The twelfth century has arrived and Aurangzeb is king;
We have seen the sign of the Day of Judgment.
The orthodox leaders explain that Aurangzeb’s rule is just.
Outwardly there is benevolence but in hearts there is spite.
The regulations of Aurangzeb are with the officials themselves.
They give us envelopes and keep the letters themselves.
Low people and money-lenders have become courtiers,
And in the houses of nobles are only simple soldiers.
Under Aurangzeb’s rule bribery is everywhere;
Mean people have become governors, and the Islamic Judge himself is called a thief.
Young Sons of Saints have lost their social standing and respect;
Pawns have leaped to become queens.
Those who used to be nobles now have to serve these mean people.
Khayasts, Khatris, and Brahmins of the army have gained much;
Wearers of the loin-cloth, by means of iron weapons, have become an estranged retinue.
North Indian Leather-workers, Tanners, and Untouchables,
Washermen, Oil-sellers, and Gardeners—all have become rulers.
May God damn the tyrant!
In this world he is an infidel; in the next he shall be in Hell.
The author was a Sufi, a Muslim ascetic and holy man, living in Bijapur in the interior of western India. The year 1100 after the Hegira began on December 25, 1688; this alone accounts for the fixability of the date when it was written. Hinduism and Islam have confronted each other in North India for a thousand years. At first sight the two would seem to have no basis whatever for rapprochement, with Islam’s uncompromising single-centeredness and rejection of imagery confronting the exuberant polytheism and visual richness of Hinduism. The rapprochement eventually had to deal with basic principles, but it also happened in the religious organizations and practices of ordinary people.
One of the most powerful developments in the last millennium of Hinduism has been the emergence of bhakti, devotionalism. This impulse—social and religious—broke with the elaborately intellectual mysticism and the ritual practices that made Brahmins the only active participants in worship. The bhakti faith called the ordinary individual worshiper to a fervent devotion to some manifestation of the great god Vishnu or Shiva. The devotees exuberantly expressed their faith in dances and in hymns whose verses were not in Sanskrit but in the vernacular language of a particular area. Bhakti cults became especially important in the regional cultures of Bijapur and other areas of central and western India south of the great river valleys. The bhakti devotee’s single-minded and emotional commitment to his deity was comparable to the Muslim’s devotion to God, despite the radical difference in content.
From the Muslim side the rapprochement was the work of Sufism, the mystical tradition of Islam. Sufism insists that it is orthodox, that it alone carries to its logical conclusion the radical split between devotion to God and the way of this world. It relies heavily on certain passages in the Quran, especially the report of Muhammad’s own mystical voyage to heaven, and on the finding of esoteric meaning in others. Focused on the individual mystic’s quest for union with God, Sufism is somewhat disdainful of other Muslims’ literal-minded concentration on daily devotions and the keeping of Islamic law. Sufi teachings were brought to western India from the fourteenth century on, just as Muslim settlers and warriors were beginning to move down out of the northern river valleys and establish centers of power in Bijapur. New lines of transmission of Sufi teaching emerged as masters studied in the Arab world or Persia and then returned and as Sufis found favor at the courts of Muslim rulers. They began to compose sermons, songs, poems in the local Dakhni vernacular to guide their followers along stages of the path toward God. They developed something much like a Muslim bhakti movement, and they began to attract many Hindu devotees, who might gradually absorb their teachings and eventually become real converts to Islam. When they asserted their own closeness to God, their own mediation between their disciples and God, and when many of their most devoted disciples were women, they moved to the very limits of Islamic orthodoxy or beyond. Their tombs became centers of veneration and pilgrimage; they transmitted their spiritual powers, their devotees, their grants of land from the rulers to their sons.
Popular devotion at the tombs of the Sufis of Bijapur persists even today, but they faced increasing difficulties and then near disaster in the seventeenth century. The rulers of Bijapur swung back toward Islamic orthodoxy, antagonizing their Hindu subjects and threatening deviant Muslims. The Marathas, a new Hindu political power reacting against the growing Islamic bias of the Mughal regime, became increasingly aggressive. From the 1670s on Bijapur was in a state of anarchy, with all kinds of local people taking power where they could. In 1686 the capital of Bijapur fell to the forces of the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb, a militantly orthodox Muslim. Then in 1688 famine and bubonic plague spread across western India. For our anonymous Sufi poet, and no doubt for many others, the round number of the year was a further stimulus to thoughts of the Last Judgment.
