History of Aurangzib, Based on Original Sources v3.c48.s2: §2. Rising of Jat peasantry in Mathura.
History of Aurangzib, Based on Original Sources v3.c48.s2
- Language
- English
§2. Rising of Jat peasantry in Mathura.
v3.c48.s2.1
At this Aurangzib sent a strong force under Radandaz Khan to quell the rebellion, while high officers like Saf Shikan Khan and Hasan Ali Khan were successively appointed faujdars of Mathura. Throughout the year 1669 lawlessness reigned in the district. An attempt in September to make terms with Gokla by granting him a pardon on condition of the restitution of all his booty, failed. By the end of November the situation had become so serious that the Emperor had to march from Delhi to the affected area. On 4th December Hasan Ali Khan attacked the rebel villagers of Rewarah, Chandar-kaha, and Sarkhud. They fought till noon, when being unable to resist any longer, many of them slaughtered their women and rushed upon the swords of the Mughals, fighting with the recklessness of despair. The loss of the imperialists was heavy, while the rebels had 300 killed and 250 (both men and women) taken captive. During the campaign the Emperor very humanely detached 200 horsemen to guard the crops of the villagers and prevent the soldiers from oppressing any of them or taking any child prisoner.*
v3.c48.s2.2
∗ Abdun Nabi, Ruqat No. 34 (Philosopher's stone); A.N. 573, 966; M.A. 75, 83 (death); N.W. Gaz. viii. pt. I. 93; Akhbarat, 9/7. There is a village named after Abdun Nabi on the left bank of the Jamuna opposite Mathura and south of Gokul.
v3.c48.s2.3
Next month Hasan Ali Khan with his lieutenant Shaikh Razi-ud-din of Bhagalpur (who was a rare combination of soldier, theologian, traveller and business man in one) defeated Gokla. The rebels, who mustered 20,000 strong, mostly Jat and other stalwart peasants, encountered the imperial forces at a place 20 miles from Tilpat, and charged most gallantly. But after a very long and bloody contest they gave way before the superior discipline and artillery of the Mughals, and fled to Tilpat which was besieged for three days and at last stormed at the point of the sword. The havoc was terrible. On the victors' side 4,000 men fell and on the rebels' 5,000, while 7,000 persons, including Gokla and his family, were taken prisoner. The Jat leader's limbs were hacked off one by one on the platform of the police office of Agra, his family was forcibly converted to Islam, and his followers were kept in prison in charge of the provost of the imperial camp. Innocent strangers who had been arrested along with the rebels, were ordered to be set free after proper inquiries, while the old men and children were handed over to an eunuch of the Court.
v3.c48.s2.4
∗ Peasant risings in Mathura and Agra districts.—M.A. 83, 92-94, 110; Ishwardas, 53 (fall of Gokla); Akhbarat, 12/22, 12/25, 13/7, 14/3.
v3.c48.s2.5
But the trouble did not die out with the loss of one leader. We read that even as late as March of that year (1670), Hasan Ali Khan was "engaged in enslaving and capturing the rebels, plundering their houses, extirpating their families, and dismantling their strong [mud] forts." These measures had the desired effect, and in a short time peace was restored to the district.
v3.c48.s2.6
But the peace did not last more than ten years. In June 1681, the faujdar of the environs of Agra had to lead an expedition against some villagers and was mortally wounded by them. This was a purely agrarian revolt, and was probably soon ended. In 1686, when the Emperor was engaged with his many enemies in the Deccan, the second great Jat rising began, under the leadership of Rajaram, and though Rajaram was soon slain, his brother's son Churaman, with his head-quarters at Sansani, carried on an intermittent war till the end of Aurangzib's life, and could not be subdued by that Emperor's decadent successors. [See Ch. 59.]
v3.c48.s2.7
§3. The Satnami sect: their character.
v3.c48.s2.8
The revolt of the SATNAMI faqirs in May 1672 has gained a place in the history of Aurangzib out of all proportion to its size or political importance.
