Jahangir had broadened his vision of sovereignty to include Nur Jahan as co-ruler.

According to Ruby Lal, perhaps he expected this arrangement to continue even after his
death, with Shah Jahan ruling the Mughal Empire and Nur serving as his wise adviser.
This would be as per the Mughal tradition of senior women of haram had served as
counselors and guides to the emperor and Nur was far more politically experienced than any
of those women had been. However, with Shehryar’s marriage to Ladli, Shah Jahan knew
that Nur Jahan would support his imperial ambitions and through him continue to
maintain some sovereign power after Jahangir’s death. Thus, the rift between the two became
quite evident and have been noted by contemporary courtiers. Bhakkari noted bluntly the
differences between Nur and Shah Jahan formed not long after Ladli’s marriage when
Nur Jahan “gave up (this feeling of) affection,” and began promoting the cause of
Shahryar. During his rebellion, Shah Jahan publicly accused Nur of being power hungry and
condemned Jahangir for allowing a woman to exercise such authority.

[Some members of the court felt that the imminent battle over Kandahar, the insurrection of
Shah Jahan, and the subsequent re arrangement of alliances were all Nur’s fault—and that she
was regularly overriding the emperor’s orders. ]

Farid Bhakkari, who served the Mughal court during Jahangir’s reign (and after) in various
financial and military capacities.4 Bhakkari was the author of a noted biographical dictionary
of nobles, scholars, and other influential Mughals, declared that the current conflicts
(imminent battle over Kandahar, the insurrection of Shah Jahan, and the subsequent
rearrangement of alliances were all Nur’s fault– and that she was regularly overriding the
emperor’s orders.) were due to the “mischief-making of Nur Jahan.” Bhakkari might praise
Nur for her political skills, artistry, and generosity—but he still believed a woman
should rise only so far.

[Bhakkari’s work, the Dhakhiratul Khawanin, completed in 1650, is a rare compilation of

non-official facts]

Shah Jahan’s vision of sovereignty different from Jahangir. Long before he became emperor,
Shah Jahan was obsessed with his “unique place in history.” While Jahangir had
preferred to write his own straightforward memoir, Shah Jahan was determined to have
his royal activities recorded in many volumes by chroniclers writing in the florid and
flattering literary style of Abul-Fazl, the author of the Akbarnama. These several volumes,
known collectively as the Shah Jahan Nama, were meant not only to highlight Shah Jahan’s
specialness, but also, in a post-Nur world, to reassert the importance of the male line of
descent among the Mughals. In the Shah Jahan nama he claimed to be the second Timur.
According to Ruby Lal, there certainly would be no female co sovereigns for a second
Timur—and no laudatory record of such a woman preceding him. Thus, once Shah
Jahan ascends the throne, he starts dismantling the image of Nur Jahan.
The official historians of Shah Jahan’s reign (deliberately) omit Nur Jahan’s merits and
extraordinary achievements even the records compassion for the people of the court, the
harem, and beyond.

When Nur isn’t absent from the histories written during the reign of Shah Jahan, she is
blamed for the chaos that befell the empire during the final years of Jahangir’s reign.

(A modern scholar who compared two such volumes found that in)

Mu’tamad Khan’s Iqbalnama and Kamgar Husaini’s Maathir-i Jahangiri, descriptions

of events related to Mahabat’s coup and Shah Jahan’s rebellion are exactly the same. He
underlines the fact that both these recorders held Nur responsible for the disorder that
occurred in the 1620s. This version of events, he writes, “was most probably inserted at the
instance of Shah Jahan …”
( Mu’tamad Khan wrote another account, called the Iqbalnama-i Jahangiri, which drew
heavily from the emperor’s memoirs. We do not have the precise dates, but Farid Bhakkari
notes that Mu’tamad died in the reign of Shah Jahan.)

Khafi Khan, writing in the eighteenth century, presented Jagat, not Nur, as the favored
wife. He tells the tale of a hunting trip that Jahangir took accompanied by Nur; her mother,
Asmat; Jagat Gosain; and servants. While the hunters were in the process of guiding a lion
within range of imperial guns, the emperor fell asleep with the women by his side. Suddenly
the lion emerged, roaring. Nur was paralyzed with fear, Khafi Khan writes. Jagat Gosain
picked up the emperor’s gun, fired, and killed the lion. This roused Jahangir from sleep.
Seeing the dead lion and Gosain with a gun, he applauded her bravery. But he was displeased,
Khafi tells us, with the terror-stricken Nur. Asmat quickly intervened, stressing that the use of
arms was the function of men who had to display their bravery on the battlefield. Women
were meant for soft words.

