A Teardrop on the Cheek of Time: The Story of the Taj Mahal (15 page)

The negotiations had, however, alerted Shah Jahan and Mumtaz to Nur’s strategy. Rifts began to open within Itimad-ud-daula’s hitherto united family. The ambitions of Nur Jahan, as consort of the current ruler and aspiring mother-in-law of any pliant prince who might succeed him, and those of Mumtaz Mahal, already wife of the most powerful claimant to the throne and devoted mother of his numerous children, were now in direct conflict. Mumtaz’s unequivocal loyalty was to her husband, not to her aunt whose hand would soon be guiding Jahangir’s increasingly antagonistic moves against Shah Jahan. The situation also left Mumtaz’s father, Asaf Khan, in an ever more sensitive position. Though a loyal supporter of his empress sister and her mouthpiece in the council, he had his daughter’s future and his own to consider. The ageing Itimad-ud-daula himself needed all his considerable skills to steer between the interests of daughter and granddaughter, while retaining Jahangir’s confidence as his chief minister.

These underlying tensions were brought into sharper relief while the imperial family was still in Kashmir. The fifty-one-year-old Jahangir was ‘seized with a catching and shortness of breath … in the air-passages on my left side near the heart, an oppression and catching was felt. It gradually increased and became fixed.’ A ‘course of warm medicine’ brought a little relief but, believing that ‘the moisture of the atmosphere’ might be to blame, Jahangir prepared to leave Kashmir for the hot, dry plains. Such evidence of her husband’s physical frailty induced Nur to act quickly. If she could not secure Khusrau as a son-in-law, there was another possibility. In December 1620, with the court now at Lahore, Nur persuaded Jahangir to betroth his youngest son, the indolent, pleasure-loving Shahriyar, to her daughter. He was, she believed, unlikely to challenge her authority. According to contemporary accounts, though
‘the most beautiful of all the princes’
, he was also showing signs of a
‘feeble mind and imbecile character’
. He must have seemed ideal.

The betrothal, with its implied threat to his position as Jahangir’s heir, could not have come at a worse time for Shah Jahan. That autumn, news had reached the imperial court that once more, as Jahangir wrote, ‘evil-disposed men in the Deccan [had] raised the standard of rebellion’. The Sultans of Bijapur and Ahmednagar, and their ally the Sultan of Golconda, had torn up the terms of their settlement with the Moghuls and, with a force of 60,000, were besieging imperial troops in Burhanpur and other cities. Once again Jahangir called on Shah Jahan to go to war. He was the obvious, indeed the only, choice. Even had he enjoyed perfect sight, Khusrau was too disaffected to be trusted; Parvez was too incompetent a military strategist and had inherited the family vice of alcoholism; while the adolescent Shahriyar was too young and inexperienced to take the field.

Shah Jahan had no wish to be over a thousand miles from court at a time when Nur was scheming against him. Furthermore, if Jahangir should die while he was away on campaign, he would be ill placed to make his bid for the throne. He decided that, although he had no option but to obey his father’s orders, he would make one demand. This was that Jahangir should give him custody of his half-brother Khusrau, who would go with him on campaign. He could at least keep one potential rival for the throne under surveillance and out of the hands of other factions.

Jahangir agreed and Shah Jahan and Mumtaz, pregnant for the eighth time, travelled south once more to the Deccan accompanied by a force including 1,000 Turkish mercenaries with the latest muskets, 50,000 artillerymen, a grey sea of elephants and the miserable Khusrau and his loyal wife. Shah Jahan would never again see the father who had so exultantly rained golden coins over his head. Within months Shah Jahan would become, as Jahangir wrote angrily in his diary, ‘a wretch’, no longer trusted or loved and fearful for his family’s safety. Neither would Khusrau see his father again – within a year he would be dead.

The ensuing family drama would have all the elements of a Jacobean revenge tragedy in which the principal players, picked out by a prescient Sir Thomas Roe, would be
‘a noble prince, an excellent wife, a faithful councillor, a crafty stepmother, an ambitious son, a cunning favourite …’

*
Price comparisons are notoriously difficult, but the fact that, according to Abul Fazl, a sheep could be bought for only one or two rupees and an ordinary silk garment for between one and five rupees gives some idea of the extravagance.

*
Originally Asian in origin, the concept of the halo reached Europe by way of Byzantium, by which time it had died out in Persia and India.

*
The gardens’ evocative name dates from a ruler of the sixth century AD, who built a house here which he called ‘Shalimar’, meaning ‘The Abode of Love’.

*
Jahangir was not alone in his drug addiction. Peter Mundy, who would arrive in India just a few years later, noted the
‘many fields of poppies of which they make opium called here
afim
by this country’s people, much used for many purposes. The seed thereof they put on their bread … of the husks they make a kind of beverage called
post
, steeping them in water a while. And squeezing and straining out the liquor, they drink it, which doth inebriate. In the like manner they use a certain [plant] called
bhang
[marijuana] working the same effect, so that most commonly they will call a drunken fellow either
afimi
[opium-eater],
posti
[opium-drunkard] or
bhangi
[drug-taker] …’

5

Emperor in Waiting

O
nce again Shah Jahan dealt swiftly with his father’s enemies in the Deccan, defeating them in a six-month campaign and this time inflicting harsher penalties. These were, as Jahangir wrote, still days of ‘gladness and victory’. While Shah Jahan consolidated his position in the south, the emperor attended in Agra ‘royal entertainments’, organized by Nur and her brother, Mumtaz’s father, at which they placed ‘many delicate gems and wonders’ before him. Jahangir was sufficiently recovered from the painful breathing problems that had afflicted him in Kashmir to take a gleeful pleasure in such things. He was also well enough to resume his study of the curiosities of nature, writing of the ‘exceeding strange’ appearance of a zebra and of the arrival at court of a hermaphrodite eunuch from Bengal.

Far away in the monsoon heat of the Deccan, in June 1621, Mumtaz gave birth to her eighth child, a daughter named Sorayya Bano. This should have been a happy time, but news from the distant imperial court was making Shah Jahan increasingly uneasy. He learned that, shortly before the birth of his new daughter, Shahriyar and Ladli had been married in Agra. A resplendent ‘feast of joy’ had been held in Itimad-ud-daula’s house, during which Jahangir, under Nur’s approving eye, had heaped honours on his youngest son. Even more disturbingly, messengers arrived with the news that Jahangir was again ill – a serious asthma attack had left him gasping for breath. As ‘the violence of the malady increased’ he dosed himself with goat’s and camel’s milk and, when that failed, turned in despair to alcohol, admitting frankly that ‘as I found relief in drinking, contrary to my habit, I resorted to it in the daytime, and by degrees I carried it to excess’. Unsurprisingly, as the weather grew hotter his condition worsened. An anxious Nur took charge and ‘exerted herself to reduce the quantity of my potations and to provide me with suitable and soothing preparations … She gradually reduced the quantity of wine I took, and guarded me against unsuitable food and improper things.’

The usually inebriated Parvez had rushed to his only slightly less drunken father’s bedside to be commended as a ‘kind and dutiful son’, but Shah Jahan and Mumtaz, so many miles away in the Deccan, could do little but wait anxiously. At the imperial court there was soon further family drama. First, Nur’s mother, Mumtaz’s grandmother, the inventor of fragrant attar of roses, became ill and died. Then, three months later, as Jahangir and the grieving Nur were progressing northwards to the cooler climes that the emperor hoped would improve his health, Itimad-ud-daula, his ‘pillar of government’, also fell sick. The old man had been devastated by the loss of his wife. Jahangir wrote how ‘he cared no longer for himself, but melted away from day to day’. Moved by Nur’s agitation, which ‘I could not bear’, Jahangir kept vigil with her while his elderly courtier slipped in and out of consciousness at ‘the hour of his death agony’. In January 1622, forty-four years after shepherding his family on their dangerous journey from Persia, Itimad-ud-daula died.

Jahangir regretted the loss of such ‘a wise and perfect Vizier, and a learned and affectionate companion’. Nur mourned not only a beloved father but also her mentor. She would find consolation in planning a white marble tomb to commemorate him in Agra but for the moment was inconsolable. Mumtaz’s reaction to the death of her grandparents is not recorded, but she too must have been saddened as well as apprehensive about how Nur would act without the restraining influence of the head of the family. Itimad-ud-daula had been the only person capable of moderating Nur’s ambitions and of balancing the overall interests of his family. Without him Mumtaz’s future, and that of her husband and children, was less secure.

A week after the passing of Itimad-ud-daula, news broke of yet another – this time very unexpected – death. A simple entry in the convalescent Jahangir’s diary reads: ‘A letter from Khurram [Shah Jahan] informed me that Khusrau had died of colic.’ He had apparently expired in the fortress of Burhanpur, where Shah Jahan had incarcerated him. Although the signatures of Shah Jahan’s chief nobles were affixed to the letter confirming the truth of its contents, the timing of Khusrau’s demise, just when Jahangir’s own survival had seemed doubtful, was striking, indeed sinister. Virtually every foreign visitor at the Moghul court concluded that Shah Jahan had murdered his thirty-six-year-old half-brother to eliminate a rival in the forthcoming fight for the throne.

Such claims persisted. A luridly detailed account, written a few years later by an Augustinian friar, is typical. He describes how Shah Jahan,
‘the author and engineer of this barbarous plan’, ordered a slave to murder Khusrau while he himself went off ‘on the pretext of hunting’ to give himself an alibi: ‘So this man, in the dead of night, went with some companions to the prince’s chamber. He knocked on the door in such a way as to deceive the prince, calling out that he was bringing letters from the father and some clothes which are used on such occasions by the Moghul emperors as an intimation that they will show clemency and forgive crimes. On hearing this joyful news the wretched prince opened the door, wholly unsuspicious of the evil tidings they were really bringing, of his sudden death. For no sooner had the executioners entered than they threw themselves upon him, gagged him, and putting a rope round his neck throttled him. When he was dead they placed the corpse on his bed, and leaving it there went away, fastening the door carefully and firmly on the outside as if they had done nothing.’
A few hours later, according to another European account, Khusrau’s faithful wife came to his room:
‘… her husband seemed to be sleeping in his bed. Seeing that he did not move, she touched his face with her hand, and found that he was cold and dead. She ran out and began to scream …’