Aspects of State Formation in South India and Southeast Asia, 1500-1650

Aspects of state formation in South India and Southeast Asia, 1500-1650

Sanjay Subrahmanyam Delhi School of Economics

The paper is broadly divided into two sections. The first section critically surveys the historiography on the formation and transformation of states, drawing upon examples, from not only southern India, but from Indonesia as well as mainland Southeast Asia. The central purpose is to show parallel tendencies in the two historiographies, and to prepare the ground for a synthesis. We also note that, at least where the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are concerned, the two historiographies borrow from the same dictionary of ideas, without however referring to one another. The critique will focus in particular on the tendency to create a chronological sequence of state types by cobbling together borrowings from other contexts: the work of Europeanists in particular, and of Africanists to a more limited extent. Correspondingly, we note the failure to develop adequate Asianist models, or for that matter models that integrally discuss the evolution of state forms as opposed to mere cyclical fluctuations in them. The second section draws on documentary material, particularly from the archives of the Dutch and English East India Companies, to elucidate some elements of a model in the context of southern India, with a tentative conclusion on how well these fit the various Southeast Asian cases.

Southern India, here defined as a part of the Indian peninsula south of the Krishna-Tungabhadra, contained within it at least two types of states in the Acknowledgements: An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Third C.D.L.Y. Conference, Yogyakarta, held between 22 and 26 September 1986. Thanks are due to several friends and colleagues for important references and critical comments. In particular, I am grateful to Vincent Houben and Dhiravat Na Pombejra for references, and to C.A. Bayly and Sabyasachi Bhattacharya for helping to bring the problem in focus. The usual disclaimers naturally apply.

Downloaded from ier.sagepub.com at UCLA on January 10, 2016 358 period under consideration. There were firstly the relatively large kingdoms, the Sultanate of Golconda, the Vijayanagar empire, and later kingdoms such as Udaiyar Mysore, and the Nayaka Kingdoms of Ikkeri, Senji, Tanjavur and Madurai. There were also the petty coastal kingdoms in the south-west comer of the region, often neglected from consideration in such works as the recent Cambridge Economic History of India, Volume 1. ~ For much of this period, the Malabar region of south western India (to which we have just referred) contained three or four principal states, namely Kolathunad, Kozhikode and Vemad, with the rulers of Cochin coming, to assume prominence in the course of the sixteenth century. We wiH begin though with a consideration of the literature on the larger sized states, which has been rather more prolific in recent times than that on Malabar. The classic portrayal ot these kingdoms, from the works of K.A.N. Sastri, N. Venkataramanayya or even W.H. Moreland does not substantially differ from the picture conventionally drawn of the Mughal Empire to the north.2 The focus is largely on organized and bureaucratic fiscal administration; the categories within the overall aegis of state comprise tributary chieftain, revenue assignee, directly taxed cultivator and inam holder, familiar to us as well from the Mughal literature. A picture is drawn of the ’Hindu’ south after the battle of Talikota (1565), which is remarkably similar to that of post-Aurangzeb Mughal India: anarchy, regional breakaway kingdoms, the foreign invader, and eventually European penetration and political control.3 Doubtless the ’dark hiatus’ between Pax Vijayanagarica and Pax Britannica endured longer than the eighteenth century anarchy so com- monly to be encountered in the literature where the north is concerned, but the elements were essentially the same. For northern India, we may note that despite the recent work of Gordon, Barnett and Bayly, this picture of the breakdown of order continues to hold sway, propped up by the Aligarh school.’4 In the case of southern India, however, the reconsideration of the period by the ’American’ school, amongst whom one may count Stein, Ludden, and 1 See Irfan Habib and Tapan Raychaudhuri eds., The Cambridge Economic History of India, Volume I (c. 1200-1750), Cambridge, 1981, especially Chapters II, IV, VII.3, VIII.2, X.3. 2 For example, K.A. Nilakantha Sastri, A History of South India from pre-historic times to the Fall of Vijayanagar, Madras, 1955; N. Venkataramanayya, Studies in the History of the Third Dynasty of Vijayanagar, Madras, 1935; W.H. Moreland, India at the Death of Akbar, London, 1920. 3 See Sastri, History, pp. 296-305; also the classic account of Colin Mackenzie, ’View of the Principal Events that Occurred in the Carnatic, from the Dissolution of the Ancient Hindoo Government in 1564 ...,’ Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, Volume XIII, Part I, January-June 1844, pp. 421-63. 4 Cf. Stewart Gordon, ’The Slow Conquest: The Administrative Integration of Malwa into the Maratha Empire, 1720-1760,’ Modern Asian Studies, Volume XI, No. 1, 1977, pp. 1-40; Richard B. Barnett, North India Between Empires: Awadh, the Mughals and the British, 1720-1801, Berkeley, 1980; C.A. Bayly, Rulers, Townsmen and Bazaars: North Indian Society in the Age of British Expansion, 1770-1870, Cambridge, 1983.

Downloaded from ier.sagepub.com at UCLA on January 10, 2016 359 others,’ has tended to stand the classic picture on its head. The central work, that of Stein, has concentrated on an earlier period than Vijayanagar, that is particularly on the phase AD 1000-1200, but nonetheless has brought into currency the idea that bureaucratic fiscal administration and penetrative centralised states were all but non-existent in southern India, the states instead having a ’segmentary’ character, with a tiny core area actually centrally administered, the rest owing no more than ritual allegiance to central authority. Stein’s work concentrates largely on the Cola period (c. 850 to 1200), but he goes on to affirm that the Vijayanagar empire was in essence a continuation of the earlier segmentary state, with the core area shifted from the Kaveri basin to the Krishna-Tungabhadra duab. We thus have the somewhat piquant situation in the Cambridge Economic History I, where north India (we are told) has all the characteristics of a glittering patrimonial-bureaucratic empire, while once south of the Godavari, state forms become segmentary, diffuse and decentralised. Caught in the wedge between these two are states like Bijapur and Golconda, physically and historically resembling the ’Hindu’ south, but historiographically identified with Mughal India. Thus the recent authoritative works on Golconda, those of Sherwani and Richards, (the latter actually identifying himself as an adherent to the ’ &dquo;Aligarh&dquo; interpretation of institutions’)6 talk of an agrarian system of Golconda in terms reminiscent of the Habib-Siddiqi conception: revenue assignments, layers of bureaucracy, the orderly conception of administration centering around the jam’i-kamil, even raising the familiar bogey of the revenue-farmer as representative of anarchic tendencies in the system. Indeed the incongruity of these two strands, that of the bureaucratic vision of state and that of segmentary diffusion, has been noted by Richards in a review of Stein. We may note the attempt at reconciliation in the following terms: If we look for a system knit together by local vitality and energy and by shared cultural values, expressed in the wide dissemination of the sacred qualities of the monarch-we will find it. If we look for a growing concentration of state power, noticeable and growing intrusion in the countryside with or without a ’bureaucracy’-we can possibly find that also.I

5 Besides Stein’s chapters in the Cambridge Economic History, I, see his Peasant State and Society in Medieval South India, Delhi, 1980. For a slightly divergent view, see David Ludden, Peasant History in South India, Princeton, 1985. Finally, for a recent critique of Stein’s model as applied to the Chola period, see E. James Heitzman, Gifts of Power: Temples, Politics and Economy in Medieval South India, unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 1985. 6 See H:K. Sherwani, History of the Qutb Shahi Dynasty, New Delhi, 1974; John F. Richards, Mughal Administration in Golconda, Oxford, 1975, Chs. 1 and 2. 7 J.F. Richards, Review of Stein, ’Peasant State and Society,’ Journal of Asian Studies, Volume XLII, No. 4, 1980, p. 1008. The unsatisfactory nature of the two extreme models described above is also noted in Frank Perlin, ’State Formation Reconsidered,’ Modern Asian Studies, Volume XIX, (3), 1985, pp. 415-80, especially p. 421.

