The (Theory and) Practice of the Mughal State

But how did all of this really work in practice? It is one thing for the emperor and his inner circle to express a desire for civility, tolerance, and harmony, but actually building a state that encourages those ideals and adheres to them in practice is quite another matter entirely.

One of the more intriguing things about the historical trajectory of the Mughal Empire, as Jos Gommans has observed, is the relative speed with which, despite their (semi-)nomadic roots in Central Asia, they adapted to the Indian environ­ment and transformed into the (mostly) sedentary rulers of a massive agrarian economy.^[1905] In military terms, the early Mughal army's tactical advantages over the Delhi Sultans rested mainly on their expertise in horsemanship and mounted ar­chery, both skills that had been long developed on the Central Eurasian steppes and required considerable speed, mobility, and finesse. There has also been a long­standing view that the Mughals had an advantage over their Indian rivals in the use of gunpowder technologies, leading them to be labeled by Marshall Hodgson as one of the trio of so-called gunpowder empires that dominated the early modern Islamicate world (the other two being the Ottomans and Safavids).^[1906] But some more recent scholarship has begun to cast doubt on this thesis, in part be­cause firearms and artillery were not completely unknown to the Mughals' rivals in the Indian subcontinent, and in any case it was not guns and cannons alone that accounted for the success of Mughal state-building efforts over the long term, even if they had a slight advantage at the beginning.

Over time, the Mughal state, as well as many of its regional clients and eventual suc­cessor states, would also depend heavily on the circulatory networks of mobile peasant labor (both military and otherwise) that characterized socioeconomic life in early modern northern India, in which the agricultural communities of the Gangetic Plain and elsewhere also cultivated deep traditions of service (naukarl) to military patrons in need of manpower, relationships that were often facilitated by local chieftains or, increasingly, middlemen taking advantage of the growing cash nexus of the Mughal economy overall.^[1908] The Mughal military conquest of northern India was thus in many ways not exclusively “Mughal” at all, but rather a sustained partnership between Mughal elites and the broad array of Hindustani allies, service elites, middlemen, peasant-soldiers, and laborers who stood to benefit from the arrangement.

This does not mean, of course, that Mughal expansionary campaigns were not sometimes accompanied by intense violence. As Nath observes, contemporary sources report, for instance, that scores of local workmen were killed daily by snipers during the construction of the siege works at Chitor, which suggests either that the Mughal salaries were simply too good to pass up, or that the local laborers' loyalty to the Raja was not so intense that they were not willing to risk their lives for the other side (or some combination of both factors).^[1909] We should also not lose sight of the fact that the Mughals themselves, even under Akbar (who is regularly viewed as the most benevolent and tolerant of all the Mughal rulers), could unleash tremendous punitive violence on those military adversaries and associated local populations who refused to submit. One of the more notorious examples of this was, again, the siege of Chitor, which ended with a brutal general massacre (qatl-i amm) on Akbar's direct orders. This infamous episode notwithstanding, however, as Nath reminds us, such unrestrained punitive violence was the exception rather than the norm in Mughal history. Indeed, “imperial armies were specifically instructed not to commit such atrocities in the course of their campaigns [because] the empire always preferred to co-opt and absorb [its erstwhile adversaries] into its own officialdom” rather than annihilate them.^[1910] The two subsequent sieges at Ranthambor and Kalinjar—in which the garrisons surrendered, were treated kindly, and were immediately incorporated into the imperial apparatus—are cases in point. But how, then, were such defeated rivals actually absorbed into the Mughal imperium, and how did the Mughal state assure that it was in their political and economic interests to do so?

When the Mughals conquered northern India, they assumed control of the ex­isting revenue system used by the erstwhile Delhi sultans, based on a system of land grants known as z'qtds.^[1911] Neither Babur nor Humayun had much of an opportunity to improve upon the existing system in their lifetimes, and thus, it was during the so- called Afghan interregnum under Sher Shah and especially his successor Islam Shah Suri (r.

