Shadow Princess

by Indu Sundaresan

  They both looked at her with affection. If Nadira had been a male child, that affection would have been somewhat wanting, for in being a boy she would have been a threat to the throne and would have, perhaps, died in the battle for succession in 1627. But a girl child, left to be brought up by servants at the southern edge of the Empire, was not to be thought of as a hazard. Her father had been a wastrel during his life, succumbing to the lure of drink, as so many Mughal princes had. At one time, Emperor Jahangir had hauled up this sluggish son and sent him, under Mahabat Khan’s care, careening around the Empire in pursuit of Shah Jahan and Mumtaz Mahal. But Shah Jahan could hardly hold a grudge against his brother’s daughter for her father’s faults—and if Parviz had lived until 1627, he might very well have died by Shah Jahan’s sword, but he had drunk himself to death, conveniently, and left behind this languid girl.

  Roshanara continued to speak, ignoring Nadira seated at their feet, her face resting against her cousin’s thigh. “Bapa has increased Jahan’s income to one million rupees.”

  “Mama’s income,” Aurangzeb said reflectively. “What will she do with so much money?”

  “And he has given her most of Mama’s estates. Five million rupees are to go to her—all of Mama’s parganas, her lands, her jewels—and the other half of five million is to be divided among the rest of us, a million each.”

  Aurangzeb grinned. “If Bapa could make Jahanara Emperor, he would. Dara would be nothing compared to her.”

  “This is not funny,” Roshan said sharply.

  “But so much money.” Nadira spoke for the first time, her little voice in a half sigh. “You are all so rich. My father was never anything compared to yours.”

  “And now Dara will be Emperor,” Roshanara said.

  “He will?” Nadira sat up and looked at the two of them. Then she collapsed back into her pose at Roshan’s side. “How nice for him.”

  “I want to be Emperor,” Aurangzeb muttered, and when Nadira opened her mouth, he said, “Nice for me too, Nadira, but only one of us can be Emperor. If your father had had much more of a spine and less of a liking for wine, he could have been king himself.”

  They continued talking thus for the next half hour, until Jahanara came back to her apartments. When she returned, Aurangzeb began to bring up the topic of his father’s conversation and found himself hesitating more than once. Closer in age than any of them, Jahan and Dara had a special friendship that he had not been able to break into. Jahanara was always kind to him, but it was not pity he wanted from her; he wanted her to respect him as she did Dara, he wanted her love and her affection, and he wanted all of that to be firm and unwavering.

  So he did not talk to Jahan in front of Roshan and Nadira, waiting for a time when they would be alone, when the only voice she heard would be his. He was well aware that he was still considered a child, although he had moved out of the zenana apartments into the mardana quarters—the male half of the household. He had a better seat on a horse than Dara, he knew almost all of the Quran by heart, and he cultivated the nobles at court with an assiduity Dara should have employed but did not. He was cut from the cloth of kings, Aurangzeb thought.

  “You must go now,” Jahanara said, sinking slowly onto a divan in one corner. “Draw the curtains.” This last was to the slave, who moved noiselessly around the room in response to her command.

  “Are you tired, Jahan?” Roshanara asked, her voice tinged with more malice than sympathy.

  “Yes. Go.”

  “I want to see Bapa.”

  Princess Jahanara raised her head from the velvet bolster and gazed steadily at the three of them. Roshanara, watchful, chewing her lower lip. Aurangzeb, all aglow with excitement, betrayed by the restless movement of his hands. Nadira, sweet and . . . well, stupid Nadira, looking away into the light beyond the thin muslin drapes.

  “Bapa does not want to see anyone yet, Roshan.”

  “He sees you,” Roshanara said bitterly.

  “Because she comforts him, Roshan. Don’t be stubborn about this.” Aurangzeb put his arms around his sister’s and his cousin’s shoulders and shepherded them out. “Let’s go now. Rest, Jahan.” When Roshanara resisted his touch, he whispered in her ear, “Later, Roshan. This is not the time to fight. Later.”

  And so they left Jahanara on the divan, alone in her room, wretchedly unhappy. She was exhausted and bewildered by the duties rapidly forced upon her. The harem scribes who came to her apartments every night to read from their journals—intimate and intricate details of all that had happened within the zenana’s walls. The begging for daily orders from the Mir Bakawal, the Master of the Imperial Kitchens—what delicacies should be prepared for the Emperor’s table, your Highness? The excessive obsequiousness from the slaves, eunuchs, and servants. The constant struggle to keep Bapa’s two wives appeased and Satti Khanum in her place.

