A Teardrop on the Cheek of Time: The Story of the Taj Mahal (11 page)

Nur Jahan drinking wine
.

Before the ceremony, Moghul noblewomen, concealed behind a curtain, painted Khurram’s hands with henna and turmeric for good luck and Jahangir himself ‘tied the marriage tiara of glittering pearls’ upon his son’s head. Mullahs read verses from the Koran – Khurram, though three-quarters Hindu through his Rajput ancestry, had been brought up as a Sunni Muslim, while Arjumand Banu was a Shia Muslim. Next, the young bride gave her formal consent and gifts were exchanged between the two families – ‘costly products of mines and quarries and the choicest harvest of the Garden of Eden’.

As the ceremony drew to a close, Khurram’s hands were rinsed in rose-water and he drank a goblet of water to confirm the union. The wedding feast was held at the house of the bride’s father. The celebrations – so noisy with ‘the drum of festivity and the clarion of joy’ that they made ‘the revolving spheres dance’ – with glittering processions and firework displays, lasted a month.

Imperial chroniclers as a matter of course hinted at the sexual potency of the emperors whose deeds they recorded, but in Khurram’s case they had no need to exaggerate. He would remain, throughout his life, a deeply sensual and sensuous man. Twenty years old at the time of his wedding to Arjumand Banu, barrel-chested and athletically built, he was at the height of his sexual powers and a deft, experienced lover, well tutored in a court where fleshly pleasures were unashamedly enjoyed. The Moghuls had readily embraced the sensual traditions of their new lands. India was known throughout the Islamic world for its sexuality and sensuality and for its love-manual, the Hindu
Kamasutra
, which dates from the third to fifth century. Sheikh Nefzawi, who wrote
The Perfumed Garden
for the Bey of Tunis in the fifteenth or sixteenth century, acknowledged that
‘the people of India had advanced further than we in the knowledge and investigation of coitus’
. He reported that, while in the Near East there were a meagre eleven sexual positions, the Indians had many more, including the twenty-five imaginative postures he described in
The Perfumed Garden
.

Wedding nights were, by tradition, carefully managed to ensure the maximum sexual gratification. The bride and groom were bathed, scented and oiled and laid upon a magnificent platform of a bed by attendants who skilfully caressed their bodies to ready them for intercourse. Sexual pleasure was regarded as one of the rights, indeed necessities, of life for both men and women. After Khurram and Arjumand Banu’s first couplings the bedding was inspected to confirm that coitus had taken place and that she had, indeed, been a virgin. Six weeks later the woman praised in the court chronicles as a
‘mine teeming with gems of royalty’
for her prodigious fertility was pregnant with their first child.

Khurram’s chroniclers relate that, having found his new wife ‘of perfect assay against the touchstone of experience; and finding also, in respect of her appearance of beauty, that she was chief and elect (
mumtaz
) from among the women of the time and the ladies of the universe, he [Khurram] gave her the title Mumtaz Mahal Begam, so that it may on the one hand serve as an indication of the pride and glory of that select one of the age, and on the other, that the real illustrious name of that reputed one of this world and the hereafter, befittingly may not occur on the tongues of the common people’. The award of such a title was a tradition of the Moghuls ‘when they wish to distinguish with greater honour from among those who grace the royal bedchamber of fortune’.

The imperial capital Agra, where the young couple began their long-delayed married life, was a thriving city of 750,000 inhabitants. English visitors thought it
‘populous beyond measure’
.
*
The houses of ordinary people were of brick and tiles, if they could afford it, or of clay or mud if not. Floors were beaten earth, varnished over with cow dung mixed with water. Roofs were often just simple thatched awnings to protect against the hot sun and vulnerable to fire – the hot, searing winds of summer, for which Agra was notorious, whirled sparks from cooking fires high into the air, causing the tinder-dry roofs to ignite. Sometimes women chose to burn to death in their houses rather than break purdah and run outside to reveal themselves to strangers.

The Moghul capital drew visitors from across the empire and far beyond. Afghan, Uzbek, Turkish, Persian and European merchants and soldiers of fortune alike found shelter in the ninety caravanserais spread throughout the city. Weary travellers sloughed off the dirt and dust of their journeys in one of 800
hammams
(bathhouses). Then, as now, the streets of Agra swarmed with hawkers energetically striving for a living. An English clerk described how ‘every evening is like a fair, where they resort, make their bargains, take and choose the whores sitting and lying on their cots’. He saw little slave girls being trained as dancers, their virginity offered ‘at first at dear rates, after prostituted for a small matter’. The streets were so crowded that people pressed themselves against the walls as chariots drawn by white, gilded-horned oxen trundled past carrying nobles to court. More dangerous were the great elephants, tramping by with their burdens of swaying howdahs from which veiled women peeped into the world. Some of the wealthy preferred to loll in a palanquin, a kind of bed with satin or brocade draperies, borne on the shoulders of slaves whose bare feet beat out a dusty tattoo as they ran.

The rituals of the court modulated the lives of all when the emperor was in residence behind the massive sandstone battlements of the Red Fort. The day began in the bleached dawn light when the beat of the great
dundhubi
(drum) announced the arrival of the emperor at the
jharokha-i-darshan
, the balcony of appearance, built high in the outside wall of every palace and fort. This was to show his people that he still lived and that the empire was safe. Akbar had introduced this ceremony that had its origins in the courts of the Hindu rulers. It was so vital, Jahangir wrote, that nothing, not even ‘great pain and sorrow’, would deflect him from appearing. Jahangir did, however, confess that he returned to bed for a couple of hours afterwards.

