by John Keay
Although the emperor maintained his own household troops, the recruitment and maintenance of most of his vast forces were thus in effect contracted out. Similarly, since all senior mansabdars were awarded jagirs by way of salaries, the responsibility for most revenue collection was also contracted out. Rates of remuneration, which included both the mansabdar’s salary and so much per sowar, were matched by jagirs affording a similar aggregate yield. If their specified yield came to more, the surplus was due to the imperial treasury; if the jagirdar extracted more than the specified yield, he kept it.
‘Towards the end of [Akbar’s] reign mansabdars and their followers consumed 82 percent of the total annual budget of the empire for their pay allowances.’6 There were around two thousand mansabdars at the time and between them they commanded 150,000–200,000 cavalrymen. The emperor personally commanded a further seven thousand crack sowars plus eighty thousand infantry and gunners who together accounted for another 9 percent of the budget. In addition, according to Abu’l-Fazl, the locally-based zamindars could muster a colossal 4.5 million retainers, mostly infantrymen. These last, who were poorly paid if at all by their zamindars, did not feature in the imperial budget. But by aggregating all these troop numbers and then adding to them the likely horde of non-combatant military dependants – suppliers, servants, family members – it has been suggested that the figure for those who relied on the military for a living could have been as high as twenty-six million. That would be a quarter of the entire population. The Mughal empire, whether bearing the character of ‘a patrimonial bureaucracy’ as per the administrative hierarchy, or of ‘a centralised autocracy’ as per the ranking system, was essentially a coercive military machine.
Much of this coercive potential was deployed in campaigns against obdurate neighbours like the Deccan sultanates. But, excluding those units on active service or in attendance at the royal court, many sowar contingents were stationed in different parts of the empire where they could be called upon to maintain order and enforce the collection of revenue. In effect many regular troops, as well as all those zamindari retainers, were being used to extract the agricultural surplus which financed them. It was, as Raychaudhuri puts it, ‘a vicious circle of coercion helping to maintain a machinery of coercion’.7
Such heavy-handed intervention on the part of the central government was necessary to overcome the resistance traditionally offered by local zamindari interests and so maximise the revenue yield due to the emperor or his jagirdars. Another way of maximising the revenue yield was to improve the means by which crops were assessed and the revenue calculated. During his brief reign Sher Shah had shown the way with new land surveys, new calculations of estimated yields, and collection in cash instead of kind. But it was Raja Todar Mal, a Colbert to Akbar’s Louis XIV, who from 1560 onwards overhauled the whole revenue system. Standard weights and measurements were introduced, new revenue districts with similar soils and climate were formed, revenue officers were appointed for each such unit, more surveys were undertaken, more data on yields and prices collected, new assessments worked out for each crop and each area, written demands issued and accepted by the village headmen, and copious records kept and filed.
The introduction of these reforms necessitated a five-year period of direct administration during which all jagirs were cancelled. When they were reintroduced in 1585 the results were highly satisfactory. Revenue receipts were vastly increased and the state enjoyed a massive share of rural productivity amounting to ‘one-third of all foodgrain production and perhaps one-fifth of other crops’, much of it achieved ‘at the expense of the older claims and perquisites of the zamindars’.8
NO MAN HIS RELATION
Drawing heavily on Bernier’s account, in 1675 John Dryden’s Aureng-Zebe, a highly romanticised verse epic, received its first performance in London. Through such works the ‘Grand Mogul’ became synonymous in English with autocratic rule and unimaginable opulence. All foreign visitors to the India of the six Great Mughals – Babur, Humayun, Akbar, Jahangir, Shah Jahan and Aurangzeb – found ample evidence of an awesome authority and were stunned by the magnificence of the imperial setting. This last was most obviously architectural, but not exclusively. The eye-catching profusion of solid gold and chased silver, precious silks and brocades, massive jewels, priceless carpets and inlaid marbles was probably without parallel in history. Sir Thomas Roe, an emissary from James I of England and a man usually more obsessed with his own dignity, was frankly amazed when he saw Jahangir in ceremonial attire. The emperor’s belt was of gold, his buckler and sword ‘sett all over with great diamonds and rubyes’.
