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Daughters of the Sun: Empresses, Queens and Begums of the Mughal Empire PDF

299 Pages·2018·6.69 MB·English
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Preview Daughters of the Sun: Empresses, Queens and Begums of the Mughal Empire

Also by Ira Mukhoty Heroines: Powerful Indian Women of Myth and History ALEPH BOOK COMPANY An independent publishing firm promoted by Rupa Publications India First published in India in 2018 by Aleph Book Company 7/16 Ansari Road, Daryaganj New Delhi 110 002 Copyright © Ira Mukhoty 2018 Pages 249 to 250 (Image Credits) are an extension of the copyright page All rights reserved. The author has asserted her moral rights. The views and opinions expressed in this book are the author’s own and the facts are as reported by her, which have been verified to the extent possible, and the publishers are in no way liable for the same. No part of this publication may be reproduced, transmitted, or stored in a retrieval system, in any form or by any means, without permission in writing from Aleph Book Company. ISBN: 978-93-86021-12-0 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2 This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published TO the memory of my parents, Gobind and Nicolle Mukhoty CONTENTS Introduction Peripatetic Queens from Persia to Hindustan 1494–1569 The Timurids, the Uzbeks and Khanzada’s Sacrifice Hindustan and the Coming of the Begums and the Khanums Khanzada Begum and the Mystic Feast Rout at the Battle of Chausa and the Afghan Menace Dildar Begum and a Marriage Proposal Hamida Banu and the Persian Escapade Bega Begum and Humayun’s Tomb Disappeared Wives and Imperial Splendour 1556–1631 Maham Anaga and the River of Milk Disappeared Wives and the Mystery of Jahangir’s Mother Gulbadan and the Mughal Hajj Salima Sultan Begum and the Prodigal Son Maryam-uz-Zamani, the Rahimi and the Perfidious Portuguese Noor Jahan, an English Ambassador and the Politics of Colour Mumtaz Mahal and a Love Supreme Ambitious Siblings and a Shahzaadi’s Dream 1631–1721 Shahzaadi That Timurid Girl A New City for the Peacock Throne Letters between a Brother and a Sister Sibling Rivalries Roshanara Begum and a Dangerous Brother The Woman in the Tower and the Last Padshah Begum Epilogue: The Sun Sets on the Mughal Empire Acknowledgements Image Credits Notes and References Bibliography INTRODUCTION India was ruled for over 200 years by the Gurkani, a clan that established an empire of such magnificence, size and wealth, that it became a byword for glory around the world. But the name by which the Gurkani became rightly famous was an aberration. The dynasty was a nomadic Timurid one, as the founder, Babur, proudly traced his lineage directly to the Turkic conqueror Amir Timur (also known as Tamerlane), who established an empire in the fourteenth century quite as glorious as Chinghiz Khan’s. Babur referred to himself, and to his lineage, as Gurkani, from the Persianized Mongol word for guregen, or son-in- law, since some of the Timurids, including Amir Timur himself, had married Chingizid women, to add to their legitimacy. But Babur himself, and all of his descendants, male and female, were intensely proud of their Timurid lineage, very consciously evoking the Timurid charisma in various ways. Indeed, Babur thoroughly loathed his Mongol cousins, the Uzbeks, considering them brutish and uncivilized, and would have been horrified to know that his dynasty would become synonymous with an Anglicized form of Mongols—the Mughals of India. It was while researching my first book, Heroines, that I realized the casual negligence with which we regard our history in India and the sometimes benign largesse with which we assimilate inaccuracy and fallacy as received wisdom. But the naming of things is important. It shapes the way in which we view ourselves and the place we occupy in the world. To name a thing is to magic it into being, to give it substance and weight. When the Europeans gave the name ‘Mughals’ to Babur’s dynasty, they were negligently assuming a shared Mongol inheritance for all Central Asian conquerors. One of the women I studied for my collection of essays in Heroines was Jahanara Begum, among the most accomplished women of the Mughal empire. I discovered the exact depth of my ignorance at that point—an ignorance that was also inadvertently tainted with prejudice. The misnomer of the dynasty is only the very beginning of an enormous amount of almost whimsical misinformation that surrounds the history of the Mughals. The empire of the great Mughals—from Babur’s invasion at Panipat in 1526 to the death of Aurangzeb in 1707—coincides exactly with the arrival and settling of the Europeans in India