Download PDF | Lisa Balabanlilar - The Emperor Jahangir Power and Kingship in Mughal India-I.B. Tauris 2020.
248 Pages
Introduction
Until very recently, the Timurid-Mughal emperors of India were routinely dismissed by scholars as too peripheral to be representative of early modern Islamic world ruling systems and imperial culture. In the last several years, however, studies of the Mughals’ own prolific writings, and those of their political and economic rivals, have affirmed that the Mughal dynasty was firmly positioned in the early modern mainstream and served as a partner and a model for rulers across the Islamic world. Rather than continue to treat the Mughals as outliers, there is growing recognition that their understandings of culture and kingship can offer dramatic testimony to not only regional but global trends and adaptations.
Yet even as the dynasty finds its place in the historical narrative of Islamic and South Asian kingship, the reign of the emperor Salim Muhammad Nuruddin Jahangir (1569–1627; r. 1605–27), fourth of the six so-called ‘Great Mughals’, continues to be disregarded, even disdained.1 There are many reasons for this, among the most obvious being that Jahangir had the misfortune to reign between two of the most successful scions of the dynasty. His father, the emperor Akbar, had been able at a very young age to seize control of what was a tenuous and fragile patrimony and expand it into one of the world’s largest and wealthiest empires. Following Jahangir’s death, his son and successor, Shah Jahan, would also overshadow his father’s memory, proving to be among the dynasty’s gifted military leaders, his legacy assured by his architectural manifesto, the Taj Mahal.
It is true that Jahangir’s historical reputation as little more than a weak placeholder cannot be blamed entirely on the conditions or timing of his inheritance. In a dynasty known for its expansionist kings and empire builders, notably Chingis Khan and Tamerlane, Babur and Akbar, Jahangir’s own military adventures were few, resulting in no dramatic gain of territory. Furthermore, as he readily admitted, Jahangir was known to be a heavy drinker and drug user who publicly agonized over his own health and sobriety. His reputation was further marred by violent rebellion against his father. Even the ability and influence of his powerful wife, Nur Jahan, would be used by historians and chroniclers to diminish the prestige of her husband – her strength cited as evidence of his ineffectual indolence.
The emperor’s biographer, Beni Prasad, represented the conventional understanding when he wrote that Jahangir had ‘suffered from weakness of will and resolution, from a lamentable propensity to surrender himself to the mercies of superior talent’.2 Yet just as the previously marginalized Mughal dynasty is becoming more generally recognized as a powerful and influential model of court culture and kingship, scholars must re-engage the question of Jahangir, whose reign demands a more thorough intellectual inquiry. There are many ways in which his tenure can be counted a success. In a rare break from his father’s policies and approach, Jahangir retained a minimalist military profile and demonstrated no ambition for extensive territorial acquisition. All the same, not only was there no significant loss of imperial lands during his reign but he managed to successfully conquer the territories of local kingdoms whose submission had long stymied his father.
In addition, Jahangir’s adept handling of the imperial elites and his attentive diplomacy established a period of political and cultural equilibrium. Apart from a brief failed insurrection by a disgruntled courtier in 1626, the only real threats to his throne or his empire would be the two princely revolts which bookended his reign. Both were successfully put down. In the twenty-two years of relative peace and stability represented by his rule, Jahangir’s greatest personal legacy was two-fold. His lifelong and passionate patronage of the arts resulted in an innovative golden age of Mughal painting, and his composition of a regnal memoir explored and reinforced the sophisticated and globally influential complex of ideas and values, social and political models that represented Mughal rule. Both of these creative productions identify him as a powerful advocate for the cultural understandings and values of his ancestors but also of his ruled territories in South Asia, all of which he deliberately reinforced and passed on to the generations that followed.
