#first and last emperor of delhi sultanate

[majirom720]

History of Bangladesh

1. Ancient Bengal (Before 1204 AD)

Prehistoric Bengal:

The history of Bengal dates back to ancient times, with archaeological evidence of human settlements dating to around 4000 BC. The early inhabitants were proto-Australoid, Tibeto-Burman, and Dravidian people. Bengal's history was largely shaped by the Ganges-Brahmaputra delta, which fostered trade and agriculture.

Vedic and Mauryan Period:

During the Vedic period, Bengal was known as "Vanga," and it is mentioned in early Sanskrit literature. Bengal was later integrated into the Mauryan Empire under Emperor Ashoka (3rd century BC), who promoted Buddhism across his vast empire. After the fall of the Mauryan Empire, Bengal was ruled by several local dynasties, including the Pundras and the Samatatas.

Gupta Empire and Bengal's Flourishing Culture:

During the Gupta period (320-550 AD), Bengal became an important cultural and political region. The Guptas, with their capital in Pataliputra, dominated much of northern India, including Bengal. The Buddhist Pala Dynasty (8th-12th century AD) succeeded the Guptas in Bengal, ushering in an era of prosperity. The Palas were great patrons of Buddhism and established universities like Nalanda and Vikramshila.

The Sena Dynasty:

The Hindu Sena dynasty (c. 1095-1204 AD) replaced the Palas. The Sena rulers were patrons of Brahmanical Hinduism and played a key role in shaping Bengali culture and society. They were the last major Hindu rulers of Bengal before the Muslim conquest.

2. Medieval Bengal (1204–1757 AD)

Early Muslim Conquests:

The Muslim conquest of Bengal began with the Turkish general Bakhtiyar Khalji’s invasion in 1204. Khalji’s forces defeated the Sena dynasty, and Bengal was gradually absorbed into the Delhi Sultanate. Over the next several centuries, Bengal became a key region in the Islamic world, ruled by various Muslim dynasties, including the Bengal Sultanate (1352–1576), which was known for its wealth and cultural diversity.

The Bengal Sultanate:

The Bengal Sultanate flourished during the 14th and 15th centuries as an independent Muslim kingdom. It was a center of trade, culture, and learning, connecting the Indian subcontinent with the broader Islamic world. The Sultans built architectural marvels, such as mosques and forts, many of which still stand today. The most prominent sultan, Ghiyasuddin Azam Shah, was a patron of Persian literature and established diplomatic relations with China.

Mughal Period (1576–1757):

The Mughals, under Emperor Akbar, annexed Bengal in 1576 after a protracted struggle. Bengal became one of the wealthiest provinces of the Mughal Empire due to its fertile lands and thriving trade. Dhaka was established as the capital of Bengal during the Mughal period and became a key center for commerce and craftsmanship, particularly in textiles. The Nawabs of Bengal, appointed by the Mughal emperors, effectively ruled the region, but they gradually gained autonomy.

3. Colonial Bengal (1757–1947)

British East India Company:

The turning point in Bengal’s history came with the Battle of Plassey in 1757, when British forces, led by Robert Clive, defeated Nawab Siraj-ud-Daulah. This marked the beginning of British control over Bengal and eventually over much of India. Bengal became the first region to come under direct control of the British East India Company. The company’s exploitation of Bengal’s resources, combined with heavy taxation, led to economic distress and famines, such as the Bengal Famine of 1770.

Bengal Renaissance:

Despite British exploitation, the 19th century saw a cultural and intellectual awakening in Bengal, known as the Bengal Renaissance. Influential figures such as Raja Ram Mohan Roy, Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar, and Rabindranath Tagore played crucial roles in reforming society, promoting education, and fighting against social injustices like Sati and child marriage. Bengal became the epicenter of Indian nationalism, with movements like the Young Bengal Movement and the Brahmo Samaj gaining prominence.

Partition of Bengal (1905) and Reversal (1911):

In 1905, the British colonial administration, under Lord Curzon, divided Bengal into two provinces: East Bengal and Assam, and West Bengal. This decision, seen as a tactic to divide and weaken the growing nationalist movement, sparked widespread protests and boycotts. The partition was eventually reversed in 1911, but the seeds of communal tension between Hindus and Muslims had already been sown.

The Independence Movement:

Bengal was at the forefront of the Indian independence movement. Leaders such as Subhas Chandra Bose, Surya Sen, and Chittaranjan Das played significant roles in resisting British rule. The Quit India Movement of 1942 also found strong support in Bengal. However, communal violence between Hindus and Muslims escalated during this period, especially during events like the Calcutta Killings of 1946.

4. The Partition and Pakistan Era (1947–1971)

Partition of Bengal (1947):

With the end of British rule in 1947, Bengal was once again divided, this time along religious lines. The western part became the Indian state of West Bengal, while the eastern part became East Pakistan, a part of the newly-formed state of Pakistan. Despite being geographically and culturally distant from West Pakistan, East Bengal (East Pakistan) became part of a nation dominated by West Pakistan.

Discontent in East Pakistan:

East Pakistan’s relationship with West Pakistan was strained from the beginning. The people of East Pakistan felt marginalized and exploited by the political and economic policies of the central government in West Pakistan. The imposition of Urdu as the sole national language in 1948 sparked the Bengali Language Movement, which culminated in the deaths of several students in Dhaka on February 21, 1952. This day is now commemorated as International Mother Language Day.

Economic disparities between the two wings of Pakistan further fueled discontent. East Pakistan, despite being the more populous and resource-rich region, received far less development aid and political representation. The situation worsened when the government of Pakistan, under President Ayub Khan, pursued policies that favored the western wing at the expense of the east.

Rise of Bengali Nationalism:

By the 1960s, Bengali nationalism was on the rise, led by Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and his party, the Awami League. The demand for greater autonomy for East Pakistan grew stronger. In 1966, Sheikh Mujib presented the Six-Point Movement, which called for significant political and economic autonomy for East Pakistan. The movement gained widespread support, especially after the devastating Bhola Cyclone in 1970, which killed hundreds of thousands of people and was met with an inadequate response from the central government.

5. The Bangladesh Liberation War (1971)

1970 General Election:

In the general elections of 1970, the Awami League, led by Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, won a landslide victory in East Pakistan, securing 167 out of 169 seats allocated to the region in the National Assembly. This gave the Awami League an overall majority in the Pakistan National Assembly, but the ruling elite in West Pakistan, led by President Yahya Khan and Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, refused to hand over power.

Operation Searchlight and the Declaration of Independence:

Tensions escalated, and on March 25, 1971, the Pakistan Army launched Operation Searchlight, a brutal crackdown on the people of East Pakistan. Thousands of Bengalis, including students, intellectuals, and political leaders, were killed. On the night of March 25, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman declared Bangladesh's independence, and the Liberation War began.

The Liberation War:

The war for Bangladesh’s independence lasted nine months, from March to December 1971. The Mukti Bahini (Liberation Army), comprised of Bengali military defectors and civilians, waged a guerrilla war against the Pakistan Army. India, under Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, supported the Bengali cause and provided training and arms to the Mukti Bahini. In December 1971, following a full-scale war between India and Pakistan, the Pakistan Army surrendered in Dhaka, and Bangladesh was born as an independent nation on December 16, 1971.

6. Post-Independence Bangladesh (1971–Present)

Early Years and Sheikh Mujib’s Leadership:

Bangladesh emerged from the war of independence devastated, with millions of lives lost and much of its infrastructure destroyed. Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, widely revered as the "Father of the Nation," became the first prime minister. His government focused on rebuilding the country, but the challenges were immense. Famine, economic instability, and political unrest plagued the early years of independence.

In 1975, Mujib introduced a one-party system through the BAKSAL (Bangladesh Krishak Sramik Awami League) party, which led to dissatisfaction among many factions. On August 15, 1975, Sheikh Mujib and most of his family were assassinated in a military coup, plunging the country into political chaos.

Military Rule and Political Instability:

Following Mujib’s

[jyotiiiii]

Explore These 5 Historical Sites In Haryana

Agroha Dham, Hisar

The magnificent temple of Agroha of Hisar district is traced back to the 3rd century and is dedicated to the Hindu Goddess Mahalakshmi and Maharaja Agrasen. Communities such as Agrawal and Agrahari claim their origins in Agroha. It has references in Ain-i-Akbari while excavations led to ancient structures pot-shards, coins and seals to surface from the site. The temple is home to several caves, among which are the longest caves in India. Around the Agroha temple, travellers can enjoy boating and benefit from the nearby park for picnicking, reading under a tree and lying on the grass.

Jal Mahal, Narnaul

The brilliant structure of Jal Mahal was built by Shah Quli Khan, the governor of Narnaul during the period of Emperor Akbar. Though now it serves only as a tourist attraction, it used to be a fortification with an artificial lake in the medieval era. With the water having receded exposing lush greenery around the structure, the palace tends to delight visitors, especially when you have an intimate accomplice.

Barsi Gate , Hansi

Barsi Gate was constructed by Famous ruler Alauddin Khilji. Built in Sultanate style of architecture, the gate was built as a massive defensive structure of Islamic period. Barsi Gate is among the five gates of the Hansi walled city that are still in existence. The remaining four gates, namely, Umra Gate, Gosain gate, Delhi gate, and Hisar Gate, were destroyed with the passage of time. Standing in the middle of a market, the structure, today, stands as an imposing gateway and walls that were used for protecting the City of Hansi. The height of the gateway is about 30 meters.

Ballabgarh Fort

There is a legend behind the birth and existence of the Ballabhgarh Fort. The story of this fort is another example of rags- to- riches.  The founding ruler of the fort, Raja Balram, was not a born king. He was a poor farmer, named Ballabh Singh. This opportunity of becoming a king was bestowed upon him by destiny, when he discovered two gold laden mules in his farm, one night. Thus, over the night he became rich, built this fort, and began being called Raja Balram. Hence, the fort is partially named after him, i.e. Ballabhgarh. Raja Nahar was a descendent of Raja Balram, after whom the town of Nahargarh is named .King Nahar also ordered to get the ancient historical monuments in the fort to be restored in their original splendor and patina. Renovation has brought the magnificence of the fort back from the silent ruins, back to its original glory. The Ballabhgarh Fort is the most enchanting site of heritage today in Haryana.

Ibrahim Lodhi Tomb , Panipat

Despite being just an open grave on a platform, this humble structure holds immense historical significance. It marks the final resting place of the last Sultan of Delhi, who bravely fought against Mughal emperor Babur in the First Battle of Panipat Situated near the dargah of Sufi saint Bu Ali Shah and maintained by the Panipat Municipal Corporation, this tomb is a constant reminder of our past and an important symbol of our heritage..

[rajasthantourtaxi2]

3 Nights 4 Days Golden Triangle tour by Rajasthan Tour Taxi Company.

introductory Three of India's most famous cities—Delhi, Agra, and Jaipur—can be experienced on the captivating 3 Nights 4 Days Golden Triangle tour. This route provides an insight into India's unique legacy and is well-known for its vibrant culture, rich history, and breathtaking architecture. The Rajasthan Tour Taxi Company's 3 Nights 4 Days Golden Triangle tour is a great option for vacationers as it guarantees a comfortable and unforgettable experience.

Rajasthan Tour Taxi Company: Why Opt for It? Summary of the Company The Rajasthan Tour Taxi Company has a solid reputation for offering dependable and superior services. With a focus on travels around Rajasthan and other regions of India, they offer customised packages that cater to the requirements of each and every visitor.

Provided Services The organization provides skilled drivers, informed guides, and well-maintained cars. To guarantee a flawless trip experience, their packages include hotel stays, scenic tours, and hassle-free transportation.

Client Opinions and Testimonials Tourists have given Rajasthan Tour Taxi Company high marks for their diligence and expertise. Excellent customer service, punctuality, and well-planned itineraries are highlighted in the positive ratings.

Day 1: Delhi arrival Arrival and Hotel Registration A representative from Rajasthan Tour Taxi Company will welcome you upon your arrival in Delhi, marking the start of your experience. You can unwind and freshen yourself before beginning your trip with a seamless journey to your accommodation.

Taking a Look at Old Delhi A lively neighborhood rich in charm and history is Old Delhi. One of India's biggest mosques, Jama Masjid, will be your next stop after you see the magnificent Red Fort, a UNESCO World Heritage site. You may sample street food and local culture by taking a rickshaw ride around Chandni Chowk's winding streets.

Day Two: New Delhi Touring and Getting to Know Agra Rashtrapati Bhavan and India Gate are visited. India Gate, a military memorial honoring Indian soldiers, is the first stop on your second day of sightseeing. You will then proceed to drive by the opulent Rashtrapati Bhavan, which serves as the President of India's official residence.

Visiting Qutub Minar and the Tomb of Humayun Qutub Minar, the world's highest brick minaret, and Humayun's Tomb, an architectural forerunner to the Taj Mahal, are the next sights on the journey. Offering interesting insights into India's Mughal and Sultanate periods, these sites are recognized as UNESCO World Heritage sites.

Heading towards Agra You are going to leave for Agra in the afternoon. You can arrive in time for your hotel check-in and evening relaxation after a four to five hour trip.

Day 3: Delhi Seeing the sights and traveling to Jaipur Dawn a trip to the Taj Mahal A sunrise visit to the Taj Mahal is what will undoubtedly be the highlight of your trip. Enjoy a peaceful start to your day as you take in the splendor of this white marble mausoleum, illuminated by the gentle morning light.

