The Planetary King

THE PLANETARY KING

Humayun Padshah Inventor and Visionary on Throne

Ebba Koch

THE PLANETARY KING

Humayun Padshah Inventor and Visionary on the Mughal Throne

Humayun, the son of Babur and the second Mughal ruler, reigned in Agra from 1530 to 1540 and then in Delhi from 1555 to 1556. Until now, his numerous achievements, including winning back the throne of Hindustan, have not been well recorded. Humayun neither wrote an autobiography nor had a historian to glorify him; the eccentric accounts of his historian Khwandamir elude general comprehension.

The Planetary King follows Humayun’s travels and campaigns during the political and social disturbances of the early sixteenth century. It delves into Humayun’ s extraordinary social and intellectual life; demystifies his magico-scientific world view, draws attention to his deep involvement with literature, poetry, painting, architecture, mathematics, astronomy, astrology, occultism and extraordinary inventions; and offers a new analysis of Humayun’s mausoleum as the posthumous sum of his visions and dreams.

Bringing this fascinating exploration to life in vivid detail, this volume includes hundreds of beautifully reproduced photographs and illustrations—from reconstructions of Humayun’s buildings to depictions of live events. The book accompanies the new site museum at Humayun’ s tomb created by the Aga Khan Trust for Culture upon the culmination of two decades of conservation work on the World Heritage Site.

With 273 illustrations.

THE PLANETARY KING

THE PLANETARY KING

Humayun Padshah Inventor and Visionary on the Mughal Throne

AgA K h A n TrusT for CulT ure

Ebba Koch

First published in India in 2022 by Mapin Publishing

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Text © Ebba Koch 2021.

Illustrations © as listed on pp. 377–78.

All rights reserved under international copyright conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording or any other information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

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ISBN: 978-93-85360-88-6

Copyediting: Emily Lane Proofreading: Ateendriya Gupta / Mapin Editorial Design: Gopal Limbad / Mapin Design Studio Production: Mapin Design Studio Printed in China

Front cover Sculpture of Humayun as Planetary King by Jill Watson, 2021.

Frontispiece Payag, Humayun Seated in a Landscape, c. 1650

Front and Back Endpapers Statues of Humayun, on the basis of Mughal paintings, by Jill Watson, 47 cm (ht), bronze, colours in oil paint , 2021. The seven figures of the Mughal emperor don the colour of the planetary lord of each day of the week: White for the Moon on Monday, red for Mars on Tuesday, blue/purple for Mercury on Wednesday, beige for Jupiter on Thursday, green for Venus on Friday, black for Saturn on Saturday, yellow for the Sun on Sunday.

Dedication

I dedicate this book to the memory of Sunil Kumar (1956–2021), a great historian and dear friend, with whom I talked about the sultans and the Mughals over thirty-six years.

Contents

Preface and Acknowledgements 8

Introduction 14

Part I: The Planetary King 17 Assessments of Humayun 18 Humayun’s Life 26

Part II: Humayun’s Inventions 76 Interests 78 Inventions 96 Humayun’s Court: Reality or Literary Utopia? 153 Humayun and the Construction of the Mughal Myth: The Emperor as Sun King 177 Humayun as Founder of the Mughal School of Painting 208 Humayun’s Buildings 229 Gardens and the Attitude to Nature 286

Part III: Humayun’s Tomb: Invention and Memorial of the Padshah 298 The Architect and the Key Design 303 The Garden and its Subsidiary Buildings 313 The Mausoleum 333

Conclusion 360 Glossary 362 Abbreviations 363 Bibliography 364 Sources of Illustrations 377 Index 379

Preface and Acknowledgements

The incentive to write this book came from my involvement in the project of a site museum for the tomb of Humayun in Delhi. In November 2014, Ratish Nanda, Director of the Aga Khan Trust for Culture (AKTC), India, asked me to join a group of conservation architects, historians, a photographer and a cultural activist, who were to conceptualize a programme for the museum beyond explaining the architecture of the amazing mausoleum and the buildings and sites around it. From our discussions, it emerged that a major focus should be on the ruler for whom the tomb was created, and that a substantial part of the museum should be dedicated to shedding light on this still-enigmatic and least-understood figure, second of the six Great Mughals, to make his life and achievements clearer to the general public and the historically minded visitor. To achieve this, Ratish Nanda assembled a team of dedicated young people, conservation architects, museologists and researchers, and invited me to be the advisor. Once set on the path of Humayun, I realized I had to lay aside once more my work on the palaces and gardens of Shah Jahan, the fifth ruler of the Mughal dynasty, and return to my research and thinking about his ancestor.

