ANAND RAO NARSI YERULKAR personified the contempt in which the Marathas held Shah Alam II. From 1780-86, Yerulkar was Mahadji Scindia’s diplomatic agent to the court of Shah Alam. In essence, his task was to “manage” this Mughal weakling. Throughout his short-lived diplomatic tenure, Yerulkar wasted no opportunity to humiliate Shah Alam.
On the Holi festival of 1786, Yerulkar got drunk and summoned an old man and a small boy. He dressed them up in rags, bedecked them with glittering ornaments and paraded them publicly. The symbolism of this hideous sight was unmistakable. The old man was the bankrupt Shah Alam II and the boy, the Shah’s favourite daughter.
Yet, Shah Alam remained unperturbed. His only concern in life was uninterrupted and unbridled sensual enjoyment. Shah Alam was the ultimate posterboy of excesses. No shame was too great to violate his devotion to lifelong profligacy. No familial bond restrained his addiction to vice. Even when he was fully bankrupt and indebted to the point of no return, he continued to borrow money solely in order to fund his limitless indulgences.
European eyewitnesses have recorded graphic accounts of Shah Alam II’s all-encompassing depravity and his utter lack of even basic humanity. According to these accounts, Shah Alam had birthed about eighty children. When the sons grew up, he got them married and threw them in the prison inside the Red Fort complex. The French administrator Comte de Modave calls them Shahzada Prisoners, who were given a daily allowance of one rupee. However, they were allowed to lead happy marital lives, which in turn produced abundant progeny. This reckless system generated the obvious outcome. In Jadunath Sarkar’s memorable verbiage,
A royal family which bred with the fecundity of rabbits, needed an ever-increasing supply of money…The inevitable result was beggarliness, starvation, and clamorous outbursts in the Delhi palace which never ceased till the British conquest.
A small example suffices to understand the level of Shah Alam’s beggary. In 1789, Mahadji Scindia gave ₹ 300 per day “in order to meet his immediate wants.”
These apart, Shah Alam liberally splurged money on the Islamic clergy. To invoke Modave again,
I have seen him surrounded by faqirs and mullas…These mullas leap up, dance, turn on their feet, their arms in the air, with a prodigious rapidity and make a hundred other extravagant acts.. . . Sometimes the mullas approach his person extending their arms in front of them, their fists pressed one against the other. The Padishah rises up, applies his hands to the fists of the mullas, and then passes his hands, sanctified by that touch, to his face and to his beard with a seriousness which gives me a great desire to laugh.
Opium addiction was Shah Alam’s other great distinction. By the time he ascended the Mughal throne, the East India Company was already running a lucrative trade in opium.
John Shore (later, 1st Baron Teignmouth), the Governor General of Bengal, in a letter dated March 25, 1797 to William Wilberforce gives an explicit description of Shah Alam’s opium-addiction.
The present possessor of the throne, the descendant of Tamerlane, lives in darkness, surrounded with empty state and real penury, a pensioner on the niggard bounty of the Mahrattas, from whom he receives less than the Duke of Bedford does from his tenants. He supplicates me on the terms of royalty… For the last seventeen years of his life, he has been in the habit of taking opium, the produce of this country, and, from its adulteration, less powerful than that which comes from Turkey, in perhaps a fifth degree. He began with a very small quantity, about two grains per diem; and he now takes four pills of about twenty grains each, in the course of the twenty-four hours; certainly equal to sixty-four grains of the strongest Turkey opium. He assures me that it never affects his appetite or strength, and there is no appearance of decay in either.
Shah Alam’s corrupt ministers were his comrades in this vice; especially his notorious Nawab, Abdul Ahad Khan, who on November 26, 1778 wrote a pathetic letter to Cornwallis begging him for copious amounts of opium. Here is an excerpt from the Calendar of Persian Correspondence:
DEBAUCHERY WAS UNARGUABLY Shah Alam’s enduring vice. His boiling loins neither cooled down nor rested even after he was blinded at age sixty. Wikipedia estimates that he had nine official begums and fourteen official children, a gross understatement. If anything, Shah Alam II maintained a city-sized Zenana, which bloated in direct proportion to his engorged lust.
Before examining specific details, let’s read Jadunath Sarkar’s overall assessment of Shah Alam II’s incurable randiness.
…boundless sensuality had disgraced the character of Shah Alam…He kept the swarm of princes and princesses confined in the palace-prison of Delhi fort on starvation allowances, and at the same time constantly added new beauties to his over-crowded harem.
In 1778, the Swiss engineer, Henri de Polier — a close aide of Robert Clive — visited Delhi and stayed there for an extended period. He was occasionally in Shah Alam’s court and this is what he observed:
Great fondness of flattery and too unreserved confidence in his ministers,. . . together with an inordinate love of women and a strong propensity to ease and indolence, form the less shining parts of Shah Alam’s character.. . The king has a numerous family, above 500 women and nearly 70 children, male and female…
But the most damning evidence of Shah Alam’s lasciviousness comes from the pen of the aforementioned Modave:
He has been seized with a sordid avarice, which . . . has gone beyond all bounds. This monarch has two qualities which seem hereditary in his house: he is…very much given to women. He passes his life in their midst, having no less than 500 in his seraglio.
Shah Alam II had pauperised even the ruins of the Mughal Empire and had reduced it to a vast harem that stretched from the Red Fort to Palam. On September 14, 1803, the victorious English army officially ended this empire of alien Muslim invaders. Shah Alam II became a puppet, once more, under this new master, sitting under the shredded Mughal canopy.
On November 19, 1806, Shah Alam died of natural causes. He died as he had lived: a coward, an imbecile, a slave, a degenerate, a wastrel, and as the author of the preface to Mughal extinction under Bahadur Shah Zafar.
Series concluded.
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