India Through the Ages Part 29

Easier said than done, even though the image-decorated church at Agra, which had been built in the reign of Akbar, and the newer one with chimes in its steeple, which had been erected at Lah.o.r.e in Jahangir's time, could easily be demolished. Still Hugli could be besieged and captured, and no doubt the success made a subject for general rejoicing. For above all things Shahjahan delighted in fireworks; that is to say, he had a perfect pa.s.sion for expensive entertainments, for gorgeous processions, for magnificent buildings. Half the architectural sights of to-day in Northern India are due to Shahjahan's lavish love of beauty. Some of his _fetes_, again, are estimated to have cost over a million and a half sterling. The famous peac.o.c.k throne, of which Tavernier, a French jeweller by profession, a.s.serts--with apparent credence--that it was commonly supposed to have been worth nearly six and a half millions, was constructed by this king's orders.

The question rises insistently: "How came the Emperor of India by such enormous wealth?" The answer is curiously simple: "L'etat c'est moi."

The State was the Emperor, or rather the Emperor was the visible State. Every atom of imperial revenue pa.s.sed through his hands for distribution. Not in precise pay to clerks and collectors, to magistrates and ministers, departments and divisions, but in lavish gifts and prodigal scatterings abroad over the land. Whence the gold, gaining circulation, filtered down in smaller payments, smaller giftings. It was a quaint, but not a bad method of making the king the Fount-of-all-Goodness, the veritable Father-of-his-people.

Indeed, Shahjahan was counted, despite the fact that he spent the three-and-twenty millions sterling of revenue in right imperial fashion, to have been an economical king, getting his full money's worth in all ways. Nor was he privately an inordinately rich man, for Bernier states that when he died his whole personal estate was worth about six millions. Thus, while we read of peac.o.c.k thrones, of marvellous mosques, of three millions spent without regret on a mausoleum, of half that sum squandered in what we have called fireworks, it is necessary to readjust our Western vision, and see public utility behind the personal extravagance. In fact the spectacle of Shahjahan, the most magnificent of monarchs, raises the problem as to how far a millionaire's reckless squandering of a sovereign injures that coin of the realm for its final purpose of bringing bread to a hungry mouth.

Regarding the actual events of Shahjahan's reign, there is very little to say. The Dekkan--in which we can now include the whole southward country down to Cape Cormorin, the hitherto unsurveyed, unrecorded triangle forming the apex of India having, chiefly by the nibbling of foreigners along the entire seaboard, by this time come into the equation--was as ever unsettled. It had, even in Akbar's time, been nothing more than a fief of the Crown, and though under his system it would doubtless have become in time an integral part of the empire, it was gradually making once more for independence. So, naturally, there was trouble in the Dekkan. The Rajputs, however, seem to have been fairly quiescent, and the chief disturbances of Shahjahan's time were the constant quarrels of his four sons, Dara, Shujah, Aurungzebe, and Morad. These, with four daughters, Padshah or Jahanara Begum, Roshanrai Begum, and two others, were undoubtedly the children of one wife; nor is there mention of others, so if it be true that Mumtaz Mahal, to whose memory the Taj was built, died in giving birth to a thirteenth child, many of her family must have died, or been done away with in infancy; legend says the latter, Shahjahan being three parts Rajput. It was, curiously enough, Shahjahan's absolute adoration for his eldest daughter, Padshah or Jahanara Begum, which was the cause of England's first hold on Bengal. She was badly burnt in attempting to save a favourite companion, and an English doctor, Gabriel Boughton, hastily summoned from Surat, asked and received as his fee, the right for Great Britain to trade in Bengal.

To return to the sons. Dara, the eldest, is drawn by Bernier in fairly pleasing colours. Frank and impetuous, liberal in his opinions, he made enemies with one hand while he made friends with the other, while his open profession of the tenets held by his grandfather Akbar, and the writing of a book to reconcile Hindu and Mahomedan doctrines, alienated the orthodox from his cause. Shujah, by his father's estimate, was a mere drunkard; Morad, the youngest, a sensualist.

There remains Aurungzebe. He was an absolute contrast to Dara. A small man, with a big brain and absolutely no heart. A man of creeds and caution, of faith and faithlessness. He had what historians call an "early turn for devotion." In a thousand ways--and those the least estimable--he reminds one of Cromwell; Cromwell without his magnificent sincerity of purpose.

