Of his three sons, Akbar favoured his firstborn, Salim, to succeed him. Yet Salim, even while being groomed for the throne, felt excluded from what he deemed his proper share of royal authority. He was especially jealous of the attention that his father showered on his principal adviser and friend, Abu’l-fazl. Already in the early 1590s, he began showing signs of impatience for full sovereign power, picking fights with his younger brothers and engaging in excesses and follies that Abu’l-fazl would bring to Akbar’s attention. This only created tensions between father and son, while intensifying the prince’s hostility towards Abu’l-fazl. Matters came to a head in 1599 when, while his father was campaigning in the Deccan, Salim gathered supporters and made an impetuous strike on Agra, where the imperial treasure was stored. When Akbar’s mother scolded the wayward prince, Salim, ashamed and unable to challenge his dear grandmother, dashed back to his base in Allahabad. In 1601, after Akbar had returned to Agra, he again marched towards the capital, pretending to pay respects to his father. But he turned away, intimidated by the prospect of actually confronting him. Yet when he returned to Allahabad, he followed the urgings of his advisers and set up his own court. He even assumied imperial titles.
A crisis occurred when Akbar recalled Abu’l-fazl, then campaigning in the Deccan. Fearing that the powerful minister might advise Akbar to take stern measures against him, possibly even barring his succession to power, Salim took the drastic step of arranging for Abu’l-fazl’s assassination. In August 1602, while marching north, Akbar’s devoted friend was cut down by Bir Singh Bundela, the Rajput chieftain of Orchha, who was then in rebellion against the Mughals. A deeply anguished Akbar now sent another senior Mughal female, Salim’s stepmother Sultana Salima Begam, to Allahabad to persuade his son to return to court. The prince again yielded to this soft diplomacy, and in April 1603 the emperor and heir apparent had an emotional reconciliation.
But it was short-lived. The emperor’s feckless attempts to check his rebellious son only worsened relations between the two men. First, he allowed Salim’s younger brother Daniyal the honour of using, while on campaign, the red tents that were normally reserved for the sovereign’s sole use. Worse, he tried to temper his son’s excesses by driving a wedge between Salim and Salim’s own son Khusrau, whom he promoted to high rank. This began as early as 1594, when Khusrau was only seven years of age. The emperor also insisted on keeping his grandson under his personal charge instead of leaving him in Salim’s household. Such measures only made the prince more frustrated and rebellious. In 1603, when Akbar sent Salim to reduce the Sisodiya chieftains of Mewar, the last major Rajput lineage to resist partnership with the Mughals, he refused to advance far from the court, fearing that, should his ageing father die, his brother Daniyal would be in a better position than he to claim the throne. Akbar finally relented and allowed him to return to his base in Allahabad, which he did in November 1603, only to set up an independent court once again.
By this time Salim’s son Khusrau was seventeen and, thanks to his grandfather’s promotions, had built up a substantial household of his own. Moreover, Khusrau was the nephew of Raja Man Singh and the son-in-law of Akbar’s foster-brother Aziz Koka, two of the most powerful nobles in the realm, both of whom supported the young prince. In April 1604 Daniyal, Akbar’s only surviving son after Salim, died of alcoholism, which considerably narrowed the number of possible successors to the throne. Four months later, when Salim was in Agra for the ceremonies after the death of Akbar’s mother, the emperor reprimanded him for his many acts of disloyalty, even humiliating his thirty-five-year-old son by confining him in a room for ten days without access to wine or opium, for both of which he had developed a fondness, if not a dependency. All this kindled in Khusrau thoughts that he himself, and not his father, should rightfully succeed to the throne. In September 1605, during an elephant fight that the emperor staged for courtly entertainment, Salim and his son had an ugly, vicious quarrel. Everybody, however, understood the quarrel’s real meaning, for Akbar’s health was then rapidly declining, and opposing factions were lining up behind his two likely successors. Despite Aziz Koka’s and Man Singh’s backing of Khusrau, it became clear that Akbar would never agree to his grandson’s succession. Consequently, when the emperor died a month later, Salim ascended the throne without a struggle, adopting as his imperial title Jahangir, ‘world-conqueror’.