Humayun had previously occupied me in the context of my participation in the ‘Network of Comparative Empires: Romans, the Ottomans and Mughals in the Pre-Industrial World from Antiquity till the Transition to Modernity’, a pan-European academic initiative organized by the Danish historian of the Roman Empire Peter Bang and the British historian of India Christopher Bailey, between 2005 and 2009. Our meetings took place in various capitals of Europe and, in the last workshop at Rome in April 2009, I presented a paper on cosmic kingship jointly with Claire Sotinel, a French historian on the late Roman empire, in which I drew attention to Humayun’s inventions, his concept of sun-rulership and how they affected his successors. Reviving these ideas and trying to find out what made Humayun the great ‘other’ in Indian history led me to embark on an intellectual adventure that resulted in writing this book.

Geographically, it meant following the padshah’s travels and campaigns during the political and social disturbances of the early sixteenth century, which took him from his birthplace Kabul and from Badakhshan, the administrative district assigned to him in his youth, to large parts of the Indian subcontinent, to his exile in Iran (which turned out to be much briefer than generally assumed) and from there again back to Afghanistan, from where, after ten years of campaigning against his brothers, he was able to re-take the Mughal throne at Delhi. Trying to understand Humayun’s personality and works meant exploring and demystifying his extraordinary social and intellectual life; engaging with his magico-scientific world view, his deep involvement with the knowledge systems of his time, with literature, poetry, painting and architecture and with the sciences of mathematics, astronomy, astrology and occultism. And since my very own research

area is architectural history, this interdisciplinary venture inevitably led me to attempt a new analysis of Humayun’s mausoleum as the posthumous sum of his visions and dreams.

This book could not have been written without the help of many friends and colleagues. My first thanks go to Ratish Nanda for his encouragement and support of this project from its inception. Our common concern for the preservation and conservation of Mughal monuments has brought us together and, over the years, we have been engaged in continuous conversations about Mughal buildings. It was a joy to work with him and his team from 2014 to 2021 on Humayun’s Tomb Site Museum. The book was written during these years and profited greatly from the research, materials and site visits provided by this group, the composition of which changed repeatedly over the years. Here, I would like to mention especially Archana Saad Akhtar, programme officer of the AKTC, India; the architect Imran Khan, with whom I worked on the digital reconstruction of Humayun’s Mystic Palace and Floating Palace; the conservation architect Ujwala Menon; and the museologists and researchers Unnati Pawar, Dinesh Patial and Dipanvita Yadav.

The Indian architect Richard André Barraud, since 1982 a pillar of my ongoing project to survey and document Mughal buildings, prepared the drawings for the reconstruction of the other architectural inventions of Humayun that form a substantial part of the book.

I am extremely grateful to Wheeler Mcintosh Thackston, whose great editions and translations of the Persian sources of Humayun and Akbar were indispensable for writing the book. Beyond that, Wheeler read, transliterated and translated inscriptions related to Humayun, in what must have appeared to him never-ending emails across the Atlantic Ocean; he was always ready to answer questions and to help with difficult passages.

Sunil Sharma kindly provided a new translation of Shah Jahan’s poet Abu Talib Kalim’s poem on Humayun’s tomb.

Robert McChesney, who is the most selfless scholar I can think of, took time out from his own research for a close reading of the manuscript. I much appreciate his stimulating suggestions and detailed comments, and especially his corrections and homogenization of my transliterations from Persian and Arabic.

Joachim Deppert kindly provided Sanskrit transliterations and helped me with bibliographical references.

In these days when academics throughout the world are mourning for Sunil Kumar, it is with a heavy heart that I find words of thanks for the help he gave me for this book. For thirty-six years, he was a close friend and for me the main person to talk to about Indian history. We had

an ongoing dialogue about the sultans and the Mughals and how to reconcile the positions of historians and art historians. Sunil encouraged me to write this book, and even read the completed manuscript. A few days before his sudden passing away on 17 January 2021, he discussed it with me over the phone and offered very helpful thoughts for the conclusion. I dedicate the book to the memory of this great scholar, who in all ways was a most wonderful human being.

