A Teardrop on the Cheek of Time: The Story of the Taj Mahal (9 page)

Akbar’s power and wealth were symbolized by the vast armies he had poured into the field and the treasuries piled with glistening diamonds, rubies, emeralds and pearls for which the Moghuls had an almost fetishistic passion. He had made his court a place of sophistication and luxury and his grand, graceful buildings were a signal to the world that the nomadic days were over. Of all Timur’s descendants, Akbar had shown himself the most able and astute, the truest successor and worthy of his name ‘The Great’.

The inheritor of this magnificence, the thirty-six-year-old Salim, was proclaimed emperor in the Hall of Public Audience in the Agra fort nine days after Akbar’s death. The name he chose for himself, Jahangir, meant
‘seizer of the world’ because, he said, without beating about the bush, ‘the business of kings is controlling the world’
.

*
Abul Fazl was of Arab extraction, the son of a cleric. He entered Akbar’s service in 1574, aged twenty-three. A liberal like his father, he became one of the emperor’s closest confidants as well as his official chronicler. He claimed to write with ’ a pen perfumed with sincerity’. Although he was obviously partial towards Akbar and constantly and prolixly praised the emperor, his diligence and general accuracy as a chronicler are beyond doubt. In English translation his writings on Akbar amount to just under 4,000 pages, some 60 per cent of which is his history of Akbar and his predecessors, the
Akbarnama
, and the remainder the
Ain-i-Akbari
, a detailed account of how the court and empire functioned.

*
Akbar’s use of ‘tens’ was based on zero, an Indian invention. What we know as Arabic numerals are really Indian numerals. They were simply brought to Europe via the Middle East.

†
Urdu, today the official language of Pakistan, is a mixture of the Persian spoken by the Moghul rulers with Hindi. It was originally spoken in the Moghuls’ military camps and the word
urdu
means ‘camp’.

*
At that time in England local gibbets displayed executed highwaymen and London’s only bridge across the Thames sported rebels’ heads, a similar reminder to the populace of the government’s power.

*
Sufis preached the seeking of a more personal relationship with God through a variety of mystical paths. The word
sufi
means ‘those who wear
suf
’, rough woollen garments. The mystics were said to have adopted such garb as did Christian hermits as an indication of asceticism and poverty.

*
Today guides point out stone depressions where they claim women deposited their jewellery so its jingling would not betray them. Chess itself had its origins in India and reached Europe via Persia, whence the expression ‘check mate’ came, deriving from
shah mat
, ‘the king is at a loss’.

*
Those who disliked the policies Akbar formulated with Abul Fazl accused him of achieving his influence ‘by his temporising disposition, by his duplicity, by his study of the emperor’s temperament and by his boundless flattery’. An intriguing sidelight on Abul Fazl is that he was said to have had an enormous appetite, consuming thirty pounds in weight of food a day.

3

‘Peerless Pearls and
Heart-pleasing Stuffs’

A
s his father’s reign began, the behaviour of his half-brother Khusrau gave young Prince Khurram, the future Shah Jahan, greater insight into power and the threat posed by ambitious, disaffected family members. There were still those who wished to see Khusrau replace his father on the throne. In April 1606, on the spurious pretext of visiting Akbar’s tomb nearby, Khusrau galloped out of the Red Fort at Agra, where Jahangir had been holding him under nominal house arrest. Pausing only to plunder sweetmeat shops for sustenance, Khusrau rode northwest to Lahore, gathering more supporters as he went, and laid siege to the city. Jahangir himself marched in pursuit of his errant son, leaving fourteen-year-old Khurram to oversee his governing council, and departing so quickly that he forgot his morning ‘allowance of opium’.

Jahangir’s army routed the rebels with ease. Khusrau fled, but Jahangir resolved that ‘I would not rest till I had taken him’. Khusrau attempted a night-time flight across a river but the boatmen refused to help him and his companions. When they tried to row themselves, they ran aground on a sandbar in their nervous, inexpert haste. At first light they surrendered. Khusrau was dragged, ‘trembling and weeping’, before his father, together with two leading confederates. According to Jahangir, ‘Khusrau was brought into my presence with his hands bound and a chain on his leg.’ The emperor ordered his son’s two supporters to be stitched tightly into the stinking and soaking wet skins of a freshly killed ass and ox, to which the flopping heads were still attached. The men were mounted backwards on mules. The grotesque little cavalcade was then led round Lahore in the baking sun until the man inside the ox skin suffocated, since, as Jahangir noted with interest, ‘the skin of an ox dries quicker than the skin of an ass’. The one in the ass’s skin survived and was eventually rehabilitated into imperial favour.

