By: Ebba Koch
The
30 years of Shah Jahan’s reign (1628–58) are widely regarded as the golden age of the Mughal empire.
already in the 18th century the
historian Muhammad Hashim
Khafi Khan, who
wrote of the Mughal emperors from Babur (r. in india 1526–30) down to the 14th year of the reign of
Muhammad Shah (r. 1719– 48), looked back to it as the best period of Mughal
rule:
it is clear to those of intelligence that, although in terms of territorial expansion [and] autonomy there was no one among the Timurids who graced the throne of hindustan better than Muhammad akbar padishah; for tight control, amassing treasure, improving the realm, appreciation of the army, and tending to the welfare of the military there has been no better ruler than Shah Jahan padishah in the vast expanse of hindustan. aside from necessary expenditures for ruling and what was spent on the buildings, fortresses and mosques of Shahjahanabad and other cities, on gratuities for ambassadors, and on the Qandahar and Balkh campaigns, which in the end went for naught, 24 crores of rupees were left behind in coin, aside from unminted gold and silver, gold and silver vessels, and jewels, which would amount to approximately 15 or 16 crores. he was most strict in tending to his subjects and [defending them] against the oppression of [his local] governors.1
Yet the
reign of the
fifth emperor of
the Mughal dynasty
is still one of the least studied areas of Mughal history. The attention of historians has been directed
mainly to akbar (r. 1556–1605) and
aurangzib (r. 1658–1707), and more recently
also to Jahangir (r. 1605–27).2 The voices speaking about Shah Jahan are few. an early assessment is abdul
aziz, “history of the reign of Shah Jahan”,
which came out in several fascicles in
five issues of the Journal of Indian History between 1927 and 1933.3
There are only three monographs dedicated to Shah Jahan. The most important of these dates back to 1932,
when Banarsi prasad Saksena brought out
his History of Shahjahan of Dihli, which he
based on his painstaking textual research of Mughal historical sources and the observations of foreign
travellers.4 This was followed at great
intervals by the more popular monographs of
Muni lal (1986) and fergus Nicoll (2009).5
one
of the reasons why Shah Jahan was studied less than akbar or aurangzib is that principal
historical texts concerning his reign
are either unedited or untranslated.6 in the past decades new initiatives were undertaken to make Shah
Jahani sources more easily
available. The late
Dr Syed Mohammad
Jaffery (also spelled
Jaffary, Jafari or
Ja’fery) worked since
the 1970s on
Persian editions of
Shah Jahan’s historians
and poets.7 he published inter alia Chandar Bhan Brahman’s
Chahār Chaman, a prose work dealing with various aspects of Mughal life
including the author’s own;8 Jalala-i Tabataba’i’s Shāhjahānnāma, an early history written for Shah Jahan;9 and the
versified Pādshāhnāma of Shah Jahan’s
court poet abu Talib Kalim Kashani.10 The only
complete translation of a historical work dedicated to Shah Jahan
so far available
is ‘Inayat Khan’s
Shāhjahānnāma.11 as to
monographs on literati
of Shah Jahan’s
court there is
Rajeev Kinra’s examination of the
life and work of the high-caste Hindu
Chandar Bhan Brahman, who worked as state secretary for Jahangir, Shah Jahan and aurangzib.12
This
recent exploration of Mughal sources (and their
authors) will hopefully give rise to a better understanding of Shah
Jahan’s reign, which promises to
overcome what appears to be a certain bias
on the part of historians. While the reign
of akbar is considered to be the great phase of Mughal state building, and the reign of aurangzib is regarded
as marking the beginning of Mughal
decline, political historians especially seem
to have seen the reign of Shah Jahan as a more static and hence less interesting phase. This view tells us
perhaps more about the
effectiveness and longevity of Shah Jahani
propaganda, which emphasized the continuity and everlastingness
of the emperor’s rule, than about the
actual historical situation.13
Art
historians, cultural historians and literary historians, on the other hand, have taken Shah Jahan more
seriously, though here too a certain
long-standing bias had to be overcome. in the
19th century his patronage was judged ambivalently. The British architectural historian James Fergusson
