Fall of the Mughal Empire v1.c7.s2: § 2. Afghān settlements in the Doab
Fall of the Mughal Empire v1.c7.s2
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§ 2. Afghān settlements in the Doab
v1.c7.s2.1
Descendants of the older Pathān ruling caste of the 15th and 16th centuries were now settled as peaceful landholders or captains of mercenaries in Orissā, Sylhet, Dārbhangā and Allahabad. But fresh bodies of immigrants from their mountain homeland streamed into India in the 17th century and created a large and compact new centre of Afghān population much closer to Delhi than these places.* The newcomers interposed an almost solid block between the vitally important *subahs* of Delhi and Agra on the west and Oudh and Allahabad on the east, and had grown into a serious menace to the imperial Government by the middle of the 18th century. Their Indian home, formerly known as *Katehr*, now acquired the name of *Rohilkhand* from its new dominant race. It is a tract bounded by the Ganges on the west and the Garrā (also called the Deohā) river on the east, with the Rāmgangā running almost midway between the two. But the Afghān immigrants had two considerable settlements even beyond Rohilkhand as thus defined, namely to the south and east of that province, —stretching west of the Ganges to the Kālī Nadī and beyond, and east of the Garrā up to the Sāī river.
v1.c7.s2.2
∗ For Afghan settlements and their early history,—Atkinson's N. W. P. Gazetteer (1st. ed.), Farrukhabad pp. 152-158, Budaun 105-109, Bareilly 656-671, Bijnor 348-350, Shahjahanpur 142-145. The histories written for these Afghan chiefs by their secretaries are all much later than 1750, while the Persian local histories of this region were composed in the 19th century. They contain many errors, some of which can be corrected from the contemporary histories of the Delhi empire used by me. Afghan sources are the basis of the historical narrative in G. Forster's Journey from Bengal to England ("History of the Rohillas", i. 101-130) and the Life of Hafiz Rahmat Khan (tr. by C. Elliott, 1831.) R. S. Whiteway's Ruhela Afghans (in the Calcutta Review, Vol. LXI, 1875, pp. 201-225), though copiously drawn upon in the N. W. P. Gazetteer, is palpably erroneous in many points and has no source independent of the above. The most valuable and scholarly sketch in the Gazetteer is that of W. Irvine in the Farrukhabad volume, but even that requires correction in the light of the fresh material and criticism accumulated since it was written 60 years ago. For the events and traditions before 1739
v1.c7.s2.3
In the first half of the 17th century a number of Afghān captains of the Dāudzāī clan had settled down in what is now called the Shāhjahānpur district, just beyond the north-western corner of the province of Oudh. Their chief town was Shāhjahānpur, colonised by 52 different tribes
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these Afghan sources (whether in Forster, Elliot or the *Gazetteer*) are our only materials. For later events I have relied on other and more authentic sources. Most of the Afghan histories can be consulted in MS. in the Abdus Salam bequest at the Aligarh University.
v1.c7.s2.5
from Afghānistān (1647.) The fort of Shāhābād, 20 miles south of it, was built some years later. A smaller place, Umrpur, about 10 miles north-west of Shāhjahānpur, was founded by a Yusufzāi Pathān. The Afghān settlements in this easternmost tract did not form a compact dominion obeying one great chieftain who might have united and led the colonists on to greater power or welded the area into a self-contained district by his possession of the whole of it. It was a mosaic of colonies standing in isolation from one another. From this cause as well as their geographical position, the Afghāns of this tract did not share the fortunes and policy of their brethren further west, but usually gravitated to the politics of the dynasty of Oudh on their eastern border.