Just So Stories: Parable of the Tub

As a young strong man beloved by his people, so says the guide, the Mughal emperor Humayun (see previous post) slipped in the bathtub (all that marble), cracked his skull and died. This is a good story, immediately vivid and sympathetic for certain audiences. It comments on the leveling power of death, which comes even to emperors who command the universe, which they are always having to extend or reconquer. In the hands of my guide, a cheerleader for India’s rising middle class, himself a proud member, it’s a very middle class story.

By that I mean it’s a cautionary, unheroic tale with a little schadenfreude thrown in, not of death in battle, or from heartbreak or assassination by relatives, or martyrdom, but from the impersonal treachery of aspirational domesticity: marble tubs that, regardless of their private status as evidence that you are somebody, reach out and grab you if you do not possess the attentive foresight (non-slip bath mats!) that is central to middle class virtue. Even if you do.

Humayun, mystic and astrologist as well as emperor, carrying the dynastic curse of addiction—-opium, for him--somewhat unfairly tagged as the non-achiever of the dynastic line, slipped (say the scholars) descending the stairs of his observatory in Delhi. Here’s how Wikipedia tells it (also more colorfully than the scholarly sources, but at least it references them):

On March 4, 1556, Humayun, his arms full of books, was descending the staircase from his library when the muezzin announced the Adhan (the call to prayer). It was his habit, wherever he heard the summons, to bow his knee in holy reverence. Kneeling, he caught his foot in his robe, tumbled down several steps and hit his temple on a rugged stone edge. He died three days later.

This is a more remote and scholarly death, certainly not the right reward for piety. If the steps in Purana Qila were anything like those to the tomb, treacherously slick in the rain the other day, I’m not surprised. Given that 16th century males might have been generally no taller than me, those were big high steps with not much tread. Akbar, his successor, was 13.