Tag Archives: Mughal Empress Nur Jahan

‘Nur Jahan is the history of India’: Historian Ruby Lal on her new book

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INDIA :

In an interview with Indianexpress.com, Lal spoke about the incredible achievements of Nur Jahan. Remnants of imperial orders issued by her, coins minted in her name, paintings that paid ode to her sovereignty and bravery are all evidence of the enormously powerful figure she was.

Left- Cover of the book ‘Empress: The astonishing reign of Nur Jahan’ (wwnorton.com) Right- Historian Ruby Lal (personal website of Ruby Lal)
Left- Cover of the book ‘Empress: The astonishing reign of Nur Jahan’ (wwnorton.com) Right- Historian Ruby Lal (personal website of Ruby Lal)

For four centuries, from when she was at the centre of one of the largest empires of the world, Nur Jahan, the twentieth and supposedly the most loved wife of Mughal emperor Jahangir, has been a household name in the Subcontinent. Though she was not officially the ruler of Mughal India, Nur Jahan has been noted by historians to be the real power behind the throne. A politically astute and charismatic figure, she ruled Mughal India as a co-sovereign of Jahangir and is known to have been more decisive and influential than he ever was. Historian Ruby Lal in her latest book, ‘Empress: The astonishing reign of Nur Jahan’, dives deep into the intriguing world of the only woman to have helmed the Mughal empire. Tracing her life in great detail, Lal attempts to rip apart narratives of romance and exoticism that surround the image of Nur Jahan and focus upon what made a Muslim woman living in seventeenth-century India, one of the most authoritarian figures in Indian history.

In an interview with Indianexpress.com, Lal spoke about the incredible achievements of Nur Jahan. “People say she always sat right next to Jehangir in the court and that if some cases or decisions came up and if she agreed with him, she would pat him on the back and he would say yes to that decision,” says Lal who is Professor of South Asian Studies at Emory University in Atlanta. Remnants of imperial orders issued by her, coins minted in her name, paintings that paid ode to her sovereignty and bravery are all evidence of the enormously powerful figure she was. Charting the life history of Nur Jahan, and placing her in the background of the pluralistic cultural space that Mughal India was, Lal puts together an evocative biographical account of the queen.

Here are excerpts from the interview with Lal.

Popular perception of Nur Jahan is somehow constricted to the romantic relationship she shared with Jahangir. Why is that the case?

There is a very long history of the erasure of Nur Jahan’s power that I chart in the book. As she traveled through the length and breadth of the country with Jahangir – issuing imperial orders, hunting a killer tiger near Mathura, discussing the expansion of the empire- she rose to being the co-sovereign. This does not mean that in her own time people did not raise eyebrows. In 1622, her stepson and Jahangir’s son Shah Jahan had risen in revolt. The catalyst for his revolt was the moment when Nur Jahan arranged a match for her daughter from her first marriage, Ladli; she chose the youngest prince, Shahriyar for her. About that time, Shah Jahan went into rebellion against Jahangir. And its is very clear that he felt threatened; he knew about the power of Nur Jahan. In fact, Shah Jahan and Nur Jahan had been closely aligned. The year 1622 is when certain chroniclers begin to write about the chaos that Nur Jahan Begum had raked up between the father and son.

“There is a very long history of the erasure of Nur Jahan’s power that I chart in the book,” says Ruby Lal. (Wikimedia Commons)
“There is a very long history of the erasure of Nur Jahan’s power that I chart in the book,” says Ruby Lal. (Wikimedia Commons)

So the early criticism appears to begin around this time. The other major moment of critique of Nur’s power was when they were on their way to Kashmir and Mahabat Khan (who went on to capture Jahangir later in 1626) goes on the journey with them to a certain distance and according to one of the chroniclers he says to Jahangir that a man who was governed by a woman is likely to suffer from unforseen results. In 1626, she, completely visible, goes to save Jahangir (sitting upon an elephant on a roaring river), commanding all men including her brother Asaf Khan. She stratergises and eventually saves the emperor. After this, we begin to come across a word called Fitna, in the records.