Notwithstanding an emotional reconciliation between Khusrau and his father, shortly after his accession to power, a wary Jahangir confined his son in Agra in a state of virtual detention, cut off from the outer world and deprived of the ability to forge alliances with would-be supporters. But, having tasted the dynasty’s practice of princely networking during the last years of Akbar’s reign, and having nearly gained the throne for himself, young Khusrau chafed at his deplorable fate. So, by a ruse, he managed to escape his confinement and with a core of followers rode towards the Punjab in search of potential allies. He was now in open rebellion. By plundering imperial convoys and using their cash to buy new supporters, Khusrau gathered a growing, though ragtag army of 10,000. When he reached Lahore, however, the governor refused to open the city’s gates for him. Meanwhile, his father and the imperial army pursued and easily defeated his hastily organized force. Khusrau fled towards Kabul, but was captured near the Chenab and brought back to Lahore. On 1 May 1606 the fugitive rebel was dragged, weeping and in chains, before his father in a garden just outside the city. But the new emperor was not about to show leniency. Khusrau’s supporters were impaled along both sides of a road, while their miserable leader was placed on an elephant and mockingly made to receive his supporters’ ‘homage’ as they writhed in agony.
From Lahore Jahangir continued marching north-west to Kabul, for the shah of Iran had recently tried to reconquer the contested city of Kandahar, which Akbar had recovered from Safavid control in 1594. In Kabul Jahangir unchained Khusrau, unaware that his son had been secretly plotting another rebellion. When the plot was discovered, Jahangir executed its ringleaders and partially blinded his son. Secure in power at last, Jahangir made shrewd choices about whom to patronize, and to what degree. He enlisted into his service Bir Singh Bundela as a reward for assassinating Abu’l-fazl. To appease his former enemies in Akbar’s court, and perhaps also to assuage his guilt, he promoted Abu’l-fazl’s son. In the same way, powerful nobles who had backed Khusrau for the succession were reintegrated into the imperial fold. Aziz Koka retained all his former titles and, although Raja Man Singh was removed as governor of Bengal, his son Jagat was promoted. Showing continuity with his father’s pattern of patronage, Jahangir generously supported the family of Shaikh Salim Chishti, in whose village Akbar had established his capital Fatehpur Sikri, and to whom Jahangir owed his princely name.
The course of Jahangir’s life was changed for ever in March 1611 when the emperor met a striking woman named Mihr al-Nissa. He was immediately smitten, notwithstanding that his harem was already stocked with seventeen wives and numerous concubines. Their marriage several months later created one of the most extraordinary marital partnerships in Mughal history. Nur Jahan, as the emperor would title her, was already a mature woman of thirty-four and the mother of a young girl from an earlier marriage. She was also the daughter of a high-ranking Iranian immigrant, I‘timad al-Daula, who had served Akbar and was now in Jahangir’s court, together with his son Asaf Khan. From all reports, Nur Jahan was a capable, independent and intelligent woman of uncommon beauty. In a contemporary painting depicting her loading a musket, her posture and her strong, angular body language suggest anything but a delicate wallflower [see Fig. 13]. In fact, she was an excellent shot. In a single day in 1617 she killed four tigers from atop an elephant, firing only six bullets without a single miss.1
Within months of her marriage, Nur Jahan began to exercise considerable influence at court, arranging high positions for her family members and associates. A powerful clique soon formed around her, consisting of herself, her father I‘timad al-Daula, her brother Asaf Khan and Jahangir’s third son, Khurram. Already nineteen years old when Nur Jahan and Jahangir were married, Khurram was brought into Nur Jahan’s clique by virtue of his marriage to Asaf Khan’s daughter, the future Mumtaz Mahal. Of the emperor’s immediate family, he was by far the most disciplined. He refused even to touch wine – the bane of many Mughals – until he was twenty-four, and then only because his father had urged it on him. Since Nur Jahan had no children with the emperor, it was Khurram on whom the clique fixed their sights to succeed Jahangir, in preference to the disgraced and partially blinded Khusrau, the dull and incompetent second son Parviz, or the much younger and totally untested Shahryar.
The ascendance of Khurram – the future emperor Shah Jahan – was associated with the Mughals’ fraught relations with the one major Rajput house that Akbar had failed to absorb into his imperial orbit: the Sisodiyas of Mewar in southern Rajasthan. Ever since the Mughals had defeated them at the Battle of Haldighati, the clan’s leader Rana Pratap, who escaped the battlefield, had led a protracted guerrilla war against Akbar. Over the next several decades he even recovered much Sisodiya territory that Akbar had seized, except the important stronghold of Chittor. During the first six years of his reign Jahangir repeatedly sent armies into Mewar against Rana Pratap’s son and successor Amar Singh. But the results were inconclusive, if not outright failures. Finally, in 1614 the emperor dispatched the veteran general Aziz Koka into Mewar, assisted by the twenty-two-year-old Khurram, his first major military assignment. However, the two had a falling-out that ended with the prince placing the senior general in confinement. Having a free hand, Khurram prosecuted a vigorous campaign against Amar Singh, who, with his forces thinning and famine threatening, finally offered peace negotiations. With a view to integrating this last major Rajput holdout into the Mughal system, Khurram treated his adversary with dignity and respect.