v3.c48.s2.9
Unlike other popular disturbances of the reign it appealed to the vulgar craze for the supernatural and sent a short thrill of fear through the capital itself. Hence, men greatly marvelled at it and it became the talk of the age.*
v3.c48.s2.10
The title *Satnamis* has been adopted by at least three religious bodies of Northern India. The one best known nowadays was founded in 1775 in Oudh, but we are not here concerned with it. The sect that rose against Aurangzib was really the *Sadhs*, who employ the name Satnami among themselves. They are a unitarian community, founded in 1543 by Birbhan of Bijesar, near Narnol, and may be looked upon as an offshoot of the Rai Dasis. [Hastings's *Encyclopædia of Religion*, xi. 46, 210.] The people nicknamed them *Mundiyas* or Shavelings from their practice of shaving off all the hair, —even the eye-brows, from their heads. The sect is scattered all over Upper India, and has monasteries in many places, but its stronghold in the 17th century was the district of Narnol, 75 miles south-west of Delhi. The religious mysteries practised by these sectaries were abominable, and a contemporary Hindu historian, Ishwardas Nagar, thus describes the repulsion which they excited: "The Satnamis are extremely filthy and wicked. In their rules they make no distinction between Hindus and Musalmans, and eat pigs and other unclean animals. If a dog is served up before them, they do not show any disgust at it! In sin and immorality they see no blame." (61b.)
v3.c48.s2.11
∗ *Satnamis*.—M.A. 115; K.K. ii. 252—254; Ishwardas 61b; *Storia*, ii. 167—168. Wilson's *Religious Sects of the Hindus* describes another sect bearing the same name but founded about 1775.
v3.c48.s2.12
But evidently their esoteric doctrines and rites did not make them bad citizens or men. Khafi Khan (ii. 252) gives them a good character as an honest and manly brotherhood, saying, "Though they dress like faqirs, most of them follow agriculture or trade on a small capital. Following the path of their own faith they wish to live with a good name and never attempt to obtain money by any dishonest or unlawful means. If any one tries to oppress them, they cannot endure it. Most of them carry arms."
v3.c48.s2.13
§4. Satnami rebellion, its history.
v3.c48.s2.14
These people came into conflict with the forces of Government from a purely temporal cause. "One day a Satnami cultivator near Narnol had a hot dispute with a foot-soldier (piada) who was watching a field, and the soldier broke the peasant's head with his thick stick. A party of Satnamis beat the assailant till he seemed dead. The shiqdar (petty revenue collector), hearing of it, sent a body of piadas to arrest the men; but the Satnamis assembled in force, beat the piadas, wounded some of them, and snatched away their arms. Their number and tumult increased every hour."
v3.c48.s2.15
The quarrel soon took on a religious colour and assumed the form of a war for the liberation of the Hindus by an attack on Aurangzib himself. An old prophetess appeared among them and declared that her spells could raise an invisible army at night, that the Satnamis fighting under her banner would be invulnerable to the enemy's weapons, and that if one of them fell eighty others would spring up in his place. The movement spread like wildfire and the Government was completely taken by surprise. The rising looked like a sudden "irruption of ants out of the ground or of locusts from the sky." Soon some five thousand Satnamis were up in arms. The local officers underrated the danger and sent out troops in small parties which were successively defeated. These initial victories only raised the confidence of the rebels and confirmed the tale of their magical power. They plundered many villages in the district and when, at last, the faujdar of Narnol came out to meet them, they routed him with heavy loss and seized the town.
v3.c48.s2.16
The danger now assumed threatening proportions. The victorious rebels plundered Narnol, demolished its mosques, and established their own administration in the district, holding it by means of outposts and collecting the revenue from the peasants.
