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The Decentralization of the Mughal Empire – An Opinion

 By: Stephan Popp

 Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. I am glad to be the person selected for representing  the Mughal Empire in this long conference, although I am not a specialist for the  eighteenth century, in which the decline or, better, the transformation of the Mughal  Empire took place. I am mostly citing literature, above all Muzaffar Alam’s The Crisis of  Empire in Mughal North India, Christopher Bayly’s Rulers, Townsmen, and Bazaars, P. J.  Marshall’s The Eighteenth Century in Indian History, and Meena Barghava’s The Decline of  the Mughal Empire. 

1. The importance of geography and logistics on Indian empires

 The Indian subcontinent is a highly self-contained area. The sea encircles its southern half;  the Himalayas close it off to the north, the Arakan Mountains to the northeast, and the  Hindukush and the Sulaiman Mountains to the west. It is therefore not astonishing that  all invaders of the subcontinent by land, with two exceptions, 1 have come from the  northwest and used the Hindukush passes near Kabul. The subcontinent itself is clearly  divided into a northern and a southern half, with the river Narmada and the surrounding  hills as its traditional border. The very flat and extremely fertile plains of North India can  support a huge population and large armies. In the hilly terrain of Peninsular India,  however, the fertile areas along the rivers alternate with steppe vegetation and small scale irrigation by tanks. Its population is therefore less dense,2 and armies tend to be  smaller. The monsoon also divides the subcontinent into a dry northeast and a wet  southwest, plus the equally wet rain-soaked Western Ghats and the river valleys. As a  cliché, people from dry zones typically keep goats, grow wheat or millet, fight on  horseback, and are free to engage in warfare after the harvest. People from wet zones  typically keep water buffaloes, fight on elephants, grow rice and are professional farmers  or soldiers all year. The Mughals usually recruited soldiers from dry zones, which they  could send home after war.3 Feeding its horses and elephants was always a crucial task  for the massive Mughal army. Elephants need 200 kilograms of fodder a day. Horse  pastures are extremely scarce in the subcontinent; hay is unavailable because farmers   must sow their crops at the precise time that hay can be made. Thus horses were fed  barley and pulses, which ruined their health in the long run, as did a longer stay in wet  areas. Any Indian empire thus depended on the steady import of healthy warhorses from  Western Asia; the more so as the main part of an army in the subcontinent were large  battalions of mounted archers. A big army was therefore a massive logistical enterprise  in the subcontinent: the army could not live off the land but needed to be supplied with  enormous quantities of food and fodder by caravans of camel and ox.4

These preliminary remarks about the nature of the subcontinent and of logistics of war  there may explain why conquering South India from the north easily resulted in the  overextension of an empire. Northern armies often relied on massive force, but the rugged  terrain of the Deccan brought it to nought and supported the local enemy’s guerrilla  tactics, and supply had to be organized from a distance. Aurangzeb was not the first  northern ruler to overextend his empire this way; Muhammad ibn Tughluq (1325–1351)  had done the same before. It was the British who ended this pattern by being less  centralized and using standing armies and line infantry that made cavalry futile. 

2. Can we talk of decline? 

That it is difficult to quote a date when the Mughal Empire declined is clear from the fact  that several dates can be drawn upon: the beginning of Aurangzeb’s 25-year Deccan War in 1682, the death of Aurangzeb as the last 'great' Mughal in 1707, the ascendancy of the  Sayyid brothers in 1713, under whom the emperor became a puppet ruler, their deposal  in 1722, the sack of Delhi by Nader Shah of Iran in 1739, the Battle of Plassey, which gave  the British control over Bengal in 1747, the Battle of Buxar in 1764, after which the  Mughal emperor granted Bengal, Bihar and Orissa to the British de jure, the capture of  Delhi by the British in 1803, and the deposition of the last Mughal emperor Bahadur Shah  Zafar in 1857. We see that the Mughal Empire was in the process of ‘decline’ for 150 years,  while the period of its growth extends no more than 180 years. We can also quarrel about  its founding date because its first founder Babur died in 1530, only four years after his  conquest of Delhi, his son then lost and regained the empire, and only his grandson Akbar  was finally able to consolidate it. 

Moreover, the decline of the empire in the eighteenth century was accompanied by  “fantastic” economic growth. 5 While Mughal officers battled each other and up-and coming new forces, while the emperor was reduced to signing grants for them, while  highwaymen roamed the countryside and bribed the authorities (and in one case even the  emperor), while official forces had to resolve to highway robbery for want of payment,6 more and more land was put to agriculture, and the export of cotton textiles reached  unprecedented levels. Whether we can talk of 'decline' or not depends on the perspective:  most chronicles were written from the viewpoint of the court or the capital Delhi, and  both underwent considerable decline in the eighteenth century. Several provinces,  however, prospered like never before. Among them were Bengal, Avadh, the Punjab, and  later the Deccan.7 Government manufactories (kārkhāna) were numerous all over the  subcontinent. 

