A Teardrop on the Cheek of Time: The Story of the Taj Mahal (5 page)

When he eventually realized the threat that Sher Shah posed to his rule, Humayun led a large army down the Ganges. His approach was leisurely and allowed Sher Shah plenty of time to prepare. After much manoeuvring the two armies finally joined battle at the end of June 1539. Sher Shah’s forces routed Humayun’s troops and the emperor was forced to flee ignominiously. He only succeeded in escaping across the Ganges with the aid of one of his water bearers, named Nazim, who blew up his animal-skin water bottle and gave it to Humayun as a flotation aid. Much to the annoyance of his brothers and courtiers the quixotic Humayun made good a promise he had given Nazim in the heat of the moment to allow him to sit on the imperial throne. Nazim was allowed to occupy it only briefly and gave but a few orders, all designed to enrich himself and his family. However, Humayun’s action did nothing to increase his regal dignity at a crucial point in his reign even if it did show him to be a man of his word.

Humayun fled first to Agra and then northwest to Lahore to meet his half-brothers Kamran, Askari and Hindal. Their loyalty was suspect. Mindful that Genghis Khan and Timur had divided their kingdoms among their sons, rather than appointing a single heir as Babur had done, each of the other brothers had sought a return to the old tradition and had already been involved in rebellions or near-rebellions, seeking to carve out territories for themselves. Each time they had been tearfully forgiven by Humayun, who, as well as respecting his father’s injunction, was sentimental and affectionate by nature. According to their sister Gulbadan, faced with a common danger the four siblings ‘conferred and took counsel and asked advice but they did not settle on any single thing’. Kamran secretly tried to negotiate a separate peace with Sher Shah which would secure him Kabul. Humayun, equally privately, offered Sher Shah peace on the basis ‘I have left you Hindustan. Leave Lahore alone and let Sind be a boundary between you and me’.

Sher Shah rejected both. When he advanced on Lahore, Humayun, his brothers and, it is said, 200,000 of their followers fled. Gulbadan wrote, ‘It was like the day of resurrection, people left their decorated palaces and their furniture just as they were.’ Accompanied by Hindal,
Humayun fled towards Sind and spent months in fruitless efforts to persuade the local ruler to support him. However, he did succeed in another task of persuasion, but only after a month of trying. He convinced Hamida, the fourteen-year-old daughter of one of Hindal’s advisers, to agree to marry him. At first both she and Hindal were vehemently opposed to the marriage, perhaps because they were mutually attracted. Eventually Hindal marched angrily away to Kandahar and Humayun’s mother induced Hamida to accept her thirty-three-year-old son on the grounds that, ‘After all, you will marry someone. Better than a king, who is there?’ Humayun ‘took [an] astrolabe into his own blessed hand’ and himself carefully worked out the astrologically most auspicious date for their marriage – 21 August 1541
.

When Hamida and Humayun left Sind in May 1542, it was to cross the Rajasthan desert back into India where Humayun had hopes of alliance with the Raja of Marwar (Jodhpur). However, these soon came to naught and the party turned back across the blistering, shimmering desert in the hottest months of the year. Hamida was eight months pregnant. Even so, the disdain some of his officers now had for Humayun was such that when, one day, Hamida was left without a horse none would lend her one. Eventually Humayun gave her his own and clambered onto a camel – an undignified and inauspicious mount for an emperor. Finally an officer relented and handed Hamida his horse, allowing Humayun to climb down.

Soon the party reached Umarkot, a desert town whose ruler had been killed by Humayun’s enemies. It was a case of ‘my enemy’s enemy is my friend’ and Humayun’s exhausted party were welcomed and feasted. There, on 15 October 1542, Hamida gave birth to a son – the future emperor Akbar. Humayun, of course, cast his son’s horoscope. It was most propitious. However, Humayun’s own position remained inauspicious. He once more left India, with his brothers Askari and Kamran among the opposition hemming him in. He decided that his only hope was to seek assistance from the Shah of Persia as his father had once done in similar straits.

Because the journey would be across harsh terrain in winter, the two fond parents entrusted their only son, now aged fourteen months, to the care of his rebellious uncle Askari. Askari was no Richard III and, in line with the best Timurid prescriptions on the treatment of princes, his wife cared well for his nephew. However, the boy’s father was by now suffering.
‘My very head was frozen by the intense cold,’ Humayun recalled. Both food and cooking pots were scarce and the party were reduced to killing one of their horses and ‘boiling some flesh in a helmet’
. Nevertheless, in January 1544 they reached Persia. The Shah welcomed Humayun as an honoured guest and seemed inclined to grant him considerable support. The Shah’s benevolence was no doubt encouraged by the Moghul wanderer’s production, from beneath his robes, of a green flowered purse. From it Humayun extracted the Koh-i-Nur and other jewels, placed them in a mother-of-pearl box and handed them to the Shah. Akbar’s chief chronicler Abul Fazl later wrote that the jewel reimbursed all the Shah’s expenditure on Humayun
‘more than four times over’
.

