The intellectual history of the Great Mughals is fascinating. The Chaghatai Turk clan that Babur was born into (his mother was a Mongol) was highly literate and extroverted. Knowledge of poetry, music and architecture was expected of the nobility and there was no merit in being just a battlefield brute.
Babur spent five years in India, but he spent those years finishing and polishing one of the best historical works ever left to us. The Baburnama (sometimes also called the Tuzuk-e-Baburi — the work was left unnamed by its author) is the first autobiography written on our subcontinent.
It is a tremendous work and in its battle descriptions the participating author is as removed and distant as Julius Caesar is in his equally great writings. His translator Beveridge has written that Babur was probably one of the two finest writers of the particular form of Turkic (now extinct) in which he wrote.
Chronicles of kings
The historian Sir Jadunath Sarkar tells us that the last Mughal, Aurangzeb, was also a skilled writer. He replied to all official correspondence in his own hand, writing diagonally across the same scroll that had been sent to him. This reply would often be in the form of a classical couplet.
His father Shah Jahan was highly secretive and about him almost nothing is known firsthand. He commissioned a court chronicle but then did not get it published. Humayun’s sister Gulbadan has written a work that describes Babur and her brother, and it is a shame that this work and others like it, though primary texts, are not better known in our nation.
Akbar was not literate and probably dyslexic, though intellectually he was quite curious. His son tells us that he had only ever seen Akbar write one word, his own name, in a childlike scrawl. Jahangir was a very good writer. Though he is vain and susceptible to flattery, he brings the interests of his ancestry to his writing.
The Tuzuk-e-Jahangiri (Tuzuk is a word meaning diary or chronicle) is written in two parts. The first is the period in which his son Khurram is in his good books. In this phase, Jahangir is nothing but love and adulation for his boy.
The second part of the memoir is after they have fallen out. The Mughals did not have primogeniture and there was no assurance that the oldest would rule. This meant that, first, successions were usually preceded by bloodshed. And second that rulers would have to be on the guard against their sons, once they grew into adults and eyed the throne.
Jahangir himself had rebelled against his father, though he avoids writing about that. Similarly, once Jahangir felt the threat from Khurram (the later Shah Jahan), they had a falling out. And so, towards the end of the second part of the book, Jahangir begins to refer to his son as a ‘wretch’ ( bi-daulat ).
Crane stories
However, the most interesting part of the work relates to nature. The north India that Akbar had left Jahangir was peaceful and he had all the time in the world to indulge in the things that interested him. Here is his description of the mating of cranes:
“At this time the mating of the saras, which I had never seen before, and is reported never to have been seen by man, was witnessed by me. The saras is a creature of the crane genus, but somewhat larger. On the top of the head it has no feathers and the skin is drawn over the bones of the head. From the back of the eye to six finger-breadths of the neck is red… The female having straightened its legs bent down a little: the male then lifted up one of its feet from the ground and placed it on her back, and afterwards the second foot, and, immediately, seating himself on her back, paired with her. He then came down, and, stretching out his neck, put his beak on the ground, and walked once round the female. It is possible they may have an egg and produce a young one.”
In fact they do. Jahangir has half a dozen entries on these cranes, who travel with him everywhere he goes with his armies. All the animals that Jahangir encountered, and many were gifted to him from foreign places, he records with the same meticulousness. You could tell purely from his accurate descriptions that he is observing a turkey. His curiosity about animals is that of a true naturalist, and that makes him unusual among Indians.
Once a python is found with a large belly. Jahangir has the snake cut open and it is found to have swallowed a deer. Jahangir is amazed the snake could get an animal of that size down its mouth (he doesn’t know what we do, through Discovery Channel, about double-hinged jaws). He gets his courtiers to force the animal again down the python’s mouth, without success. He then has the corners of the snake’s mouth slit open but still the deer’s carcass doesn’t fit. Jahangir then records this in his diary.
Cruel hunter
The emperor loved walrus teeth, hawking and, above all, he loved hunting. His favourite wife Noor Jahan was also a hunter. She kept purdah on an elephant’s howdah from where, according to European travellers, only the musket’s barrel showed. Jahangir records her as once killing two tigers with two shots.
The Mughal form of hunting was through a qamargah . This was a circle in the jungle that was 50 miles (around 80km) in circumference, formed by 100,000 soldiers who slowly closed in till the circumference became about 4 miles and held thousands of animals. Into this circle, Akbar would step armed with a gun, bow and arrow and often only a sword. The slaughter would begin and once lasted four days. Nobody else was allowed to hunt till the emperor was done.
Jahangir could become cruel when denied a chance to hunt. Once, according to his diary, two drum-beaters and a guide mistakenly come into the clearing while he has taken aim at a nilgai (blue-bull antelope). The animal flees. Jahangir has the guide executed and the two poor drum-beaters hamstrung. This means that the tendons behind their knees were sliced off, leaving them crippled for life.
Volume I of Tuzuk-e-Jahangiri has two instances where the emperor makes a full inventory of the animals he has hunted. First a short list of a current hunting season, and then a longer one of what he had hunted till then in life. In three months and 10 days in 1610, Jahangir records having hunted a total of 1,414 animals and birds.
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The writer is a columnist and translator of Urdu and Gujarati non-fiction works.
