Transcription
There are moments in history when civilizations aspire to Greatness. India had done so in ancient times, and at the end of the Middle Ages, it did so again. It was the coming of Islam that inspired the next great phase of Indian history. Today, the subcontinent is home to half of all the world's Muslims. The ebb and flow of its history has been shaped by the encounter of the two civilizations of India and Islam, and in all of history, there is no more dramatic tale.
The next chapter in the story of India.
Muslim traders had settled in South India within memory of the Prophet's lifetime, but the coming of Islam only began to work profound change in the history of the subcontinent in the Middle Ages, with invasions and settlements here in the north. That story begins in the city of Multan, in what's now Pakistan, exactly a thousand years ago. Here in Multan, a series of events began which would shift forever the balance of history in the subcontinent. And the key figure was Sultan Mahmud of Ghazni. Few characters in history have aroused more violent disagreement. To some, he was a great prince, a builder of empires, and a champion of the faith. To others, an oppressor, a fanatic, and an iconoclast. The head of a great Muslim empire in Afghanistan, Mahmud occupied the then Hindu city of Multan and used it as a base for a series of raids into India.
"So your family were connected with Mahmud Ghazni's family, and you've been here in this quarter of the city for 900, nearly a thousand years?"
"Nearly a thousand years now. Lived here all the time when our ancestor came, you see. And and he made his, when he camped here, you see, at the site where he's buried."
The ancestor came with Mahmud's son in the 11th century. That he came riding on a lion, oh yeah, with a live snake as a whip in his hand and a pair of pigeons flying over his head. But their ancestor wasn't a warrior, but a holy man, one among many who came in the Middle Ages into India.
"So this is from the 12th century, then, is it?"
"This is his tomb. He was a Sufi, an Islamic mystic. And the Sufi saints, who are still loved across Pakistan and North India, will be very important in this story. For it was the Sufi saints who first brought Islam and the people of India together. Amongst the saints of Multan, I think Shah Yusuf, our ancestor, he is the first of the Muslim saints to arrive in Multan. I would call him the founder of Muslim Multan."
So the age of Mahmud was a time of violence, but also the beginning of a meeting of minds. For like the Hindu holy men, the Sufis taught that people should strive to be with God without any attachment. And there lay the common ground between Islam and the religions of India.
"Oh, the old Ghazni library. I remember this place. This was founded by my great-great-great grandfather. And even the dreaded Mahmud himself is remembered here as a prince of high culture."
"I'm an old manuscript type. Musty old books. Some of them are 400, 500 years old. Fantastic."
He was the patron of the famous epic, Ferdowsi's Book of Kings. The one I'm interested in. This is the, this is the Firdowsi. As you know, was commissioned by Mahmud to write the history of Persia and this part of the world in poetry form. And and Mahmud promised that he would give him one, one gold coin per couplet. For a couplet, for a couplet. He wrote 40,000 couplets. 40,000. So Mahmud, I think, had he had second thoughts. And he, he said, oh, a gold coin is too much. I think I'll give you a silver coin per couplet. And he refused to accept. And he went back home. And he wrote a satire against Mahmud, which became so popular. And which he just, he criticizes Mahmud's ancestry and everything, especially his mother's side, his mother's ancestry. He says at one point that, "Mahmud, O King Mahmud, conqueror of the countries of nations, if you're not scared of anyone, at least be scared of God." Wow. God. And then, and that became so popular that every child, every child in Ghazni was reciting those couplets of the satire more than the more than that of the Shahnameh, of the original, of the main text. Mahmud regretted. He regretted that. And he decided to give, to honor his word and give a gold coin.
Mahmud led a dozen great expeditions into India. The most famous left Multan in November 1025. It took them a month to get down from Multan to the sea. To survive through this kind of terrain, they took 20,000 camels to carry the water. In these early attacks on India, the goal wasn't conquest, but plunder. They targeted in 1025 the famous Hindu temple town of Somnath, which was said to be incredibly rich in gold and silver. Though, as can still happen, the invasion was given a different public justification as a war against the infidel.