considered Shah Jahan’s buildings to be
“feeble” and “pretty”, though “at the same time
marked with that peculiar elegance which is found only in the East”; Shah Jahan’s architecture was
contrasted to that of Akbar, which was
seen as manly and vigorous:
It would be difficult to point out in the whole history of architecture any change so sudden as that which took place between the style of akbar and that of his grandson Shâh Jahân—nor any contrast as that between the manly vigour and exuberant originality of the first, as compared with the extreme but almost effeminate elegance of the second.14
and
until the end of the 20th century art historians judged painting created for Shah Jahan as decorative
and superficial.15 From deeper research beginning in the late 1970s Shah
Jahan’s patronage and, as it were, his rule, have emerged as a dynamic phase
where an increasing centralization in the administration went hand in hand with a formalization of
court ceremonial, architecture and the
arts—which intellectually express his ideal
of universal kingship.16 Shah Jahan came to be seen as Khafi Khan had pictured him, as the great perfectionist
and systematizer of the Mughal empire.
That this did not contradict but rather
refined Shah Jahan’s contribution to the Mughal imperial myth is shown by azfar Moin who integrated the
discoveries of art historians into his
study of sacred kingship.17 previously i drew
attention to the innovative, even revolutionary, aspects of Shah Jahan’s artistic projects and I tried to show
that the prevailing image one
has of Shah
Jahan’s conservatism and
increasing orthodoxy does not do
justice to his little-understood complex
personality as a man, as a ruler, and as a patron of the arts: The creation of the plant-decorated baluster
column for the architecture of his
appearances as a symbol of the bloom in
hindustan brought about by his just rule was so successful that it became a pan-indian form;18 the monumental
recreation of the Solomonic throne in
the audience hall at Delhi, which was
decorated with florentine pietra dura inlay work, including an orpheus playing to the beasts, illustrated
his Solomonic justice;19 to say nothing of the Taj Mahal as a neo-platonic
concept “in reverse”, realizing here on
earth and on a gigantic scale the ideal
paradisiacal dwelling for his deceased wife in order to guarantee a counter-image for her in the immaterial
world.20
We
note a new engagement with the larger world, especially Muslim and european, in which the
17th-century Mughals were located. The
attitude vis-à-vis europe is ambivalent: in the political realm, for example, Shah Jahan’s
attack of 1631–32 on the portuguese of
hughli,21 and in the art domain a controlled
and differentiated assimilation
of Europeanizing styles
in imperial architecture, painting
and object art.22
For literary historians, Shah Jahan’s reign is
the high point in Mughal culture, with a
dazzling array of poets of various
backgrounds and talents.23
from
these parameters further questions arose. To respond to
them is the aim of
the present volume.
For the first
time scholars with various
historical interests—political, cultural,
social, economic, literary and art-historical—are involved in an interdisciplinary exchange on Shah Jahan and
his predecessor Jahangir. The transition
between the two reigns emerged as an
issue that attracted a particular amount of interest. The study of Jahangir and Shah Jahan as a new subject
of multidisciplinary investigation hopes
to engage students of South asia, and
particularly of South asian history, showing them a wide range of possible approaches and methodologies when
dealing with textual and material
objects from an outstanding period in Mughal history. The volume is divided
into five sections.
The first
section, “From Jahangir
to Shah Jahan”,
focuses on the problematic
relationship between the two rulers, which
began with the rebellion of prince Khurram (already entitled Shah Jahan), in 1620. in that year, after
days of glory and basking in the sun of
imperial favour, the future Shah Jahan had a total falling-out
with his father
through the intrigues
of Jahangir’s powerful wife Nur Jahan. The prince of the
empire, shāh-i buland iqbāl, rebelled
and became bī-daulat (without any standing), and had to spend his time in exile in the Deccan.
his eldest sons were kept as hostages at
Jahangir’s court.
