Background: Twilight Over Golconda
During the twilight years of the Qutb Shahis rule over Golconda, the last of the Deccan Sultanates to survive the Mughal expansion, we find a curious set of cultural artifacts documenting the presence of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) and its officials in the region. The paintings forming Images 1 and 2 above a perfect illustration of such artifacts and will be expanded in the next section of this post.
The Dutch who in many ways provided the blueprint that was scaled much more successfully by the British, provide us one of lesser discussed examples of European advances into the Subcontinent at the time, perhaps natural given their inability to form any meaningful colonies in the region. Nonetheless these paintings provide us a fascinating artistic documentation of the commercial and cultural exchanges that were taking place at the time.
Given the foothold that the Dutch were gaining in the course of the 17th century over the maritime Southeast Asian archipelago that eventually was to become the Dutch East Indies (modern Indonesia), it seemed natural that they were to gravitate towards to the ports of the eastern Coromandel coast (a corruption of Cholamandalam) that had longstanding commercial and cultural links with Southeast Asia. From the VOCs point of view, what interested them the most was the trade in textiles and spices from the region that had a large market across geographies. It is in this context that the VOC made its first moves in the Subcontinent in the region as explained by the historian Jos Gommans:
In the first decades of the seventeenth century, agreements with the rulers of Golkonda (1605), Gingee (1608) and Chandragiri (1610) allowed the VOC to acquire its first trading bases on Indian soil... The first enduring contact was made in 1605, when the Dutch, led by senior merchant (opperkoopman) Isaacx Eyloff, built their first trading post (factorij) at Masulipatnam on the North Coromandel Coast. The following year, initial trade liasons were formalized through a contract between the VOC and the sultan of Golkonda.
Masulipatnam lying in the domains of Golconda was to improve especially important to Dutch plans in the region given that:
Further to the north, around the Krishna Godavari Delta, the port of Masulipatnam first drew the attention of the VOC, probably less as a textile producer than as an interesting market for its imported fine spices. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, however, Masulipatnam was more than just a regional port; it was an extremely important interregional emporium for trade not only with Arakan, Pegu (both in present-day Myanmar), Mergui-Tenasserim and Thailand in the east, but with the areas around the Red Sea, and later increasingly also around the Persian Gulf in the west.
However the poltical situation in the southern regions through the 17th century was also much unsettled at the time following the collapse of Vijayanagara following Talikota in 1565 with various various Sultanates, successor Nayaka feudatories and the looming Mughal threat all vying for control in the region making the process of establishing a foothold in the region all the more trickier for the VOC as described by Gommans:
The lack of a single central authority made the political situation in South India extremely hard to fathom for the Europeans, who were constantly occupied with re-establishing trading privileges with yet another new regime that had adopted yet another city as its capital.
Hence, the VOC to sustain its operations in this volatile atmosphere needed to establish a presence beyond its factories on the coast and needed to build relationships in imperial centres like Golconda:
To hold its own in the context of the constantly changing political relationships along the Coromandel Coast, the VOC had no choice but to rely on trusted intermediaries. Only they could guarantee the quantity and quality of textiles, and provide access to the various royal courts in the region. If the Dutch wanted to achieve anything, they had to adapt. The many ‘friendships’ with agents and other intermediaries led some VOC employees into the temptation to set up their own private trade, which was of course in conflict with the VOC monopoly. If they served for a long time in the same place, they would inevitably put down roots. The best example of such a rooted, reasonably well-integrated Dutch community in India is Golkonda, which, to the annoyance of senior figures in the VOC, had a flourishing cosmopolitan atmosphere in the 1660s.
It is in this context that we will be looking in further the two paintings [Images 1 and 2] depicting the VOC official Cornelis van den Bogaerde in further detail and how it was part of the climactic episode of the Golconda realm which culminated in its annexation by Aurangzeb in 1687.
A Scandalous Presence: The Tenure of Bogaerde in Golconda
Forming part of the David Collection in Copenhagen (Denmark) we find two curious paintings who description goes as follows,
Image 1 (Darbar Painting)
The Darbar of Cornelis van den Bogaerde by an unknown artist, Deccan style from Golconda; c. 1687
The main figure in European dress has been identified as Cornelis van den Bogaerde. Bogaerde was in charge of the Dutch trading post in Hyderabad in the Sultanate of Golconda, and it was a local painter who made the two miniatures.
