Jahangir died in late October 1627 while en route from Kashmir to Lahore. Nur Jahan’s brother Asaf Khan, who all along had backed the cause of the late emperor’s third son, Khurram, now took matters into his own hands, swiftly putting his sister under detention while, as a precautionary measure, removing Khurram’s young sons Dara Shukoh and Aurangzeb from her custody. He also sent a courier down to the Deccan to fetch Khurram to north India. While marching to Agra, the prince sent a return courier ordering the execution of other princes who might contest his claim to the throne: his younger brother Shahryar, the two sons of his late brother Khusrau, and two sons of his late uncle Danyal. Khurram was doubtless determined to avoid the sort of messy succession conflict experienced by his father, for which he himself had been responsible. In January 1628 his grisly order was carried out, and soon he triumphantly entered Agra where he was hailed with the title that his father had earlier given him – Shah Jahan. On 4 February 1628, at an hour precisely fixed by his astrologers, he was formally crowned emperor.
Shah Jahan now found himself heading one of the world’s mightiest empires at its height of wealth, political clout and cultural attainment. And the empire had found a sovereign who would revel in the most lavish displays of that wealth and glory. The new emperor lost no time in setting the tone for his reign. Upon his coronation, he doled out generous sums to his immediate family: 200,000 gold coins (ashrafi) and 600,000 rupees to his favourite wife, Mumtaz Mahal, 100,000 ashrafis and 600,000 rupees to his favourite daughter, Jahanara, and 150,000 rupees to each of his first three sons. He made Asaf Khan the vazir of the empire, with a rank of 8,000/8,000. Mahabat Khan was made governor of Ajmer, with the even higher rank of 9,000/9,000, doubtless in recognition of his superior military skills – which Shah Jahan could well appreciate, having been pursued throughout India as a rebel prince and defeated several times by him. By contrast, all Nur Jahan’s former power and authority at once drained away from the erstwhile queen, who now sank to a political nonentity. Coins stamped with her name were withdrawn from circulation. Reduced to a pensioned dowager, the once-mighty Nur Jahan quietly lived her remaining eighteen years in Lahore with her daughter, Shahryar’s widow. She would be buried next to Jahangir in the magnificent tomb that she had built for her husband outside the city.
Shortly after Shah Jahan assumed the throne, serious rebellions broke out. The Afghan nobleman Khan Jahan Lodi, though a man of mediocre military abilities, had enjoyed high favour under Jahangir, holding governorships first in Gujarat, then in the strip of the northern Deccan under Mughal administration. But in the latter capacity he had handed over much of that strip to the Nizam Shahis of Ahmadnagar in exchange for 300,000 rupees, which he pocketed. On top of that treasonous act, he had backed Shahryar, Nur Jahan’s candidate to succeed Jahangir to the throne. Khan Jahan therefore suspected that his prior actions had compromised his status in the new regime. When he failed to pursue the emperor’s forward agenda in the Deccan and was transferred to a less prestigious post in Malwa, his insecurity turned to paranoia. And when some of his jagirs were resumed, he became so alarmed that he failed to appear in court, as protocol required of mansabdars when in the capital. In October 1629, realizing that his absence had been noticed, he gathered up his household and retainers and fled south. Although an imperial army was sent to pursue the fugitive nobleman, he managed to evade capture and made his way to Daulatabad. Back in the Deccan, he was welcomed by the Nizam Shahi sultan, Burhan III, who placed him in command of his own army in the hope that he could recover parts of his territory which the Mughals had occupied. But in December Shah Jahan, aware that he could not fail this first challenge to his authority as emperor, personally left Agra for Burhanpur, the Mughals’ provincial capital in the Deccan, in order to supervise military operations against the rebel. Aware that his sheltering of Khan Jahan had only brought trouble for himself, the Nizam Shahi sultan hinted that his guest should leave. When Mughal pressure drove him from his base, Khan Jahan took the hint and left for the Punjab, but he was abandoned by most of his supporters and ultimately overpowered and beheaded by a detachment of Shah Jahan’s Rajput cavalry.
