Aurungzebe

A.D. 1657 TO A.D. 1707





With Aurungzebe, the Middle Age of Indian History ends. From the date

of his death, interest finally ceases to centre round the dying

dynasties of India, and, changing sides, concerns itself absolutely

with the coming sovereignty of the West.



Even during his long reign of fifty years, the attention is often

distracted by the welter of conflicting commerce which, leaving the

sea-boards, spread further and further up-country. It requires,

therefore, some concentration to deal with Aurungzebe, the last of the

Great Moghuls; the last, and, without doubt, the least estimable of

them all.



In truth, the steps to his throne were littered with black crime.

Shahjahan, his father, had, it is true, made his seat more secure by

the deaths by poison, bow-string, or sword, of the three next heirs to

the throne--one of them his half-uncle; but Aurungzebe trod on the

bodies of three brothers in reaching kingship, and for seven years of

that kingship carried about with him the prison key of a deposed and

dishonoured father. Of minor sins, such as the poisonings of nephews,

cousins, even aunts, there were scores. Well might he exclaim upon his

death-bed: "I have committed numerous crimes--I know not with what

punishment I may be seized."



And yet he was, in his way, a good king. Had he been less of a bigot,

he would have been a better one; but this bigotry was necessary to his

peace of mind. He could not have borne the sting of conscience without

some anodyne of hard-and-fast religious rectitude. It was after the

murder of his brother Dara, who, caught on the confines of Sinde,

almost unattended (for he had sent his most trusted adherents back to

Lahore with the dead body of his wife, who had died of fatigue), was

given a mock trial for heresy and done to death, that Aurungzebe built

the celebrated Blood-money Mosque at Lahore, in which no Mahomedan

prayed for long years, feeling it to be defiled indeed.



But Aurungzebe was for ever hedging between this world and the next,

so we must take him as we find him--an absolutely contemptible

creature, who yet did good work. Needless to say, however, "Akbar's

Dream" vanished into thin air from the moment he set his foot upon the

throne.



The first five years of his reign were practically spent in ridding

himself of relations. The whole family of Shujah suffered death, and

even his own son was immured as a state prisoner in consequence of a

trivial act of independence.



Then--and small wonder!--he was seized with a mysterious illness,

which left him speechless. Nothing but his marvellous determination

could have averted the chaos which must have followed in a state but

half broken in to his murderous methods. But he sent for his great

seal and his sister Roshanara, and keeping them both by his sick-bed,

held order by sheer insistency until he recovered.



So, after a brief holiday in Kashmir--that happy hunting-ground of all

the Moghul kings, who seem to have inherited the love of beautiful

scenery from their great ancestor, Babar--he came back to face the

greatest foe to the Moghul power which had arisen since the combined

Rajput resistance was finally broken by Mahomed-Shahab-ud-din-Ghori.



This foe was the Mahratta race, which had been gradually growing to

power in the Western Ghats, that natural stronghold of mountains which

rises in many places like a wall between the Western Sea and the high

table-land of Central India. No more fitting birthplace for warlike

tribes could be imagined. Towards the sea, breaks of rich rice-fields,

tongued by spurred rocks and outlying strips of almost impenetrable

forest. Then the bare, broken ridges, 3,000 or 4,000 feet high, ending

often in a scarp of sheer precipice, and giving on wide, thicket-set

woods, through which, after a while, ravines break into valleys to the

eastward. A land of rain--clouds from the south-west monsoon, of

roaring torrents and drifting mists; full of wild beasts fleeing

fearfully from the small, sturdy huntsmen of the hills. These were the

Mahrattas. Not a very interesting race when all was said and done.

Brave, dogged, determined, but, by reason, doubtless, of their Sudra

extraction, lacking the nobility of the Rajput and the Rajput nicety

in honour.



It was in the time of Malik-Amber, the Abyssinian slave who in the

reign of Jahangir gave new life to the dying dynasty in the Dekkan,

that the Mahrattas first made their mark. Before this, history does

not even recognise them.



