India in the Persianate Age by Richard M. Eaton

Author:Richard M. Eaton
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780141966557
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2019-08-05T16:00:00+00:00

THE VIEW FROM THE FRONTIER

Jahangir’s India amounted to much more than the palace intrigues and battles that fill the pages of contemporary chronicles, or the courtly gossip that so fascinated contemporary European visitors. A very different picture emerges if one steps away from the courtly centre and considers the empire’s political margins. In these porous frontier zones, the imperial presence was but a shadow of its imposing profile in Agra or Lahore. In the first place, such zones were hardly empty spaces that the empire simply occupied. Rather, they were filled with peoples of varied cultural backgrounds who had their own political traditions and leaders. Many of them, moreover, participated in India’s vast military labour market. Armed villagers might sell their martial services to the highest bidder, but would remain in service only as long as their salaries were forthcoming. How, then, did the Mughals integrate such politically fluid, often volatile, zones into their cultural and political system? With what success? We get glimpses from a detailed memoir left by Mirza Nathan, a junior imperial officer who was posted on the Mughals’ eastern frontier between 1607 and 1624, spanning most of Jahangir’s reign.

At an auspicious hour on 4 July 1607, Emperor Jahangir sat in his jharokha in Agra watching while, below him, a mighty flotilla of warships commanded by Admiral Ihtiman Khan set sail down the Jamuna. Announcing the great military enterprise, artillery was fired with thunderous noise. ‘The conquest of Bengal’, wrote Mirza Nathan, the admiral’s son, ‘had assumed a practical shape, as was desired by all the nobles of the State.’9 Akbar had begun the conquest several decades earlier, planting the first toeholds of imperial authority in the delta’s north-western and western quarters when he accepted the surrender of Sultan Daud Khan Karrani in 1575. But the task of subduing the entire delta remained far from complete, as the region’s dense jungles and ever-shifting maze of waterways afforded protection for indigenous peoples and an ideal refuge for those resisting Mughal suzerainty. When Jahangir came to power, Bengal’s central, northern and eastern quarters were seething with well-armed warlords, most of them Indo-Afghans, who had carved out independent kingdoms fiercely opposed to Mughal intrusions. Socially, the region was a mix of communities: independent Kuch tribes in the northern mountains, ethnic Assamese in the broad, upper Brahmaputra valley, Bengali-speakers in the delta’s flat central and eastern districts, and ethnic Arakanese who, settled in the Chittagong region, regularly made predatory raids in the southern delta. In addition, thousands of Portuguese adventurers who had abandoned service to Lisbon effectively joined eastern India’s thriving military labour market by selling their services to whichever warlord could make them the best offer. Some even set up their own petty kingdoms.

Such was the turbulent, swampy realm that Ihtiman Khan’s flotilla entered, having sailed down the Jamuna and the Ganges. The admiral was first met by Bengal’s new governor, Islam Khan Chishti (1608–13), who commanded large numbers of cavalry, infantry, elephants and war-boats of his own. These were quartered in the provincial capital of Rajmahal, in the delta’s north-western corner.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.