In addition, he built a network of over 1,700 fortified sarais—rest houses—to accommodate weary travelers, some of these sarais survive to this day. The Mughal historian Abbas Sarwani writes that ‘whoever came to the sarai was to be served with food out of government money according to one’s rank and his pony was given grain and drink’. Remarkably, in serving food, Sher Shah was careful to respect caste rules and taboos. Thus, Hindus and Muslims were provided separate apartments and cooks. Hindus who had other caste rules against inter-dining were provided uncooked food supplies. And to protect the goods of the travellers, a shuhna (custodian) was appointed.
Finally, he cracked down on highway robbery. He was able to do this by gleaning one fundamental truth about medieval India—that the only way to safeguard the highways was to strike the fear of the sultan into the hearts of the village muqaddams (headmen) and zamindars. He said of them, ‘These mischievous people never pay money from their own coffers. When the person in authority releases them after getting money from them (in payment of revenue), they take to theft and highway robbery in order to replenish their coffers.’
So he made it the muqaddams’ responsibility to arrest the culprits if a robbery had taken place within their jurisdiction. If they couldn’t arrest those responsible, they had to compensate the victim for the stolen amount. And if someone had been murdered in a dacoity, they were tasked with tracing the murderer. Failure to do so meant paying with their own lives.
Noted medieval historian Satish Chandra writes, ‘It was a barbarous rule to club the innocent with the guilty, but it was based on the principle that theft and highway robbery were committed either at the instance of the muqaddams or that the muqaddams at least had full information about them.’ Evidently, the criminal–state nexus is an old one, and Sher Shah was one of the few to successfully break it, if we are to believe the words of Abbas Sarwani, who writes, ‘In the days of the rule of Sher Khan if an old white-haired woman proceeded on the road with a basket full of goods and ornaments on her head, none of the thieves and night patrols, out of dread of Sher Khan, could even go near her.’
In addition, to curb illegal extractions, he mandated that internal customs duties be levied only twice— once at the point of entry and other at point of sale. A pre-modern GST, if you will. Sarwani claims that after this decree, ‘no one dared to levy other customs, either on the road or at the ferries, in town or village’.
While it is doubtful if Sher Shah’s dictum was honoured by the myriad local authorities even during his reign, it is well-established that by the time the Mughals had conquered much of India, inland tolls and custom duties had returned with a vengeance. Shihabu’ddin Talish writing in Aurangzeb’s reign notes that custom duty (hasil) was collected ‘from every trader, from the rose-vendor down to the clay-vendor, from the weaver of fine linen to that of coarse cloth’. This was in addition to zakat, a ‘charity’ tax that charitably relieved travellers, merchants and stable-keepers of one-fortieth of their income. He said,
On the roads and ferries matters came to such a pass that no rider was allowed to go unless he paid a dinar and no pedestrian unless he paid a diram. On the river highways, if the wind brought it to the ear of the toll-collectors that the stream was carrying away a broken boat without paying hasil, they would chain the river… They considered it an act of unparalleled leniency if no higher zakat was taken from rotten clothes actually worn than from mended rags.
As with today’s truckers, this extraction resulted in interminable delays for medieval traders. Jean de Thevenot, a French traveller and botanist, encountered no less than sixteen check-posts (chaukis) between Aurangabad and Golconda, a distance of around 500 kms. The Portuguese missionary Sebastien Manrique encountered six custom posts within the city of Rajmahal itself, in present-day Jharkhand.
And what happened at these chaukis? Here’s how Tavernier describes the elaborate ritual of official corruption in medieval India with his trademark eloquence:
In the first place, when a stranger presents himself at the gates [of the city], they search him carefully to see if he has any salt or tobacco, because these yield the principal revenue of the King… A soldier gives notice first to the officer who commands the guard, and he sends to the Darogha to give him notice also. But as it often happens that the Darogha is engaged, or that he is taking exercise outside the town, and sometimes the soldier whom they have sent pretends not to have found him, in order to have an excuse for returning, and being much better paid for his trouble—the stranger is obliged to await the termination of all this mystery, and sometimes, as I have said, for one or two days.