There are many stories about why Mahmud attacked Somnath. Long, long ago in Arabia, there was a goddess called Manat. When Islam came, the shrines of the goddesses were destroyed. But according to one version of the story, the stone image of Manat was taken away from Arabia and brought here to India, and Somnath became her temple, Somnatha. And it was to fulfill the work of the Prophet that Mahmud led his expedition to the sea. That story, no doubt, made Mahmud look good with the Caliph in Baghdad as a defender of the faith. But it was fantasy. He'd come to loot the wealth of India. And these tales became part of the mythology of the people in the borderland of Rajasthan. To them, Mahmud is still a bogeyman, and they still sing of their heroic battles in the Middle Ages against the Afghans and the Turks.
Nothing like that old sound of grumpy camels clearing their throats and farting all night, is there? Well, there isn't.
Mahmud's attack on Somnath led him 750 miles south from Multan, across the Great Desert of Thar into Gujarat, and down to the Arabian Sea. There, on the seashore, lay the rich pilgrim shrine of Somnath, inside a fortified town. The Shiva temple here was destroyed and rebuilt several times before it was restored in the 1950s after independence. Mahmud reached here in January 1026, sacked the city, destroyed the idol, and plundered the temple's gold. In today's India, the tale is still remembered with bitterness. Mahmud's expedition to Somnath was written up by his Persian and Turkish court poets as an emblematic clash between Islam and Hindu idolatry. The great historian Al-Biruni, who was no fan of Mahmud, who went with him to India, says that the 12 great plundering expeditions engendered a hatred among Hindus for the Turks, by which he means the Muslims. But as always in history, and especially in the history of India, there's another story. And what appears to begin here as a clash of civilizations will become, over time, one of the most remarkable cultural crossovers in the history of civilization. What a great Indian Muslim prince will later call the meeting of two oceans. And it's Al-Biruni, a Muslim scholar who learned Sanskrit, who gives us the first signpost.
"You must bear in mind," he says, "that the Hindus entirely differ from us in almost everything. And the barriers separating us are many: language, manners, customs, rules of purity. And India is such a diverse land, from Kashmir in the north to the southern cultures, Telugu, Kannada, and Tamil. In religion, the Indians totally differ from us. As we believe in nothing in which they believe, and vice versa. India is hard to understand, though I have a great liking for it. And our apparent differences would be perfectly transparent if there were more contact between us."
But in 1192, there came a new phase: days of military conquest by Afghans and Turks, who became Sultans of Delhi. Here, they built a giant minaret which doubled as a tower of victory, 240 feet high. It's one of the wonders of the world, the Qutub Minar, called the Might of Islam.
"The Might of Islam. So this is a statement of conquest. This is foreign conquerors coming in and creating their base here. This place was very important for taking the conquest into other parts of India. So you can very well imagine the Qutub complex was the place which established Muslim rule in India."
This was built around the end of the 12th century. That was a time when this lot area was taken over by the Afghans.
"This is the first Indo-Islamic mosque in India?"
"This is the place. This is the place. The first mosque. And all around us, the remains of Hindu columns. The inscription on the Eastern Gate says that 27 temples were actually dismantled to construct this Qutub Islam mosque."
It was as much a political as a religious statement. Since its first spread in the 7th century, the Islamic world had encountered many other religions, but nowhere as big and diverse as India. The fact was, as the Delhi Sultans soon realized, they couldn't possibly convert India. Coexistence had to follow. The different dynasties of the Sultans of Delhi ruled here for 300 years, and you can still pick up their traces today in the back streets of Old Delhi.
"So where are we heading?"
"Going to Mubarak Village."
"Yeah, where a Sayyid king who ruled sometime in 1430, yeah, is buried. To what was then just an obscure village, built this rather elaborate tomb that we about to see."
And that's it. Mubarak Shah's tomb. We're looking for the tomb of one of the Delhi Sultans, which over the centuries has become a shrine for the local community.
"What's that thing there? I don't believe this. Look at this. This is just amazing."
"Why has it been caged in, though?"
