TWELVE PARADISE OF BLISS: THE PERSIAN LEGACY IN INDIA FROM THE TIMURIDS TO THE MUGHALS

Timur Lenk was a split personality in whom was combined a love of that Persian civilization he had inherited, and a ruthless desire for conquest and destruction. His twin and contradictory passions to create and to destroy did not fit together at all well. However, his successors, more educated and less violent than was the conqueror himself, inherited overwhelmingly the cultured and civilized side of his character. Very soon the great empire was lost and the inheritance of his successors, the Timurids, was to be measured in their artistic and intellectual achievements rather than their military conquests. What was left of Timur’s empire centred on Transoxiana, the focus of the spread of Persian civilization into Central Asia.

Timur’s son and successor, Shahrukh, was quite the opposite of his father and was said to have been of ‘a cultured and pacific nature’.¹ He moved his capital well away from Samarkand to Herat, some 600 kilometres to the south, and left his son Ulugh Beg as viceroy of Transoxiana, known to the Arabs as Mawarannahr, with his capital in Samarkand. He may have done this to get away from Timur’s centre of power, with all its violent associations, but under the old warrior’s grandson, Ulugh Beg, things changed completely. His nearly half a century as viceroy and emir was a period of tranquillity and construction when the essentially Persian civilization of Central Asia flourished as never before. It was during the emirate of Ulugh Beg that some of the most magnificent buildings in Samarkand were built, including those around the Registan Square, regarded by Lord Curzon, who visited Samarkand during the later nineteenth century, as being ‘the noblest public square in the world. I know of nothing in the East approaching it in massive simplicity and grandeur; and nothing in Europe . . . which can even aspire to enter the competition.’²

The most important Timurid rulers and their dates of rule.

It was Ulugh Beg who arranged the interment of his grandfather in the beautiful Gur-Emir mausoleum close to the square. At this time, too, the magnificent gardens, which had converted Samarkand into that Persian paradise beloved by Timur, were further extended.

However, the most important achievements of Ulugh Beg were in the field of astronomy and mathematics. On the edge of his capital he built a splendid observatory in which astronomers were able to watch the heavens and do a great deal of research. Calculations of distances and orbits were made which later proved to have been remarkably accurate.

What was taking place in Timurid Transoxiana at the time of Shahrukh and his son Ulugh Beg was a most remarkable surge of new ideas in science, together with a flourishing of the arts. As a result the period of their reigns was the golden age of Timurid civilization. During the first half of the fifteenth century Transoxiana became one of the most important centres of scientific discovery in the world. In addition to astronomical research, the earth itself was not neglected, and maps were produced that displayed a surprising knowledge of geography – one was a worldview as seen from Samarkand, with the great city at its centre. This was all happening at a time when any serious scientific thought in the Christian world was being strongly discouraged by the Catholic Church. The omnipresent Christian mappa mundi, based on Catholic dogma and owing virtually nothing to real geography, inhibited any new ideas about the true nature of the world. What was happening in Transoxiana has been referred to as the ‘Timurid renaissance’, in which Samarkand together with its neighbour Bukhara and the capital city Herat became brilliant centres of a flourishing civilization. As in the time of Timur and his predecessors, this was fundamentally Persian, and the great traditions of that ancient civilization were once more transposed into Central Asia.3 Visitors to the city at that time wrote of Samarkand being ‘the mirror of the world’, ‘the garden of the blessed’ or the ‘fourth paradise’.⁴ Samarkand and Bukhara became great centres of the arts and learning which, particularly in the fields of astronomy and geography, surpassed anything in Europe at that time.

It was Shahrukh and Ulugh Beg who together set the tone for the Timurid dynasty following the death of its founder, and their successors followed in their footsteps. They maintained an interest in the arts and sciences into the later years of the fifteenth century, when this great Persian-inspired civilization was disrupted by invaders from the north. These were the Uzbeks, and with their arrival this period of achievement came to an end. They captured Samarkand and forced the Timurids to retreat south, many of them even taking refuge in Afghanistan.

Registan Square in Samarkand.

