A Teardrop on the Cheek of Time: The Story of the Taj Mahal (18 page)

This was an almost unimaginable circumstance and a sign of how little the emperor had regarded Mahabat Khan as a threat. Without considering the consequences, Mahabat Khan staged a coup. He ordered 2,000 Rajputs to guard the boat bridge and, if necessary, to burn it, to prevent the imperial army hastening back to their master’s defence. Next he led a body of 100 dust-streaked foot soldiers armed with spears and shields to the royal tents, where the few soldiers on guard were just completing their morning prayers. Jahangir’s diarist recorded an astonishing scene. Mahabat Khan strode hither and thither searching for the emperor until, spying a group of eunuchs by the entrance to the imperial bathroom tent and suspecting wrongly that Jahangir was within, he ordered his attendants to rip down the boards around it.

Hearing the commotion, Jahangir emerged from elsewhere in his quarters into a crowd of armed Rajputs. Mahabat Khan tried to justify his actions, apparently telling the incredulous emperor that since ‘I have assured myself that escape from the malice and implacable hatred of Asaf Khan is impossible, and that I shall be put to death in shame and ignominy, I have therefore boldly and presumptuously thrown myself upon Your Majesty’s protection. If I deserve death or punishment, give the order that I may suffer it in your presence.’ What he actually said was probably neither so humble nor so eloquent and left no doubt that Jahangir was his prisoner. Jahangir seemingly contemplated swiping his head from his shoulders – twice his hand reached for his sword ‘to cleanse the world from the filthy existence of that foul dog’, as a chronicler hostile to Mahabat Khan later wrote – but he restrained himself. Instead, Jahangir acquiesced to his former friend’s and present captor’s proposal that ‘it is time to go out riding and hunting; let the necessary orders be given as usual, so that your slave may go out in attendance upon you, and it may appear that this bold step has been taken by Your Majesty’s order’. However, Jahangir refused to mount Mahabat Khan’s horse, calling imperiously for his own royal stallion.

After riding ‘a distance of two arrow shots’, Mahabat Khan asked Jahangir to climb instead into a howdah on an imperial elephant, to make it easier for people to see the emperor and convince them nothing was amiss. However, during the swap Rajput warriors killed two of Jahangir’s attendants, believing they were attempting to rescue their master. In an increasingly tense atmosphere, the kidnapped emperor was hurried away to Mahabat Khan’s camp.

In his nervousness and panic, Mahabat Khan had neglected something – or, rather, someone – important. Nur was still in the imperial camp. When she realized what had happened she lost no time in hurrying to the river which, it appears, Mahabat Khan’s Rajputs chivalrously but ill advisedly allowed her to cross. Nur rushed to the tents of her brother Asaf Khan, who had crossed before Mahabat Khan’s arrival, and, regardless of the rules of purdah, summoned the chief nobles and officers and berated them and her brother: ‘It was through your negligence that things have gone so far and the unimaginable has happened. You have been disgraced before God and the people.’ Hardly surprisingly after her tirade, they decided to recross the Jhelum the next day and rescue their emperor.

The operation was a fiasco. Mahabat Khan’s men had by now burned the boat bridge, and the ford chosen for the crossing by the imperial forces was, according to Jahangir’s diarist, ‘the worst possible’, full of deep holes. As the imperial troops plunged in, many men and beasts simply tumbled over. Futhermore, as they began struggling towards the opposite bank, they saw over 700 of Mahabat Khan’s Rajputs drawn up ‘in firm array’ with their armoured war elephants, ready to repel them. The already floundering imperial troops veered away in a panic. Some battled deep water and swift currents until they came to other crossing places undefended by the Rajputs. A courageous few of these, gasping, soaking and lacerated, made their way towards the tent where Jahangir, together with Shahriyar, who had also now been captured by Mahabat Khan, was being held, but most were cut down. Others fled, including Asaf Khan, who hurried to the safety of a stout fortress built by Akbar.

The Rajputs had killed some 2,000 imperial troops and a further 2,000 had drowned, their bodies mingling with the carcasses of horses and elephants in the chilling, swirling, blood-flecked waters. The Rajputs had as usual proved fearsome opponents. According to a European mercenary who fought both with them and against them,
‘They all eat opium, and on the day of battle they swallow a double dose. They also give some to their horses to enable them to endure fatigue … Many of them wear gold armlets, so that, if killed, those finding the body may see to its cremation.’

