Mughals : The Mughal

Administration

Akbar’s conquests subdued the powerful Rajput princes, particularly after his army captured the apparently impregnable fortress of Chitor in 1567, using mines and artillery. Akbar’s reorganization of the army gave the Mughal Empire in India a permanent, powerful instrument of control. But his finest achievement was the

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organization of a system of land taxation. This was administered by his able Hindu minister, Raja Todar Mal (the process was named bandobast).

The wealth of the Indian princes and Indian states had always depended on taxing crops grown by peasant farmers. Agriculture was highly productive. Many areas grew two, or even three, crops a year. These included crops such as wheat, barley, and millet, as well as rice, cotton, and sugar cane, which needed a considerable quantity of water.

Akbar and his finance ministers decided to reorganize the land taxation system and link it to the administration of the empire. This was done in two ways. Firstly, Akbar’s officials made a detailed land survey to measure how much land was under cultivation, its fertility, and the kinds of crops grown.

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Standard rates of taxation were then imposed. The peasants cultivating the fields knew exactly how much their tax was, and when they had to pay. Secondly, Akbar started a new administrative system known as jagirdari. A military or civil officer in charge of a district was given a certain quantity of land for a limited period, instead of being paid a salary from the central treasury. A military officer was also expected to keep a certain number of cavalry soldiers, and he had to pay for these soldiers out of his jagir, or land grant. These units of cavalry made up the Mughal standing army. The holders of the jagir were moved from place to place every two to three years so that they did not become local landowners, with selfish interests. The success of the system depended on the accuracy of the land survey, and the calculation of the value of the agricultural production of each village.In addition, Akbar’s officials divided

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the empire into provinces and districts. A military officer, often a prince belonging to the royal house, acted as the viceroy (governor) of the provinces. A separate official, called the dewan, collected taxes, and sent the money to the central treasury in Delhi. The economic prosperity of Mughal India was greatly helped by these reforms, and there was a big expansion of trade. New towns and cities were built, and the production of basic goods such as cotton cloth increased. There was no elaborate system of judicial courts such as the British later introduced. Criminal cases in the towns were dealt with by government-appointed Muslim qazis or law officers administering the Muslim code. In the countryside, government courts only existed at the district headquarters or other small towns; the imperial officers were only concerned with large scale crime such as gang robbery. Order was maintained in the villages largely by the village elders

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themselves. Thus the villager saw the government mainly in the guise of a revenue-collecting agent, as a judge in a dispute, or as an army which plundered him.

Mughals : Jahangir

Jahangir (1569-1627) was the fourth Mughal emperor of India. During his reign, which lasted from 1605 until his

death, he continued the expansion of the Mughal empire.

Jahangir was saved from a war of succession by the pre-decease of his brother and had only to deal with a short-lived revolt of his eldest son Khusrau.

Jahangir was known as a patron of the arts. He was also known for his

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genuine sense of justice. This was marred by his outbursts of cruelty, and his dependence on drugs such as opium and alcohol. He could be genial one minute and violent the next. He was also criticized for giving way too often to his scheming Persian wife, Nur Jahan (Light of the World). His attachment to Nur Jahan was commemorated by a special issue of gold mohurs (coins).

Jahangir was born in the palace city of Fatehpur Sikri, near Agra, in what is now the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh. His father was the Mughal emperor Akbar. Jahangir’s father named him Muhammad Sultan Salim, but he took the title Jahangir (World-Conqueror) when he became emperor.

In 1614, Jahangir captured the last great Rajput fortress of Rajasthan, and two years later he took over half the kingdom of Ahmadnagar on the Deccan Plateau. He granted trade concessions to the British in return for their naval support against the Portuguese.

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Mughals : Shah Jahan

Shah Jahan was a man of greater mark, though less attractive than Jahangir, in spite of his obvious faults. Shah Jahan was a man of great executive ability, to which he added a love for the magnificent and a refined artistic sense, especially for architecture. Shah Jahan (1592-1666) was the fifth ruler of the Mughal Empire in India. He became ruler in 1628. At his succession he executed all the male Mughal collterals, the descendants of his brothers and uncles, although at that time they had little political significance. During his reign, the Mughals reached their golden age, with vaults crammed with treasures and with architecture in magnificent style. He was in a special sense the

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architectural director of the day and there seems to be little doubt that the great buildings of his reign, the Taj Mahal, the Delhi Fort, and Jama Masjid, and the reconstruction of the Agra Fort, would not have been what they are without his personal inspiration and direction.

