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Mughal Administration c17: Chapter XIII

Mughal Administration c17

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Chapter XIII

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Mughal Rule : its achievements and failure

§ 1. Political effects of Mughal Government.

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What is the legacy of Mughal rule* to India ? The Mughal empire at its greatest extent covered a larger portion of our country than the Indian dominions of Asoka or Samudragupta. These Hindu empires also consisted of loosely united collections of independent provinces which did not acquire any homogeneity, nor create a sense of political unity or nationality among their people. Each province led its own life, continued its old familiar system of government (though under the agents of the central power), and used its local tongue. On the other hand, the two hundred years of Mughal rule, from the accession of Akbar to the death of Muhammad Shah (1556—1749), gave to the whole of Northern India and much of the Deccan also, oneness of the official language, administrative system and coinage and also a popular *lingua franca* for all classes except the Hindu priests and the stationary village folk. Even outside the territory directly administered by the Mughal Emperors, their administrative system, official nomenclature, Court etiquette and monetary type were borrowed, more or less, by the neighbouring Hindu rajahs.

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All the twenty Indian *subahs* of the Mughal empire were governed by means of exactly the same administrative machinery with exactly the same procedure and official titles. Persian was the one language used in all office records, farmans, sanads, land-grants, passes, despatches and receipts. The same monetary standard prevailed throughout the empire, with coins having the same names, the same purity and the same denominations, and differing only in the name of the mint-town. Officials and soldiers were frequently transferred from one province to another. Thus, the native of one province felt himself almost at home in another province ; traders and travellers passed most easily from city to city, *subah* to *subah*, and all realized the imperial oneness of this vast country. Nationality, however, could not result from this political union, because the people had no civil liberty, no share in the government of their country. They were not citizens but merely equal subjects of one empire.

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∗ The subject has been more fully treated in my *India through the Ages*, Ch. 4.

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The second gift of the Muslims to India is historical literature. The chronological sense was very imperfectly developed among the Hindus, probably because being a race of Vedantists they kept their gaze fixed on eternity and despised this fleeting world and its ephemeral occurrences. The Hindus in the pre-Muhammadan days composed no true history at all ; only four political biographies have been preserved in Sanskrit, and in all of them the facts lie buried under a mass of flowers of rhetoric, tricks of style, and round-about expressions. In none of them have we dates. Even when the Hindus learnt Persian and wrote histories or memoirs of their times in that language in imitation of Persian models, their works were woefully lacking in dates.

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On the other hand, the Arab intellect is dry, methodical and matter of fact, like that of the Jews, Phoenicians and other Semitic races. All their records contain a chronological framework, and their letters almost always give the day and month of writing. Whatever the historical literature of the Muhammadans may miss out, it seldom fails to give a wealth of dates. We thus get a solid basis for our historical study. The use of one era, viz., that dating from the Prophet's flight, and calculated according to the lunar year, was a great advantage to the Muslims, as it gave to the entire world under Muhammadan sway a common system for dating events,— which affords a striking contrast to the bewildering variety of eras, length of months and length of the year that we find in Hindu inscriptions and books. To take one example only, the Hindu luni-solar year, in which each month is divided into the dark and bright fortnights (badi and sudi), was not the same in Northern India and Southern as regards the day of commencement and the intercalary month. Hence it is next to impossible to convert such dates in the old Marathi records of the 17th century into the Christian era with any certainty of correctness. The Muslim dates follow one uniform* and well-known system.

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∗ There was often the difference of one day as between India and other countries at the commencement of certain months, owing to the difference in the visibility of the new moon in the two places.

§ 2. Contact with the outer world established.

