THE STORY OF THE TAJ MAHAL
In 1631, the heartbroken Moghul Emperor, Shah Jahan, ordered the construction of a monument of unsurpassed splendour and majesty in memory of his beloved wife. Theirs was an extraordinary story of passionate love: although almost constantly pregnant – she bore him fourteen children – Mumtaz Mahal followed her husband on every military campaign, in order that they might never be apart.
But then Mumtaz died in childbirth. Blinded by grief, Shah Jahan created an exquisite and extravagant memorial for her on the banks of the river Jumna. A gleaming mausoleum of flawless symmetry, the Taj Mahal was built from milk-white marble and rose sandstone, and studded with a fortune in precious jewels. It took twenty years to complete and involved over 20,000 labourers, depleting the Moghul treasuries. But Shah Jahan was to pay a greater price for his obsession. He ended his days imprisoned by his own son in Agra Fort, gazing across the river at the monument to his love. The building of the Taj Mahal had set brother against brother and son against father in a savage conflict that pushed the seventeenth century’s most powerful empire into irreversible decline.
The story behind the Taj Mahal has the cadences of Greek tragedy, the carnage of a Jacobean revenge play and the ripe emotion of grand opera. With the storytelling skills that characterize their previous books, in this compelling narrative history Diana and Michael Preston succeed in putting a revealing human face on the famous marble masterpiece.
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A TEARDROP ON THE CHEEK OF TIME
A CORGI BOOK: 9780552154154
First published in Great Britain in 2007 by Doubleday
a division of Transworld Publishers
Corgi edition published 2008
Copyright © Diana and Michael Preston 2008
Diana and Michael Preston have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the authors of this work.
This book is a work of non-fiction.
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Cover Page
About the Book
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Acclaim for A Teardrop on the Cheek of Time
About the Author
Also by Diana and Michael Preston
Acknowledgements
Genealogy
Map
Prologue
1 ‘A Place of Few Charms’
2 Allah Akbar
3 ‘Peerless Pearls and Heart-pleasing Stuffs’
4 The Warrior Prince
5 Emperor in Waiting
6 Chosen One of the Palace
7 The Peacock Throne
8 ‘Build for Me a Mausoleum’
9 ‘Dust of Anguish’
10 ‘The Builder Could Not Have Been of This Earth’
11 ‘This Paradise-like Garden’
12 The Illumined Tomb
13 ‘The Sublime Throne’
14 ‘Sharper than a Serpent’s Tooth’
15 Fall of the Peacock Throne
16 ‘His Own Tomb on the Other Side of the River’
Postscript
Bibliography
Notes and Sources
Illustration Credits
For friends and family
Acclaim for A Teardrop on the Cheek of Time:
‘The Prestons’ delightful and definitive book tells the monument’s full, extraordinary story, not only of the vast undertaking of the building itself, but also the operatic sweep of the dynastic and romantic convulsions behind the project … Combines tremendous scholarship with a host of cracking stories well told’ Sunday Telegraph
‘Although Diana and Michael Preston’s book is centred on the Taj, it is largely taken up with an enthralling history of extraordinary kings and their peerlessly cultured and opulent lives … truly unforgettable’ Daily Mail
‘Considerable research leavened by colourful story-telling … every page offers a vivid image or telling detail that captures the deeply weird and violent world of the Moghuls. We're given internecine rivalry; the paranoia, poisonings, tortures and killings; the flaying, blinding, knifing, the general destruction of life but, above all, the luxury’ Spectator
‘The Prestons tell the story engagingly and well, providing a lucid narrative sweep that extends from the arrival of the first Mughal invaders to the manner in which Lord Curzon’s obsessive determination to preserve India’s past ensured the restoration of the Taj’Charles Allen, Literary Review
‘A highly readable potted history of the Moghul empire that produced this extraordinary building … thoroughly enjoyable’Financial Times
www.rbooks.co.uk
Diana Preston’s most recent books are Wilful Murder: The Sinking of the Lusitania (now also a major BBC1 drama documentary), A Pirate of Exquisite Mind and Before the Fall-out (selected for the Samuel Johnson Prize longlist and winner of the Los Angeles Times Science and Technology Prize). Her new book, Cleopatra and Anthony, will shortly be published by Doubleday. Her co-author is her husband Michael Preston, an historian and traveller.
