The Emperor Who Never Was

Dara Shukoh in Mughal India

Supriya Gandhi

• Publisher: Belknap Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780674243910
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia de la India y el sur de Asia

The definitive biography of the eldest son of Emperor Shah Jahan, whose death at the hands of his younger brother Aurangzeb changed the course of South Asian history. Dara Shukoh was the eldest son of Shah Jahan, the fifth Mughal emperor, best known for commissioning the Taj Mahal as a mausoleum for his beloved wife Mumtaz Mahal. Although the Mughals did not practice primogeniture, Dara, a Sufi who studied Hindu thought, was the presumed heir to the throne and prepared himself to be India's next ruler. In this exquisite narrative biography, the most comprehensive ever written, Supriya Gandhi draws on archival sources to tell the story of the four brothers—Dara, Shuja, Murad, and Aurangzeb—who with their older sister Jahanara Begum clashed during a war of succession. Emerging victorious, Aurangzeb executed his brothers, jailed his father, and became the sixth and last great Mughal. After Aurangzeb's reign, the Mughal Empire began to disintegrate. Endless battles with rival rulers depleted the royal coffers, until by the end of the seventeenth century Europeans would start gaining a foothold along the edges of the subcontinent.Historians have long wondered whether the Mughal Empire would have crumbled when it did, allowing European traders to seize control of India, if Dara Shukoh had ascended the throne. To many in South Asia, Aurangzeb is the scholastic bigot who imposed a strict form of Islam and alienated his non-Muslim subjects. Dara, by contrast, is mythologized as a poet and mystic. Gandhi's nuanced biography gives us a more complex and revealing portrait of this Mughal prince than we have ever had.

1

EMPIRE

1615–1622

JAHANGIR, THE “WORLD CONQUEROR,” had barely finished moving his court from Agra to Ajmer when he decided to go hunting. It was the end of November 1613. The forty-five-year-old emperor mounted his horse and rode with his entourage to a large water reservoir some seven miles away at Pushkar, which was surrounded by sandy, undulating plains. They crossed two ridges of the Aravalli foothills before the sacred lake, rimmed with temples both recent and old, came into view. The settlement at Pushkar was small, populated mainly by Brahmin households. Throngs of pilgrims flocked to visit its temples and holy men. The emperor’s servants set up camp on the lake’s shore.

As a rule, nobody thought to hunt in the lake’s inviolate precincts, but the emperor spent a couple of days shooting waterfowl. He also inspected a particularly magnificent temple, which, he was informed, had cost a hundred thousand rupees to build. Its patron was a certain Rana Shankar, the uncle of the neighboring kingdom’s ruler Rana Amar Singh (d. 1620). Upon seeing the statue of black stone venerated there, Jahangir shuddered in revulsion. That “loathsome statue,” he wrote later in his memoirs, “had the shape of a pig’s head, while the rest of it resembled the body of a man.” This was, of course, the Hindu deity Vishnu in the form of Varaha, the Grand Boar. Jahangir remarked that devotion to the statue was a “deficient creed of the Hindus.” Before returning to Ajmer, Jahangir ordered that it be smashed and thrown into the sacred lake. For good measure, he also drove away a yogi who frequented a nearby shrine and had the idol held there destroyed.¹

Jahangir did not usually go about desecrating temples, but this was an exceptional situation. The province to which Ajmer lent its name was a frontier of sorts. Though the empire’s borders extended much farther north and west—sweeping up Qandahar, Kabul, and Swat—Ajmer adjoined Mewar, the last Rajput state to stubbornly hold out against Mughal annexation. Crushing the Varaha idol served as both a threatening provocation and a warning to Rana Amar Singh. It inaugurated the final phase of a long drawn-out war between the Mughals and the Mewar Rajputs.

Jahangir then headed back for Ajmer. Upon returning, the emperor and his entourage ascended a hill alongside the fourteenth-century Taragarh Fort perched on Ajmer’s southwestern edge. Nestled in a valley between two parallel hilltops, Ajmer was further fortified by a rampart with an adjoining moat installed by the emperor’s late father, Akbar. Known as the Daulat-khana, “fortune’s abode,” Akbar’s red sandstone fortress edged the northeast portion of the walled enclosure. The fortress where Jahangir now stayed faced the city with an enormous gate, where the emperor made daily public appearances at a latticed balcony called a jharoka. Inside, the fort concealed a lofty, airy, pillared audience hall in a walled garden. Farther north, behind the ridge, the town bordered the expansive Anasagar reservoir with lapping waves. On its shore was a landscaped garden, where Jahangir spent candlelit evenings with the women of his household.² But the city’s real hub was in its southwest, on the banks of the Jhalra spring—the well-tended dargah of Khwaja Muin-ud-Din, an Iraqi Sufi who, four centuries earlier, established the Chishti order in the subcontinent. Jahangir’s own father, Akbar, had walked here all the way from Agra to pray for an heir. Visitors would cross three large paved courtyards to pay their respects at the saint’s shimmering marble tomb inlaid with gold and mother of pearl.³