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Thirdly, the Mughal empire, and even its so-called Pathan predecessor, re-established the contact between India and the outer Asiatic world, which had been destroyed with the decline of Buddhism in its home. Through the passes of the Afghan frontier the stream of population and trade flowed peacefully into India from Bukhara and Samarqand, Balkh and Khurasan, Khwarizm and Persia, because Afghanistan belonged to the ruler of Delhi, till near the end of the Mughal empire. Through the Bolan Pass leading from India to Qandahar in South Afghanistan and thence to Persia, as many as 14,000 camel-loads of merchandise passed every year in the reign of Jahangir, early in the 17th century. The ports on our western coast—Tatta, Broach, Surat, Chaul, Rajapur, Goa (before its annexation by the Portuguese), and Karwar,—were so many doors between India and the outer world that could be reached by sea, such as Arabia, Persia, Turkey, Egypt, Barbery, Abyssinia, and even Zanzibar. From the eastern port of Masulipatam, belonging to the Sultans of Golkonda up to 1687 and thereafter to the Mughals,—ships used to sail for Ceylon, Sumatra, Java, Siam and even China. The Arabs are born traders—like their cousins the Jews,—and they take kindly to a sea-faring life. The trade of the west coast of India had been their monopoly in the 1st century of the Christian era (as we learn from the *Periplus of the Erythræan Sea*). And now the conversion of the entire Near East and Middle East with parts of the Malay world to their faith, and their sacred tongue gave them the greatest advantage in the sea-borne trade of Asia and Africa.

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What the Muhammadans began the English have completed. To-day India’s isolation is broken and she has been switched on to the currents—economic, cultural and political,—of the entire outer world.

§ 3. Religious changes in India due to Islam.

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Fourthly, Hunter and some other European writers have held that the monotheistic or at least anti-Brahman and anti-caste movements among the Hindus in the middle ages were due to the influence of Islam. But we have to bear in mind that all the higher thinkers, all the religious reformers, all the devout *bhaktas* among the Hindus from the remotest time, have proclaimed the principle of monotheism and recognized the one supreme God behind the countless deities of popular worship. Therefore, it is not historically true that Islam taught the Hindus monotheism. What really happened was that these dissenting movements among the Hindus of mediæval India received a great impetus from the presence of the Muhammadans in our immediate neighbourhood. The example of Islamic society acted as a solvent on Hindu prejudices.

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Many sects arose which tried to harmonise Islam and Hinduism and to afford a common meeting-ground to the devout men of both creeds, without emphasizing their differences of ritual, dogma and other external marks of faith. This was the aim of Kabir and Dādu, Nānak and Chaitanya. They made converts freely from Hindus and Muslims and rejected the rigid orthodoxy of the Brahman and the Mulla alike.

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So, too, the Sufi movement afforded a common platform to the more learned and devout minds among the Hindus and Muhammadans. Unlike the above-mentioned popular religions of mediæval India, Sufism never extended to the illiterate people. It was essentially a faith—often an intellectual-emotional enjoyment—reserved for the philosophers, authors and mystics free from bigotry. The eastern variety of Sufism is mainly an off-shoot of the Vedanta of the Hindus, and it rapidly spread and developed in India from the time of Akbar onwards.

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A huge mass of Sufi literature in the Persian language was produced by the Hindus. Though of the poorest literary quality, it shows the wide prevalence of this faith among our people, especially in the 17th and 18th centuries, probably as a refuge from the political disorder and economic decay attending the decline of the Mughal empire. These popular religions and Sufi philosophy tended to bring the ruling sect and the dominated people closer together.

§ 4. Muslim influence on society, architecture and arts.

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Fifthly, many elements of modern Hindu social manners in Northern India are due to Islamic influence, which also modified the dress of our gentry and popular literature to some extent. The masses, however, remained unaffected by it.

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Next, hunting, hawking and many games became Muhammadanised in method and terminology. Persian, Arabic and Turkish words have entered largely into the Hindi, Bengali and even Marathi languages. An exact parallel is afforded by the influence of the Norman Conquest upon English life and language.