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But this statement sidesteps the issue, given the extreme nature of the contentions of the two schools, the one arguing that the state had enormous coercive powers (we would recall the Aligarh school contention that upto 50 per cent of gross agrarian product was claimed from the cultivator), the other denying the existence of fiscal linkages between large parts of the empire and its core. Ironically enough, however, recent writings find Stein, too, attempting to bridge the yawning gap in the two conceptions. In his case, the problem arises from the perspective of chronological sequencing. Bearing in mind the segmentary character of ’classic’ Vijayanagar (c. 1350- 1550), Stein appears faced with the problem of explaining the state structure in south India as one observes it on the eve of colonial rule, in the late eighteenth century. The Mysore of Hyder Ali and Tipu Sultan, in Stein’s view, was an enormously penetrative bureaucratic state--a vision remarkably similar to the Aligarh view of Mughal India.8 Stein in a recent piece attempts to explain its emergence by taking recourse to a Europeanist model of ’military fiscalism’ derived from the European Absolutist states of the early modern period.’ Thus, the problem of the evolution of Indian states turns out to be no more than a question of cobbling together one Africanist model with another Europeanist one in chronological sequence.’° An important -element in this change in the character of south Indian states is perceived to be the arrival of Europeans, who, by bringing m small-arms as well as cannon and giving them far wider currency than they had enjoyed before, cause a change in the nature of warfare, of armies and consequently of fiscal administration. This process of transformation takes place in spurts: thus, an initial impetus is given in the period of Krishna Deva Raya (1509-29), Achyuta R4ya (1529-42) and Sadasiva Raya (1542-76) at Vijayanagar, followed thereafter by what are seen by Stein as far-reaching changes under Chikka Deva Raja Udaiyar (1672-1704) at Mysore. The logical culmination of this process is reached under Hyder and Tipu. The central point at issue in the discussion of the structure of state in the case of these larger kingdoms is the nature, bureaucratic or otherwise, of fiscal administration. Since these states, at least nominally, controlled large areas of land, the principal source of revenue for the upper nobility and the

8 It is worth remarking that when the sources used are administrative manuals, official diaries and memoirs, the historiography is dominated by images of a powerful state, while when the sources used are inscriptions, and are generated by local institutions, the image is of diffused control. For a view of late eighteenth century Mysore similar to Stein’s (but which predates his writings on the subject) Asok Sen, ’A pre-British Economic Formation in India of the Late Eighteenth Century: Tipu Sultan’s Mysore,’ in Barun De ed., Perspectives in Social Sciences, 1, Calcutta, 1979, pp. 46-119. 9 Burton Stein, ’State Formation and Economy Reconsidered,’ Modern Asian Studies, Volume XIX, (3), 1985, pp. 387-413. Stein cites as his European model seventeenth century France, as described in Martin Wolfe, The Fiscal System of Renaissance France, New Haven, 1972. 10 The Africanist model taken recourse to in Stein, Peasant State and Society, is that of Aidan Southall, Alur Society, Cambridge, 1956.

Downloaded from ier.sagepub.com at UCLA on January 10, 2016 361 elites in general was agrarian surplus, whatever be the channels of redistribu- tion. However, if these states were, as Stein argues, ‘segmentary,’ it follows from his understanding of the term that agrarian surplus would not have flowed from the segment to the core area where the empire was theoretically centred. Instead, the relationship between periphery and core would remain ritual rather than fiscal. In sharp contradiction, if indeed these states were like the Mughal India of Habib, centre and periphery would be linked by fiscal flows of substantial dimensions. An exception must be made in the case of the Malabar principalities, where extant literature suggests at least superficial similarities with Indonesian kingdoms of the period, such as Aceh, Banten, Makassar (i.e., Gowa-Tallo) and Johor. There are broadly two strands of interpretation where the Malabar states are concerned. There are those who, pointing to the fluid boundaries, the existence of military chieftains owing allegiance to the principal rulers (the Kolathiri, the Samudri raja and the Tiruvadis-as also the Cochin raja) characterise the states as essentially feudal.&dquo; Thus, it is claimed, the petty chiefs who controlled bands of Nayar warriors were meant to render military service to their overlords, while otherwise tree to administer their regions of control. Some historians have even argued the existence of demesne lands, possessed by the rajas, together with ’manorial’ holdings on the part of the petty kayamals and naduvazhis. These are seen to be cultivated on occasion by hired labour, but far more frequently by bonded labour. It is a common assertion that this system was linked to another feature, the absence of land taxation in the region,’2 and that hence the resources that rulers had at their disposal were either commodity taxes, taxes on professions and communities, taxes on trade, or the produce of demesne lands. In addition, it is suggested that the rulers themselves participated both in the overland and in the coastal and overseas trade, gathering a profit thereby. Some historians dispute this characterisation, stating that taxes on the land and its produce did exist, but that most of the lands were formally held either by temples or by Namputhiri brahmins, categories who were in practice freed of such dues. At least one ingenious explanation has it that peasant proprietors, faced with two alternatives-either of paying taxes to the state, or of donating land to temples on the condition that they were retained as occupancy tenants- chose the latter as less onerous, rent payments to temples being less than revenue payments to the sta~e. 13 It is also suggested that as a consequence, potential for conflict existed between the temples and their trustees on the one hand, and the rajas and military aristocracies on the other. As we have noted at the outset, comparisons between the Indian states of the period, whether the larger or the smaller ones, and the states of Southeast Asia are rare for the period we are considering. In fact, historians

11 A. Sreedhara Menon, A Survey of Kerala History, Kottayam, 1967, pp. 254-55. 12 See Menon, A Survey of Kerala History, ibid.; Stephen F. Dale, Islamic Society on the South Asian Frontier: The Mapillas of Malabar, 1498-1922, Oxford, 1980, pp. 15-17. 13 Elamkulam Kunjan Pillai, Studies in Kerala History, Trivandrum, 1970, pp. 332-58.

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of this period of pre-colonial history in the two areas tend to ignore the existence of another potentially useful historiography, from which elements . and ideas might be drawn, even if a single ’unified theory’ is not generated. A notable exception in recent times is Stephen F. Dale in his work on the Mapillas in Malabar. Dealing specifically with the problem of the reactions of this community to Portuguese intervention in the sphere of trade in sixteenth century Malabar, Dale refers to the Acehnese case as a parallel one, and even goes on to state, ’Certain aspects of the history and political organisation of Kerala are more intelligible when the area is thought of as one of the Hinduised states of South-East Asia rather than as an integral part of the south Asian subcontinent,’ arguing that the region has a ’South-East Asian personality.&dquo;’ Yet, little of concrete worth eventually emerges from this, and as has been shown elsewhere, the Acehnese parallel has limited utility even in the context of the anti-Portuguese struggle: as it turns out, the Mapillas’ power eventually comes to be a threat not only to the Portuguese but to the local Hindu rulers (the Kolathiri and the Samudri), thus causing shifting alliances within the triad, Mapillas-Estado da india- Malabar rulers. ’5 Despite the fact that the two fields-the study of the state in late pre- colonial India and in pre-colonial Southeast Asia-have grown in recent years almost wholly in isolation from one another, many of the elements in the earlier discussion of theories of state formation in India would have a familiar ring to Southeast Asianists. This is for a simple reason: while those working in the two areas usually do not read, and are almost certainly not influenced by, one another, they both take recourse to borrowings from a common ’dictionary’ of paradigms. Thus the segmentary state of Southall, grafted by Stein onto southern India, is equally to be encountered in Warren’s The Sulu Zone and Andaya’s The Heritage of Arung Palakka.’6 In the succeeding paragraphs, I intend to devote attention to one of the more important and, arguably, more influential statements on pre-colonial state formation in Southeast Asia, that of Anthony Reid, and here too we shall note startling similarities to some ideas in the Indian context. Reid’s basic general statement is developed at length in various places, both by him and by others in specific contexts.&dquo; In his study referred to ’ above, as well as in the others, the examples chosen by Reid are essentially of the Islamic Sultanates--Aceh, Banten, Makassar, occasionally Mataram, but also sprinkled with references to other states, notably Ayutthaya and

