Wonder
of the Age

In Hindustan the day and night together were divided into sixty gharis of twenty-four minutes each, and then again into eight pahars, or watches: four for the day and four for the night. The watches were not all the same length. Abu’l Fazl notes that a pahar never ran to more than nine gharis nor fewer than six, stretching and shrinking with the seasons, so that a winter night held longer watches than a summer one. The night’s count began at sunset.

The first watch opened with the maghrib prayer as the light went. Lamps were lit along terraces and in niches, and the city’s gong-men began striking the gharis one by one from their high platforms. In Akbar’s time the imperial band, the naubat, had once played four gharis before nightfall to mark the close of the day.

The second watch belonged to isha, the last prayer, and then to talk. Akbar, according to the Ain-i-Akbari, took only a little repose in the evening and a short sleep towards morning, “but his sleep looks more like waking.” He was “accustomed to spend the hours of the night profitably” in the private hall, where philosophers, Sufis and historians were admitted by rank to argue, recite and remember.

Midnight closed the second watch and opened the third, and Akbar changed the old custom. The drums that had sounded before nightfall now played first at midnight, “when the sun commences his ascent,” as Abu’l Fazl put it. For the emperor, midnight was one of four daily moments of devotion to the light, with dawn, noon and dusk. In the city the watchmen went on counting. Babur, new to Hindustan, had complained that a sleeper woken by three strokes could not tell which watch they belonged to, and ordered that at night the number of the watch be struck after every count.

The last watch was the quietest. For the devout it was also the most valued, the hour of tahajjud, the voluntary night prayer, which came before the call to fajr. One ghari before sunrise the musicians blew the surna, a reed shawm, to “wake up those that are asleep.” After sunrise came a short prelude on the pipes, and an hour later the great kettledrums began. By then the day’s first watch was already being struck.

The Garden and the Sword. Our podcast has spent the past weeks retelling the memoirs of Babur, the Timurid prince who lost Samarkand three times and won Hindustan at Panipat in 1526. He wrote in Chaghatai Turki, with the frankness of a man keeping a diary rather than a monument, and he is at his best after dark, whether at a wine party running past midnight, on a march begun before dawn, or lying awake before a battle. For this issue we have set one episode’s night in type, so you can read at your own pace what our listeners heard aloud. It is in the Listen pages.

The Hand. From November we begin a new interview column putting questions to scholars and makers who know the Mughal world through their fingertips. The first conversation is with Sylvia Houghteling, historian of art at Bryn Mawr College and author of The Art of Cloth in Mughal India (2022), a book that follows fine cotton, silk and wool through courts, dyers’ workshops and gift exchanges and reads textiles as seriously as paintings. In December we talk with Yael Rice of Amherst College, whose The Brush of Insight: Artists and Agency at the Mughal Court (2023) asks what painters at Akbar’s and Jahangir’s courts believed their work could do, and what the emperors believed it did for them.

Write to us. Here is a question we kept asking ourselves while making this issue: why do Mughal paintings look so bright, even when the scene is plainly set at night? Mostly because the painters were not trying to reproduce darkness. The fuller story takes in black grounds, gold stars and lamplight, along with a few artists who broke the rule, and it runs to several pages in “How to Paint the Dark,” further on in the issue. If you have a question of your own, write to us, and we will answer the best of them in these pages.

A mine goes up under the walls of a fort in the Deccan. In Payag’s picture of the moment, painted for Shah Jahan’s official history, the Padshahnama, a column of smoke climbs out of the earth and fills the upper corner of the page, and in it, turning over like leaves, are bodies. Behind the smoke a low sun burns orange through the murk. Down in the trenches, soldiers crouch and watch, while their jewelled general lifts a hand towards the blast. In a corner, well away from all this, two rabbits sit beside a still pool.

No other painter of the period would have put the rabbits there, and very few would have painted the smoke as he did, dense and lit from behind, blotting out a stretch of sky that an imperial history was supposed to keep clear. The siege was of Qandahar in the Deccan, a fortress far to the north-west of Hyderabad, taken in 1631. The painter had been working for the Mughal emperors for the better part of forty years, and late in life he had become, of all things, the court’s specialist in dusk.

A long apprenticeship

Payag was a Hindu artist, the brother, probably the younger, of the portraitist Balchand. Both brothers enter the record in the 1590s as junior hands in Akbar’s studio, the great imperial workshop at Lahore where dozens of painters divided up the pages of illustrated histories. A senior master would design a composition; younger men would colour it, finish faces, fill in crowds. Payag’s early contributions are modest, the sort of work that earns a name in a margin rather than a reputation.

That reputation came slowly. Under Jahangir, who preferred single portraits and natural-history studies, Payag remained in the shadow of more famous colleagues. The commissions that survive as his masterpieces came only after Shah Jahan took the throne in 1628, by which time Payag was in middle age, with three decades of work behind him.

He could do the official style perfectly. His Shah Jahan on Horseback, made around 1630 and mounted in the emperor’s own album, shows the new ruler in profile on a stallion, halo glowing, pearls and emeralds at his throat, a long spear upright in his hand. An inscription on the border, believed to be in Shah Jahan’s own hand, names the painter. The scholar Stuart Cary Welch wrote that in Shah Jahan’s most imperial portraits “every jewel, sash end, and whisker are as perfect as his smile”, and that this picture “conforms to this rubric”. It is the enamel-bright clarity the reign is famous for, every surface evenly lit and nothing allowed to hide.

Smoke, crowds and weather

Give Payag a crowd, a battlefield or a landscape instead of a single royal figure, and he becomes another painter. Where his peers in the Padshahnama built orderly tiers of courtiers against flat gold or pale green grounds, Payag let the air between figures thicken. Horizons go soft, and hills darken as they recede. Light arrives from one direction, low and slanting, as it does in the hour before sunset, and figures emerge from shadow instead of standing out against nothing.

The source of this was European. Engravings and printed books brought by Jesuit missions and merchants had circulated at the Mughal court since Akbar’s day, and painters copied Flemish and German prints with close attention. Most took the novelties as motifs, a winged putto here, a receding townscape there. Payag seems to have taken the underlying idea, which was that a picture could be organised by light, with a single source casting shadows and modelling faces in dark and light. Italian painters called it chiaroscuro. Payag used it, more than anything, to tell you what time of day it was.

He spent his working life in a studio built to show the emperor’s world at permanent noon, and his best years painting the hour after.

A hunting scene attributed to him, Prince Dara Shikoh Hunting Nilgais, is set in the glow of early evening, the royal hunters appearing out of dark foliage with the light behind them at upper right. Your eye has to adjust, as it would in a real wood at sundown. I find it a melancholy picture, which is an odd thing to say of a royal hunt.

The most dramatic of these pictures is a large siege of Qandahar. This is the other Qandahar, the Afghan citadel that Mughal and Safavid armies fought over for decades. It shows an episode from Shah Jahan’s three failed attempts to retake the city between 1649 and 1653. Welch placed it in the first, in 1649, though it has also been linked to the last and most humiliating, led by Prince Dara Shikoh in 1653 and abandoned that September. Payag shows a small fort perched on its hill, bursting into flame and smoke, and around it dark ridges and a tide of troops that seems to go on for miles. No single hero commands the foreground, and there is no clean line of battle. The eye struggles, as the army did, to find a way through.

The war behind the war

Welch summed up Payag’s reputation in one sentence: he “is admired for portraits of holy men and ravaged old soldiers, and for views of war in all its horror.” He meant the horror. In the Deccan Qandahar page the smoke carries corpses, and, sketched so faintly that they almost vanish into the ground, some of the dead have already become skeletons. The art historian Kavita Singh has read the two rabbits in their still corner as the painter’s private comment on the scene, an invitation to look away from the explosion and consider how short a life is beside the noise of power. Whether or not Payag intended anything so exact, his battles feel more like grief than triumph.

The same temperament drew him to the night. Several small pictures of ascetics gathered around a campfire in darkness have been attributed to Payag or to painters working in his manner, with firelight catching bearded faces and dying away into black. Such attributions rest on style, and scholars handle them carefully. It is safe to say, though, that nobody else in the imperial studio was painting firelight like this around the middle of the century. Around 1630 to 1635 he also painted, or is believed to have painted, The Goddess Bhairavi Devi with Shiva, set on a cremation ground where smoke from the pyres coils up like cloud. It is a rare Hindu devotional subject from a Muslim court.

Payag was still working in the 1650s, as Shah Jahan’s reign ran towards the war of succession that would end with Dara Shikoh’s execution in 1659 and the emperor’s long imprisonment at Agra. He disappears from the record towards the end of the decade, having served three emperors. His brother Balchand is remembered for lucid, tender portraits; Payag for smoke, firelight and late afternoons.

Later Mughal and provincial painters, in Lucknow and in the Rajput courts, would paint moonlit terraces and lamplit bedrooms with a freedom that may owe something to him. None of them had quite his seriousness. He spent his working life in a studio built to show the emperor’s world at permanent noon, and his best years painting the hour after.

In a painting made at Tabriz around 1540 and attributed to Mir Sayyid Ali, a whole city has been cut open like a doll’s house. We see into a kitchen, a shop, the doorway of a mosque, a courtyard where a prince sits among musicians, and rooftops where people have laid out their bedding. Some figures are asleep. A man with a mace walks the lane with a lighted candle. The picture has long been called Nighttime in a City, yet every face in it is lit as if the sun stood overhead.

It is fair to ask why. A Persian or Mughal painter was not trying to show what the eye sees in the dark. He wanted you to know it was night, and then he got on with the story. For him, night was a convention, and a convention can be read perfectly well at noon.

The signs of night

The vocabulary was small and well understood. First, the sky. Where a daytime scene might have a sky of pale gold or clear light blue, a night scene receives a deep blue, laid on with lapis lazuli or indigo, sometimes almost black. Across it the painter scatters stars in gold, small dots or tiny rosettes applied with a fine brush. The moon, if it appears, is a white or silver disc or a slender crescent. That is often enough; a reader who sees a dark blue band studded with gold knows the hour at once.