Another early rebellion had its roots in Mughal relations with the Bundela Rajputs of Orchha, located just outside modern Jhansi. In 1627 Jhujhar Singh, the son and successor of Orchha’s Raja Bir Singh (r. 1605–27), proceeded to Agra to pay homage to Shah Jahan, who confirmed him with a rank of 4,000/4,000. But in June the next year, after the emperor ordered an inquiry into the unauthorized gains that Bir Singh had made during Jahangir’s regime, Jhujhar Singh became alarmed and, like Khan Jahan Lodi, fled Agra. Shah Jahan responded by sending an army that pursued his Rajput vassal to Erachh, the fort in Bundelkhand to which he had fled, sixty-five kilometres north-east of Jhansi. After a successful siege of the stronghold, the rebel Rajput submitted and begged forgiveness for his misdeeds, which the emperor readily granted, restoring him to his original rank. He would soon promote him to an even higher rank as a reward for his service against Khan Jahan Lodi. But in 1634 the Bundela raja reverted to his errant ways. Back in his ancestral capital of Orchha, Jhujhar Singh led an unprovoked attack on the fort of Chauragarh (one hundred kilometres west-south-west of Jabalpur), which belonged to the Gond chieftain Prem Narayan. This siege led to another instance of jauhar as Prem Narayan, in extreme desperation, massacred his women and fought to the death with 300 kinsmen, after which Jhujhar Singh occupied the fort.66 The emperor’s response to this egregious act was utterly cynical. While understandably enraged at Jhujhar Singh’s grievous behaviour, he did not seek justice or recompense for any of Prem Narayan’s surviving kinsmen. Instead, he demanded that Jhujhar Singh pay the court a large indemnity, in effect splitting with his rebel mansabdar the loot that the latter had plundered from Prem Narayan.
But Jhujhar Singh, now in full rebellion, refused the emperor’s offer and fled further south, into Malwa. In response, in 1635 Shah Jahan sent an army of 20,000 after him, commanded by three veteran generals. On the grounds that the property of a mansabdar belonged to the state and was hence liable to confiscation or destruction should its mansabdar/patron commit a state crime such as rebellion, Shah Jahan ordered the demolition of the Bundela rajas’ dynastic temple at Orchha.67 But the rebel was not the only target of the emperor’s order. The temple had been completed by Jhujhar Singh’s father, Bir Singh, mainly to legitimize his irregular accession to the throne, and to atone for the fact that his privileged position as a major courtier at Jahangir’s court had been bought through the murder of Abu’l-fazl.68 Therefore its destruction by Shah Jahan served to undermine the claims to legitimate rule asserted by both the usurper Bir Singh and his rebel son Jhujhar Singh. The emperor also forcibly converted Jhujhar Singh’s two sons to Islam, another cynical move since it excluded the rebel’s direct descendants from inheriting the rulership of Orchha. Instead, he gave that rulership to a rival branch of the Bundela lineage headed by Raja Debi Singh, a more compliant vassal. As for Jhujhar Singh himself, the fugitive rebel was ultimately driven deep into the forests of Gondwana, where he was slain by a band of Gonds, evidently in revenge for his earlier killing of their king, Prem Narayan.
Shah Jahan also took decisive steps to intensify the governance of provinces that were only loosely brought into the imperial orbit. The aggressive measures he took in 1632 against the Portuguese in lower Bengal transformed much of that region from a zone of political anarchy, favourable for piracy and slaving, to one of orderly government where Bengalis enjoyed a greater degree of security. Further to the north, in 1636 the Mughal ambassador to the Ahom court was murdered by the Assamese, leading to a series of hard-fought battles between the two powers. Although the Ahoms initially overwhelmed the Mughal outpost of Hajo, the Mughals retaliated in late 1637, driving the Assamese back to Darrang, thirty kilometres east of Gauhati. After an Assamese counter-attack the next year, the two powers negotiated a treaty whereby the Ahoms formally acknowledged Mughal control of Kamrup to the west, while the Mughals recognized the independence and territorial integrity of the Ahom kingdom. These operations established the Mughals’ ability to adapt to Bengal’s riverine terrain, where they had learnt to co-ordinate the use of watercraft and gunboats with cavalry and infantry.
On the other side of the subcontinent, in Sind, the geographical and cultural environment could hardly have been more different. Here, the fertile strip of the Indus abuts a hot, dry pastoral zone inhabited by tribal communities whose raids on trade caravans had caused perennial havoc for the Mughals. In response, Shah Jahan established regular garrisons from which provincial authorities could launch campaigns to collect taxes, in cash, from pastoral tribes. He also sought to integrate tribal chieftains into the Mughal system by defining them as mansabdars governing over territorially bounded pastoral regions that the Mughals called jagirs. Lastly, imperial officers gave lucrative land grants to important Sufi shrines that dotted the Indus valley from Sind north to the southern Punjab, and which played important roles in the religious and economic lives of the region’s pastoral and agrarian communities. From at least the late fifteenth century, in fact, tribal chieftains had been giving their daughters to descendants of prominent Sufi shaikhs. Shah Jahan therefore treated Sufi shrines as nodes of stability in an otherwise unstable region.69
The manner in which Shah Jahan prosecuted these military operations hints at changes in how the emperor began fashioning his public image. Early in his reign, when Jhujhar Singh revolted against imperial authority by fleeing the imperial court, the emperor intended to pursue the fugitive Rajput in person. But the seasoned general Mahabat Khan dissuaded him from doing so, arguing that it was beneath the emperor’s dignity to take the field against ‘a crowd of peasants and defenceless people’.70 Heeding the advice, Shah Jahan marched only as far as Gwalior, leaving the command of battlefield operations to his generals. He likewise left the direction of his later military operations to his sons. In this respect Shah Jahan broke from the tradition of his Timurid ancestors, most of whom had personally engaged in battlefield combat. It also pointed to the emperor’s gradual withdrawal from direct contact with his subjects, a process actually begun by Akbar, who had institutionalized the use of the jharokha. Even when relatively low to the ground, these devices had the effect of removing the sovereign spatially and symbolically from the people, be they commoners or nobility, and of rendering him more an icon to be adored than an administrator with whom one could interact. Settling into his persona as supreme sovereign, Shah Jahan, in sharp contrast to the feisty prince of his earlier days, increasingly projected himself as lofty, distant and majestic.
