Nader Shah's invasion of India

• 1. Introduction

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  Nader Shah's invasion of India in 1738-1739 left Delhi in ashes and ended the Mughal Empire's real grip on power. On the morning of the 22nd of March 1739, Nader Shah sat at the Sunehri Masjid of Roshan-ud-Daulah in an occupied city and unsheathed his great battle sword. The rolling of drums and the blaring of trumpets accompanied that gesture. Within hours, between 20,000 and 30,000 men, women and children lay dead in the streets. How did a Persian ruler march an army from Kandahar to the Mughal capital in less than a year? What drove him there? And what did he carry home when he left?

• 2. A Throne Under Strain

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  Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb died in 1707, and from that moment the empire his dynasty had built began to fracture. The rulers who followed him commanded only nominal allegiance from the governors and regional lords who effectively ran their own kingdoms. The Maratha Empire under Bajirao I pressed further into territories that Mughal rulers had long considered their own, challenging established ideas about Muslim political authority in India.

  The subcontinent by the early 18th century still held one of the world's largest and most productive agricultural economies. That wealth sat inside an empire that was politically fragmented and militarily weakened. To a conqueror who needed money and saw an opportunity, it was an unusually inviting target.

  Muhammad Shah sat on the Peacock Throne in Delhi, nominally emperor of all India, while the real power drained away around him. His governors plotted, his borders frayed, and his treasury beckoned. The man who would come to claim it had been consolidating his own position on the other side of the mountains.

• 3. The Road to Kandahar

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  By the end of 1736, Nader Shah had put down the internal rebellions that had troubled Iran for years and turned his attention east. The Ghilji Afghan tribe had reorganized under Hussain Hotak, a cousin of Ashraf Hotak, who had built a substantial power base as the ruler of Herat. By April 1737, Nader had moved east and established his camp near Kandahar, where he ordered the construction of a city called Naderabad.

  The Iranologist Laurence Lockhart wrote that Nader understood he could fund his ambitions for expansion with the spoils of India, because the near-continuous campaigns of the preceding years had caused famine in Persia and pushed it close to bankruptcy. Michael Axworthy, another Iranologist, put it plainly: Nader needed a breathing space for the country to recover, and a fresh source of cash to pay his army before he could renew his war against the Ottomans.

  Hussain Khan fell to Nader's forces, and Kandahar was taken, ending Ghilji dominance of the region. On the 21st of May 1738, Nader left Naderabad and marched on Kabul, where a garrison of 20,000 surrendered. He crossed the traditional border between Iran and the Mughal Empire on the 11th of June, reaching Ghazni. The invasion of India had begun.

• 4. Conquest and Collapse

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  Nader Shah's stated justification was straightforward: he told the Mughals he was simply pursuing runaway Afghans into their territory. When he entered Ghazni on the 31st of May, the city's religious scholars and leading men met him with gifts and submitted peacefully; the governor had already fled. At Kabul, one commander named Sharza Khan chose resistance. Nader arrived on the 10th of June, surveyed the city's defences from atop the Black Rock on the 11th, and the citadel capitulated by the 19th when a tower called Aqa-bin collapsed.

  Nader sent an envoy to Delhi explaining that his only wish was to rid the Mughals of the Afghan threat. The envoy was turned back at Jalalabad and then murdered by a local chieftain. Nader sacked Jalalabad on the 7th of September in direct retaliation.

  Nasir Khan, the Mughal governor of Kabul Subah, assembled roughly 20,000 poorly trained tribal levies at Peshawar. Nader marched through the steep Khyber Pass, outflanked them and destroyed the force. Three days later, Peshawar fell without any further resistance.

  At the Battle of Karnal on the 24th of February 1739, Nader's veterans met the Mughal main army and won. Muhammad Shah surrendered. The two men entered Delhi together, and the keys to the city were handed over. Nader Shah entered on the 20th of March 1739.

• 5. The Qatl-e-Aam

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  The Afsharid occupation disrupted the city's economy almost immediately, and price increases followed. The city administrator tried to force merchants to accept lower prices and sent Afsharid troops to the market at Paharganj to enforce the order. The merchants refused, violence broke out, and some Afsharid soldiers were killed.

  On the night of the 21st of March, a rumour spread that Nader had been assassinated by a female guard at the Red Fort. Indians attacked and killed 3,000 Afsharid troops in the riots that followed. Nader ordered the qatl-e-aam, which his contemporaries understood to mean the killing of the common public in the open.

  On the morning of the 22nd of March, Nader Shah drew his sword at the Sunehri Masjid. His fully armed soldiers turned on the unarmed civilians of Chandni Chowk, Dariba Kalan, Fatehpuri, Faiz Bazar, Hauz Kazi, Johri Bazar and the Lahori, Ajmeri and Kabuli gates. The chronicler Anand Ram Mukhlis recorded the scene in his Tazkira: streets remained strewn with corpses as a garden with dead leaves and flowers, and the town was reduced to ashes.

  Muhammad Shah begged for mercy for many hours. Nader eventually relented and sheathed his sword, signalling a halt. A representative of the Dutch East India Company who was present in Delhi reported that some 10,000 women and children were taken as slaves. The massacre lasted six hours.

• 6. The Plunder

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  After the bloodshed, the sack continued for several days. A fine of 20 million rupees was levied on the people of Delhi. Muhammad Shah handed over the keys to the Imperial Treasury and lost the Peacock Throne, which Nader took back to Persia as a symbol of imperial power.

  Among the other prizes were two of the most famous diamonds in the world: the Koh-i-Noor and the Darya-i-Noor, whose names translate as Mountain of Light and Sea of Light. The Koh-i-Noor is now part of the British crown jewels; the Darya-i-Noor is part of the Iranian National Jewels.

  Nader Shah and his army left Delhi on the 16th of May 1739. Before departing, he ceded all territories east of the Indus back to Muhammad Shah. On the return journey through the Punjab, Sikhs fell upon the Afsharid column and seized a large amount of the booty and freed the captive slaves. Nader's army, weighed down by plunder and oppressed by the May heat, could not pursue them effectively.

  The haul from Delhi was so vast that Nader cancelled taxation in Persia for three years after his return.

• 7. The Long Aftermath

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  Nader's son Nasrollah married a Mughal princess following the sack, a dynastic connection that reflected the scale of his father's victory. The Governor of Sindh refused to comply with Nader Shah's demands, but that defiance was a footnote to a campaign that had achieved its core purpose.

  With the eastern frontier settled, Nader turned back toward his longtime rival. Ottoman Sultan Mahmud I opened the Ottoman-Persian War in 1743-1746, and Muhammad Shah cooperated closely with the Ottomans until his death in 1748, attempting to undo the humiliation of 1739 through diplomacy and alliance.

  The Iranologist Michael Axworthy argues that Nader's campaign exposed the extreme weakness of the Mughal Empire to the East India Company and revealed the possibility of filling the power vacuum that the Mughals could no longer fill. Axworthy goes further: without Nader's invasion, eventual British rule in India would have come later and in a different form, perhaps never at all, with important global effects. The loss of the Mughal treasury carried back to Persia was the final blow to any real Mughal authority. The empire that had fractured after Aurangzeb's death in 1707 never recovered the capacity to govern.