Social Scientist Tracing Sources of Principles of Mughal Governance: A Critique of Recent Historiography Author(s): Iqtidar Alam Khan Source: Social Scientist, Vol. 37, No. 5/6 (May-June 2009), pp. 45-54 Published by: Social Scientist Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/25655998 Accessed: 26-02-2020 07:04 UTC JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms Social Scientist is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Social Scientist This content downloaded from 14.139.45.244 on Wed, 26 Feb 2020 07:04:56 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Tracing Sources of Principles of Mughal Governance: A Critique of Recent Historiography _Q CL PJ 1 > The formation of India's composite culture seen by Rabindranath 3 7\ Tagore as the central theme of Indian history1 undoubtedly became zr more noticeable with the rise of the heavily centralized Mughal Empire D under Akbar (1556-1605). As is well known, this imperial system was supported by a nobility among whom, besides Sunni Central Asians and Indian Muslims, there were also present, in the highest echelons (of mansab 1000 and above), Shi'ite Iranis and Hindu chieftains in sizeable numbers, the last-mentioned two groups representing about a third of the total strength in fairly equal shares.2 Side by side, there was developed a new theory of kingship which tended to dilute the impact of the orthodox sharia on the working of the Mughal imperial order. As articulated in Abu'l Fazl's writings, this theory assigns to sovereign a semi-divine supra-religious status. As J.F.R. Richards aptly puts it: This new imperial doctrine was the result of a brilliant partnership in which Akbar's own intuitive sense of political need, his desire for broad political support and what seems to have been a mystical sense of his own mission found a direct response in the mind of Abu'l Fazl who characterized sovereignty as divine light (farr-i izadi).3 The concept of sovereignty as divine light was evidently rooted in the illuminationist (ishraqi) doctrines of Shihab al-Din Maqtul (d.l 191) and was a radical departure from the post-Abbasid Islamic notion of the sultan being the shadow of God (zill-i Ilahi) on earth.4 As Faizi hints in one of his couplets, the attribute farr-i izadi was contingent upon the king being a master of sciences, a philosopher and guide in the divine path, and so it is not correct to read in him a (negative) quality like shadow.5 Such a king, according to Abu'l Fazl, is called upon to "inaugurate universal reconciliation (sulh-ikul) and if he does not regard all classes of men and all sects of religion with a single eye of favour, he will not be fit for the exalted office."6 It is, therefore, his function to ensure that religious differences among people do not lead to mutual antipathy; and this postulate, as Irfan Habib infers, "draws not on any philosophical or religious tradition but on a simple assertion of the sovereign's absolute power, and the obligation that such * Paper presented at the sixty-ninth session of the Indian History Congress, 2008. 45 This content downloaded from 14.139.45.244 on Wed, 26 Feb 2020 07:04:56 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Social Scientist on o absoluteness imposed on him to keep all his subjects contented."7 It was a new o concept of sovereignty directly linked to Akbar's religious policy, aimed, 0) c according to the author of Dabistan-i Mazahib, at holding together various ZD i ' elements including Hindu chieftains, without allowing any faction to become too Z powerful.8 The response of not only Hindu chieftains but also of ordinary Hindus to this novel concept of sovereignty and accompanying religious policy O can be gauged from the manner in which "a large number of them made the OlA Mughal Emperor's rite of Jharoka darshany unknown to any previous Hindu o z monarchy or ritual", a part of their daily religious routine.9 Another significant aspect of Abu'l Fazl's ideas in the Ain-iAkbari pertains m to his viewing the emergence of state power in terms of a social contract between ~o > the ruler and the ruled. His passage under the subhead riwai-i rozi carries an unmistakable echo of Ibn Khaldun's view that kingship was evolved "to exercise a restraining influence on the animal nature of man", a postulate, evidently, rooted in the writings of Plato and Epicurus.10 In this passage Abul Fazl refers