Sania Mariam

1/10/2015 Assignment: History of India (1750-1880 AD)

In what ways has new research challenged the established view of the 18 th
century India?
The 18th century occupies an interesting position in the History of India. As a
century that witnessed the passing away of an empire and its replacement by
another it is viewed and described in different ways. For chroniclers of the
declining Mughal Empire, it represented a period of political and cultural loss, an
inqilab that could only be expressed in poems of lament or shar-e- ashob. For
newcomers building smaller regional states and political units, the century was
one of opportunities that produced contrasting and competing narratives of
kingship, governance and conflict. For the aspiring English East India Company,
the century had to be projected as one of instability and decay, giving them the
necessary moral justification for the Raj. These multiple narratives have made
retrospective history writing complex and added many layers to it.
Since the big event of the century was the political collapse of the empire, the
historiography of the period was linked to the Mughal decline. Historians of the
early 20th century explained the decline of the empire by posing questions that
were personality oriented. British imperialist historians like William Irvine argued
that the flawed character of the emperors had corrupted the nobility. He accused
Aurangzeb of alienating the Hindus and the Shias. Similarly, Nationalist
historians like Jadunath Sarkar saw in the Maratha, sikh, and Jat resistance a
strong element of Hindu reaction against Aurangzebs religious bigotry. This
personality based, ideology prone interpretation was based on colonial or
Orientalist view of history, which portrayed the history of two foreign rules: one,
Islamic as tyrannical and despotic and the other, European and benevolent. The
18th century emerged as politically chaotic and economically crisis prone period.
In the late 1950s and early 1960s this view was challenged and displaced with a
series of publication by historians of Aligarh University .These Marxist-oriented
historians focused on the decline in materialistic terms .However they continued
seeing the 18th c. as politically chaotic and crises ridden. Satish Chandras
Parties and politics at the Mughal court was the first attempt to understand the
decline of the empire by studying its structural flaws as a financial cum
administrative crisis. He argued that the stability of the empire had depended on
the efficient working of the mansab and jagirdari systems, but these institutions
failed to function effectively by the reign of Aurangzeb, whose political problems
were accompanied by a crisis of the jagirdari systems.
Irfan Habib in his classic The Agrarian System of Mughal India depicted many
of the anti mughal revolts and peasants uprising owing to economic oppression.
According to his view, this was due to the high Mughal revenue demand to which
was added the rapacity of the proliferating zamindars bent on squeezing the
resources of the fast diminishing jagirs. But revolts against the Mughals appear

to have occurred in the relatively prosperous regions and were usually led by
locally wealthy zamindars, which cast some doubt on the validity of the
exploitation-poverty-resistance casual chain.
Athar ali accepted Habibs model of a fiscally centralized state but he attributed
the decline not to exorbitant land revenue but due to shortage of jagirs.
According to him, it was due to the increasing pressure of the deccan wars on the
empires financial resources and the dislocation of administration caused by the
absence of the emperor and his court in the north that caused the complicated
mechanism of the assignment of jagirs to collapse. From the work of these three
Aligarh historians it is possible to draw a diagram of tensions between the
emperor, the mansabdars /jagirdars, zamindars and the cultivators which led to
agrarian uprisings.
In 1975, Michael N Pearson, John F. Richard and Peter Hardy proposed alternative
understandings of the decline. Richard argues against the shortage of jagirs as a
prime mover of the decline and instead holds Aurangzebs strategic objectives
responsible for the disorder in the deccan. According to him, the problem was the
emperors failure to secure his southern frontiers and to exploit the considerable
resources of Bijapur and Golconda. In his article Shivaji and the decline of the
Marathas Pearson argues that the core of the Empire composed only of small
group of men called the mansabdars who were bound to the emperor by direct
patronage ties and were the only ones in whom the concept of the Mughal
Empire outweighed other primordial attachments. The continuance of this
patronage depended only on military success. He states that the mughals failure
to defeat the Marathas made the tragedy of Aurangzeb inevitable. For him, the
fundamental problem was the mughals failure to evolve a more impersonal
political system. Peter Hardy on the other hand insists on the importance of the
study of military technology and the military ethos to explain the Mughal decline.
Some scholars have considered the social basis of the fiscal system and the role
of bankers and merchants during the 18thc as a reason for decline. In the Great
Firm theory of the Decline of the empire put forward by Karen Leonard, the loss
of confidence in mughal authority forced bankers to migrate to provincial courts
and centres. Especially after the aftermath of Maratha raids they shifted their
loyalties to provincial and regional rulers, the chief beneficiary being the English
East India Company.
J F Richards argues against it by pointing out that banking families didnt
constitute the financial backbone of Mughal system and their withdrawal into the
province was a later development. Sanjay Subrahmanyam and C.A. Bayly
disagree with Richards proposition of centralization through sate power which
implies that the fiscal integration under Aurangzeb was mediated by Mughal
treasury and the great households rather than bankers. They discuss the role
played by portfolio capitalists or merchants that had begun to intervene in
agricultural production and to control labour and trade, a process that marked
the emergence of many new zamindars of the 18 th. C. The merchant capital

