Taj Mahal
Taj Mahal
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Taj Mahal
Passion and Genius at the
Heart of the Moghul Empire
DIANA AND MICHAEL PRESTON
Copyright © 2007 by Preston Writing Partnership
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Published by Walker Publishing Company, Inc., New York Distributed to the trade by Macmillan
ART CREDITS
Diana and Michael Preston: plates. The Bridgeman Art Library: plates. The Freer Gallery of Art/Smithsonian Institution.
Precise Graphics: Spaceimaging.com:.
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Contents
Prologue
1. "A Place of Few Charms"
2. Allah Akbar
3. "Seizer of the World"
4. "Peerless Pearls and Heart-Pleasing Stuffs"
5. The Warrior Prince
6. Emperor in Waiting
7. Chosen One of the Palace
8. The Peacock Throne
9. "Build for Me a Mausoleum"
10. "Dust of Anguish"
11. "The Builder Could Not Have Been of This Earth"
12. "This Paradise-Like Garden"
13. The Illumined Tomb
14. "The Sublime Throne"
15. "Sharper Than a Serpent's Tooth"
16. Fall of the Peacock Throne
17. "His Own Tomb on the Other Side of the River"
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Notes and Sources
Bibliography
Index
Genealogy
THE GREAT MOGHULS 1526-1707
Prologue
IN A DUSTY FORTRESS ON THE HOT, AIRLESS plateau of the Deccan in central India, an army commander sat playing chess with his beautiful, bejeweled and heavily pregnant wife. The year was 1631, under the Muslim calendar 1040, and both of them 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, 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 recorded 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 related that for two years her husband, 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 also a symbol of sensuality and luxury even in death. Built on a bend in the River Jumna at Shah Jahan's capital of Agra, in northern India, we know it as the Taj Mahal, the world's most famous memorial to love.
Shah Jahan
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 more than 240 feet and throws a load of some twelve thousand tons on its supports—the Taj Mahal seems to float almost weightless above its surrounding courtyards, mirrorlike watercourses 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 traveler 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 Rabindranath Tagore, the Taj was "a tear drop on the face of time." To Rudyard Kipling, it was "the ivory gate through which all good dreams come; the realisation of the gleaming halls of dawn that Tennyson sings of . . . the embodiment of all things pure, all things holy, and all things unhappy." The artist and nonsense poet Edward Lear declared 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." Eleanor Roosevelt visited the Taj Mahal just after dusk and wrote, "I held my breath unable to speak in the face of so much beauty . . . this is a beauty that enters the soul." Fittingly, another woman, the wife of an early nineteenth-century British army officer, 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 criticise 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 of the best 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 Mahal's celebrity has only grown over succeeding centuries. It is an international icon and, like the Statue of Liberty, the Eiffel Tower, the Leaning Tower of Pisa and the Great Wall of China, 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 in February 1992 to India with her then husband, Prince Charles, 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, Agra, Taken in the Garden, by Thomas and William Daniell
The Taj Mahal is an expression not only of supreme love but also of confident power and opulent majesty. It was the creation of an emperor whose dominions stretched westward across the Indus into present-day Afghanistan and Pakistan, eastward to Bengal and southward 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. Descendants of Genghis Khan and Timur, they had been pushed out of their traditional territories on the plains of central Asia beyond the mountains of the Hindu Kush by fierce rivalries among the rulers of the local clans. In the early sixteenth century, 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 as local rulers had forced them back. Not until the reign of Babur's grandson—Shah Jahan's grandfather, Akbar—from 1556 to 1605, was the Moghuls' hold 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, cooled 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 develo
ped over the years into a unique fusion of 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 equaled. 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 traveler 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 loss depleted Shah Jahan's treasuries and distracted him from the business of government. It also fueled the tensions within a 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 fort at Agra. Here he reputedly passed his days gazing across the Jumna toward 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 trying to rebuild 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 which 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 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 Safawid dynasty, they had sheltered and encouraged rebels and, as the other major regional power, disputed the Moghuls' shifting northwest borders.
Despite their nomadic origins in central Asia, the Moghuls looked toward Persia for their cultural inspiration. From Emperor Akbar onward, the Moghuls had adopted Persian as the language of their 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 and had risen to be the chief minister of Shah Jahan's father, Jahangir.
Mumtaz and her family were, like most Persians, Shia Muslims, while the Moghuls were Sunnis. The Moghul court was considerably more tolerant of differences between and within religious faiths than were Europeans of the time. The Moghul emperors married not only members of the rival Shia sect but also Hindus. Each of their wives continued to follow her own religion. Shah Jahan himself had both a Hindu mother and paternal grandmother. By contrast, many of the political divisions in Europe had their origin in religion. In the first half of the seventeenth century, as Shah Jahan consolidated his power and married Mumtaz, much of northern Europe was exhausting itself in the Thirty Years War, as much about the conflict between Catholic and Protestant, which had fed the fires of the Inquisition, as about territory.
Shah Jahan's lifetime was a period of vigorous expansion in European trade and of 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 did not share such views and in 1649, after a bloody civil war, tried and executed their king, Charles I, substituting for him a Puritan republic under Oliver Cromwell and later, in 1660, replacing that with a restored monarchy restricted by a parliament from which democracy eventually grew.
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, the English 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, oppressing its people to exploit the mineral wealth such as the mines in the 15,381-foot silver mountain at Potosi in present-day Bolivia. However, by the time of Shah Jahan's death the Spanish 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 had captured Jamaica from Spain, and from there its privateers or pirates (the designation depending on whether you were English or Spanish) plundered Spanish wealth. More insidiously, English free traders began to cooperate 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 for cotton, spices and gems on India's west coast, where the Portuguese had been established since 1510. In 1661, when Shah Jahan was in the third year of his imprisonment by his son in the Agra fort, the recently restored Charles II received Bombay (Mumbai), just outside the Moghul domains, as part of the dowry of his Portuguese wife, Catherine of Braganza. The English 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. British power would, in due course, rise in India as that of the Moghuls declined.
The English and the Portuguese were by no means the only Europeans to visit Moghul India. Others included the Dutch, the Italians and the French. Whatever their nationality, many were in search of trade. Some were Catholic priests in search of souls. Others were simply curious visitors, eager to learn more about the fabled Great Moghul and his dominions. Yet others were soldiers of fortune or pirates seeking refuge from the European authorities and prepared to share their martial skills, in particular that of gunnery, with the Moghuls for a price. Whatever their initial motivation for travel, many when they returned home wrote memoirs to satisfy increasing public demand for information about the Moghuls' lands, their lives and their magnificent jewelry, works of art and buildings.