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Authors: Michael Preston Diana Preston

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Sketch of Akbar
.

Ghiyas Beg’s progress was at first modest. Akbar appointed him to a middling rank and sent him off to be the treasurer of the northern outpost of Kabul. In 1596, he was placed in charge of the imperial court buildings back in Agra. During the intervening years Mehrunissa had grown into a beautiful, accomplished woman who, according to one account,
‘in music, in dancing, in poetry, in painting had no equal among her sex. Her disposition was volatile, her wit lively and satirical, her spirit lofty and uncontrolled.’ The subtext is that she had sex appeal. She had been married at seventeen to a well-born, battle-hardened Persian soldier who had distinguished himself in Akbar’s campaigns and whose courage would win him the title Sher Afghan, ‘Tiger Slayer’.

Several accounts suggest that, either by accident or design, Mehrunissa had already caught the susceptible eye of Prince Salim. According to one, Salim called on her father and ‘the ladies, according to custom, were introduced in their veils’. Mehrunissa danced before the inflamed Salim, who ‘could hardly be restrained by the rules of decency … When his eyes seemed to devour her, she, as by accident, dropped her veil; and shone upon him …’ Some chroniclers claim that Akbar arranged her marriage to put her out of his son’s grasp, but others hold that Salim conceived his passion for her after her betrothal and that Akbar ‘sternly refused to commit a piece of injustice’
by halting the marriage.

The many accounts were written years after these events, some while Mehrunissa was the most powerful woman in India, others after her fall from power. Some writers were anxious to present Mehrunissa and her family as scheming parvenus, while others were striving to portray a noble and enduring love. The truth is as veiled as Mehrunissa herself, living the secluded life of an aristocratic girl within the women’s quarters of Ghiyas Beg’s house. It would have been hard, if not impossible, for Salim to have made overt advances to her here or, indeed, at court. Although as the daughter of a trusted courtier Mehrunissa would have been invited to visit the ladies of the imperial harem, passing through the ranks of watchful eunuchs and muscular female guards into the scented, silken interior to drop her veil and sing and dance, no ungelded adult male except the emperor was allowed within the precincts.

Salim already had a clutch of wives, primarily dynastic alliances to bind the diverse elements of Akbar’s empire. His first marriage in 1585 was to his cousin Man Bai, daughter of the Hindu Raja of Amber (Jaipur). In 1587 she bore his first son, Khusrau. Salim’s second son, Parvez, was born to a Muslim wife in 1589. However, it was the arrival of his third son, born on 5 January 1592 in Lahore to another Hindu princess, the graceful and witty Jodh Bai of Marwar (Jodhpur), that most pleased Akbar. Akbar and his astrologers saw the birth as most auspicious. The child would be ‘a riband in the cap of royalty and more resplendent than the sun’. More significantly, the conjunction of the planets at the moment of his birth was the same as at the birth of Timur; the year of his birth was the millennium year 1000 of the Islamic calendar; while the month of his birth was the same as that of the Prophet Muhammad. The emperor named him ‘Khurram’, meaning ‘joyous’. The child, who would become the Emperor Shah Jahan, was from his earliest moments Akbar’s most adored grandchild.

The following year, Ghiyas Beg also celebrated the birth of a child – a granddaughter born to one of his sons and named Arjumand Banu. During her lifetime, the world would know her as Mumtaz Mahal, ‘Chosen One of the Palace’ and Shah Jahan’s greatest love. Her early death would translate her into the emblematic ‘Lady of the Taj’.

Akbar placed the baby prince Khurram in the care of his first wife, named Rukhiya Begum. The childless woman was also Akbar’s cousin, being a daughter of Hindal, and was a devout Muslim. The Hindu Jodh Bai was consoled with a magnificent gift of rubies and pearls. In line with Moghul custom, Khurram began his formal education at the age of four years, four months and four days. Akbar himself escorted the bejewelled, silk-clad princeling to the imperial mosque school, where leading scholars instructed him in the arts, literature and the history of his forebears, especially the great Timur. Perhaps predictably, the court chroniclers claimed that the young prince showed a remarkable grasp of detail and a powerful memory, but more unusually they described how, even at a young age, he demonstrated a sensual side, delighting in drenching his clothes in perfume and in the touch of brilliant, smooth-cut gems. Historians have pointed out that there is no record of Khurram’s circumcision, presumably a major celebration, and have suggested that, in line with his grandfather Akbar’s ambivalence towards the procedure, he may never have been circumcised. As he grew, Akbar taught him to hunt and fight. When Khurram was only six years old, Akbar took him on campaign south to the Deccan, appointing a formidable rider, marksman and swordsman as his tutor. On the journey he took his first shot at a leopard and wounded the beast. Shortly afterwards Khurram caught smallpox but survived unblemished, to his grandfather’s relief. When he was nine years old, Akbar invited the little boy to join his war council.

