222\. The Downfall of the Mughals (Ep 3)
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Hello and welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arnon. And me, William Durrumpal. Now, in this relay race through Mughal history, we are now at a point where the baton is passed to Aurangzeb. Can I just say, I mean...

William, can we have a chat about how very divisive even that name is? Because first of all, we say Aurangzeb. Everyone knows him as Aurangzeb, which is his princely name. We took great pains to say Khurram, who will soon become Shah Jahan. Well, Aurangzeb doesn't stay Aurangzeb. He becomes Emperor Alamgir. But people don't talk about him as Alamgir. They still give him almost as if it's a demotion or an insult to say, look, let's just carry on calling him Aurangzeb. Because there is such strong feeling, such a cultural feeling

if you like, over that person, the name and the history? Absolutely. I mean, he is in many ways the most hated figure and the kind of most demonized figure in all of Indian history. It's not too much of an exaggeration to say that. And the road that was named after him by the British in New Delhi only, I think, three or four years ago was renamed after Abdul Kalam, a recent president. So there is no Aurangzeb Road in Delhi anymore. And

A lot of this comes, I think, because although he has traditionally always been seen as this cruel and bigoted fellow who is held responsible for destroying temples, for killing one of the great gurus of the Sikhs, and we'll go into both those things in more detail in the course of this episode. In the way these things go, historians always react against the previous generation of historians' interpretation.

And there has been an effort by people such as Audrey Trushka lately to, in some ways, regild his image, to say he wasn't as bad as people have always thought. And just the reaction to those, I mean, the backlash against that has been enormous, has it not? Exactly. And my own view is that he's certainly, I think, a more complex figure than his popular image as a sort of horned demon figure.

would make out. And you can find evidence that at certain times he did protect Brahmins, he did give some gifts to patronize Hindu and Jain institutions, that he did increase the number of Hindu noblemen at court, and that he would regularly, for example, consult with Hindu astrologers and physicians. I have read this material closely and

looked at the revisionist views, but I think at the end of the day, he is a rather cold, ruthless and unpleasant character. He's hard to love.

or like even. You can't deny, I mean, and even the new histories do not deny the forced conversions, you know, the convert or die, the raising of temples to the ground, the introduction of the tax for non-Muslims, the jizya tax, the heavier penalty on Hindu merchants than on Muslim merchants, all of those things. But what I do see in some of the newer works is

But that was the time. That's what people did. That's what it was like. Does that excuse it or explain it? Well, as we've seen in the series, it's not how Akbar behaved and it's not how Dara Shukoh behaved. And my understanding, I mean, this is obviously a vast, the Mughal Empire was in power from the time of Babur to Baha'u'llah Shah Zafar, which is the same time as sort of Elizabeth I to Zafar.

Queen Victoria. It's an enormous way, the 300 years of history, and many different things happened during that time. But yeah, he's a difficult character to like. He's a curmudgeonly figure. And there is a sense in which he...

closed a lot of the doors. My understanding of the Mughal Empire is that Akbar in particular found a way of bringing the Rajputs into the fold and that it was in many ways a Rajput-Mughal joint endeavor. The Rajputs did very well out of it. When you go to Rajasthan, the great forts of Jaipur and Jodhpur are built at this time and Bikaner and many of the other Rajput centers.

from the loot of other parts of India under the Mughals. So when you go to Bikaner, you see all the manuscripts taken from Ahmednagar in the Deccan. And by making the empire something which enriched the Rajputs and had the Rajputs in charge of the army, actually

Akbar very cleverly created a joint venture, is how you describe it in modern language. And I think Aurangzeb did a lot to undo that. Also, I mean, on the spectrum of one to bastard when you're horrible to your family, we've talked about this. There's a lot of slaughter of a family that goes on in the succession. But to me, and again, you know this history better than I do.

