After Alamgir’s death, the Mughals had lost control of their magnates and subahdars (governors). The young Rangila had turned to one of Alamgir’s protégés, Chin Qilich Khan (Lord Boy Swordsman), son of a Turkic paladin from Bukhara, now viceroy of Deccan with the title Nizam al-Mulk (Regulator of the Realm). Yet Nizam was infuriated by Emperor Playboy’s ‘jesters and harlots’, who mocked him as ‘the Deccan Dancing Monkey’. The Nizam retired to carve out his own kingdom, founding a dynasty that would rule Hyderabad until 1947. But he was not the only one. Across India, subahdars seized revenues and territories, setting themselves up as princes – nawabs. The Tamerlane family had arrived as Turkic conquerors, becoming Indianized through their marriages with Hindu princesses, but the dynasty and a tiny clique of courtiers had squeezed the empire to pay for their wars and luxuries. A total of 655 grandees, suggests one estimate, out of 150 million Indians, owned a quarter of GNP. Shahjahan’s failed attempt to conquer Samarkand and his vanity projects – the Taj Mahal – followed by Alamgir’s interminable wars contributed to the collapse of the Mughals. ‘I failed,’ Alamgir admitted on his deathbed, ‘to protect the people.’ Now this predatory rent-seeking system, dependent on strong emperors and weak competition, had fallen apart, ‘undermined from within and below,’ writes Richard M. Eaton, ‘in the way termites silently hollow out the base of a wooden structure’. In the east, Bengal was privatized by its subahdar; in the west, a Sikh chieftain, Banda Bahadur, seized Punjab.
In the centre, Shivaji’s grandson, Shahu, had appointed a fierce, capable Maratha general called Baji Rao as peshwa (minister). Baji had expanded aggressively into Mughal territory and hacked out a Maratha empire, training his son Balaji Rao as successor: this cavalry maestro had defeated the Nizam of Hyderabad and other princes, finally turning to the decaying House of Tamerlane: ‘Let’s hack at the trunk of the withering tree and the branches will fall off themselves.’ In 1737, Baji galloped north to Delhi, defeated the Mughals and the branches started to fall off. But he himself was exhausted, dying before his fortieth birthday. The House of Tamerlane ruled no further than Delhi, but it took a foreign predator to break the Mughals.
THE ORGASM, THE CONQUEROR, THE DIAMOND AND THE COURTESAN: NADER, RANGILA AND FREDERICK
‘I haven’t come to leave the country in peace but to turn everything upside down,’ declared Nader, an athletic, weather-beaten, rugged, six foot lifeforce. ‘I’m not a human, I am God’s wrath.’ His rise was made possible only by the degeneration of the Safavi shahs, whose early deaths from alcoholism, syphilis and opium had so weakened Persia that an Afghan warlord with a tiny army managed to conquer the empire. It was a catastrophe that empowered Nader.
In 1709, the Pashtun Ghilzai tribes, Sunnis who hated the Shiite Safavis, led by a respected chieftain, Mirwais Hotak, rebelled against their Persian rulers. The Safavis, who also ruled the Caucasus in the west, promoted Bagrationi kings – descendants of Queen Tamara – to high offices and recruited armies of Georgian soldier-slaves: Shah Hosain defeated a rebellious Georgian king Giorgi XI, a tough paladin, then restored him to his throne, appointing him commander-in-chief and governor of Kandahar. Giorgi, who converted to Islam under the name Gurgin Khan, marched east with his Georgian army and retook Afghanistan, letting Hotak massacre his fellow Pashtun rivals, the Abdalis. These rivalries would soon explode out of Afghanistan in the shape of two Afghan empires.
King Giorgi sent Mirwais Hotak to Isfahan, where he warned the shah against the overmighty kinglet who governed Afghanistan and Georgia. Mirwais Baba – Granpa Mirwais – was sent back to watch Giorgi, who demanded the Afghan’s daughter as concubine. Hotak sent another girl disguised as his daughter, then orchestrated the slaughter of Giorgi and his Georgians at a banquet. He united Afghan chieftains, asking, ‘if there are any among you who lack the courage to enjoy this precious gift of heaven-sent freedom’. On his deathbed, Mirwais Baba ordered his eighteen-year-old son, Mahmud, to ‘take Isfahan itself’.
