One historian gives a somewhat different version of the birth of

Akbar. In it he was born under a tree in the desert, and the little

sixteen-year-old mother wept with fear at the hard-featured village

midwife summoned hastily to her aid, then flung her arms round her and

cried for joy when the boy-baby was put into her young arms. Within a

month she and the child were back sharing her lover-husband's danger.

It increased day by day, hour by hour. When the young Akbar was but a

year old, it reached its climax. Compelled to quit Sinde, Humayon, his

wife and child with him, and some half a dozen followers, was on his

way to Kandahar, when news came that his brother Askari was marching

against him in force. There was nothing for it but swift, immediate

flight. But the weather was boisterous, the only safe road almost

impassable.

How about the child? Rapidly calculating chances, they decided on

leaving the infant prince behind them. What tears, what forebodings

must not have been miserable Hamida's--what vain kisses and strainings

to her heart!

But when Askari entered the little camp, the deed was done. The baby

Akbar was there regal in his nurse's arms, with all his equipage, all

his poor mockery of state and service about him, but the two fugitives

were riding hard for the Persian frontier.

Humayon had lost all things, even his fatherhood.

THE HOUSE OF SUR

A.D. 1542 TO A.D. 1554

Sher-khan, the man who, worsting Humayon, seized on the throne, had no

atom of royal blood in his veins. He was a plain soldier, though of

good birth; but, his father neglecting him, he had run away from home

and entered the ranks. A rough-and-ready soldier, too, who, even in

Babar's time, had not scrupled to tell a friend that in his opinion it

would be no hard task to "drive these foreign Moghuls from Hindustan;

for though the king himself was a man of parts, he trusted too much to

his ministers, who were corrupt."

The friend laughed; but Sher-Khan was right even in his estimate of

the king who, curiously enough, singled him out unerringly a few days

afterwards, when, at a military banquet, he called for a knife to

carve a chicken withal, and, the servant taking no notice of his rough

order, immediately drew his dagger and coolly used it with

contemptuous disregard for the diversion of his neighbours. Babar's

quick eye caught the incident, and he remarked: "He may be a great man

yet; trifles do not disconcert him."

He does not, however, appear to have been either an amiable or an

estimable person, though he was not vicious, and even his successes as

a soldier are somewhat too crafty for admiration. He knew well when to

attack, when to retreat, and, if imperialist and Rajput accounts are

to be trusted, was not over-scrupulous in his use of the white flag.

Then there is no doubt but that a secret understanding existed between

him and Humayon's brother Kamran; for on the withdrawal of the latter

from Lahore, Sher-Shah instantly pounced down on it, and would have

captured the fugitive king but for his hasty flight.

He does not in truth appeal to one's sympathies, this Afghan of the

House of Sur, though he was by no means without good points. It is,

however, impossible to get up much interest in a man who picks a

quarrel with an innocent Rajput rajah on the ground that he has

Mahomedan women in his harem, and who, after a lengthy siege, induces

capitulation by promise of the garrison being allowed to march out

with their arms and their property: thereinafter, on the advice of a

learned doctor of law (who declared it was a sin to keep faith with

infidels), proceeding to surround the brave band and cut them off!

It is satisfactory to learn that they sold their lives dearly. But

Sher-Shah continued to be diplomatic. He gained his success against

the Rajah of Marwar by a stratagem. Finding himself in a tight place,

he forged treasonable correspondence between himself and certain of

the Rajput generals, which was then so disposed of as to fall into the

generalissimo's hands. The distrust thus sown of his levees' loyalty

caused the rajah to give way; and with disastrous results.

The death of this Machiavel in armour was a Nemesis, for it arose in

consequence of the Rajah of Kalinjasr's refusal to capitulate, on the

ground of Sher-Shah's many treacheries.

In the subsequent mining which became necessary to reduce the fort,

Sher-Shah was blown to bits in an explosion of a powder magazine that

had not been properly secured.

Despite his treachery, he did much for India in the way of public

works. The caravanserais, the wells which still stud the course of the

high road from Bengal to the Indus, are of his building; and the very

trees which shade the weary traveller in the long marching, if not of

his planting, stand in the places of those which he watered with care.

He reigned five years, and left two sons. The elder and rightful heir

preferred obscurity to prolonged battle for the crown, and after a

while disappeared and was no more heard of, leaving Islam-Shah, or, as

he is called by a mispronunciation, Salim-Shah, to follow in his

father's treacherous footsteps. The most noteworthy event in his reign

was the insurrection of the Mahdi sect, led by one Ilahi. The tenets

of their faith seem to have been curiously destructive of each other.

Neither their profession of predestination nor their pure socialism

prevented them from going about armed, meting out lynch-law to all and

sundry whom they deemed to be disobeying any divine law.

They must have been uncomfortable people to deal with, but the faith

spread to such alarming proportions, that Salim-Shah finally called a

Court of Arches to decide whether "Ilahi's pertinaciously

disrespectful manner to the king was consistent with his situation as

a subject, or was enjoined by any precept of the Koran?"

He was subsequently tried on the accusation of presuming to

personate the Great Mahdi--for whose advent all pious Mahomedans

look--condemned, and refusing to abjure his faith, was brought up for

punishment, though at the time suffering from the plague which was

then raging. He died under the third lash.

Almost immediately after this, Salim-Shah himself died, when his

cousin Mobarik succeeded by a singularly brutal murder. Prince Feroze,

Salim-Shah's son, was then twelve years old. His mother, Bibi Bhai,

was Mobarik's sister, and devoted to her dissolute, pleasure-loving

brother, whose life she had begged of the king. Notwithstanding this,

immediately on the latter's death Mobarik entered the harem, tore the

wretched boy from his mother's very arms, and killed him with his own

hand.

Fraternal affection with a vengeance. His subsequent career was in

keeping with this initial act. Sensual to a degree and absolutely

illiterate, he set a Hindu usurer called Hemu at the head of affairs,

and contented himself with remaining in the harem, and parading the

city with pomp, surrounded by a body of archers, whose duty it was to

discharge gold-headed arrows worth ten or twelve rupees each amongst

the crowd; the scramble for them amusing the jaded satiety of this

truly Eastern potentate.

He succeeded in A.D. 1552, and for two years the throne was the centre

of a perfect anarchy of revolt.

Hemu, who seems to have had wits, held his own until faced by the

returning Humayon, backed by that splendid old Turkoman soldier, Byram

Khan. Backed also by the son, whom eleven years before he had left

alone with his nurses in the royal camp on the road to Kandahar, and

who now--an extremely youthful warrior--won back empire for his father

by precipitating an action before the walls of Lahore, in which the

Moghuls, "animated by the conduct of that young hero," seemed to

forget that they were mortal.

So ended the usurping dynasty of Sur.

THE WANDERINGS OF A KING

A.D. 1542 TO A.D. 1556

When Humayon and his Queen Hamida-Banu-Begum left the infant Akbar to

face fortune by himself, their own hopes for the future were low

indeed. Look where they would, there seemed small chance of success.

India itself had practically become independent of Delhi, where

the dreamful, opium-drugged king had thought to consolidate his

empire by building a new capital. It is curious to mark in that

fourteen-mile-long expanse of faintly-broken ground strewn with

purple-stained bricks, which stretches between the massive ruins about

the Kutb Minar to modern Delhi at the foot of the red ridge, how each

succeeding dynasty had shifted its ground nearer and nearer the river,

until at last it flowed beneath the very walls of the palace which

Shah-jahan built, and where his descendant Bahadur-Shah carried on, in

1857, the conspiracy which led at last to the extinction of the Moghul

dynasty.

The long fight for Rajputana which had gone on for centuries so that

the taking and retaking of its principal forts forms the standing dish

of every reign, had for the time ended in temporary independence.

Even at Chitore, Humayon's delay in coming to the rescue of his

bracelet-bound sister had been unproductive of result; for the

Princess Kurnavati's young son Udai-Singh had escaped, and was now

back in his own.

The story of his escape is still a favourite one in India, and women,

cuddling their babies, tell breathlessly how one Rajputni once gave

her child to death to save a king.

Little Udai-Singh, smuggled to safety with his foster-mother, found

asylum in his half-brother's palace. But one night screams rose from

the women's apartments, followed by the sudden ominous death-wail.

Punnia, the foster-mother, knew what had happened. The half-brother

must have been assassinated as a preliminary to the murder of her

charge. She caught him up, thrust opium into his mouth with a last

drop of her milk, hid him, still sleeping, in a fruit-basket, and sent

him out by the hands of a faithful servant, to await her among the

rushes of the river-bed.

Then, throwing the little king's rich coverlet over her own child, she

sat down to wait--for what?

For a question which she must answer.

And yet, when it did come, human nature was almost too strong for her.

She could only point to the little sleeper in reply to that clamour

for "The King! The King!"

And still she had to wait. To weep reservedly over her own darling, to

do him reverence, and so, the last ceremony over, steal away hastily

to where her king waited her in the rushes. Then, dry-eyed, stern, she

carried him, drawing life from her bereaved breast, over wild hill and

dale, till, reaching the mountain fortress of Komulmer, she could set

her nurseling on the governor's knee, and say: "Guard him--he is the

King!"

Udai-Singh, unfortunately, grew up unworthy of his foster-mother's

sacrifice. Still, he held Chitore, and many another Rajput prince held

other portions of the central tableland of India, whose rocky

mountains form an ideal country for independence and revolt. For the

rest, as we have seen, the Dekkan, Guzerat, and Malwa were held by

Mahomedan dynasties, as were the smaller principalities of Khandesh,

Bengal, Jounpur, Multan, Sinde. Towards the south-east the vast

kingdom, mostly forest, of Orissa remained unexplored, and in the

west, the whole narrow strip which includes the Western Ghats figures

not at all in history. Yet it was on this narrow strip that the first

grip of Europe on Hindustan was to be laid.

Columbus was sailing the High Seas. The maritime nations, Italy,

England, Spain, were on the _qui vive_ for new worlds, and in

1484--just a year after Babar was born on Valentine's day--one Pedro

de Covilham set out for India, overland, by the orders of King John of

Portugal, with instructions to return with a report as to the

practicability of reaching Hindustan' by sea. He reached India, being,

apparently, the first European to touch its soil, but was detained on

the return journey by the Arabs.

Ere he reached home in A.D. 1525 (after close on six and-thirty years

of imprisonment), Portugal had acted on the advice which he had

managed to send, God knows how. Vasco da Gama, leaving the Tagus in

1497, "coasted Guinea southwards, until he rounded into the Indian

Ocean"; so reached Calicut in A.D. 1498. It was the beginning. Almost

each year that followed saw a fresh, and ever a larger armament sent

out chiefly by the Portuguese Order of Christ, with the ostensible

object of converting the heathen. We read of nine, of seventeen,

finally, in 1507, of twenty-two ships carrying one thousand five

hundred fighting-men, and the very first Viceroy of India, Dom

Francesco Almeda. Goa was taken and made the seat of Government by Dom

Alfonso Albuquerque--after a tussle for the Viceroyalty--in 1510, and

in 1542 St Francis Xavier, joint founder of the Jesuits with Ignatius

Loyola, went out on a mission and had an enormous success of

marvellous stability, since to this day a large proportion of the

population on the south-west coast is professedly Roman Catholic.

Thus all India is practically accounted for in this, the first half of

the sixteenth century. At a casual glance it seems as if here we have

the vast continent tabulated, scheduled, within our reach. But a

closer look shows us that these dynasties, these wars, these

annexations and depredations, are but scratches on the surface of

life. The India of reality was, as ever, in the fields, heedless of

politics, heedless of all things beyond the village cosmogony save

that recurring cry of, "The Toorkh! the Toorkh!"

That brought ruin, perchance death; but after death comes life, after

ruin prosperity. And the new masters, no matter who they were, were

not on the whole bad masters. When the revenues of the state depend

upon the peasantry and the peasantry only, it is not politic to press

the revenue-giver too hardly. There can be small doubt, therefore,

that the general state of the country was distinctly flourishing. The

land-rent or land-tax, call it what you will, was high, but the land

itself was abundant, the people who had to live on it not too

numerous. And luxury did not come, as it came in Europe, to the lives

of the poor to make them poorer still. The standard of living did not

rise, women were content with the fashions of their mothers; men asked

no more than to be let live and die; humanity was its own amusement.

Practically, there was little difference in the system of Government

under Hindu and Mahomedan rule. In both, the supreme power was easy of

access. Petitions could be brought to the final authority without any

difficulty, and a certain rough justice undoubtedly prevailed.

The king hired and paid for a portion of the army which he mounted on

his own horses, but a large number of men came in independent parties

under leaders of their own.

Such was the India which Humayon left behind him for twelve long

years. His adventures during this time are less entertaining than the

wanderings of that prince of Bohemians, his father, but they are still

interesting.

When he crossed the Persian border, he found himself received with a

certain contemptuous pity. Still, female servants were sent to attend

on the queen, and demonstrations were made in his favour. Arrived at

the court of King Tahmasp, however, the exiled monarch of India found

himself by no means on a bed of roses. Even the gift of the greatest

treasure he possessed, a huge diamond, did not ameliorate his

situation; for Shah Tahmasp affected to despise the jewel, and is said

to have sent it away disdainfully in a gift to the King of the Dekkan.

