Jahangir's Josephine

Arjumand Banu was Mumtaz Mahal, not Nur Jahan. The most famous empress of the Mughal empire was born Mehrunissa in Kandahar, the child of fleeing Persians who nearly abandoned her en route. She was the eighteenth wife of Jahangir, a widow with a small daughter when the emperor took her as his last consort in 1611, apparently to legitimise a youthful passion. But Mehrunissa never could give him a child, plotting desperately instead to marry off her daughter Ladli Begum to one of the emperor's sons. However, that is only one small facet of Nur Jahan's rise to power. In Jahangir's 22-year-long reign, she exerted an influence so profound—and assisted in embroidering a myth so pervasive—that it has remained with every successive generation down to Bollywood stereotypes. But the truth, if it can ever be told, is far more intricate and colourful than any fiction about her.

Nur Jahan has some of the attributes of an Indian Josephine to Jahangir's Napoleon—a foreigner, an older woman, attractive, intelligent and so adept in negotiating the treacherous and blood-soaked intrigues of a Mughal court that as the emperor began his decline in the old familiar grip of dipsomania (both his brothers had died early of drink), she took complete charge as his proxy. The rise of "Nur Jahan's junta", as it came to be known, was observed in detail by Sir Thomas Roe, the British monarch's envoy to Jahangir's court: "His (Jahangir's) course is directed by a woman....that all justice or care of anything or public affairs either sleeps or depends on her, who is more unaccessible than any goddess, a mystery of heathen impiety."

What this goddess looked like we cannot know for sure, for it is unlikely that other than her husband or a few close male relatives any man, and certainly no lowly artist, ever clapped his eyes on her. What miniatures that do exist are idealised portraits, bound by artistic convention and based on hearsay. The Empress left virtually no trace in her own words or speech. Yet her influence is felt everywhere—in her seals on imperial farmans, in the buildings and gardens she created, in the negotiation of trade treaties, in the manipulation of admiring or hostile courtiers, in everything, in fact, from the fashions to the administration of that glittering and bloodthirsty age. It is precisely the tangible yet elusive nature of her remains that make the search for Nur Jahan so exciting—a thriller about a thriller.

But this is not throwaway light reading, it is lofty academic investigation, a shade too high-minded perhaps. What Ellison Banks Findly, an American professor armed with degrees from Wellesley, Columbia and Yale, has done is to collate hundreds of sources—official hagiographies, Persian chronicles, European travellers' tales and later studies, then compare the evidence to the strange twists and turns of Nur Jahan's life. The quest often throws up more questions than answers. Did Salim fall in love with Mehrunissa before or after her marriage to Sher Afghan? Did he abet the killing of Sher Afghan in distant Burdwan? What exactly was the nature of her relationship with her dreaded stepson Khurram, later Shah Jahan, and how did she negotiate a settlement with him to eke out her last years in Lahore?

More than a hundred pages of references and notes can make Prof Findly's suppositions, digressions and repetitions a burden for the non-specialist reader; her prose drags on like a shop-soiled tutorial. But she cannot rob Nur Jahan of her allure. This is a proper study of power and one of the best biographies of a Mughal to come out in years. It's about time that oup came out with more such paperbacks. And what a pity that younger Indian historians aren't up to scratch with like subjects.