Emperor Jahangir 1

 A WEEK AFTER the death of Akbar, on Thursday, 3rd November 1605,

shortly after sunrise, Salim, thirty-six, ascended the imperial throne in
the Hall of Public Audience in the Agra Fort.
 There was hardly any other ceremony. For the Mughals—indeed, in
Muslim polity in general—enthronement was not a high ritual. The
Mughals especially ruled by their arms, not by the sanctity of rites. They
had therefore no accession ceremonies, no anointing or crowning, no
priestly involvement. There was not even any regalia for the emperor to
assume. The crown that Salim mentions had no particular significance; it
was just a royal ornament. The only Mughal accession requirements
were that the new monarch should formally take his seat on the throne,
have the khutbah read and coins struck in his name.
 AT THIRTY-SIX, SALIM was well past his prime when he became the
emperor, almost an old man by medieval reckoning.
 Though several members of the Mughal royal family, especially women,
had lived to ripe old ages, the average life span of Mughal princes, given
their hazardous lives and self-indulgent lifestyles, was short.
 Salim’s two brothers, Murad and Daniyal, both younger than he, died
when they were twenty-nine and thirty-three; Akbar’s brother
Muhammad Hakim died at thirty-one; Humayun died at forty-eight,
Babur at forty-seven, and Babur’s father at thirty-eight.
 When Babur’s maternal grandfather, Yunus Khan, lived beyond forty
years, it was considered as something of a wonder.
 Salim
 After the death of his several sons at an early age, Akbar sought blessings of Sheikh Salim Chisti, a holy
man who lived at Fatehpur Sikri. The holy man predicted that Akbar would have three sons and they would
not die at a young age.
 In 1569, when Akbar heard the news of his first of the many Hindu wives being pregnant, he sent her to
Sheikh’s dwelling until the birth of the child. With the holy man’s prediction coming true, the boy was
named after him as Salim.
 A child of many prayers, he had a pampered childhood. Akbar was fond of children and doted on Salim,
always lovingly calling him by his nickname, Shaikhu Baba. The ladies of the harem smothered him with
love; Salima Begum, his step-mother, and Hamida Banu Begum, his grandmother, were particularly fond of
him.
 His mother, the Amber princess, was not very much in the picture. There are altogether only a dozen
references to her in Jahangir’s memoirs, and when she died in the eighteenth year of his reign, it merits only
a casual reference by him. “On this day news came from Agra that Her highness Maryam-zamani, by the
decree of God, had died,” he writes; “I trust that Almighty God will envelop her in the ocean of His mercy.”
He did not attend her funeral, though he was nearby, in the outskirts of Fatehpur Sikri.
 About Salim’s childhood little is known. He was raised at
Sikri, where women of the Chishti shaykh’s family were
appointed his wet nurses, creating a relationship that
would be familial in its intimacy, adding ‘a material and
bodily attachment to the spiritual ties’ the emperor had
already established with the Chishti Sufi Order.
 As he grew older, the grandsons of Shaykh Salim would be
his playmates and companions.
 Early childhood
 When Salim was four years, four months and four days old, he was, in conformity to
the custom of the Mughal royal family, ceremonially initiated into the alphabet.
Maulana Mir Kalan Haravi, a venerable scholar, was appointed by Akbar as Salim’s first
tutor.
 The princes were highly literate and broadly educated.
 Abu’l Fazl would write that ‘every boy ought to read books on morals, arithmetic, the
notation particular to arithmetic, agriculture, mensuration (surveying), geometry,
astronomy, physiognomy, household matters, the rules of government, medicine, logic,
tabi‛i (natural or physical sciences), riyazi (quantitative sciences, such as math, music,
astronomy and mechanics) and illahi (theological sciences) and all history’.
 The scholarly achievements of princes were matched by their intense physical training
in horsemanship and use of arms, much of which was learned during the royal hunt and
by early participation in military campaigns.
 Mughal Princes
 From the time of their early childhoods Mughal princes were carefully linked with influential individuals at
court: powerful factions and members of the imperial military and administrative elite.
 Their royal fathers directed the process, carefully positioning their sons to achieve critical alliances, although
at times a prince would poach from his father’s household and vice versa.
 Salim later wrote of individuals he had ‘chosen and requested’ from his father’s service, promoting them within
his personal household.
 One of the most influential relationships for a prince was with his ateke, chosen by the emperor from among
the imperial elite to serve the prince as guardian, advisor, mentor and paternal representative.
