Mughal Empire

A Timurid with nowhere to go

formationDrafted from Richards, The Mughal Empire (The New Cambridge History of India, I.5) (1993)

Babur was a great-great-great-grandson of Timur and, on his mother's side, a descendant of Chinggis Khan. He spent his youth failing to hold Samarkand — he took it three times and lost it three times to the Uzbeks — and settled for Kabul instead, which is not what a Timurid prince considered a career.

India was the second choice. He beat the last Lodi sultan of Delhi at Panipat in 1526 with artillery and a smaller army, and disliked the country intensely, saying so at length in a memoir that is among the most candid ever written by a reigning monarch anywhere.

What his grandson Akbar built out of that conquest was different in kind from the Delhi Sultanate it replaced. The mansabdari system ranked every officer in a single imperial hierarchy with a numerical rank, paid from assignments of land revenue that were rotated so that no family could root itself in a province. It was a deliberate solution to the problem every state that pays its officers in land eventually runs into: the military class ends up owning the land and stops taking orders. Combined with a systematic revenue survey, it produced the most centralised state the subcontinent had seen.

Cleveland Museum of Art · Richards, The Mughal Empire (The New Cambridge History of India, I.5) (1993) · Govardhan · CC0

Akbar also abolished the jizya on non-Muslims and married into Rajput houses, governing a majority-Hindu empire through a nobility that was substantially not Muslim. That settlement held for roughly a century.

A country of few charms

expansionDrafted from Babur, The Babur-nama in English (Memoirs of Babur) (1922)

Babur took northern India in 1526 and then wrote down what he thought of it, and no conqueror anywhere has left a less flattering account of his own prize.

The complaint

The passage is famous and it is worth having in full, because the specificity is the point:

Hindustan is a country of few charms. Its people have no good looks; of social intercourse, paying and receiving visits there is none; of genius and capacity none; of manners none; in handicraft and work there is no form or symmetry, method or quality; there are no good horses, no good dogs, no grapes, musk-melons or first-rate fruits, no ice or cold water, no good bread or cooked food in the bazars, no hot-baths, no colleges, no candles, torches or candlesticks.

He then explains the last item at length, and the explanation is the most revealing thing in it. Instead of candles they have a great dirty gang called lamp-men, who hold a wooden tripod with a thick wick in one hand and a gourd of oil in the other, and dribble oil onto the wick as it needs it. Great men keep one or two hundred of them. If a noble has work at night, these men come and stand close and hold the light.

A ruler from Kabul looks at that and sees the absence of candlesticks. What he is describing is a country where labour is so abundant that nobody bothered inventing the candlestick.

What he liked

He is fair about the compensations and there are exactly two.

Pleasant things of Hindustan are that it is a large country and has masses of gold and silver.

And the monsoon air, which he found remarkably fine and unsurpassed for healthiness — with the qualification that it ruins everything. A Transoxanian bow taken through the rains cannot be drawn afterwards; not only the bow, everything is affected, armour, book, cloth, and utensils all; a house even.

A large country with masses of gold and silver. That is the whole case for the conquest, stated by the man who made it, in eleven words.

Why the complaint matters

Because it is the founding document of a dynasty that spent the next two centuries becoming Indian, and it establishes what they started from.

Babur is homesick throughout. He writes about the melons of Ferghana, the running water in Kabul gardens, the ice. His first substantial act in India was to lay out a garden — a charbagh, quartered by water channels — at Agra, because the absence of running water in the residences is one of his listed complaints, and he fixed it.

That garden is the ancestor of every Mughal garden afterwards, including the one the Taj Mahal stands in. A dynasty's most recognisable architectural form began as a Central Asian émigré's attempt to make the place bearable.

What the conquest actually was

Panipat, in April 1526, was not a large battle by Indian standards and Babur's account of it is precise about the method: a fortified centre of carts lashed together with gaps for the guns, flanking cavalry to wheel around and take the enemy from behind, and matchlockmen and artillery under an Ottoman gunner.

Babur, The Babur-nama in English (Memoirs of Babur) (1922) · Unknown · Public domain

Ibrahim Lodi's much larger army was funnelled into the front of it and could not deploy. He was killed on the field.

Babur then had to do it again the following year at Khanwa against the Rajput confederation under Rana Sanga, which was the harder fight and the one that actually secured the conquest.

