The Cambridge History of India, Vol. IV: The Mughul Period v4.c21.23

v4.c21.23

Āsaf Jāh set out from Hyderābād in January, 1743, with a vast force, and after establishing his authority at Arcot, laid siege to Trichinopoly in March. Murārī, at the head of 2000 horse and 4000 foot, held out for five months, but evacuated the fort on 25 August and left the province with all his Marāthās. Āsaf Jāh took from the Rājā of Tanjore a million rupees in cash and three and a half millions in promises, left Trichinopoly in October, and at Arcot deposed the family of Safdar ‘Alī and installed his own agent Anvar-ud-dīn as its Nawāb. When, in January, 1744, he reached the bank of the Krishnā on his return journey, he found his passage threatened by a large Marāthā force on the opposite bank and fell back three marches. But their opposition was removed by “treaty, which was more agreeable (than war) to the Nizām’s general method of proceeding”,¹ and he reached Aurangābād in April. The other notable events of his last years were the capture of Bālkonda (sixteen miles south of Nirmal) from a rebel noble (1746) and a terrible famine which desolated Gujarāt and the Deccan (1747), grain selling at 1½ seers a rupee.² Since his return from the Carnatic, Āsaf Jāh’s health had visibly declined, and at last he died at the Mohan Nālā, outside Burhānpur, on 1 June, 1748, at the age of seventy-nine lunar years. Besides liberally patronising Muslim theologians and holy men, scholars and poets, from all parts of India and the outer Islāmic world, he himself wrote Persian poetry, filling two volumes. Among his constructions are the new walls of Burhānpur city (replacing the dilapidated walls built by Aurangzib to keep Marāthā raiders out), a new city named Nizāmābād above the ruined pass of Fardāpur, protective walls round Hyderābād city, and the Harsul canal running through Aurangābād.