The Story of India

by Michael Wood

  THE MUGHAL STATE

  So what went wrong? After Akbar’s death why did the Age of Reason not come? Of course, it would not be the first time in history – and nor would it be the last – that an empire lost its way because of incompetent rule, over-consumption and extravagance, and ill-judged foreign wars. (All this would eventually happen.) The personality of the ruler also played its part. All the Mughals had demons, and some were undermined by them: Jahangir’s alcohol and opium; Jahan’s gluttony and rampant sex drive (his inordinate pursuit of women led even to accusations of incest). Aurangzeb’s demons lay the other way, in a hard-line brand of religious fundamentalism. The Mughals were also engaged in a perennial struggle against other powers within India. This had severe social and economic consequences through a period when India was still one of the two largest powers in the world. But it would come to a head in Aurangzeb’s long reign, when there was continuous warfare against Indian rulers in the Deccan.

  Until the mid-seventeenth century, though, the Mughal court was one of the most brilliant in the world. Cosmopolitan, tolerant in religion, it was a place where literature, music and painting flourished, and magnificent palaces and mosques were constructed in Agra, Delhi, Lahore and Fatehpur. But the gulf between rich and poor was acute. The nobility lived in walled castles with harems, gardens and large retinues; grand country houses that still dot the landscape of northern India. It was, as one visitor put it, a world of ‘great superfluity and absolute power’.

  This pre-British economy of India has often been portrayed as a golden age, when late Mughal India was a great manufacturing nation as well as an agricultural one. But new studies suggest that the gross domestic product of India, possibly the largest in the world during the Middle Ages, declined dramatically and was probably lower than that of Europe by the eighteenth century. The Indian ruling class had an extravagant lifestyle that surpassed that of European aristocracies. The portion of the Indian industrial sector linked to the royal court produced luxury goods that Europe couldn’t match. India’s cities were often bigger than those in Europe: in Akbar’s day London, for example, had a population of 200,000, while Agra’s was nearer 750,000. But the thriving Mughal economy was achieved by subjecting the population to a high degree of exploitation, with a land tax amounting to a third of gross crop production. The total revenue of the Mughal monarchy and nobility is estimated at 15–20 per cent of the entire national income – by European standards, a very high burden. The hierarchical nature of the caste system, with its control over village life from top to bottom, no doubt aided the acceptance of such crippling exactions. A visitor in the 1620s refers to ‘the utter subjection and poverty of the common people, a condition of stark want. A workman’s children can follow no other occupation than that of their father, nor can they intermarry with any other caste.’

  That was the reality of seventeenth-century northern India – a pointer too, perhaps, as to why Europeans were able to colonize areas of India so easily during the eighteenth century. Yet, paradoxically, the Mughals oversaw an incredible flowering of Indian civilization, the like of which the world has rarely seen. In this Akbar’s grandson Jahan was the greatest patron. In his time Mughal architecture reached its height in Delhi, Agra, the Shalimar Gardens and the great tomb of his father, Jahangir, in Lahore: but above all in the Taj Mahal.

  JAHAN AND THE TAJ

  ‘A dome of high foundation and a building of great magnificence was created,’ wrote Muhammad Qazwini Padshahnama during the early 1630s. ‘The eye of the Age has seen nothing like it under the nine vaults of the enamel blue sky, and the ear of Time has heard of nothing like it in any past age … It will be a masterpiece for ages to come, increasing the amazement of all humanity.’

  Our lodging house is in the narrow lanes of the bazaar built by Jahan. From the roof terrace the familiar dome rises above the rooftops, its white marble skin still aglow in the pink twilight. From this unfamiliar angle – not the one seen in the tourist brochures, looming ethereally over the Jumna – the Taj appears in its urban setting. From our rooftop we can look down on the yards and enclosures of the early seventeenth-century town outside the Taj: bazaars, caravanserais, craft workshops and houses for the service staff. Part of the overall plan, this is the first of several rectangular enclosures through which one progresses from the secular world into the paradise garden of the tomb itself.

