A Teardrop on the Cheek of Time: The Story of the Taj Mahal (13 page)

4

The Warrior Prince

J
ahangir intended the conquest of Mewar to be a precursor to extending Moghul control southwards over the troublesome sultans of the rugged plateau of the Deccan and then to regaining ‘the hereditary kingdom of my ancestors’ far to the north in central Asia, in particular that holy of holies, Timur’s lost capital of Samarkand. Jahangir moved the imperial court to Ajmer, 300 miles west of Agra and closer to Mewar and his son’s operations.

Khurram opened his campaign by advancing into the hills of Rajasthan and setting up a string of military checkpoints. So thorough and ruthless was the future Shah Jahan’s scorching of the countryside that even his own army was sometimes left without food, and in the face of such vigorous attrition the Rana of Mewar sought terms. Khurram took care not to humiliate this proudest of enemies. He did not ask the Rana to yield any lands or to make obeisance in person to Jahangir. His only requirement was that the Rana should send his son to wait on the emperor. The Rana’s young son Karan Singh arrived at court, where Jahangir lavished gifts on him and was amused by the lack of sophistication of a boy who ‘was of a wild nature and had lived among the hills’ – a description that not so long ago would accurately have described the Moghuls.

The twenty-two-year-old Khurram had proved his talents as both soldier and diplomat and had succeeded where his father had not. Akbar had twice ordered Jahangir to move against Mewar and twice he had obfuscated. On his arrival at court, the triumphant Khurram presented his father with a brilliant ruby worth 60,000 rupees. Jahangir decided to wear it on his arm but felt it needed ‘two rare and lustrous matched pearls’ to set it off. A courtier, taking the hint, found a single splendid pearl, but then Khurram recalled that, in the days of his boyhood with Akbar, he had seen ‘a pearl of this size and shape on an old headband’. Courtiers tracked down the venerable turban ornament and, wrote Jahangir, ‘upon examination it was found to contain a pearl of exactly the right size and shape … the jewellers were astonished’. Khurram’s prodigious memory was clearly as sharp as claimed in his boyhood, but this incident also reveals the passion that would make him one of the Moghul Empire’s greatest authorities on gems.

Khurram’s young family was growing. During the Mewar campaign Mumtaz had presented him with another daughter, Jahanara, born on 2 April 1614, and the following year bore his first son, Dara Shukoh, on 30 March 1615. The whole court celebrated. An Italian traveller observed that
‘when a princess is born in the mahal the women rejoice and go to great expense as a mark of their joy’, but ‘if a prince is born then all the court takes part in the rejoicings, which last several days … Instruments are played and music resounds …’
Yet once again the couple had little time to enjoy a tranquil family life. The following year, in 1616, Jahangir ordered Khurram south to the Deccan to replace his older brother as commander of the imperial forces. His reasoning was that ‘since the leadership and command of the Deccan campaign had not gone as well as I had wished under my son Sultan Parvez, it occurred to me to summon him and then make Baba Khurram, who was clearly competent, the vanguard of the imperial forces and go myself in his wake’.

The Moghuls viewed the independent Muslim sultanates of the Deccan – Ahmednagar, Bijapur and Golconda – on the southern edge of their empire as a threat. Sometimes these kingdoms waged war on one another, but there was always the risk of them joining forces against their northern neighbour. It was therefore important for Moghul security that they acknowledge Moghul suzerainty – something they were of course reluctant to do. The Deccani kingdoms were and would continue to be a crucible of resistance to the Moghuls. This time the enemy was a former Abyssinian slave, Malik Ambar, who had achieved high office under the sultans of Ahmednagar, some of whose lands Akbar had annexed. Malik Ambar had been waging a clever and effective guerrilla war to regain the lost territories and had found an ally in the wealthy Sultan of Bijapur.

