Masters of Kabul and Cape Comorin
A translated extract from "Tarikh-i Hindustan", 1845.
Immediately after announcing these reforms, however, problems arose. Aurangzeb would spend the remainder of his life defending and modifying these reforms and after the death of his much beloved sister Jahanara in 1681, it is said that he never enjoyed a moments peace. The first province to rise in rebellion was Ajmer, more specifically, the Rathore Rajputs of Marwar, a conflict that had been brewing for some time. Maharaja Jaswant Singh had died at his post in the Khyber Pass in 1678 after serving in the Safavid war, leaving behind no heirs. The throne of Marwar thus fell to his brother Indra Singh, who was widely seen as Aurangzeb’s creature and had little support among the other Rajputs. At around the time of Indra Singhs accession, Aurangzeb had stationed a fairly large force in Ajmer, as if he was about to do something big. Furthermore, he himself stopped off at Ajmer ostensibly on a pilgrimage, but all these combined with the fact that he had just reinstated the Jizya tax made many Rajput kings convinced he was planning to replace them all with muslims. Now, with these reforms, it seemed like he was depriving them of their authority in their ancestral lands (which he was) and, more importantly for a Rajput was slighting their honour. If Indra Singh refused to guard their honour, Jaswant’s wives decided they would and after ordering him killed, they led a coup and attempted to gain independence.
Aurangzeb now sent an army under his son Muazzam to put down the revolution but when he got there, he was easily swayed into joining the rebellion. The Ranis claimed that Aurangzeb was taking away all of the privileges that his illustrious ancestor Akbar had conferred on the Rajputs and it was Muazzams duty as a descendant of Akbar to right the evils his father had inflicted on Hindustan. Muazzam then declared himself emperor and accused his father of breaking Islamic law to justify this. This had turned into a battle for the throne of Delhi and that warranted Aurangzebs personal attention. He moved into place with an army and the two forces engaged in an uncomfortable standoff. A flurry of correspondence ensued, and Aurangzeb made good use once again of his old trick of the false letter. He sent a letter thanking Muazzam for leading the treacherous Rajputs out of their forts, ready to be slaughtered and invited him to switch sides immediately. Whether Muazzam would have switched sides is unknown- in any case he never saw the letter as Aurangzeb had arranged for it to fall in the hands of Rani Mahamaya. She at once assumed Muazzam was a traitor and ordered her soldiers to attack the forces Muazzam had brought with him, while Aurangzeb looked on from the other side of the battle field. Muazzam fled back to his fathers protection, where he was instantly imprisoned for his treason. This was a decisive victory for the Mughals on paper but the Rajputs immediately became a guerrilla force harassing Mughal armies (though they lost every pitched battle) until Aurangzeb sued for peace in 1683, promising to accept her as the queen of Marwar if she laid down her weapons.
Up to this point Mahamaya had valiantly led the resistance herself and many of the Rathores had become intensely loyal to her personally and because there were no other close male relatives of Jaswant Singh, Mahamaya was able to break all precedent and become queen regnant of Marwar, when she assumed the masculine title of Raja Mahamaya Devi. Upon her accession, she made sure to be crowned just as Jaswant Singh had been before her, thus also breaking the purdah that she had maintained while in rebellion. This caused yet another division amongst the Rajputs, with some seeing her as a hero who resisted the Mughals and others seeing her as having no respect for their tradition. Mahamaya Devi became a great devotee of the goddess Karni and publicly emphasised her piety and respect for the Brahmins at Deshnok temple to legitimise her rule. Unfortunately, her sex had rendered her unable to gather support from other Rajput chiefs, who thought she was disgracing the Rajput name and forced her to abdicate in favour of a seventeen year old adopted son, Raja Vijay Singh. After a few years acting as the power behind the throne, a faction of Rajput Sisodias from Mewar convinced Vijay Singh to get rid of her and she soon committed Jauhar in 1687, bringing her remarkable life to a tragic end. The Rathore clan to this day denies that the order to commit Jauhar was ever given, and that she did it of her own accord to atone for her dishonourable actions such as breaking purdah, insisting on a masculine title and breaking the gender norms of the era. In modern Marwar, Mahamaya is sometimes equated with the goddess Karni and a body of legends has grown up around her life.
