Fall of the Mughal Empire*

Jitendra Kumar
PhD Scholar
CHS, JNU, New Delhi

The Mughal Empire was one of the great dynastic

powers of the medieval Islamic world. Its decline in the
eighteenth century has always been of captivating interest
to historians and Muslim thinkers alike. Most
interpretations of Mughal decline reflect the historian’s
political circumstances and agenda rather than the
realities of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth
centuries. William Irvine, the earliest writer to approach
the subject systematically, focused on the degenerate
character of the later emperors and their officers, thus
justifying British rule in India. He and his immediate
successor, Jadunath Sarkar, emphasise Aurangzeb’s
religious policy as the immediate cause of the decline. His
Muslim bigotry, they assert, caused a “Hindu reaction,”
consisting of a series of revolts that led to the breakdown
of Mughal power. Sarkar also argued that Aurangzeb’s
Deccan campaigns and other shortcomings in his reigns
were also responsible for the empire’s last decline. A lack
of leadership and coherent policy left the realm vulnerable
to the various internal and external threats of the
eighteenth century, which ultimately led to the fall of the
empire. Ishtiaq Husain Qureshi, the leading Pakistani

*
This is not my original essay. Consider it as a class note
prepared for teaching history students at PGDAV College,
University of Delhi, New Delhi.

1|Page
historian, inverts this interpretation. He blames Akbar’s
inclusion of Shia Muslims and Hindus in the Mughal
ruling class. Despite Akbar’s efforts, the Mughal Empire
could only appear as Sunni Muslim rule, and neither
Hindus nor Shias could be truly loyal to it. Akbar thus
erected a house of cards that inevitably collapsed despite
Aurangzeb’s competence.

These rather monocausal explanations were

dismissed from the late 1950s onward and succeeded by
attempts to analyse the imperial system, its failure at a
more fundamental level. This new school of historians
was based at the Aligarh Muslim University, which
included Satish Chandra and M. Athar Ali, who sought
to identify the intuitional, economic and organisational
structure of the Mughal Empire and to describe its general
susceptibilities and weakness. They argued that the power
working of the mansabs and jagir system, the
constitutional framework in which the Mughal ruling
class was organised, faced a severe crisis of Aurangzeb’s
reign. After the conquest of the Deccan kingdoms
between 1686 and 1689, a growing number of nobles had
to be integrated into the imperial service to consolidate
Mughal rule in the newly annexed territories.

The generous award of high mansabs to the

Decani nobles led to increasing demand for jagirs and
exhausted the available land, i.e., the revenue reserves that
supported the Mughal nobility. The constant shortage of
jagirs resulted in an intense struggle within the aristocracy
over its economic resources base and conflicts over
revenue assignments and the growing factionalism within

2|Page
the imperial elite undermined the proper working of the
jagirdari system; over-exploitation of jagirs by oppressive
taxation, abandonment of formerly cultivated lands by the
peasants and their open rebellions were the symptoms of
an accelerating crisis in the administrative system. Due to
financial strains, the nobles found it increasingly difficult
to meet their military obligations, thus diminishing the
empire’s military power.

While Satish Chandra and Athar Ali analysed the

decline as an immediate consequence of the Deccan
conquest producing the jagir crises and the consequent
failure of the nobility to maintain imperial rule after
Aurangzeb’s death, Irfan Habib interpreted the jagir
crises as an inevitable structural crisis originating in
defects of the imperial system. He argued that the frequent
transfers of jagirs, one of the main features of the jagirdari
system, prevented the development by the nobility of a
genuine, long-term interest in land, which resulted, even
in the normal times, in relentless exploitation of agrarian
resources and fatal oppression of the rural population;
peasant-landlord rebellions were widespread phenomena
throughout the Mughal rule. Based on the analysis of the
Mughal official documents and partly building on the
earlier work of W.H. Moreland, who also used the
accounts of contemporary travellers in India extensively,
Habib concluded that the Mughal ruling class was
parasitical in nature and the resulting contradictions
within the society were irreconcilable and inherent in the
imperial system. Hence, the economic crisis towards the
end of Aurangzeb’s reign was, according to Habib,
nothing but an inevitable crisis of the system, the decline

3|Page
of the empire, provoked by peasant rebellions, determined
from the very first days of its existence.