The history of the mutual misunderstandings and divisions and coalitions of these princes is indeed a weary one. Only Dara comes out of it with comparatively clean hands. Indeed, in the last act of the drama of Shahjahan's actual reign of thirty years our sympathies go entirely with Dara, as he struggles to maintain his own future position, and still uphold that of the sick king.

As this final incident is an excellent example of what in lesser degree had been going on for years, it may be given with advantage.

Shahjahan was in his sixty-seventh year. His sons, therefore, all but the youngest, Morad, touched and overpa.s.sed forty. His eldest, Dara, had for some time had a large share in the Government, both as heir-apparent, and also because his father in his old age had turned to wine and women. Padshah Begum, the elder daughter, to whom the aged emperor had devoted attachment, unbounded affection, was ever on her brother's side. Shujah, the second son, was Viceroy in Bengal; Prince Morad, the youngest, Viceroy in Guzerat. Aurungzebe was occupied in Golconda carrying the Moghul arms into the diamond country.

Thus Dara, on his father's sudden and dangerous sickness--of the cause of it the less said the better--found himself able for a time, with his sister's help, to keep all knowledge of the king's danger from spreading throughout the country. But as Padshah Begum was Dara's ally, so Roshanrai, the younger sister, was fast friend to Aurungzebe.

Through her he learnt the truth, and instantly took his part cautiously, diplomatically. He did not instantly proclaim himself king, as Shujah and Morad did in their several viceroyalties when the news also reached their ears. He stood aside and waited, while Shujah marched with his army to engage Dara, and then wrote to his younger brother Morad one of the most fulsome letters of flattery ever penned, declaring that he, and he alone, was fit for the crown, and offering him the service of one who, weary of the world, was on the eve of renouncing it, and indulging the devotion of his nature by retirement to Mekka! Morad must have been a fool to have swallowed the bait, but swallow it he did; and with this cat's-paw puppet in front of him, Aurungzebe, with their conjoined armies, moved to Agra, whence Shujah had been driven back by Dara into Bengal. The old king was by this time convalescent, and, finding Dara, instead of taking advantage of his illness, was, on the contrary, ready to yield up his brief regency with cheerfulness, was inclined to trust his eldest son more than ever. He therefore consented, somewhat against his own will, to the latter trying conclusions at once with the Morad-Aurungzebe confederacy. Fortune went against him. During the battle Aurungzebe, who a.s.serted that he warred alone against the irreligious, the heretical, the scandalous Dara, was loud in prayerful protestations that G.o.d was on their side; after it he fell on his knees and thanked Divine Providence for the victory and the round thousand or so of souls sent below. Dara fled, and three days afterwards Aurungzebe marched into Agra, coolly imprisoned the aged king in the fort, and having now no further use for Morad, invited him to supper, plied him with drink (waiving his own pious scruples for the time), so, when hopelessly intoxicated, disarmed him in favour of chains, and packing him on an elephant, despatched him as a State prisoner to Selimgarh, the mid-river fort at Delhi! So ended poor, foolish Morad's dream of kingship; nor was his life much more prolonged, for shortly afterwards he was executed in prison on a trumped-up charge. Shujah escaped a like fate by disappearance, and poor Dara, after unheard-of dangers, difficulties, trials and terrors, met with a worse one.

But this record belongs to the reign of Aurungzebe, the man without a heart.

Shahjahan, meanwhile, remained for seven years a captive in the fort, old, decrepid, tearful, counting his jewels, and comforted by his daughter, Padshah Begum.

A sad ending this, for a man who had been the most magnificent monarch who ever sate upon the throne of India. But all his energies, all his capabilities seem to have deserted him. He made no effort to rea.s.sert his kingship, and what is still more strange, no friend or companion, no minister, no adherent, attempted it for him. Utterly deserted by all save his daughter, he died seven years afterwards, in 1665, and was buried at his own request beside his wife in the Taj Mahal, that most marvellous monument of marriage which the world has ever seen.

And out of this there springs to light for the seeing eye a pitiful story which brings back a pulse of human sympathy for the man whose old age was so sordid, so degenerate.

