History of Aurangzib, Based on Original Sources v5.c84.s5: Kashmir
History of Aurangzib, Based on Original Sources v5.c84.s5
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Kashmir
§ 25. How the Mughal Emperors regarded Kashmir.
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The province of Kashmir had been conquered by Akbar in 1586. Its delightful climate and romantic scenery attracted him and his successors for three generations. Akbar, Jahangir and Shah Jahan paid repeated visits to this country and Aurangzib one (in 1663) after his recovery from a severe fever at Delhi. To the ladies of the palace, a journey to the Happy Valley on richly caparisoned elephants, with all the comforts of royalty, and a succession of pleasure-parties in gardens and pavilions near charming fountains,—was the finest of all recreations. But such journeys did not always end in pleasure. Sometimes an elephant would take fright and stampede down the narrow and rough path, killing the attendants and porters and causing indescribable confusion and alarm on the way. Sometimes unexpected rough weather and the breakdown of transport arrangements would force the queens to walk on foot over the snows to some shelter. The descendants of Timur and Babur had so far degenerated in the Indian plains that at last the hardships of mountain travel and the cold of Kashmir excited only their fear and repulsion. After his first and only visit early in his reign, Aurangzib vowed never to go to Kashmir again; and none of his successors visited it even once.*
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The Emperors treated Kashmir merely as a pleasure resort. They did not try to improve the face of the land or the condition of the people. The cultivation of saffron was known there before the Mughal conquest, and it became a source of profit to them afterwards. Of the shawl industry the wool (and sometimes the yarn) were supplied by this province; but shawl-weaving was successfully transplanted from it to other centres, such as Lahor.
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∗ My account of Kashmir in Aurangzib's reign is almost entirely based on *Tarikh-i-Azami*, I. O. L. MS. 1429.
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§ 26. *Ignorance and poverty of the Kashmir people.*
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The common people of Kashmir were sunk in the deepest ignorance and poverty ; many of the villagers lived in primitive simplicity and went about almost naked for want of clothing ; they merely wrapped a blanket round their bodies for warmth. Long distances and lack of roads made it impossible to import grain from outside and every valley had to be self-contained in the matter of its food supply ; and when a natural calamity like flood or heavy snowfall* cut off communications, the inhabitants perished helplessly of famine in thousands. They had no savings, no economic staying power. The province was off the routes of the civilised world ; difficulty of transport raised the cost of marketting its produce. Hence, even in the case of its most valuable products, such as saffron and fine woollen yarn, their high sale price was mostly swallowed up by the middleman and the grasping landlord, while the feeble peasant or shepherd, though their actual producer, gained only a remuneration as poor as that of the cultivator of the commonest crops of the plains, and much less than that of the grower of opium or indigo. The province had no local industry. Even shawl-weaving was mostly a Government monopoly, and the people earned from it only the wages of daily labour at the State factories. The fine Kashmiri paper was consumed only by the Court, and made to order.
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∗ E.g., in the reign of the Hindu Rajah Tunjin, "When the fields were covered with the autumnal rice crop,......unexpectedly there fell heavy snow. Under this snow, which resembled the grim laughter of Death......there sank the rice crops, together with the people's hope of existence. Then came a terrible famine... While the routes over the mountains were closed by impassable snow-drifts, the people were helpless like birds when the opening in their nest is closed." [Raj-tarangini, ii. 18—38.]
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So backward were the people in civilisation that even the upper classes of Kashmiris were deemed unfit to be employed in the imperial service as mansabdars, till near the end of Aurangzib's reign. We learn that it was only in 1699 that the Emperor was first induced by the then subahdar to appoint people of Kashmir as mansabdars in any appreciable number.
