Empire of the Moghul: The Tainted Throne (53 page)

The sight restored Khurram’s confidence. Attendants were running along the battlements of the fort above, showering spectators with gold and silver coins – new minted to mark the start of his reign – and semi-precious stones – amethysts, cat’s eyes, topazes. Other servants were flinging stars and moons fashioned from thin-beaten silver and gold. It was as if the heavens were raining riches upon the earth – Moghul riches. He was master of it all and should be glorying in his power and wealth. He would not allow a few malicious words to unsettle him.

Passing through a second great gate Khurram saw before him the wide flower-filled courtyard with its bubbling fountains constructed by Akbar and beyond it the many-pillared
Hall of Public Audience where the golden throne on its marble dais awaited. His chief courtiers were already grouped beneath it in order of precedence. In just a few moments he would take his place on that throne and address his court for the first time. If he had sinned by spilling blood he would more than atone for it to his people. He would show them he deserved the throne and their love and make them rejoice that he was their emperor.

Some words of his grandfather Akbar flashed into his mind. ‘The people love show and want to be impressed by their rulers and feel awe for them. A great ruler must be like the sun – too dazzling to look upon but the source of all light and hope and warmth without whom existence would seem impossible.’ Akbar had been truly magnificent. But he, Khurram, would strive to follow him, emulate his achievements, even surpass them if he could. He would reign under the title his father had once conferred on him, Shah Jahan, Lord of the World. That golden throne on which he was about to sit would not be splendid enough for the Lord of the World. He had already visited his treasure vaults with their piles of luminous gems too numerous to count which his treasurers instead assessed by weight so that they could tell him, ‘See, Majesty, here you have half a ton of diamonds and here a ton of pearls . . .’ He would summon the best jewellers in the empire to fashion a throne in which the most glorious of his gems would be displayed. He would sit beneath a jewelled canopy supported by columns studded with rubies. On top of the canopy would be a tree symbolising the tree of life, its trunk set with diamonds and pearls and on either side of it a glittering peacock, tail outspread. Seated on his peacock throne he would indeed be too dazzling to look upon.

If it would be challenging to exceed Akbar as a great and just emperor beloved by all his people, whatever their race or religion or status, he was determined to surpass him as head of an imperial family. Akbar’s relations with his sons had been fractured and distant, just as his own had been with Jahangir. In both generations – and before that in Humayun’s time – half-brothers had contended against each other for the throne. Unlike Akbar he had the good fortune to have a united, loving family and he would make sure it stayed so. His sons and daughters, born of the same mother and brought yet closer together by all they had endured, would help him transform the dynasty. How could Dara Shukoh and Aurangzeb, having suffered imprisonment together, ever fight each other? The vicious family rivalry – the old code of
taktya takhta,
throne or coffin, that had tainted previous generations and weakened the empire with threats of civil war – would be gone for ever.

What was more, he would guard himself and his family against other weaknesses of his dynasty – the over-fondness for wine and opium that had weakened his father’s mind and that of his great-grandfather Humayun and destroyed so many members of his family – his half-brother Parvez and his uncles Daniyal and Murad. One of his first acts would be to renounce alcohol for himself and his family, even though like Akbar and Babur before him he felt strong enough to be the master of those drugs and not their servant.

A roll of drums signalled that it was time for Khurram’s elephant to halt and drop to its knees. In a moment, he would descend and advance towards the throne followed by
his sons while Arjumand’s elephant would bear her and their daughters through into the
haram.
From the women’s gallery Arjumand, his love and his comfort throughout all his misfortunes, would watch through the
jali
screen as for the first time he addressed his court. His reign was about to begin. Though it had begun in blood, together with Arjumand he would make sure it ended in glory . . .