Historical sources and the story of Jahangir
In the year of his accession to the throne of the Mughal Empire of India, Jahangir began to record the events of his reign.3 For seventeen years, Jahangir wrote in the form of a chronological diary, beginning each year with the Persian festival of Nowruz. Although many contemporary scholars refer to the complete manuscript as the Tuzuk-i Jahangiri, The Regulations of Jahangir, the emperor himself called the memoir Iqbalnama, The Auspicious Story, or simply, and most often, Jahangirnama, The Story of Jahangir. His entries were not composed daily, yet the events of his reign seem to have been recorded soon after they occurred. While Jahangir included dense descriptions of the regulations and routines of his royal court, the manuscript was far more personal than a simple record.
The Jahangirnama offers detailed and intimate ruminations on kingship and justice, the emperor’s struggles with alcohol, his passion for the hunt and for his family, his intellectual curiosity and the depth of his concern for establishing the legitimacy of his rule. It is a comprehensive and at times stirring account of the emperor’s life, but more importantly it supplies a rich context for his reign. In 1622, five years before his death, he would turn over the task to his munshi (secretary) Mu’tamid Khan, yet even then, although in failing health, Jahangir continued personally editing the pages until work on the memoir completely and suddenly stopped in 1624.
Almost a century later, Muhammad Hadi, who was probably a courtier of the emperor Muhammad Shah (1653–1707, a greatgrandson of Jahangir), claiming to have become ‘enamored by the science of history and the craft of biography’ and basing his writings on other manuscripts in the Mughal imperial library, wrote an additional few chapters, offering a brief description of Jahangir’s youth and of the events leading up to his death. Apart from Mu’tamid Khan and Muhammad Hadi’s attributed additions, and a single entry in the emperor’s eleventh regnal year when his granddaughter’s death left him so grief-stricken that he asked his father-in-law to briefly write for him, Jahangir’s authorship of the work is not in doubt. Other writers of the period acknowledged the presence of the emperor’s memoirs, and on a few occasions Jahangir presented his work to his sons and noblemen, describing the memoir as advice literature for those who would inherit his throne.
In his thirteenth year on the throne, he gave a bound copy, representing twelve years of rule, to his son Khurram, the future Emperor Shah Jahan (1592–1666, r. 1628–59), writing on the back of the manuscript that he hoped the contents would be acceptable to the God and receive praise from its readers. He later sent copies to rival kings, which he suggested could serve as manuals for ruling. Historical writing had been a regular feature at the royal courts of Jahangir’s ancestors in West and South Asia. The founder of their dynasty, Timur (Tamerlane), had been deeply involved in the production of his royal court chronicles and they would prove both popular and influential.4
Timur’s descendants continued to produce court chronicles, treating their dynastic histories as a model for rule and an assertion of their own inherited dynastic political charisma. Five generations later, Jahangir’s great-grandfather, Zahiruddin Muhammad Babur, wrote what is often described as the first autobiography of the pre-modern Islamic world, and certainly the most important and influential of the imperial histories of the Timurid-Mughals.5 He named it the Vaqa’i-i Baburi (although it is commonly referred to as the Baburnama). Likely influenced by his uncle, with whom he spent some years, Babur’s maternal nephew, Mirza Muhammad Haydar Dughlat (1499 or 1500–51), composed the Tarikh-i Rashidi of which one half was a history of the Mongols and the other half a personal account.6
The emperor Akbar so valued Babur’s Vaqa’i that he had it translated into Persian by his polymath stepson and courtier Abdur Rahim, so that its audience could be broadened. His court painters illustrated it on at least four separate occasions. Akbar would later request memoirs from all those who had memories of his father or grandfather. As his aunt, Babur’s daughter Gulbadan Begim explained, ‘An order was issued, “Write down whatever you know of the doings of Firdaus makani and Jannat ashyani [Babur and Humayun].” In obedience to the royal order, I set down whatever there is that I have heard and remember.’7 Also at Akbar’s command, Humayun’s ewer-bearer, Mihtar Jauhar, who had spent twenty years at the emperor’s side, including the period of his exile in Safavid Iran, composed the Tazkirat al-vaqa’i, and Bayezid Bayat wrote the Tarikh-i Humayun, covering the years 1542–91.8 Professional historians and courtiers also continued to chronicle the reigns of the Mughal kings. Babur’s eldest son and successor, Humayun (1508–56/ r. 1530–40, 1555–56), retained the famed historian Ghiyasuddin Khwandamir at his court, officially inviting him to compose a history of his rule, the Humayunnama, although the result is more panegyric than memoir.9 In the next generation, Akbar’s close friend and advisor Abu’l Fazl composed multiple volumes on the life of the emperor, as well as a detailed compendium on the ideological underpinnings of his empire, known as the Akbarnama and the A’in-i Akbar respectively.10
