Shobha Singh a petty zamindar of Chetwa-Barda

Shobha Singh a petty zamindar of Chetwa-Barda in the Chandrakona subdivision of Midnapur. He revolted against Mughal rule in Bengal in June 1695. Historians have debated over the ancestry of Sobha Singh, one scholar claiming his descent from Raghunath Singh of Chandrakona, who, according to a farman of 1734, was the zamindar of Chandrakona at the end of the seventeenth century. A contemporary French letter from chandannagar referred to the 'good family' of Sobha Singh, which would suggest that he might not have been a Bagdi as generally alleged, but perhaps of an inferior variety of ksatriya. According to this French letter, Sobha Singh was a petty ijaradar under Krishnaram Ray, zamindar of Burdwan, who was the principal ijaradar of the area. Sobha Singh used to pay annually Rs 22,000 for the ijara, while Krishnaram's ijara was Rs 22 lakh, making the latter a very wealthy man.
The immediate cause of Sobha Singh's revolt cannot be ascertained. A contemporary French letter suggested that the reason behind Sobha Singh's revolt was a more far-reaching one than simply a quarrel over land with his superior. The time was opportune as Emperor aurangzeb was then in the Deccan fighting the Marathas, while there was a possibility of continuing conflict between the subadar and the diwan in the Mughal court at Dhaka, then the Mughal capital of Bengal.
The attack of Sobha Singh on Burdwan was not sudden, although very well planned. There were several skirmishes before Sobha Singh attacked Krishnaram Ray at Burdwan, which perhaps was not expected by him. It appears from contemporary European documents that the attack occurred in the later months of 1695. The farman of 1734 put the death toll of Krishnaram's family to twenty-two, excepting a son, Jagat Ray, who was then away. The merciless killing of innocent family members, including ladies, would suggest that the conflict had deeper causes and not merely a land dispute. A temple inscription of Daspur, belonging to his zamindari, depicts Sobha Singh as a cruel person.
After wiping away Krishnaram and his family, Sobha Singh began to seize all the estates of the late zamindar. With a huge fund at his disposal, Sobha Singh began to recruit disgruntled Afghans from north India. The contemporary English report speaks of the plundering of the country by these Afghans, leading to the ruination of several mansabdars.
The involvement of the court of Dhaka in the revolt comes from the rivalry between the subadar ibrahim khan and the diwan, whose favourite was Manikchand, ancestor of jagat sheth. His brother, Golulchand, a contract merchant of the English east india company, had made contact with Sobha Singh and had passed his bills for money, disregarding the advice of his friends. This liaison became known to the subadar, who secretly began to intercept letters and bills of the two merchants. This led to his imprisoning Hiranand Seth, father of the two merchants, possibly at Patna, where the sarrafs led a strike against the arrest. Ibrahim Khan also arrested Manikchand at Dhaka and kept him in iron chains under heavy guard. Golulchand, on his way to Dhaka, had heard of the imprisonment and had escaped to Mukhsudabad (later known as Murshidabad) to find that all his properties and estates had been seized, sealed up and secured. The sarrafs of Hughli however struck work, possibly with the tacit support of the diwan. Golulchand was arrested at kasimbazar possibly before August 1696. The action of the subadar would reveal his liaison with a section of the rebels, since without their cooperation, it would have been difficult to intercept the letters and bills of Manikchand. (1st of 2nd Part)

