History of Aurangzib, Based on Original Sources v5.c86.s2: § 5. True character and aim of the Mughal Government.
History of Aurangzib, Based on Original Sources v5.c86.s2
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§ 5. True character and aim of the Mughal Government.
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The Mughal empire did much for India in many ways. [See Mughal Administration, 2nd. ed., Ch. 13.] But it failed to weld the people into nation, or to create a strong and enduring State.
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The glitter of gems and gold in the Taj Mahal or the Peacock Throne, ought not to blind us to the fact that in Mughal India man was considered vile; —the mass of the people had no economic liberty, no indefeasible right to justice or personal freedom, when their oppressor was a noble or high official or land-owner; political rights were not dreamt of. While the nation at large was no better than human sheep, the status of the nobles was hardly any higher under a strong and cunning king; they had no assured constitutional position, because a constitution did not exist in the scheme of government, nor even had they full right to their material acquisitions. All depended upon the will of the autocrat on the throne. The Government was in effect despotism tempered by revolution or the fear of revolution. [Mughal Adm. Ch. 9.]
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∗ Storia, ii. 19, iii.-259; he writes spells on a paper and throws it into flooded rivers to still them (Dil. ii. 159a, also Akh.)
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The most exact parallel to the Mughal Government is supplied by the mediæval Italian kingdoms, as described by the great German historian Ranke: "We here see the whole character of the Italian principality, as it existed in the 15th century: based on judiciously-calculated political relations, it was absolute and unlimited in the power of its internal administration, surrounded by splendour, closely connected with literature, and jealous even of the very appearance of power... The whole power and all the resources of a country produce a Court, —the centre of the Court is the prince; finally, then, the ultimate product of all this gathered life is the self-sufficiency of the sovereign." [*Hist. of Popes*, Bohn's ed., ii. 66.]
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In Mughal India, as in all other absolute monarchies, popular happiness even under the best of sovereigns was unstable, because it depended upon the character of one man. "The Mughal system of education and training entirely failed to maintain a line of promising heirs-apparent. . . As the princes grew up, the jealousy of rival queens forbade their taking a leading part in the politics of the capital. . . A prince who took his proper part in the council of the State was suspected of intriguing against the monarch. . . Hereditary succession is only tolerable under a system where the responsibility falls on a ministry, which screens the viciousness or incompetence of the occupant of the throne."
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"Such a ministry the Mughals were never able to organise. The monarch was obliged to fall back on the mob of adventurers who crowded round his darbar, . . . whose function was more to amuse their master than to act as a modern Cabinet. . . It was never the Mughal policy to foster the growth of a hereditary aristocracy." [*Crooke's North-Western Provinces*, 102-104.]
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By its theory, Islamic Government is military rule—the people are the faithful soldiers of Islam, the Emperor (*Khalifa*) is their commander in war and in peace, (which is only another name for the unending preparation for war with infidels.) In an army it is not for the officers, any more than for the privates, to reason why or to seek reply from the supreme leader. The Khalifa-Emperor is the silhouette of God (*zill-i-subhani*), and in God's Court there is no "why or how." No more could there be in the Padishah's administration, which was a sample of God's Court (*namuna-i-darbar-i-ilahi*). By the basic principle of Islamic Government, the Hindus and other unbelievers were admittedly outside the pale of the nation. But even the dominant sect, the Muslims, did not form a nation; they constituted a military brotherhood, a perpetual camp of soldiers.
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§ 6. Difference in life and ideal makes fusion of Hindus and Muhammadans impossible.
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According to the root principles of Muslim polity, there can be no political rights for minorities, the nation must be merged in the dominant sect, and a community homogeneous in creed and social life must be created by crushing out all divergent forms of faith opinion and life. The nation as a purely political creation was inconceivable and impossible in such a state of things. The evil was aggravated by the fact that in India the politically depressed class or "official minority" was a numerical majority, outnumbering the dominant sect as three to one, and at the same time economically better qualified, stronger in capital and wealth-producing power, and not inferior in intellect or physical vigour.
