by Michael Wood
DARA’S FALL
This heroic but quixotic enterprise would cost Dara his crown and his life. Needless to say, such syncretistic leanings did not go down well with many in the royal family, the ruling class and the Muslim orthodoxy, for whom the Koranic message was complete, and could neither be added to nor taken away from. Dara’s younger brother Aurangzeb felt that Dara had become a ‘kaffir’ (infidel), and induced the lawyers to pronounce him an apostate for claiming, among other things, that Hinduism and Islam were ‘twins’. The decree stated that Dara ‘had apostatized from the law, and having vilified the religion of God, had joined himself to heresy and infidelity’. The dissension culminated in a succession crisis of a kind frequent in Indian history, where siblings battle for the throne with relentless savagery.
The story unfolded with all the inexorable momentum of a Shakespearean tragedy. Jahan had fallen ill in 1657, and with rumours of his death widespread, a struggle broke out between his four sons. The youngest, Murad, was captured and killed by Aurangzeb; the second son, Shuja, died mysteriously in exile. So Dara and Aurangzeb were left to fight for the crown. Defeated in battle near Agra in May 1658, Dara, who was now forty-three, fled up the Grand Trunk Road into the Punjab. After Hamlet-like vacillations, and gripped by fear of seeing his wife and children killed before him, he tried to rally support and raise another army. His desperate situation is revealed in letters in the Udaipur palace archive, including an agonizing message from his wife, Nadira Banu, who sent her breast milk to one former ally in a symbolic plea for support.
Dara’s last stand was at Ajmer, his great-grandfather’s beloved shrine, in a wide valley between rugged hills south of the town. The date was 15 March 1659. Although no soldier, Dara had taken up a good position, anchored on the hills, his artillery under a young European gunnery officer called Niccolao Manucci, who later wrote a dramatic and moving account of events. The battle went well until Dara was betrayed by one of his own side, who revealed the existence of a path over the mountains, like the pass of Thermopylae, which led to the rear of his position. His last hope gone, Dara fled back towards Sind, reduced to a core of supporters, including his now desperately sick wife, and a small mounted force.
‘More dead than alive’, Dara attempted to flee to Iran via Kandahar, with his wife in a carriage behind cloth screens. They crossed the wilderness of the Rann of Kutch through waterless, trackless salt marshes by moonlight with lighted torches, pursued by Aurangzeb’s officers closing in exultantly on their prey with all the strung-out energy of hunters. He crossed the Indus, only to be robbed and abused by Baluchi tribemen, his wife’s strength all the while ebbing away. Finally, on 6 June, they reached the castle of a former vassal, the Afghan Malik Jiwan, at Dadar, near Sibi, 9 miles below the entrance to the Bolan Pass. There Dara’s wife died, and for him ‘the bright world grew dark and the pillars of his judgement and prudence all at once shook and fell down’. Although he knew his enemies were closing in, he performed her funeral rites for two days before sending a captain and seventy horsemen to escort her body to the tomb of her favourite saint, Mian Mir, in Lahore, as she had requested. Dara’s party was now sunk in gloom and foreboding. Next day, as he prepared to move on to Iran with his son and a handful of retainers, he was arrested by his host and delivered to his enemies.
There was some debate as to whether he should be killed or kept as a state prisoner. Escorted back to Delhi, on 29 August Dara was dressed in dirty clothes and a cheap turban and put on a ‘mangy old female elephant’ accompanied on the open howdah by a slave bearing a drawn sword. He was paraded down Chandni Chowk, the great commercial street of Delhi, under the walls of the Red Fort, accompanied by wails and tears from onlookers. Alarmed at this display of popular sorrow, that night Aurangzeb and his council resolved that Dara should be killed. In this they were supported by other members of the royal family: Dara’s sister, Raushandra Begum, was among those who thought it ‘unlawful to allow him to live any longer’. Lodged in a house close to Humayun’s tomb, the murder scene was worthy of the greatest tragic drama. Dara was cooking lentils in his cell with his little boy when the murderers arrived. His child clinging to his knees, Dara tried to fight with a small knife he had concealed on himself. They killed him, cut off his head and sent it to his brother. ‘Ah, I would not look on the apostate’s face when he lived and I will not now,’ said Aurangzeb. Next day the body was paraded on an elephant through the bazaar to show that Dara was dead. His head was sent to their father Jahan, imprisoned now by Aurangzeb in his gilded chamber overlooking the Taj Mahal. Jahan was shown his son’s head at table and fainted, breaking his front teeth. Dara’s son, the young prince Selim, was given a draught spiced with opium, then strangled.