Special thanks go to the following who assisted me in one way or the other in putting this book together: Daud Ali, Peter Alford Andrews, Friedrich Teja Bach, Sheila S. Blair and Jonathan M. Bloom, Sonja Brentjes, Asok Kumar Das, Himanish Das, Britta Elsner, Jos Gommans, Narayani Gupta, Navina Haidar Haykel, Sameer Hamdani, Johannes Hartner, Cynthia HazenPolsky, the late Syed Mohammad Yunus Jaffery who worked with me for forty years on Mughal Persian sources, Max Klimburg, Benedikt Koch, Tilmann Kulke, Erich Lehner, the late J. P. Losty who passed away very unexpectedly when this book was nearing its completion, Charlotte Maury, Firuze Melville, Eva Orthmann, Elenea Paskaleva, Stephan Popp, Leonhard Reis, Velizar Sadovski, Ira Sarma, Florian Schwarz, Ursula Sims-Williams, Oliver Skelton, Thomas Ster, Susan Stronge and Benjamin Tindal. Jill Watson brought Humayun to life in the first sculpture ever made of a Mughal ruler, which features as the cover image of this book.

And last but not least, I would like to thank Emily Lane, whom I know from her days at the publishing house Thames & Hudson in London when she copyedited my book on the Taj Mahal. I had much enjoyed working with her then, the more so because of her knowledge and love of the Mughals whom she had come to know when living in India as an adolescent. I was glad to win her again for The Planetary King and appreciate her perceptive and patient attention to every detail.

Needless to say, I am to blame for the mistakes overlooked despite all this assistance.

Finally, I would like to thank my husband, Benno Koch, once more for his continuous support, technical help, and for taking care of most of the demands of our daily life, which gives me hours of free thinking, unhindered research and writing.

Note on Transliteration

The transliteration of Persian and Arabic terms follows in general the system of the International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, which allows one to accommodate the usages preferred by historians of India. One exception is that the silent final ‘h’ is not included here, as in Shāhnāma Names and terms of Turkic origin are usually given in their Persianized form, unless they are part of a quotation. Place names are given in their generally accepted English spelling where one exists, with the exception of Punjab, for which I prefer Panjab. Otherwise, I have largely kept to the spelling of place names used by Irfan Habib in his Atlas of the Mughal Empire. Arabic and Persian terms that have made their way into English dictionaries are not italicized and not transliterated (e.g., hammam, hadith, mihrab, qazi, qibla, shah, sheikh, Shia, Sufi, sura).

Ebba Koch

Vienna, January 2021

Map of Humayun’s journeys.

Pat

Garmser

Mashhad

Sultaniyya

Tabriz Qandahar

Balkh Herat

Takht-i-Sulaiman

Ardabil

Qazwin

Fig.

1

Introduction

Fig. 2 The Rulers of the Mughal Dynasty from Babur to Aurangzeb, with their Ancestor Timur, attributed to Bhawani Das, c. 1707–12. Timur occupies the centre. To the left is his son Miran Shah, then Abu Sa‘ id, ruler of Samarqand, and the Mughal rulers Babur, Akbar and Shah Jahan. To the right are Timur ’s grandson Muhammad Sultan, Timur ’ s son ‘Umar Shaikh, and the Mughal rulers Humayun, Jahangir and Aurangzeb.

“I always enjoy conversing about the Moguls. It is the chief pleasure I know. You see, those first six Emperors were all most wonderful men, and as soon as one of them is mentioned, no matter which, I forget everything else in the world except the other five.”

Dr Aziz, in E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India (1924)1

The founder of the Mughal dynasty, Babur, descended from the Asian conquerors Chingiz Khan and Timur. He and his successors were always prouder of their descent from the latter and saw themselves as Chaghatai-Timurids. For the people of India, however, they were ‘the Mongols’ (variously spelled Muggula, Mugilā and Mudgala).2 The Europeans followed suit and called them Grao Mogor, Groote Mogul, Great Moghul, Grand Mogol, or Großmogul.

The Mughal dynasty was perhaps one of the most glamorous and charismatic in the history of mankind (Fig. 2).3 It was a driving concern of the first six pādshāhs, usually translated as emperors,4 the Great Mughals, to construct their image for posterity and be remembered as great rulers. They were quite successful in this. Even in the twentieth century, there were voices that praised the Mughal emperors in the manner of their court eulogists: to the world–traveller, philosopher and enthusiastic interculturalist Count Hermann Keyserling, who was in India in 1911–12, they were ‘the grandest rulers brought forth by mankind’. Keyserling came to this conclusion because the Mughals ‘combined in their personalities so many diverse talents: they were men of action, refined diplomats, experienced judges of the human psyche, and at the same

1. I found this passage as motto of Jos Gommans’ book on Mughal Warfare (2002), and he had no problem with me using it here again.

