The Crimson Throne

by Sudhir Kakar

  Prince Dara’s hesitation in promptly launching an offensive proved costly. By next morning, when the army moved to block the rebels, it was too late. Aurangzeb’s forces had crossed the river and were entrenching themselves in a vast plain outside the village of Samugarh.

  The distance between the two armies was now less than a league and a half. The prince was still of a mind to immediately attack Aurangzeb’s forces which were exhausted from the crossing. Some of the rebels’ heavier guns were still on the other side of the river. But the traitors again prevailed. This time they succeeded in bribing Bhawani Das to convince the prince that neither the day nor the hour was astrologically favourable. Prince Dara hesitated again.

  On the same evening the prince received a letter from the emperor who had got news of Aurangzeb’s crossing of the Chambal. The emperor instructed Prince Dara to retreat and take up position outside Agra till the arrival of Sulaiman Shukoh. This was an impossible demand. If we retreated, Aurangzeb would advance with greater speed and with lifted spirits. Our army would lose confidence in its commander and desert in large numbers.

  ‘Your Majesty should ease your heart,’ Prince Dara wrote back to his father. ‘I have decided to attack tomorrow. Within three days I promise to drag those wretches, Aurangzeb and Murad Baksh, bound into your august presence. You may then punish them as you deem fit.’

  On the morning of twenty-seventh May, the day the prince wanted to commence battle, there was an unseasonable shower. It cooled the earth and brought relief to the soldiers. Judging from the trumpeting of the elephants and the bellowing of the camels, the animals welcomed it just as much as the men did. The traitors, in collusion with the dog Bhawani Das, now took yet another step to scuttle the Wali Ahad’s chances of victory. Knowing well that Aurangzeb’s ranks were not in full battle order, they put up the astrologer to counsel the Wali Ahad that the time was not favourable for an attack. ‘The skies have been weeping over your defeat, O Prince, from the time they learnt Your Highness wanted to fight today. Tomorrow is the auspicious day on which you will without doubt be victorious. You must rest today.’

  Khalilullah Khan, who had accompanied Bhawani Das to ensure the success of their devious plan, supported the astrologer. ‘Tomorrow is certainly most auspicious,’ he said. ‘It is the day the Almighty created light.’

  The shadow side of a spiritual person is his conviction that the universe is teeming with signs and portents waiting to be known. Everything is not only interconnected but also has a hidden meaning which can be deciphered by those in possession of ilm-ruhani—spiritual knowledge. The Wali Ahad was highly credulous where warnings of astrologers, sorcerers and other practitioners of the occult were concerned. The attack was postponed.

  At midnight, three artillery shots were heard being fired from the direction of Aurangzeb’s camp. In a few minutes we heard the galloping and neighing of horses, and loud commands, as Prince Dara, accompanied by a few horsemen holding aloft flaming torches, approached our camp on his black Arab stallion. He wanted to personally oversee the firing of three return shots from our largest field gun, a twenty-pounder. I began to dismantle my tent to clear a passage for the prince and his escort so that they did not have to veer a couple of hundred yards to the left where there was a gap large enough for them to pass through. The prince seemed cheerful and waited patiently while the servants untied the ropes that tethered the tent to wooden pegs hammered into the ground.

  ‘We shall soon be back in our beloved Delhi, Manucci,’ he said with a smile. ‘You can go back to your life of being a doctor, and bleeding the lovely ladies!’

  ‘Your Highness, too, can continue his studies,’ I replied.

  ‘Ah, I doubt that, Manucci,’ he said. ‘It will not be like before. The responsibilities of the throne will not leave me much time to fulfil the obligation to the soul.’ He leaned forward and patted his horse’s neck as it whinnied and shivered its haunches. ‘See, how eager he is to be in the thick of the action,’ he said, his voice tinged with pride. ‘]ust like his master.’

  As he rode away the prince appeared calm and full of hope, briefly dissipating the abject foreboding that had not left me since we had marched out of Agra.

  Seeing that putting up my tent again would not be worth the time and effort, I mounted my horse and rode out of the camp in the direction of the enemy army. This was my first war and I was naturally curious, but, more than that, I needed purposeful physical activity to allay my returning sense of unease.

