Jahanara Begum

Jahanara Begum (1614 – 16 September 1681) was a Mughal princess, the eldest surviving daughter of Emperor Shah Jahan and Mumtaz Mahal ^{1 2}. On her mother's death in 1631 she took charge of the imperial seal and the title Padshah Begum, first lady of the empire, at seventeen, and she was described as the most powerful woman in the empire of her time ¹. She was also a Sufi of the Qadiriyya order and an author whose writings remain a primary witness to her spiritual life ^{1 3}. The sources divide on her birth day — 23 March 1614 in the English article, 2 April 1614 in the Arabic and Urdu articles — and the record preserves both ^{1 2}.

Educated by Sati al-Nisa Khanam in Quran, Persian literature, etiquette and medicine, Jahanara grew into her father's most trusted counsellor ^{1 2}. She held the imperial seal, issued farmans in her own right, attended councils from behind her screen, received the revenues of the port of Surat, owned trading ships and dealt with the English and the Dutch ¹. In March 1644 she was gravely burned when her perfume-soaked garments caught fire, and recovered only after a year ^{1 3}. Her charity was institutional — almsgiving on state holidays and festivals, famine relief, rice sent yearly to the poor of Mecca on her ship the Sahibi, and a madrasa attached to the Jama Masjid of Agra, which she funded entirely herself in 1648 ^{1 3}. In Shahjahanabad she commissioned five of the eighteen buildings raised by women in the new capital, including the caravanserai on Chandni Chowk ¹.

Along with her brother Dara Shikoh, Jahanara was a disciple of Mullah Shah Badakhshi, who initiated her into the Qadiriyya Sufi order in 1641 ^{1 3}. She advanced so far on the path that Mullah Shah would have named her his successor in the order, had its rules allowed it ^{1 3}. She described her initiation in her own Risala-i Sahibiyya, a biography of her master, and wrote the Munis al-Arwah, a biography of Muinuddin Chishti, the founder of the Chishti order in India, whom she regarded as her spiritual master though he had died four centuries before her ¹. In her writings she called herself a faqirah, a poor woman of God, and she made the pilgrimage to his shrine at Ajmer ^{1 3}. It is on this attested, completed discipleship — not on the Mughal court's dynastic religion — that her faith is recorded as sufi ³.

In the war of succession of 1657–1658 Jahanara stood with Dara Shikoh and shared her father's confinement in the Agra Fort; her proposal to partition the empire among the brothers was refused by Aurangzeb, and her sister Roshanara replaced her as Padshah Begum ¹. She nursed Shah Jahan until his death in 1666, then reconciled with Aurangzeb, who restored her titles, raised her allowance and sought her counsel — which she gave freely, arguing against his austerity measures and against the reimposition of the poll tax on non-Muslims in 1679 ¹. She died on 16 September 1681 and lies in the open-to-the-sky marble tomb she had built in her lifetime in the Nizamuddin Dargah complex in Delhi, Aurangzeb giving her the posthumous title Sahibat-uz-Zamani, Mistress of the Age ^{1 3}.