1The Part Where Punjab Stops Only Being Fought Over
Two things happen in these eighty years that have never happened before in this book, and they happen at the same time and in the same province.
The first is that Punjab becomes the centre of an empire rather than its shield or its corridor.
For thirteen years, from 1585 to 1598, Lahore is the capital of India. Not a provincial seat, not a frontier
command, not a governor’s town — the actual working capital of the largest and richest state on earth, with the
emperor in it, the treasury in it, and the armies that took Kashmir, Sindh and Kandahar setting out from it. This is
the high-water mark for the Punjab in the whole of these sixteen parts, and it lasts thirteen years.
The second thing is quieter and matters more.
In villages along the Ravi and the Beas — Kartarpur, Khadur, Goindwal, and then a new town built round a tank
that its founder called the Pool of Nectar — a line of teachers is building something. Not an army and not a
kingdom: a community with a common kitchen, a script of its own, its own towns, and by 1604 its own book. Part
Seven ended with the first Punjabi voice in this entire history. Part Eight is where that voice acquires an
institution to keep it.
Four things to hold on to
- The Mughal empire nearly does not happen. Babur’s son loses India completely and spends fifteen years in exile. The man who takes it from him builds the best-run state medieval India ever had, in five years, and then dies in an accident. Almost nothing in this part was inevitable.
- Punjab is the road back. Humayun returns to India through Lahore and wins the two battles that restore his dynasty at Machhiwara and Sirhind — both in the Punjab. Akbar is crowned in a field in Gurdaspur district. The Mughal empire is re-founded on Punjabi soil.
- The Salt Range still cannot be subdued. Sher Shah Suri spent five years and an enormous fortress trying, and the fortress is what survives.
- And this part has, for the first time, two kinds of source at once. Persian court chronicles written for emperors — and a scripture compiled in Punjabi in a Punjabi town, which is still recited. For the first time in this book, we can hear both.
CERTAIN means contemporary evidence — a writer who was present, a document made at the time, a building
still standing. LIKELY means good sources writing later, generally accepted. STORY means tradition, often
written down considerably afterwards.
Part Eight has a source problem that is the opposite of the earlier parts’ problem. We have almost too much, and
most of it is official. Abul Fazl’s Akbarnama is a magnificent, enormous, meticulous work written by Akbar’s closest
friend to establish Akbar’s greatness. Badauni, writing secretly at the same court, disliked almost everything about it.
Where those two disagree, this part will tell you, because the disagreement is usually the interesting part.
There is also a category this book has not needed before: religious tradition. The accounts of the Gurus in this part
come partly from later Sikh sources, and where a story is devotional tradition rather than documented history, it is
labelled and treated as such — with respect, and without pretending.
2The Brothers’ War — Kamran Takes the Punjab, 1530–1540 LIKELY
Babur had barely been buried before his second son took the Punjab off his first, and that single act is why the Mughal empire collapsed ten years later.
When: 1530, immediately on Babur’s death; the arrangement lasts until 1540.
Where: Lahore and the whole Punjab, added to Kabul and Kandahar.
Who: Kamran Mirza against his elder brother Humayun, the new emperor.
The evidence: The Humayun-nama of Gulbadan Begum — Babur’s daughter, sister to both men — and the Persian chronicles.
What happened
1. Babur died in December 1530, four and a half years after Panipat, leaving an empire that was really a
- conquest — a line of garrisons from Kabul to Bihar with almost no administration underneath it.
- Humayun succeeded him at Agra. He was twenty-two.
- Kamran, who held Kabul and Kandahar, immediately marched on Lahore and took it, along with the rest of the Punjab. He did not ask.
- And Humayun let him keep it. Rather than fight his brother in the first months of a shaky reign, he confirmed the seizure.
- For the next ten years the Punjab was not part of the Mughal empire in any meaningful sense. It was Kamran’s, governed from Lahore, with its own revenue and its own army, which was never available to the emperor.
Look at what Humayun gave away, in the terms this book has been using for eight parts.
He gave away the recruiting ground. Punjab is where the empire’s cavalry came from and where the frontier troops
were.
He gave away the road. Every reinforcement from Kabul to India comes through Lahore. With the Punjab in Kamran’s
hands, Humayun’s line of retreat and resupply belonged to somebody with his own interests.
He gave away the frontier. The pattern established in Part Six and repeated four times in Part Seven — whoever
commands the Punjab frontier eventually rules Delhi — was handed to a rival with a claim to the throne.
And when the crisis came in 1539 and 1540, all three consequences arrived at once. Kamran had an army of Punjabi
and Afghan troops at Lahore and did not use it to save his brother’s empire. He offered to help only on terms
Humayun could not accept, and when Sher Shah came west, he went to Kabul and took the army with him.
- He moved first. Within weeks of the death, before the succession had settled.
- He already held the far side. Kabul and Kandahar behind him, Lahore in front — the position that has decided every contest in this book since Part Five.
- Humayun could not afford a civil war. Afghan resistance in the east, Gujarat in the south, and a treasury that was mostly plunder.
- And Timurid practice was on his side. The tradition Babur came from divided territory among sons rather than concentrating it. Kamran was doing what his family had always done.
- An empire cut in half at the waist. India without the Punjab has no depth and no way home.
- Two Timurid courts, one throne. Every Afghan noble in northern India now had somewhere else to go.
- Humayun set the precedent by conceding. Having yielded once, he spent his reign negotiating with brothers instead of commanding them.
- And Kamran never became emperor either. He was blinded by Humayun’s officers in 1553 and sent to Mecca, where he died. Nobody won this.
Most of what we know about the inside of this family — the arguments, the arrangements, who said what
to whom in which tent — comes from a book written by Gulbadan Begum, and she is one of the most
remarkable authors in this entire history.
She was Babur’s daughter, born about 1523, sister to Humayun and Kamran and Askari and Hindal. She was
eight when her father died. She lived through the loss of India, the exile, the return, and Akbar’s reign, and
in her sixties her nephew — the emperor Akbar — asked the older members of the household to write
down what they remembered of Humayun’s time, so that Abul Fazl could use it.
She wrote the Humayun-nama. It survives incomplete, in a single damaged manuscript, and it is unlike
anything else from the period.
It is not a chronicle of battles. She writes about a family. She records the marriages and the quarrels, the
moving of households, who was angry with whom and why, what the women of the court thought about
decisions the histories present as strategy. She writes about her brothers as brothers — including
Kamran, whose betrayals she does not excuse and does not pretend not to grieve over.
And she writes in plain, direct Persian, without the enormous rhetorical apparatus that Abul Fazl brings to
everything. When Humayun is being foolish, she says so.
In eight parts and three thousand years, this is the first account of any events in this book written
by a woman. There is no earlier one and there will not be many later. She was inside the room for the
decisions that lost and regained India, she was asked to remember, and she did it honestly.
The official history of the reign runs to three enormous volumes and is one of the great works of Persian
prose. The truest thing we have about the same events is a partial manuscript by the emperor’s
aunt.
3Lahore, 1540 — The Emperor With Nowhere Left to Go LIKELY
Two Mughal princes and their whole court sat in Lahore arguing, while the man who had taken their empire sent them a message from Sirhind telling them to leave.
When: Late 1540, after the defeats at Chausa (1539) and Kannauj (1540).
Where: Lahore, and then the road out of it.
Who: Humayun and his brothers, against Sher Shah Suri, who did not need to be present.
The evidence: Gulbadan Begum, Jauhar the water-carrier’s memoir, and the Persian histories.
How it got to this
1. Sher Khan Sur — an Afghan from Bihar, a former minor jagirdar who had risen by administration and
- patience — built a power base in the east while Humayun was distracted in Gujarat.
- Chausa, June 1539. Humayun’s army was destroyed on the Ganges. The emperor escaped by swimming the river; the tradition says he was kept afloat by a water-carrier named Nizam, whom he later rewarded in an extravagant and much-embroidered way.
- Kannauj, May 1540. The second defeat, and this one was final. Sher Shah took Agra and Delhi.
- Humayun fell back to Lahore, where Kamran was — with an army.
- And nothing was agreed. The brothers argued for weeks. Kamran would not commit his troops to a war he thought was lost, or would commit them only if the terms made him something close to king.
- Then Sher Shah reached Sirhind — a hundred and fifty miles away — and sent word. The message reported in the sources is one of the coldest sentences in this book: that he had left them Kabul, and they should go there.
- They went. Kamran to Kabul with his army. Humayun south into Sindh, and then, eventually, into Persia — fifteen years of exile.
Read it as a strategic document rather than an insult, because that is what it is.