  The sky was clear and the moon nearly full. The night was heavy with the swell of piled-up heat. A slight breeze brought in a most disagreeable reek of faecal matter. I had encountered the stink wherever the army had halted and found it utterly unbearable. The higher officers of the army slept with their faces covered with muslin scarves dipped in rose or jasmine attar, and even appointed a servant to sprinkle a few drops of the perfume on the cloth every hour through the night. Although more than four hundred scavengers accompanied the imperial army to remove horse, camel and elephant dung from the camp, they could do nothing to eradicate the smell of flatulence produced by thousands of animals confined to an area of a large village or a small town. The worst stench came from the surrounding fields where thousands of ordinary soldiers relieved themselves. As the day heated up and the sun began to stir the piles of excrement spread over the land, the stench became overwhelming. When I had commented on the overpowering odour on my first day on the field I was told that the fields around the marching route of an army remain uncultivable for months. Except, that is, for fields that grow brinjals, since the vegetables prefer this particular manure and can grow to twice their normal size when supplied with the correct proportions. The price of brinjals reduced substantially after an army has passed through the area, although an upper-caste Hindu would never let the vegetable enter his kitchen.

  After riding through a mile of unploughed fields, I reached a hillock overlooking a deserted village which afforded a clear view in all directions. Dismounting, I tied my horse to a stately banyan tree and climbed on to a low, sturdy branch. For about an hour, all was quiet except for the occasional howl of an abandoned village dog and the coarse croaking of frogs from the ponds below the hill. Of this concerted bass chorus that filled the air, one could only say that the harmony was tolerable but the melody atrocious. More dogs had begun to bark now. I looked around for signs of movement and watched in dismay as at least a hundred horsemen left our camp in ones and twos and passed close to the village below me as they rode in the direction of Aurangzeb’s lines. I waited in silence to see what would transpire. At daybreak, when the sullen orange eye of the moon had still not vanished but glimmered balefully above the horizon, I saw Aurangzeb’s army advancing in my direction at a leisurely pace. It became clear to me now that the gunshots we had heard the previous night had been a signal to the traitors that Aurangzeb was ready to give battle at daybreak.

  I watched, silent and immobile, as the enemy proceeded. In the front were five divisions of cavalry that were strung out in a wide arc. I estimated each of them at ten thousand horsemen. They were armed with lances, bows and arrows, and matchlocks. Aurangzeb was seated on the elephant in the middle. The cavalry division of Murad Baksh was on his extreme left. Murad Baksh, too, was seated on an elephant that was larger than his brother’s. His three-year-old son was sitting in his lap. After the army had passed the village, the cavalry halted. From behind them, the artillery emerged to take up positions in the front, followed by musketeers and camels carrying swivel guns. The morning sun had begun to dissolve the darkness. The sky was becoming lighter, with the last of the surviving stars rapidly fading away. Clambering down the hill, I mounted my horse and rode back to our fines.

  The orders for the imperial army to move must have come soon after I left. I saw it had moved forward and Prince Dara had begun to array it for battle. The prince’s own division, with his artillery taking up position in the front, was in the middle of our massive force. Each gun carri
age flew the scarlet pennant of the Wali Ahad. The guns were chained together to prevent the enemy’s horses from riding through the gaps between them and falling on the gunners. The rows of guns protected ten thousand musketeers and five hundred camel-riders with swivel guns. These were followed by armour-clad elephants and twenty-eight thousand horsemen. Prince Dara, mounted on Fateh Jang, was at the rear of his cavalry. He was followed by more elephants carrying drums and trumpets. To the immediate right of the prince’s division, under the command of Ram Singh Rathor, were fifteen thousand Rajputs armed with lethal spears and dressed in yellow robes under their chain-mail, which signified their readiness to sacrifice their lives. Next to them, on the extreme right, was Khalilullah, leading thirty thousand Mogul horsemen. To Prince Dara’s left was Rustam Khan, the trusted general who had accompanied the prince on his expedition at Kandahar, with fifteen thousand horsemen. To Rustam Khan’s left was Rao Chatrasal leading another fifteen thousand horsemen, Rajput as well as Pathan. As the sun rose, dawn began to glint dully on the steel of the spear points and the bronze-iron gun barrels.