Like his great-grandfather Babur, Jahangir wrote his own memoirs –
Tuzuk-i-Jahangiri
– which he began in 1605, the year he became emperor. Although he describes a very different world from Babur’s, Jahangir’s memoirs are also detailed and lively and often very frank. They reveal a man riven with contradiction – one moment writing lyrically of the intricate beauty of the champa flower or the exquisite taste of the flesh of a mango and at another admitting he had his father Akbar’s friend and adviser Abul Fazl assassinated because ‘he was not my friend’. In another lengthy and bitter passage he describes his alienation from his once beloved son Khurram, deriding him as ‘that one of dark fortune’ and
bi-daulat,
‘the wretch’. His adoration of Mehrunissa is clear. In one passage he describes how, firing from a litter, she killed a tiger with a single shot which is, he writes, ‘a very difficult matter’. In 1622 the increasingly frail Jahangir handed the task of writing his memoirs to Mutamid Khan, one of his scribes, who was present during
Mahabat Khan’s coup. He faithfully continued the journal until 1624 and then wrote his own account –
Iqbal-nama
– of the last three years of Jahangir’s life. There are also several other chronicles such as Ferishta’s
Gulshan-i-Ibrahami
which deal with Jahangir’s life or parts of it. Chronicles such as the
Shahjahannama
tell the story of Khurram.

Quite a few of the foreign visitors to Hindustan in Jahangir’s reign wrote vividly of what they witnessed. The book written by Sir Thomas Roe, England’s first official envoy to the Moghul court, bursts with detail and, despite its sometimes patronising tone, betrays the amazement felt by Europeans at the Moghul court’s magnificence. Other foreign sources include the writings of William Hawkins, sent to Hindustan by the East India Company, who was at Jahangir’s court at Agra from 1609 until 1611; William Finch, Hawkins’s assistant, who is the source for the story of Akbar’s concubine Anarkali, ‘Pomegranate Blossom’; Edward Terry, a clergymen who became Roe’s chaplain for a while and sailed back to England with him; and the famous English pedestrian Thomas Coryat who travelled overland to Hindustan and in 1615 arrived at Jahangir’s court. He described the fabulous ornaments of Jahangir’s elephants which included ‘furniture for their buttocks of pure gold’.

As with the three earlier novels in the Empire of the Moghul quintet,
Raiders from the North, Brothers at War
and
Ruler of the World,
the main characters in this novel – the imperial Moghul family, the Persian Ghiyas Beg and all his family including Mehrunissa and Arjumand, the opportunistic Mahabat Khan, the Abyssinian commander and former slave Malik Ambar and many others like Sir Thomas Roe – existed. Some of the subsidiary characters like Suleiman Beg, Nicholas Ballantyne
and Kamran Iqbal are composites but in turn based on real people.

The main events – Khusrau’s revolt, Khurram’s campaigns against Malik Ambar and his estrangement from his father, Mahabat Khan’s coup – are also true although I’ve omitted or changed some details and in a few cases compressed or altered timescales. Jahangir was indeed obsessed with Mehrunissa, later known as Nur Jahan, who used her influence to gain personal power and became de facto ruler of Hindustan – a remarkable achievement for a woman of that period. It’s striking that in an age when royal women were seldom depicted in paintings several of Mehrunissa have survived including the portrait described in the book. It’s clear from the sources that Mehrunissa at first promoted the marriage of her niece Arjumand to Khurram but then turned against them. The dynamics of the story needed little embroidering. Sir Thomas Roe provided a nice snapshot of a reign with all the elements of a Shakespearean tragedy: ‘a noble prince, an excellent wife, a faithful councillor, a crafty stepmother, an ambitious son, a cunning favourite . . .’ And as so often in great tragedies one overriding message comes through – that the central players will become the authors of their own destruction.

Again one of the great pleasures of writing the book was time spent travelling through India while researching. Like Khurram I went south towards the Deccan, crossing the Narmada river and travelling on through a landscape of golden eroded hills past the sandstone fortress of Asirgarh. My destination was the palace-fortress of Burhanpur on the Tapti river – once the Moghuls’ forward command centre in their wars against the Deccan sultanates and a place where many sinister and tragic events were played out. Wandering
through the crumbling remains where water once ran through marble channels to feed the exquisitely frescoed
hammam
and Khurram’s war elephants once trumpeted in the
hati mahal
I sensed something of the Moghuls’ existence in that place.