In addition, Akbar commissioned dynastic histories such as the Chingisnama (History of Chingis Khan), the Timurnama (History of Timur) and the Tarikh-i Alfi (History of a Thousand Years), which asserted the dynasty’s Mongol and Timurid ancestry, claiming to have ‘inaugurated a new millennium’ with the foundation of the South Asian Timurid (Mughal) Empire. Finally, for Jahangir’s own period, in addition to his own memoir, two important accounts are the Iqbalnama, by the emperor’s secretary Mu’tamad Khan, and the Maasir-i Jahangiri by Khwaja Kamgar Husaini.11 The Mughal dynastic memoirs were highly prized and influential, representing the voice of the ancestral founding fathers. The expectation that autobiography brings the reader closer to truth has been shattered in the modern period but to these early modern state-builders, having access to highly personal, even intimate, texts that sprang directly from the foundational sources of dynastic power surely added to the frisson of intergenerational connection.
That the manuscripts were read by every generation in the royal family is clear from the commentary and autographs in the margins of those volumes housed in the imperial library. These powerful and authoritative texts would form the base of a canonical dynastic narrative with which the Mughals justified their ambition and success, carefully positioning their ruling legitimacy in the political charisma of their Timurid ancestry and the sovereignty of Islamic kingship. Within the royal family, and in the close circle of the nobility, the unified and comprehensive story created by their imperial predecessors affirmed across the generations the history, the values and the meaning of the Mughal heritage.
The Vaqa’i and the Jahangirnama
Biographical writing in the medieval Perso-Islamic world has been described as having a ‘timeless pattern’ with no real interest in chronology but instead imagined and organized around events or moods, eliding individual personalities and erasing the idiosyncratic in favour of identification with ideal types.12 Meaning and importance were assigned to a life, a battle, a spiritual revelation, a pilgrimage, a death, as it met and fulfilled or illustrated an expected moral and symbolic outcome, within traditional conventions. That the ideal was drawn with familiar codes and markers is of course still the norm on some level – Foucault wrote that history bequeaths the range of options we draw upon to conceive of ourselves.
We can see these tropes as representing that range: a particularly inelastic and narrow one, perhaps, by modern standards but which offered shape and consistency to the world of the medieval observer for whom it was intended. The Timurid princely courts and their successors, on the other hand, are noted for their demonstrated willingness to broaden this classical structure to include expressions of individualism through evocations or depictions of idiosyncratic personalities in the place of bare impersonal stereotypes.13
An example is that of the evolution of the traditional tadhkira, the classical Persian professional biographies of renowned poets and literati, which have been shown in the Timurid period to have begun exploring contemporary lives, rather than historical types, the authors even including themselves in their encyclopaedias and writing what are described as truly autobiographical sketches.14 In the same period, elements of the individual and the naturalistic began to slip into the visual arts. Late Timurid artists began signing their work, which illustrated increasingly secular subject matter. Timurid portraiture had begun to demonstrate a new ‘tension between individualizing and stereotyping conventions [which traditionally had relied] on a canonical language of power, whose subtly differentiated visual elements had to be decoded in order to interpret their iconography’.15 With so much evidence of artists, literary figures, and politicians of the Timurid Mughal world engaged in examining the individual self, scholars must reject the notion that these many ‘distinctly personal voices’ were entirely atypical for their time.16 Babur’s memoir is tangible evidence of the Timurid intellectual exploration of the individual.
