India: A History. Revised and Updated (66 page)

This affair, a great blow to Mughal pride, was followed by another of greater consequence for the Mughal purse. Breaking out of the hills in 1664, Shivaji personally led his forces north into Gujarat and headed for the great port of Surat. For forty days the Marathas then ransacked the place. Only the well-defended English ‘factory’ (a fortified warehouse-cum-counting-house-cum-hostel)
was spared. Most embarrassingly Shivaji’s ‘dignity’ was now eclipsing that of the empire.

Another Mughal army, fifteen thousand strong, headed for the Deccan under the great Jai Singh, the vanquisher of Prince Shuja. Once again the Maratha lands were ravaged as Jai Singh secured fort after fort and signed up their despairing defenders. By 1665 Shivaji himself was cornered near Purandhar and again sued for terms. The negotiations were protracted and complex. In the end, ‘with the ring of submission in his ears and the mantle of devotion on his body’, Shivaji agreed to the surrender of twenty forts, the payment of a substantial indemnity, the liability of his lands to assessment for Mughal military service, and the admission of his son as a Mughal
mansabdar.
He then made his personal submission to Jai Singh amidst security precautions which, understandably, were elaborate.

But the treaty of Purandhar had not been a surrender.
⁴
Shivaji retained twelve forts and he remained at the head of his depleted army which, consisting mostly of Maratha horse, could travel light and live off the countryside, and was thus infinitely more elusive and wide-ranging than its heavy Mughal counterpart. Indeed the treaty was as much about securing Maratha collaboration with the Mughal forces in an offensive against Bijapur as about neutralising Shivaji. A year later, in 1666, Mughal fears of Maratha defections in the course of this Bijapur offensive prompted a Mughal demand that Shivaji travel north to Agra to attend the emperor in person. This was not a success. At Aurangzeb’s expense Shivaji assembled an impressive cavalcade of elephants, silver palanquins and gorgeously attired retainers only, on arrival, to be barely acknowledged by the imperial presence. He was then detained, amidst rumours of death or exile, in a situation that was little better than house arrest. True to form, the mortified Maratha escaped, although probably by bribery rather than buried in a basket of confectionery as per popular myth. Through the byways and backwoods he made his way undetected back to Maharashtra. ‘It was the most thrilling exploit of all his most wonderful deeds,’ opines a not impartial historian, ‘which has for ever added a supernatural glow to his unique personality.’

It immediately resounded throughout the country, making Shivaji an all-India figure, divinely ordained with extraordinary powers. The incident simultaneously exposed the emperor’s craft, still further adding to his evil repute for cunning and cruelty. Shivaji’s reputation, on the other hand, reached its zenith for having outwitted the cleverest and mightiest of the emperors.
⁵

There followed a three-year lull before a Mughal demand seeking reimbursement for Shivaji’s expenses in Agra provoked the Maratha leader into a new offensive. Several vital forts were recaptured, in 1670 the port of Surat was a second time pillaged, and Maratha units struck deep into the Kandesh and Berar districts of the Mughal Deccan. Pune was liberated and Panhala reclaimed along with much of the Konkan coast. Then in 1674, as it were to crown it all, Shivaji had himself elevated to kingship.

The assumption of kingship was less for Mughal edification than for domestic reasons. With an eye to the future, Shivaji sought to legitimise assumed rights to precedence, revenue and service from his Maratha peers which had hitherto depended largely on force of arms and his personal ascendancy. A basic machinery of government was also established and the kingdom’s finances reorganised. The ‘coronation’ itself (no crown was actually used) presented the sort of problems which dynastic aspirants of old may have had to face. Marathas not being accounted as of
ksatriya
status, a bogus genealogy had to be fabricated which linked Shivaji’s Bhonsle predecessors with the illustrious Sesodia rajputs of Mewar. This required a brahman of acknowledged repute who would sanction the arrangement, preside over Shivaji’s penance for having hitherto lived as other than a
ksatriya
, and conduct the actual rituals of consecration. Such a man was found in Varanasi and triumphantly brought to Maharashtra; but the ritual, so long in abeyance, had to be laboriously deduced from ancient texts and adapted for current circumstances. It included much anointing with various liquids and, of course, lavish donations to brahmans. Additionally a new era was proclaimed and a new calendar drawn up. There was no horse-sacrifice but, to complete the traditional ceremony, Shivaji set off on a token
digvijaya
which included a raid on a Mughal encampment and more forays in Kandesh and Berar.

