17th Part
Q. Discuss the emergence of successor states during the 18th century.
A. The Mughal administration was centralized in character. Its success was dependent on the power & ability of the Emperor to subdue the nobles, zamindars, jagirdars and provincial officials. There were balance and coordination of interests and aspirations between the Emperor (who was always in a dominant position) and others. This position started changing with the death of Aurangzeb.
The diwan (head of the revenue administration) and the Nazim (the executive head) were the two most important functionaries. Both of them were directly appointed by the Emperor and through them, the imperial control over the provinces was retained. Besides, there were other officials like amils, faujdars, kotwals, etc. who were also appointed by the Emperor. The provincial governors also depended on the goodwill of the Emperor to continue in their job. Thus, through the control over appointment, the Emperor indirectly controlled the provincial administration. Unfortunately, the central administration was crippled by the financial crisis and factional rivalry among the nobles. The Emperor was not in a position to prevent the crisis. It failed to provide the required protection to the provincial governors. As a result, the provincial governors engaged themselves at the beginning of the 18th century to develop an independent base of power. Some of its indications were that the local appointments were made by them without the prior permission from the Emperor, and attempts were made to establish dynastic rule in the provinces. The theoretical allegiance to the Mughal Emperor in the form of sending tributes continued, however, the provincial governors virtually established their independent authority over the provinces. Even the autonomous
states in Deccan, Rajputana, etc. who were not directly under the Mughals but acknowledged the authority of the Mughals also cut off their ties with the Empire. Awadh, Bengal, and Hyderabad fall in the category of successor states. All these three provinces were directly under the control of the Mughal administration. Though the sovereignty of the Mughal Emperor was not challenged, the establishment of practically independent and hereditary authority by the governors and subordination of all offices within the region to the governors showed the emergence of autonomous polity in these regions.
Q. Discuss the nature of the successor states in the 18th century.
A. Awadh, Bengal, and Hyderabad fall in the category of successor states.
Awadh - Sa'adat Khan became the subadar of Awadh in 1722. He devoted himself to the task of making Awadh an independent center of power. The Mughal decline provided him the desired opportunity to establish his own authority in the region. The major challenge that he faced after becoming the subadar was the rebellion of local chieftains and rajas of Awadh. In order to consolidate his position he adopted the following measures:
# suppression of rebellious local zamindars and chieftains;
# curtailment of the authority of the madad-i-maash grantees;
# systematizing, revenue, collection; and
# negotiation with some local zamindars.
In appointing local officials, he considered only their personal loyalty to him. He nominated his son-in-law, Safdar Jang, as deputy governor of the province without the prior consent of the Emperor. After Sa'adat Khan, Safdar Jang pursued the same path. Even the sending of revenues to Delhi became irregular. A semblance of allegiance to the Mughal Emperor was still maintained, but between the years 1739 and 1764 Awadh emerged virtually as an autonomous state.
Bengal
In Bengal, the process of autonomy was started by Murshid Quli Khan. He was first appointed as a diwan but, later on, his success in revenue administration and the uncertainty after the death of Aurangzeb paved his way for the subadari of Bengal. Murshid Quli abolished the separate offices of the diwan & the nazim and combined them into one. His initial concern was revenue administration & in order to streamline it, he took the following measures:
# elimination of small intermediary zamindars;
# expelling rebellious zamindars and jagirdars to the frontier regions of Orissa;
# encouraging big zamindars who assumed the responsibilities of revenue collection and payment, and
# enlarging the scope and extent of the khalisa lands.
Alivardi's reign showed further development of autonomy. Major appointments at the provincial level were made by him without any reference to the Mughal ruler. He appointed his own loyalists as deputy Nawabs at Patna, Cuttack, and Dhaka. Thus, by Alivardi's time, an administrative system developed in Bengal, Bihar, and Orissa which reduced ties with the imperial court in Delhi, and for all practical purposes, an independent state emerged in Eastern India.
Hyderabad
As in Awadh and Bengal, so in Hyderabad also the weakening of the imperial rule provided the opportunity to the subadar of Deccan to lay the basis for an autonomous state. Nizamulmulk established his control over Hyderabad by removing the officials appointed by the Mughals and installed his own men. He assumed the right of making treaties, wars, granting mansabs, titles, etc. The Mughal authority was reduced to a symbolic reading of khutba. Nizamulmulk's reign thus showed the emergence of an independent state in Hyderabad with nominal allegiance to the emperor.
Q. Discuss the rise of regional states after the decline of the Mughal period.
A. The second group of regional states was the 'new states' which came into existence as a protest against the Mughals.
The Marathas
Among the various provincial states that emerged during this period, the most prominent was the Maratha state. The rise of the Marathas was both a regional reaction against Mughal centralization as well as a manifestation of the upward mobility of certain classes and castes. The Mughals never had proper control over the heartland of the Marathas. During the period of Peshwa Balaji Vishwanath, the office of the Peshwa became very powerful and the Maratha state system attained the status of a dominant expansionist state. Starting from Balaji Vishwanath to the reign of Balaji Rao, the Maratha power reached its zenith and the Marathas spread in every direction South, East, North, and Central India. So far as the administration is concerned, there were non-regulation and regulation areas. In non-regulated areas, the existing zamindars and chieftains were allowed to run the administration, but they had to pay tribute regularly to the Peshwa. In regulation areas, direct control of the Marathas was established. In these areas, a system of revenue assessment and management was developed of which the most important was the watan system. The Marathas adopted some parts of the Mughal administrative system, but their major thrust was on the extraction of surplus.
