Shah Jahan

Emperor of India (r. 1628-1658)

• Born: January 5, 1592
• Birthplace: Lahore, India (now in Pakistan)
• Died: January 22, 1666
• Place of death: Āgra, India

Shah Jahan ruled the Mughal Empire at the culminating phase of its wealth and power, enabling him to act as an unequaled patron of Muslim art and architecture in the Indian subcontinent.

Early Life

The future emperor Shah Jahan was the third son of the fourth Mughal Emperor of India, Jahāngīr. The child was given the name Khurram, which he retained until he mounted the throne in 1628. His mother was a Rājput princess, daughter of the maharaja of Jodhpur in western Rajasthan. Thus, Khurram was descended on his father’s side from the great Central Asian warlords Genghis Khan and Tamerlane, a lineage that, over time, had been softened by the twin cultural influences of Islam and Persia. On his mother’s side, he inherited the warlike traditions of the Hindu Rājputs. His Persian education consisted of penmanship and calligraphy, poetry and belles-lettres, Arabic grammar and rhetoric, and some Chaghatay Turkish, together with the practical skills of the warrior and the hunter.

From an early age, Khurram would have understood that no strict rule of primogeniture stood in the way of a younger brother’s usurping an elder brother’s place in matters of the succession. Jahāngīr’s eldest son and natural heir, Khusru, forfeited his father’s trust when, even during his grandfather Akbar the Great’s reign, he allowed himself to be put forward as a rival to his father by an unsuccessful court cabal. Thereafter, Jahāngīr never trusted him. After Jahāngīr’s accession in 1605, Khusru engaged in further futile conspiracies and was kept under close surveillance. He was eventually placed in Khurram’s custody by Jahāngīr in a drunken stupor. Khurram quickly got rid of his prisoner by killing him in cold blood in Burhanpur in 1621, although he ensured that the appropriate public obsequies were observed.

As Jahāngīr sank into an opium eater’s senility, the Nūr Jahān clique realized that Khurram was beyond their control, and they belatedly cast around for an alternative. When Jahāngīr died near Lahore in 1627 (his eldest surviving son, Parviz, had died in the previous year), Khurram himself was far away, campaigning in the Deccan (central India). Nūr Jahān, therefore, attempted to have Khurram’s younger brother, Shahryar, who had married her daughter, enthroned, but Asaf Khan, her brother, defeated the forces raised by Nūr Jahān and Shahryar, captured Shahryar, and effectively rendered his sister powerless. Meanwhile, Khurram, by this time hurrying north, sent instructions to Asaf Jah to blind Shahryar and four other rivals. On January 28, 1628, Khurram was proclaimed emperor and assumed the name Shah Jahan (king of the world). Shortly afterward, all five captive princes were executed. Shah Jahan, thirty-six years old, was indubitably master of the Mughal Empire, but he had waded to the throne through his kinsmen’s blood.

Life’s Work

Shah Jahan’s early years established his reputation as an active soldier, an able administrator, and a wily politician. For the next thirty years, he ruled the Mughal Empire at the apogee of its power, wealth, and splendor, seeking to expand its frontiers in all directions while undertaking a most ambitious program of public works, including a new capital. Seeking to elevate the concept of Mughal kingship, Shah Jahan deliberately harked back to his Central Asian ancestors. Like Tamerlane, he assumed the title of Sahib-i Qiran (lord of the fortunate conjunction of the planets); it was during his reign that Tamerlane’s possibly spurious memoirs were translated from Turkish into Persian; and he himself went to great efforts to attempt the reconquest of Tamerlane’s ancestral homeland, now in Uzbek hands.

In matters of court ceremony, he set a more formal tone than either Akbar or Jahāngīr, commissioning for himself the construction of the Peacock Throne, which was to become the focal point of the monarchy and which took seven years to fabricate. Even the Taj Mahal, built as a mausoleum for his wife Mumtaz Mahal, who died in 1631, was at once an epitome of dynastic splendor (the entire complex involved vast expenditure and took seventeen years to complete) and a statement of the emperor’s Islamic piety. Unlike his father Jahāngīr, a dissolute and lax ruler, or his grandfather, Akbar, heterodox and wayward in matters of religion, Shah Jahan was a strictly orthodox Sunni Muslim who felt no empathy for his Shia Muslim or Hindu subjects.

