Fall of the Mughal Empire PDF

Preview

Summary

Fall of the Mughal Empire* Jitendra Kumar PhD Scholar CHS, JNU, New Delhi The Mughal Empire was one of the great dynastic powers of the medieval Islamic world. Its decline in the eighteenth century has always been of captivating interest to historians and Muslim thinkers alike. Most interpretations ...

Description

Fall of the Mughal Empire* Jitendra Kumar PhD Scholar CHS, JNU, New Delhi The Mughal Empire was one of the great dynastic powers of the medieval Islamic world. Its decline in the eighteenth century has always been of captivating interest to historians and Muslim thinkers alike. Most interpretations of Mughal decline reflect the historian’s political circumstances and agenda rather than the realities of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. William Irvine, the earliest writer to approach the subject systematically, focused on the degenerate character of the later emperors and their officers, thus justifying British rule in India. He and his immediate successor, Jadunath Sarkar, emphasise Aurangzeb’s religious policy as the immediate cause of the decline. His Muslim bigotry, they assert, caused a “Hindu reaction,” consisting of a series of revolts that led to the breakdown of Mughal power. Sarkar also argued that Aurangzeb’s Deccan campaigns and other shortcomings in his reigns were also responsible for the empire’s last decline. A lack of leadership and coherent policy left the realm vulnerable to the various internal and external threats of the eighteenth century, which ultimately led to the fall of the empire. Ishtiaq Husain Qureshi, the leading Pakistani *

This is not my original essay. Consider it as a class note prepared for teaching history students at PGDAV College, University of Delhi, New Delhi.

1|Page

historian, inverts this interpretation. He blames Akbar’s inclusion of Shia Muslims and Hindus in the Mughal ruling class. Despite Akbar’s efforts, the Mughal Empire could only appear as Sunni Muslim rule, and neither Hindus nor Shias could be truly loyal to it. Akbar thus erected a house of cards that inevitably collapsed despite Aurangzeb’s competence. These rather monocausal explanations were dismissed from the late 1950s onward and succeeded by attempts to analyse the imperial system, its failure at a more fundamental level. This new school of historians was based at the Aligarh Muslim University, which included Satish Chandra and M. Athar Ali, who sought to identify the intuitional, economic and organisational structure of the Mughal Empire and to describe its general susceptibilities and weakness. They argued that the power working of the mansabs and jagir system, the constitutional framework in which the Mughal ruling class was organised, faced a severe crisis of Aurangzeb’s reign. After the conquest of the Deccan kingdoms between 1686 and 1689, a growing number of nobles had to be integrated into the imperial service to consolidate Mughal rule in the newly annexed territories. The generous award of high mansabs to the Decani nobles led to increasing demand for jagirs and exhausted the available land, i.e., the revenue reserves that supported the Mughal nobility. The constant shortage of jagirs resulted in an intense struggle within the aristocracy over its economic resources base and conflicts over revenue assignments and the growing factionalism within 2|Page

the imperial elite undermined the proper working of the jagirdari system; over-exploitation of jagirs by oppressive taxation, abandonment of formerly cultivated lands by the peasants and their open rebellions were the symptoms of an accelerating crisis in the administrative system. Due to financial strains, the nobles found it increasingly difficult to meet their military obligations, thus diminishing the empire’s military power. While Satish Chandra and Athar Ali analysed the decline as an immediate consequence of the Deccan conquest producing the jagir crises and the consequent failure of the nobility to maintain imperial rule after Aurangzeb’s death, Irfan Habib interpreted the jagir crises as an inevitable structural crisis originating in defects of the imperial system. He argued that the frequent transfers of jagirs, one of the main features of the jagirdari system, prevented the development by the nobility of a genuine, long-term interest in land, which resulted, even in the normal times, in relentless exploitation of agrarian resources and fatal oppression of the rural population; peasant-landlord rebellions were widespread phenomena throughout the Mughal rule. Based on the analysis of the Mughal official documents and partly building on the earlier work of W.H. Moreland, who also used the accounts of contemporary travellers in India extensively, Habib concluded that the Mughal ruling class was parasitical in nature and the resulting contradictions within the society were irreconcilable and inherent in the imperial system. Hence, the economic crisis towards the end of Aurangzeb’s reign was, according to Habib, nothing but an inevitable crisis of the system, the decline 3|Page

