Nadir Shah: Battle of Karnal, the Sack of Delhi and the Peacock Throne

Nadir Shah was the ruler of Iran who invaded Mughal India in 1738-39, destroyed Emperor Muhammad Shah’s army at the Battle of Karnal in February 1739 and held Delhi for 57 days. A Turkmen of the Afshar tribe from Khorasan, he had crowned himself Shah in 1736. He went home with the Peacock Throne, the Koh-i-Noor and every Mughal province west of the Indus, and the court he left behind never got its authority back.

Most readers arrive with two wrong ideas about him. The first is that he was an Afghan raider like Ahmad Shah Abdali; he was an Iranian Turkmen, and Abdali served in his army. The second is that Karnal ended Mughal rule. It didn’t: Nadir put the crown back on Muhammad Shah’s head, and Mughal emperors reigned in Delhi until 1857. What Karnal ended was the empire’s credibility. This note also settles why books print two dates for the battle and what the death tolls of the Delhi massacre actually rest on.

Nadir Shah at a Glance

Nadir Shah ruled Iran from 1736 to 1747 and founded the short-lived Afsharid dynasty. Britannica describes his empire as stretching from the Indus to the Caucasus.

How Nadir Quli Rose to Rule Iran

Nadir climbed from a herding family to the throne in about ten years, and his ladder was a collapsing dynasty. The Safavids, Iran’s Shia ruling house since 1501, lost their capital Isfahan to Ghilzai Afghan invaders in 1722, and upstart commanders rose all over the country. His rise came in four steps:

• Service under Tahmasp II. Tahmasp, a Safavid prince proclaimed shah at Qazvin, made Nadir his chief commander in the mid-1720s, and Nadir took the title Tahmasp Qoli Khan.
• The Afghans expelled, 1729. He beat the Abdali Afghans near Herat in May 1729 and the Ghilzai at Mehmandust on 29 September 1729, which Iranica treats as the real end of Afghan rule in Iran.
• Regent, 1732. When Tahmasp signed away land to the Ottomans, Nadir deposed him in August 1732 and put his eight-month-old son on the throne as Abbas III, with himself as regent.
• Shah, 1736. He gathered Iran’s tribal and town leaders on the Mughan steppe, had them choose him and was crowned on 8 March 1736.

He also tried to end the Shia-Sunni quarrel that had set Iran against its neighbors. He proposed that Twelver Shiism be treated as the Ja’fari madhhab, a fifth school of law within Sunni Islam named after the sixth Imam, Ja’far al-Sadiq. The Ottomans never accepted it. It shows how he saw himself: a Turkmen conqueror seeking kinship with the Ottoman and Mughal courts, not the heir of a Shia dynasty.

In 1738 he destroyed Qandahar, the last Ghilzai stronghold, after a siege of almost a year. That victory put his army on the Mughal frontier.

Why Did Nadir Shah Invade India?

The pretext was Afghan fugitives. The reason was a rich empire that could no longer defend itself. Iranica records that Nadir accused the Mughals of sheltering Afghans who had fled across their frontier, and that his pursuit of them grew into an invasion. The Mughal court had also left his letters unanswered.

Behind the pretext sat three decades of decay. The Mughal Empire still looked whole on the map, but after Aurangzeb died in 1707 its center had been hollowed out:

• A divided court. The Turani party of nobles of Central Asian origin, led by Nizam-ul-Mulk and his cousin the wazir Qamar-ud-din Khan, fought the Hindustani party of Khan Dauran, the Mir Bakhshi or chief paymaster of the army.
• Provinces going their own way. Nizam-ul-Mulk had made Hyderabad independent in 1724, and Saadat Khan Burhan-ul-Mulk had been turning Awadh into his own state since becoming its governor in 1722.
• The Marathas. Under Baji Rao they had taken Malwa and Gujarat and twice beaten the Nizam.
• A starved frontier. Jadunath Sarkar shows that Zakariya Khan, the governor of Lahore, was refused money and troops because he belonged to the rival faction.

