by John Keay
15
From Taj to Raj
1682–1750
‘FRAUD AND FOX-PLAY’
EXCEPT FOR one ominous development, the Deccan to which Aurangzeb returned in 1682 differed little from the Deccan which he had left in 1658. In the north the Mughal province of that name still stretched across the upper peninsula like a waistband. Comprising the erstwhile Ahmadnagar sultanate along with the eastward territories of Kandesh and Berar, it was administered from Burhanpur in Kandesh. In the west of the province the city of Aurangabad – near the Seunas’ fang-like fortress of Devagiri (Daulatabad) and the Rashtrakutas’ cave city of Ellora – was also an important centre of Mughal power and would soon supersede Burhanpur; it had been the capital of the Ahmadnagar sultanate under ‘black-faced’ Ambar Malik but had been renamed Aurangabad during Aurangzeb’s earlier governorship.
On the coast, the Europeans came and went. From their port of Bassein the Portuguese had acquired an adjacent trickle of islands which afforded good shelter for their shipping. Amongst the coconut groves on one of the islands they had built a small fort. They called it Bon Bahia, or Bombay. In the 1660s, following an Anglo – Portuguese alliance against their Dutch rivals, the place was transferred to Charles II as part of his Portuguese wife’s dowry. Although Bombay itself was as yet of no commercial value, the English thus acquired a territorial toehold adjacent to the busy shipping lanes of the west coast.
To the south, Goa remained in Portuguese hands while Cochin, an important entrepôt for the spice trade, had been wrested from them by the Dutch, also in the 1660s. North of Bombay the Mughal port of Surat, superseding the now mud-silted Cambay as the main maritime outlet of northern India, hosted much the busiest Dutch and English trading establishments. From Surat European purchasing agents fanned out into the cities and weaving centres of Gujarat and beyond to place their orders and oversee despatch. And down to Surat from Ahmadabad, Burhanpur, Broach and Baroda came the bundled cottons and silks and the barrelled indigo (in great demand for dyeing uniforms) which constituted the main items of export.
On the other side of the peninsula, all three European powers, plus the newly arrived French, retained similar toeholds on the Coromandel and Andhra coasts. Textiles were again the main item of trade, but there was a tendency here for the weavers to gravitate towards the European settlements which thus became zones of export-dependent prosperity. None of these settlements was yet of much political importance but the security offered by their heavy guns and well-built forts was proving an attraction. Additionally their stocks of powder, guns and gunners were eagerly sought by the contending powers in the hinterland.
The one obvious change which had overcome the Deccan during Aurangzeb’s twenty-four-year absence was, however, momentous: whereas in the first half of the seventeenth century there had been two major powers in the peninsula, the Golconda sultanate and the Bijapur sultanate, there were now three. The Marathas had come of age. Having established their military credentials in the service of others and then, under Shivaji’s inspirational leadership, having created an independent homeland in the Western Ghats, they had since elevated the homeland into a state and Shivaji into its king.
This revival of Hindu kingship at a time of awesome and markedly orthodox Muslim supremacy had been both unexpected and highly dramatic. As well as causing a sensation at the time, Shivaji’s extraordinary exploits would transcend their immediate context to dazzle his successors, console Hindu pride during the looming years of British supremacy, and provide Indian nationalists with an inspiring example of indigenous revolt against alien rule. Latterly they have also served to encourage Hindu extremists in the belief that martial prowess is as much part of their tradition as non-violence.
Of Shivaji’s exploits the most celebrated had occurred in 1659. In the words of Khafi Khan, an unofficial chronicler of Aurangzeb’s reign, while in the north the emperor was ‘beating off the crocodiles of the ocean of self-respect’ (his brothers, in other words), Shivaji had ‘become a master of dignity and resources’. In the previous years he had captured some forty forts in the Western Ghats and along the adjacent Konkan coast. But having ‘openly and fearlessly raised the standard of revolt’, when challenged, he revealed his true colours; ‘he resorted to fraud and fox-play’. Afzal Khan, Bijapur’s best general who had been sent to flush out ‘the designing rascal’, had run him to ground at the hill fort of Pratabgarh (near Mahabaleshwar). The Bijapuri army lacked the means to take such a strong position, while the Marathas stood no chance of driving them off. In time-honoured fashion the stalemate had therefore to be resolved by negotiation. Shivaji would have to make a token recognition of Bijapur’s suzerainty; Afzal Khan would have to leave Shivaji in undisturbed possession of his forts. This much having been agreed, it remained only for Shivaji to make his personal submission.
