South Asia in World History by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: zho
Format: epub

stalwart allies, the Rajputs, broke into open rebellion alongside the tax-resisting Jats. The Rajputs and Jats were joined by the Sikhs, whose

ninth guru, Tej Bahadur, was executed for calling for a Sikh state if

Mughal persecution of non- Muslims led to the forced conversion of

Sikhs. Under his successor, Guru Gobind Singh, the Sikh community

became an army of the KHALSA (pure) determined to free themselves

from Mughal rule. In the South, Marathas slowly recovered from the

death of Shivaji’s son, Sambhaji, and their forces marched north to men-

ace Delhi.

Aurangzeb was so great a field commander that he was able to

stave off the enemies of his empire until his illness and death in 1707

at the age of ninety. In his last will and testament, he blamed his letting Shivaji escape from his court as the cause of much misery, but offered

no remarks as to why he had lost the Maratha leader’s support. He

seemed to feel that his campaigns of conquest, particularly the twenty-

six years he spent exhausting his army and treasury in the Deccan, had

led him away, rather than toward, the divinely guided life he sought, but gave no sign he understood how this happened. If he sought to renew

his faith through the Islamicization of his empire, whose religious plu-

ralism he viewed as an offense against God, that purpose escaped him

as death approached. To his son, he wrote, “I do not know who I am,

nor what I have been doing.”12

During the reigns of Aurangzeb’s successors, wars of imperial suc-

cession and the resultant rise of regional states in much of South Asia

hastened the empire’s decline. The Marathas won control of so much

Mughal territory that the empire’s rulers were forced to pay them trib-

ute. The Sikhs carved out an empire in the Punjab, taking the lands to

the west of the Indus River from the Afghans and gaining influence

over Kashmir. Mughal provincial governors in Bengal and in the hard-

won Deccan took up the reins of power, though such was the remain-

ing prestige of the Mughal Empire that they acknowledged the titular

supremacy of the emperor by offering largely symbolic tribute.

As has often been the case in South Asian history, the subconti-

nent flourished in this less centralized condition. Regional empires, like that of the Marathas, redistributed wealth through their local courts.

Entrepreneurial market towns flourished as industry was stimulated

by the end of Mughal royal monopolies in the manufacturing sector.

In the absence of a centralized court setting religious policy, new ap-

proaches to Muslim and non- Muslim relations could be advanced. The

globally influential eighteenth- century Salafist Sunni philosopher Shah

Waliullah, himself deeply influenced by the teachings of the Naqshbandi

88

S o u t h A s i a i n Wo r l d H i s t o r y

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