Shadow Princess

by Indu Sundaresan

  He grasped at her wrist to pull away her hands and say, “I smell apples on my skin; it means death, my dear.”

  So he still remembered that prophecy from fifty years ago, when the fakir had warned him that one of his sons would cause him grief and that, when the time came for him to go, his hands would be scented with the aroma of apples. She leaned over and put her nose in the cup of his hand, and there she smelled it too, the scent of the fruit.

  She sobbed then, bending her head to let the tears pour over the wrinkled skin of his knuckles, beset by an abrupt fear of the emptiness his dying would leave. They had been so isolated for the past nine years, left here with a sprinkling of retainers—eunuchs and slaves. It was said that there was still a heavy guard outside the fort’s walls, but she had never seen the soldiers herself. Aurangzeb had sealed all the entrances to the fort except for one, and left only a man-size opening in that one. All of their food—grains, vegetables, meat, water—was brought through that doorway and inspected carefully before it was allowed in. And so they had lived, Bapa and she, alone and for the most part even happy. He had talked for long hours about his childhood and his youth, about growing up in the care of his grandfather Emperor Akbar and his favorite wife, Ruqayya Sultan Begam, who had adopted him—no, forcibly removed him from his mother’s quarters into hers. Jahanara had not met her great-grandfather, and even her grandfather Emperor Jahangir was but a faint memory to her. But her Bapa’s stories had told her so much about them—more than the official histories could ever record, more than posterity would ever know. An old man’s ramblings, Shah Jahan had said, now when he had nothing else to do.

  “There is your Mama,” Shah Jahan said softly, and they both turned to gaze out at the Luminous Tomb. Oil diyas burned around the perimeter of the dome, and they could see it sparkle along the curve of the river, the light from the lamps reaching up to cast the freestanding minarets as marble swords spearing the skies. Mists had begun to roll outward from the river’s cool winter waters, and the tomb seemed to float above, untethered from the ground.

  “Bapa,” she said. “Now you must sleep.”

  “You have been good to me, Jahan.” He tried to speak again, but the words choked his throat and he cried soundlessly. Jahanara put her arms around him and laid her head lightly on his thin chest. They stayed like that for a long time, until she heard her father’s breathing calm into a rhythm as he slept. She closed her eyes, willing him to live, knowing that he probably would not.

  When she woke suddenly, cold and shivering, she could no longer hear the sound of his heart under her ear. It was the thirty-first of January, 1666—nine years after his son Aurangzeb had incarcerated him in Agra.

  rauza-i-munavvara

  The Luminous Tomb

  Upon my grave when I shall die,

  No lamps shall burn nor jasmine lie,

  No candle, with unsteady flame,

  Serve as a reminder of my fame,

  No bulbul chanting overhead,

  Shall tell the world that I am dead.

  —SYLVIA CROWE AND SHEILA HAYWOOD, The Gardens of Mughal India

  Agra

  Monday, February 1, 1666

  26 Rajab A.H. 1076

  There were spies in the fort in Emperor Aurangzeb’s service, and even as Princess Jahanara’s wails brought the servants to her father’s bedside, the news flew to the Emperor in Delhi. He was wakened in the middle of the night, a word whispered in his ear. Aurangzeb knelt by his bed in prayer with an immense sense of relief. He was, finally, the sole and undisputed king of the Empire.

  As the mists spun around Agra an hour before dawn, there was the muffled sound of hammers on brick as the barricaded doorway at the foot of the battlements was smashed open. Jahanara watched dry-eyed as her father’s body was cleaned and washed by two of his favorite ministers—Sadullah Khan and Ali Mardan Khan—and wrapped in three shrouds of white cloth. The old amirs then lifted their Emperor’s body upon their shoulders and bore it down the stairs, moving as carefully as their aged limbs would allow them, to carry him across the maidan and onto the simple barge waiting on the river’s bank. They hesitated when the veiled princess followed them, and one of the men began to protest, but her stride was firm, her attitude inflexible—Jahanara meant to bury her father herself; she had earned the right to do so.

