Jahāngīr

Emperor of India (r. 1605-1627)

• Born: August 31, 1569
• Birthplace: Fatehpur Sīkri, India
• Died: October 28, 1627
• Place of death: Chingarhsiri, India

Jahāngīr was an emperor with musical, poetic, artistic, intellectual, culinary, and sartorial tastes and sensibilities. With his penchant for courtly rituals, as well, he contributed immensely to what came to be hallmarks of Mughal culture.

Early Life

Jahāngīr (jeh-HAHN-geer) was born Prince Salīm, the eldest son of one of India’s greatest Mughal emperors, Akbar (r. 1556-1605), and his Rājput queen Jodha Bai (d. 1623). Reportedly, Salīm’s birth was hailed by his parents as the gift of the sixteenth century Muslim saint Sheik Salīm Chishti and was, therefore, a blessing for them, as they had desperately desired a male successor. The royal child, given the royal name Nūruddīn Muḥammad Jahāngīr (light of the faith of Muḥammad, the world conqueror) was educated beginning at age four, under the guidance of important tutors such as Akbar’s courtier Abdur Rahim Khankhanan, who taught him Persian, Arabic, Hindi, history, arithmetic, geography, and other sciences.

From an early age, Jahāngīr displayed a kind of schizophrenic personality. On one hand, he was romantically inclined and had an artistic sensibility and an intellectual bent of mind. On the other hand, he had a violent temper, was intolerant of religion, and had bouts of bacchanalian frenzy, aggravated no doubt by his abuse of opium and alcohol, typical of his family. As early as 1591, Jahāngīr had been estranged from his royal father, who feared being poisoned by his son.

Around 1599, Jahāngīr, though married to several wives and the father of three sons, became involved in a scandalous love affair with one of his father’s wives, the teenaged Anarkali (pomegranate kernel). After being caught in bed with the prince, Anarkali was buried alive, and the offending prince was bypassed by his eldest son Khusru in succession to the throne. Khusru was born in 1587 to Jahāngīr and his Rājput wife Man Bai. Akbar’s choice of Khusru for the throne disconcerted Jahāngīr, and he sought to procure his rightful succession through the use of force. His opportunity came in the fall of 1599, when Akbar had left for a campaign in the Deccan (central India), which put Jahāngīr in the charge of the capital.

In July of 1600, Jahāngīr, who tried unsuccessfully to seize control of Āgra fort, confronted his father when he returned to Āgra. He spurned his father’s conciliatory offer of the governorship of Bengal and Orissa and instead retreated to Allahabad, where he began to have the khutba (the Friday sermon in the mosque) read and to have coins struck in his name. He also had his father’s trusted councillor Abu-l FazlՙAllāmī assassinated in 1602. (Abu-l FazlՙAllāmī had been sent from the Deccan to deal with Jahāngīr.) Ultimately, the terminally ill, old Emperor Akbar had a change of heart and forgave his renegade son, recognizing him as his successor before he died on October 16, 1605.

Life’s Work

Jahāngīr’s reign began with his son Khusru’s revolt on April 6, 1606. The rebellion was crushed easily and cruelly. Khusru was confined, though his life was spared at first. When, in August, 1607, Khusru was implicated in a plot to assassinate Jahāngīr, the emperor had his son partially blinded and kept under strict surveillance.

Jahāngīr’s reign was markedly affected by his marriage to Mihr-un-Nisā’ (d. 1645), the daughter of a Persian place-seeker at Akbar’s court. She earlier had married a court noble, but he died in service in Bengal. She relocated to the imperial court, where she attracted Jahāngīr’s attention, and married the emperor in 1611, thus obtaining her famous sobriquet, Nūr Jahān (light of the world). She was also known as Nūr Mahāl (light of the palace). Possessed of immense charm, charisma, and cunning, Nūr Jahān, along with her father (who received the title of Itimad-ud-daula, pillar of the state) and her brother, emerged as the real sources of power and policy in Jahāngīr’s government between 1611 and 1622.

The rise of this Persian junta coincided with the emperor’s increasing obsession with opium, wine, poetry, music, dance, and other pastimes, to the utter neglect of the more prosaic and practical art of government. A rival faction at court emerged under the Afghan soldier-statesman Mahabat Khan toward the end of Jahāngīr’s reign.

Jahāngīr continued the Mughal policy of territorial conquest and expansion. In the northeast, he subdued the warlike Ahoms (immigrants from upper Burma) in 1612. In 1614, the Hindu maharaja Amar Singh of Mewar capitulated and became a friendly tributary ruler under the Mughals. In 1616, Jahāngīr’s third son, Khurram (1592-1666), conquered Ahmadnagar in the Deccan and obtained from his royal father the title of Shah Jahan (ruler of the world), reigning from 1628 to 1658. In 1618, Jahāngīr defeated the raja of Kangra, one of the Rājput chiefs whose valley kingdoms cordoned the Himalayan foothills.

