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https://archive.org/details/mughalindiastudi0000atha
Mughal India
 Ra teestut

Studies in Polity, Ideas,

Society, and Culture

M. Athar Ali

OXFORPRDESS
UNIVERSITY
 OXFORD
UNIVERSITY PRESS

Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford.

It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship,
and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of
Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries

Published in India by
Oxford University Press
YMCA Library Building, Jai Singh Road, New Delhi 110001, India

© Oxford University Press 2006

The moral rights of the author have been asserted

First published 2006

Oxford India Paperbacks 2008
Sixth impression 2011

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in

a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the
prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted
by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics
rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the
above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the
address above

You must not circulate this work in any other form

and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer

ISBN-13: 978-0-19-569661-5
ISBN-10: 0-19-569661-1

Typeset in 10.5/12, Times New Roman

by All India Press, Pondicherry 605 001
Printed in India by Shree Krishna Offset, Noida
The publishers regret that Professor M. Athar Ali
could not live to see this book in print. We are
deeply grateful to Professor Irfan Habib for his
help in facilitating its publication.
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 Contents

Preface by Irfan Habib

Acknowledgements XVI

ANTECEDENTS
The Islamic Background to Indian History: An
Interpretation of the Islamic Past
Encounter and Efflorescence: The Genesis of the
Medieval Civilization
Nobility under Muhammad Tughlug
Capital of the Sultans: Delhi during the Thirteenth and
Fourteenth Centuries
The Punjab between the Thirteenth and Fifteenth
Centuries

FORMATION OF THE EMPIRE

Towards an Interpretation of the Mughal Empire a
The Pre-colonial Social Structure and the Polity of
the Mughal Empire 74
The Mughal Polity: A Critique of “Revisionist’
Approaches 82
Political Structures of the Islamic Orient in the
Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries 94

POLITICAL THOUGHT
The Evolution of the Perception of India:
Akbar and Abul Fazl 109
The State in Islamic Thought in India 119
Vill Contents

Elements of Social Justice in Medieval Islamic Thought 129

THE RELIGIOUS WORLD

The ‘Vision’ in the Salt Range, 1578:

An Interpretation 149
Sulh-i Kul and the Religious Ideas of Akbar 158
Translations of Sanskrit Works at Akbar’s Court 173
The Religious World of Jahangir 183
The Religious Environment under Shah Jahan and

Aurangzeb 200
Sidelights into Ideological and Religious Attitudes
in the Punjab during the Seventeenth Century 209
19. Pursuing an Elusive Seeker of Universal Truth:
The Identity and Environment of the Author of the
Dabistan-i Mazahib 216
20. Muslims’ Perceptions of Judaism and Christianity in
Medieval India 229

THE POLITICS OF EMPIRE

oak The Religious Issue in the War of Succession,

1658-59 245
22 Causes of the Rathor Rebellion of 1679 253
a Provincial Governors Under Aurangzeb: An Analysis 262

THE EMPIRE AND CONTEMPORARY POWERS

24. ‘International Law’ or Conventions Governing
Conduct of Relations between Asian States,
Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries 307
2. Jahangir and the Uzbeks 316
 Contents

26. The Objectives Behind the Mughal Expedition into

Balkh and Badakhshan, 1646-47 327

THE PASSING OF THE EMPIRE

27. The Passing of the Empire: The Mughal Case 337

28. Recent Theories of Eighteenth-century India 350

SOURCES
29. History in Indo-Muslim Tradition 363
30. The Use of Sources in Mughal Historiography 370
31. The Correspondence of Aurangzeb and its
Historical Significance 388

Index 392

MAPS
between pages 148-9
Akbar’s Progress from Ajmer to the Salt Range 1577-8

between pages 328-9

India’s North-West Frontiers from the 13th to the 19th Century
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 Preface

When the author of this collection of papers, M. Athar Ali, died of

cancer in a Delhi hospital on 7 July 1998, an association between us
of some fifty years was brought to a close. From the Intermediate to
MA in history we had studied together at the Aligarh Muslim
University (1947-53). We were both fortunate that, as we passed our
MA examination, there came to be openings for us in the same
university, because of an ambitious programme of research and
publications in medieval Indian history instituted by the Government
of India. The fields in medieval history that we took up were different
and reflected the different approaches we had. Athar Ali felt strongly
that the Mughal empire had not had a good press because the primary
Persian material had not been studied extensively enough. My own
concerns, rooted in a commitment to Marxism, were with the study of
economy, social structure, and class exploitation. Athar Ali, in line
with his own interests, took the Mughal nobility for the subject of his
PhD thesis, while I attempted a study of the agrarian system of Mughal
India. It is not surprising that the conclusions we arrived at on the
performance of the Mughal empire, were also different. In his thesis
which in its published form (Mughal Nobility under Aurangzeb, Delhi,
1966) came after mine, Athar Ali duly took me to task for my adverse
judgement on the Mughal agrarian administration. From those early
days, while debating with each other, we constantly exchanged both
information and ideas, as we sat for long hours on adjacent desks.
(The third desk was that of Professor Iqtidar Alam Khan, who, I am
glad to say, generally took my side.)
Those early days were to be followed by years in which Athar Ali,
by his two major published works and numerous papers won
considerable acclaim in the academic world both in India and abroad.
He was appointed Professor at Aligarh in 1977 and was subsequently
the UGC National Professor in 1980-1. After his retirement from
Aligarh in 1990, he was elected a National Fellow of the Indian
Council of Historical Research, 1990-3. He served as Secretary of
the Indian History Congress, 1977-80, and was elected its General
President in 1989-90. He was elected Smutts Fellow at the University
of Cambridge, 1974-5, and Wilson Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson
Xl Preface
International Centre for Scholars, Washington, DC, 1986. He worked
as a Visiting Fellow at the School of Oriental and African Studies,
London, twice, in 1970 and 1973-4. He was appointed Visiting
Professor at the Centre for South Asian Studies, University of Virginia,
Charlottesville, 1978-9, and at Centre d’etudes del’ Inde et de I’ Asie
du Sud, Paris, 1980.
That these honours were well deserved cannot admit of doubt. It
would be difficult for anyone to match the industry that Athar Ali put
in for his thesis and for compiling his second major work, The
Apparatus of Empire: Awards of Ranks, Offices and Titles to the
Mughal Nobility (1574-1658), New Delhi, 1985. He collected his data
not only from numerous official and private histories, published and
manuscript, and a mass of documentary material, especially at the
Andhra Pradesh State Archives, Hyderabad, but also from a number
of out-of-the-way texts which he read through just in case they
contained chance information on any official’s antecedents or
appointment to rank or office. In a sense The Apparatus completed
his study of the Mughal nobility, for he had now covered in this and
his earlier book the entire period from the middle of Akbar’s reign
(1574) to the death of Aurangzeb (1707). But he still wished to extend
his comprehensive biographical record of the Mughal nobility to the
whole of Aurangzeb’s reign as well, so as to produce a companion
volume to his Apparatus. Many years of intense work (involving
repeated trips to Hyderabad) followed; and the data from 1659 to
1685 was ready partly in processed and partly in handwritten form,
when he was suddenly forced by illness to abandon the work altogether
early in 1998. Sad though it is, it is difficult to see how this product of
many years’ labour can now be retrieved, and put into a form that the
author would have approved of.
Athar Ali’s work on the Mughal nobility, with the massive
information that he was able to deploy, has naturally greatly
influenced much of the subsequent work on the Mughal empire, its
structure and functioning. His Mughal Nobility under Aurangzeb,
therefore, acquired the status of a landmark in Mughal
historiography. In the last two decades or so, Athar Ali’s perceptions
of the Mughal political and administrative structure have attracted
criticism from some who have in effect questioned the validity of
the Persian evidence itself. Athar Ali’s own detailed response to
such objections came in what is now Chapter 8 in the present volume
and then in his introduction to the second edition of Mughal Nobility
 Preface Xlii
under Aurangzeb, published by the Oxford University Press, New
Delhi, 1997.
In later years Athar Ali tended to take an exceptional degree of
interest in cultural history, to which earlier he had paid little attention.
It is, perhaps, possible to trace this broadening of the scope of his
work by reference to two of his earlier essays. In one (Chapter 6),
written in 1973, he gave his general perception of the Mughal empire,
arguing that it had very strong conventions which limited the personal
powers of the emperor, and that in some respects it was a ‘quasi-
modern’ state. Such a perception of Mughal polity led him to look
anew for the factors behind its decline. This came in Chapter 27, in
which, while not overlooking factors internal to that empire, he
attributed the decline of all major Asian states at that time to what he
called a ‘cultural failure’ in their confrontation with the West. The
implication was that there was an ideology, a cultural ethos, which
had sustained the Mughal empire, but which was now getting obsolete
in the world-context.
It is this, I think, which made him take special interest in the history
of religion and ideas in his later studies. It will be seen that no less than
eleven essays in this collection (Chapters 2, 11-20) belong to this field.
He said much that was original in regard to Akbar’s ideas, and it seems
that his admiration for this extraordinary man grew much with time: it
is most notably to be seen in Chapter 10, where he assesses Akbar as a
proponent of the idea of India as well as a protagonist of the cause of
reason. It is no accident surely that what is perhaps his last essay (Chapter
19) is devoted to the author of the Dabistan-i Mazahib (c.1652) who
proceeded with the avowed purpose of giving an unbiased account of
all religions. Such a work, Athar Ali argued, could only have been
written (and become popular) in the Mughal empire.
Since his student days Athar Ali remained a steadfast friend of
the Communist movement. But while he recognized Marxism as an
important trend within modern historiography, he himself did not
accept many of its premises. At the same time he was irritated at
any tendency towards introducing religious or sectarian sentiments
into history: Chapter | is a product of his anxiety to show that Islamic
history too must be held to be susceptible to a rational interpretation.
He usually avoided polemics; but in Chapters 8 and 28, he took
issue with approaches which he thought were becoming fashionable,
without having much basis in real fact. Chapter 28 was, perhaps, the
first major critique anywhere of the conceptions of the eighteenth
XIV Preface
century that C.A. Bayly and some others have put forward.
Any collection of papers of a historian who often wrote, like many
of us, for conferences and seminars, without a thought of these going
into a book, runs the risk of appearing miscellaneous, its quality
uneven, its contents overlapping or repetitious. It is a tribute to Athar
Ali’s choice of themes, clarity of thought and fluent prose that the
reader gets here a large amount of information on medieval India in
such lucidly analysed form, where one can recognize a consistency
of approach, without any sense of hearing the same thing over and
over again. We can see him going out to explore with an open mind,
as ready to criticize as to admire what he finds. Athar Ali was no
apologist of any cause (even of the Mughal Empire!). He always felt
the excitement of pursuing enquiry for the joy of it. And the reader
too may well sense this as he goes through his written word.
It will be manifest to the reader that though Athar Ali was never
afraid of investigating minor matters, there is hardly an occasion where
his extensive researches do not produce important facts not considered
before or do not suggest new ways of looking at historical problems.
The present volume may for this reason supply a far better
comprehension of Mughal India than any conventional history of it.
Irrespective of whether one is not here or there fully in agreement
with him, one can still admire the rigorous rationality and critical
spirit with which Athar Ali goes to his materials and the
straightforwardness with which he takes his position.
The papers in the present collection were assembled by the author
himself. He also made a rough thematic arrangement, which has largely
been followed here. Unfortunately, Athar Ali decided to have the
papers retyped (not word-processed), and he fell ill before he could
check the typescript. When the material was seen by me after his
death, it became clear that the entire text needed to be checked, and
compared with the original. I have corrected typing errors, made some
spellings uniform and slightly amended the text where I felt that there
could otherwise be some confusion. Athar Ali did not sometimes give
the full publication details of the texts he used; these, as far as possible,
have been supplied. Needless to say in all this I have been greatly
helped by the excellent copy editor from the Oxford University Press.
The reader is assured, however, that there is no deviation of substance,
even on any minor point, from the text as the author had put it in a
revised form.
There is one matter in which the reader’s indulgence is sought.
 Preface XV
Athar Ali’s papers appeared in diverse publications, some of which
may have had no provision for diacritical marks, while others followed
their own special systems of transliteration. Different papers in this
volume therefore spell some of the Persian terms and names
differently; moreover, such diacritical marks as there were in the
printed articles were dropped when these were typed. To spell all the
names and terms according to a uniform transliteration system and to
apply the appropriate diacritical marks to all of them would now be
too onerous a task. The non-English words and terms therefore largely
appear as they appeared in the original publications, but without any
diacritical marks.
Before closing, I should like to add a few words on matters outside
of Athar Ali’s academic work. He possessed a wonderful fund of
commonsense and a surprisingly acute legal acumen. These capacities
were always put at his friends’ service, and of others too who called
upon him for assistance. In however critical a situation he never lost
his wits or nerve, and when he knew death was not far away he faced
it with the same calmness that one had come to expect from him in all
circumstances.
During the last ten years of his life he did not hide his growing
concern at the rapid advance of communalism in the country. The
secular India, with a strong commitment to the scientific spirit, which
we had all so long taken for granted, was now in danger. Athar Ali
joined three other distinguished historians, Professors R.S. Sharma,
Suraj Bhan, and D.N. Jha in penning a Historians’ Report to the Nation
on Ayodhya (1991). It was translated and printed in almost every
important language of India. His assistance was made available to
every organization that joined the fight for secularism, whether it was
the Indian History Congress, or SAHMAT, or the Association for the
Study of History and Archaeology (ASHA), or the Aligarh Historians
Society. His anxieties on this score are reflected in some of his later
papers in this volume (see the conclusion of Chapter 2 and Chapter
10).!
Athar Ali was always given steadfast support by his wife, Feroza
Khatoon, and his family. An apology is due to them, and to the Oxford
University Press, as well as to readers, for the time I have taken in
preparing the press copy.
IRFAN HaBIB
 Acknowledgements

‘The Islamic Background to Indian History: An Interpretation of the

Islamic Past’, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the
Orient, Vol. XXXII, October 1989, Leiden.

‘Encounter and Efflorescence: The Genesis of the Medieval

Civilization’, Presidential Address, Proceedings of Indian History
Congress, 1989, Gorakhpur session.

‘Nobility under Muhammad Tughluq’, Proceedings of Indian History

Congress, 1981, Bodh Gaya session.

‘Capital of the Sultans: Delhi during the Thirteenth and Fourteenth

Centuries’, in R.E. Frykenberg ed., Delhi Through the Ages, 1986,
Oxford University Press, New Delhi.

‘The Punjab between the Thirteenth and Fifteenth Centuries’,

Presidential Address, Medieval Section, Proceedings of Punjab
History Conference, 1981, Patiala session.

‘Towards an Interpretation of the Mughal Empire’, Journal of the

Royal Asiatic Society, Vol. 1, 1978, London.

‘The Pre-Colonial Social Structure and the Polity of the Mughal

Empire’, Proceedings of Indian History Congress, 1984, Annamalai
session.

‘The Mughal Polity: A Critique of Revisionist Approaches’, Modern

Asian Studies, Vol. 27, 1993, Cambridge.

‘Political Structures of the Islamic Orient in the Sixteenth and

Seventeenth Centuries’, in Irfan Habib ed., Medieval India 1, 1992,
Oxford University Press, New Delhi.

‘The Evolution of the Perception of India: Akbar and Abu’j Fazl’, in

Irfan Habib ed., Akbar and his India, 1996, Oxford University Press,
New Delhi.

‘The State in Islamic Thought in India’, Symposium Lecture,

Proceedings of Indian History Congress, 1982, Kurukshetra session.
ANTECEDENTS
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 1

The Islamic Background to

Indian History
An Interpretation of the Islamic Past

The medieval period of Indian history, as conventionally fixed by

historians, c. 1000 to c. 1750, had so deep an imprint of Islam, that
during much of the period India could be held to have belonged
culturally to the Islamic world, not on its periphery, but close to its
core. It is, of course, the uniqueness of India’s situation that at the
same time, strictly in terms of its Hindu component, it could be said
to have been a world in its own right, with Islam only as a peripheral
phenomenon. Yet, since the Islamic connection greatly influenced
the political structure, the fiscal system and even much of the network
of internal commerce and external trade, it is crucial to understand
the background that Islam provided to Indian history, or in other
words, to understand Islamic history till the arrival of Islam in
northern India, c. 1200.' A splendid effort to do so was provided by
Professor Mohammad Habib in his introduction to a reprint of Volume
II of Elliot and Dowson’s History of India as Told by its Own
Historians (1952). A year later Hamilton Gibb came out with his
well-known essay, ‘An Interpretation of Islamic History’, published
in the Journal of World History (1953).? Nearly thirty-five years
have passed since then, years during which much has been written,
and many new insights obtained. The present essay proposes to
offer a rather personal reappraisal of the first six hundred years of
Islamic history based, admittedly, on only a partial reading of the
vast literature on the subject and with a confessed bias towards
what seems more relevant from an Indian point of view, though not
deliberately neglecting other possible angles of vision.

I
In any narration of the events of the past, the emergence of
Islam within a neglected, seemingly ‘wild’ desert, and its rapid
4 Mughal India
transformation into one of the great historical cultures of the world,
presents a-subject of great drama and wonder. There have been
greater and more rapid conquests. The Mongols in the thirteenth
century too arose out of the steppes to create the one sole world
empire in pre-modern history, twice or thrice the size of the Islamic
caliphate at its greatest extent; and they achieved it in far less time.
But the Mongols created no international culture; their own language
was overwhelmed by the babel of tongues of their subjects; instead
of assimilating, like the Arabs, they were themselves assimilated by
others. Clearly then, without denigrating the claims of Pax Mongolica
for historical analysis, one may still assert that an analysis of Islam
is likely to tell us much more about what has happened in a large
part of Asia and Africa during the last fifteen hundred years.
How does one set about the task? There has recently been a spate
of criticism of the ‘Orientalists’. Amidst this protest, Edward W.
Said’s critique is perhaps the most comprehensive as well as
reasonable. In so far as ‘Orientalism’ is conceived as an attempt to
study eastern cultures, especially Islam, in the way one studies
Zoology, or animals of lower orders, many of the criticisms are,
perhaps, quite valid. From this valid objection, however, there has
been a tendency to go on to assert that Islamic history can be
understood only by those who believe in Islam, who can study it on
its own terms, and still better, interpret it in its terms. This is a very
attractive notion, and by ruling out all comparisons with other
cultures or systems (for each of them must then be studied on its
own terms), it Sweeps away the possibility of any arrogantly
Eurocentric interpretation of Islamic history. One may, perhaps, see
the most learned practitioner of this kind of exposition in Hamidullah,
with his well-known biography of the Prophet in two volumes.
Without totally denying the claims of this school to legitimacy, I
would still argue that the basic premises here are not acceptable. A
believer has a perfect right to expound the tenets of Islam ‘on its
own terms’, in its own terminology; but this would be theology,
without any indignity necessarily attaching to that term. Can it be
history? Islam as a historical phenomenon has always interacted
with other elements that have indisputably originated and existed
outside its fold. Will it be valid to see them on terms supposedly
proper only to Islam? If not, how is the interaction to be interpreted?
For if one is to understand the Islamic phenomenon in a historical
perspective, the interaction is not peripheral but central to any
analysis. The conclusion is inescapable that whether it is the history
 The Islamic Background to Indian History 5
of feudal Christendom or of Lama-Buddhism or of Islam, one would
need the same critical apparatus, the same freedom from assumptions
or given premises, and the same sharp critical faculty.
This can be illustrated with the very first problem one faces: the
emergence of Islam within the womb of what Muslims call the
Jahilliya, the society and culture in which the Prophet was born. Is
Jahilliya to be understood ‘on its own terms’ (hardly known to us
now, at first hand) or on those of Islam, whose followers under-
standably exaggerated the allegedly evil customs of the Jahilliya?
One must now rather examine the degree of exaggeration in the
Islamic traditions about that period and reconstruct, by additional
use of other sources, what was really happening in the Arabian
peninsula before the rise of Islam. There is no proof that the pre-
Islamic Arabian society was in a primitive communal stage, as E.A.
Belyaev has argued; nor, as he further asserts, that it was being
converted into a slave-owning one.* One would rather say that the
bedouin society, based on tribe, was indeed pastoral; but it had long
developed individual property, even if this was counted in terms of
camels and date palms rather than money. Slavery was a convenient,
but not an essential, prop of this property system. Outside Yemen
agriculture was only of secondary importance; but this, along with
date palm cultivation, would again emphasize individual right and
economic and social differentiation. Thus, clearly, private property,
which is the basis of Islamic civil law, already existed in Arabia.
Islam helped at best to standardize and systematize its norms. As far
as slavery is concerned, it is possible that slavery became more
important after Islamic conquests (with the train of captive slaves
they generated); but it is unlikely that here too Islam either greatly
modified or intensified slavery. It recognized slavery virtually just
as it had found it.
Where then was there, in a sphere other than ideological, a true
break with Jahilliya? Montgomery Watt’s thesis of town—nomad
conflict may be taken to develop a proposition of the triumph of
urbanism over pastoral rusticism.° The essential difference between
the town-dweller and the bedouin is recognized in the Quran, where
the nomad is spurned.® There is no doubt that the initial success of
Islam is related to the existence of commercial oases, notably Mecca,
within the desert wastes ofthe peninsula. One can trace this situation,
perhaps, to the discovery of the monsoons that occurred around the
time of Christ. This discovery suddenly shifted the main ports to the
mouth of the Red Sea. The Red Sea itself is unaffected by the
6 Mughal India
monsoon winds, and so posed a tedious barrier to sailing ships within
its waters. The trade between the Mediterranean and India must
needs, therefore, pass overland through Hijaz, connecting the Levant
and Egyptian ports with those of Yemen. Of this overland caravan
trade, Mecca became the undeclared capital. It also became,
apparently, the entrep6t from where some of the luxuries of
civilization were distributed among the nomadic tribes (or rather
among their chiefs and ‘wealthy’ families). Mecca sealed its position
by installing, in the Ka‘bah, the images of gods (including the one
called Allah) and goddesses to establish for itself a position of a
pilgrimage centre for the tribes of the peninsula. The response of
Mecca to Islam was governed, among other factors, by this alliance
of commerce with religion. Could Islam offer a more attractive
alternative in terms of persuading the tribes to respect the security
of the Quraysh in the name of religious sanctity? As Shaban and
Rodinson argue, the moment Islam would be shown to offer a far
more effective claim on the nomad than Lat and Manat,’ the Ka‘bah
would assume an even greater sanctity under its banner. The Meccan
reaction to Islam passed quickly from surrender to reconciliation,
and ultimately, to dominance.®
If these are reasonable notions, do we assume that Islam was
simply a development of institutions already present in Arab society
and economy? This indeed is precisely Shaban’s conclusion. Islam
‘was definitely Arab, based on Arab traditions, and shaped in Arab
forms’.? It seems to me that this represents an exaggeration that
may dangerously mar our understanding of early Islamic history.
What is missing in Shaban’s thesis is any recognition that the
essential elements of the Islamic faith cannot be shown to have
grown historically out of Arabian soil. If one does not care to contest
the believer’s faith in the message of Abraham, that message had
admittedly long been forgotten in Mecca and it had left no living
tradition. What was intruding into Arabia were the ideas of Judaism
and Christianity radiating from the Roman Empire, and later
Byzantium. The notorious missionary gibe that Islam is a rehash of
Judaism and Christianity has undoubtedly inhibited free discussion
of the matter. But the link with both religions is explicitly recognized
in the Quran, where God’s message to Prophet Muhammad clearly
reinforces, succeeds or supersedes that sent through Moses and
Christ; the tradition of the Old Testament is appealed to in
considerable detail. Its hearers did not deem these to be strange and
incomprehensible narrations, for already all over Hijaz and Yemen
 The Islamic Background to Indian History 7
there were Jewish and Christian communities of tradesmen, peasants
and even pastoralists, who often lived as at Madina, among pagan
populations. The basis, introduced from outside, for challenging
pagan beliefs already existed; without it the reception given to Islam
in pagan Arabia, after an initial hesitation, would have been
inconceivable. The ideology of Islam was, then, by no means ‘Arab’,
if it is intended to mean that its acceptance was the product of internal
questionings spontaneously sprouting in nomad Arabia.
The core of what was new to pagan Arabia was umma, a concept
which rapidly evolved from the sense of a federation of tribes or
communities, pagan, Jewish and Muslim, with the Prophet as the
arbitrator, into a community of Believers. There was no precedent
of this in Arabia. The only precedents were external to the Arabs, in
the Jewish community, for instance, but still more, the Christian
realm, embracing all, irrespective of race and tribe, who believed in
God, His Son and the Holy Ghost. If Allah was central to the faith
of Islam, the umma was central to its organization; and the latter at
any rate, was in its evolved form a purely external phenomenon.
Here one might also note that ‘Arabism’ in the age of the Prophet
would have been a total anachronism. The Arabs were conscious of
no sense of superiority; there were grounds for lack of such
consciousness. They envied the wealth and prosperity of their
neighbours; they were themselves visibly primitive and backward.
That Allah in His mercy had sent them the last of the Prophets was
a matter of Divine Grace, not a thing expected or natural. Believers
could be proud if those other than Arabs became Muslims; Islam
was thus, quite self-consciously, not an Arab but a universal faith.
Things were to change only later, when the Arabs subjugated other
people in the name of Islam. Then alone could Islam become, in the
eyes of its neo-aristocratic believers, the peculiar privilege of the
conquering race.
Yet, it was the externally introduced concept of umma that made
the conquests possible; a unity to which tribal diversity became
subordinate, and a unity that could, therefore, give cohesion and
direction, if its leadership.came into such able hands as those of
Abu Bakr and Umar, the first two caliphs. The unity did not,
however, imply equality or democracy. For one thing, the Quraysh,
as the sacred tribe of the past and now the tribe of the Prophet,
enjoyed a rising prominence. Within the tribes the chiefs (saiyyids,
shaykhs) had from the beginning retained their places upon joining
the Islamic banner. There were thus all the elements present for a
8 Mughal India
rapid evolution of an aristocracy within the umma, though such
evolution could not but bring in the infusion of family and tribal
feuds—the real ‘Arab’ heritage.

II
On the actual process of conquests little need be said, since much
has been written. It is difficult to know what the initial reactions of
the conquered people were. The Byzantine Empire was undoubtedly
ridden by sectarian quarrels, and the Sassanid Empire had been
shaken by a revolt of the poor, led by Mazdak in the preceding
century. But the factors behind the first successes of the Arabs lay
probably more within their own new-found unity of purpose than in
any support they would arouse among the ranks of their opponents.
Yet once the initial military advantage had been attained, the Arab
conquests were relatively swift, and the vast structures of the two
empires, with their taxes and rents, lay in the hands of the conquerors,
even before the Pious Caliphate came to an end (AD 661).
What took place may now be studied from two angles:what
happened to the conquerors, and what happened to the conquered.
First, I venture to think that Wellhausen’s analysis, though
demanding modifications in detail, still stands in its essentials.'° On
a Close scrutiny of the traditions incorporated in Tabari, Wellhausen
argued that with the ultimate rise to dominance of the aristocratic
Qurayshite house of the Ummayyads, there developed three basic
contradictions among the ruling classes of islam: (a) between the
tribal leaders of two great tribal federations, which evolved within
the aristocracy of tribal leaders, namely the Muzarites and the
Yemenites; (b) between the Arab tribal leaders settled in Iraq (the
conquerors of Persia) and the Syrians (who hosted, so to speak, the
Ummayyad Caliphate); and (c) between the Arabs, in general, and
the non-Arab Muslims who tended to increase with ‘unauthorized’
conversions, that is with people becoming Muslims without actual
acceptance as clients (mawwali) by any Arab tribe. I do not think
that Shaban in his The Abbasid Revolution has really brought down
Wellhausen’s major thesis, though one would readily agree that
Wellhausen’s implied supposition of the continuation of pagan—
Arab rivalries in an Islamic form, probably goes too far.'' The Abbasid
Revolution was seen by Wellhausen as an alliance of the Iraqites
with the mawwali, with loyalty to the House of the Prophet (the
Alids) as an ideological cloak for their ambitions. One could, of
 The Islamic Background to Indian History 9
course, agree that the natural result of such an alliance, when
successful, was bound to be ‘the assimilation of all Muslims’, but
whether this was a conscious immediate ‘objective’ of the Abbasid _
Revolution, as Shaban supposes may perhaps be doubted.
This brings us to the question: who were the mawwali? We must
now ask the second question, what was happening to the conquered?
It may be seen from the actual records of the Arab conquests, for
example of Sind, given in splendidly detailed narration in the
Chachnama, that the first converts to Islam, the ‘clients’ accepted
by Arabs, belonged to the high and middle nobility rather than the
masses who remained unconverted for a much longer time.
Muhammad ibn Qasim, the conqueror of Sind and his successors,
even continued the Brahmanical restrictions on the pastoral ‘unclean’
community of the Jatts.'7 The conquerors also continued the earlier
taxation, so that a very heavy tax ( kharaj) assimilated and
incorporated the earlier burdens. It is doubtful if Arab conquests
meant any kind of liberation or even relief to the poor of the conquered
lands.
The converted aristocracy, such as the marzbans and dihgans of
the Sassanid regime, became inevitable adjuncts and middlemen to
the Arab rulers. In course of time they would be Arabicized in
culture, and, perhaps, speech; they would never be tribalized. In
essence, therefore, they came to represent a more coherent and
homogeneous class than the tribally divided Arab rulers. As
conversions percolated downwards, Hajjaj ibn Yusuf could inveigh
against the rising mawwali, but in vain. The future belonged to them.

Ul
We may yet, with Wellhausen, suppose the Abbasid Revolution to
have been the work of a coalition between the Iraqite Arabs
and the mawwali, the latter still probably a minority among the
subject population, but indispensable to Iraqite rule.
The Abbasid caliphate was the period when the classical world
of Islam really took shape: A subterranean Persian basis, influx of
Hellenic and Hellenistic thought and sciences, Arabic as the vehicle
of expression—such was the trinity of Abbasid high culture. It was
the emergence of the great juridical schools, the formulation of the
orthodox (Ash‘arite) theology, the beginnings of Sufism. This high
culture, with Arabic as its main vehicle, was the obvious result of a
tremendous cross-cultural fertilization.
10 Mughal India
Alongside the development of this culture whose last great
representatives in the eastern lands were Avicenna and Alberuni (early
eleventh century), there seems to have occurred a process whereby
Islam, from being the religion of an elite minority, became the faith
of the masses. By the time of the Mongol conquests, the Muslims
obviously formed the vast bulk of the population of western and
central Asia. The Christians, Parsis and Buddhists had been reduced
to small minorities. It was probably this basic fact that saved Islam
when its splintered political fabric was all but destroyed by the
Mongols in the thirteenth century.
The process of conversion, as it neared completion, created new
problems for Islamic polity: a state where the rulers and subjects
were both Muslims, and where, therefore, the Muslims must bear
the brunt of the taxation. For such a state neither the practices of the
Prophet, more suitable for a semi-pastoral economy, nor the policies
of Umar I, when the Muslims were the conquerors and all other
people their subjects, could form a precedent. If Muslims were to
pay ushr or one-tenth of the produce, no state could subsist
financially. Inevitably, law adjusted to circumstance. The notion of
kharaj as a tax on all peasants, coinprising the surplus, irrespective
of the faith of the taxpayer, came to be conceded by the jurists of the
Hanafite School.'? In practice this prevailed from the Atlantic to the
Altai mountains. Conversely, the ruling class could no longer claim
legitimacy on the basis of its Arab or Islamic origins. The Arab
tribal claims on conquered lands in the form of ziya‘, which the
early caliphs had had to admit, similarly disappeared as the igta or
transferable revenue charge became universal. The ruling classes
came to be detached from earlier roots, and, but for exceptional
cases like the Siljug tribe under the Siljuqids, the nobility became a
class totally dependent not on hereditary claims, but on the pleasure
of the ruler. The classic new state was that of Ghaznin, whose ruler
Mahmud (999-1030), the great conqueror, was supposed to be the
first Sultan of Islam. Thus arose the characteristic state of Medieval
Islam, which seems to have formed the model of Marx’s ‘Asiatic
Despotism’.'4
In spite of these rather ominous features, the medievai states of
the Islamic world (from the thirteenth century) had many positive
contributions which may be readily admitted: patronage of
commerce, a high level of urbanization, a minimum degree of
security. There were other features, which no longer appeal to the
modern mind: oppression of the peasantry, growing orthodoxy and
 The Islamic Background to Indian History 11
stagnation in science and learning. But these questions, though
important, are outside the area of our present concern, which has
only been to raise issues about the stages of evolution of the Islamic
polities and societies of the early period, before their arrival in India
with the Ghorian conquests of c.1200.

NOTES

1. Here I am ignoring the Arab conquest of Sind, in the early eighth

century, the Muslim communities in various parts of India in the
subsequent period, and the Ghaznavide conquests of the eleventh
century. Islam, as an important social and cultural factor in Indian history,
begins its history only with the Ghorian conquests and the establishment
of the Sultanate around the beginning of the thirteenth century.
2. Reprinted in H.A.R. Gibb, Studies on the Civilization of Islam, ed.
Stanford J. Shaw and William R. Polk, London, 1912, pp. 3-33.
3. Edward W. Said, Orientalism, New York, 1979.
4. E.A. Belyaev Arabs, Islam and the Arab Caliphate, London, 1969,
i het
5. Watt’s major works are Muhammad at Mecca, Oxford, 1953; and
Muhammad at Madina, Oxford, 1956.
6. Sura ix, 98.
7. Maxime Rodinson, Mohammed, Penguin edn, 1973, esp. pp. 264—S.
M.A. Shaban, Islamic History, A.D. 600-750: A New Interpretation,
Cambridge, 1971, pp. 13-14.
8. Ibid., p. 15.
9. Ibid.
10. J. Wellhausen, The Arab Kingdom and its Fall, tr. Margaret Graham
Weir, Calcutta, 1927. One of the important modifications was introduced
by D.C. Dennet in respect of Wellhausen’s theory of the history of kharaj
and jizya (Dennet, Conversion and the Poll Tax in Early Islam,
Cambridge, Mass, 1950).
11. M.A. Shaban, The Abbasid Revolution, Cambridge, 1970, esp. p. xiv.
Clearly Shaban is much harsher on Wellhausen than the evidence
warrants.
12. Chachnama, ed. N.A. Baloch, Islamabad, 1983, pp. 163-4.
13. The most useful compilation for the jurists’ opinions on the taxation
is Aghnides, Theories of Mohammadan Finance, Lahore, 1961.
14. For the characteristics of the state now formed in the Islamic world,
see the chapter ‘Political Structures of the Islamic Orient in the Sixteenth
and Seventeenth Centuries’, in this volume.
 v4

Encounter and Efflorescence

The Genesis of the Medieval Civilization

There is much introspection, in these times, and gropings towards

conflicting ‘identities’. History (often, unhappily, appearing only in a
garb of part-mythology and part-fiction) has become a court of appeal
for all rival interests. It is time, therefore, that we interpret, as
objectively and critically as possible, our heritage. This address offers
my own understanding of that long and fateful encounter between
two civilizations which took place in the medieval times, and which I
believe to have not only been fateful but also immensely creative.
At first sight it may look odd why anyone should elaborate namely
on a theme which would now seem to be well-worn, ‘the intrusion of
Islam’ in Indian history. My own excuse for doing so is a twofold
one. First, the debate on the question, far from being closed, has
intensified, and it is not likely to go away, even if the present phase of
its violent expression would hopefully pass, being perhaps only one
of those periodical bouts in which we have learnt, by our action, to
belittle the greatness of our own civilization. Secondly, it has seemed
to me that much of previous writings, despite the extensive research
and scientific outlook on which so much of it was based, did not fully
take into account the perceptions of Islamic history, generated by
modern research, but rather took either the old-fashioned missionary’s
or the apologist’s view of Islam for its basis.
This is unfortunate. Wellhausen in his Arab Kingdom and its Fall
had, for example, long ago shattered the stereotype picture of Arabs
appearing with a sword in one hand and the Quran in the other, and
asking every one to stand up and be converted. For Indian scholars
there was little excuse to have waited. We had in the Chachnama, the
thirteenth-century Persian translation of a virtually contemporary set
of narratives of the Arab conquest of Sind, an authentic, detailed
account of the process of the Arab conquest (710-14) and its aftermath.
Here we see the Arab conquerors easily slipping into the shoes of the
Indian rulers. The Chachnama tells us how the Brahmans were
 Encounter and Efflorescence 13
continued as revenue collectors, how their mode of worship and
sanctity of images was guaranteed, including the right of the priests
to a share in tax collection, and how the lowly Jatts continued to be
subjected to the same humiliating restrictions that remind us of the
Manusmriti’s injunctions against the Chandalas.' On the last point,
we have an independent confirmation from Balazuri.2 The same
tolerance of the established religion extended to the Buddhists: they
continued to make votive offerings of Arab coins at the great Stupa of
Mirpur Khas.’ Epigraphy attests to a similar attitude of the Arab rulers
in an area further northward. In 857-8 in the Tochi Valley, North—
West Frontier Province (Pakistan), an Arab Governor Fayy ibn
‘Ammar constructed a pond, and then had a bilingual inscription set
up, in Arabic (Kufic) and Sanskrit (Sharda), the latter duly beginning
with ‘Om’.*
These actions belie the picture of the Arab conquerors as uncouth,
avaricious, barbarian nomads coming out of the desert, fired with a
fanatical belief that God was on their side. The picture is by no means
a modern one. In the eleventh century Firdausi put the following words
of indignant portrayal of the Arab victor in the mouth of the vanquished
Persian aristocrat:
From living on camel’s milk and lizard’s flesh
The Arabs have suddenly reached a_ state
That they have set their sights on the throne of the Emperors,
Fie upon thee, ever altering Fortune.

But the picture, though early, is overdrawn, even for the Arabs
who overthrew the Persians in the 630s. The overdrawing was aided
by the Muslims’ own tendency to stress the pagan Arabs’ barbarous
ways in order to highlight the change wrought by Islam. Recent
research has tended to discount much of this, and to suggest, by an
interpretation of the word ummi, that the Prophet himself was not
unlettered but only a ‘gentile’, in the Jewish and Christian meaning
of the term, and that, even the early Arabs obtained leadership and
organization from the mercantile and sophisticated Quraysh.° By the
end of the seventh century, the situation was different. The bedouin
element in the conquering Arabs had been suppressed, through a series
of bloody civil wars by the Umayyads—the cream of the Quraysh —
relying upon the Syrians, the most Hellenized of the Arabs. (We must
remember that it was through Syriac that Arabic was to receive the
wealth of Greek science and learning under the Abbasids.)
By the time the Arabs invaded Sind, other civilized elements had
14 Mughal India
entered the scene: the non-Arab Muslims, largely from Iran, called
the mawwali. Their existence was essential to the Arab regime, yet
their pretensions had to be severely suppressed in the interest of the
Arab ruling class.’ The elite position of the Syrians and the contempt
for mawwali, are duly attested by the Chachnama.* It is this hierarchical
structure pre-existing among the Arab conquerors which explains their
readiness immediately to accommodate the existing hierarchy in Sind.
They had already achieved an accommodation with the dihqans, or
the rural aristocracy of the Sassanid regime in Iran, and the move to
accept Brahmans and possibly Thakkuras (Takurs),’ as subordinate
ruling class was thus in conformity with their tradition. Their scorn
for the mawwali moderated their zeal to create a large population of
converts in Sind: the Chachnama thus records not a single forcible
conversion to Islam.
If this was the attitude of the conquerors, how were they looked at
by the vanquished? The only source for this is the Chachnama. It is
by no means an unreliable source. The presence of an entire local
chronicle for the history of the pre-Arab dynasty—reminding us of
the later, celebrated Rajatarangini of Kalhana—and of constant reports
from the Indian side on the war, including much hero-worship of
Dahar’s son, Jaisiya, shows that it can claim some authenticity as
conveyer of the Indian sentiments. It represents Dahar’s sister
preparing for self-immolation to escape from captivity under those
‘cow-eating Chandalas’.'° But, after the settlement at Brahmanabad,
the Brahman officials are said to have dispersed over the country and
to have thus addressed the ‘notables’ everywhere:
Dahar is dead; the power of the ‘infidels’ has come to an end. In the
whole of Sind and Hind, the writ of the Arabs has been established.
The big and small of this territory, from town and village, have become
one (under subjection), and our affairs are to be held to be managed
under a great Empire. We have been sent by them to give you good
assurances.!!

Thus the response was of a dual kind. In the first instance, a bitter
rejection of an alien invader: in the second, a realistic acceptance of
conditions in which the invader became familiar, and life with honour,
though with reduced authority, undoubtedly, was possible. The
question one tends to ask is whether the response could have been
very greatly different if the invaders had not been the Arabs, but, say,
another north Indian power. Certainly, when King Harsha of Kashmir
was overthrown by an internal revolt (Ap 1101), the scene of fiery
 Encounter and Efflorescence 15
immolation of the queens and women of the royal family’? was no
different from that described by the Chachnama in respect of Dahar’s
family faced with seizure by the Arabs."
Undoubtedly, the Arabs were foreigners in that they represented a
visibly different cultural tradition. But our present understanding that
‘foreign’ invasions have been detrimental to a country derives from a
natural but illogical confusion between pre-modern ‘foreign’ (a
concept again based on modern national boundaries) and modern
colonial acquisitions. There is in all advanced historiographies a much
more critical attitude towards the role played by conquerors from
different cultural areas. V. Barthold, the Soviet historian, had strongly
opposed the negative assessment of the Mongol conquests pronounced
by his Russian colleagues. It is thus equally important that we should
not try to read back our present national sentiments into those of the
people a millennium earlier, and feel awkward if these do not appear
to have been shared by them.
Conformable to this view, one tends to forget that during the
subsequent centuries too Sind remains part of Indian history. This
ought not to be forgotten if for the single reason that during this period
it represented a strong contrast to the conditions of “Indian feudalism’.
The ruins of the large city of Mansura (encompassing Brahmanabad
and Mahfuza) that the Arabs built, extended in a band about two and
a half miles long and a half to three-fourths of a mile wide, exhibiting
dense occupation with ‘thousands’ of wells.'* Nor is the coinage issued
by the Arab rulers of Sind to be despised for its size: the copper coins
recovered are numerous, and the silver, though small and relatively
‘rare’,'!° suggest commerce on a considerable scale. One would
respectfully take issue with Professor R.S. Sharma, who holds that
the Arab conquests adversely affected India’s external commerce
during the first two or three centuries of Islam.'® The statement is
perhaps based on Henry Pirenne’s famous hypothesis of the genesis
of feudalism out of the blocking of Mediterranean commerce through
the Islamic presence.'’ This argument, however, was contested long
ago by W.C. Dennett and others, and has now been virtually
abandoned.'* Conditions were, on the other hand, quite the opposite.
Spain in Arab hands was a thriving region of commerce with the
western empire, as Marc Bloch notes.'? Arab-held Sind might well
have played a similar role in ‘feudal’ India.
16 Mughal India

Textbook writers often tend to view the ‘coming’ of Islam into India
as the work of three principal figures, Mohammad ibn Qasim (d. 714),
Mahmud of Ghaznin (d. 1030) and Shihabuddin of Ghor (d. 1206).
This leaves out of account the fact that there had occurred considerable
changes in the Islamic world in the three centuries that separated the
Arab conqueror of Sind from the Ghaznavid empire-builder, and that
the nature of interests and ambitions of the two were widely different.
What happened during the three intervening centuries was the
flowering in the Asian and African worlds of a single great civilization,
and the construction, side by side, of the brutal institutions of despotic
polities. Under the great Abbasids (eighth and ninth centuries), Greek
philosophy and science found a home in Arabic, through one of the
greatest processes of translations made in pre-modern history; and it
became the starting point of an intellectual renaissance. Islam was
given its classic shape, with Asharite theology and the great schools
of jurisprudence. There came a deep new probing into the motives of
conformist ethics, and this was to lead to Islamic mysticism or
tasawwuf, the refuge of souls unimpressed by orthodoxy. By the
eleventh century the Iranian revival had begun in the eastern portion
of this world, making its own contribution to the growth of a sceptical
spirit.
Along with these developments in higher culture, new political
institutions evolved, as the caliphate waxed and waned. The claim to
the entire agrarian surplus as royal tax (kharaj), the transferable tax
assignment (iqta), the slave-soldiers and officers (largely Turkish) gave
enormous strength to the centralized regional states, which now arose,
their rulers ultimately claiming the old Arabic title of Sultan. The power
of the new states lay not only in these fiscal and administrative
instruments: the new techniques of war made the Arab infantryman
and camel-rider obsolete and brought in the mounted archer, his horse
provided, besides the saddle, with the stirrup and iron-shoe.””
The successes of Mahmud of Ghaznin were undoubtedly due not
only to his military genius, but also to the institutions of centralized
despotism and the military system that had been steadily built up. He
only put them skilfully to use for his self-aggrandizement.
From minds truly nurtured in the civilization that had been created
in the world of Islam, Mahmud could call for little sympathy. Sa‘di
(thirteenth century) saw him as an avaricious man, jealous that his
empire should pass after his death to another, and contrasted him with
 Encounter and Efflorescence 17
Naushervan, whose name would be gratefully remembered for ever
because of his pursuit of justice.*! Al-Beruni, the great scientist and
contemporary of Mahmud, did not conceal his true sympathies when
he wrote:
Mahmud utterly ruined the prosperity of the country (India), and performed
there wonderful exploits, by which the Hindus became like atoms of dust
scattered in all directions, and like a tale of old in the mouth of the people.
Their scattered remains cherish, of course, the most inveterate aversion
towards all Muslims.”