"Because there's a very real fear that history might reach out and bite you."
And in a bizarre twist, the Sultan has become a local holy man. Our friend here tells us that soon after a marriage, the newlyweds would come here and pray to not a holy man, but a Sultan.
"Oh, it's fantastic. But he has become holy. For the years. Don't ask me how."
In an age when all Hindus in the north were forced to pay a head tax to the Sultans to practice their faith, here's a clue as to how things can change on the ground.
"You won't die of hunger if you live in this vicinity because he will make sure that you have livelihood. You won't die of hunger."
"Yeah, yeah. So he still sort of protects the people who live around him. It's a fantastic idea, isn't it?"
But the biggest meeting of minds was brought about by the Sufi saints. And these are really, really basic. The idea being that the people who came to the faith through the Sufis, the devotees of both faiths found their common ground. Now you can see the pots in the trees really well from here, can you? So these are all successful wishes. These are wishes that have come true. Yes. And not just in folk beliefs, but in an idea deeply rooted in Islam's mystical traditions: the unity of all being, and of all religions.
The person who lies interred here is Abu Bakr Shahi. He belonged to the Qalandar. Qalandar. This is a Sufi order that came from Iran. Iran. Iran. This is not just a kind of conquest, is it? This is an interesting. And and a lot of people now increasingly see that in India, at least in North India, Islam didn't spread through the sword. It was through men like, uh, the person who's buried here. These Sufis. And they sort of, they sort of went on like a continuous stream, as it were, for 300 to 400 years. And perhaps real change in history has to happen at the grassroots.
The poet Amir Khusrau grew up here in the Delhi Sultanate. He's still a household name in old Muslim families. He's typical of the age, a Muslim whose parents were Turkic, who spoke Persian. And this is his voice: "India is our beloved motherland, a paradise on Earth. Intelligence is the natural gift of its people. There can be no better guide to life than the wisdom of India." This cult is frowned on by the really orthodox kind of Islamic Islam. Would find the Sufis, almost all of it, considered completely un-Islamic.
So in the Middle Ages, in the north, despite war and violence, forced conversion, discrimination against Hindus, the foundations were laid for the amazing events which would follow in the 16th century.
This is one of the most wonderful viewpoints in history. This is the end of the Khyber Pass, the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan. This is the route taken by many of the great invaders in history who came into the Indian subcontinent: Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan, and Tamerlane. In late 1525, new invaders came down this corridor of history from Afghanistan, originally from Central Asia. The Mughals had made Kandahar their base from which to mount an invasion of the plains of India. After four failures, this was the final throw on which their leader, Babur, had staked everything.
It's April 1526. The heat already clamping on the Delhi plain, temperature pushing up towards 40 degrees. The Mughal army, 12,000 men. Their leader, a grizzled veteran at 43 years old, inured to war since he was 10, descendant of Genghis Khan and Tamerlane. And ahead of him at Panipat, the Sultan of Delhi, Ibrahim, with an army of 100,000 men and a thousand war elephants. Babur's place of destiny, Panipat, just north of Delhi, was the scene of several great battles in Indian history, going back to the legendary wars of the ancient epic of the Mahabharata. But now, it was Muslim ruler against Muslim invader.
Both sides had taken their positions a week before. Both sides were preparing. We know about Babur's preparation more than Ibrahim's because Babur has left a record behind. He was outnumbered by one is to five. Wow. Yes. He's come and declared. He says about 700 carts and tied them together with fiber cables. What's he, what's he trying to do there? To protect himself. He's tied cannons in these carts. Yes. There are about several hundred cannons tied like this. Right in front, shoots the enemy with his cannons. Yeah, which is, which is for the first time happening in India. It's in the Battle of Panipat that it's happening in India. The use of artillery. The use of artillery on that scale. Behind that, his cavalry. And behind that, his infantry. And how does he win? Well, is it the artillery that makes the difference? Partly. Very largely. It does make a difference because, you know, what do the elephants and the horses do against the artillery?