Fitna

The official court historians writing during Shah Jahan’s reign about the actions of Nur Jahan
in the 1620s repeatedly used the word fitna—a term in Islamic tradition that describes
civil war so profound that it amounted to cosmic disorder. Nur drove a wedge between
the father and the son, they wrote, that forced the prince into rebellion.

The term fitna was first used to describe the actions taken by the Prophet’s beloved wife
Ayisha. She was the daughter of the first caliph, who opposed the fourth caliph, Ali, her first
cousin, the son-in law of the Prophet, and the first leader of the Shi’a Muslims. She led her
forces against his in a seventh-century fight known as the Battle of the Camel,
considered to be the first example of Islamic fitna—chaos or civil war.

[Shi’a sources cast Ayisha as the persecutor of Ali, while Sunni canon portrayed her as the
champion of the rightful caliph.
Ayisha was viewed then in various ways: reviled by some as “mischievous,” “worthless,” and
“ambitious,” and hailed by others as a great authority and an impeccable transmitter of the
Prophet’s traditions.]

For centuries after the Battle of the Camel, the Islamic world associated fitna with what
were seen as innately destructive elements in women: Their sexuality was ruinous, their
ambition damaging. Women were a source of trouble, turmoil, and temptation.14

Women’s domain was the sacred, inner quarters.

What else could follow a transgression of these boundaries but fitna? When some women in
sixteenth-century Ottoman Turkey became politically prominent, Sunullah Efendi, the
foremost guardian of Islamic law there and that empire’s highest-ranking cleric, felt
compelled to declare publicly that women should have nothing to do with “matters of
government and sovereignty.”

To express his disapproval strongly, he recalled a tradition attributed to Prophet

Muhammad about the harmful consequences of women’s leadership: “[A] people who
entrusts its affairs to a woman will never know prosperity.”

Until the break between Nur and Shah Jahan was too obvious to ignore, courtiers and critics
had somehow digested the rise of the empress.
(Akbar’s traditional nobility and ulema – Some members of the court, however, took issue
with Nur’s ascent. As early as 1612, one of Akbar’s foster brothers had written a letter to
Jahangir condemning his policy of favoring the Indian Muslims and Khurasanis (Iranians
from Khurasan) over Hindu Rajputs and Chagatai Muslims from Central Asia. The letter
targeted the dominance of Nur and her family. Another person troubled by Nur’s rise and her
family’s high-ranking government positions was Mahabat Khan, a military commander
who’d served Jahangir loyally since he was still Prince Salim. He too was uncomfortable
with the eminence of the empress and the Iranian faction that had coalesced around her.
Mahabat held back his reservations about the empress, but not for long. Mahabat said to the
emperor, “His Majesty must have read … the histories of the ancient sovereigns … Was there
any king so subject to the will of his wife? The world is surprised that such a wise and
sensible Emperor as Jahangir should permit a woman to have such great influence over him.”

They accepted her issuing edicts, striking coins, and sitting in the jharokha, even as some of
them silently lamented her authority. But once she and Shah Jahan were publicly in
opposition, condemnatory statements on her character and the dangers of her womanly
wiles began to emerge. She had sowed the seeds of dissension within the royal family.
What else was this but fitna?

Shah Jahan may have attempted to erase Nur from history in another way, ambitious but
futile. Some scholars have suggested that Shah Jahan withdrew the coins of Nur and Jahangir,
“to wipe out all memory of her [Nur Jahan’s] erstwhile sway.”21 If such a mandate were
indeed issued— though Shahjahani records don’t mention it—collecting the coins already in
circulation would have been extraordinarily difficult. Even if there were an attempt to
withdraw Nur’s coins, some survive to this day in museums.

