XIX.

A Century of Political Decline: 1707-

1803
*The Struggle for Succession* == *External Threats* ==
*Disintegration of the Empire* == *Cultural Life* == *Shah
Muhammad's Successors* == *Rise of British Power* ==
*Causes of the Mughal Decline*

[[254]] CULTURAL and artistic achievements did not come to an

end with Aurangzeb's death in 1707, and for a century and more, the
Mughals dominated the cultural life of North India. In political life, one
visible sign of the enduring power of the empire was the eagerness of
every usurper of territory to gain recognition from Delhi. Another was that
until 1835, the East India Company, which had become the effective
successor to Mughal power, still minted coins in the emperor's name. In
general, however, the eighteenth century saw a progressive decline in
Mughal political control.

The Struggle for Succession

After Aurangzeb's death, the usual war of succession followed, with

his eldest surviving son, Muazzam, the subedar of Kabul, who was the
first to reach Agra, being successful. He ascended the throne as Bahadur
Shah. A mild and forbearing man, he tackled the problems confronting
him with tolerable competence. Rebellious chieftains in Rajputana
troubled him but were overcome without much difficulty. His longest
campaign was against Banda, a leader of the Sikhs. Govind Singh, the last
Sikh guru, after years of bitter fighting against Aurangzeb, had entered
into friendly relations with Bahadur Shah, accepting the position of
mansabdar in the Mughal army. His assassination in 1708 ended this
period of amity. Govind Singh's successor as temporal leader of the Sikhs
was Banda, who returned to the Punjab declaring he was Guru Govind
Singh miraculously brought back to life. In response to his call for
disciples, many zealous Sikhs assembled and marched in arms to Sonepat,
some twenty-five miles north of Delhi. There the faujdar, who was utterly
unprepared, was routed. This success emboldened Banda. Accompanied
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 by forty thousand [[255]] men he set out to establish his power in the
north. The town of Sadhaura, near Ambala, was captured, and the Muslim
inhabitants were cruelly treated. He then moved against Sirhind, whose
governor, Wazir Khan, was held responsible for the execution of Govind
Singh's children. Banda's army pillaged the city for four days, and the
whole Muslim population was slaughtered.

The situation became so serious that Bahadur Shah himself moved

against Banda, and on December 4, 1710, he forced the evacuation of
Sadhaura. The Sikhs then moved to the strong fort of Lohgarh, where
Banda had issued coins in his own name. Bahadur Shah captured Lohgarh,
but Banda escaped. Sirhind was reoccupied in January, 1711, and Banda
took shelter in the hills.

After a halt at Sirhind, Bahadur Shah moved to Lahore. His stay here
was marked by the one major controversy of his reign. Soon after his
accession to the throne, he had given orders that the title wasi should be
used after the name of Hazrat Ali in the Friday prayers. This usage,
indicating that Ali was the testamentary successor to the Prophet, and
considered by the Sunnis to be a Shia innovation, was bitterly resented.
During his stay in Lahore Bahadur Shah tried to persuade the local ulama
to accept the change, but without success. He then ordered his chief of
artillery to have the new form of prayer recited from the pulpit of the
Badshahi Masjid on April 22, 1711. When he found that a vast crowd,
ready for violent resistance, had gathered in the streets of Lahore, he gave
way and in the end the old form in use in the days of Aurangzeb was
recited. Seven leading ulama of Lahore were sent, however, to the state
prison in the Gwalior fort. The episode indicates the limitations imposed
on the emperor by the ulama, but the punishment given the leaders shows
that resistance, even if successful, could be dangerous.

Bahadur Shah died on February 27, 1712. His favorite son, Azim-
ush-Shan, expected to succeed him, but a powerful general, Zulfiqar
Khan, the son of Aurangzeb's wazir, Azad Khan, formed an alliance with
Azim's three brothers against him. They agreed to partition the empire
among them, with Zulfiqar Khan as their common minister. In the battle
that followed Azim was drowned in the Ravi, and Zulfiqar threw aside the
two youngest princes in favor of the worthless Jahandar [[256]] Shah.
Zulfiqar became the all-powerful minister, and the emperor, infatuated
with his concubine Lal Kunwar and relieved by Zulfiqar from all
responsibilities of the state, spent his time in frivolous amusements.

Disaster was not long in coming. Muhammad Farrukhsiyar, the

second son of Azim-ush-Shan, and deputy governor of Bengal, had not
reconciled himself to Jahandar Shah's enthronement; and when he heard
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 of his father's death, he proclaimed himself emperor at Patna in April,
1712. He interested the two powerful Sayyid brothers, Husain Ali and
Hasan Ali, in his fortunes; and having collected an army, the allies moved
towards the capital. They defeated Jahandar Shah at Samugarh on January
6, 1713. Jahandar Shah fled from the battlefield, hidden in the howda of
Lal Kunwar. Entering Delhi surreptitiously at night, he sought help from
Zulfiqar and Asad Khan. Realizing that Jahandar was of no more use,
Zulfiqar and Asad Khan tried to gain favor with the new power by
imprisoning him. Jahandar was murdered in prison, but Zulfiqar also was
put to death two days later.

