Jahangir’s India amounted to much more than the palace intrigues and battles that fill the pages of contemporary chronicles, or the courtly gossip that so fascinated contemporary European visitors. A very different picture emerges if one steps away from the courtly centre and considers the empire’s political margins. In these porous frontier zones, the imperial presence was but a shadow of its imposing profile in Agra or Lahore. In the first place, such zones were hardly empty spaces that the empire simply occupied. Rather, they were filled with peoples of varied cultural backgrounds who had their own political traditions and leaders. Many of them, moreover, participated in India’s vast military labour market. Armed villagers might sell their martial services to the highest bidder, but would remain in service only as long as their salaries were forthcoming. How, then, did the Mughals integrate such politically fluid, often volatile, zones into their cultural and political system? With what success? We get glimpses from a detailed memoir left by Mirza Nathan, a junior imperial officer who was posted on the Mughals’ eastern frontier between 1607 and 1624, spanning most of Jahangir’s reign.
At an auspicious hour on 4 July 1607, Emperor Jahangir sat in his jharokha in Agra watching while, below him, a mighty flotilla of warships commanded by Admiral Ihtiman Khan set sail down the Jamuna. Announcing the great military enterprise, artillery was fired with thunderous noise. ‘The conquest of Bengal’, wrote Mirza Nathan, the admiral’s son, ‘had assumed a practical shape, as was desired by all the nobles of the State.’9 Akbar had begun the conquest several decades earlier, planting the first toeholds of imperial authority in the delta’s north-western and western quarters when he accepted the surrender of Sultan Daud Khan Karrani in 1575. But the task of subduing the entire delta remained far from complete, as the region’s dense jungles and ever-shifting maze of waterways afforded protection for indigenous peoples and an ideal refuge for those resisting Mughal suzerainty. When Jahangir came to power, Bengal’s central, northern and eastern quarters were seething with well-armed warlords, most of them Indo-Afghans, who had carved out independent kingdoms fiercely opposed to Mughal intrusions. Socially, the region was a mix of communities: independent Kuch tribes in the northern mountains, ethnic Assamese in the broad, upper Brahmaputra valley, Bengali-speakers in the delta’s flat central and eastern districts, and ethnic Arakanese who, settled in the Chittagong region, regularly made predatory raids in the southern delta. In addition, thousands of Portuguese adventurers who had abandoned service to Lisbon effectively joined eastern India’s thriving military labour market by selling their services to whichever warlord could make them the best offer. Some even set up their own petty kingdoms.
Such was the turbulent, swampy realm that Ihtiman Khan’s flotilla entered, having sailed down the Jamuna and the Ganges. The admiral was first met by Bengal’s new governor, Islam Khan Chishti (1608–13), who commanded large numbers of cavalry, infantry, elephants and war-boats of his own. These were quartered in the provincial capital of Rajmahal, in the delta’s north-western corner. In 1610 the governor would transfer the provincial capital from Rajmahal to Dhaka, in the heart of the delta, dramatizing the Mughals’ determination to subdue and annex the delta’s unsettled central and eastern quarters. The fleet sent down from Agra consisted of 295 war-boats, seventy of them equipped with heavy cannon. It was also an amphibious operation, with Ihtiman Khan commanding 770 cavalry, 3,000 infantry and eighty elephants. But co-ordinating river and land operations was always difficult, given the logistical problem of moving men, animals and supplies through Bengal’s dense forest tracts. On one occasion Mirza Nathan describes getting lost with his men in a swamp, wandering about ‘in that deep water in the whirlpool of perplexity’.10 He spoke of ‘wallowing perpetually in mud like buffaloes’,11 and tells of a Mughal army moving against Arakanese forces in the Chittagong area ‘through a jungle route which was impassable even for an ant’. Along the way, he continued:
not only others but even the Khan himself cleared jungles with his own hands and he proceeded onward till he arrived at a place where the boats could not ply any farther. A small gondola was carried with the Khan with very great difficulty. The horses also could not be taken farther. The elephants proceeded with very great difficulty. The scarcity of food became so great that a seer of oil could not be procured for Rs. 15 … The state of all other things may be imagined from this.12
Dealing with the Mughals’ human adversaries was as challenging as coping with the natural environment. On one occasion Arakanese raiders on 300 boats audaciously sailed from the Bay of Bengal to the Dhaka region, where they captured villagers and carried them off into slavery. Portuguese raiders took 1,500 villagers for the same purpose.13
Ultimately, the conquest of eastern Bengal, like that of other regions, was a political process. Islam Khan treated the delta’s warlords as Akbar and Jahangir had treated the Rajputs: while carrying a big stick, whenever possible he bestowed honours on them and confirmed them in their existing possessions, insisting only that they or their close family members serve the provincial court in Dhaka. The governor thus confronted Raja Satrajit, the king of Bhushana (in modern Faridpur District, Bangladesh), with a large army but offered him his own territory as jagir if he would enlist in Mughal service. After initially resisting, the raja ultimately submitted, in exchange for which the governor honoured him by calling him ‘son’ (farzand). Similarly, after an initial show of force, Islam Khan met the warlord of modern Jessore, Pratapaditya, at an agreed spot where the governor presented his adversary with a horse, a grand robe of honour and a bejewelled sword-belt. ‘Thus,’ records Mirza Nathan, ‘he was converted into a loyal officer.’14
An important objective of such ceremonies was to draw chieftains to the Mughal cause, on the assumption that smaller actors looked to their more powerful neighbours for political cues. Pratapaditya agreed to send his son with 400 war-boats to join the imperial fleet, while he himself contributed 20,000 infantry and 500 war-boats, together with more than 30,000 kilos of gunpowder. All these were combined with imperial forces with a view to confronting an even bigger warlord, Musa Khan, ruler of an immense tract of the eastern delta and considered the chief of east Bengal’s so-called ‘twelve chiefs’ (bara bhuyan).15 In effect, the governor offered carrots to large chieftains, enabling them to apply sticks to still larger chieftains.