Athar Ali’s study of the Mughal nobility during

the late seventeenth century has been a pioneering attempt
to systematically analyse the political and economic
significance of the imperial elite and its proneness to
instability and crises. In their examination of the resource
base of nobility, Satish Chandra and Irfan Habib gained
new insights into the agrarian and monetary systems of
the Mughal economy and established connections
between the inflationary process, repressive tax demands
and resistance by peasants and local notables. Noman
Ahmad Siddiqi and Zahiruddin Mallik directed their
attention more to the study of the first half of the
eighteenth century.

In the first place, a symposium on the subject in

1976 altered the views of the Aligarh historians who had
explained the decline mainly in economic terms. By
emphasising the aggressive-militaristic character of the
empire, M.N. Pearson interpreted the temporary military
setbacks against the Marathas in the 1660s as having a
traumatic effect on the usually triumphant army leaders;
when the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb suddenly lost his
martial ‘auro of success’ the military nobility lost its self-
confidence and its trust in the future of the empire. The
subsequent prolonged Deccan campaigns during the
Aurangzeb’s reign, which produced the catastrophic
increase in the number of mansabdars and similar
symptoms of decline, are seen as due less to the
expansionist orientation of the empire than to the failure

4|Page
of the empire to develop a more ‘impersonal level’ of
loyalty between the emperor and his nobles. It would have
helped to deal with a defeat differently, and the move
south could have been avoided.

John F. Richards, meanwhile, questioned the

widely accepted argument of a general shortage of jagirs
following the conquests of Bijapur and Golconda in 1686
and 1687. Citing data from Golconda, he showed that new
revenue assignments were available to consolidate
imperial rule in the annexed territories and stabilise the
southern frontier. However, Aurangzeb’s failure to use
those resources efficiently to secure the support of the
local elites and his ‘eagerness’ instead ‘for further
expansion’ resulted in an incomplete administrative and
political integration of the Deccan provinces. The
immense dedication of the empire’s resources to
‘continued expansion in the south brought about a crisis
in public order and public confidence’. It accelerated the
decrease of imperial authority and power, which was
visible by the years 1711-1712 in the Deccan provinces.
Peter Hardy put forward a general proposal for the fresh
investigation of previously neglected but potentially
fertile in the field of historical research’ to include once
again, for instance, the studies of military history, and
even to reconsider the personalities of individual
emperors by means of modern psychology, in order to
come to a comprehensive understanding of the decline of
the empire.

Bernard S. Cohn and A.M. Shah, while giving

examples from Banaras and Gujarat, argued that the

5|Page
conflicts of varying quality and intensity between
imperial, regional and local systems played an important
role in the decline of the Mughal empire. Ashin Das
Gupta described the manifest political conflict between a
representative of the Mughal elite, the local governor of
Surat, and the merchant community of that town, which
revolted against the political attacks on their mercantile
property in 1732. Philip B. Calkins described the
emergence of a new ruling group in Bengal between 1700
and 1740 as its causes. Stewart N. Gordon described the
formation of smaller political systems in Central India and
their gradual integration into the Maratha empire. Karen
Leonard considered Hyderabad State by the end of the
eighteenth century as a representation ‘a new political
system, with a whole new set of participants.

Furthermore, Karen Leonard gave the ‘Great

Firm’ theory for the decline of the Mughal empire. She
argued that the Mughal state, not only the whole imperial
financial system but also individual nobles and officials,
depended on credits and loans from great indigenous
banking firms for all their capital investment and financial
transactions. This service linked firms like the Jagath Seth
of Bengal to the management of land revenue, trade, and
industry and made them increasingly important to the
Mughal government. When, in the period from 1650 to
1750, these ‘indispensable allies of the Mughal state’
diverted their ‘resources, both credit and trade’ from the
Mughals to the other political powers in the Indian
subcontinent contributed to the downfall of the empire’.
However, John F. Richards criticised Leonard’s argument
on the ground that the examples she had cited were from

6|Page
the eighteenth century and relied on the regional
kingdoms. The same cannot be applied to the imperial
authority like the Mughal empire, especially during the
16th and 17th centuries.

An attempt to analyse the decline of the Mughal

empire in an international context has been made by
Marshall G.S. Hodgson and M. Athar Ali, who pointed
out the synchronism of the fall of the Mughal Safavid and
Ottoman Empires, as well as the break-up of the Uzbek
Khanate. Athar Ali argued that the failure of the Mughal
empire would seem to derive essentially from a cultural
failure shared with the entire Islamic world. Hodgson
emphasised rather the necessity to view the revolution ‘in
the context of world historical developments at that time,
which for the Muslims would mean above all the
confrontation with ‘modernity’. The economic, social and
economic transformation in Christian Europe in the
period between 1600 and 1800 had decisive repercussions
on the international political and economic system, which
became increasingly dominated by technically oriented
western societies.