It’s a description the reader would easily recognize from experience—the stately whirring of the bureaucratic machinery, the inexplicable delays that inevitably commence with ‘Sahab bahar gaye hain’, the multiple layers of hierarchy to be negotiated, until your file, which has by now exchanged many hands, is finally sanctioned, if at all.
Evidently, the medieval Indian state, in the workings of its micro-economy, was never high on efficiency and minimum government; the socialist License Raj was merely a comfortable continuation of this historical heavy-handedness of the state. As in the socialist era, when Bollywood villains were invariably smugglers, heavy internal duties in the medieval era encouraged the growth of smuggling activity. This forced customs officials to be more vigilant. But medieval merchants, both Indian and foreign, had devised ways to get around this.
Private English merchants, for instance, who were liable to be searched by Mughal officials for contraband, adopted the strategy of hiding gold coins of English make in the folds of their ridiculous netted wigs which they put on whenever they left their vessels to go on shore. However, some Englishmen also took the bodily searching as an affront to their dignity.
Tavernier narrates the tale of one such East India Company merchant in Thatta (in present-day Sindh) who was compelled to pay duty after gold was discovered on his person by officials. The merchant had already paid tax on the gold, but his protestations to that effect were summarily ignored by the officials. Enraged at being doubly taxed, the merchant decided to avenge the insult, and hatched a diabolical plan.
He marched in the direction of the Customs House, in tow with a slave carrying a china plate covered by a napkin. When the customs officials asked the Englishman what the napkin was concealing, he insisted it was nothing for which duty was liable. After some time spent arguing, he strode past the officials, carrying the plate himself. When the governor and master of the Mint asked him why he had declined to follow orders, the Englishman’s only reply was to throw the plate at them, splashing their clothes and soiling the carpet with its contents—a freshly roasted suckling-pig. Since pork is haraam in Islam, the senior officials were compelled to change their clothing and the carpet, and even have the entire structure rebuilt, or so Tavernier claims.
The only reason the Englishman was able to get away with no consequences for this ‘ignoble’ act, Tavernier tells us, was because the higher officials did not want to displease the Company from whom the realm derived much profit. (Clearly, entitled white dudes are nothing new to India.)
Tavernier, himself a legendary gem merchant well-versed in the tricks of his trade, also attests to the ‘cunning’ with which gold importers concealed the yellow metal so that little came to the notice of officials. Merchants in Surat—the entrepot and by far, most important trading centre in Hindustan—who were caught smuggling in gold were charged 10 per cent duty instead of 5 per cent duty, as penalty. (Not much has changed—over hundred tonnes of gold is smuggled into India every year even now.)
However, in practice, the rules weren’t set in stone. The amount extracted from traders often varied with the personality of the official since the governors were afforded enough discretion to levy additional taxes. Many-a-times, those extracting duties weren’t officials at all, for tolls were charged by a variety of unauthorized shadowy figures ranging from bandits, rebels and petty chieftains. Peter Mund
y, a British traveller, paid zakat to such figures on many occasions.
Some ‘princes’ were even known to resort to outright highway robbery, which continued to thrive in the 17th century, even after Sher Shah’s diagnosis of its root cause. Tavernier writes about the dangerous costs such characters posed:
One evening, being encamped on the frontiers of the territory of the Raja of Bargant, all my Peons assembled to tell me that by taking the route through Bargant we should run the risk of being all strangled, and that the Prince of that country spared no one, and lived by robbery alone. That at the least, if I did not engage one hundred other Peons, there was no possibility of escaping the hands of the runners whom he would send from both sides; and that they were obliged, as much for my safety as for their own, to give me this advice. I spent some time disputing with them, and reproaching them with their cowardice; but from fear lest they should also reproach me for my temerity, I resolved to employ fifty more, and they went to search for them in the neighbouring villages. For traversing the territories of the Raja during three days only, they asked four rupees each, which is as much as one gives them for a month.
