CHAPTER III.
ARCHITECTURAL MAGNIFICENCE OF INDIA
THE missionary authorities of the Methodist Episcopal Church resolved, in the year 1854, to found a mission in India, and they advertised during that year and the next for a man to go forth and commence the work. The writer, after waiting in the hope that some one else, better suited for the duty and less cumbered with family cares, would answer to the call, offered himself for the service. This involved one of the keenest trials through which himself and wife had ever passed—no less than a separation from their two elder boys. The necessity for this, in the case of children over the age of seven years exposed to the climate and moral influence in India, as well as the educational need, are all understood.
Having no personal friends to whose care they could be intrusted, they had to be placed at a boarding-school in the hands of strangers. God only knows the feelings with which we resigned them, fearing (what proved too true in the case of one of them) that we might see them no more on earth; but, so far as we could understand, it was either this, or for our Church to fail of her duty to perishing men in India. We understood that such sacrifices were contemplated by the Head of the Church when he instituted a missionary ministry for the salvation of the world. He was well aware what this would involve to the souls of many parents in the future, and therefore, to sustain them under the peculiar cross, he had put on record one of his most glorious promises. There can be no mistake as to the circumstances contemplated. “Peter said, Lo, we have left all and followed thee And He said unto them, Verily, verily, I say unto you, There is no man that hath left house, or parents, or brethren, or wife, or
children, for the kingdom of God's sake, who shall not receive manifold more in this present time, and in the world to come life everlasting.” With hearts bleeding at the sacrifice which we were called to make, we clung to the precious and appropriate promise of our divine Master, committed our little ones to his care, and went forth to fulfill his commission to the best of our ability.
With my wife and two younger children I sailed from Boston on the 9th of April, 1856. I was instructed to proceed by way of England, and there obtain from the secretaries of the different missionary societies all the information available in regard to those unoccupied portions of India where we might labor without interference with existing missions, “to preach the Gospel, not where Christ is named, lest we should build upon another man's foundation,” and there labor for the enlargement of the kingdom of God.
Having attended to this duty, and obtained all the light that the secretaries and returned missionaries could impart, I resolved to proceed to Calcutta, and from that to move westward into the heart of the country and examine the Valley of the Ganges. We left Southampton on the 20th of August in the steamship Pera. Just as we were departing, the consort ship of the same line, the Ripon, came in with the mails and passengers from India, and on board of her was the Queen of Oude, coming to place before the British Queen her protest against the annexation of Oude, and to plead for the restoration of the sovereignty to her family.
Apart from the singularity of the fact that she was probably the first lady of her race who had ever come to a western clime, her presence there occasioned me no particular interest; yet, as God looked down upon the objects of each, how much she and I, thus meeting casually for a moment, really depended upon each other's movements! Had she succeeded in her mission, I must necessarily have failed in mine, so far as our present mission field is concerned, for I was unconsciously going to the kingdom which she had ruled, and to the very capital whose gates she had left ajar
five weeks before—gates that had been closed by Mohammedan bigotry against Christianity for ages. Her success on this expedition would have closed them again indefinitely, and I should have had to go elsewhere; but He whose holy providence guided my steps took care of the issues. She failed, and I succeeded, yet not without “a great fight of afflictions,” as the sequel will show.
We landed at Calcutta on the 23d of September, and were most cordially welcomed by the missionary brethren there, and aided by their opinions and advice in regard to the unoccupied territory of the country. We soon realized, in the brotherly kindness of their intercourse, and the gladness with which they regarded the incoming of another mission, what real evangelical union, and what freedom from sectarianism, exist among Christians in a heathen land. Dr. Duff was especially kind to us. He seemed so thankful that the Lord was sending more help to redeem the India he loved so well, and for which he had labored so long and so faithfully. As we parted from the great and good man, I little imagined that within a year, counting us among the slain, he would write a sort of biography of me, (in his work “The Indian Rebellion,”) or that I should live to thank him, at his own table, for the peculiar privilege of knowing what my friends would say of me when I was dead. Yet so it proved.
Proceeding at once up the country, we reached the city of Agra, the seat of government for the North-west, and soon realized that we were now amid the splendid evidences of the power and glory of the “Great Moguls.” This imperial city, and the adjoining one of Delhi, were full of those reminiscences, and the interest which they at once awakened was something intense and peculiar.
We were in blissful ignorance of any cause for anxiety—knew not what a volcano of wrath was quietly preparing beneath our feet, or how surely the titled and decorated “Nawabs,” whose courteous salaams we returned, were thirsting for our blood, and resolving to have it, too; but we will let that subject rest here, until we share with the reader our interest and delight as we survey some of those magnificent, those matchless, monuments of Patan skill
and wealth with which we now found ourselves surrounded. This will also give him a better idea than any thing else could do as to what those imperial people risked in their desperate enterprise, when pensions, palaces, titles, ancestral monuments, and mausoleums, with all their gorgeous traditions, were the mighty stakes ventured in the frantic and final struggle of their dynasty with a superior civilization and the strength which accompanies it. We were, though we knew it not, contemplating many of these glories for the last time in which men could gaze in admiration upon them, for most of them, save the Taj and the Kootub, were destined to destruction by the ruin which war was so soon to bring. When we saw them again, one year afterward, “the glory had departed,” save in the cases given. The Taj, especially, seemed as though self-protected by its own purity and loveliness; even ravaging war respected it, friend and foe alike agreeing that its beauty should remain unsullied forever.
The first permanent conquest by a Mohammedan sovereign in India was that made by Mahmoud of Ghuznee in the year 1001. Sixty-five rulers of that faith, during the following eight centuries, tried to maintain their authority over the great Hindoo nations. It may be doubted whether any part of the world was ever so cursed by a line of bigoted, ferocious wretches as, with two or three exceptions, were these Mohammedan despots of India during that time. To many of them may be truly applied the terrible lines of Moore:
“One of that saintly, murderous brood,
To carnage and the Koran given,
Who think through unbelievers' blood
Lies their directest path to heaven;
One who will pause and kneel unshod
In the warm blood his hand hath poured,
To mutter o'er some text of God
Engraven on his reeking sword;
Nay, who can coolly note the line,
The letters of those words divine,
To which his blade, with searching art,
Had sunk into its victim's heart!”
And all this transacted by these “bloody men” under the professed sanction and authority of a holy and merciful God, whose
special favor and reward they asserted awaited them in Paradise for blasphemous cruelties like these! The reference in the lines is to their habit of engraving texts from the Koran upon their swords. What millions, during the past eight centuries, have been destroyed by Mohammedanism and Romanism in the name of religion, till humanity sighs to be relieved of their baneful presence, and the true Christian looks forward solemnly to the awful hour when He “to whom vengeance belongeth” will call “the beast and the false prophet” to their dread account—partners in punishment as they have been in guilt!
The character and cruelties of Popery recorded in Motley's recent histories are equaled in India's records by those Moslem scourges, Hyder Ali, Tippoo, Tamerlane, Nadir Shah, and Aurungzebe. The creed of the Koran is utterly unfit for civil government. It is a system of moral and political bondage, sustained only by military power and despotic rule, naturally corrupting those who administer it, while it has ever pauperized and demoralized the people who have been subjected to its sway. The Moguls have done in India what the Turks have accomplished in Asia Minor; and yet, while destroying and impoverishing, neither race have taken root in either land. In the former the power of the Moguls crumbled to pieces, and in the latter that of the Turks is now “ready to vanish away.”
The last century closed upon Shah Alum—the grandfather of the monarch whose portrait we here present—engaged in a terrible struggle with the Rohillas of the North and the Mahrattas of the South. The long examples of perfidy and blood were then bearing their fruit, and had made these once subject-races the remorseless and inveterate enemies of the Mogul rule. Their power had been rising as that of the Emperor was in its decadence. Destitute of the means, which were once so abundant, to repress these conflicts, the aged Emperor had to witness these fierce and powerful parties contending with each other for the possession of his person and his capital, and the power to rule in his name.
Mohammed Suraj-oo-deen Shah Gezee, Emperor of Delhi, the Last of the Moguls.
In 1785, Sindia, the Mahratta, became paramount; but a few years after, while engaged in a war with Pertalo Sing, of Jeypoor,
advantage was taken of his absence by Gholan Kadir Kahn, the Rohilla, to obtain possession of Delhi and the Emperor. This he accomplished by the treachery of the Nazir, or chief eunuch, to whom the management of the imperial establishment was intrusted. The inmates of the palace were treated by the usurper with a degree of malicious barbarity which it is hardly possible to conceive any human being could evince toward his fellow-creatures, unless actually possessed by Satan,
After cruelties of almost every description had been practiced, to extort from the members and retainers of the imperial family every article of value that still remained in their possession, Gholan Kadir continued to withhold from them even the necessaries of life, so that several ladies perished of hunger, and others, maddened by suffering, committed suicide. The royal children were compelled to perform the most humiliating offices; and when at last the wretched Emperor ventured to remonstrate indignantly against the atrocities he was thus compelled to witness, the fierce Rohilla sprang at him with the fury of a wild beast, flung the venerable monarch to the ground, knelt on his breast, and, with his dagger, pierced his eye-balls through and through!
The return of Sindia terminated these terrible scenes. Gholan Kadir fled, but was followed and captured by the Mahratta chief, who cut off his nose, ears, hands, and feet, and sent him in an iron cage to the Emperor—a fearful, though not uncommon, example of Asiatic retributive barbarity. He perished on the road, and his accomplice, the treacherous Nazir, was condemned, and trodden to death by an elephant—a mode of execution long practiced at Delhi.
The condition of the imperial family, though ameliorated, remained barely tolerable during the supremacy of Sindia; for the stated allowance for the support of the Emperor and his thirty children, though liberal in its nominal amount, was so irregularly paid that the imperial household often wanted the necessaries of life.
The real authority of the Moguls had passed away, and it now became a question, Who shall seize the fallen scepter—some one
of these contending chiefs, or the English power, which had already established itself in the South and East of the country? The latter alone had the ability to give peace to the distracted land, and, at the same time, might be relied upon to grant the most generous terms to the falling dynasty. Accordingly, on the 10th of September, 1803, Shah Alum, the last actual possessor of the once mighty throne of the Moguls, thankfully placed himself and his empire under the protection of the British commander, Lord Lake, and thus delivered himself from the cruelty and tyranny of his enemies.
The General, on his entrance to the palace, found the Emperor “seated under a small tattered canopy, his person emaciated by indigence and infirmity, his countenance disfigured by the loss of his eyes, and bearing marks of extreme old age and settled melancholy.” The arrangements made with him, under the directions of the Marquis Wellesley, then English Governor-General, were, no doubt, far beyond in liberality what the poor old man could have expected. Of this more hereafter, in its place.
The gigantic genius of Tamerlane, and the distinguished talents of the great Akbar, with the magnificent taste of Jehan, have thrown a sort of splendor over the crimes and follies of their descendants; and men kept reverence for the ruins of such greatness, and for the ideas which we have all associated in our childhood with the boundless wealth and glory suggested by the title of “The Great Moguls.”
