Roving East and Roving West | Page 7

Jahan (1627-1658),
Jahangir's son, came the present Delhi's golden age. He it was who built
the Jama Masjid, the great mosque set commandingly on a mound and
gained by magnificent flights of steps. To the traveller approaching the
city from any direction the two graceful minarets of the mosque stand
for Delhi. It was Shah Jahan, price of Mogul builders, who decreed also
the palace in the Fort, to say nothing (at the moment) of the Taj Mahal
at Agra; while two of his daughters, Jahanara, and Roshanara, that
naughty Begam, enriched Delhi too, the little pavilion in the Gardens
that bear Roshanara's name being a gem. Wandering among these
architectural delights, now empty and under alien protection, it is
difficult to believe that their period was as recent as Cromwell and
Milton. But in India the sense of chronology vanishes.
After Shah Jahan came his crafty son, Aurungzebe, who succeeded in
keeping his empire together until 1707, and with him the grandeur of
the Grand Moguls waned and after him ceased to be, although not until
the Mutiny was their rule extinguished. As I have just said, in India the
sense of chronology vanishes, or goes astray, and it is with a start that

one is confronted, in the Museum in Delhi Fort, by a photograph of the
last Mogul!
In Bombay, during my wakeful moments in the hottest part of the day,
I had passed the time and imbibed instruction by reading the three
delightful books of the late E. H. Aitken, who called himself "Eha"--
"Behind the Bungalow," "The Tribes on My Frontier" and "A
Naturalist on the Prowl." No more amusing and kindly studies of the
fauna, flora and human inhabitants of a country can have ever been
written than these; and I can suggest, to the domestically curious mind,
no better preparation for a visit to India. But at Raisina, when the cool
evenings set in and it was pleasant to get near the wood fire, I took to
history and revelled in the story of the Moguls as told by many
authorities, but most entertainingly perhaps by Tavernier, the French
adventurer who took service under Aurungzebe. If any one wants to
know what Delhi was like in the seventeenth century during
Aurungzebe's long reign, and how the daily life in the Palace went, and
would learn more of the power and autocracy and splendour and cruelty
of the Grand Moguls, let him get Tavernier's record. If once I began to
quote from it I should never stop; and therefore I pass on, merely
remarking that when you have finished the travels of M. Tavernier, the
travels of M. Bernier, another contemporary French observer, await
you. And I hold you to be envied.
The Palace in the Fort is now but a fraction of what it was in the time
of Aurungzebe and his father, but enough remains to enable the
imaginative mind to reconstruct the past, especially if one has read my
two annalists. One of Bernier's most vivid passages describes the
Diwan- i-Am, or Hall of Public Audience, the building to which, after
leaving the modern military part of the Fort, one first comes, where the
Moguls sat in state during a durbar, and painted and gilded elephants,
richly draped, took part in the obeisances. Next comes the Hall of
Private Audiences, where the Peacock Throne once stood. It has now
vanished, but in its day it was one of the wonders of the world, the tails
of the two guardian peacocks being composed of precious stones and
the throne itself being of jewelled gold. It was for this that one of Shah
Jahan's poets wrote an inscription in which we find such lines as--

By the order of the Emperor the azure of Heaven was exhausted on its
decoration....
The world had become so short of gold on account of its use in the
throne that the purse of the Earth was empty of treasure....
On a dark night, by the lustre of its rubies and pearls it can lend stars to
a hundred skies....
That was right enough, no doubt, but when our poet went on to say,
As long as a trace remains of existence and space Shah Jahan shall
continue to sit on this throne,
we feel that he was unwise. Such pronouncements can be tested. As it
happened, Shah Jahan was destined, very shortly after the poem was
written, to be removed into captivity by his son, and the rest of his
unhappy life was spent in a prison at Agra. On each end wall of the
Hall of Private Audience is the famous couplet,--
If there is a Paradise on the face of the earth, It is this, Oh! it is this, Oh!
it is this.
I think of