A Teardrop on the Cheek of Time: The Story of the Taj Mahal (41 page)

Jahanara’s most passionate protest was against her brother’s reversal in 1679 of Akbar’s abolition of the
jizya
, the poll tax on ‘infidels’, 115 years previously. She threw herself at her brother’s feet, arguing it would divide his kingdom by alienating the majority Hindu population. According to Niccolao Manucci, Aurangzeb justified himself by quoting from the Koran and then
‘bade her goodbye and turned his back upon her, a movement that cut the princess to the very quick’
.

That same year, Aurangzeb departed from Delhi on a military campaign against some of the Moghuls’ greatest Hindu allies – the Rajputs. Although he would live another twenty-seven years he would never return to his capital. Jahanara died eighteen months later, in September 1681, aged sixty-seven. Aurangzeb awarded her the posthumous title ‘Sahibat-uz-zamani’, ‘Mistress of the Age’. Mumtaz’s favourite daughter was buried in a simple tomb close to the grave of a Sufi saint in Delhi. Grass was sown over her marble sarcophagus just as she had requested in a poem she had composed in Persian:

Let green grass only conceal my grave;
Grass is the best covering of the grave of the meek

Aurangzeb’s invasion of Rajasthan had been prompted by his wish to impose more direct rule on the Rajputs. He used as a pretext the power vacuum created in Marwar (Jodhpur) by the death of the raja, leaving as his heir an infant son born posthumously. He quickly occupied Marwar and much increased the inhabitants’ opposition by destroying several Hindu temples. The neighbouring state of Mewar (Udaipur) had only acknowledged Moghul overlordship reluctantly and nominally following defeat by the young Shah Jahan. Now the conquest of Marwar led to cross-border friction with Mewar and fighting broke out once more between the Moghuls and this, the most independent of Rajput states. Although peace of a sort was soon restored with Mewar, the turmoil and sporadic guerrilla fighting in Marwar did not subside finally until nearly thirty years later, when, after the death of Aurangzeb, the Moghuls finally recognized the Raja of Marwar’s posthumous son as ruler.

The conflicts in Mewar and Marwar had one inevitable consequence – the breaking of the Hindu Rajputs’ alliance with the Moghuls, which had been a mainstay of Akbar’s and his successors’ rule, supplying them with some of their best troops and generals, as well as demonstrating their religious tolerance. Additionally, the war in Rajasthan led to the revolt of Aurangzeb’s fourth son, the twenty-three-year-old Akbar. According to Manucci, he was
‘the boldest and most turbulent’
of Aurangzeb’s sons. He was also his father’s favourite. Nevertheless, Aurangzeb had removed Akbar from command of the army fighting in Mewar because of his lack of success. While Akbar was suffering his father’s displeasure, the Rajputs contacted him and suggested that it might be in their joint interests for Akbar to replace his father and to institute a new, more tolerant reign much more akin to that of his great-great-grand-father and namesake, the Emperor Akbar. According to the chief unofficial chronicler of Aurangzeb’s reign,
‘the inexperienced prince was led astray from the path of rectitude, and through his youth and covetousness he fell into the snares of the Rajputs’
.

At first Akbar’s rebellion seemed destined to succeed. He and the Rajputs had a greatly superior force, but Akbar dallied, overconfident that the prize was already his. Aurangzeb employed his familiar stratagem of letting fall into Rajput hands, as if by chance, a letter to his son. In it Aurangzeb falsely congratulated Akbar on ingratiating himself with the Rajputs
‘as he had been instructed’ and added ‘that he should crown his service by bringing them into a position where they would be under the fire’
of the Moghul armies. The letter, as it was designed to, broke apart Akbar’s forces. Akbar fled to the Deccan.

Aurangzeb followed with the twin aims of finally quelling that troublesome region and of capturing his errant son. Pausing only to give orders for the permanent imprisonment of his eldest daughter, the poetess Zeb-un-Nissa, for secretly writing letters of support to Akbar, Aurangzeb marched his armies down to the south. There he was to eat up the remaining twenty-six years of his life and reign in continual warfare.