Rahim Khan Afghan mercenary of north India

According to the contemporary English report, Rahim Khan was then controlling the revolt since his Afghan forces formed the principal element of the rebel army. At Rajmahal, the rebels had seized Sheddon and Teshmaker of the English company. The English tried to get their release through the intervention of Sobha Singh's widow. But Rahim Khan paid no heed since the English had failed to supply ammunition demanded by the rebel faujdar, Gujrat Khan, at Makhsudabad.
According to Salimullah, Rahim Khan had taken the title of 'Shah', although there is no contemporary evidence to support it. They appear even to have begun to mint coins at Barda. By the end of May 1697, Muhammed Yusuf, former faujdar of Rajmahal, had defeated and killed Gujrat Khan. This victory not only enabled Zabardast Khan to seize Makhsudabad but also opened the route for the Mughal army to come from north India. Prince azimuddin, the new subahdar of Bengal had arrived at Patna with a large force.
Niamat Khan with his son tried to resist Rahim Khan before the arrival of Zabardast Khan. In the battle that ensued, both Niamat Khan and his son were killed and the injured Rahim Khan managed to escape. This was followed by another battle at bhagwangola between Rahim Khan and Zabardast Khan in which the former was thoroughly routed. Rahim Khan fled to Burdwan pursued by Zabardast Khan. By the second week of June 1697, Zabardast Khan had become master of Burdwan area and the rebels were fleeing towards Barda. In December 1697, Zabardast Khan had left for Hindustan with the arrival of the new Subahdar Azimuddin at Burdwan in November. The Prince had nearly ten thousand cavalry and twelve thousand foot soldiers. The rebels had nearly the equal number of soldiers. The departure of Zabardast Khan with his troops gave Rahim Khan and Maha Singh some breathing space. They had placed toll stations on the river below Uluberia and had easily defeated Kamdar Khan, subahdar of Orissa, who had come forward to negotiate.
Ghulam Hussain has described the negotiation between Rahim Khan and Khawja Anwar, a companion of the Prince and his murder by Rahim Khan in the midst of negotiation. The English letters suggest some kind of negotiation but reported that the Prince had finally refused their offer. In early 1698, the Prince with his army had crossed the Damodar, by which time, the rebels had plundered Balasore and had advanced up to Nadia, from where Father Pierre Martin had fled.
jadunath sarkar, on the basis of the Akhbarat of the Prince, has stated that the Prince had marched up to Chandrakona and defeated and killed Sobha Singh and Rahim Khan. But that despatch is a suspect, since in 1704, murshid quli khan, the new Dewan, had to undertake an expedition to Chandrakona to pacify the area. Besides, Sobha Singh was already dead. Probably the Prince had killed Rahim Khan and Maha Singh, who was then succeeded by Himmat Singh. Ghulam Hussain has described the death of Rahim Khan in the battle in detail.
The transformation of the revolt of a petty zamindar to the ruler of the west bank of the Bhagirathi was largely the work of Rahim Khan, who took almost the entire northern and western part of Bengal under his control. But he had failed to establish a civil government that would generate regular revenue. This failure led him to maintain his Afghan mercenaries whom he had to pay at higher rates by plundering the rich towns on the Bhagirathi. Such unrestricted plunder not only alienated the European companies but also the peasants and the merchants. While the 'Raja' tried to establish a regular government, the plundering activities of the other section of the rebels, led by Rahim Khan, had allowed the Mughals to overcome them.
While the rich urban areas of northern Bengal was devastated by such plunder, affecting trade and commerce and creating scarcity of money, the European companies took the opportunity to fortify their enclaves, that enhanced their powers in Bengal. It is no wonder that the contemporary European documents stated the revolt as the fall-out of the impending civil war on the approaching death of emperor aurangzeb. [Aniruddha Ray]

(3rd of 3rd part)

Bibliography Salimulla, Tarikh-i Bangla (tr. by F Gladwin), Calcutta, 1788;Ghulam Hussain Salim, Reaz-us Salatin (tr. into Bengali), Dacca, 1974-; Om Prakash, The Sobha Singh Revolt, Dutch Policy and Response, Bengal Past & Present, January-June 1975, Pt-I; Aniruddha Ray, Adventurers, Landowners and Rebels, Bengal c.1575 - c.1715, New Delhi, 1998.

