{"book":"adl1197","page":19,"text":"- 8 -\nZai king. As the political encouragement of the East India Company was responsible in producing difficulties for Zaman Shah on his western borders by the Persian kings or his agents; in the like manner the company's agents-open and covered-acted unceasingly to incite the Sikh Maharajas against their Afghan Over-Lord: and these Maharajas were encouraged to desire to overthrow their vassalage for a \"shadow independence\" of their own. Conditions continued to go on like this, till in the year 1799. A.D hethought of a plan of action in which the spirit of loyalty could be made operative; and thought that of those Sikh Rajas,who were faithful to him, more rel-iance might be made; and the Punjab territories might well be entr-usted to their care; (he resorting to some sort of indirect rule).\n\nWith a view to this, Zaman Shah placed Ranjit Singh, a man of experience, and enjoying the confidence of the Afghan king upon the Punjab goverment; so that Ranjit Singh, as the governor of the Punjab - Punjab being still the realm of the Afghans took charge of the a dministration there. This stratagem, at the time was regarded as point of great statemanship; but in reality as events revealed-was the beginning of the decline of the Afghan power and government in the Punjab; because the chief manoeuvering hand-that is to say the hand of the East India Company-who awaited some such chance, so much strengthend Ranjit Singh, to his own advantage and for his own use, of course; that the political events which emerged from that single act upto the advent of the Mohamed Zai rule and even after bear witness to the mistake then made.\n\nNOTE: THE ASCENSION TO THE THRONE BY ZAMAN SHAH.\nOn Doushambay, 8th of Shawalal Mukaram 1207. A. H. (Moon Calendar) Tamur Shah died in Kabul; and his son Zaman Shah and in Throne Room of Bala Hisar acended the throne of Afghanistan. A poet has versified the date of the occasion:\n\nTwo impressions. a beauteous and a sad one-were cast .\nThe Moon sat and the Sun rose from the horizon .\nDue to heavenly constatation; Timour \"rose\" to go away.\nAnd in his place sat Zaman Shah ( on the kingly throne.)","chars":2137,"image":"https://storage.googleapis.com/adl-page-images/adl1197/00019.jpg","first_page":1,"last_page":205,"title":"Men and events through 18th and 19th century Afghanistan","permalink":"https://afghanpress.org/book/adl1197/19","canvas":"https://afghanpress.org/iiif/adl1197/canvas/19","source":"https://afghanistandl.nyu.edu/books/adl1197/","source_pdf":"https://afghanistandl.nyu.edu/pdf/adl1197_download.pdf","rights":{"image":{"statement":"Public domain. NYU states: \"All works presented on this website are, unless otherwise indicated, in the public domain. The images available on this website may be freely reproduced, distributed and transmitted by anyone for any purpose, commercial or non-commercial.\"","uri":"http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/NoC-US/1.0/","holder":"New York University Libraries","source":"https://afghanistandl.nyu.edu/about.html","delivery":"Images are served from a copy mirrored by this project, not from NYU's servers, under the reproduction terms above.","endorsement":"This is an independent project. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or reviewed by New York University."},"text":{"statement":"Machine-generated transcription, dedicated to the public domain under CC0 1.0. No warranty of accuracy: see the provenance block on every page.","uri":"https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/","holder":"Steps Ventures"}},"provenance":{"text_produced_by":"gemini-3.1-pro-preview","thinking_level":"low","read_completed":"2026-08-09","per_page_confidence":null,"per_page_confidence_note":"Not recorded during the corpus run. No calibrated per-page score exists, and none is estimated here.","human_reviewed":false,"accuracy_context":"Roughly two thirds of characters agree with a modern printed edition of the same text. Much of the disagreement is editorial, not misreading. Treat the transcription as a finding aid and read the page image before quoting.","primary_source":"The page image. The text is an index into it."}}