Farrukhsiyar's reign (1713–1719) saw a general deterioration in the

power of the central government, but in one area its authority was strongly
asserted. Bahadur Shah had not succeeded in overcoming the menace of
the resurgent power of the Sikhs. Early in his reign, Farrukhsiyar
appointed Abdus Samad Khan as governor of Lahore with instructions to
destroy Banda, who had taken refuge in the hills and used them as a base
for raids on the countryside. Abdus Samad finally penned him up in the
fort of Gurdaspur. Banda's followers offered fanatical resistance, but all
their attempts to escape failed, and the garrison was forced to surrender
unconditionally on December 17, 1715, after an eight-month siege. Banda
was taken to Delhi and put to death. Stern vengeance was wreaked on his
followers, but the peace of the area was ensured for a generation or more.

Farrukhsiyar owed his throne to the Sayyid brothers, and he rewarded

them with the highest offices in the realm. He soon found their power
galling, but a number of ineffectual attempts to get rid of them only
worsened his position. Husain Ali left Delhi in 1715, as viceroy of the
Deccan, but before leaving he warned the emperor that [[257]] if ever his
brother was harassed at Delhi he would promptly return to the capital.
Matters came to a head in 1718 when Hasan Ali, believing he was in
danger, asked his brother to come to Delhi. A peculiarly sinister feature of
Husain Ali's return was that he was accompanied by eleven thousand
Maratha troops as well as by his own army. Maratha support had been
bought for a heavy price—among other concessions, they were promised
one-fourth of the revenue from the Deccan. The emperor was imprisoned
and blinded in February, 1719; two months later he was strangled to death.
Two of the puppets placed on the throne by the king-making Sayyids died
within a year, but a third, Raushan Akhtar, a grandson of Bahadur Shah,
who became emperor in 1719 as Muhammad Shah, reigned for thirty
years. In its duration, his reign recalls that of his great predecessors, but
possibly even they could not have prevented the decline that was now
obvious in the imperial power.

The power of the Sayyids was broken early in the reign of the new
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 emperor when two of the opposing factions at the court, the Irani nobles
and the Turani, formed an alliance against them. Both brothers were killed
in 1720, one by an assassin and the other in battle. For a short time the
wizarat was held by Muhammad Amin Khan, one of the Turani nobles
who had helped overthrow the Sayyids, but after his death in 1721, an
important new figure appeared on the Delhi scene.

This was Chin Qilich Khan, another of the Turani nobles who had
been an enemy of the Sayyids. He is best known in history by his title,
Nizam-ul-Mulk. An able administrator and soldier who had been governor
of the Deccan provinces, Nizam-ul-Mulk was made wazir of the empire in
1722. His experience in the office illustrates the increasing weakness of
the administration and the reason it could not meet the challenges of the
time. His advice to the gay young sovereign to reform the court was not
followed, and his attempts to bring about changes in the administration
were met by obstruction and indifference. He was especially anxious to
stop the farming of imperial revenues, a practice that was diverting much
of the resources that should have come into the central treasury; to
reimpose the jizya; and to eradicate bribery. This call to return to the
austerity of the [[258]] court of Aurangzeb had little chance of being
heeded in Delhi in the eighteenth century, and Nizam-ul-Mulk left Delhi
late in 1723 for Hyderabad. There he established the power which he was
able to transmit to his descendants as the largest of the Indian states.

After Nizam-ul-Mulk's departure from Delhi the Marathas became an

increasingly grave menace to the empire. By 1732 they had partially
occupied Gujarat, had partitioned Bundelkhand, and had temporarily
overrun Mewar in Rajputana. Muhammad Shah moved against them in
1733, but the imperial army never went beyond Faridabad, sixteen miles
south of Delhi. The Marathas continued to advance; and although they
suffered defeats, in 1737 under one of their greatest leaders, Baji Rao I (r.
1720–1740), they reached Delhi itself. They looted the suburbs but when
they heard that the whole Mughal army was approaching the capital, they
retired southwards./1/

It was the Maratha danger that led to the recall of Nizam-ul-Mulk to

Delhi in 1737. He was received by the wazir outside the capital with great
honor, and during the winter months was engaged in a series of
negotiations and skirmishes with Baji Rao and his troops. In return for
concessions in Central India, the Marathas withdrew from the north, but
Nizam-ul-Mulk had scarcely returned to Delhi when a new danger,
invasion from the northwest by Nadir Shah, was threatening the empire.

External Threats

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 In Persia, the ruling Safavid king had been driven out by an Afghan
soldier, whose father had freed Qandahar—long an object of dispute
between the Mughals and the Safavids—from the Persians. He conquered
Herat and Khurasan, and in 1722 occupied Isfahan, the capital. It seemed
likely that Persia would disappear as a state, since the Russians were also
interested in expanding into the area, but a remarkable soldier named
Nadir Quli, acting in the name of the Safavid dynasty, drove out both the
Afghans and the Russians. In 1736 he ascended the throne as Nadir Shah,
and wishing to regain Qandahar from the Afghans, appealed to the
Mughal emperor, Muhammad [[259]] Shah, for assistance. He was
particularly anxious to have the emperor close the border of the Mughal
province of Kabul so that fugitives from Qandahar could not escape him.