But there's a level of cruelty and a reveling in cruelty with Aurangzeb and how he dispatches, first of all, Dara Shukur, who we talked about in the last episode, a spectacular humiliation and cruelty that goes on where he sits him, for those of you who may not have heard the last episode, sits him and parades his son. His elder brother. His brother, his brother who is the man who should be king and sort of put

of puts him sitting the wrong way around on a dirty elephant in rags to be humiliated and then ultimately to be executed. It's a way in which he promises, I mean, this may not be exceptional, but promises to do a deal with his brother Murad and then has him either drugged and incapacitated, put in prison and then also bumped off at a later date with his encouragement, if not by his hand directly wielding a sword. And there are also, I mean, you mentioned Deigbader and we'll come to that in a bit,

But stories of the cruelty and torture that he employs to me are breathtaking. But I mean, are they exceptional? I mean, that's what I'm asking. I don't think they're exceptional. No, and I would disagree with you on that. I think they're there and they're true. But I think that, for example, Shah Jahan is every bit as bloody in his war of succession. One brother, two nephews, three cousins. I mean, it was a shopping list of murder with him. What to me distinguishes Aurangzeb is that he manages to alienate the Hindu subjects and the Hindu allies.

And for the first time, you get a major rebellion in Rajasthan, in Marwa and in Jaipur. And that is undoing, it seems to me very clearly, the cement which Akbar used to

create the joint venture that was the Rajput-Mughal project. And when you look at the big Mughal campaigns, often they're not Mughal troops that are conquering Bengal. They're under Man Singh or they're under Jay Singh or one of the leaders of Jaypur or Jobpur. And that comes to an end in Aurangzeb and the result is a disintegration.

And the ultimate end for this is twofold, the rise of the Marathas, who we're going to talk about a lot in this episode. And then after that, the door is open to the East India Company and a British for-profit corporation, the richest corporation in the world at the time,

manages to exploit the disunity which exists in India at that time. And by borrowing money from Jain and Hindu moneylenders, it raises a largely mercenary army of 90% Indian troops

and uses that to conquer for the profit of the corporations. So a thought experiment, the thought experiment, and we should stop casting ahead, and I'm going to stop it in a second. But the thought experiment here is that if there had been no Aurangzeb, there may not have been a British government

conquering of India? I mean, would you go that far? Well, I know that our last guest, Supriya Gandhi, pushed back against this. But the classic thought experiment that has been aired many times is that if Dara Shukla had won the war of succession and had kept Hindus and Muslims together, not only would you not have had the rise of the East India Company and the fracturing which they exploit, but you wouldn't have had partition. Hmm.

And there is a very clear argument that you can make about that. It's unfashionable. Scholars today, such as Supriya, regard this in a sense as the orthodoxy to push back against. But I think there's a lot to be said for it. Well, let's dive in. Let's dive in. So look,

reminded you of the death of Dara Shukr. We should perhaps take up the reins then from the coronation of Aurangzeb, which takes place on the 31st of July, 1658. It's not the only coronation he has, is it? It's one of two coronations that Aurangzeb has when he takes the name Alamgir. Tell us about this one on the 31st of July, 1658 and why there were two

So I actually went out once to what was originally a beautiful mogul garden where he has this ceremony. And I've been a couple of times. And the first time I came, it was very, very run down ceremony.

And you had to sort of, you know, cut your way through creepers of these old pavilions. It's the Shalimar Gardens we're talking about, aren't we? The gardens of paradise that were once the pride of the Mughal Empire. Absolutely. And there is still gorgeous Shalimar Gardens intact in Lahore that you and I have been to together. Spectacular. With fountains and pavilions. This was once very like that, but is today utterly run down.

The British initially, or rather the East India Company initially used it as a headquarters when they were first in Delhi. And people like William Fraser and Charles Metcalfe, who I've talked about a lot in my books, used to live there with their girlfriends. Then it gets sort of abandoned. And now, I went back a couple of years ago, it's now completely surrounded by these new Delhi suburbs of quite big, rich, new India housing, if you like.

And the garden has been sort of badly restored and now is much more used than it was. It doesn't have that sort of deserted, overgrown feel, but it does have a sort of municipal feel it didn't used to have with swings and things where you could do press-ups and that kind of stuff.

I mean, at the time, Bernier, who we talked about a lot with Minucci, these two doctors at large, if you like, who were documenting the Mughal period, he did describe Chalamar as handsome and noble, although not to be compared with Fontainebleau, Saint-Germain or Versailles. A very Bernier description.

But for him, that's high praise. He's actually... As good as it can get. It's as good as it can get. It's not as good as we do. But Orang Saab, I mean, do we know much about the way in which the coronation took place? I mean, was it greeted by cheering crowds who were herded in a bayonet? I mean, how does it work? No, I mean, he was clearly... One of the things that Bernier says is that he was clearly very unpopular.

