The Inner Conflict of Tradition: Essays in Indian Ritual, Kingship, and Society c15.s1.2

c15.s1.2

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