Also by Diana and Michael Preston
A PIRATE OF EXQUISITE MIND: The Life of William Dampier
by Diana Preston
THE ROAD TO CULLODEN MOOR:
Bonnie Prince Charlie and the ’45 Rebellion
A FIRST RATE TRAGEDY: Captain Scott’s Antarctic Expeditions
BESIEGED IN PEKING: The Story of the 1900 Boxer Rising
WILFUL MURDER: The Sinking of the Lusitania
BEFORE THE FALL-OUT: The Human Chain
Reaction from Marie Curie to Hiroshima
We could not have written this book without spending considerable time in India – a country that, despite the many times we have travelled there, still overwhelms our senses. In New Delhi Professor R. C. Agrawal, Joint Director-General of the Archaeological Survey of India, gave generously to us of his own time and facilitated our visits to the Taj Mahal and other sites associated with the story of Shah Jahan and Mumtaz Mahal. In Agra we were very grateful for the expert advice of Superintending Archaeologist Dr D. Dayalan and of his deputy Mr A. K. Tiwari and to Dr R. K. Dixit, who, in his atmospheric office perched in the southern gatehouse to the Taj, briefed us on recent excavations and future plans. He also led us extensively around the Taj complex and the excavations of the waterworks, helping us see things both figuratively and physically in a new light. Dr K. K. Muhammed, Superintending Archaeologist of the ASI in Bhopal, made possible our visit to the palace fortress of Burhanpur, where Mumtaz Mahal died, and the lonely site where she was temporarily laid to rest. We are also grateful to many others whom we met in India, especially Lucy Peck for her knowledge of the Moghul monuments of Delhi, Vibhuti Sachdev for insights into Hindu architectural principles and Dr Giles Tillotson for advice on Moghul architecture.
The many Moghul chronicles were key to our understanding of this story. We must especially thank the staff of the Indian Institute of the Bodleian Library and those of the British Library, the London Library and the School of Oriental and African Studies for helping us access the sources of the period. We are equally indebted to many individuals. In the USA, Julia Bailey, editor of Muqarnas, advised us on architectural sources. In the UK, Philippa Vaughan guided us to material on the depiction of women in Moghul paintings.
Our research in India entailed travelling long distances to sometimes inaccessible places. Mehera Dalton and Tanya Dalton of Greaves Travel International (UK and USA) expertly organized our itinerary and in New Delhi Mala Tandan of Greaves gave us invaluable support. We are also very grateful to the Imperial Hotel in New Delhi and to Prince Richard Holkar of the Ahilya Fort, Maheshwar, for their generous hospitality. Explore Limited gave us the chance in Uzbekistan to compare the tombs and palaces of the Moghuls’ aesthetic ancestors and in Iran to trace the Persian influences discernible in the Taj Mahal.
The advice – and criticism – of friends was invaluable. In particular we are grateful to Robin and Justina Binks, Robert Binyon, Charlie Covell, Kim and Sharon Lewison and Neil Munro. We must also thank our family for their encouragement, especially Lily Bardi-Ullmann for her research in the New York Public Library and our parents Leslie and Mary Preston and Vera Faith.
We have much appreciated the help and advice of our publishers. At Doubleday in London we are grateful to Marianne Velmans, our editor Michèle Hutchison, and also Sheila Lee and Deborah Adams. In New York, we are grateful to George Gibson and his team, including Michele Amundsen and Peter Miller, of Walker Books. In Delhi, Vivek Ahuja of Random House India gave us hospitality and encouragement and fresh insights. Finally, we thank our agents Bill Hamilton of A. M. Heath in London and Michael Carlisle of Inkwell Management in New York for their enthusiasm and support throughout.
THE GREAT MOGHULS 1526–1707
r.—reigned
=—married
* The seven of Shah Jahan and Mumtaz’s children who survived into adulthood
NOTES: All the emperors had several wives
Humayun’s mother was Ma’suma
Akbar’s mother was Hamida
Jahangir’s mother was a princess of Amber unnamed by chronicler Abul Fazl
Shah Jahan’s mother was Jodh Bai
In a dusty fortress on the hot, airless plateau of the Deccan in central India an army commander sat playing chess with his beautiful, bejewelled and heavily pregnant wife. The year was 1631 – under the Muslim calendar, 1040 – and both were Muslims. Suddenly, as the popular version of the story goes, a severe pain gripped the woman’s abdomen. Doctors were hastily summoned but despite their efforts this, the thirty-eight-year-old mother’s fourteenth pregnancy, was going severely wrong. Weak through loss of blood, she whispered to her distraught husband of their everlasting love and begged him not to marry again. Her final request was that he should build her a mausoleum resembling paradise on earth, just as she had seen in her dreams.
