A Teardrop on the Cheek of Time by Diana and Michael Preston

Author:Diana and Michael Preston
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9781446421468
Publisher: Transworld Digital
Published: 2010-12-06T16:00:00+00:00

Ahmednagar finally surrendered at the end of 1630. Abandoned by his former allies, Khan Jahan fled towards the Punjab, but Moghul patrols intercepted and killed him. His severed head was delivered to Shah Jahan at Burhanpur and mounted on the city gates. However, the rest of the campaign did not proceed smoothly. The Deccani rulers retired from the field into their strongholds and the war became a succession of sieges. As a chronicler wrote, ‘The fortresses were strong, the garrisons determined …’ Matters were made worse by the most severe and protracted famine seen in the region for a century. It had started three years earlier and by 1630 extended from the Arabian Sea far inland. The fighting, of course, made the shortages worse. European merchants described ‘desperate multitudes, who setting their lives at nought, care not what they enterprise so they may but purchase means for feeding’. Streets and highways were ‘a woeful spectacle’ filled with ‘dying and dead in great numbers’.

Peter Mundy, who journeyed from the coast to Burhanpur at this time, witnessed people fighting one another for animal excrement from which they hungrily plucked pieces of undigested grain. He saw desperate parents selling their children or even giving them away ‘to any that would take them … so that they might preserve them alive, although they were sure never to see them again’. The sweet stink of death hung in the air. On some nights Mundy could find nowhere to pitch his tent because of the piles of naked, skeletal bodies dragged out of the starving towns and villages, by those who still had strength, and abandoned to the jackals.

Shah Jahan understood the seriousness of the situation, which had even reached the streets of Burhanpur, though its citizens at least had the dwindling waters of the Tapti. His historian recorded: ‘During the past year no rain had fallen … and the drought had been especially severe … dog’s flesh was sold for goat’s flesh, and the pounded bones of the dead [people] were mixed with flour and sold [to make bread] … Destitution at length reached such a pitch that men began to devour each other, and the flesh of a son was preferred to his love.’ To aid his stricken subjects, Shah Jahan remitted taxes and ordered his officials to open feeding stations in Burhanpur and other cities, where bread and broth were doled out to the hungry. He also ordered 5,000 rupees to be distributed among the poor every Monday, ‘that day being distinguished above all others as the day of the Emperor’s accession to the throne’.

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