Examining Agra Fort After breakfast, you'll go to another UNESCO World Heritage site, Agra Fort. The Mughal rulers lived primarily in this red sandstone fort until 1638, during which time they built numerous exquisite palaces and mosques.

En route to Jaipur, stopping at Fatehpur Sikri While traveling to Jaipur, you will make a stop at Fatehpur Sikri, an abandoned city constructed by Emperor Akbar. Its unique architecture and well-preserved structures make it an intriguing destination to explore.

Arrival and Hotel Registration After arriving in Jaipur in the evening and checking into your hotel, you'll have the remainder of the night to unwind or take your time exploring the energetic city.

Day 4: Touring Jaipur and Saying Farewell Taking a Look at Amber Fort The first stop on your last day is Amber Fort, an impressive fort perched on a hill and renowned for its creative Hindu-style details. Elephant rides are available to reach the fort, where you may tour the stunning courtyards and palaces.

City Palace and Jantar Mantar visits After that, you'll go to the City Palace, a royal mansion that houses museums displaying relics from Jaipur's imperial past. Jantar Mantar, an astronomical observatory with remarkable stone instruments, is located nearby.

Purchasing at Neighborhood Markets A shopping haven is Jaipur. Spend some time shopping in the neighborhood markets for keepsakes like textiles, jewelry, and handicrafts that showcase the lively culture of the city.

Going out of Jaipur After your tour comes to an end, you'll be taken to the train or airport to continue your journey, bringing back priceless memories of India's Golden Triangle.

In conclusion Three of the most famous cities in India may be experienced in depth and thoroughly with the Rajasthan Tour Taxi Company's 3-Nights 4-Days Golden Triangle Tour. This journey offers the ideal balance of history, culture, and adventure, taking in the vibrant streets of Delhi, the enduring beauty of the Taj Mahal, and the regal magnificence of Jaipur. Whether you are an experienced tourist or a first-time visitor, this trip is sure to leave you with priceless memories.

Q&As What is covered by the tour package for the Golden Triangle? Hotel accommodations, transportation, guided tours, and admission costs to all major attractions are all included in the package.

Is the tour appropriate for families with kids? Absolutely, families and travelers of all ages can enjoy this excursion.

What kind of lodging is available? The journey includes accommodations in cozy, well-regarded hotels; depending on your preferences, you can choose from low-cost to high-end hotels.

How can I reserve a spot on the tour? Via the Rajasthan Tour Taxi Company website or by getting in touch with customer service, you can make a reservation for the tour.

When would be the best to embark on the Golden Triangle tour? October through March are the best months to do the journey because of the nice weather that is perfect for sightseeing.

[daily-quiz-join]

List of the rulers of Mughal empire in chronolical Order

ameReignImportant eventsBabur1526-1530Founded the Mughal Empire, defeated Ibrahim Lodi at the First Battle of PanipatHumayun1530-1540, 1555-1556Overthrown by Sher Shah Suri, regained the throne but died shortly afterAkbar1556-1605The greatest Mughal emperor, expanded the empire to its greatest extent, promoted religious tolerance and cultural synthesisJahangir1605-1627Continued the expansion of the empire, patronized the arts and architectureShah Jahan1628-1658Built the Taj Mahal and other magnificent buildingsAurangzeb1658-1707The last great Mughal emperor, expanded the empire further but also faced increasing religious tensionsBahadur Shah I1707-1712Faced challenges from his own sons and the Maratha EmpireJahandar Shah1712-1713Deposed and murdered by his brother FarrukhsiyarFarrukhsiyar1713-1719Deposed and blinded by his wazir, Zulfiqar Khan KokaltashMuhammad Shah1719-1748Faced challenges from the Maratha Empire and the AfghansAhmad Shah Bahadur1748-1754Faced challenges from the Maratha Empire and the Rohilla AfghansAlamgir II1754-1759Faced challenges from the Maratha Empire and the British East India CompanyShah Alam II1759-1806Restored to the throne by the British East India Company, ruled under their suzeraintyAkbar II1806-1837Faced challenges from the British East India CompanyBahadur Shah II1837-1857Last Mughal emperor, deposed by the British East India Company during the Indian Rebellion of 1857

All the important rulers of the Mughal Empire:

The Mughal Empire was founded by Babur in 1526 and lasted for over 300 years. During this time, the empire was ruled by a number of important emperors, each of whom made significant contributions to the empire's history. Babur was the founder of the Mughal Empire. He was a descendant of Timur and Genghis Khan, and he came to India from Central Asia in order to conquer the Delhi Sultanate. Babur was a skilled military commander and administrator, and he quickly established his authority over the empire. He also promoted trade and commerce, and encouraged the arts and architecture. Humayun was the son of Babur. He was a weak ruler, and he was overthrown by Sher Shah Suri, a Afghan warlord. Humayun was forced to flee India, and he spent the next 15 years in exile. Akbar was the greatest of the Mughal emperors. He ruled from 1556 to 1605, and during his reign the empire reached its greatest extent. Akbar was a tolerant ruler, and he promoted religious harmony in the empire. He also patronized the arts and architecture, and his reign is considered to be the golden age of the Mughal Empire. Jahangir was the son of Akbar. He ruled from 1605 to 1627, and he continued the expansion of the empire. He was also a patron of the arts and architecture, and he commissioned many beautiful buildings, including the Shalimar Gardens in Kashmir. Shah Jahan was the son of Jahangir. He ruled from 1628 to 1658, and during his reign the empire reached its peak of power and glory. Shah Jahan is best known for building the Taj Mahal, one of the most beautiful buildings in the world. Aurangzeb was the last great Mughal emperor. He ruled from 1658 to 1707, and during his reign the empire began to decline. Aurangzeb was a devout Muslim, and he imposed harsh religious laws on his subjects. This led to widespread discontent, and the empire began to fall apart after his death. The Mughal Empire came to an end in 1857, when the British East India Company deposed the last Mughal Read the full article

[onenesstaxi]

Exploring Delhi on a One-Way Trip from Chandigarh: A Taxi Ride to Remember

If you're planning a trip from Chandigarh to Delhi, you might want to consider taking a taxi for a comfortable and hassle-free journey. One of the most convenient and reliable options for your Chandigarh to Delhi taxi ride is OneNess Taxi. With a fleet of well-maintained and fully-equipped cars, professional drivers, and affordable rates, OneNess Taxi is the best choice for your trip. In this article, we'll explore the sights and sounds of Delhi on a one-way trip from Chandigarh, so buckle up and get ready for an unforgettable ride.

The Red Fort

Your first stop in Delhi should be the iconic Red Fort, a UNESCO World Heritage Site that was once the residence of Mughal emperors. Built in the 17th century, the fort is a stunning example of Mughal architecture and design, with red sandstone walls, intricate carvings, and beautiful gardens. You can take a guided tour of the fort to learn more about its history and significance.

Jama Masjid

After the Red Fort, head over to Jama Masjid, one of the largest mosques in India. Built in the 17th century by Mughal emperor Shah Jahan, the mosque is an impressive sight, with its towering minarets, beautiful domes, and intricate carvings. Visitors can explore the mosque and even climb to the top of one of the minarets for a breathtaking view of Delhi.

India Gate

Next up is the India Gate, a war memorial that was built in the early 20th century to honor the soldiers who died in World War I. Located in the heart of Delhi, the India Gate is a popular spot for picnics, evening strolls, and people-watching. You can also take a boat ride on the nearby lake or enjoy some street food from the many vendors in the area.

Qutub Minar

One of the most famous landmarks in Delhi is the Qutub Minar, a 73-meter tall tower that was built in the 12th century by the Delhi Sultanate. The tower is made of red sandstone and marble and is adorned with intricate carvings and inscriptions. Visitors can climb to the top of the tower for a stunning view of Delhi and the surrounding areas.

Lotus Temple

Last but not least is the Lotus Temple, a stunning architectural masterpiece that was built in the 1980s. The temple is shaped like a lotus flower and is made of white marble, with beautiful gardens and pools surrounding it. Visitors can explore the temple and its serene surroundings, and even attend a prayer service if they wish.

Conclusion

A taxi ride from Chandigarh to Delhi is not just a journey, it's an experience. With OneNess Taxi, you can sit back, relax, and enjoy the ride as you explore the sights and sounds of Delhi. From the iconic Red Fort to the beautiful Lotus Temple, Delhi has something for everyone. So book your OneNess taxi today and get ready for a ride to remember.

[jaipurpinkcitytours]

Exploring Delhi's Rich Heritage and Vibrant Culture through a Local Sightseeing Tour

Delhi, the capital city of India, is a beautiful mix of history, culture, and modernity. There are so many places to see and experience in Delhi that it can be overwhelming for a first-time visitor. But with the right planning and guidance, you can make the most of your time in Delhi and explore the city's rich heritage and vibrant culture. One such way to explore Delhi is through a delhi local sightseeing tour. In this article, we will discuss the best places to visit in Delhi through a local sightseeing tour.

Red Fort The Red Fort is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and a must-visit attraction in Delhi. The fort was built in the 17th century by Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan and served as the residence of the Mughal emperors for nearly 200 years. The fort is known for its stunning architecture and beautiful gardens. The sound and light show held in the evenings is a popular attraction and is a great way to learn about the history of the fort.

Qutub Minar Qutub Minar is another UNESCO World Heritage Site and one of the tallest minarets in the world. The minaret was built in the 12th century by the Delhi Sultanate and is an important landmark in Delhi. The complex also includes several other historical structures such as the Alai Darwaza and the Iron Pillar of Delhi.

India Gate India Gate is a war memorial located in the heart of Delhi. The memorial was built in memory of the Indian soldiers who died in World War I. The memorial is a popular spot for picnics and is often crowded with tourists and locals alike. The area around India Gate is also a popular spot for street food and is a great place to try out some local delicacies.

Humayun's Tomb Humayun's Tomb is another UNESCO World Heritage Site and a beautiful example of Mughal architecture. The tomb was built in the 16th century and is the final resting place of Mughal Emperor Humayun. The complex also includes several other tombs and structures such as the Isa Khan Niazi Tomb and the Bu Halima Garden.

Lotus Temple The Lotus Temple is a unique and modern architectural marvel in Delhi. The temple is shaped like a lotus flower and is open to people of all faiths. The temple is surrounded by beautiful gardens and is a peaceful retreat from the hustle and bustle of the city.

Akshardham Temple The Akshardham Temple is a relatively new temple in Delhi but has quickly become a popular tourist attraction. The temple is known for its stunning architecture and intricate carvings. The temple complex also includes several other attractions such as the Hall of Values and the Boat Ride.

Chandni Chowk Chandni Chowk is a bustling market in Old Delhi and is a great place to experience the local culture and cuisine. The market is known for its narrow lanes, vibrant colors, and delicious street food. The market is also home to several historical structures such as the Jama Masjid and the Red Fort.

Raj Ghat Raj Ghat is a memorial dedicated to Mahatma Gandhi, the father of the nation. The memorial is located on the banks of the Yamuna River and is a peaceful spot in the midst of the city. The memorial is surrounded by beautiful gardens and is a great place to reflect and pay homage to one of India's greatest leaders.

In conclusion, a local sightseeing tour is a great way to explore Delhi and experience the city's rich heritage and vibrant culture. With so many attractions to see and experience, it can be overwhelming to plan your itinerary. But with the right guidance, you can make the most of your time in Delhi and create memories that will last a lifetime.

[uchiyaandeewaran]

You know how some things some places some incidences from childhood deep into your memory when you’re a child?

Here’s one of mine.

I was two and a half years old, my grandmother was in a wheelchair, fighting cancer. The year was 2007. We lived in a hostel flat near CP, and my mom was in the ministry of culture. She’d arranged tickets for a light and sound show in Red Fort.

Now imagine this small child sitting in her grandmother’s lap, and one of the first thing she sees, is a huge huge huuuuge fort. I don’t have much memory of anything from that time, but I remember Amitabh Bachchan’s voice booming through the speakers, and the colors of the lights on the red fort’s walls changing, as he tells us about this Mughal emperor called Muhammad Shah Rangeela, who yells “ABHI DILLI DUUR HAI” and about how “Dilli Saat Baar veeraan hui thi”

That was the last show my nani watched with us. She passed away in 2008 January. But after that show, she used to tell me stories about that show. She used to tell me, every time I asked, about the Sultan of Delhi who shifted capitals from dilli to daulatabad.

My mumma didn’t know much about history. She wasn’t particularly fond of it either, because history had so much pain.

Somehow, that pain was absorbed by this little two and a half year old child. She never asked her mumma about the seven cities of Delhi, or any other story from that age old light and sound show, but she kept thinking about it. Every time she found out “oh this is was built in this time”, she would quietly add another number to the number of cities of Delhi she’d found out about.

She never openly asked about it, actually.

Until she came to college.

And realised her college offered a general elective course of “The history of Delhi”

She couldn’t resist. There she had it, the answer to all the unanswered questions in her head, the actual complete history of just what she wanted to know. She asked her mother if she could take the subject, more than ready to hear a “no” for an answer, along with something like “you’re studying chemistry. Physics or math would be better as an elective”

She was surprised to hear a yes.

