After Nadir Shah gave the signal for the massacre of Delhi’s citizens, he sat back to watch the grisly proceedings from the roof of a nearby mosque. A witness to the holocaust left behind his impressions:
On the morning of Sunday, March 11, 1739, an order went forth from the Persian emperor for the slaughter of Delhi’s inhabitants. Chandni Chowk, the fruit market, the Dariba Bazaar and the buildings around the Jama Masjid were set afire and reduced to ashes. The inhabitants, one and all, were slaughtered. Here and there, some people offered resistance, but in most places were butchered unresistingly. The Persians laid violent hands on everything and everybody — cloth, jewels, dishes of gold and silver, were all acceptable spoil.
Delhi was looted, burned and dismantled stone by stone. The streets were strewn with corpses like dead leaves. The city was reduced to ashes and looked like a burnt plain. The following day, the pillage continued. The bodies that had accumulated in heaps lay unattended and plague broke out. When Nadir Shah sealed the doors to the granaries, famine broke out. The plundering continued for eight weeks and in the end, some 50,000 people lay dead. Finally, after numerous supplications by Mohammed Shah, the slaughter was halted and Nadir Shah’s army marched out of Delhi but not before loading itself with enough spoils to eliminate all taxes in Persia for the next three years.
An eyewitness account states:
All the regal jewels and property and the contents of the treasury were seized by the Persian conqueror. He thus became possessed of treasure of the amount of 60 lakh rupees and the jewels, many of which were unrivalled in beauty were valued at about 50 crore. The peacock throne alone, constructed at great pain during the reign of Shah Jahan, cost one crore of rupees. Elephants, horses and whatever else pleased the emperor’s eye became his spoil. In short, the accumulated wealth of 348 years changed masters in a moment.
Thirty-two years after the death of Aurangzeb, the Mughal empire was no more. With the conquerors went not only the treasure, but also the last of the empire, Afghanistan and much of the Indus valley.
With it also went the prestige that had kept the Mughal name sacrosanct and in later years, despite minor revivals, the empire existed in title alone. Delhi was a tiny island, amidst a churning ocean of emerging political powers.
For nine years, a stunned and saddened Mohammed Shah remained on the throne, incapable of doing anything, master of a charred and desolate ghost city.
When he died in 1748, he was followed by Ahmed Shah, a debauched nonentity, who for the six years of his reign remained under the firm control of the eunuchs and his wives. Although his wazir Safdar Jung sincerely tried to bring order to what remained of the government, Safdar Jung’s successor, Imad-ul-Mulk, had less allegiance to the state or the crown. He said, “The emperor has displayed his unfitness to rule. Let him be deposed and a worthier son of the house of Timur raised to the throne.”
The worthier son Alamgir II, was a weak and pious aristocrat who was content to remain in the mosque while his treasury was stripped, his wives starved and his capital city sacked by another Persian terror, Ahmed Shah Durrani who reduced Delhi once again to chaos and rubble.
When Alamgir II finally showed some interest in his job, his wazir became annoyed and had the upstart thrown out of the palace window.
Eventually some faithful subjects retrieved the body of the poor emperor from the river bank and interred it within the walls of Humayun’s tomb.
In 1799 Alamgir’s son, Shah Alam II, was crowned emperor. During the 47 years of what can only with reservation be termed his reign, Shah Alam II was the prisoner of bandits, the puppet of the Marathas, the mouthpiece of various Bengali potentates and finally the prisoner of the British, who marched into Delhi in 1803 and found the blind and tattered old king cowering beneath the royal canopy.
Reference
The Taj Mahal by David Carroll