A Teardrop on the Cheek of Time Read online

  Humayun’s tomb was the first building in India to combine marble and sandstone in such great quantities. Some architectural historians have even suggested that in the use of white (marble) and red (sandstone) the ecumenical, inclusive Akbar was associating the Moghuls with the two highest castes of the Hindu social structure – the white of the Brahmins and the red of the military Kshatriyas.

  Akbar had gone on to rebuild the fortress of Agra beside the Jumna and, indeed, to show his own strength by running around the one-and-a-half-mile sandstone battlements with a man under each arm. However, Fatehpur Sikri best illustrates his architectural vision. The city is in the form of a vast quadrilateral, fortified on three sides and protected on the fourth by a ridged hill. Although the layout of the city follows Moghul principles, the design of the buildings, many of which survive today in a remarkably good state of preservation, is almost entirely Hindu in inspiration. The city is constructed of sandstone, a rock that can be carved by a skilled mason in much the same way as wood by a carpenter. The sharply etched decoration therefore much resembles the ornate woodcarvings on Hindu temples. The qualities of sandstone also allowed prefabrication. Father Antonio Monserrate, a European Jesuit priest, noted, ‘in order to prevent himself being deafened by the noise of the tools Akbar had everything cleverly fashioned elsewhere in accordance with the exact plan of the building and then brought to the spot, and there fitted and fastened together’. Miniature paintings show Akbar taking a detailed interest in the work of the stonemasons of Fatehpur Sikri. Monserrate went further, reporting that ‘Akbar sometimes quarries stone himself along with the other workers. Nor does he shrink … from practising, for the sake of amusement, the craft of an ordinary artisan.’

  While prefabrication was not universal at Fatehpur Sikri, as Monserrate suggested, it may well have been one reason why the nine-gated walled city was complete in seven years. Within the walls were the royal mint, bathhouses, barracks, halls, gardens, mosques, quarters for the nobles and, of course, Akbar’s own palace. His personal apartments overlooked the shining Anup Talao, or ‘Peerless Pool’.

  The huge harem, protected by a guard-house and by thick metal-studded gates, resembles a fortress. The women’s only contact with the outside world was through peeping out from screened balconies set high in the walls. Yet behind these thick walls was a luxurious pleasure palace. Fountains played among beds of bright flowers and the azure roof tiles shone in the sunlight. When refreshing breezes blew, the women gathered in a high pavilion – the Hawa Mahal, or ‘wind palace’ – to enjoy them. The red sandstone carvings of their apartments and of the interlinking courtyards had a Hindu voluptuousness. Akbar, who could access the harem through a network of screened corridors, reputedly played hide-and-seek with his women or a kind of chess using human pieces.*

  The most striking building of all is a hall whose interior is dominated by a broad, richly carved pillar supporting a platform connected by slim, diagonal bridges to hanging galleries at each corner. Historians argue about its precise use, but most consider that Akbar used it as an audience chamber. When he held council, he would sit on the circular platform, soliciting advice from those on the balconies, who could, if necessary, approach him along the bridges.

  Ralph Fitch, an early English trader, was so impressed by Agra and Fatehpur Sikri that he wrote, ‘[they] are two very great cities. Either of them much greater than London and very populous.’ However, the magnificent city of Fatehpur Sikri remained fully inhabited for just fourteen years, after which, beginning in 1586, it was gradually abandoned. The reason has been much debated but never resolved. A poor water supply and unsatisfactory communication links may have been contributing factors. Unlike Agra, Fatehpur Sikri did not sit on one of the great trunk roads connecting Akbar’s empire; nor was it on the Jumna, a major waterway for goods and travellers, particularly for those making the journey to and from Delhi. However, Akbar perhaps never took a formal decision to leave Fatehpur Sikri – it just happened over time in response to his changing priorities.

  Akbar’s attention had been caught by, among other things, a very different place – Kashmir. Captured in 1586 after a short campaign, it won the heart of Akbar and his descendants. The Vale of Kashmir nestles among high mountains in northern India and is only about ninety miles long and twenty-five miles wide. Watered by the River Jhelum, it is a verdant Shangri-La, its slopes cloaked in rhododendrons and juniper, spruce and cedar, while poplars and pines fringe its lakes. Akbar particularly enjoyed the blazing colours of autumn and the violet saffron fields of summer.