14 Dale, Islamic Society, pp. 11, 56. 15 This is discussed at greater length in Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Trade and the Regional Economy of South India, c. 1550 to 1650, thesis under submission to the University of Delhi, 1986, Ch. IV. 16 See James F. Warren, The Sulu Zone, 1768-1898: The Dynamics of External Trade, Slavery and Ethnicity in the Transformation of a Southeast Asian Maritime State, Singapore, 1981, and Leonard Y. Andaya, The Heritage of Arung Palakka: A History of South Sulawesi (Celebes) in the Seventeenth Century, The Hague, 1981, pp. 13-15. 17 Anthony Reid, ’Trade and State Power in 16th and 17th Century Southeast Asia,’ Proceedings, Seventh IAHA Conference, Bangkok, 1977.

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Burma. His central argument (simplified somewhat) appears as follows. The arrival of the Europeans m Asia in numbers dates from the early sixteenth century, following on the discovery of the Cape Route. Two major effects of this event make themselves felt on the Southeast Asian kingdoms of the period. On the one hand the growth of trade on an autonomous basis, coupled with the import of bullion promotes far-reaching but unspecified economic changes. This increase in trade is seen principally as that on the great north-west/south-east axis of Asian trade, or what Michael Pearson felicitously terms the ’Glamour Route’. On the other hand, the spread of small-arms and cannon under the aegis of European .expansion (which though they may have existed in pre-1500 Asia are seen as gaining wide currency only now), occurs together with the use of European mercenaries, and elite troops trained by such Europeans. This military role was not restricted to the Portuguese, of course, for the Acehnese link with Ottoman Turkey became well-established in the course of the sixteenth century, serving as a conduit for many of these imported elements. The result, following Reid, was a form of Asian ‘Absolutism,’ represented by such cases as Iskandar Muda in Aceh, and Prasat Thong in Ayutthaya. In other writings, Reid develops the idea in greater detail, arguing that state formation crucially hinged on the external sector, since the state drew its revenue essentially from trade, and the crucial elements of change- bullion, arms, technology of warfare and mercenaries-all came from this direction; it is never clearly specified however by what means these elements acted on the structure of state. Thus, the decline of Aceh is traced to the post-1640 period, when the Dutch East India Company (following the capture of Melaka from the Portuguese in 1641) greatly constrained trade to the port. At the same time, the balance of power between powerful orangkaya (a class of urban-based nobility) and the ’Absolutist’ monarchy shifted decisively in favour of the former, a fact reflected in the installation of a Sultana at the death of Iskandar Thani. 11 This fits in very well of course with Andaya’s portrayal of the rise of Johor from 1641 on, when trade was effectively diverted from Aceh to Johor, so that the latter’s ’increased revenue from a prosperous trade made possible Johor’s proud and self- assured activities in these years. The wealth from international trade served to enhance the prestige of Johor leaders and strengthened the traditional forces which assured the well-being of the kingdom.’’9 Reid’s thesis has been closely applied to the Burma of the period as well, in recent writings by Victor B. Lieberman.&dquo; Once again, the same elements are invoked: the growth of trade on the major axis of the intra-Asian 18 A. Reid, ’Trade and the Problem of Royal Power in Aceh: Three Stages, c. 1550-1700,’ in A. Reid and L. Castles eds., Pre-Colonial State Systems,in South-East Asia, Kuala Lumpur, 1975, pp. 45-55. 19 L.Y. Andaya, The Kingdom of Johor, 1641-1728: A Study of Economic and Political Developments in the Straits of Malacca, Ph.D. thesis, Cornell University, 1971, pp. 36-37. 20 See Victor B. Lieberman, ’Europeans, Trade and th e Unification of Burma, c. 1540- 1620,’ Oriens Extremus, Vol. XXVII, (2), 1980, pp. 203-26; Lieberman, Burmese Administrative Cycles: Anarchy and Conquest, c. 1580-1760, Princeton, 1984.

Downloaded from ier.sagepub.com at UCLA on January 10, 2016 364 network, the inflow of bullion, the import of small-arms, cannon and mercenaries. Thus, Lieberman presents a vision of Burma under the First Taung-ngu Dynasty (c. 1530-1600) in which all the familiar elements come together, adding a further one which however remains undeveloped-of conflict between military aristocracy and Buddhist religious elite over the control of agrarian resources. The spectre of Asian Absolutism is thus seen to loom large in a diversity of contexts: Banten, Aceh, Burma and southern India as well. The logic of the change is seen to lead to different solutions in different cases. Reid has it that in Aceh absolutist tendencies eventually collapse, leading to the diffusion of power in the hands of autonomous ’feudal’ uleebalang (or landed chieftains). Another possibility is of the formation of an absolutist polity which turns thalassophobic, illustrated by Reid with Mataram and Lieberman using the instance of the Restored Taung-ngu Dynasty in seventeenth century Burma. Alternatively, military fiscalism could reach its full flower as in the case of Tipu and Hyder’s Mysore as characterised by Stein. Thus, while the colonial power in India is able to build on recently improvised structures of fiscal administration in Southern India (thus proving that ’continuity’ again triumphs), in the Indonesian case what is left at the eve of colonial rule are either weak former trading kingdoms, or the more massive and (presumably) sluggish agrarian states of Schrieke and van Leur.11 Both the Indian and the Southeast Asian historiographies are characterised above all by the use of unchanging oppositions in characterising the transformation of states. In the Indian case, the classic work of W.H. Moreland and subsequently Irfan Habib sees states as torn between two tendencies, the one leading to centralization the other to decentralisation.22 The central issue is agrarian surplus, since the states that are discussed by these authors are thought to be essentially concerned with this aspect of activity. Ideally, these states should have evolved bureaucratised systems for the collection of land revenue, and indeed to Moreland this ideal is achieved under Pax Britannica. However, unable to do so, the major states of the Indian heartland adopt a system by which a proportion of fiscal rights is given out in assignment to an aristocracy. This is thought to be the root of the problem of instability in states, for when the aristocracy is given long-term fiscal rights (e. g. , the iqta) it acquires local roots, and comes to represent a threat to central power. if, however, the fiscal rights are temporary, as indeed they were in the Mughal Empire, the assignee supposedly has a tendency to oppress the peasants by extracting as much as possible in the short run. This 21 It is in fact curious that the evidence base of Reid’s theories (in particular in reference to Java) extend little further than the sources cited in B.J. Schrieke, Indonesian Sociological Studies, Volume I, The Hague 1955, pp. 37-82. In substance too, the argument has been advanced little, although the canvas has been extended. 22 W.H. Moreland, The Agrarian System of Moslem India, Cambridge, 1929; I. Habib, ’Potentialities of Capitalistic Development in the Economy of Mughal India,’ The Journal of Economic History, Volume XXIX, (1), 1969, pp. 32-78. The vision of a cyclical movement about a static mean is particularly conspicuous on p. 50.

