Chapter One Prologue: Mughal Twilight I India is a land of vanished supremacies. Each proclaimed its power and permanence by architecture on the grand scale, designed to inspire admiration, awe and even fear. Always the observer is compelled to look upwards. One cranes one's neck to see the strongholds of Rajput warlords, perched precariously on the hilltops of Rajputana (Rajasthan), and one stands back to view the great mosques and mausoleums of their overlords, the Mughal emperors. Approach requires a degree of supplication; one trudges up the hillside to reach the Jaipur maharajas' palace at Amber and vast flights of steps skirt the government offices of the British Raj in New Delhi. The overall impression is of a country where power has been concentrated in a few hands and always flowed downwards. There is much truth in this. The public buildings of the Mughals, the Indian princes and the Raj were expressions of their authority, reminding the onlooker of his place in the scale of things. Wealth went hand in hand with political power; the elaborate and intricate marblework, jewelled inlays and painted panels which decorated mosques and palaces announced their patrons and owners as men of infinite richness. The British were more cautious about this sort of ostentation. Sir Edwin Lutyens, the mastermind behind that complex of official buildings which was to form the heart of `imperial' Delhi, considered traditional Indian architecture too florid and therefore unsuitable for a regime whose chief characteristics were integrity and firmness. Like other, earlier architects of the Raj, he preferred to assert its supremacy with solid stonework and severe classical motifs, which was understandable given that they and their patrons saw Britain as the new Rome. The fashion had been set in the early 1800s by the Marquess Wellesley, who believed that the dignity of a Governor-General of Bengal required a colonnaded mansion in the contemporary Georgian neo-classical style. Opposite his austere but imposing Government House was a triumphal arch surmounted by a vigilant imperial lion, which soon became a popular roost for Calcutta's cranes, vultures and kites. India's official architecture was a backdrop for the traditional public rituals of state. The formal processions in which a ruler presented himself to his subjects and undertook his devotions, and the durbars (assemblies) where great men met, exchanged gifts and compliments and discussed high policy, required settings appropriate to what was, in effect, the theatre of power. At the heart of the Emperor Shahjahan's great palace in Delhi, now called the Red Fort, are the great audience halls, one a vast open courtyard, the other enclosed and reserved for foreign ambassadors and other elevated visitors. Both are now stripped of their awnings and wall-hangings and the private chamber lacks the Peacock Throne, a stunning construction of gold and jewels surmounted by a golden arch and topped by two gilded peacocks, birds of allegedly incorruptible flesh which may have symbolised not only the splendour of the Mughals but also their durability. When Shahjahan held durbars for his subjects, dispensing justice and settling quarrels, he overlooked them from a high, canopied dias with a delicately painted ceiling. If he glanced upwards, he saw a panel which portrays Orpheus playing his lute before wild beasts who, bewitched by his music, are calmly seated around him. The scene was a reminder to the emperor and his successors that they were Solomonic kings. Like the Thracian musician, they were bringers of harmony, spreading peace among subjects who, if left to their own devices, would live according to the laws of the jungle. It was a nice and revealing conceit, a key to the nature of Mughal kingship and, for that matter, its successor, the British Raj. Shahjahan's Delhi palace (he renamed the city Shahjahanabad) was completed in the middle years of the seventeenth century. He was a Timurid, a dynasty of interlopers who had founded their Indian empire in the mid-sixteenth century, and whose pedigree stretched back to the fourteenth-century conqueror, Timur the Great (Marlowe's Tamburlaine). By Shahjahan's time, Timurid domination extended from the Himalayan foothills to the borders of the Deccan. Even in the period of their ascendancy, the Mughals were never absolute masters of the whole of India; there were many remote, inaccessible regions where their will never penetrated. There were also areas, particularly in central India, where their authority rested on the submission and co-operation of local princes. For outsiders, the physical boundaries of Mughal power were immaterial. Contemporary Europeans, fed on travellers' tales of the magnificence of his courts at Agra and Delhi, rated India's emperor as one of the great princes of earth, equal in stature to the Sultan of Turkey or the Emperor of China. The Mughal emperor was a figure of immense dignity and grandeur, a potentate who was imagined to hold absolute sway over millions. For European intellectuals seeking to understand the nature of political power, the Great Mughal was the embodiment of that despotism which was thought to be natural to the Orient. And yet, the Mughals complied with the Renaissance ideals of kingship, for they were renowned as connoisseurs and patrons of the arts. On an embassy to the imperial court in 1615, Sir Thomas Roe judged the palace at Agra as `one of the great works and wonders of the world' and admitted to the Emperor Jahangir, who later had the Taj Mahal built, that his portrait painters surpassed those of James I. It was, of course, easy for Western visitors to be bowled over by the splendour of Mughal architecture and the magnificence of their state pageantry, and to imagine that together they were the façade of a power which was total and limitless. Appearances were misleading. Whatever its architecture announced to the contrary, the Mughal empire was never monolithic, nor did the emperor's will run freely throughout