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The Inner Conflict of Tradition: Essays in Indian Ritual, Kingship, and Society c15: 11 Western Expansion, Indian Reaction: Mughal Empire and British Raj

The Inner Conflict of Tradition: Essays in Indian Ritual, Kingship, and Society c15

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English

Contents

11 Western Expansion, Indian Reaction: Mughal Empire and British Raj

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Expansion and reaction: the coupling of the two concepts in a complementary pair seems obvious. In fact it is too obvious to be true. Expansion of Western, specifically British, control over the Indian subcontinent there certainly was—even though our understanding of this complex phenomenon is less than perfect. But what about its counterpart, the Indian reaction? One is even tempted to ask, Was there a reaction at all? Such a question flies in the face of the consecrated rhetoric that glibly speaks of the defense of traditional values, national identity, and the struggle for freedom. But then the same goes for the countervailing slogans of the white man's burden and the *mission civilisatrice*—not to mention the ambitious utterances of our latter-day development ideologists, which make the rhetoric of their colonial predecessors look rather pale and shame-faced.

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The point is, of course, that all this rhetoric—whether of the old-fashioned colonial, the equally old-fashioned (though hardly out of fashion) nationalist, or the brand-new foreign-aid variety—will not help us to understand what has happened and is still happening. If we want to give substance to the theme of expansion and reaction, we shall have to interpret it in a radically different way. First of all, we shall have to avoid the obtrusive logic of the action-reaction type, which traps us into viewing the story of European involvement exclusively in terms of a clear-cut confrontation. Even when the swelling tide of nationalism produced the noncooperation and civil disobedience movements and the clashes of 1941, the confrontation kept a curious air of tepidity, which led one historian to speak of "a Dasehra duel between two hollow statues, locked in motionless and simulated com-

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This essay appeared in slightly different form under the title "Was There an Indian Reaction: Western Expansion in Indian Perspective," in *Expansion and Reaction*, edited by H. L. Wesseling (Leiden, 1978), 31–58. Reprinted by permission.

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bat.”¹ It was only with the breaking away of the Muslims that “a real ferocity appeared—between Indian and Indian.” Nor is this a pecularity of the Indo-British entanglement. Other cases of expansion—take for instance Islam or Buddhism—similarly refuse to respond to the action-reaction logic.

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Admittedly the story is a complex and often contradictory one, which moreover ranges over a huge and diverse subcontinent. It seems, then, a natural step to take refuge in breaking up the all-too-global picture into probably endless series of areas, sectors, groups, and instances, where confrontation and reaction did occur in different ways and with different outcomes. No doubt such case studies contribute most valuable material for our understanding of the structures and processes involved. Moreover, it is clear that the two parties to the expansion-reaction game were far from being unified blocs. Even the British Indian government and its prestigious “steel frame,” the Indian Civil Service, hardly resembled the powerfully monolithic juggernaut of popular imagination,² so that here too there is unlimited scope for fragmentation. The main trouble with this break-up, however interesting its results, is that it can only lead to ever further atomization, while a comprehensive view recedes more and more behind an impenetrable screen of monographs on unique situations and events—as indeed seems to happen too often in modern Indian historiography.

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The fragmentation inherent in the expansion-reaction paradigm seems, however, to cover another, perhaps somewhat unexpected, but fundamental fact. Namely, that the aims, terms of reference, modes of operation, and organization of the parties involved had little if anything in common.³ In other words, what we should like to construe as the complementary expansion-reaction pair takes place on two different and separate planes, in two distinct worlds, as it were. Their contacts and confrontations could only have an incidental and episodic character for lack of common ground. Even in those instances where it was actively pursued, the “dialogue” is more often than not a dialogue of deaf-mutes, or at least one of misunderstandings.

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Does this mean that we have to resign ourselves to this atomization or, alternatively, that we have to fall into the trap of another fragmentation along the lines of Eurocentric, Indocentric, Sinocentric historiographies? I do not think that we have to submit to either of these unattractive alternatives. But first we should try to characterize the society where, since the second half of the eighteenth century, the expansion of British control took place.

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The first thing that strikes us is—in contradistinction to, for example, China—the virtual absence of a long-established empire commanding active and unquestioning allegiance. There was, of course, the Mughal Empire. But what was the extent of its effectualness, what the reality covered by its prestigious name? It is not that its origin in conquest by Central-Asian warriors in any way impaired its acceptance and legitimacy, nor was its explicit Islamic character a serious impediment to acceptance by its largely non-Muslim subjects. In both respects, the Mughal Empire had old and venerable precedents in the Delhi Sultanate. The truth is that—again in contradistinction to China—no ruler, whether Hindu rājā or Muslim pādshāh, could have ultimate authority and legitimacy. For these belonged to the ideal brahmin, that is, to the ultramundane renouncer, and only on condition that he kept himself free from entanglement in society, so that the ruler was barred from access to the source of ultimate authority.⁴ A comparable situation obtains in Islam where the separation of secular power and spiritual authority also keeps the ruler under a cloud of suspicion. Paradoxically, where no grave questions of the divine right of kings, the mandate of heaven, or similar transcendental concepts were directly involved, the position of the ruler was unproblematic. Whatever his origin or confession, he could be accepted with comparative ease and even enjoy a modicum of effective allegiance. So there never was a serious problem of the Mughal’s legitimacy. Whatever legitimacy and authority were possible under these circumstances he certainly possessed. If we may attach any value to the reaction of an old man in a Rajput town, who, when told of the British departure from Delhi, ponderously supposed that in that case the Mughals would be back in power,⁵ the legitimacy of Mughal rule vastly outlasted even the twilight of its declining presence.

