Mughal Administration c17.s1: § 1. Political effects of Mughal Government.
Mughal Administration c17.s1
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§ 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.