Empire of the Moghul: The Tainted Throne
Page 37
Again one of the great pleasures of writing the book was time spent travelling through India while researching. Like Khurram I went south towards the Deccan, crossing the Narmada river and travelling on through a landscape of golden eroded hills past the sandstone fortress of Asirgarh. My destination was the palace-fortress of Burhanpur on the Tapti river – once the Moghuls’ forward command centre in their wars against the Deccan sultanates and a place where many sinister and tragic events were played out. Wandering through the crumbling remains where water once ran through marble channels to feed the exquisitely frescoed hammam and Khurram’s war elephants once trumpeted in the hati mahal I sensed something of the Moghuls’ existence in that place.
Near Jodhpur I drank bitter opium water from the palm of a village elder as Rajput warriors must have done before battle. In Agra I renewed my knowledge of many places – the Red Fort where Jahangir’s five-foot-high bath hewn from a single lump of stone that always accompanied him on the march sits in a courtyard; Ghiyas Beg’s marble-inlaid tomb built by Mehrunissa, known as ‘Itimad-ud-Daulah’s tomb’; nearby Sikandra, site of Akbar’s great sandstone tomb which was completed during Jahangir’s reign; the Chambal river with its flourishing colonies of ghariyals (fish-eating crocodiles), dolphins and Sarus cranes. It was also a good opportunity to taste some of the food described in the sources like the luscious mangos Jahangir relished and fiery Rajasthani lal mas – lamb cooked with chillies which by this period like pineapples and potatoes were just beginning to appear in India from the New World.
As I travelled I could still picture the Moghul armies moving slowly but deliberately across the vast landscape raising great clouds of dust. I saw them pitching their tents at night in camps the size of small towns and servants lighting the giant bowl filled with cotton seed and oil fixed on a pole twenty feet high – the Akash-Diya, Light of the Sky – that sent flames shooting into the night sky. I could smell the bitterish aroma of a thousand dung cooking fires and hear the voices and drums and pipes of the musicians who always accompanied a Moghul force on the move. Though Jahangir and Khurram lived nearly four hundred years ago, at times they and their world didn’t seem so far away at all.
Additional Notes
Chapter 1
Akbar was born on 15 October 1542 and died on 15 October 1605.
Jahangir was born on 30 August 1569 and came to the throne on Akbar’s death.
Khusrau was born in August 1587 and his first rebellion against Jahangir began in April 1606.
Parvez was born in 1589.
Khurram was born on 5 January 1592.
The date of birth of Shahriyar, the child of a concubine, is not known precisely but was around the time of Akbar’s death.
Timur, a chieftain of the nomadic Barlas Turks, is better known in the west as Tamburlaine, a corruption of ‘Timur the Lame’. Christopher Marlowe’s play portrays him as ‘the scourge of God’.
Jahangir would have used the Muslim lunar calendar, but I have converted dates into the conventional solar, Christian, calendar we use in the west.
Khusrau’s two closest commanders were indeed paraded through Lahore in skins in the way described and many others were impaled on stakes.
Chapter 2
Jahangir is said to have had Mehrunissa’s husband Sher Afghan murdered, though not by a European.
Chapter 3
Mehrunissa’s abandonment as a baby by her family is referred to in some of the chronicles, as is her dropping of her veil before Jahangir.
Chapter 4
Punishments for sexual transgression in the haram were severe. For example, a woman was buried up to her neck in sand and left to die in the hot sun.
Chapter 5
Khurram did indeed first meet Arjumand at the Royal Meena Bazaar. She was born in 1593.
Chapter 6
Khusrau’s second rebellion and blinding occurred in late summer 1607. Ghiyas Beg was interrogated and released and his son Mir Khan executed for complicity.
Chapter 8
Mehrunissa and Jahangir married in 1611 and Khurram and Arjumand in 1612.
Chapter 9
Khurram’s first campaign against Malik Ambar was in 1616. Jahanara, who was in fact Khurram and Arjumand’s second child – an elder sister Hur-al-Nisa died in infancy – was born in April 1614.
Chapter 11
Roe arrived in India in 1615 bearing gifts including the carriage, Mercator’s maps and paintings.
Chapter 12
Roe’s letters do indeed comment on Jahangir’s pride, his agnosticism, his religious tolerance, his cruelty and Mehrunissa’s influence. On the latter Roe described how she ‘governs him and winds him up at her pleasure’.
The portrait of Jahangir with King James at his feet is in the British Library in London.
Chapter 13
Khurram’s second campaign against Malik Ambar was in 1620.
Chapter 15
Khurram’s estrangement from his father began in 1622 though in fact Roe left India in 1619.
Chapter 21
Mahabat Khan’s coup was in 1626 – the same year that Parvez died. Jahangir died on 28 October 1627.
Chapter 24
Several writers including some European authors of the time recount the story of Khurram joining a funeral cortège to conceal his progress, some even claiming he faked a scene of his own death.
In history, Khusrau had died when in Khurram’s custody in Burhanpur in 1621. Both modern historians and contemporary observers believe Khurram was responsible. Khusrau’s wife did indeed commit suicide. It was Dawar Bakhsh, Khusrau’s eldest son, who bid for the throne on Jahangir’s death and was defeated and subsequently killed on Khurram’s orders together with Shahriyar and some others of his male relations.
Chapter 26
Khurram’s (Shah Jahan’s) formal accession to the throne was on 14 February 1628 – the 72nd anniversary of Akbar’s accession and the 145th anniversary of Babur’s birth. Among the lofty titles to which Shah Jahan laid claim were ‘King of the World’, ‘Meteor of the Faith’ and ‘Second Lord of the Auspicious Conjunctions’ – a direct appropriation of the title once proudly used by Timur.
By the time of his accession, Arjumand had borne Khurram ten children of whom six – Jahanara, Dara Shukoh, Shah Shuja, Roshanara, Aurangzeb and Murad Bakhsh – had survived.