Jahangir

• 1. Introduction

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  Jahangir, the fourth emperor of the Mughal Empire, built his legacy on a paradox: a ruler who could tell at a glance which court painter had applied a single eyebrow to a portrait, yet handed the actual business of governance to his wife. Born Nur ud-din Muhammad Salim on the 31st of August 1569 in Fatehpur Sikri, he reigned from 1605 until his death in 1627, presiding over an empire stretched across the Indian subcontinent. His father, the great Akbar, had so desperately wanted him that he made a barefoot pilgrimage to Ajmer Sharif Dargah to pray for a son. That son would prove to be an emperor of extraordinary contradictions: a man of genuine scientific curiosity who compared air quality between cities by watching sheep carcasses decay, and a political leader whose courtiers and foreign visitors alike lamented his indolence. He published memoirs of striking self-awareness, ordered chains of golden bells hung so that any subject denied justice could ring them directly to the throne, then left the governance of his empire entirely to his last and favorite wife. What shaped this complicated man, and what did he actually leave behind?

• 2. A Birth Foretold

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  Salim Chishti, the reputed khawaja who lived at Fatehpur Sikri, told Akbar directly that he would be delivered of three sons who would live to old age. Akbar had already buried two twin boys, Hassan Mirza and Hussain Mirza, born in 1564, both of whom died in infancy. The grief drove both Akbar and Mariam-uz-Zamani to seek the saint's counsel, and the emperor subsequently established a royal palace near Chishti's lodgings so the empress could spend her pregnancy close to him. Akbar himself divided his time between Sikri and Agra during those months.

  The memoirs Jahangir later wrote record a telling moment during the pregnancy. The baby stopped kicking. When word reached Akbar, who was hunting cheetahs at the time, he vowed aloud that if the kicking resumed he would never hunt cheetahs on Fridays for the rest of his life. He kept that vow. Jahangir, in turn, observed the same Friday prohibition throughout his own life, out of reverence for his father.

  When Salim was born on the 31st of August 1569, Akbar ordered feasts and festivities that ran for seven days, had criminals with grave offences released, and distributed gifts across the empire. Astrological custom in Hindustan held that a father should not see the face of a long-awaited son immediately after birth, and so Akbar waited forty-one days before visiting. The boy was named after Hazrat Salim Chishti, in direct acknowledgment of the saint whose prayers Akbar credited with his survival. Jahangir's foster mother was Chishti's own daughter; his foster brother was Qutubuddin Koka, Chishti's grandson.

• 3. Education and Early Command

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  Qutubuddin Koka, Jahangir's foster brother, was also his first tutor when formal education began at age five. The occasion was marked with another imperial feast. What followed was an education designed for a future emperor: Persian, Arabic, Turkish, Hindi, Arithmetic, History, Geography, and Sciences, taught by multiple appointed tutors. Among the most notable was Abdur Rahim Khan-i-Khanan, described in the sources as one of the versatile geniuses of the age. Jahangir's maternal uncle, Bhagwant Das, the Kachhwaha ruler of Amer, reportedly taught warfare tactics.

  By adulthood, Jahangir was fluent in Persian and Hindustani, and held what his memoirs call a "respectable" knowledge of Persianised courtly Chaghatai, the Mughal ancestral tongue.

  At the age of 26, in 1594, Akbar dispatched him alongside Asaf Khan and Abu'l-Fazl ibn Mubarak to suppress a revolt centered on the city of Orchha. Jahangir arrived with a force of 12,000 troops. After fierce fighting and heavy casualties on both sides, the rebel leader Raja Vir Singh Deo Bundela surrendered, handing over 5,000 infantry and 1,000 cavalry and agreeing to enter imperial service. Jahangir ordered the completion of the Jahangir Mahal in Orchha to commemorate the victory. The relationship with Vir Singh would prove durable: Jahangir later appointed him ruler of Orchha, displacing his elder brother Ram Shah, a decision that triggered its own cycle of rebellion, which was not fully suppressed until 1607, when Ram Shah was imprisoned at Gwalior.

• 4. A Son Against His Father

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  In 1599, while Akbar was occupied with his Deccan campaigns, Prince Salim made a startling move: he declared himself emperor at Allahabad, assumed the title "Nur-ud-din Muhammad Jahangir Badshah," began minting coins in his own name, and held a separate court. The challenge to Akbar's sovereignty was open and deliberate.

  Akbar, characteristically, chose reconciliation over force. The rebellion ended without a decisive battle. Over time Salim expressed repentance, and by 1604, father and son were reconciled, through the mediation of nobles including Bir Singh Deo Bundela and Man Singh of Amber. When Akbar died, Jahangir succeeded him on the 3rd of November 1605, eight days after his father's death.

  The throne had barely settled under him before his own eldest son repeated the pattern. In April 1606, Khusrau Mirza left Agra with 350 horsemen under the pretext of visiting Akbar's tomb at Sikandra, then laid siege to Lahore. Jahangir personally relieved the siege, defeated Khusrau at the battle of Bhairowal, and captured him while he attempted to flee across the Chenab river toward Kabul. Jahangir crushed the rebellion in a week. The young aristocrats who had supported Khusrau were tortured and impaled, and made to watch their companions in agony as a warning. Khusrau himself was blinded and imprisoned until 1619. Years later, when Shah Jahan launched his own rebellion in 1622, Khusrau was murdered by his brother to remove a rival claimant to the throne.

• 5. Nur Jahan and the Shared Throne

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  On the 25th of May 1611, Jahangir married Mihr-un-Nissa, the widow of a Persian nobleman named Sher Afgan. The sources describe her as witty, intelligent, and beautiful. She was known first as Nur Mahal, "Light of the Palace," before being elevated to Nur Jahan, "Light of the World." Her abilities, as the source records them, ranged across fashion and jewellery design, perfumery, hunting, and the construction of architectural monuments.

