It is one April night in the year 1606, as the stars glitter high above Agra, the royal city by the Yamuna. A band of horsemen slips out of the city, led by none other than Prince Khusrau. Perhaps he has been tipped-off that his life is at threat – in any case, the tension between him and his father has reached boiling point. Having already plundered sections of the city, the small company wheels northwest, riding hard for the plains of Punjab and its great capital Lahore. So begins Khusrau’s rebellion.
That very night, the emperor Jahangir takes stock and sets the gears of imperial might in motion. Shortly thereafter, two armies set out in pursuit of the flying prince and engage his ragtag forces at Bhairowal. Victory is swift and Khusrau is quickly captured. The emperor’s punishment is vicious: Lahore’s residents are rounded up, their houses sacked; hundreds of rebels are mercilessly impaled; the Sikh Guru Arjun Singh is tortured and executed; the prince himself is taken back to be imprisoned at Agra. The following year, when another plot surfaces, he is finally blinded by Jahangir. Many years later, Khusrau is grudgingly handed over to his younger brother Khurram, in whose tender care the wretched prince mysteriously dies.
This sequence nicely sketches the intra-familial violence that was part of the Mughal dynasty, albeit the most brutal examples thereof. What was then the justification given for such princely rebellions and fratricides?
The Islamic cultural-judicial milieu of Mughal India was rife with exhortations of loyalty to those in power, respect towards the old, and maintenance of civil order. From popular tales to certain Sufi treatises, from akhlaq literature to the Islamic jurisprudential corpus: all promoted these ideas. Although legal exceptions certainly abounded, the bar was set high for challengers of imperial power.
In the face of this vilification of princely defiance, princes felt compelled to offer justifications to their audience: the nobility, the ulama, and the broader public. Their explanations are closely related to the appanage system.
Before 1585, princes were granted a fixed territory of the empire – appanages - which they governed semi-independently (according to the Chaghatai tradition). But as Mughal rule expanded and rapidly acquired an imperial cast, these appanages became increasingly intolerable. Both Humayun and his successor Akbar had to militarily contend with rival kinsmen for years, especially Humayun, for whom such infighting led to the dynasty’s brief overthrow by the Afghan Suris. Eventually, however, both emperors steadily did away with such opponents – one of the factors that increased the emperor’s personal power (as opposed to being merely first-among-equals). With Akbar’s sons emerging onto the imperial spotlight, the emperor was determined to get rid of this source of instability. Therefore, in 1585, the custom of princely appanages was finally abolished.
This had important repercussions. Given that Akbar had also long striven to ensure that his sons be the sole focus of the succession system, the end of appanages introduced the new expectation that each son had an equal claim to the empire upon the emperor’s death.
Denied an automatic slice of the pie, the princes now began cultivating support networks and maintaining powerful households in anticipation of the inevitable succession struggle. For favored sons, this conflicted with heightened expectations of loyal service to the emperor. Many found this balancing act frustrating, which boiled over into anger, especially when their fathers felt threatened by their strength and sought to leash them. The princes claimed this was interference in their patrimonial right to rule the empire, and so justified their revolts.
This flew in the face of norms of loyalty to the emperor. Having a royal family’s reputation to maintain, imperial chronicles accordingly tended to downplay the role of the princes in such revolts. Various accounts from the Jahangirnama to the Muntakhab ul-Lubab, for instance, condemn individuals in Khusrau’s inner circle as “mischief-makers,” “creators of discord,” and “enemies of friendship.” Khusrau is described as “simple-minded,” “short-sighted,” “easily misled,” and “inexperienced,” painting him as someone easily manipulated. Similarly, the 'Alamgirnama, although particularly harsh in its treatment of Muhammad Sultan’s rebellion, blames it mostly on the prince’s immaturity and ignorance.
Other sources revile specific individuals, as in the case of the grand vizier Abu’l Fazl in Salim’s rebellion. The Ma’asir al-Jahangiri describes him as a “rebel” who poisoned the emperor’s mind. Of Nur Jahan, multiple sources of Shah Jahan’s reign accuse her of fomenting enmity between him and his father Jahangir, and using the latter’s illness to secure power.