Khusrau himself was paraded on an elephant along a route lined with a double row of pointed wooden stakes on which 300 of his shrieking supporters had been spitted. Jahangir wrote approvingly that there was no ‘more excruciating punishment, for the culprits die in lingering torture’. Khusrau was so traumatized by the experience that, as his father coldly recalled, ‘he neither ate nor drank for three days and nights, which he consumed in tears and groans, hunger and thirst’. Yet such horrors merely dampened rather than extinguished his ambition. For a while Jahangir kept him in chains, but as soon as his father showed signs of relenting and had the chains struck from his legs, Khusrau began to plot again. A particular spur was his suspicion that Khurram, four and a half years his junior and now his father’s favourite, might soon be designated his heir. Jealousy reignited his already lively sense of grievance.

Khusrau incited a group of nobles to murder Jahangir on the hunting field. Ironically it was his rival Khurram who learned of the plot and, as Jahangir wrote, ‘in great perturbation instantly informed me’. Jahangir at once killed four of the ringleaders and pondered executing Khusrau, but decided that ‘paternal affection did not allow me to take his life’. Instead he ordered his son to be blinded. Since Khusrau later recovered some limited vision, his eyeballs were perhaps rubbed with corrosive fluids, rather than gouged, or his eyelids stitched together. Whatever the case, his existence was a miserable one and the sight of him irked his father, who complained, somewhat unfairly in the circumstances, that whenever he was brought into his presence his son was ‘always mournful and dejected in mind’. A side-effect of Khusrau’s rivalry with his father was that his mother, Jahangir’s first wife, had in despair taken ‘her own life out of the zeal that is an integral part of Rajput nature. Several times she went berserk – it must have been an hereditary trait since her father and brothers all used suddenly to appear quite mad … While I was away on a hunt … with her mind in a state of imbalance she ate a lot of opium and died soon thereafter’, wrote Jahangir.

In his treatment of Khusrau, Jahangir conveniently blotted from his memory his own rebellion against an ageing father. His lively memoirs, written with the same freshness if not always candour of his great-grandfather Babur’s, assert piously that ‘a son ought always to be the stay of monarchy’. The diary reveals the emperor as a man riven with contradictions – an effective ruler when not fuddled with opium or alcohol, charming, sophisticated and enquiring at some moments, bizarrely cruel at others. Jahangir made a pageant of torture and execution, on one occasion apparently relishing the sight of men being skinned alive. Sir Thomas Roe, England’s first ambassador to India, who arrived at his court in 1615 and shudderingly witnessed elephants crushing convicts beneath their feet as the emperor looked on, thought that Jahangir took
‘too much delight in blood’
. Even more revealing of Jahangir’s sadistic streak is that he beat his seven-year-old son, Shahriyar, to see whether he would cry and, when the little boy stayed quiet, stabbed his cheek with a bodkin. The child bled profusely but remained silent.

Jahangir could be hypocritical. A sybarite in all things, he banned alcohol but could not bear to renounce it himself, excusing his weakness with the guile of an old lady addicted to the sherry bottle.
*
He only indulged, he insisted, while overlooking the many occasions he was too drunk to stand, ‘to promote digestion of my food’. He also salved his conscience by deciding that ‘on Friday evenings I would not commit the sin of drinking wine’. Later in his reign he would somewhat ambiguously urge the benefits of wine on Khurram, while at the same time suggesting caution: ‘My boy, you are the father of children, and kings and princes drink wine. Today is a festival, and I will drink wine with you, and I give you leave to drink on feast days, on New Year’s day, and at great entertainments, but always with moderation, for to drink to excess and weaken the intellect is avoided by the wise; in fact, some good and benefit ought to be obtained from wine-drinking.’

Jahangir was deeply curious about science and nature, conducting original research into the loveplay of cranes and the gestation period of elephants, ordering a smoking meteorite to be dug up and fashioned into swords and the dissection of lions’ intestines to investigate where their courage came from. He was fascinated how the banyan, a tree sacred to Hindus, supported its weight by sending down aerial roots. In some ways, had he lived a little later in England, he would have been a natural candidate for the Royal Society, set up by Charles II in 1660 to enquire into the natural world. A workshop of court painters accompanied Jahangir on his travels to record whatever curious creature caught the emperor’s fancy. When a splendid turkey, then a novelty in India, was presented to him, he ordered its portrait painted, writing smugly that ‘although King Babur has in his memoirs given an able description and pictured representation of several animals, it is most probable he never ordered painters to draw them from life’.