The Knight-of-the-Rueful-Countenance in his youth, remarkable for his lack of amiability, Shâhjahân's character appears to have changed to cheerfulness from the moment when, at the age of thirty-seven, he ascended the throne.
It was immediately evident also that not without purpose had he sate at the feet of that Gamaliel of administrative ability, Akbar. Without his grandfather's genius, a man, in brief, of infinitely lower calibre all round, he is yet palpably a lineal descendant of the Great Moghul. In reading of him we are continually reminded of that grandfather to whom he was so much attached, that when in the hour of Akbar's death he was urged by his father to follow his example and flee the court for fear of assassination by those who were pushing Prince Khûshru's claim, he replied proudly "that his father might do as he chose, but that he would watch by Akbar till the last."
It may be that this devotion had not been disinterested, and that disappointment at not being chosen to succeed may have had something to do with the moroseness of the young prince; but, on the other hand, it may have been the hidden impatience of knowing that filial affection, honour, everything his grandfather (who had been his boyhood's hero) held most dear compelled him to bide Nature's time for kingship, that made the long years seem wasted. For Jahângir's government was not good; after a very few years the whole administration of the country had visibly declined. It rose again under Shâhjahân, and some historians go as far as to say that, although "Akbar excelled all as a law-maker, yet for order and arrangement, good finance and government in every department of State, no prince ever reigned in India that could be compared to Shâhjahân." One thing is certain. India during his time was peaceful, easeful, and prosperous.
One reason for this is not hard to trace. Europe for the first time had really entered the Indian markets, and the superfluities it found there were being paid for in gold. There had been a time of truce, as it were, between the Dutch and the English after the massacre at Amboyna--a needless and brutal massacre which still stands to the discredit of the Dutch. England had threatened war, Holland had promised redress, and so the long years passed by, giving opportunities of commerce to both sides. But it was not until the seventh year of Shâhjahân's reign that the firmân granted by Jahângir to Thomas Roe, authorising the English to trade in Bengal, was acted upon, and a factory (as such trading centres were called) opened at Pepli, close to the estuary of the river Hugli.
That the commerce was growing by leaps and bounds may be judged from the fact that the original East India Company had to petition Parliament first; to restrain their own servants from taking undue advantage of a regulation which permitted a certain fixed limit of private trade; and secondly, against the formation of another trading company to the East India's. The chief cause of complaint made about the original one being its failure to fortify its factories, and so "provide safety or settledness for the establishment of traffic in the said Indies, for the good of posterity." Whence it may be observed that the policy of "pike and carronade" was beginning to find favour. For Charles I. granted a charter to this new company; whereupon time was lost, as well as tempers, in the consequent conflict of interests. The record written by the French physician, Francois Bernier, of his "Travels and Sojourn in the Moghul Empire," gives us clear insight as to what was happening in this first organised attempt of the West on the East. Scarcely a page passes without reference to new efforts of the Portuguese to outwit England, England to outwit Portugal, and of both to double-dam the Dutch. And behind all were the refuse leavings of all three nations, mixed up with Malays, Jews, Turks, Infidels, and Hereticks, in the redoubtable persons of the Pirates of Arracan; those foremost of buccaneers, who swept the Indian seas and harried its coral strands. Bernier's description of them is worth recording, as it shows graphically how the cancer of commerce and so-called civilisation was eating into the dreamful, slothful, ease-loving body-politic of the whole peninsula.
