Shadow Princess: A Novel by Sundaresan Indu

Author:Sundaresan, Indu [Sundaresan, Indu]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atria Books
Published: 2010-03-09T00:00:00+00:00

Sixteen

The whole kingdom wears the appearance of a fertile and highly cultivated garden. Villages and hamlets are frequently seen through the luxuriant foliage. . . . The whole ground is enameled with our European flowers . . . with our apple, pear, plum, apricot and walnut trees . . . full of melons, pateques or water melons, water parsnips, red beet, radishes, most of our potherbs, and others with which we are unacquainted.

—ARCHIBALD CONSTABLE (ed.) AND IRVING BROCK (trans.), Travels in the Mogul Empire, by François Bernier A.D. 1656–1668

Kashmir

Wednesday, April 12, 1634

14 Shawwal A.H. 1043

Perhaps if Emperor Babur had seen Kashmir, he would have found his newly acquired empire in Hindustan a little more tolerable and would not have complained quite as much in his memoirs about this harsh, arid land.

Kashmir was the exclusive privilege of kings—a jewel in the crown of the Empire, pure and untouched. Jahanara took a deep breath of the thin and clean air. They were in Srinagar, some five thousand feet above sea level, and for the first few days after their arrival, even though their journey here had been of a slow rising and leisure, they had all been prostrate with shortness of breath and headaches.

They had departed from Lahore a month ago, once news was brought to the court that the mountain passes of the Pir Panjals were cleared of snow and there was no more precipitation to be expected. Their caravan this time, unlike on the trip from Agra to Lahore, had been attenuated into a more manageable number of amirs, their families, the army, and the accompanying merchants. In the beginning, around the time of the conquest of Kashmir by Emperor Akbar in 1585, a smaller court had resided in Srinagar for the summer months with the Emperor, and the reason then was that it was immensely difficult and expensive to journey north for a mere few months and every trip accumulated losses of livestock and human life. But soon, when the bounties of the vale of Kashmir in Srinagar were lauded in the blistering Indo-Gangetic plains, nobles and merchants began crowding into the city with the Emperor, spilling out into the fields, mucking the waters of the lakes, augmenting the rate of crime which the overworked havaldars could not keep track of. So a bailiff was posted at the mouth of the Pir Panjal pass, and every man entering the mountains to journey up into Srinagar had to have a special permission farman granted by the court. The numbers were so tightly controlled that the bailiff would tick off the amir’s name against a sheet of paper he had been given ahead of time and make sure that the person carrying the farman was indeed the person to whom it had been issued.

This was Jahanara’s first visit to Kashmir, for the simple reason that, though her grandfather, Emperor Jahangir, had come here, summer and winter, six times from 1620 until his death in 1627, by the time of the first

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