Empire of the Moghul: The Tainted Throne

by Alex Rutherford

  It wasn’t just on such prosaic matters she could help. She had already perceived that big decisions weighed on Jahangir. If he didn’t act immediately out of impulse or emotion – which he frequently regretted – he often put them off, and when especially anxious or perplexed he would take a little wine and opium to ease his mind. She knew enough about the running of the imperial government from her father and from listening to Jahangir’s council meetings from behind the jali screen to be able to share the burden . . . and for her it would be not a duty but a profound satisfaction.

  A loud burst of laughter from Jahangir cut into her thoughts. Khurram must have said something to amuse him and he was clapping his son on the shoulder. On the surface it was a happy family scene but to Mehrunissa it suddenly represented something potentially more ominous and she was angry with herself for not foreseeing it. Once again in her life, she would have to watch and wait but above all look to her own interests. She must make sure Jahangir understood how much he needed her and no one else.

  ‘Majesty, the ambassador from England is waiting outside the Hall of Public Audience,’ said the quorchi as late one autumn afternoon Jahangir sat with Mehrunissa in his private apartments.

  ‘Excellent. Summon my attendants.’ As his servants began to dress him, Jahangir was smiling. He was anticipating this meeting with some curiosity. News that an embassy from England had arrived at the port of Surat had reached the Moghul court eight weeks before. As the ambassador had been making his slow progress towards Agra he had sent gifts ahead. One of these, a fantastical gilded carriage shaped a little like a giant melon on high wheels – Jahangir had never seen anything like it – had pleased him greatly even though the red velvet lining was spotted with mildew – doubtless a result of the long voyage on the damp salty ship from the remote island from which the ambassador had set out. Mehrunissa too had been delighted with the carriage and he had given it to her while ordering his own craftsmen to make him an exact copy. But he needed to know how the carriages should be drawn – by oxen or by horses, and how they should be harnessed.

  ‘What do you think this ambassador wants?’ Mehrunissa asked as Jahangir studied his reflection in a tall mirror.

  ‘Trading concessions, I expect, just like the Portuguese and the Dutch. Since I allowed his countrymen to establish a small base at Surat and to export a few basic products, they’ve been petitioning me for the right to trade in goods like indigo and cotton calicoes as well as gems and pearls. I have delayed an answer, so now the ruler of their country has sent someone to plead on their behalf.’

  ‘You are wise not to respond too hastily. From what I’ve heard some of these foreign merchants are growing impertinent, quarrelling and fighting amongst themselves on our streets and offending the local people.’

  ‘Trade brings wealth. But I agree. They must be kept under control.’

  Fifteen minutes later trumpets sounded as Jahangir entered the audience hall and seated himself on his throne, his chief counsellors and courtiers grouped on either side beneath the dais and Khurram in the place of honour nearest to the emperor.

  A further flourish of trumpets accompanied by the booming of drums announced the arrival of the ambassador. Jahangir could scarcely restrain himself from laughing out loud. A tall figure with very thin legs encased in pale material beneath what looked like short, baggy trousers of dark purple, slashed to reveal bright red fabric beneath and fastened with scarlet ribbons just above the knee, was making his way slowly towards the dais. A tight-fitting bright yellow brocade jacket ending in a stiffened point just above his groin emphasised his extreme thinness. As he came closer Jahangir saw beneath his high-brimmed hat with its curling feather a bright red face – the effect of the sun on a pale skin? – made all the more startling by a wide circle of some hard-looking white material around his neck. The brown hair falling on his shoulders was sparse but extravagant curling moustaches compensated for it. It was hard to estimate the age of this eccentric figure but Jahangir guessed he must be in his late thirties.

