Zaman Shah

Zaman Shah with the support of Painda Khan Barakzai, obtained through Timur’s favourite queen, succeeded Timur. He was about 23 years of age and his empire comprehended Kabul, Ghazni, Qandahar, Herat, Khurasan, Balkh, Peshawar, Kashmir, Sind, Multan, Bahawalpur and the Derajat of Ismail Khan and Ghazi Khan. Zaman Shah however had his troubles. Usually they were from his brothers and nephews and from Iran. The principal brothers were in order : (1) Humayun, (2) Mahmud, (3) Zaman, (4) Abbas, (5) Shuja, (6) Shahpur and (7) Firuz. Then Humayun had his son Ahmad. Mahmud’s son were Nadir Mirza and Kamran. Zaman had four sons : Haidar, Qaisar, Nasir and Mansur.

Agha Muhammad Khan, the founder of the Kajar dynasty of Iran, at one time demanded Balkh, but had to give up the idea on account of the Russian invasion of his own country. Zaman Shah’s advances in India were the cause of alarm to the British in India, particularly when he was at Lahore in 1797. In 1798 he re-visited Lahore and appointed Ranjit Singh to be the raja of Lahore to the exclusion of unpopular Afghans, and returned to Heerat to meet the threat of Fath ‘Ali Shah Kajar, the successor of Agha Muhammad Khan Kajar, and installed Shuja-ul-Mulk, his own brother, as governor of Herat.

The policy of Zaman, contrary to that of his predecessors, was to keep the chiefs at his court without consulting them on affairs of state. The chiefs of the Barakzais, of the Qizilbash or the Iranian settlers in Afghanistan, and other notables were accordingly alienated. According to Elphinstone, the source of Zaman’s errors was his choice of Rahmatullah Sadozai with the title of Vafadar Khan for the office of Vazir. And Vafadar used his power against Sarfraz Khan on the allegation that Sarfraz Khan was plotting against Zaman and working for Shah Shuja ‘,

About the close of 1799, a conspiracy was organized in Kabul by the leading chiefs owing to the insolent behaviour of the Prime Minister, Vafadar Khan. The plot was betrayed. The conspirators, including Sarfraz Khan, the leader of the Barakzais, were executed. Fath Khan, the eldest of the twenty-one sons of Painda Khan, escaped to Khurasan where he joined prince Mahmud, Timur’s second son. Mahmud, on Fath Khan’s advice, advanced against Zaman Shah. Zaman’s chief ally Ahmad Khan Nurzai was won over with the result that Zaman had to fly for his life. Vafadar Khan was executed. Zaman took shelter with ‘Ashiq Khan Shinwari, a staunch supporter of his, in Ashiq Khan’s castle, which is located in Shinwari area, about 25 miles west of Jalalabad. But ‘Ashiq khan betrayed him. It was in ‘Ashiq’s castle, Elphinstone says, that Zaman secreted the Koh-i-Nur in the wall of his apartment whence it was afterwards extracted on Shuja’s accession. Asad Khan, Fath Khan’s brother, accompanied by a surgeon, caused the destruction of Zaman’s eyes in 1801.

“So fell Zaman Shah, the once dreaded Afghan monarch, whose threatened invasion of Hindostan had for years been a ghastly phantom haunting the Council Chamber of the British Indian Government,” writes John William Kaye, the author of the History of the War in Afghanistan ( London, 1857, vol 1, Page 23). “He survived the loss of his sight nearly half a century and, as the neglected pensioner of Loodianah, to the very few who could remember the awe which his name once inspired, must have presented a curious spectacle of fallen greatness – an illustration of the mutability of human affairs scarcely paralleled in the history of the world. He died at last full of years, empty of honours, his death barely worth a newspaper record or a paragraph in a state paper.”  Zaman, according to Kaye, came to Ludhiana, survived his blindness for nearly half a century, and remained a neglected pensioner of the British. But according to Jamal-ud-Din Afghani, Zaman proceeded to the Amir of Bukhara where his beautiful daughter was married to the Amir. Fath ‘Ali Shah Kajar of Iran received him in Teheran whence Zaman moved to Baghdad whose Vali at the time was Da’ud and at last died in the Hijaz. But the fact is that Zaman died at Ludhiana as a British pensioner getting Rs. 4,000 per mensem, and is buried close to his wife under a big dome in Sarhind. Shuja ‘ was over twenty at the blinding of Zaman.

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