Now an independent sovereign and temporarily under no great threat from the Mughal forces, Shivaji turned south and, in alliance with the Golconda sultanate, made a joint attack on the distant Bijapur possessions in the south of Tamil Nadu. The campaign, his last, was conducted almost entirely by Maratha forces and resulted in the formation of a new Maratha military nucleus based on the captured forts of Vellore and Jinji (south-west of Madras). When in 1680 Shivaji died, dysentery having subverted ‘dignity’, he thus left a Maratha kingdom of great but ill-defined extent. Its territories were not contiguous and its subjects were still unaccustomed to other than personal allegiance to their remarkable leader.

Divisions amongst the Maratha leaders were further exacerbated by a disputed succession. But in 1681 Shambhaji, one of Shivaji’s two competing
sons, gained the upper hand, had himself crowned, and resumed his father’s expansionist policies. It was to Shambhaji’s court that Prince Akbar, Aurangzeb’s rebellious son, had made his way after the failure of his rajput intrigues. And it was to nullify any possible rajput–Maratha alliance around the person of the prince, as well as to resume his long affair with the Deccan sultanates, that in 1682 the emperor himself headed south with the entire imperial court, the imperial administration, and something like 180,000 troops.

AURANGZEB’S LAST YEARS

The conjunction of Maratha and rajput resistance which Prince Akbar had hoped to engineer against his father never materialised. Shambhaji, with Mughal armies already swarming through the northern Maratha lands, preferred to ignore the prince’s pleas for an all-India offensive and concentrated instead on his coastal neighbours, including a fierce little war with the Portuguese in Goa. In despair Prince Akbar took ship for Persia in 1687; like Humayun, he hoped to interest the shah in his ambitions but was disappointed.

Meanwhile Aurangzeb’s armies were enjoying uninterrupted success although no decisive victories. ‘The Mughal strategy toward Maharashtra was not subtle, just thorough.’
⁶
Maratha lands were ravaged and Maratha
deshmukhs
overawed and then enlisted in the imperial service as
mansabdars
. But the forts were rarely worth the immense effort of capturing them and the main enemy detachments proved too wily to be induced into battle. Already it was becoming clear that outright conquest of the Maratha kingdom would demand a greater commitment of imperial resources than Aurangzeb had realised.
⁷

Badly in need of more tangible success, the emperor turned on Bijapur. In 1684 an army of eighty thousand invaded the sultanate. Not so much defeated as overwhelmed, both the city and its sultan surrendered after a desperate siege lasting over a year. The kingdom became a Mughal province, its chief nobles were co-opted into the Mughal hierarchy, and its sultan became a state prisoner in the imperial encampment. There he was soon joined by his opposite number of Golconda. First invaded and occupied in 1685, the Golconda sultanate finally fell, along with the great stronghold of that name, in 1687. It too was then incorporated into the empire.

Aurangzeb argued that both sultanates deserved their fate for having on occasion abetted the infidel Marathas. In Hyderabad especially, the
revenge of the righteous was sweet; vast wealth was appropriated, temples were desecrated, brahmans killed and Hindus of all castes penalised by the
jizya
. But there also arose considerable disquiet, even amongst the
ulema
, over the emperor’s cavalier treatment of such long-established Islamic states. Their non-Muslim subjects, especially those warrior aristocracies under their ex-Vijayanagar nayaks, would never become resigned to Mughal rule. And the ‘Deccani’ nobles, who though often of Persian origin and Shi’ite persuasion were now enrolled as ranking Mughal
amirs
, would retain a strong sense of regional and cultural identity. Within the Mughal military hierarchy they would constitute an influential clique on whom the ‘Hindustani’
amirs
of the north looked with suspicion.

Aurangzeb’s mission in the south seemingly soared to its glorious climax when in 1688 Shivaji’s successor Shambhaji, together with his brahman chief minister, was captured in an ambush. Brought to the imperial encampment, Shambhaji managed to heap insult on both the emperor and the Prophet. He was duly tortured and then painfully dismembered, joint by joint, limb by limb. No doubt the procedure symbolised that by which Aurangzeb imagined himself dealing with the Maratha kingdom.