  By the mid-1580s Akbar, then in his forties, was at the height of his pomp and power, an impressive figure, regal and charismatic in the eyes of all who saw him, Indians and Europeans alike. Father Monserrate described him as ‘of a stature and of a countenance well-fitted to his royal dignity so that one could easily recognise even at the first glance that he is the king. He has broad shoulders, somewhat bandy legs well-suited to horsemanship and a light-brown complexion … His expression is tranquil, serene and open, full also of dignity and, when he is angry, of awful majesty … It is hard to exaggerate how accessible he makes himself to all … for he creates an opportunity every day for any of the common people or of the nobles to see him and converse with him; and he endeavours to show himself pleasant-spoken and affable rather than severe toward all who come … it is remarkable how great an effect this courtesy and affability have in attaching to him the minds of his subjects … He has an acute insight and shows much wise foresight.’

  Akbar’s son Salim did, however, point to one failing. Despite the imperial library having grown to 25,000 sumptuously bound manuscripts, his father was ‘illiterate. Yet from constantly conversing with learned and clever persons, his language was so polished that no one could discover from his conversation that he was entirely uneducated.’ Akbar’s intelligence was also evident from his deep curiosity about the wider world which made him ‘well disposed towards foreigners’.

  In 1577 a particularly well-educated foreigner, an ambitious Persian nobleman named Mirza Ghiyas Beg, arrived at Akbar’s court. Charming as he was poor, this economic migrant had deserted his homeland to travel with his heavily pregnant wife and three young children through wild and lonely country in the hope of building his fortunes in the Moghuls’ service. The journey was arduous and dangerous, despite the fact that, for greater security, they had joined a caravan. While still in Persia, thieves attacked the family and stole everything they had except two mules. Taking it in turns to ride the stumbling beasts, the bedraggled party reached Kandahar, where Ghiyas Beg’s wife gave birth to a daughter. They named her Mehrunissa, ‘the Sun of Women’.

  According to some chroniclers, the desperate, destitute parents abandoned the baby to die of exposure but her tiny form was spotted by the caravan’s wealthy leader, who scooped her up, sought out her mother and promised to help the family. Other tales relate how the parents could not, after all, face leaving the new-born infant. Ghiyas Beg rushed back to the tree under which they had left her to find the gurgling Mehrunissa caught in the coils of a great black serpent. At the frantic father’s approach the snake unravelled itself to slink away, leaving Ghiyas Beg to reclaim his child.

  Whatever the reality, Mehrunissa survived the early, uncertain hours of her life to travel on with her family into Moghul territory. Reaching Fatehpur Sikri, Ghiyas Beg, in accordance with the custom for strangers arriving at court, was presented to Akbar. The Persian adventurer made an immediate impression. He had inherited the eloquence of his father, a smooth-tongued poet who had risen to become wazir, chief minister, of Isfahan. He was also helped by the fact that other members of his family had already joined the Moghul court and rendered useful service. None would, however, achieve the success of Ghiyas Beg, whose family would capture successive emperors both emotionally and intellectually. His daughter and granddaughter would become Moghul empresses and his great-grandson would ascend the Moghul throne.

  Sketch of Akbar.
/>
  Ghiyas Beg’s progress was at first modest. Akbar appointed him to a middling rank and sent him off to be the treasurer of the northern outpost of Kabul. In 1596, he was placed in charge of the imperial court buildings back in Agra. During the intervening years Mehrunissa had grown into a beautiful, accomplished woman who, according to one account, ‘in music, in dancing, in poetry, in painting had no equal among her sex. Her disposition was volatile, her wit lively and satirical, her spirit lofty and uncontrolled.’ The subtext is that she had sex appeal. She had been married at seventeen to a well-born, battle-hardened Persian soldier who had distinguished himself in Akbar’s campaigns and whose courage would win him the title Sher Afghan, ‘Tiger Slayer’.

