Shah Jahan: The Builder Emperor and the Limits of Mughal Power

Shah Jahan, born Shahab-ud-Din Muhammad Khurram, was the fifth emperor of the Mughal dynasty and ruled from 1628 until his sons deposed him in 1658. His name is attached above all to the buildings raised in his reign, and with reason: the thirty years of his rule produced the Taj Mahal, the walled capital of Shahjahanabad with its great fort and congregational mosque, and a distinctive architectural manner in white marble and inlaid stone that defines the visual memory of Mughal India.

The political record of the reign is more mixed than the monuments suggest, and the two are connected. Shah Jahan inherited an empire at its most prosperous and left it at its most strained. He annexed the last independent sultanate of the northern Deccan and reduced the others to tribute, and he also spent immense sums on campaigns in Central Asia and on the Afghan frontier that failed. The succession war that ended his reign was not caused by that expenditure, but it was fought over an empire whose fiscal margin had narrowed.

This article treats the reign, the administration, the campaigns, and the fall. The Taj Mahal — its design, construction, and meaning — is covered in its own article, and is discussed here only as part of the wider building programme.

Early Life and Accession

Khurram was born at Lahore on 5 January 1592, the son of the future emperor Jahangir and a Rajput princess of the ruling house of Marwar. His grandfather Akbar took a particular interest in his upbringing, and he was raised partly in the imperial household at Agra.

He emerged as the most capable of Jahangir's sons in military service. He commanded in the Mewar campaign of 1614–15 that brought the long Mughal conflict with the Sisodia Rajputs to a settlement, and he served in the Deccan, where his success in 1617 earned him the title Shah Jahan, "King of the World," from his father.

Mumtaz Mahal and the Imperial Family

In 1612 he married Arjumand Banu Begum, known by the title Mumtaz Mahal, the daughter of Asaf Khan and a niece of the empress Nur Jahan. She was not his only wife — Mughal emperors contracted marriages for political as well as personal reasons, and he had others — but the sources are unanimous that she held a position none of the others approached. She travelled with him on campaign, including during the years of rebellion, and the chronicles credit her with influence over petitions and appointments.

She died at Burhanpur in the Deccan in June 1631, in the course of giving birth to her fourteenth child. Seven of those children survived to adulthood, and the shape of the reign's end was largely determined by them. The four sons — Dara Shukoh, Shah Shuja, Aurangzeb, and Murad Bakhsh — each received provincial commands, which was the standing Mughal practice and the standing Mughal danger. Among the daughters, Jahanara Begum became the senior woman of the court and a patron and builder in her own right, while Roshanara Begum aligned herself with Aurangzeb against her sister and brother.

The court histories record Shah Jahan's grief at Mumtaz Mahal's death in unusually direct terms for official chronicles, describing a withdrawal from public business and a visible change in his appearance. The mausoleum at Agra was begun the following year. Whatever weight is given to the chronicles' account of his feeling — and it was in their interest to present a devoted sovereign — the scale of the building is itself evidence of the significance attached to her.

The Rebellion of 1622–1626

The last years of Jahangir's reign were dominated by the question of succession and by the influence of the empress Nur Jahan, who had come to exercise substantial authority at court and who favoured a different candidate — Shahryar, Jahangir's youngest surviving son, whom she married to her own daughter by a previous marriage.

The immediate trigger was a military order. In 1622 the Safavids under Shah Abbas I besieged Kandahar, and Shah Jahan was directed to march for its relief. He refused the terms of the command, judging that to leave the vicinity of the court with his army would surrender the succession to his rivals, and demanded conditions that Jahangir would not grant. Kandahar fell to the Safavids, and Shah Jahan was in open revolt.

The rebellion lasted some four years and ranged across Hindustan, the Deccan, and Bengal. He was defeated in the field near Delhi, campaigned in the Deccan and Bengal to raise resources, and was steadily worn down by imperial forces commanded by Mahabat Khan. By 1626 he had submitted, sending two of his sons — Dara Shukoh and Aurangzeb — to the court as hostages for his conduct.

