Autopsy of an Empire: Why Jadunath Sarkar’s Fall of the Mughal Empire continues to unsettle

Sir Jadunath Sarkar (1870-1958)

Every empire produces at least one great historian who anatomises its exhaustion with a completeness that neither predecessors nor successors quite match. For Rome, it was Edward Gibbon who dissected the long senescence of the western Roman and eastern Byzantine power through six volumes in ‘The history of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire’ with prosecutorial irony between 1776 and 1788. For Habsburg Spain, it was Fernand Braudel, whose vast and astonishing ‘The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II’ (1949) revealed in the slow rhythms of the longue durée how geography, climate, commerce, debt and war steadily hollowed out imperial supremacy.

For India’s early-modern twilight - the violent passage from Mughal universalism to colonial overlordship - it was Sir Jadunath Sarkar who, in his magnificent four-volume ‘The Fall of the Mughal Empire’ subjected the Mughal Empire to a forensic scrutiny from its death throes in the 1730s to British paramountcy in 1803.

Given December 10 marks Sarkar’s 155th birth anniversary, it is useful date to turn to the greatest work produced by the ‘Bengali Gibbon’ and the enduring lessons it has to offer for today’s India.

The four volumes of ‘Fall of the Mughal Empire,’ published between 1932 and 1950, stand as the most sustained, most dramatic and most relentlessly documented narrative ever written of the unravelling of India’s long 18^th century, charting the decline and fall of one empire (Mughal), the zenith and fall of another (Maratha), the rise of a third (British) while documenting the sudden rise and abrupt fall of the Jat kingdom of Bharatpur.

Sarker’s masterwork is a rarity in that it is technically complex form a historiographical point of view while being viscerally thrilling at the same time in detailing the long Anarchy that raged through the troubled 18^th century.

If the classic five-volume ‘History of Aurangzib’ (1912-24) had established Sarkar as a giant, ‘Fall of the Mughal Empire’ made him a colossus among Indian and world historians. It took Sarkar twenty-five years to complete Aurangzib. It took him another twenty-five to plan, research and execute Fall of the Mughal Empire – its title a riff on Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

Sarkar confessed to the ordeal with characteristic austerity, describing the “immensity, variety and confused character” of the sources; the thousands of laconic Marathi despatches whose dates had to be established; the Persian manuscripts whose readings had to be corrected and rearranged before even “a single page of narrative could be composed.”

This was archival labour of a Herculean order, as Sarkar himself routinely translated entire manuscripts Persian, Marathi, French, Portuguese (learning the language in order to translate them) before he allowed himself to write a line.

Given the monumental scale of his achievement, it has become almost reflexive to compare Sarkar to Edward Gibbon. Yet the analogy flatters without explaining the true difficulty of Sarkar’s task. When Gibbon began composing ‘The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,’ he inherited the accumulated labours of centuries by ancient historians like Tacitus and Livy, Ammianus Marcellinus and Suetonius, the Church Fathers and the Byzantine annalists. Rome had already been quarried to bedrock by generations of scholars.

Sarkar, by contrast, was forced to cut his marble out of living rock. He confronted an archive still in situ, scattered across princely states, decaying libraries, private households and half-catalogued Persian collections (most of which were painstakingly collected by Sarkar himself, who had one of the rarest archives of Persian manuscripts in India).

Sarkar’s narrative begins with the empty splendour of the later Mughal Emperor, Muhammad Shah’s reign (1719–1748) which received a gruesome shock in form of the ‘Persian Napoleon’ Nadir Shah’s invasion of 1738–39 and the spreading anarchy across Rajputana, Malwa and the Punjab. The second volume reconstructs the titanic Afghan–Maratha struggle that culminated with the calamity at Panipat in 1761, while the third and fourth volumes carry the story through the rise of Mahadji Scindia, the struggle for control of the Delhi puppet-emperor Shah Alam II, the debilitating Holkar-Scindia rivalry and the final establishment of British paramountcy in 1803.

Sarkar opus remains unmatched as a forensic reconstruction of how India’s last great pre-modern state disintegrated. It is not a patriotic epic, not a lament for vanished grandeur, hardly a morality tale written for easy applause but a cold autopsy of political death.

