A Teardrop on the Cheek of Time: The Story of the Taj Mahal (34 page)

A painting said to be of Jahanara
.

Fire was a perennial risk. The fabrics worn by the imperial women were indeed light and sheer to the point of transparency and very flammable. Jean-Baptiste Tavernier described a particular muslin so prized that
‘the merchants are not allowed to export it, and the Governor sends all of it for the Great Mogul’s seraglio and for the principal courtiers. This it is of which the sultanas and the wives of the great nobles make themselves shifts and garments for the hot weather, and the King and the nobles enjoy seeing them wearing these fine shifts and cause them to dance in them.’

An anguished Shah Jahan, cast into ‘deep gloom’, did not appear the next day but remained in the harem. He ordered holy men in the mosques to recite prayers for his daughter’s recovery, released prisoners from their captivity and donated enormous sums to the poor. He summoned dozens of doctors and surgeons, even foreign physicians, and tended Jahanara himself, ‘administering her medicine and diet, and applying and removing her bandages with his own hand’. He neglected his duties so that, ‘owing to His Majesty’s being constantly occupied in tending the invalid, he repaired to public audiences and private conferences very late and quitted them early’.

Two of the attendants who had tried to help Jahanara died of their burns – one after seven days, the other after eight. The princess herself started slowly to respond to treatment by a Persian doctor and for a while her condition improved. However, she began to deteriorate again, causing Shah Jahan to despair, until a royal page devised a dressing that after two months ‘caused the wounds to close’. In gratitude, Shah Jahan ordered the imperial kettledrums to be sounded and Jahanara to be weighed against gold – ‘an observance hitherto limited solely to the person of the Emperor’. However, not until late 1644 did Shah Jahan feel sufficiently confident of Jahanara’s complete recovery to stage a great eight-day festival of thanksgiving, during which he lavished on his convalescent daughter ‘rare gems and ornaments’, from ‘130 virgin pearls of the purest water’ to ‘a tiara formed of one immense diamond’. He also bestowed on her the revenues of the port of Surat once enjoyed by her great-aunt the Empress Nur. Surat was then the principal port where European trading nations conducted much of their business and the revenues were large. The celebrations ended with a magnificent fireworks display on the riverbank, ‘to the great delight of the bedazzled spectators’. ‘In fact,’ added Shah Jahan’s historian, ‘not since His Majesty’s auspicious accession had a jubilee such as this been celebrated …’

These events reveal Shah Jahan’s intense, even obsessive, love for his daughter. Foreigners, observing from the sidelines and eagerly receptive to rumour, saw something more sinister in the relationship: incest. They pointed out that, unlike the other royal princesses, Jahanara lived independently in her own palace outside the fort at Agra. They also noted the custom introduced by Akbar that prevented imperial princesses from marrying. Had Jahanara, they speculated, replaced Mumtaz in everything, finding in Shah Jahan a husband, and had he found a way of reincarnating his dead empress?

The Dutchman Joannes de Laet, writing in the very year of Mumtaz’s death and who, though not a traveller to India himself, collated the reports of others, claimed that
‘to so many murders of his relatives he [Shah Jahan] added incest also; for, when his beloved wife had died … he took to himself as wife his own daughter by that dead woman’
. Just a few months later Peter Mundy took up the theme:
‘The Great Moghul’s or King’s daughters are never suffered to marry (as I am informed), being an ancient custom. This Shah Jahan, among the rest, hath one named Chiminy Begum [Jahanara], a very beautiful creature by report, with whom (it was openly bruited and talked of in Agra) he committed incest, being very familiar with her many times.’

The stories persisted, cropping up in earnest letters home to England from clerks based in Agra and Surat. François Bernier, who arrived in the Moghul Empire towards the end of Shah Jahan’s reign and doubtless lapped up tales that had lost nothing in the intervening years, made the most explicit claims. Jahanara was, he wrote, ‘very handsome, of lively parts’, and had been ‘passionately beloved by her father. Rumour has it that his attachment reached a point which it is difficult to believe, the justification of which he rested on the decisions of the Mullahs … According to them, it would have been unjust to deny the King the privilege of gathering fruit from the tree he had himself planted.’