Dara Shukoh had been in Delhi and was the local candidate, in a sense, to succeed his father. And people had seen his humiliation through Delhi. They're just, you know, reeling from that, which they don't like. And no one likes it. And it is this strong reaction of the Delhi crowd that leads Aurangzeb to dispatch and kill Dara Shukoh. And it's possibly also why he chooses to get crowned

at Shalimar, which is outside the town. That's an important point. It's a suburban garden, not within the walls.

And he then settles in. And it's very important to recognize that Aurangzeb's reign is not one thing. He changes in the course of his life. And what is true at the beginning is not true at the end. For a start, at the beginning of his reign, he's in the north and ruling from Delhi, occupying the peacock throne. His father is still effectively under not house arrest, but palace arrest in Agra.

He and Jahanar are locked up on this gorgeous suite of rooms that he himself had built. And Shah Jahan can look out from his tower on the edge of Agra Fort and look at the gorgeous Taj Mahal, the memory of his wife. Well, can I share a story with you? I mean, this is one that guides tell. We don't often have guides. I think it was years and years ago. I was fairly young. I don't think I was working at this point, but we did a tour of the fort and

And we were told sort of rather loftily, oh, these are the rooms in which the emperor was held by the awful Aurangzeb, who to torture him, the view is not exactly on the Taj Mahal. But what he did was he embedded the Koh-i-Noor, this is before I was even thinking about writing a book or even thinking about the Koh-i-Noor at all. He embedded the Koh-i-Noor into the window frame so he could only see the Taj Mahal reflected inside.

in the diamond that he could never touch, you know, just to make the cruelty even worse. But what it does go to show is just how detested, I mean, a cruel man is made sort of comedically cruel by that story. We know for a fact that the Koh-i-Noor was still attached to the peacock throne when Nadir Shah took it in 1739. So it wasn't removed during Shah Jahan's life. And it would have been in the throne when Aurangzeb sat in it.

And I think there's a very interesting sort of psychological view that you can take of Aurangzeb is that he was an unloved son. Yes. In the letters that Shah Jahan… Oh, God, you sound like me. You sound like me doing a psychoanalysis. I'm going to sit back and enjoy you doing this because I agree 100%. Go on. Shah Jahan is writing to Aurangzeb in the Deccan. And Aurangzeb is…

as a young man, is fighting hard, trying to impress his father, trying to take on the enemies of the state. And he does very well. He takes over the states of Bijapur and Golconda, which the Mughals have been trying to get their hands on for 50, 60 years. Shah Jahan had failed and Aurangzeb succeeds. And you see the letters which survive from Shah Jahan to Aurangzeb, who far from

congratulating him as a young man. He tells him that he hasn't done enough or he's failed. Yes, that he's a bit rubbish. You know, you've let me down. And he particularly complains that he hasn't sent enough mangoes or enough grapes or enough pomegranates. Or that he's eaten some of the mangoes that should have been sent to him. And the bananas. He attributes even at his greatest moment, what should be Aurangzeb's greatest moment, he just undermines him. He makes him feel small. It is actually...

It's abusive. It's a really horrible, toxic relationship. And he grows up, the young man showing remarkable courage on the battlefield with this steely sense of duty and self-discipline, turns in the course of his adulthood into this rather sort of miserable man who ends his patronage of painting and music, although it goes on in the court around him, contrary to some accounts, and who...

ends ceremonies like Nowroz, which everybody enjoys, the New Year celebrations. He sits there copying out Qur'ans, stitching skull caps. Stitching prayer caps, yeah, with his own hand and also praying sort of very visibly five times a day. And as you say, visibly being the word. These are public displays of piety. And also what I found really very interesting is that he seeks peace

to have the rubber stamp of Mecca. And he writes to the Sharif of Mecca a few times saying, you know what, I am now the legitimate emperor.

And what he is told in return is, you know what, to turn against your father is not Islamic. And therefore the Sharif doesn't give him what he wants. And he will refuse to give him what he wants until Shah Jahan dies. And he tries again to try and woo the Sharif with gifts. It matters to him. Somebody in a parental figure has to tell the boy he done good and he's not getting it from the Sharif.

He's praying as hard as he can. He's showing, you know, sending gifts to Mecca. It matters to him what they think of it. Or somebody, somebody tell him that he's done all right, but he's not getting it. He's not getting it. And the nettle we need to grasp, because this is, in a sense, one of the main accusations against him is this business of temple destruction. In popular discourse, Aurangzeb is believed to have destroyed hundreds of temples.

including some very important ones in Matra and in Varanasi. And the answer is probably, and I've gone into this in some depth, that he destroyed far fewer than he is popularly reputed to. But he did destroy a lot. There's no question. And it's also true that he did support some temples and cash grants, but there's no equivalent answer.

