The Mughal empire: the state, economy and culture

Literary sources

• The court chronicles and the European travellers of the whole Mughal age are read in full with the emperors. (The Mughal empire: the emperors)
• Works this page draws on
  • Akbarnama (Abul Fazl, 1589 to 1598), whose third volume is the Ain i Akbari: an official panegyric, to be read as one.
  • Tuzuk i Jahangiri (Jahangir): his autobiography, and the finest Mughal writing on natural history and painting.
  • Padshahnama (Abdul Hamid Lahori): the official history of Shah Jahan, whose album at Windsor holds the court painting of his reign.

Foreign accounts

• Francois Bernier, a French physician in India from 1656 to 1668, is the source of the thesis that India had no private property in land.
• Jean Baptiste Tavernier, a French gem merchant, describes the Peacock Throne.
• European factors estimated the capital of Virji Vora of Surat at 80 lakh rupees.

Coins

• The silver rupiya held its weight and fineness for so long because American silver kept reaching India.

Archaeology and monuments

• The buildings, from Humayun's tomb to the Taj and Bibi ka Maqbara, record the sequence of Mughal style.
• The margins of Akbar's manuscripts name the designer, the colourist and the face painter of each picture.

The emperor

• The emperor was the supreme head of the Mughal state, holding all military and judicial power.
• Mughal sovereignty was personal, which is why every succession was fought.

Wakil and wazir, 1526 to 1560

• The wazirs of Babur and Humayun held great power in the young state.
• The office reached its peak under Bairam Khan, wakil wazir from 1556 to 1560.
• Akbar then deliberately broke the office up, taking its financial powers away.

The departments

• The Diwan i Kul ran revenue and finance, all the collection and expenditure of the empire.
• The diwans reported on state finance to the emperor every day.
• The Mir Saman ran the royal karkhanas: purchases and storage for the household and the making of articles for its use.
• The Qazi ul Quzat was the chief justice, an office sometimes combined with the Sadr.

The Mir Bakshi

• The Mir Bakshi ran military administration, the single most important office after the wazir.
• He endorsed the orders of appointment of mansabdars and their salary papers.
• He kept strict watch on the sanctioned size of contingents and their war equipment.
• He presented new entrants seeking service to the emperor.

The Sadr us Sudur

• The Sadr us Sudur headed the ecclesiastical department, charged with protecting the laws of the Shariat.
• He distributed allowances and stipends to eligible persons and religious institutions, which made the office very lucrative in Akbar's first 25 years.
• The mahzar of 1579 restricted his authority, and later his award of revenue free grants was restricted too.
• Muhtasibs, censors of public morals, worked under him, and also checked weights and measures and enforced fair prices.

Akbar's twelve subas

• Akbar divided the empire into twelve subas, or provinces.
• The twelve subas were:
  • Allahabad, Agra and Awadh.
  • Ajmer, Ahmedabad and Bihar.
  • Bengal, Delhi and Kabul.
  • Lahore, Malwa and Multan.
• Ahmadnagar, Berar and Khandesh were added later, and by the end of Mughal expansion there were about 20 subas.

The governor and his officers

• The subedar or sipahsalar, the provincial governor, was appointed directly by the emperor.
• He kept law and order, encouraged agriculture, trade and commerce, raised revenue, suppressed rebellion and provided troops for expeditions.
• The provincial diwan, also appointed by the emperor, headed revenue and was deliberately independent of the subedar.
• The diwan supervised collection, kept the accounts of expenditure, worked to extend cultivation and disbursed taqavi loans to peasants.
• The provincial bakshi inspected the horses and soldiers kept by mansabdars in the suba and issued paybills.
• The provincial sadr looked after those engaged in religion and learning and supervised the qazis.

Three channels to the emperor

• The Darogai i Dak kept the channel of communication, passing letters to court through postal runners.
• The waqainavis and waqainigar reported directly to the emperor, an intelligence system running parallel to the regular administration.
• The bakshi's office was often combined with the waqainigar's, reporting provincial happenings to the centre.
• The subedar and the diwan were appointed and reported separately, so neither controlled the province alone.
• With the bakshi and the news writers added, every governor was watched by three independent channels.
• The erosion of this check in the eighteenth century is precisely how the successor states emerged.

