son of Emperor Jahangir. However, it wasnât until he passed an exquisitely beautiful girl whose stall was filled with silk and glass beads that his attention was caught. Khurram asked the girl the price of the largest of the trinkets, and, in the age-old language of flirtation, she replied it was a precious diamond, one he could not afford. He paid her the fantastic sum of ten thousand rupees and left carrying the glass bead, as well as the heart of the girlâArjumand.
That evening he asked his fatherâs permission to marry Arjumand, the daughter of the prime minister, and the emperor raised his right hand in assent, as his son was his favorite, and as he too was in awe of Arjumandâs dazzling allure. However, the emperor declared that the marriage could not take place for five years, and that his son could not see his intended for that period and would have to first marry another wife, a Persian princess, for political reasons. The emperorâs word was law, and the prince was obliged to wed two times and to carry out his conjugal duties with each one; his unions produced two children.
In 1612, the court astrologers agreed on an auspicious date for the royal union, and the couple, now nineteen and twenty, still madly in love, could finally be together. The emperor arranged for the wedding of the millennium, and he himself adorned his new daughter-in-law with a wedding wreath of pearls. He also changed her name to Mumtaz Mahal, meaning âornament of the palace.â The couple headed the wedding procession, surrounded by the officials of state wearing robes of spun gold, slaves shooing off flies, servants carrying torches, and dervishes reciting from their prayer beads. Behind them followed musicians and dancers, acrobats, exotic animals in cages, slaves, and priests.
The ceremony was a fitting prelude for their gloriously happy union. During their years of marriage, Khurram built Mumtaz Mahal sumptuous palaces, showered her with jewels, ignored his polygamous rights with his two other wives, and even entrusted her with the royal seal. Full-time poets were employed at court to extol the beauty of the empress. However, all was not charmed.
In the Mogul Empire, the throne was not passed down through primogeniture; rather the royal inheritance dictated that the male heirs had to compete with one another for the scepter. This, of course, created fraternal ties similar to the ones shared by Cain and Abel. Upon Emperor Jahangirâs death, a war of succession ignited among his five sons. After years of fighting, during which his brothers all died under highly suspicious circumstances, twenty-five-year-old Prince Khurram was victorious. He was crowned king and given the title Shah Jahan, which translates to âking of the world.â
Because of the shahâs conquests, his empire grew in size, power, and opulence and was the superpower of its epoch. In true megalomaniac fashion, he built monuments to his power. Immediately following his coronation in 1628, he commissioned the creation of a gold-and-jewel-encrusted Peacock Throne. It took seven years to complete and had as its centerpiece the famous Koh-i-Noor diamond, once valued at half the wealth of India. Today, the fabled jewel is among the crown jewels of Queen Elizabeth. Inscribed on the arches of the ceremonial chair were the words If there be paradise on earth, it is here . However, for the shah, paradise did not come from his boundless wealth, but from the queen who was his ever-faithful companion, Mumtaz Mahal.
The shah and the empress loved each other to such an extent that throughout their twenty years of marriage they were inseparable. Not willing to be parted from her husband, she was always willing to forgo the pleasures of their palace for the rigors of his military campaigns. Tragically, on one of these, after giving birth to her fourteenth child in nineteen years, she became seriously ill from complications stemming from the