But the whole history of this diamond, which has now disappeared, is a

fine romance. It is said to have been the eye of Shiv-ji in some

shrine, and to have passed into the possession of many conquerors,

until it was given to Babar in recognition of chivalrous kindness and

courtesy shown to them by the family of the Rajah of Chitore. Babar,

who kept nothing for himself, gave the stone, "worth half the daily

expenditure of the world," to his son. It is said to have weighed

about 280 carats, and to have been of the purest water; it is also

conjectured that it reappeared as the Great Moghul diamond which

Tavernier describes as belonging to Shah-jahan, and that possibly it

is this very stone which, cleft and badly cut, still shines as the

Koh-i-nur.

It did not, anyhow, avail Humayon much. More effective was his servile

consent to wear the red cap of the Persian, and by this becoming a

_khizil bash_, renounce his Sunni faith, and proclaim himself a Shiah.

He did not do this without much pressure, and at the very last nearly

broke bondage; but the promise of ten thousand horse wherewith to

recover his kingdom was too tempting. With this force he attacked

Kandahar, where his brother Askari still held little Akbar as a

hostage; or, rather, had so held him until the attacking army loomed

over the horizon, when, after some hesitation as to whether it would

not be wiser to send the boy under honourable escort to his father,

Askari decided on obeying his brother Kamran's orders, and despatched

the little prisoner to Kabul. The story of that inclement winter march

across the hills, with its attempts at rescue and numberless

adventures, would make a charming book for English children.

After five months siege, Kandahar surrendered, "Dearest Lady" having

succeeded in obtaining a promise of pardon for Askari from his

brother. It was revoked, however, in an altogether indefensible

manner, and Askari was kept in chains for the next three years. This

is so unlike Humayon's usual conduct towards his brothers, that it

gives colour to the assertion made by some authorities that Askari's

punishment was due to the discovery of a further offence.

After Kandahar had capitulated, Humayon marched on Kamran and Kabul.

This is the march rendered famous by Sir Donald Stewart in the Afghan

War, and by Lord Roberts' subsequent and rapid repetition. It was now

winter, which had set in with extraordinary severity, and much of the

country was under snow. Half-way to Kabul Humayon was joined by his

brother Hindal, who, with brief intervals of hesitation, appears to

have been fairly faithful. Their amalgamated armies proved too

formidable for Kamran to face, though at first he had prepared for

extremities by removing little Akbar from his grand-aunt "Dearest

Lady's" care, and giving the lad to a trusted creature of his own; so

flight to Ghuzni followed. The child, however, remained, and Humayon's

delight at recovering his little son was great. Taking the boy in his

arms, he exclaimed: "Joseph was cast by envious brethren into the pit;

but in the end he was exalted to great glory, as thou shalt be, my

son."

Only remaining in Kabul long enough to restore the young prince to

safer keeping, Humayon set off in pursuit of his brother, who, finding

the gates of Ghuzni closed against him, had fled to the Indus; but

while on this campaign Humayon fell so sick that his life was

despaired of. After two months' confinement to bed he recovered, only

to find himself deserted by his troops, and to hear that Kamran,

returning to Kabul one dawn, had managed to slip in with a chosen band

of followers as the city gates were being opened, had murdered the

governor in his bath, had put out the eyes of Fazl and Muttro, the

young prince's foster-brothers and playfellows, and had given the

young prince himself into the charge of unkindly eunuchs. It was an

anxious moment, and the almost despairing father, still weak from

illness, set himself to beat up recruits and march to recover his

capital, recover his son. Kamran's troops, meeting with a reverse in

the suburbs of the city, where--this being April--the peach-blossom

must have been all ablow, Humstyon was enabled to establish himself on

an eminence which commands the town, and to commence shelling it.

Whereupon Kamran sent a message to say that if the cannonade

continued, he would expose the young heir to all his father's high

hopes on the wall where the fire was hottest. A brutal threat, upon

the carrying out of which history stands divided, some authorities

saying that Akbar was so exposed, others declaring that Humayon

ordered the artillery to cease firing.

Be that as it may, on the 28th of April he entered the city in

triumph, Kamran having fled the previous night.

So little Akbar was once more in his father's arms. In his mother's

also, ere long, for Hamida-Banu-Begum rejoined her husband in the

spring. Regarding this, a pretty story is told by Aunt Rosebody in her

Memoirs. Humayon, ever a lover of pleasure, devised a sumptuous

entertainment to welcome his wife, and amongst the many devices for

amusement was this. All the ladies of the family, unveiled,

resplendent in jewels, were to range themselves in a circle round a

hall; and to this dazzling company the baby-prince--he was but

four--was to be introduced to choose for himself a mother! One can

imagine the scene. Those laughing faces-all but one--around the child

who had not seen her he sought for two long years. The pause for

hesitation, the sickening suffocation of one heart, the sudden sense

of shyness, of loneliness, making one little mouth droop.

And then?

Then a quick cry, "_Amna! Amna-jan!_" and Hamida's arms closed

convulsively over the sobbing child. What laughter! What tears! As

Auntie Rosebody loves to say of all things that bring the sudden

vivifying touch of emotion, "It was like the Day of Resurrection." But

the young Akbar's trials were not yet over, neither were his father's

dangers. In the summer of 1548 Humayon once more pursued Kamran,

taking with him at first both Akbar and Akbar's mother--for whom the

king (or, as he was now called, the emperor) had an affection that

never wavered. Finding the way rough, he sent them back to Kabul; and

when he marched out from that city the next time on the same bootless

errand, he left the boy, who was now eight years old, behind him as

Governor of Kabul, under tutorship. Whereupon Kamran, who appears to

have had the faculty of doubling like a hare, taking advantage of a

serious wound which delayed his brother in the Sertun Pass, slipped to

his rear, and for the third time captured Kabul and that apple of

Humayon's eyes, Prince Akbar.

This was the last of Kamran's exploits, however, for Humayon, after

suffering agonies of fear lest evil should happen to his heir, gained

a complete and final victory over his brother, who fled once more;

not, however, to the emperor's great relief, taking Akbar with him. He

was soon after captured by the King of the Ghakkur tribe, that warlike

race of the Indian Salt Range who broke the ranks of the Ghuzni

Mahmud, and assassinated his successor in campaign, Ghori-Mahomed.

Being immediately betrayed to Humayon, he met his fate at last. Yet

even now, after treasons seventy-and-seven, he was nearly forgiven;

would have been forgiven but for the fact that Humayon's favourite

brother, Hindal, had been killed in the pursuit of him. He deserved

death, but the blindness which was meted out to him leaves us with a

revulsion of feeling against the man who was driven by his adherents

into giving the order. A revulsion which Humayon hardly deserved,

since, opium-soddened, flighty in a way, unreliable as he was, cruelty

was not one of his faults.

And the adherents were right. With Kamran scotched, Humayon's fortunes

began at once to improve, and in 1535 he was able to invade the Punjab

with fifteen thousand horse. Within a year he was once more Emperor in

Delhi; but not for long. Six months after he re-ascended the throne,

before he had time even to take breath and look around him, he fell

from the roof of his library, and died from the result of the accident

four days afterwards. Visitors to Delhi are still shown the broken

stairs from which he fell, and are told the story of how, descending

the steps, he heard the call to prayer, and stopped to repeat the

creed and sit down till the long sonorous sound of the _muazzim_ had

ended. And how, in attempting to rise again, his staff slipped on the

polished marble of the step.

The parapet is certainly but a foot high; but as one looks over it,

and remembers that Humayon was a man in the prime of life, the wonder

comes if the opium which claimed so large a share in the emperor's

life had not an equal share in his death.

[Map: India to A.D. 1556]

AKBAR THE GREAT

A.D. 1556 TO A.D. 1605

Here is a subject indeed!

Considering the time--a time when Elizabeth of England found that

England ready to support her in beheading her woman-cousin, when

Charles IX. of France idly gave the order on St Bartholomew's Eve,

and Pope Urban VIII., representing the highest majesty of the

Christian religion, forced the tortured, seventy-year-old Galileo to

his knees, there to abjure by oath what he knew to be God's truth:

considering the country--a country to this day counted uncivilised by

Europe--there is small wonder that the record of Akbar seems

incredible even to the owner of the hand which here attempts to

epitomise that record.

And yet it is a true one. Discounting to the full the open flattery of

Abul-fazl's Akbarnamah, the source from which most information is

derived, giving good measure to Budaoni's grudging criticisms, the

unbiassed readers of Akbar's life cannot avoid the conviction that in

dealing with him, they are dealing with a man of imagination, of

genius.

Between the lines, as it were, of bare fact, the unconventional, the

unexpected crops up perpetually, making the mind start and wonder. As

an instance, let us take the account of the great hunt at Bhera, near

the river Jhelum, and let us take it in the very words of the

historians.

"The Emperor gave orders for a _gamargha_ hunt, and that the nobles

and officers should according to excellent methods enclose the wild

beasts.... But, when it had almost come about that the two sides were

come together, suddenly, all at once a strange state and strong frenzy

came upon the Emperor ... to such an extent as cannot be accounted

for. And every one attributed it to some cause or other ... some

thought that the beasts of the forest had with a tongueless tongue

unfurled divine secrets to him. At this time he ordered the hunting to

be abandoned. Active men made every endeavour that no one should even

touch the feather of a finch."

Now whether the legend which lingers in India be true or not, that it

was the sight of a _chinkara_ fawn which brought about the Emperor's

swift change of front, we have here baldly set down certain events

which apparently were incomprehensible and but vaguely praiseworthy,

even to Abul-fazl's keen eye for virtue in his master. Viewed,

however, by the wider sympathies of to-day, the fact stands forth

indubitably that the "extraordinary access of rage such as none had

ever seen the like in him before" with which Akbar was seized, was no

mere fit of epilepsy, such as the rival historian Budaoni counts it to

have been, but a sudden overmastering perception of the relations

between God's creatures, the swift realisation of the Unity which

binds the whole world together; for it seems certain that he never

again countenanced a _battue_.

Now Akbar's life was full of such sudden insights. We see the effect

of them in his swift actions; actions so swift, so unerring, that they

startle the dull world around him. He was that rare thing--a dreamer

who was also a man of action.

That he was full of faults none can deny, but, judging him by the

highest canon, one feels bound to place him amongst those few names,

such as Shakspeare, Michelangelo, Beethoven and Caesar, who seem to

have had equal control over their physical and their subliminal

consciousness; and so, inevitably, head the lists of leaders amongst

men.

Of Akbar's early years enough has been said. From his birth in the

sand-swept desert, to the day on which, a lad-ling of eight, he

finally escaped the clutches of his uncle Kamran, and rode into his

father's camp before Kabul at the head of a faithful contingent, he

had suffered such constant vicissitudes of fortune that there can be

no surprise at the belief, which grew up later, that he bore a charmed

life.

Of the next three years until, at the age of twelve, he marched with

his father on India, and brought success by, with youthful energy,

precipitating a decisive battle, nothing is known, save that he was

married with much pomp to his cousin Razia-Khanum, daughter of his

dead uncle Hindal, a woman many years his senior.

Akbar, then, was thirteen years and four months old when at Hariana, a

town in the Jullunder district, he received the news of his father's

accident, and almost at the same time those of his death. He, together

with his governor, tutor, or, as it is called in Persian, _atalik_,

Byram-Khan, was engaged in pursuing Sikundah-Shah, the last scion of

the House of Sur, and it seemed to them best, ere returning to Delhi,

to secure the Punjab by securing Sikundah. But their decision proved

of doubtful wisdom; for Kabul instantly revolted, and Hemu, the

shopkeeper-prime-minister of the third Suri king, with an army of

fifty thousand men and five hundred elephants, marched on Delhi,

flushed by his victories, to restore the late dynasty, and took the

city.

In this predicament, Akbar's counsellors advised retreat to Kabul. Its

recovery seemed certain, and he could there await future developments.

But Akbar's instincts were for empire, and Byram-Khan, the old

Turkoman soldier, was with him.

Delhi must be won back at all hazards; so, not without trepidation,

the old man and the boy crossed the river Sutlej, and were joined at

Sirhind by Tardi-Beg, and the forces which had fled from Delhi. Now

Tardi-Beg was a nobleman of the House of Chagatai (which also claimed

the young king as its most distinguished scion), and between him and

Byraem-Khan there had ever been enmity. The latter, therefore, taking

as his excuse the over-haste of Tardi-Beg's retirement from Delhi,

called him to his tent, and without referring to their youthful

master, had him assassinated. The event, common enough in Indian

history, is noteworthy, because it caused the first rift in the

confidence between Byram and Akbar, who, boy as he was, showed his

displeasure, and refused to accept the rough soldier's excuse that

violence was necessary to assert power.

The next breach was of the same kind. Passing by our old friend, the

fort of Bhattinda, Akbar gave battle to Hemu on the old field at

Paniput, where, thirty years before, his grandfather, Babar, had

decided his fate.

No doubt the thought of this had something to do with the renewed

victory which left Hemu, sorely wounded, a prisoner in Byram's hands.

