Kitabı oku: «Rambles and Recollections of an Indian Official», sayfa 23
CHAPTER 52
Nūr Jahān, the Aunt of the Empress Nūr Mahal, over whose Remains the Tāj is built.595
I crossed over the river Jumna one morning to look at the tomb of Itimād-ud-daula, the most remarkable mausoleum in the neighbourhood after those of Akbar and the Tāj. On my way back, I asked one of the boatmen who was rowing me who had built what appeared to me a new dome within the fort. 'One of the Emperors, of course,' said he. 'What makes you think so?'
'Because such things are made only by Emperors,' replied the man quietly, without relaxing his pull at the oar.
'True, very true,' said an old Musalmān trooper, with large white whiskers and moustachios, who had dismounted to follow me across the river, with a melancholy shake of the head, 'very true; who but Emperors could do such things as these?'
Encouraged by the trooper, the boatman continued:—'The Jāts and the Marāthās did nothing but pull down and destroy while they held their accursed dominion here; and the European gentlemen who now govern seem to have no pleasure in building anything but factories, courts of justice, and jails.'
Feeling as an Englishman, as we all must sometimes do, be where we will, I could hardly help wishing that the beautiful panels and pillars of the bath-room had fetched a better price, and that palace, Tāj, and all at Agra, had gone to the hammer—so sadly do they exalt the past at the expense of the present in the imaginations of the people.
The tomb contains in the centre the remains of Khwāja Ghiās,596 one of the most prominent characters of the reign of Jahāngīr, and those of his wife. The remains of the other members of his family repose in rooms all round them; and are covered with slabs of marble richly cut. It is an exceedingly beautiful building, but a great part of the most valuable stones of the mosaic work have been picked out and stolen, and the whole is about to be sold by auction, by a decree of the civil court, to pay the debt of the present proprietor, who is entirely unconnected with the family whose members repose under it, and especially indifferent as to what becomes of their bones. The building and garden in which it stands were, some sixty years ago, given away, I believe, by Nājīf Khān, the prime minister, to one of his nephews, to whose family it still belongs.597 Khwaja Ghiās, a native of Western Tartary, left that country for India, where he had some relations at the imperial court, who seemed likely to be able to secure his advancement. He was a man of handsome person, and of good education and address. He set out with his wife, a bullock, and a small sum of money, which he realized by the sale of all his other property. The wife, who was pregnant, rode upon the bullock, while he walked by her side. Their stock of money had become exhausted, and they had been three days without food in the great desert, when she was taken in labour, and gave birth to a daughter. The mother could hardly keep her seat on the bullock, and the father had become too exhausted to afford her any support; and in their distress they agreed to abandon the infant. They covered it over with leaves, and towards evening pursued their journey. When they had gone on about a mile, and had lost sight of the solitary shrub under which they had left their child, the mother, in an agony of grief, threw herself from the bullock upon the ground, exclaiming, 'My child, my child!' Ghiās could not resist this appeal. He went back to the spot, took up his child, and brought it to its mother's breast. Some travellers soon after came up, and relieved their distress, and they reached Lahore, where the Emperor Akbar then held his court.598
Āsaf Khan, a distant relation of Ghiās, held a high place at court, and was much in the confidence of the Emperor. He made his kinsman his private secretary. Much pleased with his diligence and ability, Āsaf soon brought his merits to the special notice of Akbar, who raised him to the command of a thousand horse, and soon after appointed him master of the household. From this he was promoted afterwards to that of Itimād-ud-daula, or high treasurer, one of the first ministers.599
The daughter who had been born in the desert became celebrated for her great beauty, parts, and accomplishments, and won the affections of the eldest son of the Emperor, the Prince Salīm, who saw her unveiled, by accident, at a party given by her father. She had been betrothed before this to Shēr Afgan, a Turkoman gentleman of rank at court, and of great repute for his high spirit, strength, and courage.600 Salīm in vain entreated his father to interpose his authority to make him resign his claim in his favour; and she became the wife of Shēr Afgan. Salīm dare not, during his father's life, make any open attempt to revenge himself; but he, and those courtiers who thought it their interest to worship the rising sun, soon made his [Afgan's] residence at the capital disagreeable, and he retired with his wife to Bengal, where he obtained from the governor the superintendency of the district of Bardwān.