So what happened to the Mughal Empire was a transformation rather than a decline, a  transformation toward regionalization. This was the result of the very fabric of the  empire. The closer to the local level the empire managed to reach, the more local issues  could be represented at the centre, or at least with the provincial governor. Provincial and  county (pargāna) officials, though appointed by the state and transferred regularly,  sought to build a power base in their realms and to have good relations with the local  landed gentry (zamīndār). In doing so, local affairs and taxes became more important to  them than central affairs and taxes, especially when their income from the centre was  considerably reduced under Shah Jahan and in arrears in the later years of Aurangzeb.8 Aurangzeb himself can be held responsible at least for accelerating the process by  diverting all incoming money for his war and his court and neglecting to ascertain himself  of his position. This was especially true for North India, to which the emperor never  returned, but also for the south, where the officers prolonged the war to their own benefit  while the enemies built their own realms.9 To speak of a 'decline' of the Mughal Empire is  therefore analogous to speaking of a 'decline' of the Roman Empire in the sense of Gibbon,  and in both cases the current consensus is that 'decline' is not the accurate word.10

But let us begin with the fabric of the Mughal Empire before we track the stages of its  transformation. 

3. The structure of the Mughal Empire 

As Muzaffar Alam observed, the Mughals could unify the diverse provinces and societies  of North India precisely because they were outsiders and uninvolved in internal  quarrels.11 They guaranteed the rights of the zamīndārs, the landed gentry, who could be  anything from a small lord to a king. They were mostly hereditary, collected taxes from  the peasants and were taxed in turn by the empire12 already long before Mughal rule. In  order to be successful, any empire in India had to provide protection for the zamīndārs while keeping them unable to rise against it.13 Most Indian empires tried to collect as  much tax from the zamīndārs as possible in order to keep the system running on the one  hand and the majority of the zamīndārs content on the other. The Mughals were the first  empire in India that was able to prescribe taxes for the zamīndārs by calculating average  ten-year yields of every district. Earlier empires had no knowledge about the yield of their  land, so the zamīndārs had considerable control over negotiating their taxation.14 Sumit  Guha showed in 2015 that Mughal figures for yield were often rough estimations,  frequently obsolete, and not conducted in every district, and that zamīndārs continued to  negotiate their taxes.15 However, the Mughal state still had some means to assess how  much tax could be expected. 

The Mughals demanded the tax in cash and used it to finance the army and state. There  was no distinction between army and civil officers, though individual responsibilities  varied. They developed their system of officers from the rank system of Timur’s army,  called manṣab. Originally, it was divided into leaders of ten-thousand, thousand, hundred,  and ten cavalry, but the numbers were only nominal. In 1565 Emperor Akbar introduced  a double ranking with a personal (Persian ẕāt) rank and salary and a fixed number of  cavalry (Persian savār) to be kept, for which the manṣabdār received payments per horse.  Payments per horse were much more than the personal salary. Throughout the Mughal  era, this was a temptation to employ fewer permanent troops and to keep the money.16

A second reform by Akbar in the 1580s led to the Mughal version of land tenure. From  then on, the officers were paid in cash from the income of a specified province or district.  This income was called jāgīr. The officers neither owned nor ruled their land, though they  had to keep order for the emperor. They were transferred regularly, on average once  every three years so that they remained loyal to the state and could not establish roots in  a province.17 They had to extract their own salary from their jāgīr, usually one-third of an  average harvest; they had to keep up their own provincial courts and their troops; and in  addition to that, they had to compete with each other for expensive gifts to the emperor,  due on the New Year, the emperor’s birthday, and whenever they were summoned to  court. Control over the peasants was left with the zamīndārs, who stayed in place and fixed  their own share of the harvest, and the imperial tax collectors (ʿāmil), accountants  (qānūngō) and reporters to the court (vaqiʿa-navīs), who stayed in place as well and  worked independently of the mansabdārs. 

As said, there were several drawbacks to the system. First, control over the mansabdārs was not easy. Very often, they tried to save money by employing far fewer cavalry than  required and by hiding income. Second, controlling the zamīndārs was also difficult. The  Mughal state tried to extract as much means from them as possible so that they were  unable to unite against it – after all, the empire had imposed itself upon them. There still  was always a zamīndār in revolt, which meant that nobles or imperial princes rising  against the state readily found soldiers for their cause. Threatened with ruin, the  zamīndārs were eager not to forward any additional income to the mansabdār and the  court. 

However, the Mughal state's claim to power did not derive from money, but from its  prestige, or 'the glory of heavenly grandeur' (farr-i falak-jāhī), as a court poet put it on the  birth of Shah Jahan’s second son.18 The glory of the empire emanated from God to the  emperor in order to put the world in order, and from the emperor to the officers, his  'servants' (banda), who shared the emperor’s responsibility. This claim was first asserted  by Akbar, who in 1579 had all the empire’s theologians sign a declaration that he himself  was the ultimate authority on interpreting religion. Three years later, he founded a very  elitist order known as the Dīn-i ilāhī (Divine Religion) with himself as the master and the  highest officers as his disciples. From then on, the emperor’s claim to power no longer  rested on the opinion of religious leaders, but on his own claim to be chosen by God as the  'renovator' (mujaddid) of Islam in its 1000th year, and thus as the ruler of the world. At  least until the earlier reign of Aurangzeb, this claim was said to rest on reason and science  as well as on revelation. It included equal treatment in the administration for all religious  and ethnic groups (ṣulḥ-i kull = universal peace). Akbar’s argument was that he was  destined to be the ruler of the world precisely because everyone could share in his power,  while in Iran only Shi’is could, in Ottoman Turkey only Sunnis could, and in the Portuguese  domains only Christians could. In this way, the Mughal emperor was seen as the  embodiment of divine glory, divine order, and divine peace, and serving him was  considered true religion put into practice and the meaning of life. Conversely, Mughal  chronicles usually call rebels both 'pagan' and 'stupid', whether referring to Hindus or  Muslims.19 The prestige of the emperor and his officers was put on display every New  Year and on every birthday of the emperor, when the officers had to bring or send  expensive gifts as tokens of their 'sincere devotion' (ikhlāṣ). The emperor then gave them  more expensive, ‘imperial’ gifts (and promotions if due), in order to equip his servants for  spreading his glory. 

