IT IS DIFFICULT TO square up the frail man in loosely fitting blue trousers held up by braces and living in virtual seclusion in Turkey with the generals who once commanded Mughal armies hundreds of thousands strong. Mukarram Jah revels in telling fantastic-sounding tales of how his Turkoman forefathers were recruited from Central Asian sultanates 350 years ago by the Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb. He entertains friends by describing how his ancestor bribed a night watchman to open the gates to the greatest prize in southern India, the massive fortress of Golconda, allowing the Mughals to storm the citadel, take away camel-loads of gold, jewellery and diamonds and complete their conquest of the Deccan. The First Nizam was six years old when Aurangzeb took him under his wing. Jah, the eighth and last Nizam, was even younger when his grandfather began grooming him to be his successor. But after three centuries a kingdom once the size of France has been reduced to a few hundred acres of land and a handful of palaces. Slums have sprung up in the pleasure gardens where the Nizams once flaunted their wealth.
Rising 130 metres above the surrounding plain, the fort of Golconda remains the most potent symbol of what was once the wealthiest and most powerful princely state in all of India. In the seventeenth century it boasted eight gates, 87 bastions and 42 escape tunnels, and was protected by five sets of crenellated walls some 10 kilometres in circumference. Legends abound of how successive Nizams hid vast hoards of treasure inside the fort with strict injunctions that they were not to be touched unless the state was in great difficulties or in great danger. In the 1880s, Lucknow’s Pioneer newspaper recounted stories of ‘two vaults, or strong rooms . . . containing heaps of money which are never to be broken into excepting in cases of war or famine’.1
For 300 rupees a tourist guide will clap his hands at a certain guard post, and for the promise of a 10-rupee tip a man at the foot of the fort will respond to demonstrate how warnings were sounded in the days before telephony. The guide will explain how toilets were made to flush three centuries ago, how Golconda’s granaries and water tanks enabled it to withstand year-long sieges, and how a tunnel wide enough for two horses to gallop abreast connected the fort with the old city of Hyderabad and could be used to bring additional supplies and reinforcements.
When the French traveller and jeweller Jean-Baptiste Tavernier reached Golconda in 1653 he found a fortress nearly ‘two leagues in length’ and requiring a large garrison for its defence. ‘It is in reality a town where the King keeps his treasure.’2 It was also an international jewellery bazaar, where traders from as far away as Arabia, Persia, Central Asia and Europe converged to barter for precious stones under the shade of its vast banyan trees. The Great Mughal diamond, said by its owner, the Mughal Emperor Babur, to be ‘equal in value to one day’s food of all the people in the world’3 came from mines around Golconda, as did the Koh-i-Noor and dozens of other priceless gemstones.
Golconda’s citadel looked across a fertile plain to the city of Bhagnagar, later renamed Hyderabad, which had been the capital of the Qutb Shahi kings since 1591. Bhagnagar was named after a Bhagmati, a courtesan who ‘established many brothels and drinking shops’ to cater for the city’s rulers, who ‘had always been addicted to pleasure and all sorts of debauchery’.4 It was approached by a bridge over the River Musi which Tavernier described as ‘scarcely less beautiful than the Pont Neuf at Paris’. On closer enquiry Tavernier found that there were more than 20,000 prostitutes registered in the city who would take turns to present themselves in the square facing the King’s balcony. ‘If the King be there they danced before him, and if he is not, a eunuch signals to them with his hand to withdraw.’ Tavernier was told the women were so supple that when the King wanted to visit the port of Masulipatnam ‘nine of them very cleverly represented the form of an elephant, four making the feet, four others the body, and one the trunk, and the King, mounted above on a kind of throne, in that way made his entry into the town’.5
Today the main road to Golconda is lined with half-finished flats, service stations and lurid billboards advertising the latest Telegu blockbusters. Although in ruins, the fort still makes an impression as it comes into view, but few tourists continue past Golconda to Himayatsagar – where a simple tomb marks the last resting place of the loyal general of Aurangzeb who died trying to storm the fort and whose descendants would change the course of the Deccan’s history forever. The tomb contains the remains of Jah’s great ancestor, Khwaja Abid. Born in Adilabad near the ancient Silk Route city of Samarkand, Khwaja Abid’s family were ulemmas (learned men). His father, Khaji Ismael, was renowned for his piety and knowledge of the law and was honoured with the title Allum-ul-ulemma or ‘wisest of the wise’. On his father’s side the family could trace its lineage back 34 generations to the First Caliph of Islam, Abu Bakar, and on his mother’s to the Prophet Muhammad himself.6