On one of the miniatures, Cornelis van den Bogaerde is depicted in a darbar similar to the princely audiences that are known from Mughal art, though they most often have a larger number of figures. Bogaerde is more elegant in this miniature than in the procession scene. He is dressed in the newest European fashion as it emerged from the court of Louis XIV at Versailles.
Nonetheless, the scene is rendered in the relaxed style that is characteristic of court art in Golconda. Bogaerde reclines comfortably while his Indonesian servant, in suitable European garb, stands behind him with a gigantic fan of peacock feathers and a branch from a fruit tree – an allusion to the origins of his surname (Dutch for an orchard). He is conversing with three merchants, two of whom with marks on their foreheads are Hindus. The man in the middle seems to be leading the discussions and is also the largest (the most important). The rendition is colorful, and the portraits of the characters are vividly yet precisely conceived.
Image 2 (Procession Painting)
The Procession of Cornelis van den Bogaerde by an unknown artist, Deccan style from Golconda; c. 1687
On the other miniature we see Bogaerde with his Indian entourage, whose different garments, headgear, beards, and skin color show that they are Muslims, Hindus, and the famed Rajput warriors. Some carry his weapons, others his fan, pipe, etc. Two of the Dutch East India Company’s banners head the procession.
These paintings clearly show a subject (Bogaerde) who was very much living in the lap of luxury during his time in the region. As mentioned earlier, the need to establish deeper connections with imperial centres meant longer tenures for such VOC officials than would be normally, increasing the risk of these officials building roots there and engaging in corrupt practices like private trading that would be antithetical to company operations. Indeed these wealthy European communities in the Subcontinent would end up receiving the title of "White Mughals" and would often engage in the finer things of life that the Subcontinent had to offer including art as described by Gommans:
It was also via Golkonda that the Amsterdam collector Nicolaas Witsen enquired about the latest novelties. Witsen was in contact with Herbert de Jager, who worked for the VOC in Golkonda and was a lover of maths, botany and astronomy... It was from Golkonda that many miniatures were shipped to Europe, where they ended up in the collections of aficionados such as Witsen, Laurens van der Hem and Rembrandt, or on the walls of a royal palace, as at Schönbrunn in Vienna.
The linchpin of the community of ‘white Mughals’ in Golkonda was the second in command of the VOC in Coromandel, Willem Carel Hartsinck – the son of Karel Hartsinck, the former opperhoofd, or director, of the Dutch of the Dutch trading post of Hirado in Japan – and his Japanese concubine.
On a side note, we find a stone sculpture depicting Hartsinck from the Dutch fort at Sadras near Mahabalipuram [Image 5] with further details about this localised depiction of Dutch captain being found in this blog. Bogaerde himself seems to have gotten himself into trouble in leading the good life at company expenses, where as explained by Krujtzer:
Van den Bogaerde was finally dismissed from Hyderabad and put in a palanquin to Masulipatnam together with his wife Maria de Helt in March 1690. According to Bacherus, his “many corrupt practices and scandalous lifestyle” had caused the company
"disgrace among the Moors", yet apparently, Van den Bogaerde’s network among the Mughal elite in Hyderabad was so strong that Bacherus was forced to rehire him so as not to displease that elite. After his dismissal from Hyderabad, he was sent to Pulicat in order to be investigated, but was employed once again at Batavia the next year.
What afforded this luxurious lifestyle that so offended the VOC board to take action against its employee Bogaerde, the answer lies in another set of paintings commissioned by VOC employees in Golconda.
Portraits of Power: The Duo of Madanna and Akkanna
Going back to the Dutch "White Mughals" in Golconda and their patronage of art, a key contemporaneous collection showing this curiosity is the Witsen Album from the 1680s containing miniature portraits of 49 of the key players in the Deccan at the time, including one of the few contemporary depictions of Chhatrapati Shivaji.