Salīm succeeded his father on the throne;601 and, no longer restrained by his (scil. Akbar's) rigid sense of justice, he recalled Shēr Afgan to court at Delhi. He was promoted to high offices, and concluded that time had removed from the Emperor's mind all feelings of love for his wife, and of resentment against his successful rival—but he was mistaken; Salīm had never forgiven him, nor had the desire to possess his wife at all diminished. A Muhammadan of such high feeling and station would, the Emperor knew, never survive the dishonour, or suspected dishonour, of his wife; and to possess her he must make away with the husband. He dared not do this openly, because he dreaded the universal odium in which he knew it would involve him; and he made several unsuccessful attempts to get him removed by means that might not appear to have been contrived or executed by his orders. At one time he designedly, in his own presence, placed him in a situation where the pride of the chief made him contend, single- handed, with a large tiger, which he killed; and, at another, with a mad elephant, whose proboscis he cut off with his sword; but the Emperor's motives in all these attempts to put him foremost in situations of danger became so manifest that Shēr Afgan solicited, and obtained, permission to retire with his wife to Bengal.
The governor of this province, Kutb,602 having been made acquainted with the Emperor's desire to have the chief made away with, hired forty ruffians, who stole into his house one night. There happened to be nobody else in the house; but one of the party, touched by remorse on seeing so fine a man about to be murdered in his sleep, called out to him to defend himself. He seized his sword, placed himself in one corner of the room, and defended himself so well that nearly one-half of the party are said to have been killed or wounded. The rest all made off, persuaded that he was endowed with supernatural force. After this escape he retired from Tānda, the capital of Bengal,603 to his old residence of Bardwān. Soon after, Kutb came to the city with a splendid retinue, on pretence of making a tour of inspection through the provinces under his charge, but in reality for the sole purpose of making away with Shēr Afgan, who as soon as he heard of his approach, came out some miles to meet him on horseback, attended by only two followers. He was received with marks of great consideration, and he and the governor rode on for some time side by side, talking of their mutual friends, and the happy days they had spent together at the capital. At last, as they were about to enter the city, the governor suddenly called for his elephant of state, and mounted, saying it would be necessary for him to pass through the city on the first visit in some state. Shēr sat on horseback while he mounted, but one of the governor's pikemen struck his horse, and began to drive him before them. Shēr drew his sword, and, seeing all the governor's followers with theirs ready drawn to attack him, he concluded at once that the affront had been put upon him by the orders of Kutb, and with the design to provoke him to an unequal fight. Determined to have his life first, he spurred his horse upon the elephant, and killed Kutb with his spear. He now attacked the principal of officers, and five noblemen of the first rank fell by his sword. All the crowd now rolled back, and formed a circle round Shēr and his two companions, and galled them with arrows and musket balls from a distance. His horse fell under him and expired; and, having received six balls and several arrows in his body, Shēr himself at last fell exhausted to the ground; and the crowd, seeing the sword drop from his grasp, rushed in and cut him to pieces.604
His widow was sent, 'nothing loth', to court, with her only child, a daughter. She was graciously received by the Emperor's mother, and had apartments assigned her in the palace; but the Emperor himself is said not to have seen her for four years, during which time the fame of her beauty, talents, and accomplishments filled the palace and city. After the expiration of this time the feelings, whatever they were, which prevented his seeing her, subsided; and when he at last surprised her with a visit, he found her to exceed all that his imagination had painted since their last separation. In a few days their marriage was celebrated with great magnificence;605 and from that hour the Emperor resigned the reins of government almost entirely into her hands; and, till his death, under the name first of Nūr Mahall, 'Light of the Palace', and afterwards of Nūr Jahān, 'Light of the World ', she ruled the destinies of this great empire. Her father was now raised from the station of high treasurer to that of prime minister. Her two brothers obtained the titles of Āsaf Jāh and Itikād Khan; and the relations of the family poured in from Tartary in search of employment, as soon as they heard of their success.606 Nūr Jahān had by Sher Afgan, as I have stated, one daughter; but she had never any child by the Emperor Jahāngīr.607
