2
PIETY, not punctuality, is the politeness of princes. And none was more pious than the Mughal prince Dara Shikoh (1615-1659). As the eldest son of the emperor Shah Jahan, Dara Shikoh should have succeeded his father. However, Dara’s younger brother Muhi al-Din Muhammad (later the emperor Aurangzeb) practised his own version of piety. His flexible orthodoxy allowed him to imprison his father in 1658 and a year later have his brother Dara Shikoh executed.
The Timurid dynasty that ruled India from 1526 until 1857 produced a run of aesthetically inclined rulers, starting with the candid memoirist Babar to the introspective poet Bahadur Shah Zafar. In between them, Akbar ordered Persian translations of the Hindu epics the Mahabharata and the Ramayana. In time, his great-grandson Dara Shikoh translated the Upanishads (as Sirr-i-Akbar or the ‘Greatest Mystery’), the Bhagavad Gita, and the Yoga Vasistha (a fifth-century Hindu text).
The definition in the Vasistha of a jivanmukta or liberated person fits Dara Shikoh: he personified “nobleness, benevolence, love, clearness of intellect”. Dara Shikoh’s “clearness of intellect” persuaded him to write his Majma-ul-Bahrain or ‘The Mingling of the Two Oceans’, a Sufi text on the unity he found in Islam, Hinduism and other religions.
Unusually for a Mughal prince, Dara Shikoh remained monogamous. His singular love was his “dearest intimate friend” Nadirah Banu Begum, the cousin he married in 1633. Some years later, he gave her an album containing paintings and calligraphy, which he had commissioned earlier. It survived centuries of hazards. It was auctioned in 1908 and is now in the British Library.
Murad Khan’s book exercises the mind at different depths.
In the mid-1970s, I was privileged to handle it and admire its precious contents, courtesy its keeper Dr Mildred Archer. In 1981, she and Toby Falk catalogued the album’s 68 miniature paintings and 72 folios of calligraphy. Their catalogue entries were useful but brief. For example, for folio 18, they wrote: “A young prince kneels before a mulla who holds a book on which is written the two opening baits of a ghazal by Hafiz.” But who was the prince? And who was his bearded preceptor?
Murad Khan Mumtaz has re-examined the Dara Shikoh album and in his recent treatise Faces of God: Images of Devotion in Indo-Muslim Painting, 1500-1800, he reveals the deeper meanings within it. He explains that it is more than just a paean to conjugal love, like the marble sepulchre built by his father Shah Jahan for his wife Mumtaz Mahal (Dara’s mother). The album is not a random collection of favourite images. Dara Shikoh’s album in fact lauds the adolescent figures “as symbols of beauty” and the mullahs as Sufi divines.
In some, the figure is modelled on Dara Shikoh himself, in dialogue with his Sufi master. Evidence from this and similar imperial albums suggests that “God’s self-disclosure is deliberately represented in the person of the young prince”. Other albums contain reliable portraits of Sufi preceptors like Miyan Mir and Mulla Shah, who influenced the spiritual development of both Dara Shikoh and his sister Jahanara. (Incidentally, Nadirah Begam died in Sindh. Her body was brought to Lahore and buried in the precincts of the tomb of Miyan Mir.)
In his introduction to the album, Dara Shikoh praises “the master-artist of His [God’s] power who decorated the page … with golden lines/ borders [calligraphy], and the designer of His handicraft who fashioned the side-faced/ half-faced moon into a portrait”. In that one sentence, Dara explains a convention observed by miniature artists of every school over the centuries — of painting faces in profile. Very rarely, the artists would attempt a three-quarter or a full-face view. But the third dimension eluded them until they learned Western-style perspective.
The placement of miniatures and calligraphy within the album is deliberate. In a quotation Murad explains: “Each folio is a complete whole, a world; within the album one folio is not joined chronologically to the next[.] From one folio to the next, the same tonalities are amplified on extended registers, calling forth magical correspondences at every level.” Not dissimilar, Murad notes, to a raga or a ghazal. The album becomes in effect “a visual ghazal”.
Reading Murad Khan’s book is to exercise one’s mind at different levels, at different depths. It is, to use his simile, like looking at a garden through a screen. If one concentrates on the screen, the garden is a blur. If one ignores the screen, the garden comes into focus. “It is what al-Arabi famously called ‘seeing with both eyes — the eye of tashbih (similitude) and the eye of tanzih (transcendence)’.”
In an age of princely impieties and presidential transgressions, such spiritual guidance is all the more precious nowadays — for rulers as for the common man.
The writer is an author.
Published in Dawn, November 13th, 2025
