¹ Lal, Ruby, Domesticity and Power in the Early Mughal World, (New York, Cambridge, 2005)Google Scholar.

² Gronke, Monika, “The Persian Court Between Palace and Tent: From Timur to ‘Abbas I,” Timurid Art and Culture, ed. by Golombek, Lisa and Subtelney, Maria, (Leiden, 1992) pp. 18–22Google Scholar.

³ Babur, Zahir al-Din Muhammad, Baburnama (Vekayi), Critical Edition Based on Four Chaghatay Texts, Mano, Eiji, ed., (Kyoto, 1995), v. 1 (Chaghatay text) p. 16Google Scholar.

⁴ Bernier, François, Travel in the Mogul Empire, AD 1656-1668, Constable, Archibald, tr., (London, 1934)Google Scholar; (New Delhi, Oriental Reprint, 1983), pp. 380–381; and see Montserrate, The Commentary of Father Montserrate, SJ, On His Journey to the Court of Akbar, tr. J.S. Hoyland, ed., S.N. Bannerjee,(Oxford, 1922) p. 79.

⁵ Bernier, p. 108.

⁶ Ibid., p. 381.

⁷ Peter Mundy, The Travels of Peter Mundy, 2:188ff, as quoted in Thackston, Wheeler, The Jahangirnama: Memoirs of Jahangir, Emperor of India, (Oxford, New York, 1999) p. xixGoogle Scholar.

⁸ Apart from a period in the seventeenth century during which the sultans moved to Edirne in an effort to escape the political factionalism of Istanbul, from the time of Sultan Mehmet Fatih's conquest of the city in 1453, Istanbul remained the economic, political and spiritual centre of Ottoman identity until the complete collapse of empire in the twentieth century.

⁹ Of course when Aurangzeb seized control of Delhi in 1658 he essentially took control of the empire but this was not because he took the capital city, but rather because he simultaneously seized his father, the emperor Shah Jahan, who afterwards remained a prisoner of his son, housed in Agra for eight years, until his death in 1666.

¹⁰ When Akbar left Sikri and moved to the Mughal capital of Lahore, it was most immediately to position himself more closely to contested territory in Kabul, ruled by his rebellious half-brother, and Khurasan, claimed by the Safavid shahs of Iran. Even when the threats to Mughal security passed, Akbar did not return to Sikri. Modern scholarship suggests that Sikri lacked adequate water to support the imperial Mughal court but this has never been definitively confirmed.

¹¹ In self-imposed exile Aurangzeb did express nostalgia for Delhi. When, after conquering Bijapur and Hyderabad, an official suggested that the war in the south had been successfully completed and requested that the royal court return to the north, the emperor answered sympathetically in verse, “It is hard that my runaway heart longs for home, The dew has so passed away and yet it remembers the garden”. He then refused the request and returned to his pursuit of the Deccan. Bahadur, Hamid ud-Din, Ahkam-i Alamgir, trans. by Sarkar, Jadunath as Anecdotes of Aurangzeb, (London, 1988) (1st and 2nd ed. 1925; 3rd 1949), p. 74Google Scholar.

¹² Ibid., p. 37.

¹³ Ibid., p. 41. My thanks to Geoffrey Parker of the Ohio State University for bringing this to my attention.

¹⁴ de Clavijo, Ruy Gonzales, Embassy to Tamerlane, 1403-1406, trans. by le Strange, Guy, (New York, London, 1928) pp. 2215–2217Google Scholar; Sharaf al-Din Ali Yazdi, Zafarnama, trans. by Wheeler M. Thackston, A Century of Princes: Sources on Timurid History and Art, The Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture, (Cambridge, Mass., 1989) pp. 85–87; and ibn Arabshah, Ahmed, Tamerlane or Timur the Great Amir, trans. by Sanders, J.H., (London, 1936) pp. 309–310Google Scholar.

¹⁵ Clavijo, p. 216.

¹⁶ Ibid., p. 243.

