Rohilkhand and the Rohillas

A settler state

Rohillas — Pashtuns from the Afghan hills, recruited as soldiers and settling with their families — established themselves in the Katehr country north of the Ganges as Mughal authority collapsed, and by the 1740s held an independent state with a capital at Aonla. They were a significant military power, fought at Panipat in 1761 on Abdali's side, and were regarded by their neighbours as formidable and unwelcome.

The Rohilla War

In 1774 the Nawab of Awadh, Shuja-ud-Daula, hired a brigade of East India Company troops for four hundred thousand rupees and used them to conquer Rohilkhand. The campaign was accompanied by the devastation of the country and the expulsion of much of the Rohilla population.

The episode became one of the principal charges in the impeachment of Warren Hastings before the House of Lords, prosecuted by Burke and Sheridan, on the ground that the Company had hired out an army to destroy a people with whom it had no quarrel, for money. Hastings was acquitted after a trial of seven years, but the Rohilla War remained the clearest early case of British military force being sold as a commodity in Indian politics.

One Rohilla territory survived: Rampur, whose nawabs ruled until 1949 and whose library, the Raza Library, holds one of the great collections of Persian, Arabic and Sanskrit manuscripts in India. The Rampur gharana of Hindustani music also descends from that court's patronage.