It was only the fanatically inclined who would interpret Mahmud’s

exploits as contributing to the glory of Islam, and for reasons which
would be hardly edifying for any religion. Isami Se in 1350)
was to say in verse:
If | and you, O wise one, find a place in this realm,
Sometime to convert a temple into mosque, or break sacred threads,
Or make the women and children of Hindus into concubines and
slaves—
All of this is due to the legacy of his (Mahmud’s) work. This is the truth, all
else is mere talk.”
Glorification in vulgar terms like this has given Mahmud the image
of an ‘arch-fanatic he never was’. Professor Mohammad Habib was
right to argue that Islam won infamy in India, not only from the original
depredations of Mahmud, but also from admiration ‘by such
Mussalmans as have cast off the teachings of Lord Krishna in their
devotion to minor gods’.**
But it is equally right to look at some other evidence as well: Was
Mahmud so vastly different from other conquerors and marauders as
to leave in India an everlasting bitter memory? It does appear strange
as we seek such evidence that he should not be mentioned in any
Sanskrit source, except for one, Kalhana’s Rajatarangini. In that single
Sanskrit account of one of Mahmud’s invasions, a campaign against
Trilochanpala, we are told of the defeat of the combined armies of the
Shahi and Kashmir rulers, attributed by Kalhana to the Kashmir
general Tunga’s lack of acquaintance with “Turushka warfare’.
Kalhana sincerely mourns the fall of the Kashmir general brought
about by Hammira (Amir Mahmud), ‘skilled in stratagem’. But there
is no particular denunciation of the ‘fierce Chandalas’, the Turushkas,
who descended ‘on the whole surface of the earth’. There is no
reference to any plunder, enslavement, desecration of temples, flight
of Brahmans to Kashmir, which one might naturally have expected
18 Mughal India
Kalhana to dilate upon if only to stress the baneful consequence of
Tunga’s ineptitude. It is, seemingly, just one of the episodes in political
history, a conquest like any other. One begins to wonder whether the
sensitive Alberuni and the vainglorious chroniclers have not presented
a picture of Mahmud’s depredations that is heavily overdrawn. Nor
should Mahmud be allowed to overshadow Alberuni. The compilation
of Alberuni’s Kitabul-l Hind*® was a unique event in the history of
mankind, unique because there has been no other instance in pre-
modern times, of one of the greatest intellectuals of one civilization
studying and analysing, with such range and depth, the major aspects
of another civilization. To borrow words from reviews of Needham’s
great work on China, it was at once an ‘act of recognition’ and a
great act of ‘intercultural communication’. We are here introduced to
a rigorously scientific spirit, a detailed, balanced, scrutiny of Sanskrit
materials, a close knowledge of Greek philosophy and science, which
the author calls upon to assess the level of Indian cultural and
intellectual development, and a truly critical approach as well to the
ideas and institutions of his own Islamic milieu. Sachau wonders
how Alberuni, under the shadow of Mahmud, could speak of Hindu
scholars ‘who enjoy the help of God’.’’ He was ready to seek reason
behind many of the myths in his texts and rituals that he examined
with such care, just as he could condemn in his texts with
straightforward frankness the inanities or concealments that he found.
It was surely a seminal moment when Alberuni conveyed to his readers
the view, tentatively nurtured in India, that ‘the earth moves while the
sun is resting’.**
Surely, Alberuni’s immense achievement is not only a tribute to
his own genius; it is equally a tribute to the civilization which produced
him and which provided readers for his great work. There was a duality
in Islamic civilization—as in any other—greatness rubbing shoulders
with pettiness, an Alberuni by the side of Mahmud; but it would be
unhistorical, when assessing the consequences of that civilization’s
arrival in India, to absolutely forget one side of it and remember only
the other.

Il
The bilingual coinage of Muizzuddin bin Sam of Ghor (the Shihabuddin
Ghori of our textbooks) proclaimed the establishment of what was to
become essentially an Indian Sultanate. The coinage is not only
bilingual: In two gold coins, it carried the figure of a seated Lakshmi—
 Encounter and Efflorescence 19
a concession to Hindu sentiments so unique that Brown pronounces
it ‘without a parallel in Muhammadan history’.”? In other gold and
silver coins the figure of a horseman is provided, as also of Shiva’s
bull, without any thought of Islamic reserve about representation of
living beings.*° When Iltutmish created the silver tanka of 168 grains
or so, he did not import ‘Islamic’ metrology, but clearly tried to base
his coin on the tola-weight. The billon coins of Iltutmish and his
successors continued to be bilingual and carry the horseman and the
bull, down to Muizzuddin Kaiqubad (d. 1290).
The coinage suggests a polity which was not alien. Originally
planted by invasions, it was seeking to spread roots into the soil. How
far and fast they had spread is divulged by a chance exclamation of
that scrupulous chronicler, Minhaj Siraj. When in 1255 Uzbak Tughril
Khan declared himself King and marched from Bengal to Awadh, in
rebellion against Sultan Nasiruddin Mahmud, ‘this act of defiance of
his was disapproved by all.the people of Hindustan, the divines and
the nobles, Muslims and Hindus.’*!' By 1260, then, when Minhaj Siraj
was writing, it was already politically important what Hindus, and
not just a section of Muslims (the “divines and the nobles’), thought
of the claims of a pretender.
In the next century, the Sultanate was to embark on an experiment
that could have very few parallels in the pre-modern world, though it
was to be repeated in the Mughal empire on a still bolder scale: the
creation of a ruling class not confined to followers of a single religion.
Thakkura Pheru, who has left valuable information on coinage and
other economic and cultural matters in Sanskrit tracts, was an officer
of Alauddin Khalji’s mint.** Another important Hindu officer of the
treasury under the same Sultan (1296-1316), Sadharana by name,
makes his appearance in the Ladnun Sanskrit inscription. Their
number and influence increased under Muhammad Tughluq: We hear
of Ratan, the governor of Siwistan (Sind);** Bharan or Sharan, the
governor of Gulbarga;** Kishan, ‘the market-man of Indri’, the
governor of Awadh;*° and Dhara, the naib wazir of Deogir.*’ The
general statement that Hindus were given high offices by that Sultan
occurs in Isami.*®
Other sections of Hindus not in official employment also obtained
a position of protection and prosperity, such as the merchants,
especially the Multanis. Already in the thirteenth century, they were
large-scale creditors to the Sultanate nobility and greatly benefited
from this relationship.” Jalaluddin Khalji (1290-6) is said to have
commented on their prosperity and pretensions.*° And, apart from the
20 Mughal India
nobility, they were said to have been the people who retained their
wealth under Alauddin Khalji.4! They were wealthy enough to have
left step-wells, with classical Sanskrit inscriptions praising the Sultans
in the same way as a Kshatriya ruler would be praised in any prasasti.””
They would go accompanied by Brahmans to welcome Sultan Firuz
upon his successful bid for the throne,*’ and acquire ‘lakhs and crores’
under that sovereign.** Moreland long ago clarified that there is no
basis for identifying Hindus wholesale with the village aristocracy
(mugaddams, khuts, etc.), whom Alauddin Khalji tried to contain and
impoverish.* In any case, not only does Barani say that when Firuz
Tughlug ascended the throne in 135i, ‘the Muslims and Hindus had
their hearts comforted’,*° but notes that by 1357 the khuts and
muqaddams had become prosperous, with numberless horses and
cattle.’
This evidence of accommodation of Hindus in the political and
economic framework of the Sultanate had its counterpart in the official
recognition (however limited in terms of the secularism of today) of
the coexistence of the two religions. One may begin by recalling that
the extensive reconstruction of the Mahabodhi temple of Bodh Gaya,
under Arakanese auspices, took place in 1305-6, during the regime
of the Sultans.** A spirit of accommodation and even identification is
apparent in the famous poet Khusrau’s Nuh Sipihr (1318), a long
panegyric on Qutbuddin Mubarak Khalji (1316-20): Not only is India
superior to other countries, the Hindus are superior to many others in
their religious beliefs, language, learning and science.” This spirit
was obviously shared by Muhammad Tughluq when during a famine
he shifted his capital from Delhi to a new settlement on the Ganga,
and gave his new seat the Sanskrit name Swarga-duari or ‘Gate of
Heaven’.*° He would play Holi, and converse with yogis.*' There is
documentary proof too of his solicitude for the Jains: Two religious
leaders of the community were to be allowed to go wherever they
wished, and be rewarded and honoured.*? Under Muhammad
Tughluq’s successor Firuz, well known for his espousal of orthodox
‘views, a sun temple was built at Gaya in 1352, its Sanskrit inscription
containing the Sultan’s name twice.
A similar attitude was adopted by Hindu rulers. A Sanskrit
inscription of 1246 at Verawal, Gujarat, tells us of the erection of a
mosque there by Nuruddin Firuz of Hormuz, under the partronage of
the Chaulukya king Arjunadeva, said to be powerful through the grace
of ‘Siva’.** Some two hundred years later, when Rana Kumbha built
his famous victory tower, he had the word ‘Allah’ in Arabic recorded
 Encounter and Efflorescence 21
nine times on the third storey and eight times on the eighth storey, on
pillarettes in excellent workmanship. This led an English observer
(1883-84) to say:
This discovery opens up a problem, of which the only solution which
presents itself to me is that the barrier dividing the Hindus and Musalmans
three (rect. four) centuries ago, was far less impassable than it is at the
present day.

IV
The rulers’ indulgence towards the ‘other’ religion could not, indeed,
have existed had the barrier between Hindus and Muslims been as
impassable as Garrick thought it was in his own time. The evidence
on what relations between Hindus and Muslims in everyday life were
like is not large, but it is fairly clear.
I shall first offer what the dated conversations of the mystic Shaikh
Nizamuddin of Delhi, recorded by Amir Hasan Sijzi, in the first two
decades of the fourteenth century, provide us. In assessing the evidence,
it should be noted that the view that the Sufis or dervishes were
liberal men, with little care for orthodoxy, is simplistic. They accepted
the shariat, or Muslim law, in its entirety; theirs, as Professor
Mohammad Habib once remarked, was a ‘post-graduate creed’. Shaikh
Nizamuddin himself was sufficiently orthodox to find fault with Abu
Hanifa, the founder of the juridical school of Muslim Law prevalent in
the larger part of the eastern world of Islam, for saying that on the
Last Day, the unbelievers too would see the Light and be pardoned.
This could never be, said Nizamuddin, with an assured knowledge of
Divine intentions, of which only the most religious and the most
orthodox are capable.*° Yet, he tells us of his own friendly
conversations with yogis (jogis), and treats their beliefs and principles
with much respect, At one meeting at his preceptor’s seat at Ajodhan,
a yogi told him that in man’s body the navel marks the division of two
spheres, the higher concerned with spiritual matters and truth, the
other, the lower, concerned with good morals. The Shaikh
commended this.*’ Or, again, he tells of obtaining from a yogi what
qualities the offspring conceived on different days would have.**
Even more telling is Nizamuddin’s assertion that the actual ethics
of Muslims being what they were, a Hindu could not be asked to
convert to Islam. He said this when a Muslim disciple brought his
Hindu brother to Nizamuddin in the hope of attaining his conversion.”
Elsewhere, Nizamuddin contrasts the upright business ethics of the
ae. Mughal India
Hindus of Gujarat with the improbity of the Muslim merchants of
Lahore.” He commended the compiler Amir Hasan’s action in
restoring a slave girl to her Hindu parents, although this meant that
she would apostatize.*! ‘The theologians concerned with matters of
appearance would condemn such action, but one must understand
what he did’, said Nizamuddin of a similar freeing of a slave
maidservant by a mystic to enable her to return to her Hindu sons in
Katehr.”
If these were ethical values being established, in spite of the narrow
letter of the law, this was surely on account of an increasing
appreciation of the vast learning and wisdom of Hinduism (even if
seen only by encounters with yogis) and a recognition of the ethical
stature of the Hindus—early products of living side by side with them
in towns and villages.
I am not aware of any text in which appraisals from a Hindu
divine of this period can be obtained. The late Dev Raj Chanana
wrote an interesting essay on the Sanskritist and Indian society. In
this he argued that the Sanskritists were prone to sing loyally of
whomever had power, and that the prasasti-like compositions in
which the Muslim rulers appear in the same guise as the Kshatriya
rulers were not an expression of a ‘communal fraternity of an
intellectual kind’, as J.B. Chaudhuri had thought, but a pure
practising of an old tradition of opportunism. I believe Chanana
went a little too far in arguing a partly legitimate case. A poet or
writer, whether Amir Khusrau, the court poet, or Pandita Yogiswara,
the composer of the Palam Baoli inscription, would equally be ready
to serve their patrons and write what they wished them to, whether
the patron was the Sultan in one case, or a merchant in another. The
question really is why the patron should have wished the Sanskritists
to write as they did. It is difficult to believe that the Hindu merchants
who got the laudatory verses for Muslim rulers inscribed on their
step-wells at Palam or Sarban were under any pressure to do so; it
is unlikely that officials would have read the Sanskrit inscriptions to
find out whether the Sultan had been sufficiently praised. What is
more likely is that the Sultans fitted into an existing tradition of
lauding contemporary rulers; and Muslims had become so familiar a
participant in everyday life that they and their faith no longer seemed
alien. Thus Balban could be praised for doing all of Vishnu’s work
for the god, and Muhammad Tughluq could be described as the
‘crest-jewel of all rulers of the earth’ under whom at Delhi ‘sin is
expelled through the chanting of the Vedas’.“ No contradiction was
 Encounter and Efflorescence : 23
discerned in Vishnu leaving his work to a Muslim ruler, or the Vedic
hymns purging a Muslim capital.
How was a Muslim loyal to his faith looked at? An unclean mlechha,
exciting bitter hatred, as Professor R.C. Majumdar would like us to
believe?® Majumdar cites no authority for his assumption of the Hindu
urge to exterminate ‘the mlechhas (Muslims)’ altogether in India. But
one can cite a contrary view. Nanak (fl. 1500) was a Khatri, born a
Hindu. His concept of an ideal Muslim, in an oft-quoted verse, is as
follows:
Let him heartily obey the will of God,
Worship the Creator, and efface himself—
When he is kind to all men, then, Nanak,
Shall he be indeed a Musalman.*°

This was not the image of a fierce, fanatical religion, but of one
held to preach ethics and benevolence. How far the image was accurate
is not relevant; its existence in the mind of men like Nanak is the
essential fact.

Vv
The ‘intrusion of Islam’ in Indian history, in its first three centuries
(thirteenth to fifteenth) helped to create a political structure, based on
the ita (transferable territorial assignment). This allowed the creation,
even for half a century, of the first all-India empire after nearly fifteen
hundred years, the only preceding one being that of the Mauryas. It
clearly reinforced the concept of India as a country, if not a nation.
The Palam Baoli inscription of 1281 already gives a geographical
description of India, the whole of which it inaccurately claims for
Balban.®’ When less than forty years later the claim became a fact,
Amir Khusrau proudly claims for India a primary position in all aspects
of nature and culture. He gives us a description of the languages of
the different regions of the country but reminds us that the Hindawi is
the country’s lingua franca, and Sanskrit its classical language.
Khusrau knows India as ‘Hind’. In 1350, Isami could write a glowing
ode to Hindustan, the name that was to become so common:
Great is the prosperity of the country of Hindustan.
Heaven itself is jealous of this garden.
Its territories are an ornament to the face of the Earth
As a beauty spot on the face of a lovely maiden.
And so he goes on.”
24 Mughal India
This lends support to Tara Chand’s conclusion that the all-India
empire under the Sultans created ‘a political uniformity and a larger
allegiance’.” The larger allegiance coalesced with a love for the
larger land, seen and loved with a new vividness and pride as a
single country.
This country now began to develop a composite culture in which
the language, literature, ideas and arts, brought from outside merged
with those existing earlier. Tara Chand gave an account of this in a
book justly regarded as a classic and just quoted. It is pointless to
repeat in summary what he has spelt out so well. I would only remind
readers that Tara Chand’s survey was not intended to be exhaustive;
and that the influence of the earlier culture on Muslims in India was
excluded from the scope of his work, though this factor too was crucial
in the creation of a composite culture. The exchange took place at
high intellectual levels besides the level of ordinary social intercourse.
Much knowledge of Indian arts, for example, was transferred to
Persian.
In 1374-5, under the patronage of Firuz Tughluq’s governor of
Gujarat, came the first-known Persian work on Indian music, with
the most competent knowledge of Sanskrit terms imaginable.’' Nearly
a hundred and forty years later (1512-13), Bhuwa, son of Khawas
Khan, prepared a wonderfully comprehensive compendium of Indian
inedicine (Ayurveda), Ma‘dan-i Shifa-i Sikandar Shahi, with extensive
use of Sanskrit texts.’ Alberuni’s cause was by no means dead,
however pale in terms of brilliance his successors might have been.
The cultural efflorescence was accompanied by economic changes
of some significance. There was an influx of technology, to which
Kosambi had briefly referred and which Irfan Habib has studied in so
much detail.’? It was in these three centuries (thirteenth to fifteenth)
that India received the spinning-wheel, the pedals of the loom, cloth-
printing, paper, magnetic compass, techniques of large-scale arcuate
construction, lime mortar, pindrum gearing (to complete the apparatus
of the Persian wheel), more effective devices for distillation and
sericulture. These undoubtedly led to an expansion of craft production,
possibly even to greater cloth production per captia, and certainly to
more extensive use of masonry. There is evidence, literary as well as
numismatic, that commerce expanded; and archaeology attests to the
fact that the urban decline postulated for the previous period” was
over, and an urban economy of impressive size rapidly developed.
The economy had its own unhappy features, such as heavy agrarian
taxation and, at least in the initial phase, an extensive urban slavery;
 Encounter and Efflorescence 25
but these features (by no means necessarily new) were linked to what,
in comparison to its immediate predecessor, was a distinctly expanding
economy.’°
The cultural and economic changes generated consciousness of
unities and inequities that had not existed before. It expressed itself
in a religious upsurge of a kind never witnessed since the emergence
of Buddhism. A new comprehension of the unity of man, beyond
castes, classes and other frontiers, reflected itself in an
uncompromising assertion of the Unity of God. Never in India before,
neither from the pen of a Hindu nor a Muslim, had there been such
an outpouring of the rejection of the concepts of purity and
pollution—the basis of the Indian homo hierarchicus” and the
theoretical justification of the oppression of the untouchables.
Learned scholars have argued whether the religious upsurge had
been fertilized by Islamic, especially Sufic, ideas, or whether it was
a logical development from premises inherent in early Indian
philosophy. One can deduce from the first, as does R.C. Majumdar,
that the movement was outside the pale of Hinduism;”’ from the
second, as does Ishtiaq Hussain Qureshi, that it was a conspiracy by
Hinduism to thwart the spread of Islam by borrowing its very
colours.’* These are matters which may concern only those who
identify themselves with one particular religious denomination, as
delimited by themselves. To me, the signal feature of the popular
monotheistic movements of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was
that it was a movement of the Small Man; its leaders came from his
ranks and addressed him in his language; and they had an ethical
message of substance to deliver to him.
The social character of the movements is best expressed in verses
that Guru Arjan (d. 1606) composed in the name of Dhanna Jat:”
In Gobind, Gobind, Gobind was Namdev’s heart absorbed;
A calio-printer worth half a dam, he became worth a lakh.
Abandoning weaving and stretching thread, Kabir devoted his love to
God’s feet;
Though a weaver of low family he obtained untold virtues.
Ram Das who used to remove dead cattle, abandoned the world;
Became distinguished, and in the company of the saints obtained a
sight of God.
Sain, barber and village drudge, (but now) well known in every house;
In whose heart the supreme God dwelt is numbered among the saints.
Having heard all this I, a Jat, applied myself to God’s service;
I have met God in person; and great is the good fortune of Dhanna.
26 Mughal India
Or the proud declaration on behalf of the lowly composed by Guru
Amar Das:
Nanak, the gate of salvation is very narrow; only the lowly can pass
through.*°
To Kabir and Nanak and other teachers, denominations were
meaningless. They denied they were Hindus or ‘Turks’ (Muslims); it
is useless putting such tags on them. With aimost a seeming
foreknowledge of the current controvery, Kabir had sung:
Hindus call Him Ram, Muslims Khuda.
Says Kabir, Whoever lives,
never bothers with this duality—
Ka‘bah then becomes Kashi, Ram becomes Rahim.*!

When Kabir died, so the tradition runs, Hindus and Muslims came
to claim him for their own.** He thus conformed to the aspirations of
Urfi, the great Persian poet at Akbar’s court in a verse which the
author of the Dabistan-i Mazahib (c. 1655) uses for Kabir’s epitaph:
Urfi, live so well with people, good and bad,
that when you die
The Muslims should wash your body in zamzam water,
and the Hindus should cremate it.

In 1590-91, the famous theologian Abdul Haqq, closing his

biographical dictionary of Muslim saints, writes that his father when
a child asked the author’s grandfather whether Kabir, whose verses
were current among the people, was a Muslim or a Hindu. The answer
was: he was a monotheist (muwahhid). To the question further whether
a monotheist, then, is neither a Hindu nor a Muslim, the old man
replied: “To understand this is difficult: you will understand when
you grow up.’*?
It seems from some recent events and disputes that many of us
have still to grow up to understand. But so long as the Indian people
cherish a love for their heritage, in ideas and values, the message of
medieval cultural efforescence should surely live with us.

NOTES

1. Chachnama, ed. Umar bin Muhammad Daudpota, Hyderabad, 1939,

pp. 208-16.
 Encounter and Efflorescence 27
2. Futuh at Baldan, portion tr. Elliot and Dowson, History of India as
Told by its Own Historians, 1, London, 1867, p. 129.
3. Henry Cousens, Antiquities of Sind, Calcutta, 1929, p. 93.
4. Epigraphia Indo-Moslemica, 1925-6, pp. 27-8; B.N. Mukherjee,
Central and South Asian Documents on the Old Saka Era, Varanasi, 1973,
pp. 56-8.
5. Zi-shir-i shutar khurdan, etc. (Shahnama).
6. Modern research on the earliest phase of Islam, seen through a biography
of the Prophet, is best presented in Maxime Rodinson, Mohammed, Eng. tr.
Penguin Books, 1973. The term wmmi is referred to on p. 240.
7. Wellhausen’s interpretation of the main structure of the Umayyad
rule in Arab Kingdom and its Fall, essentially based on a detailed analysis
of the materials in Tabari, still stands, despite criticism by Shaban in the
Abbasid Revolution, Cambridge, 1970.
8. Chachnama, pp. 95—6; pp. 181 and 182 for the exalted position of
the Syrians; p. 192 for the low position of the mawwali.
9. Chachnama has many references to thakkuras, for example pp. 169,
177, 191, 232, but more explicitly to their adjustment with the Arab regime.
10. Chachnama, p. 195.
11. Ibid., p. 211.
12. Rajatarangini, tr. M.A. Stein London, 1990, 1, pp. 388-9.
13. Chachnama, pp. 186, 194—S.
14. Cousens, Antiquities of Sind, pp. 48ff and plate tv (plan of the city).
15. Ibid., pp. 178-83.
16. R.S. Sharma, /ndian Feudalism, Calcutta, 1965, p. 61. The statement
is retained in the second edn, New Delhi, 1980, pp. 54-5.
17. See Pirenne’s Mohammad and Charlemagne, Eng. tr., 1939, esp.
part 2, ch.1, sect. 2.
18. Cf. R. Hilton, in Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism, London,
1953, pp. 65-6; B. Lewis, Arabs in History, London, 1958, pp. 87-92.
19. Feudal Society, Eng. tr., London, 1965, p. 65.
20. For the introduction of stirrup among the Arabs, see Lynn White Jr.
Medieval Technology and Social Change, New York, 1966, pp. 18-19. The
nailed horseshoe had reached Byzantium early in the tenth century (ibid., p.
58). For the Arabic and Persian evidence, see Irfan Habib, Proceedings of the
Indian History Congress (PIHC), Varanasi (1969), p. 159.
21. Hikayat in Gulistan, beginning Yake az muluk-i Khurasan, etc.
22. Edward C. Sachau (tr.), Alberuni’s India, London, 1910, 1, p. 22.
23. Isami, Futuh-us Salatin, ed. A.S. Usha, Madras, 1948, p. 29.
24. Mohammad Habib, Sultan Mahmud of Ghaznin, Aligarh, 1951, p. 87.
28 Mughai India
25. Rajatarangini, 1, pp. 272-3. Kalhana does not give the date of the
encounter, but puts it in the reign of Samgaramaraja (1003-28).
26. Edward C. Sachau has rendered all of us in debt by his excellently
annotated translation of Kitabul-i-Hind (Alberuni’s India) in two volumes
(London, 1910). Professor Qeyamuddin Ahmad has edited an abridged
version of this translation, published by the National Book Trust, New
Delhi, 2nd edn (revised), 1983.
27. Tr. Sachau, n, p. 108. Alberuni is actually quoting Varahamihira here.
Cf. Sachau, 1, p. xviii. Perhaps, in real life, Mahmud could not care less!
28. Tr. Sachau, 1, p. 276-7.
29. C.J. Brown, The Coins of India, Calcutta, 1922, p. 70.
30. H. Nelson Wright, The Coinage and Metrology of the Sultans of
Delhi, Delhi, 1936, pp. 6-12 (catalogue), 67 (commentary). It is only fair to
say that Muizzuddin was continuing a tradition of bilingual coinage
established by the Ghaznavids.
31. Tabagat-i Nasiri, ed. Abdul Hayy Habibi, Kabul, 1343 H. u, pp. 31-2.
Raverty, the erudite translator of the work into English, notices the
implications of this statement (Tabaqat-i Nasiri, tr. Raverty, p. 764). For
the date of Tughril’s rebellion, see A.B.M. Habibullah, The Foundation of
Muslim Rule in India, 2nd (revised) ed, Allahabad, 1961, p. 130.
32. Cf. S.R. Sarma in Aligarh Journal of Oriental Studies 1 (1), 1984,
pp. 3-4.
33. Journal of Indian History (JIA), xv (2), 1936, pp. 182-3.
34. Ibn Battuta, Rihla, tr. Mehdi Husain, p. 8.
35. Isami, Futuh-us Salatin, pp. 484-8; Barani, Tarikh-i Firuz Shahi,
ed. Saiyid Ahmad Khan, Bib. Ind., Calcutta, 1862, p. 488.
36. Barani, p. 50S.
37. Ibid., p. 501.
38. Futuh-us Salatin, pp. 464-5.
39. Barani, p. 120.
40. Ibid., pp. 216-17.
41. Ibid., p. 113.
42. See the Palam Boali Inscription of ap 1281 (Journal of Asiatic
Society of Bengal, henceforth JASB xxxxim (1), 1874, pp. 104ff); and the
Sarban Inscription of 1328 (Mehdi Husain, Rise and Fall of Mohammad
Tughlug, London, 1938, pp. 246-7).
43. Barani, p. 546.
44. Ibid., p. 554 (read Sahan for Sipahan).
45. W.H. Moreland, Agrarian System of Moslem India, Cambridge,
1929, pp. 32, 225, 230.
46. Barani, p. 547.
 Encounter and Efflorescence 29
47. Ibid., p. 554.
48. Cunningham, Archaeological Survey Reports, 11, pp. 103-S.
49. Nuh Sipihr, ed. Mohammad Wahid Mirza, London, 1950, pp. 151-95.
50. Barani, p. 485; Isami, p. 472 (where for material reasons, perhaps,
the name is given as Sargadari, but a reference to heaven in the couplet
shows sarg represents swarga).
51. Isami, p. 515. For Muhammad Tughluq’s interest in yogic practices,
see Ibn Battuta, p. 266.
52. Order issued to officials in 1329. Simon Digby of Channel Islands,
UK, possesses a clear photograph of the document.
53. Cunningham, Archaeological Survey Reports, 1, pp. 103-5.
54. JIH, xv (2),p. 181.
55. H.B.W. Garrick, in Cunningham, Archaeological Survey Reports,
xxi, pp. 116-17.
56. Fawaid-ul Fowwad, ed. Mohammad Latif Malik, Lahore, 1996. pp.
118-19.
57. Ibid., p. 118.
58. Ibid., pp. 417-18; Nizamuddin’s preceptor, Farid, told him not to
bother with this, not because what the yogi was furnishing him with was
wrong, but because he would not have any use for it, since he was not to
marry himself. See also ibid., pp. 404-5.
59. Ibid., pp. 305-6, 308.
60. Ibid., pp. 201-2.
61. Ibid., pp. 339-40.
62. Ibid., pp. 278-9.
63. Enquiry, Delhi, New Series 1 (2) (Old series, no. 11), 1965, pp. 49-67.
He contests J.B. Chaudhuri’s view on p. 56.
64. In respectively the Palam and Sarban inscriptions: see references
given above.
65. R.C. Majumdar, Preface to History and Culture of Indian People,
vol. v, p. xiv.
66. Majh ki War, Guru Granth Sahib. The translation is that of
Macauliffe.
67. See references to this inscription above.
68. Nuh Sipihr, pp. 179-81.
69. Isami, pp. 604—5.
70. Tara Chand, Influence of Islam on Indian Culture, 2nd edn,
Allahabad, 1963, p. 141.
71. The work, Ghunyat-ul Munya, which is unfortunately anonymous,
has been edited by Shahab Sarmadee, Bombay, 1978.
30 Mughal India
72. Nawal Kishore editions, Lucknow, 1877, 1889 (page-to-page
correspondence with the earlier edn).
73. D.D. Kosambi, Introduction to the Study of Indian History, Bombay,
1956, p. 370. Irfan Habib, ‘Technology and Society in the 13th and 14th
Centuries’, PIHC, Varanasi, 1969, pp. 139-61, and ‘Medieval Technology:
Exchange between India and the Islamic World’, Aligarh Journal of
Oriental Studies, 11 (1-2), 1985, pp. 196-222.
74. R.S. Sharma, Urban Decay in India, c. 300-1000, New Delhi, 1987.
75. Cf. Irfan Habib, ‘Economic History of the Delhi Sutanate’, /ndian
Historical Review (IHR) wv (2), 1978, pp. 287-303.
76. Cf. Louis Dumont, Homo Hierarchicus, English, edn, London, 1972.
77. This follows from Majumdar’s identification of Hinduism with
‘temples and monasteries and Brahmans’ (History and Culture of Indian
People, 1, pp. XXXi, XXX111).
78. I.H. Querishi, History of Freedom Movement, Karachi, 1957, 1, pp.
17,20;
79. Asa, Guru Granth Sahib, Macaulifte’s translation modified.
80. Gurjari Kiwar, Guru Granth Sahib, Macauliffe’s translation.
81. Kabir Granthavali, ed. Shyam Sundar Das, Kashi, p. 54.
82. Abul Fazl, Ain-i Akbari, ed. Blochmann, 1, p. 393. Elsewhere Abul
Fazl says of Kabir: ‘Some of the truth was revealed to him, and he rejected
the obsolete customs of society’.
83. The passage is in Akhbar-ul Akhyar, Deoband, AH 1332, p. 306. The
word used for Hindu is kafir. Abdul Haqq’s grandfather Sa‘dullah died in
1523, when his father was eight years of age.
 3

Nobility under Muhammad

Tughlug

The reign of Muhammad Tughlug (1325-51) spans a critical period

in the history of the Delhi Sultanate. Under him it reached its largest
extent as well as greatest power; it also underwent an acute crisis
which led to its veritable collapse, masked and only partly delayed by
the stability and ‘prosperity’ of the reign of Firuz Tughlug.
Muhammad Tughluq is doubtless a controversial figure, full of
‘contradictory qualities’, as Barani and Ibn Battuta tell us, or of devilish
hypocrisy as Isami assures us. Was he an ingenious author of failed
projects (Barani) or a genius seeking pleasure in human distress
(Isami)? The argument can go on and on, but the tendency initiated
by Moreland,' and continued by Ishwari Prasad and Mehdi Husain,”
is to see his various measures in the light of the requirements of the
actual situation rather than in primitive psycho analysis.
One major aspect of the crisis that developed in Muhammad
Tughluq’s reign was the internal conflicts in the Sultanate nobility,
which led to the spate of rebellions in the various provinces which
not only resulted in the final secession of large parts of the empire,
but gravely weakened its power even in areas that nominally remained
under its control.
Barani suggests as if the Sultan’s ‘punishments’ were the major
reason for these outbreaks. But it is clear that the roots of the crisis
lay at least partly in the composition of the nobility. Ibn Battuta refers
to the jealously between the indigenous and foreign nobility;* Isami to
the provocation given to Muslims by the appointment of Hindu
officers;* and Barani himself, a personal aide (mugarrab) of the Sultan,
inveighs against the appointment and promotion of men of low birth.’
In addition, he speaks of the intransigence of officers known as
amiran-i sada who suddenly appear very prominently during the closing
years of the Sultan’s reign. What their grievances were does not
immediately become clear but needs investigation.
It seems that even under Ghiyasuddin Tughluq, whose reign
32 Mughal India
(1320-5) Barani describes in almost idyllic terms, there were certain
suspicions in the hearts of the previous “Alai’ nobility (i.e. those who
had served under Alauddin Khalji) as to the intentions of the new
regime towards them. Certainly, most of them had been either passive
or lukewarm in supporting Ghiyasuddin Tughlugq against the ‘usurper’
Khusrau Khan. When Muhammad Tughlug (then Ulugh Khan) had
gone on an expedition against Warangal, these suspicions ignited a
conspiracy of Alai nobles.° Bahram Aiba Kishlu Khan, who governed
Multan and had supported Ghiyasuddin Tughluq against Khusrau Khan,
rebelled against Muhammad Tughluq.’ Subsequently, Ali Shah, a Khalji
kinsman of the famous commander of Alauddin, Zafar Khan, revolted
in the Deccan.®
It is, therefore, probable that a part of the nobility inherited from
the Khaljis was not loyal to Muhammad Tughlugq, and this in part
necessitated the recruitment of new elements.
In the first phase, this probably represented nothing more than the
promotion of those already in service. The outstanding case was that
of Ahmad, (son of) Ayaz, who from his name appears originally to
have been a slave, and who was kotwal of Delhi in 1320.? Ahmad
Ayaz became the principal minister of Muhammad Tughluq.'° He was
a foreigner (Turk) and his daughters were married to Iranian
immigrants.'' Ahmad Ayaz was a pure bureaucrat and financier,'* and
this was apparently reflected in his title of Khwaja Jahan (Khwaja
meant a financial official, a moneyed man).
Another officer who probably came from the older service was
Ainul Mulk ‘Mahru’, the last being his father’s name (presumably
title). He is to be distinguished from Ainul Mulk Multani, a commander
under Alauddin Khalji, whose last assignment was as Governor of
Malwa at the time of Ghiyasuddin Tughluq’s victory against Khusrau
Khan.'* This distinction has unfortunately not been made.'* Unlike
Ainul Mulk Multani, Ainul Mulk Mahru was a bureaucrat who had no
experience of military matters. He had his own apprehensions on
being transferred to the Deccan, but his revolt in 1340-1 was
supported by Indian amirs, for they were jealous of the Khurasani
and other foreigners, who were being invited and given posts in large
numbers by Sultan Muhammad Tughluq.'*
Others were favourites of the reigning Sultan appointed directly to
office. Qutlugh Khan, the viceroy of the Deccan, had been a tutor of
Sultan Muhammad, and this was responsible for his high appointment
as well as the promotion of his brother Nizamuddin.'°
A somewhat different example was that of Kannu, an officer under
 Nobility under Muhammad Tughlug 33
the Rai of Warangal. Captured, he became formally a slave of
Muhammad Tughlug and was given the Muslim name Magbul.'? He
became deputy prime minister (naib wazir) under Sultan Muhammad,'*
and prime minister in the next reign.'?
It was obviously a part of the attempt to create his own nobility
which made Muhammad Tughlug open the doors so wide to foreign
immigrants. Ibn Battuta has left a detailed account of how rich and
well-born persons from central Asia and Iran were rewarded. He
gives particulars of how Khudawandzada and his brothers were
received at Sultan Muhammad’s court, and in this connection he names
a number of other foreign-born nobles of high station.”°
Barani not only corroborates Ibn Battuta, even mentioning the case
of Khudawandzada,”' but also tells us that Muhammad Tughlugq paid
special attention to immigrant Mongol nobles, ‘Commanders of
10,000, (amiran-i tuman), of 1000 (amiran-i hazara), ladies of high
status (Khatun) and children (ughlis).”” Among those welcomed were
a son-in-law of the Khan Tarmashirin,** and two others who remained
very high officers under Firuz Tughluq.™
It is likely that Muhammad Tughlugq wanted to attract officers to
his service who would not have any local base of their own and
would be dependent on him. Ibn Battuta tells us that only those
foreigners received rewards who agreed to enter the Sultan’s service,
as Ibn Battuta did himself. His entertainment of Mongol commanders
probably indicated his desire to reinforce the Delhi Army with Mongol
methods of organization and tactics. We shall revert to this point
when we discuss the question of amiran-i sada.
A similar anxiety drove Muhammad Tughlug to take into service
people from communities which had so far not been the source or
recruitment for the nobility. The increase in the number of Afghans
was probably owing to this cause. The rebellions of the Afghan Qazi
Jalal in Gujarat and Nasiruddin in the Deccan as well as another Afghan
revolt described by Ibn Battuta,” bring to light the fact that the Afghans
now held a considerable position in the nobility as against the period
before Qutbuddin Mubarak Shah (acc. 1316), during which not a
single Afghan officer is heard of.
Barani tells us that Muhammad Tughlug denounced men of low
birth in words but appointed a large number of such officers. Two of
those whom he mentions are well known. Aziz Khummar (khummar
means wine distiller) was the revenue official (wal’ul-kharaj) of
Amroha,’° then in charge of a shiq (province) in the Deccan*’ and
finally governor of Dhar (Malwa).** He killed a number of amiran-i
34 Mughal India
sada and then went into Gujarat where he was captured and killed by
the rebels. Aziz Khummar is repeatedly designated bad-as/ (base-born)
by Barani. A person still more bitterly denounced, Mugbil had been a
slave of Ahmad Ayaz, and served in Gujarat, where he ultimately became
governor (naib-i wazir).”? He too was defeated and driven out by the
rebels.*? Among other officers he recalls Najaba, a dancer’s son who
was given charge of territories like Gujarat, Multan and Badaun. Pira
Mali, ‘the lowest of the meanest castes of India’, was appointed to
head the finance ministry (diwan-i-wizarat),; Kishan Bazaran Indri,
similarly low in status, was given Awadh.*!
Kishan was probably a Hindu (who did not, like Maqbul above,
change his faith), but all Hindus were not of low caste. There was a
Hindu astronomer, Ratan, who was appointed governor of Siwistan
(Sehwan, Sind).*? Bharan, governor of Gulbarga, was a Hindu who
was treacherously killed by rebels.* It was probably this policy of
appointing Hindus to administrative posts that led to the criticism
that Muhammad Tughluq sat with jogis and played Holi, or that he
stopped congregation prayers.** Muhammad Tughluq probably had
a genuine interest in Hinduism, but his policy of appointing Hindus
had political objectives to serve irrespective of his own ideological
liberalism.
Barani speaks as if in the last days of Muhammad Tughluq the
basic danger to him came from the amiran-i sada (commanders of
100) whom he set out to destroy. Now it is clear that this term was a
new one; it first occurs for an office in a system of a chain of decimal
commands, in words put by Barani into Bughra Khan’s mouth. We
also hear of amiran-i panjah bandgan (captains of 50).*° These are
almost certainly officers over hundred and fifty cavalry respectively.
The names also suggest Mongol associations since captains of Mongol
army are described by Barani himself as amiran-i hazara and amiran-i
sada.*°
It is possible that the grievance of the military officers arose because
of the prominence Muhammad Tughluq gave to the bureaucracy.
This appears from Ibn Battuta’s account of the fracas at Amroha,
where Aziz Khummar as the chief tax collector (wal’ul-kharaj) was
besieged by the army commander.*’ The cases of Nusrat Khan and
Nizam Main show that Muhammad Tughluq was also farming out
revenues to speculators in order to get fixed amounts.**
It is probable that Muhammad Tughluq was trying to divide the
army command from revenue collection and so reduce the extra
revenues which went to commanders as muqtis. This could have
 Nobility under Muhammad Tughlug 35
provided enough provocation to rise against the Sultan; but the material
is perhaps not sufficient to warrant a very definite conclusion.
Muhammad Tughluq’s policy of creating a heterogeneous nobility
might have been influenced partly by eccentricity, but it was also
partly the response to a certain alienation already existing between the
Sultan and the established nobility. Unfortunately for him, the
heterogeneous elements could not be combined together into a
composite nobility. This was achieved by Firuz Tughlug by virtually
freezing its composition. This might have helped to overcome the
pressing difficulties of the moment, but it cost the Sultan the lever
(new recruitments) by which the nobles could be controlled. A decline
in the Sultan’s power was thus inevitable.

NOTES

1. W.H. Moreland, Agrarian System of Moslem India, Cambridge,

1929, pp. 45-52.
2. Ishwari Prasad, History of Qaraunah Turks in India, Allahabad,
1936; Mehdi Husain, Rise and Fall of Muhammad bin Tughluq, London,
1938.
3. Ibn Battuta, Rehla, tr. Mehdi Husain, Oriental Institute, Baroda,
1953, pp. 105-6.
4. Isami, Futuh-us Salatin, ed. A.S. Usha, Madras, 1948, p. 515.
5. Barani, Tarikh-i Firuz Shahi, ed. Saiyid Ahmad Khan, Calcutta,
1862, p. 504.
6. Ibid., p. 448.
7. On Bahram Aiba, son of Malik Ghazi, see Barani, pp. 379-8, 479.
8. Isami, pp. 483-7; Ibn Battuta, p. 111.
9. Isami, p. 425.
10. Ibn Battuta, p. 54.
11. Ibid., p. 24.
12. Barani, p. 540.
13. Ibid., p. 419.
14. As in Professor S.A. Rashid’s introduction to Insha-i Mahru, ed.
S.A. Rashid and Bashir Husain, Lahore, 1965, pp. Iff.
15. Ibn Battuta, pp. 105-6.
16. Barani, pp. 479-81.
17. Afif, Tarikh-i Firuz Shahi, Bibliothica Indica (Bib. Ind.) edn, Calcutta,
1890, pp. 394405.
18. Barani, pp. 544-5.
36 Mughal India
Afif, pp. 394-405.
Ibn Battuta, pp. 12, 81, 118.
. Barani, pp. 461-2.
. Ibid., p. 499.
. Ibid., p. 584.
. Ibid., p. 585
. Ibid., pp. 482, 514-16; Isami, pp. 503, 531-2; Ibn Battuta, pp. 113-

. Ibn Battuta, p. 144.

. Barani, pp. 501-2.
. Ibid., p. 502; Isami, p. 507.
. Isami, p. 505; Ibn Battuta, pp. 113, 116.
30. Isami, p. 505.
. Barani, p. 505.
. Ibn Battuta, p. 8.
=feF Isami, pp. 522-3.
lbid., Dudl5.
. Barani, pp. 373-6.
. Ibid., pp. 461-2.
. Ibn Battuta, pp. 144-6.
. Barani, pp. 481, 487-8.
 4

Capital of the Sultans

Delhi during the Thirteenth and
Fourteenth Centuries

The Sultanate monuments of Delhi have received much attention.