At the death of Akbar in 1605, the Mughal Empire had consisted of all northern and central India north of the Tapti River, but there remained areas that were only partly integrated into the administrative system and were still controlled by local tribes and lineages. Shah Jahan determined to consolidate this internal frontier. He vigorously harried the tribes of lower Sind and the marches of Baluchistan, and he annexed the Baglana state south of Gujarat and enforced the submission of its Rājput ruler. He mercilessly crushed the ruling line in Bundelkhand, in the course of which his armies penetrated Gondwana to the southeast. On the northern frontiers, Shah Jahan’s tenacity enforced, with difficulty, his overlordship of Gahrwal and Baltistan; in the northeast, imperial rule was confirmed in Kuch Bihar and Kamrup on the Brahmaputra, although the emperor was forced to recognize that the Ahom kingdom, formed by Shan tribesmen who had moved from upper Burma down the Brahmaputra, lay beyond his grasp.

In the south, Shah Jahan’s gains were more substantial. In the northwestern Deccan, the sultanate of Ahmadnagar, long a thorn in the Mughals’ flesh, was the object of vigorous campaigning during 1630 and 1631, leading to the fall of the citadel of Daulatabad in 1632. Thereafter, Ahmadnagar was fully integrated into the imperial system, with a provincial governor, bureaucracy, and the standard Mughal revenue system. In 1635, Shah Jahan sent embassies to the more distant sultans of Bijapur and Golconda, demanding their submission. Too weak to reject such pressure, they prevaricated, acquiescing in a dependent status while doing everything possible to keep the reality of Mughal authority at arm’s length. Shah Jahan’s third son, Aurangzeb, as viceroy of the Deccan, fought hard to break their spirit, but Shah Jahan, perhaps fearing his son’s ambitions, never permitted him the resources to complete the task. By the end of Shah Jahan’s reign, both sultanates were in effect still independent.

Great though the empire’s resources were, they were not inexhaustible, and they were severely strained by Shah Jahan’s Central Asian ambitions. Qandahār, in southern Afghanistan, marked the border between Mughal India and Ṣafavid Persia and was a bone of contention between these predatory monarchies. Jahāngīr had lost it to Shah ՙAbbās the Great in 1622, but it passed back into Mughal hands in 1638, when its Ṣafavid governor defected to the Mughal side. In 1648, ShahՙAbbās II (r. 1642-1666) recaptured it. Mughal attempts to regain the stronghold in 1649, 1652, and 1653 all failed ignominiously.

Failure was also the price paid for Shah Jahan’s ruinous attempt to reconquer his ancestral lands north of the Hindukush mountains. In 1646, a huge army was dispatched to Balkh in northern Afghanistan, ostensibly to adjudicate an Uzbek dynastic dispute but in fact to annex the city and province. For some months, the Mughals held Balkh, but in 1647, faced with Uzbek intransigence, a harsh terrain, and the logistical difficulties of supplying the army from Kabul, they were forced to withdraw.

In all this campaigning, Shah Jahan’s sons served active apprenticeships in the field, vying with each other for commands, revenue, and prestige. Conventional wisdom accepted that the Mughal inheritance would pass to the prince endowed with superior military talent, good fortune, and the blessings of Allah. For years, each brother eyed his siblings with growing hostility. Shah Jahan kept his eldest and favorite son, Dārā, with him in the north, hoping no doubt that he would be well placed to employ the central organs of government to ensure a smooth transition. Of the other sons, Shujah was governor of Bengal, Aurangzeb was governor of the Deccan, and Murad was governor of Gujarat.

Shah Jahan’s illness in September, 1657, perhaps marking the onset of senility, was the occasion for the predictably bloodthirsty struggle to break out. In the end, Aurangzeb’s superior generalship and cooler head won the day. Dārā was taken and executed, as were his sons; Shujah and his family died as fugitives in Arakan; Murad too was executed; and Aurangzeb proclaimed himself emperor in 1658, with Shah Jahan still alive. Aurangzeb treated him harshly. The old man was incarcerated in the fort at Āgra, in a gorgeous suite of rooms that he himself had constructed in happier times, but he remained a closely confined prisoner. He died there in 1666 and was buried beside Mumtaz Mahal in the Taj Mahal, the great mausoleum he had constructed across the river from the fort.

Significance

The thirty years of Shah Jahan’s reign are regarded as the culmination of the material splendor and artistic achievement of the Mughal Empire. Judged by his patronage of architecture, which draws thousands today to view his monuments, Shah Jahan was the most munificent of builders. Aside from the Taj Mahal, arguably the most famous building in the world, he rebuilt the Āgra palace-fort, with its opulent Pearl Mosque, turning structures of red sandstone into ones of glittering white marble.