to taxes paid to the king by his subjects as 'wages of protection' (dastmuzd-i pasbani),11 a characterization very similar to the idea of king receiving wages (vetari), from people for maintaining law and order found in some of the Sanskrit texts of Ancient India.12 II The unfolding of this new theory of kingship and a corresponding religious policy roughly from 1579 onwards led not only to the final abolition of the discriminatory tax, jizya (1580), but also to a situation where non-Muslims were not only allowed freedom to erect their places of worship but also received state patronage in the form of revenue-free grants for many of these shrines on an unprecedented scale.13 Again the Shiites, who under previous regimes were persecuted on suspicions of heresy, came to be recognized as an Islamic sect having the right to perform namaz in ordinary mosques.14 A majority of the orthodox Muslims, including many of those like 'Abdul Haq Muhaddis, who did not approve of Akbar's pantheistic Tauhid-i Ilahi apparently had no particular complaint about this aspect of state policy.15 However, a section represented by the Naqshbandi sufi, Shaikh Ahmad Sirhindi, were greatly provoked.16 They held Abu'l Fazl and his elder brother Faizi responsible for the change that had come about. This sentiment has found a sympathetic endorsement in a part of the Muslim discourse of the twentieth century. K.A. Nizami writing in 1953 condemns Abu'l Fazl as one who "spent his time in insulting and ridiculing the Islamic way of life". The Pakistani historian Ishtiaq Husain Qureshi tried to explain Abu'l Fazl's alleged anti-Islamic attitude in the light of the persecution his family had suffered at the hands of orthodox 46 'ulama.17 It is further held by these modern denigrators of Abu'l Fazl that the This content downloaded from 14.139.45.244 on Wed, 26 Feb 2020 07:04:56 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms Tracing Sources of Principles of Mughal Governance _Q tolerant state policies initiated by Akbar were revised by Jahangir, who eventually r+ had come under the influence of Shaikh Ahmad Sirhindi.18 CL The nature of the Mughal state and theory of kingship defining its working > during the seventeenth century, not only under Jahangir (1605- 1627), but also during Shahjahan's reign (1627-1658), as well as, in the first twenty years of 3 Aurangzeb's rule (1659-78), remained, by and large, the same as evolved by zr Akbar. Aurangzeb's letter to Rana Raj Singh of 1658 is indicative of the fact that D the principles of state defined by Abu'l Fazl continued to be respected by the Mughal ruling family and their high nobles down to the end of Shahjahan's reign, orthodox leanings of that monarch notwithstanding.19 Aurangzeb's attempt to reverse this orientation, apparently, was not fully successful. Jai Singh Sawai's and Girdhar Bahadur's argument (1723) that Muhammad Shah, being the emperor of both the Hindus and Muslims, was not expected to reimpose a discriminatory tax like jizya, is suggestive of this situation. The Hindu chiefs serving the Mughal Empire as nobles or bound to it in some other way were generally assured down to 1739 that the empire's basic character was still the same as handed down by Akbar to his successors. They were perhaps confident that by taking a stand in defence of the supra-religious character of the empire they would not be offending the religious sentiments of any section of the nobility. A similar impression is created by a surviving letter of Shivaji to Aurangzeb (1679), where he goes out of his way in praising Akbar for abolishing the jizya. Shivaji also hints in this letter that the Mughals' difficulties in dealing with Marathas were an outcome of Aurangzeb's deviation from his predecessors' policy of not discriminating against any section of subjects of the Empire. The timing and language of this letter suggests that Shivaji was shrewdly appealing to the prevailing sentiment among Mughal nobles many of whom are known to have disapproved of the reimposition of jizya.20 Ill In 1975, S.A.A. Rizvi suggested in his pathbreaking book, Religious and Intellectual History of the Muslims in Akbar s Reign, that Abu'l Fazl had formulated his postulates about sovereignty by synthesizing ideas borrowed from a wide range of early Islamic theorists (Farabi, Avicenna and Turtushi) and mystics (Ibn al-Arabi and Shihab al-Din Suhrawardi Maqtul).