Saiyid Ahmad’s Asarus Sanadid' and Carr Stephen’s Archaeology
and Monumental Remains of Delhi (1876), are old but competent
descriptions. But everything else is overshadowed by the great survey,
Delhi: Architectural Remains of the Delhi Sultanate Period by Tatsuro
Yamamoto, Matsuo Ara, and Tokifusa Tsukinowa, published in Tokyo
in 1970, with its detailed descriptions (all in Japanese), scientific
diagrams and magnificent photographs. Handling it, one feels in the
presence of a definitive work.
The purpose of this essay is, however, not to offer a short view of
the monuments, but to focus on the settlements; for this purpose the
existing archaeological evidence is undoubtedly very important, but
our attention here is basically directed towards literary evidence, and
on what it tells us about the settlement history of Delhi during the
thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Such a correlation has been
surprisingly lacking until now, and the intention here is to fill the gap.
When one looks at Delhi on the map, one feels a little surprised
that its importance in the historical period should date only from the
twelfth century. The spurs of the Aravalli range reaching deep into
the great alluvial plains of north India have their terminal point in the
Delhi Ridge. The Yamuna river is thereby diverted from its seemingly
natural south-westerly course (parallel to the Indus tributaries) to an
easterly one (parallel to the Ganga) by the interposition of the Ridge
under which it flows. Thus heights for commanding positions, rocks
for stone quarries, and the river for water supply, navigation and
defence from the east, all should have combined to attract to Delhi
the attention of rulers and merchants alike.
Yet, so far as we know, when Prithvi Raja was defeated at Tarain
in 1192, there was only a small fort amidst the present ruins on the
rocky ground now called Qila Rai Pithora. It was this fort which
38 Mughal India
Qutbuddin Aibak occupied on behalf of Shahabuddin of Ghor in 1192,”
and which became the nucleus of the Delhi of his successor Iltutmish—
the Delhi known as Dihli-i Kuhna or ‘Old Delhi’ in the fourteenth
century.’
It was natural that the Ghorian—Turkish conquerors should, upon
choosing Delhi for their headquarters, start building their city around
the fortress they had captured. So was built the Jama Majid, with the
Qutb Minar, and a new fort (Hisar-i Nau) close to the north of the
mosque.* This latter was probably the walled enclosure now known
as Lal Kot. Probably adjacent to the mosque was a religious school
founded as early as the reign of Muizzuddin of Ghor, since it was
know as Madrasa-i Muizzi. Outside its gate was a market for cloth-
merchants (Bazar-i bazzazan) through which a party of Carpmthian
heretics had tried to break into the mosque, in AH 724/AD 1324, having
mistaken the madrasa for the mosque.°
An obvious deterrent to the growth of the city, which during the
first half of the thirteenth century could not have been very large,
was the problem of water supply. The Yamuna was far away from
the site of the town; the nearest point on the Yamuna is 18 Km from
the Qutb Minar as the crow flies. The rocky ground on the Aravalli
spurs precluded the digging of wells at most places. It proved,
therefore, incumbent upon IItutmish, (1210-36) to lay out a large
tank, Hauz-i Sultani or Hauz-i Shamsi from which citizens of Delhi
could fetch water.° When during the 1260s, the Meos became turbulent
and began to come up to the walls of Delhi, they prevented the citizens
from enjoying a walk up to the tank and harassed the water-carriers
and the slave girls who came to fetch water.’ It subsequently dried up
because the channels feeding it were dammed up by ‘dishonest men’.
Firuz Shah (1351-88), however, claims to have broken down these
dams and so opened the supply of water to the tank again.* The Hauz-
i Shamsi was situated to the south of the then city, about three
kilometres from the Qutb complex. It received rain-water? drained
off from the large, higher, fairly level catchment area to its west. The
present mapped dimensions of the ‘Shamsi Talab’ as it is now called
suggest that it was rectangular, about 200 metres long and 125 metres
broad.'® (Ibn Battuta’s statement that it was two ‘miles’ (mil) long
and one mile broad '' indicated its roughly rectangular shape; it also
suggests that his mil is a unit of length far short of the English mile.)
A tank of this size, large as it was, could not have met the needs of a
large population; and the difficulty in carrying water from it to the
populated parts of the city must have been considerable.
 Capital of the Sultans 39
It was, therefore, natural that a tendency should emerge to shift
towards the Yamuna river. A suburb first developed at Ghayaspur,
whose name suggests its settlement during the reign of Sultan
Ghyasuddin Balban. Since Shaikh Nizamuddin established his Jammat
Khana in this suburb,’” the present Dargah Nizamuddin fixes its site
pretty will. Quite obviously, it owed its settlement to its being near the
bank of the river’? which just below here takes a turn towards the
east, the point was thus nearest the then city of Delhi, while being
close to the river. Still the distance between the Qutb Minar and Dargah
Nizamuddin is about seven miles in a straight line.
Between this settlement and the Yamuna, Balban’s grandson and
successor, Muizzuddin Kaiqubad (d. 1289) began building a walled
palace (gasr), which was either named Kilokhari or was on the site of
a village of that name.'* It was about half a kuroh (less than a mile)
from Ghayaspur;'° this broadly suits too the position of the ‘Kilokhari’
palace which fronted the river, although there is said to have been
space enough in between for Jalaluddin Khalji (1290-6) to lay out a
garden.'° Under this Sultan, who harboured suspicions about the loyalty
of the leading citizens of the old city, a ‘New City’, the Shahr-i Nau,
developed around the palace.
Sultan Jalaluddin ordered his own nobles and commanders as well as the
great men of the city to build houses in Kilokhari and erect high edifices,
and bring certain merchants from the (Old) city. Large markets came to be
established, and Kilokhari was named Shahr-i Nau, Moreover, a stone-fort
was built, of very great eminence.'”

The population seems to have extended up to the present Purana

Qila, if the latter represents correctly the position of the then village
of Indpat or Indarpat (Indraprastha). During Jalaluddin Khalji’s reign,
a number of Mongols (Mughals) are said to have settled in Kilokhari
and Ghayaspur as well as Indarpat and Bakula (?), their settlements
being known as Mughalpur.'®
It is almost certain that the shift of the town from the dry rocky
zone to the riverside would have continued, had not certain
circumstances occurred during the reign of Jalaluddin Khalji’s nephew
and successor, Alauddin Khalji, to force the Sultan to adopt a new
policy.
The circumstances were, perhaps, dual in nature. On the one hand,
the combination of the Ogetai and Chaghatai hordes in Central Asia
under the leadership of Qaidu, gave a new intensity and ferocity to
the Mongol raids into India. Delhi itself became the target of Mongol
40 Mughal India
attack and was subject to siege twice.' It therefore became necessary
for the population of the capital to be kept within fortified walls. This
meant that the vicinity of the rocky zone where the supply of stone
was easier must continue to contain the capital. Barani clearly says as
much:
The terror of the Mongols became all pervasive. Mughal horsemen began
to come up to the platform of Subhani (Chabutara-i Subhani), and the
villages of Mori and Hadhi, and the banks of the Hauz-i Sultani (Hauz-i
Shamsi)—after the disaster of Targhi’s invasion—which was a great
disaster, Sultan Alauddin woke up from his sleep of negligence and gave
up the projects of taking away the army on campaigns and reducing forts
(in India). He now built his palace (kaushak) in Siri and began to reside at
Siri; he designated Siri his capital (Darul Khilafa) and made it well
populated. He also built up the fort of Old Delhi.”°

Siri was in fact a plain waste ground (sahra) almost adjoining the
old city of Delhi to its north-east;?! Alauddin had camped his army
here before entering the walled capital in 1296.*? He had also come
out of the walled capital (Old Delhi), and pitched his tent on this plain
when the Mughal commander Qutlugh Khwaja came to make an
attempt on the capital.”
In the beginning the settlement at Siri seems to have been called
Lashkar or Lashkargah (army encampment) in contrast to the Qutb
Delhi knows as Shahr (City). Nizamuddin commented upon the
distance between Shahr and Lashkar.** His disciple and recorder of
his conversations, Amir Hasan Sijzi, himself an army officer, had built
a house in Lashkar, and this enabled him to offer his Friday prayers at
the Friday mosque in Kilokhari.*> Subsequently, Lashkargah, situated
in Siri, was named Darul Khilafa,*° a statement corroborated by Ibn
Battuta’’ and Barani.”®
Apparently, local memory of where Siri was situated was lost; it
was Cunningham who identified it with a vast area enclosed by raised
mounds of earth and containing the village of Shahpur Jat. The
identification is now held to be definitive and the name Siri appears
on the survey sheets. It indeed meets all the indications of the position
of Siri in our sources; an expanse of level ground between Qutb Delhi
and Kilokhari. The enclosed area amounts to some 1.7 square
kilometres.*? The Statement in Yazdi’s Zafarnama, that the walled
enclosure (sura) of Siri was roughly ‘circular’ is broadly correct in
that it is not rectangular.*°
Alauddin Khalji’s attention seems, however, mainly to have centred
 Capital of the Sultans 4]
on Qutb Delhi. The vast extensions he made to the Friday Mosque?!
suggest not only his interest in that city, but also the fact that an
enormous increase in the population of the city had occurred since
Iltutmish’s time so that the old space no longer sufficed. Indeed, this
was the Shahr par excellence in contrast to the Darul-Khilafa that
was Siri and Sahr-i Nau (new city) that was Kilokhari.*? It was the
major commercial centre, as Barani’s description of Alauddin Khalji’s
price regulation so definitely tells us.
Alauddin decreed that the cloth markets should be established on
an open ground (sahra) within (i.e. inside the city wall at) Badaun
Gate in the direction of Kaushak-i Sabz, that had for years remained
unoccupied.** The market came to be known as Sara-i ‘Al. The Badaun
Gate is mentioned as the ‘greatest gate’ of (Qutb) Delhi by Ibn
Battuta,* and is often mentioned in our authorities.*° Outside the gate
were excavated dry wells which served as dungeons for the imbibers
and purveyors of wine.*° The grain market (manda or mandi), so often
referred to by Barani,*’ was situated at yet another gate of the city, the
Mandavi Darwaza.**
The dry wells outside Badaun Gate should remind us of the problem
of water supply in the enlarged city, a problem more acute for the
settlement around the Qutb than for Siri, where underground water
could be reached more easily by digging wells through alluvial soil.
Alauddin Khalji tried to alleviate this problem by re-excavating
Iltutmish’s Hauz-i Sultani or Hauz-i Shamsi. That tank is said to have
run dry and to have only contained some pools. Large amounts of
mud and silt were therefore removed from inside the tank and a
platform (chabutra) and domed pavilion (gumbad) built in the
middle.”
However, as Amir Khusrau remarks with engaging exaggeration,
the waters of the Nile and Euphrates would have been insufficient to
meet the needs of the increased population of Qutb Delhi.” In any
case, the Hauz-i Shamsi would have been too far south for the quarters
and suburbs situated to the north of the Qutb Minar.
Alauddin Khalji, therefore, excavated another tank about two miles
north of the Qutb, the Hauz-i Alai or Hauz-i Khas (now the name of a
well-known part of upper-class New Delhi); the banks of the tank are
still traceable; it is a square, each side some 600 m in length, the total
space enclosed by the banks amounting to over 70 acres.*! Ibn Battuta
describes it as larger than the Hauz-i Shamsi.*” Yazdi calls it a “small
sea’ (daryacha), and says it was filled during the rainy season and
served to supply the needs of the inhabitants of Delhi for the whole
42 Mughal India
year’. The catchment area of the tank lay to the south behind the
present-day Indian Institute of Technology and Jawaharlal Nehru
University, and some channels which probably took water to the tank
can still be traced. Like Hauz-i Shamsi, this too was at some distance
from the more closely inhabited parts of the city. Plain vacant ground
(sahra) adjoined it, interposing itself between the tank, on the one
hand, and Siri on the other, and stretching to the fortified wall of Qutb
Delhi. In this ground Khusrau Khan had planted orchards.** Women
singers and dancing women lived on one side of the tank. Fetching
water from the tank must have been strenuous business and must have
involved the labour of many maidservants or slaves and professional
water-carriers.
The major part of Delhi under Alauddin Khalji (1296-1316) was
thus the Qutb Delhi with Siri as an isolated extension. When Barani
later on recollected how large numbers of people came to visit Shaikh
Nizamuddin, the Chishti mystic settled at Ghayaspur (near Kilokhari
in Shahr-i Nau), he thought of the crowds coming from the Shahr, the
city, or Qutb Delhi. The road by which they came probably passed
through much uninhabited waste or unpopulated terrain:
The freemen (hurrs) and philanthropists laid out platforms at many places
from the Shahr to Ghayaspur; there they set up thatched huts, dug wells,
and kept ready water-filled basins with clay vessels, and with matting spread
out. Every platform and thatched hut had a watchman and servants so that
the disciples, followers and pious men should not have anything to worry
about in regard to ablutions and performing of prayers during their visit to
and return from the Shaikh’s house."

It seems that the increase in the population of Delhi and Siri led
Ghiyasuddin Tughlug (1320-5) to lay out yet another settlement,
namely Tughluqabad.”’ The site is at a considerable distance (about
eight kilometres) due east of the Qutb Minar (and so of ‘Old Dethi’);
it sits upon a southern terminal of the Ridge towards the Yamuna,
from which it is almost as much distant as from the Qutb Minar. The
advantage of the site lay in its stone quarries which provided building
material, and the scraps that could be used to reinforce the elevation
of fortifications. There was the possibility too of setting a dam against
the natural eastward drainage line, which narrowed here; and so of
creating a tank and source of water supply. Isami writes: ‘The
sagacious sovereign ordered the digging of a tank under the elevated
fort. Every moment the tank was beset by waves like the seven oceans
beneath the Caucasus Mountains’.*®
 Capital of the Sultans 43
The great survey of Sultanate Delhi by Yamamoto and others,
contains excellent photographs of the tank, the surrounding walls and
the main dam with its three arches containing the sluices.*°
Unfortunately, besides the outstanding monuments, namely the tomb
of Ghayasuddin Tughluq and the fortress walls, it is difficult to
reconstruct the plan of Tughluqabad. Across the tank Muhammad
Tughlug constructed the fort of Adilabad, with which Tughluqabad is
corrected by a cause way. It would seen that Tughlugabad was more
or less a detached complex to house the Sultan, his retinue and personal
troops; it was, perhaps, never intended to replace ‘Old Delhi’ as either
a commercial or even administrative centre.
Indeed, “Old Delhi’ continued to grow; and this led Muhammad
Tughlug (1325-51) to plan an immense length of fortification so as to
enclose the entire area between the Qutb Delhi and Siri within its
walls, giving to the enclosure the name of Jahanpanah.*° Thus, now,
three settlements, ‘Old Delhi’, Jahanpanah and Siri arose, linked to
each other.
Yazdi said that Jahanpanath exceeded ‘Old Delhi’ in size; and ‘Old
Delhi’ exceeded Siri. The walls of Jahanpanah had six gates leading
out to the north-west, seven to the south, and three into Siri.°! The
north-western wall was skirted by Hauz-i Khas, directly fronting which
was a gate.°* The southern wall of Jahanpanah can be traced easily:
the north-western wall appears on maps, but on the ground has virtually
disappeared.
As usual, for water supply yet another reservoir was provided. An
embankment 850 feet in length with seven arches (and thus called
‘Satpula’ or ‘Satpala’) was thrown across a drain near the present
village of Khirki, as part of the southern wall of Jahanpanath, to retain
a vast sheet of water. The drain still runs in virtually the same channel.
The dam towers some 21.3 feet above ground level.”
Delhi had thus reached an enormous size—unfortunately, no
estimate of its population is possible—when Muhammad Tughluq
decided to transfer his capital to Daulatabad in the Deccan. The
statement that this was accompanied by a wholesale transfer of
population is made by all of our three major authorities, Ibn Battuta,
Isami and Barani, with considerable circumstantial detail.°* It is not
intended here to discuss the extent to which Delhi was actually
depopulated. Ibn Battuta said that when he arrived in 1334, he could
witness the unhappy effects.°° Barani says that people from the
surrounding country came and took the place of those who had
been taken to the south.*° Delhi was subsequently troubled too by
44 Mughal India
famine, and Muhammad Tughluq was compelled to establish a
camp city on the Ganga river, called Swarga-duari (Gate of
Paradise) where the people of Delhi might go to live on grain
brought up the river.*’
It is possible that the rebellions in the 1340s further told on the
prosperity of Delhi, and the enormous city began to go partly to ruin.
During the reign of Firuz Tughlugq (1351-88) the decline became
perceptible. Firuz Tughlugq himself records that the drains flowing
into the Hauz-i Shamsi had been closed by ‘people’ building dams
across them; and the Hauz-i Alai had silted up, running dry, so that
the ‘people of the city’ carried on cultivation within it, digging wells
and selling water drawn from them.°* By Firuz Shah’s reign the ruins
of ‘Old Delhi’ had indeed become a rich source of bricks and Stones
for the new city of Firuzabad.°°
The ruin of ‘Old Delhi’ may possibly have become inevitable as a
consequence of the decline of the Sultanate. Enormous settlements
set on the Aravalli rocks, away from the river, must have meant an
extra drain of revenue, to meet the extra cost of water supply and
expense of transporting grain and goods. The revenue must have
perceptibly declined as the Sultanate contracted and the administrative
structure atrophied. There was therefore good reason for a shift to an
economically more suitable position, 1.e. along the river, from the
upper rocky grounds. In spite of his valiant effort to repair and rebuild
the older structures and re-excavate the great reservoirs of the older
complex, Firuz Shah was constrained to build his own capital upon
the Yamuna river.
The new capital was Firuzabad. Firuz established it quite early in
his reign, since Barani writing in 1358 mentions its foundation on the
banks of the Yamuna, prophesying that ‘in course of time it would be
the envy of the Great Cities’.°' Afif describes the extent of the new
city in an oft-quoted passage. It was on the Yamuna, ‘five kurohs’
from (old) Delhi. The total expanse embraced eighteen villages. The
core village (presumably the site of Firuz Shah Kotla) was Kawin or
Gawin. It included lands of the village of Kathiwara, which is
presumably identical with the ford or ferry (guzar) of Kath in Barani.™
Its exact site 1s not located; more easily located are Indpat (Indraprastha,
Purana Qila), and the land of the tomb of Sultan Razia (situated in the
Mohalla Bulbuli Khana near Turkman Gate, Shahjahanabad).® The
city extended much further northwards across the whole of the later
city of Shahjahanabad up to the base of the Ridge between modern
Sabzi Mandi and the Civil Lines. Afif tells us that:
 Capital of the Sultans 45
By the grace of God, the population of Delhi increased so much that the
entire space between Indpat and the Kaushak-i Shikar had been inhabited,
the distance between the limits of Indpat and the Kaushak-i Shikar is five
kurohs.®

Kaushak-i Shikar is easy to identify because of the Ashokan pillar

which Firuz Shah set up there. This stands on the Ridge between
Sabzi Mandi and the Civil Lines. Quite obviously the population
extended along the Yamuna river, possibly in a fairly narrow belt.
The statement that it extended to Hauz-i Khas is made by Saiyid
Ahmad, and is repeated by Carr Stephen, but is without any
substance.°’
It is difficult to the sure about the extent to which the growth of
Firuzabad compensated for the decay of ‘Old Delhi. Certainly, the
settlement was more successful than Kilokhari, which seems, from its
exclusion, to have decayed by now. Firuz Shah shifted Delhi to a
more suitable terrain; henceforth its settlement were to adjoin the
Yamuna rather than the Aravalli ridge. Sher Shah’s Delhi, Salim Garh,
Humayun’s Tomb, Shahjahanabad, even New Delhi, are situated within
the alluvial zone. In a geographical sense, as much as historical,
Firuzabad set the seal on the decline of the Delhi of the Sultanate with
its sites upon and round the rocky wastes, and shifted it compellingly
to the lower lands to the north and north-east.

NOTES

1. First ed., 1847. Ihave used the comprehensive edition by Khalid Nasir
Hashmi, Delhi, 1965.
2. Minhaj Siraj, Tabaqat-i Nasiri, ed. Abdul Hai Habibi, 2nd. edn,
vol. 1, Kabul, 1963, p. 400.
3. ‘Ali Yazdi, Zafarnama, Bib. Ind., Calcutta, 1888, 1, p. 125, where
the three cities of Delhi are described under the names of Jahanpanah,
Siri (to north-east of Jahanpanah), and Dihli-i Kuhna (to south west of
Jahanpanah).
4. Tabagat-i Nasiri, 1, p. 461.
as tbid, 167"
6. The earliest reference to this tank seems to be in ibid., 1, p. 466.
7. Ziya’ Barani, Tarikh-i Firuz Shahi, Bib. Ind. edn, Calcutta, 1862, p.
56, where the tank is designated Hauz-i Sultani.
8. Futuhat-i Firuz Shahi, ed. S.A. Rashid, Aligarh, 1954, p. 12.
46 Mughal India
9. Ibn Battuta, Rehla, tr. Mehdi Husain, Baroda, 1953, p. 28.
10. See T. Yamamoto, M. Ara, and T. Tsukinowa, Delhi, Tokyo, 1970,
map. Saiyid Ahmad gives its area as 276 ‘pucca bighas’ or 172.5 acres
(Asaru-s Sanadid, p. 175).
11. Ibn Battuta, Rehla, tr., p.28.
12. Barani, Tarikh-i Firuz Shahi, pp. 343-4; Shaikh Nasiruddin,
Khairu-l Majalis, Aligarh, 1959, p. 126. On p. 325 Barani styles
Nizamuddin as Ghayaspuri, i.e. of Ghayaspur.
13. Shaikh Nasiruddin (c.1356) described the Jama‘at Khana of
Nizamuddin as being in Kilokhari and on the bank of the river Jaun
(Yamuna) (Khairu-l Majalis, p. 283). This statement raises some problems.
The Jama‘at Khana was in Ghayaspur not Kilokhari, but since the two
adjoined each other, Nasiruddin might have spoken loosely here. If the
Jama‘at Khana’s site was the same as of the one now pointed out in
Dargah Nizamuddin, we must infer that the Yamuna must then have flowed
through the present Zoological park and passed by west of the site of
Humayun’s tomb. Such a channel, in its southern section, can still be
traced: it probably carried only a branch of the river.
14. Barani, p. 175, and passim
15. Khairu-l Majalis, p. 126.
16. Barani, p. 175.
17. Ibid. Practically no ruins survive in Kilokhari.
18. Ibid., p. 219.
19. Barani, pp. 254-61, 300. One raid was under Qutlugh Khwaja,
followed by another under Targhi. See also Isami, Futuh-us- Salatin, ed.
A.S. Usha, Madras, 1948, pp. 256-70, 285-6.
20. Barani, pp. 301—2. Is modern Mehrauli a corruption of Mori-Hadhi?
21. Ibid., p. 246; Yazdi’s Zafarnama, vol. ti, 125, gives the direction in
relation to “Old Delhi’, i.e. Qutb Delhi.
22. Barani, p. 246.
23. Ibid., p. 254.
24. Hasan Syzi, Fawaid-ul Fuad, ed. M. Latif Malik, Lahore, 1966 p.
282 (11 January 1317).
25. Ibid., p. 195 (8 April 1314).
26. Ibid., p. 311 (8 February 1318).
27. Ibn Battuta, Rehla, tr, Mehdi Husain, pp. 25, 73-4.
28. Barani, p. 302.
29. Measured from the Survey of India’s Delhi Guide Map (1:20,000),
1969 edn.
30. Zafarnama, il, vol. p. 125.
31. Carr Stephen, The Archaeology and Monumental Remains of Delhi,
Ludhiana and Calcutta, 86, pp. 53-4. Alauddin Khalji ‘nearly doubled the
 Capital of the Sultans 47
length of the Mosque after Altamash’s extensions and added about half
as much ground to its breadh’(p. 53).
32. Fawaid-ul Fuad, p. 282; Barani, p. 299.
33. Barani, pp. 310-12.
34. Ibn Battuta, p. 26.
35. For example, Barani himself, pp. 54, 246, 258, 330.
36. Ibid., pp. 258-66.
37. Ibid., pp. 304ff.
38. Ibn Battuta, p. 26.
39. Amir Khusrau, Khazainul Futuh, Aligarh edn, 1927, pp. 31-4. When
the water rose in the tank the domed pavilion could only be reached by boat
(Ibn Battuta, p. 28). Both structures survive (Carr Stephen, p. 69).
40. Khazainul Futuh, pp. 32-3.
41. Sides of the tank measured from map; area from Carr Stephen, p. 83.
42. Ibn Battuta, p. 28.
43. Zafarnama, vol. u, pp. 108-9. Because Firuz Shah re-excavated it,
Yazdi ascribes its construction to that Sultan.
44. Barani, pp. 417-8.
45. Ibn Battuta, p. 28.
46. Barani, pp. 343-4.
47. Isami, Futuh-us Salatin, p. 412; Barani, p. 442; Ibn Battuta, p. 25.
48. Isami, p. 412.
49. Yamamoto, et al. vol. 11, Waterworks, plates 19-22; the textual
description is on pp. 46-51.
50. Ibn Battuta, p. 25.
51. Zafarnama, vol. tl, p. 125.
52. Ibid., p. 116.
53. For description of this work, see Saiyid Ahmad, Asarus-Sanadid, pp.
193-4; Carr Stephen, pp. 101-2. There are magnificent photographs in
Yamamoto, vol. 1, plates 23-4, also a plan opposite p. 56.
54. Ibn Battuta, p. 94; Isami, pp. 446-54; Barani, pp. 473-5.
55. Ibn Battuta, p. 94.
56. Barani, p. 474.
57. Ibid., pp. 485-6. Cf. Ibn Battuta, p. 87.
58. Firuz Shah’s inscription, Futuhat-i Firuz Shahi, pp. 12-14.
59. Afif, Tarikh-i Firuz Shahi, Calcutta, 1890, p. 376.
60. Firuz Shah’s building effect in ‘old Delhi’ is attested by the numerous
structures erected or repaired by him; but see Firuz Shah’s own Futuhat-i
Firuz Shahi; Barani, pp. 562-6; and Afif, passim.
48 Mughal India
61. Barani, p. 566.
62. The straight map distance between the Qutb Minar and Firuz Shah
Kotla is 13.5 kilometres. Yazdi says it was three kurohs from Jahanpanah
(Zafarnama, vol. 11, p. 127).
63. Barani, p. 246. It appears as the village of Kathi in Yazdi, Zafarnama,
vol. 11, p. 85.
64. Asarus Sanadid, pp. 179-80.
65. Afif, p. 135. The actual distance is ‘six miles as the crow flies’ (Carr
Stephen, p. 123).
66. Afif, p. 305.
67. Asarus Sanadid, p. 92; Carr Stephen, p. 123. Saiyid Ahmad’s mistake
arose out of a misreading of the text of Yazdi’s Zafarnama vol. ul, pp. 108-9,
where it is stated that the tomb of Sultan Firuz Shah (not Firuzabad) was
situated near Hauz Khas.
 5

The Punjab between the

Thirteenth and Fifteenth Centuries

The Punjab has been politically and culturally a very important region
of India in all periods of our history; the medieval times being no
exception. After all, it was during the medieval period that the Punjab
gave Sikhism to the world.
Certain aspects of the history of the Punjab during the period of
the Delhi Sultanate, that is during the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries,
are of considerable interest. When the Ghorians occupied Punjab, it
was broadly divided into three political units: Lahore, Multan and the
trans-Sutlej tract centred on Tabarhinda or Bhatinda. Multan had been
seized from the Qaramita (Ismailis); Lahore (‘Lahor’) from the
Ghaznavides, AD 1186; and the cis-Sutlej tract from the Chahamanas
(1185). These three units remained distinct, except that after the
sack of Lahore by the Mongols in 1241, Lahore lost its importance
for over two centuries; and Dipalpur (also in the present Bari Doab)
became the centre of authority for that area. East of Sutlej, Samana
became the headquarters of a large province or iqta replacing
Tabarhinda. One may recall that in Balban’s reign, the Mongol raids
were checked by commanders posted at Multan and Samana.' Under
Alauddin Khalji, Ghazi Malik was posted at Dipalpur to guard against
the Mongols.” The importance of the three cities continued into the
fourteenth century as well.
The present essay treats these three divisions of the Punjab
separately since it would perhaps best contribute to clarity of
exposition.
The area inherited from the Ghaznavi kingdom of Lahore comprised
the Salt Range or Koh-i Jud, the alluvial plains of the Jech, the upper
Rachna and Bari Doabs, and possibly, the present Bet-Jalandhar Doab.
Early in the thirteenth century, the Kokhars formed a very important
element in the population of the area. They inhabited the area between
the Salt Range and Lahore. They harassed Muizuddin of Ghor when
he was returning from a campaign against Khusrau Malik and again
when in his later days, their presumption led Muizuddin to organize a
50 Mughal India
large campaign against them (1205-6). Iltutmish particularly
distinguished himself against them on the banks of the Jhelum river.
This proved to be his Muizuddin’s campaign. When the Mongols
sacked Lahore in 1241, the ‘Kokhars and the Hindus’ are said to have
set about plundering the city.”
The Mongol raid on Lahore (1241) presaged a continuous Mongol
pressure on the Lahore region. It would seem that the Salt Range
virtually passed out of control of the Sultans. This is borne out not
only from the fact that Balban once led an expedition into Salt Range
as if into a foreign country, but also by place names like Hazara Qarlugh
(the present Hazara district), Hazara Gujaran, and Hazara, which we
find in the A ‘in-i Akbari.* Hazara was the standard Mongol division
of a tuman; and areas where Hazaras were garrisoned tend to be
assigned this name. (Compare the ‘Hazarajat’ in Afghanistan, whence
the Hazara people who claim a Mongol origin.) The Qarlugh were a
client Turkish clan, who had come into the Indus region with
Jalaluddin, the Khwarizimian prince, and then shifted their loyalty to
the Mongols.
As a result, the Kokhars became politically still more important
since they occupied the first line of defence of the Sultanate. Towards
the end of Balban’s reign (1266-86), his eldest son Khan Muhammad,
governor of Multan, was killed in an encounter with the Mongols
between Lahore and Dipalpur. It is said that his body was recovered
from the Mongols by Rai Kalu, a local chief, who was also the father-
in-law of the prince.° Obviously, the policy of conciliating the local
chiefs had begun, to the extent that matrimonial alliances were being
contracted to cement the alliance. Rai Kalu’s tribe is not stated, but he
might well have been a Kokhar.
When under Alauddin Khalji (1296-1316), Ghazi Malik was posted
to Dipalpur mainly to check the Mongols, he seems to have looked to
establishing local alliances. He married his brother Rajab to the
daughter of Rana Mal Bhatti, a chief of Abohar.’ He seems to have
developed friendly relations with the Kokhars as well. In 1321, when
he marched against Khusrau Khan, he was joined by Gulchand and
Sahaj Rai, two chiefs of that tribe. Gulchand, ‘the prince of the
Kokhars’ distinguished himself in the battle with Khusrau Khan.*
During the reign of Muhammad Tughlug (1325-51), however,
Gulchand along with two (Mongol) officers, Shahu and Halajun,
revolted and lost his life when the rebellion was suppressed.”
In the latter half of the fourteenth century, the Kokhars seem to
have been converted to Islam; but their power remained undiminished.
 The Punjab between the Thirteenth and Fifteenth Centuries 51
When Timur invaded India in 1398, Shaikh or Shaikha was the
principal Kokhar chief. He had for some time obtained possession of
Lahore.'® His brother Nusrat unsuccessfully contested Timur’s
passage.'' Shaikha then offered allegiance to Timur; but he resiled,
and was accordingly captured with this family by a detachment of
Timur’s troops sent to Lahore.!”
Shaikha was succeeded by his son Jasrath Shaikha or simply Jasrath,
a clearly Hindu name. It was under Jasrath that the Kokhars’ power
seems to have reached its zenith; Jasrath defeated and captured Sultan
Ali Shah of Kashmir (1413-20) and even threatened Delhi.'* But
Jasrath seems to have been not only the most powerful but also the
last prominent Kokhar chief; after him the Kokhars rapidly diminished
in influence, and by the sixteenth century appear only as zamindars in
the Bari and Rachna Doabs.'*
Lahore, in spite of being noticed in the histories from time to time,
never regained much importance in the fourteenth century. Two new
towns arose in the vicinity, namely Dipalpur, a political centre, and
Ajodhan, the seat of the Sufic establishment of Shaikh Fariduddin.
Neither place is mentioned in the Zabgat-i Nasiri; but Dipalpur, at
least, gained clearly from the decay of Lahore. When in the fifteenth
century Lahore again began to revive, Dipalpur correspondingly lost
it former importance.
The recovery of Lahore was accompanied by an extension of
settlement in the Bari Doab region marked by the foundation of
townships like Batala, the focal point in the study of urban history
being undertaken by J.S. Grewal and Indu Banga. Sujan Rai, writing
in 1995, attributed this process of resettlement to the cessation of
Mongol invasions,'° and he seems well justified in this inference.
Lahore also apparently gained from larger demand in Europe for
indigo which was linked with Europe’s own economic recovery in
the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. This demand was met by the
transportation of Bayana indigo to Lahore where caravans assembled
for journey to the Levant. When the indigo reached Allepo, the
Venetian and other European merchants knew of it as Laor, Lahore,
etc. after the name of this major town of the Punjab.
Multan (Mulasthanapura) has a much longer history than Lahore.
When Yuan Chwang visited it in the seventh century, it was the capital
of the Takka or Takya (Cheh-Kiya).'° It was known for its celebrated
sun-temple, so that at one time it must have been a major place of
pilgrimage. Some time later in the seventh century it was annexed to
the Kingdom of Sind, becoming the headquarters of its northernmost
32 Mughal India
province. The association with Sind continued after the Arab conquest
of that kingdom in 711-14, Multan being described in some detail by
the Chachnama, the thirteenth-century Persian translation of a very
early Arabic narrative of the Arab conquest.'’ The association of
Multan with Sind continued well into the fourteenth century (and even
till Akbar’s time), the city being a capital of a vast region that stretched
down to the mouth of the Indus: This was its situation in Qabacha’s
short-lived Sultanate in the earlier part of the thirteenth century;
‘Multan and Sind’ formed a single large iqta under the Delhi Sultans;'*
it formed part of the Arghun Kingdom of Sind in the sixteenth century;
and late in that century, Akbar’s suba of Multan included the sub-
province of Thatta or Sind.'? This association with Sind must have
reinforced, if not itself been originally responsible, for the influx of a
large proportion of Sindhi vocabulary into the Punjabi speech of the
Multan area, which is recognized as a separate dialect (“Multani’) by
philologists. The dialect has given a distinct character to the area as a
cultural region.
The river map of the region was different from what it is today.
The Chachnama for the early eighth century and Yazdi for the close
of the fifteenth century show the combined waters of the Chenab and
Jhelum flowing to the west of Multan; but the Ravi (Irawa) river flowed
to its east. In other words, the Ravi was not flowing in its Sidhnai
reach, and Multan lay in the Rachna and not the Bari Doab. The well-
known town of Uchh then stood at the junction of all the Punjab rivers,
including the Indus, as is stated in the fifteenth-century Palam Baoli
inscription. To the east of Multan the Sutlej flowed in two branches,
the eastward in its present channels, past Ajodhan (Pakpattan) and
the westward in the channel of ‘old Bias’ still shown in the maps.”°
The presence of rivers in their numerous channels, undrained by large
canals taking off from their upper reaches, must have provided a
floodland character to agriculture around Multan.
The undoubtedly rich agriculture of the Multan—Uchh area and its
strategic position made Multan an ideal mart. The word Multani in
the fourteenth century represented a wealthy merchant indulging in
large-scale usury (as creditor to potentates) and engaging in long-
distance trade. This is the picture that Barani offers of the Multanes
in his Tarikh-i Firuz Shahi.” It is not certain that they were all Hindus,
though this is suggested by the connotation of Hindu merchant given
to the word in Tek Chand’s Bahar-i Ajam. Barani speaks of Qazi
Abdul Hamid Multani’s father as Malikuttujjar (prince of merchants).
Multan’s significance as commercial centre was enhanced further
 The Punjab between the Thirteenth and Fifteenth Centuries 53
by the large establishment of the Suhrawardi silsila. From the time of
Bahauddin Zakariya (thirteenth century), the Suhrawardi saints enjoyed
a very high repute; and the tomb of the saint became a pilgrim centre,
doing the duty for the city that the sun temple used to perform five or
six centuries earlier.
Multan was an important town irrespective of the fortunes of
Lahore. But the decline of Lahore after 1241 certainly enhanced its
importance. The great trade route between Delhi and the Islamic world
passed through Multan. Ajodhan (Pak Pattan) rose in significance
not only because of Shaikh Fariduddin Ganj-i Shakar, but also because
it lay on the Delhi—Multan route. Sultan Firuz Tughluq’s governor of
Multan, Ainul Mulk Multani, has left his letters, edited by Professor
S.A. Rashid from Lahore, which show the significant position Multan
occupied in the traffic with the Islamic countries; there apparently
was, among other things, a brisk export of slaves, which Firuz sought
to prohibit.
The third segment of medieval Punjab is the cis-Sutlej tract, whose
earlier centre seems to have been the town normally spelt Tabarhinda
in our texts, which is usually identified by historians with Bhatinda.
Climatology dictated that the belt running along the Himalayan
foothills could support much cultivation; the seasonal streams running
south and south-eastward from this belts disappeared into the Thar
Desert at points 150 or 200 miles from the foothills. In its south and
south-east the region contained what were oases rather than large
compact territories of cultivation, while to the north the cultivation
became denser and continuous.
It is, therefore, not surprising that Samana should have enjoyed
premier importance in the area with its more northerly position, along
with towns like Kaithal and Ghuram. But if the agricultural prosperity
belonged to the north, the commercial and military significance
attached itself to the south. The Multan—Ajodhan—Abohar-Bhatnair-
Hansi—Delhi route was taken by merchants as well as invaders trying
to strike at Delhi. (Compare the route recorded by Ibn Battuta with
that taken by Timur or, for that matter, by Firuz Tughlug on his march
from Sindh to Delhi in 1351.)
Firuz Tughluq’s interest in the southern portion of the region must
have derived from the area’s commercial and strategic importance.
The great canal he ran from the Yamuna to Hansi, and beyond, the
fort of Hisar Firuza that he founded, and the canal that he seems to
have excavated from Sutlej to Sarsuti (Sirsa) are indicators of his
close concern with this area.”
54 Mughal India
Timur’s invasion ravaged much of the area, and the canals and
towns both decayed in the sixteenth century. In the Mughal period,
the area to the north-west of Hisar Firuza became strangely
unimportant and neglected; the main lines of trade now ran from
Delhi to Sirhind and then to Lahore, it being the time of its greatest
glory. The high road from Delhi to Multan via Pakpattan was not
traversed by any writer known to us in the seventeenth century: it
had simply disappeared.”*
The above, of course, is a very fragmentary picture of the Punjab
during the three centuries preceding the establishment of Mughal
power in India. The interpretations offered of certain details are mere
attempts to stimulate reflection and further research into certain
historical phenomena that make up a portion of the known history of
medieval Punjab. These should be treated as questions rather than
answers, and, still less, solutions.

