Page:The Land of the Veda.djvu/120

110 A few facts in explanation are necessary here. This monarch, Mohammed Suraj-oo-deen, succeeded his father in 1836. The father, at the instigation of one of his wives, the favorite Begum, had done his best to deprive his son of his inheritance, and to have her own son, Mirza Saleem, acknowledged as his successor by the British Government. To this injustice that Government would not consent; so his rights were protected, and he mounted the throne of his ancestors.

The beautiful steel engraving on the opposite page gives a faithful picture of the wife, or, rather, one of the wives, of this old gentleman—the last of “The Great Moguls.” Her name is Zeenat Mahal—the Ornament of the Palace—which was conferred on her when she was married to the Emperor in 1833. She was then sixteen years of age, and he was sixty—a disparity by no means uncommon in a land where polygamy prevails, and where such prejudice exists against marrying a widow, no matter how young or fair she may be. Her sexagenarian husband had other wives than Zeenat Mahal, but the beautiful and ambitious girl soon gained a complete control over the mind and heart of her aged lord, and this was made all the more influential when she had added the claims of a mother to the attractions of a wife.

Then commenced those intrigues, which she carried on up to the year 1856, to secure the succession to the throne for her child, Mirza Jumma Bukht, to the exclusion of Mirza Furruk-oo-deen, the elder son, whose prior claims the English Government recognized and sustained, as in duty bound. Her hostility to British influence, therefore, became intense; and her hopes of gaining her object were identified with the efforts of the Sepoy conspiracy to overthrow the English power in India. Poor lady! she utterly failed; and she and the son for whom every thing was risked are to-day wanderers in a foreign land, with the bitter reflection of the utter desolation which has overwhelmed the dynasty of which she thus became the last empress. She is the daughter of the Rajah of Bhatneer, a territory about one hundred and eighty miles northwest of Delhi.