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The art of war was very highly developed by the Muslims, partly by borrowing from Europe through Turkey—and, to a lesser extent, through Persia. The rajahs of the Hindu period used to lead petty forces or the confederation of a number of distinct petty contingents. But the Mughal Emperors commanded vast armies obeying one supreme voice, the handling of which required greater organizing power and capacity, and thus gave greater opportunities for the display of generalship than was possible in the Hindu period. From the point of view of mere organization [as distinct from real efficiency as an instrument of war], the Mughal army was almost perfect in every branch, according to mediæval Asiatic standards.

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The system of fortification was greatly improved by the Muhammadans in India, as a natural consequence of the general advance of civilisation and the introduction of artillery.

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Muhammadan rule caused a distinct advance in architecture. The Hindu kings lavished their wealth and skill on temples ; their palaces have all perished, and seem to have been of no high or costly pattern. But the Muhammadans built palaces and tombs in addition to mosques. The semi-circular radiating arch and the vaulted dome are peculiarly Muhammadan, and so also are geometrically laid out gardens.

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In the domain of the fine arts the richest contribution of the Muhammadans is the Indo-Saracen school of painting. The Mughals introduced Chinese painting by way of Bukhara and Khurasan, and at the Court of Akbar this art mingled with the indigenous Hindu painting, of which traditions still lingered amidst neglect and poverty. The result of the fusion was that the Chinese characteristics were rapidly dropped and a purely Indian appearance was given to pieces marked by undeniable foreign technique. (Studies in Mughal India, 290-291.) Thus, in painting there was a true revival and the highest genius was displayed by our artists in this field in the Mughal age. This style holds the field even now under the name of "Indian art" or "Mughal painting." The so-called Rajput school is only the Mughal or Indo-Saracen style with Hindu mythological or epic subjects. The motifs were different, but not the technique or style.

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We have seen that Muslim rule in general, and the Mughal empire in particular, achieved many things great and good for mediæval India. Why then did it fail? In order to answer this question it is necessary for us to examine the strength and weakness of the Muslim State in India.

§ 5. Elements of strength in the Muslim position in India.

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The Muhammadans in India at first possessed the advantage of a common language, common traditions, a common religion, common teachers, and a common political status in the midst of a conquered and alien population. The absence of caste distinctions and the democratic spirit of Islam fused the conquering sect into a brotherhood. Hence, the State in Muslim India, before its degeneration in the 18th century, often displayed an unexampled solidarity in the face of foreign invasion. Another source of the strength of the Muslim rulers of India was that they wisely retained the old system of village administration and method of revenue collection of the Hindu times unchanged, and even employed Hindu officials almost exclusively in the Revenue Department. The result was that the lives of the millions of our villagers were undisturbed by the dynastic changes at the capital, and they had no reason to be discontented with their new masters and to rise against them.

§ 6. Muhammadan settlers Indianised.

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But the long stay of the invading Muslim races in India gradually destroyed their alien character and gave to them a purely Indian stamp, till at last from the 17th century onwards it became increasingly difficult for the Indian Muhammadans to absorb readily into their society new-comers from Bukhara, Persia or Arabia. (This was a change quite distinct from the deterioration in their physique and colour under the Indian climate.) The Indo-Muhammadans adopted many Indian customs beliefs articles of food [esp. betel-leaf] and dress, and even an Indian language, namely, Hindustani [zabān-i-Hindavi, the Indian tongue] which is Sanskritic in its grammatical structure though its vocabulary is full of Persian and Arabic words in addition to Hindi. Thus, in the course of centuries the Indo-Muhammadans almost completely drifted apart from their brethren of the outer Asiatic world. The later Muhammadan immigrants into India were absorbed in the local population, but only after the lapse of two or three generations, by which time they had acquired the distinctive Indian character and given up their foreign peculiarities.

