“Emperor Aurangzeb has departed for the house of Allah. But internal squabbles, fear of enemy attack and other such worries have tied the hands of the administrators. Which is why the passing away of Alamgir after his illness is not being made public.” This gossip doing the rounds, along with the other drops of secret news leaking out, had robbed the denizens of the Yamuna bank of their sleep.
However, Aurangzeb gave them all a rude shock by presenting himself in the flesh in a durbar organised specially for the occasion. Bearing all the marks of wear and tear that his long illness had wrought upon his person, he declared in the Deewaan-e-Aam, the hall of public audience, “All those who were celebrating the news of my passing away will doubtless be grieved to see me here in flesh and blood. I am one with them in their grief; but the point is, why should I be in a hurry to cross over to the other world? I have already sent three of my dear brothers there with all due honour, while my ailing Abba Huzoor is conveniently living out his worldly days in incarceration at the Agra palace. Indeed, it is rightly said that there is no early relief from this world for evil people like me.”
Muhi-ud-din Mohammad Aurangzeb, who had assumed the regnal title of Alamgir, was forty-four years of age. His huge empire stretched from Afghanistan in the north to Burma in the east. His durbar was bustling with envoys from Bukhara, Persia and the Arab lands, standing before him in abject servility. Aurangzeb’s strict and tyrannical rule had created an atmosphere of terror across the realm.
Courtesans and dancers had fled Delhi and Agra in fear for their lives. The slightest sound of music or merrymaking emerging from any locality in these cities would immediately invite a raid by the emperor’s police force. Artists were belaboured like thieves, and singers had been reduced to beggary. There was strict prohibition throughout the empire and imbibers ran the risk of having their limbs chopped off.
The lamp of religious tolerance and freedom of belief that Akbar had lit a generation earlier was ruthlessly snuffed out. Most of the Hindu grandees, particularly the Rajputs whom the Great Mughal had bound close to his heart, had now become objects of hate and derision. Equal hate and derision was mandated for the Shi’a, the dissident sect that had broken away from the main body of orthodox Sunni Muslims. As pious as he was fanatical, Aurangzeb would lead the recitation of the Qur’an immediately after the fast was broken in the evenings during the holy month of Ramzan, and continue with the recitation for nine hours at a stretch.
A few months back, he had fallen seriously ill and would often sink into delirium. But he was alert enough to register that his beloved sister Roshanara had begun to look for a successor to his throne and had immediately tossed her out of his affections.
Aurangzeb was the fourth son of emperor Shah Jahan and his wife Mumtaz Mahal. His subjects would often express astonishment in private, of course – that a person born to the most beautiful (and presumably kind) woman in the world should have turned out to be so hard-hearted and bigoted. When Aurangzeb was still a boy, a soothsayer had alerted Shah Jahan, “The most renegade of all your princes is this Aurangzeb. One day he is going to be the cause not only of your destruction, but that of your entire lineage.” The emperor had taken this warning to heart. This boy Aurang was the fairest in complexion among the Mughal princes. The emperor would often tell his eldest son Dara Shikoh, “Never show any mercy to this rascal. He is a white snake that has sprung from my loins. One of these days he is going to bite you and spread his poison in your blood.”
The soothsayer’s prophecy came true. Aurangzeb had not only enthusiastically hounded, imprisoned, tortured and finally slaughtered all three of his elder brothers, but even celebrated the event as Shabe-baaraat, the evening of joy. He had not even spared his own father, a person of no less eminence than Shah Jahan. He had disrupted the water supply to the palace in the Agra fort where he held him prisoner. He had even schemed to have him secretly eliminated.
These blood-curdling deeds had created a dark aura around him and made him a dreaded figure, in whose presence the stoutest heart quaked with fear. In spite of all this, his maternal uncle Shaista Khan had managed to acquire for himself the privilege of being the emperor’s close friend and confidante. Obviously, it was a colourful series of events that had earned him this entitlement.
It was Uncle Shaista who had conveyed verbatim to Aurangzeb his father’s message, “Don’t you ever forget, boy, that your old age will bring you more misery than you have brought into mine. Despite being a prince of the realm, you have converted the last days of your old father and king into hell on earth. This act of yours can never find favour with Allahta’ala. Even while you have the throne of the empire under your buttocks, you will wander through jungle and heath like the bears that the dervishes drag behind them by their nose-rings.”
