by John Keay
Definitely included in Akbar’s theological tournées were Portuguese priests, of whose presence the emperor had become aware during the conquest of Gujarat. Interpreting the imperial summons as evidence of divine intervention, in 1580 the padres hastened from Goa confident of the most sensational conversion of all time. In the event they were disappointed – as were all the other disputants. Akbar’s quest for spiritual enlightenment was undoubtedly sincere but it was not disinterested. He sought a faith which would satisfy the needs of his realm as well as those of his conscience, one based on irrefutable logic, composed (like Fatehpur Sikri) of the finest elements in existing practice, and endowed with a universal appeal, something monumental and sublime which would transcend all sectarian differences and unite his chronically disparate subjects. It was a tall order and one which even a bazaar-ful of theologians could not fulfil.
In its stead, and perhaps with something of the naivety and self-reliance of the unlettered genius, Akbar improvised an ideology based on the only element in which he had complete confidence, his imperial persona. The resultant Din Ilahi (‘Divine Faith’) was neither clearly formulated nor vigorously promulgated. It centred on himself, but whether as God or His representative is not certain; and it graded his disciples, all of whom were senior and uncritical courtiers, according to the degree to which they could supposedly perceive his divine distinction. By Abu’l-Fazl, who became the main exponent of the new creed, this distinction was represented as a mystical effulgence which beamed from the royal forehead as from a mirror. The Akbar-nama devotes whole chapters to the historical pedigree of the phenomenon.
The same work begins with what looks like the standard Muslim invocation Allahu Akbar! (‘God is Great!’). But given the coincidence of the emperor’s name, it could also be read as the blasphemous ‘Akbar is God.’ The emperor claimed, even when the same phrase began appearing on his coinage, that no unorthodox meaning was intended. But given that he was assuming other religious prerogatives, including what some regarded as a doctrinal authority amounting to infallibility, and given the announcement of a new chronology to be known as the ‘Divine Era’ and to begin from his own accession, his disclaimer must be suspect.
It certainly seemed so to his critics. To the orthodox, to the ulema of whom Akbar was especially dismissive, indeed to all but royal sycophants, it looked as if Islam was under threat. Thus in 1579–80 there materialised the most serious challenge of the entire reign. Senior Islamic officials openly condemned the new directives and so provided a focus for the rebellion of mainly Afghan units in Bengal and Bihar plus a rising by Hakim, Akbar’s half-brother who held the governorship of Kabul. The latter had dynastic ambitions, the former nursed military grievances; it was not a purely religious protest. But with the promulgation in Jaunpur of a fatwa enjoining all Muslims to rebel, and with the naming of Hakim as the legitimate sovereign during the Friday congregational prayers, the emperor’s authority looked to be undermined.
Luckily Akbar’s personal ascendancy was by now unquestioned; Hakim, on the other hand, was acknowledged to be little more than an instrument in the hands of others. Luckily, too, Akbar’s reforms of both the administration and the military had created a nobility deeply interested in his survival. Man Singh, the Kacchwaha rajput who held Lahore against the invasion by Hakim, was typical; so too was Todar Mal, another Hindu commander, who was sent east to deal with the Afghans in Bengal. Akbar himself hastened to the Panjab and continued on to Kabul, which city, the scene of his childhood, he entered in triumph in 1581. Although Bengal would continue to be troublesome, the revolt was virtually over.
Four years later Akbar again forsook Fatehpur Sikri, this time for good, as court and government shifted to Lahore. The litany of ‘dominion-increasing victories’ had scarcely faltered throughout his reign; but with the subjugation of Rajasthan, the reconquest of Gujarat in 1573, the annexation of Orissa in 1575 and now the latest and most successful of several attempts to subdue Bengal, all the provinces held by his predecessors had been secured and Akbar’s gaze shifted back to the north-west. From Lahore in the late 1580s the chant of victory continued. He imposed his authority on the restless tribes of the frontier, then conquered Kashmir and next Sind, both of which were incorporated into the empire. Kabul was again secured; and in 1595 Kandahar, which had been awarded to the shah of Persia as part of Humayun’s rescue package, was resumed.
Excluding quixotic adventures to China and central Asia like those envisaged by Muhammad bin Tughluq, there remained only the Deccan and the south. Akbar therefore returned to Agra in 1598 to pass the last and least rewarding years of his reign directing an assault on Ahmadnagar, the nearest of the Deccani sultanates. This conflict became inextricably confused with the struggle for the succession and the manoeuvres of his eldest son Salim. It was also possibly because of the threat posed by Salim that Akbar now preferred the security of Agra’s Red Fort to the comparative isolation and vulnerability of Fatehpur Sikri. Popularly its desertion is attributed to the uncertainty of its water supply, although artificial reservoirs had previously been found adequate and could doubtless have been augmented. More convincingly it has been suggested that Akbar’s ideology had outgrown the devotion to the Chishti saints which had prompted the choice of the site in the first place. A display of Islamic piety was no longer appropriate.30 Moreover, disillusioned with his royal heirs, he had become disillusioned with the shaikh who had foretold them and with the site which celebrated that prophecy.
