The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company

by William Dalrymple

In 1762 Ahmad Shah Durrani had ousted Shah Alam’s teenage nemesis, Imad ul-Mulk, from the Red Fort, and installed as governor Najib ud-Daula, a Rohilla of Afghan birth.

The main architect of the Afghan incursions into northern India, Ahmad Shah Durrani, had now returned to the mountains of his homeland to die. He was suffering the last stages of an illness that had long debilitated him, as his face was eaten away by what the Afghan sources call a ‘gangrenous ulcer’, possibly leprosy or some form of tumour.

Soon after winning his greatest victory at Panipat, Ahmad Shah’s disease began consuming his nose, and a diamond-studded substitute was attached in its place. By 1772, maggots were dropping from the upper part of his putrefying nose into his mouth and his food as he ate. Having despaired of finding a cure, he took to his bed in the Toba hills, where he had gone to escape the summer heat of Kandahar.

In May 1766, the Marathas launched their first, relatively modest, expedition north of the Chambal since Panipat five years earlier. By 1770, they were back again, this time with an ‘ocean-like army’ of 75,000, which they used to defeat the Jat Raja of Deeg and to raid deep into Rohilla territory east of Agra.19 It was becoming increasingly clear that the future lay once again with the Marathas, and that the days of Afghan domination were now over.

In contrast to the failing and retreating Durrani monarchy, the Marathas had produced two rival young leaders who had showed both the determination and the military ability to recover and expand Maratha fortunes in the north. The first of these was the young Mahadji Scindia. Of humble origins, Scindia had been chased from the battlefield of Panipat by an Afghan cavalryman who rode him down, wounded him below the knee with his battle axe, then left him to bleed to death. Scindia had crawled to safety to fight another day but he would limp badly from the wound for the rest of his life. Unable to take exercise, Scindia had grown immensely fat. He was, however, a brilliant politician, capable, canny and highly intelligent.

But both men did agree that this was the right moment to revive Maratha power in Hindustan, and that the best way of cementing this would be to install Shah Alam back in Delhi under their joint protection, and so secure control of his affairs.21 The master of Delhi, they knew, was always the master of Hindustan.

Still in his mid-thirties, handsome, polished and charming, Najaf Khan had the blood of the royal Persian Safavid dynasty flowing in his veins and was allied through marriage with Nawab Shuja ud-Daula of Avadh.

Few believed Shah Alam had much of a chance of getting safely back to Delhi. Fewer still believed he had any hope of re-establishing Mughal rule there, or of achieving any meaningful independence from the Marathas, who clearly wished to use him for their own ends, just as the Company had done. But if anyone could help Shah Alam succeed on all these fronts, Najaf Khan was the man.

But the Emperor kept his nerve. He stayed nearly three weeks at Serai Alamchand, sequestered in his tent with Mirza Najaf Khan, ‘invisible to every person’, planning every detail of their march and working out together how to overcome the different obstacles.

The following week, Shah Alam’s army trudged in the heat past Kannauj and over the border into Rohilla territory.

The Rohilla Nawab of Farrukhabad, Ahmad Khan Bangash, had just died. Shah Alam decided to demonstrate his resolve by demanding that all the Nawab’s estates should now escheat to the crown, in the traditional Mughal manner. His demands were resisted by the Nawab’s grandson and successor, who gathered a Rohilla army, surrounded and cut off the Emperor’s column, and prepared to attack the imperial camp. Shah Alam sent urgent messages to Mahadji Scindia, requesting immediate military assistance.

On 18 November, Mahadji Scindia finally came in person to the imperial camp. He was led limping into the Emperor’s durbar by Prince Akbar, as everyone watched to see whether the Maratha chieftain would conform to Mughal court etiquette and offer full submission to the Emperor. After a moment’s hesitation, to the relief of the Mughals, Scindia prostrated himself before the Emperor, ‘laid his head at the Emperor’s feet, who raised him up, clasped him to his bosom and praised him. On account of his lameness, he was ordered to sit down in front of the Emperor’s gold chair.’

