Mughal Emperor Jahangir as a logician and scientist

by Guest Tue Apr 11, 2017 6:14 pm

Pragmatic and a firm believer in reason, Jahangir had not the slightest trace of
gullibility. "This is so strange, it is recorded here," he is fond of commenting, or, "It
does not accord with reason, and my mind does not accept it." Of course, he had his
prejudices and blind spots too. Although he was religiously tolerant, his tolerance did
not extend to religious chicanery of any stripe: he dealt summarily with a self-styled
guru whose actions had displeased him (page 59), he drove a yogi away and had his
idol smashed (page 153), and he imprisoned a famous Muslim divine who thought too
highly of himself (page 304). At the same time, however, he was devoted to and
believed implicitly in saints' tombs and the efficacy of holy men's prayers, particularly
those he thought had brought about his birth. A child of his age, he also believed in
astrology and was careful to give alms to ward off the inauspiciousness that could be
occasioned by an infelicitous conjunction of planets (page 111).

There are few instances in the memoirs of the sort of fickle "oriental despotism" popular imagination
might have one expect, and the one occasion on which he had one of his grooms killed
for a relatively minor offense (page 106) will strike the reader as astonishingly unchar-
acteristic, for another time, when his servants, terrified by a lion, knocked him down
and ran right over him — "in the rush I was knocked back one or two paces. I know for
certain that two or three of them stepped on my chest getting over me" (page 117) —
his reaction was quite restrained. Although he was an avid hunter and took great pride
in maintaining an accurate count of the vast numbers of animals he bagged, he also
extended his father's injunction against the slaughter of animals and encouragement of
meatless days to two days a week and to a period of days equal to the number of his
years at every birthday.

Jahangir was fond of "scientific" experiments of his own devising. He debunked the
accepted reason for the mountain sheep's pugnacity (page 65),- he tested the reported
efficacy of bitumen for broken bones on a chicken and found that it had none (page
143f),- he tested the relative salubrity of the air in Ahmadabad and Mahmudabad by
banging sheep carcasses in each city to see which carcass would putrefy sooner (page
274f); he took an active interest in animal husbandry and goat breeding (page 302),- he
determined the gestation periods for elephants with nearly correct results (page 160),-
and he examined a lion's and wolf's livers to see whether their gall bladders were inside
or outside the liver as a measure of courage (pages 207 and 213).

https://archive.org/stream/jahangirnamamemo00jaha/jahangirnamamemo00jaha_djvu.txt

by Guest Tue Apr 11, 2017 7:14 pm

The Royal Society was established in England only a few decades after Jahangir's death. Jahangir would have surely enjoyed interacting with the scientists who comprised the membership of the Royal Society. In particular, Jahangir would have enjoyed conversing with Sir Issac Newton

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Mughal Emperor Jahangir as a logician and scientist

Mughal Emperor Jahangir as a logician and scientist

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