He also accused Jahanara of taking other lovers: ‘I hope I shall not be suspected of a wish to supply subjects for romance’, he wrote piously. ‘What I am writing is a matter of history, and my object is to present a faithful account of the manners of this people. Love adventures are not attended with the same danger in Europe as in Asia. In France they excite only merriment; they create a laugh, and are forgotten; but in this part of the world, few are the instances in which they are not followed by some dreadful and tragical catastrophe.’ He went on to describe an incident poised between farce and revenge tragedy. Jahanara, he suggested, had begun an affair with a young man ‘of no very exalted rank’ but handsome. The jealous Shah Jahan, alerted to his daughter’s liaison, entered her apartments ‘at an unusual and unexpected hour’, causing her lover to hide in a big cauldron used to heat water for baths. After conversing with his nervous daughter ‘on ordinary topics’ he observed that ‘the state of her skin indicated a neglect of her customary ablutions, and that it was proper she should bathe. He then commanded the eunuchs to light a fire under the cauldron, and did not retire until they gave him to understand that his wretched victim was no more.’ Bernier also reported that Shah Jahan slew another of his daughter’s lovers by smilingly handing the unfortunate youth poisoned betel to chew.

Not all Europeans, though, were convinced. The Venetian Niccolao Manucci dismissed Bernier’s stories of boiled and poisoned lovers as ‘founded entirely on the talk of low people’. He attributed the charge of incest to the fact that Jahanara served her father ‘with the greatest love and diligence in order that Shah Jahan should accede to her petitions. It was from this cause that the common people hinted that she had intercourse with her father …’ Manucci claimed to have first-hand knowledge of happenings within Jahanara’s mansion. He described how ‘… the princess was fond of drinking wine, which was imported for her from Persia, Kabul and Kashmir. But the best liquor she drank was distilled in her own house. It was a most delicious spirit, made from wine and rosewater, flavoured with many costly spices and aromatic drugs. Many a time she did me the favour of ordering some bottles of it to be sent to my house, in sign of her gratitude for my curing people in her harem … The lady’s drinking was at night, when various delightful pranks, music, dancing, and acting were going on around her. Things arrived at such a pass that sometimes she was unable to stand, and they had to carry her to bed.’ As if anticipating questions he added, ‘I say this because I was admitted on familiar terms to this house, and I was deep in the confidence of the principal ladies and eunuchs in her service.’
*

The official Moghul sources are silent on any incestuous behaviour, portraying Jahanara as an adored daughter, nothing more. Since Shah Jahan approved every word of the court histories, this is not surprising. At this distance in time, allegations of incest are as hard to prove as they are to dismiss. The close bonds between Shah Jahan and Jahanara clearly provoked comment. It is plausible that an emperor disorientated by a terrible grief found physical solace in a daughter who closely resembled the young Mumtaz. It is also possible that a young princess passionately devoted to her father, perhaps fearing for his reason, acquiesced. However, it seems more likely that, while Shah Jahan may have harboured sexual feelings, conscious or unconscious, they were not fulfilled. In later years, rebellious sons would accuse him of many things but not of incestuous relations with their sister.

Also, Shah Jahan’s obsession with Jahanara fitted a pattern that was not necessarily sexual. His deepest feelings seem to have been reserved for the women in his life. He had been broken by grief when his mother died and his enduring, exclusive love for Mumtaz had been as much about companionship and empathy as about sex.

Whatever the reality of their relationship, Jahanara’s influence over Shah Jahan was beyond question. Manucci was only one of many to observe that
‘she obtained from her father whatever she asked’
. In 1644, the year of her recovery from the near-fatal fire, Jahanara interceded on behalf of her brother Aurangzeb, who, soon after her accident, had clashed with Shah Jahan.

Until this time, Aurangzeb had been the very model of a martial Moghul princeling. In 1635, Shah Jahan had sent the then sixteen-year-old Aurangzeb to war. The enemy was the wealthy Raja of Orchha, Jhujhar Singh, whose territory lay in a richly forested region about 100 miles south of Agra. The raja had rebelled at the start of Shah Jahan’s reign but had been pacified shortly before the much bigger campaign that had taken Shah Jahan and Mumtaz to the Deccan in 1629. However, the raja had subsequently shown unwelcome signs of independence, prompting Shah Jahan to act. Aurangzeb’s forces overpowered the raja, who fled in panic into the forests, where he was murdered by wild Gond tribesmen. Aurangzeb pursued the remainder of his family and captured them before the women had time to commit the rite of
jauhur
, burning themselves on great funeral pyres, which, a court historian disapprovingly observed,
‘is one of the benighted practices of Hindustan’
.

