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Fall of the Mughal Empire v4.c59: Chapter LI. The Old Order and the New

Fall of the Mughal Empire v4.c59

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Chapter LI. The Old Order and the New

§ 1. Mughal imperialism contrasted with the British : Social changes

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We can judge of the achievements and failure of the Mughal Empire most clearly when we look at it as the background of the British Indian Empire familiar to us. It must be admitted that the Mughal Emperors united many provinces of India into one political unit, with uniformity of official language, administrative machinery, coinage and public service, and indeed a common type of civilisation for the higher classes. They also recognised it as a duty to preserve peace and the reign of law throughout their dominions. The British continued the same policy but more efficiently and over a much wider area of India. But here the parallel ends.

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First, British paramountcy, by the system of subsidiary alliances, injected into our royal houses the germs of a moral decline which was incurable except by downright annexation.

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Secondly, in the British administered provinces, covering two-thirds of India, but not in the protected States, the aristocracy became extinct as an order. Bernier had noticed in the middle 17th century that the Mughals had no hereditary peerage like that of England or France, but only an official and military aristocracy, personal in theory, but tending to be renewed in each generation with decreasing rank. In British India this class lost its sole reason for existing, as it was manifestly incapable of supplying the administrative leaders required by the modern civilisation now introduced by the English rulers. Thus, the wise Sir Thomas Munro did not fail to notice, as early as 1817, that, "There is perhaps no example of any conquest in which the natives have been so completely excluded from all share of the government of their country as in British India.”

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The British recognised the remnant of the functional aristocracy of the Mughal empire as hereditary princes enjoying their lands, but without any duty to the new suzerain power. Thus India’s face came to be pitted with more than six hundred Native States, like so many pock-marks, each legally of a higher status than the largest zamindari. Feudal rights and duties ceased altogether in British India, but in the mediatised States, the feudal services due to the Rajas disappeared as well as baronial turbulence, but their vassals continued to enjoy all the profits of feudalism.

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An aristocracy of wealth has grown up in British India trying to fill the vacuum caused by the abolition of the aristocracy of birth. An attempt was made by the British to create, by means of the Permanent Settlement of Land (1793), a landed aristocracy, without the political status and powers of the feudal baronage, who would help in conducting the administration and maintaining rural peace like the landed gentry who did much of the administrative work of Great Britain in an honorary capacity before the Reform Act of 1832. They were expected to be enlightened “improving landlords” and justices of the peace. But the attempt totally failed.

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Among social changes, the greatest achievement of British administration and modern civilisation has been the creation of a middle class independent of Government service and therefore more permanent and fundamentally stronger than the mansab-dār families of Mughal India. This class had become, by the year 1947, immensely larger in size, better educated, more influential and closer integrated with our life and government than the āmils and munshis, faujdārs and dāroghas, who formed the only middle class in the Mughal times, and who could not stand as a buffer between the autocratic baronage at the top and the helpless peasants and artisans at the bottom of Mughal Indian society.

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The fortunes amassed and the social standing honourably gained by our modern great lawyers, physicians, engineers, and writers, were undreamt of in the Mughal times.

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The rise of this middle class has at the same time lifted up the lowest stratum of our society, which continually feeds the class just above it with recruits. It cannot be denied that as the result of social and economic changes, even more than the direct action of an enlightened modern Government,—there has been a fairer distribution of the wealth of the country among the different grades of the population in India, and that the servile conditions of Indian workmen's life that Bernier deplored, have ceased to exist. No doubt, the improvement is being counteracted by the intensified pressure of the population on the soil which civilised rule brings in its train.

§ 2. Economic life of India, how changed

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Under British rule, the change in our economic life has been as great as that of our social life Soon after the establishment of British paramountcy, India was struck by the full blast of the Industrial Revolution in England; then came the introduction of steamer transport to Europe, the opening of railways in India, and finally the cutting of the Suez Canal. All these factors united to destroy the economic system under which the Indian millions had toiled, fed themselves, and provided the needs of their government for centuries during the middle ages. Gone was India's monopoly of indigo, saltpetre and cotton fabrics in the world market. She now sank into a producer of raw materials in the bulk instead of finished articles or of luxuries of small bulk and high value as in Mughal times. Even her coarse and coloured cotton exports to the South and East Asiatic world ceased, though these had formed more than a quarter of the East India Company's annual investment in the Mughal times.

