The Crimson Throne

by Sudhir Kakar

  I was glad to contribute the bottles of excellent liquor Prince Dara had sent my way to our evenings of drinking and amiable chatter. Like all exiles, our talk was laced with nostalgia that became more intense as the evening wore on and the wine took effect. Once in a while, we returned to the current situation in India. The fathers agreed that Aurangzeb’s victory in the coming struggle would spell an end to Jesuit missionary activities in India. They wanted Prince Dara to prevail, or even Shuja or Murad, but were not sanguine about their prospects.

  Father Roth, who had been lately suffering from dyspepsia, summarized their feeling succinctly, ‘Hindus have a saying, “Yatha raja tatha praja (As is the king, so are the subjects)”. The truth is exactly the opposite. It is the king who is a reflection of his people. If the people are dishonest, the king is even more corrupt. He is a tyrant if the people he rules are violent. Indians are a malicious, scheming lot. Their monarch can only be someone as malevolent as Aurangzeb; Dara is too good-hearted.’

  One of the first indications that the inevitable war, though as yet undeclared, was upon Hindustan occurred very soon after the emperor’s miraculous recovery.

  One evening, I had just finished dinner when a man in the Wali Ahad’s service came with a message that I was to proceed immediately to Princess Jahanara’s apartments in the imperial palace. As soon as I entered the waiting carriage, it set off at a great speed towards the Royal Square. The messenger was unable to tell me the nature of the emergency. I gauged the seriousness of the situation when I observed upon my arrival that all the rules governing entry into the harem had been suspended. I found myself waiting in the antechamber of Princess Jahanara’s apartment with at least ten other doctors who were engaged in discussions in hushed whispers.

  It appeared that the princess had taken ill in the morning with symptoms of acute poisoning. The emperor, the Wali Ahad and Mukarram Khan were with her in the bedroom. The doctors waiting outside were being summoned inside, one by one, for their opinion. When a doctor emerged, the others would surround him, eager for the latest tidings. We were told that the distraught emperor was just sitting in a chair, muttering a prayer. His eyes were closed, his palms supporting his bowed head, as he beseeched the Almighty to spare his daughter’s life in a low mumble. Prince Dara was pacing around the room, often stopping to look at his sister lying motionless in the bed, her face fast losing colour. ‘Can’t you do something? Do something!’ he would sometimes angrily command the conferring doctors.

  I became more and more concerned as I heard that the princess’s condition was deteriorating. I am not one who is given to fulsomeness in my expression, but the few times that I had had the privilege of being called upon to bleed the princess, I had found her to be a rare combination of beauty and intellect. Rarer still was the existence of these attributes alongside a loving heart full of generosity and compassion that did not distinguish between the status of its recipients. As far as I had heard, she was as helpful in furthering the forbidden liaison of an attending maid who had fallen in love with a Hindu scribe as she was in interceding with her father to save the king of Golconda from a ruinous war Aurangzeb was attempting to foist on the Deccan kingdom.

  I am not ashamed to admit that I had always looked forward to our bloodletting sessions.

  ‘Ah, my handsome Niccolao is here,’ Jahanara Begum would sing out to her attendants. ‘He is like a vampire, this farangi, always on the lookout to suck some blood from my weak body. Look, how red his lips have become!’

  Red, though, was nearer the colour of my ears than my lips as she laughed at my evident embarrassment, thereby heightening it.

  I would watch as one mesmerized as the beautiful princess rolled up the sleeve of her tunic and extended a slim, alabaster-white forearm towards me. I could feel her eyes on me as I stroked the selected spot for just a little longer than was necessary. When, unable to resist, I would raise my eyes to meet her level gaze, I could never resist the laughter in her soot-black eyes shaded by thick lashes and framed by thin eyebrows the shape of perfect scimitars. More often than not, I would have to avert my gaze quickly as I felt my ears grow hot and the blood rush to my cheeks. At these times the princess was gracious enough to divert me by asking me about Venice and my journey across the seas to India.

