The Crimson Throne

by Sudhir Kakar

  I got to know the Agha well through the conversations we had in his house in the evenings. Once he was free from dealing with affairs of state, the Agha would slip into the more comfortable loose shalwar and qaba after ungirding the cummerbund and send a message that he desired my company for diversion and, perhaps, instruction. Still curious as a child in spite of his fifty-odd years, Danishmand Khan gave me to understand that he would welcome discourses on the philosophies of Gassendi and Descartes, as also on the discoveries of Harvey and Pecquet in anatomy. It was at the Agha’s suggestion that I began to translate Descartes’s Discourse on the Method of Properly Conducting One’s Reason and of Seeking the Truth in Sciences into Persian, an undertaking that has afforded me much satisfaction over the years. Were it not for the Agha’s constant enquiries as to its progress, I might, in fact, have broken faith with the project.

  Besides philosophy, Danishmand Khan enjoyed discussions about religion. Although he was dedicated to the preservation and strengthening of Islam in India, I can personally vouch that he was not a bigot and embraced a liberal view of his faith. Later, when we came closer, I enjoyed our good-humoured arguments on which religion, Christian or Mohammedan, was superior. Even when he teased me with sly provocations, smiling all the while, I was always careful not to cross the boundary that separates the Agha from his retainer, although in my case this deference did not have its origin in the disparity of our positions in the world, but arose from my genuine respect for his person and accomplishments.

  Danishmand Khan’s house, reflecting his character, was more sober than those of other high-ranking Omrah. It was airy, exposed on all sides to the wind, especially to the northern breezes, and had a number of terraces where the family slept on hot summer nights. The terraces opened into a large chamber where the bedsteads were moved in case it rained, or if the sleeping family was surprised by a dust storm at night, or wished to prevent paralysing numbness in the limbs caused by penetrating dews at certain times in the year. Unlike most Omrah who imitated the king in building their mansions with rare pink stone and marble from the mines of Rajputana, the Agha’s house was made of ordinary brick, slaked lime and timber. The person of its owner, his modesty and understated elegance, was not obvious in the materials he had used in its construction, or in the ostentation of its furnishings, but in the attention he lavished on the gardens and the care he took in selecting the best artists from the emperor’s karkhana to paint the murals on the walls. The walls of the entrance hall, the waiting area for a visitor, for instance, were painted by no less an artist than the renowned Mirza Kalam whose reputation extended as far as Turkey. The paintings of hunting scenes with huntsmen bearing bows and arrows or firing matchlocks at leaping tigers showed excellent skill in colour and craftsmanship, though I must admit that by being repeated on one panel after another they did appear monotonous to the eye.

  Other than jade and porcelain vases and exquisite flower-pots of blue pottery from China, displayed in niches of different shapes and sizes cut into the walls, the rooms were bare of decoration. Visitors sat on thin mattresses spread on the floor that were covered with fine cotton cloth with floral designs produced by a combination of dyeing, printing and free-hand painting. Large cushions, embroidered with satin thread rather than the gold and silver brocade favoured by the Omrah, were thrown across the room. A small mattress with a fine silk covering was spread against one wall, intended for the master of the house and any person of quality who happened to call on him, or indeed anyone else Danishmand Khan invited to share it with him. I felt honoured that he bestowed this signal mark of favour on me quite early in our association.

