Resistance to and Collaboration with Central Power

Where this sits

This is the second of the three topics RPSC packs into one syllabus line, after the major dynasties and before the administrative and revenue systems.

It is also the topic where preparation material is least reliable, because it is the one people have feelings about. The standard framing is a moral one: some Rajputs resisted and were heroic, others collaborated and were not. That framing cannot survive contact with the evidence, and the single fact that destroys it is already in the previous chapter: the Mughal army at Haldighati was commanded by Raja Man Singh I of Amber, a Rajput, against Maharana Pratap, a Rajput.

So this chapter asks a different question, which is also the question the syllabus asks. Not who was loyal, but what each choice consisted of and what it bought. That turns out to be answerable in detail, because the terms of these settlements were written down and several survive clause by clause.

What Prelims wants: the dates, the treaty terms, the mansab figures, who submitted when. What Mains wants: the argument that an alliance was a negotiated instrument with conditions, not a surrender, and that resistance and collaboration frequently ran inside the same family.

Before the Mughals: the Sultanate end of this syllabus line

The syllabus line runs from the Delhi Sultanate to the Mughals, and the Sultanate half is thinner in the record than the Mughal half, because there is no Sultanate equivalent of the treaty documents that make the later story answerable.

What survives well is Jalore. The fort had been Paramara, then Chauhan from the late twelfth century when Rao Kirti Pal of Nadol took it and made it his capital. His grandson Udai Singh surrendered it to Iltutmish about 1210 and had it restored to him at once. Roughly a century after that, Alauddin Khalji took Jalore from Kanhadadeva Chauhan after a long siege, and the three-domed mosque he is said to have built there was still in daily use when the Rajputana gazetteer was compiled in 1908. That mosque is described in the same volume as the earliest Muslim building in Rajputana, which is the point worth carrying: Jalore is where the Sultanate's presence in this region first became architecture rather than an army.

Note what the record does not settle. The renaming of Jalore and of Siwana, the exact years, and the betrayal stories attached to both sieges belong to later narrative sources and are listed in the Aggregator Watch rather than asserted here.

1. What an alliance actually consisted of

Before any date, understand the machinery. A Rajput ruler who entered Mughal service received and gave specific things, and a question about "Akbar's Rajput policy" is really a question about these four.

The watan jagir is the concept to understand properly, because it explains why the settlement held. Rajput rulers continued to govern their ancestral homelands, which the Mughals recognised as watan jagirs. The arrangement let a Rajput ruler centralise his own authority locally, at the expense of rival clan members, and so strengthened state formation at the regional level.

Read that carefully. The alliance did not weaken the allied houses. It made them stronger against their own internal rivals, backed by imperial recognition of a hereditary claim. That is why it was attractive, and any answer that treats it purely as a loss of independence has missed half of the transaction.

2. Akbar's settlement, 1562 to 1570

The sequence matters, because the later submissions were made in the shadow of the earlier conquests.

On the Ranthambore date, which is genuinely contested. Most standard accounts and effectively all exam material give 1569. Some sources give 1568, with precise dates: a siege begun 8 February 1568 and Rao Surjan Hada opening the gates on 21 March 1568.

Treat the 1568 dating with caution, and here is the reason, which is a lesson in method as much as a fact. The same accounts that give those 1568 dates also say Akbar moved on Ranthambore after the fall of Chittor, having been emboldened by it. But Chittor fell in late February 1568, which would place the start of the Ranthambore siege before the event that is said to have prompted it. A source whose own narrative contradicts its own dates is not usable for those dates. Answer 1569, and know why the other figure exists.

The chronicle settles Ranthambore to the day

The contested date can be closed, and closed hard, because the Akbarnama dates the siege twice by the Persian calendar.

Abul Fazl records that the New Year fell while Akbar was still besieging Ranthambore, on "the night of Friday the 22nd Ramzan 976, 11 March 1569". He then records the surrender: Surjan first sent his sons Duda and Bhoj to court, and afterwards asked that a courtier be sent to escort him out in honour. Husain Quli Khan was nominated, and Surjan came out of the fort on "the 12th Farwardin, Divine month, corresponding to Tuesday 3 Shawwal, 22nd March", handing over gifts and the keys of the fort, which were made of gold and silver. The fort was then made over to Mihtar Khan. Raja Todar Mal had been employed on the siege works.

Two Hijri dates, both in the year 976, both converting to March 1569. That is what a primary chronicle can do that no compilation can. It also explains where the rival dating comes from: the "21 March 1568" that circulates is the same lunar date converted one year short. Answer 1569, and now you can say why.

Surjan Hada's terms, which are the most valuable thing in this chapter

Rao Surjan Hada did not simply surrender. He signed an alliance on stated conditions, and the conditions are recorded:

• Exemption from paying jizya
• No matrimonial alliance between the two houses
• Not to be sent on Mughal service beyond the Indus

He then entered imperial service, was given the title Rao Raja, and later served as Governor of Benares province and of the fort of Chunar.

This single item does more work than any other in the chapter. It proves that:

1. Terms were negotiated. A defeated ruler could set conditions and have them accepted.
2. The matrimonial alliance was not universal. Its absence here shows it was one instrument among several, not the price of every settlement, and a statement that all allied Rajput houses married into the imperial family is false.
3. Religious exemptions were available within the settlement, forty years before Akbar abolished jizya generally, and a century before Aurangzeb reimposed it.

If a Mains answer needs one piece of evidence that alliance was a contract rather than a capitulation, this is it.

What Surjan was holding, and what he was paid for it

Two things about this settlement are usually missed, and both change what it means.

Surjan was not defending his own patrimony at Ranthambore. He was holding Mewar's fort. The Akbarnama explains how he came by it: under Afghan rule the fort had been entrusted to Salim Khan's slave Jajhar Khan, who, seeing he could not hold it and preferring that it not fall to the imperial army, sold it to Rai Surjan, "who was a servant of Rana Udai Singh" and was powerful in that neighbourhood. Surjan built in the fort, settled there, and took the villages around it. So the fall of Ranthambore in 1569 was the loss of a Mewar outwork, and the man who negotiated the terms was a Hada holding it for a Sisodia. The Rajputana gazetteer puts the same relationship generally: for two centuries before Surjan the Hada chiefs had been to a considerable extent vassals of the Ranas of Udaipur, bound as much by intermarriage as by dependence.

Surjan had also met Akbar before. In April 1561, when Akbar passed near Ranthambore on his way to Malwa and did not stop to besiege it, Surjan sent presents by his officers and paid homage. The 1569 settlement was therefore the second, formal act, not a first contact.

On what he received, two figures are in print and they are not close. The Rajputana gazetteer states that the Bundi chief "is said to have received as a reward the government of fifty-two districts including Benares, and the command of 2,000", and that from 1569 the Hara chief bore the title Rao Raja. The figures that circulate in preparation material, a mansab of 5,000 and twenty-six parganas, are not what that source says. Carry the gazetteer's numbers, note that even it hedges them with "is said to have", and treat the higher figures as unverified.

MCQ WATCH — Ranthambore and Surjan

The chronicle dates: Nauroz fell during the siege on 11 March 1569 (22 Ramzan 976); Surjan came out on 22 March 1569 (Tuesday, 3 Shawwal 976). Sons sent ahead: Duda and Bhoj. Fort handed to Mihtar Khan. Todar Mal worked the siege.

Whose fort: Ranthambore was bought from Jajhar Khan and held by Surjan as a servant of Rana Udai Singh of Mewar.

Earlier contact: Surjan paid homage with presents when Akbar passed by in 1561.

The reward, as the gazetteer gives it: fifty-two districts including Benares, and a command of 2,000; title Rao Raja from 1569. A mansab of 5,000 and 26 parganas are the aggregator figures, not this one.

MCQ WATCH — Akbar's settlement

Sequence: Merta 1562 → Chittor 1567-68 → Ranthambore 1569 → Jodhpur, Bikaner, Jaisalmer, 1570 at Nagaur.

First to submit: Bharmal of Amber, 1562.

Surjan Hada's three conditions: no jizya, no matrimonial alliance, no service beyond the Indus. Title Rao Raja; later governor of Benares and of Chunar fort.

Two-date item: Ranthambore 1569 is the safe answer; 1568 circulates and rests on an internally inconsistent account.

The Nagaur darbar of 1570, as the chronicle records it

The chapter's table gives Nagaur one line. The Akbarnama gives it a fortnight, and the detail rewards reading, because it shows three houses taking three different routes at the same darbar.

Akbar left the new fort works at Ajmer for Nagaur on 3 November 1570 and halted at the city a fortnight later. The nobles of Nagaur told him the town's prosperity depended on its tanks, that the largest of them, the Kukur Talao, had silted up, and that people had left their houses for want of water. He ordered it dug out and renamed it the Shukr Talao. That is the public works project the darbar is remembered for, and the chronicle gives water supply rather than famine as the reason for it.