After Nur passed away, on November 18, 1645, even the Shah Jahan Nama acknowledged
her greatness:

‘In the city of Lahore, the Queen Dowager Nur Jahan Begam—whom it is needless to praise
as she had already reached the pinnacle of fame—departed to Paradise in the seventy-second
year of her age.… The renowned Begam was the chaste daughter of I’timad al-Daula and
sister of the late Yamin al-Daula [Asaf Khan]. From the sixth year of the late Emperor’s
reign, when she was united to him in the bond of matrimony, she gradually acquired such
unbounded influence over His Majesty’s mind that she seized the reins of government and
abrogated to herself the supreme civil and financial administration of the realm, ruling with
absolute authority till the conclusion of his reign.’ 30

Ruby Lal- The remarkable fact of Nur Jahan’s supremacy emerges undiluted despite
the disparaging tone of Shah Jahan’s chronicle. Yet in the Shahjahani histories, in her
coins and monuments, in the work of feminist scholars, a much richer and more complete
story of Nur’s achievements resides. It is as if, no matter what, some people will themselves
into history.

Foreign traveller’s negative depiction of Nur Jahan

Thomas Roe, the British ambassador to Jahangir’s court, clearly found Nur Jahan as central a
trading partner as any in the government. However, he describes her as manipulative and
mysterious: “[Jahangir’s] course is directed by a woeman, and is now, as it were, shut up by
her soe, that all justice or care of anything or publique affayres either sleepes or depends on
her, who is more unaccessible then any goddesse or mistery of heathen impietye.”10

In the travel journals of Europeans, such as Francisco Pelsaert (1590-1630) and Peter
Mundy (1596-1667), Nur Jahan is described negatively.

Francisco Pelsaert, who had travelled to Jahangir’s court during Nur Jahan’s reign, wrote
that the Queen was a “crafty wife of humble lineage.”9 He felt she had taken over the
empire with her brother and father and that she would spend an exorbitant amount of money
to build serais and develop her legacy through her architectural work. He also described how
Jahangir was not interested in anything but hunting and drinking. Pelsaert claimed that she
would wait until Jahangir was inebriated to ask for permission for her projects.10

Peter Mundy also felt similarly to Pelsaert during his time in the Mughal court. He suggested
that Nur Jahan was supposed to be the prisoner of Jahangir after the death of her husband,
possibly referring to her time as a lady-in-waiting, but “hee became her prisoner by
Marryeing her.”11[ As men from seventeenth-century Europe, they would take issue with the
wife of a king having political control over an empire.]

Ruby Lal- Europeans like Roe and Mundy seemed especially bewildered by the phenomenon
of Nur Jahan.
●​ She hadn’t inherited an empire, as had Queen Elizabeth I of England, crowned twenty
years before Nur’s birth,
●​ nor was she exactly a favorite, the familiar adviser-minister figure they knew, a staple
of European courts but always a male.
●​ They couldn’t quite wrap their minds around a woman’s coming to power because of
her own talents, but they could understand a wily consort winning the indulgence of a
love-blind emperor.

During Shah Jahan’s reign, the bazaar gossip and myths fueled by the anti-Nur campaign
inspired the writings of later travellers. According to Francois Bernier, during Shah Jahan’s
reign, Nur Jahan was known as the queen “who….wielded the sceptre, while her husband
abandoned himself to drunkenness and dissipation,” as her “transcendent abilities rendered
her competent to govern the Empire without interference of her husband.” Niccolao
Manucci’s account is a romanticized narrative about Jahangir and Nur Jahan. According to
Ellison Banks Findly, European accounts were the first sources to report romanticized
narratives as they were most eager to announce any scandal emanating from the court, and
they were also especially close to the gossip channels. And the woman who married Jahangir
in her mature years and ruled with him was reduced to a paradigm of flighty romantic love. In
the centuries that followed, the caricature of a besotted, drunken Emperor Jahangir came to
dominate the public imagination as the most likely explanation of Nur’s power.

During Shah Jahan's reign, bazaar gossip and anti-Nur campaign inspired the writings of later
travellers. Francois Bernier characterized Nur as “wielding the scepter” while Jahangir
succumbed to "drunkenness and dissipation," her "transcendent abilities" enabling
governance without her husband's involvement. Niccolao Manucci offered romanticized
narratives about the couple. Ellison Banks Findly argues that European observers,
particularly receptive to court scandal and well-connected to gossip networks, were the first
sources to report romanticized narratives. Consequently, a woman who married in maturity
and exercised genuine co-sovereignty was reduced to a paradigm of flighty romantic love.

In the centuries that followed, the caricature of a besotted, drunken Emperor Jahangir came to
dominate the public imagination as the most likely explanation of Nur’s power.