Absolutely not of the sort of mass. The patronage of his forebears. Yeah, the patronage that took place under Akbar. There's no question that you get, not only does Akbar himself give grants, but all his Hindu noblemen go on a massive temple building spree, the biggest since the 12th century. But that's not the case here. There is a mosque building that takes place. There's a mosque building and also there's some retrenchment

whereby a lot of the most holy idols, which are in, for example, Braj, the area associated with Krishna, are moved.

So the idol that's now in the city palace in Jaipur is said to have been moved at roughly this period. The image of Krishna at Nadwara, which is one of the most holy pilgrimage shrines in India, is said to have been moved at this time to protect it. So there is a basis for this reputation that he has. It's not a historical myth, and no amount of revisionism can really change the contrast with the period of Akbar and the massive...

Hindu-Muslim project and the sense of these two peoples working together to attack common enemies in the Deccan. But also this desire to define yourself as something very different from the father who never loved you and never gave you any credit and didn't want you to take over. So, you know, whereas his forebears, they drank alcohol

They enjoyed music and opium. He bands all of this. Wine's band, Hashish's band. You know, he has this very austere reign, which does not look like anything else that came before.

He does things like, you know, the public celebration of Naros, which, you know, again, we talked about, you know, his forebears having their weight in gold given them at the Persian New Year. And he just replaces it with Eid al-Fitr and says, no, we're not doing Naros anymore. That's not the thing. There is a change in tone. There's no way you can get around that. Completely. But there's also, there is also...

There's also discrimination because this thing about custom duties, you can trace it through that, that there is a two-tier apartheid economy. You know, that if you are a Muslim merchant, you don't pay custom duties anymore. But if you are a Hindu trader, you'll pay them and you'll pay them more than you ever did before. And what's interesting is that we know from foreign sources who haven't got a dog in the race, so to speak,

that the laws which Akbar passed to protect Hindu holy things were rigorously enforced. So, for example, there's a story in one of the Portuguese Jesuit travel writings of a party of Portuguese who go shooting peacocks, which is a Hindu holy bird.

And they're arrested during the reign of Akbar because they've killed a peacock. They claim ignorance and eventually they get out of prison. But they are arrested because this law is enforced. If you kill a holy Hindu bird, you are put in jail. And so there's no sense anymore that the emperor is on your side if you're a Hindu. And there's a question of, I think, chicken and egg at this point, because

Some historians of Azraean, such as Audatrushka, make the point that a lot of this legislation, this Puritan legislation, ending Hashish, ending Naoroz, imposing the jizya tax on Hindus, happen after Aurangzeb has already faced massive defeats in the Deccan. And we need to talk about his Deccan campaign first.

Because that's where a lot of his life is spent. Quite early on, he leaves Delhi and he goes down to the Deccan. And it is what he awakens there, the spirit of resistance that he provokes,

that not only causes the first military defeats that the Mughals face internally, but also, in a sense, cause him to double down and begin to enact more and more anti-Hindu legislation. I was going to say, you know, if we're doing thought experiments, I mean, the Deccan campaigns, what are the years of the Deccan campaigns? Just remind us. The Mughals have been campaigning in the Deccan since the period of Akbar. Jahangir and Shah Jahan both cut their teeth attacking these, what are called the Deccan Sultanates. By that we mean...

set of different cities, Ahmednagar, Bijapur, Golconda, which are independent states, rivals to the Mughals, many of them Shia and many of them in touch with Shia Persia. We talked about the Safavids in an earlier episode.

Often these guys are on the principle that my enemy's enemy is my friend. They're enemies of the Mughals who are Sunni, make an alliance, the two Shia forces, both in the Deccan area of India and in Persia. Aurangzeb leaves Delhi for the last time in 1679, and he never returns.

He spends the whole of the rest of his life in the city called Rangabad after him. So, I mean, before we get to his departure, I mean, there's a date before that, which is of huge significance to Sikhs in particular, but Punjabis in general. And I would suggest, again, if we're doing thought experiments, this one might be a doozy. If you look at some of the history books, it will say the execution of Dev Bahadur becomes one of the Sikh gurus. Now, the story behind it. So Dev Bahadur was a very respected Sikh.