The episode is worth recording for two reasons beyond its own drama. It established the pattern of his relations with his family: a claim pressed by force against a reigning father, resolved by submission and then by inheritance. And it gave Aurangzeb, then a boy, his first extended experience of the imperial court as a hostage of his father's failed rebellion.

When Jahangir died in 1627, Shah Jahan was in the Deccan. His supporters at court — chiefly his father-in-law Asaf Khan, who was also Nur Jahan's brother — secured the succession for him against Shahryar's claim, and he was formally enthroned at Agra in January 1628. As was usual in Mughal successions, the rival claimants and their male supporters within the family were eliminated, and Nur Jahan was retired from public life on a pension.

Campaigns and Frontiers

The Deccan

The most substantial territorial achievement of the reign was in the Deccan, where Mughal pressure on the successor states of the Bahmani sultanate had continued for decades. Ahmadnagar was extinguished and annexed in 1636. Bijapur and Golconda were compelled to accept tributary status and to cede territory, and were left as subordinate but surviving states. Shah Jahan appointed his son Aurangzeb as viceroy of the Deccan, an assignment that gave the future emperor both his military apprenticeship and his base of support.

The settlement of 1636 defined the political shape of the region for a generation. Ahmadnagar was extinguished outright and its territory absorbed into the empire as Mughal provinces. Bijapur and Golconda were left standing but reduced: each acknowledged Mughal suzerainty, ceded districts, and undertook tribute, and Bijapur was additionally required to abandon its claims on Ahmadnagar's former lands. The arrangement suited both sides for a time — it gave the Mughals a frontier they could hold and gave the two sultanates survival on terms — and it was Aurangzeb, having governed the region under it, who eventually destroyed it by annexing both states in the 1680s.

The Famine of 1630–1632

The Deccan campaigns coincided with the worst humanitarian episode of the reign. Failure of the rains across the Deccan and Gujarat produced a famine of extraordinary severity between 1630 and 1632, and it is documented from two independent directions: the court historian Abdul Hamid Lahori recorded it in the official chronicle, and the English merchant Peter Mundy, travelling through Gujarat, described what he saw.

Both accounts describe mortality on a scale that emptied districts, the abandonment of villages, roads lined with the dead, and the sale of children. Lahori's inclusion of this material in an official history intended to celebrate the reign is itself notable, and historians have taken his willingness to record it as a mark of the disaster's scale.

Relief was ordered. Revenue was remitted in the affected districts, sums were allocated for distribution, and feeding stations were established at Burhanpur, Ahmadabad and Surat. The measures were real and, on the testimony of the same sources, wholly inadequate to the event. The episode is a corrective to the impression of uniform prosperity that the reign's monuments and court accounts convey, and it bears on the question of how the fiscal demand of these years was actually experienced in the countryside.

Balkh, Badakhshan and Kandahar

The two great military failures of the reign lay to the north and west. In 1646–47 Shah Jahan sent armies across the Hindu Kush to take Balkh and Badakhshan, the ancestral Timurid lands from which Babur had come. Balkh was occupied, but the position proved impossible to hold: the terrain, the winter, the hostility of the Uzbek population, and the cost of supply forced a withdrawal that was itself costly in men and animals.

Kandahar, the strategic fortress commanding the route between India and Iran, was lost to the Safavids in 1649. Shah Jahan mounted three expeditions to recover it — in 1649, 1652 and 1653 — and all three failed.

The reasons were consistent and instructive. Kandahar's defences were built to withstand exactly the kind of assault the Mughals could mount, and the Mughal siege train was not equal to them: the heavy guns needed to breach the walls could not be moved quickly enough over the intervening country, and the lighter artillery that could be brought forward made little impression. Each siege had to be conducted within a short campaigning season, since the army could not be supplied through an Afghan winter at the end of a line of communication running back to the Punjab. In each case the Safavid garrison held long enough for the season to close, and the Mughals withdrew.

