Book review: Ebba Koch,ed.,in collaboration with Ali Anooshahr,The Mughal Empire from Jahangir to Shah Jahan: Art,Architecture,Politics,Law and Literature

Studies of the Mughal Empire tend to focus either on the period of Emperor Akbar (r. 1556–1605), its presumed ‘golden age’, or on the period of ‘decline’ during and after Emperor Aurangzeb (r. 1658–1707). Ebba Koch’s The Mughal Empire from Jahangir to Shah Jahan offers a useful critique of this tendency by bringing together a multidisciplinary set of scholars working on the cultural histories of the seventeenth century’s first half across the reigns of Jahangir (r. 1605–27) and Shah Jahan (r. 1628–58). In the introduction, Koch notes that many texts from this period remain untranslated or in manuscript, reflecting on her long association with renowned late historian-linguist, Dr Syed Muhammad Yunus Jafari, one of few people left in Delhi after Independence, who read and translated Persian for foreign scholars and produced editions of key texts from Shah Jahan’s period (pp. 11–12, 16–17).

With contributions from 14 scholars, the volume is divided into 5 parts. The essays are organised thematically around politics of succession, court culture, and art and architecture, with several authors combining methods from history, literary studies, art history and the study of architecture.

Part One, ‘From Jahangir to Shah Jahan’, includes essays by Corinne Lefèvre, Anna Kollatz, Ali Anooshahr, Munis D. Faruqui, and Mehreen Chida-Razvi and unpacks the fraught period of transition from Jahangir to Shah Jahan, turning to how power was represented and legitimised in texts, painting and architectural sites. Lefèvre shows a common attachment to Akbar’s legacy and striking continuities through what she calls Shah Jahan’s ‘hidden indebtedness’ to his father, Jahangir (p. 22). The arguments in Lefèvre’s opening contribution to this volume complement those of her book now available in English, Consolidating Empire: Power and Elites in Jahangir’s India (1605–1627). Anna Kollatz investigates strategies of narration in historian and translator ‘Abd al-Sattar b. Qasim Lahauri Majālis-i Jahāngīrī’ (ca. 1609–11), a well-known malfūzāt (compilation of public assemblies), opening up the possibility of reading such Sufi literary genres alongside and against court chronicles, which are carefully considered in the next two essays by Anooshahr and Faruqui, where both authors analyse the multiple motivations that underlay conflicting narrations of political rebellions on the eve of Shah Jahan’s ascension to the throne and immediately afterwards. Chida-Razvi examines the split patronage of Jahangir’s tomb in Lahore, reading its imperfections such as the modest construction budget, layout and orientation as a window into understanding the relationship between Emperor Jahangir and Nur Jahan after the former’s death. The essays in Part One demonstrate the distinctiveness of the seventeenth century’s first half, a period of structural continuity despite polemics of discontinuity between the reign of Jahangir and Shah Jahan.

Part Two, ‘At the Court of Shah Jahan’, consists of essays by Harit Joshi, Stephan Popp and Roman Siebertz, each with very different ways of reading court etiquette and protocol. Harit Joshi analyses norms of etiquette for different groups of people as represented in court chronicles, emphasising the role of ceremony in enhancing imperial prestige. Rather than just recounting selected chronicle narrations, Popp detects overarching thematic patterns and creates a typology of gift-giving to unveil larger changes between the two emperors in imperial ideology towards courtly elites. Such eclectic approaches for reading chronicles are among the most useful lessons for graduate students in the volume. The third essay, by Roman Siebertz, takes up Koch’s call in the introduction to address the gap in studies of trade and Shah Jahan’s expansive role in the Indian Ocean.

To this end, Siebertz presents two files, VOC 1168 and VOC 1162, from the Overgekomen Brieven en Papieren (Incoming Letters and Papers), which give a day-to-day account of VOC merchant Joan Tack’s dealings, ca. 1648, with the grand wazīr, Sa’d Allah Khan (d. 1656) and Haqiqat Khan, an intercessor of the VOC, who previously held the office of the bakshi (paymaster) and waqā‘i navīs (intelligencer) in Kabul. While this reviewer found Siebertz’ reading of these two files fascinating, two disagreements may be generative here. The first concerns how we read the Persian/Urdu overlay embedded within this and thousands of other such Dutch and Portuguese archival documents. What do these acts of translation tell us about the everyday exchanges between polyvocal scribes that shaped the constitution of these materials? Despite illuminating the political context of the two files, Siebertz eventually resorts to an old trope of hapless Europeans at the mercy of the Mughal state’s patrimonial character, where most actions and decisions stemmed from the personal networks and whims of individual officers, a paradigm that has for centuries explained away state bureaucracies across the Islamic world. Siebertz’ essay would have benefited from connecting VOC representations of Mughal officeholders, for instance, with Farhat Hasan’s work on the office of the hakim/mutasaddi of Surat and the procedural norms that defined the relationship of maritime provinces like Gujarat with Delhi. The grand wazīr, Sa’d Allah Khan, may be understood then as yet another beleaguered Mughal official simply adhering to the complex rules and administrative norms for document drafting, rather than someone particularly opposed to the VOC, who constituted one among many headaches in the Mughal chancery.