Additionally, these accounts shy away from the word “fitna” – a particularly incendiary term for civil strife – preferring instead softer terms such as “disruption,” “disobedience,” and “rebellion” to describe princely revolts. Of course, where non-princely actors are concerned, they have no qualms against liberally applying the word, as in the case of Mahabat Khan’s failed coup.
A curious case occurs at the end of Shah Jahan’s reign. The emperor had fallen ill, failing to appear in court for a week. Believing him to be near death, his four sons lost no time in turning on each other. Awkwardly, however, the emperor recovered after two months – yet the fighting could not now be stopped. In due course, then, when Prince Aurangzeb arrived in Delhi, fresh from two military victories, he found Shah Jahan alive and well – much to his consternation. For a person professing piousness, the prince found himself in a markedly unenviable position – as usurpation was forbidden by Islamic law.
Aurangzeb recovered quickly. Confining his unfortunate father to the Red Fort – where he was to spend the rest of his years – the prince summarily proceeded to crown himself. Since Shah Jahan’s chief qaḍi refused to sanction his accession, Aurangzeb stripped him of his position and consulted the more obliging Abdul Wahhab. This upstart declared that Shah Jahan was physically unfit to govern, making the throne practically vacant, meaning that the prince’s accession was not un-Islamic. In return for these services, Abdul Wahhab was made chief qaḍi and went on to have a spectacularly corrupt career.
(How Khusrau must have chortled in glee beyond the grave: seeing his old rival ousted by his own son.)
As for the fratricides, well, Khurram certainly did not openly kill Khusrau. He claimed it was colic; though hardly anyone believed him, least of all Jahangir, who punished the unruly prince by reassigning his jagirs in a punitive manner. For this, Khurram went into revolt and was soundly trounced – but that’s another tale.
Though Khurram did not stop with just his brother. Upon Jahangir’s death, he ordered Asaf Khan, Nur Jahan’s powerful brother and his staunch ally, to have the other potential candidates killed. This ghastly deed was done and in January 1628, Khurram’s step-brother Shahryar, his two nephews of Khusrau’s seed, and his two cousins all met their wretched ends. No justification was offered the public.
More infamous, though somewhat less bloody, was Aurangzeb’s execution of Dara Shikoh, the emperor’s erstwhile favourite and his bitter rival. More, he turned on Murad, handing him over to his enemies, who duly had him tried and executed. (Shuja managed to flee to Bengal.) Like his father, Aurangzeb killed two of his brothers; yet unlike his father, he left in peace those of his family who had not participated in the succession struggle.
Even more, Aurangzeb obtained legal sanction, trying Dara as a heretic and a danger to the state. For Murad’s execution, the charge was a prior murder, which the betrayed prince resignedly accepted. Interestingly, later scholars, like Khafi Khan in the Muntakhab ul-Labab, would declare that Murad’s death was necessary by citing a verse of the celebrated poet Sa’di, much quoted by Babur, which asserted that two kings cannot be contained in a single kingdom. Babur’s exhortations of fraternal forgiveness they conveniently ignored.
Moving on to a cheerier topic: the usage of intoxicants was widespread in the Mughal imperial circle as well as among their subjects, having a rich tradition reaching back to the Central Asian kingdoms and the mighty Abbasids. Babur viewed drinking and drug parties as an opportunity for the ruler to socialise: forging personal bonds with their followers, nurture social camaraderie, and let close followers affirm their loyalty. Jahangir, a well-known wine addict, cursorily offers a similar defence in his memoirs – ironic, given that he repeatedly issued edicts prohibiting the distilling and sale of intoxicants (not that they saw much success.) Jahangir also sought justification from Hafez’s verses, the audacious Sufi poet known for his delinquency.
Yet as the imperial persona became dyed with ever more dignity and distance, mention of drinking at court decreased. Shah Jahan, for example, was not known to be a public drinker, though rumours whirled in his later years.
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