"The Kingdom of Arracan has contained during many years several Portuguese settlers, a great number of Christian slaves, or half-cast Portuguese and other Europeans collected from various parts of the world. That kingdom was a place of refuge for fugitives from Goa, Ceylon, Cochin, Malacca, and other settlements ... and no persons were better received than those who had deserted their monasteries, married two or three wives, or committed other great crimes.... As they were unawed and unrestrained by the Government, it was not surprising that these renegades pursued no other trade than that of rapine and piracy. They scoured the neighbouring seas in light galleys, entered the numerous arms of the Ganges, ravished the islands of Lower Bengal; and, often penetrating forty or fifty leagues up the country, surprised and carried away the entire population of villages on market days, and at times when the inhabitants were assembled for the celebration of a marriage, or some other festival.... The treatment of the slaves thus made was most cruel.... By a mutual understanding, the pirates would await the arrival of the Portuguese ships, who bought whole cargoes at a cheap rate; and it is lamentable to reflect that other Europeans have pursued the same flagitious commerce with the Pirates of Arracan, who boast that they convert more Hindus to Christianity in a twelve-month than all the missionaries in India do in twelve years."
Not a pleasing picture, though it whets the curiosity to know more, for instance, of the career of Fra Joan, the Augustine monk who, having by means unknown possessed himself of the island of Sundiva, reigned there King-of-the-Pirates for many years.
It was the encouragement given to these scourges of the seas which brought down on the Portuguese the vengeance of Shâhjahân, whose laconic reply to the complaint of his governor in Bengal against their new factory at Hugli is delightful in its peremptoriness, pathetic in its pride: "Expel those idolaters from my dominions!"
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 Lahôre in Jahângir'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 Shâhjahân delighted in fireworks; that is to say, he had a perfect passion for expensive entertainments, for gorgeous processions, for magnificent buildings. Half the architectural sights of to-day in Northern India are due to Shâhjahân's lavish love of beauty. Some of his fêtes, again, are estimated to have cost over a million and a half sterling. The famous peacock throne, of which Tavernier, a French jeweller by profession, asserts--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 passed 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, Shâhjahân 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 peacock 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 Shâhjahân, 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 Shâhjahân'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 Râjputs, however, seem to have been fairly quiescent, and the chief disturbances of Shâhjahân's time were the constant quarrels of his four sons, Dâra, Shujah, Aurungzebe, and Morâd. These, with four daughters, Pâdshâh or Jahanâra Begum, Roshanrâi Begum, and two others, were undoubtedly the children of one wife; nor is there mention of others, so if it be true that Mumtâz Mahal, to whose memory the Tâj 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, Shâhjahân being three parts Râjput. It was, curiously enough, Shâhjahân's absolute adoration for his eldest daughter, Pâdshâh or Jahanâra 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. Dâra, 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; Morâd, the youngest, a sensualist. There remains Aurungzebe. He was an absolute contrast to Dâra. 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 Dâra comes out of it with comparatively clean hands. Indeed, in the last act of the drama of Shâhjahân's actual reign of thirty years our sympathies go entirely with Dâra, 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. Shâhjahân was in his sixty-seventh year. His sons, therefore, all but the youngest, Morâd, touched and overpassed forty. His eldest, Dâra, 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. Pâdshâh 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 Morâd, the youngest, Viceroy in Guzerât. Aurungzebe was occupied in Golconda carrying the Moghul arms into the diamond country.
Thus Dâra, 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 Pâdshâh Begum was Dâra's ally, so Roshanrâi, 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 Morâd 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 Dâra, and then wrote to his younger brother Morâd 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! Morâd 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 Dâra into Bengal. The old king was by this time convalescent, and, finding Dâra, 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 Morâd-Aurungzebe confederacy. Fortune went against him. During the battle Aurungzebe, who asserted that he warred alone against the irreligious, the heretical, the scandalous Dâra, was loud in prayerful protestations that God 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. Dâra fled, and three days afterwards Aurungzebe marched into Agra, coolly imprisoned the aged king in the fort, and having now no further use for Morâd, 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 Morâd'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 Dâra, 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.
Shâhjahân, meanwhile, remained for seven years a captive in the fort, old, decrepid, tearful, counting his jewels, and comforted by his daughter, Pâdshâh 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 reassert 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 Tâj 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, Ârjamund 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 Shâhjahân'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. Humâyon, 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 passion, settled down into the life of an anchorite. Shâhjahân, who built the Tâj, 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 Tâj. 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 Tâj--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 Shâhjahân 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 Tâj 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.