Fall of the Mughal Empire v1.c13.s4.1

v1.c13.s4.1

Such a State could have been saved only by a wazir of Bismarckian capacity and dictatorial power. But Safdar Jang had neither. Indeed, his position was one of unusual difficulty. He was a foreign-born adventurer whose uncle had been the first of the family to enter the service of Delhi and he could not establish aristocratic connections and local influence in the course of one generation. Safdar Jang was considered an interloper by the old nobility whose pedigree went back to the reign of Aurangzib or even earlier. Public offices had now come to be regarded as the heritable property of their holders' families, apart from any consideration of ability or training or selection by the master,—the surest sign of political decadence. The late wazir Qamruddin's son, Intizām-ud-daulah, regarded Safdar Jang as having robbed him of his father's legacy, the imperial chancellorship. Intizām's sister had been married to Ghāzi-uddin, the eldest son of the Nizam Asaf Jah, besides which tie the great-grandfathers of these two nobles had been full brothers. They therefore formed a closely knit family interest of the greatest prestige and power in the State. The Nizam's son had, in addition, a grievance of his own. His father had held the office of Mir Bakhshi (from 1739 to his death in 1748) and he looked upon it as his birthright. The appointment of an outsider, Salābat Khan (a friend of Safdar Jang), to that post after the Nizām's death was resented as an act of dispossession!