A Teardrop on the Cheek of Time: The Story of the Taj Mahal (24 page)

Eunuchs also rode or walked ahead, lashing out with their sticks at any man daring to get too close. The French doctor François Bernier, who later watched the extravagant cavalcade bearing one of Mumtaz’s daughters to Kashmir, wrote, ‘Woe to any unlucky cavalier, however exalted in rank, who, meeting the procession, is found too near. Nothing can exceed the insolence of the tribes of eunuchs and footmen which he has to encounter, and they eagerly avail themselves of any opportunity to beat a man in the most unmerciful manner.’ Nevertheless, the fairytale spectacle of the imperial harem, howdahs ‘blazing with gold and azure’, enchanted Bernier so that he ‘should have been apt to be carried away by such flights of imagination as inspire most of the Indian poets, when they represent the elephants as conveying so many goddesses concealed from the vulgar gaze’
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Sometimes, when the emperor wished to make a detour to visit a local fort or curiosity or perhaps a shrine, the harem took a shorter route, reaching the camp in advance of the emperor. Mumtaz was thus ready to welcome Shah Jahan with the customary greeting ‘
mubarak manzil
’, ‘happy be the journey’, as he entered the royal enclosure to the beating of kettledrums and the metallic fanfare of trumpets.

The setting for this ritual had changed little since the time of Timur. The imperial camp was laid out to a predetermined plan with well-defined streets like a town, which, in its huge scale, it resembled. The life of the camp reflected that of any large mass of people. A Moghul noble wrote,
‘Though there was much praying and fasting in the camp, gambling, sodomy, drinking and fornication were also prevalent.’
The ordinary soldiery and camp followers inhabited the perimeter, cooking their meals over fires of cow and camel dung. Within the encampment, every nobleman had his allotted place to pitch his tents that did not vary from one camp to the next, so that people could easily find their way. Nobles always took care when erecting their tents to keep them lower than the imperial ones, knowing that they would otherwise be pulled down and they themselves perhaps ruined.

Mumtaz and Shah Jahan occupied a large, fort-like enclosure in the very centre of the camp, separated by a wide space from the tents of their nobles and well protected by artillery and palisades. The outer walls consisted of panels of wood draped with scarlet cloth and fastened together with leather thongs, with a handsome gatehouse. A selection of the emperor’s swiftest horses were kept saddled and ready by the gatehouse in case of any emergency. Within the enclosure were all the facilities of the royal court – tented halls of public and private audience shimmering with fabrics shot through with gold and silver thread. In the centre of each hall was a gorgeously decorated stage where Shah Jahan held court beneath a canopy of velvet or flowered silk. There was even a portable wooden two-storey house with a
jharokha
balcony so that Shah Jahan could, as usual, display himself to his people to assure them he still lived. The well-screened, spacious and sumptuous harem quarters lay close by. Bathhouses and privies were accommodated in special tents – an emphasis on cleanliness that went back to Timur’s time. His nomadic warriors had been accustomed to rinse off the sweat, dust and blood of battle in mobile public bathhouses using water heated in boilers.
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Transporting the massive imperial tents with their protective awnings of waxed cloth was an immense exercise, especially since there were two sets of everything. Abul Fazl recorded that in Akbar’s time the task required 100 elephants, 500 camels and 400 carts. The duplicates meant that while one camp was being pitched, the other set of tents could be despatched ahead with the superintendent of the royal household, who would select a suitable site for the next night’s encampment and ensure everything was in place to receive the emperor and empress.

Lighting, as elaborate as in the royal palace, was designed to make the Moghul camp shine out gloriously – and conspicuously – from afar. Servants erected a giant pole over 120 feet high, which they anchored by sixteen ropes. On the very top was a giant
diya
, a bowl, filled with cotton seed and oil, which they lit at sunset, sending flames shooting into the night sky. It was called
Akash-Diya
, the ‘Light of the Sky’. Nobles, summoned to wait on the emperor, found their way with flambeaux. Bernier wrote that the camp
‘is a grand and imposing spectacle on a dark night to behold when standing at some distance, long rows of torches lighting these nobles through extended lanes of tents …’

Although the imperial court was marching to war, life for Shah Jahan and Mumtaz was as festive as at Agra. Singers, dancers and musicians entertained the imperial family, and a menagerie of exotic animals, from lions to rhinoceros, accompanied the camp so that fights could be staged. Shah Jahan also went hunting. There is no evidence to suggest that Mumtaz was, like her aunt Nur, a crack shot, and accompanied him, but Shah Jahan certainly relished the sport. He went hawking and hunted tigers and lions – a royal prerogative. He also stalked deer using trained leopards, carried hooded to the chase, jewelled collars around their furry necks. Dutchman Francisco Pelsaert, who witnessed the leopards at work, thought it ‘a remarkable form of sport’, writing: ‘These brutes are so accustomed to men that they are as tame as cats, whether they are reared from cubs or tamed when full grown. They are very carefully fed, and each has two men to look after him, as well as a cart, in which they sit, or are driven out, daily. When they come to a place where they sight buck, the leopard is released from the cart and he creeps on his four feet until he gets a view, taking cover behind trees, plants or thickets, until he sees that his first quick rush and spring will be successful, for that is his only chance. Most are so well trained that they never, or very seldom, miss.’

