Fall of the Mughal Empire v3.c34.s4: § 4. Character of Mirza Najaf Khan
Fall of the Mughal Empire v3.c34.s4
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§ 4. Character of Mirza Najaf Khan
v3.c34.s4.1
When we contemplate the career of Najaf Khan we do not know what to admire most,—his military capacity, his political insight, or his humanity. In none of these points he had an equal among the peerage of Delhi or the vassal princes of the Empire in his own day. Najibud-daulah may have surpassed him in military genius and fought greater battles against mightier antagonists, but the circumstances of his time were different, and he merely carried on the traditional Afghan system of war with supreme thoroughness. Najaf Khan, on the other hand, had received a military education denied to the great Ruhela; he had faced British troops in the field and later fought side by side with them; he knew and appreciated the new warfare which the Europeans had brought into India, and he quickly adapted himself to the change and successfully incorporated into his army alien elements and diverse instruments. He concentrated on fire arms, and assembled ten thousand sepoy musketeers trained in the European system and a heavy park of improved artillery; he enlisted European partisan leaders like Rene Madec, Walter Reinhard and the Comte de Modave, and added to these two arms the best cavalry then available in India, namely the Mughal horse. But he was never, like Daulat Rao Sindhia, the helpless slave of his foreign mercenaries. The result of this successful grafting of the new on the old was that the Marathas Ruhelas and Jats, till then considered invincible, were hopelessly out-classed in their wars with Najaf Khan and the lieutenants who carried on his legacy, till De Boigne confronted them with a still more modernised force before which nothing Indian could stand and which met its doom only from the white troops of another race.
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As a politician Najaf Khan stands even higher. His self-control and calmness in the midst of harassing disappointments and hostile plots won the admiration of a cultured French observer, the Comte de Modave, who wrote from his camp, "I do not know how to describe the composure of mind and tranquillity of Najaf Khan in the midst of these Court intrigues directed against him. He was informed about their smallest details, and amused himself by discussing them with his friends. He used to say that these petty contrivances were the resource of the weak."* In the correctness of his vision into the future he had no rival among his peers.
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∗ Modave, Journal du Voyage..., ms. p. 289 (tr. by me in Bengal Past & Present, 1936.)
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His patience was inexhaustible because he knew his own strength. From the same source also sprang his marvellous moderation, whether we consider the long years during which he persisted in rejecting his lieutenants' demand for marching to Delhi and forcibly removing the mischievous Abdul Ahad Khan from the Emperor's counsels, or study his treatment of his defeated foes. In the hour of victory he never attempted to crush them outright, but followed a policy of compromise and liberal concession which turned his late enemies into grateful and loyal allies, as the great Akbar had so often done. In the end, his successful campaigns left no dormant danger behind them. To the innocent peasantry and traders and the non-combatants of captured cities he extended a humanity of treatment and a generous protection of their property and family honour that were unknown in Asiatic warfare in that age. When we study his character we can understand why his death called forth universal and spontaneous mourning from the people, regardless of their rank or creed.