A Teardrop on the Cheek of Time: The Story of the Taj Mahal (3 page)

Shah Jahan’s lifetime saw vigorous European expansion and a shifting balance between European powers. The outcome of the Thirty Years War would keep Germany fragmented until the rise of the Prussian Empire some two hundred years later. Catholic France, however, would soon reach the summit of its power under Louis XIV, whose centralized, autocratic court bore many resemblances to that of the Moghuls and who, like the Moghul emperors, believed in the Divine Right of Kings.

The Protestant English Parliament of course did not share such views and, in 1649, tried and executed Charles I, substituting for him a Puritan republic until in 1660 they replaced that with a restored monarchy restricted by Parliament. The English founded their first colony in America at Jamestown in Virginia in 1607, the year of Shah Jahan’s betrothal to Mumtaz Mahal. In 1664, two years before Shah Jahan’s death, they acquired from the Dutch the town of New Amsterdam and renamed it ‘New York’. The Dutch consoled themselves with their burgeoning, monopolistic spice trade in the East, where the Dutch East India Company had already established its headquarters at Batavia (modern Jakarta) in 1619.

The Spanish had long been masters of much of South and Central America. However, by Shah Jahan’s death they were a fading power. Like their contemporaries the Moghuls, they had failed to develop a trading system independent of regal bureaucracy and cupidity. In 1655, the English Republic captured Jamaica from Spain and from there her privateers or pirates plundered Spanish wealth. More insidiously, English free traders began to co-operate with local Spanish merchants to trade outside the bounds of the Spanish customs regime. The English were also bringing their own brand of free trade to other parts of the world. In Africa they traded with local rulers for the black slaves they first took to Virginia in 1619 and in the East Indies they began to encroach on Spanish and Dutch monopolies.

When Shakespeare and his contemporaries such as Christopher Marlowe referred to ‘India’ it was as a synonym for exotic wealth in gems and spices. The English East India Company was chartered in 1600 and began trading on India’s west coast where the Portuguese had been established since 1510. The English and the Portuguese were, however, mere lowly observers at the court of the Moghuls. A miniature portrait of Shah Jahan’s father, Jahangir, shows him ruling the world while an insignificant James I of England is pictured beneath in a subordinate position looking somewhat sour even if he is wearing only slightly fewer pearls and jewels on his person and clothes than Jahangir.

In architecture, Shah Jahan had been born just as St Peter’s in Rome was finished and died just as Christopher Wren was preparing to work on his masterpiece, the world’s first Protestant cathedral, St Paul’s in London. The walled enclosure of the Taj Mahal was big enough to encompass the whole of St Peter’s, including the later piazza designed by Bernini and constructed during Shah Jahan’s last decade. St Paul’s rises 365 feet above the ground, compared to the Taj Mahal at over 240 feet, but its footprint is much smaller. In Persia, in the southern city of Isfahan, Shah Abbas had built the beautiful Shah Mosque between about 1611 and 1630. It shares many architectural features with the Taj Mahal, from the swelling, double-skinned dome with a massive, weight-saving void between the outer and inner surfaces, to the grand rectangular
iwans
– framed recessed entrance arches – dominating the main façades. However, covered in blue, soft yellow and green tiles, its patterned exuberance contrasts with the opalescent serenity of the Taj Mahal’s white marble and shows how far Moghul architecture had diverged from its Persian influences, despite the continuing employment of Persian immigrants in the design and decoration of Moghul buildings.

During Shah Jahan’s lifetime Europe’s most prominent artists included Caravaggio, Velasquez and Rubens but also a most notable collector of Moghul drawings and paintings, Rembrandt. Rembrandt made sketches based on the paintings and seems to have taken a particular interest in the jewellery displayed. That Rembrandt copied paintings made by Shah Jahan’s painters, who had themselves been influenced by European works given by travellers to his father Jahangir, is just one example of how, even then, artistic influences could migrate around the world. Chauvinistic European historians conscious of the Taj’s greatness would soon claim that its intricate semiprecious stone inlay and perhaps its design were influenced or even undertaken by Europeans. Such rivalries about the Taj’s origins persist. In India today some even claim the Taj Mahal as an entirely Hindu achievement rather than a Moghul synthesis of Islamic and indigenous influences. Others insist that it is a wholly Muslim creation which should be managed under Sharia law.

Rembrandt’s sketch of a Moghul ruler
.