Her mother told her she’d known it the entire time.

Have you ever heard of someone crying during a light and sound show?? At a historical monument???

Well last night this child went to Red Fort for a similar light and sound show, and was hit with nostalgia so hard she couldn’t catch her breath. She wasn’t the only one who had grown over the years, so had the show. Still narrated by the same legendary actor, but now, from the perspective of the omniscient narrator, waqt, time. Same words, same stories. But now she understood what they meant, she actually understood that pain she had felt as a child.

She’d gotten all the answers she wanted.

[blackswaneuroparedux]

Treat Your S(h)elf: The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise Of The East India Company (2019)

It was not the British government that began seizing great chunks of India in the mid-eighteenth century, but a dangerously unregulated private company headquartered in one small office, five windows wide, in London, and managed in India by a violent, utterly ruthless and intermittently mentally unstable corporate predator – Clive.

William Dalrymple, The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise Of The East India Company

“One of the very first Indian words to enter the English language was the Hindustani slang for plunder: loot. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, this word was rarely heard outside the plains of north India until the late eighteenth century, when it became a common term across Britain.”

With these words, populist historian William Dalrymple, introduces his latest book The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company. It is a perfect companion piece to his previous book ‘The Last Mughal’ which I have also read avidly. I’m a big fan of William Dalrymple’s writings as I’ve followed his literary output closely.

And this review is harder to be objective when you actually know the author and like him and his family personally. Born a Scot he was schooled at Ampleforth and Cambridge before he wrote his first much lauded travel book (In Xanadu 1989) just after graduation about his trek through Iran and South Asia. Other highly regarded books followed on such subjects as Byzantium and Afghanistan but mostly about his central love, Delhi. He has won many literary awards for his writings and other honours.  He slowly turned to writing histories and co-founding the Jaipur Literary Festival (one of the best I’ve ever been to). He has been living on and off outside Delhi on a farmhouse rasing his children and goats with his artist wife, Olivia. It’s delightfully charming.

Whatever he writes he never disappoints. This latest tome I enjoyed immensely even if I disagreed with some of his conclusions.

Dalrymple recounts the remarkable rise of the East India Company from its founding in 1599 to 1803 when it commanded an army twice the size of the British Army and ruled over the Indian subcontinent. Dalrymple targets the British East India Company for its questionable activities over two centuries in India. In the process, he unmasks a passel of crude, extravagant, feckless, greedy, reprobate rascals - the so-called indigenous rulers over whom the Company trampled to conquer India.

None of this is news to me as I’m already familiar with British imperial history but also speaking more personally. Like many other British families we had strong links to the British Empire, especially India, the jewel in its crown. Those links went all the way back to the East India Company. Typically the second or third sons of the landed gentry or others from the rising bourgeois classes with little financial prospects or advancement would seek their fortune overseas and the East India Company was the ticket to their success - or so they thought.  

The East India Company tends to get swept under the carpet and instead everyone focuses on the British Empire. But the birth of British colonialism wasn’t engineered in the halls of Whitehall or the Foreign Office but by what Dalrymple calls, “handful of businessmen from a boardroom in the City of London”. There wasn’t any grand design to speak of, just the pursuit of profit. And it was this that opened a Pandora’s Box that defined the following two centuries of British imperialism of India and the rise of its colonial empire.

The 18th-century triumph and then fall of the Company, and its role in founding what became Queen Victoria’s Indian empire is an astonishing story, which has been recounted in books including The Honourable Company by John Keay (1991) and The Corporation that Changed the World by Nick Robins (2006). It is well-trodden territory but Dalrymple, a historian and author who lives in India and has written widely about the Mughal empire, brings to it erudition, deep insight and an entertaining style.

He also takes a different and topical twist on the question how did a joint stock company founded in Elizabethan England come to replace the glorious Mughal Empire of India, ruling that great land for a hundred years? The answer lies mainly in the title of the book. The Anarchy refers not to the period of British rule but to the period before that time. Dalrymple mentions his title is drawn from a remark attributed to Fakir Khair ud-Din Illahabadi, whose Book of Admonition provided the author with the source material and who said of the 18th century “the once peaceful realm of India became the abode of Anarchy.” But Dalrymple goes further and tells the story as a warning from history on the perils of corporate power. The American edition sports the provocative subtitle, “The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of an Empire” (compared with the neutral British subtitle, “The Relentless Rise of the East India Company”). However I think the story Dalrymple really tells is also of how government power corrupts commercial enterprise.

It’s an amazing story and Dalrymple tells it with verve and style drawing, as in his previous books, on underused Indian, Persian and French sources. Dalrymple has a wonderful eye for detail e.g. After the Company’s charter is approved in 1600 the merchant adventures scout for ships to undertake the India voyage: “They have been to Deptford to ‘view severall shippes,’ one of which, the May Flowre, was later famous for a voyage heading in the opposite direction”.

What a Game of Thrones styled tv series it would make, and what a tragedy it unfolded in reality. A preface begins with the foundation of the Company by “Customer Smythe” in 1599, who already had experience trading with the Levant. Certain merchants were little better than pirates and the British lagged behind the Dutch, the Portuguese, the French and even the Spanish in their global aspirations. It was with envious eyes that they saw how Spain had so effectively despoiled Central America. The book fast-forwards to 1756, with successive chapters, and a degree of flexibility in chronology, taking the reader up to 1799. What was supposed to be a few trading posts in India and an import/export agreement became, within a century, a geopolitical force in its own right with its own standing army larger than the British Army.

It is a story of Machiavels from both Britain and India, of pitched battles, vying factions, the use of technology in warfare, strange moments of mutual respect, parliamentary impeachment featuring two of the greatest orators of the day (Edmund Burke and Richard Sheridan), blindings, rapes, psychopaths on both sides, unimaginable wealth, avarice, plunder, famine and worse. It is, in particular – because of the feuding groups loyal to the Mughals, the Marathas, the Rohilla Afghans, the so-called “bankers of the world” the Jagat Seths, and local tribal warlords – a kind of Game Of Thrones with pepper, silk and saltpetre. And that is even before we get to the British, characters such as Robert Clive “of India”, victor at the Battle of Plassey and subsequent suicide; the problematic figure of the cultured Warren Hastings, the whistle-blower who became an unfair scapegoat for Company atrocities; and Richard Wellesley, older brother to the more famous Arthur who became the Duke of Wellington. Co-ordinating such a vast canvas requires a deft hand, and Dalrymple manages this (although the list of dramatis personae is useful). There is even a French mercenary who is described as a “pastry cook, pyrotechnic and poltroon”.

When the Red Dragon slipped anchor at Woolwich early in 1601 to exploit the new royal charter granted to the East India Company, the venture started inauspiciously. The ship lay becalmed off Dover for two months before reaching the Indonesian sultanate of Aceh and seizing pepper, cinnamon and cloves from a passing Portuguese vessel. The Company was a strange beast from the start  “a joint stock company founded by a motley bunch of explorers and adventurers to trade the world’s riches. This was partly driven by Protestant England’s break with largely Catholic continental Europe. Isolated from their baffled neighbours, the English were forced to scour the globe for new markets and commercial openings further afield. This they did with piratical enthusiasm” William Dalrymple writes. From these Brexit-like roots, it grew into an enterprise that has never been replicated “a business with its own army that conquered swaths of India, seizing minerals, jewels and the wealth of Mughal emperors. This was mercenary globalisation, practised by what the philosopher Edmund Burke called “a state in the guise of a merchant””.

The East India Company’s charter began with an original sin - Elizabeth I granted the company a perpetual monopoly on trade with the East Indies. With its monopoly giving it enhanced access to credit and vast wealth from Indian trade, it’s no surprise that the company grew to control an eighth of all Britain’s imports by the 1750s. Yet it was still primarily a trading company, with some military capacity to defend its factories. That changed thanks to a well-known problem in institutional economics - opportunism by a company agent, in this case Robert Clive of India, who in time became the richest self-made man in the world in time.

Like many start-ups, it had to pivot in its early days, giving up on competing with the entrenched Dutch East India Company in the Spice Islands, and instead specialising in cotton and calico from India. It was an accidental strategy, but it introduced early officials including Sir Thomas Roe to “a world of almost unimaginable splendour” in India, run by the cultured Mughals.

The Nawab of Bengal called the English “a company of base, quarrelling people and foul dealers”, and one local had it that “they live like Englishmen and die like rotten sheep”. But the Company had on its side the adaptiveness and energy of capitalism. It also had a force of 260,000, which was decisive when it stopped negotiating with the Mughals and went to war. After the Battle of Buxar in 1764, “the English gentlemen took off their hats to clap the defeated Shuja ud-Daula, before reinstalling him as a tame ruler, backed by the Company’s Indian troops, and paying it a huge subsidy. “We have at last arrived at that critical Conjuncture, which I have long foreseen” wrote Robert Clive, the “curt, withdrawn and socially awkward young accountant” whose risk-taking and aggression secured crucial military victories for the Company. It was a high point for “the most opulent company in the world,” as Robert Clive described it.

So how was a humble group of British merchants able to take over one of the great empires of history? Under Aurangzeb, the fanatic and ruthless Mughal emperor (1658-1707), the empire grew to its largest geographic extent but only because of decades of continuous warfare and attendant taxing, pillaging, famine, misery and mass death. It was a classic case of the eventual fall of a great power through military over-extension.

At Aurangzeb’s death in 1707, a power struggle ensued but none could command. “Mughal succession disputes and a string of weak and powerless emperors exacerbated the sense of imperial crisis: three emperors were murdered (one was, in addition, first blinded with a hot needle); the mother of one ruler was strangled and the father of another forced off a precipice on his elephant. In the worst year of all, 1719, four different Emperors occupied the Peacock Throne in rapid succession. According to the Mughal historian Khair ud-Din Illahabadi … ‘Disorder and corruption no longer sought to hide themselves and the once peaceful realm of India became a lair of Anarchy’”.

Seeing the chaos at the top, local rulers stopped paying tribute and tried to establish their own power bases. The result was more warfare and a decline in trade as banditry made it unsafe to travel. The Empire appeared ripe to fall. “Delhi in 1737 had around 2 million inhabitants. Larger than London and Paris combined, it was still the most prosperous and magnificent city between Ottoman Istanbul and Imperial Edo (Tokyo). As the Empire fell apart around it, it hung like an overripe mango, huge and inviting, yet clearly in decay, ready to fall and disintegrate”.

In 1739 the mango was plucked by the Persian warlord Nader Shah. Using the latest military technology, horse-mounted cannon, Shah devastated a much larger force of Mughal troops and “managed to capture the Emperor himself by the simple ruse of inviting him to dinner, then refusing to let him leave.” In Delhi, Nader Shah massacred a hundred thousand people and then, after 57 days of pillaging and plundering, left with two hundred years’ worth of Mughal treasure carried on “700 elephants, 4,000 camels and 12,000 horses carrying wagons all laden with gold, silver and precious stones”.

At this time, the East India Company would have probably preferred a stable India but through a series of unforeseen events it gained in relative power as the rest of India crumbled. With the decline of the Mughals, the biggest military power in India was the Marathas and they attacked Bengal, the richest Indian province, looting, plundering, raping and killing as many as 400,000 civilians. Fearing the Maratha hordes, Bengalis fled to the only safe area in the region, the company stronghold in Calcutta. “What was a nightmare for Bengal turned out to be a major opportunity for the Company. Against artillery and cities defended by the trained musketeers of the European powers, the Maratha cavalry was ineffective. Calcutta in particular was protected by a deep defensive ditch especially dug by the Company to keep the Maratha cavalry at bay, and displaced Bengalis now poured over it into the town that they believed offered better protection than any other in the region, more than tripling the size of Calcutta in a decade. … But it was not just the protection of a fortification that was the attraction. Already Calcutta had become a haven of private enterprise, drawing in not just Bengali textile merchants and moneylenders, but also Parsis, Gujaratis and Marwari entrepreneurs and business houses who found it a safe and sheltered environment in which to make their fortunes”. In an early example of what might be called a “charter city,”

English commercial law also attracted entrepreneurs to Calcutta. The “city’s legal system and the availability of a framework of English commercial law and formal commercial contracts, enforceable by the state, all contributed to making it increasingly the destination of choice for merchants and bankers from across Asia”.

The Company benefited by another unforeseen circumstance, Siraj ud-Daula, the Nawab (ruler) of Bengal, was a psychotic rapist who got his kicks from sinking ferry boats in the Ganges and watching the travelers drown. Siraj was uniformly hated by everyone who knew him. “Not one of the many sources for the period — Persian, Bengali, Mughal, French, Dutch or English — has a good word to say about Siraj”. Despite his flaws, Siraj might have stayed in power had he not made the fatal mistake of striking his banker. The Jagat Seth bankers took their revenge when Siraj ud-Daula came into conflict with the Company under Robert Clive. Conspiring with Clive, the Seths arranged for the Nawab’s general to abandon him and thus the Battle of Plassey was won and the stage set for the East India Company.

In typical fashion, Dalrymple devotes half a dozen pages to the Company’s defeat at Pollidur in 1780 by Haider Ali and his son, Tipu, but a few paragraphs to its significance (Haider could have expelled the Company from much of southern India but failed to pursue his advantage). The reader is not spared the gory details.