This plundering wasn’t unusual by itself. The transition from daku to baghi to raja is an age old one in India, a tradition admirably carried forward by our politicians today. In pre-modern India, bandits, often from the lower orders of society, who had managed to usurp enough power, were in the habit of declaring themselves kings. Many of these belonged to the category of ‘social bandits’—peasant outlaws whom the state regarded as criminals, but who were considered heroes by their people.
One such figure was Papadu, a toddy-tapper from Telangana who in the late 17th century had managed to acquire the ‘trappings of royal status and the economic substance of a great landholder’ through brigandage on the highway connecting Hyderabad and Golconda, going as far as building a formidable fort of stone and mortar that survives to this day.
Since highway robbers like Papadu interfered with the smooth conduct of trade, and on occasion sought to disturb the established social and political order, it is no great surprise that punishment meted out to them was swift and brutal. Tavernier writes of how Mir Jumla, then prime minister of Golconda and later a prominent courtier under Aurangzeb, dealt with brigands and dacoits:
He suddenly ordered the criminals to be brought in; and after having questioned them, made them confess with their own mouths the crime of which they were accused… Among these four prisoners who were brought into his presence was one who had entered a house and had slain a mother and her three infants. He was condemned forthwith to have his feet and hands cut off, and to be thrown into a field near the high road to end his days. Another had stolen on the high road, and the Nawab ordered him to have his stomach slit open and to be flung in a drain. I could not ascertain what the others had done, but both their heads were cut off…
Often, an example was made out of them. Aurangzeb is said to have set up several towers on the old Deccan road near the town of Kalabagh, which had the heads of highway robbers protruding out of their windows. On Tavernier’s visit through the region in 1665, he says ‘all the heads were still entire, and gave out a foul odour’.
But even then, as the historians Tapan Raychaudhuri and Irfan Habib write, highway crime functioned within a framework of ‘social sanctions and shared values’. Thus, while setting out from Ahmedabad to Surat, the French traveller Jean de Thevenot was advised to take along a charan (minstrel) and his wife whose ‘threats of suicide and self-mutilation’ were known to dissuade robbers. Another traveller, Banarasi, mistakenly entered a thieves’ village, only to be welcomed by its chief on the ‘strength of a sloka’. Similarly, robbers who had captured Badauni promptly submitted themselves to him when he told them he had just taken his leave from the blessed Shaikh Aim Ishaq.
It seems traders simply adjusted to the insecurity posed by highway robbers, which often meant nothing more than a bit of extra expense, as Tavernier’s experience with the Raja of Bargant illustrates. In fact, as is the case today, the robbers’ loot was nowhere comparable to the ‘systematic exactions of the state’. Habib and Raychaudhuri go as far as to say that the ‘petty functionaries charged with prevention of crime in remote areas were at times the real threat’.
Indeed, if we were to compare medieval and modern India, it would seem things have both changed and remained the same. While the highways today are relatively safer, and punishments less drastic, official extraction from truckers—highway robbery by another name—continues unabated, perpetrated with the aid of extractive innovations such as ‘mechanical’.
We are getting close to Kakinada. My time with Rao is up. He is bemused when I tell him about the reasons behind this ‘mechanical’. ‘Okay, so there’s no particular reason then?’ he says with equanimity. As if to say, naturally, don’t you know, this is how things work in India?
Talking to Rao, it seems to me truckers’ attitudes towards state extortion are governed by what the anthropologist Akhil Gupta calls the ‘narratives of corruption’. ‘Stories of corruption are saturated with emotion: disgust, anger, and frustration at corrupt officials or organizations; happiness at having cleverly beaten the system or satisfaction at getting a job accomplished; and humor, sarcasm, and irony can be effective techniques for coping with the absurdities of bureaucratic process.’