  Behind him followed a much younger man – barely more than a youth – dressed in the same fashion except that his clothes were all of some dark brown material and he was bare headed. He was of middle height with hair the colour of barley and bright blue eyes like those of Bartholomew Hawkins – who to Jahangir’s regret had recently returned to England, chests bulging with new-found wealth – that were looking with some wonder at him on his golden throne. In his right hand was a leash attached to the collar of a long-legged, pale-coated dog so lean that Jahangir could count its every rib. It didn’t look unlike the ambassador.

  At a gesture from Jahangir’s vizier, Majid Khan, the ambassador halted some ten feet from the dais and removing his hat, which he tucked beneath his right arm, extended one skinny leg straight out in front of him, bent the other and inclined his upper body forward from the hips while making a circling movement with his right hand. It was a strange obeisance, and the young man who Jahangir guessed must be his qorchi did the same. He was about to wave forward one of his scholars who could speak some English to interpret when the ambassador himself began to speak in halting but still recognisable Persian.

  ‘Great emperor, my name is Sir Thomas Roe. I bring greetings from my own king, James the first of England and sixth of Scotland. Hearing of your greatness as a ruler he wishes to present you with gifts from his country. I have already sent some of these ahead of me and I bring more – paintings, silver mirrors, fine leathers, maps of the known world, a drink from the north of our island that we call whisky, four fine horses that I will present to Your Majesty when they have recovered from the long sea voyage and are worthy to be seen by you, and this hunting dog from our country – in English we call it a greyhound. There is no swifter dog in the world.’ Roe turned to the young man, who was standing just behind his right shoulder. The youth stepped forward and undid the dog’s leash. Jahangir expected it to race off but it must have been carefully trained for this moment. It took a few steps forward, then extending its front right paw as Roe had extended his leg lowered its head, mimicking the ambassador’s own obeisance.

  ‘You are welcome at my court. I thank your master for his presents.’ Jahangir gestured to one of his qorchis to take the dog away. ‘I trust that your apartments in the fort are comfortable and I look forward to talking with you in the days ahead.’

  Roe looked a little confused and the young man began to whisper into his ear. At a nod from the ambassador he said, ‘My master apologises, Majesty. He has learned a little Persian, enough to address you just now – and hopes to learn more – but his understanding of the language is still limited. I am his interpreter and his squire. My name is Nicholas Ballantyne.’ After a further exchange of whispers Ballantyne continued, ‘The ambassador thanks you for your kindness. His apartments are indeed comfortable. During the discussions he looks forward to having with you, he hopes you will look favourably on our desire to trade with your great empire. He wishes me to tell you that we not only have our own goods to offer you but also our ships to carry your pilgrims to Arabia. We are island people and our vessels are the best in the world. They can cross great oceans and their cannon can destroy the ships of any nation. Last year, as you may know, Majesty, the Portuguese dared to attack two English ships off your coast. We sank them.’

  Jahangir’s eyes widened – not just at surprise at the young man’s near perfect Persian but at the bluntness of the proposal. A Moghul – or indeed a Persian – would have taken far longer to come to the point. But it was good to know what the English king had to offer beyond his gifts. Till now Arab and Portuguese ships had between them enjoyed a virtual monopoly in conveying Muslim pilgrims from the ports of Gujarat across the seas on the first stage of their journey to Mecca. The Arab ships were not always seaworthy – only three weeks ago one had foundered in a storm with the loss of all three hundred aboard. And the Arab sailors were no match for the pirates who preyed on the pilgrim ships.

  As for the
Portuguese, Jahangir had seen the permits they sold to their passengers engraved with the images of their gods – a bearded young man called Jesus and a pale-faced virgin queen whose name was Mary. The Portuguese ships were strong and their well-armed sailors put up a better resistance to the pirates, but the Portuguese in their trading settlement at Goa were growing ever more arrogant. Their priests were aggressively seeking converts among both the Hindu and the Muslim populations and even trying to persuade pilgrims waiting to take ship for Mecca that their beliefs were mistaken. The Portuguese were also asking increasing sums for the transport of pilgrims. The fact that the English king had sent an ambassador to court might make them moderate their demands.

