These names, "Conqueror of the World" and "Light of the World," are inseparable.
It is as well they should be so, for they supply us with the only excuse which Prince Salîm could put forward for the curious animosity that for many years went hand in hand with his undoubted affection and respect for his great father, Akbar; the excuse being that he had been crossed in love, real, genuine love, by that father's absurd sense of justice.
The story will bear telling.
There was a poor Persian called Mirza or "Prince" Ghiâss, of good family but abjectly poverty-stricken, who, finding it impossible to live in his own country, determined to emigrate to India with his family. On the way thither, his wife, Bibi Azizan, somewhat of a feckless fashionable, was delivered of another daughter. Already in dire distress, the parents felt unable to cope with this fresh misfortune. So they left the child by the wayside. The chief merchant of the caravan by which they were travelling, happening to come along the same road a few hours afterwards, found the baby, and being struck by its beauty, determined to rear it as his own.
Now in a travelling caravan wet-nurses are rare. Small wonder, then, that the infant, whom the merchant had instantly called the "Queen of Women" (Mihr-un-nissa), should find its way back to its mother. This led to explanations. The merchant, discovering the father to be much above his present position, employed him in various ways, and became interested in his future.
This led to his being brought to Akbar's notice, who, finding him straightforward and capable, advanced him until he rose to be Lord High Treasurer of the Empire. A fine position, truly, especially for Bibi Azizan, who, amongst the ladies of the court, was noted for the dernier cri of fashion both in dress and perfume. It was she, briefly, who invented the attar of rose, which at first sold for its weight in gold.
Now Bibi Azizan was a matchmaking mamma, and in little Mihr-un-nissa she had a pretty piece of goods to bring to market. A thousand pities, indeed, that husband Ghiâss, honest man, had already allowed talk of betrothal with young Sher-Afkân of the King's Light Horse. All the more pity because there was Prince Salîm giving his father trouble despite the Râjput wife they had given him.
That Bibi Azizan cast nets is fairly certain; but it was Fate which sent the bird into them.
It was after one of Akbar's favourite diversions, a Paradise Bazaar, when the lords and ladies of the court had been playing pranks, that Salîm first saw the girl who was, long years afterwards, to be his good genius. The tale may be fully told in verse of how--
"Long ago, so runs the story, in the days of King Akbar,
'Mid the pearly-tinted splendours of the Paradise Bazaar,
Young Jahângir, boyish-hearted, playing idly with his dove,
Lost his boyhood, lost his favourite, lost his heart, and
found his love.
By a fretted marble fountain, set in 'broidery of flowers,
Sat a girl, half-child, half-maiden, dreaming o'er her coming
hours.
Wondering vaguely, yet half guessing, what the harem women mean
When they call her fair, and whisper, 'You are born to be a
queen'.
Curving her small palms, like petals, for their store of
glistening spray,
Gazing in the sunny water where in rippling shadow lay
Lips that ripen fast for kisses, slender form of budding grace,
Hair that frames with ebon softness a clear, oval, ivory face.
Arched and fringed with velvet blackness from their shady
depths her eyes
Shine as summer lightning flashes in the dusky evening skies.
Mihr-un-nissa, Queen of Women, so they call the little maid
Dreaming by the marble fountain where but yesterday she played.
Heavy sweet the creamy blossoms gem the burnished orange
groves,
Through their shade comes Prince Jehângir, on his wrist two
fluttering doves.
'Hold my birds, child!' cries the stripling, 'I am tired of
their play',
Thrusts them in her hands, unwilling, careless saunters on
his way.
Culling posies as he wanders from the flowers rich and rare,
Heedless that the fairest blossom 'mid the blaze of blossom
there
Is the little dreaming maiden by the fountain-side at rest
With the orange-eyed, bright-plumaged birds of love upon her
breast.
Flowers fade and perfume passes; nothing pleases long to-day;
Back toward his feathered fav'rites soon the Prince's
footsteps stray.
Dreaming still sits Mihr-un-nissa, but within her listless hold
Only one vain-struggling captive does the lad, surprised,
behold.
'Only one?' he queries sharply. 'Sire', she falters, 'one has
flown!'
'Stupid! How?' The maiden flushes at his quick imperious tone.
