Page:Studies in Mughal India.djvu/7

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STUDIES IN MUGHAL INDIA.

THE DAILY LIFE OF SHAH JAHAN.

POPULAR VIEW WRONG.

The Mughal palaces at Delhi and Agra every year draw thousands of visitors from far and near. Their beauty and splendour have moved the wonder of the world and the rapture of admiring artists and eloquent writers. The globe-trotter in India gives them the foremost place in his tour programme. Photographs and lantern-slides have made them familiar to far-off lands and home-staying people.

But what is it that the common tourist sees in them? He may feast his eyes on their delicate mosaics and reliefs; he may soothe his spirit in the cool recesses of those pure white domes. But what he looks at is after all stone, bare stone. Does he ever reflect that these halls were once full of life, crowded with all the moving pageants of a Court? Does he try to realise that life of a bygone world, so distant, so unlike his? If so, what is his mental picture of it?

We are afraid that most Europeans still lie under the spell of the popular novelists. With them, all Oriental kings were heartless brainless despots, full of pride and ignorance, surrounded by pimps and sycophants, squeezing the last farthing out of a down-trodden peasantry, and spending their hoards on sensual pleasure or childish show, — who passed their lives in toying with women in the harem, in listening to the fulsome praise

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