 It was hoped that an ateke would retain a core loyalty to the father, although that would prove not always to
be the case. Imperial appointments of this sort confirmed the very close ties of loyalty and patronage that
already bound elite families to the Mughals.
 In 1573, when Akbar led an army to Gujarat, he appointed the Sufi Shaykh Salim’s second son Shaykh Ahmad, as
his son’s ateke.
 In 1577, Prince Salim was paired with Qutbuddin Khan, the brother of Akbar’s own childhood ateke,
Shamsuddin Khan, whose wife had been one of Akbar’s wet-nurses (anaga), a relationship that made her son,
Mirza Aziz, a milk brother (koka) of the emperor and an important notable of the imperial court. Qutbuddin
celebrated his prestigious new assignment with a lavish feast.
 In 1582, when Qutbuddin was sent on campaign, he was replaced by another member of Akbar’s intimate inner
circle and one of the most powerful men in the empire, Abdur Rahim, entitled Khan-i Khanan Lord of Lords, the
son of Bairam Khan, the Persian general who had guided Akbar in the early years of his kingship. Abdur Rahim
had been raised under Akbar’s attention and care – the emperor, his step-father, called him farzand (son).
 Marriages

 While still a member of his father’s household, Salim was married several
times and sometimes within very short span of time.
 His marriages to the daughters of noble loyalists and political allies were
carefully chosen for very much the same reason that other princely
relationships were established: to reinforce dynastic relationships and to
build a strong community of personal and dynastic alliances for the individual
prince.
 Salim’s marital alliances would include the daughters of the rajas of Amber,
Bikaner, Khandesh, Jaisalmer and Marwar, as well as rulers in, Kashmir as well
as affiliated dynastic relations and noble families.
 Each marriage was an opportunity to create layers of protection and support,
both dynastic and personal.
 From an early age the princes were given impressive ranks and titles, positioning them well
above their father’s noblemen.
 Salim was ranked the highest, a very public affirmation that he was the heir presumptive.
 The imperial assignments of the young princes were extravagant, but in fact they were largely
ceremonial and honorific, as in 1576 when Akbar, observing in his son ‘obedience, good
disposition, prudence and endurance’ gave seven-year-old Salim authority over the entire
Mughal army along with the rank of commander of 10,000.
 His brother Murad was assigned the rank of 7,000 and Danyal, 6,000.
 Although even as young children the princes were occasionally assigned a task away from the
royal court, to serve as representatives of the emperor, they were expected to return
immediately after, to pay homage to their father.25
 In 1581, Salim was sent to Ajmer to meet the Mughal women returning from their hajj and to
escort them home, where his father gave over to him the responsibility for arranging marriage
and birthday feasts.
 The assignment publicly displayed Salim’s position as heir apparent, however dull a task it was
for an ambitious royal son
 Salim’s first battle experience, according to the Rajput tradition recorded by
Tod, came quite early, when at the age of seven he was given nominal charge
of the Mewar campaign. Around this time his rank was raised to that of a
commander of 10,000, with an income to match.
 When he was around twelve, he accompanied Akbar on the Kabul campaign,
and was given command of a large detachment.
 Soon after, to initiate him into the administrative processes of the empire,
two important departments (justice and celebrations) were put in his charge,
with Abdur-Rahim, the Khan-i-khanan, as his guide.
 In the years of Salim’s childhood, the royal household of the Mughals was an eclectic community that
included not only Timurid Central Asian Turks and Mongols but also large numbers of Persian emigres, local
caste and tribal leaders, foreign diplomats and of course the Rajput allies and relations of the ruling
family, as well as the first arrivals of European merchants and missionaries.
 There was a constant flow of visitors through the royal court, arriving at the bidding of the king to pay
homage, settle disputes, offer what was often fabulous tribute of celebrated treasure, arrange military
campaigns and hunts and raucously celebrate successes.
 Promotion, power and wealth were controlled at the emperor’s pleasure, but Akbar was notably generous
and egalitarian, his reputation attracting a steady influx of adventurers and artists, intellectuals, poets
and painters, engineers, scholars and scientists from across the world, all seeking employment and the
patronage of a beneficent king.
 Diplomats and other visitors arrived with trains of tribute-bearing horses, camels and elephants. Artists
and poets brought panegyric works to the king and religious scholars came to advise and confer.
 The princes were often present and not only interacted with those who came to the royal court, but
formed personal relationships with them.
 Among these were the Jesuit Missions to the Mughal throne, which first arrived in Sikri in 1580, led by
Father Ridolpho Aquaviva. Father Jerome Xavier (grand-nephew of Francis Xavier), who came to the
Mughal court in 1595, described regular interactions with Prince Salim, who, he claimed, demonstrated
‘great affection’ for the Jesuit mission, serving as their patron at court, arranging permission for the
construction of a church and carrying their concerns directly to the emperor.