He is telling them exactly where the border is. Kabul is theirs; India is not. He is not offering to negotiate and he is
not threatening to pursue them beyond a certain line. He is drawing the frontier and inviting them to accept it.
And he is right about the geography, in the way everyone in this book who wins is right about the geography. The line
he is drawing runs through the Punjab — and the first thing he does after they leave is start building the works
that will hold it. That is the next two wars.
Notice also what is not in the message: any acknowledgement that these men had an army at Lahore, a Timurid claim,
and the whole of the Punjab under their control. He is treating an emperor with a province and a garrison as
somebody to be moved along. On the evidence, he had judged them correctly.
- He had already won twice. Chausa and Kannauj had destroyed the Mughal field army; what was at Lahore was a court, not a force.
- He knew the brothers would not combine. Ten years of visible division told him everything he needed.
- He moved fast and stopped in the right place. Sirhind is close enough to be a threat and far enough to leave them a road out. A cornered enemy fights.
- And he wanted the country, not the men. Chasing Humayun into Sindh would have cost a season he needed for governing.
- The army at Lahore had a different owner. Ten years of Kamran holding the province meant those troops were his, not the empire’s.
- Nobody could give an order. Two Timurid princes of near-equal standing, in one city, in a crisis, with no mechanism to decide anything.
- Humayun had no local base. He had been emperor for ten years and had never governed the Punjab.
- And the Afghans of the Punjab preferred Sher Shah. He was one of them; the Mughals were Turks from Kabul. That preference is worth more than a battle.
Follow Humayun out of Lahore, because what happens next is the most extraordinary reversal in this book
and almost nobody outside India has heard of it.
He goes into Sindh and spends two and a half years trying to raise support. It fails. His brothers hunt him.
In 1542, in the desert fort of Umarkot, while he is a fugitive with a few hundred men, his wife gives birth to
a son. They name him Akbar. Within months the child has to be left behind in Kandahar, in the hands of
an uncle who is technically an enemy.
Humayun crosses into Persia with about forty companions. The Shah receives him — and the price of
hospitality includes political and religious concessions that the Persian and Mughal sources describe very
differently, and that Humayun spent the rest of his life managing.
With Persian troops he takes Kandahar, then Kabul, then loses Kabul, then takes it again. He fights his
brothers for a decade. Kamran changes sides so many times that even Gulbadan, who loved him, runs out of
ways to explain it; in 1553 he is finally blinded and sent away.
And then, in 1555 — fifteen years after being told to go to Kabul — Humayun comes back down
through the passes into the Punjab, wins two battles in the doabs, and takes Delhi.
Six months after that he falls down the stone stairs of his library in Delhi and dies.
The Victorian historian Stanley Lane-Poole wrote the line that has stuck to him ever since: that he
tumbled through life, and he tumbled out of it. It is unfair and it is also hard to improve on.
But keep the fifteen years in view, because the man in this story is not a joke. He lost an empire at thirty-
two and took it back at forty-seven, from exile, with borrowed troops, having been betrayed by
three brothers. Almost nobody in this book who loses on that scale ever comes back at all.
4Rohtas — The Fort Built to Hold Down the Salt Range CERTAIN
The best administrator in medieval India spent five years and a fortune building a fortress against the people of the Jhelum country, and it did not work.
When: Fort begun about 1541, finished about 1548; the campaigns run through 1543–1545.
Where: Rohtas, on the Kahan river near Jhelum, in the Salt Range.
Who: Sher Shah Suri against the Gakkhars under Sarang Khan.
The evidence: Persian histories of the Sur period — and the fortress, which is still standing and is enormous.
Why he built it
Two reasons, and he stated both.
The first was Humayun. Sher Shah had told the Mughals to go to Kabul, and he expected them to try to come
back. Everything comes back the same way: down the passes, across the Indus, through the Salt Range, onto the
plain. A fortress there is a cork in the bottle.
The second was the Gakkhars. The people of the Salt Range and the Jhelum country had refused to submit, and
they were in contact with the Mughals — which made them not merely disobedient but a standing invitation.
So he built a fort. Not a garrison post: a circuit of walls something like four kilometres around, up to twelve
or more metres thick in places, with a dozen gates, set on a ridge above a river gorge. It is one of the
largest fortifications of its century anywhere in the world, and it was built to hold down a district.
You have been reading about the people of the Salt Range for four parts — the bare-headed charge at Waihind in 1008,
the assassination on the Jhelum in 1206, Jasrat holding the northern Punjab for twenty years in the 1420s and 1430s.
The Persian sources call them Khokhar in some places and Gakkhar in others, and the Sur-period sources for this war
generally say Gakkhar.
Whether these are the same people is disputed and has been for a long time. Some historians treat the names as
variants for one group; others hold that they are two distinct communities of the same region whom outside
chroniclers, writing in Persian from Delhi, repeatedly confused.
This book cannot settle it, and it is worth saying why the confusion exists at all. The people involved left no written
record of their own. Everything we have is a name written down by an enemy in a foreign language, and enemies are
careless about the difference between one hill clan and another.
- Same reasons as Jasrat in Part Seven. No capital to take, no army to destroy, ground that punishes a large force, and no need to win — only to still be there.
- They had an outside patron. Contact with Humayun in Kabul meant that submitting to Sher Shah was not their only option.
- The Salt Range is the best defensive country in the Punjab. Part Five said this at Nandana in 1014 and it has not changed.
- And Sher Shah ran out of time. He died in 1545, four years into the problem.
- It could hold the road. As a block on the route from the Indus to the plain it was well sited and well built.
- It could not occupy a people. A fortress controls the ground it can see. The Gakkhars lived in the country it could not.
- It cost more than the problem. Five years and a legendary amount of money to garrison a district that had never produced much revenue.
- And it was surrendered without a fight. Which is the story below.
There is a story about the building of Rohtas that is repeated in the Persian histories and by everyone who
has written about the fort since, and it is worth telling carefully because it says more than it means to.
The work was given to an officer named Todar Mal Khatri — a Punjabi administrator, and very probably
the same man who would later build Akbar’s revenue system, which would make him one of the most
consequential officials in Indian history.
He could not get labour. The local people would not work on it. They understood perfectly well what the
fort was for: it was being built on their land, out of their stone, to hold them down. So they stayed away.
Todar Mal raised the rate. They still would not come. He raised it again. The story ends with the rate
reaching a gold coin for every stone laid — an absurd figure, quoted to convey scale rather than
accountancy — before the work could go forward, and with Sher Shah, on being told what it was costing,
telling him to pay it.
Now the part the story does not intend. It is a record of a boycott. The people of the Salt Range could not
beat Sher Shah’s army — nobody in India could, in 1541 — so they used the only leverage they had, which
was their labour, and they made him pay a price that became proverbial.
And there is a final detail that finishes it. Rohtas was garrisoned by the Suris and held the road exactly as
designed. When Humayun came back down through the passes in 1555, the commander at Rohtas
surrendered it without a fight, and the Gakkhars, who had never submitted, came out for the returning
Mughals.
The fort is still there, above the Kahan river, largely intact, a UNESCO World Heritage site. It is the biggest
monument any ruler in this book ever built to the problem of governing the Punjab, and it never
fired a shot in anger.
5The Road, the Rupee and the Register, 1540–1545 CERTAIN
The only war in this book fought against distance — and it was won so thoroughly that you are still using the results.
When: 1540–1545. Five years, from taking Delhi to his death at Kalinjar.
Where: From Bengal to the Indus — and the central section runs the length of the Punjab.
Who: Sher Shah, against the ordinary condition of a fifteenth-century Indian state.
The evidence: Persian histories, surviving coins, surviving sarais, and the road.
What he did
1. The road. He rebuilt and extended the great trunk route — the Sadak-e-Azam — from Bengal across the
- Ganges plain and the Punjab to the Indus. Trees along both sides for shade. Wells at intervals. And sarais — walled rest-houses — spaced roughly a day’s travel apart, in numbers the sources put in the many hundreds, each with lodging, water, a mosque, and food provided free to travellers.
- The post. The sarais doubled as relay stations for a horse-borne courier service, so that a message could travel the length of the empire at the speed of a fresh horse rather than a tired one.
- The coinage. He issued a standardised silver coin of about 178 grains and called it the rupiya, together with a copper dam and a gold piece, in fixed relation to each other. That coin is the direct ancestor of the rupee — the name and the standard both survive the Mughals, the East India Company and the Raj, and are in your pocket now if you are reading this in South Asia.
- The register. Land was measured. The share due was fixed as a proportion of the actual crop rather than guessed at. Every cultivator was given a written statement of what he held and what he owed — a patta — and gave a written undertaking in return. Rates were adjusted for the quality of the soil.
