Alamgirnama: A Mughal Timeline

[XFE]

I'll just give my unpopular opinion that I'd much rather a realistic growth of the Mughal Empire--one that offers is insight into the development and gradual transformation of India, rather than ASB wankery that feels more like an SI than anything.

@Madhav Deval has put a lot of work into making this Mughal Empire feel real and unwanked. Reading this TL genuinely does feel like we're looking at an untrodden path of history that might well have happened with a different Aurangzeb. A Mughal Empire that might have been, rather than the impossible one-sided steamrolling that wanks generally are. The TL's realism is why I read the TL--a Mughal-wank would turn me off.

 

[Madhukar_Shah]

@Xianfeng Emperor oh no don’t worry, I’m definitely not going to ignore the fact that OTL, just twenty years after Aurangzebs death, emperors were being tortured, imprisoned, deposed, rising to the throne like bubbles only to pop when they get there. Hopefully we’ll be spared the darkest of that here, but the Mughal court in this period is still feeling a lot of pressure that’s not just going to go away and even the strongest of superpowers doesn’t get its way half the time (case in point America)

 

[Aghstadian]

Well i don't have problem with wank to be honest provide they done correctly not some magical asb "do this one thing and problem goes away forever". Even then i hardly call this a wank since Mughal themselves has the potential to be a great power not as result of buffing them up for no reason at all.

Regarding the tl itself. Mughal positition seem secure for now with strong economy and relatively stable. But futher consolidation still needed to ensure it remain. Iran is a mess right now, I actually suprise both Ottoman and Mughal at very least not try to create a proxies in Iran just to keep the conflict not spill over to their respective territory. But i see what you did there with Afghan raid as far as Kabul that Mughal will response in next update.

Overall good tl so far.

 

[haider najib]

Btw what sources did you use to do your research.
Another question with no perisans princes no more who do the mughals marry their woman to now? Could they marry them to hindu and non muslim rulers as like the ulitmate reward for loyalty, also keeps them loyal.

 

[haider najib]

offers is insight into the development and gradual transformation of India, rather than ASB wankery that feels more like an SI than anything

True, i just want a dominant india, the main thing a want mughals be able to shrug off europe ambitions and become their power claiming land, such as Australia and also for it to have consequences, for europe. I like a would have mughal dominated century like the brits in 19th century not a mughal not a mughal united world thats for eu 4 aars. As someone pointed out semi wank for the win.

provide they done correctly not some magical asb "do this one thing and problem goes away forever".

this.

 

[HIM Dogson]

Personally I'm fine with a semi-wank or something realistic. It's not like Mughal wanks are cliche, so its fine.

 

[Madhukar_Shah]

Btw what sources did you use to do your research.
Another question with no perisans princes no more who do the mughals marry their woman to now? Could they marry them to hindu and non muslim rulers as like the ulitmate reward for loyalty, also keeps them loyal.

Im currently using:

• The Mughal Throne: The Saga of India's Great Emperors (nice little anecdotes about Shivaji, Aurangzeb and the earlier emperors, though not all that useful now)
• After Tamerlane: A History of Global Empire (helps put it all into global context)
• India before Europe (Its super useful for cultural developments in India, in terms of religion and arts)
• A History of Modern India (the most useful source for the post-aurangzeb years of the empire)

Also, the Mughals never married their women to persian princes or anyone else as a rule. They were all kept unmarried as their children could conceivably challenge the emperor's children in a future succession war. I'm not too sure how I want that to develop in the future.

