Jorge Flores | University of Lisbon

From Capital to Capital: Shah Jahan on the Move through the European Lens (1638, 1648)

Summary The paper briefly reflected about a couple of European manuscript descriptions – one Italian, the other Portuguese – concerning two of the many journeys between Mughal capitals made by Emperor Shah Jahan during his thirty-year reign (r. 1628-1658) and what these texts might offer about some of the themes most treated by Professor Ebba Koch: the profile of the imperial compounds, imperial visits to cities, the emperors’ mobility and their nomadic heritage. I have focused on a) Shah Jahan’s departure from Agra to Lahore in August 1638, as narrated by an anonymous Italian originally from Piedmonte in his “Partenza del Re Gran Mogor della citta d’Agra per la citta di Laoor” (1638); b) the same ruler’s departure from Agra to Delhi in April 1648, recounted by the Portuguese Jesuit António Botelho in his longer and later account titled “Relação das cousas mais notaveis que observei no reino do Gran Mogol em perto de seis anos…” (c. 1670). The paper first surveyed these two texts’ contexts and key features, with particular reference to their role as pieces of a larger constellation of accounts (European and Mughal alike) on the same topic, as well as their possible readership and circulation. Next, the paper addressed the main differences and commonalities between the “Partenza” and the “Relação”, especially with regard to the authors’ expertise in things Mughal and the observation posts from where they watched the imperial procession respectively in 1638 and 1648. I have likewise described the topics explored in the two accounts and underlined the remarkably positive image of Shah Jahan conveyed by both authors. The paper’s conclusion consisted of some thoughts on the significance of these texts where the writing of Mughal history is concerned and their place in seventeenth-century European writing on the “Great Mughal”.