A Teardrop on the Cheek of Time: The Story of the Taj Mahal (14 page)

Nur held a victory feast, costing a staggering 300,000 rupees, at which she presented bejewelled robes, horses and elephants to Shah Jahan and dresses of honour to Mumtaz and the other women of his household.
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A painting depicts the banquet spread on lavish carpets in a pavilioned garden. Nur is offering a dish to Jahangir, who kneels beside her, a halo around his head. This nimbus, intended to convey sanctity, was an artistic innovation of Jahangir’s, borrowed from Jesuit art.
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Shah Jahan kneels by his father’s side and a group of bejewelled women in diaphanous clothes look on admiringly. One of them is, perhaps, Mumtaz, sharing this high point in her husband’s fortunes. Barely a month before the victory feast Mumtaz had been delivered of their fifth child, another daughter, named Raushanara.

In his father’s eyes Shah Jahan personified everything a Moghul prince should be. Jahangir wrote that ‘my consideration for this son is so unbounded that I would do anything to please him, and in fact, he is an excellent son, and one adorned with every grace, and in his early youth has accomplished to my satisfaction everything that he has set his hand to’.

There was, however, something else that Jahangir required of his son – to take a further wife, which he duly did on the very day of Raushanara’s birth. The bride was the granddaughter of Jahangir’s
khan khanan
or commander-in-chief, whom Jahangir wished to reward. The marriage was, according to Shah Jahan’s court historians, entirely
‘due to political expediency’ and the girl was ‘content with this illustrious connection in name only’
. He nevertheless fathered a son, Sultan Afroz, by her. However, the child did not rank either in status or sentiment with the children of Mumtaz. Of the little boy’s birth, Shah Jahan’s chronicler wrote simply that
‘as the child was not born in an auspicious hour, His Majesty did not keep him with himself …’
A later incident recorded by Jahangir also reveals his insignificance to the imperial family. In 1620, Mumtaz’s second son, Shah Shuja, a sickly child prone to ailments, fell ill ‘with an eruption so violent that water would not go down his throat’ and court astrologers told the distraught parents that his death was in the stars. However, another astrologer disagreed, prophesying that ‘some other child would die’ instead. Jahangir recorded with joy that the man had been correct: Shah Shuja indeed recovered. It was unlucky little Sultan Afroz who died, passing out of history with the briefest of mentions.

In 1618, the emperor gave further signals that he regarded Shah Jahan as his heir. He decided that the diary he had kept for the first twelve years of his reign should be bound into a single volume and copies made for favoured friends or, as he conceitedly wrote, to be ‘sent to other countries to be used by rulers as a manual for ruling’. However, he presented the first copy of all to twenty-six-year-old Shah Jahan, ‘whom’, he wrote, ‘I consider to be in all respects the first of my sons’. When, a few months later, Shah Jahan’s mother, Jodh Bai, died, he again publicly showed his love and concern for his son. Although removed from his mother at birth, Shah Jahan had become devoted to her. Indeed, throughout his life it would be the women of his close family who would unleash his deepest feelings. So excessive was his grief that Jahangir ‘went to the house of that precious son’. After ‘having condoled with him in every way’, and finding him still inconsolable, Jahangir ‘took him with me to the palace’ to try to assuage his sorrow.

Jahangir remained deeply attached to Shah Jahan and Mumtaz’s children, sharing in the day-to-day crises that naturally arose with such a burgeoning brood. He described another illness of Shah Shuja: ‘Prince Shuja, my son Shah Jahan’s darling son … of whom I am inordinately fond, contracted a childhood illness called infantile epilepsy. He was unconscious for a long time. No matter what treatments and remedies those with experience tried they did no good …’ Mumtaz, pregnant again, must have been poignantly reminded of the loss of her eldest daughter to smallpox two years earlier. In despair Jahangir made a solemn vow not to harm ‘any living thing with my own hand’ if only the child lived. Soon after, the little boy recovered and Jahangir, as good as his word, gave up hunting.