  She closed her eyes and tried to calm the riot of thoughts that thundered in her brain. There had not been a moment to think of Mama in these past few days, and she was crushed by the change in Bapa. He refused to eat; she had managed to coax a few mouthfuls of chicken biryani into his mouth, feeding him herself, and a couple of sips of wine. But he had had no interest in more. Of anything, it would seem.

  A benevolent sleep came to claim her then, and as she slept, she cried softly, tears escaping down her face to dry in rivers of salt.

  Outside her rooms, Aurangzeb, Roshanara, and Nadira parted and went on to their own quarters. Prince Aurangzeb skipped as he ran. Jahan must have noticed this little service he had done for her, and soon he would speak with her in private about what he had overheard. No one else knew of this, he was sure; Mahabat Khan would not speak until it was made a fact.

  But Roshanara and he had talked enough in front of Nadira, after a while not really noticing that she was even there, so light was her presence. And that princess let her slave girls run ahead of her, waited until they had disappeared, and then sent a message to the mardana through a eunuch she found passing by. The next day, Nadira took the boat to Zainabad Bagh, to pay her respects to her departed aunt, she said, and when she was alone at the baradari, another boat docked on the other side, and she turned eagerly to meet the man who had come in response to her summons.

  rauza-i-munavvara

  The Luminous Tomb

  Across the river Jumna . . . is the tomb of I’timad-ud-Daulah. . . . This exquisite mausoleum, the first example of inlaid marble work in a style directly evolved from the Persian tile-mosaics, was raised by the Empress Nur-Jahan to the memory of her father, Mirza Ghias Beg.

  —C. M. VILLIERS STUART, Gardens of the Great Mughals

  Agra

  Tuesday, June 23, 1631

  24 Zi’l-Qa’da A.H. 1040

  Once upon a time, not so long ago—fifty-four years to be exact—a young Persian nobleman packed his belongings in the middle of the night and fled his homeland, heading east in the year 1577. The family took with them only as much as they could easily transport, having left in shame and in stealth. Ghias Beg had three children, two boys and a girl, and his wife carried a fourth in her rounded belly. When they stopped at a nomadic encampment in Qandahar, on the outer verge of the mighty Mughal Empire, the wife gave birth to a baby girl in the midst of a winter storm. This child they named Mehrunnisa—the Sun of Women. A desolate Ghias sat outside the tent in the battering baying of the wind and pondered his fate—a new baby to feed, a family to keep safe, nothing but three gold mohurs in his cummerbund. The bejeweled court of Emperor Akbar beckoned from the capital at Agra, and if fortune was kind to Ghias, he could, perhaps, join the ranks of the lower nobility, earn a living, and die an inconspicuous death.

  He did not know then that this last was not to be. For that child named Mehrunnisa, born in the tattered black tent in the desert near Qandahar, would become, thirty-four years later, Empress Nur Jahan of the Mughal Empire when she married Akbar’s son Jahangir and came into his harem as his twentieth wife. Ten years after the marriage, when Gh
ias Beg died with the title Itimadaddaula, or Pillar of the Government, Nur Jahan would raise a wondrous white marble tomb over her father’s remains on the eastern bank of the Yamuna River. She would herself never see it completed, for by the time the last stone was laid, Mehrunnisa had been sent into exile by the current Emperor.

  As powerful as Ghias’s daughter would become—in fact, the most powerful woman in the Mughal dynasty—it would be his granddaughter’s name that would adorn the thoughts of posterity. And that granddaughter—Mumtaz Mahal—who was Nur Jahan’s niece, had just died herself. The plot of land where her glowing tomb would come to be built was on the western bank of the Yamuna River—southwest of her grandfather’s spectacular tomb.

  The penniless and not-always-honest Persian nobleman who had had to flee his homeland would find a permanent home in Hindustan. The women of his family would light up the harems of the Mughal kings. His own tomb, exquisitely wrought with his daughter’s vast wealth, in marble inlaid with semiprecious stones, would be a veritable jewel. His granddaughter’s tomb would eventually be built along the same lines—in white marble, with brilliant red and purple inlays of gems, a crimson sandstone platform, a massive gateway of red sandstone speckled with white marble.

