Dariah Teach MOOC: Digital Scholarly Editions. This file is for exercise only, not to distribute.
Near the Ajmeri Gate lies the old Cobblers’ Bazaar. Most of the Muslim shoemakers who worked here fled to Karachi in 1947, and today the Punjabis who replaced them sell mostly locks and chains and hardware. But a few of the old shopkeepers remain, and among them is the shop of Shamim and Ali Akbar Khan. Despite the position of their workshop, the father of Shamim and Ali was no cobbler; he was one of the most famous calligraphers in Delhi. Shamim continues his father’s trade and still lives by producing beautifully inscribed title deeds, wills and marriage documents.
I met Shamim in a chai shop outside the Ajmeri Gate mosque. He was a tall and elegant man in his early fifties, dressed in an immaculate sherwani frock coat and a tall lambskin cap. He had high cheekbones, fair skin, and narrow, almond-shaped eyes that hinted at a Central Asian ancestry. On his chin he sported a neat goatee beard. He sat down beside me at a table in the rear of the shop and over a glass of masala tea we began to talk. ‘My forebears were writers at the Mughal court,’ said Shamim. ‘And before that we were calligraphers in Samarkand. My family have always been in this business.’ ‘And you illuminate your documents in exactly the way your father taught you?’ ‘My father was a very accomplished man. He knew the shikastah script as well as the nastaliq; he could write both Persian and Urdu. I learned only the nastaliq. Slowly the skills are dying. Today there are only two other calligraphers in Delhi and they are of inferior quality.’
Shah Jehan was forty-seven when he decided to move his court from Agra to Delhi. He had just lost his wife; his children were now grown up. The building of a new city was the middle-aged Emperor’s bid for immortality.
Shah Jehan had himself come to power twelve years earlier after a bloody civil war.
He had been the able but ruthless third son; to seize the throne he had had to rebel
against his father and murder his two elder brothers, their two children, and two
male cousins. Yet while Shah Jehan was capable of bouts of cold-blooded brutality, he
was still the most aesthetically sensitive of all the Mughals. As a boy of fifteen he
had impressed his father, the Emperor Jehangir, with the taste he demonstrated in
redesigning the Imperial apartments in Kabul. As the young Emperor he had rebuilt the
Red Fort
Before her death Mumtaz Mahal had borne Shah Jehan fourteen children; of these, four sons and three daughters survived to adulthood. The eldest was Dara Shukoh - the Glory of Darius.
Manucci, who was employed in Dara Shukoh’s artillery, portrays his patron as a flawed
hero, brave and generous but constantly in danger of being outwitted by his wily
opponents: Prince Dara was a man of dignified manners, of a comely countenance,
polite in conversation, ready and gracious of speech, of extraordinary liberality,
kindly and compassionate,
Prince Aurangzeb, Shah Jehan’s third son, was a very different character from his elder brother. As tough and warlike as Dara was civilized and courtly, he cloaked his ambition in a robe of holy simplicity, affecting the ways of a Muslim dervish. A master of deceit, he learned how to sow distrust and dissent within the ranks of his enemies. He controlled an efficient network of spies: nothing could be said in Delhi without Aurangzeb coming to hear of it. Moreover, he knew the art of poisoning with subtle toxins. Manucci was wary of him, fearing and disliking him in equal proportions.