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No fusion between the two classes was possible even with the passage of centuries, as they differed like poles in ideal and life. The Hindu is solitary, passive, other-worldly; his highest aim is self-realisation, the attainment of personal salvation by individual effort private devotions and lonely austerities. To him birth is a misfortune and his fellow-beings so many sources of distraction from his one goal. Not by enjoyment of God's gifts but by renunciation, not by joyous expansion but by repression of emotion, is he to attain to bliss.
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The Muslim, on the other hand, is taught to feel that he is nothing if not a soldier of the militant force of Islam; he must pray in congregation; he must give proof of the sincerity of his faith by undertaking jihad or active exertion for the spread of his religion and the destruction of unbelief among other men. He is a missionary, and cannot be indifferent to the welfare of his neighbours' souls; nay, he must be ever alive to his duty of promoting the salvation of others by all means at his command, physical as much as spiritual. Then, again, Islam boldly avows that it is good for us to be here, that God has given the world to the faithful as an inheritance for their enjoyment.
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The ancient Socratic ideal that "he who has the fewest wants is most like the gods", is peculiarly the Hindu's. No doubt, Islam too has its ascetics; no doubt Muslim theology recognises abstinence (parhez) as good for the soul even of the householder. But in practice the immense body of Islamites loved to enjoy and considered it as nowise wrong to enjoy the good things of the world.*
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The practical outlook and social solidarity of the Muslims have made them develop the arts and civilisation (excepting literature) in a much higher degree than the Hindus ; their pleasures are of a more varied and elegant kind, and the Hindu aristocracy in Mughal times were only clumsy imitators of the Muslim peers. The general type of the Muhammadan population (excepting beggars and menial labourers) are accustomed to a costlier mode of life and more refined, while Hindus of the corresponding classes, even when rich, are grosser and less cultured.† The lower classes of the Hindus, how-
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† Col. T. D. Pearse wrote to Warren Hastings in 1781 from Ellore : "The Hindus [of N. India] are nine out of ten in the numbers composing this army; ...but 29 Hindus have deserted for one Musalman. The cause is but too evident : an Hindu can live on Rs. 2 a month, and save 5 after paying for necessaries,—whereas the Musalman will live well whilst he can; is seldom worth a Rupee, and therefore has a tie upon the service that the other has not : for the Hindu with Rs. 100, returning to his home, can stock a farm, and live happily for the rest of his days." [Br. Ind. Mil. Repository, vol. ii. (1823) p. 19.]
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* Persian poetry is not lacking in melancholy musings on the mutability of things (like what we find in Chaucer and Spenser). We are told that the world is a caravan sarai, a goglet of gold now filled with sweet drink and now with a bitter draught,—the steed of death ever stands ready saddled, &c.
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But it was a literary fashion handed down from the middle ages, and did not influence life in India in the 17th century.
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ever, are distinctly cleaner and more intellectual than Muslims of the same grades of life.
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§ 7. Hindus politically depressed and degraded under Aurangzib.
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Apart from the restrictions about food, difference of religious doctrine and ritual, rules forbidding intermarriage, &c., this polar difference in the outlook upon life made a fusion between Hindus and Muslims impossible. In addition to these, the Quranic polity made life intolerable for the Hindus under orthodox Muhammadan rule. Aurangzib furnishes the best example of the effects of that polity when carried to its logical conclusions by a king of exemplary morality and religious zeal, without fear or favour in discharging what he held to be his duty as the first servant of God. Schools of Hindu learning were broken up by him, Hindu places of worship were demolished, Hindu fairs were forbidden, the Hindu population was subjected to special fiscal burdens in addition to being made to bear a public badge of inferiority; and the service of the State was closed to them, as we have seen in Ch. 34.
