Fall of the Mughal Empire v4.c51.s6: § 6. The Failure of the Maratha princes to raise revenue from their dominions explained
Fall of the Mughal Empire v4.c51.s6
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§ 6. The Failure of the Maratha princes to raise revenue from their dominions explained
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We may naturally ask how European generals in the Maratha service could pay their campoos regularly and yet build up such vast fortunes, even when they did not enjoy political supremacy like the English in Bengal. Our wonder is heightened by the fact that the Maratha princes when holding exactly the same territories, used to keep their soldiers in arrears for years together and also run into heavy debt to the bankers. The historical records of the time make the reason for it quite clear.
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The Maratha Government in Hindustan had no competent civil service, no stable administration, and no wise foreign policy. De Boigne and Perron, by constant tours in their jāgirs, put down lawless bands wherever they raised their heads, and thus they gave their lands the necessary peace and security for producing crops and paying revenue. That revenue was collected by a band of Indian civil officers, whose work was daily checked by their French masters, and thus slackness and peculation in the subordinates could be at once detected and punished. A British revenue officer noticed, "The Doab parganas having been under the management of General Perron and the others (viz. those on the right bank of the Jamunā) under that of Col. Hessing, the administration of both which officers was much superior to that of the native Governments." (Atkinson, *N.W.P. Gazetteer*, VII. 520.)
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The Sindhia and Holkar chiefs were illiterate or almost so, and quite incapable by education and habits, of checking the accounts of their civil servants. Nor would they undergo the drudgery of daily calling their collectors to account. The result was that their entire revenue administration was left to their Brahman diwans and Prabhu clerks; and these men were notorious for their love of peculation and ignorance of the economic law that the revenue cannot be increased simply by squeezing the peasantry. The rapacious and inefficient government of the Maratha agents in Hindustan kept lawlessness always raging in their jāgirs, and the desolated land could yield no produce for feeding the population or paying for the administration. Thomas Twining who travelled through the Upper Doab from Farrukhabad via Firuzabad to Agra, Mathurā and Delhi, and back from Delhi via Bulandshahar, Khurjā, Koil, Kāsganj, Dārāganj and Farrukhabad to Fathgarh, in November and December 1794, has left a sad picture of the ruin of agriculture, destruction of the population and widespread brigandage throughout the region; the only oases in this wilderness of anarchy were some villages peacefully cultivated under the strong protection of De Boigne's agents.
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On the other hand, the incompetence and venality of the Maratha civil officers were notorious. As De Boigne wrote in a private letter, in March 1794,—"The pandits who have the management of all business at Sindhia's Court, will never put aside the old way of embezzling the half of what is to pass by their hands, which is so familiar in every transaction that it is not thought so much as to take any notice of it."
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Finally the Frenchmen developed the economic resources of their fiefs to an extent inconceivable to the Marathas.
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De Boigne was the first to settle European indigo-planters in the Aligarh district. They were Monsieur Jourdan (at Khair), Mr. Orr (at Mendu), John Thornton (at Koil and Machhuā), T. Longcroft (at Koil and Jalali), and Robinson and Stewart (at Māloi and Allahdād-pur.) Indigo was then the chief export of the district and it used to be shipped at Farrukhabad down the Ganges for Calcutta.
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At the beginning of 1792 a European coming with an introduction from the British Resident at Lucknow, met De Boigne at Khurja and took from him a lease of the indigo production in Khurja, Jalesar and some other mahals for three lakhs of Rupees a year. Thomas Longcroft who managed the factory at Jalali, told Twining that in 1794 he produced 3,000 maunds of finished indigo, and in good seasons 5,000 maunds. The price of a maund of indigo in 1830 was Rs. 200 or a little more. If this rate obtained in 1794, then the single factory at Jalali used to earn from six to ten lakhs of rupees in one year. How much could a Maratha jāgirdār get out of the same district under this head?
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Next to indigo the most important export of De Boigne's district was saltpetre, in which India had a monopoly of the European market during the wars of the French Revolution. In 1856, the Aligarh district produced 50,000 maunds of refined saltpetre. Supposing that in 1794 the yield was the same, this commodity (of which the price in Calcutta was Rs. 6 a maund) alone fetched three lakhs of rupees a year. It went by boat from Farrukhabad to Calcutta for exportation to Europe.
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∗ Indigo in Aligarh, Atkinson *N.W.P. Gaz.*, ii. 472-473. Lease granted by De Boigne, *DY.* ii. 85. Longcroft, Twining's *Travels in India*, 285-288,—"I observed (to Longcroft) that with one or two good years he would be able to return to Europe with a fortune". Saltpetre, Atkinson, ii. 476; Twining, p. 218 (price).
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The remedy tried by the two Maratha chiefs in Hindustan to secure better revenue, made the disease worse. Mahadji Sindhia constantly changed his diwān in a vain attempt to collect a higher proportion of his dues from the ryots and the feudatories, but this policy only led to a greater desolation of the land and squeezing of the peasantry. It is admitted that his actual collection fell to one-tenth of the standard revenue in many places. [H.P. 607.] Tukoji Holkar followed the cruder method of putting his Brahman diwāns to torture, but even he could not draw blood out of stone. The dishonesty and incapacity of the Maratha civil servants and their masters' lack of far sight in administration and of statesmanship in policy, destroyed all chances of their repeating the financial successes of De Boigne or Perron.
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The effect of this financial stringency was aggravated by the short-sighted selfishness of every Maratha prince; he built up a private treasure-hoard of his own while letting his State go to the dogs for lack of the necessary income. As Captain Broughton wrote from Daulat Rao Sindhia's camp in May 1809,—"While Sindhia is daily submitting to these and similar insults [from his starving unpaid soldiery and servants], he possesses a privy purse, stocked, it is said, to the amount of fifty lakhs; which no distress either to himself or his troops is sufficiently powerful to induce him to violate, it being an established rule to put as much as possible into it, but never to take anything out." [Letters from a Maratha Camp, p. 106.]
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Even from the tributary princes of Rajputana, De Boigne and Perron could more easily realise the promised instalments, because these princes knew that the European generals were men of their words and would hold strictly to their engagements without trying to extort a rupee more as the Maratha agents usually did. And these foreign generals rendered to the Rajput Rajas valuable services in return for the tribute paid, by putting down their rebel nobles and recovering particular districts from the hands of usurpers. This fact is illustrated in extant Persian letters from De Boigne to the Raja of Jaipur and from Perron to the Regent of Kotā.