So, like his contemporaries Cortez and Pizarro in the New World, in one battle, the Mughal conqueror Babur had gained the heartland of India. In Thanksgiving, he built a little mosque overlooking the battlefield, the first Mughal mosque in India. So this place marks the start of a new age and of a new style that we now think of as quintessentially Indian.
"This is a palace built by Babur for his queen."
"He's saying it's a, it's a mosque."
"Babur, Babur, for his army to say their prayers."
"Two different stories in India. Babur is known as a warrior, as a conqueror, great soldier. In his home, back home in Tashkent area, probably nobody even knows that he came to India and conquered. But they remember him as a great poet, very, very great poet. He's a, he's a man of many, many parts and very, above all, a very honest, sincere man, very charming, lovable man. He was also a devout Muslim. Not a very, what shall I say, dogmatic Muslim, but a devout Muslim who said his prayers very regularly, five times a day. After saying his prayers, he went and had a cup of wine, of course. But, so it's a, it's a, it's a very human figure, you know. It's a figure of a live man."
"Yeah, a regular guy, you said to know."
"Yes."
And after the battle, what Babur does next is another clue to what will follow. He enters Delhi but doesn't plunder the city. Instead, he comes here to the old Sufi shrine of Nizamuddin, still a favorite among Delhiites of all communities, Hindu as well as Muslim. And here he offers a humble prayer before going back to camp to have a cup of wine and write poetry.
Thank you very much. And that will set the tone of the next amazing phase of the story of India. Devotion to the Sufis will mark all of Babur's descendants, just as respect for all religions marked his ancestors back to Tamerlane.
"Salam. Beautiful place."
"Under the Mughals, the story of Islam and India will move onto a different plane, which still has lessons for the world today."
"Well, that's very, very kind. Thank you. Thank you very much."
"This is the most important. The shrines of the saints in Delhi. Yes. This great Sufi, great Sufi saint."
"Yeah, yeah."
The tale of the Mughals is a family story, one of the most remarkable and gifted dynasties in history. They ruled India for 330 years before they were deposed by the British. But immediately after Babur's death, his son Humayun was driven into exile, where his wife gave birth to a son who would become one of the greatest of all Indian rulers: Akbar.
The tale of Akbar takes us first to Rajasthan, where the local Hindu Rajas had always resisted the Muslim conquerors. In the 16th century, the majority of Indian people in the north were still Hindus, who followed the old religions of India, of Shiva, Vishnu, and the Goddess. They had often endured intolerance and forced conversion under the medieval Sultans.
"Kush kush."
"I'm Michael. My name is Michael. And this is your brother. Thank you."
"This is the best place in Jaipur."
Akbar would change the relations between Hindu and Muslim in India. When he was born in the house of relatives of the royal family of Jodhpur, there were omens which foretold his future greatness, just as there were for other giants of history like Alexander.
So back in 1542, when the astrologers did his horoscope, what did they see in Akbar's line of life? I asked the present Maharaja's astrologer to redraw his chart.
"Shri, it's lovely to see you again."
"Hello, Abhay."
"That's great. So how did we, how did we do?"
"What, um, first of all, the date. The 25th of October, 1542. Sunday morning."
"This is Sunday morning. Saturday night and the Sunday morning, 2:00 a.m. is the 2:00 a.m.?"
"Yeah. That at the time of his birth, Sirius was in the fifth house. That's astrologically."
"So this is the Emperor Akbar's chart here?"
"Yes."
"And this becomes computer-made chart. He was born in the Leo ascendant."
"In the Leo ascendant. Hmm. So these people are very, very confident about what they are doing, and they are very keen and they are focused about their goals."
"The aspect of Sun and Saturn. It is the kingdom yoga, as we describe in the astrology, which is the Maharaj yoga."
"See, he was born when Scorpio was in the fourth house, and that was the reason that he was bound to have led a good and comfortable life. Though born at a different state, but the horoscope also indicates that he was not to get ancestral property. And this holds good because he later acquired kingdom."