From Kabul to Karnal took about eight months. Kabul’s citadel surrendered on 19 June 1738 by Sarkar’s Old Style reckoning, and the imperial treasury and elephants there fell to Nadir. He crossed the Khyber late in 1738, bridged the Indus at Attock and took Lahore. Muhammad Shah left Delhi only on 29 January 1739 and camped at Karnal, 20 miles north of Panipat on the old Delhi-Lahore road.

What Happened at the Battle of Karnal?

At Karnal, on 24 February 1739, Nadir’s army broke the Mughal field force in a single afternoon. It won because the Mughal commanders fought as three separate armies, and only two of them fought at all.

The numbers were closer than the result suggests. Sarkar puts the Mughal fighting strength at no more than 75,000, inside a camp swollen with followers, against a Persian army that the chronicler Rustam Ali estimated at 55,000 horse. The difference lay in command and in firepower. The battle unfolded in four moves:

• The late arrival. Saadat Khan reached the camp near midnight with his Awadh contingent after a month of forced marches.
• The bait. The next day Persian skirmishers raided his baggage, and he rode out to recover it without waiting for a plan.
• The trap. Khan Dauran followed him in support, and both ran into Nadir’s musketeers, with 3,000 of his best men held in ambush.
• The empty flank. Sarkar records that the Nizam, the ablest general on the Mughal side, stayed inactive all day, possibly hoping to inherit his rivals’ offices if they fell.

It was over in under three hours. Saadat Khan was captured and Khan Dauran was carried back mortally wounded; Britannica says he died the next day. The estimates of the Mughal dead run from 8,000, Rustam Ali’s count as reconstructed by Sarkar, to 30,000, the figure of Nadir’s court historian, which Sarkar calls exaggerated.

From 50 lakh to Delhi

Karnal was a defeat, not yet a catastrophe. The Nizam went to the Persian camp and negotiated a war indemnity of 50 lakh rupees, payable in four installments on the road from Karnal to Kabul, after which Nadir would go home. Asked why his letters had been ignored, the Nizam told him that since Farrukhsiyar’s death the government had “gone to rack and ruin owing to quarrels among the nobles.”

Court politics then undid the deal. When Khan Dauran died, the Nizam took the vacant Bakhshi’s post for himself, a post Saadat Khan had long wanted. In Sarkar’s account, which follows the chronicler Harcharandas, the captive Saadat Khan told Nadir that 50 lakh was a poor bargain when Delhi could yield 20 crore in cash and jewels. Nadir turned toward the capital with the emperor in his camp.

Why Did Nadir Shah Order the Massacre in Delhi?

A false rumor of his death set off a riot in which his soldiers were killed, and Nadir answered it by punishing whole neighborhoods.

Nadir entered Delhi on 20 March 1739 and lodged in Shah Jahan’s own palace chambers near the Diwan-i-khas of the Red Fort. That night Saadat Khan, rebuked for failing to raise the money he had promised, took poison in Sarkar’s account. The next day was Id-uz-zuha, and Nadir’s name was read as sovereign from the pulpit of the Jama Masjid. In the afternoon a story ran through the bazaars that a Qalmaq woman guard in the palace had shot him on the emperor’s orders. Crowds attacked Persian soldiers strolling through the streets in twos and threes, and the fighting went on through the night.

At sunrise on 22 March 1739 Nadir rode in armor to the Golden Mosque of Roshan-ud-daulah, the Sunehri Masjid in the middle of Chandni Chowk. He found out which wards the attacks had come from and drew his sword as the signal. His soldiers looted and burned through Chandni Chowk, the Dariba bazaar and the streets around the Jama Masjid, and Hindus and Muslims were burned together. The killing ran from about 9 in the morning to 2 in the afternoon by Sarkar’s reckoning; Laurence Lockhart gives six hours. It stopped when Muhammad Shah sent the Nizam and the wazir to beg for the city.