Downloaded from ier.sagepub.com at UCLA on January 10, 2016 365 in turn is thought to lead to unrest and the disintegration of the large state. Thus, through the revenue assignment, these writings generate cycles of state formation and disintegration, perhaps accompanied by cycles of peasant unrest, but this leads to no unidirectional change; it is a fluctuation about a static mean. I should stress that Wink’s recent writings on state formation and fitna represent no more than a variation on this theme; as in Mark Elvin’s discussion on China, he appears to argue that the expansion of states is based on compromises on the margin, that these compromises lead to the prosperity of the local elites with whom such arrangements are made, and that prosperity as much as misery is a recipe for rebellion.z3 In the Indonesian case, the dominant theme while discussing state formation is, similarly, cyclical. It can in fact be traced back to Schrieke, and has subsequently been reiterated by van Leur, Burger, and more recently Reid. 21 In sum, a central dichotomy is thrown up: between the trading state and the inland, ’massive,’ and ’hydraulic’ state, the latter being thalassophobic to a greater or lesser degree. Trading states include Srivijaya, Melaka, Demak and the sixteenth century north Javanese states, and sixteenth and seventeenth century Aceh, Banten and Makassar. The agrarian stales with which they are engaged in a mortal struggle are-in the Javanese case-first Majapahit, later Pajang, and finally Mataram. Thus, if one follows Burger, there existed no threat to the Mataram state other than that from the north Javanese trading states; hence, they had to be crushed. In sum, according to orthodoxy, in Indonesia state formation can be encapsulated more or less as a cyclical process, with agrarian and trading states alternately in the ascendant. Once again the alternation leads to no cumulative process; thus Schrieke’s assertion that ’the structure of the Java of around 1700 was not appreciably different from that of the Java of around 700.’ It is only in the late seventeenth century that the power of trading states is crushed once and for all, leading to growing thalassophobia and isolation in Java. Once one accepts a theory of either this sort, or the segmentary state construct of Stein et al. , which clearly contains within it no tensions (not even cyclical ones) historical change and the evolution of state forms naturally become dependent on the importation of deus ex machina. Here, the European presence in Asia proves to be a boon to the historian, for now

23 André Wink, ’Sovereignity and Universal Dominion in South Asia,’ The Indian Economic and Social History Review, Volume XXI, (3), 1984, pp. 265-92. Compare this to the more general discussion on the formation and dissolution of empires in Mark Elvin, The Pattern of the Chinese Past, Stanford, 1973, pp. 17-22. 24 Schrieke, Indonesian Sociological Studies, 1, pp. 80-82; J.C. van Leur, Indonesian Trade and Society, The Hague, 1955, pp. 172-75, passim; D.H. Burger, Sociologisch-Economische Geschiedenis van Indonesia, Deel 1, reprint, The Hague, 1975, pp. 27-30. Burger has incidentally been criticised for not adequately emphasising another element of tension, that between secular and religious elite—cf. Harry J. Benda, ’The Structure of Southeast Asian History: Some Preliminary Observations,’ Journal of South-East Asian History, Volume III, (1), 1962, pp. 106-38.

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timelessness or cyclical time can be replaced by linear, orderly progressions. This, then, might be thought of as the logic behind a much-discussed historiographical construct: the Vasco da Gama epoch. In its most recent version, it is not the dominance over maritime over terrestrial factors that is stressed, so much as the convenient arrival of an outside force to liberate Asian state formation from sterile cyclical revolutions.25

The foregoing discussion has been essentially negative in character, pointing to weaknesses in existing constructs but arguably adding little of a positive nature to our understanding of the formation and transformation of state structures. In this section, some elements of an argument will be put forward, essentially concerned with the dynamic of state formation. The focus here is a grey area or middle ground that exists between state and ’civil’ society in the period, where one can locate intermediary elements. Put simply, points of view on the relationship between the pre-colonial state and its society can be divided into two strands. First, there are those who continue to see the state as ephemeral, and essentially divorced from society in general. Thus, changes in the state actually take the form of ’palace coups,’ or the substitu- tion by conquest of one elite by another. At any rate, these changes at the top of the pyramid are thought to have little relevance for society in general. On the other hand, we have the alternative viewpoint, a step removed from that summarised above. Here, state and society are seen as meeting, but this is an encounter wholly predicated on the initiative of the state; the terminology, which centres around the ’penetration’ of society by state, thus speaks for itself. The state can, thus, by fiscal or other intervention, affect society. It can never, in this vision, be affected by society. Criticising the first of the two viewpoints outlined above, Jan Breman has noted that ’according to this conceptualisation, the social order had a dual character: on the one hand a fragile and vulnerable macro-part which regularly faded away, and, on the other, a solid eternal base.’ He compares the two to ’separate circuits of which the contact zone remained vague and indistinct.’z6 It is precisely this ’contact zone’ or middle ground that we will focus on here, seeing it as an arena not only of initiatives from above (’state penetration’), but of

. engagement from below. It is argued that where the larger south Indian states in the period were concerned, the most significant developments occurred precisely in this middle ground. However, to discuss the middle 25 The question of whether the post-1500 period indeed constitutes a new epoch (as is assumed in pro st standard accounts of Southeast Asia) has been debated in the pages of the Journal of South-East Asian History in the early 1960s. See, for example, (besides Benda’s paper cited above) John R.W. Smail, ’On the Possibility of an Autonomous History of Modem Southeast Asia,’ Journal of Southeast Asian History, Vol. II, (2), 1961, pp. 72-102, in fact a response to an earlier article by John Bastin. 26 See Jan Breman, ’The Village on Java and the Early Colonial State,’ The Journal of Peasant Studies, Volume IX, (4), July 1982, pp. 189-240, especially pp. 191-93.