The Vaqa’i did not reject the traditional tropes and classical models of medieval biography but made critical additions to them, as Babur successfully located the exemplary and the heroic in his own contemporary personality. Not every facet of Babur’s life and literary career are equally wellknown, but at least it is possible to see his literary life as both stereotypical and idiosyncratic, and as both formulaic and inimitable.17 He was a typical royal poet in many respects, in his regard for classic exemplars, his emulation of traditional genres, and his desire for literary fame and cultural legitimacy. He was also a unique royal poet in his relative freedom from the stylistic constraints of court culture and his frank willingness to use traditional genres to express his feelings. Babur’s use of his own name as the takhallus, for which poets generally chose pen names, may be one measure of the degree to which he was prepared openly to reveal his emotions in verse. Using his own name was an egoistic act, reflective of the compelling, self-assured personality that he revealed in the Baburnama. He favourably compared himself to the greatest Timurid ruler of the day, Sultan Husain Baiqara of Herat, and felt confident enough of his literary skills to claim superiority for his essay on prosody to that of the great Ali Shir Nava’i, whose work on metrics Babur dismissed as ‘full of mistakes’.18 In the absence of literary models, why would he have come to write a memoir? Babur may have been driven by the obstacles he faced in the traditional succession practices of the Timurid dynasty, which allowed every male member of the royal family to be considered a viable contender for rule. While their shared Chinggisid-Timurid genealogical charisma supported the case for a common dynastic legitimacy, it did nothing for the ambitions of a specific individual. Written in the very moment of the dynasty’s transition from Mawarannahr, the autobiographical Vaqa’i made a claim to leadership of the Timurids that went far beyond the power of Babur’s royal bloodlines. The greater dynasty was vitally important to Babur – after all, his powerful lineage was the foundation for his political claims – but in composing a personal memoir he actively differentiated himself from those other ambitious princes with whom he shared his elite lineage. Presenting himself as complex, creative and idiosyncratic, Babur made an argument for power that was highly specific and personal. Augmenting and elaborating traditional tropes and classical models of medieval biography, Babur so distinguished his singular self that even modern readers claim to come away from his memoir with a sense of personal recognition.19 While it is true that he did not engage in a great deal of self-examination, Babur’s memoir is at times startlingly frank, as he composed poetry in a youthful flirtation with a boy in the bazaar, described his own tears at the loss of an important battle and narrated with barely suppressed hilarity a drunken return to his tent after a particularly wild party. Babur claimed to be writing advice literature, using his own personal history as a model for their sons and rival princes, but his writings – even in describing his weaknesses, failures and misjudgements – built a case for his own personal leadership over the Timurid community. Struggling to seize control in an anarchic and uncertain landscape, Babur emerges in his own pages as drunken, sarcastic, embarrassed, sometimes cruel, but always redeemed, at least in his own telling, by his personal attributes: political charisma, ambition, bravery, immense reserves of loyalty, a degree of poetic talent and a very human pathos. In the spirit of his writings, this poet-warrior and founder of empire would come to be celebrated precisely for his personal particularities rather than any adherence to conventional standards of heroic leadership. Among his followers and their descendants Babur’s Vaqa’i not only heightened recognition of the individual personality but also reinforced the value of self-representation. While they would never entirely forego the traditional tropes and models of the greater Islamic world, the Mughals would continue to construct their presentations of kingship from across the variety of sources available to them, including preIslamic Persian, Turco-Mongol and increasingly South Asian. Seventy-five years after Babur’s death, the newly and as yet insecurely enthroned Jahangir seized on the device of personal memoir as a part of his larger effort to re-invent himself and justify his ascension. Rejecting his father’s model of encouraging a devotee to create the record of his reign, Jahangir chose to follow the precedent of the Mughal founding father, Babur. Notably he even emulated the tone of Babur’s Vaqa’i, which is not only written in clear and unadorned language but is famously direct and personal, even intimate.