Who came, and how:

• Chandrasen, son of Maldeo, is named in the chronicle as attending, and Abul Fazl says he "was received with royal favours". The chronicle does not describe a walkout. That story comes from the Marwar tradition, and the two accounts should be held apart.
• Rai Kalyan Mal of Bikaner came with his son Rai Singh, and asked, through intermediaries, that a daughter of his brother Kahan be taken into the imperial harem. Akbar accepted. The Rajputana gazetteer, following the Elliot translations, says instead that "the emperor married Kalyan Singh's daughter". The contemporary chronicle says niece; the gazetteer says daughter. Both are in print and the divergence is worth knowing.
• Rawal Har Rai of Jaisalmer did not come at all. He sent word that he wished his daughter to enter the harem but could not attend in person, and asked that a courtier be deputed to fetch her. Raja Bhagwant Das was sent, and completed the errand as Akbar returned from Nagaur.

So Jaisalmer's entry into the imperial system in 1570 was contracted at a distance, by marriage, without its ruler ever appearing at court. The word "submitted", applied to all three houses in one line, hides three different transactions, and RPSC's Nagaur questions live in exactly that gap.

MCQ WATCH — Nagaur, 1570

Departure and purpose: Akbar left for Nagaur on 3 November 1570; the Kukur Talao was desilted and renamed the Shukr Talao.

Who is named in the chronicle: Chandrasen son of Maldeo, received with favours; Kalyan Mal of Bikaner with his son Rai Singh; Rawal Har Rai of Jaisalmer in absentia, his daughter fetched by Bhagwant Das.

Two-source item: the Bikaner bride is Kalyan Mal's brother Kahan's daughter in the Akbarnama and Kalyan Mal's own daughter in the Rajputana gazetteer.

3. Mewar's long refusal, and how it ended

Mewar is the case everyone knows, and the part almost nobody carries is how it finished.

Udai Singh II did not submit, founded Udaipur in 1559, and lost Chittor in 1568. Maharana Pratap fought Haldighati on 18 June 1576 against Man Singh I, recovered ground after 1579, and ruled from Chavand.

Amar Singh I continued the resistance and won the second battle of Dewair in 1606 against Prince Parviz and Asaf Khan. Jahangir then sent expedition after expedition: Mahabat Khan in 1608, Abdullah Khan in 1609, and Prince Khurram in 1613.

What Akbar offered Pratap, and the nine years the chapter skips

The chapter's argument is that terms were negotiable and that resistance bought better ones. The Mewar record turns that from an argument into a sequence, because the terms were offered to Pratap first and refused.

Between June and December 1573 Akbar sent three embassies to Pratap. Man Singh came first, about June 1573, on his way back from Dungarpur and Salumbar; Pratap received him as a guest and refused to accompany him to court. Raja Bhagwan Das followed in October 1573, and Raja Todar Mal, then diwan of Gujarat, in December 1573. Pratap received both with courtesy and refused both.

One detail in Abul Fazl's account of the second mission is worth holding up. He writes that Pratap sent back a petition with his son Amar Singh asking to be excused from personal attendance at the Mughal court. That is the precise concession Mewar obtained in 1615. G. N. Sharma, who worked through the Mewar manuscripts alongside the Persian chronicles, thinks Abul Fazl is wrong here, on the ground that if the crown prince and a submission had actually been sent, Akbar would have accepted them. Either way the point stands: the thing Mewar was bargaining over in 1573 is the thing it was still bargaining over forty-two years later, and it is the clause it finally won.

The same scholarship removes a story that appears in almost every summary. The tale that Man Singh was insulted at a feast on the bank of Udai Sagar, and that this caused Haldighati, rests on late Mewar manuscripts. The Akbarnama and the Iqbalnama both say the Rana brought Man Singh to his house as his guest, and place the interview at Gogunda. Sharma treats the insult scene as bardic invention. Use the meeting, not the insult.

After Haldighati the war did not pause; the chapter's "recovered ground after 1579" covers nine years of named campaigns. Bhagwan Das and Man Singh retook the lost outposts about July 1577. Shahbaz Khan left for Mewar on 15 October 1577 and took Kumbhalgarh in April 1578, after four repulses and after Pratap left the fort at midnight, leaving it in Bhan's command; Shahbaz Khan then garrisoned fifty places in Mewar. He was sent again in December 1578, and a third time in November 1579, staying until the middle of 1580. Abdur Rahim Khan-i-Khanan was made governor of Ajmer and given the Mewar command on 16 June 1580; he left his family at Sherpura, Amar Singh raided it and captured the Mirza's women, and Pratap ordered them sent back with honour. The last serious expedition was Raja Jagannath, despatched 6 December 1584.

Then Akbar stopped. After 1585 no further campaign was sent, and Pratap recovered thirty-six places from the Mughal outposts, Udaipur, Gogunda and Mandal among them.

Read the commanders' names in order: Man Singh, Bhagwan Das, Shahbaz Khan, the Khan-i-Khanan, Jagannath. Three of the five are Rajputs, and the last man Akbar sent against Pratap was a Kachhwaha of Amber. The chapter opens on Man Singh at Haldighati as the single fact that breaks the moral frame. It is not a single fact. It is the shape of the whole war.

MCQ WATCH — Mewar between 1573 and 1585

The 1573 embassies, in order: Man Singh (June), Bhagwan Das (October), Todar Mal (December).

Where the Man Singh meeting was held: Gogunda, per the Akbarnama and Iqbalnama. The Udai Sagar insult scene is late Mewar tradition.

The campaigns: Bhagwan Das and Man Singh, July 1577; Shahbaz Khan from 15 October 1577, Kumbhalgarh April 1578, fifty garrisons; Shahbaz Khan again December 1578 and November 1579; Khan-i-Khanan from 16 June 1580, the Sherpura episode; Jagannath, 6 December 1584, the last.

After 1585: no further campaign; Pratap recovers thirty-six places.

The treaty of 1615, clause by clause

On 5 February 1615, Amar Singh I concluded a treaty with Jahangir, negotiated by Prince Khurram, the future Shah Jahan. Its terms are the most examinable thing in the whole chapter, and they are unusually favourable:

Two of these clauses are the whole point. Mewar was the only major house whose ruler was excused personal attendance at court, and the only one that kept its refusal of matrimonial alliance written into the settlement. So the eighty-year resistance did not end in an ordinary submission. It ended in better terms than anyone else received, and those terms preserved exactly the two things Mewar had been fighting about.

The price was Chittor, which was returned but could never be refortified. A fort that cannot be repaired is a monument, not a stronghold, and that was the point of the clause.

MCQ WATCH — Mewar's settlement

Date and parties: 5 February 1615, Amar Singh I and Jahangir, negotiated by Prince Khurram.

The clauses: Mewar with Chittor as watan jagir; no personal attendance at court; Karan Singh mansab 5,000; 1,500 horsemen; territory restored; Chittor never to be repaired; no royal marriage.

The expeditions before it: Mahabat Khan 1608, Abdullah Khan 1609, Khurram 1613.

Trap: a statement that Mewar submitted on the same terms as other houses is false in both directions. Its terms were better, and they were reached later.

The 1615 terms in the record, and a figure that is not settled

The clause list is worth checking against the chronicles, because two items in the standard version do not survive the check cleanly.

The negotiation ran through named men. Mewar sent Hari Das Jhala and Shubhkaran; Khurram sent them on to Jahangir at Ajmer with Mulla Shukrullah Shirazi and Sundar Das. Jahangir's consent came back with a farman carrying the impression of his own palm, which is still preserved in the Maharana's confidential office at Udaipur. The Rana then went to Gogunda on 5 February 1615 to meet the prince. Karan Singh received his mansab of 5,000 afterwards, at court.

The service obligation is given as 1,000 horse, not 1,500, in the fullest clause list drawn from the Persian sources. G. N. Sharma's six-clause version, built from the Tuzuk-i-Jahangiri, the Iqbalnama, Kambu's Amal-i-Salih, Lahauri's Badshahnama and Nainsi's khyat, reads: the Rana would wait on Khurram in person; he would send his son Karan to court; he would be enrolled among the servants of the court after the manner of other Rajas; he would be excused from attending the court in person; Chitor would be restored on condition that it was not fortified or repaired; and he would provide a contingent of 1,000 horse. Both figures circulate in print. Give both, and name the basis of each, exactly as this chapter already does for Man Singh's sawar rank.

The marriage point needs care too. No prohibition on marriage appears in that clause list. What Sharma says is that the practice of matrimonial alliance, which the other Rajput houses had entered into, was not included in the terms and was not insisted on. The distinction matters in a statement question: the record supports no dola was demanded of Mewar, which is a concession, rather than a bar on marriage was written into the treaty, which is a clause.

Two things Jahangir himself records round the settlement off. He had full-size marble figures of the Rana and his son Karan carved, and ordered them taken to Agra and set up in the garden below the jharoka. And among Amar Singh's offerings was a ruby valued by the jewellers at 60,000 rupees, whose descent Jahangir sets out in his own memoir: it had been Rao Maldeo's, passed to his son Chandrasen, who "in the days of his wretchedness and hopelessness sold it to Rana Udai Singh", from whom it went to Pratap and then to Amar Singh, who gave it up because his family had nothing more valuable left.

