Fall of the Mughal Empire v1.c14.s2: § 3. Safdar Jang seizes the Bangash possessions
Fall of the Mughal Empire v1.c14.s2
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§ 3. Safdar Jang seizes the Bangash possessions
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Imām Khan, the eleventh son of Muhammad Khan Bangash, was raised to the lordship of Farrukhabad by his mother Bībi Sāhiba, but he had little ability or power. The tough old lady also planned to enlist Marātha support by offering a subsidy of 20 lakhs of Rupees to their sardārs in Northern India. (*Bayan*, 251.) What followed Qāim Khan’s death throws a lurid light on the morality of the Delhi Government in that age and explains its downfall as an act of divine justice. The wazir, instead of reasserting his master’s authority and avenging the fall of his agent, seized this opportunity of enriching himself at the expense of his helpless dupe. He revived the obsolete Mughal practice of escheating the property of dead nobles, and induced the Emperor to order the attachment of Qāim Khan’s lands and property, as there was none left to defend them. Taking the Emperor with him, Safdar Jang marched out of Delhi (29th November 1749) only 17 days after Qāim’s death. In a few marches Koil (Aligarh) was reached, where he left the Emperor, and then pushed on with his own army to Dariyāganj (in the Eta district), 45 miles n.w. of Farrukhabad. By his order, his deputy in Oudh, Rajah Naval Rāi, advanced and occupied Khudaganj, 16 miles s.e. of Farrukhabad.
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∗ *Imād*, 45, *Muz.* 11, *Bayān* 251-255, *Siyar* iii. 29, *G-i-R.* 28-31, *Farrukhabad Gaz.* 158-171; *Budaun Gaz.* 235; *TAh.* 22a.
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Qāim’s mother opened negotiations with the wazir for saving the Bangash heritage for a price, and herself came to Safdar Jang’s camp on 24th December. After long discussions, it was finally agreed that on payment of 60 lakhs of Rupees, as escheat to the imperial exchequer on account of Qāim Khan’s property, all that chieftain’s territory would be confirmed to Imām Khan, who would be recognised as the new Nawāb. Three-fourths of this succession-fee was paid in cash and kind, and for the balance the Dowager Begam threw the responsibility on Sadullah Khan Ruhela who had seized Qāim’s elephants and camp property at Daunri and from whom the wazir must collect the amount as the price of these spoils.
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Then Safdar Jang threw off the mask. He caused Bibi Sāhiba (Qāim’s mother) to be kept in surveillance in his camp, while Naval Rāi advanced and occupied Farrukhabad itself. Bibi Sāhiba was left to enjoy the revenue of Farrukhabad city and twelve villages,—a gift to the family from the Emperor Farrukhsiyar,—but the rest of Muhammad Khan Bangash’s extensive domains was annexed to the wazir’s territory and placed in charge of Naval Rāi, who made Qanauj his headquarters. Five of Qāim Khan’s brothers were seized and sent to the wazir’s fort of Allahabad as prisoners. His work done, Safdar Jang returned to Delhi (on 25th May 1750), bringing away under arrest five of the principal slaves and men of business of Qāim Khan.
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§ 4. Afghan popular rising against Safdar Jang; battle of Khudaganj.
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All Farrukhabad now lay prostrate at the wazir’s feet. But his agents abused their power, and by their greed and insolence galled the spirit of the proud and martial Afghān race, so that in six months Safdar Jang’s rule was swept off the country. Qāim’s mother was kept in detention at Qanauj for realising the balance of the promised money. She escaped through the devotion of a hereditary clerk (munshi) of her husband’s house, named Sāhib Rāi. This man gained a place in Naval Rāi’s society and got his signature, when deep in his cups, on an order for her release. The time was midnight, but the order was immediately presented and the lady was conveyed by fast travel to her own people at Mau Rashidabad. Here she set herself to rouse the Afghāns by sending her veil to the headmen of different villages and appealing to their sense of honour and love of liberty.
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To the mass of the people, the wazir's rule was already intolerable, and the more so because its agents were the despised Hindus. A police underling of the new governor had an altercation with a woman vendor in the market of Mau, and after the usual exchange of abuse slapped her with his shoes. The aggrieved woman was the widow of an Afridi soldier; she appealed to Ahmad Bangash (a younger brother of Qāim), telling him that it would have been better if he had been born a woman as he was not fit to wear a man's turban when he could not protect his father's subjects from dishonour.*
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The population of Farrukhabad was ready for an explosion; it only required a leader to supply the spark. Bibi Sāhiba wisely formed an alliance with her step-son Ahmad and he was accepted as the leader of the Afghān rising, though without money, arms or men. Rustam Khan Afridi raised Rs. 5,000 by selling his household goods and lent the money to Ahmad. With part of this sum four hundred men were secretly enlisted and armed. Then they committed a night robbery on a rich Hindu banker in a village 32 miles from Mau, killed him and his servants, and carried off his wealth, which enabled more Afghāns to be enlisted and fed. Eight days after this feat, Ahmad at the head of 6,000 men recovered Farrukhabad and set off southwards to expel Safdar Jang's men from the rest of his father's jāgir.