Khwaja Abid broke with family tradition and became a fighter rather than a scholar. Henry George Briggs, whose two-volume classic published in 1861, The Nizam: His History and Relations with the British Government, remains the definitive work on the establishment of the dynasty, writes of Khwaja Abid:
In youth he was trained to the use of the bow, the spear and the sword. Riding on horseback was as familiar to him from the moment he could toddle alone from his mother’s knee as it is to this day to every boy from the plains of Arabia to the hills of Afghanistan, and he was specially taught to regard the cause of the Crescent and the Koran as the great purpose of his existence.7
In 1655 Khwaja Abid undertook a pilgrimage to Mecca. After crossing the Hindu Kush mountain range he reached Delhi, where he presented himself before the imperial court of Shah Jehan. The Mughal Emperor bestowed on Khwaja Abid a khilat (dress of honour) and promised that after he returned from Mecca he could take up a post on his personal staff. But by the time he came back in 1658, Shah Jehan had been taken ill and the war for succession to the Mughal throne was well under way. Khwaja Abid decided to throw in his lot with Aurangzeb, one of Shah Jehan’s sons, who had locked his father in Agra’s Red Fort where he lived out the rest of his days getting drunk, singing obscene songs, calling for concubines and gazing forlornly at the Taj Mahal, which he had constructed after the death of his wife Mumtaz.
Taking command of one of the Mughal armies, Khwaja Abid played a crucial role in the battle for Samugarh, where Dara Shikoh, the last remaining contestant for the Mughal throne, was defeated, his body cut to pieces and his blood-soaked head presented to Aurangzeb. Khwaja Abid was rewarded by being made one of the Emperor’s most trusted generals.
From the moment he was crowned Emperor in 1658, the conquest of the Deccan, started by Akbar in 1561 and carried on by Shah Jehan, became such an obsession for Aurangzeb that he lost sight of the cost of the campaign in terms of money and lives. The Deccan that the Mughals so coveted, the Nizams inherited and Jah would later turn his back on, stretches from the Narmada River in the north to the Cauvery in the south and is flanked on either side by spectacular jungle-clad mountain ranges known as the Western and Eastern Ghats. This vast plateau, with an elevation of between 600 and 900 metres, is one of the oldest landmasses on earth. The ancient rock strata beneath its rich basalt soil once hid the richest deposits of diamonds in the known world. Aside from its numerous diamond mines, the Deccan was also one of the most sought-after prizes in India because of its agricultural wealth and its strategic location. The Portuguese, Dutch, French and British established their first trading posts along the surrounding coastline in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and constantly lobbied local rulers to grant trade concessions. In the north, the black soils of Berar produced the finest cotton in all of India, while Masulipatnam, at the mouth of the Krishna River, was the best deep-water port on the eastern coast. From there ships set sail for Burma, Bengal, Cochin China, Mecca and Hormuz carrying silk, gemstones, calico, cotton and flax.
Standing between Aurangzeb and his objective were two major obstacles. The first was the Maratha kingdom founded by the Hindu warrior and chieftain Shivaji. ‘Mad dog Shivaji’, as Aurangzeb described him, was a ruthless leader who once slit open the stomach of one of his opponents with a set of hidden tiger claws attached to his left hand after pretending to give him a friendly embrace. Under Shivaji and his successors, the Marathas had built a string of forts along the Western Ghats from where they could harass the Mughals and other rulers of peninsular India. The second was Golconda, which was ruled by the Qutb Shahi king Abdul Hassan. According to the Italian adventurer Manucci, who shadowed Aurangzeb throughout much of his campaign, Abdul Hassan was a despised and debauched ruler who was more interested in ‘passing his life in taverns and shops, looking on at dancing and listening to music’ than fighting.8 A Sunni, Aurangzeb despised Abdul Hassan’s decadent Shia kingdom. ‘The evil deeds of this wicked man pass beyond the bounds of writing,’ recorded Aurangzeb’s courtier Khafi Khan.9
On hearing that the Mughals were approaching, Abdul Hassan fled to Golconda ‘with boxes full of such valuables as he could carry’, leaving the city to the mercy of looters. ‘A noise and tumult arose like that of doomsday,’ wrote Khafi Khan. ‘Words cannot express how many women and children of Musulmans and Hindoos were made prisoners, or how many women of high and low degree were dishonoured . . . Carpets of great value, which were too heavy to carry, were cut to pieces with swords and daggers, and every bit was struggled for.’10
Realising he had little chance of surviving Aurangzeb’s assault, Abdul Hassan promised to withdraw from Golconda on payment of the 12 million rupees he owed the Imperial treasury. He also promised to sack his Hindu ministers and return to the Mughals territory he had seized earlier. However, the deal was rejected by his Muslim subjects, who rose against the Hindu ministers, massacred them as they left their darbar and sent their heads to the Mughal army’s camp.
