A Teardrop on the Cheek of Time: The Story of the Taj Mahal (36 page)

The gem-studded golden throne surmounted by its brilliant-eyed birds stunned those European visitors lucky enough to see it. Friar Manrique was positively transported by its brilliant diamonds, glowing emeralds and ‘celestial’ sapphires: ‘So, if what is most perfect disturbs our feelings, just as the glowing rays of the sun confronting us obscure our vision; if the roar of dashing, clashing waters hurling themselves from a lofty rock stuns and deafens our hearing; if the scent of aromatic drugs and oriental spices confounds our sense of smell; if the sweetness of the honey of Hybla vitiates our sense of taste; if the effect of frost numbs and destroys the sense of touch; – what wonder is it that, when my senses were distracted at the sight of so remarkable and surprising an object as that throne, I could not well grasp the precious nature of its constituent materials?’

The throne was an appropriate symbol for the Great Moghul, probably the seventeenth century’s richest monarch. His annual income was 220,000,000 rupees, while his treasure houses were heaped with rare jewels and precious metals worth many millions more. Yet, the throne was also emblematic of the empire’s growing financial ossification.

Although imperial revenues were three times what they had been in Akbar’s day, this had not been achieved by expansions in territory or by making the existing Moghul lands more productive through improved agricultural techniques and nurturing trade. Instead Shah Jahan had squeezed his subjects, allowing imperial tax collectors to levy increasingly oppressive taxes. Consequently, as his reign wore on, many of Shah Jahan’s subjects were putting their wealth into gems and precious metals and secreting them from the tax collectors – a recipe for financial stagnation not dynamism. At the same time as revenues had trebled, imperial expenditure had quadrupled since Akbar’s reign.

Shah Jahan had, like Jahangir, followed Akbar’s administrative system of awarding ranks and salaries to his nobles and officials in terms of the numbers of soldiers they were required to support. Expediency and political pressure to satisfy powerful factions had led him to award ever-higher ranks and consequently incomes to them. Such pressures had also forced him to ignore the fact that his supporters rarely maintained the numbers of troops that their rank required of them. Sometimes they maintained a mere fraction, borrowing horses and men from each other when it became time for an imperial inspection. Sometimes, they bribed corrupt officials to turn a blind eye to their failings by, in turn, disregarding the same officials’ squeezing of the population to enrich themselves.

Aware that his spending was increasing much faster than his income, Shah Jahan tried to arrest this rising inflation in ranks and salaries. However, in practice too severe economies would have alienated his supporters, so his limited measures had little effect on the outflow of funds. Undeterred, Shah Jahan continued pouring his passion and the decreasing resources of his treasury into his grand architectural designs. In 1650 he ordered the construction of the Jami Masjid in Shahjahanabad, the largest mosque in the empire, which over the next six years grew to dominate the city with its three sandstone and marble domes and two soaring minarets. It would be his last major project.

The Prophet Muhammad is reported to have once described architecture as
‘the most unprofitable thing that eats up the wealth of the believer’
. The full costs of Shah Jahan’s building projects throughout his reign are difficult to quantify because figures in the chronicles sometimes omit the costs of items such as the materials, as seems to be the case for the 5,000,000 rupees quoted by Lahori for the Taj Mahal. However, conservative calculations indicate that an average of between 10 and 20 per cent of the annual expenditure from the Moghul treasury (another figure difficult to estimate accurately) was spent on buildings. Such expenditure was directed to enhancing the imperial image of the Moghul court and to beauty for its own sake, rather than to the construction or improvement of military defences or supply and communication routes. Therefore the projects seriously depleted the treasury as well as distracting the emperor and his officials from the business of governing the empire, increasing its prosperity and strengthening it against internal dissent and external aggression. The consequences of this expensive distraction would become clear over the next few years for the emperor personally and over the next few decades for his empire.

Bereft of Mumtaz, his companion of nearly two decades, Shah Jahan also sought distraction by indulging in frenetic, loveless couplings in a fruitless attempt to find physical compensation for his emotional loss. Terrible pains – from which, according to his historian, he suffered for three weeks – were brought on by his overenthusiastic use of aphrodisiacs. Although he took no further wives, European visitors were quick to report his many sexual partners. While the various accounts may be exaggerated and designed to titillate, their frequency and detail suggest a basis of truth. Equally, they suggest that rumours of Shah Jahan’s sexual obsession with Jahanara were unlikely to have been true. Had she become Mumtaz’s surrogate in a physical sense, he would not have been so promiscuous.

The Venetian Manucci described the opportunities afforded to Shah Jahan by the Meena bazaar, the event at which he reputedly first saw the young Mumtaz: ‘In those eight days, the king visited the stalls twice every day, seated on a small throne carried by several Tartar women, surrounded by several matrons, who walked with their sticks of enamelled gold in their hands, and many eunuchs, all brokers for the subsequent bargaining; there were also a set of women musicians. Shah Jahan moves past with his attention fixed, and seeing any seller that attracts his fancy, he goes up to the stall, and making a polite speech, selects some of the things and orders whatever she asks for them to be paid to her. Then the king gives an agreed-on signal and having passed on, the matrons, well-versed in these matters, take care that they get her; and in due time, she is produced in the royal presence. Many of them come out of the palace very rich and satisfied, while others continue to dwell there with the dignity of concubines.’