Shah Jahan firing a matchlock while out hunting
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By early 1630 Shah Jahan, Mumtaz and their retinue had passed through the ranges of the Vindhya mountains and were journeying through shady, wooded hills towards the city of Burhanpur on the Tapti River, 450 miles southwest of Agra. Shah Jahan and Mumtaz knew the Deccan well – they had spent a third of their seventeen years of married life here, some of it in Shah Jahan’s years of triumph as a victorious young prince, some of it in perilous circumstances. They also knew the palace fortress in Burhanpur – Mumtaz had given birth to two daughters here, and here one of her sons had died. Shah Jahan’s half-brother Khusrau had met his mysterious end in the fortress, while another half-brother, Parvez, had died of alcoholism. As Shah Jahan and Mumtaz entered Burhanpur in March 1630, it must have stirred memories, some comfortable and some less so, for them both.

The trouble which had forced them here from the opulence of Agra was the defection of Khan Jahan Lodi, a nobleman once a great favourite of Jahangir. Khan Jahan had guarded Agra against Shah Jahan during the latter’s rebellion against his father and Jahangir had subsequently appointed him Governor of the Deccan. This proud, independent-minded man was descended from the Afghan Lodi sultans who had ruled in Delhi until unseated by Babur. When Shah Jahan became emperor, Khan Jahan had conspicuously failed to come to Agra to make his obeisance, pleading ill health. Shah Jahan had subsequently ordered him to Agra and reluctantly he had obeyed. After his arrival at court, a still suspicious Shah Jahan asked him to disband his followers and confiscated some of his lands.

This was too much for Khan Jahan, who, on an October night in 1629, fled Agra at the head of 2,000 Afghans back towards the Deccan. Shah Jahan at once despatched imperial troops in pursuit. They quickly caught up with Khan Jahan and confronted his forces on the banks of the Chambal River, some forty miles from Agra. After a furious and bloody struggle during which two of Khan Jahan’s sons, two of his brothers and many of his followers were killed, he escaped across the swollen river and made his way to the kingdom of Ahmednagar. Its ruler, with whom Khan Jahan had already been colluding before his summons to Agra, welcomed him as an ally and gave him charge of his forces.

Shah Jahan’s plan, as he settled into Burhanpur, was not only to crush Ahmednagar but to pursue a full-blown subjugation of his other old foes in the Deccan – the kingdoms of Bijapur and Golconda. On this occasion, Shah Jahan did not intend to fight in the field himself but his presence as overall commander in the Deccan was vital since, as one of his historians wrote,
‘discord and dissension existed among the chiefs and leaders of the army to such an extent, that they constantly sought to undermine each other’s enterprise’
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While Shah Jahan consulted his commanders and advisers and considered his strategy, Mumtaz prepared in the royal apartments for the arrival of their thirteenth child. Barely a month after their arrival, she gave birth to a daughter. The court chronicles report simply that the child died shortly afterwards.

Ahmednagar finally surrendered at the end of 1630. Abandoned by his former allies, Khan Jahan fled towards the Punjab, but Moghul patrols intercepted and killed him. His severed head was delivered to Shah Jahan at Burhanpur and mounted on the city gates. However, the rest of the campaign did not proceed smoothly. The Deccani rulers retired from the field into their strongholds and the war became a succession of sieges. As a chronicler wrote,
‘The fortresses were strong, the garrisons determined …’
Matters were made worse by the most severe and protracted famine seen in the region for a century. It had started three years earlier and by 1630 extended from the Arabian Sea far inland. The fighting, of course, made the shortages worse. European merchants described
‘desperate multitudes, who setting their lives at nought, care not what they enterprise so they may but purchase means for feeding’. Streets and highways were ‘a woeful spectacle’ filled with ‘dying and dead in great numbers’
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Peter Mundy, who journeyed from the coast to Burhanpur at this time, witnessed people fighting one another for animal excrement from which they hungrily plucked pieces of undigested grain. He saw desperate parents selling their children or even giving them away
‘to any that would take them … so that they might preserve them alive, although they were sure never to see them again’
. The sweet stink of death hung in the air. On some nights Mundy could find nowhere to pitch his tent because of the piles of naked, skeletal bodies dragged out of the starving towns and villages, by those who still had strength, and abandoned to the jackals.

Shah Jahan understood the seriousness of the situation, which had even reached the streets of Burhanpur, though its citizens at least had the dwindling waters of the Tapti. His historian recorded: ‘During the past year no rain had fallen … and the drought had been especially severe … dog’s flesh was sold for goat’s flesh, and the pounded bones of the dead [people] were mixed with flour and sold [to make bread] … Destitution at length reached such a pitch that men began to devour each other, and the flesh of a son was preferred to his love.’ To aid his stricken subjects, Shah Jahan remitted taxes and ordered his officials to open feeding stations in Burhanpur and other cities, where bread and broth were doled out to the hungry. He also ordered 5,000 rupees to be distributed among the poor every Monday, ‘that day being distinguished above all others as the day of the Emperor’s accession to the throne’
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