BBC | Treasures of the Indus | The Other Side of the Taj Mahal | S01E02

the indus river is where i started a journey that is taking me thousands of miles deep into the indian subcontinent to which the river gave its name a journey that will help me discover some of its most hidden treasures and reveal secrets from its distant past in the last program i traveled back five millennia in time to the ancient civilization that first grew up on the shores of the indus and explored the lost buddhist culture of northern pakistan now i want to see what happened when the muslim invaders who had occupied modern-day pakistan moved further south and produced an extraordinary flowering of art and architecture and some of the world's greatest treasures [Music] as an art historian and museum curator i've looked after these treasures for most of my life in this series i want to explore their stories and the people who created them [Music] for hundreds of years india was ruled by a foreign empire these invaders came from the north and spread their influence right across this vast land from the peaks of the himalayas to the plains of the punjab to the jungles of central india they were the moguls [Music] the moguls were a race of islamic warrior kings from central asia who were also poets scholars and traders in matters of religion and philosophy they were more progressive and liberal than most european rulers of the time they made some of the world's most beautiful art they presided over advances in science and technology they brought war but also great prosperity freedom at first but later intolerance in modern india the moguls remain controversial the question is did their impact change india for the better or the worse [Music] really come from well my parents are from kolkata but i was born in england so um india is one of my homes yes my ancestral home but being in india always feels like coming home really nice yeah to tell the story of the moguls will take me not just to india where they created an empire but also to pakistan where that empire began the moguls originally came from the mountains of central asia what is now afghanistan and uzbekistan then at the beginning of the 16th century they moved south towards the riches that lay beyond the river indus [Music] in 1526 just as king henry viii began to woo and berlin in england the mogul king babour arrived at the outskirts of the great city of lahore favor had been a king since he was 12 years old he was descended from genghis khan and tamale by 17 he had conquered samarkand and back 22 he had kabul he was 43 by the time he got to lahore and deeply unimpressed with what he found in his diary bubble wrote hindustan is a country of few charms its people are ugly rude and have no artistic talent there are no good horses no good dogs no grapes must melons or first-rate fruits no ice or cold water no good bread or cooked food in the bazaars no hot baths and not even any candlesticks it seemed the only thing that impressed him about india was that it was a large country and there was masses of gold and silver homesick for the ordered beauty they knew in central asia the moguls transformed lahore into a garden city these mogul gardens were nothing like india had seen before they were grand in scale and their emphasis on symmetry and balance was completely new flowing water was as important as greenery it helped to cool the gardens on hot days and showed off the wealth and ingenuity of the new rulers in islam like judaism and christianity paradise is often represented as a garden the creation of beauty and order in these gardens was about more than just making pleasant spaces it was symbolic of the arrival of the moguls by the end of their rule these gardens have been constructed in all major cities and towns throughout india these warriors turned gardens into a symbol of their power [Music] but they also brought gardens and flowers into their buildings together with a sensuous love for the pleasures of life that they had left behind in the valleys of central asia although one pleasure they had brought with them the moguls created exquisite drinking vessels but they had a very complex relationship with alcohol they consumed it publicly and yet it always remained an illicit pleasure babur on the one hand he was descended from the very public drinking culture of genghis khan and on the other he wanted to be a good muslim [Music] knew his drinking was controversial amongst his orthodox muslim army and if he was to continue his invasion further into india he would need to inspire his tired troops particularly if he was to capture the fort here in agra the second capital of hindustan whose sultan was fabulously wealthy a year after he had conquered lahore babour arrived in agra 600 kilometers to the south he now took a vow in front of his men never to drink wine again and also not to trim his beard and he told them that the wall they were engaged with with the hindu kings of india was a holy struggle if we fall in the field we die the death of martyrs if we survive we rise victorious the avengers of allah's sacred calls [Music] he then had his dual encrusted gold and silver drinking goblets destroyed and distributed amongst the poor according to legend barbora's men were deeply moved by his vow and the following day they won a stunning victory