of the empire, provoked by peasant rebellions, determined from the very first days of its existence. Athar Ali’s study of the Mughal nobility during the late seventeenth century has been a pioneering attempt to systematically analyse the political and economic significance of the imperial elite and its proneness to instability and crises. In their examination of the resource base of nobility, Satish Chandra and Irfan Habib gained new insights into the agrarian and monetary systems of the Mughal economy and established connections between the inflationary process, repressive tax demands and resistance by peasants and local notables. Noman Ahmad Siddiqi and Zahiruddin Mallik directed their attention more to the study of the first half of the eighteenth century. In the first place, a symposium on the subject in 1976 altered the views of the Aligarh historians who had explained the decline mainly in economic terms. By emphasising the aggressive-militaristic character of the empire, M.N. Pearson interpreted the temporary military setbacks against the Marathas in the 1660s as having a traumatic effect on the usually triumphant army leaders; when the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb suddenly lost his martial ‘auro of success’ the military nobility lost its selfconfidence and its trust in the future of the empire. The subsequent prolonged Deccan campaigns during the Aurangzeb’s reign, which produced the catastrophic increase in the number of mansabdars and similar symptoms of decline, are seen as due less to the expansionist orientation of the empire than to the failure 4|Page

of the empire to develop a more ‘impersonal level’ of loyalty between the emperor and his nobles. It would have helped to deal with a defeat differently, and the move south could have been avoided. John F. Richards, meanwhile, questioned the widely accepted argument of a general shortage of jagirs following the conquests of Bijapur and Golconda in 1686 and 1687. Citing data from Golconda, he showed that new revenue assignments were available to consolidate imperial rule in the annexed territories and stabilise the southern frontier. However, Aurangzeb’s failure to use those resources efficiently to secure the support of the local elites and his ‘eagerness’ instead ‘for further expansion’ resulted in an incomplete administrative and political integration of the Deccan provinces. The immense dedication of the empire’s resources to ‘continued expansion in the south brought about a crisis in public order and public confidence’. It accelerated the decrease of imperial authority and power, which was visible by the years 1711-1712 in the Deccan provinces. Peter Hardy put forward a general proposal for the fresh investigation of previously neglected but potentially fertile in the field of historical research’ to include once again, for instance, the studies of military history, and even to reconsider the personalities of individual emperors by means of modern psychology, in order to come to a comprehensive understanding of the decline of the empire. Bernard S. Cohn and A.M. Shah, while giving examples from Banaras and Gujarat, argued that the 5|Page

conflicts of varying quality and intensity between imperial, regional and local systems played an important role in the decline of the Mughal empire. Ashin Das Gupta described the manifest political conflict between a representative of the Mughal elite, the local governor of Surat, and the merchant community of that town, which revolted against the political attacks on their mercantile property in 1732. Philip B. Calkins described the emergence of a new ruling group in Bengal between 1700 and 1740 as its causes. Stewart N. Gordon described the formation of smaller political systems in Central India and their gradual integration into the Maratha empire. Karen Leonard considered Hyderabad State by the end of the eighteenth century as a representation ‘a new political system, with a whole new set of participants. Furthermore, Karen Leonard gave the ‘Great Firm’ theory for the decline of the Mughal empire. She argued that the Mughal state, not only the whole imperial financial system but also individual nobles and officials, depended on credits and loans from great indigenous banking firms for all their capital investment and financial transactions. This service linked firms like the Jagath Seth of Bengal to the management of land revenue, trade, and industry and made them increasingly important to the Mughal government. When, in the period from 1650 to 1750, these ‘indispensable allies of the Mughal state’ diverted their ‘resources, both credit and trade’ from the Mughals to the other political powers in the Indian subcontinent contributed to the downfall of the empire’. However, John F. Richards criticised Leonard’s argument on the ground that the examples she had cited were from 6|Page