India is a world of diverse religions, cultures, ethnic stocks. Several times in its history, political orders of amazing strength and flexibility have made it possible for most of these peoples to live within one state, and frequently side by side, in peace. One of the most brilliant of such orders was that of the Mughal Empire, founded in the early sixteenth century by Muslim invaders from the northwest (modern Afghanistan). Their Muslim religion, their refined Persian court culture, even their tall statures and relatively pale complexions distinguished them sharply from most of their subjects. Still, Hindus or Muslims might give their allegiance to the Mughal emperor and eventually be rewarded by appointment to a high military command or civil office. But the tolerant, somewhat syncretistic court culture that expressed and supported this order was unraveling in the late seventeenth century. After the death of Shah Jahan in 1658, the new emperor, Aurangzeb, was the victor in a savage civil war against three of his brothers. By conviction a much more orthodox Muslim than many of his family, he presented himself as an Islamic champion in waging war against one of his brothers, who had proclaimed that Islam and Hinduism were essentially identical. Once firmly in power, he set out to purify the court culture of non-Islamic elements, forbidding the use of alcohol and opium and even the celebration of the Persian New Year festival. From 1669 on he ordered the destruction of some great Hindu temples, revoked land grants held by Hindu officials, and began to levy the jizya poll tax on non-Muslims and other discriminatory taxes. These were not the whims of one bigoted despot but part of a general trend toward orthodoxy already apparent in the previous reign. Aurangzeb frequently had the enthusiastic cooperation of his Muslim soldiers in the harassment of non-Muslims and the desecration of their temples.
The resulting growth of resistance was visible from the beginning of Aurangzeb’s reign. Clumsy efforts to force the raising of a Sikh or Rajput heir as a Muslim provoked revolts that did not spread but could not be conclusively crushed. Hindus crowded around the emperor to protest the new taxes as he rode to Friday prayers in Delhi. In the hills of South India the Maratha leader Shivaji was building up an autonomous Hindu power that also had had its origins in 1658–59. Shivaji’s father had pieced together a modest sphere of local power in rough hill country, not radically different from the local power of Hindu nobles under earlier Muslim rulers. In 1659 Shivaji assassinated a Muslim general who had been desecrating Hindu sacred places. He was of low-caste origin, not of the military castes that could become Hindu rulers, but in 1674 he found an ingenious Brahmin who declared that he had warrior ancestry. The Brahmin then supervised elaborate ceremonies in which Shivaji was anointed with many sacred liquids and declared a true Hindu sovereign, carrying the bows and arrows and mounted on the chariot of the god Indra.
Shivaji and his successors continued to elaborate their appeal to Hindu feelings, to the defense of cow and country against Muslim repression. They also developed a mode of warfare very different from the Mughal, which the Mughals ultimately could not crush. A Mughal campaign, like the one that brought Aurangzeb to Hyderabad in 1687–88, was a huge, slow-moving, implacable marvel of organization, including long supply trains, excellent artillery, marvelously mounted and disciplined cavalry, all the equipment to besiege a fortress if necessary, and sometimes the splendid insignia and white tents of the emperor’s camp. An expensive mode of campaign, it could pay for itself only by conquering new territory from which fresh revenue could be drawn and which could be granted to imperial generals and officials. The Marathas, on the other hand, had risen as raiders, sweeping as light cavalry out of their hill forts, looting or extracting contributions from terrified local officials, then moving on. In the eighteenth century they were to build up one of the state structures that were to fight over the corpse of the Mughal Empire, but they always retained something of an atmosphere of gallop, raid, and derring-do. They were immensely destructive to the areas they raided. Shivaji died in 1680; his son Sambhaji probably was not his equal as a leader, but Maratha power continued to increase. The Mughals won many victories against them, only to find them springing back to life in another area.
Aurangzeb spent the first days of 1688 in or near the city of Hyderabad, the capital of Golconda. Then on January 25 the huge procession of the imperial court and army set out to the west. Hyderabad was a splendid, orderly, foursquare Muslim city, with a multitude of fine mosques, schools, and charitable institutions. Many but by no means all of its most distinguished and powerful residents were Muslim, often of families that had started from as far away as Persia or Afghanistan and had joined early or late in the advance of Muslim power and culture toward southern India. But the surrounding countryside was a complex realm of Hindus speaking Telugu, a non-Indo-European language, tough fighters and hardworking farmers who had toiled patiently for centuries to overcome a landscape of thin soil, erratic water supplies, and much bare granite.