The resistance to these invaders was led by a Timurid prince called Babur, a direct descendant of Timur through his paternal grandfather. He was successful in regaining territory from the Uzbeks, even for a time retaking Samarkand itself. In 1512 Babur was defeated by the Uzbeks just north of Samarkand and was forced southwards, seeking refuge like so many others in Afghanistan. This marked the end of the Timurid dynasty and from this time on the Uzbeks became the rulers of Transoxiana.

Babur’s centre of power was now Kabul, but he remained impatient to redeem himself by making new conquests. Historically, Afghanistan had been a holding area for successive invasions of India from the north and Babur, his homeland now conquered by the Uzbeks, was also forced to look to the south. In 1526 he invaded India using the Khyber Pass route into the Punjab. On the field of Panipat just north of Delhi, the site of many battles for the possession of India, he met and defeated the army of the sultanate of Delhi, which had for many centuries been the dominant power in the subcontinent. From there Babur moved on and occupied Delhi and Sikandrabad, the last capital of the sultanate. With this the sultanate came to an end and Babur was proclaimed emperor and established the Mughal dynasty, which was to rule over the greater part of India for the next three centuries.

Mughal derives from the Persian ‘Mughul’, meaning Mongol. Timur Lenk, the founder of the Timurid dynasty, had claimed to have Mongol blood and this claim gave legitimacy to his conquests as heir to the Mongol Empire. He married a Chinggisid princess and from then on always insisted on being known as ‘gurgan’, the Persian word for son-in-law, rather than khan. The link back to Timur continued through subsequent generations and the Mughals actually referred to themselves as Gurkhani. In so doing they perpetuated both their Timurid origins and their strong connections to Persian culture.

Successful as they were in battle, the military prowess of the Mughals was by no means truly representative of the nature of the new dynasty. They were, after all, successors to the Timurids and, like them, had both the desire and the capacity to create rather than to destroy. The early Mughals, at least, proved to be civilized rulers. They spoke Persian and were firmly in that great tradition of art, architecture, science and literature that had spread outwards from Persia via Transoxiana. As has been seen, the Persian expansion northwards had produced its own great scholars and scientists, such as Al-Biruni and Avicenna, the magnificent architecture of Samarkand and, of course, the pairidaēza that adorned their cities with parks and gardens. It was this civilization the Mughals brought with them that made them so much more than conquerors and added a whole new dimension to the art, architecture, literature and science of the Indian subcontinent.

It was Babur who began this process. Scion of the great Timurid civilization, he was said to be the most brilliant Asiatic prince of his age and, according to the British historian Vincent Arthur Smith, ‘worthy of a high place among the sovereigns of any age or country’.5 He wrote a diary, the Babur-nama, originally in Turkish but translated into Persian after his death. In this he describes in detail his conquest of India and the nature of the new empire he inherited.⁶ He did not have a very high opinion of India and saw it as merely a big land having such things as ‘an abundance of gold and silver’ and a huge and easily exploited workforce. He disliked the hot climate and missed the coolness and the mountain landscapes of Afghanistan. On his death in 1530 his body was taken back and buried in his beloved Kabul.

Mausoleum of Humayun in Delhi in 1820 surrounded by early Mughal gardens. Watercolour in Agra style by an unknown Delhi artist.

Miniature from Babur’s Waqiat-i-Baburi, or Babur-nama, showing Babur laying out a garden in Kabul, c. 1508.

Babur was, like his ancestor Timur, both warrior and scholar, but he mercifully lacked the latter’s savagery. His son Humayun was more completely in the Timurid tradition of Shahrukh and Ulugh Beg. Bookish and intellectual but an ineffective ruler, it was he who began the building programme that was to transform Delhi into a splendid Mughal city. He was the first Mughal emperor to be buried in India, his tomb in Delhi being an early and magnificent example of that unmistakable Mughal architecture that derived via Transoxiana from Persia. It was designed by a Persian architect from Bukhara and was typical of both Timurid Samarkand and Safavid Persia.

The first six great Mughals.