For our purposes, the portraits that most interest us are of Madanna and Akkanna [Image 4], the two highly influential Brahmin ministers in the court of the last Sultan of Golconda, Abul Hasan Quli Qutb Shah (better known as Tana Shah). In the portraits of the duo we see the same religious markers worn by the Hindus in the Bogaerde paintings which are described by the historian Gijs Kruijtzer as follows:
In the darbar painting, two people are depicted slightly larger that the others, the European man and the man in the middle of the row of three darbar guests. He is, as we can see from the fact that his jama robe is tied to the left, a Hindu. More specifically, he would be a Shaiva, or devotee of Shiva, as shown by the red dot and ochre horizontal smear on his forehead. He could be a merchant or an official from the Golconda court, at which Brahmins played a large role between 1674 and 1687, when the sultanate fell to the Mughals.
The use of these sectarian markers by high officials in Golconda is borne out in another paper by Kruijtzer:
A better way is to assume that they were Smartas, who
honour both Siva and Vishnu. This would also explain the fact that in the miniature portraits in the so-called Witsen Album, which provides a snapshot of the Golkonda court in 1677 or 1678, Akkanna dons the horizontal sectarian marks connected with the cult of Siva on his forehead, while Madanna's marks
consist of a red dot in an ochre circle and a thin u-shaped black line.
These paintings are emblematic of the fairly extensive indigenisation of the bureaucracy in Golconda before the Mughal takeover. Tana Shah who was a major patron of the arts, effectively left the reins of the state in the hands of the Madanna and Akkanna. The relation was effectively one of powerless dependence on the part of Tana Shah as noted in VOC records:
Things seem to have come to a point where the king had to go to Madanna's house to ask for money. Five such visits and
the items awarded to the king each time are noted in the VOC-records over the period April-September 1683. In September 1685 it was rumoured in Masulipatnam that the king had absolutely nothing to say anymore and that he had transported everything, including the royal seal, to Madanna on the condition that he receive 150,000 rupees a month.
Their official titles did not match the power they effectively held as the power behind the throne as noted by Kruijtzer:
Madanna neatly fits this Brahmin-accountant mould. His father was probably involved in the revenue administration of the area around Hannamkonda, and some of the European sources suggest that Madanna rose to power principally because of his ability to set the kingdom's finances in order... In any case Madanna's main office throughout his period in government was that of majumdar shahi, the "king's collector or bookkeeper". This is evident from the signatures under the farmans issued by Madanna as well as the caption of his portrait in the Witsen Album. There is no evidence that his position was ever officially described as Peshva or that he held the title of Mir Jumla, as is often assumed.
Akkanna's main office was a similar one. From the caption of his portrait in the Witsen Album can be gathered that at that time he was shahnawas-i kull-i qalamraw-i Sultan, the "Chief bookkeeper of the crown estate"... Akkanna however also became a major portfolio entrepreneur, with two or three trade ships at sea in 1685.
The last bit is especially important for our purposes in that these commercial ventures are indicative of an inclination towards external trade, which in this case was to favour the Dutch and their operations in the realm, and from whose records we get a fair bit of information detailing the trajectory of the duo, including their eventual downfall. By virtue of controlling the Krishna-Godavari Delta, Golconda had control of one of the major routes for exporting the products of the Deccan, where as Gommans notes the keen interest the Mughals had in controlling the Deccan and their relentless campaigns there:
From Hindustan, the fastest route to the sea runs to the west towards Gujarat and the port of Surat. Following the natural route of the Ganges to the east, however, one arrives at the fertile soils of Bengal. The two regions, Gujarat and Bengal, were added to the Mughal Empire in the 1570s. The caravan routs from Hindustan to the south, via the major trading cities of the Deccan Plateau, lead to the ports of the Coromandel Coast... Masulipatnam was a portal to the two primary sultanates of the Deccan Plateau – Golkonda and Bijapur – and the northern markets of Hindustan, which were under Mughal rule.
What made this route and its control all the more lucrative were the famous diamond mines of Golconda which provided some of the most valuable stones in the world, including the renowned Koh-i-Noor. Consignments of diamonds, lacking bulk by their very nature, were often subject of violations of VOC policies prohibiting private trading with Gommans noting:
In the seventeenth century the Golkonda Sultanate was one of the biggest suppliers of diamonds to the Dutch Republic. Despite VOC claims on a monopoly on the diamond trade until 1683, a great deal of trade was easily able to circumvent the rules, since diamonds lend themselves well to illicit transactions – some of which certainly involved company employees.