Delhi sent favorable replies, but nothing tangible was done to prevent
the Afghans crossing into Kabul, and Nadir Shah sent another envoy to
Muhammad Shah for an explanation. When the envoy could not get an
audience with Muhammad Shah, Nadir Shah began to make preparations
to enter Mughal territory. After defeating the Afghans at Qandahar, he
moved toward Ghazni and Kabul, which he captured in June, 1738. From
there he continued to Peshawar and Lahore, which he occupied in 1739
after minor local resistance. From Lahore he addressed a letter to
Muhammad Shah complaining of gross discourtesy, adding that he was
coming to Delhi to punish the royal counsellors who were responsible for
the insult. Muhammad Shah with a large force marched to stop the invader
at Karnal, but the Indian army (to which Rajput chiefs had refused to send
any contingents) was outmaneuvered. In a skirmish between the Irani
scouts and the fresh troops which were being brought to join the main
Indian army, Burhan-ul-Mulk, the subedar of Oudh, was captured, and
Khan-i-Dauran, the commander-in-chief, was fatally wounded. Although
the main body of the Indian army had not been involved in action, the
battle of Karnal was over, with disastrous results for the Mughal empire.

The catastrophe begun on the battlefield was completed by treachery

and poor statesmanship. Burhan-ul-Mulk, who had been taken to the
Persian camp, persuaded Nadir to leave Muhammad Shah on the throne of
Delhi and to retire from India on payment of an indemnity of twenty
million rupees. Burhan-ul-Mulk hoped, however, to be made commander-
in-chief in place of Khan-i-Dauran, but Muhammad Shah conferred the
office on Nizam-ul-Mulk. Burhan-ul-Mulk was so furious that he now
advised Nadir Shah not to be contented with twenty millions, but to move
on Delhi. The Persian king decided to leave the question of indemnity
open until he reached the capital.

Further suffering was brought about by the rashness of the citizens of

Delhi. Nadir Shah's troops were quartered in different parts of the [[260]]
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 city, when a rumor spread that the Persian king had been assassinated.
This led to a massacre of nearly nine hundred Persian soldiers, who were
moving about unarmed. Nadir took vengeance by ordering a general
massacre of the citizens of Delhi. This continued for a whole day,
resulting in the slaughter of nearly thirty thousand persons. The massacre
stopped by evening, but the looting continued. In addition to the seizure of
Shah Jahan's wonderful Peacock Throne and a large stock of jewelry from
the imperial treasury, levies were imposed on nobles, and the wealthy
citizens were plundered.

On May 16 Nadir Shah retired from Delhi, laden with a greater booty
than any previous conqueror had ever taken. He left Muhammad Shah on
the throne of Delhi, but annexed all territory west of the Indus, including
the province of Kabul. He later stipulated that a sum of twenty lakhs out
of the revenue of four districts of Gujarat, Sialkot, Pasrur, and Aurangabad
(in the Punjab) which had hitherto been reserved for meeting the
administrative cost of the province of Kabul should be paid into the
Persian treasury.

Nadir's defeat of the Indian army and massacre and plunder of the
capital destroyed the prestige of the Mughal government and ruined it
financially. This emboldened the Sikhs and the Marathas, and even the
provincial governors became defiant. Addressing Muhammad Shah in a
letter from Kabul, Nadir Shah had stated that he had occupied his
northwestern territory "purely out of zeal for Islam," so that in case "the
wretches of the Deccan" again moved towards Hindustan, he might "send
an army of victorious Qizilbashes to drive them to the abyss of Hell."/2/
He had, in fact, given a death wound to the Mughal empire.

Nadir's invasion of India was a stunning blow, but after a period of

helpless stupor, Muhammad Shah tried to reorganize his government.
According to contemporary accounts, "the emperor and the nobles turned
to the management of state affairs and gave up all sorts of uncanonical
practices," but this phase was short-lived. Nadir Shah, by his attempts to
influence Muhammad Shah against Nizam-ul-Mulk and to buttress the
influence of the Irani faction, had further [[261]] aggravated the internal
conflicts at the court which had contributed to Mughal weakness.
Muhammad Shah's reign did not, however, close without at least one
victory. In March, 1748, the Mughal army defeated Ahmad Shah Abdali,
who had succeeded to the eastern territories of Nadir Shah's empire, near
Sirhind. This was the last victory the Mughals were to win against a
foreign invader.

Disintegration of the Empire

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 Muhammad Shah died in 1748, a few weeks after this last victory.
His long reign had seen a growing paralysis in imperial power, of which
the most visible symptom was the establishment of hereditary
viceroyalties in the major provinces of the empire. The pattern was one
that had been seen before in India history: as the central power weakened,
either as a cause or a result the outlying provinces assumed independent
status. These states were the administrative units of the Mughal empire,
but they were also the traditional "nuclear" regions of Indian history,
defined by geography, language, and past traditions.

The provincial governors long continued to demonstrate the symbolic

function of the Mughal emperor by their desire to gain his recognition for
their rule, but from the time of Muhammad Shah they sought such
recognition after, not before, their seizure of power. In the Punjab, largely
because of the intervention of external forces from the northwest,
independent kingdoms were not formed in the middle of the eighteenth
century, but elsewhere the process of the disintegration of central authority
was complete. In the Deccan, Oudh, Bengal, and to some extent
Rohilkhand, large principalities over which the central government of
Delhi had only nominal authority came into existence. By depriving the
empire of financial resources, even though they continued to send an
annual tribute to Delhi, and by reducing the possibility of united action,
these kingdoms lessened the chances of the empire's survival when attacks
came from without.

