220. Battle of Brothers: The Puritan vs The Mystic (Ep 1)

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0:28Hello and welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arnans. And me, William Durrumpur. We've been having just such a rollercoaster ride with the story of the Morgals. And thank you so much for all of your kind comments. It's lovely to know that you're enjoying the series as much as you are. We left off with a broken hearted, turned white overnight Shah Jahan, his hair turning white, his love gone, his heart broken, and the memory of the love of his life, Mumtaz Mahal, being raised from the ground in this white mausoleum that today is the path for all travellers to India, the Taj Mahal. and that was great fun talking about that.

1:05But we take up the reins. We sort of left you on a little bit of a cliffhanger that the death of that love also heralds great building but also the start of some rather turbulent times in the Empire. We're going to pick up those reins right now with a superb, fantastic guest that Willy cannot contain himself over his excitement that we've managed to get her on. Supriya Gandhi is with us, author of The Emperor Who Never Was, Dara Shuko. in Mughal India. And amongst other things, a very esteemed academic. I'm going to hand over to Willie because he's going to do a really, I mean, Supriya, fasten your seatbelt.

1:40It's going to be rather embarrassing fanboy moment for you. Go on, Willie. Off you go. Supriya is an old friend. How old were we when we first met, Supriya? An old Delhi? Probably 16 or 17. 16 or 17. And I was 24 or 25. This is now 20-something years ago. And I was just finished city of jinns, and you were beginning your path to studying Persian. And we both gravitated to the room of a wonderful Sufi teacher teaching in the Anglo-Arabic school just outside the old city. And we used to sit together in this domed room as he would tell us Sufi anecdotes and pour us pots of masala chai. You were literally 16 or 17 already setting off on your life's work.

2:24What a precocious historian at 16 or 17, Supriya. Do you have recollections of this? I didn't know that I was going to be a historian. But when I arrived in Delhi to go to college, I started exploring the city and I came across quite serendipitously Dr. Jafri, through whom I then met Willy. And Dr. Jafri was my sort of gateway into the whole world of Persian and Mughal history. Okay, so just between us, describe Willy. What was he like? Describe Willy. Yeah, what was he like? And just between you and me, what was he really like? What I remember about him is that he had a mobile phone and I hadn't quite seen one before.

3:06I'd heard about them. So, he had this sort of this very fancy gadget and he was always traveling in taxis, which struck me as extremely decadent because, you know, I would travel by bus and Can I just say, a man who's attached to his phone and incredibly decadent, I mean, you've changed a lot, William. It's hardly recognisable for the man I know today. Before Supriya begins to tell us about this man who she's written this wonderful biography about, I should quickly say to anyone listening that Supriya's book, The Emperor Who Never Was, is just a model of accessible, beautifully written scholarship.

3:45Supriya's clearly spent years with all the primary sources, and yet she writes with great lightness and grace. It's an utterly, utterly entrancing book. And it's also oddly unfamiliar because people have often talked about Dharashuko and Aurangzeb in India. They're kind of symbols of everything that went wrong and Dharashuko of everything that could have been. And we'll go into that further in this episode. But it's always been built on often fictional betrayals of these two men. And Supriya, oddly, is the first person since the 1930s, since Kanungo, I think, is the last person to produce a biography of Dara Shuko.

4:23That's actually based on primary sources and rooted in the original writings. And she's completely rewritten the story. And so I recommend it to anyone. Well, look, we talked, Supri, in the last episode about raising the Taj Mahal and about that ultimate political flex, the peacock throne, and how he sort of throws himself into the construction of all of these things. And how Jahanara, his daughter, takes a really pivotal role in being the glue that makes sure that the family doesn't fragment in the absence of the matriarch and the grief of the father. But I did sort of allude to the fact that we were in for some turbulence because all of these very solid structures were going up.

5:02But succession is a very tricky thing. It isn't just an HBO series. It is a tricky thing, especially when you introduce it to the Mughal period. And we are here to talk about the man you've written about, Dara Shukoh, who we talked a lot about Jahanara, but not so much about his eldest son. Just tell us a little bit about him. Well, Dara Shukhu was a Mughal prince. And we hear of the Mughal princes who become emperors, you know, quite naturally. But there were many Mughal princes who thought that they ought to be emperors, or rather they fought for the throne. And Dara Shukhu is considered to be sort of an exception, because the stereotype about him is that he was this prince in an ivory tower who was too naive, too mystical, too sort of interested in spending time with Sufis and chatting with sort of Hindu sages to actually really sort of be suited for the throne.