Manucci also paints a raucous, raunchy picture of Shah Jahan’s dalliances with the wives of some of his courtiers. As these women passed in state through the streets, people would boldly call, ‘O breakfast of Shah Jahan! Remember us! O luncheon of Shah Jahan! Succour us!’
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Manucci also claimed that ‘For the greater satisfaction of his lusts Shah Jahan ordered the erection of a large hall twenty cubits long and eight cubits wide, adorned throughout with great mirrors. The gold alone cost fifteen millions of rupees, not including the enamel work and precious stones, of which no account was kept. On the ceiling of the said hall, between one mirror and another, were strips of gold richly ornamented with pearls. At the corners of the mirrors hung great clusters of pearls, and the walls were of jasper stone. All this expenditure was made so that he might obscenely observe himself with his favourite women. It would seem as if the only thing Shah Jahan cared for was the search for women to serve his pleasure.’

Bernier wrote of how his troupe of dancing girls diverted him
‘with their antics and follies’, which, he carped, ‘transgressed the bounds of decency’
. Sometimes Shah Jahan was so taken with one of these low-born girls that he ordered her admission to the harem, justifying his passions with the excuse that
‘a good article may be from any shop’
.

There were, however, no further children to rival those he had with Mumtaz and Europeans speculated whether some form of abortion was being practised within the harem. Shah Jahan certainly found no fulfilling relationship to rival that between himself and Mumtaz in its mix of sublime sexual compatibility interleaved with friendship and trust. Perhaps his incessant pursuit of loveless sex and his debauching of his courtiers’ wives and daughters represented a fervid quest to prove that Mumtaz Mahal had been unique and worthy of a unique love.

Preoccupied with his building schemes, his sexual athletics and the complex daily ritual of court life, Shah Jahan increasingly left the conduct of military campaigns to his four sons. In earlier years he had usually chosen to be close to the action, albeit not fighting himself, but by now he preferred to issue his orders from afar. By 1648, when he took up residence in Shahjahanabad, all his sons were mature men: Dara Shukoh was thirty-three; Shah Shuja, thirty-one; Aurangzeb, twenty-nine; and Murad Bakhsh, twenty-three. Dara, open-minded, aesthetic and liberal, was a scholar rather than a warrior, with the intellectual curiosity about religion of some of his Moghul forebears, especially Akbar. In his writings he compared elements of Hindu doctrine with Sufism, the mystical branch of Islam of which he, like Jahanara, was a fervent follower. In addition, he translated the
Upanishads
, the major expression of Hindu philosophy, into Persian and persuaded his father to donate a stone railing to a Hindu temple. Dara composed elegant poetry and was a talented calligrapher. However, he was also conceited. Bernier thought that, though polite and open-minded, ‘he entertained too exalted an opinion of himself; believed he could accomplish everything by the powers of his own mind’.

Shah Shuja, according to Bernier, resembled Dara but was more politically astute. While Dara disdained advice and did not bother to cultivate important nobles, feeling court politics beneath him, Shah Shuja was an accomplished intriguer who knew how to acquire useful friends. At the same time, he was ‘a slave to his pleasures; and once surrounded by his women, who were exceedingly numerous, he would pass whole days and nights in dancing, singing and drinking wine’.

Aurangzeb lacked the courtly urbanity of his elder brothers. Contemporary accounts depict a focused, capable, sometimes melancholy man who was, according to Bernier,
‘reserved, subtle and a complete master of the art of dissimulation’. The Frenchman accused him of affecting ‘contempt for worldly grandeur while clandestinely endeavouring to pave the way to future elevation’
. Aurangzeb, while certainly cunning and ambitious, was also insecure and paranoid – hence his extraordinary row with Dara when he accused him of plotting to murder him. Like Dara he was religious, but instead of his brother’s open, enquiring, all-embracing mysticism, which he thoroughly despised, Aurangzeb was a fierce advocate of austere orthodox Sunni Islam. While Governor of Gujarat, he had attempted to seize premises belonging to a Jain temple until prevented by Dara.

Of all the brothers, Aurangzeb had the most difficult relationship with Shah Jahan, whom he strove to please but who frequently rebuffed him. His letters to Jahanara reveal his despondency that his father found him
‘undeserving [of] confidence and trust’. ‘Alas! alas! unhappy, disgraceful, and unfortunate are my stars’
, he lamented. The Venetian Manucci put his finger on the cause of Aurangzeb’s alienation when he observed that the prince knew his father
‘did not love him’
. Aurangzeb’s position echoed previous sourings of relationships between Moghul fathers and sons. Jahangir had felt unloved and unappreciated by his father, Akbar, while Shah Jahan had grown resentful and distrustful of Jahangir.

Murad Bakhsh, Shah Jahan and Mumtaz’s youngest surviving son, was an engaging, swashbuckling playboy whose
‘constant thought’, again according to Bernier, ‘was how he might enjoy himself ’. He loved hunting, despised political intrigues and claimed that ‘he trusted only to his sword and to the strength of his arm’
. It was to Murad Bakhsh that Shah Jahan turned in 1646. Like his predecessors, Shah Jahan yearned to recapture the peacock-blue-domed city of Samarkand –
‘the home and capital of his great ancestor Timur’
– from the Uzbeks. Vicious infighting among the Uzbeks gave him his chance and he despatched Murad with a force of 50,000 cavalry and 10,000 musketeers, rocket-men and gunners to pursue his cherished dream. Local rulers fled at the advance of such a force, leaving the way clear to the River Oxus. Murad seized the ancient city of Balkh, but here he paused although Samarkand lay just 170 miles northwards.