t Mahomedan kingdoms of India, he had exhausted his vast
military resources in long and fruitless endeavours to arrest the growth
of the new Mahratta power, to which Shivaji had not unsuccessfully
attempted to rally the spiritual forces of disaffected Hinduism. In the
incapable hands of Aurungzeb's successors, whilst the Delhi palace
became a hotbed of squalid and often sanguinary intrigue, disintegration
proceeded with startling rapidity. Revolt followed revolt within, and
the era of external invasions was reopened. Nadir Shah swept down from
Persia and, after two months' carnage and plunder, carried off from
Delhi booty to the value of thirty-two millions, including the famous
Peacock Throne. Then the Afghans again broke through the northern
passes. Six times in the course of fourteen years did Ahmed Shah Durani
carry fire and sword through Northern India. One service, however, the
Afghan rendered. From the Deccan, where a great Mahratta confederacy
had grown up under the Poona Peishwa, the Mahrattas slowly but surely
closed in upon Delhi. Another great battle was fought at Panipat between
the Afghan invaders from the North and the flower of the Mahratta army.
The Mahrattas endured a crushing defeat, which, together with treachery
within their own ranks, broke up the confederacy and prepared the
downfall of their military power, which British arms were to complete.

For whilst the Moghul Empire was rapidly breaking up, the oversea
penetration of India by the ocean route, which the Portuguese had been
the first to open up at the beginning of the sixteenth century, was
progressing apace. Of all those who had followed in the wake of the
Portuguese--Dutch and Danes and Spaniards and French and British--the
British alone had come to stay. After Panipat the wretched emperor, Shah
Alam II., actually took refuge at Allahabad under British protection,
and stayed there for some years as a pensioner of the East India
Company, already a power in the land. Well for him had he remained
there, for he returned to Delhi only to be buffeted, first by one
faction and then by another. Ghulam Kadir, the Rohilla, blinded him in
the very Hall of Audience which bears the famous inscription, "If a
paradise there be on earth, it is here, it is here, it is here"; and
when the Mahrattas rescued him he merely exchanged jailers. He was
already an old man, decrepit and sightless, when in 1803, in the same
Hall of Audience, he welcomed his deliverer