Sultanate of Kashmir

A wife for a day

Drafted from (ed.), The Cambridge History of India, Volume III: Turks and Afghans (1928)formation

Islam entered the Kashmir valley through an adventurer rather than a conquest. Shah Mirza arrived from Swat in 1315 and entered the service of Sinha Deva, a local chieftain who then ruled the valley. Sinha Deva was overthrown and killed by his own minister, Rainchan, a Tibetan who accepted Islam — probably at Shah Mirza's own suggestion — and made his adviser tutor to his children, trusting him with exactly the kind of long-term access to the succession that later proved fatal to his own family's hold on the throne.

A widow's mistake

When Rainchan died, a scion of the old royal house, Udayana Deva, returned from exile, married Rainchan's widow Kota Devi, and took the throne himself. He reigned fifteen years. On his death, the widowed queen again turned to Shah Mirza — by now a minister of long and trusted standing — and asked him to place her own son on the throne. It was, after decades of faithful service, one request too many for a man who had already built a faction of his own inside the court and had no further interest in remaining a kingmaker rather than a king.

What happened when he refused

The accounts of what followed disagree on the sequence but not the outcome. One version has Shah Mirza proposing marriage to the widowed queen, who killed herself rather than accept; the more probable account, Haig judges, is that when he hesitated to obey her command outright, she raised an army against him — and lost. Shah Mirza forcibly married her, imprisoned her within twenty-four hours of the wedding, and ascended the throne in 1346 under the title Shams-ud-din Shah. Decades of patient service, three successive rulers outlasted, and a queen's own miscalculated appeal had converted a foreign adventurer's influence into an outright dynasty.

A gentler hand than his predecessors

Whatever the manner of his accession, Shah Mir governed with a restraint the Hindu kings before him had rarely shown. Where they had left their subjects, by Haig's account, "nothing beyond a bare subsistence," Shah Mir abolished the arbitrary taxes and cruel collection methods of the old regime and fixed the crown's share of the land's produce at a flat one-sixth — a founder who had taken his throne by force and then governed, for the three years remaining to him, as though force were not the only tool available to a king.

The Akbar of Kashmir

Drafted from (ed.), The Cambridge History of India, Volume III: Turks and Afghans (1928)peak

Zain-ul-Abidin took the throne in June 1420 and held it for fifty years — long enough, and governed well enough, that Haig reaches for the same comparison every historian of Kashmir eventually makes: he was, in substance if not in scale, the Akbar of Kashmir, a full century before the Mughal emperor whose name attached to the comparison was even born.

What his father had broken, he mended

His own father, Sikandar, had earned the epithet "the Iconoclast" for a reign of religious severity that left Kashmir with no more than eleven Brahman families still openly practising their faith. Zain-ul-Abidin recalled the exiles, let those who had only feigned conversion to Islam return openly to their old religion, released prisoners held under his father's harsher laws, and abolished the jizya, the poll tax on non-Muslims, outright. He restored temples his predecessors had left in ruin, and — in the one point of genuine continuity with his father's reign — admitted learned Hindus and Brahmans to his own court on the same terms as Muslim scholars, a taste for mixed company Sikandar had shared even while persecuting the community it was drawn from.

Roads, water, and a currency worth trusting

His public works reached further than piety. He founded a new city, bridged rivers, and built irrigation channels that carried water to nearly every village in the valley — work he had convicted criminals perform in place of the execution his predecessors' penal codes would otherwise have demanded. He made village communities collectively responsible for crimes committed on their land, restored a currency his predecessors had debased by melting down idols of inconsistent purity into coin, and financed most of his government from the produce of his own royal mines rather than squeezing his subjects for it.

A scholar-king with an unlikely correspondence

He was fluent in Persian, Hindi and Tibetan on top of his own language, had the Mahabharata and the Rajatarangini — the only work in Sanskrit generally regarded as genuine history — translated into Persian, and kept up friendly correspondence with a roster of contemporaries that crossed every political and religious line in reach: Bahlul Lodi of Delhi, Mahmud Begada of Gujarat, the Mamluk sultans of Egypt, the Sharif of Mecca, and a Hindu raja of Gwalior with whom he shared nothing but a love of music.

What tolerance did not extend to his own sons

None of this serenity survived intact into his own family. Three sons — Adam Khan, Haji Khan and Bahram Khan — spent his last years locked in rivalry violent enough that the one occasion Haig records him abandoning his own character was directed at them: defeating a rebellious Haji Khan in the field, he massacred his prisoners and built a column of their skulls, a cruelty foreign to everything else known about him. He refused his counsellors' pleas to abdicate in favour of one son while the rivalry still raged, and only settled the question by outliving it: when he died in the winter of 1470, Haji Khan, restored to favour after his own period of exile and rebellion, ascended the throne without opposition as Haidar Shah — the one clean succession his fifty-year reign, for all its enlightenment, was never quite able to guarantee in advance.