Nur had participated in the attack across the river, riding high in a howdah, her granddaughter in her arms and the child’s nurse beside her. She had been caught in a storm of arrows and Rajput throwing spears, which lacerated her elephant’s tough hide. When the baby – or, according to one account, the nurse – was hit in the arm, Nur pulled out the arrow ‘with her own hand, and threw it out, bloodying her clothes in the process’, and emptied three quiverfuls of arrows into the Rajputs in return. Her elephant driver urged the stricken animal away from the ford and into deeper waters where it could swim and eventually Nur and her party gained a section of the far bank free of Rajputs. Having witnessed the bloody chaos of the crossing and learning that her brother had fled, Nur accepted the impossibility of rescuing her husband and surrendered to Mahabat Khan, insisting on joining Jahangir in captivity. Within days Asaf Khan, winkled from his mountain hideaway and kept for a while in chains, also joined the royal prisoners.

With the royal family, indeed the entire royal household, firmly in the grip of his Rajput forces, but under the pretence of being still a loyal subject, Mahabat Khan set out for Kabul, about 200 miles away to the northwest, in line with Jahangir’s original intention. To the ordinary onlooker all appeared normal as, in May 1626, the royal entourage passed into the ancient mud-walled city beyond the Khyber Pass. Jahangir, on a gorgeously caparisoned elephant, scattered gold and silver coin ‘as usual’ to the admiring and deferential crowds.

Over the following uneasy months in Kabul the strange charade continued. Mahabat Khan had seized Jahangir on impulse with no defined plans and seemingly no thoughts of seizing the throne for himself. He probably heartily regretted his hasty action but was unable to see a way out of it. Meanwhile, under Nur’s careful tutelage, Jahangir contributed to the pretence of calm and continuity, graciously acceding in public to Mahabat Khan’s requests. Privately he reassured Mahabat Khan that he intended him no ill and blamed his previous suspicions on Nur. According to Jahangir’s diarist, the emperor even warned the general that ‘the begam intends to attack you. Beware.’ Mahabat Khan was reassured by such confidences. He even seems to have convinced himself that Jahangir was happy to be released from the yoke of a wife who had assumed far too much power.

Nur was quietly and patiently awaiting the chance to wrest control back from Mahabat Khan. She had her own imperial cavalry, which Mahabat Khan had allowed her to keep, no doubt to preserve outward appearances and prevent a confrontation. As Jahangir’s diarist noted, Nur courted them, ensuring that she kept ‘her battle-tried warriors appeased and in a good frame of mind’, presumably discouraging desertions through bribes. Through her eunuchs she also secretly bought the services of large numbers of mercenary foot soldiers and cavalry. Her chance came when, in August 1626, to avoid the approaching chill of autumn, the royal entourage journeyed southeast again on a 500-mile progress down from Kabul through the stark Khyber Pass back towards the welcoming warmth of Lahore. By November they were nearing the Jhelum River, where Mahabat Khan had staged his opportunistic coup. On Nur’s advice, Jahangir told his general that he wished to review the empress’s cavalry and asked him to march ahead with his own forces ‘lest an argument ensue and battle break out’ between Nur’s Muslim soldiers and Mahabat Khan’s Hindu Rajputs.

As Nur had hoped, the increasingly nervous and uncertain Mahabat Khan recognized a chance to extricate himself from what had become an impasse. According to Jahangir’s diarist, without demur he ‘did as he was told’ and set out with his men. As his distance from the imperial forces grew, an orderly advance became an undignified scramble and then a heedless flight. As a precaution Mahabat Khan had taken hostages with him, including Asaf Khan and his son. Such was his fear of Nur’s power, however, that when she ordered Mahabat Khan to release them he did so as soon as he judged he had placed enough distance between himself and the vengeful empress. Nur had, in modern parlance, simply outpsyched him.