  ‘Ah, Niccolao, do not form an opinion of the princess based on her outer shell alone,’ Father Buze said when I told him wistfully of my visits to the princess’s palace. ‘There has been no woman in the history of the House of Timur who was so beautiful, accomplished and universally loved as she is. Do you know that Mullah Shah has initiated her into the Sufi order of the Chistis even though she is a woman? He holds such a high opinion of her spiritual gifts that he once publicly announced in Prince Dara’s court that her mystical knowledge being as extraordinary as it is, he considers her worthy of being his representative. Let me show you something.’

  From his room, Father Buze brought out a slim book bound in burnished calf leather.

  ‘This is her book, Munis-ul-Arwah, a biography of the founder of her Order, in which she has described some of her own experiences,’ he remarked as he opened it to a page which had its upper corner turned down.

  He began to translate it laboriously: ‘I seated myself in a corner with my face turned towards Mecca, and concentrated all my mind on the image of the Master, calling up at the same time, in my imagination, my vision of the most holy Prophet. Occupied with this contemplation, I arrived at a state of my soul in which I neither slept nor was awake. And then I saw the holy company of the Prophet and his four friends. I also saw Mullah Shah. He was seated beside the Prophet, upon whose feet his head lay, while the Prophet said to him, “O Mullah Shah, for what reason did you illumine that Timuri?”

  Praise be to Allah who, through the particular attention of the holy Master, has accorded to me, a poor woman, the gift of conceiving the Supreme Being in the most complete manner, as I have always desired. Every man who has attained this supreme felicity becomes through this fact the most accomplished and the most noble of beings. His individual existence vanishes in Absolute Existence. He becomes a drop in the ocean, a mote in the sunshine, an atom in the totality. Arrived in this state, he is above death, future punishment, the Garden of Paradise and the Fire of Hell. Whether man or woman, he is always the most Perfect Being.1

  I had listened attentively but found it difficult to reconcile the two images: the laughing, beautiful woman flushed with sensuality on the one hand and the lofty mystic absorbed in contemplation of God on the other. Jahanara Begum loved Prince Dara more than her other brothers and often influenced her father on his behalf not only because he was a brother in flesh but also in spirit, a fellow seeker of truth.

  I have heard from various quarters that M. Bernier has maligned the princess by calling her promiscuous and has even gone so far as to repeat with conviction the bazaar gossip that she was her father’s mistress. Yes, her father loved her, as did everyone else, but his love was that of a father for a daughter, not a lover for his beloved. There had indeed been talk of her liaison with a handsome young man of no exalted rank, whom the emperor forbade her from marrying, but the crass Frenchman has provided his listeners with absurd details of some imagined tale. According to M. Bernier, the emperor surprised the lovers by entering the harem at an unusual hour, causing the gallant to hide himself in a capacious cauldron used for baths. Having guessed where he was hiding, the cunning emperor told his daughter in the course of their conversation that her normally clear skin looked smudged. She needed a bath, he decreed, and instructed the eunuchs to light a fire under the cauldron. He continued to talk to the distraught princess, seemingly oblivious to the shrieks coming from inside the cauldron, and only retired when the eunuchs, who were holding down the lid, gave him to understand that the man inside was dead. I am not sure how people have believed such a sorry tale. If the emperor withheld his permission for her marriage, he was simply following the rule made by his grandfather Akbar that a royal prin
cess should not be given in marriage because her husband, in becoming powerful through the royal alliance, may himself aspire to the throne.

  M. Bernier has circulated another piece of gossip as gospel truth. Once, on suspicion of illicit relations between his daughter and a young nobleman, he says, the emperor presented the unsuspecting youth with a paan as a special mark of royal favour. According to custom, the young man was obliged to immediately chew on the paan while expressing gratefulness for the signal honour, and he died from the poison in the paan before he could reach home. I leave it to readers to judge whether a man who loved his daughter so much would cause her such grievous harm. And that too under the scrutiny of an entire court where there were so many nobles and ambassadors who would be witness to the emperor’s viciousness!

  Jahanara Begum undoubtedly had lovers, but the emperor ignored their existence as long as she was discreet. As the first lady of the empire, she did not need to hide herself from men who had cause to visit the imperial harem.

