A Teardrop on the Cheek of Time: The Story of the Taj Mahal (22 page)

No dust from her behaviour ever settled
On the mirror of the Emperor’s mind
.

She was always seeking to please the King;
She knew full well the King of Kings’ temperament
.

Despite her power as the consort of the King
She always displayed conformity and obedience to him
.

The third, most secret layer of government was the meetings of the privy council in the Royal Tower, to which, after completing business in the hall of private audience and sending any documents into the harem for Mumtaz to see, Shah Jahan summoned only
‘the fortunate princes and a few trusted confidants’
, including, of course, his father-in-law, Asaf Khan.

Shah Jahan could, however, discuss all the day’s official business with Mumtaz when, at around noon, he repaired to the security of the harem to eat with the empress and other ladies of the household, including his daughters Jahanara and eleven-year-old Raushanara. After washing, they ate, sitting cross-legged on the sumptuously carpeted floor, which was protected at meal-times by pieces of hide covered with white cloths.

The food was an elaborate and exquisite fusion. The Moghuls had brought with them to India a cuisine already containing influences from Persia, the Middle East and central Asia. From Persia and Afghanistan came the use of dried fruits such as apricots and sultanas as well as almonds and other nuts. From the Middle East and the nomadic tradition they brought with them the spit-roasting of lamb, either whole or as kebabs (the latter is an Urdu word). From central Asia derived a greater use of root vegetables, such as turnips and carrots, all mixed together with peppers, mutton and buttered rice in
pulaos
, designed to give energy to resist the winter’s cold. The Moghuls relished the sweet and sour contrasts now associated with the Far East. They frequently added sugar and lemon syrups to their dishes and salt often counterpointed sweet tastes.

The Moghuls quickly assimilated the many flavours and influences of India, particularly those of the Hindu vegetarian tradition. These included the use of yoghurts and of many different pulses. A favourite dish of Shah Jahan’s was rice and lentils mixed together with butter and spices – a sophisticated version of an Indian peasant dish known as
khichari
.
*
Other borrowings from Indian cuisine included the mouth-puckering, mouth-watering taste of tamarind, so unlike any other flavour, and the use of turmeric, both as colouring and flavouring. New conquests brought new additions to the Moghul menu. The absorption of Kashmir intensified the use of fruits and of green vegetables such as spinach and kohlrabi, as well as adding more waterfowl, such as duck, to the diet.

By Shah Jahan’s and Mumtaz’s time, ingredients from the New World, such as the potato – now an Indian staple – were beginning to be brought into India by traders from the Americas.
*
Cinnamon, cloves, pepper, cardamom, coriander and anis seeds and fresh ginger were the main spices, but chilli – another New World import – would soon join them. Recipes were complex and subtle. An Englishman even marvelled at the skill with which rice was boiled
‘so artfully that every grain lies singly without being added together with spices intermixt and a boiled fowl in the middle’
. Sophisticated recipes survive showing how chickens were boned and stuffed whole with other meats, eggs, coriander and ginger.
Dumpukht
– meat or chicken smothered in almonds and then braised in butter and yoghurt – was another favourite. The Indian
dum
means ‘breath’ and the Moghul cooks used to allow dishes to rest or ‘take breath’ just before serving, as called for by modern chefs. Some recipes required dishes to be smoked by a hot charcoal being placed in the middle of a casserole full of food, which was then sealed for about a quarter of an hour to allow the smoky flavour to permeate.

The royal kitchens were an independent department. Here cooks kept food in such a state of preparedness that one hundred dishes could be ready within an hour of the emperor giving the command. For feasts, gold and silver leaf was used to garnish the food, as well as fruit and herbs. The food was served in dishes made of gold and silver and sometimes of a kind of jade said to be an antidote to poison. Buwa, the mother of the slain sultan of Delhi, had tried to kill Babur through introducing poison into the new Indian dishes he was tasting and poison remained a constant concern. Awnings screened the cooks when they were at work to inhibit prying eyes. Cooks had to tuck up their sleeves and hems before removing the food from pans or ovens to make sure they could introduce no extraneous matter. The cooks who had produced the individual dishes tasted the emperor’s meals, followed by their supervisors and finally by the head of the kitchens.
*

Before the food was taken to the harem, each dish was individually wrapped in cloths and the head of the kitchen wrote a description of the contents, which he affixed to the cloth together with his seal so that no dish could be swapped. Then, the cooks and other servants carried the bowls to the harem. Macebearers and guards went before and behind them to keep malcontents away. The kitchen head accompanied the procession and remained at the gate under the eyes of the guards until the meal was completed. Once in the harem, the food was again tasted, this time by the eunuchs and women servants. Next they arranged the dishes before Shah Jahan and Mumtaz Mahal.