Fitna is a very loaded term in Islamic history. It is used for the first time during the Shia-Sunni split for civil strife. It was also used against Ayesha, Prophet Muhammad’s favourite wife, when she went on a battle against Ali who was eventually the leader of the Shias. Over time, the word came to be used against women’s visibility, their sexuality and so on. Following 1626, this is one word that is used repeatedly against nur – that is to say that her power produced chaos.

Later, in the Shahjahanama, we find that at one point that the chronicler lists her power as a “problem”: the Shahjahanama reverts to the male inheritance of power and completely undoes her co-sovereignty with Jahangir.

Then there were also visitors to India like Thomas Roe, the ambassador of James I of England who follows Nur and Jahangir through the camps in Gujarat and Malwa. He calls her the Goddess of heathen impiety.

In the 19th century orientalist renditions of the romance of Nur and Jahangir become very important in the histories of the time; later, the colonial renditions highlight and forward such stories. Nur Jahan becomes classic oriental queen. Thus, a long-standing history of the erasure of the power of an astonishing emperess. It is certain that the erasure of Nur’s power travels into modern times and we only hear about her romance with Jahangir, not about her work as co-sovereign of the empire.

Jahangir is often compared with Akbar and criticised for being an uncompetitive, flamboyant king, who spent much of his time in drinking and merrymaking. But the fact that it was during the reign of Jahangir that a woman became so powerful, what does it say about his attitude towards women?

You are right, this is how Jahangir has come to be imagined. There are a range of scholars who for sometime now have been rethinking Jahangir’s reign, his philosophical and artistic engagements. My book foregrounds the ways in which Jahangir seeks to go differently from how Akbar articulated his sovereignty. If you look at the reigns of Babur and Humayun, there was no stone harem: the kings were nomadic and forever on the move. During Akbar the Great, for the first time in Mughal history, the imperial harem is built in stone in Fatehpur Sikhri. For the first time in the Ain-e-Akbari, women are declared as ‘pardeh-giyan’ which means “the veiled ones.”

“My book foregrounds the ways in which Jahangir seeks to go differently from how Akbar articulated his sovereignty,” says Ruby Lal. (Wikimedia Commons)
“My book foregrounds the ways in which Jahangir seeks to go differently from how Akbar articulated his sovereignty,” says Ruby Lal. (Wikimedia Commons)

But what Jahangir does is that he goes back to the ethics of Babur. He was constantly wandering, he was constantly moving. The ethics of a peripatetic life and movement, which contributed to the co-sovereignty of Nur Jahan. Nur Jahan is the biggest example of Jahangir’s attitude towards women. An 18th-century chronicler that advances the Jahangirnama to the end of Jahangir’s death had suggested that the emperor had once claimed that he had given the sovereignty to Nur Jahan Begum and that he was quite content with his wine and meat. It’s an allegorical statement: and one indicates his admiration of Nur, something that he chronicles in his own memoir

Would Nur Jahan be this powerful had she not been married to Jahangir or had she not been part of the Mughal empire?

I think, Nur Jahan, looking at her whole life history and context, would have expressed her power differently in other circumstances. Her life history shows her dynamism and boldness. Of course, as I have been saying, and detail in the book that the plural landscape of Hindustan was very important- in that that it fostered experimentation and all sorts of ways of being (alongside war other challenges of co-existence of multi-confessional identities). We should also remember that she comes from an important Persian family background, deeply invested in poetry, arts, calligraphy. Then her own initiative must be highlighted: there were other women in the harem – and indeed Nur walks in the tracks of these women’s power – but no one becomes a co-sovereign. That speaks something about her boldness, her endeavours and of course her ambition.

Islamic societies are often noted to be more regressive compared to others in their treatment of women. In your book do you try to subvert this notion?