  None of these details, in their specifics or even in their aggregate, had taken shape in Emperor Shah Jahan’s mind as he mourned the death of the wife he had loved above everything else in the world . . . perhaps even more than the Empire he had fought so hard to rule. But now he was Emperor; the treasury vaults under the fort at Agra shimmered with jewels and stones of astounding value; his lands stretched hugely across the map of Hindustan; every plate he ate from, every goblet he sipped his wine from was studded with diamonds and rubies—this immense wealth, in a sense, was what he had fought for. With this wealth came his power.

  As the skies settled into a deep cobalt over the fort at Burhanpur on the night Emperor Shah Jahan had decided to give up his throne, he knew that his wife’s final resting place would not be humble. She had been precious to him when alive, the mother of fourteen of his children. She would rest for all eternity at Agra, he thought, not here at Burhanpur. And where in Agra? There were the vast grounds that Raja Jai Singh had inherited from his grandfather, which Shah Jahan had let him take upon Man Singh’s death, unquestioned. And now . . . he wanted that land.

  In the undulating light of the diyas, that very night, Emperor Shah Jahan wrote out a farman—a royal edict—to Raja Jai Singh, ostensibly requesting the land and his mansion at Agra, in reality ordering him to hand them over. In return, because he was going to build something so sacred upon that land, the tomb that would house Mumtaz’s remains, he gave Jai Singh four other mansions in Agra as a gift. He signed the farman, affixed the royal seal at the head of the orders, and sent the paper to his daughter Jahanara to read it over.

  Then he set the goose-feather quill down with a shaking hand and covered his eyes.

  He had no idea yet what to do with the land or how to construct the tomb upon it. Only a few months later would he begin to think of Itimadaddaula’s tomb of white marble on the eastern bank of the Yamuna, to think in terms of something similar for his wife, pure and chaste in marble so untarnished that the color would bleed white in the harshness of the sun and emit coolness on the night of a full moon. Nowhere as tiny as Itimadaddaula’s tomb, but mammoth in its lines, yet graceful and elegant, as only his vision could make it. But for now, he knew that, no matter what the tomb looked like, he would call it the rauza-i-munavvara—the Luminous Tomb.

  Four

  In our quarter of the globe, the succession to the crown is settled in favour of the eldest by wise and fixed laws; but in Hindoustan the right of governing is usually disputed by all the sons of the deceased monarch, each of whom is reduced to the cruel alternative of sacrificing his brothers, that he himself might reign.

  —ARCHIBALD CONSTABLE (ed.) AND IRVING BROCK (trans.), Travels in the Mogul Empire by François Bernier A.D. 1656–1668

  Burhanpur

  Wednesday, June 24, 1631

  25 Zi’l-Qa’da A.H. 1040

  When Emperor Shah Jahan woke that morning, he felt the chill of the metal disk under his cheek where he had laid it the night before, and when he rose to look at his grief-ravaged face in the mirror, he saw the imprint of the Persian script upon the disk on his skin. He stared at his image for a long time, his fingers brushing over the writing on his face, then glanced at the royal seal in his hand. Impressed on the heavy gold were the names of his ancestors—Timur the Lame, Babur, Humayun, Akbar, Jahangir, and in the very center his own, Shah Jahan, the King of the World.

  Eunuchs and slaves moved around in his apartments soundlessly as he went to the balcony attached to his rooms and stood in the morning sunlight. From here he could see the dusty plains around Burhanpur stretching out for miles, a few splashes of green where trees grew with dogged determination, low hills on the horizon. He owned all of this land, as far as he could see, and so much more of India—Kabul and Lahore in the northwest, Kashmir in the north, Bengal in the east, and here in the south pushing against the edge of the Deccan kingdoms. The Emperor laid the seal on its side upon the balustrade of the balcony and watched the chunk of gold glow, faint smears of ink darkening the grooves and furrows of the writing upon it. It had been hard won, this Empire of his, with a bloody history he had engraved upon his heart, along with which came the knowledge that nothing worthwhile was achieved easily.

  Some hundred years before, in April of 1526, an upstart Timurid prince had brought his twenty-five-thousand-strong army in battle to the plains of Panipat near Delhi. His name was Babur. In that battle, Babur, with his pathetically small army, met the one-hundred-thousand-strong forces of Sultan Ibrahim Lodi, who was the ruler of the Delhi Sultanate—and routed them by firing with muskets from behind a barricade of carts on the battlefield. With that stunning victory over the Lodi king, Babur became the first Emperor of Mughal India. With the conquest came the vast wealth of Hindustan—gold coins, jewels of magnificent luster and value, trim and well-fed horses to populate an immense cavalry, war elephants, and an astounding and new collection of subjects, who looked strange and spoke in stranger tongues—all prostrated at the feet of the new Emperor.