5:58Nicola Minucci, who we slapped him off terribly in the last episode about the reliability of some of his history, but he wrote about Prince Zara as if he had a crush. So can I just read a little bit of what he has to say. And as you say, sort of many people dwell on his beauty and his sort of, you know, that he lives in a higher plane than most of us. But this is what Minucci writes about him. Prince Dara was a man of dignified manners, of comely countenance, polite in conversation, ready and gracious of speech, of extraordinary liberality, kindly, compassionate, but overconfident in his opinion of himself, considering himself competent in all things and having no need of advisors.

6:36Indeed, he despised those who gave him counsel. Now, since we poured a whole bucket of sick over some of Minucci's thoughts and musings in the last episode, how much can we rely on his pen portrait of this man? Minucci was writing for, I think, a European audience. And of course, he wanted to tell a good story and an engaging story. He wanted to show that he had access to the Mughal court in a manner that was, I think, fairly exaggerated. So, of course, one ought to, if not be suspicious, at least contextualize the sorts of stories that Manochi told. But I mean, is it right that he despised advisors?

7:14I mean, is that something that is based on anything other than Manochi writing a story? So when Manochi was actually in Mughal India in the 1650s, this is sort of coming off a period when Dara Shukho is already, he's sort of established himself, his father is old, And he really is almost like the core ruler alongside his father who trusts him immensely, cherishes him, gives him a prominent place in court. So it isn't surprising that Dara Shukoh indeed would think of himself so highly, or at least give that impression to Manucci, because he's had that power. He hasn't had to fight for it. He hasn't had to push against his father and rebel like a lot of princes who later successfully become emperors.

7:59So he has access to his father's court. He is able to host a whole range of figures. So you'd actually go along with Manucci in many ways. You think he was a bit overconfident and that portrait is not in itself inaccurate. As a historian, I'm sort of a little wary of thinking that I know the personalities of historical figures like Dara Shukho, you know, really well and really closely. And part of this is, of course, you know, that in the colonial period, there was this fascination with the personalities of Mughal emperors. And they were supposed to have certain personality traits, and then these personality traits defined a whole age.

8:36And then it, you know, it came to be that you just utter the name of someone like Dara Shogur, Aurangzeb, or Akbar, and you think that you know them. And their names become metonyms for just, you know, a whole range of sort of qualities that then sort of become inextricably glued to them. And of course, people are complex. They change over time. And what we have about Dara Shuko is not his inner thoughts directly, but we have a kaleidoscope of representations, how he presented himself to the world, how other people portrayed him, whether it's European writers, whether it's contemporaneous writers and so on.

9:08So I think that might capture a bit of it, but it's more complex. On perception, let's just do the thing that I do, which is the absolutely shallow and completely aesthetic. I mean, he's a looker. Yeah, he's certainly in there. Miniatures do him no harm at all. I mean, he looks like a sort of more handsome version of his dad, frankly. You know, you've got that sort of aquiline nose, you know, those almond eyes. They're heavily fringed with thick eyelashes. You know, he's a beauty in miniatures. You have never, ever said that before about any of the figures we've looked at. I'm so superficial. Honestly, I've got the reputation for being...

9:42A new side of your character coming out here. They have given me the reputation for being boy mad, and now I'm embracing it. I don't fight it anymore. I just embrace it. But I mean, this sort of the beauty of the man in the court, was it something that people commented on at the time? Or are these just miniaturists and court artists trying to flatter a man who has or may have all the power in the future? Well, there certainly were a lot of paintings of Dara Shako. Lots and lots. There are just many of them. They've survived. So we really have sort of this most profuse efflorescence of paintings that are coming out of Shah Jahan's court.

10:17And, you know, Dara Shukho is clearly an important patron. And we have paintings of Dara Shukho where he's clearly a youth. He doesn't have a beard yet. And he has these finely chiseled features. He has a sort of this luminous look in his eyes. And I think the idea is to portray someone who is young, but destined for great spiritual prowess, as well as, you know, perhaps sort of worldly success. So you have him sort of looking most earnestly at a spiritual teacher and a whole series of paintings. And then as he grows older, yes, you see him portrayed with a beard, much like his father and his brother Aurangzeb.