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The attempts made in the Eighteen seventies by Sir George Birdwood, Sir William Hunter and other kind British officers, to save our artisan class from starvation by promoting the manufacture and sale of curios and objects of art, for foreign tourists, had exactly the same practical effect as applying a mop to the Atlantic waves rolling on the beach of England. In the meantime the situation was hopelessly worsened by the rise in the price of food grains due to the inflation of currency caused by the vast amount of specie sent to India to buy her raw goods for export and to pay her labourers on the daily expanding roads and railways. The real wages of our labourers could never keep pace with the rise in the price of food and clothing. Hence the blank despair which faced M. G. Ranadé, Romesh C. Dutt and G. K. Gokhalé as they contemplated India's economic future near the close of the 19th century. Cash crops and mass production of some low commodities became, no doubt, novel features of India's economic life under British rule, but they could not fully offset the daily rising price of food and increase in the number of hungry mouths without employment.

§ 3. Degeneracy of rulers and stagnation in the Indian States

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The British empire by retaining the feudal organisation of society in the Native States, prevented reform in fully one third of this vast country. Thus a sharp cleavage in the standard of education and the conditions of life between British India and the Protected States was created, though the people on the two sides constantly mingled together by reason of their sameness of race, language, creed and often of family too. The political evil of feudalism, however, was removed by the English suzerain curbing the lawless refractory nobles and restoring the supreme authority of the Rajas. Internal peace was ensured in their dominions, but not progress, for a century and a half, while British India was advancing by leaps and bounds.

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The subsidiary alliance system, while it fully met the dangers of foreign invasion and civil war, was not an un- *mixed blessing.* It robbed the people of the Protected States of the power of rebellion as the natural curative of misgovernment. Now began a rapid and hopeless decline in the moral character of our ruling Rajas and Nawābs. They continued to live as autocrats without the moral justification of being the leaders in war and fathers of clans that the founders of their dynasties had been. Civil war, as a test for the survival of the fittest to rule, was now barred out by British bayonets. As Sir Thomas Munro justly observed, “A subsidiary force has a natural tendency to render the government of every country in which it exists, weak and oppressive; to extinguish all honourable spirit among the higher classes of society. . . . It renders the prince on the throne indolent by teaching him to trust to strangers for his security; and cruel and avaricious by showing him that he has nothing to fear from the hatred of his subjects.”* Thus, as the result of a century and a half of enlightened British rule, the case of the Protected Princes in India was hopeless. Nothing could possibly keep them alive in the modern order which burst upon India on 16th August 1947.

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§ 4. *Why England failed to form a nation in India.*

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When the British resigned their trusteeship for India in 1947, they had failed to give the Indian people a political education which might enable them to stand on their own feet. This was not exactly due to selfishness on the part of our British protectors. It is a tremendous task to fit a nation for self-government after six centuries of alien domination. A king cannot be deposed by halves, and yet full responsibility for governing—and possibly also misgoverning, the dumb millions of India could not be handed over to untried indigenous leaders, till two successive deluges of

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[^ *]: Munro's letter to Marquis of Hastings, 12th Aug. 1817. The Duke of Wellington agrees,—“As soon as a subsidiary alliance has been formed, it has invariably been discovered that the whole strength of the tributary government consisted in the aid afforded by its more powerful ally, or rather protector?—and from that moment the respect, duty, and loyalty of its subjects have been weakened.” S. Owen, Wellesley, 795, 773.

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world-wars within 30 years of each other upset all former political speculations and prophecies, and forced the hands of the rulers and the ruled in India. The transfer of India's sovereignty from British to Indian hands was a revolution, accomplished amidst nearly as much bloodshed, destruction of property and the people's misery as the French Revolution, though only the smallest portion of it was due to the rulers' obstinacy.

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For this it is not fair to lay the blame on British selfishness. The fact is that while intellectual and moral reform can proceed apace from foreign impetus provided that the people respond to it, democratic government or true nationhood cannot be imposed upon a people by a decree of alien rulers; its necessary conditions are a long course of preparation or practical education and a surging up of the masses in search of the new political ideal.* But such a widespread popular upheaval was not possible under orderly, mechanical, British rule. The experiment of giving realistic political training to our people involved unimaginable dangers to public order and social stability. Hence, when the last British pro-consul withdrew with his legions, no Indian nation had been born to take his place.