Second, artificial light. Candles in tall stands, oil lamps in niches and torches carried by servants are all painted with care, their flames tipped with gold and sometimes given a soft halo of paler colour. The lamps cast no shadows, though. The flame is a sign of light, like the stars, and the figures around it remain evenly coloured from head to foot.

Third, the black itself. The painter’s black was lampblack, the fine soot collected from burning oil, ground with gum and water. The same material served for ink. It was used for outlines, for hair, for the trunks of trees in a night garden and for the shadowy interiors of doorways, but rarely to darken a whole scene.

Much of this restraint was practical. These pictures were made to be held in the hand and read beside a text. A Tuti-nama page from Akbar’s early studio, painted around 1560 and attributed in part to Daswanth, belongs to a book organised entirely by nights: a parrot tells a new story each evening to keep his mistress at home while her husband is away. Its foxes, and the parrot mother in the dark tree above them warning her young against them, still have to read at a glance.

Silver that turned black

Some night scenes look darker today than their painters intended. Silver was used for moonlight, for water and for the gleam of metal, applied as leaf or ground into a paint. Over centuries, silver reacts with sulphur in the air and tarnishes to a dull grey or black. A pool that once shone under the moon now reads as a black hole in the page. A silver moon may have turned the colour of the night around it. When a Persian or Mughal picture has patches of oddly flat darkness, tarnished silver is often the cause.

A pool that once shone under the moon now reads as a black hole in the page.

Into the real dark

The change came through Europe. Engravings, and some paintings, reached the Mughal court from the late sixteenth century onwards, and with them a different idea of light, in which a single source falls across a scene and leaves the rest in shadow. By the middle of the seventeenth century Payag, profiled elsewhere in this issue, was painting sieges wrapped in smoke, and pictures attributed to him show holy men around a campfire, faces caught in the glow and fading to black.

Over the following century the new darkness spread. Late Mughal painters of the eighteenth century produced women on terraces lit by fireworks and single candles, dark rooms in which a figure holds a sparkler. At Lucknow, the capital of the Nawabs of Awadh, artists working alongside European visitors painted moonlit terraces above the river under real night skies. Rajput painters in Rajasthan and the Punjab hills, meanwhile, developed their own lyrical nights for the love of Radha and Krishna, with lightning and monsoon cloud over dark groves.

Even then, most of these painters kept the old habit of clarity. A late night scene may have a true black sky, but its lovers are still lit well enough to be admired, and the patrons who paid for them would hardly have had it any other way.

Every Saturday, the king of Persia went into the dark. The Sasanian ruler Bahram Gur, as the poet Nizami of Ganja tells it in the Haft Paykar of 1197, had fallen in love with seven portraits found in a locked room of his palace, each showing a princess from one of the seven climes of the world. He won them all as brides, and his architect raised for them seven domed pavilions, each coloured for one of the seven planets and one day of the week. On Saturday, the day of Saturn, he went to the black dome, where the princess of India waited.

The title of the poem is a play on words. Haft means seven and paykar a portrait, or, figuratively, a beauty, so the book is at once Seven Portraits and Seven Beauties. In each pavilion the princess tells the king a story after nightfall, and the colours climb from Saturday’s black to Friday’s white, a slow ascent from darkness towards light that many modern readers take as an allegory of the soul’s education, though others read the poem as a lesson in kingship rather than mysticism.

The Indian princess’s tale is the first, the strangest and, we think, the saddest. A king, the story goes, once received a stranger dressed from head to foot in black, who would not say why. At last the king left his throne and travelled to the city the stranger had named, far off in China, where everyone went in black. There, after a year, a butcher he had befriended led him by night to a basket on a rope. He climbed in, was hauled to the top of a tall column and left hanging, and at dawn clung to the foot of an enormous bird, which carried him off and set him down in a garden ruled by a fairy queen, Turktaz, and her maidens. Night after night she entertained him, on one condition: he must be patient. When at last he could not wait, he closed his eyes at her bidding and opened them to find himself back in the basket, alone. He returned home and wore black for the rest of his life, like everyone else who had lost that garden.

Nizami’s five long poems, the Khamsa, were among the most loved books at the Mughal court. Abu’l Fazl lists his verse among the works read aloud to Akbar, and in the 1590s the imperial studio produced a sumptuous small Khamsa for the emperor, completed around 1595, with pages by the leading painters of the day. Nizami’s Persia was a shared inheritance for the Mughals, and an Indian princess telling a Persian king a story in Persian verse needed no explaining at an Indian court.

The painter puts the couple at the heart of the dome, framed by its arch so that the eye goes straight in. The verses written above and below them belong to the princess’s tale, the king’s first night in Turktaz’s garden, with its feast, its music and its maidens bringing dishes; the pair may be the king of her story and his fairy hostess, the tale folded into its frame. Stars on the dome and a crescent moon announce the night, and this is the one pavilion whose colour is also the colour of night. Yet nobody inside is in shadow. Faces, hands and garments are as precise as in any daylight scene, and the king himself is not even dressed in black. The attendants at the edges, the patterned cloths and the curve of the dome all lead back to the pair at the centre, her hand raised, his head turned towards her.

The roof of the Sher Mandal is small and flat, with a little domed kiosk at its centre, and in January the air above Delhi turns cold as soon as the sun goes. On a Friday evening in 1556 the second Mughal emperor stood up there, leaning on his staff. He had shown himself to the crowd gathered below, heard reports brought from Kabul, and questioned travellers newly back from Mecca. Now he was waiting for Venus. He had sent for his mathematicians: when the planet rose and the moment turned auspicious, he meant to hold a grand assembly and promote his officers. Humayun did nothing important without first asking the sky.

He was forty-seven. Six months earlier he had ridden back into Delhi after fifteen years as a wanderer, and the octagonal red sandstone tower in the Purana Qila, whether Sher Shah Suri began it or Humayun himself built it (historians still argue), had become his library. Its narrow stair drops steeply from the roof, each stone step about a foot high. He had just started down it when the call to prayer rose from the mosque nearby.

The carpet of the planets

His name means “fortunate” in Persian, and he took it as a programme of government. In 1533–34, three years after succeeding his father Babur, the historian Khwandamir, then in his service, set down the new rules of his court in a short book, the Qanun-i Humayuni. It describes a monarchy run by the stars. Each day of the week belonged to a planet and to the business that planet governed. Saturday, the day of Saturn, “patron of the respected Shaikhs and persons of old respectable families”, and Thursday, Jupiter’s day, went to men of religion and learning. Sunday, ruled by the Sun, and Tuesday, the day of Mars, “the patron of warriors”, were for affairs of state. Monday and Wednesday were given over to pleasure.

The emperor dressed to match. Khwandamir says that each morning Humayun put on “an apparel of such a colour as was appropriate to the day” with a crown of the same shade: yellow for the Sun on Sunday, black for Saturn on Saturday. The court itself was divided into three orders, the men of state, the men of learning and the people of delight, each with a golden arrow held by its chief.

The strangest invention was the bisat-i nishat, the carpet of mirth. It was round, and woven in concentric circles for the heavenly spheres: white for the outermost, then blue, black for Saturn, sandalwood for Jupiter, red for Mars, cloth of gold for the Sun, bright green for Venus, violet for Mercury and white again for the Moon, “like the face of the Moon of fourteenth night”. Humayun sat in the golden ring. Courtiers took their places in the circle of their planet, then threw dice painted with little figures standing, sitting or lying down, and did as the dice told them. If the reclining figure came up, Khwandamir reports, a man lay down “and even went to sleep”. I cannot tell whether anyone found this as funny as I do.

His half-sister Gulbadan Begum, who wrote her memoir of his reign when she was in her sixties at the request of her nephew Akbar, remembered the feast of 1533 at which he opened a “Mystic House” beside the river at Agra. It had an octagonal hall with an octagonal tank, and in the middle of the water an octagonal platform spread with Persian carpets, where “young men and pretty girls and elegant women and musicians and sweet-voiced reciters were ordered to sit”. Upstairs were three rooms, named the House of Dominion, the House of Good Fortune and the House of Pleasure. The first held weapons. The second held books.

Fifteen years without a throne

Nobody ever doubted his courage. In the spring of 1535 Sultan Bahadur of Gujarat slipped out of his own besieged camp after dark, and within months he had run for the coast. That summer, besieging the Gujarati hill fort of Champaner, Humayun climbed its cliffs on iron spikes hammered into the rock, the forty-first of some three hundred men who went over the wall. He then lingered in the captured province, feasting, and lost it almost as fast as he had won it.

Meanwhile an Afghan commander in Bihar, Sher Khan Sur, was building a kingdom of his own. At Chausa on the Ganges in June 1539 he fell on the Mughal camp before dawn. Humayun’s horse was swept away in the river, and a water-carrier held him up on an inflated skin. Gulbadan tells how he repaid the man by seating him on the throne and letting him rule for as much as two days. Nobody afterwards was sure of his name: “some said Nizam, some said Sambal.” In May 1540, at Kannauj, Sher Khan (now Sher Shah) beat Humayun again, and the emperor fled west into the deserts of Sind with his court shrinking around him.

Exile brought him a wife. Hamida Banu, fourteen and the daughter of his brother Hindal’s teacher, refused him for forty days. “To see kings once is lawful,” she told his messenger; “a second time it is forbidden.” Gulbadan’s mother at last talked her round, and in September 1541, Gulbadan writes, “his Majesty took the astrolabe into his own blessed hand” and chose the hour of the wedding. Their son Akbar was born in October 1542 at Amarkot, in the desert.

By 1544 Humayun was in Persia as the guest, and to a degree the prisoner, of Shah Tahmasp, who pressed religious and political terms on him before lending him an army. Persia gave him something that outlasted the army. At Tabriz he met Mir Sayyid Ali and Abd al-Samad, masters of the most refined school of painting in the Islamic world, and asked them to follow him. By about 1549 both had reached his camp at Kabul, where Abd al-Samad taught the young Akbar to draw.

