By: Srijoni Guptaroy
The Mughal Empire despite it's magnitude and intricacies began crumbling away from the end of the 17th century. The boundaries of the vast empire began to shrink and the administrative apparatus witnessed an accelerated demise owing to a number of causal factors. There emerged a number of regional states which filled the glaring vacuum left behind by the declining Mughal empire which led to the final usurpation of power by the British colonial government. Why the 18th century is imperative for the better understanding of Indian history is because it symbolizes the crucial juncture which preceeds the commencement of the colonialism in India whose impact can be felt even today and the transition into modernity. The decline of the Mughals have garnered scholarly views and has attracted different strands of historiography which dissects every aspect of its disintegration and provides us with a more holistic perspective.
The gradual end
of this Central Asian empire has been viewed from two very important standpoints:
the Mughal-centric approach through which historians look at the structural
failure within the boundaries of the empire and the region centric approach
which travels outside the precincts of the empire to provide a view of the
instabilities and struggles in different geographical areas. One of the major
distinctions that need to be drawn here is the difference between the term
'collapse' and 'fall'. While collapse indicates a more gradualistic decline,
the latter symbolizes a more singular and sudden death. It becomes important to
clarify that the empire witnessed the former rather than the latter.
Dealing with the Mughal-centric viewpoint, one of the most comprehensive arguments have been put forward by the set of pre-independant scholars like William Irvine, Stanley Lanepoole, V.A Smith, Jadunath Sarkar among others. They associate the decline with the atrocities and restrictions imposed by Aurangzeb on the population which accelerated the destructive forces. William Irvine concentrated on the degenrate character of the emperors that succeeded Aurangzeb and their officers as well, justifying the advent of British rule, Jadunath Sarkar argued that the religious policy of intolerance towards the non-Muslims exercised rigidly by Aurangzeb culminated in a 'Hindu reaction' which only widened the gap between the different communities within the population and caused the breakdown of the imperial machinery. Ishtiaq Husain Qureshi, a Pakistani historian, argues contrastingly and holds Akbar responsible for including the Shias as well as the Hindus in the governing processes. He propunded that these classes could not have been loyal as they did not belong to the Sunni Muslim community and fell like a house of cards uner the competence of Aurangzeb. Bipin Chandra also analyses the policies of the emperor, looking critically at the imposition of jiziya on the non-Muslims along with the ruination of Hindu temples and restrictions on the practising of Hindu religion, however he concludes that these processes should not be singularly magnified as they had been revoked in the years after Aurangzeb's death. He also pointed out that other groups that rose to power like the Marathas also committed their political expansion to the cause of plunder and pwer and hence was not a unique phenomenon.
In 1959 the publication of Satish Chandra’s Parties and Politics at the Mugltal Court 1707-40 marked the first serious attempt to study the structure of the Mughal Empire. He intricately laid down the many facets of the most crucial administrative machinery, the masab-jagir relationship. He argued that despite the slow agricultural growth, the wants of the nobles increased rapidly. Though trade was always present as an alternative income, it could never supplement the revenue appropriated from land and the exploitation of peasantry to squeeze every grain grew beyond leaps and bounds. He believed that the Mughal attitude towards the zamindars had always remained contradictory in nature; while they were considered the main threat to the internal stability of the empire, they were also judged the crucial intermediary for local adminitration which was indispensible. They were thus awarded the status of a mansab along with a piece of land for maintenance termed jagir. This system brought the internal contradictions of rural life to the forefront as zamindars were not willing to give up their influential positions. Peasant uprisings against the increased rates of revenue, uprisings by the zamindars and the attempts to carve out separate kingdoms were the different ways in which the frustration of the rural classes manifested. He argued the emergence of the jagirdari crisis was a result of the inability of the jagirdars to procure the stipulated amount of revenue which were in turn required to maintain their troops. The situation was even worse in the Deccan where the vast influx of nobles could not find appropriate jagirs due to the infertility of the soil. Athar Ali postulated in 1966 that the absorption of Deccani and Maratha nobles against the backdrop of decreasing jagirs only eroded the system that was intrinsic to the smooth functioning of the Mughal empire. Each jagirdar competed for better plots of land due to their increasing numbers. Nurul Hassan also added to this trend by arguing that agrarian relationships had developed in a pyramidal authoritarian structure with different rights being juxtaposed and the bulk of the revenue becoming the burden of the peasantry. With the change in dynamics after the death of Aurangzeb, the zamindars who were otherwise loyal to the state began succumbing to the economic pressures which culminated in the antagonisms between the state and this class. Their growing authority could no longer be kept in check and they often undermined state power. Hassan calculated that the only solution available would have been alternative institutions who remained exclusive of the zamindars who could curb their increasing influence. Since this was not available, the dissolution of the empire became imminent. Bipin Chandra also added to this strand of economic writing by arguing that agriculture was no longer able to meet the increasing demands of the population due to the cnstant warfare and increased luxury of the nobles. He substantiated his arguments by propounded the marked distinction in the conditions in Europe and the Indian subcontinent pointing to the newer technologies that were present in the former nation. In Mughal India, ths growth was hampered by bad communications and by the self-sufficient nature of village economy. In the absense of newer advances in science and technology, India lagged behind Europe, both economically and politically ad eventually succumbed to the pressure.
