When in the garden enjoy every moment,
Every moment of every day.
Spring passes into summer, summer into autumn,
And the flowers of henna
Shall wither away.
While Dara Shikoh clung to his father’s apron at Delhi and Agra, we administered the Deccan, restored order in Balkh, Badakshan, Kandahar and Multan. We measured swords against the misguided Persians. We were continuously on the move from one field of battle to another. The only part of our life which never changed was the routine of our devotions. It mattered not to us where we were or how critical the battle, as soon as it was time for prayer we put aside our weapons and turned our face towards Mecca to pay homage to our Maker.
Misguided historians have written many falsehoods about the way we came to acquire sovereignty over Hindustan while our father Emperor Shah Jahan was still alive. They have maligned our name as a scheming self-seeker and a plotter. They forget that the holy book says; ‘God is the best of plotters.’ We were but the instrument of His design.
The stars and saints had foretold the shape of things to come. Our agent in the court of our father had informed us that once the emperor had asked a saint, who could read the book of future events, which of his four sons would sit on the peacock throne. The saint asked him the names of his sons.
‘Dara Shikoh is the eldest,’ replied the emperor.
‘His fate will be the same as of his namesake Darius who fell to Alexander.’
‘Shuja is the second.’
‘Though his name means ‘fearless’ he is not without fear.’
‘Murad is our youngest.’ (His Majesty, as was his wont, often overlooked our existence).
‘Though his name means ambition, he will not achieve it.’
‘Then there is Aurangzeb.’
‘He has been justly named for he alone is fit for the throne. Wisdom and fortune are closely connected to each other. He who lacks wisdom will have no fortune either.’
We were in Burhanpur when we received the news that His Majesty had been taken ill on 6 September 1657. Our agent in Shahjahanabad sent us a message in code saying that His Majesty had been unable to pass motions or urine for several days and the physicians attending on him despaired of his ruling Hindustan for much longer.
We instructed our agent to keep us posted on His Majesty’s state of health and at the same time ordered our agents in the courts of our brothers to keep us informed of every move they made. In our letter praying for his speedy recovery, we sought His Majesty’s permission to attend on him at Delhi.
His Majesty sent us a very curt note to say that rumour-mongers had exaggerated a minor stomach upset; that he was in perfect health and proceeding to Agra. At the same time our agent in Delhi informed us that the royal
hakeem
, on being given a handful of gold
mohurs
, had expressed the opinion that unless Allah performed a miracle His Majesty’s sojourn in this troublesome world might soon be over. Our dear sister Roshanara Begum, who was in attendance on His Majesty, also sent us a cryptic message hinting at the machinations of our brothers and wishing us success.
We advised our brothers Shuja and Murad to behave in a manner becoming of the descendants of Taimur and Babar. They did not heed our counsel. First Shuja, who was in Bengal, proclaimed himself Emperor with the title Abul Fauz Nasiruddin Mohammed Taimur III, Alexander II, Shah Shuja Bahadur Ghazi. A few weeks later Murad, who was in Gujarat, proclaimed himself monarch of Hindustan with the title Maruwwajuddin and asked us to join him in the march to Agra. Being unable to govern his hot temper he soiled his hands by murdering his minister, Ali Naqvi, on suspicion of conspiring with Dara Shikoh. Our agent in Agra sent us news that Dara Shikoh had already made himself master of the Red Fort where His Majesty was convalescing and had opened negotiations with the infidel Rajputs to help him become the Emperor of Hindustan.
We pondered the matter for many days. We could not believe our brothers would behave in this unseemly manner. Dara Shikoh’s pretensions disturbed us most. If he became king, the empire of Hindustan would cease to be Dar-ul-Islam and the work of our Mughal forefathers, and the Afghan and Turki monarchs before them, would come to nought.
There was another matter which caused much disturbance in our mind: the viciousness of sibling rivalry. We knew that kingship knows no kinship. No bridge of affection spans the abyss that separates a monarch from his sons; no bonds of affection exist between the sons of kings. Sired though they may have been by the same loins, lain in succession in the same womb and suckled the same breasts, no sooner were they old enough to know the world than they understood that they must destroy their siblings or be destroyed themselves.
