Fall of the Mughal Empire v3.c33.s1: § 2. Causes of the decline of the Jāt Power after Jawāhir Singh's death
Fall of the Mughal Empire v3.c33.s1
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§ 2. Causes of the decline of the Jāt Power after Jawāhir Singh's death
v3.c33.s1.1
When Jawāhir Singh's tempestuous career ended in an appropriately violent death (June 1768), his throne passed to his younger brother Ratan Singh. No enemy was then in sight; the spirited Rajah of Jaipur had died a few months before Jawāhir; the Marathas were too deeply involved in their own country to send any expedition to Hindustan, and even their local agents in Bundelkhand and North Malwa were hard put to it to hold their own; Delhi was a lordless city, the Emperor being a powerless pensioner of the English at Allahabad; Najib-ud-daulah was now a broken down invalid who had retired from active life to wait for his latter end in resignation. While the Jāt Rajah was thus at peace with his neighbours, the rebels and refractory vassals within his territory were promptly crushed by his European generals, Sombre and Madec. The treasury was fairly full; even the ceaseless warfare of Jawāhir Singh's reign and his buying of Maratha and Sikh aid for avenging his father's blood at any cost, had not turned him insolvent, so vast had been the accumulations in the treasury of Bharatpur during the long and prudent reigns of Badan Singh and Suraj Mal.
v3.c33.s1.2
The Jāt State, therefore, might well have looked forward to a long period of peaceful recuperation and progress. But a nation's greatest enemy is within, not without. Jawāhir Singh had established his royal autocracy by crushing out the old Jāt nobility whom even Badan Singh had spared and Suraj Mal had cherished and turned into his best lieutenants. But the young dictator who followed them on the throne, had in less than five years chopped off all the tall poppies in the land, and henceforth the life of the State depended solely on the wisdom and strength of one man. A simple warrior-tribe like the Jāts could flourish only under a succession of warrior kings, now that no martial baronage was left to supply the king's place at the head of the national levy and command the confidence of all the tribal brethren.
v3.c33.s1.3
The Jāts, mostly ignorant peasantry, had not been able to adopt the European discipline and tactics which had now come to sway Indian warfare. This military weakness of their State was for a time concealed by their employment of two very able European mercenary captains, Walter Reinhard (popularly called Sombre or Samru) and René Madec. Of these Sombre cared only for money and was ever ready to desert to the highest bidder, while Madec was lured away by his patriotic instinct, at the call of M. Chevalier the French Chief of Chandernagar, to transfer his services to the Emperor's Court at Delhi (Oct. 1772) and there serve as a French agent for building up coalitions against the British Power in Hindustan.
v3.c33.s1.4
Brain and character alike were wanting among the successors of Jawāhir Singh, and, in addition, the lack of a strong man at the head of the State let loose all the selfishness and factious spirit among the other members of the royal family, which completed the national downfall in a few years.