Jahangir

The Jahangirnama is unlike other Mughal court histories because the emperor wrote it himself and put in what interested him: the weather, animals dissected out of curiosity, his opium and his wine, and a running record of the holy men he went to see. He describes repeated visits to the Hindu ascetic Jadrup, sitting with him in a pit dug into a hillside and discussing what he had learned, and he continued his father practice of receiving Jesuit priests, Sufi shaikhs and Jain teachers at court.

The painting is where the theology becomes explicit, because he commissioned images that argue. In one, he is enthroned on an hourglass handing a book to a Sufi shaikh while a Turkish sultan and a European king wait below, and an inscription says that although kings stand before him he looks to the holy men. In another he embraces the Safavid shah in a dream of concord neither ruler had in fact achieved. These are not records of events. They are statements about what kingship is for, made in a medium the court controlled completely, and they are among the clearest surviving evidence of how a Mughal emperor wanted his religious position understood.

The memoir records his own religious position as well. He kept up the practice of taking chosen officers as personal disciples, an arrangement his father had begun, in which a courtier received a small portrait of the emperor to wear and accepted a set of obligations toward him. It is a striking hybrid: a Sufi form of attachment between master and follower, used to bind a service elite to a monarch, and one of the clearest examples anywhere of Mughal court religion being invented rather than inherited.

In 1606 the fifth Sikh Guru, Arjan, died in Mughal custody at Lahore. The emperor own memoir records his decision against Arjan, taken after the Guru had been connected with his rebellious son Khusrau, and the details of what followed in custody are reported differently in different traditions. Sikh accounts remember it as a martyrdom and treat it as the first of the tradition, and the atlas records both the imperial notice and the Sikh reading rather than harmonising them.

What followed changed the community. Arjan son Hargobind is remembered as having taken up two swords at his succession, standing for miri and piri, temporal and spiritual authority together, and as having built the Akal Takht facing the Harmandir Sahib at Amritsar, a seat from which worldly matters could be decided. The Sikh community began to arm and to organise, and the sequence that runs through the execution of the ninth Guru under Aurangzeb to the founding of the Khalsa has this reign at its head. It is worth setting that beside the picture in the first article. Personal curiosity about other religions and lethal action against a particular movement sat in the same ruler without either cancelling the other, which is a more useful fact about religious politics than either half on its own.