Since the Mughals had ruled over a domain larger than that ruled by any other dynasty in the world, it was the Mughals who had spilt more royal blood than any other succession of monarchs. Our great ancestor Zahiruddin Babar had laid the foundation stone of the empire in Hindustan in 1526. His two sons, Humayun and Kamran, had then drawn their swords against each other. Allah had granted the throne to Humayun and so he took the light out of the eyes of his brother and sent him off to Mecca to die. When Akbar succeeded Humayun he disposed of Kamran’s only son. Likewise Emperor Akbar’s reign was disturbed by the revolt of his beloved son Salim Jahangir—who in his turn had to keep his own impatient son Khusrau in confinement. The same fate had befallen our father who had also to suffer his sons Dara Shikoh and ourselves being taken hostage. When Allah bestowed the empire of Hindustan on our father, he was compelled to remove his own brothers Dawar Baksh and Shahryar along-with their male progeny. Truly does the prophet Jeremiah say: ‘Fathers have eaten sour grapes and the children’s teeth are on edge.’
Only one of us four brothers could sit on the peacock throne; for the other three it had to be the scaffold. The Hindvis summed it up in an aphorism;
taj ya takhta
(the crown or the gibbet). A kingdom is like a scabbard which can hold only one sword at a time.
The ambition to be Emperor of Hindustan possessed Dara Shikoh like a fever; his ambition had been fed by assurances given to him by a mad charlatan, Sarmad, who went about the streets of Delhi without as much as a loin-cloth to clothe his nakedness. This Sarmad had proclaimed that Dara would be King of India.
Allah who knows the innermost secrets of our hearts knew that we had no thought of royalty when we responded to Murad’s request to join him on the march to Agra. Our only aim was to save the empire from falling into the hands of an enemy of Islam like Dara Shikoh.
Soon our worst fears were confirmed. The infidel Rajputs aligned themselves on the side of Dara Shikoh. His son Sulaiman Shikoh and the Rajput Jai Singh defeated Shuja near Benares. He sent another Rajput, Jaswant Singh of Jodhpur, against us and Murad. We routed his army and proceeded apace towards our goal. Dara Shikoh met us at Samugarh, ten miles from Agra. Once more our swords were crowned with success. While we gave our thanks to the Granter of Victories, Murad, as was his wont, took the daughter of the grape to bed and remained drunk for many days.
Even in the flush of victory we penned respectful words to our father, the Emperor: ‘Obedience was my passion as long as power was vested in your venerable hands, and I never went beyond my limit, for which the all-knowing Allah is my witness. But owing to your Majesty’s illness Prince Dara Shikoh, usurping all authority and bent upon propagating the religion of the Hindus and idolaters and suppressing the faith of the Prophet, had brought chaos and anarchy throughout the empire. Consequently I started from Burhanpur lest I should be held responsible in the next world for not providing a remedy for disorders.’
Our victorious armies arrived at Agra. Dara fled. Then Jahanara Begum sent us a note of remonstrance saying: ‘Your armed advance is an act of war against your father. Even if it is directed against Dara it is no less sinful, since the eldest brother both by common law and common usage stands in the position of the father.’ We felt it was time to kill the serpent of falsehood with the staff of truth. ‘Dara is doing everything to ruin his younger brothers. Witness how he has crushed Shuja already,’ we wrote in reply. ‘He has poisoned the Emperor’s ears against us.’
His Majesty, though old and sick, continued to weave the net of intrigue against us. He sent us gifts including the famous sword
Alamgir
and invited us to visit him in the fort. He flattered us for our piety and addressed us as ‘His Holiness’. Our spies warned us that preparations were afoot to have the women of the harem assassinate us as soon as we set foot in the palace. We refused to walk into the trap laid for us and cut off the water channel that ran from the river into the fort. In his next communication, His Majesty pleaded for our sympathy: ‘Why should I complain of the unkindness of fortune, seeing that not a leaf is shed by a tree without the will of Allah? Only yesterday I was master of 9,00,000 troops, and today I am in need of a pitcher of water! Praise be to the Hindus who offer water to their dead, while my devout Muslim son refuses water to the living!’
We ordered water to be sent to His Majesty but declined to call upon him till we were assured of our safety. When on 8 June 1658 the gates of the Red Fort were thrown open to us, we beseeched the emperor and Jahanara Begum to move into the palace with their retinue and ordered our trusted eunuch Etabar Khan (aptly named by its parents) to allow no one save our beloved sister Roshanara Begum to come and go whenever it pleased her.