10:55They all look sort of similar. Was he like his dad in his regard for astrology? We talked about his father, Shah Jahar, pausing at the gates of Agra for 12 days until all the planets are aligned and it's an auspicious time for him to actually enter and do what is inevitable, which is claim power. Is his son, Dara Shukha, exactly like that or different? Yeah. Well, I think we ought to regard Shah Jahan's interest in astrology not as a kind of quirk of his character or an eccentricity. This was an age where astrology was science. And in the West too. And in the West as well. I mean, you have figures like John Dee and all of these other people.

11:36Dr. Dee in London. Yes. The man who comes up with the word British Empire, apparently. Absolutely. So this was an age where the world wasn't entirely known, and that was okay. The aim wasn't to know every single bit of the world, but to learn how to manipulate and master some of these unseen elements, elements that were considered to be deeply interconnected. So Priya, in your wonderful book, you very much have two sides of Dara on show. On one hand, he's a court, and you're at pains to show that he is very much an active player, along with his sister Jahanara and his father, and the three of them in many ways are Trambrit.

12:18But you also have this other side of him, which is the really intriguing side for so many of us who are interested in him, this Sufi side, where he is going up to Kashmir, hanging out with ascetics, both Hindu and Muslim, and where he is trying to find commonalities between the spiritual paths of the various different traditions. In our eyes, particularly, strikingly, the fact that it is both Hindu and Muslim, two paths which have diverged so dramatically in the 20th century, in which in some ways you can go back to Dara Shukoh as the point where the fork in the road begins, or where the divergence begins at the end of his life.

12:59Tell us about his spiritual life and about his searchings, and particularly the thing which I didn't know until I read your book about his interest in yogic breathing, of all things. Now, that wasn't entirely unusual. Muslim scholars have been interested in yoga and tantra and even tantric spells and all kinds of things forever, for a very long time. You find references to these hidden in the pages of Arabic books by religious scholars, you know, whom today you wouldn't really imagine would be interested in these things, but they were. So, Dara Shukra wasn't completely unique in his interest, but he certainly was unusual in the depth to which he pursued them.

13:37And he was actually introduced to the Qadri Sufi order, which wasn't the usual kind of Sufi order that the Mughals patroned. Could you explain what that means, the Qadri Sufi order? It was a Sufi order that attributed its founding to the famous sort of Sufi from the Baghdad, Abdul Qadir Jilani, and it had a branch of its followers and lineages in India. There was another Sufi lineage, the Chishti lineage, that was very prominent throughout North India and the Deccan as well. And Akbar and Jahangir were great patrons of that particular Sufi order. And for Dara Shukhu to do something a little different that followed what his ancestors did, and it reference that.

14:21It followed the same pattern, but it still showed him to be carving his own path and his own right. He cultivated ties with the Qadiri order. And it was his father who introduced him to this Qadiri Sufi known as Miamir, or sometimes Miamjiv. Jiv is like a kind of respectful term. And he was living in Lahore at the time. And Dara Shukoh had been newly married, had recently lost his firstborn child, was quite stricken with grief, and he also fell ill. And his father introduced him to the Sufi, who actually, in Dara Shukhu's account, cured him. Of grief? Well, cured him of physical illness that might have been connected with his grief, yes.

15:02Oh, I see. Certainly, that occurred in the aftermath of his grief. And this was a Sufi who wasn't necessarily very kind to figures of authority. Yes, quite abrupt in your telling of the story. Yes, very abrupt. So for Sufis, it was very difficult to tread this line between being spiritually independent, because that's how people respected them, and that's how they got their spiritual authority, and also having relations with people in power, because Sufis always have had that. It's a difficult relationship to cultivate. So we see in Dara Shukor's story, we also see a story of these fiercely independent Sufis who are increasingly getting closer and closer to this orbit of imperial power.