  ‘Tell your master I will consider his proposals and that we will talk further,’ Jahangir said. He gave a brief nod to the trumpeter standing to the right of the dais and the man put his bronze instrument to his lips to sound the short blast signalling that the interview was over. As Jahangir rose, the ambassador again stuck out a leg and made his elaborate homage. When he straightened up again his red face was even redder and beneath the arms of his yellow brocade jacket were dark circles of sweat. Had he been nervous or was it just the unaccustomed heat of Hindustan?

  ‘Send in more wine,’ Jahangir ordered his qorchi. Roe’s face looked shiny with perspiration, the muscles slack – the result of the prodigious amount of alcohol he’d consumed over the past three hours. Jahangir had never met a man with such capacity, but wine didn’t seem to dull Roe’s wits – rather the reverse. The more he drank the more Jahangir enjoyed his conversation, relishing the information flowing from his willing lips. Roe was clearly an educated man though the writers he was fond of quoting – Roman and Greek philosophers, some dead for nearly two thousand years, he said – were mostly unknown to Jahangir. During the four months he’d spent at court the ambassador’s Persian had improved and, though Jahangir might have expected the contrary, wine seemed to give him added fluency. Only yesterday Jahangir had listened to him make a spirited case to one of his own scholars that belief in the existence of the philosopher’s stone – a substance thought by some to have the power to change base metals into silver and gold and even to hold the secret of eternal life – was irrational nonsense. Jahangir, whose inclination was to be sceptical of anything which could not be proved, had agreed.

  Spread out on the table before them was a book of maps created by a map-maker whose name according to Roe was Mercator, which he had presented to Jahangir soon after his arrival at court. Roe called the book an ‘Atlas’, explaining that was the name of the mythological man bearing the whole weight of the world upon his shoulders depicted on the cover. ‘I know, Majesty, that on your accession you took the title “Seizer of the World”, but see how much of the world there actually is,’ the ambassador had said a little slyly but making Jahangir laugh. Fascinated, he had kept going back to it, carefully turning the heavy pages to examine the outlines of lands he had never even heard of, all the while his brain teeming with questions for Roe, which was why he had invited him yet again to his private apartments.

  ‘According to what you yourself have told me, it seems that the Spanish, the Portuguese and the Dutch are better explorers even than the English? That man Magellan you were talking about the other day – the first whose ship sailed right around the world – he was Portuguese, wasn’t he?’

  Roe tried to settle himself more comfortably. With his long thin legs he found sitting cross-legged for long periods difficult. ‘Yes, Majesty. It is true that a few foreign adventurers were lucky in their voyagings, but our English sailors and ships are second to none. My countrymen have recently established the first settlement in the northern Americas at a place they have named Jamestown, after our great king.’ Roe’s unshakeable belief in the importance of his remote little island never failed to amuse Jahangir. The life the ambassador described with such enthusiasm, from the habits of ordinary people to the customs of the court, sounded primitive to Jahangir’s ears, though of course courtesy and his growing liking for Roe prevented him from saying as much.

  ‘If it is true what you say and if your country will indeed provide ships to carry our pilgrims I may grant you the trading concessions you wish, but there will be conditions.’

  ‘Of course, Majesty.’ Despite all the wine he had consumed, Roe’s eyes were suddenly intent. Over the months since the ambassador’s arrival, Jahangir had been sparing with promises though he had sent gifts to this King James of his, carefully chosen to be impressive but not of a magnificence to embarrass the English ruler, who so obviously lacked the wealth of the Moghuls. Though he himself had been pleased with a crystal box inlaid with gold, some of the other English gifts were already falling apart – the leathers were cracking, perhaps as a result of the heat, the gilt was peeling from the picture frames, and he had already had the musty-smelling lining of the coach replaced with fine green brocade from Gujarat. Yet Roe had brought what no other ambassador had – information about the wider world, like the maps, and descriptions of new plants and animals found in this ‘new world’ he was so fond of talking about. Soon after his arrival he had presented Jahangir with a small cotton bag containing some hard, round vegetable tubers – ‘potatoes’, he called them – and claimed they were good to eat once baked or boiled.