  In this hour of her need, I wished that I had studied medicine in the more formal setting of a university, that I knew more about poisons and their antidotes, and was not limited by the specialized knowledge I had acquired at the Royal Hospital in Goa or from Vaidraj.

  The symptoms the princess had displayed—abdominal pain, diarrhoea and vomiting—being indistinguishable from a severe stomach upset had been initially treated as such. Only after an alert slave girl informed the attending physician that the princess had been on a fast the entire day, as part of her spiritual regimen, was poison suspected.

  Everyone was at a loss: If the princess had not eaten a morsel the whole day, how had she ingested the poison? In the end, it was left to Khwaja Younis, the chief eunuch of Prince Dara’s harem, to solve the mystery. Khwaja Younis commanded the slave girls to reconstruct a minute by minute account of the princess’s activities through the day. The attendants, still shaking and distraught, filled in bits of the puzzle. It transpired that in the early hours of the morning, the princess had received a book penned in the finest calligraphic hand, each page outlined in striking, decorative borders. In her eagerness to read the book, Jahanara Begum immediately opened it, but finding the first five pages stuck together she proceeded to separate them by repeatedly wetting the index finger of her right hand with her spittle and sliding it across the page that was stuck to the one below. It became clear that this was how the poison had entered her stomach: the pages were glued together with a paste made from castor beans, a deadly poison that mimics the symptoms of stomach cramps.

  No one knew who had sent the book—it had been handed to a guard by a well-dressed stranger—but in our minds there was little doubt that the attempt to poison the princess was the fiend Aurangzeb’s handiwork. I could not fathom the evil in a brother’s heart that would prompt him to go to such lengths to harm such a sister. We have since been proved right as the younger prince’s preference for poison as a tool of assassination is now acknowledged by everyone except his blatant partisans.

  ‘In his unguarded moments he called Aurangzeb “the white snake”’.

  FRANCOIS BERNIER

  I BELIEVE THAT OVER the years I have developed and refined my skills in judging a person’s character, guided chiefly by M. Gassendi’s advice to mistrust first impressions and wait for my mind to form a considered opinion rather than grasping at one in haste. I was thus disheartened to observe Danishmand Khan, whom I had always considered a picture of equanimity, unmoved by the storms swirling around him, become as anxious and restless as he did in the days following the emperor’s illness in the beginning of September 1657.

  From what we heard, the illness was serious, brought about by an excess of priapism highly unbecoming a man who had crossed the age of sixty.

  ‘Men deal with the loss of love differently, Bernier,’ the Agha chided me for my expression of disapproval. ‘Some will never again plant a garden of love around them once the old one has withered. Others, like our monarch—and never doubt that he loved Mumtaz Mahal dearly— seem to go berserk in their consumption of female flesh. Their erotic junoon, delirium if I may call it so, however, is but an attempt to relieve a pain that is only fleetingly assuaged in the moment of an embrace before it returns with its original severity. What I worry about is that if the emperor does not recover in the next few days, it may be too late to save the empire from the ill fortune that is already knocking at its door. Perhaps it is too late already. Once the rumour reaches the princes that the emperor is dying—even though he is alive—the war of succession will become inevitable. With all the upheavals in the House of Timur over the last two centuries, I am no longer confident that its foundations are strong enough to withstand any further buffets.’

  In the absence of reliable news about the emperor’s illness, there were indeed all kinds of rumours circulating in the bazaars of Delhi. ‘The emperor is already dead’, ‘The princes, Aurangzeb, Murad and Shuja, are marching their armies to Delhi’ were the most rampant among these. As the anxiety at the looming violence had become palpable, so had the excitement at hearing the waves of fresh rumours, which seemed to breathe fresh life into normal, everyday life. I was frequently amused to see Khwaja Chisti’s mien assume a strange gravity as he conveyed a rumour, quite unlike the mischievous glee that always accompanied his relay of its sibling, a piece of gossip.