15:46I'm sort of listening to you and thinking, I know this is going to, particularly the yogic breathing, which for those of you who aren't hipsters in North London and aren't actually people who do yoga, is the practice of putting, you know, sort of a finger on one nostril and breathing in and then two fingers on the other side and breathing out and maybe with a mantra involved in this. I can't think that the mullahs would like this very much at all. Strict Islamic scholars. I mean, did they have anything to say about it? Or if, you know, the son of the emperor wants to do it, it's fine by us. Well, you know, I think we might have a modern idea of what went on in Mughal courts if you've watched Jodha Akbar.

16:21Have you ever seen that? Yeah, so the Bollywood movie, lavish Bollywood movie for those who don't indulge. With Ritik Roshan and Aishwarya Rai. Yes. So it's certainly very pretty. But then you have these sort of spinning Sufi dances that are sort of like, you know, what you'd see in Istanbul today. And then you have these religious scholars who are very strict and they're always berating Akbar and they're wearing these sort of dark cloaks and conniving and complaining. Looking like Iranian mullahs. Yeah. And that really isn't quite what happened in these times. The ulama were not the strictly defined class that we have later on, say, in the 19th century.

17:00A Muslim scholar of the religious sciences could also wear many hats. I mean, he could be a general. He could be someone who's managing the imperial household. He was almost certainly inducted into a Sufi order because Sufism was really the default form of religiosity in this period. And there were many people who wrote all kinds of learned treatises on sort of religious topics, but they were also interested in what we might consider to be the occult or astrology, you know, again, because that was part of the whole system of learning in those days. Understanding the world, exactly. Absolutely.

17:37So things were more complex than that, but it doesn't mean that there weren't disagreements. You put in your own book, though, Supriya, a verse of Dara's which I'd like to read out. Paradise is where no mullahs are found, where there is no bickering and clamor from the mullahs. May the world be free of the mullahs' noise. May no one care about their fatwas. In the city where a mullah has his home, there isn't a wise man to be found. Don't gaze upon the mullahs' face. Don't go where there is no madness for love. That does imply that there is an opposition there between the lovers who are the Sufis.

18:12That's why I thought there might be a little friction, because that just suddenly sounds like friction. And there's one other lovely verse, which is from the previous biography, which I'd love to read too, which again is associated with Dara. Thou art in the Kaaba at Mecca, as well as in the Hindu temple of Somnat. Thou art in the monastery, as well as at the tavern. Thou art at the same time the light and the moth, the wine and the cup, the sage and the fool, the friend and the stranger, the rose and the nightingale. So there was certainly opposition, and there was opposition not just to Dara Shukoh, but opposition to things that certain Sufis who were perhaps more ecstatic in their expressions of religiosity said.

18:58So Mullah Shah, who was the successor of Dara Shukoh's first spiritual teacher, Miamir, Mullah Shah was originally from Central Asia, from Badr-Shan, and he lived in Kashmir. And after Tarashikuk convinced him to take him on as his disciple, he and Jahanara would always visit him. And Shah Jahar had also a very close relationship with him. So Mullah Shah had certain ecstatic utterances about the Prophet Muhammad, about how he was hand in hand with the Prophet and so on, that were considered to be very disrespectful by certain religious scholars in Shah Jahar's court. And Miamir was deeply concerned about this, and he actually asked Shah Jahar to help.

19:40And it looks like Dara Shukop also urged Shah Jahar to intervene. And finally, whatever sort of threat or punishment was in the making for Mullah Shah, that was averted. So definitely, there were differences in opinion among these religious scholars, many of whom were also Sufis. There were tensions. And another thing is that Sufi poetry often uses these conventions of contrasting very strict-minded scholars who are only concerned about the externals of religion with those who are more interested or more focused on a sort of internal esoteric spiritual quest. So we see these tropes in Dara's writings as well, and they may indeed have reflected tensions that were already taking place.

20:32And Supri, one of the things that distinguishes Dara is that he has this intuition that Islam and Hinduism are not separate religions, that the Upanishads could even be the secret books referred to in the Quran. Tell us about that whole idea, because that's something which is far from orthodox. So to properly understand this, we need to look at these two very famous figures whom Darushoko isn't directly saying he wants to emulate, but who really are his models. And one of them is his great-grandfather, Akbar. Darushoko doesn't say that he wants to be like Akbar, but really what he's doing is he's trying to rule the way Akbar ruled in the second half of his reign after he'd consolidated his empire and he was getting all of these Sanskrit texts translated into Persian and all of that and holding into religious dialogue.