Part Three, ‘Poetry and Court Rhetoric’, includes essays by Sunil Sharma and Chander Shekhar that cover literature in Shah Jahan’s court and its utility for writing social and literary histories. Through the poet laureate Kalim Kashani’s life and work and tracing the motifs and topographical themes in Persian masnavi, Sharma marks a shift in the social profile of Mughal literati from ‘Iranians’ in the first half of Shah Jahan’s reign to Persianate Indians, both Hindus and Muslims, in its second half. Chander Shekhar covers the practice of dībācha-nigārī or the preface to different kinds of literary and historical works, where authors presented the reasons for undertaking the composition, named their patrons and acknowledged their shortcomings. The article also includes an appendix with transcribed examples of selected dibāche, showing the potential of comparing authorial confessions for themes such as tāza-gū’ī (fresh speak) poetry, recently at the centre of scholarly debates about poetic competition across the Persianate world.

Part Four, ‘Architecture, Legal Practice, Ornament and Painting’, consists of essays by Ebba Koch, Susan Stronge and the late Jerry P. Losty that bring the question of materiality to the volume’s forefront. All three authors deal with a daunting set of historical materials that do not necessarily ‘speak’ in the same way that textual sources like chronicles and court poetry do. It opens with Koch’s intriguing chapter on Mughal legal norms on escheat, the practice of the state taking over the houses and gardens of deceased Mughal elites, a common practice that the author claims goes against prescriptions in Islamic inheritance laws. Koch’s analysis of both textual and material evidence may have come into sharper focus had she taken into account the important distinction between ownership versus possession, a distinction that legal historians often make when examining property across different pre-modern contexts. Addressing this binary and showing the application of Hanafi law in everyday life, Naveen Kanalu Ramamurthy has unearthed hundreds of legal texts in Arabic that regulated relations of possession versus ownership in the context of the state ownership of land in Mughal India. Indeed, as he argues, the Mughals adhered to the legal opinions of their madhhab on land tenure and urban properties. Inheritance laws did not apply in the case of escheat as these lands were, like agrarian tracts, state property. (Naveen Kanalu Ramamurthy, Mirrors and Masks of Sovereignty: Imperial Governance in the Mughal World of Legal Normativism, c. 1650s–1720s, PhD dissertation, UCLA, 2021).

Susan Stronge’s chapter examines the stylistic and formal clues of square and rectangle-shaped cuerda seca tile revetments on the gateway to the tomb of Madani (d. 1445) in Srinagar. Stronge links these to small caches of tile collections in museums and monuments, dating the gateway’s construction to 1640 under Shah Jahan, and shows the influence of Safavid architectural decoration. In a similar spirit of sleuthing and connecting non-textual materials, J.P. Losty examines the Dara Shukuh Album (in the British Library), studying its calligraphy and flower decoration, affirming his previous dating of the album to 1630–33. By comparing materiality across multiple sites of production, Stronge and Losty point to the circulation of technique and talent across political divides and unsettle narratives written from the vantage point of Delhi and the northern Indian plains, helping readers follow the movement of artistic innovation from Kashmir to the Deccan.

The ‘Epilogue’ by Robert D. McChesney turns to Shah Jahan’s enduring legacy and afterlife in the kingship practices of the founder of the Afghan state, Ahmad Khan of the Saduza’i clan. He examines how two Afghan amirs added buildings to the Mughal Garden, Bagh-i Nimla, located between Kabul and Jalalabad, and resuscitated the imperial weighing ceremony in attempts to reproduce Mughal symbols of royal power.

Given the nature of surviving archives, Mughal sovereigns usually loom large in the historiography regardless of the period being discussed. The collective effort in Koch and Anooshahr’s volume makes an enduring contribution to the field by going beyond the figure of the ruler to a wider range of social actors. Such an interdisciplinary endeavour would have been unthinkable only a decade ago when the study of the Mughal world was much more strictly defined between political and economic history on one hand and literature and art on the other. The volume enriches the field by presenting new ways of reading existing archives and marking new directions in Mughal studies, including the empire’s early maritime bureaucracy, the social history of law, and the study of comparative religion, art and literature in a period usually dismissed as one when nothing really happened, as everyone was bracing for a decline in the eighteenth century.