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Nadir Shah In India. Battle Of Karnal.

Kouli-Khan, having secured the Persian throne, now appears in history as Nadir Shah. Soon after he was crowned, he resolved to overthrow the neighbouring empire of the Affghans, and, accordingly, had set out to invade that power in December, 1737- After a long siege Kandahar surrendered to him, and the Affghans submitted to his rule. While thus engaged, he received an invitation from some officers in the court of Mohammad Shah, the great Mogul, to advance and take possession of the Mogul empire. The murder of an envoy furnished him with a pretext for hostilities against the Sovereign of Delhi. In May, 1738, he accordingly commenced his march, for the frontiers of India, at the head of 120,000 men. Having taken the places that lay in his route, he found himself before Cabul, which he took by storm. He levelled Jellalabad with the earth, and burst into Lahore before the Mogul army had scarcely time to be collected. Still advancing, he suddenly came upon the unsuspecting forces of the Emperor, who occupied an intrenched camp at Karnal, or Caernal, on the left bank of the Jumna, about eighty miles to the westward of Delhi. Here the Shah and the Mogul measured their swords on the 8th of March, 1739. On the part of the latter it was a confused and irregular fight, but the Persians, accustomed to act together, and not more obedient than brave, charged in close array with efficient support, and, of course, gained the victory. The Vizier was mortally wounded, and countless numbers of lesser note were slain in the battle. The spirit of the whole Indian nation was now effectually broken, and the idea of further resistance laid aside. Nadir accordingly advanced to the capital, the gates of which were thrown open to receive him. Here he found immense treasure, the accumulated wealth of nearly two centuries. The amount of money, jewels, costly effects, and heavy contributions upon all ranks and classes of men, found or raised, has been estimated at thirty-two millions sterling. Amongst the trophies were the throne representing the tail of a peacock, composed of precious stones, and the two famous diamonds, the Koh-i-noor, or Mountain of Light, and another called the Sea of Light. Among a people with whom avarice is so strong a passion, every attempt was made to conceal wealth: torture was therefore used to enforce discovery, and in the violence and resistance a tumult ensued, in which some persons were killed. The insatiate and ruthless Shah gave immediate orders for an indiscriminate assault, without regard to sex or age, in every street or avenue in which was found the body of a slaughtered Persian, and 8000 persons are reported to have been sacrificed in this dreadful massacre.

Nadir Shah did not, however, exercise the power of which he was now certainly possessed to dethrone Mohammad, and put an end to the Mogul sovereignty: on the contrary, with his own hands he replaced the crown on the head of the Emperor, affirming, as his reason for it, his regard for the illustrious house of Timour, to which this maker of sheep-skin caps declared "We ourselves belong;" and on the 6th of May he was pleased, after exercising the rights of a conqueror for thirty-seven days, to march back his army to Ispahan, having only required from Mohammad to resign his rights over all the provinces west of the Indus.

A fatal blow was, nevertheless, at this time struck at the grandeur of the Great Mogul, from which it has never recovered. Already, soon after the death of Aurungzebe, the Deccan had been severed from the imperial rule and placed under a powerful chief, who called himself Nizam-ool-Moolk, or the regulator of the state, and who, in this capacity, governed ten millions of subjects. Another powerful chief established himself at Oude, as Soubahdar, with six millions of subjects. The sovereignty of Bengal became independent under Aliverdy Khan. About the same time, the Rohillas, a tribe from the mountains which lie between India and Persia, erected an independent state.on the east of the Ganges, within eighty miles of Delhi. The Sikhs, a set of semi-religious, semi-political adventurers, profited by the weakness of the Mogul to establish themselves in independence, and Mooltan and Lahore were formally separated from the empire. The most considerable of all the Hindoo powers, the Mahrattas, were not unmindful of this opportunity to obtain power, territory, and influence. The powerful kingdom of the Peishwah was then formed, with its capital at Poonah ; and subsequently Scindiah, Holkar, and the Guicowar asserted their independence. The Mahrattas were a singular, wild, and warlike people, who said of themselves that their Prince's throne is the horse's back, their sword their sceptre, and their empire all that they could conquer. All these various states now form a part of the British Indian empire, and will in the course of these Annals pass in battle array in the military history of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

in 1738 Nadir Shah, enraged at not being recognised by the Delhi court, invaded India. On 8th January 1739 he reached Sarhind, where he learned that Mahomed Shah with an enormous army occupied a strongly fortified camp at Karnal. Nadir Shah marched on to Taraori, on which, it being a fortified town, he had to turn his guns before it would open its gates to him. Here he learned from some prisoners he had made that the approach to Karnal from thedirection of Taraori was through dense jungle, and exceedingly difficult ; and that Mahomed Shah had no room to move in, being encamped in a small plain which was hardly sufficient for his camp, and surrounded on three sides by thick woods. He accordingly resolved to take the enemy in flank from the south-east. On the 15th January he left Taraori, and marching round by the banks of the Jamna to the back of the city, advanced to a position close to the Delhi camp ; meanwhile he sent Prince Nasr Ulla Mirzah with a considerable force to a spot north of the canal and close to Karnal. All this time Mahomed Shah was not even aware that Nadir Shah was in the neighbourhood. Just at this time a detachment which had been sent to oppose Saadat Khan the Viceroy of Oudh who was marching from Panipat with reinforcements, and missing the enemy had followed him up to Karnal, came to close quarters with him. Nadir Shah and Prince Nasr Ulla at once marched to the support of their detachment, which was the first intimation the Imperial army had of their presence. The engagement which followed was not decisive. But the army of Mahomed Shah, which had already been encamped for three months at Karnal and had suffered greatly from want of supplies, was now cut off from the open country in the rear, and food became so scarce that a seer of flour could not be bought for four rupees. Thus Mahomed Shah was starved into submission, and on the 13th of February Third Battle of Panipat. yielded to the invader, who led him in his train to Delhi.1 The operations are very minutely described in the Nadir Namah, of which I have been unable to obtain the text. Sir William Jones, in his French translation, speaks much of " Darian Hamun " close to Karnal, and between it and the Jamna. I fancy the words may be daryd hamln, and refer to the canal, which had already been described as a large river.