Shah Jahan is best remembered for the perfectly proportioned Taj Mahal, an immense tomb of white marble built for his wife in Agra, India. These and other buildings still stand as examples of Mughal glory. His romantic love for Mumtaz Mahal (his wife) did not hesitate to expose Mumtaz to the rigours of travel in all states of health so that she died at the age of 39 after giving birth to her fourteenth child. The dynasty began its decline because too much money was spent on luxuries and too much effort was wasted in war. Shah Jahan’s reign was a troubled one, and one of his sons took his throne by force.

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Taj Mahal

Taj Mahal is one of the most beautiful and costly tombs in the world. The Indian ruler Shah Jahan ordered it built in memory of his favourite wife, Mumtaz Mahal, who

died in 1629. The tomb stands near the city of Agra, in northern India, on the south bank of the Jumna River. About 20,000 workers were employed in its construction, completed after some 20 years by about 1650.

According to tradition, the Taj Mahal was designed by a Turkish architect. It is made of white marble and rests on a platform of red sandstone. At each corner of the platform stands a slender minaret (prayer tower). Each tower is 40.5 metres high. The building itself is

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almost 57 metres square. A dome covers the centre of the building.

It is over 21 metres in diameter and 36.5 metres high. Passages from the Muslim holy book, the Quran, decorate the outside along with inlaid floral patterns. A central room contains two cenotaphs (monuments). Visitors can see the monuments through a carved alabaster screen. The bodies of Shah Jahan and his wife lie in a vault below. The tomb stands in a garden.

next page >>Mughals : Aurangzeb

Aurangzeb (1618-1707), was an emperor who ruled what is now India and Pakistan from 1658 until his death. During his reign as monarch of the Mughal Empire, he conquered several states in southern India.

Aurangzeb, a devout Muslim, tried to make all his people follow the doctrines of Islam, the Muslim

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religion. He differed from Akbar in consciously tolerating Hindus rather than treating them as equals. He placed special taxes on Hindus and destroyed Hindu temples and images, such as the destruction of Kashi Vishwanath temple and erection of a mosque in its place. Aurangzeb also destroyed many works of art because he feared that they might be worshipped as idols.

Aurangzeb was born in Dohad, near Ahmadabad. In a struggle for the throne, Aurangzeb murdered his three other brothers, including the crown prince Dara Shukoh, and deposed Shah Jahan, the reigning emperor, to seize the throne for himself. Shah Jahan died a prisoner in the fortress of Agra. Aurangzeb’s reign was one of the longest in the history of the Mughal dynasty. His rebellion and acts of cruelty toward his family at first aroused public horror and dislike. Yet there was no law recognized in Islamic states to nominate a legal successor to the king. The succession was often settled by wars and by murders.

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The new emperor, Aurangzeb, was a strict Muslim. To begin with, he followed the policy of making peace with the non-Muslim peoples he conquered and bringing them into the imperial service. But the policy broke down, and in the latter part of his reign, Aurangzeb imposed a much stricter form of Islamic rule. In 1679, he reintroduced the jiziya, a poll tax on non-Muslims. Militarily, Aurangzeb set out to protect his northern borders and subdue the independent Muslim kingdoms in the Deccan and south India. By 1690, the whole of the Indian subcontinent lay within the Mughal Empire.

Aurangzeb won swift political and military success, through his abilities as a soldier and politician. But his conquests brought him great trouble toward the end of his reign. The wars were expensive and the military officers were rewarded for their service by the grant of new jagirs. The jagir-holders taxed the peasants mercilessly, causing many

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to flee from the villages. Much land was left uncultivated as a result.

Aurangzeb’s reign was troubled by developments in west and south India. As early as the 1660’s, Shivaji, a Hindu chief of western India, had built up a strong private army and begun to raid Mughal towns and cities. He captured and sacked the great port of Surat. Shivaji’s followers, known as the Marathas, were very good cavalry fighters. They took all the strong fortresses from the Mughal governors. Aurangzeb had to fight the Marathas, and many other local chiefs in the south, who were constantly rebelling against Mughal rule and trying to reestablish their independence.

Mughals : The Last Mughals

The visible decline of the empire can be dated from 1712, the year of the death of Bahadur Shah 1. But it remained an apparently imposing

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institution until the I750s, and few thought its doom inevitable before then. The first stage in the process was succession wars which left a puppet in the hands of kingmakers. The kingmakers overreached themselves when the third choice proved a clever youth who disposed of them in the course of two Years.