NOTES

1. Barani, Tarikh-i Firuz Shahi, Bib. Ind., p. 81.

2. Ibid., pp. 322-3.
3. All the facts about the Kokhars are from Tabqat-i Nasiri,vol. i, ed.
Habibi, pp. 398, 403, 433, 166.
4. Hazara Qarlugh and Hazara Gujaran are shown as mahals of the Sind
Sagar Doab in Abu’l Fazl’s A’in-i Akbari. Hazara was in the Jech Doab; it is
the present Midh Ranjo.
5. Barani, p. 109.
Isami, Futuh-us Salatin, ed. A.S. Usha, Madras, 1948, p. 180.
Afif, Tarikh-i Firuz Shahi, Bib. Ind. pp. 37-9.
Isami, pp. 378, 384—5.
pci Ibid., p. 471.
Pe
esl
[Ses
10. Yahya Sarhindi, Tarikh-i Mubarak Shahi, ed. Hidayat Hosain,
Calcutta, 1931, pp. 154-7.
11. Yazdi, Zafarnama, vol. u, pp. 56-7.
12. Ibid., pp. 169-72. Apparently, many Kokhars were still Hindus, for
Yazdi says that those Hindu who said they were of Shaikha’s tribe had been
exempted from plunders by Timur during the time that Shaikha remained in
the train of Timur. See also Yahya Sirhindi, pp. 166-7.
13.Sirhindi, Tarikh-i Mubarak Shahi, pp. 193-4, and ff.
 The Punjab between the Thirteenth and Fifteenth Centuries 55
14. A’in-i Akbari, statistics for suba Lahore, Column for bhumi or
zamindars.
15. Khulasatut-Tawarikh, ed. Zafar Hasan, Delhi, 1918, pp. 66-7.
16. S. Beal, Buddhist Records of the Western World, vol. 11, pp. 274-5.
Watters doubts the identification of Mu-lo-San-pu-lu with Multan, purely on
rigorous philological grounds; he is, however, unconvincing (Watters, On
Yuan Chwang, tl, p. 254).
17. Chachnama, text edited by Daudpota; translation (with omissions)
in Elliot and Dowson, History of India as Told by its Own Historians, vol.
1, and by Kalichbeg Fredunbeg.
18. See. e.g., Barani, p. 428.
19. A’in-i Akbari, Account of the Twelve Subas’ in H. Blochmann’s
ed., Calcutta, 1866-77, vol. 1.
20. These remarks are based on the work on historical geography of
the region, by Raverty, [badur Rahman Khan and Irfan Habib.
21. Barani, pp. 120, 311.
22. The classic account of the West Jamuna Canal is in Afif, Tarikh-i
Firuz Shahi, pp. 127-31. For the canal from the Sutlej, see Tarikh-i Mubarak
Shahi, pp. 125-6.
23. See Sheet 4B of Irfan Habib’s Atlas of the Mughal Empire Delhi,
1982.
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FORMATION OF THE EMPIRE
 6

Towards an Interpretation of the

Mughal Empire

It is nowadays common for Indian history textbooks to treat the various

‘empires’ that successively occupied the stage of Indian history, with
their respective ‘administrations’, as so many successive repetitions with
merely different names for offices and institutions that in substance
remained the same: namely the king, the ministers, the provinces, the
governors, the taxes, land grants, and so on. But D.D. Kosambi, in his
Introduction to the Study of Indian History (Bombay, 1975), rightly
observed that this repetitive succession cannot be assumed, and that
each regime, when subjected to critical study, displays distinct elements
that call for analysis in the context of ‘relations of production’ (as he
put it) existing at that particular time.
Of all the ‘empires’ previous to the British, we know most, of course,
about the Mughal empire. And this empire displays so many striking
features that it should in fact attract an historical analyst of today as
much as it did Bernier. In its large extent and long duration, it had only
one precedent, the Mauryan empire, some 1900 years earlier. Havell
well might regard it as the fulfilment of the political ambitions embodied
in Indian polity for three millennia.
And yet, there is also a temptation to see in the Mughal empire a
primitive version of the modern state. Its existence belongs to a period
when modern technology had dawned in Europe, some rays of which
had also fallen on Asia. Can it then be said, as Barthold? implied, that
the foundations of the Mughal empire lay in artillery—the most brilliant
and dreadful representative of modern technology, as much as did those
of the modern absolute monarchies of Europe? Can we say, further,
that the Mughal empire, far from being the climax of traditional Indian
political endeavour, represented one of the several unsuccessful
experiments of History towards that titration which has at last given us
the distinct modern civilization of our times?
These questions are unlikely to be answered easily, or perhaps ever,
with a simple yes or no. The factors to be considered are too numerous,
and often too remote, to be evaluated or assessed with any reasonable
60 Mughal India
assurance of comprehensiveness and accuracy. But is there any student
of the period who does not, in his private thoughts, have a predilection
for one or the other setting for the Mughal empire, that is for regarding
it either as the most successful of the traditional Indian states or as an
abortive quasi-modern polity?
The essay attempts to discuss certain matters which may be of inter-
est to a contingent debate on the theme which has been briefly outlined
here. Most of the conclusions are naturally tentative; and I can hope for
no more than that the aspects touched upon may be found to be deserv-
ing of closer scrutiny.
A question that comes to mind regarding the general characterization
of the Mughal empire is, what was new—or if not new, then, at any
rate, exotic—in the polity of the Mughal empire?
In the view of a number of historians, including Rushbrook Williams*
and R.P. Tripathi,’ the institutions and mutual relations of kingship and
nobility in the Mughal empire derive essentially from Turko-Mongol
traditions, contrasted with the ‘Afghan’. The former conferred on the
emperor absolute powers over his nobles and subjects, whereas the latter,
particularly in the circumstances of the fifteenth century, tended to place
the king in no higher a position than of the first among equals. This
view has been criticized, first through an analysis of the surviving Turkish
and Mongol traditions (for both were not only distinct, but historically
different) in the Central Asia of Babur’s time, it being shown that these
by no means prescribed an absolute despotism.° The other criticism is
that it is possibly inaccurate to describe the Indo-Afghan or Lodi polity
as a mere tribal confederation; for this would underestimate the
underlying powers of the monarch that certain tribal forms only barely
concealed.°
There is still a third factor, to which, perhaps, sufficient attention has
not been paid. This is the continuing survival of the framework of the
administration of the Delhi Sultanate, established under the Khaljis and
Tughlugs, especially the land revenue system. Abul Fazl’s statement
that Sher Shah sought to copy the administrative measures of Alauddin
Khalji which he had read about in Barani’s Tarikh-i Firuz Shahi would
have been effective as a gibe had Sher Shah not proved himself a realist
by his success in carrying out these measures. This success testified to
the similarity, if not identity, of the administrative system of the early
sixteenth century with that of the fourteenth.
The contribution of the Sur regime to the structure of Mughal polity,
too, needs to be borne in mind. Sher Shah and Islam Shah created the
zabt system of land-revenue assessment, the cornerstone of Akbar’s
 Towards an Interpretation of the Mughal Empire 61
land revenue administration. They imposed the dagh, or horse branding,
an equally basic device for controlling the army. If Abbas Sarwani is to
be believed, Sher Shah attempted a conscious centralized despotism;
and Islam Shah certainly gave shape to it by bringing the whole of his
empire under direct control (khalisa), thus anticipating Akbar’s measures
of 1574.
These achievements were acclaimed by the Afghan historians of
the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; but they also won wider
recognition. There are guarded admissions in Abul Fazl; and a paean
of praise for Sher Shah is found in a letter written in 1611 by Mirza
Aziz Koka, himself one of ‘the old wolves’ of the Mughal state.’
What more could be required as a testimony of the popular admira-
tion of Sher Shah than that Dawar Bakhsh, a claimant to the Mughal
throne in 1627, should assume for himself the very same title of
Sher Shah?8
But, quite obviously, Mughal polity could not have been a simple
continuation of the Sultanate and Sur polity. Had it been such, its
comparatively greater success would be impossible to explain. What,
then, were the new elements of political chemistry out of which Akbar
compounded such a large, stable, long-lasting political 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.
In spite of the work done on Akbar’s administration, notably by
Moreland, Saran and Ibn Hasan, there has not been an adequate appre-
ciation of Akbar’s achievement in the realm of systematization
of administration. We see such systematization in his creation of mansab,
classifying all individual officers into definite categories. Whereas be-
fore Akbar each appointment, promotion, fixation of pay, and obliga-
tion was in the case of higher officers a separate ad hoc arrangement,
under Akbar every such action was reduced to a change in the mansab
(the number assigned to a man). Increase or diminution of pay and
obligation followed a change in the mansab as a matter of course, un-
der set regulations. Much research has gone into discovering the ‘deci-
mal system’ of military organization under the Delhi Sultans and the
Mongols. But mansab has really little kinship with any such system. It
has been shown, quite persuasively, that there was no mansab or number-
rank in existence before 1574.° In fact, no analogous system of
numbered ranks can be found in any Central Asian or Middle Eastern
state—and certainly not in the Timurid, the Uzbek, the Safavid, and the
Ottoman empires. The mansab system was a unique and, as far as cen-
62 Mughal India
tralization went, an unrivalled device for organizing the ruling class.
We get the same sense of systematization in the development of jagir
as the pure form of land-revenue assignment. It is possible to argue that
the jagir fits the definition of iqta’ given in the Siyasatnama of Nizam-
al-Mulk Tusi (twelfth century).'° But whereas in all earlier states the
iqta in practice always became confounded with general administrative
charge, the jagir in actual practice exactly fitted the standard definition
of iqta’. The maintenance of jama’ dami (estimated revenue) figures,
and the assignment of jagir to a mansab holder, rigidly on the basis of
the approved jama’ dami equalling the talab, or his sanctioned pay, the
constant transfer of jagirs, and the restricting of jagirdars’ powers to
revenue collection alone,'' are again measures for which precedents
and parallels in the Islamic world are not easy to find.
Akbar’s division of his empire into subas, sarkars and mahalls and
his largely successful attempts to make the entire administrative structure
of one suba into an exact replica of the other, with a chain of officers at
various levels ultimately controlled by the ministers at the centre, gave
identity to Mughal administrative institutions irrespective of the regions
where they functioned.
The systematization continued under Akbar’s successors. When new
administrative categories were created, whether duaspasihaspa ranks
under Jahangir, or the month scales under Shah Jahan, they too appear,
in the ultimate analysis, to substitute general categories for individual
exceptions.'’ Even in the sphere of land-revenue administration, where
regional differences were inevitable, the zabt system—the characteris-
tic institution of the Mughal revenue administration—was extended to
the Deccan by Murshid Quli Khan (1655-8).
Side by side with his immense work of centralizaticn and systemati-
zation, we see under Akbar the exposition of a new stress on the
absoluteness of sovereignty. The accepted Mughal doctrine of sover-
eignty was derived from several distinct sources which could by no
means be logically interrelated. It partly consisted of an exaltation of
the blue blood of the Mughal dynasty. The long history of the Mughals
as a ruling dynasty, going back to Timur and Chengiz Khan, rulers not
of obscure states but of world empires, was an asset which the Mughals
put to skilful use. Abul Fazl’s Akbarnama offers a superb example of
the propaganda carried on for the dynasty on the basis of its past. The
Mughals accentuated the consciousness of their exalted status by ab-
staining from marrying princesses of the dynasty to anyone except a
member of the imperial family. On the other hand, the privilege of
marrying a daughter to a prince or emperor came to be zealously guarded
 Towards an Interpretation of the Mughal Empire 63
by a few Iranian, Turanian and Rajput families of high status. The his-
toric halo around the dynasty justified the submission of the chiefs of
the proudest clans to its suzerainty.
A second element derived from the earlier Muslim political think-
ers. In the chapter, Rawai-i rozi, in the A’in-i Akbari, Abul Fazl repeats
the well-known theory of social contract to justify the sovereign’s ab-
solute claims over the individual subject. The strength of this theory
lies in its secular character and its foundation on alleged social needs. It
has the further merit of being rational.
But rationality was probably not deemed a sufficient incentive to the
total obedience that the Mughal sovereign sought. A third element then
entered; and that was religious. Ever since the Safavids successfully
utilized their past as religious leaders and based their sovereignty on
their spiritual authority, the attractions of a similar position for sunni
sovereigns were irresistible. The Ottomans ultimately purchased from
existing claimants the authority of the Abbasid caliphate; but they were
anticipated by Akbar, who, through the mahzar of 1579, attempted to
assume the position of an interpreter of Islamic law and, in spheres
where the existing corpus was silent, of a legislator."
For reasons into which we cannot go here, Akbar’s attempt to
establish such a position within the framework of Islam proved
abortive.'* Moreover, it did not solve the problem of spiritual authority
in relations with his non-Muslim subjects. It therefore gave way to a
new attempt in which it was claimed that the emperor enjoyed the
position of a spiritual guide and that this position derived not from any
particular religion, but directly from God. “Sovereignty is a ray of light
from the Divine Sun’, claims Abul Fazl.'° As such, men of all faiths
were beneficiaries of the Divine Light. Thus Aurangzeb would write to
Rana Raj Singh when seeking the throne:
Because the persons of the great kings are shadows of God, the attention of
this elevated class (of kings), who are the pillars of the great court, is devoted
to this, that men belonging to various communities and different religions
should live in the vale of peace and pass their days in prosperity, and no one
should interfere in the affairs of another. Any one of this sky-glorious group
(of kings) who resorted to intolerance, became the cause of dispute and
conflict and of harm to the people at large, who are indeed a trust received
from God: in reality (such a king) thereby endeavoured to devastate the
prosperous creations of God and destroy the foundation of the God-created
fabric, which is a habit deserving to be rejected and cast off. God willing,
when the true cause (i.e. Aurangzeb’s own cause) is successful, and the
wishes of the sincerely loyal ones are fulfilled, the benefits of the revered
practices and established regulations of my great ancestors, who are so
64 Mughal India
much esteemed by the worshipful ones, will cast lustre on the four-cornered
inhabited world.'®
Akbar initiated the practice of jharoka darshan, a striking innovation
which nevertheless seemed to be in accordance with Hindu tradition.
To a more select circle of disciples, styled the iradat-gazinan by Abul
Fazl, Akbar was the spiritual guide. Akbar’s successors enlarged this
circle virtually to include all their nobles; and it became a convention
for every high noble, Muslim or Hindu, to address the emperor as
Pir-o murshid, and designate himself as his murid.
It can be seen that, combined with the tolerant religious policy of
which Akbar was the author, the basing of political authority on spiritual
sanctity was an intelligent device to strengthen the sovereign’s position.
Its logical implications lay, however, not in secularism, but in an as yet
dormant and unelaborated concept of religious equality. Abul Fazl’s
claims for his master could only be justified by the subsequent
theories of Dara Shukoh.
The third important element which Akbar introduced into imperial
polity was, as already mentioned, the establishment of certain prin-
ciples governing the relations between the king and the nobles. That
Akbar created a composite nobility has been well recognized since the
seventeenth century, when the author of the Dabistan-i Mazahib as-
cribed the prosperity of the Mughal dynasty to the fact that Akbar had
succeeded in removing the dependence of the sovereign on the Muslim
nobility alone.'’ Though the attribution of the creation of a composite
nobility to Akbar is now a part of the established historical dogma, it
can be accepted only with much qualification. A composite nobility, in
terms of race, existed already under the Khaljis (1290-1320); and a
composite nobility, in terms of religion, under Muhammad Tughluq.'*
The latter Sultan too linked his policy towards the nobility with innova-
tions in his religious policy, such as a repressive attitude towards the
Muslim orthodoxy, public discourses with yogis (Hindu mendicants)
and personal participation in the Holi festival.'? And yet the effort to
give stability to the political structure of the Sultanate by this means
had not been successful.
It may be that there were also autonomous causes for the greater
success of Akbar in creating a loyal nobility. For instance, the gradual
progress of Islamic-Persian court culture among the higher classes of
non-Muslims, including the Rajputs, might have generated a common
cultural ground for the political alliance between sections of Muslim
and non-Muslim aristocracies.
 Towards an Interpretation of the Mughal Empire 65
There is also another factor to consider. The rural aristocracy,
descendants of the ruling class of the twelfth century, had not only fresh
memories in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries of their past glories,
but probably then objected to the imposition of the exotic fiscal system,
whereby the bulk of the agricultural surplus was claimed by the Sultan
as kharaj (land-tax) to be distributed among his nobles, the muqtis or
iqta-holders. By the sixteenth century, the kharaj system could no longer
be seen as an innovation, and the rural aristocracy, having been reduced
to the status of zamindars, must have largely accommodated themselves
to it.° It was thus possible to introduce into the Mughal nobility certain
zamindar elements (e.g. the Rajput chiefs, Ghakkars, etc.) without
endangering its foundations.”!
Both these factors are easily admitted. But one significant contribution
of Akbar that continued to be honoured by his four immediate successors
must be given due recognition. This was the enunciation of an essentially
humane approach to the individuals constituting the nobility. In this
respect, the Mughal empire stood apart from the Sultanate; and it also
stood apart from the Safavid and other polities of the contemporary
Islamic world.
The official chronicler of Shah Jahan tells us:
In matters of punishments, His Majesty does not regard the nobles as
different from ordinary. human beings. If per chance mention is made in His
Majesty’s presence of the cruelty of the Emperors of Constantinople, Iran,
and Uzbeks, and of their ferocity in awarding punishments, His Majesty
gets so perturbed that the signs of sadness are apparent from his illustrious
forehead. His Majesty has often been heard to say that God has given the
kings authority and made all men their subjects for the sole purpose that the
entire attention of kings be directed towards the maintenance of justice,
which is the basis of the functioning of the world and the races of men.
Therefore, the king should so award punishments that the cruel cannot
oppress their victims, and (the nobles) may treat the poor mildly, and the
garden of the world flourish owing to the removal of the thorns of cruelty.
Not that in the name of awarding punishments the king should slaughter
large numbers of men for a small fault, and on a small suspicion injure fellow
beings, who are a trust from God.”

The boast for the Mughal empire implicit in this passage was not an
empty one. The Mughal emperors shine by contrast with their despotic
contemporaries. Taking the Tarikh-i Alam Ara-i Abbasi,” | compiled a
list of the leading nobles executed by Shah Abbas I (1587-1629), the
great Safavid emperor. I found that during thirty-one years, he executed
no less than forty-eight prominent officers of his, generally upon the
66 Mughal India
slightest suspicion. Some of the executions were on religious grounds.”
When we turn from this gory record to the annals of the Mughal empire,
we find that even dismissals, let alone executions, are very rare. When
high officers were dismissed for major faults, they were usually
pensioned off with land grants. Confiscation of individual nobles’
property, as punishment, was unknown. So also the humiliation of the
family of a noble no longer in favour. It was only in the rare cases of
rebellions or wars of succession that the nobles met a violent end. Even
here an unwritten custom provided that only under exceptional
circumstances were nobles of the defeated side to be executed after a
battle. In an overwhelmingly large number of cases, nobles who escaped
death on the battlefield could be sure of escaping it at their captor’s
hands. In the wars of succession, it remained indeed usual, until 1713,
to offer appointments to the supporters of the defeated claimants. During
the war of 1658-9, for example, neither Aurangzeb nor Dara Shukoh
executed any noble. It was only the princes of royal blood whose lives
remained insecure, ever since Shah Jahan in 1628 established the
practice of executing possible rivals.
It was this approach to the nobility, in which loyalty to the throne
was assumed from every one, that was perhaps a major factor in enabling
the Mughals to avoid a crisis in their relations with the nobles after the
aristocratic rebellion of 1580. This approach had a corollary to it. While
the Mughal emperor undertook no obligation to maintain an hereditary
nobility, and in theory could appoint anyone to any mansab, in actual
fact recruitment to the nobility was confined to certain foreign racial
elements and indigenous clans which, in spite of their diverse
backgrounds, were bound to the Mughal dynasty in grateful obedience.
If one collects data about the mansab-holders under the different
emperors, one is surprised at the broadly unvarying nature of the
proportions shared by the various elements.
Table | gives the composition of (a) the 98 mansabdars alive in 1595,
and enjoying the mansab of 500 and above; (b) the 100 highest
mansabdars in service in 1620; (c) the 100 highest mansabdars in 1656;
(d) the 202 mansabdars appointed/promoted to the mansabs of 2,000/
1,500 and above during the period 1658-78; and (e) 277 mansabdars
of the same ranks serving during 1679-1707.” It will be seen from the
table that the main disturbance in the proportionate strength of the various
elements in the Mughal nobility was caused by the entrance of the
Marathas and other Dakhinis (the real strength of the latter is concealed
in the break-up of the table), who appear in increasing numbers from
1656. This intrusion is, of course, explained by the increasing
 Towards an Interpretation of the Mughal Empire 67
involvement of the Mughal empire in the Deccan, especially during the
reign of Aurangzeb (1659-1707).
Thus we see two opposites reconciled successfully in Mughal pol-
ity, namely the absolute despotic power of the emperor, bolstered by
immense centralization and a theory of semi-divine sovereignty; and a
structure heavily systematized with such conventions governing the
relations between the king and his nobles as to deserve even the appel-
lation of ‘constitution’, with a small if not a capital ‘c’. We have seen,
further, that in the formation of this policy both the development of
institutions, already in existence under the previous regimes, and a de-
liberate policy on the part of the Mughal emperors, had distinct roles to
play. These two causal factors did certainly not have a directly
‘modern’ origin, even taking that imprecise term in the widest of its
possible senses.
And yet it is possible that some of the changes that took place in
other parts of the world at the dawn of the modern era did
exercise certain influences on the last-stage, but crucial, development
of medieval institutions that we have just considered, and on the ideas
and intellectual atmosphere in which what was new in the Mughal
imperial polity was formulated.
I would begin by taking up a small point: the system of coinage. The
Mughal system of coinage was tri-metallic, with coins struck in three
metals, gold, silver and copper, with the highest degree of purity achieved
anywhere in the world. Such coinage too had its predecessor in the
Sultanate coinage of the fourteenth century. But during the fifteenth
century coinage had been heavily debased, the main coin being a copper
tanka with a progressively declining silver alloy. Sher Shah sought to
eliminate the debased coinage, and he minted the first rupee, a coin of
178 grains of virtually pure silver. By the end of the sixteenth century
the attempt that had continued under the later Surs and yet more
vigorously under Akbar, succeeded in making the rupee the basic unit
of currency actually in use.*° It is pointless to dilate upon the importance
of this achievement for successful functioning of commerce and credit,
and the importance of the latter, in turn, for the functioning of a highly
centralized administration. Yet, it is not to be forgotten that the coming
of the rupee was linked to the Spanish discovery of the New World,
because that led to a heavy influx of silver, plundered extracted
from the newly discovered continents, into the “Old World’, thereby
ending the silver famine that had prevailed there since the fourteenth
century. Thus what would have been otherwise exceptionally difficult
if not impossible—namely the institution of a pure silver currency,
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 Towards an Interpretation of the Mughal Empire 69
previously limited by conditions of very high silver prices—became
possible as an economic byproduct of the Age of Discovery.
There is also the role of the artillery to be considered. It is true that
the Mughal army, like the Safavid and Uzbek, and even the Ottoman
army, was mainly a cavalry force. It was characteristic that the mansab
indicating the size of military contingent its possessor was obliged to
maintain was styled suwar or ‘horseman’. But it would be wrong to
think that artillery had no more than a marginal role to play in the Mughal
army, especially when we remember that we ought not to be thinking of
cannon only, but also, and even particularly, of muskets. After all, if in
1647 there were 200,000 horsemen under the imperial banner, there
were also no less than 40,000 infantrymen, consisting of ‘matchlock
men, gunners, cannoneers and rocketeers’.”’
It is quite likely that the increasing use of artillery during the hun-
dred years following the battle of Panipat in 1526 gave the Mughal
army a decisive weapon against the traditional chiefs with their old-
type cavalry retainers (of whom the Rajputs were a characteristic illus-
tration). Moreover, artillery gave to the towns, where alone guns and
muskets could be manufactured, a new basis for political and military
domination over the countryside. In so far as the Mughal ruling class
was mainly urban in character,” it must certainly have gained as a re-
sult of the new military importance of towns.
We can thus at least identify two new sources of strength and stabil-
ity that ‘modern’ developments gave to the Mughal polity—the silver
influx, a component of the Price Revolution, and the artillery, an early
product of modern technology. It is, moreover, possible that the devel-
opment in Europe was influencing ideas too, indirectly but powerfully.
Information about the Europeans was available to Akbar and his
contemporaries; and this was not confined to knowledge about the Jesuits
and Christianity. Abul Fazl was aware that the Europeans had discov-
ered the Americas, which he called Alam-i Nau,” the New World. The
accounts of the time are replete with references to the technological
ingenuity of the Firangis, it being mentioned with pride if craftsmen at
any place could manufacture articles that might compare with those of
European manufacturers. As is well known, by the seventeenth century
European physicians and surgeons had established a reputation for
western science; and in a notable encounter of the two cultures, Bernier
explained the theory of the circulation of blood to Danishmand Khan.”
Such information, showing the lead that Europe was attaining in
several branches of human activity, could not but engender questioning
about the finality of traditional knowledge. This questioning took
70 Mughal India
several forms. On one side was the rational approach of Abul Fazl, who
would point out that zinc, as a separate metal (a recent discovery in
Asia), was not known to the ancients,*' or would say that al-Ghazali
spoke nonsense when he condemned sciences that were not manifestly
based upon the Quran.” Then there was Dara Shukoh and men of his
stamp, who rejected the traditional sciences, but also rejected rationality,
and sought to establish an obscurantist spiritual dogma on the
foundations of Comparative Religion.*’ Further to the ‘right’ still, there
were men like Mullah Nasir of Burhanpur who thought that no particular
sanctity attached to the classical Islamic jurists, and what they said could
be challenged by men of equal or greater learning, like himself.** Even
Shaykh Ahmad Sirhindi was thought by his critics to be tarnished with
similar thoughts of his own superiority over the earlier interpreters.*°
In the previous (sixteenth) century, the Mahdavi Movement had at-
tained considerable success; and it was certainly a consciously ‘revi-
sionist’ doctrine.
All these were symptoms of a cleft in the hitherto solid structure of
faith in the traditional cultural heritage of Islam. It was this void that
was unconsciously sought to be filled by the special position of the
Mughal emperor as a spiritual guide, and the self-conscious view of
the Mughal empire as a great new polity, essentially just and humane
(to the individuai members of the ruling class). If this hypothesis is
accepted, we can perhaps see a dual ideological role of the Mughal
empire. On the one hand, the need of an official theory of sovereignty,
and of the specific role of Mughal polity, arose because of the
undermining of the traditional ideological structure from tremors
originating from the remote and largely unidentified developments of
the early modern world; but, in its turn, the theory cemented and
strengthened the traditional culture and made the Mughal empire its
upholder and protector.
The suggestion that I should like to make is, then, that we should not
treat the Mughal empire as simply the last in the line of succession of
the traditional Indian empires. It is true that its structure and institutions
had deep indigenous roots. Its success also owed not in small measure
to the genius of one man, Akbar. But the circumstances and atmosphere
in which it was created were shaped by certain other factors as well,
that had much to do with the very events that played an important part
in the origin and development of modern culture in Europe. A certain
intellectual ferment was in the air in India also, stirred in unseen ways
by the advance of Europe; and this too contributed to the acceptance of
a new ideological basis offered for the Mughal empire.
 Towards an Interpretation of the Mughal Empire 71
This does not suggest that these factors converted the Mughal em-
pire into a modern state. If it had some rudiments of an unwritten con-
stitution, it did not yet claim for itself the legislative power and func-
tions that are the hallmarks of a modern state. It was essentially the
‘perfection’ of a medieval polity, made possible by certain early mod-
ern develcpments. Though this gave it the stability and power denied to
its predecessors, it still did not solve the new contradiction inherent in
the existence of a medieval polity in a world advancing to modern con-
ditions.
As I see it, this contradiction expressed itself mainly in the contrast
between the sense of unity infused in the imperial ruling class, in spite
of its heterogeneity, and the absence of the consciousness of such unity
among the mass of the imperial subjects. In other words, the subconti-
nent of India had a centralized quasi-modern state without any devel-
oping sense of nationhood. It is true that ‘Hindustan’, a word so often
used, was more than a simple geographical expression. But if it was so,
this was not because of any new popular consciousness, but because of
its geographical correspondence with the area in which Hindu mythol-
ogy had been enacted and places of pilgrimage lay scattered. This was
not sufficient to overcome divisions of caste and community.
It was for this reason, perhaps, that the Mughal empire proved so
vulnerable to the challenges from the Marathas, Jats, Sikhs, and Af-
ghans, who represented not its conventional political opponents, but
forces of a new kind, involving the entry of peasant-soldiers. This is not
the place to discuss how far these forces were the product of the ‘agrar-
ian crisis’ of the Mughal empire. What is more significant for the present
purpose is that while no serious decision occurred within the Mughal
ruling class, in the face of these challenges it still proved incapable of
meeting them and failed to invoke any popular support in its struggle. It
seemed as if the people at large were indifferent to whether they were
under an imperial or a regional regime.
Admittedly, all this is hypothesis, even speculation. But the whole
purpose here is simply to suggest a sphere in which speculation may
usefully be pursued, in that it may lead to our attaching fresh signifi-
cance to facts hitherto not noticed, or hardly noticed. Then, one day,
perhaps, we may really assign to the Mughal empire its true place in
history.
72 Mughal India
NOTES

1. E.B. Havell, A History of Aryan Rule in India, Loudon, n.d., pp. 520—

2. V.V. Barthold, ‘Iran’, tr. GK. Nariman, in Posthumous Works of GK.

Nariman, ed. S.H. Jhabvala, Bombay, 1935, pp. 142-3.
3. ‘It will thus be seen that Babur had not merely to conquer a kingdom;
he had to create a theory of kingship. He was determined to be no Sultan,
hampered by all limitations which had beset the Lodi dynasty; but a padshah,
looking down upon even his highest amirs from the towering eminence
upon which the divine right of Timur’s blood had placed him’ (Rushbrook
Williams, An Empire Builder of the Sixteenth Century, London, 1918, p.
161).
4. ‘The Chaghatain conqueror Babar came to India with ideas (of sov-
ereignty) that were not quite similar to those of either the early Turkish
rulers of Delhi or the Afghans’ (R.P. Tripathi, Some Aspects of Muslim
Administration, Allahabad, 1936, pp. 105ff).
5. Iqtidar Alam Khan, “The Turko-Mongol Theory of Kingship’, in
Medieval India: A Miscellany, 11, 1972, pp. 8-18.
6. Iqtidar Husain Siddiqi, Some Aspects of Afghan Despotism in India,
Aligarh, 1971, pp. 1-60.
7. ‘Sher Shah Afghan was not a king (malik) but an angel (malak). In six
years he gave such stability to the structure that the foundations still survive’
(B.M. MS. Add. 16859, f. 19a).
8. The curious fact is not mentioned in the Indian chronicles. But it is the
title Dawar Bakhsh assumes in his farman of 1627 to Raja Jai Singh (Bikaner,
old serial no. 176, New S. 021). This is corroborated by the Tarikh-i Alam Ara-
i-Abbasi, Tehran edn, A.G. 1314, p. 750.
9. AJ. Qaisar, PIHC, Delhi session, 1961, pp. 155-7.
10. Siyasatnama, ed. C. Scheffer, Paris, 1891-92, p. 28.
11. Cf. Irfan Habib, Agrarian System of Mughal India, 1556-1707,
Bombay, 1963, pp. 256 ff.
12. Cf. W.H. Moreland, ‘Rank (Mansab) in the Mughal State Service’,
Journal of Royal Asiatic Society (JRAS), 1936, pp. 641-65; Irfan Habib,
‘The Mansab System, 1595-1637’, PIHC, Patiala session, 1968, pp. 221ff.
13. Cf. S. Nurul Hasan, “The Mahzar of Akbar’s Reign’, Journal of U.P.
History Society, xvi, 1968, p. 126.
14. Cf. Iqtidar Alam Khan in JRAS, 1968, pp. 34-5.
15. A’in-i Akbari, m.
16. For the text of the nishan, see Kaviraj Shyamaldas, Udaipur, n.d; Vir
Vinod, ul, pp. 419-20 n.
17. Dabistan-i Mazahib, ed. Nazar Ashraf, Calcutta, 1809, p. 432.
 Towards an Interpretation of the Mughal Empire 7
18. See M. Athar Ali, ‘Foundations of Akbar’s Organization of the
Nobility: An Interpretation’, Medieval India Quarterly, m (3-4), 1958, pp.
80-7.
19. Isami, Futuh-us Salatin, ed. A.S. Usha, Madras, 1948, p. 515.
20. Cf. Irfan Habib, ‘Social Distribution of Landed Property in Pre-British
India’, Enquiry, no. 12, pp. 54-6.
21. Dr Ahsan Raza Khan in his unpublished thesis on the chiefs under
Akbar has collected interesting data about the chiefs (high zamindars) who
were granted mansabs under Akbar.
22. Lahori, Badshahnama, 1, Bib. Ind., Calcutta, 1866-74, pp. 139-40.
23. Tehran edn, AH 1214.
24. For example in his seventeenth regnal year.
25. These data are based: (a) on the A’in-i Akbari’s list of mansabdars;
(b) on Irfan Habib’s list (unpublished) of mansabdars under Jahangir, mainly
based on the Tuzuk-i Jahangiri; and (c) on Waris, Badshahnama, Ethe,
329, for the list of mansabdars in 1656. The racial composition has been
established by detailed checking with the biographical information in the
chronicles (e.g. Lahori) as well as the Zakhirat al-Khawanin and the Ma’asir
al- ‘Umara’. (d) and (e) are based on the list of mansabdars of Aurangzeb’s
reign given in M. Athar Ali, The Mughal Nobility under Aurangzeb, Bom-
bay, 1966.
26. Cf. H.N. Wright, The Coinage and Metrology of the Sultans of Delhi,
London, 1936, pp. 260-1; Irfan Habib, /ndian Economic and Social His-
tory Review (IESHR), \v, 1967, pp. 217-19.
27. Lahori, Badshahnama, ui, p. 715.
28. See M. Athar Ali, Mughal Nobility under Aurangzeb, pp. 154 ff.
29. A’in-i Akbari, m, p. 22.
30. Bernier, Travels in the Mogul Empire, Bombay, 1934, pp. 324, 339.
31. A’ in-i Akbari, 1, p. 24.
32. Muhammad Hashim Kishmi, Zubdat-al-Maqamat, Mahmud Press,
Lucknow, AH 1302, p. 131.
33. Cf. K.R. Qanungo, Dara Shukoh, Calcutta, 1935, pp. 78ff.
34. Muhammad Baga, Mirut al alam, MS Aligarh; Abd al-Salam, 84/314,
Pairaish 1.
35. S.A. Rizvi, Muslim Revivalist Movements in Northern India in the 16th
and 17th Centuries, Agra, 1965, pp. 268-70.
 7

The Pre-colonial Social Structure

and the Polity of the
Mughal Empire

India for at least the last three millennia has been an agrarian society,
and, for much of that period, land revenue has been at the core of its
polities. The transformation of this society under the pressure of a
colonial industrial power is one of the major facts of modern history;
but that transformation—destructive, regenerative, or neither—can be
understood adequately only when we have been able to define the
contours of the earlier order. For this there is the evidence of documents
and statistics; and these have to be analysed—a task for which we are
so greatly tempted to use the great theoretical frameworks of Marx and
Weber. The Imperialists and Nationalists too have left us with some
basic notions, but which we have to check and test with evidence with
the greatest integrity of purpose.
I have just spoken of the previous ‘order’; there can immediately be
a question whether we are justified in speaking of such an order in the
singular—why not a multiplicity of systems? Could there be an agrarian
regime common to Rajasthan and Kerala, to Bengal and the Punjab?
Or did the Lodi Kingdom and Vijayanagar have similar polities? Are
we not assuming a unity or uniformity where none existed? There is
considerable insistence at the present time on the regional focus; and
this is not unreasonable. The agriculture pursued in regions of over 80
inches of annual rainfall has its own implications for the organization
of agrarian life, different from those of a region on the fringe of the
desert; and India has both the extremes. Added to this are the cultural
specificities expressing themselves in divergent traditions; and the
variations must be immense.
But these were variations largely of detail, not of essence. No analysis
can ignore these variations; but an analysis which concerns itself with
these alone would surely ignore the wood for the trees. The elements of
uniformity, on the other hand, affect the very heart of the Indian social
system.
 The Pre-colonial Social Structure TS
For one thing, there is the universality of individual peasant cultivation.
This, of course, is not saying much; this economic form was a feature
of all civilized societies until the British landowners proved in the
eighteenth century that there could be a lordship without a peasantry.
But it is the social organization of the Indian peasantry which gave it a
distinctive feature, a universality within India, a specificity in relation to
the world. This, of course, lay in the caste system. The caste defined
who could be a peasant; it created hereditary menial labourers to sustain
peasant agriculture (the present Scheduled Castes); and it provided for
the village artisans and servants to serve the material and social needs
of the peasant. This function of the caste system furnishes the general
basis of Indian agrarian society. Its influence on the formation of the
superior agrarian Classes (e.g. zamindars) is not always so well marked,
but in their exercise of superior rights the Nairs in Kerala might still
have had something in common with the Rajputs of northern India.
The second common feature is represented by the land-tax. James
Mill was not the first to be excited by the curious fact that rent in India
should take the form of land-revenue.' Cornwallis had fixed the land-
revenue at 10/11 of the rent, to begin with; and Thomas Munro had
sought to fix the land-revenue at a third of the produce, as a kind of fair
rent. Sovereignty in India thus seemed to be equivalent to the right to
rent and this was surely the reason why from the sixteenth century
European travellers had spoken of the king as the sole proprietor of the
land. This had been said with equal impartiality of the Mughal empire
as of rulers in south India.” No claim to landownership for the king was
laid by Indian writers until the eighteenth century. They seemed unaware
that the only form in which surplus could be legally extracted must be
the landowner’s ‘rent’. Yet, the concept that the land-tax embraced all
produce above that required for the peasant’s subsistence for continuing
the cycle of agricultural production was deeply rooted. Bhimsen’s
explanation for the massive temples of the south, built out of the rulers’
revenue which were enormous owing to the low costs of subsistence, is
an excellent illustration of this concept of the land-tax.* And from the
fact of the land-tax approximating to rent, Qazi Muhammad A‘la
declared the king to be the possessor of the soil, if not its proprietor.’
Why and how Indian agrarian society developed the system of tax-rent
instead of landowners’ rent is certainly an important subject for
comparative history; but there can be little doubt as to its universality in
seventeenth-and eighteenth-century India, north as well as south.
Between these two poles, the peasant and the king (and his
bureaucrats or nobles, who collected the revenue on his behalf and
76 Mughal India
largely retained it) stood a series of intermediate classes. Their existence
too was universal. The simple two-tier structure of the ruler and ruled
(ra ‘iyyat, hence ‘ryot’, peasants), though accepted as an original relation
by Moreland,* could not really have existed anywhere in that form. A
triangular relationship, for example king/nobility—zamindar—peasant, was
a truer approximation to reality; and this lies at the root of the remarkable
discussion of the Indian agrarian conditions in Qazi Muhammad Ala’s
Risala Ahkam Arazi (early eighteenth century).° But even this was only
a rough approximation to reality; the intermediate classes had a complex
composition and structure everywhere, though with some important
common features.
Almost everywhere the intermediary classes were divisible into two
clear categories, which, from the point of view of the ruling class, might
be defined respectively as the dependent and the accessary classes. The
dependent classes included the Brahman landholders of brahmadeya
villages and the Muslim holders of aimma or madad-i ma ‘ash grants:
these were generally granted the revenue owing to the sovereign from
certain lands. They received grants from their patrons out of the same
motives as induced European lords to part with lands for the Church in
the Middle Ages, that is expectation of benefits in afterlife.
Of a different nature altogether were the classes which I have called
accessary—accessary, that is, to the main business of surplus extraction.
If the sovereign wished to realize ‘rent’, he had to associate with this
process persons who had some local power or position; for this service,
they had to be remunerated by a share of the revenue they collected.
Such would be the zamindars, or hereditary potentates, and village
headmen (mugqaddams), each class remunerated by a share of the tax,
traditionally 10 per cent (nankar) in northern India for the zamindars,
2% per cent for village headmen, and so on. The remuneration might be
made in allowance of tax-free lands, but these were a mere form of
commission, and not an outright revenue grant as in the case of madad-
i ma‘ash lands.
The structure of these accessary classes coincided with the traditional
structure of privilege, which cannot exactly be called a hierarchy because
there was not necessarily any chain of command and obligation. It
seemed as if each class had some privilege, to distinguish it from others.
Thus beginning with the menial castes or outcastes, who could not hold
any land, but had merely some customary privileges of garbage collecting
or skinning dead animals; the paikasht or non-resident peasants who
were permitted to cultivate the land of a village under certain terms and
conditions;’ the khudkasht or paltis or resident cultivators, who had an
 The Pre-colonial Social Structure WU
absolute right to cultivate within the village; the privileged higher castes,
who paid revenue at lower rates,’ and who in the Deccan and south
India came to bear the designation of mirasdar. Above or often from
amongst these, were the headmen (muqaddams, mahtauns, patels,
etc.), who laid claims to certain customary dues. These in turn tended
to merge with the zamindars (bhumias, wanthyas, etc.), who laid claims
to perquisites and exactions realized from villagers in cash and kind on
a hereditary basis.’ Every hereditary privilege was actually or potentially
a saleable right, and thus the structure of privilege tended to appear at
its apex as a system of property relationships. A market—not in land as
such—but in zamindari, and even headmen’s rights, therefore long
preceded the British conquests, and was almost a universal feature of
agrarian life in India around the middle of the eighteenth century.'°
In the foregoing sketch I have tended to describe the agrarian
conditions in a static framework. One may recall Marx’s assessment of
the Indian society (as a characteristic form of the ‘Asiatic’) that it was
‘unchanging’ and ‘stagnatory’.'' This judgement is, perhaps, both right
and wrong. Right, to the extent that it contrasts the rapidity of social
transformation in Europe from the close of the fifteenth century with
the inability of the Indian society similarly to generate capitalism. But
this, at best, would be stating the obvious: the question is whether there
was any social and economic change at all which may or may not have
been in the direction of capitalism.
I would suggest that built into the agrarian structure that I have
described, there were three possible factors which compelled change
and created at least a recurring instability in the entire system.
First, the internal strains in the political structure. I know that with
all the dedicated attention being now paid to the ‘subaltern classes’, a
person who like me wallows in the study of the nobility, should feel
extremely obsolete. However, surely there would be no ‘subaltern
classes’ if there was not a ruling class. How sufficiently the latter
performed the functions necessary for the perpetuation of their own
dominance, is an essential element of the medieval historical situation.
At the core of this was the degree of unity and stability the ruling class
could attain. That the twin phenomena had essentially contradictory
prerequisites was well stressed by Barani in the fourteenth century. Unity
required an absolute despotic sovereign; stability needed limitations on
his powers. The principal achievement of Akbar was the securing of a
workable compromise under what may be regarded as an unwritten
‘constitution’ of the Mughal empire. A theoretically absolute king, had
to function within a fairly firm framework of the mansab and jagir
78 Mughal India
system, and recognized conventions. A composite nobility, a religious
policy of tolerance (Sulh-i Kul under Akbar), a continuous recruitment
of immigrants, were all facets of the compromise. The seventeenth
century showed that the strains could be reconciled or subordinated to
the larger interests of the empire. But already by Aurangzeb’s time, the
early signs of breakdown became noticeable. It may be that once the
natural geographical limits of expansion were reached, the interests of
the divergent sections of the nobility could no longer be subsumed within
a fulfilment (always limited) of the interests of all. Aurangzeb’s religious
policy may be one reflection of the new dissensions; the unprecedented
bloodthirsty bitterness of the war of succession of 1713, their final
general expression.
Thus the empire collapsed, partly at least from its own internal fissures
and imbalances. Indian statesmanship could not create a successor,
whether under Maratha leadership, or, what would have been far less
plausible, under Afghan tutelage. There is no reason to ignore or
overlook this political breakdown, although by itself it is only part of
the story.
Second, the land-tax: its magnitude and mode of realization had
inevitably to lead to a subversion of relationships previously established.
It has been argued that it was retrogressive (the same standard share of
the crop irrespective of the size of holding of the revenue-payer), and,
therefore if rigorously assessed, would pauperize the poorer peasant
and intensify differentiation. On the other hand, its collection involved
collaboration of the accessary classes. If agriculture was adversely
affected by heavy demand, the customary claims of these privileged
groups would be affected as well. Thus inevitably the collaboration
would be replaced by conflict. Part of the history of the Mughal Empire
and even the Maratha regimes has indeed been explained in terms of
this analysis."
I would, however, enter a word of caution here. While the land-tax
might impose an intolerable burden on a segment of the agrarian
population, it is not necessary to believe that the ruined population was
always a high proportion of the total rural population. The ruin of one
village might be simultaneous with the relative prosperity of ten. I have
therefore some doubt about the stagnation which is sometimes assumed
for the few centuries before the British conquests. In this respect the
demographic data are of some interest. Moreland estimated India’s
population at 100 million for 1605;'° by 1800 it was nearly 200 million."
Could a doubling of population be regarded as consonant with absolute
economic stagnation? The picture would not substantially alter even if
 The Pre-colonial Social Structure 79
Moreland’s figure is revised to 125 million'> or even 140-150 million.'*
Clearly, the land-tax did leave a share of the surplus sticking to the
fingers of the accessory classes and even the higher privileged strata,
and this could not only create an agrarian market, but perhaps even go
back as agricultural inputs (cattle, seed, etc.) to expand agricultural
production.'’ One need not surely be totally converted by Sir John
Shore’s criticism of the zamindars.'*
The third possible source of change was monetization. The prevalence
of the cash nexus has already been stressed frequently enough to require
any further elaboration.'? Whether the peasant put a part of his produce
on the market to pay land-tax or buy goods for his own use, has no
direct relevance to the effects of market relations on agriculture. It could
only determine whether the goods produced in return went to the town
(where the tax collections would be mainly disbursed) or to the village.
Market conditions must lead, through the usual routine, to usury and
differentiation. A moneyed rural class must come to exist; and we may
recall Tavernier’s remark that a village must be small indeed if it has no
shroff.”? The sale of rights and privileges of which I have spoken above
must have kept pace with the process of monetization. It is also very
likely that the influx of New World silver from c. 1550 to c. 1750 greatly
expanded money circulation not only in the absolute terms of metal
but, more important, in terms of transactions.
There must, therefore, have been an expansion of trade. This, I think,
is in conformity with the force of early English evidence about the
considerable size of merchant wealth in India whether in the seventeenth
or eighteenth century. But why such monetization should subvert any
existing political and economic relationships is difficult to understand.
It is difficult to designate the economy on the eve of the British
conquest as in crisis. What was in crisis was the political apparatus.
What happened, probably, was that the British were able to utilize the
political crisis to assume dominance, while being able to derive full
advantage from controlling a fairly well functioning economy. According
to Sir John Shore’s estimate made in 1789, out of a total agricultural
production of Rs 8.51 crore in Bengal, the land revenue claimed by the
Company accounted for about Rs 2.50 crore.*! Such a high share for
revenue out of the gross agricultural product shows the enormous size
of the fiscal claims which the English not only inherited but enforced
with full vigour. It was, perhaps, unfortunate for India that this was so;
for this all the more cleared the way for the tribute or drain of wealth to
England which both Shore and Cornwallis mourned but accepted as a
law of nature.” It is not only the ways in which the Company revised
80 Mughal India
the mode of assessment and collection through the Permanent, Ryotwari
and Mahalwari Settlements that are important, but also how the revenues
so collected were spent. The drain broke the ‘circuit’ underlying the
functioning of the Indian agrarian economy; and serious consequences
were bound to flow from this critical disruption. They demand a much
closer analysis especially for the latter half of the eighteenth century
than has been applied to them so far.”
There is a further related point to be considered as well. If the land-
tax inherited by the East India Company was akin to rent, rather than a
tax to meet the needs of government, inputs for further expansion of
agricultural production ought to have come out of the land revenue
collections, at least in areas such as the Ryotwari regions where the
land revenue retained its inherited character until the middle of the
nineteenth century. And yet government expenditure (notably salaries
of Company officials as well as the payments to Britain, of Company
dividends, etc.) expanded to eat up the entire revenues, with hardly any
expenditure on public works worth the name. This might or might not
have posed a noticeable contrast to the practice of previous governments;
but the total waste of the rental resources was an enormous drag on the
agrarian economy. The difference of the Permanent Settlement
zamindars to the situation of their ryots was strongly criticized by shore
and others; but criticism could hardly be convincing when it came from
a government which made virtually no return to agriculture from its
own resources when it itself drew the bulk of the rent. This was surely
tantamount to continuing the medieval legacy in the wrong age.