How many people died in the Delhi massacre?

Nobody counted the dead reliably, and the figures come from sources of very different quality, as Sarkar’s list shows:

• 8,000, the kotwal’s later count, as it appears in Sarkar’s manuscript of Abdul Karim’s memoirs.
• 20,000, the same count in the copy used by the translator for H. M. Elliot’s series.
• 30,000, given by Mirza Mahdi, Nadir’s own state secretary.
• 50,000, and elsewhere 3 to 4 lakh, in Maratha newsletters written from distant hearsay.
• 1 lakh in Harcharandas; the traveler Jonas Hanway adds 10,000 more.

Sarkar judged 20,000 the most probable figure, given the small area affected and the few hours the killing lasted. That’s the number to carry, with his name attached. The memory outlived the dead: the poets Mir and Sauda mourned the ruin of Delhi, and Lockhart noted that in the Delhi bazaar a Nadir Shahi had come to mean a massacre.

What Did Nadir Shah Take From India?

Nadir took the Mughal crown jewels, the treasury and the nobles’ wealth, then the provinces west of the Indus. The pieces can be listed with confidence even though the total can’t:

• The Peacock Throne. Built for Shah Jahan, it had cost 2 crore rupees, according to Sarkar.
• The Koh-i-Noor, surrendered with the rest of the crown jewels.
• The treasuries. Hanway recorded 3 crore in the public treasuries and far more in inner vaults that had stayed shut for several reigns.
• The citizens’ levy. The well-off who survived the massacre were ordered to pay half their property, fixed at 2 crore in all.
• Animals and craftsmen. Some 300 elephants, 10,000 horses and 10,000 camels, and several hundred masons, carpenters, blacksmiths and stonecutters to build a Delhi in Iran; many of the craftsmen slipped away before Lahore.

The usual total is 70 crore rupees. It comes from the Scottish writer James Fraser, whom Sarkar thought exaggerated; Lockhart and the IGNOU unit on the period accept at least that much. For scale, the whole indemnity agreed at Karnal had been 50 lakh, less than a hundredth of it.

On 12 May 1739 Nadir held a grand court and placed the crown of Hindustan on Muhammad Shah’s head with his own hands. The emperor then offered him the provinces west of the Indus, from Kashmir to Sindh, together with Thatta and its ports. Nadir left Delhi on 16 May 1739. Back in Iran the loot let him cancel all taxes for three years.

How Nadir Shah’s Invasion Changed Indian History

The invasion didn’t destroy the Mughal state. It showed every power from Pune to Kabul that nobody would fight for it. Satish Chandra puts it plainly: Nadir’s capture of the emperor and of Delhi in 1739 proclaimed the empire’s weakness to the world. The effects ran in five directions:

• An empty treasury. The crown jewels and the old vaults were gone, and Britannica calls the damage to Mughal prestige huge.
• An open north-west. With Kabul, Peshawar and the Khyber in foreign hands, Sarkar notes, the Punjab became a starting point for fresh expeditions against Delhi.
• Ahmad Shah Abdali. Abdali rose as one of Nadir’s commanders, founded the Durrani state in Afghanistan after 1747 and invaded north India many times between 1748 and 1767, winning the Third Battle of Panipat in 1761.
• The Marathas. Baji Rao wrote that helping the emperor would bring glory to the Maratha state, but no Maratha force reached Karnal, and during the occupation he planned to hold the Chambal to shield the Deccan. Two decades later it was the Marathas, not the Mughals, who faced Abdali at Panipat.
• The successor states. Hyderabad and Awadh kept their autonomy but also their links with Delhi, which is why the historian Muzaffar Alam calls the change a transformation rather than a collapse.

Nadir himself gained little. After an attempt on his life in 1741 he had his eldest son blinded on suspicion of plotting it; heavy taxes returned and revolts followed one another. In June 1747 a group of Afshar and Qajar officers killed him at Fathabad, and his empire broke up soon after.