Abdul Hassan had little choice now but to fight. He was helped by the arrival of some 40,000 Maratha horsemen as well as infighting among the Mughal commanders. What appeared at the outset to be a walkover by the Mughal forces turned into an eight-month siege of the virtually impregnable fort. ‘Day by day and week by week the trenches were pushed forward. Almost daily the garrison made sallies, some of which were successful but the defenders were never able to break the line, and the toils gradually closed in on the fortress. So hot was the fire on both sides that the smoke is said to have removed the distinction between night and day.’11 As bands of marauding Marathas cut off Aurangzeb’s supply routes, pestilence broke out in the Mughal camp. One eyewitness reported that the city of Hyderabad was utterly depopulated. Corpses were flung on the riverbank without burial. ‘The survivors in the agony of hunger ate the carrion of men and beasts. For miles around, the eye rested only on mounds of corpses.’12
By the time the army had reached Golconda, the main force of the Mughal army was under the command of Khwaja Abid’s son, Firuz Jung. Determined to take the fort in a sudden assault, Firuz Jung put his father in charge of the storming party. However, during the attack Khwaja Abid was hit by a musket ball that tore away his arm at the shoulder. Despite his horrific injuries he refused to dismount and rode back to the camp where the rest of the army was waiting. When Aurangzeb’s prime minister went to enquire about his health, he found Khwaja Abid stoically sipping coffee, ‘admiring the beauty and charms of surgeons who were busy taking bits of iron and bone out of the wound’, and expressing confidence that he would be back on the battlefield in a matter of days. But Aurangzeb’s best physicians could not save Khwaja Abid, who after three days ‘drank the sherbet of death from the hands of the messenger of the Almighty’ and was buried near the village of Atapur. His severed hand, identified by the signet ring he always wore on his finger, was found several days later and given a separate burial.13
During his entire campaign in the Deccan, Aurangzeb had only taken one fort by fighting. His other victories had been the result of negotiation or, failing that, straight-out bribery. Golconda would be no different. After months of stalemate that had cost his forces thousands of lives from cannon fire, famine, floods and disease, Aurangzeb lost patience and ordered his generals to begin offering Abdul Hassan’s commanders fantastic bribes and high ranks in the Mughal army if they defected. Finally, the last remaining general, Abdullah Khan Panni, was bought off with the promise of a governorship. In the dead of night on 21 September 1687, Panni opened the western gate of the fort, allowing Aurangzeb’s forces to overrun Golconda and slaughter its defenders who were caught unawares.
The conquest of Golconda gave Aurangzeb virtual control of the Deccan. Its treasury yielded gold and silver coins valued at over 60 million rupees along with vast quantities of jewellery, gold and silver utensils and other valuables. However, Aurangzeb had paid a heavy price, losing some of his best generals in the battle, including Khwaja Abid. As if to make up for the loss, Aurangzeb began lavishing attention on Khwaja Abid’s grandson, Qamruddin. The young Qamruddin was just six years old when he was first brought to the Emperor’s court in Agra by his father Firuz Jung in 1677. According to the Imperial records, Aurangzeb received the young boy ‘with kindness’ and bestowed upon him a mansab (hereditary title). He told his father: ‘The star of destiny shines on the forehead of your son.’14
Aurangzeb’s faith was not misplaced. Qamruddin would become the first Nizam of Hyderabad and one of the most successful rulers of eighteenth-century India. His empire would fill the void left by the disintegration of the Mughal dynasty. From a loyal soldier, he would rise to become a kingmaker, a skilled diplomat and an able administrator. Described by one historian as the last representative of the ‘Aurangzeb school of public duty and integrity’,15 he inherited his grandfather’s piety and his father’s military prowess. ‘Taking all the actors together, from one end of Hindoosthan during the period that Nizam-ool-Mulk played his part, his stature takes colossal dimensions,’ wrote Briggs. ‘If Moosulman were accustomed to perpetuate the memory of their heroes by posthumous ovations, India might have seen a hundred statues of her greatest Mahommedan hero of the eighteenth century.’16
For the young Qamruddin, Aurangzeb’s Deccan obsession presented him with endless opportunities to rise through the ranks. Each victory, each heap of stones added to the empire, brought promotions and handouts. Like his grandfather, Qamruddin took to the saddle as soon as he could walk, and before he had reached his teens began accompanying his father into battle. His first promotion came at the age of 13 after the successful capture of the forts of Poona and Supa, when he received the rank of 400 zat, 100 horse. By the time he was 16, Qamruddin had added the fortresses of Raigarh to his list of conquests and was rewarded with a bejewelled sword, a robe of honour and an elephant. In 1688 he joined his father in the successful assault on the fort of Adoni and was promoted to the rank of 2000 zat and 500 horse and presented with the finest Arab steed from the Mughal stables. At the age of 20 Qamruddin was gifted a female elephant and was bestowed with the title of Chin Qilich Khan (boy swordsman). For surviving an attack that blew off three of his horse’s legs during the siege of Wakinhera fort, he was given an Arab steed with gold trappings and a ‘pastille perfumed with ambergris’. For fighting on and capturing the fort he was raised to rank of 5000 horse and awarded 15 million dams, a jewelled sabre and a third elephant. He was also made the Viceroy of Bijapur.17
