The Crimson Throne

by Sudhir Kakar

  The journey to Lahore was slow since we were careful to travel only during daytime. At noon, we would halt to feed and rest the animals and then travel for another couple of hours till we reached a serai where we could seek shelter in some security. On the highway outside Panipat, fifty miles west of Delhi, we passed a newly erected tower pierced all round by several openings. Placed in each window at intervals of two feet, were several severed heads of robbers who had been caught and executed. A small boy in a tattered loincloth, no more than three years of age, the tip of his tongue flicking on the snot plastered between his nose and his upper lip, was staring at one of the heads. A mangy dog, a large tumour bulging under the skin of its neck, sat crouched next to the boy, chewing on a bone of uncertain provenance. It could not have been long since the execution had taken place. The heads were still not wholly decomposed and gave out a foul odour. For a brief moment, my eyes tricked my brain and the heads I saw were those of my friends in Prince Dara’s entourage: Wazir Khan, Rustam Khan, Khwaja Younis. I shook my head violently to rid it of these ominous imaginings.

  The prince’s eyes brimmed with tears when I presented myself at his court in Lahore. The recent events had left their mark on his face; he looked years older than he had just a few weeks ago when he had charged at Aurangzeb’s army atop Fateh Jang. There were deep furrows around his eyes that frequently became moist from uncontrolled emotion; the white hairs in his beard and eyebrows were visible even from a distance.

  ‘Look!’ the prince said turning to his officers, his voice hoarse with emotion. ‘Look at the fidelity of this farangi lad! He is neither of my religion, nor of my race. Nor has he eaten of my salt for long. Yet he has come to join me, passing through dangers and risking his life. Those whom I retained in my service for so many years, who gladly accepted gifts and favours, have abandoned me in my hour of need with base ingratitude and disloyalty.’

  He ordered that a horse be given to me and that it be brought in at once. The prince personally inspected the horse, and not satisfied with its look asked for another. He then presented me with five hundred rupees and ordered that my pay be doubled. I had no difficulty in finding appropriate lodging in Lahore as several of my European friends who had served in the prince’s artillery, and had escaped from Agra before Aurangzeb’s arrival, were already residing there and kindly asked me to join them.

  With fresh news arriving daily of Aurangzeb’s imminent arrival in Delhi in pursuit of the prince, raising a new army had become a matter of utmost urgency. Although Prince Dara now had twenty thousand horsemen in his service, they were far from being a fighting force that could resist Aurangzeb’s armies. His hopes lay with the Rajput prince Rajrup Singh whose territory in Jammu adjoined the mountainous kingdom of Kashmir. Rajrup Singh, who had served under the Wali Ahad in the siege of Kandahar, had a cavalry of fifteen thousand and an infantry of three hundred thousand Rajputs. He had offered his support on condition that the prince would provide him sufficient funds. The Wali Ahad, who had protected and supported Hindus throughout his life, still laid store in the honour and fidelity of the Rajput kings. He at once gave the raja one million rupees. To bind him further to his cause, he sent the raja to Nadira Begum, who gave Rajrup Singh many presents, addressed him as her son, as dear to her as Sulaiman Shukoh. She then did something that was unprecedented among the Moguls. Since there was no milk in her breasts, she washed them with water and offered the Rajput this water to drink. Rajrup Singh drank the water and solemnly swore he would always be true to her and never fail his duties as a son. Then, promising to return with his army, he left for his kingdom with the money. In the next ten days, as Aurangzeb’s army approached, Prince Dara sent Rajrup Singh frantic messages summoning the raja to his aid, but the messages were met with silence. Betrayal, which had been quietly tiptoeing into the prince’s fate, had now taken full possession of it.

  I witnessed the consternation in the court when the news arrived that the vanguard of Aurangzeb’s army under the command of Khalilullah had crossed the river Sutlej at Ropar. The only natural obstacle that now remained between Aurangzeb’s forces and Lahore was the river Beas. The prince wavered. At times he was determined to strengthen the fort, summon the nobles of the neighbouring provinces to come to his aid and make a last valiant effort. At other times he gave in to despair. There is no hope,’ he said to his assembled officers one day. ‘It is better that this half-dead man leave the world so he is saved from witnessing the slaughter of his wives and children.’

