Was Anarkali buried alive or did she escape? If so, where?

Question

Was Anarkali buried alive or did she escape? If so, where?
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Answer

NO incident in the history of Mughal India enjoys so much popularity as the royal romance of Prince Salim later Jahangir and Anarkali. It is believed that the original name of Anarkali was Nadira or Sharfunnisa and that she received the name or the title of Anarkali literally meaning pomegranate bud for her beauty.brbrThe popular version of the story runs thus. Anarkali was a dancer at the court of Emperor Akbar. The emperors eldest son and heir apparent, Salim, fell in love with her. Akbar did not approve of the relation as the dancer was of lowly birth and hence considered not fit to be the queen of the wouldbe emperor of Hindustan. But the lovers did not pay heed to the emperors disapproval. At last, Anarkali was sentenced to death she was bricked alive in a wall. This basic storyline is variously told with minor variations in detail. However, one may be surprised to note that the name of Anarkali is not even mentioned in the historical details of the period of Akbar or in the memoirs of Jahangir.br brbr Today many historians doubt the authenticity of the story and consider it a mere fabrication.brThe believers in the story mention a tomb in Lahore which is popularly considered to be that of Anarkali. It is situated on the premises of the Punjab Civil Secretariat and now houses the Punjab Records Office. It is an octagonal building covered with a dome. At each corner of the building is an octagonal turret surmounted with a kiosk. In olden times, this building was surrounded by a garden that had at its entrance a doublestoreyed gateway. But no trace of the garden survives now. The building still enshrines a beautifully inscribed monolithic sarcophagus.brbrOn the sarcophagus are inscribed names of Allah and the Persian coupletbrbrTa qayamat shukr goyam kard gar khwish rabrAh! gar man baz beenam rui yar khwish rabrAh ! could I beholdbrthe face of my beloved once morebrI would give thanks unto my GodbrUnto the day of resurrection.brbrOn the northern side of the sarcophagus are inscribed the words Majnun Salim Akbar i.e. quotThe profoundly enamoured Salim son of Akbarquot.brbrThe sarcophagus bears two dates also. The date given in letters as well as in numerals is hijri AD. On the western side of the sarcophagus is another date hijri AD.brbrScholar Ahsan Quraishi mentions one more inscription in the tomb which is said to have been destroyed by General Ventura, the French mercenary fighting for the Sikhs, who used the monument as his residence. The contents of this extinct Persian inscription can be translated as follows quotThe innocent who is murdered mercilessly and who dies after enduring much pain, is a martyr. God considers himher a martyrquot.brbrAlthough the name of Anarkali is not mentioned in any of these inscriptions but on the basis of the contents of these inscriptions, a group of scholars construe that the person buried in the memorial is no other than Anarkali. Of the two dates, the first is believed to be that of the execution of Anarkali and the second one as the date of the erection of the tomb. But this supposition cannot be correct because Akbar was not at Lahore in hijri. He had already left it for Agra in hijri in November . So the story about Anarkali being buried alive by the orders of Akbar cannot be correct.brbrThe earliest writers to report the love affair of Salim were two British travellers William Finch and Edward Terry. William Finch reached Lahore in February only eleven years after the supposed death of Anarkali, to sell the indigo he had purchased at Bayana on behalf of the East India Company. His account, written in early seventeenth century English, gives the following information In the suburbs of the town, a fair monument for Prince Daniyal and his mother, one of the Akbars wives, with whom it is said Prince Salim had a liaison. Upon the notice of the affair, King Akbar caused the lady to be enclosed within a wall of his palace, where she died. The King Jahangir, in token of his love, ordered a magnificent tomb of stone to be built in the midst of a walled foursquare garden provided with a gate. The body of the tomb, the emperor willed to be wrought in work of gold....brbrEdward Terry who visited a few years after William Finch writes that Akbar had threatened to disinherit Jahangir, for his liaison with Anarkali, the emperors most beloved wife. But on his deathbed, Akbar repealed it.brbrBasing his analysis on the above two Britishers accounts, Abraham Eraly, the author of The Last Spring The Lives and Times of the Great Mughals, suspects that there quotseems to have been an oedipal conflict between Akbar and Salim.quot He also considers it probable that the legendary Anarkali was nobody other than the mother of Prince Daniyal.brbrEraly supports his hypothesis by quoting an incident recorded by Abul Fazl, the courthistorian of Akbar. According to the historian, Salim was beaten up one evening by guards of the royal harem of Akbar. The story is that a mad man had wandered into Akbars harem because of the carelessness of the guards. Abul Fazl writes that Salim caught the man but was himself mistaken for the intruder. The emperor arrived upon the scene and was about to strike with his sword when he recognised Salim. Most probably, the intruder was no other than Prince Salim and the story of the mad man was concocted to put a veil on the indecency of the Prince.brbrBut the accounts of the British travellers and consequently the presumption of Eraly is falsified when one comes to know that the mother of prince Daniyal had died in which does not match the dates inscribed on the sarcophagus.brbrAnother scholar, Muhammad Baqir, the author of Lahore Past and Present opines that Anarkali was originally the name of the garden in which the tomb was situated, but with the passage of time, the tomb itself came to be named as that of Anarkalis. This garden is mentioned by Dara Shikoh, the grandson of Jahangir, in his work Sakinat alAuliya, as one of the places where the Saint Hazrat Mian Mir used to sit. Dara also mentions the existence of a tomb in the garden but he does not give it any name.brbrMuhammad Baqir believes that the socalled tomb of Anarkali actually belongs to the lady named or entitled Sahibi Jamal, another wife of Salim and the mother of the Princes second son Sultan Parvez, and a daughter of the noble Zain Khan Koka. This conclusion is also partially faulty. The mother of Sultan Parviz was not a daughter of Zain Khan Koka but the daughter of Khawaja Hasan, the paternal uncle of Zain Khan. Of course, subsequently, the daughter of Zain Khan was also married to Salim, on June , .brbrIt is recorded in Akbar Nama that Jahangir quotbecame violently enamoured of the daughter of Zain Khan Koka. H.M. Akbar was displeased at the impropriety, but he saw that his heart was immoderately affected, he, of necessity, gave his consent.quot The translator of Akbar Nama, H. Beveridge, opines that Akbar objected to the marriage, because the Prince was already married quotto Zain Khans niecequot actually the daughter of paternal uncle of Zain Khan, and hence his sister. Akbar objected to marriages between near relations. But we do not know the date of death of the either of these two wives of Jahangir.brbrNoted arthistorian R. Nath argues that there is no wife of Jahangir on record bearing the name or title of Anarkali to whom the emperor could have built a tomb and dedicated a couplet with a suffix Majnun. He considers it quotabsolutely improbable that the grand Mughal emperor would address his married wife as yar designate himself as majnun and aspire to see her face once again. Had he not seen her enough? Obviously she was not his married wife but only his beloved, to whom he would take the liberty to be romantic and a little poetic too, and it appears to be a case of an unsuccessful romance of a disappointed lover.... The prince could not save her, though it is on record that he was so unhappy with his father in this year that he defied his orders and revolted. It may be recalled that Mehrunissa later Nurjahan Begum was also married to Sher Afgan the same year and the young Prince was so dejected and disturbed on the failure of his two romances and annihilation of his tender feelings of love that he went as far as to defy Akbar.quot