City of Djinns

by William Dalrymple

  The first to make a move was Shah Shuja, the Emperor’s second son and viceroy of Bengal. Collecting a large army, he marched it across the width of northern India, supported on his flank by a flotilla of ships advancing slowly down the Ganges. In a battle before the walls of Agra, Shah Shuja was defeated by the Imperial army commanded by Dara’s twenty-five-year-old son, Sulaiman Shikoh.

  Shah Jehan had now recovered from his illness and was able to move to Agra and join in the victory celebrations. These festivities were, however, soon cut short when news arrived that the Emperor’s third and fourth sons, Aurangzeb and Murad Baksh, had joined forces and were heading north. Their army was about half the size of Dara‘s, although highly trained and confident. But Aurangzeb was rarely prepared to rely on military prowess alone. He opened up a correspondence with the more pliable officers among Dara’s army and with promises of rewards secretly won over a sizeable proportion of his opponent’s force.

  Despite the April heat, the rebel army made fast progress through Central India and by the end of the month had reached a position near Ujjain. Crossing the last barrier, a narrow but fast-flowing river, the rebel army drew up on the plain of Samugarh a few miles from Agra. It was 29 May 1657. Facing them were the battalions of Dara Shukoh, among them Dara’s junior artilleryman Niccolao Manucci:When placed in the field our army looked like a lovely city adorned with beautiful tents flying innumerable flags of all colours ... Prince Dara amidst his squadron appeared like a crystal tower, resplendent as a sun shining over the land. All around him rode many squadrons of Rajput cavalry whose armour glittered from afar. In front went many ferocious war elephants clad in shining steel with tusks encrusted with gold and silver.

  The vast army numbered around 100,000 cavalry and 25,000 musketeers as well as divisions of war elephants and camel-artillery. Nevertheless, for all the glitter and gold, Manucci was not over-confident : ‘The greater number of soldiers that Dara had enlisted were not very warlike; they were butchers, barbers, blacksmiths, carpenters, tailors and such like. It is true that on their horses and with their arms they looked well at a review; but they knew nothing of war.’

  The day of the battle dawned a hot May morning. On the insistence of Khalil Ullah Khan, one of Aurangzeb’s agents in the Imperial army, Dara made a decision to leave his strong defensive position and open the attack. Soon after nine o‘clock his army lumbered forward. Aurangzeb’s musketeers held their fire until the last minute, then discharged their entire artillery. The Rajputs who had been in the lead took the full force of the barrage; the new conscripts behind them turned and fled.

  But Dara did not waver. He pressed on, encouraging his army from the top of his great caparisoned war elephant. Around him the Rajputs regrouped. The superior numbers of the Imperial army stood them in good stead: within a few minutes, Dara’s forces had broken through the rebels’ artillery and put to flight the infantry. It was then that Aurangzeb’s cunning saved the day for the rebels. His agents within the Imperial army managed to assassinate three of Dara’s generals as they sat exposed on their elephants. One, Ram Singh Rathor, was controlling the left wing. When his Rajputs saw that their leader had fallen, they began to give way.

  Seeing his opportunity, Khalil Ullah Khan rode up to Dara and advised him to dismount from his war elephant and ride over to take charge of the wavering left wing. In the panic of the moment, the prince agreed. With Dara no longer visible on his elephant a rumour spread that he had been killed. Aurangzeb seized the moment and pressed forward. By noon, Dara’s poorly disciplined troops had given way ‘like dark clouds blown by a high wind’. The battle was lost.

  Dara fled back to Agra and set off on the road to Delhi without daring to face his father. On hearing the news of the battle, Shah Jehan prepared to ambush Aurangzeb as he entered the Agra Fort — but his plan was betrayed by Aurangzeb’s sister and ally, Roshanara Begum. The rebels besieged the fort, sent in troops to rescue Roshanara, then left the old monarch locked into the harem, a prisoner in his own palace.

  Later, while the rebel army celebrated their victory, Aurangzeb invited Murad Baksh to his tent and there got him drunk. When he had fallen asleep, Aurangzeb quietly chained up his brother in silver fetters and sent him off to Delhi in a covered elephant howdah. On his arrival, Murad was thrown into a dungeon in Sel imgarh, opposite the Red Fort. There he was force-fed poppy-water, an extract of opium guaranteed to leave the drinker crippled and quite insane within the space of a few months.