When
Shah Jahan managed to succeed to the Mughal throne in 1628 his historians lashed out at the
reign of Jahangir. They stigmatized it
as a time of bad government, which in their eyes was
no wonder because
the affairs of
the empire had
been in the hands of a woman (Nur
Jahan). Shah Jahan’s accession as a
mujaddid, a religious renewer, ended an era of corruption and religious decline. Shah Jahan’s early
historian Qazvini brings this to the
point when he writes:
in
each cycle of the ages he [god] brings a famous one from the hidden place of nonexistence to the
wide space of reality and makes him a
mirror of his own beautiful power, and in
each century he brings a ṣāḥib-i qirān24 from the narrowness of concealment
into the wide space of visible
appearance and makes him the manifestation
of his full power, so that the dust of degeneration which in the passing of days and ages has settled
on the face of time may be wiped off
with the sleeve of his [the ṣāḥib-i qirān’s] wisdom and thoughtful
planning, and the flame of discord and corruption that has been
blazing through this little sarāy of the
world may be extinguished with the gleam [of the bright steel] of the sword of his
effort and his struggle for religious
causes. [and in this way] he
re-strengthens the foundation of religion and the people, promotes
afresh the affairs
of the kingdom
and state, introduces good rules
and laws, takes the present state out of
its worn gown, lets the water of justice flow
again in the channels of the kingdom, rips out the roots of tyranny and oppression from the plain of
the world (sarābistan-i gītī), and gives
splendour to the forecourt of existence
(pīshgāh-i hastī) by spreading the carpet of
peace and security and makes it current, and he increases the adornment of the workshop of the world
(kārkhāna-i dunyā) with paintings and
ornaments and with returning
benevolence.
In
each cycle of the administration of affairs,
it is absolutely essential to have a ṣāḥib-i
qirān. Because the chain of his justice with many mouths [chain links]
laughs at the justice of Nushirvan.25
This passage
gives us the
official view of
Shah Jahan on
the rule of
Jahangir, and acquaints
us with the
difficulty in the
transition between the
two reigns. The
papers of the
first section analyse the various
ways in which the events of the
transition found textual expression
in Jahangir’s and
Shah Jahan’s historiography, and
also in subaltern courtly writing, a
genre new to this period. Corinne lefèvre shows that Jahangir was excluded from the new imperial model
crafted by his son’s historians to the
benefit of more prestigious forebears
such as Timur and akbar, but she detects
a “hidden indebtedness” as emblematic of
Shah Jahan’s relationship to Jahangir’s heritage. anna Kollatz analyses the Majālis-i Jahāngīrī
of ‘abd al-Sattar lahauri, a lower-placed
member of the elite, who in narrating
Jahangir’s nightly discoursesintroduced a Sufi literary genre, the malfūẓāt, into court writing, to project the
emperor as a rational but at the same
time divinely inspired guide of his people (pīr wa murshid-i rāhnumā). ali
anooshahr examines another text “from
below”, Bahāristān-i Ghaibī, the
memoirs of the
Mughal officer Mirza Nathan, written to exculpate himself
when his loyalty was challenged in the rebellion
of prince Khurram (the future Shah
Jahan) against his father, Jahangir. The question of “how to serve two masters” posed itself for many a
manṣabdār caught in the events of this
time. Munis faruqui takes the rebellion of
Mahabat Khan of 1626, and the
role that Asaf Khan, Jahangir’s
prime minister (wakīl) and Shah Jahan’s kingmaker, played in it, to show how the same historical event was
narrated differently— from
Jahangir’s perspective in the
Fathnāma-i Nūr Jahān Begum of
Mulla Kami Shirazi,
and from Shah
Jahan’s in the
Ma’āsir-i Jahāngīrī of Khwaja
Kamgar husaini/ghairat Khan (c. 1630) and
the Iqbālnāma-i Jahāngīrī of Muhammad Sharif/Mu‘tamad Khan (c. 1632). While historiographic voices
speaking for Jahangir differ, for
Shah Jahan they
are (by imperial
imposition and control) unanimous.