The trend of
concentrating on the personalities of the emperors and their associated officers
gradually gave way to a greater ambit of administration wherein Irfan Habib has
done some pioneering work. The focus of Irfan Habib is on the structural
contradictions of the Mughal polity that eventually led to the decline of the
Empire. The Mughals did notallow the Jagirdars to be at a same Jagir for more
than four years. This was a done inorder to ensure that Jagirdars didn’t become
powerful in there jagirs. Eventhough this policy in some sense gave made the
centralisation of power possible in the Mughal regime, but at the same time
this policy also made jagirdars oppressive in demanding the revenues. They
started demanding excessive taxes in places with fertile soil as they had no
reason to think about the future implications of their act. As a result the
peasantry had to suffer tremendously. The payment of taxes left the peasants in
a state of penury and pverty. This oppression was the driving force for peasant
revolts.Throughout the Mughal regime there were numerous peasant revolts.
Sometimes zamindars also joined, supported or started the revolts. These
zamindars thought that the increased tax demands had left them worse-off as
they were left with lesser amount of the collected revenue. These revolts
eventually led to the collapse of the Mughal Empire especially the revolt of
the Jats, Satnamis and the Marathas. C.A Bayly takes a contrasting stand
propunding that the death of Aurangzeb brought local and small leaders to the
fore who benefitted from the collapse of the pyrimidal structure and constituted
the new emerging class . Many would indulge in non-farming activities such as
trade or production of textiles.This growing ‘middle class’ benefitted from the
increased economic trade. Bayly thus argues that the rich peasantry along with
the small scale rulers led to the downfall of the Mughal Empire. Rohan D'Souza
views the crisis from the vantage point of the weakening military might. He
affirms to the idea that the equilibrium that had been maintained
administratively had been tipped due to the protracted battles in the Deccan.
They undermined the Mughal military prowess and added very few glorious
resources in its treasury as a result of which the precipitation of the
jagirdari crisis had been even more profound. Bipin Chandra also comments on the
characteristics of the nobility by asserting that the new entrants were seldom
interested in the betterment of state and society and instead focused on their
own selfish motives. The weakeness of the Mughal nobility, according to
Chandra, was not in the decline of the average ability or the moral decay but
due to the selfishness and lack of devotion towards the state. The most able
bodied out of them were the ones who carved out their succeeding kingdoms.
However he also justified this argument by citing that this phenomenon was
observed in other communities like Jats, Sikhs, Satnamis as well.
M.N Pearson
scrutinized the role of the Maratha threat and concluded that the Mughals could
never crush them entirely. He argued that Aurangzeb was confronted with the
" aura of success" i.e. the rejuvination of the alliances and the
nobility's confidence in the emperor's person hadnt happened with the Deccan.
He was of the view that Aurangzeb granted the choicest of lands in the new
territories as jagirs to the top end of the provincial elite and those fighting
the Marathas and then made further expansionary thrusts. This was done to shore
up his most substantial alliances and enhance his capacity to control over the
nobility. The Deccan imbroglio was a clear signal that the political process
that worked the institutions of rule were severley undermined, principally as a
result of new tacticla context of guerilla warfare employed by the Marathas. He
argued that the nobility was tied to the concept of the Mughal Empire and when
the patronage directed towards them declined due the military expansions in the
south, this concept ceased to exist and hence caused distress. J.F Richards
added a new dimension to this argument in the 1970s by propogating the view
that the crisis of jagirdari was a mangerial issue rather than an
administrative one. He was of the opinion that Aurangzeb reserved the fertile
tracts of the Deccan for the khalisa lands and failed to dispense the growing
needs of the newly inducted nobles. The pacification of this class was not
conducted appropriately and crumbled under the pressure. He also digresses the
the viewpoint that resources were available for the smooth functioning of the
empire however he never forged strengthened ties with the notable elites of the
region to gain unfettered access to these resources. He failed as a ruler, to
provide military assisstance to the jagirdars in the region for the collection
of revenue and hence gave agency to these nobles to find security in the camps
of the enemy. Hence at a later stage, their contributions to the Mughal
campaigns remained dismal.Thus the crisis owed its origins to non-functionality
and not bejagiri.However, he managed to eliminate the disastrous impact these
campaigns had on these regions in his thesis.