2 See, e.g., the sixteenth-century sequel of Kalhaṇa’s Rājataraṅgiṇi, the history of Kashmir by Suka in Jonaraja 1898/1986, 426, 427. To give another example: Chattopadhyaya 1998, 46–47, mentions that Humayun was called Humāyu Mugilādhirājah by Rudrakavi, a poet from the south, in a historical text entitled Rāṣṭraud¸havaṃśa-mahākāvyam that he wrote in 1596; cf. Mudgala on his p. 30. Hemu, the Hindu general of the Surs, who fought against Akbar, swore that if he conquered the Mughals (لغم), he would become a Muslim: Bayazid 2009, 102, f. 88a. On the Mughal side, Akbar’s critical historian ‘Abd al-Qadir Bada’uni refers to the ruling élite as Moghuls: see Bada’uni 1884–1925/1973, vol. 2, 350.

3. The success, especially of the first rulers, of the Mughal dynasty seems to have been due to what the German social historian Max Weber called ‘charismatic authority’, as one of the three principles justifying the legitimacy of Herrschaft (rule) in his lecture ‘Politics as Vocation’: ‘But in addition [secondly], there is authority which is based on a special personal spiritual gift (charisma), and which is reflected in a personal dedication to, and a personal trust in revelation, heroism, or other traits characteristic of a Leader [Führer]. This kind of charismatically based Herrschaft was practiced by a prophet or—if you think in political dimensions—by a chosen warlord, or [in Rome] the popularly elected “Ruler,” the great demagogue, and the Leader of political parties.’ See Weber 2015, ch. 7, citation on p. 11.

4. In this book, I use ‘padshah’ for Babur and Humayun because they did not as yet rule over an empire as their successors did.

time aesthetes and dreamers’. He thought that such a ‘superior human synthesis’ (grossartige Menschheitsynthese) had not been manifest in any European king.5 And the art historian Stuart Cary Welch (1928–2008), who taught Indian painting at Harvard, exclaimed: ‘What would our lives be without those fascinating Mughals!’6

A few achievements for which the Mughals were widely acclaimed and endeared themselves to their admirers can be singled out. Babur (1483–1530, r. 1526–30) wrote his memoirs, which acquired the status of a dynastic textbook, a mirror of princes for his descendants. Today he is

5. Keyserling 1923, vol. 1, 233–34; cited previously in Koch 2006/2012, 14; Koch 2009, 294.

6. Personal communication in October 1985 on the occasion of India!, the exhibition that he curated in the Metropolitan Museum in New York.

admired for the candid recording of himself and the world around him: his autobiography has been regarded as one the most impressive works of the kind ever written.

Babur also became famous as a lover of nature and creator of gardens, which earned him the esteem of his colonial British observers, since his interests harmonized with their own cultural interests. His grandson Akbar (1542–1605, r. 1556–1605) was presented by the historian Abu’l Fazl (1551–1602) as the millennial hero7 of Muslim history: he entered modern awareness as a tolerant ruler and unifier of India, anticipating enlightenment and modern secularism. Jahangir (1569–1627, r. 1605–27), though less valued as a ruler, made a name as an autobiographer, a patron of painting and a scientist on the throne; his observations on ornithology and the gestation period of elephants are cited in the specialized literature today. Recent research has discovered ever more original and creative aspects of Jahangir, notably the interest he showed in the landscape and topography of his territories, as the first Mughal ruler to be born in Hindustan.8 Shah Jahan (1592–1666, r. 1628–58), the son and successor of Jahangir, had as his declared motto the Arabic saying asār-unā tadullu ‘alainā—‘Verily, our relics/artefacts tell of us’,9 and he realized that in the grand buildings raised during his reign, crowned by his chief success, the world-famous Taj Mahal (1632–43/48).

But what about Humayun, the son of Babur and second Mughal padshah (1508–56, r. in India 1530–40 and 1555–56)? He is chiefly remembered as a political and military failure, because he lost back to his rival, the Afghan Sher Shah, what Babur had conquered in India, and had to seek refuge in Iran and fight in Afghanistan to regain his throne at Delhi. He did not write his autobiography, nor had he a historian like his son Akbar’s Abu’l Fazl to glorify him; and what his historian Khwandamir recorded is so eccentric that it eludes general comprehension. To the wider public, Humayun is best known through his splendid tomb, erected by Akbar in Delhi between c. 1562 and 1571.

Who then was the Mughal padshah and man for whom the tomb was built?

