A Lamp for the Dark World, page 11
Akbar was camped outside Mankot, a little north of Multan, on the borders of Hindustan. Bairam Khan had resumed the campaign against Sikandar Suri, who was waging an increasingly hopeless resistance from within the Mankot fort, a grand and solid affair built on four hills by Salim Suri with the express purpose of repelling attacks from across the Indus. After the horrors of Panipat, the Mughals seemed to be taking the siege as an opportunity for showmanship. On the very first day, Maham Anaka’s son, Adham Khan, had made a solo charge at a troop of soldiers from the fort – racing at them, sword in hand, slashing several to the ground ‘in dust and blood’ before making an about-turn and returning to ‘shouts of Bravo!’ Every day, writes Abul Fazl, ‘war-loving . . . men’ followed Adham Khan’s example and made such brash attacks.
It may have been Akbar who told Abul Fazl of these exploits; perhaps he watched them with a mixture of admiration and envy, dying to make heroic dashes himself. No matter how intently he watched the siege, however, he kept one eye on the road to Lahore. Maham Anaka had gone to escort Hamida and the ladies to Mankot from that city. When he heard they were nearby, Akbar left the siege and went to meet them, to ‘mutual rejoicings’.53
The harem brought good luck with them. In summer that year, Sikandar Suri gave up the fight and offered to surrender. Shamsuddin of Ghazni, Akbar’s ataka, went into the fort to negotiate terms: all Sikandar wanted was to retire somewhere in the east. He sent ‘money and goods’ to bolster his case, though not to Akbar, nor even to Bairam, but to Pir Muhammad – some indication, perhaps, of Bairam’s deputy’s rising influence.54 Then, on 24 July 1557, he gave up the keys to the fort and went away to Bihar. The east, Bihar and Bengal, would be the heart of vigorous Afghan resistance to Akbar’s rule for years to come, but it would not feature Sikandar. He died in two years’ time.
The Mughal camp should have been full of joy and bonhomie, the men reunited with their wives, their last real Suri challenger defeated. Instead, bad feeling filled the air.
Much of it was concentrated in Bairam Khan’s tent, where Akbar’s regent was laid up with a painful case of boils. Akbar doesn’t seem to have been very concerned; he was busy fighting his elephants. One day, a particularly lively bout careened its way towards Bairam’s tent – trumpeting animals, cheering spectators, exactly the kind of commotion designed to send an ill man into a rage.
What crime had he committed, Bairam railed to Maham Anaka, that Akbar had let ‘furious elephants . . . loose against my tent?’55
Why would Bairam imagine that Akbar set the fight by his tent on purpose? Both Abul Fazl and the historian Nizamuddin say that gossips and troublemakers put the idea in the regent’s head. Maham tried to ‘quiet his disturbed mind’, says Abul Fazl; Nizamuddin adds that Bairam was not to be soothed. In fact, he insisted that Maham convey his displeasure to Akbar.
Is it possible that Bairam was beginning to tire of the padishah’s veil? Did he feel that Akbar was spending too much time fighting elephants and too little strategizing with Bairam? One day, some years later, Akbar would remind Bairam of how he’d often ‘said . . . that it was time we dealt with affairs of state’.56 Was Bairam’s impatience exacerbated by paranoia, the fears of a Shia Turcoman who had imprisoned a Sunni rival, Abul Ma’ali, and executed a Chagatai nobleman, Tardi Beg? Bairam had every reason to believe that the Chagatai nobility mistrusted him. Munim Khan, Akbar’s ataliq not long ago, was escorting the harem to Hindustan when he heard what Bairam had done to Tardi Beg. Promptly, the cautious khan turned back around. Was Bairam really contemplating a further purge of Akbar’s court? If so, he must have known that his plan would require the young padishah’s deference and that deference was not Akbar’s strong suit.
And what of Akbar? How would he have felt being told off by his regent for a bit of hijinks with elephants?
‘At this time a strange thing happened’, writes Abul Fazl. Akbar, who had once put men in dog leashes for their slackness, ‘began to chafe’ until his indignation ‘broke out into anger’. Shouting let no one dare follow him, not even his ‘grooms and such like persons’, he got on his best horse, Hayran, unequalled for speed, and galloped away.
After a while, Akbar got off, but Hayran, wild and ‘fiery’ like his rider, continued to run, until he was out of sight. Akbar was entirely alone, not even the impatient whinnying of a horse to distract him. Maybe this is what he wanted. A moment away from the unending drumroll of events that had filled his life since Humayun died, a moment away from Bairam’s nagging annoyance and Maham’s solicitous advice. Abul Fazl says that Akbar prayed, ‘communing with his God’.