Sikh who has a deal of power, doesn't like what the jizya tax is doing to his people. He talks about it and against it. He talks about religious freedom being very important. And then this pivotal moment happens when the Brahmins of Kashmir come to him and they say, look, we have been told that we have to convert. Aurangzeb has told us we have to convert to Islam or we will die. That's what's going to happen. Those are the choices that he's given us.

And so what he does is he says, you know what, and this is the Sikh story that all Sikhs will be told. He says, no, over my dead body will that happen. And even though, you know, Sikhs are also critical of Hindus, they don't like their idolatrous worship. But he says,

actually because everyone should be free to worship in their own way. If he can convert me, then I will say, then he can convert you. But if he can't convert me, I'm going to make a deal with him that he's not going to be able to convert you. And he goes to Aurangzeb's court and presents himself and says, right, I believe in the right of others to practice their faith peacefully and

if you can't do this to me and you shouldn't do this to me, then you can't do this to them. And in response, I mean, the stories vary in the barbarity of the treatment, but he's sort of kept prisoner people. He loves the tortured in front of him. He himself is tortured. And then he is finally executed for the temerity to stand up to Aurangzeb. And it is said to be in a place in Delhi where there is now a gurdwara, which is

been built to commemorate it. And he is now a guru of the Sikh faith. And the date of his execution, 24th of November, is still commemorated as a day of a great hero. Now, again, factually,

Some of it has been questioned as to how long the torture happened, but he was executed. And who was tortured in front of him, but he was executed. And where even he was executed, but he was executed. All of these things stand. These are the things that are fought over. But as a result of this, Sikhs had an absolute visceral hatred of Aurangzeb. That survives to this day. To this day. I mean, you just mentioned his name and it makes...

people livid and furious and they all will quote you the martyrdom of Tehugbadur. But my thought experiment is this, that if that hadn't have happened, if he hadn't have turned the Sikhs against him as violently as they turned against him after this, that when the East India Company or the British came in and sometimes recruited the Maharajas of princely states to be on their side because they claimed to be the people who eventually would put down Aurangzeb and his type and

That may not have had as much traction as it goes on to have. I don't know. It's a thought experiment. Dismiss it if you like. But I'm just saying this is a seismic event and he is a huge bogeyman to Sikhs in particular. And you know,

Punjabi Hindus because the Kashmiri pundits were the ones who asked for his help as a whole. So what we should do perhaps is take a break now and after the break we will look at the group of people from the Deccan who are credited with rolling back the Mughal Empire and defeating Aurangzeb and that is the Marathas led by their leader Shivaji Bonsley. Music

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Welcome back. So just before the break, William was telling us that these Deccan campaigns are absolutely central to what will become the legacy of Aurangzeb's rule. And let's talk, I mean, you mentioned his name a few times, Shivaji. Can you tell us who he was? Because he's otherwise known as the Great Maratha in India. He's an enormous, bigger now under Morthy than ever before, I might suggest. Yes. I mean, when you go to Bombay, not only is the airport

port named after him, but the museum, which was previously the Prince of Wales, is also named after Shivaji now, as is the railway station, which was previously named after Queen Victoria. So he is the great hero of the Bombay region, and the Marathas, who are the people of that region, remember him as the person that liberated them from slavery.

And I had always assumed that this was an entirely modern view, that it was a view of modern nationalism, probably dating from the 20th century, but that is not the case. And when you read 18th century and 19th century Maratha sources, even at that point, they see Shivaji as the liberator from Mughal oppression. And it's there from a very early period.

So the Marathas are the peasants, but also the landowners who live on the west coast of India in the Western Ghats, those dramatic mountains that rise up from the Arabian Sea.

Now, in the period before Aurangzeb's Deccan campaigns, before he attacks the great Deccan Sultanates of Bijapur and Golconda, the Marathas are serving as guerrilla raiders under the leadership of the Bijapur and Golconda Sultans. And it is...

ending the independent sultanates of Bijapur and Golconda, who lived to a certain extent in harmony with the Marathas, that is the kicking of the hornet's nest, that Aurangzeb unwittingly unleashes these guys against him. And Shivaji Bosley is a charismatic Maratha Hindu warlord, the British historians used to call him. Today, he's regarded as the ultimate Hindu king.

who began launching attacks against the Mughal armies, occupying, in his view, the Deccan.