In both cases, the occasional revelations of startlingly personal detail were very likely to have been made deliberately. From their inception, the Vaqa’i and the Jahangirnama were created as public documents. Both authors remained fully aware of their readers and their personal exposure was self-serving, deliberate and tightly managed. In Babur’s case, this is indicated by his use of Chaghatay Turkish rather than court Persian, allowing him to speak directly to a Central Asian constituency made up of the Timurid and Chaghatayyid elite who represented the followers and supporters of Babur’s imperial ambition.20 That a copy of Babur’s memoirs was sent back to his base in Kabul as early as 1529, where nearly one hundred years later Jahangir would read it in the original Turkish, confirms that Babur had a very particular audience in mind as he wrote.21 Jahangir would be no less deliberate, publicly sharing early versions of his own memoir. In 1618, Jahangir had copies of his Nama bound, intending to distribute it to his intimate companions and even send to foreign countries as a manual for rule. The first bound copy was given to his third son and successor, Khurram, in late August. By mid-September, two more copies had been produced, which Jahangir gifted to his father-in-law I’timaduddawla and brother-in-law Asaf Khan. A fourth copy was sent to his second son, Parvez, from the emperor’s temporary camp at Fatehpur Sikri, in January. While these earliest manuscripts chronicled Jahangir’s first twelve years as emperor, the writing continued until 1624. He was deliberate in pairing his work with that of Babur, while expressing self-conscious pride in his innovative illustration of the memoir. As a devoted patron of the arts, Jahangir had as early as 1612, if not before, begun ordering paintings to accompany his text. Early in 1618, before the first copy was bound, his favourite painter, Abu’l Hasan, who he had honoured with the title of Nadir al-Zaman, the Pinnacle of the Age, had painted a picture of Jahangir’s accession to serve as the frontispiece of the Jahangirnama. Although Jahangir had modelled the writings of his imperial memoir on those of his great-grandfather, he relished an opportunity to surpass Babur by adding illustrations to his own work. He wrote: ‘Although Firdaws-Makani [“He who is in the place of paradise,” i.e., Babur] wrote in his memoir about the shapes of some animals, he does not seem to have ordered artists to depict them…I both wrote about them and ordered the artists to draw them for the Jahangirnama.’22 Unfortunately, there is no extant Jahangirnama with a complete set of illustrations, and it is not at all clear that an illustrated manuscript was ever in fact completed. Certainly the earlier versions of the memoir, including the copies gifted to his sons in 1618, likely did not include any of the miniatures that were intended for it. Even the Abu’l Hasan frontispiece had been commissioned only a few months earlier, and it would eventually be discovered in a separate album of paintings from the Mughal imperial atelier. Other individual pages of illustration, seemingly intended for the Jahangirnama, have appeared in various collections, showing no evidence of having ever having been bound into a manuscript.23 Many are so damaged that their production date and artist are in doubt. Yet within the text of the Jahangirnama itself, the emperor explicitly described several commissions of miniatures, sketches, nature studies and portraits, and there is no doubt that many extant imperial miniatures were originally produced to illustrate his memoir. A North American turkey and an African zebra, brought to Jahangir from the port at Goa, were ordered painted by Jahangir’s master painter, Mansur, specifically as an illustration for the Jahangirnama, ‘so that the astonishment one has at hearing of them would increase by seeing them’. Affirming the inherently political nature of the manuscript, individual folios that were likely intended for the pages of the Nama include a painting of the submission of Rana Singh of Mewar, which retains marks that indicate it was intended to illustrate an album. That it was meant to corroborate his written text comes as no surprise – the conquest of Mewar had been one of Akbar’s rare military failures, and Jahangir would proudly memorialize it in multiple formats: memoir, painting and even in rare Mughal sculpture. Jahangir intended his illustrated memoir to fit neatly within the larger dynastic project of narrative and remembrance, even as he continually returned to themes of kingship and affirmations of his own personal political legitimacy. In his discourses on inheritance and power, he continually reinforced his identification with and loyalty to Akbar, nostalgically referenced his ancestry and dynastic legacy, elaborated his performance of Persio-Islamic kingship and asserted the inherently sacred quality of kings – making use of a dynastic