 Then inexplicably, for the next eighteen years, from the
age of about thirteen till he broke out in rebellion in 1600
at the age of thirty-one, Salim virtually disappears from
Mughal chronicles, with only a few stray references to
him, most of them towards the very end of the period.
 Throughout his youth no important responsibilities are
recorded to have been assigned to the heir apparent.
 As the princes grew to adulthood, they began to demonstrate a growing
impatience with their positions.
 They were highly trained and ambitious, and increasingly resentful of
the limitations of their roles as servitors of their father’s state.
 The Jesuit Father Monserrate suggested that the relationship between
father and sons may have been abusive and controlling, writing: ‘The
king’s nature was such that, although he loved his children very dearly,
he used to give them orders rather roughly whenever he wanted
anything done; and he sometimes punished them with blows as well as
harsh words’.
 Perhaps Monserrate exaggerated or misunderstood what he had
witnessed, but at the very least, for all the glories of the Akbari court,
by 1590 there were serious tensions in the Mughal household.
 For the increasingly ambitious princes, there could have been little hope of change in the near
future.
 While it was true that their father had already been on the throne for decades, Akbar was still a
young man – he had been crowned at the age of thirteen and was noted for his physical strength
– and all were aware of the possibility that he might remain on the throne for decades more.
 Adding to the tension, the brothers were unable to unite as allies, driven apart as they were by
the rivalry demanded by Mughal traditions of open succession and the constant competition for
liegemen and allies, for promotion and prestige.
 The eldest sons grew combative and restless, surrounded by their personal households, members
of which were increasingly critical of their father, the ruling monarch, and suspicious of the rival
brothers.
 Eventually, the princes were physically separated, stationed in military or governing roles far
from each other. Salim, as the recognized favourite, remained with his father at the imperial
centre until 1599, while Murad was sent to the provinces in 1591 and the youngest prince,
Danyal, assigned to Allahabad in 1597
 Salim had been waiting in the wings for a long time, with growing
impatience, to move to centre stage.
 As the sixteenth century drew to a close, his impatience turned into
despair. He found it an intolerable affront to be thirty-one years old
and yet not be king.
 Akbar at fifty-eight was still in robust health; he had been king for
forty-four years, and it looked as though he would reign for many
more years, and might even outlive Salim.
 Akbar’s sons drank heavily.
 In his memoir, Salim would describe the beginning of his addiction with his first drink of alcohol at the
age of eighteen.
 He drank it and ‘liked the feeling it gave me’.
 Before long, he was consuming such large quantities of alcohol that concerns were expressed about his
health. By 1590, Salim had become known at court for excessive drinking.
 His brothers were also known topers. Like Salim, they may have begun drinking while still in residence at
their father’s court; as they grew older and were stationed further afield, their behaviour grew steadily
more obstreperous, fuelled by the enormous quantities of alcohol they were consuming.
 As a young prince, Murad, one year younger than Salim, had been tutored by the Jesuits residing at his
father’s court. They claimed to see great promise in him, commending his ‘good disposition’ and his
‘great natural genius’.
 In adulthood, however, he quickly fell to pieces. Murad was assigned to Malwa in 1591, at the age of
twenty-one, then to Gujarat and the Deccan. He drank heavily, maintaining a constant level of
disobedience that never quite exploded into open rebellion.
 Murad fought over tactics and strategy with his father’s generals who had been sent to lead the Mughal
war effort in the region, while eluding his father’s efforts at control.
 In 1598, a concerned and frustrated Akbar finally sent Abu’l Fazl to recall the prince to court. Murad
managed to remain a step ahead of his father’s agent, but would die of alcohol poisoning within a year,
at the age of twenty-eight.
 Salim’s rebellion
 Matters came to a head when Akbar set out for the Deccan in September
1599.
 Before he left Agra, he had charged Salim to resume the long neglected
offensive against Mewar, but the prince, reluctant to get bogged down in
what he knew would be a long and frustrating campaign.
 In mid-1600, in open disobedience of his father, if not in rebellion, Salim left
Ajmer and proceeded to Agra.
 There he made a half hearted attempt to seize the treasury, and when that
failed, swerved and headed for Allahabad, avoiding meeting his grandmother,
the venerable Hamida Banu Begum, who was very fond of him and wanted to
divert him from his reckless course.