On the night of 3 November 1618, Mumtaz gave birth to her third son. She was accompanying Jahangir, Shah Jahan and the rest of the imperial court on its way to Agra when she went into labour in a small village high in the mountains dividing the Deccan from Hindustan to the north. Several days later, when the court reached Ujjain, capital of the province of Malwa, the birth was celebrated with due ceremony. Jahangir attended a party in Shah Jahan’s quarters, during which his son ‘brought that auspicious child before me, and, presenting as offerings trays of jewels and jewelled ornaments and fifty elephants … asked me for a name for him’. He chose Aurangzeb.

Barely three months later, Mumtaz was pregnant once more. During the first seven years of their marriage Mumtaz had as many children, and seven more were to follow. Even contemporaries marvelled at such devotion and fecundity.

In March 1620 Jahangir, Nur, Shah Jahan and Mumtaz arrived among the bluebells and pale-pink almond blossom of the Vale of Kashmir. The journey from Agra had taken over five months and the latter stages had been hazardous, ‘full of hills and passes, ravines and ascents’, as Jahangir described, and through drizzling rain that sometimes turned to snow. On one particularly dreadful day, travelling along narrow mountain tracks, horses and elephants laden with the paraphernalia of the imperial household and weakened by the march ‘fell in every direction and were not able to rise again’. Twenty-five elephants died. The experience had been taxing for everyone but must have been especially so for the pregnant Mumtaz, who during the journey, in December 1619, had given birth to a further son, Ummid Bakhsh. (The robustness of Moghul women surprised foreigners. According to one,
‘They [seemed to] suffer much less than other mortals in child-birth: for not infrequently they bear a child at the end of a day’s journey and on the next day ride forward carrying the infant in their arms.’
)

But here in Kashmir Mumtaz could recuperate, although the rural idyll was punctured briefly when little Shah Shuja, while playing in the palace, tumbled through an open portal and down over a high wall. Luckily a rug and the body of a man sitting beneath the wall broke his fall. The prince’s head landed on the rug, while his feet hit the man’s back or he would have been killed. The commander of the palace guard ‘immediately ran and picked the prince up, clasped him to his breast, and started up the stairs’. In his confused state all the prince could do was repeat, ‘Where are you taking me?’

The imperial family passed lazy days floating in
shikara
boats on the ‘crystal brilliance’ of Dal Lake and plucking scarlet lotuses. They watched local farmers tend their crops of melons and cucumbers planted on floating islands that they poled about the lake and admired the soft mauve haze of the fields where the saffron-producing crocuses grew. Jahangir, ever the naturalist, described how ‘every parterre, every field, was, as far as the eye could reach, covered with flowers … the flower has five petals of a violet colour, and three stigmas producing saffron are found within it, and that is the purest saffron’.

Kashmir’s beauty moved him to passionate, lyrical verse:

The garden nymphs [flowers] were brilliant,
Their cheeks shone like lamps;
There were fragrant buds on their stems
Like dark amulets on the arms of the beloved.
The wakeful, ode-rehearsing nightingale
Whetted the desires of wine-drinkers;
At each fountain the duck dipped his beak
Like golden scissors cutting silk;
There were flower carpets and fresh rosebuds,
The wind fanned the lamps of the roses,
The violet braided her locks,
The buds tied a knot in the heart
.

Jahangir had begun laying out gardens in Kashmir soon after his accession and sought Shah Jahan’s help with a new project – building pleasure grounds in the lower reaches of what today are the famous Shalimar Gardens on the shores of Dal Lake.
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The prince designed a wide, central waterway to channel water from the melted snows of the mountains down a series of cascades, then on through avenues of poplar and sycamore trees and out into the lake. His imaginative ideas made the gardens, as Jahangir admiringly wrote, one of the most idyllic and scenic in Kashmir.

