Fall of the Mughal Empire v4.c59.s3: § 3. Degeneracy of rulers and stagnation in the Indian States
Fall of the Mughal Empire v4.c59.s3
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§ 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.