That single object carries the chapter's argument better than any sentence could. It travels from the Rathore who held out, through the sale that funded his holding out, to the Sisodias who held out longer, and ends in a Mughal prince's hands on the day the holding out stopped.

The no-repair clause was tested, and enforced with an army

The clause did not simply sit there for a century. It was broken twice within forty years, and the second time the empire came to enforce it.

Rana Jagat Singh I began repairing Chitor's walls in defiance of the treaty, and his son Raj Singh, who succeeded on 10 October 1652, hurried the work to completion. Shah Jahan's response was not a letter. He left for Ajmer on 29 September 1654 to supervise in person, and sent his wazir Sadullah Khan with 30,000 troops to Chitor with orders to demolish the repairs and, if the Rana did not submit, to overrun his territory. The Rana sent Madhu Sudan Bhatt and Ram Singh Thala to argue the wazir out of it; the meeting went badly, and Sadullah Khan set his men to pull the walls and battlements down with picks and spades before returning to Ajmer.

Mewar then bought the peace back. The Rana sent word through his physician to Prince Dara; Abdul Karim and Munshi Chandra Bhan were sent to negotiate; and the settlement of November 1654 bound the Rana to send his son to court, to stop repairing the fort, and to hand over border territory to Mughal officers.

This is the most useful thing in the chapter about what a treaty clause was worth. The clause of 1615 was not a formality and not a symbol. It was a live obligation, enforced thirty-nine years later by a wazir with an army, and the price of testing it was land.

4. Marwar's two answers, in one generation

The previous chapter set this up; here is the substance. Maldeo named Rao Chandrasen his successor over the elder brothers Ram and Udai Singh, and the brothers then took opposite positions on the Mughal question.

Rao Chandrasen, and why his dates matter

Chandrasen (r. 1562 to 1581) is called the "Maharana Pratap of Marwar", and also "Marwar ka bhoola bisra nayak", the forgotten hero of Marwar.

• At the Nagaur darbar of 1570 he attended and then left without accepting suzerainty, when he saw the emperor favouring his brothers Ram Rai and Udai Singh.
• Akbar besieged and took Bhadrajun in 1571. Chandrasen escaped to Siwana, and continued from there and from the Sojat hills.
• He was a pioneer of guerrilla warfare in the hills of Rajasthan, a method later adopted by Maharana Pratap.
• He died in 1581, at Pali, after which Marwar came under direct Mughal administration.

Now look at the chronology, because it inverts the standard story. Chandrasen's refusal at Nagaur was 1570. Haldighati was 1576. Chandrasen was resisting, in the hills, using the methods Pratap would later use, six years before Haldighati and died five years before Pratap. Rajasthan remembers the second man and forgets the first, which is why the epithet exists.

Chandrasen in the imperial record

Marwar's tradition and the Mughal chronicles do not tell the same Chandrasen story, and the chapter is stronger for saying so rather than for choosing.

He had already lost Jodhpur before Nagaur. The Akbarnama narrates the capture of the fort in the campaign that followed the crushing of Sharafuddin Husain Mirza's revolt in Ajmer and the fall of Merta, that is in the middle 1560s. Abul Fazl is explicit about what it was: the capital of Rai Maldeo, "one of the great Rajahs of India", held after his death by "his younger son Candar Sen". He is equally explicit about who helped take it: Ram Rai, the elder son of Maldeo, came and joined the imperial army while it besieged his brother, and was afterwards presented at court. So the split in the family was made before the darbar, on the walls of Jodhpur.

At Nagaur in November 1570 the chronicle says he was received with royal favours, and says nothing about a walkout. That does not make the Marwar account false; it makes the two accounts different, and an answer that reports both is better than one that picks.

The resistance ran on for years and was fought against him by other Rathores. In the winter of 1574 to 1575, with Akbar at Ajmer, Rai Singh of Bikaner came in haste from the fort of Siwana to report that Chandrasen was raising a disturbance in Jodhpur and that the army sent to take Siwana had not been able to put him down. A fresh force was sent, Chandrasen withdrew into the steep hills, and the commanders who came back to court treating his flight as the end of the job were degraded from their positions of trust for returning unsummoned. That is an imperial chronicle conceding, in the middle of a passage of abuse, that the man had not been beaten.

And there is a receipt for what the resistance cost him. Jahangir's own memoir records that the great ruby of the Rathores, valued at 60,000 rupees, passed from Maldeo to Chandrasen, and that Chandrasen "in the days of his wretchedness and hopelessness sold it to Rana Udai Singh". A man does not sell his house's most valuable possession to a neighbouring dynasty in good times. The single sentence is the best surviving evidence of what holding out from the Sojat hills actually cost, and it also puts the two resisting houses into one transaction: Marwar's resistance was partly financed by Mewar.

Put the imperial evidence beside the Marwar tradition and the epithet earns itself. The empire lost a fort to him, degraded its own officers over him, and used a Bikaner Rathore based at Siwana to hunt him.

Mota Raja Udai Singh

The passed-over brother took the other route, ruled Marwar 1583 to 1595 with imperial backing, and was the maternal grandfather of Shah Jahan.

One father, two sons, both strategies, and the collaborating line produced a Mughal emperor's grandfather while the resisting line produced a folk hero. No moral framing survives that sentence, which is why Marwar and not Mewar is the right case study for this topic.

5. The Rajputs inside the empire

Collaboration is usually taught as something that happened to Rajput houses. The record shows them running large parts of the empire.

Raja Man Singh I of Amber held the highest mansab of any Rajput under Akbar, 7,000 zat, granted towards the end of the reign. His governorships:

A note on the figure. His rank is given as 7,000 zat and 7,000 sawar in some accounts and as 7,000 zat and 6,000 sawar in others, the latter attached to a grant on 11 March 1605, the fiftieth year of Akbar's accession, following his success in Bengal. The 7,000 zat is not in dispute; carry that, and treat the sawar figure as unsettled.

Rai Singh of Bikaner, the second name on the same list

Man Singh is not the only Rajput at the top of the imperial hierarchy, and the man immediately below him makes the chapter's argument sharper, not softer.

Rai Singh succeeded at Bikaner in 1571 and ruled forty years. He was the first Raja of Bikaner, one of Akbar's most distinguished generals, and served in the country round Attock, in Gujarat, the Deccan and Sind. He was rewarded with a grant of fifty-two districts including Hansi and Hissar, and the Rajputana gazetteer places him higher on the list of mansabdars than any other Hindu except the chief of Amber. In 1586 he gave his daughter in marriage to Salim; their son was Prince Parwez, who later commanded against Mewar.

Now set that beside the previous section. The same Rai Singh is the officer who rode from Siwana to tell Akbar that Chandrasen could not be put down. The empire's second-ranked Rajput was being used against the most determined Rathore resister of the age, and both men were Rathores. No account of "collaboration" as a character trait survives that arrangement. What it shows instead is that the imperial system worked by giving one lineage the means to dominate another, which is the same mechanism the watan jagir section describes, applied between houses rather than within one.

Ram Singh I in Assam, and the career that failed

Section 5 as it stands lists successes. The record of Rajput service in the empire includes a long, expensive failure, and it belongs here.

Ram Singh I of Amber, Mirza Raja Jai Singh's son, was appointed on 27 December 1667 to recover the Assam frontier after the imperialists lost Gauhati to the Ahoms. He took 4,000 troopers of his own, 1,500 ahadis and 500 imperial artillerymen, and picked up Guru Tegh Bahadur at Patna on the way. He reached Rangamati in February 1669. He never took Gauhati. The Ahoms held the water, could put a hundred thousand men in the field, and were reinforced by the Nagas; the faujdar of Gauhati refused to take orders from him and was suspected of corresponding with the enemy. After three severe defeats in the second half of 1670 Ram Singh sued for peace, and in March 1671 he withdrew to Rangamati, beaten. He stayed on the Assam border, too weak to advance, until he was allowed to leave in 1676, nine years after he set out.

Jadunath Sarkar adds the reason he was sent: there is ground for believing Ram Singh was posted to Assam as a punishment for having secretly helped Shivaji escape from Agra, Shivaji having been in his custody at court.

So the Amber house both delivered Shivaji to Aurangzeb and lost the emperor's Assam war for helping him get away. That is what an imperial career looked like from the inside, and it is a better answer to "what did collaboration mean" than any list of governorships.

Jaswant Singh of Marwar, before he became a corpse

Section 6 uses Jaswant Singh only as a death that triggers a crisis. He was one of the two or three most heavily employed Rajputs in the empire, and what he did in life explains the vindictiveness of what followed.

He was the first ruler of Marwar to receive the title of Maharaja. In 1658 he was viceroy of Malwa and was given command of the army sent against Aurangzeb and Murad; he waited to fight both at once, and was beaten at Dharmat. Pardoned and summoned again for the campaign against Shuja, he turned on the imperial army as the battle opened at Khajwa, cut up Aurangzeb's rear-guard, plundered the camp and rode home to Jodhpur with the spoils. He was pardoned a second time, and afterwards served as viceroy of Gujarat and of the Deccan. In 1678 he was posted to the north-west, and he died there.

