The Inner Conflict of Tradition: Essays in Indian Ritual, Kingship, and Society c15.s1.3

c15.s1.3

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