As was the custom in the Islamic world and in India, the food was eaten with the fingers of the right hand (never the left). Servants stood by to fetch more food or to brush off flies, impossible to avoid at some times of the year, with horse-hair whisks. Once dinner was over, a fine flour made of pulses was used to clear grease from the fingers, which were then washed, and the mouth rinsed.

In addition to the apples and pears of central Asia and the pomegranates, oranges, figs and dates of Persia and the Middle East, the Moghuls came to prize the fruits of India. Even Babur said that
‘when the mango is good it is really good’, although he did complain that good ones were scarce. His successors enjoyed the banana, the custard apple and, as the records show, even the jackfruit, which Babur had dismissed as ‘unbelievably ugly and bad tasting – it looks exactly like sheep’s intestines turned inside out like stuffed tripe [and] has a cloyingly sweet taste’
. Jahangir wrote how his father, Akbar, planted another New World import, the pineapple,
‘found in the Franks’ ports. It is extremely good smelling and tasting. Several thousand are produced every year … in Agra.’

The kitchen department took much trouble in procuring the best ingredients available. A list of comparative prices produced by Abul Fazl, about thirty years before Shah Jahan came to the throne, shows that a duck, which often had to be brought from Kashmir, could cost up to half the price of a whole sheep, while a first-quality melon transported down the Khyber Pass from Kabul cost much more than either.

There was a separate department for drinking water and ice. Like mineral-water connoisseurs today, each of the emperors had a different taste in water. Akbar had preferred Ganges water and runners carried supplies to him daily wherever he was, in jars sealed to prevent tampering. Jahangir was less fussy but sensibly preferred flowing or spring water to that stored in a tank for any length of time. Shah Jahan drank only what he called
‘the molten snow’
of the Jumna. In the summer all three liked their water and sherbets to be cooled. Boats, carts and runners brought ice from the northwestern mountains and saltpetre was also sometimes used as a cooling agent. The imperial family drank from cups of green or white jade or pale, rose-hued quartz.

After the midday repast Shah Jahan rested, but, his historian rather self-righteously claimed, did not indulge in sex at this stage of the working day.
‘Even in the sacred seraglio, His Majesty – unlike other negligent Kings – refrains from indulging in carnal lusts and sensual pleasures, and instead devotes himself to granting requests of the poor.’ Mumtaz relied on her gifted Persian friend Satti al-Nisa Khanan to bring to her attention cases of impoverished girls in need of dowries, ornaments and clothes, or of destitute widows and orphans in want of pensions or grants of land, so that she could place them before her husband, who would in turn order their needs to be met. Satti had, according to court historians, become Mumtaz’s confidante ‘owing to her confidence, eloquent tongue, excellent service and noble etiquette’. Well-versed in the Koran, she instructed Mumtaz’s daughter Jahanara in the writing of Persian verses and prose, a talent Mumtaz also shared.

The emperor devoted the rest of the afternoon and early evening to outstanding business, appearing again in the audience chambers and at prayers in the fort mosque. At about eight o’clock, he returned to the harem for the evening meal and the night’s entertainment – ‘beautiful songs or stirring melodies’
, sometimes a game of chess with Mumtaz, played with pieces of ivory, sandalwood, silver or gold, or a bout of love-making. By this hour of the evening, the imperial household was lit by the soft glow of hundreds of thousands of lamps, torches and candles. A court officer maintained the household’s source of fire, a sacred flame flickering in an
agingir
or fire-pot. It was renewed once a year, at noon, on the day when the sun moved into the 19th degree of Aries in a ritual introduced by Akbar, because of his adoration of fire and light. Attendants exposed a brilliant white stone to the hot rays. Then they placed a piece of fine cotton near the hot stone until it burst into flame.