over the hindu king [Applause] we know an unusual amount about babur because he detailed both his struggles with alcohol and his conquests in a remarkably frank autobiography [Music] in it he described how once he had crossed the indus he found himself in another world of fakies magicians and exotic animals [Applause] and how india was ruled by a whole set of hindu rajput princes consumed by petty infighting babur's army swept these princes aside to lay the foundations of the mughal empire in northern india but he didn't only bring war he and his successors brought elements of culture and architecture from central asia and this magnificent monument is the earliest example of indo-passionate architecture in mogul india it takes the shapes and forms of central asia and persia in the cusped arches and the domes and marries them with the red sandstone of india and then you have these small flourishes on top of the chatries which is a sanskrit word meaning umbrella the pavilion you see this glistening tile work which is of course reminiscent of the architecture of samakand and other places in central asia so they brought to bear all these different influences and for the first time you see a new kind of architecture in india [Music] babur would only briefly enjoy the new kingdom he had conquered four years after arriving in india he died aged just 47 still homesick for the gardens of central asia and some say the greatest of all the mogul emperors who followed him was his grandson akbar [Applause] [Music] akbar came to the throne early at just 13 and inherited his grandfather's driving ambition and focus [Music] during argbar's rule india became one of the most powerful and richest empires on the face of the earth he expanded it beyond even the vast lands of his grandfather babur one reason for the mogul's startling military success was that they brought their asian skills as fast wheeling horsemen down to the plains of india these descendants of genghis khan often had five times as many cavalry as they did foot soldiers in their army so they could run rings around the slow-moving hindu forces traditionally and given their nomadic roots mogul emperors had lived most of their lives under canvas and were constantly on the move but as his military campaign went from strength to strength akbar could indulge in the luxury of a new more permanent city to rule from here at fatima sikri akbar builds a fabulous pop-up capital out of red sandstone in the middle of nowhere it remains one of the most tantalising and bizarre architectural sites in the whole of india english traders first arrived in the 1580s when elizabeth the first was on the throne back in london lured by tales of its grandeur they had never seen a city so large or magnificent as fatigue in their lives there was nothing in the world like it and certainly not in their own relatively poor nation here courtiers were the finest fabrics dripping in gold and jewels the palaces were cooled by continuous motion of the panka wallers waving peacock feather fans akbar created his own perfumes and had the air centered with precious ambergris and aloe's wood servants burned incense in gold and silver sensors so the sun is setting in this beautiful open courtyard with the central pool with four paths leading to it and a platform for musicians who would have performed usually as the sun was going down and the heat of the day was passing and just up there a viewing gallery for the emperor to get the best view and this whole courtyard would have been filled with the sound of music and dance [Music] all across this palace complex barbour's roving entourage of encampments and tents has now been translated to stone and you have the series of spaced out beautiful pavilions one tradition that the moguls had brought with them from the steps of central asia was a passion for the hunt as a young man akbar kept a thousand cheaters trained for the chase like dogs were in europe north india was rich in wildlife and the mughal emperors built hunting pavilions like this across their domains but it was during one of these hunts that something happened that changed the entire course of agbar's reign hunting was a great sport during the mughal emperor's time and agbar in a hunting lodge much like this one gathered his courtiers who for 10 days drove animals from a circumference of 80 kilometers surrounding this lodge but just at the moment when the hunt was ready all the animals were gathered he stopped because he had an epiphany his biographers described it as an epileptic seizure or some kind of delusion but whatever it was it was a moment of complete change for agbar and he cancelled the hunt one witness described how suddenly all at once a strange state a strong frenzy came upon the emperor and an extraordinary change was manifested in his manner and everyone attributed it to some cause or other but god alone knows such secrets he set the animals free and he declared that none of them were going to be hurt henceforth this strange experience seems to be the turning point in akbar's reign because after this nothing was the same again [Music] after the hunting incident akbar became a much more spiritual man he stopped eating meat shaved his head and started to ask questions of himself and of others in the middle of this whole complex of this magnificent