The return

In the summer of 1555 the Sur empire was falling apart among Sher Shah’s heirs. Humayun beat Sikandar Shah Sur at Sirhind in June and entered Delhi in July. The admiral Sidi Ali Reis, an Ottoman stranded in India after losing his fleet, reached the court that autumn and found an emperor who wanted him to stay on and “calculate solar and lunar eclipses” and help the court astrologers with the sun’s course. Sidi Ali stayed through the rains, offering ghazals that led Humayun to hail him as a second Mir Ali Shir, the great Chaghatai poet, and had only just won leave to go home when the emperor fell.

Humayun did nothing important without first asking the sky.

Back, then, to the stair of the Sher Mandal and the azan. Sidi Ali, who was at court and wrote an account soon afterwards, says it was Humayun’s habit to kneel wherever he heard the call. On the second step he tried to. His foot caught in his robe, his staff slid on the polished stone, and he fell headlong down the steps, striking his right temple. Abu’l Fazl says he at once sent Akbar a reassuring letter, though the blow to his head proved mortal. He died three days later, on 27 January 1556.

His officers hid the death until Akbar, thirteen and campaigning in the Punjab, could be proclaimed. Sidi Ali claims he advised it, remembering how an Ottoman vizier had hidden the death of Sultan Selim, and on one occasion a man who looked something like the emperor, Mulla Bekasi, was dressed in his robes and shown to the people on the terrace above the river, as though Humayun had recovered.

The historian Stanley Lane-Poole, writing in 1903, gave him the unkind epitaph: “He tumbled through life, and he tumbled out of it.” It is fair about the empire he lost, and it forgets the painters he brought home from Tabriz, who went on to found the imperial studio under his son. His senior widow, Bega Begum, is traditionally credited with building his great garden tomb in Delhi, which was finished around 1570 and faced in red sandstone and white marble. It sits a few kilometres south of the Purana Qila. Go at dusk in winter and look west, low over the city. In the months when it is the evening star, Venus comes out there soon after sunset.

On the night of Shab-i Barat in 1617, at Mandu in Malwa, Emperor Jahangir called his nobles to a feast in one of his wife’s palaces, a house set among large tanks of water. The meal had been prepared by her. As the evening came on, servants lit lanterns and lamps all round the tanks and the buildings, and Jahangir, who kept a diary of everything that pleased him, wrote that “the lanterns and lamps cast their reflection on the water, and it appeared as if the whole surface of the tank was a plain of fire.” The hostess was Nur Jahan, Light of the World. She was forty years old and had been married to him for six years.

Her biographer Ruby Lal dates the first coins bearing her name beside the emperor’s to that same year, though the dated pieces that survive were struck between 1624 and 1627. Their Persian couplet ran, in an old translation: “By order of the King Jahangir, gold has a hundred splendours added to it by receiving the impression of the name of Nur Jahan, the Queen Begam.” No other Mughal empress was ever given the coinage, and after 1627 Shah Jahan had pieces carrying her name withdrawn. Imperial orders went out under her own seal, signed Nur Jahan Padshah Begam, a title Lal translates, bluntly and correctly, as the lady emperor.

A family from the road

She was born Mihr un-Nissa on 31 May 1577 at Kandahar, while her parents were on their way from Persia to seek service at Akbar’s court. Her father, Mirza Ghiyas Beg, came from a cultivated Tehran family whose fortunes had collapsed; robbers stripped the party on the journey. Later chroniclers improved the story, claiming that the destitute parents left the newborn under a tree and turned back for her. Historians treat that as legend. Ghiyas Beg certainly prospered in India, and under Jahangir he became chief minister with the title I’timad al-Daula, Trust of the State.

Her mother, Asmat Begum, has her own small place in history as the woman Jahangir credited with the attar of roses, a story told in our Scent pages.

At seventeen Mihr un-Nissa married a Persian soldier, Ali Quli Beg, known by his title Sher Afgan, the tiger-slayer. They had a daughter, Ladli. In 1607 he was killed in Bengal in a clash with the imperial governor, and some later writers accused Jahangir of arranging it in order to have the widow. There is no good evidence for it. She came to court as an attendant in the household of one of Akbar’s widows (Ruby Lal names Salima Sultan Begum), and in May 1611 the emperor married her. She was titled Nur Mahal, Light of the Palace, and five years later Nur Jahan.

The tiger-slayer

In April 1617, while the court was at Mandu in Malwa, the huntsmen marked down four tigers. Jahangir wrote what followed. “Nur-Jahan Begam submitted that if I would order her she herself would kill the tigers with her gun. I said, ‘Let it be so.’ She shot two tigers with one shot each and knocked over the two others with four shots.” Six shots from a covered howdah on an elephant’s back, “and not one miss”. He gave her diamond bracelets worth a hundred thousand rupees and scattered a thousand gold coins over her. A note in the Persian edition of the memoirs adds that a poet recited a couplet on the spot: “Though Nur-Jahan be in form a woman, / In the ranks of men she’s a tiger-slayer.”

When a fever came on him at Ajmer in 1614 he hid it from his physicians and his nobles, and “only imparted this to Nur-Jahan Begam than whom I did not think anyone was fonder of me.” As his health worsened with drink and opium through the 1620s, business passed through her hands and through those of her brother Asaf Khan, as it had through their father’s until his death in 1622. Asaf Khan’s daughter Arjumand Banu had married Prince Khurram, the future Shah Jahan. Twentieth-century historians called it a junta. Lal sees a sovereign who governed openly.

She also made money. Her ships are said to have carried indigo and embroidered cloth from Surat to the Arabian coasts, with Asaf Khan acting as her agent, and she dealt directly with European traders. Later writers credit her with new fashions in dress: dudami, a flowered muslin for gowns, and badla, a brocade of silver thread. From 1618 she built a great caravanserai on the Lahore road, still called Serai Nurmahal, whose western gateway is carved with elephants, peacocks and horsemen playing polo.

Six shots from a covered howdah on an elephant’s back, “and not one miss”.

When her parents died, within months of each other in 1621 and 1622, she built their tomb on the bank of the Yamuna at Agra. It was finished around 1628. Instead of red sandstone she faced it in white marble, inlaid with jasper, onyx and topaz in cypresses, wine cups and flower vases, the first great Mughal building to use inlaid stone so lavishly. People call it the jewel box. It looks ahead to the Taj Mahal, which her niece’s husband would later build across the river for that niece.

The river

In March 1626 the imperial camp was pitched on the bank of the Jhelum, on the way to Kabul, when the general Mahabat Khan, fearing ruin at Nur Jahan’s hands, rode in with his Rajput troops and seized the emperor. She escaped across the river. The next day she led the counter-attack herself, seated in a howdah on a war elephant, with, by one account, her infant granddaughter and the child’s nurse beside her. The ford was deep and the current fast. Chroniclers say her elephant was wounded, and that the nurse took an arrow in the arm, which Nur Jahan pulled out with her own hand. The attack failed and she gave herself up to share her husband’s captivity. Within months, working from inside the rebel camp, she had arranged his escape. The poet Mulla Kami Shirazi wrote a long poem in praise of her courage that same year.

Jahangir died in October 1627 on the road down from Kashmir. Her hopes rested on Shahryar, the prince she had married to her daughter Ladli, and Shah Jahan swept him aside within months. Nur Jahan, now fifty, went into retirement at Lahore on a large pension and lived there for eighteen more years. She is credited with raising her husband’s tomb at Shahdara, across the Ravi, and she built her own close beside it. Persian verses under the pen name Makhfi, “the hidden one”, were long attributed to her, but scholars now treat that as a mistake: the name belongs to later poets, Zeb-un-Nissa among them.

She died on 17 December 1645. Tradition credits her with the couplet said to have been written for her grave, asking that on the tomb of a poor stranger there be neither lamp nor rose, so that no moth’s wing burns and no nightingale sings, though the scholar Gulchin Ma’ani traced it to the divan of the poet Tajalli Kashi. It is a sad little couplet for a woman who once lit every tank at Mandu, and I rather wish it were hers.

One spring night in 1644, a few days after her thirtieth birthday, Jahanara Begum walked too close to a lamp. Her gown was of the fine muslin the court favoured, and it had been dressed with perfumed oil; the flame caught the hem and climbed. Her women beat at the fire and burned their own hands. By the time it was out, the princess had been burned across her back, her hands and both sides of her body, and for weeks the chroniclers were unsure whether she would live.

Shah Jahan all but stopped holding court. He came to the audience hall briefly and went back to her rooms. Alms were given out by the sackful, prisoners were released, and prayers were ordered across the empire. The imperial physicians failed; a Persian doctor did a little better; in the end, the court historians say, it was an ointment prepared by a royal page called ‘Arif that closed the wounds. An Englishman later claimed the cure for a surgeon of the East India Company, a story historians now treat with caution. Recovery took the better part of a year. When she was well again, the emperor celebrated with gifts of jewels and, among other grants, the revenues of Surat, the empire’s great western port.

The first lady of the empire

She had held that rank since she was seventeen. Born in Ajmer in 1614, the eldest daughter of Shah Jahan and Mumtaz Mahal, she was with her mother in the camp at Burhanpur in 1631 when Mumtaz died in childbirth. Her father, who had other wives, gave the title of Padshah Begum to his daughter. With it came the keeping of the imperial seal, the management of the harem and an allowance that made her one of the richest people in Asia.

She used the money. Her ship, the Sahibi, sailed from Surat for the Red Sea in 1643, carrying trade goods and, by her order, rice for the poor of Mecca. Her agents dealt with Dutch and English merchants at the port. Much of the rest went on building, and on pilgrims.

A disciple of the night vigil

Jahanara and her brother Dara Shikoh, a year younger, were the two mystics of the family. In 1640 or 1641 she was initiated into the Qadiri order by Mulla Shah Badakhshi, Dara’s teacher, a severe and learned man who spent his summers in Kashmir. Because she could not sit openly at his feet, much of her instruction came by letter. She describes her initiation in a short treatise, the Risala-i Sahibiya, written soon afterwards: the long nights of recitation and concentration on her master, and the joy that followed when the practice at last took hold.