The command arrangements added a further dimension. Aurangzeb led the second attempt and Dara Shukoh the third, and both failed; the rivalry between the brothers meant that each failure was material for the other's advocates at court. The Kandahar campaigns thus contributed to the poisoning of relations among the princes as well as to the depletion of the treasury.

The financial cost of the northern wars taken together was very large, and modern assessments generally treat the Balkh and Kandahar ventures as the point at which Mughal military expenditure ceased to yield a return.

Elsewhere the reign saw a campaign against Jujhar Singh in Bundelkhand, and the expulsion of the Portuguese from their settlement at Hugli in Bengal in 1632.

Government, Economy and Court

Shah Jahan's empire was, by the measures available, the wealthiest state in the world of its time, and the accounts of European visitors — François Bernier, Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, Peter Mundy, and the Augustinian Sebastien Manrique among them — describe a court of extraordinary display. The Peacock Throne, commissioned early in the reign and encrusted with the accumulated gemstones of the treasury, was its emblem.

Administratively he worked within the framework established by Akbar, and it is worth setting out because the strains of the later empire arose from its mechanics.

Office-holders were graded in the mansabdari system by two numbers: the zat, which fixed personal rank and pay, and the sawar, which fixed the number of cavalry the holder was obliged to maintain. Salary was normally not paid in cash but assigned as jagir — the right to collect the assessed revenue of a specified territory, up to the value of the entitlement. The territory was not hereditary property; assignments were rotated between provinces precisely so that no officer struck roots in one place.

The system's logic was elegant and its vulnerability specific. The value of an assignment depended on the difference between the revenue assessed on paper and the revenue that could actually be collected. As the number of ranked officers grew, as military obligations expanded, and as the assessed figures drifted away from what the land would bear, that margin narrowed. Officers responded by pressing collection harder, and since assignments rotated, none had a durable interest in the long-term condition of the district he was squeezing. Irfan Habib and others have identified this as a developing structural problem of the later empire rather than a crisis of this reign alone, but it is in Shah Jahan's period that the mechanism becomes visible.

Provincial government followed Akbar's template: the empire divided into subas under governors, subdivided into sarkars and parganas, with the revenue administration, the military command and the judiciary held by separate officers reporting independently to the centre — a deliberate division designed to prevent any provincial figure from accumulating the whole apparatus of power in one hand.

In religious policy Shah Jahan moved away from the accommodating posture of Akbar and, to a lesser degree, Jahangir. He gave more prominence to orthodox Sunni scholars at court, discontinued some of the practices Akbar had introduced, and issued orders in the early 1630s against newly built temples in certain localities, including at Benares. At the same time Hindu nobles continued to hold senior military and administrative rank throughout the reign, most prominently Raja Jai Singh, and his eldest son and designated heir Dara Shukoh was a serious student of comparative religion who sponsored translations of Sanskrit works. The record therefore does not support a single characterisation, and it is set out here as the mixed evidence it is.

The Building Programme

The architecture of the reign represents the mature phase of the Mughal style: white marble in place of red sandstone, pietra dura inlay of coloured stones, bulbous domes, cusped arches, and an insistence on bilateral symmetry and formal garden settings. The whole is often labelled the Shahjahani manner, and it is treated at greater length in the survey of Indo-Islamic architecture.

The principal works were these. The Taj Mahal at Agra, begun in 1632 as the mausoleum of Mumtaz Mahal, with the tomb itself substantially finished by the early 1640s and the wider complex completed over the following decade. The new capital of Shahjahanabad at Delhi, founded in 1639 and inaugurated in 1648, with the Red Fort at its heart containing the halls of public and private audience. The Jama Masjid at Delhi, built between 1650 and 1656, among the largest congregational mosques of the subcontinent. The Moti Masjid and other additions within Agra Fort. And the Shalimar gardens at Lahore, laid out in the early 1640s.

Two points about this programme are worth stating. First, it was an instrument of rule as much as an aesthetic project: a new capital bearing the emperor's name, a dynastic mausoleum on the river at Agra, and a congregational mosque of unprecedented scale were assertions of legitimacy and permanence directed at subjects and rivals alike. Second, the scale of expenditure was possible because of the revenue base Akbar's settlement had created, and it coincided with the military spending that strained it.