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True, there were some Muslim scholars and saints in Kashmir who enjoyed the patronage of the Mughal nobility,—but this was not the class from which civil servants and army captains were recruited. No Kashmir Hindu gained any office under the Mughal empire, and as for the common Muslims of the province, if they were villagers, they were despised as ignorant savages, and if townsmen as lying flatterers and cowardly cheats. In this universal closing of honourable and responsible careers to talent, the intellectual cleverness of certain classes of the natives developed into glibness of tongue, low cunning, and skill in treacherous intrigue,—so that, in Mughal India a Kashmiri came to be a by-word for a smooth-spoken rogue, as the Græculus was in the early days of the Roman empire. Ignorance, poverty, and the feudal organisation of society,—which kept the masses in a servile condition, also accounted for their Mongoloid disregard for the honour of their wives and daughters.
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§ 27. Popular superstition and fights between sects.
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The ignorance of the people was only equalled by their superstitiousness. A huge parasite class of Muslim saints and their disciples flourished in this charming climate and exploited the credulity of the people. Renowned Shaikhs and Pirs from outside also paid periodical visits to the Happy Valley and reaped a golden harvest by initiating the people into the circle of their disciples. Many of the local holy men (bābās) were illiterate; but it did not matter at all. They had the power of falling into mystic trances and working miracles, and could compose Sufi verses extempore, which brought them immense popularity.
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In the cities of Kashmir, the sectarian bitterness between the Shias and the Sunnis often led to fierce rioting and even civil war, and the strong arm of the governor (when he did not happen to be the partisan of either sect) could only maintain an armed truce among the local population. The Shias, who were a minority, naturally congregated in wards of their own in the cities. But the two sects could not help coming together in the course of business travel or litigation. Any conflict of material interests between them was quickly turned into a theological quarrel. The disputants abused each other's religion; the Shia was accused of having reviled the first three Khalifs, the Sunni qazi condemned him to death for blasphemy, and the orthodox Aurangzib confirmed the sentence on the heretic.
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Quarrels between individual members of the rival sects quickly passed into mass conflicts; the Sunni mob of the capital, roused by the qazi's harangues, plundered and burnt the Shia quarter, in defiance of the governor's authority, and massacred every Shia whom they could catch. Sometimes there were pitched battles in the streets between the armed rioters and the governor's troops. Even the viceroy's residence was not safe from the Sunni mob and soldiery, if he was suspected of harbouring any Shia whom they wanted to lynch.
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§ 28. Miserable life of the people of Srinagar.
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The villagers were half-naked boors, living in abject poverty, ignorance, and filth. The townsmen, too, had not a much happier lot, though for a different reason. The sudden and dangerous floods to which the lake is subject, forced them to build their homes in the cramped high ground above the edge of the river of the lake. The frequency of earthquakes made it necessary for their houses to be light wooden structures. The intense cold of the country made fires necessary in every household day and night for several months. The natural consequence of this chain of causes was that fires were frequent, and when they broke out they spread from one end of the city to another, making a clean sweep of these crowded human warrens of timber and grass. To its inhabitants Kashmir was often a very unhappy valley, and their utterly degraded condition would be the standing disgrace of the Mughal administration if we were to judge it by modern standards of the duties of the State.
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§ 29. Aurangzib's viceroys and their doings in Kashmir.
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In Aurangzib's reign, there were twelve subahdars in Kashmir during 48 years. None of them governed the country for more than eight years at a time. Ibrahim Khan, a son of the famous Ali Mardan Khan of Shah Jahan's Court, served there thrice, for a total of 14 years, while some others governed it for a year or two only.
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The life of the province varied as the characters of its successive governors varied. Some of them, like Itimad Khan and Fazil Khan administered justice with great diligence and honoured learning. Others, like Saif Khan, introduced innovations in the form of new exactions such as (a) assessing the revenue by the actual measurement of the land, in the place of the old practice of making a rough eye-estimate of it based on guess, (b) taxing the people to make good any loss or damage to things ordered from the province by the Emperors (*qasur-i-farmaish*), and (c) change in or deduction from men's salaries due.