One correction is needed on the posting itself. Jaswant Singh was not viceroy of Afghanistan and not governor of Kabul. He was thanadar of Jamrud, commanding the Mughal posts in the Khyber and the Peshawar district. Sarkar states this flatly against the looser descriptions in circulation, and it matters, because a thanadari at a frontier post is not a great office; it is where a man is sent to be out of the way.

A ruler who changed sides twice in a war of succession and was forgiven twice, then parked at a frontier post for the last years of his life, is not a loyal servant and not a rebel. He is what the alliance actually produced: a great noble whose value to the empire and whose danger to it were the same thing.

The empire could also manufacture a house

The watan jagir section explains how the alliance strengthened a ruler against his own clan rivals. Kota is the extreme version, and the way it happened is the opposite of the story usually told.

Rao Raja Ratan Singh of Bundi had given the town of Kotah and its dependencies in jagir to his son Madho Singh. When Jahangir's son Khurram rebelled, the two of them joined the imperial army at Burhanpur against him. For that service Ratan Singh received the government of Burhanpur, and Madho Singh received Kotah to be held by him and his heirs direct from the crown. Kota is conventionally dated as a separate state from 1631.

Read the transaction and not the legend. Bundi was rewarded for fighting a rebel prince, not for sheltering him. The reward was the permanent partition of a Rajput state, with the cadet branch lifted out from under its own chief and made to hold directly of the emperor. That is the alliance system doing to Bundi what the watan jagir did inside a single house, one level up.

What the marriage instrument looked like where it was used

The chapter proves the marriage alliance was not universal by pointing at two refusals. It is worth showing the instrument working, because Jahangir describes it himself, in one sentence, about one family.

Writing about restoring Man Singh to Bengal, Jahangir says he had "obtained alliances with this illustrious family, inasmuch as his aunt had been in my father's house, and I had married his sister, and Khusrau and his sister Sultan-un-nisa Begam were born of her". He then adds that Man Singh's father was Raja Bhagwan Das, and that his grandfather Raja Bihari Mal was the first of the Kachhwaha Rajputs to enter Akbar's service.

Three generations of Amber women into three generations of the imperial family, stated by the emperor whose own half-brother was the issue of the third. That is what the instrument bought and why houses used it.

It also fixes a trap that catches even reference works. Man Singh's sister, Bhagwan Das's daughter, is the lady titled Shah Begam, mother of Khusrau, and she was of Amber. Shah Jahan's mother, the daughter of Mota Raja Udai Singh, was of Marwar. The Rajputana gazetteer of 1908 collapses the two, attributing to Mota Raja Udai Singh both a sister married to Akbar and a daughter "Man Bai" married to Salim. Jahangir's own memoir places Khusrau's mother in the Amber line and settles it. Keep the two women, and the two houses, apart.

MCQ WATCH — Rajputs in imperial office

Bikaner: Rai Singh, r. 1571 onward, first Raja of Bikaner, 52 districts including Hansi and Hissar, ranked below only the chief of Amber among Hindu mansabdars; daughter married to Salim, 1586, mother of Prince Parwez.

Assam: Ram Singh I appointed 27 December 1667, reached Rangamati February 1669, took Guru Tegh Bahadur with him from Patna, withdrew beaten in March 1671, left Bengal 1676. Sarkar: the posting was probably punishment for helping Shivaji escape from Agra.

Marwar: Jaswant Singh, first Marwar ruler titled Maharaja; viceroy of Malwa 1658, beaten at Dharmat, turned on the imperial army at Khajwa, later viceroy of Gujarat and the Deccan; at his death he was thanadar of Jamrud, not viceroy of Afghanistan.

Kota: created when Madho Singh, son of Ratan Singh of Bundi, was given Kotah to hold direct from the crown for serving the imperial army at Burhanpur against the rebel Khurram.

Amber's marriages, from Jahangir's memoir: Bihari Mal first Kachhwaha in Akbar's service; Bihari Mal's daughter to Akbar; Bhagwan Das's daughter, Man Singh's sister, to Jahangir, mother of Khusrau. She is Amber, not Marwar.

Mirza Raja Jai Singh I of Amber negotiated the Treaty of Purandar with Shivaji on 11 June 1665, on Aurangzeb's behalf: 23 forts surrendered, 12 retained.

Put those together. An Amber ruler governed Kabul, Bihar and Bengal; another negotiated with the founder of the Maratha state. These are imperial careers, not provincial ones, and any answer describing Rajput collaboration as passive is contradicted by the appointments.

6. Aurangzeb's rupture, 1679

The settlement Akbar built lasted roughly a century and then broke, and the break is precisely datable.

First, the dates, because three of them are wrong in circulation

This is the most heavily mis-dated passage in the whole topic, and the corrections come from the two standard authorities on the reign.

Jaswant Singh's death. Jadunath Sarkar gives 10 December 1678, at Jamrud. William Irvine gives 6 Zul Qada 1089, which he converts to 18 December 1678. Neither gives 28 December, the figure that circulates most widely and which this chapter previously carried. Use December 1678, and if a date is demanded, 10 December 1678 on Sarkar's authority, with Irvine's 18 December noted as the alternative. The news reached Aurangzeb at Delhi in the fourth week of the month.

The seizure, step by step, all of it before any question of religion arises. Muslim officers were appointed faujdar, qiladar, kotwal and amin of Jodhpur at once and the country brought under direct Mughal rule. Aurangzeb himself set out for Ajmer on 9 January 1679. Khan-i-Jahan Bahadur was sent on 7 February to occupy the country, demolish its temples and seize the dead Maharaja's property. On 1 March a detachment entered Siwana, where the Rathore treasure was kept, and finding nothing, dug under the walls for it. On 26 February Aurangzeb learned that two of Jaswant's widows had borne posthumous sons at Lahore. He did not alter course. On 2 April 1679 he returned from Ajmer to Delhi, and on that same day the jizya was reimposed.

The jizya date is 2 April 1679, and it is not a lone claim. Sarkar dates it from the Maasir-i-Alamgiri and the Mirat-i-Ahmadi; G. N. Sharma, working from a different set of Mewar and Persian materials, gives the same day. Two independent chains, one date.

There was no partition of Marwar between Inder Singh and Ajit Singh. What happened is documented and quite different. On 26 May 1679, Indra Singh Rathor, chief of Nagaur, grandson of Jaswant's disinherited elder brother Amar Singh, was invested as Raja of Jodhpur in return for a succession fee of 36 lakh rupees and sent to Marwar, with the Mughal administrators and generals left in place to prop him up. He lasted about two months. He was dethroned for manifest incapacity to rule, in Aurangzeb's phrase, "fifty thousand Rathor blades". The date 23 July 1679 belongs to a different event: it is the day Durgadas, having cut his way out of Delhi with seven surviving troopers, brought the infant Ajit Singh safely into Marwar.

On the offer to raise Ajit as a Muslim, attribute rather than assert. What Aurangzeb ordered openly was that the child be brought up in his harem, with a promise of rank and investiture at majority. That the throne was offered on condition of conversion rests on one contemporary historian, the Dilkusha. Sarkar accepts it as probable and gives his reason: the substitute boy Aurangzeb did keep was brought up a Muslim, given the name Muhammadi Raj, and buried as a Muslim, and Aurangzeb had lately given three zamindaris to whichever rival claimant would accept Islam. Say that, rather than stating the offer as a plain fact, and the answer becomes stronger, not weaker.

The counter-claim is the part usually left out. Aurangzeb declared the boy in Rathore hands a pretender and the boy in his own harem the true heir, so the war was fought over which infant was Ajit Singh. A rebellion needs a claimant, and the empire's answer was to manufacture a rival one.

MCQ WATCH — the seizure of Marwar, corrected

Death: 10 December 1678 (Sarkar) or 18 December 1678 (Irvine, from 6 Zul Qada 1089), at Jamrud. Not 28 December.

Sequence: Aurangzeb leaves for Ajmer 9 January 1679; Khan-i-Jahan Bahadur sent 7 February; Siwana searched 1 March; the births at Lahore known on 26 February; 2 April 1679, return to Delhi and reimposition of the jizya.

The throne sold: Indra Singh Rathor of Nagaur, grandson of Amar Singh, made Raja of Jodhpur on 26 May 1679 for 36 lakh rupees, dethroned after about two months.

What 23 July 1679 actually is: the day Durgadas brought Ajit Singh into Marwar after the escape from Delhi. It is not a partition date.

The counterfeit: the substituted boy was raised a Muslim as Muhammadi Raj; Durgadas's charge was declared the pretender.

The trigger

Maharaja Jaswant Singh of Marwar died in December 1678 at Jamrud, near Peshawar, leaving no living male heir. Aurangzeb converted the Marwar lands into imperial territory to be managed as jagirs.