Aurangzeb had been forced to sue for peace in the Rajputana however, because of the breakout of a Maratha rebellion. Shivaji’s untimely death had left the inheritance of the chattrapati in doubt. At first, Shivaji’s ten year old son was placed on the throne by his second wife Soryabai, though his older son Sambhaji was able to win over more of the Maratha chiefs to his side and led a coup. Upon ascending to the throne, Sambhaji declared his independence from Delhi and this obviously demanded Aurangzeb’s personal attention. Rajaram and Soryabai escaped from their imprisonment and fled north to Malwa, where they were met by the subahdar and sent a letter to Delhi asking for help getting the throne back. Aurangzeb replied saying that he would be happy to do that as soon as Rajaram converted to Islam. Whether he did or he didn’t agree to this has been lost to time, but Aurangzeb did send a force under his son Muhammad Akbar to assist Rajaram. These wars took an increasing toll on the Mughal empire and when they finally reached their conclusion, it was through diplomacy rather than any military superiority. Notably however, both armies had been decisively influenced by the exact same legendary commander and thus their tactics were very similar. As time wore on, the Peacock throne managed to entice some more Maratha chieftains to Rajaram’s cause until in 1686 Sambhaji was captured and put under house arrest for the rest of his life, with Rajaram crowned in the normal hindu fashion as Chattrapati. Historians have often given credit for this victory to the co operation of Venkoji, who remained neutral throughout the whole episode, but seized the opportunity to raid territory that Sambhaji claimed, forcing him to defend it and catching him in a war on two fronts.
There was widespread initial opposition to the reforms as a whole but the strength of Aurangzebs relentless, if uncharismatic personality, cowed those who didn’t agree and allowed proponents of the trade it would make them the masters of, to explain to their colleagues what riches lay in store. And if there was one thing that the entire gamut of Mughal officers, hindu or muslim, irani or turani or Hindustani, understood, it was riches. Bastions of support for this extra commercialisation emerged in Bengal and the former Golkonda sultanate, due to the merchant cultures both areas had already developed
The last major rebellion over these reforms came from the English East India Company, who had established factories in Surat, Dhaka and Madras and were enjoying their monopoly on Indian textiles to England as it was a lucrative business. An example of their factory in Patna is shown. This decree however, threatened to completely destroy this monopoly and so in 1684, Josiah Child started a war with the Mughals. A fleet was sent to try and conquer the entirety of Dhaka and ideally, a fair amount of Bengal Subah as well. This proved to be a crushing defeat however, and though the English fleet managed to command the bay of Bengal, the coastal waters were successfully guarded by the Siddis, an Abyssinian ethnic group from where the majority of Aurangzeb’s naval officers came. The English factory at Dhaka was destroyed and Aurangzeb banned them from all trade with India until they paid a massive indemnity. For a time, the English position in India looked very precarious and they resorted to becoming a major nuisance for Mughal trading convoys, engaging in numerous acts of piracy. After being proven unable to defend his own ships beyond his own coasts and thus putting the viability of his reforms in doubt in the minds of the mansabdars, Aurangzeb sent an envoy to the English temporary base in the Madurai Nayak, at the very tip of peninsular India to re start negotiations in 1690. The final agreement stipulated a much lower indemnity in return for forty English warships (the only navy the Mughals had prior to this was commandeered merchant vessels, unsuited to high seas warfare) and an agreement that Mughal trade ships would respect the English company’s monopoly in the british isles, the dutch company’s monopoly in the Netherlands. Notably, the declining power of the Portuguese was absent from this protection. From here on, the primary European market for Mughal merchants would be France and the Iberian peninsula. For the first time, a Mughal navy could establish its presence throughout the entirety of the Indian ocean, with command of this being given mainly to the Siddis, although almost anyone of the military mansabdars who wanted the position was confirmed.
At this point, the new class of merchant-military officials had been engaging in trade for eight years, the majority of it with the established markets in the middle east, though an increasing number of ships was heading out further to south east asia, east asia, the east African coast and to Europe and some had begun to accrue considerable wealth. Even the imperial princes had been distracted from rebellion by the glitter of gold at this point. Though a few very small scale rebellions resurfaced, they were usually put down by a grandson of Aurangzeb. In 1690, the 72 year old emperor felt secure enough to send three forces led by Muhammad Akbar, Azam Shah and Kam Baksh in a grand competition to see which of these princes would be able to conquer first Mysore and then the Madurai Nayak, nominally uniting the whole subcontinent for the first time since the Mauryan empire almost two thousand years ago. He sent Asad Khan, his new vakil and one of the only people he trusted down to accompany the campaign and report the victor to him. Each prince considered this their opportunity to win support in the succession struggle they all saw coming and so pushed their own forces as hard as they possibly could, with the result that the aging Maharaja of Mysore secured his jagir on Mughal ships in 1692 and the Nayaka of Madurai secured hers in 1695, both in exchange for a large tribute and the abolishment of their militaries, and their power and assistance in integrating the new territories into the new and improved administrative system.