Another Persian import was the garden that surrounded the tomb and which set off its architectural splendour against a background of greenery. It was the first of those Mughal gardens that derived from the gardens of Samarkand and before that the Persian pairidaēza. Such gardens were among the most magnificent gifts bestowed by the Mughals on India.

Humayun’s successor, Akbar, was perhaps the most successful of all the Mughal emperors in uniting and extending his dominions, but he also found time to engage in building, with a fury that in many ways resembled that of his ancestor Timur in Samarkand. It was he who built the great fort at Agra and then went on to build a new capital city at nearby Fatehpur Sikri, the City of Victory. This capital was not the centre of Mughal power for very long and perhaps was never intended to be. Like Persepolis, it was designed as a ceremonial city and in many ways it resembled the Achaemenid capital itself. Most significant was the fact that the site had been chosen for largely symbolic reasons, in this case with its strong links to religion.7

Like his forebears, Akbar was a Muslim but he was also interested in the other religions of India and brought together representatives of each of them in the great five-storey Panch Mahal. There religious discussions took place and new ideas were formulated. This led over time to the emergence of a new, eclectic state religion that centred on Akbar himself. This was Dīn-i Ilāhī, the Divine Religion, and with Akbar at its centre the Mughal Empire took on many of the characteristics of a theocratic state.8 However, toleration was extended to the other religions of the empire and Akbar himself took part in Hindu celebrations. This closely resembled the sympathetic way in which Cyrus behaved towards the religions of his Achaemenid Empire. The record of the reign, the Akbar-nama, written in Persian, gives many instances both of Akbar’s interest in religion and his attitude towards it.⁹ It is interesting to note that despite this toleration, Islam, the religion of the Persians and the Timurids, came to be treated more harshly than the other religions.

Akbar did not actually remain in Fatehpur for very long. He soon left for Lahore and later in his reign returned to the Red Fort at Agra. Behind its gigantic walls he and his immediate successors were secure and it was from there that they planned their campaigns for further expansion of the empire to the south. Fatehpur Sikri remained a magnificent symbol of Mughal power but religion always remained at the heart of the project. The grandest building in the city was the Jama Masjid mosque, built on the plan of the great mosque in Mecca. By then Akbar had proclaimed himself imam, and in so doing became the religious as well as the political head of his empire.

The final great addition to Fatehpur Sikri in the last years of the reign typifies that binding together of state and religion. This was the Buland Darwaza, the ‘Gate of Victory’, a triumphal gateway added to the Jama Masjid mosque. The eclectic nature of Akbar’s state religion is also made clear from the inscription above the entrance, which reads, ‘Jesus, son of Mary, said, on whom be peace: the world is a bridge, pass over it but build no house upon it.’ The image of the bridge, which can also be found elsewhere in Fatehpur, encapsulated the idea of the link between the divergent peoples and religions of the empire that Akbar strove throughout his reign to create.

While Fatehpur Sikri was in the Mughal architectural style, there were also considerable Hindu influences with strong political meanings. The concept of the bridge is certainly an idea that would have applied also to Cyrus with his policy of tolerance of the diversity of the peoples of his empire. Neither Cyrus nor Akbar tried to force an artificial unity on the peoples of their empires but allowed the existence of a natural diversity. Dīn-i Ilāhī was intended most particularly to be the religion of the Mughal dynasty in much the same ways as Zoroastrianism had been the religion of the Achaemenid dynasty.

Akbar died in 1605 and his son and successor, Jahangir, built his magnificent tomb nearby at Sikandarabad. Like that of Humayun, it is surrounded by a splendid formal garden in the Mughal style.

The concept of the pairidaēza went on to play an important role in the architectural projects of Shah Jahan, the grandson of Akbar. Perhaps the most magnificent of all is the Taj Mahal at Agra, a tomb complex built by Shah Jahan for his wife Mumtaz Mahal, who died at a young age. Its magnificent gardens integrated into the complex of tomb, mosque and residences are very much in the Persian tradition. Artists and craftsmen from Samarkand, Bukhara, Balkh and even Shiraz worked on the mosaics, calligraphy and sculpture. The architecture of the tomb was in that mature Mughal style which owed so much to Samarkand, and before that to the architecture of the Sasanians. Like his ancestors Timur in Samarkand and Akbar in Fatehpur, Shah Jahan is said to have thrown himself into the project with wild enthusiasm and lack of concern for the cost, which proved to be a considerable drain on the coffers of the state.