pop-up city called fatimi there is this real conundrum a hall of public audience but architecturally it suggests well it remains enigmatic why because in the middle you've got this central column which is really reminiscent on the one hand of the pillar that you see outside every hindu temple which represents the axis of the universe the cosmic axis if you like um but then it doesn't space doesn't lend itself to conversation because the seating area is up above [Music] there's a theme in persian painting of the treehouse which is a space that's elevated it's actually not public it's private and really there is greater license when you're above the realm of the everyday to engage in the kind of discussions or activities that might not otherwise be allowed as soon as you step up here you get a real sense of course that you're elevated in a rather unusual fashion above the ground there are these very low balconies and wonderful ventilation all around which would make this a fantastic little hideaway in a sense for them from the world for akbar to come up with whomever he pleased to sit and discuss affairs of the heart or state i can imagine akbar sitting here inviting certain people from all four corners to come and join him in the center for intimate conversation it doesn't really give a sense of public audience it's a much more private space it's elevated above the ground and you really get a sense here that you need to be invited up to the emperor's tree house in order to converse with him in the most intimate fashion [Music] for the rest of his 50-year long reign akbar now dedicated himself to the exploration of other religions when the moguls had first arrived in india they found a country of many other religions they smell beautiful hinduism jainism and buddhism all flourished akbar decided he would not try to suppress any of these but rather embrace and encourage them it is this open-mindedness that above all distinguishes agbar from his successes i'm on my way to the sufi shrine of nizamuddin in delhi one of the most important in india it lies at the heart of the labyrinth of narrow alleyways and stalls selling rose petals to scatter on the grave of the saint sufism is a mystical form of islam that believes there are many different pathways to god some stricter interpretations of islam forbid music and dancing entirely but for sufis music is the expression of religious ecstasy [Applause] akbar came to just such a sufi shrine to pray for the birth of a son and heir to the throne it worked he got three and after the hunting incident he became intensely drawn to sufism and its openness to all people and all faiths [Applause] the traditional music still played at sufi shrines like this is called kawali infuses indian music styles with arabic poetry which is why the moguls loved it [Music] as they sought to integrate themselves into their new indian domains akbar looked for other ways to combine islam with elements of hinduism in song in imagery and in architecture [Music] sages gurus and spiritual leaders of all sorts were now welcomed at fatima sikri although they did not always agree giles tillotson has written about how the peculiar architecture of akbar's palace both facilitated and reflected his new tolerance to religions other than islam [Music] according to akbar's court historian abel fazil these discussions had as it were their own institution he describes the discussions taking place in a palace that contained four interlocking rooms with concurrent discussions going on in each and that the emperor used to move from one room to the other to participate right in the discussions as they were continuing as they were taking place exactly yes so how exactly did the discussions go i mean what sort of format did they take well i think actually there's a hint in abel fazil that they didn't always go terribly well i think akbar's hope was that by getting the most learned people from different religions together that he would solve some of the central eternal questions of the universe as it were but to his frustration though perhaps not to our surprise the priests often took entrenched positions and refused to ready to exchange ideas at all so how unusual was it for agba to have such an expansive vision of all these different religions i think this was probably the first time that a muslim court had been so open to the investigation of religious matters from the perspective of other religions around them rather than simply pursuing different schools within islam itself [Music] agbar's new openness to different religions can be seen also in his playful approach to architecture when you encounter some of these buildings as you approach them there is a sort of christmas cake effect where different elements are sort of plonked on top of the other yes it's clearly a design school yes it's a design school that's used to working with certain traditions but very different traditions have have come into the same space and the designers have thought well how can we play with the new material that's available to us in the hope of creating something different the experimental nature of the design is very clear here for example where you have above a line of ornamental niches and then below them this line of dado panels with the the decorated border but these are features that you