¹⁷ Lentz, Thomas W., “Memory and Ideology in the Timurid Garden”, in Mughal Gardens: Sources, Places, Representations and Prospects, Westcoat, James L. Jr. and Wolschke-Bulmahn, Joachim, (Dumbarton Oaks, 1996) p. 39Google Scholar.

¹⁸ Baburnama, Mano, v. 1, p. 482. As Anthony Welch has shown, there were gardens in northern India at the time of Babur's arrival that the Timurid prince must have been aware of but because they lacked the particular attributes of a Timurid garden (running water and the classic Persian geometric chahar bagh structure) and perhaps even more importantly, because they were the aesthetic and imperial remains of preceding dynasties, Babur was dismissive of them. See Welch, “Gardens That Babur Did Not Like: Landscape, Water and Architecture for the Sultans of Delhi”, Mughal Gardens, (Dumbarton Oaks, 1996).

¹⁹ Mano, v. 1, p. 482.

²⁰ Dale, Stephen F., The Garden of the Eight Paradises: Babur and the Culture of Empire in Central Asia, Afghanistan and India (1483- 1530), (Leiden, 2004) p. 186Google Scholar.

²¹ Rehman, Abdul, “Garden Types in Mughal Lahore”, in Gardens in the Time of the Great Muslim Empires, Petruccioli, Attilio, ed., (Leiden, 1997) p. 166Google Scholar.

²² Nur al-Din Muhammad Jahangir, Jahangirnama (Tuzuk-i Jahangiri), (Tehran, Buny adi Farhangi Iran, 1359 (1980)) p. 207.

²³ Sir Thomas Roe, The Embassy of Sir Thomas Roe to the Court of the Great Mogul, 1615–1619, ed. by William Foster, (Hakluyt Society, 1899), (Kraus Reprint, 1967) p. 375.

²⁴ al-Badauni, Abdul Qadir Ibn Muluk Shah. (Badaoni), Muntakhabut al-Tawarikh. Lowe, W.H., tr. and ed. (Patna, India, 1973), v. 2, p. 350Google Scholar.

²⁵ Ibid..

²⁶ Jahangirnama, p. 22.

²⁷ Ibid., p. 2.

²⁸ Ibid., p. 203.

²⁹ In describing Jadrup Gosain, Jahangir uses the Sanskrit term sanyasi rather than the Persian darwish, then couples it with the Persian term murtazi, stressing ascetic discipline. Ibid., p. 202.

³⁰ Ibid.

³¹ Ibid., p. 316.

³² Ibid., p. 202.

³³ Ibid., p. 268.

³⁴ Ibid., p. 60.

³⁵ Ibid., p. 23.

³⁶ Ibid., p. 384.

³⁷ Ibid., p. 60. The ‘anga is also commonly known in Persian literature as the simurgh.

³⁸ Ibid., p. 384.

³⁹ Ibid., p. 145.

⁴⁰ Clavijo, p. 231.

⁴¹ Khwandamir, Habib al-Siyar, in Century of Princes, ed. and tr. Wheeler M. Thackston, (Cambridge, Mass., 1989), p. 118.

⁴² Dughlat, Mirza Haydar, Tarikh-i Rashidi, trans. Thackston, Wheeler, (Cambridge, Mass., 1996) vol. 1, p. 179Google Scholar.

⁴³ Begum, Gulbaden, Humayunnama, Delhi: Idarah-i Adabiyar-i Delhi, 1972, Persian text, p. 131Google Scholar.

⁴⁴ Kaswini, Asad Beg, Wikaya, Elliot, and Dowson, , ed. and tr., (New York, 1966), VI, p.155Google Scholar.

⁴⁵ Jahangirnama, p. 360.

⁴⁶ Jahangirnama, p. 324. Translated by Wheeler Thackston, The Jahangirnama, p. 320. The couplet was composed by Taleb Amuli, a Persian immigrant to the Mughal court, appointed poet laureate in 1618 and the author of the Kulliyat.

⁴⁷ Baburnama, Mano, vol. 1, p. 560. For discussion of this point, see also Dale, Garden of Eight Paradises, p. 148.

⁴⁸ Jahangirnama, p. 212.