- And the officials were watched. Transfers were routine so that nobody built a local empire; the army was paid from the centre and the men were described in the muster rolls so that commanders could not invent soldiers.
Because of what this whole history has been about.
Distance is the enemy that beat everybody in the previous seven parts. The Mauryas could not watch their
officials at Taxila and lost the north-west. The Guptas never garrisoned the passes because the passes were too far from
the Ganges. Delhi could not relieve Lahore in 1241 and wrote the province off. Alauddin Khalji’s whole system was an
attempt to move soldiers and information fast enough, and it decayed within ten years of his death. Muhammad bin
Tughluq’s empire dissolved because nothing he decided in the capital could be enforced at the edge.
Sher Shah attacked that problem directly and comprehensively, and it is why he is in this book despite being
from Bihar. A road with rest-houses and a courier relay is a machine for shrinking a country. A standard coin means a
soldier in Lahore and a merchant in Bengal can be paid in the same thing. A written revenue record means a peasant in
the Punjab knows what he owes and can say so when an official asks for more.
He held India for five years. Akbar’s administration — the one that ran an empire for fifty years — was
substantially Sher Shah’s, refined by Todar Mal, who had learned it working for him.
- He had been a small landholder. He had run a jagir himself, at ground level, and knew exactly how officials cheated because he had watched them do it.
- He built the boring things first. Roads, coins, records, muster rolls. No conqueror in this book had ever prioritised in that order.
- He standardised. One coin, one measure, one written form of agreement, across the whole empire.
- And he spent his whole reign inside his own country. Five years, no foreign adventures.
- It was one man’s system. His son Islam Shah held it together; after that the Sur family fell into the usual succession war within a decade.
- Five years is not long enough. Institutions need a generation to become habits, and he got half of one.
- The Afghan nobility was the same problem it had been under the Lodis — a consultative aristocracy that would not be ruled absolutely, and was ruinous when it split.
- And he died in an accident. Besieging the fort of Kalinjar in 1545, he was killed by an explosion of his own gunpowder.
Here is the thing about Sher Shah Suri that makes him different from every other conqueror in these eight
parts.
Timur is a name attached to a massacre. Mahmud is seventeen raids. Alexander turned back at a river. Most
of the men in this book are remembered for the day they won something and forgotten immediately
afterwards, and what they built — where they built anything — has to be dug out of the ground by
archaeologists.
Sher Shah’s road is still the road.
The route he rebuilt runs, in its modern form, from Bangladesh across northern India through Delhi and
Amritsar, over the border at Wagah, through Lahore and Gujranwala and Jhelum and Rawalpindi to
Peshawar. It carries lorries, buses, pilgrims, families and freight, every day, in enormous quantity. Sections
of it are motorway now and sections of it are not, and the alignment is not identical to his — a road that old
has been straightened and rerouted a hundred times.
But the line is his line, and some of his sarais are still standing beside it, in various conditions, doing
various jobs. Some are ruins. Some became villages. Kipling called the road a river of life, which is the sort of
thing that gets quoted too often and happens to be accurate.
And the reason it matters in a book about Punjab specifically: its central third runs the whole length of
this province, because the province is what lies between the Ganges plain and the passes, and always has.
Every army in Parts Five, Six and Seven walked that route before it was a road. Sher Shah made it a road.
Every army in Parts Nine to Sixteen walks it as one.
He ruled India for five years, four hundred and eighty years ago. If you have travelled between Delhi
and Peshawar by land, you have used the thing he did with them.
6Machhiwara and Sirhind, 1555 — The Empire Comes Back LIKELY
The Mughal empire was refounded in the Punjab doabs, in two battles, by an exiled emperor and a regent with a thirteen-year-old in the saddle.
When: May 1555 at Machhiwara; 22 June 1555 at Sirhind.
Where: Machhiwara on the Sutlej near Ludhiana; Sirhind on the Delhi road. Both in the Punjab.
Who: Bairam Khan, commanding for Humayun, against Sikandar Shah Suri.
The evidence: Abul Fazl’s Akbarnama, Jauhar’s memoir, and the Persian histories of the Sur collapse.
Why the door was open
Because the Sur empire had done what every Afghan state in this book does. Sher Shah died in 1545; his able son
Islam Shah died in 1554; and then the family tore itself apart. By 1555 there were three or four Suri claimants
fighting each other across northern India, and the Punjab belonged to Sikandar Shah Suri, who was one of them.
Humayun had spent fifteen years waiting for exactly this. He came down through the passes with a Persian-
equipped army, took Rohtas without a fight, took Lahore, and moved down the Punjab road.
What happened
1. Machhiwara, May 1555. A Suri force was beaten near the Sutlej. The Mughals were outnumbered and won by
- fighting at a moment and place of their choosing.
- Sikandar Shah came out in strength. The numbers in the sources are the usual sort — thirty thousand against eighty thousand is the figure most often repeated, and like all such figures it is the winner’s arithmetic.
- Sirhind, 22 June 1555. Bairam Khan commanded. The nominal commander was Akbar, aged twelve. It was his first battle and he was there to be seen at it, which is exactly what a regent does with a boy who has to be made into an emperor. 4. Bairam Khan entrenched. Rather than meet a larger army in the open, he built a fortified camp, made the Suris attack it, and broke them when they had spent themselves — the same answer Babur used at Panipat in Part Seven and Ghor used at Tarain in Part Six.
- The Suri army disintegrated. Sikandar fled into the Siwalik hills, which is War Seven of this part.
- Delhi and Agra fell within weeks, and in July 1555 Humayun sat on the throne he had lost in 1540.
- And in January 1556 he fell down his library stairs and died. He had ruled his recovered empire for about six months.
It is worth being blunt about this, because the textbooks are not.
The Mughal empire is usually dated from Panipat in 1526. But that empire lasted fourteen years and was completely
lost. The empire that ruled India until 1857 — the one of Akbar and Shah Jahan and Aurangzeb, the one that
built the Taj Mahal and governed a hundred million people — begins in the summer of 1555, in the Punjab.
Its founding battles were fought at Machhiwara on the Sutlej and at Sirhind on the Grand Trunk Road. Its first
sovereign act after the victory was performed at Lahore. And when Humayun died six months later, his successor was
crowned in a field in Gurdaspur district, which is the next war.
Punjab has been the corridor, the shield, the buffer and the springboard in every part of this book so far. In 1555 and
1556 it is the birthplace.
- They came back into a civil war. Fifteen years of patience, and then arriving in the one year the Suris were fighting each other.
- Bairam Khan. A first-rate professional soldier with total authority — the thing Humayun had never had in the 1530s.
- They fought from prepared positions. Twice, against larger armies, in a book where the smaller army with a ditch nearly always wins.
- And the Punjab did not resist them. Rohtas surrendered, the Gakkhars came out for them, and Lahore opened. Fifteen years of Sur rule had not produced loyalty.
- Four claimants, one throne. Sikandar was fighting Mughals in the Punjab while other Suris held Delhi, Agra and Bengal against him.
- The system had lost its author. Sher Shah’s administration needed somebody to run it and instead had somebody to fight over.
- They attacked entrenchments frontally, with numbers, which by 1555 had failed in this book at Tarain, at Delhi and at Panipat.
- And they had no depth. Beaten at Sirhind, there was nowhere to fall back to that was not held by another Suri.
At the battle of Sirhind on 22 June 1555, the army of the restored Mughal empire was formally commanded
by a twelve-year-old boy who had been born in a desert fort while his father was a fugitive, and who had
spent most of his childhood as a hostage in the households of uncles who were trying to kill his father.
He had been left behind at Kandahar as an infant. He had been passed between Kamran and Askari. At one
point in the fighting around Kabul, the sources describe him being placed on a wall as a human shield by
an uncle, in the hope that his father’s guns would stop firing.
He could not read. Whether he was dyslexic or simply never taught properly is argued about, and he
remained unable to read for the whole of his life. He had books read aloud to him instead, in
enormous quantity, for forty years, and built one of the great libraries of the world.
Bairam Khan put him at the head of the army at Sirhind because a claimant who has never been seen with
an army is not a claimant. It was a piece of political theatre, and the boy was almost certainly nowhere near
the fighting.
Eight months later his father was dead and he was proclaimed emperor at the age of thirteen, standing on a
brick platform in a field in the Punjab. Nobody present had much reason to think he would last a year. The
dynasty had already lost India once, the Suris were still in the field, and the empire consisted of Delhi, Agra
and whatever Bairam Khan’s army was standing on.