Such self-fashioning is clearly seen in the emperor’s architectural programme. Of all the Mughals, Shah Jahan was the most invested in patronizing grand works of architecture that have become iconic of the entire Mughal era – indeed, of India itself. Even before his accession to power, he had patronized architectural projects in his various postings – for example, quarters inside Kabul fort, the Shahi Bagh in Ahmedabad, a hunting lodge near Burhanpur, the Shalimar garden in Kashmir. But it was an event in the fourth year of his reign that provided a major impetus to express himself through works of monumental architecture. In March 1630 he, his household and his court had reached the Deccan’s provincial capital of Burhanpur in order to oversee military and diplomatic operations against the plateau’s three remaining independent sultanates: Ahmadnagar, Bijapur and Golconda. This was a happy period for the emperor and his beloved wife, Mumtaz Mahal, who gave birth to a daughter, Husn Ara Begum, a month after the imperial household had reached Burhanpur. This was followed by the good news of the rebel Khan Jahan Lodi’s capture and execution.
But in the following year personal tragedy struck. In June 1631, Mumtaz Mahal died giving birth to her fourteenth child, plunging the king into a state of unremitting grief. For a week he refused to appear in public. No business was transacted. From constant weeping he was forced to wear spectacles, so his chronicler reports, and within a matter of days a third of his beard and moustache had turned white.71 The queen’s body was sent to Agra, escorted by their second son, prince Shuja‘, and buried by the Jamuna on a plot formerly owned by Raja Man Singh. On that spot would rise one of the world’s most famous monuments. Work on building the Taj Mahal, a corruption of the queen’s name Mumtaz Mahal, began in January 1632 and was completed eleven years later at a cost of five million rupees. Although Europeans of the day – and even colonial British scholars of the twentieth century – were certain it was the work of a European architect,72 the emperor himself appears to have provided both the inspiration and the overall design, with skilled architects merely carrying out the execution.73 His aim was to create an earthly replica of the house of Mumtaz Mahal in the Garden of Paradise. For this purpose he took to a monumental scale the kind of riverfront style that was already prevalent among Agra’s residential gardens, while also building upon the tradition of Mughal tomb design.74 Placing any monument over a grave – especially one with a proud, assertive dome – is problematic in Islamic tradition, which stresses humility before God. Babur’s grave in Kabul was open to the sky. By contrast Humayun’s tomb, built by Akbar, broke with tradition with its prominent marble dome. This was followed by Akbar’s and Jahangir’s tombs, both of which lack domes. With the Taj, its more daring, more bulbous dome set on a higher drum, surrounded by four smaller domes, Shah Jahan not only reasserted the idea of a domed tomb, but surpassed that of Humayun.
If the Taj Mahal projects an aura of sublime harmony, elegance and simplicity, Shah Jahan’s palace complexes convey his vision of a highly centralized, absolute monarchy and of his own exalted place in the cosmos. Notably, the emperor titled himself the ‘Second Lord of the Conjunction’ (sahib-i qiran-i thani), referring to the significance his astrologers attributed to periodic conjunctions of Saturn and Jupiter. In the Persianate world, persons thought to have been born during such an event were considered extraordinary, capable even of ushering in a new age of justice, peace and prosperity. The phrase suggested, in short, a messiah-like figure. Although Timur himself had laid no claim to being a ‘Lord of the Conjunction’ (sahib-i qiran), and in fact denied it, contemporaries across the Persianate world had called him that, while his own soldiers worshipped him as a saint. Shah Jahan’s reference to himself as the second ‘Lord of the Conjunction’ therefore reveals how the emperor saw himself in relation to his own, illustrious ancestor. It also reveals a man claiming quasi-divine attributes, destined to play a transformative role in world history – in short, a ‘millennial sovereign’.75 Unlike portraits of Mughal emperors from Babur through to Jahangir, which typically reveal each monarch’s humanity, emotions and individual character, those of Shah Jahan present a flawless, unchanging ideal, a face enveloped by a halo, often with small angels above his head, even crowning him. The emperor’s official chronicle opens with a frontispiece depicting Timur and Shah Jahan seated on thrones, facing each other, the former presenting the imperial crown to the latter.76 These were not just artistic fantasies. Revealing how closely he identified with Timur and his legacy, Shah Jahan – alone among Mughal emperors – tried to reclaim for the Mughal empire territory that both Timur and Babur had once ruled. So in the mid 1640s he sent armies across Afghanistan’s Hindu Kush Mountains into Central Asia, there to confront his dynasty’s ancient enemies, the Uzbeks. Although the invasion failed, the effort shows the emperor’s determination to act out his identity as the ‘Second Lord of the Conjunction’.