He died in 1530, four years after Panipat, having spent almost all of them campaigning, and was buried at Agra — and then, on his own instructions, moved to Kabul, to a garden on a hillside, which is where he still is.

Babur, The Babur-nama in English (Memoirs of Babur) (1922) · ninara · CC BY 2.0

The rank and the register

peakDrafted from Richards, The Mughal Empire (The New Cambridge History of India, I.5) (1993)

Akbar came to the throne at thirteen in 1556 and spent fifty years building an apparatus that solved, for about a century, the problem every state in this part of the world had failed to solve.

The problem

A ruler pays his officers with assignments of land revenue because he has no other way to pay them. Within three generations the officers' families own the land, the assignments have become hereditary, and the men who were supposed to serve the crown have their own resources, their own dependants and their own opinions.

The Delhi Sultanate ran into it. The Seljuks, the Mamluks and the Ottomans all ran into it. It is the most reliable failure mode in pre-modern government.

The answer

Akbar's mansabdari system put every officer of the empire — Muslim, Hindu, Persian émigré, Rajput prince — into a single numerical hierarchy.

A mansab was a rank expressed as two numbers: the zat, which fixed personal status and pay, and the sawar, which fixed how many cavalrymen the holder had to maintain. Everything followed from the rank: salary, precedence, the size of the contingent, the position in the hall.

The rank was granted by the emperor, held at his pleasure, and not heritable. When a mansabdar died his assignment reverted to the crown and his estate was audited for what he owed it.

And the assignments — jagirs, districts whose revenue paid the salary — were rotated. A holder kept one for a few years and was then moved somewhere else, so that no family could put down roots in a province, build a local following, or confuse the revenue of a district with the ownership of it.

To make the rotation possible you have to know what every district is worth. Which is why the other half of the system is the survey.

The survey

Todar Mal's revenue settlement measured the cultivated land of the empire's core provinces with a standard unit, classified it by what it grew and how reliably, averaged the yields and the prices over ten years, and fixed the state's demand in cash as a share of that average.

That is a permanent, written, checkable assessment covering millions of cultivators, produced by a sixteenth-century government. Abu'l Fazl's A'in-i Akbari prints the results province by province, along with the ranks, the salaries, the imperial workshops, the price of everything the household bought, and the regulations for branding cavalry horses so that a mansabdar could not hire the same animals twice for two musters.

The other settlement

The administrative machinery would not have held a majority-Hindu empire on its own, and Akbar knew it.

He abolished the jizya on non-Muslims in 1564, and the pilgrimage tax before that. He married Rajput princesses and did not require them to convert. He put Rajput rulers into the mansabdari at high rank, commanding imperial armies, including against other Rajputs — Man Singh of Amber led Mughal forces for decades.

By the end of the reign something over a fifth of the senior nobility was Hindu. That is a Muslim dynasty governing India through a nobility a substantial part of which was not Muslim, by design, as policy.

The religious experiments of his later years — the debates at the Ibadat Khana where Jesuits, Jains, Zoroastrians and Hindus argued in front of him, and the din-i ilahi, a small circle of personal discipleship the sources describe variously — are usually treated as the interesting part. They mattered far less than the tax exemption and the marriages, which were structural.

Richards, The Mughal Empire (The New Cambridge History of India, I.5) (1993) · Unknown · Public domain

What it produced

By 1600 the Mughal empire had perhaps a hundred million subjects, the largest revenue of any state on earth, and an administrative record so detailed that economic historians still work from it.

It also had a rule about land that would break when there was no more land to assign, and a settlement about religion that depended on the emperor of the day wanting to keep it.

The head in the box

contractionDrafted from Bernier, Travels in the Mogul Empire, A.D. 1656-1668 (1916)

Shah Jahan fell seriously ill in September 1657, past sixty-four and suffering from a disorder Bernier calls too disgraceful to describe. The illness itself mattered less than what it triggered: all four of his sons - Dara Shikoh at Delhi and Agra, Shah Shuja in Bengal, Aurangzeb in the Deccan, Murad Bakhsh in Gujarat - began raising armies before anyone could confirm whether their father was even still alive. Shah Jahan recovered enough to send each of them letters ordering them home, but Shuja's own courtiers told him the emperor's recovery was a fiction, and Aurangzeb, distrustful of his eldest brother Dara's hold on the ailing king, kept his own army moving north regardless. Bernier, who had arrived in India the previous year and would spend most of the next decade attached to a noble at Aurangzeb's own court, watched the whole war unfold at close range.

Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York · Bernier, Travels in the Mogul Empire, A.D. 1656-1668 (1916) · Unknown · Public domain

Two battles, one winner

Aurangzeb and Murad Bakhsh combined their forces and crushed an imperial army under Dara's own general, Jaswant Singh, at a river crossing near Dharmat in April 1658 - a defeat sealed when the imperial commander Kasim Khan abandoned the field, leaving the Rajput contingent that had fought loyally to be cut down almost to a man. Dara met the brothers himself the following month at Samugarh, and by Bernier's own account fought with real courage - riding an elephant into the thick of the fighting, rallying broken units back into line, twice driving Aurangzeb's own wing from the field. But the battle turned on treachery rather than force: Khalilullah Khan, commanding thirty thousand of Dara's own troops on the right wing, held his division back from the fighting entirely, and without it Dara's advantage evaporated. He fled the field, and his army, which had been winning when he left it, dissolved behind him.

Harvard Art Museums · Bernier, Travels in the Mogul Empire, A.D. 1656-1668 (1916) · Payag · Public domain

A trap sprung on its own builder

Shah Jahan, still confined to the fortress at Agra, tried to play Aurangzeb against his own son the way he had once played his sons against each other - sending secret messages of support to whichever side seemed useful in the moment, while publicly professing loyalty to none of them. Aurangzeb, who knew exactly what his father was doing, refused to enter the fortress himself; instead he sent his own son, Sultan Muhammad, ostensibly to deliver a message, who turned on the gate guards the moment he was inside and took the fortress by surprise. Shah Jahan, who had spent weeks trying to out-scheme his son, discovered that he had walked into the same kind of trap he had set for others - a prisoner in his own citadel, with Aurangzeb now holding both the fortress and, in practice, the throne.

A charge that settled the question in advance

Dara fled first toward Sindh and then east, betrayed in the end by a local chieftain, Malik Jiwan, whose life Dara had once spared and who delivered him to Aurangzeb's forces in chains. Bernier records the charge that condemned him: not treason alone, but apostasy - that he "had long since ceased to be a Musulman, and become a Kafer," a judgment secured, Khafi Khan's own account adds, by a legal opinion from the court's own jurists that he had "apostatised from the law, had vilified religion, and had allied himself with heresy and infidelity." It was the same charge, in miniature, that Aurangzeb's later religious policy would apply to the empire at large. Dara was executed in his cell in 1659, and by the account of witnesses the translator's own notes preserve, his head was embalmed, sealed in a box, and delivered to Shah Jahan in Aurangzeb's name. The old emperor, still imprisoned at Agra, opened it expecting a gesture of reconciliation from his usurping son and found his own son's face instead.

What died at Samugarh

Dara Shikoh had spent the years before the war as governor of Benares commissioning a Persian translation of the Upanishads, made by a staff of Benares pandits and titled the Sirr-i-Akbar - the Secret of Secrets - a scholarly project that later found its way, by a long chain of translation, into European hands entirely. None of that scholarship survived him into power. Murad Bakhsh, who had fought beside Aurangzeb at both battles, was imprisoned and then executed in turn: unwilling to poison a member of the royal family whose death might later be doubted, Aurangzeb had the sons of a man Murad had murdered years earlier in Gujarat brought to court to demand his head, and used their claim of blood as the form of law for an execution he had already decided on. Shah Shuja fled to Arakan and, by the account Bernier's own translator records, was drowned there with his entire family by the local raja's own order in 1660. Aurangzeb held the throne he had taken by 1658 for the next forty-nine years, ruling a father he kept confined at Agra until Shah Jahan's own death in 1666 - a reign that began, before any campaign or any law, with a brother's head arriving in a box addressed to a prisoner.

British Museum, London · Bernier, Travels in the Mogul Empire, A.D. 1656-1668 (1916) · Unknown · Public domain

Bernier's argument

contractionDrafted from Bernier, Travels in the Mogul Empire, A.D. 1656-1668 (1916)

François Bernier spent twelve years in India, most of them attached to a senior noble of Aurangzeb's court, and went home in 1668 with a theory about why the country was poor. The theory was wrong in an interesting way and it shaped European thinking about Asia for the next two hundred years.