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The doubts about the Mughal Empire are in another area. The extant administrative documents, relatively few though they may be, conjure up a most impressive picture of a centralized bureaucratic empire, efficiently run on lines of adequate regulations.⁶ No doubt, if more of the Mughal archives had been salvaged, or if more official documents come to light, this impression would only be further substantiated. However, even the most complete archives cannot tell the whole story. Perhaps we should even say that the greater their precision of focus and formulation, the less they will fit untidy reality. And so perhaps we should not be surprised that the empire appeared to observers as singularly ineffectual. Or, as the comment of an English factor has it, “every man honours the king, but no man obeys him”.⁷

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This inconsistency can, of course, be explained away by invoking an organic scheme of rise, decline, and fall that explains itself and only needs to be filled in with details. In this view, the Mughal empire had its day of youthful vigor in the sixteenth century under Akbar. Its middle age in the seventeenth century sees the beginning of decline—notwithstanding the fact that it reaches its greatest expansion at the end of the century—and old age is reached in the eighteenth century when the empire founders in chaos, its remnants salvaged by the incipient British-Indian Empire, which then starts on a new cycle of rise and fall. Such a view, however, does little to provide adequate reasons for the fatal decline of the once impressive imperial administration. The reason cannot be found in the personalities and capacities of the successive rulers, for the prime requisite of an adequate and well-established bureaucracy is that it withstand just such vagaries. Indeed, a good case can be made for the strength of Mughal administration even under the strains and stresses of Aurangzeb's Deccan campaigns (especially after 1689) and of his declining years.⁸

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So the discussion centers, not on the nature of the empire, but on possible explanations for its decline and break-up. The doyen of Mughal studies, Sir Jadunath Sarkar, has given strength to the argument that the empire was fatally impaired by the break between Hindus and Muslims caused by Aurangzeb's religious policies.⁹ Recently a variety of other explanations have been brought forward. Satish Chandra has pointed to the disruptive effect of intense factionalism over the allocation of increasingly scarce land assignments among the vastly increased service nobility.¹⁰ Irfan Habib sees the decisive factor in the exploitation of assigned lands, leading to flight and finally rebellion by the oppressed peasantry.¹¹ J. F. Richards stresses Aurangzeb's decision to direct his efforts at subduing the Marathas instead of coming to a settlement with them so as to round off the Deccan conquests and integrate them, with the result that "the imperial administration and military machinery was stretched past its capacity".¹² Finally M. Athar Ali seeks to place the crisis of the Mughal Empire in a global context by contrasting the growing preponderance of Northwestern Europe with the economic stagnation of the Islamic empires, which in the last resort he ascribes to a cultural failure of the entire Islamic world.¹³ The debate is certain to continue for some time to come,¹⁴ but the divergence of even the most recent opinions seems to suggest that in the end we may have to admit defeat in the face of an inextricable tangle of interacting causes—a formula often intoned in such cases.

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In the meantime, we might consider, albeit tentatively, whether we are asking the right question. Our perception of the Mughal breakdown is, of course, conditioned by our knowledge of what happened afterward, namely, the unforeseen takeover by the British. In other words, was the breakdown as absolute and irreversible as India's subsequent history has made it? Questions about what might have been are notoriously vacuous. We should not, however, forget that there was at least one other Islamic empire, the Ottoman, whose doom was already spelled out in gloomy terms in the beginning of the sixteenth century. All four pillars of the state—religion, justice, the council, and finance—are broken, and one wonders whether matters can continue in this way, a Dutch consul reported in 1626 from Aleppo.¹⁵ Well, as we know with the inexorable certainty of hindsight, matters were to continue for another three hundred years, and it took a global conflagration to put an end to them. When such time spans are involved, we may wonder whether we should not look for the reasons of the remarkable resilience rather than for those of the decline. Both sets of reasons may be largely the same. Most, if not all, is in the eye of the beholder. In other words, what we perceive as a process of decline, relentlessly leading to an unavoidable and definitive fall, may well be, not a process, but a structure—and a remarkably durable one at that, allowing for dramatic ups and downs without an inevitable and irreversible collapse.