The most important of the new principalities was Hyderabad, made

up of six subas of the Deccan, which at this time had a revenue of sixteen
crores of rupees, compared with seventeen crores from the other twelve
provinces of the Mughal empire. As already noted, the [[262]] founder of
the state was Nizam-ul-Mulk, who had been made viceroy of the Deccan
by Farrukhsiyar in 1714, and wazir of the empire by Muhammad Shah in
1722. On his return to the Deccan in 1724, he began to build up a strong
state, although still offering assistance to the emperor. At his death in
1748, he passed on a well-administered state that continued to be a center
of Muslim culture in the Deccan for two centuries.

In Bengal, power passed into the hands of two remarkable men,

Murshid Quli Khan and Alivardi Khan. Under these able administrators
Bengal was among the most peaceful and prosperous areas of India, and
paid an annual tribute of ten million rupees to the Delhi court.

In the Punjab, the Sikhs used Nadir Shah's invasion in 1739 as an

opportunity to attack Mughal authority; but the able governor, Zakariya
Khan, crushed them. After his death in 1745 the province passed out of
effective Mughal control.
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 Sind does not figure greatly in Mughal history, and authority had
always tended to reside in the hands of local chiefs. The most important of
these belonged to the Kalhara family, descendants of the disciples of a
sixteenth-century spiritual leader. Through the course of the next hundred
years they built up great land holdings, and by the beginning of the
eighteenth century were recognized as governors of a large area of Upper
Sind. Muhammad Shah completed the process in 1736 by conferring on
the chief of the Kalharas a title that acknowledged his control of the whole
province of Sind.

Cultural Life
Against this picture of a disintegrating empire must be set the
undoubted fact that Muhammad Shah's reign was a time of very
considerable cultural activity. Urdu, which had gained admission in the
literary and cultural circles of the metropolis only a few years before the
beginning of Muhammad Shah's reign, was a fully developed literary
language at its end. A new school of music grew up around the Mughal
court, and the names of Sadarang and his brother occupy a high place in
the evolution of khiyal, which was to supersede all [[263]] other varieties
of Hindustani music. Indian dancing, freed from the atmosphere of the
temple, became an art ministering to human pleasure. A new style of
painting, closely related to the rise of Urdu literature, brought fresh vigor
to the tradition of pictorial art./3/ Indian astronomy also reached a new
level of excellence in this period, as indicated by the magnificent
astronomical instruments at Delhi and Ujjain. The creator of these works,
Maharaja Jai Singh of Jaipur, was Muhammad Shah's governor in Malwa
from 1728 to 1734.

Most significant of all the cultural activities of Muhammad Shah's

reign was the beginning of the work of Shah Waliullah (1703–1762), the
greatest Islamic scholar India ever produced. That the political
disintegration of Islamic power in the eighteenth century was not
accompanied by a religious collapse was largely due to his work; and
more than anyone else, he is responsible for the religious regeneration of
Indian Islam.

Shah Waliullah received his training from his father, who as a

theologian, Sufi, and philosopher combined in his own person these three
main strands of Indian Islam. He was in his teens when he started teaching
in his father's madrasah. He continued this for twelve years, after which he
left for Arabia for higher studies and for performing the Hajj. He was in
Arabia for nearly fourteen months, pursuing his studies under famous
teachers at Mecca and Medina.

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 During his stay at Mecca, Shah Waliullah saw a vision in which the
Holy Prophet informed him that he would be instrumental in the
organization of a section of the Muslim community. Friends urged him to
stay in Hijaz, and not to return to the unsettled conditions of India, but he
was convinced that his mission was to work there. He returned to Delhi in
1732, and began what was to be his life's work. He had been a teacher
before he went to Arabia, and while he resumed his occupation, he no
longer followed the traditional methods of instruction. He trained pupils in
different branches of Islamic knowledge, then entrusted them with the
teaching of the students, while he devoted himself to writing. Before his
death in 1762, he had completed practically a library of standard works in
all branches of [[264]] "Islamic sciences" of the type particularly suited to
the Indian conditions.

Shah Waliullah's most important single work was his translation of

the Quran into simple Persian, the literary language of Muslim India.
Translations had been attempted earlier, but they either were incidental to
a voluminous commentary, or did not gain wide acceptance. After some
opposition Shah Waliullah's translation became popular, either because of
the translator's eminence in religious circles, or because his translation
was connected with a broad-based movement aimed at bringing the
knowledge of the Quran within the reach of the average, literate Indian
Muslim. Shah Waliullah's action, which involved not only scholarship, but
also imagination and great moral courage, smoothed the way for others.
Within sixty years his two sons prepared their Urdu translations—one
completely literal and following the Arabic sentence-structure, and the
other idiomatic and in accordance with Urdu usage. Not only did his sons
follow his example, but in course of time, so did scores of others; and it is
because of his initiative that, outside the Arabic-speaking countries,
Muslims in India and Pakistan have taken the lead in the study and
propagation of the Quran.