The appointment came at a traumatic time for Mumtaz and her husband. In the early summer of 1616 their eldest daughter, three-year-old Hur al-Nisa, died of smallpox. Mumtaz’s emotions are not recorded but can be imagined, especially as she was at this time over eight months pregnant. Khurram was ‘very much grieved’ and Jahangir, too, was distraught at the loss of his grandchild, writing that ‘although I was greatly desirous of writing it down, my hand and heart have failed me. Whenever I took my pen, my state became bewildered and I helplessly ordered Itimad-ud-daula to write it.’ Itimad-ud-daula, the baby’s great-grandfather, duly took up the sad tale, describing in the flowery language of the court how ‘the bird of her soul flew from her elemental cage and passed into the gardens of Paradise’. The weeping Jahangir remained secluded for two days and ordered that Wednesday, the day of the child’s death, should henceforth be known as ‘the lost day’. On the third day Jahangir went to Khurram’s house but ‘could not control himself ’.

Less than three weeks later, however, the family’s sorrow was mitigated. Jahangir described how ‘there came from the womb of the daughter of Asaf Khan (wife of Khurram) a precious pearl into the world of being. With joy and gladness at this great boon the drums beat loudly, and the door of pleasure and enjoyment was opened in the face of the people.’ Mumtaz had given birth to her second son, Shah Shuja.

While Mumtaz recovered she also got ready to accompany Khurram as he again prepared for war. His base would be the city of Burhanpur on the Tapti River, noted for its bright chintzes and opium and which had long been the Moghuls’ command centre for their operations against the recalcitrant Deccani kingdoms that lay further south across a barren landscape of eroded tablelands. On 31 October 1616, the day fixed by the astrologers for his departure to Burhanpur, Khurram paraded the pick of his troops for his father’s inspection. Some 600 richly caparisoned elephants and 10,000 cavalrymen, aglitter in cloth of gold and with white egrets’ feathers fluttering in their turbans, saluted their emperor. Jahangir kissed his son, who was dressed
‘in a coat of cloth of silver, embroidered with great pearls and shining in diamonds like a firmament’
, and presented him with gifts, including what Jahangir himself called a ‘wind-footed’ horse with a jewelled saddle.

English ambassador Sir Thomas Roe captured Khurram’s rising star. ‘It is true’, he wrote, ‘all men awe him more than the king [emperor], now that he is to receive the army’ and ‘all men [are] fawning on this idol’. Roe himself was not an admirer of the young prince, whom he characterized as ‘ravenous and tyrannical’ and with such a pride ‘as may teach Lucifer’. Khurram had complained to him about the loutish behaviour of English merchants, ‘their drinking and quarrelling in the streets, and drawing swords in the custom house’. The prince had also consistently frustrated Roe’s attempts to win trading concessions and his men had seized gifts Roe had brought from England to help ingratiate himself with Jahangir. In fact, the only presents that pleased the emperor from what, to the Moghuls, must have seemed a remote and retarded island, which no one from Hindustan had yet been recorded as having visited, were an English coach and some paintings. For the Nauroz or New Year festival of 1616, Jahangir had the alcove behind his throne festooned with images of the English royal family.

Jahangir followed Khurram’s armies towards the Deccan, as he had promised, moving his court south from Ajmer to the hill fortress of Mandu high on an escarpment some 100 miles northwest of Burhanpur. Roe accompanied him. The ambassador’s waspish dispatches to England sometimes bemoaned Moghul vulgarity. He likened their love of display to that of a lady who in her determination ‘to show all … set on a cupboard her embroidered slippers with her [silver] plate’. This time, though, the pageantry unequivocally impressed him. Before he left, Jahangir, glittering with jewels and fanned with feathers by two eunuchs, appeared on the palace balcony to give and receive presents. Roe described how ‘what he bestowed he let down by a silk string … what was given him, a venerable fat deformed old matron, wrinkled and hung with gimbels [rings] like an image [idol], pulled up at a hole with another …’

Roe thought he caught a glimpse of Nur Jahan, with another of Jahangir’s wives, watching these operations: ‘At one side in a window were his two principal wives, whose curiosity made them break little holes in a grate of reeds that hung before it to gaze on me. I saw first their fingers, and after laying their faces close now one eye, now another; sometime I could discern the full proportion. They were indifferently white, black hair smoothed up; but if I had had no other light, their diamonds and pearls had sufficed to show them. When I looked up they retired, and were so merry that I supposed they laughed at me.’