Throughout this monumental Indian ‘game of thrones’ - replete with arch-intriguers, conniving adventurers and rapacious invaders – Sarkar produces dazzling set-pieces of battles forgotten and famous, with descriptions of terrain and tactics, of palace conspiracies and revolutions that remain etched in one’s mind. Be it the Battle of Gangwana in 1741 during the last days of Sawai Jai Singh or Ram Chatauni in 1750, where the imperial Wazir Safdar Jang and his Jat ally Suraj Mal clashed with the Afghan Rohillas, or the Battle of Patan (1790) between Scindia and the Rajput rulers of Marwar and Jaipur, Sarkar’s command of terrain, logistics and tactical movement is precise while his descriptions are cinematic in their rendition.

For Sarkar, rivers, broken supply lines, exhausted cavalry marches, zamburaks and matchlocks are not background props but active agents of history. Nowhere is this more terrifying than in his account of the Third Battle of Panipat - the crowning jewel of opus. Here, the Maratha charge under Sadashiv Rao Bhau detonates across the page in his hands:

“Suddenly, the tiring on the Maratha side ceased… a thunderous roar of Hara! Hara! Mahadev! was heard… a vast cavalcade of 13,500 men heaved tumultuously like one gigantic billow of the ocean… dashed in resistless sweep upon the Durrani centre…”

His pen-portraits of the great and small, noble and ignoble – from Baji Rao 1 to Mughlani Begum, from Ahmad Shah Durrani to Jaswant Rao Holkar - are brilliantly rendered, brimming with pitiless, razor-sharp aperçus.

Speaking of Wazir Imad-ul-Mulk, the poisonous king-maker of Delhi in 1755, Sarkar writes: “He clung like a helpless infant to the breast of the Marathas…but Deccani armed aid was a very costly thing.”

On eighteenth-century Rajputana, torn by internecine feuds among Bundi, Jaipur and Jodhpur, with the Sisodia Rana reduced to a cipher after Raj Singh’s death in 1680, Sarkar writes: “Rajputana became a zoological garden with the barriers of the cages thrown down and the keepers removed.”

His description of Ahmad Shah Abdali’s horrific ravaging of Mathura and Vrindavan in 1757 is bone-chilling. Here, Sarkar was sharply critical of the Marathas for failing to protect Mathura and Vrindavan Yet, he was unstinting in praising their incredible valour at Panipat.

Sarkar refused to mourn the Maratha defeat as a civilisational catastrophe, which earned him the ire of Pune’s historians. To him, Panipat was a political and military collision between rival imperialisms. Indeed, he notes that much of northern India - the Jats, Rajputs, Sikhs and the peasantry feared Maratha victory as much as Afghan conquest. Maratha fiscal rapacity and strategic bad faith had exhausted local goodwill.  While unflinchingly describing their brutalities, Abdali and Najib-ud-Daulah earn Sarkar’s ‘admiration’ in battle for their tact, cohesion and decisiveness.

His dissection of the Maratha polity is equally severe. Mahadji Sindhia’s brilliance is charted alongside his financial distress, Tukoji Holkar’s cantankerous obstruction, and the ruinous cabinet politics of Nana Phadnis. “Nana Fadnis,” Sarkar writes, “was jealous of Mahadji Sindhia’s rise… and deliberately kept the Holkar–Sindhia quarrel open.”

Sarkar’s eye roves incessantly - north to the Punjab, south to Poona, west to Rajputana, east to Bengal - registering each tremor in the disintegrating body of the empire.

Sarkar had a strong aversion not merely to untruth but to intellectual laziness, which makes him the target of first the Marxist historians who dominated the post-colonial stage and regional chauvinists who now bristle at his refusal to mythologise Maratha virtue or Hindu unity.

‘Fall of the Mughal Empire’ explains the modern Indian state better than a hundred policy papers. Sarkar’s rigour and unflinching adherence to evidence is what makes it so unsettling. It defies easy pigeonholing in today’s culture wars. Today, when the Mughal past is brandished either as curated nostalgia or unhealed injury, Sarkar offers no anodyne, only the relentless logic of history without anaesthetic.