v3.c48.s2.17
"The zamindars of the neighbourhood and some foolish Rajputs seized the opportunity to rebel and withhold the payment of revenue to the State. The disturbance daily grew worse." "The rebels marched to Bairat Singhana, looting the villages. The noise of their tumult reached Delhi, where the grain supply became scanty and the citizens were greatly alarmed and distracted." Superstitious terror demoralized the imperial army. "Magical powers were ascribed to the Satnamis...Great Rajahs and experienced generals with large armies were appointed against them, but refused to face them, though they had arrived within 32 or 34 miles of Delhi."
v3.c48.s2.18
Aurangzib was now fully roused. On 15th March he sent a large force, 10,000 strong, under Radandaz Khan and many other high officers with artillery and a detachment from the Emperor's bodyguard against the rebels. To counteract the spells of the Satnamis, the Emperor, who had the reputation of being a living saint (*Alamgir zinda pir*), wrote out prayers and magical figures with his own hand and ordered the papers to be sewed on to the banners of his army and displayed before the enemy. The encounter was terrible. "The rebels advanced to the attack. In spite of their poverty in war-material, they enacted the scenes of the great war of the *Mahabharat*. The Muslim heroes reddened their pitiless swords in the blood of the wretches." After a most obstinate battle, two thousand of the Satnamis fell on the field, while many more were slain during the pursuit. "Very few of them escaped; and that tract of country was cleared of the infidels." In the imperial ranks 200 were killed, and Rajah Bishnu Singh Kachhwa, who had fought most gallantly, had his elephant wounded in seven places. The victors were richly rewarded. Radandaz Khan was given the title of Shujaet Khan, and all the officers, high and low alike, received promotion and robes of honour. The artillery planted outside Delhi to command the approaches to the city, stood there for some time after as an eloquent memorial of the panic created at the capital by the Satnami advance.
v3.c48.s2.19
§5. The course of the Sikh religion.
v3.c48.s2.20
The Mughal empire soon afterwards created a more formidable enemy, who continued to wage war with it till its downfall. These were the SIKHS.
v3.c48.s2.21
Towards the close of the 15th century, when the first wave of Muslim immigration into India had worn itself out, leaving the country in political disruption social disorder and moral decadence, there arose in the extreme east and the extreme west of India two Hindu reformers who called upon the people to prefer the essence to the form of religion, a living faith to a dead mechanical ritual, and the spirit to the letter of their scriptures. Both of them insisted on the unity of the Godhead underlying the multitude of the idols of popular worship. Both taught that God can be realized only by means of a love as ardent and all-absorbing as the conjugal passion. Both urged on their hearers to work out their salvation personally by strenuous holy living and not to imagine that it can be won through any other man's exertions or the mechanical repetition of any words. Both invited earnest believers to their folds without distinction of caste or creed, and tried to form a brotherhood of the elect. Both attempts, after glorious success for three generations, ended in failure, and their only result has been to add two more names to the long list of the religious sects of the Hindus. The goal of Chaitanya* was lost when his Church passed under the control of Brahman Goswamis who developed a very subtle and esoteric theology in which the brain has suppressed the heart, and his Vaishnava followers now form two sharply divided sections,—an emotional but morally undisciplined rabble at the base, and a keenly intellectual but cold and fastidious priesthood at the top, without any link between them. The aims of Nanak were abandoned when his successors in the leadership of the Sikhs set up a temporal dominion for themselves and made military drill take the place of moral self-reform and spiritual growth.
v3.c48.s2.22
∗ For the teachings of Chaitanya, see my work *Chaitanya's Life and Teachings*, 2nd ed.