Under the new rule India began to return to peace, and such prosperity as was possible, with a still brighter day dawning upon her. Shah Alum enjoyed his honors and emoluments till 1806, when he was succeeded on his titular throne by his son. Shah Akbar, who held it until 1836, when its last possessor—the man whose portrait is here given—commenced his occupancy, and retained it till 1857, when a mad and hopeless infatuation led him to violate his treaty, and defy the power of the actual rulers of his empire, and precipitated him from the height to which his ambition had for a few weeks soared, into the depths of ignominious and unpitied exile.
A few facts in explanation are necessary here. This monarch, Mohammed Suraj-oo-deen, succeeded his father in 1836. The father, at the instigation of one of his wives, the favorite Begum, had done his best to deprive his son of his inheritance, and to have her own son, Mirza Saleem, acknowledged as his successor by the British Government. To this injustice that Government would not consent; so his rights were protected, and he mounted the throne of his ancestors.
The beautiful steel engraving on the opposite page gives a faithful picture of the wife, or, rather, one of the wives, of this old gentleman—the last of “The Great Moguls.” Her name is Zeenat Mahal—the Ornament of the Palace—which was conferred on her when she was married to the Emperor in 1833. She was then sixteen years of age, and he was sixty—a disparity by no means uncommon in a land where polygamy prevails, and where such prejudice exists against marrying a widow, no matter how young or fair she may be. Her sexagenarian husband had other wives than Zeenat Mahal, but the beautiful and ambitious girl soon gained a complete control over the mind and heart of her aged lord, and this was made all the more influential when she had added the claims of a mother to the attractions of a wife.
Then commenced those intrigues, which she carried on up to the year 1856, to secure the succession to the throne for her child, Mirza Jumma Bukht, to the exclusion of Mirza Furruk-oo-deen, the elder son, whose prior claims the English Government recognized and sustained, as in duty bound. Her hostility to British influence, therefore, became intense; and her hopes of gaining her object were identified with the efforts of the Sepoy conspiracy to overthrow the English power in India. Poor lady! she utterly failed; and she and the son for whom every thing was risked are to-day wanderers in a foreign land, with the bitter reflection of the utter desolation which has overwhelmed the dynasty of which she thus became the last empress. She is the daughter of the Rajah of Bhatneer, a territory about one hundred and eighty miles northwest of Delhi.
Zeenat Mahal, Empress of Delhi.
The pictures of the Emperor and Empress here presented were painted on ivory by the Court portrait-painter twenty years ago, and are beautiful specimens of native art, and very correct likenesses of them both.
We will now turn from these royal persons to their home, and some of their splendid surroundings; and, first of all, let us look at their historical and beautiful Dewan Khass. There was something remarkably significant in the fact that the magnificent and famous Audience Hall of the Moguls should sink to ruin with the dynasty which had so long adorned it. For two hundred and fifty years they had shed luster upon each other; but, when we remember the crimes which had so long cried to Heaven for vengeance from the polished floor of this marble hall, it did seem fitting that the Most High, who ruleth in the kingdoms of men, in the hour when their judgment came should, with the same blow, strike down both the Mogul line and their magnificent memorial. When their cup of iniquity was full, and their hands were red with Christian blood, then came the day of vengeance.
It was my lot to be a witness of the wondrous ruin—to behold this imperial head of Oriental Mohammedanism, this “Light of the Faith,” as he was designated, sinking into utter ruin and darkness;
“Falling, like Lucifer,
Never to hope again.”
When I reached the Mogul capital of Hindustan, in the autumn of 1856, the Dewan Khass was still the center of state and pageantry, and its imperial master living in Oriental style on his salary of eighteen lakhs of rupees—$900,000 gold—per annum. Within one year from that day I was again in the Dewan Khass, where he used to sit in his gorgeous array, to witness his trial, and that of his princes and nobles, before a military commission of British officers, by whom he was condemned to be banished as a felon to a foreign shore for the remnant of his miserable life, there to subsist on a convict's allowance; and within a few weeks after, when I again visited the once magnificent Dewan Khass, I found it despoiled of its glory, its marble halls and columns whitewashed,
and the whole turned into a hospital for sick soldiers! Has the world ever witnessed a ruin more prompt, more complete, more amazing than this?
For seven hundred years the Mohammedan dynasties—of whom this wretched old man was the last representative—had tried to hold the reins of power over India, alien alike in race, language, and religion from the people whom they ruled. Mahmoud of Ghuznee—a contemporary for five years of William the Conqueror—was the founder of this line of monarchs; and yet such was their character, that when these long centuries of selfish and bigoted misrule were ending, and this old man was in circumstances that might well have evoked compassion and sympathy from those around him, he was allowed to sink out of sight, not only without regret or condolence, but amid the expressed sense of relief of the race over whom he and his ancestors had dominated—a people with whom they had ever refused to amalgamate, whom they had never tried to conciliate, and from whom his race never realized either loyalty or affection.
It may be doubted if any royal line on earth has had such a sad record to present to the historian. Of the sixty-five monarchs who thus conquered and ruled India, only twenty-seven of the number died a natural death; all the rest were either exiled, killed in battle, or assassinated, while the average length of each reign was only eleven years. Truly has it been said, “Delhi has been the stage of greatness—men the actors, ambition the prompter, and centuries the audience.” It was my opportunity to come in at the close, and behold destruction drawing the curtain over the scene, and writing upon it the realized sentence, and the warning to the nations: “Thou shalt break them with a rod of iron; thou shalt dash them in pieces like a potter's vessel. Be wise now therefore, O ye kings; be instructed, ye judges of the earth. Serve the Lord with fear, and rejoice with trembling. Kiss the Son, lest he be angry, and ye perish from the way, when his wrath is kindled but a little.”
This was all the more significant, because the men by whose instrumentality God wrought out his purposes were the very race
whose new monarchy opened with their own in the tenth century; but a race who received the faith which those Mohammedans repelled and persecuted, and who have consequently risen to supremacy among the nations; so that, while one portion of them rules the New World, the other inherits the empire of the fallen Moguls, and are there with confidence expecting that the promise of the Almighty shall ere long be made as true as his threatenings now consummated: “Ask of me, and I shall give thee the heathen for thine inheritance, and the uttermost parts of the earth for thy possession.” How expressively does the history of these eight hundred years declare, “Blessed are all they that put their trust in Him!”
True religion was the only thing this guilty but magnificent race needed for perpetuity. No dynasty ever had a grander opportunity than they—a rich land, the sixth of the world's population, boundless wealth, almost a millennium of time for the trial, with a civilization all their own, and a splendid cultivated taste, which they had the will and the ability to gratify to the utmost, as its memorials in Agra, and Delhi, and elsewhere, attest, to the surprise and delight of the traveler and tourist from many lands.
The Emperor Shah Jehan—A. D. 1627—alone, for his portion, laid out in Alipoor the celebrated Gardens of Shalimar, at a cost of $5,000,000. They were about two miles and a half in circumference, and were almost like Paradise in beauty. He then built the world-renowned Taj Mahal, expending upon it nearly $60,000,000, the present value of money. He also erected the Dewan Khass, the most gorgeous audience hall in the East. This latter we here illustrate.
The Dewan Khass; or, Hall of Audience, Palace of Delhi.
This imperial hall was a gorgeous accessory of the Palace of Delhi. The front opened on a large quadrangle, and the whole stood in what was once a garden, extremely rich and beautiful. This unique pavilion rested on an elevated terrace, and was formed entirely of white marble. It was one hundred and fifty feet long, and forty in breadth, having a graceful cupola at each angle. The roof was supported on colonnades of marble pillars. The solid and
polished marble has been worked into its forms with as much delicacy as though it had been wax, and its whole surface, pillars, walls, arches, and roof, and even the pavement, was inlaid with the richest, most profuse, and exquisite designs in foliage and arabesque; the fruits and flowers being represented in sections of gems, such as amethysts, carnelian, blood-stone, garnet, topaz, lapis lazuli, green serpentine, and various colored crystals. A bordering ran around the walls and columns similarly decorated, inlaid with inscriptions in Arabic from the Koran. The whole had the appearance of some rich work from the loom, in which a brilliant pattern is woven on a pure white ground, the tracery of rare and cunning artists. Purdahs (curtains) of all colors and designs hung from the crenated arches on the outside to exclude the glare and heat. (These purdahs are omitted in the engraving for the sake of the interior view.)
In the center of the hall stood the Takt Taous, or Peacock Throne, of Shah Jehan, on the erection of which Price's History tells us he expended thirty millions sterling, ($150,000,000.) This wondrous work of art was ascended by steps of silver, at the summit of which rose a massive seat of pure gold, with a canopy of the same metal inlaid with jewels. The chief feature of the design was a peacock with his tail spread, the natural colors being represented by pure gems. A vine also was introduced into the design, the leaves and fruit of which were of precious stones, whose rays were reflected from mirrors set in large pearls. Beneath all this “glory” sat the Great Mogul.
No wonder that the fame of this wealth and extravagance should attract the notice and cupidity of a man like Nadir Shah, the Persian, who, in 1739, invaded Hindustan, and carried off this Peacock Throne among his trophies. His estimate of it may be understood from the fact that he had a tent constructed to contain it, the outside of which was covered with scarlet broadcloth and the inside of violet-colored satin, on which birds and beasts, trees and flowers, were depicted in precious stones. On either side of the Peacock Throne a screen was extended, adorned with the
figures of two angels, also represented in various colored gems. Even the tent-poles were adorned with jewels, and the pins were of massive gold. The whole formed a load for several elephants. The gorgeous trophy was afterward broken up by Adil Shah, the nephew and successor of the captor. Its place in the Dewan Khass was afterward supplied by another of inferior value, and by the Crystal Throne, which the writer saw in 1857.
Inside of the entrance of the Khass, inscribed in black letters upon a slab of alabaster, is the Persian couplet, in the hyperbolical language of the East, quoted by Moore in his Lalla Rookh.
| “ | If there be an elysium on earth, |
| It is this, it is this.” |
Moore introduces it in “The Light of the Harem,” where the Emperor Jehangeer and his beloved and beautiful Nourmahal, in their visit to the Valley of Cashmere, happen to fall into a sort of lovers' quarrel, and in the evening she vails herself, and takes her place among the beautiful female singers who have come to entertain the reclining Emperor—one of whom seems disposed to avail herself of the opportunity to attract the wounded and wandering love of Jehangeer in a wrong direction, when the vailed Nourmahal, at the pause, strikes her lute and sings sweetly:
“There's a bliss beyond all that the minstrel has told,
When two that are linked in one heavenly tie,
With heart never changing, and brow never cold,
Love on through all ills, and love on till they die!
One hour of a passion so sacred is worth
Whole ages of heartless and wandering bliss;
And O, if there be an elysium on earth.
It is this, it is this!”