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Centuries of residence in this country in the midst of a vastly more numerous Hindu element and a purely Indian environment, gradually fused the Muhammadans in certain respects with the indigenous population. The Indo-Muhammadans largely married local women and admitted to social equality enormous numbers of converts from Hinduism (or corrupt Buddhism), with the result that they quickly lost their purity of blood and distinctive racial characteristics. They also adopted many Hindu customs, beliefs and even ways of life. The popular religions of mediæval India, Sufism, the Urdu language, and Indo-Saracen art were the common property of the conquerors and the conquered, and tended to blend them together culturally, while the granite walls of the caste system kept them apart. Many Muhammadan saints (pirs) were worshipped by the lower classes of the Hindus, and renowned Muslim saints were adored by stout champions of Hindu orthodoxy like Shivaji and Mahadji Sindhia. The ignorant Muhammadan peasantry of Bengal and even of other provinces where no vigilant reforming mulla was present, took part in Hindu religious festivals and the worship of popular village-gods, just as in Bihar lowclass Hindus until quite recently used to take part in the Muharram procession as enthusiastically as the Muhammadans.

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Thus, while the old scriptures and strict theory kept the two sects apart, a common destiny and the common weal and woe of life under the same Indian sun drew them together, except for occasional crescentades by a puritan Sultan or Padishah.

§ 7. Disruptive forces in the State.

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Muhammadan dominion over India was spread more by individual chieftains and adventurers than by the direct action of any organized central power. There was, no doubt, always a lawful Sultan as the theoretical king; but the enthusiastic and fanatical generals who conquered the Hindu provinces beyond the frontiers, owed only a nominal allegiance to this Central Government, and they were usually masters of their own troops and treasures, instead of being merely salaried servants removable at a word from the Sultan. Macaulay in his famous essay on the Popes has described how the Roman Catholic Church utilizes the enthusiasm of unattached or irregular fanatics to convert new peoples without having to devote its regular priesthood to the work, but deriving full advantage from the voluntary action of these enthusiasts. Similar was the policy of the central monarch of Muslim India during the period of expansion and conquest. He maintained excellent relations with the enterprising adventurers of his own faith; he profited by their bold initiative and zealous exertions, without having to spend his own men or money. At the same time he kept them pleased by not insisting upon too much subordination to himself or too rigid a control of the provinces won and ruled by them.

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This arrangement worked well so long as there were fresh lands to conquer. But when the Muslim expansion reached its furthest possible limit eastward and southward, rebellion, intrigue, murder of sovereigns and chaotic wars of succession became frequent, because the old plan of Muslim conquest left as its legacy a centrifugal or disruptive spirit tending to local autonomy. These frequent changes of dynasty and violent civil wars hindered the growth of civilization, the economic prosperity of the country, and the development of institutions. As the Latin proverb has it, "In the midst of arms, the laws are silent."

§ 8. Gradual decline of the people.

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There was no hereditary peerage in Islam, no recognition of the right of private property. Every nobleman's lands and personal effects were confiscated to the State on his death. If his son got any portion of them, it was as a mere act of grace on the part of the sovereign. This rule, no doubt, prevented the slackening of effort, but it also destroyed the basis of civilization, *viz.*, the accumulation of savings from the past for improvement in the future. All was ephemeral in such a society; the economic prosperity and position built up by an individual noble was levelled to the ground at his death, and his son had to begin his career as a commoner from the very bottom without being able to take advantage of the progress made by his father. Thus, generation after generation an Islamic country witnessed the same process of building up fortunes from the smallest beginnings and undoing a life's work at death by the confiscation of the private property of the deceased man to the State and the reduction of his sons to the rank of poor commoners.

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So much for the richer classes. As regards the common people, the Muslim State made no attempt to strengthen the nation, to develop the national character, or ensure the economic prosperity of the people. No independence of thought was allowed, and the grossest kind of flattery was expected and encouraged by the Court. Hence, no first-rate genius in literature or art was produced among the Indian Muhammadans.