'So! my lord!' she says defiant, with a curving lip, and
straight
From her unclasped hands the other circling flies to join its
mate.
Heavy sweet the creamy blossom gems the burnished orange tree,
Where the happy doves are cooing o'er their new-found liberty.
Startled by her quick reprisal, wrath is lost in blank
surprise,
Silent stands the heir of Akbar, gazing with awakening eyes
At the small rebellious figure, with its slender arms
outspread,
Face half frowns, half laughter, royal right of maidenhead.
Slowly dies the flush of anger as the flush of evening dies,
Slowly grow his eyes to brightness as the stars in evening
skies.
'So, my lord!' So Love had flitted from the listless hand of
Fate,
And the heart of young Jahângir, like the dove, had found its
mate!"Such is the tale which, even nowadays, the women of India love to tell, bewailing the unkind destiny which separated the lovers for nearly twenty years. But, as a matter of fact, there is no evidence to prove that the little Queen-of-Women fell in love with the prince at all. On the contrary, it seems probable that, being a girl of great sense as well as great beauty, she preferred her father's young soldier to her mother's somewhat debauched heir to a throne. Certain it is, however, that the orthodox Mahomedan faction would have viewed with favour the introduction of a Mahomedan bride. Akbar, however, possibly from political motives, ostensibly because of the previous promise, vetoed the match, and giving the young soldier-bridegroom an estate in Bengal, sent him thither with his disturbing wife. Here they seem to have been very happy. But Jahângir did not forget, and the fact that fourteen years afterwards, at least, one of the very first acts of his reign was to send to Bengal, pick a quarrel with Sher-Aikân (who appears to have acted as an honest and upright gentleman by point-blank refusing to be bribed), and treacherously killing him, carry off his wife, makes one pause to wonder whether Jahângir's life might not have been a better one had his inclinations towards this most masterful woman not been thwarted.
It is a curious story altogether, one which needs reading between the lines. Not the least curious part of it being the fact that Jahângir, passionately lustful as he must have been by the time when, as a man of nigh forty, he gained actual possession of Nurjahân, used no force towards her. He accepted her scornful rejection of her husband's murderer, and after months spent in the endeavour to soothe and conciliate her, accepted his defeat.
For six long years Nurjahân lived at the court as one of the attendants of Jahângir's Râjput mother, refusing any pension from the hand of the man who had killed Sher-Afkân, and supporting herself entirely by her exquisite skill in embroidery and painting.
And then?
It is customary to say that ambition overcame her scruples; but the seeing eye, reading between the lines, may find a womanly pity for the man who in the prime of life had lost all control over himself, and who sorely needed help. She was a clever, a fascinating woman; and no woman could quite keep her head before such long constancy as his.
It needed little to bring him back. The story runs, that a single visit to her rooms, where, dressed in the simple white which she always wore after her widowhood, she received him gravely, kindly, was sufficient.
They were married almost immediately, and from that time the woman whom he had first seen as a little maiden beside the fountain was the one over-mastering influence in his life.
Thus before we begin even on Jahângir's career we must concede to him the grace of being a constant lover.
The six years which had passed since he had succeeded to his father had been fairly peaceful ones.
He had found the whole of his vast empire tranquil. The Râna of Oudipur, it is true, was still unvanquished; but the thorn of Chitore had almost ceased to rankle from its sheer persistence. The Dekkan was also disloyal; but there was no pressure of battle, no stress of struggle anywhere, for Jahângir's eldest son, Khushrou (Fair Face), had, after years of open enmity, subsided for the time into sullenness and dejection.
But almost the very first act of Jahângir's administration was one which, as it were, swept away the whole foundation of the empire which Akbar had built up.
He restored the Mahomedan confession of faith to the coins of the realm, thus giving the casting vote to a creed.
It was the first nail in the coffin of Unity.
For the rest, Jahângir evidently did his best for a while. He issued a few edicts, notably one against drug-takers and dram-drinkers, he all the while continuing his notorious habits.