C.A. Bayly has summarised the main angles for

interpreting historical developments in the eighteenth
century that led to the decline of the Mughal empire. He
argued that the crises of eighteenth-century India now
appear to have three distinct aspects. First, there were the
cumulative indigenous changes reflecting
commercialisation, the formation of social groups and
political transformation within the subcontinent itself.
Secondly, there was a wider level of the crisis of the west

7|Page
and South Asia crisis, signalled by the decline of the great
Islamic empires, the Mughals and their contemporaries,
the Ottomans and the Safavids. Thirdly, there was a
massive expansion of European production trade during
the eighteenth century and the development of more
aggressive national states in Europe, which were
indirectly echoed in the more assertive policies of the
European companies in India from the 1730s, and notably
of the English Company after 1757.

As we have seen that the Mughal empire started

falling after the death of Aurangzeb as a result of various
reasons highlighted by the above historical works.
However, the disintegration of the Mughal Empire did not
mean the eclipse of the political authority and economic
stagnation of the entire society. The eighteenth century
not only witnessed the weakening of the Mughal empire
but also the emergence of numerous regional political
structures, virtually independent of the Mughal imperial
control. The decline of the Mughal empire was not a
sudden breakdown of the imperial apparatus but an
accelerated process of crisis in imperial structures in
which political and military power shifted from the centre
to the periphery. As Andrea Hintze argued that the
decentralisation of power followed the boundaries of the
major socio-economic regions. New principalities
established themselves in regional centres and took over
political control. The transfer of power in the formal
Mughal provinces of Awadh, Bengal and Hyderabad were
formerly acknowledged by the emperor. The new regimes
early continued formal relations with the Mughal dynasty
to share in its aura of legitimacy.

8|Page
Bibliography: -

Ali, M. Athar. Mughal Nobility under Aurangzeb. New

Delhi: Asia Publishing House, 1966.
Bayly, C.A. Rulers, Townsmen, and Bazaars: North
Indian Society in the Age of British Expansion,
1770-1870. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1983.
Bhargava, Meena (ed.). The Decline of the Mughal
Empire: Debates in Indian History. Delhi: Oxford
University Press, 2014.
Calkins, Philip B. “The Formation of a Regionally
Oriented Ruling Group in Bengal, 1700-1740.”
The Journal of Asian Studies, 29/4 (Aug. 1970),
799-806.
Chandra, Satish. Parties and Politics at the Mughal
Court, 1707-1740. Delhi: Oxford University
Press, 2002 [1959].
_____Medieval India: Society, Jagirdari Crisis, and the
Village. Delhi: Macmillan, 1982.
Cohn, Bernard S. “Political Systems in the Eighteenth
Century India: The Banaras Region.”, Journal of
American Oriental Society, 82/3 (Sep. 1962), 312-
320.
Habib, Irfan. Agrarian System of Mughal India, 1554-
707. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999.
Hardy, Peter. “Commentary and Critique”. The Journal of
Asian Studies, 35/2 (February 1976 ), 257 – 263.
Hintze, Andrea. The Mughal Empire and its Decline: An
Interpretation of the Sources of Social Power.
Aldershot: Ashgate, 1997.

9|Page
Irvine, William. The Army of the Indian Moghuls: Its
Organisation and Administration. London, 1903.
_____Later Mughals, Vol I. Edited by Jadunath Sarkar.
Calcutta: M.C. Sarkar.
Leonard, Karen. “The ‘Great Firm’ Theory of the Decline
of the Mughal Empire”, Comparative Studies in
Society and History, 21/2 (Apr. 1979), 151-167.
Moreland, W.H. From Akbar to Aurangzeb: A Study in
Indian Economic History. Delhi: Low Price
Publications, 2008.
Pearson, M.N. “Symposium: Decline of The Mughal
Empire”. The Journal of Asian Studies, 35/2
(February 1976), 221 – 235.
Richards, John F. “The Imperial Crisis in the Deccan”,
The Journal of Asian Studies, 35/2 (February
1976 ), 237 – 256.
Sarkar, Jadunath. A Short History of Aurangzeb, 1618-
1707. Calcutta: M.C. Sarkar, 1930.
Shah, A.M. “Political Systems in the 18th Century
Gujarat”. Enquiry, 1/1 (Spring 1964), 83-95.

10 | P a g e