for trade and more, the elucidation of that history and the way in which we view it even today is marked by the way in which those early Europeans experienced and interpreted Mughal rule. The Europeans kept meticulous records of all their transactions with the Mughal court. They wrote detailed accounts in their letters to their holding companies and they wrote memoirs and travelogues. Jesuit missionaries arrived at the same time and they too wrote extensively of their experiences and travels. On the other hand, from the Indian point of view, it was considered indelicate, indeed outright rude, to write about royal Muslim women who were expected to maintain a decorous purdah. The Europeans, not held back by any such need for decorum, were instead fascinated by the notion of the private space of the Mughal women and indulged in some truly fervid leaps of imagination when trying to conjure up that forbidden world—the Mughal harem. An Englishman travelling to Mecca in the seventeenth century admitted that the first question a traveller returning from the East was faced with was ‘what are the women like?’ And yet, when European men interacted with the Mughal court, they found themselves distanced from the affairs of women at several levels: as men, European men, they were both physically and culturally separated from the world of women. The purdah of the zenana meant that the women and the household that they inhabited were prohibited to them. François Bernier, a seventeenth-century French physician and meticulous observer of Shahjahanabad, admitted that though he yearned to visit the zenana, ‘who is the traveller that can describe from ocular observation the interior of the building?’ Moreover, since they usually did not speak Persian or Turki, Europeans could only comprehend this beguiling world through an interpreter. The nuances of culture and comportment were therefore often inaccessible to them. They could not understand the reason for a Mughal woman’s influence and power, attributing it to an emperor’s weakness, or worse, to incest. The resulting chimera creation, the ‘Oriental harem’, was therefore a lurid and sometimes fantastical mix of bazaar gossip, stray gleanings of fact and sexual fantasy. The most frequent portrayal of this ‘harem’, as it was consumed eagerly by a curious audience in Europe that was beginning to be fascinated by the ‘exotic East’, was that of a cruel, despotic and endlessly lascivious emperor surrounded by thousands of nubile young women competing for his attention and pining away in sexual frustration. Not only was this image eagerly adopted by Western audiences, it also trickled down into the Indian consciousness through the colonial experience and the European narrative of Indian history. Thus, to this day, there is a perception that Mughal women operated within a fixed zone of influence, the domestic harem, an immutable cloistered space in which they led restricted and unfulfilled lives, from which they could seldom escape, and to which only the emperor had access. As I discovered while doing my research on the women of the great Mughals, nothing could be farther from the truth. In fact, the zenana was an industrious, carefully calibrated and orchestrated world. The wanton world of the Europeans’ imagination in which the women ruthlessly schemed against one another and wasted the hours of their days in frustrated languor was just that, a fantasy. The zenana was instead a busy, well-ordered place where each woman knew her place and her worth. It was a place where accomplished, educated women were prized; well-spoken, articulate and cultured women most likely to advance. There were intrigues, and jealousies, certainly, for how would there not be when hundreds and sometimes thousands of people lived together? But the overwhelming nature of the zenana was one of warm support and companionship, a complex, nuanced world of female complicity and understanding, one in which excellence was valued and women learned all the skills required to run a city, for there were no men within. A much truer picture of a zenana was described by an Englishwoman, Mrs Meer Hassan Ali, who married an Indian man and lived for twelve years in a Muslim nobleman’s household in the nineteenth century. ‘A lady here,’ wrote Mrs Meer Hassan, referring to an Indian zenana, ‘would be the most unhappy creature existing, unless surrounded by a multitude of attendants suitable to her rank in life.’ Moreover, ‘they cannot imagine anything so stupid as my preference to a quiet study, rather than the constant bustle of a well-filled zenana… The ladies’ society is by no means insipid or without interest’, she further writes of the zenana. ‘They are naturally gifted with good sense and politeness, fond of conversation, shrewd in their remarks and their language is both correct and refined.’ She writes of the ‘cheerful meeting of friends, the distribution of presents to dependents and remembrances to the poor; all is life and joy, cheerful bustle and amusement’, and it is difficult to imagine a world more far removed from the claustrophobic, sexually charged harem of popular imagination. John Fryer, a physician with the East India Company (EIC), accidentally spied a zenana when the curtain separating him from his patients fell. He was surprised to find the women ‘not altogether unemployed, there lying pared mangoes, and other fruits for confection and achars, or pickles; some samplers of good housewifery in needleworks; and no indecent decorum managing their cloistered way of living’. And so John Fryer found the women busy making achaars and doing embroidery, and he was amazed, for it was its very mundanity and industry that he found puzzling. The mystery, really, is how this pervasive notion of the ‘harem’ came to have such a tenacious hold on the modern Indian imagination. The explanation usually given for the general dearth of information about Indian women is multi-layered: women were usually uneducated, so they did not transmit written histories; India, in general, tended not to emphasize written histories, preferring the oral tradition; moreover, physical evidence is fragile in India, subject to the tempestuous weather, eroded by time and the negligence of historians. But in the case of the Mughals, none of this holds true. The women were all, right from the beginning, some of the most educated of their age. Timurid girls were given the same rigorous education, in mathematics, history, physics, poetry, astronomy etc., as boys because the Timurids placed a very high value on calligraphy, writing and erudition. The Mughals were also memory- keepers par excellence of all Indian kings. They wrote memoirs and appointed court historians in enthusiastic numbers. As for the physical evidence of Mughal ambition and glory, India is fairly studded with examples of their vision, in sandstone and in marble. The information is available, therefore, though it is often oblique, obfuscated or hidden in plain sight. This book is an attempt to recreate the dynamic, changing world of the women of the Mughal empire, from the time that Babur chanced upon the ‘al-Hind’ to the beginning of the eighteenth century which marked the end of Aurangzeb’s reign—a period of almost 200 years. I have examined the lives and influence of some fifteen women who left their mark on India and whose lives impacted, to a greater or lesser degree, the luminous destinies of these Mughal padshahs. In the case of the earlier Mughals, it was the older matriarchs who were most influential, aunts and mothers like Aisan Daulat Begum, Khanzada Begum, Dildar Begum, Gulbadan Begum, Bega Begum and Maham Begum. When Akbar became padshah at only thirteen years of age, a group of ‘milk mothers’ or foster-mothers, became powerful, including Jiji Anaga and Maham Anaga. Then, as the padshahs settled into their growing empire, their wives gained in influence and so there was Harkha Bai, Salima Sultan Begum and, much more famously, Noor Jahan and Mumtaz Mahal. Finally, as the empire became truly luminescent, unmarried daughters became powerful and there is the astounding legacy of Jahanara Begum and Roshanara Begum. Under the last of the great Mughals, Aurangzeb, there are the waning stars of his daughters Zeb-un-Nisa Begum and Zeenat-un-Nisa Begum. The ambition of the Mughals of India, from the time of Babur himself, was to found an empire worthy of their glorious ancestors. Hindustan, for them, was never a plunderous foray. It was a homeland to be created and claimed, at a time when anything less than blistering confidence meant instant death. And so, to bolster their claims, they carefully nurtured the old Perso-Chigizid symbology of the sun. In the genealogy created by Abu’l-Fazl for Akbar, the Mughals traced their lineage through Timur and Chinghiz Khan to Princess Alanquwa of Mughalistan who was impregnated by the divine light of the sun. The imagery of this powerful radiance was burnished by each successive emperor and used to stake their claims and mitigate their status as recent parvenus. In the interludes between battles, for example, Humayun liked to portray himself as the solar emperor in the centre of an elaborately constructed cosmic heaven. But Hindustan was a diverse land with its own venerable legacy of sun worship. There was the Parsi fire-worship and the Hindu veneration of the sun god. And so, Akbar, in an affable, chimeric adoption of all these symbols, became ‘His Majesty the Sun’, who recited the 