Sarkar and pargana

• Subas were divided into sarkars, and sarkars into parganas, with the village as the smallest unit.
• At the sarkar the faujdar, appointed by imperial order, guarded life and property, kept order and helped collect revenue where force was needed.
• Faujdari was an administrative division and the sarkar a territorial and revenue division, so the two did not always match.
• Sometimes several faujdars sat within one sarkar, and sometimes one faujdar's jurisdiction spread across two sarkars in different subas.
• The amalguzar or amil assessed and supervised collection, extended cultivation and sent daily reports of receipts and expenditure to the provincial diwan.

The pargana, the village and the town

• At the pargana the shiqdar was the executive officer, the amil handled revenue and the qanungo kept all the records of land.
• In the village the muqaddam was headman and the patwari kept the revenue records.
• In the towns the kotwal, appointed by the imperial government, kept law and order and a register of people entering and leaving.
• Zamindars served the state for law and order and for revenue collection in their own areas.

Forts and ports

• Each fort was under an officer called the qiladar.
• Port administration was independent of the provincial authority, under a mutasaddi appointed directly by the emperor.
• The mutasaddi collected customs, kept a customhouse and supervised the mint at the port.
• Seaborne customs revenue went straight to the centre.

Akbar's mansab

• Akbar evolved the mansabdari out of earlier practice, and it became the basis of both civil and military administration.
• The word mansab means a place or position.
• A mansab fixed three things at once: the holder's status, his salary and the number of armed retainers he kept.
• Its purpose was to streamline the ranks of the nobles, fix their pay and specify the cavalry they owed.
• Abul Fazl says Akbar set 66 grades, from commanders of 10 horsemen to 10,000, though he lists only 33.
• There was no distinction between civil and military service, so the nobility is best seen as a single service class.

Zat and sawar

• At first a single number stood for rank, personal pay and contingent alike.
• Later rank came to be given by two numbers, the zat and the sawar.
• Zat was the official's personal rank and pay, and sawar the number of horsemen he had to keep.
• Sawar was equal to or less than zat, and the relation between the two set three classes of mansabdar.
• Position in the hierarchy went by zat, so a mansabdar of 4000 zat and 2000 sawar outranked one of 3000 and 3000.
• Where a mansabdar served in difficult terrain among rebels, the state often raised his sawar without touching his zat, sometimes only for an emergency.

Jahangir: du aspa sih aspa

• Jahangir designated part of the sawar rank of chosen mansabdars du aspa sih aspa, of two horses and three horses.
• For that part, pay came at double the usual rate of 8,000 dams a sawar, and the holder kept double the troopers.
• He did it to strengthen nobles he trusted militarily without raising their zat.
• A higher zat would have caused jealousy among the rest and added a permanent burden on the treasury.

Shah Jahan: the month scale

• Salaries were paid through jagirs valued on expected income, the jama, but the actual collection, the hasil, always fell short.
• Shah Jahan therefore recalculated pay on a month scale, and applied it to cash salaries too.
• A jagir yielding half its jama was shashmaha, six monthly, and one yielding a quarter was sihmaha, three monthly.
• He also let mansabdars keep only one fifth to one third of their sanctioned sawar with no cut in their maintenance claim.
• That concession was an open admission that the system no longer worked as designed.

Aurangzeb: mashrut

• Aurangzeb continued all the changes of his father and grandfather.
• He created an additional conditional rank, mashrut, to raise a mansabdar's sawar temporarily.
• He added a deduction, khurak i dawwab, toward the feed of the animals in the imperial stables.

Khalisa and jagir under Akbar

• A jagir was the revenue of a territory assigned to a noble in place of a cash salary, and its holder was the jagirdar.
• The jagirdari was an integral part of the mansabdari and cannot be understood apart from it.
• Under Akbar all territory was either khalisa, paying the imperial treasury, or jagir, assigned to jagirdars.

How a jagir was assigned

• A mansabdar's salary was calculated from his zat and sawar ranks.
• It could be paid in cash, making him naqdi, or by a jagir, which was the preferred mode.
• The office of the central diwan found parganas whose total jama equalled the salary claim.
• Where the jama exceeded the claim the assignee paid the balance to the treasury, and where it fell short the treasury paid the shortfall.
• Jagirdars could collect only the authorised revenue, employed their own officials such as the amil, and were watched by the imperial office.

