In 30 Seconds
Story
Between the Ganga and the Kumaon hills lies a region whose very name is a migration record. Rohilkhand, the country of the Rohillas, takes its title from the Pashtun highlanders, the men of Roh, the mountain country of the Afghan borderlands, who settled the tract in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and, in the Mughal empire’s long subsiding, built there the plain’s most improbable state, an Afghan confederacy in the middle of Hindustan. Its rise, its destruction in one of colonial India’s most controversial wars, and its long afterlife in the culture of Bareilly and Rampur form the batch’s northwestern panel.
The settlement began as employment. Afghan soldiers of fortune had served Hindustan’s armies for centuries, and in the katehr country of the upper doab, a tract of famously defiant Rajput peasantries and weak imperial control, they found both work and land. The founding figure of the Rohilla state proper was Ali Muhammad Khan, by the traditions a local boy adopted and raised by the Afghan chief Daud Khan, who in the 1720s and 1730s converted a soldier’s holdings into a principality, gathering the scattered Afghan colonies under his leadership as the Mughal province dissolved around them. His capital at Aonla, and his successors’ seats at Bareilly and Rampur, presided over a confederacy rather than a kingdom, sardars holding their own tracts under a first among equals, a structure Afghan to its bones, formidable in war and fissile in peace.
The Rohillas’ half century as a power wrote them into the age’s every drama. Their most famous chief, Najib ud Daula, rose from soldier to kingmaker at Delhi itself, holding the capital for years as the emperor’s regent and the Afghan king Ahmad Shah Abdali’s ally, and it was substantially at his invitation that Abdali’s army stood at Panipat in 1761, the Rohilla contingents fighting in the great battle that broke Maratha power in the north for a decade, a service the Marathas did not forget. The confederacy’s scholar statesman, Hafiz Rahmat Khan, guardian of Ali Muhammad’s heirs, gave the state its most respected leadership, a patron of learning remembered in the region’s traditions, and under such men Rohilkhand in its brief noon was prosperous, its towns growing, its cavalry the most respected recruitment in Hindustan.
The destruction came by contract, and it stained everyone it touched. The Marathas, recovered from Panipat, raided Rohilkhand at the decade’s turn, and the Rohillas sought protection from their powerful neighbour, the Nawab of Awadh, in an agreement whose terms, a promised indemnity of forty lakhs, became the casus belli, for the money went unpaid and Shuja ud Daula resolved to take the country instead. What made the conquest infamous was his instrument. By the treaty arrangements of 1773, the Nawab hired a brigade of the East India Company’s troops, and in 1774, at the battle of Miranpur Katra, the Company’s disciplined line broke the Rohilla host, Hafiz Rahmat Khan dying on the field with, the accounts record, conspicuous courage. The country was annexed to Awadh amid devastation and the flight of a great part of its Afghan population, and the Company had crossed a line its own conscience marked, its army rented out to extinguish a state with which it had no quarrel. The Rohilla war became a principal article in the impeachment of Warren Hastings, Edmund Burke’s oratory fixing the campaign in imperial memory as mercenary conquest, a charge the defence answered with realpolitik, and the debate has continued in the histories ever since, the ledger of the affair carrying, as so often in this series, discredit sufficient for all parties, the Rohillas themselves having been, in their own rise, no gentler than their age.
One fragment survived by prudence. Faizullah Khan, Ali Muhammad’s son, salvaged from the wreck the small state of Rampur, which endured as a princely state under British paramountcy until 1949, the last Rohilla polity, and turned its smallness into depth, its court becoming a celebrated refuge of musicians, poets, and calligraphers, the Rampur Sadaat and the gharana of its name enriching Hindustani music, and its Raza Library, built around the Nawabs’ manuscripts, standing today among the subcontinent’s great collections, an Afghan soldier state ending its story as a house of books.
The region the Rohillas named remains the state’s most distinctive northwestern country, its Muslim population among UP’s densest, its Pathan lineages keeping their genealogies, its politics, as the first batch noted, a recurring swing factor, and its cities, Bareilly of the previous batch’s seminary, Moradabad of the brass, Rampur of the knives and the library, carrying each a shard of the confederacy’s afterlife. For the UP Files, Rohilkhand completes a pattern the batch has traced across Jaunpur and Awadh, the plain’s genius for absorbing its conquerors into its permanent cast, the men of Roh arriving as soldiers and remaining, three centuries on, as one more thread in the heartland’s weave.