  At dawn the creamy white marble of the dome appears cool, soft and translucent, and will change colour through the day. Mughal poets compared it to an early dawn or a cloud, ‘a piece of heaven. The colour of dawn’s bright face … not marble at all, its translucence the eye can mistake it for a cloud.’ This is no mere hyperbole. Marble transmits and refracts light, so it responds to atmospheric changes and alters from hour to hour. As a British visitor in 1836 noted ‘the mind seemed to repose in the calm persuasion that there was an entire harmony of parts, a faultless congregation of architectural beauties’.

  The tale of the Taj begins with the death of Shah Jahan’s most beloved wife Mumtaz. In his grief he decided to create a wonderful and eternal monument to her, a tomb to represent on Earth the house of the queen in paradise. For the location Jahan went to some lengths to acquire a plot by the river Jumna from the Hindu rajah of Amber, to whom he gave four mansions in Agra as payment. We will see shortly why the specific landscape was so important to his plan. When work began in 1632 one of the builders’ very first jobs was to plant trees so that they would have grown to some height by the time the building was ready more than ten years later.

  One might think it hardly possible to say anything new about one of the best-known buildings in the world. But fascinating new theories about its conception have emerged only recently. The plan of the Taj was influenced in the first place by earlier Mughal ideas about gardens, especially the Eight Paradises Pavilion, which is the funerary form of a paradise garden. This had many ancient relatives in the Byzantine and classical Mediterranean world, and even in the ancient Near East. But the plan also drew on number symbolism in Hindu and Buddhist thought. These numerical schemes were assimilated by the architects into Islamic traditions about paradise. In medieval Muslim tradition paradise had at least seven levels, often eight. In particular, the famous mystic ibn Arabi in his Meccan Revelations of c.1230 described paradise as three gardens, of which the third is divided into eight sections with eight doors. These ideas of a paradise pavilion had long been present in Mughal art – they are used in the tomb of Humayun in Delhi – and, interestingly enough, Renaissance artists such as Bramante, Michelangelo and Palladio were also interested in this numerical symbolism.

  To this architectural plan Jahan’s architects added the largest scriptural inscriptional programme in the Islamic world: twenty-five quotations from the Koran, including fourteen complete suras (chapters), were depicted on the great gate, the mausoleum and the mosque in elegant black marble inlay on rectangular white marble plaques framed by red sandstone bands and enlivened by ornate floral patterns above the gate arches. The theme of the inscriptions connects with the function of the building as a tomb. It was eschatological, that is to say, concerned with the Day of Judgement. All the suras on the building speak about the Day of Judgement, divine mercy and the paradise promised to the faithful. Indeed, one new theory about the Taj sees the building as a symbolic replica of the throne of God on Judgement Day, specifically as expressed in a mystical diagram drawn by ibn Arabi and reproduced in the manuscripts of his Meccan Revelations. This may be too schematic: but, nevertheless, as a whole the programme of the Taj represents a highly intellectual conception of the tomb as the house prepared for Mumtaz (and eventually Jahan himself) in paradise.

  THE GARDEN OF PARADISE

  Evening shadows fall over the platform of the mausoleum as the heat fades and the last visitors depart. Inside the mausoleum, in the still air, someone calls and we hear the famous echo: eerie, unearthly. Incredibly, the tomb holds a musical tone for almost half a minute. The architects omitt
ed nothing, even using sound as an expression of eternity. As the British author William Sleeman observed in 1836: ‘We feel as if the sound were from heaven, and breathed by angels; it is to the ear what the building itself is to the eye … It was heavenly, and produced heavenly emotions.’

  Upriver the sun is setting over Agra, smoke drifting through the trees from the funeral pyres at the burning ghat on the bank of the Jumna; flocks of birds rise, twittering.