Transfer, the heart of the matter

• No assignment was permanent or hereditary, and jagirdars were routinely transferred.
• Transfer stopped jagirdars from growing local roots and becoming independent.
• It also removed every incentive to invest in the land.
• Irfan Habib calls the jagirdar a bird of passage, and this one feature carries much of his explanation of the collapse.

The four kinds of jagir

• The tankha jagir, given in lieu of salary and transferable normally every three to four years, was the ordinary kind.
• The mashrut jagir was a conditional assignment tied to a temporary rise in sawar rank for a short duration.
• The watan jagir, given to a zamindar or raja in his own hereditary dominion, was hereditary and non transferable.
• Where a chief's rank paid more than his watan yielded, he got a tankha jagir elsewhere, the device that made the Rajput settlement work.
• The altamgha jagir went to Muslim nobles in their family towns or birthplaces, hereditary in intent.

The khalisa through the reigns

• The khalisa's share of total revenue is an index of fiscal health.
• It was about 5 per cent under Akbar and about 10 per cent under Jahangir.
• Under Shah Jahan it fluctuated between 9 and 15 per cent.
• In Aurangzeb's later years the khalisa came under great pressure as claimants multiplied.

Iqta and jagir

• Under the iqta land was split between iqtadars and the sultan, while under the jagir all land was the emperor's. (The Delhi Sultanate: five dynasties, 1206 to 1526)
• The muqti kept law and order in his iqta, while the jagirdar only drew the revenue of his jagir.
• Most muqtis lived in their iqta, while jagirdars generally did not and were transferred out.
• The iqta became hereditary in its later phase, but the mansab never did.
• The Mughals made rank, pay and troops one arithmetic and kept it revocable, so it worked better and, when it broke, failed more completely.

From Sher Shah to Todar Mal

• Akbar's revenue system was called zabti or bandobast, built on Sher Shah's system with modifications.
• Raja Todar Mal, who had served Sher Shah first, carried that system into Akbar's service.
• Sher Shah's ray, patta and qabuliyat passed through Todar Mal into Akbar's dahsala. (The Mughal empire: the emperors)

The dahsala, about 1580

• The dahsala, completed about 1580, was Todar Mal's improvement and the mature form of zabti.
• Land was measured uniformly with the Ilahi gaz and a jarib of bamboo joined by iron rings, which did not stretch or shrink like the old hempen rope.
• Revenue was fixed on the average yield of the past 10 years, which is what dah sala means.
• The state took one third of the average produce, generally paid in cash.
• Rates were fixed for each crop and each revenue circle, the dastur, so a fertile district and a poor one were not assessed alike.

The classes of land

• Land was classed by how long it lay fallow, the point about the dahsala most often asked.
• Polaj was cultivated every year and never left fallow, and paid the full rate.
• Parauti was left fallow for a time to recover, cultivated once in two years, and paid the full rate when cultivated.
• Chachar, fallow three or four years, and banjar, uncultivated five years or more, paid a concessional rate rising gradually to the full.

Karoris and taqavi

• Karoris were officials appointed to collect a crore of dams, about 2,50,000 rupees.
• They also checked the figures of the qanungos, a deliberate second channel against the hereditary local record keeper.
• Akbar took a close personal interest in extending cultivation.
• Amils advanced taqavi loans for implements, seed and animals in time of need, recovered in easy instalments.

Where zabti ran

• Zabti applied mainly to the core provinces from Lahore to Allahabad and to Malwa and Gujarat.
• Elsewhere the state used other systems: ghalla bakhshi, kankut and nasaq.

Ghalla bakhshi or batai

• Ghalla bakhshi or batai was crop sharing, the state taking a share of the actual produce rather than cash.
• In batai the harvest was stacked in heaps and the officer took heaps by the state demand, such as two of four for a half share.
• In khet batai the field was divided by a line, a khatt, once sown and while the crop was still unripe.
• Lang batai was batai with the heaps made after the grain had been separated from the chaff.
• It was used in Thatta, parts of Kashmir and the sarkar of Kandahar.
• Many cultivators preferred it, because it moved with seasonal variation and did not ruin them in a bad year.