On his head he wore a rich turbant with a plume of herne tops, not many but long; on one syde hung a ruby unsett, as big as a walnutt; on the other syde a diamond as greate; in the middle an emeralld like a hart, [but] much bigger. His shash was wreathed about with a chaine of great pearles, rubyes and diamonds, drilld. About his neck he carried a chaine of most excellent pearle, three double (so great I never saw); at his elbowes, armletts set with diamonds; and on his wrists three rowes of several sorts.9
Bernier was equally impressed. ‘I doubt whether any other monarch possesses more of this species of wealth [i.e. gold, silver and jewels] …, and the enormous consumption of fine cloths of gold, and brocades, silks, embroideries, pearls, musk, amber and sweet essences is greater than can be conceived.’
Yet, despite all this show, there remained some doubt about the real prosperity of the Mughal emperors. Aurangzeb’s income, reported Bernier in the 1660s, ‘probably exceeds the joint revenues of the Grand Seignior [i.e. the Ottoman sultan] and of the King of Persia’. But so, continued the Frenchman, did his expenses. And although revenue receipts had doubled since Akbar’s day (partly thanks to Todar Mal’s reforms, partly as a result of the acquisition of new territories), so too had expenditure. The emperor was therefore to be considered wealthy ‘only in the sense that a treasurer is to be considered wealthy who pays with one hand the large sums which he receives with the other’.10 As for all the gems and gold, these represented not revenue but gifts, tribute and booty, ‘the spoils of ancient princes’. Though valuable enough, they were not productive. India had long been ‘an abyss for gold and silver’, drawing to itself the world’s bullion and then nullifying its economic potential by melting and spinning the precious metals into bracelets, brocades and other ostentatious heirlooms.
There was also doubt about the size of the imperial army. Jean de Thevenot, another French visitor to Aurangzeb’s empire, had read that the emperor and his mansabdars could field 300,000 horse. This was what the records showed, and ‘they say indeed that he pays so many’. But, mansabdars being notoriously lax in providing their full complement of troopers, ‘it is certain that they hardly keep on foot one half of the men they are appointed to have; so that when the Great Mogol marches upon any expedition of war, his army exceeds not a hundred and fifty thousand horse, with very few foot, though he have betwixt 300,000 and 400,000 mouths in the army.’11
Worse still, the army, like the wealth, was not always being deployed to productive effect. Akbar’s long reign (1556–1605) had been punctuated by a succession of brilliant and rewarding conquests, but as it drew to a close these were overshadowed by rivalry and rebellion. In 1600 Prince Salim, the future Jahangir, attempted to seize Agra during Akbar’s absence in the Deccan; in 1602 he actually proclaimed himself emperor; and in 1605, a few weeks before Akbar’s death, he re-erected that Ashoka pillar at Allahabad and, in a blatant assumption of Indian sovereignty, had his own genealogy inscribed alongside the Maurya’s edicts and Samudra-Gupta’s encomium. Abu’l-Fazl, by now a senior commander as well as Akbar’s memorialist, was sent to deal with the prince but was coolly murdered on the latter’s orders. Even when, after reconciliation with his father, Salim/Jahangir’s succession seemed settled, he was opposed by sections of the nobility who preferred Prince Khusrau, his (Salim’s) eldest son. When his father was duly installed as the Emperor Jahangir (‘World-
Conqueror’), Khusrau fled north, laid siege to Lahore, and had to be subdued in battle. Captured, he was eventually blinded on his father’s instructions.
‘Sovereignty does not regard the relation of father and son,’ explained Jahangir in his enlightening but decidedly naive memoir. ‘A king, it is said, should deem no man his relation.’12 Distrust between father and son, as also between brothers, would be a recurring theme of the Mughal period, generating internal crises more serious and more costly than any external threat. Of another trouble-maker Jahangir quoted a Persian verse: ‘The wolf’s whelp will grow up a wolf, even though reared with man himself.’ This proved unintentionally apposite. In 1622 Prince Khurram, Jahangir’s second and best-loved son, on whom he had just bestowed the title ‘Shah Jahan’ (‘King of the World’), would dispose of his elder brother (the blind Khusrau) and then himself rebel against his father. The whelp was indeed worthy of the wolf. In the field or on the run, Shah Jahan led the imperial forces a merry dance for four years. Father and son were only reconciled eighteen months before Jahangir’s death in 1627. There then followed more blood-letting as Shah Jahan made good his claim to the throne by ordering the death of his one remaining brother, plus sundry cousins.