NOTES

1. One can hardly improve upon the discussion of this theme in the late
Eric Stokes, The English Utilitarians and India, Oxford, 1959, pp. 81ff.
2. The statements with regard to the Mughal Empire are well known,
especially through the pages of Bernier. For the Golkunda kingdom, see
Methwold in Relations of Golkunda, ed. W.H. Moreland, Hakluyt Society,
London, 1932, pp. 10-11.
3. Bhim Sen, Nuskha-i Dilkhusha, Br. Mus. or 23, ff. 112b-113b.
4. Risala-i Ahkam-i Arazi, Maulana Azad Library (Aligarh) MSS Abdus
Salam, 331-10, ff. 616-62a.
5. W.H. Moreland, Agrarian System of Moslem India, Cambridge 1929,
p. 2, but see also pp. 67ff.
 The Pre-colonial Social Structure 81
6. Maulana Azad Library (Aligarh) MSS Abdus Salam. Arabiya 331-—
10ff. 43b—6S5a.
7. Cf. Satish Chandra, ‘Some Aspects of Indian Village Society in
Northern India during the 18th century’, JHR, 1, 1974, pp. 51-64.
8. See Dilbagh Singh, JHR (2), pp. 299-311; S.P. Gupta, PIHC, Aligarh,
1975, pp. 235-7; R.P. Rana, JESHR, xvm(3-4), pp. 292-326.
9. Cf. S. Moosvi, JESHR, xi (3), pp. 359-74 for the size of zamindar’s
income.
10. Cf. Irfan Habib, Agrarian System of Mughal India, Bombay, 1963,
pp. 129-31, 157-59.
11. K. Marx and F. Engels, On Colonialism, Moscow, 1976, pp. 35-41.
12. See Irfan Habib, Agrarian System of Mughal India, esp. ch. 1x.
13. W.H. Moreland, India at the Death of Akbar, London, 1920, pp. 19-

14. Morris D. Morris, JESHR, xi(2-3), p. 311.

15. Kingsley Davis, Population of India and Pakistan, Princeton, 1951,
p. 24.
16. Irfan Habib, in Cambridge Economic History of India, 1, Cambridge,
1980, p. 166.
17. Cf. Satish Chandra, ‘Some Institutional Factors in Providing Capital
Inputs for the Improvement and Extension of Cultivation in Medieval India’,
THR, m(1), 1976, pp. 83-98.
18. Minutes of 18 June 1789; Appendix I to the Fifth Report, London,
1812, p. 169.
19. For example, Irfan Habib, Agrarian System of Mughal India, Bombay,
1963, pp. 236-40.
20. J.B. Tavernier, Travels, tr. V. Ball, ed. Crooke, London, 1925, 1, p. 24.
21. Shore’s Minute, Fifth Report, p. 181.
22. Fifth Report, 1812, pp. 183, 493.
23. H. Furber’s John Company at Work, Cambridge, 1951, still remains
the major work on the subject of the eighteenth-century drain, despite its
very strong bias against the Indian nationalists’ critique of the drain.
 8
The Mughal Polity
A Critique of ‘Revisionist’ Approaches

The nature of the pre-colonial Indian state, especially as one could see
it in similarity or opposition to the state in Europe, has exercised a
particular fascination since the seventeenth century, when Frangois
Bernier spelled out his theory about Oriental monarchies, with special
reference to the Mughal Empire and Turkey. It may be recalled that he
saw eastern states as different from the European in two major
particulars: (1) The king here was the owner of the soil, in other words,
the exactor of rent; and (2) those who actually collected the tax-rent
held only temporary tenures, as holders of jagirs or timars, unlike the
hereditary European lords. The temporary tenures, which were a
necessary reflex of state ownership of land led to over-exploitation of
the peasantry, and, therefore, a progressive decline of the economy and
polity. This was in contrast to western Europe, where the limitation of
state right of sovereignty and the dominance of private property over
the land under its protection, were the surest means to progress and
prosperity. Already in Bernier we have the articulation of the contrast
between the Oriental despotic state and the occidental laissez-faire state.
The colonial conquest did not, by inducing greater familiarity, force
an alteration of Bernier’s basic thesis. It could at once be seen that over
much of India, there was little that could be identified as European
landlord’s rent, whereas the most visible claimant to a comparable
position in size was the tax collected by, or in the name of, the ruler.
The theory was wholly taken over by James Mill in his History of British
India, and in his later arguments at East India House, that the Indians
were the most lightly taxed people in the world, since what the state
took from them under the designation of land revenue was the landlords’
rent and not tax.” In 1839, John Crawfurd would speak of his objection
to an ‘Asiatic land-tax’ as ‘a tax which aims at the entire absorption by
the state of all it can seize of the rent of the country, nearly the whole
industry of which is rural’.* Though Mill and Crawfurd were on the
opposite sides in the revenue controversy, their perceptions of the pre-
colonial Indian state and its rights to rent were identical.
 The Mughal Polity 83
The tradition continued till W.H. Moreland (1929) who in his pioneer
essay on the medieval Indian agrarian system recognized
The fact that in the Mogul period the state disposed of from a third to a half
of the gross produce of the land constituted by far the most potent factor in
the distribution of the national income;... [and] that next only to the weather,
the administration was the dominant fact in the economic life of the country.
(italics ours.)*

This naturally assigned to the pre-colonial state an economic role

which distinguished it crucially from its European counterpart. If one
emphasized the selfish nature of the king and the ruling class of the pre-
colonial times, exhibited in a lack of reasonable restraint in taxation, one
would call it ‘despotic’. Where one wished to consider the exaction of
rent as a necessary device for extending disinterested protection, as the
British thought was true in their case, a word like ‘paternalistic’ was
thought more to suit such a state, which, created in pre-colonial times,
continued in its essential fiscal aspect into the colonial. The great
difference in intent, not substance, of the state is well put by Macaulay
when he presented William Bentinck as having ‘infused into Oriental
despotism the Spirit of British freedom’.°
It was inevitable that this portraiture of the pre-colonial state should
receive reconsideration from historians having a standpoint different
from the masters of the Raj. R.P. Tripathi in a thesis submitted in 1926,
argued that there were limits to despotism in ‘the Muslim theory of
sovereignty’.° Ibn Hasan (1933), while disavowing any attempt to
comment or condemn the Mughal polity from the standpoint of ‘modern
institutions’, insisted that the ‘military form’ of the state and the institution
of monarchy were derived from the geography and social institutions
of the country.’ In other words, it did not have an independent, self-
propelled tendency towards total authority. P. Saran (1941), more directly
responding to the Bernier-generated theories, asserted that “our modern
[read: colonial] institutions are not in all respects necessarily an advance
over their predecessors’; he denied that the king in India had been the
owner of the soil, and insisted that ‘the peasants who cultivated the
land were the de facto as well as de jure owners of their respective
plots’.* Saran was also definite that there was little room for over-
taxation in the Mughal system. In all there seemed to be a tendency to
look at the Mughal empire as essentially similar to contemporary European
polities, institutionally committed to a self-limiting sovereignty and
charged with the role of a benevolent protector of society rather than
its principal slave-driver.
84 Mughal India
New questions came to be posed once the colonial ban on Marxist
literature was lifted, and Marxist ideas began increasingly to influence
historians after 1947. As is well known, Marx took over the concept of
the Asiatic rent-exacting state ‘Oriental Despotism’ or, but modified it
heavily by ascribing to it a concern for ‘public works’, chiefly irrigation,
and by integrating with it the institution of village communities.’ At the
same time, he put forward the concept of the state as the protector (and,
therefore, the instrument) of the principal exploiting class in society,
and indicated that the specific relationship of the state with society would
vary, within this basic area, from one ‘mode of production’ to another,
the series comprising ‘the Asiatic, the ancient, the feudal and the modern
bourgeois mode of production’.'? The major interpretation of pre-
colonial history under Marxian influence was that of D.D. Kosambi
(1956). He saw in the Mauryan state of late fourth and third centuries
BC a reflex of the Asiatic state, but argued that there was a decline in
both state power and urbanism during the first millennium. In the
evolution of ‘Indian feudalism’, he saw a weak state, its authority
weakened constantly by the rise of local potentates (“from below’) or
by the installation of king’s officials as territorial potentates (‘from
above’).'' However, it was not clear how the weak, feudal polity
continued in the Delhi Sultanate (thirteenth and fourteenth centuries)
and the Mughai Empire (sixteenth and seventeenth centuries). Kosambi
was obviously on rather unsure ground when he took the very statements
made by Marx for his concept of Oriental Despotism, as evidence of a
‘feudal system’ .'?
A different approach was adopted by scholars who, while largely
seeking a conformity with the Marxist framework, wished first to
describe Mughal polity before classifying it. Satish Chandra (1959)
offered an excellent synthesis of the work already done on sources of
Mughal political history and administration in the introduction to his
work on the Mughal Empire during the first half of the eighteenth
century.'’ In his work on the agrarian system of the Mughal Empire, '4
Irfan Habib (1963) broadly accepted and underlined the centralized
nature of Mughal polity and the large share of the surplus that the Mughal
land-tax represented. On this he presented an impressive amount of
documentary evidence. At the same time he insisted that the centralized
ruling class of the Mughal Empire coexisted, in a relationship of
collaboration and antagonism, with another scattered, localized
hereditary ‘junior’ ruling class, that of the zamindars, who were smaller
co-sharers in the surplus. This assertion was based on a fresh scrutiny
of Mughal historical works and official records supplemented by an
 The Mughal Polity 85
extensive study of local ‘private’ documents.'> The view of the Mughal
agrarian system as a relationship between just two sides, the state and
the peasantry, was thus replaced with the conception of a three-tiered
structure, the tiers being the imperial ruling class, the zamindars and
the peasants. Irfan Habib asserted that ‘the peculiar feature of the state
in Mughal India was that it served not merely as the protective arm of
the exploiting classes, but was itself the principal instrument of
exploitation’.'° This brought him, of course, very close to the concept
of “Oriental Despotism’ (or to the ‘Tributary Mode’ of Samir Amin).
But implicit in his entire work was also the view that the state was
wider than the formal framework of the Mughal Empire, and the
zamindars constituted a centrifugal force. S. Nurul Hasan (1973) with
his classification of ‘primary’, ‘intermediary’ and ‘tributary’ zamindars
was subsequently particularly to reinforce these conclusions.'’ One could
almost say that these views presumed an ‘Oriental Despotism’
superimposed over a ‘feudal’ substratum to create the state of
seventeenth-century India. However, while accepting the force of much
of the evidence presented on the concentration of authority in the Mughal
Empire, I argued (1972) that the very systematization of the polity
represented a control on its arbitrariness, and one could even see in the
Empire a ‘quasi-modern’, rather than an ‘Asiatic state’.'*
While in India these conclusions received considerable acceptance,
and have received continuing confirmation from studies of documentary
material from all parts of India, these views have been subjected to
increasing suspicion by an ever larger set of western scholars.
The starting point of the objections seems to be the rejection of a
view that India could really have developed centralized or systematized
state institutions in view of its cultural and social circumstances. Burton
Stein (1980) raised this objection in a challenging form, when he argued
that the model of the state in south India was that of the “segmentary
state’ located in African tribal society by Aidan Southal.’? The new
discovery was that caste, religion and ethnicity were now the forming
social institutions which occupied much of the space assigned by modern
theory to the state, while the formal state tended to be weak in the same
ratio as distance from the capital, to be unsystematized and
accommodative of local autonomies. It would have been too much to
expect that having found the concept so useful for a particular period,
Burton Stein and others would not assume that it was also applicable to
the rest of India. In the enthusiasm for the new doctrine one could easily
forget that Stein’s imposition of the Segmentary State on south India
itself has not found unanimous acceptance; R. Champakalakshmi (1981)
86 Mughal India
and D.N. Jha (1982) have recorded important caveats and rebuttals.”
The ‘revisionist’ approach to the analysis of Mughal polity arrived
at by ‘Mughal-centred’ ‘historians (Frank Perlin’s expression) has now
taken a number of forms. The first was initiated in asides, rather than in
substance, by C.A. Bayly (1983).”' He acknowledged that “the key note
of Mughal rule had been size and centralization’ .” Yet he also suggested
that ‘the previous writing (on the Mughal Empire) has been too
preoccupied with the state at the expense of the corporate groups which
constituted it’; in other words, that unlike post-Reformation Europe,
the state in India was not ‘the unchallenged political form’. He saw in
the decline of the Mughal Empire a positive element, where these
‘corporate groups’ or ‘social classes’ played their role through the
‘commercialization’ and ‘decentralization’ of Mughal polity in the
eighteenth century, in extending agriculture and intensifying commerce,
and then shifted their loyalties to the British, as the most—for them—
beneficial power. The British conquest was thus an Indo-British affair—
the culmination of Bayly’s ‘continuity’ thesis.*? Implicit in this thesis
was a favourable assessment of the performance of the regional elite,
forming the eighteenth-century transition states, as if decentralization
and regionalization were the historical objectives of the Mughal Empire:
there was, therefore, no real decline.**
Bayly’s thesis was supported by Muzaffar Alam (1986), who took
over the glorification of the permanent jagir and revenue farming (ijara)
as indices not of collapse of government and equity, but of regionalization
and commercialization—and, therefore, of ‘growth’ .*° He has now made
the gratifying supplementary discovery that, but for the work of western
scholars from Bernard Cohn (1962) to Bayly and André Wink (1986),
there would be no emphasis laid on eighteenth-century regional economy
and the ‘local social context of politics’.
A second line of approach has been adopted by André Wink (1986),
which in its conclusions loosely meshes with the Bayly argument. Wink
has had access only to material in Marathi (and not apparently even to
the extensive Persian records of the Marathas), but he starts with the
assumption that ‘Mughal sources’ consist of only a few chronicles which
‘merely hide behind a fagade of moralistic or religious condemnation’.
Once he has so easily wished away the mass of Persian and Rajasthani
documentation that “Mughal historians’ have been using, he has no
difficulty in first assuming a universalist Islamic theory of sovereignty,
which allegedly applied to the Mughal Empire, then emphasizing the
actuality of the power of ‘the intermediary gentry or zamindari stratum’,
and finally seeing the constant reconciliation of the two by means of
 The Mughal Polity 87
the process of fitna, an Arabic word meaning sedition, to which Wink
gave so wide a range of meanings (all his own) to make it virtually an
equivalent of policy or adjustment. He was so led away by his own
theory that to him the centralization and systematization of the Mughal
Empire became virtually illusory, its expansion achieved by fitna, its
‘decline’ (to be always put within inverted commas) the consummation
of its expansion. ‘The Mughal Empire’ merely ‘represented a form of
sovereignty, a balancing system of continually shifting rivalries and
alliances—At no stage did it transcend fitna’.?” One begins to ask why
Wink did not put the words ‘empire’ and ‘expansion’ also within inverted
commas, and have done with it.
If there were any peaks of mystification left unscaled by Wink, these
have been ascended by Frank Perlin (1985). Like Wink, Perlin’s main
documentary base is Marathi (not inclusive of Persian records of the
Marathas); Wink’s cult of fitna is here paralleled by that of watan
(another Arabic word) seen by Perlin as the basic factor behind state
formation.** The picture of the Mughal Empire, its centralization and
systematization, drawn by ‘Mughal-centred’ historians is dismissed in
a few sentences and footnotes as being the work of those who cannot
relate text to context, and ‘fish’ out data from different areas of individual
complexity to create an illusory uniformity.” The contradictions in the
Mughal agrarian system, derived by Irfan Habib from a large mass of
documents, are described without further ado as contradictions not of
fact but ‘of our organization of knowledge about the state’ .*° All this, in
spite of Perlin not himself caring to present any evidence about the
polity, economy and society of the Mughal empire.
If one blows away the smoke of the ‘revisionist’ verbiage, there
remains precious little fact that can take us anywhere beyond the three-
tier relationship of the Empire—zamindar-—peasantry, which since the
early 1960s has been the cornerstone of conventional Mughal
historiography. Bayly’s ‘corporate groups’, Wink’s fitna and Perlin’s
watan are all different ways of defining and describing the position of
the intermediate class in this triangular relationship. On the Mughal
state itself no new light has been shed, no illumination gained. This may
justify the recent bitter observation of Burton Stein that the history of
‘the mightiest of the pre-colonial kingdoms of India has not been
substantially revised... and there appears to be no disposition on the
part of most Mughalists to do so’. In the manner of one finding a useful
scapegoat he locates the cause of this stultification in ‘the inertia induced
by the siege mentality of Aligarh’!*' The reason, of course, is not in
anyone’s mentality, but in the fact that fresh explorations of documentary
88 Mughal India
evidence have only tended to confirm and underline the standard
propositions about the elements of centralization and systematization in
the Mughal polity and the position of the zamindar class. There may be
new readings of village communities or monetization or legal systems;
but nothing has come up even remotely to challenge the basic perceptions
about mansab and jagir.
The controversy about the nature of the pre-colonial Indian state
may be of some value, if it enables us to elucidate better the basic features
of the Mughal Empire, especially in comparison to its eighteenth-century
successors. Here it may be well to remind ourselves that there are two
separate problems to consider. The question of centralization must be
kept distinct from that of the plenitude of state power. On the one hand,
a state with a low quantum of power within society may be extensive
and centralized. On the other, a small decentralized state may enjoy
unchallenged supremacy over society within its constricted borders. It
is obviously an elementary error to suppose that a historian who finds
that the Mughal Empire was centralized and had a high degree of
administrative unity must also be assumed to assert that the Mughal
Empire was to be put in the same class as a Post-Reformation European
Enlightened Despotism. And yet this accusation is implicit in Bayly as
well as all the succeeding ‘revisionists’.
On the issue of centralization, two objections to its actuality within
the Mughal Empire have been put forward. The first raised by Gerard
Fussman (1982/1990) relates to the problem of communications. He
presents a map based on speeds of relay-couriers in the Mughal Empire,
and then infers from this the necessary “existence of local representatives
of the king, who had at their disposal a large amount of power’. The
inference is drawn in respect of the Mauryan Empire, but it would be
most directly relevant to the Mughals. One could most easily retort that
speed of communications did not increase between Akbar’s time and
the installation of the telegraph in about the middle of the nineteenth
century, and yet it would be hard to argue that the East India Company’s
government in India in Lord William Bentinck’s time was decentralized
in any recognizable sense of the word. As far as the Mughal Empire is
concerned, it is enough to see documents, such as letters from governors
(notably, Aurangzeb’s letters as viceroy of the Deccan, in Adab-i
Alamgiri), the reports of the proceedings at the governor’s headquarters
(e.g. Akhbarat of Prince Azam’s headquarters at Ahmadabad), and the
news reports (e.g. the wagai of the Deccan and of Ajmer) that have
survived to show the plenitude of power that the emperor reserved for
himself and for central ministers. The discussion on the degree of Mughal
 The Mughal Polity 89
centralization must surely rest on a scrutiny of such documentation.
The only declared support for the revisionist approach by looking at
details of seventeenth-century Mughal documentation that I know of
has come from Chetan Singh (1988). Basically his argument is to
challenge the view that ‘on account of frequent transfers the Mughal
bureaucracy was unable to develop regional moorings’.* He asserts
that officials appointed as governors of Punjab ‘belonged to areas lying
within it’, and mentions the names of Ghazi Beg Tarkhan, Dilawar
Khan Kakar, and Khwaja Main (sic).*° Of these, however, Ghazi Beg
Tarkhan ‘belonged’ to Sind, not Punjab, and was governor of Thatta at
the beginning of Jahangir’s reign; he then held successively governorship
of Qandahar (1606-7, and he died there in 1612-13). He was governor
of Multan for only a short while in Jahangir’s second regnal year.
Dilawar Khan (Ibrahim Khan) Kakar was an Afghan. After a brief term
in Lahore, he is not known to have been posted in Punjab at all. In
1617-18 he was appointed governor of Kashmir, where he died in
1619-20. ‘Khwaja Main’(by this must be meant Khwaja Muin Khan)
was simply deputy governor of Lahore in 1656-7, when this
appointment ceased. Nothing else is known about him.*° How Chetan
Singh assumed that all the three ‘belonged’ to Punjab is a mystery.
Moreover, he thinks that Lahore and Multan provinces constituted one
region (Multan then included northern Sind as well); they might for
him, but there is no reason to believe that the Mughals thought so. For
them, the two were distinct provinces, with totally different sets of
officials. They could not have known that Ranjit Singh and the British
would one day make Lahore and Multan (minus upper Sind) into one
unit. This disposes of most ‘appointments’ in the same region that
Chetan Singh pinpoints.*’ As for those to whom he ascribes regional
affiliations, one can easily see that this has been done by ignoring other
postings received by these very officials.
Najabat Khan Mirza Shuja in fact not only twice held the governorship
of Multan, but also twice held the faujdari of Koil (Aligarh) in Agra
suba and died in 1663-4 as subedar of Malwa!** Qulij Khan, twice
subedar of Multan, served also as subedar of Delhi, Allahabad,
Qandahar, Lahore and Kabul. Said Khan Bahadur, twice subedar of
Lahore, also served twice as subedar of Kabul and once of Qandahar
and Bihar. Lashkar Khan, twice subedar of Multan, also served as subedar
of Kashmir, Thatta and Bihar. Murshid Quli Khan, whose
appointments in Lahore and Multan Chetan Singh refers to, served as
mir atish (artillery commander) at the court and from 1652 to his death
in 1658, was the diwan first of Balaghat and of the whole of the Mughal
90 Mughal India
Deccan.*’ Any regional attachment of these officers, once we examine
their whole careers, is hard to discern. Rather, what strikes one is the
ease with which they would be shifted to distant areas, from Kabul to
Bihar, or from the Punjab to the Deccan.
If one can construct ‘regionalization of the administrative
functionaries’ in the face of such contrary evidence, and in the absence
of any positive one worth the name, we can only imagine that one is
working to a brief and not going to the sources with an open mind.
The second question relates to the degree of power of the state (and
not just of the centre) over society. This, as we have seen, is about what
power the state, centralized or not, exercised within a given territory. It
may not matter for this purpose whether the given territory, say Gujarat,
was administered from Ahmadabad or Agra. We are here concerned
with how much of the rural surplus was taken by the state, how much
did it interfere in commerce or community life, and so on. In the
economic sphere the central question is the nature and size of the land-
tax.*' That the modes of assessment of land-tax and customary shares
of the zamindars varied from area to area was well recognized in
conventional historiography (as well as, richly enough, in Mughal
documentation). The key issue is whether there was any substantial
region in the Mughal Empire, where the land-tax was not seen as the
major claim on peasants’ surplus. On this matter, the ‘revisionists’ have
been strangely silent. For here the Persian, the Rajasthani, the Marathi
and the English documentation is universally in agreement: the ‘text’ is
at peace with the ‘context’. A state which claimed such a heavy share
out of agricultural produce, as Moreland saw, could not just be a marginal
social institution, or one among many, as we are now being told to
suppose.
As for other limiting features, such as that the Mughal Empire
was not a legislating state, that is creating its own law independent
of and suspending customary and religious laws, nor a state
committed to economic growth beyond measures designed to lead
to future tax growth, these limitations have never been doubted by
historians. In fact, this was implicit in the traditional view that full
sovereignty in the sense of complete legislative control over society
is the produce of modern European history and cannot be looked
for in non-European pre-modern states.** No historian had ever laid
claim that Mughal polity was in these aspects the equal of the
European post-Reformation state. And if the ‘revisionists’ have this
in mind only, there should be no ground for disagreement with
anyone. But the picture of the Mughal Empire in its classic phase,
 The Mughal Polity 91
as a centralized polity, geared to systematization and the creation of
an all-imperial bureaucracy, would still remain unshaken.

NOTES

1. Francois Bernier, Travels in the Mughal Empire ap 1656-1668, tr.

A. Constable, 2nd edn revised by V.A. Smith, Oxford, 1916, pp. 223-38.
2. James Mill, History of British India, 2nd edn, London, 1820, vol. I, pp.
277-8; and his evidence before the Commons Select Committee in 1831, quoted
by E. Stokes, The English Utilitarians and India, Oxford, 1959, p. 91.
3. Quoted by Stokes, ibid., p. 62.
4. W.H. Moreland, Agrarian System of Moslem India, Allahabad reprint,
Md p. XL
5. Obituary of William Bentinck quoted by V.A. Smith in Oxford History
of India, Oxford, 1918, p. 657.
6. Some Aspects of Muslim Administration, 2nd rev. edn, Allahabad, 1956,
pp. 1-6.
7. Ibn Hasan, Central Structure of the Mughal Empire, New Delhi, 1970,
PP: 23.9334.
8. P. Saran, The Provincial Government of the Mughals, Allahabad, 1941,
pp. xx, 333.
9. Marx first spelt out his ideas on the pre-colonial Indian state and society
in ‘British Rule in India’, article published in New York Tribune, 1853 (Marx
and Engels, On Colonialism, Moscow, 1976, pp. 35-41).
10. See F. Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State,
Moscow, 1948, esp. ch. 1x. The list of the successive mode first appears in
Marx’s Preface to his contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, orig.
pub. 1859.
11. D.D. Kosambi, An Introduction to the Study of Indian History,
Bombay, 1956.
LZ. “OIG... Dy oo:
13. Satish Chandra, Parties and Politics at the Mughal Court, 1707-1740,
Aligarh, 1959, pp. xv-L.
14. Irfan Habib, The Agrarian System of Mughal India, Bombay, 1963.
15. See specially ibid., pp. 136-89.
16: Tord: p: 257.
17. Saiyid Nurul Hasan, Thoughts on Agrarian Relations in Mughal India,
New Delhi, 1973, pp. 18-40.
92 Mughal India
18. Presidential Address, Medieval India Section, PJHC,
Muzaffarpur session, 1972; rev. version, JRAS, London, 1978, no. 1,
pp. 38-49.
19. Burton Stein, Peasant, State and Society of Medieval South India,
Delhi, 1980, p. 23.
20. R. Champakalakshmi, JESHR, xvm(3-4), pp. 411-26; D.N. Jha, JHR,
vin(1—2), pp. 74-94.
21. C.A. Bayly, Rulers, Townsmen and Bazaars: North Indian Society in
the Age of British Expansion, 1770-1870, Cambridge, 1983.
22. Ibid., p. 465.
23. IDid.. Pads
24. Bayly sums up his arguments conveniently in his conclusion (ibid., pp.
458-72).
25. Muzaffar Alam, The Crisis of Empire in Mughal North India: Awadh
and the Punjab, 1707-48, Delhi, 1986, esp. p. 318.
26. IESHR, xxvun(1) (1991), p. 43 and n. It sheds interesting light on
consciously ‘todate’ historiography that Muzaffar Alam in his list of eight
authors should have overlooked all works of Indian scholars in the same
genre, such as N.K. Sinha (on Bengal), Asok Sen and Nikhiles Guha
(Mysore), Raghubir Sinh (Malwa), Ashin Das Gupta (Surat), S.P. Gupta
and G.D. Sharma (Rajasthan), V.V. Diwekar (Maharashtra) and Indu Banga
(Punjab), to name a few only.
27. André Wink, Land and Sovereignty in India. Agrarian Society
and Politics under the Eighteenth Century Maratha Svarjya, Cambridge,
1986,p. 34.
28. Frank Perlin, ‘State Formation Reconsidered’, Modern Asian Studies,
xix (3), pp. 415-80.
29. Ibid., pp. 418ff., esp. pp. 419 and n, 420 and n, 423 and n.
30. Ibid., p. 427 and n.
31. South Asia Research, x(2), November 1990, p. 125-6.
32. Gerard Fussman, “Central and Provincial Administration in Ancient
India’, JHR, xiv (1-2), pp. 54-6, 67 (map). Fussman’s article originally
appeared in Annales, économies, sociétés, civilisations (1982).
33. Chetan Singh, ‘Centre and Periphery in the Mughal State: The
Case of Seventeenth Century Panjab’, Modern Asian Studies 22(2) (1988),
pp. 299-318.
34. Ibid., p. 304.
35. Ibid., p. 305.
36. No authorities for statements made here are separately cited, because
the references can be traced by looking up the names in the index to my
Apparatus of Empire. Award of Ranks, Offices and Titles of the Mughal Nobility
 The Mughal Polity 93
(1574-1658), Delhi, 1985. Curiously, Chetan Singh makes no mention of
the lists of Governors of Lahore and Multan as well as other subas worked
out by Irfan Habib (Medieval India, 1, pp. 91-4) and by me (ibid., pp. 96-
133; and Medieval India, 1, pp. 80-112).
37. Chetan Singh, ‘Centre and Periphery’, pp. 306-7.
38. For his last appointment, Alamgirnama, Bib. Ind., p. 873, for the other
details Apparatus of Empire (indexed refs).
39. For the careers of all these officials, whose cases Chetan Singh, pp.
306-7, cites as indicators of regional affiliations, see Apparatus of Empire
(indexed refs).
40. Chetan Singh, “Centre and Periphery’, p. 317.
41. ‘At the heart of the Indian administration lay the land revenue system’
(Eric Stokes, The English Utilitarians and India, Delhi, 1959/1982, p. 81).
42. I may here quote my own remark on these limitations of the Mughal
state, in JRAS, 1978, no. I, p. 47; ‘If it [the Mughal Empire] had some rudiments
of an unwritten constitution, it yet did not claim for itself the legislative power
and functions that are the hall-marks of a modern state.’
 9

Political Structures of the Islamic

Orient in the Sixteenth and
Seventeenth Centuries

It is possible to place the four major empires of Asia, apart from China,
during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries into a single category
according to three distinct and separate modes of classification. First of
all, the Ottomans (West Asia), the Safavids (Iran), the Uzbeks (Central
Asia), and the Mughals (India) can be seen as belonging to the category
of Islamic states; and Islam (and the law, polity and culture historically
associated with it) can be regarded as one of the distinguishing features
of this class of states. Second, one may adopt, with Francois Bernier,
the frankly Eurocentric view that these states shared among themselves
a negative characteristic, namely they lacked the merits of European
law and politics, especially full-scale private property in land. Finally,
there is the classification which flows from the question asked by Marx:
Was there something common to these state systems that inhibited their
societies from growing into capitalism? So stated, these classifications
appear simplistic, even banal; I propose to show, however, that studies
on the lines opened by these simple questions can nevertheless give us
insights, just as they also compel us to offer many qualifications and
even reservations to the standard theories.

The Islamic associations of the four empires are so obvious that one
need not labour the point. The crucial question is whether Islam was a
substratum or only a veneer. It must be admitted that these states set out
to enforce the sharia as it was understood by the school that carried
official sanction—any of the four schools of jurists among Sunnis in
three of the four empires, while Safavid Iran followed the sharia as
interpreted by the Shiite theologians. By and large, it gave a universal
civil and criminal law (with only minor shades of differences) to all
 Political Structures of the Islamic Orient 95
these countries. The qazi, however corrupt and however frequently the
butt of ridicule, yet represented a unique legal universality over a region
extending from the Bay of Bengal to the Atlantic. Conversely, this
universality meant that, however absolute, the state lacked the power to
legislate. The Tudor monarchy, with its control over Parliament and its
legislation, was thus surely far more absolute or despotic than any Great
Mughal.
The sharia not only delimited the sovereignty of the state in this
crucial manner; it also tended to define more positively how this could
be constituted. During the first two centuries after the death of the
Prophet (AD 632), the concept of the khilafat (caliphate) had taken
shape, based not on the Quran,' but on the political history of Islam
during the period. The institution of the caliphate, as it decayed after the
ninth century, became more and more the object of theological or
scholarly definition (as in Mawardi): who could be a caliph and what
the caliph could or could not do would be rigorously laid down. As the
caliph’s place came to be taken increasingly by kings (sultans), the
latter could be visualized as deputies of the caliphs, so to speak; if so,
they could not have any powers which the caliph did not enjoy. At best,
Muslim rulers could begin claiming to be caliphs themselves as was
done by the Ottomans and, more indifferently, by the Mughals. Only
the Safavids claimed a distinctly higher position—that of the
representative of the imam. But when Akbar, the Mughal emperor, in
1579 obtained from his doctors a declaration (mahzar) that he could sit
in judgement over various interpretations of Muslim law, this created
much indignation among the devout and helped to bring about a revolt
which almost shook his throne.
None the less, it is true that political tradition within Islam too was wv

of historical growth, and the powers and pretensions—and not only the
nominal titles of the sultans—grew with time. Other traditions like the
ancient Iranian, the Turkic and Mongol were either invoked or absorbed,
and it is possible to say that the sultans after Timur took the Mongol
Khans rather than the Samanids for their models. This brings me to the
consideration of another important strand in the political and social
history of the Islamic world—the conflict between nomadism and
civilization.
If one looks at the physical map of the Old World, one finds starting
from China north of the Great Wall, a huge band of steppe and desert
generally heading west, while tending slightly to the south. The Gobi
and Takla Makan deserts turn into the arid grasslands of Central Asia
and southern Russia, after the band crosses the Tienan Shan range.
96 Mughal India
Sweeping across Iran with its waterless plateau, it encompasses the
Arabian desert; and, then, across the Red Sea and the Nile, it forms the
great Sahara, dividing Africa into two. In this brief description we have
not been able to list the many smaller deserts and steppes identified and
named by geographers. Suffice it to say that this vast waterless band
with deserts and grasslands has been the largest known reservoir of
nomadic peoples. As it cut right across the Islamic world it made it
consist essentially of deserts and oases, the biggest of the latter being
the Fertile Cresent (Egypt, Syria, and Iraq), followed closely by
Mavraunnahar (itself divided into the three ‘Oases’ of Ferghana, the
Zarafshan valley and Khwarizm or Khiva).
The two regions which offer exceptions to this infestation of steppe
and desert are India and the Balkans, both of which were brought under
the ambit of Islam in the secondary phase of its expansion (after the
twelfth century); their populations also remained non-Muslim in the
larger part. For the history of the core area of the Islamic world, in
geieral, the nomad-city syndrome seems to set the red thread; and it is
the particular virtue of Ibn Khaldun, the great historian of the fourteenth
century, to have perceived this fact and to have built a theory of historical
development on its basis.?
Historians often see the steppe element as a dynamic source of much
of Islamic polity. The Arabs themselves were, after all, desert nomads.
Founders of all the dynasties of the four empires we are concerned with
here, the Ottomans (from Seljuqs), the Uzbeks (from Mongols of the
Golden Horde) and the Mughals (from the Chaghtai Horde) had steppe
ancestors; and Isma‘il, the founder of the Safavid dynasty, had his
following initially among the Turkoman nomads, so that Turkish
remained for long the language of the Safavid court. It is easy, as we
look closer, to drill holes in this generalization. Paul Wittek* has already
shown that the impulse behind the rise of the Ottoman state even in its
earliest phase was not of nomadic origin, but lay in a combination of
the Ghazi tradition with the conditions of government associated with
Higher Islam. The Mughal Empire in India certainly displayed no feature
that could be identified as direct importations from nomadism.
Going beyond this, even the widespread attribution of the origins of
Islam and its success as one of great nomadic movements needs
qualification. The Prophet himself was not a nomad but a merchant of
the Quraish tribe, which was a settled community of the Arabian
peninsula’s biggest town, Mecca. The Quran, in a well-known passage,
doubts the bedouin’s genuineness of belief.* Clearly, Islam both subdued
and utilized the nomad; its own urbanism® saved it from the fate of
 Political ‘Structures of ithe Islamic Orient 97
other nomadic traditions, that of a total alysorption among the conquered
civilized societies.
Yet, the fact remains that the bedouin formed the bulk of Arab soldiers
who demolished the Iranian and (in part) the Byzantine Empire. So
also the fact that the successive nomadic conquests by the Seljuqs, the
Qara Khitai, and the Mongols,
all originated from the nomadic reservoir
of the Asian steppes. The infiltration of nomadic notions and institutions
was thus bound continuously to modify the political tradition and
‘applied’ law in the Islamic world.
It is possible to see the influence of nomadism in the evolution of the
concept of an implicit state property in land. As Kovalevsky noticed
long ago, Islamic law has a fairly well-developed concept of private
property in land (as behoves an urban tradition codified so largely in
Iran).° The nomads, on the other hand, could only have a concept of
— tribal possession of a territory; and individual possession of a particular
strip of land had no meaning for the bedouin or other nomadic peoples.’
A conquered territory belonged to the tribe, and was not divisibie among
its individuals. The personal iqta of early Islam was thus contrasted to
territory belonging to the entire Islamic (or rather Arab-Islamic)
community, of which the caliph was the head. Thus the iqta now came
to mean merely a temporary assignment of the claims to surplus from
the land which were thought to vest in the caliph. The doctrine of state
property could seldom be distinctly enunciated, in view of the lack of
its reconcilability with Islamic law; but it came to arise in practice
nevertheless.
This implicit concept was nomadic; in itself it could have little
significance but for its being combined with the purely sedentary notion
of land-tax. The classic Islamic concept of kharaj (land-tax on non-
Muslims ranging from a fifth to half of the produce) and ‘ushr (tithe
on Muslims), seems quite alien to the later development of the land-
tax. ‘Ushr disappeared, except as a concessionary arrangement with
favoured elements; and Muslim peasants too had normally to pay
kharaj. Finally, the kharaj approached or exceeded half of the produce
wherever this could be realized. In other words, it tended to
approximate to the surplus, or potential rent. This enlargement of the
state demand could take place only by a corresponding destruction of
private property; and it is extremely tempting to see in this process
the evolution of an idea initially germinated by tribal nomads: the
tribal possession over land converted into state property. This
development was crucial for what may be regarded as the common
fiscal feature of all the four states we are considering, an identification,
98 Mughal India
which so far as we can see, grew within the fold of Islam under repeated
nomadic tribal impulses.*
But if the Islamic background provided such a unifying factor in the
fiscal system of all these four states, we must remember that the Ottoman
Empire and, still more, the Mughal Empire, had large non-Muslim
populations. Even if one were to attribute the Ottoman control over the
Balkans to simple military subjugation through an outward expansion
of Islam (though this too is questionable, since the Ottomans conquered
the Balkans first, and the Islamic lands outside Anatolia only later), it is
difficult to say the same about the Mughal Empire, which did not have
any Islamic hinterland at all. The successful implantation in India, and
possibly in the Balkans, of forms of political organization developed in
the Islamic world, must then be regarded as a singular historic
achievement. Once formed, the institutions of ‘Islamic’ polity offered
immense advantages to those at the head of power. In this sense it is
even possible to say that the Rajput states of north India in the fifteenth
and sixteenth centuries or the contemporary Vijayanagar Empire of the
south were ‘Islamic’ polities though they did not accept the Islamic
faith, while accepting its tradition in crucial matters like taxation and
state property.” The advantage of these Islamic institutions to a Hindu
ruling class was just as great as was that of the caste system among its
Hindu subjects for the Muslim ruling class, which thereby derived cheap
artisan labour for its own use.

I
With such features as we have touched upon, how far were these Islamic
states different from those that developed with the absolute monarchies
in Europe during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries? The question
was asked and sought to be answered by Francois Bernier in his
remarkable description of Oriental states and societies on the basis of
personal observations in the East during the twelve years from 1656-
68.!°

Bernier came to India after visiting Constantinople, Syria and Egypt

and was familiar with the conditions of the Ottoman Empire. Thereafter
he spent nine years in India. He was, therefore, no bird of passage, no
superficial sightseer. What gives additional weight to his interpretation
of the Orient is his scientific background and his association with the
new philosophical school of which Pierre Gassendi was a notable
representative. Earlier European travellers of the sixteenth century, like
Bernier’s own fellow-countryman, Pyrard de Laval, had based their
 Political Structures of the Islamic Orient 99
assumption of European superiority on the well-known fact that
Christianity was a superior religion; otherwise, in commerce and crafts
the people in India were similar to them or even more skilled." In
Bernier’s eyes, on the other hand, European superiority lay essentially
in its science, arts, technology, property laws and social system.
Furthermore, not only was Europe ahead, but the Orient was receding.
Bernier located the major difference between the West and East, in the
nature of the state. European states recognized private property and so
created all the stability, security and public welfare that private property
generates. [t was otherwise with oriental states like those of the Ottomans
and the Mughals. Their indifference to private property was causing a
steady devastation of the economies and societies of these empires: ‘I
have carefully compared the condition of European States, where that
right [of private property] is recognized, with the condition of those
countries where it is not known, and am persuaded that the absence of
it among the people is injurious to the best interest of the Sovereign
himself.’ !?
Specifically speaking, the absence of private property, according to
Bernier, affected the oriental states in the following manner. The king,
being the owner of the soil, distributed the right to collect taxes over
particular territories to assignees or tax-farmers who had temporary
tenures. These assignments were known in the Ottoman Empire as
timar, and in the Mughal Empire as jagir. Being temporary, the attitude
of the assignees to the land under their jurisdiction could be summed up
as follows:

The Timariots, Governors, and Revenue Contractors on their part reason in

this manner: Why should the neglected state of this land create uneasiness
in our minds? And why should we expend our own money and time to
render it fruitful? We may be deprived of it in a single moment, and our
exertions would benefit neither ourselves nor our children. Let us draw from
the soil all the money we can, though the peasants should starve or abscond,
and we should leave it, when commanded to quit, a dreary wilderness."

This, said Bernier, was at the root of the visible ruin of eastern
states. Bernier’s theory has received much attention from historians of
the Mughal Empire, notably because he gave a fairly accurate depiction
of the jagir system. The Empire was indeed divided up into the jagirs or
assignments held by nobles in lieu of pay under their mansabs, or
numerical ranks, that also defined the size and composition of the military
contingents they were to maintain. In a sense the lands reserved for the
king’s own revenues, called khalisa, could be termed his jagirs. The
100 Mughal India
jagirs, including the khalisa, were constantly transferred, each period
of assignment on average barely exceeding two or three years.'* There
has, therefore, been a strongly held view that the jagir system brought
about the collapse of the Mughal Empire as a viable economic system,
just as Bernier had suggested.'°
But to generalize this view for all the Islamic empires would
overlook the fact that the other three empires of our period did not
have a system of assignment-transfers working as rigorously as in
the Mughal Empire. Take, for instance, the Ottoman timar. The timar,
or ‘military fief’, was transferable only in name; a timariot was not
removed so long as he brought troops; and the son usually succeeded
his father. Centralization of the grant of timars in the sixteenth century
had the result only of creating large estates at the cost of the small
ones, leading to disaffection among the timariots, which made some
small timariots leaders of peasant uprisings in Anatolia.'® There would
be little here to support the Bernier thesis of devastation of peasant by
‘temporary’ timariots.
If we turn to the Safavid Empire the picture is almost the same. The
counterpart of jagir in that empire was the twyu/. Bernier’s contemporary,
Chardin, reported that the tuyuls were virtually the property of those to
whom they were assigned; and wherever the holder expected to hold
the land in his lifetime and transfer it to his son, the peasants were
correspondingly better treated.'’ Rapid transfers of tuyuls appear, in
fact, to have been very rare.
As far as the Uzbek Empire is concerned, the Mughal jagir system
was so alien to its organization that when in the 1640s Nazar (Nadir)
Muhammad, the Khan of Bokhara, tried to imitate the Mughals and
transfer his governors and commanders from thieir territories, he brought
about a rebellion against himself, which ultimately resulted in his
expulsion from the Khanate.'*
It seems, then, fairly clear that the rigorous system of temporary
assignments was a characteristic feature of the Mughal Empire alone,
but of not of the other three empires, where transfer and resumption
of fiefs was in the nature of an ultimate weapon and only occasionally
exercised.
This would remove much of the universality in Bernier’s explanation
of the decline of oriental empires. What he says, then, was at best true
of India alone as far as the jagir system is concerned; as to its
consequences even in India there remains some room for doubt.!®
While the agrarian aspect of Bernier’s theory has excited the most
interest, it must be remembered that he extended the ill-effects of
 Political Structures of the Islamic Orient 101
‘Oriental Despotism’ to trade and industry as well. Merchants’ wealth
was subject to usurpation and confiscation; so they had to hide their
wealth and hoard treasure (and so were not about to use seek it capital).
The craftsmen were unable to apply themselves because they could
always be forced to work at low wages.” Thus the contempt for private
property led to a constriction of commerce and crafts as well.
While abuses of the kind Bernier mentions can be illustrated from
individual instances of oppression and injustice, there seems to be no
reason to believe that the merchants were not allowed to have private
property or that the artisans were semi-servile. Halil Inalcik has shown
how. commerce expanded in the Ottoman Empire, and Irfan Habib has
referred to the growth of merchant capital in India aided by institutions
like deposit banking and insurance.”' Jt can hardly be said that the oriental
despots. throttled: commerce by continuous confiscation of merchant
property, or that such confiscations were a characteristic feature of the
Asian empires, we are studying.
In other words, Bernier has given us brilliant answers to a cogent
question; but the answers tend to become less and less convincing as
we look closer into the evidence.

il
Bernier’s work won considerable readership in Europe and much of
European writing on “Oriental Despotism’ down to the nineteenth
century bore marks of his influence.” Karl Marx read him in 1853 and
was certainly impressed by the acuteness of his observations. Yet, Marx’s
own perception of the oriental state was intrinsically different; with all
its imperfections it may be said to make a fundamental break with the
earlier traditions, though Marx had little before him except for some
information directly or indirectly derived from reports of British
administrators in India.
The essential question asked by Marx was whether there were
any social and political obstacles to growth (particularly, growth
into capitalism) in oriental societies, as a result of which their
civilization seemed to have atrophied. Marx found the answer in a
combination of two institutions, the village community and ‘Oriental
Despotism’. The village community, a primitive ‘republic’, was based
on a hereditary division of labour (e.g. caste), and by its stable but
pliant nature enabled the surplus it produced to be extracted by the
external power, the despotic ruling class. Land-tax and rent, therefore,
coincided. The tax-rent was usually taken in kind; it was then sold
102 Mughal India
by the state, since money economy and commerce existed only
outside the village communities. The ‘economic’ basis of the extra-
economic coercion by the despot lay in the irrigation works that the
state provided to the village communities.”
The cycle of production and re-production was here completed
without any need of capitalistic intervention. More, since the villages
remained autonomous and almost amoebic units, the emergence and
fall of individual dynasties or empires had no significance for the
system, which expanded or contracted, but never grew.
Marx’s model of the oriental state has an inner logical consistency
that is most persuasive; it is accordingly open to extreme
oversimplification as in the hands of Karl A. Wittfogel (Oriental
Despotism, 1957). But there are a number of factual weaknesses in
the theory. The ‘village community’ of Marx is largely an ideal
reconstructed by British administrators who tended to ignore the
realities of internal stratification within the village just as they tended
partly to overlook the universality of individual landholding existing
within it. Furthermore the village community model of Marx could
hardly apply to the Ottoman Empire and Iran which has no caste
system to supply a hereditary, fixed division of labour.** In most
parts of India, moreover, the peasants normally paid rent in money
and only partly or occasionally in grain, so that grain-rent cannot be
taken to be as universal a basis for the fiscal systems of oriental
states as Marx had thought. As for the state structures proper, Marx
wrote too little about them to enable one to argue with him over this
crucial aspect of oriental polities. It may, however, be said that
irrigation works were not very important sectors of state activity in
the four empires that we are discussing, with the possible exception
of Safavid Iran. In the north Indian plains, at any rate, irrigation was
largely looked after by the peasants themselves, mainly though the
digging of wells, though the state too laid out canals.
If many of the perceptions that Marx obtained must now be
rejected or heavily qualified, three essential features of his ‘Asiatic
mode’ seem still valid in relation to the four empires with which we
are concerned: first, the practical identity of tax with rent; second,
the identity of the rent-appropriators and the bureaucracy (this point
is implicit rather than explicit in Marx’s writings); and, finally, the
parasitic nature of the urban economy based on the expendiiure of
the state’s tax-income.
Are these features sufficient to set the oriental states apart from
the European absolutist states of the sixteenth and seventeenth
 Political Structures of the Islamic Orient 103
centuries? In the absolutist European states we have the rent in
more or less pure form, it being appropriated by individual
landowners and not by the state; hence follows a separation of state
bureaucracy and the landowning aristocracy; a standing army paid
directly by the state replaces landowners’ retainers; and an urban
economy arises marked by the growing importance of the middle
classes. The oriental states by their structures appear to have inhibited
such developments within the societies they controlled; but whether
this led to a total absence of such features is another question.”
I have discussed successively the three types of major analytical
framework in which the western, central and South Asian states of
the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries can be studied. Their unities
and specificities must be set by the side of contemporary systems
in other parts of the world to understand them better. In other words,
there has to be an inward as well as outward comparison of the
structures of their polities. What has been offered above represents
merely preliminary suggestions towards developing a suitable basis
for classifying (or trying to classify) pre-modern states, with the
four empires of the Islamic Orient seen as a possible single category.
No sure success can be claimed for such an enterprise; it is only
claimed that an attempt to explore the possibility can yet yield a
number of important new perceptions of the general or individual
characteristics of the polities of these empires.

