He lives with pleasure, and he dies with pain’;
and be soft-hearted enough to wish that his father were alive to share with him the delicious mangoes of India. He could procure the murder of Abū-l-faẓl and avow the fact without remorse, and also pity the royal elephants because they shivered in winter when they sprinkled themselves with cold water. ‘I observed this,’ he says, ‘and so I ordered that the water should be heated to the temperature of luke-warm milk.’ And he adds: ‘This was entirely my own idea; nobody had ever thought of it before.’ One good trait in Jahāngīr was his hearty enjoyment of Nature and his love for flowers. Bābar had this also, but he was old, or at least worn out, when he came to India, and he was disgusted by an Indian attempt to poison him, and so his description of India is meagre and splenetic. Jahāngīr, on the other hand, is a true Indian, and dwells delightedly on the charms of Indian flowers, particularises the palās, the bokūl, and the champa, and avows that no fruit of Afghanistan or Central Asia is equal to the mango. He loved, too, to converse with pandits and Hindu ascetics, though he is contemptuous of their avatars, and causes the image of Vishnu as the boar avatar to be broken and flung into the Pushkar lake.
“It is a remark of Hallam’s that the best attribute of Muhammadan princes is a rigorous justice in chastising the offences of others. Of this quality Jahāngīr, in spite of all his weaknesses, had a large share, and even to this day he is spoken of with respect by Muhammadans on account of his love of justice. It is a pathetic circumstance that it was this princely quality which was to some extent the cause of the great affront put upon him by Mahābat K͟hān. Many complaints had been made to Jahāngīr of the oppressions of Mahābat in Bengal, and crowds of suppliants had come to Jahāngīr’s camp. It was his desire to give them redress and to punish Mahābat for his exactions, together with his physical and mental weakness, which led to his capture on the banks of the Jhilam.
“One of the many interesting observations in his Memoirs is his account of an inscription he saw at Hindaun. He says that in the thirteenth year of his reign, as he was marching back to Agra, he found a verse by someone inscribed on the pillar of a pleasure-house on an islet in the lake at Hindaun. He then proceeds to quote it, and it turns out to be one of Omar Khayyam’s! This is FitzGerald’s paraphrase:—
‘For some we loved, the loveliest and the best
That from his vintage Time hath prest,
Have drunk their Cup a Round or two before,
And one by one crept silently to rest.’
“The same quatrain has also been quoted by Badayūnī in his history, and the interesting thing about Jahāngīr’s quotation of it is that he could see the beauty of the verse and at the same time did not know who was the author. There is also an interest in the fact that the third line contains a different reading from that given in Whinfield’s edition of the text. Hindaun is in the Jaipur territory, and one would like to know if the inscription still exists.
“Among other things in Jahāngīr’s Memoirs there is the description of the outbreak of the Plague, given to him by a lady of his court [which has been quoted by Dr. Simpson in his book upon Plague], and there is a very full account of Kashmir, which is considerably superior to that in the Āyīn Akbarī, which Sir Walter Lawrence has praised.”