4. Development of the empire under Jahangir and Shah Jahan 

As mentioned, the officers were in a dilemma to administer parts of the empire they were  barely familiar with prior to their transfer there, and yet they were in need of considerable  sums from these lands for representing the court there, for the upkeep of their soldiers,  and for the gifts needed to prove their loyalty to the emperor. A successful officer would  therefore try to be on good terms with the zamīndārs and the tax officers and reporters to  the court in his jāgīr. This, in turn, meant that the local gentry had access to the court  through the officer. Thus they too had an interest in keeping him in place if all worked out  well. In this way, the jāgīr system had a natural tendency to favour alliances between  locals and officers against the centre and to represent local affairs at the court. It is proven  that jāgīrdārs in Punjab and Bengal were already working toward staying in place in the  seventeenth century and that if they were transferred, they maintained close  connections.20


Moreover, the payment for the officers could not keep pace with the growth of the empire.  Jahangir did not control the finances well, which led to the officers keeping significant sums by not employing the required number of cavalry.21 Shah Jahan (1628–58) therefore  had to reduce the payment of the officers by one-third in 1630. In 1642, he reformed the  jāgīr system further. Jāgīrs were now classified in 'monthly tables' according to how long  their tax yield could support an officer. He made the officers part-time employees, who  were only entitled to a payment of as many months as the income from their jāgīr yielded.  More than eight months' pay was extremely rare. Savār ranks were also reduced this  way.22 

This made the officers considerably poorer than before23 and stimulated a search for  other means of income. This was found in supporting trade and increasing agriculture,  which in turn meant that their interest in staying in place increased, and that the  zamīndārs also earned more. Lower and middle ranks of the state apparatus already were  recruited from among the local zamīndārs. Officers also tried to have their sons appointed  as deputies in their jāgīr in the hope that they were appointed after them.24 This was  possible because Shah Jahan discarded the master and disciple approach to the state in  favour of the state seen as the emperor’s extended household, and favoured the 'house born' (khāna-zād) sons of officers above newcomers.25 In spite of the cost cuts, Shah  Jahan’s later unsuccessful wars to gain today’s northern Afghanistan, and to recover the  city of Kandahar from Iran, strained his finances further.26

5. The crisis in the later years of Aurangzeb 

The war for the throne between three sons of Shah Jahan did not strain the empire  financially, but Aurangzeb had deposed his father and desperately needed a reason to  justify it lest opponents would reinstall his father (who died in 1666). His attempt to prove  himself as a conqueror did not succeed: the conquest of Assam in 1662 was short-lived  and followed by a slow but successful reconquest by the kings of Assam. Conquering rich  lands to increase the state income like Akbar did was becoming difficult. Therefore  Aurangzeb sought to justify himself by giving the empire a more Islamic outlook. He had  Islamic law codified and reintroduced the jizya, the tax for non-Muslims. The jizya did not  apply to the many Hindu officers in the army, but was a matter of concern for many  zamīndārs. 

Meanwhile, local revolts spread over all rural North India. This included the heartland of  the empire, just outside Agra and Delhi, where the Jats (1669) and the Satnami sect (1672)  rose up and had to be suppressed. The Jats even raided Akbar’s tomb. When the king of  the vassal kingdom of Marwar died without an heir, Aurangzeb tried to annex his lands  against common practice, probably to gain income for new jāgīrs. Accordingly, the rulers  and armies of Marwar and neighbouring Mewar rebelled (1679), and could not be  overcome.27 Guru Gobind Singh, leader of the Sikhs in the Punjab, reacted to suppression  and the execution of his father (1670) by creating the military brotherhood of the Khalsa  (1699) and rejecting Mughal rule altogether. All the revolts show that the gentry of North  India had become rich enough to take up arms and defy Mughal rule.