would normally expect to find on the interior here they're expressed on the exterior of the building it would be rather like in modern terms putting wallpaper on the outside of your house clearly this is meant to be experimental it's playful it's not to be taken entirely seriously they're trying new things out and as with the mixture of motifs from from different sources it's like again to put it in modern day terms like producing a design in photoshop to see whether it works or not but after only 14 years this fantasy city of arcbars was abandoned was impractical some say because there was a shortage of water the other restless agbar moved on leaving fatima secretly like an abandoned las vegas in the desert [Music] despite his many other achievements modern indians often think of akbar as a romantic hero as in this bollywood box office smash jorda agbar about the emperor and jodha a hindu princess it was huge i think it was a big hit mainly because ritik roshan is so cute and and it's very beautiful and both of them really light up the screen there's a scene in which he's waggling a sword and he's he's he's got a bear torso and ashuri is looking at him from behind and she's totally giving him the eye and there is you know you can actually feel you can feel the prison so i think the film did very well essentially because it was it had great music it had these two very lovely looking leads and the fact that they got together really well what has always given the story of akbar and his hindu wife jodah such box office appeal is that this is a west side story of montagues and capulets akbar the muslim emperor marrying a hindu princess a subject that still has controversial resonance in india today and has helped make akbar a talismanic figure in history do you think akbar the historical figure makes a good hero i think he makes a wonderful hero because of the fact of what he did because he had jodha as his wife who was a hindu nobody else before that had actually made one of his prime ranis a hindu and he's he was dead first he stuck to that position despite the kind of the conflict that that happened as a consequence of his act he's he stuck firm to his uh guns and i think it was akbar who gave india india of the medieval era its first taste of what it was like to be a unified country despite the fact that it had all these little you know uh principalities and kingdoms fighting but he really brought it together really unified and celebrated yes because akbar did what he did it became it became a country that it wasn't before [Music] akbar also married hindu and islamic styles in art to great effect he initiated an immense expansion of the imperial studio and recruited artists from all the conquered kingdoms of northern india these brothers can trace their lineage directly down from one of the greatest of the mogul artists who achieved an intense saffron yellow in his paintings with the urine of mango fed cows his descendants still use the same painstaking technique using tiny squirrel hair brushes which can take many months just to finish a single picture [Music] nitin payana is a leading art critic and collector who's an expert on how native rajput painting changed with the arrival of the moguls a sequence of mughal emperors brought artists from the courts of persia and then later developed a school of painting in india by enrolling various artists and made karakanas or factories where they would produce a huge number of paintings and you see slowly but surely in a span of 50 or 100 years paintings moving from styles like this crude styles like this to something like that you still see rajput elements yeah and then you see them really melting away into a painting like that from the state of bikaner which is closely aligned to the mughals yeah and this could be a mughal painting couldn't and look at the hills look at the distance look at the perspective on the buildings and look at the faces if you look at the difference in the faces you couldn't almost you know you can tell who these people are absolutely so as we went along i think it became more and more more and more mughal yeah akbar commissioned his artists to do increasingly ambitious scenes of the spectacle of court life as here where the emperor seen riding an elephant one of his great passions and here akbar is now heroically trying to tame an escaped elephant and this picture exemplifies how the moguls brought a new sense of verve and dynamism to indian art in their use of space and perspective one of the things that really first drew me towards indian art was its completely different conception of space ever since the renaissance in european art there's been this ambition to recreate reality on the canvas to effectively punch a hole through it for indian artists you've got reality in spades so what did they do they made space and they would use as many different viewpoints within a single painting as they needed to tell the story they wanted to tell and those multiple viewpoints were necessary for the stories agbar commissioned large-scale illustrations of court life and history often with scenes of violence or boisterous energy like hunts battles or sieges but under his successes the painting style became more intimate you can start to see individual portraits emerge as in this picture of the most famous mogul