A fortnight or so after arriving in Ajmer, the emperor dispatched his third son, the twenty-one-year-old Khurram, to Udaipur so that the prince could conclude the ongoing military campaign against Rana Amar Singh. Khurram pitched camp at Lake Pichola with his armies, sending a steady stream of soldiers to chase the Mewar rana out from his capital Udaipur, farther and farther into the hills.

With his kingdom ravaged after more than a year of grueling warfare, the rana finally capitulated in February 1615. Arriving to meet Khurram with whatever gifts he could muster, Amar Singh grasped the prince’s ankle in an extravagant performance of surrender. Khurram, in turn, reportedly lifted the rana’s head and pressed it to his breast, in order to console him—a gesture both benevolent and patronizing.⁴ Mewar was now a vassal of the Mughal state. The contract between them spared the rana the further humiliation of submitting before Jahangir. Instead, Amar Singh sent his son Karan as his envoy to accompany Khurram back to the court at Ajmer.

Submission of Rana Amar Singh to Prince Khurram.

On the first of March, Khurram headed a victory march through the city. He then made a grand entry into the Daulat-khana’s audience hall, bringing with him the rana’s gifts as well as charitable offerings, including a thousand gold coins for the shrine of Khwaja Muin-ud-Din Chishti. In his memoirs, Jahangir writes of the pride that he felt upon seeing his victorious son. He was so overjoyed to see Khurram, he broke with protocol to hug him and shower him with kisses. The emperor’s immediate task, though, was to win over Karan. It was not enough to crush Mewar. Karan Singh, its next ruler, Jahangir writes, “had a savage disposition and had never seen a royal assembly, having grown up in the mountains.” The Rajput prince had to be groomed in Mughal etiquette, tastes, and ways so that he could become a trustworthy ally.⁵

Over the next several days, Jahangir treated Karan lavishly. Both he and his favorite wife, Nur Mahal, bestowed the Rajput prince with elephants, jeweled daggers, rich textiles, falcons, and gemstone prayer beads. These gifts not only showcased the emperor’s wealth and magnanimity; they also burdened Karan with obligations to the emperor. Before Karan returned home, Jahangir took the Rajput hunting. The emperor explains in his memoirs that he wanted to show off his skill in shooting with a gun. Since the time of Akbar, the hunt also had a symbolic value as a Mughal practice of taming recalcitrant nobles.⁶

The emperor’s men had spotted a lioness, and though Jahangir preferred to shoot only male lions, he decided to go ahead with the pursuit. Despite gusts of wind that could have interfered with his bullet’s course and an elephant who took fright upon seeing the fierce animal, Jahangir shot the beast straight between the eyes. Karan Singh was impressed. The emperor celebrated his success by chronicling the event in his memoirs.⁷ Jahangir also thought the event important enough to be illustrated. A miniature painting survives from the time; in it, the emperor appears in the upper left center, sitting cross-legged atop an elephant with his rifle poised upward. He turns to face Karan who is following behind on another elephant, his right arm crooked at the elbow, lifted behind his head in amazement. Flanked by others on elephants and a horse, the two face a clearing in the midst of which the dead lioness lies, belly exposed, by a stream. The viewer’s line of sight is directed to the emperor, as nearly all the men portrayed look up at him, pointing or gesturing in wondrous awe toward his prey.⁸

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ON THE THIRTIETH OF MARCH, around the same time of the month as Jahangir and Karan Singh’s hunting expedition, Khurram’s second wife Arjumand Bano went into labor. The twenty-two-year-old princess was of Iranian origin, the daughter of Asaf Khan, brother of Jahangir’s wife Nur Mahal. She was thus Jahangir’s niece through marriage as well as his daughter-in-law. Arjumand and Khurram were betrothed in 1607. His father, the emperor, placed the ring on her finger himself.⁹ Five years later, in 1612, the couple celebrated with a glittering wedding.