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§ 5. Causes of the fall of the Mughal Empire.

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The Mughal Empire and with it the Maratha overlordship of Hindustan, fell because of the rottenness at the core of Indian society. This rottenness showed itself in the form of military and political helplessness. The country could not defend itself; royalty was hopelessly depraved or imbecile; the nobles were selfish and short-sighted; corruption, inefficiency and treachery disgraced all branches of the public service. In the midst of this decay and confusion, our literature, art and even true religion had perished.*

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∗ As President Masaryk wrote, "Democracy is not alone a form of State and of administration. It is a philosophy of life and an outlook on the world. The authority of the State and of its laws is derived from general agreement among citizens upon the main postulates of philosophy and life." Could the effects of three centuries of subjection [under Austria] be effaced by the magic of liberty? Masaryk was certain that they could not, and that a long and careful process of re-education, moral and political, yet above all moral, would be needed to restore the spirit of Hus and Comenius. *Times Lit. Sup.*, 3 March, 1950, p. 131.

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By this time India had ceased to produce leaders, with the solitary exception of Mahādji Sindhia; I do not include Jaswant Rao Holkar, because after a short and fitful career, his genius crossed its limits and merged into madness. Thus, in war, which is the supreme test of a nation's efficiency, our people willingly accepted the leadership of foreigners and colourable imitations of foreigners. The clearest proof of India's failure to produce leaders from among her sons was, the fact of our Rajas giving the command of their armies to French and Portuguese mestizoes, Eurasian lads run away from school, without a tincture of English education, illiterate European sailors,† who used to dictate letters to their Indian clerks in Urdu for Persian, and even pure Indian black Christians of Goa.

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† Such as George Thomas, Nabab Perron, and James Skinner. Others in the Aligarh district, noticed by Bishop Heber. Journal, ii. 342.

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The reason for it was the undeniable fact that Mughal India had ceased to have any school for higher teaching. Hence, any man pretending to have had a foreign education which our princes were incapable of testing, was chosen for leadership, because no Indian could be found with the least knowledge of modern arts and sciences.

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During the decline of Mughal civilisation, education died out in India; the only schools that survived devoted themselves to the low but useful work of preparing clerks and accountants. The primary education of the masses and the higher education of the classes, were alike undreamt of. Our indigenous leaders revealed their true character in the case of the Sanskrit College founded at Benares by Jonathan Duncan. The Peshwas had set up no great college of Hindu learning, and when the British established their Sanskrit College at Benares and Duncan expected the supreme head of the Brahman rāj to rejoice at this promotion of Brahmanic learning, Sir Charles Malet, the Resident at Punā, reported that when he talked enthusiastically about the merits of this “College for promoting, or rather preserving Brahmanic knowledge,...he had the mortification of thinking that his descriptions, instead of producing admiration and emulation, have been received with marks of coldness and jealousy.” [*PRC.* ii. 146, Aug. 1792.]

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∗ In Nov. 1778, the British Governor-General received a letter from the Emperor Shah Alam II (not yet old or blind) requesting the loyal gift of many rarities and two maunds of the best Patna opium for himself and a separate consignment of the same drug for his minister Abdul Ahad [C.P.C. v. No. 1212, p. 238.] "Every evening Asaf-ud-daula stupifies himself with opium. . . . His confidants are the meanest and lowest people: he dreads the society of men of worth. . . . He has spent a crore of rupees in procuring entertainment. . . . Beggars, buffoons, dancers and all that class, with fools, knaves and sycophants, compose the Court of this illustrious ruler of millions." (Sir J. Shore's letter, in Life, i. 407-408.) And yet the Lucknow people were so debased as to adore Asaf-ud-daula's memory for his reckless charity to all who begged! For the vices of Peshwa Baji Rao II, see Kharé, xiv. 6710. Delhi palace vices, p. 335n. of this book.

