Death Of Shahjehan – Excerpts from Sultan Jahan’s Autobiography

The following excerpt is from the book titled “An Account Of My Life” – an autobiography of Sultan Jahan Begum, the twelfth ruler of Bhopal:

Days passed, and my mother’s condition grew steadily worse. A few days before her death she caused the following pathetic notice to be published:

“If there are any among my subjects who, during the thirty-three years of my reign, have received unmerited punishment at my hands, I ask them, in the name of God, to forgive me”.

The people of Bhopal received this last message from their dying ruler with sorrow and sympathy, and there was not one amongst them who did not pray to God that the burden of her afflictions might be lightened. My own emotion as I read the words I will not attempt to describe. I longed for only one sentence more, “I too forgive the faults of others”, and I read and re-read the message in vein hope that I had overlooked it. With such words to support me I could have gone to my mother, and, having won the forgiveness she could no longer have withheld, I could have cheered the last moments of her life with pent-up love of twenty-seven long years. At last as every day brought worse tidings, my anxiety became more than I could bear, and I determined to go to Taj Mahal, let my enemies put what construction they would upon my visit. I set out with my heart full of misgivings. My husband was even more uneasy, and fearing that his presence might stir my mother to anger, and that her sickness might thereby be aggravated, he did not accompany me.

I took with me only Hamidullah Khan, my youngest son. He was then seven years old, and I know not what were the thoughts that filled his childish mind as he passed, for the first time in his life, beneath the gateway of his grandmother’s palace. It was 2 o’clock in the afternoon when we arrived, and the day was intensely hot. Few people were about. I enquired the way from one person after another, and we at length entered the chamber where my mother lay, with a female attendant seated by her side. I approached a few steps and waited, and Hamidullah, in fear and wonder, stood by my side. Her Highness turned her face towards me, but thirteen years of grief and trouble had made some changes in my appearance, and in the subdued light of the sick room she did not recognize me. She asked me who I was, but my fear of her displeasure, and of being sent away from her presence was so great that I made no reply. Again she put the same question, and asked me why did not speak. Still I made no reply, and it was not until the question had been asked a third time, and the attendant spoke my name, that I found my voice, and with clasped hands begged her forgiveness. The fears, which kept me silent, had not been groundless. In a voice in which sorrow and anger were mingled she said, “ Leave me; after my death you may come here” (Hamidullah in a letter to his daughter recalls Shahjehan saying, “Why do you want to hover over my body like vultures? I will soon die and the state will be yours. Let me die in piece”). Seeing I still stood there, she repeated the word even more sternly. This time I did not venture to disobey. It was plain that my presence troubled her, and I returned weeping and with a heavy heart to Sadar Manzil.

Shahjehan died on 6^th June 1901, four months after Queen Victoria. She was buried at the Nishat Afzah Garden