In Bengal’s northernmost region, Kuch Bihar and Kamrup (western Assam), the Mughals faced tough resistance in thickly forested terrain inhabited by peoples very different from the mainly Hindu, hierarchically structured peasant society of the western delta, which for centuries had been well integrated into the Bengal sultanate (1342–1574). Kuch society, by contrast, consisted of clan-based tribes whose cultivators paid tribute to a king, not in cash or crops but in rotational corvée labour, rendering service to him for one of every four years. The region had never evolved bureaucratic land-revenue systems as found in monetized and agrarian tracts such as western Bengal. Only in the sixteenth century had Kuch agriculture begun shifting from the hoe to the plough, adopting with it the sedentary life associated with the cultivation of wet rice.
In early 1613, having already subdued the ‘twelve chieftains’ of lower Bengal, Islam Khan sent a large force of musketeers, cavalrymen, war-boats, elephants and cash up the Brahmaputra valley into the Kuch country. Upon besieging and seizing Dhubri, an important fortress on the western banks of the Brahmaputra, the imperial forces pushed on, driving the Kuch raja into Kamrup, where he finally submitted to Mughal authority and was sent off to Dhaka in order, as Mirza Nathan put it, ‘to learn the court etiquettes’.16 By mid 1613 the Mughals had annexed both Kuch Bihar and Kamrup, bringing both regions under direct imperial administration. The land was divided into revenue circles, taxes were levied on the peasantry, and agents were sent to collect the newly imposed revenue demand. The Mughals also required that local militias be paid out of the general land tax, thus transforming a corvée-based militia system into a salaried army under the authority of a distant governor. Mughal revenue farmers who had contracted to pay the government’s land tax squeezed the peasantry for their own profit by raising taxes in their revenue circles. The whole system was supported by tax burdens imposed on a peasantry unfamiliar with a monetized economy. Such conditions led to serious peasant revolts in 1614, followed the next year by a full-scale Mughal invasion in which imperial stockades recently seized by the rebels were retaken by force.17
But Mughal rule along the Bengal frontier was always constrained by the region’s politically porous, sponge-like character. Local authorities, whether natives or imperial appointees, had options: if their overlords on one side of the frontier were oppressive or simply too demanding, they could – and did – cast their eyes to the other side. Apart from the Mughals, these might be Indo-Afghans, forest chieftains, renegade Portuguese, Ahom rajas or Arakanese, among others.18 Similarly, cultivators had to be treated fairly lest they flee their lands, leaving revenue authorities with nothing to tax. This would explain why government assessors sent to recently annexed Jessore were instructed to prepare revenue registers ‘to the satisfaction of the ryots [cultivators]’.19 Islam Khan instructed his commanders to offer enemy chieftains, in exchange for submission, the hope of having their territory transformed into jagir, with themselves named the jagirdar, or jagir-holder.20 Mirza Yusuf Barlas, the chief minister of Raja Ananta Manik, warlord of the Noakhali region in south-eastern Bengal, accepted an imperial mansab of 500/300 in return for submission to the Mughals.21 The imperial governor well understood the empire’s relatively weak position along its furthest peripheries, where offers of honours, land or a rank in the Mughal mansabdari system were more effectual than the application of brute force.