In a clearing at the foot of the Pratabgarh hill the two men met. Each had supposedly dispensed with attendants and weapons. Nevertheless, ‘both men came to the meeting armed’.1 Amongst Shivaji’s hidden arsenal was a small iron finger-grip with four curving talons, each as long and as sharp as a cut-throat razor.
As soon as that experienced and perfect traitor [i.e. Shivaji] neared Afzal Khan, he threw himself at his feet weeping. When he [Afzal Khan] wanted to raise his [Shivaji’s] head and put the hand of kindness on his back to embrace him, Shivaji with perfect dexterity thrust that hidden weapon into his abdomen in such a way that he [Afzal Khan] had not even time to sigh, and thus killed him.2
Shivaji then gave a signal to his men who were hidden in the surrounding scrub. Taking the Bijapuris by surprise, they ‘destroyed the camp of the ill-fated Afzal Khan’, captured his stores, treasure, horses and elephants, and enrolled many of his men. ‘Thus Shivaji acquired dignity and force much larger than before.’
Since some of the Bijapuri troops were actually Marathas and some of Shivaji’s were Muslims, it is clear that what Khafi Khan’s translator renders as ‘dignity’ – or perhaps ‘prestige’ – mattered more than creed. The same translator, a Muslim, calls the affair ‘one of the most notorious murders in the history of the subcontinent’; yet it seems that to contemporaries, as to most Hindu historians, it was testimony to Shivaji’s resourceful genius as much as his ‘designing turpitude’. Whilst the loyalties of kinsmen and co-religionists were vital, so were those of the assorted dissidents and adventurers who now recognised in him a leader of indomitable courage and assured fortune. Shivaji, says Khafi Khan, ‘made it a rule … not to desecrate mosques or the Book of Allah, nor to seize the women’.3 Muslims as well as Hindus could comfortably serve under his standard.
Shivaji celebrated his success over Afzal Khan by grabbing more of the Konkan coast between Bombay and Goa. There he assembled a small navy and began the fortification of the coves and estuaries from which it would operate. He also seized the pine-scented heights of Panhala, more a walled massif than a hill fort, just to the north of Kolhapur. A new Bijapuri army caught up with him there but, in another celebrated exploit, he gave the enemy the slip by escaping under cover of darkness with a few trusted followers.
By 1660 Aurangzeb had dealt with the ‘crocodiles’ and had sent to the Deccan a large army under Shaista Khan, the brother of Shah Jahan’s beloved Mumtaz Mahal. Shaista Khan was to secure the territories ceded to the empire by Bijapur in 1657, which included the Maratha homeland in the Ghats. Shivaji thus faced a new and much more formidable foe whom he had even less chance of defeating. The Mughal army was relentlessly harried and every fort took a heavy toll of Mughal blood; yet Pune, Shivaji’s capital, fell; then one by one the Maratha strongholds succumbed. By 1663 Shivaji was facing defeat. Another exploit was called for.
Shaista Khan had taken up residence in a house in the now Mughal city of Pune. No Marathas were allowed within the city walls and the house was heavily guarded. But special permission was obtained for a wedding party to enter the city and on the same day a more disconsolate group of Marathas were brought in as
prisoners. Late that night the bridegroom, the wedding party, the prisoners and their guards met up as arranged. Discarding disguise, they produced their weapons, crawled into the compound of Shaista Khan’s house through a kitchen window, and then smashed through a wall to reach the sleeping apartments. There ‘they made everyone who was awake to sleep in death and everyone who was asleep they killed in bed.’ Shaista Khan himself was lucky. He lost a thumb and seems to have fainted, whereupon ‘his maid servants carried him from hand to hand and then took him to a safe place.’ According to Khafi Khan, whose father was serving in Pune at the time, the Marathas then mistook their man and killed someone else thinking it was the Mughal commander. Also killed was Shaista Khan’s son and one of his wives. No plunder was taken; the raiders withdrew as suddenly as they had emerged; and although Shivaji himself was not among them, it seems that he had organised the raid and had probably secured the collusion of one of the Mughal generals.