What he saw

He saw the jagir system from the inside, and what he saw was real.

An officer holds a district for a few years, is paid out of its revenue, and knows he will be moved. He therefore has no reason whatever to invest in it: not in the canals, not in the wells, not in anything that pays back over a decade. What he has every reason to do is extract as much as the district will bear before he is transferred.

Bernier's description of the consequence is unsparing:

a tyranny often so excessive as to deprive the peasant and artisan of the necessaries of life, and leave them to die of misery and exhaustion... a tyranny, in fine, that drives the cultivator of the soil from his wretched home to some neighbouring state, in hopes of finding milder treatment, or to the army.

And the mechanism underneath it:

As the ground is seldom tilled otherwise than by compulsion, and as no person is found willing and able to repair the ditches and canals for the conveyance of water, it happens that the whole country is badly cultivated, and a great part rendered unproductive from the want of irrigation.

He puts the peasant's reasoning in the peasant's mouth: Why should I toil for a tyrant who may come to-morrow and lay his rapacious hands upon all I possess?

He also notes, precisely, that the emperor could not stop it even if he wanted to, in provinces not contiguous to his capital.

The theory he built on it

Bernier's explanation was that the king owned all the land — that there was no private property in the soil at all, and therefore none of the security that makes people improve things.

That argument travelled. Montesquieu took it, and it became "oriental despotism": a whole civilisation explained by the absence of property, standing in permanent contrast to a Europe defined by having it. Marx took a version of it for the Asiatic mode of production. It was still doing service in the nineteenth century as a justification for governing India, on the grounds that a people who had never had property rights could not be expected to manage themselves.

Why it is wrong

Every historian of Mughal revenue since has attacked it, and the attack is straightforward: there was extensive private property in land, transacted, mortgaged, inherited and litigated over.

The zamindars held hereditary rights in the revenue of their localities and sold them. Peasants held heritable occupancy rights that the courts recognised. The state's claim was on a share of the produce, which is a tax, and a heavy tax is not the same thing as the absence of ownership.

What Bernier had actually observed was narrower and more accurate than the theory he wrapped it in: a transferable revenue assignment creates no incentive to invest, and by the 1660s the empire was running out of assignments to give out.

Which is the real problem

Akbar's system worked because the number of mansabdars was matched to the amount of assignable revenue. Aurangzeb doubled the nobility — partly by absorbing the Deccan sultanates' officers, partly to buy Maratha and other support — while the revenue did not double.

So jagirs were over-assessed on paper against what they actually yielded, holders received assignments that could not pay their obligations, transfers became more frequent to spread the shortfall, and the incentive to strip a district before moving on became irresistible.

Contemporary Mughal officials wrote about this as the be-jagiri crisis — the shortage of assignments — and it is the mechanism by which the most sophisticated revenue system of the seventeenth century turned into the thing Bernier described.

He was in the right country, watching the right process, and reached for an explanation about the nature of Asia when the answer was an accounting problem.

When the settlement broke

endDrafted from Richards, The Mughal Empire (The New Cambridge History of India, I.5) (1993)

Akbar's arrangement — the jizya abolished, Rajput houses married into the imperial family, a nobility that was substantially Hindu, and a state that did not identify itself with one community against the others — held for roughly a century under Jahangir and Shah Jahan.

Aurangzeb reversed much of it. He reimposed the jizya in 1679, patronised a stricter Sunni establishment, and spent the last twenty-five years of a forty-nine year reign campaigning in the Deccan against the Marathas and the Deccan sultanates. The empire reached its greatest extent under him and was insolvent when he died in 1707.

Richards, The Mughal Empire (The New Cambridge History of India, I.5) (1993) · Unknown · Public domain

The two facts are connected and the causation is argued about. The Deccan wars consumed revenue and kept the emperor and the army permanently a thousand miles from the capital; the mansabdari system ran short of assignable land to pay an expanded nobility; the Marathas were never defeated so much as absorbed as a permanent expense. How much the religious policy contributed is genuinely contested, and the honest answer is that the fiscal argument explains more of it than the confessional one does.

