Rediscovering a canal digger

Salman Rashid

That the writers of the Shah Jehan Nama were tactfully silent about how the emperor really felt concerning Ali Mardan is understandable. As court historians they could only record what the emperor wished

Outside the railway workshop of Mughalpura on the east side of Lahore, hard by the Grand Trunk Road, there sits a Mughal tomb. Once in the midst of orchards and, according to Kanhaya Lal, the 19th century historian of Lahore, the ‘highest mausoleum in Lahore’, it is now barely visible from anywhere. After British authorities laid out the workshop, the tomb fell in its precincts and is now accessible by a long tunnel.

One of the two sarcophagi in the subterranean chamber holds the remains of Ali Mardan Khan who has been deified by the cunning chowkidars of the Department of Archaeology: they collect the donations for permitting superstitious idiots to revere this man as a saint. Those with pretence of learning bill him as the builder of Shalimar Gardens and a great digger of canals. In reality, Ali Mardan was as fallible as fallible can be.

In the 1630s, this man was the governor of Kandahar on behalf of the Safvid king of Persia. Now, until 1607 Kandahar was a Mughal possession that had been wrested away by Shah Abbas the Safvid. When Shah Abbas died and was replaced on the throne by his grandson Shah Safi, Ali Mardan was the governor at Kandahar. Fearing the paranoid and murderous Shah Safi, Ali Mardan sent a secret message to the Mughal governor at Kabul that were the Persian king to attack Kandahar he would quickly hand over the city to the Mughals.

Not long afterwards Shah Safi did indeed march on Kandahar. Ali Mardan changed sides and Shah Jehan was more than pleased to regain Kandahar that his father had lost to the Safvids. The turncoat was invited to the court at Lahore where, according to the Shah Jehan Nama, he was favoured with the chance of ‘doing obeisance at the foot of the royal throne’. He was also awarded a right royal sum of three hundred thousand rupees as his claimed travel expenses for the journey.

The man wintered in Lahore where he evidently enjoyed the emperor’s ear and when summer approached requested a posting as governor of Kashmir because he ‘was habituated to the climate of Iran and could not endure the burning heat of Hindustan’. A year later he whinged about winter being too harsh in Kashmir. From then on it was summers in Kashmir and winters in Lahore — as governor at both places. No one had it better under Shah Jehan!

Meanwhile, it is very clear that the emperor was beholden no end to Ali Mardan for returning the province of Kandahar to the Mughal crown because gifts from the court flowed liberally. In 1639, two years after he had been enjoying Lahore and Kashmir as best as anyone could, Ali Mardan told the emperor that there was ‘an engineer in his service who possesses eminent skill in the art of constructing canals’. He suggested that a channel be dug from the Ravi where it breaks out of the mountains about a hundred and eighty kilometres away and brought to slake the parched country around Lahore city.

Shah Jehan liked the idea and immediately paid out the one hundred thousand rupees that Ali Mardan demanded as the cost of the project. Work began and what happened next smacks exactly of government outfits in modern Pakistan. In February 1641 with the canal yet unfinished Ali Mardan contrived a transfer to the governorship of Kabul. Shortly afterwards Shah Jehan inspected work on the canal and in anticipation of the water that promised to flow in it ordered the laying out of a garden that was to be one of his most enduring and beautiful gifts to Lahore — the Shalimar Gardens.

Work on the garden began on the twelfth day of June 1641 and this gem was completed in record time of sixteen months. Meanwhile, Ali Mardan’s servants, from time to time, came up with additional demands for funds that amounted in total to another one hundred thousand rupees ‘in order that the water might be made to flow with the required volume.’ But the canal completed ‘under the directions of Ali Mardan Khan’s servants’ stubbornly remained bone dry.

The emperor was miffed and Ali Mardan’s servants were booted out. The Shah Jehan Nama records that these so-called engineers had ‘through bad judgement’ wasted fifty thousand rupees. The chronicle goes on to say that ‘several learned specialists who possessed great engineering skill’ were recruited to design the canal all over again. An altogether new channel thirty-two kos (about 110 kilometres) long, was designed. It should be of great interest that only five kos (some eighteen kilometres) of the original excavation by Ali Mardan’s engineers could be utilised in this new design that eventually brought water to the garden.

Shortly after assigning new engineers to the failed project, Shah Jehan, acting as peculiarly as only kings can, honoured Ali Mardan Khan with the title of Amir ul Umra (Lord of Lords). A few years later, in 1649, the emperor conferred Kashmir as a fief upon this man. From this point on Ali Mardan remained, depending upon the season, either in Lahore or in Kashmir.

Though it does not say so in explicit terms, an objective reading of the Shah Jehan Nama shows that the emperor was somehow not quite sure of Ali Mardan’s faithfulness. His readiness to acquiesce to the various requests by the man was, in all probability, an attempt to keep a dubious ally in good humour. Surely Shah Jehan must have been apprehensive of a piqued Ali Mardan Khan changing sides as he had done in the past and delivering the coveted outlying province of Kabul, and with it Kandahar, into Safvid hands and was constrained to keep the man content.

That the writers of the Shah Jehan Nama were tactfully silent about how the emperor really felt concerning Ali Mardan is understandable. As court historians they could only record what the emperor wished. What is amazing is why later historians, particularly the British, unnecessarily made too much of the man. Long after his death some Raj historian turned rapacious, grabbing Ali Mardan Khan into Shah Jehan’s master architect. A detailed reading would have shown this historian that Ali Mardan was eating highland apricots in Kabul while his factotums aimlessly flogged the earth outside Lahore with their spades. The crown of apotheosis was placed upon his head by modern Pakistan. Those who come to beg him to intercede on their behalf will never believe they are bending their head to the tomb of a highly dubious character.

If the emperor had meant to keep him in good humour, he did it pretty well. Toward the end of his career Ali Mardan was collecting from the treasury a stipend of three million rupees per annum. In April 1657 when he died from dysentery on his way to Kashmir, his total assets were well over ten million rupees!