Bahadur Shah I fought several battles on behalf of his father Aurangzeb, later with his brothers and then with the rebellious chieftains around Delhi and Agra. And guess who fought alongside him? A woman of Portuguese or Armenian descent who was a firangi in local parlance. A devout Catholic, she suffered imprisonment along with the emperor when as Prince Muaazam he incurred the wrath of his father. He had to eat the bread of prisoners “moistened with tears” in Salimgarh, where his mother, Nawab Begum, aka Rehmat-un-Nisa, was also held captive as she too had displeased Aurangzeb.
It was in Salimgarh, adjacent to the Red Fort, that Muaazam’s uncle, Murad, had also been imprisoned by Aurangzeb after the war of succession among the sons of Shah Jahan and later killed. Seven years, like the “Prisoner of Chillon” in Byron’s famous poem, somehow passed and the heir apparent was finally released. After that his liking for Juliana da Costa, known as Bibi Juliana, increased, more so as she crowned the prince with a wreath on the feast day of John the Baptist and presented a palm on Palm Sunday, a week before Easter, besides making dal-chawal for him. The firangi mem has not found much mention in historical records as such but in oral history researched by a New Zealand scholar, Jonathan Gil Harris.
According to him, firangi is an allusion coined during the Mughal period, actually in Akbar’s time, for Armenians who had come to his kingdom as merchants primarily but also as administrators and religious personalities. The name Firangi was appended to their names, otherwise how would one have known that Abdul Hai was a native of Armenia though he served as Akbar’s Minister of Justice, or that Mirza Zulqarnain, Master of the salt mines in Sambar (now in Rajasthan) was not a Mughal prince but the son of Iskandar Firangi, who was close to the emperor!After his father’s death, the still young Zulqarnain was adopted by Akbar and later raised to a high rank.
Harris, now domiciled in Delhi with his Indian wife and their children, in his treatise, “The First Firangis” (Aleph Publications), gives a deep insight into medieval matters, punctuated with some modern history and Bollywood comparisons. Initially affected by Delhi Belly, to which he jokingly alludes, he has woven out a wonderful mixture of fact and conjecture. It is due to his painstaking research that we learn of three Julianas –– Bibi Juliana Firangi, who graced Akbar’s court, Bibi Juliana Bourbon and Bibi Juliana Dias da Costa.
Reading the account one is given to understand that the notion of Bibi Juliana Bourbon marrying a fugitive French prince, Jeane Phillipe de Bourbon, and her sister Maria wedding Akbar may be myths. According to Harris, Juliana Bourbon was actually married to Iskandar the Faujdar of Sambar and bore him two sons, one of whom was Zulqarnain. This Bibi died in 1598 and is believed to have been buried in Akbar’s church. We are told that Juliana Bourbon, Juliana Firangi and Juliana Dias da Costa, variously believed to be of Portuguese, Dutch or Armenian descent, were actually two persons and not three — Juliana Firangi and Juliana Bourbon being one and Juliana Dias da Costa the other.
Born 100 years later, Juliana da Costa served in the harem of Aurangzeb and then as a close friend of Muaazam, who ascended the throne as Shah Alam I or Bahadur Shah I. This Juliana, also known as Jullena, was given a jagir of 97 bighas near Delhi city, on which DDA’s Serai Jullena flats have come up and part of which is the Masigarh church complex. She came to be known to the villagers as Jodbai, and a school of that name is still there in Okhla. The Bibi died in 1734, having been born in 1688.
Another interesting story is about Sarmad Shaheed, the Omar Khayyam of Delhi, who came from Thatta, in Sindh, visited Hyderabad with his gay friend Abhai Chand and finally settled down in the Capital. Abhai Chand translated the Tohra (Sarmad was initially a Jew) into Hindi and also wrote some rubais like his mentor. Sarmad was executed by Aurangzeb as a heretic.
Some of the details traced by Harris are amazing, as also his surmise about Akbar’s Rajput wife, mistakenly associated with Joda Bai but actually Harka Bai. He also writes about the 17th Century European traveller Niccolao Manucci who was looted at Hodal, 68 km from Delhi, before joining the Mughal court; Thomas Coryat, Jester of the court of James I who came on foot from England and begged at the shrine of Hazrat Moinuddin Chisti at Ajmer when short of money; and John Mildenhall, the only Englishman to see Akbar face to face. There are more such revelations in the treatise which throw new light on our medieval past.
(The author is a veteran chronicler of Delhi)