He ruled for forty-nine years.
7Panipat, 5 November 1556 — Decided by One Arrow LIKELY
Hemu was winning. Then something hit him in the eye, and an empire changed hands because one man went quiet.
When: 5 November 1556.
Where: Panipat again — thirty years after Babur, twenty miles from Tarain.
Who: Hemu — Hemchandra Vikramaditya — against the army of the thirteen-year-old Akbar under Bairam Khan.
The evidence: Abul Fazl, Badauni, and the Persian histories. No account from Hemu’s side survives.
Who Hemu was
This is worth getting right, because he is one of the most unusual figures in Indian history and he is usually
reduced to a footnote in somebody else’s victory.
He came from a modest background in the Rewari country — the sources describe him starting as a trader, in one
tradition a dealer in saltpetre. He rose through the Suri administration by ability: superintendent of markets, then
a revenue official, then a commander. By 1556 he was the effective ruler of the eastern Suri realm and had
won a long run of engagements against rivals and rebels.
When Humayun died, Hemu moved. He took Agra, then marched on Delhi and beat the Mughal governor Tardi Beg
outside the city in October 1556.
And then he did something that had not happened in northern India for three hundred and fifty years. He had
himself crowned at Delhi, taking the title Vikramaditya — an ancient Indian royal name — ruling in his
own right rather than as anybody’s deputy.
What happened
1. The Mughal council wanted to retreat to Kabul. Delhi and Agra were gone, the emperor was thirteen, and
- the enemy had just beaten a Mughal army in the field. Most of Akbar’s officers argued for withdrawing to the safety of the passes.
- Bairam Khan refused, and marched for Panipat. This is the single decision the Mughal empire rests on.
- Hemu came out with a large army and a great many war elephants. The figures given run to fifteen hundred elephants, which should be read the way this book has read every elephant count since Part Two.
- And he was winning. Both Mughal wings were pushed back. The accounts on the Mughal side do not disguise it.
- Then an arrow hit him in the eye. He was on his elephant, in armour, in the centre — visible, as a commander of that kind of army has to be.
- He went down, and the army broke. Not because it had lost, but because the one man holding it together had stopped being visible on his elephant. Nobody knew what to do next, so they went.
- He was captured unconscious and brought before Akbar. The accounts differ about what happened then — some have Bairam Khan urging the boy to strike the killing blow and Akbar refusing or merely touching him with the sword; others have him striking. Hemu was beheaded. His head was sent to Kabul and his body displayed at Delhi.
Count them, because by now this is not a coincidence, it is the central military fact of pre-modern India.
Part Two, the Hydaspes: Porus’s elephants turn and trample his own line. Part Five, Waihind 1008: Anandapala’s
elephant bolts and the largest Indian coalition in eight centuries dissolves in minutes. Part Six, Tarain 1191:
Muhammad of Ghor is wounded and carried off, and his entire army runs. Part Six, Kili 1299: Qutlugh Khwaja is
wounded and a full invasion is abandoned. Part Eight, Panipat 1556: Hemu takes an arrow in the eye while winning,
and loses.
The mechanism is always identical. An army assembled from contingents, held together by the visible presence of
one man on one large animal, with no second-in-command whom everybody would obey and no plan for what happens
when he goes down. The commander must be visible to command — and being visible is what kills him.
The armies that do not do this in this book are Alexander’s, Ghor’s second army at Tarain, Timur’s, Babur’s and Bairam
Khan’s. All of them are professional forces under a single owner, with subordinate officers who can fight the
battle without the boss. That difference decides more engagements in these sixteen parts than any weapon ever
invented.
- Bairam Khan refused to retreat. Everything else follows from one man overruling a council.
- Their command survived contact. Both wings were pushed back and the army did not break, because it did not depend on any one person being visible.
- Archery at the right target. Whether the shot was aimed or lucky is unknowable, but Mughal tactics deliberately concentrated fire on the enemy’s command elephant.
- And they were lucky. This book will say so plainly. On the balance of the fighting, Hemu should have won.
- He was the army. Personal authority over a force with no institutional structure beneath it.
- He fought from an elephant. Visible, elevated, unmissable, and the highest-value target on the field.
- His officers had no reason to hold. Most were Suri men serving whoever was winning, and when he fell there was nothing to be loyal to.
- And he had been in power for weeks. A month-old regime has no reserves of loyalty to spend on a bad afternoon.
Nine months before Panipat, on 14 February 1556, a thirteen-year-old boy was proclaimed emperor of
India in a garden at Kalanaur, in what is now Gurdaspur district in the Indian Punjab.
His father had died in Delhi three weeks earlier and the news had been kept quiet while a man was dressed
up as the emperor and shown to the people from a balcony, so that the government would not collapse
before the son could be crowned. The boy was in the Punjab with Bairam Khan, campaigning against the
last Suris.
There was no palace and no time to reach one. They built a platform of brick in the open air and put
him on it, and Bairam Khan read out what needed reading, and that was the accession of the emperor
Akbar.
The platform is still there. It is a low brick structure in a field, with a small enclosure round it, on the
road between Gurdaspur and Kalanaur, and if you did not know what it was you would walk past it.
Consider what this book has been describing for eight parts. Punjab as the road other people’s armies use.
Punjab as the province that gets spent so that the doab can be saved. Punjab as the shield, the corridor, the
buffer, the springboard — always the ground somebody else’s history happens on.
And then, on a February morning in a Gurdaspur field, the greatest of the Mughal emperors is
crowned on a heap of bricks because there was nowhere better and no time to find one.
Forty-nine years later he would rule from the Indus to the Godavari, and Lahore would be his capital for
thirteen of those years. It starts in a field, in the Punjab, with a boy nobody expected to survive the summer.
8Mankot, 1557 — The Last Afghan in the Hills LIKELY
The Afghan century that began with Bahlul Lodi in 1451 ended in a hill fort above the Punjab, after a six-month siege that nobody remembers.
When: Besieged from late 1556; surrendered May 1557.
Where: Mankot, a hill fort in the Siwaliks on the edge of the Jammu country.
Who: Sikandar Shah Suri, the last Suri with an army, against Akbar and Bairam Khan.
The evidence: Abul Fazl, who covers it briefly, and the Persian histories.
What happened
1. Sikandar Shah had lost the Punjab at Sirhind in June 1555 and had gone north into the hills, which is what
- every beaten commander in this book does when the Siwaliks are available.
- He kept a force in being for eighteen months in the broken country along the edge of the mountains, raiding and recruiting.
- Akbar came for him after Panipat. With Hemu dead and Delhi secure, the last Suri army was the only organised opposition left in northern India.
- The siege lasted about six months. There was no assault worth recording. Mankot was blockaded until it could not feed itself.
- He surrendered in May 1557 and was pardoned — given a jagir in Bihar, where he died a couple of years later.
It is worth pausing over how long this had run.
Afghan power in northern India begins in 1451, when Bahlul Lodi comes down from Sirhind and takes Delhi —
War Eleven of Part Seven. It survives Babur’s conquest, because the Lodis’ Afghan nobility simply becomes the Afghan
nobility of the Sur empire. It produces Sher Shah Suri, the best administrator any medieval Indian state ever had, and
it drives the Mughals out of India entirely for fifteen years.
It ends in a hill fort in May 1557, with a blockade and a pardon.
A hundred and six years, two dynasties, an empire lost and regained, and it finishes with a garrison running out of
grain in the Siwaliks. There is no last stand, no famous speech, and nobody has ever painted it.
That is what the end of an era actually looks like most of the time, and this book has now shown it three times:
the Ghaznavids negotiated out of Lahore in 1186, the Shahis ending in a pay dispute in Part Five, and now the Afghans
starved out of Mankot.
- He did not attack. Storming a hill fort is expensive; waiting is not, if you can afford to wait.
- He had the plain and the revenue. The besieger was eating from the Punjab; the besieged were eating from a fort.
- He offered terms worth taking. A pardon and a jagir is a better outcome than starvation, and both sides knew it.
- And there was nothing left to hold out for. No other Suri army existed by 1557.
- The hills preserve; they do not supply. Broken country is excellent for surviving and hopeless for feeding an army.
- His allies had gone. The Afghan nobility of the Punjab had made its peace with the Mughals over the previous two years.
- He held a fort instead of a country. The mistake the Shahis made at Nandana in Part Five, five hundred and forty years earlier.
- And a fortress needs a field army behind it. There was not one.
Look at where beaten men go in this book, because it is always the same place.
Mihirakula, broken at Sondani in Part Four, goes north into Kashmir and comes back down.