The authoritative court chroniclers record her death just a few minutes later after giving birth to a daughter:
When she brought out the last single pearl
She emptied her body like an oyster.
They continue that for two years her husband, that same commander, the Moghul Emperor Shah Jahan, hid himself away, spurning worldly pleasures and exchanging sparkling gems and rich clothes for simple mourning garments of pure white. In the words of one of his court poets, ‘his eyes wept pearl drops of sadness’. His hair turned white overnight. He devoted his energies to fulfilling the dream of his wife Mumtaz Mahal, ‘Chosen One of the Palace’, creating a tomb that was not only a representation of heaven on earth but a symbol of sensuality and luxury even in death. Built on a bend in the River Jumna at Agra, Shah Jahan’s capital, in northwestern India, we know it as the Taj Mahal, the world’s most famous memorial to love.
The Taj Mahal’s architect is not known for certain but this much-debated figure produced a design of flawless symmetry and exquisite elegance, a synthesis of Muslim and Hindu styles executed in rose sandstone and milk-white marble. Despite its massive size – the main dome rises over 240 feet and throws a load of over 12,000 tons on its supports – the Taj Mahal seems to float almost weightless above its surrounding courtyards, mirror-like water courses and vivid green gardens. Its mythic fragile beauty rarely fails to captivate even the most cynical.
Contemporaries immediately recognized the Taj as a marvel of the age. A seventeenth-century French traveller decided that this building ‘deserves much more to be numbered among the wonders of the world than the pyramids of Egypt’. A Moghul scholar wrote that: ‘The eye of the sun overflows with tears from looking at it; its shadow is like moonlight to the earth.’
Later generations struggled to express the emotions the Taj’s ethereal, melancholic beauty inspired in them. To the Nobel Prize-winning poet Sir Rabindranath Tagore the Taj was ‘a teardrop on the cheek of time’. To Rudyard Kipling it was ‘the ivory gate through which all good dreams come; the realization of the gleaming halls of dawn that Tennyson sings of … the embodiment of all things pure, all things holy, and all things unhappy’. Edward Lear decided that ‘Descriptions of this wonderfully lovely place are simply silly as no words can describe it at all. Henceforth let the inhabitants of the world be divided into two classes – them as has seen the Taj Mahal and them as hasn’t.’ Fittingly, it was a woman, the wife of an early nineteenth-century British army officer, who best captured the sublime intensity of the love that inspired the building. She wrote simply to her husband, ‘I cannot tell you what I think for I know not how to criticize such a building, but I can tell you what I feel. I would die tomorrow to have such another over me.’
By the end of the eighteenth century the British artist Thomas Daniell, who produced some fine early paintings and plans of the Taj Mahal, could write after his visit: ‘The Taj Mahal has always been considered … a spectacle of the highest celebrity … visited by persons of all rank and from all parts.’ The Taj’s celebrity has only grown over succeeding centuries. It is now an international icon and, like the Statue of Liberty, the Eiffel Tower, the Leaning Tower of Pisa, the Great Wall of China and the Sydney Opera House, one of the world’s most readily identifiable structures. Despite being built by an occupying dynasty, it is a symbol of India adopted by numerous tourist organizations, restaurant owners and manufacturers in India and worldwide. It has also become a symbol of enduring love. By the time of Princess Diana’s visit to India with her then husband Prince Charles in February 1992, the power of the Taj Mahal’s image was such that when she visited the Taj alone and allowed herself to be photographed – a single, disconsolate and melancholy figure seated on a white marble bench before a monument to an abiding royal romance – no words were needed.
