A Teardrop on the Cheek of Time: The Story of the Taj Mahal (17 page)

However, Shah Jahan’s and Mumtaz’s most determined and dangerous opponent was Nur. Though bereft of her father’s advice and increasingly unsure of the allegiance of her brother Asaf Khan, she had Jahangir’s total trust and devotion. Her power over him, given that she was now in her late forties in a society where, as an English visitor observed,
‘the King and his great men maintain their women, but little affect them after thirty years of their age’
, was remarkable and as much a tribute to her strong, attractive and intelligent personality as to any enduring beauty. In fact, she was about to become a grandmother with the birth that September of a daughter to the handsome if foolish Shahriyar and her own daughter, Ladli. The arrival of her grandchild no doubt strengthened her resolve to rule.

Jahangir’s increasing frailty made it easier for Nur to assume new powers. He was grateful to her for taking up his burdens at a time when he found himself no longer even able to keep his own diary. He confessed that ‘in consequence of the weakness that came over me two years ago and still continues, heart and brain do not accord. I cannot make notes of events and occurrences.’ Instead he asked a courtier, Mutamad Khan, who ‘knows my temperament and understands my words’, henceforth to keep a record of events and submit it to him for verification. The death of Jahangir’s charismatic Hindu mother in the summer of 1623 must have also reinforced Nur’s authority over her increasingly dependent husband.

Shah Jahan and Mumtaz soon learned the depth of Nur’s enmity towards them as they moved south from Mewar towards the Deccan. With many supporters deserting to the imperial armies, the prince’s forces were dangerously reduced and he decided he must secure a suitable retreat for Mumtaz and the children. He chose the great hill fortress of Asir, close to Burhanpur and under the control of a chieftain married to a cousin of Mumtaz, whom he hoped would help them. However, this cousin was also a niece of Nur’s, who, learning of Shah Jahan’s plan, moved to frustrate it. She herself wrote to the chieftain, warning him: ‘Beware, a thousand times beware, not to allow Bi-daulat [Shah Jahan] and his men to come near the fort, but strengthen the towers and gates, and do your duty, and do not act in such a manner that the stain of a curse and ingratitude for favours should fall …’

Nevertheless, Shah Jahan forced the chieftain by threats to open the gates of his fortress, but with the imperial forces marching swiftly in pursuit he and his family did not linger long within the protection of its walls. Leaving a trusted Rajput in command of the fort, Shah Jahan took them the twelve miles south to Burhanpur, from where he made tentative overtures of peace to Mahabat Khan. When these failed, he and his family trekked yet further south across the Tapti and other dangerously swift-flowing rivers fed by the drenching monsoon rains. He tried to form alliances with the local sultans of the Deccan but they rebuffed him. The only help came from the ruler of Golconda, who, eager to encourage any disorder in the Moghul domains, allowed his former enemy and his entourage to pass through his kingdom northeast into Orissa, a journey through mountains and marshland during which, according to Jahangir’s memoirs, the bedraggled force ‘had to endure great hardships’, such that many more of Shah Jahan’s supporters slipped away.

However, Shah Jahan’s luck turned when the governor of Orissa, a cousin of both Nur and Mumtaz, was so struck with terror at his arrival that he fled, leaving everything behind him. Shah Jahan seized the governor’s rich treasure, rebuilt his armies and advanced with fresh recruits, artillery, horses and war elephants into Bihar and Bengal, capturing several important cities and forcing their nobles to swear allegiance to him. In the spring of 1624 he killed Nur’s uncle, the governor of Bengal, in a fierce fight on the banks of the Ganges. The governor had not only been brother to Nur’s mother, the celebrated discoverer of attar of roses, but was also Mumtaz’s great uncle. At times, Mumtaz’s flight across India must have seemed to her like a grotesque game of chess in which many of the main pieces eliminated or elevated were her close relations.

Yet Mahabat Khan was soon nipping at Shah Jahan’s heels again and pushed him back into Orissa. From here the prince and his family could do little but retrace their tortuous path back to Golconda. Once more in the Deccan, Shah Jahan found an unlikely ally. Malik Ambar of Ahmednagar, the former Abyssinian slave he had twice defeated on Jahangir’s behalf, was anxious to join forces with Shah Jahan ‘on the basis of common enmity to the Imperial government’. This seasoned guerrilla fighter was glad of the opportunity to exploit Shah Jahan’s rebellion to his own advantage. Together they mounted a number of attacks, harassing the imperial forces.

However, in 1625, as a chronicler related, Shah Jahan
‘was seized with illness’
and realized he could no longer go on. For three years Mahabat Khan had chased him and his family thousands of miles back and forth in a game of cat and mouse through the deserts of Rajasthan – southwards to the Deccan, east to Orissa and Bengal, back once more towards Agra, then southwards again to the Deccan. Shah Jahan had tried to avoid pitched battles with his father’s forces but, when he had been forced to fight, had invariably been the loser. During one battle an arrow severely wounded Shah Jahan’s horse and only when an officer gave him his horse on which to flee did he make good his escape. Purely the ability of Shah Jahan and his followers to travel light and fast, at least by Moghul standards, had prevented the more cumbersome pursuing forces from capturing him.