Agra with its cosmopolitan bazaars and its strategic location on the Jamuna was altogether a worthier setting for the focus of an empire. Some, like Babur, had accrued territories; others, like the Khaljis and the Tughluqs, had laid claim to far-flung feudatories. But Akbar had fashioned an empire. Arguably the imperial structures which he bequeathed to his successors would be more historically significant even than his roll-call of conquests.
14
Mughal Pomp, Indian Circumstance
1605–1682
THE CHIEF EXCELLENCY
In India as elsewhere economic indicators for the pre-modern period are hard to come by. But thanks to Abu’l-Fazl’s Ain-i-Akbari, to the numerous accounts of the Mughal empire written by foreign visitors, and to the painstaking analysis recently undertaken by scholars like Irfan Habib,1 some basic statistics are available from the late sixteenth century onwards. By combining different methods of calculation, the population of the Indian subcontinent in the year 1600 has been estimated at about 140 million, of whom about 100 million lived within the great band of territory between the Himalayas and the Deccan sultanates which comprised Akbar’s empire. At a time when the population of the British Isles can have been barely five million, and that of all western Europe less than forty million, India was not short of manpower. Travellers, Asian as well as European, marvelled at the frequency of villages and at the dense crowds which thronged the cities. Even Babur, though unimpressed by the inventiveness of India’s craftsmen, had been taken aback by their numbers. Timur had employed two hundred stone-cutters in Samarkand; Babur on the other hand employed nearly fifteen hundred, mostly at Agra. ‘Men of every trade and occupation are numberless and without stint in Hindustan,’ he reported.2
Nor was the country in any sense impoverished by having to support such a large population. Quite the contrary; it was this abundant labour force which generated the surplus on which the Great Mughals grew so great. Compared to central Asia, ‘the chief excellency of Hindustan is that it is a large country and has abundance of gold and silver,’ reckoned Babur. But neither gold nor silver were mined in very significant quantities anywhere in India: such wealth could be accumulated only from foreign trade. The largeness of the country, rather than the abundance of precious metals, represented its true ‘excellency’. For a large country meant plenty of land and, given an average monsoon, plenty of land meant bounteous crops.
Land and labour generated the wealth of India; and on the success with which these resources could be command
ed, and their surplus mobilised and distributed, depended the stability of every dynastic regime. It would be wrong, though, to conclude that land and labour were therefore considered the basic units of the economy. Possibly because they had always been comparatively abundant, ownership and input were usually subsumed in a calculation of their joint yield. In India, ever since the earliest evidence of a share of the crop being donated for ritual purposes, produce – not people, not property – was what mattered. On what a field, village, district or province could be expected to produce, or on the value placed on this product, were based all grants, taxes and other revenue rights.
These rights were the means by which the surplus was creamed off from the cultivator, and they varied enormously from one part of the country to another, from one period to another, and from one crop to another. Even in a single village at any given time there might be cultivators subject to three of four different kinds of surplus extraction; thus the yield of some lands might constitute the jagir (revenue assignment) of a great amir (noble), that of others might have been granted as income to some religious establishment, and that of yet others might have been reserved to the crown (khalsa). In addition to such grand and usually absent beneficiaries there were also various lesser and usually local intermediaries with a tenacious claim on the yield. These included those who facilitated or enforced its actual collection, amongst them powerful individuals and interests ranging from the village headman to the zamindar (literally ‘landholder’ but more generally a blanket term for any rural superior).
Although the theory was that all these beneficiaries were entitled to a certain percentage of the yield, leaving the remainder to the cultivator, the reality was that the entire yield, minus only what was deemed necessary for the cultivator’s survival, was liable to appropriation. ‘Amidst the complexity of the arrangements for assessment and collection [of the revenue], one major aim of the Mughal administration still stands out: the attempt at securing the bulk of the peasant’s surplus.’3
In consequence the peasant’s lot was not, even in good times, a happy one. François Bernier, a doctor who travelled widely in India in the 1660s and then reported his findings to Louis XIV’s chief minister, described the lot of the Indian peasant as ‘a debasing state of slavery’. Jagirdars, zamindars and the like exercised ‘a tyranny often so excessive as to deprive the peasant and the artisan of the necessaries of life, and leave them to die of misery and exhaustion’. It was, moreover, ‘a tyranny that drives the cultivator of the soil from his wretched home to some neighbouring state in hopes of milder treatment, or to the army where he becomes the servant of some trooper’.
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 for want of irrigation.4
Bernier thought the problem lay in the absence of individual property rights. Like most Europeans he mistook revenue rights for outright ownership and so considered the king, as the bestower of these rights, to be ‘the sole proprietor of the land’. Since such rights, or in Bernier’s estimation such land grants, were not heritable and could be resumed or swapped by the sovereign at will, the jagirdars who held them had no long-term interest in improving the yield by investing in wells and irrigation. ‘“Why should we spend time and money making [the land] fruitful,” they asked, “when we may be deprived of it at any moment and our exertions will benefit neither ourselves nor our children?”’ Likewise, according to Bernier, ‘the peasant cannot avoid asking himself the question: “Why should I toil for a tyrant who may come tomorrow and lay his rapacious hands on all I possess without leaving me, if such be his humour, the means to drag on my miserable existence?”’