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The Mughal Empire, it would seem, fits very well into the perspective of resilience and durability. Thus, J. F. Richards convincingly concludes that "the vector of change was always in the direction of centralized power exercised by an Islamic ruler . . . . Despite the extent and severity of revolts and disorder in the first half of the eighteenth century Muslim rulers and Muslim institutions retained a tenacious hold on power."¹⁶ If this is the case, the question as to how the empire actually worked rather than how it declined and collapsed imposes itself.

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In the center of the stage were the Mughal and his retainers, the *mansabdārs*, whose primary function was the recruitment and maintenance of specified contingents of the Mughal heavy cavalry, the prescribed size of the contingent indicating the mansabdār's rank. These ranks, it should be noted, did not derive from a hierarchical command structure, but only represented a gradation of status. A military command structure was largely missing. This made for maximal flexibility, but it also meant that the Mughal was not comfortably situated at the apex of a vertical military hierarchy but had to move in a horizontal field of personal relationships with at least the higher-ranking mansabdārs or nobles—this possibly was the reason for the complicated rules of court etiquette, which stressed the otherwise less-than-absolute rulership of the Mughal. In other words, the central, or at least most conspicuous, organizational principle was that of an elaborate predatory war band with an ethos of martial panache and personal loyalty to the Mughal, proven on the battlefield and rewarded with heroic titles. Thus the Mughal primarily worked through a personal network of high-ranking retainers that was ideologically oriented toward conquest.

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However, this was only part and perhaps not even the most important part of the picture. The actual base of the empire was clearly agrarian, which means that the central concern had to be the extraction of whatever agrarian surplus could be made available, for this had to pay for the mansabdārs and their troopers, either indirectly through salaries derived from the crown lands or directly through assignments of taxable land (*jāgīr*). So the main problem was not conquest but the extraction and management of the agrarian surplus from the tracts that could be controlled. This obviously called for intensive regulation and considerable bureaucratic effort. The mansabdārs, therefore, were not only warriors and courtiers, they had to be competent administrators as well, so as to be able to head the bureaucratic establishments at the center and in the provinces—not to mention the supervision of the management of their land assignments.

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That there was indeed an impressive bureaucracy which administered the complicated regulation system is, as already mentioned, amply attested. However, even the best of military and administrative systems cannot by themselves produce the agrarian surplus that they need for their own maintenance. This meant that the imperial undertaking—apart from its being a “gamble on the monsoon”—essentially depended on the degree of cooperation that could be obtained from the local producers or, rather, from their leaders, the local men of substance. Over the centuries, a considerable store of mutual accommodation as well as of technical experience with assessment had been built up, but the yearly realization of the agrarian revenue always remained a precarious matter of what in each case the trade could bear.

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Because of the insecure agrarian base, conquest remained a necessary complement to the management of the areas already under control, and as we saw, the central organization and ideology were in principle geared to that purpose. However, conquest—as distinct from mere raiding—not only meant a fairly heavy outlay in campaign costs, but also, and more important, the winning over of the local men who were in actual control of the agrarian resources in the areas to be conquered. This in turn meant that these new “subjects” had to be rewarded, preferably by integrating them into the mansabdār corps and giving them the corresponding salaries in cash or taxable land. Thus, for instance, the conquests in the Deccan resulted in the influx of a great number of Deccani notables into the higher mansabdār ranks.¹⁷

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This investment in local influence was always a risky one. For whatever was to be added to the central resources in crown lands and the revenue to be derived from them was in fact largely preempted by the demand for salaries and assignments to pay the rising number of mansabdārs. In the case of the Deccan, the conquest conspicuously failed to produce the expected returns and even seems to have created a severe shortage of assignments. Even the newly won crown lands of Golconda, which were left relatively undisturbed by the Maratha inroads, could not remedy the pressing demand created by the expansion of the mansabdār corps.¹⁸ In this way, the effects of direct military failure in open battle were less damaging than the risks of successful conquest—particularly since the Mughal heavy cavalry usually remained master of the battlefield till they were outdated by the firing power and organization of the sepoy battalions. The danger was in the aftermath of conquest.

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So the empire remained precariously suspended between the opposite needs of careful husbanding of its resources and risky investment in conquest. But in order to put this dilemma in its proper context, two further points must be considered, namely, the role of trade and the problem of the frontier.

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While there is no doubt that the main prop of the Mughal Empire was agriculture, it would seem that trade and finance as important, even pivotal, factors are left somewhat in the dark. The language of the official documents and the chronicles puts almost exclusive stress on the warrior-administrator with his troopers and clerks on the one hand and the peasant or ryot (*ra'īyat*) on the other, and nothing in between. The situation looks as if the administration was in direct contact with the peasant-producers who provided the sinews of war as well as of peace. Such a situation, where all manner of intermediaries are excluded and dealings are directly with each peasant separately seems indeed to have been the ideal, as it also was of the British administration.¹⁹ And it stands to reason that the bureaucratic idiom was geared to this ideal. However, the various ways in which the sources insist on direct relations with the peasant—to the point of encouraging him to pay his revenue directly into the treasury, bypassing the revenue collectors²⁰—suggest that actual practice will have been rather different. In fact, it could hardly have been otherwise.