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On 20th January 1696, the Emperor received complaints from the peasants of Kashmir to the effect that the high grandees who had been granted jagirs in that province had farmed their revenue collection to traders, who were making oppressive exactions and had thus ruined the cultivators. Aurangzib immediately ordered all the jagirs in Kashmir to be resumed and made Crownland. At this the traders pleaded that they had advanced heavy loans to the nobles and they would not get back a penny out of them if the jagirs were resumed. The Emperor angrily replied, "Ask your money back from those to whom you have lent it." [*Akhbarat.*]
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Under Mubariz Khan (1668—1669) who was a good-natured but indolent man, his Uzbak retainers shamelessly oppressed and ill-treated the people, wounding and killing all who resisted them.
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Muzaffar Khan and his brother Abu Nasar Khan (1690—1697), both sons of Shaista Khan, enriched themselves by levying illegal cesses, in addition to realising their legitimate fees with the utmost rigour. A story is told that when a copy of the Quran was included among the assets of a certain disputed property, they, after decreeing the shares of the estate to the different heirs, tore up the sacred volume and took one-fourth of its leaves as the magistrate's lawful fee!
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Fazil Khan (1697—1701), in addition to being a patron of scholars and holy men, built many mosques schools pavilions sarais embankments and gardens &c. He was the first to introduce the Kashmiris to the Emperor's service, and he also remitted many cesses of former times.*
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Saif Khan during his second viceroyalty (1669—1671) promoted agriculture by planting colonies and building a city. Nearly all the governors who were long enough in the province built mosques and sarais and laid out new gardens.
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The long roll of natural calamities during the half century of Aurangzib's reign includes two earthquakes (June 1669 and 1681), two conflagrations of the capital (1672 and 1678), one flood (1681), and a famine (1688.) The most notable events of this period in the history of Kashmir were Aurangzib's royal progress through it (1663),† of which Bernier has left a graphic account, and the conquest of Greater Tibet (1666), whose ruler, styled Daldal Namjal in the Persian chronicles, bowed to Islam, caused coins to be struck and the *khutba* read in the Emperor's name, and built a mosque in his capital. In 1683 when the Black Qalmaqs invaded his country he begged the aid of his suzerain. An imperial force sent from Kabul under Fidai Khan (the son of the Kashmir subahdar Ibrahim Khan) drove the Qalmaqs out, reinstated the Lama, and returned in triumph with much booty. [Ch. 26 § 6.]*
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∗ They are named as *hasil-i-ghalak* (tax on earthen jars for storing things; or is it a mistake for *nimak* i.e., salt duty) and *damdari* (tax on bird-catchers, musicians &c.)
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† V. A. Smith in his *Oxford History of India*, p. 425 footnote, is severe upon other scholars for their supposed error in placing this visit in 1663 instead of 1665 as stated by Bernier, while he is himself blissfully ignorant of the fact that Bernier was wrong in his date and this mistake was pointed out by his contemporary Manucci in such a standard work as the *Storia do Mogor* (ii. 66; also 72 for other blunders of Bernier.)
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§ 30. Civil war between Shias and Sunnis, 1684.
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In the same year took place what was probably the worst fight between the Shias and the Sunnis. The Hassanabad quarter of Srinagar was a Shia stronghold. A resident of it named Abdus Shakur and his sons had done some injury to a Sunni named Sadiq. Their enmity grew into a long-standing quarrel. In the course of it these Shias publicly did some acts and made some remarks designed to insult the memory of the first three Khalifs (who were usurpers, according to Shia theology.) When Sadiq lodged a complaint of blasphemy against these men in the ecclesiastical court, they took refuge with
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My date is based upon the official history *Alamgirnamah*, which cannot possibly be wrong about the Emperor's movements.
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∗ An expedition was sent against the Rajah of Jamu, which was kept busy there for two years (1686-1688.) About 1705 the Rajah of Rajaur and his son were converted to Islam.
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Ibrahim Khan. The qazi Muhammad Yusuf, in pious frenzy, roused the mob of the city and created a great tumult. As the accused were being harboured in the governor's house, the Sunni mob set fire to the Hassanabad quarter. During the riot, Fidai Khan came out to support the men of Hassanabad, while the mob strengthened by the Kabul officers just returned from Tibet and some local mansabdars, opposed him. Many were slain and wounded on both sides, the mob rioted with terrible fury, and the qazi lost control over them.