  In a brief campaign, Aurangzeb had seized the empire, imprisoned his father, and had begun hunting down and murdering his three brothers. Now, although Shah Jehan still lived, Aurangzeb decided to have himself crowned. For this ceremony he chose the beautiful pleasure garden of Shalimar, about five miles north of Old Delhi.

  Although few Delhi-wallahs know of its existence, the garden of Shalimar still survives today. I went there one spring evening with my diary under my arm, looking for a peaceful place to write.

  Bernier describes Shalimar as ‘handsome and noble ... although not to be compared to Fontainebleau, Saint Germain or Versailles.’ He is right: by both Mughal and French standards it is a large but hardly dramatic garden. There is a single Shahjehani-style pavilion, a few dry water channels and fine surrounding wall. But though simple, Shalimar is still very atmospheric: it is overgrown and forgotten, heavily haunted by djinns. It is a good place to sit and watch the sun go down.

  I came to the garden by way of the village which has grown up on its edge. The villagers were sitting on their charpoys, sucking lengths of sugarcane. One lady crouched under the leathery flanks of a water buffalo, gently pulling at the beast’s udders, shooting warm jets of frothy milk into a battered tin pail. Nearby, a cart horse had just been released from its harness and was busy munching at its fodder; the up-ended cart stood to one side. I wound my way through this village scene, then quite suddenly I was no longer in an Indian village, but instead in a Mughal garden. The dusty cart-track had become a lawn; the village houses had given way to straight, symmetrical lines of bottle-palms; in the borders the lilies and irises were in full bloom - wonderful swathes of azure and magenta leading on into the char-bagh.

  I realized then quite what an intrusion any Mughal garden is into the Indian scene. Hindus revere nature but never feel any need to marshal or mould it into a design of their own: a banyan tree will almost be encouraged to spread its drooping creepers into the middle of any village market, or to block any backwoods track. It is revered for itself; however it develops, that end is regarded as a sort of perfection. As in nature, so in architecture: Hindu palaces seem to grow organically of their own will: a hall here, a shrine there, a sudden inexplicable curve in the curtain wall somewhere else.

  The Muslim tradition is quite different. Inheriting the Greek love of order and logic, Islamic gardens - like their buildings - are regimented into lines of perfect symmetry; balance and design is all; nothing is left to impulse or chance. With these qualities, the Mughal gardens dotted around the subcontinent are as alien to the Indian environment as the Brighton Pavilion is to the English south coast, or the Chinese Pagoda to Kew. Outside the garden, all is delightful chaos; inside, reflecting the central concept of Islam, spontaneity is crushed by submission to a higher order.

  As if they had subconsciously realized this, a little party of Muslims had taken up their station on a carpet by the edge of the garden. Here an elderly mullah was nodding his turban as he instructed a party of young novices on the Koran and the Hadiths, the sayings of the Prophet. Books were spread out on the ground. The murmur of chanting voices carried above the far-distant thunder of the Grand Trunk Road, the old Mughal highway linking the farms of the Punjab with the bazaars of Delhi. In the undergrowth around them, village women were heading back home, carrying on their heads great bundles of firewood for their cooking-hearths. There was that all-pervasive evening scent of cut grass and jasmine.

  I came across the garden’s central pavilion quite by chance, stumbling
on it as I followed a dried water-course. It is now so overgrown with vines and creepers that it has half returned to the jungle. The plasterwork has peeled to reveal the red sandstone underneath; and in places that sandstone has in turn crumbled away to reveal the intricate brickwork that lies at the core of the structure.

  As the sun began to go down, I wandered happily through the ruins until I came across a band of Timurid star-vaulting in one of the side chambers. Here a few fragments of painted stucco still remained and on these were painted a tangle of trailing flowers: roses, tulips and irises, some cut, some growing from the ground, others emerging from cornucopias- ancient symbols of fertility and plenty, merging and tangling with the real creepers of the jungle.

