by Sudhir Kakar
Everyone in Hindustan knew that Emperor Shah Jahan was a man of remarkable sexual appetite. He saw no reason to control it even when his beloved queen Mumtaz Mahal was alive. Yes, he mourned her death in many ways (he even gave up the practice of plucking out grey hair from his beard), but renouncing the pleasures promised by women’s bodies was not one of them. I do not say he neglected Mumtaz Mahal when she was alive. After all, she bore him fourteen children in eighteen years. But with the queen pregnant most of the time and the native belief that intercourse with a pregnant woman harms the foetus—’Its soft head can be dented by the knocks from the tip of a hard penis,’ my friend Mukarram Khan, the emperor’s personal physician had confided in me—Shah Jahan’s sexual energy always sought other outlets.
Age seemed to have increased the emperor’s sexual ardour in the same proportion as his physical vigour had declined. At sixty-five years of age, yet reluctant to let go of his youth, the old monarch spent more and more time in his harem and, in desperation, sought to redress the mismatch through artifice. Not only did he apply a variety of drugs and unguents procured from all parts of India and beyond on his genitals, but if the stories of palace insiders were to be believed he had also commanded the construction of a large hall in his harem, twenty cubits in length and eight cubits wide, its walls and ceiling covered with large mirrors where the emperor could observe himself sporting with women.
Nor was there a limit to the number and variety of women he bedded. Not content with the two thousand queens, concubines, dancing girls, female musicians and slaves in his harem (although I admit that such a large figure serves more as an insignia of the emperor’s power and majesty than the actual number of partners available to him for fornication), the emperor was also in the habit of inviting kanjaris, who traditionally visited the court on Wednesdays, to stay in the harem for a night to amuse him. These ravishing dancing girls were known for employing their amazingly supple limbs most innovativcly in amorous sport, particularly (and I can personally vouch for their extraordinary skill) in tightening the muscles in their sex at will around the base of a man’s shaft, affording him the most exquisite sensations, especially at the cusp of release. These girls, in fact, were so agile that when the emperor once wished to visit the Meena Bazaar, nine of them had apparently gathered in a clever formation to represent an elephant—four making the four feet, four others the body, and one the trunk—to enable his entry into the bazaar to be dramatic indeed. It had been heard that Shah Jahan often rode his ‘elephant’ in the privacy of his pleasure pavilion, both rider and elephant devoid of a stitch of clothing.
The emperor frequented Meena Bazaar often. Here, the wives and grown up daughters of nobles played at being shopkeepers. Good-natured bargaining and playful banter often led to the extraction of promises of later, more private, meetings. Like other votaries of Venus, the licentious monarch dreaded the monotony that lurks at the edges of pleasure promised by women’s bodies and found it necessary to add a hint of the illicit, a touch of danger, to his sexual encounters to keep boredom away. But, for one to whom nothing is forbidden, making sex dangerous proved to be a challenge and led him, at times, to overstep his bounds. In the rare instances when his advances were resisted, he simply used force to grab what was not freely granted. Most nobles at Emperor Shah Jahan’s court were not less licentious than their liege, yet they were cautious not to interfere with the wives of other grandees. The emperor did not observe these restrictions.
In European countries love adventures only excite merriment and occasion witticisms and are then forgotten. But in India they are attached with dangers that cannot be imagined. More often than not, they are followed by some dreadful and tragic catastrophe. Indians, the Muslims in particular, zealously guard their women as the embodiment of their honour. I do not wish to pronounce a moral judgement when I speak of the emperor’s sexual excesses. I am a man of flesh and blood myself, and in such matters I go by the dictum ‘live and let live’. But I am of the firm opinion that the risks the emperor took in seducing the wives of his nobles were responsible to a great extent in eventually tearing apart an empire universally regarded as the most magnificent in Asia.
Emperor Shah Jahan’s dalliances were many, but of these three affairs had the gravest consequences. The first and most notorious was his tryst with the wife of the captain-general of the imperial cavalry, Khalilullah Khan. The affair was so well known that insolent beggars harassed Khalilullah’s wife as her litter was carried past them on the streets and addressed her tauntingly as ‘Shah Jahan’s lunch’.