“Such as were saved from immediate death,” reads a quote from a British survivor about his fellow troops, “were so crowded together…several were in a state of suffocation, while others from the weight of the dead bodies that had fallen upon them were fixed to the spot and therefore at the mercy of the enemy…Some were trampled under the feet of elephants, camels, and horses. Those who were stripped of their clothing lay exposed to the scorching sun, without water and died a lingering and miserable death, becoming prey to ravenous wild animals.”

Many further battles and adventures would ensue before the British were firmly ensconced by 1803 but the general outline of the story remained the same. The EIC prospered due to a combination of luck, disarray among the Company’s rivals and good financing.

The Mughal emperor Shah Alam, for example, had been forced to flee Delhi leaving it to be ruled by a succession of Persian, Afghani and Maratha warlords. But after wandering across eastern India for many years, he regathered his army, retook Delhi and almost restored Mughal power. At a key moment, however, he invited into the Red Fort with open arms his “adopted” son, Ghulam Qadir. Ghulam was the actual son of Zabita Khan who had been defeated by Shah Alam sixteen years earlier. Ghulam, at that time a young boy, had been taken hostage by Shah Alam and raised like a son, albeit a son whom Alam probably used as a catamite. Expecting gratitude, Shah Alam instead found Ghulam driven mad.  Ghulam Qadir, a psychopath, ordered a minion to blind Shah Alam: “With his Afghan knife….Qandahari Khan first cut one of Shah Alam’s eyes out of its socket; then, the other eye was wrenched out…Shah Alam flopped on the ground like a chicken with its neck cut.” Ghulam took over the Red Fort and after cutting out the eyes of the Mughal emperor, immediately calling for a painter to immortalise the event.

A few pages on, Ghulam Qadir gets his just dessert. Captured by an ally of the emperor, he is hung in a cage, his ears, nose, tongue, and upper lip cut off, his eyes scooped out, then his hands cut off, followed by his genitals and head. Dalrymple out-grosses himself with the description of Ahmad Shah Durrani, the Afghan invader of India, dying of leprosy with “maggots….dropping from the upper part of his putrefying nose into his mouth and food as he ate.”

By 1803, the Company’s army had defeated the Maratha gunners and their French officers, installed Shah Alam as a puppet back on his imitation Peacock Throne in Delhi, and the Company ruled all of India virtually.

Indeed as late as 1803, the Marathas too might have defeated the British but rivalry between Tukoji Holkar and Daulat Rao Scindia prevented an alliance. “Here Wellesley’s masterstroke was to send Holkar a captured letter from Scindia in which the latter plotted with Peshwa Baji Rao to overthrow Holkar … ‘After the war is over, we shall both wreak our full vengeance upon him.’ … After receiving this, Holkar, who had just made the first two days march towards Scindia, turned back and firmly declined to join the coalition”.

For Dalrymple the crucial point was the unsanctioned actions of Robert Clive and the bullying of Shah Alam in the rise of the East India Company.

The Jagat Seths then bribed the company men to attack Siraj. Clive, with an eye for personal gain, was happy attack Siraj at the behest of the Jagat Seths even if the company directors had no part in this. They “consistently abhorred ambitious plans of conquest,” he notes. Clive’s defeat of Siraj at Plassey and the subsequent chain of events that led to Shah Alam giving tax-raising powers to the company in 1765 may be history’s most egregious example of the principal-agent problem.

Thus, the East India Company acquired by accident the ultimate economic rent — a secure, unearned income stream. Company cronies initially thwarted attempts at oversight in London, but a government bailout in 1772 following the Bengal Famine and the collapse of Ayr Bank confirmed the crown’s interest in the company, which had now become Too Big to Fail. Adam Smith called the company’s twin roles of trader and sovereign a “strange absurdity” in Book IV of The Wealth of Nations (unfortunately, Smith’s long condemnatory discussion of the company receives only a cursory reference from Dalrymple).

As part of the bailout, Parliament passed the Tea Act to help the company dump its unsold products on the American colonies by giving it the monopoly on legal tea there (Americans drank mostly smuggled Dutch tea). This, of course, led to the Boston Tea Party and the American Revolution.

By 1784, Parliament had set up an oversight board that increasingly dictated the company’s political affairs. The attempted impeachment of Governor-General Warren Hastings by the House of Lords in 1788 confirmed that the company was no longer its own master. By that stage, the company was an arm of the state. Dalrymple’s coverage of the subsequent racist policies of Lord Cornwallis and the military adventures of Richard Wellesley make for compelling reading, but they are not examples of unfettered corporate power.

Overlaid on top of luck and disorder, was the simple fact that the Company paid its bills. Indeed, the Company paid its sepoys (Indian troops) considerably more than did any of its rivals and it paid them on time. It was able to do so because Indian bankers and moneylenders trusted the Company. “In the end it was this access to unlimited reserves of credit, partly through stable flows of land revenues, and partly through collaboration of Indian moneylenders and financiers, that in this period finally gave the Company its edge over their Indian rivals. It was no longer superior European military technology, nor powers of administration that made the difference. It was the ability to mobilise and transfer massive financial resources that enabled the Company to put the largest and best-trained army in the eastern world into the field”.

Dalrymple pretty much loses interest once the Company gains full control. “This book does not aim to provide a complete history of the East India Company,” he writes. He skips past one mention of Hong Kong, which the East India Company seized after the opium wars in China. A few sentences record the 1857 uprising of Indian soldiers that led to the British government taking India from the Company and establishing the Raj that lasted until Indian independence in 1947.

The author makes passing reference to the fact that the struggle for American independence was underway for much of the period about which he writes. He notes that It was British East India Company tea that patriots dumped into Boston harbor in 1773. American colonists were so grateful that the Mysore sultans tied up British forces that might have been deployed in America, they named a warship the Hyder Ali. Lord Cornwallis provides a connection, having surrendered to George Washington at Yorktown in 1781, an event confirming American independence, and turning up in 1786 in India as governor-general, taking Tipu Sultan’s surrender in 1792.

That reference raises an interesting side question that may someday deserve closer examination - Why were American colonists successful in driving off their British overlords. At the same time, Indian aristocracy and the masses over whom they ruled were unable to rid themselves of the British East India Company and the British Raj for another century?

No heroes emerge from Dalrymple’s expansive account that is rich, even overwhelming in detail. He covers two centuries but focuses on the period between 1765 and 1803 when the Company was transformed from a commercial operation to military and totalitarian — to use an appropriate term derived from Sanskrit - juggernaut. Among the multitude of characters involved in this sordid story are a few British names familiar in general history, Robert Clive of India, Warren Hastings, Lord Cornwallis, and Colonel Arthur Wellesley, who was better known long after he departed India as the Duke of Wellington. None - with the exception of Hastings - escape the scathing indictment of Dalrymple’s pen.

At the core of the story we meet Robert Clive, an emblematic character who from being a juvenile delinquent and suicidal lunatic rose to rule India, eventually killing himself in the aftermath of a corruption scandal. In particular Robert Clive comes in for much criticism by Dalrymple. After putting down one rebellion, Clive managed to send back £232 million, of which he personally received £22m. There was a rumour that, on his return to England, his wife’s pet ferret wore a necklace of jewels worth £2,500. Contrast that with the horrors of the 1769 famine: farmers selling their tools, rivers so full of corpses that the fish were inedible, one administrator seeing 40 dead bodies within 20 yards of his home, even cannibalism, all while the Company was stockpiling rice. Some Indian weavers even chopped off their own thumbs to avoid being forced to work and pay the exorbitant taxes that would be imposed on them. The Great Bengal famine of 1770 had already led to unease in London at its methods. “We have murdered, deposed, plundered, usurped,” wrote the Whig politician Horace Walpole. “I stand astonished by my own moderation,” Clive protested, after outrage intensified when the Company had to be bailed out by the British government in 1772. Clive took his own life in disgrace. 

Warren Hastings, whom Dalrymple portrays as the more sensitive and sympathetic Company man, was first made governor general of India for 12 years and later endured seven years of impeachment for corruption before acquittal. Hastings showed “deep respect” for India and Indians, writes, Dalrymple, as opposed to most other Europeans in India to suck out as much as possible of the subcontinent’s resources and wealth. “In truth, I love India a little more than my own country,” wrote Hastings, who spoke good Bengali and Urdu, as well as fluent Persian. “(Edmund) Burke had defended Robert Clive (first Governor General of Bengal) against parliamentary enquiry, and so helped exonerate someone who genuinely was a ruthlessly unprincipled plunderer. Now he directed his skills of oratory against Warren Hastings (who was finally impeached), a man who, by virtue of his position, was certainly the symbol of an entire system of mercantile oppression in India, but who had personally done much to begin the process of regulating and reforming the Company, and who had probably done more than any other Company official to rein in the worst excesses of its rule,” Dalrymple writes. At his public impeachment hearing in 1788, Burke thundered: “We have brought before you…..one in whom all the frauds, all the peculation, all the violence, all the tyranny in India are embodied.’ They got the wrong man but, by the time he was cleared in 1795, the British state was steadily absorbing the Company, denouncing its methods but retaining many of its assets.

Dalrymple has a soft spot for a couple of Indian locals. “The British consistently portrayed Tipu as a savage and fanatical barbarian,” Dalrymple writes, “but he was in truth a connoisseur and an intellectual…” Of course, Tipu, Dalrymple confesses a bit later, had rebels’ “arms, legs, ears, and noses cut off before being hanged” as well as forcibly circumcising captives and converting them to Islam.

Emperor Shah Alam (1728-1806) is contemporary for much of the time Dalrymple covers. “His was…a life marked by kindness, decency, integrity and learning at a time when such qualities were in short supply…he…managed to keep the Mughul flame alive through the worst of the Great Anarchy….” Dalrymple portrays a most intriguing figure in Emperor Shah Alam, a man attracted to mysticism and yet as prepared as his contemporaries to double-deal; someone who endures exile and torture and who outlives, albeit in a melancholy fashion, his enemies. Despite his lack of wealth, troops or political power, the very nature of his being emperor still, it seems, inspired affection.

Part of Dalrymple’s excellence is in the use of Indian sources – he takes numerous quotes from Ghulam Hussain Khan, acclaimed by Dalrymple as “brilliant,” who threads the story as an 18th-century historian on his untranslated works, Seir Mutaqherin (Review of Modern Times). Dalrymple has used a trove of company documents in Britain and India as well as Persian-language histories, much of which he shares in English translation with the reader. However he does this a bit too often and portions of his account can seem more assembled than written.

These pages are also brimming with anecdotes retold with Dalrymple’s distinctive delight in the piquant, equivoque and gory: we have historical moments when “it seemed as if it were raining blood, for the drains were streaming with it” (quoted from a report c1740 regarding events that preceded Nadir Shah’s infamous looting of the peacock throne) as well as duels between Company officials so busy with their in-fighting that it’s a miracle they could perform their work at all; there’s also homosexuality, homophobia, sexual torture, castrations, cannibalism, brothels and gonorrhoea.

The principal protagonists of the “Black Hole of Calcutta” incident are both, naturally, certified pervs: Siraj ud-Daula is a “serial bisexual rapist” while his opponent Governor Drake is having an “affair with his sister”. And one particular Mughal governor liked to throw tax defaulters in pits of rotting shit (“the stench was so offensive, that it almost suffocated anyone who came near it”). All this gives one a rough idea of what historically important people were up to according to Dalrymple. But all things considered, Dalrymple’s research is solid and heavily annotated.

However entertaining and widely researched using unused Urdu and Persian sources, Dalrymple’s overall approach doesn’t tell us very much about the general tendency in eighteenth-century imperial activity, and particularly that of the British, that we didn’t already know. And other things he downplays or neglects. Thus, the East India Company was one of a series of ‘national’ East India companies, including those of France, the Netherlands and Sweden. Moreover, for Britain, there was the Hudson Bay Company, the Royal African Company, and the chartered companies involved in North America, as well, for example, as the Bank of England.  Delegated authority in this form or shared state/private activities were a major part of governance. To assume from the modern perspective of state authority that this was necessarily inadequate is misleading as well as teleological. Indeed, Dalrymple offers no real evidence for his view. Was Portuguese India, where the state had a larger role, ‘better’?

Secondly, let us look at India as a whole. There is an established scholarly debate to which Dalrymple makes no ground breaking contribution. This debate focuses on the question of whether, after the death in 1707 of the mighty Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb (r. 1658-1707), the focus should be on decline and chaos or, instead, on the development of a tier of powers within the sub-continent, for example Hyderabad. In the latter perspective, the East India Company (EIC) emerges as one and, eventually, the most successful of the successor powers. That raises questions of comparative efficiency and how the EIC succeeded in the Indian military labour market, this helping in defeating the Marathas in the 1800s.

An Indian power, the EIC was also a ‘foreign’ one; although foreignness should not be understood in modern terms. As a ‘foreign’ one, the EIC was not alone among the successful players, and was not even particularly successful, other than against marginal players, until the 1760s.  Compared to Nadir Shah of Persia in the late 1730s (on whom Michael Axworthy is well worth reading), or the Afghans from the late 1750s (on whom Jos Gommans is best), the EIC was limited on land. This was part of a longstanding pattern, encompassing indeed, to a degree, the Mughals. Dalrymple fails to address this comparative context adequately.