Over a thousand miles away to the south, Shah Jahan and Mumtaz, pregnant once more, had anxiously been following the strange events of that summer as news and rumour, difficult to distinguish between and alike many days old, filtered through to them. Their chief worry must have been the possible dangers for their young hostage sons, who reached their grandfather’s camp soon after Mahabat Khan’s coup. Yet at the same time Mahabat Khan’s seizure of Jahangir offered Shah Jahan fresh possibilities for advancing his own interests. On first learning of Mahabat Khan’s action, Shah Jahan gathered 1,000 horsemen and, in June 1626, marched out to Jahangir’s aid – or so he said. However, as he and Mumtaz made the long and arduous journey northwards, desertions reduced their forces and they found themselves ‘in great distress and poverty’, as Jahangir’s diarist noted. Shah Jahan’s attempt to besiege a port in Sind in northwestern India to give himself a base faltered after its governor, who was loyal to his half-brother Shahriyar, blocked his advance. Furthermore, the debilitating sickness that had ended his own revolt still troubled him. At one point he was so weak he could travel only in a litter. The result was that before Shah Jahan could reach the imperial camp, Mahabat Khan had fled and Nur and Jahangir were once more in control.

Alarmed by Shah Jahan’s advance from the south and suspecting that his motives were more than mere solicitude for his father, Nur ordered him back. According to one contemporary account, she wrote informing him that ‘his march had alarmed Mahabat Khan, whose forces had been driven away and dispersed, and that the prince had better return to the Deccan and await a change of fortune’. Shah Jahan contemplated fleeing to Persia, but, receiving little encouragement from Shah Abbas, retreated obediently southwards with Mumtaz. Despite this, Nur still doubted his intentions. She decided to neutralize two enemies by setting them against each other, ordering Mahabat Khan to block Shah Jahan’s path should he try to advance again. However, Mahabat Khan was astute enough to know that Nur would never forgive his seizure of the emperor and would ultimately seek his destruction. His interests, he decided, would be far better served by joining forces with his erstwhile pupil and one time opponent.

Another factor in Mahabat Khan’s thinking, no doubt, was that in October 1626 Shah Jahan’s thirty-eight-year-old half-brother Parvez had died. So lost to alcoholism that ‘little by little he developed an aversion to food’, as Jahangir’s diarist recorded sadly, he had been suffering fits, during which ‘the physicians had resorted to burning brands and placed five of them on his forehead and temples’. Despite, or perhaps because, of such ministrations, he had finally succumbed at Burhanpur – the fortress where Khusrau had been murdered. A few contemporaries speculated whether Shah Jahan might have had a hand in his brother’s death, but more probably the hereditary family weakness for alcohol was to blame.

Whatever the case, Parvez’s demise made it likely that, on Jahangir’s death, the contest for the imperial throne would be between Jahangir’s two surviving sons – Shah Jahan and his younger half-brother, Nur’s son-in-law, Shahriyar. It was also clear that that struggle was not far off. The wheezing, asthmatic Jahangir was growing ever weaker. A sojourn in ‘the peerless perennial garden of Kashmir’ failed to improve his health and Jahangir returned wearily towards the heat of the plains, having lost even his appetite for the opium on which he had fed for forty years. He seems to have sensed his impending end. His diarist wrote of the ‘aroma of hopelessness’ he exuded. The sight of one of his huntsmen plunging over a high cliff while pursuing an antelope seemed to Jahangir an inauspicious omen, ‘as though he had thus seen the angel of death’. Three days later, on 28 October 1627, as the first pale shafts of morning light penetrated his tent in the mountains above the plains, the fifty-eight-year-old ‘Seizer of the World’ drew his last, laboured breaths. He had not named a successor.

A dazed, grief-stricken Nur attempted to convene a council of nobles, but few came, a clear if brutal signal that her power had expired with her husband. Asaf Khan acted swiftly to outmanœuvre his sister. On the excuse that
‘the young princes were not safe with Nur Mahal’
, but in reality to gain control of them, he removed his grandsons Aurangzeb and Dara Shukoh. After some debate, he entrusted them to a nobleman married to another of his and Nur’s sisters, who ‘fluttered around them like a butterfly’ in her eagerness to please. He placed Nur under guard in her tent, ordering that no one should have access to her, and ignored her repeated summonses to go to her.