Jehangeer's heart is touched, and there ensues a happy reconciliation. Unfortunately, however, for the poet, there is an anachronism here, and a violation of historic truth, as well as an inadequate translation, for Shah Jehan, who built the Dewan Khass, and inscribed the words on the slab of alabaster over the entrance, was the son of Jehangeer, and it is not likely that his father's wife could quote the words before they were composed. Moore's
picture of Jehangeer and Nourmahal is the very reverse of what truthful history, corroborated by the personal observation of Sir Thomas Roe, tells us of that cruel sot and his talented but unprincipled Empress. And she could cherish but little true love for the man that had her noble husband, Sheer Afghan, so basely assassinated in order to gain possession of her person.
It is a pity that poetry should be so often perverted and its elegancies made to adorn the unworthy and the vile. Nevertheless, we know that “the judgments of God are according to truth,” and we see here that no wealth, or power, or magnificence, or human adulation, can shield the guilty when the inevitable hand of the Divine verdict has come.
“Elysium” is too European, too Northern, a term to express Shah Jehan's word. But Moore, for a good part of his life a Romanist, may have thought the term over-biblical for his use, and chose the heathen phrase “elysium” in preference to the plain rendering of the word. The inscription runs exactly as follows, expressed in English letters:
“Ugur Firdousi ba-roo-i-zameen ust,
Ameen ust, ameen ust, ameen ust.”
And the rendering is:
| “ | If there be a paradise on the face of the earth. |
| This is it, this is it, this is it!” |
(The original Persian may be found quoted by Dr. Clarke in his Commentary on Nehemiah i, verse 8.)
In or near Persia was the region of Paradise, and the fame of the first garden, planted by God, near the banks of the Euphrates, lingered as a tradition in its own vicinity for four thousand years, and led to those imitations of it in the “paradises of Oriental despots.” Most of the invasions of India were from the regions of the ancient Eden, and the invaders carried with them their ideas of paradise to the land of the Ganges, and tried to reproduce them there. This Dewan Khass was the central object of the most costly one ever planted in India, or perhaps anywhere else.
Standing in the midst of it, how easy it seemed to transport one's self in thought to that similar scene mentioned in the book of Esther i, 4, 7, where, nearly five hundred years before Christ, Ahasuerus, the Persian, “who reigned from India even unto Ethiopia,” displayed his magnificence during the seven days' feast “in the court of the garden of the king's palace, where were white, green, and blue hangings fastened with cords of fine linen and purple to silver rings and pillars of marble; the beds [or seats] were of gold and silver, upon a pavement of red, and blue, and white, and black marble.” Verses 5 and 6.
As Dr. Clarke has remarked, the term paradise “is applied to denote splendid apartments, as well as fine gardens; in a word, any place of pleasure and delight.” And is not this exactly the idea of the paradise described in the twenty-first and twenty-second chapters of Revelation — the golden city, with its jasper walls and gates of pearl, in the midst of the garden of God, with the river of the water of life, clear as crystal, and the tree of life yielding its fruit every month?
In speaking of it Jesus says, “In my Father's house are many mansions.” “I go to prepare a place for you.” “They shall walk with me in white.” “To him that overcometh will I give to eat of the tree of life which is in the midst of the paradise of God.” How Oriental are all these thoughts! I have seen the princely Asiatic host, with his guests around him in their white flowing robes, moving through his beautiful garden, as he entertained them with his fellowship, with music, and the freest use of the bounties around them; and the earthly scene has been a vivid image of what the heavenly paradise will be to the redeemed, when they shall find themselves at last in the garden of God, with Jesus as their host, having the right of entrance to his glorious audience hall, and the amazing honor of sitting down with him upon his sapphire throne, in the presence of the host of heaven! See Exod. xxiv, 10; Ezek. i, 26; Rev. iii, 21.
The crown worn on the head of the Great Mogul was worthy of the Khass and the throne on which he sat. It was made by the
great Akbar, in the fashion of that worn by the Persian kings, and was of extraordinary beauty and magnificence. It had twelve points, each surmounted by a diamond of the purest water, while the central point terminated in a single pearl of extraordinary size, the whole, including many valuable rubies, being estimated at a cost equivalent to £2,070,000 sterling, or $10,350,000. Add one thing more, the Koh-i-noor diamond, on his brow, and you have the Mogul “in all his glory,” as he sat on the Peacock Throne in his Dewan Khass, surrounded by Mohammedan princes, by turbaned and jeweled rajahs, amid splendor which only “the gorgeous East” could furnish, and the fame of which seemed to the poor courts of Europe of that day like a tale of the Arabian Nights.
Soon the Portuguese were found making their way around “the Cape of Storms” into the Indian Ocean, and thence to the capital of the Moguls. James I. of England, in 1615, sent as his embassador Sir Thomas Roe, whose chaplain has left us a record of the embassy in A Voyage to the East Indies. Sir Thomas felt keenly the contrast afforded by the unpretending character of the presents and retinue with which his royal master had provided him, to the magnificent ceremonial which he daily witnessed, and in which he was permitted to take part. He remained two years at Jehangeer's Court. One of the greatest displays occurred on the Emperor's birthday, when, amid the ceremonies, the royal person was weighed in golden scales twelve times against gold, silver, perfumes, and other valuables, the whole of which were then divided among the spectators. His description of the splendors of the scene sounds like the veriest romance.
On one of the pillars of the Audience Hall is shown the mark of the dagger of the Hindoo Prince of Chittore, who, in the very presence of the Emperor, stabbed to the heart one of the Mohammedan ministers, who made use of some disrespectful language toward him. On being asked how he presumed to do this in the presence of his sovereign, he answered in almost the very words of Roderic Dhu,
“I right my wrongs where they are given,
Though it were in the court of Heaven.”
Weighing of the Emperor in the Dewan Khass.
Alas! what scenes of perfidy and blood have been witnessed within the walls of this Dewan Khass! Sleeman and others have narrated some of them, but the half has not been told, and all are only known to Heaven. The last of them, in 1857, exhausted the patience of the Almighty, and the dynasty and their Khass were destroyed by that “stone” which then fell upon them, and ground them to powder.
Here in this hall, which he himself had built, sat the great Shah Jehan, obliged to receive the insolent commands of his own grandson, Mohammed, when flushed with victory, and to offer him the throne, merely to disappoint the expectations of the youth's rebel father. Here sat Aurungzebe—Shah Jehan's fourth son—when he ordered the assassination of his own brothers, Dara and Morad, and the imprisonment and destruction by slow poison of his own son Mohammed, who had so often fought bravely by his side in battle. Here, too, stood in chains the graceful Sooleeman, to receive his sentence of death, with his poor young brother. Sipeher Shekoh, who had shared all his father's toils and dangers, and witnessed his brutal murder. And here sat the handsome, but effeminate, Mohammed Shah, in March, 1739, bandying compliments with his ferocious conqueror, Nadir Shah, the Persian King, who had destroyed his armies, plundered his treasury, appropriated his throne, and ordered the murder of nearly one hundred thousand of the helpless inhabitants of his capital, men, women, and children, in a general massacre. The bodies of these people lay unburied in the streets, tainting the air, while the two sovereigns sat here sipping their coffee in the presence of their courtiers, and swearing to the most deliberate lies in the name of their God, prophet, and Koran!
Sleeman relates that on this occasion the coffee was brought into the Dewan Khass upon a golden salver, and delivered to the two sovereigns by the most polished gentleman of Mohammed Shah's Court. Precedence and public courtesies are, in the East, managed and respected with a tenacity and importance that to us of the Western world seems positively ridiculous.
Nevertheless, they are vital to the Oriental, and life or death have often hung upon their manifestations. All present on this occasion felt its significance. The movements of the officer, as he entered the gorgeous apartment, amid the splendid trains of the two Emperors, were watched with great anxiety; if he presented the coffee first to his own master, the furious conqueror, before whom the sovereign of India and all his courtiers trembled, might order him to instant execution; if he presented it to Nadir first, he would certainly insult his own sovereign out of fear of the stranger. To the astonishment of all, he walked up, with a steady step, direct to his own master. “I cannot,” said he, “aspire to the honor of presenting the cup to the king of kings, your majesty's honored guest, nor would your majesty wish that any hand but your own should do so.” The Emperor took the cup from the golden salver, and presented it to Nadir Shah, who said with a smile as he took it: “Had all your officers known and done their duty like this man, you had never, my good cousin, seen me and my Kuzul Bashus at Delhi. Take care of him for your own sake, and get around you as many like him as you can.”
All these are now dust—the oppressor and the oppressed gone to their account before God; but the spirit of bigotry, and recklessness of human suffering and life, engendered by the Moslem creed, clung to the place until its gems ceased to shine, and its glory was extinguished forever. For here, too, sat its last occupant—this man whose portrait we present, Mohammed Suraj-oo-deen—on the 12th of May, 1857, and issued those orders under which England's embassador and his chaplain, with every Christian whom they could find in Delhi, male and female, native or European, were butchered amid barbarities the enormity of which has never been exceeded by any of the edicts of cruelty which have gone forth, even from the Dewan Khass.
Humanity heaves a sigh of relief to know that this is the last. The house of Tamerlane is no more; their Dewan Khass is in ruins; their pomp, and glory, and power, have gone down to the grave forever.
The Taj Mahal viewed from the River Jumna.
From these, with all their crimes, changes, and sufferings, we turn now to the peaceful and lovely monument which is India's architectural glory, and one of earth's great wonders—the existence of which is probably the only valid apology remaining for the vast revenues squandered by these irresponsible despots during so many hundred years.
About six miles before the traveler reaches the city of Agra the dome and minarets of the world-renowned Taj Mahal burst upon his view from behind a grove of fruit-trees near the road. The effect is wonderful! The long-anticipated pleasure of beholding earth's most beautiful shrine is now within his reach, and the gratified and delighted sight rests upon this first view of its harmony of parts, its faultless congregation of architectural beauties, with a kind of ecstasy. Of the thousands who have traveled far to gaze upon it, it may safely be asserted that not one of the number has been disappointed in the examination of its wondrous beauty. The Queen of Sheba would probably have admitted, had she seen it, that the “half had not been told her.”
We first look at it from the north side, on the river bank, where the scene is fully presented. The building to the right of the Taj is a Mosque for religious services, and that to the left is a Travelers' Rest House, where visitors can be accommodated. We next go around to the gate of entrance on the other side. The inclosure, including the gardens and outer court, is a parallelogram of one thousand eight hundred and sixty feet by more than one thousand feet, with a system of fountains, eighty-four in number, along the central avenue, and a marble reservoir in the middle about forty feet square, in which are five additional fountains, one in the center, and one at each corner. On either side of this beautiful sheet of water, into which are falling the silvery jets of spray from the fountains, are rows of dark Italian cypress, significant of the great design of the shrine. The river Jumna flows mildly by, and the birds, encouraged by the delicious coolness and shade of the place, forget their usual lassitude, and pour forth their songs, while the odor of roses, and of the orange, and lemon, and tamarind trees, perfume the air.