The agreement concluded in 1615 between Khurram and Amar was exceptional in the history of Mughal–Rajput relations. The Sisodiyas were exempted from entering into matrimonial relations with the Mughals; they were not obliged to send their ruling head to the imperial court; and no Sisodiya territory was placed under Mughal administration. In addition, Jahangir made two gestures of goodwill towards these ancient adversaries. First, he returned the historic fort of Chittor to the Sisodiya house, on the condition that it never again be fully inhabited. And, second, he ordered that two life-size equestrian statues of Amar Singh and his son Karan Singh be carved from marble and placed in Agra’s most important palace garden. It was a politically astute move. While acknowledging the unique importance of the Sisodiya clan by monumentalizing its two leading political figures in the heart of Mughal power and authority, the statues visibly displayed the Sisodiyas’ obeisance to Mughal authority since they were placed immediately below the jharokha in which the Mughal emperor would sit above his subjects.2
Jahangir also inherited the perennial north Indian ambition, going back to the days of Ashoka (r. 268–232 BC), of conquering the Deccan plateau, thereby bringing territories both north and south of the Vindhya Mountains under the sway of a single, northern sovereign. Both ‘Ala al-Din Khalji and Muhammad bin Tughluq had been seized by this ambition. In Mughal times Akbar was the first to chip away at the Deccan’s north-western corner, conquering and occupying Asirgarh and Burhanpur in Khandesh, and the Nizam Shahi capital of Ahmadnagar (though not its territory). Early in Jahangir’s reign, Mughal generals waged no fewer than five major campaigns south of the Vindhyas, with no decisive breakthrough. Finally, the veteran commander ‘Abd al-Rahim Khan-i Khanan (d. 1627) deployed the Mughals’ vast financial resources to bribe independent chieftains and officers of Bijapur and Ahmadnagar to the Mughal cause, followed by decisive battlefield victories in early 1616 that brought territories between the Tapti and Godavari Rivers into Mughal possession. A year later Prince Khurram reached Burhanpur, by then the Mughals’ staging point for subsequent Deccan operations. From there he sent envoys to the sultan of Bijapur to negotiate a treaty formally ceding to the Mughals the territories that Khan-i Khanan had recently conquered. Khurram then proceeded to the imperial court in Mandu, where in October 1617 Nur Jahan hosted a grand feast to celebrate his recent triumphs, even though in reality he had only formalized territorial gains already made by Khan-i Khanan. Jahangir also used that occasion to raise his son’s rank to an unprecedented mansab of 30,000/30,000 and to confer on him the lofty title Shah Jahan, ‘king of the world’.
The Mandu celebrations marked the zenith of the cohesiveness and political influence of Nur Jahan’s clique. Thereafter serious splits developed, followed by a headlong train of events that would end with a new emperor. It began with the first signs of Jahangir’s deteriorating health. For years the emperor had been consuming twenty cups of doubly distilled spirits daily, which by 1616 had caused so much trembling in his hands that he needed assistance drinking.3 In 1618 he began suffering from shortness of breath. By 1623 he was no longer physically able to write his memoir, which he entrusted to the chronicler Mu‘tamad Khan.4 While empowering Nur Jahan, Jahangir’s worsening condition also made urgent the issue of succession at the very time that Khurram, the clique’s favourite candidate, was growing arrogant, thanks to his Deccan successes and his father’s favours. This only made Nur Jahan more jealous of her authority as she gradually grew threatened by, and estranged from, her headstrong stepson.