Āsaf Jāh became prime minister on the death of his father; and, in spite of his sister, he managed to secure the crown to Shāh Jahān, the third son of Jahāngīr, who had married his daughter, the lady over whose remains the Tāj was afterwards built. Jahāngīr's eldest son, Khusrū, had his eyes put out by his father's orders for repeated rebellions, to which he had been instigated by a desire to revenge his mother's murder, and by the ambition of her brother, the Hindoo prince, Mān Singh,608 who wished to see his own nephew on the throne, and by his wife's father, the prime minister of Akbar, Khan Azam.609 Nūr Jahān had invited the mother of Khusrū, the sister of Rājā Mān Singh, to look with her down a well in the courtyard of her apartments by moonlight, and as she did so she threw her in. As soon as she saw that she had ceased to struggle she gave the alarm, and pretended that she had fallen in by accident.610
By the murder of the mother of the heir-apparent she expected to secure the throne to a creature of her own. Khusrū was treated with great kindness by his father, after he had been barbarously deprived of sight;611 but when his brother, Shāh Jahān, was appointed to the government of Southern India, he pretended great solicitude about the comforts of his poor blind brother, which he thought would not be attended to at court, and took him with him to his government in the Deccan, where he got him assassinated, as the only sure mode of securing the throne to himself.612 Parwīz, the second son, died a natural death;613 so also did his only son; and so also Dāniyāl, the fourth son of the Emperor.614 Nūr Jahān's daughter by Shēr Afgan had married Shahryār, a young son of the Emperor by a concubine; and, just before his death he (the Emperor), at the instigation of Nūr Jahān, named this son as his successor in his will. He was placed upon the throne, and put in possession of the treasury, and at the head of a respectable army;615 but the Empress's brother, Āsaf, designed the throne for his own son-in-law, Shāh Jahān; and, as soon as the Emperor died, he put up a puppet to amuse the people till he could come up with his army from the Deccan—Bulākī, the eldest son of the deceased Khusrū. Shahryār's troops were defeated; he was taken prisoner, and had his eyes put out forthwith, and the Empress was put into close confinement. As Shāh Jahān approached Lahore with his army, Āsaf put his puppet, Bulākī, and his younger brother, with the two young sons of Dāniyāl, into prison, where they were strangled by a messenger sent on for the purpose by Shāh Jahān, with the sanction of Āsaf.616 This measure left no male heir alive of the house of Tīmūr (Tamerlane) in Hindustan, save Shāh Jahān himself and his four sons. Dārā was then thirteen years of age, Shujā twelve, Aurangzēb ten, and Murād four;617 and all were present to learn from their father this sad lesson—that such of them who might be alive on his death, save one, must, with their sons, be hunted down and destroyed like mad dogs, lest they might get into the hands of the disaffected, and be made the tools of faction.
Monsieur de Thevenot, who visited Agra, as I have before stated, in 1666, says, 'Some affirm that there are twenty-five thousand Christian families in Agra; but all do not agree in that. The Dutch have a factory in the town, but the English have now none, because it did not turn to account.' The number must have been great, or so sober a man as Monsieur Thevenot would not have thought such an estimate worthy to be quoted without contradiction.618 They were all, except those connected with the single Dutch factory, maintained from the salaries of office; and they gradually disappeared as their offices became filled with Muhammadans and Hindoos. The duties of the artillery, its arsenals, and foundries, were the chief foundation upon which the superstructure of Christianity then stood in India. These duties were everywhere entrusted exclusively to Europeans, and all Europeans were Christians, and, under Shāh Jahān, permitted freely to follow their own modes of worship. They were, too. Roman Catholic, and spent the greater part of their incomes in the maintenance of priests. But they could never forget that they were strangers in the land, and held their offices upon a precarious tenure; and, consequently, they never felt disposed to expend the little wealth they had in raising durable tombs, churches, and other public buildings, to tell posterity who or what they were. Present physical enjoyment, and the prayers of their priests for a good berth in the next world, were the only objects of their ambition. Muhammadans and Hindoos soon learned to perform duties which they saw bring to the Christians so much of honour and emolument; and, as they did so, they necessarily sapped the walls of the fabric. Christianity never became independent of office in India, and, I am afraid, never will; even under our rule, it still mainly rests upon that foundation.619
CHAPTER 53
Father Gregory's Notion of the Impediments to Conversion in India—Inability of Europeans to speak Eastern Languages
Father Gregory, the Roman Catholic priest, dined with us one evening, and Major Godby took occasion to ask him at table, 'What progress our religion was making among the people?'