The
tensions between Jahangir and Shah Jahan were
reflected not only in textual matter but also in architecture and art. Mehreen Chida-razvi argues that the
person responsible for the tomb of
Jahangir was Nur Jahan, not Shah Jahan, who
to follow convention claimed the patronage of the mausoleum of his father for himself. he did contribute
key elements to the project—the
upper and lower
cenotaphs inlaid with
floral pietra dura work, of the
same outstanding workmanship as the
cenotaphs of Mumtaz Mahal at agra, and to all evidence created by the same artists. We observe here a case
of “split patronage” which can be
disentangled by linking visual and written sources. From the methodological point of view it will
be of great benefit to historians and
art students to understand how textual sources can be read against the physical
evidence of architecture.
The
second section, “at the Court of Shah Jahan”, throws light on the emperor’s interaction with his
subjects and foreign visitors as themes
of historiography. No regularizing texts on the
organization of Shah Jahan’s court such as books of ceremonies are available, so harit Joshi examines the
writings of Shah Jahan’s chief
historians, ‘Abd al-Hamid
Lahauri, Muhammad Salih
Kanbu and Chandar/Chandra Bhan
Brahman, to find
the norms of etiquette governing
comportment in terms of speech and
gestures of all categories of individuals—members of the ruling
family, high-ranking officials,
minor courtiers, foreign dignitaries and
traders—when they were
in the emperor’s
presence. Within this striving for regulation and order Joshi points out contradictions which disturb the
projected image of the perfect and
orthodox ruler: that Shah Jahan tolerated the
involvement of his son Dara Shukuh and his daughter Jahanara with eminent mystics and that he himself
sought the company of Sufis and visited
their shrines. We even learn that the emperor
had a kind of jester at his court: the eccentric Shaikh Nazir who performed miracles and declared himself to be
a god-appointed guardian of Shah
Jahan.
Stephan
popp focuses on the exchange of presents, or rather the presentations, at the courts of Jahangir
and Shah Jahan, descriptions of which
occupy a principal part in their histories;
he gives us a precise and highly useful analysis of what was given, when, by whom, and to whom. Besides
ceremonial processes and reciprocal
presentations as signifiers of the emperor’s interaction with his court and the wider world, detailed
descriptions of the emperor’s building
projects emerge as new subjects of Mughal
historiography.26
The changing
emphasis on specific
topics leads us
to the more general issue of the analysis of Mughal
historiography which is
still insufficiently developed.
Shah Jahan’s histories
are often and misleadingly termed “chronicles” though they are obviously motivated by much greater and
complex ambitions than the chronological
recording of events. There are also new
foreign voices to consider. roman Siebertz analyses the Dutch merchant Joan Tack’s experience when trying
to obtain a farmān from Shah Jahan to solve ongoing disputes between the Dutch
east india Company and the Mughal state when the emperor was in Delhi in 1648; it serves as a case study
for the inner workings of the Mughal
state and its bureaucracy. a greater look at what was happening with trade and mercantile
groups in this period would be an
important context in which to locate the more
expansive Shah Jahani world.
The
third section, “poetry and Court rhetoric”, is devoted to
the literature under
Shah Jahan’s patronage.