Those bold enough could seek direct redress for their ills from Jahangir. Anxious to be considered a just ruler who could
‘win the hearts of all the people and re-arrange the withered world’, early in his reign he devised what he called ‘a chain of justice’. This was an eighty-foot-long rope festooned with sixty golden bells and its task was to ‘remove the rust of oppression from the hearts of his people’
. Englishman William Hawkins wrote of the long rope stretched between a stone pillar on the riverbank and the battlements of the Agra fort:
‘This rope is hanged full of bells, plated with gold, so that the rope being shaken the bells are heard by the king, who sendeth to know the cause and doth his justice accordingly.’

Those judged to have pulled on the chain for insufficient reason risked punishment; thus it took courage to seek an audience with the emperor. Imperial etiquette was complex and demanding. Profound silence was the rule and no one, not even royal princes, could move from their allotted position in the chamber of audience without approval. Punishments were often carried out immediately in front of the emperor. Hawkins described how,
‘Right before the king standeth one of his sheriffs, together with his master hangman, who is accompanied with forty hangmen wearing on their heads a certain quilted cap, different from all others, with a hatchet on their shoulders; and others with all sorts of whips being there, ready to do what the King commands.’

Other bells rang in Agra, like those of the churches built by the Jesuits in Akbar’s reign, whose sonorous clang mingled with the muezzins’ call to prayer. Jahangir was, on the whole, tolerant of different religions, writing in his memoirs of his wish, like Akbar, to ‘follow the rule of universal peace with regard to religion’. Pietro della Valle, an Italian visitor to his court, wrote that he
‘makes no difference in his dominions between the one sort and the other and both in his court and armies, and even amongst men of the highest degree, they are [all] of equal account and consideration’
. Cows ambled at will through Agra’s streets since, out of regard for his Hindu subjects, Jahangir forbade their killing on pain of death. His tolerance was, however, more erratic than Akbar’s. Occasionally he took emotional or aesthetic exception to something – for example, angrily demolishing an idol with a pig’s head that offended him.
*

As far as his own religion was concerned, Jahangir observed the tenets of Islam but enjoyed listening to debates between Jesuits and mullahs. Sir Thomas Roe observed shrewdly that his religion was
‘his own invention’
and even suggested that Jahangir was really an atheist. In 1610 he allowed the Jesuits to baptize three sons of his dead brother Daniyal, summoning the amazed and delighted priests to the palace at midnight so he could hand the boys over to them. The conversion of his nephews did not, however, last. The Jesuits wrote with disgust that the princes
‘rejected the light and returned to their vomit’
.

Along the Jumna River were the elegant, luxurious mansions of the courtiers, with their flower-filled, tree-shaded gardens and cooling fountains. Because river frontage was so sought after, the city was, according to one European visitor,
‘much longer than it is broad’
, curving like a half-moon with the course of the river. Among the great palaces was Khurram’s, where Mumtaz settled into her own apartments within the traditional enclosed courtyard of the harem, hidden from public view in conformity with the Koran. The word ‘harem’ itself derives from the Arabic
harim
, meaning something sacred or forbidden. Accounts are silent on the fate of the Persian princess Khurram had wed two years earlier. For political reasons he would take at least one further wife, but as the court historians later wrote under his direct supervision,
‘his whole delight was centred in this illustrious lady [Mumtaz], to such an extent that he did not feel towards the others one-thousandth part of the affection that he did for her …’
For her part, Mumtaz had the happiness of a relationship that mirrored close marital bonds within her own Persian family. Her grandparents, Itimad-ud-daula and his wife, loved each other devotedly and her aunt Nur Mahal, the former Mehrunissa, was already developing a powerful bond with her new husband, Jahangir.

Nur was consolidating her central position within the huge imperial harem – a place whose seeming
‘lascivious sensuality, and wanton and reckless festivity’
, fascinated Western visitors to the Moghul court, at this time all male of course. They speculated enthusiastically about what went on within this world of women and wrote titillating accounts of how the sentinels would allow nothing of a phallic shape, not even a cucumber or a radish, to penetrate these female sanctums. The eccentric English pedestrian Thomas Coryat, who arrived at the Moghul court in 1615, went further:
‘whatsoever is brought in of virile shape’ was ‘cut and jagged for fear of converting the same to some unnatural abuse’
. In fact, the women of the harem had no need of such crude devices. Artificial phalluses of gold, silver, copper, iron, ivory, horn and wood that were hollow and smooth with a number of small protuberances for extra sensation were available in India.

The imperial harem was, of course, a sexual playground – Jahangir had at least three hundred sexual partners, girding himself for love by swallowing aphrodisiac potions. Female harem officials kept a careful record of his love-making, from the frequency to the name of his partner. If Moghul miniatures are accurate, they were sometimes even present during the emperor’s couplings, albeit with eyes decorously averted from the writhing couple.

But the harem was many other things besides. It was home to large numbers of imperial family members – mothers, aunts, sisters, cousins and widows, together with superannuated concubines, put out to grass as their sexual attraction waned. The harem also functioned as a nursery for the imperial children, who, as Khurram had been, were on occasion brought up by senior matrons of the imperial family, rather than their own mothers.