The Fall of the Moghul Empire of Hindustan

by H. G. Keene

Meanwhile the British, finding that the Emperor was unable to protect the provinces about Allahabad, which they had put into his charge, made them over to the Viceroy of Audh, to whose management they had been attached previous to the negotiations that followed the battle of Buxar, and between whose dominions and those of the British they formed the connecting link. They had been abandoned by the Emperor when he proceeded to Dehli, contrary to the remonstrance of the Bengal Council, and though his own lieutenant had reported, and with perfect accuracy, that he could not regard the order to give them up to the Mahrattas as a free act of his master's. It would, indeed, have been an easy step towards the ruin of the British to have allowed the Mahrattas to take possession of this tract, and so form a permanent lodgement upon the borders of the possessions in Bihar and the Eastern Subahs which the British held by the indefeasible and twofold tenure of conquest, and of an Imperial grant. And it so happened that the necessary transfer could not be carried out without an armed demonstration for the expulsion or coercion of the usurping Mahrattas. The expenses of this expedition were naturally met by the Viceroy. Judged even by modern standards, this cannot but be regarded as a perfectly legitimate act of self-defence. It is, however, thus characterized by Macaulay: "The provinces which had been torn from the Mogul were made over to the government of Audh for about half a million sterling.'' The British having joined their forces to those of the Vazir-Viceroy Shujaa, accordingly marched to meet the invaders. Hafiz Rahmat, whom we have lately seen treating with those powers, now became anxious about the money-payments for which he had engaged, in the usual reckless Oriental way, and entered into negotiations with the Mahrattas. In this scheme, the sudden arrival of the British and Audh armies surprised him and he was forced to abandon it for the present and join the allies in an advance against the Mahrattas, who precipitately retired on Etawa, and thence to their own country in May, 1773.

It has been already seen that Mirza Najaf Khan was a family connection of Shujaa-ud-daulah, and an old friend of the British general; and, on the retreat of his Mahratta supporters, he came over to the allied camp, where he met the reception due to his merits.

The allied armies moved on to Anupshahar, accompanied by the ex-minister, who was attended by his faithful Moghuls. This town, which had, as we have seen, been a cantonment of Ahmad the Abdali, was particularly well situated for the advanced post of a power like the British, seeking to hold the balance among the native states of Hindustan. To the north were the fords of Sukhartal, by which the Najibabad Rohillas passed from one part of their dominions to another; to the south was the ford of Ramghat, leading from Aligarh to Bareilly. It remained a British cantonment from this time until some time subsequent to the occupation of the country in general, in 1806; after which the town of Meerut was found more central, and Anupshahar ceased to be a station for troops. It is a thriving commercial entrepot in our days, though much menaced by the Ganges, on whose right bank it stands. The only memorial of the long-continued presence of a British force is now to be found in two cemeteries, containing numbers of tombs from which the inscriptions have disappeared.

At this station Najaf Khan took leave of his patrons, having received from Shujaa-ud-daulah the portfolio (or, to use the Eastern phrase, the pencase), of Deputy Vazir, and from the British General a warm letter of recommendation to the Emperor. It was especially magnanimous on the part of the Vazir to let bygones be bygones, since they included the murder, by himself, of his new Deputy's kinsman and former patron Mohammad Kuli Khan, the former Governor of Allahabad; and it was not an impolitic, though probably unintentional, stroke on the part of Sir R. Barker to lend his assistance towards introducing into the direction of the Imperial councils a chief who was as strongly opposed to the Rohillas as to the Mahrattas.

Armed with these credentials, and accompanied by a small but compact and faithful force, the Mirza proceeded to Court to assume his post. The newly-created premier noble, Zabita Khan, took refuge with the Jats; but Hisam-ud-daulah, who had been for some time in charge of the local revenue (Diwan-i-Khalsa) was dismissed, put under arrest, and made to surrender some of his ill-gotten wealth. An inadequate idea may be formed of the want of supervision which characterized Shah Alam's reign, by observing that this man, who had not been more than two years in charge of the collections of a small and impoverished district, disgorged, in all, no less than fifteen lakhs of rupees. He was succeeded in his appointment by Abdul Ahid Khan (who bears henceforth the title of Majad-ud-daulah), while Manzur Ali Khan, another nominee of the minister's, became Vazir, or Controller of the Household. Of these two officers it is only necessary here to observe, that after events showed the former who was a Musalman native of Kashmir as a character marked by the faithlessness and want of manly spirit for which the people of that country are proverbial in India. The latter was to turn out either a very blundering politician, or a very black-hearted traitor.