Aurangzeb’s stay at Hyderabad marked the consummation of a long process of growing Muslim power over a Hindu society. When the immense fortress outside Hyderabad fell to Aurangzeb’s armies on October 2, 1687, it had been garrisoned by Muslim forces for more than three hundred years. But shaky Muslim domination of the Hindu population had been converted into a stable political and social order only as Muslim rulers made far-reaching concessions to the society around them. To the conquerors, more at home in the North Indian plains where Indo-European languages were spoken and where Hindus and Muslims had centuries of experience in dealing with each other, the Hindus of Golconda, varied in skin color and facial type, speaking Telugu, were as alien and obdurate as the broken-up landscape, with its narrow river valleys and, low granite mountains. The mountains provided easily defended locations for fortresses like Golconda and for compact walled villages. The granite was excellent material for the many temples and their immense variety of images, especially those of the great god Shiva, threatening destruction from his third eye, dancing the creation and destruction of the universe. Hindus and Muslims hardly ever saw the interiors of each other’s places of worship, but the Muslim rulers, who recognized only one supreme and unrepresentable God and viewed all portrayals of human and animal forms as usurpations of the powers of the Creator, surely knew enough to shudder at the wild profusion of the Hindu imagination, with its gods and goddesses with many arms or animal heads. Also, in many Shiva temples the holy of holies was a great stone lingam, the erect phallus of the god, worshiped, anointed with water or melted butter, emblem of transformation and generative power, about as far removed from Muslim singularity of devotion and sexual puritanism as any religious expression could be.
The Muslim rulers of Golconda could not rule without the cooperation of the Hindu warriors. Far-reaching concessions might be required. The terms of appointment of a Hindu headman might concede to him a large part of the revenue theoretically due to the ruler. The poll tax on non-Muslims was not collected, and the rulers frequently donated lands for the building and upkeep of Hindu temples. In turn the Telugu warriors transferred their traditional bravery and loyalty to the service of the Muslim sovereigns. The whole system, of course, rested on the backs of the lower-caste cultivators who waded in the rice paddies under the tropical sun and spent the off-season cutting stone and repairing reservoirs and irrigation channels.
For decades before 1688 all this local concession and adjustment had failed to produce political stability for the kingdom of Golconda as a whole. In 1635 the Mughal armies briefly conquered it, then withdrew, leaving a resident to make sure that a large tribute was sent annually to the northern court. In 1656 the Mughals looted Hyderabad again but accepted a confirmation of the tribute relation. In the 1670s the court was dominated by an immensely powerful and wealthy Brahmin family, and the émigré Persian administrators lost influence. Under Brahmin influence Golconda aligned itself with and subsidized the Marathas. In 1686, as the Mughal army besieged the capital of Bijapur, a letter that revealed the Golconda-Maratha connection was intercepted. The furious Aurangzeb promptly sent an army toward Hyderabad. The ruler of Golconda and his Muslim ministers tried to placate the Mughals by murdering the two leading Hindu ministers and sending their heads to Aurangzeb. A general upheaval followed in which most Hindu financial officers lost their jobs and quite a few were killed. The Mughal armies kept coming. Aurangzeb would not forgive Golconda’s support of the Marathas. In January 1687 Mughal forces occupied the city of Hyderabad; the Golconda rulers and his loyal ministers retreated to a huge fortress nearby. The walls were high and strong, and the storehouses were full. The besiegers endured much misery, especially in the monsoon rains. The whole region was suffering from famine and epidemic, and the Mughal army was not spared. When they tried to plant explosives under a key portion of walls, the charge misfired, killing many of the besiegers. Finally in September 1687 a traitor let them into the great fortress.