Sunil Sharma characterizes its main trends, how the
dominance of iranian poets gave way to
an integration of persianate indians, and he
also looks at hindi and Sanskrit texts; he focuses on a genre that is
specific to Shah Jahan’s
reign, the Persian masnavī (poem
in rhyming couplets) on Kashmir, that
combines verse travelogues and
topographical poems. Chander Shekhar looks at the genre of dībācha—prefaces or introductions in the
literature produced at Shah Jahan’s
court—and identifies three categories: dibachas to poetical works, dibachas to historical works
and court chronicles such as the
Pādshāhnāmas or Shāhjahānnāmas, and dibachas by
princes or by others to their literary compositions.
The
fourth section, “architecture, legal practice, ornament and painting”, is, as its title indicates, an
exercise in approaching material
evidence with new and diverse methodologies. ebba Koch looks at the palaces and gardens of the
Mughal nobility as an intersection of
architecture and law; she discovers in their
changing ownership the pattern of imperial escheat, which became an established praxis under Shah
Jahan. Susan Stronge’s essay on the
dispersed tile-facing of the gate of the tomb and mosque of Madani (d. 1445) at Srinagar in
Kashmir is a piece of detective work,
effected through close stylistic
analysis; she suggests a date of 1640
for the gate, and a link to Safavid iran for
the innovative technique of its
figural cuerda seca tiles, which became a characteristic form of architectural
ornamentation under Shah Jahan. J.p.
losty examines the famous Dara Shukuh
album (now in the British library), and in a painstaking analysis of
its calligraphy and
flower decoration places
its creation in
1630–33 at the beginning of Shah Jahan’s reign, and its position as central to the changes of artistic patronal
taste that transformed Jahangiri into
Shah Jahani painting.
In
the fifth and final section, the “Epilogue”, Robert McChesney shows
that Shah Jahan’s
reign cast such a long
shadow that it
even reached the late 19th- and early 20th-century rulers of afghanistan—amir ‘abd al-rahman Khan (r.
1880–1901) and his son and successor,
amir habib allah Khan (r. 1901–19); he discusses the variety of ways in which Shah Jahan’s image
was evoked by these two men, as filtered
through the account of their chronicler, Faiz
Muhammad ‘Katib’ Hazarah, the author of Sirāj al-tawārīkh.
Shah
Jahan, whose motto was “Verily our traditions [āsār] tell of us”, would have been pleased.
So,
where should we situate a book such as this in the field of Mughal studies? it hopes to newly position
the distinctiveness of the first half of
the 17th century in the history of the Mughals and to look at it as an entity where structural
continuity prevailed in the face of the
polemically professed divisions between the
reign of Jahangir and Shah Jahan. But the book goes further. As its chapters have underlined, so much
finessing was carried out at
different levels during
the reigns of the
two monarchs that they actually appear as a unit, not so
much a culmination, but a creative
reconceptualization of the Mughal empire as
imagined by akbar on the basis of what Babur and humayun had initiated. it also makes us reconsider
commensurability— the 17th-century Mughals seemed to anticipate the
europeans during a period when there
were so many shared concerns and so much
dialogue—and also uniqueness. To be sure the Mughal archive does not have the kind of
documentation that can sustain a Norbert Elias-like evaluation
of affect and
politeness that flowed from courtly society into an enlarging public
arena that shaped early Modernity. But
the chapters in this volume do enlarge
on the elements that shaped an asian early Modernity— humanism, self-will,
curiosity, scientific interest, exploration of
the potential of art, experimentation with languages and the confidence
of the state
to articulate a
cultural uniqueness for
its domain. So much of this asian early Modernity belongs to the fashioning that took place during the
early 17th century. The concluding
essay of Robert
McChesney’s contribution on
19th-century evaluations of Shah
Jahan’s reign in Afghanistan is very much to the point in this
context—outside india, and in a world
that was not ruptured by an intrusive Colonial Modernity, it was Shah Jahan’s court, not Akbar’s, that
was regarded as the paradigm of
civility, progress and development.
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Introduction
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Notes
1 Khafi Khan 1869–1925, Pt. 1, pp. 757–58. One
crore is ten million rupees. i thank
Wheeler Thackston for help with the translation of this passage.