played a significant role in state and military finance, which subsequently led to
the rise of English East India Company.
Another view put forward by Athar Ali in his article The passage of the empire:
The Mughal case looks into the wider historical contexts of the Asian empires
and sees the downfall of the empire as a cultural failure. He argues that this
period not only witnessed the decline of the Mughal Empire but also the Safavid
empire, Ottoman empire and the Uzbek khanate. According to him the
emergence of Europe as the centre of world commerce, disbalance of trade
subverted states and society of Asia even before military coercion was felt. With
the rise in the costs of luxury items , the elites engaged in further agrarian
exploitation. Moreover, he adds that Mughals technological and intellectual
aridity limited development in science and technology, thereby preventing towns
and cities from becoming safety valves that could grapple with agrarian crisis.
Thus he argues that the failure of the ME was derived from a cultural failure that
it shared with other Asian states. . An interesting perspective on this matter has
been added by Rosalind OHanlon who provides a gendered dimension to the
disintegration of Mughal service morale after the late 17 th c. 4
The predominant theme of the above historians, their differences not
withstanding projected the 18th as a Dark Age marked by political chaos and
economic decline. They took no cognizance of the diverse ways in which Mughal
institutions were being modified and transformed at local and regional level. The
historiography did saw the emergence of regional outfits but there political
realignments were explained within the framework of the functioning of the
Mughal agrarian system. The focus remained on the structures of revenue
extraction and not on other forms of production or trade.
Research conducted since the 1980s is less concerned with the mughal decline
and more with understanding an evolutionary pattern of change. The fortune or
the misfortune of the empire is not considered the sole determining factor in
understanding the historical processes in the 18thc.Neither do they accept the
idea of pan-Indian decline or of a stagnant economy that lacked sufficient
potentiality to grow. The 18th c. no longer appears as a dark valley in the
shadow of towering empires The emergence of regional powers in the 18 th c.
represented a transformation rather than the collapse of the polity. It signified
decentralization of power rather than political chaos. They see more continuity
that discontinuity between the mughal empire and the regional states and thus
provided a realistic understanding of the period that is free from euro centric,
dogmatic, Mughal-centric and essentialist viewpoints. These two divergent
positions form the Dark Ages verses Economic prosperity debate on the 18 th c.
5
C.A. Bayly rejects the black Century conception of the 18 th c and offers a strong
counter argument for the political and economic vigour of that period. He writes
the Mughal empire didnt fall, it was simply swallowed by a larger political
organism. Political decentralisation boosted the growing economic vitality of
regional and local powers that gained autonomy between 1735 and 1762.It led

