THE SWORD AND INDIA 59Of Shah Jahan’s four sons, the third, Aurangzeb would succeed to the
throne by the preferred method of treachery and violence. He declared
himself emperor in 1658, while Shah Jahan was still alive. Sultan Au-
rangzeb was a remarkable man—modest, capable, ascetic, honest, and an
excellent battlefield commander. He was also a near perfect model of
intolerant and extreme Islam. He removed non-Muslims from all positions
of authority, reimposed the hatedjizya—the tax on unbelievers—de-
stroyed hundreds or thousands of Hindu temples and dictated a strict pub-
lic morality based upon the ideals—not the practices—of the ruling
Muslim minority. He was well hated and well feared.
Aurangzeb led his armies against the sultans of the Deccan and con-
quered them in hard-fought campaigns, pushing his authority to the ex-
treme south. The resistance was led by Sivaji, founder of the Mahratta
confederacy. He conceived and organized a uniquely powerful guerrilla
force based on masses of light horsemen. Their mobility and fighting
power frustrated the Muslim generals. He successfully outfought the Mus-
lim armies with their own weapons and carved a kingdom out of their
territory. His memory is revered to this day as the acme of Hindu patri-
otism. He died in 1680, and his son and successor, Sambhaji, was betrayed
to Aurangzeb and put to death. The rising Mahratta power was checked,
and the Moghul armies once again began operating freely in eastern Dec-
can. In 1686 the Muslims took the city of Bijapur, and Golconda fell the
next year. No independent power remained in southern India.
Aurangzeb died in 1707, and the Moghul Empire, rent by intolerant
policies and resulting guerrilla strife, immediately began its decline. Like
the empires of most warlords, the decline would be as rapid as the rise.
Thirty-two years and ten Moghul emperors produced no achievement wor-
thy of the name. In 1739 Persian Nadir Shah led the sixth and last Muslim
conquest of India through Hindustan to conquer the imperial city of Delhi.
After that, the Great Moghul Empire became only a name. Internal strife
and the resurrection of the Mahrattas continued the weaken the empire,
though when the Muslim and Mahratta forces met at Panipat on January
7, 1761, the Muslims under Nadir Shah won a useful victory. Following
the battle, Nadir Shah led his army back to Kabul in Afghanistan. With
his authority placed at a distance, the southern Moghul puppets returned
to their independent ways.
By the seventeenth century, British and French ships began appearing
in Indian waters in significant numbers and the trading companies and
their colonies followed soon after. European colonialism came into contact
with the Muslim states of India at this time, and the Muslims played their
parts in the extended European rivalries that reached across the globe.