Kankut and nasaq

• Kankut estimated the yield by inspecting the standing crop, and was used where measurement was impractical.
• Nasaq was a rough assessment from the past revenue records of an area, without fresh measurement or appraisal each year.
• Nasaq was widely used in Bengal, and in practice was more common than the textbooks suggest.

The trade off

• Ghalla bakhshi protected the peasant, because the state's take fell with the crop.
• It was unmanageable for the state, since the crop had to be measured, guarded until sold and then converted to cash.
• Zabti gave the state a predictable cash income and gave the peasant certainty about what he owed.
• But zabti put the whole risk of a bad season on the peasant.

The zamindar

• The zamindar held hereditary rights over the produce of the land, with a direct share of about 10 to 25 per cent.
• He helped the state collect revenue and gave military service when required.
• He was not the owner of all the land in his zamindari.
• The peasants who cultivated could not be dispossessed so long as they paid the land revenue.
• That fact demolishes Bernier's influential claim that India had no private property in land.

The hinge of the system

• Mughal revenue collection rested in the end on the cooperation of zamindars and local chiefs.
• The jagirdar, transferred every few years, could not collect without them.
• When the state could not satisfy the jagirdars, they could not hold the zamindars, and the whole intermediate structure detached.
• Satish Chandra calls this the crisis of the mediatory apparatus.

Crops

• Wheat, rice, barley, millets, pulses and oilseeds were the food crops.
• Cotton, indigo, sugarcane and opium were the cash crops that fed the export trade.
• Tobacco and maize arrived in this period from the New World.
• Jahangir recorded the spread of tobacco with disapproval.

The karkhana

• Karkhanas were imperial and noble workshops making textiles, arms, jewellery and luxury goods under the Mir Saman.
• They set the standards of craft.
• They also locked much of the best skill into making goods for the court rather than the market.
• That is one reason the Mughal economy generated enormous wealth without generating industrial change.

Textiles

• Textiles were the great manufacture of Mughal India.
• Bengal made muslin and silk, and Gujarat and the Coromandel made cottons and chintz.
• Kashmir made shawls and Banaras made brocade.
• In the seventeenth century Indian cloth was the most widely traded manufacture in the world.

The trading communities

• The Seths and Bohras were long distance traders, and the Baniks local traders.
• The Banjaras carried grain and salt in bulk on oxen over long distances, the transport system of the interior.
• The Oswals, Maheshwaris and Agarwals of Rajasthan came to be called Marwaris.
• The Chettis were the principal merchants of the Coromandel coast.
• Muslim merchants of Malabar ran the pepper and spice trade of the western coast.

Sarrafs and the hundi

• Sarrafs were money changers and bankers who tested and valued coin and took deposits.
• They issued the hundi, the bill of exchange that made long distance trade possible without moving bullion.

The great merchants

• Virji Vora of Surat had capital that European factors estimated at 80 lakh rupees.
• Virji Vora lent repeatedly to the English Company.
• Abdul Ghafur of Surat owned a fleet.
• The Jagat Seths of Bengal followed in the next century.
• The scale of Indian commercial capital undermines any simple picture of a backward economy.

The ports

• Surat was the premier western port and the gateway for the Haj.
• Cambay was declining as its creek silted.
• Masulipatnam served Golconda and the Coromandel, and Hugli served Bengal.
• Calicut and Cochin were the ports of pepper.

Silver and the balance of trade

• India exported far more than it imported and was paid in bullion.
• American silver, reaching India through the Levant and then directly by sea, financed the monetisation of the Mughal economy.
• That is why the silver rupiya held its weight and fineness for so long.
• Contemporaries called India a sink for the world's precious metals.

The Portuguese

• Vasco da Gama reached India in 1498, and the Portuguese Estado da India took Goa in 1510.
• Its principal settlements were Goa, Daman, Diu and Hugli.
• The Portuguese were broken as a power at Hugli in 1632 and by the loss of their horse and spice monopoly.

The English

• The English East India Company was chartered in 1600.
• It won a factory at Surat in 1613, after Swally in 1612.
• Madras came in 1639 from Chandragiri, and Bombay in 1668 from the Crown.
• Calcutta followed in 1690.

