The Mughal Padshah

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The Mughal Padshah The Mughal Padshah A Jesuit Treatise on Emperor Jahangir’s Court and Household By Jorge Flores LEIDEN | BOSTON Cover illustration: Darbar of Jahangir (detail), possibly by Manohar or Abuʾl Hasan, ca. 1620–25. It shows a Jesuit priest, probably the Florentine Francesco Corsi, taking part in that daily ceremony. Courtesy of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. This publication has been typeset in the multilingual “Brill” typeface. With over 5,100 characters covering Latin, IPA, Greek, and Cyrillic, this typeface is especially suitable for use in the humanities. For more information, please see www.brill.com/brill-typeface. issn 2211-4610 isbn 978-90-04-30752-0 (hardback) isbn 978-90-04-30753-7 (e-book) Copyright 2016 by Koninklijke Brill nv, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Hes & De Graaf, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Rodopi and Hotei Publishing. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill nv provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, ma 01923, usA. Fees are subject to change. This book is printed on acid-free paper. Some, who were supreme yesterday, are no one today. Some fell due to their own faults, others by way of rumours, and others because they believed that the world, with all its tricks, could not beat them jerónimo xavier, at Jahangir’s court in Lahore, 1607 … A very small fault, or a trifling mistake, may bring a man to the depths of misery or to the scaffold, and consequently everything in the kingdom is uncertain. Wealth, position, love, friendship, confidence, everything hangs by a thread francisco pelsaert, Dutch Factor in Agra, 1626 … Some people, mindful of the Qur’anic verse, “and make not your hands con- tribute to your destruction,” employ themselves in well-wishing for kings from afar. Others throw their hearts and souls into danger and remain day and night in visible proximity around kings mutribi, at Jahangir’s court in Lahore, 1627 ∵ Contents Preface ix List of Illustrations xii part 1 Introduction 1 The Threads and Knots of an Unusual Jesuit Text 3 1.1 The Text: Outline and Profile 3 1.2 The Context: Mughal–Portuguese Relations 10 1.2.1 From Babur to Jahangir 10 1.2.2 The Early 1610s 15 1.3 The Authorship: Xavier or Pinheiro? 21 1.4 The Readership: The (at Least) Four Iberian Lives of the Treatise 26 1.4.1 Problems of Chronology and Transmission 26 1.4.2 How Did a Manuscript Travel from Goa to Lisbon? 31 1.4.3 Textual Practices 35 2 Reading the Treatise 43 2.1 The Jesuit Missionary as Political Observer (Actor and Thinker) 43 2.2 The Mughal Padshah 46 2.2.1 Capital and Citadel, Family and Harem 48 2.2.2 An Emperor on Display and in Command 55 2.3 Jahangir by the Numbers 64 2.3.1 Figures, Lists, Archives 64 2.3.2 Household Expenses and Imperial Revenues 71 2.3.3 Mansabdars and Mansabs 73 2.4 Concluding Remarks 81 part 2 The Text 1 The Manuscript: Its Translation and Transcription 85 viii contents 2 Text A: ANTT MS—Annotated English Translation: Treatise of the Court and Household of Jahangir Padshah King of the Mughals 87 On the Court of the Great Mughal 88 On the Children and Kin of this King 90 On the Occasions when the King Appears before His People; and the Order of His Household 92 On the King’s Wives, and How They are Served inside the Palace, and on the Riches of Their Garments, and of Their Persons 95 Expenses of His Household 96 Expenses with the Animals, and Other Things Pertaining to the Service of this King 97 On the King’s Treasures and Revenues 98 On His Captains and Their Greatness 101 On the Kingdoms This King Possesses 102 Revenues of the Sons of Jahangir Padshah King of the Mughals, and of His Captains 105 3 Text B: ANTT MS—Portuguese Original: Tratado da Corte, e Caza de Iamguir Pachá Rey dos Mogores 130 Da corte do Grõ [sic] Mogor 131 Dos filhos e geração deste Rei 132 Das vezes em que el Rey aparece a seu povo: e ordem de sua caza 133 Das mulheres que este Rei tem, e como se servem de sua porta a dentro, e das riquezas de seu trajo, e de suas pesoas 135 Gastos de sua caza 137 Gastos dos animais, e mais couzas do serviço deste rey 137 Dos tizouros, e rendas que este Rey tem 138 Dos seos capitais, e da sua grandeza 140 Dos Reinos que este Rey tem 141 Rendas dos filhos de Jamguir Pachá Rey dos Mogores e de seos capitais 143 Bibliography 163 Index 173 Preface Those specializing in Mughal history are well aware of the renewed interest in the figure of Emperor