nadir shah and the afghans, 1732–47region. At the end of February 1757 Jahan Khan attacked Mathura, which
in Hindu tradition is the birthplace of the god Krishna. The city’s occupants
were mostly non-combatants – religious mendicants, Brahmins, priests
and pilgrims – but despite this Sardar Jahan Khan’s troops massacred them
and defiled the corpses of sanyasis, priests and sadhus by stuffing pieces
of slaughtered cow in their mouths. The city’s temples were also burnt
and images smashed. When Jahan Khan offered a bounty of 5 rupees for
every Hindu head, thousands of men, women and children were killed and
decapitated. Not even the Muslim population of the city was spared. One
Muslim jeweller, in a desperate attempt to save his life, bared himself in
front of a sword-wielding assailant to show that he was circumcised, but
he was still slashed by the assailant’s sword. One of the few survivors of
the massacre later recalled how the waters of the Yamuna river, sacred to
Hindus, ran red with blood for seven days after the slaughter.
The massacre at Mathura was just the beginning of Sardar Jahan
Khan’s blood-soaked campaign. When the nearby town of Brindaban fell,
it suffered the same fate. Jahan Khan then rejected the offered ransom from
the authorities of Agra, Akbar the Great’s capital, as inadequate. Despite
Agra’s reputation as a centre of Islamic jurisprudence and the fact that
the commander of the Agra garrison was a Muslim, Jahan Khan’s troops
went on another orgy of slaughter and pillage. Meanwhile Ahmad Shah
marched on Gokul, another major Hindu cult centre, only to encounter
a very different kind of Hindu devotee, for Gokul was the centre of the
Nanga Sadhus, devotees of the Bakhti sect who were renowned for their
martial prowess. As the army approached the town, thousands of naked,
ash-smeared Nangas poured out of the city and attacked the invaders with-
out regard for life or limb. Ahmad Shah eventually admitted defeat and
Gokul was spared the fate of Mathura.
By this time the heat of the Indian summer had arrived and begun
to take a toll on Ahmad Shah’s troops. Provisions were in short supply,
for most of the storehouses had been pillaged and the crops burnt while
the Yamuna, the main source of water for the army, was so polluted by
blood, corpses and the detritus of war that an epidemic of cholera and
typhoid broke out. With thousands of his men dead or incapacitated,
Ahmad Shah decided to return to the cooler climate of the Afghan hills.
Before he left Delhi, Ahmad Shah demanded the hand of Zuhra Begam,
daughter of the former Mughal king, Muhammad Shah, while ‘Alamgir’s
daughter was married to Ahmad Shah’s eleven-year-old son, Timur Shah.
When informed of the arrangement, Muhammad Shah’s widow declared
she would rather put her daughter to death than have her wed an Afghan,