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∗ It is added by the gossipy Sayyid Ghulām Ali that Ahmad Khan after hearing this reproach, in deep mortification at his own powerlessness, spent the next two nights in grieving and the days in fasting, and then girt up his loins for redressing the wrongs of his people. (Imād, 46.) Fall of Naval Rai.—TAh. 23b, 25b-26a, Siyar iii, 30-31, D.C. for dates. G-i-R. 35-37; Chahār Gul. 402b-403a (meagre), Imād. 45-48, Bayān 256-259. Muz. 44-45; Far. Gaz. 160-163; S.P.D. xxi. 32 (brief.)
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Naval Rai promptly advanced from Qanauj to meet the oncoming enemy and crush the rising before it could grow to full strength. He halted at Khudāganj, just north of the Kālī Nadi and 16 miles south of Farrukhabad, the Afghān camp being some two miles north of him. Naval Rai, a Sāksena Kāyastha, had risen by his ability in civil administration and management of men from a humble rank to the deputy governorship of Oudh and a position at the right hand of the wazir. He was fitted by his character and experience to be a revenue collector rather than the military governor of a district. Though not wanting in personal courage, he had no genius for soldiering nor training in the handling of armies. At Khudā- ganj he received a letter from Safdar Jang telling him to avoid an engagement pending the arrival of reinforcements then on the way from Delhi. So he took due precautions, posted guards round his camp and his artillery in front, facing the enemy position, and warned his men to remain within their lines and not to fight unless attacked.
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The news of reinforcements having started from Delhi for the Oudh army reached Ahmad Bangash through a friendly Rajah, and he lost not a day in striking his blow before the enemy's strength was doubled. In the dark and rainy night of 1st August, nine thousand Afghān infantry and 2,000 horse stole out of their camp, made a wide detour and attacked Naval Rai's camp from the rear* which was unprotected by artillery. The Sayyids of Barha, in charge of the defence here, at first repulsed the attack. "But by threatening suicide Ahmad Khan succeeded in rallying the fugitives, and led them to a second and more successful attempt. They made their way into the camp and threw it into the utmost confusion. The night was dark and rainy; and the artillerymen, not knowing where the enemy was, fired off their pieces without doing any execution. Meanwhile Naval Rai, who was deep in his devotions, was forced with some difficulty to mount his elephant. The fighting went on in the confusion and darkness till the day broke. Naval Rai was shot dead soon after sunrise, and his elephant driver made off with his body across the river to Qanauj. The retreat then became general, and many of the fugitives were drowned in attempting to follow their chief's corpse. Qanauj was evacuated by the wazir's troops, and occupied by Ahmad Khan. An immense booty fell into the hands of the Pathāns." (Far. Gaz. 163.) The result was that "the beggarly and starving Afghans became very rich and owners of property and treasure." (Bayān, 259.) They crossed the Ganges and looted or occupied many places on its eastern bank or the Oudh side (Imād, 48.)
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∗ The exact spot is said to have been the boundary of Kaitha and Gangui villages, about a mile west of Khudāganj (Far. Gaz. 162 n.)
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§ 5. Safdar Jang's advance against the Afghans.
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While the Bangash leader showed such rapidity of decision and promptitude of execution, the wazir had been taking things in a lordly and leisurely fashion. He underrated the gravity of the danger and despised his enemies, particularly in the absence of any leader of repute on their side. As early as 6th July he had taken public leave of the Emperor at Delhi to go to Farrukhabad, but had thereafter halted for three weeks in a garden outside the capital. The first division of his army, under Ismail Beg Khan and Rajah Devidat, began its march on 22nd July, while the wazir himself started on the 25th and moved slowly, doing two days' march in three or four days.