LOST DREAM OR CONTINUING LEGACY?
It is unlikely, perhaps, that these great Mughals could have succeeded in putting their ideas into the service of the state. Indeed, both Akbar and Dara were driven by elite and esoteric forms of knowledge that could only ever be shared by the nobility. Dara tells us specifically that he was not concerned with the mass of the population. Nevertheless, then as now, it is elites who drive policy. Had they done so, other possible trajectories might have emerged, which are fascinating to contemplate in the light of the present so-called ‘Clash of Civilizations’ and the ‘War on Terror’. First, the most powerful and populous Islamic civilization in the world might have developed from a great Renaissance state to an Islamic Enlightenment state, even using modern science and technology. (Although poorly explored by the Mughals in general, such things were a special interest of Akbar, and would be characteristic of, for example, the southern court in Tanjore during the eighteenth century, which imported Western texts on medicine, optics, anatomy and surgery.) Second, Hinduism among India’s elites (as opposed to religion at the popular level) might have evolved on a path more in line with its monotheistic potential (as it did under the impact of the British and Christianity during the nineteenth century). Third, Indian Islam might even eventually have been absorbed into Indian religion more fully, rather as Buddhism had been. But this did not happen, and now, sixty years after Independence, as India is fast rising to become an economic giant, there are still battles being fought over this history – over mosques built by Babur or temples demolished by Aurangzeb. The great struggle for accommodation and understanding continues.
AURANGZEB
The sixth great ruler of the Mughals, Aurangzeb, became absolute ruler of the empire at the age of forty, and would rule for nearly fifty years. There are few more controversial and hated figures in Indian history today. In his long reign, from 1658 to 1707, he instated shariah law, reimposed the tax on non-Muslims stopped by Akbar back in 1562, rejected all crossover in cultural politics, and condoned many forced conversions. As a ruler, he had some formidable qualities: his long experience as governor in the Deccan, Gujarat and Balkh stood him in good stead, and he was a warrior, unlike Dara (to whom his father, he felt, had always shown preference). Austere, devout and self-denying, he was not a man for opium, wine and women. But his long reign was, in hindsight, a disaster for India: he overstretched the resources of the empire with campaigns in the Deccan and Afghanistan, and at home he undid what his predecessors had achieved through tact and conciliation. He faced many rebellions from Marathas, (led by their hero the great Shivaji), and from Rajputs and Sikhs, whose ninth guru he tortured to death, leaving a bitter memory among many Indians for his negative view of Hinduism. He even attempted to outlaw music and wine-making, and to ban Diwali. Needless to say, history could have told him that this was not the way to rule India.
Aurangzeb had, perhaps, ceased to understand the purpose of it all by the time he was nearing ninety: ‘I came alone and I go as a stranger. I do not know who I am, nor what I have been doing,’ the dying old man confessed to his son in February 1707. ‘I have sinned terribly, and I do not know what punishment awaits me.’ Whether he counted the persecution of other faiths as one of his sins is not clear. His simple tomb, open t
o the sky at Khuldabad, is still reverently maintained, and visited by wandering dervishes. Aurangzeb, more than most, paved the way for the problems of the modern period, leading to Partition. Piously weaving Haj caps in his few moments of spare time, and copying the Koran in a firm scholar’s script, he had lost one of the greatest opportunities ever given to a ruler of India. As the Roman poet Lucretius put it, ‘tantum religio potuit suadere malorum’ (such are the heights of wickedness to which men are driven by religion).