The assault on Wakinhera in 1705 was the last undertaken by Aurangzeb. With the conquest of the Deccan now complete, he decided at the age of 87 to lead his army back to Delhi. But this was not the return march of a triumphant monarch. Aurangzeb had taken Mughal rule and its brand of Sunni Islam west beyond the deserts of Baluchistan, east into the Arakan and south as far as the Cauvery River near present-day Madras. Not until the British consolidated their rule after the Mutiny of 1857 would such large swathes of the sub-continent be united under a single force. However, after two centuries of empire-building, the Mughal Empire was overstretched and fraying at the edges.
Aurangzeb had drained his coffers, demoralised his soldiers and corrupted his court with his expensive military campaigns. When Aurangzeb had come to the throne the Mughal fighting force in the Deccan alone numbered around 170,000 soldiers. Wherever the army went, so did the imperial court. At each stop a tented city was set up, complete with bazaars, cantonments and harems. Counting non-combatants and camp followers, the number of inhabitants that had to be fed and housed was close to half a million. The ranks of nobles who expected suitable remuneration in the territories under Mughal control also grew exponentially. When Sir William Norris, trade representative of King William III, had visited Aurangzeb a few years earlier, he reported that the Emperor’s soldiers had not been paid in two years and his courtiers could be bribed for a bottle of wine. ‘All administration has disappeared,’ wrote one eyewitness. ‘The realm is desolated, nobody gets justice, they have been utterly ruined.’18
As Aurangzeb marched north ‘slowly and with difficulty’, local warlords moved in to reclaim their territories and armed bands of Marathas shadowed his forces. In January 1706 Aurangzeb ordered his soldiers to set up camp at Ahmadnagar for what turned out to be the final time. Although he was ‘very weak and death was clearly stamped upon his face’, he still stuck to his royal routine, up to the point of holding a make-believe darbar which he reviewed from his sickbed.19
In the early hours of Friday, 3 March 1707, ‘when one watch of the day had gone and the prayers and creed had been duly recited, his weary spirit was released’. Manucci recounts that at the moment of his death ‘a whirlwind arose, so fierce that it blew down all the tents standing in the encampment . . . The day became so dark that men ran into each other . . . villages were destroyed and trees overthrown.’20
Well aware of the chaos that surrounded his own ascension to the throne, Aurangzeb had tried in vain to lay the groundwork for an orderly transfer of power. Fearing that they would rebel against him, he imprisoned three of his five sons for petty crimes such as embezzlement. Another was dispatched to a post at a farflung corner of the empire. In his last testament Aurangzeb advised his successors never to trust their sons or get too close to them. ‘The main pillar of government is to be well informed in the news of the kingdom. The negligence for a single moment becomes the cause of disgrace for long years.’ He also asked for a simple burial with the funeral expenses to be met only from sale of the Korans he had personally copied and the prayer caps he had stitched. ‘Bury this wanderer . . . with his head bare, because every ruined sinner who is conducted bare-footed before the Grand Emperor is sure to be an object of mercy.’21
But in the end it all came to nought. The great Mughal’s burial near Daulatabad touched off a debilitating fratricidal struggle that saw son conspire against son, puppet against pretender, often with murderous consequences. In the course of a dozen years no fewer than 17 aspirants would jockey for the throne. Aurangzeb’s death also opened the way for new players to enter this eighteenth-century great game for the control of the Indian sub-continent and its vast wealth. No longer would wars be fought solely between Hindu and Muslim armies. Britain and France, once content to send emissaries like Norris bearing gifts to win favours from local rulers, were about to become full-blown rivals for trade and territory. For the next hundred years British mercenaries and French freebooters would serve whichever side offered them the greatest rewards. Nawabs, peshwas, rajahs and sultans were forced to sue for peace by handing over territory to the East India Company or French forces and by emptying their treasuries to pay for reparations. Only those rulers with wealth, cunning and a great deal of luck would find themselves with an empire to speak of by the end of the century. One of them would be the Nizam of Hyderabad.