'Progress!' said he; 'why, what progress can we ever hope to make among a people who, the moment we begin to talk to them about the miracles performed by Christ, begin to tell us of those infinitely more wonderful performed by Krishna, who lifted a mountain upon his little finger, as an umbrella, to defend his shepherdesses at Govardhan from a shower of rain.620 The Hindoos never doubt any part of the miracles and prophecies of our scripture—they believe every word of them; and the only thing that surprises them is that they should be so much less wonderful than those of their own scriptures, in which also they implicitly believe. Men who believe that the histories of the wars and amours of Rām and Krishna, two of the incarnations of Vishnu, were written some fifty thousand years before these wars and amours actually took place upon the earth, would of course easily believe in the fulfilment of any prophecy that might be related to them out of any other book;621 and, as to miracles, there is absolutely nothing too extraordinary for their belief. If a Christian of respectability were to tell a Hindoo that, to satisfy some scruples of the Corinthians, St. Paul had brought the sun and moon down upon the earth, and made them rebound off again into their places, like tennis balls, without the slightest injury to any of the three planets [sic], I do not think he would feel the slightest doubt of the truth of it; but he would immediately be put in mind of something still more extraordinary that Krishna did to amuse the milkmaids, or to satisfy some sceptics of his day, and relate it with all the naïveté imaginable.
I saw at Agra Mirzā Kām Baksh, the eldest son of Sulaimān Shikoh, the eldest son of the brother of the present Emperor. He had spent a season with us at Jubbulpore, while prosecuting his claim to an estate against the Rājā of Rīwā. The Emperor, Shāh Ālam, in his flight before our troops from Bengal (1762), struck off the high road to Delhi at Mirzapore, and came down to Rīwā, where he found an asylum during the season of the rains with the Rīwā Rājā, who assigned for his residence the village of Makanpur.622 His wife, the Empress, was here delivered of a son, the present Emperor, of Hindustān, Akbar Shāh;623 and the Rājā assigned to him and his heirs for ever the fee simple of this village. As the members of this family increased in geometrical ratio, under the new system, which gave them plenty to eat with nothing to do, the Emperor had of late been obliged to hunt round for little additions to his income; and in his search he found that Makanpur gave name to a 'pargana', or little district, of which it was the capital, and that a good deal of merchandize passed through this district, and paid heavy dues to the Rājā. Nothing, he thought, would be lost by trying to get the whole district instead of the village; and for this purpose he sent down Kām Baksh, the ablest man of the whole family, to urge and prosecute his claim; but the Rājā was a close, shrewd man, and not to be done out of his revenue, and Kām Baksh was obliged to return minus some thousand rupees, which he had spent in attempting to keep up appearances.
The best of us Europeans feel our deficiencies in conversation with Muhammadans of high rank and education, when we are called upon to talk upon subjects beyond the everyday occurrences of life. A Muhammadan gentleman of education is tolerably acquainted with astronomy, as it was taught by Ptolemy; with the logic and ethics of Aristotle and Plato; with the works of Hippocrates and Galen, through those of Avicenna, or, as they call him, Abū- Alīsīna;624 and he is very capable of talking upon all subjects of philosophy, literature, science, and the arts, and very much inclined to do so; and of understanding the nature of the improvements that have been made in them in modern times. But, however capable we may feel of discussing these subjects, or explaining these improvements in our own language, we all feel ourselves very much at a loss when we attempt to do it in theirs. Perhaps few Europeans have mixed and conversed more freely with all classes than I have; and yet I feel myself sadly deficient when I enter, as I often do, into discussions with Muhammadan gentlemen of education upon the subject of the character of the governments and institutions of different countries—their effects upon the character and condition of the people; the arts and the sciences; the faculties and operations of the human mind; and the thousand other things which are subjects of everyday conversation among educated and thinking; men in our country. I feel that they could understand me quite well if I could find words for my ideas; but these I cannot find, though their languages abound in them, nor have I ever met the European gentleman who could. East Indians can;625 but they commonly want the ideas as much as we want the language. The chief cause of this deficiency is the want of sufficient intercourse with men in whose presence we should be ashamed to appear ignorant—this is the great secret, and all should know and acknowledge it.