Not less important was his balanced understanding and fair-minded

approach to different religious questions. In his day Indian Islam was rent
by controversies and conflicts between the Shia and the Sunni, the Sufi
and the Mullah, the Hanafi and the Wahhabi, the Mujaddidi and the
Wahdat-al-Wajudi, and the Mu'tazali and the Asha'ari. To Shah Waliullah,
adl (justice, equity) was the prime virtue and the basis of civilized
existence, and he studied the writings of all schools of thought, trying to
understand the attitudes of each of them. He then wrote authoritative
volumes expounding what was just and acceptable to different points of
view. In this way, by working out a system of thought on which all but the
extremists could agree, he helped to provide a spiritual basis for national
cohesion and harmony./4/

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 Shah Waliullah's success was also due to his able and devoted [[265]]
successors. One of his grandsons was the great reformer Shah Ismail
Shahid. Three of his sons were leading scholars and writers, including
Shah Abdul Aziz, who dominated Delhi religious life for nearly fifty
years. The brothers taught and trained a large body of men who carried the
message of Shah Waliullah to all parts of India. Their students and
successors organized jihad against persecution of Islam by the Sikhs in the
northwest, brought about a revival of Islam in Bengal, and were held in
equal veneration by Sir Sayyid Ahmed Khan, the leader of the Aligarh
movement, and Maulana Muhammad Qasim, the founder of the Deoband
seminary.

While Islam is not organized along national lines, owing to historic,

racial, linguistic, and geographic factors, a variety of schools and
viewpoints have gained prominence in different Muslim countries. In Iran,
for example, the Shia form of Islam is the national religion, while in the
desert of Najd, Wahhabi puritanism is dominant. Similarly, different
countries have adopted, according to their peculiar developments,
different schools of law—the Shafii, the Hanbali, the Maliki, and the
Hanafi. If the beliefs, the legal traditions, and the religious tendencies of
modern Muslim India and Pakistan were to be examined from this point of
view, it would be seen that the foundation of the religious structure which
is dominant there was laid by Shah Waliullah.

Shah Muhammad's Successors

Looking at Shah Muhammad's reign, the author of the late

eighteenth-century history, Siyar-ul-Mutakhkhirin, declared: "In his reign
the people passed their lives in ease, and the empire outwardly retained its
dignity and prestige. The foundations of the Delhi monarchy were really
rotten, but Muhammad Shah by his cleverness kept them standing. He
may be called the last of the rulers of Babur's line, as after him the
kingship had nothing but the name left to it."/5/ The records of the last
fifty years of the century suggest no reason for challenging this
melancholy verdict. After Muhammad Shah's death, [[266]] Prince
Ahmad Shah (r.1748–1754), the hero of the battle of Sirhind, ascended the
throne, and although he was a well-meaning and active young man, he
could effect no improvement in government affairs. His appointment of
Safdar Jang as wazir was especially unfortunate. An opportunist whose
measures helped to destroy the Mughal empire, Safdar Jang seems to have
been motivated by two aims. One was to humiliate any relatives of his
predecessors in the wizarat; the other was to drive out all Afghans from
positions of authority.

Safdar's policy brought him in conflict with the principal Turani

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 families, but his initial difficulties came from the royal favorites headed
by the chief eunuch, Javed Khan, and the emperor's mother. Safdar Jang
had Javed Khan assassinated in August, 1752, but then the emperor started
favoring Ghazi-ud-din, a grandson of Nizam-ul-Mulk, and a clever but
completely unscrupulous youth of eighteen. Safdar Jang lost the support
of the emperor, and in May, 1753, though still the wazir of the realm,
rebelled against his master. Ghazi-ud-din organized the opposition to
Safdar Jang, and with his usual lack of scruples, whipped up Shia-Sunni
and Afghan-Irani differences to gain supporters. Safdar was defeated and
forgiven; but realizing that the best field for the satisfaction of his
ambitions was away from the capital, withdrew to Oudh. Ghazi-ud-din
was now all-powerful at the capital. This was dramatically attested when
the emperor, who had soon become estranged from him, sought to have
him removed from the court. With the help of the Maratha chiefs, Ghazi-
ud-din made himself wazir and in June, 1754, deposed the emperor.

The man placed on the throne in 1754 as Alamgir II was a son of

Jahandar Shah. A man of good intentions, his adoption of Aurangzeb's
title was an indication of his desire to follow in his great predecessor's
footsteps, but the situation in the empire was beyond his control. The
Marathas, who had grown more powerful because of their collaboration
with Ghazi-ud-din, now dominated the whole of northern India. In 1758
they occupied Lahore and drove out Taimur Shah, the son and viceroy of
the Afghan ruler, Ahmad Shah Abdali. This was the high-water mark of
the Maratha expansion. "Their frontier extended on the north to the Indus
and the Himalaya, and in [[267]] the south nearly to the extremity of the
peninsula; all the territory within those limits which was not their own,
paid tribute." The whole of this great power was wielded by one hand, that
of the Peshwa, who talked of placing Bishvas Rao on the Mughal
throne./6/

Maratha dreams, however, received a shattering blow. The expulsion

of Taimur Shah provoked the wrath of Ahmad Shah Abdali, who was
joined in the war against the Marathas by the principal Muslim nobles of
North India. The main battle was fought at Panipat on June 14, 1761. This
was the most desperate of the three historic battles of Panipat (the first
fought by Babur in 1526, and the second by Humayun in 1556), and its
results were of great significance for Indian history. The Marathas were
completely defeated, and while their chiefs retained power in Central
India, the centralizing power of the Peshwa was destroyed. Panipat meant
that whoever succeeded the Mughals on the throne of Delhi, it would not
be the Marathas. Ahmad Shah Abdali's own design of building up an
Afghan empire in India was frustrated by the impetuosity of his soldiers,
who hated the heat of the plains and clamored for an immediate return to

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 Kabul with their plunder. Since they had been away from their homes for a
long time and were on the verge of mutiny, Ahmad Shah had to abandon
his dreams and return to his own country.