The Taj Mahal is not only an expression of supreme love but also of confident power and opulent majesty. It was the creation of an emperor whose dominions stretched westwards across the Indus into present-day Afghanistan and Pakistan, eastwards to Bengal and southwards to the central Indian plateau of the Deccan. Shah Jahan’s ancestors, the four preceding emperors, had acquired these huge – and hugely wealthy – lands by persistent opportunism. They had been pushed out of their traditional territories beyond the mountains of the Hindu Kush by fierce rivalries among the rulers of the local clans. Under the leadership of Babur, the first Moghul emperor, they had begun probing down through the Khyber Pass into Hindustan – northern India. Their hold on their territorial gains had at first been precarious. Not until the reign of Babur’s grandson – Shah Jahan’s grandfather Akbar from 1556 to 1605 – was the Moghuls’ grip on India secure.
With stability and prosperity came the opportunity for the Moghuls to indulge their traditional aesthetic interests. Nostalgic for the cooler climes they had left behind them, they had a particular love for exquisite gardens, watered by fountains and streams and with airy pavilions in which to relax. They were the prototype for the gardens of the Taj Mahal and several survive to this day. The emperors also became enthusiastic builders, constructing in their new lands fortresses and palaces and within their pleasure gardens their own beautiful mausolea. They brought with them a tradition of tomb building which they developed over the years into a unique fusion of the Islamic and indigenous traditions. The fabulous wealth of India, piled high in the imperial Moghul treasuries, enabled them to build mausolea of extraordinary magnificence and sophistication. Shah Jahan could literally stud the Taj Mahal with jewels, inlaid into the building’s white marble to form the glowing flowers of an earthly representation of the heavenly paradise where Mumtaz awaited her grieving husband.
The Taj Mahal was the Moghul Empire’s ultimate artistic expression – emulated but never equalled. However, it extracted a high price from its builder, Shah Jahan, in every sense. Creating this ‘heaven on earth’ was an almost impossible undertaking, physically and financially. A contemporary English traveller wrote, ‘the building goes on with excessive labour and cost … Gold and silver esteemed common metal and marble but an ordinary stone.’ The Taj’s construction and the emotional impact of Mumtaz Mahal’s death depleted Shah Jahan’s treasuries and distracted him from the business of government. It also fuelled the tensions within a now motherless imperial family, inserted the seed of Shah Jahan’s own downfall and helped precipitate what was then the world’s most powerful empire into religious fundamentalism and decline.
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.
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.
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.
Beginning in 1519, Babur made four preliminary expeditions into Hindustan before unleashing a full invasion in the autumn of 1525. At this time the Muslim sultanate of Delhi, who had dominated much of northern India for over three hundred years, was riven by internal feuding against the ruling sultan Ibrahim. Therefore Babur had descended the snowy passes of Afghanistan and Pakistan, crossed the Indus, marched on through the foothills of the Punjab and reached Panipat on the hot, dusty plains only fifty miles from Delhi before, in April 1526, he had to face any determined opposition. The 100,000 men deployed there by Sultan Ibrahim, who took personal command, outnumbered Babur’s troops by five to one. Babur made best use of his only superiority – that in cannons and matchlock muskets, both being employed in India for the first time. He drew his 700 wagons, joined together by their leather harnesses, into a defensive perimeter – a bit like the encircled covered wagons of the American West – behind which he placed his cannons and matchlock men. When, just after dawn on 20 April, the sultan’s forces attacked with almost a thousand war elephants in the van, fire from Babur’s muskets and bronze cannon halted their advance and threw their ranks into panic and confusion. Next Babur’s mounted archers attacked the disordered mass of trumpeting elephants and yelling, bewildered and frightened men from the side and rear. Within five hours 20,000 of his enemy were dead, including Sultan Ibrahim. Babur was master of northern India.
Once Babur had been proclaimed ruler in Delhi by having Friday’s midday sermon, the khutba, read in his name in the main mosque as a public statement of his sovereignty, he marched along the banks of the River Jumna to Agra. Here his son Humayun presented him with a huge diamond that Humayun had, in turn, been given by the Rajput royal family of Gwalior in gratitude for their protection after their ruler’s death fighting for Ibrahim at Panipat. Babur recalled that ‘a gem merchant once assessed its worth as the whole world’s expenditure for half a day … but I returned it straightaway to [Humayun]’. It was the famous Koh-i-Nur, the ‘mountain of light’, that would reappear several times in the Moghul story.