the eighteenth century and relied on the regional kingdoms. The same cannot be applied to the imperial authority like the Mughal empire, especially during the 16th and 17th centuries. An attempt to analyse the decline of the Mughal empire in an international context has been made by Marshall G.S. Hodgson and M. Athar Ali, who pointed out the synchronism of the fall of the Mughal Safavid and Ottoman Empires, as well as the break-up of the Uzbek Khanate. Athar Ali argued that the failure of the Mughal empire would seem to derive essentially from a cultural failure shared with the entire Islamic world. Hodgson emphasised rather the necessity to view the revolution ‘in the context of world historical developments at that time, which for the Muslims would mean above all the confrontation with ‘modernity’. The economic, social and economic transformation in Christian Europe in the period between 1600 and 1800 had decisive repercussions on the international political and economic system, which became increasingly dominated by technically oriented western societies. C.A. Bayly has summarised the main angles for interpreting historical developments in the eighteenth century that led to the decline of the Mughal empire. He argued that the crises of eighteenth-century India now appear to have three distinct aspects. First, there were the cumulative indigenous changes reflecting commercialisation, the formation of social groups and political transformation within the subcontinent itself. Secondly, there was a wider level of the crisis of the west 7|Page

and South Asia crisis, signalled by the decline of the great Islamic empires, the Mughals and their contemporaries, the Ottomans and the Safavids. Thirdly, there was a massive expansion of European production trade during the eighteenth century and the development of more aggressive national states in Europe, which were indirectly echoed in the more assertive policies of the European companies in India from the 1730s, and notably of the English Company after 1757. As we have seen that the Mughal empire started falling after the death of Aurangzeb as a result of various reasons highlighted by the above historical works. However, the disintegration of the Mughal Empire did not mean the eclipse of the political authority and economic stagnation of the entire society. The eighteenth century not only witnessed the weakening of the Mughal empire but also the emergence of numerous regional political structures, virtually independent of the Mughal imperial control. The decline of the Mughal empire was not a sudden breakdown of the imperial apparatus but an accelerated process of crisis in imperial structures in which political and military power shifted from the centre to the periphery. As Andrea Hintze argued that the decentralisation of power followed the boundaries of the major socio-economic regions. New principalities established themselves in regional centres and took over political control. The transfer of power in the formal Mughal provinces of Awadh, Bengal and Hyderabad were formerly acknowledged by the emperor. The new regimes early continued formal relations with the Mughal dynasty to share in its aura of legitimacy. 8|Page

Bibliography: Ali, M. Athar. Mughal Nobility under Aurangzeb. New Delhi: Asia Publishing House, 1966. Bayly, C.A. Rulers, Townsmen, and Bazaars: North Indian Society in the Age of British Expansion, 1770-1870. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983. Bhargava, Meena (ed.). The Decline of the Mughal Empire: Debates in Indian History. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2014. Calkins, Philip B. “The Formation of a Regionally Oriented Ruling Group in Bengal, 1700-1740.” The Journal of Asian Studies, 29/4 (Aug. 1970), 799-806. Chandra, Satish. Parties and Politics at the Mughal Court, 1707-1740. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2002 [1959]. _____Medieval India: Society, Jagirdari Crisis, and the Village. Delhi: Macmillan, 1982. Cohn, Bernard S. “Political Systems in the Eighteenth Century India: The Banaras Region.”, Journal of American Oriental Society, 82/3 (Sep. 1962), 312320. Habib, Irfan. Agrarian System of Mughal India, 1554707. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999. Hardy, Peter. “Commentary and Critique”. The Journal of Asian Studies, 35/2 (February 1976 ), 257 – 263. Hintze, Andrea. The Mughal Empire and its Decline: An Interpretation of the Sources of Social Power. Aldershot: Ashgate, 1997. 9|Page

Irvine, William. The Army of the Indian Moghuls: Its Organisation and Administration. London, 1903. _____Later Mughals, Vol I. Edited by Jadunath Sarkar. Calcutta: M.C. Sarkar. Leonard, Karen. “The ‘Great Firm’ Theory of the Decline of the Mughal Empire”, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 21/2 (Apr. 1979), 151-167. Moreland, W.H. From Akbar to Aurangzeb: A Study in Indian Economic History. Delhi: Low Price Publications, 2008. Pearson, M.N. “Symposium: Decline of The Mughal Empire”. The Journal of Asian Studies, 35/2 (February 1976), 221 – 235. Richards, John F. “The Imperial Crisis in the Deccan”, The Journal of Asian Studies, 35/2 (February 1976 ), 237 – 256. Sarkar, Jadunath. A Short History of Aurangzeb, 16181707. Calcutta: M.C. Sarkar, 1930. Shah, A.M. “Political Systems in the 18th Century Gujarat”. Enquiry, 1/1 (Spring 1964), 83-95.

10 | P a g e...