Now the Mughal rulers settled down to practice what was, along with siegecraft and military supply, another of their specialties: surveying the administration of a conquered province that already was ruled by Muslims according to institutions roughly similar to their own and forming a regime that was more equitable, thorough, and lucrative than what had preceded it. Most of the Muslim officials of the old Golconda regime were given posts in the Mughal administration. The new rulers relied on the religion, political culture, and languages they shared with the local Muslims, who, once thoroughly assimilated and tested as Mughal administrators, would be sent to serve in other parts of the empire. One eminent general, Shaikh Nizam, who had surrendered before the final fall of the fortress, already was given a responsible command in 1688. Almost all Hindu administrators who had survived the bloodbath of late 1686 now were dismissed; even the famous Hindu pilgrimage center at Kancheepuram got a Muslim administrator. The Mughal rulers opted for a total resurvey and reassessment of all tax obligations in their new realm. The resulting quotas were higher but seldom were completely collected. It is clear that despite the Mughal will to thoroughness and system, there were many compromises with local conditions and power holders. But the revenue collected, after years of war and famine, was roughly equal to what the rulers of Golconda had collected in good years, an impressive achievement. If Aurangzeb’s newest province was not as thoroughly integrated into Mughal rule as the core provinces on the North Indian plain, still he got what he most wanted from it, a steady stream of revenue to support his continuing war against the Marathas.
Three great columns of Mughal forces moved out to the west from Hyderabad in January 1688. They were plagued by shortages of food and outbreaks of disease. But they pushed on, occupying what they could and laying waste towns and villages whose rulers refused to surrender. With their usual maddening mobility, the Marathas raided right up to Hyderabad in April. Still, the Mughal columns rumbled west into Maratha country. In January 1689 Shaikh Nizam, the former Golconda general, learned that Shivaji’s son and heir, Sambhaji, was lying low not far away. A quick dash by a picked force caught him off guard. He was brought to Aurangzeb’s camp, blinded, tied to a camel’s back and sent swaying through the camp for all to mock, and killed slowly, his limbs hacked off and thrown to the dogs. But Rajaram, his nineteen-year-old heir, and the young man’s mother kept the struggle going, and from 1691 to 1698 held out against a Mughal siege of the fortress of Jinji south of Madras.
The death of Aurangzeb in 1707 was followed by another vicious succession struggle, but neither the victor nor the structure he presided over had anything like the focus and power of Aurangzeb and the imperial machine of a half century before. From the 1720s on a new autonomous Muslim dynasty based at Hyderabad joined the regional powers, including the Marathas, contending for shares of the unraveling Mughal regime. And soon Frenchmen and Englishmen were learning how to play Indian power games, and the British in Bengal were emerging as formidable contenders.
The story of the stresses on the Mughal state in 1688 should not be told entirely in terms of the great conquests and movements of armies. Much depended on the details, on the ability of the Mughals to draw into their court culture and politics the indigenous power holders of their new subjects, as they had done so well in the sixteenth century. But the difficulties were very great. For example, with the collapse of the Muslim state of Bijapur in 1686, the small kingdom of the Bedar people on its southern flank was exposed to Mughal power. Dark-skinned, classed as an outcaste hunting group in Hindu society, speaking a non-Indo-European language, relying on their own formidable martial skills and on the cohesion of their tribal organization, the Bedars had been loyal supporters of Bijapur. When a Mughal army appeared before their capital town late in 1687, the ruler, Pam Nayak, surrendered. The Mughals immediately set up a mosque in the town, making it crystal-clear that this was a Muslim conquest. Pam Nayak was brought to the splendid camp of Aurangzeb. He was to be immediately given a high command with a substantial income. Court nobles, Hindu and Muslim, all fully at home in the refined court life, were jealous. To them, Pam Nayak was a strange creature, “pot-black,” deformed, of a tribe of carrion eaters. “Night has gone into mourning at being taken for his emblem. . . . Bears and pigs would have felt deeply disgraced if likened to him. . . . Even the washer of the dead was disgusted at the sight of him.”
The nobles mocked him, laughed at him when he appeared for his audience before the emperor. “After attending the Court for five or six days, he suddenly set off to visit Hell.” It seems that he died sometime in January 1688. Possible causes include the order of Aurangzeb, his own reaction to his humiliation, and the plague that was raging in western India.
Pam Nayak’s sons were given Mughal commands and apparently remained loyal, but a nephew fled from the Mughals, fortified a hill town, and sent out mounted raiders for many miles around until 1703 or later, spreading destruction, disrupting trade, demonstrating by his survival the hollowness of Mughal claims to rule.