Satish Chandra,
at this point, addressed the issue by marking a distinction between the crisis
of the jagirdari system and bejagiri. He laid down the network of relationships
that constituted medieval rural society pointing to a tripolar corelation
between the peasants, zamindars and the jagirdar/mansabdar. The effective
responsibility of the mansabdar/jagirdar was to collect revenue from the
zamindar and keep the peasants under cultivation. Jagirdars required military
might to maintain this relationship. However , in the 17th century, the social
crisis of the mUghals reflected in the financial strain. The glaring difference
between the jama and the hasil had gained greater prominence from the end of
Shah Jahan's reign. The mansabdars , as a result, could not maintain their
troops for periods longer than 5 months due to the income generated which
resulted in rapid shrinking of the armed forces. In the Deccan, this period was
even shorter and lasted not more than 3 months. Once the military power suffered
this attack, the tripolar relationship eroded. He pointed to two visible ways
in which this disaster could be avoided. the first was that had the Mughals
reconciledwith the zamindars and come up with a settlement with Marathas,the
outcome might have been diametrically opposite. But by the time settlement was
achieved, after Aurangzeb, Marathas had become powerful and the Mughal
aristocracy had weakened. This further deepened the jagirdari crisis
whicheventually led to the downfall of the Mughal Empire. The other method
propounded by him was if there was a rapid development of the economy in both
agrarian and non-agrarian sectors. Trade had always been supplementary and no
definitive proof exists to establish whether these finances were injected into
the economy or reserved for the ostentatious lives of the nobles. However
merchants were not rich or powrful and evidence suggested that Mughal
administrative policy was always directed towards preserving small peasant
economy. Thus they had very few options besides becoming share croppers and
further deteriorating their positions. The only way they could grow was if they
became intermediary zamindars or mahajans. As the agrarian development remained
slow, this development never occured. As a result, it could be concluded that
the administrative system was reared on this structure, the two acting and
reacting on each other. All the other factors like the growth in the size of
the ruling class, the growing ostentatious life style of the nobles which
limited the surplus available for expanding production and resulted in slow
economic growth were contributory factors to the growth of the crisis.
The decline of
the Mughal empire was also evaluated in political terms by Karen Leonard
through his 'Great firm' theory. It utilizes secondary sources and even extends
the economic prongs of imperial decline. He prophesized that indigeneous
banking firms were indispensible allies of the Mughals however the great firms
began diverging their resources, both credit and trade, from the Mughals to
other political powers in the subcontinent which contributed to the downfall of
the empire. This downfall coincided with the increased involvement of banking
firms in revenue collection at regional and local levels in preference to their
continued provision of credit to the Central Mughal government. Between 1650
and 1750, bankers were more directly involved in positions of political power
all over India. This great firm partnership with regional powers, among them,
the English East India Company, would lead to political losses at the end
of1750s due to their systematic ejection from the system.
Coming the the
second broad classification of Mughal decline, the region centric view is
hinged on the extensive research by Muzaffar Alam in the comparitive analysis
of the Mughal subas of Punjab and Awadh and Chetan Singh's study on 17th
century Punjab. The shed new light on the instability that permeated in the
fringes of the Mughal empire in the wake of its decline.
Looking at the
empire through the regional literature of Awadh, Alam affirmed that the Mughal
empire acted as coordinating agency among the several communities and
conflicting stratas that were existent. The basis of the empire lay in the
negative as power was derived from the fact that these local elements could not
gain power beyond narrow confines and hence its structure remained flawed
leading to the lack of political integration.
It was to a large extent conditional on the co-ordination of the
interests and the political activities of the various social groups led by
local magnates. This was accompanied by the latter realizing that they could
not amass wealth by themselves as their position and power emanated directly
from the emperor himself.They had no hereditary estates to pass on to their
descendants and they ulitmately epitomized the Mughal representative. Yet they
had problems even within the confines of the nobility. The policy of jagir
transfer was implemented to check the influence of the jagirdar in the local
affairs of that geographical region but only went on to inconvenience those who
resisted it as its execution varied from
one place to the next. In some regions this policy remained unenacted till the
17th century. The other local group that constituted lower level officials from
various communities was the madad-e-maash holders who created pockets of Mughal influence in
far flung regions of the empire to curb the powers of the recalciterant
zamindars. Thus these power structures were inherent for the social and political
well-being of the countryside. However in the 18th century, it was seen that
there emerged an inability to sustain this equilibrium between the peasant,
jagirdar, zamindar and madad-e-maash grantees. There was a divertion towards
independant empires being carved out by zamindars and an increasing tendency to
encroach on the property of the other class. This was not entirely incompatible
with the structure of the empire but at the time when the empire was already
amidst a gradual decline with the loss of military might, it added to the pace
of events.