I Am trying to suggest that Nur Jahan is the history of India. She was a Shia married to a Sunni Muslim who was also half Hindu Rajput. Further, Nur Jahan is the only woman ruler among the great Mughals of India (there are technical signs of being a sovereign and informal signs, both of which I detail in the book). That is the history of India. As far as Islam is concerned, people should know that there were incredible and powerful women in Islamic history all the way through. We have Ayesha, Raziya, we have Nur Jahan Begum, we have any number of powerful women. It is also the multicultural world. In the modern world, we tend to think in terms of fixed identities. People in early modern times were much more open. Jahangir was engaging with Siddichandra, a Jain monk. Nur Jahan used to tease him about the pleasures of the flesh.  What does this tell you? It tells you about an open engagement. It tells you about how experimental Islam is, how mixed Islam is, how vibrant Muslim women are and how Islam is so deeply attached to India.

‘Empress: The astonishing reign of Nur Jahan’ has been published by W.W.Norton in the United States earlier this month and will be published by Penguin Books in India soon.
source: http://www.indianexpress.com / The Indian Express / Home> Research / by Anrija Roychowdhury, New Delhi / July 11th, 2018

Nur Jahan: The Mughal queen who wielded the musket

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NEW DELHI , INDIA  :

Ruby Lal’s book gives a new life to Nur Jahanas Jahangir’s co-sovereign, a position never held by any Mughal woman

EmpressNurJahan01MPOs31aug2018

While there may be more than a grain of truth in Jahangir’s devotion to his beloved spouse (it has been the subject of several movies), Nur Jahan’s political acumen and gallantry make her phenomenal career trajectory seem inevitable.

The polemical potential of Ruby Lal’s new book is apparent from its title, even before we get to the text proper. Empress: The Astonishing Reign Of Nur Jahan takes the spotlight away from Jahangir, one of the Great Mughals, to shine it on his 20th and favourite wife, who, as Lal proposes, not only scaled untold heights during his reign but also announced herself to be his “co-sovereign”.

“Scholars have for some time acknowledged her power, almost in bullet points, but never in any concrete way thought through it,” says Lal, who teaches at Emory University in the US, on email. “There is still the tendency in scholarly and other writings to lock Nur’s power in a romantic story with Jahangir: in fact, that romance becomes the explanation for her rise.”

While there may be more than a grain of truth in Jahangir’s devotion to his beloved spouse (it has been the subject of several movies), Nur Jahan’s political acumen and gallantry make her phenomenal career trajectory seem inevitable. Lal begins, for instance, with a spectacular scene of a hunt, in which a musket-bearing Nur Jahan kills a man-eating tiger in Mathura, where the royal cavalcade made a stop on its way to the Himalayan foothills in the autumn of 1619. Nur, 42 at the time, had been married to Jahangir, her second husband, since 1611. It was a fate her parents, Ghiyas Beg and Asmat Begum, could never have foreseen when their daughter, Mihr un-Nisa, was born in 1577 by the roadside outside Kandahar, as they fled their home in Herat.

Hounded out of Persia due to religious persecution, Beg sought Akbar’s patronage in the late 16th century, and it was generously provided. Eventually decorated as I’timad ud-Daula, or the Pillar of the State, by his regal son-in-law, Beg went on to assume the highest rank in Jahangir’s service. His family did well by the Mughal rulers too. Beg’s son, Asaf Khan, would turn out to be the future emperor Shah Jahan’s father-in-law. But it was Beg’s daughter, Mihr un-Nisa, honoured by her royal husband as Nur Jahan, or the Light of the World, who assured him a place in history.

EmpressNurJahan02MPOs31aug2018

If Nur was exemplary for being the first woman in the subcontinent to exercise direct executive privilege, she was doubly impressive for achieving such a status as a rank outsider. “Remember, she was not a Mughal by bloodline,” says Lal, “not like Queen Elizabeth I (of England) or Queen Christina (of Sweden), who were from royal families.” Nur’s elevation, in the context of her times, was certainly unprecedented, though women in the Mughal harem, especially the elders, often did act as confidantes, advisers and counsellors to the emperor.

Gulbadan Banu Begum, Babar’s daughter and Akbar’s aunt, and Hamideh Begum, Akbar’s mother, were matriarchs to reckon with. Nur’s mother, a lady of refinement and education, was credited with the discovery of an itar (perfume) while boiling petals to make rosewater. But no one went as far as Nur, who made appearances on the imperial balcony, issued firmans (orders) and had coins embossed with her own image—all of which were kingly prerogatives. A skilled marksman, Nur would also lead an army later in life in a failed attempt to rescue Jahangir when he was held hostage by one of his aggrieved officials.