Downloaded from ier.sagepub.com at UCLA on January 10, 2016 367 ground at a level of generality means little. It is of essence to focus on the institutions of the ’contact zone’. Here we focus specifically on one of these-namely revenue-farming. As Bayly has noted, this institution is one that characterises many economies in the late pre-colonial period outside Europe, and is also an area that has witnessed a resurgence of recent interest in the historiography.2’ Revenue-farming as an institution existed in fifteenth and sixteenth century Vijayanagar, but appears to have been largely confined to the farming of customs in ports, and of other levies such as octroi. Thus, in the two most important ports of the empire circa 1500, namely Bhatkal and Pulicat, the person referred to as the ’governor’ of the port is interchangeably referred to in Portuguese documents as a rendeiro (or rentier). Revenue-farming of agrarian taxes was little known, and while Stein has noted forms of fiscal arrangements termed kattu-kodugai and dasavanda, which he terms ’rural developmental tenures, ’28 it is not clear that these were widespread. The tenures mentioned above enabled entrepreneurs to undertake the clearing and colonisation of scrub or wasteland, with the state agreeing to either fully or partially remit revenue dues for a period, so that the entrepreneur would gain in the process. However, by the early years of the seventeenth century, the literature emphasises that much of the coastal Tamilnadu and Andhra regions was held in revenue-farm. In fact, this phenomenon seems to have advanced in the course of the first half of the seventeenth century; for example, the Pulicat region, which was under the direct fiscal control of the Chandragiri raja in 1605 is later seen to be farmed out. The opus classicus on south Indian revenue-farming is Moreland’s From Akbar to Aurangzeb, subsequently lent weight by Raychaudhuri’s work on the region.29 Moreland sees the fiscal system as arbitrary, cruel and rapacious, with no redeeming features whatsoever. This view is clearly of a piece with his work on northern India, and indeed subsequent writings on Mughal India argue that Mughal decline was essentially a consequence of the rise of ijaradari (revenue-farming) in the late seventeenth century, leading to widespread rebellions in an irate and long-suffering jacquerie. 30 27 C.A. Bayly, ’States and Empires, 1760-1830,’ paper presented to the Cambridge Overseas History Seminar, 1985. 28 On the Pulicat ’rendeiro,’ see Arquivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo, Lisbon (henceforth ANTT), Corpo Cronológico, 1/77/26,’Parecer de Jorge Cabral....’On the ’rural developmental tenures,’ Stein, Peasant State and Society, op. cit., pp. 426-27. 29 W.H. Moreland, From Akbar to Aurangzeb: A Study in Indian Economic History, London, 1923, especially pp. 239-45; T. Raychaudhuri, Jan Company in Coromandel, 1605-1690: A Study in the Interrelations of European Commerce and Traditional Economies, The Hague, 1962. 30 This view is clearly articulated in Irfan Habib, The Agrarian System of Mughal India, 1565-1707, Bombay, 1963, and N.A. Siddiqi, Land Revenue Administration Under the Mughals 1700-1750, Bombay, 1970. It continues to be maintained in Habib’s chapters in the Cambridge Economic History. For the most recent reiteration of the view, see Irfan Habib, ’Classifying Pre-Colonial India,’ in T.J. Byres and H. Mukhia, eds., Feudalism and Non-European Societies, London, 1985, pp. 44-53.

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J.F. Richards’s writings on Golconda (where revenue-farming obtained as much as in the ’Hindu’ south) begin by taking up much the same position. He notes the existence of two levels of revenue farmers: the sar samatus, who controlled relatively large territorial expanses, and the hawaldars, who farmed smaller parcels below them. He begins by describing the system as one run by ’desperate men, driven by fear on the one hand, and by possibilities of great profits on the other, [who] applied severe measures to the tax- payers under their jurisdiction.’ However, he goes on to note in puzzlement that this system did not ’halt or appreciably slow agricultural production.’3’ Striving to reconcile the elements of the paradox, he concludes that there were three reasons why the system did not collapse: the existence of bureaucratic systems of assessment if not collection, the existence of inam (tax- free) lands, and ’the strength of local rural society throughout the kingdom.’ A rather different perspective emerges from examining the actual careers and activities of some of the revenue-farmers. We shall briefly devote space to two such cases, one in Golconda and the other in the Senji-Vellur region. But before proceeding to these, we may note that the term ’revenue-farmer’ could conceal a multitude of actual arrangements. Putting aside the problem of a hierarchy of such persons for the moment, we may note that two features could vary: length of tenure and degree of supervision. To modify Wink’s analysis of Maratha revenue-farming somewhat, with these two measured on the two axes, one could construct a notional ’box’. 32 At one comer, one would find permanent and wholly unsupervised fiscal inter- mediaries, who would approximate the tributary rajas of such places as Srikakulam or Nuzvid in the Golconda Sultanate. Then there might be revenue-farmers who held farms for short periods but who were extensively supervised, or farmers who approximated bureaucratic arrangements, with long supervised tenures. Finally, we have near one corner of the box, the classic Bernieresque revenue-farmer, with a short tenure and wholly unsupervised. This figure is rendered still more extreme when he purchases the right to collect revenue in public auction. Yet in general, all these shades and possibilities would be characterised by a single feature: they contract in advance to pay a sum of revenue defined in money terms to the higher authority. Where can one place the revenue-farmers of southern India in the space so defined? In the case of Golconda, we will note that the sar samatus’ posts were in fact not auctioned freely in public but circulated amongst a limited set of Persian Sayyids, occasionally passing to a Habshi of note.33 Further, we observe that from some of the more important posts (sar samatu of the Masulipatnam region for example), it was but a short step to becoming

31 Richards, Mughal Administration, pp. 22-26, passim. 32 André Wink, ’Maratha Revenue-Farming,’ Modern Asian Studies. Volume XVII, (4), 1983, pp. 591-628. 33 Cf. Jagadish Narayan Sarkar, The Life of Mir Jumla, the General of Aurangzeb, reprint, New Delhi, 1979, pp. 5-19.

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Sar-i-Khail or even Mir Jumla. Besides the well known example of Muhammad Sayyid Ardestani, we have those of Mulla Muhammad Taqi Taqrishi, and Mansur Khan Habshi, which demonstrate that from the viewpoint of career advancement, such posts-though termed ’revenue farms’-were not free of ’career’ connotations. 34 The lowest level of posts,- of hawaldars-were largely the province of Niyogi Brahmins. Though these were, in principle, held on an annual basis, there are examples of hawaldars who continued for over a decade in a position.35 Further south, in the regions controlled in the early seventeenth century by the Chandragiri raja (the titular Vijayanagar Raya) and by the Nayakas of Senji and Tanjavur, we once again find the existence of revenue-farming, the farmers here being- among others-Komattis, Beri Chettis, and Balija Naidus. I have elsewhere traced in detail the instance of a family of Balija Naidus, closely associated with the Dutch and English Companies in the period 1610-60, and of pre-eminent importance in the region. The enterprise, conducted in the main by two brothers, Achyutappa and Chinanna, but also by rival factions of the family, had interests in overland trade, overseas shipping, and revenue farming, besides having a military dimension to their activities. 36 In particular Chinanna, who maintained a lavish lifestyle, with numerous concubines, a house at Devanampattinam fortified and armed with Dutch cannon, and a large stable of horses and elephants, clearly nurtured ambitions, both in the context of court politics at Senji, and in the wider political arena of northern Tamil&dquo;1adu and southern Andhra. ~7 The characteristic feature of activities of such men as these, as well of many of the sar samatus and hawaldars mentioned earlier, is the diversity of activities in which they involve themselves. The involvement was by no means marginal; revenue-farms were frequently in the 30,000 to 50,000 pagoda range, while the operation of over a thousand tons of shipping was by no means a small enterprise in the context of the period. For example, in the case of Chinanna and Achyutappa, we know that each owned a fleet of four to five ships, using which they traded from Pulicat and Devanampattinam to Bengal, Arakan, Pegu, Tenasserim, the Malay Peninsula ports and Ceylon. In the case of Mir Kamal-al-din Haji Jamal, a prominent Persian of Golconda, we are aware of his activities in a period from 1608 to 1636, as an

34 This is discussed at greater length in Sanjay Subrahmanyam, ’Persians, Pilgrims and Portuguese: The Travails of Masulipatnam Shipping in the Western Indian Ocean, 1590-1665,’ in G. Bouchon and P.-Y. Manguin eds., Vfodern Asian Studies, Special Number, forthcoming. 35 These included the redoubtable Sidappa (also known as Busbal Rao), first encountered by the Dutch in about 1608, who continued to govern Masulipatnam until about 1620. 36 For a brief discussion of the family, see Joseph J. Brennig, ’Chief Merchants and the European Enclaves of Seventeenth Century Coromandel,’ Modern Asian Studies, Volume XI, (3), 1977, pp. 321-40. 37 For references, see Algemeen Rijksarchief (henceforth AR), The Hague, Overgekomen Brieven en Papieren (henceforth OB), VOC. 1127, fl. 227; VOC. 1130, fls. 978, 1049; VOC. 1133, fls. 433-36, 464-65; VOC. 1135, fls. 278v-79; VOC. 1138, fls. 435, 447; VOC. 1147, fls. 541, 571; VOC. 1172, fls. 523-24.