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Persia had ceased to be the school of the East and the spring-head of Islamic culture, with the degeneracy of her Safavi kings at the end of the 17th century, the Afghan usurpation, the blood-stained reign of Nadir Shah, and the long years of turmoil that followed his murder (1747.) Nor did Islam in India produce a new generation of scholars when the stream of teachers from Irān and Khurāsān ran dry. The great Sultans who had patronised Shia learning at their courts were now dead and succeeded by imbecile or impoverished grandsons.

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Ever since the middle of the 17th century, there had been close commercial exchange between India and England, but our royalty and ruling classes imported only European articles of luxury; none cared for European knowledge; no printing press, not even the cheapest and smallest lithographic stone was installed by the Mughal Emperors or the Peshwas. They imported only what catered to their luxury and vice.

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With the disappearance of true education, the literature now produced ceased to promote higher thinking, it merely pandered to rich men’s pride and vice. This sad fall from the age of Akbar and Tulsidas is noticeable alike in the Persian compositions of Ja‘far Zatali, the Urdu literature of the Court of Oudh, the Bengali works of Bhārat Chandra Ray and much of the latest Vaishnav poetry of Bengal. The Sanskrit and Persian languages had long ceased to bring forth any worthy fruit on the Indian soil. The new race of Hindi poets, like the flatterers of the Muslim rulers, devoted their talents to the ignoble task of flattering their worthless patrons' vanity or stimulating their baser appetites.

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§ 6. How the English have modernised India.

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The fall of the Mughal Empire meant also the fall of the Maratha Empire. The Indo-Persian civilisation which had grown up under the shadow of the Delhi Pādishāhs and the new Hindu culture which had sprouted up under the Peshwas, were both dead by the end of the 18th century. Their power for good was gone, and their lifeless corpses lingered in the country only to spread rottenness all around.

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But with the death of the Mughal Empire the middle ages in India ended and the modern age began. In Europe the fall of the Roman Empire was followed by a thousand years of disorder and darkness, out of which Europe struggled back into light only in the 15th century. Happily for India, the death of her old order was immediately followed by the birth on her soil of modern civilisation and thought. It was as if the seedlings of the Renaissance and the Reformation had been planted in the city of Rome in 476 as soon as the last Emperor Augustulus had extinguished himself after the victory of Odoacer.

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But not immediately after. The beneficent action of this change in India's destiny was at first delayed for 20 years. England was engaged in a death-grapple with Nepoleon from 1803 to 1815, and thereafter followed years of unrest and people's suffering at home before Britain's life could return to the normal. In India, too, Marquess Wellesley's lightning successes at the end of 1803 were followed by a very great set-back and a temporary reversal of his policy. It was only after the Marquis of Hastings had completed Wellesley’s unfinished task in 1818 that British imperialism in India found its feet.

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By a providential coincidence, that was just the year when the modernisation of India was taken in hand by some of her sons through their own enterprise, with the generous help of many Britons given in private, but not yet through any official agency. This was the opening of the Hindoo College (for giving high English education) on 20th January 1817, the starting of the first Bengali newspaper (the *Samāchār Darpan*) on 23rd May 1818, and the institution of the Calcutta Society for preparing, printing and distributing suitable text books in English and Bengali, on 4th July 1817.

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In deed, the intellectual and moral regeneration of India will be remembered as the greatest glory of British imperialism. Such a renaissance has not been seen anywhere else in the world’s history.* On our hopelessly decadent society, the rational progressive spirit of Europe struck with resistless force. First of all, an honest and efficient administration was imposed on the country and directed by a British agency to ensure peace and economic growth. Then, within one generation the land began to recover from the blight of mediæval theocratic rule. Education, literature, society, religion, man’s handiwork and political life,—all felt the revivifying touch of the new impetus from the west. The dry bones of a stationary oriental society began to stir under the wand of a heaven-sent magician. It was truly a Renaissance, wider, deeper, and more revolutionary than that of Europe after the fall of Constantinople.

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In the reform of thought and morals, the pressure of rulers from the top is not half so potent an instrument as a passionate awakening in the people’s heart ; that alone can give the reform its necessary momentum and permanence.

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∗ From this point onwards, I repeat some passages of my earlier writings, e.g., *India through the Ages*. The priceless corpus of information on the Renaissance in India is Brojendranath Banerji’s Bengali works *Sambādpatré Sekāler Kathā*, 2 vols. &c. Also *Calcutta Christian Observer*, 1832-1864.