And so it went on. ‘Deeming no man their relation’, least of all their father, in due course each of Shah Jahan’s four sons would mobilise separately against him as also against one another. When Aurangzeb won this contest and in 1658 deposed his father Shah Jahan and imprisoned him in Agra’s fort for the rest of his days, he not unreasonably justified his conduct on the grounds that he was merely treating Shah Jahan as Shah Jahan had sought to treat Jahangir and as Jahangir had sought to treat Akbar. Unsurprisingly Aurangzeb would himself in turn be challenged by his progeny.
Such was the intensity of this internal strife that during much of the seventeenth century it obscured and even confounded attempts to expand Mughal rule. Jahangir’s one notable success was achieved early in his reign when Prince Khurram (Shah Jahan), at that time still ‘my dearest son’ rather than ‘the wretch’ he later became, secured the submission of the Mewar rajputs. Since Rana Udai Singh’s desertion of Chitor and its capture by Akbar, the Mewar Sesodias had recouped their forces and under Rana Amar Singh had successfully seen off several Mughal attempts to induce their submission. Khurram – Shah Jahan at the head of a vast army now concentrated on containment and attrition rather than epic sieges. There was no great battle; indeed Roe, the English ambassador, snidely remarked that the Rana had ‘rather been bought than conquered’, or ‘won to own a superior by gifts and not by arms’.13
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THE GREAT MUGHALS
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Nevertheless the arrival at court of the son of Rana Amar Singh was proof enough of Mewar’s shame. Jahangir, content to have succeeded where Babur and Akbar had both failed, proved magnanimous in victory, while the young Mewar prince sought to save face by excusing himself from making personal submission; no reigning Rana ever would. Amar Singh’s successors would remain on good terms with Khurram – Shah Jahan who received from them sanctuary when in revolt and support when in power. It was during Shah Jahan’s reign as emperor and Jagat Singh’s as rana that the latter embellished his lake at Udaipur with the island, clad in white marble, which was later rebuilt as the famous Jagnivas or ‘Lake Palace’.
But in the next Mughal succession crisis the rana was wrong-footed. A victorious Aurangzeb had no time for his father’s allies nor for the half-loyalties of a Hindu princeling. Every rajput must now be a subservient Mughal amir (noble); either that or be outlawed as one of those ‘Rashboots’ (i.e. rajputs) whom, in the 1690s, the German traveller de Mandelso took to be ‘Highway men or Tories’. Mughal – Mewar hostilities had yet to run their course.
Meanwhile on the frontiers of their empire Jahangir and Shah Jahan endeavoured to emulate Akbar. They rarely succeeded. In the east, although nearly all of what is now Bangladesh was by this time under Mughal rule, a Shan people from upper Burma, the Ahoms, pre-empted Mughal expansion in Assam and repeatedly rolled back Mughal incursions. In the north, along the foothills of the Himalaya, much was made of the capture by Khurram – Shah Jahan in 1618 of the great fort of Kangra (now in Himachal Pradesh). Again Jahangir, who was still emperor at the time, claimed the victory for himself; ‘since the day when the sword of Islam and the glory of the Mohamedan religion have reigned in Hindustan’ no sovereign, he boasted, had been able to reduce the place.14 He was evidently unaware that, as Nagerkot, the fort had been ransacked by Mahmud of Ghazni six hundred years before. There followed minor conquests on the frontiers of Kashmir, whose willow-fringed lakes and cooler climate so enchanted Jahangir, plus another triumph for Khurram – Shah Jahan when at the very end of his father’s reign he finally secured the submission of the raja of Garhwal, a minor hill state in Uttar Pradesh.