 

[Madhukar_Shah]

The Reign of Azam Shah​

"Great Indians" by Dilawar Khan

After his fathers death, Muhammad Azam Shah was eagerly awaiting the first uncontested accession to the throne of Delhi in the history of the Gurkani dynasty. In October, he started minting coins in his own name and had the khutba read in his own name as well, the only two rituals theoretically needed to ascend to the throne. Three days later, however, his brother Muazzam was broken out of jail and proclaimed himself emperor as well, taking the regnal title of Bahadur Shah. This was to prove a significantly greater threat than Kam Baksh had been earlier, partly because many assumed that, having been imprisoned for the past twenty years, Bahadur Shah would have little appetite for government, allowing those who would use his office for their own ends to take control of the sultanate. A coalition quickly assembled itself around him, comprised of his own sons, the faujdars of awadh and certain deccan subahs as well as a number of zamindars, most notably the jat nobility, united by the potential to take the governance of Hindustan into the hands of Hindustanis. The Jats, led by Churaman, professed different religions vis a vis Hinduism, Islam and Sikhism but were united by their common tribal heritage. Because they lived within the Agra triangle, Mughal authority was felt to the fullest extent by them, including Aurangzeb’s temple destruction edicts and jizya taxation. Many Jats looked back fondly to the days when Dara Shikoh had gifted them gold railings for the Keshab Rai temple in Mathura.

This rebellion was put down at the battle of Karnal when an attempt to storm past Azam Shah’s defensive line went wrong. Three of Bahadur Shah’s sons would die in this battle, while the would be emperor himself was sent to replace Mohammad Akbar, who had recently died, at the court of the Ottoman caliph in Istanbul. His other surviving son would be sent to the court of the Khanate of Bukhara where he was soon killed during the chaos that realm erupted into at the time. This marked the formalisation of the policy that Aurangzeb had unknowingly made a tradition- from now on rivals for the throne would attempt to have each other sent to distant corners of the world to remove them as competition. This battle was significant mainly because of the emergence of the three Sayyid brothers and Raja Jai Singh as political actors and as the first time prince Bidar Bakht heard the war cry “Hindavi Swarajya”.

It seems at first, he was confused by this- weren’t he and his father just as Indian as his uncle? Why would these nobles think Bahadur Shah would be friendlier to Hindustanis than he would be? It was this thought that followed him as his father ascended to the peacock throne. Azam Shah received the submission of the vast majority of mansabdars within a year of taking the throne, though soon, even his most ardent supporters would become lukewarm. Already half a century old, Azam Shah was past the age where he could’ve been expected to show imagination in any work. He was a man of a haughty disposition exceedingly proud of his pure Safavid bloodline. He was incapable of saying no to anybody with a famous ancestor and his idea of statesmanship was to let one of the Hastvazirat deal with it. He also suffered from the typical Mughal vices of opium and alcoholism. A crypto-shia by faith, the Irani party came in the ascendant during his reign, with the aging Asad Khan and his son Zulfiqar as his first two Vakils. He even inserted a declaration of Ali as wali in the friday prayers, an overtly shia position that alienated his Turani and Hindustani followers.

He stocked his first Hastvazirat with Irani immigrants, giving that faction undue power in court. This faction was perturbed by the instability in Iran and had been lobbying Aurangzeb for a while to intervene in the politics there. Azam Shah thus as one of his first farmans called up various portions of the standing armies of all his subahs and directed them to Kandahar, from there hoping to restore Abbas to the throne in Isfahan, just as Shah Tahmasp Safavi had restored Badshah Humayun to the takht of Delhi, then too after an afghan rebellion.

The original plan was to push the Afghans out of their power base in Herat and then send a light cavalry force to Isfahan, followed by a larger force, which would ensure Safavid restoration. By 1709, however, when the armies had just reached Kandahar, the majority were forced to turn back. With the perceived removal of Mughal military force from the conquered regions in south India, regional powers had reasserted themselves, led by the kingdom of Mysore. Allied with him in this rebellion was the Dutch East Indies Company, hoping to regain the monopoly of textiles to South East Asia.