Akbar’s love for his grandson contrasted with his ambivalent feelings for Salim, who recalled somewhat wistfully in his memoirs Akbar’s attentiveness to Khurram and how the old emperor lauded the young prince as his own
‘true son’
. Abul Fazl was also struck that ‘the affectionate sovereign loved grandsons more than sons’. Yet Akbar had once doted on Salim. As a child he too had been the indulged darling of the harem whose early signs of prowess at hunting and the martial arts had delighted Akbar. Aged just twelve, he had been given command of a large detachment and gone on campaign with Akbar. Nevertheless, as Salim grew into active and able manhood, Akbar’s affection waned. The ageing emperor perhaps felt threatened by what he perceived as the restless, greedy ambition of his son.

There are also hints in the account of an English visitor to the Moghul court, merchant William Finch, and in later Moghul chronicles of sexual rivalry between the two. They claim that Salim fell in love with Akbar’s loveliest concubine, Anarkali, meaning ‘Pomegranate Blossom’, and that on discovering the affair Akbar had her walled up alive.

Salim certainly felt insecure. Since the Moghuls’ ancestors did not always observe the rules of primogeniture, though he was Akbar’s eldest son he could not assume the throne was his. Faced with such uncertainty, Salim refused to command military expeditions to remote regions in case his father died while he was too far from the seat of power to claim the crown. Akbar in turn began openly favouring his younger sons, Prince Murad and Prince Daniyal, both hopeless drunkards.

Salim too enjoyed drinking. At the age of eighteen he tasted a glass of sweet yellow wine, which, he confessed,
‘I drank and liked the feeling I got.’ He started drinking every day, soon abandoning wine for spirits. By his late twenties he was swallowing ‘twenty phials of double-distilled spirits’
a day and existing on a meagre diet of bread and radishes. Racked by hangovers and with his hands shaking so badly that he could no longer hold a glass, he sought the help of court physicians. They warned that if he did not desist he would be dead in six months. Salim cut back to six cups of wine mixed with spirits and fourteen grains of opium a day. The process of drying out, however incomplete, probably did not improve his temper or make him more forgiving of his father’s neglect.

In 1601, a resentful Salim rebelled. His revolt was somewhat half-hearted and he contented himself with marching aimlessly hither and thither with a force of 30,000 while tentatively calling himself emperor. Father and son seem to have striven to avoid an open fight. Instead, Salim turned his aggression towards Abul Fazl, who was, as well as Akbar’s chronicler, one of his closest advisers. So close that, when Akbar was gored in his testicles while out hunting, Abul Fazl proudly recalled that the application of ointment was left ‘to the writer of this book of fortune’. Latterly, the fifty-two-year-old had also become one of Akbar’s more successful generals and was away on campaign at the time of the revolt. By 1602 Akbar had become sufficiently perturbed to recall Abul Fazl to Agra. Salim disliked and distrusted the soldier scholar who, as he later wrote in his memoirs, was
‘no friend of mine’
and plotted his assassination. As Abul Fazl hastened to his emperor’s side, he was murdered by a local raja whom Salim offered to reward
‘if he would stop that sedition monger and kill him’
. According to some accounts, Salim ordered Abul Fazl’s severed head, sent to him by the raja in triumph, to be tossed into a common latrine.
*

