Weighing the Mughal

Abstract

Twice a year, on his solar and his lunar birthday, the Indian Mughal was weighed before his entire court. For this occasion, many nobles and governors from the provinces came to the place where the Mughal held court. In this solemnity, the Mughal sat, richly clothed and with lots of jewellery, in a huge and sumptuous scale and was weighed several times: against money, against gold and jewels, a third time against precious clothes and spices, and then a last time against cereals, butter, and herbs. Afterwards, the precious items were given to the courtiers, and the money and food to the poor. If the Mughal weighed more than the year before, everybody was happy. Many travellers wrote about this special ritual, travellers who had actually been at the court and could thus observe this ceremony first-hand, such as the French Jean de Thevenot, Jean-Baptiste Tavernier and Francois Bernier, or Sir Thomas Roe, the first English ambassador at the Mughal court. The ritual was integrated into most of the compilations and in rather general texts about India, such as the ones written by Olfert Dappert (Asia, Oder: Ausfuhrliche Beschreibung Des Reichs des Grossen Mogols 1681) or Erasmus Francisci (Ost- und West-Indischer wie auch Sinesischer Lust- und Statsgarten 1668), as too into encyclopedias like Zedlers Universalexicon. The representation of the Mughal Empire in this single solemnity was also used in a different medium. One of the most famous and precious objects in the Grune Gewolbe (Green Vaults), the treasure chamber in Dresden, is the “Court in Delhi at the Birthday of the Great Mughal Aurangzeb” (Der Hofstaat zu Delhi am Geburtstag des Grosmughals Aurang Zeb), made by the goldsmith Johann Melchior Dinglinger between 1701 and 1707 on behalf of August the Strong, Elector of Saxony and King of Poland (Warncke 2004; Muller and Springeth 2000). This diorama consists of 165 small golden figures coloured with enamel and jewel-encrusted, depicting courtiers, servants, ambassadors with presents, exotic animals etc., and, in the centre, the Mughal Aurangzeb (who was still alive when Dinglinger started his work). This piece of art is not a fictional scene; Dinglinger referred in part to several travellers’ reports in order to make a true representation of the Mughal’s court, and as well he integrated aspects from other Asian courts to produce a representation of the whole of Asia. In the installation today, a huge set of scales is placed, rather forlornly, at the edge of the scene, whereas in the early eighteenth century it was situated near the Mughal and thus indicated the ritual of his weighing (Warncke 1989: 2156). It would seem that if someone wanted to accumulate all the knowledge available about the Mughal Empire and its governance in one scene, this ritual of weighing was the one chosen in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Today, as also in the late eighteenth and throughout the nineteenth century, this gorgeous Indian court life fits the picture of oriental lavishness. The image of India became homogeneous after the second half of the eighteenth century: the Mughal became one amongst the oriental despots, India the country of holy cows and snake charmers. This orientalistic interpretation and construction of the Mughal Empire, its government, as well as of the whole of India was very successful: older pictures and older knowledge were forgotten for a long time. While the impact of the Chinese experience on Europe was never totally forgotten and research on Chinese-European encounters has increased in recent decades (Osterhammel 1998; Appleton 1951; Hobson 2004), the Indian subcontinent stayed as a static world region in the shadow of historical research, at least in Germany.