1,001 names of the sun and worshipped at the fire altar. Jahangir, who took the regnal name ‘Light of the Faith’, was often depicted with a divine solar light shining around his head like a nimbus. Shah Jahan took the enigmatic title Sahib-e-Qiran (Lord of the Auspicious Conjunction), thereby stating clearly his aim of lighting the ‘Timurid Lamp’. But it was not only the Mughal emperors who so assiduously courted the divine glory of the sun. Many of the Mughal women—wives, daughters and mothers— all carefully placed themselves within the warm orbit of the sun. In some cases, the women consciously evoked the symbol of the sun, as when Mehr-un-Nisa Begum took the title Noor Jahan, or Light of the World and when Mumtaz Mahal came to be known as the ‘Sun of Modesty’. But in many cases, it was the old Timurid ideal that the women aspired to. When Jahanara wrote her Sufi treatises and discovered a Shining Truth, it was the Timurid Lamp, once again, that shone through her. In their roles as ambassadors, peacekeepers, rulers in absentia and even as guardians of memory, it was the Timurid-Chingizid ideal that these Mughal women were claiming. They were equally invested in the fabric of myth-making and empire-building as the emperors, and were proud and ardent daughters of the sun. The term I use for the space reserved for women is zenana, which is more Indian in its origin than harem, the term the Europeans used to speak of a general ‘oriental’ secluded space, whether they were referring to the Ottomans in Central Asia or the Mughals of India. When the Central Asian semi-nomadic warlord Babur rode into Hindustan, he did not only bring his warriors with him. He brought his ‘haraman’ or household, which included elderly matrons, young wives, children, servants, widowed relatives, divorced sisters and unmarried royal relatives. The women of the haraman lived in tents and spent most of their life on horseback, riding with the men and travelling great distances. These early Mughals, Babur and Humayun, had enormous respect for the matriarchs of the clan, their mothers and grandmothers, whose advice often helped keep warring brothers together and empires intact. One of the earliest women to travel into Hindustan on horseback was Khanzada, Babur’s elder sister. Babur, and then his son Humayun, revered Khanzada because of the sacrifice she was required to make early in her life, when she was left behind with the Uzbek warlord Shaybani Khan, to secure Babur’s safety. The Mughals were tenacious in their gratitude towards the matriarchs of their clan, who were robust, physically inured to hardship, and willing to suffer their menfolk’s privations alongside them. They were pragmatic about women who ‘fell’ to an enemy, unlike their contemporaries, the Rajputs, who invested so heavily in their women’s sexual chastity that death, through sati, was preferred to ‘loss of honour’ to an enemy. In this early haraman, there was no fixed, cloistered space which was designated only for the women, as the very concept of home and homeland was still being formed. As the scholar Ruby Lal, in her ground-breaking work Domesticity and Power in the Early Mughal World, has shown, there was no clear separation of ‘public’ and ‘private’ space at all for these early Mughals. The women created a home on the move—travelling while pregnant, delivering babies, arranging marriages and parlaying with errant sons and brothers. When Khanzada left on her arduous, lonely mission from Kandahar across the icy passes as ambassador to Kamran Mirza’s court at Kabul at the very advanced age of sixty-five, it is also the ‘harem’ that she represented. She carried with her the harem’s ardent desire for reconciliation while also performing her duty as the padshah’s ambassador. Maham Begum, Dildar Begum and Gulrukh Begum, Babur’s principal wives, along with Gulnar Agacha and Nargul Agacha, Babur’s concubines, bore Babur’s children even as they were constantly on the move, harried by enemies. They helped to create a sense of a settled Timurid homeland even when, in the early years, this was just a mirage. Later on, when the thirteen- year-old Akbar was first declared Padshah Ghazi, he had to send for the haraman from Kabul so that his grizzled warriors, veterans of Central Asian wars, were persuaded to remain beside him and fight for Hindustan. The resources to piece together a life of the Mughal women are available but they are sometimes unaccountably ignored. An extraordinary document exists, discovered and translated from Persian into English in the early twentieth

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Most books are stored in the elastic cloud where traffic is expensive. For this reason, we have a limit on daily download.