Akbar learned of the murder while playing with his tame pigeons and collapsed in tearful anguish. He wanted to punish Salim but was in a difficult situation. Murad had died, quivering in the throes of delirium tremens, and Daniyal was also busily drinking himself to death. Despite his father’s frantic efforts to keep alcohol from him, his followers brought wine past Akbar’s spies, hidden in cows’ intestines, which they wound round their bodies under their clothes. Akbar realized that he and Salim must be reconciled to protect the Moghul dynasty. In line with Moghul tradition, the imperial ladies were the go-betweens. One of Akbar’s senior wives persuaded the disgruntled prince to return with her to Agra, where he was received by his grandmother Hamida, Humayun’s reluctant bride of more than half a century before. The old lady induced Salim to prostrate himself at his father’s feet. In a designedly theatrical scene Akbar lifted his wayward son in his arms, embraced him and placed his imperial turban on his head – a sign to onlookers that Salim was his heir. He ordered drums to be beaten loudly and joyously to announce the reconciliation.

Yet family problems and uncertainty about the succession were not over. In 1604 the death of Daniyal, after a particularly spectacular drinking bout using double-strength spirits smuggled in a rusty musket barrel, freed Salim of fraternal rivals. However, his eldest son, the mettlesome teenage Khusrau, was emerging as a challenger for the throne, being in the eyes of his supporters less volatile and more pliable than his erratic, violent father. The last year of Akbar’s reign brought a very public showdown when the emperor deliberately arranged a contest between Salim’s and Khusrau’s most powerful war elephants. Elephant fights were a favourite royal pastime, with the great beasts goaded into action by riders clinging to their backs. However, this occasion had a special significance. Perhaps the old man was seeking a portent for the future of the empire; or perhaps, still grieving at the death of his seventy-seven-year-old mother Hamida the year before, he was merely trying to discomfit his own over-eager son.

Akbar watched the noisy contest from a balcony with the thirteen-year-old Khurram, who was, as usual, by his side, on this occasion acting as the referee. Salim’s elephant was being mangled by Khusrau’s and Khurram at once ordered a reserve elephant into the arena to draw the contestants apart. When this did not succeed, the guards fired rockets to separate the enraged, trumpeting beasts. Frightened by the flashes and bangs, Khusrau’s elephant bolted, leaving Salim the unexpected victor. In the highly charged atmosphere, fighting broke out among the respective supporters and Akbar sent Khurram with orders to Salim and Khusrau to quell the fracas. Khurram’s thoughts about the feuding and jealousy between the two would-be emperors and his own intervention are not recorded, but the teenager watching closely by his grandfather’s side was imbibing lessons. The future Shah Jahan would one day demonstrate a ruthlessness in eliminating family rivals unmatched by any of his predecessors.

Whatever his feelings for his father and half-brothers, Khurram loved Akbar. When, a week after the elephant fight, the old man began suffering from diarrhoea and internal bleeding a distraught Khurram refused to leave his bedside, insisting,
‘So long as there is a breath of life in Shah Baba [Akbar], nothing can induce me to leave him.’
Meanwhile his father and half-brother each schemed for the throne. In the event, the majority of nobles, summoned by Akbar to give their views, favoured the more seasoned Salim over the youthful Khusrau. Anxious that his empire should not decline into civil war, Akbar accepted their verdict. The dying man signalled Salim to put on the imperial robes and turban and gird on Humayun’s sword hanging at the foot of his bed. A few hours later that same day, 15 October 1605, Akbar was dead at sixty-three. At dawn his corpse was borne on a bier to Sikandra, five miles from Agra, to the great tomb that he himself had begun, but which was not yet complete.

Akbar’s vision and vitality had forged a strong, cohesive empire of 100,000,000 ethnically and religiously diverse subjects across two-thirds of the Indian subcontinent. He had almost trebled the precarious dominions bequeathed him by Humayun. Among the more significant of Akbar’s later campaigns were those to consolidate and extend Moghul rule in Bihar and Bengal, the expansion of his territories in Afghanistan, including the taking from the Persians of Kabul, and the then, as now, strategic city of Kandahar, the conquest of Sind and Baluchistan in what is now Pakistan and incursions into the Deccan to the south. Conscious that seizing territory is far easier than holding it, he had reformed and centralized his administration, welding it into an efficient machine.

BOOK: A Teardrop on the Cheek of Time: The Story of the Taj Mahal
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