Two days later, Scindia returned for a second visit, and the two leaders, the Mughal and the Maratha, worked out their plans and strategy. On 29 November, the newly confederated armies struck camp and together headed on towards Delhi.34

Shah Alam marched out from his camp near Sikandra on New Year’s Day 1772, and that evening, at Shahdara, on the eastern bank of the Yamuna, he finally came within sight of the domes and walls of his capital rising across the river. The Maratha garrison rode out to greet him, bringing with them Zeenat Mahal, the Empress Mother, the Crown Prince Jawan Bakht and ‘at least twenty-seven [of the Emperor’s other] children.’35 Shah Alam received them all in formal durbar. Five days later, at quarter past eight in the morning, with his colours flying and drums beating, Shah Alam rode through the Delhi Gate into the ruins of Shahjahanabad. That day, the auspicious feast of Id ul-Fitr, marking the end of the holy fasting month of Ramadan, was remembered as his bazgasht, or homecoming.

He and Mirza Najaf Khan had two immediate targets in sight: the Jat Raja of Deeg had usurped much of the territory immediately south of the capital, between Delhi and Agra. But more pressing than that was the need to bring to heel the rogue Rohilla leader Zabita Khan, who now stood accused of disobeying the Emperor’s summons, as well as dishonouring his sister.

The following morning, the 17th, he set off with Mirza Najaf Khan and Mahadji Scindia to attack Zabita Khan’s fortress.

The two armies, Mughal and Maratha, then closed in to besiege Zabita Khan’s great stone fortress at Pathargarh, where he had lodged his family and treasure for safety.

Zabita Khan’s young son, Ghulam Qadir, was among the prisoners and hostages brought back to Shahjahanabad. There he was virtually adopted by the Emperor and brought up in style in the imperial gardens and palaces of Qudsia Bagh, north of Shahjahanabad. This was an act that Shah Alam would later come to regret. Even as his father continued to resist the Emperor and plot a series of rebellions against Shah Alam’s rule, Ghulam Qadir was given the luxurious life of an imperial prince, and grew up, in the words of one Mughal prince, to be as arrogant ‘as Pharaoh himself’.43 One senior noble, whose brother had been killed by Zabita Khan, asked the Emperor for Ghulam Qadir’s head in return, but Shah Alam protected the boy and insisted that no son should be responsible for the misdeeds of his father:

The Delhi Shah Alam returned to at the end of his campaign against Zabita Khan bore little resemblance to the magnificent capital in which he had grown up. Thirty years of incessant warfare, conquest and plunder since 1739 had left the city ruined and depopulated.

The Swiss adventurer Antoine Polier painted an equally bleak vision. Delhi, he wrote, was now a ‘heap of ruins and rubbish’. The mansions were dilapidated, the gorgeously carved balconies had been sawn up for firewood by the Rohillas; the canals in the Faiz Bazaar and Chandni Chowk were clogged and dry. ‘The only houses in good repair were those belonging to merchants or bankers,’ noted the Comte de Modave.

The great Urdu poet Mir returned to Delhi from exile around this time, full of hope that Delhi’s downward trajectory might have been arrested after so many years of ill fortune. On arrival he could not believe the scale of the devastation he found.

Nor was it clear that any sort of final peace had now come to the city. In the aftermath of the capture of Pathargarh, the fragile new alliance between the Mughals and the Marathas already appeared to be near collapse as the two sides fought over the division of the spoils: ‘the faithless Marathas have seized all the artillery and treasures of Zabita Khan, as well as his elephants, horses and other property,’ reported a palace newswriter, ‘and have offered only a worthless fraction to the Emperor.’52

The matter was still unresolved when the two armies returned to Delhi. By December 1772 things had escalated to such a pitch of hostility that on Friday the 17th there was a full-scale Maratha attack on Shah Alam’s small army, as his troops made a stand amid the ruins of the old fort of Purana Qila.

They were determined not to allow him to increase his military strength, which would soon enough have been a counterbalance to their own armed forces. All they wanted was to keep Shah Alam dependent on themselves. Their terms were that the Emperor would keep only such troops as he strictly needed as a personal guard … After this affair, the Emperor found himself reduced to a pitiable condition. He had failed to pay his troops before the battle, and was in even less of a position to pay them after. I could see that my troops were on the point of rebellion.