During the Mughal operation in the Deccan, Jahāngīr spent more than five years away from the capital at Āgra, traveling to Mandu and Gujarat. When he returned to the capital in April of 1619, his health failed and his court came under the control of Nūr Jahān’s faction. Nūr Jahān, originally a favorer of Khurram’s succession, feared losing her hold over the empire because she disliked the prince’s imperious attitude. In search of a pliable successor, she had her own daughter from her first marriage, Ladli Begum, married to Jahāngīr’s youngest son, Shahryar (1605-1628). Her first effective move against Shah Jahan was made in 1622, when the empire’s ongoing clashes with the Ṣafavid ruler of Persia, ShahՙAbbās the Great (r. 1587-1629), over Qandahār had taken a bad turn. Nūr Jahān wanted Khurram to lead the expedition to Qandahār, where he would either be defeated by the shah or, because he would have to stay far away, lose his clout at the imperial court.

Shah Jahan’s expected refusal played into Nūr Jahān’s hands, and he was hunted by the imperial army as a traitor. Mahabat Khan, the commander in chief of the imperial army, was able to bring the rebellious prince under control, but he did not surrender him to the court, fearing that such a move would strengthen Nūr Jahān’s position. Mahabat allowed his prisoner to escape to far-off Bengal, where Shah Jahan began to regroup his forces. When Nūr Jahān accused Mahabat of embezzling government funds and violating imperial protocol, the enraged commander in chief retaliated by placing both the emperor and his queen under his surveillance in March of 1626, while the royal couple was encamping at Lahore. Mahabat’s move did not succeed because Nūr Jahān still enjoyed the complete support of the court at Āgra, which was under the control of her family. In October of 1626, Mahabat’s protégé Parvez, Jahāngīr’s second son, died, so Mahabat decided to join forces with Shah Jahan in Bengal to prepare for a final showdown of power between the ailing emperor and his renegade son.

Meanwhile, Jahāngīr’s illness, which had become serious since 1621, rapidly worsened. During the hot weather of 1627, he traveled to his beloved Kashmir for relief and rest. Within days of arrival there, both he and his accompanying youngest son, Shahryar, fell ill, terminally. Shahryar’s condition compelled him to return to the warmer climate of Lahore. Jahāngīr, too, was persuaded to leave Kashmir and stay near his ailing son. On October 28, 1627, on the way back to Lahore from Kashmir, at Chingarhsiri, Jahāngīr died at age fifty-eight, after having reigned for a little more than twenty-one years.

Significance

Jahāngīr was an accomplished individual, “an aristocrat with the eye of a naturalist, the vision of a poet, the taste of connoisseur and the philosophy of an epicurean,” in the estimation of an eminent scholar. Arguably, his reign was of little note politically—he merely carried on the policies of his predecessor—though it registered a cultural triumph. Thanks to the influence of his queen Nūr Jahān, Persian culture affected almost every aspect of refined life, from cuisine, calligraphy, and costumes to art and architecture, and it became a part of Indian civilization.

Though seen generally as a lazy and indulgent libertine, jealous of his brothers and sons, Jahāngīr nevertheless was a self-conscious monarch with a vision of majestic grandeur. He prescribed the parameters of an ordered society upon commencing his reign (witness his dastan ul-amal, twelve edicts for the conduct of his subjects). He also had a “chain of justice” fastened at one end of the battlements of Āgra fort and to a stone post on the Yamuna River at the other end. Anyone seeking justice or the attention of the emperor could pull the chain of bells.

In the realm of religion, Jahāngīr was a marked eclectic and was even occasionally seen as a favorer of Christianity. It was during his reign that the British East India Company received the imperial farman (decree or license) in 1619 to open a factory at Surat, Mughal India’s principal port on the western coast, after the arrival of Sir Thomas Roe, King James I’s ambassador to the Mughal court, in 1614.

Bibliography

Edwardes, S. M., and H. L. O Garrett. Mughal Rule in India. 2d ed. Delhi, India: S. Chand, 1962. A solid and succinct account of the Mughal period in India.

Findly, Ellison B. Nūr Jahān: Empress of Mughal India. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. This work is elegant as well as erudite, offering an excellent read and valuable analysis of both Nūr Jahān and Jahāngīr.

Husain, Afzal. The Nobility Under Akbar and Jahāngīr: A Study of Family Groups. New Delhi: Manohar, 1999. Details the kinship structures of nine noble families and the social structure of Mughal culture in general. Explains the relationship between family, politics, and religion.

Prasad, Beni. History of Jahāngīr. 1922. 5th ed. Allahabad: Indian Press, 1962. A standard and reliable account of Jahāngīr’s life and reign.

Richards, John F. The Mughal Empire. Vol. 5 in The New Cambridge History of India. 1993. Reprint. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996. A standard scholarly overview of the Mughal Empire in the context of India’s history.

Wolpert, Stanley. A New History of India. 7th ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. This frequently updated general history, written by one of the leading historians of India, provides an accessible introduction.

Yunus, Mohammed, and Anuradha Parmar. South Asia: A Historical Narrative. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. A helpful text for beginners but lacking in important details.