Dalrymple seems particularly incensed at “corporate violence” and in a (mercifully short) final chapter alludes to Exxon and the United Fruit Company. Indeed Dalrymple has a pitch ” that globalisation is rooted here, albeit that “the world’s largest corporations…..are tame beasts compared with the ravaging territorial appetites of the militarised East India Company.”

It is an interesting question to ask: How might the actions of these corporate raiders have differed from those of a state? It’s not clear, for example, that the EIC was any worse than the average Indian ruler and surely these stationary bandits were better than roving bandits like Nader Shah. The EIC may have looted India but economic historian Tirthankar Roy explains that: “Much of the money that Clive and his henchmen looted from India came from the treasury of the nawab. The Indian princes, ‘walking jeweler’s shops’ as an American merchant called them, spent more money on pearls and diamonds than on infrastructural developments or welfare measures for the poor. If the Company transferred taxpayers’ money from the pockets of an Indian nobleman to its own pockets, the transfer might have bankrupted pearl merchants and reduced the number of people in the harem, but would make little difference to the ordinary Indian.”

Moreover, although it began as a private-firm, the EIC became so regulated by Parliament that Hejeebu (2016) concludes, “After 1773, little of the Company’s commercial ethos survived in India.” Certainly, by the time the brothers Wellesley were making their final push for territorial acquisition, the company directors back in London were pulling out their hair and begging for fewer expensive wars and more trading profits.

So also for eighteenth-century Asia as a whole. Dalrymple has it in for the form of capitalism the EIC represents; but it was less destructive than the Manchu conquest of Xinjiang in the 1750s, or, indeed, the Afghan destruction of Safavid rule in Persia in the early 1720s. Such comparative points would have been offered Dalrymple the opportunity to deploy scholarship and judgment, and, indeed, raise interesting questions about the conceptualisation and methodologies of cross-cultural and diachronic comparison.

Focusing anew on India, the extent to which the Mughal achievement in subjugating the Deccan was itself transient might be underlined, and, alongside consideration, of the Maratha-Mughal struggle in the late seventeenth century, that provides another perspective on subsequent developments. The extent to which Bengal, for example, did not know much peace prior to the EIC is worthy of consideration. It also helps explain why so many local interests found it appropriate, as well as convenient, to ally with the EIC. It brought a degree of protection for the regional economy and offered defence against Maratha, Afghan, and other, attacks and/or exactions. The terms of entry into a British-led global economy were less unwelcome than later nationalist writers might suggest. Dalrymple himself cites Trotsky, who was no guide to the period. To turn to other specifics is only to underline these points.

After Warren Hastings’ impeachment which in effect brought to an end the era when “almost all of India south of [Delhi] was…..effectively ruled by a handful of businessmen from a boardroom in the City of London.” It is hard to find a simple lesson, beyond Dalrymple’s point that talk of Britain having conquered India ‘disguises a much more sinister reality’.

One of the great advantages non-fiction has over fiction is that you cannot make it up, and in the case of the East India Company, you cannot make it up to an extent that beggars belief. William Dalrymple has been for some years one of the most eloquent and assiduous chroniclers of Indian history. With this new work, he sounds a minatory note. The East India Company may be history, but it has warnings for the future. It was “the first great multinational corporation, and the first to run amok”. Wryly, he writes that at least Walmart doesn’t own a fleet of nuclear submarines and Facebook doesn’t have regiments of infantry.

Yet Facebook and Uber does indeed have the potential power to usurp national authority - Facebook can sway elections through its monopoly on how people consume their news for instance. But they do not seize physical territory as Dalrymple states. Even an oil company with private guards in a war-torn country does not compare these days. This doesn’t exonerate corporations though. I know from personal experience of working in the corporate world that it attracts its fair share of psychopaths and cold blooded operators obsessed with the bottom lines of their balance sheets and the worship of the fortunes of their share prices and the lengths they go to would indeed come close to or cross over moral and legal lines. Perhaps the moral is to keep a stern eye on ‘corporate influence, with its fatal blend of power, money and unaccountability’. Clive reflected after Buxar, ‘We must indeed become Nabobs ourselves in Fact if not in Name…..We must go forward, for to retract is impossible.’ That was the nature of the beast. 

Speaking of being beastly, some readers may disagree with the more radical views presented in taking apart the imperialist project and showed it for what it was - not about civilising savages, but about brutally exploiting civilised humans by treating them as savages. I think that’s partly true but not the whole story as Dalrymple will freely concede himself. Imperial history is a charged subject and they defy lazy Manichean conclusions of good guys and bad guys.

Dalrymple’s book is an excellent example of popular history - engaging, entertaining, readable, and informative. However, I honestly think he should have stuck to the history and not tried to draw out a trustbusting parallel with today’s big companies. Where the parallels exist, they are to do with cronyism, rent-seeking, and bailouts, all of which are primarily sins of government. 

The Anarchy remains though a page-turning history of the rise of the East India Company with plenty of raw material to enjoy and to think about. To my mind the title ‘The Anarchy’ is brilliantly and appositely chosen. There are in fact two anarchies here; the anarchy of the competing regimes in India, and the anarchy – literally, without leaders or rules – of the East India Company itself, a corporation that put itself above law. The dangers of power without governance are depicted in an exemplary fashion. Dalrymple has done a great service in not just writing an eminently readable history of 18th century India, but in reflecting on how so much of it serves as a warning for our own time when chaos runs amok from those seeking to be above the law.

[cincinnatusvirtue]

Nader Shah: Sword of Persia

Nader Shah Afshar (1688-1747) was the Shah (King) of Persia officially from 1736 until his assassination in 1747.  Though he de-facto became Iran’s most powerful figure by 1729 and especially after 1732 he was regent of then the Shah, ruler in all but name.  Nader Shah is sometimes known as by monikers as the “Sword of Persia” or the “Second Alexander the Great” or “Napoleon of Persia”.  These names don’t really do him entirely justice, especially the latter considering he lived prior to Napoleon.  Though the comparison as a successful conqueror and tactician in battle is true enough.  Nader’s rise from abject poverty to the heights of dominating the Middle East and Western and Central Asia is nothing short of extraordinary and in many cases is the last in the long line of famous conquerors in the East of a Turco-Mongol tradition that included his true idols Genghis Khan and Timur.

Nader was born presumably in 1688 according to most sources in the area of Dargaz of the Khorasan Province of modern Iran located in the northeastern extremity of the country.  He was part of the ethnically Turkic Afshar tribe, that was semi-nomadic and had years before settled in parts of Northern Iran and Azerbaijan.  The Afshar were Turkic in their blood but culturally a synthesis of Persian (Iranian) and Turkic tradition, their religion was a brand of Shia Islam.  His father was a herdsman and coatmaker and they maintained a nomadic lifestyle, his father died at 13 and without income his family was reduced to greater poverty than his earlier upbringing.  He earned money by gathering sticks in the Iranian Plateau for firewood which he would sell at market.  In 1704 Uzbek Turkic raiders captured his family including him and his mother and were put into slavery where his mother died.  According to some sources he escaped by deception but by 1708 he had returned to the Khorasan Province.

What he had grown up in and returned to was an increasingly declining Persian Empire ruled by the famed Safavid Dynasty that had ruled Persia and much the Middle East since 1502 but at this time it was under the rule of Sultan Husayn from (1694-1722).  He was facing rebellion in the east from Afghan Pashtuns under Mahmud Hotek, who rose to become Emir of Afghanistan and briefly in 1722 overthrew Husayn as Shah of Persia by besieging the capital Isfahan, ruling until 1725.  Hotek was not completely recognized as Shah and Tahmasp (son of Sultan Husayn) fought against this.  Meanwhile, Persian’s arch rivals to the west and north the Ottoman and Russian Empires respectively used this chaos to  grab Persian territory in the Caucasus and elsewhere.  Hotek was killed and replaced by his cousin and who actually fought back against the Ottomans and Russians who tried to restore Tahmasp.

Nader in these chaotic years began a steady rise to personal power.  According to some sources, Nader started as a royal mail carrier for the Safavid Empire, however he is said to have killed a fellow royal mail carrier and taken over his route himself, then killed a nobleman who employed him and married the nobleman’s daughter.  He then became a bandit on the loose in his native Khorasan Province and gradually added members of his tribe into a sort of local army, becoming a powerful warlord in the process.  He was contacted by the Safavid under Tahmasp who wished to employ him as a sort of mercenary against the Hotek Dynasty.  1729 saw Nader defeat the Afghans, first in Afghanistan and then in the Battle of Damghan he beat the Afghans once more helping pave the way for Tahmasp to rise to Shah of Persia as Tamasp II.  As thanks for his help, Nader was made royal governor of Eastern Iran, namely Khorasan and he was married to Tahmasp’s sister, Razia.

1730 saw Nader now undertaking campaigns on behalf of the Safavids to retake Mesopotamia (Iraq) and the southern Caucasus regions previously ceded to the Turkish Ottomans who were Sunni Muslims.  His campaigns became the stuff of legend as he had reformed the Persian Army as one no longer based solely on cavalry now in the age of gunpowder, instead he sought a combined arms strategy, mixing cavalry with artillery, namely with the use of the camel mounted artillery on swivel guns known as zamburaks, this mobile form of artillery was inventive on the battlefield and  combined with aggressive infantry tactics as well.  Nader was a proponent of aggressive and bold moves involving great mobility and preferred flanking maneuvers to offset his enemies.  Time and again the Ottomans fell in battle to aggressive tactics.  Nader was successful in gaining territory back from the Ottomans.  However, Shah Tahmasp now jealous of Nader’s success launched his campaign to take Armenia from the Turks, it failed and undid much of Nader’s earlier success.

In 1732, Nader used the ineptness of Tahmasp’s campaign to provide fodder for his being deposed from the throne, in his place Tahmasp’s infant son, Abbas III was named Shah with Nader as his regent, becoming in effect ruler of Persia.  He resumed a campaign in 1733 against the Ottomans in Iraq which initially did not go well for Nader.  Nader however quickly rebuilt his army and fought the Ottomans at Kirkuk, defeating them with a pincer movement.  However, rebellion in Iran and Afghanistan compelled him back to Persia.  He put these down and by 1735 was back onto invading Ottoman territory winning the major Battle of Yeghevard, ending the war with the Ottomans and leading to Persia regaining its western territories once more. 

1736 saw the pretense of regency thrown off as Nader deposed the young Abbas by throwing a qoroltai, a traditional meeting of the leading nobles in the countryside as part of a great hunting party where they signed a document, granting their support to Nader’s suggestion to be named Shah.  This was done in a tradition imitating Genghis Khan and Timur in centuries past.  Now Nader was officially Nader Shah and founder of his own Afsharid Dynasty.  As a ruler, Nader implemented many domestic changes.  Including a new silver coinage system, called Naderi after himself which was paired with the Indian rupees.  Nader also paid his army in coins and currency rather than the previous tradition of grants of land and spoils of war.  He also reformed the army into a national identity, rather than a mix of provincial and tribal loyalties that had divided and decentralized Persia in the past.  He spoke Persian and Turkic.  The former being the official language of the nation and its government and the latter for his military administration.  Nader in religious policy was more pragmatic than a true believer, like Napoleon who followed him, he saw religion as a tool to wield for political purposes.  His level of true belief is a matter of debate and it appears he may not in fact have been personally that religious if at all.  Officially, Persia followed Shia Islam but his army was a mix of Shia and Sunnis and Christian vassals from Georgia and Armenia.  He eventually settled on a blend of Shia Islam  called Ja’fari that was less offensive to Sunnis, believing previous Safavid Shia policy had alienated the Ottoman Sunnis.

1739 saw his most famous campaign, the invasion of India.  India at that time was ruled by a mix of local kingdoms and European colonies but in the North it was still nominally under the rich but declining Islamic Mughal Empire which was ruled by a 16th century dynasty descended from his hero, Timur of Turco-Mongol extraction.  His impetus for invasion was the Mughals hiding Afghan rebels.  Nader lead his Persian Army, supported by Georgian Christian vassals into Afghanistan, Pakistan and India with a goal to take over the Mughal capital at Delhi.  The Mughal Emperor, Muhammad Shah lead an army of 300,000 troops north of Dehli to meet the Persian invasion which number 55,000.  Outnumbered six to one it looked as Nader would be overwhelmed but on February 24, 1739 the greatest battle of his career would take place, the Battle of Karnal.  What Nader lacked in numbers he made up for in experience, discipline, mobility and tactical prowess.  The Mughals were numerous but their army, including war elephants was more ornate than effective and was cumbersome due to their large numbers and baggage trains.  The Mughals advanced in divided columns while the Pesians split their forces too.  Nader ordered his camel mobile artillery, the zamburaks to fire along with his artillery and infantry which devastate the advancing Mughals, it worked.  The sheer volume of artillery and infantry fire mowed down the Indian army and then combined with ambushes put them into confusion and disarray.  The Mughals suffered heavy losses and were forced into a retreat. Subsequently, their Emperor met with Nader and accompanied him in a humiliating fashion as a sort of hostage back to Delhi where Persian troops occupied the city.  Nader planned to leave India soon.  He planned little to no territorial gains but did plan to plunder much of the Mughal treasury, famed for its diamond, emeralds and rubies, including the the famed jeweled Peacock Throne of the Mughal Emperor.  A riot broke out in Delhi which killed Persian troops, outraged Nader let his army loose on the city.  Muslim and Hindu were killed and raped in the thousands.  The city was torched and looted until Nader ordered it to stop, 30,000 killed.  Indeed the Persians collected so levied tax in currency and jewels from the Mughals, that upon their return to Persia the government was so wealthy Nader placed a three year moratorium on local taxes in all of the empire. He also now forced the Mughals to cede all their land by treaty west of the Indus River, securing eastern Persia’s borders in Iran, Pakistan and Afghanistan.  The Mughals were so weakened by Nader’s invasion that it allowed for a power vacuum to develop in Northern India that by century’s end would see the rise of the British East India Company overtaking much of country.