Dara Shukoh was Arjumand’s third child in as many years. The first child was born a year after their marriage—a girl named Hur-un-Nisa, “Houri among women.” Arjumand gave birth to their second-born child, also a girl, almost exactly a year later in March 1614, and called her Jahanara, “Ornament of the world.” This time, she delivered a boy after the second of the night’s four watches had passed. Soon after the birth, the emperor himself named the baby Dara Shukoh, meaning “Majestic as Darius,” after the legendary ruler of ancient, pre-Islamic Persia.¹⁰

In his memoir, Jahangir mentions visits to Khurram’s house in Ajmer during this time. This indicates that at the period of Dara’s birth, Arjumand must have been staying there and not in one of the elaborate tents in which Mughal elites often led their migratory lives. She would have had with her some senior women of the household. A certain Huri Khanum, wet nurse to her daughter Jahanara, may have been among them.¹¹ To breastfeed the newborn prince soon after his birth, there were other noblewomen too, as it was customary for Mughal princes and princesses to have wet nurses. Sometimes more than one would be employed, chosen from among the wives of high-ranking noblemen. Arjumand could thus regain her fertility early and focus on producing more children. But apart from being a means of nourishing the baby, this practice stemmed from the idea, present in the Quran and early biographical accounts of the Prophet, that milk and blood were parallel ways of creating kinship ties.¹² Through one act of suckling, the newborn Dara Shukoh could instantly acquire a whole other “milk” family. The infants of the royal Mughal family were linked through ties of milk to the children of their nurses, who were considered to be their foster siblings. In fact, one should not imagine that in the Mughal imperial household, blood generated a comparable emotional bond. Princes vied with their own brothers and half-brothers for the throne, while their foster families very rarely posed such a threat. As a result, milk brothers became crucial members of a grown prince’s entourage and occupied positions of power and responsibility. Wet-nursing also gave the foster mothers a way to gather wealth and political influence.

Though family relations between siblings and co-wives were potentially fraught, it is not unheard of to see expressions of love and loyalty for a spouse. It would not be an overstatement to say that anyone growing up in Jahangir’s India would be familiar with the idea of romantic love, ishq, in Persian lyric poetry. Passionate and unrequited, ishq is frequently likened to a malady. It is also a central metaphor conveying the soul’s yearning for divine union. But there was also room for another understanding of love as the companionship and intimacy of a married couple. Jahangir writes that he did not think anyone in the whole world was fonder of him than his wife, Nur Jahan.¹³ Later chroniclers would celebrate the deep bond between Arjumand and her husband. At the time of Dara Shukoh’s birth, Khurram and Arjumand had not spent time apart since their marriage; indeed, they never did. Their “mutual friendship and rapport,” remarked the court historian Mirza Amin Qazwini (fl. 1645), “reached such a height as was never found between any husband and wife in all the classes of sultans or other people.” Their love was not based merely on “carnal desire,” but on their “inner and outer good qualities,” as well as on “physical and spiritual harmony.”¹⁴

Such conjugal attachments, though, were not predicated on monogamy. Mughal royal men not only had access to concubines, but they also married multiple times, a practice sanctioned by the Quran and the Prophet’s personal example as well as by the courtly cultures of India, Central Asia, Iran, and beyond.

Indeed, while still betrothed to Arjumand, in November 1610, Khurram first wed the daughter of another Iranian nobleman, Mirza Husain Safavi.¹⁵ The wedding was celebrated with pomp. Qazwini later described the festivities as rivaling the beauty of the famous gardens of Eram in ancient Iran.¹⁶ The bride’s father was a descendant of Shah Ismail (d. 1524), the founder of the Safavid dynasty in Iran. Most marriages in the royal family were to some measure informed by political expediency, and this was no exception. There is good reason to suspect that Jahangir arranged this match after Arjumand’s paternal uncle, Muhammad Sharif, was implicated in a conspiracy to assassinate Jahangir and was subsequently executed.¹⁷ The plot’s mastermind was Jahangir’s eldest son Khusrau, who harbored hopes of the throne.

In August 1611, ten months after their wedding, Khurram’s wife, who was known as Qandahari Mahal in the chronicles, gave birth to a daughter named Purhunar Bano.¹⁸ Had she delivered a son, she would probably have had a more prominent role in Khurram’s life. By now, the young prince was already making arrangements for his marriage to Arjumand,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Note on Transliterations and Conventions
• Map
• Introduction
• 1. Empire, 1615–1622
• 2. Dynasty, 1622–1628
• 3. Youth, 1628–1634
• 4. Discipleship, 1634–1642
• 5. The Chosen, 1642–1652
• 6. Mission, 1652–1654
• 7. Confluence, 1654–1656
• 8. The Greatest Secret, 1656–1657
• 9. Succession, 1657–1659
• Conclusion
• Dramatis Personae
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• Illustration Credits
• Index