THE HALF SMILEthe Emperor ordered her to be buried alive. She was accordingly
placed in an upright position at the appointed place, and a wall was
built round with bricks. Salem felt intense remorse at her death, and,
on assuming sovereign authority, had an immense superstruqture
raised over her sepulcher. It is made of a block of pure marble of extra-
ordinary beauty and exquisite workmanship. On the side is the
Persian couplet composed by Jahangir, her royal paramour: Ah! Could
I behold the face of my beloved once more / I would give thanks until
the day of judgement.
The inscription is signed Majnun Saleem Akbar. The inscription
shows how passionately fond Salem had been of Anarkali, and how
deeply her death had grieved him. It is the spontaneous outcome of a
melancholic mind, the irrepressible outburst of an affectionate heart.
The building was until lately used as the Sikh administrative offices,
and later a Protestant Church.^37Like the memory of the two daughters of Dahar, the 1892 depiction
of Anarkali focuses on a transgression between a father and son, which
puts into crisis the succession to the throne. In the development of the
story, the woman's transgression becomes the act in focus, not the
contest between father and son. The smile links the two accounts.
Scholars have pointed out that there is no basis for this story of An-
arkali in Mughal chronicles. Shireen Moosavi disentangles the rumor
to offer the historian's ta-ke. Moosavi names many women who may
possibly be interred in the tomb.^38 Yet Moosavi's interest lies in deter-
mining the•facticity of Anarkali's existence.
But what if we historians shift the focus from the fact of Anarka-
li's existence to the political and social landscape of the time that she
represents? Returning to Moosavi then, we see a list of strong, politi-
cally powerful women who participated in the courts of Akbar and
Jahangir. These women-Akbar's mother Hamida Bano, Salim's wife,
Danyal's mother-who surround "Anarkali" are themselves absent as
historical actors. We have no histories of their presence or of partici-
pation in the politics of the Mughal court.^39 Our scholarly attention
remains on the male conqueror-whether Qasim or Firuz Shah or
Babur or Akbar-and what their individual talent produced or failed
to produce. The material history of Uch, like the material history of
Lahore, belies this historiography.