to the growth of homogenous merchant class that operated round small towns
far from imperial capitals. The so called Black century witnessed the
redeployment of merchant capital rather than its destruction. He asserts that the
growth of urbanism, mercantile activity and service people was influenced by
external trade that remained buoyant throughout the 18 th.c.
He also argues strongly against the argument of cultural stagnation, military
decline and elite debauchery. According to him peace and stability contributed to
deepening of commercial networks, an expansion of urbanisation and a
dominance of landed classes. These developments generated a new economic
and social order that later weakened the empire and ultimately wasted and
muscled out the previous institutions. According to him, a combination of
accommodating indigenous capitalism and fiscal weakness unsettled these
centralised bureaucracies. As this happened, new commercial and landed classes
merged into vibrant regional and provincial formations.
Philip Calkin studied the role of Merchants and bankers in the Bengals politics
concluding that the decline of mughal imperial power brought a rather orderly
transformation in the political structure of Bengals provincial system rather than
chaos or administrative inefficiency. As the Mughal Empire weakened, political
power shifted from the centre to the province. The power of the Imperial
mansabdars in Bengal declined and at the same time there emerged a coalition
between a group of larger and stronger zamindars and the Mughal emperor.
Muzaffar Alam also sees economic stability and growth in regional areas in the
earlier half of the 18th century though it was accompanied by a political crisis as
old relationships between the empires different constituents were politically
realigned. Though advantageous to both zamindars and merchants, the
flourishing economy engendered conflict among various local groups as each
tried to maximise its profits at the expense of the others. Paradoxically, the
restabilization of the regions was achieved wholly within the Mughal
institutional framework even when the central government was collapsing and
region identities were getting stronger. He argues that despite the shift in power,
the myth and influence of Delhi remained unfazed as no region could match
Delhis symbolic power.
Muzzafar Alam is sceptic of the Persian chroniclers of the age who had presented
the 18th c. as that of total chaos and failure as the chroniclers were in some way
beneficiaries of the Mughal State and had suffered much when the provinces
became autonomous. He argues that since their vantage point was the Mughal
throne and the person of the emperor, they tended to associate the decline of
the imperial structure with the decline and decay of the entire society.
Chetan Singh argues that even though medieval chronicles imply that Mughal
bureaucracy was prevented from developing a strong regional base, this was
far from the truth. He argues that for its very survival the empire had to
incorporate regional landed elites into its administration. Dismissing the notion of
a high degree of centralisation as an illusion, Singh argues that development in
18thc. Punjab can be traced back to 17th c. and to the emergence and long term

survival of regional administrative elites. Similar arguments have been made by

David Washbrook, Sanjay Subhramanyam, Andre Wink ,Steward Gordon, David
Ludden among others.
Dismissing the notion of civilisational failure Richard Barnett prefers to see it as
an almost inevitable conclusion to a lasting, dazzling civilizational
achievement. He also observes that characterising the 18 th c as a cultural failure
of the Islamic world amounts to not only prefiguring modernity and judging
historical societies by contemporary standards but also legitimising the British
opinion on pre colonial history.
Thus it can be concluded that inter-regional imbalances of wealth and intra
regional disparities between classes combined in complex ways to weaken the
leverage of the Mughal centre vis a vis the regions in the early 18 th.c. In addition
to internal contradictions, a couple of major trends outside the subcontinent
exerted serious pressure on the Mughal Empire. A general South and West Asian
crisis in the form of tribal incursions from Central Asia and the raids of Nadir
Shah and Ahmed Shah Abdali which left the cities devastated. Moreover, the
disruption of bullion flows from Europe began to alter the framework of EuropeAsia economic relations. These multiple internal and external factors led to the
steady attenuation of Mughal power.
Except from a Delhi centred perspective, the politics of 18 th c. was marked more
by decentralisation than decline. The economy was characterised by general
buoyancy and creativity despite some weakness and contradiction. It was this
vibrant tributary commercialism as David Luden calls it, which made India look
attractive to European companies. The tendency according to C.A. Bayly was
towards greater complexity and richness of religion and cultural traditions rather
than towards homogeneity.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

1. Sugata bose and Ayesha Jalal, Modern South Asia :History Culture ,Political
economy.
2. Meena Bhargava (ed.), The Decline of the Mughal Empire
3. lakshmi Subramanian, History of India,1707-1857
4. Sekhar Bandyopadhyay, From Plassey to Partiton and after: A History of
Modern India