THE TEMPLES OF MADHAVARAYA SWAMI and Raghunatha Swami in the precincts of the Gandikota fort are standing testimonies to the destruction of the Vijayanagara-era splendour.
Then there is a third physical clue.
It is the vast Jumma Masjid standing bang inside the fort to the north of the Madhavaraya Temple.
Built after razing several other temples in the premises. Built with their own debris.
Built in 1650 CE.
Built by the unvarnished bigot, Mir Jumla who styled himself the Nawab of Gandikota and later became a key right-hand man of Aurangzeb.
There is also a fourth clue. It is both oral and textual. In the first decade of the 20th century, one of the British compilers of the Cuddapah Gazetteer visited Gandikota and began making notes about its history. This is how the published version reads:
The name of the first Nawab [of Gandikota] is said to have been Meer Jumla. His name is held in the utmost abhorrence on account of his intolerance of the Hindu religion and his desecration of the temples, the materials of which he used for the construction of the Jumma Masjid. He is said to have killed the hundred cows belonging to the Madhavaswami temple.
A few months after occupying the Gandikota fort, Mir Jumla decided to further strengthen it using a variety of devices. One of these included a plan to install twenty massive artilleries. The metal required for such a mammoth project came from hundreds of Hindu deities.
Which is the subject of our story.
BORN AS MIR MOHAMMAD SAYYID ARDISTANI, the torrid career of Mir Jumla is the tale of a whirlwind ascent from abject penury to astounding political power. It begins with his birth in Isfahan, Iran as the son of an impoverished oil trader. A gifted boy, he learned the alphabet — a near impossibility for people of his social class — and found a job as a clerk and apprentice under a diamond merchant who had solid links with the Golconda Sultanate.
Political instability in Iran led him to flee to Golconda around 1620. By then, he had mastered the tricks of the diamond trade and soon started his own diamond trading outfit in the city. This was the launchpad that spurred him on to diversify recklessly. This audacity eventually made him ride on the risky waves of maritime commerce, which in turn swelled his ravenous coffers. But his unquenchable ambition respected neither rest nor restraint.
Sometime around 1630, Mir Jumla bribed his way into the court of Abdullah Qutb Shah, the Sultan of Golconda. Four years later, he was appointed as the Sar-i-Khāil or Chief Governor of the Golconda State. From there, his ascent to the Wazir’s (Prime Minister) seat was swift. It was also the perfect seat to realise even bigger ambitions.
More than a dozen years before he quit the Golconda Sultanate in 1655, Mir Jumla had emerged as a commanding political force throughout Southern India and beyond. He became the nightmare that haunted the British, Dutch, Portuguese and the Danes in India. At various points, all these foreign powers either sought to curb him or entered into all kinds of surreptitious treaties with him. The English East India Company especially, saw him as their one-man competitor in trans-oceanic trade.
Mir Jumla was a combination of a plunderer-businessman cum military commander cum Prime Minister. His raw business instincts had enabled him to acquire and wield enormous political power, and he ruthlessly used that power to further expand his business. The same entrepreneurial acumen had also transformed him into a skilled negotiator and a spotter of talent. Thus, he freely recruited competent people even from the enemy camp. His vast business and military empire was oiled by a diverse spectrum of professionals that included Brahmanas, Afghans, Marathas, Rajputs, British, French, Italians, the Portuguese and the Dutch. These formed an cross-disciplinary cocktail of freebooting adventurers, mercenaries, military deserters, metallurgists, carpenters, accountants, clerks, tailors, ship-builders, sappers and miners, carriage-handlers, postal messengers…
Jumla’s revenue management was almost wholly entrusted to Telugu Niyogi Brahmanas. They singlehandedly managed his annual income which stood at a whopping ₹ 43 lakh. The role of these Brahmanas in laying the financial edifice of what later became the bustling commerical city called Madras deserves a separate chapter.
Likewise, his artillery was organised and supervised by the French and Italians who did an excellent job with cannons and catapults. The British mainly served as gunners, gunner’s mates, armourers and stormtroopers. Six skilled English gunners are specially named in various historical records of that period: Jeremy Root, Hugh Dixon, Richard Emerson, John Cowhill, Robert Bringbourne and Richard Hall. Among these, Mir Jumla successfully enticed Jeremy Root to desert his position at Fort St. George, Madras. On one occasion, he offered to invest about 50 or 60,000 gold Pagodas in the East India Company stock in return for a proportional share in the profits. The offer was rejected.
To be continued
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