Downloaded from ier.sagepub.com at UCLA on January 10, 2016 370 overland trader to Bijapur and Surat, and as a prominent shipowner and trader to Aceh, Pegu the Malay Peninsula ports, Makassar as well as Mocha and Bandar Abbas. On occasion he is to be encountered as sar samatu over the Narsapur region, north of Masulipatnam.38 Most curious of all is his relationship with Sultan Abdullah Qutb Shah of Golconda, since on occasion a ship is referred to indifferently as that of the Sultan and that of Mir Kamal-al-din; we know too ~of correspondence between the Qutb Shahi court and that of Isfahan to secure privileges for his ship Mansuri, destined for Bandar Abbas from Masulipatnam in 1632. 31 The activities of such magnates as these, as well as pettier operators such as Sidappa, hawaldar of Masulipatnam and later Nizamapatnam, could be used to illustrate various points of possible interest. One purpose might be to show that the Pearson-Das Gupta characterisation of a disjunction between the ’great tradition’ of landbound activity and the ’little tradition’ of the sea does not hold for at least a good proportion of the Indian subcontinent.4° What we wish to argue here, however, is only partly related to this; the point to be made is that even in states whose logic was essentially agrarian-whether Golconda or the Nayaka kingdoms-an important figure in the seventeenth century was the ’portfolio capitalist’: an entrepreneur who held a notional portfolio of investments in different activities. I would argue too that the categories mooted by Bayly in a recent paper- of military fiscal elites, merchant-trader-usurers, landlord elites/local magnates, and village entrepreneurs--cannot adequately accommodate this type of figure, unless thrust willy-nilly into the category of ’military-fiscal elite’.4’ Such a definition does not fit the Persian Sayyids of Golconda, adequate though it may be for the Mughal mansabdar. In addition, it should be noted that such a category of person-the portfolio capitalist-is not to be encountered in all of southern India. Certainly, an examination of evidence for the south-west coast does not throw up corresponding images. Even the extraordinary career of Samuel Castiel, regedor mor of the Cochin raja in the 1630s, eventually assassinated by Portuguese casados of that town from fear of his growing power, does not lend itself to parallels.42 However,

38 AR,See OB, VOC. 1087, fl. 207; VOC. 1094, fl. 99v; VOC. 1095, fls. 71v-72,passim. 39 AR, OB, VOC. 1109, fl. 283; W. Foster ed., The English Factories in India, 13 Volumes, Oxford, 1906-27, EFI [1634-36], pp. 137-38, 187-88, 195-96, passim. 40 For this position, see M.N. Pearson, Merchants and Rulers in Gujarat: The Response to the Portuguese in the Sixteenth Century, Berkeley/London, 1976; Ashin Das Gupta, Indian Merchants and the Decline of Surat, 1700-1750, Wiesbaden, 1979. For support from an unexpected source, Denys Lombard, ’Questions on the Contact between Europeans and Asian Societies,’ in L. Blussé and F. Gaastra eds., Companies and Trade, Leiden, 1981,pp.179-87. 41 C. A. Bayly, ’States and Empires. 42 On Samuel Castiel, see ANTT, Documentos Remetidos de Índia, Livro 50, fl. 110v; Livro 56, fls. 27, 212-12v.

Downloaded from ier.sagepub.com at UCLA on January 10, 2016 371 much of the rest of southern India abounds in such examples, from Akkanna and Madanna in Golconda to Periathambi Marikkar in the Ramnad- Tirunelveli region.4’ The question of why such a development occurred in this area and period cannot be satisfactorily answered in a short space. To indicate some elements of an answer, I would begin by pointing to the social flux that characterises the region from the mid-fourteenth century on, accompanying the migratory movement on a north to south axis from the Telugu to the Tamil regions. This eventually led to a redefinition of the class structure in many areas, as is evidenced by the important, though often misunderstood, idangai-valangai conflicts of the period.&dquo; To these vertical and horizontal tensions were added in Golconda the influx of new elite elements, particularly Persians, as also Abyssinian Muslims in limited numbers. At a broad level, it may be argued that any explication of the institution of revenue-farming (and concomitantly in the case at hand the emergence of the ’portfolio capitalism’) must address three questions: first, of why the institution arose, second, of what its long-term effects on the system were, and third, of what the place of the revenue-farmer in the polity and power structure in fact was. To turn to each of these briefly in turn, one may hypothesise that the rise of revenue- farming represents an attempt by the state or revenue assignment holders to stabilise income, and as such can be seen as a characteristic response to crisis. We may note that in each of the instances that are before us, the states are typically under external threat (Golconda from the Mughal Empire, and the Chandragiri Kingdom from the Deccan Sultanates). Similarly, another state structure which resorts extensively to the farming of revenue in the seventeenth century-the Portuguese Estado da India-also does so under external threat. In this scenario, the revenue-farmer reaps the benefit of fluctuations in the revenue he collects, while the state obtains a stable income to meet its military and tributary needs. Thus, the interests of both entities are met. Turning to the second question, that of the long-term effects of revenue- farming on the agrarian system, we have noted that-contrary to dogma- revenue-farming in seventeenth century southern India is accompanied by quite considerable expansion in both the agrarian and manufacturing economies of the region.45 This coexistence of revenue-farming and

43 On Akkanna and Madanna, see Joseph J. Brennig, The Textile Trade of 17th Century Northern Coromandel: A Study of a Pre-Modern Asian Export Industry, unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Wisconsin, Madison, 1975, pp. 178-191; also see S. Arasaratnam, ’A Note on Periathamby Marikkar—A Seventeenth Century Commercial Magnate,’ Tamil Culture, Volume X, (1), 1964, pp. 1-7. 44 For a discussion of the nature of upward mobility in southern Indian society under Vijayanagar, see Vijaya Ramaswamy, ’Artisans in Vijayanagar Society,’ The Indian Economic and Social History Review, Vol. XXII, (4), 1985, pp. 417-44. 45 On the continuing expansion and prosperity of the economy of the seventeenth century Coromandel plain, see Richards, Mughal Administration, pp. 22-26; also Burton Stein, ’The