Amongst the Mahratta officers of Malik-Amber was one Malo-ji, who had

a five-year-old son called Shah-ji. To a Hindu festival at the house

of a Rajput this boy was taken, and by chance was lifted to one knee

of the host, whose little daughter of three occupied the other.



"They are a fine couple," laughed the host and father. "They should be

man and wife!"



This was enough for Malo-ji's ambition. He started up, and called the

company to witness that the girl was affianced to his son.



Naturally enough, the claim roused indignation; but in the end,

Malo-ji's fortunes improving, Shah-ji gained his high-caste bride, and

from the marriage sprang Siva-ji, the national hero of the Mahrattas,

who was destined to wreck the power of the Moghuls in the south.



Siva-ji, by the time he was sixteen, was already notorious. His love

of adventure, his knowledge of the popular ballads of the people, his

complicity in the great gang-robberies which formed an ever-recurring

excitement to life in the Ghats, his intimate acquaintance with every

footpath and defile in that wild country, his horsemanship, his

sportsmanship, were on the tongues of all; and when, still in his

teens, he fortified one of the neglected hill-citadels and set up a

chieftainship of his own, there were not wanting those who laughed at

the impertinence as a high-spirited, boyish freak.



But within a few years the boyish freak was found to be open

rebellion, and Siva-ji was practically king of the wild western

country. What is more, he had become an ardent Hindu, and laid claims

to Divine dreams.



The court at Bijapur attempted remonstrance, imprisoned poor Shah-ji,

his father, and threatened to wall him up unless Siva-ji repented of

his errors: whereupon, with the cunning which distinguished him in all

things, the latter made overtures to, and was taken into the service

of, Shahjahan, then engaged in the Dekkan. So for a few years affairs

remained at a deadlock; Siva-ji, apprehensive for his father, Bijapur

of the Moghuls.



Then Shah-ji being released, his son began his career of annexation

afresh, being checked, however, in his depredations by fear of Prince

Aurungzebe, who was then fighting the King of Golconda.



Both of the same kidney, artful, designing, specious, the diplomacies

which passed between the Mahratta robber-chieftain and Aurungzebe,

intent on stealing the throne of India, cannot have been edifying.

The former took the opportunity of the latter's hasty retreat on the

news of his father's illness, to increase his power by an act of

double-dyed treachery. He induced the commander of the King of

Bijapur's forces to come unattended to the hill fort of Partabghar in

order to receive his submission.



The scene is dramatic.



The generalissimo, in white muslin, carrying for ornament only a

stiff, straight sword of state, awaiting on a rocky plateau with one

single attendant the advance of Siva-ji, who, also in white muslin,

was seen slowly descending the steps of his eyrie, apparently unarmed,

and also with but one attendant. A slim little bit of a fellow this

Siva-ji, timid, hesitating. But appearances are deceitful: underneath

his muslin robing was chain armour, within his closed left hand were

the "tiger's claws" (sharp hooks of steel fastened on to the fingers

with which to grapple with the foe), and close to his outstretched,

salaaming right hand was a poniard. It was all over in a second. The

tiger's claws gripped and held, the dagger did its work. And then

Siva-ji's wild robber hordes, conveniently disposed beforehand by

secret paths round the royal troops, fell upon them and spared not

until victory was secure. For in truth Siva-ji appears to have been of

the noble highwayman type--that is to say, not set on murder if he can

gain gold without it.



Siva-ji's next exploit was less blameworthy. Shayista-Khan, who

commanded Aurungzebe's forces in the Dekkan, marched to annihilate the

little robber, and, succeeding in worsting him in the open, took up

quarters at Poona; curiously enough, occupying the very house in which

Siva-ji had spent his youth.



Possibly the intimate knowledge of back-door passages, which he must

thus have possessed, suggested what was more a boyish escapade than a

serious attack. Siva-ji, with some twenty followers, entered Poona at

night by joining a marriage procession, made his way straight to the

house, entered by a side door, and was in Shayista-Khan's bedroom but

half a minute too late, yet just in time to cut off with his sword the

two fingers that clung to the window-sill as the Mahomedan general let

himself down into the courtyard below. Whereupon, seeing that same

courtyard full of ramping soldiery, Siva-ji retired as he came, until,

once outside the city gates, he lit up torches and flambeaux; so

making his way back to his hill eyrie, some 12 miles off, in a blaze

of triumph that was visible to every Moghul in the place. This tale is

still told by the Mahratta bards with immense enthusiasm, though the

story of his march against Aurungzebe at Delhi is really more

exciting.