  ‘The Holy Quran says that hopelessness in a Muslim is as great a sin as infidelity,’ the chief commander Daud Khan gently reminded him, seeking to steel the prince’s resolve. He suggested the prince stay at Lahore while he proceeded with the bulk of the forces to contest the crossing of the Beas. But the delay on the prince’s part in reaching a decision proved costly. Khalilullah had already crossed the Beas. When the prince heard that Aurangzeb himself had reached Ropar with another large army, he decided there was no option left but to flee from Lahore.

  I will not describe the hardships we faced as our army of a few thousand horsemen abandoned one fort after another, Aurangzeb’s troops under Khalilullah Khan and Raja Jai Singh, who had joined the new emperor, in hot pursuit. It seemed even the saints with whom he had enjoyed such close commerce had abandoned Prince Dara’s cause. I felt pity for the prince as he desperately clutched at occult straws and hoped for supernatural interventions to restore his fortunes. In Multan, he asked the descendants of the famous Sufi saint Sheikh Baha-ud-din Zakaria to intercede with the Prophet on his behalf.

  ‘We will certainly do so,’ they said. ‘We will remain awake during the night so as to be the first ones to receive an audience at dawn with Prophet Mohammed.’ In the morning, they appeared with downcast eyes and said that though they had waited in the Prophet’s antechamber the entire night they were unable to speak to him— because he had been conversing with Aurangzeb! This continued for three days. Prince Dara still did not waver in his regard for saints, and knaves who pretended to be such. He presented them with twenty-five thousand rupees and a costly chadar of the finest cloth to be spread over the tomb of Baha-ud-din.

  From Multan, we headed westwards in long marches, moving day and night, our strength reduced through desertions to five thousand cavalry and five thousand infantry. The guns, ammunition and supplies that would be required to withstand a long siege were loaded in five hundred boats that sailed for the fortress of Bhakkar. When we reached the fortress, which stood on a rocky island in the middle of the Indus where all the five rivers of the Punjab meet, the prince decided that two thousand of his select soldiers would be left behind at Bhakkar to deny the enemy a crossing. The prince himself would make for Gujarat through Sind with the rest of his troops to raise another army. I begged the prince to take me with him.

  ‘I would like to take all of you with me, my faithful farangi lad, but this fortress must be held to stop the advance of the traitors. That is the only chance we have to reverse our fortunes.’

  I protested. I entreated.

  ‘I promise you, Manucci,’ he said gently, ‘that when I am emperor you will be an Amir at the court. I now double your salary to three hundred rupees. You shall also be the captain of the Europeans. And to console you for my absence’—a rare smile appeared on his face like the sun emerging from behind dark monsoon clouds—’you shall have a boatload of the best wines from Kabul and Persia.’

  This was the last time I saw the prince. The news of a rare success in raising an army of twenty thousand horsemen in Gujarat and his faith that the Rajput princes, Jaswant Singh of Jodhpur and the Maharana of Udaipur, who owed so much to his intercessions on their behalf with Emperor Shah Jahan would come to his aid, gave all of us who had remained behind fleeting hope. But the prince’s spiteful fate would only be content with his total ruin. The Rajputs stayed in their dominions and the prince’s small army was decimated at Deorai. He was now in headlong flight through the harsh lands of Gujarat and
Sind, with his wives and children and a few hundred men. It was only a question of time before Aurangzeb’s forces would capture the prince.

  As if foreordained, the prince’s capture came through a final betrayal. He was taken prisoner by the Afghan Malik Jivan, with whom he had sought shelter in the northernmost reaches of the empire. Jivan was the same man whose life he had saved not once but twice from his father’s wrath.

  The twenty-ninth of August 1659. The day of the greatest infamy in the history of the Moguls. Bile rises in my mouth as I remember.

