History of Aurangzib, Based on Original Sources v5.c72.s2: §3. The Maratha recovery, 1690-91.
History of Aurangzib, Based on Original Sources v5.c72.s2
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§3. The Maratha recovery, 1690-91.
v5.c72.s2.1
The years 1688 and 1689 were a period of unbroken triumph to the Emperor. His armies marched east and south to take possession of the forts and provinces of the annexed kingdoms of Bijapur and Golkonda. Thus, Sagar (the Berad capital), Raichur and Adoni (in the east), Sera and Bangalore (in Mysore), Wandiwash and Conjeveram (in the Madras Karnatak), Bankapur and Belgaon (in the extreme south-west), were occupied; and to crown all, Shambhuji was captured and his capital with his entire family seized. As the Maratha chronicle says of 1689, "This year the Mughals took all the forts." In Northern India, too, signal success attended his arms: the Jat rising under Rajaram was put down and that leader was slain (on 4th July, 1688).
v5.c72.s2.2
But at the end of 1689 the new Maratha king Rajaram was known to have reached the fort of Jinji in safety, and the Emperor's forces had henceforth to be directed south-eastwards into the Mysore plateau and the Madras Karnatak if he was to preserve his rightful gains from Bijapur and Golkonda in those quarters and to check Maratha activity there. Thus, the brilliant success of Mughal arms since 1687 received a sharp set-back in 1690. Jinji became a centre of Maratha enterprise in the East Coast, while their ministers left at home organised resistance to the Mughals in the west. The difficulties of Aurangzib were only multiplied by the disappearance of a common head and a central Government among the Marathas, as every Maratha captain with his own retainers fought and raided in a different quarter and on his own account. It now became a people's war, and Aurangzib could not end it, because there was no Maratha Government or State-army for him to attack and destroy. The imperial forces could not be present everywhere in full strength; hence, they suffered reverses here and there. The enemy forts which the Mughals had captured or bought during the first panic following Shambhuji's downfall, now began to be recovered by the Marathas. The tide first turned against Aurangzib in May 1690, when his general Rustam Khan was captured and his whole camp looted by the Marathas.
v5.c72.s2.3
Throughout 1690 and 1691 the Emperor's chief concern still was to take possession of the almost boundless expanse of fertile territory in the south and the east, which had legally fallen to him as the heir-at-law of Adil Shah and Qutb Shah. At this stage, he evidently underrated the Maratha danger, as he hoped that with their capital and royal family in his hands and their new king invested in Jinji by the same general who had captured Sahu and Raigarh, the State of the Marathas had been practically annihilated. He had yet to take a proper measure of the Maratha people.
v5.c72.s2.4
§4. The fighting during 1692 and 1693.
v5.c72.s2.5
In the autumn of 1691 the Mughal position before Jinji became so dangerous that the Emperor had to divert large forces to that quarter. In 1692 nothing was achieved by the imperialists in the western theatre, while in the east coast the year ended with crushing disasters to their arms,—the capture of two high Mughal generals, the abandonment of the siege lines before Jinji, and the arrest of Prince Kam Bakhsh by his colleagues (Dec. 1692—Jan. 1693). So, the first thing to be done in 1693 was to save the situation by pouring reinforcements and supplies into the Eastern Karnatak. In the western theatre, Prince Muizz-ud-din, who had laid siege to Panhala in October 1692, toiled unsuccessfully throughout the next year, and was finally expelled by the Marathas in March 1694. In addition to this, there were the incessant raids of the Maratha partisan leaders,—Santa Ghorparé, Dhana Jadav, Nima Sindhia, Hanumant Rao and others,—diversified by occasional successes of the Mughal pursuing columns which had not the least decisive effect, but merely lightened the Maratha rovers of a part of their booty and some mares and arms, and sometimes cost them the lives of their rear-guard.
v5.c72.s2.6
Meantime, nearer the imperial head-quarters, over the broad and strategically important tract from Bidar to Bijapur and from Raichur to Malkhed, the activities of the hardy aboriginal tribe of Berads led by the genius of their chief Pidia Nayak, had become so serious that a large army under a first-rate general had to be posted at Sagar (72 miles east of Bijapur) from June 1691 to December 1692.
v5.c72.s2.7
Then the Berad chieftain made his submission, but he renewed his hostility three years later, when another large army had to be sent against him (1696).
v5.c72.s2.8
During 1694 the war in Western Deccan continued to be of the same indecisive and straggling character. Only in the Madras Karnatak the reinforced Mughal general made many conquests and levied contribution from Tanjore, but without thereby hastening the capture of the new Maratha capital at Jinji.