Nader had reached his pinnacle of success and wealth with his victory in India.  Despite the wealth and moratorium on tax, the economic burden of endless war continued to drain Persia’s economy.  He invaded the Northern Caucasus of modern Dagestan in Russia to mixed results, the Uzbeks in Central Asia with success, the Arabs of Oman on the Arabian Peninsula were also conquered and another war with the Ottomans from 1743-1746 which ended in stalemate.  The endless wars also saw him develop a rivalry with his first son, leading to having his son punished with torture and the blinding of his eyes.  He also suppressed supposed conspiracies and uprisings in Persia too, killing his opposition, implementing torture and symbolically stacking the skulls of his dissidents both real and imagined in literal towers of beheaded skulls.  Nader was also building a navy at this time but it was never large enough of a force to effect much power beyond the Persian Gulf. 

In 1747, Nader returned to Khorasan to fight Kurdish rebels in the area.  However, conspiracy finally caught up with him when relatives of his, worried about his draining of Persia’s economy with endless war and his own derangement from reality due to ill health in his advancing age, megalomania and desire for blood lust estranged him from their favor.  These relatives plotted an assassination and June 20th, acted on their plot when 15 assassins armed with swords rushed into his war tent as he slept intent on hacking him to death.  The noise of the nervous and impatient assassins awoke Nader who personally killed two in the struggle that followed.  His relative came in and hit him with a sword blow followed by three other conspirators stabbing him repeatedly while eyewitnesses say Nader pleaded for them to stop, offering to spare their lives and give them riches in return, finally another relative came in and beheaded Nader with one fell swoop, ending his once promising reign which had become twisted and deranged due to his paranoia.

His dynasty officially lasted until 1796 though it never reached the heights it did under Nader who had territory from Arabia and Iraq to Russia and all the way to India in his control by his conquest and military prowess.  It would be replaced by the Qajar Dynasty which ruled Persia until 1925.  Nader was a source of pride for Persia and source of ruin, the last in a tradition of Asiatic conquerors from the days of Genghis Khan and Timur, both of whom he emulated in his tactical prowess and his personal cruelty.  Nader indeed is another example somewhat like Napoleon Bonaparte who followed in the coming decades, of a man rising from nearly nothing to the heights of absolute power by personal military talent and opportunity in a time of national chaos.  Nader is sometimes called the “Persian Napoleon” though it maybe more correct to call Napoleon the “French Nader Shah!”

[flyingsassysaddles]

I ship Mongolia with happiness and success, and with India for no reason in specific

India/Mongolia 

(Shout out to @ariuka-munkh for giving the idea for the pic :P I really like this ship too!!))

Tibet/Mongolia

Historical Relationship 

Alright, so this one is also a bit of a doozy, and kinda long. However, it still pretty cool! This one will also be under a keep reading as well!

Like Tibet, there were few contacts between the Mongols (as the Blue Turks/Black Tatars) and India pre-Mongol Empire, on account of India being behind the Himalayas and on its own subcontinent. According to this source, a brief paper on India-Mongolia relations, some tribes from the Kangra kingdom migrated to the Mongolian Steppe to the Mongolian steppe 10,000 years ago before returning to their homeland 2,000 years later. Since India has always been a place of prominent trade and part of the silk road, there, of course, might have been contact via the silk road, ideas and products traveling from India and eventually finding themselves on the steppe, though the influence didn’t have a great effect on the tribes of the steppe, it was still there. 

Fast forward to the Mongol Empire, specifically after the invasion of Khwarezmia. The Shah Jalal ad-Din of Khwarezmia had about 20,000 soldiers dedicated to hunting him down after the Khwarezmia empire fell, and the Shah escaped to India, and of course, the Mongols followed. At the battle of Indus in 1221, what was ledt of the Shah’s army was destroyed and he feld. Asking for an alliance (or asylum) from the Delhi Sultanate of India, he was turned down, he fought against local leaders with his small army that he managed to create, and eventually securing an alliance with a local khokhar chieftain from the Salt Range by marrying the chieftain’s daughter, gaining a bigger army. Upon hearing there was a rebellion in modern-day southern Iran, he goes there and allies himself with more people, specifically the Khilji, Turkoman, and Ghori tribes.

Now that Shah Jalal al Din had a big enough army, he and his men fought a battle with a Mongol division headed by a general who had been tracking him down. they win the battle, but his army squabbles over the booty from after the battle, the argument causes his allies to abandon him, and soon after, after Genghis Khan’s death and the rise of his son Ogedei Khan, the Shah was defeated (don’t worry, he lived to see another day and went on to conquer the kingdom of Georgia and a ton of other shenanigans). 

In 1235 a Mongol force invaded Kasmir, which, after revolting against Mongol rule in 1254-1255 and the Mongols killing the king, was secured as a Mongol principality. The Mongols also invaded the Indus river valley in 1241. 

In 1251, Mongke Khan rises to power, and present at the ceremony was a Delhi prince who requested troops to overthrow his elder brother and take control of the Delhi Sultanate. Mongke Khan instructed his brother and general Sali to help the prince, and the Mongols then conquered Sindh. However, Mongke Khan’s brother, Hulagu refused to launch a large-scale invasion on India, saving his troops for the fight against the rest of the Middle East (poor Baghdad) and there was peace between the Mongols and India for a bit. 

Under Duwa Khan in 1292, the Ilkhanate, aka Chagatai Khanate, invaded India yet again. However, during a battle, their advanced guard was defeated, taken prisoner by the Khalji Sultan. Scared of the Mongol army, he bought off their attacks and the captured army converted to Islam and settled in India. There were two more invasions from 1296-1297. A mixed Turk-Mongol army also fought against the Rajput kings in 1298 but disbanded over arguments over the captured wealth. 

In 1299, Delhi Sultan Alauddin Khilji attacked the Mongols, and managed to push them back and captured a few cities. However, the Mongols tricked his generals and surrounded his troops, killing them and their general. However, the Sultan barraged them with too many attacks to stand their ground, so they went to the mountains to regroup. Attacking when the sultan was least prepared, besieging another city, they defeated him and even conquered Delhi and looted it. 

This prompted the Delhi Sultanate to create more fortifications, but the Mongols found great success in raiding anyway, and were on the way back to Central Asia, carrying all their loot, when the sultan’s army surprised them in the Battle of Amroha Kubak, which the Mongols lost, and Alauddin Khilji had the generals they captured trampled to death by elephants, and the prisoners’ heads hung from the walls of a fort. Fun guy. 

Another invasion came happened in 1307-8, which the sultan also defeated. The same year Duwa Khan died. Soon after the sultan crippled the Mongol line of the control into India by attacking several strategic cities. The Mongols invade Kashmir again and pillaged the area for 8 months before leaving in the winter. 

ANOTHER another invasion in 1327 under Tasmashirin, sacking towns and cities and eventually besieging Delhi, and the residing Sultan paid a heavy bounty to prevent from more attacks. From this point, the Mongol raids mostly stopped, until, you guessed it, Timur and Barbur. 

Timur the Lame has spent his military career before the invasion of India by attacking and conquering the Golden Horde, parts of Persia, Iran, Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Mesopotamia. Notorious for how brutal his troops and how cunning and strategically brilliant he could be, Timur was an adamant believer in Islam, and imperialism, invading India on the pretext that India’s Muslim rulers were showing an excessive tolerance to Hindus. Timur was a descendant of Chagatai, Genghis Khan’s son, but his army was mostly made of Turks. Still, there were some Mongols in there, and Timur believed that he was trying to restore the Mongol Empire, so onward.  

Attacking in 1398, Timur destroyed most things that stood in his way and Delhi’s army was destroyed, along with the city of Delhi, taking more than a century to recover.  He actually headed back to Central Asia after that, it was his grandson Babur who established the Mughal Empire. 

Denied any power in Central Asia, Babur turned his attention to India. Taking Lahore in 1523, he allied himself with a rebel leader to conquer Delhi, since the ruler there was despised. In 1526, the sultan and Babur go head to head, and Babur emerges victorious, going on to conquer the rest of northern India with his son. He spent the rest of his life structuring his new kingdom, dying in 1530. His empire is remembered as the Mughal Empire, and lasted close to 300 years, Mughal itself meaning Mongol.

He was remarkably tolerant to all religions when he was a ruler, a point that his descendants copied. In fact, it was when they stopped being tolerant that the empire started to weaken. India boomed during this period, the Taj Mahal was constructed and India became a Muslim power comparable to the Ottoman Empire. 

Four generations after Babur, Aurangzeb seized power, killing his three brothers and securing himself on the throne, sending his father away from power. A very stronger believer in a more orthodox version of Islam, he enforced strict Islamic laws and even banned music, expanding the empire as well. However, after a revolt, the empire lost much control over the area of Afganistan, weakening it considerably. He died in 1707, and from this point on, the Mughal Empire began slowly collapsing, kingdoms popping up around it and causing it to shrink. While the empire was getting weaker, the British East India Company was getting stronger. 

After the Battle of Palashi in 1757, the British East India Company had political control of India, the Mughal rulers being nothing more than puppets. In 1857, parts of the Indian army revolted, but Britain quickly put it down to protect its interests. Emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar was then arrested and exiled to Burma, and this was the end of the Mughal Dynasty, 

I know what you’re thinking, if there were so many battles and wars and the Mongols even partially ruled India for a while, why are the countries close today? 

The two coutries of India and Mongol share a long history, yes, but they also share another thing- Buddhism. The Mongols became Buddhists, and India was known as the and of Buddha by the Mongols, making it a place of great respect, many Mongols going to study there and learn from India’s many schools. India also took part in the Mongol Empire’s expansive silk road, and many items and ideas were exchanged between the two groups via the silk road. Indian culture spread throughout Siberia and Central Asia, and the Mongols also transcribed many Indian philosophies, teachings, and medical practices that were lost to India itself over the centuries, preserving the knowledge. India is also seen as a “third, spiritual neighbor” by Mongolia, and this closeness was illustrated through the actions of the states in the modern day.

Mongolia, the modern day country, had the special privilege of being vetoed or having the threat of being vetoed, from becoming part of the UN by China, who claimed Mongolia was part of China so it couldn’t become a member. The United States also led a western coalition against Mongolia being recognized, most likely to prevent the USSR from gaining any more nations under its control, as Mongol was part of the Soviet bloc. As a consequence, it wasn’t until 1961 that Mongolia was fully recognized by the UN, and Russia had to hold the nationhood of African nations hostage to do it. And India campaigned heavily for Mongolia to become a state. 

India recognized Mongolia in 1955, six years before the UN did. The next year, India also hosted the first Mongolian ambassador. India began vigorously campaign for Mongolian UN membership, and at the 10th UN general assembly, India’s representative said, “Mongolia was founded neither yesterday nor today but has existed as an independent state over many centuries. Hence, similarly like any other country, the Mongolian People’s Republic has full rights to become a member of the United Nations Organization.” 

At the 15th UN general assembly, India once again advocated heavily for Mongolia to becoming an independent nation, saying, “If they received so many countries in the United Nations then why should Mongolia stay outside it? What had she done wrong? What kind of error did she commit against the (UN) Charter? The people of Mongolia are tranquil, and her peace-loving toilers are firmly striving for progress, and it seems absolutely wrong, from the principle point of view, not to allow her to the great organization.”

After the 1971 war against Pakistan, and the creation of Bangladesh, the prime minister wanted to seek recognition for Bangladesh into the UN, and after much lobbying, only Bhutan and Mongolia co-sponsor the resolution for Bangladesh’s recognition. Many nations, including the US and China, doubted that the secessionist entity could really be a state. When Mongolia backed India’s resolution, Pakistan cut off diplomatic relations, but Mongolia still didn’t change stances. 

In 1973, India and Mongolia signed the Joint Indo-Mongol Declaration, listing the 8 principles that would guide India-Mongolia relations. The treaty was then backed up by a Treaty of Friendly Relations and Cooperation in 1994. Strong ties continue as India sets up institutions of religious study, information technology, and skill development, and in defense and cyber defense also pushes them closer. 

The only thing buffering them is the physical distance, as it’s hard to send resources, tourism, and trade since they’re so far from each other. There’s no direct flight path from India to Mongolia in fact, one has to go through Russia or China’s airports. However, this might change as the two strengthen relations.

I learned a lot from this one, and hey, they’re pretty darn cute. Thank you for the ask!