This affair, a great blow to Mughal pride, was followed by another of greater consequence for the Mughal purse. Breaking out of the hills in 1664, Shivaji personally led his forces north into Gujarat and headed for the great port of Surat. For forty days the Marathas then ransacked the place. Only the well-defended English ‘factory’ (a fortified warehouse-cum-counting-house-cum-hostel) was spared. Most embarrassingly Shivaji’s ‘dignity’ was now eclipsing that of the empire.
Another Mughal army, fifteen thousand strong, headed for the Deccan under the great Jai Singh, the vanquisher of Prince Shuja. Once again the Maratha lands were ravaged as Jai Singh secured fort after fort and signed up their despairing defenders. By 1665 Shivaji himself was cornered near Purandhar and again sued for terms. The negotiations were protracted and complex. In the end, ‘with the ring of submission in his ears and the mantle of devotion on his body’, Shivaji agreed to the surrender of twenty forts, the payment of a substantial indemnity, the liability of his lands to assessment for Mughal military service, and the admission of his son as a Mughal mansabdar. He then made his personal submission to Jai Singh amidst security precautions which, understandably, were elaborate.
But the treaty of Purandhar had not been a surrender.4 Shivaji retained twelve forts and he remained at the head of his depleted army which, consisting mostly of Maratha horse, could travel light and live off the countryside, and was thus infinitely more elusive and wide-ranging than its heavy Mughal counterpart. Indeed the treaty was as much about securing Maratha collaboration with the Mughal forces in an offensive against Bijapur as about neutralising Shivaji. A year later, in 1666, Mughal fears of Maratha defections in the course of this Bijapur offensive prompted a Mughal demand that Shivaji travel north to Agra to attend the emperor in person. This was not a success. At Aurangzeb’s expense Shivaji assembled an impressive cavalcade of elephants, silver palanquins and gorgeously attired retainers only, on arrival, to be barely acknowledged by the imperial presence. He was then detained, amidst rumours of death or exile, in a situation that was little better than house arrest. True to form, the mortified Maratha escaped, although probably by bribery rather than buried in a basket of confectionery as per popular myth. Through the byways and backwoods he made his way undetected back to Maharashtra. ‘It was the most thrilling exploit of all his most wonderful deeds,’ opines a not impartial historian, ‘which has for ever added a supernatural glow to his unique personality.’
It immediately resounded throughout the country, making Shivaji an all-India figure, divinely ordained with extraordinary powers. The incident simultaneously exposed the emperor’s craft, still further adding to his evil repute for cunning and cruelty. Shivaji’s reputation, on the other hand, reached its zenith for having outwitted the cleverest and mightiest of the emperors.5
There followed a three-year lull before a Mughal demand seeking reimbursement for Shivaji’s expenses in Agra provoked the Maratha leader into a new offensive. Several vital forts were recaptured, in 1670 the port of Surat was a second time pillaged, and Maratha units struck deep into the Kandesh and Berar districts of the Mughal Deccan. Pune was liberated and Panhala reclaimed along with much of the Konkan coast. Then in 1674, as it were to crown it all, Shivaji had himself elevated to kingship.
The assumption of kingship was less for Mughal edification than for domestic reasons. With an eye to the future, Shivaji sought to legitimise assumed rights to precedence, revenue and service from his Maratha peers which had hitherto depended largely on force of arms and his personal ascendancy. A basic machinery of government was also established and the kingdom’s finances reorganised. The ‘coronation’ itself (no crown was actually used) presented the sort of problems which dynastic aspirants of old may have had to face. Marathas not being accounted as of ksatriya status, a bogus genealogy had to be fabricated which linked Shivaji’s Bhonsle predecessors with the illustrious Sesodia rajputs of Mewar. This required a brahman of acknowledged repute who would sanction the arrangement, preside over Shivaji’s penance for having hitherto lived as other than a ksatriya, and conduct the actual rituals of consecration. Such a man was found in Varanasi and triumphantly brought to Maharashtra; but the ritual, so long in abeyance, had to be laboriously deduced from ancient texts and adapted for current circumstances. It included much anointing with various liquids and, of course, lavish donations to brahmans. Additionally a new era was proclaimed and a new calendar drawn up. There was no horse-sacrifice but, to complete the traditional ceremony, Shivaji set off on a token digvijaya which included a raid on a Mughal encampment and more forays in Kandesh and Berar.