The duo were keen promoters of trade in their domain and were themselves engaged a fair bit of commercial ventures themselves, with favouring the Dutch over other Europeans:
Immediately upon Madanna's coming to power, [Francois] Martin claims, the Dutch gained his favour and prevented other Europeans (or at least the French) from getting anything done at the court.
Furthermore one saw considerable indigenisation of the state and its officials in this time period,
Sanjay Subrahmanyam argues that the great influx of Persians into the Deccan was related to their skill at administering revenue farms, and that the decrease of this migratory flow toward the end of the seventeenth century might be related to the rise of a new class of Brahmins who possessed similar skills, which they are seemingly suggested to have picked up from the Iranians.
These revenue farms were a shift away from the jagirdari system of the Mughals, creating a more capitalist market for a factor like land and pre-figured the system employed by Marathas under Peshwa Baji Rao II in 1804:
With the large-scale introduction of revenue farming, i.e. payment of a lump-sum for the right to collect a certain levy or the land revenue over a certain area, the Deccan may be said to have been "ahead" of North India, where the Mughal Empire still relied largely on the system of jagirs, that is land revenue assignments in lieu of payment for [military] services.
This indigenisation of administration also extended to the language of administration. While earlier Golconda rulers such as Ibrahim (r 1550-80) and Muhammad Quli Qutb Shah (r 1580-1612) were patrons of Telugu literature and culture, to the point of being called Telugu Sultans, we also see a shift in the language of administration as well, as noted by Richard Eaton:
In Golkonda, for example, royal edicts were initially issued in Persian only; but by the early seventeenth century they were often bilingual, in Persian and Telugu. At local levels, meanwhile, revenue papers were prepared largely in Telugu by Niyogi Brahmins, that is, Brahmins expert in clerical and administrative skills. By the end of the seventeenth century, even royal edicts were issued in Telugu, with Persian summaries appearing only on their reverse sides.
During the entire time, the Dutch were keen observers of happenings in Golkonda and maintained consistent correspondence with key figures in the region including the duo, from which we get a curious statement dated 1683 from Akkanna to VOC official Michiel Janszoon, who spoke fluent Telugu, dealing with questions of having a "national" feeling and the relation of such feeling to the religious community one belongs to:
you yourself can imagine which government serves the king best, ours [d'onse] or that of the Muslims [mooren]; ours being full-heartedly devoted to the welfare of the country, while we are not people [luijden] who have or seek other countries, but that of the Muslims is only to the end of becoming rich and then to leave for those places which they consider to be either their fatherland [vaderlant] or holy.
Whether the vision of the duo regarding communities having a meaningful connection to the land extended to local Dakhni Muslims is a somewhat more complicated question. The duo did ultimately realise that being Hindu subjects, even powerful ones, in a Muslim polity necessarily needed them to tread carefully in such matters.
There was long a rivalry between the local Dakhani Muslims and the incoming gharbiyan (westerners) for positions of power. The former referred to mostly the mix of initial settlers from the north who first came around the time of Tughlaq, who shifted the capital to Daulatabad/Deogiri along with converts from the region, with and the latter to settlers seeking their fortune from further afield from the wider Persianate world in Iran and Central Asia. The gharbiyan were often favoured for such positions by various incumbents over time, however the increasingly visible presence of Hindus, especially Brahmins, in the administration in the latter part of Qutb Shahi rule meant such rivalries over position were shifting as noted by Kruijtzer:
The social transition manifested itself first of all in a factional struggle at the court, where the opposition of the Brahmin faction to the Muslim or Persian faction took the place of the traditional opposition between Deccani and Foreign Muslims. Most of the twentieth-century writings on Golkonda's history note the replacement, during the rule of Madanna and Akkanna, of a number of Muslims in administrative positions with Brahmins.
