Mughal Administration c17.s10: § 10. Why did the Indian Muhammadans deteriorate?
Mughal Administration c17.s10
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§ 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.