18th Century Debate

The 18th century was an age of decline, crisis and transition. Comment!

How has the recent debates enriched our understanding of 18th century?

How have recent debates changed the earlier perceptions of 18 th century

India?
By 1680s, Aurangzeb had almost a pan-Hindustan Empire to preside over. As famous as the
contemporary Ottoman and Safavid Empires, the Mughal Empire’s expansion and success were
based on the mansabdari, jagirdari and zamindari institutions along with the multi-religious nobility
at the core. The nobility and the institutions thrived off the land-revenue extracted from the
estimated population of 100-150 million. Seemingly beneficial trade with the future colonial powers,
mainly British and French, added to the prosperity of the Mughal Empire. However, the empire
began to face a sloppy decline from the 1680s. Some think that it was the expansion of the Empire
that cost her, such unbearable price, while others think that the cultural and technological
orthodoxy caused the decline of not only the Mughal Empire but also its middle-east counterparts;
while some assert the ‘institutional’ decline, others charge personality for his bigotry that alienated
nobility and the population. British Empire was to take the undue advantage of the issues at the
core. The process started with the peripheral victory in 1757 and ended with the final blow to the
Mughal Empire in 1857.

Contemporary travellers, as well as imperialist, conventionalist and Aligadh Muslim historians, till
the 1960s, presented such a picture of the Mughal decline. However, what has been challenged by
the recent ‘Revisionist’ historians is this picture, which depicts the Mughal decline in absolute terms
and the 18th century as the ‘Dark Age’. While the word ‘Dark Age’ per se is not found to have been
used by historians, as Athar Ali claims, Irfan Habib’s claim of 18 th century being the period of
‘reckless rapine, anarchy and foreign conquest’ does suggest a similar notion.

Revisionists propose that 18th century was marked not only by one transition – from Mughal to
British power – instead it was marked by two transitions – from Mughal to regional powers and from
regional powers to British. They did not discard the presence of the imperial decline, but proffered a
‘disaggregated picture’ of different regional trajectories instead of a ‘monolithic one’. By highlighting
the region-centric approach as a criticism to empire-centric approach, the chronological approach
will be somewhat compromised here to enhance the picture of one of the liveliest debates on South-
Asian studies. Also, since the Mughal decline is the subject matter of the current essay, the second
transition will be showed as an adjunct – keeping regionalization as the heroic response to the
Mughal decline.

The decline of the Mughal Empire, as depicted in the accounts of Francois Bernier (d. 1688) became
the basis of both British imperialist and early Indian nationalist historians of late 19 th-early 20th
century. James Mill (d. 1836) used the decline of the Mughal Empire and the subsequent disruption
of trade and administration as a compulsion for EIC to assume the control; evangelical and utilitarian
writers rationalized the colonial rule by describing it as a ‘civilizing mission’. However, it was William
Irvine who trended the trajectory to ‘personality-oriented’ faults. Since Aurangzeb alienated Hindus
by annexing Jodhpur, invading Mewar, destroying temples and imposing jaziya, Marathas
resembling the Hindu response retaliated and slayed the ‘Satanic’ dynasty. Similarly, by
characterizing the period as politically chaotic and economically crisis-ridden, Jadunath Sarkar
focussed on Aurangzeb’s religious policy and Deccan campaigns as the principal reasons for the
‘Great Anarchy’. Ishwari Prasad, S R Sharma and J N Sarkar subscribed to the Irvine-Sarkar
interpretation of Mughal decline. Crux of their arguments was that the “Quranic polity made life
intolerable for the Hindus under orthodox Mohammadan rule” who rebelled and destroyed the
Muslim rule. Importantly, these interpretations were largely based on the colonial categorization of
Indian history as ‘Hindu, Muslim and British’ periods.

Contemporaneously, W H Moreland highlighted the exploitative character of the Mughal revenue

assignment system which impoverished the peasants, exhausted agricultural production and caused
the decline of the Empire. Aurangzeb was held responsible for the decline. This economic
interpretation was to generate the interest in Aligarh Muslim historians later. In 1960s, the debate
on the Mughal decline took swerved as the Aligarh Muslim historians like Satish Chandra, Irfan
Habib, Athar Ali as well as Noman Siddiqui posited economic-Marxist interpretations. Although they
based their arguments on Bernier’s observations partly, Muzaffar Alam argued that Bernier was
compelled to misrepresent the zamindari unrest so as to make aware Louis XIV about the French
situation.