On one occasion Emperor Shah Jahan had accused the hapless man in open court of embezzlement, an offence punishable by death. The emperor said he had heard that Khalilullah’s wife wore shoes worth three million rupees and studded with precious stones. ‘If your wife, of whose beauty we have heard much praise, wears such valuable shoes, then your wealth must be great indeed,’ the emperor said, the menace in his voice highlighted by its apparent calm. ‘It is evident that the greater part of this wealth must have been through embezzlement and the betrayal of the trust we have placed in you.’
Khalilullah had stood before the monarch with his head bowed, speechless at the allegation. His right hand involuntarily rose to rub his earlobe between a thumb and index finger. A stocky man with expressionless eyes, Khalilullah Khan had a thick growth of hair on his ear, like a bear’s, about which he was extremely sensitive. The incessant manipulation of his earlobe whenever he was nervous was to check that no unruly hair had escaped the clipper.
The emperor’s brother-in-law, Shaista Khan, a tall, barrel-chested man, who was prickly about all matters of honour, took the emperor’s permission to reply on his behalf.
‘Your Majesty,’ he said. ‘Khalilullah Khan’s whole wealth is in those shoes. His wife has the habit of shoe-beating him on his face every morning. That is the only way he can enjoy his riches.’
Shaista Khan’s intercession on his friend’s behalf was not particularly witty. All the same, the emperor chuckled, which in turn gave the Omrah permission to break out in loud guffaws.
‘To have such an angry wife at home is sufficient punishment,’ the emperor said, dismissing the mortified wretch from his presence. Although he quietly swallowed the humiliation, Khalilullah never forgot the affront.
M. Bernier dishonestly spread quite a different version of the incident. It is the Wali Ahad, he reported, who used his shoes to beat Khalilullah. The man’s wife finds no mention in his account of the incident. This is positively untrue. If what M. Bernier described were true, Khalilullah would have been so disgraced that he could neither have stayed on as commander of the imperial cavalry nor dared to show his face again at the court. Besides, Prince Dara, although partial to practical jokes, did not possess a mean or cruel streak. Rather, he was much given to laughter, and was generous to a fault.
The second of the emperor’s widely known exploits involved Jafar Khan’s wife, also known on the streets of Delhi as ‘Shah Jahan’s breakfast’. It is beyond dispute that Jafar Khan almost lost his life because of the emperor’s passion for his wife. The Amir was saved only because his wife begged the emperor to spare his life and, instead, send him away to Patna as governor while she stayed back in Delhi. Jafar Khan, who valued his head above his honour, accepted the governorship with a show of effusive gratefulness. But did he forget the incident? Could he?
Perhaps the emperor’s worst misstep was the rape of the wife of his brother-in-law, Shaista Khan. I do not believe the entire tale related to me by my friends in the imperial harem, but it is widely rumoured that the virtuous noblewoman had been resisting the emperor’s propositions for a while, until one day, on Jahanara Begum’s invitation, she visited the palace for lunch. At the end of the feast, the emperor joined the women. Once Princess Jahanara and the serving women had left, he again importuned the lady, but finding her unwilling to accede to his wishes, he raped her. On returning to her mansion, Shaista Khan’s wife refused to eat or change
out of her torn shift. Within a week, she died from grief. Her husband pretended to be ignorant of what had taken place that day in the palace, but he silently vowed vengeance. He was careful to hide the glow of revenge’s fire that had been fit in his heart that day, but the grave consequences of the monarch’s indulgences were to emerge soon enough.
India is not the only country where momentous events are too often caused by insults to honour, or as a result of envy. Historians ignore this truth and indulge in vain speculation as to the causes and course of agitations that shake up empires. Like these historians, M. Bernier too ignores the humanity of his actors and looks, instead, to reasons of state and grand goals as causes for their actions. Any observer of history, if he looks honestly and unsparingly at his own life, will admit that it was steered less by reason than by passions of which he often remained unaware. Why should they then believe that princes are different? In my twenty years of close observation of Indian potentates, I have been convinced that such passions sway powerful monarchs even more than they do ordinary men. Doubtless, this holds true for our European princes as well.