  A sunny morning, without a cloud to mar the deep blue of the sky, held no foreboding of the dark hours that awaited my beloved prince. Hoarse, throbbing drums led the sorry parade. And then the prince came into sight. His mount was no longer the majestic Fateh Jang, adorned in a gilt harness, his howdah crafted out of gold and silver shaded from the sun by a magnificent velvet canopy, but an undersized, worn-out female elephant liberally caked with mud and destined for slaughter. Deliberately fed on a diet of corn, cabbage and beans the previous evening, the animal’s booming farts accompanied the procession like the irregular beats of a discordant drum. Having gorged on decades of hate so that his very spittle turned into bile whenever he thought of Prince Dara, the monster Aurangzeb could not heap enough indignity on a man far his superior in all qualities of head and heart that make a prince immortal in the shared memories of his people. Aurangzeb’s attempt to humiliate the Wali Ahad by parading him in the sorriest of plights only lent him an air of tragic nobility. The Wali Ahad and his youngest son Sipir Shukoh, no more than a boy, clad in torn, dirty clothes, were seated in the open howdah, their hands and feet fettered in iron chains and their coarse cotton turbans covered in filth. Those who stood in the front rows of the onlookers and were in a position to observe the expression on the prince’s face tell me that it was serene, as if his soul was already viewing realms hidden from human eyes. Nazar Beg, whom I recognized as a slave the prince had often chastised, sat behind them with a raised sword. A squadron of mail-clad cavalry, their naked swords glinting in the sun, rode on both sides of the elephant. Behind them was a sight that made my blood boil: a procession of the vilest traitors that ever lived—Malik Jivan and his Afghans, who had betrayed the prince to the pursuing forces of Raja Jai Singh and Bahadur Khan, rode behind the elephant.

  Onlookers wept openly. I could hear shrieks and piercing wails of distress from women crowding the balconies. Indians have tender hearts but little physical courage. Although some women threw ashes and pots filled with urine and faeces on the heads of the traitorous Afghans riding below—which they parried with their shields—not one person made a single move or drew a sword to deliver the prince they loved and admired. I am ashamed to admit that after living for so many years among Indians, my own blood ran tepid in my veins. My sword, too, remained stuck in the scabbard. The impulse to draw it and rush to my beloved prince’s assistance remained just that—an impulse.

  Informed of the sympathy Prince Dara had aroused among Delhi’s inhabitants, Aurangzeb decided on a quick execution. Danishmand Khan was the only Amir who protested the decision and recommended that the prince be confined in the state prison at Gwalior. Circumspect as always, with blood as cold as that of his French retainer, that scoundrel M. Bernier, he took care to couch his opposition in terms of the effect the execution of a royal prince would have on India’s image in the courts of Persia and Turkey. He was scrupulous not to utter any words that could be construed as favourable to Prince Dara’s person. But the opportunity was too rife for the tyrant to be distracted from it, and he entrusted Nazar Beg with the foul task.

  When the rumours surrounding the circumstances of the prince’s execution finally settled, the images of the gruesome deed swam in my head. The Afghans had barged into the prince’s cell at nightfall just as father and son, who had refused food sent by the jailor for fear of being poisoned, were boiling lentils for their evening meal. They had caught hold of the boy, forcibly separated him from his father and dragged him into the adjoining cell. The piteous shrieks of his son continued to reach the prince till the last moment after he himself had been overpowered, and Nazar Beg had severed his head from his trunk. The ingrate then calmly wiped his sword against the cloth covering the lower part of the prince’s body and sent word to Aurangzeb that his order had been carried out.

  What I heard afterwards and then witnessed with my own eyes in the days that followed made me feel as though I were sinking in a swamp of black, fetid grief. Aurangzeb, who had been anxiously awaiting the news, ordered that Prince Dara’s head be washed of blood and brought to him on a dish. He then stamped on the face and said, Take it away from my sight. I did not look at the face of this apostate when he was alive, and I do not wish to do so now.’ The prince’s head was hung from a peg above the main gate of the palace for three days, rotting in the sun. An unending smoke of flies drifted over it before it was joined to the trunk and the corpse interred, unwashed and unprayed over, in an unmarked grave under the vault in the tomb of their great-great grandfather, Humayun.

