“The World Conqueror”

Abstract

Abstract The ease with which Nur Jahan took control was as much a function of the personality of Jahangir as it was of her own clear sight and charisma. The man she married as her second husband, and with whom she spent more than a third of her adult life as consort, was an odd mix of traits often much at war. It has become commonplace to say that Jahangir had contradictory elements within his personality, that he was as Terry noted above both barbarously cruel and exceedingly fair and gentle, weak and yet amiable, and as given to scrupulous, severe, and exact behavior as he was to caprice and whim. Modern scholars, too, generally characterize Jahangir as a man of contrasts saying, for example, that he was a “strange mix of savagry and kindness,” a not altogether harmonious blend of whimsical temperamentalness and sympathy, or of intolerance and understanding. While the view that Jahangir was a man plagued by inconsistency is fair—great cruelty and random punishment did alternate with a love of justice and odd affections—these inconsistencies masked another, greater vision. The world peculiar to Jahangir grew, apparently, from a perspective that was clear and satisfying and that seemed, internally at least, to be as reasonable and coherent as any of those held otherwise.