The War of Succession and Deposition

In September 1657 Shah Jahan fell seriously ill, and the illness set off the succession contest that Mughal practice made almost unavoidable, since there was no law of primogeniture and each adult prince held a provincial command with troops. His four sons — Dara Shukoh, the eldest and his father's choice, at court; Shah Shuja in Bengal; Aurangzeb in the Deccan; and Murad Bakhsh in Gujarat — each moved to secure the throne.

The war was decided in a sequence of engagements across 1658 and 1659. At Bahadurpur in February 1658 Shah Shuja was checked by Dara Shukoh's son Sulaiman Shikoh. At Dharmat, on the plain near Ujjain, on 15 April 1658, the combined forces of Aurangzeb and Murad Bakhsh defeated an imperial army sent against them under Jaswant Singh of Marwar and Qasim Khan; the accounts attribute the outcome largely to Aurangzeb's superiority in artillery and to the coordination of his commanders. The decisive battle followed at Samugarh, near Agra, in May 1658, where Dara Shukoh's larger but less cohesive army broke; the sources differ on the exact day within that month.

Aurangzeb took Agra, and Shah Jahan — by then recovered from his illness — was deposed and confined. The remaining claimants were eliminated in turn: Shah Shuja was defeated at Khajwa on 5 January 1659 and driven eventually into Arakan; Dara Shukoh, after a final stand at Deorai near Ajmer on 12–14 April 1659, was captured and executed later that year; and Murad Bakhsh, Aurangzeb's early ally, was imprisoned and put to death. The establishment of Aurangzeb's rule and his own assessment of these events are treated in that emperor's article.

The Years of Confinement

Shah Jahan spent the last seven and a half years of his life under confinement in Agra Fort. The conditions reported by the sources were those of a deposed sovereign rather than a prisoner in the ordinary sense: he retained apartments in the palace, a household, and his own attendants, and correspondence passed between him and his son, some of it preserved and much of it acrimonious. He was not permitted to leave, and the ceremonial functions of kingship were withheld.

His daughter Jahanara Begum, who had supported Dara Shukoh's cause, chose to share the confinement and remained with him until his death. Her position illustrates something of the character of the Mughal household: a princess of the first rank could take a side in a civil war, lose, and retain both her life and her property, and Aurangzeb restored her to honour at court after their father's death.

Shah Jahan died in Agra Fort on 22 January 1666, aged seventy-four. He was buried beside Mumtaz Mahal in the mausoleum he had built for her — the only substantial asymmetry in an otherwise exactly symmetrical building, since his cenotaph was added beside hers on the central axis rather than in a place designed for it.

Court Culture and Patronage

The court of Shah Jahan was the most elaborate the dynasty produced, and its culture is documented in unusual detail because the reign coincided with a period of sustained European presence and observation.

Imperial painting reached a distinct manner under his patronage. Where Akbar's workshop had favoured crowded narrative composition and Jahangir's had specialised in naturalistic portraiture and studies of birds, animals, and plants, the Shahjahani style is formal, hieratic, and concerned with dynastic statement: the emperor in profile in durbar, haloed, receiving submission amid careful hierarchies of rank. The great illustrated Padshahnama manuscript is the central document of this manner. It is court art in the strict sense, produced to assert the order it depicts.

Manuscript production, calligraphy, jewellery, textiles, and jade carving flourished on the same principle. The relevant background on the wider tradition is set out in the survey of Islamic art and in the article on Islamic calligraphy, whose inscriptional programmes on his buildings — Quranic passages selected and placed with evident deliberation — are among the finest achievements of the craft in India.

The emperor's children were significant figures in this culture. Dara Shukoh, the eldest son and intended heir, was a serious scholar with an interest in comparative religion who commissioned Persian translations of the Upanishads and associated himself with Sufi teachers. Jahanara Begum, the eldest daughter, was a builder and patron in her own right, commissioning works in Shahjahanabad and holding a position of unusual influence at court, and she chose to share her father's confinement. Aurangzeb's formation was different, shaped by long provincial command in the Deccan and by an austerity of temperament that the sources contrast with his brother's speculative interests.

