A Teardrop on the Cheek of Time: The Story of the Taj Mahal (40 page)

He was correct. Aurangzeb was, in fact, determined on murder but he had to find a justification. Convening his council, he maintained that Dara had deposed Shah Jahan in order to suppress Islam. His brother, he insisted, had
‘revived the customs of infidelity and atheism throughout the empire’ and ‘had not even the resemblance of a Musulman’
. Aurangzeb’s scorn for Dara’s religious eclecticism was genuine and longstanding. He despised Dara’s interest in Hinduism and his pursuit of his brother had in some ways been a
jihad
, a holy war. However, Dara’s ‘heresies’ were also extremely convenient. Aurangzeb so managed the debate in the council that he was able to give the appearance of wishing only for his brother’s exile while leaving the difficult decision to others. Thus he was later able to claim, not unlike Elizabeth I over the execution of her cousin Mary Queen of Scots, that Dara’s death was forced upon him by others. The council concluded almost unanimously that Dara deserved death and among those most vociferously demanding his execution was his uncle, Mumtaz’s brother Shaista Khan, who had secretly abetted Aurangzeb from the start.

The execution came quickly. The day after the shameful parading of Dara, slaves entered his prison cell, dragged his young son Sipihr from his side, and cut off Dara’s still handsome head. The prince’s bleeding torso was borne through the bazaars on an elephant and despatched for burial in Humayun’s tomb. His head was sent to Aurangzeb. Stories quickly spread. Manucci, who had been left behind by Dara to defend a fortress and was not in Delhi at the time, claimed that an exultant Aurangzeb had hacked at the severed head with his sword and then sent it to Agra to be served up to Shah Jahan in a dish. More plausible than this act of Grand Guignol are Moghul accounts of Aurangzeb’s dismissive remark that, since he had had no wish to look upon this infidel’s face in his lifetime, he had no wish to do so now.

Aurangzeb dealt swiftly with any remaining potential claimants to the throne. In the case of his imprisoned brother Murad, he made use of the fact that, in the early stages of his own bid for the throne, Murad had murdered his finance minister. Aurangzeb blandly invited the minister’s family to seek justice, which, under Muslim law, allowed them to demand either financial compensation or, if they so insisted, a life for a life. While the minister’s eldest son refused to seek compensation either financial or physical, the second son, doubtless bribed, refused money but demanded Murad’s death and on 4 December 1661 Murad was executed. Aurangzeb characteristically rewarded the elder brother for
‘not enforcing his claim of blood’
.

Dara’s eldest son and Shah Jahan’s favourite grandson, Suleiman Shukoh, had sought refuge in the Punjab but, just as his father had been, he was betrayed into Aurangzeb’s eager hands by his host. Aurangzeb forced Suleiman to drink a daily draft of
pousta
– an extract of poppies – which sapped his body and mind and, after reducing him to a zombie, killed him. Suleiman Shukoh’s own young sons had already been murdered on Aurangzeb’s orders. This left Dara’s other son, the young Sipihr Shukoh, whom Aurangzeb locked up behind the high sandstone walls and stout elephant gate of the fortress of Gwalior. Fourteen years later, Aurangzeb would marry one of his daughters to the prisoner. Aurangzeb also took action against his own son Muhammad Sultan, who had briefly and ill advisedly deserted his father’s forces to join his uncle Shah Shuja. Aurangzeb confined him to prison for the remaining fourteen years of his young life.

The news of Dara’s death left Shah Jahan ‘inconsolable with grief’. It must have been a bitter thought that the great love between himself and Mumtaz had not translated itself to their children. Instead, hatred and jealousy had transcended family feeling to culminate in the pitiless executions of two of their sons, the disappearance of a third and the destruction of beloved grandsons and great-grandsons. Perhaps Shah Jahan blamed himself for singling out Dara and neglecting his other sons. Perhaps he believed the fault lay with the tradition that, instead of clearly embracing primogeniture, tacitly invited any imperial prince with ability and ambition to make a play for the throne. After all, had he not done so himself?

Shah Jahan passed his final years confined in the marble pavilions that he himself had built in the Agra fort overlooking the Jumna. From here he could gaze across the curve of the river at the Taj Mahal. His best view was from the copper-domed Octagonal Tower built on a bastion projecting out over the river. With walls and pillars inlaid with jewels, superbly carved dados of waving irises and a graceful, sculpted marble pool, it was the loveliest of all the apartments he had created.

He was consoled by Jahanara, his constant and devoted companion who shared his confinement, but there was no softening of Aurangzeb’s resentment. The new emperor imposed a series of petty restrictions on his father, sometimes even forbidding him access to writing materials. He sought to make his father surrender his beloved jewels, asserting that a prisoner leading a retired life had no need of such things, and, in particular, tried to obtain Shah Jahan’s pearl rosary. Shah Jahan responded that he would rather grind the hundred perfectly matched pearls to dust than yield them up. He kept the rosary.