Time passed. Having left the camp of annoying adults in a rage, Akbar may have begun to wish he hadn’t. Especially now that he had no horse to return upon, Hayran having disappeared across the horizon. He was wondering what to do, beginning to worry, maybe, in his helpless, unaccustomed solitude. Just then, Hayran returned, galloping to Akbar from wherever it is he’d gone to douse his own fury, and coming to a tame halt by his young rider’s side. Akbar ‘mounted the noble animal’, astonished – an astonishment that he must have communicated to his historian, years later, for Abul Fazl’s description of the scene is rather more overwrought (‘to noble discourse of this kind there is no limit!’) than the reunion warrants.
Still, you cannot discount Akbar’s joy at Hayran’s return. Akbar loved animals, and animals can love back in a way that no human can; the wildness of the horse and the fury of the boy may have been like balm to one another. Akbar got back in his saddle and returned to camp, his temper restored. His relationship with Bairam, however, had only suffered the first of many bumps in a long and rocky decline.
Five days after Sikandar Suri surrendered, the victorious Mughal army packed up and went to Lahore. Akbar raced ahead, hunting all the way. Bairam brooded. In Lahore, says Nizamuddin, the regent ‘still harped upon’ the elephant fight – but his suspicions had shifted from Akbar to his ataka, Shamsuddin Muhammad Khan.
Like Bairam, Shamsuddin began his career as a soldier. Unlike Bairam, he had no claim to any kind of name. Bairam descended from a well-known clan of Baharlu Turks; his father was governor of Ghazni under Babur, the very province in which Shamsuddin’s father was a farmer. The class difference is clear in the fact that Abul Fazl doesn’t include Shamsuddin in his list of commanders who came to Hindustan with Humayun; Shamsuddin was part of the retinue, yes, but he came as an attendant, not a warrior.57 The two men did have one thing in common, however: they were both hugely ambitious.
Back on his farm in Ghazni, a twenty-two-year-old Shamsuddin had dreamt of holding the moon in his arms. Following the lucky accident by which he rescued Humayun in Kannauj, the young soldier had gained a place of intimate trust in Humayun’s life. His wife, Jiji, was one of Akbar’s many affectionate anakas – in fact, she had been the first foster mama to hold the newborn. Their son, Aziz, was Akbar’s koka, milk brother, and would remain his friend until the end of Akbar’s life. The padishah was the moon of Shamsuddin’s dreams – and a man who had held Akbar in his arms from infancy would have a far greater hold on his love, and trust, than Bairam could hope for. Might the ataka, then, usurp the regent’s role?
Bairam turned on him. Akbar’s seeming ‘disfavour’ Bairam could only blame on Shamsuddin’s ‘calumnies’. Why, asked Bairam, was Shamsuddin ‘thirsting for my blood’, and turning Akbar against him such that the young emperor would ‘even go so far as to [make an] attempt [on] my life?’
Bairam was a powerful man, and Shamsuddin did not take his melodramatic allegations lightly. He went to Bairam with all his sons and relatives and swore ‘solemn oaths’ of allegiance – he had never spoken ill of the regent, he never would. Finally, Bairam Khan ‘came to his senses’.58
The saga was not yet ended, however. Having complained to Maham and terrified Shamsuddin, Bairam decided to punish Akbar. He confiscated the boy’s beloved elephants, distributing the imperial herd among his own men. Akbar said nothing, and Abul Fazl can’t believe it. ‘Good God! What width of capacity! And what gentleness!’ Not only did the padishah not protest his deprivation, he even rewarded his regent a few months later, marrying him to his cousin, Salima.
Poor Akbar. Was it the loss of his elephants that hurt more, or the realization that in Bairam Khan, now his brother-in-law, he was stuck with a tutor he could neither evade nor dismiss?
And poor Abul Fazl, too, anguished on his emperor’s behalf. Few biographers, even fewer biographers of pre-modern monarchs, can have written at such length, in such detail and with such feeling for their subjects as Abul Fazl of Akbar. And yet, though the Akbarnama and the Ain-i-Akbari deliver, between them, such plentiful detail about Akbar’s life and reign, from the founding myth of Alanqoa to what he fed his best elephants (rice cooked with chillies and cloves was part of the menu), it is maddeningly difficult to get an unhindered view of Akbar himself, wrapped as he is in the blinding embrace of Abul Fazl’s adoration.
Only occasionally can you see him in flesh and blood: a child afraid of the dark, a boy missing his mother, an adolescent in a rage. Now, in the third year of his reign, another glimpse of his character emerges: he was deeply uncomfortable with homosexual love.
