03 Sep Four Tombs and a Family Feud: Walking Through Khusro Bagh
An Allahabad garden that tells us something surprising about the Mughals
There are places where history is displayed in museums, behind glass and accompanied by neat labels. And then there are places like Allahabad’s Khusro Bagh, where history lies scattered beneath mango trees and inside magnificent sandstone tombs – and where a quiet afternoon’s walk can overturn some of our assumptions about the Mughal Empire.
Four Mughal tombs that tell us surprising stories: inside Allahabad’s Khusro BaghI visited Khusro Bagh curious about what I would see. And I came away with two thoughts.
The first is that the Mughals were far more Rajput than we tend to remember.
Akbar’s marriage alliances had brought Rajput power into the very heart of the imperial household. So, by the time Jehangir became the Mughal emperor, his mother Harka Bai was a Rajput princess, his wife Man Bai another princess from Amber, and his eldest son Khusro – after whom Khusro Bagh is named – had more Rajput blood in his veins than Timurid.
The second was darker. Being one of the richest and most powerful families on earth did not make the Mughals a particularly happy one. Fathers feared sons, brothers fought brothers, princes rebelled, mothers caught between husbands and children committed suicide, and succession could end in imprisonment and death.
Khusro Bagh contains all of this. And that is what makes the place so fascinating.
Princes, rebellions and suicide: a Mughal family at war
There are four great mausoleums in Khusro Bagh, set amid landscaped lawns and a verdant green orchard.
The largest belongs to Mirza Khusro, Jehangir’s eldest son, whose challenge to his father’s throne ended in defeat, blinding and imprisonment, and eventually, murder.
Nearby lies Khusro’s mother Man Bai, Jehangir’s first wife, who took her own life, after becoming caught in the bitter conflict between husband and son. Between them is another tomb which belongs to Khusro’s sister Nisar Begum.
And then the smallest and most mysterious of them all; the tomb of Bibi Tamolon, whose identity has largely disappeared from history.
I started with Khusro.
The prince who took on his father (and paid the price…)
Here lies Mirza Khusro; the ill-fated Mughal prince who dared take on his fatherI climbed the shallow steps and walked around the tomb’s platform, peering through jaali windows at Khusro’s grave inside, walled off behind a glass protection.
There was almost nobody around – just me and a few young couples, the swish of gardeners’ brooms sweeping fallen leaves and the occasional mournful hoot of a train pulling into nearby Prayagraj station.
It seemed an improbably peaceful resting place for a prince whose life had been anything but peaceful.
Above the doorway, a Mughal Garden translated into paint
A winged Pari or Farishta, a part of Mughal funerary art that symbolizes paradiseBut the greatest surprise for me lay above the tomb’s arched doorways.
Looking up, I could see original paintings from four centuries ago that still survived.
There were floral decorations in browns and green and blue, of vases and cypress trees, almost like a Mughal Garden translated into paint. The most striking image was of a winged celestial figure – a Pari or Farishta – richly dressed and wearing strings of pearls, holding a cup.
Sitting in the quiet hush of the doors, I reflected on the cruel irony of these images of paradise. Because Khusro’s life was anything but the restful and idyllic world painted around his grave.
The unfortunate life of Prince Khusro
Khusro (1587-1622) was Jehangir’s eldest son and Akbar’s favorite grandson and was born with almost everything going for him. Cultured and educated by the finest minds in court, there were even rumors that Akbar preferred the young Khusro as heir over his own son Jehangir.
But Khusro allowed his ambition to get the better of him.
Soon after Jehangir took the throne, Khusro rebelled against his father. On the pretext of visiting Akbar’s grave, he slipped out of Agra, gathered supporters and marched towards Lahore. The rebellion ended disastrously: Khusro was defeated, captured, partially blinded and imprisoned.
Eventually he was placed in the custody of his younger brother and rival, Prince Khurram – the future Shah Jahan. In 1622, Khusro died at Burhanpur. The official explanation was illness, although many believed Khurram had ordered his murder.
But even in death however, Khusro’s story had one final twist.
His body was brought hundreds of kilometers to Allahabad to be buried beside his mother. Reports say that makeshift shrines began appearing in villages where his bier had rested, with local people treating the unfortunate prince as a pir, or saint. An alarmed Jehangir, wanting to avoid the spread of a cult, ordered its suppression.
A mother caught between husband and son
Unmistakably Rajasthani: the tomb of Khusro’s mother Man Bai (Shah Bai)
A short walk away from Khusro lies his mother Man Bai (or Shah Begum), who took her own life in 1603.
Man Bai’s tomb is so very Rajasthani – square and solid, without a dome and crowned instead by a chattri – that I knew it was hers as soon as I saw it.
It was here, standing in the shade of a tree beside Man Bai’s unmistakenly Rajasthani tomb, that both the lessons from Khusro Bagh got cemented in my head.
I didn’t need to read up on history to see the Rajput presence inside the Mughal dynasty. It was standing right there in stone, in front of me.
Man Bai herself could hardly have been better connected. She was the daughter of Raja Bhagwant Das of Amber, sister the great Mughal general Man Singh, the niece of Harka Bai (Akbar’s Rajput wife), wife of Jehangir and mother of a Mughal prince.
Yet all that rank could not protect her from her own family. Caught in the of increasingly bittern conflict between her husband and son, Man Bai committed suicide by overdosing on opium.
Jehangir later recalled in his memoirs…”at a time when I had gone hunting, she in her agitation swallowed a quantity of opium, and quickly passed away. It was as if she had foreseen this behavior of her unworthy son”*.
He remembered fondly that “my first marriage and that at the commencement of my adolescence was with her”. After her death, he wrote, he took neither food nor drink for four days.
Like a family album in stone
At the western end of the garden, slightly apart from the others, is the smallest and perhaps prettiest of Khusro Bagh’s monuments. This elegant domed building, surrounded by a bed of white tiger lilies, is known as the Tomb of Bibi Tamolon.
Mystery surrounds the Tomb of Bibi TamolonBut who was Bibi Tamolon?
Nobody really knows. There is no surviving historical record of her. To add to the mystery, the building has neither any funerary inscriptions nor an actual grave. Which raises the intriguing question – was this even a tomb?
There are different theories. Perhaps Bibi Tamolon was an attendant or companion of Man Bai. Or the building could have been intended for another of Jehangir’s daughters who was eventually buried elsewhere. But nothing is conclusive, and we simply don’t know.
So I ended my exploration of Khusro Bagh at a fitting place. While the rest of the stories of Khusro Bagh – the marriages, ambitions, rebellions, deaths – are so well documented, this last one is the opposite; a monument that survives but the memory of the person behind it a mystery. Let the mystery remain.
How to get here:
Information:
- Parking is available on the road outside
- Entry is free
- Open from sunrise to sunset
Sources:
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- Francisco Pelsaert, Jahangir’s India: The Remonstrantie of Francisco Pelsaert, trans. W. H. Moreland and P. Geyl (Cambridge: W. Heffer & Sons, 1925), pp. 71–72.
- Tuzuk-I–Jahangiri (Memoirs of Jahangir) Vol. I, translated by Alexander Rogers, edited by Henry Beveridge. Published by the Royal Asiatic Society, London, 1909.