7. Landes 2018: ‘Millennialism, millenarianism or chiliasm, the belief, expressed in the book of Revelation to John, the last book of the New Testament, that Christ will establish a 1,000-year reign of the saints on earth (the millennium) before the Last Judgment. More broadly defined, it is a cross-cultural concept grounded in the expectation of a time of supernatural peace and abundance on earth. … Islam, a “religion of revelation” that began as an apocalyptic movement anticipating the “Day of Judgment,” retains apocalyptic and millennial elements to this day, especially in Shī‘ite theology but also in many forms of popular religiousness. In particular, the mujaddid tradition, which foresees a “renewer” at the turn of every century of the Muslim calendar, is a form of apocalyptic messianism in its expectation of the coming of the mahdi.’ Encyclopedia Britannica, https://www.britannica.com/topic/millennialism (accessed 30 June 2020). Millennialism in the Muslim world has become a major issue in the academic debate; Moin 2012 even gave his book on Mughal kingship the title The Millennial Sovereign

8. See Koch 2017a; Balabanlilar 2020.

9. Lahauri 1866–72, vol. 1, pt 1, 149, transl. Nur Bakhsh 1903–04, 190–91.

part i

The Planetary King

Assessments of Humayun

Humayun is still less well understood than the other ‘Great Mughals’. His reign is generally framed within the notions of failure and exile. Azfar Moin wrote in 2012:

If Humayun was found wanting in politics, he certainly did not make up for it in cultural life, apart from his patronage of a few artists he brought with him from Iran and Kabul. Unlike his father, he did not compose a brilliant memoir or leave behind some other intellectual artefact of note. His alleged lack of political acumen and cultural accomplishment thus leads to easy contrasts between him and his father: more indolent than athletic, more sentimental than pragmatic, and more of an epicure than littérateur. Humayun’s greatest sin in modern eyes, it seems, was his deep interest in magic and astrology. Thus he receives mention today mainly for two things: for losing the fledgling Mughal empire in northern India to the Afghans and for the ‘strangeness’ of his beliefs.10

Ali Anooshahr added ‘unmanliness’ as an unfavourable judgement of the second Mughal padshah in historical sources of his own time, and argued that Humayun was and is regarded as unsuccessful because of his ‘indifference or failure to realise the importance of exerting direct control over his image’, as Babur did in writing his memoirs.11 This, as has been pointed out by Orthmann, is failing to see that Humayun was highly concerned about creating his image for posterity,12 but went about it in such new and unheard-of ways that it did not have the effect he hoped for.

The first and most vivid eyewitness to write about Humayun was his own father, Babur, in the Bāburnāma, the memoirs that were translated by Akbar’s courtier ‘ Abd al-Rahim Khan-i Khanan from Chaghatai Turkish into Persian (1589).13 Shaikh Zain al-Din Khwafi (hereafter Shaikh Zain Khan) (d. 1533–34), a close companion and admirer of Babur, wrote about his conquest of Hindustan in the Ṭabaqāt-i Bāburī, which also mentions Humayun’s actions at the time.14 Of Humayun as padshah we have several contemporary accounts: the Qānūn-i Humāyūnī (Institutions of Humayun) by the renowned Timurid historian Ghiyas al-Din Khwandamir (c. 1475–1535/36) from Herat, commissioned by the padshah in 1533 to record his inventions for posterity as a testimony of his reign. Khwandamir was born probably in Herat, into a family of high officials and scholars: his grandfather was the famous historian Mirkhwand. When still a young man, he was patronized by the great politician and author Mir ‘Ali Shir Nava’i, one of the luminaries of the last glorious age of Timurid culture created by the court of Sultan Husain