v3.c48.s2.23
"The liberation which Baba Nanak realized in his heart was not political liberty, but spiritual freedom. Nanak had called upon his disciples to free themselves from selfishness, from narrow bigotry, from spiritual lethargy. Guru Govind organized the Sikhs to suit a special purpose. He called in the human energy of the Sikhs from all other sides and made it flow in one particular channel only; they ceased to be full, free men. He converted the spiritual unity of the Sikhs into a means of worldly success; he dwarfed the unity of a religious sect into an instrument of political advancement. Hence the Sikhs, who had been advancing for centuries to be true men, now suddenly stopped short and became mere *soldiers*! The end of Sikh history looks very sad. When a river, which had left the pure, snowy, cloud-kissing hilltops to reach the ocean, disappears in a sandy plain, losing its dance, losing its song, a sorry sight is its failure. Even so, when the pure white stream of energy which issued from a *bhakta's* heart to cleanse and fertilize the earth ends in the red mire of a military cantonment, men can see no glory, no joy in it.......To-day there is no spirit of progress among the Sikhs. They have crystallized into a small sect. Centuries have failed to produce a new spiritual teacher from among them."*
v3.c48.s2.24
∗ Rabindranath Tagore, as translated by me in *Modern Review*, April, 1911, 334-338. Cf. Pincott, "The religion of Nanak began in
v3.c48.s2.25
§6. Life and teachings of Nanak.
v3.c48.s2.26
Nanak, a Hindu of the Khatri or trader caste, was born in 1469 at Talwandi (now, Nanakana), 35 miles s. w. of Lahor. In early youth he began to consort with holy men and wandering friars and have ecstatic visions, and then throwing up his post under Daulat Khan Lodi he took to a life of religious travel and preaching. The essence of his creed was belief in the one true living God, and the shaping of every man's conduct in such a way as to realize that God. In his moments of inspiration he held communion with his Maker and sang of Him in the very language of the Song of Songs. Like Kabir and other Indian saints before him, he preached against the hollowness of conventional beliefs and mechanical rites, and urged his hearers to go back to the very spring-head of a personal and living faith. It was only natural that such a teacher should denounce the Hindus and Muhammadans of the age as false to their creeds, and that his insistence on the common truth of all religions should make all spiritual-minded men among both sects accept him as their master and guide, even as Kabir had been accepted. But the vulgar people and the selfish priests raised the cry that Nanak had condemned their scriptures as inefficacious for salvation, that he was saying "There
v3.c48.s2.27
large-hearted tolerance; and political causes operated to convert its adherents into a narrow-minded sect."
v3.c48.s2.28
is no Hindu and there is no Musalman,'' and even that he had ``become a Turk!''*
v3.c48.s2.29
Indeed, there was much in Nanak's speech and conduct to lend colour to such a charge. His dress was as eclectic as his doctrines. ``The Guru set out towards the east, having arrayed himself in a strange motley of Hindu and Muhammadan religious habiliments......He wore a necklace of bones, and imprinted a saffron mark on his forehead in the style of Hindus.'' (Mac. i. 58.)
v3.c48.s2.30
His devotion to one God, ``the True, the Immortal, the Self-existent, the Pure, the Invisible,'' made him reject incarnations and idols as abominations, while his insistence on right conduct cut away the basis of ritualistic practices and set prayers. As he said, repeating the words of Kabir, ``O brethren, the Vedas and the Quran are false, and free not the mind from anxiety......God can be obtained by humility and prayer, self-restraint, searching of the heart, and fixed gaze on Him.'' (Mac. i. 177.)
v3.c48.s2.31
Nanak (who lived till 1538) drew round himself a band of earnest worshippers, and in time they solidified into a sect. But his original intention was to save all souls without distinction, and not to found a narrow brotherhood with its peculiar dress, marks, doctrines, form of worship and scripture. He acknowledged no guru save God and no worship except the practice of virtue. Even his hymns were mostly adapted from the sacred songs left behind by the monotheistic reformers of the past, and had nothing distinctive, nothing sectarian about them.
v3.c48.s2.32
∗ Macauliffe's *Sikh Religion*, 6 vols., Hughes's *Dictionary of Islam*, 583-594 (article by F. Pincott), *Dabistan-ul-mazahib* (Bombay lithographed text), 178-193, and Sujan Rai Khatri's *Khulasat-at-tawarikh*, as trans. by me in *India of Aurangzib*, 88-91, are our original sources of information about the Sikh gurus. I shall, in future, refer to the first of these works as 'Mac.'