Not satisfied with this, the savage old Tartar general brought him

into Akbar's tent, and, presenting the boy with a sword, said: "This

is your first war, my king. Prove your sword upon this infidel." But

Akbar drew back indignantly. "How can I strike one who is no better

than a dead man?" he replied hotly. "It is on strength and sense that

a king's sword is tried." Whereupon Byram, incensed, no doubt, by the

proud refusal, instantly cut down Hemu himself.

They say the boy-king wept; certain it is that he never forgot, never

quite forgave, the incident. Next day, marching 53 miles without a

halt, Akbar entered Delhi, the acknowledged Emperor of India.

What that India was, we know. On all sides was despotism; good or bad

government being the result of the personal equation of the despot.

Akbar was to change much of this by wise, unalterable, and beneficent

laws during the nine-and-forty years of his reign; for the present,

however, he was under tutelage, and the first four years after his

accession passed without the young king's showing any of the

markedly-original tendencies which characterised him in after life.

But during those four years he was learning to recognise what he

liked, what he disliked. Amongst the latter was the arbitrary exercise

of Byram's power. This became more and more galling as the years sped

by, and the boy, now growing to manhood, began to realise _himself_,

began to dream dreams, began to see realities with a clearness and

insight far beyond those of his tutor. But he had a generous, an

affectionate heart. He hestitated long to throw off the yoke of

tutelage and proclaim his determination to rule in his own way; and

despite the efforts of Byram's enemies--and he had many--added to the

persuasions of Maham-Anagah (Akbar's foster-mother, who all his life,

from the day when, a yearling babe, he was left in her charge while

his father and mother fled for their lives across the Persian

frontier, had been his chief adviser), it was not till A.D. 1560 that

Akbar made up his mind to action. Then, leaving Byram engaged in a

hunting expedition, he returned, on pretext of his mother's sudden

illness, to Delhi and issued a proclamation announcing to his people

that he had taken the sole management of affairs into his own hands,

and that no orders, except those given under his own seal, should in

future be obeyed. At the same time he sent a dignified message to

Byram-Khan to this effect:--

"Till now our mind has been taken up with our education and by the

amusements of youth, and it was our royal will that you should

regulate the affairs of our empire. But, it being our intention

henceforward to govern our people by our own judgment, let our

well-wisher withdraw from all worldly concerns, and taking the

pilgrimage to Mecca on which he has for so long been intent, spend the

rest of his days in prayer far removed from the toils of public life."

The very dignity of this was, however, irritating, and Byram, after a

brief feint of obedience, broke out into open revolt.

It needed Akbar himself to reduce his disloyalty by a display of

clemency which must have convinced the old Tartar that he had here to

do with some one, with something, the like of which he had never seen

before. For when, driven to bay, in utmost distress he sent in an

almost hopeless appeal for pardon, Akbar's reply was the despatching

of a guard of honour equal to his own to bring the unfortunate man to

his presence with every mark of distinction. It was too much for the

old soldier. His pride broke down, he flung himself at his young

master's feet in a passion of tears. Akbar's reply was to raise him by

the hand, order a robe of honour to be flung round him, and to place

him in his old seat by the king's side above all the other nobles.

So in "the very loud voice," and with "the very elegant and pleasant

manner of speech" for which the young king was famous, he addressed

him thus:--

"If Byram-Khan loves a military life, the governorship of Kalpe offers

field for his ambition. If he prefers to remain at court, our favour

will never be wanting to the benefactor of our family. But if he

choose devotion, he shall be escorted to Mecca with all the honour due

to his rank, and receive a pension of 50,000 rupees annually."

Byram chose the last, and from that time Akbar reigned alone; and, to

his credit be it said, except in his disastrous leniency towards his

sons, there is scarcely a mistake to be laid to his charge. Before,

however, embarking on what must necessarily be a very inadequate

sketch of this remarkable man, a few words as to his personality and

his looks may not be amiss. He was "inclined to be tall, sinewy,

strong, with an open forehead and chest and long arms. He had most

captivating manners and an agreeable expression." According to his

son, "his manners and habits were quite different from those of other

persons, and his visage was full of a godly dignity." For the rest, he

was a great athlete, the best polo-player and shot at court, and ready

for any exploit that required strength and skill.

His mind followed suit with his body, though he was absolutely unlike

his grandfather Babar in versatility. Yet he had had, apparently, much

the same opportunity of education. In both, the four years from eight

to twelve were all that Fate gave them for schooling; but Babar

emerged from his, a writer, a poet, a painter, a musician. Akbar,

strange to say, could neither read nor write, but he was counted the

first musician of his day.

Such was the man who at eighteen started to rule India on new lines,

whose head held a new idea concerning kingship. The king according to

this, should be the connecting link between his subjects. He should

rule not for one but for all. Just as Asoka, nigh on two thousand

years before, had protested that conquest by the sword was not worth

calling conquest, so Akbar, whose soul in many ways followed close in

thought to that of the old Buddhist king, felt, vaguely at first,

afterwards more clearly, more concisely, that the king should be, as

it were, the solvent in which caste and creed, even race, should

disappear, leaving behind them nothing but equal rights, equal

justice, equal law. To secure this, it was necessary to make all men

forget conquest.

It was a big idea, and to carry it through in the face of a society

which deemed kingship a personal pleasure to be gained by a long purse

or a stout arm, needed a strong will.

But Akbar was young, and vital to his finger-tips. The first thing to

be accomplished was to annex all India--as bloodlessly as he could.

That is the first thing to be noticed in Akbar's rule. War, even from

the beginning, was never to him anything but the lesser of two evils;

the other being disunion, decentralisation, consequent misgovernment.

His first annexation was Malwa, where the governor, hard-pressed,

"sought a refuge from the frowns of fortune" in Akbar's clemency. As a

result of which he lived, and fought, and died, long years afterwards,

in the service of the king, feeling his honour in no way impaired by

his defeat.

Immediately after this, Akbar had to choose between personal affection

and abstract justice. His foster-brother, Adham-Khan, son to that

Maham-Anagah whose kindly, capable breast had been the young king's

refuge for so many years, began to give trouble. Lawless, dissolute,

he presumed on the king's love for his former playfellow in a thousand

ways. It was he who was chief actor in the tragedy of Rup-mati, the

beautiful dancing-girl with whom Baz-Bahadur of Malwa lived for "seven

long happy years, while she sang to him of love," and who killed

herself sooner than submit to Adham-Khan's desires. This brought down

on him the king's anger, but he defied it still more by assassinating

the prime minister as he sate at prayers in Akbar's antechamber on the

roof. Some say, and this is probably true, that the king, hearing the

old man's cry, came out sword in hand to avenge him, but, restraining

his wrath, ordered the murderer to be instantly thrown over the

battlements. The story, however, is also told that the young Akbar,

coming out from his sleeping-chamber, himself gripped the offender in

his strong arms, and forcing him backward to the edge, paused for a

last kiss of farewell ere he sent the sin-stained soul to its account.

It is, at least, more dramatic.

But either tale ends with the greatest of tragedies for the young

king. Maham-Anagah, his more than mother, died of grief within forty

days--died unforgiving.

The task of consolidating his empire occupied Akbar for the next two

years. It would be idle to attempt to follow him from the Nerbudda to

the Indus, from Allahabad to Guzerat. One incident will give an idea

of his swiftness, his extraordinary dash and courage.

Returned from a long campaign on the north-western hills against his

young brother, Mahomed Hakim, Akbar heard of renewed trouble with the

Usbeks in Oude. Though it was then the height of the rainy season, he

made a forced march over a flooded country, and arriving at the Ganges

at nightfall, swam its swollen stream with his advanced guard, and

after lying concealed till daybreak, sounded the attack.

"The enemy, who had passed the night in festivity, little supposing

the king would attempt to cross the river without his army, could

hardly believe their senses when they heard the royal kettledrums."

Needless to say, the rebels, surprised, were defeated, and, as usual,

pardoned. This was Akbar's policy. To punish swiftly, then to forgive.

Thus he bound men to him by ties of fear and love. Already he had

conceived and carried out the almost inconceivable project of allying

himself in honourable and peaceful marriage with the Rajputs. Behari

Mull, Rajah of Amber (or Jeypore), had given the king his daughter,

while his son Bhagwan-das, and his nephew Man-Singh, were amongst

Akbar's most trusted friends, and held high posts in the imperial

army. Toleration was beginning to bear fruit; but Chitore, the Sacred

City, held out alike against annexation or cajolery. So it could not

be allowed to remain a centre of independence, of revolt. It was in

A.D. 1568 that Akbar began its siege. Udai-Singh, the Fat King, had

fled to the mountains, being but a bastard Rajput in courage, leaving

one Jaimul in charge of the sanctuary of Rajput chivalry.

It was a long business. Once an accident in the mines which Akbar was

pushing with the utmost care, brought about disaster, and the siege

had practically to be begun again. In the end, it was a chance shot

which brought success. Alone, unattended, in darkness, Akbar was in

the habit of wandering round his guards at night, marking the work

done in the trenches, dreaming over the next day's plans. So occupied

in a close-pushed bastion, he saw by the flare of a torch on the

rampart of the city some Rajput generals also going their rounds. To

snatch a matchlock from the sentry and fire was Akbar's quick impulse.

It won him Chitore; for the man who fell, shot through the head, was

Jaimul himself. Next morning, Akbar went through scenes which he never

forgot. He saw, as his grandfather had done, the great war-sacrifice

of the Rajputs; but, unlike Babar, he did not view it contemptuously.

It made an indelible mark upon his soul. The story goes, that two

thousand of the Rajput warriors escaped the general slaughter by the

"stratagem of binding the hands of their women and children, and

marching with them through the imperial troops as if they were a

detachment of the besiegers in charge of prisoners."

If this extraordinary tale be true, the explanation of it surely lies

in Akbar's admiration; an admiration which led him on his return to

Delhi to order two huge stone elephants, formed of immense blocks of

red sandstone, to be built at the gateway of his palace. And on the

necks of these elephants he placed two gigantic stone figures

representing Jaimul and Punnu, the two Rajput generals who had so

bravely defended Chitore.

It was during this siege that Akbar's friendship with the poet Faizi

commenced. Five years younger than the young king, who was then but

six-and-twenty years of age, Faizi, or Abul-faiz, as he is rightly

named, was by profession a physician, by temperament an artist in the

highest sense. Charmed by his varied talents, fascinated by his

goodness, Akbar kept him by his side until he died nineteen years

afterwards, when it is recorded that the king wept inconsolably. One

thing they had in common--an unusual thing in those days--they were

both extraordinarily fond of animals, especially of dogs.

This friendship, bringing about as it did the introduction to Akbar of

Abul-faiz's younger brother, Abul-fazl, marks an important change in

the king's mental development.

Hitherto he had been strictly orthodox. In a way, he had set aside the

problems of life in favour of his self-imposed task; henceforward his

mind was to be as keen, as swift to gain spiritual mastery, as his

body was to gain the physical mastery of his world. Possibly he may

have been led to thought by the death in this year of his twin sons;

apparently these were the only children which had as yet been born to

him, and at twenty-seven it is time that an Eastern potentate had

sons. With him, too, the very idea of empire must have been bound up

with that of an heir to empire. So it is no wonder that we find him

overwhelmed with joy at the birth, in 1569, of Prince Salim. Yet his

sons (he had three of them in Fate's good time) were to be the great

tragedy of Akbar's life. Long years afterwards, when the baby Salim,

whom he had welcomed verily as a gift from God, had grown to be a man,

a cruel man, who ordered an offender to be flayed alive, Akbar, with a

shiver of disgust, asked bitterly "how the son of a man who could not

see a dead beast flayed without pain, could be guilty of such

barbarity to a human being?"

How indeed? Were they really his sons, these hard-drinking,

hard-living young princes, who had no thought beyond the princelings

of their age?

This resentment, this disgust, however, was not to be for many years.

Meanwhile, Akbar, having built the fort at Agra, that splendid

building whose every foundation finds water, whose every stone is

fitted to the next and chained to it by iron rings, began on his City

of Victory, Fatehpur Sikri.

And wherefore not, since sons had been born to his empire? It was wide

by this time, but Guzerat was still independent and had to be brought

within the net.

It was in this campaign that Akbar nearly met his end in the narrow

cactus lane at Sarsa, when he and the two Rajput chieftains,

Bhagwan-das and Man-Singh, fought their way through their enemies,

each guarding the other's head.

Akbar's life is full of such reckless bravery, such

wonderful escapes; in this, at least, he was true grandson to

Babar-of-the-Thousand-Adventures.

It was in the following year that the famous ride from Agra to

Ahmedabad in nine days was made; and, after all, somewhat uselessly

made, since the emperor was too chivalrous to take his enemy unawares,

and, finding him asleep, ordered the royal trumpeters to sound a

_reveillee_ before, after giving him plenty of time, the imperial

party "charged like a fierce tiger." It is good reading all this,

overburdened though the pages of the Akbarnamah-Abul-fazl's great

History of his Master--may be with flatteries and digressions.