Tellingly, Shah Jahan ordered the Hindu temple built by Jhujhar Singh’s father – the man who had so obligingly murdered Akbar’s friend and chronicler Abul Fazl at Jahangir’s request – to be pulled down and replaced by a mosque. This was a signal of Shah Jahan’s drift away from the religious tolerance of his father and grandfather. The balanced pragmatism of his younger days was yielding to a more rigid, regimented outlook. The first signs had come in the immediate aftermath of Mumtaz’s death. In early 1632, he had ordered the destruction of all newly built Hindu temples and was especially adamant that his orders be enforced in that
‘great stronghold of infidelity’
, the Hindu holy city of Benares. He also banned any further temple building. His actions may have been prompted by grief and a sense that Mumtaz’s death had been a punishment for his leniency towards unbelievers. They may have been in response to pressure from orthodox mullahs. Though a Sunni Muslim himself, Shah Jahan had, on his accession, dismissed certain hard-line Sunni clerics and perhaps felt the need to placate them.

Also in 1632, Shah Jahan had ordered the first full-scale attack on Christians in the Moghul Empire. His target was the Portuguese in their long-established trading settlement on the River Hugli in Bengal, northwest of present-day Calcutta. Shah Jahan had always been more suspicious of foreigners than had his father Jahangir, as English ambassador Sir Thomas Roe had complained bitterly. The Portuguese, as well as being ‘unbelievers’, had, according to Shah Jahan’s historian, compounded their sins by fortifying their town
‘with cannon and matchlocks and other instruments of war’
and attacked neighbouring villages, forcibly converting people to Christianity and selling others into slavery.

If this was not enough, Shah Jahan had personal motives for attacking these particular
‘heretics’
. During his rebellion against his father, the Portuguese had refused to help him and, indeed, had aided the imperial forces fighting against him. On Shah Jahan’s accession they had conspicuously failed to offer the traditional congratulations and gifts. Some accounts also suggest a link between Shah Jahan’s vendetta against the Portuguese and Mumtaz. They describe how, when Shah Jahan and Mumtaz were fleeing through Bengal, the Portuguese took advantage of their plight as they passed close to Hugli. According to Niccolao Manucci,
‘Some Portuguese sallied forth and seized two beloved female slaves of [Mumtaz Mahal]. This lady sent word to them that it would be better for them to help a prince then seeking refuge in flight than to attempt to rob him. Therefore she urgently prayed them to send her the two slave girls. But the Portuguese paid no heed to her request, an act which cost them dear …’

The reckoning was indeed expensive. On Shah Jahan’s order the Governor of Bengal besieged the settlement, placing a string of boats across the river to prevent the Portuguese from escaping by boat and then detonating a huge mine beneath the fortifications. In the ensuing panic,
‘warriors of Islam’
overran the settlement, capturing over 4,000 people, mostly women and children, who were despatched on an eleven-month march to Agra. François Bernier described their fate:
‘The handsome women, as well married as single, became inmates of the seraglio; those of a more advanced age, or of inferior beauty, were distributed among the Omrahs [nobles]; little children underwent the rite of circumcision, and were made pages; and the men of adult age, allured, for the most part, by fair promises, or terrified by the daily threat of throwing them under the feet of elephants, renounced the Christian faith.’
According to Lahori, those who refused to convert were
‘kept in continual confinement’ and ‘such of their idols as were likenesses of the prophets were thrown into the Jumna, the rest were broken to pieces’
. Shah Jahan also ordered the demolition of churches in Agra and Lahore erected during his father’s reign. The loud chiming of the clock in the steeple of the Agra church had been heard in every part of the city. Perhaps Shah Jahan did not wish the infidel sound to penetrate Mumtaz’s resting place.

Shah Jahan’s punitive actions against Christian communities did not, in fact, continue. The Jesuits in Agra, themselves harassed in the early years of Shah Jahan’s reign, managed to rehabilitate themselves and even to intercede for some of the captive fathers from Hugli. However, Shah Jahan’s gestures towards fundamentalism had been welcomed by the young Aurangzeb, whose religious vision of the world was more bleakly austere than any of his Moghul forebears and who would be relentless in his pursuit of it.