Person · eldest daughter of Shah Jahan; her dates not yet read from a page

Jahanara

جہاں آرا

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Shah Jahan’s eldest daughter, the "Begam Sahib", with an income of three million rupees and the revenues of Surat, and kept unmarried under what Manucci calls "the regulation of Akbar that daughters should not be given husbands".

Draft. This entry is an unreviewed first draft. It has not yet been checked by a subject reviewer — see sources and method.

Income and the Surat revenue

"This princess had an annual income of three millions of rupees, in addition to the revenues of the port of Sūrat, assigned for her expenditure on betel." Manucci had already noted, of his own party’s seventy-five days at Surat, that its revenues "had been given by Shāh Jahān to his daughter, Begom Saeb (Begam Sāḥib), to meet her expenditure on betel."

Kept unmarried

When Dara pressed his father to marry her to the general Najabat Khan, Shaista Khan argued against it — a husband "would necessarily have to be placed in the same rank as any other prince", Najabat Khan was kin to the king of Balkh, and "he ought to bear in remembrance the regulation of Akbar that daughters should not be given husbands." "This was the reason why Shāhjahān did not give his daughter in marriage."

Manucci is a witness and a gossip on the same page, and the archive takes the regulation as his report of a court explanation, not as a decree it has read. But it is the one page yet opened that states the direction finding the women angle looks for: after Akbar, the house received daughters and gave none.

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