What followed was rapid. Within fifty years the empire was a set of effectively independent provinces — Bengal, Awadh, Hyderabad — whose governors remitted nothing and whose emperor was a figure of ceremony in Delhi.

That is the same shape the Abbasid caliphate took under the Buyids, four hundred years earlier and two thousand miles west: an imperial office retaining its legitimacy and its ceremony long after it had stopped governing, useful to everyone who took power precisely because it was powerless and could not object. The East India Company ruled Bengal in the emperor's name from 1765.

The emperor of Delhi

afterlifeDrafted from Richards, The Mughal Empire (The New Cambridge History of India, I.5) (1993)

The Mughal empire stopped governing around 1720 and was not abolished until 1858, and the hundred and thirty-eight years in between are the most instructive part of its history.

The useful shell

By the 1750s the emperor at Delhi had no army, no revenue and no province. What he had was a signature that everybody wanted.

The Nawabs of Bengal, Awadh and the Carnatic, the Nizam of Hyderabad, the Marathas, the French and the English all governed in his name and remitted him nothing. Every one of them held their position by an imperial grant, and every one of them found it cheaper to obtain the grant than to argue about whether it was necessary.

In 1765 the East India Company took the diwani of Bengal, Bihar and Orissa — the right to collect the revenue of the richest provinces in India — from Shah Alam II, by a treaty, in return for an annual payment. A trading company became the tax authority of thirty million people by receiving an office from an emperor who could not have enforced anything against it.

British Library, London · Richards, The Mughal Empire (The New Cambridge History of India, I.5) (1993) · Benjamin West · Public domain

Company coins were struck in the emperor's name until 1835. Company documents ran in his name for decades after nobody pretended he ruled.

Why the shell was worth having

Because legitimacy is a real asset and the alternative was expensive.

A Maratha general or a Company official who governed in the emperor's name was doing something the local revenue officials, the zamindars and the courts already knew how to recognise. Somebody governing in his own name would have had to explain himself to all of them, in every district, and enforce the explanation.

That is the same arrangement the Abbasid caliphate had in Baghdad after the Buyids, four hundred years earlier and two thousand miles west: an office retaining its ceremony long after it had stopped governing, useful to everyone who took power precisely because it was powerless and could not object.

1857

The end came because somebody took the fiction seriously.

When the sepoy regiments mutinied in May 1857 they marched to Delhi and proclaimed Bahadur Shah Zafar — an eighty-two-year-old poet who had been a British pensioner in his own palace, whose authority ran to the Red Fort and not beyond it — as emperor of Hindustan.

He did not want it. He had no forces, no money and no illusions. But the rebels needed a name that everyone from Bengal to the Punjab already accepted, and there was only one, which is a measure of how much residual value the office still had after a century of meaning nothing.

The British retook Delhi in September, shot his sons, tried him for treason against a crown he had never sworn to, and exiled him to Rangoon, where he died in 1862. The Company was abolished in the same settlement and India passed to the Crown; Victoria was proclaimed Empress of India in 1877, taking the title the Mughals had held.

Richards, The Mughal Empire (The New Cambridge History of India, I.5) (1993) · Horatio Gordon Robley · Public domain

Bahadur Shah wrote in Urdu, and some of the ghazals attributed to him are still sung.

What is actually inherited

The buildings, most obviously — the Taj Mahal, the Red Fort, Fatehpur Sikri, Humayun's tomb, the Lahore fort — and a style that regional courts across the subcontinent copied for two centuries.

J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles · Richards, The Mughal Empire (The New Cambridge History of India, I.5) (1993) · Shepherd and Robertson · CC0

The administrative geography. The Mughal subas are the ancestors of the provinces the British administered and, in modified form, of several modern Indian states. The revenue settlements the British made in the nineteenth century were built on Mughal registers and Mughal categories, which is why the land records of large parts of India still carry terms from Akbar's survey.

The language, which the previous empire started and this one carried: Urdu acquired its literature at the Mughal and successor courts, and Persian remained the language of government until 1837.

And an argument that has not stopped. Whether the empire was an Indian state that happened to be ruled by Muslims or a Muslim state ruling Indians is a question about the seventeenth century that is fought over in the twenty-first, in politics rather than in journals, by people for whom Akbar's jizya abolition and Aurangzeb's reimposition of it are positions rather than events.

That is what happens to an empire that lasted long enough to be everybody's ancestor.