Babur now took stock of his new realm. He was not overly impressed: ‘Hindustan is a place of few charms … The cities and provinces are all unpleasant. The gardens have no walls and most places are flat as boards. There is no beauty in its people, no graceful society, no poetic talent, no etiquette, nobility or manliness … There are no good horses, meat, grapes, melons or other fruit … no ice, cold water, no good food, no baths, no madrasas … no running water in their gardens or palaces and in their buildings no pleasing harmony or symmetry’. At first Babur could only think of one satisfactory characteristic: ‘The one nice aspect of Hindustan is that it is a large country and has masses of gold and money.’ After a little he managed another: ‘… the unlimited numbers of craftsmen and practitioners of every trade’. Like his ancestor Timur, he particularly prized the excellent stonemasons. He and his descendants would employ them to spectacular effect.
Babur soon remedied some of the faults he perceived, by building a garden on the banks of the Jumna in Agra, opposite where the Taj Mahal now stands. ‘In charmless and inharmonious India marvellously regular and geometric gardens were laid out … and in every border rose and narcissus in perfect arrangement’, he wrote.
Babur had treated the family of his defeated enemy Sultan Ibrahim well, keeping his mother, Buwa, at court. However, she did not reciprocate his kindness. Babur had retained four of Ibrahim’s cooks to allow him to try Hindustani dishes. On 21 December 1526, Buwa persuaded one to sprinkle poison on Babur’s food. Babur takes up the story. ‘There was no apparent bad taste. While seated at the meal I was near vomiting on the tablecloth … I got up and on my way to the toilet I almost threw up. When I got there I vomited much. I never vomited after meals, not even when drinking. I ordered the vomit given to a dog. [The dog] became pretty listless. No matter how many stones they threw at it, it refused to get up but did not die.’ Babur had the cook arrested. After he confessed under torture, two old women who had acted as messengers and Babur’s taster were in turn arrested. ‘They also confessed … I ordered the taster to be hacked to pieces and the cook skinned alive. One of the two women I had thrown under the elephant’s feet and the other shot. I had Buwa put under arrest.’ To cure himself Babur drank some opium mixed in milk. ‘On the first day of this medicine I excreted some pitch black things like burnt bile. Thank goodness now everything is alright. I never knew how sweet a thing life was.’
Although Babur cheated death on that occasion, he had less than four years to live. Part he spent in quelling uprisings against Moghul rule and repelling incursions by neighbouring princes, part in composing poetry and in compiling his honest and intimate memoir, the Baburnama, the first autobiography in Islamic literature. According to the chronicles Babur’s death resulted from the severe illness of his son Humayun. Indifferent as he might be to his wives, Babur loved his children, declaring Humayun ‘an incomparable companion’. When his son was deep in delirium seers suggested to Babur that if he gave up one of Humayun’s valued possessions he might recover. They seem to have meant the ‘Koh-i-Nur’, but Babur took it that he should offer his own life to God. He did so, crying, ‘I shall be his sacrifice … I can endure all his pain’, and ‘when his prayer had been heard by God … Babur felt a strange effect on himself and cried out “We have borne it away!” Immediately a strange heat of fever surged upon his majesty and there was a sudden diminution of it in [Humayun]’.
Babur’s health did deteriorate after the incident, but several months elapsed before his death in December 1530, which to those of a less romantic mind is more likely to have been related to the rigours of his youthful life and his over-indulgence in wine, opiates and other drugs. (Babur described how in a drug-induced trance, hippy-like, he enjoyed ‘wonderful fields of flowers’.) But before he died, Babur called upon his supporters to recognize Humayun as his rightful successor and lectured Humayun ‘do nought against your brothers, even though they may deserve it’. Unlike some of his descendants, Humayun would follow his father’s injunction, which derived from a general Timurid principle that the lives of royal princes should be protected. Babur was buried in his new garden opposite the future site of the Taj Mahal. Later his body was returned to Kabul as he had wished and interred in his hillside garden overlooking the city. At his request, and in accordance with Islamic tradition that tombs should lie beneath the open canopy of the sky, no building was constructed over his marble cenotaph.