What Historians Dispute About Nadir Shah

On four points the sources still disagree:

• Two dates for everything. Sarkar and the IGNOU unit print 13 February 1739 for Karnal; Britannica prints 24 February. Both are right. Sarkar used the Old Style (Julian) calendar, 11 days behind the New Style (Gregorian) one that Lockhart uses, and the same gap turns Sarkar’s 11 March massacre into 22 March.
• The scale. The death toll runs from 8,000 to several lakh and the plunder from Mirza Mahdi’s 15 crore for the gifts, throne included, to 70 crore and more.
• Treachery or faction? The historian Shakir Khan claimed that Zakariya Khan let Nadir into Lahore at the prompting of the Nizam and Saadat Khan; Sarkar dismisses it as party rancor. The Nizam’s idleness at Karnal is on record, but his motive is a guess.
• How decisive was it? Britannica says Karnal marked the effective end of the Mughal Empire. The IGNOU unit disagrees: Abdali’s raids left Delhi worse off, and by 1772 the city had revived. Satish Chandra traces the decline to the crisis of the jagirdari system, too many nobles chasing too few revenue assignments under the mansabdari system.

A balanced answer treats Karnal as the moment the decline became visible, not its cause.

Nadir Shah and His Plunder Today

The throne is gone, the diamond is in London and the battlefield is a district town in Haryana. Here’s what happened to each:

• The Peacock Throne. Britannica records that Nadir had a matching divan made and took both to Iran, where both were lost in warfare with the Kurds, who apparently broke them up. The thrones later shown in Tehran are copies.
• The Koh-i-Noor. After Nadir’s death it passed to Ahmad Shah, then to his descendant Shah Shuja, who was forced to surrender it to Maharaja Ranjit Singh. The British took it when they annexed the Punjab in 1849, and it has been among the British crown jewels since. India has demanded its return, and it was left out of the coronation of Charles III in 2023.
• The 2025 exchange. On 2 May 2025 UK Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy and Culture Minister Gajendra Singh Shekhawat signed the UK-India Programme of Cultural Cooperation in New Delhi. Asked during that visit about returning the Koh-i-Noor, Nandy spoke of collaboration and shared access to such artifacts, not of return.
• Karnal. The district administration’s history page dates the town’s prominence to Nadir’s victory in 1739.

How to Study Nadir Shah for Exams

Nadir Shah sits on the seam between medieval and modern history. GS Paper I’s modern history begins from about the middle of the eighteenth century, and his invasion is where that story usually starts; Prelims history covers the later Mughals, and the History optional tests the eighteenth century directly. In the site’s Prelims question bank, History accounts for 184 of the 1,403 questions.

Mains tests the theme rather than the man. History optional Paper I in 2026 asked “Would you consider eighteenth century in India an era of ‘Dark Age’, or a period of economic growth? Elucidate.“, and the sack of Delhi is the strongest exhibit for the Dark Age side, with Delhi’s recovery by 1772 the reply. History optional Paper I in 2019 set “It was as much the court intrigues as also the defiance of the provincial powers that hastened the decline of the Mughals in the 18th century. Comment.” Karnal, lost to Saadat Khan’s haste and the Nizam’s idleness, is the ready example.

The facts worth drilling:

• Crowned 8 March 1736; killed in June 1747 at Fathabad.
• Kabul, June 1738; Karnal, 24 February 1739; the Delhi massacre, 22 March 1739; departure, 16 May 1739.
• At Karnal: Saadat Khan captured, Khan Dauran mortally wounded, the Nizam inactive.
• A 50 lakh indemnity agreed, about 70 crore taken, including the Peacock Throne and the Koh-i-Noor.
• Ceded: the provinces west of the Indus, Kashmir to Sindh, with Thatta.
• The massacre toll: about 20,000 by Sarkar’s estimate, in a range of 8,000 to several lakh.