"After the sixth day of his birth, the astrologer must have calculated his birth chart because we believe that on the sixth day, the goddess of fortune comes and she writes the fortune of a child. They saw the future fortune because the Sun and Saturn, the Saturn is the main planet who gives the kingdom. If the Saturn is on the highest state, it must have given the kingdom. It will give at that time. They have thought, and they were right."
Akbar became king in 1556 when his father died after falling down his library steps in Delhi. At that moment, much of North India was controlled by their enemies, and the Mughals might just have been an unlamented blip in the story of India.
"That's an unlikely place, isn't it? But, um, there was a beautiful Mughal garden here in 1556. Akbar was proclaimed king here at Kalanaur by generals loyal to his father."
"Thank you. So where is the Takh-i-Akari?"
"Yes. Yeah, this is it. Well, how about that? Isn't that extraordinary? It doesn't look as if there's any of the garden left, does it?"
"There's a beautiful spot. Akbar came back, back several times in his later life. Gorgeous, isn't it? This evening."
"So this is the place where he was formerly proclaimed king in February 1556. That was the throne platform there. He would have sat on that. Have to remember, he's only a 13-year-old boy. He'd been brought up in exile among tough warriors in Afghanistan. You can imagine, in the sort, I'm sure he played truant from school, preferred outdoor sports and games, and remained illiterate all his life."
"What is your name?"
"Naman."
"And how old are you?"
"12."
"12. So you are nearly the same age as Akbar. He was 13 and you are 12. It's incredible thought, isn't it, that he was only this age when he became king?"
Maybe because the intellectuals and the scholars and the Mullas had never got their intellectual straightjacket on him, he retained a wonderful capacity to make unexpected, unconventional connections, as we would put it, to think outside the box. At this point, the Mughal kingdom had shrunk to a few small pockets around Kandahar, Lahore, and Delhi. But young Akbar acts fast, defeats his enemies, and wins the kingdom. And then, over the next 10 years, he expands it across to Bengal and down to the Deccan to become one of the world's great powers. And soon, the illiterate young tough guy was showing unexpected skills in rulership and an unsuspected interest in India's different philosophies.
"Akbar is, um, not very religious. He has, um, attachments to Sufis, superstitious attachments, let us say, to the shrine and so on. India was what he experienced. He liked this language. He liked mixing with the people. As you know, he was a bit of a loafer in the beginning, so he loafed with people and often went to gatherings, even when he had become a king, without courtiers, incognito. He was a different type of sovereign."
In January 1575, Akbar came with his closest Hindu advisor here to the junction of the Ganges and the Yamuna rivers at the time of the great bathing festival. What Akbar saw here was one of those great Hindu melas when millions of people come down to the junction of the rivers to take a holy bath. At Prayag, Akbar's advisor tells the story how a strange thing happens at that time. He says, "When the planet Jupiter enters the constellation of Aquarius, then a small mound island rises in the middle of the river Ganges. All the people go out to it to do worship." Akbar was so touched by his experience that he named the Hindu sacred place of Prayag, Ilahabad. Akbar's today, Allahabad, the city of God. So here, having already lifted the hated tax on Hindus, Akbar begins to embrace all India's religions.
The Sikhs were one of the radical religious groups who'd sprung up out of the interaction of Hinduism and Islam in the 16th century. Their first Guru, Nanak, who died in 1539, had asserted, "There is no Hindu or Muslim," and laid stress on the worship of one God and works of charity. His legacy today is a world faith, singled out by the turban that all men must wear to enter their holy shrines. And it was Akbar who gifted them land here in Amritsar to build the Golden Temple, the most famous landmark of Sikhism today. It would be under the later Mughals that the Sikhs became a military sect, bearing the symbols still carried by all Sikh men today. What they call the five Ks.
