Jahangir (1605 to 1627): Mughal Emperor, Nur Jahan and the English

Jahangir: Early Life of Prince Salim and Accession to the Throne

Jahangir's Early Life: Father, Mother and Education of Prince Salim

Salim was born at Fatehpur Sikri on 31 August 1569, the son of the emperor Akbar and his consort Mariam-uz-Zamani, a Kachhwaha princess, daughter of the Rajput ruler of Amber. Two elder brothers had died in infancy, and Akbar had sought the blessing of the Sufi saint Salim Chishti of Sikri for a son; the boy was named after the saint.

His education began at the age of five. Tutors taught him Persian, Arabic, Turkish, Hindi, arithmetic, history, geography and the sciences, and Abdur Rahim Khan-i-Khanan was among them. He grew up fluent in Persian and Hindustani, with a sound knowledge of Turki, the ancestral language of the Mughals.

• Orchha, 1594: Sent by Akbar against the rebel Bundela chief Vir Singh Deo, the prince subdued him; the Jahangir Mahal at Orchha was later built in his honour.
• Marriages: His first wife was a Kachhwaha princess of Amber, mother of Khusrau; a Rathor princess of Marwar, Jagat Gosain, was the mother of Shah Jahan.

Prince Salim's Revolt Against Akbar and Jahangir's Accession in 1605

The prince did not wait quietly for the throne. In 1599, while Akbar was campaigning in the Deccan, Salim declared himself emperor at Allahabad, struck coins in his own name and held his own court. Akbar chose reconciliation over punishment, and by 1604 father and son were at peace again.

Akbar died in October 1605, and Salim succeeded him on 3 November 1605, eight days later, taking the title Jahangir, World-Seizer. Mughal emperors chose such titles to announce a claim: Shah Jahan means King of the World, and the court chroniclers used the titles to stress the emperor's claim to unchallenged power.

Khusrau's Rebellion of 1606 and the Execution of Guru Arjan

The new reign began with a revolt by the emperor's eldest son. In April 1606 Khusrau left Agra, claiming the throne on the strength of Akbar's wishes, and laid siege to Lahore. Jahangir relieved the city and defeated him at Bhairowal, and the prince was captured while crossing the Chenab. After a later plot he was blinded and kept a prisoner; he died at Burhanpur in 1622, killed on the orders of his brother Khurram.

The revolt drew in the Sikh Guru. Jahangir accused Guru Arjan, the fifth Sikh Guru and compiler of the Adi Granth, of supporting Khusrau, and ordered his execution in 1606. Jahangir already looked on the growing Sikh community around the Harmandar Sahib at Ramdaspur as a potential threat; the next Guru, Hargobind, was imprisoned at Gwalior for a time and later released.

Jahangir's Administration: Justice, Religious Policy and Memoir

Chain of Justice and the Twelve Orders of Jahangir

Jahangir wanted to be seen above all as a just king. The Chain of Justice was a golden chain with bells: in his memoir he wrote that his first order after his accession was to have it fastened up, so that anyone denied justice by the officials could shake it and draw the emperor's attention. He gave its length as 30 gaz and its bells as 60.

• Twelve orders: Issued at his accession; one forbade the making and sale of rice spirit and intoxicating drugs, and another set up free hospitals with physicians in the cities of the empire.
• Jharoka darshan: Each morning the emperor appeared at a balcony facing the east, where soldiers, merchants, craftspeople, peasants and women with sick children waited for a sight of him; the custom began under Akbar.
• Tobacco ban: Smoking spread quickly after 1604, and Jahangir banned it; the ban failed, and by the end of the century tobacco was grown and traded all over India.

Court painting turned the idea into an image. A painting by Abu'l Hasan shows Jahangir shooting at the figure of poverty, with the Chain of Justice descending from heaven; the painter wraps the target in a dark cloud to show that it stands for an idea, a device called allegory.

Jahangir's Religious Policy: Sulh-i-Kul and Its Limits

Jahangir kept his father's principle of sulh-i-kul, universal peace, which judged subjects by a common ethic of honesty, justice and peace rather than by religion. He described Akbar's policy in his own words, and Shah Jahan followed the same principle.