In the first decade of his reign, with a view to aligning his palace architecture with his exalted self-image, Shah Jahan remodelled the forts of the empire’s two primary capitals, Lahore and Agra. At both sites, nearly all the structures built by Akbar and Jahangir were dismantled to make room for new palaces that emphasized political hierarchy, a rigid formalization of artistic expression and an obsessive regulation of every detail of courtly life. Shah Jahan’s name, after all, means ‘king of the world’, and a guiding idea pervading his reign was that of the court as a microcosm of the world. It followed that a well-ordered court would radiate outwards, projecting its order into the empire at large. Prior to his reign, imperial mansabdars simply stood in the open courtyards before the emperor’s jharokha. Shah Jahan, however, built covered audience halls (chihil sutun), whose forty evenly spaced columns enabled a precise positioning of courtiers in the imperial hierarchy. Mansabdars stood stiffly at a distance from the jharokha corresponding to their relative rank in the imperial hierarchy, their eyes riveted on the emperor seated above them. Probably inspired by audience halls of Persepolis in ancient Iran, these underscored the emperor’s centrality in both the cosmos and the empire.77 In Agra, courtiers faced east towards the emperor’s jharokha, while directly across the adjacent courtyard was a mosque, whose qibla – a niche indicating the direction of Mecca – lay on a direct axis with Jahangir’s jharokha. Such a design visually expressed a unity of political and spiritual authority and implied the emperor’s centrality for both, since contemporary eulogists often praised him as the qibla of his subjects.78
Remodelling the cramped and crowded forts of Lahore and Agra, however, had its limitations. In order more fully to press architecture and the principles of urban design to serve his expansive political ideals, Shah Jahan resolved to build an entire city–fort complex from scratch. This is Shahjahanabad, today’s ‘Red Fort’ and its adjoining walled city – now Old Delhi – built between 1639 and 1648 at a cost of six million rupees. With its red-sandstone walls rising to a height of thirty-three metres and a perimeter of nearly two and a half kilometres, its eastern side abutting the Jamuna, and with the rest of the perimeter punctuated by stately gateways and encircled by a moat, the fort was intended to be dramatic and imposing, as it certainly is. Moreover, by placing his new capital in the greater Delhi plain, Shah Jahan associated his dynasty more directly with the historical cockpit of north Indian power, and also with the many active shrines of saints – in particular Chishti Sufis – that both the Delhi sultans and the Mughals had patronized. Finally, like Akbar’s Fatehpur Sikri, this fort–city gave the emperor a large stage on which to enact his ideals of courtly hierarchy and absolute monarchy. It was in the fort’s ornate Hall of Private Audience that Shah Jahan placed his famous Peacock Throne, which took craftsmen seven years to assemble, and whose precious stones were valued at ten million rupees. The French traveller Jean-Baptiste Tavernier visited the court in the winter of 1640–41, when the throne had been built but was still in the court at Agra, as the new capital at Shahjahanabad was then under construction. Himself a gem merchant, Tavernier described a dazzling throne 1.8 metres in length and 1.2 metres wide inlaid with numerous emeralds, rubies, pearls and diamonds, with a canopy surmounted with a peacock, its tail made of blue sapphires, its gold body inlaid with precious stones and an enormous pear-shaped pearl suspended from a large ruby fronting its breast.79
Tavernier was hardly the only foreigner struck by the pomp of Shah Jahan’s court. Other seventeenth-century travellers like him carried their sense of awe back to Europe, where the very word ‘mogul’ came to connote grandiose power, as it still does today. Coincidentally, monarchal absolutism and centralized authority, together with a rigid formalization of courtly ritual amplified by elaborate ceremony and monumental architecture, were also being articulated in contemporary Europe. The reign of France’s Louis XIV began in 1643, shortly before Shah Jahan formally occupied Shahjahanabad. The French ‘Sun King’ began enlarging his own dazzling palace–city at Versailles in 1661, just a few years after Shah Jahan’s rule had come to an end. By the mid seventeenth century, then, royal absolutism had reached both India and Europe, which is perhaps why contemporary Europeans in India, when beholding Shahjahanabad, seem to have felt a shock of recognition.