HARKING BACK: Jahangir’s missing pavilion and entombed Spaniard

We all know that on the 19th of July, 1932, Lahore was hit by a huge storm and lightning struck the top pavilion of the Hazuri Bagh structure. Its upper storey was badly damaged and the then British administration thought it prudent to do away with the top portion of the pavilion.

Not only were the remains of the damaged portion removed, in the process it was decided that the basement of the Hazuri Bagh pavilion be closed, or better still walled off. So what you see today is just a third of the original structure. But our story is about a deeper mystery, about the origins of the upper storey pavilion. At the Hazuri Bagh site originally existed a small structure called ‘Serai Alamgiri’ built by Emperor Aurangzeb while his beautiful Badshahi Mosque was being constructed. After his death in 1707, the Mughal Empire declined and after a number of Afghan invasions and the battles with Banda Bayragi Bahadar, we see that in 1765 the first Sikh ruling triumvirate of Gujjar Singh, Lehna Singh and Soba Singh take over Lahore. In this ‘Serai Alamgiri’ sat Lehna Singh who spent most of his time smoking opium.

Once Maharajah Ranjit Singh took power from this troika in 1799, he set about consolidating his position. By 1813, he had managed to take possession of the famous ‘Koh-e-Noor’ diamond from Shah Shuja, the exiled Afghan king residing in Haveli Mubarak inside Mochi Gate. An excited Sikh maharajah wanted to celebrate this acquisition by rebuilding the ‘Serai Alamgiri’ in pure marble and he instructed his Minister Fakir Azizuddin to design and lay out a pavilion better than any Mughal structure.

The problem was to find pure white marble. His military commander Jamadar Khushal Singh suggested that a small pavilion that sat atop the mausoleum of Jahangir be removed and be part of a new structure between the mosque and the Alamgiri Gate of the Lahore Fort. A courtier Khalifa Nooruddin, so one account states, managed to dismantle the elegant pavilion atop the mausoleum of the Mughal Emperor Jahangir. The design of the new pavilion at Hazuri Bagh incorporated the white marble pavilion removed from Shahdara.

A huge quantity of white marble from Jahangir’s mausoleum as also that of the nearby Asaf Khan, especially those with inlaid semi-precious stones, was removed and also used for decorating the Golden Temple at Amritsar. So it was that the two-storey Hazuri Bagh structure, along with a basement for use in very hot weather, came about. I am not sure whether the basement was the same as Aurangzeb’s ‘Serai Alamgiri’ building. This calls for closer examination.

The Hazuri Bagh structure was partly damaged during the Sikh ruler Sher Singh’s struggle for power after the death of Ranjit Singh. But it was in 1932 that the upper pavilion got damaged and was discarded. Just where did the pieces go? Of this there seems to be no record.

But the mystery of the missing pavilion is not about the upper one at Hazuri Bagh, but that this was the second time that this pavilion disappeared. It was the original one atop Jahangir’s mausoleum. What proof is that this was the very same twice missing pavilion?

For this a set of measurements was needed from on top of the existing Hazuri Bagh pavilion, and also from atop the mausoleum of Jahangir. When an expert went to Jahangir’s tomb, he found the base of the missing pavilion still visible. The base was measured. Then at Hazuri Bagh the same measurements were taken. Both the measurements matched in every respect. The placement of the pillars was the same. This makes this highly probable of the Hazuri Bagh upper pavilion being the Jahangir pavilion.

Mind you at this stage it is essential to clarify a tradition of building a dome atop a mausoleum, as it is in the case of all tombs built in the Mughal tradition, influenced heavily by Safavid architecture of Iran. What is amazing is that Emperor Jahangir had strictly forbidden in his lifetime that his mausoleum should not have a dome. The ‘Shah Jahan Nama’ of Inayat Khan, the royal librarian of those days, clearly states this wish of Jahangir. So it was that Noor Jehan built a chamber in which the remains of the emperor rested in a crypt below an exquisite cenotaph very much in the Temurid tradition which Jahangir wished, with a pavilion above instead of a dome. It is a unique structure in the strict Mughal sense, and represents more of a Sufi mystical way of thinking.

The mausoleum construction began in 1627 and took ten years to complete at a cost of Rs1 million. The removal of the pavilion in 1813 saw the first major damage to this masterpiece. Once water started leaking onto the crypt, on considerable Muslim protest Maharajah Ranjit Singh ordered a major repair programme to be started in 1814. But by then the entire mausoleum had been considerably damaged, especially with the upper pavilion missing.

Once essential repair work was completed the Sikh Army camped on the grounds. At this place we see a relatively little known Spanish military officer by the name of Senor Oms, known popularly as ‘Musa Sahib’, come to live inside the mausoleum from 1826 onwards. He had joined the Sikh Army and had raised the initial battalions for Ranjit Singh. He founded the famed ‘Fauj-e-Khas’. The French officers of the Sikh Army did not believe that he was from the south of France, but from Spain. So they kept their distance from him. In a mysterious set of circumstances Senor Oms died of cholera in 1828, and in a further dramatic move the maharajah ordered that the Spaniard be buried inside Jahangir’s mausoleum itself by opening up a side wall. Just exactly where ‘Musa Sahib’ was buried is difficult to locate.

The missing pavilion and the burial of a Spaniard inside the cenotaph added to the mystery and by the early 1880s people started suggesting that a major part of the structure had gone missing. That is the only mention of the pavilion that we see, except for the instructions by Jahangir himself about not having a dome.