The Crimson Throne

by Sudhir Kakar

  And so, in addition to being a respected physician, I gained the reputation of being an expert exorcist. For the purpose of healing, whether it is of body or spirit, reputation is all, and I worked hard at improving mine. The native exorcists used talismans containing appropriate Quranic verses and the names of Allah—Al-Muhyi, Al-Qadri, Al-Hefiz—written by a calligrapher to repulse spirit attacks. Depending on the nature of the possessing spirit, the talisman was employed in various ways. It could be tied around the patient’s neck or around an arm. It could be burnt and the patient fumigated with its smoke. Its writing could be dissolved in water, which was then consumed by the patient. It could be wrapped in a piece of cotton soaked in perfumed oil and then burnt as the wick of a lamp at her bedside. The method I employed to expel spirits possessing the bodies of women was more dramatic. I conducted evil-smelling fumigations, beat drums and rung a bell; I shouted, threw my arms around, leapt up and down and, on occasion, even recited the ‘Hail Mary’ in rapid-fire Italian. It was a performance I thoroughly enjoyed as, I suspect, did some of the possessed women, even when I used a cane to administer a fight beating —confining the blows to the woman’s buttocks and thighs, of course.

  I had another trump up my sleeve but resisted letting Maria in on the secret for the longest time—perhaps because its very purpose demanded utmost secrecy, or perhaps because I was unsure whether it really worked. This was Vaidraj’s recipe for the ointment that would ensure a man’s sexual fealty. Its prescription had to be limited to only one woman per harem since any hint that I was favouring one wife or concubine over others would have aroused so much jealousy among them and ire towards me that my practice would have been jeopardized. More than that, unlike other medical treatments, the failure of the treatment could not be easily explained away by the doctor since its effects would not manifest themselves in the patient but in her husband, whom the doctor would never meet.

  Maria was thrilled when she heard about it.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me about this earlier, Nicco?’ she said, breathless with excitement. ‘If the ointment works, it will be as if you have been given the key to the treasure chests of the Omrah with an invitation to help yourself to their contents. You cannot imagine the demand it will have in the harems. I understand we have to limit its supply, but that is even better because reducing the supply will further increase its price. If the ointment does not work, a woman will be too ashamed to let it be known that she used it. As for your other apprehension, there is a simple solution. We will become partners and I will distribute the ointment. If anybody should ask, I will say that I obtained the recipe from a most learned Hindu doctor; your name need never be mentioned.’

  I let myself be convinced, by Maria as much as by my own greed. For a few months we carried on a discreet but hugely profitable business in dispensing the ointment to carefully selected women in different harems. The large chest I kept under my bed soon began to bulge with gold coins and chains, strings of pearl, gold rings and armlets encrusted with precious gems, which grateful clients had gifted to Maria. How were we to know that the consequences of our avarice would soon be upon us?

  Given the circumstances of our lives, it was inevitable that Maria and I would become lovers. Wary about preserving my reputation at this time, I was careful not to visit prostitutes as I had during my carefree days in Goa. The prince’s wazir frequently made offers of the services of slave girls, but I refused him every time. On Maria’s advice, I had set out to create the image of a celibate doctor, as much a priest as a physician. The ladies of the harem, Maria had told me, found this combination both reassuring and intriguing and I had already become the subject of much gossip, salacious as well as reverential. ‘A doctor cannot ask for anything better,’ she had reassured. But I was not just a doctor; I was also very much a man of flesh and blood and all the consequent needs. Maria, too, possessed a certain restlessness, that of a woman who has been deprived of physical love for a long time. However influential her position in the harem, she was still a slave (though one with some freedom of movement), and had been starved of intimacy with a man ever since she was separated from her husband after the fall of Hoogly. Every Sunday, under the pretext of carrying out her religious observances with the Jesuit fathers and unobserved by her escorts, who waited outside, she would slip out of the back door and into my house through the wicker gate in the compound wall that separated the two properties. The fathers were worldly men and, other than Father Roth who initially voiced mild protests, they indulgently tolerated the arrangement.

  What began as an agreement of convenience soon developed into a passionate affair. On those Sunday afternoons, lying entwined in bed aware of their impending separation, our bodies could not have enough of each other. Maria not only matched my ardour but fuelled it to a point where the keenness of pleasure keels into pain. Spent, we never alluded to the sublime love our bodies had just shared. Instead we discussed the happenings at the Wali Ahad’s court, the gossip in the harem, our business arrangements, even as our bodies and souls quietly glowed in the aftermath of exquisite pleasure. If Maria developed feelings of a more tender kind for me than what our arrangement strictly required, she never revealed them. And if she did, then I, in the single-minded pursuit of my goal, hardly took notice. As with Mala, I repaid Maria’s generosity not with unkindness but with worse—a benevolent indifference.

  I should have known that partnerships begun in bed should remain confined to the bed. Extending them to business proves inevitably disastrous, both for business and for the bed.

  ‘I know I have been accused of being biased against Dara, the heir apparent’

  FRANCOIS BERNIER

  WITHIN TWO MONTHS OF my entering the service of Danishmand Khan, and even though I was a foreigner only recently arrived in the Indies, I sensed the singular unease that was rippling through the empire like a wave in the bowels of the ocean.

  My close observation of the lives and more of the Omrah did not blind me to the happenings at the Mogul court, and from my close interrogation of the Agha’s head eunuch, Khwaja Chisti, of whose peculiar situation I will speak later, I understood that the peace of the empire was threatened by a looming crisis. The nature of the crisis can only be understood if I first give a brief historical background. Just as we can better appreciate the present condition of a person if we are also conversant with his past, the contemporary circumstances of a country reveals deeper patterns if we are aware of its history.

  Since the Moguls lack our principle of primogeniture wherein the eldest son takes the place of his departed father, the succession to the throne of India has always been contentious and is decided upon by the strength of arms. Bloody wars between brothers, or even between father and son, have been the rule rather than the exception in the House of Timur. The present emperor Shah Jahan’s grandfather, Humayun, was perhaps the kindest in that he exiled one of his brothers and blinded the other after emerging victorious in the war of succession. Emperor Shah Jahan himself had rebelled against his father and marked his accession to the throne by murdering his brothers and nephews. It is entirely lawful for the great sovereigns, say the mullahs, the interpreters of Mohammedan law, to rid the mortal world of their brothers and other relations whose annihilation is conducive to the common good.

  To be a Mogul prince is, therefore, to grow up carrying the disturbing knowledge that your destined end is either to be raised to glory and power far surpassing that of any European monarch, or to die by slow-poisoning or a quicker thrust of the dagger at the hands of your brother. Deep in the heart of a prince, there can thus be little room for brotherly sentiment or, indeed, filial piety; the fate of fathers and sons, and of brothers, is dominated by rivalry and images of violent death rather than by loyalty and memories of affectionate embraces.

  As Emperor Shah Jahan aged, he had increasingly come to be haunted by violent imaginings from his own past and his ancestral history. Tormented by the forebodings of the events that had their origins in his
memories, and in perpetual apprehension of his sons taking recourse to arms as he had once done against his own father, the monarch had sought to save himself from impending calamity and guaranteed his safety by bestowing upon his sons the government of four distant provinces. His eldest son Dara Shukoh was appointed the governor of Kabul and Multan; the second son Sultan Shuja, of Bengal; the third son Aurangzeb, of the Deccan; and the youngest, Murad Baksh, of Gujarat. With the exception of Dara Shukoh, who selected a governor to look after his assigned provinces, the other princes reluctantly repaired to their far-off domains where they acted as independent sovereigns and appropriated the revenues of the province to raise formidable armies for the war of succession that had begun to loom large on the horizon.

  Dara Shukoh had stayed back in Delhi, not only because the emperor liked him the best—love would be too strong a word to characterize relations between a Mogul father and son—but also because the monarch had to ensure that at least one son was bound to him to secure his own survival. When I entered Danishmand Khan’s service, I soon gathered that the Omrah knew that the emperor wanted his elder son to be his successor. This indication of their sovereign’s wishes did not, however, stop them from secretly dividing into factions, each supporting the claim of one or the other prince.

  Such division among the nobles is not a matter of mere court intrigue, without relevance to the lives of the common people. With the emperor exercising absolute power far greater than that of a European king, no business can be done at the court, whether it is a European ambassador seeking permission to set up a trading factory or a poor scholar praying to be granted a few acres of rent-free land, without the help of a patron who intercedes with the emperor on behalf of the supplicant. The closer a noble is perceived to be to the emperor, the greater his prestige as a patron. For his trouble, a patron is recompensed with what Indians, in their love for circumlocution, call ‘presents’, rather than the bribes they actually are. The disquiet was thus not limited to the court but spread through the empire as the patrons—with their retinues of feudatories in dispute with their neighbours, contiguous vassal states quarrelling over their boundaries and even foreign trading companies bent on elbowing out one another—scrambled to forge alliances and form factions allied to one or the other prince. The largest faction was in support of Dara, the Wali Ahad, followed by one which espoused the cause of Aurangzeb, and smaller ones of Shuja and Murad.

  Dara’s cause as the Wali Ahad was greatly aided by the affection his sister Jahanara Begum held for him. They also shared common spiritual interests and were the followers of a Sufi fakir, one of the many eccentric, if not half-mad, religious zealots that abound in the Indies, both among the Mohammedans and the idolaters. Unusual request. Contrary to what every man in India yearns for, namely the enhancement of his sexual potency, Khwaja Chisti wanted to know whether there was any remedy in farangi medicine which eliminates sexual desire altogether. He had fallen passionately in love with a slave girl, demonstrating the fallacy of an opinion entertained by myself as well as by others that he who is entirely deprived of manhood cannot feel the urges of passion. Khwaja Chisti confessed that he had frequent and intense sexual feelings and even ejaculated some mucous in the throes of voluptuous sensations engendered by dreams of the girl caressing his penis and scrotum, both of which had been removed when he was thirteen. He could not bear the indignity of these nocturnal occurrences and I promised him I would consult my medical books to find a cure.

  To show his appreciation for my goodwill and to satisfy my natural curiosity on what was happening at the court, Khwaja Chisti began to share with me the substance of every conversation between the two ministers within hours of their meetings. He claimed he was repeating some of it verbatim, mimicking with considerable pleasure the measured cadences of the Agha’s speech as also the more clipped delivery of Jafar Khan, although I had no way of judging the veracity of this particular claim or, indeed, the accuracy of his reports of what transpired in the course of their confabulations. From what the eunuch told me, I gathered that Jafar Khan was trying to persuade the Agha to take a more active stance in support of Prince Aurangzeb, whose cause he had made his own. Having closely observed the political developments in the land since my arrival, I understood well that ‘active’, in the current circumstance, did not mean ‘open’; a forthright declaration of support for Aurangzeb as successor to the throne of India would amount to treason and imite the wrath of both the emperor and the crown prince. Jafar Khan wanted only that Danishmand Khan’s preference be known more widely among the Omrah so it may help tip those who were still hesitant into Aurangzeb’s camp.

  The two ministers agreed that it would be a calamity for the House of Timur if either of the other princes, Sultan Shuja or Murad Baksh, were to ascend the throne. Sultan Shuja, the second son, was intelligent, discreet, firm of purpose—but only when he was sober. A slave to his pleasures, once he was surrounded by his women, who exceeded a rational number, he spent whole days and nights dancing, singing and drinking wine. However, his greater drawback, Chisti said, was that he had declared himself a follower of the Shia heresy, the religion of the Persians that was anathema to a pious and orthodox Sunni like Jafar Khan, a kind and tolerant man except in matters of faith, for whom a Shia on the throne of India would be a calamity he could not countenance.

  The objections of our Agha, who too was a Sunni but far less conservative than Jafar Khan in the interpretation of his faith, were more professional than personal, and stemmed from his position as the foreign minister of the empire. For two hundred years, the cornerstone of Mogul foreign policy had been to counter the threat to the empire by the heretical Persians. For over a century the two countries had intermittently gone to war over the northern province of Kandahar, which had often changed hands. One of the reasons why the recently failed expedition of the Mogul army to capture the fort of Kandahar had not excited passionate comment at the court or in the bazaars was that such reverses were as much part of the long-drawn-out struggle against Persia as were the occasional successes. Danishmand Khan had laboured hard on the traditional strategy of isolating Persia by building a coalition with the Sunni rulers of Turkey and Balkh and the Uzbek rulers of Transoxonia. Indeed, he was expecting an Uzbek embassy the very next week and had graciously invited me to be present at the dinner he was hosting for them. Sultan Shuja’s ascent to the throne would throw a tried-and-tested foreign policy into utter disarray.

  The youngest son, Murad Baksh, was generous, polite and excelled the other brothers in bodily strength and sheer animal courage. “Aztnan kascbahadur nis (There is none braver than I),’ he often bragged. Like all Mogul princes—except Aurangzeb—he was pleasure-loving, but was addicted solely to food. His breakfast alone consisted of trotters of a kid goat cooked with a little turmeric, onions and whole black peppers on a slow fire through the night, a leg of lamb marinated with a mixture of coriander, cardamom, cloves and cashewnut paste and grilled in a clay oven, together with platters of six different kinds of kebabs served in massive silver tureens with ornate gold handles. His father once remarked of him that Murad cared only for the nourishment of his body, that he was a tanparwar. His fatal flaw was a singular lack of judgement, an essential prerequisite for a ruler. All other failings of a monarch are not so grave that they cannot be compensated for by a judicious selection of counsellors who can provide the subjects and the realm with what the ruler himself lacks. Deficient judgement with regard to one’s own abilities and those of other men is a certain recipe for failure and it was no surprise that Murad had hitherto failed in every task the emperor had entrusted to him.

  Where the two ministers differed, less in substance than in the strength of their feelings, was in their appraisal of Dara Shukoh. Jafar Khan, normally courteous to the core, could scarcely hide his aversion to the crown prince, while the Agha never hid his fondness for the prince even when he disapproved of him.

  ‘Ah, my friend, I agree with you. Dara can be inordinately in
sulting when he loses his temper,’ Khwaja Chisti reported the Agha as telling Jafar Khan. ‘I do not mind his boorishness towards me. Irascibility in a ruler is a deplorable trait that causes but little harm. Sometimes it may even be useful in preventing inappropriate familiarity and in instilling much-needed fear.’

  Although I had been in Delhi for less than a couple of months I, too, had heard stories about Dara Shukoh’s lack of tact in dealing with the Mogul nobility who attach much importance to what they call izzat or personal honour. A slight on their honour normally invites lethal retribution, but the Omrah were helpless when the source of the affront was a member of the royal family. Nothing held Dara back from publicly insulting many of the Omrah and he had even slighted Prime Minister Sadullah Khan on more than one occasion, requiring the emperor’s intervention to soothe the injured amour-propre of a man the emperor esteemed as an able administrator and valuable adviser.

  ‘No doubt the Wali Ahad possesses the resources, majesty and pomp of a king,’ Shah Jahan had written to his favourite son after one such instance when Dara had accused Sadullah Khan of cheating him out of some land revenue, ‘but he appears to be inimical to honest people. The Wali Ahad is good to bad men and bad to the good ones.’

  Khwaja Chisti reported another conversation where Jafar Khan’s normally clipped speech had occasionally degenerated into sputters of outrage.