This military prevarication greatly lowered imperial prestige among the officers and infantry alike. Eventually, a Rajput contingent, led by Jai Singh was left to prevent raids into Hindustan while the rest of the army went south again to deal with the Southern Rebellion. By the time the entire army got there in 1711, they found that the alliance headed by Kanthirava Narasaraja II of Mysore threatened all of their possessions south of the Krishna river, the garrisons left in the southern subahs hadn’t been enough to fully stop them, although they had regrouped to create a line of defence just south of the river. The alliance had been supplied with the latest in European musketry by the Dutch republic and the Mughal forces found that it was only with the guns they had just started importing from Europe that they made any progress whatsoever. A rough stalemate emerged, with the Mughals only ever inching forward to secure more territory, despite numerical superiority while the Mysore alliance was never able to decisively push the Mughals out. This was the first war of the Indian subcontinent that had a significant naval aspect as by this time, both sides had major assets travelling by sea and the Mughal ability to seize the assets of the southern princes using their green water navy proved a powerful weapon. On the other hand, their complete inexperience regarding blue water navies showed when they attempted to oust the Dutch from Sri Lanka. They attempted to use their age old tactic of lining ships up so that the masses of Indian soldiers could use their numerical advantage and swarm the enemy ships, in essence a land battle but on water. This proved disastrous as the dutch simply blew them out of the water before they could get close.

The Mughal treasury was also under immense strain after years of war and in the north, certain provincial officials were reporting that they weren’t getting their salaries on time. In this context, a rebellion broke out in Awadh by unpaid tax collectors in 1713, that required Bidar Bakht to crush. A potential cause of both these rebellions was the devaluation of the rupee due to inflation and the surplus of precious metals. In 1712, Azam Shah had realised that if the Dutch alliance with the Mysoreans was causing this much trouble, they needed their own European allies. At first, he asked the British for help but they were aware of the fact that their country was allied with the dutch for the war of Spanish succession and after long internal arguments, decided to side with queen and country over profits. This forced Azam Shah to send orders to Europe to invite France into an alliance in return for the dutch place in the mansab system. By the time these orders reached Europe, the war there was already almost over, but the French were nevertheless eager to get an in for the trade with India, so when that same convoy returned, it was loaded with French military advisers and flintlock muskets. Upon arrival in India in 1714, these advisers were put in charge of the Mughal war effort, partially because the sixty year old emperor was desperate to finish the war by any means. This is an incredibly significant moment in the history of India because it marks the inclusion of India into the European system of alliances that had been going on and the import of military ideas influential in Europe that updated Indian warfare, such as making artillery more manageable and the refinement of infantry techniques. By 1716, Mughal commanders began to be sent home, as the eventual victory became more and more certain. The Dutch surrendered in 1717 and all military forces had been neutralised by 1720. As reparation, the Dutch were expelled from India and Sri Lanka. France gained not only the Dutch place in the Mughal trade system (curiously this remained as trade with the Dutch Republic, not trade with their own country, which by now was firmly in Mughal hands) but also the right to all exports from Ceylon, which was annexed into the Mughal administration in 1721.

In 1715, another revolution had occurred within the Mughal court. The Irani hastvazirat had been incredibly unpopular with most mansabdars, and were widely seen as the cause of the southern war as well as being incredibly corrupt. And there was some truth to this, as corruption had immediately worsened when they took power and the value of jagirs possessed by the Iranian faction at court had gone up almost exponentially. The lakhs of rupees given as gifts had had its own impact on the treasury and needed extra taxes on the peasantry to fund. It is possible that the empire itself could have collapsed were it not for Bidar Bakht. His fathers Shia leanings and pandering to the Irani faction at court had led him to cement an alliance with the Hindustani faction. He accused the new Vakil, Zulfiqar Khan with treason and in this conspiracy half of the Iranians at court as well as two of his brothers, Jawan Bakht and Sikander Shan were also implicated. Jawan Bakht was sent to Spain, and Sikander Shan managed to escape, convert to Shia Islam, convince Abbas the third to accept him as his heir (all children of Azam Shah had some Safavid blood from his mothers side) and with the blessings of Azam Shah left to attempt to take control of Persia along with the majority of powerful Iranian courtiers. Bidar Bakht managed to have all three Sayyid brothers (who had risen to prominence during the southern war) instated in the Hastvazirat, Abdullah Khan as the vazir, Nuruddin Ali Khan as the vakil and Husain Ali Khan as the mir bakshi. To fix the treasury, Bidar Bakht and Abdullah Khan engineered negotiations between the Jagat Sethi banking house and other institutions across the Mughal realm that would lead in 1718 to the creation of a Khazana-I Hind bank, on the same model of the British bank of England. The first act of this bank was to start issuing banknotes, as had happened in England almost three decades earlier, and in order to print banknotes, they created the worlds first Urdu printing press, which would be incredibly important in the development of the next century. Under their influence, Azam Shah was also convinced to stop the collection of the jizya tax, and this also helped to recover the imperial prestige in the eyes of Hindu notables.