  Perhaps partly because of the decay, the garden had retained the atmosphere of enclosure and secrecy - that feeling of shutting out the world beyond — essential to any walled pleasure garden. It was just this conspiratorial atmosphere that Roshanara Bagh and the Red Fort both now lack.

  I walked on, past mango trees, sisam and jamun to the garden wall. This faces out on to a flooded water meadow full of grazing buffaloes. An elderly herder in white pyjamas was sitting to one side. Around him swooped two hoopoes. It was spring and the hoopoes were dipping and diving, circling each other, so that the black and white of their zebra-underwings melted into the scarlet of their crests. Behind me, over by the pavilion, the colour on the red-stone pillars grew more vivid as the evening light slipped down their sides. Suddenly there was a loud screech, and on the roof a wild peacock appeared. I opened my diary and started scribbling.

  But as I sat with my legs dangling over the edge, looking out on to the quiet water meadow, the anarchy of Delhi seemed far away and I began to see why in all the most sensible cultures, Paradise was envisaged as a walled pleasure garden. Before I came to India, I had not realized that the English word ‘paradise’ was borrowed from the ancient Persian words pairi (around) and daeza (a wall). The word was brought west by Xenophon, who introduced it into Greek when describing the fabulous garden built by the Persian Emperor Cyrus at Sardis; from the Greek paradeisoi it passed into Latin as paradisum; and hence into Middle English as paradis.

  Now, sitting in the Shalimar Garden, it was very easy to see why the Persian word for an enclosed garden had become an English synonym for bliss.

  The day after the Shalimar crowning ceremony, Aurangzeb again gathered his army and headed north after Dara Shukoh. But it was not until August 1659, a year and a half after Dara’s defeat, that Aurangzeb finally captured him. Fleeing across the western deserts, abandoned by all but his immediate family, Dara was eventually betrayed by Jiwan Khan, a local chieftain whom Dara had personally saved from death only a few years before. Like Murad before him, Dara was seized, manacled and sent to Delhi in a closed howdah.

  Just before he entered the city, he was transferred to a ‘miserable and worn out animal, covered with filth’. Holding his young son in front of him in a sort of cruel parody of his wedding procession, he was humiliatingly marched publicly down the full length of the new Chandni Chowk. Bernier, who was in Delhi that day, witnessed the procession. Dara was dressed in ‘dirty cloth of the coars est texture, and his sorry turban was wrapped around with a muffler like that worn by the meanest of people.’ Half-way down the great boulevard a fakir shouted up to Dara that previously he had always been generous to the poor; but now he understood that Dara had nothing to give. Hearing the man, Dara stripped off his sackcloth cloak and threw it down. But Aurangzeb’s troops forbade the holy man to accept the gift. Dara, they said, no longer had any right to give anything to anyone.

  A few days later a group of nobles keen to impress Aurangzeb broke into the quarters where Dara was being kept, a small garden outside the walls of Shahjehanabad towards Nizamuddin. Dara seized a kitchen knife and tried to defend himself, but the thugs overpowered him. They threw him to the ground and beheaded him in front of his son. The prince’s head was cleaned, wrapped in a turban and presented to Aurangzeb on a golden dish. The new Emperor called for lights, examined the face, then thrust at it three times with a sword. He said: ‘Behold the face of a would-be king and Emperor of all the Mughal realms. Take him out of my sight.’

  No one was more pleased about Dara’s demise than Roshanara Begum. She had begged Aurangzeb not to spare Dara, and now that she heard of his end she threw a great party in the Imperial harem. At this gathering she persuaded Aurangzeb that it would be an amusing joke to send the head to their father in his palace-prison in Agra. It was duly dispatched the following morning with Aurangzeb’s chief eunuch, I‘tibar Khan. ’[The eunuch] waited until the hour Shah Jehan had sat down to dinner,‘ wrote Manucci.

  When he had begun to eat, I‘tibar Khan entered with the box and laid it before the unhappy father, saying: ’King Aurangzeb, your son sends this plat to your majesty to let you see that he does not forget you.‘ The old Emperor said: ’Blessed be God that my son still remembers me.‘ The box having been placed upon the table, he ordered it with great eagerness to be opened. But on withdrawing the lid, he discovered the face of Prince Dara. Horrified, he uttered a cry and fell on his hands and face upon the table, and, striking against the golden vessels, broke some of his teeth and lay there apparently lifeless.