Delhi, the capital of the Muslim rulers of northern India since the early thirteenth century, he rebuilt completely on a partly new site, perhaps in emulation of ShahՙAbbās the Great of Persia, who had laid out a lavish new palace-quarter in Eşfahān. Shahjahanabad (today referred to as Old Delhi) was designed as the sumptuous capital of an expanding empire, with the Red Fort at its core, while the city’s congregational mosque, the Jama Masjid, was to be the largest in India. Other major architectural undertakings included the fort at Lahore, the congregational mosque in Thatta (now in Pakistan), and the garden retreats on the Dal Lake in Kashmir.

In miniature painting and in the sumptuary arts of carpet and textile weaving, and in the fabrication of objets d’art in metal, ivory, jade, and jewelry, the artists of the reign have rarely been equaled, as can be seen in major museum collections, perhaps most particularly that of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. Vast wealth in precious metals and jewels was accumulated in the Mughal treasury, exemplified by the Peacock Throne, glittering with emeralds, now largely destroyed but preserved in contemporary miniatures. A desiccated version, still encrusted with precious stones and surrounded by other Mughal treasures acquired by the Persian conqueror Nadir Shah during his sack of Delhi in 1737, is preserved in the Bank-i Melli in Tehran, Iran.

The age of Shah Jahan was marked by artistic splendor. However, one should not forget the predatory nature of the Mughal regime and the immense military expenditure authorized by Shah Jahan in unsuccessful attempts to recapture Qandahār and to hold Balkh and in expansive campaigns in the Deccan. These expenditures, together with his building program and the conspicuous waste of an ostentatious court, bled the empire dry. Government revenues were derived mainly from agriculture, and Shah Jahan’s three decades of extravagance may well have created the circumstances that made inevitable the empire’s impoverishment and gradual decline.

Bibliography

Asher, Catherine. Architecture of Mughal India. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992. The best account of Shah Jahan as a builder and patron of architecture, with accompanying ground plans, diagrams, and photographs.

Beach, M. C., E. Koch, and Wheeler Thackston. King of the World. London: Azimuth Editions, 1997. Selected translations from a major chronicle, the Padshahnama, of Abdul Hamid Lahawri, accompanied by sumptuous illustrations of what is perhaps the most splendid surviving Mughal manuscript, now in England’s Royal Library at Windsor Castle.

Begley, Wayne E. “The Myth of the Taj Mahal and a New Theory of Its Symbolic Meaning.” Art Bulletin (March, 1979): 7-37. This important article lays to rest the legend that the Taj Mahal was built as a monument to conjugal love. It was an act of state proclaiming the splendor of the dynasty as well as an act of piety conceived as a symbolic statement affirming the truths of the Muslim faith.

Begley, Wayne E., and Z. A. Desai, eds. The Shah Jahan Nama of Inayat Khan. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1990. An abridged version of one of the most detailed and important chronicles of the reign.

Bernier, François. Travels in the Mogul Empire, A.D. 1656-1668. Translated by Archibald Constable. Westminster, England: Archibald Constable, 1891. Reprint of 2d rev. ed. Delhi, India: Low Price Publications, 1989. The observations of the Frenchman Bernier are among the liveliest and most perceptive of European travel writers who visited Mughal India. Essential reading for its portrait of mid-seventeenth century India.

Blake, Stephen. Shahjahanabad, the Sovereign City in Mughal India, 1639-1739. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991. A study of the inception and development of Shah Jahan’s new capital, with emphasis on dynastic involvement in urban planning and patronage.

Kozlowski, Gregory C. “Private Lives and Public Piety: Women and the Practice of Islam in Mughal India.” In Women in the Medieval Muslim World: Power, Patronage, and Piety, edited by Gavin R. G. Hambly. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998. Establishes the central role of Mughal court women, including Shah Jahan’s formidable aunt by marriage, Nūr Jahān, his wives, and his two daughters, as patrons of architecture and urban renewal.

Lal, Muni. Shah Jahan. New Delhi, India: Vikas, 1986. A popular biography of the emperor.

Raj Kumar, ed. India Under Shah Jahan. New Delhi, India: Anmol, 2000. A collection of articles examining various aspects of Indian life during Shah Jahan’s rule.

Saksena, Banarsi Prasad. History of Shahjahan of Dihli. Allahabad, India: Central Book Depot, 1962. A complete account of Shah Jahan’s life. Packed with information, but somewhat dated in style.