Once upon a time, a dear friend and fellow historian was writing about Aurangzeb (d. 1707), the last powerful Mughal king. We shared an interest in this much-misunderstood king, who was devious, passionate, tormented, and given to dark, dark moods. He had issues with trust and forgiveness. Some people blame him for the end of the Mughal Empire and others blame him for all that is wrong with South Asia. If you’re reading this and you know something about astrology, you may already have guessed he was a Scorpio. I suggested as much to my friend: I said something along the lines of “Dude, how about using his sun sign to explain why he did the things he did?” My friend laughed and refused to entertain this. Astrology isn’t something you’re supposed to put much stock in if you have a PhD, and if you do in fact subscribe to explaining things by invoking the stars, it’s polite to keep this to yourself. Astronomy is respectable; astrology is not.
For much of human history, this hasn’t been the case. The Mughals, like their contemporaries, the Safavids and Ottomans, cared about the stars. Beyond studying the stars to plot long journeys and pilgrimages to Makkah, the Mughals also consulted their astrologers before major battles and had charts drawn up for newborns.
There’s a section in Gulbadan Begum where she writes:
“The blessed birth of the Emperor Humayun, the first-born son of His Majesty Firdaus Makani (Babur), occurred on the night of Tuesday, 4th Zilqada, 913 A.H. (March 6, 1508) in the citadel of Kabul, when the sun was in Pisces”
After this, Gulbadan tells us, Babur began calling himself Babur Padishah; he had an heir, his son Humayun, and this made him a king. I began thinking about how to illustrate this and looked up Pisces symbolism in astrological charts.
I also thought about the Huma, which is a mythical bird. If the shadow of the Huma falls on you, then it means you will be king. Hence, the name Humayun. In my sketchbook, I wrote out the Farsi and the English and made some rough sketches of who I wanted in my drawing. I wanted Babur and his wife Maham (who was Humayun’s mother), and who plays a prominent role in Gulbadan’s text. I wanted something that symbolized Pisces, and I wanted a Huma bird. The great thing about mythical birds is that no one’s seen them, so you can do whatever you like. Even though I’m a Virgo (sun and moon), I’m not obsessive about getting things exactly right. This may be because Scorpio is my rising sign and I was born prematurely and was supposed to be a Libra. (Ali Olomi has an excellent twitter thread on astrology in the Islamic world, with details on each sign, that I highly recommend)
After I was done with the sketch I put on some music (MUNA!) and got to work at 3.00 AM, the best hour for doing these things. Here’s what I came up with:
