The Crimson Throne

by Sudhir Kakar

  ‘What I dread with his ascension to the throne is much worse than bad manners: I fear the disappearance of Islam from Hindustan!’ Jafar Khan had said, adjusting his turban that had come askew in his excitement. ‘You see how he surrounds himself with infidels and takes great pleasure in translating their religious books. He openly professes allegiance to the Sufi heresy that all religions have the same goal, only the paths are different. He claims that he is an arif who has known and glimpsed the unveiled face of God and thus no longer needs to comply with the injunctions of the Sharia. I hear that in his own court he openly repeats the Sufi heresy of that shameless Mullah Shah that a true Believer is the infidel who has attained God and an infidel is a Believer who has not seen or known Him. And he has even had the effrontery to write, “Life lies concealed in every idol and Faith lies hidden behind Infidelity”.’

  ‘Ah, Jafar, my friend, you exaggerate,’ the Agha had countered, ‘Prince Dara remains a Believer. There are no indications that he has renounced Prophet Mohammed, sallallahou alayhi wasallam, peace be upon him.’

  ‘I grant you that he has yet to outdo his great-grandfather, Emperor Akbar, who made scandalous remarks about the moral character of the Prophet. Emperor Akbar simply pushed the Prophet aside, disobeyed Allah’s command that Mohammed was the last of the prophets and even aspired to form an Ummat of his own. But give Dara Shukoh a few years on the throne and I dread the consequence for the religion of Mohammed and the rule of the Mughals. I hear he wears a ring inscribed in the script of the infidels, and it says “Prabhu”, one of the names the wretched infidels have for their God, or is it one of their many gods, I never know which.’

  ‘You are right about the danger to the empire if the Wali Ahad ascends the throne,’ said Danishmand Khan. ‘I wish Prince Dara’s pursuits were less intellectual and his aims less spiritual. How different he would have been if he had studied less philosophy and more military science, if he had devoted to administration the time he has spent in writing books. If the Wali Ahad had more worldly cunning in him and less mystic spiritualism I would have bowed to my emperor’s choice and never entertained disloyal thoughts.’

  Danishmand Khan had supervised the education of the princes when they were children but, and this is one of the many qualities I admired in him, he did not let his personal liking for his former charge come in the way of a fair and objective assessment of the eldest prince’s character.

  ‘I remember that even when he was studying Persian poetry, Prince Dara showed far less interest in the epics of Firdausi and Sadi than in the mystical verse of Rumi and Jami. The miracles performed by saints spoke to him more than the exploits of warrior heroes. His later association with Sufi and Hindu mystics has developed in him a frame of mind that is credulous, sensitive and impractical. And that is the danger, my friend. Once you begin to lose contact with the real world and dwell more and more in your own mind, your judgement will be warped no matter how brilliant your mind is. Dara believes whatever he wishes, and whatever he believes he sees in dreams and visions and not in the world as it is. He is convinced that he can accomplish everything by the powers of his mind. What frightens me is that he considers himself competent in all matters and does not feel the need to consult advisers, as if knowledge of the Divine, which he claims to possess, also gives him knowledge of state finances or of warfare. No one has a higher opinion of the ability of the Wali Ahad than the prince himself. Do you know that he even lets himself be addressed as al-kamil, the perfect man?’

  ‘Why do you then hesitate to join Aurangzeb’s party?’ Jafar Khan asked. ‘He will be a great monarch, perhaps the greatest in the Timur dynasty. I have interacted closely with the prince during our campaign against the Persians. I have seen with my own eyes that he is a shrewd judge of human character. He has an indefatigable capacity for work, even routine work which seems to tire the Wali Ahad so quickly. Aurangzeb is the only prince, perhaps in the history of the House of Timur, who spurns luxury and the pleasures of the senses. Above all, he is a pious and God-fearing Muslim who carries out the injunctions of the Sharia exactly as prescribed, without deviating from it an iota in letter or spirit. He will restore Islam in India to its pristine glory, my friend. He will clean its holy river from the polluting streams of laxity and heresy that have been flowing into it ever since the time of Emperor Akbar.’

  ‘You will not find me hesitating when the time comes to do my duty,’ Danishmand Khan replied.

  ‘Ah, our Agha is a canny one, Bernier,’ Khwaja Chisti said with glee, tapping his temple with a forefinger. Jafar Khan had to content himself with this enigmatic response.’

  I know I have been accused of being biased against Dara, the heir apparent, especially by the Europeans in his service, but anyone who has read Lataif-ul-akhbar, a detailed account of Dara’s siege of Kandahar, a book that was widely circulated when I was in Delhi, cannot but give assent to Jafar Khan’s charges.

  Take the matter of Dara’s credulity. I am well aware that Indians, and indeed all orientals, are excessively superstitious and consult astrologers for almost every occasion of import, but the prince’s dependence on people who would dictate an auspicious time for an army to march, begin a siege or launch an assault I found well beyond the boundaries of reason. Although I find it difficult to appreciate I do understand that when Prince Dara left Lahore with an army of seventy thousand horses, five thousand mounted matchlock men, three thousand mounted archers, ten thousand infantry, over two hundred war elephants, six thousand diggers, five thousand stone-cutters and sappers, he also took along a hundred mullahs to beseech God daily for his victory. Priests praying for their prince’s success at arms are a part of every army, though a hundred of them might seem excessive. With somewhat greater difficulty, owing no doubt to my Christian faith, I can also countenance that like many other commanders, the prince did not rely on God’s help alone but also pressed Satan into his service by employing several sorcerers to generate worms in the food of the besieged Persian garrison in the Kandahar fort. But any rational man can only shake his head in disbelief when he hears about other instances of the Wali Ahad’s superstitious nature and his deep faith in the occult, as also his offensive behaviour towards his senior commanders, which are detailed in the Lataiful-akhbar, a trustworthy source on the Kandahar campaign even if, understandably, its author chose to remain anonymous.

  In the three months that the prince’s army held siege of the fort at Kandahar, there appeared, among others, a renowned Tantrik who promised to summon forty génies, déos as the Indians call them, and dispatch them to pull down the fort’s walls; a yogi accompanied by forty long-haired and bearded disciples, clad in no more than strips of cloth that make a pretence of covering their private parts, who offered to perform a special prayer that would secure the submission of the Persian garrison within twenty days; and a group of sadhus from Kashmir undertaking to build for the prince a wonderful contraption, which would fly through air without wings and could carry three soldiers armed with grenades. The prince welcomed and entertained them all, falling prey to their incredible claims and indulging their unending demands.

  The account involving a sorcerer who claimed he could silence the guns and muskets of the Persians for three hours with his incantations, time enough for the soldiers to capture the fort, is particularly entertaining. The magician demanded a fee of twenty rupees and said he would require two dancing girls, one buffalo, a lamb, five cocks, two gamblers and two thieves in order to perform the necessary rites. The sorcerer declared that he had been inside the fort in an invisible form and would lead the soldiers there at an auspicious hour. On the night after, he performed his diabolical rites in the presence of the prince and his favourite commander, Mirza Jafar, throwing grains into a fire as he danced around it, now jumping a yard in the air, now rolling on the ground, and then sacrificed a dog as also the lamb and the cocks he had asked for earlier. To the dancing girls, gamblers and thieves he said, ‘It is obligatory to sacrifice you all. Howev
er, I shall give my own blood and set you free.’ He then stabbed his thigh with a knife and sprinkled drops of his own blood on the blood of the slain animals before he began his weird dance again. Finally, he instructed Mirza Jafar to wash his sword in the sacrificial blood, claiming this would empower the sword to cut through steel and transform its owner into a veritable Achilles without the accursed heel.

  Early next morning, when Mirza Jafar went to the sorcerer’s tent to wake him up so he could silence the Persian guns before the assault was carried out, the fraud told the bewildered commander, ‘Mirza, three powerful dcos are guarding the fort. I have struggled with them the entire night. I fought them in the air and on the ground. I have now subdued two who are in my captivity, but the third remains undefeated. Let the attack be postponed till next Monday, once he has been captured.’ Of course, on the appointed Monday, the sorcerer revealed that he had been unable to round up the third genie who had proved to be much too strong and, in fact, the sorcerer’s own life was in grave danger unless he released the other two génies, and recommended that the whole enterprise be abandoned!

  Upon hearing of this turn of events, the prince is said to have asked the veteran general, Mahabat Khan, a slow-paced, grizzled bear of a man, ‘The breaches have been opened. What do you advise about an assault?’

  ‘We are servants,’ Mahabat Khan replied. ‘We are only there to carryout your orders. Only kings can advise kings.’

  Dara began with flattery, but ended with harsh words.

  ‘Why do you not say plainly that attack is advisable and that you will fight shoulder to shoulder with the others towards victory? Your father captured the famous fort of Daulatabad and you seem to think of returning home without capturing Kandahar. You will do well to banish such a vain and mischievous idea from your mind.’

  Next, the prince asked Najabat Khan to give his opinion on the feasibility of an assault. The commander had recently regained prince’s favour after a disgraceful defeat at the hands of the queen of Kumaon, a warrior who had a fondness for cutting off the noses of enemies she captured in battle. Najabat Khan submitted that it would be better if the guns were employed for a further three or four days to punch holes through the walls of the fort. Dara looked at Najabat Khan, tapping his own nose in a message that was as clear to everyone at the meeting as it was insulting to the commander. ‘You seem to insinuate that no breaches have been affected. Whether or not there is a breach, an assault must be delivered.’

  Then he had turned to Raja Jai Singh of Jaipur and said, ‘Raja-ji, your exertions in the emperor’s business have fallen short of expectations from the very start. No plea will be heard now. If your objection is that no breach has been made in front of your battery, I give you jafar’s.’

  Declining the offer, the raja said, ‘By the time Jafar enters through the breach, I shall be able to do the same by fixing scaling-ladders to the wall.’

  ‘If so, when do you propose to deliver the attack?’

  ‘I have nothing to do with agreements and assurances. I have to simply obey your command,’ Jai Singh replied.

  ‘What words are these?’ the prince had cried out in passion. You must say plainly whether an assault is advisable or not. If you mean to keep yourself aloof from the affair, give it to me in writing so that I may either order a retreat to Hindustan or recall Rustam Khan and initiate an attack with his advice.’

  ‘I am prepared to give in writing that I am always in favour of an attack, and always ready to deliver it,’ the raja said.

  ‘Your heart and tongue do not seem to agree,’ Prince Dara had retorted. ‘What is in your heart your tongue does not reveal, and what your tongue utters finds no echo in your heart. Perhaps it has not occurred to you that I shall return without conquering Kandahar,’ he continued. ‘If I do so, how can I show my face to the emperor?’

  The raja had bridled. Your Highness is the very light of the emperor’s eyes. Whenever his glance lights upon your face, it will be welcomed. But how shall we humble servants show our faces?’ he said.

  ‘You have twice shown this very face to His Majesty,’ the prince sarcastically remarked. ‘The difficulty is mine, for whom this will be the first occasion to do so.’

  Jai Singh’s face had flushed. The ends of his moustache, the proud accoutrement of a Rajput, quivered.

  ‘Whether you agree or disagree, I command you to make an assault, no matter if you die while conquering the fort.’

  As Jai Singh was leaving, Dara said in a voice loud enough to be overheard that the raja looked like a mirasi, a minstrel. This was a deadly insult to Rajput honour, implying that the man was only capable of holding a lute in his hands, not a sword.

  It is thus untrue, a falsehood given currency by Dara’s partisans, that all idolater rajas loved Dara and considered him as one of their own; I cannot imagine that Raja Jai Singh, a proud Rajput, ever forgot that the prince had called him a mirasi or bore him any affection thereafter.

  A few days later, watched by Prince Dara from the shelter of a house on top of a hill, the Mogul army finally attacked the fort and was met by withering crossfire from the Persian cannon and musketry. After four hours of fighting, the loss of sixteen hundred men and an equal number being wounded, the Indians retreaterd. Within the fort, the Persians played their trumpets and kettle drums announcing their victory and, to mock the defeated Moguls, they brought dancing girls to perform within sight of the Mogul batteries. The next day, the Persian commander allowed the imperial army to carry away and bury the dead bodies of the Mohammedans while the heads of five hundred idolater soldiers were cut off and heaped together in the fort, leaving the headless trunks to the vultures.

  On his return from the failed campaign, the Wali Ahad was accorded a grand reception by the emperor in the audience hall of the Red Fort in the newly constructed city of Delhi where the prince’s favourite commanders were honoured with additional titles and rich presents. It seems that given the Mogul army’s earlier failures under Aurangzeb on the same mission and the general lack of success against the Persians in recent times, no one took the retreat from Kandahar seriously. Except, perhaps, Prince Dara himself, whose overweening vanity could not bear the slightest dent in the self-image of perfection he had assiduously cultivated throughout his life.

  ‘The larger part of my misfortune probably lay in a constellation of planets that had long ago linked my fate to that of Prince Dara’

  NICCOLAO MANUCCI

  THE THREE YEARS THAT I spent at the court of the Wali Ahad was also the best period in the noble prince’s life. His one failure till that time, the military expedition to recapture the fort of Kandahar, was by now forgotten. The gathering clouds of the struggle for the empire, visible to any wise Amir, were still too far off to be an immediate cause for concern. Showered with honours, his golden throne placed just below the emperor’s, the prince was the ruler of India in all but name.

  The source of the Wali Ahad’s high spirits was neither the ever-increasing signs of his father’s favour nor the authority to reign over a great empire. He certainly enjoyed the exercise of power, but what gave him the greatest joy and made him feel most alive were his flights of inspiration as a scholar of religions. I do not quite understand the pleasures of scholarly work and I have even less use for religion than for scholarship—religion never filled a poor man’s belly or warmed a lonely man’s bed. I do not see the point of delving into dusty tomes to then produce one yourself since it will merely be fated to gather dust. But friends who are scholars tell me that the pleasure of such an exercise is akin to what a doctor feels when he arrives at the correct diagnosis and treatment of a disease that his colleagues have declared incurable. It is, they tell me, very much like the elation one feels when a misty vision suddenly clears up or one gains sight of something that was earlier only sensed. It is the ecstasy one experiences when tediously gathered details retreat into the background and their larger connection stands out for the very first time. But if one wanted to prosper
at the prince’s court, it was best to show an interest in both.

  Much to my relief, I did not need to pretend for too long. In spite of my lack of education, I discovered myself warming to the heat of religious discussions. There was much I did not understand, yet my incomprehension was not an obstacle. Rather, it was a spur, a promise that one day I too will be a part of the conversations that give rise to so much pleasure and excitement.

  How do I describe the brilliance of the evenings I spent at the Wali Ahad’s mansion, where poetry flowed as liberally as wine; where the naked Sufi poet Sarmad sat on the same carpet as the richly robed and bejewelled Wazir Khan; where, on his rare visits to the capital, Mullah Shah, the prince’s spiritual mentor, was received with the honour otherwise reserved for the emperor; where we applauded with genuine delight as the Wali Ahad sang a lullaby he had composed for his war elephant, Fateh Jang; where our frequent laughter dissolved all differences in status but never our mutual respect?

  During my time at his court, the prince was at work on his greatest literary essay. With the help of select Hindu scholars he was translating into Persian the fifty-nine Upanishads, the scriptures that contain the core of Hindu philosophy. He was convinced that the Upanishads were the ‘hidden books’ alluded to in the Quran. His chief helper in this enterprise was one whom I had seen when I was first presented to the prince in his palace, the famed Maratha scholar Kavindracharya Saraswati.

  For all his scholarship, Kavindracharya was a young man, no more than a decade older than I. His head was shaven. He was always clad in a single length of white or saffron coloured cloth wrapped around his waist, with one end thrown over a shoulder. Normally reserved, if not cold and remote, he thawed when I told him of my studies with the Hindu doctor in Goa.

  ‘Ah, yes, our best doctors live in Goa,’ he said.

  I asked him some questions about Hindu religion. He answered them politely enough, but I understood from his responses and the way his thin lips seemed to lose any softness that he found my questions naïve. His innate courtesy prevented him from being openly dismissive. He became animated only once, when I spoke of my difficulty with Hindu idolatry.