emperor of them all agua's grandson who when he came to the throne took the name shah jahan glory of the world patronage of the arts continued under shah jahan and you see the emperor here on his imperial elephant clumping through a very elegant landscape and the devil is really in the detail you can see each of these individually painted flowers here and behind him there are geese flying through the sky and the billowing clouds what's interesting about uh mogul painting is that you have the flatness and the palette of the indigenous rajput courts married with attention to detail in everyday life i mean look at the way the emperor's features are portrayed they're highly naturalistic and then the halo around his head of course comes from the european tradition so the many different influences converging in a single painting [Music] when shah jahan came to the throne mogul architecture changed dramatically all his predecessors had used red sandstone for their buildings as here at the aptly named red fort in agra where generations of mogul emperors had lived so it's a good place to see the spectacular difference when shah jahan decided to build in a new area of the palace he started to cover everything in dazzling white marble [Music] unlike the roving entourage of babor and the outward looking symposium of agbara's court the rituals of mogul india were literally set in stone under shah jahan the architecture it elevated and framed the impossible grandeur of the great [Music] moguls the moguls were really interested in gardens but they weren't only concerned in their formal beauty and in them as spaces for relaxation and enjoyment but also in flora they were great botanists and they famously collected specimens of different flowers and had them painted but what you see here in shah jahan's magnificent private quarters is the transposing of that interest in flora into stone and they used this technique called pietrodura which was then current in renaissance italy so it was absolutely ala mode but made it a very indian experience and using semi-precious stones like lapis carnelian jasper jade and setting them into the marble to create these incredible designs so it wasn't about botanical representation anymore it was about taking that interest and creating something completely new and unique this technique was of course derived from italy but you see it here transposed to a whole new context under the patronage of shah jahan in the nearby city of agra there are still traces of the craftsmanship that was brought to peak under shah jahan's rule although you have to look hard to find it in the busy sprawling streets [Music] [Music] the thing about india that even with the massive boom that's driving its economy today um and throwing up skyscrapers in mumbai and delhi you just need to step back from that for a moment and wander down some of the back streets and find life pretty much unchanged for a large majority of the population and hidden away there you'll find practices crafts techniques that are still cherished just off the maze of back streets is a stone cutters workshop it's a family business that seems to have been going for more generations than anyone is able to remember and they specialize in decorative marble inlay designs are traced out and like some kind of beautiful jigsaw individual elements are crafted to fit the master pattern it's very reminiscent of the emperor's quarters up on the nearby hillside you really get a sense of when the water is applied and the dust is cleaned away these incredible range of colors emerge and how they stand out against the white marble they may not be big on health and safety but it's shown me how incredibly painstaking this work is as they chisel away at these intricate forms and then inlay them with precious stones and how many thousands of man-hours it must have taken to create these fantasy buildings of white marble for shah jahan i first came here when i was about eight years old and i remember how amazed i was then at the sheer amount of white marble a fairy tale wedding cake of a palace and of course they already knew the story of how its builder shah jahan the grandson of agbar and jodhabai had his own passionate love affair a marriage which had its final consummation in one of the most famous buildings in the world like all mogul rulers shah jahan was married to several women at once yet the love of his life was unquestionably mumbas mahal here portrayed with the spring flowers and cherry blossom of kashmir that shah jahan loved so well [Music] sadly in 1631 she died giving birth to their 14th child and shah jahan was so distraught his beard turned white overnight and he kept the course in mourning for over two years he also vowed to build her the greatest monument to love the world has ever seen [Music] so anywhere else this incredible gateway would be a destination in its own right here it serves as a magnificent reveal [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Applause] every time i come here it absolutely takes my breath away rising like a mirage out of the early morning sunshine the taj mahal was built by the finest artisans from across the islamic world stone cutters from balochistan architects from the ottoman empire and calligraphers from persia native indian craftsmen also brought their own cultural influences