Part 23 (1/2)

THE HOUSE OF SuR

A.D. 1542 TO A.D. 1554

Sher-khan, the man who, worsting Humayon, seized on the throne, had no atom of royal blood in his veins. He was a plain soldier, though of good birth; but, his father neglecting him, he had run away from home and entered the ranks. A rough-and-ready soldier, too, who, even in Babar's time, had not scrupled to tell a friend that in his opinion it would be no hard task to ”drive these foreign Moghuls from Hindustan; for though the king himself was a man of parts, he trusted too much to his ministers, who were corrupt.”

The friend laughed; but Sher-Khan was right even in his estimate of the king who, curiously enough, singled him out unerringly a few days afterwards, when, at a military banquet, he called for a knife to carve a chicken withal, and, the servant taking no notice of his rough order, immediately drew his dagger and coolly used it with contemptuous disregard for the diversion of his neighbours. Babar's quick eye caught the incident, and he remarked: ”He may be a great man yet; trifles do not disconcert him.”

He does not, however, appear to have been either an amiable or an estimable person, though he was not vicious, and even his successes as a soldier are somewhat too crafty for admiration. He knew well when to attack, when to retreat, and, if imperialist and Rajput accounts are to be trusted, was not over-scrupulous in his use of the white flag.

Then there is no doubt but that a secret understanding existed between him and Humayon's brother Kamran; for on the withdrawal of the latter from Lah.o.r.e, Sher-Shah instantly pounced down on it, and would have captured the fugitive king but for his hasty flight.

He does not in truth appeal to one's sympathies, this Afghan of the House of Sur, though he was by no means without good points. It is, however, impossible to get up much interest in a man who picks a quarrel with an innocent Rajput rajah on the ground that he has Mahomedan women in his harem, and who, after a lengthy siege, induces capitulation by promise of the garrison being allowed to march out with their arms and their property: thereinafter, on the advice of a learned doctor of law (who declared it was a sin to keep faith with infidels), proceeding to surround the brave band and cut them off!

It is satisfactory to learn that they sold their lives dearly. But Sher-Shah continued to be diplomatic. He gained his success against the Rajah of Marwar by a stratagem. Finding himself in a tight place, he forged treasonable correspondence between himself and certain of the Rajput generals, which was then so disposed of as to fall into the generalissimo's hands. The distrust thus sown of his levees' loyalty caused the rajah to give way; and with disastrous results.

The death of this Machiavel in armour was a Nemesis, for it arose in consequence of the Rajah of Kalinjasr's refusal to capitulate, on the ground of Sher-Shah's many treacheries.

In the subsequent mining which became necessary to reduce the fort, Sher-Shah was blown to bits in an explosion of a powder magazine that had not been properly secured.

Despite his treachery, he did much for India in the way of public works. The caravanserais, the wells which still stud the course of the high road from Bengal to the Indus, are of his building; and the very trees which shade the weary traveller in the long marching, if not of his planting, stand in the places of those which he watered with care.

He reigned five years, and left two sons. The elder and rightful heir preferred obscurity to prolonged battle for the crown, and after a while disappeared and was no more heard of, leaving Islam-Shah, or, as he is called by a misp.r.o.nunciation, Salim-Shah, to follow in his father's treacherous footsteps. The most noteworthy event in his reign was the insurrection of the Mahdi sect, led by one Ilahi. The tenets of their faith seem to have been curiously destructive of each other.

Neither their profession of predestination nor their pure socialism prevented them from going about armed, meting out lynch-law to all and sundry whom they deemed to be disobeying any divine law.

They must have been uncomfortable people to deal with, but the faith spread to such alarming proportions, that Salim-Shah finally called a Court of Arches to decide whether ”Ilahi's pertinaciously disrespectful manner to the king was consistent with his situation as a subject, or was enjoined by any precept of the Koran?”

He was subsequently tried on the accusation of presuming to personate the Great Mahdi--for whose advent all pious Mahomedans look--condemned, and refusing to abjure his faith, was brought up for punishment, though at the time suffering from the plague which was then raging. He died under the third lash.

Almost immediately after this, Salim-Shah himself died, when his cousin Mobarik succeeded by a singularly brutal murder. Prince Feroze, Salim-Shah's son, was then twelve years old. His mother, Bibi Bhai, was Mobarik's sister, and devoted to her dissolute, pleasure-loving brother, whose life she had begged of the king. Notwithstanding this, immediately on the latter's death Mobarik entered the harem, tore the wretched boy from his mother's very arms, and killed him with his own hand.

Fraternal affection with a vengeance. His subsequent career was in keeping with this initial act. Sensual to a degree and absolutely illiterate, he set a Hindu usurer called Hemu at the head of affairs, and contented himself with remaining in the harem, and parading the city with pomp, surrounded by a body of archers, whose duty it was to discharge gold-headed arrows worth ten or twelve rupees each amongst the crowd; the scramble for them amusing the jaded satiety of this truly Eastern potentate.

He succeeded in A.D. 1552, and for two years the throne was the centre of a perfect anarchy of revolt.

Hemu, who seems to have had wits, held his own until faced by the returning Humayon, backed by that splendid old Turkoman soldier, Byram Khan. Backed also by the son, whom eleven years before he had left alone with his nurses in the royal camp on the road to Kandahar, and who now--an extremely youthful warrior--won back empire for his father by precipitating an action before the walls of Lah.o.r.e, in which the Moghuls, ”animated by the conduct of that young hero,” seemed to forget that they were mortal.

So ended the usurping dynasty of Sur.

THE WANDERINGS OF A KING

A.D. 1542 TO A.D. 1556

When Humayon and his Queen Hamida-Banu-Begum left the infant Akbar to face fortune by himself, their own hopes for the future were low indeed. Look where they would, there seemed small chance of success.

India itself had practically become independent of Delhi, where the dreamful, opium-drugged king had thought to consolidate his empire by building a new capital. It is curious to mark in that fourteen-mile-long expanse of faintly-broken ground strewn with purple-stained bricks, which stretches between the ma.s.sive ruins about the Kutb Minar to modern Delhi at the foot of the red ridge, how each succeeding dynasty had s.h.i.+fted its ground nearer and nearer the river, until at last it flowed beneath the very walls of the palace which Shah-jahan built, and where his descendant Bahadur-Shah carried on, in 1857, the conspiracy which led at last to the extinction of the Moghul dynasty.

The long fight for Rajputana which had gone on for centuries so that the taking and retaking of its princ.i.p.al forts forms the standing dish of every reign, had for the time ended in temporary independence.

Even at Chitore, Humayon's delay in coming to the rescue of his bracelet-bound sister had been unproductive of result; for the Princess Kurnavati's young son Udai-Singh had escaped, and was now back in his own.