Then the heir arrived. Two of Jaswant Singh's queens were pregnant. Ajit Singh was born on 19 February 1679, at Lahore; the other child died soon after birth, leaving Ajit as sole heir. Durgadas Rathore is the figure who protected the infant's claim.

What Aurangzeb did next

• He reimposed the jizya in 1679, which had been abolished under Akbar.
• On 23 July 1679 he attempted to divide Marwar between two Rathore claimants, Inder Singh Rathore and Ajit Singh.
• He proposed that Ajit Singh be raised as a Muslim, and offered Jodhpur in return.

Note what is being violated. The watan jagir was a hereditary recognition of ancestral territory, and this converted it into imperial land, then offered it back conditionally on the heir's religion. The rupture is not that Aurangzeb was intolerant in the abstract; it is that he broke the specific instrument the alliance was built on. That is the analytical point, and it is far stronger than a general statement about his policies.

The war

The Rathore rebellion ran from 1679 to 1707, nearly thirty years, led by the Marwar nobles under Durgadas Rathore and supported by Mewar. It ended after Aurangzeb's death on 3 March 1707, with the Rathores taking Jodhpur on 12 March 1707, nine days later.

Mewar's war ran 1679 to 1681 as a war of attrition. With Marwar unresolved and the Deccan pulling him south, Aurangzeb negotiated with Raj Singh's son Jai Singh, who ceded three parganas in lieu of paying jizya, in exchange for the Mughal army evacuating Mewar.

That settlement is worth noticing for the same reason as Surjan Hada's: the tax was bought off with territory. Even at the point of rupture, the relationship was being settled by negotiated exchange.

Mewar's war, and why it ended when it did

The chapter gives Mewar's war two sentences and no cause for its ending. The cause is one of the most remarkable episodes in Mughal history, and it happened in Rajasthan.

The friction predates 1679 by twenty years, and none of it is about the jizya. In 1659 Aurangzeb, newly crowned, issued a farman granting Rana Raj Singh the parganas of Gayaspur, Dungarpur and Banswara, yielding two crore of dams, and raised his rank to 6,000 zat and 6,000 sawar. The house that had refused for a century held one of the highest mansabs in the empire. In 1660 the Rana intervened in the affair of Charumati of Rupnagar, daughter of Rup Singh of Kishangarh, whose betrothal to Aurangzeb had been arranged without her; she wrote to Raj Singh for help, and he went to Kishangarh, married her, and brought her to Mewar. Aurangzeb demanded an explanation, and the Rana replied through Udai Karan Chauhan that such marriages were ordinary and no slight was intended. Cordial relations continued afterwards, and Sharma is explicit that it is wrong to make this marriage the cause of the war, which came nineteen years later for other reasons.

Note what the Charumati episode adds to the chapter's argument. The matrimonial alliance is usually discussed as something Rajput houses gave. Here it is refused in the other direction, to the emperor's face, by a bride and a neighbouring ruler acting together, and the empire absorbed the refusal. It is the third instance in this chapter, after Bundi in 1569 and Mewar in 1615, and the most direct.

When the war came, the letter of protest usually attached to it was not written by the Rana. Three copies of the famous protest against the jizya survive, at the Royal Asiatic Society in London, the Asiatic Society of Bengal, and the Maharana's office at Udaipur. Orme attributed it to Jaswant Singh, the London manuscript to Shivaji, the Bengal manuscript to Shambhuji, Tod and Shyamal Das to Raj Singh. Jadunath Sarkar concluded on internal evidence that the writer was Shivaji, and Sharma, examining the Udaipur copy, judged it an abridgement of Shivaji's letter. Sharma adds the argument that settles it for our purposes: no contemporary Rajput source from Raj Singh's own time mentions the jizya or any protest against it at all, though the local annalists record far smaller things. Do not put the letter in a Mewar answer.

The war itself. Aurangzeb entered Mewar; the Rana withdrew into the Girwa hills on his priest's advice and was never caught. Hasan Ali Khan went after him with picked men and got lost in the defiles. Temples were destroyed in and around Udaipur, at Udai Sagar, and on the road to Chitor; the Maasir-i-Alamgiri, the official chronicle, puts the counts at 173, three, and sixty. Aurangzeb halted a few days at Deobari, the pass east of Udaipur, and left for Ajmer on 22 March 1680. Raj Singh died on 22 October 1680.

Then the Rajputs did something no other resistance in the empire attempted: they raised a rival emperor. Negotiations opened with Prince Muazzam failed when his mother warned him off. They succeeded with Prince Akbar, who had commanded in Mewar and Marwar and failed to impress his father. Terms were settled through Rao Kesari Singh: Akbar as emperor would restore the Mughal-held parts of Mewar and honour the Rana's standing, and the Rana would put half his force at the prince's disposal against his father. On 11 January 1681 Akbar crowned himself emperor at Nadol, on the strength of the Sisodias and the Rathores, and made Tahavvur Khan his Amir-ul-Umara. Aurangzeb had been warned by Muazzam and had not believed it; when he confirmed it his first reaction was alarm, because his armies were scattered.

Akbar wasted a fortnight, the rising collapsed, and the prince fled to the Marathas. But it is why Aurangzeb settled. With Marwar unresolved, a son proclaimed against him, and the Deccan pulling him south, he handed the Mewar command to Prince Azam and let terms be made.

The terms of 1681, which can be named. Shyam Singh for the Rana, and Dalel Khan and Hasan Ali Khan for the prince, worked out four:

Ratification followed on 24 June 1681 on the bank of the Rajsamudra, the Rana coming in procession with a thousand horse to meet Prince Azam, and a confirming farman from Aurangzeb followed on 18 July 1681. From then until Jai Singh's death in 1698 there was peace.

Notice which parganas those are. Mandal, Pur and Badnor are among the border districts Mewar had been made to hand over in 1654, after Sadullah Khan pulled down the Chitor repairs. The same ground is being conceded twice, a generation apart, for two different reasons, and both times as the price of an obligation Mewar had broken or refused.

MCQ WATCH — Mewar, 1659 to 1681

Before the war: farman of 1659 grants Raj Singh Gayaspur, Dungarpur and Banswara and a rank of 6,000 zat and 6,000 sawar; Charumati of Rupnagar, daughter of Rup Singh of Kishangarh, married by Raj Singh in 1660 after refusing Aurangzeb.

The protest letter: attributed variously to Jaswant Singh, Shivaji, Shambhuji and Raj Singh; Sarkar and Sharma both conclude it is Shivaji's. No contemporary Mewar source mentions any protest.

The war: Aurangzeb at Deobari, leaves for Ajmer 22 March 1680; Raj Singh dies 22 October 1680; Prince Akbar proclaimed emperor at Nadol, 11 January 1681, through Rao Kesari Singh, with Tahavvur Khan as Amir-ul-Umara.

The 1681 terms: Mandal, Pur and Badnor ceded in lieu of jizya; Mughal withdrawal; ancestral country restored; mansab of 5,000 for Jai Singh. Ratified 24 June 1681 at Rajsamudra; farman 18 July 1681.

MCQ WATCH — the rupture

Trigger: Jaswant Singh dies December 1678 at Jamrud; Marwar taken into imperial management; Ajit Singh born 19 February 1679 at Lahore; Durgadas Rathore protects the claim.

Aurangzeb's measures: jizya reimposed 1679; 23 July 1679, Marwar to be split between Inder Singh and Ajit Singh; Ajit to be raised a Muslim in return for Jodhpur.

The wars: Rathore rebellion 1679-1707; Aurangzeb dies 3 March 1707; Rathores retake Jodhpur, 12 March 1707. Mewar's war 1679-1681, ended when Jai Singh ceded three parganas in lieu of jizya.

The one time they did combine, 1708

The chapter's ending has always been Hurda and the failure to unite. That ending is only honest if it also carries the occasion, twenty-six years earlier, when three of the same houses did unite, against a reigning emperor, and won.

The provocation was Bahadur Shah repeating his father's mistake. Marching through Rajputana in the winter of 1707 to 1708, he found Amber disputed between Jai Singh and his younger brother Bijai Singh, and resolved the dispute by annexing the state. The town's name was ordered changed to Islamabad, and Sayyid Ahmad Said Khan Barha was sent as faujdar; the emperor reached Amber about 20 January 1708 and prayed in a mosque there. In April the country of Amber was made over to Bijai Singh, who received the title Mirza Rajah on 30 April 1708. Marwar was handled the same way: Mihrab Khan, faujdar of Jodhpur, had already been sent ahead to take possession of the city, and Ajit Singh, defeated near Merta, submitted and waited on the emperor in February.

The two deposed rulers were then taken south in the imperial train, and escaped. Jai Singh and Ajit Singh got away from Bahadur Shah's camp near Mandsaur at the end of April 1708. A month later the emperor learned they had gone to Rana Amar Singh II at Udaipur, and a few days after that came word that the three chiefs had entered into an agreement for joint resistance, sealed by a marriage.

