Mughal Administration c13.s4: § 4. Principles involved in the rule of escheat.
Mughal Administration c13.s4
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- English
§ 4. Principles involved in the rule of escheat.
c13.s4.1
From a careful study of the Mughal practice of escheating noblemen’s property after their death and Aurangzib’s rules and actual practice in this matter, I am impressed by the belief that here we have the Quranic law of the sacredness of private property superimposed upon an older and alien institution, namely the communal ownership of all property among a nomadic tribe.
c13.s4.2
The Turks, as the so-called Pathan and Mughal rulers of Delhi really were by race, were originally a nomadic people and they retained the essential characteristics of nomads to the end, though thinly veiled under the pomp and institutions of empire. Such a tribe migrates from pasture to pasture, conquers fresh lands and accumulates plunder and slaves under the leadership of their chieftain and with the solidarity of a family and an army in one. Their chieftain is the patriarch of the clan, and the individual members of the tribe (or, more correctly, the heads of the different families) are merely the limbs of the great trunk of the tribe. They derive their strength from the tribe and render up their acquisitions to it as the property of the tribe. The tribe might gain accessions to its number from outside by marriage (as among the Brahuis) or by the adoption of slaves, but the newcomers are made a part and parcel of the tribe as if born to it.
c13.s4.3
The most adventurous spirits among the tribe, when settled in a country like India, received an advance of men and money from their chieftain, carved out conquests or brought in plunder, and enjoyed these during their lifetime. But when they died, all their acquisitions legally lapsed to the Government, because they had really been the factors or *entrepreneurs* employed and financed by the tribal State. This practice and tradition of the homeland of Turan continued under the Mughal empire in India. There was no nobleman who was not a servant of the State, a holder of *mansab* or rank in the army. He received advance of money (*musaidat*) and materials (*ajnas*) or other payment on account from the Public Treasury, and his business was to achieve fresh gains for the State by employing these means, and in the end he was to be rewarded by his grateful employer with a share of the profits. Therefore, all his acquisitions were legally bound to revert to the State, as the earnings of a Christian monk must to the order to which he belongs, and those of an *entrepreneur* of industry must to the fund of the joint-stock company that he serves. By the essence and fundamental theory of the Turkish social and political organisation, private property on the part of a State official was as inconceivable as that of a Catholic monk or a factory manager within the factory.
c13.s4.4
The whole history of the Muslim period in India—in the Deccani States as well as in the Delhi monarchy—illustrates the expansion of Islamic dominion through the individual efforts and initiative of private adventurers, financed by the State and backed by all its regular forces in the case of a reverse,—and rarely through the operation of the salaried servants of the Crown acting under the direction and control of the central Government.
c13.s4.5
Therefore, the State claimed what was left of a life’s acquisitions due to its own sanction, money aid, and armed support. The empire was communal property, and the Amir, Sultan or Padishah, as the Commander of the Faithful, was entitled to escheat all the earnings of the officers in this army of Islam. He was only the trustee of the rights of the Sovereign Congregation (jamait) of true believers, as the tribal patriarch had been in the days before their conversion to Islam. Whether the nomadic society was patriarchal (as before Islam), or theocratic (as under Islam), property was equally communal.
c13.s4.6
This basic idea of the Turkish State could not be reconciled with the more modern notions of the sacredness of private property and the responsibility of the king before God to see that none was robbed of his heritage,—which are a part of Islamic private law. And Aurangzib’s regulations represent an attempt at a compromise between the two, and the final abandonment, in outward profession at least, of the nomad idea of communal property and the adoption of the modern idea of individual private possessions,—i.e., the conversion of mere agents of the State into private owners. It would, in my opinion, be unhistoric to suppose that these escheats were originally due to a wicked desire of the autocratic sovereign to seize his subjects' rightful property when they were no longer alive to defend it.