Muzaffar Alam's
main concern was to analyze what triggered off this imbalance in the 18th
century and not at a period preceeding it.He discovers that this was a period
of economic boom unlike the sentiments of Satish Chandra and others who felt
that the empire was submerged in a prolonged financial crisis. Alam argued that
it was become of these economic developments that the elements that had once
been loyal to the state found agency to encroach on the rights and priveleges
of others. The political edifice of the company was bound to suffer amidst
these circumstances. Alam concluded that these situations gave rise to a new
subadari and independant regional units existed in both Punjab and Awadh. the
marked distinction was that in Awadh, there emerged a stable dynastic rule
while Punjab crumbled away.
Muzaffar Alam's
line of argumentation has been carried further by the works of Chetan Singh in
his book titled ,' Region and Politics' which looks closely not only at the
political changes that occured in 18th century Mughal suba of Punjab but
connects it to the much wider saw of political developments in the West Asian
world. He argued that the administrative apparatus undoubtedly connected the
region to the administrative core however this integration was subject to
certain antagonisms. He , further argued, that the local society and polity
were privy to certain stresses and the administration responded by trangressing
the formal administrative divisions and sub divisions of the governmental
system. This held true for general as well as pragmatic considerations which
led to the inherent flexibility in offices and collection of revenue. Thus with
time, certain norms and conditions evolved, enforced by rules and regulations
which was the basis of stability in the Mughal Empire. Singh further analyzes
the reasons for the collapse of independant alignments in Punjab and cites the
occurence of heavy silting in the riverine basin of Punjab in the 17th century
which led to a virtual standstill in traffic and an adverse effect on the
highly commercialized economy of Punjab. The political developments in Turkey,
the loss of Qandahar to the Shah of Iran and the Mughal attempt to recapture it
all added to the declining situation. This coincided with the Yusufzai
rebellion in 1667 in North-West Punjab and the Afridi rebellion in 1678 which
deteriorated the economic prongs on which Punjab thrived. Thus, Singh,
concluded that the economic stresses manifested in social upheavals. These
rebellions were more prone to occur in regions of dense commercialisation as
the effect of a disintegrating economy was more profound here. He pointed to
the unequal distribution of uprisings owing to the distinction in the intensity
of commercialisation in these areas. Hence he propounded that these forces of
decline had been silently at work even before it gained momentum in the 18th
century. It is here thathe adds a new dimension to the mooted question of
'crisis of the Empire'. He answers that while analyzing the various reasons for
the dissociation of different regions , a very different image of the empire
emerges, one in which the forces of demise had been at play even during the
hey-day of the empire. They worked gradually to erode and caused the severence
of subas from the Mughal core and led to the emergence of independane regional
successor states.
It can thus be
concluded that there emerges not one approach of defining Mughal political
decline which encompasses every facet of its demise. It can best be viewed as a
consensus between the centre and the periphery. The decline began when the
equilibrium between these two spheres
was dismantled and the newly independent areas viewed their dissociation
as a means to amass wealth by utilising the opportunities that came with
economic growth. Regional histories indicate the vanquish of socio-cultural
bonds that existed between the centre and the peripheries. The heterogeneous
linkages that had been delicately laid down between the two paradigms of Mughal
rule inevitably severed due the stresses it was being subjected to.It was thus
logical for these regions to dissociate themselves from the core and thereby
ushering in the downfall of the once mighty Mughal empire.
Lastly, the
conclusion that could be inevitably drawn up from the sentiments of scholars
was that the decline of the empire was initially conceived to have its roots in
the maladjustment of administrative institutions that formed the base of Mughal
stability and power. It was gradually that newer strands of historiography
pointed to the shift in perspective to the regional entities which could not
configure in the immediate history of the Mughal centre and added to a more
holistic approach. Thus, it becomes inherently clear that the application of
one clear theory which incorporated every strand of development across every
region within the empire was not possible to be conceptualized as each
geographical area was earmarked by distinct circumstances. The final blow to
the empire came with the series of foreign invasions by Nadir Shah and Ahmed
Shah Abdali which were the consequences of weakness of the empire, drained of
wealth and military might. It was the emergence of the British challenge which
took away the hope of revival of a crisis-ridden empire. Thus the Mughal empire
that ruled in the subcontinent for two centuries drew to a close.
THANK YOU
Bibliography:
Satish Chandra-
Medieval india: Society, the Jagirdari Crisis
and the Village
Bipin Chandra-
History of Modern India
Irfan Habib-
India Historical View
Internet