The Economy of the Reign

The reign is the period for which the wealth of Mughal India is most fully attested, and also the period in which the strains on its fiscal structure become visible.

Revenue rested overwhelmingly on agriculture, assessed and collected through the system inherited from Akbar's settlement and administered by revenue officials whose demand was calculated on measured area and expected yield. Around this ran an extensive commercial economy: cotton textiles above all, produced in Bengal, Gujarat, and the Coromandel for markets across the Indian Ocean and increasingly for European companies; indigo, saltpetre, silk, and spices; and an inflow of silver, much of it ultimately from the Americas, that paid for these exports and supplied the mints.

The pressures were structural. The mansabdari and jagir systems paid officers by assigning them the revenue of a territory, and the value of assignments depended on the gap between the assessed demand and what could actually be collected. As the number of ranked officers grew and as military expenditure rose, that gap narrowed and assignments were pressed harder, which fell on the cultivator. Irfan Habib's analysis treats this as a developing contradiction of the Mughal agrarian order rather than a crisis of any single reign, and it is in Shah Jahan's period that the trajectory becomes discernible.

The building programme and the Central Asian wars drew on the same revenue. The distinction between them is that the buildings were a one-time capital expenditure yielding durable assets and prestige, while Balkh and Kandahar consumed men and money without return. Contemporary observers noticed the difference; Bernier, writing shortly afterwards, connected the splendour of the court with the condition of the countryside in terms that have shaped subsequent debate.

Shahjahanabad: The Building of a Capital

The foundation of a new capital at Delhi in 1639 was the largest single undertaking of the reign and deserves separate notice, since it is often overshadowed by the mausoleum at Agra.

Shahjahanabad was a planned city, walled, with a fort-palace at its north-eastern corner on the river, a congregational mosque on high ground to the south-west, and two great processional avenues connecting the fort to the city's gates, one of them lined with a canal and a covered bazaar. The plan integrated the palace, the mosque, the market, and the residential quarters of the nobility into a single composition expressing the relationship between sovereign, faith, commerce, and service nobility.

The Red Fort within it contains the halls of public and private audience, the imperial apartments, and the Moti Masjid added later; the Jama Masjid, raised on its rocky platform above the city, remains among the largest mosques in South Asia. The whole ensemble is the most complete surviving example of Mughal urban design and is treated further in the survey of Islamic urban planning.

The choice of Delhi carried its own argument. Agra had been the Mughal seat since Babur, but Delhi was the historic capital of the Delhi Sultanate and the site of the tombs of earlier Muslim dynasties in India, including Humayun's. Founding a new city there, bearing his own name, placed Shah Jahan in that longer succession of Indo-Islamic sovereignty.

Religious Policy

Shah Jahan's religious policy marked a shift from the position his grandfather Akbar had established, and it is a subject on which the evidence pulls in more than one direction.

The shift is real and documented. Akbar had cultivated an eclectic court religion and had suspended a number of the disabilities that Islamic law traditionally attached to non-Muslim subjects; Jahangir had largely continued this. Shah Jahan reversed several of these measures. He discontinued Akbar's Ilahi solar era in official use and restored the Islamic lunar calendar for state purposes. He abandoned the practice of prostration before the emperor, which orthodox scholars had objected to as an act owed to God alone, replacing it with a lesser form of salutation. He gave a more prominent place at court to scholars of the ulama, and he patronised the Naqshbandi Sufi order, whose Indian branch was closely associated with a reassertion of Islamic legal norms.

He also issued orders in the early 1630s directed against Hindu temples newly under construction, and the destruction of a number of such structures — the sources name Benares among the locations — was carried out under them. The distinction drawn in the orders, between long-established temples and those newly begun, reflects a legal position rather than a general campaign, but the effect was destructive and is recorded as such.

