nadir shah and the afghans, 1732–47to be spoon-fed and his speech was so incomprehensible he could only
communicate by signs or notes. He finally passed away in his sleep on the
night of 23 October 1772.
Ahmad Shah Durrani: historical realities and the myth
of the Golden AgeAs with events surrounding his coronation, the reign of Ahmad Shah has
been recast and remoulded by Afghan and European historians into some-
thing that bears little resemblance to historical reality. Pushtun monarchists
in the twentieth century, for example, tend to portray his reign as a Golden
Age and his life as an exemplar for kings. Dubbed Baba-yi Afghan, Father
of Afghans, Ahmad Shah is lauded as ‘the idol of his nation’ 27 and a king
who ‘possessed sublime qualities of selflessness’. 28 Even his Sikh biog rapher,
Ganda Singh, cannot refrain from panegyric, despite all that Ahmad Shah
had done to his people and the Sikh holy cities. Colonial historians have
been equally profuse. According to Olaf Caroe, Ahmad Shah had a ‘bold
and commanding turn of natural genius’. 29 Fraser-Tytler too calls him
a ‘genius’, who welded ‘so intractable a people as the Afghans into the
semblance of a nation’. 30
Such panegyric makes an objective assessment, let alone criticism, of
Ahmad Shah and his reign difficult, as well as unpopular. Ahmad Shah was
certainly a great military leader and tactician, though comparing him to
Sultan Mahmud of Ghazni or Zahir al-Din Babur, as Fraser-Tytler does, is
going too far. After all, these two men not only won battles, but established
enduring empires. Ahmad Shah’s empire, on the other hand, was fleeting
and was already falling apart before his death.
Ahmad Shah’s military achievements are better equated to those of
his mentor, Nadir Shah, for both men were more at home leading their
armies into battle but were far less successful when it came to governing
their kingdoms. Furthermore, the legacy of the Ghaznivids and Mughals
is seen today less in terms of their military victories than the civilizations
they created as patrons of the arts and architecture. The contribution of
Ahmad Shah in this respect was limited. Ahmad Shah’s new capital had
little to commend it architecturally, while his tomb and those of his succes-
sors are copies of Mughal mausolea found throughout the Punjab. Ahmad
Shah is attributed with a corpus of poetry, including some Pushtu verse,
and several regnal histories were written about his reign and conquests,
but by and large Ahmad Shah spent more time destroying civilizations
than he did in establishing his own.