Then we decided to go in pursuit of Dara Shikoh who had fled to Delhi. But we first had to deal with Murad. After the victories that Allah had granted us, he had lost his balance of mind. In his camp there was nothing but music, dancing, wine-bibbing and revelry. It became clear as daylight that if the reins of the empire were left in Murad’s hands, the empire’s chariot would soon be wrecked. We decided to let Murad retire to a place where he could drink and carouse to his heart’s desire without any harm to the empire of the Mughals.
We also heard reports that while in his cups Murad not only foolishly boasted of having won the victories that Allah had bestowed upon us but had also confided to his drinking companions that after finishing with Dara and Shuja he would turn his attention to us. We did not allow such impious thoughts which poisoned our ears to poison our heart but resolved thereafter not to be misled by Murad’s professions of affection and kept a watch on his actions.
We awaited Murad at Mathura, a city regarded as holy by the Hindus. When he arrived we invited him to our tent, and with our own hands offered him a cup of wine which we, as a pious Muslim, heartily abominated. Murad drank many cups. Slave girls in our employ massaged his besotted limbs and divested him of his weapons. On a sign made by us, the girls put gold handcuffs on his hands and feet. We ordered that he be given generous libations of opium and wine for as long as he lived. Then we proceeded on our march. We arrived in Delhi and took the management of the city’s affairs in our hands.
Dara fled before our victorious army leaving the entire country at our feet. With our father too old and too ill to bear the burden of the empire and our brothers having proved inept we were compelled to overrule our heart’s desire to retire to a hermitage and instead forced to take upon us the crown of thorns which adorns the heads of kings. This we did (after consulting astrologers) on 21 July 1658. We received felicitations from monarchs of distant lands: Iran, Bokhara, Mecca and Ethiopia.
It took us another year to remove the thorn of Dara from our side. Our troops pursued him through the Punjab, Rajasthan, Gujarat and in a skirmish at Seorai scattered his following as the breeze of autumn scatters dead leaves. Dara was finally captured trying to flee to Afghanistan. A few weeks after the celebrations of our first anniversary as King of Hindustan had ended, our loyal servant Malik Jeewan brought him, his sons and entourage in chains to Delhi.
We consulted the
ulema
. With one voice they replied that by the holy law the punishment for heresy was death. Our dear sister, Roshanara, equally related to Dara as she was to us, expressed the same opinion. Dara Shikoh begged us to pardon him.
‘My brother and my king,’ he wrote to us, ‘my execution is an unnecessary preoccupation for your lofty mind. Grant me a house to live in, and a maid from my former retinue to attend to my needs, and I will devote my life in retreat to praying for your good.’
We did not wish to enter into controversy with Dara Shikoh. At the bottom of his petition for pardon we appended one line in Arabic: ‘You usurped authority and you were seditious.’
The fate of Dara Shikoh excited the passions of the misguided citizens of Delhi. They wept in sympathy with him and pelted the loyal Malik Jeewan who had brought him to justice with pots full of urine and excreta. Though our heart was heavy with sorrow we again reminded ourselves that kingship knows no kinship and signed the warrant of death. He was separated from his son Siphir Shikoh and executed on the evening of 30 August 1659. His severed head was brought to us in the Red Fort for inspection. The next morning his headless body was paraded through the streets of Delhi before being interred in a vault of the tomb of our great, great-grandsire, Emperor Humayun.
Dara’s son, Sulaiman Shikoh, who had fled into the mountains was likewise apprehended and brought in irons to Delhi. On the morning of 5 January 1661, he was led to our presence in the Diwan-i-Khas. We had not seen him for many years and were struck by his handsome and manly bearing. We had to remind ourselves that though the skin of the serpent may be beautiful, within it there is deadly poison. We explained to him the enormity of the crimes committed by his father and himself and ordered him to be sent to prison in Gwalior fort where he was executed.
We had yet to deal with the charlatan Sarmad who had falsely prophesied the crown to Dara Shikoh. Apart from going about naked in front of men and women alike his attachment to a Hindu boy had become scandalous. Although professing Islam, he was reported to have used expressions lowering the dignity of the Prophet. We summoned him to our presence and questioned him about his prophecy. The villain had the audacity to reply; ‘God hath given him (Dara) eternal sovereignty!’ We further asked him if it was true that he only recited half the
kalima
—’There is no God but Allah’— leaving out ‘and Mohammed is His Prophet’. He replied: