Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan, or the Central and Western Rajput States of India v1.c20.s7.30

v1.c20.s7.30

Shāh Alam Bahādur Shāh, Emperor, A.D. 1707-12.—At his death his second son Azam assumed the imperial dignity, and aided by the Rajput princes of Datia and Kotah,¹ who had always served in his division, he marched to Agra to contest the legitimate claims of his eldest brother Muazzam, who was advancing from Kabul supported by the contingents of Mewar and Marwar, and all western Rajwara. The battle of Jajau [398] ² was fatal to Azam, who with his son Bedarbakht and the princes of Kotah and Datia was slain, when Muazzam ascended the throne under the title of Shah Alam Bahadur Shah. This prince had many qualities which endeared him to the Rajputs, to whom his sympathies were united by the ties of blood, his mother being a Rajput princess.³ Had he immediately succeeded the beneficent Shah Jahan, the race of Timur, in all human probability, would have been still enthroned at Delhi, and might have presented a picture of one of the most powerful monarchies of Asia. But Aurangzeb had inflicted an incurable wound on the mind of the Hindu race, which for ever estranged them from his successors; nor were the virtues of Bahadur, during the short lustre of his sway, capable of healing it. The bitter fruit of a long experience had taught the Rajputs not to hope for amelioration from any graft of that stem, which, like the deadly Upas, had stifled the vital energies of Rajasthan, whose leaders accordingly formed a league for mutual preservation, which it would have been madness to dissolve merely because a fair portion of virtue was the inheritance of the tyrant's successor. They had proved that no act of duty or subserviency could guarantee them from the infatuated abuse of power, and they were at length steeled against every appeal to their loyalty, replying with a trite adage, which we may translate ‘*quem Deus vult perdere, prius dementat*,’—of common application with the Rajput in such a predicament.