How many years was it since with bitter grief he had buried the wife to whom he was so devotedly attached that history declares he kept faithfully to her, and to her only, till death did them part?

It was four-and-thirty years since the daughter she was bearing to him cried--so the story runs--ere it was born, and within a few hours, arjamund the Beloved lay dead with her still-born babe.

A tragedy indeed! Think what it means! Long years of hardship, exile, wandering, and then four only--four short years of content, of kingship, in which to heap comforts, luxuries, on the woman whom you love--who has borne with you the heat and burden of the day.

That was Shahjahan's fate. But the history of these Moghul kings, these Great Moghuls whose name still lingers in conjunction with that of the Grand Turk and Bluebeard as something slightly shocking and decidedly despotic so far as women are concerned, is curiously disconcerting to one's preconceived ideas on this counter.

Babar, whose Mahum met him after long years "at midnight," as with bare head and slipper-shoon he ran to catch the earliest glimpse of her along the dusty road. Humayon, whose sixteen-year-old bride, Hamida, wedded in hot love-haste, brought him his first son at the age of thirty-eight. Akbar, who, after a brief youth of normal pa.s.sion, settled down into the life of an anchorite. Shahjahan, who built the Taj, who spent twenty-two years of his life in gathering together every conceivable beauty to lay at the dead feet of a woman who bore him thirteen children.

These are not the records which we should have expected from a line of Eastern kings.

Regarding this same monument of marriage, the Taj. So much has been said about it, that little remains to say. Perhaps the most bewildering thing about its beauty is the impossibility of saying wherein that beauty lies. Colour of stone, purity of outline, faultlessness of form, delicacy of decoration--all these are here; but they are also in many a building from which the eye turns--and turns to forget.

But once seen, the Taj--whether seen with approval or disapproval--is never forgotten. It remains ever a thing apart. Something which the world cannot touch with either praise or blame--something elusive, beyond criticism in three dimensional terms.

It was Shahjahan who first thought of it; but who designed, who built it?

The very question brings a certain revulsion. It is impossible to dislocate one stone of the Taj from another, to think of it in fragments, as anything than as a perfect whole.

No! it was never built. It is a bit of the New Jerusalem which some yellow Eastern dawn coming after a velvet-dark Eastern night, found standing, as it stands now, amid the cypresses of the garden.

AURUNGZEBE

A.D. 1657 TO A.D. 1707

With Aurungzebe, the Middle Age of Indian History ends. From the date of his death, interest finally ceases to centre round the dying dynasties of India, and, changing sides, concerns itself absolutely with the coming sovereignty of the West.

Even during his long reign of fifty years, the attention is often distracted by the welter of conflicting commerces which, leaving the sea-boards, spread further and further up-country. It requires, therefore, some concentration to deal with Aurungzebe, the last of the Great Moghuls; the last, and, without doubt, the least estimable of them all.

In truth, the steps to his throne were littered with black crime.

Shahjahan, his father, had, it is true, made his seat more secure by the deaths by poison, bow-string, or sword, of the three next heirs to the throne--one of them his half-uncle; but Aurungzebe trod on the bodies of three brothers in reaching kingship, and for seven years of that kingship carried about with him the prison key of a deposed and dishonoured father. Of minor sins, such as the poisonings of nephews, cousins, even aunts, there were scores. Well might he exclaim upon his death-bed: "I have committed numerous crimes--I know not with what punishment I may be seized."

And yet he was, in his way, a good king. Had he been less of a bigot, he would have been a better one; but this bigotry was necessary to his peace of mind. He could not have borne the sting of conscience without some anodyne of hard-and-fast religious rect.i.tude. It was after the murder of his brother Dara, who, caught on the confines of Sinde, almost unattended (for he had sent his most trusted adherents back to Lah.o.r.e with the dead body of his wife, who had died of fatigue), was given a mock trial for heresy and done to death, that Aurungzebe built the celebrated Blood-money Mosque at Lah.o.r.e, in which no Mahomedan prayed for long years, feeling it to be defiled indeed.

But Aurungzebe was for ever hedging between this world and the next, so we must take him as we find him--an absolutely contemptible creature, who yet did good work. Needless to say, however, "Akbar's Dream" vanished into thin air from the moment he set his foot upon the throne.