The twenty-two-year-old Humayun was ‘a dignified and magnificent prince, kindhearted and generous, mild and benevolent’. He was personally brave but crucially lacked the determination and decision necessary to consolidate his energetic and charismatic father’s four-year-old rule over Hindustan. He was easily distracted and so superstitious that he always entered a room right foot first and sent others who did not back outside to re-enter properly. He was obsessed with astrology. He wore different-coloured clothes and varied his pursuits to suit the governing planets of the days of the week. On Sunday, for example, he wore yellow and dealt with state affairs and on Monday, green and made merry. On Tuesday he wore warlike red and acted wrathful and vengeful. His wrath could be both whimsical and cruel. One Tuesday, he claimed to fit punishments to the crime, removing the heads of those he considered ‘headstrong’ and chopping off the hands and feet of those he thought lacked judgement – i.e. failing to ‘distinguish between their feet and hands’.
His natural lethargy was multiplied manifold by what one chronicler called his ‘excessive’ use of opium, which he took mixed with rose-water. As a result of such failings Humayun lost Hindustan and was forced to wander, a ruler without a throne, as had Babur in his youth. The agent of his expulsion was the astute, stout and subtle Sher Shah. From humble origins as an officer in a small Muslim state in Bihar along the Ganges, he had over a number of years quietly established himself as the virtual ruler of much of Bihar and Bengal.
When he eventually realized the threat that Sher Shah posed to his rule, Humayun led a large army down the Ganges. His approach was leisurely and allowed Sher Shah plenty of time to prepare. After much manoeuvring the two armies finally joined battle at the end of June 1539. Sher Shah’s forces routed Humayun’s troops and the emperor was forced to flee ignominiously. He only succeeded in escaping across the Ganges with the aid of one of his water bearers, named Nazim, who blew up his animal-skin water bottle and gave it to Humayun as a flotation aid. Much to the annoyance of his brothers and courtiers the quixotic Humayun made good a promise he had given Nazim in the heat of the moment to allow him to sit on the imperial throne. Nazim was allowed to occupy it only briefly and gave but a few orders, all designed to enrich himself and his family. However, Humayun’s action did nothing to increase his regal dignity at a crucial point in his reign even if it did show him to be a man of his word.
Humayun fled first to Agra and then northwest to Lahore to meet his half-brothers Kamran, Askari and Hindal. Their loyalty was suspect. Mindful that Genghis Khan and Timur had divided their kingdoms among their sons, rather than appointing a single heir as Babur had done, each of the other brothers had sought a return to the old tradition and had already been involved in rebellions or near-rebellions, seeking to carve out territories for themselves. Each time they had been tearfully forgiven by Humayun, who, as well as respecting his father’s injunction, was sentimental and affectionate by nature. According to their sister Gulbadan, faced with a common danger the four siblings ‘conferred and took counsel and asked advice but they did not settle on any single thing’. Kamran secretly tried to negotiate a separate peace with Sher Shah which would secure him Kabul. Humayun, equally privately, offered Sher Shah peace on the basis ‘I have left you Hindustan. Leave Lahore alone and let Sind be a boundary between you and me’.
Sher Shah rejected both. When he advanced on Lahore, Humayun, his brothers and, it is said, 200,000 of their followers fled. Gulbadan wrote, ‘It was like the day of resurrection, people left their decorated palaces and their furniture just as they were.’ Accompanied by Hindal, Humayun fled towards Sind and spent months in fruitless efforts to persuade the local ruler to support him. However, he did succeed in another task of persuasion, but only after a month of trying. He convinced Hamida, the fourteen-year-old daughter of one of Hindal’s advisers, to agree to marry him. At first both she and Hindal were vehemently opposed to the marriage, perhaps because they were mutually attracted. Eventually Hindal marched angrily away to Kandahar and Humayun’s mother induced Hamida to accept her thirty-three-year-old son on the grounds that, ‘After all, you will marry someone. Better than a king, who is there?’ Humayun ‘took [an] astrolabe into his own blessed hand’ and himself carefully worked out the astrologically most auspicious date for their marriage – 21 August 1541.
When Hamida and Humayun left Sind in May 1542, it was to cross the Rajasthan desert back into India where Humayun had hopes of alliance with the Raja of Marwar (Jodhpur). However, these soon came to naught and the party turned back across the blistering, shimmering desert in the hottest months of the year. Hamida was eight months pregnant. Even so, the disdain some of his officers now had for Humayun was such that when, one day, Hamida was left without a horse none would lend her one. Eventually Humayun gave her his own and clambered onto a camel – an undignified and inauspicious mount for an emperor. Finally an officer relented and handed Hamida his horse, allowing Humayun to climb down.