Amid all this loveliness the Taj rises before your view, upon an elevated terrace of white and yellow marble, about thirty feet in height, and having a graceful minaret at each corner. On either side are the beautiful Mosque and the Rest House, facing inward, and corresponding exactly with each other in size, design, and execution. That on the left side is the one used for service, as it allows the faces of the worshipers to be set toward the tomb of their prophet, to the west, at Mecca. The one to the right is used for the accommodation of visitors who come from various parts of the world to enjoy this great sight, and who here receive free quarters as long as they choose to remain.
From the center of this great platform springs up the Taj itself. A detailed description of its general appearance is rendered unnecessary, as our readers have that before them in the beautiful engraving here given. The mausoleum itself, the terrace upon which it stands, and the minarets, are all formed of the finest white marble, inlaid with precious stones. The marble was brought from the Jeypore territory, a distance of nearly three hundred miles, and the sandstone for the walls, from Dholepore and Futtehpore Secree. A Persian manuscript, preserved in the Taj, professes to give a full account of the stones and materials used in its construction. The white marble was brought from Jeypore, the yellow marble from the Nerbudda, the black from Charkoh, crystal from China, jasper from the Punjab, carnelian from Bagdad, turquoises from Thibet, agate from Yemen, lapis lazuli from Ceylon, diamonds from Punah, rockspar from the Nerbudda, loadstone from Gwalior, amethyst and onyx from Persia, chalcedony from Villiat, and sapphires from Lanka—and this does not exhaust the list.
The dome, “shining like an enchanted castle of burnished silver,” is seventy feet in diameter, the Taj itself is two hundred and forty-five feet in altitude, and the cullice, or golden spire on the summit, is thirty feet more, making a height of two hundred and seventy-five feet from the terrace to the golden crescent.
It is asserted that the whole of the Koran is inlaid upon the building in the Arabic language, the letters being beautifully formed
in black marble on the outside, and in precious stones within. Nearly all the external ornamentation which the reader sees in the engraving are these texts.
The writer's earnest desire is, that his description may in some measure be worthy of the pictures; yet, though conscious of having done his best, and venturing to assert that he has here brought together the most complete account of the Taj that has yet appeared, still he realizes to himself how tame and imperfect is any effort to convey to those who never had the privilege of seeing it an adequate idea of what its beauty really is, or of the effect it produces upon the mind of the beholder as he stands within its sacred inclosure and realizes its loveliness as fully displayed before him. Like piety, or like heaven, it may be said of the beauty of the Taj, that “no man knoweth it save him that receiveth it.” Let our readers judge of this enthusiasm by the views before them, and by what follows.
The beautiful wood-cut opposite, presenting the view of the gate of the Taj, and the steel engraving which follows, are both made from photographs of the originals, taken in India, so that our readers may be assured that they have here before them the most perfect and worthy representation of this matchless structure that has ever appeared.
The Gate of the Taj.
The Taj Mahal.
The Taj is a mausoleum, built by the Great Mogul, Shah Jehan, over his beautiful Empress. It is situated in the midst of a garden of vast extent and beauty, three miles from Agra. The entrance to the garden is through the gateway here shown. This superb entrance is of red sandstone, inlaid with ornaments and with texts from the Koran in white marble, and is itself a palace, both as regards its magnitude and its decoration. The lofty walls that surround the garden are of the same material, having arched colonnades running around the interior, and giving an air of magnificence to the whole inclosure. The garden is laid out with rich taste. Its paths are paved with slabs of freestone, arranged in fanciful devices. Noble trees, affording a delightful shade and pleasant walks, even in the middle of the day, are planted in
sufficient number through the various spaces, while the fruit-trees, with the graceful palm, the banyan, and the feathery bamboo, mingle their foliage, and are ornamented by the sweet-scented tamarind and by flowers of the loveliest hue, which bloom in profusion around.
It is difficult to determine whether the exterior or the interior is the more fascinating; each has its own matchless claim, and each is perfect in its loveliness. Externally, the best times to see the Taj are by sunrise or by moonlight. The midday sun shining upon its polished surface is too brilliant for the eye to bear with satisfaction: for a position from whence to view it, the gallery on the top of the entrance-gate inside is decidedly the best point of observation. An hour before the sun rises you may see persons taking their places in that gallery, and there, elevated about sixty feet, they wait for the opening day, and the effect produced is thus well described: “The gray light of morning had not yet appeared when we reached the Taj and made our way up to the top of the gate, to look upon it as it gradually grew into shape and form at the bidding of the rising sun. The moon had just hidden her face beneath the western horizon, and the darkness was at its deepest, presaging the approaching break of day. We looked down upon the immense inclosure crowded with trees mingled together in one undistinguishable mass, gently surging and moaning in the night breeze. Above rose, apparently in the distance, a huge gray-blue mass, without shape or form, which rested like a cloud on the gloomy sea of foliage. Soon a faint glimmer of light appeared in the eastern horizon; as the darkness fled away before its gradually increasing power, the cloud changed first to a light blue, and then developed into shape and proportion; and the minarets, and the cupolas, and dome defined themselves in clearer lines upon the still dark sky beyond. Soon the first rosy tint of the dawn appeared, and as if by magic the whole assumed a roseate hue, which increased as the sun made its appearance, and the Taj stood before us, dazzlingly brilliant in the purest white, absolutely perfect in its fairy proportions. It is impossible to describe it. I had heard of perfection
of outline and of graceful symmetry of proportion, but never realized the true meaning of the words until the morning when I watched the Taj burst into loveliness at the touch of the sun's magic wand.”
Under the softened light of the moon the beautiful structure develops fresh beauties. The dazzling effect has ceased, and you gaze upon every part of it as it appears bathed in a soft amber light that seems to enter your own soul and impart its peace and serenity till you wonder that outside these walls there can be a world of sin, and strife, and sorrow. You are conscious of abandoning yourself to the delightful, if brief, enjoyment of that poetic and mental peace which the charming scene was designed to produce upon the beholder.
Let us now enter the wonderful shrine itself, and gaze upon its internal beauty. Before entering the central hall we descend to the vault below, where the real sarcophagi are, in which lie the remains of the Emperor and Empress. Her tomb occupies the very center, and his is by her side. The light is made to fall directly upon her tomb, which is of white marble and beautifully decorated. But the especial splendor is reserved for the tombs in the rotunda above, directly over these, and which, as it were, officially represent them.
We ascend to them, and stand amid a scene of architectural glory which has no equal on earth. Above us rises the lofty dome, far up into the dim distance. The floor on which we tread is of polished marble and jasper, ornamented with a wainscoating of sculptured marble tablets inlaid with flowers formed of precious stones. Around are windows or screens of marble filigree, richly wrought in various patterns, which admit a faint and delicate illumination—what Ritualists would love to call “a dim, religious light”—into the gorgeous apartment. In the center are the two tombs, surrounded by a magnificent octagonal screen about six feet high, with doors on the sides. The open tracery in this white marble screen is wrought into beautiful flowers, such as lilies, irises, and others, and the borders of the screen are inlaid with
precious stones, representing flowers, executed with such wonderful perfection that the forms wave as in nature, and the hues and shades of the stems, leaves, and flowers appear as real almost as the beauties which they represent.
These ornamental designs are so carefully and exquisitely executed that several of the flowers have as many as eighty different stones entering into their composition, all polished uniform with the marble, into which they are so delicately inserted that you can hardly trace their joinings. They seem as though they had grown there, instead of being separately prepared and placed in their positions by the hands of the “cunning workman,” who designed and executed this imperishable and magnificent memorial of human love.
But the richest work of all is on the cenotaph of the Empress within the screen. Upon her tomb—according to universal Mohammedan usage—is a slate or tablet of marble, while on the Emperor's is a small box representing a pen-holder. These always distinguish a man's or a woman's grave among these people; the idea being that a woman's heart is a tablet on which lordly man can write whatever pleases him best. And this mark of feminine inferiority was not spared even the beloved occupant of the Taj Mahal.
But her tomb—how beautiful! The snow-white marble is inlaid with flowers so delicately formed that they look like embroidery on white satin, so exquisitely is the mosaic executed in carnelian, blood-stone, agates, jasper, turquoise, lapis lazuli, and other precious stones. Thirty-five different specimens of carnelian are employed in forming a single leaf of a carnation; and in one flower, not larger than a silver dollar, as many as twenty-three different stones can be counted. Yet these are but specimens of the beauties that are spread in unparalleled profusion over this entire chamber. Indeed, Long asserts that he found one flower upon her tomb to be composed of no less than three hundred different stones.
Her name and date of death, with her virtuous qualities, are recorded in the same costly manner, in gems of Arabic—the sacred
language of the Mohammedans—on the side of her tomb. There are other inscriptions upon it, which we will hereafter refer to when we come to examine who this lady was that was thus honored in death beyond all her sex.
The Emperor's tomb is plainer than the other, has no passages from the Koran, but merely a similar mosaic work of flowers, and his name, with the date of his death, upon it.
Over all this richness and beauty rises the magnificent dome, which is so constructed as to contain an echo more pure, and prolonged, and harmonious than any other in the world, so far as known. A competent judge has declared, “Of all the complicated music ever heard on earth, that of a flute played gently in the vault below, where the remains of the Emperor and his consort repose, as the sound rises to the dome amid a hundred arched alcoves around, and descends in heavenly reverberations upon those who sit or recline on the cenotaphs above, is perhaps the finest to an inartificial ear. We feel as if it were from heaven, and breathed by angels. It is to the ear what the building itself is to the eye; but unhappily it cannot, like the building, live in our recollections. All that we can in after life remember is, that it was heavenly and produced heavenly emotions.” An enthusiast thus more glowingly describes it: “Now take your seat upon the marble pavement beside the upper tombs, and send your companion to the vault underneath to run slowly over the notes of his flute or guitar. Was ever melody like this? It haunts the air above and around. It distills in showers upon the polished marble. It condenses into the mild shadows, and sublimes into the softened, hallowed light of the dome. It rises, it falls; it swims mockingly, meltingly around. It is the very element with which sweet dreams are builded. It is the melancholy echo of the past—it is the bright, delicate harping of the future. It is the atmosphere breathed by Ariel, and playing around the fountain of Chindara. It is the spirit of the Taj, the voice of inspired love, which called into being this peerless wonder of the world, and elaborated its symmetry and composed its harmony, and, eddying around its young minarets
and domes, blended them without a line into the azure of immensity.”
Let us imagine, if we can, the effect produced here when the funeral dirge was chanted over the tomb of the lovely Empress, and the answering echoes, in the pauses of the strains, would seem to fall like the responses of angel choirs in paradise!
Princely provision was made by the gifted originator of the Taj for its care and services. The light that fell upon that tomb day and night was from perfumed oil in golden lamps; fresh garlands of nature's flowers were laid upon it daily; Mogul musicians furnished appropriate music; five times in each twenty-four hours the Muezzin's cry to prayers resounded from these minarets; and a eunuch of high station, with two thousand Sepoys under his orders, held watch and ward without ceasing over the entire place and all its approaches. None but men of Mohammedan faith were permitted to come within these precincts, or to draw near her tomb; and the entire shrine was by the Emperor's orders expressly held sacred from the approach of any Christian foot.