Akbar had sought refuge with the Marathas in their Deccan mountain hideouts. The martial Marathas had long been a problem for Aurangzeb. Under their previous chieftain Shivaji, they had fought extensive guerrilla wars against the Moghuls. In 1663 Shivaji had tricked his way into Poona, where the brother of Mumtaz Mahal, Shaista Khan, commanded the Moghul garrison. Led by Shivaji himself, the Marathas slipped stealthily and by night into Shaista Khan’s compound, broke through a partially bricked-up window into the harem where Shaista Khan was sleeping and attacked him as he struggled from his bed. Before they fled, the Marathas succeeded in cutting off Shaista Khan’s thumb and killing one of his sons. Eventually forced to capitulate, Shivaji did so only on condition that after paying tribute to the Moghuls he should retain some of his lands. When taken to Aurangzeb’s court at Agra in 1666, Shivaji did not receive the honours he felt he had been promised. He protested volubly before the emperor and was put under house arrest. He soon escaped, carried from the residence hidden in a food basket, before returning to the Deccan mountains disguised as an ash-daubed, semi-naked Hindu fakir. In the years that followed, the Marathas’ power had increased and Shivaji’s further exploits had made him into one of the first heroes of India’s long independence struggle. Shivaji had died a year before Akbar reached the Maratha territories. His son Shambuji, who now ruled in Shivaji’s stead, was less martial, preferring, in the words of one European trader, to
‘divert himself far too much with women and drink’
. Consequently he gave Akbar little material support other than protection from the probing raids that Aurangzeb sent into the Deccan hills.

Now free of the parental restraint of his own father, Shah Jahan, which had often stayed his hand in the Deccan, Aurangzeb decided that the best way to deal with the Marathas was to conquer first the neighbouring and larger Muslim states of Bijapur and Golconda, the long-time enemies of the Moghuls. Once deprived of their support, the Hindu Marathas and their guest Akbar would be easier prey. Aurangzeb attacked Bijapur first, in June 1685. It took him fifteen months to conquer the state and open the way to invade Golconda, which by then had a licentious reputation. The capital, Hyderabad, claimed to house 20,000 prostitutes, many of whom besported themselves before the ruler in the public square every Friday. At the first sign of Moghul attack, the ruler fled from his pleasure dome of Hyderabad to the neighbouring mountain fortress of Golconda without, according to a chronicler,
‘consulting with any of his nobles or even caring anything for his property or the honour of his own women and family’
. Once inside he recovered his courage and resisted Aurangzeb’s forces bravely. Moghul bribery, not military might, forced open the fortress’s gates after a siege of eight months, during which plague had ravaged the Moghul camp. Golconda’s dissipated ruler followed Bijapur’s into an austere prison as their states were subsumed into the Moghul Empire.

By this time Akbar had fled to Persia with the aid, according to Manucci, of some French merchants, but Aurangzeb remained determined to defeat his son’s hosts, the Marathas. The Moghuls captured the indolent, luxury-loving Shambuji and his chief minister in a lightning raid on the minister’s house. Both were hiding in a hole in the ground cut beneath the minister’s floor. The Moghuls paraded the pair, with bell-bedecked fools’ caps on their heads, on camels round the roads of the Deccan and into the imperial camp. When brought before Aurangzeb, Shambuji refused to reveal where his treasure was buried, cursed Aurangzeb and blasphemed his religion. Aurangzeb rewarded him with a slow death. First, the Moghuls cut out his blaspheming tongue. Then they blinded him. Further protracted torture followed over two weeks, at the end of which his limbs were hacked off and fed to the camp dogs and his head stuffed with straw and paraded around the Deccan to show the fate of insolent rebels.

Unsurprisingly, Shambuji’s cruel death won loyalty not for Aurangzeb but for the Maratha cause. Aurangzeb stayed in the Deccan, intent on its complete pacification, but guerrilla raids mounted, against which Aurangzeb’s 170,000 soldiers and a third of a million camp followers were cumbersomely ineffective. Although with his recent conquests Aurangzeb had extended the boundaries of the Moghul Empire to their largest extent, pushing its borders far down into southern India, the wars in the Deccan became an endless sink for the riches of the Moghuls, seemingly inexhaustible when Shah Jahan had contemplated his vast and expensive building projects. Aurangzeb’s treatment of his Hindu subjects in the Deccan, in Rajasthan and elsewhere had changed the character of Moghul rule. It was no longer the inclusive, tolerant empire bound together by mutual trust and interdependence established by Akbar. Instead the Moghuls were once again, as in the time of Babur, an occupying power.