to bear on the design and detail and in so doing honored the hindus of india as well as the muslims a british poet sir edwin arnold described it as not a piece of architecture as other buildings are but the proud passion of an emperor's love wrought in living stone and it is still largely thought of as a monument to love whenever i come to this place i feel loved so if i sit somewhere by myself i just i can't express my feeling for taj mahal yeah it symbolizes affection and love so that is the main motto of our life so that symbolizes that i mean india is generally known for the taj people from outside come so we thought we must my first visit was invited by mrs gandhi indira gandhi yes yes 1979 this is the building of love a husband build this beautiful building for his beloved wife yeah so we can all live in hope exactly that is the only reason i've come and yes we are very close to it so we should definitely see one of them and as indians yes what do you feel that represents and symbolizes to you i guess it symbolizes life but in thinking of the taj mahal as mainly a monument to love have we completely misunderstood what the moguls were trying to do hi shauna i hope you've had your photograph taken there are certain important rituals in this place absolutely as you can see so there are a number of mythologies that one grows up with when i first came here when i was eight um i was told by a guide that the architect's hands were cut off so that he couldn't reproduce a monument such as this again and i grew up believing that yeah i think of all of all the myths about the charge that is perhaps the most objectionable i mean one can't debunk all of them people will have their myths but that one does seem particularly inappropriate in fact um the architect was busy by the time the building was completed was busy designing the red fort in delhi so he didn't do another taj but another great mogul masterpiece i think it's impossible for us today to approach the monument from any perspective other than that of the legend the famous love story between shah jahan and london we're all told so emphatically that it's a symbol of love that it's impossible to see it in any other light but there's a sense in which i think we have to try to get beyond that to see it more as the mogul saw it not as a symbol of love but as a symbol of paradise recreated on earth sort of thing yes i mean the tomb itself is actually the mansion of the departed soul in paradise and that paradise imagery extends not just to the building but to the whole of the garden the layout of the garden so have the gardens changed since mogul times oh i think very considerably yes a lot of the mature planting that we see now is of much more recent times from contemporary accounts it's clear that the garden originally was mostly occupied by flowering trees and by fruit trees and indeed the the produce was marketed it was collected and sold in the market in order to raise money to pay the salaries of the tomb attendants so really quite pragmatic and sensible yes you had as it were this sort of a form of market gardening if you will [Music] tourists often make the mistake of thinking that the gardens around the taj are just a municipal park to frame the jewel at their center but shah jahan like all his ancestors thought of the moguls as children of the high mountain valleys of his beloved kashmir which he visited every year and these gardens were an attempt to recreate such a paradise on earth for the tomb of his wife [Music] me the taj mahal is often said to be one of the greatest monuments to love and it is without doubt one of the greatest achievements of mogul architecture but while it signals the climax of the mogul empire in some ways it was also the start of its decline and fall you only have to travel a short distance from the tharj to find yourself in another world with ruined mogul buildings abandoned in the countryside these are the old palaces and gardens of mogul nobles stretching for miles up the riverbank they are not protected by the indian government and are simply rotting away [Music] this eerie dilapidated building which today seems only to be home to a swarm of bees was once the home of mumtaz's eunuch and there's this magnificent view of the tharj just across the water there there's actually some graffiti here on the wall which says hindu muslim ginder hail to hindu muslim unity quite appropriate for an old mogul monument the taj mahal is the height of mogul achievement the crowning glory of a great of controversial empire but the taj also marked the beginning of a terrible end shah jahan and monktars had many sons however unlike in europe the eldest son wasn't necessarily the heir and if the strongest son could see his power he too could rule legitimately as any of his brothers shah jahan named his eldest son darashika as his heir there were high hopes for him like his great ancestor akbar darashuka was a progressive tolerant and intellectual man with interests in all world's religions darashrika as you can see is is a pretty dressy kind of guy he's got a little string of pearls across his face he's dressed up in the finest mogul kit all his jammer and he's on horseback he's absolutely dripping in jewels yeah and the contrast between this man settled at court getting on with his dad living his family