Page:Aurangzíb and the Decay of the Mughal Empire.djvu/25

Rh Aurangzíb, who swooped down on India from the north, were ruddy men in boots: the courtiers among whom Aurangzíb grew up were pale persons in petticoats. Bábar, the founder of the empire, had swum every river which he met with during thirty years' campaigning; the luxurious nobles around the youthful Aurangzíb wore skirts made of innumerable folds of the finest white muslin, and went to war in palankins.' The rough breath of their highland birth-place was changed to sickly essences; and the old battle-cry of Allah had become a hollow symbol of the religion they had studied to forget. Childish superstition or impotent indifference had taken the place of the old faith; and immorality and debauchery had followed close upon the loosening of the religious bond.

Against the Mughals – a term which by this time meant any Indian Muslim with a fair complexion, and implied very little Mughal blood – the new Emperor could set the Rájputs, the pick of the warriors of Hindústán, who had been loyal servants to three successive Mughal kings, but whose fidelity depended upon the respect paid to their prejudices and customs. They might either be the flower of the Imperial army, or its most formidable foe. The new Emperor had it in his power to decide which it should be.

To retrieve the growing effeminacy of the Mughals, to attach or curb the Rájputs, to check the tendency of provincial governors to transmit their prestige to their sons and found dynasties, to put a heart into a decaying system and a faith into a listless soul, –