Ghazi-ud-din had put Alamgir II to death in 1759, replacing him with

a puppet, but after the battle of Panipat, Ahmad Shah nominated a son of
Alamgir II as emperor, with the title of Shah Alam (1761–1803). In the
struggles that followed, Ghazi-ud-din lost power and fled from the capital.
The administration of the shrunken empire—by now reduced to little more
than the area around Delhi—was in the hands of Najib-ud-daula. It was he
who had organized the Muslim confederacy that defeated the Marathas at
Panipat, and he remained loyal throughout his life to the Mughal emperor.
This was all the more remarkable since Shah Alam was absent from Delhi
almost continuously until 1772. Najib's main task was to maintain order in
the Mughal domain around Delhi. After the battle of Panipat the Marathas
were quiescent for some time, but the Jats and the [[268]] Sikhs began to
threaten the integrity of the remaining imperial territories. Najib defeated
the Jats and killed their leader, Suraj Mal, but he was less successful with
the Sikhs. They were kept from creating too much trouble, however, by an
internal split between two groups.

Rise of British Power

Meanwhile, far-reaching developments had taken place outside the
capital. Alivardi Khan, the able governor of Bengal, died on April 10,
1756, and was succeeded by his grandson, Mirza Muhammad, better
known as Siraj-ud-daula. The disruptive forces which had been kept under
check by Alivardi got out of hand and overwhelmed the government.
Alivardi's commander-in-chief, Mir Jafar, to whom his half-sister was
married, started plotting against Siraj-ud-daula, and for a short time was
removed from the command. Another reason for weakness was the
existence of the East India Company, which had established at Calcutta
not only a commercial, but a political center. A third was the attitude of
the Hindu zamindars, bankers, and officials who, always influential in
Bengal, had grown very powerful since the days of Murshid Quli Khan.

Alivardi Khan made no distinction between the Hindus and the

Muslims. He had gained his position with the support of the Hindu
notables, and they shared the government with him. This had not
reconciled them to a Muslim ruler; or perhaps they recognized that a new
power might soon overthrow his rule, and they wanted to be on the
winning side. In any case, as an official of the East India Company had
written two years before Alivardi's death: "[Hindu] rajas and inhabitants
were disaffected to the Moor government and secretly wished for a change
and opportunity of throwing off their tyrannical yoke."/7/ These three
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 forces sealed the fate of Siraj-ud-daula. The familiar story of British
activities need not be told here, but the role of the treacherous Mir Jafar,
generally held responsible for the fate of Siraj, was comparatively a minor
one. More significant was the alliance of the Hindu merchants with the
East India Company. This [[269]] new alignment, as much as any single
factor, must be taken into account in explaining the end of Muslim rule in
Bengal.

The battle fought at Plassey, a few miles outside Murshidabad, has

been called by a modern British writer "the most miserable skirmish ever
to be called a decisive battle."/8/ An army of which the commander-in-
chief had been won over and took no part in the battle, can hardly offer
spirited contests. Siraj-ud-daula's Hindu paymaster, Mir Madan, however,
was loyal to the nawab, and fell in action. Clive's spirited leadership and
British organization, coupled with the help they received from the
powerful local elements, resulted in the rout and flight of Siraj-ud-daula.
On June 28, 1757, Clive installed Mir Jafar on the masnad of
Murshidabad and four days later Siraj-ud-daula was executed.

The legal position in Bengal had not changed with the British victory
at Plassey, for the nawab was still in charge of the administration. But the
officials of the East India Company expected him to do their bidding, and
a clash was inevitable if a nawab sought to impose policies counter to
British interests. The clash came when Nawab Mir Qasim, who had
succeeded the incompetent Mir Jafar, tried to collect internal revenue from
the English traders. According to an agreement, only the East India
Company itself was to be free from the tax; in practice, every company
servant traded on his own account and refused to pay any duty. In
desperation, since his revenues were disappearing, Mir Qasim abolished
all internal duties, thus removing the English advantage over the Indian
traders. The British refused to accept this, and Mir Qasim left Bengal to
organize an attack on the British.

Support of a half-hearted kind came from Emperor Shah Alam and

Shuja-ud-daula, the wazir of Oudh, who had followed the general pattern
of the time by establishing himself as a semi-independent ruler. The
Mughal and the British forces met at Buxar in October, 1764, and while
the British suffered fairly heavy losses, they won a clear victory. The
results of the battle of Buxar were more far-reaching than those of Plassey.
Even before the battle the British had attempted to facilitate the military
task by diplomatic means, and the newly [[270]] crowned Shah Alam was
only a fugitive from Delhi, but the East India Company had gained a
victory against what appeared to be the combined army of the emperor
and the rulers of Bengal and Oudh. It gave greater prestige to British arms
than had the earlier victory over a provincial government. It also altered
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 Shuja-ud-daula's course of action. Henceforth dependence on the British
became a cardinal point of his policy, and Oudh was, for all practical
purposes, drawn into the orbit of the British influence. Most important of
all, Emperor Shah Alam was forced to give the East India Company the
diwani, or civil government, of Bengal, Bihar, and Orissa in return for the
districts of Allahabad and Kora and an annual payment of two and a half
million rupees. This provided the legal basis for British rule in Bengal.