Shortly before, in 1640, she had finished Mu’nis al-Arwah, “The Confidant of Spirits”, a life of Mu’in al-Din Chishti, the saint of Ajmer, the city of her birth. It is devout and well read, and oddly personal. She left an account of her own pilgrimage to his tomb, where she swept the floor with her eyelashes, and in the book she laments that as a woman she cannot give herself to the Sufi path as freely as a man. She called herself his disciple for the rest of her life.

Jahanara went into the fort with him.

Moonlight Square

In 1648 the court moved into Shahjahanabad, the new walled city on the Yamuna, and the princess took charge of its principal street. Around 1650 she laid out a broad avenue running west from the Red Fort towards the Fatehpuri mosque, lined with arcaded shops and split down its centre by a channel of water drawn from the city’s canal. Where the avenue widened in front of her caravanserai, the channel opened into an octagonal pool. On clear nights the moon lay in the water, and the square was called Chandni Chowk, “Moonlight Square”. The name later spread along the whole street.

The caravanserai, the Begum’s Sarai, was the finest in the city. François Bernier compared it to the Place Royale in Paris, a great square of arcades with a gallery of chambers above, and wished Paris had twenty like it. It was, he wrote, “the rendezvous of the rich Persian, Usbek, and other foreign merchants”, who slept “with perfect security, the gate being closed at night”. Behind it she planted a large garden, the Sahibabad, later called the Begum ka Bagh, with water channels, fruit trees and a bathhouse.

The pool, the canal and the sarai are gone. The channel was later covered over, the sarai was cleared after 1857, and a clock tower stood where the pool had been. The street has kept the name.

Captive in Agra

When Shah Jahan fell ill in 1657, his four sons went to war. Jahanara stood with Dara and, after his defeat at Samugarh, went to Aurangzeb to propose that the empire be divided among the brothers. Aurangzeb refused, and in 1658 confined his father in the fort at Agra. Jahanara went into the fort with him. For eight years she nursed the old emperor in the marble rooms above the river, from which, the story goes, he could see the Taj Mahal. He died in her care in January 1666.

Aurangzeb then brought her back to Delhi with honour and restored her title. She lived another fifteen years, rich, pious and apparently not afraid to argue with him. She died in September 1681, aged sixty-seven.

She is buried in the precinct of Nizamuddin Auliya, the Chishti saint of Delhi, in a small enclosure of marble screens open to the sky. The top of the grave is hollow and filled with earth, and grass grows on it. The inscription at its head is in Persian and is traditionally said to be her own composition. In our rendering:

“Let nothing but green grass cover my grave; grass alone is covering enough for the poor. The humble, perishable Jahanara, disciple of the masters of Chisht, daughter of Shah Jahan.”

In 1562 Akbar sent an officer to Raja Ramchandra, the Baghela ruler of Bhath, with an order that could not be refused. The raja kept the finest singer in Hindustan, and the emperor wanted him. Ramchandra sent Tansen to court with gifts and, according to later tradition, with tears. Tansen was by then a man in late middle age, born around 1500 in or near Gwalior, and he spent the remaining quarter-century of his life at Akbar’s side.

Gwalior was the home of dhrupad, the grave, unhurried vocal form that grew up under its Tomar kings: long unaccompanied improvisation, then verses in Brajbhasha sung to the beat of the pakhawaj drum. Legend makes Tansen a pupil of Swami Haridas, the Vrindavan saint-musician; the attachment is old but unproven. He is also linked with the Sufi Muhammad Ghaus of Gwalior, beside whose tomb he now lies.

Abu’l Fazl, not a man to understate his master’s possessions, listed him first among the court’s musicians in the Ain-i-Akbari: “Miyan Tansen, of Gwaliar. A singer like him has not been in India for the last thousand years.” Later tradition counted him among Akbar’s navaratnas, the nine jewels of the court, a grouping no contemporary source uses.

The stories began after his death. He sang Raga Deepak, it is said, and the lamps in the hall caught fire of themselves, and the heat of it nearly killed him until Megh Malhar was sung and rain fell. These are legends, repeated in every music school in North India, and no chronicler of Akbar’s reign records them. More durable is the music tradition credits to him: Miyan ki Todi, Miyan ki Malhar, and Darbari Kanada, the “Kanada of the court”, a slow, heavy raga with a wavering komal gandhar, meant for the hours after midnight. Whether he invented it or shaped an older tune, singers still treat it as the deepest of night ragas.

Abu’l Fazl records his death in 1589. Every December, musicians gather at his tomb in Gwalior for the Tansen Samaroh, singing through the cold nights in the garden. Visitors chew the leaves of the tamarind tree beside the grave, which are said to sweeten the voice.

The heat does not break at sunset. It settles. In the summer of 1660 the stone of Shahjahanabad gives back the day’s sun long after the sun has gone, and a French physician named François Bernier, a year into his Delhi years, is finding out, as every household in the city already knows, that nobody sleeps indoors. Three years later he wrote it down for a friend in Paris, the philosopher La Mothe le Vayer. For more than six months of the year, he explained, “everybody lies in the open air without covering”, the poor in the streets, merchants and grander people in their courts and gardens or on their terraces, “which are first carefully watered”.

So this is a walk through a city that sleeps on its roofs. Some of it is reconstruction, the ordinary imagining any historian does when the sources fall silent. Much of it is Bernier, who looked hard at everything, and Niccolao Manucci, the Venetian runaway who reached India in 1656 and stayed for the rest of his long life. Where one of them saw a thing, I will say so.

The city itself was barely a generation old. Shah Jahan had begun his fortress-palace on the Yamuna in 1639 and entered it in state in 1648, naming the new capital after himself. Now he was not in it. Since 1658 he had been confined in the fort at Agra by his son Aurangzeb, who in the summer of 1659 had held his formal coronation here, and later that summer paraded his defeated brother Dara Shikoh through these streets before having him killed. Even the mud ramparts had been refaced in red stone only three years before.

Dusk: the drum

Stand at the Lahori Gate of the fort, the great western gate, and look away from the palace. Chandni Chowk runs out ahead of you almost as far as the eye can reach, laid out in 1650 by Shah Jahan’s eldest daughter, Jahanara. Down its centre runs water: a channel fed by the old canal from the Yamuna far upstream that Ali Mardan Khan had restored and carried on to the city, which Bernier noted had been dug “with great labour through fields and rocky ground”. Halfway along, in front of Jahanara’s caravanserai, the channel opens into a pool. The name Chandni Chowk, the moonlit square, is usually explained by that sheet of still water holding the moon.

At this hour the arcaded shops are closing. Bernier describes each arch with a small door at the back “opening into a warehouse, in which these wares are deposited for the night”, and above them the merchants’ houses, which “communicate with the terrace-roofs over the shops, on which the inhabitants sleep”. Bedsteads are being carried up. Servants splash water on the brick to cool it. Jahanara’s caravanserai, where Persian and Uzbek traders lodge, is about to shut its gate; Bernier admired it because strangers could sleep there “with perfect security, the gate being closed at night”.

Then the drum. Over the inner gate of the fort sits the naqqar khana, the drum house, and at set hours of the day and night its musicians play. Bernier first found the noise unbearable: ten or twelve shawms and as many cymbals, some of the cymbals a fathom across, and one long instrument, the karna, “a fathom and a half in length”. The building was set well away from the royal apartments, he noted, “that the King may not be annoyed”. Habit changed him. By the time he wrote to Paris the music reached him “in the night, particularly, when in bed and afar, on my terrace”, and sounded “solemn, grand, and melodious”. Anyone sleeping on a roof within earshot heard the watches of the night counted out by it.

Anyone sleeping on a roof within earshot heard the watches of the night counted out by it.

Inside the walls the day’s great ceremonies are over. In the Diwan-i-Am, the hall of public audience that Bernier found “painted and overlaid with gold”, the throne window is empty. What continues is the evening assembly. Every nobleman at court was expected to present himself to the emperor after dark, and Bernier, who thought it a heavy burden on the nobles, conceded that it made a fine sight: “long rows of torches lighting these Nobles” to the assembly and home again. The torches were plain things, he explained, “a piece of iron hafted in a stick” wound with rags steeped in oil, kept alight by the mashalchis, the link-boys, who walked beside them carrying oil in long narrow-necked vessels of iron or brass. He was describing the imperial camp on the march, but noted that the assembly ran just as it did in Delhi.

Midnight

By the second watch the city has gone to its roofs. Seen from above, it would have been far darker than Paris. Bernier was frank about this. Late in his letter, weighing Delhi and Agra against Paris, he told his friend to stand on the Pont-Neuf after dark and see “long lines of brilliant lamps”, with citizens and “what never happens in Asia” their wives and daughters walking the streets without fear of thieves. Delhi’s light was private. A chiragh, the small clay oil lamp, in a wall niche; a lantern in a courtyard; torches for the rich when they moved.

Fire was the real fear. Most of the city was not the red stone of the fort but mud and thatch, lodging the soldiers and servants who followed the court. Bernier called it “a collection of many villages”. In the year before he wrote, he reported, three fires driven by hot summer winds had consumed “more than sixty thousand roofs”.

Now imagine the patrol. The kotwal, the city’s chief of police, kept his post on Chandni Chowk, near where the Sikh shrine of Sis Ganj stands today. Manucci, writing of the empire’s towns in general, explains the system. In every ward “there is a horseman and twenty to thirty foot soldiers, who, in a sort of way, go the rounds”. The house scavengers, who entered every home twice a day, reported what they saw, and the kotwal answered to the emperor for everything “that has happened, whether it be by night or by day”. If a house in his jurisdiction was robbed, the kotwal had to make the loss good. By most accounts the city’s fourteen gates were locked through the night. It was a city policed by gossip as much as by force, and I suspect a foreigner’s footsteps on a terrace did not go unremarked.