And they use these guerrilla tactics. They don't go straight up and attack army to army as it happened during the wars of succession and so on. They attack the communication lines. We've seen it before, Toussaint L'Ouverture taking on, you know, the great French forces and the great sort of imperial forces by just harrying the middle supply lines and everything else. It's very much that kind of thing. I just, just before you go on about what they did, I mean, people were remarkably dismissive of them at the time, which, you know, they can look

back and repent their words, they underestimated them. So you've got a Mughal chronicler saying most of the men in the Maratha army are unendowed with illustrious birth and husbandmen, carpenters and shopkeepers abound among their soldiery. And you've got a British Elizabethan traveler, Dr. John Fryer of the East India Company, calling them naked, starved rascals. So everybody underestimates them because they don't have the force and the armor and the shiny weapons, but they are remarkably effective. They are brilliant. Correct.

cutting into the middle of troops and making their lives completely untenable. And even Friar recognises that despite the fact that they are, in his view, naked starved rascals, armed only with lances and long swords two inches wide,

He says they could not defeat the Mughals in a pitch battle, but they were supremely skilled at surprising and ransacking. And so these guys avoid pitch battles. But as soon as the Mughal army is moving from place to place and leaving the walls of their forts,

This peasant army attacks them. And in 1664, there's an unprecedented moment when Shivaji leads them to attack the incredibly wealthy Mughal port of Surat in Gujarat, which is a long way from the heartlands of Maharashtra. Was it a diamond center even then? It was a diamond center even then. Yeah, center of the German trade, even at that period. And

a super rich town filled with warehouses where all the money from foreign trade would come in, where Hajj pilgrims would leave from.

and probably the busiest port in India. And in 1664, to the utter surprise and shock of the Mughals, this peasant army comes out of the countryside and sacks it, takes away all the money from the warehouses. And they do the same in 1670, and then a third time in 1677. And this has never happened before. There's been nothing like this in Mughal history since the time of Babur. There hasn't been a peasant army which has risen up

And there is a long campaign of attrition. And Shivaji sets himself up as the nemesis of Aurangzeb. At one point, he surrenders and goes to Agra, but he's treated so badly by Aurangzeb. He's promised an honorable surrender.

And he's treated so badly that he famously escapes from Agra and does a bunk from the fort. And there's various filmic versions of this when he's hiding in carpets or pots of... Can I... One of the stories has been told so many times in so many ways by so many historians, but one of the...

ones that tickled me, was that he sort of presented to Aurangzeb and Aurangzeb makes him stand with the commoners rather than the aristocrats, which is where he deserves. I mean, this is something that a couple, it must come from a court chronicle. This seems to be true. I think this is not a, yeah, this is not a legend. No, no. So this comes from, you know, this is sourced. Some of the stuff around this is not sourced, but this is sourced. And I'll tell you about that. So he's put among the commoners.

And he doesn't like it. And he starts shouting that this is not where I should be. He won't even engage with Aurangzeb.

because of this slight and he starts shouting and yelling and he's kind of dragged out from the court to be imprisoned with his son. And then you've got the various stories of they're either rolled up in carpet or, you know, they bribe a guard or he gets out dressed as a beggar and his son is dressed as his wife and who's only nine years old. He's got a little son with him at the time and they escape and melt into the night. But, you know, this is a very romantic part.

part of him thumbing his nose at Aurangzeb in front of him defiant till the end what the stories of Bonnie Prince Charlie escaping from Butcher Cumberland are to Scots this is to the Marathas yeah but also not accepting I am not a commoner I may be you know in front of you and you may be right now have the upper hand but I do not bow to you you give me the respect I deserve and you can see why that's compelling as a nationalist figure right so he escapes and he makes it back to uh

the Deccan, and anyone that ever has the chance to go visit the hill forts that Shivaji lived in must do so because they are some of the most spectacular sites in India. They are not on any international tourist trail. I know hardly any foreigners who go to these forts, but they are big places of pilgrimage for Marathas coming up from Bombay. And people do these incredible treks up these mountain, these stiff cliff faces. I mean, they're two or three hour climbs.