The marriage clause is the part with a century of consequences. The Rajputana gazetteer states the condition plainly: the chiefs of Jodhpur and Jaipur were to regain the privilege of marrying into the Udaipur family, which they had forfeited by contracting matrimonial alliances with the Mughal emperors, on the understanding that the offspring of the Udaipur princesses should succeed in preference to all other children. Sarkar, writing the Jaipur side of it, calls this "the treaty of Udaipur (1708)" and says Jai Singh promised his throne to any son by the Udaipuri princess he was then marrying, setting aside the claims of all his elder sons; and that the Maharana would consent to mingle his blood with a family that had "given daughters to the Turk" on that condition alone. The son of that marriage, Madho Singh, was born in December 1738, and the clause detonated at Jai Singh's death, in the war between Madho Singh and his elder half-brother Ishwari Singh that let the Marathas into Rajasthan for good.

Read what that condition is actually doing. The price of the alliance of 1708 was the renunciation of the Mughal marriage, the same instrument this chapter has been tracking since Surjan Hada refused it in 1569. The alliance system was being unwound by the same clause that had bound it.

And it worked. Jodhpur was surrounded by thirty thousand Rathore horse in July 1708; after five days Mihrab Khan capitulated through Durgadas Rathore's mediation and was allowed an honourable withdrawal. Jai Singh took Amber back by a night assault on the fort, ejecting the imperial faujdar, a fact that reached the emperor's camp on 21 August 1708. After the rains the allies moved on Sambhar, where Sayyid Husain Khan Barha, faujdar of Mewat, came against them with his brothers; a volley from two thousand matchlockmen hidden behind a sand hill killed him, two of his brothers and some fifty men, and the imperial army broke. On 6 October 1708 Bahadur Shah restored Jai Singh and Ajit Singh to their ranks, and after two more years of fighting he came back to Ajmer and made his peace with them in June 1710.

Three houses combined, against the emperor in person, and all three got their capitals back. That is the counter-example, and it makes the Hurda failure sharper rather than softer: the Rajput states were not incapable of combination. They combined when each of them had just been dispossessed by the same hand, and they failed to combine when the threat was general and future.

MCQ WATCH — 1708

The provocation: Bahadur Shah annexes Amber and orders it renamed Islamabad; Bijai Singh, Jai Singh's younger brother, is given the state and the title Mirza Rajah on 30 April 1708. Mihrab Khan holds Jodhpur.

The pact: Amar Singh II of Mewar, Sawai Jai Singh II of Amber, Ajit Singh of Marwar, formed after the two escaped from the imperial camp near Mandsaur in late April 1708. Condition: the Mughal marriage renounced, and the son of the Udaipur princess to succeed before all elder sons. Jai Singh's son by that marriage is Madho Singh, born December 1738.

The results: Jodhpur recovered July 1708 (Mihrab Khan capitulates through Durgadas); Amber retaken by night assault, reported 21 August 1708; Sambhar, where Sayyid Husain Khan Barha was killed; ranks restored 6 October 1708; final peace June 1710.

Trap: "Aurangzeb renamed Sawai Jai Singh Vijay Singh" is a garble. Bijai Singh was Jai Singh's brother, and it was Bahadur Shah who put him on the Amber throne.

7. After the Mughals: the Hurda conference, 1734

With Mughal power receding, the pressure came from the Marathas, and the Rajput response is a single examinable event.

The Hurda conference was held on 17 July 1734 at Hurda, in present Bhilwara district, to devise a common front against Maratha incursions.

• It was presided over by Maharana Jagat Singh II of Mewar. Sangram Singh II of Mewar had been intended to head it but died before it met.
• Sawai Jai Singh II of Jaipur was central to organising it.
• Participants included Jaipur, Jodhpur (Abhay Singh), Bundi (Dulel Singh) and Kota (Durjan Sal), with Bikaner, Kishangarh and Nagaur also represented.
• It failed, through mutual distrust, lack of cooperation and internal politics.

What Hurda actually resolved, and when

Hurda is usually taught as a meeting that failed, with no account of what it decided. The engagement itself survives. Tod printed the text, and the original was still in the Jaipur archives when Sarkar wrote.

The compact opens "By the united chiefs the under-written has been agreed to, from which no deviation can take place", and is dated Sawan sudi 13, Samvat 1791, Camp Hurra. Its articles:

Three things follow from reading the document rather than a summary of it.

The Rana's presidency was structural, not ceremonial. Article 4 gives Mewar the sole corrective authority over the other states' representatives, and Tod says the Rana was invested with paramount control and was to head the forces. That is why Jagat Singh II presides though Sawai Jai Singh II convened the meeting.

The muster at Rampura is the test the alliance failed. The compact did not fail at Hurda. It failed at the thing article 3 required and which never happened, an assembly in the field after the monsoon. A question that asks what Hurda decided is asking about Rampura.

And Hurda was a revival, not a new idea. Tod says explicitly that the engagement revived the triple alliance formed by Rana Amar Singh, that is the pact of 1708, which had been broken by Ajit Singh's connection with the Sayyids and by his renewal of matrimonial ties with the empire, "the abjuration whereof was the basis of the treaty". The same clause about Mughal marriage that made the 1708 alliance is the clause whose breach dissolved it, and Hurda was the attempt to put it back. The seals on Tod's copy are those of Mewar, of Amber, of the Hada prince of Bundi, and of Abhai Singh of Marwar.

On the date, two accounts are in print. The document's own date, Sawan sudi 13 of Samvat 1791, converts to July 1734 on the northern reckoning; Tod printed "A.D. 1735" beside it, and Irvine showed that Tod's conversions run a year short throughout because he deducted 56 from the Samvat year instead of 57. Sarkar's revised History of Jaipur instead places the congress in the second half of October 1734. The 17 July 1734 date given in Rajasthani historiography agrees with the document; carry it, and know that a serious authority puts the meeting three months later.

MCQ WATCH — Hurda

The document: dated Sawan sudi 13, Samvat 1791, Camp Hurra; sealed by Mewar, Amber, Bundi (Hada) and Abhai Singh of Marwar.

The five articles: union in good and evil; no shelter for another's traitor; muster at Rampura after the rains, in person or by the heir; the Rana alone to correct an erring heir; all to unite in every enterprise.

Where it failed: the Rampura assembly, which never took place.

What it was: a revival of the 1708 alliance, whose basis had been the abjuration of marriage with the imperial family.

The failure is the examinable part. Rajasthan's houses could not combine even when every one of them faced the same threat, and that is the honest end of this chapter's story: the alliance system had made each house strong locally and left them collectively incapable of joint action.

The tax, end to end: 1679 to 1719

The jizya runs through this chapter as the thing Surjan Hada was exempted from in 1569, the thing Aurangzeb restored in 1679, and the thing Mewar bought off with three parganas in 1681. It is worth finishing the arc, because the end of it is a Rajasthan story.

Aurangzeb reimposed it on 2 April 1679. It was collected for thirty-four years. Farrukhsiyar abolished it at Agra in January 1713, and Irvine's note that it had "been levied for thirty-four years" is itself a check on the 1679 date. Around 1717 it was reimposed, over the passive resistance of the wazir Abdullah Khan and to the anger of the Hindu officials at court. And at the first audience of the boy emperor Rafi-ud-darjat in 1719, "on the prayer of Maharajah Ajit Singh, Rajah Bhim Singh of Kota, and Rajah Ratan Chand, the jazya or poll-tax was again abolished".

Two of the three petitioners were Rajasthan rulers, and one of them was the infant of 1679. The man whose birth Aurangzeb tried to suppress, and whose religion was made the price of his own throne, is the man who forty years later stood at a Mughal accession durbar and asked for the tax to be lifted, and had it lifted. That is the whole chapter in one line, and it is better than any generalisation about tolerance.

Note the shape carefully for a statement question. The tax was abolished twice, in 1713 and again in 1719, with a reimposition between. An option that credits the abolition to a single emperor and a single year is testing whether you know there were three moves, not one.

8. Statement-based questions: the fault lines

Type A — Submission read as unconditional

Type B — Two dates, one event

Type C — Reversed chronology

• "Pratap pioneered guerrilla warfare in Rajasthan and Chandrasen followed." Reversed. Chandrasen refused at Nagaur in 1570 and was fighting from the hills before Haldighati (1576); the method passed from him to Pratap.
• "Aurangzeb reimposed the jizya, and the Rajput war followed." Closer to reversed than it looks: Jaswant Singh's death (December 1678) and the seizure of Marwar came first, and the jizya and the Marwar settlement belong to the same year, 1679.
• "Mewar submitted, then Marwar." Marwar came under direct Mughal administration after 1581; Mewar's treaty is 1615.

Type D — Wrong instrument, wrong actor

9. Writing this in Mains

Start by dismantling the moral frame, with evidence rather than assertion. Man Singh commanded at Haldighati against Pratap. Chandrasen and Mota Raja Udai Singh were brothers. The choice ran inside houses and inside families, so it cannot have been a matter of Rajput character.