Trilochanapala, the last effective Shahi, fights on from the Siwaliks for seven years after losing Nandana in
Part Five. Jasrat Khokhar runs the northern Punjab for twenty years in Part Seven by retreating into the
Salt Range every time a Delhi army appears. Sikandar Shah Suri holds out here for eighteen months. And
in Part Nine, when the Mughal empire turns on the Sikh Gurus, the fighting will be in exactly this country
— the Siwalik foothills between the Sutlej and the Beas, at Anandpur and Bhangani and Chamkaur.
The reason is geography and it does not change. The hills that fringe the Punjab on the north and east
are the province’s only defensible terrain, and everybody in this book eventually finds out. A
cavalry army from the plains cannot deploy there. Supply is a nightmare. Every valley has to be taken
separately, and the people who live in them know the ground.
And the limitation is just as constant. You can survive in those hills indefinitely and you cannot rule
from them. There is no revenue, no manpower to speak of, and no way to threaten anybody on the plain.
Every figure listed above ends the same way — preserved by the hills, and finished by them.
Punjab loses on its plains and survives in its hills. Eight parts, and the rule has not been broken once.
9The Regent’s Revolt, 1560 LIKELY
The man who had saved the dynasty twice was dismissed at eighteen, rebelled in the Punjab, was beaten, forgiven, and murdered on his way to Mecca.
When: Dismissed March 1560; defeated later that year; murdered January 1561.
Where: The Punjab — the fighting at Gunachur, near Jalandhar.
Who: Bairam Khan against the emperor he had made.
The evidence: Abul Fazl, whose account is careful, and Badauni, whose account is not.
What happened
1. Bairam Khan had run the empire for four years as regent, and had run it well — Panipat, Mankot, Gwalior,
- Jaunpur, and an administration that functioned.
- Akbar turned seventeen and then eighteen, and the court around him — the harem faction, his foster-mother Maham Anga, and nobles who resented the regent’s authority — pressed for the end of the regency.
- In March 1560 Akbar dismissed him, by a manoeuvre rather than a confrontation: he left for Delhi, then sent word that he had taken the government into his own hands and that Bairam Khan should go on pilgrimage to Mecca.
- Bairam Khan accepted, and then did not. Humiliated on the road by officials sent to hurry him along, he turned back and raised troops in the Punjab.
- He was beaten near Jalandhar, at a place the sources call Gunachur, by a Mughal force sent against him.
- And Akbar pardoned him. Completely — he was received at court with honour and offered a governorship or the pilgrimage. He chose the pilgrimage.
- He never got there. At Patan in Gujarat, in January 1561, he was stabbed to death by an Afghan whose father had been killed fighting him at Machhiwara five years earlier.
This is the first serious decision Akbar made on his own, and it set the pattern for a fifty-year reign.
He could have executed him. A defeated rebel who had been regent, who had a following in the army and a claim on
the loyalty of half the nobility, is the most dangerous man alive. Every ruler in this book kills him. Alauddin Khalji
would have killed him. Sher Shah would have killed him.
Akbar received him, embraced him, and offered him his choice of futures.
Whether that was mercy, calculation, or genuine feeling for the man who had raised him is unknowable, and Abul Fazl
— writing to establish Akbar’s greatness — is not a neutral witness. But the policy was real and it was repeated for
fifty years. Akbar’s method with defeated enemies was to absorb them: Rajput rulers married into the imperial family
and given the highest commands, Afghan nobles kept in service, rebels forgiven.
And there is a coda that says more than the policy does. Bairam Khan’s widow and his four-year-old son were
brought to court and taken into the imperial household. That son, Abdul Rahim, grew up to be commander-in-
chief of the Mughal army, and one of the finest poets in Hindi — his verses are still learned by schoolchildren in
northern India.
The emperor raised the son of the man who had rebelled against him, and the boy became a poet in the language of the
country rather than the language of the court.
- He moved before the confrontation. Leaving for Delhi and announcing the change from a position of safety, rather than arguing about it in a camp Bairam Khan controlled.
- The nobility went with the throne. Most of the army preferred a legitimate emperor to a regent with a grievance.
- He offered an exit. The pilgrimage was a face-saving retirement, and it very nearly worked.
- And then he forgave. Which removed any reason for the rest of Bairam Khan’s faction to keep fighting.
- He had no cause. Rebelling against a Timurid emperor in the name of nothing but his own dignity gave nobody a reason to join him.
- He was a servant of the dynasty, and everyone knew it. His whole reputation rested on loyalty; the moment he rebelled he had spent it.
- Punjab was not his. He raised troops there but had no base of his own — the mistake that ended Daulat Khan Lodi in Part Seven.
- And he was fifty and tired. He submitted quickly, which suggests he knew.
Bairam Khan is the most consequential person in this part of the book and he has no monument, no
dynasty and no chapter with his name on it.
He was a Turkoman from Badakhshan who attached himself to Humayun in the bad years and stayed
through all of them — the flight into Sindh, the exile in Persia, the wars against the brothers. He
commanded at Machhiwara and Sirhind, the two battles that gave the Mughals India back. When
Humayun died, he held the empire together for a thirteen-year-old.
And at Panipat in 1556, with the boy’s entire council urging retreat to Kabul, he refused, marched, and
fought a battle he was losing until an arrow decided it. If Bairam Khan had agreed with the council on
that day, there is no Mughal empire. No Akbar’s reign, no Jahangir, no Shah Jahan, no Taj Mahal, no
Aurangzeb — and Part Nine of this book is about something else entirely.
He was dismissed four years later at the urging of a court faction, rebelled out of wounded pride, was
beaten in the Punjab, forgiven, and stabbed to death by a private enemy on a pilgrimage road in Gujarat.
His tomb is at Patan. It is not a famous building.
The winner is whoever gets written about — and the man who won the battle that founded the
Mughal empire is remembered mainly as the regent Akbar had to get rid of before he could be great.
10Mirza Hakim Comes Down From Kabul, 1581 LIKELY
Akbar’s half-brother invaded the Punjab, half the Mughal nobility had already declared for him, and the empire came closer to breaking than at any point in fifty years.
When: 1580–1581; Akbar takes Kabul in August 1581.
Where: The Punjab, up to the walls of Lahore; then Kabul.
Who: Mirza Muhammad Hakim, Akbar’s half-brother and ruler of Kabul, against the empire.
The evidence: Abul Fazl, and Badauni, who was hostile to Akbar and is therefore useful here.
Why it was dangerous
Because it was not simply an invasion. It was an invasion that a large part of the Mughal establishment wanted to
succeed.
Akbar’s religious policy had by 1580 gone a long way from where his nobility expected it to be. He had abolished
the pilgrim tax and the jizya. He had married Rajput princesses and given their families the highest commands in
the army. He held debates in a hall at Fatehpur Sikri where Muslim theologians argued with Hindus, Jains,
Zoroastrians and Jesuit priests, and the orthodox found the results alarming. In 1579 he issued a decree that made
his own judgement final in disputed religious questions.
Badauni, who was at that court and hated all of it, records the anger in detail. He is a difficult and
prejudiced witness and he is also the only one who tells us what the opposition sounded like.
So when a serious revolt broke out in Bengal and Bihar in 1580, the rebels proclaimed Mirza Hakim — Akbar’s
half-brother, who ruled Kabul, and who was a conventional Muslim prince — as the rightful emperor. Fatwas were
obtained. And in early 1581 Hakim crossed into the Punjab.
What happened
1. Hakim invaded with a substantial force and moved on Lahore, which was the key to the whole province.
2. Lahore held. It was defended by Man Singh and Bhagwant Das — Rajput commanders of the Amber house,
- whose promotion was one of the things the rebels were objecting to. The city that saved Akbar’s empire from the orthodox reaction was held for him by Hindu generals.
- Akbar marched. He assembled an enormous army and came north up the Grand Trunk Road at speed.
- Hakim did not wait. He withdrew from the Punjab without a general engagement.
- Akbar followed him to Kabul and took it in August 1581.
- And then he gave it back. He handed the government of Kabul to his half-sister, Bakht-un-Nissa Begum, with Hakim left in place under her, and went home. He had taken his brother’s capital and declined to keep it.
- Hakim died in 1585, of drink by most accounts, and Kabul was then annexed without a fight.
The obvious answer is that it was cheap generosity towards a brother, and Abul Fazl presents it that way.
The strategic answer is better. Kabul as a hostile power is a permanent threat to the Punjab; Kabul as a family
appanage is a buffer. Akbar had just demonstrated that he could take it whenever he liked, which was the actual
point of the campaign. Occupying it would have committed a garrison and an army to a country that had eaten armies
for a thousand years — as Part Five’s Ghaznavids and Part Six’s Mongols could both have told him.