literary tradition to confirm the legitimacy of his own individual inheritance, sanctioned, as Jahangir would claim, by both the dynastic and the divine. Intensely loyal to his dynasty and its values, Jahangir used the device of memoir to affirm his position as a conduit of the powerful ideas of his ancestors, offering detailed and explicit descriptions of Timurid-Mughal courtly traditions; understandings of kingship, law, religion, succession and inheritance; and ideas of beauty, poetry, gardens and architecture. His memoir also details the workings of the seventeenth-century royal court of India, including rich descriptions of the monarch’s relationship with his diverse nobility as well as the steady stream of merchants, adventurers, ambassadors and rivals who arrived before his throne. We are given an intimate glimpse into family life, spiritual practice and even detailed views of the pre-modern South Asian landscape. Yet for all its public character, his memoir also details Jahangir’s struggles with alcoholism and drug use, with his father’s complex legacy, his own rebellious sons and disloyal courtiers, his evolving defence of his own kingship and his passionate curiosity regarding the natural world. In other words, we can read the Jahangirnama as a conscious and deliberate self-portrayal that is in some ways more revealing than the author likely intended. For these reasons, the Jahangirnama, acknowledged as the most important historical source for the period, is at the core of this study.24 While it was initially inspired by the newly enthroned emperor’s need to explain and justify his contested inheritance and to declare his close association to his father’s ruling ethos, it would become much more than that, as Jahangir used the memoir as a commentary on both his close relationships at the royal court – personal, local and international – and his constant close attention to the lands and peoples of his ruled territories. Such a self-serving document calls for a high degree of scepticism on the part of the reader. The emperor’s descriptions of specific events and actions are generally confirmed by other sources from the period, but in attempting to reveal his motives and beliefs we proceed with caution, acknowledging that the Jahangirnama is an extended effort at self-promotion. Several other valuable chronicles recount the events of Jahangir’s reign. They come from a diverse company – Jesuit priests, English merchants, intimates of the king – representing the eclectic nature of the Mughal royal court in the early seventeenth century. Their descriptions and interpretations of events broaden our perspective, even as they corroborate, in many ways, the emperor’s own narrative of the events of his reign. There are three important Mughal court chronicles identified with Jahangir’s reign: the Iqbalnama of Mu’tamid Khan, the Maasir-i-Jahangiri of Khwaja Kamgar Huseini and the more recently published Majalis-i Jahangiri by Abdus Sattar.25 The first two authors used the Jahangirnama as their own primary source of information, and so offer little that is original or independent. They were completed several years after Jahangir’s death and under the rule of his son and successor, Shah Jahan. It is hard to imagine that their editorial comments and additions were not powerfully influenced by the prevailing ruler and his effort to control the narrative of his own rebellion, succession and enthronement. This point is best illustrated by the writings of Mu’tamid Khan who, in addition to his Iqbalnama, wrote several chapters of the Jahangirnama at the behest and under the close guidance of Jahangir. Differences in tone between the two manuscripts are obvious. For example, when collaborating with Jahangir, Mu’tamid Khan openly and explicitly described Shah Jahan’s rebellion, even using Jahangir’s pejorative name of Bidawlat (Wretched One) for the prince. In his own authored chronicle, however, produced after Jahangir’s death, Mu’tamid Khan shifted his position, to place much of the blame for the princely rebellion at the feet of the queen, Nur Jahan, who in the last years of her husband’s reign had become Shah Jahan’s enemy. Mu’tamid Khan notably refers to the rebel prince and his supporters in sympathetic terms throughout the Iqbalnama. For these reasons, then, while both courtiers’ chronicles have been used for this study, they do not take precedence except in those periods in which Jahangir’s memoir is silent, in particular in the last few years of his reign. Finally, an important Mughal chronicle of the period has come to the notice of Western scholars more recently: the Majalis-i-Jahangiri, of Abdus Sattar. Sattar’s focus is on the evening assemblies of Jahangir’s court and he offers enormous insight where none had existed previously. His chronicle covers only a three-year period in the early period of Jahangir’s reign, unfortunately, although is used here extensively where appropriate. Other major