During the first year of Shah Jahan’s incarceration, father and son also exchanged letters, full of reproaches on Shah Jahan’s side and pious self-justifications on Aurangzeb’s. In one letter, however, Aurangzeb cut straight to the point, stating with the deep hurt of a neglected child, ‘I was convinced that your majesty loved not me.’ He also taunted his father with Shah Jahan’s own commission of fratricide: ‘By what names does not your majesty still call Khusrau … who departed to the place of non-existence long before the days of your accession to empire, and from whom to you no injury or offence occurred?’

As the years of his imprisonment passed, accounts of the conditions in which Shah Jahan was kept conflict. According to Bernier, Shah Jahan was allowed not only the company of Jahanara but
‘the whole of his female establishment, including the singing and dancing women, cooks and others’
. However, Manucci claims Aurangzeb continued his acts of spite, including the bricking up of a particular window from which the old emperor had loved to watch the quiet flow of the Jumna and, no doubt, contemplate Mumtaz’s tomb.

In early 1666, Shah Jahan fell ill with fever, strangury and dysentery – symptoms very similar to those that had precipitated his sons’ fight for the throne. A European account attributed the cause, once again, to aphrodisiacs:
‘The Great Moghul, seeking by artificial means to stir up lust, which was naturally decaying in him, being 73 years of age, wrought his own death.’
Shah Jahan failed to respond to massages with oil or to an operation to unblock his urinary tract. His fever grew and with it a desperate thirst. According to some accounts, realizing that he was dying, Shah Jahan asked to be carried to an adjoining balcony from where he could more easily see the Taj. There, wrapped in soft Kashmiri blankets and with the weeping Jahanara by his side, he died in the early hours of 22 January 1666. Attendants bathed his body in camphor water, wrapped it in pale shrouds and laid it in a sandalwood coffin. The next morning he was taken out head first, as custom demanded, through a newly reopened basement gate down to the riverbank and rowed across the Jumna accompanied by a small party of mourners.

Jahanara had planned
‘a grand and honourable funeral’
, but this was not to be. Aurangzeb had not sanctioned a state funeral. Instead, to the chanting of prayers, the old emperor was quickly and quietly laid beside Mumtaz in the marble crypt of the Taj Mahal.

In due course, a white marble cenotaph inlaid with glowing flowers fashioned from semiprecious stones and bearing a brief epitaph would be placed here. In the main tomb chamber directly above, another flower-inlaid cenotaph would also be placed. Following Muslim tradition, carved pen boxes standing proud on the lids of both cenotaphs signified that they belonged to a man, just as the slender, inlaid forms of writing slates on Mumtaz’s denoted that here lay a woman.

*
Strangury is an extremely painful condition of the urinary tract. Sufferers can only urinate slowly, stinging drop by stinging drop.

*
An elephant’s armour consisted of chain mail and over 8,000 overlapping steel plates, 2,000 just to cover the head alone.

*
This contrasts with the disastrous effect when Dara dismounted at the Battle of Samugarh. Aurangzeb’s forces clearly had confidence in their leader.

15

Fall of the Peacock Throne

A
urangzeb, who had assumed the white garb of mourning, did not begin his journey from Delhi to the tomb of his parents in Agra until two weeks after his father’s death. Perhaps he wanted to check that there would be no political backlash. Once arrived, he visited the Taj Mahal, distributed alms, and gave every appearance of grief.

He was also reunited and swiftly reconciled with his eldest sister, Jahanara. She had seemingly forgiven Aurangzeb for his treatment of their father. Such was the fifty-one-year-old princess’s charm and ability that she quickly became his trusted adviser, supplanting Raushanara. Jahanara felt secure enough in her position to argue against Aurangzeb’s increasingly strict regulation of public life in accordance with his fundamentalist religious beliefs. Aurangzeb had banned court music, court poetry and the keeping of an official chronicle of his reign – the latter on the grounds that it was vainglorious. He abandoned the emperor’s morning appearance before his subjects on the
jharokha
balcony as tending towards idolatry. He prohibited cannabis, alcohol and sex out of wedlock with as much success as other rulers who have tried such courses.

In some ways the religious orthodoxy and prescriptions of Aurangzeb are comparable to the Puritanism of Oliver Cromwell, who, just a few years earlier in England, banned merriment or religious festivities at Christmas as well as theatre and maypole dancing. Like Cromwell, in his hatred of idolatry Aurangzeb defaced religious statues and sculptures. His main targets were the statues in Hindu temples. At Mathura near Agra, sacred to Hindus as the birthplace of Lord Krishna, he went further, constructing a three-domed fortress-like mosque virtually over the Hindu shrine. At the holiest Hindu city of all, Benares on the Ganges, he built a vast mosque on the foundations of a Hindu temple. Its 225-foot-high minarets dominated the city and the ceremonial cremation ghats.