India. He was shah-an-shah , a king of kings, a monarch whose dominions were a political mosaic, whose tessera included provinces administered by imperial governors and semi-independent petty states. In the Deccan alone there were over a thousand fortified towns and villages, each under the thumb of its own zamindar (landowner), who was both a subject of the emperor and his partner in government. The machinery of Mughal government needed the goodwill and co-operation of such men, as well as the services of its salaried administrators who enforced the law and gathered imperial revenues. Timurid power rested ultimately on the cash raised from the land tax. Its burden was heaviest on the ryots (peasants) and it was theoretically yielding an annual 232 million rupees (£31.3 million) at the close of the seventeenth century. Taken from an official revenue manual, this estimate ignored the often considerable sums siphoned off by venal officials. Nonetheless, the Mughals possessed, at least on paper, the wherewithal to play a political masterhand in their dominions: cash procured soldiers, allies and a loyal civil service. It could also seduce the discontented and purchase the allegiance of enemies. In the early 1690s, when the Emperor Aurangzeb's armies were fighting in Karnataka, he lured back a renegade raja, Yacham Nair, with an offer of a jagir (a lifetime annuity from land revenue) worth 900,000 rupees (£121,500) a year. Not long after, Aurangzeb ordered Yacham's arrest and murder. This was a typical exercise in Mughal statecraft. Dynastic survival and India's tranquillity depended upon an emperor's mastery of the arcane arts of political fixing; he gave or withheld patronage, he bargained with lesser princes, and played ambitious courtiers, nobles and officials against each other. Shahjahan's choice of Orpheus, the mollifier and enchanter, as a source of political inspiration was therefore very apt. It was also a very daring gesture, for the presence of a figure from pagan mythology above the imperial seat of power would certainly have made many of the emperor's fellow Muslims uneasy. Like the Turkish and Persian empires, Mughal India was an Islamic state. It had, in 1700, an estimated population of about 180 million, of whom at least two-thirds were unbelievers, mostly Hindus. Although the emperors enjoyed the title khalifa (Caliph), and with it a claim to be regarded by Muslims as successors to Muhammad, they could only govern with the co-operation of the Hindus. A policy of pragmatic toleration was adopted, but unevenly and in ways which never wholly satisfied the Sikhs of the Punjab or the Hindu warrior castes, the Jats of Rajasthan and the Marathas of the Deccan. Integrated within the Mughal system, these groups submitted grudgingly and were always ready to spring to arms if their faith appeared to be in danger. Aurangzeb's policy of destroying Hindu temples during the suppression of insurrections in Karnataka and Rajasthan stiffened rather than reduced resistance. Ever since the genesis of the Timurid empire under Akbar the Great (1556-1605), dynastic survival had depended on genetic good fortune in the form of emperors who were forceful, energetic and skilled manipulators. This luck ran out with the death of Aurangzeb in 1707, and the empire passed into nerveless and fumbling hands. Even so, it would have required rulers with superhuman talents to have preserved an inheritance which was already beset by difficulties, let alone overcome the problems which raised themselves during the next sixty years. II The Mughal empire fell apart swiftly. In what turned out to be the final surge of Mughal expansion, Aurangzeb overstepped himself by undertaking a series of campaigns designed to extend and consolidate his rule in the Deccan and Hyderabad. They became a war of attrition which stretched imperial resources beyond their breaking point, and by 1707, after nearly twenty years of intermittent fighting, the empire was exhausted. There was no breathing space; an eighteen-month war for the succession followed Aurangzeb's death. Moreover, the repercussions of the stalemate in central and southern India and the civil war were felt across the country. From the early 1680s onwards the Jats of Rajasthan launched a sequence of insurrections against oppressive taxation, seizing whole districts, occupying towns and, growing more audacious, were raiding the suburbs of Delhi by 1717. Strong men flourished as anarchy spread. It was a period of making and breaking as determined and ambitious men snatched at opportunities to enrich themselves and usurp authority. Imperial officials, increasingly isolated and starved of funds, found their loyalty withering and looked for ways to preserve and advance themselves in a suddenly mutable world. There were fortunes to be made among the wreckage of an empire which was cracking up, and success went to the cunning and ruthless. The adventures of Riza Khan, an Afghan professional soldier in the imperial service, may serve as a template for the stories of many others. In about 1700 he was appointed governor of Ramgir in the Deccan, but found his entry barred by his predecessor. Riza, a determined and resourceful figure, gathered extra men and entered the town by force, and turned it into a private power base. Turning his back on an emperor who was no longer able to reward his servants, Riza decided to make his own destiny; he turned bandit and enriched himself by diverting imperial taxes into his own pocket and looting caravans. He prospered and attracted followers, men like himself who had been cast adrift in a violent and disorderly world and whose only assets were their wits and their swords. His horde grew, swollen by deserters, unpaid soldiers from other armies, and those whose livelihoods had been destroyed by war and brigandage. Within six years Riza Khan was the leader of 10,000 freelances and an important piece on the chessboard of local power politics. His services were sought and obtained by Mughal officials in