Her death removed the last rival of Aurang-zib's youngest and best loved concubine, Udipuri Mahal, Udipuri Mahal the mother of Kam Bakhsh. The contemporary Venetian traveller Manucci speaks of her as a Georgian slave-girl of Dara Shukoh's harem, who, on the downfall of her first master, became the concubine of his victorious rival.[1] She seems to have been a very young woman at the time, as she first became a mother in 1667, when Aurangzib was verging on fifty. She retained her youth and influence over the Emperor till his death, and was the darling of his old age. Under the spell of her beauty he pardoned the many faults of Kam Bakhsh and overlooked her freaks of drunkenness,[2] which must have shocked so pious a Muslim.[3]
- ↑ Irvine's Storia do Mogor, i. 361, ii. 107.
- ↑ Ibid, ii. 107, 108.
- ↑ That l'dipuri was a slave and no wedded wife is proved by Aurangzib's own words. When her son Kam
Bakhsh intrigued with the enemy at the siege of Jinji, Aurangzib angrily remarked,—
'A slave-girl's son comes to no good,
Even though he may have been begotten by a king.' (Anecdotes of Aurangzib, § 25. He is also called 'a dancing-girl's son' (Storia, ii. 316n). Orme (Fragments, 85) speaks of her as a Circassian, evidently on the authority of Manucci. In a letter written by Aurangzib on his death-bed to Kam Bakhsh, he says "Udipuri, your
princess, provided with a dome of extraordinary height, the whole executed in marble brought expressly from the province of Ajmer." (Storia, iii. 269)