Arrangements were made for occasionally exhibiting its loveliness by light adequate to bring out its perfect beauty. Rests were provided on the eight corners of the shrine for blue or Bengal lights, and when these were simultaneously fired, as the writer has seen them, the effect was magical. The candles had been previously extinguished and the building left in total darkness, when, at the signal, the brilliant illumination burst forth, and every point and ornament, even to the top of the rich dome itself, was displayed more gloriously than the light of day could ever have exhibited their rich colors. The inlaid ornamentation and filagree of the scenes, now like transparent and delicate lace-work, all seemed, to the astonished vision, like a palace of enchantment, and the mind of the beholder was awed into homage of that rare intellect which could devise and execute this the most beautiful monument on which the human eye can ever gaze on earth!
Perhaps no one has ever rendered such perfect justice to the beauty of this mausoleum as the unnamed author quoted by
Stocqueler. He thus sketches it: “I have been to visit the Taj. I have returned full of emotion. My mind is enriched with visions of ideal beauty. When first I approached the Taj, eleven years ago, I was disappointed. In after days, when my admiration for the loveliness of this building had grown into a passion, I often inquired why this should have been? And the only answer I can find is, that the symmetry is too perfect to strike at first. It meets you as the most natural of objects. It, therefore, does not startle, and you return from it disappointed that you have not been startled. But it grows upon you in all the harmony of its proportions, in all the exquisite delicacy of its adornment, and at each glance some fresh beauty or grace is developed. And, besides, it stands so much alone in the world of beauty. Imagination has never conceived a second Taj, nor had any thing similar ever before occurred to it.
“View the Taj at a distance! It is as the spirit of some happy dream, dwelling dim, but pure, upon the horizon of your hope, and reigning in virgin supremacy over the visible circle of the earth and sky. Approach it nearer, and its grandeur appears unlessened by the acuteness of its fabric, and swelling in all its fresh and fairy harmony until you are at a loss for feelings worthy of its presence. Approach still nearer, and that which, as a whole, has proved so charming, is found to be equally exquisite in the minutest detail. Here are no mere touches for distant effect. Here is no need to place the beholder in a particular spot to cast a partial light upon the performance; the work which dazzles with its elegance at the coup d'œil will bear the scrutiny of the miscroscope; the sculpture of the panels, the fretwork and mosaic of the screen, the elegance of the marble pavement, the perfect finish of every jot and iota, are as if the meanest architect had been one of those potent genii who were of yore compelled to adorn the palaces of necromancers and kings.
“We feel, as our eye wanders around this hallowed space, that we have hitherto lavished our language and admiration in vain. We dread to think of it with feelings which workmanship less
exquisite has awakened, and we dare not use, in its praise, language hackneyed in the service of every-day minds. We seek for it a new train of associations, a fresh range of ideas, a greener and more sacred corner in the repository of the heart. And yet, wherefore should this be, since no terms applying to other works of beauty, excepting the most general, can be appropriated here? For those there be phrases established by usage, which their several classifications of style render intelligible to all acquainted with similar works of art. But in the Taj we fall upon a new and separate creation, which never can become a style, since it can never be imitated. It is like some bright and newly discovered winged thing, all beauteous in a beauty peculiar to itself, and referable to no class or order on the roll of zoology, which the whole world flocks to gaze upon with solemn delight, none presuming to designate the lovely stranger, nor to conjecture a kindred for it with the winged things of the earth. Suffice it—Love was its author, Beauty its inspiration.”
There never was erected in this world any thing so perfect and lovely, save Solomon's Temple. In gazing down upon the scene, as the writer did in the closing days of the terrible rebellion in 1858, the effect was wonderful, and akin to those emotions that must thrill the soul which looks out for the first time upon the plains of heaven. Every thing that could remind one of ruin and misery seemed so far away, that as we sat, and the delighted eyes drank in the scene before them, terminated by the gorgeous fane as it rose up toward the blue and cloudless sky, we thought, if John Bunyan could have shared the opportunity, he would surely have imagined his dreams realized, and believed himself looking over the battlements of the New Jerusalem, and viewing that “region of eternal day” where holiness and peace are typified by pearls and gold, and all manner of precious stones, with the fountain of life, clear as crystal, proceeding from the throne of God and the Lamb!
Two questions now remain to be answered: Who was the lady to whom the Taj was erected? and, Who was the architect who designed and executed it?
There has been much misunderstanding upon these subjects. The wrong lady has been named by authors who might have understood better, had they consulted the proper authorities, and it has also been asserted that the architect was unknown. Bayard Taylor, for instance, in his India, China, and Japan, informs his readers that “Shah Jehan—the ‘Selim’ of Moore's poem—erected it as a mausoleum to his Queen Noor Jehan, the ‘Light of the World,’ ” and he several times repeats this blunder. Mr. Taylor is not profound in Indian history. Every statement in the above quotation is incorrect. The Selim of Moore's poem was not Shah Jehan, but his father; Noor Jehan was not Shah Jehan's wife, but his stepmother; and Noor Jehan was not buried in the Taj, but beyond the Attock, in the North-west, where her tomb is to-day a mere ruin. That Bayard Taylor should write in this superficial style is not very unusual with him: but that such authors as Montgomery Martin and Bishop Heber should say it was for Noor Jehan is indeed surprising: for they had acquaintance with the history of India, and had not to depend upon ignorant guides and guide books for the information they would give their readers.
Our description of Etmad-od-Doulah's Tomb will present the facts, showing that the infant born in the desert afterward became the wife, first of Sheer Afghan, and then of Prince Selim, after he mounted the throne, taking the name of Jehangeer, when he conferred upon her the title of Noor Jehan. These were the hero and heroine of Moore's poem. Shah Jehan, who built the Taj, was the son of Jehangeer by a different wife than Noor Jehan. Noor Jehan's brother, Asuf Jan, had a daughter whom Shah Jehan married, and to whom he gave the title of Moomtaj-i-Mahal, and it was to her memory that he built the Taj, long after his father was dead, and while he held his stepmother, Noor Jehan—who died in 1646—in a state of honorable captivity. Moomtaj-i-Mahal died in 1631, fifteen years before her aunt, Noor Jehan.
The history of Moomtaj is very interesting, and we may give a few of the facts here. She was very beautiful, and obtained an unbounded influence over the mind of the Emperor, exhibiting
such capacity for the management of State affairs, that her husband seems for years to have resigned the reins of government into her hands, while he was consuming his time over the wine bottle in the company of a favorite French physician.
From this dream of pleasure, the history tells us, Shah Jehan was suddenly awakened by the fatal illness of his beautiful Empress. She died in giving birth to a daughter, who is said to have been heard crying in the womb by herself and her other daughters. She sent for the Emperor, and told him that she believed no mother had ever been known to survive the birth of a child so heard, and that she felt her end was near. “She had,” she said, “only two requests to make: first, that he would not marry again after her death, and have children to contend with hers for his favors and dominions; and, secondly, that he would build for her the tomb with which he had promised to perpetuate her name.” Both her dying requests were granted. Her tomb was commenced immediately. No woman ever pretended to supply her place in the palace, nor had Shah Jehan children by any other.
But Moomtaj might well, in her dying hours, make the request she did, for she could not be ignorant that Shah Jehan had secured the throne to himself, from the other children of his father, by the use of the dagger and the bow-string. And it was not without reason; for before she was many years laid in the Taj her own children, even, contended for the throne; and the magnificent Shah Jehan, realizing that “as he had done so God rewarded him,” died in prison in 1666, a captive in the hands of his son, Aurungzebe, who had already followed the example of his father in hunting down and destroying his brothers and nephews in order to secure the throne undisputed to himself.
But we return to the peaceful Taj. The Empress Moomtaj was a Khadija in her day, a Mohammedan devotee, and a bitter foe of Christianity—such Christianity as she knew. She took care that this animosity should go with her to the grave, and even be inserted on her tomb; and there it is to-day, in the Taj, amid the flowers and inscriptions on her cenotaph—a prohibition and a prayer against
Christ's followers, which her race has now forever lost the power to enforce, and which God Almighty has taken providential care shall not only remain unanswered, but be reversed to the very letter.
The circumstances were these: Prior to the days of Shah Jehan and his wife, the Portuguese, attracted by the fame and the wealth of the great Akbar and his sons, had found their way to India, establishing themselves as traders and merchants, on the west coast at Goa and on the east at Hooghly, near the present Calcutta. Some, who were artisans, reached Agra, the imperial city, where they were employed by the Government chiefly in the duties of the artillery, the arsenals and founderies, and a few as artists. The emoluments of office, for arts which they were thus introducing, were very large, and soon attracted great numbers to Agra, so that Monsieur Thevenot, who visited Agra in 1666, tells us that the Christian families there were estimated to have been about twenty-five thousand—an exaggeration doubtless. Still their number must have been large; and among them were some Italians and Frenchmen, as is evident from their tombs, which are still extant in the Roman Catholic cemetery at Agra, where the dates of several are still visible on the head-stones, ranging from the year 1600 to 1650.
Akbar and Shah Jehan allowed these people the free exercise of their religion. Indeed, the former built them a church, and used to take pleasure in presiding at discussions where he matched the Romanist priests against his Pundits and Moulvies, and seemed to enjoy the theological battles between them. Feeble as the light was which thus penetrated the imperial household, it did not shine in vain, for some of Akbar's household were actually baptized and professed the Christian faith.
Roman Catholicism never had a grander opportunity than it enjoyed at Agra during those sixty years. Had it been a pure Christianity it might have won over the house of Tamerlane to the faith, and perhaps have saved all India long since. But it failed utterly, and won only a grave-yard at Agra. These thousands
of families soon vanished away and left no succession, for Hindoos and Mohammedans learned to perform duties which they saw bringing to the Christians so much honor and profit, and, as they did so, they necessarily hastened the removal of a religion which they detested. What is needed in India is a Christianity independent of the emoluments of office—one that shall take root in the soil, and be self-sustaining. But Romanism failed, and not from this cause alone, or even chiefly; its weak point was the fearful charge of idolatry which the Moulvies triumphantly urged against its priests on all occasions. The skeptical but honest Akbar—the Oriental head of a faith iconoclastic to the core—was confused, as well he might be, when he saw his own Moulvies able to quote the Christian Bible against professed Christian ministers to sustain this terrible charge. Denial of it would not avail; there were their own teachings and acts: worship and prayers to the Virgin Mary, invocation of saints, and prostrations before pictures and images. The subterfuge of a qualified homage was rejected in view of the prohibition of the Second Commandment of Almighty God, forbidding not only the act, but also its semblance, “Thou shalt not bow down to them, nor worship them.” The priests were worsted; and Akbar and his people, knowing no Christianity but this, concluded that the religion of the Son of God was on a par with Paganism, and that Christians were idolaters. A revulsion set in, which the Empress Moomtaj afterward fully shared. In her case, the hatred of the Christian name was intensified by the remembrance of some insolence shown by the Portuguese at Hooghly, several years before her husband ascended the throne, and when he was a fugitive, after an unsuccessful rebellion against his father. When the power passed into her hands her hatred against “the European idolaters,” as she called them, led her to demand their expulsion, at least from Hooghly.