The Dutch

• The Dutch East India Company (VOC) was founded in 1602.
• Its settlements were Pulicat, Nagapattinam, Chinsura and Cochin.
• It dominated the spice trade and Indian textiles for the Indonesian market.

The Danes and the French

• The Danish company was founded in 1616, with Tranquebar in 1620 and Serampore.
• The French Compagnie was founded in 1664.
• It settled Pondicherry in 1674 and Chandernagore in 1690.

Traders on sufferance

• Through the seventeenth century the Europeans were traders operating on Mughal sufferance.
• They paid customs and petitioned for farmans.
• What changed in the eighteenth century was the collapse of the authority that had contained them, not their commercial position.

Humayun: the Safavid seed

• In exile Humayun recruited painters from Shah Tahmasp's atelier at Tabriz.
• Through them the Persian line of Bihzad entered India.
• His masters were Mir Sayyid Ali and Abdus Samad, titled Shirin Qalam, the sweet pen.

Akbar: the workshop

• Akbar's painting was crowded, narrative and full of action, in bright primary colour.
• From the 1580s it absorbed European perspective and modelling through Jesuit prints.
• Margins record joint authorship: one artist for the design, one for colouring, a specialist for faces.
• Portraiture began on Akbar's order that likenesses of all the grandees be made.
• The Hamzanama, begun about 1557 and finished about 1572 to 1577, had roughly 1,400 large paintings on cotton cloth in 14 volumes.
• It was the founding monument of the school, and its workshop trained a generation.

Akbar's painters

• Daswant, son of a palanquin bearer, was ranked first of the age by Abul Fazl, and died by suicide in 1584.
• Basawan, master of modelling, recession and light and shade, was the first to absorb European chiaroscuro.
• Miskin painted animals, and Kesu Das, Lal and Mukund worked in the same studio.
• The workshop illustrated the Tutinama, the Razmnama, the Baburnama and the Akbarnama.

Jahangir: the album and the portrait

• Under Jahangir the single study and the album leaf, in subdued colour with gilded margins, replaced narrative illustration.
• His painters made precise natural history and strict profile portraits of psychological depth.
• Allegorical and dream paintings used European symbols, the halo and cherubs, as statements of sovereignty.
• Ustad Mansur, Nadir ul Asr, painted the Siberian crane, the turkey cock, the dodo, the zebra and a hundred Kashmiri flowers.
• Abul Hasan, Nadir uz Zaman, painted Jahangir embracing Shah Abbas, and Bichitr painted Jahangir preferring a Sufi Shaikh to Kings.
• Bishandas, sent to the Safavid court, was called by Jahangir unequalled at a likeness.

Shah Jahan: formal splendour

• Painting under Shah Jahan was technically superb but formal, static and hieratic, with portraiture as protocol rather than observation.
• Its finish was gold heavy and jewel like, with nimbate emperors.
• The Padshahnama album at Windsor is by Bichitr, Payag, Balchand and Abid.
• The Dara Shukoh Album shows the softer, Sufi inflected side.

Aurangzeb and the dispersal

• Aurangzeb withdrew imperial patronage, though not absolutely, since good early portraits and siege scenes survive.
• The decisive effect was dispersal, not extinction.
• Painters moved to the Rajput courts of Mewar, Bikaner, Kishangarh and Amber.
• Others went to the Punjab hills, seeding the Pahari schools of Basohli, Guler and Kangra.
• Later they went to Awadh and Murshidabad, with a brief revival under Muhammad Shah and then the Company School.

Babur and the Sur interlude

• Little of Babur's building survives: the Kabuli Bagh mosque at Panipat and the Aram Bagh at Agra.
• His real contribution was the Timurid charbagh, the four part garden, the setting for every great Mughal tomb.
• Sher Shah's tomb at Sasaram and the Qila i Kuhna Masjid of 1541 are the climax of the Indo Afghan style and the bridge to Mughal work.

Humayun's tomb, 1565 to 1572

• Humayun's tomb in Delhi was built by Bega Begum with the architect Mirak Mirza Ghiyas.
• It was India's first monumental garden tomb, set in a charbagh.
• It has the first great double dome in the Persian manner, after the Lodi experiments, giving a high outer silhouette over a proportionate chamber.
• It is red sandstone with white and black marble inlay, on a high arcaded plinth and a hasht bihisht, eight paradises, plan.
• It is the acknowledged prototype of the Taj, and a UNESCO site since 1993.