  The qorchi had returned. ‘Majesty. This wine – scented with rosewater – is a special gift from the empress. She asked me to say that she prepared it with her own hands.’

  ‘Excellent. Now, ambassador, let’s see how the potency of this wine compares with that whisky you brought me . . . and I want you to send for that qorchi of yours to sing me some more of those English songs . . .’

  ‘Majesty, the emperor is asleep.’

  Mehrunissa looked up from the book she had been reading by the light of an oil lamp, though now that the early morning light was filtering in through the casement she no longer needed it. ‘And the ambassador?’

  ‘Also asleep, Majesty.’

  ‘Order attendants to carry the emperor back here to his apartments and send for the Englishman’s servants to take him to his quarters.’

  This was by no means the first time Jahangir’s drinking bouts with Roe had lasted until dawn and Mehrunissa knew exactly what the qorchi meant when he said that her husband was asleep: the emperor had passed out. These sessions with Roe had been growing more frequent. Jahangir’s excuse was that they had so many interesting things to discuss, so many ideas to explore. Yesterday he had told her he wanted to explain to Roe about some of his experiments with new medicines, especially his discovery – using water in which the leaves of the plane tree had been fermented – of a salve to make wounds heal faster. He had been testing the ointment on a qorchi who had been gored in the thigh by a stag while out hunting. But she knew from observing through a small jali screen a few hours earlier that Jahangir and Roe had soon turned to more frivolous matters, singing bawdy songs – Persian and English – that they had taught one another, and even attempting trials of strength which the far more powerfully built Jahangir invariably won.

  They were more like a pair of boys than an emperor and the ambassador of a foreign ruler, but perhaps such carousing was common at the English court. It certainly had charms for Jahangir, perhaps as a contrast to the elaborate formality of his own court where he must behave as not so much a man as the image of power and wealth. When Roe had farted loud and long in his presence, Jahangir had laughed and clapped him on the shoulder. Though they drank so much these sessions were perhaps no bad thing. They relaxed Jahangir and, apart from the fact that on some nights they kept him from her bed, took nothing away from her. Indeed the reverse was true, since they allowed her to do more for him. She tended him when, head aching, he finally woke, rubbing his temples with aloe and sandalwood oils to drive away the pain.

  Sometimes, still bleary eyed after the previous night’s carousing, he found it difficult to concentrate on the matters that made up so much of the business of his council meetin
gs – the raising of taxes, the granting of titles and estates to his nobles, the sending of orders to the governors of his provinces. Even at the best of time such things bored him. However, she, who never missed a meeting, sitting intent behind the jali screen in the royal women’s gallery, absorbed everything and could remind him of the things he ought to know. More and more frequently she offered to read the official documents he found so tedious and tell him the gist of their contents and he readily agreed, delighted to shift some of the burden from his shoulders to hers. Just as she had hoped he would, he now often sought her advice, even joking that he had little need of his vizier Majid Khan. The boundary between influence and power wasn’t so wide, and recently she had felt herself beginning to edge across it . . .

  Her fears that Khurram might be the one to whom Jahangir turned had so far proved groundless. He had been delighted by the birth of a son, Dara Shukoh, to Khurram and Arjumand, but though he and Khurram were frequently together it was usually to go hunting or hawking or to test each other’s skill at archery or watch an elephant fight. Since his return from the Deccan the prince had shown no inclination to become involved in the minutiae of government that she found so fascinating and had such appetite for. Others were noticing her growing influence. Only last week half a dozen petitions addressed directly to her had arrived in the imperial haram. Soon she would ask Jahangir whether, to save him effort, she could start issuing edicts under her own name. She would use the carved emerald he had given her, inscribed with her title, Nur Mahal . . .