Accordingly, the Governor of Bengal received from Shah Jehan the laconic command, “Expel those idolaters from my dominions.” It was done. Hooghly was carried by storm, after a siege of three months and a half, involving a terrible destruction of life on
the side of the Portuguese, whose fleet was almost entirely annihilated. The principal ship, in which about two thousand men, women, and children had taken refuge, with all their treasure, was blown up by her captain sooner than surrender to the Moguls. From the prisoners five hundred young persons of both sexes, with some of the priests, were sent to Agra. The girls were divided among the harems of the court and nobles, the boys circumcised, and the priests and Jesuits threatened with torture if they refused to accept the Koran. After some months of imprisonment, however, they were liberated and sent off to Goa, and the pictures and images, which had excited the ire of the Empress, were all destroyed by her orders. Such wrong did Romanism do Christianity in India, and the name of our God and Saviour was blasphemed among the heathen through its idolatry.
The Empress Moomtaj, even in death, could not forget her enmity to every form of Christianity, and secured that it should be expressed upon her very tomb, and there it remains to-day, and will remain while the world stands or the Taj exists. The inscription on the tomb, translated, is as follows: “Moomtaj-i-Mahal, Ranee Begum, died 1631:” and on the end of the tomb which faces the entrance, so that all may see it as they approach, are these words: “And defend us from the tribe of unbelievers”—Kafirs; the word “Kafirs” being a bitter term of contempt for Christians and all who lack faith in Mohammed and the Koran.
Heaven would not answer the fanatical prayer of this mistaken woman; but, instead, has placed even her shrine in the custody of those she hated; and that very “tribe” now gather from all parts of the civilized world, to enter freely and admire the splendors of the tomb which was raised over her remains, and smile with pity at the impotent bigotry which asked Heaven to forbid their approach! The writer had the privilege, with a band of Christian missionaries, of standing around her tomb, and, in the presence of these words, of joining heartily in singing the Christian Doxology over her moldering remains, while the echo above sweetly repeated the praise to “Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.”
An article on the Taj, without some account of its architect, would be indeed incomplete. But the record, assuming its correctness, enables us to supply this information also. The wonderful man whose creation the Taj is, was, it is believed, a Frenchman, by the name of Austin de Bordeux, a man of great ability. The Emperor, who had unbounded confidence in his merit and integrity, gave him the title of “Zurrier Dust”—the Jewel-Handed—to distinguish him from all other artists; but by the native writers he is called “Gostan Esau Nadir ol Asur”—the Wonderful of the Age. For his office of “Nuksha Nuwes,” or architect, he received a regular salary of one thousand rupees per month—$6,000 gold per annum—with perquisites and presents, which made his income very large. He built the palace at Delhi and the palace at Agra, as well as the Taj.
Tavernier, the traveler, who saw this building commenced and finished, tells us that the Taj, in its erection, occupied 20,000 men for twenty-two years. Its cost, we are told, was “threescore, seventeen lakhs, forty-eight thousand and twenty-six rupees;” that is, £3,174,802 sterling, or, in American money, $15,874,010 gold, of the money of that time, equal to about $60,000,000 of our money! But many of the precious stones in the mosaic were presented by different tributary powers, and are not included in the above estimate. Having finished the Taj, the architect was engaged in designing a silver ceiling for one of the galleries in the palace at Agra when he was sent by the Emperor on business of great importance to Goa. He died at Cochin on his return, and is supposed to have been poisoned by the Portuguese, who were jealous of his influence at Court. Shah Jehan had commenced his own tomb on the other side of the Jumna, and it and the Taj were to have been united by a bridge; but the death of Austin de Bordeux, and the wars between Shah Jehan's sons, which then broke out, prevented the completion of these magnificent works, and so the Emperor was laid beside his consort, when he died in 1666, and the Taj contains the remains of both.
The Empress's title, translated, is, The Ornament of the Palace,
for so Shah Jehan esteemed her. The name of the tomb, Taj Mahal, means, The Crown of Edifices, or Palaces—from Taj, a crown, and Mahal, a palace. It is worthy of its title, and is under the special care of the English Government, and will no doubt be preserved in its present perfect and stainless condition for its own sake, and because it is and must ever remain—notwithstanding the sins and frailties of the couple who beneath its dome await the call to judgment—the most perfect and beautiful testimonial to the virtues of a wife ever raised by an affectionate husband.
Among the thousands of her sex who have visited the Taj, and felt its peculiar fascination over the susceptible heart of sentimental women, Lady Sleeman was not the first, as she certainly will not be the last, to realize the emotion which is recorded of her. Retiring from the Taj, lost in reflection and admiration, she was asked by her husband what she thought of the Taj? Her prompt reply was, “I cannot tell you what I think, for I know not how to criticise such a building; but I can tell you what I feel—I would die to-morrow to have such another put over me!”
A short distance from the Taj we reach the beautiful tomb of the Premier of the great Emperor Akbar. This splendid pile of white marble, delicately carved into fret-work, its screens and tessellated enamels being very fine, is situated on the right hand of the road as you enter the city of Agra.
Tomb of Asuf Khan, Agra.
The tomb is not only beautiful in itself, and one of the most interesting specimens of Mogul architecture to be met with, even in a city so replete with artistic triumphs as was once imperial Agra, the creation of the renowned Akbar; but there is a history connected with it so romantic, illustrated by Sleeman and Martin, that it is worthy of its high place among the curiosities of Oriental life.
This structure was raised by the famous Noor Jehan, in loving remembrance of her father, Khwaja Accas, one of the most prominent characters in the history of India during the reign of Akbar. The liberality and fame of the greatest monarch that ever ruled India, and the patronage he extended to men of genius and worth, attracted to his Court from Persia and the adjacent nations those
who in his service found wealth and honor. Khwaja Accas was a native of Western Tartary. He had some relations at the Imperial Court of India who encouraged him to join them, under the expectation that they could secure his advancement in life. He was of good ancestry, but of reduced means, and possessed of abilities which needed only a fair opportunity for development to insure his success. He left Tartary for India at the close of the sixteenth century, accompanied by his wife and children; their only means for their journey having been provided by the sale of his little property. The incidents of their long and weary emigration are given with much simplicity. Their stock of money had become exhausted, and, in crossing the Great Desert, they were three days without food, and in danger of perishing. In this fearful emergency, the wife of Khwaja Accas gave birth to a daughter; but, worn out with fatigue and privation, the miserable parents concluded to abandon the poor infant. They covered it over with leaves, and toward evening pursued their journey. One bullock remained to them, and on this the father placed his wife, and tried to support her on their way, in hope to reach the cultivated country and find relief They had gone about a mile, and had just lost sight of the solitary shrub under which they had left their child, when Nature triumphed, and the mother, in an agony of grief, threw herself from the bullock upon the ground, exclaiming, “My child, my child!” Accas could not resist the appeal. He returned to the spot which they had left, took up his infant, and brought it to its mother's breast.
Shortly after a caravan was seen in the distance coming toward them; their circumstances were made known, and a wealthy merchant took compassion upon them, relieved their necessities, and safely conducted them to their destination; he even lent his influence to advance them in life when they reached Lahore, where the Emperor Akbar was then holding his Court.
That little group of five persons, the father and mother, the babe and her two brothers, were destined to fill a place in the page of history more influential than that of any family that ever emigrated
to India; for, leaving out of view for the present the high positions afterward attained by the father and his sons, that babe of the desert became, a few years subsequently, Empress of India, and bore the famous title of “Noor Jehan”—the Light of the World—while her brother, Asuf Jan, became the father of the equally celebrated Moomtaj-i-Mahal—to whose memory her husband, Shah Jehan, built the matchless Taj Mahal—the noblest monument ever erected to woman.
Asuf Khan, a distant relative of Khwaja Accas, held a high place at Court, and was much in the confidence of the Emperor. He made his kinsman his private secretary. Pleased with his ability and diligence, Asuf 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 Imperial Household. From this he was subsequently promoted to that of Etmad-od-Doulah, or High Treasurer of the Empire, and first minister. His legislative ability soon produced beneficial results in public affairs, while his modest yet manly bearing conciliated the nobility, who learned to appreciate the value of the control which he exercised over the ill-regulated mind of the Emperor.
His daughter, born in the desert, developed into one of the most lovely women of the East, as celebrated for her accomplishments as she was for her beauty, and ultimately she became the wife of the Prince Selim, known afterward by his title of Jehangeer, by whom she was raised to the throne, and had lavished upon her honors and power never before enjoyed by the consort of an Oriental potentate, even to the conjunction of her name with that of Jehangeer on the coins of the realm.
On the death of her venerable and honored father she erected this tomb over his remains. The building, rising from a broad platform, is of white marble, of quadrangular shape, flanked by octagonal towers, which are surmounted by cupolas on a series of open columns. From the center of the roof of the main building springs a small tomb-like structure, elaborately carved and decorated, the corners terminating in golden spires. Immediately
below this, on the floor of the hall, is the tomb inclosing the body of Etmad-od-Doulah. Interiorly and exteriorly this fairy pile is covered, as with beautiful lace, by lattice-work, delicately wrought in marble, covered with foliage and flowers, and intermingled with scrolls bearing passages from the Koran. Every portion of the mausoleum is thus enriched, and all that wealth could furnish, or Oriental art suggest, or genius execute, in the completion of the structure, was devoted to its adornment. The original idea in the mind of the Empress, as Martin and others relate, was to construct her father's shrine of solid silver; and she was only dissuaded from this purpose by the assurance that if marble was not equally costly, it was certain to be more durable, and less likely to attract the cupidity of future ages.
The photograph of this building, when examined by a good glass, brings out its singular loveliness as no mere engraving can present it. Each slab of white marble is wrought in rich tracery in the most delicate manner, pierced through and through so as to be the same when seen from either side; the pattern of each slab differs from the next one, and the rich variety, as well as beauty of the designs, fixes the attention of the beholder in amazement at the taste and patient skill that could originate and execute this vision of beauty, which seems like an imagination rising before the fancy, and then, by some wondrous wand of power, transmuted into a solid form forever, to be touched, and examined, and admired. Standing within the shrine, it seems as though it was covered with a rich vail, wrought in curious needle-work, every ray of light that enters coming through the various patterns. You approach and touch it, and find it is of white marble, two inches in thickness! What mind but that of a lady could have suggested a design so unique and feminine?
According to the usages of the Moguls, a lovely garden was planted around the fair shrine, and ample provision made for its care and preservation in the future. Rare and costly trees, flagrant evergreens, shady walks, and tanks and fountains, all added their charms to set off the central pile. A small mosque was
added, and such religion as they knew lent its influence to the sacredness of the locality; while the beautiful birds of India, their plumage bearing
“The rich hues of all glorious things,”
made the calm and sweet retreat more gorgeous by their presence.