  Danishmand Khan’s pride was the large garden surrounding the mansion. The pavilion located at its centre was an ideal spot for the Agha and his friends to spend summer evenings, contemplating or conversing. The pavilion was surrounded by a pool created from two water channels that crossed each other, dividing the garden into four quarters and cooling the air scented by fragrant night-flowering plants such as jasmine, narcissus and Queen of the Night. A Mogul garden lacks the austere beauty of our French gardens but one cannot deny that it possesses a singular charm. The philosophical basis of a French garden, as M. Gassendi eloquently put it, is the subordination of nature to human reason. The control of nature is not only apparent in the geometric designs in accordance with rules of proportion, perspective and taste, and the attempt to create a shape as pure as the path of the sun, but also in the aviaries and menageries that are a part of every great French garden. In contrast, I found that a Mogul garden endeavoured to create a reflection of the Quranic images of Paradise; its quadrangular layout, called Chahar Bagh, an imitation of the four paradisiacal gardens described in the Quran. Cool pavilions, flowing springs, gushing fountains, shade and fruit trees mentioned in the Quranic descriptions of Paradise, were its essential features. Cypress and flowering fruit trees were planted along the main axis of the Agha’s garden to emphasize its general lines. Peonies, jasmine, carnations, roses, pink delphiniums and hollyhocks were planted parallel to the two principal water channels and also bordered the smaller subdivisions of Chahar Bagh. In the spring, there would be beds of lily, tulip, poppy, anemone, cyclamen, iris and violet.

  When our familiarity grew and the Agha gained confidence in my taste and judgement, he explained to me the underlying symbolism of the plants and their placement in the garden. Cypress, an evergreen, represented eternity to the Moguls, although in Persia it was also a conventional symbol of female beauty. Flowering fruit trees such as lemon, orange, plum, white kachnar and almond represented renewal, a symbol of youth and life.

  ‘The hay at bakhsh, the life-bestowing garden, Bernier, is to a building as the soul is to the body and the lamp to an assembly,’ he told me. ‘Each of the water cascades you see is the whitener of the dawn. I see each fountain as a hand of light reaching out to the inhabitants of the heavens, as a string of bright pearls made to descend to reward the inhabitants of earth.’ Danishmand Khan could wax lyrical when the occasion so demanded.

  Each of Danishmand Khan’s four wives had a separate apartment in the seraglio, where she lived with fifteen to twenty slave girls. I had heard it said that unlike the Agha, whose interest in worldly possessions was only of an aesthetic nature, his wives vied with each other in adorning their apartments with expensive ornamental flourishes. Their bedsteads were lavishly inlaid with gold and silver and their table service and utensils made extensive use of these precious metals. Because of the small size of his seraglio—-the concubines normally kept for the master’s added pleasures of the bed were not a part of it—Danishmand Khan needed only four eunuchs to keep watch over the women’s quarters. Khwaja Chisti, the head eunuch of the Agha’s seraglio, became my friend in strange circumstances which I will describe later in the narrative.

  The mansions of the Omrah are exclusively oriented to provide pleasure to their owners and the seraglio plays a key role in this. Indeed, if it were not for the compulsion to attend court, no Amir would willingly leave the company of the women in his seraglio, all of them eager to satisfy every whim of his flesh. (Except, of course, for the pleasures of pederasty to which a few Omrah were known to be quite partial.) Europeans will be hard-pressed to imagine the varied delights on offer in the mansions of the Omrah or envisage the magnificence of the settings in which they are proffered.

  The pleasures of the seraglio are, however, attended by the constant danger of one or the other woman going astray—and punishments for sexual misconduct of women among Mogul nobility are extreme, a starving rat placed in the trousers of the unchaste woman being the mildest. Usually the woman is put to death, the deed carried out by a family member, a brother or father, summoned for the purpose, an act that is commended rather than questioned. If I were of a more fanciful nature, I would say that I have smelt the blood of murdered women in the mansion of many an Amir.

  It was not just the location of the house—situated as it was in a nondescript suburb rather tha
n on the riverbank, the site preferred by most Omrah—or its modest construction that made Danishmand Khan’s dwelling different. The distinction lay in its ambience of serenity, a quality that was generally missing from the mansions of the Mogul nobility. I can say this now with a measure of confidence, although it did take me a long time to identify the root of this subtle difference, which I could sense but not name in the beginning.