v3.c48.s2.33
This liberality of mind, devotion to the essence of religion, and contempt for wealth and power continued to mark the Sikh gurus throughout the 16th century, from Nanak to Arjun the 5th guru. Their saintly lives won the reverence of the Mughal emperors and they had no quarrel either with Islam or the State.
v3.c48.s2.34
§7. Change in the lives and aims of the later Gurus.
v3.c48.s2.35
Before the reign of Aurangzib the Sikhs were never persecuted on religious grounds, and their collision with the Mughal Government, which began in Jahangir's time, was due entirely to secular causes, and the change in the character of the gurus was solely responsible for it.*
v3.c48.s2.36
∗ "The entire reversal of the project [of Nanak to reconcile Hinduism with Muhammadanism] and the production of the deadliest of feuds between Muhammadans and Sikhs......was as much due to political causes as to a steady departure from the teachings of the Founder of Sikhism." (Pincott, in Hughes, 591.)
v3.c48.s2.37
Nanak had no guru save God, and his two immediate successors were chosen for superior character only. But after the third guru the headship of the Church became hereditary. The guru was credited with superhuman powers; he was invested with regal pomp, and man-worship began to infect the Sikhs. When boys of nine and even five years (like Govind Rai and Har Krishan respectively) were accepted as spiritual leaders, it was clear that the guru had ceased to be regarded as a human teacher and was held to be born with supernatural powers like an incarnation of God, whose acts could not be judged by the standard of human reason.*
v3.c48.s2.38
Under Arjun, the 5th guru (1581-1606), the number of Sikh converts greatly increased, and with them the guru's income. As a contemporary remarked, "The Emperor [Akbar] and kings bow before him. Wealth ever cometh to him." (Mac. iii. 28.) "The royal state and retinue" of this guru were so great that even a Chancellor (diwan) of the empire considered the guru's son a desirable match for his daughter, but the guru scornfully declined the alliance. With the business instincts of a Khatri (petty trader), guru Arjun organized a permanent source of income. A band of agents called *masands* were stationed in every city from Kabul to Dacca where there was a Sikh, to collect the tithes and offerings of the faithful; and this spiritual tribute, so far as it escaped peculation by the agents, reached the central treasury at Amritsar. The guru was treated as a temporal king and girt round by a body of courtiers and ministers called *masands*, which is the Hindi corruption of the title *masnad-i-ala* borne by nobles under the Pathan Sultans of Delhi. Like the Muslim kings, too, the gurus used to take several wives.* They also began to be called *Padishahs* or Emperors.
v3.c48.s2.39
∗ So, too Baba Atal, the son of Har Govind, though only 8 years old, conveyed "a profound meaning in whatever he said even jestingly," (Mac., iv. 130) and was believed to be "a treasury of miraculous power." (131.)
v3.c48.s2.40
The effects of this conversion of a spiritual guide into an earthly ruler began to show themselves clearly after the death of Arjun. That guru was a man of peace and humility, and devoted himself to consolidating the Church. He completed the two sacred tanks at Amritsar, built the first temple for enshrining the Holy Book (*Granth*) on the site of the present Golden Temple, drew up a scheme of daily religious services for the Sikhs, and gave the final shape to their scriptures by compiling a volume of hymns selected from those composed by his four predecessors as well as those current among "the followers of the principal Indian saints, Hindu and Muhammadan, since the days of Jaidev." (Mac. iii. 60.)
v3.c48.s2.41
∗ Har Rai, 7th guru, when a mere boy of nine, was "wedded collectively" to all the daughters of a follower named Daya Ram. (Mac. iii. 225.)
Linked texts (1)
- Mahābhārata — Vyāsa, Sanskrit