Last Nizam (9781742626109) Read online

  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