Dara believed the only way to deal with Aurangzeb was to humble him on the battlefield and persuaded a sorrowful Shah Jahan to agree. On 18 May 1658 Dara left Agra, marching south to seize the fords over the River Chambal and thus prevent Aurangzeb and Murad from crossing until the arrival of imperial reinforcements under his son Suleiman Shukoh from the east. According to his chronicler, Shah Jahan parted from his son
‘with the greatest reluctance … the distraught emperor held his son in a close embrace unaware that fate had decreed that this was to be their last meeting’
. Then, raising his hands in prayer, Shah Jahan called on God to grant Dara victory.
Niccolao Manucci, about to participate in the battle as a mercenary artilleryman with Dara’s troops, described how ‘We began the march in such great order that it seemed as if sea and land were united. Prince Dara amidst his squadron appeared like a crystal tower, resplendent as a sun shining over all the land. Around him rode many squadrons of Rajput cavalry whose armour glittered from afar, and their lance-heads with a tremulous motion sent forth rays of light … A marvellous thing was it to behold the march, which moved over the heights and through the vales like the waves of a stormy sea.’ Yet despite the splendour of the ranks of war elephants clad in shining steel armour and with swords fitted to their tusks and the martial cacophony of trumpets and kettledrums, Manucci could see that the army was not all it should be.
*
The best of the imperial troops were with Suleiman, and some of Dara’s forces, on closer inspection, proved ‘not very warlike; they were butchers, barbers, blacksmiths, carpenters, tailors and such-like’.
The other problem was the speed of Aurangzeb’s and Murad’s advance. By a forced march, they got their army across the Chambal before Dara could stop them, using a little-known and unguarded ford. Instead of engaging his brothers’ troops while they were still exhausted from their efforts, Dara hurried back towards Agra. On the great Plain of Samugarh, just eight miles southeast of the city, he paused and prepared for battle. There was still no sign of Suleiman.
On 29 May 1658, the two forces engaged in literally blistering heat: men’s skin was seared by the hot metal of their armour. The fighting was bitter. Murad, riding on an elephant, was hit in the face by arrows and his howdah was studded with them. After three hours Dara’s troops appeared to be in the ascendant, but at a critical moment Dara paused and dismounted from his elephant. ‘This was’, wrote Manucci, ‘as if he had quitted victory.’ In fact, Dara was only transferring to a horse to give him greater speed of manœuvre, but the psychological damage was done. Unable to see their commander, panic spread through the inexperienced ranks and within minutes the whole imperial army was fleeing ‘like dark clouds blown by a high wind’. An attendant grabbed Dara’s bridle and hurried him away.
Dara galloped back to Agra, where Shah Jahan, anxiously awaiting news with Jahanara, implored his disconsolate son to come to him, but Dara was too ashamed. He remained in his mansion until the early hours, when he set out for Delhi with his wife, children and grandchildren and a small retinue on horse and elephant back. The distraught Shah Jahan sent mules loaded with gold to Dara and orders to the Governor of Delhi to throw the imperial treasury open to him, while Jahanara sent him valuable jewels.
The prince had fled just in time. The following day, riding out of Agra to join Dara, Manucci found his road blocked by Aurangzeb’s victorious troops, who forced him to turn back. ‘The government had already changed hands’, they told him, ‘and Aurangzeb was the victor.’ They were right: Aurangzeb was in effective control. As events would show, the battle of Samugarh had been as pivotal as a Culloden or Waterloo. The spiritual, intellectual, aesthetic, religiously liberal but arrogant Dara would never regain the initiative from his more brutal, aggressive, intolerant and battle-seasoned younger brother and the history of the Moghul Empire, and of India, would, as a result, take a different, divisive and ultimately disastrous course.
