Attendant Lords: Bairam Khan and Abdur Rahim, Courtiers and Poets in Mughal India

390 Pages·2018·2.03 MB·English

by  T.C.A. Raghavan

ATTENDANT LORDS
BAIRAM KHAN AND ABDUR RAHIM
COURTIERS & POETS IN MUGHAL INDIA
T.C.A. RAGHAVAN
To the memory of my parents
T.C.A. Srinivasa Varadan
T.C.A. Nayantara
No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;
Am an attendant lord, one that will do
To swell a progress, start a scene or two,
Advise the prince …
—T. S. Eliot, ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufock’
CONTENTS
Introduction
1. Bairam
2. The Young Noble
3. The Senior Commander
4. The Deccan
5. The Twilight Years
6. Afterlife: Rahiman and Abdur Rahim
Epilogue
Notes
Index
Acknowledgements
About the Book
About the Author
Praise for the Attendant Lords
Praise for The People Next Door
Copyright
INTRODUCTION
THIS BOOK is about the lives of two noblemen in Mughal India: Bairam Khan
Khan-i-Khanan (c. 1497–1561) and his son Abdur Rahim Khan-i-Khanan
(1556–1626). In any period and in any country, these would have been
extraordinary men. Bairam was a Persian Turkmen, scion of a distinguished clan
that was influential in Persia and Central Asia in the fifteenth century. He stands
out in Mughal history as the regent of the empire for five years after the premature
death of Emperor Humayun, when Akbar was still a child and too young to rule.
Bairam’s son, Abdur Rahim, became one of the great generals of the Mughal empire
and a premier noble during the reigns of Akbar and Jahangir. Abdur Rahim’s
political and military achievements surpass his father’s, but he is best remembered
for his literary prowess. He was one of the great patrons of Persian literature of his
time; in the history of Hindi literature, he has an even greater reputation as an
outstanding poet in a century of literary achievement. Between them, the father and
son straddled some hundred years of Mughal history in India, living through the
reigns of four emperors, and their spectacular and turbulent trajectories reflect both
the grand designs and the destructive courtly intrigues of Mughal politics.
In the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries Bairam Khan and Abdur Rahim
stood at the confluence of the faiths of Islam and Hinduism. It was a defining time
elsewhere too. In Europe, Protestant–Catholic conflicts were raging; Luther and
Calvin were advocating an open defiance of centuries of established Roman
Catholic doctrine. In England the great Tudors, Henry VIII and Elizabeth I, were
laying the foundations of future English maritime and commercial dominance.
Kepler, Copernicus, Galileo and Shakespeare were reshaping ideas of science and
literature. In northern India too this was the age of a great literary and spiritual
effervescence as under the Mughals, India once again entered the age of a
centralized empire. With the poet saints Tulsidas and Surdas, a spiritual community
of devotion to the Hindu gods, Rama and Krishna, was consolidated and
simultaneously Braj Bhasha and Avadhi were transformed from the status of dialects
to the maturity of full-fledged languages. If the devotional verses of these poets
catalysed this transformation, secular – largely courtly and sensuous – poetry such as
of the great Keshavdas played an equally significant role in the literary revolution in
north India in the sixteenth century. Literature plays some part in our story too, for
both Bairam Khan and Abdur Rahim regarded literary achievement as a means to
political status as well as a vital adjunct in its consolidation.
An account of these two lives, substantial and extraordinary though they
undoubtedly were, would nevertheless be incomplete if we stopped with their life
stories. The shadows of Bairam Khan and Abdur Rahim touch our times as well:
these real-life medieval figures have been transformed into templates; their lives
celebrated in numerous ways through association with significant milestones or
other icons from history. In these narratives, literary enterprise, history, language
and religion are inextricably combined within a broader context of nationalism and
nation building, as answers to the dilemmas of the present are sought in the
perceived certainties of the past.
Above all, this is a story of life and politics in Mughal India. Bairam Khan and
Abdur Rahim Khan-i-Khanan were powerful men at the heart of the Mughal court.
Their great military feats, political acumen and their closeness to successive
emperors brought them great rewards and enviable positions, yet they were prey to
all the jealousies and betrayals, ideological and religious contests and controversies