ENTER THE HONOURABLE EAST INDIA COMPANY
On the Hooghly river below Calcutta, soon after dawn. The heat is already coming up as we glide past the forested banks dotted with boatyards, factories and warehouses. Back in 1585 Elizabeth I had written to Akbar hoping that ‘mutual and friendly traffic of merchandise on both sides may come’. With that end in mind, the East India Company was given its charter in 1601. How that private company metamorphosed into the greatest empire the world had ever seen is an extraordinary story with many twists and turns; and, as we shall see, there is a grain of truth in the old joke that the empire was gained ‘in a fit of absent-mindedness’. But the key was this. Other empires in northern India – Greeks, Sakas, Kushans, Turks, Mongols, Afghans, Mughals – had come by land from the northwest over the Khyber. The British came from a tiny country, but they were a trading nation, and with their navy would eventually control the sea. Their ports and factories around the shores of India grew into the great entrepôts of Bombay, Calcutta and Madras, and eventually became a ‘ring of steel’ around the subcontinent. In the crucial areas of conflict, in the south and in Bengal, violence would be used to tip the scale, but in the early days the system owed its existence to Indian permission, partnership and complicity in the business of making money. And, of course, the fact that India was not a single entity: it was many different states and regions. Mughal rule didn’t cover much of the subcontinent, which made it easier for the British to divide and rule.
From 1657 the British began trading in Bengal under a permit from Shah Jahan, siting their main textile factories in villages on the Hooghly tributary of the Ganges. They processed stuffs from the village-based handloom industry, made by hundreds of thousands of highly skilled weavers, dyers and washers. They exported enormous quantities of different kinds of cloths, with different designs aimed at specific markets around Asia and at home. In surviving examples from the eighteenth century held in collections, and, of course, still in today’s industry we can see the fabulous designs and colour combinations that can be created with hand-painting and wooden blocking. Eventually, the 1765 treaty with the Mughals gave the British the diwan, the rule of Bengal, and, above all, the right to collect taxes. It was the first step in the almost incredible tale of how a private company came to rule a vast empire, the forerunner of the modern multinationals, who exercise power of life and death over great swathes of the world.
DAWN OF A NEW AGE
The Mughal dynasty in India began in war and ended in war. But it also started and ended with literature, music and poetry. Its best rulers had the most highly developed aesthetic sensibilities of any rulers in the world – superior even to the brilliant Elizabeth Tudor, who translated Boethius, conversed in Latin with the conquistador Sarmiento de Gamboa, and watched with critical interest the dramas of Shakespeare. Within a few decades Indian rulers and artists developed a wonderful style that tried to harmonize all human creation, from cities, shrines and gardens to the tiniest enamelled turban pin. The kings had to be practical rulers, stern and determined, but the culture allowed them also to be dreamers: think of Babur’s imperial ambitions, Akbar’s utopian aspirations, Jahan’s mystic flights at the Taj, Dara’s erudite translations from the Sanskrit. In the wings, waiting for their chance, practical, clear-sighted, ethics subordinated to the ruthless imperatives of profit, were the British, who had a very different idea about what the Age of Reason could mean.
CHAPTER SIX
FREEDOM AND LIBERATION
I’M SITTING OUT on the terrace of a little boarding house in Allahabad, one of the last of the British bungalows that once gave the city – alternatively known as the ‘Oxford of India’ or the ‘Oven of India’ – its low-rise charm. Tea and fruit cake are on the table. The owners of the hotel are Parsees (key people here during the Raj, the time of British rule: the first photographers; the first car dealers; some of the first native lawyers, dentists and doctors, were all Parsees). They are related to Feroz Gandhi, who married Jawaharlal Nehru’s daughter Indira, whose family were also Allahabad people. The hotel has a rather faded touch of the Old World, but I prefer it to the new, slick international-style hotels in the Civil Lines (the former European city), despite the attraction of air-conditioned rooms, plush bars and wireless Internet. The front garden, with its old well and spreading pipal tree, is a nice place to sit after a long day and watch the crowds of lawyers, with their starched collars and gowns, hurrying to their waiting auto-rickshaws.