Title and lucrative office were now conferred upon the Kashmirian, Abdul Ahid, whose pliant manners soon enabled him to secure a complete influence over his indolent master. Najaf Khan seems to have been equally deceived at the time; but after-events showed the difference between the undeceiving of a worn-out voluptuary, and that of a nature unsuspicious from its own goodness.

Such were the first fruits of Najaf's alliance with the Viceroy of Audh; the price was to be paid in the bestowal of the Imperial sanction upon the final destruction of the Rohilla Pathans. It has been already seen how this province, which ran up between the personal domains of the crown and the fief of the Viceroy of Audh, had been seized, first by Ali Mohammad, and latterly by his son's guardian, the Protector Rahmat Khan. But ever since Ali Mohammad's wars with the late Vazir, Safdar Jang, the rulers of Audh had probably coveted the province, and the retreat of the Mahrattas and their occupation in domestic pursuits in the Deccan afforded just the occasion for which Shujaa-ud-daula was waiting. Much eloquent indignation has been vented by Macaulay and Mill on the subject of the accession to this campaign of the British Governor, Mr. Hastings. As I am not writing a history of British administration, I shall only observe that the Emperor, whose servants the British professed themselves, had conferred the authority usurped by Rahmat Khan upon the Vazir, with whom they had been for some years in alliance. As allies of both parties they were clearly at liberty to throw in their help against the common enemies of both, especially when these chanced to be their own enemies also. The Mahrattas were the foes of all rulers on that side of India; and the Rohillas were either in collusion with the Mahrattas or unable to oppose them. It was essential, if not to the safety of the possessions of the Vazir-Viceroy, at least to British interests in Bengal, that a band of faithless usurpers should not be allowed to hold a country which they could not, or would not, prevent from affording a high road for the Mahrattas at all seasons of the year. That view, perhaps, commended itself to the House of Lords when they finally acquitted Mr. Hastings, after a protracted trial, in which some of the ablest of the Whig orators had been engaged against the accused. It is easy for historians, writing long after the passions, the temptations, the necessities of the moment have ceased to press, to criticize the acts of the past by the "dry light" of pure reason and abstract morality. But the claims of necessity should not be ignored in delivering what is intended to form a sort of judicial award.

It is perhaps a mark of the good sense and justice of the English nation that, when they had considered the matter calmly, they should have come to the conclusion that to condemn Hastings would be to condemn their own existence in India. Such a conclusion would logically require their retirement from the country _ a step they did not feel at all called upon to take. This appears the moral of the acquittal. Even Macaulay, who objects to the decision of the Peers acquitting Hastings as inadmissible at the bar of history nevertheless confesses that it was generally approved by the nation. At all events, this particular affair was dropped out of the charges even before the impeachment began.

But, however important to the existence of the British in India might be the possession of this frontier territory by the strongest ally they could secure, the conduct of the Emperor (or rather of Mirza Najaf, in whose hands he was not quite a free agent) remains the special subject of inquiry in this place. I think, however, that both the minister and his master were quite justified in wishing to transfer the province of Rohilkand from the hands of Rahmat to those of the Vazir. It has been already seen that the Pathan usurpers of that province had always been foes of the Moghul power, since the first rebellion of Ali Mohammad, with the solitary exception of the campaign of 1761, when they joined their Abdali kinsman at Panipat. It has also been seen that the fords by which the Ganges could be crossed in the cold weather were in their country, but that they could never hold them; and that, lastly, they were known to have been lately in treaty with the Mahrattas, without reference to the interests of the Empire. Eastern politicians are not usually or especially scrupulous; but, when it is remembered that the Rohillas were feudatories who had neither the will nor the power to be faithful, it must follow that here were substantial considerations of vital importance to the Dehli Government, sufficient to give them a fair inducement to sanction the enterprise of one who was their chief minister and most powerful supporter.

Of Shujaa's own motives there is not so much palliation to offer. He had often received aid from the Rohillas, and was under personal obligations to them, which ought to have obliterated all earlier memories of a hostile character; and, whatever grounds the Emperor may have had for consenting to an attack upon the Pathans, or the British for aiding the same, none such are likely to have seriously actuated the Vazir in his individual character. If he thought the Rohillas were inclined to negotiate with the Mahrattas, he must have seen how those negotiations had been broken off the instant he came to their assistance; and if he wished to command the movements of the Mahrattas, he might first have endeavoured to strengthen the hands of the Imperial Government, and to cordially carry out his share of the treaty of 1772.