Maharaja Jai Singh of Amer was one of the most remarkable individuals of the Hindu political renaissance. Born in 1688 to one of the most important Rajput kingdoms, he received an education common to most Mughal elites- he was schooled in Persian, Arabic and Sanskrit, poetry, history and mathematics. It is this last field where he particularly excelled and he soon took charge of accountancy for his family’s jagir. Though initially he found his family had become poor through historical wasteful spending, under his careful watch the Kachawa Rajputs became the richest family in the Rajputana. His interest in mathematics led to him searching for a tutor in Greek, so that he might be able to create translations in Sanskrit of ancient Greek mathematical treatises, originally focusing on Euclid’s “Geometry”. Gifted with intelligence, he was also very precocious and forced his father to send him to the English court at the age of 13, where he spent four years. During this spell he became knowledgeable on British culture, watched many English plays and spent most of his time in Oxford and Cambridge University, where he insisted upon an education in maths, Greek, Latin and English as well as the classic Mughal education he was receiving from tutors he had brought with him. While in Oxford, he was delighted by the printing press he was shown and it is possible that without him, the cultural exchange between India and Europe would have taken a lot longer. After reading a copy of Newton’s Principia Mathematica, he insisted on meeting this visionary, and though we have no record of their conversations, he spends many paragraphs in one of his next letters home talking about the wisdom of this man, calling him the favourite of Saraswati. During his stay, he also awakened interest in the East amongst the Oxford scholars and when he left, his own tutor requested leave to stay a while as the Oxford professor of Persian and Sanskrit. His interest in the west was also reflected in his convincing his father to ask Aurangzeb for Jagirs to France and his profligacy in translating Western knowledge into Urdu, Persian and Sanskrit. His time in England was cut short however, by the death of his father in 1705, which forced him to return to Amer and take up the throne there.


At the time of the false war, he joined the Mughal forces heading to Kandahar and was part of the contingent left behind to keep order within Mughal borders. He must have received the greatest of shocks when in 1710, he was conducting a tour of the citadel of Kandahar and he stumbled upon a plaque with inscriptions he recognised as Greek. Though he could recognise the Greek letters, he wasn’t yet quite good enough at the language to actually translate the entirety, so he copied down the inscription and sent it to his Greek tutor, who made an attempt to translate it, that despite not being completely accurate revealed that it described the rule of an ancient king, Piodasses and some of his rules. Seized with curiosity about this ruler, Jai Singh spent the next few weeks sending soldiers to find more ancient Greek inscriptions in the area, until the discovery of a different plaque that also mentioned this king Piodasses. His original theory was that Piodasses must have been one of the descendants of the generals of Alexander the Great, and formulated the idea that they had intermarried with Indians to create the modern Rajput clans. In 1712, he convinced Azam Shah to let him send Brahmins from every major city the empire to collect as much local history as possible, in the form of ancient texts and monuments, in order to create a single document, a world history in the Islamic tradition that detailed the entire history of India. Significantly, the language all this knowledge was collected in was Urdu, which Jai Singh insisted upon when Azam Shah disallowed him from compiling it in Sanskrit. He left Kandahar in 1715 to join the war effort in the south, though more importantly he joined the Hindustani coup and helped abolish the Jizya. Upon returning home to Amer in 1717, he performed the Ashvamedha Yajna, becoming the first individual since the 11th century to perform this legendary rite, which claimed to confirm the worldwide sovereignty of the performer. After this, he took a brief break from politics, instead focusing on social issues and trying to reduce the amount of money poor people were forced to pay brahmins during wedding ceremonies and campaigning for the abolition of sati. He ordered the constructions of Jantar Mantars, massive observatories based on Ulugh Beg’s, Aurangzeb’s great-great-great-great-great grandfather’s in Samarkand though combining classical Indian knowledge and Enlightenment European knowledge as well. His last major acts in Azam Shah’s reign were the construction of a massive cannon, the Jaivana, which remains the largest wheeled cannon in the world and the commencement of the Yamuna-Sutlej Canal in 1718, an engineering project of immense scale that would link the Yamuna-Ganga river system to the Indus river system, allowing for goods to be transported from Bengal to the Panjab and vice versa. It took seven years to complete, along with all the alterations that needed to be made along the courses of both rivers to allow for inland shipping and was instantly profitable. This set off the so called Canal Craze of the early 18th Century where nobles raced to improve irrigation and inland shipping. The central government sold the rights to create these canals as privately run businesses and allowed nobles to levy a toll for their use. Most activity focused on the level rivers of the northern subcontinent for the first half of the century, though by the 1750’s significant progress was being made in the faster, steeper rivers of the south.