After attending the burial of Aurangzeb, Qamruddin offered his services to the Emperor’s successor, Bahadur Shah, and was appointed the Governor of Oudh. However, Bahadur Shah’s reign lasted only five years, and with his death the fragile empire that Aurangzeb left behind began to collapse. Nowhere was that disintegration more pronounced than in the Deccan. Chroniclers of the time reported that two decades of war had left its provinces ‘black and barren’ and its fields filled with ‘the bones of men and beasts’.22 The Maratha chieftains who had surrendered to Aurangzeb renounced their pledges, resumed their lands, took up arms and began their raids again.
Tired of the political machinations that had engulfed the Mughal throne, and the ‘frivolity and incapacity of the Emperor’, Qamruddin opted for a private life in Delhi. ‘For a considerable period he abstained entirely from coming to court, lived in seclusion, and was seldom seen abroad, and then only for the purpose of paying a visit to some man renowned for his piety or his learning.’23 But his sabbatical was cut short when, in 1712, the sixth of Aurangzeb’s successors, Farrukhsiyar, managed to stay on the throne long enough to convince him to take up the post of Viceroy of the Deccan with the hereditary title of Nizam ul-Mulk (Regulator of the Realm) Fateh Jung. Nizam ul-Mulk (as Qamruddin was now known) began building up his own power-base independently of the Mughals in Delhi, while continuing to give obeisance to the throne and even remitting money to the centre.
Farrukhsiyar demanded Nizam ul-Mulk’s help in subduing the Saiyid brothers, Hussain Ali Khan and Abdullah Khan, who had developed a reputation for setting up and removing emperors ‘like skittles’. In 1719 they marched on Delhi, captured Farrukhsiyar, who was hiding in the zenana, blinded him with a needle, locked him up in a prison cell for two months and then stabbed him to death. Farrukhsiyar was eventually replaced by the 18-year-old Muhammad Shah, who rewarded Nizam ul-Mulk for his help in defeating the Saiyids with the post of Diwan (Prime Minister) in his own court. However, Nizam ul-Mulk’s attempts to reform the corrupt Mughal administration with its cliques of concubines and eunuchs created many enemies. According to Nizam ul-Mulk’s biographer, Yusuf Husain, he grew to hate the ‘harlots and jesters’ who were the Emperor’s constant companions and ‘greeted all great nobles of the realm with lewd gestures and offensive epithets’. Nizam ul-Mulk’s desire to restore the ‘etiquette of the Court and the discipline of the State’ earned him few friends. ‘By envious, malicious insinuations [the courtiers] poisoned the mind of the Emperor against his devoted servant.’24
In 1724 Nizam ul-Mulk resigned his post in disgust and set off for the Deccan to resume the Viceroyalty, only to find Mubariz Khan, who had been appointed governor by Farrukhsiyar nine years earlier, refusing to vacate the post. Mubariz Khan had successfully restored law and order in the Deccan and fended off marauding bands of Maratha raiders, rebellious Telegu zamindars, bandit chiefs and renegade Mughal commanders, but he was also paying lip service to the Mughal throne, making only token payments and dividing plum administrative posts among his sons, his uncle and his favourite slave eunuch. Unimpressed by the upstart occupying what he considered to be his rightful place, Nizam ul-Mulk gathered his forces at Shakarkhelda in Berar for a showdown with Mubariz Khan’s impressive army. The encounter was short but decisive. Wrapped in his blood-soaked shawl, Mubariz Khan drove his war elephant into battle until he died from his wounds. His severed head was then sent to Delhi as proof of Nizam ul-Mulk’s determination to annihilate anyone who stood in his way.
With this decisive victory Muhammad Shah had little choice but to recognise Nizam ul-Mulk’s claim to the suzerainty of the Deccan. ‘Now there came to him from the Emperor an elephant, jewels and the title of Asaf Jah, with directions to settle the country, repress the turbulent, punish the rebels and cherish the people,’ recorded Khafi Khan.25 Asaf Jah, or the Equal to Asaf, the Grand Wazir in the court of the biblical ruler King Solomon, was the highest title that could be awarded to a subject of the Mughal Empire.