10. Moin 2012, 95.

11. Anooshahr 2008, 328.

12. Orthmann 2014, 5 and passim

13. Babur 1922/1972; Babur 1993; Babur 1996.

14. Zain Khan 1982. According to Ghani 1929/1983, 5, he was also one of the teachers of Humayun.

Bayqara (1470–1506). After the death of his patron in 1501, Khwandamir entered the service of Badi‘ al-Zaman, the eldest son of Sultan Husain, by whom he was employed in diplomatic missions to potential allies of the sultan, to ward off Uzbek claims on Khurasan. Khwandamir managed to maintain himself during the Uzbek invasion of Herat. After the Safavids had taken over the city in 1510, he lived as a retired scholar in Pasht near Herat, where he wrote his main work, Ḥabīb al-siyār, a universal history from the creation of the world to 930/1524, the year of its completion.15 In 1527, Khwandamir left his homeland and travelled by way of Qandahar to Agra, where he entered the service of Babur in 1528. After Babur’s death in 1530, Humayun was keen to keep the great historian at his court and employ him as the recorder of his own deeds. The Qānūn was Khwandamir’s last work. He died c. 1535–36. According to the historian Firishta, he was buried at his wish in Delhi near the tomb of the famous Chishti saint Nizam al-Din Auliya (hereafter also Nizam al-Din and Nizamuddin) and the poet Amir Khusrau.16 The Qānūn-i Humāyūnī is our chief source for the padshah’s works, which form the main subject of this book.17 Another eyewitness account is the Mirāt al-memālik by the Ottoman admiral and scholar Sidi ‘Ali Reis, who visited Delhi in autumn 1555 and wrote about his time with Humayun, shortly before the padshah’s fatal accident.18 One account is by Mirza19 Haider Dughlat (1499–1551), who was Babur’s first cousin on his mother’s side in the old Chingizid lineage of Moghulistan. In Tārīkh-i Rashīdi (completed in 1546), which he composed for Sultan ‘Abd al-Rashid Khan of Yarkand, Mirza Haider writes about how he came from Kashgar to India and joined Humayun in his campaign against the Afghan leader Sher Shah Sur in the summer of 1540, and how, after the battle at Kannauj was lost, he was sent to take Kashmir for the Mughals.20

15. The third volume of Khwandamir’s universal history, which deals with the Timurid era, has been translated into English by Wheeler Thackston; see ‘Khwandamir’ in Thackston 1989, 101–246.

16. The account of Khwandamir’s life is based on Hosain in Khwandamir 1940a, i–xvi. The tomb has not yet been identified.

17. Two manuscript copies of the work are known. One is BL, MS Or.1762, ff. 121–58; see C. Rieu, Catalogue of the Persian Manuscripts in the British Museum, vol.3, 1024, http://menadoc.bibliothek.uni-halle.de/ssg/content/ pageview/788730?query=manuscript (accessed 19 September 2020). The other is in the library of the Institute of Oriental Languages in St Petersburg; see Victor Rosen, Collections scientifiques de l’Institut des langues orientales, vol. 3: Les Manuscrits persans (St Petersburg, 1886), 142, no. 23, where it features under the title Humāyūnnāma: http://menadoc.bibliothek.uni-halle.de/ssg/content/pageview/856825 (accessed 19 September 2020). Prashad in Khwandamir 1940b, vi, refers to yet another manuscript mentioned by Beveridge in Gulbadan 1902/1972, 78 in the BM; it is the possibly BL, MS Or. 1762. The text edition of M. Hidayat Hosain was based on the manuscript in the BL and published by the Royal Asiatic Society in Calcutta in 1940. See Khwandamir 1940a, XXXIV–XXXV. 18. Reis 1899/1975.

19. Opinions about the use of the title ‘Mirza’ vary. See, for instance, Perry 1990; I thank Sunil Sharma for referring me to this article. Wheeler Thackston gave me his opinion about its use in the Chaghatai-Mughal context in an email dated 30 June 2020: ‘All those titles, mirza, beg, khan, etc. follow the name when used in the Turkish fashion. Some, like beg and khan, are almost always stuck in the Turkish manner and follow the name. Others, like mirza and shah, precede the name when used in the Persian fashion. As far as I have seen you can have Mirza Kamran and Kamran Mirza, and Shah Akbar and Akbar Shah, indiscriminately. What is true is that mirza began life as a princely title, amirzada [son or offspring of an amir], for descendants of Tamerlane and, like almost all titles, began a slow descent down the social scale until, by the nineteenth century, it designated ordinary scribes and secretaries. I had a look through the mirzas who appear in the Baburnama, and while all the Timurids are mirzas, not all mirzas are Timurids. The Dughlats and others get the title, and they were certainly not Timurids.’

20. Mirza Haider 1996, trans., 283–89.

Fig. 3 The Bala Hisar (‘High Fort’) of Kabul, founded c. fifth century AD.

Fig. 4 Surjiv, Babur Celebrating the Birth of Humayun in 1508 with a Great Feast for his Chiefs and Nobles, from the Tarīkh-i Khāndān-i Tīmūriyya, 1577–78.