 On reaching Allahabad, he seized the treasury there and set himself up as a
virtually independent ruler, appointing his own officers and distributing fiefs
among them.
 He also began to raise an army.
 When the startling development was reported to Akbar, his
reaction was low key; he was inclined to treat it as a
family affair rather than as a matter of state, as the
misconduct of a son rather than as a rebellion.
 So, instead of sending a punitive force against Salim, he
sent one of his amirs—Khwaja Muhammad Sharif, a
childhood friend of Salim—to Allahabad to guide the prince
back to obedience.
 Nothing came of it, for Salim induced Sharif to join him as
a minister.
 Still, Akbar forbore. There was something tentative about
the whole affair, in Salim’s challenge as well as in Akbar’s
response.
 Meanwhile, with Ahmadnagar and Asirgarh fallen, Akbar concluded his
southern campaign and returned to Agra in August 1601.
 He then resumed the contact with Salim, to find out what was troubling
him and how his anxieties could be assuaged.
 Unexpectedly, Salim took to the field, advancing towards Agra with a
cavalry force of over 30,000. Ostensibly he was going to pay his respects
to his father, but in the prevailing charged atmosphere anything could
have happened.
 He got as far as Etawah, a mere 100 kilometres from Agra, but Akbar
remained cool—he ordered the prince to disband his army and visit him
only with a small escort, or to return to Allahabad if he did not feel safe
without his army.
 Salim dared not disobey a direct command from Akbar. He returned to
Allahabad.
 Akbar then issued a firman appointing Salim as
the viceroy of Bengal and Orissa, denoting that he
did not consider the prince to be a rebel.
 Salim, however, preferred to stay on in Allahabad,
where he now struck coins in his own name, and
even sent some of them to Akbar—perhaps for his
father to appreciate their artistic quality, or
perhaps to indicate that he now considered
himself an independent sovereign, though he
showed Akbar the doubtful courtesy of calling him
the Great King.
 To work out a plan for that, Akbar recalled Abul Fazl, his
trusted advisor, from the Deccan for consultations.
 But this only deepened the crisis. Salim and Abul Fazl
disliked and distrusted each other.
 “Since his feelings towards me were not honest,” writes
Salim about Abul Fazl, “he both publicly and privately
spoke against me. At this period, when, through strife-
mongering intriguers, the august feelings of my revered
father were entirely embittered against me, it was certain
that if he obtained the honour of waiting on him, it would
be the cause of more confusion, and would preclude me
from the favour of union with him.”
 Salim pre-empted that prospect by having Abul Fazl assassinated by Bir
Singh, the roguish Bundela chief of Orchha, through whose territory Abul
Fazl had to pass on his way to Agra.
 Abul Fazl had been warned of the danger lurking ahead, but scorned to
take any precaution
 He was an easy prey for Bir Singh, who intercepted him in the hill
country south of Gwalior, speared him down, and sent his severed head
to Salim in Allahabad.
 The prince, it is said, had the head “thrown into an unworthy place”. He
was entirely unrepentant about the murder of Abul Fazl, which, in his
view, was an act of imperative political exigency.
 “Although this event was a cause of anger in the mind of the late king,”
he writes in his memoirs.
 Akbar was shattered by the outrage.
 When Abul Fazl’s deputy sombrely presented himself
before the emperor with a blue handkerchief around his
wrist, Akbar immediately knew what it meant—it was the
custom at the Mughal court not to mention death directly
before the emperor, but to signify it with a blue cloth.
 Akbar, who was at that time relaxing with his tumbler
pigeons, “uttered a cry and became insensible,” says
Muhibb Ali.
 Reconciliation
 Though Akbar was deeply hurt by Salim’s involvement in Abul Fazl’s assassination, he still made no
move to chastise him.
 In this predicament, the great ladies of the harem took the initiative to deal with Salim—not to
castigate him, but to affect a reconciliation between father and son.
 Salima Begum, Akbar’s favourite wife, took the task on herself.
 Muhibb Ali wrote in Allahabad, she berated Salim into submission, and brought him back with her to
Agra.
 Hamida Banu Begum took over, and led Salim to her residence.
 Akbar himself went to his mother’s residence to see the prince.
 The reconciliation was complete. Salim’s three-year rebellion was over.
 But when Akbar ordered Salim to proceed against Mewar, the conquest of which was an unfinished
task in Akbar’s calendar, the prince demurred.
 He marched out obediently, but halted at Fatehpur Sikri, and then, on the ground that the forces given
to him were insufficient for the task, requested Akbar to permit him to return to Allahabad.
 Reluctantly, Akbar agreed.