Just before his marriage with Nurjahân, the Dekkan gave him serious trouble. An Abyssinian slave called Malik-Ambêr rose to power and swept all before him, compelling the Imperial troops to retire. But in Bengal peace was restored, and after many successes Oudipur succumbed to a final attack from Prince Khurram, Jahângir's second son, who afterwards reigned as Shâh-jahân. The emperor's delight on this occasion was childlike. In a rather inefficient and unreal diary, which he kept in imitation of his great-grandfather Babar, he records how the very day after the arrival of some captured elephants from Chitore, he sent for the largest of these and "went abroad mounted on Âlam-gomân, to my great satisfaction, and distributed gold in great quantity."
But in all ways he appears to have been blatant, even in his good humours. And these came to the front after his marriage. For Nurjahân was skilful. She held him hard in leash; her ascendency was absolute. It is usual, once more, to discount her influence by asserting its root to have been ambition; but there is absolutely nothing to warrant this assertion. It is true that she raised her own minions to office, that her father held the post of prime minister; but he was wise and just. Nor can there be any doubt that the whole administration improved after Jahângir's marriage. As for his private character, he became, for a time, quite a decent and respectable monarch. If he drank, he drank at night in secret; his day duties were done with decorum.
Meanwhile, the report which a certain Mr Ralph Fitch had brought home to a certain "island set in steely seas" was beginning to bear fruit, and something more than hope of mere commerce filled the sails of the innumerable fleets which, not from England alone, but from Holland also, set forth to break through the monopoly of the shores of Ind which Portugal was endeavouring to maintain. The Dutch succeeded first, and their East India Company was formed in 1602. The first Royal Charter given to an English Trading Company was in 1601, but it was not until 1613 that a fleet of four joint-stock vessels, with Sir Thomas Roe aboard, as accredited ambassador from James I to Jahângir's court at Ajmîr, sailed for India.
The journal of this voyage, written by Sir Thomas Roe himself, is excellent reading, and gives us a quaint picture of life at the court of the Great Moghul. Jahângir himself, dead-drunk as often as not, with the figures of Christ and the Virgin Mary hanging to his Mahomedan rosary. A spurious Christianity (deep-dyed by the monkish legends which the Jesuit translators had coolly interpolated into the version of the gospels which Akbar had ordered and paid for!), hustling Hinduism and Islâmism combined. Nurjahân, with trembling lips, no doubt, at times, driving her despot gingerly what way he should go, proud of her power, but weary, a-weary of heart. A beautiful queen, beautifully dressed, clever beyond compare, contriving and scheming, plotting, planning, shielding, and saving, doing all things for the man hidden in the pampered, drink-sodden carcase of the king; the man who, for her, at any rate, always had a heart.
The inconceivable magnificence of it all, the courtesy, the hospitality, the devil-may-care indifference to such trivialities as English merchants or solid English presents! As Sir Thomas Roe writes sadly to his Company:--
"But raretyes please as well, and if you were furnished yearly from Francford, where are all knacks and new devices, £100 would go farther than £500 layd out in England, and here better acceptable."
Thus the rivalry of "made in Germany" is no new thing to India. Sir Thomas himself seems to have been a most excellent, God-fearing man, who was both perplexed and distressed at the attitude of the heathen towards his own faith.
"I found it impossible," he writes, "to convince them that the Christian faith was designed for the whole world, and that theirs was mere fable and gross superstition. There answer was amusing" (?) "enough. 'We pretend not,' they replied, 'that our law is of universal application. God intended it only for us. We do not even say that yours is a false religion; it may be adapted to your wants and circumstances, God having, no doubt, appointed many different ways of going to Heaven.'"
Whether amusing or not, the argument was singularly unanswerable!
One of Sir Thomas Roe's most striking sketches is that of Prince Khurram, who moved through the court, a young man of five-and-twenty, cold, disdainful, showing no respect or distinction of persons; "flattered by some, envied by others, loved by none." "I never saw," writes the ambassador, "so settled a countenance, or any man keep so constant a gravity."
Sir Thomas Roe was not by any means the only Englishman at court. Captain Hawkins had come thither nearly six years before, and had--Heaven knows why!--been beguiled by the capricious king into remaining, on the promise of a high salary. More than once he had attempted to escape in various ways; but even his plea that he lived in fear of poison was met by Jahângir with almost ludicrous firmness, and the presentation of a "white mayden out of his palace, so that by these means my meats and drinks should be looked into."