[rajputanatours]

Enjoy Ajmer Attractions on a Rajasthan Tour

A word about the founder : In a picturesque valley ringed by the hills of the Aravali Range 131 kms, west of Jaipur , lies Ajmer. The city is said to have been founded by Maharaja Ajay Pal Chauhan in the 7th century AD. He named the place 'Ajaymeru ' ( The invincible hill ) from which the present name Ajmer is derived. Here , he built india's first hill fort - Tarahagh. Ajmer was a chauhan stronghold till 1192 AD when Prithvi Raj Chauhan, the last Hindu Kind of Delhi, lost it to Mohammed Ghori. The Strategic Position of this city has led to its long and turbulent history. tour operator in jaipur is connected to Delhi , Agra , Ahmedabad , Abu , Jodhpur , Udaipur & Jaipur by main highways and holds strategic aceen to Gujrat and Malwa ( M.P). It was a key center of Chauhan power along with the twin capital of Delhi , but after Prithviraj Chauhan was defeated by Sultan Mohammed Ghori (1193 ) , it had to pass through a chequered and violent history. Ajmer has remained throughout a great centre of pilgrimage for both Hindus and Muslims. A feature that gives the city its character and lends it Importance. rajasthan package Ajmer is a true amalgam of rich Hindu and Islamic heritage. The Sacred lake of Pushkar believed by Hindus to be a old as creation as the temple of Brahma has been a place of Pilgrimage from time immemorial. The great Sufi Sanit Khwaja Muin - Ud - Din Chisti of Persia was buried here and his Dargah is equally sacred for the followers of Islam as well as Hinduism. The Emperor Akbar made an annual visit to the Shrine of the saint , Sometimes on foot , as any ordinary pilgrim would. PLACES TO SEE THE DARGAH : In the heart of the city is the tomb of Saint Khwaja Muin - Ud -din - Chishit , popularly known as Dargah Sharif , It has been since long a pilgrimage and spiritual centre where followers of almost every creed and faith , muslims and non muslims , came throughout the year, especially on the occasion of the annual 'Urs' celebrated from the 1st to 6th day of Islamic month of Rajab. The Shrine of Khwaja Muin -Ud-din Chishti is considered today, a second Mecca / Medina for the Muslims of South Asia. The enormous gate of the Mausoleum leading to the open court was built by Sultan Altamash ( 12th century ). In the Court are two gigantic iron cauldrons donated by the Mughal emperors. On the right is Akbar's Mosque , a simple structure of dignified proportions , made of white marble. On top of the inner gate huge drums are kept in the Naubat Ghar or drum house, The Inner gate was donated by a Nawab of Hyderabad , Several tombs are located in the inner enclosure. SHAH JAHAN'S MOSQUE : In a corner of the inner court is an elegant building . A long ( 30.5 meters ) and narrow court with a low arcade in white marble , is delicately carved with trellis -work , it is the most beautiful of all the buildings within the Dargah precinct. The Tomb of the Saint is in a square building of white marble with a large dome. It has two entrances . The Front Porch is covered with lamps and chandeliers donated by devotees. ADHAI- DIN - KA - JHONPRA : Beyond the Dargah, among narrow and crowded lanes is a remarkable early Islamic structure . it was originally a Sanskrit college, probably within a temple enclosure. In 1193, Mohammed Ghori took over rajasthan tour packages from jaipur , destroyed the college and from its ruins, along with the remains of many nearby temples, hurriedly put together a mosque within two and a half days ( Adhai-Din). Pillars from at least thirty temples must have gone into the making of this elegant monument, a superb example of Indo-Islamic architecture. TARAGARH FORT ( AKBAR'S FORT ) : Above the Adhai- din - ka - Jhonpra, the road turns into a bridle path , leading to the top of hill on which the remains if strongly built fort stand . One is rewarded by a fine view of the city , from the Taragarh Fort. THE MUSEUM : Akbar's royal residence is now the museum which has an excellent collection of Moghal and Rajput armour and some fine Sculpture. MAYO COLLEGE : MAYO COLLEGE : In the South - East of the city is one of India's finest public schools, Mayo College . It was founded in 1875 , originally only for the sons of Rajput royalty , Each heir to a state built his own house within the spacious college ground covering 81 hectares which also housed his entire retinue along with his English Tutor. The college is now open to all and is run as public school tradition. THE CIRCUIT HOUSE : The former British Residency , overlooking Ana Sagar lake has been Convertel as the circuit house . From here the finest view of the lake can be had. One can also see the cenotaph and shrine of the Hindu reformer Swami Dayanand who founded the Arya Samaj movement in north India. PUSHKAR LAKE : An interesting drive. 11 km to the west , takes one through a mountain pass to the holy lake pf Pushkar. One of the mountains on this pass is called Nag Pahar or Snake Mountain where the Panchkund and cave of saint Agastya Rishi is located. It is said that Kalidasa, the 4th century Sanskrit poet and playright , palced the action of his masterpiece Abhijnama Shakuntalam in this forest hermitage . The Lake has legendary origins . A lotus fell from the hand of lord Bhahma and dropped into this valley. A lake sprang up on the spot , and was dedicated to him. A temple of Brahma is a popular place of pilgrimage. PUSHKAR FAIR : About 2,00,000 pilgrims gather annually at Pushkar during the autumnal fair, This is also a livestock fair and hundreds of horses , camels, cows and bulls are brought for sale. At the time of the fair Pushkar blossoms into gaiety and colour. There ae camel- cart races which everyone enjoys and are a delight to photographers , film makers and tourists. MAN MAHAL : Bulit by Raja Man Singh of Amer , the Man Mahal standing on the banks of Pushkar is now the R. T.D.C Sarovar tourist bungalow. It is most convenient place for visitors to stay, Pushkar Palace ( Kishangarh House ) an adjoining old building is now a heritage hotel. FOY SAGAR : 12 km. Named after the engineer who built it , Foy Sagar is a picturesque artificial lake. Is was the result of famine relief project.

[webseo1230]

Same Day Delhi Tour - A Day worth Exploring the Capital

The National Capital, Delhi Is Rich In Both Heritage And Culture. There Are Many Tourist Attractions In And Around The City That One Can Explore When They Visit India. If You Are A Globetrotter And Love To Tour Around The Best Places In India, You Could Blindly Choose Delhi As It Will Fill You Up With Never-Ending Contentment. The Modernized And Traditional Blend Of Delhi's Culture Will Leave You Surprised. Delhi Is The Home For Both Historical And Modern Constructions, Which Asks For Great Tourist Attractions.

You Can Witness The Great Architecture Left Behind By The Delhi Sultans And Mughal Emperors In Delhi City. If You Are Planning To Visit India, Especially Delhi, The

Same Day Delhi Tour

Would Be The Best Package You Can Book. The Tour Package Covers All The Significant Monuments In The City And The Time Is Scattered Very Well To Explore Every Monument In Detail Without Any Hurry. Plan Your Trip This Time To Delhi And You Will Complete The Tour With Tons Of Fresh Memories.

Same Day Delhi Tour Itinerary

You Get To Explore Many Places During The

Delhi Sightseeing Tour

. The Schedule Is Tightly Packed And You Will Visit All The Historic Places In Delhi In Just 8 Hours. At Sharp 9 AM, We Will Start Our Delhi Sightseeing Tour And Our Representative Will Escort You To Every Place And Give You A Brief Info About The History Of That Place.

You Will First Explore Old Delhi And Then Go To New Delhi. You Will Be Visiting Places Like Jama Masjid, Chandni chowk, Qutub minar, Humayun’s Tomb, India Gate, President’s House, Bangla Sahib Gurudwara, Parliament House, And Raj ghat, Shakti Sthal, Veer Bhumi. Learn What These Places Have To Offer From This Article.

Chandni chowk

For The Shopaholics Out There, Chandni chowk Is The Promising Place You Can Visit To Buy Ornaments And Accessories At Reasonable Costs. You Can Take A Rickshaw To Travel In The Lanes Of The City. After That, We Will Take You For A Lunch At Famous A Local Restaurant Where You Will Get To Taste The Popular Dishes Of Delhi. After Lunch, We Will Get Back To Our Delhi Tour. It Is Time To Explore The Monuments In New Delhi.

Qutub Minar

Jama Masjid Is Situated In The Centre Of Old Delhi And Was Built By Shah Jaha In 1650. It Is One Of The Biggest Mosques In The World. Qutub Minar Is One Of The Prominent Places In New Delhi. It Is 73 M High And Is A Must-Visit Location In Delhi. The Iron Pillar In The Qutub Complex, Which Was Constructed Ages Ago Is Still Not Rusted A Bit.  

Humayun’s Tomb This Wonderful Monument Was Constructed By Humayun’s First Wife, Bega Begum In 1558. As The Name Says, It Is An Islamic Tomb And Represents The Powerful Mughal Dynasty. The Tomb Was Built By Mirak Mirza Ghiyath.

India Gate

India Gate Is Yet Another Tourist Attraction In Delhi That Is Visited By Legions Of Tourists Every Day. It Is Constructed To Pay Homage To The Indian Soldiers Who Lost Their Lives During World War I. It Is 42 Meters High And Is Constructed Back In 1931. You Can Capture Good Pictures At The Monument And Also Watch The Amar Jawan jyoti From There.

President’s House

You Will Next Get To See President's House From Outside. Also Called Rashtrapati bhavan Is The Residence Of The President Of India. It Is Located In Rajpath, New Delhi, India.

Bangla Sahib Gurudwara

Bangla Sahib Gurudwara Is One Of The Most Sought-After Gurudwaras In The Country. This Is One Of The Major Tourist Attractions In Delhi Which Is Visited By Lakhs Of Tourists Every Year.

Parliament House

Tourists Can View The Parliament House From Outside Due To Security Issues. The Rajya Sabha And The Lok Sabha Are Hosted In The House.

Rajghat, Shakti Sthal, Veer Bhumi

At Last, You Will Take A Tour Of The Memorials Of The Former Prime Ministers. You Can Witness The Memorials Of Mahatma Gandhi In Rajghat While Shakti Sthal Is The Memorial Of Indira Gandhi. Rajiv Gandhi's Memorial Is Located In Veer Bhumi. It Is A Fantastic View To Catch With All The Greenery Around And No Pollution.

Your Same Day Delhi Tour Ends Here And We Are Sure This Tour, As Well As Our Services, Will Persist In Your Remembrances For Life.  

Here Are What Is Included And What Is Excluded

Inclusion

• Pick Up And Drop To And From The Hotel Is On Us.

• Personal Tour Guide To Assist You With Your Visits To The Monuments.

• AC Car With An Experienced Driver.

• Entrance Fees For All The Site Visits.

• Yummy Buffet Lunch

• All Taxes Are Included

• Mineral Water Bottles Provided

Exclusion

• Food Other Than Lunch And Beverages Should Be From Your Expenses.

• Tips For The Driver/Guide After The Tour.

Confirmation Policy

During The Confirmation Of The Tour, You Need To Submit All Your Details Like The Names And Ages Of Persons Travelling With Us. You Have To Carry Your Identity Proof With You While Travelling. The Pickup And Drop Places Should Be Cleared By You At The Time Of Booking.

Payment

While Booking The Tour You Have To Clear 50% Of The Total Booking Amount. This Confirms Your Tour With Us. Once You Complete The Tour You Have To Pay The Remaining 50%. You Can Also Choose Online Payment To Clear The Amount.

More Details Please visit our Website

www.creativeindiaholidays.com or

Call Us At 0091-9536141076, 8410116725 Or Email Us : info@creativeindiaholidays.com

[royal-diaries-podcast]

The Mughal Empire at its greatest extent, c. 1700 The Mughal, Mogul or Moghul Empire, was an early modern empire in South Asia. For some two centuries, the empire stretched from the outer fringes of the Indus basin in the west, northern Afghanistan in the northwest, and Kashmir in the north, to the highlands of present-day Assam and Bangladesh in the east, and the uplands of the Deccan plateau in south India. The Mughal empire is conventionally said to have been founded in 1526 by Babur, a warrior chieftain from what is today Uzbekistan, who employed military aid in the form of matchlock guns and cast cannon from the Ottoman Empire, and his superior strategy and cavalry to defeat the Sultan of Delhi, Ibrahim Lodhi, in the First Battle of Panipat, and to sweep down the plains of Upper India, subduing Rajputs and Afghans. The Mughal imperial structure, however, is sometimes dated to 1600, to the rule of Babur's grandson, Akbar. This imperial structure lasted until 1720, until shortly after the death of the last major emperor, Aurangzeb, during whose reign the empire also achieved its maximum geographical extent. Reduced subsequently, especially during the East India Company rule in India, to the region in and around Old Delhi, the empire was formally dissolved by the British Raj after the Indian Rebellion of 1857.

[mysuitandtiefixation]

A day of polo with Royal Salute

A week ago I had the opportunity to attend one of the most important events in the English sporting and social calendar with the company of other fellow bloggers. Hosted by whisky brand Royal Salute, this is the largest annual international polo match in the world. For a first experience at the also known Sports of Kings, I have to say that it exceeded all expectations. 

THE MASTERCLASS

It was an early start!  At 9AM in the morning we had an introduction to the sport, with tuition from top league polo player Malcolm Borwick. I didn’t know that the sport actually originated in ancient Persia (circa 6th Century BC). Later, the sport passed to other regions in Asia, where it became very popular, including the Indian subcontinent.

The modern game of polo is derived from Manipur, India, where In 1833 the first polo club was founded. British military officers in India then introduced the sport to their peers in England and later on it spread worldwide. 

