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Hunted by the alien scepter and haunted by the specter of Hindu-Muslim unity slogans for a thousand years the teacher-and- writer of Indian history has been unwittingly trapped in to writing wishful, sanctimonious concoctions in suppression of actual facts of history.
Shahjahan, the fifth Moghul was himself a great forger. He got hold of a stooge; his name was Kamgar Khan. Kamgar Khan, at Shahjahan's order, fabricated a concoction of his father, Jehangir's entire chronicle, Jehangirnama; that was because in the original Jehangirnama the father had described his son Shahjahan as a scoundrel and a wretch, a rebel and a traitor. The other well known forgery is a document called the 'Tarikh-i-Taj Mahal' which was supposed to be a title deed given to the caretakers of the tombs in the famous Taj Mahal at Agra. Keene, a British scholar, calls the document a forgery.
Shahjahan alias Prince Khurram was born on January 5, 1592, at Lahore. His mother was a Hindu princess forcibly taken to the Moghul harem in 1586 A.D. She was Jagat Gosaini Jodhabai alias Manmati, the daughter of Raja Udaisingh of Mewar.
A ruffian by nature, Shahjahan refused to be tutored by the plethora of tutors appointed from time to time. His misdeeds of dacoity and arson throughout India, while in revolt against his emperor father Jehangir, made the latter record, in sheer despair and anguish, that his son Shahjahan was a wretch and a scoundrel. How dare any historian ignore the father's estimate of his own son and call the miscreant a noble lover of art and finer things of life, that his reign was a golden period in Indian history?
Keene, a British historian, states that Shahjahan was the first Moghul emperor who murdered all his rivals. He even murdered his own blinded elder brother Khusru in his bed at the dead of night while Khusru was in Shahjahan's protective custody. Shahjahan waged war against his own father Jehangir for three long years and surely would have murdered him too, if ever Jehangir fell in Shahjahan's hands.
At the age of six, Shahjahan suffered from small-pox. He remained pock-marked since then for life. In 1607 A.D. he was betrothed to Arzumand Banu Begam who is believed to be buried in the Taj at Agra. Two years later he was betrothed to an Iranian princess. Since Arzumand Banu was a commoner, the Iranian princess, though betrothed later, was married to Shahjahan in 1610 A.D. while Arzumand Banu was married to him only in 1612 A.D. Shahjahan also married a great granddaughter of Behram Khan. In addition, Shahjahan had 5,000 other mostly Hindu women in his harem.
Author : Shri Purushottam Nagesh Oak
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