  Several accounts suggest that, either by accident or design, Mehrunissa had already caught the susceptible eye of Prince Salim. According to one, Salim called on her father and ‘the ladies, according to custom, were introduced in their veils’. Mehrunissa danced before the inflamed Salim, who ‘could hardly be restrained by the rules of decency … When his eyes seemed to devour her, she, as by accident, dropped her veil; and shone upon him …’ Some chroniclers claim that Akbar arranged her marriage to put her out of his son’s grasp, but others hold that Salim conceived his passion for her after her betrothal and that Akbar ‘sternly refused to commit a piece of injustice’ by halting the marriage.

  The many accounts were written years after these events, some while Mehrunissa was the most powerful woman in India, others after her fall from power. Some writers were anxious to present Mehrunissa and her family as scheming parvenus, while others were striving to portray a noble and enduring love. The truth is as veiled as Mehrunissa herself, living the secluded life of an aristocratic girl within the women’s quarters of Ghiyas Beg’s house. It would have been hard, if not impossible, for Salim to have made overt advances to her here or, indeed, at court. Although as the daughter of a trusted courtier Mehrunissa would have been invited to visit the ladies of the imperial harem, passing through the ranks of watchful eunuchs and muscular female guards into the scented, silken interior to drop her veil and sing and dance, no ungelded adult male except the emperor was allowed within the precincts.

  Salim already had a clutch of wives, primarily dynastic alliances to bind the diverse elements of Akbar’s empire. His first marriage in 1585 was to his cousin Man Bai, daughter of the Hindu Raja of Amber (Jaipur). In 1587 she bore his first son, Khusrau. Salim’s second son, Parvez, was born to a Muslim wife in 1589. However, it was the arrival of his third son, born on 5 January 1592 in Lahore to another Hindu princess, the graceful and witty Jodh Bai of Marwar (Jodhpur), that most pleased Akbar. Akbar and his astrologers saw the birth as most auspicious. The child would be ‘a riband in the cap of royalty and more resplendent than the sun’. More significantly, the conjunction of the planets at the moment of his birth was the same as at the birth of Timur; the year of his birth was the millennium year 1000 of the Islamic calendar; while the month of his birth was the same as that of the Prophet Muhammad. The emperor named him ‘Khurram’, meaning ‘joyous’. The child, who would become the Emperor Shah Jahan, was from his earliest moments Akbar’s most adored grandchild.

  The following year, Ghiyas Beg also celebrated the birth of a child – a granddaughter born to one of his sons and named Arjumand Banu. During her lifetime, the world would know her as Mumtaz Mahal, ‘Chosen One of the Palace’ and Shah Jahan’s greatest love. Her early death would translate her into the emblematic ‘Lady of the Taj’.

  Akbar placed the baby prince Khurram in the care of his first wife, named Rukhiya Begum. The childless woman was also Akbar’s cousin, being a daughter of Hindal, and was a devout Muslim. The Hindu Jodh Bai was consoled with a magnificent gift of rubies and pearls. In line with Moghul custom, Khurram began his formal education at the age of four years, four months and four days. Akbar himself escorted the bejewelled, silk-clad princeling to the imperial mosque school, where leading scholars instructed him in the arts, literature and the history of his forebears, especially the great Timur. Perhaps predictably, the court chroniclers claimed that the young prince showed a remarkable grasp of detail and a powerful memory, but more unusually they described how, even at a young age, he demonstrated a sensual side, delighting in drenching his clothes in perfume and in the touch of brilliant, smooth-cut gems. Historians have pointed out that there is no record of Khurram’s circumcision, presumably a major celebration, and have suggested that, in line with his grandfather Akbar’s ambivalence towards the procedure, he may never have been circumcised. As he grew, Akbar taught him to hunt and fight. When Khurram was only six years old, Akbar took him on campaign south to the Deccan, appointing a formidable rider, marksman and swordsman as his tutor. On the journey he took his first shot at a leopard and wounded the beast. Shortly afterwards Khurram caught smallpox but survived unblemished, to his grandfather’s relief. When he was nine years old, Akbar invited the little boy to join his war council.