Poor Hawkins! His protest that he would take none but a Christian girl was of no avail. An orphan Armenian was promptly found, and the discomfited Captain could only write home:--
"I little thought a Christian's daughter could be found; but seeing she was of so honest a descent, and having passed my word to the king, could not withstand my fortunes. Wherefore I tooke her, and, for want of a minister, before Christian witnesses I marryed her; the priest being my man Nicolas; which I thought had been lawful, till I met with a preacher that came with Sir Harry Middleton, and he, showing mee the error, I was newly marryed againe."
An honest soul, apparently, this Captain Hawkins. Sir Harry Middleton was hardly so virtuous, for, disappointed in his desire to establish a factory at Surat, he started with his little fleet for piracy on the High Seas, waylaying other people's golden galleons! But all round the coast, nibbling, as it were, at India's coral strand, were strange ships out of strange nations, seeking for a foothold, seeking for merchandise, for money.
But of this the emperor took no notice; neither did his far more able son, Prince Shâhjahân. Backed by all Nurjahân's influence, he was fast superseding his father in a dual administration, leaving the latter free to amuse himself in Kashmir. But the death of Ghiâss, Nurjahân's father, about the year 1620, brought about complications. His sound good sense, his justice, had so far kept the impulsive womanhood of the empress inline with policy. Now she suddenly betrothed her daughter by her first husband to Prince Shariyâr, the youngest of Jahângir's sons, and naturally threw over the Knight-of-the-Rueful-Countenance, in whose inflexibility she saw danger to her own power. For Jahângir was ill of asthma, and like to die.
Aided by her brother, she set to work instantly to sow dissension between father and son, to such purpose that Shâhjahân, till then the undoubted heir-apparent, his father's fighting right hand, was forced to take refuge in the Dekkan, which once more was in the act of throwing off allegiance to the Moghul.
Having thus disposed, for the time being, of the inconvenient heir, Nurjahân took her emperor to Kashmîr, where, no doubt, he enjoyed himself, for he returned thither the next year. He was, however, living in a fool's paradise, while Nurjahân, bereft of her father's shrewd eyes and Shâhjahân's haughty insight, was but poor protection for a debauched and drunken monarch.
So one dawning the crisis came. Mohabat Khân, whilom Governor of Bengal, a worthy and excellent man, fell into disgrace with the empress. His son-in-law, sent to beg forgiveness, was bastinadoed and returned to him, face towards tail, on an ass.
So it came to pass that while the imperial camp, conveying the emperor to a summer in Kâbul, was marching northward, there followed behind it a half-defiant, half-repentant chieftain, commanding some five thousand stalwart Râjputs.
A word might have brought him to obedience once more; but the imperial camp was large, and proud, and self-confident. So Mohabat bided his time. There was a bridge of boats over the Jhelum River, nigh where the bridge stands now, and after the usual custom, the imperial troops, marching at nightfall, spent the dark hours in crossing and preparing the new camp on the opposite bank.
Thus by dawn little was left but the scarlet-and-gold imperial tents, wherein Majesty lay sleeping; a drunken sleep, it is to be feared.
This was Mohabat's opportunity. He swooped down, overpowered the guards at the bridge, burnt some of the boats, cut others adrift, and then awoke the confused monarch.
One can picture the scene. A protesting prince in pyjamas begging to be allowed to dress in the women's tents, and so gain a few words with his ever-ready counsellor. Mohabat wilily refusing; and so out into the dawn, down by the river-bed, with the red flush paling to primrose in the sky, and the wild geese calling from every patch of green pulse, a disconsolate despot bereft of his guide.
The empress, however, discovering her loss, was nothing daunted. She put on disguise; somehow--Heaven knows how!--managed to cross the Jhelum, and finding her generals somewhat doubtful, somewhat chill, upbraided them for allowing their rightful king to be stolen before their very eyes. That night an attempt was made to rescue him by a nobleman called Fedai-Khân, who swam the river at the head of a small body of horse; but it failed, and half the party was drowned.