Emperor Shah Alam remained in Allahabad for some years after the
battle of Buxar, but he returned to Delhi in 1772, after the death of his
wazir, Najib-ud-daula, who had been the actual ruler of the city for a
decade. Motivated either by his own greed for money, or under the
influence of the Marathas, who were supporting him for their own ends,
Shah Alam attacked Zabita Khan, the powerful son of Najib-ud-daula,
who was the leader of the Rohilla Afghans who had established
themselves to the east of Delhi. In one punitive expedition against the
family stronghold of Ghausgarh, Zabita Khan's relatives were treated with
great cruelty. According to tradition, his son, Ghulam Qadir, was castrated
and made to serve as page in the palace at Delhi, but a few years later,
Ghulam Qadir was able to exact a terrible revenge.

Affairs in the capital were following a tortuous course, with the

nobles intriguing against each other for the spoils of the decaying empire.
One able administrator, Najaf Khan, succeeded for a time in organizing a
small effective army to maintain order, but he eventually succumbed to the
debilitating atmosphere.

Without any able or loyal followers, the emperor took a momentous

step. In 1785 he invited the great Maratha chieftain Mahadaji Sindhia of
Gwalior to take charge of the Delhi administration. Appointed
commander-in-chief and supreme regent (wakil-i-mutliq) of the empire,
Sindhia tried to get the cooperation of Ghulam Qadir in [[271]]

*INDIA IN 1780*
[[272]] dealing with the Sikhs, but Ghulam Qadir, waiting for a chance to
repay the humiliation he and his family had suffered at the hands of Shah
Alam, had no desire to strengthen the emperor's rule.

His opportunity came in 1787, when Sindhia was defeated by the

Rajputs. Ghulam Qadir entered Delhi in September, 1787, and forced the
emperor to appoint him mir bakhshi or paymaster, and regent. He was
driven out of Delhi by the emperor's supporters, but entered the city again
the following year, deposed Shah Alam, and blinded him.

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 A drunken ruffian, Ghulam Qadir behaved with gross brutality to the
emperor and his family. Three servants and two water-carriers who tried to
help the bleeding emperor were killed. According to one account, Ghulam
would pull the beard of the old monarch, and say: "Serves you right. This
is the return for your action at Ghausgarh." Servants were tortured and
made to reveal the hidden treasures, and the entire palace was ransacked
to find the buried wealth.

After ten horrible weeks during which the honor of the royal family
and prestige of the Mughal empire reached its lowest ebb, Ghulam Qadir
left with the booty for his stronghold. Sindhia's officers hunted him down
and captured him in December, 1788. He was put to death with tortures
which equalled his own fiendish cruelties.

When Delhi was retaken by the Marathas, the blind Shah Alam was
enthroned again. While his action reconciled the people to Sindhia's rule,
it meant that Delhi was being drawn into the great struggle then taking
place between the Marathas and the British.

An account of that struggle and of British expansion is outside the

scope of this chapter, for the British did not defeat Mughal India, but its
successor states, both Muslim and Hindu. Conquest was cautiously
achieved. Periods of rapid expansion alternated with long periods of
consolidation. Military action was effectively aided by diplomatic activity.
Local differences and jealousies were most skilfully exploited. The
Company's forces were normally able to depend on the direct or indirect
cooperation of the commander, or at least some of the major leaders, of
the troops confronting them. At Plassey it was Mir Jafar; at Buxar, the
differences between Shuja-ud-daula and Mir Qasim were fully exploited.
In fact, British success owed as [[273]] much to diplomatic skill and the
demoralized state of Indian society as to valor and military organization.

The great period of expansion initiated during the governor-

generalship (1798–1805) of Lord Wellesley saw Delhi and the Mughal
emperor pass under British sway. But even as late as 1798 this absorption
did not seem inevitable, for an attempt was made to create a confederacy
of the Afghan king, the wazir of Oudh, and a number of Maratha chiefs, to
strengthen the position of the emperor. Wellesley took the plan seriously
enough to stir up trouble between the Persian and the Afghan courts, so
that the Afghan ruler would not be able to give any attention to India./9/

More important for the fate of the Mughals was Wellesley's war with
the Marathas in 1803. In a two-pronged attack, they were defeated in the
Deccan and North India. Sindhia's defeat meant the capture of Delhi, and
with this the Mughal empire, long a dependent of the Marathas, passed

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 into British control. Yet after a century of decline, the Mughal emperor
still remained a symbol of greatness that was not easily defaced. To many
British, his continuance seemed absurd, at best an empty pageant. Yet as
events were to show in 1857, even the last flickering shadow of Mughal
greatness still appeared to be a possible center of power.

Causes of the Mughal Decline

Before turning to these last years of the Mughal empire, it may be

useful to summarize what appear to have been certain general causes of
Mughal decline, leaving aside such specific causes as external invasions
and internal rebellions. One feature of Islamic power in India, as
elsewhere, was the failure to make progress in certain vital fields. For
example, even Akbar failed to see the possibilities in the introduction of
printing. The scarcity of books resulted in comparative ignorance, low
standards of education, and limitation of the subjects of study. Because of
this, the governing classes were ignorant of the affairs of the outside
world. The position becomes clear if we [[274]] compare the books on
India printed in Europe during the eighteenth century with the knowledge
of the West current in India. The interest on the part of Europeans that led
travelers like Bernier to make reports on their travels finds no parallel in
Mughal India. So far from being concerned with Europe, the Mughals,
after Ain-i-Akbari, made no real addition to their knowledge even of their
own dominions.