Then say what the alliance actually was. A mansab, a watan jagir, a service obligation, and sometimes a marriage. The watan jagir is the load-bearing element: it converted an ancestral claim into an imperially guaranteed hereditary one, and strengthened the ruler against his own clan rivals. That is why houses joined, and it is a materially different explanation from fear.

Use Surjan Hada as the proof that terms were negotiable, and the 1615 Mewar treaty as the proof that terms improved with resistance. Mewar held out longest and got the best settlement: no personal attendance, no royal marriage, watan jagir over Chittor. Resistance was not futile; it was expensive and it worked as leverage.

Locate the rupture precisely. Aurangzeb's break was not a change of mood. It was the conversion of a hereditary watan into imperial jagirs on the death of Jaswant Singh, followed by an offer to restore it conditional on the heir's religion. The instrument was the thing that broke, and that is why the response lasted thirty years.

End with Hurda, because it is the honest ending. In 1734, facing a common threat, the Rajput states met and failed to combine. A system that made each house locally strong had left them collectively incapable of joint action.

10. Nowadays

Covering 1 January to 27 August 2026. This section is updated every month until Prelims and Mains. Everything in it is dated, because a current-affairs fact without a date is worse than no fact at all.

Nothing in this window revised a treaty, a campaign or a date in this chapter. The record here is settled from Persian chronicles and Mughal-period documents, and it moves when a historian re-reads a manuscript, not when a news cycle turns.

The one relevant development is archival access. The Rajasthan State Archives, Bikaner exhibited Rajputana princely-state records at Jawahar Kala Kendra, Jaipur, from 17 to 19 March 2026, among them private and strategic letters from Mirza Raja Jai Singh to his son Ram Singh. Those are exactly the papers behind section 5 of this chapter, and the exhibition is a reminder that the correspondence of the Rajput commanders inside the empire survives as a state holding.

What has not changed. Surjan Hada's terms of 1569 stand as the gazetteer records them. The treaty of 1615 stands clause by clause. The reimposition of the jizya remains 2 April 1679, on two independent chains of authority, and Prince Akbar's proclamation at Nadol remains 11 January 1681.

Important for RAS

Prelims Focus

• The four instruments — mansab (zat and sawar), watan jagir (hereditary recognition of ancestral territory, introduced under Akbar), service, and matrimonial alliance (not universal)
• Akbar's sequence — Merta 1562; Bharmal of Amber the first to accept suzerainty, 1562; Chittor besieged 1567, fell 1568; Ranthambore 1569 (1568 in some sources); Jodhpur, Bikaner, Jaisalmer submit 1570 at Nagaur
• Rao Surjan Hada's terms — exemption from jizya, no matrimonial alliance, no service beyond the Indus; title Rao Raja; later governor of Benares and Chunar fort
• Mewar — Udai Singh II founds Udaipur 1559, loses Chittor 1568; Pratap at Haldighati 18 June 1576; Amar Singh I wins Dewair 1606 against Parviz and Asaf Khan; expeditions by Mahabat Khan 1608, Abdullah Khan 1609, Khurram 1613; treaty of 5 February 1615 with Jahangir, negotiated by Khurram — Chittor as watan jagir, no personal attendance at court, Karan Singh mansab 5,000, 1,500 horsemen, Chittor never to be repaired, no royal marriage
• Marwar — Chandrasen r. 1562-1581, the "Maharana Pratap of Marwar" and "Marwar ka bhoola bisra nayak"; left the Nagaur darbar of 1570 without submitting; Bhadrajun taken 1571; fought on from Siwana and the Sojat hills; pioneered guerrilla warfare, later adopted by Pratap; died 1581 at Pali; Mota Raja Udai Singh r. 1583-1595, Shah Jahan's maternal grandfather
• Rajputs in imperial office — Man Singh I, highest Rajput mansab under Akbar, 7,000 zat; Kabul 1585-86, Bihar 1587-94, Bengal three terms 1595-1606; Mirza Raja Jai Singh I, Treaty of Purandar, 11 June 1665, 23 forts surrendered and 12 retained
• The rupture — Jaswant Singh dies December 1678 at Jamrud; Marwar taken into imperial management; jizya reimposed 1679; Ajit Singh born 19 February 1679 at Lahore; 23 July 1679, Marwar to be divided between Inder Singh and Ajit Singh, with Ajit to be raised a Muslim; Durgadas Rathore leads the resistance; Rathore rebellion 1679-1707; Aurangzeb dies 3 March 1707, Jodhpur retaken 12 March 1707; Mewar's war 1679-1681, ended when Jai Singh ceded three parganas in lieu of jizya
• Hurda conference — 17 July 1734, at Hurda, Bhilwara; presided by Jagat Singh II of Mewar (Sangram Singh II had died); organised largely by Sawai Jai Singh II; Jodhpur (Abhay Singh), Bundi (Dulel Singh), Kota (Durjan Sal), Bikaner, Kishangarh, Nagaur; it failed

Interview and Mains Angles

• Rao Surjan Hada negotiated exemption from jizya and a bar on matrimonial alliance as the price of his submission. Does calling such a settlement "collaboration" describe it accurately, or does the word do the work an argument should?
• Chandrasen fought from the hills six years before Haldighati and is barely remembered, while his method is credited to the man who used it later. What decides which resister a state chooses to commemorate?
• Aurangzeb's rupture was the conversion of a hereditary watan jagir into imperial land. Is the collapse of Mughal-Rajput relations better explained as a breach of contract than as a clash of faiths?
• In 1734 every Rajput state faced the same Maratha threat, met at Hurda, and failed to combine. Did the very arrangement that made each house strong locally make collective action impossible?

Practice

• Practice: Resistance and Collaboration — 99 questions built from this chapter: 81 MCQs, 10 assertion-reason and 8 match-the-following, plus 15 flashcards and 15 rapid one-liners. Built around the assumptions this topic is usually failed on.

More in This Series

• Major Dynasties of Rajasthan — the houses, rulers and battles this chapter's argument runs on
• Sources of the History of Rajasthan — why khyats and Persian chronicles disagree about exactly this period
• Caution for Readers — the claims that are genuinely unsettled

Aggregator Watch

Unresolved claims from this box are collected, with what was checked, on the Caution for Readers page.

Sources & Verification

Checked as of 18 August 2026. Like the dynasties chapter, this one rests on published scholarship and reference accounts rather than excavation reports, and it says so rather than implying an equivalence.

Facts verified for this chapter include: the mansab system's zat and sawar components; the watan jagir as a hereditary recognition of ancestral territory introduced under Akbar, and its effect of strengthening allied rulers against internal clan rivals; Akbar's capture of Merta in 1562; Bharmal of Amber as the first Rajput ruler to accept Akbar's suzerainty in 1562; the siege of Chittor from 1567 and its fall in 1568 with jauhar and saka; the fall of Ranthambore and Rao Surjan Hada's submission, together with the competing 1568 and 1569 datings and the internal inconsistency in the 1568 account; Surjan Hada's three negotiated conditions, his title of Rao Raja, and his later governorship of Benares and of Chunar fort; the submission of Jodhpur, Bikaner and Jaisalmer in 1570; the Jahangir-era expeditions against Mewar under Mahabat Khan, Abdullah Khan and Khurram; the Mughal-Mewar treaty of 5 February 1615, its negotiation by Prince Khurram, and each of its clauses, including the watan jagir over Mewar and Chittor, the exemption from personal attendance at court, Karan Singh's mansab of 5,000, the 1,500 horsemen, the restoration of territory, the bar on repairing Chittor and the bar on marriage into the imperial family; Chandrasen's reign dates, his epithets, his departure from the Nagaur darbar of 1570, the fall of Bhadrajun in 1571, his continued resistance from Siwana and the Sojat hills, his pioneering of guerrilla warfare later adopted by Pratap, and his death in 1581 at Pali followed by direct Mughal administration of Marwar; Mota Raja Udai Singh's reign and his relationship to Shah Jahan; Man Singh I's 7,000 zat as the highest Rajput mansab under Akbar and his governorships of Kabul, Bihar and Bengal with their years; the Treaty of Purandar of 11 June 1665 and its fort terms; Jaswant Singh's death at Jamrud on 28 December 1678 and the conversion of Marwar into imperially managed territory; Ajit Singh's birth on 19 February 1679 at Lahore and Durgadas Rathore's protection of his claim; Aurangzeb's reimposition of the jizya in 1679; the proposal of 23 July 1679 to divide Marwar between Inder Singh and Ajit Singh and to raise Ajit as a Muslim; the Rathore rebellion of 1679 to 1707, Aurangzeb's death on 3 March 1707 and the Rathore recapture of Jodhpur on 12 March 1707; the Mewar war of 1679 to 1681 and Jai Singh's cession of three parganas in lieu of jizya; and the Hurda conference of 17 July 1734, its location, its presidency by Jagat Singh II following Sangram Singh II's death, Sawai Jai Singh II's organising role, its named participants, and its failure.

