THE RISE AND FALL OF THE MUGHAL EMPIRETHE STRUGGLE FOR SUPREMACY IN INDIA
The decline of the Mughal empire in the eighteenth century led to a
resurgence of regional powers in India. Actually, India had been dominated
by regional powers rather than by centralised empires during most of the
country’s history so this development was not at all unusual. With the
hindsight of post-colonial India and of the freedom movement, the
eighteenth century has usually been characterised as a period of national
decadence and chaos which naturally led to foreign domination.
If we look at the eighteenth century in its own terms, we see a number
of regional regimes which copy the style of the declining central power and
consolidate their rule in this way. This is just what had happened after the
decline of the Gupta empire when numerous regional kingdoms emerged
which reflected the style of the earlier imperial dynasty. The nawab
(governor) of Bengal was the first one who asserted his independence, the
nawab of Oudh soon followed, and the vesir of the Mughal empire,
Nizam-ul-Mulk, left Delhi and established a dynasty of his own in
Hyderabad on the Deccan. The Marathas conquered most of western
India, and the South was dominated by several petty rulers whose
predecessors had been governors in the Vijayanagar empire. Around the
middle of the eighteenth century this new regional division seemed to be
more or less an accepted fact. The European powers were still sticking to
the maritime periphery of India, they controlled no major part of Indian
territory and their potential for military intervention was rather modest.
Indian rulers were much more concerned with the raids of the Afghan
Ahmad Shah Durrani, who invaded the Indian plains repeatedly in the
1750s, just as Baber had done in his time.
The real problem of this period was that the Mughal empire, though
defunct, did not cease to exist. The Great Mughal still resided in Delhi and
everybody tried to manipulate him. Baji Rao is reputed to have said the way
to fell a tree is to cut the trunk—then the branches will come down by
themselves. The trunk of the Mughal power, however, was not cut, although
it was precariously hollow. Mughal supremacy was no longer respected and
ambitious rulers dreamed of becoming heirs to that supremacy: nobody
suspected that a European power would claim this heritage.
European military intervention: infantry versus cavalryThe first indications of the growing potential for military intervention by
European powers came during the 1744–8 war between the British and the
French. The two antagonists were engaged in a global struggle for
supremacy which was to last the best part of twenty years (1744–63). In
Europe this struggle was suspended from 1748 to 1755; in America and
Asia, however, it continued unabated. With the new regional power