57Historiographical Perspective on the Mughal Decline

The history of this phase of the Mughal empire has generally been written from the perspective of the decline of Mughal power. William Irvine and Jadunath Sarkar who wrote the first detailed histories of this period,1 attributed the decline to a deterioration in the characters of the emperors and their nobles. As Sarkar examined the developments of this period in the context of law and order, he held Aurangzeb to have been the arch-culprit. Aurangzeb was a religious bigot, and therefore failed. He discriminated against certain sections of the nobility who had served the empire like members of a large joint family. Aurangzeb’s successors and their nobles, he suggested, were mere shadows of their predecessors and were thus unable to set right the evils of the legacy of Aurangzeb. This explanation did not lead us beyond the perspective of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries’ Persian chroniclers, with the difference that Sarkar also read evidence of a ‘Hindu reaction’ in the Rathor, Bundela, Maratha and Sikh wars against the Mughal empire. On the contrary, in contemporary sources the rebels and ‘disturbers’ had been identified in terms of either their class, namely, zamindars, or their caste, clan and region.2 Sarkar’s views and like them, the views of (p.3) many other historians,3 are to be seen

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against the ambience of the times which lent legitimacy to communal interpretations of Indian history in the late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries.4 They rightly emphasized Aurangzeb’s attempt to associate the Mughal state with Muslim orthodoxy; but the conclusion that this engendered problems for the empire only from the Hindus and that the ‘Hindu reaction’ was the major cause of the decline is unsatisfactory, since Muslim nobles and officials also reacted to such policies. In addition, as this study will show, Muslim madad-i ma‘ash holders independently created problems of comparable magnitude for the empire.

In 1959 the publication of Satish Chandra’s Parties and Politics at the Mughal Court, 1707–40 5 from Aligarh marked the first serious attempt to study the structural flaws of the Mughal system with a view to understanding the decline of the empire in the eighteenth century. To Satish Chandra, the stability of the empire as a centralized state in the seventeenth century depended on an efficient working of the mansab and jagir system. The nobles (umara) were the core state officials whose position and status in the hierarchy corresponded to their rankings designated in numbers (mansabs) and who were paid generally in assignments of land revenue (jagirs). Availability of the revenues to be assigned and the ability of the Mughals to collect them thus became two crucial prerequisites for an effective working of the system. Towards the end of Aurangzeb’s reign the Mughal failure to maintain the system had become too evident to be concealed any longer.6

(p.4) In 1963, Irfan Habib from Aligarh attempted an in-depth analysis of the collapse of the empire in his seminal work, The Agrarian System of Mughal India. According to Habib, the mechanism of collection of revenues that the Mughals evolved was inherently flawed. If on the one hand the imperial policy was to set the revenue at the highest rate possible so as to secure the greatest military strength of the empire, the nobles, on the other, tended to squeeze the maximum from their jagirs, even if it ruined the peasantry and destroyed the revenue-paying capacity of the area for all time. The noble, whose jagirs were liable to be transferred frequently, could never follow a far-sighted policy of agricultural development. In some areas the peasants were even deprived of their means of survival. By the late 1700s, the burden on the peasants, thus, became unbearable. In many areas, they took to flight or refused to pay the revenue and were up in arms against the Mughals.7 Habib argued that the working of the Mughal authority structure proved disastrous also for the precolonial economy. The Mughal system left little with the peasantry to invest in improvement of agriculture and to provide a market for the tools, techniques and goods of others.8

In 1966, also from Aligarh appeared yet another major study of the subject in M. Athar Ali’s excellent work on the nobility and their politics in the lateseventeenth century.9 Athar Ali provided quantitative support to Satish

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Chandra’s study. In these two studies, the problems attending the annexation of the Deccan states, the absorption of the Marathas and the Deccanis into the Mughal nobility, and the subsequent shortage of jagirs have the pride of place.

In a recent symposium on the decline of the Mughal empire, J. F. Richards, M. N. Pearson and P. Hardy also give a pivotal position to the Mughal involvement in the Deccan and the Maratha land.10 But the participants of this symposium also try to modify the explanations offered by the Aligarh historians. Pearson notices a basic flaw in the Mughal system. Mughal rule, he argues, was ‘very indirect’ and it was not (p.5) state control but local ties and norms which governed ‘the lives of most people most of the time’. It was only for the nobles that the concept of the Mughal empire outweighed other ‘primordial attachments’; and the nobles were bound to the empire only by ‘patronage’ which depended on the ‘constant military success’ of the emperor. Pearson emphasizes the absence of an impersonalized bureaucracy, its consequences for the Mughal state and thus reaffirms an oft-repeated explanation for the absence of successful states in Asia and Africa in pre-modern times.