NOTES

1. Except for one verse asking the faithful to ‘obey God, His Prophet
and those in authority among you’, the Quran has almost nothing to offer
on the nature and functions of sovereignty.
2. Cf. Muhsin Mahdi, /bn Khaldun’s Philosophy of History, Chicago,
1964, pp. 193ff.
3. The Rise of the Ottoman Empire, Royal Asiatic Society, London,
Loy.
4. Quran, Sura IX, 98.
5. See F. Lokkegaard’s description of Islam as ‘a religion for
townspeople’ (/slamic Taxation in the Classic Period, Copenhagen, 1950,
D352):
6. Communal Landholding (in Russian), 1879, cited by Rosa
Luxemburg, The Accumulation of Capital, tr. A. Schwarzchild, London,
1951, pp. 372-3n.
104 Mughal India
7. Lokkegaard, Islamic Taxation, p. 20.
8. One recalls that in 1853 Marx attributed to Muslims the creation
of state property in land in Asia under the principle of ‘no property in
land’ (letter of 14 June 1853 in Selected Correspondence, ed. Dona Torr,
Calcutta, 1945, p. 62).
9. I may mention in passing that I consider Burton Stein’s application
of the segmentary state thesis to the Vijayanagar Empire in Cambridge
Economic History of India, ed. T. Raychaudhuri and I. Habib, 1982,
rather unconvincing.
10. Bernier, Travels in the Mughal Empire, ap 1656-68, tr. A.
Constable, 2nd edn revised by V.A. Smith, Oxford, 1916.
11. Pyrard de Laval (1607-10) says of Indians: ‘They are all cunning
folk, and owe nothing to the people of the West, themselves endowed
with a keener intelligence than is usual with us, and hands as subtle as
ours’ (The Voyages of Francois Pyrard de Laval to the East Indies, the
Maldives, the Moluccas and Brazil, tr. and ed. A. Grey, assisted by H.C.P.
Bell, 11, part 1, Hakluyt Society, London, 1888).
12. Bernier, Travels, p. 226.
13. Ibid., p. 227.
14. See Irfan Habib, Agrarian System of Mughal India, Bombay,
1963, ch. vi. The only non-transferable jagirs were the watan jagirs,
which did not cover a relatively significant area.
15. Ibid., ch. ix.
16. Cf. Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean
World in the Age of Philip II, Eng. tr., Fontana edn, 1975, 1, pp. 718-24.
17. Cf. Ann K.S. Lambton, Landlord and Peasant in Persia, London,
1953, p. 110.
18. Abdul Hamid Lahori, Badshah Nama, Bib. Ind., Calcutta, 1867—
68, pp. 295, 401-2.
19. See Athar Ali, ‘The Passing of Empire: The Mughal Case’,
Modern Asian Studies, Cambridge, 1975, 1x, part 3, pp. 385-96.
20. Bernier, Travels, pp. 225-9.
21. See both writers’ contributions in The Journal of Economic
History, xx1x(1), March 1969.
22. Cf. Perry Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State, London,
1974, pp. 462ff.
23. Marx formulated his views on India initially in 1853, and articles
in the New York Daily Tribune of that year (conveniently collected by
Shlomo Avineri in Karl Marx on Colonialism and Modernization, Anchor
 Political Structures of the Islamic Orient 105
Books, New York, 1969) are a particularly important source of his views.
His classic statement on the village community occurs. in Capital, 1, Eng.
tr., ed. Dona Torr, London, 1938, p. 35. For tax andi rent coinciding, see
Capital, 11, Moscow, 1959, pp. 771-2.
24. Conversely, because of the other identities. im these civilizations,
this.may be-treated as a refutation of the thesis popularized by Louis Dumont
in Homo Hierarchicus, Paladin edn, London, 1972, that the caste system
made India into a totally different civilization from any other.
25. Here attention may be drawn to.a strong body of opinion among
scholars in India which holds that the Mughal Empire did help create a
middle class. The first salvo was fired’ by W.C. Smith, “The Mughal
Empire and the Middle Classes’, /slamic Culture, Hyderabad, 1944}. pp.
349-63. See also Iqtidar Alam Khan; “The Middle Classes in the Minghal
Empire’, Presidential Address, Medieval! India section, PIHC, Aligarh
session, 1975.
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POLITICAL THOUGHT
 10

The Evolution of the

Perception of India
Akbar and Abul Fazl

For more than a century, the status of India as a concept has repeatedly
been under discussion. Is it really anything more than a ‘geographical
expression’, its ring of mountain ranges in a rough semi-circle in the
north, and that of the ocean in the form of an inverted cone in the
south, making its geographical entity far more distinct than that of
many other countries? Its limits formed the ideal ‘scientific frontiers’
for the British Indian Empire and suggested a continued tradition of
ambitions of supremacy over land enclosed by them, which the Raj
claimed consciously to be its inheritance. Whether there was still
anything beyond a territory imagined for political convenience in
cultural terms was something on which spokesmen of British
imperialism allowed themselves to be of two minds. V.A. Smith would
assert,' while the Simon Commission would deny,’ a ‘unity in
diversity’. More recently, partly under the influence of works like
Anderson’s Imagined Communities’, there has been criticism among
subaltern and/or post-modern circles of the concept of the Indian
nation. As Partha Chatterjee tells us, ‘the very singularity of the idea
of a national history of India’ tends to divide ‘Indians’ even further*+—
though one wonders where the ‘Indians’ as a pre-divided lot have
arisen from, if there was no India.
There should be no two opinions, therefore, that the case for the
study of a history of the concept of India is strong, both for those who
assert its present or past reality, as did the spokesmen of the National
Movement, and for those who deny it in the footsteps of Lord Simon.
To this study, the present chapter, touching on the perception of India
in the minds of Akbar and his advisors—admittedly a most elite
group—is a modest contribution.
One has then to begin with the Arabic—Persian tradition in which
Akbar’s background especially lay and in which India had two names,
the Arabic ‘Hind’ from ancient Iranian ‘Hindu’ (the Avestan variant
110 Mughal India
of Vedic Sindhu), whence the Greek ‘India’ also came; and the late
Iranian ‘Hindustan’, created by the Iranian tendency of adding ‘stan’
as suffix to territorial names (Tukharistan, Sijistan, Gurjistan, etc.).
As outsiders, the Iranians were prone to consider India to cover all
territory east of the Indus, whence the two names. In the eleventh
century, the scientist Abu Raihan al-Biruni, in his celebrated Kitab
al-Hind (1035) was able to offer a precise geographical definition of
the country of Hind as being ‘limited in the south by the above
mentioned Indian ocean, and on all three other sides by the lofty
mountains, the waters of which flow down to it’.’ By his study of
Sanskrit scientific and sacred texts, Alberuni was also made aware of
a problem in the perception of the territory too. The inhabitable world
extending southward from Himavant was Bharata-varsha, which was
the centre of Jambu-dvipa. Alberuni says that there was an assumption
that Bharata-varsha comprised the entire inhabitable world, whereas,
the parts named and ascribed to it were located in Hind alone.® To
Alberuni ‘Hindus’, as inhabitants of this country, had an identifiable
single higher culture, with Sanskrit as its language, which he made it
his business to study and interpret, critically and without bias. He
thus saw a firm cultural unity, reflected in an arrogant insularity on
the part of the Hindus, which he regretted characteristically on account
of the obstruction it raised to the study of their culture by an outsider.’
Once the Ghorian conquest and the establishment of the Sultanate
had implanted over a large part of India another higher culture in
parallel existence with the brahmanical, the clear-cut all-exclusive
identification of the brahmanical culture and India, so natural for
Alberuni, could no longer be sustained. Yet, the concept of Hindustan
for the same limits as in Alberuni survived, sometimes with culturally
neutral qualities. This is most visible in Isami’s ode to India (1350),
which begins:

Blessed the splendour of the country of Hindustan,

For Heaven itself is envious of this scented garden.

What is acclaimed is its climate, its rivers, its fertility, its life-
strengthening environment, attracting all immigrants to settle here.
Cultural specifity plays no part here.®
But already in 1318 Amir Khusrau in his metrical work Nuh Sipihr
found other more profound qualities beyond these purely natural or
physical ones, to attribute to India. He stridently prociaimed his
patriotism: ‘Hind’ was the land (zamin) ‘of his birth, where he lived,
 The Evolution of the Perception of India 111
his native place’; ‘the love of one’s native land (watan) is part of
one’s faith (iman)’.? He too thought that India (for which he uses the
name Hind throughout) was paradise-like in the fertility of its soil and
pleasant climate.'° To this he adds the achievements of Hindu learning
and beliefs. Like Greece (Rum), the Hindus had sciences, and their
higher minds believed in one God." This is an echo of Alberuni. But
then Amir Khusrau begins to speak in the first person plural. ‘We’,
Indians, are able to speak foreign languages; but the Chinese, Mongols,
Turks and Arabs are unable to speak ‘our Hindi tongue’.'” Indians do
not go to other countries to seek knowledge; others have to come
here.'? India has given the world the numerals, the Panchatantra tales,
and chess.'* He goes on to associate India with certain languages
from outside that now had currency within it. ‘The Ghorians and
Turks’ had brought with them Persian, which was now learnt by all
levels of people; then there were the regional languages (Hindawi’s),
of which Khusrau lists twelve (including Tamil and Kannada) and,
finally, Sanskrit, the language of the learned Brahmans.’ He takes
special pride in this wealth of languages. Clearly, with Khusrau, India
has an entity that is not defined merely by brahmanical high culture,
though it is an essential part of it. Already, we see a tendency to
envision India as a country with a composite culture specific to itself,
to which a member of the Turkish Muslim immigrant family like
Amir Khusrau can proudly proclaim his allegiance, and which had
adopted Persian as one of its own languages.
A noteworthy development which was bound to affect the
perception of India as a country with cultural and social institutions
of its own, was the growth of a Muslim community within India,
distinct from the Muslim communities of other countries. The orthodox
theologian and historian Abdul Qadir Badauni, in his work on ethics
written in 1590-1 acknowledges that marriages for limited periods
and divorce (by the husband) are permitted by Muslim law and
sanctified by precedent, but then comments, ‘What good custom have
the people of India that they shun this practice and regard it [divorce]
as the worst word of abuse, so much so that if someone is called
talagi [divorcer], he, out of folly, would be ready to fight to death.’ '°
Clearly, Badauni thought that Muslims in India had a way of life
different from Muslims of other countries, for example in thinking
very ill of divorcing one’s wife. Whether this outlook was influenced
by the absolute permanence of marriage in Hindu law cannot be said
for certain: but the recognized existence of a distinct Indian Muslim
custom is unmistakable here.
12 Mughal India
Almost simultaneously came the recognition of India as an entity
for historical purposes. It began with Badauni’s friend, Nizamuddin
Ahmad, who in 1593-4 completed his Tabaqat-i Akbari, designed to
give the annals separately for nine regions of India (Delhi, Deccan,
Gujarat, Malwa, Bengal, Jaunpur, Kashmir, Sind, and Multan). Such
a departure from dynastic history in favour of a general history of
India is something for which Nizamuddin has surely not received
adequate credit. He inspired a series of works, including Firishta’s
celebrated Gulshan-l Ibrahimi (1609-10), where the attempt is
extended to reconstruct even the pre-Islamic history of the country.
Even if the conception of history is rather narrow here, a little more
than a grouping of separate dynastic histories (laboriously compiled),
the constant underlying assumption of the historical unity of India is
remarkable."’
The concept of India had thus gone much beyond a purely territorial
one in the Indo-Muslim tradition with which Akbar had been in the
main familiar. Though born in India (1542), Akbar’s boyhood was
spent in Afghanistan, until 1555, and he himself spoke later of his
arrival in India (‘Hind’).'* He developed an increasing interest in the
language and customs of his subjects. In 1563, confronting Adham
Khan, he used a Hindi word of abuse still current.'? He composed
verses in Hindi, containing, in the words of his official biographer,
‘colourful conceits’.”” Imitating ‘the loyal Indians’, he let grow his
hair, rather than cut it short:*! and he never kept a beard. His love for
Indian tales made him commission the translation of Singhasan Battisi
even before 1571—2.” But it is in October 1578 that, for the first time,
we find him referring with affection and pride to the people of India
(‘Hind’). When in an assembly at the court, Akbar ‘praised the truth-
based nature of the people of India, whose women, however hard the
life they might have lived (with their husbands) show the greatest
affection and love for their husbands once they are dead’, and went
on to refer to the self-sacrifice offered by Indian women as sati. At
the same time, Akbar condemned the pusillanimity of men of
‘Hindustan’ who allowed or encouraged such acts by their women.”
Since Muslims did not practise anything remotely resembling sati, the
identification of Indians and India with Hindus and Hinduism both in
the friendly and critical aspects is unmistakable.
A similar identification tended to occur when Akbar began to
acquire familiarity with the religious beliefs of the various schools of
Hinduism. In 1578, again, two Brahmans, Purushuttam and Devi (?),
introduced him to these complexities leading him to believe that
 The Evolution of the Perception of India i Be.
transmigration of souls was an essential element of Hinduism.” In his
Sayings, as reported by Abul Fazl, Akbar shows a grasp of the doctrine
of transmigration of souls, and the consequence which such a belief’
led to in India: divine incarnation not prophethood. Thus he observed:
‘In India (‘Hind’), no one set forth a claim to Prophethood: this is
because the claim to Divinity has had precedence here’ .*
We see in these statements a pride in India tempered with a critical
spirit. If India is to be identified by the currency of certain customs
and beliefs, it is not necessary that these should be accepted. Akbar
thus adds a new component to the vision of India, that of reform. His
prohibition of forced sati and of pre-puberty marriage, his demand
for equal inheritance for the daughter, his condemnation of slavery
and slave trade,” all suggest the rejection of some of the burdens of
the past. From India seen as a cultural unity, and then as a cultural
diversity undergoing synthesis, we have with Akbar the first vision of
India undergoing change. It was linked to a bold rejection of
traditionalism:
The pursuit of reason (‘aq/) and rejection of traditionalism (taglid) are so
brilliantly patent as to be above the need of argument. If traditionalism
was proper, the prophets would merely have followed their own elders
[and not come with new messages].”’

One could almost say that with Akbar we begin to have in a

rudimentary form a pre-modern vision of a modernized India, a
patriotism without revivalism. But to understand in greater detail and
depth, what India meant to Akbar and his circle we have to go to his
principal spokesman, Abul Fazl.
There is no doubt that Abul Fazl was more conscious of the
geography of India than any previous writer. In the north he considered
the great mountain ranges to separate India from Turan (Central Asia)
and Iran an one side and China (‘Chin and Machin’) on the other.”
The following passage from his pen was long an aid to the arguments
of those British strategists who would place the ‘scientific frontier’ of
the Raj across the heart of Afghanistan:
Intelligent men of the past have considered Kabul and Qandahar as the
twin gates of Hindustan, one (Qandahar) for the passage to Iran, and the
other for that to Turan. By guarding these two places, Hindustan obtains
peace from the alien (raider), and global traffic by these two routes can
prosper.”
It is significant that Abul Fazl considers India to be a peninsula, for
he says that the sea borders Hindustan ‘on the east, west and south’.
114 Mughal India
He claims, however, that Hindustan also included ‘Sarandip (Sri Lanka),
Achin (in Sumatra), Maluk (Malaya), Malagha (Malacca) and many
islands’, so that ‘the sea cannot really demarcate its limits’.*°This too
is a rather expansive concept of India—anticipating the ‘Greater India’
of later days—which one can hardly endorse. But probably Abul Faz]
meant no more than that the sea could not prevent Indian cultural
influences from reaching these countries; and this in itself was an
interesting statement for him to make.
Abul Faz] displays his patriotism by showering unqualified praise
on the people of India:

The people of this country are God-seeking, generous-hearted, friendly to

strangers, pleasant-faced, of broad forehead, patrons of learning, lovers
of asceticism, inclined to justice, contented, hard working and efficient,
true to salt, truth-seeing and attached to loyalty.*!

These qualities, it is worth noting, are assigned to inhabitants of

the territory, not to the followers of any religious persuasion. But since
the majority of Indians were Hindus, Abul Faz! claims that ‘all’ (that
is, including the Hindus) ‘acclaim the oneness of God’. Though some
of them revere images, he argues, this is not really idol worship, since
images are used merely to assist in the worship of God.*? We are not
concerned here with the veracity of this defence, but with the fact that
Abul Faz] needs to make it, since his praise of Indians as God-seekers
would cover the Hindus as well.
The recognition of India as the birthplace of an important culture,
which found its major expression in the Indian (‘Hindi’) languages,
becomes the starting-point of a long and accurate survey of it in the
latter portion of the A’in-i Akbari, entitled “Account of Hindustan’
(Ahwal-i Hindustan). There is no indication in Abul Fazl that he
intended the culture to be considered in a sectarian colour: It is
characteristic of modern biases that when he begins by stating his
intention ‘to describe a little of the conditions of this country and
survey the opinions of the Indian (Hindi-nazad) sages’ ,*° the translator
renders the last phrase as ‘the opinion professed by the majority of
the learned among the Hindus’.** Indeed, Abul Fazl does not begin
with religion at all, but with Indian beliefs in the spheres of astronomy
and geography. His attitude in this respect is very similar to that of
Alberuni, who too was concerned with the entire range of Indian
learning. At the conclusion of his survey, Abul Faz} regrets that he
did not have time to compare the opinions of the learned of India with
those of Greece and Persia.** This again suggests, beyond regret, at
 The Evolution of the Perception of India 115
not having proceeded as Alberuni had done, the harbouring of an
essentially secular or non-sectarian perception of Indian culture.
There is no doubt that Abul Fazl’s description of Indian culture
running to about 150 pages of the large folio edition in Persian is an
outstanding achievement in detail and accuracy, covering secular
learning, religion, ritual and ethnography. The account is totaily
independent of Alberuni and from the point of view purely of
information adds much to Alberuni. Abul Fazl professedly derived
his knowledge from a large number of Indian texts, through the medium
of numerous learned interpreters and translators, but the care and
precision he exercised in setting out the information is very greatly to
his credit. The survey needs to be analysed, despite Sarkar’s rather
disparaging remarks,*’ since it tells us how, with what points of
emphasis, various beliefs and opinions were held or expressed at the
time (c. 1595).
Abul Fazl has a particular interest in presenting to the Persian-
knowing reader the essentials of Indian culture, which is seen, despite
its diversities, as a unity. He looks forward to a larger unity, so that
‘the inner and external conflict should turn into amity, the thorn-bush
of enmity and hostility into the garden of friendship and the sounds of
reasoned argument should come forth and an informed assemblage
be arranged’.** He is too scientific and too scornful of ‘tradition-bound
imitators’* to approve of the various Indian beliefs and opinions he
surveys. He says, on one occasion, in obvious deprecation of the Indian
and Greek views on the habitable world, that ‘today the truth-inclined
learned consider the south to be inhabited just like the north’.
In other words, Abul Fazl was looking to much beyond a parallel
coexistence of cultures or to a composite traditional Indian culture, a
mere synthesis of traditions. He made his own bow to the cultural
coexistence when after a survey of the traditional culture of India, he
goes on to give us notices of foreigners arriving in India (‘Hindustan’)
from Adam to Humayun,"' and then of Muslim divines and saints of
India,” as if these constituted streams that too belonged to India. But
such streams had to join together, purified by reason, before the higher
unity could be achieved. For this higher ground to be reached, Abul
Fazl saw an essential role to lie with the sovereign.
Humayun’s arrival in India after so many travails was to be
celebrated, because it led to Akbar’s accession, and it was under the
aegis of Akbar’s justice and judgement of men that ‘Hindustan has
become the concourse of good men of the seven climes and every one
in different ways attains his object.’ The key instrument of the
116 Mughal India
sovereign was Sulh-i Kul, absolute peace, a means of relief for
individuals like Abul Fazl himself,“ as well as peoples. For the sovereign
is ‘father of humanity. All kinds of people seek comfort from him,
and no dust of duality rises forth from the variety of religions believed
in by men’. At the same time, the sovereign ‘should not seek popularity
among people through opposing Reason’.* In other words, tolerance
of existing beliefs is only one part of the sovereign’s duty; persuasion
to follow reason, and so reject traditionalism is a necessary and
complementary one.
We can now see that Abul Faz reaches a conclusion which justifies
Akbar’s promotion of both rationalism and social reform, in order to
construct a ‘Hindustan’ that could stand out in the world. Is this view
still so ‘singular’ that it must be summarily thrown out of court as
some are now suggesting?

NOTES

1. Oxford History of India, London, 1919, pp. ix—x.

2. See the critique of its views in R.P. Dutt, India Today, Bombay,
1947, pp. 237-9.
3. Benedict Anderson, Jmagined Communities: Reflections on the
Origin and Spread of Nationalism, London, 1983.
4. Subaltern Studies, vm, New Delhi, 1994, p. 49.
5. Edward C. Sachau (tr.), Alberuni’s India, London, 1910, 1, p. 198.
6. Ibid., pp. 294-8.
7. Ibid., pp. 224.
8. Isami, Futuh-us Salatin, ed. A.S. Usha, Madras, 1948, pp. 404-5.
Isami was writing at Daulatabad in the Deccan and his ‘Hindustan’ thus
included the whole of India.
9. Nuh Sipihr, ed. Mohammad Wahid Mirza, London, 1950, p. 150.
10. Ibid., pp. 151-61.
11. Ibid., pp. 162-6.
12. Ibid., pp. 166-7.
13. Ibid., pp. 167-8.
14, Ibid., pp. 168-70.
15. Ibid., pp. 178-181.
16. Nijat al-Rashid, ed. Sayyid Muinu’] Haqq, Lahore, 1972, p. 437.
17. There is a faint earlier glimmer of it, though, in Isami, who says that
 The Evolution of the Perception of India 117
Alauddin Khalji enriched, while Muhammad Tughlug ravaged, ‘Hindustan’
(Futuh-us Salatin, p. 605).
18. Abul Fazl, A’in-i Akbari, Naval Kishore, Lucknow, 1892, m, p. 118:
‘When we arrived in India our heart was attracted to the elephants’.
19. Bayazid Bayat, Tazkara-i Humayun wa Akbar, ed. M. Hidayat Hosain,
Calcutta, 1941, pp. 251-2.
20. Abul Fazl, Akbarnama, ed. Ahmad Ali, Calcutta, 1873-87, 1,
pp. 270-1.
21. First version of Akbarnama, B.L. Add. 27, 247, f.294a.
22. Badauni, Muntakhab’ut Tawarikh, Calcutta, 1865-9, 1, pp. 177-8.
23. Akbarnama, first version, B.L. Add. 27, 247, ff. 295b-296a. A
stronger condemnation of the men’s behaviour by Akbar is quoted by
Abul Fazl among the sayings of Akbar towards the end of A’in-i Akbar,
m, p. 190.
24. Badauni, Muntakhab ut-Tawarikh, u, pp. 398-400.
25. A’in-i Akbari, m, p. 185.
26. Cf. Irfan Habib, ‘Akbar and Social Inequities: A Study of the
Evolution of his Ideas’, P/HC, Warangal session, Delhi, 1993, pp. 300-10,
who sees in Akbar, ‘the early flickers of that critique of traditional India,
which would later turn into flame in the 19th Century Indian Renaissance’.
27. Akbar’s sayings in A’in-i Akbari, m, p. 179.
28. Ibid., u, p. 192. See the citation of this passage in V.A. Smith,
Oxford History of India, p. 755 in a discussion of the scientific frontier.
29. A’in-i Akbari, Naval Kishore, m, p. 4.
30. Ibid.
31. Ibid., p. 5.
32. Ibid.
33" Ibids"p22.
34. A’in-i Akbari, m, tr. H.S. Jarrett, ed. Jadunath Sarkar, Calcutta,
1948, p. 1. It is also not clear where Jarrett gets his ‘majority’ from. With
similar inaccuracy, though less unjustly, Jarrett and Sarkar render ‘Hindi’
(Indian) language as Sanskrit.
35. A’in-i Akbari, Naval Kishore, m, p. 177. In respect of astronomy and
geography, Abul Fazl does indeed make extensive references to Greek views
and findings.
36. Ibid., p. 2.
37. A’in-i Akbari, m, tr. Jarrett, ed. Sarkar, p. Iv.
38. A’in-i Akbari, Naval Kishore, m, p. 2.
39. Ibid., p. 30.
40. Ibid., p. 22.
118 Mughal India
41. Ibid., pp. 152-63.
42. Ibid., pp. 163-77. In this Abul Faz] had a very orthodox scholar
preceding him by a few years. Abdul Haqq of Delhi completed in 1591 the
Akbar ul-Akhyar, a collection of biographical notices of 255 Indian Muslim
saints.
43. A’in-i Akbari, Naval Kishore, m, p. 163.
44. Ibid., pp. 177-8.
45. Ibid., 1, p. 3.
 11

The State in Islamic Thought

in India

Islamic justifications of sovereignty usually take as their starting-

point the Quranic injunction, ‘Obey God and His Prophet and those
in authority among you’. It is best to remember, however, the context
in which this Revelation came. The Prophet was trying to establish
his authority from his seat at Medina over the various parts of the
Arabian Peninsula. The tribal chiefs (shaykhs, saiyids) were
persuaded, by force, by inducements or by sincere conversion, to
accept the hegemony of the Medina republic; and it was important,
not only that the entire tribe should follow its chiefs in their
conversion to Islam, but should accept them as conduits of authority
emanating from the Prophet. Traditional sources of authority were
thus put to the use of the new religious community; and it is easy to
understand, then, the meaning which the Prophet’s contemporaries
must have given to the celebrated Revelation quoted above. They
were not being asked to shed their chiefs or their tribal system of
political organization. They were to continue obeying the chiefs and
conform to the tribal system, since these had now been subordinated
to the Prophet’s control, fiscal, military and religious; and the chiefs’
continued strength was important for the success of Islam as a
political force.
With the death of the Prophet in Ap 632 a totally new significance
devolved upon that brief Divine injunction. So long as the Prophet
lived, religious and political authority was combined in him without
much distinction. Revelations to him were the source of legislation
which changed established tribal customs; they also could justify
some apparently transitory measures of policy or some particular
acts or decisions of the Prophet. With his death, all Revelations would
cease; the direct source of legislation would dry up. His successor
(khalifa) could not directly invoke God to justify any measures; he
could only invoke a known revelation in the Quran, or the known
tradition (hadis) of the practice and opinion of the Prophet (Sunna).
In effect, not only were the caliphs or khalifas the mere successors
120 Mughal India
to the temporal or political power of the Prophet; they lacked an
essential element of sovereignty, namely the capacity to make law.
If they were to extract obedience at all, it became all the more
necessary to cite the authority of the Quranic verse enjoining
submission to ‘those in authority’.
The practice of the four ‘Pious’ Caliphs (Ap 632-61), especially
their modest conception of their own role, led to a denigration of
sovereignty in orthodox Islamic tradition. The imam (the leader, the
caliph) was only a shari‘, ‘enforcer of law’. Even where in practice
the caliphs promulgated measures, which were of a legislative
character, or set precedents for future lawyers (Caliph Umar was
particularly notable for this), the claim still remained that these were
only secondary extensions of the decisions made by the Prophet
himself, or applications of the traditional practices or sentiments of
the Arabs that the Prophet had either countenanced or approved.
There were many reasons for the collapse of the Pious Caliphate.
The absence of an established norm of determining succession was
one: The claims of companionship to the Prophet, the traditional
Quraiyshite loyalties, the blood-ties with the Prophet, all stood in
mutual contradiction. But beyond these complex difficulties faced
by the Pious Caliphate, there was the further one of Islam becoming
a power outside Arabia: First, because the Arabs under the Pious
Caliphs had conquered vast non-Arab lands, which they plundered
and exploited, but had also to administer. Second, because there
would be a stream of non-Arabs (mawwali) from the conquered
lands of the Byzantine and Sassanid Empires bringing their own
traditions into Islam, and even converting their masters over to these
traditions.
It was manifestly impossible to administer the complex societies
of Byzantium and Persia on the basis of a system forged in the tribal
mores of Arabia. Even with the growing manufacture of the Prophet’s
traditions to justify one measure or another, the process remained a
difficult one. Moreover, the unending forgeries of hadis (Prophet’s
sayings) tended to shake popular confidence in the Sunna: and thus
there soon started a splendid scholarly exercise to weed out the
‘weak’ traditions, and build up a body of authoritative traditions,
which, though containing much posthumous matter, still became,
after a passage of time, so well established that further forgeries or
additions became nearly impossible.
It was, therefore, inevitable that the caliphs looked increasingly
to the imperial traditions of the conquered countries to reinforce
 The State in Islamic Thought in India 121
their authority. Mu‘awiya (aD 661-80), who was so adept at using
Islamic theology as well as Arab tribal traditions to bolster his
position, was yet regarded by later Arabs as the first Caesar (Qaisar)
in Islam. His capital, Damascus, became the site of infusion of a whole
body of Byzantine court traditions into Islamic polity. Similarly, under
the Abbasid caliphs (ap 750-847), with their seat of authority in Iraq,
Sassanid traditions became an important element not only determining
court ceremonial, and influencing the creation of such offices as of
the vizier, but also ascribing to caliph a position and power quite
outside the framework of orthodox Islam, a framework which the
theologians and jurists were almost simultaneously forging (in theory)
into a rigid structure.
As the Abbasid caliphate declined, the Persian tradition become even
more important for the provincial governors who began to set up their
local independent dynasties. It was no accident that at the Sassanid
court (tenth century) Bil‘ami should prepare a Persian version of Tabari’s
celebrated History, in which the history and traditions of the Sassanid
Empire would be added in a very long and important section. In the
next century came Firdausi’s Shahnama, with its glorification of the
Sassanid emperors, their court, their sense of justice, their immense
power, and a belittling (by implication, but on occasion in explicit terms)
of the Arab intrusion. Out of this revival of a past imperial tradition
arose the concept of the sultan. The word sultan was an old Arabic
one: the sense now given to it, however, was quite new.
The sultan, a temporal sovereign, stood in contrast to the caliph, a
temporal successor of the Prophet. If the former did not enjoy the
religious halo of the latter, he also did not labour under the disadvantage
of being bound by the limitations that the religious tradition placed
upon the authority of the caliph. Mahmud of Ghaznin (ap 999-30)
came to be regarded as the first sultan, the epitome of the new
sovereign. Not for nothing would tradition also say that Firdausi
dedicated his Shahnama to Sultan Mahmud, in spite of Mahmud being
a Turk, and so hardly likely to be favourably inclined to the biased
version of the great ancient conflicts between the Persians and Turks
that Firdausi presented.
If the institutions of the Abbasid caliphate, representing a transition
from the Islamic to the imperial tradition, were subjected to an analysis
by the great Muslim jurist Mawardi (AD 972-1058), the institutions of
the sultanate received their classic description in the Siyasatnama of
Nizam-al-Mulk Tusi, a minister in the Siljugqid Empire (eleventh and
twelfth centuries).
122 Mughal India
This particular development of the sultanate as a form of state was
made possible by the perfection of three institutions which gave it its
characteristic strength. The fiscal system, which had taken shape
breaking through or distorting the restrictions of Muslim law, had
now as its basis a single land-tax (kharaj) that was so determined as
to appropriate the bulk of the peasants’ surplus. The sultan determined,
too, how this surplus would be distributed by having the absolute
right to appoint its appropriators—nobles, commanders, governors,
etc—and transferring their territorial revenue assignments (iqta‘) at
will. Finally, a system of ‘king’s justice’ and means of terror developed,
by which the sultan and his officers could judge and award punishments
without reference to the Shariat (Muslim Law).
The new sovereignty dominated the thought of Ziauddin Barani,
the famous Indian historian of the fourteenth century. An acute thinker,
Barani did not write history as a simple narration, but within a cause-
and-effect framework and often to illustrate his basic ideas. He
completed his famous History (Tarikh-i Firuz Shahi) in 1357 near the
end of a long life during which he had served as an adviser to a great
sultan of Delhi (Muhammad Tughluq).
Barani’s basic preoccupation is with maintaining social stability.
This derived from his devoted attachment to the principle of inherited
qualities. He shared enthusiastically the view often espoused in Sa‘di’s
Gulistan and Bostan, composed in the previous century, that a man’s
character was determined by his station at birth. Only those born in
aristocratic families had the right to belong to the ruling class; the
infusion of any upstarts would be a terrible disaster. Barani was not
directly pleading for a caste system on Indian lines; these views of
his, as I have just suggested, were derived from an established
sentiment in the Islamic world. But, in essence, he came very near to
justifying a rigid system of inherited class structure almost akin to the
caste system. In both the Tarikh-i Firuz Shahi and in his Fatawa-i
Jahandari, a collection of anecdotes and dialogues on the problem of
sovereignty, he reverts again and again to the misfortune that society
faces when the established families are destroyed and those born in
inferior classes become rich and powerful.
The primary justification that Barani saw in the new embodiment
of sovereignty, the sultanate, as distinct from the caliphate, was its
ability to prevent a social upheaval of this kind. Unlike the caliphs
this was the sultans’ sole reason for existence: For where the caliphs
held their power by deserts (istihgaq), the Muslim kings obtained it
by sheer force (taghallub). Barani says plainly in the Fatawa-i
 The State in Islamic Thought in India 123
Jahandari that the humble and modest ways of the Pious Caliphs,
with their action and conduct restricted by a strict observance of
God’s word and the Prophet’s precedents, were not suited to the
ways of his own time. The Muslim community, in his view, had so
degenerated in morals and discipline that it was no longer possible for
it to be controlled by the Shariat alone. Indeed, if the Shariat itself
was to be saved, that is if its rules were to be enforced, extra-Shariat
engines of terror and punishment were necessary. Barani approvingly
attributes this particular statement to Balban, the famous sultan of
Delhi, 1266-86. It was the sultan who was the fountainhead of this
entire penal system. Barani also conceived that while it was the duty
of the sultan to enforce the Shariat, he must also have the discretion
to modify or relax the strict instruments of the Shariat. He could
modify the enforcement of the law against drinking, gambling, usury
or prostitution. A too rigid enforcement of the law might unnecessarily
provoke disorder. For this view, too, Barani sets Balban as his model.
In other words, Barani recognizes that the sultanate was an institution
that had no place within the Shariat; and that it necessarily limits the
operation of the Shariat; but he urges that it was still necessary for the
continued survival of the Shariat even within its narrowed sphere.
Without the sultan’s authority and terror all ties binding society would
collapse, because, as Barani often remarks in his Tarikh, the Muslims
would tend to turn immoral and the Hindus rebellious.
Barani, therefore, considers the despotic power of the sultan as
necessary, in spite of its imperfections and horrors. He is not blind to
the suffering and torture that the unbridled authority of the sultan
might inflict on large sections of his subjects; and he describes the
punishments inflicted by Balban or Alauddin Khalji or Muhammad
Tughlug with considerable pity for the victims.
Barani is also sceptical of any divine origin of the sultan’s power.
In his chapter on Balban, it is true, he approvingly quotes Balban
for saying that while ‘monarchy is the embodiment of despotism’,
there is a reflection (mazhar) of the divine in the heart of the sovereign.
Barani might be correct or incorrect in his ascription of the latter
view to Balban, whom he admired for his resolutely espoused theory
of birth. But it is best to remember that Barani himself tells us of
Jalaluddin Khalji’s discovery upon becoming sultan (AD 1290) that
there was nothing to be found in the internal fabric of sovereignty: it
was ‘all empty’. That is, the sovereign was after all a man, with all
the human weaknesses and imperfections, and had no extra-human
guidance to resort to. At such protestations of the old Khalji sultan,
124 Mughal India
Barani makes the younger Khalji nobles mutter among themselves,
‘Severeignty is (after all) nothing but terror, power and title to unshared
authority.’ It was the ability of the sultan to destroy and reward—
that set him up over and above his fellow beings. That was all.
But Barani is conscious throughout of a contradiction that cannot
be resolved, and whose development in various forms runs like a red
thread through his Tarikh. His justification for the sultan’s power is
that it protects social stability; but, in practice, the sultan finds it
necessary to overthrow the established nobility and replace it with
upstarts. Thus the sultans themselves become the source of continuous
social disturbance. Barani attributes the rise of the slave nobles at the
cost of the free-born in the thirteenth century to the weakness of the
sultan’s authority under Iltutmish’s successors. But what of Alauddin
Khalji’s recruitment of the people of ‘low birth’, and of Muhammad
Tughluq’s measures of the same kind on a vaster scale? These were
despotic rulers, by no means weak or incompetent in any sense. Barani
tells us, moreover, that Muhammad Tughluq always decried men of
‘low birth’ in his conversations; yet, he says, he gave them the highest
offices. Barani therefore wonders at the ‘contradictory qualities’ of
that sultan. But we can, perhaps, answer Barani by suggesting that
the contradiction lay within the situation. Despotic monarchy could
not pull on with a rigidly hereditary nobility. The tendency of despotism
was to convert an aristocracy into a bureaucracy. This could not be
done without the influx of external elements, and thus just as the sultan,
while enforcing the Shariat, must restrict its scope, so too, while
protecting social stability, he must make exceptions to protect his own
despotism.
Barani’s entire theory of the sultanate, brilliant as it was, thus led
to a dilemma to which he had no solution.
If Barani was the great political thinker of the Delhi Sultanate,
Abul Fazl was the great spokesman for the Mughal Empire. Abul
Faz] offers a sharp contrast to Barani, in that with Abul Fazl, the anxiety
about the contradiction between the sultan and the Shariat disappears.
The latter excites in him little interest as far as his theory of sovereignty
is concerned. His only common ground with Barani is his concern
with social stability; but he handles the whole question in a completely
different manner.
In a chapter of his great work A’in-i Akbari, titled Rawai-i Rozi,
or the maintenance of livelihood, Abul Faz] offers a justification for
sovereignty based on the simple fact of social contract. In words which
make us recall Hobbes, he describes the contradiction of society before
 The State in Islamic Thought in India |
a
the emergence of the sovereign. There was complete instability, a
veritable anarchy: No man was safe from another. Property, life,
honour—none were safe. Indeed, property could not emerge, life was
short, honour non-existent. In desperation men went to someone, who
was able and strong, and solicited him to protect them. For this the
protector employed soldiers, for whose pay he needed resources. These
were provided by the protected people. Out of this arrangement arose
the sovereign, taxes and subjects. If, then, at the beginning of the
history of sovereignty there was only an act of contract, did this
place any limitations on the sovereign? None, says Abul Fazl. It is the
moral duty of the subject to submit to the will of the sovereign in
respect of his property as well as life, since the sovereign protects the
greatest thing of all, the subject’s honour. If in practice, there are
limitations on the share of subjects’ property taken away in taxation,
this limitation is no part of the contract, but is a mere matter of
discretion on the part of the sovereign, who restrains himself out of
compassion for his subjects.
But Abul Fazl has another theory of sovereignty, with which the
social contract theory cannot be fully reconciled. His father Shaikh
Mubarak had often pleaded for a special position for the king within
the juridical world of Islam. In 1579 in the controversial Mahzar, the
leading theologians at Akbar’s court had sought to give Akbar as
much authority to interpret law or even legislate, as had been conceded
to the great Muslim jurists (Imam Abu Hanifa, Hambal, and others).
But Akbar was not apparently satisfied with this limited position, and
very soon he was no longer anxious to have any position at all as a
‘king of Islam’. He now sought a wider religious justification and
Abul Fazl, as his major intellectual-courtier, set out to provide him
with one.
Sovereignty, said Abul Fazl, was in nature a divine light (farr-i
izadi). With this statement he seems to dismiss as inadequate the
traditional reference to the king as the shadow of God (zill-i Ilahi).
At Akbar’s court, Light was often regarded as the greatest Divine
blessing and, indeed, a symbol of God. Since sovereignty was a Divine
Ray of Light, the sovereign, though himself not divine, was called
upon to work as an Agent of God, and thus partook of the authority
and burdens that were fashioned, as it were, ‘in the image of God’.
Just as God’s favours (sunlight, rain, etc.) fell on all irrespective of
religious beliefs, so too the sovereign could not discriminate, in
dispensing his favours, between the votaries of the different faiths.
This became a doctrine for justifying the tolerant religious policy
126 Mughal India
initiated by Akbar, and it was invoked by Jahangir and indeed even by
Aurangzeb (in his nishan to Rana Raj Singh) to a similar purpose.
Being derived directly from God, sovereignty need not be restricted
by association with any particular sect or faith. It came to be a
fashionable dogma at Akbar’s court that all religions are in essence
the same; only the forms varied. Abul Faz! carries this to its logical
conclusion by detaching sovereignty from the forms of any particular
religion or its law, notably from Islam and Shariat. It follows then that
unlike Barani, Abul Fazl can see no justification for sovereignty to be
assigned the function of enforcing any particular religious system
law. Here then was a complete break from the traditional Muslim
outlook, including that of Barani.
Abul Faz] was astute enough to underline the relevance of his theory
of sovereignty for a multi-religious country like India. Here the
sovereign should not be tarnished with association with any one sect
or religion alone. As sovereign, he inust be above all religions. It can
be seen that his views were not fully secular; he thought that the
sovereign, being God’s agent, had certain spiritual obligations, namely
to promote certain religious beliefs, for example in God, in the Light
as His symbol, and in inter-sectarian peace (Sulh-i Kul), and so on.
The quasi-divine status of the sovereign had to be sustained by an
appropriate religious status assumed by the sovereign and kept up
through a ceremonial carved out of borrowings from different faiths.
Abul Faz] is undoubtedly one of the greatest thinkers and scholars
that India has produced. One may pick holes in his theory of social
contract and still more in his theory of divine origin of sovereignty,
particularly since the two theories are not logically compatible with
each other. Indeed, he may be said to have tried to ride two horses,
and combined (in anticipation) the views of Hobbes and James I (and
he went much beyond James I in his claim for the sovereign). Yet the
essential bedrock of rationality in Abul Fazl’s thought commands
respect, even admiration. Certainly no one after him in India debated
the issues of sovereignty at the same high level of reason and
abstraction.
A thinker who wrote during the declining phase of the Mughal
Empire, Shah Waliullah (1704—62) offers a third theory of polity which,
though not as incisive as Barani’s nor as brilliant as Abul Fazl’s,
nevertheless has claims to be considered as a serious contribution to
medieval political thought.
Shah Waliullah was a theologian, and he wrote his famous work
Hujatullah il Baligha as a treatise on Muslim law, ritual and ethics.
 The State in Islamic Thought in India Ly
But in an important portion early in his work, he discourses on the
universality of certain human needs, economic activities, social
customs, and ethical values. He argues that the organization of society
which results from these phenomena is in many respects equally
universal, ‘from east to west’. He urges that the foundations of all
social organization lie in the universality of inborn inequality. Some
are by nature (tab‘an) born to dominate over others, some, says he
with supreme naivety, are by nature inclined to obey others and love
to be slaves. Women are inferior to men and must be subservient to
the latter.
These natural divisions happily suit our convenience. The son of
an ironsmith finds it more convenient to follow the profession of his
father. Society acts on basis of cooperation of, and adjustment between,
these various classes and groups of men. The cooperation takes place
under the aegis of rulers (muluk). Waliullah follows early Muslim
jurists in taking muluk as a universal category of sovereigns, whereas
the khalifas are specifically Muslim. But unlike Barani and other more
careful historians, Waliullah subsequently fails to distinguish between
the khalifas and ordinary Muslim rulers.
Waliullah does not postulate an original social contract, though he
does emphasize the role of the sovereigns in keeping the various parts
of society together. At the same time, he departs from Abul Faz] in
arguing that there are limits to the sovereign’s impositions upon his
subjects. He says that in his own time the decline of the contemporary
states was caused by two factors:
(i) alarge number of persons who ought to have rendered service
to the state became simple parasites living as useless burdens
on the treasury; and
(ii) the sovereign imposed heavy taxation on the peasants and
artisans, which caused them to rise in rebellion.
Obviously Shah Waliullah’s perception was influenced by the
contemporary problems of the Mughal Empire, in which there had
been a breakdown of agrarian administration.
It is a remarkable feature in Shah Waliullah’s thought that such
insights (limited as they are) are left behind when he enters the realm
of Islamic law and theology. Forgetting his own admonitions to
sovereigns to avoid oppressive measures, he now recommends that
the infidels should be treated as hewers of wood and drawers of
water, and as no better than beasts of burden.
This, then, was the ultimate contradiction which could not be
128 Mughal India
resolved so long as political thought remained shackled to the
constraints of orthodoxy. Shah Waliullah was not perhaps an
unintelligent man, he perceived the decline of the polity to which his
class was tied; and he was acute enough to place its decline partly at
least in an economic perspective. But he was not acute enough to
suggest an alternative basis for political practice; his actual solution,
obedience to the Shariat, was only a means of solace for depressed
spirits; it could offer no light to practical men.
 |e

Elements of Social Justice in

Medieval Islamic Thought

Before we can analyse the perception of social justice in an earlier age,

we should first have some clarification as to what we mean by this
term. I would, therefore, begin with what the term connotes to a modern
theorist of some repute, John Rawls. Rawls tells us that ‘justice is the
first virtue of social institutions, as truth is of systems of thought.”!
Justice must, therefore, be sought in the thought and beliefs of mankind,
even in prehistoric times, whenever and wherever ‘social institutions’,
like family, clan, occupations, etc. arose. But ‘social justice’ is of later
growth, for, according to Rawls: ‘A conception of social justice, then,
is to be regarded as providing in the first instance a standard whereby
the distributive aspects of the basic structure of society are to be
assessed.”?
Clearly, distributive problems with human societies arose only after
man began to produce surpluses; and this sets a much later period for
the emergence of any ideas of social justice other than simple justice,
which latter would be merely concerned with obedience to custom.
But, in fact, the two principles of justice (or, as perhaps, he should
have better said, social justice) that Rawls frames are such as could not
possibly have been invoked before very recent times. He gives the
following description of the two principles:
First: each person is to have an equal right to the most extensive basic
liberty compatible with a similar liberty for others. Second: social and
economic inequalities are to be arranged so that they are both (a) reasonably
expected to be to every one’s advantage, and (b) attached to positions and
offices open to all.?