  When I now think of the army positioned for battle, the ranks are more organized in my imagination than they were in reality. The cavalry divisions, for instance, were not separated by any distance, but were positioned very close to each other, like pine trees in a forest. There was considerable mingling among horses and riders at the edges. Scattered horsemen carrying messages from commanders galloped in front of the massed force. Water-carriers walked to and fro through the lines, stilling thirst on what promised to be the hottest day that year. At around eight o’clock an order was passed from one division to the next that all the courier horsemen should ride back to their respective divisions, and the water-carriers and hawkers retire to the rear of the army, as the artillery was ready to fire. I reached for my gun just as the artillery barrage started. A Mogul horseman who was late in returning to his squadron was hit by a stray ball and was the first casualty. Miraculously, the horse survived, and I watched him limping on alone, yelped at by one of the village dogs. As my eyes turned to the cur, oblivious to the massed death surrounding him, I felt the first stabbing of fear. Unbidden images of my lifeless body lying under a heap of corpses flashed through my mind. Then another image, that of my mother, never as clearly recollected as at that instant, replaced the earlier ones of death and decay. She was lifting up an infant in her arms, a faint smile on her inclined face. I looked up to scan the heavens for a sign that I would not die on a foreign battiefield, far from the canals and bridges of my beloved Venice. High above, I saw the first vultures begin to circle. I knew then with a certainty that can only arise from the depths of one’s body and never from the cogitations of the mind that I was not intended to be a part of the feast that awaited them.

  With no order to cease fire coming forth, the artillery salvos continued for three hours. The enemy, however, held their fire, except for occasional shots from two or three guns, fired almost as a mockery of our bombardments. As I came to know later, our shots did no damage, for they fell short of Aurangzeb’s forces.

  When the order to cease fire finally came, the soldiers lay down their weapons and took off the metal head-pieces and the jackets of mail, looking as though they had emerged from an oven kept at low heat. They sought the smallest bits of shade in the wavering shadows thrown by the horses and the fines of guns. As water-carriers swarmed through the lines, I too found refuge from the sun in the shadow thrown by the gun on my left. The casing of my own gun had cracked after the third round of firing. Luckily no one was injured since the crack was detected in time and the gun did not burst. A five-pounder that had burst its barrel while being fired had killed its Belgian gunner and his three helpers, and injured ten others, a few minutes later. It had been scarcely thirty paces to my right. Even ten paces closer and the shards of flying metal would have seriously injured or even maimed me for life. The inchoate feeling of being kept safe from harm that had begun to take hold of me with the image of my mother’s face now became a certainty: I was invulnerable.

  I heard later that Prince Dara had conferred with his generals during the pause. Khalilullah’s advice had been to attack. ‘The invincible Wali Ahad is in sight of a famous victory. Without losing a single man, except a wretched horseman who died of heat stroke, your artillery has destroyed a greater part of the enemy. Now it is time to make the final effort and attack.’

  The other senior general Rustam Khan, who was reputed to be physically as powerful as Murad and carried a volume of the Persian poet Hafiz’s poems in the pocket of his tunic to every battle, differed. He counselled prudence. ‘It is better to await the enemy’s attack. And attack it must since it has travelled a great distance to seek us. When the attack comes we can take advantage of our valour and our organized positions.’

  ‘I am astonished that so famous a captain should say at this juncture that we should be cowards,’ Khalilullah had retorted. ‘That we should have so little courage as not to take the offensive after we have almost destroyed the enemy.’

  Since defence facks the glory of attack, Prince Dara found Khalilullah’s advice congenial to his own temperament. Rustam Khan was ordered to return to his division and prepare to launch the offensive on a signal from the Wali Ahad.