"The first K is the Kesh, which is unshorn here. You don't cut your hair. No. Hence, therefore, the beard. You don't, you don't cut your hair. And second one is Kanga, which is a wooden comb. Comb. Wooden comb, yes. And you keep that with you. We keep that in the hair here. And third is a bracelet. It is called Kara. Starts with K. Fourth K is your Kirpan, which is a baggy shorts. Breeches. Baggy breeches, which you wear undergarment, right? And the fifth, finally, is Khanda. Khanda is, actually, now, if I can take you through this. This is not a sword, and it is not a knife either. Yes. Sure. What it's called, Kirpan, is to defend your respect, to stand against the tyranny of the time, so that we could defend the faith. Now it has become clear to me," said Akbar, "that it cannot be wisdom to assert the truth of one faith over another. In our troubled world, so full of contradictions, the wise person makes justice his guide and learns from all. Perhaps in this way, the door may be opened again whose key has been lost."
The new age demanded a new capital. Fatehpur Sikri was built in the 1570s in the plain near Agra. Above the entrance is a quotation from a Christian savior and Muslim prophet, Jesus.
This is the Great Gate of Akbar's city at Fatehpur Sikri. The inscription reads: "Jesus, peace be upon him, said: 'This world is a bridge. Cross it, but build no house upon it. For the world endures but a moment, and the rest is unknown.'" The new city was built around the tiny shrine of a Sufi saint whose blessing Akbar had sought to get a son and heir. And the lavish celebrations when his son was born are still remembered by the ancient guardian of the shrine.
While the new city was being built and Akbar was beginning his philosophical inquiries, he also oversaw a great reform of Mughal government.
"The administrative structure of the Mughal Empire is practically complete. Provinces are established in 1580. The centralized administration is then already established. In 1574, he establishes his military service. Bureaucracy and army are combined. He has the new land revenue system. Conquests are going on, but now Akbar is not personally involved. Or so, actually, this philosophy is the philosophy of political leisure. Arms, let us say, partly leisure, personal search. But, you see, he's seeking for a justification of sovereignty and how to justify sovereignty to create an allegiance in a nation of such diversity. That was the question."
Akbar's big idea was very simple: no one religion can claim absolute knowledge, absolute authority. He'd already had discussions with Muslim wise men, Sunni and Shia, but he'd been shocked by how quickly they'd come to blows with each other. Now he summoned leaders of all the religions of the world: Christians, Muslims, Hindus, Jews, Parsis, Jains, to find the common ground of all religion. And in those weekly seminars here at Fatehpur, perhaps for the first time in human history, the absolute claims of religion itself were put under scrutiny.
"Every religion is wrong, but all differences have to be tolerated," he says. "In India, there are so many religions, and therefore the sovereign should not identify with one. He's the, just as God can't identify himself with one religion, so the sovereign can't identify as sovereign."
From Mughal India to Christian Europe, it was a Renaissance world. And Akbar even received a letter from his contemporary, Elizabeth I.
"In her letter to the Emperor Akbar, Queen Elizabeth of England says something very interesting. She says that 'the singular report of your Majesty's humanity has reached even these most distant shores of the world.' Humanity, not power, glory, riches. But it's right to talk about Akbar's humanity. Still, it's what makes him one of the most engaging figures in the history of the world. But it's not the whole story. The other side is his rationality. Don't think for a moment that his dream of one religion was some new age whim. It was conceived as rationally as all his other great policies: his drastic overhaul of the land revenue and taxation system of his great empire, his overhaul of the Mughal civil service, his effort to make his Hindu subjects more equal under the law. These were all big ideas, the sort of big ideas that would become part of the mainstream in Europe in the 18th century Enlightenment. But in 16th century Europe, no Renaissance prince, not even the brilliant Elizabeth Tudor, tried so consistently as Akbar to bring in the Age of Reason."
After a reign of nearly 50 years, Akbar died in 1605, two years after Elizabeth I. He would be succeeded by his son Jahangir and his grandson Shah Jahan, both men of high sensibility but with inner demons, drawn to dissipation. Akbar had laid the foundations, administrative, fiscal, and moral, for Mughal India's future greatness. At his death, India had the largest GDP in the world. Before it lay the possibility of an Indo-Islamic Enlightenment.
