Latest / Aurangzeb: The Emperor Who Expanded and Broke the Mughal Empire — Fexingo History / Aurangzeb's Water Crisis: How the Mughal Empire Dried Up
Transcript
- Lucas: If you've been stepping into history with us episode by episode, you'll know that Aurangzeb spent the last twenty-five years of his life camped in the Deccan, chasing Maratha guerillas from fort to fort. What often gets overlooked is that this war wasn't just fought with swords and cannons — it was fought with water. Luna: Water? Like, literally fighting over wells? Lucas: Exactly. The Deccan plateau is dry — it gets most of its rain in a few monsoon months, and the rest of the year it's a thirsty landscape. Aurangzeb's army, at its peak, numbered over three hundred thousand men, plus horses, elephants, and camp followers. That's an enormous demand for water. And the local infrastructure — stepwells, tanks, reservoirs — had been built over centuries by the Bahmani sultanates and the Maratha kingdoms, maintained by local communities. Lucas: Aurangzeb's approach was to seize and militarize these water sources. He ordered his engineers to divert streams, build temporary canals, and dig new wells for the imperial camp. But the scale of the army meant that within a few weeks, any water source near the camp was exhausted or polluted. The maasir i alamgiri records that in 1695, near the fortress of Panhala, the army had to march fourteen miles just to find drinkable water. Luna: Fourteen miles — in that heat, with armour? Lucas: Yes, and it wasn't just thirst. The constant movement of the army trampled the catchment areas and silted up the tanks. The local population suffered too — farmers abandoned their fields because the wells were either taken by the Mughals or destroyed in the fighting. François Bernier, the French traveler who spent years in Mughal India, noted that in the Deccan, a single Mughal campaign could turn a fertile district into a desert within a season. Lucas: One of the most ambitious — and disastrous — projects was the Nizam Shah canal, built on Aurangzeb's orders in 1698 to bring water from the Godavari river to his camp near the fort of Nizam Shah. The canal was supposed to be thirty miles long, but the terrain was rocky, and the engineers miscalculated the gradient. After two years of digging and a massive expense in gold, the canal carried water for only a few weeks before silting up completely. Luna: So they basically threw money into a ditch. Lucas: That's exactly what it was. And the treasury was already strained from decades of war. But Aurangzeb couldn't afford to give up — controlling water was essential to controlling the Deccan. The Marathas, on the other hand, knew the terrain intimately. They would poison wells before Mughal troops arrived, or dam small streams to create marshes that slowed the Mughal cavalry. Lucas: If today was actually useful to you, the way these stay ad-free is listener support — buy me a coffee dot com slash fexingo. It keeps us independent so we can dig into stories like this without sponsors. Luna: Yeah, it really does make a difference. And it helps us spend time on research. Lucas: So, back to the water war. One of the most telling signs of the crisis is what happened to the baolis — the elaborate stepwells that dotted the Deccan. In Aurangabad, which was Aurangzeb's capital, there were dozens of baolis built by Malik Ambar and the Nizam Shahi sultans. But during the last years of Aurangzeb's reign, many of them fell into disrepair because the local administrators were too busy supplying the army to maintain them. Luna: So the heart of the empire started to dry up too? Lucas: Exactly. The maasir i alamgiri mentions that in 1705, the water level in the main baoli of Aurangabad dropped so low that the city's residents had to dig new wells inside their homes. And this wasn't just a matter of comfort — it was a public health disaster. Stagnant water bred disease, and epidemics of cholera and dysentery swept through the Mughal camps year after year. Lucas: Aurangzeb himself wrote letters to his generals complaining about the lack of clean water. In one letter to Zulfiqar Khan, he says, 'The army is suffering from thirst; the horses are dying; we cannot remain here without water.' But instead of pulling back, he ordered more wells to be dug, often in places where the groundwater was too brackish to drink. Luna: Was there any attempt at long-term solutions? Lucas: A few. The most notable was the reconstruction of the Paithan reservoir, an ancient tank on the Godavari that had been built by the Satavahana dynasty over a thousand years earlier. Aurangzeb's engineers tried to repair its embankment in 1699, but the work was shoddy — they used poor-quality mortar, and the reservoir failed again within a decade. After Aurangzeb's death in 1707, the entire water infrastructure of the Deccan was in ruins. Lucas: And that had long-term consequences. The Maratha resurgence under Shivaji's grandson Shahu was partly possible because the Mughals had so degraded the land that local populations were willing to support anyone who could restore order and water. The British later noted in their irrigation surveys that the Deccan had never fully recovered from Aurangzeb's campaigns. Luna: So the empire literally drank itself to death. Lucas: In a way, yes. The Mughal war machine required water on a scale that the arid Deccan simply couldn't sustain without massive investment in infrastructure — investment that Aurangzeb was unwilling or unable to make because every rupee went into the army. It's a cautionary tale about the limits of military power in an environment that doesn't cooperate.