Humayun’s Life

Humayun as Prince Nasir al-Din Muhammad Humayun (Defender of the Faith, Muhammad, the August/Royal/ Fortunate) was born as the first son of Babur by Maham/Mahim Begam on 4 Dhu’l-Qa‘da 913/6 March 1508 in the citadel of Kabul, which Babur used as a base for his campaigns to conquer Hindustan (Fig. 3).56 Maham Begam was related to Sultan Husain Bayqara, the last Timurid ruler of Herat. Babur had married her in Herat in 1506: he had come to the city after Sultan Husain’s death to condole with his sons. Maham Begam was also descended from Shaikh Ahmad-i Jam, known as Zhanda Pil, or less commonly Zhanda-fil (Colossal Elephant) (1048/49–1141), a distinguished Sufi saint of Khurasan.57 Babur celebrated the birth of Humayun (Fig. 4) and took it as the occasion to assume a new, more prestigious title: ‘Up to this time the descendants of Temür [Timur] Beg had been called mirza, even when they were ruling. At this time I ordered that they call me padishah.’58

FIG. 3

Humayun’s younger siblings were born in the following years from different wives of Babur. The siblings who were to play an important role in his life were his two brothers Kamran (born c. 1509/10) and ‘Askari (1516), whose mother was Gulrukh Begam, and his brother Hindal (b. 1519)

56. On the Kabul fortress called Bala Hisar, see Woodburn 2009.

57. Abu’l Fazl 2015, 389. See also Parodi 2011, who discusses this family relationship.

58. Babur 1996, 266.

Fig. 39 Basawan, The Supply Train of the Mughal Army Crossing a Bridge of Boats, from the Akbarnāma of Hamida Banu Begam, c. 1595–1600.

Fig. 40 At the top of the scene in Fig. 39 are camels carrying boxes, suggesting how Humayun’s library would have been transported.

Interests Books

Humayun was fond of his books, ‘his true companions (muṣāḥibān-i ma‘anavī) and always with him’,258 and Babur’s follower Shaikh Zain Khan describes him as ‘the true judge of books’.259 Humayun put his books on display in his Mystic Palace at Agra and during his peregrinations, he took a portable library, kept in wooden chests carried by special library camels (shutūr-i kitābkhāna) (Figs 39, 40).260 He was desolate when on his Gujarat campaign of 1535, during a raid by local tribes a precious Tīmūrnāma, a history of his ancestor Timur—which had been copied by the famous calligrapher Mulla Sultan ‘Ali and illustrated with paintings by the celebrated Timurid painter Bihzad—got lost. Abu’l Fazl says that it was recovered and kept in the library (kitābkhāna) of Akbar.261 This is taken to be the Ẓafarnāma of Sharaf al-Din ‘Ali Yazdi, now in Baltimore.262 Humayun’s reputation as a lover of books preceded him on his

FIG. 39

FIG. 40

258. Abu’l Fazl 2015, 430–31. Thackston translates it ‘spiritual companions’, but I prefer ‘true companions’.

259. Zain Khan 1982, 57–58; Adle 2000, 192–93, challenges ‘Askari’s translation of Zain Khan’s ṣadr al-kitāb as ‘true judge of books’ without providing a convincing alternative.

260. Adle 2000, 204–5; Bayazid 2009, 76.

261. Abu’l Fazl 2015, 430–31.

262. Soucek 1987, 166.

travels: when he left India as a refugee and entered Sistan, the brother of the governor of the province, Ahmad Sultan Shamlu, offered him several books, of which Humayun selected those he liked and returned the rest to the giver.263 And he was overjoyed when two camels carrying his ‘personal imperial books (kitāb-i khāṣṣa-i pādshāhī)’, which had been lost in 1550 at the battle of the Qipchaq Pass in present-day Afghanistan, turned up again, wandering without their drivers in the battlefield outside Kabul, which he had just taken back once again from his disloyal brother Mirza Kamran.264 When Humayun visited Bairam Khan at Qandahar in the early months of 1554, he presented the khan with a little book on astronomy (juzve dar ‘ilm-i hay’āt), found after some searching in a chest (ṣandūq) carried by the royal library camel.265 And when Humayun triumphantly returned to Delhi in 1555, one of the first buildings he constructed was a permanent home for his books, a library (kitābkhāna) in his palace of Dinpanah, identified as the so-called Sher Mandal in the Purana Qila, from the stairs of which he was to fall to his death.