Further south, the zamīndār Shivajī Bhonsle was carving out a kingdom for himself from  his home territory in the northern hills of the Bijāpūr Sultanate. Unlike the Mughal  Empire, the Bījāpūr Sultanate was familiar with de jure hereditary land titles for long established, usually Hindu nobles. 28 In contrast to the Mughal nobility, who saw  themselves as the emperor’s 'devoted slaves' (banda-yi mukhliṣ) and deemed it their  honour to serve 'God’s shadow, the refuge of the world' (Ẓillu ‘llāh-i jahān-panāh),29 these  Maratha soldiers were opportunists, supporting the sultan to the extent that the sultan  supported their power base. Shivajī’s father had fought for the Mughals and Bījāpūr

alternately before becoming kingmaker in Bijāpūr, and his grandfather had been a  condottiere for both Bījāpūr and the Mughals. After 1657, Shivaji began to raid Mughal  territories too. In 1664, he sacked Surat, the main Mughal port, unhindered. Then a  Mughal army routed him and brought him to the capital. Aurangzeb offered him a mansab of 5,000, but he refused and demanded 7,000, protesting that his young son had 5,000.  The courtiers had never seen such impudence: this boor had dared to question 'the order  initiating fate' (farmān-i qażā-jarayān)30 and was asking for more! Shivajī was thrown in  jail, but he escaped and worked to recover his kingdom,31 looting Surat a second time in  1671. In 1674, he had himself crowned king in an ancient Hindu ritual.32 His son was  employed in the Mughal army with a mansab of 5,000, but the humiliation he had done to  Mughal prestige by sacking Surat and refusing a high mansab prevailed. Even the Shah of  Iran taunted Aurangzeb for not being able to subdue Shivajī.33

In 1684, Aurangzeb resolved to conquer the remaining two sultanates in the Deccan,  Bijāpūr and Golconda, and to solve the Maratha problem finally. (Shivaji had died in 1680,  and his son Shambhaji had inherited his dominion.) He moved his whole army south and,  after long sieges, managed to conquer Bijāpūr first (1686), then the weaker but richer  Golconda (1687).34 The Marathas, however, were an enemy of another kind. Shambhaji  and his successor Rājarām resembled coordinators of robber bands more than rulers in  the Mughal sense. The Maratha armies typically consisted of several small bands who  fought for their own profit and could unite or disperse. They lived on plunder and tribute  for protection (chauth, literally 'quarter'). They could not dare confront the Mughal army  openly, but took to guerrilla tactics and to robbing the Mughal baggage train.35 Thus when  the Mughals captured and executed Shambhaji in 1689 the problem was not solved.36 Not  only was Rājarām repeatedly pursued and besieged in vain, but the Maratha generals also  acted independently of him. Aurangzeb, already in his seventies, developed a stubborn  resolve to put them down at all costs, probably in order to repair the loss of image that  they had inflicted on the institution of the emperor. Aurangzeb’s contemporaries were  well aware that he was neglecting his responsibility to protect his subjects and that this  was detrimental to the empire, as the memoirs of the secretary Bhimsen Saxena Kayasth  show.37 

Mughal wars included enticing away the enemy’s generals, offering generous employment  for those who changed sides. Aurangzeb practiced this on a very large scale. However, the  emperor needed jāgīrs to employ people. But the assignable land (Persian: paibāqī) had  shrunk considerably, and Aurangzeb and his father had increased crown lands to almost  one-fifth of the entire country.38 In the newly conquered areas of Bijāpūr and Golconda,  Aurangzeb took all the good land (in Golconda 44 %). Of the rest, he assigned about one third to his administrators there, and used the rest for his war. The remaining lands were  not assigned to the old elite of the sultanates despite their enrolment, nor to Aurangzeb’s  soldiers or officers in North India to manage the problems there. North India was left  alone and had to do without the government. This, of course, meant that the governors in  the north tried to keep the taxes for themselves and did not remit them to the court.  Moreover, the new lands often did not yield enough to support the number of soldiers that  they were assigned for, and plunder was ruining their value further. Officers were  therefore dismissed and the army shrank. Soldiers were demoralised and malnourished, also because the Marathas were robbing them whenever they could. Moreover, the huge  Mughal army was not accustomed to besieging forts in hilly, jungle terrain, where moving  thousands of men was difficult and surprise attacks were easy. 39 In addition to this, the  generals saw their income decline and were afraid that they would be dismissed should  peace break out. Therefore, they prolonged the war, did not attack when they could, and  struck up secret agreements with the enemy.40 The war was therefore not ‘decided’ at all,  rather the Marathas had survived it by the death of Aurangzeb in 1707.41

Aurangzeb could have employed local warriors, but he did not. There is evidence that the  Mughal soldiers had a deep prejudice against Deccani warriors. They regarded them as  barbarian, ugly, and filthy, and as despicable turncoats without a sense of honour.42 In any  case, those who knew the terrain and had control over the peasants were not employed  after the conquest of Golconda, and deprived of any employment, they turned to  robbery.43 The war thus created many more rebels than it could put down. What seemed  to be rebels and robbers in the eyes of the Mughal officers were evolving new states, and  those that managed to establish themselves later strove to end robbery and set up order.44  In short, Aurangzeb accelerated the tendency of decentralization that was already present  at his accession. Most of all, he failed to control his old territories by leaving them alone.  It would have been better if he had returned to the north, cared for the affairs there and  assigned the conquest to his sons.45 This was what his father had done with him when he  delegated the conquest of the Deccan to him. Aurangzeb’s decision to give more  importance to the war than to consolidate the new territories and stabilize the old ones  made it necessary for officers to remain in their territories and care for them and for  income for their soldiers. Between them, new contestants for power from former rebel  groups had asserted themselves. Aurangzeb died in 1707 at age 89. After a war of  succession, his son Muʿaẓẓam, already 63 years old, was crowned Emperor Bahādur Shah. 