Although the Mughal harem has claimed the attention of scholars, Ira Mukhoty’s recent feminist history, Daughters Of The Sun: Empresses, Queens And Begums Of The Mughal Empire, breathed fresh life into it, making it accessible and emotionally absorbing to the common reader. Lal’s book, replete with research but also narrated with a sense of drama befitting a novel, complements it beautifully.

With the paucity of first-person testimonies from the women of the era, it is not surprising that much of the narrative of Empress is pieced together from observations left behind by Nur Jahan’s contemporaries in the footnotes and interstices of archival documents. “The records are plenty and rich,” says Lal, emphatically, “it’s how you approach the courtly documents, paintings, poetry, coins, architecture, and even legends.”

The British diplomat Thomas Roe, for instance, who visited Jahangir’s court to woo him for exclusive trading rights, was piqued by Nur’s bossiness. But her charisma, intelligence and stately demeanour didn’t escape him. “Noormahel fulfils the observation that in all actions of consequence in Court, a woman is not only always an ingredient, but commonly a principal drug of most virtue,” he noted, “and she shows that they are not incapable of conducting business, nor her self void of wit and subtlety.” It’s not hard to imagine why tales were spun around Jahangir’s early infatuation with Nur, since the days he was Prince Salim. Some chroniclers even claim that young Mihr was married off to a fellow Persian nobleman, Ali Quli, to keep her away from the smitten crown prince.

Yet it would be patently unfair to reduce Nur’s influence to her “womanly wiles”. As an astute observer of court politics, she played her hand shrewdly. Initially, she forged an alliance with the ambitious Prince Khurram (later Shah Jahan), but then Nur got her only daughter, Ladli Begum (by her first husband), married to the younger Prince Shahryar, hoping to push the latter for the throne. With Jahangir’s health worsening due to his addiction to alcohol and opium and civil wars breaking out between factions of the royal family, Nur became increasingly anxious about her hold over the palace. The last straw was the ascension of Shah Jahan to the throne after Jahangir’s death when he stripped Nur of her privileges. She was packed off to live on a modest pension away from the court. In exile, too, she conducted herself with the dignity and grace suited to her station as a noblewoman. Known for her philanthropic work for the poor, she also built a tomb for her parents in Agra that would become the model for the Taj Mahal.

Nur Jahan was neither a Machiavellian dissenter nor a feminist rebel, as Lal writes tellingly. She seemed to have accepted the “emphatically patriarchal” norms of her time, the rules of the feudal, aristocratic world she spent her life in. “I do not believe feminist history should be one in which the woman is always a winner,” says Lal. “It is (rather) what she does, and how effectively she does it, despite all odds. Vulnerability is feminist history.”

source: http://www.livemint.com / Live Mint / Home> Lounge> Leisure / by Somak Ghoshal / August 31st, 2018

Chikankari Embroidery

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Lucknow ,  UTTAR PRADESH :

Rehana Begum, a master of Chikankari work. Photo: R. Shivaji Rao | Photo Credit: R. Shivaji Rao
Rehana Begum, a master of Chikankari work. Photo: R. Shivaji Rao | Photo Credit: R. Shivaji Rao

A pantheon of craftsmen and their art are on display at Kaivalam, under way in Chennai. Rashmi R.D. introduces us to some Living Legends of Indian crafts. Meet Rehana Begum

“I learned from my father Shree Hasan Mirza, who received a national award in 1969 for his craftsmanship,” says fifty eight year old Rehana Begum.

Hailing from a long line of chikankari exponents, Rehana Begum began her work with this form of embroidery at the age of thirteen.

Chikankari dates back two centuries. The word chikan is thought to be derived from a Persian word; one theory is that the form travelled to India when its artisans migrated from Persia in search of better patronage. I t is believed that these artisans found a patroness in Mughal Empress Noor Jahan, wife of Emperor Jehangir, and that she did a lot to promote and popularize this craft form.

