Regarding Jahangir, Emperor of India: "All sorts of religions are welcome and free, for the King is of none"

by Guest Sat Mar 25, 2017 9:53 pm

From the chapter on Jahangir in Bamber Gascoigne's "The Great Moghuls":

Historians of a schoolmasterly disposition have tended to award Jahangir very low marks as being debauched, spineless, and susceptible to women, but he is among the most sympathetic of the Great Moghuls, and was--at least in cultural matters--one of the most talented. Certainly no other member of his family comes alive so vividly to a modern student. There are two reasons specifically for this, and both are the direct result of Jahangir's own talents and energies.

The first is that he has left a diary which is just as fresh and immediate as the autobiography of his great-grandfather Babur; and the second that under his direct guidance the court painters reached unrivalled heights, particularly in portraiture with the result that the personality of the emperor himself remains exposed to us in a wide range of subtly realistic studies.It is a most unjust accident of history that Babur's memoirs should be so famous and Jahangir's almost unknown. Admittedly Babur, writing in a period when other chronicles were scarce, has an extra value as a unique source for many facts and dates, but on any other score Jahangir is at least his equal.

Jahangir inherited his curiosity from his father...his distinction is his fierce emperical rationalism combined with an almost ecstatic response to simple facts of nature, as when he marvles at a tree in blossom and then, as he looks more closely, marvels equally at a single blossom on that tree. The Emperor would have found himself much in sympathy with the scientific gentleman who, many thousand miles away and some thirty years after his death, gathered together in London to form the Royal Society...It is typical of his rational skepticism that when he visits a tomb where miracles are said to occur, his first question to the attendant is 'What is the real state of affairs?'...a long tale about the philosopher's stone leads him to the instinctive conclusion 'My intelligence in no way accepts this story. It appears to me to be all delusion.'...

The memory of his father dominated Jahangir the Emperor as much as Akbar himself had dominated Salim the crown prince...He deliberately received with favor the disciples of Akbar's religion, recounted with approval in his diary the principles of the din-i-Ilahi and the need to 'follow the rule of universal peace with regard to religions' and continued Akbar's Thursday evening discussions. He encouraged the Jesuites at least as much as Akbar and his favourite holy man was a Hindu ascetic named Jadrup whom he loved to visit whenever possible for long discussions in the 'narrow and dark hole' cut into a hillside where the hermit lived without mat or fire and naked except for his loin cloth.

But Jahangir's religious attitudes were largely matters of impulse where Akbar's had been of policy. His tolerance of other religions derived from the receptive quality of his mind, but a shock of aesthetic disgust could well make him behave quite inconsistently--as when at the lake of Pushkar, a holy place to the Hindus, he was deeply offended by the sight of an idol, a 'form cut out of black stone, which from the neck above was in the shape of a pig's head, and the rest of the body was like that of a man'.* So he ordered his followers to 'break that hideous form' and throw it into the water, and for good measure disposed too of the local belief that there is no bottom to the lake by establishing it to be 'nowhere deeper than 12 cubits'...It is interesting that Roe** describes him in words which read as if written about Akbar:"His religion is of his own invention; for he envies Mahomett, and wisely sees no reason why he should not be as great a prophet as he, and therefore proffesseth himself so...he hath found many disciples that flatter or follow him...all sorts of religions are welcome and free, for the King is of none."

Jahangir could be monstrously unpredictable and cruel--particularly under the influence of alcohol, as when he gave instructions one evening for his companions to drink with him, forgot the next morning that he had done so and punished the less powerful among them most brutally for indulging themselves--but for the most part he was unusually mild and he is described in European accounts as 'gentle, soft of disposition' or 'gentle and debonaire'. Roe was highly impressed by the courtesy which he always received from Jahangir; and the emperor's charm can be seen again and again in the ambassador's pages.

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* Varah avataar or boar avataar is one of the avataars of Vishnu

**Sir Thomas Roe--British Ambassador at Jahangir's court