Every day at sunset, imperial servants lit twelve camphor-scented candles and carried them, in candlesticks of silver and gold, before the emperor. A court singer raised his voice in praise of God and prayed for the continuance of the auspicious reign. The whole palace was then lit up. Some candlesticks were huge. Akbar had devised a candelabrum in which five candlesticks, each in the shape of an animal, stood on a base over three feet tall. White wax candles, nine feet high and more, burned in it and attendants scaled ladders to snuff them out.

Palace lighting varied with the phases of the moon. On the first three nights of every lunar month, when the period of moonlight was briefest, eight wicks were placed in giant brass, bronze or copper
diyas
, shallow saucers filled with mustard oil. Servants positioned the saucers in niches in the walls along corridors and passages. From the fourth to the tenth day of the lunar month, they progressively reduced the number of wicks by one a night, so that by the tenth night, when the moonbeams shone brightest, only one wick burned. So it continued until the sixteenth night, when they gradually increased the number again.

The soft lighting enhanced the sensuous feel of the harem, where the weary new emperor rested after his long day. Even after sixteen years of marriage and twelve children, Mumtaz clearly still held a unique sexual attraction for Shah Jahan. She was by now in her late thirties, an age at which most wives and concubines were considered too old for sex, but as with her aunt Nur her beauty must have endured. She could also rely on a formidable battery of cosmetics to beautify and purify her body for the imperial bed, including concoctions of flowers, seeds and oils to give added lustre to black hair, black powdered antimony sulphide – kohl – to rim her eyes and pastes of burned conchshells and banana juice to remove unwanted hair.
*

Mumtaz also had available the most seductive of clothes – thin silks in rainbow hues from pale apricot to lilac to ruby red, or diaphanous, gossamer-thin muslins that, because of their fine texture, were given names like ‘running water’, ‘woven air’ and ‘evening dew’. They were made up into tight-fitting
pyjama
or
salwar
– drawers which fastened with bunches of pearls – tight
cholis
or bodices, half concealing the breasts, and a V-necked
pesvaj
, a long transparent coat open to the ankles from its fastening at the breast. Though the clothes of Moghul women were still heavily Turkish in style, they had adopted Hindu ways of dressing their hair. Instead of simply wearing it loose and parted, they had begun twisting it
‘into a flat pad at the back from which a few curls rolled on’
. Mumtaz draped her head with golden veils or wore turbans of bright silk with waving ostrich plumes. As the favourite wife of an emperor who was passionate about gems, she would also have possessed the most fabulous and elaborate of jewels. Some slight hint of what she must have worn comes from a European doctor allowed to treat a woman of the imperial harem. He complained that he was unable to locate his patient’s pulse because of the
‘very rich bracelets or bands of pearls which usually go round nine or twelve times’
.

The sexual gratification of the emperor was paramount and there were techniques Mumtaz could use to make her vagina, the
madan-mandir
, or temple of love, slackened through constant pregnancies, contract to enhance his pleasure. She could delicately apply such fragrant pastes as camphor mixed with honey, lotus flowers crushed in milk, or pounded pomegranate skins to the vagina walls. However, the need for women to experience sexual pleasure was also understood and a range of aphrodisiac concoctions existed to help women achieve orgasm. Some, like powdered ginger and black pepper, mixed with the honey of a large bee, were applied inside the vagina. Other aphrodisiac concoctions were smeared on the lover’s penis two hours before intercourse; by stimulating and enlarging the organ, these were said to heighten the woman’s sensation. There were also methods of delaying male ejaculation, some involving swallowing opium, and aphrodisiacs claimed to be so effective that they gave a man the sexual energy of a stallion. A set of stimulants collectively named ‘the Making of the Horse’ was particularly popular.

Whatever techniques he and Mumtaz may have used, after making love Shah Jahan liked to be lulled to sleep by dulcet-toned women who, concealed behind a screen, read aloud from his favourite works, which included Babur’s memoirs or accounts of Timur’s conquests.