And they're magnificent. I mean, they're some of the most dramatic forts you'll see anywhere in the world. And the Mughals are constantly trying to besiege these forts. And then, you know, the Marathas escape from one to the other. Shivaji dies in 1680. And the campaign continues with his son Sambhaji. And then there's a terrible moment on the 11th of March, 1689,

when Sambhaji is captured. He's the eldest son and the successor of Shivaji, and he's brutally tortured for a week. His eyes and tongue are cut out. His skin is flayed with tiger claws before he's savagely put to death. And again, so this is a talisman for so many people. This is

bad diplomacy apart from anything else you know and this is you you sort of think this is not what his grandfather would have done or would have been a bit cannier about doing it but he goes full-on medieval on Shivaji's son and again you know sort of an entire army of haters are refueled who loathe you and they've seen what you've done to Shivaji's son it's just not okay and by 1700

It looks as if with Sambhaji dead, with Shivaji dead, as if Aurangzeb, now a very old man and who's fought in the Deccan for 25 years, it looks as if he's defeated the Marathas. They capture Satara, which is one of the capitals. And as the great Mughal historian Ghulam Hussain Khan puts it, driven that restless nation from its home and reduced it to taking shelter in skulking holes and in fastnesses.

but rather like, you know, later generations of Afghan Mujahideen escaping in the mountains, that, you know, a centralized army with a heavy military system can't take on guerrillas in mountains.

And the Mughals effectively exhaust themselves in this attempt to try and crush these people. And the impression that the Marathas have been defeated is quickly proved to be wrong. There is a whole succession of defeats that begin to take place. And by the time that Aurangzeb is now getting into his, is it his 70s?

Certainly by the time he's a very old man, he begins to suspect that he has created so much resistance and so much hatred that the empire will disintegrate the minute he dies. And there is this wonderful series of letters from the old Aurangzeb, this Puritan writer

hard, ruthless man who's been fighting all his life and realizes on his deathbed that the harder he fights, the more that he creates resistance. And I'd love to read the letter that he writes to his son on his deathbed, because it's a rather remarkable letter. I mean, I'm not at all a fan of Orang Zed, but he shows this

odd self-knowledge in his last moments. And he says, I came alone and I go a stranger. The instant which has passed in power has left only sorrow behind it. I have not been the guardian and protector of the empire. Life, so valuable, has been squandered in vain. God was in my heart, but I could not see him. Life is transient. The past is gone and there is no hope

There's a powerful letter.

Of a broken man. Can I ask you the question? What was going through his head where he thought that 25 years was a good amount of time to devote chasing Marathas from fort to fort and breaking your army and exhausting your coffers? Is this a mark of good policy because you think they could...

collect together and rise up against you or just obsession that actually no one stands against Orang Serp? I think it's a man who can't admit defeat and who keeps raising the stakes hoping that his luck will turn. He's like a guy in a casino who's lost a fortune and continues to put more money on the wheel and each time he loses more and more and by the end

He knows that he's got no more time left. The people he rules are so divided now that the whole thing is going to fall out. And by the time that he dies, and this is the crucial thing, there have been major rebellions among the Rajputs and particularly Mawa, which is Jodhpur, and Miwa, which is Udaipur.

And there's definitely a feeling of sort of exhaustion among the Rajputs of Jaipur led by Jai Singh.

who now is also an old man who supported Aurangzeb at the War of Succession and now can see that he's backed in a sense a very dodgy horse. The dodgy horse though, can I just say, lives for a mogul to an extraordinary age. He's 88 years old when he dies on the 3rd of March 1707. And if you look at portraits of the white bearded man, and there are a few of them, a few miniatures painted of him, he's always sort of head to

Back bent. Even the portraiture of the time, which usually falls over itself. To flatter. Yes, flattering. They give him this broken back, this sad face. Holding one of them, which I think is just...

You know, quite affecting, actually. He seems almost blind because he's holding up, obviously, his Quran very close to his face, trying to read it with his snowy white beard and white clothes, always in white clothes at this time. But they know him to be broken. People paint him, but they're not afraid to paint him as a broken man.

And again, this sort of interesting decision. He decides to be buried. Remember, his father was buried in the Taj Mahal in the most magnificent of all. Yes, off-center, who didn't mean to be. I mean, I love that so much. For those who didn't hear it, he wasn't meant to be, it seems, because the middle tomb, which is right in the center, which is beautifully symmetrical as the Taj is, is for his wife. And it's like he's an add-on at the last minute because he's to the one side of his wife. He is an add-on, yeah.

