The Courtly and Refined Work of Jahanara, the Daughter of Shah Jahan

This is a time of strong literary engagement with Indian history. Several contemporary writers, who may have earlier focused on a purely contemporary social realism, feel the call to confront distant pasts. What may be of note is that a simple idea of “our” past is expanding. While there may be a common sense idea of the units of belonging (region, language, community and so on), the engagement with the past is no longer by predictable constituencies. 

Thus, it may or may not be surprising that Tamil writers may be interested in an Agra- and Persian-centred Mughal paramountcy. Many southern Indian writers are making claims to this more universal idea of the Indian past. In this context, the noted litterateur Sukumaran’s Jahanara (translated by Kalaivani Karunakaran) is a skilful addition. 

One need not know much about the princess Jahanara (1614-1681) to enjoy the book. Jahanara was the daughter of Shah Jahan, and the sister of Dara Shikoh and Aurangzeb. It is hard to imagine how the Persian or Hindustani bhasha of that world may flow into Sukumaran’s Tamil. Receiving it now as translated into English, this is hard to gauge – was English (for the Mughal court already had Englishmen) not much farther than Tamil to the world of the Mughals? 

One welcomes such venturings in languages, but perhaps a clearer and more extended note (by the author or translator) could have given a better context of both history and translation. It is often not entirely clear what the historical Jahanara wrote, and what the author’s reconstructions are from what has been imputed to Jahanara by generations of scholars and writers who have sought to re-imagine her life. 

In English, as a translator, a lyric fluency of Jahanara’s world has been achieved by Kalaivani Karunakaran. Jahanara had been privately educated in many literary and religious traditions. Sukumaran writes the initial chapters in the voice of the head of eunuch – Panipat. This solves a novelistic problem of access to inner quarters by an intimate, and one who possesses a historical knowledge of the family – and yet, also does some disservice to Panipat who is not developed sufficiently.

There are only rare moments when Jahanara finds solidarity with other undefended people of the court, such as the accountants who have to find the money to spend on lavish personal projects. As Panipat remarks on one of these, “Perhaps he too was just like me – someone who was against power, but entirely dependent on it for survival”.

More successful formal devices that create access to that world include creations of atmospheric mood – be they of funerals, coronations, mehfils, elaborate feasts with their mingling of the scents and cold perfumes of kasturi and sandal, of various kinds of warmed meat oe the extended chess games that went on with laughter all through the night. Yet, despite the romance of the palace, the novel is not quite able to ground romance in this milieu – understandably, working out of a sparse and speculative set of sources, the imagination of Jahanara’s love-life does not quite hold water.

Often the palace’s mood of dreams is cleverly linked to some geopolitical intrigue that marks the court. There is the realisation amid all the intrigue that “bravery is not courage alone but a combination of daring, ingenuity and fear”. There are cinematic images too: “ I slowly climbed down from the balcony and took cover in the darkness near the emperor’s throne”. 

There is a growing wariness of the single-minded, rising power of Aurangzeb, as ruthless in prayer as in war. He was thus seen from childhood: “He ate little, wore simple garments, spun caps and had them sold, offering the money earned to charity for the pilgrims”. When ill, he wanted to “heal through prayers and prayers alone”. In contrast, Jahanara wavered at crucial times–Panipat remarks that her (Jahanara’s) “power is just like an arrow in the hands of an expert archer who hesitates to shoot”.

In the 17th century, the pre-eminent sense of being an artist was that of architecture. A great deal of what is murmuringly beautiful of Delhi was Jahanara’s doing: she and her father brought to life a river-bank capital, a ”pond brimming with moonlight”, with the “moon at the window [heightening] the white marble walls and floors”. Like her father, more than war, it was building and gardening that gave them joy – there were whole gardens built to celebrate single flowers. This resolve deepens as Mumtaz dies in childbirth on a far, war-torn province of empire an hour before dawn, even as the opium dissolved in pomegranate juice makes its way through her body. 

Her mother’s death is used by Sukumaran to introduce Jahanara’s voice directly, without Panipat. This second part of the book however seems to introduce fewer new themes. This is ironic as it is finally in Jahanara’s voice. Perhaps as a matter of actual historical truth, her life indeed diminishes to just watching her brothers battling it out. She becomes a mere witness behind a “silk-curtained palanquin”.

 Everything is in suspension till one of the brothers triumphs. Delhi seems the eternal Kurukshetra, and she wonders if the “ air in Delhi always carry the germs that spread the lust for power”. As one of the characters says of the interminable war that seems a very constricted history: “ I am telling this story to someone other than me. To whom? To forgetting…”. 

As Jahanara loses her brother Dara, she writes: “Let my tears touch the ink. My tears aren’t colorless. They are black with despair.” An age at its most vile is reduced to the binary of takht/taboot (throne/tomb).

Though Jahanara bets on the wrong horse, she does over time manage to regain her position in the court. She survives, as sister and daughter, through the internecine inter-generational wars of fathers and sons and brothers. As Aurangzeb says when he refuses to meet his father: “This son won’t forgive the father who didn’t forgive him”. Against this grim view of eternal unforgiving, Sukumaran’s Jahanara survives as a counterpoint into our own time, as one whose words and white-marble architecture we can still inhabit in her beloved Delhi. 

Nikhil Govind, professor of literary studies at the Manipal Centre for Humanities, Manipal, and is the author, most recently, of the Moral Imagination of the Mahabharata (Bloomsbury, 2022).