Against this stands the composition of his administration and his household. Hindu nobles held senior military and civil rank throughout the reign; Raja Jai Singh of Amber and Jaswant Singh of Marwar commanded imperial armies, and Rajput contingents were integral to Mughal campaigns including the succession war fought at the reign's end. His designated heir, Dara Shukoh, pursued the study of Hindu religious philosophy openly and with his father's knowledge, commissioning Persian translations of Sanskrit works. The emperor's own mother was a Rajput princess.

The pattern is therefore neither the tolerant syncretism sometimes attributed to the earlier Mughals nor the confessional rigour sometimes attributed to Aurangzeb, and modern scholarship has largely abandoned attempts to resolve it into either. What can be said is that the ceremonial and legal presentation of the monarchy became more explicitly Islamic while the practical composition of the ruling class remained mixed.

European Trade and the Wider World

The reign coincided with the consolidation of European commercial activity in India, and Shah Jahan's government dealt with it as a matter of revenue and coastal order rather than of strategy.

The Portuguese, established on the Indian coasts since the previous century, were expelled from their settlement at Hugli in Bengal in 1632 after disputes over customs, shipping, and the treatment of Mughal subjects. The English East India Company, trading from Surat under earlier concessions, obtained further permissions during the reign, and Dutch and English factories multiplied along both coasts. These companies were, in Mughal eyes, one more category of merchant to be taxed and controlled; the notion that they represented a political threat belonged to a later century.

The commercial consequence was substantial. Indian cotton textiles, indigo, and saltpetre flowed outward in growing volume, and silver flowed in to pay for them, much of it originating in the Americas and reaching India through the Levant, the Red Sea, and the Cape route. That silver supplied the imperial mints and underwrote the monetary economy of the reign, which is one reason the period appears so conspicuously wealthy in contemporary description.

The most celebrated single object of the reign belongs to this economy of accumulated treasure. The Peacock Throne, commissioned early in the reign and completed over several years, was a jewelled seat of state set with stones drawn from the imperial collection, and it became the standing symbol of Mughal magnificence in European as well as Indian accounts. It was carried off from Delhi by Nader Shah of Iran in 1739 and does not survive.

Historiographical Note

Assessments of Shah Jahan's reign have been shaped, more than is usual, by the testimony of a single European observer. François Bernier, a French physician who reached India near the end of the reign and remained through the succession war, produced an account that connected the visible splendour of the court with the condition of the peasantry, and argued that the absence of secure private property in land was the cause of India's economic character. His analysis was influential far beyond Indian history: it fed European theories of "oriental despotism" and was drawn on by later political economists.

Modern scholarship treats Bernier as a valuable eyewitness and an unreliable analyst. Research on the Mughal agrarian order — Irfan Habib's work in particular — has established that rights in land were considerably more complex than Bernier understood, and that the fiscal pressures of the later seventeenth century arose from identifiable mechanisms within the jagir and mansabdari systems rather than from a general absence of property. The contemporary Persian chronicles present the opposite difficulty: Lahori's Padshahnama is an official production whose purpose is to record the reign as the court wished it recorded, and its silences are as significant as its statements.

The result is that the two best-documented aspects of the reign — its architecture and its court ceremonial — are also the aspects the sources were most concerned to celebrate, while the fiscal and agrarian record has had to be reconstructed by later research. Readers should hold the resulting picture of the reign's magnificence alongside the awareness that it was produced, in part, by those employed to produce it.

Assessment

The judgement on Shah Jahan has to separate two things that his reputation usually merges: the cultural achievement, which is beyond dispute, and the political stewardship, which is more equivocal.

The architecture is the most complete and coherent body of imperial building in Indian history, and its influence on the visual identity of the subcontinent has no rival. The Taj Mahal is a work of the first rank by any standard, and the ensemble of Shahjahanabad, the Delhi Jama Masjid, and the marble pavilions of Agra constitutes a single sustained artistic programme carried out over three decades. The court culture of the reign — its painting, its manuscript production, its jewellery and its ceremonial — was correspondingly refined.

