Fall of the Mughal Empire v3.c39.s1: § 2. Intrigues against Mahadji Sindhia
Fall of the Mughal Empire v3.c39.s1
- Language
- English
§ 2. Intrigues against Mahadji Sindhia
v3.c39.s1.1
At the same time the most confused and intricate intrigues were going on for the succession to Afrāsiyāb Khan and the control of the weak Emperor. The dead Mir Bakhshi’s diwān Nārāyandās and his ally the unscrupulous Gosāin Himmat Bahadur planned to bribe the Emperor with twelve lakhs of Rupees and thus induce him to create Afrāsiyāb’s son, a boy of three, commander-in-chief, and then govern the realm themselves as this infant’s guardians and devour the revenues of his jagirs and the Crownlands customarily administered by the Mir Bakhshi! Another widow of Afrāsiyāb, not this boy’s passive mother, but an imperious Afghan lady, whose father and uncle then held the key-positions of commandant of Agra fort and chief of the imperial artillery,—sought permission to adopt a son and manage Afrāsiyāb’s vast property in the name of her nominee. Major Browne was working desperately to revive Warren Hastings’s abandoned plan of turning the Emperor into an English puppet and governing the empire through some Muslim regent who would be under the dictation of the British Resident at the capital, as the Nawab of Oudh already was. Those two masters of low cunning and underground intrigue which always ends in futility, Nārāyandās and Himmat Bahadur, even imagined that they could get rid of Sindhia by throwing to him a few crumbs of territory and a few thousand Rupees worth of jewellery from Afrāsiyāb’s legacy, and thus clear the path of their ambition to rule the realm as Najib-ud-daulah or Mirzā Najaf had done before! They even tried to buy Sindhia’s ministers over to these views.
v3.c39.s1.2
All this reached Mahādji’s ears and he took his measures with marvellous patience, secrecy and exactness in timing his blows. He first crushed Muhammad Beg Hamadāni and removed that source of danger and distraction from his neighbourhood (c. 10 Nov.) Then, when the Emperor removed to the circuit of the Maratha camp (15 Nov.), he took over the control of the Emperor’s and Afrāsiyāb’s camps by posting his own disciplined battalions around them. “Without his permit none can go from one camp to the other, none can visit the Emperor, none can leave the Emperor’s camp.” [DY. i. 120, 117.] The Mughalia sardars, lately under Hamadāni, were similarly isolated by Maratha guards.
v3.c39.s1.3
Sindhia held many private conferences with the Emperor, some on the problems facing that helmless Government, some on the persistent English request to recall the fugitive Prince Jawan Bakht to Delhi at the head of five trained sepoy battalions and give him a vast appanage. Above all, there was the urgent question of finding the large sums necessary for maintaining the Emperor’s household and regularly paying the enormous army assembled in his name. [HP. 369. Ibr. ii. 99, PRC. i. 7.]