Meanwhile the situation on the northern border had become one where the empire had a large army for the defence of the empire made up of temporarily levied conscripts who were simply sent up there to provide a show of numbers and discourage incursions. This was separate from the professional standing army maintained by the empire to put down rebellions and to conquer new territory.

Bidar Bakht’s coup had pretty much divorced the emperor from the reigns of government, though he was still the nominal ruler. The father had, in all senses become a puppet ruler for his own son. It got to a point where the Sayyid brothers would send guards to watch over him whenever he left his house and his correspondence with anyone who wasn’t firmly part of the Hindustani faction was banned. He repeatedly asked his four remaining sons to free him and depose their brother, but they pointed out, Bidar Bakht had no position from which to oust. The Hastvazirat, originally meant to be appointed by the emperor, controlled by the emperor and dismissed by the emperor was now in effect a separate power, kept in power by the fact that most of the nobility agreed with them. In 1719, however, a turanian faction, known as friends of the emperor, and led by Nizam-ul-Mulk from his power base in Bihar attempted to free Azam Shah and place Ali Tabar as crown prince. This attempted rebellion collapsed due to lack of funds, troublesome zamindars who switched their loyalty back to the government and the death of Azam Shah in early 1721. Bidar Bakht once again pulled his classic move of exiling opponents, sending Ali Tabar to the Ottoman empire, Wala Jah to the Johor Sultanate, Zih Jah to England, and Wala Shan to France. Nizam Ul Mulk on the other hand was simply executed. In August 1721, at age 51, Bidar Bakht ascended to the Peacock throne as Jahanzeb Shah.





I've always thought it a shame that OTL Jai Singh was forced to get involved with the dreary business of ruling when he was most obviously meant to be a scholar, OTL, he himself didn't know any European languages but he did commission translations and was very interested in maths and engineering in Europe. I think I've accidentally made this really similar to OTL as well in that the Sayyid brothers imprison an emperor, but moderated by the survival of the third brother and the strong leadership of Bidar Bakht, there'll be no imperial carcasses found rotting in rivers. The main feature of this period in OTL mughal court was the jockeying for position between the Emperor and the Vazir, and the various court factions, which i've got here. As OTL, Nizam-ul-Mulk heads up the Turanian Emperor's Friends faction, but OTL, the Sayyid Brothers disagreed on where to put him- Abdullah said keep him occupied with the rebellious Zamindars in Bihar, Hussain Ali said let's put him in Malwa and Hussain, being the more assertive of the two won. From there Nizam Ul Mulk consolidated power in the Deccan and established his own Hyderabad state. ITTL, his rebellion flounders and the sayyids remain powers at court. Under the influence of the Sayyid brothers OTL, Jizya was re-abolished and the hindu peasantry allowed to rebuild temples that had been recently destroyed. On the whole though, this empire has a much stronger centre than OTL, and is culturally becoming more cosmopolitan. At the same time though, is that much control over the emperor really a precedent Jahanzeb Shah wants to set? Major kudos to anyone who recognised what I’m talking about in the Greek stuff at Kandahar.