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The point is that at least from the thirteenth century onward, the revenue was assessed and paid in cash.²¹ So the crux of the matter was the conversion of the extracted surplus into money. The relationship between warrior-administrator and peasant could therefore hardly be a direct one. In between the two was the cash nexus. Short of an enormous state trading organization—even with the help of modern facilities such ventures are beset with dismal failures—the administration was unable to handle the cash nexus by itself. The only possibility was to shift the burden of the problem to the peasant and let him cope as best he could with the conversion tangle.

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Now "peasant" is a reputedly vague category—in fact, something of an abominable snowman of Indian history, ubiquitous but elusive. But so much is clear, the actual tiller or cultivator could hardly be called upon to make revenue payments in cash. The evidence is scanty, but what we know clearly indicates an utterly depressed condition of the country people.²² As a Dutch observer noted about 1614, "When travelling through the country, I have often wondered whence so much money could be collected, for they live extremely poorly and meanly."²³ Even the growers of an important crop like indigo near the great center Agra were "constrained to sell to engrossers at very low prices for want of money to supply the needful."²⁴ The cultivator, then, appears to be generally unable to deal with the revenue demand by himself, nor can he have been an interesting target for the revenue authorities. So both "peasant" and administrator needed an intermediary class of financiers and merchants, such as the indigo engrossers, who had sufficient liquid capital at their disposal to handle the cash nexus. Although the sources have little but disparaging remarks to offer on merchants and moneylenders, it seems safe to infer that they actually were the pivot of the imperial enterprise.

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That the sources nevertheless tend to ignore this class need not surprise us, since they stress the warrior-administrator's outlook and values. Generally speaking, the merchant is, from the point of view of agrarian society, a marginal figure, if he is not roundly deprecated as a dangerous interloper. Thus the ancient Indian book of statecraft, the *Arthaśāstra*, ranges the merchant with the "thieves known under other names" and describes him as a "thorn" in the body politic.²⁵ Possibly his pivotal importance made him even more suspect in the eyes of those who depended on him. On the other hand, the commercial class was far from being easily definable. The variety of its operations made it perfectly possible to classify the merchant and financier in other ways. His access to local or regional markets meant that his function was the marketing of the agrarian surplus. This enabled him to act as a source of credit and to "engage for the revenue." And this in turn was practically tantamount to land control. He could then quite naturally be labeled as a landholder, while conversely, the landholder had to have liquidity and credit at his disposal. Superior rights in land had by nature a commercial aspect, and we do indeed meet landholders of different denominations who at the same time had important commercial interests.²⁶ The fact, attested by sixteenth-century documents, that superior rights in land were a perfectly saleable commodity, also bears out the connection of landholding and commerce.²⁷

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By this route, the merchant and financier found his way into the bureaucracy to which he was anyhow indispensable. Tax collecting and "engaging for the revenue" look very much like the two faces of the same Janus—if indeed they were not identical—and we can readily understand the orders, which, as already noted, attempted to bypass the *'āmil*, or tax collector. As one mansabdār complained with characteristic literary flourish, "the boat of his jāgīr was floundering in the flood of misappropriations raised by his tempestuous 'āmils." And this was only a jāgīr; the vast imperial and provincial bureaucracy must have offered staggering opportunities to the "tempestuous." At any rate, whether tempestuous or not, the official tax collector needed to have the same financial expertise, knowledge of the district, and understanding of the market as the grain dealer and moneylender.

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Even though the Mughals clearly strove to keep commercial interests and official administration apart, they badly needed the cooperation of these experts and they could hardly avoid recruiting them to the financial departments of their bureaucracy. Thus the repeated injunctions against the farming out of revenue rights seem to indicate that this was more of a practice than the sources want us to believe. Moreover, it is difficult to see how, for instance, the holders of land assignments (*jāgīrdār*), often posted at a great distance from their assigned lands, could manage them without leaving a great measure of freedom to their ‘āmils. The question whether the actual arrangement was technically one of farming or not seems largely an academic one. In fact, the practice of farming out the collection of estate rents to groups of local financiers who provided for the management of the estate while being equally involved with the district administration through family connections seems to have remained a common practice in the nineteenth and even twentieth centuries.²⁸ We know the difficulties that the incipient English administration experienced on a far larger scale in the second half of the eighteenth century over the problem of divorcing commerce from administration.