Downloaded from ier.sagepub.com at UCLA on January 10, 2016 372 economic expansion is characterised by some almost as a paradox, but is in fact quite easily understood. The activities of the entrepreneurs whom we have termed ’portfolio capitalists,’ far from ruining the agrarian system, or causing widespread peasant wars, did in fact contribute in large measure to agrarian expansion, and we may broadly regard their role as parallel to that of entrepreneurial elements in the vision of the later Physiocratic writers such as Turgot. Characteristically, they appeared in situations that were propititious for the expansion of agriculture on the extensive margin, and channeled resources gathered from other contexts into agriculture, while simultaneously using the returns from agrarian entrepreneurship to further their trade in both agricultural produce and manufactures. To explain why their activities did not bring about an economic collapse, we would do well to remember that these were by no means the fly-by-night operators of myth; they could not have been, if they were to have adequate information on the fiscal capacity of the local economy. This brings us in turn to the third question, of the place of these elements in the political power structures that obtained in the period. In this context, it is often forgotten that such collectors were embedded within the system, and usually had to function by making use of pre-existent intermediary structures and channels. Equally, the fact that in southern India in the period, no single group had the monopoly of the use of force is often forgotten. As revenue-farming documents from the Godavari delta region in the late seventeenth century show, the revenue-farmer operated within constraints set by custom, power, information, and the fact that-in order to survive-he had to strike a balance between those above and those below him in the fiscal hierarchy. 46 In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, some parallel situations certainly arose in Southeast Asia. At least one of these still awaits adequate analysis, and this is the crisis among elites in seventeenth century Ayutthaya, with the rise of Persian ’portfolio capitalists’ of a sort similar to the ones we have just discussed.47 But elsewhere, in Indonesia, the emphasis in the orthodox literature appears to be far more on a single dimension of activity. States and their elite structures are seen as either purely mercantile, or wholly agrarian. 48 It is worth investigating whether here too a middle ground existed, populated by individuals who are not easily classifiable into

State and the Economy: The South,’ in Cambridge Economic History of India, Vol. I, pp. 203-213, especially pp. 211-13. 46 For the details of the revenue-farming arrangements, see inter alia AR, OB, VOC. 1511, fls. 958-v, 959-v, 1144-46v, 1149-53, passim, dealing with the villages of Palakollu, Konteru, Golepallem and Gondewaram in the Godavari delta region. 47 For an interesting discussion of the Persians of Siam, see Jean Aubin, ’Les Persans au Siam sous le règne de Narai [1656-88],’ Mare Luso-Indicum, IV, Paris, 1980, pp. 95-126. 48 See, for example, Burger, Sociologisch-Economische Geschiedenis, op. cit. , pp. 8-9, 26-27, passim; Anthony Reid, ’Trade and State Power,’ op. cit.

Downloaded from ier.sagepub.com at UCLA on January 10, 2016 373 convenient categories such as ’merchants,’ or ’agrarian/feudal elite’. An examination of recent literature on Indonesia does lend prima facie support to such a view. For example, the Chinese entrepreneurs in seventeenth century west Java, some of whose careers have been traced by Leonard Blusse, operated not merely as traders and brokers, but also helped develop agricultural production in the ’Bataviaasch Omnelanden’ (the hinterland to the interior of Jakarta).49 The career of a person such as Su Ming-Kang (or Bencon) thus carries startling parallels to that of a Kamal-al-din or Chinanna, even if he operated in the context of a European ’city state’ rather than a purely Asian polity. Further, one could point to the career of Su Ming- Kang’s father-in-law, Intje Muda, who is to be encountered as Shahbandar at Japara, and earlier Jaratan, as a trader in rice in the ports of north Java, and with a familial trading network extending not merely to Banten and Jakarta, but the Sumatran West Coast as well.10 Other examples that come to mind from the early seventeenth century include the Chinese ’Sim Suan’ of Banten, and another member of the same community, known to the Dutch as Lim Lakko, who was closely associated with the Sultan of Banten. And finally, we have the case of the well-known Chinese Muslim, Kechil Japon of Jambi, who was referred to as Orangkaya Sirre Lela, and recognised as a member of the Jambi aristocracy. Evidence for the sixteenth century is somewhat more sketchy, but_here too one encounters instances such as Pati Yusuf of Gresik, who not merely dominated the spice trade from the Moluccas to pre-Portuguese Melaka, but is described as an owner of ’landed property’ in the rice-exporting area of northern Java, suggesting that the worlds of ’commerciall~ apathetic’ agrarian elite and trader were not quite so disjunct as might have been thought. I In the case of Aceh once again, recent work by Takeshi Ito casts doubt on the conventional characterisation of the Sultanate as solely supported by mercantile revenues. In fact, from the late sixteenth century on, the collection of agrarian tributes from Pasai, Pidie and other areas such as Aru (on the Sumatran east coast) formed an important part of the state’s activities. 52 How these tributes were collected, what the intermediary 49 L. Blussé, ’Batavia, 1619-1740: The Rise and Fall of a Chinese Colonial Town,’Journal of South East Asian Studies, Volume XII, (1), 1981, pp. 159-78. 50 On Intje Muda, Sim Suan, Lim Lakko etc. (all of which may be presumed to be distorted Dutch versions of Chinese and Malay names), see M.A.P. Meilink-Roelofsz., Asian Trade and European Influence in the Indonesian Archipelago Between 1500 and About 1630, The Hague, 1962, pp. 259-60,283-90. 51 The case of Pati Yusuf of Gresik is discussed in Meilink-Roelofsz., ibid., pp. 108-10, passim. For a comment, also see D.K. Bassett, ’European Influence in South-East Asia, 1500-1630,’ Journal of South-East Asian History, Vol. IV, (2), 1963, pp. 173-209, especially pp. 182-85. Bassett, like almost all historians of Southeast Asia in the period, sees the dichotomy of a trading elite, clinging limpet-like to the coast, and a ’commercially apathetic’ inland elite as ’trenchant and sound’. 52 See Takeshi Ito, ’A Note on Some Aspects of the Trade of Aceh in the 17th Century,’ Nampo-Bunka (Tenri Bulletin of South Asian Studies), No. 9, 1982, pp. 33-60.

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structures used were, and whether the orangkaya of Aceh-hitherto seen as a purely trading elite-helped link state not only to the exchange economy but to the production economy, all these remain unanswered questions. At the other end of the spectrum, the important seventeenth century Javanese state of Mataram-hitherto viewed as dominated by an agrarian (or ’feudal’) elite, pathologically opposed to maritime trade and trading groups-clearly sheltered an elite that also participated in activities of a mercantile character. One is somewhat sceptical, in the view of the slender evidence base, of whether this state was so powerful as to wholly extinguish Javanese maritime trade, as well as to successfully centralise at a single port (Japara) all of the commerce in rice. The literature too remains somewhat vague on the modalities of this ’administered trade,’ since in effect the bupati lords of coastal territories such as Kendal and Tegal seem to have been left the responsibility of ensuring compliance. 53 Certainly, in the Indian case, the difficulties of policing a vast coastline rendered such an enterprise (though attempted on more than one occasion in the seventeenth century) futile in even the medium term.54 Where Mataram itself is concerned, the writings of S. Moertono and Onghokham provide an important counterpoint to the point of perspective represented by Schrieke, Burger and Reid.55 They suggest that once outside the negara-agung or core region of the Mataram Sultanate, the state tended to be structured in a relatively loose manner, reminiscent of the multiplicity of hierarchies that obtained, for example, in sixteenth and seventeenth century south Indian states such as Vijayanagar or Golconda. Thus, in the outlying territories (or mancanegara), of south-eastern Java, the bupatis represented important foci of power, and although they ruled in theory ’at the Sultan’s pleasure,’ they were in fact able to command considerable economic and military resources on their own account. Yet, this was not the simple structure of the ’segmentary’ state, for subtle gradations existed in the extent of control exercised by the Sultan’s Kraton over specific local lords, thus once again providing informative parallels with the Indian situation. Two interesting issues to be raised in this context then are the following: First, moving away from the notion of a mythical, all-powerful absolutist bureaucracy, one must address the question of how the commercial economy (and more particularly the trade in rice) can

53 The evidence of the ’vanishing’ of Javanese mantime trade in the late seventeenth century, a belief that permeates the historiography from Schrieke and van Leur, through Meilink- Roelofsz., to Reid, is a single reference in the Batavia Dagh-Register of 1677. See Dagh- Register gehouden int Casteel Batavia, Anno 1677, p. 436, cited in Schrieke, Indonesian Sociological Studies, I, pp. 78-79. On Chinese dominance at Japara, see Meilink-Roelofsz., Asian Trade, op. cit. , 286-90. 54 See, for example, ANTT, Documentos Remetidos da Índia, Livro 22, fls. 86v-87. 55 See Soemarsaid Moertono, State and Statecraft in Old Java: A Study of the Later Mataram Period, 16th to 19th Centuries, Ithaca, Cornell Modern Indonesia Project, Monograph No. 43; Onghokham, ’The Inscrutable and the Paranoid: An Investigation into the Sources of the Brotodiningrat Affair,’ in Ruth T. McVey ed., Southeast Asian Transitions: Approaches through Social History (Yale Southeast Asia Studies: 8), New Haven, 1978, pp. 112-57.