 

[haider najib]

Are the mughals shia now? Majority of indian Muslims are sunni thats not good.

 

[Madhukar_Shah]

Are the mughals shia now? Majority of indian Muslims are sunni thats not good.

No, no the dynasty as a whole is still Sunni, but Azam Shah personally and some of his children are a bit of a blip there and convert- in fact Jahanzeb Shah removes the declaration of Ali as wali as soon as he ascends

 

[haider najib]

No, no the dynasty as a whole is still Sunni, but Azam Shah personally and some of his children are a bit of a blip there and convert- in fact Jahanzeb Shah removes the declaration of Ali as wali as soon as he ascends

Alot happened here could you summaries it please as i have had brain fart im struggling to break it down. Some mughals now shia, mughals are puppets? Rebellion in the south. Could please explain to this pleb what happened im for some reason struggling to comprehend what happened.

 

[Madhukar_Shah]

Alot happened here could you summaries it please as i have had brain fart im struggling to break it down. Some mughals now shia, mughals are puppets? Rebellion in the south. Could please explain to this pleb what happened im for some reason struggling to comprehend what happened.

There really was a lot going on wasn’t there- basically some Mughals went Shia (as OTL), and there’s a rebellion in the south led by local rulers and the Dutch, during this rebellion the Sunni Mughals and the Hindustani faction oust most Shia Mughals and exile them to Iran. Azam Shah, as the emperor, cant be exiled, so he’s kept on as a puppet ruler, with a coalition between the Sayyid brothers and his son Bidar Bakht as his puppet masters

 

[haider najib]

@Madhav Deval could i suggest for mughal princesses that they become trade queens, let them control the trade in empire as they most likely were raised to run finance and controlling court.

 

[markus meecham]

Oh, for whoever just got to this tl and doesn't understand the indian numeral nomenclature, a lakh is a hundred thousand, a crore is ten million.

 

[agisXIV]

I remember that from Ibn Battutah...

 

[souvikkundu25140017]

How much of reforms of Jai Singh was imposed upon the empire?

 

[Madhukar_Shah]

How much of reforms of Jai Singh was imposed upon the empire?

As of right now, not actually that much.
Sure he was important in putting the idea of a central bank into heads at Delhi, in abolishing Jizya, and in setting off a trend of canals that is vital for integrating the economy, culture and politics of the empire but his biggest influence on imperial politics will come during the reign of Jahanzeb Shah.

 

[souvikkundu25140017]

As of right now, not actually that much.
Sure he was important in putting the idea of a central bank into heads at Delhi, in abolishing Jizya, and in setting off a trend of canals that is vital for integrating the economy, culture and politics of the empire but his biggest influence on imperial politics will come during the reign of Jahanzeb Shah.

What about Hundi and insurance? I am sure those were present during the mughal era, is there any changes due to the introduction of central bank?

 

[Madhukar_Shah]

What about Hundi and insurance? I am sure those were present during the mughal era, is there any changes due to the introduction of central bank?

Not really, the Khazana I Hind works pretty much just like any other Indian bank complete with Hundis and all, but it’s a lot bigger and like the Bank of England, the bank has exclusive control over government balances and it’s the only business allowed to print banknotes. The lenders making up the bank give the government bullion and issue notes against government bonds (an idea that’s also new to India) which can be lent again.

Now that they’ve gone a ways to fix the currency crisis, the main role of the Khazana will be financing the private ventures of mansabdars- this is going to go a ways to fund the industries that all the mansabdars want to sell. The government itself is just fine as long as it has full access to the land tax and apart from very rare situations, won’t need to dip into the private capital market.

 

[haider najib]

Didn't Aurangzeb depose his own father? Why could this not be done again.