• Patronage: Grants to the Chaitanya sect for temples at Vrindavan, and a qazi for the Hindus, Srikant of Kashmir, so that they had their own judicial officer.
• Bans: Cow slaughter, and the killing of animals on certain days of the week, as under Akbar.
• Orthodox pressure: Nobles close to Ahmad Sirhindi pressed him to undo parts of Akbar’s policy, and the conquest of Kangra was marked with Islamic rites.

The record is mixed, and his memoir is not a neutral witness. The execution of Guru Arjan and an order against Jain monks, soon withdrawn, sit beside grants to temples and close ties with Jain teachers; the historian M. Athar Ali argued that Jahangir wrote for a Persian-reading Muslim audience and shaped the facts to look like an anti-idolatrous sultan. In Athar Ali's judgement Jahangir generally continued his father's religious policy.

Tuzuk-i-Jahangiri: Jahangir's Memoir, the Jahangirnama

Like his great-grandfather Babur, Jahangir wrote his own memoir. The Tuzuk-i-Jahangiri, also called the Jahangirnama, is in Persian and covers his reign from 1605; he wrote it until 1622, after which Mu'tamad Khan and then Muhammad Hadi carried it on to his death in 1627.

• Natural history: Long descriptions of birds, animals and plants, with paintings ordered to go with them; a falcon sent by the ruler of Iran in 1619 was painted by Ustad Mansur.
• Economy: Notes such as the Banjaras carrying grain on their bullocks to sell in towns.
• Court and family: Ceremonies such as the weighing of Prince Khurram against precious metals, the jashn-i wazn or tula dan.
• Experiments: He tested bitumen on a broken bone of a chicken and compared the air of Ahmadabad and Mahmudabad by how fast meat decayed.

The memoir belongs to a larger body of Persian writing. Akbar made Persian the leading language of the court and of administration at every level, and the Mughal chronicles, the Akbar Nama, the Jahangirnama and the Badshah Nama, were written in it by courtiers who centred their histories on the emperor, his family, his court, his wars and his administration. Read with care, they show the spirit of the age: the ideal of the just king, the court's ceremonial, its curiosity about the natural world, and the policy of sulh-i-kul.

Nur Jahan: Jahangir's Wife and the Power Behind the Throne

Nur Jahan's Early Life: From Mehrunnisa to Padshah Begum

Nur Jahan was born Mehrunnisa in 1577 at Kandahar, while her family was travelling from Iran to seek service under Akbar. Her father, Mirza Ghiyas Beg, rose in Mughal service and received the title Itimad-ud-Daula, Pillar of the State; she was educated in Arabic and Persian, literature, art and music.

• First marriage, 1594: To Ali Quli Istajlu, an Iranian officer given the title Sher Afgan; their daughter, Ladli Begum, was born in 1605. Sher Afgan was killed in 1607 in a clash with the governor of Bengal.
• Marriage to Jahangir, 1611: After four years at court as lady-in-waiting to Ruqaiya Sultan Begum, she married Jahangir on 25 May 1611, his last wife.
• Titles: First Nur Mahal, Light of the Palace, then Nur Jahan, Light of the World; from 1620 she held the rank of Padshah Begum, chief queen.

Nur Jahan's Power: Coins, Farmans and the Nur Jahan Junta

No Mughal empress before or after held such power. Jahangir struck silver coins with his own titles on one side and on the other the words struck in the name of the Queen Begum, Nur Jahan, and she issued her own orders, or farmans, under a seal that called her Nur Jahan Padshah Begum. As Jahangir's health failed, she came to decide many affairs of state herself.

Her family rose with her. Her father became chief minister and her brother Asaf Khan a leading noble, and historians call this group of relatives in high office the Nur Jahan junta. Iranians gained high offices under Jahangir, and after Nur Jahan, Mughal queens and princesses began to control significant financial resources of their own.

