An important moment in the decline of the Mughal Empire was the Persian Safavid ruler Nader Shah’s raid on Delhi in 1739 as the Mughals looked on, helplessly.
“For a long time after,” wrote Anand Mukhlis, who saw the scene from his rooftop, “the streets remained strewn with corpses, as the walks of a garden are with dead flowers and leaves.”
Nader Shah took ‘the pick of the treasures’ the Mughals had collected over ‘200 years of sovereignty and conquest’, William Dalrymple writes, so that in a ‘single swift blow, Nader Shah had broken the Mughal spell.’
Richard Eaton sees the event as a symptom of decline, and this it was. Who could imagine the Persian ruler appearing anywhere near Delhi with his head intact when Akbar, or even Aurangzeb, was emperor? Dalrymple asserts that the tragedy made the process of decline speed up, too.
Mughal Delhi suddenly became poor. This meant that administrative and military salaries could not be paid, and regional dynasties became increasingly independent from the virtually bankrupt central state. In the anarchy that ensued a military labour market bloomed. The British East India Company steadily increased its power, with the Mughal state subjugated and diminished.
William Dalrymple, The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company (2019)
Richard Eaton, India in the Persianate Age: 1000-1765 (2019)