  We take a boat over the river to where a decayed Mughal turret with a cupola points to one more extraordinary discovery. Legend has it that Jahan planned a black Taj for his own tomb, as a mirror image on the other side of the river. We now know from archaeology that this myth is untrue. Jahan always intended to share his wife’s tomb. What was on the other side of the river, though, was indeed a mirror of the rectangular enclosure of the Taj, but it was a paradise garden, and was always planned as such. To reach it you must go where Jahan’s architects laid out the Moonlit Garden, full of delicate but sensuous pleasure in contrast to the more austere courtyard of the Taj. There the Great Mughal could sit in an ornamental pavilion with a huge octagonal pool in which moon and Taj were reflected as if in a dream. As is written in the Koranic texts displayed on the mausoleum itself, ‘Their reward is with their lord: gardens of everlasting bliss graced with flowing streams.’ (Sura 98) ‘They will suit on couches feeling neither burning heat nor biting cold, with shady branches spread above them and clusters of fruit hanging close at hand.’ (Sura 76)

  Flooded within years of its construction, the paradise garden was forgotten for three centuries, though a drawing by the British artists William and Thomas Daniell, done in 1789, enabled the whole plan to be recovered in the 1990s. An archaeological dig has since revealed what was growing in the garden, and night-scented trees and flowers are now being replanted. Away from the polluted uproar of Agra and the tourist-choked courtyards of the Taj, the paradise garden is one of the few places where one may feel for a moment the original intentions of Shah Jahan and his architects.

  The other element in this grand design is the river itself. Sadly, the Jumna today is a shadow of the sacred river beloved by Indians over the centuries. In the summer season it is reduced to a small trickle between stagnant pools, and after it passes Delhi nothing in it is said to remain of the source water from the ice fields of Jumnotri in the Himalayas. With global warming and the gradual reduction of all the glacier-fed rivers of India to seasonal flows, will it ever recover? Today one can only imagine the royal barge drifting on its broad flow from the fort to the garden, where the shah could climb the steps to sit in his pavilion and take in the view of his wife’s tomb, at sunset and by moonlight, and enjoy its ethereal likeness shimmering in the great octagonal pool. As the Koran says, ‘in a garden, by a river, in the presence of the Almighty’. One may censure Jahan for his vanity, vainglory and megalomania, but all the same, the effect is fantastically poignant. Especially when one recalls his end, imprisoned by his own son in a gilded cage in Agra looking downriver to the great tomb, always visible, but always beyond reach.

  DARA SHIKOH AND THE MEETING OF THE TWO OCEANS

  The growth of trade with Europe was still slow, the possibility of colonization not even a shadow on the horizon. Jahan issued the first firman, or permit, to the British only in 1657. But in that year fateful events were beginning to tear apart the Mughal state. These events would have the greatest significance in India, but also impinge on the wider world. Only fifty years or so after Akbar’s death his great-grandsons fought a battle over his legacy, the effects of which are still with us today. The issue in the biggest Muslim civilization in the world was nothing less than the course Indian Islam should take. Akbar, Jahangir and Jahan had all revoked discriminatory laws against Hindus, employed eminent Sanskrit scholars, invited Hindu Brahmins and yogis to court, and commissioned a huge translating programme to make Indian religious texts accessible to Muslims in Persian. Jahan’s eldest son, Dara Shiukoh, was drawn to go further. Impressed by radical figures in Islam, such as the Sufi ibn Arabi, he also immersed himself in the Hindu scriptures. His younger brother Aurangzeb, however, was educated by legalists and orthodox Sufis, the converting orders who had made much headway converting Hindus in Kashmir and Bengal, and viewed such experiments as un-Islamic. Their dissension would lead to civil war in the empire, in which (at the state level) orthodoxy would triumph.