The family also held the succession together, and then split it. Asaf Khan's daughter Mumtaz Mahal married Prince Khurram in 1612, and in 1621 Nur Jahan married her own daughter Ladli Begum to the youngest prince, Shahryar. The two marriages tied her family to both rival princes, and in 1627 brother and sister backed different sons-in-law.

Nur Jahan's Patronage: Itimad-ud-Daula's Tomb and Her Buildings

Nur Jahan built on a grand scale. When her father died in 1622 she raised a tomb for him and her mother on the eastern bank of the Yamuna at Agra, finished in 1628, and the Dutch merchant Pelsaert noted that she built sarais for travellers, pleasure gardens and palaces in every direction.

• Itimad-ud-Daula’s tomb: One of the first Mughal buildings in white marble instead of red sandstone, with jali screens and pietra dura, inlay of cornelian, jasper, lapis lazuli, onyx and topaz set into the marble, among the earliest true examples in India; it is called the Baby Taj.
• Turning point in design: It marks the move from the red sandstone of Humayun’s and Akbar’s tombs towards the white marble and inlay of the Taj Mahal.
• Other works: The Pattar Masjid at Srinagar, a large sarai in Jalandhar district (1620), and her own tomb at Shahdara near Lahore.

After Jahangir's death she lived quietly at Lahore on an allowance from Shah Jahan, with her widowed daughter, and died in 1645. She is buried in the tomb she built for herself at Shahdara near Lahore, with her brother Asaf Khan's tomb nearby.

Jahangir's Wars, Frontiers and Rebellions

Jahangir's Campaigns: Mewar's Submission of 1615, Bengal and Kangra

Jahangir ended a century-long struggle with the Sisodiya house of Mewar. Rana Amar Singh, son of Maharana Pratap, kept up his father's resistance from the hills, and armies sent in 1606 and 1608 made no headway. In 1613 Jahangir came to Rajputana himself, and Prince Khurram pressed the campaign until Mughal posts were set up inside Mewar in 1614.

In 1615 Amar Singh agreed to meet Khurram, and the Sisodiya ruler accepted Mughal service. The settlement brought into Mughal service the Rajput house that had resisted longest, after a struggle that had lasted a century. As with the other Rajput houses, the terms were generous: the rulers accepted Mughal supremacy but kept their territories and received high ranks in the nobility.

Jahangir's other campaigns filled out the edges of the empire rather than adding new provinces. The military campaigns begun by Akbar went on, while those against the Sikhs, the Ahoms and Ahmadnagar were less successful.

• Bengal: From 1608 Islam Khan subdued Musa Khan, leader of the Baro-Bhuyan chiefs, and the Raja of Koch Bihar accepted Mughal overlordship.
• Kangra: The hill fort was besieged and taken in 1620, and the Raja of Chamba submitted; Kishtwar in Kashmir was conquered in the same year.
• The Ahoms: Campaigns against the Ahom kingdom of Assam made little headway.

Jahangir's Deccan Policy: Ahmadnagar and Malik Ambar

In the Deccan Jahangir carried on Akbar's campaigns with less success. Malik Ambar, born in Ethiopia and sold as a slave, rose to be Peshwa, or chief minister, and the real ruler of Ahmadnagar from 1600 to his death in 1626. His army by 1610 counted 10,000 Habshis and 40,000 Deccanis, and with guerrilla tactics he defeated the Mughal attempts on the kingdom for a decade.

• Malik Ambar’s work: A revenue settlement of much of the Deccan, on which later settlements were based, and the founding of the city later called Aurangabad.
• Khurram in the Deccan: In 1616 Jahangir sent Prince Khurram against Ahmadnagar, Bijapur and Golconda; he was the emperor’s favourite son.
• Jahangir’s anger: The memoir never names Malik Ambar without abuse, and Abu’l Hasan painted Jahangir shooting arrows at Malik Ambar’s head, a scene that never happened.

Loss of Qandahar in 1622: Jahangir and the Safavids

Qandahar mattered because of where it stood. Every invader of north India had to cross the Hindukush, so Mughal policy tried to hold the strategic outposts on the way, Kabul and Qandahar; the fortress-town was a bone of contention between the Mughals and the Safavids of Iran, and Akbar had retaken it in 1595.