The Daughter of the Desert, forgetting forever the unnatural desertion of him whom she so lavishly honored, thus made a paradise of the abode of the dead. Let her have the credit of whatever estimable qualities the great act expressed; she needs this, and every other allowance that fairly belongs to her history, as some offset to the sadder parts of a life and character that, two hundred and fifty years ago, surprised all India by its singularity, its magnificence, and its less worthy qualities—a fame that lingered in their legends and history, and which, after such long interval, settled so fascinatingly on the imagination of Tom Moore, and came forth in his romance of Lalla Rookh. But the poet left out more than half the life of his heroine; he gave her loves and fascinations, but omitted her labors, and those brilliant exploits which, quite as much as her beauty, commended her to the admiration of Jehangeer and his subjects.
Looking at such persons, and their brilliant, yet abused, opportunities, one may well say, “I have seen an end of all perfection.” How transitory, at best, is the fame that rests on such foundations! While we admire the taste, accomplishments, and achievements of this magnificent woman, we seek in vain for any evidence of benevolence or goodness in what she did. She seems to have left God and humanity entirely out of her calculations. In all the tombs and palaces built by her and for her, personal glory and selfish ends—for self and family—alone appear. On these the revenues of a whole people were squandered, and their hard earnings demanded to enable her to exhibit, on this lavish scale, her magnificent caprices. But no hospitals, or schools, or asylums for suffering humanity, exist to call her blessed, or to hand down her name as a pattern or promoter of purity and goodness. How much more “honorable and glorious” is the character, or the lot, of the humblest saint of God
who lives to do good to her fellow-creatures! Her grave may be as lowly and lone as that of Ann Hazeltine Judson, on the rock at Amherst, and without a stone to mark it, as I saw it in 1864; but, when Noor Jehan's marble edifices have returned to the dust, those who have thus employed their time and abilities to save the perishing will be “had in everlasting remembrance,” and “shine as the stars for ever and ever.” Few men have visited the East who possessed so highly as did Bishop Heber the capacity to appreciate the taste and skill exhib- ited in the gorgeous buildings of India. Truly and appropriately does he exclaim, while contemplating their wondrous works, “These Patans built like giants, and finished their work like jewelers.” The highest illustration of this eulogium is found in the matchless Taj Mahal.
We present one more evidence of their taste and skill in the wonderful Kootub Minar.
The Kootub. From a photograph.
It has been well observed that this Minar is, among the towers of the earth, what the Taj is among the tombs, something unique of its kind, that must ever stand alone in the recollection of him who has gazed upon its beautiful proportions, its chaste embellishments, and exquisite finish. About eleven miles south-west of the modern city of Delhi stands the desolate site of ancient Delhi. This city is supposed to have been founded about 57 B. C. The height of prosperity to which it rose may be imagined from its only memorials—the tombs, columns, gateways, mosques, and masonry, which lie strewn around in silent and naked desolation. Where rose temple and tower now resounds only the cry of the jackal and the wolf; for the voice of man is silent there, and the wanderings of the occasional tourist alone give any sign of human life or presence in the once “glorious city.” The ruins cover a circle of about twenty miles in extent.
In the midst and above all this wild ruin, like a Pharos to guide the traveler over this sea of desolation, rises the tall, tapering cylinder of the Kootub Minar. To archaeologists like Cunningham, travelers like Von Orlich, and learned observers like General
man, Mr. Archer, and Bholanauth Chunder, and the pages of the “Asiatic Researches,” we are indebted for the best descriptions of this wonderful relic of antiquity. These authors have necessarily borrowed largely from each other in representing this city of the dead and its wonderful and unequaled pillar, the towering majesty of which has looked down for centuries only upon ruin and the wild jungle which now grows where once stood the great center of India's glory—its magnificent metropolis.
The Kootub forms the left of two minars of a mosque, which, in size and splendor, was to be peerless on the earth as a place of worship, and from the character of this single shaft it is evident that, had the design been completed, it would have been all that its imperial founder intended in that respect. But death, war, and human vacillation make sad havoc of men's hopes and intentions, and this great memorial stands in attestation of the fact.
For nearly a century a controversy has existed in India as to the architectural honors of the wonderful Kootub. The Hindoos would fain claim that they built it, and Bholanauth Chunder, on their behalf, makes the best case he can to prove that the honor of its design and creation belongs to his race, and not to the hated Moslem; yet even he has to concede that the evidences of its Mohammedan origin are so decided that the Hindoos must give up the claim to the glory of its origination. The Baboo's description is very vivid, and as he corrected the measurements of General Sleeman and others, and has made his examinations within the past five years, and was also well qualified for the task which he undertook, we quote him with confidence in the following description:
“The Kootub outdoes every thing of its kind—it is rich, unique, venerable, and magnificent. It ‘stands as it were alone in India;’ rather, it should have been said, alone in the world; for it is the highest column that the hand of man has yet reared, being, as it stands now, two hundred and thirty-eight feet and one inch above the level of the ground. Once it is said to have been three hundred feet high, but there is not any very reliable authority for this
statement. In 1794, however, it had been actually measured to be two hundred and fifty feet eleven inches high. The Pillar of Pompey at Alexandria, the Minaret of the Mosque of Hassan at Cairo, and the Alexandrine Column at St. Petersburg, all bow their heads to the Kootub.
“The base of this Minar is a polygon of twenty-four sides, altogether measuring one hundred and forty-seven feet. The shaft is of a circular form, and tapers regularly from the base to the summit. It is divided into five stories, round each of which runs a bold, projecting balcony, supported upon large and richly-carved brackets, having balustrades that give to the pillar a most ornamental effect.
“The exterior of the basement story is fluted alternately in twenty-seven angular and semicircular faces. In the second story the flutings are only semicircular; in the third they are all angular. The fourth story is circular and plain; the fifth again has semicircular flutings. The relative height of the stories to the diameter of the base has quite scientific proportions. The first, or lowermost story, is ninety-five feet from the ground, or just two diameters in height; the second is fifty-three feet farther up, the third forty feet farther. The fourth story is twenty-four feet above the third, and the fifth has a height of twenty-two feet. The whole column is just five diameters in height. Up to the third story the Minar is built of fine red sandstone. From the third balcony to the fifth the building is composed chiefly of white Jeypoor marble. The interior is of the gray rose-quartz stone. The ascent is by a spiral staircase of three hundred and seventy-six steps to the balcony of the fifth story, and thence are three more steps to the top of the present stone-work. Inside it is roomy enough, and full of openings for the admission of light and air. The steps are almost ‘lady-steps,’ and the ascent is quite easy. The ferruginous sandstone has been well selected to lend a rich, majestic appearance to the column. The surface of that material seems to have deepened in reddish tint by exposure for ages to the oxygen of the atmosphere. The white marble of the upper stories sits like a tasteful
crown upon the red stone; and the graceful bells sculptured in the balconies are like a ‘cummerbund’ around the waist of the majestic tower. The lettering on the upper portions has to be made out by using a telescope.” The Kootub does not stand now in all the integrity of its original structure. It was struck by lightning, and had to be repaired by the Emperor Feroz Shah in 1368.
In 1503 the Minar happened to be again injured, and was repaired by the orders of Secunder Lodi, the reigning sovereign, a man of great taste and a munificent patron of learning and the arts.
Three hundred years after its reparation by Secunder Lodi, in the year 1803, a severe earthquake seriously injured the pillar, and its dangerous state having been brought to the notice of the British Government on their taking possession of the country, they liberally undertook its repair. These repairs were brought to a close in twenty-five years. The old cupola of Feroz Shah, or of Secunder Lodi, that was standing in 1794, having fallen down, had been substituted by a plain, octagonal red-stone pavilion. To men of artistic taste this had appeared a very unfitting head-piece for the noble column, so it was taken down by the orders of Lord Hardinge in 1847, and the present stone-work put up in its stead. The condemned top now lies on a raised plot of ground in front, as shown resting on the platform on the right-hand side in the engraving.
Now, as to the origin of the Kootub, a subject on which much speculation has been wasted.
Theories professing a Hindoo origin are maintained by one party: theories professing its Mohammedan origin are propounded by the other. The Hindoo party believes the Minar to have been built by a Hindoo prince for his daughter, who wished to worship the rising sun and to view the waters of the Jumna from the top of it every morning. The Mohammedan party repudiates this as an outrageous paradox, and would have the Kootub taken for the unmistakable Mazinah of the Musjeed-i-Kootub-ul-Islam. “No man who sees the Minar can mistake it for a moment to be any other than a thoroughly Mohammedan building—Mohammedan in design, and
Mohammedan in its intents and purposes. The object is at once apparent to the spectator—that of a Mazinah for the Muezzin to call the faithful to prayers. The adjoining mosque, fully corresponding in design, proportion, and execution to the tower, bears one out in such a view of the lofty column, and there is the recorded testimony of Shams-i-raj and Abulfeda to place the fact beyond a doubt.”
In addition to its structure, and the vast mosque near which it stands, and of which it so manifestly forms a part, we have the conclusive fact that the history of the Kootub is written in its own inscriptions. None dares to impeach these records, and the Kootub thus seems to have been commenced in about 1200 A. D., and finished in 1220.
In the “Asiatic Researches” (vol. XIV, p. 481) is given the following translation of the fourth inscription upon the Minar: “The erection of this building was commenced in the glorious time of the great Sultan, the mighty King of kings, the Master of mankind, the Lord of the monarchs of Turkestan, Arabia, and Persia, the Sun of the world and religion, of the faith and of the faithful, the Lord of safety and protection, the heir of the kingdoms of Suliman—Abu Muzefifa Altemsh Nasir Amin ul Momenin.”
Such was the style and title affected by these high and haughty sovereigns of Oriental Mohammedanism when, reveling in pride and power, like Nebuchadnezzar, they looked around at the “great Babylons” which they had built. How little they imagined with what utter desolation their works would be overthrown, to leave behind only a name and a ruin, and that so nearly undistinguishable that men in future ages could only ascertain the shadowy record by making it a special study!
For six hundred and forty-six years has the gigantic Kootub weathered the rude assaults of the elements, and thousands of strangers from distant lands have come to gaze upon the mighty monument of a departed glory and a dying faith. How many, as they have stood in its shadow, have realized that there must be an adequate supernatural cause to account for all this wondrous
decadence and death, which so quietly but effectively, has prostrated its hopes and heaped confusion upon its intentions (despite its boundless wealth, military power, and fierce religious fanaticism) to defend and diffuse its dominating faith! Yet, after all, thus it sinks and thus it dies in its chosen homes.
The instability and the doom that seems ever impending over the institutions and structures raised by the worshipers of Allah, of Vishnu, of Buddha, or the Virgin Mary, come not causeless. They are Heaven's maledictions upon the fearful crime of false religions, which, while they defy God, degrade and dishonor men—cursing their conditions by poverty, miserable homes, and wretched compensation for their toil; wasting their revenues, sinking them in ignorance, destroying their morals, depriving them of liberty, and ruining their souls; till at length, when they have filled up their measure of iniquity, it turns the very centers and cradles of their faiths into the abodes of material or moral ruin, “the hold of every foul spirit, and a cage of every unclean and hateful bird.”