There were no lavish ceremonies to mark the establishment of the Asaf Jahi dynasty in 1724. The inauguration of First Nizam, as its leaders became known, took place behind closed doors in a private ceremony attended by the new ruler’s closest advisors. Nizam ul-Mulk never formally declared his independence and insisted that his rule was entirely based on the trust reposed in him by the Mughal Emperor, to whom he swore eternal loyalty. His faithfulness to the Mughal court was unswerving and would be passed down through the generations that followed. The Nizam’s Dominions yielded an income that was almost equal to the rest of the Mughal Empire, yet there was no throne, no crown and no symbol of sovereignty. Coins were still minted with the Emperor’s name until 1858. It was in the name of the Mughal ruler and not the Nizam that prayers were read out in the khutba (Friday Sermon). On the seal used to authenticate all public acts, the Nizam was designated as the ‘Servant of the Emperor’. Though he conferred titles on his subjects, he received his designations from the Mughal Emperor in Delhi.
As the Viceroy of the Deccan, the Nizam was the head of the executive and judicial departments and the source of all civil and military authority, ruling as an absolute monarch. All officials were appointed by him directly or in his name. Assisted by a Diwan, the Nizams drafted their own laws, raised their own armies, flew their own flags and formed their own governments, but they refused to adopt the title of King even when it was offered to them by the British in 1810. It was not until India was granted its independence in 1947 that the Seventh Nizam, Osman Ali Khan, formally claimed to be a ruler in his own right, but by then it was too late for a sovereign Hyderabad to coexist with a free India. Its independence lasted less than 400 days.
Despite Nizam ul-Mulk’s earlier differences with the Emperor, his letter acknowledging Muhammad Shah’s farman was couched in the most reverential language. ‘Even if the pen opens its thousand tongues of gratitude for His Majesty it would simply be impossible to recount one out of the innumerable favours and benefits conferred on his servant,’ he wrote. ‘As long as the sun shines on firmament, may the altar of the Caliphate and the asylum of the world remain victorious and blest causing envy to the assembly of Jam and the garden of Paradise.’26
Nizam ul-Mulk had good reason to be grateful. Alongside his own personal wealth came the spoils of war and status. As the Nizam he was entitled to the lion’s share of gold unearthed in his Dominions, the finest diamonds and gems from the Golconda mines and the income from his vast personal estates. He also adopted the Mughal practice of accepting nazars (gifts) every time someone came to him with a petition or to mark a special occasion. Nazars ranged from gold coins, emeralds, rubies and other precious stones to the finest horses, the best elephants, expensive clothes, daggers and swords, palaces, eunuchs and even dancing girls.
Nizam ul-Mulk’s first priority was to secure the Deccan from ‘the abominations of infidelity and tyranny . . . the ruffianism of highway robbers and the rapacity of the Marathas and rebellious zamindars’.27 He then divided his newly acquired kingdom into three parts. One third became his own private estate known as the Sarf-i-Khas, one third was allotted for the expenses of the government and was known as the Diwan’s territory, and the remainder was distributed to Muslim nobles, who in return paid nazars to the Nizam for the privilege of collecting revenue from the villages under their suzerainty. The most important of these were the Paigah estates. The Paigahs doubled up as generals, making it easy to raise an army should the Nizam’s Dominions come under attack. Scattered around the country were also numerous Hindu rajahs and chiefs who were also granted jagirs and allowed to maintain a certain level of autonomy on payment of annual tributes to the Nizam. On the sanads (scrolls) granting them their jagirs, inscribed in Persian were the words ‘as long as the sun and moon are in rotation’.28
The owners of the estates were mostly absentee landlords who cared little for the condition of the lands under their control. Jagirs were usually split into numerous pieces in order to prevent the most powerful of the nobles from entertaining any thought of carving out an empire for themselves. The system, which continued relatively unchanged until 1950, ensured a steady source of income for the state treasury and the Nizam himself, but also transformed Hyderabad into the most feudal of all the Indian princely states.
As Nizam ul-Mulk strengthened his dominions, Muhammad Shah barely clung on to his. The Mughal Emperor was better known for his debauchery than his fighting skills. (A miniature painting made at the time depicted him cavorting with one of his dancing girls – his massive phallus in the act of penetration.) Hordes of Maratha warriors terrorised Delhi, and on more than one occasion Muhammad Shah called on the Nizam to keep the raiders at bay. In 1738 a much greater threat came from beyond the Hindu Kush as the Persian conqueror Nadir Shah started advancing towards Delhi through Afghanistan and the Punjab.
