In 1617, just three years after destroying Lord Varaha's temple, Jahangir began to engage in a series of discussions with a Hindu sannyasi named Gosain Jadrup. Their meetings continued over the course of two years. This pastime is often pointed to by historians who are trying to make the case that Jahangir's sentiments drastically changed, and he became a benevolent friend to the Hindus, just as his father had been.
"Jahangir reported that Jadrup at that time lived in a hole in the side of a hill whose entrance was so small that it was difficult even for a very thin person to use. Jadrup, apparently, bathed twice a day and went once a day into Ujjain for alms where, Jahangir said, he accepted five mouthfuls of food which he swallowed without chewing.
The two conversed for long periods at a time during these two years, usually "in the retirement of his cell" [pictured above], and from Jadrup Jahangir learned much of what he reported on Hindu caste, family custom, and ritual. By Jahangir's own accounting, Jadrup had "thoroughly mastered the science of the Vedanta" but how much of "the science of Sufism" – which Jahangir claimed was the same as Vedanta – Jadrup knew is not clear.
Jahangir's attraction to Jadrup was probably not due strictly to doctrine anyway, however, but rather to some lived spiritual ideal he perceived in the saint. Jadrup had, in 1618, been an ascetic living "in the garment of nakedness" for thirty-eight years, after taking this vow against external attachments when he was twenty-two. Jahangir clearly admired the sannyasi's tenacity and the consistency with which he maintained his austerities, as well as the modesty with which he taught, and it is fair to say that Jadrup's appeal for the emperor lay primarily in his saintly posture more than anything else.
Jahangir's last account of the sannyasi, in fact, before he said good-bye in 1619, was of Jadrup's temperament: "[a man whose] heart [was] free from the attachments of the world." The hedonistic and sensuous emperor, then, had found a spiritual comrade in someone who had put aside all that he himself had claimed. Again, it seems that Jahangir's choice was an aesthetic one: of a companion and mentor whose lifestyle was so authentically stark and uncompromised that its cleanness far outstripped the beauty Jahangir thought he had in his own colorful yet cluttered existence.
After the interviews with Jadrup, Jahangir's approach to Hinduism was substantially more open and forgiving. In 1620, for example, on the way to Kashmir, he came across merchants from the apple-growing village of Baramula, but even when he learned that their district was named for the boar incarnation of Vishnu, he showed none of the vehement disgust he had earlier during the incident of the black Varaha image in Ajmer. [Other reports put the Varaha temple incident at Pushkar.]
Moreover, he continued to take an interest in Hindu theories of men and women as well as in that culminating act of marital unity, the creation of the sati, although in late 1620 he became so overcome by the practice of sati and of female infanticide among the Rajaur women, who "ally themselves with Hindus," that he prohibited any such acts of violence against women. He continued to extend kindnesses to holy men and to converse with learned brahmans on issues of theology and Hindu custom, and at the beginning of 1622, he became so fascinated with a sannyasi's powers of renunciation and persistence that he had the man brought to court and tested, successfully, with a drink of double-strength spirits."
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