Harking Back: Mystery of the Portuguese queen and her mosque

Quite a few moons ago I had the pleasure of taking a group of my students to see the Old Walled City of Lahore. With the connivance of my ‘Androon-e-Shehr’ friends we designed an unconventional route that weaved through little known narrow lanes ending with a puzzle for the students.

Official guides follow set-piece routes which to my mind take the fun out of appreciating a very old city. The fun is to make visitors think about a great and ancient city. Visiting any place should be about learning and appreciating it from a people’s point of view. We started from the ‘unavoidable’ Shahi Hammam inside Delhi Gate and after seeing the mosque of Wazir Khan we immediately turned inside the first lane to the left just behind the mosque, or onto Bazaar Kakayzian. This is where the mysteries and the bizarre stories began. Each corner of the labyrinth that is the city has a unique story, a mystery, and a lesson. By the time we ended three hours and 18 stops and stories later, we stood a very exhausted lot at the exquisite mosque of Marium-uz-Zamani.

Almost everyone asked the question: ‘Who was Marium-uz-Zamani?’ Oh, I love telling this one. “Well, a few experts believe she was the real legendary Maharani Jodha Bai”, I set the bait. The look on everyone’s face immediately changed to utter disbelief. So here we have probably Lahore’s oldest mosque, if not its most beautiful, and we have a mysterious story attached to who exactly was Marium-uz-Zamani. The tired students had virtually collapsed on the mosque floor and the ‘qissa-goh’ went on. First about Marium-uz-Zamani and then about her amazing mosque.

“The fact is that Marium-uz-Zamani was the mother of the Emperor Jahangir and one of the several wives of the Emperor Akbar who had converted to Islam. The mystery is who really was given the name Marium-uz-Zamani? Was she a Portuguese woman by the name of Dona Maria Mascarenhas, a beautiful 17-year old woman captured by the Mughal navy off the coast of Gujarat along with her sister Juliana while travelling in a Portuguese naval armada that was hit by a storm? There is documentary proof that she was offered to the 18-year old Akbar by Sultan Bahadar Shah of Gujarat in the year 1562, who immediately married her.

The mystery is that a lot of scholars claim that she was not the Portuguese beauty, but that her real name was Harkha Bai of Jodhpur, a Rajput princess. Another set of scholars believe that her real name was Jodha Bai. Here two sources need to be studied. We know that Abu’l Fazl, as well as Abd-al Qadir Badauni, both royal chroniclers of the ‘Akbarnama’, have not mentioned Harkha Bai, or even Jodha Bai in any document. In those days any alliance with Rajputs was surely a priority for Akbar and mention of such an alliance would have been made. That is why the mystery deepens.

Here we turn to a recent book by Luis de Assis Correia, titled “Portuguese India and Mughal Relations 1510-1735” which claims that Jodha Bai was in fact a Portuguese woman who was added to the Mughal harem and renamed ‘Marium-uz-Zamani’ after converting to Islam after she gave birth to a son named Jahangir. One fact remains irrefutable and that is that Marium-uz-Zamani was Jahangir’s mother. On the eastern gateway is the inscription: “Oh Allah, May the worlds’ conqueror, Badshah Nuruddin Muhammad, shine like the sun and the moon”. It surely was a mother’s prayer.

On the subject of the name Marium-uz-Zamani, we have a comment from the renowned Aligarh University researcher and historian, Dr. Shireen Moosvi, who said: “There is no mention of Jodha Bai in the ‘Akbarnama’. But then the famed historian Dr. Ram Nath of the Rajasthan University says there is no mention of Jodha Bai having wed Akbar in any known source. But then he added: “A ‘mahal’ in Fatehpur Sikri with a Star of David on it is known as being that of Jodha Bai”.

The book by Correia mentions the fact that Akbar, as also Jahangir, both allowed Portuguese Jesuit priests to visit Lahore and even set up a small church made of wood in what we today know as Chowk Taxali Gate. That was burnt down in the last days of Jahangir as the Mughals slowly turned more and more religious. The inference is that Marium-uz-Zamani, the Portuguese, could have influenced the coming of the Portuguese. But then the mystery continues.

Now to the early 17th century mosque. This is in all probability the oldest mosque in Lahore. Its architecture is part Iranian and part Mughal, reflecting the times in which it was built. The central portion is very much in the Iranian ‘Chahar Taq’ tradition, with short domes and wide arches, which has its roots in the Pars province of Iran. Probably the oldest existing structures in the ‘shahar taq’ style are the fire temples of the early Sassanian periods, especially those in Abyaneh, Amol and Nayasar in Iran. Experts attribute this dual tradition style to the transitional times in which it was built.

Originally the mosque had three gateways. Today it has only two thanks to the destructive illegal rim market that came up a few decades ago. They have completely blocked the view from the road, where once existed a beautiful garden in which the mosque stood out.

Located outside Masti Gate, whose name is a corruption of the word ‘masjid’, just opposite the Lahore Fort’s Akbari Gate, the construction started in the year 1611 and continued for four years, with the finest artisans being called from Pars in Iran. Much later the mosque of Wazir Khan inside Delhi Gate, and then still later the Badshahi Mosque, both drew inspiration from the exquisite mosque of Marium-uz-Zamani.

In the period after the death of Aurangzeb in 1707 with growing Sikh insurgency, this mosque was neglected. When Maharajah Ranjit Singh came to power in 1799, he turned it into a gunpowder factory. In those days we read about a ‘Masjid Baroodkhana’ where Dr. Johann Martin Honigberger, the surgeon from Kronstadt, Romania, worked and mixed gunpowder for the Lahore Darbar. Amazingly this name stuck till quite recently. The British restored the mosque to the Muslims of Lahore after taking over in 1849.

The neglect of this masterpiece of Lahore has continued ever since. In 2016 the Walled City of Lahore Authority officially announced that the rim market would be removed. It remains still official intent. Till date no one has been able to remove a single shop. The wrath of the trader-politician class of the walled city is best avoided by relevant officials, and the law does not matter for them.

Of special interest are the beautiful frescoes on the walls of the mosque. The dome is embellished with Mughal frescoes, as are the walls and the balconies and bays. The basic structure has five bays and three arches, with a water fountain in the middle praying courtyard. On the walls are Quranic calligraphic text in a style that is unique to this mosque. There are also Persian sayings depicting the glory of Mughal rulers.

On the northern gateway is a couplet that states that the founder of this structure is Maharani Mariam-uz-Zamani, which resembles paradise. Also over the same gateway is the Persian saying: ‘The faithful in a mosque are as fish are in water.’