These were, however, the last days of unalloyed harmony between the emperor and his favourite son. The tight family circle that had cocooned Shah Jahan and Mumtaz was starting to unravel. In the early years of his marriage to her niece, Nur had protected and promoted Shah Jahan’s interests. The two of them, with Mumtaz’s father, Asaf Khan, and her grandfather Itimad-ud-daula, had formed a powerful quartet. As Shah Jahan had grown in his father’s favour, so had her own hold over Jahangir. An underlying factor was Jahangir’s weakness for alcohol and opium, which had progressively nourished his natural indolence and hedonism. Contemporary accounts suggest that Jahangir was often comatose through drink and drugs. Roe, a favourite drinking companion of the emperor, described how evening council meetings with the imperial ministers were often
‘prevented by a drowziness which possesseth His Majesty from the fumes of Bacchus’
. Sometimes he would simply stretch out and go to sleep. After a couple of hours his attendants would respectfully nudge him awake and bring food, which, because he was too unsteady to feed himself, was
‘thrust into his mouth by others’
.
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Nur was lovingly indulgent to Jahangir and fussed over his health. One account describes how she undressed him,
‘chafing and fondling him as if he were a little child’
. At the same time, his weakness and befuddlement had given Nur scope to exercise her remarkable talents. Her absorption of power had begun early in her marriage. When Sir Thomas Roe first arrived at court in 1615, her influence was already such that she could order his credentials to be sent to her in the harem so that she personally could check them. Roe quickly and correctly deduced Nur’s influence on the emperor, reporting back to England that she
‘governs him and winds him up at her pleasure’
.
‘Easy in his temper and naturally voluptuous’
, Jahangir became increasingly content to relinquish the tiresome, tedious business of government to his energetic, capable and ambitious wife.

Nur began exercising power directly – independently approving imperial orders and having them issued under Jahangir’s name with the addition of her own name, ‘Nur Jahan, the Queen Begam’, beside the imperial signature. She took control of the frequent appointments, promotions and demotions that were the heart-beat of Moghul administration. A contemporary complained that
‘her former and present supporters have been well-rewarded … most of the men who are near the king owe their promotion to her … many misunderstandings result, for the King’s orders or grants of appointments etc. are not certainties, being of no value until they have been approved by the Queen’
. Nur also had coins struck in her name and was distinguished from Jahangir’s other wives by the title of
shahi
, empress. The only right she never acquired was that of having the
khutba
read in her name as a statement of sovereignty before midday Friday prayers in the mosque.

While Nur attended to the administrative aspects of government on behalf of her husband, Shah Jahan had conducted Jahangir’s military campaigns. Their interests had, for a while, run in tandem, but Shah Jahan had become wary of Nur’s growing domination and suspicious of her ambitions. In 1617 they had sparred over the awarding of trading concessions to the English – the first time there was open disagreement between them. However, a far more serious issue for them both was what would happen when Jahangir died. Around this time Nur had begun seeking a more malleable candidate for the imperial throne than the clever, increasingly independent Shah Jahan – she sought a man through whom she could rule as she governed through Jahangir. The best way of achieving this was through yet another alliance between her family and the imperial house.

Some accounts suggest that Nur had originally considered trying to marry her only child, Ladli – her daughter by her first husband, Sher Afghan – to Shah Jahan. However, this seems implausible. Her niece Mumtaz was so obviously and absolutely his beloved principal wife and had borne him a clutch of children, including male heirs. Instead, Nur’s first thought seems to have been to marry Ladli to Shah Jahan’s half-brother Prince Khusrau. The partially sighted prince would, she reasoned, be more tractable than Shah Jahan. Yet, although the marriage would have freed Khusrau from the prison where he was currently confined, he refused. According to the many and various accounts, this was out of love for the wife who had insisted on sharing his imprisonment and had
‘utterly refused any other comfort than to be the companion of her husband’s miseries’
. Not even her selfless pleadings to marry Ladli and thus to secure his freedom had moved Khusrau to accept Nur’s offer.