Shah Alam was now forty-five, late middle age by Mughal standards. For all his mixed fortunes in battle, he could still look back on many aspects of his life with gratitude: he had successfully eluded assassination at the hands of Imad ul-Mulk, and had survived four pitched battles with the Company’s sepoys, only to have the victors swear him allegiance. He had made it back to Delhi and now occupied the Peacock Throne, independent within his kingdom and beholden to no one. This was for Shah Alam an almost miraculous outcome, and one that he had no hesitation attributing to divine intervention.

While Shah Alam relaxed and celebrated in Mehrauli, Najaf Khan was hard at work. He first secured the estates he had been granted in Hansi, and then used their revenues to pay his troops. He began to recruit and train further battalions, including one made up of destitute Rohillas, left penniless after the fall of Pathargarh, who were now driven by poverty to join the forces of their former enemies.

Steadily, one by one, he pulled them in: first the Breton soldier of fortune René Madec; then Mir Qasim’s Alsatian assassin, Walter Reinhardt, now widely known as Sumru and married to a remarkable and forceful Kashmiri dancing girl, Farzana. The Begum Sumru, as she later became celebrated, had become the mother of Sumru’s son, and travelled across northern India with her mercenary husband; she would soon prove herself every bit as resilient and ruthless as he. While Sumru marched with Najaf Khan, the Begum pacified and settled the estates the couple had just been given by Shah Alam at Sardhana near Meerut.

Antoine Polier,

Comte de Modave

Duc de Choiseul.

dreadlocked Nagas

Anupgiri Gossain.

Nawal Singh sued for peace, while actively preparing for war and seeking an alliance with Zabita Khan Rohilla, who had recently returned to his devastated lands and was now thirsting for revenge. But Najaf Khan moved too quickly to allow any pact to be stitched together. His swift advance crushed the troops of Nawal Singh. On 24 September, he marched deep into Jat country and on the evening of 30 October at Barsana, just north of Deeg, with the sun sinking fast into fields of high millet, he killed and beheaded the principal Jat general and defeated his army, leaving 3,000 of them dead on the battlefield.

As word spread of Najaf Khan’s military prowess, his enemies began to flee in advance of his arrival, enabling Najaf to take in quick succession the fort of Ballabgarh, halfway to Agra, as well as a series of smaller Jat forts at Kotvan and Farrukhnagar.65 By mid-December, Najaf Khan had laid siege to Akbar the Great’s fort at Agra. He left Polier to direct siegeworks, and then headed further south with half the army to seize the mighty fortress of Ramgarh, which he took by surprise, then renamed Aligarh.

Nevertheless, in less than four years, Najaf Khan had reconquered all the most important strongholds of the Mughal heartlands and brought to heel the Emperor’s most unruly vassals. The Rohillas were crushed in 1772, again in 1774 and finally, in 1777, the Jats’ strongholds were all seized. By 1778, the Sikhs had been driven back into the Punjab, and Jaipur had offered submission. A token suzerainty had been re-established over both Avadh and parts of Rajputana.

While Mirza Najaf Khan was busy with the army, Shah Alam stayed in Delhi, re-establishing his court and trying to breathe life back into his dead capital. Imperial patronage began to flow and the artists and writers started to return: as well as the poets Mir and Sauda, the three greatest painters of the age, Nidha Mal, Khairullah and Mihir Chand, all came back home from self-exile in Lucknow.

Najaf Khan shrugged off the gossip, carrying on with his conquests with an equanimity that impressed observers: ‘His perseverance is unparalleled,’ wrote Polier. ‘His patience and fortitude in bearing the reproaches and impertinence of this courtly rabble is admirable.’