Downloaded from ier.sagepub.com at UCLA on January 10, 2016 375 be related to the economic and political configurations that one observes. Second, one’s attention returns willy-nilly to the middle ground, in particular the twilight zone between priyayi elite and wong-cilik (or commoners); this middle ground was occupied by entrepreneurs whom Onghokham terms jago, who looked both to those below and those above in a characteristically janus-faced role. One notes too that this middle ground was where vertical social mobility manifested itself, for we are informed that ’the precolonial system, despite its emphasis on rank, allowed social mobility,’ and it is here that one might encounter those who aspired (through the so-called magang system) to enter the elite.56 In the Indian context, the continuities between the developments traced above and the relations between state and society in the eighteenth century certainly represent an interesting line to be developed. Thus, the ’magnate’ families observed by Perlin in the early eighteenth century Maharashtra can logically be sited in the context of developments beginning at least a century earlier, 51 while the place of parallel figures in other regimes of the eighteenth century (notably Udaiyar Mysore and the Nawabi of Arcot) would bear investigation too. In the case of late eighteenth century Java, one notes in the recent study by Peter Carey a focus on precisely this ’middle ground,’ in the use of Demang (provincial tax-farmers) by appanage holders to collect revenue from the local tax-collectors (Beken. Eventually, we observe too the introduction of a ’trading group’ into the system, with the involvement of Chinese tax-farmers. 58

III

To sum up then, a central problem while approaching the process of state formation in both south India and Southeast Asia is the dependence of the historiography on received models and mechanisms. Historians of an earlier generation were able to sweep many substantial issues under the carpet by using such terms (borrowed from Europeanists) as ’feudalism’. This particular characterisation has fallen into disuse of late, even though it is revived from time to time in such guises as ’semi-feudalism’ and ‘proto-feudalism’.59 More recent times have witnessed an attempt to superimpose the categories developed by Africanists in the discussion of the state on India and Southeast Asia. Yet, of late, some of the protagonists of such a view find

56 ibid.,Onghokham, pp. 118-19. 57 Frank Perlin, ’Of White Whale and Countrymen in the Eighteenth-Century Maratha Deccan: Extended Class Relations, Rights and the Problem of Rural Autonomy Under the Old Regime,’JournalVolume of Peasant Studies, V, (2), 1978, pp. 172-237. 58 See Peter Carey, ’Waiting for the "Just King": The Agrarian World of South-Central Java from Giyanti [1755] to the Java War [1825-30],’Modern Asian Studies, Volume XX, (1), 1986. 59 For continuing instances of the ’feudal’ characterisation, see N. Karashima, South Indian History and Society: Studies from Inscriptions, AD. 850 to 1800, Delhi 1984, pp. xxx-xxxi, passim; while ’proto-feudal’ is used by M.G.S. Narayanan in his review of the same, The Indian Economic and Social History Review, Volume XXII, (1), 1985, pp. 95-101.

Downloaded from ier.sagepub.com at UCLA on January 10, 2016 376 themselves falling back on early modem Europe for their categories, so that recourse is taken to the rise of international trade and a ’military revolution’ to explain state formation in the South and Southeast Asia of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. There are really two problems with these theories, besides the fact that they reduce the history of Asia to an almost complete dependence on borrowed concepts. In the first place, writings on the European ’military revolution’ of the sixteenth and seventeenth century seldom place military technology as prime mover, causing state penetration to grow. Rather, the growing centralisation of resources is usually seen as a precondition for changes in modes of warfare.6° Equally, theories giving pride of place to the dissolving and transforming effects of trade on state are increasingly under fire. The second problem, at least in the case of south India, is that there is no unequivocal evidence of a ’military revolution’ in the period. While the introduction of cannon, harquebus, and (in the eighteenth century) flintlock did occur, the focus remained on light cavalry and irregular infantry levies. A careful investigation of Dutch and Portuguese sources also lends little weight to the hypotheses that the size of armies increased, that disciplined, centrally maintained infantry came to dominate cavalry, or that in general the effects of war on society increased dramatically.6’ Rather than take recourse to these hastily ’grafted’ theories of state formation, and subsequently seek evidence that might be interpreted in their support, this paper has sought instead to focus on the middle ground between state and society. The context, in the case of southern India, is of an agrarian and manufacturing economy expanding with fair rapidity upto the last quarter of the seventeenth century, and in fits and starts thereafter. To accommodate and benefit from such an expansion, state structures had to be modified, giving increasing place to a class of persons whom we have here termed ’portfolio capitalists’. It is in the exploration of the relations between this set of persons and other groups, the Nayakas and rajas, the palaiyakaras, ubiquitous in the dry lands, merchant-trader-usurers, the mirasidar landlords of the prosperous wet regions, that one can eventually comprehend how the character of the states of the region evolved over time. Where Indonesia in 60 For a discussion, see Geoffrey Parker, ’The "Military Revolution" 1560—1660—A myth?,’ Journal of Modern History, Volume 48, (2), 1976, pp. 195-214. An attempt to portray autonomous changes in military technology as the prime mover behind European state formation in the sixteenth and seventeenth century is that of Richard L. Bean, ’War and the Birth of the Nation State,’ The Journal of Economic History, Volume XXXIII, (1), 1973, pp. 203-21, which is criticised by Parker (above) and by David R. Ringrose and Richard Roehl in The Journal of Economic History, XXXIII, (1), pp. 222-31. 61 These questions are discussed at greater length in Sanjay Subrahmanyam, ’Firearms, Warfare and Fiscal Structure: A Note on South India in the 16th and 17th centuries,’ (unpublished paper). The discussion is largely based on the Dutch records, AR, OB, VOC. 1056 to VOC. 1172 (particularly the ’Dagh-Registers’ for Masulipatnam and Pulicat, on the wars of the Coromandel plain in the early seventeenth century), and such Portuguese records as Biblioteca Nacional, Lisbon, Fundo Geral, Códice 178, fls. 49v-51v; Fundo Geral, Códice 4179. For a study of the structure of the army of an Indian state in the seventeenth and eighteenth century, which supports this view, see S.N. Sen, The Military System of the Marathas, Delhi, 1958.

Downloaded from ier.sagepub.com at UCLA on January 10, 2016 377 the period is concerned, the ohservations in the paper represent little more than an outsider’s first attempt at synthesis. If the central notion informing this paper-that important parallels between state formation in parts of India and Indonesia in the late pre-colonial period exist and are worth exploring, particularly in the exploration of the middle ground between ’state’ and ’society’-finds some acceptance, its purpose would have been accomplished.

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