No doubt Bernier generalised. His India of the 1660s would be still recovering from a succession crisis which amounted to civil war. Large parts of the Deccan, through which he travelled, were in turmoil. An honest observer, he saw India as a parable in mismanagement which might be useful to France’s chief minister, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, as he undertook the radical reform of Louis XIV’s finances. Bernier also overlooked the fact that during the latter part of Akbar’s reign and during those of his immediate successors, Jahangir (1605–27) and Shah Jahan (1627–58), many parts of northern and central India had been enjoying a period of unprecedented political stability. Crop seizures and the requisitioning of transport and labour for military purposes had practically ceased. Markets functioned well, weights and measures were standardised, and cash circulated easily. The population was gradually increasing and so was productivity. Even the derelict villages noticed by the doctor may have been deserted simply because the cultivators had decamped to develop new lands on which the revenue assessment was lighter. Under such incentives much wasteland is thought to have been reclaimed for cultivation during the seventeenth century.
Industry and trade also boomed thanks to the settled conditions and safer communications. Roads, some still today with their Mughal kos minar (brick or stone watchtowers at regular intervals, like mile-posts), linked provincial capitals and trading centres to the imperial axis of Agra – Delhi – Lahore. Around the imperial court at all three of these cities grew up extensive service complexes housing costumiers, perfumiers, gold and silversmiths, jewellers, ivory-carvers, gunsmiths, saddlers, joiners and the army of architects, civil engineers, stonemasons and polishers needed for India’s most ambitious building programme. Similar establishments catered for the nobility in the provincial capitals which, like Ahmadabad, rapidly grew into major cities under Islamic patronage. In the field a moveable bazaar of farriers, armourers, elephant-keepers, tent-makers and provisioners accompanied the imperial forces.
The advent of new European trading companies also stimulated industrial demand, especially for the cotton textiles – muslins, taffetas, brocades, batiks, ginghams – of Gujarat, Bengal, Golconda and the Tamil country. Founded respectively in 1600 and 1602, the East India Companies of London and the Netherlands had been intended to contest the Portuguese monopoly of the mainly Indonesian spice trade. They soon became equally interested in India’s manufactures. During the reign of Jahangir, Akbar’s immediate successor, both companies set up trading houses in Surat, which was by now the main port in Gujarat. They also began to tap into the ancient trade between India’s east coast ports and south-east Asia. Politically the companies were an irrelevance and would long remain so. But by 1640 they had ended Portugal’s monopoly of the eastern sea-routes; Europe’s domestic markets were discovering the joys of cheaper soft-furnishings and more washable cotton apparel; and sailings, whether regulated by the companies or unregulated, were boosting demand in India and, since payment was usually made in bullion, providing a welcome influx of silver.
None of this alleviated the plight of the cultivator. In fact his situation may have been worsened by the prevailing pax Mughala. Unlike the nayaks of the Vijayanagar empire, office-holders and jagirdars under the Mughal dispensation were seldom left long enough in possession of their grants either to become acquainted with rural conditions or to attract local allegiance. Defiance of imperial directives was therefore rarer and, with the important exception of imperial claimants, the nobility were less inclined to revolt. The reforms undertaken by Akbar would indeed go a long way towards integrating most of the subcontinent into a strong, centralised political structure. But it was an integration from above which ignored the plight of the producer and sought increased productivity through increased exploitation. ‘The Mughal state was an insatiable Leviathan,’ writes Tapan Raychaudhuri in The Cambridge Economic History of India, ‘its impact on the economy was defined above all by its unlimited appetite for resources.’5
Akbar’s reforms focused on two distinct control mechanisms: the creation of a centralised bureaucracy, and the elaboration of a standard system of military grading. Each resulted in a separate hierarchy which overlapped only at
the top. The bureaucracy sprang from his abolition of the office of chief minister. Instead there were to be four departments and four department heads, one for finance and revenue, one for the military and intelligence, one for religious affairs and the judiciary, and one for the royal household and public works. The same arrangement was duplicated in the provincial capitals of each of the main provinces (Lahore for the Panjab, Ajmer for Rajasthan, etc.), and was extended to other regions as they were incorporated into the empire. All departments were subject to audit; and most staff were salaried although the more senior office-holders were awarded jagirs (revenue assignments) and a ranking within the military hierarchy.
The system of military ranking, Akbar’s other control mechanism, assigned to every senior military commander and office-holder a numerical rank which governed his status and remuneration. Additionally a second system was introduced to denote the number of armed cavalrymen, or sowars, which each had to maintain for service in the imperial army; extra horses, transport and elephants were stipulated for the most senior ranks. Thus all amirs (nobles) and many lesser mansabdars (rank-holders) had both a zat (personal) ranking and a sowar (trooper) ranking. All such rankings were in the emperor’s gift, as were promotion, demotion and dismissal. The system was laden with incentives and duly produced some exceptionally able commanders and administrators. It also encouraged personal loyalty to the emperor while integrating into a single power-structure the assorted Turks, Persians, Afghans, rajputs and Indian Muslims who comprised the nobility.