  ‘All we know for certain from my sources in the palace, Bernier,’ the Agha told me on the evening of the tenth day of September, his face drawn with worry, is that for four days, the emperor has had high fever and is lying motionless except for an occasional mysterious effort to lift a hand to his nose. Jahanara Begum has been tending to her sick father day and night. With the exception of Jahanara Begum, the Wali Ahad, the chief hakim, and the emperor’s personal retainers, no one else has been allowed to see him during this time. All the gates of the Red Fort except for two have been closed and these are guarded by Raja Jaswant Singh of Marwar and Raja Ram Singh of Kishangarh with their thirty thousand Rajput soldiers.’

  On the way out of the Agha’s chambers, Khwaja Chisti, who was accompanying me, said quietly, ‘Bernier, there is much more going on under the surface than the Agha knows. Whenever I try to tell him, he rebukes me severely. He thinks I am repeating rumours I have heard on the streets. But my information is reliable. It comes from my best friend Niamat, who may be out of favour with the emperor now, but once personally served him and still has good contacts in the palace. Why have all the Mohammedan commanders been removed from guard duty? Is it the emperor or some other high personage who doesn’t trust them?’

  Chisti gave me a meaningful look before continuing. ‘Niamat tells me that Jahanara Begum is the only person allowed to be in the emperor’s bed chamber. Prince Dara is permitted entry into the fort only during the day. I tell you the monarch is on his death bed, poisoned by the same high personage who holds him prisoner.’

  Chisti’s dire forecast about the emperor’s imminent demise, however, proved unfounded, since four days later we heard that the emperor was feeling better and would make an appearance before the populace through a window of his chamber in the palace. As it happened, the emaciated figure that appeared at the window for a few seconds failed to convince most onlookers; many believed the figure was merely an impostor, an old eunuch dressed in imperial robes, and that Dara had indeed imprisoned his father, or perhaps even killed him. I do not know if Aurangzeb, Murad and Shuja really believed the rumours or only pretended to believe them.

  The Agha’s house witnessed a flood of visitors during those days: Omrah and Hindu rajas seeking information, or the Agha’s opinions, on the looming crisis; and messengers from Gujarat, Bengal and the Deccan bringing the latest tidings from the courts of the three princes. The news was ominous, though not unexpected; the brothers were rushing to raise large armies to march to Delhi and make their claim for the throne of the Indies.

  Most Omrah wanted to know whether Danishmand Khan was already committed to the caus
e of one or the other prince in the war of succession, which seemed to become inevitable in the absence of any signs of the emperor’s recovery as the days went by. They believed that as the foreign minister the Agha exercised some influence at the courts of Persia and Balkh and could persuade one or the other sovereign to intervene on behalf of the prince he favoured as successor to the Great Mogul. Jafar Khan was a frequent visitor at the beginning of the crisis, urging the Agha to quickly commit himself to Aurangzeb’s side if he wanted to reap the rewards from the coming dispensation, but his visits soon tapered off as he threw himself into the vortex of the fast-moving events.

  The Agha was an honourable man who had sworn an oath of fealty to the emperor. Every day he agonized over the question of his loyalty: was his oath bound to the person of the emperor or to what he represented, the sanctity and welfare of the empire? A diplomat by temperament and long practice, he could not discuss his mental turmoil with other nobles, each of them by now scampering to find shelter from the coming storm—and thus, by default, I became his confidant. He would send for me in the late evenings when the last of his visitors had left; the only demand on me was to listen without interrupting or offering my opinion.

  A few weeks later the Agha told me that the emperor had left for Agra. ‘He is proud of the new capital he has built in Delhi but his heart lies in Agra, where Mumtaz Mahal is buried. From the windows of his bed chamber in the Agra fort, he can see her tomb and relive the memories of their years together.’

  I did not have to enquire further to know that the emperor’s recovery was now of little consequence, since the princes’ ambitions had set into motion events that were now irreversible.

  ‘The fresh reports I receive every day indicate that the princes will not be dissuaded in their preparations for war by court dispatches under the emperor’s seal,’ the Agha was saying. ‘They dismiss these as forgeries …’ As he spoke, I gradually understood that the Agha’s dilemma in choosing between the princes Dara and Aurangzeb—Shuja and Murad never even entered his mind—involved not just the moral and political aspects of kingship but also personal considerations that troubled him even though he was determined to disregard their impact on his choice.