So what went wrong? Why did it fail after Akbar's death? Why did the Age of Reason not come? Well, it wouldn't be the first time in history, and it certainly wouldn't be the last, that an empire lost its way because of overconsumption, extravagance, bad leadership, and unwise foreign wars. Through the 17th century, the Mughals pursued their futile dream of regaining their ancestral homeland in Central Asia. And at home, they engaged in vast building projects. The most famous was the Taj Mahal.
Now, you might have thought that the best-known building in the world had no more secrets. The Taj is told in all the tourist guides as a monument to love, the tomb of Shah Jahan's favorite wife, Mumtaz, and later of Jahangir himself, a teardrop on the face of time. But new discoveries suggest the design may go back to the Mughals' beloved Sufi saints, that the key to the Taj may be a mystic map of a Sufi's dream. It's a map of the Day of Judgment. The cosmos is seen as a rectangle. On one side, the fields of paradise. On the other side, the Sirat, the way, the bridge over which the righteous must pass and be judged on Judgment Day. In the middle, a pool and the congregation grounds for the faithful on that Day of Judgment. And in the center, the Throne of God himself.
When you walk through the Taj, you come finally to the great platform on which the tomb chamber stands, underneath which Shah Jahan and Mumtaz are buried. But that's not the last point in the journey. To see the full plan unfold, we've got to cross the river and see what's on the other side. Now you begin to see what the architect of the Taj is doing. He's including the sacred river, Yamuna, the Hindu sacred river, in the architecture of his own sacred space. Legend says that Jahangir planned a black Taj as a mirror image on the other side. But archaeologists have found something more haunting still. Across the river was a walled paradise garden. In it were night-scented trees and flowers, red cedars and magnolias. There were fruits and nuts, jujubes, mangoes, sugar palms, chironjis, whose sweet kernel tastes like pistachio. Here, the great Mughal could sit in his pavilion in the moonlight and look at his creation.
So the Taj is a product of the Hindu-Muslim synthesis that took place over much of India in the 17th century. But the world's richest economy had begun to decline. British visitors give graphic accounts of the shocking poverty of the rural workforce in Jahangir's day, even though the cities were still wealthy. Agra, here, three times the size of London. But more than 20% of the national income was spent on the court elite, on an upper class who lived at a higher level of consumption than any European aristocracy.
You can still glimpse the incredible richness of Mughal art in the jeweler's workshops in Jaipur. The Kasliwal family were jewelers to the Mughal court in the 17th century. Jewelry was always considered to be a symbol of power.
"And what stone is this?"
"Ruby."
"Ruby. And also with the Mughals, what was quite treasured were the spinels, you know, which are quite rare stones."
"What is this?"
"Spinel."
"Spinel. And for a long time, spinels were confused to be rubies. So when we see those pictures of the Mughal emperors with often with what look like rubies, it's probably these."
"God, how, how amazing."
These exquisite Mughal arts went from the scale of the Taj to the smallest turban pin.
"If you see, that's the base of the box. And when you open it, inside there are various."
"Gosh, man. Look."
"So you can see through it. It's just like a filigree, all cut work. It's almost like lace work and gold. So it's perfect from each angle."
"It was your ancestors that actually made these things? Or like this one here, like an opium box."
"All these are rubies which have been calibrated to fit into the shape."
"So the great Mughal would have kept his opium in something like this. And what, laced his wine with it? Or did they, did they smoke it? Or put it in there?"
"Opium was, you know, we used to have opium ceremonies where you would offer opium to your guests."
The Mughals had come to India as conquerors, but bearing the tolerant views of their ancestors, they ruled North India for more than 300 years. At their best, creating an extraordinary Hindu-Muslim synthesis, almost healing the wound of its history. And now, with hindsight, after the British and the partition of India in 1947, their wonderful buildings and creations have become memory rooms for the story of India, and also perhaps symbols of what might have been.
But go to great cities like Lahore in Pakistan today, the most romantic of Mughal cities, and you still feel the living presence of that lost world, its poignant beauty, and its refinement.
But in the mid-1650s, behind the extravagance of the court, discord was looming. The aging Jahangir was now incompetent, was imprisoned, and his sons prepared to fight for the kingdom. The civil war was as much about faith as about empire. The younger son, Aurangzeb, wanted to return to orthodox Islam. The elder, Dara, following in Akbar's footsteps, had translated Hindu sacred texts.
