India: A History. Revised and Updated by John Keay

Author:John Keay [Keay, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3
Tags: Eurasian History, Asian History, India, v.5, Amazon.com, Retail, History
ISBN: 9780802145581
Amazon: 0802145582
Barnesnoble: 0802145582
Publisher: Grove Press
Published: 2011-04-11T15:00:00+00:00

Nevertheless the arrival at court of the son of Rana Amar Singh was proof enough of Mewar’s shame. Jahangir, content to have succeeded where Babur and Akbar had both failed, proved magnanimous in victory, while the young Mewar prince sought to save face by excusing himself from making personal submission; no reigning Rana ever would. Amar Singh’s successors would remain on good terms with Khurram–Shah Jahan who received from them sanctuary when in revolt and support when in power. It was during Shah Jahan’s reign as emperor and Jagat Singh’s as rana that the latter embellished his lake at Udaipur with the island, clad in white marble, which was later rebuilt as the famous Jagnivas or ‘Lake Palace’.

But in the next Mughal succession crisis the rana was wrong-footed. A victorious Aurangzeb had no time for his father’s allies nor for the half-loyalties of a Hindu princeling. Every rajput must now be a subservient Mughal amir (noble); either that or be outlawed as one of those ‘Rashboots’ (i.e. rajputs) whom, in the 1690s, the German traveller de Mandelso took to be ‘Highway men or Tories’. Mughal–Mewar hostilities had yet to run their course.

Meanwhile on the frontiers of their empire Jahangir and Shah Jahan endeavoured to emulate Akbar. They rarely succeeded. In the east, although nearly all of what is now Bangladesh was by this time under Mughal rule, a Shan people from upper Burma, the Ahoms, pre-empted Mughal expansion in Assam and repeatedly rolled back Mughal incursions. In the north, along the foothills of the Himalaya, much was made of the capture by Khurram–Shah Jahan in 1618 of the great fort of Kangra (now in Himachal Pradesh). Again Jahangir, who was still emperor at the time, claimed the victory for himself; ‘since the day when the sword of Islam and the glory of the Mohamedan religion have reigned in Hindustan’ no sovereign, he boasted, had been able to reduce the place.14 He was evidently unaware that, as Nagerkot, the fort had been ransacked by Mahmud of Ghazni six hundred years before. There followed minor conquests on the frontiers of Kashmir, whose willow-fringed lakes and cooler climate so enchanted Jahangir, plus another triumph for Khurram–Shah Jahan when at the very end of his father’s reign he finally secured the submission of the raja of Garhwal, a minor hill state in Uttar Pradesh.

None of these places can have rewarded the expense of taking them, nor were they of any great strategic or prestige value. In a very different class, though, were the empire’s two other land frontiers, that in the north-west and that in the Deccan. Invasion was possible from either, both were in the habit of welcoming and assisting Mughal dissidents, and both were arenas in which the Mughals had long-standing ancestral designs. A sovereign self-billed as a ‘World-Conqueror’ like Jahan-gir, or as a ‘King of the World’ like Shah Jahan, could ill afford to ignore either. But here again little real headway was made. In fact Kandahar, the commercially and strategically

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