India: A History. Revised and Updated (62 page)

But in the next Mughal succession crisis the rana was wrong-footed. A victorious Aurangzeb had no time for his father’s allies nor for the half-loyalties of a Hindu princeling. Every rajput must now be a subservient Mughal
amir
(noble); either that or be outlawed as one of those ‘Rashboots’ (i.e. rajputs) whom, in the 1690s, the German traveller de Mandelso took to be ‘Highway men or Tories’. Mughal–Mewar hostilities had yet to run their course.

Meanwhile on the frontiers of their empire Jahangir and Shah Jahan endeavoured to emulate Akbar. They rarely succeeded. In the east, although nearly all of what is now Bangladesh was by this time under Mughal rule, a Shan people from upper Burma, the Ahoms, pre-empted Mughal expansion in Assam and repeatedly rolled back Mughal incursions. In the north, along the foothills of the Himalaya, much was made of the capture by Khurram–Shah Jahan in 1618 of the great fort of Kangra (now in Himachal Pradesh). Again Jahangir, who was still emperor at the time, claimed the victory for himself; ‘since the day when the sword of Islam and the glory of the Mohamedan religion have reigned in Hindustan’ no sovereign, he boasted, had been able to reduce the place.
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He was evidently unaware that, as Nagerkot, the fort had been ransacked by Mahmud of Ghazni six hundred years before. There followed minor conquests on the frontiers of Kashmir, whose willow-fringed lakes and cooler climate so enchanted Jahangir, plus another triumph for Khurram–Shah Jahan when at the very end of his father’s reign he finally secured the submission of the raja of Garhwal, a minor hill state in Uttar Pradesh.

None of these places can have rewarded the expense of taking them, nor were they of any great strategic or prestige value. In a very different class, though, were the empire’s two other land frontiers, that in the north-west and that in the Deccan. Invasion was possible from either, both were in the habit of welcoming and assisting Mughal dissidents, and both were arenas in which the Mughals had long-standing ancestral designs. A sovereign self-billed as a ‘World-Conqueror’ like
Jahangir
, or as a ‘King of the World’ like
Shah Jahan
, could ill afford to ignore either. But here again little real headway was made. In fact Kandahar, the commercially and strategically important capital of southern Afghanistan which Humayun had ceded to Persia and which Akbar had then won back, was again lost. As Persia’s great Shah Abbas advanced on the city in 1622, Jahangir commanded Khurram–Shah Jahan to rush his troops to its defence. This
was the order which tipped the latter’s suspicions of his being sidelined for the succession into an open defiance. Jahangir had to switch his attention to the more immediate challenge posed by his son, and Kandahar fell to the shah. Although, as emperor, Shah Jahan launched numerous expeditions to reclaim the city, all proved dismal and increasingly embarrassing failures. So were Shah Jahan’s two forays into northern Afghanistan. Neither of their targets, Balkh and Badakshan, was secured and the dream of reinstating a Timurid in Samarkand receded still further.

The Deccan should have offered a softer and more rewarding target. In the early seventeenth century it was still divided amongst those successor states of the Bahmanid sultanate – now principally Ahmadnagar (in Maharashtra), Golconda (later Hyderabad) and Bijapur (in Karnataka) – which had briefly united for the conquest of Vijayanagar. Akbar, towards the end of his reign, had made the first move by mounting several attacks on Ahmadnagar which culminated with the capture of the city itself in 1600. It also destabilised the Ahmadnagar sultanate, already shaken by rivalry with Bijapur. In the confusion an unlikely but immensely able king-maker emerged. Malik Ambar was an African
hubshi
(Negro) who had been sold in Baghdad as a slave, brought to the Deccan and, after speedy advancement as a result of numerous military exploits, now undertook the restoration of the Ahmadnagar sultanate with himself as commander and policy-maker. As an administrator he is said to have shown a fine impartiality as between Hindus and Muslims and to have adopted most of the revenue reforms pioneered in Mughal territory by Raja Todar Mal. As a commander he had neither master nor equal and proved the most resourceful and resilient campaigner of his day. Often obliged to use guerrilla tactics, he relied heavily on highly mobile cavalry units which, raised from the martial Hindu aristocracy of upland Maharashtra, were now known as Marathas. Other Marathas served in the Bijapur and Golconda forces. In the increasingly chaotic affairs of the Deccan these Maratha leaders, taking their cue from Malik Ambar, would soon strike out on their own.

