Jahangir’s reign falls into two distinct phases. From his coronation to 1622, the emperor remained active in the state’s administrative and military affairs, ruling after 1611 in virtual partnership with Nur Jahan. The latter issued land grants to women under her own seal, struck coins in her own name and sat in the jharokha of her palace, while below her nobles presented themselves and received her orders. Her name and title were jointly attached on all imperial documents receiving Jahangir’s signature.53 But in the last five years of his life, from 1622 to his death in 1627, the emperor became so incapacitated by drink and opium that Nur Jahan took many administrative matters into her own hands. The extent of her influence in this latter phase of Jahangir’s reign is suggested by Francisco Pelsaert, a Dutch East Company commercial officer serving in Agra from 1621 to 1627. ‘When the King comes home in the evening from hunting,’ he wrote:
he takes his seat in his Ghusalkhana [private audience chamber], where all the lords come to present themselves, and where strangers who have requests to make are received in audience. He sits here till a quarter of the night or more has passed, and during this time he drinks his three piyala, or cups, of wine, taking them successively at regular intervals … Everyone leaves when the last cup has been drunk, and the King goes to bed. As soon as all the men have left, the Queen comes with the female slaves, and they undress him, chafing and fondling him as if he were a little child; for his three cups have made him so ‘happy’ that he is more disposed to rest than to keep awake. This is the time when his wife, who knows so well how to manage him that she obtains whatever she asks for or desires, gets always ‘yes’, and hardly ever ‘no’ in reply.54
Some might dismiss such an intimate glimpse of the emperor and his favourite wife as bazaar gossip tossed off by a foreigner who would have had no access to the royal chambers. On the other hand Mu‘tamad Khan, the courtier entrusted with completing Jahangir’s memoir and identified by him as ‘a servant who knows my temperament’,55 remarked that the emperor repeatedly let it be known ‘that he had bestowed the sovereignty on Nur Jahan Begam, and would say, “I require nothing beyond only a sir [0.9 kg] of wine and a half sir of meat.”’56 Politics aside, Nur Jahan was deeply devoted to the emperor, as he was to her.57
Like Sultan Muhammad bin Tughluq before him, Jahangir made ostentatious displays of his devotion to justice. In his very first order as emperor he established a ‘chain of justice’ strung between the Agra fort and the Jamuna, with bells attached to it so that anybody seeking justice could shake the chain and expect the government’s response.58 And like his Tughluq predecessor, he was a man of sharp contradictions. He could be almost arbitrarily cruel, as when he had a man nearly beaten to death and imprisoned for life for breaking a china dish.59 When two bearers and a bush-beater accidently caused a blue bull to run off during a hunt, he ordered the bearers to be hamstrung and the bush-beater killed on the spot.60 On the other hand, he was capable of great sensitivity. He noticed, for example, that in the winter elephants would shiver when splashing themselves with cold water. Fearing their discomfort, he ordered that lukewarm water be prepared for their use.61 In the Khyber Pass, he once marvelled at watching a spider the size of a crab seize and kill a snake 1.4 metres in length.62 He was so struck by the beauty of a falcon and its black markings that he ordered it to be painted by the famous artist Ustad Mansur.63 And he made a detailed list of the thirty birds that were not found in Kashmir.64 In short, Jahangir’s most refined sensibility was aesthetic, especially of the visual sort. But unlike the art patronized by Akbar, which depicts the latter engaged in a frenzy of heroic activity – hunting, fighting, directing great projects, and so on – the work patronized by his son was typically contemplative and naturalistic. The contrasting temperaments of father and son could hardly be more stark. And yet he shared with Akbar a fascination with Indian religions, he maintained his father’s practice of sponsoring inter-faith debates, and he went out of his way to visit the Hindu ascetic Jadrup, in whose cave near Ujjain he thrice held extended philosophical discussions. Those meetings, too, he ordered to be documented in art [see Fig. 16].
In the last analysis Jahangir, having inherited a finely tuned administrative machine capable of running largely on its own, was able to devote himself to cultivating the sort of cultural projects that only peace and security could afford. He knew that he lived in the shadow of an overachieving father, whom he always honoured despite his youthful rebellion against him. Thus the magnificent tomb in Agra that Jahangir built for Akbar suggests its patron’s wish to be remembered as the dutiful son, rather than as the impatient prince who had rebelled against his father and arranged for the assassination of his father’s revered adviser. Art, literature, architecture, landscaping – especially in his beloved Kashmir – all these were incomparably enriched by Jahangir’s refined sensibility and generous patronage. In fact, had he inherited his father’s hyperactive side, Jahangir might have waged a lot more wars and overextended the empire to breaking point, as actually did happen under his grandson ‘Alamgir. Indeed, Akbar arguably had already overextended the empire with his annexation of Kandahar, which lies beyond the subcontinent. All this suggests that, in hindsight, Jahangir was the right man for his time.65