Nevertheless, before granting assistance the Shah insisted that Humayun, a Sunni Muslim, should change his sect and become a Shia.
*
Humayun could only reluctantly acquiesce, at least while under the Shah’s sway. So an army was provided and Humayun advanced into Afghanistan, where he captured Kandahar from his brother Askari and Kabul from his brother Kamran. In Kabul, he and Hamida were reunited with Akbar, by now in the care of another of Babur’s sisters, Khandura, who in the way of the women of the Moghul royal family had become a frequent intermediary between the warring brothers. As part of the celebrations, the important public ceremony of the circumcision of three-year-old Akbar took place. Humayun participated in the celebratory wrestling contest with his nobles.

Although the brothers were reconciled once more, they could not agree for long. Both Kamran and Askari rebelled on further occasions. Hindal died fighting Askari’s forces. Humayun eventually despatched Askari on a pilgrimage to Mecca – a common form of Moghul exile – on which he died. After Kamran had twice recaptured Kabul from Humayun and twice lost it again, Humayun’s forces captured him in 1552. Humayun’s counsellors argued for Kamran’s execution,
‘Brotherly custom has nothing to do with ruling and reigning. If you wish to be king put aside brotherly sentiment … This is no brother! This is your majesty’s foe.’

Humayun reluctantly agreed that Kamran should be blinded, a stratagem used in Timurid kingdoms to disable rivals. Some of Humayun’s men held the wildly struggling Kamran down, repeatedly lanced his eyeballs and then rubbed salt and lemon juice into the wounds. Later Kamran is said to have told his weeping brother,
‘Whatever has happened to me has proceeded from my own misconduct.’
Kamran departed on a pilgrimage to Mecca, where he too died.

In 1554 news came to Humayun in Kabul of the death in Hindustan of Sher Shah’s son and successor Islam Shah. (Sher Shah himself had died in the explosion of a gunpowder magazine in 1545 while on campaign.) Soon afterwards came further welcome news – three rival claimants were fighting for the throne of Hindustan. Even the normally indecisive Humayun could not ignore such a clear opportunity. Taking his young heir Akbar with him, he advanced quickly into India, twice defeated his main rivals and in July 1555 retook Delhi – fifteen years after he had fled before Sher Shah.

Back on his throne, Humayun unsurprisingly devoted himself to astrology and to literature. He established an observatory and refurbished a small octagonal sandstone pavilion in Sher Shah’s palace, known as the Sher Mandal, to become his library. (His collection of manuscripts including his father’s memoirs had, like his other prize possession, his jewels, accompanied him on his wanderings.) But his fate continued to belie his name of ‘fortunate’. One evening towards sunset in late January 1556, he was sitting on the flat roof of the Sher Mandal discussing with his astronomers when Venus would rise into the night sky, since he thought this would be a propitious time for important announcements. After a while he decided to return to his living quarters. As he was setting foot on the Sher Mandal’s narrow, steep and sharp-edged stone steps he heard the call to prayer from the neighbouring mosque and
‘his blessed foot caught in the skirt of his robe … He lost his feet and fell upon his head, his right temple receiving a serious blow so that blood issued from his right ear.’ He slipped in and out of consciousness, dying three days later with the words ‘I hear the divine call.’
He was forty-seven years and ten months old, just a few days older than his father Babur had been when he died.

Humayun had lived less than a third of his life in India. His son Akbar, who like his contemporary Shakespeare would die on his own birthday, would live precisely sixty-three years, fifty of them in India, forty-nine of them as emperor. He would transform Moghul rule in India from a foreign occupation into a structured, integrated, stable empire.

*
Central Asian royal libraries contained only manuscripts. Although the world’s oldest printed book, Wang Jie’s
Diamond Sutra
, was produced in China in AD 868 by the painstaking hand-engraving of wooden blocks, and printed books were becoming commonplace in Europe following Johannes Gutenberg’s independent invention in the mid-fifteenth century of reusable type and the printing press, neither process was used in central Asia or Moghul India. While this resulted in a greater reliance on oral communication, occasionally a problem for the historian, it also produced beautiful illuminated manuscript copies of key documents such as the chronicles of kings.

*
The Safawid dynasty had made the Shia practice of Islam the state religion of Persia in 1501. The distinction between Shia and Sunni derived from the first century of Islam and originally related to who was Muhammad’s legitimate successor and whether the office should be an elected one or restricted, as the Shias claimed, to the descendants of the prophet through his cousin and son-in-law, Ali. ‘Shia’ is the word for ‘party’ and comes from the phrase ‘the party of Ali’. ‘Sunni’ means ‘those who follow the custom, “Sunna”, of Muhammad’. By the sixteenth century further differences had grown between the two sects such as the nature of daily prayer required.

2

Allah Akbar

T
he first six years of young Akbar’s rule were conducted, as his chief chronicler Abul Fazl put it, ‘behind the veil’, firstly under the tutelage of his father’s leading general and then under that of his chief foster-mother or wet-nurse, Maham Anga, and her family.
*
According to Abul Fazl, when Akbar was born in the Rajasthan desert he had first been put to suckle at his fifteen-year-old mother’s breast, ‘his honeyed lips in contact with the benign breasts, his life was sweetened by the life-giving fluid’. However, and according to Timurid custom, he had then been passed to a series of highborn wet-nurses. Theirs was a coveted position because they acquired great influence and their sons were considered foster-brothers of the royal infant. Akbar had at least ten foster-mothers, rather more than usual, because at the time of his birth Humayun had little other way of rewarding loyal followers.