Satish Chandra’s Parties and Politics at the Mughal Court (1959) was the first serious Marxist attempt
to explain the Mughal decline by highlighting the structural flaws. The mansabdari and jagirdari
institutions experienced the crisis as early as in Jahangir’s reign. Shah Jahan tried to mitigate the
problem by introducing the rule of 1/3 rd – 1/4th and mahwar scales but to no success. Thus, by the
end of Aurangzeb’s reign the ‘institutional’ crisis became so acute that situation was beyond the
competence of the Emperor. In 1982, with the help of new archival sources, he drew a tri-polar
relationship between jagirdars, zamindars, and raiyat (primarily khudkasht) who acted as checks and
balances on each other. Muzaffar Alam later added the fourth element which included madadd i
mash grantees and shaikhzadas. As the Empire entrenched into Deccan, the ‘jagiri’ crisis arose due
to delay in allotment of jagirs. By negating ‘be-jagiri’ thesis of Athar Ali, Chandra argued that instead
of shortage of paibaqi, delay in assigning productive jagirs affected the ‘new entrants’ including
smaller mansabdars and khanazads (families of mansabdars). Grabbing the opportunity, zamindars
stimulated the peasants and together offset the balance that had been enduring the Mughal Empire
for long. On J F Richards’ criticism, he commented that jagirdari crisis must be seen as a deep-seated
social crisis instead of merely financial-cum-administrative one.

In his seminal work The Agrarian System of Mughal India (1963), Irfan Habib explained the decline of
the Mughal Empire in fiscal terms, by highlighting the agrarian crisis and unrest. Mughal
administration had set the revenue at highest rate possible, which caused the peasants to flee the
Empire consequently and zamindars to become defiant. Moreover, jagirdars, who were afraid of
their frequent transfers, collected maximum revenue possible which overtime squeezed the
peasantry and ruined the agricultural production. Thus, Jats and Marathas, who rebelled against the
Emperors, were aspiring to be zamindars and were supported by peasantry. In his Agrarian Causes
of the Fall of the Mughal Empire, he eloquently puts that agrarian crisis and subsequent agrarian
unrest had ‘devastated the towns, throttled trade and commerce and thus created ideal conditions
for foreign conquest.’ Although Habib drew his Marxist interpretation from Moreland, unlike
Moreland’s Oriental Despotism he categorized agrarian unrest as ‘class-based exploitation’. In The
Nobility under Aurangzeb (1966), Athar Ali accepted Habib’s model of a fiscally centralized state but
attributed the decline not to an exorbitant land revenue demand but to the shortage of paibaqi.

A 1975 symposium on Mughal Decline turned the balance in favour of Micheal N Pearson, John F
Richards and Peter Hardy. Richards argued against the Athar Ali’s argument of shortage of jagirs and
held Aurangzeb’s strategic objectives responsible for disorder in the Deccan. He asserted that the
shortage of jagirs was partly an ‘artificial’ condition caused by Aurangzeb’s decision to put
potentially revenue-yielding lands under khalisa and not given to the jagirdars. He estimates that if
Aurangzeb had allocated and utilized the jagirs discreetly, the annexation of Bijapur and Golconda
could have enhanced the annual imperial revenues by at least 23%. By 1711-12, the affected
zamindars had resorted to open revolt. In his article Shivaji and the Decline of the Mughal Empire,
Pearson argued that only the mansabdars were loyal to the Empire, while all other subjects were
loyal to the social groups to which they belonged and not the Emperor or Empire. Mughals’ failure to
evolve a more impersonal political system enabled Marathas to dismantle the Mughal rule.
However, Hardy and Muzaffar Alam disagreed with Pearson’s proposition.

With the arrival of Karen Leonard’s ‘Great Firm Theory’ in 1979, the focus shifted to the
‘regionalization’ process. Leonard brought into the ambit the critical roles of bankers – sahukars,
shroffs, and mahajans – involved in the great firms. These ‘autonomous’ and ‘apolitical’, ‘passive’
and ‘parasitic’ beneficiaries were crucial to both central government and individual mansabdars,
jagirdars, zamindars as well as talukdars. These ‘indispensible allies’ of the Mughal state diverted
both credit and trade from Mughal authorities to regional powers; result was the accession of Nizam
ul mulk Asaf Jah in Hyderabad, Murshid Quli Khan in Bengal and Saadat Khan in Awadh. However,
Alam and Richards vehemently criticized Leonard’s argument. Instead, Richards proposed
‘centralization through state power’. His argument was again criticized by Sanjay Subramanyam and
C A Bayly, who emphasized that ‘portfolio capitalists’ had emerged due to coalescence of merchant
and agrarian interests, ‘military fiscalism’ and ‘gentrification’, who were ‘able to straddle the worlds
of commerce and political participation’. Indeed, ‘kayasthas’ resembled such social mobility in
Bengal.