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Ibrahim Khan, finding himself worsted in the contest, at last handed Abdus Shakur and other accused Shias over to the qazi, by whom Shakur and his two sons and one son-in-law were put to death under canonical sentence. After this the qazi gave up visiting the subahdar, though it was his official duty, and he did not leave his own house, in spite of the latter begging for forgiveness. The mufti (Muhammad Tahir), however, acted in exactly the opposite manner, and therefore the mob sacked and destroyed his house. The Sunni rioters were masters of the city. Baba Qasim, the preceptor of the Shias, was seized on the road and put to death with disgrace. Fidai Khan rode out in force to punish the mob. The fight took place before the house of Mirza Salim Kashghari, a local leader of the Sunnis, and the latter was slain with many of the mob. But in the meantime, Shaikh Baqā Bābā had assembled another crowd, and set fire to Ibrahim Khan's mansion! That governor then arrested and imprisoned Baqa Baba, the qazi, news-writer, and bakhshi of the province, and the leading men of the capital. This strong action cowed the people into submission.
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Aurangzib, on hearing of these occurrences, removed Ibrahim Khan from the viceroyalty and ordered the Sunni captives to be released. [Azami, 131b—132b.]
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§ 31. The Prophet's relics brought to Kashmir.
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About 1698—99 an event happened which roused the religious fervour of the Muslims to the point of overflowing. This was the bringing into the country of the reputed hair of the Prophet Muhammad which Khwajah Nuruddin had secured in Bijapur, and which was sent after his death to Kashmir along with his corpse. The entire Muslim population poured out into the streets and open spaces, to behold the blessed relic, chanting the praises of God and His Prophet. "Men and women flocked together in perfect amity as if a flood of human beings was sweeping through every lane and bazar, rendering them hard to cross. A great noise filled the air. Scholars, saints, theologians and religious mendicants vied with one another, in passionate earnestness, to get a turn in placing on their shoulders the poles of the litter in which the relic casket was carried," and they considered themselves blessed when with the greatest effort and difficulty they could once touch it. [*Azami*, 140a.]
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§ 32. Example of popular credulity.
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Another incident, illustrating the gross credulity of the people of Kashmir, took place in May 1692, which in that year was the Muslim month of fasting (Ramzan). A stranger of some position (*sardar*) named Mir Husain had come to Kashmir and taken up his residence near the Takht-i-Sulaiman hill, where he set up his hermitage. Gradually the local people began to visit him freely. In the month of Ramzan he prepared a grand illumination in honour of the season. Most of the people of Srinagar turned it into an occasion for excursion and sight-seeing. Many boats went there, forming a vast crowd, and all were free from care. In the third quarter of the day such a violent storm of wind rain thunder and lightning burst upon the place that the whole city was darkened as in the darkest night. It continued so for some time, and then the people, believing that the Sun had set, broke their day's fast. But after 2 or 3 hours the tempest ceased, the Sun reappeared, and all felt themselves befooled and disgraced, for a Muslim can hardly commit a greater sin than to eat anything in the day-time of the month of Ramzan.
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It is characteristic of the intelligence and education of the people of the capital city of Kashmir that they ascribed this abnormal phenomenon to the magic art of that heretic hermit. High and low, the vulgar and the wise, drew up a jury report (*mahazar*) fixing the blame for the temporary obscurity of the Sun,—and the consequent sin of their breaking the Ramzan fast,—on Mir Husain, and sent it to Aurangzib. The historian Azam gravely tells us that that "faith-defending, truth-knowing" Emperor believed in the charge and ordered the magician to be expelled, which was immediately done by his viceroy. At this the historian exclaims in admiration, "Great God! what an act of devotion to goodness! What passion for doing justice! What intense attention to the enforcement of the decrees of Canon Law!" [*Azami*, 139a.]
Linked texts (1)
- Rājataraṅgiṇī — Kalhaṇa, Sanskrit