Rahim Khan Afghan mercenary of north India

It appears that the 'Raja' Maha Singh, after his failure to take hughli and the areas below it, thanks to the resistance of the Europeans, had come to the northern part. The merchants of kasimbazar as well as the vakil of the Dutch company had visited the Raja, who had prevented immediate plunder of Kasimbazar.
The victory of Makhsudabad induced the neighbouring zamindars to submit to the rebels particularly when the rebels had seized the Mughal faujdar of the area. The French letter of 16 January 1697 estimates the plunder of Makhsudabad to twenty lakh rupees. Most of the people of the west bank had crossed the Ganges and were fleeing towards Dhaka. The rebels had begun to fortify Makhsudabad. It appears that Rahim Khan had not formally proclaimed himself leader. The English reported that Maha Singh, the general of the rebel forces, had declared his intention to become the king of Bengal. The rumour of the next rebel attack on Dhaka, never realised, merely revealed the fragile nature of the Mughal rule in northern Bengal.
Trade had not been normalised till the end of December 1696 and the English saw no possibility of its resumption in the immediate future. Excepting some isolated thanas and fortified enclaves of the European companies the rebels held the western bank of the Bhagirathi. Apart from the plunder of the rich merchants of Makhsudabad, the rebels had seized one lakh ten thousand rupees from the treasury of Makhsudabad with which they could pay the mercenaries at higher rates. They had established chowkies (toll stations) on the Bhagirathi and had begun to issue the dustak (permit) of the 'Raja' for safe conduct of boats at a price. However, in some isolated places, the Mughal thanadars would seize the rebel boats and send these to Dhaka from time to time.
A detachment of the rebels had advanced close to the European factories on the Bhagirathi, which the Europeans resisted. The route from Hughli to Dhaka was open but the merchants were unwilling to send either goods or money. Partitioned in two halves, Bengal was witnessing the operation of two parallel authorities. However the contradiction within the structure of the revolt was also clear. While the higher command was trying to set up the usual paraphernalia of an established authority, the lower command was bent on plunder.
By the middle of January 1697, some of the Afghan captains, not willing to risk their ill-gotten riches, had left Bengal to return to their homes laden with plunder. From the end of January 1697, the rebel leaders had begun to extend their operation of plunder of defencelss towns. Despite the payment of forty thousand rupees by the merchants, the rebels plundered Kasimbazar, where they besieged the European factories, demanding a payment of Four lakh rupees from the dutch and Rs. Nine thousand from the french. The rebel commanders, desperate to get fund to pay their soldiers, were forcibly exacting money from the merchants. Fonneville, the French merchant, escaped at night with a clerk to chandannagar and the French factory at Kasimbazar was plundered.
After March 1697, it was still hazardous to send goods to Rajmahal from Patna. The rebels had plundered Malda after defeating Muhammad Taqi, a big Mansabdar. By that time, Zabardast Khan was rapidly advancing towards the river. The rebels, with the strategy of defeating him before the arrival of troops from north India, had several skirmishes with his advanced detachments. They had concentrated at Makhsudabad, which had saved Hughli from further attacks.

Rahim Khan Afghan mercenary of north India

Rahim Khan Afghan mercenary of north India, joined shobha singh principally for plunder. His patron Sobha Singh was a petty zamindar of Chetwa-Barda pargana of the district of Midnapore and had rebelled and killed Krishnaram Ray, the zamindar and the chief ijaradar of Burdwan around June 1695. Sobha Singh began to raise troops with the money plundered from Krishnaram's house. Ghulam Hussain Salim has placed the advent of Rahim Khan around this time. By the third week of November 1696, Sobha Singh's troops included seven to eight thousand horsemen, all probably Afghan mercenaries. The sudden death of Sobha Singh, of a fall from high terrace before the end of November 1696, made his uncle Maha Singh the leader of his forces. The real leader, however, was Rahim Khan, under whose leadership the rebels became far more aggressive and undertook unrestricted plunders, particularly of the rich towns of northern Bengal.
Maha Singh tried to normalise the situation by assuring the merchants and collecting revenue in the usual fashion. It seems that the rebels had divided their forces as well as the areas of operations. While Maha Singh concentrated on the seizure of the Hughli fort and the areas below it on the Bhagirathi, Rahim Khan shifted his operations in the northern part of the Bhagirathi.
By the end of November 1696, rebel forces led by Rahim Khan had pushed towards Makhsudabad. On the way, they had defeated a mansabdar coming with 5000 horse and 5000 foot and plundered the city of Makhsudabad. By then the merchants fled and the trading activities had entirely stopped. Salimullah, the late eighteenth century historian, has given the credit of the victory to Rahim Khan.
With an army rapidly swelling to ten thousand horse and equal number of foot, the rebels had reached the outskirts of rajmahal without opposition. They had also sent 2000 horse to Cottapore to prevent Zabardast Khan, who was coming with a Mughal army from Dhaka crossing the Ganges. The western bank of the Bhagirathi, with its rich and open market towns, lay completely at the mercy of the marauding Afghans. (1st of 3rd part)

Sarkar, Jadunath (1870-1958) historian.

