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At court in Agra, the meena bazaar for the Nowruz festival was the ideal occasion for flirtations. Mihr al-Nisa was thirty-four, a widow with a daughter; Jahangir was already fifty-one with fifteen wives and a packed harem, but ‘I didn’t think anyone was fonder of me.’ This astute Persian, raised in Kandahar, was not only tempestuous, lithe and beautiful, fluent in Persian and Arabic, but also fun. She loved to paint with a drink in her hand, and she was a crack markswoman who once shot four tigers from an elephant, using only six bullets, without a miss. ‘Such shooting had never been seen,’ wrote Jahangir; ‘the four tigers never got a chance to spring.’ An English merchant once saw the couple riding gaily into a hunting camp together on a cart, alone, with the emperor driving.

In 1612, after their wedding – at which he gave her the name Nurmahal, Light of the Palace, later promoted to Nurjahan, Light of the World – they arranged the match of his disciplined, abstemious third son Khurram (later Emperor Shahjahan) to her niece Arjumand Banu, who was as erudite and charming as her aunt. Khurram had been the favourite grandson of Akbar, who named him Joyful then took him from his Rajput mother and had him raised by his childless senior wife Ruqaiya, who ‘always promoted him’, and told Jahangir ‘there was no comparison between him and my other children’. Akbar ‘regarded him as his real child’, while Ruqaiya loved him ‘a thousand times more than if he’d been her own’. Raised by these two titans, Khurram was unimpressed by the feckless Jahangir but he fell in love with his new wife at once, renaming her Mumtaz Mahal (Exalted of the Palace). But Nurjahan then married her own daughter to another of Jahangir’s sons, the footling youngest Shahryar, sparking Khurram’s suspicion that she was planning to destroy him.

It was now that the Dutch and English companies arrived in Agra to request trading concessions. Jahangir’s empire was the richest power on earth, approaching the height of its economic power: it is estimated that its share of world GDP was climbing fast, from 22.7 per cent in 1600 to 24.4 per cent in 1700, bigger than China’s. Its population – 110 million – was larger than all Europe combined. Its textiles, manufactured in thousands of small cottage-scale craft shops, were exported to Europe, where they were becoming fashionable, along with jewels, ivory and spices supplied by Portuguese and Arab traders. But in 1616, Jahangir granted the Dutch trading factories first in Surat, then in Bengal. At the same time, the EIC sent their flashy plenipotentiary, Thomas Roe, veteran of the hunt for the Guyanese Eldorado, to charm Jahangir. The two boozed together and Jahangir granted Roe a factory at Surat. But these Europeans were very small fry for the World Seizer.^*

Jahangir ruled northern India but not the south. Keen to expand, he ordered Khurram to advance southwards into Deccan (from Dakhin meaning south), earning his father’s promotion to the highest mansab (the rank system created by Akbar) and the title Shahjahan – World King. ‘With an impulse of unabashed paternal affection I took him in my arms,’ wrote Jahangir. ‘The more he expressed his reverence for me, the more my tenderness increased.’

Yet their southern advance was blocked by the sultanate of Ahmadnagar, ruled at the time by a gifted African paladin, Malik Ambar, one of the Habashi, usually pagans from the African interior who were captured by Christians or Arabs then sold to Gujaratis to serve as soldiers for the sultans of east and south India.^* Sold by his parents, converted to Islam by his first master in Baghdad, Ambar was eventually manumitted. ‘A black kafir [an Arabic word for infidel which became a European racist epithet for Africans] with a stern Roman face,’ according to a Dutch merchant, he commanded 10,000 Habashi, taking over Ahmadnagar as peshwa (chief minister), marrying its sultan to his daughter. Repeatedly defeating Jahangir, Ambar was almost eighty by the time Shahjahan humbled him, a triumph celebrated by Jahangir in a painting of him shooting a bow at Ambar, an allegory of wish fulfilment, showing how powerful the Habashi had become. Only after Ambar’s death did the Mughals swallow Ahmadnagar.

Yet relations between father and son were frosty. The warmer Jahangir was, the colder was Shahjahan. Even in this bout of familial love, there was bloodletting too: Shahjahan asked for the custody of his blinded brother Khusrau, whom he then killed. His affection was reserved for Mumtaz Mahal. ‘Don’t father children on any other woman,’ she told him, ‘lest hers and mine fight for the succession.’ He ordered other women to abort their pregnancies. Now he observed his father’s decline.