A crucial transitional figure here is Raja Todar Mal (d. 1589), a Hindu who had served as an officer, administrator, and engineer under both Sher Shah and Islam Shah before entering Akbar's service in the early 1560s.^[1913] Todar Mal would serve in a variety of positions in Akbar's government—including, eventually, chief fi­nance minister—in which capacity he emerged as one of the key figures respon­sible for planning and executing numerous administrative and economic reforms. Other important figures in this process were Iranian emigres like the finance officer Muzaffar Khan Turbati (d. 1580) and the influential polymath Mir Fath Allah Shirazi (d. 1589), who, even before joining the Mughal court, had been a noted member of a network of early modern Iranian intellectuals that Ali Anooshahr has described as the “Shiraz School” of scientists, philosophers, and scholar-administrators. The intellectuals associated with this school of thought cultivated a diverse curriculum of theoretical and applied sciences that went far beyond the “traditional” learning of religious ‘ulama (such as Qur'anic exegesis, jurisprudence, and the like) to include subjects like logic, mathematics, astronomy, metaphysics, epistemology, political science, and other forms of “practical knowledge” (‘ilm-i amali) such as agricultural administration, irrigation, and attention to the welfare of farmers, peasants, and other rural folk.^[1914]

Together, Raja Todar Mal, Mir Fath Allah, and a handful of other influential min­isters helped conceive and implement a whole suite of reforms to the Mughal state's organization and administration over roughly the last three decades of the six­teenth century.

The idea was not simply for the Mughal state to maximize its extractive efficiency (though of course that was obviously an important consideration from the imperial perspective) but also for the state to be as fair as possible to the peasants, cultivators, and other local and provincial stakeholders such as the traditional landed gentry (or zammdars) so as to prevent the kind of resistance and rebellion that would both disrupt the economy and require additional time, energy, and resources to quell. To borrow a more recent terminology, the Mughals recognized that to the extent pos­sible, “manufacturing consent” among the peasants and local and provincial elites was simply better for business—and the stability of the empire—than exploiting them ruthlessly or imposing arbitrary tax burdens that they would realistically be unable to meet.

The system was not foolproof, of course, and there is plenty of evidence over the long span of Mughal rule of periodic resistance from both peasants and zam mdars. But generally speaking, it is nevertheless the case that one of the key factors in the Mughal Empire's long run of success was the energy and resources that it put toward ensuring that the zabt system was as regulated, rational, and yet supple as possible in adapting to local considerations and changing circumstances over time. To be sure, like most systems of government and taxation, the Mughal state was also not im­mune to inefficiency and corruption. For instance, according to some contemporary sources (e.g., the historian Badayuni) the kroris were notorious for sometimes taking advantage of their position to milk the system to their own personal advantage, es­pecially early on. But it is equally important to note that the overall logic of the zabt system was that responsibility for assessment and collection of taxes was to be in­creasingly diffused among an ever growing set of nested bureaucratic hierarchies whose jurisdictions often overlapped with one another, which in time created certain “checks and balances” on the power of individual collectors to exploit the masses. Peasants, or the local zamindars who sometimes served as intermediaries between the peasants and the state, could always appeal to different agents of the state, or higher-ups in the provincial government—and sometimes even all the way to the emperor himself—for justice. Mughal officials also underwent routine perfor­mance reviews, and we have plenty of evidence that those who were caught abusing their position were reprimanded (or worse) for jeopardizing the state's image as a protector of its subjects. Moreover, it is not as if the system was just set up by Akbar and his ministers and then left to run automatically (as some modern historians have implied).^[1916] On the contrary, there were continuing efforts under later emperors and administrators to adjust the system according to changing circumstances.^[1917]

The zabt system also had other important knock-on effects on Mughal society. Perhaps most notable among these was the way that the changes in the adminis­trative culture also transformed the literary culture of northern India through the spread of Persian literacy after it was made, about halfway through Akbar's reign, the official language of Mughal administration. The new zabt regulations necessitated an enormous boost in skilled manpower, record-keeping capacity, and organiza­tion, all of which would obviously be more efficiently conducted in one administra­tive idiom. Crop statistics and district accounts now had to be collected, recorded, indexed, and reduplicated annually, and then archived in such a way that they could be accessed and recalculated every few years. These records began to be kept in du­plicate and in some cases even triplicate at the district, provincial, and central level, resulting in a surge in what we might nowadays call “public sector” jobs: scribes, clerks, secretaries, accountants, and other low-level bureaucrats employed up and down the entire chain of Mughal governance to collect all these statistics and main­tain the account ledgers. Qualified regulators were also needed, obviously, to oversee the fiscal system overall, and provincial army commanders (faujdars), local sheriffs (kotwals), magistrates (shiqdars), jurists (qazis), revenue officials (amils, mustaufls, karkuns, qanungos, etc.), scribes/clerks (nawisandas, katibs), more highly skilled secretaries (dabirs, munshis), and various other types of officials and bureaucrats all had their part to play in the larger panoply of Mughal governmentality.

