|
Page2
But the very climax of this eerie finale was that Ghulam Kadir summoned a painter post-haste to do an instant, on-the-spot royal command-painting of the horrid scene of his weird triumph in having the emperor Shah Alam II pinned down under him and the frightened imperial women and children dancing attendance on him and his villainous henchmen, in baroque nudity, lest this gala performance be lost to an oblivious posterity. A grotesque kind of sanctity was sought to be imparted to this barbaric horror-drama by both the sides freely quoting from the Koran, swearing on it in solemn aplomb and flamboyantly flaunting it in the face of the other party as Allah's own word for their criminal acts of commission and omission.
What greater irony and curious divineretribution could there be than Allah sending a devil like Ghulam Kadir to make the last Muslim emperor Shah Alam II stew in the juice of tyranny of one of his own co-religionists in symbolic atonement for the horrid atrocities perpetrated by his forbears in Hindusthan for 1,000 long years!
The parade of mini-Moghuls appearing and disappearing like bubbles on the waters of Islamic court politics started after the death of Aurangzeb - the last most powerful, tyrannical and treacherous Moghul, in A.D. 1707.
Aurangzeb had five legitimate sons. The two elder ones were born of Nawab Bai, the daughter of the Raja of Rajauri in Kashmir. The eldest, prince Mohammed Sultan, who had been trained by Aurangzeb in filial perfidy by being deputed to round up all of Aurangzeb's adversaries including emperor Shahjahan, mount guard over them and blind or murder many of them, had died on December 14, 1676 A.D. at the age of 39. Another prince, Akbar (born of Dilras Banu Bagam), had turned a rebel and gone into voluntary exile where he died toward the close of Aurangzeb's reign. So on Aurangzeb's death there were only three legitimate claimants. Prince Muazzam alias Shah Alam (born at Burhanpur on October 14, 1643 A.D. from Nawab Bai) was the eldest among the three. In the inevitable fraternal strife for the throne, he succeeded in murdering his two brothers and seizing the throne following the royal precedent of his Muslim father and Islamic forefathers.
At his death, Aurangzeb had taken care to see that none of his three sons were near him. He was afraid they may make him a prisoner even as Aurangzeb himself had done with his own father Shahjahan. Muazzam, the heir apparent, was in Kabul. Kam Bakhsh, the youngest, was in Bijapur and Azam was in Malwa.
|