Just as in the Deccan, integrating these provinces proved difficult especially because of Mughal religious policy- attempts at temple destruction severely weakened Mughal control over the newly conquered areas, such that by the time they got all the way down to Madurai, they would just order the temple temporarily closed while the army was there to appease Aurangzeb. After setting up a Subah centred around Mysore, with Venkoji as Subahdar and various Irani, Turani officials to fill the rest of
the bureaucracy, the princes received summons back north to Delhi, Muhammad Azam Shah, as the first Timurid to reach the southern tip of the peninsula would receive his reward. The convoy, laden with loot, made slow progress, stopping off at the local palaces and forts of every Mansabdar. All three expected Azam Shah to be appointed crown prince upon their arrival, so tension was high. When the convoy stopped off at Hyderabad, an argument broke out late one night during which 29 year old Kam Baksh made an attempt on the life of Azam Shah, his arrest was ordered and in the confusion, he fled to the Maratha court of Rajaram where he tried to convince the young chattrapati to help him in the rebellion he had inadvertently declared. Azam Shah sent Muhammad Akbar to apprehend their younger brother while he left the main convoy under Zulfiqar Khan, the son of Asad Khan and shown here in Aurangzeb's service, while he and the vakil hurried north as fast as their horses could carry them to officially secure his title as heir apparent. He arrived at Delhi in 1697 and went straight to Aurangzeb and was duly confirmed. With this move, every subject of the empire was legally bound to support him in the struggle- in theory.
Akbar arrived at Rajaram’s court and he and Kam Baksh both tried to convince the Maratha to apprehend the other. In the end, Akbar won due to the trust he had gained in his earlier campaign to put Rajaram on the Maratha throne- before he could actually arrest his brother though, Kam Baksh escaped and commandeered a ship up to Surat, where he travelled in disguise north up to Kabul, the base of the ever restless Afghans and there he managed to secure aid. From there, in 1699, it looked as if he might even capture Delhi. It was the third battle of Panipat in January 1700 where the afghan forces of Kam Baksh were defeated by the combined imperial forces that put an end both to the rebellion and Kam Baksh. Kam Baksh’s inability to secure aid even when he promised many favours upon his accession is perhaps symbolic of the fact that even at this early stage of the merchant era, the nobility had lessened their dependence on the imperial centre for wealth and prestige. At this point, the Sikh community took up arms again, but after reading a letter from the new Guru, Govind Singh on how he had betrayed Islam in his cruelty and oppression, Aurangzeb backtracked on his previous promise of death and destruction and sent his grandson Bidar Bakht to give the new Guru his own jagir on a ship in 1703.
The remaining two brothers however, immediately began plotting against each other. It was at this point that Aurangzeb himself intervened. In 1701, he ordered Muhammad Akbar to perform the hajj and after that become his representative in the court of the Caliph to ensure the rights of their merchants within the Ottoman empire. He was conveyed to Surat with full imperial honours and when they got there, two of his sisters, Zubdat-un-Nissa and Zeb-un-nissa, the pride of Delhi for her poetry and vital influence in the formative stages of the Urdu language’s maturing, both decided to go with him. As their ship sailed beyond the horizon, it is reported that Aurangzeb broke down into tears.
The last few years of Aurangzeb’s life consisted of him sending various princes to put down small scale rebellions and keeping Azam Shah away from the capital, on constant tours around the empire to check on the implementation of the reforms and the efficiency of the provincial administration and when those were over on visits to major Sufi shrines, all the while showing his inability to hand over the reins of government to anyone else. This proved near disastrous after his death. While he was alive however, he spent his time constantly summoning various officials to Delhi to evaluate them and ensure their loyalty, combing over the Diwan’s accountancy for corruption and copying out the Quran to earn his own living. The unwavering attention and energy he devoted to the state took a toll on the aged emperor, such that by 1703, he had little awareness of the world around him. His letters from these years are pitiful:
“I know not who I am, where I shall go, or what will happen to this sinner full of sins. . . . My years have gone by profitless. God has been in my heart, yet my darkened eyes have not recognized his light. . . . There is no hope for me in the future. The fever is gone, but only the skin is left. ... I have greatly sinned, and know not what torments await me. . . . May the peace of God be upon you.”
He left instructions that his funeral should be ascetically simple, and that no money should be spent on his shroud except the four rupees that he had made by sewing caps. The top of his coffin was to be covered with a plain piece of canvas. To the poor he left three hundred rupees earned by copying the Koran. He died at the age of eighty-six, having long outstayed his welcome on the earth. His final resting place was beside his sister Jahanara near the tomb of sufi sheikh, Nizamuddin Auliya, where he followed the tomb design she had innovated, with an emphasis on pious simplicity.
I know, another chapter, so soon after the last? Im shocked too. So thats the old bugger dead. He had a good innings, didnt he? Moving into the 18th Century, the Mughal Sultanate has a much firmer base, and is establishing itself on the international stage. What that doesn't mean, however is that the future is rosy. What are you guys expecting to see next? Any areas you'd like me to cover? Perhaps a little teaser: "The decision to post a force to maintain order in Kandahar proved one of the most important moments in modern Indian history"