A Teardrop on the Cheek of Time: The Story of the Taj Mahal (4 page)

Babur’s second reign in Samarkand lasted less than a year before he was again forced to abandon the city to his rivals, slipping away with only a few followers. This was the nadir of his fortunes. He later admitted, ‘that to wander from mountain to mountain, homeless and houseless, had nothing to recommend it’. Then came the news that Kabul, another ancestral Timurid territory, had fallen to an outsider on the death of its previous ruler, one of Babur’s uncles. If Babur could capture the city he had as strong a claim to it as anyone. As he advanced, his forces grew and the incumbent ruler decamped, leaving only chaos. Babur recalled, ‘in the end I rode there and had four or five people shot and one or two dismembered. The riot ceased.’ On 14 June 1504, still only twenty-one, he took possession of Kabul. It would remain his powerbase and spiritual home for the rest of his life. Here in Kabul, Babur for the first time had leisure to indulge his inherited passion for books and for gardens.

Despite his reputation in Europe as a savage nomad and, in Christopher Marlowe’s words,
‘the scourge of God’
, Timur too had been a cultivated man. In Samarkand he had built magnificent gardens. A European ambassador described how they
‘were traversed by many channels of water which flowed among the fruit trees and gave a pleasant shade. In the centre of the avenues of trees were raised platforms.’
True to his nomadic background, Timur lived in his gardens in large tents, some made of red cloth, others of sumptuously embroidered silk. But he also built domed mosques and tombs, each with a perfect symmetry of plan.

Babur described how he established his favourite garden in Kabul and probably anywhere: ‘I laid [it] out on a hillside facing south. In the middle a stream flows constantly past the little hill on which are the four garden plots. In the southwest there is a reservoir round which are orange trees and a few pomegranates, the whole encircled by a meadow. This is the best part of the garden, a most beautiful sight when the oranges take colour. Truly,’ he congratulated himself, ‘that garden is admirably situated.’ Even when ruling in India, Babur found time to write to his governor in Kabul that his garden should be well watered and properly stocked with flowers.

When Babur conquered new lands, one of his first acts was to plunder the ruler’s libraries to add to his own collection.
*
Babur himself wrote poetry and prose and the breadth of his interest in the arts is summed up in the education he enforced on a young cousin,
‘calligraphy, reading, making verses, epistolary style, painting and illumination … such crafts as seal-engraving, jewellers’ and goldsmiths’ work’
.

However, Babur was keenly aware that if he did not keep his troops on the move in search of new territory and new plunder, their minds might turn to revolt. With Persian backing he made another foray to Samarkand. Although he captured the city and held it for eight months, he was once more forced to retreat, abandoning Samarkand to the Uzbeks. He next turned his aggressive attentions southwards to Hindustan – or northern India. Both his famous ancestors had invaded the subcontinent. In 1221 Genghis Khan had reached the River Indus, one of the major natural defensive barriers protecting northwest India, and turned back. At the age of sixty, in 1398, Timur, whose cold, determined eyes a contemporary likened to
‘candles without brilliance’
, crossed the Indus over a bridge of boats with his marauding troops. They plundered and pillaged all the way to Delhi, leaving
‘a multitude of dead carcasses which infected the air’
in their wake. Timur entered Delhi in December and put the city to the sword and flame so efficiently that
‘nothing stirred not even a bird for two months’
.

However, before the flames consumed the city, Timur assembled as many of Delhi’s craftsmen – particularly stonemasons – as he could to accompany him back to Samarkand to work on his construction projects, such as the splendid turquoise-blue domed tomb he was building for himself. Indeed, after each of his conquests Timur selected skilled artisans to beautify his capital. Glassblowers came from Damascus and silversmiths from Turkey. An ambassador described how there was
‘such a multitude’ of workers that Samarkand ‘was not large enough to hold them, and it was wonderful what a number lived under trees and in caves outside’
.

So laden with booty that according to one report they could move at no more than four miles a day, Timur and his army left India less than six months after entering it.

