Part 29 (2/2)

AURUNGZEBE

A.D. 1657 TO A.D. 1707

With Aurungzebe, the Middle Age of Indian History ends. From the date of his death, interest finally ceases to centre round the dying dynasties of India, and, changing sides, concerns itself absolutely with the coming sovereignty of the West.

Even during his long reign of fifty years, the attention is often distracted by the welter of conflicting commerces which, leaving the sea-boards, spread further and further up-country. It requires, therefore, some concentration to deal with Aurungzebe, the last of the Great Moghuls; the last, and, without doubt, the least estimable of them all.

In truth, the steps to his throne were littered with black crime.

Shahjahan, his father, had, it is true, made his seat more secure by the deaths by poison, bow-string, or sword, of the three next heirs to the throne--one of them his half-uncle; but Aurungzebe trod on the bodies of three brothers in reaching kings.h.i.+p, and for seven years of that kings.h.i.+p carried about with him the prison key of a deposed and dishonoured father. Of minor sins, such as the poisonings of nephews, cousins, even aunts, there were scores. Well might he exclaim upon his death-bed: ”I have committed numerous crimes--I know not with what punishment I may be seized.”

And yet he was, in his way, a good king. Had he been less of a bigot, he would have been a better one; but this bigotry was necessary to his peace of mind. He could not have borne the sting of conscience without some anodyne of hard-and-fast religious rect.i.tude. It was after the murder of his brother Dara, who, caught on the confines of Sinde, almost unattended (for he had sent his most trusted adherents back to Lah.o.r.e with the dead body of his wife, who had died of fatigue), was given a mock trial for heresy and done to death, that Aurungzebe built the celebrated Blood-money Mosque at Lah.o.r.e, in which no Mahomedan prayed for long years, feeling it to be defiled indeed.

But Aurungzebe was for ever hedging between this world and the next, so we must take him as we find him--an absolutely contemptible creature, who yet did good work. Needless to say, however, ”Akbar's Dream” vanished into thin air from the moment he set his foot upon the throne.

The first five years of his reign were practically spent in ridding himself of relations. The whole family of Shujah suffered death, and even his own son was immured as a state prisoner in consequence of a trivial act of independence.

Then--and small wonder!--he was seized with a mysterious illness, which left him speechless. Nothing but his marvellous determination could have averted the chaos which must have followed in a state but half broken in to his murderous methods. But he sent for his great seal and his sister Roshanara, and keeping them both by his sick-bed, held order by sheer insistency until he recovered.

So, after a brief holiday in Kashmir--that happy hunting-ground of all the Moghul kings, who seem to have inherited the love of beautiful scenery from their great ancestor, Babar--he came back to face the greatest foe to the Moghul power which had arisen since the combined Rajput resistance was finally broken by Mahomed-Shahab-ud-din-Ghori.

This foe was the Mahratta race, which had been gradually growing to power in the Western Ghats, that natural stronghold of mountains which rises in many places like a wall between the Western Sea and the high table-land of Central India. No more fitting birthplace for warlike tribes could be imagined. Towards the sea, breaks of rich rice-fields, tongued by spurred rocks and outlying strips of almost impenetrable forest. Then the bare, broken ridges, 3,000 or 4,000 feet high, ending often in a scarp of sheer precipice, and giving on wide, thicket-set woods, through which, after a while, ravines break into valleys to the eastward. A land of rain--clouds from the south-west monsoon, of roaring torrents and drifting mists; full of wild beasts fleeing fearfully from the small, st.u.r.dy huntsmen of the hills. These were the Mahrattas. Not a very interesting race when all was said and done.

Brave, dogged, determined, but, by reason, doubtless, of their Sudra extraction, lacking the n.o.bility of the Rajput and the Rajput nicety in honour.

It was in the time of Malik-Amber, the Abyssinian slave who in the reign of Jahangir gave new life to the dying dynasty in the Dekkan, that the Mahrattas first made their mark. Before this, history does not even recognise them.

Amongst the Mahratta officers of Malik-Amber was one Malo-ji, who had a five-year-old son called Shah-ji. To a Hindu festival at the house of a Rajput this boy was taken, and by chance was lifted to one knee of the host, whose little daughter of three occupied the other.

”They are a fine couple,” laughed the host and father. ”They should be man and wife!”

This was enough for Malo-ji's ambition. He started up, and called the company to witness that the girl was affianced to his son.

Naturally enough, the claim roused indignation; but in the end, Malo-ji's fortunes improving, Shah-ji gained his high-caste bride, and from the marriage sprang Siva-ji, the national hero of the Mahrattas, who was destined to wreck the power of the Moghuls in the south.

Siva-ji, by the time he was sixteen, was already notorious. His love of adventure, his knowledge of the popular ballads of the people, his complicity in the great gang-robberies which formed an ever-recurring excitement to life in the Ghats, his intimate acquaintance with every footpath and defile in that wild country, his horsemans.h.i.+p, his sportsmans.h.i.+p, were on the tongues of all; and when, still in his teens, he fortified one of the neglected hill-citadels and set up a chieftains.h.i.+p of his own, there were not wanting those who laughed at the impertinence as a high-spirited, boyish freak.

But within a few years the boyish freak was found to be open rebellion, and Siva-ji was practically king of the wild western country. What is more, he had become an ardent Hindu, and laid claims to Divine dreams.

The court at Bij.a.pur attempted remonstrance, imprisoned poor Shah-ji, his father, and threatened to wall him up unless Siva-ji repented of his errors: whereupon, with the cunning which distinguished him in all things, the latter made overtures to, and was taken into the service of, Shahjahan, then engaged in the Dekkan. So for a few years affairs remained at a deadlock; Siva-ji, apprehensive for his father, Bij.a.pur of the Moghuls.

Then Shah-ji being released, his son began his career of annexation afresh, being checked, however, in his depredations by fear of Prince Aurungzebe, who was then fighting the King of Golconda.

Both of the same kidney, artful, designing, specious, the diplomacies which pa.s.sed between the Mahratta robber-chieftain and Aurungzebe, intent on stealing the throne of India, cannot have been edifying.

The former took the opportunity of the latter's hasty retreat on the news of his father's illness, to increase his power by an act of double-dyed treachery. He induced the commander of the King of Bij.a.pur's forces to come unattended to the hill fort of Partabghar in order to receive his submission.

The scene is dramatic.

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