6. The rise of successor states and the political system of the eighteenth century 

By 1707, the overextended and increasingly unregulated empire already showed signs of  disintegration. Bahādur Shah moved to North India, trying to tackle the problems there.  But he died five years later, too short a time for reconquering large parts of the empire  and enforcing a new effective compromise between the court, the officers and the  zamīndārs. The tendency of regionalization therefore prevailed, and the officers managed  to enforce them at court. This was assisted by steep economic growth, which benefitted  the innovative officers more than the conservative, hierarchy-minded emperor.  According to Muzaffar Alam, the breakup of the Mughal Empire can be divided into the  following four phases: 

6.1 1707–13: Impossibility of reasserting centralized power over both rebels and  officers 

The short reign of Bahādur Shah (1707–1712) and his eldest son Jahāndār Shah (1712– 13) did not bring about changes, though the emperor gave up the Deccan War. An attempt  to quell the Rajput rebellion failed, as well as that of the Sikhs, who were removing Mughal  officials from their territory in a quest for independence. The emperor tried to keep the  nobles in check by promoting many small officers to high ranks, which, however, alienated  the old nobility. His measures to facilitate a steady income from the provinces were  resisted by the provincial officials and the great nobles seeking to stay in power in their  province. 46 Therefore, the 'king mechanism' of creating two conflicting groups of  dependent officials and becoming their indispensable arbitrator 47 did not work with  Bahādur Shah because he failed to make the two groups dependent upon him. The  traditional notion that the nobles were the emperor’s 'devoted slaves' whose authority  and income depended entirely on the emperor hampered the emperor’s realization that  reality was now something very different.48 This was true also true for his successors.49 In Avadh, families of state pensioners (e.g. judges, policemen and reporters to the court)  had become rich enough to engage in large-scale revenue farming, moneylending, and  buying up zamīndār lands, the income of which was then lost for the state.50 Meanwhile,  nobles could depend on their power bases in the provinces as much as on the emperor, a  notion that was alien to Mughal state theory, and the state pensioners began to work for  the provincial official instead of the central authority.51 Moreover, Bahadur Shah could  not curb the officers’ ambitions as rigorously as necessary because he needed them in the  wars against his brother Kām Bakhsh (until January 1709), the Sikhs, the Rajputs, and the  Marathas. Moreover, the prospect of income from new conquests had become a matter of  the past.52

6.2 1713–22: Power struggles weaken the centre while the provinces assert  themselves 

Emperors Farrukhsiyar (1713–19), Rafi ud-Darjat and Shah Jahan II in 1719, and the early  reign of Muhammad Shah from September 1719 were dominated by the Sayyid brothers.  Sayyid ʿAbdullāh Barhā and Sayyid ʿAlī Khān Barhā had been generals of Bahadur Shah  and became the most powerful men at court in 1713, installing and deploying emperors  at will. In order to counterbalance the Sayyid brothers, Emperor Farrukhsiyar granted  privileges to nobles that supported him, like control over the provincial finances. Thinking  in terms of promotion for loyal service only, the notion of individual power bases evaded  the emperor’s mind as before, but meanwhile the process of establishing power bases had  become irreversible.53 Moreover, politics at court were dominated by the power struggles  of the factions of nobles, with the emperor being much weaker than the Sayyid Brothers  and the leaders of other factions. The concentration of the court on the politics of the  northern provinces, and of the imperial army on fighting rebels and later the Sayyid  Brothers in the north, helped the Marathas to overcome their crisis of succession and  consolidate their power in the south. 54 In 1722, Emperor Muhammad Shah overcame and  executed the Sayyid brothers with the help of Chīn Qilich Khan, who later founded the  Nizam dynasty of Hyderabad. However, he already lacked sufficient strength to enforce  his will on the officers. 

Rebellions were widespread in these nine years due to two severe droughts. It does not  seem to have been sheer despair, though, because the reports of great plundering imply  leaders powerful enough to organize and arm sizeable gangs. This led government  officials to avoid transferring, and to accumulating land close to their home to an even  greater extent than before.55 Especially at lower levels of the state, jāgīrs were granted for  a lifetime (vaṭan jāgīr = home assignment), and holders of older ‘home assignments’ were  allowed to extend them. This was done to allow the holders to maintain order where the  centre was unable to do so. The imperial court accepted the shift in balance of power away  from the centre because it feared to lose control entirely. 56 Additionally, tax farming  (ijāra) became widespread and led to even important offices becoming purchasable  rather than depending on the emperor’s grace and plans, and to an even greater  exploitation of the peasantry.57

6.3 1722–39: Independent provinces and rebel states establish their own systems;  the emperor is reduced to a symbol of authority 