The stagnation visible in the intellectual field was visible also in the
military sphere. Babur had introduced gunpowder in India, but after him
there was no advance in military equipment, although the organization and
discipline of forces had been completely revolutionized in the West. The
Portuguese had brought ships on which cannons were mounted, and had
thus introduced a new element which made them masters of the Indian
Ocean. What was a fortified wall round the country became a highway,
and opened up the empire to those countries which had not remained
stagnant. Mughal helplessness on the sea was obvious from the days of
Akbar. Their ships could not sail to Mecca without a safe-conduct permit
from the Portuguese. Sir Thomas Roe had warned Jahangir that if Prince
Shah Jahan as governor of Gujarat turned the English out, "then he must
expect we would do our justice upon the seas." The failure of the Mughals
to develop a powerful navy and control the seas surrounding their
dominions was a direct cause of their replacement by an European power
having these advantages.

On land no real progress or large-scale training of local personnel in

the use of artillery was made in Mughal India, and the best they could do
was to hire foreigners for manning the artillery. The military weakness
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 resulting from this was obvious, and was clearly visible to foreign
observers. Bernier wrote in the early years of Aurangzeb's reign:" I could
never see these soldiers, destitute of order, and marching with the
irregularity of a herd of animals, without reflecting upon the ease with
which five-and-twenty thousand of our veterans from the army in
Flanders, commanded by Prince Condé or Marshal Turenne would
overcome these armies, however numerous."/10/ With this condition of
the Mughal army, the downfall of the empire was only a question of time.

[[275]] Another factor which contributed to the fall of the Mughal

empire was the moral decay of the ruling classes. This was partly due to
the affluent standard of living maintained by monarchs like Shah Jahan
and queens like Nur Jahan. Ostentatious luxury became the ambition of
everyone who could afford it, and the puritanical Aurangzeb's attempts to
arrest the tide were without success. The evil had gone too far and was
only driven underground, to reappear within ten years of the emperor's
death, in the uncontrolled orgies of his grandson Jahandar Shah. Perhaps
Aurangzeb's extreme asceticism and self-denial only intensified the
reaction of the nobility. Many a Maratha hill fortress captured after long
and dreary siege was lost because the Mughal commander, unwilling to
spend the monsoon months in his lonely perch, came down to the plains,
while the hardy Marathas, awaiting the opportunity, moved in.

The moral decline of the nobility showed itself in lack of discipline,

laziness, evasion of duties, and even treacherous conduct. It also made
them rapacious and heartless in dealing with the public. The extravagant
standards that the Mughal bureaucrats tried to maintain were not possible
without corruption, extortion, and the enrichment of the officers at the
expense of the state and the people. These evils increased as Mughal
authority weakened, but their seeds had been sown in earlier days and
were a natural result of the efforts of the officers to maintain standards
beyond their means.

These were the basic factors responsible for the downfall of the
Mughal empire, but others were contributory. The fact that after the death
of Aurangzeb no ruler of real vigor and resourcefulness came to the throne
made recovery of the lost position almost impossible. Even Aurangzeb's
long life was an asset of doubtful value in its last stages. He drove himself
hard and resolutely, conscientiously performing his duties, but at the age
of ninety he was subject to the laws governing all human machines. When
he died, his son and successor Bahadur Shah was already an old man of
sixty. He began well but was on the throne for barely six years, and with
his death a disastrous chapter opened in Mughal annals.

Directly related to the troubles of this period was the absence of a

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 well-defined law of succession to ensure the continuity of government.
The result was that each son of a deceased king felt that he had [[276]] an
equal claim to the crown, and succession to the throne was invariably
accompanied by bloody warfare. The disaster was compounded when the
imperial princes, who were often viceroys governing vast territories,
started making secret pacts with soldiers to ensure their support for the
time when the fateful struggle would begin. Soon not only the imperial
army but forces external to the empire—the East India Company, the
Marathas, the Sikhs—were being used by claimants to the throne of Delhi,
as well as to control of the provincial kingdoms. The results were fatal.

NOTES

/1/ G. S. Sardesai, New History of the Marathas (Bombay, 1958), II, 166–
67.
/2/ Quoted in Muhammad Latif, The History of the Panjab (Calcutta,
1891), p. 200.
/3/ Hermann Goetz, The Crisis of Indian Civilization in the Eighteenth
and Early Nineteenth Century (Calcutta, 1939).
/4/ For a brief selection from Shah Waliullah's writings, see Wm.
Theodore de Bary et al., Sources of Indian Tradition (New York, 1958),
pp. 455–62.
/5/ Ghulam Husain Khan, Seir-ul-Mutaqheerin, trans. by Raymond
Mustapha (Calcutta, 1902), III, 281. The quotation is translated differently
in this edition.
/6/ Mountstuart Elphinstone, History of India (London, 1905), p. 276.
/7/ Quoted in S. C. Hill, Bengal in 1756–1757 (London, 1903), III, 328.
/8/ Philip Woodruff, The Men Who Ruled India (New York, 1954), I, 100.
/9/ H. W. C. Davis, "The Great Game in Asia," Proceedings of the British
Academy, XII (1926), 230.
/10/ François Bernier, Travels in the Mogul Empire A. D. 1656–1668,
trans. by A. Constable (London, 1914), p. 55.

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