attractions.” One day, as she was dancing, Prince Salim entered the royal apartments. “The eyes of the two met. Salem [sic] was fascinated by the graces of her person, no less than by her sprightly wit. The attachment was mutual.”

  Although Mihr was already betrothed to Quli, Salim met her at her mother’s house on several occasions and found opportunities to court her, according to Latif. His behavior disturbed Asmat, who spoke to the prince’s mother. Through her the matter reached the emperor. Salim longed to marry Mihr and petitioned his father for permission. But Akbar was “too honorable a man to commit such an injustice” to his valued minister Ghiyas, who had already arranged his daughter’s marriage to Quli. The emperor recommended to Asmat that the wedding take place as soon as possible. Mihr “had no voice in her own destiny,” Latif wrote. She warned her parents and one of her brothers that, by refusing h
er marriage to the prince, they would “incur the wrath” of Salim, who was cruel in his revenge. “In vain did she plead that his whole happiness depended on this marriage, as did hers. In vain did she point out that she had no fear of Jodha Bai, Prince Salem’s principle [sic] wife, and that she would mold Salem like wax in her fingers.” Nothing worked. Mihr was married to Quli and “the young but dangerous beauty was removed to a distance from her royal lover, the bridegroom taking her away to his manor in Bardwan.”16

  The legends differ in their details: Mihr and Salim had or hadn’t met in their early youth. She was betrothed to Quli before she met Salim or after Salim fell in love with her. Akbar the Great was a ferocious disciplinarian, a just king, or both. But the legends agree: Salim was bewitched by Mihr.

  In 1594, Mihr married Ali Quli, and they departed for the town of Burdwan in the distant eastern province of Bengal. As Mihr left her father’s haveli with her new husband, she stepped over the threshold into the world of the householder. Like her mother, she would now be in charge of her own home. In keeping with the tradition of loyal wet nurses, Dai Dilaram, now middle-aged, would accompany Mihr, supporting her as she began a new life in a land rich with rivers, far more verdant, lush, and wild than her childhood home.

  They set off east toward Bengal from Agra, along the ancient Grand Trunk Road, a well-traveled route that followed the sinuous Yamuna River. Covered coaches drawn by oxen would protect them from bad weather, driving them past villages set among groves of neem and mango trees that gave pleasant shade to travelers. Mihr, Quli, and their attendants traversed the doab, the richly cultivated land between the two great rivers, Ganga and Yamuna. On limestone columns placed at regular intervals along the road were warnings posted against pillaging. Traveling in the 1640s, the Portuguese priest Sebastien Manrique reported seeing piles of heads on the roadside and bodies hanging from the trees, punishments for robbery. The terrain was likely just as dangerous when Mihr and Quli made their journey, though as a military officer, Quli would have been armed.

  After a fifteen-to-twenty-day journey of three hundred miles, Mihr and Quli would reach Allahabad, at the confluence of the Yamuna and the Ganga. There, or perhaps at the holy Hindu city of Banaras 75 miles beyond, or still farther east at the city of Patna in Bihar, the province where Buddha achieved enlightenment, the party would switch from coaches to boats. In a comfortable vessel with a canopy, powered by oarsmen, they would make their way on the nourishing waters of the wide, slow Ganga. It was still another 200 miles or so from Patna to the border of Bengal. Even though they had carefully planned the journey and carried imperial documents sanctioning passage along the river, there would have been delays. Along the way, exhaustion would give rise to anxious questions and revive memories. Mihr may have worried about what her new life would be like, far from Agra; perhaps Dilaram recalled the onerous journey that Mihr’s parents took from Iran to India, prompting Quli to discuss his own adventures when he left Iran and joined Rahim in Sind.

  More than a month after leaving Agra, the couple would arrive in Rajmahal, the capital of Bengal. From their boat, they would see crowds of people in ferries, traders in vessels, and, as a European visitor to Rajmahal wrote, “floating mansions, anchored in due order … in regular streets as it were, thus making an attractive and beautiful City.”17

  Under Mughal administrative control since 1586, Bengal had become a province of the empire only in 1594, the year of Mihr and Quli’s arrival. Quli would know Raja Man Singh, the first Mughal Bengal governor, a leading minister in Akbar’s court. It was important that Quli stop at Man Singh’s headquarters in Rajmahal before the couple set off for Burdwan, about 150 miles farther south. Establishing a good relationship with the governor was vital to the success of provincial officers like Quli. Although the emperor made all appointments, it was the duty of the governor, far from the center of the Mughal court in Lahore and Agra, to ensure that officers worked faithfully and in accordance with imperial directives.

  Then it was on to Burdwan. Located on the northern bank of the river Damodar, seventy miles northwest of today’s Calcutta/Kolkata, Burdwan was an important military outpost on the frontier of Mughal territory.18 It was from Burdwan that the Mughals had marched to seize Bengal, formerly ruled by the Afghans. The Damodar essentially marked the Mughal administrative boundary. To the south of the river was the territory of the raja of Bishnupur, who enjoyed virtual independence even though he was formally a subordinate ally of the Mughals. Other parts of Bengal—the tribal areas west of Burdwan, the cities of Dhaka and Chittagong to the east, the beautiful mangrove forests of the Sundarbans, home of the Bengal tiger, farther southeast—had various and fluid arrangements with the Mughal government.