sources for the reign of Jahangir were produced by outsiders, the Jesuit missions who remained for long periods at the Mughal court and European merchants who arrived in increasing numbers throughout the period. These records are of limited value and are used with extreme caution. A serious reading of any European sources of the period reveals not only the self-serving nature of their records, but also the confusion and inaccuracy of their analysis and explanations. In particular, favourite topics of the Western visitors that are most egregiously misunderstood include the harem and the political activities of Mughal women, the emperor and religious identity, as well as the meaning of the exchange of gifts and honours at the imperial durbar. Modern scholars have pointed out that the real value in these European commentaries can be found by turning them on themselves, revealing the culture, politics, religion and values of their own European courts. On the other hand, the observations of these outsiders can in some cases offer a glimpse of the visual display of Mughal rule in early modern India. Where the Mughals and their courtiers may not have found it necessary or interesting to describe the court progress or the crowded throne room or the streets of Mughal cities, foreign visitors were fascinated by the visual feast and wrote rich and important commentary. It is as observers, then, that the foreign visitors to the Mughal court have been useful for this study, but the gossip they shared between themselves and their pronouncements on features of the royal court and society that they themselves did not witness are not given a credible hearing here.
About this book
This biography tells two stories. The first is the story of Jahangir, describing the narrative of his life but also examining his values, expectations and relationships; his sense of the world around him and his place within it. The second story is a broader exploration of the cultural traditions and trends that drove the emperor’s decisions and fuelled the events of his reign. In that spirit, this study is built on a structural compromise, retaining when possible a chronological approach but digressing into historically grounded thematic discussion surrounding issues that Jahangir grappled with throughout his reign: relationships both global and local, claims of divine kingship, the royal court progress, the arts, marriage and the power of elite women, in particular that of his favourite wife, Nur Jahan. Finally, an important goal of this book has been not only to place Jahangir in a very particular historical moment, but also to physically locate him in a highly specific geographic space. The landscape and people of South Asia were a vital part of his identity and his power, and deserve a central place in his narrative. As his own record makes abundantly clear, Jahangir had a deeply passionate and emotional connection to his ruled territories. Using the Mughal emperor’s memoir, the Jahangirnama, as a framework upon which historical developments are revealed and institutions, events and large-scale developments given context, this study adheres as closely as possible to the interests and itinerary of the emperor himself. If my work seems to have been driven by Jahangir’s own passions and concerns – kingship, power and responsibility, loyalty, beauty, love and friendship, the natural world and the always changing and deeply fascinating landscape of South Asia – that is for the most part because, as a cultural historian, I find these topics to be just as compelling as he did.
A note about transliteration systems and sources
Words from Persian, Arabic and Turkish have been rendered using a simplified transliteration system without diacritical marks, in the interests of keeping the text uncluttered, and generally following the conventions of the International Journal of Middle East Studies (IJMES). Transliterated words from secondary works and translations of primary sources are cited without modification, except that diacritical marks are dropped. Secondary sources may offer a variety of accepted spellings and I have remained true to these variants when directly quoting. The sources on which I rely most heavily and consistently I have used in the original languages, in widely accepted editions such as the 1980 Tehran edition of Jahangirnama and Ejii Mano’s seminal critical edition of the Baburnama. Most of the important primary sources of the period were written in court Persian and translations are my own unless stated. This being said, I had the good fortune to work with Wheeler Thackston on Persian palaeography at the Harvard Ottoman Institute on Cunda Island many years ago, and know well his enormous skill and intellectual generosity. It is a vain scholar who would attempt to better the work of Wheeler Bey. When Jahangir waxes most poetical, I defer to Thackston’s translation.
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