BY LAURENCE BINYON
5 Is there in all history a chapter more full of fascinating interest, from every angle of view, than the story of the Moguls in India. If it were merely a story of invasion and conquest, it would be little memorable. But it is much more than that. It begins as superb adventure, it goes on to the solving of complex problems of government, of the reconciliation of races and religions; it culminates in the gradual consolidation of an empire. At the same time it is the story of a succession of vivid and brilliant personalities: Babur, the adventurous soldier, who swam every river he had to cross, lover of poetry and a poet himself, with his passion for flowers and gardens; Akbar, one of the greatest of all rulers, a man of extraordinary physical strength and courage, a mighty hunter, with sudden fits of tenderness to all creatures, illiterate, yet a lover of literature, deeply interested in religion and finding good in various faiths, far-sighted in resolve to identify himself with the country he had conquered and sharing his government with the Indians; Nur Jahan, the strong, ambitious wife of Jahangir, who in all but name ruled the empire for her pleasure-loving husband; Shah Jahan, the magnificent, who built the Taj Mahal as a tomb for his beloved.
Dara Shakoh, deeply versed in religion and philosophy, but charming and frank in manner; and Aurangzeb, his brother, the superb dissimulator, the great captain and austere fanatic, by whom he met his death.
Simply from the human point of view, as drama on a great scale and a conspicuous stage, this period is of an interest unsurpassed. And no period is more vividly presented to us, alike in personal memoirs written by some of the chief characters or by Europeans who were in India at the time, and in pictorial record.
The story culminates in the closing years of Shah Jahan, when his sons whom he had sent to rule over distant provinces, for fear of their ambition, rose against him and against each other.
It is into the heart of this most dramatic crisis that Madame Butenschon takes us. In choosing the tragic story of Jahanara, the elder daughter of Shah Jahan, she is able to picture to us the succession of terrible events from within. Unable to take an active part in them, Jahanara witnesses all. Proud of her lineage, proud of the splendid achievements of her family, she endures to see her father imprisoned, her beloved brother Dara brought to ignominy and death; the House of Timur, divided against itself, seems to be falling in ruins. And Jahanara, in the midst of these calamities, suffers most from her own secret and unhappy passion. Madame Butenschon communicates to her readers the storms that shake the heart of her heroine, sensitive alike to the beauty of things and persons, to physical and mental agitation, to the glory of the race from which she comes and the ancient grandeurs of the land she now belongs to. Above all we are made to feel, now at a distance, now near, now imminent, the terrible power of a cold, unscrupulous will, as Aurangzeb, throwing off the mask of subservience just at the crucial moment, advances, step by step, over the bodies of his brothers, to seize his father's throne. It is Aurangzeb who dominates the story. Dryden wrote a play on Aurangzeb while that monarch was still alive; but readers of that play get from it little hint of the real story which throbs and burns in the pages of this book.
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