Punjab
The development in Punjab was different from other regions. Zakaria Khan, the governor of Lahore, had tried to establish an independent political system' in Punjab. But he failed mainly because of the struggle of the Sikhs' for independent political authority. The foreign invasion (Persian and Afghan), the Mantha
incursion and internal rivalry in the provincial administration created a very fluid situation in Punjab which helped the Sikhs to consolidate their base. In the second half of the 18th century, the different Sikh pups had regrouped themselves into 12 larger regional confederacies. The process towards the establishment of an autonomous state became complete only under Ranjit Singh at the beginning of the 19th century.
The Jat State
The Jats were an agriculturist caste inhabiting the Delhi-Agra region. The Jats also tried to establish an autonomous zone of their control. Churaman and Badan Singh took the initiative but it was Suraj Mal who consolidated the Jet state at Bhamtpur during 1756-1763. The state was expanded in the east up to the boundaries of the Ganga, in the south the Chambal, in the north Delhi and in the west Agra. The state was feudal by nature and it was the zamindar who were in control of both administrative and revenue powers.
Q. Critically examine the empire - centric approach for explaining the decline of the Mughal empire. A. Empire Centric Approach -
# Aurangzeb was a religious fanatic. He discriminated against sections of the nobles and officials on the basis of religion. This led to widescale resentment among the nobility.
# Jagirdari Crisis - The nobles in the Mughal Empire were the core state officials. They were given ranks corresponding to their status in the Mughal official hierarchy. These ranks were called mansab. Each holder of a mansab, called mansabdar, was paid in assignments of land revenue (jagir). Among the various obligations, the mansabdar had to maintain a requisite contingent of troopers.' These troopers were paid and maintained out of the revenue of the jagir. They formed the base of the mansabdar's power and assisted him in the collection of land revenue. Availability of the revenues to be assigned and the ability of the Mughals to collect them thus became two crucial pre-requisites for the effective working of the system. The Mughal failure, towards the end of Aurangzeb's reign, to maintain the system of the mansabdar-jagirdar. As this system went into disarray, the Empire was bound to collapse. The sudden increase in the number of nobles caused due to the expansion of the Empire into the Deccan and Maratha territory, created a crisis in the functioning of the jagir system. the nobels competed for better jagh, which were increasingly becoming rare due to the influx of nobles from the south. The logical consequence was the erosion in the political structure which was based on jagirdari to a large extent.
# Agrarian crisis - the mechanism of collection of revenue that the Mughals had evolved was inherently flawed. The imperial policy was to set the revenue at the highest rate possible to secure the greatest military strength for the Empire, the nobles. On the other band, they tended to squeeze the maximum from their jagirs, even
if it ruined the peasantry and destroyed the revenue paying capacity of the area. Since the nobles' jagirs were liable to be transferred frequently, they did not find it necessary to follow a far-sighted policy of agricultural development. As the burden on the peasantry increased, they were often deprived of their very means of survival. In reaction to this excessive exploitation of the peasantry, the latter had no option but to protest. The forms of rural protest in Medieval India were varied in nature. In many areas, the peasants took to flight. Entire villages were left deserted due to the large scale migration of peasants to the towns or other villages. Very often the peasants protested against the state by refusing to pay the revenue and were up in arms against the Mughals. These peasant protests weakened the political and social fabric of the Empire.
Q. How does the region-centric approach explain the process of decline of the Mughal empire?
A. Political integration in Mughal India was, up to a point, inherently flawed. It was to a large extent conditional on the co-ordination of the interests and the political activities of the various social groups led by local magnates. The nobles were dependent on their position and power directly on the Emperor who appointed them. They had no hereditary estates to consolidate or bequeath to their descendants. Their resources were scrutinized and regulated by the Empire. They were in a way representatives of the Mughal Emperor. Yet the nobility also had its tensions. The policy of jagir transfer, by checking the noble's ambition to build a personal base, was meant to strengthen the imperial organization. But it inconvenienced the nobles who opposed and resisted its implementation. In many regions of the Mughal Empire, it was left unimplemented in the 17th century. Alongside the local elites (zamindars) and the nobles, the village and qasba based madad-i ma'ash holders (men of learning, who were given revenue-free grants of land by the Mughal Emperors) and a very large numbers of lower-level officials drawn from various regional and local communities, were all integrated intimately into the framework of the Empire.
The Mughal decline in the early 18th century has to be seen in the inability of the state to maintain its policy of checks and balances between the zamindars, jagirdars, madad-i ma'ash holders and the local indigenous elements; like the shaikhzada3 in Awadh. In the early 18th century, there was a thrust 'of the nobles towards independent political alignments with the zamindars in order to
carve out their own fortunes. Alongside there was an attempt betwe& the various co-sharers of Mughal power (the zamindars, madad-i ma'ash holders, etc.) to encroach on each other's rights and territorial jurisdictions. These developments were not entirely) incompatible with what happened earlier. But in the hey-day of
the Empire, these tensions had been contained. This was achieved at times by the use of military force and at other times by balancing out the power of one social group by settling another in the vicinity.
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