Humayun had difficulty ruling because he was overly generous to his brothers. He was, sadly, a good human being. Akbar, like his buildings, was a touch too manly. Jahangir was fiercely proud of his connoisseurship. When Mumtaz Mahal died, Shah Jahan cried so much he needed glasses. Listening to Ebba Koch is fascinating and entertaining.
For her, the Mughals seem family. Koch, an art history professor at the University of Vienna, is certainly interested in the history of art but as she begins talking about the Mughals and their artistic predilections, art soon becomes history. Sitting in a cafe on Delhi’s Lodhi Road, so close to the tombs and gardens she knows well, she says, “Very often I find in visual sources, ideas and concepts not expressed in written sources.” Writing in the time of Akbar, a historian had said that by looking at a building, you can see whether an empire is in good order and, more importantly, you can also see the personality of the person who built it.
Koch agrees. Shah Jahan, she argues, suffered because the architecture he preferred was too pretty: “People looked at his buildings as superficial, and historians, as a result, have thought him effeminate.” Even though Shah Jahan has been largely neglected, Koch has for long been trying to give the ruler his due. In 1988, her doctoral thesis was titled Shah Jahan and Orpheus, and now in 2019, she has edited The Mughal Empire from Jahangir to Shah Jahan. Rather than his father, the essayists here are more interested in the “golden age” of Shah Jahan’s 30-year reign (1628-1658).
“Shah Jahan,” Koch says, “supervised the editing and writing of his history on a daily basis.” As a result, becoming a victim of his own propaganda. “He would like us to think that during his rule, Hindustan became a paradise on earth. It was a garden where eternal spring was reigning. This idea that nothing changed later impressed itself on historians.”
Author of The Complete Taj Mahal (2006), Koch can speak at length about the monument’s geometric planning, but then, as if whispering a secret, she says, “For Plato, ideal things exist in a spiritual world. We can only glance at their shadows here. But Shah Jahan creates the ideal on earth to guarantee Mumtaz a similar existence in the other world.” Koch can tell a story. She revises more than just Plato.
(By Shreevatsa Nevatia)
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