And there is a third reason, which is the one this book keeps coming back to. Whoever holds Kabul holds the door
into the Punjab. Akbar had spent 1581 discovering exactly how fast an army from Kabul could reach Lahore, and the
answer had frightened him enough that four years later he moved his entire court to Lahore and kept it there for
thirteen years.
- Speed. He reached the Punjab before the rebellion in the east could combine with the invasion in the west.
- Lahore held. One city, competently defended, denied Hakim the base he needed.
- His Rajput commanders were loyal, which was precisely the arrangement his enemies were rebelling against. The policy defended itself.
- And he took the war to Kabul. Ending it at the source rather than defending the frontier — the thing Jayapala tried in Part Five and could not manage.
- He was a figurehead, not a leader. The rebels wanted a name; he supplied one and very little else.
- He could not take Lahore. Without it there was no Punjab, and without the Punjab there was no march on Delhi.
- The two revolts never joined. Bengal in the east and Kabul in the west, a continent apart, with Akbar in the middle.
- And he was outmatched by an enormous margin, in troops, money and ability.
Hold the picture of 1581 in your head, because it is one of the strangest arrangements in this book and it is
entirely real.
A Muslim Timurid prince invades the Punjab from Kabul, backed by fatwas declaring that the reigning
emperor has departed from the faith and that the invader is the rightful sovereign. A substantial part of the
Muslim nobility of the empire agrees with him.
The city he has to take is Lahore. Lahore is held against him by Man Singh and Bhagwant Das of
Amber — Rajputs, Hindus, whose sister and aunt had married into the imperial family, and
whose rapid promotion is one of the specific grievances the rebels have listed.
They hold it. The emperor arrives. The rebellion collapses.
Man Singh went on to become one of the greatest commanders of the age — governor of Kabul, then of
Bengal, then of the Deccan, with the highest rank in the imperial service. He fought at Haldighati against
Rana Pratap, which is why his reputation in later Rajput tradition is complicated and remains so.
What this book takes from 1581 is narrower and harder to argue with. Akbar’s policy of absorbing
his enemies rather than destroying them — Rajputs married in and promoted, Afghans kept in service,
rebels pardoned — was attacked as a betrayal by people who thought it was weakness.
And when the attack came, the policy was what held the walls.
11The Karakar Pass, 1586 — The Worst Day of Akbar’s Reign LIKELY
Eight thousand men were lost in a defile in the hills north-west of the Punjab, and the emperor is said to have refused food for two days.
When: February 1586.
Where: The Karakar Pass in the Swat–Buner country, north-west of the Indus.
Who: Raja Birbal, Zain Khan Koka and Hakim Abul Fath, against the Yusufzai tribes.
The evidence: Abul Fazl, who was Akbar’s friend and does not disguise the scale of it; Badauni, who enjoyed it.
Why the frontier was on fire
Because of a religious movement that the empire could not negotiate with. The Roshaniyya — the followers of
Bayazid Ansari, called Pir Roshan, and after him his son Jalaluddin — had spread through the Pashtun tribes of
the north-west frontier, and had turned the ordinary friction of the hill country into an organised refusal to
submit.
The Yusufzai tribes of Swat and Buner were the core of it, and their country sits directly above the road from
Kabul to the Punjab. An empire that had just moved its capital to Lahore could not have an unsubdued
and hostile frontier three days’ march to the north-west.
What happened
1. Zain Khan Koka was sent against the Yusufzai in 1585 and made slow progress in extremely difficult
- country.
- Reinforcements were sent in early 1586 under Raja Birbal and Hakim Abul Fath.
- The commanders did not agree. This is the central fact and every source says it. Three men of roughly equal standing, no clear chain of command, and a disagreement about whether to press on or withdraw. 4. They decided to withdraw, and did it through a defile — the Karakar Pass — with the tribes on the heights above them.
- The column was destroyed. An army strung out in single file on a mountain track, attacked from above along its whole length, cannot form, cannot deploy and cannot fight back. The figure in the sources is about eight thousand dead.
- Birbal was killed. His body was never recovered.
- Akbar took it very badly. Abul Fazl records that he was inconsolable and would not eat for two days.
- The frontier was pacified slowly afterwards — Todar Mal, then Man Singh — by roads, forts and payments rather than by a decisive battle. Nobody ever avenged the pass.
Raja Birbal — born Mahesh Das, a Brahmin from a poor family — had come to Akbar’s court as a poet and musician
and had become one of the emperor’s closest personal friends. He was one of the very small group Akbar genuinely
relaxed with. He is also, in folk memory across northern India, the wit of a thousand stories: the clever courtier who
solves impossible problems with a joke, in tales that are still told to children and have been filmed and televised
endlessly.
Almost none of those stories are historical. They are a folk tradition that attached itself to a real man over four
centuries.
The real man was a courtier and a poet with no significant military experience, sent to command in the worst terrain
on the subcontinent against the best light infantry in Asia — and it killed him and eight thousand others.
Badauni, who despised Birbal as a Hindu favourite with too much influence, records the disaster with something close
to satisfaction. His hostility is exactly why he is worth reading: Abul Fazl would have found a way to soften it, and
Badauni would not.
- They chose the ground. A defile with heights on both sides is the one place a regular army cannot use its advantages.
- They attacked a retreat. The most vulnerable moment in any campaign, and they waited for it.
- They knew the country and the Mughals did not. Every path, every spur, every place a column has to string out.
- And they had nothing to defend. No city, no capital, no army to be destroyed — the same reason the Salt Range people could never be finished.
- Divided command. Three commanders, no authority, a quarrel in the field. This is the whole disaster in two words.
- A political appointment to a military job. Birbal was sent because he was trusted, not because he could do it.
- They took heavy cavalry into mountains. The arm the Mughal army was built around was useless on those tracks.
- And they retreated through a defile without securing the heights, which is the first thing anyone fighting in hills is supposed to know.
The Karakar Pass in 1586 is not an isolated catastrophe. It is one instance of the single most repeated event
in the military history of this region, and the list is worth setting out because it does not stop at 1586.
A regular army from the plains enters the hills north-west of the Punjab. It is strung out in a
defile. It is attacked from above. It is destroyed.
It happened to Alexander’s detachments in the Swat valley in Part Two, which is why he had to storm
Aornos. It happened to the Mughals here, in 1586, costing eight thousand men and the emperor’s closest
friend. It happened to Akbar’s successors repeatedly in the same country. It happened to a British army
retreating from Kabul in January 1842, when roughly sixteen thousand people entered the passes
and, by the most famous account, one exhausted surgeon reached Jalalabad. It happened to the
British again in the frontier campaigns of the 1890s. Armies have been learning it and forgetting it for two
thousand three hundred years.
And the reason is always the same, and it has nothing to do with the courage of anybody involved. The
advantages that make a plains army powerful — numbers, cavalry, artillery, supply trains,
formation — all become liabilities on a mountain track. Numbers mean a longer column. Cavalry
means animals that cannot manoeuvre. Supply means a baggage train that cannot be defended. Formation
means nothing at all when you are in single file.
Against that, a few hundred men on the heights with time to prepare are worth more than a division.
This is the country that has funnelled every invasion in this book down onto the Punjab plain. It has never
been conquered by anybody, in any century, and it has ruined the reputation of every empire that
has tried.
12Lahore, Capital of India, 1585–1598 CERTAIN
For thirteen years the largest empire on earth was governed from the Punjab, and Kashmir, Sindh and Kandahar were taken from there.
When: The court moves to Lahore in 1585 and returns to Agra in 1598.
Where: Lahore — and the campaigns launched from it into Kashmir, Sindh, Baluchistan and Kandahar.
Who: Akbar, against the Uzbeks he never had to fight, and everybody he did.
The evidence: Abul Fazl’s Akbarnama and Ain-i-Akbari, the buildings, and European travellers who saw it.
Why he moved
Three things happened in a single year and together they emptied the north-west of everything that had been
holding it steady.
1. Mirza Hakim died in 1585, which meant Kabul had no ruler.
2. Abdullah Khan Uzbek was conquering Central Asia. He had taken Balkh and Badakhshan and was the
- most dangerous man north of the Hindu Kush. An Uzbek advance on Kabul was a real prospect, and Kabul is the door into the Punjab.
- The frontier tribes were in revolt, and in February 1586 they destroyed an imperial army in the Karakar Pass.
Akbar’s answer was to move the entire apparatus of government — court, treasury, harem, records, army
headquarters — to Lahore, and run the empire from there until the problem was solved. He stayed thirteen years.