By 1722, only fifteen years after the death of Aurangzeb, we can speak of successor  states58 with the emperor as their ceremonial head. The governors took titles that implied  subordination, like Navāb ('representative') or Niẓām ('administrator'), and drew upon  the emperor to acknowledge their titles for a fee. But they ruled independently, seeing the  emperor as an ally against rivals and others, when suitable, and siding against him when  that, too, was suitable. Orders of the emperor were only taken when they were  advantageous; even dismissals were ignored without consequences. However, the officers  took part in the power struggle at the court in Delhi in order to assert their position.59 Examples of such effectively independent provinces were Avadh, Bengal, and the Niẓām’s dominions. Likewise, subordinate officers strove to establish a power base at the county  and village level, and withheld taxes too.60 The provincial governors therefore had to  reach new agreements, and many now appreciated employing the rebels in ‘home  taxholdings’ and formalizing decentralization.61 They reformed administration in various  ways: Bengal abolished the jāgīr system and centralized revenue; Avadh kept the jāgīrs but farmed out the tax to officers with a local base, who stayed in place; the Niẓām did  roughly the same. 62 In this way, the provincial governors created the order that the  emperor was unable to create.63 In effect, the officers were not ‘devoted slaves’ of the  emperor any longer, rather the emperor was a servant to their interests. But as the  theoretical source of all power, he still represented the unity of all powers, his orders  legitimized matters that officers, or rebels, had achieved before,64 so that they could assert  their own claims against a rival’s interest.65 

New rebel states emerged together with effectively independent provinces. The Marathas,  the Sikhs, the Jats, and Afghan soldiers of fortune founded several states. Though detested  by Mughal writers as boorish, and often behaving as such, they grew to control the  countryside in the 1730s and, ultimately the cities too. The Sikhs led the way in ousting  the Mughal system. After infiltrating and plundering the province of Malwa for more than  ten years, the Marathas defeated the Mughal army in 1737 and forced the emperor to  legalize their tenure of the Malwa province. They then reorganized the province as a  centralized state without jāgīrs and a strict separation of military and administration.  They also supported new cities, while the old Mughal centres of trade fell into decline.66

6.4 1739–48: Destruction of the centre 

The sack of Delhi by Nāder Shah of Iran in 1739 reduced the resources of Delhi and the  Mughal Emperor to nearly nothing. Moreover, Nāder had overcome a Mughal army six  times his own using advanced firearms – especially batteries of musketeers, which  showed that Mughal warfare was outdated. Muhammad Shah’s efforts to raise a new army  failed due to the lack of resources in spite of several nobles investing in it.67 The Afghan  raids of India weakened the Punjab even further. Muhammad Shah died in 1748, leaving  a bankrupt empire, and the following rulers were puppets of Awadh, then of the Marathas,  and finally of the British when they occupied Delhi in 1803. From then on, the Mughal  Empire existed only in name, with an emperor that was no longer a political player, but a  symbolic figure that stood for the legitimacy of the various successor states. 

7. British expansion and the end of the system of successor states  It is to be noted that European trade companies did not have a hand in the disintegration.  An indirect influence of the Spanish silver trade from Potosí into India, or of the growing  luxury cloth exports from India to Europe, is even difficult to prove, though Athar Ali has  tried this rather unconvincingly.68 Although the Dutch, the British and the French had  been present as trade companies in India since the early seventeenth century, the rise of  British power in India began in the 1740s, when the Mughal emperor ceased to be an  independent political power. The British East India Company had taken control of Bengal  and its taxes after the Battle of Plassey in 1747. It had therefore become one of the states  struggling for power in India, though it was legally a trade company. Since becoming  enemies to the French in the War of the Austrian Succession (1740–1748), the British also  had to compete with the French, who introduced line infantry with well-drilled Indian  musketeers in India, a weapon that made traditional Indian cavalry warfare futile and cost  less. Paris, however, wanted its trade company to conduct trade, reduced support for its  warfare and, consequently, lost most of its Indian possessions to the British in the Seven  Years’ War (1756–1763). The Third Battle of Panipat in 1761, won by the Afghans over  the Marathas, prevented the consolidation of the Marathas into an empire and ensured  that the British would not face a superior enemy. Winning the Battle of Buxar in 1764  resulted in Emperor Shah Alam II legally granting the revenue of Bengal to the British East  India Company. Gradually, and by reacting to the present political situations as required,  the British gained control over more and more tracts of India by low-cost war. Unlike  Indian rulers, the East India Company needed to be profitable even in war, and closely  controlled war. Moreover, it needed to be successful as a company, not as a single  commander, and relied on teaching and sharing strategy, not on military genius. It did not  take over easily, but had equal adversaries in the Marathas, the Sikhs, and Tipu Sultan of  Mysore. The British could have been ousted by an alliance of these three, but this never  happened. All of them were rulers that no longer drew on Mughal tradition. Tipu Sultan  even relied on French models of governance and warfare, introduced gun factories, a  mercantilist economy and direct taxation of all subjects. His defeat in 1799 definitively  ended French influence in India and made the British lords of South India and the  remaining princes their vassals. The Second Anglo-Maratha War 1803–1805 also gave the  British the upper hand over the Marathas and rule over the Mughal heartland in Delhi and  Agra. We can therefore claim that the British became the dominant power in India in the  first years of the nineteenth century. The Sikhs maintained independence under their  ruler Ranjit Singh (1780–1893), who had modernized his army according to European  models, but his quarrelling successors were overcome by the British in 1847.69 Formally,  the British acted in the name of the emperor, but he was their pensioner after 1803. After  the great uprising in 1857, the inadequacy of a trade company ruling a vast country was  felt in England. Therefore, the British parliament passed the Government of India Act of 1858, by which India became a British crown colony, the East India Company was  dissolved, and the last Mughal emperor deposed and sent into exile to Burma. 