Am I being unfair to M. Bernier because of what happened between us? In all honesty, no! I have many failings, but lack of honesty is not one of them. M. Bernier is the type of European found in the Indies who detests natives while being unfailingly polite to them. He looks down upon his successful compatriots, such as I, if they are low-born. M. Bernier is an honest man but one who is honest to his pretensions, not to facts. He can only look at men and events through the lens crafted by his upbringing and education. Nowhere does this bias shine through more clearly than in his vain pronouncements the characters of Prince Dara and that interloper Aurangzeb, the lead actors in the tragic drama that was soon to overtake the Mogul empire.
Nevertheless, the present ailment was nothing more mysterious than a painful swelling of His Majesty’s private parts. Contrary to the stories that later did the rounds, it was not the consumption of shink, the spawn of a crocodile from the marshes of Lower Egypt, that almost killed the monarch. The truth is more prosaic. I have it on authority of Mukarram Khan that it was an overdose of a powder made from the crushed wings of a beetle found in Spain which led to this grievous outcome.
By the grace of God, the emperor survived the crisis. No one who witnessed the Wali Ahad’s devoted caring of his father, when the emperor was given up for dead by even the most experienced hakims, can ever doubt the depth of the prince’s filial love. Through the days and nights that the high fever burnt the emperor’s brows and prevented him from opening his eyes, the prince rarely closed his own. At night, he rested on a carpet next to his father’s bed and started at the least unrest the emperor displayed, his ears attuned to every sound like a mother’s to the slightest mewl of distress from her baby.
Here, I must mention my own contribution, though a minor one, to the emperor’s recovery. Hakim Tabinda, one of his attending physicians and a friend, was genuinely interested in Hindu medicine and often asked my opinion on how my teacher in Goa would treat a particular malady. One morning, just as I had woken up, he burst into my house in high agitation, his untied qaba flapping like a sail in high wind.
‘Manucci, I have had a most powerful dream! It has left me quite shaken. In the dream I saw the emperor talking to Jahanara Begum on the medicinal virtues of the basil plant. Then the emperor turned to me, patted me on the cheek and said that his recovery began the day he took a broth made from its leaves. What do you know about these leaves?’
‘Well, basil or tulsi, as the Hindus call it, is highly esteemed in their medicine. It is even considered sacred because of its miraculous qualities. My teacher used to call it the “elixir of life”. He told me that in case of acute fevers, a decoction of its leaves boiled with powdered cardamom in half a litre of water and mixed with wild honey brings down the temperature,’ I said.
It later reached my ears that when the Wali Ahad had heard how much the Hindus regarded the tulsi, and that its powers had been revealed to Tabinda in a dream, he commanded that the treatment be started immediately. Within twelve hours, the emperor’s condition took a turn for the better.
Soon after his recovery, although he was still in fragile health, the emperor insisted on making a public appearance. More than the rumours about his death or incapacitation, he was disturbed by the news that his remaining three sons, Murad Baksh, Aurangzeb and Shah Shuja, acting in concert, were intent on marching to Delhi with the armies they had raised in their distant provinces. The vile Aurangzeb had persuaded them to adopt the stratagem of being loyal sons who were charging to rescue their father from captivity in the hands of their tyrannical brother, Dara. But there was no doubt in anybody’s mind, least of all the emperor’s, that the princes’ only concern was ascending the throne. But the monarch had convinced himself that once he had attended court and shown that he was in full control, the rumours of his incapacity would be deprived of further fuel and the rebellious sons would return to their provinces. No one could dissuade him from this line of thought. Solicitous about his father’s health, Prince Dara pleaded that the emperor at least keep the durbar small so as not to tax his energy.
On the evening of the twelfth of September 1657, forty of the highest-ranking Omrah, rajas, the ambassador of Persia and members of Prince Dara’s retinue were summoned to attend the imperial court.