Perhaps even more than their counterparts in Europe, the Moghuls were keen to record their actions and the detail of their lives. The Emperors Babur and Jahangir kept diaries. Akbar and Shah Jahan each employed court chroniclers to write the history of their reign from day to day and took care to scrutinize and to approve the results. Some courtiers kept diaries. Many of the imperial diaries and other memoirs have survived. Taken together with the accounts of European visitors to India, printed to satisfy public demand for accounts of the fabled ‘Great Moghul’, these official chronicles and private memoirs provide a surprisingly intimate and multifaceted view of the imperial family and their doings, including the creation of the Taj Mahal.

The story of the Taj and the love that created it has the cadences of Greek tragedy and the ripe emotion of grand opera. It is a tale of overwhelming passion, set against a world of imperious patriarchs, jealous sons and powerful, charismatic women dominating court politics from behind the silken screens of the harem. The fate of an empire of a hundred million souls hung on the relationships within the imperial family as sons sought to depose fathers, brother killed brother, and empresses and would-be empresses plotted and schemed. Yet a veil of glittering wealth, supreme power and an exotic location cannot obscure the universal but deeply personal nature of the emotions that gave rise to the Taj Mahal. At the heart of the Taj are questions transcending time and cultures about the nature of love, of grief and of beauty, and of whether these intangible qualities can be given substantive and enduring earthly expression.

1

‘A Place of Few Charms’

A
lthough he was the founding father of the Moghul Empire, Babur had a father of his own, the King of Ferghana, a small state to the east of Samarkand in central Asia. He was, in Babur’s words, ‘short and fat … he wore his tunic so tight that to fasten the strings he had to draw in his belly, if he let himself go the ties often broke’. He was ‘brave and valiant, good-natured, talkative and fun to be with. He packed quite a punch, however, and no one was ever hit by him who did not bite the dust. His urge to expand his territory turned many a truce into a battle and many a friend into a foe.’ On 8 June 1494, this small, stout man was inspecting a dovecote on his castle walls when the parapet collapsed, precipitating him and the dovecote into the ravine below. Thus, wrote Babur, ‘in the twelfth year of my age I became ruler in the country of Ferghana’.

Ferghana was only one of several principalities in what is now Uzbekistan and Afghanistan whose rulers were in constant conflict to claim a greater share of the fragmented legacy of two preceding dynasties – those of Genghis Khan and of Timur. Most of the contenders could claim descent from one or the other; Babur could claim both. On his mother’s side Babur was a direct descendant of the legendary Genghis Khan. When Genghis was born, the son of a local headman on the Mongolian plains, he is said to have been clutching a blood clot in his fist, the symbol of his warrior destiny. When he died in 1227, he was known as the ‘Oceanic Ruler’. He and his horde of horsemen had plundered half of the known world from Beijing to the Danube.

Timur was Babur’s great-great-great-grandfather on his father’s side. Better known to Europeans as Tamburlaine from a corruption of his nickname ‘Timur the Lame’, he was a chieftain of the nomadic Barlas Turks who, a hundred years before Babur’s birth, had once more established a vast empire stretching from the borders of China to Turkey with its capital at the fabled golden city of Samarkand. Like that of Genghis Khan before it, the empire of Timur was divided on his death among his family rather than being left to a single heir; hence its rapid disintegration.

Babur was much prouder of his Timurid, or what he thought of as his Turkish, descent than of his Mongol inheritance. His comment that ‘were the Mongols a race of angels it would still be a vile nation’ encapsulates his view of them and he would have been much affronted that the dynasty he was to initiate in India became known as the ‘Moghuls’, from a corruption of the Persian word for Mongol.

Nevertheless, it was his Mongol grandmother who steered Babur through the early adolescent years of his rule. The first but not the last woman to guide the Moghuls from behind the purdah veil, she was, according to her grandson, ‘intelligent and a good planner. Most affairs were settled with her counsel.’ Under her tutelage Babur had within three years captured Samarkand, but his rule lasted only a hundred days. The loss of the fabled golden city was, he wrote, ‘difficult for me. I could not help crying a good deal.’ He did, however, recover Samarkand less than three years later, in July 1500.

In the interval Babur had married but had not enjoyed the experience. ‘In the early days after the wedding I was bashful, I went to her only every ten, fifteen or twenty days. Later on I lost my fondness for her altogether … Once every forty days my mother drove me to her with all the severity of a quartermaster.’ Babur confessed that his affections were engaged elsewhere in an adolescent crush on a market boy named Baburi: ‘I developed a strange inclination for him – rather I made myself miserable over him. Before this experience I had never felt a desire for anyone. Occasionally Baburi came to me but I was so bashful that I could not look him in the face, much less converse freely with him. There was no possibility of speaking coherently.’ After some three years of marriage Babur’s wife left him, as he recorded, ‘at her elder sister’s instigation’.