When you count Genghis Khan, Tamerlane — or Timur Lang as this part of the world knows him — Babur and Akbar as your ancestors, there’s not much you can do to outshine them to ensure your place in history. Unless, of course, you build the Taj Mahal.
That and the fact that he sired Aurangzeb, one of the most despotic emperors to have ruled Hindustan, ensured that the fifth Mughul emperor Shah Jahan held his own in the pages of Indian history.
Whether that’s true or not is up for discussion, but that’s the opinion one forms from Alex Rutherford’s fifth book in the Empire of Moghul series, The Serpent’s Tooth, which continues from where the last one, The Tainted Throne, left off.
Shah Jahan has finally managed to ascend the throne and is the fifth Mughul emperor. However, even after gaining the throne after years of strife and civil war, his rule is not smooth. The new emperor is kept on his toes with assassination attempts, insurrections in the Deccan and revolting satraps.
Amidst all this the new king tries to fall into a routine, taking solace from the rituals his grandfather Akbar had established in the royal household. But what his entire being is centred around is his love and adoration for his wife Mumtaz. He falls back on her time and again for comfort and reassurance and she is all too happy to provide it. Over the years, the couple’s bond has only become stronger, thanks to their days of strife.
So when Shah Jahan decides to march with all the might of the Mughal Empire to supress a rebellion of the Golconda and Bijapur kings, Mumtaz, pregnant with their seventh child, forces him to take her along. And that becomes her undoing.
At the fag end of the campaign, Mumtaz dies during childbirth. Before dying she makes Shah Jahan promise to build a mausoleum for her that would be unparalleled in the world.
A devastated Shah Jahan returns to Agra and work on the Taj Mahal begins.
The Serpent’s Tooth actually starts gathering steam from here. We see Shah Jahan wallowing in self-pity and despair after Mumtaz’s death, only taking interest in the ongoing work on the Taj. He makes his eldest daughter Jahanara the First Lady of the empire and is happy to relinquish responsibility to her and his eldest son Dara Shukoh, both of whom are close to him.
He does not realise that his other children, Roshanara, Aurangzeb, Shah Shuja, Murad and Gauharara are steadily feeling estranged.
A disastrous campaign to take Samarkand follows where first Murad, then Aurangzeb, whom Shah Jahan appoints as successive commanders, fail miserably.
The rest as we know, is history… literally.
A rebuffed Aurangzeb teams up with his brothers Murad and Shah Shuja and rebels against his father who sends Dara to quell the rebellion. But the united front of the brothers overcomes the imperial forces and Dara is forced to flee. He is betrayed by a trusted ally and is taken prisoner along with his son.
Aurangzeb promptly beheads Dara and proclaims himself emperor, giving the excuse that his father is not fit, physically as well as mentally, to rule. To ensure that there is no competition, he also has Murad thrown into prison on trumped-up charges.
While Rutherford duly dots the I’s and crosses the T’s in The Serpent’s Tooth, as an Indian reader aware of our history, one is left with the feeling that something is missing. We already know about the Taj Mahal, the Peacock Throne and Aurangzeb’s plotting, and would have liked a bit more detail in the book than what our history textbooks tell us. After all, it’s a work of fiction and a bit of added masala would not have been amiss.
If the first book of the series, Raiders from the North, which told the tale of Babur, was an eight out of ten, The Serpant’s Tooth would be a five, that too from a lenient examiner.
After five books, descriptions of the wars, with the same sword-slashing and the almost-getting-killed-but-saved-by-a-lucky-stroke, have become a bit jaded. Rutherford it seems has hit upon a formula which, while fresh and vibrant in the beginning, is fast losing lustre. One can hope that Aurangzeb’s story is faster paced, as it was in real life.
Rutherford’s fictional characters, however, are well sketched. We see a true Rajput hero in Ashok Singh, a commander in the imperial Army, and rejoice when the Englishman Nicholas Ballantyne reappears in this book.
Ballantyne’s character in particular is well fleshed out and his allegiance to Shah Jahan’s family and his platonic affair with Jahanara makes him all the more human. Pity though that he could not play a larger part in the climax of the book.
And while one might argue that the author (Alex Rutherford is actually the pen name for Diana and Michael Preston) wanted to stick to actual facts and real characters as much as possible, full justice has not been done to Shah Jahan.
While he comes across as a weak ruler in the book, in reality his reign was known as the golden period of Mughal rule. The empire increased its boundaries (though Aurangzeb would take it even further), the tax regime and administration were people-friendly and most importantly, Shah Jahan, like his father and grandfather, did not have any issues with other religions, something that would vastly change under Aurangzeb.
He was also a builder par excellence. Other than commissioning the Taj and the Peacock Throne, he built the Red Fort and the Jama Masjid in Delhi and founded Shahjahanabad, which is now Old Delhi. Rutherford, unfortunately, refers to these achievements only in passing.
While there is actually nothing wrong with The Serpent’s Tooth, it is a far cry from the earlier four in the series. Rutherford, however, can be given the benefit of doubt this time and one can only hope that the next one, on Aurangzeb, will be better.
Given the fact that he has already portrayed Aurangzeb as a villain here, it will be interesting to see how the author deals with the next book. After all, a religious fanatic hell-bent on persecuting “non-believers” is a tough person to portray as a hero.