nadir shah and the afghans, 1732–47plundering and burning shops and houses. When Nadir Shah finally
ordered an end to the bloodshed, between 20,000 and 30,000 men, women
and children had perished. To add to the insult, Nadir Shah ordered the
bodies to be left where they lay for several days. The mas sacre ended the
riot but it was a watershed in Nadir Shah’s reign. Up to this point he had
shown remarkable restraint when he conquered towns, even sparing the
lives of rebels, but the Delhi massacre marked the beginning of a more
bloody era, a change that went hand-in-hand with a deterioration in Nadir
Shah’s mental and physical health. Towards the end of his reign Nadir Shah
was increasingly paranoid and eventually trusted no one, not even his own
sons, and the last years of his reign were drenched in blood.
Nadir Shah had no intention of ruling in Delhi and, having conquered
the Mughal capital, he allowed the weak and ineffective Muhammad Shah
to continue as token head of state. The price he had to pay, however, was
very high: all Mughal territory beyond the Indus, including Peshawar,
Jalalabad, Kabul and Ghazni, was ceded to Persia, while the tribute and
goods acquired from the pillage of the Mughal palaces was valued at around
70 million rupees.5 The sack of Delhi and the massacre left Muhammad
Shah unable to raise sufficient revenues to pay his army or officials and
so weakened the Mughal ruler that he sought the aid of the East India
Company to contain revolts in Bengal. This, in turn, opened the door for
the rise of British power in northern India. In the end, it was not Persia
or the Afghans who benefited from Nadir Shah’s invasion of India, but
Great Britain.
As Nadir Shah headed back to Kabul, his Afghan levies again proved
their worth by beating off the Yusufzais and the Khyber tribes who opposed
his passage through the pass. Once in Kabul, Nadir Shah called on all
the tribes of the area to come and formally submit to him: some 40,000
tribesmen pledged their allegiance and they were required to provide
levies to replace the losses incurred during the Indian campaign. Among
those who attended the Kabul darbar was Darwish ‘Ali Khan, chief of
the Sunni Hazaras of Deh Zangi, who was ordered to move his tribe to
the Bala Murghab region in order to protect the frontier against Uzbek
and Turkman slave raids. Badghis thus became the Sunni Hazaras’ new
homeland and from this point forward the tribe was reckoned as one of
the Chahar Aimaq of the region. 6 Their relocation, however, led to the
displacement of another Aimaq tribe, the Jamshidis, and the two tribes
became sworn enemies. Later in the century Darwish ‘Ali Khan’s nephew,
Agha-yi Sultan, founded the town of Qal‘a-y Nau, which became the Sunni
Hazaras’ most important stronghold.