We are not ashamed to convey our orders to our native servants in a barbarous language. Military officers seldom speak to their 'sipāhīs' (sepoys) and native officers, about anything but arms, accoutrements, and drill; or to other natives about anything but the sports of the field; and, as long as they are understood, they care not one straw in what language they express themselves. The conversation of the civil servants with their native officers takes sometimes a wider range; but they have the same philosophical indifference as to the language in which they attempt to convey their ideas; and I have heard some of our highest diplomatic characters talking,626 without the slightest feeling of shame or embarrassment, to native princes on the most ordinary subjects of everyday interest in a language which no human being but themselves could understand. We shall remain the same till some change of system inspire us with stronger motives to please and conciliate the educated classes of the native community. They may be reconciled, but they can never be charmed out of their prejudices or the errors of their preconceived opinions by such language as the European gentlemen are now in the habit of speaking to them.627 We must learn their language better, or we must teach them our own, before we can venture to introduce among them those free institutions which would oblige us to meet them on equal terms at the bar, on the bench, and in the senate.628 Perhaps two of the best secular works that were ever written upon the facilities and operations of the human mind, and the duties of men in their relations with each other, are those of Imām-ud-dīn Ghazzālī, and Nasīr-ud-dīn of Tūs.629 Their idol was Plato, but their works are of a more practical character than his, and less dry than those of Aristotle.
I may here mention the following, among many instances that occur to me, of the amusing mistakes into which Europeans are liable to fall in their conversation with natives.
Mr. J. W–n, of the Bengal Civil Service, commonly known by the name of Beau W–n,630 was the Honourable Company's opium agent at Patna, when I arrived at Dinapore to join my regiment in 1810.631 He had a splendid house, and lived in excellent style; and was never so happy as when he had a dozen young men from the Dinapore cantonments living with him. He complained that year, as I was told, that he had not been able to save more than one hundred thousand rupees that season out of his salary and commission upon the opium, purchased by the Government from the cultivators.632 The members of the civil service, in the other branches of public service, were all anxious to have it believed by their countrymen that they were well acquainted with their duties, and able and willing to perform them; but the Honourable Company's commercial agents were, on the contrary, generally anxious to make their countrymen believe that they neither knew nor cared anything about their duties, because they were ashamed of them. They were sinecure posts for the drones of the service, or for those who had great interest and no capacity.633 Had any young man made it appear that he really thought W–n knew or cared anything about his duties, he would certainly never have been invited to his house again; and if any one knew, certainly no one seemed to know that he had any other duty than that of entertaining his guests.
No one ever spoke the native language so badly, because no man had ever so little intercourse with the natives; and it was, I have been told, to his ignorance of the native languages that his bosom friend, Mr. P–st, owed his life on one occasion. W. sat by the sick-bed of his friend with unwearied attention, for some days and nights, after the doctors had declared his case entirely hopeless. He proposed at last to try change of air, and take him on the river Ganges. The doctors, thinking that he might as well die in his boat on the river as in his house at Calcutta, consented to his taking him on board. They got up as far as Hooghly, when P. said that he felt better and thought he could eat something. What should it be? A little roasted kid perhaps. The very thing that he was longing for! W. went out upon the deck to give orders for the kid, that his friend might not be disturbed by the gruff voice of the old 'khānsāmā' (butler). P. heard the conversation, however.
'Khānsāmā', said the Beau W., 'you know that my friend Mr. P. is very ill?'
'Yes, sir.'
'And that he has not eaten anything for a month?'
'A long time for a man to fast, sir.'
'Yes, Khānsāmā, and his stomach is now become very delicate, and could not stand anything strong.'
'Certainly not, sir.'
'Well, Khānsāmā, then he has taken a fancy to a roasted mare' ('mādiyān'), meaning a 'halwān', or kid.'634
'A roasted mare, sir?'
'Yes, Khānsāmā, a roasted mare, which you must have nicely prepared.'
'What, the whole, sir?'
'Not the whole at one time; but have the whole ready as there is no knowing what part he may like best.'
The old butter had heard of the Tartars eating their horses when in robust health, but the idea of a sick man, not able to move in his bed without assistance, taking a fancy to a roasted mare, quite staggered him.
'But, sir, I may not be able to get such a thing as a mare at a moment's notice; and if I get her she will be very dear.'
'Never mind, Khānsāmā, get you the mare, cost what she will; if she costs a thousand rupees my friend shall have her. He has taken a fancy to the mare, and the mare he shall have, if she costs a thousand rupees.'
The butter made his salaam, said he would do his best, and took his leave, requesting that the boats might be kept at the bank of the river till he came back.