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So it cannot come as a surprise when on one hand we learn that local governors seem in practice to have been free to enter the market on their own initiative, while on the other hand, we see merchant community leaders in political roles, financing pretenders to imperial succession or negotiating political settlements. No less indicative are the fairly common instances of public authorities lending money to merchants and vice versa in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries²⁹—that is, long before the time of the empire’s break-up. Nor was there a serious barrier preventing the merchant-financier from entering the ranks of the mansabdār nobility.³⁰ Even military roles came easily within his purview, since his operations would anyhow have acquainted him with the use of arms, both for the control of the revenue-paying estates and for providing protection to his transport.³¹ The cash nexus made the combination of commercial and financial operations with land control on the one hand and official administrative, on occasion even military, functions on the other rather natural and unavoidable.

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The point of all this is not, of course, to celebrate the period as one ‘‘of equal opportunities’’ and ‘‘careers open to talent.’’ The essential point is that we should be wary of viewing the empire as a rigidly centralized and hierarchical bureaucratic structure rationally extracting and managing its agrarian resources. The Mughals certainly wanted it to be just that, but their imperial pyramid had to be built on the quicksands of personal networks with variously overlapping personnel and interests, which controlled the local and regional markets and thereby the surrounding agrarian tracts. It was these groups and networks that were in actual control of the sources of revenue on which the empire depended. Instead of controlling them from a commanding height, the Mughal, in order to get at the resources necessary for his survival, had to involve himself all the time in local affairs and had to stake his power in the ever-changing alignments of factions jostling for local and regional predominance. By the same token, local influence was free to encroach on the imperial center. The integrity of the whole was therefore in the intertwining and overlapping of interests competing for the distribution of power, rather than in the spectacular use of superior force, which moreover could all too easily lead to overextension. The system, then, was one of a "balancing of relative weakness," managed by conflict in which the Mughal could at best be a superior arbiter, arranging and rearranging the distribution of power by a judicious and sparing use of his resources.³² Viewed in this perspective, the imposing pyramid of imperial power sags into a rather shapeless horizontal reality, formed by constantly shifting power configurations and governed by pervasive conflict.

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The resulting diffusion of power was not, however, mere confusion and chaos. The neat picture propounded by the sources, which opposes the peasant-producer and the warrior-administrator as the two poles of the empire, is broken in the middle by the operation of the cash nexus. But the same phenomenon can also offer us a vantage point for discerning a certain leading principle in the seemingly chaotic free-for-all. This principle would, as we saw, be hard to find in the formal administrative and military structure of the empire; rather, we find it in the movements of trade.

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Though the imperial administration held on to an exhaustive organization of the total area claimed by the Mughal in nested territorial units—pargana, district, province—it would be misleading to view the empire as an integrated territorial whole, pushing its boundaries ever further into the subcontinent. Rather, we have to think of the empire in terms of strings of greater and smaller centers controlling their immediate hinterlands. These centers were the market towns, where the cash nexus found its natural solution. From these towns, the business communities could control the immediate agrarian hinterland, extract the marketable surplus, convert it into cash, and pay the revenue. These greater and smaller market centers did not exist in isolation. They were linked with each other by an extensive network of trade routes. In an ancient trading area like India, with its strategic position in the Indian Ocean and its overland connections with Western and Central Asia, important trade routes existed together with a well-developed system of long-distance transport and finance. "All nations bring coin and carry away commodities for the same; and this coin is buried in India and goeth out not," as an early English merchant succinctly put it.³³

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Rather than the actual control of vast territories, which anyhow had to be left to all manner of intermediaries, the leading principle of imperial power appears to have been the control of trade routes and the market towns along them. The emphasis on the protection of the roads and the principle that the officer in whose jurisdiction a robbery or theft had been committed had either to recover the stolen goods or pay compensation were obviously dictated by more than a simple concern for public order as an aim in itself.³⁴ The safety of the trade routes clearly was of vital importance to the empire. The remittances of revenue depended on the capacity of long-distance trade and finance for this essential service. The breaking away of provincial administrations and their becoming independent sultanates—as happened to the Delhi Sultanate—may well have been occasioned by severe imbalances in interregional commerce or the rerouting of trade rather than by purely military weakness. Conversely, the Mughal Empire’s cohesion may have had the strength of interregional trade as its mainstay, since the revenue transmitted through the channels of interregional commerce was an important factor in financing this trade. That the Delhi Sultantate, like so many other Indian empires, had a history of repeated break-ups while the Mughal Empire did not would seem to be a tribute to the increased strength of interregional commerce, stimulated by the growth of overseas trade. The weakening of the Mughal Empire may, then, have been caused by the impossibility of controlling the sea lanes and forcing the seaborne trade to use the ports that it favored. The growing concentration on Calcutta in the eighteenth century, corresponding to a rerouting of trade and a falling-off of other trading areas, including the routes to Western and Central Asia, may have had more to do with the declining effectiveness of the empire than its military-administrative weakness.³⁵

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Admittedly, this line of reasoning raises more questions than this essay can even begin to answer. But it seems safe to assume that roads and their trade provided the basic framework of the empire. It was only through the intermediaries of the market towns along the trade routes that the cash nexus could be handled. This meant that the Mughal’s effective power and authority—as distinct from mere ceremonial suzerainty to be invoked or disregarded at will—was virtually limited to the trading centers and their immediate hinterlands. As the Dutch Company merchant Pelsaert reported, the Mughal “is to be regarded as king of the plains and open roads only”.³⁶ The expansion of the Mughal Empire was therefore as much a matter of extending control along the main routes as of developing lateral feeding roads and qasbahs in the further hinterlands.