While it is true that some aspects of the Mughal state bureaucracy during this period have been criticized in modern historiography for having been overly convoluted and sometimes redundant,^[1918] there was also a method to some of this redundancy—again, a logic of “checks and balances” as it were. Everyone with some measure of power and authority was answerable to someone, whether horizontally, i.e., to someone else who had a complementary role with an overlapping jurisdic­tion, or vertically, i.e., to a higher authority up the chain of command, all the way to the emperor himself. And thus, in cases of abuse of power or official corruption, local peasants, producers, and other subjects always had some alternative official with whom they could at least lodge complaints and seek some form of redress.^[1919]

To meet this increased demand for service elites, Akbar also instituted signifi­cant educational reforms under the direction of Mir Fathullah Shirazi (d. 1589), widening access to schools and making specific adjustments to the Persian-medium curriculum of instruction that would prepare students for careers in the Mughal administrative service. The syllabus was wide-ranging: besides a healthy dose of history and the Persian literary classics like Sa'di’s Gulistan and Bustan, students were trained in a variety of secular topics “which included ethics (akhlaq), arith­metic (hisab), notations peculiar to arithmetic (siyaq), agriculture (falahat), meas­urement (masahat), geometry, astronomy, physiognomy, household economy (tadblr-i manzil), the rules of government (siyasat-i mudun), medicine, logic, mathematics (riyazl) and physical and metaphysical (tab‘l and Ilahl) sciences.”^[1920] Theology was conspicuously absent from this curriculum, and in any case the point was not to proselytize and convert, but rather to train recruits in a neutral, universal language of Mughal administration. This, no doubt, is one of the reasons that by the end of the seventeenth century the majority of clerks, scribes, and secretaries in the Mughal administration were Hindus, many of them serving in extremely high positions. Some, like Chandar Bhan Brahman (d. ca. 1670), who served under three different emperors, were also accomplished literati in their own right; and most had an official rank, or mansab, within the Mughal military-political hierarchy. For in­stance, as of 1655-1656 ce the Hindu finance officer Rai (later Raja) Raghu Nath (d. 1664)—who served for a time as interim prime minister (wazlr) during Shah Jahan’s reign, and would later be promoted to wazlr in his own right for most of the first decade of Aurangzeb’s—held the respectable rank of 1,000 zat/400 sawar.^[1921]

The introduction of this hierarchical matrix of decimal ranks known as the mansabdarl (“rank-holding”) system was yet another part of Akbar’s larger reorgani­zation of the rights, duties, and privileges of the aristocracy and other members of the state apparatus. All participants in the Mughal state, from defeated kings and other dignitaries who were now incorporated into the Mughal political system, all the way down to minor provincial secretaries and other bureaucrats were assigned a numer­ical rank, or mansab, that indexed their place in the political hierarchy. Toward the end of the sixteenth century, a further refinement was introduced whereby (as in the example of Raja Raghu Nath’s rank mentioned in the previous paragraph) each mansab ranking would have two numerical components: one that indicated the official’s personal status (zdt), and another that reflected their military capability (sawdr)—or, more precisely, the size of the military retinue they were expected to maintain should they be called upon to assist the imperial army in a campaign.

Even poets got a rank. And the logic, particularly in the context of a multilin­gual, multiethnic, multi-religious environment like India, was consonant with the various other Mughal policies designed to fashion an imperial culture wherein the ties of political solidarity could transcend more parochial considerations like a person’s tribe, ethnicity, regional attachments, or religious persuasion. Suddenly, being from a particular place or holding a particular sectarian affiliation meant less in terms of assuring one’s status, rights, and privileges than demonstrating one’s loyalty to the salt of the emperor and one’s capabilities in serving the state. It was an elegant means for enlisting defeated rivals (such as, say, Rajput kings) and talented subjects from virtually any background (such as, say, Iranian poets or Brahman, khatri, and kdyastha administrators) in the imperial project—saying to their subjects, in effect: regardless of your religion, regardless of your native tongue, and regardless of where you come from, show allegiance to the Mughal state and you will be considered one of us, with all the rights and privileges that entails, and a ranking (mansab) commensurate with your social status and value to the state.