Allahabad (‘Godville’ is Mark Twain’s apt translation) has already appeared several times in this story. It got its present name from the emperor Akbar, who proclaimed his new religion here in 1575 (see here). At the sangam, the sacred confluence of the Ganges and the Jumna, he built a giant fortress, one of the four greatest Mughal forts, along with Delhi, Agra and Lahore. What a role this place has played in Indian history! As the ancient Hindu holy site of Prayag, it hosts the Kumbh Mela festival, which on one night in 2001 attracted 25 million pilgrims, dwarfing all the other gatherings there have ever been on Earth. It is also the final point in the circuit of India’s holy sites in the Mahabharata, and still known among Hindus as the ‘King of Holy Places’. Inside the Mughal fort is the famous stone pillar carrying the decrees of Ashoka and the inscriptions of Samudragupta and Jahangir. The mythological navel of the Earth, it is a place whose symbolic life is even richer than its real history.
When they became the rulers of India in the bloody aftermath of the Mutiny of 1857, the chastened British were mindful of these great associations. It was a few yards away from Ashoka’s pillar, on the outer bastion, that Lord Canning proclaimed the end of the East India Company’s rule and the beginning of Victoria’s Raj (an event commemorated in the little garden of Minto Park as ‘India’s Magna Carta’). But that came after savagery. The Civil Lines, with their neat, tree-lined avenues, their parks, gymkhana clubs and orderly cantonments, were laid out over eight Indian villages that were razed to the ground in revenge, and where ‘nigger’ women and children perished along with the ‘vilest malefactors’.
In the next three decades the city fittingly became a centre of the nascent freedom movement. The site of British India’s most important High Court, Allahabad was a city of lawyers, and the men who made India free, including Jawaharlal Nehru, the first prime minister, would all be British-educated lawyers. The Nehrus, old Kashmiri Brahmins, were Allahabad people, and the house owned by Nehru’s father, Motilal, still stands in the European town: a spacious estate, fitting for a rich advocate who became a London QC. Around it there are still many places with British associations: the university with its Gothic cloisters; the beautiful Anglican cathedral, all flying buttresses and stained glass; the Civil Lines shopping arcade, with Wheelers Bookshop and the neoclassical Picture Palace; not forgetting Barnetts House of Confectionery (now the Harsh Hotel), which serviced the Imperial Airways stopover from Croydon to Calcutta. In Motilal’s day a soon-to-be iconic Raj figure, the writer Rudyard Kipling, worked here for the local English-language newspaper, the Pioneer, which ‘ably opposed Indian aspirations’, as John Murray’s Guidebook blithely put it. The Pioneer has long since moved to Lucknow, and the old newspaper building, another red-brick bungalow only yards from the Nehru residence, has been demolished since I was here in the summer of 2006, a victim of Allahabad’s building boom. But the house where Kipling lodged is still here, in an overgrown garden inhabited by a bony cow and a mongoose. It is now lived in by a sprightly eighty-year-old journalist called Durga, who started wi
th All India Radio in 1943, and covered the last phase of the freedom struggle. ‘I was glad to see the back of the British,’ she told me with a clear eye. ‘Which people doesn’t want to be free?’
Sitting here in Allahabad (a town I feel I know better than many in England), I am painfully conscious of my own ancestry. I am a child of post-war Britain, and though I could not see it at that time, colonialism shaped me too. In the 1950s and 1960s we were brought up at home and school with rose-tinted spectacles about the British Empire. Scented with saddle soap and railway steam, and orchestrated by Edward Elgar, we were given a Raj drenched in nostalgia in novels, on television and in the cinema. But, however we dress it up, imperialism is still imperialism. India was turned into a classic colonial economy, exporting raw materials and importing finished goods. The natural resources of India were plundered, and her people treated like children by those who saw themselves as the superior race. These days some British historians put forward the argument that colonialism was a good thing, lighting the world’s path to progress. I have to say that I am not, by and large, of that persuasion. Over thirty-five years travelling in Asia, Africa and the Americas, seeing things on the ground, has given me a different perspective, and has left me with the conviction that its impact has been largely destructive. The age of European empires unleashed tremendous historical forces, many of them no doubt creative, but for much of the population of the globe this was a cataclysmic epoch that left few native cultures intact. Only great and resilient civilizations, such as India, were able to hold their own, take what was useful, and emerge still themselves.