"It's gorgeous, isn't it? When was this written?"
"And this was written in 16, um, 55. He explains in the introduction that, um, he, having become a Sufi, he wanted to find out about the wisdom of the Indian religions. And he also mentions that he's written this work for his family only, not for the general public."
Dara even tells how the Hindu god Rama had met him in a dream and embraced him. Dara's project was bold in his own time, but now, in the age of wars on terror, almost inconceivable. He took his lead from the Sufi idea of the unity of being, and the Quran's revelation that God had sent messengers to Earth before the Prophet Muhammad. And he argued for the unity of religion. Islam and Hinduism were twins, he said, hairs of the same head. He tells us, "I talked to the Hindu holy men, people who had attained the highest level of spiritual enlightenment. And in our conversations that were free and open, I detected, although there were verbal differences, no essential disagreement on our understanding of God. And so I decided to write a book about that, about the religions of the two communities, and I called it 'The Meeting Place of the Two Oceans.'"
It was a project that was heroic, quixotic even, and it would cost him his life and his crown. The decisive battle between Dara and Aurangzeb was fought outside Ajmer in 1658. Now the story unfolds with all the momentum and awful sense of destiny of a Shakespearean tragedy. The battle was fought here in this wide valley just outside Ajmer, on the railway line to Rajasthan. Dara and his European artillery officers had chosen a good position with their wings anchored on the hills on either side of us. But there was one weakness to the position: a secret path led over the mountains around to the back of Dara's army, and he was betrayed to Aurangzeb.
The issue now was what should be done with Dara. To gauge the public mood, Aurangzeb decided to humiliate him. Strip him of all marks of office, mount him on a clapped-out old female elephant driven by a slave in rags, parade him here down the great market street of Delhi. But the onlookers were all horrified by Dara's fall. Many of them burst into tears. And with that, Aurangzeb decided that Dara should die.
The killers came that night to his prison by Humayun's tomb. There they found Dara cooking lentils with his little boy. Prince Salim, his son, clung desperately to his father's legs but was dragged away. Dara was overpowered, and they cut his head off and sent it to his brother. Aurangzeb said, "I wouldn't look the Caliph in the face while he was still alive, and I won't now." And he sent his head in a box to their father, Shah Jahan, in his prison in the palace in Agra. Jahangir opened it at table while he was eating, collapsed, fainting, broke his front teeth. As for Dara's little boy, he was given a draft of opium and then strangled. The father and the son were buried here in the Tomb of Humayun.
Dara's death marks the end of that story. But for all the ebb and flow of India's history since then, the best for Hindu-Muslim unity has never been abandoned.
"Religions still, from their time till today, religions are the same. The teachings are the same. And it is the, you know, uh, the misinterpretation which takes, uh, uh, the brotherhood apart. Whether it is Hindu or Muslim or Sikh or Christian, if that person follows his religion correctly, so I don't think there will be any problem because you, you are doing, you will do correct, each and everything correct. We are talking about specially India. And in India, this is so diversified as far as religions are concerned. I think the most diversified country in the world, I think so, as far as the religions are concerned, as far as the cultures are concerned, as far as the languages are concerned."
Can we judge the past by the standards of the 21st century? Should we judge our time by theirs? The Mughal Empire began and ended with war. In a few decades, they created a civilizational wonderland here in India, a kind of Indo-Islamic synthesis. Their rulers were not only practical men but visionaries: Babur's imperial dreams, Akbar's utopian visions. But waiting in the wings with ominous patience were the British, who had a very different idea of what bringing in the Age of Reason could mean.
Next in the story of India: the last invaders, the British. The First War of Freedom.
"So your family were committed to fighting against the British and the horrors of the Great Mutiny? And what happened here? British has destroyed it with the 16 guns."
"The balance sheet of the British reign. The Britishers who gave us a complete map of India. And the coming of freedom, you know, bondage. Nobody likes. Everybody likes to be free."