Near Jodhpur I drank bitter opium water from the palm of a village elder as Rajput warriors must have done before battle. In Agra I renewed my knowledge of many places – the Red Fort where Jahangir’s five-foot-high bath hewn from a single lump of stone that always accompanied him on the march sits in a courtyard; Ghiyas Beg’s marble-inlaid tomb built by Mehrunissa, known as ‘Itimad-ud-Daulah’s tomb’; nearby Sikandra, site of Akbar’s great sandstone tomb which was completed during Jahangir’s reign; the Chambal river with its flourishing colonies of ghariyals (fish-eating crocodiles), dolphins and Sarus cranes. It was also a good opportunity to taste some of the food described in the sources like the luscious mangos Jahangir relished and fiery Rajasthani
lal mas
– lamb cooked with chillies which by this period like pineapples and potatoes were just beginning to appear in India from the New World.

As I travelled I could still picture the Moghul armies moving slowly but deliberately across the vast landscape raising great clouds of dust. I saw them pitching their tents at night in camps the size of small towns and servants lighting the giant bowl filled with cotton seed and oil fixed on a pole twenty feet high – the
Akash-Diya,
Light of the Sky – that sent flames shooting into the night sky. I could smell the bitterish aroma of a thousand dung cooking fires and hear the voices and drums and pipes of the musicians who always accompanied a Moghul force on the move. Though Jahangir and Khurram lived nearly four hundred years ago, at times they and their world didn’t seem so far away at all.

Chapter 1

Akbar was born on 15 October 1542 and died on 15 October 1605.

Jahangir was born on 30 August 1569 and came to the throne on Akbar’s death.

Khusrau was born in August 1587 and his first rebellion against Jahangir began in April 1606.

Parvez was born in 1589.

Khurram was born on 5 January 1592.

The date of birth of Shahriyar, the child of a concubine, is not known precisely but was around the time of Akbar’s death.

Timur, a chieftain of the nomadic Barlas Turks, is better known in the west as Tamburlaine, a corruption of ‘Timur the Lame’. Christopher Marlowe’s play portrays him as ‘the scourge of God’.

Jahangir would have used the Muslim lunar calendar, but I
have converted dates into the conventional solar, Christian, calendar we use in the west.

Khusrau’s two closest commanders were indeed paraded through Lahore in skins in the way described and many others were impaled on stakes.

Chapter 2

Jahangir is said to have had Mehrunissa’s husband Sher Afghan murdered, though not by a European.

Chapter 3

Mehrunissa’s abandonment as a baby by her family is referred to in some of the chronicles, as is her dropping of her veil before Jahangir.

Chapter 4

Punishments for sexual transgression in the
haram
were severe. For example, a woman was buried up to her neck in sand and left to die in the hot sun.

Chapter 5

Khurram did indeed first meet Arjumand at the Royal Meena Bazaar. She was born in 1593.

Chapter 6

Khusrau’s second rebellion and blinding occurred in late summer 1607. Ghiyas Beg was interrogated and released and his son Mir Khan executed for complicity.

Chapter 8

Mehrunissa and Jahangir married in 1611 and Khurram and Arjumand in 1612.

Chapter 9

Khurram’s first campaign against Malik Ambar was in 1616. Jahanara, who was in fact Khurram and Arjumand’s second child – an elder sister Hur-al-Nisa died in infancy – was born in April 1614.

Chapter 11

Roe arrived in India in 1615 bearing gifts including the carriage, Mercator’s maps and paintings.

Chapter 12

Roe’s letters do indeed comment on Jahangir’s pride, his agnosticism, his religious tolerance, his cruelty and Mehrunissa’s influence. On the latter Roe described how she ‘governs him and winds him up at her pleasure’.

The portrait of Jahangir with King James at his feet is in the British Library in London.

Chapter 13

Khurram’s second campaign against Malik Ambar was in 1620.

Chapter 15

Khurram’s estrangement from his father began in 1622 though in fact Roe left India in 1619.

Chapter 21

Mahabat Khan’s coup was in 1626 – the same year that Parvez died. Jahangir died on 28 October 1627.

Chapter 24

Several writers including some European authors of the time recount the story of Khurram joining a funeral cortège to conceal his progress, some even claiming he faked a scene of his own death.

In history, Khusrau had died when in Khurram’s custody in Burhanpur in 1621. Both modern historians and contemporary observers believe Khurram was responsible. Khusrau’s wife did indeed commit suicide. It was Dawar Bakhsh, Khusrau’s eldest son, who bid for the throne on Jahangir’s death and was defeated and subsequently killed on Khurram’s orders together with Shahriyar and some others of his male relations.