  From that marriage onward, Jahangir left the reins of government in her hands, appointing her family and relatives to high positions. The sources note that she had complete freedom of speech near him without reprimand and could argue with him on the smallest matter. The arrangement provoked displeasure among both his courtiers and foreign observers.

  Nur Jahan's political reach extended into the succession itself. When she married her daughter to Jahangir's youngest son, Shahryar Mirza, his third son Khurram suspected a maneuver to position Shahryar as heir. Khurram launched a rebellion in 1622, using the terrain of the Deccan to his advantage. He also murdered his blinded older brother Khusrau to eliminate a rival. The civil war lasted until October 1625, when Jahangir's general Mahabat Khan, after a series of victories, finally suppressed Khurram's forces.

  After Jahangir's death in 1627, Nur Jahan backed Shahryar for the throne. Her brother, Abu'l-Hassan Asaf Khan, backed Khurram. Asaf Khan installed a puppet ruler and confined Nur Jahan at Shahdara while Khurram traveled to Agra. When Khurram arrived in February 1628, he executed both Shahryar and the puppet ruler and took the regnal name Shah Jahan.

• 6. Art, Nature, and the Jahangirnama

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  Ustad Mansur, one of the court painters Jahangir commissioned, painted a royal falcon delivered from the ruler of Iran in 1619. Jahangir's description of the bird in his autobiography survives: "What can I write of the beauty of this bird's colour? It had black markings, and every feather on its wings, back, and sides was extremely beautiful." He then recorded his command that Mansur paint a portrait of it after it perished. That sequence captures Jahangir's distinctive impulse: observe, write, then preserve through paint.

  In his memoirs, called the Jahangirnama, he recorded not only political events but descriptions of flora and fauna, organized court painters into creating elaborate albums of hundreds of images, sometimes arranged around a theme such as zoology. He had his painter Govardhan travel to Prayagraj to paint sadhus, producing what the source describes as the earliest set of images depicting sadhus in all yogic positions. When he was in Rahimabad and shot a tiger he found particularly beautiful, he had painters on hand to capture its appearance immediately.

  Jahangir was not modest about his connoisseurship. He wrote in his own memoirs that when any painting was brought to him, without being told the artist's name, he could identify the maker on the spot. He went further: if a single portrait contained faces painted by different masters, he could identify which master had painted each face, and even determine who had painted the eyes and eyebrows if a different hand had added them to another artist's original work.

  When the English ambassador Thomas Roe visited the court, Jahangir challenged him to pick the original from among five copies of a European miniature that his painters had replicated. Roe could not. A collection at the British Museum in London holds seventy-four drawings of Indian portraits from Jahangir's reign, including a portrait of the emperor himself, notable for depicting faces with the shoulders as well as the head.

• 7. Justice, Science, and Skepticism

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  The "Chain of Justice" that Jahangir describes in his memoir the Tuzk-e-Jahangiri was a golden chain with golden bells, depicted in contemporary paintings, that any subject could use to appeal directly to the emperor if they had been denied justice at any level. The image captures something real about how Jahangir wished to be seen.

  His twelve orders issued after his accession covered a range of concerns. The fifth forbade the manufacture and sale of rice spirit and intoxicating drugs. The tenth established free hospitals and the appointment of physicians across the cities of his empire.

  His approach to natural inquiry was hands-on and often unexpected. He personally tested whether bitumen could heal broken bones, using a chicken as his specimen, and found it could not. He compared the air quality of Ahmadabad and Mahmudabad by observing the rate of decay in sheep carcasses between the two locations. He estimated the gestation period of elephants through direct study, and he investigated whether the position of the gall bladder inside or outside the liver in lions and wolves corresponded with their courage.

  His memoirs reveal a consistent skeptical reflex. He recorded unusual occurrences with the phrase "this is so strange, it is recorded here," and dismissed claims that defied logic with "it does not accord with reason, and my mind does not accept it." He punished a self-proclaimed guru who displeased him, expelled a yogi for performing what he considered superstitious rituals, and imprisoned a Naqshbandi scholar he believed was trading on false mysticism. He also issued the portrait coinage known as Jahangiri coins and a zodiac series in gold and silver. His successor Shah Jahan ordered all of those coins melted down as forbidden by Islamic law, which accounts for their rarity today.

• 8. Death and Legacy

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  Jahangir's final years were spent trying to recover his health. A lifelong user of opium and wine, he was frequently ill through the 1620s. He traveled between Kashmir and Kabul seeking relief. On his return journey from Kashmir toward Lahore, he died near Bhimber on the 28th of October 1627. His entrails were removed for preservation and buried inside Baghsar Fort near Bhimber in the Subah of Lahore. His body was carried by palanquin to Lahore and interred at Shahdara Bagh, a suburb of the city. Shah Jahan commissioned his tomb, which was inscribed on the tentative list for UNESCO World Heritage Site status in 1993.

  The judgment of his contemporaries was often harsh. Orientalist Henry Beveridge compared him to the Roman emperor Claudius, writing that both were "weak men in their wrong places as rulers" and suggesting that Jahangir would have been better and happier as head of a natural history museum. Sir William Hawkins, who visited the court in 1609, observed that what Jahangir's father had acquired in the Deccan, Jahangir was beginning to lose.

  The loss of Kandahar to the Safavid emperor Abbas the Great in 1622 was the most concrete territorial blow. In 1626, Jahangir was corresponding with the Ottoman Sultan Murad IV, hoping to build an alliance with the Ottomans and the Khanate of Bukhara against the Safavids. He did not live to see whether that ambition could have been realized.