  Unlike the nobility in France, the Omrah are not members of ancient families. Since all of the land belongs to the emperor, dukedoms or marquisates do not exist in India, and after an Amir’s death the family’s distinction is soon lost. No Amir can bequeath his title or the land assigned to him by the emperor to an heir, nor is an heir allowed to inherit the wealth of his father. Unless an Amir succeeds in obtaining a special royal favour during his lifetime for the advancement of his children, his sons, or at least his grandsons, are generally reduced to the ranks of the poor and compelled to enlist as mere troopers in the cavalry of some other Amir, although the emperor often bestows a small pension on the widow. Most Omrah are thus adventurers, often of low descent, from different Mohammedan nations; within the empire they were raised by the emperor to the rank of dignitaries, or degraded into obscurity, according to his pleasure and caprice.

  Uncertain about how long they will remain rich and without an incentive to save and pass on their wealth to their children, the Omrah sport the most extravagant lifestyles that are the ultimate in luxury and pomp. They live in grand mansions, surrounded by wives, concubines, slaves and dancing girls. They are waited upon by an army of servants, to the extent that at least two attendants are appointed for each of their horses and an elephant may have as many as four servants exclusively devoted to its upkeep. I knew an Amir who had three hundred torch-bearers in his service!

  In keeping with their desired lifestyles, the Omrah dress in clothes of the finest silk and brocade and wear turbans woven with silver and gold thread. Their feet are clad in velvet sandals, the instep set with rubies and diamonds. Their women wear expensive jewellery made by the country’s most gifted craftsmen. They are daily served with hundreds of rich dishes from their kitchens, and spend as recklessly on family celebrations as on games of chance. No Amir ever thinks of saving money but finds ever-new ways of spending it. Dost Khan, a swarthy Amir of Turkish origin concealed an essential frivolity behind a regal appearance and who called himself Danishmand Khan’s friend (although I know the Agha did not think of him in the same way) once boasted to me of his new extravagance. Everyone knows how dear and scarce the essence of roses is. Yet neither scarcity nor high cost deterred Dost Khan from having his favourite horses rubbed with rosewater every day. Not to be outdone, his elder brother Mushtaq Khan, who was in charge of the emperor’s treasury, was said to be building the most luxurious mansion the country had ever seen; it had everything except wings!

  If there is a hint of censure in my description, a scorn of the lifestyle of Indian nobility, then I hasten to assure you that my disapproval does not spring from the base emotion of envy but from the moral outrage of a Christian upbringing that erupts through the philosophical neutrality M. Gassendi was at such pains to cultivate in my sensibility. Moral outrage results from moral blindness, my mentor often remarked. You must develop a capacity to look at both sides of an issue, he said, no matter how abhorrent you may feel about what you readily see. Remember, there are always aspects of the unseen that are not so obvious and will mitigate the initial moral outrage. So I shall also add that the Omrah are generous to a fault, even if this generosity is more impulsive than part of a well-considered design for leading a moral life. They are also warm-hearted, loyal to friends and exceptionally kind to strangers to whom they easily open their homes and hearts. I know, since I was one of those strangers.

  ‘I Was a veritable Avicenna in the treatment of diseases that afflicted women’

  NICCOLAO MANUCCI

  “REMEMBER NICCOLAO, FIRST IMPRESSIONS are decisive. Especially with the Moguls, who attach great importance to the way they are approached.’ Father Malpica’s voice echoed in my ear as he helped me into the blue satin qaba that I had received as a gift, together with a handsome reward of ten rupees, from Wazir Khan the day after his wife had fully recovered.

  I was due at Prince Dara’s residence a little after sundown. A thunderstorm in the afternoon had markedly lowered the temperature and the Jesuit fathers had coaxed me into being finely clad for my interview with the Wali Ahad. I had given in after some initial resistance, being reassured that the weather now being what it was I would not be perspiring under the arms in the heavy satin garment and thus not emitting the smell peculiar to Europeans that Indians find offensive.

  The fathers bantered continually as they busied themselves in preparing me for the evening.

  ‘The way to earn the prince’s favour is to display a passion for religion—not for the practices of various faiths but for what the prince believes is the unity that underlies them all,’ said Father Buze, the plump Flemish priest who wore a full Mogul beard and counted himself among the Wali Ahad’s friends.