Kingmakers without a crown

Drafted from (ed.), The Cambridge History of India, Volume III: Turks and Afghans (1928)contraction

Zain-ul-Abidin's death in the winter of 1470 did not just end a reign; it ended, in every way that mattered, the rule of the family he belonged to. His own account of the Chakk clan was that they were already a menace to public order serious enough that he had expelled them from the valley outright. Under the feebler kings who followed him they drifted back, and for the better part of a century Kashmir's throne belonged, in substance, to whichever Chakk chieftain could out-manoeuvre his own kinsmen for the year.

A century of puppets

The pattern set in almost immediately. Zain-ul-Abidin's own sons fought each other for the throne before and after his death; his grandson Hasan Shah divided the tutoring of his two young heirs between rival factions as though impartiality between them were a policy rather than an abdication of one, and watched the resulting rivalry consume the court around him. A ten-year Mughal occupation under Mirza Haidar Dughlat came and went in the 1540s, ended by a night attack that killed its own commander by the hands of his own men. Through all of it, the office of kingmaker passed between Chakk chieftains — Kaji Chakk, then Ghazi Khan — who found it more useful for decades to rule through a succession of puppet Shah Miri princes than to wear the crown themselves.

Ghazi Khan stops pretending

Ghazi Khan was the one who ended the pretence. Having already crushed rebellions, executed his own conspiring son, and deposed one puppet king after another, he dethroned and imprisoned the reigning Habib Shah in 1561 and took the throne in his own name as Ghazi Shah. The house Shah Mirza had founded in 1346 had held the crown for two hundred and fifteen years, but for the last ninety of them, since Zain-ul-Abidin's death, it had held no real authority at all — Ghazi Shah's coronation only made official what the Chakk clan's chieftains had already been for two generations.

A leper's throne, and the family quarrels resume

Ghazi Shah's own reign closed in the same pattern it had exploited: a military failure in Tibet cost him his son's loyalty, and leprosy cost him his fingers and then his sight. He abdicated to his half-brother Husain Shah in 1563-64, tried unsuccessfully to reclaim the throne when he disagreed with a decision of his successor's, and died, Haig records, of grief after his own son was blinded for conspiring against the new king. Husain Shah's own reign ran through further rebellions, a religious dispute over a wounded qazi that drew in one of Akbar's own envoys, and ended in 1569-70 when his brother Ali Shah raised troops against him while he lay weakened by dysentery and took the crown without a fight. The clan that had spent a century making and unmaking Shah Miri princes had, by unmaking itself with the same regularity, made its own hold on the throne no steadier than the one it replaced.

A treaty Akbar did not keep

Drafted from (ed.), The Cambridge History of India, Volume III: Turks and Afghans (1928)end

Ali Shah's son Yusuf Shah inherited a throne in 1579 that was, by then, barely his to keep. Within his first years he put down a rebellion led by his own uncle, watched a Sayyid noble usurp the crown outright and then lose it in a counter-rebellion, and was finally driven out himself when his cousin Lohar Chakk seized the throne in his place.

A throne recovered with borrowed authority

Yusuf did not try to retake Kashmir with an army of his own. He travelled to Akbar's court at Fathpur-Sikri in January 1580 and asked for the emperor's help. He left with an imperial order directing Mughal officers in the Punjab to back him — and before that force ever had to march, word that Akbar was prepared to aid him was enough on its own to bring Kashmir's nobles back to Yusuf's side. He returned alone, defeated and captured Lohar Chakk at Sopur that November, and had his throne back without a single Mughal soldier crossing the passes. It was a debt he could not fully repay: he had recovered the crown through Akbar's reputation rather than Akbar's army, which let him tell himself he ruled as an independent king, while the court that had lent him that reputation took a very different view.

The homage he kept failing to pay in person

For years afterward, Yusuf managed the relationship at arm's length, sending sons and envoys to Akbar's court in his own place rather than appearing himself, and the absence was noticed each time. When his elder son fled the imperial camp fearing for his life, and Yusuf's own nobles talked him out of going in person to smooth things over, Akbar stopped treating him as anything other than a defiant vassal. An army under Raja Bhagwan Das marched on Kashmir; Yusuf held the mountain passes against it long enough that the raja, unwilling to risk a winter campaign in the hills, agreed to a peace in exchange for Yusuf's promise to present himself at court.

A promise kept, and a promise broken

Yusuf kept his side of it. He appeared before Akbar on 7 April 1586 to fulfil the terms his own general had negotiated on his behalf — and Akbar refused to honour the treaty Bhagwan Das had made, detaining Yusuf as a prisoner the moment he arrived. Bhagwan Das, whose word had been given in good faith and broken by his own emperor, took his own life over the dishonour. Yusuf's elder son Yaqub stayed behind in Kashmir and held out against the imperial administration for more than two years of guerrilla resistance before finally submitting to Akbar in person in August 1589.

What became of the man himself

Haig calls Akbar's treatment of Yusuf one of the chief blots on his reputation. After a year in captivity Yusuf was released with a modest fief in Bihar and command of five hundred horse — a rank he never rose above, serving under Man Singh in Bengal, Orissa and Chota Nagpur in the years that followed, the last king of an independent Kashmir living out his life as one more officer in the army of the empire that had ended it.