But it is not in all this that Akbar's glory lies. It is in the

far-reaching justice of his legal and administrative reforms, above

all, in the reasons he gives for these reforms, that he stands unique

amongst all Indian kings. We have, however, still to record his

conquest of Bengal (where, it may be noted, he swam his rivers on

horseback at the head of every detachment for pursuit, every advance

guard), still to tell the tale of the Fat King Udai-Singh's son, Rajah

Pertap, before at Fatehpur Sikri, in the twentieth year of his reign,

and the thirty-third of his life, we can find pause to consider

Akbar's principles and practice. Bengal, then, was added to empire

with the usual rapidity. Then arose trouble in Mewar. Udai-Singh was

dead, still defying from a distance Akbar's power, still scorning the

alliance by marriage which had brought his neighbours revenue and

renown; but his son Pertap lived--Pertap, who was to the sixteenth

century what Prithvi-Raj had been to the fourteenth; that is to say,

the flower of Rajput chivalry, the idol of the men, the darling of the

women. He had taken to the hills, he had outraged Akbar's sense of

justice, and he must be crushed. The battle of Huldighat decided his

fate. Wounded, wearied, he fled on his grey horse "Chytuc" up a

narrowing stony ravine, behind him the clatter of another horse

swifter than his own; for "Chytuc," his friend, his companion, was

wounded, too, and more wearied even than wounded.

"_Ho! nila-ghora-ki-aswar!_"

["Oh! Rider of the grey horse!"]

The cry rang out amid the echoing rocks. What! Was his enemy within

call already? "Chytuc" stumbled on, urged by the spur.

"_Ho! nila-ghora-ki-aswar!_"

Nearer and nearer! A cry that must be answered at last. One final

stumble, "Chytuc" was down, and Pertap turned to sell life dearly.

Turned to find his brother.

"Thy horse is at its end--take mine," said Sukta, who long years

before had gone over to Akbar's side, driven thither by Pertap's

pride.

"And thou?"

"I go back whence I came."

Those who had watched the chase from the plains below asked for

explanations. They were given.

"Tell the truth," came the calm reply.

Then Sukta told it. Drawing himself up, he said briefly:

"The burden of a kingdom over-weighted my brother. I helped him to

carry it."

Needless to say, the excuse was accepted. And to this day the cry,

"_Ho! nila-ghora-ki-aswar_," is one of the war-cries of the Rajput.

To return to Akbar, in the twentieth year of his reign. It was just

ten years since Faizi had come into his life--Faizi, the first

Mahomedan to trouble his head about Hindu literature, Hindu science.

It had opened up a new world to Akbar, and when six years afterwards

Abul-fazl entered into the emperor's life also, with his broad, clear,

tolerant, critical outlook, and his intense personal belief in the

genius of the man he served, it seemed possible to achieve what till

then Akbar had almost despaired of achieving. The dream had always

been there. In some ways he had gone far towards realising it. He had,

early in his reign, abolished the capitation tax on infidels, and the

tax on pilgrimages, his reason for the latter being, "that although

the tax was undoubtedly on a vain superstition, yet, as all modes of

worship were designed for the One Great Being, it was wrong to throw

any obstacle in the way of the devout, and so cut them off from their

own mode of intercourse with their Maker."

Then he had absolutely forbidden the slavery of prisoners of war; and

having observed, both during his many campaigns and his still more

numerous hunting expeditions, that the greater portion of the land

he traversed remained uncultivated, he had set himself, alone,

unaided--for his courtiers were content with conventionalities--to

find out the cause. The land was rich, the cultivators were

industrious; the reason must lie in something which made cultivation

unprofitable. What was it? An excessive land-tax? He instantly started

experimental farms, which convinced him that this, and nothing else,

was the cause of the land lying idle. But on all sides he met with

opposition. Convinced himself that the old methods were obsolete, he

had almost given up the task of reform in despair, when he met

Abul-fazl. In religious matters, too, he had gone far beyond his age.

The intolerance the bigotry of those around him shocked his innate

sense of justice. Here again Abul-fazl was a tower of strength, and,

inch by inch, yard by yard, his support enabled the king to fight for

his final position, until in 1577, after endless discussions in the

House-of-Argument (which he had had built for the purpose, and where,

night after night, he sate listening while doctors of the law,

Brahmans, Jews, Jesuits, Sufis--God only knows what sects and

creeds--discussed truth from their varying standpoints), he took

the law into his own hands and practically forced the learned

Ulemas to put their signatures to a document which proclaimed him

Head-of-the-Church, the spiritual as well as the temporal guide of his

subjects. The reason he gave for desiring this decision was, that as

kings were answerable to God for their subjects, any division of

authority in dealing with them was inexpedient.

So in 1579 he mounted the pulpit in his Great Mosque at Fatehpur

Sikri, and read the Kutbah prayer in his own name in these words,

written for the occasion by the poet Faizi:--

"Lo! from Almighty God I take my kingship,

Before His throne I bow and take my judgeship,

Take Strength from Strength, and Wisdom from His Wiseness,

Right from the Right, and Justice from His Justice.

Praising the King, I praise God near and far--

Great is His Power! Allah-hu-Akbar!"

They were not unworthy words; and they were, as Sir William Hunter

well calls them, the Magna Charter of Akbar's reign. He was now free

to realise all his long-cherished dreams of universal tolerance and

absolute unity. In future, no distinctions of race and creed were held

cogent. The judicial system was reorganised and the magistracy made to

understand that the question of religion was no longer to enter into

their work.

The whole revenue administration was altered, and it remains to this

day practically as Akbar left it. In this, as in finance and currency,

he was ably aided by Todar-Mull, a Hindu of exceptional ability and

tried integrity.

But Akbar was fortunate in his friends. In addition to Faizi, who

appears to have satisfied his philosophic instincts, and Abul-fazl, to

whose clear eyes he always turned when in doubt, he had a third

intimate companion who, in many ways, stood closest to him of the

three.

This was Rajah Birbal, who began life as a minstrel. His pure

intellectuality, his quaint humour and cynical outlook on life, seem

to have given Akbar the nerve tonic, which, dreamer as he was at

times, he seems to have needed; for like all really great men, the

emperor was almost feminine in sensitiveness.

It is difficult to decide what his own personal creed was. That which

he promulgated as the Divine Faith is a somewhat nebulous Deism. That

which is credited to him in the following words is poetically

mystical:--

"In every Temple they seek Thee, in every Language they praise Thee.

Each Religion says that it holds Thee, the One. But it is Thou whom I

seek from temple to temple; for Heresy and Orthodoxy stand not behind

the Screen of thy Truth. Heresy to the Heretic, Orthodoxy to the

Orthodox; but only the dust of the Rose Petal remains to the seller of

perfume."

Behind all this there lies the conviction so strongly expressed that

"not one step can be made without the torch of truth," that "to be

beneficial to the soul, belief must be the outcome of clear judgment."

But the chronicle of the remainder of his reign claims us.

In 1584 he outraged the orthodox by choosing a Rajputni Jodh-Bai, the

daughter of Rajah Bhagwan-das, as the first wife of his son and heir,

Prince Salim.

He himself had left such things as marriage behind him, and, though

still in the prime of years, led the life of an ascetic. Five hours

sleep sufficed for him; he ate but sparingly once a day; wine and

women he appears to have forgotten. There is a saying attributed to

him of his regret that he had not earlier recognised all women as

sisters. Certainly for the last five-and-twenty years of his life he

had nothing in this respect wherewith to reproach himself. Wider

interests absorbed him. Child-marriages had to be discountenanced,

abolished by a sweep of the pen; education placed on a firmer, better

basis. It seemed to him, as it seems to many of us to-day, that an

unconscionable time was spent in teaching very little, and, hey

presto! another sweep of the pen, and school-time was diminished by

one-half. There is nothing so dynamic as a good despotism!

All this was crowded, literally crammed into a few peaceful years at

Fatehpur Sikri, and then suddenly he left his City of Victory, the

city that was bound up with his hope of personal empire, the city he

had built to commemorate the birth of his heir and removed his

capital, not to Delhi, but to the far north--to Lahore.

Why was this?

It is said that a lack of water at Fatehpur was the cause. And yet

with the river Jumna close at hand, and Akbar's wealth and boundless

energies, what was a lack of water had he really been set on remaining

there?

It seems as if we must seek for a cause behind this patent and pitiful

one. Such cause, deep-seated, scarcely acknowledged, is surely to be

found in the bitter disappointment caused to the emperor by his sons.

From his earliest years Salim had given trouble. At eighteen he was

dissolute, cruel, arrogant beyond belief. His younger brothers, Murad

and Danyal, were little better. Of the three, Murad was the best; it

was possible to think of him as his father's son. Yet the iron must

have eaten into that father's soul as he saw them uncomprehending even

of his idea, his dream. In leaving Fatehpur Sikri, as he did in 1585,

therefore, it seems likely that he left behind also much of his

personal interest in empire.

The ostensible cause of his northward journey was the death of his

brother, and a consequent revolt in Kabul; but he did not return for

fourteen long years--years that while they brought him success, while

they justified his wisdom, brought him also much sorrow and

disappointment. Though both earlier historians and Western

commentators fail, as a rule, to notice it, there can be no doubt to

those who, taking Akbar's whole character as their guide, attempt to

read between the lines, that the emperor's policy changed greatly

after he left Fatehpur Sikri behind him. A certain personal note is

wanting in it. Take, for instance, the war which he carried out in the

province of Swat, and which ended in a disaster that cost him his

dearest friend, Rajah Birbal. Now that disaster was due entirely to

this new note in Akbar's policy. He did not desire conquest; not, at

least, conquest on the old blood-and-thunder lines. He wished, and he

ordered, what we should nowadays call a "peaceful demonstration to the

tribes." The army was to march through the Swat territory, using as

little violence as possible, and return. The idea was outrageous to

the regulation general, so Abul-fazl and Birbal drew lots as to which

of them should go and keep Zein-Khan's martial ardours in check. It

fell on Birbal; much, it is believed, to Akbar's regret. Of the exact

cause of disagreement between Birbal and Zein-Khan little is known;

but they did disagree, and with disastrous results. The whole Moghul

army was practically overwhelmed, and it is supposed that Birbal, in

attempting escape by the hills, was slain. His body was never found.

Elphinstone, in his History, accuses Abul-fazl of giving a confused

and contradictory account of this event, "though he must have been

minutely informed of its history"; but a little imagination supplies a

cause for this: Abul-fazl knew that Birbal was undoubtedly acting on

the king's orders.

The emperor for a long time refused even to see Zein-Khan, and he was

inconsolable for the loss of his friend--his greatest friend--who had

known his every thought. It is said, indeed, that these two men, both

keenly interested in the answer to the Great Riddle of Life, the one

Agnostic, the other hopeless Optimist by virtue of his genius, had

agreed that they would come back the one to the other after death if

possible, and that therein lay Akbar's strange eagerness to credit the

many reports which gained currency, that Birbal had been seen again

alive.

There can be no doubt but that the loss of his friend saddened the

remainder of Akbar's life. Indeed, it may be said that from the year

in which he quitted Fatehpur Sikri, thus abandoning his Town of

Conquest to the flitting bats, the prowling hyenas, the year also of

Birbal's loss, a cloud seems to fall over the gorgeous pageant of

Akbar's royalty.

Just before this, however, on the very eve of departure, an event

occurred at Fatehpur Sikri which in itself, had the Dreamer-King but

possessed second sight, would have been sufficient to dim the lustre

of his personal life.

For in 1585 three travellers from England arrived with a letter from

Elizabeth their queen, to one "Yellabdin Echebar, King of Cambaya,

Invincible Emperor."

The letter is worth giving:--

"The great affection which our subjects have to visit the most distant

places of the world, not without good intention to introduce the

trades of all nations whatsoever they can, by which meanes the mutual

and friendly traffique of merchandise on both sides may come, is the

cause that the bearer of this letter, John Newberie, joyntly with

those that be in his company, with a courteous and honest boldnesse,

doe repaire to the borders and countreys of your Empire; we doubt not

but that your Imperiall Maiestie, through your royal grace, will

favourably and friendly accept him. And that you wold doe it the

rather for our sake, to make us greatly beholden to your Maiestie, wee

should more earnestly, and with more words, require it, if wee did

think it needful.

"But, by the cingular report that is of your Imperiall Maiestie's

humanitie in these uttermost parts of the world, we are greatly eased

of that burden, and therefore we use the fewer and lesse words; only

we request, that because they are our subjects, they may be honestly

entreated and received. And that in respect of the hard journey which

they have taken to places so far distant, it would please your

Maiestie with some libertie and securitie of voiage to gratify it with

such privileges as to you shall seem good: which curtesie of your

Imperiall Maiestie shall to our subjects at our request perform, wee,

according to our royal honour, will recompense the same with as many

deserts as we can. And herewith wee bid your Imperiall Maiestie to

farewell."

Akbar's answer was to give the travellers safe conduct. So John

Newbery, of Aleppo, after seeing all that was to be seen, journeyed

Punjab-ways, to be never again heard of. Ralph Fitch, merchant of

London, went south-eastward to find the Great Delta of the Ganges, and

so return to England, and by his report, help to start the first

British venture to the East; and William Leedes, jeweller, who had

learnt his trade in Ghent, remained to cut gems for Akbar.