  Father Roth, lean, dark-haired and hollow-cheeked, was more cynical. ‘Yes, it is only in discussions on religion that the prince permits dissent.’

  ‘No, no!’ cried Father Buze, suddenly defensive. ‘You will not encounter a more open and liberal mind in all the courts of Europe. Before you accuse him of anything you must read the most recent of his writings, the Majma-ul-Baharain, “The Mingling of Two Oceans”. I have a copy in my room.’

  Curious, but not wanting to expose my deficient reading skills, I asked Father Buze what he thought of the book.

  ‘It is a wonderful work. Any scholar will be proud to be identified as its author. The Prince has tried to cull together elements of the theory of Creation which are common to both Islamic and Hindu beliefs. His conclusion is that there is no difference between Hindus and Muslims in the ways of knowing God. The difference is in the language, in the words and expression, and not in the essence.’

  ‘And see how he is reviled by the mullahs who rightly see in this book another step in the prince’s turning away from what they regard as the true faith?’ Father Roth countered. ‘He may loftily term the outcry as the ranting of “ignorant blockheads” or be as dismissive of the ire of Believers as he is oblivious to the threat his brothers pose for him. The prince is rowing in very dangerous waters indeed.’

  ‘Father, he is writing for the elect, not for the masses. We Jesuits should be the first to sympathize with that intention,’ Father Buze said, stroking his beard with his right palm. ‘The Wali Ahad rightly believes that he will be successful in convincing the elect of the two communities of his ideals, that he will bring Hindus and Muslims together and achieve his desire of mingling the two oceans. What nobility of thought! What lofty aspiration of brotherhood!’

  I heard Father Roth snort softly while Father Malpica, ever a practical peacemaker, reached for a flagon of their favourite wine.

  ‘Courtesy of the Wali Ahad,’ Father Buze whispered severely in my ear.

  My final lesson for the afternoon was the special salaam with which one pays obeisance to royalty. ‘Stand erect, then bend your body forward until your forehead is close to the ground,’ Father Malpica instructed. ‘Place your right hand on the ground, the palm facing upwards, then raise it to your forehead and stand up straight. Repeat this three times although this is normally done only when approaching the emperor. But since you are a farangi, I am sure the prince will excuse the lapse.’

  I did not miss the exchange of smiles and winks among the fathers as they watched my performance.

  I was so dazed with excitement that I have few recollections of my first visit to Prince Dara’s palace. Yet the ones that made their home in my memory are of surprising clarity.

  Unlike in Venice, where the long afternoons slowly die in the golden light of the canals, in India the transition from daylight to darkness is swift. Night quickly swallowed the remnant
s of light from a rapidly sinking sun as I was escorted through a large garden. The mild, sweet scent of Molushri trees pervaded the air. Oil lamps were being lit, the smaller ones already twinkling in the bushes and on trees. The entrance to the palace apartments was guarded by two sentries and lit by torches on either side. Immediately inside the heavy, carved teak door studded with silver knobs was a lotus fountain, the radial petals at its outer circumference sculpted directly out of the white marble floor. Engravings inset with precious stones made the jets of water glitter in brilliant hues.

  In the ante-chamber, where I waited for my summons, stood a casket with mother-of-pearl inlays. The pieces of shell, in lustrous pink and turquoise, gleamed against the dark rosewood base. I was anxious, yes, but my nervousness did not distract me from appreciating the beauty of the room. Panels in coloured mosaic depicting hunting scenes or combat between elephants lined the polished alabaster walls. Arched niches within the walls covered with panels of lotuses and leaves were inset with tiny mirrors, producing myriad reflecting surfaces. Prince Dara, I discovered later, shared the aesthetic leanings of Hindu princes in his penchant for floral motifs rather than the geometric patterns, arabesques and calligraphy favoured by the Mogul nobility. In his preference for the depiction of the Indian lotus rather than the central Asian poppy as the centrepiece of this decorative pattern he deviated even further from the artistic tastes of his ancestors.