Nur Jahan: Empress of Mughal India.

• Author: Kozlowski, Gregory C.

Gossip was a popular form of entertainment long before the tabloid press or Geraldo Rivera. The personal lives of Mughal dynasts, their sisters, mothers, wives and aunts, were a prodigious source of tittle-tattle. Some of the idle chatter may have been based on real happenings. Given, however, the intentional distance which the emperors maintained between themselves and all but a small, select circle of familiars, most of the prattle was probably fantastical as well as malicious rumor. A serious study of Jahangir's consort, Nur Jahan, should do more than repeat the ripping yarns. Nur Jahan and women in the Mughal era certainly deserve more serious treatment.

Some knowledge of the Persian language is an essential tool in providing a sober assessment of Nur Jahan's life and times. The author of this book seems to lack that prerequisite. Dr. Findly appears to be wholly dependent on translations and the usual assortment of accounts produced by European visitors to Mughal India.

Together with the Rogers and Beveridge translation of Jahangir's memoirs as well as Blochman's A in-i Akbari, this author relies heavily on Elliot's and Dowson's anthology. Many years ago, Muhammad Habib pointed to the stultifying effects of the latter's historical tastes. They focused on the sensational and the political. They kept the kissing and the killing, but threw out the poetry, which could have given a clue about the motives of smoochers and assassins alike.

Dr. Findly is even more dependent on the tourists than the translators. She tends to favor Tudor-Stuart stalwarts like Hawkins and Roe over the perfidious Portuguese Jesuits. That may explain this book's rather dated character. Nur Jahan could easily have been written by Vincent Smith eighty years ago. Dr. Findly seems to be looking for Nur in all the wrong places.

The past thirty years of scholarship on the Mughals have not apparently made much of an impression on Nur Jahan's author. While she notes Irfan Habib's Atlas, she has ignored his Agrarian System. That leads her to make serious blunders, such as mistaking a jagir for a grant of land rather than a grant of revenue. A sense of basic geography is also lacking, as when Dr. Findly discusses the Safavid siege of Qandhahar and Jahangir's order to the governor of "nearby Multan" (p. 173) to support the Mughal relief force. The author has trouble distinguishing between what is "Hindu," "Indian," and "Islamic" or "Mughal." She has a tendency to employ...