Having built this magnificent complex in Agra, Shah Jahan then made the momentous decision to return his capital to Delhi. Like his forebears, he was a natural builder and on the site of Delhi he built the entirely new city of Shahjahanabad, with its massive walls and impressive towers.10 It was laid out in a grid pattern, bisected by the Chandni Chowk, a grand processional way. Its most important and impressive building was a second Red Fort, intended to be the imperial residence and centre of government. This palace-fortress was, like the fort at Agra, built of red sandstone and, like the Taj Mahal, it also contained much white marble. While it was certainly a symbol of power in stone, inside its formidable walls was revealed architecture of the greatest beauty. The pivot of the Red Fort was the Diwan-i-Am, the Hall of Public Audience, where the emperor dealt with matters of state in front of his subjects. As the British arts writer Louise Nicholson put it, this was ‘the Mughal Empire’s centre stage for displaying its greatest pomp and ceremony’.¹¹ This again placed the Mughals in that tradition, dating back to the Achaemenids, of the display of power in stone. Like the Great Stairway leading to the Gate of the Nations and the Throne Room at Persepolis, the processional route down the Chandni Chowk and through the Lahore Gate led impressively to the presence of the emperor.

The Taj Mahal at Agra with watercourse and gardens.

However, while the Diwan-i-Am was the place where power was on display, the real centre of power lay hidden behind it in the Diwan-i-Khas, the Hall of Private Audience where the emperor met privately with his ministers and the really important decisions of state were arrived at. The pièce de résistance in this diwan was the magnificent Peacock Throne inlaid with the most precious stones and symbolizing both the magnificence and the power of the emperor. Both Shah Jahan and his throne were described by the visiting Frenchman François Bernier in the following words:

The King appeared seated upon his throne, at the end of the great hall, in the most magnificent attire. His vest was of white and delicately flowered satin, with a silk and gold embroidery of the finest texture. The turban of gold cloth had an aigrette whose base was composed of diamonds (and) an Oriental topaz exhibiting a lustre like the sun . . . The throne was supported by six massy feet said to be of solid gold, sprinkled over with rubies, emeralds and diamonds. I cannot tell you with accuracy the number or value of this vast collection of precious stones, because no person may approach sufficiently near to reckon them.12

The Diwan-i-Am, Red Fort, Delhi.

That the heart of the Red Fort, and therefore the heart of the Mughal Empire, was also a private place of beauty and relaxation for the emperor and the court was made clear by the couplet by Khusrau inscribed in Persian on the wall above the throne: ‘If on earth there be a paradise of bliss, / It is this, Oh! It is this! It is this!’

The Mughals remained great lovers of gardens, fountains, cascades and pools, and these were all to be found in the Red Fort surrounding the diwans and the other buildings, including the harem and the private quarters of the emperor. As the couplet suggests, these Mughal gardens were certainly pairidaēza in the Persian sense of the word, something that was readily acknowledged by the Mughals themselves. The gardens of the Fort were in the classic Persian char-bagh (four garden) style, enclosed by a wall and crossed by two watercourses dividing them into four parts. At the centre was a pool with fountains and cascades. In the dry climate of Delhi, these pairidaēza would have been as welcome as had been those created by the Achaemenids in Parsa 2,000 years earlier.