Roe described how, when the moment of departure came, Jahangir ‘descended the stairs with such an acclamation of “Padshah salamat”, “health to the king”, as would have outcried cannons …’ An attendant buckled on his sword ‘set all over with great diamonds and rubies’. On one side of his turban hung an unset ruby ‘as big as a walnut’, while on the other dangled ‘a diamond as great’ and, in the middle, an enormous, heart-shaped emerald. Jahangir’s tunic of cloth of gold was tied with a sash ‘wreathed about with a chain of great pearls, rubies and diamonds …’ The ambassador was gratified to see Jahangir rattle off in a luxurious replica he had commissioned of the English coach lined with Persian velvet. Nur Jahan followed in the original conveyance, ‘newly covered and trimmed rich’. Jahangir had had it sumptuously refurbished because the original upholstery had mildewed on the long, damp, salty sea voyage from England.

Roe also admired the superb organization that enabled the emperor to move with an entourage equivalent to a small town. His chaplain thought it was like an
ambulans respublica
, a mobile state. Over 100,000 bullocks lumbered along, hauling creaking wooden carts laden with provisions. When Jahangir made camp, it covered an area of twenty miles in circumference. Jahangir’s own accommodation was erected at its heart. Roe measured it and found it nearly 300 yards in diameter. To Roe it was ‘one of the wonders of my little experience’, though he was disconcerted by the arrival of a camel swaying under a putrescent burden of 300 rebels’ heads, a thoughtful gift to Jahangir from the governor of Kandahar.

As Jahangir made his leisurely progress south in Khurram’s wake, Nur demonstrated her skill as a huntswoman. Jahangir recorded proudly that ‘she shot two tigers with one shot each and knocked over two others with four shots … Until now such shooting was never seen, that from the top of an elephant and inside of a howdah, six shots should be made and not one miss.’

Khurram also gave his father cause for pride. In another short and cleverly managed campaign, the prince quelled, at least for the present, Malik Ambar and the Sultan of Bijapur. Roe’s chaplain caught the drama of battles between armies which
‘in these eastern wars oftentimes consist of incredible multitudes … The music they have when they go to battle is from kettle-drums and long wind instruments. The armies on both sides usually begin with most furious onsets …’
Khurram forced his adversaries to retreat from the Moghul lands they had invaded and extracted from them huge amounts of treasure and their promise that henceforth they would remain, in Jahangir’s words, ‘quiet and loyal’.

When reports of Khurram’s victory reached Jahangir he ‘ordered the drums of rejoicing beaten’ that ‘the troublemakers who had dared to rebel had admitted their inability and powerlessness’. In October 1617 Khurram returned
‘in wondrous triumph’, as Roe reported. Roe himself was prevented from waiting on the prince, ‘having the emralds [haemorrhoids, or piles] still bleeding’, a condition that had already lasted ‘a scouring twenty weeks’
. Jahangir’s memoirs make clear his delight with Khurram: ‘After he had paid me his respects, I called him in the window where I was sitting, and with the impulse of excessive paternal affection and love, I immediately rose up and took him in my arms. The more he expressed his reverence and respect for me, the more my tenderness increased towards him.’ The emperor showered his son’s head with trays of jewels and golden coins and announced that from now on he would be known as ‘Shah Jahan’ – ‘Lord of the World’. Jahangir also ordered that ‘henceforth a chair should be placed for him in the court next to my throne, an honour … never before known in my family’ and appointed him governor of the wealthy province of Gujarat.