A Teardrop on the Cheek of Time: The Story of the Taj Mahal (19 page)

However, Asaf Khan was in a delicate position. His daughter Mumtaz and Shah Jahan were far away. Although he had immediately and secretly despatched a trusted Hindu messenger bearing his signet ring to inform them of Jahangir’s death and urge them to hurry northwards, he knew the man would take up to twenty days to reach them. In the meantime, Asaf Khan needed to ensure that Shahriyar, then in Lahore, was not proclaimed emperor. Shahriyar had gone to the city in the hope that the climate of the Punjab would alleviate the symptoms of a disease – possibly leprosy – that had attacked him while in Kashmir and ‘robbed him of his honour’ – a contemporary euphemism for the fact that his beard, moustache, eyebrows and eyelashes and all the rest of his hair had dropped out. Such loss of bodily hair was considered shameful.

Within just hours of Jahangir’s death, Asaf Khan found a cunning solution. He convinced his fellow nobles that, with both Shah Jahan and Shahriyar absent from court, the only way to prevent a vacuum was to offer the throne to Dawar Bakhsh, one of Khusrau’s young sons, whom Nur had recently ordered to be kept in chains ‘as a precaution’. By this move, Asaf Khan ensured that when Shahriyar challenged for the throne – as he surely must – he would be forced into the mode of rebel and usurper. This would prevent him from mobilizing the imperial armies against Shah Jahan. As for Dawar Bakhsh, he was, as Jahangir’s diarist wrote after his master’s death, to be ‘a mere sacrificial lamb’. His slaughter would be deferred only until the arrival of Shah Jahan. A European observer predicted that
‘there is very little hope or chance’
for him.

Dawar Bakhsh was an intelligent youth who shared Jahangir’s obsession with nature’s eccentricities. Several years earlier he had presented his grandfather with, as Jahangir’s diarist describes, ‘a tiger, which had an extraordinary affection for a goat, which lived in the same cage with it. They used even to couple and consort together, as if they were animals of the same kind.’ Dawar Bakhsh was initially suspicious, especially given his father’s fate, that he was being induced to accept ‘a phantom rulership’. However, he was eventually won round by the silken-tongued Asaf Khan and the solemn oaths of his confederates. The boy allowed them to proclaim him emperor before setting out, a virtual prisoner, on horseback and surrounded by Asaf Khan and the leading nobles to confront Shahriyar at Lahore. Nur followed a day later, with the body of her dead husband. Asaf Khan had issued strict orders that she was to accompany the cortège every slow step of the journey to the corpse’s final resting place.

In Lahore, Shahriyar had indeed been quick to act, spurred by a terse message from Nur – the last she was able to send before being confined – and by the urgings of his wife, Nur’s daughter, Ladli. He too claimed the throne, using 7,000,000 rupees purloined from the imperial treasury in the city to buy support and raise an army. However, Asaf Khan’s army swiftly defeated his inexperienced forces when they clashed some eight miles from Lahore. A Turkish slave rushed from the battlefield to Shahriyar, hovering indecisively just outside the city, with news of the defeat. The prince took refuge within the Lahore fortress, which soon fell to the attacking forces. A eunuch dragged the hairless, trembling Shahriyar from the sanctuary of the harem. Asaf Khan had him thrown into prison and, two days later, blinded. Dawar Bakhsh, meanwhile, mounted the throne within the citadel, but would not occupy it for long.

The messenger sent by Asaf Khan reached Shah Jahan at Junnar in the northern Deccan on 18 November. Learning of his arrival, Shah Jahan came hurrying out of the harem, where he had been with Mumtaz. The messenger flung himself to the ground before Shah Jahan, kissed it and handed over Asaf Khan’s ring as proof of the story he proceeded to relate. Shah Jahan passed four days in mourning, as decency and decorum demanded, but there seems to have been no sign of the deep grief that had so afflicted him as a boy when Akbar died or when, eight years earlier, he had lost his beloved mother. Affection between father and son had withered long ago, the victim of ambition on one side and suspicion on the other.