This youth was Muhammad Shah, who reigned for twenty-nine years until 1748. The twenties saw the next stage when the empire was virtually divided into two. Asaf Jah, Nizam-ul-mulk, baulked in his reforming intentions as chief minister in Delhi, went back to his Deccan provinces and became the virtually independent ruler of the southern half of the Mughal empire with Hyderabad as its capital.

The empire bad crushed the Sikhs in 1716, but it found itself helpless against the Marathas. In 1738 the Marathas plundered the suburbs of Delhi and dictated a peace which divided the two halves of the empire by the cession of the

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province of Malwa. In 1739 came the humiliation of the Persian King Nadir Shah’s invasion. Neglect, ineptitude, divided counsels, and treachery led to military debacle at Karnal, the occupation of Delhi, massacre, and wholesale plunder. Nevertheless, when Nadir Shah’s back was turned, with the Peacock Throne in his train, the empire seemed to recover and even repelled the first of the Afghan incursions in 1748. With Muhammad Shah’s death the collapse began. A civil war between rival ministers left a headlong and ruthless youth in power, which murdered two emperors and called in the Marathas before vanishing into obscurity. The south was already the Nizam’s domain. Kabul was lost to Nadir Shah in 1739. Sindh and fertile Gujarat with Surat went in 1750, prosperous Oudh in 1754 and the martial Punjab to the Afghans in the same year. Bengal still sent tribute but was virtually independent.

The cause of this collapse is usually

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put down to the effeteness of the emperors. This was certainly one cause since personality was one of the main imperial pillars. But it was not the only cause or necessarily the vital one. Another important reason was Aurangzeb’s policy of treating the empire as a Muslim state instead of an Indian state with Islam as the state religion. Which alienated Hindus to such an extent that they had no desire of allowing Mughal empire to continue. Martial groups like the Sikhs and the Jats were encouraged to open revolt. And the Marathas with their invincibility and Guerrilla warfare had all the capabilities to ruin the Mughals and form another empire.

Mughals : Europeans in India - Part I

European interest in India has persisted since classical times and for very cogent reasons. India had

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much to give Europe in the practical form of spices, textiles, and other oriental products. When direct contact was lost after the fall of Rome and the rise of Muslim Arabs the trade was carried out through middlemen. In the late Middle Ages it increased with the increasing prosperity of Europe. It should be remembered that spice trade was not just a luxury trade at that time.

Spices were used to preserve meat through the winter. The trade suffered two threats in the later middle ages. There was the threat of Mongol and Turkish invasion which interfered with the land routes and threatened to engulf the sea route through Egypt, and there was the threat of monopoly shared between Venetians & Egyptians. Crusading zeal against Muslims and commercial zeal against spice monopolists were the motives which sent Columbus to America and Vasco da Gama to Calicut in 1498.

Vasco da Gama told the first Indians

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he met on the Malabar Coast that he came to seek ‘Christians and Spices’. The Christians he was seeking were the legendary people to be rescued from Muslim encirclement; they were in fact Abyssinians whom da Gama never met. The Portuguese soon found that Malabar was as important a centre for re-export of spices from the East Indies as for the sale of its own limited range of pepper and cardamom. They also found that the trade with Egypt and so with Europe was in the hands of Arab merchants. So a double strategy was developed.

A series of strong points was established so as to dominate both the East Indies and the Arabian sea. The object of the former measure was to control the spice trade at its principal sources from Java to the Mulucca Islands (home of the clove) and of the latter to cut off the Arabian-managcd spice trade from south India to Egypt and the Persian Gulf. In this way the European spice trade would be diverted to

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Portuguese ships and toll could be taken (by a system of licences) of all the remaining maritime trade of the Indian Ocean. The Portuguese were largely successful in their venture because of the superior power of their ships, whose guns could blow most ‘country ships’ of the time out of the water, of the daring and endurance of their captains and men, and of the genius of Aflonso de Albuquerque.* It was he who in 1510 captured Goa on the west coast of India from the Sultan of Bijapur and made it the capital of the Portuguese eastern empire.

continued....Mughals : Europeans in India - Part II

The Portuguese never attempted largescale conquest but they did impinge on Indian affairs and they carried their culture with them.

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Politically their control of the sea irked Mughal and preceding Muslim rulers because of the toll they took of the trade from the port of Surat and the pilgrim traffic. In seizing and retaining their strong points they acquired a reputation for cruelty and perfidy because their practice on both these points was below the current Indian standard. They were deeply impregnated with the idea that no faith need be kept with an infidel.

It was from this period that the word feringi (lit. farangi, frank) acquired the opprobrium. In religion they were intolerant to the extent of allowing no Hindu temples in Goa and introducing the Inquisition (1560), both measures which can be regarded as sub-standard from the Indian standpoint.