What was done from Lahore
1. Kabul annexed, 1585, on Hakim’s death.
2. Kashmir conquered, 1586. Akbar visited it three times afterwards and it became the summer resort of the
- Mughal empire, which it remained for a century and a half. 3. Sindh conquered, 1591, by Abdul Rahim Khan-i-Khanan — Bairam Khan’s son, the boy from War Eight, now commander-in-chief.
- Baluchistan and the Makran coast brought in, 1595.
- Kandahar taken, 1595, without a battle, when its Safavid governors handed it over.
- And the Uzbek war never happened. Abdullah Khan, faced with an emperor sitting at Lahore with a field army, negotiated instead. The most successful campaign of the thirteen years was the one that was deterred.
A capital city is not just an address. For thirteen years, everything that flows to a capital flowed to Lahore.
The fort was rebuilt in brick and stone — the great Mughal Lahore Fort essentially begins with Akbar’s
reconstruction, and his successors added to it for a century. The city walls were rebuilt. Gardens, mosques, tombs,
markets and the enormous apparatus of an imperial court all arrived at once.
The painters, calligraphers, poets and craftsmen of the imperial workshops came with the court. Some of the
finest Mughal manuscript painting was produced at Lahore in these years.
And the trade followed. Lahore sat where the routes from Kabul, Kashmir, Multan and Delhi met, and with the court
there it became one of the great commercial cities of Asia. European travellers reaching it in this period described it in
the same breath as the largest cities they knew.
Then in 1598 the court went back to Agra, because the Deccan wars needed the emperor at the other end of the empire,
and Lahore became a provincial capital again — a very great one, but not the centre.
Thirteen years, in a book that covers about five thousand. It is the only period in these sixteen parts when the
Punjab is where the decisions are made, and it happens because an emperor was frightened of the Uzbeks.
- He put the government where the problem was. Obvious, and almost nobody in this book ever does it — Part Four spent a chapter complaining that nobody garrisons the door.
- Presence deterred the war. The Uzbeks did not attack an emperor who was three weeks away instead of three months.
- The frontier was pacified with money and roads, not battles. After the Karakar Pass, the policy shifted to subsidy, fortification and negotiation, which is slower and worked.
- And the administration travelled. Sher Shah’s road and Todar Mal’s revenue system meant an empire could be run from a different city without breaking.
- The hill tribes were never subdued. Contained, subsidised, and left alone.
- Kandahar did not stay. It changed hands repeatedly between Mughals and Safavids for the next seventy years.
- And the capital left. Thirteen years, and then the centre of gravity went back east for good.
While the court was at Lahore, Abul Fazl was finishing a project that is unlike anything else produced in
the sixteenth century anywhere in the world.
The Ain-i-Akbari — the Institutes of Akbar — is the administrative volume of his history, and it is
essentially a description of an empire by measurement. It lists the provinces and their subdivisions,
the revenue assessed on each, the crops grown, the prices of goods in the markets, the wages of
workmen, the ranks and pay of officers, the organisation of the imperial kitchen, the stables, the
workshops, the mint. It records the castes and communities of each region, the rivers, the roads, and the
distances between places.
For the Punjab it gives, district by district, what the land was worth and what it grew.
Nothing like it exists for any earlier period of Indian history, and that absence is why this book
has spent eight parts saying “the figure is a court number.” For Waihind in 1008 we have a
chronicler’s guess. For Panipat in 1526 we have Babur’s estimate of his own enemy. For the Ain, we have a
government’s own working papers.
It is not neutral — Abul Fazl was writing to demonstrate that Akbar’s empire was the best-ordered state on
earth, and he chose what to count. But you cannot fake a revenue table across hundreds of districts, and
historians have been using his numbers for two hundred years because there is nothing else of the kind.
Set it beside the other book being finished in the Punjab in the same decade, twenty-five miles from Lahore.
One is an empire counting its provinces. The other is a community writing down its hymns. Both
are being completed within a few years of each other, in the same province, and the second one is the
subject of the next war.
13The War That Was Not Fought — Goindwal, Amritsar and the Book, 1539–1604 LIKELY
While everything else in this part was being decided by cavalry, the most consequential thing in it was happening in three villages on the rivers, and nobody fought anybody at all.
When: 1539–1604, from Guru Nanak’s death to the installation of the Adi Granth.
Where: Khadur, Goindwal, Ramdaspur — Amritsar — and Tarn Taran, between the Ravi and the Beas.
Who: Guru Angad, Guru Amar Das, Guru Ram Das and Guru Arjan.
The evidence: The Adi Granth itself; Mughal records; and later Sikh tradition, which is labelled as such.
What was actually built
Part Seven ended with Guru Nanak watching Babur’s army sack Saidpur and writing about it in Punjabi. He died
in 1539. What his four successors did over the next sixty-five years was turn a teaching into an institution, and
each step is concrete.
1. A script. Guru Angad established Gurmukhi in the form it has today — a script for writing Punjabi, standardised so that the hymns could be recorded and taught accurately. A language with its own script is a
- language that can keep its own records. Eight parts of this book have complained that Punjab wrote nothing down. This is the tool that ends that.
- A common kitchen. The langar — free food, cooked and eaten together — was made central by Guru Amar Das, who required that anyone coming to see him must first sit and eat in the same row as everyone else, whatever their caste or rank. In sixteenth-century India that is not hospitality. It is an argument, made with food, every day.
- Towns. Goindwal on the Beas, with its great step-well; then Ramdaspur, founded by Guru Ram Das around a tank he called the Amritsar, the pool of nectar — the town that took its name from the water; then Tarn Taran, Kartarpur in the Jalandhar doab, and Hargobindpur. 4. An organisation. Guru Amar Das divided the community into districts, each with an appointed representative, so that a scattered following became something that could be administered.
- A building. The Harmandir Sahib was completed at Amritsar under Guru Arjan by about 1589 — set below the level of the surrounding ground, so that a visitor walks down to it, with entrances on all four sides.
- And a book. In 1604, Guru Arjan compiled the Adi Granth and installed it in the Harmandir Sahib.
Sikh tradition records that Akbar visited Guru Amar Das at Goindwal, and that before he could meet the Guru he had to
sit on the floor in the langar and eat with everybody else, which he did. Tradition also holds that he offered a revenue
grant and that it was declined, and that at the Guru’s request he remitted revenue during a hard year.
The visit is plausible and widely accepted; the details of what was said are tradition rather than documented
history, and this book will not present them as more than that.
What can be said from the record is narrower and still striking. Akbar’s government did not persecute this
community. A movement that rejected caste, fed everyone from one kitchen, and was growing fast among the
peasantry of the Punjab could easily have been treated as a threat by a less unusual emperor. It was not. It was allowed
to build towns, dig tanks, raise a central shrine and compile a scripture, twenty-five miles from the imperial capital,
during the years when that capital was Lahore.
The land on which Amritsar was founded is another disputed point: some traditions say Akbar granted it, others
that it was bought from the villagers of Tung. The honest answer is that the evidence does not settle it.
And it does not last. Akbar died in October 1605. Within eight months his successor had executed Guru Arjan at
Lahore, and Part Nine begins.
- It was built, not preached. Wells, kitchens, towns, a script, districts, a book — physical things that outlast the person who made them.
- It was in Punjabi. Not Persian, not Sanskrit — the language the farmers of the doabs actually spoke.
- The succession was planned. Each Guru chose his successor and installed him in his lifetime, which is more than almost any dynasty in this book managed.
- And the political weather was favourable for exactly the right sixty years. Which was luck, and it ran out.
- A different emperor. Jahangir’s own memoirs discuss Guru Arjan in terms Akbar never used about anybody in the Punjab.
- Proximity to a succession war. Jahangir’s rebel son Khusrau passed through the Punjab in 1606, and the Guru’s contact with him became the stated pretext.
- Success itself. A community with towns, a treasury of offerings and a central shrine is visible in a way a wandering teacher is not.
- And there was no answer available yet. In 1606 this was a community with a book and no means of defending itself. That changes in Part Nine, and it changes because of what happens in 1606.
In 1604 Guru Arjan finished compiling the Adi Granth and had it installed in the Harmandir Sahib at
Amritsar, with Baba Buddha as its first attendant.
It contains the hymns of the Gurus. It also contains something else, and this is the part worth stopping on.
It contains the hymns of people who were not Sikhs at all. Kabir, the weaver of Benares. Namdev, the
calico-printer from Maharashtra. Ravidas, a leather-worker — a caste treated as untouchable. Sheikh Farid,
a Muslim Sufi of the Punjab from the thirteenth century. Bhikhan, Sain, Dhanna, and others: Hindus and
Muslims, from several centuries and several provinces, many of them from the lowest social ranks in India.