It will be seen that these two principles invoke the three ideals of
liberty, equality and fraternity, which were central to the political thought
generating and sustaining the French Revolution of 1789. In other words,
social justice, as conceived by modern theorists, is barely two hundred
130 Mughal India
years old. When, therefore, we turn to earlier periods, our study can
only be that of attitudes towards these ideals, or some concessions made
to them, rather than that of attempts to do away with imperfections in
the professed pursuit of them.
For convenience, I would limit my study to the medieval Indian
political regimes and writers of a professedly Islamic complexion and
focus on their perception of justice in the fields of social hierarchy,
slavery and women. The realm of social justice, doubtless extends much
beyond these fields, but I believe that a scrutiny of beliefs and practice
in this limited area would still be adequately illustrative, if not fully
exhaustive.

II
One may begin by raising the question of concept of social justice in
the Islamic tradition to the point (or points) that it was received in India
or began to interact with the Indian reality. Contrary to the express or
implicit assertion in many modern apologetic or fundamentalist writing,
it is not possible to identify any religion, including Islam, with an ideal
social order. This is because by its very definition, religion, in its own
consciousness, is primarily concerned not with this, but with the other
world. This explains the point in an early Islamic tradition traced to
‘Umar, later to be the second caliph of Islam. “Umar remonstrated with
the Prophet that the Persians and Byzantines had all the affluence given
to them by God when they did not believe in Him. The Prophet replied,
‘(But) in this world (only).’ ‘Umar thereupon begged God’s forgiveness.*
The requirements of the present world were, therefore, after all,
secondary; worldly life had to be organized by the believers only in so
far as this was necessary for obedience to the dictates of God, in turn
necessary for salvation in the world beyond. Serious Muslim thinkers
agreed that worldly practice formed a realm, namely that of ethics, which
was not exclusively the preserve of one religion. The very orthodox
theologians Abdul Qadir Badauni in his own work on ethics (1591-2)
recognized that ‘not only Islamic scholars, but also sages of every religion
(millat) like Christians, Jews, Zoroastrians and Hindus have books on
the subject of ethics (ikhlaq)’, and explicitly commended the Indian
Kalila wa Dimna (the Perso-Arabic version of the Panchatantra) and
the Iranian Marzban-nama and Javedan.*
It is, therefore, unhistorical to assume that Islam could represent a
conscious social revolution at any stage, despite the fact that, in the
eyes of its believers, its aim was to win the world for God. The
 Elements of Social Justice in Medieval Islamic Thought 131
universality of its appeal (and, therefore, in a sense equality of all in
common humility before God) was inherent in the Prophet’s message
from the beginning. ‘Men were once one community’, God had decreed;
He had sent ‘the prophets as messengers’ to them all.° And so God told
the Prophet of Islam: ‘Say, O men, I am the Messenger of Allah to you
all from Him who rules over earth and sky.’’ But the universality of the
message was at the heart of the faith alone; it was by no means the core
of the prescribed practice of worldly life, of the realms of law and justice.
In treating of the Quranic canons of social conduct one must recall that
pagan communities in the Arabian peninsula with their various customs
already coexisted with Jewish and Christian communities following a
mixture of biblical and Roman law. If the Islamic umma was to be a
single community, it had to have practices of its own, which in a large
part would still draw from the pool of varied social customs existing
within the peninsula. The reforms that the Quranic injunctions made
might also, therefore, look to us as compromises between uniformity
and existing custom. The famous Quranic injunction to obey God, His
Prophet and ‘those in authority among you’’ could be taken to mean
that, subject to the commands of God and His Prophet, the hereditary
rulers and tribal chiefs (shaykhs and saiyids) could still claim the
allegiance of the faithful.’ Other aspects of social inequality are also
implied in the Quran. A Quranic verse is protective about trading (al-
bai);'° and there is, on the other hand, the well-known verse holding
‘the Arab nomad’ in scorn as being hostile to the Faith.'' Here is then a
visible reflection of the high position of the mercantile Quraysh above
the bedouin tribes, a circumstance which early Islamic polity inherited,
consolidated and hugely enlarged.’
In respect of women, the duality is similarly present. The Quran
recognizes that women have rights similar to those of men, a recognition
given partial reflection in the Islamic law of inheritance.'’ The principle
derived almost certainly from Islam’s insistence on individual obligation
in respect of fidelity to God borne by both men and women; but equally
certainly it came from the social milieu of pagan Mecca where the
Prophet’s wife Khadija had been a merchant in her own right. Yet, the
reality of a patriarchal environment is not forgotten. ‘Men are in a degree
above them (women)’, and, for men the women are like a field to sow;
‘so go to your tilth as you will’.'*
Islam admits both slavery and concubinage, the latter explicity in a
Quranic verse.'* Both institutions were strongly entrenched in pagan
society. On the other hand, among the virtues of the righteous is the
ability ‘to set slaves (fi al-rigabo) free’ .'°Manumitting one’s slaves
[SZ Mughal india
was thus at par with giving up part of one’s wealth, in order to give
relief to the needy. But manumission of individual slaves no more
dispensed with slavery than did charity dispense with concentrations of
wealth in early Islamic society.
I would again like to repeat that the Quranic concern with these
matters of social distinctions is secondary; to someone less familiar
with the Quran’s principal concern with the individual’s complete
submission (islam) to God, these may, indeed, appear as compromises
between the perceived equality before God and the existing inequality
among believers. But I would argue that the spiritual principle and
practical adjustments are on two different planes altogether; and equality
in worldly society was never a part of the aspirations of original Islam.
The history of early Islamic polity, as analysed classically by
Wellhausen in The Arab Kingdom and its Fall,'’ brings out the
transformation in the concepts of social hierarchy, as the Arabs
dramatically expanded their hegemony, destroying the Sassanid empire
and much of the Byzantine within the seventh century. Tribes jostled
for position within the new hegemony; and under the acknowledged
Qurayshite supremacy, two great tribal federations emerged, the northern
or Muzar (comprising mainly the Qais and Tamim) and the southern or
Yemenite (mainly Kalb and Azad) to contest each other’s pre-eminence.
There was the tribal Arab’s dislike of the non-tribal Hellenized Syrian
Arabs (Shamis) manifest in the hostility of the tribes settled in Iraq
towards them. But with increasing severity there grew the scorn and
contempt for the non-Arab converts, called mawwali or clients, because,
characteristically, it was thought unacceptable if a non-Arab claimed to
be a Muslim without having at the same time been allowed to become a
client (mawla) of an Arab tribe. As these converts, especially Iranians,
became more and more important as soldiers and secretaries and, then,
as scholars, theologians and literati, the suppression of the mawwali
became one of the pillars of the policies of the Ummayyad caliphate
(660-750), notably under Hajjaj ibn Yusuf, the Ummayyad viceroy of
Iraq and the eastern regions of the caliphate."
This hierarchical structure began to fall, with the forces let loose by
the so-called Abbasid revolution. Without going into the objections
raised by historians of the Arabist school like Shaban'’ to Wellhausen’s
thesis of the overthrow of Arabism involved in the installation of the
Abbasid dynasty in 750, the long-term results can hardly be disputed.”
With the ‘emancipation’ of the mawwali, Islam lost its exclusive
identification with Arab tradition, and Arabic became for two centuries
the literary language of Iran. The universality of Islam was invoked to
 Elements of Social Justice in Medieval Islamic Thought 133
rule out racialism and tribalism from the social ethics of Islam. This
was done by a long process of reconstruction (with much unconscious
creative forgery of the prophetic traditions, the hadis), a process which
has been given its classical analysis by Sahacht.?! Thus, a scattered
unsystematic assemblage of Quranic injunction and Arab tribal spirit
and customs was now sought to be converted in the eighth and ninth
centuries into a system of law by one of the greatest intellectual efforts
in the history of Islam. The effort was ‘to systematize ... and by the
tendency to “Islamicize’’, to impregnate the sphere of law with religious
and ethical ideas, to subject it to Islamic norms’.” The effort was not
only reflected in giving an absolute multi-racial universality to Islam; it
was also expressed in the emergence of new ethical ideas, which impelled
bans that did not exist in the Quran. Temporary contractual marriages
(mut‘a) which destroyed the woman’s stable place in the family, had
undoubtedly been a part of Arab social practice both during pagan days
and under early Islam. Traditions, accepted by all schools, except the
Shi'ite, now became current asserting that the Prophet disapproved of
mut‘a.”*> Similarly, a more humane spirit could be discerned in the
treatment of slavery. A woman slave made into a concubine to give him
a child could not then be sold away by the master—a new legal doctrine
without any historical proof of such protection extended to the Umm
al-walad concubines in the Prophet’s time or even under the Pious
Caliphs.** We see, then, that with the change in the territorial and
civilizational context of Islam, new ethical perceptions began to modify
and, in some respects, transform social outlook, in what today may
seem to be a movement towards a more benign ‘social justice’.
It is, however, necessary to remember that while this movement was
emancipatory in some respects, in relation, for example, to the mawwali,
and to certain categories of women and female slaves, it was not a
conscious movement towards equality. For one thing, there was no
attempt to deny the inferior status of women (however much protection
might be extended to them) or to question the legality and legitimacy of
slavery (increasingly humane though were the injunctions for treatment
of the slaves).> For another, as the Arab tribal customs and jealousies
were given less and less accommodation, the protection of property
and inheritance and the honouring of contracts became more and more
central to Islamic law. Where in an earlier age, constant war and booty
seemed to be in accordance with God’s insistent decree, now stability
was seen as the great virtue of properly arranged societies. It was,
therefore, not an accident that the ideal regime to many Islamic thinkers,
notably Ibn Khaldun (fourteenth century) began to be identified with
134 Mughal India
the pre-Islamic Sassanid Empire of Iran, where the rulers ruled for the
common good, that is, for the continuing stability of established
hierarchy.”° The craving. for society where birth should determine one’s
position in the apparatus of power that one finds in the Indian historian
Ziauddin Barani (1357) is, therefore, fully in accordance with the main
thrust of Islamic thought as it had developed by that time.’
Barani’s ideas on hierarchy, then, had a blue-blooded Islamic ancestry,
immersed as he himself was in Islamic history and theology. With due
respect to a scholar of the calibre of the late Professor Mohammed
Habib, it is difficult to see in his ideas any influence of ‘the traditions of
the Hindu caste system’.”’ It is noticeable that Barani never invokes the
caste system as an acceptable hierarchical order. More precisely, in his
vision of the ideal social order, there is no hint of a ban on occupational
mobility or of a hereditary priesthood, nor any concept of inherited
purity or pollution. All the essentials of the caste system are, therefore,
lacking.

il
Given the nature and development of Islamic theology and thought, as
I have sketched above, it is easy to see that with the coming of Islam to
India, there resulted no encounter between a religion of social equality
and the classical order of homo hierarchicus, to borrow from the title of
Dumont’s book.” Rather, two systems of hierarchy of different sorts
met and interacted.
This dimension of the reality perhaps best explains why the attitude
of Muslim statesmen and thinkers towards the caste system was so
accommodating. With regard to the rulers, one can cite a very early
example, Muhammad ibn Qasim. After his seizure of the capital of
Sind (712), he virtually took over the entire Brahman bureaucracy of
the fallen regime, and allowed his Brahman advisers and officials to
determine how the outcastes should be treated:
The minister (the Brahman Siyakar) said, in the presence of Moka of
Basaya, that during the reign of Rai Chach, the (Jatts of) Lohana, that is,
Lakha and Summa, were not allowed to wear soft garments, or put satin
(caps) on their head, but could only wear black woollen cloth above and
below, and throw a coarse sheet over the shoulder, and had to go about
bare-headed and bare-footed. Whoever wore a soft garment was fined.
When they came out of their house, they had to take a dog with them so
that their identity be known to all. It was decreed that no high person
from amongst them might ride a horse. ... They have no high and low
 Elements of Social Justice in Medieval Islamic Thought 135
among them and are of a savage temperament.... (Thereupon) Muhammad-
i Qasim said: ‘What disgusting people are these! They are like the steppe
nomads of Fars and Koh Paya (in Iran). The same regulations (as before)
should continue in regard to them.’ Muhammad-i Qasim kept them subject
to that prescribed mode and manner of conduct.”
There is little that needs to be added to this. The Arab conquest did
not signify any emancipation of the low castes, since the older social
regime was left undisturbed. There was no recognition of any violation
of any Islamic principles of ‘social justice’ in the retention of the old
constraints.
There centuries later, Alberuni set himself to study the Indian
civilization in all its aspects. No greater intellect than he could be
produced by the world of Islam in the realms with which he
concerned himself. He shows a remarkable tolerance for the caste
system, though he admits that such an institution is not permitted in
Islam. He argues that the caste system arose out of the rulers’ concern
for their subjects’ welfare. ‘The kings of antiquity, who were
industriously devoted to the duties of their office, spent most of
their care on the division of their subjects into different classes and
orders, which they tried to preserve from intermixture and disorder’.
He recalled, in this connection, ‘the history of the ancient Chosroes
(Sassanid emperors), for they had created great institutions, which
could not be broken through by the special merits of any individual,
nor by bribery’.*! We here have once again the admiration for the
stable hierarchy of pre-Islamic Iran, which Alberuni invokes to
explain (and, perhaps, justify) the caste system for his Muslim
readers.
Alberuni was an objective, and often sympathetic, observer of
Hinduism. But even among Muslims who held an obvious religious
bias, one looks in vain for a critique or denunciation of the caste system
throughout medieval times.*” Indeed, later descriptions of the caste
system, such as those of Abul Fazl (c. 1595), delineate it with almost
clinical neutrality.** It is possible, indeed, that some prejudices from the
Indian caste system entered popular Muslim ethos quite early. Thus
Barani tells us of Iltutmish’s officers discovering that his minister
Nizamul Mulk Junaidi was of lowly origin, being the descendant of a
weaver;™ and this reminds us of the especially low position allowed to
the weaver in the caste system, as reported by Alberuni.** Or again
Barani’s own use of an abusive epithet for an officer of Muhammad
Tughlug, which might then have been in use for sweepers.*° Only on
some rare occasions does a spirit different from that of the Brahmanical
136 Mughal India
appear in the treatment of the lowest castes, as in Akbar’s treatment of
the khidmatiyas, a Chandala caste.”’
While the caste system was thus tolerated among the Hindus, yet,
despite some transferred prejudices, it never established itself among
Muslims in a significant measure. Part of the reason lay in the fact that
Muslim law, which was created outside the environment of the caste
system, steadily expanded at the expense of inherited custom within
Muslim communities. Another reason was the fact that Muslim
perceptions of purity and pollution were so different from the caste
perceptions that the latter could not be adopted. One illustration may
serve: When the Arabs invaded Sind early in the eighth century, they
were denounced by their opponents as ‘beef-eating Chandalas’.**
Badauni (1590-1) cites a saying of the Prophet (given in Arabic) that
God curses the slaughterer of the cow, the tree-feller and the slave-
seller. Badauni found this quotation in books on ethics though he agreed
that it was of questionable authenticity. Nevertheless, he saw that there
was reason behind the condemnation of the three actions which were
legitimate only under necessity. Yet, he says ‘the belief of the common
people (among Muslims) is that unless they eat beef, their faith cannot
be true’. He goes on ironically to add, ‘Praise be to God, and wonderful
it is, what Islam has come to.’*? The observation underlines the
continuous process of the undermining of the caste sense of ‘purity’ in
converted communities by a kind of aggressive popular Muslim assertion
of a counter-custom or ritual, even when there was no provision for the
latter in orthodox theology.

IV
We have seen that the Quran has a dual perception of woman: she has a
person of her own, with rights to property, and is not the slave, in any
sense, of her father or her husband.*° On the other hand, she is deemed
inferior to man, an inferiority reflected in the daughter’s share to
inheritance being half that of son;"' also, no evidence is acceptable if all
witnesses are women, and the evidence of two women counts as that of
one man.” This duality of approach is to be found almost universally in
the thought and practice of medieval Islam.
There is no doubt that the distinct individual rights of women
continued to be preserved in Muslim jurisprudence. The illustrative
evidence for this comes from documents relating to marriage contracts
and divorce settlements from the port of Surat to which Moosvi has
drawn attention.* Here we find the wife ensuring through conditions in
 Elements of Social Justice in Medieval Islamic Thought 137
the marriage contract that the husband be bound to pay her a fixed
dower, abstain from taking another wife or having liaison with a
concubine, to not physically injure the contracting wife, to provide for
her specific subsistence needs and not to be absent for more than a
fixed period, The marriage was to be deemed terminated if any of these
conditions were not fulfilled by the husband. On the other hand, one
women simply bought a divorce from her husband by paying him a
particular amount.“
The tendency of Muslim ethical and legal authorities was to criticize
the availability of “easy divorce’ by which husbands might dispose of
their wives, who were thus bound to have an insecure position all the
time. This position is well represented by Badauni who, while
acknowledging the actual occurrence of temporary, even one-night,
matriages in the Prophet’s time,*° says that ‘since divorce is the least
liked of permissible things, resort to divorce is far from manliness’. He
then goes on to commend the Indians’ distaste of divorce: “What good
custom the people of India have that they shun this practice, and consider
its attribution to them the worst of abuse.’
Yet, if the woman’s right to look to the welfare of her person and
property was conceded, on one side, quite a contrary spirit prevailed,
on the other.
Thus, it was held that man had a right to sexual appetite, which
could not be allowed to woman. Jahangir’s contemporary, Shaikh Ahmad
Sirhindi, commended God for having shown such consideration for
men’s appetites as to allow man to have four wives, and enjoy any
number of concubines and use the device of divorce to change wives
at will;*’ women, on the contrary, were to be condemned as mischievous
and sinful for having similar urges towards men, as may be seen in the
verses of the fourteenth century poets, Amir Khusrau and Isami.**
Badauni too waxes eloquent on the theme.*? Shaikh Ahmad Sirhindi,
taking things to the extreme, as usual, asserted that women were primarily
to blame for adulterous acts, so that God held adulteresses to be more
reprehensible than their male partners.*°
Such statements provided the rationale for prescribing the strictest
seclusion for women. Amir Khusrau had exhorted the woman to keep
her face to the wall and her back to the door, and not to pass through
the door to leave the inside of the house.°' Badauni, invoking a supposed
prohibition on women riding horses attributed to the Prophet, makes
the demand that a woman should not come out of the four walls of the
house and should treat the wall as her covering garment (chadar). He
even says that the best place for a woman is the purdah or the grave.”
138 Mughal India
This is virtually halfway to the statement that the grave is one’s best
son-in-law, a saying attributed to the Prophet by the historian Afif (c.
1400),°3 but actually found in pre-Islamic Arabic poetry.™
The dual attitude is responsible for the attitude towards sati in Indo-
Muslim writing. Amir Khusrau recognized that the self-destruction of
the woman upon the death of her husband was not permitted ‘in Islam’.*°
And we may well believe Ibn Battuta when he speaks of his shock
when he first witnessed widow-burning in India.°° There was a jurists’
opinion spoken of in Badauni’s time that if a Hindu woman resolved to
burn herself (and so commit an illegal act), she became a ‘booty for
Muslims’, and whoever could, might seize and enslave her. Badauni to
his credit doubted the existence of such an opinion. On the other hand,
he was full of admiration for the Hindu women who so sacrificed
themselves for their husbands and contrasted their devotion to ‘the (lack
of) manliness of us weak- willed people’ in the path of devotion to the
Divine Beloved.*’ He duly quotes a verse in his support, but he might
better have quoted Amir Khusrau’s famous couplet:
The world has no manly lover like the Hindu wife.
Not every insect is equal to burning itself out over a dead candle.**

Indeed, Amir Khusrau had been an outspoken admirer of the fortitude

and devotion of the Hindu widow offering herself as sati.*”
A change in the attitude towards women came with Akbar; and it is
possible that in some respects contacts with Christianity played a role
in the framing of his ideas. His preference for monogamy was first
expressed in 1578 in a conversation with a Christian layman.© There
were then discussions on monogamy with the first Jesuit mission in
1580.°' Badauni reports a firm order enforcing it in 1587,° and Abul
Fazl (c. 1595) reports Akbar’s opinion that a second marriage was
justified only if the first wife had proved barren or sonless. Such advice
on restraint was naturally opposed to the traditional view. So also was
Akbar’s dislike of marriage between minors, first expressed in 1582.
This, too, could be of Christian inspiration. Akbar’s criticism of sati
could also perhaps have been engendered by the protest of Jesuit fathers
in 1580 at his appearance at widow-burnings.® It was in 1583 that Akbar
first acted personally to prevent the burning of a non-consenting widow
of a Rajput officer. Badauni reports a prohibition of forced satis in
1591;°7 and the A’in-i Akbari (c. 1595) treats it as a standing regulation.®
But it is not possible to attribute Akbar’s concern for increasing
Muslim women’s share in inheritance to any Christian influence. Akbar’s
explicit criticism of Muslim law, that it allowed a smaller share to the
 Elements of Social Justice in Medieval Islamic Thought 139
daughter, while as the weaker person she should have a larger share
(than her brother), suggests a perceptive vision of justice that, perhaps,
owed more to Akbar’s growing humanistic concerns than any new
religious influence. Indeed, Akbar’s sentiments of increasing
protectiveness towards women’s interests and his refusal to join the
chorus over women’s innate inferiority, deserve a special tribute which
has so far been rarely extended to him.”

Vv
Slavery in India long pre-dated Islam, as Dev Raj Chanana’s study has
well shown.”' Its actual harshness is apparent from the texts of thirteenth-
century documents on female slaves in the Lekhapadhati.” As we have
seen, Islam too accepted the institution of slavery it had inherited from
pagan society; and captives in war, including civil population seized as
booty, were an important source of the burgeoning slave population in
early Islamic society. It has, indeed, been argued that in a similar fashion,
there was a considerable enhancement of slave population in the north
Indian towns as a result of the Ghorian invasions and the long process
of subjugation of the countryside in the thirteenth and fourteenth
centuries.’? Whether this view can be quantitatively established is another
matter, for comparative data for the preceding period are simply not
available.
The view on slavery, as one can see in Indo-Muslim thought,
tends to begin from two propositions: One is that the master’s right
over the slave’s person is proprietary in nature, so that the slave
cannot, of his own, terminate the relationship. This not only imposed
the duty on civil authorities to recover the fugitive slave, as they
were obliged to recover any stolen property; it was quite also in
form for sufis like Nizamuddin Auliya (d. 1324) to pray for the
recapture of such a slave.”* The second proposition was that the
slave was, in the religious sphere, a full human being in the eyes of
the Lord. Thus, observed the same Nizamuddin Auliya in a
conversation recorded in 1308, ‘in this (spiritual) path, the question
of who is master and who slave does not arise.’’* From this
proposition derived a number of inferences. While it was deemed
legitimate to take a slave-girl for a concubine, her will being of no
moment,” it was not at all legitimate for the master to let his female
slaves be similarly used by other men.’’ I do not know on what
authority Badauni, who condemned the latter practice, noted that
‘this practice has survived among the Hindus of India till this day in
140 Mughal India
some places.’’* But a slave sent out to earn income for himself, could
legitimately be required to part with a share of it by his master.”
The view further developed that the relationship between the master
and slave was personal in nature, and a sale of slaves, though lawful
was not ethical. We have seen that Badauni (1591-2) quotes a saying
attributed to the Prophet that a slave-seller is a person, with two others,
whom God curses.*° Although a flourishing slave trade existed between
Delhi and Ghaznin in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, there are
two passages in Nizamuddin Auliya’s conversations which suggest at
least a mild disapproval of those who participated in the trade.*' Akbar’s
prohibition of slave trade, first issued in 1562-3 and strengthened later,*°
was thus in line with an ethical doctrine developing within Muslim
thought.
The disapproval of slave trade naturally led to the questioning of
whether free persons (hurr, pl. ahrar) could be made into slaves. That
non-Muslims could be enslaved in military raids was accepted for a
fact of life in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries even in sufic
literature. But even this became a matter of controversy in the fifteenth
century. It is reported by Badauni that in an assembly of a hundred and
twenty jurists convened before Sultan Mahmud Sharqi, Samauddin
argued that non-Muslims of hostile territory could not be enslaved,
though Qazi A‘zam of Lakhnauti presented the opposite case. Badauni
felt that the latter had had the better of the argument; yet the fact of
there having been such a controversy itself is significant.
Another aspect of the debate was whether distressed parents could
sell their children. Apparently, under the pressure of slave-purchasers,
certain scholars of Agra, like Mufti Bahauddin, issued an opinion during
the famine of 1556-7, permitting such a practice; others like Shaikh
Mubarak (the father of Abul Fazl) and the orthodox theologian, Mian
Hatim, refused to endorse it.** Badauni’s own sympathies were with
the latter view, and in his Nijatur Rashid (1590-1) he held that one of
the evil practices found among the Muslims much more than the
followers of other religions, and especially in India, was the selling
away of the freeborn as slaves. Yet he praised God that in more recent
times ‘this practice has been abandoned to some degree.’*
There was good Quranic sanction, as noted earlier, for considering
the liberation of a slave a most praiseworthy act. This view coincided
with the growing recognition that slavery was a most unnatural state
for a free-born man, the recognition extended, as we have seen, to cover
non-Muslims as well. But once a non-Muslim was enslaved, and became
a convert to Islam, freeing such a slave in circumstances where
 Elements of Social Justice in Medieval Islamic Thought 141
manumission would lead to apostasy by the slave, compelled weighing
of the merit of manumission against the dire sin of colluding in apostasy.
Nevertheless, the grant of freedom to a slave had become so meritorious
in Muslim ethics that Nizamuddin Auliya had no hesitation (though
with tears in his eyes) to approve of such manumission.’’ Here, again,
Akbar followed the logic of an established trend in Islamic tradition
when during the famine of 1594, he ordered that parents who sold their
children under compulsion could recover them by returning the amount
they had received, though, as one has to presume from the context, this
might involve a return to the children’s original religion.** In 1680, in
the time of Aurangzeb, it could be successfully argued that the return of
a child in such cases involved no sin, because the reversion of a child to
the religion of his parents involved no act of apostasy on his part, he
being a minor.*
The foregoing discussion of certain elements in medieval Indo-
Muslim attitude towards what appear to us as gross violation of any
credible system of social justice shows that we are not dealing here
with any closed system. Nor was thought so much bound with theology
that growing ethical perceptions had no effect on it. It is true that there
were few spirits bold enough like Abul Faz] to claim that if Imam Abu
Hanifa had been alive in his day, he would have written a different
interpretation of law (figh).*° But the change, however constricted by
original premises, is nonetheless perceptible over time in the attitudes
to hierarchy, women and slaves. The conditions of India, rather than
Hindu thought directly, exerted their influence too, as Islam had to come
to terms with a long-term coexistence with Hinduism. Sympathies tended
to cross religious boundaries, at least at the level of ethical conduct,
even in a man so orthodox as Abdul Qadir Badauni. If, for the reason I
set out at the beginning of this essay, no vision of social justice, as we
understand it today, could be expected from medieval thought, we still
have gropings towards such social justice. And these are especially
precious, because each represented an expansion of the human spirit. It
is precisely the presence of such human spirit that, in the final analysis,
enables us to judge the historical level of each civilization.

NOTES

1. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice, Cambridge, Mass. 1971, p. 3.

Ze) ., Poo.
142 Mughal India
3. Ibid., p. 60.
4, Quoted from Bukhari, Sahih, by Maxime Rodinson, Mohammad, Eng.
tr., Penguin Books, 1973, p. 282.
5, Badauni, Nijatur Rashid, ed. S. Moinul Haq, Lahore, 1972, pp. 21-2.
6. Quran, 1, 209.
7. Quran, 1, 155-8.
8. Quran, Iv, 62.
9, For the rather unconvincing view of commentators that the persons in
authority referred to were the Prophet’s own appointees alone, see Reuben
Levy, The Social Structure of Islam, Cambridge, 1957, p. 276.
10, Quran, 11, 275.
11. Quran, 1x, 97.
12. ‘He (Muhammad) had conquered an empire for those who had rejected
him, the Quraysh. A not uncommon outcome of revolutions’ (Rodinson,
Muhammad, p. 295).
13. Quran, 1, 228.
14. Ibid., 1, 223, 228.
15. Quran, rv, 3.
16. Quran, 1, 177.
17. Julius Wellhausen, The Arab Kingdom and its Fall, Eng. tr., London,
1927/1973. Wellhausen’s German text came out in 1902; but the pioneering
work had been done in the field by Ignaz Goldziher in two essays, “The Arabic
Tribes and Islam’ and ‘Arab and Ajam’, published in his Muslim Studies, Eng.
tr., 1, London, 1967, pp. 45-136, the studies having been published in German
(Muhammadanische studien) in 1889-90,
18. Apart from his well-known measures against the mawwali discussed
by Wellhausen, pp. 243-57, 496-500, one may recall his reprimand to
Muhammad ibn Qasim, the conqueror of Sind, for praising the heroism of a
mawla in the same breath as Arab warriors. The mawla, he declared, must
be deemed ‘a wretch’, ‘a hypocrite’, not deserving to be mentioned in
despatches (Chachnama, ed, Umar Daudpota, Hyderabad-Deccan, 1939, p.
192),
19, The Abbasid Revolution, Cambridge, 1970,
20, See Wellhausen’s insightful passage on these results, The Arab
Kingdom, pp. 556ff.
21. Joseph Schacht, The Origins of Muhammadan Jurisprudence, Oxford,
1950, Schacht acknowledges his debt to the previous work of Goldziher and
Margoliouth,
22. Ibid., p. 283.
23. Ibid., pp. 266-7. It is interesting to find Badauni giving evidence for
mut‘a sanctioned by the Prophet and then giving contradictory traditions about
who abolished the practice (Nijatu’r Rashid, pp. 434-8).
 Elements of Social Justice in Medieval Islamic Thought 143
24. Schacht, ibid., pp. 264-6.
25. ‘It cannot be denied ... that the Islamic spirit helped to make good
treatment of slaves a duty and inner duty, and to encourage an attitude which
had its roots in the oldest documents of Islam’ (Goldziher, Muslim Studies, 1, p.
117),
26. Cf. Muhsin Mahdi, /bn Khaldun’s Philosophy of History, Chicago, 1964,
pp. 248-51,
27. Barani’s main ideas in this respect are found scattered throughout
his Tarikh-i Firuz Shahi, ed. Saiyid Ahmad Khan, W. Nassau Lees and
Maulavi Kabiruddin, Bib. Ind., Calcutta, 1860-2, but especially in its
introduction, and in Advice xxi in the same author’s Fatawa-i Jahandari
(tr. M. Habib and Afsar Begum, Medieval India Quarterly, 1 (3-4), 1958,
pp. 181-8).
28. Medieval India Quarterly, ibid., p. 224.
29, Louis Dumont, Homo Hierarchicus, Paladin edn, London, 1972.
Without accepting Dumont’s interpretation of the caste system (cf. Irfan Habib’s
critique in Essays in Indian History, New Delhi, 1995, pp. 161 ff), I find it still
useful as a standard ‘brahmanical’ exposition, a kind of ‘ideal’ to which reality
may be counterposed.
30. Chachnama, pp. 214-15.
31. Edward C. Sachau (tr.), Alberuni’s India, London, 1910, 1, pp. 99-100.
32. Cf. Irfan Habib, Essays in Indian History, pp. 172-3.
33. A’in-i Akbari, Nawal Kishore ed., Lucknow, 1892, pp. 42-5.
34. Barani, Tarikh-i Firuz Shahi, p. 39.
35. Sachau, 1, p. 101.
36. Bhangri Bhangi Khurafati (Tarikh-i Firuz Shahi, p. 487).
37. Abul Fazl, Akbarnama, ed. Ahmad Ali and Abdur Rahim, Bib. Ind.,
Calcutta, 1873-87, m1, p. 604.
38, Chachnama, p. 195.
39, Nijatur Rashid, p. 264.
40. Reuben Levy, The Social Structure of Islam, Cambridge, 1957, pp.
97-8.
41. Quran, vy, p. 12.
42. Quran, 1, p. 282.
43. Shireen Moosvi, ‘Travails of a Mercantile Community in Surat’,
PIHC, 52nd session, (1991-2), Delhi, 1992, pp. 401-9.
44. See translations of the relevant documents in ibid., pp. 404-9. The
original texts are in Bibliothique Nationale (Bib, Nat.), Blochet, Suppl.
Pers. 482, a collection compiled c, 1650.
45. Nijatur Rashid, pp. 434-5.
144 Mughal India
46. Ibid., p. 437.
47. Letter to Abdur Rahim Khan-i Khanan (Maktubat-i Imam Rabbani,
Nawal Kishore, Lucknow, 1889, I, pp. 190-1).
48. Amir Khusrau, Hasht Bihisht, ed. Sulaiman Ashraf, Aligarh, 1336/
1918, pp. 26-9; Isami, Futuh-us Salatin, ed. A.S. Usha, Madras, 1948, pp.
134-5.
49. Nijatur Rashid, p. 460.
50. Maktubat-i Imam Rabbani, i, p. 69.
51. Hasht Bihisht, pp. 28-9.
52. Nijatu-r Rashid, p. 460.
53. Shams Siraj Afif, Tarikh-i Firuz Shahi, ed. Vilayat Husain, Bib. Ind.,
Calcutta, 1888-91, p. 352.
54. Quoted in Levy, Social Structure of Islam, p. 92.
55. Nuh Sipihr, ed. Wahid Mirza, London, 1950, pp. 194—S.
56. The Travels of Ibn Battuta (ab 1325—1354), tr. H.R.A. Gibb, London,
Indian reprint, New Delhi, 1993, in, p. 616.
57. Nijatu-r Rashid, p. 412.
58. Hamchu Hindu zan jahan ra, etc.
59. Cf. Nuh Sipihr, pp. 194-5.
60. Abul Fazl, Akbarnama, first version, B. L. Add. 27, 247, f.296a.
61. A. Monserrate, Commentary on his Journey to the Court of Akbar, tr.
J.S. Hoyland and S.N. Banerjee, Calcutta, 1922, pp. 43-8.
62. Badauni, Muntakhabu-t Tawarikh, ed. Ali, Ahmad and Less, Bib.
Ind., Calcutta, 1864-9, n, pp. 355-6.
63. A’in-i Akbari, ed. H. Blochmann, Bib. Ind., Calcutta, 1866-7, m1, p.
243.
64. Akbarnama, first version, B. L. Add. 27, 247, f. 327b. Cf. 11, pp. 306,
338, 355-6.
65. Monserrate, Commentary, pp. 61-2.
66. Akbarnama, 1, pp. 402-3.
67. Muntakhab-ut Tawarikh, i, p. 376.
68. A’in-i Akbari, ed. Blochmann,|, p. 284.
69. Ibid., 0, p. 235.
70. See, however, Irfan Habib in PIHC, S3rd session, 1992-3, pp.
303-5.
71. Dev Raj Chanana, Slavery in Ancient India as depicted in Pali and
Sanskrit Texts, New Delhi, 1960.
72. Cf. Pushpa Prasad, ‘Female Slavery in the 13th-century Gujarat
Documents in the Lekhapadhati’, IHR, xv (1-2), 1988-9, pp. 269-75.
 Elements of Social Justice in Medieval Islamic Thought 145
73. Tapan Raychaudhuri and Irfan Habib (eds), Cambridge Economic
History of India, 1, Cambridge, 1982, pp. 89-93.
74. Both these aspects are brought out very well in the anecdote of the
recovery of Khwaja Khujandi’s slave by the prayers of Shaikh Nizamuddin
Auliya (Khairul Majalis, ed. Khaliq Ahmad Nizami, Aligarh, 1959, p. 184).
75. Amir Hasan Sijzi, Fawaid-u’l Fawad, ed. M. Latif Malik, Lahore, 1966,
i) ok
76. For this see Abul Fath Gilani (1581), Rug’at, ed. M. Bashir Husain,
Lahore, 1968, p. 22.
77. Nijatur Rashid, pp. 242-3.
78. Ibid., p. 243.
79. Cf. Nur Turk and his slave working as cotton carder, anecdote in
Fawaid-ul Fawad, pp. 334-5.
80. Nijatur Rashid, p. 264.
81. Fawaid-u’l Fawad, pp. 14-15, 192-3.
82. See Irfan Habib, PIHC, 53rd session, 1992-3, pp. 300-1, for an
adequate discussion. It is interesting, however, that Rafiuddin Ibrahim Shirazi
attributed Akbar’s action in his early years to a young Brahman woman then
receiving his favour (Tazkarat-ul Muluk, B. L. Add. 23833, ff. 231b—232a).
83. Fawaidu-l Fawad, pp. 278, 379; Khairu-l Majalis, 236-8.
84. Nijatu-r Rashid, p. 240.
85. Muntakhab-ut Tawarikh, w, pp. 66-89.
86. Nijatu-r Rashid, pp. 239-40.
87. Fawaid-u’l Fawad, pp. 278-9, 339-40. Nizamuddin conceded,
however, that the conventional theologians (Ulama-i Zahiri) would forbid such
action.
88. Muntakhab-ut Tawarikh, i, p. 390.
89. Waga’i ‘Sarkar Ranthambhor wa Suba Ajmer, transcript in Library
of CAS in History, Aligarh, 1, p. 578.
90. Muntakhabu-t Tawarikh, i, p. 79.
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 15

The ‘Vision’ in the Salt

Range, 1578
An Interpretation

The development of Akbar’s religious ideas, all historians would agree,

reached a critical point in the late 1570s. Why this crisis arrived could
be attributed to several factors. Badauni attributes it to Akbar’s
increasing irritation with the theologians, the influence upon him of
his Rajput queens and of Birbal, and the pantheistic and heterodox
ideas insinuated into his mind by Shaikh Mubarak, his son Abul Fazl
and others. But there was a special, psychological dimension to this
crisis as well, which cannot be lost sight of. This was a factor too that
made the crisis especially severe for Akbar.
While describing the construction of the famous ‘/Jbadat Khana at
Fatehpur Sikri in 983/1575—6, Badauni tells us that since Akbar had
won so many victories and the empire had so greatly expanded, he
was increasingly affected by a sense of gratitude to God:
Respect for the Real Benefactor established itself in his heart, and in order
to render thanks to those acts of assistance, by way of humility and
sincerity, he used to sit in early mornings on an old stone in an old cell,
near the Imperial Palaces, but away on one side from habitation, when he
used to become engrossed in meditation.'

It was natural that in such condition, he should turn particularly to

mysticism, which seemed to offer to the votary an intense personal
relationship with God. Again, Badauni, who was a direct witness of
what took place in those days at Fatehpur Sikri, tells us of Akbar’s
introduction to Ibn al-Arabi’s extreme mystical and semi-pantheistic
concepts as something that had come about before 986/1578—9:
For some time Shaikh Tajuddin, son of Shaikh Zakariya Ajodhani Dehlawi,
who was called ‘Tajul Arifin’ by many notables, was the principal disciple
of Shaikh Zaman Panipati, author of Sharh-i Lawaih and many learned
works. In the science of mysticism and of Divine Unity he was a second
Ibn al-‘Arabi and had written a long commentary on Nuzhatu- | Arwah. In
150 Mughal India
the manner described, His majesty summoning him for several nights,
heard from him the ecstatic ravings and futilities of the mystic. He was not
constrained by any obligation to the demands of orthodox law, and so laid
(before the king) the doctrine of Unity of Existence (Wahdat-i Wujud),
which the false mystics believe in, and which ultimately leads to
libertarianism and heresy....

