IN HIS TESTIMONY to the Select Committee set up by the British Parliament to inquire into the excesses committed by the East India Company in Bengal, this is what Robert Clive said in 1773:
Consider the situation in which victory at Plassey had placed me. A great prince was dependent on my pleasure; an opulent city lay at my mercy; I walked through vaults which were thrown open to me alone, piled on either hand with gold and jewels! Mr. Chairman, this moment, I stand astonished at my own moderation.
Clive’s “moderation” was a paltry sum of ₹ 40 Lakh rupees in an era in which one rupee could buy four maunds (70 kilograms) of rice. The vaults he refers to were located inside the Treasure Chamber of the opulent Murshidabad palace. But even this dazzling treasure was just the partial loot of forty years, most of which had been accumulated between 1717 - 1727 by an Islamic despot and the founder of the first Nawabi dynasty in Bengal. Year after year, he had augmented this treasury with mounds of gold, diamonds, gems, rubies, pearls and jewelry.
His name was Murshid Quli Khan, the founder of Murshidabad, now a decrepit town about 50 kilometres from Palashi, West Bengal.
MURSHID QULI KHAN was born in 1660 as a Brahmana named Suryanarayan Mishra somewhere in Dakshinapatha, and eventually became one of Aurangzeb’s most trusted lieutenants. His life and career almost mirrors that of the more infamous Malik Kafur and Maqbool, the talented minister of Firuz Shah Tughlaq.
When he was just nine, a man named Haji Shafi Isfahani purchased Suryanarayan Mishra, converted him to Islam and renamed him as Muhammad Hādi after circumcising him. He raised this former Brahmana boy like his own son.
Hailing originally from Persia, Haji Shafi was a Shia nobleman who had held various influential posts in the Mughal Empire. In 1668, he was promoted as the Diwan-i-Tan (officer in charge of the Central Budget and disbursement of salaries and wages) of Delhi. Ten years later, he was appointed as the Diwan of Bengal. In 1683, he was transferred to the Deccan where he held the same post until his retirement in February 1690.
Throughout his long career, Haji Shafi kept Muhammad Hādi close to him and gave him a solid training in all the functions of the Diwani department. The gifted boy was also a quick learner who impressed every master that coached him. Growing up in an orthodox Shia household and surrounded by hardcore bigots at office, Hādi quickly lost even the feeblest traces of his Hindu past.
Post retirement, Haji Shafi returned to Persia — his beloved homeland — taking his adopted son with him. There, Haji Shafi subjected Hādi to an even more intense training. In the words of Acharya Jadunath Sarkar, Shafi, “grafted the refinement, orderliness and wisdom of the Persian race on the intelligence and industry of his Brahman stock. I am tempted to imagine that he was a South Indian Brahman…”
Haji Shafi Isfahani died in 1696 and Muhammad Hādi suddenly found himself orphaned and a stranger in Persia. He returned to Hindustan armed with some recommendations and soon landed a job with Haji Abdullah Khurāsāni, the Diwan of Berar (in general, the Vidarbha region). Like Shafi, Abdullah too, was a migrant from Persia.
It didn’t take long for Aurangzeb to notice this young man’s unmatched competence in revenue matters. As we shall see in the future episodes of this series, Muhammad Hādi became Aurangzeb’s right-hand man who ruthlessly implemented a “pure,” Sharia-based financial administration throughout the Mughal empire. In blunt terms, it meant an uncompromising extortion of Hindus to the point of impoverishment or conversion.
Muhammad Hādi’s rise was meteoric. In 1698 — just two years after his return to Hindustan — Aurangzeb took him under his direct employment and elevated him as the Diwan of Hyderabad and as the Faujdar of Yellakonda (now under the Rangareddy district).
With this promotion, Muhammad Hādi’s career acquired massive wings. Akin to a hungry bird of prey, it lay in wait for just the right opportunity. Which came two years later.
BENGAL, THE RICHEST Subaa of the Mughal empire, had become a sultan-sized mess towards the end of Aurangzeb’s torrid life. For centuries, a lineage of corrupt, landed oligarchs in cahoots with the Mughal officialdom, had held the province in their thrall. They fudged accounts and under-reported revenues to the imperial treasury. The officialdom, especially, had entered into sleazy alliances with Europeans who had flocked to Bengal like locusts. The Dutch, the French, the English and the Portuguese made enormous fortunes by bribing the highest levels of Aurangzeb’s bureaucracy in Bengal.
To give only one example of how this venal oligarchy operated, there was a class of the lower-rank bureaucracy known as Kokas. These were the sons of wet-nurses of the Mughal emperor’s sons and grandsons. And they knew the precise nature of the power they wielded and they wielded it with impunity. The source of the Koka power was their unrestrained, personal access to the Mughal harem. They generationally used this power not only for personal gain, but to even bypass and mock the authority of the Diwan himself. If the Diwan took a decision they didn’t like, they would get orders directly from the Mughal emperor overruling the Diwan. The orders were the outcome of the princes and princesses who had been suckled by the mothers of these Kokas. Hard to match this sort of proxy power, enjoyed generationally.
Acharya Jadunath Sarkar pithily characterises this entire clique of grifters as “the old gang of lazy inefficient well-born hereditary official class.” In Aurangzeb’s time, this gang was headed by his own grandson, Muhammad Azim-ud-Din, the Subahdar of the Bengal Suba.
In 1700, Aurangzeb appointed Muhammad Hādi as the Diwan of this Bengal and gave him unlimited powers to reform its revenue administration. With this lucrative elevation, Muhammad Hādi found himself becoming the second most powerful man in the richest province of the Mughal empire. He was now christened Kār Talb Khan.
The bird of prey at last opened its wings wide and soared aloft. To the eternal misfortune of Bengali Hindus. It would wring Bengal’s farmers dry even as it bloated Muhammad Hādi’s coffers and funded Aurangzeb’s serial Jihads against the Hindu Rajas of Bharata. And, in just thirty years after Hādi’s death, the things he set in motion would lead to the pivotal Battle of Palashi which would deliver the whole of Bengal to the British and later, the whole of India to yet another alien power.
To be continued
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