Inside the fort the night guard had its own geometry. Bernier saw that the lesser nobles, the mansabdars, kept watch through the night on the raised walkways that ran either side of the fort’s main street, above a canal of running water. That water was the same that ran on into the palace and became the Nahr-i-Bihisht, the Stream of Paradise, flowing in a marble channel through one pavilion after another along the river front. When Bernier was called into the women’s quarters to treat a sick lady, a Kashmir shawl was put over his head and a eunuch led him by the hand “as if I had been a blind man”, so he relied on the eunuchs’ description: running water at nearly every chamber door, and “lofty divans and terraces, on which to sleep coolly at night”.

Beyond the palace wall lies the Yamuna, broad and low in summer, with the single bridge of boats Bernier mentions. Between river and fort a strip of sand where, by day, elephants fought beneath the emperor’s window. At night it is the widest dark in the city, and from the river the palace would have shown only a few lights, pricked out along more than half a mile of river wall.

The last watch

Turn back west into the city, towards the one building that rises above everything. The Jama Masjid, completed in 1656, stands on a levelled outcrop of rock, and Bernier, who admitted that it broke the rules of European architecture, still thought a church built after its model “would be admired” even in Paris. Its three white marble domes would have held what little light there was.

The isha prayer was called soon after dark; now the city waits for fajr. Aurangzeb, famously exact in his devotions, is inside the palace. Within a decade he will stop showing himself at the dawn window and will silence much of the court’s music. In 1660 neither has happened yet. At first light the emperor still appears at the jharokha above the river, and men who have camped on the sand below to see him look up.

Before that, in the grey, the muezzins’ calls travel across the roofs, the sleepers stir, and the bedsteads go back indoors. Every terrace, Bernier noted, opened onto a chamber so that the bed could be carried in when the cold air came at break of day, or against “those light but penetrating dews” that he, a careful physician, believed numbed the limbs. On the royal parade ground outside the fort gate, grooms are already exercising the imperial horses “at break of day”. The mashalchis are putting out their torches. Somewhere a kotwal’s horseman is riding home.

Two hundred kilometres south, in the fort at Agra, an old man who built all of this is waking too. Tradition says he spent his captivity looking across the river at his wife’s tomb. Nobody in Delhi could see him.

In December 1652 Prince Aurangzeb, passing through Agra on his way south, wrote his father a report on the family monuments. The dome of the Taj Mahal was leaking. And across the river, the garden called the Mahtab Bagh, the moonlight garden, “was completely inundated, and therefore it has lost its charm”. It would soon, he added, regain its verdancy; the octagonal pool and the pavilion around it were “in splendid condition”. Floods had already begun to bury the place, and in time the river finished the job.

By the late twentieth century the Mahtab Bagh was little more than a great mound of sand facing the Taj. Its return to fame owed something to a legend, and more to the dig that disproved it.

The legend belongs to Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, the French jeweller who was in Agra in 1665. He reported that Shah Jahan had begun a tomb for himself on the far bank, and that the war among his sons prevented him finishing it. Over time the story darkened into the Black Taj: a twin mausoleum in black marble, joined to the white one by a bridge. In his survey of 1871–72 a British archaeologist, A. C. L. Carlleyle, measured a great oval ring of masonry on the north bank and took it for the foundations of that tomb.

The ground was tested properly in the 1990s. Elizabeth Moynihan, a garden historian who had spent years tracing Babur’s gardens across South Asia, led a seven-year project with the Archaeological Survey of India and published the results in 2000 as The Moonlight Garden: New Discoveries at the Taj Mahal. The diggers found what Aurangzeb had described: a garden exactly as wide as the Taj complex and set on its axis, with a great octagonal pool at its river edge fitted with twenty-five fountain jets. The supposed foundations turned out to belong to the garden, and the dig found no evidence that a second mausoleum had ever stood there. The garden itself was the Taj’s other half, which I find a better story than the black tomb.

The garden itself was the Taj’s other half.

A plan of paradise

Behind the Mahtab Bagh lies an older form, the chahar bagh, or fourfold garden. Walks and water channels divide a square into four; each quarter may be divided again. The word paradise comes, by way of Greek, from an old Iranian word for a walled enclosure, and the Quran’s descriptions of the gardens of the blessed, with their rivers of water, milk, wine and honey, gave the plan its spiritual charge. Babur, homesick in Hindustan, laid out chahar baghs along the Yamuna at Agra almost as soon as he arrived in 1526, and his descendants lined both banks with them.

At the Taj, Shah Jahan did something unusual. The tomb does not stand in the middle of its garden, as Humayun’s does in Delhi, but at the far end, on the riverbank. For Moynihan, the discovery completed the logic. Read from north to south, on her account, the whole composition is a garden, then a river, then a tomb, then another garden, with the Yamuna running through the centre like the great channel of a chahar bagh. The moonlight garden was the viewing platform for that composition. From its pavilions, on a still night, the white dome would have appeared twice: once across the water, and once upside down in the octagonal pool.

Gardens after dark

The name was not decorative. In Agra’s heat, gardens were at their best when the sun had gone, and Mughal writers describe them lit for pleasure. Jahangir records in his memoirs that on the Shab-i-barat, the night of the fifteenth of Sha’ban when Muslims light lamps for the dead and the coming year, he had a tank at Ahmedabad ringed with lights. “The buildings all round the tank they had arranged with lanterns of different colours,” he wrote, “and all kinds of artifices that are practicable with lamps, and fireworks.” Another year boats hung with lamps and fireworks were brought before him on the river, and he spent a long time going round to look at them. In the gardens of Kashmir, rows of small arched niches were built behind falling water; the story goes that they held flowers by day and oil lamps by night, so that the cascade glittered.

What grew in the Mahtab Bagh suited the hour. Plant remains analysed for Moynihan’s project pointed, according to the project’s published summaries, to shade and fruit trees together with fragrant night-flowering species; later reports add cypress, jujube and lotus. The evidence is fragmentary and the identifications should be held loosely. The idea behind them is not in doubt. A garden meant for moonlight wants pale flowers that show up in the dark and scent that carries on warm air.

The Archaeological Survey has since replanted the site with species known from Mughal gardens and opened it to visitors. It is still a quiet place. On a clear evening the Taj stands on its terrace across the water, squarely on the garden’s axis, as it was meant to. The river is lower now, and the pool is dry.

At dusk the Panch Mahal turns into a cage of light. Its five storeys of columns shrink as they climb, from a ground floor crowded with pillars to a single domed kiosk at the top, and there are hardly any walls, only the gaps where screens once hung between the shafts. It was built to catch the evening air coming off the lake. The lake has gone. What blows through the columns at sunset now is the dry wind off the ridge, and a little later come the bats, pouring out of the palace galleries in a long ribbon over the paved court where, the guides still say, Akbar played pachisi using living people as the pieces.

Fatehpur Sikri was built because of a promise. In the late 1560s Akbar had no son who had lived. He went to Shaikh Salim Chishti, a Sufi who lived in a hermitage on the ridge at Sikri, some twenty-five miles west of Agra, and the Shaikh foretold three sons. When his Kachhwaha wife, later honoured as Mariam-uz-Zamani, was expecting, she was moved into the Shaikh’s own house. There, at the end of August 1569, she gave birth to a boy, who was named Salim after the saint. He would reign as Jahangir. In thanks Akbar walked all the way from Agra to the shrine of Khwaja Mu’in al-Din Chishti at Ajmer, the head shrine of the saint’s order, and in 1571 he began to build a capital around the hermitage. When he conquered Gujarat in 1573 he gave it its name: Fatehpur, the City of Victory.

Red stone, white marble

The ridge was its own quarry. Its red sandstone came out in easy blocks and could be cut as finely as timber. The Jama Masjid was among the first buildings to rise, its inscription dating it to 1571–72. When Jahangir came back as emperor in 1619 he wrote that “there is nothing like this mosque in any other country”. It had cost five lakhs of rupees. The Buland Darwaza, the huge southern gate raised in the years after the Gujarat campaign, stands at the top of a steep flight of steps. On its arch is a saying given to Jesus: the world is a bridge, pass over it, but build no house upon it.

In the mosque courtyard Salim Chishti, who died in 1572, lies in a small white tomb. It is so pale against the red that it holds the light after the sandstone has gone dark. Its screens are pierced into dense geometric lattices. Jahangir recorded that his foster brother Qutb al-Din Khan Kokaltash paid for the marble railing and floor. He also left a picture of the mosque at night: on the eves of anniversaries and holy days, lamps were set in the small domes above the cloisters, “enveloped in coloured cloths”, so the whole roofline glowed.

The palace buildings are harder to name with confidence. The Diwan-i-Khas is one tall room with a single carved pillar at its centre, which spreads into a great bracketed capital holding up a round seat, and four narrow bridges run from the seat to the corners. Tradition puts Akbar on that seat, but some scholars have argued the building was a treasury. The Anup Talao, a square pool with a platform in the middle reached by four causeways, is where Tansen is said to have sung. In 1575 Akbar built the Ibadat Khana, the House of Worship, where scholars of rival faiths debated before him late into Thursday nights. Its site has never been identified for certain.

The lake has gone. What blows through the columns at sunset now is the dry wind off the ridge.

Why they left

In 1585 the court left for the Punjab and made its base at Lahore for thirteen years. When Akbar came back south in 1598, he went to Agra, not Sikri. The old explanation is water. The city stood on a dry ridge, the story goes, and was abandoned when the supply failed. That story has a respectable witness. In 1619 Jahangir himself wrote that “Fathpur has little water, and what there is is bad”, which is why a well under the mosque courtyard was filled with rainwater for the Shaikh’s family.

But in the same visit Jahangir had the lake measured, and it came to seven kos around. In recent decades historians, above all Syed Ali Nadeem Rezavi at Aligarh, have argued that the water story mixes up taste with quantity. A Jesuit visitor in the early 1580s described a lake two miles long and half a mile broad. Rezavi counts at least thirteen stepwells and eight tanks inside the city, besides ordinary wells. Attilio Petruccioli’s study of the site mapped the dams and channels that fed the city and its lake. A few years before the move part of the dam did burst, and the water rushed out, but it seems to have been rebuilt soon after.

