A Teardrop on the Cheek of Time Read online

  While Shah Jahan still lived, he witnessed four of his and Mumtaz Mahal’s sons fight among themselves for his throne, and the victor, the strictly orthodox Aurangzeb, murder two brothers and several of Shah Jahan’s grandchildren. As for Shah Jahan himself, he passed his final years a prisoner in the Agra fort. Here he reputedly drew out his days gazing across the Jumna towards the Taj Mahal, piling recriminations on his son for the divisions he was creating in the empire and regretting what might have been had Mumtaz Mahal, the Lady of the Taj, survived.

  The seventy-three years of Shah Jahan’s life, from 1592 to 1666, were a pivotal period in the fortunes of the Moghuls, but also a time of rapid change in the wider world which itself had a growing influence on the Moghul Empire. In the Middle East, the Ottoman Turks were rebuilding their power after their great naval defeat by Spanish and Venetian fleets at Lepanto. Under Mehmet III, who had in 1595 murdered twenty-seven of his brothers and half-brothers to win power – a number that puts into perspective the fratricidal tally at the end of Shah Jahan’s reign – and his successors, the Ottomans reconquered much of the Balkans. In 1639, they recaptured from Persia what is now Iraq and established a permanent border with the Persians. Persia would henceforth need to turn east in search of any further conquests.

  Persia had long been alternately ally and adversary of the Moghuls. The Persian emperors had provided support to the earlier Moghul emperors in time of crisis, but more recently, under the new Safawid dynasty, they had sheltered and encouraged rebels and disputed the Moghuls’ shifting northwest borders. Despite their nomadic origins in central Asia, the Moghuls looked towards Persia for their cultural inspiration. The Emperor Akbar had adopted Persian as the language of the court and members of the imperial family, as well as courtiers, were skilled in the composition of both Persian poetry and prose.

  The Moghuls also looked to Persia as a reservoir of talented manpower. Many Moghul courtiers, generals and artists were Persian-born or of Persian descent. Among the former was Amanat Khan, the calligrapher from Shiraz who was the only man Shah Jahan allowed to sign his work on the Taj Mahal. Among the latter was Mumtaz Mahal herself. Her grandfather had arrived at the Moghul court from Persia a penniless immigrant only a few decades previously and had risen to be the chief minister of Shah Jahan’s father Jahangir.

  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 so
ught 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’

  Although 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’.

  Babur’s second reign in Samarkand lasted less than a year before he was again forced to abandon the city to his rivals, slipping away with only a few followers. This was the nadir of his fortunes. He later admitted, ‘that to wander from mountain to mountain, homeless and houseless, had nothing to recommend it’. Then came the news that Kabul, another ancestral Timurid territory, had fallen to an outsider on the death of its previous ruler, one of Babur’s uncles. If Babur could capture the city he had as strong a claim to it as anyone. As he advanced, his forces grew and the incumbent ruler decamped, leaving only chaos. Babur recalled, ‘in the end I rode there and had four or five people shot and one or two dismembered. The riot ceased.’ On 14 June 1504, still only twenty-one, he took possession of Kabul. It would remain his powerbase and spiritual home for the rest of his life. Here in Kabul, Babur for the first time had leisure to indulge his inherited passion for books and for gardens.

  Despite his reputation in Europe as a savage nomad and, in Christopher Marlowe’s words, ‘the scourge of God’, Timur too had been a cultivated man. In Samarkand he had built magnificent gardens. A European ambassador described how they ‘were traversed by many channels of water which flowed among the fruit trees and gave a pleasant shade. In the centre of the avenues of trees were raised platforms.’ True to his nomadic background, Timur lived in his gardens in large tents, some made of red cloth, others of sumptuously embroidered silk. But he also built domed mosques and tombs, each with a perfect symmetry of plan.

  Babur described how he established his favourite garden in Kabul and probably anywhere: ‘I laid [it] out on a hillside facing south. In the middle a stream flows constantly past the little hill on which are the four garden plots. In the southwest there is a reservoir round which are orange trees and a few pomegranates, the whole encircled by a meadow. This is the best part of the garden, a most beautiful sight when the oranges take colour. Truly,’ he congratulated himself, ‘that garden is admirably situated.’ Even when ruling in India, Babur found time to write to his governor in Kabul that his garden should be well watered and properly stocked with flowers.

  When Babur conquered new lands, one of his first acts was to plunder the ruler’s libraries to add to his own collection.* Babur himself wrote poetry and prose and the breadth of his interest in the arts is summed up in the education he enforced on a young cousin, ‘calligraphy, reading, making verses, epistolary style, painting and illumination … such crafts as seal-engraving, jewellers’ and goldsmiths’ work’.

  However, Babur was keenly aware that if he did not keep his troops on the move in search of new territory and new plunder, their minds might turn to revolt. With Persian backing he made another foray to Samarkand. Although he captured the city and held it for eight months, he was once more forced to retreat, abandoning Samarkand to the Uzbeks. He next turned his aggressive attentions southwards to Hindustan – or northern India. Both his famous ancestors had invaded the subcontinent. In 1221 Genghis Khan had reached the River Indus, one of the major natural defensive barriers protecting northwest India, and turned back. At the age of sixty, in 1398, Timur, whose cold, determined eyes a contemporary likened to ‘candles without brilliance’, crossed the Indus over a bridge of boats with his marauding troops. They plundered and pillaged all the way to Delhi, leaving ‘a multitude of dead carcasses which infected the air’ in their wake. Timur entered Delhi in December and put the city to the sword and flame so efficiently that ‘nothing stirred not even a bird for two months’.

  However, before the flames consumed the city, Timur assembled as many of Delhi’s craftsmen – particularly stonemasons – as he could to accompany him back to Samarkand to work on his construction projects, such as the splendid turquoise-blue domed tomb
he was building for himself. Indeed, after each of his conquests Timur selected skilled artisans to beautify his capital. Glassblowers came from Damascus and silversmiths from Turkey. An ambassador described how there was ‘such a multitude’ of workers that Samarkand ‘was not large enough to hold them, and it was wonderful what a number lived under trees and in caves outside’.

  So laden with booty that according to one report they could move at no more than four miles a day, Timur and his army left India less than six months after entering it.

  Before embarking on his own conquest of India, both Babur’s army and Babur’s family received reinforcements. The army acquired cannon and matchlock muskets from the Ottoman Turks, Babur another wife, Ma’suma Sultan Begum. Although he describes how ‘upon first laying eyes on me she felt a great inclination toward me’, he does not reveal his feelings about her. But around nine months later, in March 1508, Babur greeted the birth of a son, Humayun, with unequivocal joy: ‘I gave a feast in celebration. More silver coins were piled up than had ever been seen before in one place. It was a first-rate feast.’ Humayun means ‘fortunate’, but by no means all his fortune would be good. Other sons from different wives followed: Kamran in 1509, Askari in 1516 and Hindal in 1519.