Inevitably in such circumstances, between the Emperor and his most brilliant commander, a polite and courtly coldness developed which manifested itself in subtle ways that Modave took great pleasure in noting down:

Indeed two of the king’s greatest faults are his great fondness of flattery, and the too unreserved confidence he places on his ministers. Though he cannot be called a great king, he must be allowed to have many qualities that would entitle him, in private life, to the character of a good and benevolent man

Though this prince has several good qualities – intelligence, gentleness, and a perceptive understanding – his occasional pettiness can ruin everything. Cossetted among his womenfolk, he lives out a flabby, effeminate existence. One of his daily pastimes is playing a board-game with his favourite concubines, with oblong dice about the length of the middle finger [chaupar] … Each game the Padshah plays with his ladies involves 3 or 4 paisas, which he pays if he loses and insists that he receive if he wins, according to the rules.

He has the failings of all weak rulers, and that is to hate those he is constrained to promote, which is the case with his general Najaf Khan – they both mistrust each other, and are continually falling out … Even though Shah Alam has taken part in war, he has never developed any taste for the military profession, even though the position he finds himself in would demand that he make fighting his principal occupation. One wastes one’s time trying to persuade him to go on campaign; since his return to Delhi, he has either avoided or refused all proposals made to him on that subject.

But the most serious problem for the court was not internal divisions and intrigues so much as Shah Alam’s perennial lack of funds. On 9 September 1773, Shah Alam wrote to Warren Hastings asking for the tribute of Bengal. He said he had received no money from the Company ‘for the last two years and our distress is therefore very great now’. He reminded the Company of their treaty obligations – to remit revenue and to allow him the lands awarded to him at Kora and Allahabad.

Najaf Khan first became ill in the winter of 1775 and was confined to his bed for several months. While he was unwell, the Jats rose in revolt and it was not until he recovered in April that he was able to lead a second campaign to re-establish imperial authority in Hariana.

Under the guise of being his well-wisher, he shamelessly encouraged the Mirza, who till then had spent his time fighting and defeating enemies of the state, to taste the hitherto unknown pleasures of voluptuousness. Latafat Ali Khan was able to introduce into the Mirza’s own private quarters an experienced prostitute, who day and night had slept with a thousand different men. He now had her appear shamelessly at every intimate gathering, till the Mirza became infatuated with her, and little by little became her sexual slave. By this channel, Latafat Ali Khan was able to receive endless sums of money and gifts; but the wine and the woman quickly sapped the Mirza’s strength.

Whatever may have been the particulars of Najaf Khan’s love life, the truth about his illness was far crueller. In reality, his time in bed was spent, not in sexual ecstasy, but in pain and suffering, spitting blood. The commander had contracted consumption. By August 1781 he was bedridden. He lingered for the first three months of 1782, gaunt and cadaverous, more dead than alive.

Mirza Najaf Khan died on 6 April 1782, aged only forty-six. For ten years he had worked against all the odds, and usually without thanks, to restore to Shah Alam the empire of his ancestors. Thereafter, as one historian put it, ‘The rays of hope for the recovery of the Mughal glory that had begun to shine were dissipated in the growing cloud of anarchy.’87 Najaf Khan was remembered as the last really powerful nobleman of the Mughal rule in India and was given the honorific title of Zul-Fiqaru’d-Daula (the Ultimate Discriminator of the Kingdom).88 He was buried in a modest tomb in a garden a short distance from that of Safdar Jung.* Like much of his life’s work, it was never completed.

Unable to impose order on his court, and threatened by resurgent enemies on all sides, Shah Alam had no option but to reach out again to Mahadji Scindia, who had finally returned to Hindustan from the Deccan after an absence of eleven years:

Comte Benoît de Boigne,

De Boigne was responsible for transferring to Scindia’s Marathas sophisticated new European military technology including cannon armed with the latest sighting and aiming systems with adjustable heights and elevating screws, and the introduction of iron rods to their muskets that allowed the best-trained troops to fire three shots a minute.

A decade hence, when Scindia’s battalions were fully trained and reached their total strength, many would regard them as the most formidable army in India, and certainly the equal of that of the Company.98 Already, Scindia’s Rajput opponents were learning to surrender rather than attempt to defeat de Boigne’s new battalions, and Ajmer, Patan and Merta all gave up the fight after a brief bombardment rather than face the systematic slaughter of man and horse that de Boigne inevitably unleashed on his enemies.