Specifically, of the love that Ali Quli Shaibani, the brilliant Uzbek warrior who stole Hemu’s artillery and held his place against Hemu’s elephants, espoused for a beautiful flirt of a man called Shahim Beg.
Ali Quli was one of the great warlords of his age.59 His role in Panipat was second only to that of the anonymous arrow that blinded Hemu (and the arrow was probably shot by one of his troops); thereafter, he played a considerable role in clearing Afghan resistance from Sambhal and Lucknow. It wasn’t just courage Ali Quli possessed, but also considerable flair. In Lucknow, being told mid-meal that 20,000 Afghans were marching at him, Ali Quli finished eating and began a game of chess before he rose to slay the enemy.
Badauni, who relates this anecdote with much admiration, describes Ali Quli’s campaigns as ‘a bright page in the annals of the time’. A later historian, Heinrich Blochmann, goes so far as to say that, after Bairam Khan, it is Ali Quli who deserves credit for ‘the restoration of the Mughal Dynasty’.60 And yet, soon after his impressive victory in Lucknow, the talk at Akbar’s court turned from Ali Quli Shaibani’s sangfroid to his fevered passion for Shahim Beg.
Shahim Beg was a quorchi – part of an elite class of soldiers at the Persian court, where his father held charge of the shah’s camels, for which reason Abul Fazl refers to Shahim, sneeringly, as ‘a camel driver’s son’. Badauni tells the story with more sympathy. Shahim Beg, who had joined Humayun’s court and remained in Akbar’s, was a man of ‘good looks, good disposition, and approved manners’; indeed, he embodied ‘the beau ideal of the age’, and Ali Quli had been smitten by him ever since Humayun’s campaign for Hindustan began.
For a while, Ali Quli contented himself, in the manner of lovers, by writing moony poetry. ‘Who else, as I for love of thee, lives such a weary life?’61 But poetry, no matter how lovelorn, cannot take the beloved’s place, and Ali Quli Shaibani was an intrepid man, after all. He sent a secret delegation to Delhi, where Shahim Beg was in attendance on Akbar, and smuggled his knight away.
Stories of Ali Quli’s ‘wonderful affection’ began to spread: he would call Shahim ‘my king’, and wait on him ‘like an ordinary servant’, remain standing in his lover’s presence. More: Shahim was a pious man, it seems, and to please him, Ali Quli ‘became adorned with scrupulous regard for the Law’ – presumably the sharia – even sending out officers to ‘abolish all wanton and forbidden practices’ in his camp.62
It may seem almost numbingly ironic to modern readers that a man embraced religious law in adoration of his gay lover, but there was clearly no insurmountable contradiction between homosexuality and Islamic piety – not for Shahim Beg and Ali Quli, nor for Badauni, bitter critic though he was of Akbar’s later heresies. Ali Quli was ‘following the manners of Transoxiana’, writes Badauni, as an aside more than a reproach. Love between men wasn’t reprehensible in Central Asia. Babur’s first love was a young man called Baburi, of whom he wrote, ‘I was so bashful that I could not look him in the face.’63 Bairam Khan, too, did not disapprove of Ali Quli’s affections; in fact, he ‘took the part of ’Ali Quli Khan and . . . regarded his lawless acts as unacted’.64
It is Abul Fazl, the progressive to Badauni’s conservative, who bristles at ‘the wicked spirits of Transoxiana’, and at Ali Quli’s temerity in giving ‘this outburst of . . . bestial desire the name of Love’. It is Abul Fazl, too, who records that Akbar sent Ali Quli a letter, inviting him to ‘repent of your deeds and amend your evil-doings’, reinforcing his reproof via ‘a number of brave men’ sent to appropriate fiefs in Ali Quli’s vicinity, and thus keep an eye on him. As it happens, Ali Quli had already assigned one of these fiefs to one of his own men, who did not surrender his claim without a fight.
With battles breaking out in his backyard, and the wild throbbing of his heart shaking the scaffolding of Akbar’s nascent kingdom, Ali Quli sent an emissary to Delhi. This man, one Burj Ali, did not plead his case before Bairam or Akbar. Like Sikandar Suri in Mankot, he approached Pir Muhammad. Bairam Khan’s deputy’s career was careening upwards: he was ‘all powerful’, writes Abul Fazl, and cruel, as Burj Ali would discover.
Pir Muhammad had Ali Quli’s emissary beaten and thrown off a tower. Not content with killing the man, Pir Muhammad made a callous little pun on his name, too; ‘Burj’ means ‘tower’.