They were birds of a feather these two: both small, slippery,

absolutely untrustworthy; both playing consistently for their own

hands. At one time, however, Siva-ji seems to have been inclined to

yield to Aurungzebe, and honest, liberal treatment might have turned

the rebel freebooter into a staunch adherent; but it was not in

Aurungzebe to trust any one. So, mistaking his man utterly, he

received the little Mahratta cavalierly, and when he stormed and raged

and positively swooned with vexation, made him virtually a prisoner.



Almost alone in Delhi with his five-year-old son Samba-ji, Siva-ji was

too wily to precipitate matters by any display of annoyance; but he

laid his plans. His first move was to beg leave for his small escort

to leave Delhi, the climate of which he said was insalubrious. To this

Aurungzebe gave glad consent; it seemed to leave Siva-ji still more at

his mercy. The latter next took to his bed on plea of sickness. This

afforded him an opportunity of, first, being able to use the Hindu

physicians, who were allowed to attend him, as spies and go-betweens;

second, of sending sweetmeats and other offerings to various fakirs,

Hindu and Mahomedan, with a request for their prayers. And as he grew

more and more sick, the hampers and baskets containing the offerings

grew larger and larger, until one day--hey presto!--little Siva-ji and

his little son occupied the place of the sweetmeats. It was hours

before the guards discovered that the sick-bed was occupied by a

dummy, and by that time Siva-ji was in Muttra amongst his disguised

followers. He himself adopted that of a wandering jogi, and, smeared

all over with ashes, arrived in due time quite jauntily in his old

haunts.



Aurungzebe took his defeat in good part. For the time he was occupied

with Shahjahan's death, and with embassies from Arabia and Abyssinia.

Then Little Tibet had just been brought under his sway, and in Bengal

the kingdom of Arrakan, which held the rich rice-fields of Chittagong,

had been added to the crown.



It was some years, therefore, before Aurungzebe pitted himself once

more against the Mahratta.



Then once again he found the impracticability of subduing an enemy

which, at the first attack, reduced itself to a horde of units, each

one animated by individual love of fight, love of plunder. It was

guerilla war with a vengeance, so after a time the emperor was not

sorry to have his attention drawn from it to the northwest frontier.

On his return from this unsuccessful expedition, he settled down for a

time to govern his kingdom, which he did in a way that irritated and

exasperated both Hindus and Mahomedans. The former almost rose in

revolt at the reimposition of the poll tax on infidels; the latter,

especially in the court, objected to the prohibition of all

amusements. Amongst other prohibitions was the curious one of

forbidding history to be written, or court annals to be kept; the

result being that no real record of the last forty years of this reign

is extant.



As time went on, he bore more and more hardly on the Hindus, until

discontent spread on all sides, and in the Dekkan every one was at

heart a partisan of Siva-ji.



Finally, an attempt on Aurungzebe's part to get into his power the

infant children of Rajah Jai-Singh of Amber, whom he had caused to be

poisoned in his distant viceroyalty of Kabul, joined to the iniquity

of the jizya, or infidel tax, set the whole of Rajputana in a flame.

In this connection the letter sent to the Emperor by Rana Raj-Singh of

Chittore may be quoted in part, as an example of the dignified

remonstrances which preceded the appeal to the sword.





"How can the dignity of the sovereign be preserved who employs his

power in exacting heavy tribute from a people thus miserably

reduced?... If your Majesty places any faith in those books, by

distinction called divine, you will there be instructed that God is

the god of all mankind, not the god of Mahomedans alone. The pagan and

the Mussulman are equally in His presence ... to vilify the religion

or customs of other men is to set at naught the pleasure of the

Almighty ... In fine, the tribute you demand from Hindus is repugnant

to justice; it is equally foreign to good policy, as it must

impoverish the country."