A notable event, indeed, this first touch of England on India. And it

happened when the Moghul dynasty was at the height of its power, when

Akbar Emperor, indeed, had but one failure in his life--his sons.

Surely it must have been some prescience of what was to come, which

made him, so soon after giving that safe conduct, leave the outward

and visible sign of his personal hold on Empire--the City of his

Heirs--a prey to the owl and the bat?

Akbar's fourteen-year stay in the Punjab, spent partly at the Fort of

Attock, which he built, and which still frowns over the rushing Indus,

and at Lahore, was marked by the annexation of Kashmir, which was

effected with very little bloodshed. Owing to the difficulty of the

passes, the first expedition made terms with the ruling power, by

which, while the sovereignty of the Moghul was ceded, his interference

was barred. This did not suit Akbar's dream of united, consolidated

government. So he refused to ratify the treaty, and when the winter

snows had melted, sent another expedition to enforce his claim to

rule.

Dissensions due to bad government were rife in Kashmir. The troops

detailed to defend the Pir-Punjai pass were disloyal. Half, deserted

to the invading force, the remainder retired on the capital.

Whereupon, the whole valley lying at the mercy of the Moghul, terms

were dictated.

Akbar himself went twice into Kashmir. Those who have been fortunate

enough to see the indescribable beauties of its lakes, its trees, its

mountains, can imagine how it must have appealed to a man of his

nature.

Sinde and Kandahar followed Kashmir swiftly into the wide net of

Moghul influence, and took their places quietly in the emperor's Dream

of Empire. Kabul followed in its turn. While there, Akbar suffered a

severe blow in the news of the death in one day--though at different

places and causes--of two of his most trusted friends and adherents,

Rajah Todar-Mull, the great Finance-Minister, and Rajah Bhagwan-das,

his first Rajput ally.

The Dekkan was in process of being netted also, when another and still

heavier blow fell on the emperor in the death of his second--and, in

many ways, most promising--son, Murad. He died, briefly, of drink.

But the worst blow was the conduct of his son and heir, Salim,

which in 1598 made it necessary for his father to leave Lahore for

Agra, in order to check the prince's open rebellion. He was now

thirty--arrogant, dissolute, passionate in every way; and, finding

himself as his father's viceroy at the head of a large army, made a

bid for the crown, while his father's forces were engaged in the

Dekkan.

But Akbar's love made him patient. He wrote an almost pitiful letter

of dignified tolerance. His affection, he said, was still

undiminished. Let his son return to duty, and all would be forgotten.

Salim chose the wiser part of submission, but even as he did so,

prepared to wound his forgiving father to the uttermost.

Abul-fazl was on his way back from the Dekkan, and Prince Salim

instigated the Rajah of Orchcha to lay an ambuscade for this old, this

most beloved companion of the king.

History says that he and his small force defended themselves with the

greatest gallantry, but were eventually cut to pieces. Abul-fazl's

head was sent to Prince Salim, who, however, had craft; for his

father, mercifully, never knew whose was the hand that really dealt

the death-blow. Had he done so, his grief would have been even greater

than it is reported to have been. He touched no food for days; neither

did he sleep.

Akbar, indeed, was fast becoming almost unnerved by his tenderness of

heart. Salim, professedly repentant, abandoned himself to still

further debaucheries at Allahabad.

As a last resource, a last effort, Akbar resolved, in a personal

interview, to appeal to his son's better feelings.

He had hardly started from Agra, however, when he was recalled to his

mother's death-bed. It was yet another shock to Akbar, who, ever since

that day of choice, when, surrounded by smiling, expectant faces, he

had stood frightened, almost tearful, then with a cry found--he knew

not how--Hamida-Begum's loving arms, had held his mother as he held no

other woman in the world.

Something of the pity of it must have struck even Salim's passion-torn

heart, for he followed his father and gave in his submission. Not for

long, however. Akbar could not be hard on those he loved. The

restraint was soon slackened; the physicians who were to break the

drug-habit sent to the right-about, and the patient restored to

freedom and favour.

And still Fate had arrows in store for poor Akbar's wounded heart.

Prince Danyal, his youngest son, drank himself to death in the

thirtieth year of his age, having accomplished his object by liquor

smuggled to him in the barrel of his fowling piece.

A pretty prince, indeed, to be the son of the greatest king India has

ever known.

This rapid succession of sorrow left the emperor enfeebled. He had

always been a hard worker, had spared himself not at all; now Nature

was revenging herself on him for his defiance of fatigue.

As he lay dying in the fort at Agra, the emperor, bereft of his

friends, worse than bereft of his sons, had but one comfort--his

grandson, Prince Khurram, who afterwards succeeded his father under

the title of Shah-jahan. A word from Akbar might have set him on the

throne; but the father was loyal to his disloyal son. He summoned his

nobles around him, and his personal influence was still so great that

not a voice of dissent was raised against his declaration of Prince

Salim--little Shaikie, as he still called him at times--as his heir.

Akbar died at sixty-three, almost his last words being to ask

forgiveness of those who stood about his bed, should he ever in any

way have wronged any one of them.

The Mahomedan historians assert loudly that he also repeated the

Orthodox creed; but this is not likely. He had wandered too far from

the fold of Islam to find shelter from death in it.

So died a man who dreamt a dream, who turned that dream into a reality

for his lifetime; but for his lifetime only. Fate gave him no future.

Even his enemies admit with a sneer, saying he had it a gift from a

Hindu _jogi_, his almost marvellous power of seeing through men and

their motives at a glance. Did he ever, we wonder, look at his own

face in the glass, and see written there his failure?

Most of his administrative reforms exist to the present day. Some,

such as the abolition of _suttee_ and the legislation for widow

remarriage which he enforced easily, nearly cost us India to

establish.

But Akbar had the advantage of being a king indeed.

"There is but one God, and Akbar is his Viceroy."

Such was his first motto. If it made him a despot, his second one made

him tolerant.

"There is good in all things. Let us adopt what _is_ good, and discard

the remainder." And this admixture of despotism and tolerance is the

secret of Indian statesmanship.

Akbar was the most magnificent of monarchs; but all his magnificences

held a hint of imagination. Whether in the scattering amongst the

crowd by the king's own hand, as he passed to and fro, of dainty

enamelled rose-leaves, silvern jasmine-buds, or gilded almonds, or in

the daily Procession of the Hours, all Akbar's ceremonials have

reference to something beyond the weary, workaday world. In the midst

of it all he was simplicity itself.

No better conclusion to this ineffectual record of his reign can be

given than this description of him by a European eyewitness:--

"He is affable and majestical, merciful and sincere. Skilful in

mechanical arts, as making guns, etc.; of sparing diet, sleeping but

three hours a day, curiously industrious, affable to the vulgar,

seeming to grace them and their presents with more respective

ceremonies than those of the grandees; loved and feared of his own;

terrible to his enemies."

One word more. He invariably administered justice sitting or standing

below the throne; thus declaring himself to be the mere instrument of

a Supreme Power to which he also owned obedience.

So not without cause did this record begin by calling Akbar a Dreamer.

JAHANGIR AND NURJAHAN

A.D. 1605 TO A.D. 1627

These names, "Conqueror of the World" and "Light of the World," are

inseparable.

It is as well they should be so, for they supply us with the only

excuse which Prince Salim could put forward for the curious animosity

that for many years went hand in hand with his undoubted affection and

respect for his great father, Akbar; the excuse being that he had been

crossed in love, real, genuine love, by that father's absurd sense of

justice.

The story will bear telling.

There was a poor Persian called Mirza or "Prince" Ghiass, of good

family but abjectly poverty-stricken, who, finding it impossible to

live in his own country, determined to emigrate to India with his

family. On the way thither, his wife, Bibi Azizan, somewhat of a

feckless fashionable, was delivered of another daughter. Already in

dire distress, the parents felt unable to cope with this fresh

misfortune. So they left the child by the wayside. The chief merchant

of the caravan by which they were travelling, happening to come along

the same road a few hours afterwards, found the baby, and being struck

by its beauty, determined to rear it as his own.

Now in a travelling caravan wet-nurses are rare. Small wonder, then,

that the infant, whom the merchant had instantly called the "Queen of

Women" (_Mihr-un-nissa_), should find its way back to its mother. This

led to explanations. The merchant, discovering the father to be much

above his present position, employed him in various ways, and became

interested in his future.

This led to his being brought to Akbar's notice, who, finding him

straightforward and capable, advanced him until he rose to be Lord

High Treasurer of the Empire. A fine position, truly, especially for

Bibi Azizan, who, amongst the ladies of the court, was noted for the

_dernier cri_ of fashion both in dress and perfume. It was she,

briefly, who invented the attar of rose, which at first sold for its

weight in gold.

Now Bibi Azizan was a matchmaking mamma, and in little Mihr-un-nissa

she had a pretty piece of goods to bring to market. A thousand pities,

indeed, that husband Ghiass, honest man, had already allowed talk of

betrothal with young Sher-Afkan of the King's Light Horse. All the

more pity because there was Prince Salim giving his father trouble

despite the Rajput wife they had given him.

That Bibi Azizan cast nets is fairly certain; but it was Fate which

sent the bird into them.

It was after one of Akbar's favourite diversions, a Paradise Bazaar,

when the lords and ladies of the court had been playing pranks, that

Salim first saw the girl who was, long years afterwards, to be his

good genius. The tale may be fully told in verse of how--

"Long ago, so runs the story, in the days of King Akbar,

'Mid the pearly-tinted splendours of the Paradise Bazaar,

Young Jahangir, boyish-hearted, playing idly with his dove,

Lost his boyhood, lost his favourite, lost his heart, and

found his love.

By a fretted marble fountain, set in 'broidery of flowers,

Sat a girl, half-child, half-maiden, dreaming o'er her coming

hours.

Wondering vaguely, yet half guessing, what the harem women mean

When they call her fair, and whisper, 'You are born to be a

queen'.

Curving her small palms, like petals, for their store of

glistening spray,

Gazing in the sunny water where in rippling shadow lay

Lips that ripen fast for kisses, slender form of budding grace,

Hair that frames with ebon softness a clear, oval, ivory face.

Arched and fringed with velvet blackness from their shady

depths her eyes

Shine as summer lightning flashes in the dusky evening skies.

Mihr-un-nissa, Queen of Women, so they call the little maid

Dreaming by the marble fountain where but yesterday she played.

Heavy sweet the creamy blossoms gem the burnished orange

groves,

Through their shade comes Prince Jehangir, on his wrist two

fluttering doves.

'Hold my birds, child!' cries the stripling, 'I am tired of

their play',

Thrusts them in her hands, unwilling, careless saunters on

his way.

Culling posies as he wanders from the flowers rich and rare,

Heedless that the fairest blossom 'mid the blaze of blossom

there

Is the little dreaming maiden by the fountain-side at rest

With the orange-eyed, bright-plumaged birds of love upon her

breast.

Flowers fade and perfume passes; nothing pleases long to-day;

Back toward his feathered fav'rites soon the Prince's

footsteps stray.

Dreaming still sits Mihr-un-nissa, but within her listless hold

Only one vain-struggling captive does the lad, surprised,

behold.

'Only one?' he queries sharply. 'Sire', she falters, 'one has

flown!'

'Stupid! How?' The maiden flushes at his quick imperious tone.

'So! my lord!' she says defiant, with a curving lip, and

straight

From her unclasped hands the other circling flies to join its

mate.

Heavy sweet the creamy blossom gems the burnished orange tree,

Where the happy doves are cooing o'er their new-found liberty.

Startled by her quick reprisal, wrath is lost in blank

surprise,

Silent stands the heir of Akbar, gazing with awakening eyes

At the small rebellious figure, with its slender arms

outspread,

Face half frowns, half laughter, royal right of maidenhead.

Slowly dies the flush of anger as the flush of evening dies,

Slowly grow his eyes to brightness as the stars in evening

skies.

'So, my lord!' So Love had flitted from the listless hand of

Fate,

And the heart of young Jahangir, like the dove, had found its

mate!"

Such is the tale which, even nowadays, the women of India love to

tell, bewailing the unkind destiny which separated the lovers for

nearly twenty years. But, as a matter of fact, there is no evidence to

prove that the little Queen-of-Women fell in love with the prince at

all. On the contrary, it seems probable that, being a girl of great

sense as well as great beauty, she preferred her father's young

soldier to her mother's somewhat debauched heir to a throne. Certain

it is, however, that the orthodox Mahomedan faction would have viewed

with favour the introduction of a Mahomedan bride. Akbar, however,

possibly from political motives, ostensibly because of the previous

promise, vetoed the match, and giving the young soldier-bridegroom an

estate in Bengal, sent him thither with his disturbing wife. Here they

seem to have been very happy. But Jahangir did not forget, and the

fact that fourteen years afterwards, at least, one of the very first

acts of his reign was to send to Bengal, pick a quarrel with

Sher-Aikan (who appears to have acted as an honest and upright

gentleman by point-blank refusing to be bribed), and treacherously

killing him, carry off his wife, makes one pause to wonder whether

Jahangir's life might not have been a better one had his inclinations

towards this most masterful woman not been thwarted.

