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Indian Economic & Social History Review http://ier.sagepub.com The Mughal state—Structure or process? Reflections on recent western historiography Sanjay Subrahmanyam Indian Economic Social History Review 1992; 29; 291 DOI: 10.1177/001946469202900302 The online version of this article can be found at: http://ier.sagepub.com Published by: http://www.sagepublications.com Additional services and information for Indian Economic & Social History Review can be found at: Email Alerts: http://ier.sagepub.com/cgi/alerts Subscriptions: http://ier.sagepub.com/subscriptions Reprints: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.nav Permissions: http://www.sagepub.in/about/permissions.asp Downloaded from http://ier.sagepub.com at CALIFORNIA DIGITAL LIBRARY on February 11, 2010 The Mughal state—Structure or process? Reflections on recent western historiography Sanjay Subrahmanyam Delhi School of Economics &dquo;The empire of the Great Mogol comprehends several nations, over which he is not absolute master. Most of them still retain their own peculiar chiefs or sovereigns, who obey the Mogol or pay him tribute only by compulsion. In many instances this tribute is of trifling amount; in others none is paid; and I shall adduce instances of nations which, instead of paying, receive tribute&dquo;. - Francois Bernier, Travels in the Mogul Empire (1656-1668), p. 205. &dquo;What, then, were the new elements of political chemistry out of which Akbar compounded such a large, stable, long-lasting politicf!! structure? At the risk of oversimplification, I would say that these were an extreme systematization of administration, a new theoretical basis for .sovereignty, and a balanced and stable composition of the ruling class&dquo;. - M. Athar Ali, &dquo;Towards an interpretation of the Mughal Empire&dquo;, p. 40. Introduction Much has been written in the past three decades about the Mughal state, which dominates the study of ’medieval’ Indian history, even though its career extends in one fashion or the other as late as the middle of the nineteenth century. The first volume of The Cambridge Economic History of India (1982) is largely devoted to the Mughals; the New Cambridge History of India, a set of volumes still in progress, has an entire section (Section I) devoted to ’The Mughals and their Contemporaries’, including- ironically enough-a volume on the Vijayanagara state, which was founded some two hundred years before Babur set foot in Hindustan.’ ’ Cf. Tapan Raychaudhuri and Irfan Habib, eds., The Cambridge Economic History of India, Vol. I, Cambridge, 1982; the volume on the general history of the Mughals in the New Cambridge History of India is to be by J.F. Richards (provisional title: The Mughal Empire), Acknowledgements: The author acknowledges with gratitude the help of Muzaffar Alam and Nalini Delvoye, and comments hy Ramachandra Guha. All views expressed here are those of the author alone. Downloaded from http://ier.sagepub.com at CALIFORNIA DIGITAL LIBRARY on February 11, 2010 292 The greater part of these writings have, almost inevitably, been pro- duced in south Asia, and at least some of them have the sort of coherence that one would attribute to a ’school’. In contrast, with the exception of John F. Richards’s Mughal Administration in Golconda. 1687-1724 (Oxford 1975), the 1960s and 1970s saw no major work on the economic and political history of Mughal India produced in Europe or North America. Indeed, at the level of monographic literature, scholars based in these continents have remained remarkably wary of venturing any general- isations on the ’high’ Mughal period-preferring instead to view the Mughals from the safe vantage-point of the late eighteenth or nineteenth centuries, and very largely on the basis of the documentation provided by the English East India Company. Writings such as those of Andrd Wink, sometimes misrepresented as making a basic contribution to Mughal studies through the use of ’master concepts’ (in the instance, fitna), in fact are essentially treatments of regional states in the eighteenth century, based almost exclusively on materials pertaining to this period.’ This is in marked contrast to the situation in respect of cultural history, where much interesting work continues to emerge, on subjects like Mughal architecture and painting, from the western universities.’ However, these writings remain imperfectly integrated into the larger political, social and and has not yet appeared. For a fuller examination of the historiography, and an attempt at reformulating the problems of Mughal state-building, see Muzaffar Alam and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, ’State-building in South Asia and the Mughals, 1500-1750’, in Tosun Aricanli, Ashraf Ghani and David Ludden, eds., The Political Economy of the Ottoman, Safavid and Mughal Empires, New York, forthcoming. 