Jahangir tried diplomacy first. In 1613 he sent an envoy to Shah Abbas to plead the Mughal case, without success, and in the winter of 1622 a Persian army besieged Qandahar; the ill-prepared garrison surrendered the fortress and the city. Prince Khurram, ordered to march to its relief, refused, and rose in revolt instead.

Jahangir's Sons at War: Shah Jahan's Rebellion and Mahabat Khan's Coup

The last years of the reign were shaped by the fight for the succession. Khurram, the emperor's favourite, saw in the marriage of Ladli Begum to Shahryar in 1621 a sign that Nur Jahan meant to make Shahryar the heir; the second son, Parviz, was weak and addicted to alcohol, so the contest lay between these two. In 1622 he rebelled, having first had his blind brother Khusrau killed; the general Mahabat Khan defeated him, and the civil war ended in 1625.

The victor then became a threat. Nur Jahan, wary of Mahabat Khan's new prestige, sent him to Bengal and summoned him to answer charges. In 1626 he struck first: with a force of Rajput soldiers he seized the emperor at his camp on the Jhelum. Nur Jahan tried to rescue her husband, then joined him in captivity and organised his escape, and the coup soon collapsed.

Jahangir and the English East India Company

William Hawkins and the First English Factories at Masulipatnam and Surat

The English East India Company reached the Mughal empire in Jahangir's reign. Company ships came to Surat, the chief port of the Mughals, in 1608, and William Hawkins, captain of the Hector, went on to Jahangir's court, which he visited in 1609.

• Masulipatnam, 1611: The Company founded a settlement on the Andhra coast, its main base on the east coast until the move to Madras after 1640.
• Battle of Swally, 1612: Captain Thomas Best’s four ships beat a Portuguese squadron off Suvali near Surat; during the talks the governor granted trading rights, subject to the emperor’s approval.
• Surat, 1613: The Company set up its first permanent factory in India at Surat, with Mughal permission.

A factory in this sense was not a place of manufacture but a trading post. The Portuguese, already at sea in these waters, made the Mughals wary of them: in 1613 they seized the Rahimi, a great pilgrim ship owned by Jahangir's mother, and Jahangir ordered Daman taken and the Portuguese in his empire arrested. The Dutch were close behind the English; in 1618 Jahangir issued a farman to the Dutch company in Gujarat allowing trade at Mughal ports.

Sir Thomas Roe at Jahangir's Court, 1615 to 1619

England's ambassador at Jahangir's court was Sir Thomas Roe, sent by King James I at the Company's request. He arrived in 1615 and stayed until 1619, and his journals are among the best sources for the reign.

• Etiquette: Envoys were expected to bow deeply or kiss the ground; Roe simply bowed in the European way and shocked the court by asking for a chair.
• Gifts: Gifts were a sign of honour, and Roe was disappointed when Asaf Khan returned a ring he had given because it was worth only 400 rupees.
• The result: Permission and protection for the Company’s factory at Surat, though no major trading privileges.
• A test of painters: Jahangir had a European miniature copied several times and challenged Roe to pick out the original; Roe could not.

Art and Architecture Under Jahangir

Mughal Painting Under Jahangir: Portraits, Albums and Natural History

Mughal painting developed furthest under Jahangir, and its character changed. Akbar's studio had worked mainly on illustrated books, with several artists sharing a manuscript; Jahangir preferred single paintings collected in albums, or muraqqa, and portraits, studies of birds, animals and flowers, and scenes from his own life.

• Ustad Mansur: Master of natural history, given the title Nadir-al-Asr, Unequalled of the Age; he made the earliest colour painting of the dodo and the first of the Siberian crane.
• Abu’l Hasan: Painter of allegories such as Jahangir shooting at poverty and Jahangir’s dream, in which the emperor embraces Shah Abbas of Iran.
• Bishandas: Went with the embassy to Iran in 1613 and painted Shah Abbas from life.
• European influence: Portraits and paintings sent from England, and single-point perspective, taken up in the studio.

