Nur Jahan and the fascinating world of Mughal women

Raziuddin Aquil 

Historians are increasingly coming out from the ivory towers of academia and its elitist intellectual discourse to engage with larger readership of the popular domain. In doing so, they are able to deploy current historical research for informing and educating non-historians and general readers on themes of topical interest or offering interesting biographies of charismatic figures of the past. Ruby Lal's book, Empress: The Astonishing Reign of Nur Jahan, is one such attempt of critical importance. 

Mughal women are known for their powerful presence, both when they lived in army camps during political flux and when they were sequestered in segregated harems during political stability. In the early period of the making of the Mughal empire, the kings would reveal their temptations for good looking young boys; once the powerful empire was established, the emperors styled themselves as big Indian patriarchs.

Lal herself has set the agenda straight: "My work as a feminist historian has focused on two interrelated questions: First, how can I best tell the stories of women and girls, which are largely missing from the precolonial and colonial history of South Asia? Then, what counts as evidence, and therefore as history? One answer to both questions has involved using sources that other historians have ignored." Lal has also employed her feminist gaze to see what men writing in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had to say about a remarkable seventeenth-century woman, Nur Jahan, who has been portrayed by the author as something of a proto-feminist and an Empress in her own right.

Some very interesting work on women and questions relating to gender in medieval and early modern India has emerged in recent decades, but no amount of writing is enough on the resourceful Mughal women who turned Mughal politics and rule inside out. This is particularly significant because women asserted themselves at a time when they were being invisibilised in well-guarded harem from the time of the most powerful emperor Akbar (1556-1605).

As Lal has mentioned, growing up in Fatehpur-Sikri and Agra, and probably living there until her marriage, Nur Jahan's parents would have ensured that their daughters would be known for intelligence, piety, self-control, good judgment, tenderness, and temperate speech. Texts in circulation on norms of comportment would also recommend that girls should be brought up to keep close to the house and live in seclusion and develop qualities required to make good wives, for which they did not need to be taught to read and write. 

However, Mughal women were often highly accomplished scholars, writers, poets and intellectuals, either through their personal excellence and initiatives to break free from any restrictions or because of the fact that Mughal India was not such a regressive place to inhabit. "The comfortable coexistence of Hindu rajas and the Mughals, of Hindavi and Persian, the Bible and the Quran, the orthodox and the heterodox", in sum, "the diversity of beliefs and practices made Akbar's India a charmed place".

Emperor Jahangir (1605-1627) built upon the broad-based Akbari dispensation, which in turn invoked the experience and expertise of Babur and Humayun (reflected among other accounts in the narrative prepared by formidable personality of Babur's daughter Gulbadan Begum). The Mughals also invoked their Chingizi and Timurid legacy and drew on historical experience of various Muslim Sultanates, established in India since the thirteenth century, which also witnessed the exceptional rise and rule of Raziya Sultan. The latter was nominated by her own father, Sultan Iltutmish who established the Delhi Sultanate on a firm footing. 

Jahangir's granddaughters, Raushan Ara and Jahan Ara, are also known for their strong and divergent political stands during the war of succession, which led to Aurangzeb (1658-1707) capturing power by eliminating his brothers and incarcerating his father emperor Shah Jahan (1628-1658). Jahan Ara's mother and Shah Jahan's favourite wife, Mumtaz Mahal, in whose honour the emperor built the Taj Mahal, was a daughter of Nur Jahan's brother, the powerful minister Asaf Khan. Nur Jahan and Asaf Khan were among the talented children of I'timad ud-Daula Ghiyas Beg, one of the most distinguished Iranian nobles of the Mughal empire.

Thus, Nur Jahan belonged to a highly influential family of Persian aristocratic background, with father, brother and first husband enjoying considerable power. When brought to Jahangir's harem as widow of Sher Afgan, the Iranian-Mughal administrator of Burdawan in Bengal, she was "thirty-one years old, attractive, dignified, and well trained in the behaviour and duties required of noblewomen connected with palace society". Meanwhile, Jahangir had already married as many as nineteen times, had a flock of concubines, and was adored by senior harem women. As Lal points out: "Political ambition, intrigue, and aspirations cultivated in the harem were tightly entwined with courtly matters", the harem thus offered women surprising opportunities - "wide horizons behind high walls". Not long after her marriage with Jahangir, as his twentieth wife, Nur Jahan goes on to eliminate all opposition and competition to control and dominate the emperor's private and public life. 

The family's hold on the emperor is further strengthened by Nur Jahan marrying her daughter from her first marriage, Ladli Begum with Jahangir's youngest son, Shahryar, from an unnamed concubine, besides marrying her niece Arjumand Banu (daughter of Asaf Khan) with Khurram, the future Mughal emperor Shah Jahan. As reports indicate, Nur Jahan herself assumed enough power to issue farmans, get coins struck in her name and shoot tigers as a mark of her hunting ability, which in turn symbolised imperial power and dominance. Together all these constituted her claims on sovereignty, which according to Lal was self evident for the major part of her association with Jahangir, as co-sovereign or a pair of sovereigns. Her later attempts to push for Shahryar as a possible successor of Jahangir created an unbridgeable rift not only between her and Khurram, who rebels and eventually takes over, but also with her brother Asaf Khan. Mercifully, they ensured that she will lead a dignified retired life in Lahore till she passed away, nearly two decades after Jahangir's death.

Since the book is written like a historical novel, or as a possible pre-script for a drama or another movie on Nur Jahan, and not a conventional historical biography aimed at critical scrutiny, approval and recognition from experts in Mughal history, the latter should not crib about any acts of omission or commission on the part of the author. Nur Jahan is such a charismatic figure that anything written on her should be taken as an opportunity to know and discuss her extraordinary life. 

In continuation of her somewhat exaggerated deference for the enigmatic charm of the remarkable personality of Nur Jahan, Lal says: "In act after act - hunting, advising, issuing imperial orders and coins, designing buildings - she ensured that her name was etched indelibly in public memory and history". Unfortunately for Nur Jahan and her biographer, the theologians never read khutba (Friday sermon) in her name, which would truly make her a legitimate empress of Hindustan. Instead, she was generally dismissed as a gold-digger, scheming and mischievous woman, whose ambitious political manoeuvres and aggressive interventions in matters of governance caused much consternation. For some opponents, it was a veritable fitna - a seditious enterprise of disastrous consequences.

Empress: The Astonishing Reign of Nur Jahan, Penguin, By Ruby Lal, Rs 599.

A shorter version has been published in the Telegraph:

https://m.telegraphindia.com/culture/books/the-remarkable-life-of-mughal-empress-nur-jahan/cid/1683944?ref=culture_culture-page