⁴⁹ Ibid., p. 224.

⁵⁰ Ibid., p. 286.

⁵¹ Ibid., p. 360.

⁵² Ibid., p. 210.

⁵³ Allsen, Thomas T., The Royal Hunt in Eurasian History, (Philadelphia, 2006) p. 183Google Scholar

⁵⁴ Ibid., p. 181.

⁵⁵ Jahangirnama, p. 219.

⁵⁶ Shirazi, Kami, Waqa-i-uz-Zaman (Fath Nama-i-Nur Jahan Begam), Siddiqi, W.H., ed., (Rampur, Uttar Pradesh, 2003) p. 156Google Scholar.

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⁵⁸ Grotenhaus, Elizabeth ten, Japanese Mandalas: Representations of Sacred Geography, (Honolulu, 1998)Google Scholar.

⁵⁹ Kautilya, , The Arthashastra, Rangarajan, L.N., ed. and tr., (New Delhi and New York, 1992)Google Scholar. See also, Kautilya's Arthashastra, R. Shamasastry, tr., (Mysore, 1967).

⁶⁰ Mukherjee, Bharati, Kautilya's Concept of Diplomacy, A New Interpretation, (Calcutta, 1976), pp. 24–26Google Scholar.

⁶¹ Gonda, J., Ancient Indian Kingship From the Religious Point of View, (Leiden, 1969) p. 104Google Scholar.

⁶² Sax, William S., “The Ramnagar Ramlila: Text, Performance, Pilgrimage,” History of Religions, 30/2, Nov. 1990, pp. 129–153, p. 143CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁶³ Respectively, Devahuti, D., Harsha, A Political Study, (Oxford, 1970), p. 230Google Scholar and Inden, Ronald, “Ritual, Authority and Cyclic Time in Hindu Kingship,” in Kingship and Authority in South Asia, ed. Richards, J.F., (Madison, 1978) p. 28Google Scholar.

⁶⁴ Benoy Kumar Sarkar, “The Hindu Theory of International Relations”, American Political Science Review, 1919.

⁶⁵ Ali, Daud, Courtly Culture and Political Life in Early Medieval India, (Cambridge, 2004) p. 35Google Scholar.

⁶⁶ Literary references to the digvijaya are numerous, including the earliest in the Mahabharata, in which four of the five Pandava brothers perform a ritualised digvijaya simultaneously. See Sax, “Ramnagar Ramlila”, p. 143.

⁶⁷ Ronald Inden, “Cultural and Symbolic Constitutions in Ancient India”, (Princeton, 1978), typescript, pp. 26, 59–60, as in Sax, “Ramnagar Ramlila”, p. 143.

⁶⁸ Shivaji's digvijaya was only one part of a large and complex effort to assert and defend his claims to kshatriya caste, including lengthy purification rites, a coronation carefully contrived in reference to ancient Hindu texts, a thread ceremony for himself and his son, and remarriage, now under Kshatriya custom, to each of his wives. Gordon, Stewart, The Marathas, 1600-1818, (Cambridge, 1993) pp. 87–90CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Keay, John, India: A History, (New York, 2000) p. 354Google Scholar.

It has been suggested that the Vedic tradition of the digvijaya continues to resonate in South Asian society, remaining a common point of reference in modern performances of political theatre an example being Advani's rath yatra, or “chariot procession”, from Somnatha to Ayodhya in 1990. See Sax, William S., “Conquering the Quarters: Religion and Politics in Hinduism”, International Journal of Hindu Studies, 4/1, April 2000, pp. 39–60CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁶⁹ It was the twelfth-century Rajput king Prithviraj who, having succeeded in uniting some of the Rajput princes and cordoning off the Muslim Panjab, was probably performing a ritual digvijaya when he was attacked by the eventually victorious Muhammad of Ghorid, who established what became known as the Delhi sultanate.

⁷⁰ Khan, Muhammad Sharif Mu'tamid, Iqbalnama-i Jahangiri, Elliot, and Dowson, , ed. and tr., (New York, 1966) vol. 6, p. 292Google Scholar.