The appeal, needless to say, was fruitless; but after a long and

mutually disastrous war a sort of peace was patched up between the

Rajputs and the Moghuls, leaving Aurungzebe free to attempt yet once

again to repress the irrepressible Siva-ji, who by this time had been

crowned King of the Mahrattas, and had become a still more ardent

Hindu, minutely scrupulous to ceremonial and caste.



Thus the two great rival powers in India were bigoted Hinduism,

bigoted Islamism. A far cry, indeed, from dead Akbar's Dream of

tolerant Unity.



So the struggle recommenced. But Siva-ji was more elusive than ever.

He fought by sea as well as by land, and the first record of a naval

war in India is that which he waged along the shores of Western India.

Only the English settlement at Surat defied him. They put their

factory into what state of defence was possible, garrisoned it with

their crews, and met the marauding Mahrattas with a sally which

effectually drove them off. For which valiant defence of their own,

Aurungzebe exempted the English for ever from a portion of the customs

duty paid by other nations, and remitted the transit charges.



Siva-ji thus indirectly did a good turn to English commerce.



Years passed, bringing advantage to the Mahratta side, when, in 1680,

death suddenly intervened and carried off the clever, astute little

Siva-ji in the fifty-third year of his age.



A bit of a genius was Siva-ji, quick to seize on the mistakes of his

adversary, and far-seeing enough to appeal to natural spirit and

religious enthusiasm in his adherents. Thus, though his death was a

great blow, it did not crush the rising fortunes of the Mahrattas,

despite the fact that Samba-ji, his heir, had shown no capability for

kingship during his youth, and on his accession gave himself up to

cruelty and passion. Still the war dragged on; defeat was indeed

impossible to an army which had no cohesion, and which now, in

consequence of the failure of regular pay under Samba-ji's career of

idle luxury, degenerated into plundering hordes of mere freebooters.



It was at this juncture that Aurungzebe himself, possibly suspicious

of his generals, always distrustful of everything that did not

actually come under his eyes, and pass through his hands, marched

southwards. In a way, it was a fatal mistake; for he brought with him

all his intolerant authority, his infatuation for his faith. Hitherto

his officers, seeing the evil effects of levying the infidel tax

strictly in this land of infidels, had let it slide; now affairs took

a very different turn. But at first the imperial troops were fairly

successful, though by the time they had marched through the Ghat

country they were crippled by sickness, outwearied by the difficulty

of the roads, harassed by the continual depredations of Samba-ji's

guerillas both by sea and land. To add to difficulty, the latter

concluded a sort of a defensive alliance with the King of Golconda;

whereupon the emperor, tired of hunting a Will-o'-the-Wisp through

mists and swamps, seized on a stationary enemy. Golconda reduced to

terms, Bijapur next came under displeasure. A very small state, its

capital was an extremely large town, the circumference of the walls

being more than 6 miles. Garrisoned by a very small force it soon

fell, and Aurungzebe was carried in a portable throne through the

breach into the deserted city. It remains now much as it was then--a

city, not of ruins, but of desertion. The walls, still entire, are

surmounted by the cupolas and minarets of the public buildings within,

so that from outside Bijapur shows bravely; but within all is

desolation. The wide Mosque, the splendid palace, the great domed tomb

of the kings, are alike deserted, the home only of bats and hyenas.

Yet still, centering the desertion, stands the old brass cannon,

weighing 41 tons, which "Rumi the European" cast in 1585.



While this was going on, be-drugged, dissolute Samba-ji watched the

proceedings inertly, ineptly. The Mahratta historians accuse Kalusha

the Brahman, his favourite, the pandar to all his vices, of having

enchanted the young man; but the enchantment was mere sensuality,

self-indulgence.