Three mix-ups cost the most marks:

• Nadir and Abdali. Nadir was an Iranian Turkmen who invaded once, in 1738-39. Abdali was his Afghan commander, who raided repeatedly from 1748 and won at Panipat in 1761.
• Karnal and Panipat. The two fields lie 20 miles apart on the same road, but Karnal was Nadir against the Mughals and the third Panipat was Abdali against the Marathas.
• Two February dates. 13 February (Old Style) and 24 February (New Style) are the same day.

Set him beside the other invaders who took Delhi and his particular damage stands out:

Nadir Shah is worth an hour of revision, not a day, but it has to be the right hour. Learn him as the stress test the later Mughal state failed, keep the two calendars apart and pin every casualty and treasure figure to its source, and any question on the eighteenth century gets its best opening example.

Frequently Asked Questions

Practice Questions

Prelims

1. Consider the following statements about Nadir Shah: 1. He belonged to the Afshar tribe of Turkmen. 2. He founded the Durrani dynasty of Afghanistan. Which of the statements given above is/are correct?

• (a) 1 only
• (b) 2 only
• (c) Both 1 and 2
• (d) Neither 1 nor 2

Answer: (a) The Durrani dynasty was founded by Ahmad Shah Abdali, one of Nadir’s former commanders.

2. Consider the following statements about the Battle of Karnal: 1. It was fought in 1739 between Nadir Shah and the Mughal emperor Muhammad Shah. 2. Nizam-ul-Mulk was captured on the battlefield. Which of the statements given above is/are correct?

• (a) 1 only
• (b) 2 only
• (c) Both 1 and 2
• (d) Neither 1 nor 2

Answer: (a) Saadat Khan of Awadh was captured; the Nizam stayed out of the fighting.

3. Arrange the following events in chronological order: 1. Third Battle of Panipat 2. Battle of Karnal 3. Coronation of Nadir Shah 4. Assassination of Nadir Shah. Select the correct answer using the code given below.

• (a) 3-2-4-1
• (b) 2-3-4-1
• (c) 3-2-1-4
• (d) 2-3-1-4

Answer: (a) Coronation (1736), Karnal (1739), assassination (1747) and Panipat (1761).

4. The massacre in Delhi in March 1739 was set off by:

• (a) Muhammad Shah’s refusal to pay the indemnity agreed at Karnal
• (b) A rumor that Nadir Shah had been killed
• (c) A Maratha attack on the Persian camp
• (d) The death of Saadat Khan

Answer: (b) A false rumor of Nadir’s death led to attacks on Persian soldiers, and he ordered the massacre in reprisal.

5. Consider the following statements: 1. After Nadir Shah’s invasion the Mughals ceded their provinces west of the Indus to him. 2. Ahmad Shah Abdali later returned the Peacock Throne to Delhi. Which of the statements given above is/are correct?

• (a) 1 only
• (b) 2 only
• (c) Both 1 and 2
• (d) Neither 1 nor 2

Answer: (a) The Peacock Throne never came back; it was lost in Iran after Nadir’s death.

Mains

1. Clarify how mid-eighteenth century India was beset with the spectre of a fragmented polity. (10 marks, 150 words) Previous year: Mains 2017, GS Paper I.
2. The Battle of Karnal was lost in the Mughal court before it was lost on the field. Examine with reference to the roles of Saadat Khan and Nizam-ul-Mulk. (15 marks, 250 words)
3. Critically evaluate the view that Nadir Shah’s invasion of 1738-39 marked the effective end of the Mughal Empire. (15 marks, 250 words)
4. How did the cession of the provinces west of the Indus in 1739 shape the invasions of Ahmad Shah Abdali? (10 marks, 150 words)
5. Estimates of the dead in the Delhi massacre of 1739 range from 8,000 to several lakh. What does this range tell a historian about the sources for eighteenth-century India? (10 marks, 150 words)