W. went into his sick friend, who, with great difficulty, managed to keep his countenance while he complained of the liberties old servants were in the habit of taking with their masters. 'They think themselves privileged', said W., 'to conjure up difficulties in the way of everything that one wants to have done.'
'Yes', said P–st, 'we like to have old and faithful servants about us, particularly when we are sick; but they are apt to take liberties, which new ones will not.'
In about two hours the butler's approach was announced from the deck, and W. walked out to scold him for his delay. The old gentleman was coming down over the bank, followed by about eight men bearing the four quarters of an old mare. The butler was very fat; and the proud consciousness of having done his duty, and met his master's wishes in a very difficult and important point, had made him a perfect Falstaff. He marshalled his men in front of the cooking-boat, and then came towards his master, who for some time stood amazed, and unable to speak. At last he roared out, 'And what the devil have you here?'
'Why, the mare that the sick gentleman took a fancy for; and dear enough she has cost me; not a farthing less than two hundred rupees would the fellow take for his mare.'
P–st could contain himself no longer; he burst into an immoderate fit of laughter, during which the abscess in his liver burst into the intestines, and he felt himself relieved, as if by enchantment. The mistake was rectified—he got his kid; and in ten days he was taken back to Calcutta a sound man, to the great astonishment of all the doctors.
During the first campaign against Nepāl, in 1815, Colonel, now Major-General, O.H., who commanded the–Regiment, N. I.,635 had to march with his regiment through the town of Darbhanga, the capital of the Rājā, who came to pay his respects to him. He brought a number of presents, but the colonel, a high-minded, amiable man, never took anything himself, nor suffered any person in his camp to do so, in the districts they passed through without paying for it. He politely declined to take any of the presents; but said that he 'had heard that Darbhanga produced crows ("kauwā"), and should be glad to get some of them if the Rājā could spare them,'—meaning coffee, or 'kahwā'.
The Rājā stared, and said that certainly they had abundance of crows in Darbhanga; but he thought they were equally abundant in all parts of India.
'Quite the contrary, Rājā Sāhib, I assure you,' said the colonel; 'there is not such a thing as a crow to be found in any part of the Company's dominions that I have seen, and I have been all over them.'
'Very strange!' said the Rājā, turning round to his followers.
'Yes,' replied they,' it is very strange, Rājā Sāhib; but such is your 'ikbāl' (good fortune), that everything thrives under it; and, if the colonel should wish to have a few crows, we could easily collect them for him.'
'If', said the colonel, greatly delighted, 'you could provide us with a few of these crows, we should really feel very much obliged to you; for we have a long and cold campaign before us among the bleak hills of Nepal; and we are all fond of crows.'
'Indeed,' returned the Rājā, 'I shall be happy to send you as many as you wish.' ('Much' and 'many' are expressed by the same term.)
'Then we should be glad to have two or three bags full, if it would not be robbing you.'
'Not in the least,' said the Rājā; 'I will go home and order them to be collected immediately.'
In the evening, as the officers, with the colonel at their head, were sitting down to dinner, a man came up to announce the Rājā's present. Three fine large bags were brought in, and the colonel requested that one might be opened immediately. It was opened accordingly, and the mess butler ('khansāmān') drew out by the legs a fine old crow. The colonel immediately saw the mistake, and laughed as heartily as the rest at the result. A polite message was sent to the Rājā, requesting that he would excuse his having made it—for he had had half a dozen men out shooting crows all day with their matchlocks. Few Europeans spoke the language better than General –, and I do not believe that one European in a thousand, at this very moment, makes any difference, or knows any difference, in the sound of the two terms.
Fergusson's description and just criticism deserve quotation. 'The tomb known as that of Itimād-ud-daula, at Agra, . . . cannot be passed over, not only from its own beauty of design, but also because it marks an epoch in the style to which it belongs. It was erected by Nūr-Jahān in memory of her father, who died in 1621, and [it] was completed in 1628. It is situated on the left bank of the river, in the midst of a garden surrounded by a wall measuring 540 feet on each side. In the centre of this, on a raised platform, stands the tomb itself, a square measuring 69 feet on each side. It is two stories in height, and at each angle is an octagonal tower, surmounted by an open pavilion. The towers, however, are rather squat in proportion, and the general design of the building very far from being so pleasing as that of many less pretentious tombs in the neighbourhood. Had it, indeed, been built in red sandstone, or even with an inlay of white marble like that of Humāyūn, it would not have attracted much attention, its real merit consists in being wholly in white marble, and being covered throughout with a mosaic in 'pietra dura'—the first, apparently, and certainly one of the most splendid, examples of that class of ornamentation in India....