Akbar: red sandstone and trabeate

• Akbar built in red sandstone, in the trabeate manner of post and beam.
• Agra Fort holds the Jahangiri Mahal, with Gujarati and Rajasthani brackets and carved columns.
• Fatehpur Sikri was built from 1571. (The Mughal empire: the emperors)
• Akbar's tomb at Sikandra is a five storeyed truncated pyramid of tiered pavilions with an open marble top storey.
• It has no dome, and is the most experimental of Mughal tombs.

Itmad ud Daula's tomb, 1622 to 1628

• Nur Jahan built the tomb of Itmad ud Daula at Agra for her father.
• It was the first Mughal building faced entirely in white marble.
• It made the first extensive use of pietra dura, or parchin kari, an inlay of cornelian, jasper, lapis, onyx and topaz.
• Its fine jali screens and jewel box proportions carry a pavilion roof, not a dome, and it is called the Baby Taj.
• It is the hinge between Akbari sandstone and Shahjahani marble.

Shah Jahan: the zenith

• Under Shah Jahan marble replaced sandstone, and the arcuate, or arched, replaced the trabeate, or post and beam.
• His builders used the bulbous double dome on a constricted neck, cusped arches, baluster columns and curved Bangla roofs.
• Pietra dura carried the naturalistic single plant motif borrowed from European herbals, in rigorous bilateral symmetry.
• The Red Fort and Shahjahanabad rose from 1639 to 1648, with Chandni Chowk laid out by Jahanara.
• The Jama Masjid of Delhi, 1650 to 1656, is the largest mosque in India.
• The Peacock Throne, made by Saida i Gilani from 1628 to 1635 for about a crore of rupees, was carried off by Nadir Shah in 1739.

The Taj Mahal, 1632 to 1653

• The Taj Mahal, a UNESCO site since 1983, was built from 1632 to 1653, the mausoleum essentially complete by 1643.
• Its chief architect was Ustad Ahmad Lahauri, and Amanat Khan Shirazi graded the calligraphy up the arch so it reads evenly from the ground.
• Built of Makrana marble, it cost about 32 million rupees and the work of over 20,000 men.
• Its real innovation is the riverfront terrace, with the tomb at the end of the charbagh rather than its centre.
• Four detached minarets cant slightly outward, and the height of the dome is matched to the facade.
• The Tejo Mahalaya claim has no scholarly standing, and the Black Taj story is unsubstantiated.

Aurangzeb and after

• Under Aurangzeb patronage fell away and plaster over brick replaced marble, but building did not stop.
• Bibi ka Maqbara at Aurangabad, 1660 to 1661, was built by Prince Azam Shah for his mother as a deliberate imitation of the Taj at a fraction of the cost.
• It has marble only on the lower mausoleum and dome, and is called the Dakkhani Taj, criticised for thin proportions.
• The Badshahi Mosque at Lahore, 1671 to 1673, among the largest in the world, answered Shah Jahan's Jama Masjid at greater scale.
• Aurangzeb's Moti Masjid in the Red Fort, 1659 to 1663, is distinct from Shah Jahan's in Agra Fort.
• The tomb of Safdarjung at Delhi, 1754, is what Percy Brown calls the last flicker in the lamp of Mughal architecture.

How historians explain the decline

Within the system

• There was no law of primogeniture, so almost every change of reign brought a ruinous war of succession.
• The mansabdari degenerated into inflated zat ranks and shrinking sawar contingents.
• The one third and one fourth rules and fraudulent musters weakened it further despite the branding system.
• Ijara, revenue farming, spread, putting collection in the hands of men with a purely short term interest in extraction.

From outside and from the regions

• Nadir Shah sacked Delhi in 1739.
• Ahmad Shah Abdali's invasions culminated in Panipat in 1761.
• The Marathas, Sikhs, Jats and Rohillas rose as regional powers.

The military gap

• Mughal armies failed to adopt light field artillery and the flintlock.
• That stagnation made European infantry so effective against Indian armies from the 1740s.