A sudden thrust came in the forms of scientific and cultural interpretations, when Athar Ali
published his article The Passing of the Empire: The Mughal Case. He looked the decline of Mughal
Empire in the larger format of parallel decline of Ottoman and Safavid Empires, owing to the cultural
stagnation, military decline and elite debauchery. For him, 1757 represented emergence of the
colonial rule and 1761 – Afghan invasion – represented turning point for the Mughal Empire. In this
context, Bayly completely rejected the argument. Richards, on the other hand, criticized the ‘general
crises’ theory of the 17th century.

For Revisionists, whereas the people of Delhi surely felt ‘a sense of being under permanent siege’,
such feelings were not necessarily shared beyond the capital. The theory of ‘cataclysmic change’ and
imperial disintegration was now utterly replaced by the proposition of political decentralization.
However, as Jos Gommans puts, regional centralization was already ‘pre-cooked’ in the late-17 th
century process of ‘zamindarization’. Sanjay Subrahmanyam and Muzaffar Alam encapsulate this
process by stating that the Mughal state appeared as a ‘patchwork quilt’ rather than a ‘wall-to-wall
carpet’; ‘if this was the case, then the emergence of regional states and kingdoms in the 18 th century
was not necessarily a ‘political revolution’. In his work on Punjab, Chetan Singh elucidates the point
by stating that while the Mughal state outwardly appeared highly centralized, regional diversity as is
seen in 17th century Punjab could hardly have been accommodated within a rigid and centralized
‘bureaucratic’ structure.

In a more recent clarification, Frank Perlin argued that political decentralization was not synonymous
to decline. In his Rulers, Townsmen and Bazaars, Bayly asserts that “indeed, the Mughal Empire did
not fall, it was simply swallowed by a larger political organism”. Similarly, Richard Barnett artistically
states that different social and political formations “emerge as young plants where before grew only
the mammoth imperial banyan tree.”

As early as in 1960s, Bernard Cohn marked out the four levels of the political decentralization of the
18th century: imperial, secondary, regional and local. His thesis formulated the efforts of zamindars
and amildars in manipulating the imperial and regional level power structures so as to carve out
independent niches. In a somewhat same strand, Muzaffar Alam, in the case of Awadh, argues that
the zamindars, who had become rich in the heyday of Mughals, took advantages of their newly
acquired assets by posing rebellions against the Emperor.

Scholars like Andre Wink, Burton Stein and Stewart Gordon have asserted the role of ‘military
fiscalism’ by arguing that the 18 th century states of Mysore and Maratha depict a state-building,
which hinges on an economy sustained by ‘marauding’ and ‘pillaging’ and integrates the region into
their commercialized polity. The process of military fiscalism precisely meant the recruitment and
maintenance of large armies and their deployment in revenue collection.

In the economical sphere, Bayly has advanced the notion of a certain unity in north india’s political
economy from about 1740 to 1830. For him, India’s so-called ‘Black Century’ witnessed the
redeployment of merchant capital, rather than its destruction. The growth of urbanism, mercantile
activity, and service people was influenced by external trade that had remained buoyant throughout
the 18th century and continued to increase after 1780. As David Ludden, P J Marshall and Ashin
Dasgupta suggests, it was precisely the period’s pulsating, throbbing ‘tributary commercialism’ that
made India look appealing and engaging to the European companies.

In conclusion, one may say that perhaps the best way to prevent the 18 th century from misnomer
and misinterpretation is by categorizing the 15 th-18th centuries as ‘early modern’ in tune with
historians such as Fernand Braudel. According to Sanjay Subrahmanyam, such categorization does
not only include India in the larger framework of world history, but also excludes her from the
Eurocentric, Mughal-centric, dogmatic, prefiguring and essentialist view of 18 th century as ‘Dark Age’.
In the same manner, it also excludes her from the constraining dichotomy of continuity and change,
tradition and modernity.