Rajaram, Shambhaji’s brother and earlier rival, now assumed the mantle of Shivaji, but was himself besieged in the fort of Raigarh. He escaped and headed south to the Maratha possessions in Tamil Nadu. There, installed on the heights of Jinji, he was soon under siege from another Mughal army. The siege of Jinji lasted an amazing eight years (1689–97) and accounted for most of Rajaram’s reign. At times Maratha units from elsewhere pressed the Mughals so hard, and cut off their supplies so successfully, that the besiegers became the besieged. At others the stalemate stemmed from collusion; when the fort finally fell Rajaram and most of his men were allowed to make their escape.

Aurangzeb himself never visited Jinji. Nor was Rajaram’s protracted defence responsible for the emperor’s remaining in the Deccan. The real difficulty lay in the intransigence of the Maratha bands in the Western Ghats. Here, well into his eighties, the emperor would continue to lead his weary armies on an expensive and increasingly futile round of fort-bagging. He saw the campaign as a
jihad
and, along with such pious works as transcribing the Quran and stitching skull-caps for the faithful, he regarded a visit to another doomed stronghold of idolatry as an appropriate way in which to end his days.

But such obsessive concentration on the minutiae of Maharashtrian resistance was not good for the empire as a whole, and it was hopelessly counter-productive in respect of the Marathas. The terrain was partly
responsible. Anywhere less suited to the Mughal military machine than the mountain rockery of the Ghats would be hard to imagine. North-to-south perpendicular escarpments shield a chaotic land of wooded ravines and barren downs in which every hill is a natural fortress and every valley a potential death-trap. Between the Konkan coastline of baked rock and the Deccan hinterland of parched tundra, this same choppy configuration continues for hundreds of miles. Here the Mughals’ superior artillery and heavily armoured cavalry were more a handicap than an asset.

When forts were taken it was rarely by storm. Their garrisons preferred to accept the best terms on offer, wait till the Mughal circus moved on, and then, renouncing their pledges, resume their lands and reoccupy the forts. Aurangzeb, in fact, was confronted with a new kind of insurgency which was partly of his own making. With Shambhaji dead and Rajaram cornered, each Maratha chief was now operating independently. The state was no longer susceptible to the systematic dismemberment meted out to Shambhaji. Aurangzeb’s army was simply betraying its own impotence and, by devastating Maratha lands, positively obliging those whose livelihood derived from them to take up arms and redouble their raiding.

In 1700 Satara, to which place Shivaji had earlier moved the Maratha capital, came under siege and was eventually surrendered to the Mughals. At about the same time Rajaram died. His senior widow, Tarabai, assumed control in the name of her son, Shambhaji II, and offered terms to Aurangzeb which should have ended the war. Yet despite the fact that Satara had cost thousands of lives – two thousand Mughal troops died in a single misdirected mining attempt – the emperor rejected this overture. That same year Maratha raiders for the first time crossed the Narmada river. This was the traditional Rubicon between the Deccan and the north; Malwa was now in the Maratha sights. Two years later they turned east to launch an expedition fifty thousand strong against Hyderabad. The great city, still one of the richest in the peninsula, was ransacked. In 1704 it was ransacked again and the same fate befell even Machchlipatnam (Masulipatnam), its port on the Bay of Bengal. Maratha activities now extended to virtually the entire peninsula.

Meanwhile Tarabai as regent was insinuating into the Mughal province of the Deccan what amounted to a parallel administration. This was a new tactic based on a Maratha claim to a 25 percent share (
chauth
) of all revenues collected in the Deccan and a further 10 per cent for the hereditary Maratha
sardeshmukh
, or sovereign. Payment supposedly guaranteed protection, especially from Mughal revenue collectors; it also justified a shadow hierarchy of Maratha governors and deputies operating from their own fortified bases within Mughal territory and levying additional tolls on the vital trade routes of the region. Non-payment, of course, whether by traders or
zamindars
, meant forcible expropriation or further raids. In practice it was little better than a protection racket. But it was not necessarily resisted. The emperor’s extreme old age, the succession crisis which would inevitably follow his death, the resentment stirred up by his religious policies, the strain imposed on his military and financial resources by the incessant Maratha campaign, and the growing discontent amongst Mughal
mansabdars
whose Deccan
jagirs
either failed to materialise or failed to yield their expected revenue, were all taking their toll of Mughal authority.