Next morning, Nurjahân, having succeeded in rousing the army to a sense of its duty, herself headed a general attack. There was no bridge; the only ford was a bad one, full of dangerous deep pools. But the rashness of impulse was leader, and the woman was amongst the first to land of a whole army, drenched, disordered, dispirited, with powder damp, weighed down with wet clothes and accoutrements.
The result was a foregone conclusion. Nurjahân herself was as a fury. Her elephant circled in by enemies, her guards cut down, balls and arrows falling thick around her howdah, one of them actually hitting her infant grand-daughter, Prince Shahriyar's child, who was seated in her lap. A strange place, in truth, for a baby, unless it were put there as a loyalist oriflamme. Then, her driver being killed, and leviathan cut across the proboscis, the beast dashed into the river, sank in deep water, plunged madly, sank again, and so, carried down-stream, finally found shore; and the empress's women, looking to find her half-drowned, half-dead with fear, discovered her busy in binding up baby's wound.
Bravo, Nurjahân! One can forgive much for this one touch of grand-motherhood.
Of course she was beaten; whereupon she gave up force and instantly went to join her husband in the guise of a dutiful wife. It was her only chance of regaining him, and her empire over his enfeebled brain.
Already she was almost too late. Mohabat had been before with her, had treated him with deference, with profound respect, had made him see that she was the cause of all his troubles--which was hardly the case. Anyhow, she was met point-blank with an order for her execution.
Even this did not daunt her courage. She only asked for permission to kiss her lord's hand before death.
Grudgingly assent was given; it could not well be withheld. And one sight of her was enough. Jahângir's heart had really been hers ever since, as a boy, she had defied him in that matter of the doves.
Perhaps--who knows?--she may have stood before him--guilefully--in the very attitude in which she had stood while Love flitted from the listless hand of Fate; and all that Mohabat could do was to bow low and say: "It is not for the Emperor of the Moghuls to ask in vain."
So Nurjahân was once more in her old place beside the drunkard, free to begin again with her fine, feminine wiles. It did not take her long to undermine Mohabat's influence. Within six months her intricate intrigues bore fruit. Jahângir, whose person was so watched and guarded that he was practically a prisoner, was spirited away by a muster of Nurjahân's contingent in the middle of a review, and Mohabat having thus lost his hostage was compelled to come to terms.
One of these being an extremely guileful one, namely, that the ex-Governor of Bengal should turn his military capacity to the crushing of Shâhjahân, who was beginning to give trouble in the Dekkan.
This policy of the Kilkenny cats seemed to promise peace, and, relieved of all anxiety, the emperor and empress set off for their annual visit to Kashmîr. But this time death lurked amid the purple iris fields which they loved so well. The asthma from which Jahângir had suffered for many years became alarming. What were the floating gardens of the Dhal Lake, the Grove of Sweet Breezes, or the Festival of Roses to a monarch who could not draw his breath? They tried to get him back to the warmer climate of the plains, but he died almost ere he left the valley, being carried dead into the tent on one of the high uplands of the Himalaya.
So ended the reign, and with it, Nurjahân's. She made no effort to enter public life again; she put on the white robes of widowhood, and spent her days in prayer and charity, a sufficient answer to those who charge her with personal ambition. As far as India is concerned, Jahângir's was a neutral influence, except for that one first act of his, that rehabilitation of the Mahomedan formula. Under this, the whole of Akbar's dream of unity was dissolving into thin air. Yet the danger which perhaps he had foreseen, against which he had, perhaps, attempted to guard India, was becoming every day more dangerous.
The vultures--or, let us say, the eagles--were gathering over the carcase. From Holland, from Portugal, from England, even from France, came galleons, like birds of prey eager to carry off the riches of the East.
So for picturesque purposes we can think of this reign as of the picture of a man, pampered, bloated, half-drunken, looking in the lazy sunlight at the figure of a woman round whose head doves flutter amongst the hawks.
Jahângir's famous drinking-cup, cut from a single ruby about 3 inches long, after passing from hand to hand for many years down to the last century, has finally and mysteriously disappeared.
In some ways it would be worth while once to drain the good wine of Shiraz from the glowing red heart of that fatal cup which bears on it, in fine gold characters, a single name.
They say it is "Jahângir"--Or is it "Nurjahân"?