A battle and an execution already in its wake, Ali Quli’s love affair was about to enter its final, tragic, act.
Though Abul Fazl insists that ‘the wicked ways of Transoxiana’ are bereft of all worthy emotion, ‘neither consuming nor melting, neither love nor friendship’, few readers will deny that Ali Quli’s love for Shahim possessed such noble qualities, sometimes in too great a measure. At some point, his previously pious knight shifted his affections from God to a dancing girl called Aram Jaan. Aram Jaan was not only ‘very fascinating, and graceful in her movements’, as Badauni puts it, she was also Ali Quli’s wife. But what could the besotted commander do? ‘No one can force the affections of the heart’, writes Badauni, wisely. Ali Quli surrendered his wife to his lover.
Meanwhile, Akbar had decided to drown Ali Quli’s passion in work – an order arrived for the warlord to leave Lucknow and go conquer Jaunpur. Ali Quli obeyed; when he went to Jaunpur, he even sent Shahim Beg away, though not without another poem – ‘The [cold] wind of absence knows no bounds.’ Shahim Beg was to leave, Aram Jaan in tow, and lie low a while in Sarharpur, a fiefdom not too far from Jaunpur. Ali Quli hoped they would be reunited once the ‘wrath of the Emperor . . . abated’.65
Ali Quli might have thought he had it all figured out, but he hadn’t taken his lover’s fickle heart into account. Shahim Beg did go to Sarharpur, but once there he appears to have surrendered both his affection and Aram Jaan to its fief-holder, Abdur Rahman – then demanded her back. When Abdur Rahman refused, Shahim Beg tied him up and ran off with Aram Jaan. They were dallying in amorous if strategically unwise solitude when they were interrupted by Abdur Rahman’s brother, who arrived with a posse of armed men, one of whom killed the faithless knight.
Abdur Rahman hurried to Akbar’s court, hoping to present the whole affair as ‘good service’66 – his own bright idea, that is, to rid the world of Shahim Beg’s intoxicating influence. Ali Quli’s love, meanwhile, had wilted not a jot from Shahim’s faithless behaviour. He was in mourning, and galloping on Abdur Rahman’s heels, having hot words, at the very least, to exchange with the man who murdered his philandering lover. But when it became clear that Abdur Rahman would reach Akbar before Ali Quli caught him, the heartbroken warrior reined in his horse and returned to Jaunpur. Here, he buried the undeserving Shahim Beg by the side of a lake and built a grand tomb for the man who stole his heart. ‘Night put on mourning black, and Morn / Raised a cold sigh, and rent its dress’, writes Badauni. Abul Fazl wastes no time on condoling verses; for him, this was only another example of how resistance to Akbar invited a bad end.
Thus, the ‘insane affair’67 was ended, though neither man tells us what happened to Aram Jaan – that ‘street-walker’, Abul Fazl hisses, ‘that wanton [woman]’. In what may be a painting of the brawl that claimed Shahim Beg’s life, we may imagine her not overly perturbed by the commotion of armed men around her, nor by the spreadeagled form of her lover with an arrow through his chest.68 Perhaps she was glad to have survived the dangerous infatuations of susceptible men and hoped to spend the rest of her life in peaceful obscurity.
And what, meanwhile, of Akbar’s disapproval? Badauni records that the padishah’s ‘wrath knew no bounds’. When love between men was so common that even Badauni’s orthodoxy didn’t blink at it, why should Akbar find it so disturbing? Was it the impropriety of luring away one of his quorchis that galled the padishah? The theory might be credible, if it weren’t for the fact that, soon after the Ali Quli affair began, Akbar had another of his courtiers separated from the young male dancer he had taken as companion. This courtier, Shahquli Khan, was so dismayed at his love being locked away that he ‘set fire to his name . . . put on the dress of [a] yogi’69 and retired from the world. A great deal of coaxing was required to bring him back – Bairam Khan even wrote him a ghazal – but the beloved dancer was never returned to him.
It may be pointless to speculate about Akbar’s anachronistic homophobia. Still, there is something intriguing about it, particularly in a man whose male friendships would acquire legendary status – the Akbar and Birbal stories of popular culture, for example. Soon after the unhappy end of Ali Quli’s tale, in the fourth year of Akbar’s reign when he was seventeen, we hear of Akbar holding ‘a wine party’ for the first time.70 Such assemblies would be commonplace in the years to come: Akbar’s would be a garrulous court, and Akbar himself its beating heart. At the moment, however, Akbar was a beardless adolescent surrounded by Central Asian chiefs, each with more experience and clout than the other. Is it beyond belief that Akbar wanted to discourage potential romantic overtures?