Whether the religion be utterly false or only a perversion of the true, its influence is equally pernicious and manifest. He who runs may read this on its very face in India and in Ireland, in Egypt and Burmah, in Delhi and Rome, in Benares and Mexico; in the Sepoy, the Gazee, and the Jesuit; in Tamerlane, Cesare Borgia, and the Nana Sahib; in Cawnpore, Canton, and St. Bartholomew. All equally evince the direful influence of false religions upon the conditions of men and nations.
On the other hand, the holy, living faith of a divine Jesus regenerates the hearts and the communities which yield themselves to its influence—confers freedom, light, education, equal rights, temporal prosperity, moral purity, domestic joy, and every thing lovely, virtuous, and of good report—rears up the temples of a true Christianity, and, without a stain of decadence upon its bright prospects of final universality, presents no ruins or desolations amid its evangelical conquests or their results.
Those once powerful religions and nations that marched so proudly and resolutely to conquest and ascendency under their
Antichristian banners, and raised their vainglorious monuments on the sites of their cruel victories, and then looked forward to such perpetuity of power and glory—where are they now? “How are the mighty fallen!” How fast they rushed on to their inevitable ruin, while those behind are to-day sinking into the same desolation! And why? Because there were higher laws than their own which they dared to violate—an authority against which they vainly dashed themselves—a power which they had the temerity to oppose, but which, nevertheless, numbered their kingdoms and finished them, by the terrible penalties which they had incurred, and the fearful evidences of which are strewn around in India and so many other localities.
How can these facts and results be understood or explained save on the New Testament assumption that Jehovah Christ has all power in heaven and on earth—that he has a dominion here which he must maintain and vindicate, though earth and hell oppose him, till his enemies are put beneath his feet, and He, the blessed and only Potentate, shall stand at last, amid the overthrow of all opposition, the Conqueror of the world!
“In righteousness he doth judge and make war” upon these enemies of his faith. Before his Holy Word the Veda and the Bana, the Koran and the Missal, must fall. Until that is done he will make good his own awful declaration, that “out of his mouth goeth a sharp sword, that with it he should smite the nations; and he shall rule them with a rod of iron. He treadeth the winepress of the fierceness and wrath of Almighty God, and he hath on his vesture and on his thigh a name written, King of kings and Lord of lords.”
The Kootub Mosque stands deserted; snakes and lizards now crawl in its ruins, amid which the Mazinah yet stands, solitary, grand, and majestic, as though heaven spurned the attempt to rear up and perpetuate a peerless sanctuary, where Moslem blasphemy against the Christ of God might be continually uttered in a grand center toward which all Oriental Islamites might turn, and in which they might glory. God dashed their hopes to pieces like a
potter's vessel, and changed their ambition and glory into a tomb and a ruin.
The unfinished Minar to the right hand has twice the dimensions of the Minar here shown. This column was evidently intended for a second mazinah, without which a Mohammedan mosque is essentially defective.
The second Minar—or Minaret, to use the modern phrase—is considerably larger in the base than the one shown in the engraving. It stands at a proper distance from the first, and was carried up about thirty feet above ground, and then discontinued. Antiquarians have been greatly puzzled to account for the variations from the dimensions of the first and finished one; but it is not necessary to trouble the reader with their theories or debates, as Sleeman's solution has been accepted as highly probable and satisfactory.
His explanation is, that the unfinished minaret was commenced first, but upon too large a scale, and with too small a diminution of the circumference from the base upward. It is two fifths larger than the finished minaret in circumference, and much more perpendicular. Finding these errors, when the builders had gone up with it thirty feet from the ground, the royal founder began the work anew, and on qualified and corrected dimensions, and this is the finished one before the reader. Had he lived he would no doubt have carried up the second minaret in its proper place on the same scale, and so completed his mosque; but his death occurring, and being followed by fearful revolutions—so that five sovereigns sat upon the throne of Delhi in the succeeding ten years—works of peace were suspended in the presence of war, while the succeeding monarchs sought renown in military enterprises, and thus the building of the second minaret was never proceeded with.
The great mosque itself, with that exception, seems to have been completed. Nearly all the arches are still standing in a more or less perfect state. They correspond with the magnificent minaret in design, proportion, and execution, it evidently having been the
intention of the founder to make them all sustain and illustrate the matchless grandeur of the finished work. It was in this condition when Tamerlane invaded India A. D. 1398. That “firebrand of the universe,” as he was called, was so enchanted with the great mosque and its minar that he had a model of it made, which he took back with him, along with all the masons that he could find in Delhi, and it is said that he erected a mosque exactly upon this plan at his capital of Samarcund, before he again left it for the invasion of Syria.
The west face of the quadrangle, in which the minar stands, was formed by eleven large alcoves, the center and greatest of which contained the pulpit.
The court to the eastward is inclosed by a high wall, bordered by arcades formed of pillars carved in the highest style of Hindoo art. Those on the opposite side are dissimilar, and the fair inference is, that the Moslem monarch built his mosque, in part, by materials taken from the great Hindoo temples, which he must have desecrated for the purpose. This was after their fashion, and laid the foundation for those bitter feuds and hatreds of the one people against the other, which have lasted to this day.
Close to the minar are the remains of one of those superb portals, so general in the great works of the Patans. The archway of this gate is sixty feet high, and the ornaments with which it is embellished are cut with the delicacy of a seal engraving, retaining, after the lapse of six hundred years, their sharp, clear outlines.
Few who visit the Kootub, if they have strength for the toilsome ascent, fail to go to the summit, and well does it repay the effort. It is sublime to look up to the unclouded heavens, to which you seem so near, while beneath and beyond, the eye wanders over not merely the city beneath, but across to modern Delhi, with its white and glittering mosques and palaces, the silvery Jumna gently pouring along, the feudal towers of Selimghur, and the mausoleums of Humayun and Sufter Jung, all in the soft light of the India sunset; but what must that view have been when imperial splendors, and cultivation like earthly paradises, or “the
gardens of God,” combined all their wealth of beauty beneath its shadow, and then away as far as the eye could reach on every side!
The writer visited the Kootub, on the last occasion, in 1864, in company with Bishop Thomson. The Bishop's description may be found in his “Oriental Missions,” Vol. I, p. 65. He justly calls the Minar “the grandest column of the world.” It is so. Except the tower of Babel, probably nothing ever erected by human hands has produced the same effect, as one stands awe-struck at its base and gazes up upon its majestic form towering to the skies.
It has not been without its tragic incidents. General Sleeman, writing in 1844, tells us that five years previously, “while the Emperor was on a visit to the tomb of Kootub-ad-deen, an insane man got into his private apartment. The servants were ordered to turn him out. On passing the Minar he ran in, ascended to the top, stood a few moments on the verge, laughing at those who were running after him, and made a spring that enabled him to reach the bottom without touching the sides. An eye-witness told me that he kept his erect position till about half-way down, when he turned over, and continued to turn till he got to the bottom, where his fall made a report like a gun. He was, of course, dashed to pieces.”
Close to the Kootub stands the famous Iron Pillar—the palladium of Hindoo dominion—and which, there is evidence for believing, has stood there for fifteen hundred years.
The Iron Pillar is a solid shaft of mixed metal resembling bronze, upward of sixteen inches in diameter and about sixty feet in length. The greater part of it is under-ground, and that which is above is less than thirty feet high. The ground about it has marks of exca- vation, said to have been carried down to twenty-six feet without reaching the foundation on which the pillar rests, and without loosening it in any degree. The pillar contains about eighty cubic feet of metal, and would probably weigh upward of seventeen tons.
The Iron Pillar, standing nearly in the middle of a grand square,
“records its own history in a deeply-cut Sanscrit inscription of six lines on its western face.” Antiquaries have read the characters, and the pillar has been made out to be “the arm of fame—Kirtibhuja—of Rajah Dhava.” He is stated to have been a worshiper of Vishnu, and a monarch who “had obtained with his own arm an undivided sovereignty on the earth for a long period.” The letters upon the triumphal pillar are called “the typical cuts inflicted on his enemies by his sword, writing his immortal fame.” “It is a pity that posterity can know nothing more of this mighty Rajah Dhava than what is recorded in the meager inscription upon this wonderful relic of antiquity. The characters of the inscription are thought to be the same as those of the Gupta inscriptions, and the success alluded to therein is supposed to have been the assistance which that Rajah had rendered in the downfall of the powerful sovereigns of the Gupta dynasty. The age in which he flourished is, therefore, concluded to have been about the year 319 A. D., the initial point of the Balabhi or Gupta era.”
Antiquarians have tried very earnestly to solve the mystery of this metallic monument. The most probable conclusion is, that it marked the center of the great Rajah's city, and stood in a splendid temple. But on the invasion and conquest of Delhi by the Mohammedan power the Emperor chose that center for his own purposes, and threw his great mosque across the very site of that temple, taking its marble columns for his colonnades, permitting the Iron Pillar to remain, but erecting the Minar near it, forever to dwarf its proportions and interest. But all are alike in ruin now—their rage, contention, and emulation in the dust, while the Pillar and the Minar alone remain.
How little did either the proud Rajah or the fierce Emperor anticipate what a wreck the Ruler of heaven and earth would make of their hopes, and that where they built and embellished, and set forth their glory, would yet be as naked as ruin itself, and that the wild beasts of the forest would howl in their desolate palaces!
That desolation is the more marked, when we remember that very probably, after all these high anticipations, carried out so
despotically, and with the lavish expenditure of such untold millions, this mosque and minar may never have answered, even in a single instance, the purposes for which they were so proudly intended. According to their customs and rules, the mosque would probably not be used till completed. The second minar, being unfinished, would very likely prevent the dedication; so that ere another hand could consummate the great design, the death of the founder, the long and fierce wars that followed, and finally the imperial fickleness which chose the banks of the Jumna, eleven miles away, as the site of new Delhi, leading to the utter forsaking of the grand old city, with all its monuments, temples, mosques, and palaces, consigned the Kootub forever to desolation, and after all left it, very likely, a mosque where no prayer was ever offered, and a minaret from whose lofty summit no muezzin's voice ever called the sons of the Koran to their vain devotions.
Though fifteen hundred years have gone over it, the Iron Pillar shows no sign of decay; it is smooth and clean. The metal of which it is composed was so fused and amalgamated that it defies all oxidation, while the characters engraven upon it remain to-day clear and distinct as when they were first cut by the hand of the engraver.
The great antiquity, the enormous size, and the interesting inscriptions upon the pillar of Rajah Dhava have led to great reverence toward it by all Hindoos, and legends are not wanting to account for its origin and position. One tradition is, that it is the veritable club that great Bheema wielded in the battles of the Mahabharata, and which was left standing there by the Pandus after their contest. But the more popular story is, that it is a pillar so long that it pierced the entire depth of the earth, till it rested on the head of the gigantic snake called Vasuki, who supports the world—that its stability was the palladium of Hindoo dominion in India.
Such were some of the magnificent and unique surroundings of the Mogul Court in 1856; and all this, with much more that might be mentioned, they were then about to risk the possession of in a fearful struggle with the white-faced race.