Aurungzebe at his death divided his dominions among his three sons, who at once fell to fighting for the succession to the entire realm. The contest was decided after a year in favour of the eldest of them, Bahadur Shah, who hastened to make terms with the Mahrattas in the south, but secured a precarious peace in that quarter only to find himself confronted with an insurrection of Rajpoots and with the sudden and alarming rise of the Sikhs in the Punjaub. He died in 1712, when the succession after the inevitable dispute passed to his grandson Farokshir, who succeeded in crushing the Sikhs but made little head against the Mahrattas, whose territory continued to increase in the south. Finally, on Farokshir's death in 1719 Nizam-ul-Mulk, the Governor of Malwa, rose in revolt against his successor, made terms with the Mahrattas, and was soon virtually master of the Deccan; to which, after a short-lived reconciliation with the Court of Delhi, he returned in 1724, openly and avowedly as an independent monarch. [Sidenote: 1725.] [Sidenote: 1735.] During this period the English Company acquired from Farokshir an extension of territory on the Hooghly, amounting to a tract of nearly ten miles on both sides of the river. The French, on the other hand, were declining owing to the virtual insolvency of the Company; nor was it until 1723, five years after the reconstruction of a new Company, that their prospects in India began to revive. But already, in 1720, a man had been appointed to high station in Pondicherry who was destined to raise French influence in India to a height undreamed of by friend or foe. This was Joseph François Dupleix, son of a director of the French East India Company, who, though in boyhood averse to a mercantile life, had been converted by travel at sea to a passion for commercial enterprise and to a longing for a field wherein to indulge it. Such a field was now opened to him, when no more than twenty-three years of age, in India. His idea was to extend the operations of the Company beyond the mere trade between Europe and Pondicherry, and, by opening up traffic with the cities both inland and on the coast, to make Pondicherry the centre of the commerce of Southern India. To show, by example, that such a scheme was feasible, he embarked his own fortune in the trade and made a handsome profit. In 1731 he was sent to Chandernagore, then fast sinking into stagnation and decay, and by his energy soon raised it to the most important European centre in Bengal. Concurrently a second great Frenchman, who was also to leave his mark on India, had made his appearance in 1725. The occasion was the capture of Mahé, a little town on the western coast, where the French desired a port to compensate them for the abandonment of Surat. The feat was accomplished by a captain in the French navy named Bertrand de la Bourdonnais. His next duty, though not performed in India, was none the less of high importance to