Ghulam Kadir

Ghulam Kadir blinded the Mughal emperor with his own hands, and was hunted down and mutilated in return within the year. He was a Rohilla Afghan, grandson of Najib ad-Dawlah, who had been a power at the Delhi court, and son of Zabita Khan; the family held Ghausgarh and Saharanpur north of the capital. As a boy he had been a hostage at Delhi, and the mistreatment he suffered there is the usual explanation for what followed, though it explains nothing adequately. In July 1788, with the Maratha garrison drawn away, he entered Delhi in alliance with the Sikh chief Ismail Beg, seized the Red Fort and deposed Shah Alam II in favour of a puppet. He searched the palace for treasure that had largely ceased to exist, tortured members of the imperial family, starved princes and princesses, and on 10 August put out the emperor's eyes himself with a dagger, an act recorded in several independent accounts. The occupation lasted about ten weeks. Mahadji Shinde's Maratha forces retook the city in October; Ghulam Kadir fled, was captured near Meerut in December, and was sent back toward Mathura with his ears, nose, hands and eyes cut off in stages, dying before he arrived. His severed eyes are said to have been sent to the blinded emperor. Shah Alam lived another eighteen years as a blind pensioner, first of the Marathas and then of the East India Company, and the episode is generally taken as the moment the Mughal throne stopped being a prize worth fighting for on its own account. He was nineteen or twenty when he died. The Marathas exhibited what was left of him at Mathura. William Francklin, an English officer who collected accounts from eyewitnesses within a few years, is the main source in English for what happened in the fort.

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