  Barely ten minutes later, the drums began to beat again, signalling a fresh attack. The guns were unchained to allow the troops to pass through the lines. The prince too had set his own elephant in motion. There was much disorder as the non-combatants, the barbers, shopkeepers, water-carriers and the rest began to run in the opposite direction to escape the approaching armies. One of the water-carriers dropped his leather sack full of water and stopped for a moment, agonizing whether he should pick up the sack before deciding that he could run much faster without the load.

  From my vantage position in the front row of the guns that were now silent, I could now fully concentrate on watching the battle that began with four squadrons of Prince Dara’s cavalry charging at the enemy ranks. As the Omrah leading the attack spurred their horses on to full speed, bright sunlight raking the animals’ flanks with fire, the tassels of yak tails in the front and back of the saddles, as well as on the horses’ heads, flew about in the wind as though the animals had grown wings.

  At first the rebel forces did not react. Then, suddenly, when the horsemen were almost upon them, they discharged their cannon, musketry and swivel pieces. The advancing troops suffered heavy losses and scattered in all directions. From the top of his elephant, Prince Dara signalled for the guns to be moved forward and for the musketeers to advance, but we knew the artillery would be useless at such close quarters. Rustam Khan and Rao Chatrasal, whose divisions too had suffered heavy losses from enemy firing, rallied their troops. Prince Dara now launched an attack with such violence and vigour that he broke through the rebels’ frontline artillery. The enemy’s camels and infantry were put to flight. Seeing the prince’s success at the centre, Aurangzeb sent squadrons of cavalry as reinforcement. The fighting was fierce. Arrows flew thick in the air. We rejoiced to see that the rebel reinforcements were in disarray. Aurangzeb, who was not far away, was in obvious danger if the advance continued from our end, for he was left with few fresh troops. He had even double-chained the legs of his tusker to prevent the animal from suddenly retreating.

  But Prince Dara halted to regroup his forces. During this pause he received the news that both Rustam Khan and Rao Chatrasal had been killed, though their forces continued to fight valiantly. The prince veered to the left to reinforce these forces, unwisely evacuating his position at the centre. He fought so vafiantly that the rebels were routed. Victorious on three fronts, our morale now rose and every soldier on the field was enthused into fighting with redoubled energy.

  Meanwhile, fresh reports reached the prince from the other end of the battlefield. The Rajputs led by Ram Singh Rathor had engaged Murad Baksh’s division and had pressed their attack with such energy that they had dispersed Murad’s vanguard and ca
ptured his guns. A dozen Rajputs led by Ram Singh himself had reached the elephant on which Murad was seated. They let loose arrows at the howdah, killing the driver and planting one in Murad’s cheek, just under the left eye. Murad was a lout, but a brave man. He did not retreat. Even though he was trying to control the elephant at the same time as he was saving himself from the relentless shower of arrows, he picked up his son, threw the boy on the floor of the howdah and covered him with a shield on which he placed his foot. On seeing Murad in dire straits, Ram Singh and his Rajputs dismounted and leapt on to the elephant. They hoped to sever its girths by sword cuts and thus bring Murad to ground. But the Rajputs’ luck had finally run out. One of Murad’s arrows struck Ram Singh in the chest, felling him, and Murad’s expertly trained war elephant seized the body with its trunk and threw it under its feet, crushing the brave Rajput. When Prince Dara heard the news, he hastened to reinforce the Rajputs and capture the exposed Murad. What unfolded now was the final act of Khafilullah Khan’s treachery.

  As a part of our battle strategy, Khalilullah was supposed to have held his division in reserve to aid the imperial army in sectors where its situation became precarious. After the warning I had received from his wife, 1 had tried to keep an eye on Khalilullah’s movements on the battlefield and had seen no sign that his division was fulfilling its assigned role. In the beginning, his forces had discharged several volleys of arrows but as soon he saw Rao Chatrasal’s men engage with the enemy, he had commanded his own men to retire behind the line of battle. In spite of their losses from artillery and musket fire, the brave Rajputs and Pathans had driven themselves in like a steel wedge between Aurangzeb’s troops and Murad’s. All I saw of Khalilullah’s mercenaries was scattered groups aimlessly galloping from one end of the battlefield to another with loud shouts of ‘Ba-kush! Ba-kush!’