21:26So, Dharash was wanting to do what Akbar did before he actually became emperor. So, there was an established model for that. So, it wasn't only his personal intuition. He was following the model of Akbar. Didn't quite say that Islam and Hinduism are the same, but what Akbar was trying to do was to point at a universal truth that was at the core of different religious traditions, and that Akbar, being the spiritually enlightened emperor, had access to that truth. He had this perfect understanding, so he could guide his subjects. He could cure the dissension and conflict that existed between people of different religions because he understood this universal truth that was at the core of all of these religions.

22:09And in a sense, that's what Darashukho is trying to achieve. But for Dara Shukho to understand this, he first starts by seeking out spiritual teachers, first Sufis, and then he has dialogues with Hindu sages. So he sort of branches out even more and sort of gets interested in perhaps, you know, yoga and so on. And then he clearly is studying a whole range of texts. So he's figuring out what he thinks is this core truth of which Islamic concepts and Hindu concepts are just different expressions. And then he moves even further. He actually finds what he thinks is this text that is going to unlock all of these deep spiritual mysteries.

22:52And the implication is, you know, when he's actually found and understood this text and translated it with this group of Sanskrit pundits, you know, these religious scholars from Benares, that the idea is once he's understood this, he really doesn't need to go to gurus and spiritual teachers anymore. He's actually found the source and he's put it between the covers of a book. The mingling of two oceans. You can see why he's beloved of people who, you know, their mantra is, why can't we just get along? Because it's basically the core philosophy that he lives by. We've spoken about him and Jahanara and it seems as if they have a fairly good relationship.

23:29They do things together. Their father loves them both. We haven't talked about the sibling, Aurangzeb. Now, just tell us a little bit how they contrast and maybe just tell us about the differing attitudes to the elephant fight between these two brothers. So the elephant fight is one episode that is quite well known because there are a lot of leader writers who've made much of this elephant fight. And some gorgeous pictures, aren't there, in the Panjshanama and so on. There are these gorgeous pictures in the Pajshanama. So this was, you know, after Shah Jahar becomes emperor. And as sort of he and his sons like to do, they were watching these two maddened elephants engage in this fierce and vicious fight.

24:12And there was sort of their trunks were knotted. And so they were sort of writhing like serpents. And, you know, all was, you know, going very well until one of the elephants actually started charging. And these young princes and the emperor were all nearby on horseback. And what happened was that Darushuko, well, he may not have been near the elephant, but the one who actually drove his spear several inches deep into the elephant's head was Aurangzeb. Who showed great bravery by charging the charging elephant. Yes, he showed great bravery. It actually didn't really serve to resolve the situation because things were still very chaotic.

24:50There were people throwing fireworks at the elephants to try to distract them. Because that notoriously helps in a tricky situation. Yes. What actually happened was, you know, finally the other elephant then resumed the fight and then distracted the offending elephant from attacking the crowd. So Priya, while Aurangzeb is bravely attacking the charging elephant and saving his father and the rest of his family, Dara seems to be hanging back. And there's even some suggestion that he's allowing the unhorsed Aurangzeb to suffer for his fate. Is that the implication of the story? That's the implication that later commentators have applied to the story.

25:35In the poems of the time, again, we have this great poet, Kaleem Karshani, who praises Aurangzeb, but he doesn't say nasty things about Dara. He says that Aurangzeb, who isn't really even of age, shows this most amazing maturity. and that when he plunged his spear into the elephant, all the elephant's madness just came gushing out and left him. So certainly this was a way to elevate Aurangzeb, but it was later on used as a way to attack Dara. Right, attack him as a coward, whereas Aurangzeb is the man of action. I think we need to come back after the break and examine Aurangzeb a bit more. So do join us.

26:19Welcome back. So just before the break, Supriya was telling us about how an interpretation at the time and thereafter has colored people's view of these two brothers, Aurangzeb and Dara Shukoh. And we should talk about Prince Aurangzeb now because he was, I mean, this isn't just a people who come later sort of imposing thoughts and images on people. Aurangzeb was different. He was a different kind of character. As you did so beautifully with Dara Shukoh, tell us a little bit about this young man who's three years younger than Dara, but has a huge ambition, even at a young age. And who we should say is today possibly the most controversial person in Indian history.