This was not my first glimpse of a court that was universally believed to be the most splendid in the world. Europeans who are in a position to compare and have no reason to exaggerate, say that, perhaps, with the exception of the Emperor of China, no other sovereign, not the King of Spain nor of France, not even the Sultan of Turkey, could match the magnificence of Emperor Shah Jahan’s court.
The first time I had been presented at the court I was open-mouthed with wonder that human beings could create such grandeur and such pageantry. This evening, though, the opulence of the court’s furnishings could not prevail our impoverished spirits. The brocade-draped pillars of the hall and carpets of the richest silk covering the floor lacked their usual sheen. The gold railing separating the balcony on which the Peacock Throne stood did not glow in the light of the jewelled candelabras. Even the magnificence of the throne, more a divan than a chair, which had on every previous occasion transfixed me with its six massive legs of gold studded with precious stones looked tawdry today. The two peacocks atop each column, thickset with gems and a tree set with rubies, emeralds, diamonds and pearls between them did not overwhelm me with their exquisite workmanship as they had done before. All I saw was a shrunken figure sitting cross-legged on a cushion, lost in the vastness of the throne. The turban of woven gold with an aigrette whose base was composed of large diamonds and one of the biggest topazes I had ever seen, seemed too heavy for the emperor’s head. It kept slipping to one side, exposing the balding pate below. The necklace of immense pearls reaching down to his stomach could not mask the diminishing of authority that had taken place over the last ten days. When a sudden gust of wind made the chandeliers sway in long arcs, their wavering light making the pockmarks on his face stand out sharply against his papery skin, I realized with a start that the Great Mogul had been reduced to being just a shrivelled old man.
When the emperor spoke, however, his voice was firm, quite belying the fragility of his frame. He thanked the Almighty and asked the Wali Ahad to step forward.
The prince Dara Shukoh has always shown infinitely more affection for his father than his other sons. He has nursed his father to the utmost limit of possibility and that is the best form of worship of Allah. I desire that from today all the assembled and absent Omrah, and all the chief officers of the state, obey Prince Dara Shukoh as their sovereign in every matter, at all times and in every place.’
He proceeded to announce an increase of the prince’s mansab by fifty thousand zat and an inam of two and a half lakh rupees. Then, turning to the prince, the emperor asked him to take his place on the Peacock Throne. ‘If Allah prolongs my life for
some days,’ he said, ‘I would desire to see my son Dara Shukoh in peaceable possession of the empire.’
Prince Dara, an emotional man at the best of times, was visibly moved. He did not proceed to the throne. Instead, bowing low before his father, he said, ‘I pray for the long life of Your Majesty. While Allah preserves it, I cannot dream of ascending the throne, but will consider myself fortunate in being your humblest subject.’
A murmur of ‘Alhamd-u-Lillah:, ‘All praise and thanks be to Allah’, rose from the assembled Omrah as they came forward, strictly in order of rank and seniority, to pay their homage to the Wali Ahad and renew their oath of fealty to the emperor. As one Amir after another made his low salaam and retreated, I wished I could read their impassive faces to uncover the secrets of their hearts. All the Omrah were apprehensive about the future, but it was impossible to identify the ones who were planning their acts of treachery and had shifted their loyalty to one or the other of Prince Dara’s three brothers.
Even the display of fireworks on the bank of the Jamuna that night failed to dispel the anxiety that had gripped the imperial capital for almost a week. In other ways, too, the durbar did not quite have its intended effect. It may have brought a degree of calm to Delhi, but it further steeled the resolve of the three rebel princes to make an armed bid for the throne.
My sole refuge from politics and the crisis that gripped the empire was the house of the Jesuit fathers. M. Bernier, I heard, had been sent to the Deccan on some errand by his employer. I could thus freely visit the priests without running the risk of encountering that lying Frenchman. Another man of French origin, a more convivial companion than M. Bernier could ever hope to be, sometimes joined us. He was the executor of the two magnificent jewelled peacocks that adorned the imperial throne.