§ 7. The Indian Renaissance

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The Indian Renaissance was possible only because a principle was discovered by which India could throw herself into the full current of modern civilisation in the outer world without totally discarding her past. She could approach the temple of modern art and science not as a naked beggar, not as an utter alien, but as a backward and at present impoverished country cousin of Europe. She had a spiritual and intellectual heritage of which she need not be ashamed before the world. In fact, India was not called upon to plume herself in the borrowed feathers of European civilisation, she had only to assimilate modern thought and modern arts into her inner life without any loss of what she had so long possessed.

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Ram Mohan Roy was the first to reach the root principle of the Indian Renaissance; it is the belief that modern civilisation is not antagonistic to the heart of Hinduism, and that the external trappings in which the two civilisations differ are mere accidents. He preached and showed by his own life that India would not lose her soul by welcoming western science and thought, but she would thereby rather recover her lost glory. The basis of such a union between the modern west and the ancient east was the philosophy of humanism, which springs from the belief that God pervades the universe, *i.e.*, pantheism. Thus, the Hindu Vedāntist, the Islāmic Sufi, and the Christian Unitarian can worship at the same temple. So, he taught his countrymen to accept modern philosophy and science without fear or suspicion.

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The ground was prepared for this revolution in thought by the change in our education system which began in Bengal about 1810 and grew with increasing force from 1818. (Bengal will best serve as my illustration.) Education through the English language was the lever which moved the mediæval Indian world, after centuries of inertia under Muslim rule.

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The mere copying of the externals of European civilisation, without undergoing a new birth of the spirit, cannot produce a renaissance. It led only to the growth of the Anglo-Muslim culture of the Oudh Nawab’s Court, which was a bastard sprout producing no flower or fruit. In it the inner spirit of modern civilisation was wanting, and only the outer trappings of European life were borrowed and put on the persons of Indians who then looked like idiots or buffoons. No modern literature took its birth at the Lucknow royal court; the pictures and poetry it produced were mostly pornographic; Asaf-ud-daula used to eat 64 grains of the strongest Turkish opium every day. His successor, Sadat Ali knew English and a little French too, but turned out on the throne to be such a drunkard that he had to be assisted to his bed almost every night.

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This Renaissance was at first an intellectual awakening, and it influenced our education, thought, literature and art; but in the second generation (1840-1870) it became a moral force and set itself to reforming our society and religion. It began with our study of English literature and modern philosophy from books written in the English language, that is, with what is called higher or college education, as distinct from the mere knowledge of English for the work of clerks or interpreters to the British officers.

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As Sir Charles Trevelyan wrote in 1836, “The curiosity of the people is thoroughly roused, and the passion for English knowledge has penetrated the most obscure, and extended to the most remote parts of India. . . . There appears to be no limit to the number of scholars [in the English schools] except that of the number of teachers whom the Committee is able to provide.”

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In the next generation, the fruits of this English education produced a new and highly valuable literature in the provincial languages of India, at first by translation, next by adaptation from English works, and finally as original compositions. In these writings the influence of English literature and European thought is unmistakable, but equally unmistakable is their success in adapting the foreign spirit and literary model to the Indian mind and tradition. Their best specimens represent the spirit of England clad in a half-oriental garb, but there has been no wholesale borrowing from the west.

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As surely as the Renaissance in Europe was followed by the Reformation, so too, in India a modification of our social relations, our general outlook upon life, and our religious doctrines and practices was bound to result from our English education. Attempts at social reform began to take shape from 1855 under our own leaders. And the movement gained great impetus from the extensive legislative powers given to the people in the 20th century. Under British rule it was possible for an Indian to be in a minority of one, in his opinions and practices, and yet remain in society. In Mughal and Hindu times, such a free-thinker had to turn a homeless monk or the founder of a new outcaste sect, if he was not beheaded as a ‘public enemy.’ (Raghuvamsam, xv. 51.);—there was no place for him in the community.

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Modern India has become an independent, fully sovereign State. That political evolution has been made possible only by British imperialism. This is the reason why the noblest sons of India, like Bankim Chandra Chatterji, Dr. Prafulla Chandra Ray, and Gopal Krishna Gokhalé, have recognised a divine dispensation in the fall of the Mughal Empire, as looked at from before and behind.

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