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By the same logic, the limited areas of effective control interconnected by the main and lateral roads left large interstices where the Mughal had to content himself with, at best, a nominal overlordship, leaving the management of affairs to the local *magnati et potentes*. That the latter were either recognized as tributary chiefs or, if they could not be made to agree to a tributary arrangement known as rebels and robbers was, of course, a fine but largely theoretical distinction. In practice, the personnel of both categories could and did change from one to the other with disconcerting ease.

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Thus Pelsaert, after stating that the Mughal’s rule only extended over the plains and open roads, continues: “for in many places you can travel only with a strong body of men or on payment of heavy tolls to rebels. The whole country is enclosed and broken up by many mountains and the people who live in, or beyond the mountains know nothing of any king or of Jahangir; they recognize only their rājās who are very numerous. Jahangir, whose name implies that he grasps the whole world, must therefore be regarded as ruling no more than half the dominions which he claims.”

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This would not have been so serious a limitation if the situation could have been stabilized in a durable manner. But, of course, that would have been too much to expect, and it stands to reason that the activities of the “rebels” in the interstitial areas were primarily directed at the trade routes, where sizable gains, ranging from simple plunder to regular transit dues, could be made.³⁷ Tolls and transit dues, though certainly an object of imperial regulation, were levied not only by “rebels,” but also by tributary rājās and even imperial officers, whether authorized to do so or not. An instructive case is provided by the transit dues levied by the rājā of Dhaita—not a “rebel”—on the road from Surat to Burhanpur. When the English complained on the grounds of the exemption from transit dues granted to them by the emperor, they were made to understand that the emperor could not interfere. The interesting point is that this was not so much a matter of the rājā’s autonomy as it was of the tributary arrangement, for, as the emperor somewhat lamely but understandably explained, it was out of the transit dues that the rājā paid his tribute.³⁸ Obviously, the empire was not a territorial unity, but this case shows the degree to which the emperor not only acquiesced in, but depended on, local situations and arrangements that went against the grain of imperial regulation. Quite apart from tributary rājās, there were also cases of villages forcibly exacting transit dues, even within a few miles of the imperial center, Agra. Even worse is reported by Pelsaert, who mentions the rājā of Rajpipla’s forces pillaging up to and inside Surat. Nor were the immediate neighborhoods of even greater centers, such as Ahmadabad, Agra, Delhi, and Lahore, spared the inroads of “thieves and robbers,” coming “in force by night and day like open enemies”³⁹—all this in the twenties of the sixteenth century, that is, long before there was any question of an impending breakdown of the empire.

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The point to be stressed is not the deficiencies of public order—the situation seems to have compared favorably with that in other areas, for instance, the Deccan sultanates—but that observers seem to have taken such disturbances as in the nature of things, as a fact of life. The basic structure, then, to which one had to adapt oneself, was the precarious balance of “regulation” tracts round the market towns and uncontrolled interstitial areas with their numerous rājās beyond the Mughal’s effective grasp. Or, in Mughal terms, revenue paying, or *ra’īyatī*, areas as against the “rebellious”

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ones known as *mawās*.⁴⁰ Since the Mughal could not hope definitively to subdue the *mawās*, he had to settle for an uneasy and constantly changing balance of forces.

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In this context, we can perhaps better understand the problems involved in the dual aim of conquest and careful management of already controlled areas. As already pointed out, the precariousness of the agrarian resource base often made conquest a likely or even unavoidable proposition. But we also saw that conquest could well turn into a self-defeating venture. The Mughals must have been perfectly aware of this risk. That they nevertheless gave prominence to conquest seems to have another reason. This is that there was not just an external frontier, which one could either choose to round off and secure or to push further out. The real frontier was a ragged and shifting internal one, dividing *ra'īyatī* and *mawās*. On the one hand, control of the main trade routes had to be followed through to their end. Stopping at a particular point, say half-way across the Deccan, would not only impair the use of the routes, which would then depend on what happened at the end beyond the empire's control, but, what is more important, uncontrolled forces would find sanctuary there and be able to interfere with traffic even on the Mughal side. On the other hand, with the extension of control along the trade routes, the interstitial areas grew *pari passu*. Both faces of the dilemma were amply demonstrated by Aurangzeb's experiences in conquering the Deccan, but by the same token, it seems doubtful whether he had much of a real choice between continuing his costly campaigns or limiting his efforts to the areas conquered earlier.⁴¹