Aware that she could never exercise the same influence through Khurram that she could through her husband, Nur Jahan began looking for an alternative candidate for the impending succession. Her ace card in this delicate game was her daughter from her first marriage, Ladli, whom she would marry off to any prince she could manipulate. Initially, she set her hopes on the still-imprisoned and partially blind Khusrau, even offering him freedom if he would marry the girl. But Khusrau refused, stubbornly preferring life in confinement with his devoted wife to accepting his stepmother’s offer. The queen then focused on marrying Ladli to Jahangir’s youngest surviving son, the sixteen-year-old Shahryar. Although the lad was widely dismissed as an inexperienced lightweight, in late 1620 his marriage took place, and immediately the queen’s clique began to crumble. Her father I‘timad al-Daula, for years the pillar of the clique, died soon after the marriage ceremonies had concluded, while her brother Asaf Khan stoutly supported Khurram, to whom his own daughter Arjomand Banu was married. With brother and sister now backing different princes, and Nur Jahan’s new son-in-law by far the weaker of the two, the queen became ever more isolated, even as her influence over her failing husband continued to grow.
To prevent Khurram from participating in a succession struggle, the queen persuaded Jahangir to send him back south to resume his Deccan operations. But Khurram, wary of her designs, refused to go unless his imprisoned brother Khusrau, whom he regarded as his only viable rival, be transferred to his custody. Content with having both rivals to Shahryar away from the court, Nur Jahan got the emperor to approve Khurram’s request. In December 1620 the prince left the court at Lahore with 40,000 troops and headed for Burhanpur. Once in the Deccan, however, Khurram learnt that Jahangir had fallen seriously ill and, anticipating his father’s death, arranged for Khusrau’s murder. Refusing to believe Khurram’s claim that he had died from colic, in 1622 Jahangir reassigned Khurram’s jagirs in a manner the prince considered punitive. In response, the unruly Khurram went into open rebellion, marching directly north towards Agra, with the Mughal treasury his target. In an imperial order bearing her own seal, the queen then summoned the veteran commander Mahabat Khan from virtual exile in Afghanistan, raised his rank to 6,000/5,000 and sent him to check the rebellious prince. In March 1623 an army under his command soundly defeated Khurram between Delhi and Agra. Mahabat Khan then pursued Khurram in a great pan-India sweep as the fugitive prince first moved south to Mandu, then east through Golconda’s territory to Masulipatam on the Andhra coast, then north through Orissa and into Bengal. Swinging back up the Gangetic plain, in mid 1624 Khurram was again defeated by Mahabat Khan near Allahabad. Once more he returned to the Deccan where, having run out of options, he begged for the court’s full pardon. In early 1626 Nur Jahan replied that he would first have to surrender several forts – Rohtas in Bihar and Asirgarh in Khandesh – and as a sign of good faith, send to the court two of his sons: ten-year-old Dara Shukoh and eight-year-old Aurangzeb. Khurram complied, and in June 1626 the two boys reached Lahore, where they were placed under the queen’s care.
Khurram’s three-year traipse through the subcontinent reveals much about the nature of Mughal politics at the highest level. Whereas a prince might acquire the skills of political networking in a gradual way while serving as a governor or field commander, in the midst of rebellion he had to learn them very quickly to survive. Prince Khusrau had failed that test. In a rebellion lasting less than a month in early 1606, he had only begun frantically forging alliances before he was captured, blinded and imprisoned. Prince Khurram, by contrast, had passed the test, but not without enduring great hardships. In November 1623, by the time he reached the Andhra coast with the imperial army in hot pursuit, he had been reduced to just 4,500 cavalry, 10,000 infantry and 500 elephants.5 But because he managed to stay just beyond the reach of the imperial forces, he had three full years to build up broad political networks across a wide expanse stretching from Gujarat to Bengal, and from Allahabad to the northern Deccan. Everywhere he went, he gained the support of groups either previously opposed to the Mughals or poorly integrated into imperial networks. In Bengal and Bihar, for example, he paid respects to important Sufi shrines, to which he distributed large sums of money, which won him favour.6 He also recruited landed chiefs – especially Indo-Afghans, who had a long history of opposition to Mughal rule – to join him in defeating the Mughal governor of Bengal.7 Such intense political activity placed Khurram in a far better position than any rival both to win the succession struggle when it finally arrived, and also to govern successfully once he had gained the throne.
Another lesson to draw from Khurram’s three-year rebellion is the court’s benign response to it. Once he fulfilled the conditions imposed on him for a pardon, he was fully rehabilitated into the imperial structure. His reconciliation with Jahangir recalls Jahangir’s own with Akbar after he, as Prince Salim, had similarly rebelled against imperial authority. For such reasons Mughal succession struggles, while disastrous for their losers and disruptive for many in the short term, could in the long run be restorative for the empire as a whole. New elites and political networks were invariably swept into power with their victors, thereby replenishing the entire system.8