The first five years of his reign were practically spent in ridding himself of relations. The whole family of Shujah suffered death, and even his own son was immured as a state prisoner in consequence of a trivial act of independence.

Then--and small wonder!--he was seized with a mysterious illness, which left him speechless. Nothing but his marvellous determination could have averted the chaos which must have followed in a state but half broken in to his murderous methods. But he sent for his great seal and his sister Roshanara, and keeping them both by his sick-bed, held order by sheer insistency until he recovered.

So, after a brief holiday in Kashmir--that happy hunting-ground of all the Moghul kings, who seem to have inherited the love of beautiful scenery from their great ancestor, Babar--he came back to face the greatest foe to the Moghul power which had arisen since the combined Rajput resistance was finally broken by Mahomed-Shahab-ud-din-Ghori.

This foe was the Mahratta race, which had been gradually growing to power in the Western Ghats, that natural stronghold of mountains which rises in many places like a wall between the Western Sea and the high table-land of Central India. No more fitting birthplace for warlike tribes could be imagined. Towards the sea, breaks of rich rice-fields, tongued by spurred rocks and outlying strips of almost impenetrable forest. Then the bare, broken ridges, 3,000 or 4,000 feet high, ending often in a scarp of sheer precipice, and giving on wide, thicket-set woods, through which, after a while, ravines break into valleys to the eastward. A land of rain--clouds from the south-west monsoon, of roaring torrents and drifting mists; full of wild beasts fleeing fearfully from the small, st.u.r.dy huntsmen of the hills. These were the Mahrattas. Not a very interesting race when all was said and done.

Brave, dogged, determined, but, by reason, doubtless, of their Sudra extraction, lacking the n.o.bility of the Rajput and the Rajput nicety in honour.

It was in the time of Malik-Amber, the Abyssinian slave who in the reign of Jahangir gave new life to the dying dynasty in the Dekkan, that the Mahrattas first made their mark. Before this, history does not even recognise them.

Amongst the Mahratta officers of Malik-Amber was one Malo-ji, who had a five-year-old son called Shah-ji. To a Hindu festival at the house of a Rajput this boy was taken, and by chance was lifted to one knee of the host, whose little daughter of three occupied the other.

"They are a fine couple," laughed the host and father. "They should be man and wife!"

This was enough for Malo-ji's ambition. He started up, and called the company to witness that the girl was affianced to his son.

Naturally enough, the claim roused indignation; but in the end, Malo-ji's fortunes improving, Shah-ji gained his high-caste bride, and from the marriage sprang Siva-ji, the national hero of the Mahrattas, who was destined to wreck the power of the Moghuls in the south.

Siva-ji, by the time he was sixteen, was already notorious. His love of adventure, his knowledge of the popular ballads of the people, his complicity in the great gang-robberies which formed an ever-recurring excitement to life in the Ghats, his intimate acquaintance with every footpath and defile in that wild country, his horsemanship, his sportsmanship, were on the tongues of all; and when, still in his teens, he fortified one of the neglected hill-citadels and set up a chieftainship of his own, there were not wanting those who laughed at the impertinence as a high-spirited, boyish freak.

But within a few years the boyish freak was found to be open rebellion, and Siva-ji was practically king of the wild western country. What is more, he had become an ardent Hindu, and laid claims to Divine dreams.

The court at Bij.a.pur attempted remonstrance, imprisoned poor Shah-ji, his father, and threatened to wall him up unless Siva-ji repented of his errors: whereupon, with the cunning which distinguished him in all things, the latter made overtures to, and was taken into the service of, Shahjahan, then engaged in the Dekkan. So for a few years affairs remained at a deadlock; Siva-ji, apprehensive for his father, Bij.a.pur of the Moghuls.

Then Shah-ji being released, his son began his career of annexation afresh, being checked, however, in his depredations by fear of Prince Aurungzebe, who was then fighting the King of Golconda.

Both of the same kidney, artful, designing, specious, the diplomacies which pa.s.sed between the Mahratta robber-chieftain and Aurungzebe, intent on stealing the throne of India, cannot have been edifying.

The former took the opportunity of the latter's hasty retreat on the news of his father's illness, to increase his power by an act of double-dyed treachery. He induced the commander of the King of Bij.a.pur's forces to come unattended to the hill fort of Partabghar in order to receive his submission.

The scene is dramatic.