In my experience, their encounters with the state were marked by contempt or resignation. Mostly, they employed humour to make reality palatable. Many times, when we were struck interminably at state borders, or tax collection centres, I would be overcome by impatience and quiet fury at the utter incomprehensibility of the situation. There didn’t seem to be a queue in which we’d be moving, no visible signs of progress. The truckers, who apparently knew the routine from experience, would mind their own business, either sleeping or catching up with the other truck drivers around. Never did I see a truck driver bristling with impatience, or complaining about an especially tiresome bureaucratic procedure. They seemed to possess an infinite talent for waiting, benumbed waiting in which they attained a zen-like state, unthinkable for entitled city boys like me with attenuated attention spans.
‘For drivers, there’s not much difference between police and highway robbers,’ says Rao, as I prepare to jump out of his truck. ‘The police threaten us, while the thief shows the knife; the police use barricades to stop us while the thieves use their bikes.’ This ulta-pulta world, the upside-down, this blurring between legality and extortion, forms the persistent background to the lives of truckers like Rao, something they have to constantly negotiate to deliver our goods on time.
The Road to Cape Comorin
I’m stranded in the dark, opposite a family restaurant, a predictably garish affair which offers the optional service of usable toilets. I’m near Chittoor in Rayalaseema, the southernmost and poorest region of Andhra Pradesh. I am to meet an old friend thirty kilometres away in the hilly town of Palamaner, but my body is already cracking under the strain of traveling all day. I had set out from Nellore on the Andhra coast in the morning, and had covered over two hundred kilometres hitchhiking with three truckers, the last of whom had dropped me near an RTO check post so I could find another truck towards Palamaner, up the narrow two-lane highway that clambers up the Palkonda Hills.
It is near total blackness, except the bursts of colloidal dust which shimmers in the headlights of trucks that roll past me. The drivers either seem to be ignoring me, or are unable to see my protruding thumb pointed futilely at the dark road ahead. I don’t know which. But having successfully covered two hundred kilometres, a wave of unreasonable confidence animates me. What were thirty more?
And then out of nowhere, it arrives upon me. A bright red colossus. The truckers have taken pity on me. ‘I saw your backpack and understood that you are a decent person,’ one of them says to me later.
There are three of them, all from Gwalior district, all of them glad to encounter a fellow Hindi speaker. They ask me with
prodding sympathy, how I have enjoyed the food of South India, the idli and dosa, wrinkling their noses at the prospect.
Two of them are brothers, Hari Jha and Ramu Jha—earnest, well-mannered Maithili Brahmin boys with neatly combed hair, who proclaim themselves kattar Hindutva supporters. The driver, Chhotu Baghel, barely out of his teens, is a khalassi undergoing training under the Jha brothers.
And they ride the most decked up truck in all of South India. My hands slide over the velvet seats of their cabin, which transport me to the cramped middle class houses of my childhood in Mumbai, that compensated for their lack of space with excessively plush sofas. But the ambience of this truck is different. It’s straight out of a Dev.D scene—psychedelic red light, Bollywood music, and a general air of debauched enthusiasm. Going by the looks of it, they seem to be on more of a road trip, than a routine haul.
I compliment them on their cabin. ‘Thank you. It’s brand new. Only been on a couple of trips before,’ says Ramu. ‘Actually, what happened was that a few months ago, one of our seth’s drivers fell asleep at the wheel and rammed into the divider. He was going so fast, the truck toppled over and fell to the other side. The driver died, and the cabin was destroyed. It had to be completely remade.’
His account reminds me of the Ship of Theseus. If the entire body had been refabricated, is this the same truck or a new one altogether? The truck, however, is different in that it bears no trace of this grisly past. Instead, it is permeated by a mood of low-key, high-tech celebration. The new body is embedded with a high-quality surround sound system, which thuds to the beats of the latest Bollywood item numbers. Also, Chhotu is the first driver I’ve met who constantly refers to Google Maps for navigation, as any Uber driver.
Truck de India! Page 20