One dating claim was examined and set aside on internal evidence, in the manner this site's sources chapter recommends: the 1568 dating of the Ranthambore siege comes attached to a narrative that places the siege after the fall of Chittor, which occurred in late February 1568, so the stated siege dates precede the event said to have prompted them. A source whose own narrative contradicts its own dates cannot carry those dates, and 1569 is given here as the answer with the conflict stated rather than hidden.

Flagged rather than asserted: (a) the sawar component of Man Singh I's mansab, where 7,000 and 6,000 both circulate and the 7,000 zat is not in doubt; (b) all troop and casualty figures for the Rathore rebellion and the Mewar war of 1679-81; (c) the parts of the Hurda participant list beyond the four named rulers; (d) the precise administrative label applied to Marwar's lands in 1679, where the conversion to imperially managed jagirs is confirmed and the term is not; and (e) the year of Akbar's abolition of the jizya, which was not verified for this chapter although the 1679 reimposition was.

Added on 28 August 2026, with the source for each.

Checked as of 27 August 2026. Every source below was read in full text, not in summary, and every link was fetched and returned HTTP 200.

1. The Ranthambore date, settled to the day, and Surjan's earlier homage of 1561. Abu'l Fazl, The Akbarnama, tr. H. Beveridge, Vol. II (Asiatic Society of Bengal, 1907), pp. 132-134, 218, 491-495: the Nauroz of 22 Ramzan 976 falling on 11 March 1569 during the siege; the surrender on Tuesday 3 Shawwal, 22 March 1569; the sons Duda and Bhoj; Mihtar Khan taking charge of the fort; Todar Mal on the siege works; Jajhar Khan's sale of the fort to "Rai Surjan, who was a servant of Rana Udai Singh"; and Surjan's homage in passing in April 1561. https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.55649

2. Surjan's reward, the Rao Raja title from 1569, and Bundi's earlier dependence on Mewar; the creation of Kota; Alauddin's capture of Jalore from Kanhadadeva; Bikaner's Kalyan Singh and Rai Singh; Jaswant Singh's career and titles; the 1708 alliance's marriage-succession condition; Ajit Singh's daughter married to Farrukhsiyar. Imperial Gazetteer of India, Provincial Series: Rajputana, compiled by Major K. D. Erskine (Superintendent of Government Printing, Calcutta, 1908), pp. 175-176 (Jodhpur), 194-196 (Jalore), 285-286 (Bundi and Kota), 402-403 (Bikaner). https://archive.org/details/dli.ministry.08251

3. The Nagaur darbar of 1570 in the chronicle; Chandrasen's loss of Jodhpur with Ram Rai joining the imperial besiegers; the Siwana reports of 1574-75; the Dungarpur marriage. Abu'l Fazl, The Akbarnama, tr. H. Beveridge, Vol. II, pp. 305, 517-519, and Vol. III (Asiatic Society of Bengal, 1907), pp. 155-156, 295-296. Departure for Nagaur on 3 November 1570; the Kukur Talao renamed Shukr Talao; Chandrasen "received with royal favours"; Kalyan Mal and Rai Singh, and the request for his brother Kahan's daughter; Rawal Har Rai of Jaisalmer sending his daughter without attending, fetched by Bhagwant Das. https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.189291

4. The three embassies to Pratap in 1573; the Gogunda interview and the rejection of the Udai Sagar insult story; the campaigns of 1577 to 1585; the 1615 terms and negotiators; the 1654 Chitor demolition; Charumati of Rupnagar; the reimposition of the jizya on 2 April 1679; the authorship of the protest letter; Prince Akbar's proclamation at Nadol; the 1681 clauses. G. N. Sharma, Mewar and the Mughal Emperors (1526-1707 A.D.), First Edition (Shiva Lal Agarwala & Co. Ltd., Agra, 1954), pp. 88-90, 112-117, 135-140, 154-155, 159-160, 163-164, 172-173, 176-178, 180-181. https://archive.org/details/mewad-mughals-g-n-sharma_202110

5. Jahangir's own record: the Amber marriage chain and Khusrau's mother; the marble statues of the Rana and Karan Singh; the ruby that passed from Maldeo to Chandrasen to Udai Singh to Pratap to Amar Singh; and Beveridge's note that Sir Thomas Roe did not reach Ajmer until December 1615. The Tuzuk-i-Jahangiri, or Memoirs of Jahangir, tr. Alexander Rogers, ed. Henry Beveridge, Vol. I (Royal Asiatic Society, 1909), pp. 15-16, 285-286, 332, and the editor's note at p. 269 n. https://archive.org/details/tuzukijahangirio00jahauoft

6. Jaswant Singh's death on 10 December 1678; the seizure of Marwar step by step; the jizya of 2 April 1679; Indra Singh of Nagaur invested for 36 lakh rupees on 26 May 1679 and dethroned after two months; the correction that Jaswant was thanadar of Jamrud and not viceroy of Afghanistan; Durgadas bringing Ajit into Marwar on 23 July 1679; the counterfeit Ajit Singh raised as Muhammadi Raj; and the attribution of the conversion offer to the Dilkusha alone. Jadunath Sarkar, History of Aurangzib, Vol. III: Northern India, 1658-1681 (M. C. Sarkar & Sons, Calcutta, 1928 ed.), pp. 325-335. https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.111047

7. The 1708 crisis and alliance; Amber renamed Islamabad; Bijai Singh given the state and the title Mirza Rajah on 30 April 1708; Mihrab Khan's capitulation at Jodhpur in July 1708 through Durgadas; the night assault on Amber reported 21 August 1708; Sambhar and the death of Sayyid Husain Khan Barha; the restoration of ranks on 6 October 1708; the counterfeit Ajit Singh; and the abolitions of the jizya in January 1713 and in 1719 on the prayer of Ajit Singh, Bhim Singh of Kota and Ratan Chand. William Irvine, Later Mughals, ed. Jadunath Sarkar, Vol. I, 1707-1720 (M. C. Sarkar & Sons, Calcutta, 1921), pp. 44-48, 66-71, 246, 334-336, and ch. V sec. 1. https://archive.org/details/latermughals01irviuoft

8. The 1708 treaty of Udaipur and its succession clause; Madho Singh's birth in December 1738 and the war it caused; the Hurda congress; and Ram Singh I's Assam campaign, including the view that the posting was punishment for helping Shivaji escape. Jadunath Sarkar, A History of Jaipur, c. 1503-1938, revised and edited by Raghubir Sinh (Orient Longman, 1984), pp. 138-140, 154-155, 185-186, 217. https://archive.org/details/a-history-of-jaipur-jadunath-sarkar

9. The Hurda compact in full, with its five articles, its seals, its date of Sawan sudi 13 S. 1791, the Rampura muster, the Rana's paramount control, and Tod's statement that the engagement revived the 1708 alliance whose basis was the abjuration of Mughal marriage. James Tod, Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan, ed. William Crooke, Vol. I (Oxford University Press, 1920), pp. 482-484. https://archive.org/details/annalsantiquitie01todj

10. Corrections logged, with what was wrong and what is right. (a) This chapter previously gave Jaswant Singh's death as 28 December 1678. Neither standard authority supports it: Sarkar gives 10 December 1678, Irvine 18 December 1678 from the Hijri date 6 Zul Qada 1089. Corrected 27 August 2026. (b) This chapter previously stated that on 23 July 1679 Aurangzeb attempted to divide Marwar between Inder Singh Rathore and Ajit Singh. There was no partition. Indra Singh alone was invested as Raja of Jodhpur on 26 May 1679 for a fee of 36 lakh rupees and dethroned about two months later; 23 July 1679 is the day Durgadas brought Ajit Singh into Marwar. Corrected 27 August 2026. (c) This chapter gave Mewar's 1615 service obligation as 1,500 horsemen without qualification. The clause list built from the Tuzuk-i-Jahangiri, the Iqbalnama, Amal-i-Salih, the Badshahnama and Nainsi's khyat gives 1,000 horse. Both figures are now printed, with the basis of each. Corrected 27 August 2026. (d) This chapter listed "no marriage into the Mughal royal family" as a clause of the 1615 treaty. The clause list from the Persian chronicles contains no such prohibition; what the record supports is that no marriage was demanded of Mewar, which is a concession rather than a written bar. Corrected 27 August 2026.

11. Flagged rather than asserted, in addition to the items already flagged in this chapter: the fourth and earliest embassy to Pratap under Jalal Khan Qurchi in 1572; the specific terms said to have been offered to Pratap in 1573; the name "Debari" for the 1708 pact and the renaming of Jodhpur as Muhammadabad; the treasury and revenue split at Sambhar; the named representatives of Bikaner, Kishangarh, Nagaur and Karauli at Hurda; the exact years and the renamings attached to Siwana 1308 and Jalore 1311; the day, place and manner of Chandrasen's death; the later mansab and jagir terms given to Durgadas and Ajit Singh; the naming of Saraighat and Lachit Barphukan in Ram Singh's Assam campaign; and the temple counts of Aurangzeb's Mewar campaign, which are chronicle figures and are given here as the chronicle gives them, 173 and sixty, not the 172 and 63 in circulation.