Within a span of 10 years since Shivaji made his ingenious escape, hidden in a fruit basket under Aurangzeb’s nose he managed to give the Marathas a working government and was the master of a kingdom that stretched like an archipelago across the Deccan.
When he passed away in 1680, the foundations of the Maratha empire were so deeply entrenched that only the British Indian army would be able to dislodge it after 130 years.
In Delhi, Aurangzeb was becoming alarmed at the turn of events as the Hindus and the Shiites reinforced their hold over South India. They had to be stopped somehow and in 1682, the emperor proclaimed war on all enemies of the faith and moved his armies and his court to the Deccan.
However, his efforts were in vain because 25 years later his war was at a stalemate and his empire was in chaos.
Two pyrrhic victories (see box) against the Shiite kings — one in Bijapur and another in Golkonda — decimated a fifth of the army and another segment succumbed to the bubonic plague.
Another factor was that Aurangzeb’s heavy-footed infantry was no match for the nimble footed Maratha hill fighters. The rugged Marathas travelled as fast as deer, knew every rise and lane of the jagged Deccan landscape, could go days without water and weeks without food.
When they fought, they fought with passion unlike the Mughal soldiers who were mercenaries and fought only for pay. The Marathas battled for a cause that they considered holy.
Like Russia proved to be the downfall of Napoleon, Aurangzeb was swallowed up by the Deccan, the victim of an elusive hydra headed enemy, a merciless climate and boundless tracts of empty space.
During the many years of his absence from Delhi, the dancing girls and the wine vendors he had so despised crept back to their stations. The treasury had been emptied by the endless wars. Arts and learning were only an echo of their former splendour and lawlessness was rife in the towns and in the highways.
The bureaucrats were corrupt and careless without the emperor’s supervision, less faithful to the cause than to the highest bidder. The Mughal empire may have been bigger than ever before, but it had a weak and a rotten core.
In 1707, at the age of 89, his body racked by innumerable ailments, Aurangzeb died.
He died a disillusioned and unhappy man who had no illusions of his greatness. He wrote shortly before his death, “I have not done well for the country or its people. My years have gone by profitless. Life is transient and the lost moment never comes back. There is no hope for me in the future. From father to son, six successive generations of Mughal emperors had ruled India in the 181 years since Babur had seized power. In the succeeding 150 years, there will be 11 more Mughal rulers, but the days of glory were definitely past.”
Within a few decades after Aurangzeb’s demise, the Mughal empire collapsed, the victim of invaders and its own dead weight.
Aurangzeb’s religious policy had severed the right arm of the state, the Rajputs, and only a lax and indifferent army was there to replace it. Although the army was gigantic, it was filled with soldiers of dubious loyalties, drifters and freebooters recruited from within India and also places far away as France.
(Reference: The Taj Mahal by David Carroll)