Casting aside his puritanical streak, Nizam ul-Mulk answered the Emperor’s call for help by sending his troops to Karnal, where Muhammad Shah’s forces had gathered to turn back the Persian army. But the combined armies were cannon fodder for the Persian cavalry and its superior weaponry and tactics. Up to 150,000 Indian soldiers were said to have died in the three-hour battle on 13 February 1739. When Nizam ul-Mulk went to Nadir Shah’s tent to negotiate an end to hostilities, the Persian king began upping his terms for the withdrawal of his forces from 5 million rupees to 400 million rupees. When the Emperor protested, Nadir Shah angrily pointed out that he had no choice in the matter.
A few days later the Persian army began its final march on Delhi, with Muhammad Shah and his wives guarded by 12,000 soldiers, together with whatever remained of the Indian contingents. On the outskirts of the city, Nadir Shah stopped and ordered the humiliated Emperor to march ahead so that he could organise a fitting welcome for his honoured guest. In reality Nadir Shah was there to strip his host of his dignity and wealth.
However, within 24 hours of Nadir Shah’s ceremonial welcome, the citizens of Delhi began stirring. Just before midnight a group of Persian agents sent to enquire about the price grain was fetching in the bazaar had their throats slit. Shortly after, a group of Mughal prisoners seized their jailers and ran into the streets shouting that Nadir Shah had been assassinated by Muhammad Shah. Almost immediately another rumour spread that Nadir Shah had been killed by one of the female guards of the Mughal harem.
When the first reports of violence reached Nadir Shah he dismissed them as exaggerated, but by dawn the uprising was in full swing. When Nadir Shah rode through the city dressed in armour, thousands of his soldiers lay dead, many of their bodies horribly mutilated. Reaching the Sunehri Mosque near Chandni Chowk, in the heart of what is today Old Delhi, he climbed the terrace and saw people on the surrounding rooftops throwing stones and other missiles at the Persian soldiers below. When a bullet killed one of his generals standing next to him, Nadir Shah’s anger exploded. Waving his sword above his head he gave the signal for the ransack of Delhi to begin.
‘There was scarcely a spot left in Delhi but was stained with human blood,’ reported one survivor. ‘For a long time the streets remained strewn with corpses as the walks of a garden with dead flowers and leaves. The town was reduced to ashes and had the appearance of a plain consumed with fire. The ruin in which its beautiful streets and buildings we loved was such that the labour of years could alone restore the town to its former glory.’29 Most estimates put the number of those killed on that day at 20,000.
Unable to prevent his capital being destroyed, Muhammad Shah again summoned Nizam ul-Mulk for help. Once more the ageing monarch obliged. A master of tact and diplomacy, he presented himself before the Persian king bare-headed and with his sword hanging around his neck. Appealing to Nadir Shah’s sense of pity and pleading for the massacre to end, Nizam ul-Mulk recited a couplet by the Persian poet Hafiz:
‘Oh King your anger has killed so many men,
If you want to kill some more, bring them back to life again.’30
Moved by the couplet and sickened by the slaughter taking place outside, Nadir Shah complied. Saying to the Nizam, ‘I pardon in consideration of thy grey beard’,31 he ordered the massacre to stop.
As the survivors began to bury or cremate their dead, Nadir Shah’s men began packing up the royal treasury and stripping the palaces of valuables. ‘Confident persons sent to seize the treasuries secured such an amount of vessels of gold and silver and vases of China, and articles set with precious jewels, and other valuable things, that the registrars and clerks were unable to catalogue or compute them,’ recorded a contemporary historian. ‘Of the number was the Peacock Throne, studded with inestimable jewels, on the adornment of which the former kings of India spent two millions sterling, with such round pearls and glittering diamonds as were not to be found in the possession of any kings of the past or present time.’32
The Koh-i-Noor diamond, which now adorns the Crown Jewels, also made its way into Nadir Shah’s collection, after a courtesan told the Persian king that the priceless stone was hidden in Mohammad Shah’s turban. Citing an ancient tradition, Nadir Shah demanded an exchange of headgear with Muhammad Shah, who had no option but to comply. Some estimates of the total value of gold and silver coinage, jewellery, weapons and furniture gathered in slightly under two months run as high as 700 million rupees. The Peacock Throne, decorated with diamonds, rubies, emeralds and pearls, was believed to be worth 90 million rupees alone.