Throughout all this, Mumtaz, the hitherto pampered product of the harem, had remained steadfastly by his side, sharing the hardships just as she had once shared the glory of going on campaign when Shah Jahan was still a favoured son. The family had lived with danger and stress and found few allies. Often, as Jahangir noted with satisfaction, they had been ‘in a wretched state’, forced to flee in disorder ‘through the heavy rain, and the mud and mire’, so that ‘if any baggage was left behind no enquiries were made and Shah Jahan and his children and dependants thought themselves lucky to save their lives’. Such an existence could not continue.

In the circumstances, Shah Jahan decided that he had no option but to throw himself and his loved ones on his father’s mercy. His family included a new son, Murad Bakhsh, born in September 1624 in the citadel of Rohtas near the Hindu holy city of Benares on the banks of the Ganges, from where the smoke of ritual funeral pyres curled eternally skywards. Ill and depressed, Shah Jahan wrote to his father, ‘expressing his sorrow and repentance and begging pardon for all faults past and present’ and waited apprehensively for a reply.

Jahangir’s response was conciliatory, unlike his brutal reaction to Khusrau’s rebellion nearly twenty years before. Perhaps Nur had decided that Shah Jahan and his father were so estranged that a true reconciliation would never be possible and Shah Jahan no longer posed a serious threat. She may also have been wary of antagonizing her brother, Asaf Khan. Perhaps the latter lobbied Jahangir on behalf of Shah Jahan. Perhaps the emperor simply welcomed the chance to make peace with his son and to halt a campaign that had stretched his supply lines across thousands of miles. He replied in his own hand that not only would he grant his son ‘full forgiveness’, but he would also appoint him governor of the remote province of Balaghat in central India. There was, however, a sting. Shah Jahan must surrender the fortresses of Rohtas and Asir, which were still occupied by his officers. He must also send ten-year-old Dara Shukoh and seven-year-old Aurangzeb to the imperial court as hostages in all but name. To soften the blow, Jahangir sent his jewel-loving son a diamond-studded mace.

Parting with the boys in such circumstances must have been deeply traumatic for Shah Jahan and Mumtaz. Of the ten children born to them by this time, three had already died. A chronicle relates how, ‘notwithstanding the love he had for his sons’, Shah Jahan, who was still afflicted by ‘his bodily weakness’, had no option but to send them to his father, together with ‘offerings of jewels, chased guns and elephants’. Shah Jahan and Mumtaz were placing their faith in the old Timurid custom that the lives of princes of the blood were sacred. However, reflections on the recent fate of his half-brother Khusrau, who had perished in his own custody, must surely have troubled Shah Jahan.

6

Chosen One of the Palace

S
hah Jahan and Mumtaz were effectively in exile. Their three-year rebellion had achieved little except to exhaust them physically and emotionally, rob them of two of their sons and demonstrate their irreconcilable differences with Nur. Their only hope was that others resentful of the empress’s increasingly arrogant and autocratic behaviour might act.

One such was Mahabat Khan. His defeat of Shah Jahan had made him one of Jahangir’s most influential nobles. It had also brought him into prolonged contact with the thirty-six-year-old Prince Parvez as together they had hounded Shah Jahan and his family across the empire. As Jahangir’s oldest surviving son, Parvez had a good claim to the throne. His alcoholism was a weakness, but, Mahabat Khan must have reasoned, would also make him easier to control should he become emperor.

Mahabat Khan’s growing influence over Parvez was, however, being watched with alarm by both Nur and her brother Asaf Khan, neither of whom had any interest in seeing Parvez prosper. Their first step was to detach Mahabat Khan from the impressionable prince by persuading Jahangir to appoint Mahabat Khan Governor of Bengal in the distant east. At the same time Nur and her brother accused him of misappropriating treasure and elephants during the campaign against Shah Jahan. Deducing that there was a conspiracy against him, Mahabat Khan decided to appear before his emperor and defend himself.

In March 1626, at the head of over 4,000 Rajputs, Mahabat Khan approached the dusty imperial encampment on the east shore of the deep, swift-flowing Jhelum River, a tributary of the Indus flowing down from the mountains of Kashmir, where Jahangir had paused on his way northwest to Kabul. Learning of his approach, Jahangir sent orders that he was to halt and send ahead only his elephants and a few attendants. The still respectful Mahabat Khan duly despatched an advance party that included the young man who had recently married his daughter. When Mahabat Khan’s son-in-law arrived at the imperial encampment, soldiers seized him, flogged him and put him in chains, on the excuse that he had wed without the emperor’s consent. To add insult to physical injury, Jahangir ordered Mahabat Khan’s wedding gifts to the couple to be confiscated and sent to the imperial treasury.

When Mahabat Khan learned what had happened, it confirmed his fears that Nur and her brother were bent on destroying him. His only hope, he decided, was to gain direct access to Jahangir and plead his case in person. The noble recently entrusted by Jahangir with writing his diary, and who was an eyewitness, recorded how Mahabat Khan swept into the camp at the head of his men to discover that the majority of the imperial court, including the bulk of the army under Asaf Khan and ‘the baggage, the treasury, the arms, etc, even to the very domestics’, were already busily crossing a boat bridge over the river, so they would be ready for the next day’s journey. Jahangir, Nur, Shahriyar and their immediate household, who were to follow in the morning, were still in their tents – unprotected and vulnerable.