There is no denying the fact that the personal achievements and failures of the emperors and their declining military fortunes weighed considerably with the nobles. Pearson’s formulation, however, is not borne out from the details of the history of our period. My study shows that not only the small group of nobles (umara) but also the zamindars, the village and qasba-based madad-i ma‘ash holders and a very large number of lower-level officials drawn from various regional and local communities were all integrated intimately into the framework of the empire. The Mughal empire rested on a balancing of these diverse interests. But it is true that the imperial system could not fully override, let alone obliterate the landholders’ primary attachments to local groups, in particular those of kin, clan and caste. The empire signified a coordinating agency between conflicting communities and the various indigenous sociopolitical systems at different levels. The basis of the empire, in a measure, had been negative; its strength had lain in the inability of the local communities and their systems to mobilize beyond relatively narrow bounds.

Political integration in Mughal India was, up to a point, inherently flawed. It was conditional on the coordination of the interests and the political activities of the various social groups led by local magnates. This, in turn, was dependent on the latter realizing that they could not make fortunes by themselves. The nobles were dependent for their position and power directly on the emperor who appointed them. They had no hereditary estates to consolidate or bequeath to their successors. Their resources were scrutinized and regulated by the state. They were, in substance, salaried civil and military servants; and they represented the emperor in various capacities at different levels. Yet the nobility had its tensions. The principle of the jagir transfer, by (p.6) checking the noble’s ambition to build a personal base, was meant to strengthen the imperial

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organization; but it implied an inconvenience for the nobles who resisted its enforcement, and therefore it was left unimplemented in a number of cases in the seventeenth century.

Thus, the thrust of the nobles’ actions in our period, and their endeavour towards independent political alignments with the zamindars in order to carve out their own fortunes, were not absolutely incompatible with earlier developments.

The leaders of the local communities, generally identified as zamindars in our sources were hereditary local potentates. Their position, strength and resources were, in origin, independent of the state. But they were sharply divided among themselves on caste, clan and territorial lines and were perpetually at war with each other. Each group feared the other; each had to be constantly on guard against the actual or threatened encroachment of the other. The social conditions of the period rarely allowed the various local communities to stand together, they could always be subjugated by a power that was able to stand above kin, clan, regional and religious connections. Such a paramount power also promised to keep in check the threats to the various groups’ individual positions. Thus the very nature of local social and political conditions had facilitated and legitimated imperial Mughal penetration. In almost every Mughal victory over a local community, the support of one or other local chief had proved crucial in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

The basis for the integration of the local communities into the empire was narrow and negative. The submission of zamindars to the imperial state depended not only on a demonstration of the latter’s political and military power, but also on creation of conditions of security. The zamindars were frequently the virtual rulers of the region; and the terms on which their relations with the state were worked out depended on the strength or weakness of the people and the areas they controlled. The regions under examination, as we shall see, did not remain stagnant; they experienced economic growth in the seventeenth century, and so the zamindars and their followers in the community felt increasingly confident and strong enough to stand on their own. Much of their earlier feeling of insecurity was neutralized. It is thus incorrect to explain the instability of the Mughal system (p.7) merely in terms of the personal and military failures of the emperor or his nobility.

By contending that the shortage of usable jagirs in the Deccan in the 1690s was artificial, J. F. Richards11 makes a valuable contribution to an explanation of the problems of Mughal administration in the late-seventeenth and early-eighteenth centuries. He demolishes the long-held belief that the Deccan was a deficit area from which had sprung the belief that be-jagiri (absence of jagirs) was the major cause of the decline of the Mughal empire. Considering newly discovered archival sources, Satish Chandra makes a clear distinction between be-jagiri and

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the crisis in the jagirdari system in a review of his explanation of the decline of the Mughal empire.12 Central to the growth of the crisis of the jagirdari system, as he suggests in this study, was its non-functionality—not the growth in the size of the ruling class and the corresponding decline in the revenues earmarked to be assigned in jagirs (paibaqi). Richards is right in stressing the role of ‘the local warrior aristocracies’ for any analysis of the problems of the Mughal administration in the late-seventeenth and early-eighteenth centuries. Satish Chandra hints at the possibility of a ‘tripolar relationship’ between the jagirdars, zamindars and the khudkashtas (resident cultivators) having been the principal factor in the stability of the Mughal empire. Nowhere, however, has the dynamic of these relationships been linked to the social conditions of those constituting them: the jagirdars, the zamindars and the peasants. Richards sometimes explains ‘the imperial crisis’ in terms of the emperor’s decisions and policies.

