India and the Mughals experienced important changes under Jahangir and Shah Jahan. First, the empire grew in both territorial extent and wealth: between 1580 and 1646 its revenue demand more than doubled, growing from 90.7 to 222.3 million rupees, owing largely to territorial annexations, especially in Bengal and the northern Deccan.80 When Shah Jahan came to power, however, he found a treasury that had been nearly depleted. To remedy this, he increased the amount of the empire’s khalisa land, or land whose revenues went directly to the central treasury, and decreased its total jagir land, whose revenues were allocated to imperial mansabdars. Between 1631 and 1646, khalisa land increased from 6.6 per cent to 14.3 per cent of the empire’s total assessed revenue.81 Both khalisa and jagir lands were administered under Akbar’s regulation system (zabt), according to which government officials made periodic surveys and revenue assessments by measuring land areas and by determining the quality of the fields and their potential crop value. Detailed records of such surveys and assessments were kept in both local and central revenue offices – information that was critical for running the army, since the number of troops a mansabdar was expected to maintain had to match the amount of revenue his jagirs were expected to produce.
Mansabdars of medium or higher rank, by ethnicity82
1595
1656
Number
Per cent
Number
Per cent
Iranian
75
26.9
139
28.4
Turkish
93
33.3
123
25.1
Afghan
10
3.6
34
6.9
Indian Muslim
36
12.9
59
12.0
Rajput
40
14.3
87
17.8
Other
25
9.0
48
9.8
TOTAL
279
490
As the empire’s territory expanded, so did its corps of mansabdars, both in size and in composition. As the above chart indicates, mansabdars holding medium or higher ranks nearly doubled in number between the end of Akbar’s reign and the end of Shah Jahan’s reign. Throughout this period the nobility’s Iranian component remained high and stable, comprising about a quarter of the total. Afghans were poorly represented in Akbar’s nobility owing to suspicions of their loyalty, but they fared somewhat better under Jahangir and Shah Jahan, as those suspicions began to dissipate. Whereas the proportion of Indian Muslims in the nobility remained at about an eighth of the total throughout this period, the number of Turkish nobles dropped from a third to a quarter of the total, while Rajputs made a modest gain overall. However, these figures distort the extent of the Rajputs’ actual importance in Mughal service, since they tended to have, on average, higher ranks than did other groups.
An important change also occurred in the nature of the mansabdars’ relationship to the emperor. Under Akbar and Jahangir, powerful mansabdars were bound to the emperor by a personality cult in which they were considered disciples of a charismatic ruler. Upon being ceremonially inducted into Akbar’s or Jahangir’s inner circle, these men received small images of the emperor, which they pinned to their turbans. They also performed full prostration before him. But Shah Jahan did away with the little images, the prostration and the personality cult altogether, replacing them with formalized rituals that established a greater distance between himself and all his subjects. Moreover, with each passing generation, the imperial service became more of an entrenched, hereditary nobility. Instead of instilling an ideological conformity among its ruling elite by instituting something like imperial China’s examination system, which was based on a common core of literary classics that applicants had to master, the Mughals recruited new talent through a highly regulated process of nomination. Senior officers recommended candidates whose credentials were then vetted by court officials and, in theory, by the emperor himself. If approved, these recruits were given appointments, typically in the form of jagirs. By the end of Shah Jahan’s reign, relatives of powerful nobles might enter imperial service not only on the death of their patron-relative, but even during his lifetime. In fact, sons of the highest-ranking mansabdars were normally enrolled as mansabdars themselves. Although they could not inherit their fathers’ status or titles and had to begin their careers with a relatively low rank, such men were marked for promotion and rapid advancement in the system.
