nadir shah and the afghans, 1732–47force far larger than the ‘Abdali king, however, the Mughal army was deeply
divided. The two armies met at Adina in January 1748 and even before
battle commenced one of the nawab’s Afghan regiments defected. Ahmad
Shah then sent his mounted musketeers, or jezailchis, to attack the massed
ranks of Mughal infantry, inflicting such a great loss of life that eventu-
ally they broke ranks and fled. The Afghans poured into Lahore, looting
and killing as they went and the bloodshed was only ended when Shah
Nawaz’s rivals were released from prison, tendered their submission and
agreed to pay a tribute of 3 million rupees. As a consequence of the sack of
Lahore, Ahmad Shah acquired a huge amount of booty and a vast quantity
of military supplies, including siege guns and rockets. At the same time,
thousands of women and children were enslaved and thousands of Punjabi
men were conscripted into his army.
Among the conscripts were a number of Armenians who were experts
in casting cannon. 6 One of them, whose Persian name was Shah Nazar
Khan, later cast two massive siege guns for Ahmad Shah, the most famous
of which was the Zamzama, or Thunderer. 7 This enormous artillery piece
was more than 4 metres (13 ft) long, had a bore in excess of 21 centimetres
(8 in.), and could fire a cannonball weighing more than 18 kilograms (40 lb).
The gun was used in various siege situations until it was eventually captured
by the Sikhs and subsequently acquired by the British, who placed it at the
entrance to the Lahore Museum, where it remains to this day. Later, Rudyard
Kipling, whose father was curator of the museum, featured Zamzama in the
opening scene of Kim. As for Shah Nazar Khan, he died in Agra but several
Armenian families, possibly all related to Shah Nazar, were relocated to
Kabul and Kandahar where they set up artillery workshops.
Following the fall of Lahore, Muhammad Shah finally dispatched an
army to halt any Afghan advance on Delhi, but Ahmad Shah bypassed
this force and took the key town of Sirhind, putting most of the town’s
male population to the sword and enslaving its women and children. The
entire treasury of the Mughal army and its heavy baggage also fell into
his hands. The sack of Sirhind was carried out despite the city having a
substantial Muslim population and it being the ancestral home of Shaikh
Ahmad Sirhind (1564–1624), known as Mujadid Alf Sani, the Renewer
of the Second Age. This Hanafi jurist, theologian and Naqshbandi pir
had been an outspoken opponent of Muslim syncretic practices as well
as Akbar the Great’s unifying religious movement, Din-i Ilahi. At the
end of the eighteenth century, members of this Mujadidi Order estab-
lished khanagahs in the Tagab and Kohistan region north of Kabul, while
another member of this tariqa took up residence in Kabul, where he