Fall of the Mughal Empire v3.c39.s1.1

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.