The more likely reasons are political. In July 1585 Akbar’s half-brother Mirza Muhammad Hakim, who ruled Kabul, died. The northwest frontier lay open, and the Uzbeks of Transoxiana were pressing on Badakhshan. Akbar went north to hold it. The frontier, and later the Deccan, kept him away.

The city was never simply left empty. Akbar’s mother stayed on, and he came back briefly in 1601. In 1619 Jahangir spent three and a half months there while plague was killing people in Agra. Shah Jahan came more than once to hunt, and at the Id of 1644 the crowd at the great mosque spilled out into its gateway. In 1719 Muhammad Shah was enthroned in the imperial camp pitched near the city. Merchants moved into the empty mansions of the nobles.

At night the palace belongs to the bats again, but the saint’s tomb is still in use. People hoping for a child still tie coloured threads to its marble screens. Beyond the mosque wall the lake bed is now dry fields, and when the moon is up you can pick out the Panch Mahal on the ridge from a long way off.

In the morning the whole court went to the Diwan-i-Am. The Diwan-i-Khas, the Hall of Private Audience in Shah Jahan’s new fort at Delhi, was finished in 1648, and only a few people were allowed in. François Bernier, who saw it under Aurangzeb, called it “very handsome, spacious, gilt and painted”. In it the emperor sat with his nobles standing around him, heard reports and decided matters of state. Every noble was fined if he missed this assembly in the evening, just as he was fined for missing the public one in the morning.

The hall is an open pavilion of white marble, and it was lit by lamps after dark. A channel of water ran through it. Tradition sets the Peacock Throne here, though Tavernier seems to have seen it in the public hall, and it could be moved between the two. Either way it stayed in the fort until Nadir Shah of Persia sacked Delhi in 1739 and took it home with him. The silver in the ceiling went later, stripped off in the eighteenth century, by the Marathas in 1760 by most accounts, though some blame the Jats, when the city changed hands and its captors needed money. Over the corner arches runs the couplet everyone quotes: Agar firdaus bar ru-ye zamin ast, hamin ast o hamin ast o hamin ast, “If there is paradise on earth, it is this, it is this, it is this.” It is usually attributed to Amir Khusrau, though the attribution is uncertain.

Akbar ate once in twenty-four hours, and nobody knew when. His minister Abu’l Fazl, who set down the workings of the court in the Ain-i-Akbari, says the emperor left the table “before he is fully satisfied”. Since there was no set hour, the kitchen was kept ready so that “in the space of an hour, after the order has been given, a hundred dishes are served up”. Food for the women of the palace started leaving the kitchen in the morning and did not stop “till night”.

The kitchen was run like a treasury. Its head was the Mir Bakawal, or Master of the Kitchen, with tasters, treasurers and a clerk under him. The storeroom doors carried his seal. Ducks, waterfowl and some vegetables came from Kashmir. While the food cooked, an awning was spread and onlookers were kept away. The cook tasted each dish, then the Bakawal, then the Mir Bakawal himself. Gold and silver dishes were wrapped in red cloth, and copper and china ones in white. Each bundle was sealed and labelled, and a list went inside with them “that none of the dishes may be changed”. When the emperor sat down, a share was first set aside for the dervishes. He began with milk or curds.

Abu’l Fazl divides the cooking into three kinds. First come dishes with no meat, which he says were called sufiyana: sweet saffron rice, khichri, spinach, lentils and a halwa of flour, sugar-candy and ghee. Second are dishes of meat with rice or grain, among them qabuli, a pulao of minced meat, harisa and the samosa. Third are meats cooked with spices. Of the “sugared fruits, and drinks” he writes only that he “cannot here describe” them, which is a pity.

His Majesty calls this source of life “the water of immortality”.

The water of immortality

The water got its own department, the Abdar Khana. “His Majesty calls this source of life ‘the water of immortality’,” Abu’l Fazl writes. Akbar drank only Ganges water, at home and on the march. Trusted men stationed on the river sent it to him in sealed jars, from Sarun while the court was at Agra and Fatehpur, and from Hardwar once it moved to the Punjab. The cooks used rain water or water from the Jumna or the Chenab, with a little Ganges water added.

The court cooled its water with saltpetre, the same salt that goes into gunpowder. A sealed flask of water was swirled in a bath of saltpetre and water for about a quarter of an hour until it went cold. Once the court settled in the Punjab in the mid-1580s, it had ice as well, brought from the mountains of Panhan, about forty-five kos from Lahore. It came by boat, by carriage over fourteen stages with horses changed at each, and on the backs of relays of porters. “All ranks use ice in summer,” Abu’l Fazl notes, but “the nobles use it throughout the whole year.”

Melons and lamplight

Akbar’s grandfather Babur never forgot the tables of Herat. He visited the Timurid princes there in 1506. At one party a roast goose was set in front of him, and he left it alone because, he admitted, “I am a poor carver.” His host carved it for him on the spot, which says something for Herat manners.

India disappointed him. In his memoir Babur listed what Hindustan lacked, “no grapes, musk-melons or first-rate fruits, no ice or cold water”, and grumbled that it had “no candles, torches or candlesticks”, only lamp-men with a wick and a gourd of oil. In a letter home he wrote that he was brought a melon, and “to cut and eat it affected me strangely; I was all tears!” There is no more homesick line in the book. Two generations later, according to Abu’l Fazl, melons and grapes had become “very plentiful and excellent” in India. Growers from Iran and Central Asia had settled there, and fruit came in by the load from Kabul and Kashmir.

On festival nights the lamps mattered as much as the food. At the Shab-i-barat feast Nur Jahan gave at Mandu in 1617, told in our profile of her, roast meats and fruit were set before every guest while lamps turned the palace tanks to fire. Families across South Asia still make halwa for that night. A collection of recipes that carries Shah Jahan’s name, the Nuskha-i-Shahjahani, shows how far court cooking had come by his time. It runs to breads, soups, kababs, do-piyazas, samosas and sweets, and dozens of pulaos, some cooked slowly under a sealed lid in the dum style. Its author is unknown, and so is the date it was compiled.

In the winter of 1614–15, with the court at Ajmer, Jahangir paused his memoir to record a small domestic miracle. The mother of Nur Jahan, Asmat Begum, had been making rose-water. As the hot water was poured from jugs into dishes, an oily scum gathered on its surface, and she skimmed it off, a little at a time, until she had a quantity worth keeping.

“It is of such strength in perfume that if one drop be rubbed on the palm of the hand it scents a whole assembly, and it appears as if many red rosebuds had bloomed at once.” So Jahangir wrote, in the Rogers and Beveridge translation. He gave the inventress a string of pearls. Salima Sultan Begum, his father’s widow, named the oil ‘itr-i-jahangiri, and Jahangir regretted only that Akbar had not lived to smell it.

Whether it was truly a first is another matter. Persian distillers had made rose-water for centuries, and the oil that floats on it may well have been noticed before. Asmat Begum perhaps hit on a household method rather than a discovery. It still made a story good enough for an emperor to claim for his reign.

An attar, in the Indian sense, is a scent carried in oil rather than alcohol. In Kannauj, on the Ganges, they still make it the old way, and slowly. Petals are packed into a copper still, the deg, sealed with clay and heated over a wood or dung fire. The vapour runs down a bamboo pipe into a copper receiver, the bhapka, which sits in a tank of cool water and holds a measure of sandalwood oil. Over hours and days the oil absorbs the scent, and the distillers judge its strength by smell alone. A rose attar made this way, laid onto sandalwood, is sold as attar gulab. The pure rose oil, distilled with no sandalwood at all, is ruh gulab, “spirit of the rose”.

Night is the perfumer’s season. Motia, the Arabian jasmine, opens its flowers at dusk and is sweetest after dark. Raat ki rani, “queen of the night”, fills Indian gardens after dark, though it is a later arrival from tropical America. The court had a night method of its own. The Ain-i-Akbari describes civet being smeared inside a China cup and kept at night inverted over an extract of chambeli jasmine or of roses, then set out in the sun by day.

Akbar’s household ran its own department of perfumes, and Abu’l Fazl wrote that the emperor was “very fond of perfumes”. The audience hall, he reported, was “continually scented with ambergris, aloewood, and compositions according to ancient recipes, or mixtures invented by His Majesty”, while incense burned daily in gold and silver censers.

The Mughal night was counted out in sound. The naubat, the great band above the palace gate, struck up at midnight and again at dawn, and one ghari before sunrise its players blew the surna, in Abu’l Fazl’s words, to “wake up those that are asleep.”

Music inside the palace kept time as well. Hindustani tradition divides day and night into eight watches, or prahar, of about three hours each, and assigns each raga to its watch. The principle is called samay, which means “time”. Musicians have argued over the details for centuries, but the broad shape holds. A raga sung in the wrong hour is not forbidden. It is merely out of season, like snow in June.

The hinge of the day

The most charged hours are the joins. Ragas of sandhi prakash, the “junction of light”, belong to the twilight when day and night overlap. At sunset come Marwa and Puriya, built on a restless flattened second and slow to settle; you spend much of a good Marwa waiting for it to come home. As dark falls, Yaman opens the night. It is among the first ragas a student learns, and its raised fourth gives it an easy, open calm.

Bageshri, full of longing, belongs to the hours before midnight. Darbari Kanada is a midnight raga, grave and very slow, with a wide oscillation on its flattened sixth; tradition credits its creation to Tansen, the singer Akbar prized above all others, and its name means “of the court”. Malkauns, five notes and no more, is for the small hours. Before dawn comes Lalit, to our ears the strangest of them all. At first light, Bhairav.

A raga sung in the wrong hour is not forbidden. It is merely out of season, like snow in June.