Now an independent sovereign and temporarily under no great threat from the Mughal forces, Shivaji turned south and, in alliance with the Golconda sultanate, made a joint attack on the distant Bijapur possessions in the south of Tamil Nadu. The campaign, his last, was conducted almost entirely by Maratha forces and resulted in the formation of a new Maratha military nucleus based on the captured forts of Vellore and Jinji (south-west of Madras). When in 1680 Shivaji died, dysentery having subverted ‘dignity’, he thus left a Maratha kingdom of great but ill-defined extent. Its territories were not contiguous and its subjects were still unaccustomed to other than personal allegiance to their remarkable leader.
Divisions amongst the Maratha leaders were further exacerbated by a disputed succession. But in 1681 Shambhaji, one of Shivaji’s two competing sons, gained the upper hand, had himself crowned, and resumed his father’s expansionist policies. It was to Shambhaji’s court that Prince Akbar, Aurangzeb’s rebellious son, had made his way after the failure of his rajput intrigues. And it was to nullify any possible rajput – Maratha alliance around the person of the prince, as well as to resume his long affair with the Deccan sultanates, that in 1682 the emperor himself headed south with the entire imperial court, the imperial administration, and something like 180,000 troops.
AURANGZEB’S LAST YEARS
The conjunction of Maratha and rajput resistance which Prince Akbar had hoped to engineer against his father never materialised. Shambhaji, with Mughal armies already swarming through the northern Maratha lands, preferred to ignore the prince’s pleas for an all-India offensive and concentrated instead on his coastal neighbours, including a fierce little war with the Portuguese in Goa. In despair Prince Akbar took ship for Persia in 1687; like Humayun, he hoped to interest the shah in his ambitions but was disappointed.
Meanwhile Aurangzeb’s armies were enjoying uninterrupted success although no decisive victories. ‘The Mughal strategy toward Maharashtra was not subtle, just thorough.’6 Maratha lands were ravaged and Maratha deshmukhs overawed and then enlisted in the imperial service as mansabdars. But the forts were rarely worth the immense effort of capturing them and the main enemy detachments proved too wily to be induced into battle. Already it was becoming clear that outright conquest of the Maratha kingdom would demand a greater commitment of imperial resources than Aurangzeb had realised.7
Badly in need of more tangible success, the emperor turned on Bijapur. In 1684 an army of eigh
ty thousand invaded the sultanate. Not so much defeated as overwhelmed, both the city and its sultan surrendered after a desperate siege lasting over a year. The kingdom became a Mughal province, its chief nobles were co-opted into the Mughal hierarchy, and its sultan became a state prisoner in the imperial encampment. There he was soon joined by his opposite number of Golconda. First invaded and occupied in 1685, the Golconda sultanate finally fell, along with the great stronghold of that name, in 1687. It too was then incorporated into the empire.
Aurangzeb argued that both sultanates deserved their fate for having on occasion abetted the infidel Marathas. In Hyderabad especially, the revenge of the righteous was sweet; vast wealth was appropriated, temples were desecrated, brahmans killed and Hindus of all castes penalised by the jizya. But there also arose considerable disquiet, even amongst the ulema, over the emperor’s cavalier treatment of such long-established Islamic states. Their non-Muslim subjects, especially those warrior aristocracies under their ex-Vijayanagar nayaks, would never become resigned to Mughal rule. And the ‘Deccani’ nobles, who though often of Persian origin and Shi’ite persuasion were now enrolled as ranking Mughal amirs, would retain a strong sense of regional and cultural identity. Within the Mughal military hierarchy they would constitute an influential clique on whom the ‘Hindustani’ amirs of the north looked with suspicion.
Aurangzeb’s mission in the south seemingly soared to its glorious climax when in 1688 Shivaji’s successor Shambhaji, together with his brahman chief minister, was captured in an ambush. Brought to the imperial encampment, Shambhaji managed to heap insult on both the emperor and the Prophet. He was duly tortured and then painfully dismembered, joint by joint, limb by limb. No doubt the procedure symbolised that by which Aurangzeb imagined himself dealing with the Maratha kingdom.