On 1 June Aurangzeb and Murad arrived outside Agra. Jahanara visited her two brothers and Shah Jahan sent a conciliatory message to Aurangzeb inviting him to visit him in the fort. He also sent him a famous and glittering sword, ‘Alamgir’, ‘Seizer of the Universe’. Aurangzeb’s curt response was that he would only enter the fort if his father surrendered it. Predictably, Shah Jahan refused, at which Aurangzeb, abandoning any pretence of concern for his father’s welfare, laid siege to it. When attempts to blast its stout walls with cannons failed, Aurangzeb resorted to a simpler plan: cutting off the fort’s water supply from the Jumna. Forced at the height of the summer heat to drink the brackish, bitter water from the fort’s defunct old wells rather than the ‘molten snow’ of the Jumna, after only three days Shah Jahan, lacking the determination that had fuelled his own rebellion with Mumtaz against Jahangir, meekly gave in and opened the gates.
Aurangzeb ordered his father and Jahanara to be confined to the harem. The only woman allowed to leave the fort was Raushanara, who, according to Manucci, departed ‘with great pomp’. Three days later Aurangzeb made a pretence of setting out to visit his father. However, as he made his triumphal progress towards the fort atop a richly caparisoned elephant, convenient warnings reached him, or so he claimed, that the female Tartar guards of Shah Jahan’s harem intended to slay him. His attendants also produced a supposed intercepted letter from Shah Jahan in which he promised his beloved Dara his continued support. Aurangzeb at once turned around and returned to his quarters.
A fanciful tale, circulating some years later among the European community and probably the result of hindsight, claims that Shah Jahan had long feared Aurangzeb. According to the story, during one of Mumtaz’s many pregnancies she had longed for apples, which were not then in season. Shah Jahan, anxious to find some for her, encountered a fakir who gave him two of the fruits. He also told the grateful Shah Jahan that if ever he felt ill he should smell his hands. So long as they retained the scent of apples he would recover, but when they lost that fragrance ‘it would be a warning that he had reached the term of his life’. Anxious for further insights into his future, Shah Jahan pressed the fakir to tell him ‘which of his sons would be the destroyer of his race’. The fakir answered that it would be Aurangzeb.
Aurangzeb’s immediate objective was to rid himself of Murad, whose usefulness as an ally was over. His opportunity came a few days later after both brothers had marched out together in pursuit of Dara. On the night of 25 June, while their armies were camped at Mathura, Aurangzeb invited Murad to his tent and plied his naïve and self-indulgent sibling with heady wines that he himself, as a devout Muslim, naturally refused to touch. An inebriated Murad gave himself happily into the hands of a skilled girl sent to ‘shampoo’ him. (‘Shampoo’, a Hindi word in origin, means not to wash the hair but to massage.) As the skilful masseuse went to work, Murad fell into contented sleep. Soon after, the heavily muscled, heavily armed eunuch whom he had brought to guard him was lured outside the tent and strangled. When Murad finally woke up, he found himself a defenceless prisoner. Later that night, four elephants bearing identical howdahs departed from the camp north, south, east and west. Few knew that the hapless Murad was trussed up on the elephant tramping slowly north. It was carrying him to imprisonment on an island in the Jumna near Delhi.
Aurangzeb decided the moment had come to declare himself emperor. The simple ceremony took place on 21 July 1658 in a garden outside Delhi. The reason for its brevity was that Aurangzeb still had two brothers to deal with – Dara in the west and Shah Shuja to the east. Judging that the problem of Dara was more pressing, he set out in pursuit of his detested eldest brother. After taking what treasure he could from Delhi, Dara had withdrawn first to Lahore, then southwest along the Indus towards Sind, retreating along the very same route taken by his great-great-grandfather Humayun when he had fled the seizer of his throne, Sher Shah. Several times Dara could have turned and fought but chose not to. Although he had amassed another large army it was inexperienced and he doubted its loyalty. Aurangzeb skilfully nourished these doubts through a string of counterfeit letters, which his agents smuggled into his brother’s camp and which falsely appeared to implicate some of his officers in schemes to betray Dara. At the same time, Aurangzeb sent genuine letters to Dara’s supporters, offering them bribes to change sides. As a result, Dara’s army began to fall apart. Manucci, who caught up with Dara near Lahore, related a telling incident. Dara’s wife had wooed a powerful raja by assuring him that he was as a son to her. In confirmation of her words she did something ‘never done before in the Moghul’s empire – she offered him water to drink with which she had washed her breasts, not having milk in them’. The raja drank, and promised fealty, but after extracting money to enlist men to fight for Dara he quietly disappeared back to his lands.