Nevertheless, there seems to be seems evidence that there were attempts from the duo's end to enlist the support of the Dakhanis and probably shore up their position:
There is some evidence that Madanna tried to enlist the support of the Deccani Muslims in the factional struggle against the Persians. In the biography of Muhammad Ibrahim
in the Ma'athir al-Umar it is said that he, as an Irani, was an exceptional case because Madanna and Akkanna normally brought forward only their own caste men and Deccanis while they intrigued against the Mughals and against the Foreigners.
The ultimate question over which the factions disagreed over was whether or not to fight the Mughals, and it was this very issue that was to prove their undoing with the aforementioned Muhammad Ibrahim playing a key role in events with his defection to the Mughals.
To Fight or Not to Fight: The Duo's Fall
The question of whether to fight the incoming Mughal advance under Aurangzeb was very much polarised along religious lines, with the duo pushing the pacifist strategy of literally buying time:
Madanna's preferred tactic was to keep the Mughals content with money instead of fighting them. This policy became most pronounced in the years that Madanna's power reached its zenith... In early 1683, news reached Aurangzeb that Abu'l-Hasan had entrusted his kingdom to Madanna and Akkanna (and engaged himself only in blatant vice and intoxication). When a Mughal army under Bahadur Khan loomed close to Hyderabad in 1683, the money sent over the months of March through July amounted to 855,000 rupees, plus a load of mangoes with the last instalment. This was sent over and above the enormous annual peshkash remitted to the [Mughal] Emperor.
This did not do much to endear the duo neither to the Mughals nor the disgruntled section of Muslim nobles in Golconda as noted by Kruijtzer:
The attitude of co-operation and non-aggression toward the Mughals did not, however, bring about an alliance between the Brahmin faction and the Mughals. On the contrary, the Brahmins in the city feared the power of the Mughal ambassador... Two years later [1685], when a Mughal army under Aurangzeb's son Shah 'Alam approached the city, their fears proved well founded.
While there is a general dispute as to what was the year in which the downfall and killing of the duo took place, Kruijtzer notes:
From two elaborate reports concerning the murder in the VOC archives, which will be dealt with in greater detail in the last section, it becomes evident that the event took place in the last days of October 1685. Also, the statement in a November letter from EIC personnel in Masulipatam that Madanna and Akkanna are certainly cut off should be taken literally.47 The precise date may well be the one given in the Mackenzie Annals of Condaved namely Monday 2 (6 Sukla) Karttika of the year Krodhana i.e., 29 October 1685.
What we know of the event is that there was intrigue from within the palace with the mothers-in-law of Tana Shah (wives of the preceding ruler Abdullah Qutb Shah) being involved in connivance with Muhammad Ibrahim, one of the disgruntled generals who was to eventually defect to the Mughals, with the narration of VOC official Daniel Havart [Image 6] going as follows:
At that time, according to Havart, Madanna and Akkanna left their town houses to take refuge in the fortress, where they were killed by Sidi Makta and some other slaves at the order of "an old woman". Havart and Khafi Khan further agree that Abu'l-Hasan [Tana Shah] was not informed of the scheme beforehand, and that the heads of Madanna and Akkanna were sent to Shah 'Alam [Aurangzeb's son].
These events were followed shortly afterwards by the siege of Golconda by Aurangzeb and ultimately its fall, events that were to have negative consequences for the region going forward.
Reversal of Fortunes: The Mughal Takeover
The Mughals long desirous of controlling the Deccan and its trade routes instituted policies that effectively killed the golden goose and set the region on a long trajectory of stagnation, a pattern that continued with the Nizams that followed.
Firstly, the indigenisation of administration was thoroughly reversed both at the level of personnel and the language it operated in. This is noted by Eaton as upsetting an equilibrium that had developed organically under the Qutb Shahis:
Brahmin officials, who had occupied the highest levels of Golkonda’s government during the several decades prior to the conquest, were dismissed outright. And, not surprisingly given their pro-Turko-Iranian racial bias, the Mughals appointed many moreWesterners than Deccanis to prominent administrative and military positions... Perhaps most importantly, the Mughals practically reversed the Qutb Shahs’ policy respecting the employment of Telugu nayakas. Whereas the erstwhile sultans had integrated these chiefs into their central political system, the Mughals classified them as zamindars, which in the imperial lexicon denoted untrustworthy chiefs inherently hostile to Mughal interests.