Meanwhile, in an adaptation of the old iqta‘ system, the most elite military and political mansabddrs were typically given land assignments (now known as jdgirs) in lieu of—or sometimes as a supplement to—a cash salary. The holder of such an assignment, or jdgirddr, was expected to help govern the land in question on be­half of the emperor, and ensure the efficient administration and collection of tax revenue, in exchange for which they were allowed to keep a certain regulated per­centage of the surplus revenue to support their household, to superintend the functions of local government for which they were responsible, and, significantly, to maintain a military contingent commensurate with their status and obligations to the emperor (This is where the sawdr—literally, “horseman”—part of the mansab ranking came into play).

However, although the Mughal jdgirddrs had certain governing responsibilities in the territories assigned to them, they did not have absolute jurisdiction—far from it. For one thing, except in the case of certain Rajputs whose hereditary royal claims were acknowledged through what were called “homeland assignments” (watan jdgirs), most jdgir assignments were temporary—usually only two to three years be­fore the jdgirddr was rotated to another location. Moreover, the land assignments themselves were based purely on revenue districts that did not necessarily map onto the political subdivisions of the empire. To administer the latter jurisdictions, there was an additional layer of military, political, and administrative bureaucracy which governed at the provincial, district, and town levels: provincial governors (subaddrs), revenue officers (amils), army superintendents (faujddrs), judges (qdzis), officers in charge of charitable endowments (sadrs), sheriffs (kotwdls), and the like. All were

answerable either directly or indirectly to the central administration, and ultimately to the emperor himself.

Such officials were also given direct guidance on how to behave, and how to govern, through periodic memoranda called dastur al-‘amals. A particularly mem­orable example of one such memorandum from March 1594 instructs provincial ‘amils and other officials on everything from what they should be reading (“books on ethics and good morals such as Akhldq-i Nasiri” etc.), to how to comport them­selves with dignity and moderation. Thus, the officer:

should not swear... should not accustom himself to expressing bad words or abusing any person, for this is a mean habit... Sleep and food should not exceed the limits... As far as possible they should not postpone the day's work to the night... Should not joke or laugh too much...

Or, with regard to the proper administration of justice:

[He] Should distinguish in a subtle way which fault is pardonable or can be ignored and which needs investigation, announcement, and punishment... Should make suitable enquiries before awarding punishment to people because the reports may be incorrect as slanderers and deceitful persons are numerous, and the righteous and truthful are rare... Acceptance of apologies and overlooking faults should be a part of [the official's] nature, [for] ‘to err is human,' and no one is without fault... The punishment [of] people is in fact one of the most delicate acts of state­craft and should be tackled wisely and cautiously...

Akbar also made clear that his officers were expected to cultivate an atmosphere of tolerance and respect for learning, directing that they “should not interfere with re­ligious matters, customs or beliefs of people... [and should] try to popularise philos­ophy, learning, skills and acquisition of knowledge so that talents do not disappear from amongst the people.” And, on a related note, the memo spoke eloquently of the officers' obligation to promote the general welfare impartially, without regard to personal gain:

The best service to God in this world is the growth of relations and the accom­plishment of works of people's welfare which they should perform without re­gard to personal friendship, enmity, or relation... [they should be helpful] to the poor and the downtrodden, particularly the retired and recluses... Should entrust the safety of roads to God-fearing courageous persons and should obtain their reports from time to time, for the essence of sovereignty and leadership lay in the watchmanship and the protection of subjects.^[1922]

Although it would be naive for us to pretend that all Mughal officials always lived up to such high standards of conduct—indeed, we know that they didn't—nevertheless, the clear articulation of these principles, coming directly from the emperor, provides an important window into the sort of values the court sought to promote and inculcate in those tasked with representing it on the ground at the provincial and local levels. Note, too, that although the memo was distributed on Akbar's or­ders, it was actually written by his renowned courtier, confidant, and biographer, Abu al-Fazl ibn Mubarak (d. 1602), and also included in the latter's collection of let­ters and other miscellaneous prose writings (insha). This collection was considered to be a model of early modern Indo-Persian prose style well into the nineteenth century, and as such was practically required reading for any member (or even aspiring member) of the Mughal intelligentsia more broadly. Thus, the memo­randum, and the message that it tried to convey, continued to circulate far beyond Mughal officialdom, indeed throughout the Indo-Persian world, long after Akbar's reign had ended.