8. Conclusion 

The decentralization of the Mughal Empire can serve as a prime example for the  disintegration of an empire from within. It is hard to speak of a decline of the whole  empire, given the economic boom that the provinces profited from, but we can speak of a  decline of Mughal central authority. The development was triggered by the very structure  of power and taxation in the Mughal Empire that put the officials in a conflict between  loyalty to the centre and their profit from their region. Rebellions by the landed gentry,  who benefitted from the growing economy, would have occurred anyway, but the reaction  of the emperor and the officers to it show that they thought in terms of hierarchy, not  income, and failed to see that new arrangements were necessary. When the officers finally  understood the gentry’s improved position, they no longer had an interest in passing the  profit on to the emperor. The existing decentralization was greatly accelerated by the  overextension in Aurangzeb’s wars, which Aurangzeb refused to tackle, and by the nobles and the gentry, who reacted to it to their own advantage, not to that of the centre, and  were often left to help themselves as the war dragged on. 

It was finalized in the first half of the eighteenth century by the rebels and robbers fighting  for themselves and later for a dominion, by the officers establishing their own rule in the  provinces, and by the emperors who thought in terms of loyalty instead of power bases  and other sources of capital. Discourses of power therefore played as significant a rule as  resources did: Aurangzeb’s Deccan war ended as a stalemate because the restoration of  his imperial honour had priority over consolidating the new lands, and later emperors  were so accustomed to the traditional role of the emperor that they failed to realize that  their officers were transforming it. Thus politics, like card games, is not only about having  trumps and gaining points, but about how the cards are played: about agreed rules,  changeable conventions, personal skill, and luck. The fiction of the emperor as the  ultimate source of all authority indeed prevailed until the British deposed the last  emperor to Burma, even if the British tended to see him as a fool after 1803. In order to  keep the empire their own, the emperors of the eighteenth century would have had to  abandon all disputed territory, reorganize the rest, gather a well-equipped and well-paid  army, and reconquer India anew, and that against rulers who would have been well established in the meantime. The result would surely not have resembled the old Mughal  Empire anymore. 

Select Literature 

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Anwar, Firdos. 2001. Nobility under the Mughals, 1628–58. Delhi: Manohar.  Athar Ali, Muhammad. 2006. Mughal India, Studies in Polity, Ideas, Society and Culture.  Delhi: Oxford Univ. Press.

– 2011 (fourth ed., first ed. 1997). The Mughal Nobility under Aurangzeb. Delhi: Oxford  Univ. Press. 

Bayly, Christopher Alan. 2002 (Orig. 1982). Rulers, Townsmen and Bazars, North Indian  Society in the Age of British Expansion, 1770–1870. Delhi: Oxford Univ. Press.  Bhargava, Meena (Ed.). 2014. Decline of the Mughal Empire. Delhi: Oxford Univ. Press.  Elias, Norbert. 2002 (Orig. 1969). Die höfische Gesellschaft, Untersuchungen zur Soziologie  des Königtums und der höfischen Aristokratie. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp. English edition:  Elias, Norbert. 2006 (Orig. 1983). The Court Society (trans. Edmund Jephcott). Dublin:  University College Dublin Press. 

Fukuzawa, Hiroshi. 1991. The Medieval Deccan: Peasants, Social Systems and States -  Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries, Delhi: Oxford Univ. Press. 

Gommans, Jos. 2002. Mughal Warfare: Indian Frontiers and High Roads to Empire, 1500- 1700. Oxford and New York: Routledge. 

Gordon, Stewart. 1977. The Slow Conquest: Administrative Integration of Malwa into the  Maratha Empire, 1720–60. Modern Asian Studies 11/1: 1–40.  https://doi.org/10.1017/S0026749X00013202. 

Guha, Sumit. 2015. Rethinking the Economy of Mughal India: Lateral Perspectives. Journal  of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 58/4: 532–575. https://doi.org/10.1163/15685209-12341382. 

Kulke, Hermann, and Rothermund, Dietmar. 1982. Geschichte Indiens. Stuttgart (et al.):  Kohlhammer. English edition: Kulke, Herrmann, and Rothermund, Dietmar. Third ed.  1998. A History of India. London and New York: Routledge. 

Marshall, Peter James (ed.). 2003. The Eighteenth Century in Indian History: Evolution or  Revolution? New Delhi: Oxford Univ. Press. 

Moreland, William Harrison.1998. Rank (manṣab) in the Mughal State Service. In The  Mughal State, ed. Alam, Muzaffar and Subrahmanyam, Sanjay, 213–233. Delhi: Oxford  Univ. Press. 

Om Prakash. 2004. Bullion for Goods: European and Indian Merchants in the Indian Ocean  Trade, 1500–1800. Delhi: Manohar. 

Parthasarathi, Prasannan. 2011. Why Europe Grew Rich and Asia Did Not: Global Economic  Divergence, 1600–1850. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 

Pearson, Michael Naylor. 1976. Shivaji and the Decline of the Mughal Empire. Journal of  Asian Studies 35/2, 221–235. https://doi.org/10.2307/2053980.