As a ruler he consolidated in the Deccan and overreached in Central Asia and at Kandahar. The northern campaigns were undertaken for dynastic and prestige reasons and returned nothing; they consumed revenue and manpower at precisely the period when the jagir system was beginning to show strain. The empire he handed on was territorially larger and financially tighter than the one he received.

His reign also demonstrated the unresolved constitutional weakness of the Mughal state. The absence of any rule of succession meant that the illness of an emperor was sufficient to produce a civil war among armed provincial governors who happened to be his sons. Shah Jahan had himself come to the throne through rebellion against his father and the elimination of rivals; he lost it the same way, to a son who had been a hostage for that first rebellion. That pattern, rather than any particular policy, was the most consequential inheritance he passed to his successors.

References and Further Reading

Primary Islamic Sources

• Quran, Surah Al-Imran (3:26) — on sovereignty being given and taken away by God; a text used in the Mughal chronicles to frame both accession and deposition
• Quran, Surah al-Rahman (55:26–27) — on the passing of all things and the endurance of God alone; among the Quranic passages inscribed in the calligraphic programmes of his mausoleum architecture
• Quran, Surah al-Nisa (4:58) — on rendering trusts and judging with justice, the standard invoked in Indo-Persian writing on the duties of rulers
• Quran, Surah Yasin (36) and Surah al-Fajr (89) — among the surahs employed in the inscriptional schemes of the imperial tombs of the period
• Sahih al-Bukhari and Sahih Muslim, Books of Leadership (Kitab al-Imarah) — the prophetic material on rulers' accountability, the framework of contemporary religious assessment of his reign

Classical Islamic Sources

• Abdul Hamid Lahori. Padshahnama. Edited by Kabir al-Din Ahmad and Abd al-Rahim. Calcutta: Asiatic Society of Bengal, 1866–1872. [Compiled c. 1640s] — the official chronicle of the first two decades of the reign, and the principal source for the famine of 1630–32
• Inayat Khan. The Shah Jahan Nama. Translated by A.R. Fuller, edited by W.E. Begley and Z.A. Desai. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1990. [Compiled late 17th century]
• Muhammad Salih Kanbo. Amal-i Salih (Shah Jahan Nama). [Compiled c. 1660s]
• Abd al-Hamid Lahori and successors, the continuations of the Padshahnama covering the later years
• Muhammad Kazim. Alamgirnama. Calcutta: Asiatic Society of Bengal, 1868. [Compiled c. 1688] — for the war of succession and the deposition, from the victor's side

Academic and Scholarly Sources

• Richards, John F. The Mughal Empire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.
• Koch, Ebba. The Complete Taj Mahal and the Riverfront Gardens of Agra. London: Thames and Hudson, 2006.
• Asher, Catherine B. Architecture of Mughal India. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992.
• Begley, W.E., and Z.A. Desai, eds. Taj Mahal: The Illumined Tomb. Cambridge, MA: Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture, 1989.
• Habib, Irfan. The Agrarian System of Mughal India, 1556–1707. 2nd ed. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999.
• Foltz, Richard C. Mughal India and Central Asia. Karachi: Oxford University Press, 1998. — on the Balkh and Badakhshan campaigns
• Eaton, Richard M. India in the Persianate Age, 1000–1765. London: Allen Lane, 2019.
• Alam, Muzaffar, and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, eds. The Mughal State, 1526–1750. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998.

Further Reading

• Bernier, François. Travels in the Mogul Empire, AD 1656–1668. Translated by Archibald Constable. London: Oxford University Press, 1916. — eyewitness account of the court and the war of succession
• Tavernier, Jean-Baptiste. Travels in India. Translated by V. Ball. London: Macmillan, 1889.
• Koch, Ebba. Mughal Architecture: An Outline of Its History and Development. Munich: Prestel, 1991.
• Asher, Catherine B., and Cynthia Talbot. India Before Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.
• Archaeological Survey of India, documentation on the Taj Mahal, Agra Fort, and the Red Fort complex.