Before embarking on his own conquest of India, both Babur’s army and Babur’s family received reinforcements. The army acquired cannon and matchlock muskets from the Ottoman Turks, Babur another wife, Ma’suma Sultan Begum. Although he describes how ‘upon first laying eyes on me she felt a great inclination toward me’, he does not reveal his feelings about her. But around nine months later, in March 1508, Babur greeted the birth of a son, Humayun, with unequivocal joy: ‘I gave a feast in celebration. More silver coins were piled up than had ever been seen before in one place. It was a first-rate feast.’
Humayun
means ‘fortunate’, but by no means all his fortune would be good. Other sons from different wives followed: Kamran in 1509, Askari in 1516 and Hindal in 1519.

Beginning in 1519, Babur made four preliminary expeditions into Hindustan before unleashing a full invasion in the autumn of 1525. At this time the Muslim sultanate of Delhi, who had dominated much of northern India for over three hundred years, was riven by internal feuding against the ruling sultan Ibrahim. Therefore Babur had descended the snowy passes of Afghanistan and Pakistan, crossed the Indus, marched on through the foothills of the Punjab and reached Panipat on the hot, dusty plains only fifty miles from Delhi before, in April 1526, he had to face any determined opposition. The 100,000 men deployed there by Sultan Ibrahim, who took personal command, outnumbered Babur’s troops by five to one. Babur made best use of his only superiority – that in cannons and matchlock muskets, both being employed in India for the first time. He drew his 700 wagons, joined together by their leather harnesses, into a defensive perimeter – a bit like the encircled covered wagons of the American West – behind which he placed his cannons and matchlock men. When, just after dawn on 20 April, the sultan’s forces attacked with almost a thousand war elephants in the van, fire from Babur’s muskets and bronze cannon halted their advance and threw their ranks into panic and confusion. Next Babur’s mounted archers attacked the disordered mass of trumpeting elephants and yelling, bewildered and frightened men from the side and rear. Within five hours 20,000 of his enemy were dead, including Sultan Ibrahim. Babur was master of northern India.

Once Babur had been proclaimed ruler in Delhi by having Friday’s midday sermon, the
khutba
, read in his name in the main mosque as a public statement of his sovereignty, he marched along the banks of the River Jumna to Agra. Here his son Humayun presented him with a huge diamond that Humayun had, in turn, been given by the Rajput royal family of Gwalior in gratitude for their protection after their ruler’s death fighting for Ibrahim at Panipat. Babur recalled that ‘a gem merchant once assessed its worth as the whole world’s expenditure for half a day … but I returned it straightaway to [Humayun]’. It was the famous Koh-i-Nur, the ‘mountain of light’, that would reappear several times in the Moghul story.

Babur now took stock of his new realm. He was not overly impressed: ‘Hindustan is a place of few charms … The cities and provinces are all unpleasant. The gardens have no walls and most places are flat as boards. There is no beauty in its people, no graceful society, no poetic talent, no etiquette, nobility or manliness … There are no good horses, meat, grapes, melons or other fruit … no ice, cold water, no good food, no baths, no madrasas … no running water in their gardens or palaces and in their buildings no pleasing harmony or symmetry’. At first Babur could only think of one satisfactory characteristic: ‘The one nice aspect of Hindustan is that it is a large country and has masses of gold and money.’ After a little he managed another: ‘… the unlimited numbers of craftsmen and practitioners of every trade’. Like his ancestor Timur, he particularly prized the excellent stonemasons. He and his descendants would employ them to spectacular effect.

Babur soon remedied some of the faults he perceived, by building a garden on the banks of the Jumna in Agra, opposite where the Taj Mahal now stands. ‘In charmless and inharmonious India marvellously regular and geometric gardens were laid out … and in every border rose and narcissus in perfect arrangement’, he wrote.