None of these places can have rewarded the expense of taking them, nor were they of any great strategic or prestige value. In a very different class, though, were the empire’s two other land frontiers, that in the northwest and that in the Deccan. Invasion was possible from either, both were in the habit of welcoming and assisting Mughal dissidents, and both were arenas in which the Mughals had long-standing ancestral designs. A sovereign self-billed as a ‘World-Conqueror’ like Jahan-gir, or as a ‘King of the World’ like Shah Jahan, could ill afford to ignore either. But here again little real headway was made. In fact Kandahar, the commercially and strategically important capital of southern Afghanistan which Humayun had ceded to Persia and which Akbar had then won back, was again lost. As Persia’s great Shah Abbas advanced on the city in 1622, Jahangir commanded Khurram – Shah Jahan to rush his troops to its defence. This was the order which tipped the latter’s suspicions of his being sidelined for the succession into an open defiance. Jahangir had to switch his attention to the more immediate challenge posed by his son, and Kandahar fell to the shah. Although, as emperor, Shah Jahan launched numerous expeditions to reclaim the city, all proved dismal and increasingly embarrassing failures. So were Shah Jahan’s two forays into northern Afghanistan. Neither of their targets, Balkh and Badakshan, was secured and the dream of reinstating a Timurid in Samarkand receded still further.
The Deccan should have offered a softer and more rewarding target. In the early seventeenth century it was still divided amongst those successor states of the Bahmanid sultanate – now principally Ahmadnagar (in Maharashtra), Golconda (later Hyderabad) and Bijapur (in Karnataka) – which had briefly united for the conquest of Vijayanagar. Akbar, towards the end of his reign, had made the first move by mounting several attacks on Ahmadnagar which culminated with the capture of the city itself in 1600. It also destabilised the Ahmadnagar sultanate, already shaken by rivalry with Bijapur. In the confusion an unlikely but immensely able king-maker emerged. Malik Ambar was an African hubshi (Negro) who had been sold in Baghdad as a slave, brought to the Deccan and, after speedy advancement as a result of numerous military exploits, now undertook the restoration of the Ahmadnagar sultanate with himself as commander and policy-maker. As an administrator he is said to have shown a fine impartiality as between Hindus and Muslims and to have adopted most of the revenue reforms pioneered in Mughal territory by Raja Todar Mal. As a commander he had neither master nor equal and proved the most resourceful and resilient campaigner of his day. Often obliged to use guerrilla tactics, he relied heavily on highly mobile cavalry units which, raised from the martial Hindu aristocracy of upland Maharashtra, were now known as Marathas. Other Marathas served in the Bijapur and Golconda forces. In the increasingly chaotic affairs of the Deccan these Maratha leaders, taking their cue from Malik Ambar, would soon strike out on their own.
Throughout Jahangir’s reign, ‘the black-faced Ambar’ harassed and occasionally routed most of the many Mughal expeditions launched against him. At one point he led his forces north as far as Mandu in Malwa, at another he lay siege to Bijapur. Defeats were quickly reversed, losses recovered, submissions withdrawn.
In 1624, at Bhatvadi near Ahmadnagar, Malik Ambar inflicted such a crushing defeat on a combined Mughal – Bijapuri force that he was able to recover virtually the whole of the erstwhile Ahmadnagar sultanate. Then in a final irony Khurram – Shah Jahan, a commander at whose hands he had previously suffered, sought his alliance. This was in 1625 when Khurram – Shah Jahan was in rebellion against his father. The African ex-slave welcomed the ‘King of the World’ and together their forces laid siege to the Mughal’s Deccan headquarters at Burhanpur.
For Malik Ambar there was no such thing as defeat; only his death in 1626 proved irreversible. Thereafter the Ahmadnagar succession faltered and, despite the efforts of Shahji, a Maratha leader of some future consequence, the state barely survived until Shah Jahan, as emperor, formally incorporated it into the Mughal dominions in the mid-1630s. He followed this success by demanding, at the head of an army fifty thousand strong, the submission of Golconda and Bijapur as vassal states. Both eventually complied, the latter after a hard-fought resistance. This was undoubtedly Shah Jahan’s greatest triumph and on paper it extended Mughal suzerainty deep into the peninsula.
But ironically it was also the making of the sultanates. Acceptance of Mughal overlordship scarcely limited their freedom of action and, with their northern frontiers now secure, both Bijapur and Golconda embarked on extensive conquests to the south in the domains of the Vijayanagar nayaks. Much of what is now northern Tamil Nadu – including a Portuguese settlement at San Thome plus a neighbouring stretch of deserted beach at Madras(patnam) where Francis Day of the English East India Company was about to petition the local nayak for building permission – passed under Golconda’s rule. Bijapur secured southern Karnataka (the modern Mysore/Bangalore area) and a fat wedge of southern Tamil Nadu which included the Chola heartland.