His time for enjoyment, nevertheless, ran short. Golconda and Bijapur

taken, Aurungzebe, triumphant--after, as usual, alienating the people

by his religious intolerance--added to religious hatred by capturing

the person of Samba-ji while drunk and incapable in his favourite

palace of pleasure, and thereinafter, having paraded him through the

camp in disgrace, ordering him to prison. Whereupon Samba-ji, roused

at last to sense, openly reviled the emperor, his prophet, his faith,

in language so strong that it was considered necessary to cut his

tongue out as a punishment for blasphemy, before beheading him and his

favourite, the vile Kalusha.



Anything more injudicious could not well be conceived. Despised as

Samba-ji had been whilst alive by the better class of Mahrattas, he

was now a martyr. From this time, the fortunes of Aurungzebe, and with

them the Empire of the Moghuls, began to fall; and for the few

remaining years of his life, the emperor, now growing old, must have

felt himself and his power on the downward grade. His indefatigable

perseverance, his laborious energy, are almost pitiful. Over eighty

years of age, he rested not at all, and despite our reprobation, the

heart softens towards the tired old man as we see him, seemingly

careless of the greater enemy along his sea-board, leading his armies

through trackless forests and flooded valleys, enduring hardships that

would have tried youth, in pursuit of the irrepressible, irresponsible

Mahrattas. An old man, small, slender, stooping, with a long nose, a

frosted beard, and a perpetual smile.



That smile was worn outside; but within? Within was weariness and fear

even for this life. The remembrance of his father's fate at his hands

seems never to have left him; every action of his during the later

years of his reign showing his fear lest a like fate should be his. So

he held every tiny thread of the great warp and woof of Government in

his own hands. Only thus could he feel secure.



In such a system abuse is inevitable. No single eye can supervise a

wide empire, and so corruption grew apace, and with corruption,

inefficiency. The noblemen, waxing effeminate, wore wadded coats under

their chain armour; their horses, laden with ornamentations, housed

with velvet, were purely processional, and utterly unfit for war. The

common soldiers, aping their superiors, followed suit, and became so

slothful that they could neither keep watch nor picket, and discipline

disappeared utterly.



Yet all the time, while Aurungzebe, old, enfeebled in health,

outwearied himself in precautions, in providence, the greatest enemy

to the Moghul dynasty was advancing, apparently unnoticed, in rapid

strides. For the West had finally set its face towards the East.

Commerce had already joined hands over the empire. In 1667 Britain,

France, Holland, and Denmark, signed a treaty of common cause at Breda

that was practically a league against the Pagan and the Portuguese. A

few years previously the island and town of Bombay had been ceded to

England as part of the dower of Catherine of Braganza, and had become

thereby so much an integral part of Great Britain that every native in

it, every child born there, had the right to claim every privilege of

a British subject.



Fort St George, the nucleus of Madras, was finally established, and

the group of factories around it formed into a presidency. Job

Charnock had founded Calcutta, and Hugli was soon to be merged in it.



Then a new note had come into the dealings of the English with the

accession of James II. A large shareholder, he promised the East India

Company military support, and henceforward the "native powers were to

be given to understand that the Company would treat with them as an

independent power, and, if necessary, compell redress by force of

arms." In consequence of this the President, Sir John Child, was

appointed "Captain-General and Admiral of all forces by sea and land."



Poor Sir John Child! He was the first instance of a cat's-paw in the

East (there have been many since!), and when the tortuous policy of

the Company towards the Great Moghul failed, and they found it

impossible to hunt with the hounds and run with the hare, by making

war in Bengal, and wearing a mask of friendship in Bombay, he went to

the wall promptly in obedience to Aurungzebe's "irreversible order"

that "Mr Child, who did the disgrace, should be turned out and

expelled."



But there was more disgrace than the making of a scapegoat out of one

man in store for the old original East India Company. How much of the

dirt flung at it in the next ten years or so deserves to stick? Who

can tell? Or who can say how much of the moil and turmoil which arose

around it was due to honest John Bull's honest love of clean hands,

and how much to the itching of his palm? When gold is in dispute,

motives are hard to dissever, impossible to pigeonhole. And in those

days the Pagoda Tree was in full bearing, the gold lay on Tom

Tiddler's ground ready to be picked up. So, at least, it must have

seemed to England.