that the acquisition of power and the loss of it inevitably brings, no matter in which
century or country. Their personal tragedies still resonate each time an act of
miscalculation, or misjudgement, or the outmanoeuvring by a rival, or the simple
arbitrariness of power takes its toll.
1
BAIRAM
AS DUSK fell on the last day of January 1561, an ageing nobleman was boating in
the Sahasralinga Talav, on the outskirts of Patan. His bearing was
distinguished; even in a boat, his air of authority was apparent. Yet, the entourage
waiting on the bank of the lake was quite small. He had spent some time sitting in
the small pavilion at the centre of the lake, but now he was being rowed back to the
bank.
As his boat approached, a group of men – Afghans by their appearance – came
forward to pay their respects. The noble obviously found this unsurprising and
directed the boatman towards them, some fifty yards away. The man at the head of
the Afghan group greeted the nobleman courteously as he alighted from the boat.
As they embraced, the Afghan unsheathed a dagger and planted it in the nobleman’s
back with such force that it pierced right through, emerging from the breast.
Another Afghan struck with a sword to the head. Death came instantaneously, but
one source describes the nobleman, blood gushing from his wounds, reciting the
words of the Shahadat as he lay dying: there is no God except Allah and
Muhammad is his Prophet.
The life of Bairam Khan, Emperor Humayun’s most trusted general and
Emperor Akbar’s regent, ended that evening on the banks of the Sahasralinga Talav
in Patan, Gujarat. A Turkmen by birth, his eminent position during the last decade
of Humayun’s life and in the early years of Akbar’s reign is recorded frequently in
the miniatures painted to illustrate contemporary milestones. The most dramatic is,
naturally, a representation of the assassination. We see the Afghans outnumbering
Bairam Khan’s small entourage; his followers fleeing in disarray; his camp, some
distance away, attacked and plundered; his body unguarded and untended by the
lakeside (see Plate I).1
Bairam Khan’s tumultuous life and tragic end constitute one of the most dramatic
narratives of the Mughal era. He was the faithful friend and counsellor of the
second emperor, Humayun, and was guardian to the third, Akbar, after Humayun’s
premature death in 1556. As regent, he was responsible for the consolidation of the
empire after the second battle of Panipat. Bairam’s fall from favour and his tragic
end in Patan on the shores of the Sahasralinga Talav were in some ways a fitting end
to his life, the tragedy and pathos of the concluding drama giving a certain
completeness to the story.
If the milestones of Bairam’s life are well known, the details of the journey are
less so. It is with Bairam’s patrimony, therefore, that we begin this story; indeed, his
foremost modern biographer begins by saying: ‘Bairam Khan was no novus homo: he
had a great ancestry.’2 This background remained a determining factor throughout
his life; his rise to greatness was, to his contemporaries and biographers alike, a
consequence of his patrimony. He belonged to the Baharlu clan of the major tribal
confederation of the Qara Qoyunlu, which reached its greatest power and spread –
stretching over parts of present-day Iraq, Afghanistan, Persia and Azerbaijan – in the
mid-fifteenth century during the reign of Mirza Jahan Shah (1437–67). The great
rivals of the Qara Qoyunlu were the Aq Qoyunlu; their conflicts and contests
dominated a large part of the fifteenth century in that region. A sectarian edge
provided an added dimension to this rivalry: the Aq Qoyunlu were Sunni, the Qara
Qoyunlu were Shia. The Aq Qoyunlu fared better in the great rivalry and after
Jahan Shah, the Qara Qoyunlu were never in a position to assert control over a large
dominion of their own.
One of the most prominent tribal leaders of Jahan Shah’s court was Ali Shukur
Beg of the Baharlu clan.3 Successive defeats suffered by the Qara Qoyunlu and the
Baharlu forced Ali Shukur Beg’s sons and grandsons to seek service in the courts of
other princes. Linked by numerous ties of marriage with the family of Jahan Shah,
Ali Shukur Beg’s children were also married into prominent Timurid noble families
and, most notably from our point of view, into the family from which Babur was
descended. Ali Shukur Beg’s grandson Yar Ali Beg and his son Saif Ali joined
Babur’s service, beginning a connection that saw their descendants, Bairam Khan
and Abdur Rahim, serve Babur’s descendants – Humayun, Akbar and Jahangir – for
almost a century. Abul Baqi Nihavandi, Abdur Rahim’s contemporary and – some