So in contrast, Aurangzeb always reacting against his dad, who never loved him and never approved of him. He decides to get buried in a simple grave open to the skies, not in Agra, not in Delhi, but in Khundabad, in the middle of the Deccan, where he fought and where he spent most of his adult life, trying and failing to bring the Marathas to heel. And in the years that follow his death,

you see the authority of the Mughal state begin to dissolve. First, the Deccan falls very quickly to the Marathas. Already, they are the rebel force controlling the night and the rural areas. It's only the cities that they don't control. But in the years that follow, they control the cities too.

And what you see after that is this disintegration. A whole string of weak and powerless emperors follows Aurangzeb. Three emperors are murdered. One is, in addition, first blinded with a hot needle. The mother of one ruler is strangled, and the father of another is forced off a precipice on an elephant. According to the Mughal historian Herodin Ilhabadi, and this is my lovely friend Bruce Wanel's translation,

The emperor spent three years and fortunes trying to destroy the foundations of Maratha power, but this tree could not be pulled up by the roots. From Baba to Aurangzeb, the Mughal monarchy of Hindustan has grown ever more powerful,

But now there was war among his descendants, each seeking to pull down the other. The monarch's suspicious attitude towards his ministers and the commanders, habitual interference beyond their remit with short-sighted selfishness and dishonesty, only made matters worse. Disorder and corruption could no longer hide themselves and the once peaceful realm of India.

became the lair of anarchy. That's a really powerful translation, isn't it good? That was the passage which gave me the title of my book. Remembering Bruce Whannell again, which is always a delight to do. A man I never met in life, but I feel I've got to know him. Did you never meet him? Never met him. He lived in this house for 20 years. I know, I know. Well, I've stayed in the Whannell wing. That's obviously when you appropriated your top room. Stayed there.

When he dragged all your best furniture, the Hanging Gardens of Bruce. But this idea of the disintegration, it is so very real and you can trace it because all the Mughal governors decide to split off and do their own thing. So that unity, that strength of answering to a high command, that's not there anymore. No. And what's interesting is that at the height of Mughal power,

The Mughal emperors are very clever in moving their generals around, moving their... Yeah, don't get too comfortable. Yeah, you're never owning the land that you're given as a jagir. It is yours as a loan and as a posting. So rather like the British ambassador to Paris doesn't own the...

the ambassador's house. And it is clearly something that the ambassador lives in and then moves on. This is what happens for most of the Mughal period. The governors circulate, they move from Bengal to Gujarat to the Deccan or to Kashmir. But after Aurangzeb, it becomes father to son. And you end up having these dynasties in Bengal and in Hyderabad, which become hereditary. The model I always use to describe this is imagine that you're

a great gilded Baroque mirror, and you walk up to the third story of the house and you just throw it off the roof. That's what happens to the Mughal Empire. It shatters into a million pieces in the 10, 20 years following Aurangzeb's death. And all these constituent parts, all these cities that the tourists now go trekking around, Udaipur, Jodhpur, Jaipur, Tanjore, Hyderabad,

Murshidabad, all these become independent states. And this is something I think we must do in another series another time. Because of course, what happens is that this unity creates the vacuum

that leaves the door open to the East India Company. Because if you've got a fragmented, if you've got some kind of sort of vainglorious leader who once had to answer to an emperor who spoke for all of them, but on this time you can flatter and perhaps trade with and promise the next door kingdom to, you know, you can make deals if you've got fragmentation. You can't make deals if you're facing a wall.

And there is no war anymore. It's a broken mirror, as you say. And as I said at the beginning, the weirdness of what happens next is so extraordinary. Public limited company, a corporation, a joint stock company run from a single office in London arrives and with a tiny number of Englishmen in charge of it.

It creates a system whereby, thanks to the disunity, it can borrow money from Hindu and Jain moneylenders and recruit armies that are 95% Indian. The sepoys are recruited locally, trained up in European military techniques, and it is they who conquer India for this corporation. It's an unprecedented moment in history.

And you can say, I think, very clearly that it is the failure of Aurangzeb and the way that he broke that alliance with the Rajputs and the Hindus created by Akbar that opens the door to this foreign revolution.

looting and extraction that the East India Company brings about. Well, it's a good place to leave it. And also just sort of thinking, you know, the man who would be the strongest emperor of all presides over the greatest weakening of that 300 year empire. It's fascinating, absolutely fascinating. Till the next time we meet, it's goodbye from me, Anita Anand. And goodbye from me, William Durham-Poole.