They were included as scripture, on the same footing, in the same volume, and they are recited as scripture
today.
Consider what that decision is, made in the Punjab in 1604 by a man whose father founded the town and
whose great-great-predecessor had watched Babur’s army sack Saidpur. It is a deliberate statement that
truth is not the property of one community — assembled, written down in a Punjabi script, and given a
permanent physical home so that it could not be lost the way everything else in this book has been lost.
And now the thing this history has been building towards for eight parts.
Guru Arjan included Guru Nanak’s hymns on Babur’s invasion. The Babarvani — the eyewitness
account of the sack of Saidpur, the accusation against the conqueror, the question put to God about why it
was permitted — went into the book in 1604 and has been recited ever since.
Read what that means against the previous seven parts. The wars of Punjab have reached us through
Greeks writing centuries later, Chinese pilgrims describing ruins, Persian court historians counting the
dead for their employers, a Kashmiri poet six hundred years after the event, and victory inscriptions carved
by winners in provinces a thousand miles away. Not one word from inside, kept by the people it happened
to.
In 1604, in a town on the Punjab plain, that ends. The province acquires a book of its own, in its own
language, in its own script, containing its own account of what was done to it — and an institution whose
entire purpose is to make sure the book survives.
Everything in Part Nine follows from that. So does everything in Parts Ten, Eleven, Twelve and Thirteen.
From here on, when somebody comes down the road, Punjab writes it down.
14The Whole Chapter on One Page
Five patterns to carry into Part Nine
1. Punjab is where the empire is refounded, not where it is defended. Machhiwara, Sirhind, Kalanaur —
- the Mughal state that ruled India until 1857 begins in the Punjab doabs in 1555 and 1556. And for thirteen years from 1585 it is governed from Lahore. This is the highest point Punjab reaches in the entire book, and it happens because an emperor was afraid of the Uzbeks.
- The army that fights as a machine beats the army that fights as a man. Hemu at Panipat is the fifth commander in this book to be winning and then lose because he personally went down — after Porus, Anandapala, Muhammad of Ghor and Qutlugh Khwaja. The armies that survive their commander’s fall are professional forces with subordinate officers. That single organisational fact decides more battles in these sixteen parts than any weapon.
- The hills preserve and the hills imprison. Sikandar Shah in the Siwaliks, the Gakkhars in the Salt Range, the Yusufzai above the Karakar Pass. You cannot be finished there and you cannot rule from there. Watch this become the central military fact of Part Nine, when the fighting moves to Anandpur and Chamkaur.
- Distance is the enemy, and Sher Shah is the only ruler in this book who attacked it directly. A road, a courier relay, one coin and a written record for every cultivator. He held India for five years and his system outlived him by three centuries. The Mughal empire that Part Nine describes is running, substantially, on his machinery.
- And Punjab now keeps its own record. After eight parts of hearing about the Punjab only from Greeks, Chinese, Persians and Kashmiris, the province has a script, a book, a shrine and an organisation to maintain them. Part Nine is the first part of this history where the losing side’s account survives — and it survives because of what was built between 1539 and 1604.
The Gurus and the Mughals, 1605–1708. Within a year of Akbar’s death, Guru Arjan is executed at Lahore — and his
son responds by putting on two swords and building a fort. Part Nine is the century in which the community of Part
Eight becomes a military power: the battles around Amritsar and Kartarpur under Guru Hargobind; the founding of
Anandpur in the Siwalik hills; the execution of Guru Tegh Bahadur at Delhi in 1675; and then Guru Gobind Singh —
Bhangani, Nadaun, the founding of the Khalsa at Anandpur in 1699, the long sieges, the retreat from Anandpur,
Chamkaur and Muktsar in the winter of 1704 and 1705. It ends with Aurangzeb dead in 1707 and a Punjab that has,
for the first time since the Shahis, an army of its own.
15Words Used in This Part
A Timurid prince. Kamran Mirza and Mirza Muhammad Hakim were both sons of emperors with territories of their own.
The Afghan dynasty founded by Sher Shah, ruling India 1540–1555. Its collapse into rival claimants is what let the Mughals back in.
A walled rest-house on a road, with lodging, water and a mosque. Sher Shah built them a day’s travel apart along the Grand Trunk Road, and they doubled as courier relay stations.
“The great road.” Sher Shah’s trunk route from Bengal to the Indus — the Grand Trunk Road, whose central third runs the length of the Punjab.
The standardised silver coin issued by Sher Shah, of about 178 grains. The direct ancestor of the rupee.
The written statement given to a cultivator recording what he held and what he owed. Half of Sher Shah’s revenue reform; the cultivator’s written undertaking in return was the other half.
An assignment of land revenue in return for service. The standard way of paying an officer in both the Sur and Mughal systems.
The people of the Salt Range and Jhelum country in the Sur-period sources. Whether they are the same as the Khokhars of Parts Five to Seven is disputed.
Abul Fazl’s history of Akbar’s reign and its administrative volume. The Ain lists revenues, prices, wages and crops province by province — the first Indian source of its kind.
Abd al-Qadir Badauni, a scholar at Akbar’s court who wrote a secret history hostile to almost everything the emperor did. Prejudiced, and indispensable.
Gulbadan Begum’s memoir of her brother’s reign, written at Akbar’s request. The only account of these events by a woman, and the frankest.
The religious and political movement among the Pashtun tribes founded by Bayazid Ansari, which turned the north-west frontier into a war zone in the 1580s.
The Pashtun tribes of Swat and Buner who destroyed the Mughal column in the Karakar Pass in 1586.
The script established in its present form by Guru Angad for writing Punjabi. The tool that lets the province keep its own records.
The free community kitchen, where everyone eats together in the same row regardless of caste or rank. Made central by Guru Amar Das.
The central shrine at Amritsar, completed under Guru Arjan by about 1589, set below the surrounding ground with entrances on all four sides.
The scripture compiled by Guru Arjan and installed at Amritsar in 1604. It includes hymns by Hindu and Muslim saints alongside those of the Gurus.
“The pool of nectar” — the name of the tank dug by Guru Ram Das, which the town founded around it eventually took as its own.
Sources used for this part
- Abul Fazl, Akbarnama and Ain-i-Akbari, in Beveridge’s and Blochmann’s translations — official, magnificent and partisan
- Abd al-Qadir Badauni, Muntakhab-ut-Tawarikh — written secretly at the same court and hostile throughout
- Gulbadan Begum, Humayun-nama, in Annette Beveridge’s translation
- Jauhar Aftabchi, Tazkirat-ul-Waqiat — the memoir of Humayun’s water-bearer, who was with him in exile
- Abbas Khan Sarwani, Tarikh-i-Sher Shahi, and the other Persian histories of the Sur period
- Ferishta, Tarikh-i Ferishta, in Briggs’s translation
- The Adi Granth (Guru Granth Sahib) as a primary document of the period, and standard scholarly histories of the early Sikh
- community
- The surviving fabric of Rohtas Fort, Lahore Fort, and the sarais of the Grand Trunk Road
- Coins of Sher Shah and Akbar, for the currency reform
- Elliot and Dowson, The History of India as Told by Its Own Historians, for the translated Persian material
- Standard modern accounts of Humayun’s exile and return, the Sur administration, Akbar’s reign, and the north-west frontier
- campaigns
The open questions here include: how far the water-carrier story at Chausa has been embroidered; the true size of the
armies at Sirhind and at Panipat in 1556; whether Akbar struck Hemu or refused to; the exact number of Sher Shah’s
sarais; whether the Gakkhars and Khokhars are one people or two; the precise casualty figure at the Karakar Pass; and
whether Akbar granted the land at Amritsar or it was purchased.
Two cautions in particular. First, Abul Fazl is the main source for most of Akbar’s reign and he was writing to
establish his friend’s greatness. Where this part has relied on him for something flattering — the pardon of Bairam
Khan, the grief over Birbal, the handing back of Kabul — it has said so. Badauni is the corrective, and he is prejudiced
in the opposite direction.
Second, and more important: the section on the Gurus draws on later Sikh tradition as well as on contemporary
record, and the two have been kept apart on the page. The building of Goindwal and Amritsar, the compilation of
the Adi Granth in 1604 and its contents are documented. Akbar’s visit to Goindwal is widely accepted; what was said
there is tradition. This book treats devotional tradition with respect and does not present it as documentary evidence,
and it will hold to that in Part Nine, where the stakes are considerably higher.