Painters gave the ragas bodies. From the sixteenth century, ragamala sets, “garlands of ragas”, pictured each mode as a scene, its raginis imagined as wives. Todi Ragini is almost always a woman alone in a grove, usually with a vina on her shoulder, deer drawn out of the trees by the sound; ours has set hers down. Strictly, Todi is a morning raga. She is here because her hour follows ours, when the night’s listening ends.

The emperor’s singers

Tansen, a Gwalior man, came to Akbar’s court in 1562 from the court of Raja Ram Chand of Rewa, who could not refuse the emperor’s summons. “A singer like him has not been in India for the last thousand years,” Abu’l Fazl wrote. His line carried on under Jahangir and into the court of Shah Jahan. There the leading musician was Lal Khan, son-in-law of Tansen’s son Bilas Khan, who received the title Gunsamundar, “ocean of excellence”. Beside him stood Jagannath, a poet-composer given the title Kavirai. The chroniclers record that Jagannath and another singer, Dirang Khan, were each weighed against silver and given the sum, 4,500 rupees apiece.

Things changed under Aurangzeb, who in the late 1660s gave up listening to music himself, though historians now doubt that he banned it outright; musicians stayed on the imperial rolls, and princes and nobles kept them busy. The chronicler Khafi Khan tells how the singers carried a bier beneath the imperial window and wailed that Melody had died. The emperor told them to bury it deep, “so that neither voice nor echo may issue from it”. It is too neat a story to trust entirely, and too good to leave out. The music survived him in the houses of nobles and the lodges of Sufis.

To hear it properly, wait until it is dark. Begin at nightfall with Kishori Amonkar singing Raga Bhoop, her Sahela re, which takes its time. Near midnight turn to Ustad Amir Khan’s Darbari Kanada, a famously slow, inward performance issued on LP in 1960 with his Marwa. For the small hours there is Pandit Pran Nath’s Midnight, a single long meditation on Malkauns.

Look closely at a standing Mughal nobleman and you can often see his legs. The jama, the long wrapped coat of the court, falls to his calves, yet through its skirt you can see what lies beneath and behind it, the pattern of his trousers or the shield at his back, as if the painter had forgotten to finish the cloth. He has not forgotten. He is recording muslin, and the finest of it came from Dhaka.

Its grades had names like lines of poetry. The sorts recorded from Mughal and later sources include ab-e-rawan, “running water”; shabnam, “evening dew”; and baft-hawa, “woven air”. The finest of all was malmal khas, the emperor’s muslin, reserved for the imperial wardrobe and sent up from the looms of eastern Bengal as a matter of state.

The thread began as a cotton called phuti karpas, which grew on the banks of the Meghna and its sister rivers near Dhaka. Its fibres were short, and too delicate for any machine. Women spun them by hand with a slender spindle, and the work went best in the humid hours of early morning, when moisture in the air gave the fibre strength and the thread would not snap. A single length of the finest cloth could take months.

The best-known muslin story is certainly a legend. It is told of Zeb-un-Nissa, the poet daughter of Aurangzeb, who came before her father in a dress so sheer that he scolded her for appearing uncovered. She answered, the story goes, that she was wearing seven layers. No contemporary source records the scene, and versions attach it to other princesses and other emperors. We would not want to lose it.

By the nineteenth century the trade had collapsed. Under the East India Company the weavers of Bengal were squeezed by fixed prices and debt, while cheap machine-spun cotton from Lancashire flooded the markets that muslin had once supplied. Famine thinned the villages. The spinners died without apprentices, and phuti karpas disappeared from the fields; for more than a century botanists believed it extinct.

The revival has been slow and careful. In 2014 Saiful Islam of the Dhaka photography agency Drik founded the Bengal Muslin project, which traced the old cotton through dried leaves kept in a London herbarium, sequenced its DNA and found a close match growing wild in Bangladesh. With master weavers, the project has since produced saris spun from hybrid thread. A government programme, begun in the same years with botanists at Rajshahi University, has made saris of its own, and at the end of 2020 Dhakai muslin was recognised as a geographical indication of Bangladesh.

Every evening at Akbar’s court, Abu’l Fazl records, the emperor was woken or called down from his horse a little before sunset. “And when the sun sets, the attendants light twelve white candles, on twelve candlesticks of gold and silver, and bring them before his Majesty,” while a singer, candle in hand, sang in praise of God. Lighting the dark was a ceremony. Few of us run to twelve gold candlesticks, but the paintings on our walls will repay a little of the same care.

Begin with the colour of the light. Mughal painting is built on warm pigments: gold, vermilion, the ochres and saffron yellows, the green of a garden terrace. Under cool white light, around 4000 kelvin and above, we find that gold tends to look grey and reds turn towards brick. Choose bulbs rated 2700 to 3000K, the range of an old incandescent lamp or a late-afternoon room, and the gold will glow instead of glare. Colour temperature is only half the story, though. Look, too, for the colour rendering index printed on the box. A CRI of 90 or more means the bulb shows colour faithfully; cheaper lamps flatten the difference between a crimson and a rose.

Where the light falls

A picture light, the small brass arm fixed above a frame, is the gentlest choice for a single painting and suits a study or a narrow hall. For a larger wall, adjustable ceiling spots or track lights give more control and keep wires out of sight. Whichever you use, aim the beam at about 30 degrees from the vertical, measured at the centre of the picture. Steeper, and the frame casts a heavy shadow across the top. Shallower, and a glazed picture throws the light straight back into your eyes. If your picture is under glass, get this right before you spend a penny on bulbs.

Fit a dimmer. A painting lit at full brightness at midnight looks like an exhibit; the same work at half strength looks like a window into another evening. Set it a little brighter than the room around it, enough to catch the eye and no more.

A painting lit at full brightness at midnight looks like an exhibit; the same work at half strength looks like a window into another evening.

Then protect the work. Modern LEDs give off almost no ultraviolet and little heat, which makes them the kindest light for pigments, paper and canvas. Direct sunlight is the real enemy, fading colour year by year, so keep valued pictures off walls that catch the afternoon sun. Nor should they hang above radiators, fireplaces or lamps that run hot. Candles are lovely, but keep them well away from the art. Soot and heat do slow damage, and an open flame near a frame is asking for trouble.

The lit pavilion

For all the grandeur of Akbar’s candlesticks, a Mughal room at night was more often lit by many small lights than by one large one. Palace walls were cut with taq, shallow niches that held oil lamps and threw a soft glow across plaster. The walls of the tomb of I’timad al-Daula at Agra are painted with rows of such niches holding flasks and vases, a pattern known as chini-khana, from the niches made to show porcelain. At Lahore, in the Shish Mahal that Shah Jahan built in 1631–32, walls and vaults were set with thousands of fragments of mirror, so that a single flame at night became a sky of small reflected points.

You can borrow the principle without the mirrors. Put table lamps at seated eye level, not only overhead, so that faces and pictures are lit from the side as they would be in a pavilion at dusk. Light a bookshelf, or the far corner of the room. Let the painting be one of several warm points in the dark rather than the only bright thing in it. We think pictures look happier that way, and so do the people sitting under them.

When Babur walked his first gardens in Hindustan he took notes on the flowers as closely as he did on the fruit. Of the jasmine he wrote that it “is larger and more strongly scented than our yāsman-flower”, the one he knew from home. Many of India’s best-loved scents open only after sunset, to call in moths rather than bees. One pot of any of the five below, set by a door or an open window, is enough to bring a little of that night-garden indoors.

Jasmine (Jasminum sambac), the motia of garlands, is a cousin of the jasmine Babur admired, its waxy white flowers strongest at dusk. Give it full sun and steady water, and feed it through summer. It is hardy outdoors in zones 9 to 11; elsewhere, bring the pot into a bright room before the first frost.

Tuberose (Polianthes tuberosa), rajnigandha, “night-fragrance”, is native to Mexico, where the Aztecs grew it. It reached Europe with the Spanish in the sixteenth century and travelled on to India, though exactly when, and how well the Mughal gardens knew it, is uncertain. Plant the tubers in spring in a deep pot, in full sun, and water freely once growth starts. North of zone 8, lift and store them dry over winter.

Night-blooming jasmine (Cestrum nocturnum), raat ki rani, “queen of the night”, is not a true jasmine and not Indian either; it comes from tropical America, from Mexico down to Venezuela, and was brought to India from the New World. The scent is almost overwhelming (some find it too much by half), so keep it on a terrace and away from the bedroom. Sun to part shade; hardy in zones 9 to 11.

Night-flowering jasmine (Nyctanthes arbor-tristis), the parijat or harsingar, opens its white, orange-tubed flowers at dusk and drops them by dawn, which is how it came to be called the “tree of sorrow”. A native of the subcontinent, it tolerates brief cold into the thirties Fahrenheit. Grow it in a large pot in full sun and prune to keep it compact.

Champa (Magnolia champaca), golden and heavy with perfume, is a tree in the wild, but a grafted plant will flower in a big container. It wants full sun, rich soil and generous water while young, and is hardy only in zones 9 to 11, where even then young plants need protection from frost, so most American growers will winter it indoors.

This is adapted from The Garden and the Sword, our podcast retelling Babur’s memoir, the Baburnama; his own words appear in quotation marks, from Annette Beveridge’s 1922 translation.

It is late autumn in the year 906 of the Hijra, the end of 1500 by the Christian count, and a prince without a kingdom is sitting in a small fort in the hill country up the river from Samarkand, asking his companions to guess the future. Babur has lost Farghana, the valley he inherited at eleven. He has taken Samarkand once already, in 1497, and held it for about a hundred days before it slipped away. Now the city belongs to Shaibani Khan, the Uzbek chief who seized it only months before. In the fort at Asfidik the household plays at prophecy. When will we take Samarkand? In the hot season, says one. In a month, says another. Forty days. Twenty. His foster-brother Nuyan Kukuldash says fourteen. Years later, setting the scene down in his memoir, Babur cannot resist the arithmetic. They took it in exactly fourteen days.