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The problem showed its sharpest edge in Aurangzeb's campaigns, but we may doubt whether this was simply a matter of foreign conquest that one could decide for or against as one saw fit. The problem was essentially the same as that of the inner frontier. The inner frontier was not, of course, a more-or-less fixed line but consisted of wide stretches of area weaving round the trade arteries. In these stretches, competing groups of warriors, traders, and landholders—categories which, as we saw, easily overlapped to the point of being indistinguishable—converged and struggled for control, sometimes coming dangerously near to the main centers. To understand the nature of these areas, it may be useful to recall the classical Indian opposition between the areas, or patches, of settled agriculture and the wastes surrounding them, each with its own way of life and institutions. While family and caste were at home in the agricultural village, the wastes were the home of the warrior and his war band. The two, though opposite and perpetually in conflict—latent or patent—with each other, were not mutually exclusive. People from the villages would join the warriors in the wastes, while the warrior and his retainers might either be called into the village for protection against other warriors or force their protection upon the village. Agriculturalists would try to extend their cultivation to the wastes, which they also needed for grazing their cattle, while warriors would strive for control of the settled areas and their productivity.⁴² Most important, however, was the fact that the connections between the areas of settled agriculture and between them and the greater urban centers ran through the wastes.

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Thus, for instance, an early Rajput chronicle of the great Rathor house relates how an ancestor, Vīrama, after joining two leading members of the inimical Johiyo clan, started a feud against his elder brother, was expelled, made attacks on the "imperial road," fought and dodged the troops of the sultan, and finally, combining again with his two Johiyo allies, "went and unyoked his carts at Vaderana. And the Johiyos gave Vīrama the fourth part (of the profits of) the road." Then, finding new allies through marriage, he "started to devastate the territory of the Johiyos and to seize the whole (profit of) the road," till Vīrama at last was killed with 140 of his men, as was the leading Johiyo, when the latter retaliated by devastating the villages controlled by Vīrama. And so the story of feuds, alliances, establishing and losing control over roads and villages, founding and attacking towns and principalities went on.⁴³ Though this particular episode relates to the fifteenth century, it may well epitomize the inner frontier under the Mughals.

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As will be clear from its similarity with the small-scale situation of the village and the surrounding wastes, the inner frontier was ubiquitous. But it was, of course, weightiest around the main through routes, which attracted the greatest density of interested parties, especially bands of warriors, and a correspondingly high level of competition and conflict. These areas amounted in many cases to what might be called "frontier marches",⁴⁴ which included both revenue-paying regulation tracts around the market centers and uncontrolled areas in ever-changing balance. Now cultivation and regulation were extended, then again sedition took over, whole tracts reverting to mawās status and giving shelter to "malefactors" and "non-chiefs."

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The only thing that the Mughals could do to reduce these inner marches to a modicum of order was to involve themselves in local affairs and stake their power in the ongoing tussle for local control—an activity that tallied particularly well with their origin and ideology of a war band. The time-honored and, in fact, only way to do this successfully was to make use of the pervasive conflict between the different participants and to enter into alliances with a number of them, so as to control the others. That is, in many ways they had to act, not so much as powerful overlords, although this was certainly their intention, but rather as partners in the affairs of the inner marches.

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The pattern for these arrangements was set from the start by the Mughal- Rajput alliance, which made the empire in effect a joint venture. This meant that the Mughals had to tie some of the great Rajput houses into their system by establishing asymmetric marriage alliances with them, which virtually made the Mughal into the highest ranking Rajput, and by giving them high mansabdār ranks with the corresponding remunerations and court privileges. This particular alliance was a notable success. But the arrangement had as its corollary that many of the important roads running south from the Delhi-Agra area had to be left in the control of Rajput chiefs.

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The direct route between Surat and Agra via Ahmadabad, which ran through the territories of tributary Rajput chiefs, was so beset with dangers and exactions that usually the longer route via Burhanpur was preferred, although the latter was far from free of risks. Moreover, the rules of the game, namely, making use of and involving oneself in the existing factional alignments, implied that only a part of the Rajputs were effectively tied into the imperial system, while the Mughal had to content himself with, at best, tributary arrangements with the others. In fact, the situation was even more complicated, for factionalism did not stop at the level of the chiefs of the great Rajput houses. It was not unusual for their sons and relatives, when they felt they had been wronged, to "take to the fields" with their retainers and start harassing their chiefs till a settlement was reached.⁴⁵ The latter feature could, of course, work both against and in favor of the Mughals, but in order to exploit it, they had to involve themselves in these dissensions. What is worse, involvement meant that dissension could all too easily spread to the Mughal side as well. So the careful balance between the limited capacity to establish and keep up imperial regulation and the threatening forces of the mawās essentially depended on the exploitation of local dissension and making alliances with certain of the contenders—Rajputs, Marathas, and others, as the case might be.