  Another doorway had been opened in the Luminous Tomb, leading from the riverfront terrace to the subterranean rooms below, and here the two men deposited their burden upon the cool marble floor. In the few hours since his death, a grave had already been cleaved into the ground beside the sarcophagus of Mumtaz Mahal.

  At the end of the second pahr of the day, the noon hour, the men lowered Emperor Shah Jahan’s body into the ground and recited the Fatiha. Jahanara stood at one corner, still veiled, but she stepped forward now to lift a handful of earth and throw it upon her father’s body.

  “You are with Mama now, Bapa,” she whispered, then moved back to her place as the gravediggers piled mud over the grave and laid a white marble slab on top of it.

  In time, another sarcophagus would be raised over the Emperor’s remains, and Emperor Aurangzeb would order a similar one in the upper chamber of the tomb, by the side of his mother’s. Unlike his mother’s cenotaph, this one would not be inscribed and inlaid with verses from the Quran—Amanat Khan had died a few years earlier, and no other calligrapher could be trusted with the task—but instead would be decorated with a forest of flowers in blues, greens, and reds. Only the most careful of observers would notice the difference—what they would see instead was that the Emperor’s cenotaph was bigger than his wife’s, that it sat off center within the marble railing surrounding the cenotaphs, as though he had never meant to rest by his wife’s side for all eternity.

  When Jahanara stepped out onto the riverfront terrace, she took a deep breath of the cool, moist air. It had begun to rain, just as it had on the day that her mother had been buried. This was a winter rain, chilly, blowing about with gusts of wind. She knew that Aurangzeb, who had not attended the burial, was waiting for her in her apartments as he had promised that he would, to renew his exhortations that she come to his zenana, return to court life, come under his protection, as a sister should. She would talk to him now, she thought; before it would have been a betrayal of her father . . . now it did not matter.

  The imperial barge was already docked at the pier below the Taj Mahal, the boatmen clad in white, its awnings of a rich and russet red. Jahanara went down the stairs of the Tahkhana, which consisted of the rooms fronting the Yamuna carved into the sandstone base of the tomb, and paused when she saw the man standing at the foot of the pier. Najabat Khan put out a hand, and she went forward to meet him.

  Emperor Shah Jahan, who had ruled over the richest and most glorious Empire in the world, had died a pauper’s death. There had been no state funeral, no alms given to the poor, no recitals of the Quran over his grave in the ponderous voices of the imams—just a hurried flight from the fort to the tomb, a lone daughter to watch him go to his final rest, a couple of old ministers who had defied their Emperor to perform this final duty for the man they had loved.

  But she did not know that, despite all of her Bapa’s achievements in stone and marble—the apartments in Agra fort, the glorious city of Shahjahanabad, the gardens of Kashmir—this tomb would eventually cast all of their lives in its elegant shadow. She did not know, as she boarded the barge and sat next to Najabat, her heart exploding with pain and joy, that, though her father had died a broken, unhappy man, his name would come to typify the grandeur and majesty of the Mughal Empire in Hindustan. That posterity would remember him, not his ancestors or his son or the useless sons of his son, with awe—and if he had known this, at least he might have died in some peace.

  Because he would always be revered and respected as the man who had built that most Luminous Tomb.

  Afterword

  Why Jahanara? Readers of The Twentieth Wife and The Feast of Roses will notice that I’ve
skipped a generation in Mughal history for this one, Shadow Princess. Mumtaz Mahal (Arjumand Banu Begam) appears in the aforementioned novels—as a child, as a young woman whose hopes of marriage have been blighted by circumstances beyond her control, and as a new wife, incredibly fecund, absurdly in love with her husband. When she dies, four years into his reign as Emperor Shah Jahan, he builds the Taj Mahal in her memory.

  By then Jahanara is seventeen years old, forced to carry the weight of an imperial zenana, in the nebulous position of being a beloved daughter and yet the most important woman in the harem and at court for the rest of her father’s life.

  Mughal women, especially of the imperial family, lived behind a veil both literally and figuratively. They were rarely seen at public occasions, and then only in the fluttering of their fingers or a bold and curious eye through a latticework screen, or a hukm or nishan (imperial command) sent to a noble with a specific order.