Two hundred and forty

Babur is honest about numbers, even when they make him look reckless. “Our men, good and bad were 240.” Inside the walls, Shaibani’s governor Jan-wafa holds the fort with five or six hundred. Shaibani himself lies a short ride away near the fort of Khwaja Didar, with three or four thousand Uzbeks and as many again gathered locally. On paper the venture is absurd. Babur and his begs argue otherwise. Shaibani has held the city so briefly that its people feel nothing for him; if ladders can be set up and the fort taken by surprise, the Samarkandis will cheer their own Timurid prince, and even if they do not help, they will hardly fight for the Uzbeks.

The first attempts come to nothing. A party of his begs sets ladders against the little fort of Rabat-i-khwaja, is discovered, and falls back. Then the whole company rides out of the Yar-yilaq hills after the midday prayer and on through the dark, and at midnight, at a halting place called Khan-yurti, word comes that Samarkand knows they are coming. They turn round. Dawn finds them crossing the Kohik river, the Zarafshan, and back where they started, with the secret spent.

Then Babur dreams. Khwaja ‘Ubaidullah Ahrar, the great Naqshbandi saint of Samarkand, dead these ten years, comes to visit him. A cloth is laid before the Khwaja carelessly and a shadow crosses the holy man’s face; Babur signals that the fault is the servant’s, and the excuse is accepted. As Babur sees him out, in the hall of the house, the Khwaja takes him by the arm and lifts him until one foot leaves the ground, saying that Shaikh Maslahat has given it. Babur records the dream without comment, then adds that a few days later he took Samarkand.

The Lovers’ Cave

Within two or three days they move to Fort Wasmand and try again, knowing the plan has leaked and trusting, as Babur puts it, in God. They ride out after the midday prayer, Khwaja Abu’l-makaram with them, and by midnight they reach the Deep-fosse bridge on the Avenue, the tree-lined road that runs up to the city. There the column halts. Seventy or eighty good men go forward with the ladders.

They choose a stretch of wall Babur had reason to remember: the wall opposite the Lovers’ Cave. Their target is the Turquoise Gate. Three years earlier, during Babur’s first siege, a message had come out of the city inviting his men to the Lovers’ Cave by night, where they would be handed the fort. It was a trap. Four or five of his household foot-soldiers were killed there, among them a man called Haji who had served him since childhood. Now the ladders go up against the wall where his servants died.

This time nobody hears. The men climb over, drop inside and make straight for the Turquoise Gate, where Fazil Tarkhan, a merchant whom Shaibani had raised to rank, keeps watch with a few retainers. They cut them down, break the lock with an axe and haul the gate open. At that moment, Babur writes, he comes up and rides in.

Down, down

The city is still asleep. “The towns-people were still slumbering; a few traders peeped out of their shops, recognized me and put up prayers.” Babur rides to the college and takes his post above the arch of the monastery beside it. The news runs from lane to lane, and the people of Samarkand turn on the occupiers with clubs and stones; Babur reckons four or five hundred Uzbeks killed in the lanes and alleys. Jan-wafa slips out of the house where he has been living and escapes to his master. Until daybreak the streets ring with the hunters’ cry, down, down.

At first light the prince hears that Uzbeks have barricaded themselves inside the Iron Gate, between its outer and inner doors. He sets off with ten or twenty men, but the townspeople, already ransacking the city for loot, have driven them out before he arrives. Shaibani gallops up to the Iron Gate at sunrise with a hundred or a hundred and forty men, takes one look and turns away. Babur goes on to the citadel and dismounts at the Bustan palace, where notables and headmen come to bless him. Then he writes the sentence he has waited years to write. “Samarkand for nearly 140 years had been the capital of our dynasty. An alien, and of what stamp! an Auzbeg foe, had taken possession of it! It had slipped from our hands; God gave it again!”

Now the ladders go up against the wall where his servants died.

He is proud, and does not hide it. He sets his night beside the famous surprise of Herat by Sultan Husain Mirza thirty years before, and counts off the differences: Husain was a seasoned ruler facing a drunken boy, while Babur was young and faced Shaibani, a veteran on his guard. He gives his age as nineteen; he was then in his nineteenth year by the Muslim lunar calendar, and by the Christian count, born in February 1483, he was seventeen. The poets compose chronograms on the victory of Babur Bahadur, and within three or four months the forts of Soghd come back to him one after another.

It does not last. In the spring of 1501 Babur hurries into pitched battle with Shaibani at Sar-i-Pul, partly, he admits, because the Eight Stars stood between the two armies, a sign he later calls worthless. The Uzbeks wheel round his flank in their favourite manoeuvre, his Mughul allies begin plundering his own men, and he escapes by swimming the flooded Kohik in full armour with ten or fifteen companions. A siege of some four or five months follows. Food runs out. Men let themselves down from the ramparts at night and vanish. Shaibani brings his camp right up to the Lovers’ Cave.

At last, around midnight, under a peace of sorts, Babur leaves by the Shaikh-zada’s Gate with his mother. His elder sister Khanzada Begum stays behind as Shaibani’s wife. Babur writes that she “fell into Shaibaq Khan’s hands”, but other sources say the marriage was agreed before the gates were opened, part of the price of the peace. Brother and sister will not meet again for ten years. In the dark the fugitives lose their way among the irrigation channels of Soghd. At dawn Babur races his companions, twists round in the saddle to look back, and is thrown on his head. For the rest of the day, he writes, the world seems like something seen in a dream. It is as good a description of concussion as any.

That fall points south. The night of the ladders had given him Samarkand for a few months. After three years of wandering he crosses the Hindu Kush and takes Kabul in 1504, and from Kabul, twenty-two years later, he rides down to Panipat and the throne of Delhi.

Before it meant a stretch of time, pahar meant a blow. The word comes from Sanskrit prahara, built on pra-hṛ, “to strike”, and Monier-Williams glosses it plainly: a division of about three hours, literally a “stroke” on a gong. The watch was named after the sound that ended it. Babur, arriving in Hindustan in 1526, noted that the Persian equivalent was pās, and that he had heard of “a watch and watchman” at home in Transoxania, but never with such particulars.

From the same root comes pahra, a guard’s turn of duty, and the pehredar who keeps it; the ending -dar, “holder”, is Persian, so the watchman is literally the holder of the watch. His colleague the chaukidar holds a chauki, a guard-post or station, a word the British carried home as “choky” for a lock-up.

The ghari has travelled further. It descends from Sanskrit ghaṭikā, a small ghaṭa or water-pot, because the twenty-four-minute unit was measured by a perforated bowl that filled and sank. In modern Hindi and Urdu ghaṛī means a watch on the wrist or a clock on the wall, which is a long way for a pot to come.

Put the two together and you get a phrase still heard in song and speech, aath pahar chaunsath ghari: eight watches, sixty-four gharis, meaning every waking and sleeping moment. The arithmetic is poetic (the true count was sixty), and nobody minds.

For the night itself, Hindustani keeps two words side by side. Raat comes from Sanskrit rātri. Shab is Persian, and tends to turn up on occasions: shab-e-barat, the night of the fifteenth of Sha’ban, kept with lamps and prayers for the dead, and the courteous shab-bakhair, “night with goodness,” the Urdu good night.

The clock was a bowl with a hole in it. Set on the surface of a basin of water, it took in water through its base, slowly and at a known rate, until it grew heavy and sank. This took one ghari, or twenty-four minutes. A man fished it out, emptied it, floated it again, and struck a gong. Sixty sinkings made a day and a night.

Babur found the arrangement worth a careful page in his memoirs. Every considerable town of Hindustan, he wrote, kept a body of ghariyalis, and hung up a broad brass plate “perhaps as large as a tray” in a high place. Beside it they kept “a vessel perforated at the bottom like an hour-cup and filling in one g’harī.” When the cup first filled at daybreak, the gong was struck once; at the second filling, twice; and so on to the end of the watch, which was marked by several rapid blows followed by a count of one to four for the watch just ended.

Babur being Babur, he found a flaw and fixed it. Because the number of the watch was struck only when the watch ended, a sleeper who woke to three strokes could not tell which watch they belonged to. “I therefore ordered,” he wrote, “that at night or on a cloudy day the sign of the watch should be struck after that of the g’harī.” The reform pleased him. “It did very well,” he concluded; anyone waking in the night “would know what g’harī of what watch of night it was.”

Two generations later Abu’l Fazl gave the instrument its own section in the Ain-i-Akbari, “The Institution of the Gharyal,” and quoted Babur’s reform. His specifications are exact. The bowl was of copper or another metal, a hundred tanks in weight, narrower at the base, twelve fingers high and twelve broad. Through the hole passed a golden tube weighing one masha and five fingers long, which fixed the rate of flow. The basin had to hold pure water and stand where no wind could disturb it. In Persian, he adds, the bowl was called a pingan.

The gong itself was “of mixed metal, shaped like a griddle but thicker,” and hung from a cord. Abu’l Fazl adds something Babur did not mention. The gharyal, he says, might be sounded only by royal command, and it travelled with the royal equipage. Every town might have its public gong, but a gong of one’s own was a mark of rank: as H. Blochmann, the Ain’s first translator, noted, the distinctions the emperor conferred on his mansabdars included certain flags and the gharyal.

Neither writer claimed the device as new. Abu’l Fazl’s nineteenth-century translator, H. S. Jarrett, traced the sinking bowl to Sanskrit astronomical texts written centuries before the Mughals arrived. Babur and Akbar’s historian were describing a very old instrument, now kept going in town after town across an empire. In Agra or Lahore, anyone lying awake on a still night could count along.

In November we put down the lamp and pick up the cloth. Mughal India measured rank, affection and diplomacy in lengths of fabric. There were robes of honour handed down from the throne, muslins light enough to pass for mist, and painted cottons that went by sea to other empires.

Our guide is Sylvia Houghteling of Bryn Mawr College, author of The Art of Cloth in Mughal India, the first guest in our new interview column, The Hand. We ask her how cloth moved through the Mughal world and who wore what, and why. We also want to know what a painter’s close attention to a sash or a hem can tell us that no chronicle does.