Rehana Begum works from her home in Thakur Ganj, Napier Road, Lucknow. “We are Lucknowi, born and bred.” Her whole family is involved with making Chikankari embroidery. They work as a group in one room which has become the embroidery room of the house.

“When I was younger we embroidered kurtas, topis, angarkhas jaise nawab log pehn te te (just like the nawabs used to wear). Now we do saris, suits (salwar kameez), ladies tops, whatever the new styles of dressing are in fashion now we embroider.”

Chikankari, she says, was traditionally done only on pure, un-dyed white shazaada cotton or Dhaka ki mulmul, both sourced from Dhaka, Bangladesh. The katcha daagha, the thread used for the embroidery, was also white and procured from Calcutta or Dhaka. Rehana Begum defines Chinkankari in her terms as ‘white on white’ embroidery.

“The first thing I made all by myself was a table cover. It took me one and half years to complete.”

And how long does it take to embroider a sari? “About two years. We usually work six to eight hours a day. My eyes aren’t what they used to be, so now I only do about two hours of embroidery work a day. I spend the rest of the time supervising the work of my apprentices and teaching them the various stitches.”

Rehana Begum takes her inspiration for her embroidery motifs from Mughal architecture. The delicate marble jaali (trellis) pattern of Mughal-style windows and parapet walls is transposed onto the fabric as a fine gossamer trellis of thread work. She also replicates the inlay patterns from Mughal monuments on the fabric she embroiders.

Chikankari has six basic stitches and over thirty-five other traditional stitches used in various combinations based on what the pattern to be embroidered requires. The names of some of these stitches are phanda, chana patti, ghaas patti, bijli, jaali, tepchi, bakhiya, hool, zanzeera, rahet, banaarsi, kharau, keel kangan, bubul and hath kadi. Depending on the type of garment and the pattern to be embroidered the entire process happens in a series of stages over a period of months or even years. Also, the embroidery itself is divided among the artisans, with pairs or groups of three or more specializing in one particular stitch. When one group completes their particular stitch for a garment, it is passed on to the next group to add their specialty stitch. One group may also have mastery of two or more stitches.

The pattern to be embroidered is stamped onto the fabric by hand with a wooden pattern block that has been coated with neel (indigo). The fabric now has the outlines of the designs that will be embroidered into the delicate ‘shadow’ embroidery motifs that are the defining feature of Chikankari.

“I would like to open a shop of my own someday,” Rehana Begum says hopefully. “What we kaarigars (artisans) get at the end of the day, after the shops and agents have taken their percentage—it isn’t much. I’d like to be able to meet directly with people who want to buy our work. Maybe we should have something like a kaarigar market…”

She and her family do travel extensively to participate in national textile fairs and handicraft exhibitions, but though sales are good, the travel costs add up. The price of raw materials has increased too, with good quality cotton and thread getting steadily more expensive.

“I love what I do,” she says emphatically. “There’s no way I could have done this for so long if I didn’t. I get a lot of satisfaction when I finish a piece. I have a large sample swatch that I take with me to exhibitions or when I get called to travel abroad. It took me three years to embroider. When I show it to people they are always amazed by the work. I feel very happy when I see their reactions.”

Rehana Begum has been invited to show case her work in Hamburg (Germany), Ireland, Cuba, Dubai and Muscat (Oman).

In 1976, she was given a State Award from the Uttar Pradesh government, and her work has been on display in the Crafts Museum of Uttar Pradesh. In 2003 she received the Shilp Guru award for her contribution to Chikankari.

“I am excited about coming to Chennai in October. I haven’t been to that city in a long time. I see it as an opportunity to show the international artisans who will be attending this event that Hindustan has great craft talent. They will be able to see what a wealth of kaarigars we have. Jo bhi kaarigar waha maujood honge, hum sab milkar hamare desh ka naam roshan karenge. (All of the artisans who gather for this event, together we will make the name of our country shine).”

source: http://www.thehindu.com / The Hindu / Home> Indian Crafts> Crafts / by Rashmi M.D. / Chennai – October 10th, 2012