Socially the policy of Albuquerque in encouraging mixed marriages had important results. His object was to rear a population possessing Portuguese blood and imbued with Portuguese Catholic culture who

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would be committed by race and taste to the Portuguese settlements and so form a permanent self-perpetuating garrison. The result was the race long known as Luso-Indians and now as Goans.

From early times they spilled over from the Portuguese settlements and formed communities of their own which tended towards disorder and piracy. One such at Hughli was suppressed by Shah Jahan in 1632.

The Dutch sent their first fleet to the East in 1595. Being commercial realists they went straight to the source of the spice trade in the East Indies, established themselves at Batavia (now as previous to their arrival called Jakarta), and proceeded to oust the Portuguese. Then they established a chain of posts through Ceylon and Capetown to connect themselves with their home base and proceeded to develop a great Asian network of trade.

The Dutch had ‘factories’ or

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warehouses as far north as Agra but they took no part in politics or cultural contacts. Their eccentric tombs at Surat and their factories at Cochin and Negapatam are their principal memorials in India. Only in Ceylon did they exercise dominion in the plains from Colombo and leave a living memorial in the Burgher community.

Mughals : Nadir Shah

Aurangzeb’s death had created a void in the Mughal empire which none of his successors were able to fill. Frequent struggles for throne and betrayal of ministers had resulted in the weakening of the empire. Nadir Shah, who from being a chief of dacoits had become the king of Persia, saw the weak empire as an opportunity.

In 1738, Nadir Shah proceeded to invade India. The excuse for the invasion being that the Mughal emperor Muhammad Shah had

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insulted the Persian envoy at the royal court of Delhi. He overran the western frontiers of Mughal empire capturing Ghazni, Kabul and Lahore in 1739. When Nadir Shah crossed Khyber Pass the Governor of Punjab requested the Mughal Empire to reinforce the defences in Punjab, but the then Mughal emperor Muhammad Shah turned a deaf ear towards his genuine request.

Soon Nadir Shah stormed Punjab, Muhammad Shah realizing the danger asked Khan Dauran and Nizam-ul-Mulk to lead the Mughal forces against Nadir Shah. But the two declined, so ultimately Muhammad Shah decided to lead the forces himself. The two forces met at Karnal, but soon the Mughal forces were encircled and defeated. The Nawab of Awadh Saadat Khan was taken prisoner and Khan Dauran was seriously wounded.

The defeat of the Mughal army created confusion in their ranks. The Nizam played the role of mediator and persuaded Nadir Shah

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to return to Persia on receiving 20 million rupees. Mughal emperor pleased with Nizam conferred him the title of ‘Amir-Ul-Umra’ and also appointed him the Prime Minister. Jealous Saadat Khan approached Nadir Khan and told him that he should not get satisfied with such a paltry sum which evens a provincial governor can give him. This had an electrifying effect on the Persian ruler and the grandeur of Delhi flashed before his eyes.

Triumphant Nadir Shah entered Delhi along with the humbled Mughal Emperor. The keys of the Delhi fort and treasure had already been surrendered. An amount was also settled with Nadir Shah as a condition for his return. But a rumour spread that Nadir Shah has been killed. Riots were sparked off in Delhi in which few Persian soldiers were killed. As Nadir Shah heard of this he straightaway rode into the city, in the city he saw the corpses of Persian soldiers lying on the streets. Near the Sunhari masjid of Roshnuddola, some people

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hurled stones at him also a stray bullet killed a Persian soldier. He was enraged; he ordered a general massacre at all those localities where the bodies of Persian soldiers were found. Consequently on 11th of March 1739 citizens of Delhi were plundered and slaughtered, some historians say that nearly 0.2 million people were killed.

Nadir Shah on his return after plundering and slaughtering Delhites for 57 days, took with him the famous ‘Peacock throne’ built by Shahjahan and the legendary ‘Koh-i-noor’ along with 600 million rupees worth of jewellery, gold worth 10 million rupees and coins worth 6 million rupees. His total collection of booty was worth 700 million rupees and also took care to include in his train 100 elephants, 7000 craftsmen, 100 stone-cutters and 200 carpenters.

Nadir Shah’s invasion did an irreparable damage to the Mughal Empire. Mughal provinces across the Indus were seceded to the

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Persians. Later on inspired by the antics of Nadir Shah his successor Ahmad Shah Abdali too invaded India several times between 1748 and 1767 and plundered Delhi.

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