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The Court was the only centre of culture and the only nursery of the fine arts (if we except a few temples in the far-off South.) But the nation in general did not benefit by it, and Court patronage had a really demoralizing effect on creative genius. Hence, Hindu and Muhammadan literature and art in mediæval India fell far short of the productions of democratic Greece or England.

§ 9. Natural growth of the Hindus stopped.

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Muslim rule also arrested the growth of the Hindus. At the first stage of the conquest, all our monasteries and rich temples were sacked, and thus the centres of Hindu learning were destroyed. No powerful Hindu rajah was left to serve as a patron of Sanskrit scholars and authors. In consequence, Sanskrit learning virtually died out of mediæval India. What little was left of it, was extremely barren and consisted of logical subtleties, elaboration of rituals, new editions of Canon law, commentaries on old books, and commentaries on commentaries. Thus North India was intellectually a desert from 1200 to 1550 A.D. It was only under Akbar that with Tulsidas in Hindi and the Vaishnav writers in Bengali, a great Hindu literature reappeared, but in the vernacular. The same Emperor founded a truly national Court, and under him there was a great upheaval of the Indian intellect.

§ 10. Why did the Indian Muhammadans deteriorate?

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A minute study of the history of Mughal India gives one a clear impression of the rapid decline of the Muslim aristocracy and gentry settled in India. The rapidity and sureness of this decline are partly concealed by the genius and character of many of the converts from Hinduism and fresh immigrants from Persia or Central Asia. But it is equally striking that the grandsons of the last two classes on the Indian soil became hopelessly degenerate.

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The first cause of this phenomenon was a reckless cross-breeding and the maintenance of harems filled with women of all sorts of races, castes and stages of civilization. The children of such unions represented a much lower intellectual type than pure Hindus, pure Persians or pure Turks.

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Too much wealth, when accompanied by the peace and order which the Mughal empire gave to the land, fostered luxury among the Muhammadan upper classes, and their position as the dominant race fostered pride and idleness. Hereditary aristocracies have a natural tendency to deteriorate, and the process is checked only by hard work in the army or civil administration and other kinds of healthy activity, such as participation in the free public life of a democratic country or in adventure and exploration. But these correctives were wanting among the sons of the Mughal peers, to whom the Emperors always left a portion of their fathers' earnings and gave fairly high posts by reason of their birth.

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The Indian Muhammadans could not retain Persian or Turkish as their mother-tongue, and yet they did not cultivate any Indian vernacular for literary purposes. They were ashamed to write in the *zaban-i-Hindavi* (i.e., Hindustani) which they spoke in the home, the office, the street, and the camp. The desperate and ruinous attempt to cling to Persian as the language of official correspondence, of serious and elegant literature, and polished intercourse, while Hindustani was their mother-tongue, was continued by the Indian Muhammadans till about 1780, when Hindustani was frankly accepted as their literary language. This linguistic difficulty accounts for the literary barrenness of the Indian Muhammadans, and it greatly retarded the spread of real education during the Mughal period.

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The Muhammadans of India, particularly those of Turkish and Afghan breeds, are a military race, but not eminently intellectual nor industrial. Hence they began to decline when the utmost possible limit of their conquest was reached.

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The degradation of women in the harems of the rich naturally tends to degrade their children. The evil took a more aggravated form in India than in Arabia or Persia, where few could afford to support more wives than one, and these wives were usually of the same race as their husbands.

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§ 11. Failure of Mughal Empire due to lack of the spirit of progress and self-correction.

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The student of mediæval Indian history cannot fail to be struck by the fact that the Mughal empire became a hopeless failure in the 18th century, though it had splendid resources behind it and had achieved much for India in the 16th and 17th centuries. In the 18th century, Mughal civilization was like a spent bullet, and the downfall of the Mughal empire was only a question of time, even if no Nadir Shah or Ahmad Abdali had appeared in India.

