Latest / Aurangzeb: The Emperor Who Expanded and Broke the Mughal Empire — Fexingo History / Aurangzeb's War of 27 Years: The Deccan That Devoured the Mughals
Transcript
- Lucas: So, we've talked a lot about Aurangzeb's Deccan campaigns — the sieges of Bijapur and Golconda, the war with Shivaji. But I want to zoom in on something that really broke the Mughal war machine: the Deccan itself became a trap. After Shivaji died in 1680, his son Rajaram took over, and he did something brilliant — he fled to the fortress of Jinji, deep in what's now Tamil Nadu. Luna: Jinji — that's the one that held out for years, right? Lucas: Exactly. From 1689 to 1698, Rajaram and the Marathas held Jinji against the Mughal army. And this wasn't just a siege — it was a whole new kind of war. The Marathas didn't fight pitched battles. They used Jinji as a base to raid Mughal supply lines, then melted back into the hills. The Mughal commanders, like Zulfikar Khan, were chasing shadows. Luna: So the Mughals had this huge, slow army — how did they even supply it? Lucas: That's the key. The Mughal army in the Deccan was massive — maybe 500,000 men at its peak. They relied on a colossal baggage train of bullock carts, elephants, and camels, stretching for miles. The Marathas would just pick off the stragglers, burn the grain, and vanish. One Maratha leader, Santaji Ghorpade, was famous for these lightning raids. He'd hit the supply convoys near Surat, hundreds of miles away, then ride back to Jinji. Luna: So it was like a guerrilla war, but on an empire-wide scale. Lucas: Exactly. And the Mughals couldn't adapt. They kept trying to besiege forts, but the Marathas just didn't care about holding territory. They'd let the Mughals take a fort, then retake it the moment the army moved on. It was a war of exhaustion. And it wasn't just on land — the Maratha navy under Kanhoji Angre started raiding Mughal shipping along the Konkan coast, disrupting trade and even capturing ships from the British East India Company. Luna: Wait, the Maratha had a navy? I didn't know that. Lucas: Oh yes. Kanhoji Angre was a brilliant admiral. He built coastal forts like Suvarnadurg and Vijaydurg, and his ships would intercept Mughal vessels carrying supplies to the army in the Deccan. He even formed alliances with the Siddis of Janjira, who were nominally Mughal allies, but he kept them in check. So the Mughals were being squeezed from both sides. Luna: And this went on for twenty-seven years? Lucas: Aurangzeb's Deccan campaign lasted from 1681 to 1707 — twenty-six years. He never left the Deccan after 1682. He set up his court first at Aurangabad, then moved with the army. The cost was astronomical. The Mughal treasury was drained. The empire's provinces in the north, like Bengal and Gujarat, sent their revenues south, but it was never enough. And then came the famine. Luna: The famine of 1702 to 1704, right? I've read about it — millions died. Lucas: Yes. The combination of war, drought, and the constant movement of armies wiped out crops. The Deccan was already a dry region, and now you had hundreds of thousands of soldiers and camp followers consuming everything. Contemporary accounts from the maasir i alamgiri describe people eating grass and bones. The Famine Codes of the British Raj later estimated that maybe two million people died in those three years alone. Luna: And yet Aurangzeb didn't stop. Why? Lucas: He saw it as a religious duty. He believed the Deccan was dar ul harb — land of war — and that he had to bring it under Islamic rule. But also, he was stubborn. He couldn't admit that the Marathas were unbeatable. He kept appointing new generals, but they couldn't pin the Marathas down. In 1698, Rajaram died, but his widow Tarabai took over, and she was even more aggressive. She used the same tactics — raid and retreat. Luna: So the Marathas were basically fighting a war of independence, but using modern guerrilla tactics? Lucas: Exactly. They didn't have the heavy artillery or the numbers to defeat the Mughals in open battle, so they didn't try. They targeted the Mughal economy — trade routes, revenue collectors, supply depots. And it worked. By 1705, the Mughal army was demoralized, starving, and deserting in droves. Aurangzeb himself wrote letters to his sons, despairing that he had wasted his life in the Deccan. Luna: He said that? Do we have the actual letters? Lucas: Some survive, in Persian. In one, he wrote: 'I came alone, and I go alone. I have not done well by the country or the people.' It's heartbreaking, really. He died in 1707 at Ahmednagar, an old man of 88, still in the Deccan. And within a few years, the Marathas under Shivaji's grandson, Shahu, were marching on Delhi. Luna: So his obsession with the Deccan ended up destroying the empire he'd built. Lucas: Absolutely. The Mughal Empire after Aurangzeb was a shadow. The treasury was empty, the army was broken, and the provinces — like Hyderabad, Bengal, and Awadh — started acting like independent kingdoms. The Marathas became the de facto power in much of India for the next century. So in a way, the Deccan didn't just break Aurangzeb — it broke the Mughal Empire. Luna: It's almost like the empire was too big, too rigid to survive a long guerrilla war. Lucas: Exactly. The Mughals were designed for quick, decisive campaigns — like the ones against Bijapur and Golconda. But the Marathas turned war into a war of attrition, and the Mughal system couldn't handle it. It reminds me of what happened to the British in the American Revolution, or the Soviets in Afghanistan — a superpower trying to fight a guerrilla war on its own terms, and losing. Luna: So the lesson is: never get bogged down in a war you can't win quickly. Lucas: And never underestimate the power of a motivated, mobile enemy that knows the terrain. The Marathas didn't just fight for territory — they fought for survival, and that made them relentless. It's one of the great what-ifs of Indian history: what if Aurangzeb had made peace with the Marathas in the 1680s, instead of fighting for thirty years? The empire might have lasted another century. Luna: But he couldn't, because of his worldview. Lucas: Right. And that's the tragedy of Aurangzeb. He was a brilliant administrator, a devout Muslim, and a tireless ruler — but his rigidity and his refusal to compromise destroyed everything he built. The Deccan swallowed him whole.