67The Imperial Court in the Eighteenth Century

One may ask why the new subadar wanted this support from the imperial court or, in other words, why the symbols of empire continued to be persuasive, even though the power which had promoted them decayed. We shall see that the social and political realities of the eighteenth century continued to require reference to at least a semblance of an imperial centre. Our period saw not only the collapse of central government, but also a restabilization in certain regions and this was achieved almost wholly within the Mughal institutional framework. Disintegration of the empire did not mean the drying up of all sources of growth in society. But no region was in a position to maintain itself in complete isolation of other areas. Despite decentralization and the regional rulers’ war against each other, the regions remained integrated through trade and monetary transactions.19 Again, in the conditions of (p.17) unfettered political and military adventurism which accompanied and followed the decline of imperial

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68Introduction

power, none of the adventurers was strong enough to be able to win the allegiance of the others and then replace the imperial power. All of them struggled separately to make their fortunes and threatened each other’s position and achievements. Only some of them, however, could establish their dominance over the others. When they sought institutional validation of their spoils, they needed a centre to legitimize their acquisitions.

The Mughal emperor and his court provided the safest such centre, since it had long been generally accepted as a source of all political power and authority; but now it was too weak and ineffective to resist the adventurers’ ambitions and was also unable to restrict regional developments. It is significant that even after the total collapse of the central government, the governors of the virtually independent provinces continued to make serious efforts to obtain offices at the Mughal court. Considered from the perspective of the Mughal court, this phase of politics has been seen either as mere factionalism in the nobility,20 sometimes attributed to the ‘crisis’ of the period,21 or as a kind of recurrence of an earlier pattern.22 This study suggests that court politics in the 1740s, the last phase of our period, could well be linked to the conditions emerging in the provinces, particularly the ambitions of political and military adventurers who sought a standing at the centre, in order to secure firmly their positions in the regions. Ambitious individuals, like the governors of Awadh, or groups like the Marathas, looked for positions at the court after they had established their dominance over local groups in the regions in order to reinforce and secure their regional bases. This shift from control of peripheries by the centre in the seventeenth century to control of centre by the provinces is significant. But such was the myth and influence of Delhi that no regional power could replace it as the centre in the eighteenth century.