Throughout Jahangir’s reign, ‘the black-faced Ambar’ harassed and occasionally routed most of the many Mughal expeditions launched against him. At one point he led his forces north as far as Mandu in Malwa, at another he lay siege to Bijapur. Defeats were quickly reversed, losses recovered, submissions withdrawn. In 1624, at Bhatvadi near Ahmadnagar, Malik Ambar inflicted such a crushing defeat on a combined Mughal–Bijapuri force that he was able to recover virtually the whole of the erstwhile Ahmadnagar sultanate. Then in a final irony Khurram–Shah Jahan, a commander at whose hands he had previously suffered, sought his alliance. This was
in 1625 when Khurram–Shah Jahan was in rebellion against his father. The African ex-slave welcomed the ‘King of the World’ and together their forces laid siege to the Mughal’s Deccan headquarters at Burhanpur.

For Malik Ambar there was no such thing as defeat; only his death in 1626 proved irreversible. Thereafter the Ahmadnagar succession faltered and, despite the efforts of Shahji, a Maratha leader of some future consequence, the state barely survived until Shah Jahan, as emperor, formally incorporated it into the Mughal dominions in the mid-1630s. He followed this success by demanding, at the head of an army fifty thousand strong, the submission of Golconda and Bijapur as vassal states. Both eventually complied, the latter after a hard-fought resistance. This was undoubtedly Shah Jahan’s greatest triumph and on paper it extended Mughal suzerainty deep into the peninsula.

But ironically it was also the making of the sultanates. Acceptance of Mughal overlordship scarcely limited their freedom of action and, with their northern frontiers now secure, both Bijapur and Golconda embarked on extensive conquests to the south in the domains of the Vijayanagar nayaks. Much of what is now northern Tamil Nadu – including a Portuguese settlement at San Thome plus a neighbouring stretch of deserted beach at Madras(patnam) where Francis Day of the English East India Company was about to petition the local nayak for building permission – passed under Golconda’s rule. Bijapur secured southern Karnataka (the modern Mysore/Bangalore area) and a fat wedge of southern Tamil Nadu which included the Chola heartland.

In extending Muslim rule to the mouth of the Kaveri river, the Deccan sultanates had revived the successes of the Khalji and Tughluq sultans. Like these predecessors, they too were greatly enriched thereby and, together with the Marathas, they and their wealth would become a preoccupation of the redoubtable Aurangzeb. As Shah Jahan’s governor in the Mughal Deccan and then as emperor, Aurangzeb would for long periods make the Deccan his home. Indeed Deccan policy would be a vital ingredient in his bid for power. Once again the interests of the empire would be subordinated to those of the succession.

It has to be said in defence of the chaotic Mughal successions that only the fittest could hope to survive. From the filial free-for-alls there emerged some of the ablest, most charismatic and most long-lived rulers India has ever known. Even Humayun and Jahangir, the one addicted to opium, the other to alcohol, yet had the sense to select extremely capable consorts and advisers. In 1611 Jahangir had married the thirty-year-old widow of one of his Afghan
amirs.
Her father, the Persian-born Itimad-ud-Daula, became his closest adviser-cum-minister; her brother Asaf Khan was one of his most successful generals; and the lady herself, eventually known as Nur Jahan (‘Light of the World’), acted as co-ruler and, during periods of imperial incapacity, as the supreme sovereign. Public business ‘sleepes’, reported ambassador Roe, unless it was referred to her; she ‘governs him [Jahangir] and wynds him up at her pleasure’.
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In an unheard-of division of Islamic sovereignty, coins were even struck in her name. Were there any evidence that Jahangir could read the Gupta inscription on the pillar which he had so deliberately re-erected at Allahabad, one might infer that he derived the precedent from Chandra-Gupta I, whose Licchavi queen seems to have been the last consort to feature on north India’s coinage.