In a broader sense, this is the concept of the progress of civilisation as envisaged by Mill. Each conquest is an affirmation of the progress. By the same token, the Sultanate period should have been seen as such, but Jadunath had categorised it as a dark period. Tarafdar has rightly asked how the age of Akbar had become the bacon of civilisation if the preceding age was so dark. Recent researches have shown that while Akbar had limited his patronage to only two Rajput houses, his successors, Jahahgir and Shah Jahan, had expanded it. Actually compared to Akbar's period, the number of Hindu Mansabdars had increased during the period of Aurangzeb, thus belying the thesis of Jadunath. That Aurangzeb had given generous grants to non-Muslim monasteries, including the Vrndaban monastery of the Vaishnavas, has been shown in recent years.
Even then, one could see that Jadunath believed in the plural society of medieval India, grown out of various influences coming from outside, including those of the Muslim Sufis. But this 'mixed culture' was very limited according to Jadunath. The exchanges between the Hindus and the Muslims had occurred at a lower level and among the lower classes and lower castes. Jadunath believed that improvement would come through progressive English education, but he did not specify it.
In his edition of the medieval History of Bengal Vol. II (Dhaka University, 1943), Jadunath seemed to believe that the English had rescued the Bengalis from oblivion and darkness, a kind of 'reverse nationalism', which did not look at the colonial policies of the English. He was silent on the question of independence of India and in a sense, there was not much difference between him and the English historians. He evaded the questions arising from the fact that the English colonial policy had started soon after the battle of Palashi.
Despite all these, Jadunath has narrated events with extraordinary skill and eloquence. The structure he has given to the decline and fall of the Mughal Empire in his account, with some modifications, has remained intact. The picture of the individual Mughal and Maratha nobles moving towards their final destiny like the characters of a Greek tragedy against the background of the decline, with all their personal conflicts, cowardice, heroism and self-sacrifice, so ably created by Jadunath, has remained unsurpassed even to this day. Jadunath Sarkar died on the night of 19 May 1958. [Aniruddha Ray]

(3rd of 3rd part)

Bibliography HR Gupta (ed), Life and Letters of Sir Jadunath Sarkar, Punjab University, 1958; MR Tarafdar 'Aitihasik Jadunath Sarkar', Itihas, No. 2-3, Dhaka, 1377 BS; NK Sinha, 'Jadunath Sarkar Reread', Bengal Past & Present, XCII, 1973; Amalendu De & Benoy Bhusan Ray, Sir Jadunath Rachnanapanji (Bengali), Calcutta, 1380 BS; VG Kobrekar (ed), Making of a Princely Historian, Maharastra State Archives, 1975; Kiron Power, Sir Jadunath Sarkar, New Delhi, 1985; Aniruddha Ray, Jadunath Sarkar (Bengali), Calcutta, 1999.

Elliot and Dowson influenced Jadunath,(1870-1958)..