life reveling in everything that the capital had to offer is in stark contrast to aurangzeb the younger brother orang zeb is hated by his father and this sort of twists him uh he becomes this very a child who is rejected right becomes crabbed in some way and aurangzeb is determined to destroy the existing rulers his father and his obvious heir dara and aurangzeb has the advantage of course because he's been in the field he's been the general yeah he's a puritan he is ruthless he's machiavellian the whole thing is very like in king lear where you have the two sons edgar and edmund and edgar's the beloved son of gloucester sure and and grows up weak and hopeless yeah uh while edmund is the legitimate one who has never given any love but ruthlessness in his position yeah and there's a great shakespearean quality i think in the way that uh these two sons battle it out dara for all the team represents he represents everything that is we find most attractive in the moguls not only is he have exquisite taste does he commission beautiful art is he responsible for extraordinary architecture he also has this wonderfully tolerant attitude inherits from the tradition of akbar yeah and our anxiety is is this tough guy who's had to make his own way who's been ignored by the court ignored by his father and he's frankly fed up and he's frankly fed up and the more that his father and his brother indulge in jewels and manuscript elimination the more he rejects that whole world and yet when it comes to the final battle when orangzeb advances from the deccan with his battle-hardened troops although they are a fraction of the size of the imperial army which darushuko leads into battle the spoiled silly young prince doesn't have to fight a battle and oranguzo but this small crack force makes mincemeat of him our unzerb's war of succession was short and brutal he took his father and brother prisoner killing most of their generals and men he then began planning his coronation to be held here in delhi darashuku was brought back to delhi and paraded through the streets in rags and chains he was sat mockingly on top of an old broken down elephant poison bernier who worked as a doctor in the court of shah jahan witnessed the event [Music] i could not divest myself of the idea that some dreadful execution was about to take place the crowd assembled upon this disgraceful occasion was immense and everywhere i observed the people weeping and lamenting the fate of dara in the most touching language for the indian people have a very tender heart men women and children wailing as if some mighty calamity had happened to themselves aurangzeb was shocked that the people had wept for dara and decided that his brother must be put to death on the 30th of august 1659 he was attacked by four assassins who held him down and hacked off his head barrow's head was brought to our unzip who had to wash the blood away in order to recognize his brother's features then he wept and exclaimed let this shocking sight no longer offend my eyes take away this head and let it be buried and hurt my hands too was buried here in an unmarked grave amongst his ancestors and with him was buried the liberal era of mogul rule [Music] at the end of his life shah jahan was imprisoned here at the red fort by his own son arungzeb and you can imagine how he would have felt looking out at the taj the very monument he built to his beloved mumdas that was later described as a teardrop on the cheek of time our unzip changed the face of mogul rule in india with fire and sword he conquered even more territory for the mughal empire which had nearly doubled in size by the 1700s [Music] the generous treatment of non-muslims which had begun under akbar came to an end it is said that our unzip forced hindus to convert to islam and demolished some hindu temples to symbolize the importance and dominance of islam harangze built the huge bad shahi mosque in lahore positioned opposite the fault to emphasize the unity of islam and power here in delhi too islamic prayer was now a very public and political statement of faith but even though our wrongs have now forbade the use of music and discouraged the arts at his court the mogul influence continued to live on elsewhere in india we've been given privileged access to this exquisite and rare 18th century manuscript from bikini where all the script is in sanskrit it's been handwritten um and it's got this beautiful illustration so it's a real treasure to be able to view this at such close quarters aurangzeb as a more traditional muslim did not patronize the arts in the way that his ancestors had done and the court hotelier dispersed and artists moved away from the royal court to the regional hindu and deccan courts where they began practicing but bringing the skills they had learnt in the mogul courts to the region such as at bikener which is where this manuscript is from and i just found a snakeskin inside which is a traditional conservation technique for deterring termites from eating one's paintings and what's wonderful about this manuscript is that you really see the coming together the joining of the great two great indian traditions of hindu and mogul art such a shiva here sitting on top of mount kailash and the mountains are painted in exactly the tradition of mogul painting and this painting in particular