'As one of the first, the tomb of Itimād-ud-daula was certainly one of the least successful specimens of its class. The patterns do not quite fit the places where they are put, and the spaces are not always those best suited for this style of decoration. [Altogether I cannot help fancying that the Italians had more to do with the design of this building than was at all desirable, and they are to blame for its want of grace.[a]] But, on the other hand, the beautiful tracery of the pierced marble slabs of its Windows, which resemble those of Salīm Chishtī's tomb at Fatehpur Sikrī, the beauty of its white marble walls, and the rich colour of its decorations, make up so beautiful a whole, that it is only on comparing it with the works of Shāh Jahān that we are justified in finding fault.' (Indian and Eastern Architecture, ed. 1910, pp. 305-7.) Further details will be found in Syad Muhammad Latīf, Agra (Calcutta, 1896); A.S.R. iv, pp. 137-41 (Calcutta, 1874); and more satisfactorily, in E. W. Smith, Moghul Colour Decoration of Agra (Allahabad, 1901), pp. 18-20, pl. lxv-lxxvii. Mr. E. W. Smith, if he had lived, would have produced a separate volume descriptive of this unique building.
The building is now carefully guarded and kept in repair. The restoration of the inlay of precious stones is so enormously expensive that much progress in that branch of the work is impracticable. The mausoleum contains seven tombs.
a. This sentence has been deleted by Dr. Burgess in his edition, 1910.
Coins were struck in the joint names of Jahāngīr and his consort, bearing a rhyming Persian couplet to the effect that
'By command of Jahāngīr the King, from the name of Nūr Jahān his Queen, gold gained a hundred beauties.'
The Queen's administration is censured by some of the European travellers who visited India during Jahāngīr's reign as being venal and inefficient, and she is accused of cruelty and perfidy. She died on the 18th December (N.S.), 1645, and was buried by the aide of Jahāngīr in his mausoleum at Lahore. At her death she was in her 72nd year, according to the Muhammadan lunar reckoning, and would thus have been thirty-four solar years of age when the Emperor married her in 1610 (Beale: Blochmann).
(1) the old Catholic graveyard at the village of Lashkarpur, dating from the time of Akbar, who made a grant of the site about A.D. 1600. This cemetery includes the Martyrs' Chapel, also known as the Chapel of Father Santus (Santucci), which was erected in memory of Khoja Mortenepus, an Armenian merchant, whose epitaph is dated 1611. The next oldest tombstone, that of Father Emmanuel d' Anhaya, who died in prison, bears the date August, 1633. Father Joseph de Castro, who died at Lahore, on December 15, 1646, lies in the same building.
(2) A cemetery in Pādrītola, the native Christian ward of the city behind the old cathedral. Father Tieffenthaler is buried there.
(3) A cemetery in an unnamed village, granted by Jahāngīr, and situated a mile north of Lashkarpur. An unpublished letter in the British Museum shows that Jahāngīr closed the churches in his dominions in 1615. Notwithstanding, the College at Agra was founded about 1617 by an Armenian who is known by his title Mirzā Zul-Qarnain. The acute persecution by Shāh Jahān occurred in 1631.
The artillery men in the Mogul service were not all European Christians. Turks from the Ottoman Empire were freely employed. (See Ep. Ind., ii, 132 note.)
The facts concerning the early history of Christianity in Northern India have been imperfectly studied. In this note I have used chiefly a pamphlet by Father H. Hosten, S. J., entitled Jesuit Missionaries in Northern India, &c. (Catholic Orphan Press, Calcutta, 1907), and the confused little book by Fanthome, Reminiscences of Agra (2nd ed., Thacker, Spink & Co., Calcutta, 1895). The Jesuit and Capuchin Fathers are working at the subject and hope to elucidate it. From the A.S. Progress Rep. N. Circle, Muhammadan Monuments, for 1911-12, p. 21, it appears that arrangements for the proper maintenance of the Old Catholic cemetery are in hand.
The author's observations concerning the official relations of Christianity in India do not apply at all to the very ancient churches of the South (See E.H.I., 3rd ed., 1914, App. M, pp. 245-7). Even in the north, the modern missionary operations may claim to be 'independent of office'.