Qazvīnī, Muḥammad Amīn: Bādshāhnāma, Tārīkh-i Shāh Jahān-i dah-sāla, (History of the  First Decade of Shah Jahan). Manuscript. British Library, MS Or. 173.  Richards, John F. 1976. The Imperial Crisis in the Dekkan. Journal of Asian Studies 35/2:  237–256. https://doi.org/10.2307/2053981. 

– 1993. Power, Administration and Finance in Mughal India. Aldershot and Brookfield:  Variorum/Ashgate. 

– 1993. The Mughal Empire (The New Cambridge History of India I.5). Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press. 

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Notes

1 The two exceptions were: 1) the conquest of Assam between 1228 and 1268 by Prince Sukhaphaa from  the small ‘Northern Tai’ state of Mong Mao (today on the border between Burma and China, Chinese  side), which established the Kingdom of Assam, and 2) the three Burmese invasions of Assam in 1816,  1819, and 1821, which ended the Kingdom of Assam. They finally led to the first Anglo-Burmese war and  the annexation of Assam by the British in 1825. 

2 With the exception of Kerala. The kings of this area, however, were closed off from the rest of the country  by the Western Ghats and did not have any dealings with the Mughals, so they are not dealt with in this  article. 

3 Gommans 2002, p. 10–14.

4 Ibid. p. 112–126. 

5 Alam p. 12.

6 Pearson 1976, p. 241–255. 

7 Alam 2001, p. 11 f. 

8 Ibid. p. 299. 

9 Athar Ali 2011, p. 92. 

10 Bhargava p. xlvii.

11 Alam 2001, p. 305. 

12 Athar Ali 2011, p. 84. 

13 Kulke and Rothermund, 1998, p. 161 f. 

14 Richards: The Mughal Empire, Cambridge 1993, p. 81 ff. 

15 Guha 2015, p. 532 – 575.

16 Moreland 1998, p. 213–233. In 1646, the wages paid for cavalry ranks amounted to 77.2 % of all salaries  and to 47.7 % of the whole tax yield. Cf. Qaisar, A. Jan 2006. Distribution of the Revenue Resources of the  Mughal Empire among the Nobility. In: Athar Ali. 2006: 252–257: 256.

17 Athar Ali 2011, p. 75–79.

18 Qazvīnī, fol. 67 b. All translations from this manuscript are by the author of this article.

19 For example, Qazvīnī describes the unsuccessful actions of a Muslim and a Hindu officer against the Rānā  of Mēwar thus: 'For another time, that difficult affair caused the market of "Abdullāh Ḳhān to flourish,  and the actions of Rājā Bāsū to be sought after … Lost in the desert of pagan ignorance and stupidity  (jahālat-u nādānī), they had to endure various toils and troubles"'. Qazvīnī, fol. 50 b. 

20 Bhargava 2014, xliv–xlii. 

21 Anwar 2001, p. 22.

22 Moreland 1998, p. 225–232; Athar Ali 2011, p. 46–49.

23 Anwar 2001, p. 21. 

24 Bharghava 2014, p. xliv–xlii. 

25 Richards 1993, p. 263. 

26 Anwar 2001, p. 45.

27 Athar Ali 2011, p. 97–101.

28 Fukuzawa 1991, p. 1–48. 

29 Richards 1993, p. 265 f. 

30 Qazvīnī, fol. 53 b.

31 Sarkar 1973, p. 13–82.

32 Ibid. p. 149–153 and 168. 

33 Pearson 1977, p. 226–232.

34 Sarkar 1973, vol. IV, p. 262–326.

35 Gordon 1977, p. 6 f. The chauth was one quarter of the district’s jāgīr income, hence the name.  36 Sarkar 1973, vol. IV, p. 341–344 and 346 f. 

37 Richards 1993, p. 276 f. 

38 Athar Ali 2011, p. 74.

39 Richards 1976, p. 248–251. 

40 Athar Ali 2001, p. 92. 

41 Gordon 1977, p. 6. 

42 Richards 1976, p. 245 f. 

43 Ibid. p. 255. 

44 For example the Marathas after they had infiltrated the province of Malwa in the 1730s and early 1730s,  and had taken it over legally after the Battle of Bhopal in 1738, cf. Gordon 1977, p. 36.  45 Gommans 2002, p. 101 f

46 Alam 2001, p. 20–27.

47 Elias 2002, p. 44 and 301. 

48 Alam 2001, p. 23 f. 

49 Ibid. p. 66. 

50 Ibid. p. 110–117.

51 Ibid. p. 15.

52 Alam 2001, p. 28–31.

53 Ibid. p. 66. 

54 Bhargava 2014, p. xxxviii. 

55 Alam 2001, p. 31–35.

56 Ibid. p. 124–133.

57 Alam 2001, p. 40. 

58 Ibid. p. 14. 

59 Ibid. p. 308–310.

60 Ibid. p. 15. 

61 Ibid. p. 50. 

62 Athar Ali 2006, p. 344. 

63 Alam 2001, p. 208. 

64 Ibid. p. 50. 

65 Ibid. p. 54.

66 Gordon 1977, p. 6-15 and 35-38.

67 Alam 2001, p. 51–55.

68 Athar Ali 2006, p. 338–340.

69 Kulke and Rothermund 1998, p. 210–223.

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