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The constant rearticulation of the balance demanded that the Mughals most of the time had to commit their forces in local situations, sometimes becoming submerged in them to the point where imperial officers were allied with "rebels" and vice-versa. The pervasiveness of the conflict of the inner frontier was such that they could often hardly do otherwise. Mawās areas were often, and on purpose, included in their jāgīrs. Since the forces of the imperial or provincial centers were either already engaged in particular campaigns or otherwise dispersed in local involvements, extra support was hard to get, so that the imperial officers, both in their jāgīrs and in their posts, were left to fend for themselves as best they could. They therefore had to adapt themselves to the ways of the "marches." There they had to tussle cheek-by-jowl with their opposite numbers, known in the imperial idiom as "malefactors," "rebels," and "non-chiefs" or as landholders (*zamīndārs*) and officers if they had somehow obtained an imperial sanction.⁴⁶ In other words, imperial officers had to operate in the same way as those they purported to rule, intertwining their military and administrative functions with financial and landholding interests in a situation where imperial pretensions could easily become more of a burden than a support.

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When viewed in this perspective, it seems somewhat superfluous to look for specific internal reasons to explain the decline and fall of the Mughal Empire. Even in its hey-day, it rested on a precarious balance of forces round the inner frontier. A breakdown was always just round the corner, but the system could just as well continue indefinitely. It was, moreover, precisely this fluidity that gave the Mughal Empire its remarkable resilience and durability, even under the pressure of overextension and adversity, for the working of the precarious balance and the corresponding diffusion of power meant that there was no single, readily definable point where the imperial system could be attacked and defeated. In fact it never was. It was simply overarched and finally replaced by a completely different dispensation.

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After this lengthy disquisition, it is time to return to the theme of expansion and reaction. But before we can speak about a reaction, or even before we can ask whether there was a clear-cut reaction at all, a few words must be said about the way expansion took place. In the first place, it is important to note that there was no strategic level or center where the expansionist forces could come to grips with the Mughal system in a decisive manner, even if they had wanted to do so. But except for a single and ill-prepared venture to start a diminutive empire of their own, the English, like their European competitors, did not want to do so. Instead they desperately tried to stick exclusively to their commercial role. When they were finally forced to give up this stance and started to intervene in India's politics, it was not because of the empire's weakness. Primarily it was a by-product of inter-European competition for control of the sea lanes. When this happened, the English had to combine their commercial operations with military activities and land control. In other words, the English—following the French lead—became partners in the classical game of the inner frontier, to the point where the Company Bahādur obtained, as provincial dīwān, the revenue rights of Bengal, and Clive became a high-ranking imperial noble with a resounding Persian title. Although it presented the somewhat jarring picture of a mercantile company going into agrarian land control, and on a dangerously large scale at that, this type of expansion hardly called for an Indian reaction. On the contrary, it was the English who reacted by adapting, not without enthusiasm, to Indian ways and circumstances. The game was played on Indian terms, even though the English generally could call the shots.

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However, after what has been said about the precarious balance that the inner frontier implied, it is clear that the English venture could all too easily lead to overextension and play havoc with the company's finances—as indeed happened during the first decade or so after Plassey. Essentially, the choices before the English were to involve themselves and their resources at the local level, to manipulate and arbitrate competition and conflict—as the Mughals had been forced to do—or to withdraw as far as possible from local conflict in order to pool and reserve the company's power and resources. Since the first course of action—especially in the form of illegal private trade by company servants using the company's power and privileges—had proved disastrous, it was the second that imposed itself. This found its clearest expression in the Permanent Settlement of 1793. Whatever this momentous decree may have done for the introduction of full private ownership of land protected by law, its main thrust was the reservation of British power and of the use of force, and it reflected the British refusal to get involved in local affairs. This meant that the state, now a public realm, was decisively set apart from the web of competing social forces, which were left to cope with their local situations, as many new-style landowners found to their grief.

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It took, of course, a considerable time before the policy could be fully effective. For some time, the company still had its own frontier areas, such as the semi-independent Oudh kingdom, where British merchants and even official personnel, together with their Indian partners, continued to dabble profitably in trade and land control in the traditional way.⁴⁷ But compared with the Mughal system, the new dispensation was an unprecedented departure from tradition. Where the Mughals had been forced to involve themselves in local affairs and conflicts to the point of submergence, the English could extricate themselves from them and could even pay the price of leaving a possible surplus in the hands of the landholders. Such a step the Mughals would never have been able to take, not because of indiscriminate greed, but because the undrained surplus would have strengthened the forces of dissension and aggravated the pervasive problem of the inner frontier. The English, on the other hand, could afford to do this, since theirs was not an exclusively agrarian empire but a worldwide trading network with its power center safely outside India and soon to be backed by the industrial revolution.

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Nevertheless, the British Indian regime was far from being a laissez-faire proposition. It had to and did pursue vigorous policies of pacification, regulation, education, and public works. Apart from that, even while following a policy of reservation and withdrawal, the government could not ignore Indian society. The British Raj, like any colonial regime, was perpetually pulled in opposite directions by the need to leave the ruled-over society alone and the equally pressing need to deal with it in an effective way.

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