Person · Durrani state founder · Afghanistan
Ahmad Shāh Abdālī
Also known as Ahmad Shah Durrani, Ahmad Shah Abdali, Ahmad Khan Abdali
A commander of Nader Shah's guard who was elected head of the Afghan tribal confederacy at Kandahar in 1747 and built the Durrani state out of the wreck of two empires. He invaded India nine times, sacked Delhi and Mathura, and destroyed the Maratha army at Panipat in 1761 without being able to hold anything he took.
- Date
- 1722–1772
- Function
- Authority & administration
- Confidence
- Not assessed
- Location
- 29.391, 76.963
Worth knowing
He carried off the Koh-i-Noor from Nader Shah's camp and it stayed in Afghan hands until Shah Shuja surrendered it to Ranjit Singh in 1813. Panipat removed the only Indian power capable of succeeding the Mughals, which left the field to the East India Company.
About the place
Placed at Panipat, where his army destroyed the Maratha field force in January 1761. He ruled from Kandahar and is buried there.
Connections (5)
- CampaignPanipat
Abdali's achievement at Panipat was logistical before it was tactical: he held the crossings, cut the Maratha line of supply to the Deccan, and waited. He then withdrew, because his Afghan troops would not stay for a second season. The victory removed the only Indian power capable of succeeding the Mughals without replacing it with another.
- Life routeNāder Shāh
Abdali commanded a division of Nader Shah's guard and was in the camp when Nader was murdered in 1747; he rode for Kandahar with the treasury escort and the Koh-i-Noor, and was elected head of the Afghan confederacy within weeks. The Durrani state is the piece of Nader's empire that survived him, and the diamond travelled with it.
- CampaignRed Fort, Delhi
Both sides at Panipat claimed to be acting for the Mughal emperor, who was in neither camp. Abdali had sacked Delhi in 1757 and installed his own candidate; the Marathas held the fort in 1760 in the name of Shah Jahan III. After the battle the throne belonged to whoever escorted its occupant, and from 1803 that was the East India Company.
- Samadhi atKandahar
Ahmad Shāh was chosen king at Kandahar in 1747 by an assembly of Pashtun chiefs after Nādir Shāh's murder, made the city his capital, and is buried there under an octagonal dome beside the shrine of the Cloak of the Prophet, which he brought from Bukhara. The empire he built ran at its greatest extent from Mashhad to Delhi and from Kashmir to the Arabian Sea, and it is the political ancestor of Afghanistan — which is why his tomb, not any battlefield, is the state's founding monument.
- CampaignKalāt
Mīr Nasīr Khān Noori of Kalat campaigned with Ahmad Shāh Durrānī — Baloch levies were at Panipat in 1761 — and then spent the rest of his long reign converting that service into autonomy. Kalat acknowledged Durrānī suzerainty and paid it very little, and by the 1760s Nasīr Khān had beaten off an Afghan expedition sent to enforce it. The arrangement he arrived at, nominal submission and practical independence, is what the British inherited and formalised by treaty a century later.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Ahmad Shah Durrani”. Mahmud al-Husaini, Tārīkh-i Ahmad Shāhī; Ganda Singh, Ahmad Shah Durrani (1959).
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