Jahangir judged painting closely. He claimed he could name the artist of any picture at a glance, even the painter of the eyes and eyebrows in a face done by several hands, and the works of his reign were catalogued, dated and often signed, so that historians can place them with fair accuracy.

Shalimar Bagh, Jahangir Mahal and the Tomb of Jahangir

Gardens were Jahangir's favourite form of building. The Mughals laid out the chahar bagh, a walled garden divided into four quarters by water channels, and some of the most beautiful were made by Jahangir and Shah Jahan in Kashmir, Agra and Delhi.

• Shalimar Bagh, Srinagar: Built by Jahangir in 1619 on the shore of Dal Lake and named Farah Baksh; it was the summer residence of the court, which moved to Kashmir many times. The Mughal Gardens in Kashmir have been on India’s Tentative List for UNESCO World Heritage since 2010.
• Jahangir Mahal, Orchha: The palace built by Vir Singh Deo Bundela in honour of Jahangir.
• Tomb of Jahangir: Built in 1637 under Shah Jahan in the Dilkusha garden at Shahdara, across the Ravi from Lahore, with frescoes and marble inside.

Painting and building are told together for the whole dynasty in Mughal art and architecture, where the line from Itimad-ud-Daula's tomb to the Taj Mahal is followed in full.

Death of Jahangir and an Assessment of His Reign

How Jahangir Died: Death in 1627 and the War of Succession

Jahangir died in October 1627 near Bhimber, on the way back from Kashmir to Lahore. A lifelong user of opium and wine, he had been often ill in the 1620s and had gone to Kashmir and Kabul to recover his health; he was buried at Shahdara near Lahore.

• Shahryar: Nur Jahan’s son-in-law took power at Lahore from November 1627 to January 1628, relying on her support.
• Asaf Khan: Her brother backed his own son-in-law Khurram, set up Dawar Bakhsh as a puppet ruler in the meantime, and confined Nur Jahan.
• Shah Jahan: Khurram reached Agra in February 1628, had Shahryar and Dawar Bakhsh executed, and became emperor as Shah Jahan.

The war of succession followed the Mughal pattern: the throne went to the prince who won it. The story continues in Shah Jahan and the zenith of Mughal splendour.

Jahangir's Reign: An Assessment of His Achievements and Failures

Historians have judged Jahangir unevenly. Henry Beveridge, editor of his memoir, called him a weak ruler who would have been happier running a natural history museum, and blamed his dependence on Nur Jahan for the quarrel with Shah Jahan; others stress that the institutions of his father's empire held firm under him. Expansion slowed but did not stop: Akbar had three fairly able successors, and under them territorial expansion continued at a much reduced pace while the instruments of government were kept and consolidated.

Sources

• NCERT: Our Pasts II (Class VII), The Mughal Empire
• NCERT: Themes in Indian History, Part II (Class XII), Kings and Chronicles
• INCOIS (Ministry of Earth Sciences): Science, civilisation and society, Jahangir
• Incredible India (Ministry of Tourism): Itimad-ud-Daulah's Tomb, Agra
• PIB: India, properties on the UNESCO Tentative List (2023)
• Wikipedia: Jahangir
• Wikipedia: Nur Jahan
• Wikipedia: Thomas Roe
• Wikipedia: Khusrau Mirza
• Wikipedia: Guru Arjan
• Wikipedia: Tomb of I'timad-ud-Daulah
• Wikipedia: Mahabat Khan
• Wikipedia: Jahangirnama
• Wikipedia: Ustad Mansur
• Wikipedia: Mughal painting
• Wikipedia: Shalimar Bagh, Srinagar
• Wikipedia: Malik Ambar
• Wikipedia: Mirza Ghiyas Beg
• Wikipedia: Tomb of Jahangir
• Wikipedia: Amar Singh I
• Wikipedia: Shah Jahan
• Wikipedia: Shahryar Mirza
• Wikipedia: Battle of Swally
• Wikipedia: East India Company
• Wikipedia: Machilipatnam
• UPSC: Civil Services Examination question papers