Hyderabad, once to help run down another bandit. He might have ended his life as a landowner, perhaps the founder of a dynasty, but his luck ran out in 1712 when he was tricked, taken prisoner and executed by a new governor. Others were more fortunate. Daud Khan Ruhela, another Afghan and the alleged son of a slave, made himself the master of a cluster of villages in the region north-east of the old imperial capital, Agra. It was an area where Akbar the Great had encouraged Afghan settlement in the sixteenth century, no doubt with an eye to swelling the numbers of his Muslim subjects. Daud Khan proceeded in what was becoming the classic manner for ambitious freebooters: he first hired himself and his brigands to another man on the make, a local zamindar, and then picked up property and helped himself to imperial revenues. Playing a double game with the Raja of Kumaun, he came unstuck, was captured and tortured to death in 1720. It was onwards and upwards for his adopted heir, Ali Muhammad Khan, who showed a remarkable virtuosity in switching alliances and, as his estates and prestige grew, meddling in the intrigues of the imperial court. When he died in 1748 he was the dominant figure in the constellation of petty Ruhela states which had emerged over the past thirty years and now stretched from the foothills of the Himalayas southwards across the Ganges valley to a line between Delhi and Agra. Princes deferred to him; the Raja of Garwhal paid him 160,000 rupees (£21,600) a year in protection money, and he was deeply engaged in the factional strife at court. One of Ali Muhammad Khan's greatest opportunities had come in 1739-40, when a Persian army under Nadir Shah invaded India, defeated the Emperor Muhammad at the battle of Kamal and then occupied Delhi. The city was thoroughly plundered, its inhabitants massacred and, in a gesture which combined cupidity with political symbolism, the Peacock Throne was carried off to Persia. While Delhi was in chaos, Ali Muhammad Khan engrossed a handful of parganas (imperial tax districts). Like every other predator on the loose in India, his motive in acquiring imperial revenues was a mixture of greed and political acumen. By encroaching on imperial rights, India's new masters transformed themselves into the heirs of the emperor. By the mid-eighteenth century the self-made heirs of the Timurid emperors had changed the political map of India. New polities had appeared: the large states of Mysore, Hyderabad, Awadh (Oudh), Bengal and the Maratha principalities of Deccan. There was also a body of looser political units formed by the Ruhelas, the Sikhs of the Punjab and the Rajputs of Rajasthan. The masters of both the larger and smaller states behaved as independent rulers and presented themselves to their subjects as the legitimate successors of the Mughals. These `lesser Mughals' upheld all the administrative codes and practices of traditional imperial government, particularly and for obvious reasons those concerned with the imposition of taxes. And yet, curiously, India's arriviste princes continued to treat the emperor's person with customary respect and reverence long after his real power had evaporated. Even after 1784, when he became the virtual prisoner of the Maratha prince, Mahadji Scindia, his captor insisted that he was merely a `servant' of the emperor. Although little more than ornaments, the Timurid emperors were still the sole source of legitimate political authority within India. They had none themselves, but they could be induced to bestow it on others, which was why nobody wished to get rid of them. Mughal traditions and culture set the tone in all the new states. Ali Muhammad Khan was the patron of poets and musicians. Like the emperors, he generously endowed mosques and had a mausoleum built in his capital, Aonla (south-west of Bareilly), which is still an object of veneration. Murshid Quli Khan, Nawab (governor) of Bengal, who delicately balanced his duties as a Mughal agent in the province with establishing himself as its effective ruler, followed imperial custom by renaming its capital, Murshidabad. It was embellished, at his expense, with a splendid, five-domed mosque. Hindu princes also imitated Mughal munificence by founding temples and building palaces in the Mughal style with audience halls, private apartments and elaborate gardens. Former Mughal artisans and artists were employed in all these enterprises; humble men, like great ones, had to follow where advantage led them. III One of the most ominous features of the power struggles which accompanied the collapse of Mughal power was the willingness of contestants to enlist external help. In the early 1740s the warring princes of Karnataka sought and gained military assistance from the British East India Company and the French Compagnie des Indes and paid for it by assignments of land and taxation. The four invasions of northern India by the Afghan ruler Ahmad Shah Abdali (1748, 1749, 1751 and 1757-61) revealed a variety of collaborators who were willing either to remain neutral or provide him with fighting men, whichever best suited their private interests. During the final incursion, Safdar Jang, the Nawab of Awadh, offered the Afghans lukewarm support, while Najib-ud Daula, an Afghan and former imperial commander, supplied them with Ruhela troops. He did so partly to further his own ambitions and partly because he knew the Ruhelas could only overcome their enemies, the Marathas, with Afghan backing. They did so at the decisive battle of Panipat in January 1761, which opened the way for Najib to secure the position of regent for the Afghan-nominated, puppet emperor Shah Alam II. It might be added that before the battle the Maratha peshwa (prince), Balaji Baji Rao, had attempted a deal with the East India Company, offering land in exchange for batteries of artillery and European-trained gunners. (Continues...) Excerpted from Raj by Lawrence James. Copyright © 1997 by Lawrence James. Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