  When I began reading and researching facts about the life of Mehrunnisa, Empress Nur Jahan, for my first two novels, I found only brief mentions of her in seventeenth-century Mughal sources. Even Emperor Jahangir remarks on her fewer than a handful of times in his memoirs; a couple of references are telling, true, but for the history of her life, before she married Jahangir and after, I had to rely upon the small allusions in the accounts of the merchants from the British and Dutch East India companies and other travelers’ tales. In some, Mehrunnisa is the ideal wife and companion; in others (court documents from Shah Jahan’s reign), she is the epitome of evil—cunning, sly, dominating, and overly ambitious. Yet, despite this paucity of material, there emerged a more or less complete picture of the woman.

  It was during these readings that I stumbled upon Niccolao Manucci’s portraits of the two princesses—Jahanara and Roshanara—and knew, even that early on, that they would find a place in a future novel. They were both said to have been powerful women in their own right: Jahanara almost from the moment of her mother’s death, Roshanara from behind the walls of Aurangzeb’s zenana. There were other stories—of men smuggled into the harem for their pleasure, of an injunction against their ever being married, of rumors about the love Shah Jahan had for Jahanara, and, finally, the fact that each of these women championed a different brother as the next Emperor. And only one of them was, naturally, successful in the end. Yet, it was the other, Jahanara, who became the Padshah Begam of Aurangzeb’s harem once her father died and she could leave the confines of the fort at Agra.

  The facts of Jahanara’s life—when and where she was born; the income her father gave her; her hold over him and the love he had for her (which led to speculations about their true relationship, based upon, as far as I can see, some loose bazaar gossip, which probably had its origins in the harem itself)—are readily documented in official court papers and the travelogues of foreign visitors to India. I chose not to believe in the incest for two primary reasons: one, the rumors began as early as six months after Mumtaz Mahal’s death, even before her body was disinterred from Burhanpur and brought to Agra; and two, Emperor Shah Jahan did not live out the rest of his life as a saint—he had a vigorous sex life, with reports of more than one dalliance with the wives of his nobles.

  There are two broadly defined sources for Mughal history during Shah Jahan’s rule. The first set consists of the official biographies the Emperor commissioned; at least eight men lent their names to various prose and verse histories. The second set is easier to read, not as bombastic in language, gossipy in style, and of somewhat suspect authenticity—these are the tales of travelers, foreigners who found themselves in India by chance or intent. They either settled in and stayed or spent a few years or months in desultory wanderings, noting aspects of Mughal culture, cuisine, manners, and customs, picking up bazaar chatter and recording it in their journals.

  In most accounts, Jahanara comes across as a woman of stupendous power, imagination, strength, and piety; there is very little of the human left in her. Only this interesting tidbit—a stray mention by Manucci of a possible alliance with a noble at court, Najabat Khan. This alliance leads to nothing, for she is known not to have married. Yet, from that one aside, I built up the entire love story in Shadow Princess. Najabat Khan did have a son, named Shah Alam, in Aurangzeb’s court, and his background and history are as recounted. There is no mention, though, in any official documentation, of Shah Alam’s mother.

  All the royal historians cite the Emperor’s immense grief at Mumtaz Mahal’s death and the fact that he considered giving up his Empire—relegated to a minor footnote, since Shah Jahan continued to rule for over a quarter of a century. Lahori is most eloquent in his Padshah Nama: “It was repeatedly uttered by his divine revelation-interpreting tongue that, if the heavy burden of the divine deputyship . . . had not been imposed on this seeker of the will of God . . . he would have certainly abandoned the high-ranked vast empire of Hindustan and divided among the princes of noble birth this extensive kingdom.” To me, these casual lines were important. Shah Jahan would not have considered Murad (seven years old) or Aurangzeb (thirteen) or perhaps even Shah Shuja (fifteen) as fit for the throne—he was undoubtedly thinking of his eldest son, Dara Shikoh, who, at sixteen years of age, was the crown prince. All of a sudden, this historical postscript was significant, because I believe that the lines of loyalty began to be drawn from this moment, a few days after Mumtaz Mahal died. The Mughal princes all had rights to the throne by law. It was enough to have been born male—whether to a wife or to a concubine—and to have a steady hand on the sword, a heart unmoved by excessive sympathy, and a voice fluent enough in diplomacy to court the backing of the powerful amirs. In the end, it was Dara who lacked judgment, Aurangzeb who had it, despite, or perhaps because of, his stubborn will and his inflexibility in matters relating to religion. Everything that happened over the next twenty-seven years of their father’s reign came back to this time, when Jahanara supported Dara, and Roshanara supported Aurangzeb. This prince, on more shaky ground than the favored Dara, worked assiduously to woo his other brothers and the nobles at court.