Babur had treated the family of his defeated enemy Sultan Ibrahim well, keeping his mother, Buwa, at court. However, she did not reciprocate his kindness. Babur had retained four of Ibrahim’s cooks to allow him to try Hindustani dishes. On 21 December 1526, Buwa persuaded one to sprinkle poison on Babur’s food. Babur takes up the story. ‘There was no apparent bad taste. While seated at the meal I was near vomiting on the tablecloth … I got up and on my way to the toilet I almost threw up. When I got there I vomited much. I never vomited after meals, not even when drinking. I ordered the vomit given to a dog. [The dog] became pretty listless. No matter how many stones they threw at it, it refused to get up but did not die.’ Babur had the cook arrested. After he confessed under torture, two old women who had acted as messengers and Babur’s taster were in turn arrested. ‘They also confessed … I ordered the taster to be hacked to pieces and the cook skinned alive. One of the two women I had thrown under the elephant’s feet and the other shot. I had Buwa put under arrest.’ To cure himself Babur drank some opium mixed in milk. ‘On the first day of this medicine I excreted some pitch black things like burnt bile. Thank goodness now everything is alright. I never knew how sweet a thing life was.’

Although Babur cheated death on that occasion, he had less than four years to live. Part he spent in quelling uprisings against Moghul rule and repelling incursions by neighbouring princes, part in composing poetry and in compiling his honest and intimate memoir, the
Baburnama
, the first autobiography in Islamic literature. According to the chronicles Babur’s death resulted from the severe illness of his son Humayun. Indifferent as he might be to his wives, Babur loved his children, declaring Humayun ‘an incomparable companion’. When his son was deep in delirium seers suggested to Babur that if he gave up one of Humayun’s valued possessions he might recover. They seem to have meant the ‘Koh-i-Nur’, but Babur took it that he should offer his own life to God. He did so, crying, ‘I shall be his sacrifice … I can endure all his pain’, and ‘when his prayer had been heard by God … Babur felt a strange effect on himself and cried out “We have borne it away!” Immediately a strange heat of fever surged upon his majesty and there was a sudden diminution of it in [Humayun]’
.

Babur’s health did deteriorate after the incident, but several months elapsed before his death in December 1530, which to those of a less romantic mind is more likely to have been related to the rigours of his youthful life and his over-indulgence in wine, opiates and other drugs. (Babur described how in a drug-induced trance, hippy-like, he enjoyed ‘wonderful fields of flowers’.) But before he died, Babur called upon his supporters to recognize Humayun as his rightful successor and lectured Humayun
‘do nought against your brothers, even though they may deserve it’
. Unlike some of his descendants, Humayun would follow his father’s injunction, which derived from a general Timurid principle that the lives of royal princes should be protected. Babur was buried in his new garden opposite the future site of the Taj Mahal. Later his body was returned to Kabul as he had wished and interred in his hillside garden overlooking the city. At his request, and in accordance with Islamic tradition that tombs should lie beneath the open canopy of the sky, no building was constructed over his marble cenotaph.

The twenty-two-year-old Humayun was ‘a dignified and magnificent prince, kindhearted and generous, mild and benevolent’. He was personally brave but crucially lacked the determination and decision necessary to consolidate his energetic and charismatic father’s four-year-old rule over Hindustan. He was easily distracted and so superstitious that he always entered a room right foot first and sent others who did not back outside to re-enter properly. He was obsessed with astrology. He wore different-coloured clothes and varied his pursuits to suit the governing planets of the days of the week. On Sunday, for example, he wore yellow and dealt with state affairs and on Monday, green and made merry. On Tuesday he wore warlike red and acted wrathful and vengeful. His wrath could be both whimsical and cruel. One Tuesday, he claimed to fit punishments to the crime, removing the heads of those he considered ‘headstrong’ and chopping off the hands and feet of those he thought lacked judgement – i.e. failing to ‘distinguish between their feet and hands’
.

His natural lethargy was multiplied manifold by what one chronicler called his
‘excessive’
use of opium, which he took mixed with rose-water. As a result of such failings Humayun lost Hindustan and was forced to wander, a ruler without a throne, as had Babur in his youth. The agent of his expulsion was the astute, stout and subtle Sher Shah. From humble origins as an officer in a small Muslim state in Bihar along the Ganges, he had over a number of years quietly established himself as the virtual ruler of much of Bihar and Bengal.