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Arrived at Mārhara (in the Eta district, 13 miles north-west of Eta city), at the beginning of August, he heard of the disaster at Khudāganj. So a halt of one month was made here in order to call up more troops. The state of indiscipline in his army and the cleavage between the population and the soldiery who were to defend them are painfully illustrated by the sack of this loyal village in the wazir's presence. "A camel-driver in the service of a Mughal captain (i.e., a Persian-Turk soldier of Safdar Jang) cut down a tree growing before the gate of Ināyet Khan, an officer of the wazir and an inhabitant of this place, who chastised him severely for it. That captain sent a party of men to seize Ināyet Khan. The other Mughalia troops, imagining that the wazir had ordered a general looting of the village, armed themselves, plundered the village in the evening, and levelled it to the dust. Ināyet and his young son were killed besides 58 other people of the village. The women of many Sayyids, Shaikhs, and Kambuh and other respectable men, as well as of the common people, were dragged away into slavery.” (Siyar, iii. 32; Khazin-Am. 81.)
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∗ D.C. records an intestine fight between Ismail Khan (the slave and most trusted counsellor of Safdar Jang) and Muhammad Ali Khan (a cavalry leader and high general of the wazir) in his camp on 18th December 1749. The English factors of Patna wrote in Dec. 1742, "The subah(dār) of Oudh is advancing this way with 40,000 horse . . . His people commit outrages, and are under no command."
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At last his musters fully made up, Safdar Jang resumed his march on 10th September, amidst the hardly suppressed curses of the people of Mārhara, and sighted the enemy, three days afterwards, near Rām Chatāuni, some 22 miles east of Mārhara and 18 miles north of Eta.* With him was a vast host of 70 to 80 thousand men, of the most miscellaneous description, mostly raw levies and under no sort of discipline. Nor were the different divisions of this army closely knit together by the watchful activity of one supreme master and the ready co-operation of the sub-commanders. Safdar Jang had not the royal gift of choosing able agents nor of knowing sound advice when given to him. He merely tried to bind his soldiery to himself by lavish gifts of money at his caprice and winking at their plunder of the population, and not by sharing their toils like a comrade and frequently exercising them under his eyes, as Aurangzib used to do. Arrived now at the height of power, his overweening pride and excessive devotion to pleasure repelled honest and capable counsellors, and he became a mere puppet moved by one or two favourites, especially Ismail Khan, a former slave and now in effect his prime minister and chief manager of affairs. A few high-born nobles followed him loyally out of personal affection or because he was the supreme man of their faith (Shia-ism) in the imperial Government; but they had no effective forces under them and were not allowed to organise his military movements or regulate his administration. This disorderly rabble,—without any concerted plan of action, without any real head to control the tide of battle as it changed from hour to hour,—now flung itself on the smaller but more compact Afghan tribal levy, rightly self-confident from an unbroken series of victories and seasoned in manoeuvre and ambuscade in that terrain.
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∗ Seven miles east of Sahāwar and five miles west of Patiāli [Irvine in Far. Gaz. 163.] Patiāli, which has given its name to the battle in some old histories, is 22m. n.e. of Eta, 27m. due east of Marehra, and 42m. n.w. of Farrukhabad. [Ind. At. 68.] I cannot find Ram Chatauni here, but two villages Rampurah and Chaundahi.
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§ 6. Safdar Jang defeated at Ram Chatauni.
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At three hours after sunrise, on the 13th of September 1750, the wazir's army advanced upon the enemy in the usual formation. The four miles of ground separating the two camps were covered in about two hours and then followed an exchange of gunfire, in which Safdar Jang had a marked superiority of weight of metal. Next his right wing under Suraj Mal Jat and his left under Ismail Beg Khan attacked the Afghāns opposite them with vigour. The fighting here was long and obstinate; the Afghāns resisted to the utmost, and it was only after six thousand of them had fallen, including their commander Rustam Khan Afridi, that the two divisions gave way and were pursued for miles by Ismail Beg and Suraj Mal. Safdar Jang, ignorant or scornful of Afghān war tactics, very unwisely sent up cannon, swivels and rockets with more troops from his side to strengthen the pursuers, as if the entire enemy army had been defeated and it only remained to follow up the victory to the utmost.* The result was that his army became broken up into two parts, separated beyond call, while he the commander-in-chief stood in the field with only a small escort and no artillery around him, and half the Afghan army still unbroken and facing him. The battle had to be fought and won yet.
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∗ Safdar Jang's defeat.—Siyar iii. 31-34, TAh. 26 b, Bayān 260-262, Muz. 46-49, Chahār Gul, 403b-406b, Imād. 49; Shākir 64, Farrukhabad Gaz. 163-164, G-i-R. 37-39, Sujān Charitra, iv Jang. (pp. 59-99). S.P.D. ii. 20 and 23 (very useful), xxi. 36. Khazinah-i-Amira, 81-83.