Shah Jahan was soon making plans for the march northwards. On a day deemed auspicious by his astrologers, he and Mumtaz, who at this momentous time was again pregnant, set out to claim the throne, escorted by Mahabat Khan. As they journeyed on, Shah Jahan received a letter from Asaf Khan ‘filled with the good news of victory and triumph’ over Shahriyar and begging that ‘his glorious retinue would proceed on wings of haste to rescue the world from chaos’ – in other words, warning him to be quick.

The time approached when the young puppet emperor’s strings must be cut. Shah Jahan decided to leave as little as possible to chance. Nearing Agra, he despatched a hand-written message to Asaf Khan in Lahore ‘to the effect that it would be well if Dawar Bakhsh, the son, and [Shahriyar] the useless brother of Khusrau, and the [two] sons of Prince Daniyal [Jahangir’s long dead brother], were all sent out of the world’. His father-in-law obliged, ordering the murder of all four, and, for good measure, of Dawar Bakhsh’s younger brother, just two days after receiving Shah Jahan’s note. They were probably strangled.
*

This ruthless removal of one half-brother, two nephews and two cousins eliminated any close Timurid rivals for the imperial throne. A chronicler sympathetic to Shah Jahan excused his actions on the grounds that it was a question of kill or be killed:
‘Self-preservation, that first principle of the human mind, converted frequently the humane prince into a cruel tyrant, and thus necessity prompted men to actions which their souls perhaps abhorred.’
The dilemma was neatly encapsulated in a Moghul proverb –
Taktya Takhta?
, ‘throne or coffin?’ However, this violation of the Timurid code of protection for princes and the earlier murder of Khusrau were deeds that would rebound on Shah Jahan.

For the moment, though, Shah Jahan’s future and that of his large family seemed assured. Their journey turned into a triumphal progress as governors and local chieftains of the provinces through which they passed hurried to make obeisance and present gifts. English clerk Peter Mundy, who was in India at the time, French jeweller Tavernier, who first arrived in 1638, and Venetian traveller Niccolao Manucci, who reached there in 1656, all wrote highly coloured accounts of supposed dramas along the way, which hybridized into a number of far-fetched tales. According to one such, the King of Bijapur attempted to prevent Shah Jahan from leaving the Deccan to claim the throne but Shah Jahan surreptitiously swallowed goat’s blood, which he spewed up in front of the king in a colourful simulation of death. Mumtaz then asked leave
‘to carry her husband’s body to be buried in his own country’. It was granted her and ‘in a coffin covered with black’
the very much alive Shah Jahan was smuggled northwards,
‘with all the trappings of woe, and followed by all his people weeping and lamenting as they went’. As the supposed funeral cortège approached Agra, Asaf Khan met the party and ordered the coffin to be struck open, whereupon ‘the fictitious defunct’
, Shah Jahan,
‘raised himself and appeared before the eyes of all the army’
.

Whatever the case, on 24 January 1628, a date deemed favourable by his astrologers, Shah Jahan and his family passed into Agra in a magnificent procession of swaying elephants,
‘scattering mountains of coins left and right’
to the mob, whose cheers were half-drowned by the booming of the imperial kettledrums. As Asaf Khan had promised,
‘the high and low of this ageless city of Agra gave him a reception the like of which had not been extended to any ruler before’
. As the
khutba
had already been read in Shah Jahan’s name in Lahore, all that remained was for him to mount the throne in the halls of public and private audience within the fort. The chosen date was 14 February 1628, the seventy-second anniversary of Akbar’s succession to the throne and the 145th anniversary of Babur’s birth. Among the lofty titles to which Shah Jahan laid claim were ‘King of the World’, ‘Meteor of the Faith’ and ‘Second Lord of the Auspicious Conjunctions’ – a direct appropriation of the title once proudly used by Timur. Shah Jahan took equal pride that he was the tenth ruler in direct descent from the great Timur.