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Thus, the only life that the Hindus could lead under Aurangzib was a life deprived of the light of knowledge, deprived of the consolations of religion, deprived of social union and public rejoicing, of wealth and the self-confidence that is begotten by the free exercise of natural activities and use of opportunities,—in short, a life exposed to constant public humiliation and political disabilities.
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Heaven and earth alike were closed to him as long as he remained a Hindu. Hence, the effect of Aurangzib's reign was not only to goad the Hindus into constant revolt and disturbances, but also to make them deteriorate in intellect, organisation, and economic resources, and thereby weaken the State of which they formed more than two-thirds.
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§ 8. Decline of the Muslims in India; its causes.
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The Muslim portion of the population, too, did not prosper under such a polity, though for a different reason in their case. The Turks are soldiers and nothing else; their manhood is a naturally embodied army, and war is their only profession. A standing army is necessarily prevented from cultivating continuous domestic life. The ruling race among the so-called Mughals were really Turks. Hence, Muslim society in the Mughal period, in many of its civilian ranks also, frequently displayed garrison manners, as the organisation of their Government was of a military type and the soldiers set the tone to society.
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The intellectual decline of the Muslims was hastened by the peculiar position of the faithful in India. They had made India their permanent home; many of them were Indians by race; and all had become so in their personal appearance, thoughts, manners and customs. And yet their religious teachers urged them to look back to ancient Arabia and draw their mental sustenance from the far-off age of the Prophet. The language of their religion must be Arabic, which not one in a hundred fully understood; their cultural language was Persian, which a few more learnt with difficulty and used with an impurity that excited the laughter and scorn of the Persian born. The greatest Indo-Persian poet was Amir Khusrau, but even he was ranked with third-class poets among the natives of Persia. Faizi, our second best, was held to be still inferior. Witness the scorn poured by Babur and Shaikh Ali Hazin alike on the Indian use of Persian.
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The Indian Muslim considered it beneath his dignity (till well into the 18th century) to use the vernacular for literary purposes. Hence, the immense majority of this sect were without any literature of their own; their education was hampered and their private life, (except in the case of the few who could use Persian freely), was deprived of intellectual joys. They could not have even a living growing religious literature. Hindustani amatory or devotional songs and Sufi verses in Persian were not adequate instruments for the diffusion of culture or the removal of general ignorance among a whole community.
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Thus, the orthodox Muslim ever felt that he was in India, but not of it. He durst not, for peril to his soul,—so he was taught,—strike his roots deep into his native soil. He must not take to his heart its traditions language and cultural products; he must import these from Persia and Arabia. Even his civil and criminal law must be derived from the writings of jurists and the decisions of judges in Baghdad or Cairo. [*Mughal Administration*, 2nd ed., Ch. 6.] The Muslim in India was an intellectual exotic; he could not like Antæus replenish his strength by coming in contact with his mother earth. He must not adapt himself to his environment. The Quranic precepts for the guidance of civil society and the regulation of human conduct and relations, were framed in a far-off age for a nomadic people. It was absurd, as a rationalist like Akbar argued, that they should be considered binding on men of the 16th or 17th century living in a country that had nothing in common with Arabia.
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The intellectual vacuity caused by this unnatural straining after a foreign and impracticable ideal, not only arrested the mental and social progress of the Indian Muslims, but also made their hearts a fertile soil for noxious weeds. The eternal human craving for a personal religion, for a living faith, could not be satisfied by repeating an Arabic book by rote (*hifz-i-kalam-ullah*), or by going through one monotonous physical drill five times a day in a public gathering (*jamait*). The thirsty soul turned to every fabled living saint in its neighbourhood and to the successors in attendance at the tombs of famous saints of the past,—both of whom were believed to be capable of working miracles.
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The racial character of the Semitic peoples who created the Quran and Sunni Canon Law was essentially different from that of the Indians, and the mere fact of a body of the latter race having accepted the religion of the Arabs could not obliterate this ethnic difference. These were insurmountable handicaps to Indian Islam.