On frontiers such as eastern Bengal the Mughals used various mechanisms to promote cohesiveness among their own culturally mixed imperial corps. The Islamic religion was certainly not among these; in fact, state officials were punished for promoting Islam among non-Muslim subjects. When Islam Khan learnt that an officer of his had converted the son of one of Bengal’s notorious ‘twelve chiefs’, he had him censured and transferred from his jagir.22 More important for this purpose, and more subtle, was the substance and political symbolism of salt, great quantities of which had been loaded on to the flotilla of boats bound for Bengal in July 1607. For the Mughals, salt possessed a deep cultural significance since it defined patron–client relations. From the emperor down to the lowest servant, individuals and groups were intrinsically linked vertically by mutual obligations of protection and dependency expressed by the giving and receiving of the mineral: the giver of salt pledged to protect a recipient, and the latter swore undying loyalty to the giver. The symbolism of salt also bound together members of the imperial corps horizontally, as it expressed corporate solidarity, especially at times when the group felt itself mortally endangered. In 1615, during an imperial invasion of Assam, Mughal troops once found themselves surrounded by the army of the Ahom raja. The commanding officer and his comrades wrapped their heads in shrouds and, preparing for death rather than surrender, cried out to the Assamese: ‘As we have taken the salt of Jahangir, we consider martyrdom to be our blessings for both the worlds.’23 Such declarations were not just metaphorical. After Musa Khan finally submitted to Mughal power in Bengal, the Afghan warlord Khwaja Usman became the Mughals’ most redoubtable opponent and leader of the resistance to imperial rule in the delta. When he was killed in battle in 1612, his Indo-Afghan supporters formalized their surrender by presenting elephants to the Mughal general, who in turn gave robes of honour to the relatives of Usman Khan and shawls to 400 Afghan commanders. Then, preceding a grand feast organized for their former enemies, the Mughals distributed the salt the emperor to all the Afghans.24 It was, in effect, the political and ideological ‘glue’ cementing the loyalty of these former enemies to the Mughal order.
Also serving to promote solidarity within Mughal service were Rajput practices that, by the time Jahangir came to power, had thoroughly saturated Mughal culture. In Dhaka, governor Islam Khan had a jharokha built into the side of his palace four metres above ground level, overlooking the courtyard. Seated in the jharokha, he would review both military and non-military personnel, who in turn paid him their respects, standing in fixed positions according to their mansab.25 When Jahangir learnt of this he sternly rebuked the governor, on the grounds that it too closely approximated his own imperial jharokha in Agra. The governor was ordered that his jharokha could be no higher than half a man’s height above the ground and that nobody could pay obeisance there or remain standing while attending the governor.26 Here one sees not just an assertion of an imperial prerogative over that of a provincial governor. The larger point is that first Akbar, then Jahangir and now Jahangir’s governors had all taken an originally Rajput political institution and made it their own. Even more strikingly, by the early seventeenth century the tradition of jauhar had found its way into the practices of officers and ordinary troopers in Bengal, indicating the Mughals’ assimilation of an ethos of martial heroism and honour that by this time had become associated with Rajput lineages. In 1617 Bengal’s ex-governor, Qasim Khan Chishti, and his allies were besieged in a fort near Dhaka and, when it became clear that they would not survive the battle, they destroyed all their women in the terrifying rite of jauhar.27 Somewhat later, Mirza Nathan twice ordered his men to commit the rite of jauhar should their situation in the heat of battle likewise become so desperate.28
The diffusion of Rajput institutions in Mughal culture is partly explained by the incorporation of Rajput women in the Mughal harem and Rajput youths in Mughal households, which had begun in the early decades of Akbar’s reign. Children born of Rajput women in the imperial harem were treated as full members of the Mughal dynasty and eligible for inheriting the throne. This meant that, although Jahangir’s paternal grandfather was Humayun, his maternal grandfather was Raja Bharmal, leader of the Kachwaha Rajput lineage. Jahangir’s mother, Harkha,29 entitled Mariam al-Zamani, was the sister of Raja Bharmal’s son and successor, Bhagwant Das. Jahangir himself, then, was biologically half Rajput. He, in turn, married the daughters of prominent Rajput rulers who had submitted to Mughal overlordship. Seven of his seventeen wives before Nur Jahan had come from Rajput lineages: two from Amber, and one each from Jodhpur, Jaisalmer, Jhabua, Bikaner and Orchha.30 His son Khurram, the future Shah Jahan, was born of one of these Rajputs – Jagat Gosain Begum, the daughter of Udai Singh of Jodhpur. Shah Jahan was therefore three-quarters Rajput by blood. Since Rajput mothers imparted their inherited culture to their offspring, the Mughal harem became a site for the diffusion of Rajput values at the heart of the imperial system. The Mughal connection with Rajputs, then, was more than political. It was biological and cultural, as Rajput institutions, introduced at the upper end of the Mughal order, percolated downwards, gradually diffusing among the officer corps. In addition, many officers and troopers in Mughal service were themselves Rajputs, which also served to lend a Rajput ethos to imperial armies.