I was surprised to know that the game is only played by 4 players on each team but the dimensions of the playing field (270m by 150m) is 6 times the size of a football field (approx. 100m by 70m.) This seems a very largue área with a lot of empty space, but if you consider that horses reach a speed of 30 miles an hour it would become chaos otherwise.

Another consideration to take into account is that polo is a very physical sport that requires a lot of strength and is highly dangerous. Emperor Alexander of Byzantine Empire died of exhaustion while playing and Qutubuddin Aibak, Sultan of Delhi, died impaled when he fell off the horse.

Due to this reason, there are strict rules that are applied in order for this already dangerous sport to avoid becoming a "factory" of injures! Probably the most important rule is the “imaginary line” between the player on hold of the ball (player who last hit the ball) and the ball itself that cannot be crossed at any time by any player. Nevertheless you are allowed to block the opponent’s mallet with your own mallet or even push the opponent off the line by intersecting him by no more than 45 degrees.

Later on, I had the chance to try the real game, or its version for first time players, anyway. I began by practicing a few swings with the mallet. As you can imagine, riding a horse at the same time as you try to hit a small ball with a long stick is not an easy task. Especially as it was my first time on the back of a horse. The experience let me with a feeling of wanting more and I have to thank the Guards Polo Academy for being so helpful and also so patient.

THE TASTING

It was 11:30 in the morning by the time we finished our Masterclass and what better idea at this time of the day than having a whiskey tasting! Well, at least we didn't have it before getting on the horse! I have never tasted such a fine whiskey and I can confirm, whisky tastes better the older it gets.

The first taster was a Royal Salute’s signature 21 year old blended scotch whisky. It was rich,complex and it became sweeter with just a few drops of water, letting out hints of sherry and oak.

The second to taste was a 38 year old blend in a special flagon made to represent the “Stone of Destiny’, an oblong block of red sandstone that was used for centuries in the Coronation of the Monarchs of Scotland, and later the monarchs of England and the Kingdom of Great Britain. What flowed from the bottle was a very dark coloured blend, with a distinctive flavour of raisins and dark chocolate, yummy!

But by far, the most special whisky to taste was the third one, the 62 Gun Salute, bottled in a luxurious blue glass decanter inlaid with 24 Carat gold, made of a blend of whiskies that have been aged for at least 40 years. I won’t tell you how much the 62 Gun Salute costs, but you can find out,  and appreciate how prestigious it is and how honoured I felt to taste this delicacy. I was surprised by its colour, very light as opposed to the previous one. 

THE MAIN EVENT

A bit tipsy, I changed into something more appropriate for the main event. Smart casual was required for this polo event. This means collared shirts for men, with trousers or chinos and smart shorts if the weather gets hot. I chose a blue blazer, something very appropriate for this type of events and you can never be wrong with one. I chose also a white shirt, pink striped tie, and blue pocket square with a flower print. I was happy with the colour choice as it matched the colour theme of the event, all on purpose, of course ;) 

I was going to wear white trousers and loafers, and it probably would have look perfectly combined, but after checking the weather for the day, rainy of course, I changed my mind, and went for light grey check pair of trousers and my brown/blue spectator shoes. You know, grey combines perfectly with the English sky. 

Food was delicious, drinks were delicious and desserts were as well. But what happened to the polo match? Wasn’t that the reason why everybody was there dressed to the nines? Well of course!

At 4PM the first game began. England’s top polo stars competed against the Commonwealth for the most prestigious international tittle in the sport. They gave us a some great moments and some players fell off their horses, something that made me think again of the dangers of polo. Apparently it is something that happens often. 

Initially the weather seemed to get in our way but after a few cocktails we didn’t seem to mind too much about the rain and we all came out and had a fantastic time. 

Thanks again to Royal Salute for the hospitality and great organization of the event. It was a first experience to be remembered. 

[xtruss]

DECODER

The 3 Most Polarizing Words in India, the Fascist & Terrorist Regime of Fucked-up Hindus!

“Jai Shri Ram” was meant to be a celebration of a Hindu deity. But the phrase is turning into hate speech—and a dog whistle for attacks on Muslims.

— By Snigdha Poonam| February 13, 2020 | Foreign Policy

“Jai Shri Ram!” Those were the words 25-year-old Kapil Gujjar shouted as he pointed his semi-automatic pistol at hundreds of unarmed women and children at Shaheen Bagh, a predominantly Muslim colony in New Delhi, on Saturday, Feb. 1. It was a cool, smog-infused afternoon, and Indians from all walks of life had gathered in a peaceful protest against a controversial new citizenship law that especially affects the country’s poor, women, and, perhaps most of all, Muslims. Gujjar fired three bullets in the air. The crowd scattered. Later, while being handcuffed by the police, Gujjar explained his motive: “In our country, only Hindus will prevail.”

Jai Shri Ram literally translates as “Victory to Lord Ram,” a popular Hindu deity. But while this seemingly harmless phrase originated as a pious declaration of devotion in India, it is today increasingly deployed not only as a Hindu chauvinist slogan but also as a threat to anyone who dares to challenge Hindu supremacy.

Gujjar’s message was aimed at India’s 200 million Muslims —the largest religious minority in a mostly Hindu population of 1.3 billion people—who have become unwitting targets in an us-versus-them culture war waged by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). The latest catalyst for tensions is the new Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), which discriminates on the basis of religion. The law grants citizenship to refugees from Afghanistan, Bangladesh, and Pakistan who are Buddhists, Christians, Hindus, Jains, Sikhs, or Zoroastrians—but not Muslims—as long as they entered India before 2015.

Jai Shri Ram is today increasingly deployed as a threat to anyone who dares to challenge Hindu supremacy.

Activists point out that the CAA goes against the secular principles enshrined in the Indian Constitution. Jai Shri Ram is today increasingly deployed as a threat to anyone who dares to challenge Hindu supremacy. And when coupled with a proposed national registry of citizens that could force people to prove their citizenship, the government’s plans could hurt the many millions of poor and illiterate Indians who don’t possess any documents to further their claims. Mass protests have seized the country’s cities and towns since the CAA was passed on Dec. 11; in scenes unprecedented in modern India, thousands of demonstrators have been forming human chains, singing the national anthem, and reading the constitution aloud. Shaheen Bagh, where hundreds of local Muslim women have staged a sit-in since the start of this year, has become the center of the national movement as more and more Indians—students, professionals, activists, singers, artists—join them every day.

Two days before Gujjar walked into Shaheen Bagh, another young man, a teenager, produced a pistol near the area and shot at anti-CAA demonstrators, injuring one and terrifying hundreds. The juvenile shooter, whom Indian law prohibits the media from naming, had apparently been prepared to become a martyr in what he perceived as a war for Hindu supremacy. In a Facebook video he recorded while on his way to Shaheen Bagh, he had left instructions for his fellow warriors: “On my final journey, cover me in saffron clothes and chant Jai Shri Ram.” The phrase has provoked terror in the capital since the beginning of this year: On the night of Jan. 5, a group of masked attackers affiliated with the Hindu far-right cried “Jai Shri Ram” as they entered Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University, a hub of left-wing politics, and brutally beat up students who had been protesting against a recent fee hike.

People take part in protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act and the National Register of Citizens at Shaheen Bagh in New Delhi, on Feb. 2, the day after a shooter fired on protesters there.

Ram, the popular Hindu god, is the protagonist of the Sanskrit epic Ramayana, said to be written sometime between the seventh and third centuries B.C. In modern, mainstream depictions of the Ramayana, Ram is extolled as the embodiment of the perfect man: an exiled prince who rescues his abducted wife and destroys an evil empire before returning home to assume his rightful throne. Ram is always described as just, brave, self-sacrificing, and righteous. His followers even justify the fact that he later abandoned his wife, Sita, after commoners questioned her purity—after all, they argue, Ram’s role as king superseded his duties as a husband. He was likely only following the social mores of his era.

Ram is always described as just, brave, self-sacrificing, and righteous.

In Hindi-speaking regions, Hindus have invoked Ram’s name for more than a century in regular greetings, in exclamation, and in folk songs. The deity’s political influence goes back even further. In the 12th century, a “sudden rush of temples [were] built for Ram” in response to the establishment of the first sultanate in Delhi in 1206, the journalist Shoaib Daniyal points out in Scroll.in. “In the 17th century, for example, two Marathi Ramayans were written, one which compared Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb to Raavan [Ram’s nemesis] and the other to Raavan’s gluttonous brother Kumbhakarna,” he writes.

But the phrase’s cultural relevance changed markedly in the last four decades, when it began to take on a different meaning. I first heard the words while watching the late 1980s television adaptation of Ramayana that aired on the national broadcaster Doordarshan. The program became a Sunday ritual in Hindi-speaking parts of India, and it depicted Ram as an ideal, pious man with a beatific smile—until he encountered evil, which he slew on sight. But Ram never used his special powers unless it was warranted. “Attacking the weak or the innocent to show your arrogance or your might doesn’t count as the dharma [duty] of the brave,” Ram’s spiritual mentor, Vishwamitra, advises while awarding him with celestial weapons.

Some purported followers of Ram now seem to have a different interpretation of dharma. Last year, across several incidents, dozens of poor and innocent Indians were attacked because they refused to say the words Jai Shri Ram. On June 18, a 24-year-old man was lynched in Jharkhand; on June 20, a 40-year-old cleric was hit by a car in Delhi; on June 23, a 25-year-old cab driver was beaten up in Thane near Mumbai; and on July 28, a 15-year-old boy was set on fire in Uttar Pradesh. In each of these attacks, the victims were Muslim, and they were asked to chant Jai Shri Ram by as few as three and as many as 30 Hindu assailants.

The slogan is deployed as effectively in violence as it is in entertainment. Last July, as Muslims were being forced to intone Jai Shri Ram, the country seemed gripped by a viral music video (now deleted) on YouTube titled “Jo Na bole Jai Sri Ram, bhej do usko kabristan” (Those who don’t say Jai Shri Ram, send them to their graveyards). The reference to cemeteries made clear that the message was directed at Muslims and Christians. Four people involved in making and uploading the video were later arrested. There is no stopping the messages of hate, however. On YouTube, one can now find dozens of songs glorifying Ram and denigrating minorities. Most of them mix Hindi hate speech with electronic beats. Some are so popular that they are requested at weddings and played in clubs. “Hindu Blood Hit,” for example, has been viewed more than 3.8 million times. Between psychedelic repetitions of Jai Shri Ram, the singer warns India’s Muslims that their time is up. Other viral songs can be geopolitical: “Jai Shree Ram DJ Vicky Mix” calls for a future in which “there will continue to be a Kashmir but no Pakistan.”

Arun Govil as Lord Ram and Deepika Chikhalia as Sita in Ramanand Sagar’s TV adaptation of the epic Hindu poem Ramayana.

The 1980s television show of the Ramayana reached millions of Indians right as the BJP accelerated its project to unite Hindi-speaking Hindus around the figure of Ram. This was a bold political experiment. Although widely known as the hero of the Ramayana, which has been published in multiple languages and dialects, Ram was worshipped only selectively in India. In some parts such as Tamil Nadu, his worship elicits hostility by those who see the Ramayana’s narrative as racist toward Dravidians, the ancestral inhabitants of southern India. In West Bengal, where the majority of Hindus worship the goddesses Durga and Kali, Ram’s name doesn’t resonate widely.

Ram’s imprint has spread in the years since the BJP chose him as the mascot for its project to build and cultivate a Hindu base of voters.

But Ram’s imprint has spread in the years since the BJP chose him as the mascot for its project to build and cultivate a Hindu base of voters.Ram’s imprint has spread in the years since the BJP chose him as the mascot for its project to build and cultivate a Hindu base of voters. The center for this project was the city of Ayodhya, where a 16th-century Mughal mosque occupied what some believe to be the site of Ram’s birth. Around the mid-19th century, regional Hindu organizations attempted to claim the site and build a temple to Ram on the mosque’s grounds. But then, in the 1980s, the BJP and its ideological allies turned the local demand for a Ram temple at the site into a sweeping Hindu nationalist movement. The slogan for this movement, which was led by BJP leader and then-Home Minister L.K. Advani, was Jai Shri Ram. The words were chanted, loud and clear, as the foundation for the temple was laid next to the mosque and bricks were loaded into trucks and trains headed for Ayodhya. And the same words tore through the city on Dec. 6, 1992, as thousands of Hindu volunteers pounded the mosque with hammers and axes. In a matter of hours, the building was razed; riots sparked throughout India. Jai Shri Ram now had an additional meaning: an expression of Hindu dominance and the BJP’s rise.

Last June, cries of Jai Shri Ram echoed through the Indian Parliament after the BJP was reelected with a sweeping majority, winning 303 of 543 parliamentary seats in an ugly, polarized election. The words were used to heckle Muslim legislators as they took their oaths to uphold the Indian Constitution. Five months later, India’s Supreme Court settled the country’s longest-running property dispute by ruling in favor of a Ram temple to be built in Ayodhya at the same site where the mosque was demolished by Hindu nationalists in 1992. The Muslim petitioners were granted 5 acres elsewhere in the city to build a mosque. On Nov. 9, as the government commenced arrangements for building the temple, Modi tweeted his response to the court verdict: “May peace and harmony prevail!” But those words seem lost amid the dog whistles sounded by senior leaders and amplified on social media with impunity. It is no surprise then that the devotees firing bullets at Shaheen Bagh have different intentions.