2 André Wink, Land and sovereignty in India: Agrarian society and politics under the eighteenth-century Maratha Svarajya, Cambridge, 1986; for views of this book as a basic reformulation on the Mughals in even the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, see Robert E. Frykenberg, ’India’s Past seen "From Below" ’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, Vol. XVII, (3), 1989, pp. 433-37; also David Washbrook, ’South Asia, The World System, and World Capitalism’, The Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. XLIX, (3), 1990, pp. 479-508, especially p. 491. Finally, see Peter Hardy, ’The authority of Muslim kings in mediaeval South Asia’, in Marc Gaborieau, ed., Islam et société en Asie du Sud, Collection Purusārtha No. 9, Paris, 1986, pp. 37-55. Hardy concludes his discussion in the 1750s. and writes, acknowledging a ’great debt’ to Wink’s work: ’At that point, when all conflict, all politics had been submerged in the stable stillness of a motionless immensity of all-embracing but impotent universal overlordship, Mughal authority had become most truly Indian’ (p. 51). In brief then, Wink’s theories have their greatest appeal to those who believe in the ’motionless immensity’ of the basic motors of state formation in pre-colonial India! 3 For contributions to the study of Mughal architecture, Wayne E. Begley and Z.A. Desai, Taj Mahal: The illumined tomb, Cambridge, Mass. , 1989; Wayne E. Begley, ’The myth of the Taj Mahal and a new theory of its symbolic meaning’, The Art Bulletin, No. 61, March 1979, pp. 7-37; Ebba Koch, Shahjahan and Orpheus, Graz, 1988. More recently, there is a useful summing up of recent developments in this field by Ebba Koch, Mughal Architecture: An outline of its history and development, Munich, 1991. On art-history, see Milo C. Beach, The Grand Mogul: Imperial Painting in India. 1600-1660, Williamstown, Mass., 1978; Stuart Cary Welch, Imperial Mughal Painting, London, 1978; Milo C. Beach, The Imperial image: Paintings for the Mughal court, Washington, 1981; Annemarie Schimmel and Stuart Cary Welch, Downloaded from http://ier.sagepub.com at CALIFORNIA DIGITAL LIBRARY on February 11, 2010 293 economic history of the period, and a work of synthesis which takes account of these varied developments is as yet a distant prospect. At present, most writers on art-history and architectural history accept in a relatively unquestioning manner the basic postulates on the nature and history of the Mughal state set out for them by political and social historians, on the basis of chronicles and documents; political and social historians, for their part, seem to have disdain for art-history and allied disciplines. Some recent monographs (in particular two by Douglas Streusand and Stephen Blake) seem to mark a departure from the earlier trend, in which south Asia-based scholars dominated the study of the political, economic and social history of the Mughal empire.&dquo; The present article is partly concerned with locating these new writings in the ongoing debate on the Mughal state and the society it ruled over, while at the same time showing where such work stands in a larger comparative perspective, taking west Asia in particular into account. This is all the more necessary since the authors of these writings seem to claim for themselves a status that goes beyond the narrow confines of the Mughal historiography, and make frequent reference to the Ottoman and Safavid states. The received wisdom Let us begin though by sketching very broadly the received wisdom and the current state of the historiography on the Mughals. It is often stated that modem studies of the Mughals are dominated by the ’Aligarh school’, a statement that might itself be open to controversy. Is there an ’Aligarh school’ in medieval Indian history? If so, what are the main propositions it has put forward? A consideration of Medieval ’ndia-A Miscellany, an occasional publication from the Centre for Advanced Study, Department of History, Aligarh Muslim University, may leave the reader in doubt.’’5 The Miscellany is precisely that, an eclectic collection of points of view; if Anvari’s Divan: A pocket book for Akbar, New York, 1983; Michael Brand and Glenn D. Lowry, Akbar’s India: Art from the Mughal City of Victory, New York, 1985. For a rare attempt to use art-history for the furtherance of political history, see Som Prakash Verma, ’Elements of historicity in the portraits of the Mughal school’, The Indian Historical Review, Vol. IX, (1/2), 1982-83, pp. 63-73. Milo C. Beach will author a volume on Mughal art-history for the New Cambridge History of India, with the counterpart volume for architecture being by Catherine Asher. 4 Douglas E. Streusand, The Formation of the Mughal Empire, Delhi, 1989; Stephen P. Blake, Shahjahanabad: The Sovereign City in Mughal India 1639-1739, Cambridge, 1991. 5 Medieval India—A Miscellany, 4 Volumes, Bombay, 1969-1977; Volumes V and VI are forthcoming. For an early reference to the ’Aligarh school’ see Peter Hardy, ’Commentary and Critique’, in The Journal of Asian Studies, Vol.