  A note on the Islamic dates used at the beginnings of the chapters. The dates are applied based on the Hijri calendar of twelve lunar months (instead of the Gregorian solar months) and begin on the Gregorian calendar in A.D. 622, the year the Prophet Muhammad emigrated from Mecca to Medina (known as the Hijra). The Hijri years are abbreviated A.H., from the Latin anno Hegirae—the year of the Hijra. The official biographers of Emperor Shah Jahan’s court use the Hijri calendar to date events and occasions; in some instances I’ve used their actual dates, in others I converted Gregorian dates into Hijri using an online source: http://www.islamicfinder.org/Hcal/index.php.

  Today, a visitor to the Taj Mahal enters through the western gateway of the Jilaukhana—the forecourt to the tomb. The Taj Ganj, south of the forecourt, is no longer a part of the complex; it has been built over extensively over the years with bazaars and houses, some of which still bear parts of the original stonework. But the Great Gate remains. As does the view Jahanara must have seen when she stepped onto the platform of the gate and looked down the length of the garden at the riverfront terrace, with its mausoleum in the center, the mosque on the left, the Miham Khana on the right.

  Shadow Princess ends nine years into Aurangzeb’s reign and fifteen years before Jahanara dies. She settles, finally, into her once-loathed brother’s harem and again supersedes her sister Roshanara by acquiring the title Padshah Begam—the chief lady of the zenana. Surely the rivalry that drove their lives would have reared its head once more, even though they were older and perhaps wiser. Official sources, and those unofficial, don’t mention why Jahanara loved Dara so passionately or why she supported him, or why indeed she disliked Aurangzeb so much.

  But even though the sources don’t give reasons for the adoration Aurangzeb, in his turn, had for the sister who refused to espouse his ambitions, in giving her a home and the premier position in his harem, he amply demonstrated that devotion.

&nb
sp; Indu Sundaresan

  March 2009

  Acknowledgments

  Thanks go: first, to the early readers of Shadow Princess, my friends Janet Lee Carey and Phillip Winberry, for being willing to plow through an unrevised manuscript and comment upon it.

  To my agent Sandy Dijkstra and everyone at the Sandra Dijkstra Literary Agency, for everything—how hard they work, how carefully they read my work, how well they champion it, and how nice they all are; this last is a true and unexpected blessing.

  To other nice people: my publisher, Judith Curr, and my editor, Malaika Adero, for their support, encouragement, and counsel on my work.

  To the very first reader of any manuscript-in-progress, my husband, Uday. And to Uday and Sitara for making me happy enough to write.

  And finally, to the two library systems near home—the King County Library System, and the University of Washington’s Suzzallo and Allen libraries—for their superb (and expanding) collection of work on India, which has provided me with invaluable research material for Shadow Princess.

  Glossary

  Amir

  nobleman

  Bagh

  garden

  Baithak

  seating area

  Baradari

  pavilion

  Beta

  literally “son”; here a term of endearment

  Biryani

  rice with meat, vegetables, and spices

  Chahar Taslim

  form of salutation in which the hand is raised to the head four times, as opposed to the traditional three of the taslim

  Chajja

  eave

  Chappals

  sandals

  Charbagh

  garden divided into four quadrants by two intersecting walkways; Persian in origin