2
The most detailed new examination of Jahangir is lefèvre 2018.
3
aziz 1927–33.
4
Saksena 1932/1968. The work ran to several editions: 1962, 1968 and 1975.
5
Both works drew on Saksena. That of Nicoll was in addition informed by Dr Syed Mohammed Jaffery.
6 Until
2004 only the
histories of Shah
Jahan’s historians Lahauri
and Kanbu were available in printed persian editions: lahauri 1866–72 and Kanbu 1967–72. There were also
printed editions of Shah Jahan’s court poet Abu Talib Kalim Kashani, such as Kalim 1957, Kalim 1990. None of these
sources were translated into english.
7 Dr
Jaffery undertook this work in collaboration with me for my
project on the art, architecture and court culture of Shah Jahan, which I began at Delhi in 1976. I provided
him with microfilms of manuscripts of
Shah Jahani sources, chiefly in the British Library, of which he prepared typed transcripts. he
read the histories and poetic works and
took notes of topics of interest to me. We then
translated the relevant passages together, meeting on a regular basis during my stay at Delhi between 1976
and 1986, and during my following visits
until his death in 2016.
8
Chandar Bhan 2007.
9 Tabataba’i 2009.
10 Kalim
2016. Dr Jaffery
also prepared typescripts
of manuscripts of the
Pādshāhnāmas of Muhammad amin or amina-i Qazvini and Muhammad Waris as a base for future
publications.
11 ʻInayat Khan 1990. The earliest translation
of a historian writing about the reign
of Shah Jahan is perhaps by francis gladwin who
translated extracts of Chandar Bhan Brahman’s Chahār Chaman as a model of persian prose style. See gladwin
1801. elliot and Dowson translated extracts
of Shah Jahan’s
historians Qazvini, Lahauri,
ʻInayat Khan, Waris, Kanbu, Muhammad Sadik Khan, Muhammad Sharif Hanafi and Mufazzal Khan in their
monumental work The History of India, as
Told by Its Own Historians, see elliot and Dowson 1867–77, Vol. 7, pp. 1–145. There exists also
a faulty and abridged translation of
lahauri: see lahori 2010. Begley and Desai 1989
assembled an anthology of translations of texts related to the Taj Mahal.
12 Kinra 2015; Thackston’s thesis on Kalim is still unpublished. See Thackston 1974.
13
See Koch 2001, introduction, p. xxvii.
14
fergusson 1910/1972, Vol. 2, p. 308.
15
linda leach wrote: “he [Shah Jahan] seems to have viewed painting purely as a decorative art and
therefore did not require the same
expressiveness from his miniaturists as did Jahangir.” leach 1995, Vol. 1, p. 354.
16
See especially Begley 1979; Koch 1988/2001; Beach, Koch and Thackston 1997; Koch 2006; Joshi 2010; Moin
2012.
17
Moin 2012.
18
Koch 1982/2001.
19
Koch 1988/2001.
20
Koch 2006.
21
Saksena 1932/1968, pp. 104–12.
22
See e.g. Koch 1988/2001 and 2017.
23
Sharma 2017.
24
Ṣāḥib-i qirān is an astrological expression, literally meaning “lord of the Conjunction”. it refers to the
auspicious conjunction of the planets
Jupiter and Venus. it was the title of Timur and other rulers who referred to him. See Moin 2012,
Chapter 2.
25 Qazvīnī,
fols. 10a–10b. The
late Dr Jaffery,
who was preparing
an edition of
Qazvīnī’s Pādshāhnāma, and
Stephan popp, who is working on its
translation, assisted me in rendering this passage into english. anushirvan, the Sasanian king
Khusrau i (r. 531–579), became
proverbial for his justice in persianate cultures. for the chain of justice as a literary trope and a
real practice at the Mughal court see
Koch 2012, pp. 205–08.
26
See e.g. Koch 2013, especially pp.