  Jahanara Begum and the other women present began to wail, beat their breasts, tear their hair and rend their garments ... But the eunuch I‘tibar Khan made a report to King Aurangzeb of what had passed, with all the details, whereby he and Roshanara Begum received great delight.

  The unnatural act of Dara’s murder and the treacherous overthrow of Shah Jehan acted like a curse upon Delhi. Never again did it match that apex of prosperity that it reached during the brief nine years that Shah Jehan ruled from the Red Fort.

  Aurangzeb spent as little time as possible in the city, preferring to continue his campaigns from Aurangabad, his own foundation in the Deccan. Delhi had lived by the court and when the court disappeared, the city emptied like a basin of water whose plug had been removed. Travellers began to describe the city as being like a ghost town: ‘The city appears to be a desert when the King is absent,’ wrote the French traveller Jean de Thévenot. ‘If there have been four hundred thousand Men in it when the King was there, there hardly remains the sixth part in his absence.’

  But it was not just the absence of the Emperor. Aurangzeb’s rule proved harsh and repressive. Spies were everywhere; men never knew whom they could trust. All the things that had made Delhi an amusing and lively city were one by one forbidden. Dancing women and courtesans were forced to marry. Prostitution was banned, as was wine-drinking, hashish-smoking and the playing of music.

  More serious were Aurangzeb’s actions against non-Muslims. His fundamentalist outlook led him to destroy Hindu temples across the empire. He imposed a special tax on all Hindus and executed Guru Teg Bahadur, the ninth of the great teachers of the Sikhs. The religious wounds he opened up have never again entirely healed; but at the time they literally tore the country in two. From the fissures between the two religions, there emerged whispers of sorcery, of strange succubuses, of unrest among the city’s djinns. In the wilds of Rajasthan a naked army of shaven-headed Hindu sadhus was rumoured to be marching on Delhi, led by an old sorceress. Early reports had the sadhus sweeping the Mughal army in front of them — until, so it was said, Aurangzeb deployed strange magic against them.

  It was the golden age of the fakirs. Their activity amazed and baffled even the sceptical Bernier: ‘They tell any person his thoughts, cause the branch of a tree to blossom and to bear fruit within an hour, hatch an egg in their bosom within fifteen minutes, producing what ever bird may be demanded, and make it fly around the room.’

  Later, when Aurangzeb ordered the decapitation of the naked fakir Sarmad, an Armenian Jew who had converted to Islam, the sage allegedly picked up his head and walked up the steps of the Jama Masjid. There he said a final set of prayers before departing to the heavens.

  Meanwhile in the court, the dam-
burst of treachery unleashed by Aurangzeb left the principal players wading deeper and deeper into the darkness. Roshanara Begum, the Lady Macbeth of Delhi, had taken over the position vacated by Jahanara Begum: chief of the Imperial Harem. She gathered about her a vast retinue and used to enjoy making pompous processions through the streets of Delhi. But then, during the monsoon of 1661, she made her fatal mistake.

  Aurangzeb had been struck down with a fever, and it was believed that he was beyond recovery. Believing this to be the case, Roshanara stole the Imperial seal and used it to forge an order that proclaimed Aurangzeb’s nine-year-old youngest son to be the next Emperor in preference to the rightful heir. This switch was intended to enable Roshanara to retain her influence by stepping in as the child’s regent. But at this awkward moment, Aurangzeb suddenly recovered. He discovered from his eunuchs what Roshanara had been up to, and, despite her support for him over many years, he disgraced her. Later, after she was caught red-handed in an orgy with nine lovers in her Red Fort harem apartments, Aurangzeb arranged for his sister to be discreetly poisoned. She died in great pain, ‘swollen out like a hogshead, leaving behind her the name of great lasciviousness’. She was buried under the pavilion she had built in the Roshanara Gardens.

  With his sister poisoned, Aurangzeb was now able to trust no one. In his old age he marched to and fro, viciously putting down rebellions, trying to impose his harsh regime on his unwilling subjects. On his death in 1707 the empire fragmented. Yet the Mughal line never quite died out.