  After the unspeakable murder of the Wali Ahad, I sank into a melancholic stupor which lasted almost six months. Sitting alone in my garden in the evenings, tears leaking out of the corners of my eyes, I wept at the fate of the prince. My thoughts, each beginning with ‘If only …’ obsessively circled around all that could have happened to allow the Wali Ahad to return victorious from the war and be crowned the emperor. If only the turncoat Jai Singh, a blot on the fair name of Rajputs, had pursued Shuja after his defeat as vigorously as he later pursued Prince Dara in service of Aurangzeb. If only the prince had been less trusting of the traitor Khalilullah Khan. If only…

  Since I was known to have been partisan to Prince Dara, the Omrah hesitated to call me to their harems in case of sickness. My place was filled by M. Bernier who, on the recommendation of Danishmand Khan, was appointed as one of Aurangzeb’s personal physicians. Prince Dara’s harem had scattered, its inmates absorbed into the harems of Aurangzeb and his sons. Nadira Begum, who had accompanied her husband on his flight through the harsh desert lands of Sind, had ingested poison after they were captured by the Afghans. Unable to reconcile to her future fate as Aurangzeb’s concubine, she preferred to end her life rather than become part of the spoils gracing his triumph. Prince Dara’s first love and my first medical disaster, Meher Begum, remained steadfast in rejecting Aurangzeb’s invitations to enter his harem. When the new emperor sent word that he was captivated by her hair, Meher Begum cut off her thick tresses and sent them to him with the message, ‘Here is the hair you found so attractive.’ Aurangzeb persisted. Her beauty was incomparable, he said, and he wanted her as one of his wives. Meher Begum slashed her face with a knife, collected the blood in a cloth and sent it to Aurangzeb with the note that if he sought the beauty of her face, it was now undone, and if her blood gratified him he was welcome to it. Impressed by her steadfastness, Aurangzeb left her alone.

  I fervently hoped that he suffered unbearable pangs of jealousy at Prince Dara’s ability to evoke such loyalty in a woman even after his death. I was loath to concede that although Aurangzeb was a heartless monster, capable ol the most foul acts of murder and perfidy, he had one redeeming quality. Although he shared the Islamic view that regards women less than men, he yet accorded them a higher place in the social order than most Muslims did. ‘A woman is not an instrument that can be hung against the wall when you have played on it; she is a man’s equal partner in the grand drama of creation,’ he is reported to have said. This is the only grey strand I can discern in the otherwise total blackness of Aurangzeb’s fiendish soul.

  In the worst period of my gloom, I wished I could follow the example of Prince Dara’s elephant. They say that after the Wali Ahad’s execution, the keeper of the elephant came sobbing to the animal and throwing his arms around its trunk said, ‘Unhappy Fateh Jang! What will become of you now that your master is dead?’ On hearing this, the elephant began to gather dust from th
e ground and throw it over its head with its trunk. It then sank to the ground on its knees and refused all food and water. Within a fortnight it was dead.

  My misery was no doubt made worse by the complete lack of companionship. Most of my friends from the Wali Ahad’s court were either dead or in prison. The rest had left Delhi and were scattered all over the country. The neighbouring house of the Jesuits, where I had spent many convivial evenings, lay empty. The fathers had been expelled from Delhi soon after Aurangzeb’s coronation and had returned to their original home in Agra. I myself lived in constant fear of a knock on the door announcing the arrival of a court official ordering me to vacate the house Prince Dara had allotted me.

  I was young then, and the dismal apathy began to lift once the resilience of youth joined the fray in earnest. Perhaps it is more accurate to say that my sorrow retreated into the deeper reaches of my heart. The prince and my friends rose from the dead only in my sleep. During the day I was calm, sometimes even cheerful. It was only at dawn that I would awake from an uneasy sleep with my eyelids wet from the tears I had shed in my dreams.

  Oddly, it was the day on which I witnessed Sarmad’s execution that I felt the stone that had been weighing on my spirit finally lift. Early on a December morning the naked poet, who had spread such joy with his wit and verse in the prince’s court, was taken to the square in front of the royal citadel to be executed. Low pale light was just beginning to spread across the land. It promised to be a bright day, but to those gathered at the square its menace was as palpable as a blade of knife. Perhaps it was the courage with which Sarmad faced the executioners that cut through the web in which my soul had been enmeshed for the last few months.