Nur Jahan’s influence should have extended into the next reign. Her brother Asaf Khan stood by Shah Jahan during his rebellion and duly became his closest adviser when he succeeded. Moreover Asaf Khan’s daughter, the famous Mumtaz Mahal, was Shah Jahan’s beloved consort. However Nur Jahan, nothing if not ambitious, came to doubt her chances of controlling her niece’s wilful husband and preferred the idea of a less
wilful son-in-law. This was Prince Shariyar, one of Shah Jahan’s brothers and rivals, who was duly married to Nur Jahan’s daughter by her first marriage. On Jahangir’s death, Shariyar, aided by Nur Jahan, made his bid for power. He was outwitted by Asaf Khan, then defeated and murdered. Nur Jahan’s days as the power behind the throne were over. Instead she concentrated on erecting a tomb for her father Itimad-ud-Daula, who had died just before Jahangir.

Itimad-ud-Daula’s stately Agra tomb of white marble inlaid with semi-precious stones ushers in the classic period of Mughal architecture. Jahangir, though best remembered as an ardent and knowledgeable patron of Mughal painting, had not been uninterested in monuments, and under his direction Akbar’s five-tiered but domeless tomb at Sikandra (near Agra) had been erected. Like Sher Shah’s at Sassaram, its terraces and
chattris
seem to owe more to Indo-Muslim palace architecture than to the funerary conventions of Islam. Only the minarets which flank its gateway are determinedly Islamic; thirty years later they would be gloriously translated into the white marble sentinels which flank Shah Jahan’s Taj Mahal.

Jahangir also built in Lahore, Allahabad and Agra itself, and endowed a variety of less obvious sites in Kashmir and the Panjab with gardens, towers and watercourses. But it is to his son Shah Jahan, to his lavish patronage, his grand imagination and his inspired example, that north India owes its most splendid monuments. Of the magnificence and the might of the Mughals, as also of their extravagance and oppression, there could be no more eloquent testimony.

Shah Jahan built both the black marble pavilion of his now forlorn Shalimar gardens in Kashmir and the white marble pavilions of his now unrecognisable palace in Ajmer. There and in Lahore he also built mosques and, although it is scarcely mentioned in memoirs of his reign, he was presumably responsible for Jahangir’s tomb in Lahore. But it was in Agra and then Delhi that he most famously left his mark. Each in turn became the setting for the formal and increasingly rigid rituals of a self-conscious sovereignty which bordered on the divine. The informality of Babur’s roving entourage and the outspoken animation of Akbar’s symposia had given way to a more awesome ceremonial and a more exalted symbolism. Now the ‘King of the World’ ethereally presided from sun-drenched verandahs of the whitest marble; he was glimpsed through apertures of the richest inlay or framed by cusp-pecked arches; painted profiles showed his impeccable features within a glowing halo, a device adopted from Christian iconography; like the moon in the firmament he shone from the high-carat backdrop of his Peacock Throne wherein jewels to a value of ten million rupees
humbly twinkled. The rituals of court and council and the conventions of costume and address were also set, as it were, in stone. Like the architecture, they were formulated to elevate and magnify the impossible grandeur of the greatest ‘Grand Mogul’.

Shah Jahan’s most ambitious creation was another new Delhi. Designed to supersede Agra as the imperial capital, it was not just a fort like Tughlaqabad and not just a sandstone fantasy like Fatehpur Sikri, but a whole new city with processional thoroughfares, bazaars, caravanserais, shaded waterways, spacious squares and massive stone walls. ‘The new walls were punctuated with twenty-seven towers and eleven gates enclosing some 6,400 acres; about 400,000 people lived within them.’
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Constructed in 1639–48 and called Shahjahanabad, this new Delhi was built to the north of the Khalji–Tughluq city and is now known as Old Delhi. Its rigid geometry has long since been blurred and its stately avenues obliterated, but some of the walls and gates remain as do the imperial complex known as the Red Fort and, hard by, the great Jama Masjid. The latter was then the largest mosque in India. From its slight eminence it still contrives to preside over the crowded chaos of one of India’s most densely peopled inner cities. Likewise the Fort, though ravaged by subsequent occupants, including the British, remains an impressive ensemble and is still a focus for state occasions and political pronouncements.