Convinced that he had pushed his demoralized eldest brother far enough away to pose no immediate danger, Aurangzeb left the problem of Dara to others and turned his attentions to Shah Shuja, who, by late September 1658, was advancing on Agra with the declared intention of liberating his father. With his old ally Mir Jumla, by then ‘released’ from his pretended imprisonment, Aurangzeb confronted Shah Shuja at Khajwah, halfway between Benares and Agra on the Ganges. The fighting was fierce and, as a result of the defection of one of Aurangzeb’s commanders, Jaswant Singh, Raja of Marwar (Jodhpur), Aurangzeb nearly lost. However, he retained his customary coolness, once more dismounting at the prescribed hour to kneel in prayer amid the mayhem of battle, before rising to steady his men and direct them to victory.
*
Shah Shuja fled down the Ganges with Mir Jumla in pursuit. It was the start of fifteen months of cat-and-mouse that would see Shah Shuja and his family pushed into the lands of the pirate king of Arakan, east of Bengal. Here, amid ‘impenetrable jungles and mighty rivers full of alligators’, as Manucci shudderingly described the marshy region, they disappeared, probably murdered.
Dara meanwhile had rebuilt his army in Gujarat and the Raja of Marwar sent messages promising that if he would advance towards Agra he would meet him with 20,000 Rajputs for a showdown with Aurangzeb. Dara agreed, but as he journeyed north there was no sign of the raja, whom Aurangzeb had coaxed, threatened and bribed back to his side. As Dara approached Ajmer, the city some 300 miles west of Agra where Mumtaz had given birth to him, and with Aurangzeb marching rapidly towards him, he prepared for a stand, choosing a good defensive position in a narrow pass. He held out for three days, but on the night of 14 March 1659 Aurangzeb’s forces overwhelmed him.
Dara once more escaped, travelling southwards with his fifteen-year-old son Sipihr Shukoh and a handful of attendants. In the confusion he failed to rendezvous with his wife, concubines and eunuchs waiting anxiously nearby with his baggage and treasure. They were reunited with Dara the next day, but only after they had been plundered by their own servants and the women stripped of their jewels. The bedraggled fugitives hurried south towards Ahmadabad in Gujarat, harried by robbers, but even now there was no refuge. The nervous citizens of Ahmadabad thought it too risky to admit the refugees. Perhaps Dara was reminded of another bitter journey, decades before, when he, his parents and siblings, including Aurangzeb, had been hunted like foxes and could find no shelter. Bernier, who had run into Dara’s fleeing party by chance, described how ‘The shrieks of the females drew tears from every eye’. Dara himself seemed ‘more dead than alive’ and was clearly uncertain what to do. Demoralized and completely lacking his previous self-confidence and hauteur, he was ‘stopping and consulting even the commonest soldier’. At last he concluded that their only safety lay over the wide saline marshes and deserts of the Rann of Kutch in Sind. As one of his women had a badly injured leg he wanted Bernier to go with him, but he could not even provide an animal to carry the doctor. Bernier made his excuses.
Dara succeeded in crossing the Rann of Kutch and hoped to find sanctuary to the west in Persia, but at this point his beloved wife Nadira Begum, weakened by dysentery and fatigue, collapsed and died. Sending her body for burial in Lahore, the dazed Dara found refuge with an Afghan chieftain for whom, some years earlier, he had interceded with Shah Jahan and saved from being trampled to death by elephants. The chieftain was neither as grateful nor as honourable as Dara thought and after a few days took Dara and his family captive. He despatched Dara and Sipihr in a closed howdah to Delhi, where Aurangzeb had, just a few weeks earlier, ascended the Peacock Throne amid scenes of unparalleled magnificence, even by Moghul standards, as if to compensate for the earlier, modest ceremony.
The captives reached the city on 23 August 1659 and, six days later, Aurangzeb paraded them in rags on a filthy elephant through the streets of Delhi. Dara, sitting stoically with bowed head, had been popular and people in the crowd cried openly and threw ordure and insults at the chieftain who had betrayed him. Bernier, who had returned to Delhi and witnessed the
‘disgraceful procession’
, feared that some dreadful act was about to take place.