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The first and foremost cause of this decline is the contrast between the spirit of all oriental monarchies and that of a modern civilized empire like the British. Such a modern empire contains an element of self-criticism and reform within itself. Hence, any new defect or source of decay in it is promptly detected and remedied before it can become incurable. Not so oriental monarchies, or even European monarchies of the ancient world, like the Roman and Macedonian.

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Secondly, oriental monarchies are essentially dependent upon the personality of the sovereign and to some extent also on the character of the ruling minority. The British empire, on the other hand, is democratic; it is the domination of much of the world by the entire British race and other races absorbed into the British,—and not by an individual king or family. Hence, though the ruling British families of one generation may degenerate in the next, streams of fresh and able rulers of men rise from the ranks of the British race to take their places. In Mughal India, on the other hand, the degeneration of India-born Muhammadans was rapid and striking, and nothing could remedy it, as there was no popular education, no public discussion, no social reform. The supply of able adventurers from beyond the Khaibar Pass who had contributed to the glories of the reigns of Akbar and Shah Jahan ceased, and the decay in the ruling families of India could not be arrested by the infusion of new blood either from among the mass of the local people or from the thinned stream of foreign immigrants.

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It was the fatal defect of Mughal rule that it always continued to bear the character of a military occupation of the land and did not try to build up a nation or a homogeneous State. The glories of Agra and Delhi in the golden days of Shah Jahan ought not to blind us to the fact that the Mughal Emperors never followed the first principle of political science, viz., that "there cannot be a great empire without a great *people*." Under even the best of them, though there were great ministers and generals, the mass of the people remained "human sheep" as in the worst days of the past. The Englishmen who overthrew the Indian Nawabs and Maharajahs may have been a handful of men—some of them not even professional soldiers; but they had behind them the enormous reservoir of the British democracy with all its collective talents and resources, while our Nawabs and Maharajahs had behind them none but a few self-seeking followers and hireling troops. They did not lead any national resistance to the foreign conquerors.

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Islam, as interpreted after the failure of the rationalistic (*mutazala*) movement in the Court of the early Abbasid Khalifs of Baghdad, became too rigid, too inelastic and incapable of adapting itself to changes of environment. It has all the strength and weakness of a strictly dogmatic creed like Calvinism. The rigidity of Islam has enabled its followers in all lands to succeed up to a certain point. But there they have stopped, while progress is the law of life of the living world. At the same time that Europe has been steadily advancing, the stationary Muhamadans have been relatively falling back, and every year has increased the distance between Europe and Asia in knowledge, organization, accumulated resources and acquired capacity, and made it increasingly difficult for the Asiatics to compete with the Europeans. The English conquest of the Mughal empire is only a part of the inevitable domination of all Africa and Asia by the European nations,—which is only another way of saying that the progressive races are replacing the conservative ones, just as enterprising families replace sleepy indolent ones in the leadership of our own society. Therefore, if we wish to profit by the study of our country's history

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Forward, forward let us range,
Let the great world spin for ever down the ringing
grooves of change.

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The greatest gifts of the British to India have been political directly and economic only in a secondary way. They are, security of property and personal freedom (of production and service) for the individual. These, even more than pure and convenient courts of justice, an efficient police, mechanical transport and uniform currency, have improved the economic condition of modern India. On the other hand, Mughal India was under an essentially military type of administration, and that too conducted by a semi-nomadic people. This political factor entirely dominated our economic situation in that age. The unspeakable degradation of the intellect and character of the subject people under nomad rulers is the only adequate explanation of the real economic misery of this fabled land of gold in the age of the Great Mughals. India, even in the economic sphere, has profited most from the political or non-economic effects of British rule,—namely, personal freedom, security of possessions, and, above all, that spirit of progress and that removal of "the slave mentality" of our masses which we owe to Western education, British laws, and contact with English society. These, and not a "return to the learning of Confucius" will enable the Indians to rise to the full stature of their national growth.