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
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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.