An examination of some of the problems of these ‘tripolar’ relationships is necessary. In addition, the role of the madad-i ma‘ash holders and of a large number of the indigenous elements (Shaikhzadas in Awadh and Khatris in the Punjab) in Mughal administration must be taken into account, not as dependents and officials of the state or as associates of the big nobles, but as elements embedded within local communities and groups.

(p.8) The Mughal decline has also been explained in terms of participation in eighteenth-century politics of groups conventionally regarded as non-political. Karen Leonard argues that ‘indigenous banking firms were indispensable allies of the Mughal state’, and that the great nobles and imperial officers ‘were more than likely to be directly dependent upon these firms’. When in the period 1650– 1750 these banking firms began ‘the redirection of [their] economic and political support’ towards nascent regional polities and rulers, including the British East India Company in Bengal, this led to bankruptcy, the ensuing series of political crises and the ‘downfall of the empire’.13 The premises on which Leonard builds her conclusions do not get adequate support from the existing studies of Mughal polity and economy; yet her explanation is worth considering and cannot be dismissed summarily.

Philip Calkins was the first to take serious note of the role of merchants and bankers in his analysis of political formation in the eighteenth-century Bengal.14 In Pearson’s study of Gujarat there is some convincing evidence of the merchants’ participation in politics.15 Still, Pearson refrains from suggesting that the Mughal finance system was dependent on merchants’ credit. Calkins also limits his generalization to the period and the region he examines and refrains from attributing the stability of the empire to merchant participation in earlier periods or in other regions. Without any fresh evidence to support her contention, Leonard extends further what Calkins and Pearson have suggested with rather unfair and exaggerated emphasis on the role of bankers.

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It is difficult to pinpoint the exact nature of the political participation of the merchant, for the Persian sources on which this study rests contain little information about the conventionally non-political urban groups. However, some references to the Khatris as ‘nobles’ (umara) and ‘notables’ (a‘yan) are worth considering. Big merchants (p.9) (sahukars) and some artisans in the Punjab supported the Mughal drive against the Sikhs in the early-eighteenth century. This indicates that, at least in some parts of Mughal India, the trading community had a tradition of political participation. But it is possible that the merchant interests were tied to the prosperity and stability of the ruling class and the markets they had encouraged. They appear to have begun to take active part in politics when their fortunes were in danger in the wake of imperial decline. It may be presumed that a class with a tradition of political participation would certainly not remain passive onlookers if they thought regional stability might be possible with their support.

Societal ‘crisis’ is the dominant note in the writings of Cantwell Smith, K. M. Ashraf, Irfan Habib and Athar Ali.16 The Mughal empire, according to them, declined as society failed to produce enough surplus to sustain a vast all-India polity. In other words, economic failures, at least, coincided with, if they did not actually precede, political decline. The belief that the phase of decline was predominantly a period of chaos and disorder receives nourishment even in the writings of those who have recently tried to replace the term ‘decline’ with ‘decentralization’. My study confirms that society in the early-eighteenth century was disturbed; old relationships between the different constituents of the empire were, willy nilly, undergoing political realignments. But the connection between this disturbance and failures in the spheres of production and market is far from obvious.

The eighteenth century in Indian history, particularly its first half, was unfortunate in that it was sandwiched between the political glory of the Great Mughals and the humiliation of colonial rule. Further, the British who wrote the first modern histories of India’s past had their own interests in presenting a bleak portrayal of the period. A virtually uncritical acceptance of the British depiction is implicit in a number of modern writings on the eighteenth century. The fact that most contemporary Persian chroniclers have also projected the period as one of total chaos and failure not only suited the interests of the British writers (p.10) but also lent strength to their interpretations. This factor still conditions our appreciation of the circumstances that led to the imperial decline and the ensuing developments in the regions. But we have to be on guard against the prejudices of these chroniclers, who, in most cases, were proteges of the nobles, the premier beneficiaries of the Mughal imperial structure. They suffered as the regions resisted imperial control and obtained some independence from Delhi. The decline of their fortunes has been portrayed in these chronicles as the decline and decay of the entire society. We may also bear in mind that the Mughal throne and the person of the emperor was central

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to their vision and the decline of the imperial edifice was tantamount to a total collapse of all society.