February 12, 2002

The reason why uneasy lies the head that wears the crown is that it teems with megalomaniac ideas. Jahangir, the great-grandson of the Mughal adventurer Babur, must have cut a strange figure when he sat on the scales so that he could be measured against gold and other precious objects, to be distributed among the poor and the needy afterwards. In his memoirs, Jahangir describes these bizarre happenings unabashedly.

“According to custom they got ready the weighing apparatus and the scales in the house of Maryam-zamani (his mother). At the moment appointed blessings were invoked and I sate in the scales. Each suspending rope was held by an elderly person who offered up prayers. The first time the weight in gold came to three Hindustani maunds and ten seers. After this I was weighed against several metals, perfumes and essences, up to twelve weighings, the details of which will be given hereafter. Twice a year I weigh myself against gold and silver and other metals, and against all sorts of silks and cloths, and various grains, etc, once at the beginning of the solar year and once at that of the lunar.”

The redoubtable Vincent A. Smith (The Oxford history of India) says that “the leading authority is the annotated version of Jahangir’s authentic memoirs, in two volumes, by Rogers and Beveridge, dealing with nineteen years of the reign.” In the preface to the memoirs, which were translated by Alexander Rogers, the editor Henry Beveridge notes that “Jahangir was indeed a strange mixture. The man who could stand by and see men flayed alive, and who, as he himself tells us, put one man to death and had two others hamstrung because they showed themselves inopportunely and frightened away his game, could yet be a lover of justice and could spend his Thursday evenings in holding high converse.”

The instance of cruelty Mr Beveridge alludes to appears on p164. Without the slightest compunction, Jahangir records: “On the 22nd, when I had got within shot of a nilgaw, suddenly a groom and two bearers appeared, and the nilgaw escaped. In a great rage I ordered them to kill the groom on the spot, and to hamstring the bearers and mount them on asses and parade them through the camp, so that no one should have the boldness to do such a thing. After this I mounted a horse and continued hunting with hawks and falcons.” Conscience does not smite Jahangir when in Rawalpindi he orders one of his men and a sheep into a pool which was believed to have crocodiles (p98). Travelogue writer Isobel Shaw notes that “he (Jahangir) seems to have been quite disappointed when they emerged unscathed”.

Jahangir sheds no tears at the killing of Sher Afgan, thus lending credence to the widely rumoured view that the emperor had the Bengal dissident murdered so that he could marry Mihr-un-Nisa (1577-1645) on whom he subsequently conferred the title of Nur Jahan (‘Light of the world’). The memoirs record: “... his [Qutbuddin Khan Koka’s] men attacked him (Sher Afgan) and cut him in pieces and sent him to hell. It is to be hoped that the place of this black-faced scoundrel will always be there.”

The family of Qutbuddin Khan Koka, Jahangir’s foster-brother, earns the opprobrium of Nur Jahan because it was allegedly at his hands that Sher Afgan had been killed. It is not surprising then that after AD 1611 — the year 34-year-old Nur Jahan became Jahangir’s eighteenth and last legitimate wife — the ascent of her family (her brother Asaf Khan and her Khurasan-born father Mirza Ghiyas Beg) coincides with the decline of the descendents of Shaikh Salim Chishti. (Qutubuddin Khan Koka was the grandson of the Shaikh thanks to whose prayers Jahangir had been born).

Historians have marvelled at the fact that Jahangir makes no mention at all of his marriage to Nur Jahan in his memoirs. Even the unflappable Henry Beveridge expresses wonderment when Jahangir describes the events of the year 1611 without saying a word about his marriage. In a footnote on p192, Mr Beveridge writes: “Jahangir does not mention that it was in this year that he married Nur Jahan. ...It would seem that Jahangir married Nur Jahan four years and a few days after her first husband’s death.” Nur Jahan makes her first appearance in the memoirs on p266. For reasons best known to himself, Jahangir remains equally cagey about Nur Jahan’s numerous talents. If he had been more forthright he might have quashed future calumnies suggesting that he had had Sher Afgan liquidated so that he could marry Nur Jahan.

However, the definitive The Cambridge history of India throws its erudite weight behind Jahangir. It says: “The story usually told is that Jahangir had fallen in love with her long before, at his father’s court, that Akbar, to prevent a marriage, caused her to be married to Sher Afgan, and that Jahangir, thus frustrated, afterwards compassed her husband’s death, after which she for four years repelled the advances of his murderer, but at last relented. From the best contemporary evidence it appears that this story is a fabrication. Sher Afgan suffered death as any other assassin would have suffered in like circumstances, not because the emperor loved his wife, and his widow was not unkind to her imperial wooer.”

The Tuzuk-i-Jahangiri: memoirs of Jahangir (2 volumes)
Translated by Alexander Rogers
Edited by Henry Beveridge
Sang-e-Meel Publications, 20 Shahrah-i-Pakistan, Lahore
Tel: 042-7220100
Email: smp@sang-e-meel.com
ISBN 969-35-1093-3
793pp. Rs900

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