TLS on Mahal

on Love of Mahal

Love of Mahall

by Francis Robinson

a review of

Fergus Nicoll's Shah Jahan
The rise and fall of the Mughal Emperor 332pp. Haus. £20. 978 1 905791 910

At its height, the Mughal Empire was the greatest of the early modern Muslim gunpowder empires, ruling 100 million people, as compared with the 22 million of the Ottomans and the 6.5 million of the Safavids. Indeed, it was surpassed only by China's Ming Empire. From 1526 to 1707, with only a brief interval, the Mughals ruled most of India.
The wealth of the Mughal court made it a huge source of patronage, such as no European court could rival, and thus a destination for ambitious and gifted Arabs, Persians, Turks, and even the odd European. The men and women who ruled the empire (there were two women who controlled the royal seal from the harem, and others who participated in government) were remarkable both for their gifts and for their personalities. Shah Jahan, the son of the Emperor Jahangir by a Hindu Rajput wife, lived from 1592 to 1666 and ruled as emperor from 1628 to 1658. He had been a favourite of his grandfather, Akbar, and had kept vigil by the old emperor's bedside as he lay dying. As a young man he was a successful soldier, being awarded the title Shah Jahan "King of the World" by his father in 1617 on his return from successful campaigning in the Deccan. He continued to be personally involved in warfare up to his failed attempt in the mid-1640s to recapture the family patrimony in Samarkand.
He loved music, singing in a light baritone voice and playing the violin.

read more
He was a connoisseur of jewels, studding his Peacock Throne with the most precious of them and deploying semi-precious stones in his signature white marble buildings. He is famous for his love of his second wife, Mumtaz Mahal "Most Exquisite of the Palace", who bore him fifteen children in eighteen years and died bearing her last child. His grief, the adventurer Manucci tells us, turned his black beard white in the space of a few days.
If he had any passion that rivalled that for Mumtaz, it was for architecture. From his teenage years he commissioned new buildings and altered old ones, developing the high Mughal style. His most notable achievements were Shahjahanabad, now known as Old Delhi, a complete new capital built for the effective display of royal power, and, of course, the Taj Mahal, his exquisite tribute to Mumtaz Mahal. It is a building which impresses even the most cynical of visitors. Shah Jahan spent his last eight years gazing at the Taj from his imprisonment in Agra Fort. Having seized power himself by ordering the murder of two brothers and at least six other relatives, he discovered that his sons were not slow to follow his example. "How do you still regard the memory of Khusrau and Shahriyar", Aurangzeb the victor asked him, "whom you did to death before your accession and who had threatened no injury to you?" Fergus Nicoll sets out to tell the history of the rise and fall of Shah Jahan, combining scholarship with accessibility. His work is supported by wide reading in the primary and secondary literature; there are footnotes aplenty. Scholarly appendices explain complex issues such as dating (at least five different calendars are involved) and chronograms, the art of producing a verse about an event the value of the letters of which (each letter of the Persian alphabet has a numerical value) equals the date of the event. Nicoll's style readily grabs the attention. The only problem for the scholar is that one does not know at which point his use of imaginative licence ends and facts supported by evidence begin.
Nicoll gives particular emphasis to three great succession struggles; those to succeed Akbar, Jahangir and Shah Jahan. The Mughals did not practise primogeniture, so succession was a vicious affair. Rulers did try to indicate who their successors should be. But it was a dangerous business; if one son became too powerful, there was a chance that he might overthrow his father, a fact which made Jahangir keep Shah Jahan in uncertainty, damaging their relations. Whatever happened, as the Emperor began to age, or suffer a temporary illness in the case of Shah Jahan, the princes would prepare for the showdown. They knew that only one of them would survive the outcome. Nicoll narrates these struggles with great verve and with alertness to the play of court factions.
Particular emphasis, too, is given to the role of women. Following Ruby Lal, who, in Domesticity and Power in the Early Mughal World (2005), demonstrated the centrality of women to the Mughal project in the sixteenth century, Nicoll sets out the important role played by Mumtaz Mahal and in particular Nur Jahan, the wife of Jahangir, in the politics of the era. Shah Jahan might have been married to Nur Jahan's niece, but this did not prevent her from making his life miserable. Towards the end of Jahangir's reign she manipulated court politics to try to take the succession away from Shah Jahan in favour of Jahangir's son, Shahriyar, whom she had got married to her daughter by her first husband. Her aim, of course, was less that her daughter should be queen than that she should continue to be the power behind the throne.
Following Ebba Koch, whose masterly The Complete Taj Mahal was published in 2006, and whose personal assistance Nicoll graciously acknowledges, proper attention is given to the building's design and construction.
Shah Jahan was fully involved in every aspect of the project, which drew on the skills of craftsmen not just from India but from across the Islamic world to the Ottoman Empire. An appendix lists which suras of the Qur'an can be found on which parts of the structure. We are reminded that the Taj was just part of a much larger complex of buildings, including a bazaar and a caravanserai, and that it had a counterpoint across the River Jumna in the recently excavated Moonlight Garden, in which the marble tomb was to be enjoyed at night.
Nicoll does not dwell on Shah Jahan's dissipation after the death of Mumtaz Mahal. He consorted with the wives of nobles, to whom beggars cried out as they passed: "O breakfast of Shah Jahan! Remember us!" or "O luncheon of Shah Jahan! Succour us!". The reason for Jahan's illness in 1657, which sparked the succession struggle leading to his overthrow, was the impact of aphrodisiacs taken to revive his flagging powers. Moreover, in that struggle it is worth noting the emperor's further misery in finding his able daughters on opposing sides.
There are points where Nicoll's scholarship is not entirely secure: Allahabad was never the capital of the Mughal subah of Bihar, being the capital of its own subah; Chishti Sufis are not usually linked by blood, as Nicoll suggests, but by spiritual descent; Balkh is not a mountainous kingdom but in the plains of northern Afghanistan; and "Islamism" or "political Islam" is a term of art in contemporary political science which is not properly applied to Shah Jahan's moves in an orthodox direction.
Nicoll makes several claims to establish new facts, of which the strongest is his explanation for the five-year gap between Shah Jahan's engagement to Mumtaz Mahal, and his eventual marriage, in terms of her family falling out of favour because of her uncle's involvement in a succession plot. But his real claim to novelty is in providing the first book-length study of this remarkable emperor since R. N. Saksena in 1932, and doing so in a manner which deserves to bring a new following to Mughal history.