 In 1604 Hamida Banu Begum died.
 The death of his beloved grandmother gave Salim an opportunity to
resolve the conflict with his father without the public humiliation that
military defeat or surrender would have surely brought.
 The prince let it be known that he planned to return to Agra, to join his
family in mourning, arriving with a cluster of courtiers
on 9 November 1604.
 Akbar swallowed his wrath and accepted Salim’s return to court.
 As soon as the public formalities were completed, however, he had
Salim seized and imprisoned – not for the murder of Abu’l Fazl, nor the
prince’s rebellious acts, but in order to force his son, whose
consumption of alcohol remained alarming, to stop drinking.
 After ten days of confinement in the family quarters in the company of
a royal physician, the prince was released. His lands and rank
reinstated, Salim would remain in Agra and his relations with his father,
though strained, resumed.
 Much as his aggression would seem to suggest otherwise, the goal of Salim’s advance
was not to overthrow his father and seize the Mughal throne.
 At the end of the sixteenth century, having ruled since 1556, Akbar was deeply
entrenched, and the armies at his command were vast in number and experienced.
 Salim, after more than a decade of working in and with his father’s armies, was surely
aware that his own chances against the imperial forces were not promising.
 It is much more likely that Salim’s primary interest was in the creation of an
independent appanage within the greater Mughal Empire, an arrangement
based roughly on the model of his Timurid ancestors, which would offer him autonomy
and authority.
 Perhaps recognizing the limitations of Salim’s ambitions, Akbar responded to his son’s
flagrant disrespect with caution and patience, in no hurry to check Salim efforts at
independent rule.
 Salim had long been publicly acknowledged as the heir to the throne and although he
was proving to be defiant and unruly, Murad’s death had narrowed the emperor’s
options.
 Khusraw Factor

 While Akbar’s acceptance of Salim’s return was surely fuelled by the

loss of his other sons, Salim’s decision to give up independent rule in
Allahabad in exchange for life at his father’s court may have been
further encouraged by the growing influence of another, increasingly
serious, competitor for Akbar’s throne: Salim’s eldest son, Khusraw.
 Khusraw had been born in Lahore in 1587 of a Kachhwaha princess,
the daughter of Raja Bhagwant Das. Although still in his teens he had,
for the last few years, become the willing centre of a conspiracy to
promote an alternative succession.
 Khusraw

 Among Khusraw’s staunchest allies was his father-in-law,

Mirza Aziz Koka Khan Azam, milk-brother of the emperor
and among the highest of the elite.
 In addition, the young prince’s former ateke, the great
Rajput general Raja Man Singh, had joined Khan Azam’s
plot to put Khusraw on the throne, though seemingly
inspired by love for Akbar and the empire rather than the
self-interest demonstrated by his co-conspirator.
 With such powerful supporters, the plot gained attention
and adherents.
 Khusraw’s effort to position himself as legitimate successor to Akbar had of course
created sharp tensions with his father.
 There can be no doubt that Salim’s awareness of this powerful faction of detractors at
the imperial centre played a role in his decision to seek a rapprochement with Akbar,
yet with his return to Agra the rivals were both domiciled in the emperor’s household
and the atmosphere of distrust must have been nearly unbearable.
 The increasing tension between father and son was publicly demonstrated at an
elephant fight on the palace grounds, during which Akbar arranged to have Salim and
Khusraw pit their elephants against each other.
 The contest was seen by many of the observers, and perhaps the emperor himself, as a
proxy battle for their competing claims of legitimacy.
 With so much at stake, when Salim’s elephant began to overpower his foe, supporters
of the rivals leapt into the fight to assist their champions and the event disintegrated
into an unruly and embarrassing brawl.
 That evening Akbar fell into a fever, and over the next few weeks his condition
worsened.
 The issue of succession, and the rivalry between his only surviving son and his eldest
grandson, had suddenly become immediate and momentous.
 Fearing conspiracy, neither Khusraw nor Salim felt safe visiting the dying Akbar.
 Yet while Khusraw’s adherents openly agitated for his candidacy, there were many who
were determined to retain a direct lateral succession from father to son.
 With support growing among the empire’s most powerful noblemen, Salim promised
forgiveness to those who had opposed him.
 An increasingly confident Salim made his way at last to Akbar’s bedside, where his
father formally invested him with the robes of office, shortly before his death,
on 27 October 1605.
 Salim took the throne of the Mughal Empire at the (solar) age of thirty-six,
on 3 November 1605, assuming for himself the regnal name of Jahangir, He who Seizes
the World.