“This is wonderful, Maamoojaan,” Aurangzeb happily confessed. “Whenever I hear my father cursing in bitterness and frustration, when he tears his hair in anger and desperation, I swear, I feel that my day is made.” To ensure that he would not be obliged to visit his incarcerated father every now and then, he had ensconced himself at Red Fort in Delhi, far enough away from Agra.
A pleasant, cool wind was blowing through the palace in the fort on the banks of the Yamuna. The reddish rays of the setting sun had bathed the garden behind the palace in surreal hues. The trees were laden with flowers and fruit. Deer and peacock leapt and strutted everywhere. Skillfully constructed waterfalls and gushing fountains created little streams and rivulets that gurgled pleasantly as they flowed by. The evening air was a heady mix of colour, sound and fragrance. Uncle and nephew were soaking in the atmosphere as they sat chatting under a bower.
“Shall I tell you something, Maamoojaan?”
“By all means, Alam-panaah.”
“A good four or five years have passed since I took over the reins of the empire. The heaven on earth that people call Kashmir is very much a part of our empire, but I have not been able to pay a visit to that land of roses. I have not even been able to indulge in the little bit of hunting that I enjoy so much.”
“Without a doubt, my liege, Kashmir is our own land.”
For Shaista Khan, this growing intimacy with the emperor was nothing less than a blessing from Allah. When the battle for succession had flared up in Delhi during Shah Jahan’s reign, it was Shaista Khan who had sent this nephew of his an urgent message, advising him to rush to the capital and jump into the fray, manoeuvre his way past his older siblings by hook or by crook, and snatch the crown for himself.
Quite against character, Aurangzeb had lately been taken over by a strange whim to rebuild his bond with his old father. Not liking what he saw, Shaista Khan sidled up to his nephew and said, “In my last meeting with Shahjahan sahib, I had told him that trying to snap the bond between father and son is like trying to bisect flowing water with a word. It can never happen.”
“So, what did Abbajaan say?”
“He said that he didn’t care that Aurangzeb had caused rivers of blood to flow, but he couldn’t forgive him for that one demoniacal deed –”
“Which one?”
“The sheer viciousness of sending to him, wrapped in a kerchief, the severed head of his darling son Dara Shikoh. The humiliation to which the young prince’s body had been subjected, and the wicked, black-hearted joke that had been played upon a loving father! He said he would have been eternally thankful if, instead, you had blown him up with a cannon.”
As Shaista spoke on, Aurangzeb’s annoyance waxed. The very utterance of his father’s name was now sending him into a paroxysm of rage. He had always detested the old man for his philandering nature. Jahaanara Begum, his sister who had inherited the fabled beauty of their mother Mumtaz Mahal, had remained unmarried despite being the daughter of the most powerful person of his time. Aurangzeb’s grouse was that it was their father who had scuttled her prospects of marriage. The gossip doing the rounds in Delhi and other cities along the Yamuna was that the father himself had been preying upon his daughter’s beauty like a wild beast.
Such rumours would incense Aurangzeb beyond endurance. “Lecherous old bastard,” he raged, “smutty old goat! I’ve been seeing him from my earliest days. Who did he appoint to guard his palace? Strong, robust young soldiers? No! He had these long-legged beauties specially imported from Iran and Turan orbiting around him, so that he could lust after them. Wanton, filthy man of the first water!”
“Yes, well, there are other things I could say, but I had better hold my tongue,” Shaista muttered.
“No, no, Maamoojaan, come out with it. There’s little that can shock me!”
“Well, Alam-panaah, I want to thank you.”
“What for?”
“For not missing a single opportunity to seek your revenge.”
“Why do you say that?”
“I hear that you had once tried to get a firangi doctor to administer poison to the emperor?”
“Yes, I did, but did it help? The old sinner wanted to place that apostate Dara Shikoh on the throne of Hindustan – the dream scenario of our foolish subjects, these infidel Hindus and my senile father! How could a god-fearing Muslim like me let such a catastrophe come to pass? It was my mission to exterminate my heretic brothers, eliminate my wretched father and save the empire from disaster.”
Aurangzeb had proceeded to do exactly that. He had brought peace of a sort upon his empire. All internal squabbles, intrigues and rebellion had been put down with an iron hand. Across the realm, he had whipped the administration into shape and improved security arrangements. In the cities, the old narrow lanes and arches of the cities had been demolished while new battlements and gates were constructed. Protective boundary walls were built on the emperor’s orders around the city of Lahore.
Excerpted with permission from The Wild Warfront: Shivaji Mahasamrat – Volume 2, Vishwas Patil, translated from the Marathi by Nadeem Khan, Eka/Westland.
