Fall of the Mughal Empire v4.c59.s1: § 1. Mughal imperialism contrasted with the British : Social changes
Fall of the Mughal Empire v4.c59.s1
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§ 1. Mughal imperialism contrasted with the British : Social changes
v4.c59.s1.1
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.
v4.c59.s1.2
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.”
v4.c59.s1.4
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.
v4.c59.s1.5
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.
v4.c59.s1.6
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.