Few figures in the history of South Asia embody the tension between political power and spiritual freedom as poignantly as Prince Dara Shikoh (1615–1659).

Eldest son and intended heir of Shah Jahan, Dara possessed all the attributes of a Mughal prince, yet his deepest intellectual and spiritual loyalties took him away from the conventional world of courtly power. Lahore, and above all the Qadiri saint Mian Mir, occupied a decisive place in this transformation.

To understand Dara Shikoh’s Lahore is, therefore, to understand much more than a Mughal prince’s association with a provincial capital. Lahore was, for Dara, a city of saints, seekers and encounters—a place where Islam, Sikhism, Hindu traditions and diverse currents of Sufism met. It was here that his relationship with Mian Mir helped shape a spiritual outlook that eventually found its most remarkable literary expression in Majma-ul-Bahrain, The mingling of the two oceans. Dara’s project was not simply to advocate tolerance in the modern political sense. He was searching for a deeper unity beneath apparent religious difference.

Dara’s relationship with Lahore began during the formative years of his youth. In 1634, when the 20-year-old prince fell seriously ill, Shah Jahan took him to Lahore to seek the prayers of Mian Mir, then among the most revered Sufi figures of the region. Dara later recorded that Mian Mir prayed over water and gave it to him; according to his account, he recovered within a week. Modern scholarship has treated this episode as a crucial turning point in Dara’s spiritual life.

Mian Mir died in Lahore in 1635, but his influence upon Dara did not end with his death. The prince increasingly immersed himself in the literature of Sufism and began compiling biographies of saints. His Safinat-ul-Auliya and, subsequently, Sakinat-ul-Auliya—his account of Mian Mir and his successor Mulla Shah—were products of this spiritual quest. Dara eventually entered the Qadiri order under Mulla Shah, Mian Mir’s spiritual successor, in 1640 and adopted the name Dara Shikoh Qadiri.

The Punjab’s spiritual landscape was thus central to Dara’s formation. Lahore was not merely the seat of Mughal administration; it was a living Sufi landscape. Mian Mir’s khanqah represented a world in which the authority of the saint derived not from imperial office but from spiritual insight. The Punjab’s traditions of interaction among Muslims, Sikhs and Hindus provided an environment in which religious identities could coexist without necessarily becoming mutually exclusive.

The Punjab historian Rajmohan Gandhi has pointed to another revealing episode: Dara’s dialogue with the Hindu thinker Baba Lal took place in Lahore at the house of the wealthy Hindu Chander Bhan. The subject was nothing less than the bridging of the gulf between race and creed, and between Hinduism and Islam. Dara’s affection for Lahore was expressed in verse, in which he prayed for the prosperity of Punjab and described Lahore as a city that should remain filled with bliss.

Mian Mir’s importance to Dara cannot be reduced to that of a conventional religious tutor. He represented a form of Sufism in which inward realisation was more important than external status. The official Punjab Auqaf account describes him as a Qadiri saint who avoided worldly ambition and the attentions of greedy nobles. Dara, despite being the son of the emperor, was drawn precisely to this world in which spiritual authority stood above political authority.

Dara’s own writings preserve the reverence with which he regarded Mian Mir. In Sakinat-ul-Auliya, he recorded aspects of the saint’s life and teaching, while later scholarship has drawn attention to the importance of the master’s face and presence in Dara’s conception of spiritual practice. One scholarly study notes that Dara’s Risala-i Haqnuma presents contemplation of the guide as part of the Sufi journey, while his biography of Mian Mir recounts the saint advising that the disciple contemplate the face of his guide.

This relationship also illuminates an important distinction. Dara did not abandon Islam in his search for other traditions. His intellectual journey began within Sufism and remained deeply rooted in Islamic mystical thought. Supriya Gandhi, in The emperor who never was: Dara Shukoh in Mughal India, cautions against simply turning him into a modern “liberal” or “secular” figure. His categories were those of a 17th century Muslim intellectual and Sufi seeker, not those of a 21st century secularist. This is precisely why his encounter with Hindu thought becomes so significant.

Dara’s great intellectual experiment was Majma-ul-Bahrain, generally translated as The mingling or confluence of the two oceans. Written in Persian in the mid-1650s, the work sought correspondences between Sufi metaphysics and Vedantic thought. It examined concepts, vocabulary and spiritual ideas in the two traditions and attempted to show that apparently different religious languages could point toward comparable truths.

The metaphor of the two oceans is itself revealing. Dara did not imagine Hinduism and Islam as identical institutions. Rather, he believed that beneath their outward forms one could discover a profound spiritual conversation. The “two oceans” retain their names, histories and particularities, but their waters can meet.

That idea became even more ambitious when Dara sponsored the Persian translation of the Upanishads, known as Sirr-i-Akbar, or The great secret. He believed that Indian metaphysical wisdom deserved to be read by Persian-speaking Muslims and speculated that the Qur’anic reference to the “hidden book” might correspond to the Upanishads. His interest also extended to the Yoga Vasistha, the Bhagavad Gita and other Indic texts.

In this sense, Dara was doing something extraordinary for his time: he was translating across civilisations rather than merely debating them.

The older scholarship on Dara Shikoh, including the work of S. M. Ikram, is important because it places his religious outlook within the broader history of Indo-Muslim civilisation. Dara emerges not as an isolated eccentric but as a culmination of a long tradition of intellectual interaction in India. The Mughal world itself had inherited a culture in which Persian, Sanskrit and vernacular intellectual traditions could encounter one another.

Athar Abbas Rizvi’s monumental work on Sufism in India is equally important for understanding the spiritual environment from which Dara emerged. The Qadiri tradition, and particularly the circle surrounding Mian Mir, cannot be understood simply through the modern vocabulary of “tolerance”. Its emphasis was on the transformation of the self, divine love and the possibility of approaching God through inward realisation. Dara’s universalism grew from this mystical soil. (to be continued)

Published in Dawn, September 13th, 2026