A terrible temptation to all sorts of sins. And so we have allegations

of bribery, Parliamentary enquiries, scandalous disclosures,

petitions, answers at length, impeachment of the Duke of Leeds,

convenient disappearance of the Duke's servant, final hint by the

disturbed king--William of Orange--that disclosures and exposures were

out of season, as he was under the necessity of "putting an end to

this session in a few days."



So at last we get at Act 9, William III., c. 44, for "raising a sum

not exceeding 2,000,000 upon a fund for payment of annuities after the

rate of L8 per annum, and for settling the trade to the East

Indies."



Thus the new company, started by solemn act of legislature, was left

eyeing the old one. At first there seemed likelihood of their fighting

it out like the Kilkenny cats. But in the pursuit of gold the main

chance is a potent factor for peace. And so, while Aurungzebe, near

his life's limit, was still, in his ninth decade of years, wearily

pursuing the Mahratta, Earl Godolphin, Lord High Treasurer of Great

Britain, as referee, succeeded in reconciling the conflicting claims

of commerce, and--to make his award binding on both parties--inserted

a special clause in an Act of Parliament, by which the old London East

India Company and the new English East India Company were for ever

amalgamated under the title of the "United Company of Merchants of

England trading to the East Indies."



By this arrangement there passed to one control in India alone, the

ports and islands of Bombay, the factories of Surat, Sivalli, Broach,

of Amadad, Agra, Lucknow, and on the Malabar Coast, the forts of

Karwar, Tellicherri, Anjengo, besides the factory at Calicut. Rounding

Cape Cormorin, the coast of Coromandel held Orissa, Chingi, Fort St

George, the city of Madras and its dependencies; Fort St David, the

factories of Cuddalore, Porto-Novo, Pettipoli, Masulipatam,

Madapollam, Vizagapatam. Going northward to Bengal there was Fort

William or Calcutta, with its large territory, Balasore, Cossimbazaar,

Dacca, Hugli, Malda, Rajmahal, and Patna.



From which long list may be seen how steady had been the nibbling at

India's coral strand during the last fifty years. The grant of

Calcutta, with leave thereupon to erect fortifications, was

practically the beginning of the end. This was almost the last act of

Aurungzebe's reign. Shortly after, he lay dying, a man of eighty-nine,

still in full possession of his faculties.



There is something very terrible about the death-bed of this man, who

for fifty long years had held, without aid of any sort, the reins of

Government. He had no friends; he could not trust any one sufficient

for friendship. His one lukewarm affection seems to have been for his

intriguing sister Roshanrai, the woman who had sate beside his sick-bed

guarding the Great Seal. For others he had literally no heart.



So in his death he was quite alone. Except for his remorse.





"Old age has arrived.... I came a stranger into this world, and a

stranger I depart. I know nothing of myself; what I am, and for what I

am destined. The instant which has passed in power, hath left only

sorrow behind it. I have not been the guardian and protector of the

Empire. My valuable time has been passed vainly. I had a guide given

me in my own dwelling" (conscience), "but his glorious light was

unseen by my dim sight. I brought nothing into this world, and, except

the infirmities of man, take nothing out. I have a dread for my

salvation and with what torments I may be punished.... Regarding my

actions fear will not quit me; but when I am gone, reflection will not

remain. Come, then, what come may, I have launched my vessel to the

waves. Farewell, Farewell--Farewell!"





So he wrote from his death-bed to his second son, and to his youngest

thus:--





"Son nearest to my heart! The agonies of death come upon me fast.

Wherever I look I see nothing but the Divinity. I am going! Whatever

good or evil I have done it was done for you."





He was a great letter-writer. Three huge volumes of his epistles are

still extant; but even in these last solemn ones the absolute truth

was not in them; for under his pillow when he died a paper was

found--a sort of will, in which he appoints his eldest son Emperor,

bids his second be content with Agra and Bengal, while to the one

"nearest his heart," the doubtful kingship of Bijapur and Golconda was

gifted. Aurungzebe was diplomatic to the last.





[Map: India to A.D. 1707]