In a ceremony that literally glittered, jewels sent by Mumtaz and other women of the harem were poured over the new emperor’s head. Shah Jahan dispensed silken robes of honour, jewelled swords, flags, drums, and piles of silver, gold and gems to his nobles and received their gifts in return. He appointed his father-in-law Asaf Khan, who was bringing the young princes from Lahore and was therefore not present, his chief minister – the role Asaf Khan’s father Itimad-ud-daula had fulfilled for Jahangir – and made Mahabat Khan governor of Ajmer and commander-in-chief of the imperial armies. Then, retiring into the silk-hung harem, Shah Jahan rewarded the thirty-five-yearold Mumtaz, ‘that Queen of the Age’ who had stood by him through so much. He gave her 200,000 gold pieces, 600,000 rupees and an annual allowance of 1,000,000 rupees.

A few days later, in early March, Mumtaz was reunited with the young sons from whom she had been parted for over two years when her father, Asaf Khan, and her mother returned Dara Shukoh and Aurangzeb safely to her. Shah Jahan’s official chronicler described in restrained language what must have been a highly emotional occasion:
‘Her Majesty the Queen greatly rejoiced to hear the news of the arrival of the august princes and her respected parents. With royal permission, she rode out to greet her noble parents in the company of Her Highness princess Jahanara Begam and other royal children; and from the other side, the Princes rode onward to meet the litter of Her Majesty the Queen. They met at a place … where tents had been pitched for the occasion and all were overjoyed to see one another again after the long separation.’

The next day, escorted by the elite of the nobility, the relieved, happy empress and her children processed into the imperial capital, where, on the
jharokha
balcony of the Red Fort, the imperial princes, but not their relieved mother, showed themselves to the cheering crowds. An exquisite painting in the only illustrated manuscript of the
Padshahnama
, an official chronicle of Shah Jahan’s reign now in the Queen’s collection in the Royal Library, Windsor Castle, shows the bejewelled emperor in purple robes greeting his sons, who are equally lavishly attired in coats of orange, gold and jade green, with ropes of pearls around their necks. The chronicle records that Shah Jahan
‘much rejoiced at the sight of his children, who had all been born to him by his favourite wife’
.

These should have been days of harmony and happiness. Mumtaz could introduce the returned princes to the new brother they had never seen – the fifteen-month-old Sultan Lutf Allah, born during her uncertain exile with Shah Jahan. Of the eleven offspring born since her marriage sixteen years earlier, eight were alive and apparently thriving at this time. Yet within just three months of Shah Jahan’s accession to the throne this would change. In late April 1628, shortly before Mumtaz was due to give birth, their seven-year-old daughter Sorayya Bano died of smallpox. Then, on 9 May 1628, a court chronicler reported that
‘an auspicious star appeared in the sky’ – Mumtaz had borne Shah Jahan another son, his eighth, Sultan Daulat Afza.

Yet if joy at this event helped mitigate previous sorrows, this was short-lived. Five days later, ‘while everyone was enjoying the gifts of this world’ and Shah Jahan was distributing largesse to everyone from high-ranking nobles to ‘the turbaned religious scholars, deserving persons and musicians and dancers’ and lavishing gifts on his beloved Mumtaz, little Sultan Lutf Allah, ‘owing to the perverseness of obstinate heaven’, departed suddenly ‘to the asylum of the world beyond’
.

Though people were accustomed to relatively high rates of child mortality at this time, the death of an infant in the imperial family was always deeply mourned and the death of two children within such a short time at the outset of the reign must have seemed a bad omen. European observers were also uneasy about what the new reign would bring, but on different grounds. One wrote,
‘As to the nature of the present ruler, it is impossible as yet to express an opinion, though it is easy to foretell that a reign inaugurated by so many crimes will prove to be ill-starred, and that a throne buttressed by the shedding of so much innocent blood will prove to be insecure.’