It is a curious story altogether, one which needs reading between the

lines. Not the least curious part of it being the fact that Jahangir,

passionately lustful as he must have been by the time when, as a man

of nigh forty, he gained actual possession of Nurjahan, used no force

towards her. He accepted her scornful rejection of her husband's

murderer, and after months spent in the endeavour to soothe and

conciliate her, accepted his defeat.

For six long years Nurjahan lived at the court as one of the

attendants of Jahangir's Rajput mother, refusing any pension from the

hand of the man who had killed Sher-Afkan, and supporting herself

entirely by her exquisite skill in embroidery and painting.

And then?

It is customary to say that ambition overcame her scruples; but the

seeing eye, reading between the lines, may find a womanly pity for the

man who in the prime of life had lost all control over himself, and

who sorely needed help. She was a clever, a fascinating woman; and no

woman could quite keep her head before such long constancy as his.

It needed little to bring him back. The story runs, that a single

visit to her rooms, where, dressed in the simple white which she

always wore after her widowhood, she received him gravely, kindly, was

sufficient.

They were married almost immediately, and from that time the woman

whom he had first seen as a little maiden beside the fountain was the

one over-mastering influence in his life.

Thus before we begin even on Jahangir's career we must concede to him

the grace of being a constant lover.

The six years which had passed since he had succeeded to his father

had been fairly peaceful ones.

He had found the whole of his vast empire tranquil. The Rana of

Oudipur, it is true, was still unvanquished; but the thorn of Chitore

had almost ceased to rankle from its sheer persistence. The Dekkan was

also disloyal; but there was no pressure of battle, no stress of

struggle anywhere, for Jahangir's eldest son, Khushrou (Fair Face),

had, after years of open enmity, subsided for the time into sullenness

and dejection.

But almost the very first act of Jahangir's administration was one

which, as it were, swept away the whole foundation of the empire which

Akbar had built up.

He restored the Mahomedan confession of faith to the coins of the

realm, thus giving the casting vote to a creed.

It was the first nail in the coffin of Unity.

For the rest, Jahangir evidently did his best for a while. He issued a

few edicts, notably one against drug-takers and dram-drinkers, he all

the while continuing his notorious habits.

Just before his marriage with Nurjahan, the Dekkan gave him serious

trouble. An Abyssinian slave called Malik-Amber rose to power and

swept all before him, compelling the Imperial troops to retire. But in

Bengal peace was restored, and after many successes Oudipur succumbed

to a final attack from Prince Khurram, Jahangir's second son, who

afterwards reigned as Shah-jahan. The emperor's delight on this

occasion was childlike. In a rather inefficient and unreal diary,

which he kept in imitation of his great-grandfather Babar, he records

how the very day after the arrival of some captured elephants from

Chitore, he sent for the largest of these and "went abroad mounted on

Alam-goman, to my great satisfaction, and distributed gold in great

quantity."

But in all ways he appears to have been blatant, even in his good

humours. And these came to the front after his marriage. For Nurjahan

was skilful. She held him hard in leash; her ascendency was absolute.

It is usual, once more, to discount her influence by asserting its

root to have been ambition; but there is absolutely nothing to warrant

this assertion. It is true that she raised her own minions to office,

that her father held the post of prime minister; but he was wise and

just. Nor can there be any doubt that the whole administration

improved after Jahangir's marriage. As for his private character, he

became, for a time, quite a decent and respectable monarch. If he

drank, he drank at night in secret; his day duties were done with

decorum.

Meanwhile, the report which a certain Mr Ralph Fitch had brought home

to a certain "island set in steely seas" was beginning to bear fruit,

and something more than hope of mere commerce filled the sails of the

innumerable fleets which, not from England alone, but from Holland

also, set forth to break through the monopoly of the shores of Ind

which Portugal was endeavouring to maintain. The Dutch succeeded

first, and their East India Company was formed in 1602. The first

Royal Charter given to an English Trading Company was in 1601, but it

was not until 1613 that a fleet of four joint-stock vessels, with Sir

Thomas Roe aboard, as accredited ambassador from James I to Jahangir's

court at Ajmir, sailed for India.

The journal of this voyage, written by Sir Thomas Roe himself, is

excellent reading, and gives us a quaint picture of life at the court

of the Great Moghul. Jahangir himself, dead-drunk as often as not,

with the figures of Christ and the Virgin Mary hanging to his

Mahomedan rosary. A spurious Christianity (deep-dyed by the monkish

legends which the Jesuit translators had coolly interpolated into the

version of the gospels which Akbar had ordered and paid for!),

hustling Hinduism and Islamism combined. Nurjahan, with trembling

lips, no doubt, at times, driving her despot gingerly what way he

should go, proud of her power, but weary, a-weary of heart. A

beautiful queen, beautifully dressed, clever beyond compare,

contriving and scheming, plotting, planning, shielding, and saving,

doing all things for the man hidden in the pampered, drink-sodden

carcase of the king; the man who, for her, at any rate, always had a

heart.

The inconceivable magnificence of it all, the courtesy, the

hospitality, the devil-may-care indifference to such trivialities as

English merchants or solid English presents! As Sir Thomas Roe writes

sadly to his Company:--

"But raretyes please as well, and if you were furnished yearly from

Francford, where are all knacks and new devices, L100 would go farther

than L500 layd out in England, and _here better acceptable_."

Thus the rivalry of "made in Germany" is no new thing to India. Sir

Thomas himself seems to have been a most excellent, God-fearing man,

who was both perplexed and distressed at the attitude of the heathen

towards his own faith.

"I found it impossible," he writes, "to convince them that the

Christian faith was designed for the whole world, and that theirs was

mere fable and gross superstition. There answer was amusing" (?)

"enough. 'We pretend not,' they replied, 'that our law is of universal

application. God intended it only for us. We do not even say that

yours is a false religion; it may be adapted to your wants and

circumstances, God having, no doubt, appointed many different ways of

going to Heaven.'"

Whether amusing or not, the argument was singularly unanswerable!

One of Sir Thomas Roe's most striking sketches is that of Prince

Khurram, who moved through the court, a young man of five-and-twenty,

cold, disdainful, showing no respect or distinction of persons;

"flattered by some, envied by others, loved by none." "I never saw,"

writes the ambassador, "so settled a countenance, or any man keep so

constant a gravity."

Sir Thomas Roe was not by any means the only Englishman at court.

Captain Hawkins had come thither nearly six years before, and

had--Heaven knows why!--been beguiled by the capricious king into

remaining, on the promise of a high salary. More than once he had

attempted to escape in various ways; but even his plea that he lived

in fear of poison was met by Jahangir with almost ludicrous firmness,

and the presentation of a "white mayden out of his palace, so that by

these means my meats and drinks should be looked into."

Poor Hawkins! His protest that he would take none but a Christian girl

was of no avail. An orphan Armenian was promptly found, and the

discomfited Captain could only write home:--

"I little thought a Christian's daughter could be found; but seeing

she was of so honest a descent, and having passed my word to the king,

could not withstand my fortunes. Wherefore I tooke her, and, for want

of a minister, before Christian witnesses I marryed her; the priest

being my man Nicolas; which I thought had been lawful, till I met with

a preacher that came with Sir Harry Middleton, and he, showing mee the

error, I was newly marryed againe."

An honest soul, apparently, this Captain Hawkins. Sir Harry Middleton

was hardly so virtuous, for, disappointed in his desire to establish a

factory at Surat, he started with his little fleet for piracy on the

High Seas, waylaying other people's golden galleons! But all round the

coast, nibbling, as it were, at India's coral strand, were strange

ships out of strange nations, seeking for a foothold, seeking for

merchandise, for money.

But of this the emperor took no notice; neither did his far more able

son, Prince Shahjahan. Backed by all Nurjahan's influence, he was fast

superseding his father in a dual administration, leaving the

latter free to amuse himself in Kashmir. But the death of

Ghiass, Nurjahan's father, about the year 1620, brought about

complications. His sound good sense, his justice, had so far kept

the impulsive womanhood of the empress inline with policy. Now she

suddenly betrothed her daughter by her first husband to Prince

Shariyar, the youngest of Jahangir's sons, and naturally threw over

the Knight-of-the-Rueful-Countenance, in whose inflexibility she saw

danger to her own power. For Jahangir was ill of asthma, and like to

die.

Aided by her brother, she set to work instantly to sow dissension

between father and son, to such purpose that Shahjahan, till then the

undoubted heir-apparent, his father's fighting right hand, was forced

to take refuge in the Dekkan, which once more was in the act of

throwing off allegiance to the Moghul.

Having thus disposed, for the time being, of the inconvenient heir,

Nurjahan took her emperor to Kashmir, where, no doubt, he enjoyed

himself, for he returned thither the next year. He was, however,

living in a fool's paradise, while Nurjahan, bereft of her father's

shrewd eyes and Shahjahan's haughty insight, was but poor protection

for a debauched and drunken monarch.

So one dawning the crisis came. Mohabat Khan, whilom Governor of

Bengal, a worthy and excellent man, fell into disgrace with the

empress. His son-in-law, sent to beg forgiveness, was bastinadoed and

returned to him, face towards tail, on an ass.

So it came to pass that while the imperial camp, conveying the emperor

to a summer in Kabul, was marching northward, there followed behind it

a half-defiant, half-repentant chieftain, commanding some five

thousand stalwart Rajputs.

A word might have brought him to obedience once more; but the imperial

camp was large, and proud, and self-confident. So Mohabat bided his

time. There was a bridge of boats over the Jhelum River, nigh where

the bridge stands now, and after the usual custom, the imperial

troops, marching at nightfall, spent the dark hours in crossing and

preparing the new camp on the opposite bank.

Thus by dawn little was left but the scarlet-and-gold imperial tents,

wherein Majesty lay sleeping; a drunken sleep, it is to be feared.

This was Mohabat's opportunity. He swooped down, overpowered the

guards at the bridge, burnt some of the boats, cut others adrift, and

then awoke the confused monarch.

One can picture the scene. A protesting prince in pyjamas begging to

be allowed to dress in the women's tents, and so gain a few words with

his ever-ready counsellor. Mohabat wilily refusing; and so out into

the dawn, down by the river-bed, with the red flush paling to primrose

in the sky, and the wild geese calling from every patch of green

pulse, a disconsolate despot bereft of his guide.

The empress, however, discovering her loss, was nothing daunted. She

put on disguise; somehow--Heaven knows how!--managed to cross the

Jhelum, and finding her generals somewhat doubtful, somewhat chill,

upbraided them for allowing their rightful king to be stolen before

their very eyes. That night an attempt was made to rescue him by a

nobleman called Fedai-Khan, who swam the river at the head of a small

body of horse; but it failed, and half the party was drowned.

Next morning, Nurjahan, having succeeded in rousing the army to a

sense of its duty, herself headed a general attack. There was no

bridge; the only ford was a bad one, full of dangerous deep pools. But

the rashness of impulse was leader, and the woman was amongst the

first to land of a whole army, drenched, disordered, dispirited, with

powder damp, weighed down with wet clothes and accoutrements.

The result was a foregone conclusion. Nurjahan herself was as a fury.

Her elephant circled in by enemies, her guards cut down, balls and

arrows falling thick around her howdah, one of them actually hitting

her infant grand-daughter, Prince Shahriyar's child, who was seated in

her lap. A strange place, in truth, for a baby, unless it were put

there as a loyalist _oriflamme_. Then, her driver being killed, and

leviathan cut across the proboscis, the beast dashed into the river,

sank in deep water, plunged madly, sank again, and so, carried

down-stream, finally found shore; and the empress's women, looking to

find her half-drowned, half-dead with fear, discovered her busy in

binding up baby's wound.

Bravo, Nurjahan! One can forgive much for this one touch of

grand-motherhood.

Of course she was beaten; whereupon she gave up force and instantly

went to join her husband in the guise of a dutiful wife. It was her

only chance of regaining him, and her empire over his enfeebled brain.

Already she was almost too late. Mohabat had been before with her, had

treated him with deference, with profound respect, had made him see

that she was the cause of all his troubles--which was hardly the case.

Anyhow, she was met point-blank with an order for her execution.

Even this did not daunt her courage. She only asked for permission to

kiss her lord's hand before death.

Grudgingly assent was given; it could not well be withheld. And one

sight of her was enough. Jahangir's heart had really been hers ever

since, as a boy, she had defied him in that matter of the doves.

Perhaps--who knows?--she may have stood before him--guilefully--in the

very attitude in which she had stood while Love flitted from the

listless hand of Fate; and all that Mohabat could do was to bow low

and say: "It is not for the Emperor of the Moghuls to ask in vain."

So Nurjahan was once more in her old place beside the drunkard, free

to begin again with her fine, feminine wiles. It did not take her long

to undermine Mohabat's influence. Within six months her intricate

intrigues bore fruit. Jahangir, whose person was so watched and

guarded that he was practically a prisoner, was spirited away by a

muster of Nurjahan's contingent in the middle of a review, and Mohabat

having thus lost his hostage was compelled to come to terms.