Elliot and Dowson influenced Jadunath, but he did not belong to their school. His first book showed that the Muslim historians had not written only on political history, contrary to the claim of Elliot, but on socio-economic aspects of the Mughal Empire as well. In a broader sense, Jadunath had taken the cue from Mill. Jadunath regarded the pre-Mughal Sultanate period as one of darkness. He believed that akbar had brought a new civilising light in the arts, in administration, in law and order. Interestingly neither Mill nor Elphinstone had termed the Sultanate period as a dark age because they always made a comparison on racial and communal lines.
Although Jadunath had praised Akbar, he chose aurangzeb for his first major work, thus coming closer to that of Elphinstone. There Jadunath differed from him. The objective of Elphinstone was to show the break-up of the Mughal Empire as a reaction to Aurangzeb's policy, and the rescue of Indian civilisation by the progressively civilised English. Jadunath tried to show in his study of Aurangzeb as in his Fall of the Mughal Empire, that the Mughal Empire fell due to its own internal weaknesses. However he remained silent on the role of the English. It was only after the description of the battle of palashi that he heralded the English victory as a harbinger of a 'new renaissance... the like of which the world had never seen...'.
Jadunath was equally reticent about the periodisation of Indian history by James Mill. He did not specifically protest against the racial and communal basis of such periodisation, but foresaw difficulties in periods overlapping each other. One of the methodologies of Jadunath was his insistence on the 'evidence', although he was not so profuse or detailed in the notes supporting the evidence. He took great pains to get documents in different languages to establish the 'facts'. Given the situation of the times, Jadunath, like most of his predecessors, established 'facts' of mostly a political and military nature. But the results of his search unearthed several important documents, including Akhbarat from Jaipur, Baharistan-i Ghayebi, Haft Anjuman and other documents, some of which had remained for so long either in personal collections or in the European archives.
As a matter of fact, Jadunath spent his whole life in collecting such documents, which he often presented in the annual conferences of the Indian Historical Records Commission. He gave almost equal importance to contemporary English and the French documents, and translated portions of the diary of the seventeenth century French merchant Francois Martin. His translation was however heavily criticised by Surendranath Sen. On the other hand, Jadunath had begun to question the value of Sanskrit poems, Maratha documents and Bakhar literature. To Jadunath, the contemporary English correspondences, for example the Poona Residency Correspondences, were more important since they revealed the details lacking in Indian documents.
These European documents helped Jadunath to establish his 'facts'. In his work on the battles, he would take great pains to describe troop movements and identify the exact spots, for which he would take the trouble of visiting the spots again and again. As a result, the descriptions of the battles become far livelier, in which he had used the knowledge of geography unlike other contemporary historians. Often he corrected his earlier identifications. Jadunath was therefore searching for the truth in the 'facts', almost impersonally, but only in those 'facts' which appeared to him from his documents.
Jadunath is remembered for his books, some of which he re-edited in his later years. His Aurangzib and Shivaji narrated the history of the seventeenth century around two individuals while his Later Mughals and Fall of the Mughal Empire dealt with the personalities and events of the eighteenth century. Aurangzib traced the fall of the Mughal Empire and Shivaji, a contrast, the rise of a nation under a heroic leader. To Jadunath, it was individual leadership which mattered, but actually, these two were tales of the decadence of an empire and the rise of another, the state being the principal object.
The other works almost had the same picture, the decline of both the Mughals and the Marathas and the rise of the English. It was the country and the state that concerned Jadunath in the background of the contrasting forces. Strictly speaking, Jadunath dealt only with the decline of the Mughals and did not go into the details of the decline of the Marathas or the rise of the English, who were kept always in the background, so that their attempts at expansion were not given due attention. This becomes quite clear in his narrative of the fall of Nawab sirajuddaula in Bengal in 1757, where the internal weakness of the Nizamat, and the weak character of the nawab had been painted in detail. Jadunath supported such analysis by drawing on the later Persian sources written under the aegis of the British officials.
Jadunath was attracted to Vincent Smith's pragmatic concept of history as a view of the past, from which one could learn some lessons. But he was far more concerned with the concept of the progress of civilisation, obviously taken from Mill. The change towards the pragmatic concept came somewhere between 1928 and 1932. By then Jadunath had become conscious about the formation of Indian nationality. That Aurangzib, by his fundamentalist approach, had heightened communal tension, thereby destroying the formation of Indian nationality, in contrast to that of Akbar, an Elphinstonian touch, had been the theme of Jadunath. Later researches of M Athar Ali (Mughal Nobility Under Aurangzeb, 1966) and Irfan Habib (Agrarian System of Mughal Empire, 1963) had shown that the concept of Elphinstone, taken by Jadunath, was historically inaccurate and that there were administrative-economic reasons for the decline of the Mughal Empire. Therefore the theory of the crisis, as seen by Jadunath, caused by moral degeneration and communal politics, would not hold good.
Nineteenth and twentieth century Maratha nationalism had no impact on Shivaji by Jadunath, who, as seen earlier, was against the nationalists for basing their writings on unhistorical facts. Yet a closer reading of Shivaji would give the impression that Jadunath was not immune to Maratha nationalism. However, he felt that the Maratha movement after Baji Rao had undergone a change, when fundamentalist Hinduism had become dominant, whose seeds Jadunath had traced in the administrative set-up of Shivaji. At the same time, he had written strongly against the Shivaji myth.
In the 1952 edition of Volume V of History of Aurangzib, Jadunath had added a chapter entitled 'Aurangzib and the Indian Nation'. Here he had shown that the Hindus were under the domination of the Muslims, although the Muslims were more progressive. The downtrodden majority could not make the nation. Finally, the Muslims looked beyond India and brought their downfall, while the caste system and their conflicts had brought the downfall of the Hindus. At that time Europe was going forward in acquiring and applying technological knowledge that resulted in their conquest of Asia and Africa.

(2nd of 3rd part).