Jahangir (r. 1605–27). Long overshadowed by his charis- matic father Akbar, Jahangir has been characterized consistently as a weak and shallow ruler, more given to rituals and empty gestures than to strong political and military action. But recent work on Jahangir and the Mughal political cul- ture of the period has put this emperor—his reign, court, and persona—at the heart of important historiographical developments. His capacity as collector, patron and naturalist, which was signaled before by art historians, has been further investigated. The richness of the political and religious debates tak- ing place in his court has been unearthed thanks to the analysis of new texts and the reconsideration of older ones. This is precisely where the research on Jahangir dovetails with the history of the Society of Jesus, namely through the prominent figure of Jerónimo (Jerome) Xavier, who in 1595 headed the third Jesuit mission to the Mughal court, and there remained for almost twenty years. This is likewise the point at which the Portuguese Tratado da Corte e Caza de Jamguir Pachá Rey dos Mogores (Treatise in the shorthand English form), prob- ably written by Xavier in late 1610 or early 1611, enters the discussion. I came across this intriguing text on Jahangir’s court and household about fifteen years ago, and explored it for the first time in the edited volume accom- panying the exhibition ‘Goa and the Great Mughal’, Calouste Gulbenkian Museum, Lisbon (2004).1 Ever since then, I have toyed with the idea of pub- lishing the Treatise—though academic careers are built on monographs, and not so much on the publication of primary sources. More and more during these past years I have become convinced of the benefit to the wider reading public of rendering the Treatise into English. My goal is to frame the work as an integral part of a large and complex web of contemporary texts and conversa- tions in, or about the court of Jahangir. These range from European Protestant and Catholic authors like William Hawkins, Jerónimo Xavier, Thomas Roe and Francisco Pelsaert to Central Asian and South Asian writers such as Mutribi, ʿAbdus Sattar, Keshavdas, and Jahangir himself. What is more, the figure of Xavier has been chiefly studied (and rightly so) as a missionary, and particularly as a religious intellectual invested in the pro- duction of texts in the Persian language concerning the Christian faith that 1 Jorge Flores, ‘Two Portuguese Visions of Jahangir’s India: Jerónimo Xavier and Manuel Godinho de Erédia’, in Jorge Flores and Nuno Vassallo e Silva, eds., Goa and the Great Mughal (London, 2004), 44–67 [48–56]. x prefAce could presumably ‘speak’ to Akbar and Jahangir. The recent English edition of the Cleveland Museum of Art illustrated copy of the Mirʾat al-quds (Mirror of Holiness) is a case in point. Notwithstanding, Xavier was also a homo politi- cus, and that is what the Treatise, if he ever penned it, tells us. He was in fact schooled in the Mughal court, and was a sharp observer of its ritualized power relations, shifting political and religious currents and social dynamics. He must have seen it (and experienced it) as a place both of high expectations and seri- ous dangers, just as his 1607 assessment of courtiers’ fortunes illustrates.2 At least in this regard—the exordia show it—Xavier is strikingly close to another observer of, and participant in the Mughal court, namely Mutribi. What the poet from Samarqand wrote some twenty years later about the potentially ‘toxic’ effects of the court differs very little from the Spanish missionary’s own judgment. To be too close to the ruler is to put oneself at risk, as they would probably agree.3 Oddly enough, I have decided to write a substantial introduction to con- textualize an early-seventeenth century text that, with its nineteen folios, is far from being long. While probing the Treatise word by word (and number by number . .), trying to make sense of its nature and rationale, its relationship with Mughal history and political culture, the history of the Jesuit mission to the Mogor, and the history of the Portuguese Asian Empire was of course pat- ent. Additionally, I came to understand that the task implied engaging with courtly studies, the intricacies of early modern political ethnography, as well as the history of the book and reading practices. The intersectionality of all these fields and research paths, which I aim at in the introduction, is as powerful as it is challenging.
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