Aurangzeb only turned north again sixteen years later, in October 1705. In declining health and at the age of eighty-seven, he reached Ahmednagar, east of Mumbai (Bombay), where he died. The date on the Western calendar was 21 February 1707. As Aurangzeb had wished, it was a Friday, the Muslim holy day. He was buried within the confines of a Muslim saint’s tomb at Khuldabad, about twenty miles from Ahmednagar. In accordance with his wishes, the tomb of the last of the great Moghuls was topped by an uninscribed sandstone slab and left open to the skies – an even simpler tomb than that of his great-great-great-grandfather Babur in Kabul and in complete contrast to his parents’ magnificent mausoleum. His resentment towards his father overflows into his last testament:
‘Never trust your sons, nor treat them during your life time in an intimate manner; because if emperor Shah Jahan had not [favoured] Dara Shukoh, his affairs would not have come to such a sorry pass. Ever keep in view the saying “The word of a king is barren”.’

Chaos soon followed Aurangzeb’s death. Akbar had previously died in exile in 1704, but Aurangzeb’s three surviving sons – two of whom Aurangzeb had imprisoned at various times – fought for the succession. Two of the sons and three grandsons died in the conflict. The Moghul Empire quickly disintegrated into a mass of feuding smaller states with a succession of dissipated emperors exercising ever more nominal suzerainty. A raid on Delhi by the Persians under Nadir Shah in 1739 led to the city’s capture, the payment by the inhabitants of a large indemnity and the carrying off by the Persians of the Peacock Throne and much other treasure. In the nearly 350 years since Timur’s raid on Delhi and his round-up of artisans and in the over 200 years since Babur had found craftsmen one of the few things he prized in Hindustan, the reputation of Indian artisans had only increased. Unsurprisingly, therefore, among the Persian booty in 1739 were 100 masons and 200 carpenters to beautify their captor’s country.

As the power of the Moghul emperors declined, so did their presence in Agra, now relegated to the status of a provincial city. The Taj Mahal remained a symbol at this time not so much of love but of former Moghul glories. Its riches and those of the other Moghul monuments surrounding Agra provided an all too tempting target for plunderers from near and far, even if their depredations were not on the scale of Nadir Shah’s in Delhi. The Jats, a rising local military power, carried away much of the wealth of the Moghuls, including, it is alleged, the Taj Mahal’s ornate and bejewelled silver gates. They also took marble and sandstone for their own palace complexes. Later in the eighteenth century when the Marathas, the now powerful nation once led by Shivaji, occupied the city, they and their French advisers continued to plunder Moghul buildings, removing semiprecious inlay and more stone for building projects.

Most of the valuable fittings, as well as carpets, jewelled canopies and wall hangings, had disappeared from the Taj Mahal by the time the army of the British East India Company under General Lake occupied Agra in 1803. Although they took the first steps in surveying the Taj Mahal and began the first restoration work as early as 1810, the British did not treat the monument with the respect it deserved. They let out the mosque and the guesthouse flanking the mausoleum as honeymoon cottages. They also held balls at which military bands performed from the plinth of the mausoleum. As Lord Curzon, the British viceroy at the beginning of the twentieth century, admitted,
‘At an earlier date, when picnic parties were held in the garden of the Taj, it was not an uncommon thing for the revellers to arm themselves with hammer and chisel with which they whiled away the afternoon by chipping out fragments of agate and carnelian from the cenotaphs of the emperor and his lamented queen.’

The British also used the gardens as a place to indulge in secluded drinking sessions. An English guidebook of 1872 sniffed haughtily,
‘It would certainly be more in character if no festivities ever disturbed the repose of a place set aside for sacred memories, but as long as the natives hold constant fairs in the enclosure and throw orange peels and other debris about the whole place, it is perhaps somewhat hypocritical to object to a few Englishmen refreshing themselves in a remote corner.’