Persian was, of course, the language most used by the Mughal dynasty, and the memoirs of the Great Mughals were either written in or soon translated into that language. It was the official language of the Mughal Empire and remained so until the nineteenth century. Babur also brought Persian book illustration to India and Akbar encouraged the local artists to revive the tradition of Persian miniatures. The most important historian of the period was Abu’l Fazl, the writer of the Akbar-nama, a detailed account of the Great Mughal’s reign. It was said that the lyrical beauty and descriptive quality of Abu’l Fazl’s Persian challenged the Sanskrit of India’s own scribes. Abu’l Fazl also wrote the Ain-i-Akbari, a kind of ‘Domesday Book’ of the empire and a work of immense length. Sanskrit works such as the Bhagavad Gita were also translated into Persian, thus helping to provide that unity in diversity that Akbar saw as being the most important unifying force for his empire. In reality this linguistic divide set the rulers apart from the ruled, much like the French-speaking Normans were set apart from their Anglo-Saxon subjects. This powerful Persian–Hindi linguistic and cultural divide remained until the end of the Mughal Empire in the nineteenth century and was one of the factors contributing to the failure of the Mughals to bring India under their rule.

Despite the lapse of time, there is a remarkable similarity between the Achaemenids and the Mughals. Cyrus sought to build his empire by cooperation and consent and was largely successful in achieving this. However, apart from Darius, his successors moved away from his methods and reverted to the more usual type of imperialism based on compulsion and fear. This was a major contributory factor in the eventual fall of the Achaemenids and the victory of Alexander. In like manner, the Mughal emperor Akbar attempted to unify his empire by gaining the consent and trust of his subjects while his successors reverted to harsher methods. As John Keay puts it, by the time of Shah Jahan, ‘the outspoken animation of Akbar’s symposia had given way to a more awesome ceremonial and a more exalted symbolism. Now the “King of the World” ethereally presided from sun-drenched verandahs of the whitest marble.’ In the Red Fort, ‘the ritual of Court and Council and the conventions of costume were set in stone’.13 After Darius the Achaemenid Empire was also in many ways ‘set in stone’ and this was very much the case of the Mughal Empire under Shah Jahan’s son and successor, Aurangzeb, whose cruelty and Islamic intransigence set the scene for its fall. By the end of his reign, Muslims and Hindus had never been further apart.

The strong Persian influence on the Mughals, which had lasted for 200 years, was soon to be followed by a very different sort of Persian intervention in the affairs of the subcontinent. Soon after the death of Aurangzeb in 1707, other invaders began to move onto the Indian scene. The most ferocious of these was the Persian Nadir Shah, who in 1739 invaded India through Afghanistan, the route of so many conquerors in the past. Defeating the Mughal army at Karnal, he occupied Delhi and set the seal on the approaching end of the empire that had ruled India for the previous 200 years. A latter-day Timur, and usurper of the throne, Nadir Shah engaged in an orgy of slaughter and destruction similar to Timur’s attack on the city 300 years earlier. He returned to Persia rich with booty, including much gold and precious stones. Among the latter was the famous Koh-i-noor diamond that was eventually to find its way into the British Crown Jewels. Most significantly, he took with him back to Persia the Peacock Throne, which had since the reign of Shah Jahan been the symbol of Mughal power. Its removal symbolized the end of the effective power of the dynasty. From then on its emperors were for the most part mere shadows, pawns in the hands of adventurers. For the next half-century the empire existed in name only. This situation was expressed in another Persian couplet: ‘Az Delhi to Palam / Badshahi Shah Alam’ (From Delhi to Palam / Is the realm of the Shah Alam). Palam was just outside Delhi, and the couplet was intended to deride the emperor Shah Alam, whose writ extended little further than the edges of his capital city. In 1804 he placed himself under the protection of the British, and a new power was poised to take over the ruins of the Mughal Empire. In order to communicate with the Mughals, the British found that they needed a knowledge of Persian, and this was something they quickly began to acquire. It was this more than anything else that gave them access to the literature and history of a great civilization and added considerably to their knowledge and understanding of what came to be known as the ‘East’.14 This was of particular value as the British became heirs to the Mughals and strove to consolidate their own world empire.

When the Peacock Throne was taken by Nadir Shah back to his capital, its role changed from being the symbol of the Mughal emperors to the symbol of the empire of the shah of Persia. It came to be regularly used in the great ceremonies of state, including coronations, and from then on the term ‘Peacock Throne’ became a kind of synonym for Persian imperial power. Both the term and the throne itself remained in use until the deposition of the last shah and the establishment of the Islamic Republic, discussed in Chapter Fourteen.¹⁵