  But Emperor Babur hated Hindustan—he loathed the heat, found the topography too flat, too uninteresting, and yearned all the while for his gardens in Kabul until he died four years later.

  Babur’s eldest son, Humayun, became Emperor after him and found that his father had bequeathed upon him an unsteady Empire and also three half brothers, who thought themselves as much sovereign as the eldest son. Ten years later, beset by family troubles, he was driven out of India by Sher Shah Sur, who set up court in Delhi instead. It would take Humayun fourteen more years to set foot in Hindustan again with the help of the Shah of Persia, and when he did, in 1554, it was only to rule for two short years before he died. His son Akbar was only thirteen years old when Humayun died and already on campaign far from his father’s side.

  Emperor Akbar ruled for forty-nine years, expanding the boundaries of the Empire his grandfather had laid the foundations for well beyond Emperor Babur’s imagining. He conquered kingdoms and married daughters, nieces, and sisters of the vassal kings to demand thus their everlasting fealty to his Mughal crown. He built monuments, tombs, and forts, palaces and entire cities so lavish that they would survive for hundreds of years. He was a great king, a good king, a just king, known for his liberality, his generosity, even his patronage of arts and culture.

  When Emperor Akbar died, in 1605, only his oldest son, Jahangir, was alive, and he ascended the throne when he was thirty-eight years old after a long and bitter struggle with his father (and indeed with one of his own sons) to feel the heft of the Mughal crown on his head. When Jahangir became Emperor, his father bestowed upon him—the first of the Mughal Emperors to be given this bounty—a more or less peaceful Empire, a firm throne, and an unshakable legacy free from any threat from the ou
tside. Most of Jahangir’s troubles came from the inside.

  When he was forty-three, Emperor Jahangir married for the twentieth time and brought into his harem a Persian woman, Mehrunnisa, whom he made influential within his harem and without, at court. Mehrunnisa would, eventually, become the bane of one of Emperor Jahangir’s sons—Shah Jahan. When Jahangir died, Mehrunnisa attempted to put on the throne another son, a weakling prince named Shahryar, nicknamed most unflatteringly nashudani, good-for-nothing. In the end, it was Shah Jahan who ascended the throne at Agra as the fifth Emperor of the Mughal dynasty, and he sent to their deaths his brother Shahryar and, for good measure, a couple of his cousins, thereby ensuring even in 1627 that, if anyone would lay claim to the throne of the mighty Mughal Empire, it would be only someone who was directly descended from him and his wife Mumtaz Mahal.

  And now, in June of 1631, a week after his wife’s death, Emperor Shah Jahan leaned his arms on the railing of the balcony and closed his eyes wearily against the glare of the royal seal when the sun lit upon its golden face. He was contemplating erasing his name from the center of the seal, divesting himself of the imperial turban, having the khutba—the official proclamation of sovereignty—read out in the name of one of his sons instead. The question was . . . which one?

  • • •

  When the heir apparent to the Mughal throne, Prince Muhammad Dara Shikoh, was born, in March of 1615, his father and mother were still firmly in the good graces of their Emperor, Jahangir. Dara’s grandfather was overjoyed to hear news of his birth, for he was the first son of a then-favorite son, and Jahangir gave the infant boy his name, which was to mean “the glory of Darius.” Five years after Dara’s birth, his family fell into disgrace. He remembered some of that mad flight around the Empire with his parents and his brothers and sisters—his grandfather’s imperial troops filling in their footsteps in the thickly packed mud of the countryside almost as soon as they had made them. Or so it seemed to Dara. They roamed the Empire for five years, sleeping in one palace one night, another the next, and a strange succession of princes and nobles came to lay their arms down before his father, who was then only a prince, a disgraced and defamed prince whom Emperor Jahangir and his twentieth wife, Mehrunnisa, were determined to crush. Even in circumstances such as these, the then five-, six-, seven-, and nine-year-old Dara watched fealty being sworn to his handsome father, leanly muscled and dark hued from days spent in the saddle, and he learned what it was to have royal blood imbuing his veins.