you have a very naturalistic landscape which would sit very comfortably in in a mogul painting as much as it would in a gainsborough with this elegant marble pavilion on the left hand side painted in full perspective and then two shiver yogi's sitting one of them with a halo around his head which again comes from european painting and they're holding audience with one of the princes of bickener who has arrived dressed very simply apart from the crown upon his head it's a great sadness that artistic endeavors like these would not have survived at our enzob's court under his new austerity regime music painting and poetry held no interest for the emperor instead he was a man whose fervent wish was to leave the legacy of a well-ordered islamic state yet his heavy-handed rule led to resentment and ultimately rebellion and unlike his forebears it was a regime that had no room for consensus after almost 50 years on the throne he died and the mughal empire weakened leaving the way clear for india's new conquerors the british during the british empire a far more short-lived one than the moguls the rulers of the raj tried to emulate the grandeur of mogul ambition however the british unlike the muslims never became indian they capitalized on existing tensions between hindus and muslims befriending some communities and fighting others this imperial strategy worked for a while but by dividing and ruling by pursuing a strategy so different from others the british essentially created division in india and applied so much pressure that eventually the country was ripped into [Applause] the prologue to agitation for indian independence caused great tensions between hindus and muslims which resulted in communal riots across india by the time of indian independence in 1947 the liberation from british rule was short-lived as india was brutally split and millions of lives were lost brutalized families were severed as hindus rushed over the border into india and many indian muslims moved north into what was to become the islamic republic of pakistan and the tragedy today is that there hasn't been any public national acknowledgement on either side of the border of the great loss that happened at partition [Music] families were torn apart in my own family on the one hand people had to give up their lands overnight and rush across the border into what's now west bengal and calcutta and the people who were living in kolkata had to give up their lands overnight for the millions of refugees who are coming over the border which they did it's one of the reasons why today indians don't really know what's happening over the border in pakistan and vice versa and the real tragedy of that is that they have an incredible shared history and you can't really understand one country without looking at the other [Music] so i've left india and come back to lahore in pakistan where the mughal empire began to talk to leading journalist ahmed rasheed about the lasting divide left by the mughal emperors so i was interested in what the imprint or historical memory of akbar and orenza is in lahore well it's very very sharp i mean if you if you read the school textbooks which were really um re re-jigged yes by uh the um the the military ruler of pakistan in the 80s who was an islamist he was a great admirer of origame and he saw himself as a kind of aurangzeb type figure remember under him pakistan helped the mujahideen in afghanistan fight the soviets and under him we had this whole revival of the the war in kashmir and the use of extremists in kashmir and a great belief in islamic fundamentalism and going back to the precepts of law and all the rest of it so in fact i mean the real lesson of akbar which we desperately need now in pakistan the the message of tolerance of you know accepting other religions accepting minorities um you know letting them pray as their wish which is of course also the message of muhammad ali jinnah the founder of pakistan in all his most famous speeches he said you know now you can go to your mosques in your temples and your churches and your synagogues and you are free to pray as you like you know all that is unfortunately forgotten and the originator of that was really upbeat for over 300 years the moguls united india and then divided it they gave the country some of its greatest monuments but also cut some of its deepest scars they were often liberal and tolerant but also laid the foundation for a much stricter interpretation of islam even today their legacy is extraordinary controversial as mobile history has become the battleground for a new india as it struggles once again with its religious and cultural identity in the next episode i will be traveling even further down into india to explore the temples of tamil nadu and the exuberant art of the hindu heartland and the final part of treasures of the indus is here on bbc four at the same time next week there's plenty more to come from the india season though stay with us for a little taster next

Channel: JOURNEYS

Views: 113,856

Keywords: India, Pakistan, Indus, BBC, History, Heritage, Lahore, Agra, Taj Mahal, Buddhism, Islam, Mughal, Karachi, Faislabad, New Delhi, Peshawar, Multan, Islamabad, Rawalpindi, Quetta, Sialkot, Hyderabad

Id: 9CJi92Vw63w

Length: 58min 59sec (3539 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 03 2020