Poetry

Humayun valued poetry; like his father, Babur, he was a poet and wrote in Persian and Turki. He recited suitable Persian verses on all occasions, and also composed a Dīwān 266 Here is one of his ghazals (love poems):

My fate has fallen with [has been decided by] a moon-faced beauty And fire has fallen into my heart. My house was brightened with the face of my beloved, From the moon-faced beauty has fallen a ray. In every direction my heart, O life, draws me, Since my heart has fallen to [become captive of] the attracter of hearts. The object of my heart I shall seize now When exhilaration (sar-khwush) has fallen into my hand. Do not seek reason and wit in me When Humayun has fallen into senselessness.267

Ghani says that Humayun wrote in several poetic forms—ghazal (short poem consisting of rhyming couplets), rubā‘ī (poem consisting of four lines), and masnawī (long rhyming poem usually associated with the didactic or romantic genres)—in a clear and simple style and also improved the verses of other poets.268 Creating and enjoying poetry was part of Timurid court culture: not only poets but also princes and nobles, scholars and scientists would compete

263. Bayazid 2009, 3.

264. Abu’l Fazl 2016, 330–31.

265. Bayazid 2009, f. 70b, transl. 76.

266. Abu’l Fazl 2016, 512–13; on Humayun as a poet, see especially Ghani 1929/1983, pt 2, 10–26 and passim; Ray 1948, 37, n. 4.

267. Ghani 1929/1983, pt 2, 10–11, gives the Persian text and a translation that I modified.

268. ibid., 23–26.

The Planetary King114 FIG. 58

Fig. 58 Horoscope of Iskandar Sultan, 1411.

Fig. 263 Corner of the tomb.

Fig. 264 The Afsarwala tomb, Delhi, 1560 s.

Fig. 265 Six-pointed star with lotus ornament in the spandrel of a pīshṭāq arch of the tomb.

FIG. 265

of brahmins, the priestly caste, and red stone for those of the kshatriyas, the warrior caste.1085 The synthesis of the two colours had an auspicious connotation. ‘White, it would seem, is opposed to red as the purity of the Brahmin is opposed to the ruling power of the Kshatriya.’1086 By adopting the use of white and red in their buildings, the Mughals represented themselves architecturally in the terms of the two highest levels of the Indian social system.1087 It is characteristic of their approach that they employed the symbolically highly charged colour dualism with studied rationality and intentionality in a much wider context than the Delhi sultans before them. Special accents in the façade of Humayun’s tomb are set by the facing of the spandrels of the large arches with buff sandstone, into which are set six-pointed stars in black stone; the pīshṭāq arches have in addition a projecting lotus ornament of white marble in their centre (Fig. 265). Geometric patterns in red and white stucco decorate the half-vaults of the niches surrounding the platform. However, within the overall Indian red and white philosophy of Humayun’s tomb, Timurid ornamental traditions were not forgotten. The tile-cladding of the small chhatrīs that accentuate the corners of the pīshṭāqs is a distinctly visible Timurid reference on the outside of the building.

The Interior

The interior is in the Timurid style. All the domes display the characteristic interweaving arched ribs in their transition zone. The large hall in the centre is a self-contained unit, which runs up

1085. Vishnudharmottara 1990, 268; also recommended are white and red clay for these castes, 271.

1086. Beck 1969, 559.

1087. Discussed previously by Koch 2000 and Koch 2006/2012, 215–17.

Ebba Koch, pre-eminent art and architectural historian, was a professor at the Institute of Art History in Vienna, Austria and taught at the universities of Oxford and Harvard. She specializes in the art and culture of the Great Mughals of South Asia and their artistic connections to Central Asia, Iran and Europe and is considered a leading authority on Mughal architecture. In 2016, Koch became the advisor to the Aga Khan Trust for Culture, India. She has published numerous papers in journals and volumes on Indian and Islamic architecture and art, which also address cultural issues of interest to political, social and economic historians.

Her volume The Complete Taj Mahal (2006/2012) has become the standard work on the subject. She recently edited together with Ali Anooshahr the collective volume The Mughal Empire from Jahangir to Shah Jahan (2019).

“This is a truly extraordinary book. It takes as its subject the personality and remarkable cultural achievements of the second and least appreciated of the six ‘Great Moghuls’, Humayun the son of Babur, and restores him to the place he rightfully should occupy as the founder of Mughal monarchic culture. Professor Koch has brought her unparalleled knowledge of Mughal history and artistic culture into a sharply penetrating focus on Humayun’s career and his many contributions to architecture, science, and literature besides his role in creating a Mughal ruling ideology. Particularly effective is the way in which so many aspects of Humayun’s cultural legacy are brought together into a unified whole and how those aspects were then adopted and adapted by his successors.”

R. D. McChesney Professor Emeritus, New York University