It is said that even today Delhi has not recovered the level of prosperity it enjoyed before Nadir Shah’s invasion. The Imperial treasury was empty, much of the city had been destroyed and the myth of Mughal supremacy had been dealt a fatal blow. Although the Mughal Empire would continue for another 118 years, it would remain a shadow of its former glory. The only Indian ruler to retain any credibility and keep his Dominions intact was Nizam ul-Mulk.
Following the sacking of Delhi, the steady stream of exiles from the Mughal capital to the Deccan became a flood. Administrators, artisans, musicians, poets and religious teachers were welcomed into the Nizam’s court. But for all his skills as a ruler, the founder of the Asaf Jahi dynasty was either unable or unwilling to stamp out the worst legacies of Aurangzeb’s reign. Banditry was rife in those areas where the Marathas held sway, disrupting the development of trade and commerce that would make the Nizam’s empire viable. His elite nobles and soldiers were arrogant and morally degenerate. Peasants were exploited and whatever surplus they produced lined the pockets of the feudal aristocracy. No attempt was made to spend money on local infrastructure such as roads, irrigation works or communications. ‘They kept for themselves as much as they could out of the revenues and when subterfuges would no longer answer, they sent the remainder to headquarters.’33
An official history of Hyderabad published in the 1930s described the Deccan in the final years of the First Nizam’s rule as having been ‘well-nigh devastated as a result of these perpetual struggles, in many parts it was almost depopulated, and in the absence of anything like a settled government confusion and chaos reigned everywhere. The petty rajahs and zamindars were frequently in a state of revolt. They were always turbulent and very dilatory in the payment of their peshkash. The bigger nobles enjoyed their estates with almost regal powers. They had the power of life and death and exercised a kind of “Imperium-in-Imperio”.’34
Just days before he died in 1748, Asaf Jah dictated his last will and testament. The 17-clause document was a blueprint for governance and personal conduct that ranged from advice on how to keep the troops happy and well fed to an apology for neglecting his wife. He began by calling on his successors to defend the dignity of the Deccan from the Marathas, whom he referred to as ‘armies of freebooters’. He warned them to be on guard against the Marathas, Pathans, Gujaratis and Kashmiris. As for Hindu Brahmins, they were ‘fit only to be hanged and quartered’. He then reminded his successors to remain subservient to the Mughal Emperor who had granted them their office and rank. He warned against declaring war unnecessarily, but if forced to do so to seek the help of elders and saints and follow the sayings and practices of the Prophet. He cautioned against senseless killing, saying that: ‘Mankind should not be likened to so many ears of barley, wheat and maize which grow anew every year.’35
He also urged fiscal restraint. ‘Keep the treasury with you wherever you go so that whenever the army gets restive, their arrears can be paid off. There is enough money in the treasury to last seven generations – if properly spent.’ Finally, he insisted: ‘You must not lend your ears to tittle-tattle of the backbiters and slanderers, nor suffer the riff-raff to approach your presence.’36 Having dictated his will, Nizam ul-Mulk summoned his second son Nasir Jung, his wives and chief nobles to his bedside, said his prayers and died aged 77.
Despite the unrest that began to spread through his Dominions in the final years of his rule, Nizam ul-Mulk is remembered as laying the foundation for what would become the most important Muslim state outside the Middle East by the first half of the twentieth century. ‘History has done scant justice to his achievements,’ reads one modern account of his legacy. ‘He was not only in command of armies, but was indeed a leader of men. He not only founded a State, but also organised and established it.’ The endless platitudes heaped upon him include his loyalty and bravery, his skills as a poet and scholar as well as his ‘political sagacity and statesmanship of a high order’.37
When compared with his successors the First Nizam’s achievements were indeed remarkable; but it would take another century before Hyderabad recovered from the misrule that followed his death. Henry George Briggs was more critical in his assessment of Nizam ul-Mulk than most Indian historians, but he was still impressed by his stature:
If pliableness of will, unparalleled duplicity and utter unscrupulousness constitute the necessary elements to greatness, Nizam ul-Mulk possessed them in a degree passing belief. But it must be remembered that Nizam ul-Mulk lived at a time and in a country where men gloried in excelling in these qualities . . . Nurtured and trained at the court of Aurangzebe, it is not strange that Nizam ul-Mulk should have been both wily and unscrupulous; nor yet that, like his royal master, he should have exercised his devotions to austerity; but unlike Aurangzebe, he was an affectionate parent and his attachment to his friends was both sincere and steady. He left a legacy to his posterity whi ch the rebellion of 1857 has made ‘the greatest Mohammadan power in India’.38