  When Quli and Mihr arrived in Burdwan, the town had a fort, a mosque, a bazaar, and the tomb of a Sufi saint, Bahram Sakka, a humble water-carrier who had gained Akbar’s admiration. The emperor gave Sakka the village of Faqirpur, near Burdwan. He died some thirty years before the newlyweds’ arrival. Mihr must have been moved by the villagers’ tales of Sakka’s benevolence, and by the message inscribed on his tomb: “The rich should, according to the injunction of the Koran, with pleasure, help orphans, beggars, the afflicted and the homeless.”19 Mihr returned periodically to Sakka’s tomb after leaving Burdwan, and later in her life would take it upon herself to help hundreds of orphan girls successfully arrange marriages.

  The Damodar River was fordable only in the dry season. For much of the year, people crossed in small boats. Come the rains, the embankments would break and floodwaters creep into the mosques and temples, the bazaar, and the earthen residences of Burdwan’s inhabitants. Swampy, stagnant pools formed along the river, breeding mosquitos.

  Mihr and Quli’s home would be like other havelis in the region, known as bangala or chauchala in Bengali. Some thirty miles east of Burdwan were large settlements of Muslims, the most prominent in the Padua and Hugli areas. Revenue collectors, learned men, merchants, and ex-soldiers lived there, and it’s likely that Quli and Mihr did too. The houses of the elite, both Muslim and Hindu, were built from a combination of bamboo, the wood of the betel-nut tree, and, rarely, sun-dried bricks, some reaching as high as three stories. Spacious and beautiful, with multiple halls, the houses were flat-roofed; they had gardens with covered walks and walls to protect the residents from foxes and tigers. Mihr’s new mansion would be commodious, with clean reservoirs of water for bathing. A few bangalas had hammams, hot baths—“a rare luxury in Bengal.”20

  As part of their compensation for administrative duties and revenue collection, Mughal officers like Quli were given jagir lands, areas under their personal supervision. On their own lands, jagirdars were free to conduct matters as they liked—“free to rule, and free to oppress” tenants and farmers, as one historian put it—raising their taxes, even seizing their sons and daughters.21

  Bengali landowners squeezed the peasantry, especially at the time of annual revenue collection. In addition, the imperial government levied taxes of all kinds: on exports and imports, on the shops of workmen and retail merchants in towns, on temporary stalls in pilgrim bazaars. An inland toll collected at roadside and riverbank stations, an additional financial burden, became a big nuisance. The profusion of taxes and the multitude of officers (some without specific office) meant constant confusion for travelers and local people.

  Even in remote provinces like Bengal, the Mughal emperor, not the governor, was the ultimate authority, and relations between Akbar and provincial officers were almost always direct. From time to time, he sent his personal agent to bestow money, horses, imperial robes, and other honors as a token of his recognition of a man’s work. And if there were cases of disobedience or neglect among his officers, the emperor meted out punishment. The governor sent progress reports to the sovereign, but officers were also eager to inform the emperor of their own exploits—suppressing a local rebellion, perhaps, or successfully collecting taxes—sometimes sending substantial gifts along with their updat
es.

  So employees of the Mughal court stationed in Bengal looked to two epicenters: Rajmahal and the Mughal capital. Officers visited these cities in person periodically, in pursuit of approval or advancement—and longing for a transfer to a less isolated area. Quli made trips to the provincial and imperial capitals; he was deeply caught up in news and rumors from both centers. The entanglement would grow more intense with the rebellion of one of the emperor’s sons, an insurrection that was to shape the end of Quli and Mihr’s years in Bengal.

  Relations between the Mughals and the province of Bengal were far from stable. The imperial officers serving there were exclusively non-Bengali, both Indian and non-Indian. Except for a few of the local landed elite who were incorporated into Mughal service and could be required to participate in military campaigns, no Bengali was assigned a number in the emperor’s numerical ranking system. So imperial officials were, to quote a Bengal historian, “nothing more than a body of foreigners who came to this province only as sojourners and went back at the end of their terms of service.”22 Often, there were clashes between imperial officers and the local Bengali officers.

  The region was warm through most of the year. No more freezing winters, as in Lahore or Agra; no more crisp evenings near the time of Diwali, the Hindu festival of lights celebrated in autumn. In Bengal, sultry temperatures and high humidity during the rains meant changes in the way Mihr and Quli dressed. The local people wore mostly cool cotton. Quli would have been most comfortable in trousers and a kabaya, a knee-length robe that folded around the neck and closed with knots down the front. Mihr dressed in flowing cotton drawers, trousers, and blouses, with a light cotton head cover. Dilaram’s attire would be similar. The couple’s diet would change too. Bengalis ate more rice—cultivated extensively in the province—fish, herbs, lemons, and vegetables than Mihr’s family had in Agra; green chilies soaked in vinegar were a regional specialty.