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Ahmad Bangash, on the other hand, had coolly kept himself on the defensive, and was directing his followers' movements from the centre. When he learnt of the rout of his two wings and the fall of Rustam Khan, he concealed the fatal news and shouted out to his own division that Rustam had gained the victory and that the Bangashes must now exert themselves if they were not to be outdone by the Afridis. Thus heartened, his men renewed the battle.
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The sun had now begun to decline from the meridian. It is the habit of India-born soldiers to slacken their efforts about one o'clock in the afternoon and seek refreshments and drink, especially if they have been under arms since the morning. A lassitude now fell on the wazir's army. The opportunity was not lost by the Afghans. They at once renewed the attack. Ahmad himself at the head of 6,000 fresh troops, mostly on foot, advancing under cover of a field of vetch, suddenly fell upon the wazir's vanguard. In the fight that followed Nasiruddin Haidar (son of the wazir's maternal uncle and one of his leading generals) fell. Kāmgār Khan Baluch, another high officer, who commanded a division close to the vanguard, fled away, probably in collusion with the Bangashes.
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Then the Persian contingent, which was the backbone of the wazir’s army, lost heart, “their feet shook and they thought defeat certain.” (*Siyar*, iii. 33.) The van fell into utter confusion and broke up into a disorderly mass of soldiers elephants and driverless carts, which obstructed the ground between the centre and the vanguard. The wazir ordered up reinforcements from the rear, but only three hundred horse, under Muhammad Ali Khan and Sayyid Nurul Hasan Bilgrami could force their way through the crowd to the fighting line. This handful of men could not restore confidence to their vanguard. A high wind with dust storm then arose and aggravated the confusion. (*G-i-R*, 38.) Numbers of the wazir’s men began to leave the field.
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The Oudh vanguard having been thus paralysed or dispersed, Ahmad Khan fought his way steadily towards the wazir in the centre. Then followed a period of confused struggle with the initiative entirely in the hands of the Afghāns and heavy odds against the wazir’s remaining troops, who had now entirely denuded themselves of artillery. A compact body of Afghans, consisting of some 3000 infantry in front with a few horsemen behind them, advanced in a wedge-shaped formation ("conical", *Siyar*, iii. 33) from the wazir's left side. When checked by Muhammad Ali Khan and his musketeers, they wheeled a little and turned towards the centre. Here the wazir was sitting on his elephant, with only a few staunch followers around him, while the field was covered with scattered groups of his fugitive soldiery. The Afghans fired a volley at the elephant-riders and then rushed upon the wazir's force sword in hand. Safdar Jang's *mahut* was shot dead, and he himself received a bullet in the neck and sank down into his brass-plated *hāuda* in a swoon. The driverless elephant wandered unrecognised by the Afghāns and thus the wazir's life was saved.
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The Afghān victory was complete; the Oudh army was dissolved in utter rout. The victors gave chase for a short distance, and at this time Najmūddaulah Ishaq Khan II, the imperial *diwān* of Crownlands and an intimate kinsman and friend of the wazir, was killed fighting to the last. When surrounded by the enemy he had diverted their attention from the wazir by shouting out that he was Safdar Jang! The wazir's elephant was mounted by Jagat Nārāyan (the younger brother of Rajah Lachhmi Nārāyan) and led out of the field into safety.
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With less than two hundred troopers, the wazir and Muhammad Ali Khan, both wounded, fell back on Marhara, 22 miles west of the field of battle, and next morning set out for Delhi with some appearance of order and formation among his followers. Much of his property was plundered by his own Mughal troops and the rest by the villagers around. When the victorious right wing of the Oudh army returned from their distant chase of Rustam Khan Afridi's division, they found the battle lost beyond hope of retrieval and their master nowhere to be seen. So, they retreated westwards.
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To the Afghāns the victory had come just in time to give them breathing space at the end of a day of long uncertainty and strenuous exertion. One division of their force had been crushed with the loss of some 6000 men and the second-in-command of their entire army. The struggle had been so confused that the fulness of the wazir's defeat became manifest only after the sun had set, so that the victors could not at once reap the full fruits of their success. There was, therefore, no pursuit, but the wazir's standing camp was captured by the Afghāns after much of its contents had been looted by his own soldiers and the villagers in the course of that might.
Linked texts (3)
- Bayān-i wāqiʿ — Khwāja ʿAbd al-Karīm Kashmīrī 1780, Persian
- Selections from the Peshwa Daftar — Marathi
- Sujāncaritr — Sūdan 1725, Hindi