A while ago I came across a mention of Badshah Akbar Shah’s (1760-1837) phytophilia in an archival document and it got me thinking about the later Mughals and agency. Of course, in recent years historians have written about this for e.g. Amar Farooqui writes of how a new notion of kingship was crafted by Shah Alam, his son Akbar Shah and grandson Bahadur Shah, the last Mughal.
So, what is in the document, you might ask? Well, it seems that Akbar Shah was on some sort of knowledge gathering project ordering plant seeds from the colonial Botanical Gardens in Calcutta, England and North America. In 1811 for example, a report suggests that Akbar Shah had been requesting ‘rare and uncommon’ seeds for two years to plant in his own garden in the Lal Qila. Those requests included- European apple trees, Olive trees, ornamental shrubs, European kitchen garden and flower seeds. These were listed alongside peach, beetul nut plants, pear and dwarf mango trees for example, which are clearly Indian. Another record from 1852 shows that the even after Akbar Shah was long gone the Mughals were still requesting plants, this time from the Horticultural Society at Calcutta.
The Mughals were known as keen gardeners and planters and the progenitor of the dynasty, Babur was known to have ‘disciplined’ the arid Indian landscape with the introduction of the Chahar Bagh and new varieties of plants. But what was happening in this context many centuries later? Were Akbar Shah’s planting experiments a self-indulgent activity or something purposeful- learning about European climes and their botanical experiments?
More on this on another occasion.
Also, in the absence of botanical pictures, we have the man himself above. This has been taken from the V&As archive.
See you next Friday.
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