Shah Jahan’s refinements in his courtly self-fashioning speak of broader changes in royal ideology that had taken place during the early seventeenth century. The century had opened with Akbar, who, despite his vacillations, remained genuinely fascinated with religions of all sorts. Jahangir mostly followed his father in this respect, not only allowing all religions to flourish, but opposing the conversion from any religion to another one.83 But with Shah Jahan the matter is more complicated. On the one hand, he personally commissioned or initiated the construction of more mosques than any Mughal ruler before or after him. These include Lahore’s mosque of Wazir Khan (1635), the mosque at Shaikh Mu‘in al-Din Chishti’s shrine in Ajmer (1636), and the congregational mosques at Agra (1648), Shahjahanabad (1656) and Thatta (1657). He also reinstituted the annual pilgrimage to Mecca and issued an edict prohibiting the repair of non-Muslim structures. In view of such acts, his reign has sometimes been called a ‘return to an Islamic political culture’.84
However, there was a genuine disconnect between Shah Jahan as portrayed in official edicts and court chronicles, and the emperor as portrayed in art and courtly culture. Whereas the former category presents him in the tradition of Islam, the latter portrays him in terms of sacred kingship, messianism, and the cult of Timur as a world-conqueror.85 At the top of the arched niche behind the jharokha in Shahjahanabad’s Hall of Public Audience, there is a Florentine image of Orpheus Playing to the Beasts. This figure, who in Greek mythology could charm living beings with his music, was identified by the Mughals with the prophet-king Solomon – the font of justice in Middle Eastern lore – who in the context of this throne ensemble was identified with Shah Jahan himself.86 Cosmic entities also appear differently in paintings of Shah Jahan and his father. Whereas Jahangir is depicted surrounded by superhuman agencies only in paintings in which he is dreaming or imagining something, such as shooting Malik Ambar, those of Shah Jahan often show the emperor surrounded by cosmic beings even while he is engaged in worldly events, as though he were an active millennial figure existing in real time.87 Furthermore, by titling himself the Second Lord of the Conjunction, the emperor asserted his direct link with Timur, the alleged Lord of the Conjunction. Since Shah Jahan happened to be born in the year 1000 of the Islamic era, he could readily imagine himself as literally a millennial sovereign, a self-perception that appears to have guided his actions. By sending huge armies into Central Asia with the goal of capturing parts of Timur’s sovereign territory, the emperor was doing more than just expanding Mughal territory: he was conflating real time with millennial time – he was doing what, to his own thinking, he was born to do.
Important changes in imperial succession also occurred during the reigns of Jahangir and Shah Jahan. The practice that crystallized during their reigns, and which continued down to the year 1712, was unique among the great Persianate states of the day. From around 1600, princes in the Safavid and Ottoman empires were customarily confined to the harem, while the reigning emperor or powerful royal or non-royal actors nominated the next ruler from among those princes. As a result, the new ruler would probably have had little if any experience in the rough-and-tumble world of forging political alliances and networks. By contrast, the Mughals practised an open-ended succession system in which any prince could claim the throne; but he could win it only by defeating his brothers. This principle was conceptualized late in Akbar’s reign, and then put to the test in the reigns of his two successors. By denying the throne to his grandson Khusrau, Akbar established a precedent whereby only a sovereign’s sons could contend for the throne. This narrowed the eligible princes down to a manageable figure, which in the case of Akbar’s own succession was only one: Salim. In addition, Akbar ended the earlier practice of giving semi-independent and semi-permanent holdings to princely heirs. From his reign onwards, princes would receive transferable jagirs like any other noble, instead of permanent or semi-permanent power bases on the model of the *iqta‘*s of the Delhi sultans. This meant that the Mughals’ sovereign realm was no longer thought of as a confederation of semi-independent political territories, but as a single indivisible state. As was revealed in the political manoeuvrings of Khusrau and Salim in the last month of Akbar’s life, contenders for power had therefore to vie for the entire empire, and not a portion of it. It was an all-or-nothing contest.
It is sometimes suggested that the sort of bloody, fratricidal contests to which these ideas gave rise were politically destabilizing and detrimental to the long-term health of the Mughal empire, if not, indeed, illustrative of what was once called ‘Oriental despotism’. It can be argued, though, that in reality the post-Akbar winner-take-all succession contest fought by a limited number of actors actually contributed to the empire’s success and dynamism. Anticipating certain conflict with their brothers in a contest for the throne, princes would spend several decades building up powerful households, resilient alliances and networks of support spanning the entire empire. This sort of princely competition drew new groups into the political system, integrated peripheral areas more closely to the imperial centre, reinforced the foundations of imperial authority and forced princes to articulate a vision of how they might rule. In short, princes had to learn how to be competent political actors, since by this brutal logic the best-networked prince would become the next emperor. Moreover, by backing the right candidate, supporters of the winning prince – many of them from humble origins or from peripheral regions – would be swept into positions of importance. As a result, succession struggles, or even rebellions during a given reign, replenished the empire’s body politic with new blood every few decades. At the same time, since supporters of defeated opponents were never considered permanent enemies – an echo of India’s ancient mandala theory of warfare – victors made a point of forgiving and reintegrating them into the system, which was also a stabilizing influence.88
These ideas are nowhere better illustrated than in the bitter and fateful succession struggle that was fought among the four sons of Shah Jahan, an event that occurred about midway in the long life of one of those sons, Aurangzeb. It has been suggested that for sixty years, from the mid seventeenth to the early eighteenth century, the history of India and that of this one individual are practically the same.89 This claim might be only a slight exaggeration, as we will see in the next chapter.