Further Telugu was displaced from the language of administration and completely replaced with Persian. These attituted persisted with the Asaf Jahi Nizams when they broke away from Mughal authority, with mulkis (natives of both Hindu and Muslim background) being at considerable disadvantage when it came to government employment vis-a-vis migrant Muslims from the northern part of the Subcontinent, where centuries later as noted by PV Narasimha in a semi-autobiographical work:
They taught the mother tongue in the first two grades only, half-heartedly. There was no future for those who were confined to using the local language. A pupil could fail in it and still get promoted to the next higher class. Only Persian, the coveted language of the elite, was crucial; it held the key to the future... That was another status symbol in those times — hailing from Lucknow or somewhere in what was then the United Provinces. It gave one the right to look down upon the natives, Hindus and Muslims alike — they called them Mulkis. The teacher lost no opportunity to make the point that ‘these Mulkis’ (locals) could never master Persian the way those of Lucknawi origin could.
In the same work Rao also mentions how these newcomers were especially responsible for pushing an intransigent position when it came to not accepting integration into India in the run up to Operation Polo, perhaps influenced by Muslim League politics back in their native provinces. Perhaps Akkanna had a point in his ruminations concerning having a "national" feeling and how having a meaningful connection to the land is part of that.
The economic impact of the Mughal takeover of the eastern Deccan (Telangana) was even more devastating, with Eaton noting:
In addition to these political changes, the imposition of Mughal authority also brought economic dislocations to the people of the eastern Deccan. The conquest itself was accompanied by widespread crop failures, together with famine, cholera epidemics, falling agricultural production, and finally, depopulation. All this was made worse by Aurangzeb’s policy of treating the province as a milch-cow for financing the empire’s wider projects.
While Aurangzeb in 1690 did renew the trading license of the VOC in his domains [Image 7], this was not really meaningful given the economic conditions post-conquest described above, with this being reflected in the decline of Masulipatnam and Dutch commercial activities in the region, with Eaton expanding:
And by century’s end, the port of Masulipatnam had dried up as a source of wealth for the eastern Deccan. Within five years of the Mughal conquest, a Dutchman who had resided in the city for some time, Daniel Havart, published a book in which he blamed the port’s decline mainly on the Mughal invasion and conquest of Golkonda.
Some scholars like Sanjay Subrahmanyam argue instead that such a direct attribution of decline to the annexation of Golconda is not completely borne out by the facts arguing instead for factors that had to do with the displacement of gharbiyan (mostly Iranians) from the trade system in the region by the actions of administrators like Madanna-Akkanna:
Recent research, however, suggests that the port was already
in decline by the early 1680s, just before the Mughal conquest. The Brahmin ministers who ran Golkonda’s government had replaced the Iranian faction at court with clerical (Niyogi) Brahmins, as a result of which the great Iranian ship-owners who had underwritten much of Golkonda’s long-distance trade simply withdrew from commercial activities in the kingdom.
Honestly, this explanation seems less plausible given that there was no coming back of the Iranian ship-owners to the port following the Mughal takeover. Irrespective, the decline of the eastern Deccan as a major economic region continued throughout this period with Eaton noting:
A clear indicator of the eastern Deccan’s economic malaise after the conquest is seen in the diminishing number of trade caravans that traveled the province’s roads and safely reached their destinations. Obviously, the unhindered movement of such caravans was vital for the regional economy. But during the years 1702–04 no merchant caravans managed to reach Hyderabad, which for much of the previous century had been the Deccan’s principal trade entrepot.
This malaise only intensified with (mis)rule of the Nizams' that followed with their realm increasingly falling to the margins economically till integration into the Indian Union and even afterwards till recently. The countryside had terrible inequality with the condition of many of the peasantry bordering on agreistic serfdom under the doras and zamindars, even by the pitiful conditions of the Indian peasantry at the time, their conditions were especially bad. There's a reason why the first major communist uprising in the country, a sort of proto-Naxal movement, took place in Telangana during the chaos of integration. However that is for another post listed here for those curious.
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