One of these being an extremely guileful one, namely, that the

ex-Governor of Bengal should turn his military capacity to the

crushing of Shahjahan, who was beginning to give trouble in the

Dekkan.

This policy of the Kilkenny cats seemed to promise peace, and,

relieved of all anxiety, the emperor and empress set off for their

annual visit to Kashmir. But this time death lurked amid the purple

iris fields which they loved so well. The asthma from which Jahangir

had suffered for many years became alarming. What were the floating

gardens of the Dhal Lake, the Grove of Sweet Breezes, or the Festival

of Roses to a monarch who could not draw his breath? They tried to get

him back to the warmer climate of the plains, but he died almost ere

he left the valley, being carried dead into the tent on one of the

high uplands of the Himalaya.

So ended the reign, and with it, Nurjahan's. She made no effort to

enter public life again; she put on the white robes of widowhood, and

spent her days in prayer and charity, a sufficient answer to those who

charge her with personal ambition. As far as India is concerned,

Jahangir's was a neutral influence, except for that one first act of

his, that rehabilitation of the Mahomedan formula. Under this, the

whole of Akbar's dream of unity was dissolving into thin air. Yet the

danger which perhaps he had foreseen, against which he had, perhaps,

attempted to guard India, was becoming every day more dangerous.

The vultures--or, let us say, the eagles--were gathering over the

carcase. From Holland, from Portugal, from England, even from France,

came galleons, like birds of prey eager to carry off the riches of the

East.

So for picturesque purposes we can think of this reign as of the

picture of a man, pampered, bloated, half-drunken, looking in the lazy

sunlight at the figure of a woman round whose head doves flutter

amongst the hawks.

Jahangir's famous drinking-cup, cut from a single ruby about 3 inches

long, after passing from hand to hand for many years down to the last

century, has finally and mysteriously disappeared.

In some ways it would be worth while once to drain the good wine of

Shiraz from the glowing red heart of that fatal cup which bears on it,

in fine gold characters, a single name.

They say it is "Jahangir"--Or is it "Nurjahan"?

SHAHJAHAN

A.D. 1627 TO A.D. 1657

The Knight-of-the-Rueful-Countenance in his youth, remarkable for his

lack of amiability, Shahjahan's character appears to have changed to

cheerfulness from the moment when, at the age of thirty-seven, he

ascended the throne.

It was immediately evident also that not without purpose had he sate

at the feet of that Gamaliel of administrative ability, Akbar. Without

his grandfather's genius, a man, in brief, of infinitely lower calibre

all round, he is yet palpably a lineal descendant of the Great Moghul.

In reading of him we are continually reminded of that grandfather to

whom he was so much attached, that when in the hour of Akbar's death

he was urged by his father to follow his example and flee the court

for fear of assassination by those who were pushing Prince Khushru's

claim, he replied proudly "that his father might do as he chose, but

that he would watch by Akbar till the last."

It may be that this devotion had not been disinterested, and that

disappointment at not being chosen to succeed may have had something

to do with the moroseness of the young prince; but, on the other hand,

it may have been the hidden impatience of knowing that filial

affection, honour, everything his grandfather (who had been his

boyhood's hero) held most dear compelled him to bide Nature's time for

kingship, that made the long years seem wasted. For Jahangir's

government was not good; after a very few years the whole

administration of the country had visibly declined. It rose again

under Shahjahan, and some historians go as far as to say that,

although "Akbar excelled all as a law-maker, yet for order and

arrangement, good finance and government in every department of State,

no prince ever reigned in India that could be compared to Shahjahan."

One thing is certain. India during his time was peaceful, easeful, and

prosperous.

One reason for this is not hard to trace. Europe for the first time

had really entered the Indian markets, and the superfluities it found

there were being paid for in gold. There had been a time of truce, as

it were, between the Dutch and the English after the massacre at

Amboyna--a needless and brutal massacre which still stands to the

discredit of the Dutch. England had threatened war, Holland had

promised redress, and so the long years passed by, giving

opportunities of commerce to both sides. But it was not until the

seventh year of Shahjahan's reign that the _firman_ granted by

Jahangir to Thomas Roe, authorising the English to trade in Bengal,

was acted upon, and a factory (as such trading centres were called)

opened at Pepli, close to the estuary of the river Hugli.

That the commerce was growing by leaps and bounds may be judged from

the fact that the original East India Company had to petition

Parliament first; to restrain their own servants from taking undue

advantage of a regulation which permitted a certain fixed limit of

private trade; and secondly, against the formation of another trading

company to the East India's. The chief cause of complaint made about

the original one being its failure to fortify its factories, and so

"provide safety or settledness for the establishment of traffic in the

said Indies, for the good of posterity." Whence it may be observed

that the policy of "pike and carronade" was beginning to find favour.

For Charles I. granted a charter to this new company; whereupon time

was lost, as well as tempers, in the consequent conflict of interests.

The record written by the French physician, Francois Bernier, of his

"Travels and Sojourn in the Moghul Empire," gives us clear insight as

to what was happening in this first organised attempt of the West on

the East. Scarcely a page passes without reference to new efforts of

the Portuguese to outwit England, England to outwit Portugal, and of

both to double-dam the Dutch. And behind all were the refuse leavings

of all three nations, mixed up with Malays, Jews, Turks, Infidels, and

Hereticks, in the redoubtable persons of the Pirates of Arracan; those

foremost of buccaneers, who swept the Indian seas and harried its

coral strands. Bernier's description of them is worth recording, as it

shows graphically how the cancer of commerce and so-called

civilisation was eating into the dreamful, slothful, ease-loving

body-politic of the whole peninsula.

"The Kingdom of Arracan has contained during many years several

Portuguese settlers, a great number of Christian slaves, or half-cast

Portuguese and other Europeans collected from various parts of the

world. That kingdom was a place of refuge for fugitives from Goa,

Ceylon, Cochin, Malacca, and other settlements ... and no persons were

better received than those who had deserted their monasteries, married

two or three wives, or committed other great crimes.... As they were

unawed and unrestrained by the Government, it was not surprising that

these renegades pursued no other trade than that of rapine and piracy.

They scoured the neighbouring seas in light galleys, entered the

numerous arms of the Ganges, ravished the islands of Lower Bengal;

and, often penetrating forty or fifty leagues up the country,

surprised and carried away the entire population of villages on market

days, and at times when the inhabitants were assembled for the

celebration of a marriage, or some other festival.... The treatment of

the slaves thus made was most cruel.... By a mutual understanding, the

pirates would await the arrival of the Portuguese ships, who bought

whole cargoes at a cheap rate; and it is lamentable to reflect that

other Europeans have pursued the same flagitious commerce with the

Pirates of Arracan, who boast that they convert more Hindus to

Christianity in a twelve-month than all the missionaries in India do

in twelve years."

Not a pleasing picture, though it whets the curiosity to know more,

for instance, of the career of Fra Joan, the Augustine monk who,

having by means unknown possessed himself of the island of Sundiva,

reigned there King-of-the-Pirates for many years.

It was the encouragement given to these scourges of the seas which

brought down on the Portuguese the vengeance of Shahjahan, whose

laconic reply to the complaint of his governor in Bengal against their

new factory at Hugli is delightful in its peremptoriness, pathetic in

its pride: "Expel those idolaters from my dominions!"

Easier said than done, even though the image-decorated church at Agra,

which had been built in the reign of Akbar, and the newer one with

chimes in its steeple, which had been erected at Lahore in Jahangir's

time, could easily be demolished. Still Hugli could be besieged and

captured, and no doubt the success made a subject for general

rejoicing. For above all things Shahjahan delighted in fireworks; that

is to say, he had a perfect passion for expensive entertainments, for

gorgeous processions, for magnificent buildings. Half the

architectural sights of to-day in Northern India are due to

Shahjahan's lavish love of beauty. Some of his _fetes_, again, are

estimated to have cost over a million and a half sterling. The famous

peacock throne, of which Tavernier, a French jeweller by profession,

asserts--with apparent credence--that it was commonly supposed to have

been worth nearly six and a half millions, was constructed by this

king's orders.

The question rises insistently: "How came the Emperor of India by such

enormous wealth?" The answer is curiously simple: "L'etat c'est moi."

The State was the Emperor, or rather the Emperor was the visible

State. Every atom of imperial revenue passed through his hands for

distribution. Not in precise pay to clerks and collectors, to

magistrates and ministers, departments and divisions, but in lavish

gifts and prodigal scatterings abroad over the land. Whence the gold,

gaining circulation, filtered down in smaller payments, smaller

giftings. It was a quaint, but not a bad method of making the

king the Fount-of-all-Goodness, the veritable Father-of-his-people.

Indeed, Shahjahan was counted, despite the fact that he spent the

three-and-twenty millions sterling of revenue in right imperial

fashion, to have been an economical king, getting his full money's

worth in all ways. Nor was he privately an inordinately rich man, for

Bernier states that when he died his whole personal estate was worth

about six millions. Thus, while we read of peacock thrones, of

marvellous mosques, of three millions spent without regret on a

mausoleum, of half that sum squandered in what we have called

fireworks, it is necessary to readjust our Western vision, and see

public utility behind the personal extravagance. In fact the spectacle

of Shahjahan, the most magnificent of monarchs, raises the problem as

to how far a millionaire's reckless squandering of a sovereign injures

that coin of the realm for its final purpose of bringing bread to a

hungry mouth.

Regarding the actual events of Shahjahan's reign, there is very little

to say. The Dekkan--in which we can now include the whole southward

country down to Cape Cormorin, the hitherto unsurveyed, unrecorded

triangle forming the apex of India having, chiefly by the nibbling of

foreigners along the entire seaboard, by this time come into the

equation--was as ever unsettled. It had, even in Akbar's time, been

nothing more than a fief of the Crown, and though under his system it

would doubtless have become in time an integral part of the empire, it

was gradually making once more for independence. So, naturally, there

was trouble in the Dekkan. The Rajputs, however, seem to have been

fairly quiescent, and the chief disturbances of Shahjahan's time were

the constant quarrels of his four sons, Dara, Shujah, Aurungzebe, and

Morad. These, with four daughters, Padshah or Jahanara Begum,

Roshanrai Begum, and two others, were undoubtedly the children of one

wife; nor is there mention of others, so if it be true that Mumtaz

Mahal, to whose memory the Taj was built, died in giving birth to a

thirteenth child, many of her family must have died, or been done away

with in infancy; legend says the latter, Shahjahan being three parts

Rajput. It was, curiously enough, Shahjahan's absolute adoration for

his eldest daughter, Padshah or Jahanara Begum, which was the cause of

England's first hold on Bengal. She was badly burnt in attempting to

save a favourite companion, and an English doctor, Gabriel Boughton,

hastily summoned from Surat, asked and received as his fee, the right

for Great Britain to trade in Bengal.

To return to the sons. Dara, the eldest, is drawn by Bernier in fairly

pleasing colours. Frank and impetuous, liberal in his opinions, he

made enemies with one hand while he made friends with the other, while

his open profession of the tenets held by his grandfather Akbar, and

the writing of a book to reconcile Hindu and Mahomedan doctrines,

alienated the orthodox from his cause. Shujah, by his father's

estimate, was a mere drunkard; Morad, the youngest, a sensualist.

There remains Aurungzebe. He was an absolute contrast to Dara. A small

man, with a big brain and absolutely no heart. A man of creeds and

caution, of faith and faithlessness. He had what historians call an

"early turn for devotion." In a thousand ways--and those the least

estimable--he reminds one of Cromwell; Cromwell without his

magnificent sincerity of purpose.

The history of the mutual misunderstandings and divisions and

coalitions of these princes is indeed a weary one. Only Dara comes out

of it with comparatively clean hands. Indeed, in the last act of the

drama of Shahjahan's actual reign of thirty years our sympathies go

entirely with Dara, as he struggles to maintain his own future

position, and still uphold that of the sick king.

As this final incident is an excellent example of what in lesser

degree had been going on for years, it may be given with advantage.

Shahjahan was in his sixty-seventh year. His sons, therefore, all but

the youngest, Morad, touched and overpassed forty. His eldest, Dara,

had for some time had a large share in the Government, both as

heir-apparent, and also because his father in his old age had turned

to wine and women. Padshah Begum, the elder daughter, to whom the aged

emperor had devoted attachment, unbounded affection, was ever on her

brother's side. Shujah, the second son, was Viceroy in Bengal; Prince

Morad, the youngest, Viceroy in Guzerat. Aurungzebe was occupied in

Golconda carrying the Moghul arms into the diamond country.

Thus Dara, on his father's sudden and dangerous sickness--of the cause

of it the less said the better--found himself able for a time, with

his sister's help, to keep all knowledge of the king's danger from

spreading throughout the country. But as Padshah Begum was Dara's

ally, so Roshanrai, the younger sister, was fast friend to Aurungzebe.