  Educated in the religious texts of both religions, Dara took his stand on the Koran’s revelation (in Sura 56) that before the Prophet Muhammad, God had sent humanity messengers to all peoples – and given them scriptures. The Hindu sacred books too – for example, the Bhagavadgita – say that God had sent messengers throughout history ‘whenever injustice thrived’. Was it not therefore the case that the core of all religions was divinely given? Dara argued that it was the moral duty of all Muslims to learn from other religions; and, indeed, that the ‘concealed scriptures’ of Sura 56 of the Koran were none other than the Upanishads, the original core of monotheism. The wisdom of India, then, was just that: the earliest spiritual vision of humanity. So with the help of pundits from Benares, Dara translated the Gita and some of the Vedic hymns and Upanishads into Persian under the title ‘The Great Secret’. He always insisted that his translation was intended to clarify the Koranic revelation, not to devalue it. His motive, he said, was personal rather than political, and ‘not intended to be of relevance to common people of either community’. How he came to this is revealed in his preface to a treatise on Hindu mysticism, the Yoga Vasistha, translated at his behest after a dream in which the author Vasistha, one of India’s legendary seven sages, and Rama himself, to whom the book is addressed, appeared to Dara in a dream:

  I was naturally attracted to them, and Vasistha was very kind to me and patted me on the back. He told Rama that I was his brother because we were both seekers after truth. He asked Rama to embrace me, which he did in an exuberance of love. Thereupon he gave some food to Rama, which I also took and ate. After this vision a desire to have the book newly translated intensified in me.

  Manuscripts of Dara’s translation can still be found preserved in the libraries of old humanistic Muslim families in Lucknow, and in Multan and Lahore in Pakistan. Put into Latin in Paris in 1801, Dara’s translation of the Upanishads played a major role in the discovery of India in Europe in the early nineteenth century, part of the influx to the West of Hindu mysticism that inspired, among others, the poet William Blake and the philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer.

  Of course, it was impossible that such enquiries in a great prince could be seen as non-political. At Lahore in October 1653, after a campaign in Kandahar, Dara held public meetings with Baba Lal, a great Hindu renouncer of the Vaishnavaite sect – meetings so famous that they were illustrated by Mughal miniature painters. They took place in seven main sessions over a period of nine days in various palaces, gardens and hunting lodges around Lahore. Their conversations ranged over the technical vocabulary of Hindu sacred texts, the works of Persian mysticism, the theory of the avatars of Vishnu, and a fascinating symbolic exegesis of the Ramayana in which, according to Baba Lal, ‘Sita in reality is the dharma, pure justice’. These questings were not official in the sense that Akbar’s seminars were, but as we look at it now, sixty years on from Independence and Partition, when the effort of mutual comprehension failed, this seed of reconciliation is worth pause. One of the most fascinating sources for the meeting of Islam and Hindu religion, these conversations in Hindi were interpreted and written up in Persian by Dara’s Punjabi Brahmin secretary.

  ‘Tell me,’ said Dara, ‘about the cult of idols in the Hindu world: who prescribed this?’

  ‘This form of observance began as a way of concentrating the mind,’ Baba Lal replied. ‘The person who understands the true reality of things has no need of such exterior forms. In the same way a little girl before her marriage plays with a doll, but once she is married she leaves that behind. It’s the same with the cult of idols: when one does
not know the core, one is attached to the exterior form; when one knows the core, one passes beyond the appearance.’

  These researches led Dara to compose a treatise on comparative religion, in which he tried to prove the equivalence of Sufi and Hindu mysticism through their technical vocabulary. Although the two faiths were ‘hairs on the same head,’ he thought, they were, ‘like two opposite poles, not working as they should to serve as a means for people to attain beauty and the divine’. However limited its audience, it was a ground-breaking book for its time, and in our time too, when interfaith dialogue and knowledge of other cultures are becoming matters of vital urgency. Here, in his own words, Dara’s introduction to one of the most extraordinary attemps in history to bridge the gap between religious faiths:

  I discussed and talked openly with certain Hindu learned men, but saving a few differences in verbal usage, I found no difference between them as for their way of understanding and knowing God. Based on these exchanges, I set out to compare the tenets of the two faiths and to bring them back together, reunite those among them whose knowledge is of value and absolutely necessary to aspirants to the truth. Finally, I made an essay of that collection of the truths and esoteric sciences belonging to both communities, and I called it ‘The Confluence of the Two Oceans’.