  Akbar’s love for his grandson contrasted with his ambivalent feelings for Salim, who recalled somewhat wistfully in his memoirs Akbar’s attentiveness to Khurram and how the old emperor lauded the young prince as his own ‘true son’. Abul Fazl was also struck that ‘the affectionate sovereign loved grandsons more than sons’. Yet Akbar had once doted on Salim. As a child he too had been the indulged darling of the harem whose early signs of prowess at hunting and the martial arts had delighted Akbar. Aged just twelve, he had been given command of a large detachment and gone on campaign with Akbar. Nevertheless, as Salim grew into active and able manhood, Akbar’s affection waned. The ageing emperor perhaps felt threatened by what he perceived as the restless, greedy ambition of his son.

  There are also hints in the account of an English visitor to the Moghul court, merchant William Finch, and in later Moghul chronicles of sexual rivalry between the two. They claim that Salim fell in love with Akbar’s loveliest concubine, Anarkali, meaning ‘Pomegranate Blossom’, and that on discovering the affair Akbar had her walled up alive.

  Salim certainly felt insecure. Since the Moghuls’ ancestors did not always observe the rules of primogeniture, though he was Akbar’s eldest son he could not assume the throne was his. Faced with such uncertainty, Salim refused to command military expeditions to remote regions in case his father died while he was too far from the seat of power to claim the crown. Akbar in turn began openly favouring his younger sons, Prince Murad and Prince Daniyal, both hopeless drunkards.

  Salim too enjoyed drinking. At the age of eighteen he tasted a glass of sweet yellow wine, which, he confessed, ‘I drank and liked the feeling I got.’ He started drinking every day, soon abandoning wine for spirits. By his late twenties he was swallowing ‘twenty phials of double-distilled spirits’ a day and existing on a meagre diet of bread and radishes. Racked by hangovers and with his hands shaking so badly that he could no longer hold a glass, he sought the help of court physicians. They warned that if he did not desist he would be dead in six months. Salim cut back to six cups of wine mixed with spirits and fourteen grains of opium a day. The process of drying out, however incomplete, probably did not improve his temper or make him more forgiving of his father’s neglect.

  In 1601, a resentful Salim rebelled. His revolt was somewhat half-hearted and he contented himself with marching aimlessly hither and thither with a force of 30,000 while tentatively calling himself emperor. Father and son seem to have striven to avoid an open fight. Instead, Salim turned his aggression towards Abul Fazl, who was, as well as Akbar’s chronicler, one of his closest advisers. So close that, when Akbar was gored in his testicles while out hunting, Abul Fazl proudly recalled that the application of ointment was left ‘to the writer of this book of fortune’. Latterly, the fifty-two-year-old had also become one of Akbar’s more successful generals and was away on campaign at the time of the revolt. By 1602 Akbar had become sufficiently perturbed to recall Abul Fazl to Agra. Salim disliked and distrusted the soldier scholar who, as he later wrote in his me
moirs, was ‘no friend of mine’ and plotted his assassination. As Abul Fazl hastened to his emperor’s side, he was murdered by a local raja whom Salim offered to reward ‘if he would stop that sedition monger and kill him’. According to some accounts, Salim ordered Abul Fazl’s severed head, sent to him by the raja in triumph, to be tossed into a common latrine.*

  Akbar learned of the murder while playing with his tame pigeons and collapsed in tearful anguish. He wanted to punish Salim but was in a difficult situation. Murad had died, quivering in the throes of delirium tremens, and Daniyal was also busily drinking himself to death. Despite his father’s frantic efforts to keep alcohol from him, his followers brought wine past Akbar’s spies, hidden in cows’ intestines, which they wound round their bodies under their clothes. Akbar realized that he and Salim must be reconciled to protect the Moghul dynasty. In line with Moghul tradition, the imperial ladies were the go-betweens. One of Akbar’s senior wives persuaded the disgruntled prince to return with her to Agra, where he was received by his grandmother Hamida, Humayun’s reluctant bride of more than half a century before. The old lady induced Salim to prostrate himself at his father’s feet. In a designedly theatrical scene Akbar lifted his wayward son in his arms, embraced him and placed his imperial turban on his head – a sign to onlookers that Salim was his heir. He ordered drums to be beaten loudly and joyously to announce the reconciliation.