Shah Alam II

• 1. Introduction

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  Shah Alam II was born Ali Gohar on the 25th of June 1728, inside the Red Fort in Delhi, in the semi-captivity quarters reserved for princes of the royal blood. He was the son of a man who had not yet become emperor, and he grew up in a world defined by confinement. Yet unlike most Mughal princes trapped in those gilded walls, he did not become decadent. He studied. He wrote poetry under the pen-name Aftab, meaning "the sun". He would go on to compose a Diwan of his own verse and author a prose work in Urdu called the Ajaib-ul-Qasas, considered one of the earliest prominent books of prose in that language.

  He would also become, in a blunt phrase that echoed across the Persian-speaking world, the emperor whose kingdom ran only from Delhi to Palam. Palam was a suburb. The mockery captures the distance between title and reality that defined his life.

  How does a man who begins as a crown prince end up blinded by an enemy's knife inside his own palace? How does the seventeenth Mughal emperor spend twelve years of his reign camped in Allahabad, governing an empire in name only? And what drove him to take the field against the East India Company at the Battle of Buxar in 1764, at a moment when the British were already the dominant military force in Bengal? Those questions are the spine of a life that ran from 1728 to 1806, across the collapse of the greatest empire the subcontinent had ever seen.

• 2. Flight and Ambition

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  His father, Alamgir II, had been raised to the throne not by his own strength but by the maneuver of the Wazir Imad-ul-Mulk and the Maratha leader Sadashivrao Bhau. That dependence set the tone for everything that followed. Ali Gauhar, as heir apparent, watched almost all real authority pool in the Wazir's hands. Quarrels with Imad-ul-Mulk, and a genuine fear for his life, drove him to flee Delhi in 1758.

  He did not flee passively. He organized a militia and moved east, appearing in the Eastern Subah in 1759 with the intention of capturing Bengal, Bihar and Odisha and using their revenues to build a power base independent of whoever controlled the capital. His forces included Muhammad Quli Khan, Kadim Husein, Kamgar Khan, Hidayat Ali, Mir Afzal and Ghulam Husain Tabatabai. They were reinforced by the forces of Shuja-ud-Daula and Najib-ud-Daula and Ahmad Khan Bangash. He also acquired an unusual ally: Jean Law and two hundred French soldiers, fighting on the Mughal side during the global contest known as the Seven Years' War.

  With a combined force that grew to over 40,000, Prince Ali Gauhar besieged Patna, pressing hard against Ramnarian, a man the source describes as a sworn enemy of the Mughals. Mir Jafar, the Nawab of Bengal who owed his position to British support, sent his own son Miran to relieve the city. He also called in Major John Caillaud, who dispersed the prince's army in 1761 after four separate engagements: the battles of Patna, Sirpur, Birpur and Siwan. The east was lost for now. Back in Delhi, meanwhile, the situation had shifted dramatically: Najib-ud-Daula had assembled a Mughal army and used it to drive Imad-ul-Mulk out of the capital and depose his puppet emperor Shah Jahan III. Ahmad Shah Durrani, whose forces had just crushed the Marathas at the third battle of Panipat in 1761, nominated Ali Gauhar as the rightful emperor under the name Shah Alam II.

• 3. The Treaty That Ceded an Empire

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  On the 22nd of October 1764 the Battle of Buxar brought Shah Alam II, Mir Qasim and Shuja-ud-Daula together against Hector Munro and the East India Company on the banks of the Ganges. The Company won decisively.

  A defeated sovereign, Shah Alam II signed the Treaty of Allahabad in 1765 and the consequences were enormous. He granted the Company the Diwani, the right to collect revenue, across Bengal, Bihar and Odisha. In return the Company agreed to pay him an annual tribute of 2.6 million rupees drawn from that very revenue. Tax exemption status for Company traders was restored. The Company also secured the districts of Kora and Allahabad, giving it the power to collect taxes from more than twenty million people. It appointed Nawab Muhammad Reza Khan as its deputy to handle the actual collection.

  The arrangement had an almost theatrical quality. Shah Alam II remained emperor in name while the British ran the finances of what had been the Mughal heartland. Warren Hastings, who became the first Governor of Bengal in 1774, operated inside this dual structure. The Company later discontinued the annual tribute of 2.6 million rupees. It eventually handed Allahabad and Kora back to the Nawab of Awadh, steps that amounted to a public repudiation of its earlier vassalage to the emperor. By 1793 the Company was strong enough to abolish Nizamat, local rule, entirely and annex Bengal outright.

  Shah Alam himself stayed away from Delhi for years after Buxar, resident in the fort at Allahabad and protected by Shuja-ud-Daula, the Nawab of Awadh. His son, Prince Mirza Jawan Bakht, held his place in the capital alongside Najib-ul-Daula for the next twelve years.

• 4. Mirza Najaf Khan and the Brief Revival

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  Mahadaji Scindia of Gwalior escorted Shah Alam II back to Delhi in January 1772, after the Marathas had already retaken the city the previous year. The return came with a price: the emperor became a client of the Gwalior state, whose Peshwa demanded and received tribute.

  Back on his throne for the first time in years, Shah Alam II moved quickly on one front. He placed a new Mughal army under the command of Mirza Najaf Khan. The force that Najaf Khan built was different from the old Mughal military. Its infantrymen used both flintlock muskets and talwars. It relied on elephants for transport and was less dependent on artillery and cavalry. Najaf Khan also introduced the more effective firelock muskets, drawing on a collaboration with Mir Qasim, the former Nawab of Bengal who had himself built firelock factories at Patna.

  The results were real. In 1777 Najaf Khan decisively defeated the forces of Zabita Khan. In 1779 he routed Zabita Khan again alongside his Sikh allies; that battle cost the rebels more than 5,000 men, and they did not threaten the empire again during his lifetime. Najaf Khan also granted the Sikhs sovereign rights in a formal agreement, managing the threat diplomatically as well as militarily. But when Shah Alam ordered a campaign against Sikh forces in 1778, sending the Grand Vizier Majad-ud-Daula with 20,000 troops, the army lost twice: first at the Battle of Muzzaffargarh and then at the Battle of Ghanaur. Shah Alam recalled Najaf Khan. Najaf Khan died of natural causes in 1782. With him went the last serious capacity of the Mughal military.

• 5. Blinded in the Palace

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  Ghulam Qadir was the grandson of Najib Khan, a former Mughal ally turned regional power. He arrived in Delhi with Sikh allies and forced Shah Alam II to appoint him Grand Vizier of the Mughal Empire. His real purpose was the Mughal treasury, believed to hold treasure worth Rs. 250 million. He tore through the palaces looking for it.

  When the treasure did not appear in the amounts he expected, and when the emperor made moves to eliminate him, Ghulam Qadir blinded Shah Alam II with an Afghani knife on the 10th of August 1788. Three servants and two water-carriers who tried to help the bleeding emperor were beheaded. Over the ten weeks that Ghulam Qadir held Delhi, the royal princesses were stripped naked and forced to dance before him; several jumped into the Yamuna river to drown rather than endure the humiliation.

  Mahadaji Scindia ended it. He intervened militarily, killed Ghulam Qadir, and took possession of Delhi on the 2nd of October 1788. He restored Shah Alam II to the throne and resumed the role of protector. As a mark of what had happened, Mahadaji Scindia sent the ears and eyes of Ghulam Qadir to the emperor he had saved. Shah Alam honored Scindia with the titles Vakil-ul-Mutlaq, regent of the empire, and Amir-ul-Amara, head of the nobility. A Gwalior state garrison occupied Delhi permanently from 1788 onward and ruled in northern India for the next two decades.

  A Persian-language saying had already begun to circulate about the man whose domain had shrunk to the city itself: Sultanat-e-Shah Alam, Az Dilli ta Palam. The empire of Shah Alam is from Delhi to Palam.

• 6. Pensioner of the British

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  Farzana Zeb un-Nissa had saved Delhi from a potential invasion by 30,000 Sikh troops under Jassa Singh Ahluwalia, Jassa Singh Ramgarhia and Baghel Singh in 1783. Even Begum Samru had intervened to persuade Baghel Singh to spare Shah Alam II when Sikh forces briefly occupied the Red Fort that year. The empire's survival had come to depend on individuals acting out of their own calculations rather than any Mughal institutional strength.

  The British had their own calculations. A French military presence in India threatened their position, and they feared that French officers might co-opt Maratha power and invoke the Mughal emperor's symbolic authority against them. When the Second Anglo-Maratha War brought British troops into Delhi on the 14th of September 1803, they found a blind old man seated under a tattered canopy. He became their pensioner.

  That pensioner still commanded something the British could not manufacture. The Nawabs and Subedars of the subcontinent continued to seek the Mughal emperor's formal approval when they came to power. They struck coins in his name. They read the khutba, the Friday sermon, invoking him. The titles he bestowed carried weight across the country even though the man granting them had no army and no revenue of his own. Shah Alam II died of natural causes on the 19th of November 1806. His grave lies in a marble enclosure in Mehrauli, Delhi, adjoined to the Moti Masjid and next to the shrine of Qutbuddin Bakhtiar Kaki, a Sufi saint of the 13th century. Bahadur Shah I and Akbar Shah II are buried in the same enclosure, three emperors in a shared marble space at the edge of the city that had slipped from their hands.