Through her he learnt the truth, and instantly took his part

cautiously, diplomatically. He did not instantly proclaim himself

king, as Shujah and Morad did in their several viceroyalties when the

news also reached their ears. He stood aside and waited, while Shujah

marched with his army to engage Dara, and then wrote to his younger

brother Morad one of the most fulsome letters of flattery ever penned,

declaring that he, and he alone, was fit for the crown, and offering

him the service of one who, weary of the world, was on the eve of

renouncing it, and indulging the devotion of his nature by retirement

to Mekka! Morad must have been a fool to have swallowed the bait, but

swallow it he did; and with this cat's-paw puppet in front of him,

Aurungzebe, with their conjoined armies, moved to Agra, whence Shujah

had been driven back by Dara into Bengal. The old king was by this

time convalescent, and, finding Dara, instead of taking advantage of

his illness, was, on the contrary, ready to yield up his brief regency

with cheerfulness, was inclined to trust his eldest son more than

ever. He therefore consented, somewhat against his own will, to the

latter trying conclusions at once with the Morad-Aurungzebe

confederacy. Fortune went against him. During the battle Aurungzebe,

who asserted that he warred alone against the irreligious, the

heretical, the scandalous Dara, was loud in prayerful protestations

that God was on their side; after it he fell on his knees and thanked

Divine Providence for the victory and the round thousand or so of

souls sent below. Dara fled, and three days afterwards Aurungzebe

marched into Agra, coolly imprisoned the aged king in the fort, and

having now no further use for Morad, invited him to supper, plied him

with drink (waiving his own pious scruples for the time), so, when

hopelessly intoxicated, disarmed him in favour of chains, and packing

him on an elephant, despatched him as a State prisoner to Selimgarh,

the mid-river fort at Delhi! So ended poor, foolish Morad's dream of

kingship; nor was his life much more prolonged, for shortly afterwards

he was executed in prison on a trumped-up charge. Shujah escaped a

like fate by disappearance, and poor Dara, after unheard-of dangers,

difficulties, trials and terrors, met with a worse one.

But this record belongs to the reign of Aurungzebe, the man without a

heart.

Shahjahan, meanwhile, remained for seven years a captive in the fort,

old, decrepid, tearful, counting his jewels, and comforted by his

daughter, Padshah Begum.

A sad ending this, for a man who had been the most magnificent monarch

who ever sate upon the throne of India. But all his energies, all his

capabilities seem to have deserted him. He made no effort to reassert

his kingship, and what is still more strange, no friend or companion,

no minister, no adherent, attempted it for him. Utterly deserted by

all save his daughter, he died seven years afterwards, in 1665, and

was buried at his own request beside his wife in the Taj Mahal, that

most marvellous monument of marriage which the world has ever seen.

And out of this there springs to light for the seeing eye a pitiful

story which brings back a pulse of human sympathy for the man whose

old age was so sordid, so degenerate.

How many years was it since with bitter grief he had buried the wife

to whom he was so devotedly attached that history declares he kept

faithfully to her, and to her only, till death did them part?

It was four-and-thirty years since the daughter she was bearing to him

cried--so the story runs--ere it was born, and within a few hours,

Arjamund the Beloved lay dead with her still-born babe.

A tragedy indeed! Think what it means! Long years of hardship, exile,

wandering, and then four only--four short years of content, of

kingship, in which to heap comforts, luxuries, on the woman whom you

love--who has borne with you the heat and burden of the day.

That was Shahjahan's fate. But the history of these Moghul kings,

these Great Moghuls whose name still lingers in conjunction with that

of the Grand Turk and Bluebeard as something slightly shocking and

decidedly despotic so far as women are concerned, is curiously

disconcerting to one's preconceived ideas on this counter.

Babar, whose Mahum met him after long years "at midnight," as with

bare head and slipper-shoon he ran to catch the earliest glimpse of

her along the dusty road. Humayon, whose sixteen-year-old bride,

Hamida, wedded in hot love-haste, brought him his first son at the age

of thirty-eight. Akbar, who, after a brief youth of normal passion,

settled down into the life of an anchorite. Shahjahan, who built the

Taj, who spent twenty-two years of his life in gathering together

every conceivable beauty to lay at the dead feet of a woman who bore

him thirteen children.

These are not the records which we should have expected from a line of

Eastern kings.

Regarding this same monument of marriage, the Taj. So much has been

said about it, that little remains to say. Perhaps the most

bewildering thing about its beauty is the impossibility of saying

wherein that beauty lies. Colour of stone, purity of outline,

faultlessness of form, delicacy of decoration--all these are here; but

they are also in many a building from which the eye turns--and turns

to forget.

But once seen, the Taj--whether seen with approval or disapproval--is

never forgotten. It remains ever a thing apart. Something which the

world cannot touch with either praise or blame--something elusive,

beyond criticism in three dimensional terms.

It was Shahjahan who first thought of it; but who designed, who built

it?

The very question brings a certain revulsion. It is impossible to

dislocate one stone of the Taj from another, to think of it in

fragments, as anything than as a perfect whole.

No! it was never built. It is a bit of the New Jerusalem which some

yellow Eastern dawn coming after a velvet-dark Eastern night, found

standing, as it stands now, amid the cypresses of the garden.

AURUNGZEBE

A.D. 1657 TO A.D. 1707

With Aurungzebe, the Middle Age of Indian History ends. From the date

of his death, interest finally ceases to centre round the dying

dynasties of India, and, changing sides, concerns itself absolutely

with the coming sovereignty of the West.

Even during his long reign of fifty years, the attention is often

distracted by the welter of conflicting commerces which, leaving the

sea-boards, spread further and further up-country. It requires,

therefore, some concentration to deal with Aurungzebe, the last of the

Great Moghuls; the last, and, without doubt, the least estimable of

them all.

In truth, the steps to his throne were littered with black crime.

Shahjahan, his father, had, it is true, made his seat more secure by

the deaths by poison, bow-string, or sword, of the three next heirs to

the throne--one of them his half-uncle; but Aurungzebe trod on the

bodies of three brothers in reaching kingship, and for seven years of

that kingship carried about with him the prison key of a deposed and

dishonoured father. Of minor sins, such as the poisonings of nephews,

cousins, even aunts, there were scores. Well might he exclaim upon his

death-bed: "I have committed numerous crimes--I know not with what

punishment I may be seized."

And yet he was, in his way, a good king. Had he been less of a bigot,

he would have been a better one; but this bigotry was necessary to his

peace of mind. He could not have borne the sting of conscience without

some anodyne of hard-and-fast religious rectitude. It was after the

murder of his brother Dara, who, caught on the confines of Sinde,

almost unattended (for he had sent his most trusted adherents back to

Lahore with the dead body of his wife, who had died of fatigue), was

given a mock trial for heresy and done to death, that Aurungzebe built

the celebrated Blood-money Mosque at Lahore, in which no Mahomedan

prayed for long years, feeling it to be defiled indeed.

But Aurungzebe was for ever hedging between this world and the next,

so we must take him as we find him--an absolutely contemptible

creature, who yet did good work. Needless to say, however, "Akbar's

Dream" vanished into thin air from the moment he set his foot upon the

throne.

The first five years of his reign were practically spent in ridding

himself of relations. The whole family of Shujah suffered death, and

even his own son was immured as a state prisoner in consequence of a

trivial act of independence.

Then--and small wonder!--he was seized with a mysterious illness,

which left him speechless. Nothing but his marvellous determination

could have averted the chaos which must have followed in a state but

half broken in to his murderous methods. But he sent for his great

seal and his sister Roshanara, and keeping them both by his sick-bed,

held order by sheer insistency until he recovered.

So, after a brief holiday in Kashmir--that happy hunting-ground of all

the Moghul kings, who seem to have inherited the love of beautiful

scenery from their great ancestor, Babar--he came back to face the

greatest foe to the Moghul power which had arisen since the combined

Rajput resistance was finally broken by Mahomed-Shahab-ud-din-Ghori.

This foe was the Mahratta race, which had been gradually growing to

power in the Western Ghats, that natural stronghold of mountains which

rises in many places like a wall between the Western Sea and the high

table-land of Central India. No more fitting birthplace for warlike

tribes could be imagined. Towards the sea, breaks of rich rice-fields,

tongued by spurred rocks and outlying strips of almost impenetrable

forest. Then the bare, broken ridges, 3,000 or 4,000 feet high, ending

often in a scarp of sheer precipice, and giving on wide, thicket-set

woods, through which, after a while, ravines break into valleys to the

eastward. A land of rain--clouds from the south-west monsoon, of

roaring torrents and drifting mists; full of wild beasts fleeing

fearfully from the small, sturdy huntsmen of the hills. These were the

Mahrattas. Not a very interesting race when all was said and done.

Brave, dogged, determined, but, by reason, doubtless, of their Sudra

extraction, lacking the nobility of the Rajput and the Rajput nicety

in honour.

It was in the time of Malik-Amber, the Abyssinian slave who in the

reign of Jahangir gave new life to the dying dynasty in the Dekkan,

that the Mahrattas first made their mark. Before this, history does

not even recognise them.

Amongst the Mahratta officers of Malik-Amber was one Malo-ji, who had

a five-year-old son called Shah-ji. To a Hindu festival at the house

of a Rajput this boy was taken, and by chance was lifted to one knee

of the host, whose little daughter of three occupied the other.

"They are a fine couple," laughed the host and father. "They should be

man and wife!"

This was enough for Malo-ji's ambition. He started up, and called the

company to witness that the girl was affianced to his son.

Naturally enough, the claim roused indignation; but in the end,

Malo-ji's fortunes improving, Shah-ji gained his high-caste bride, and

from the marriage sprang Siva-ji, the national hero of the Mahrattas,

who was destined to wreck the power of the Moghuls in the south.

Siva-ji, by the time he was sixteen, was already notorious. His love

of adventure, his knowledge of the popular ballads of the people, his

complicity in the great gang-robberies which formed an ever-recurring

excitement to life in the Ghats, his intimate acquaintance with every

footpath and defile in that wild country, his horsemanship, his

sportsmanship, were on the tongues of all; and when, still in his

teens, he fortified one of the neglected hill-citadels and set up a

chieftainship of his own, there were not wanting those who laughed at

the impertinence as a high-spirited, boyish freak.

But within a few years the boyish freak was found to be open

rebellion, and Siva-ji was practically king of the wild western

country. What is more, he had become an ardent Hindu, and laid claims

to Divine dreams.

The court at Bijapur attempted remonstrance, imprisoned poor Shah-ji,

his father, and threatened to wall him up unless Siva-ji repented of

his errors: whereupon, with the cunning which distinguished him in all

things, the latter made overtures to, and was taken into the service

of, Shahjahan, then engaged in the Dekkan. So for a few years affairs

remained at a deadlock; Siva-ji, apprehensive for his father, Bijapur

of the Moghuls.

Then Shah-ji being released, his son began his career of annexation

afresh, being checked, however, in his depredations by fear of Prince

Aurungzebe, who was then fighting the King of Golconda.

Both of the same kidney, artful, designing, specious, the diplomacies

which passed between the Mahratta robber-chieftain and Aurungzebe,

intent on stealing the throne of India, cannot have been edifying.

The former took the opportunity of the latter's hasty retreat on the

news of his father's illness, to increase his power by an act of

double-dyed treachery. He induced the commander of the King of

Bijapur's forces to come unattended to the hill fort of Partabghar in

order to receive his submission.

The scene is dramatic.

The generalissimo, in white muslin, carrying for ornament only a

stiff, straight sword of state, awaiting on a rocky plateau with one

single attendant the advance of Siva-ji, who, also in white muslin,

was seen slowly descending the steps of his eyrie, apparently unarmed,

and also with but one attendant. A slim little bit of a fellow this

Siva-ji, timid, hesitating. But appearances are deceitful: underneath

his muslin robing was chain armour, within his closed left hand were

the "tiger's claws" (sharp hooks of steel fastened on to the fingers

with which to grapple with the foe), and close to his outstretched,

salaaming right hand was a poniard. It was all over in a second. The

tiger's claws gripped and held, the dagger did its work. And then

Siva-ji's wild robber hordes, conveniently disposed beforehand by

secret paths round the royal troops, fell upon them and spared not

until victory was secure. For in truth Siva-ji appears to have been of

the noble highwayman type--that is to say, not set on murder if he can

gain gold without it.

Siva-ji's next exploit was less blameworthy. Shayista-Khan, who

commanded Aurungzebe's forces in the Dekkan, marched to annihilate the

little robber, and, succeeding in worsting him in the open, took up

quarters at Poona; curiously enough, occupying the very house in which

Siva-ji had spent his youth.

Possibly the intimate knowledge of back-door passages, which he must

thus have possessed, suggested what was more a boyish escapade than a

serious attack. Siva-ji, with some twenty followers, entered Poona at

night by joining a marriage procession, made his way straight to the

house, entered by a side door, and was in Shayista-Khan's bedroom but

half a minute too late, yet just in time to cut off with his sword the

two fingers that clung to the window-sill as the Mahomedan general let

himself down into the courtyard below. Whereupon, seeing that same

courtyard full of ramping soldiery, Siva-ji retired as he came, until,

once outside the city gates, he lit up torches and flambeaux; so

making his way back to his hill eyrie, some 12 miles off, in a blaze

of triumph that was visible to every Moghul in the place. This tale is

still told by the Mahratta bards with immense enthusiasm, though the

story of his march against Aurungzebe at Delhi is really more

exciting.