A Mughal of many colours

Thomas Carlyle, the Scottish philosopher, once wrote, “The history of the world is but the biography of great men.” Like many great men, this 19th-century intellectual, too, has suffered correction over the generations. At the barest minimum, after all, history is also women; besides, it is classes and movements, political forces and economic imperatives — and individuals, howsoever grand, are only part of vast concatenations of events.

And yet, it is also true that popular imagination of the past tends to focus on exceptional persons: the heroic and wise — Alexander, Cleopatra, Ashoka the Great — or the villains who serve as warnings — Caligula, Ivan the Terrible, Adolf Hitler. It’s a dichotomy that applies to the Mughals, too, of whom two emperors take up more of our attention than all the rest. On the one hand is Akbar the Great, a hero for his much-vaunted ‘secularism’; on the other, Aurangzeb, a ‘communal’ villain. It cannot be a coincidence that these very qualities — secularism versus religious bigotry — have also informed much of the debate that India has had with itself as an independent nation. Thus, neither Akbar nor Aurangzeb remains a historical figure, but rather an embodiment of qualities to be espoused or shunned. In the process, however, what we gain in nobility of national ethos, we lose in complexity of character. In the story of Akbar as a bridge between religions, for example, there is no place for the man who may have considered himself near-divine; Aurangzeb the unrelenting bigot cannot also be the man willing to down a goblet of wine to prove his love to a dancing girl.

Jahangir, unencumbered by expectation, makes for a bracing alternative. The qualities for which he’s best known — alcoholism and aestheticism — are neither marks of great nobility, nor great villainy.

In the details of his life, too, he is rarely just one thing or another, but often three or four things at the same time.

Take, for example, Jahangir and religion. Jahangir’s accession to the Mughal throne involved a great deal of politicking between the ageing Akbar, the rebellious Jahangir, and Jahangir’s own son, Khusro.

It is very likely that part of Jahangir’s backing came from conservative Muslim amirs and clerics, distraught by Akbar’s unrelenting religious eclecticism. Iqtidar Alam Khan, a former professor at the Aligarh Muslim University, has written of how Jahangir, in his rebel court, had even issued a farman censoring his father’s ‘anti-Muslim’ policies, such as prohibiting congregational namaaz.

Jahangir: An Intimate Portrait of a Great Mughal /Parvati Sharma /Juggernaut /Non-fiction /₹599

On the other hand, there is the story of Qazi Nurullah Shushtari, a Shia cleric in Jahangir’s court. As Sajjad Rizvi, an associate professor at the University of Exeter, recounts in an illuminating essay, ‘Shi’i Polemics at the Mughal Court’ , the unfortunate qazi was whipped on the emperor’s orders and subsequently died. Through a close analysis of various accounts of the event, Rizvi paints a dizzying picture of the wheels within wheels that may have been churning in Jahangir’s mind and court. For one thing, Shushtari may have been pretending to be Sunni, to blend with the conservative Sunni faction emboldened in the early years of Jahangir’s reign. If so, when Jahangir discovered the pretence, he was enraged — not by the pretence alone but by the shadow this cast on his avowed embrace of all sects and religions. Rizvi quotes Jahangir as lamenting the fact that, thanks to Shushtari, “People have been imagining us to be a bigoted and coarse Sunni. May God preserve all from the disease of bigotry, especially us, the manifestation of the Divine!” In a further twist, however, Rizvi writes that it’s possible Jahangir was compelled to punish Shushtari by a sectarian court — and then forced to pretend that it was not so. In the eyes of travelling Europeans, meanwhile, no one could be further removed from religious dogma than the emperor. Within this early expat community, there were even rumours that Jahangir wasn’t circumcised. Thomas Roe, the first English ambassador to an Indian court, would write to the Bishop of Canterbury that Jahangir was either “the most impossible man in the world to be converted, or the most easy; for he loves to heare, and hath so little religion yet, that he can well abyde to have any decided”.

And finally, there is the evidence of the emperor’s own diary, the Jahangirnama , and the recurring presence of a Brahmin ascetic called Jadrup Gosain in it. The emperor visits Gosain several times; each time they meet alone and talk for hours; each time, the emperor emerges with a palpable sense of joy. “Without exaggeration,” he once wrote, “it was hard for me to part from him.”

An emperor who was brought to the throne by Sunni conservatives, who punished a Shia cleric for doubting his religious liberality, who was perceived as an atheist by foreign visitors, and who found comfort in conversing with a Brahmin sage — such a man is not an ‘example’ in the way great men are, or are supposed to be. Instead, perhaps, he is a mirror; a man who contains, in his life and his mind, the churning of religions and races, of the beliefs and compromises that continue to flavour the great Indian melting pot.

Parvati Sharma is a Delhi-based writer and the author, most recently, of Jahangir: An Intimate Portrait of a Great Mughal