One of the mystic (sufic) practices that began to attract Akbar

now was abstention from meat. Abul Fazl aptly gives to meat-less
diet the name sufiana in the A’in-i Akbari.? Badauni was later to
attribute this to the influence of Birbal and Akbar’s Hindu queens,
who argued against beef-eating,* but here the abstention was from all
meat, and the source of inspiration was clearly the sufic tradition,
based originally perhaps more on ascetic intent than on love of animal
life which Akbar deliberately read into it. Certainly, the latter reading
was much in accord with the logic of Ibn al-‘Arabi’s pantheism. It
may be recalled that contacts with Jains were established only at a
later date.
Consistent with Akbar’s internal striving for spiritual solace was
his great devotion, exhibited at this time, to the Ajmer shrine (the
dargah of Muinuddin Chishti), which amounted to sheer addiction.
He went there repeatedly; and the height was reached when in March
1576, he traversed the last stage of the journey on foot ‘making
externalia a means of increasing internal illumination’ .° He returned to
Ajmer the same year in September, and was so swayed by holy
inspiration that he even expressed a desire to go on the Haj pilgrimage;
in lieu of this, a splendid Haj-party on the emperor’s behalf was sent
off from Ajmer, with presents of Rs 6 lakh, and no less than 12,000
robes of honour to be distributed.° If one were to disregard the element
of vanity behind this display of splendour, it can hardly be denied that
when Akbar left Ajmer in October 1577 his personal religious
affiliations, however deepened and spiritualized, were within the
framework of Islam.
Akbar had been turning to Ajmer not for religious reasons alone.
The pacification and administration of Gujarat and Mewar needed his
attention; and he left Ajmer to make a tour of Gogunda and Udaipur,
and then returned. But when he left it on 15 October, it was not to
march back to his capital Fatehpur Sikri, but to make his way to the
Punjab.’
One reason why Akbar took this decision is stated by Abul Faz] to
lie in his secret thoughts ‘for hastening to Kabul’.* It may be safely
assumed that it had much to do with affairs in Kabul, where Akbar’s
 The ‘Vision’ in the Salt Range 151
younger brother, Mirza Hakim, had long been ruling as an independent
ruler. He had previously tried his luck against Akbar by invading the
Punjab in 1566, and was to do so again in 1580. But it is possible that
this time Akbar had certain intentions of his own. Shah Tahmasp died
in May 1576; and reports must have arrived of the subsequent
happenings in Iran under his successor Shah Ismail, who killed a
number of his brothers and relatives and was soon to be done to
death himself.° This might have been regarded by Akbar and his advisers
as an opportune moment to secure Kabul, or at least clip Mirza Hakim’s
wings.
There, then, began a march, seemingly leisurely, but presumably
intended to gather reinforcements as Akbar proceeded north and north-
westwards. Passing through Amber, Manoharnagar (a fortress whose
foundations he now laid), Kotputli and Narnaul, Akbar reached Delhi,
on 27 Azar (8 November).'° But he left it on 26 Dai (7 December), to
go hunting, proceeding first to Hissar, then to Hansi and Gohana, and
thence turning back towards Delhi. From here he wheeled back to
Sunam, then going to Shadiwal and Tihara on the Sutlej. Here again,
a sharp change in direction brought him to Qayampur. Crossing the
Sutlej on a bridge of boats, he came to Patan or Pakpatan, which he
reached on 12 Isfandarmuz (23 February 1578). Proceeding from
here, the Ravi was crossed at Khanpur (not identified) on 3 Farwardin
(14 March), and the Chenab at Chiniot on 31 Farwardin (10 April)."'
Akbar then proceeded towards Bhera, in the vicinity of which a great
hunt for wild animals was to be organized.
If we draw this itinerary on the map, a curious indecisive mode of
progress appears there. There are inexplicable turn-abouts at Hissar,
Gohana and Tihara. Lahore is totally bypassed. It is possible that
Akbar was trying to conceal his intentions by avoiding a march in the
straight direction of Kabul, a device to put Mirza Hakim and his
counsellors off their guard. This would be quite in character with a
master tactician like Akbar.
Yet, what is interesting in the routes adopted is also the religious or
rather mystic dimension. An event to be borne in mind is the appearance
of the comet, which passed its perihelion on 26 October, just after
Akbar had left Ajmer. Contemporaries attached an ominous significance
to the appearance of comets, and Abul Fazl is not above offering a
detailed ‘scientific’ expositions of its ill effects, reinforced by historical
experience.’ The recent events in Iran showed, to Abul Fazl’s
consternation, that the comet of 1577 was no less malevolent.'? One
must assume that Akbar, though not an easy prey to superstition,
152, Mughal India
was not immune from one that could be so reasonably argued and so
closely illustrated from facts. One must suppose, given his acutely
activated spiritual senses, that anxiety for divine protection and
gratification of having been protected so far made him especially
vulnerable to mystic invocations and ritual. This tended to give a
rationale to the turns and twists in Akbar’s marches.
We are fortunate that we can supplement here the more courtly
and diplomatic version of events in the final text of the Akbarnama by
an earlier text of the work, preserved in a unique copy of the British
Library (Add. 27247).'* At Narnaul on 21 November, Akbar especiaily
went to the house of Shaikh Nizam who, says Abul Faz] patronizingly
enough, had opened a spiritual ‘shop’ there. Yet, in spite of Abul Fazl’s
later belittling of what the mystics could offer to a spiritually rich
person like Akbar, it is apparent that he felt himself called upon to
explain why the emperor should have gone to Shaikh Nizam seeking
instruction on things divine.'’ In December, Akbar made a point of
going to Hansi to pray at the shrine of Shaikh Jamal, a disciple of the
famous Chishti mystic, Fariduddin Ganj Shakar (thirteenth century).’°
He was still so respectful towards religious divines that when one
noted theologian, Muhammad Yazdi, arrived at his camp about the
time (about 31 January 1578), he sent him to Shaikh Abdun Nabi, the
orthodox theologian and minister for revenue grants, accompanied
by his own son, Sultan Murad."’ .
A little later at Shadiwal, when Akbar apparently decided to make a
journey to Pakpattan, the place of the tomb and shrine of Farid Ganj
Shakar, he decided not to eat meat on Fridays till he reached that
place, as an act of ascetic devotion to that saint. Clearly, it was in his
mind, as Abul Fazl explicitly proclaims here, that killing and eating an
animal and so making one’s stomach ‘a graveyard of animals’ was
unethical in itself.'’ Arriving at Pakpattan Akbar performed all the
rituals that a devotee was expected to perform and met two notable
Sufis.'? When at Chiniot on 10 April, Akbar issued an order banning
bird-catching and fishing, while speaking ‘many truths’ about these
‘improper acts’.”°
We can see here how Akbar’s mind was gravitating towards Sufism,
and how, what was an ascetic practice in Sufism appeared to him an
act of ethical conduct. It created the background for the dramatic
incident in the Salt Range in May 1578. The incident is described by
Arif Qandahari, writing in 1580-1, without his being conscious of
Akbar formulating any new religious ideas. He is followed by Abul
Fazl (two versions), Shaikh Nizamuddin Ahmad and Badauni. We
 The ‘Vision’ in the Salt Range {53
could do best by combining the facts as they give them.
Having reached Bhera, Akbar crossed the Jhelam on 22 April. From
Girjhak to Old Bhera, both on the right bank of the river, a distance of
25 kurohs (or some 60 miles) intervened. A line of beaters was
established with these as terminal points and with the river as the
natural barrier. Wild animals were to be collected and then herded
together in what, perhaps, could be one of the largest gamargha hunts
ever organized. Troops were deployed to make it a success. On 25
April, Mirza Yusuf Khan, Naurang Khan and Asaf Khan were
despatched to take charge of the arrangements. All the nobles and
other mansabdars, ‘troop by troop, army by army’ (i.e. their
contingents) were sent to take up their positions. On 27 April, the
Baluch chiefs from across the Indus, recently subjugated (Haji Khan,
Jatta Khan, etc.), arrived to render obeisance, and they too were sent
off to take part in the enterprise.*' Clearly, the aim Akbar had in mind
was to organize an enormous military exercise.
All the mansabdars’ contingents could now be seen in operation,
and tested for numerical strength and efficiency. Conducted almost
in sight of what was Akbar’s great border fort at this time, namely
Rohtas, the exercise would be a show of strength for Mirza Hakim
and others at Kabul to take full cognizance of. If the qamargha is
seen in this light, the actual slaughter of animals when herded into
one mass by the beaters comes out as only a very secondary object
of the ‘hunt’.
It was on 4 May, when the time for the slaughter of the wild herd
driven into the designated ground was near, that, as Akbar was sitting
under a tree, he suddenly had an inner ‘illumination from divine light’;
a ‘strange condition’ (halate ‘ajib) came over him; a ‘strong emotion’
(jazba-i qawi) took possession of him, so three historians have told
us.” It was a public change of heart, a scene for later court painters to
paint in Akbarnama illustrations. As Akbar came out of his reverie,
he ordered the lines to be withdrawn and the hemmed-in beasts, “some
thousands’ to be left free. Fast messengers were dispatched to put the
order into effect.”
We can see now that Akbar’s spiritual inclinations shown in periodic
abstention from meat and prohibition of bird-killing and fishing were
leading up to such a denouement. A slaughter of animals on this scale
would have been totally opposed to his developing inclinations towards
the protection of animal life.
Akbar took, however, another step which showed his own religious,
perhaps partly superstitious, anxieties. He had let his hair grow like
154 Mughai India
the Hindus (‘the truth-following Hindus’), contrary to the Muslim
practice—‘the practice of my ancestors’. He now decided to cut his
hair short, and so revert to the practice previously abandoned.” This
decision to revert to this “approved practice’ (sunnat-i sunnia) was
noted with gratification by Arif Qandahri, writing within two years or
so of the event. Was Akbar here sincerely contrite at this deviation
from the rites of his own faith, or was it a gesture made for the
consumption of the overwhelming Muslim population across the
Indus? The latter, though not impossible, is unlikely; and one must
suppose that Akbar at this point of time had come heavily under the
influence of Muslim mysticism.
This is further confirmed by his other steps. Greatly trying to
establish the spiritual significance of the vision he had received, he
built a large pavilion and laid out an extensive garden;”° but, most
significantly, he named the place the “Little Mecca’ (Makka-i Khurd).”’
His vision then was altogether within the Islamic framework.
Akbar’s spiritual experience and the calling off of the qamargha
had no diplomatic and military sequel. A great military exercise had
taken place. A line extending for much over 60 miles had been formed:
if there was one person for every two yards more than 50,000 troops
must have been deployed. The message that such an assemblage of
armed men ready for action would get to those for whom it was
intended.
If there was no sequel, much was perhaps due to the intervention
of Akbar’s mother, Hamida Banu Mariyam Zamani. The movement
of her son westward with an increasing rally of troops could not conceal
from her what Akbar’s intentions were. It was clearly this, not her
anxiety about Akbar’s health**—for she could hardly have learnt of
the old Bhera vision and responded to it so fast—that brought her to
Bhera from Fatehpur Sikri in pursuit of her son. She wished to avoid,
one must suppose, an open strife in the family. A compromise was
effected. Mirza Hakim’s full sister, Sakina Banu, was now sent as
envoy to Mirza Hakim, for an offer of marriage of Salim (who was
then nine years) to Mirza Hakim’s daughter. The kingdom of Kabul
could then be claimed for Salim in inheritance.” At the same time, a
mission was sent to Badakhshan to accept Shah Rukh Mirza’s mother’s
apologies for her son’s conduct.” A kind of paramountcy over the
two Timurid states still surviving on the border could possibly have
been in contemplation. For the moment, however, the military
campaign was abandoned, and Akbar began his journey back to
Fatehpur Sikri by the more conventional route.
 The ‘Vision’ in the Salt Range 155
The entire episode suggests that in the first phase of his spiritual
crisis, Akbar’s effort was to turn heavily to the Islamic mystical
sources. One can then see how this would logically lead in 1579 to
his reading the Khutba or Friday sermon in the Fatehpur Sikri mosque
and to the mahzar or statement of eminent theologians recognizing
his special position as interpreter of Muslim law.*!
Why this path, involving a certain amount of Muslim orthodoxy
with religious tolerance, could not be continued by Akbar, cannot,
perhaps be answered from the point of view of political exigencies
alone, much though, and quite rightly, Iqtidar Alam Khan has stressed
the relationship between the two in an important essay.*? One must
give due weight to the fact that Akbar, in his spiritual anxieties,
demanded a kind of solace, a degree of internal peace that Islam or,
for that matter, any religion could not provide him with. Already, late
in 1578 at Fatehpur Sikri, in an answer to Mirza Aziz Koka, Akbar
would cast doubt on men’s claims to divine incarnation in India and
prophethood elsewhere.** The doubts would grow apace, and create
that stormy mental crisis of 1579-80, out of which a cogent perception
of Divine omnipotence and the equal illusoriness of World and
Religion would be grasped and the principle of Sulh-i Kul, Absolute
Peace, crafted to create for Akbar his own world of spirit.*4 It was
essentially the work of a reasoner, if not fully of a rationalist; and we
may be belittling the earnestness of the intellectual and moral
endeavour if we suppose either that it was a chance synthesis of several
religions or a mere religious rationalization of political expediency.
The incident of 1578 that we have analysed shows clearly enough
that politics and religion ran for him a parallel, rather than an
intermixing, course.

NOTES

1. Badauni, Muntakhab’ul Lubab, ed. W.N. Lees and Ahmad Ah,

Calcutta, 1865, 1, p. 200. This personal need for solace on Akbar’s side is
lost sight of in Abul Fazl’s long passage on the /badat Khana.
2. Badauni, 1, p. 258.
A’in-i Akbari, 1, ed. H. Blochmann, Calcutta, 1866-7, 1, p. 59.
Badauni, i, pp. 302-3.
Akbarnama, Bib. Ind. ed. 1, p. 164.
wDAR
Ibid., pp. 191-2, 217.
156 Mughal India
7. Akbarnama, i, p. 220.
8. Ibid., p. 244.
9. These events are described in Akbarnama, 1, pp. 224-7.
10. Ibid., p. 227.
11.“ Tbid., p. 239.
12. Ibid., pp. 221-4.
13. Ibid., pp. 224-7.
14. This was used occasionally by Henry Beveridge in his translation of
the Akbarnama; it is surprising that he did not appreciate its full historical
value.
15. The explanation is longer in Add. 27247, f. 291a than in Akbarnama,
mM, p. 227.
16. Akbarnama, i, p. 232.
17. Add. 27247, ff. 292b—293a; Akbarnama, i, pp. 232-3.
18. Add. 27247, f. 293a. In his final version, Abul Fazl omits here all
references to Shaikh Farid’s shrine; but this is a misleading omission.
19. Akbarnama, 0, p. 236.
20. Add. 27247, f. 293(a). No reference in final version.
21. All these details are from Add. 27247, f. 294a., Cf. Akbarnama, I, p.
241, which has shortened the narrative somewhat.
22. Akbarnama, version of Add. 27247, f. 294a and the published edn,
pp. 241-2 (the first statements); Nizamuddin Ahmad, Tabaqat-i Akbari, ed.
B. De., Calcutta, 1931, u, p. 337, and Badauni, u, pp. 243-54 (the third
statement).
23. Akbarnama, both versions.
24. Akbarnama, i, p. 242 (Add. 27247, f. 294a, has a clear text.
25. Arif Qandahari,Tarikh-i Akbari, ed. Muinuddin Nadvi et al.,
Rampur, 1962, p. 254.
26. Nizamuddin Ahmad, 1, p. 338; Badauni, 1. p. 254.
27. Arif Qandahari, p. 236. Being the earliest source, with no axe to grind,
there is no reason to disbelieve the information he gives. Abul Fazl and the
other historians, who seem to follow him here, omit all references to the name.
28. As supposed by V.A. Smith, Akbar the Great Mogul, 2nd edn, Indian
reprint, Delhi, 1962, p. 114.
29. Akbarnama, it, pp. 243.
30. Ibid., p. 243.
31. See Akbarnama, Add. 27247, ff. 298b—299a, ed. pp. 268-73;
Nizamuddin Ahmad, u, pp. 343-16; Badauni, 1, pp. 270-2.
32. ‘Nobility under Akbar and the Development of his Religious Policy’,
JRAS (1968), pp. 29-36.
 The ‘Vision’ in the Salt Range 157
33. I would continue to urge that for Akbar’s own final ideas, an accurate
understanding of Abul Fazl’s chapter A’in-i Rahnamuni in A’in-i Akbari, ed.
H. Blockmann, 1, pp. 158-61, is indispensable.
34. Ibid.
 14

Sulh-i Kul and the Religious

Ideas of Akbar

That Akbar formulated a religious policy for the Mughal Empire that
can in some ways claim to be a forerunner of the secular aspects of
modern Indian polity, is now almost a historical cliche; that he founded
a new religion is a school textbook dogma that serious historians have
long been trying to eradicate without much success.
My present endeavour is not so much as to concentrate on Akbar’s
religious policy, but to treat of Akbar’s religious philosophy, beliefs
or ideas (whatever word be the most appropriate) that he came to
entertain during the last twenty-five years or so of his life. These cannot
be separated from his positive practical measures; and this will be
clear, I hope, from my own exposition. But ideas will form my starting-
point, and the measures will serve only to illustrate.
Much can be written on the evolution of Akbar’s religious ideas. It
became part of the imperial legend that one of the miraculous powers
of Akbar was that, though he remained formally illiterate (ummi) like
the Arabian Prophet, he could understand and appreciate the highest
thoughts, principles and works of art and literature. It is almost certain
that, though encouraged by Akbar himself, as his Happy Sayings
reproduced in the A’in-i Akbari show, his illiteracy was more or less a
myth. The basis was probably no more than this that as a child Akbar
had paid more attention to playing games than to learning the alphabet.
Quite possibly, the habit of reading directly never grew because of
the custom of officials reading out documents and books to princes.
But a man who had such an eye for calligraphy and book illustration,
and built up a splendid library, could not have been illiterate by any
standard. It does seem probable, however, that Akbar did not obtain
formal education in the theological and legal sciences that formed the
core of all knowledge in the eyes of the orthodox. This may be because
his tutor Abdul Latif was liberal, as suggested by Badauni,” or because
Akbar had little inclination towards the dull details of theology.
It is possible that Akbar’s later liberation from theology owed a
little at least to the absence of his personal commitment to this or that
 Sulh-i Kul and the Religious Ideas of Akbar 159
school, forged in the process of early education. But while Akbar’s
knowledge of Muslim theology probably never became profound, like
many ‘laymen’, he stood, in his youth, in considerable awe of the
prowess of religious men. This awe amounted often to superstition,
as exhibited by his self-deprecation before Mulla Abdullah Sultanpuri,’
his excessive adulation of the dargah of Ajmer,‘ and his faith in the
prayers of Shaikh Salim Chishti.° It must be remembered that by his
time the mystics were as much a part of the Muslim religious
establishment as any mullas or conventional theologians.
As Iqtidar Alam Khan has shown, Akbar’s early measures of
tolerance, and the abolition of the pilgrimage tax and jizya in the early
1560s were episodic and of little immediate significance.° Writing
later, Abul Fazl probably exaggerates their importance. On the other
hand, Akbar soon initiated a vigorous ‘Islamic’ policy, illustrated by
the Fathnama-i Chittor, the proclamation on the fall of Chittor in
1568, where the infidels are reviled; the reimposition of jizya in 1575
is also symbolic of this policy. Indeed, Akbar, bolstered by his success
against the Rajputs, was looking forward to widespread acclamation
as a great conqueror of Islam.
It was probably here, in the realm of relations between political
sovereignty and theological Law, that the contradiction germinated,
which later on led to a complete reformulation of Akbar’s religious
views. There is no doubt that Safavid Iran exercised considerable
influence on the minds and manners of Akbar’s court. The Safavid
Shah was also a religious figure, a representative of the imam, and
thus superior to all religious divines of the country. It was not unnatural
that Akbar should aspire to such a status within the Sunni framework.
It was obviously with this view that Ibadat Khana consultations or
discussions of theologians were initiated. Akbar hoped to implement
what theologians told him, and, in return, secure from the latter a
recognition of his own supreme position.
But, as Badauni lamented, the theologians could not agree on any
thing,’ while, to their credit, on some matters like the number of lawful
wives, they could not reconcile Akbar’s own practice with any reading
of the Quranic injunctions. In 1579, they were at last persuaded to
sign a statement of testimony (mahzar) recognizing that Akbar
possessed a particular religious status. The text has fortunately been
preserved for us in the Tabagat-i Akbari of Nizamuddin Ahmad* and
the Muntakhabut Tawarikh of Abdul Qadir Badauni.’ The statement
admits that the position of a just king (Sultan-i ‘Adil) is above that of
a mujtahid (interpreter of law); that Akbar was such a Sultan-i ‘Adil;
160 Mughal India
and that Akbar, therefore, could (a) accept any of the existing divergent
authoritative interpretations of mujtahids, (b) give his own opinion on
any matter, provided it did not violate the nas (Holy Quran). All the
leading theologians at the court signed (i.e. affixed their seals), but
we can see now that the mahzar did not ultimately meet Akbar’s
ambitions: Abul Fazl in his Akbarnama passes it by very casually.'°
Akbar’s immediate attempt to take it seriously, and to abide by his
newly gained religious status among Muslims by giving a Friday
sermon, failed to enthuse either himself, or, apparently his audience."
The authority assigned to him was of marginal import, and yet a novelty
considered dangerous in its implications by traditionalist Muslims.
Akbar had already begun looking towards other religions, first out
of curiosity, and after the mahzar, out of an increasing desire to put
his own position beyond the narrow framework of traditional Islam.
Acquaviva’s Jesuit mission came soon after the mahzar. The 1580-1
rebellion set a seal on the alienation of Akbar from Islamic orthodoxy;
and the phase opened in which Akbar defined his own views more
and more sharply. It is with a restatement of these views that I shall
henceforth be chiefly concerned.
1 It may be argued by the sceptic that so much has been written on
Akbar’s religious views that a fresh exposition can only be superfluous.
And yet there is need, first of all, to establish accurately what views
Akbar held or developed after the failure of his appeasement of the
Muslim orthodoxy that had culminated in the mahzar of 1579, that is
during the period 1580-1605, when, according to popular textbook
writers, he created a religion, the Din-i Ilahi, to absorb all religions.
Our primary source for Akbar’s ideas of this final phase of his life
are Abul Fazl’s Akbarnama and A’in-i Akbari. These works were read
out to Akbar and personally approved by him.'* They were, therefore,
no mere official works by a hack. Nor did they necessarily contain
only the ideas which Abul Fazl himself held. They contained the ideas
and reflected the ideology of the patron, though the draftsman himself
was a master of style and a scholar of no mean learning. In the urge to
endorse orreject the contentions of the critic Badauni or the narratives
of the Jesuit fathers, these two works have been strangely undervalued
as the source of Akbar’s belief and practice in religious matters. The
effort here is to set matters right in this respect.
On reading the Akbarnama and the A’in-i Akbari, one realizes
immediately that Akbar wished to assert his very strong belief in God;
but his concept of the way God is to be worshipped was independent
of either orthodox Islam or Hinduism. As the ‘Happy Sayings’ set out
 Sulh-i Kul and the Religious Ideas of Akbar 161
in the A’in show, he believed, as did the Sufis, that God is to be
grasped and worshipped by different men according to the limitations
of their knowledge. God was formless (be-surat) and could not be
grasped in any form except by the greatest effort of the mind (chira-
dasti-i khyal)."" To worship such a one, physical action in prayer
(Suri-paristish) was suitable only for the unawakened ones."
Otherwise, worship could only be an act of the heart. Elsewhere,
Akbar is said to have held that the real act of God worship is to have
‘an illuminated heart that loves Light’ (Raushan-dil-i nur dosti).'°
Akbar, therefore, deprecated both the image-worship of the Hindus
and the prayer-ritual of the Muslims. His deprecation of image-worship
is particularly borne upon us when the author of the Akbarnama
styles Todar Mal a ‘simple one’ (sada-lauh), because he mourned the
loss of the idols he used to worship; it goes on to call him ‘a blind
follower of custom and narrow-mindedness.’'® For the benefit of this
famous revenue minister, Akbar also sermonized to the effect that no
worship of God is superior to looking after the weak."’
The importance Akbar gave to Light might well be due to the fact
that it is formless; and there was, therefore, a natural tendency to exalt
the Sun, the source of Light, as is indicated in the A’in’s chapters,
A’in-i Rahnamuni and A’in-i Iradat Gazinan.'* Akbar said that ‘the
exalted Sun is of great benefit for rulers; and so they direct words of
praise to it and count it God-worship, though the narrow-minded ones
suspect them (of sun worship).’'? Akbar obviously had in mind the
Nauroz festivities of the Sassanid tradition, in which the Parsi worship
of Sun and Light had a role. Akbar was thus attempting to reconcile
that ancient royal tradition with his own theory of divine light.
The A’in-i Rahnamuni further reveals that Akbar’s idea of God
was heavily influenced by pantheism: God creates visible differences
whereas the Reality is the same. ‘One heart-ensnaring Beauty lights
up thousands of curtains (pardah).’ Akbar, indeed, protests that to
ascribe evil to Satan (as is done by conventional Muslims) is really to
limit the absoluteness of God. The evil of Satan too comes from God.”
At the same time, he is no believer in divine incarnations. He makes a
wry dig at this belief of popular Hinduism, when he says that in India
no one claimed to be a prophet because all would-be prophets claimed
to be ‘God’.”! Akbar thus expressed a positive disbelief in any visual
appearance of the Creator in any form whatsoever.
Akbar saw a close relationship between the Divine Sovereign and
the temporal sovereign. To see sovereigns (farman dahan) is
considered to be worship of God;” and for sovereigns, in return, the
162 Mughal India
dispensing of justice and administering the world, is the real mode of
worship.”?
The A’in accordingly styles sovereignty, in a well-known phrase,
as farr-i izadi, divine light.”4
As a sovereign, who is indeed ‘the elect of God’, Akbar saw himself
in a direct relationship with God, independent of any religion.
Predisposed to pantheism, he saw din (religion) itself to be as illusory
as dunya (A’in-i Rahnamuni). To continue to follow the ritual of one’s
faith was a mere reflex or imitation (taglid). In this respect, he exalted
aql (reason) and condemned taqlid, arguing that if taqlid was desirable,
all prophets would have merely followed old customs (and not brought
forth new laws).” In this respect Akbar was thus following a tradition,
once strong in classical antiquity, as against orthodox Islam, that of
aql or Reason opposed to naq/ or imitation. But he used it to subject
even Islam to a rational questioning.
He saw in Islam (as well as in other religions of his time), an
illusory separateness from other religions, based on a differentiation
in ritual and belief brought about by taglid or imitation. It is significant
that throughout the Akbarnama and the A’in-i Akbari, a very neutral
terminology is adopted in references to Islam. Islam is not styled as
such at all. It is usually called Ahmadi- Kesh, that is the Muhammadan
doctrine, as one may say in English. Ahmadi-Kesh is clearly a term
coined by Akbar or by Abul Fazl with his approval. No other work in
Persian ever uses such a designation for Islam. Was it that the word
Islam, implying submission to God as the characteristic element of
the faith, was thought by Akbar to be too value-loaded, to be used for
it?
Akbar not only felt free of any restraint of Islamic law; he could
also freely criticize it. It is interesting to read his criticism of how
daughters are treated in Islamic law. ‘In the Ahmadi-Kesh, the
daughter receives a smaller share in inheritance although it is better
that the weaker should receive the larger share.’”° He had as little
patience with Hindu customs and practices, and condemned child
marriage in no uncertain terms, describing it as an act that displeases
God.”’
Akbar’s view of himself as a repository of enlightened ideas did
not imply a missionary or propagandist motive. On the contrary, he
had an extremely elitist view of the people to whom such knowledge—
or any knowledge, for the matter—must be confined. He approvingly
cited an anecdote of Shah Tahmasp in which he punished a personal
servant for displaying erudition. “Whenever servants take to knowledge
 Sulh-i Kul and the Religious Ideas of Akbar 163
(ilm), various affairs would become disordered’.”* As to divine
knowledge, it had to be even more restricted: ‘The enhancement of
wisdom cannot encompass every house, and recognition cannot be
received by every heart. If one does reach the stage of recognition,
one has to take to silence out of the fear of life-taking men. If such a
full-hearted one speaks out, good-natured simple ones, accusing him
of infidelity and heresy, deprive him of his life’ (A’in-i Rahnamuni).
He held no divine message for ordinary men: ‘Let the artisans (pesha-
war) be more skilled at their work. That is divine worship for them.’”
Quite clearly, if Akbar had any spiritual integration in mind, it was
solely at an aristocratic level. In any case to talk of, or expect, ideas
of ‘national integration’, when the idea of nation itself did not exist or
was at best dormant, can only be an anachronism.
It is this essentially elitist view of Akbar about the possessors of
religious truth that must be basic to any interpretation of the
organization and ritual he instituted for its propagation. S.R. Sharma
has already cogently argued that Akbar aimed at initiating no religion,
and certainly did not coin and did not use the word Din-i Ilahi.*° But
such is the force of a preconceived notion that Blochmann, one of
the ablest of translators, fell consistently into such error. He rendered
A’in-i Iradat Gazinan, literally, regulations for those privileged to
be (His Majesty’s) disciples, as “Ordinances of the Divine-Faith’.
Even when translating Badauni, in his notes for his translation of the
A’in, Blochmann translated halga-i iradat and silsilah-i muridan,
literally circle of disciples, as ‘Divine Faith’ and ‘the new religion’,
in two passages.*!
The very fact that Akbar was employing the terminology of the
Sufi silsilahs, especially calling his spiritual followers iradat-gazinan
or murids, disciples, suggests that Akbar was here aspiring to a position
analogous to a murshid, or spiritual guide of an elite set of disciples.
Abul Faz! bears this out: ‘Whoever desires to be enrolled as a disciple
finds great difficulty in his plea being accepted.’** Only when the
integrity of such a candidate was established to Akbar’s satisfaction
would he admit him to the silsilah-i iradat.
Another mistranslation, here again by Blochmann, has completely
altered the whole sense of the original. Abul Faz] says that “in spite of
the difficulties that lie (in the path of admission) and the strictness in
choosing the candidate, thousands upon thousands of men of all classes
have worn the mantle of trust (in His Majesty) and hold (entry into)
the circle of discipleship as a means of attaining every good fortune.’**
In other words, a few were accepted out of thousands—a pardonable
164 Mughal India
exaggeration from a courtier. Blochmann converts all these unknown
unaccepted candidates as ‘converts’ to ‘the New Faith’.**
One may pass over the principal injunctions and petty ritual that
Akbar provided for the accepted disciples.* The content of his teaching
is, however, summed up most intelligently by his son Jahangir, when
soon after his own accession in 1605, he followed his father in enrolling
his own murids:
Let the disciples never make their own time dark and disturbed by the
hostility against any religious community (millat) from amongst the
religions; with men of all faiths, let them follow the path of Sulh-i Kul
(Absolute Peace). Let them not kill any living being with their own hands
or carry arms, except in war and hunt.*°
The key principle to be communicated was Absolute Peace or
Sulh-i Kul, a term favoured too by Abul Fazl.
There is no evidence to suggest that Akbar intended his circle of
disciples to be anything more than a limited circle of sincere admirers.
It was not even to be a ginger-group propagating the principles of a
new ideology.
And yet, Akbar was not averse to establishing for himself a holy
position in the eyes of the multitude. So far as we know, no Hindu
ruler had employed the ceremony of jharoka darshan, where the
sovereign appeared at dawn to be seen at the latticed window by those
believing that a sight of him was auspicious. Clearly, the ceremony
suggested that the sovereign was himself either semi-divine or, at least,
of such sacred substance that catching sight of him was a greater
religious gain than immersion in holy water.*’ It was a most intelligent
use of a widely held Hindu belief in early morning immersion to bolster
the sovereign’s claim to not only being a guru (the equivalent of pir),
but to possibly something more in the spiritual world.
It is also clear that Akbar did not simply look for the devotion of
the multitude obtained by claims to sanctity. He did imply that his
religious ideas had to be reflected in his own practice. While the real
doctrine of pantheism was to be prudently conveyed to a select group
of ‘disciples’, the principles of Sulh-i Kul that flowed from it were of
general import for imperial policy in all spheres.
The author of the seventeenth-century encyclopaedic work on
religions, the Dabistan-i Mazahib, made a striking observation when
he traced Akbar’s policy of religious toleration to the need of keeping
within his nobility men of all creeds and faiths.** This needs no
substantiation today; the fact is too obvious. One may remember only
 Sulh-i Kul and the Religious Ideas of Akbar 165
that the need extended not only to tolerating Hindus, but Shias as
well. From my own study of grants of mansabs,*® the relative position
of the Hindus and Iranis (who were mostly Shias) in the higher and
medium ranks of Akbar’s nobility in the year 1595 appear as given in
Table 1.

TABLE |

Mansabdars Excluding
Sons and Grandsons of the Emperor, Alive in 1595

Total Hindus Iranis

5,000 and above 8 1

3,000 to 4,500 13 3 5
1,000 to 2,500 3h 6 6
500 to 900 61 12 12
200 to 450 160 25 48

279 47 US

The figures reflect the truly composite character that Akbar

imparted to the Mughal ruling class. The Hindus claiming a share
of 16.8 per cent in the nobility may be thought to have yet obtained
only a small foothold; and yet this was to grow in size in the
seventeenth century under the next three successors of Akbar. For
this I have set out the evidence in my book The Mughal Nobility
under Aurangzeb.”
A noteworthy element of Akbar’s policy during his last twenty-
five years was not only general toleration for men of all faiths, about
which so much has already been said, but also his tolerance of Shias
and prohibition of Sunni—Shia conflict. With pride Jahangir could
say that while elsewhere Shias persecuted Sunnis and vice versa, in
his father’s empire, ‘the Sunnis and Shias prayed in one mosque’.*!
The policy was clearly set forth in Abul Fazl’s account of the
execution of Mirza Faulad, who had killed a Shia theologian, Ahmad
Thattawi: every religious group was free to worship God freely in
its own way, but not to quarrel with others. Mulla Ahmad ‘was very
166 Mughal India
firm and free of tongue is support of the Imamite (Shia) faith and
constantly raised the Sunni—Shia question.’ But Akbar would show
no mercy to his murderer, who was executed in spite of pleas by
the highest officers.”
Abul Fazl’s language here and elsewhere implies no special esteem
for Shiaism, either on his part or Akbar’s. The implicit but repeated
suggestions by Dr Athar Abbas Rizvi in his recent work that Akbar
was hostile only to Sunni orthodoxy, has little basis.*? Shia
theologians were by no means more liberal than the Sunnis in their
attitude to non-Muslims; and it is difficult to locate in Akbar’s
religious ideas any particular trace of Shiite influence. Certainly,
there was no exaltation anywhere of the person or status of Ali in
any of the Happy Sayings of Akbar or in Abul Fazl’s works.
In one way, then, Akbar made the Mughal Empire into a neutral
force as far as the internal controversies of Islam were concerned. This
by itself may have been a matter of consternation to the Sunni ulama,
who till now had been in the ascendant, and one of frustration for the
Shiite scholars, who saw that the path of dominance could only be the
difficult one of persuasion and not the shorter one of persecution of
their opponents. But all this cannot explain the suggestions in our sources
that Islam as a whole suffered during Akbar’s last years.
The historian Badauni’s effective rhetoric against Akbar and his
plaintive and repeated statements about the hard days for Islam have
been dismissed or deprecated as the exaggerations of a narrow-minded
theologian, who inflated the decline of the ulama’s influence into a
decline of Islam. The Jesuit fathers’ statements supporting Badauni’s
general statements about the ruin of mosques“ have been ascribed to
their excessive readiness to believe that Akbar was abandoning the faith
of his forefathers. Criticism of these two sources on these lines may be
read in S.R. Sharma’s Religious Policy of the Mughal Emperors.*
But it is important to remember that statements about the declining
fortunes of Islam as a practised religion during Akbar’s later years
are not confined to these two sources alone.
One important work of Jahangir’s reign is the Tarikh-i Khan
Jahani, written in 1613 by Niamatullah, a protégé of Jahangir’s
favourite Afghan noble, Khan Jahan Lodi. The author is no bigot
and praises Khan Jahan Lodi for constantly speaking out before
Jahangir in praise of the bravery and loyalty of the Rajputs at a time
when the Emperor was greatly annoyed with them.”*° Yet, the same
writer offers this passage for the conditions prevailing at Akbar’s
death, and the change which took place with Jahangir’s accession:
 Sulh-i Kul and the Religious Ideas of Akbar 167
The Prophet’s Shariat, which like the red flower withered by the autumn
wind, blossomed afresh with the vernal wind, with the accession of the
King of Islam (Jahangir); and the mosques, khangahs and madrasas
that had become for the last thirty years the abode of birds and beasts,
while the call to Muslim prayer was heard by no one, were cleared (of
them) and became clean once again.*’

One may then take it that the Jesuits were not wrong when they
found mosques seized and used for other purposes; and that though
Badauni might have been guilty of exhaling much smoke, there was
at least some fire behind the smoke of his rhetoric.
The question arises whether Islam suffered from some positive
persecution during the reign of Akbar. Another contemporary divine,
Shaikh Ahmad Sirhindi, in a letter apparently written soon after
Jahangir’s accession, indeed asserts that this was so. According to
him, the greatest misfortune that had befallen Islam in times of
weakness was that the Muslims had been allowed to practise their
religion and the infidels theirs (normally, implies the mystic-
theologian, the latter should not have been so allowed). But what
had happened in the period immediately past was that the infidels
openly practised their rites, while the Muslims were prevented from
so doing; and if they did so, they were killed, so says the divine with
the usual smug exaggeration of which the self-righteous are so
capable.**
The allegation of persecution stated in such terms, takes us
necessarily to the matter of martyrs which every persecution of a
religion with faithful followers must produce. Here, admittedly, the
evidence becomes weak; for an account of specific punishments
meted out to theologians or others who stood up for the open practice
of their religion is difficult to find.
An interesting work in this connection is Muhammad Sadiq’s
Tabagat-i Shah Jahani, written in 1636-7, which gives biographies
of Muslim theologians reign by reign. The author alleges that towards
the end of his reign “Akbar Badshah deviated from the Faith (of
Islam) and summoned mystics and theologians from all parts and
inflicted punishments on them.’*’ But the only case of an execution
he records is that of Haji Sultan Thansesari, who in fact was a revenue
collector appointed, curiously enough, on Abul Fazl’s
recommendation. He was executed on the complaint of Hindus ‘for
justice’, in 1600. Since even Muhammad Sadiq refrains from calling
him a shahid (martyr), it is not clear if any religious issue was at all
involved. In another anecdote, the same author records that Shaikh
168 Mughal India
Abul Fath, when summoned to Akbar’s court, went post-haste
expecting to be punished, but was immediately permitted to return
home by Akbar.®
We are, therefore, left with general statements about persecution
and punishments but hardly any particulars. The roll of martyrs is a
disappointingly short one, if indeed it at all exists.
Moreover, there are contradictions in our evidence that are not
easy to explain. Thus mosques continued to be built during Akbar’s
last years. The most outstanding example is the exceptionally large
mosque built by Man Singh at Raj Mahal in Bengal, in 1592. The
local tradition presents a curious picture of Akbar as an orthodox
Muslim sovereign. The Archaeological Survey reports that the
mosque ‘was originally intended for a temple, but was afterwards
turned into the Jama Masjid for fear of the Emperor’.*'
It is therefore unlikely that Muslim rites of public prayer were
suppressed. True, cow slaughter was prohibited at least in the Punjab,
and this prohibition was continued by Jahangir.’ But this does not
amount to suppression of any Islamic ritual.
One, then, has to look for an explanation of why the cause of
Islam seemed to suffer during Akbar’s last years without there being
any perceptible sign of persecution. Partly, it is possible that once
the Emperor’s own neutral views were known, Muslim nobles too
might have refrained from a too conspicuous patronage of Islamic
ritual and the theologians. The implications of Akbar’s espousal of
pantheism and references to Islam simply as Ahmadi-Kesh would
have been lost only on a very dull-witted courtier. In this respect
Aziz Koka’s letter to Akbar from Mecca, written in 1594 is of great
interest. From the safety of his temporary sojourn in the holy city of
Islam, this leading noble at Akbar’s court virtually accused Akbar
of ‘claiming to be a Prophet and abolishing the faith of Muhammad’.
He warned him against the insincere nobles, who ‘prefer the infidels
to the Muslims’ and so were encouraging him in his policies.°* Such
nobles would have thought it generally prudent to exhibit agreement
with their sovereign and be lukewarm in extending grants and
charities on which Muslim theologians and institutions so largely
subsisted.**
The drying up of nobles’ patronage must have paralleled a
reduction in the flow of imperial financial patronage, which used to
sustain a large number of mosques, madrasas and khangahs. The
main channel of state patronage was the grant of suyurghal, or
revenue grants. Badauni has described how successive measures
 Sulh-i Kul and the Religious Ideas of Akbar 169
curtailed the grants made to Muslim theologians.* Abul Fazl in his
own chapter on suyurghal justifies such measures of curtailment as
essential to prevent fraud. All lands previously held in grant were
transferred to specified villages. Later, all grants of above 500 bighas
were held forfeit unless approved afresh by the Emperor. Then, of
all grants of above 100 bighas, three-fifths of the area was to be
resumed, except in the case of grants held by Irani and Turani women.
If anyone asked for a transfer of land for convenience, he was to
lose a fourth. A number of qazis, ‘those turban wearers of evil heart
and long-sleeved ones of little minds’, as Abul Fazl styled them,
were forthwith deprived of their lands. Upon the death of a grantee
holding land exceeding 15 bighas, the land was to be resumed until
the heirs proved their deserts before the Emperor—an expensive
procedure under any circumstances. Finally, even those grants which
were less than 100 bighas were to be rechecked by the sadr (central
minister in charge of the grants) and Abul Fazl himself was to see if
they had not been obtained by the undeserving.*° The effect of these
successive measures on the grantees can be imagined. Since they
constituted the core of the class of professional theologians it was
probably no longer possible to maintain mosques and madrasas in
the old prosperity; and, perhaps, many such institutions might have
been left without support and eventually abandoned. No positive
persecution was needed to bring about this situation.
The conclusions that emerge, then, are that Akbar, in pursuit of
Empire and under the light of an exceptionally brilliant mind, evolved
a set of mutually consistent religious ideas derived from a multiplicity
of sources but processed and refined by a considerable application
of reason. The sincerity with which the beliefs once evolved came
to be held, was accompanied by an anxiety to provide them with
practical application to which we may apply the term Sulh-i Kul. In
this application, there was an extension in the opening of doors to
the Hindus and to Shias, as far as the ranks of the nobility were
concerned; and there was a withdrawal of patronage to a class
particularly hostile to Akbar’s own views and policies, the Muslim
orthodoxy. Critics of Sulh-i Kul were naturally prone to denounce
the new policy which certainly had other sources of justification.
Given India’s variegated culture and multiplicity of religious beliefs,
what Akbar was attempting to secure was an integrated ruling class.
That he also thereby took a step which could later on be invoked by
India’s modern nation-builders is not only a tribute to the breadth of
his vision, but also an illustration of the way in which historical
170 Mughal India
processes occur achieving ends which in earlier times would have
been only dimly grasped, or would perhaps have remained totally
undiscerned.

NOTES

1. Abul Fazl, Akbarnama, Bib. Ind., Calcutta, 1873-87, pp. 256, 270-1.
2. Abdul Qadir Badauni, Muntakhab-ut Tawarikh, ed. Ahmad Ali and
Lees, Bib. Ind., Calcutta, 1864—69, 11, p. 30.
Sy olLBCeg aie AVE
4. Akbarnama, i, pp. 154-8.
5. Tuzuk-i Jahangiri, ed. Syed Ahmad Khan, 1863-64, p. 1.
6. Iqtidar Alam Khan, ‘The Nobility under Akbar and the Development
of His Religious Policy, 1560-80, JRAS, 1968, no. 1, pp. 29-36.
7. Badauni, u, pp. 210-11, 259-60.
8. Tabagat-i Akbari, Bib. Ind., vol. 0, pp. 344-6.
9. Badauni, 1, p. 270.
10. Akbarnama, t, pp. 269-70.
11. Yabagat-i Akbari, i, p. 344; Badauni, 1, p. 268; Akbarnama, iu, p.
270.
12. Akbarnama, 1, p. 10; A’in-i Akbari, ed. Blochmann, Calcutta, 1867—
77, Wu, pp. 277-44.
13. A’in-i Akbari, m, p. 228.
14. Ibid.
15. Ibid., 1, p. 43.
16. Akbarnama, in, p. 221.
17. Ibid, p. 567.
18. A’in-i Akbari, 1, pp. 158, 160.
19. Ibid., 1, p. 235. Akbar correctly anticipated the reaction of the
narrow-minded ones of the twentieth, as well as the sixteenth century.
Maulana Abul Hasan Ali Nadvi in his Tarikh-i Da‘wat o‘ Azimat, 1,
Lucknow, 1980, p. 199, reproducing this passage blatantly mistranslates
niyayashgari as ‘worship’, and presents this passage as evidence of Akbar’s
religious heresy.
20. A’in-i Akbari, i, p. 158.
21. Ibid., p. 236.
22. Ibid., p. 243.
25, ADIG. 220,
 Sulh-i Kul and the Religious Ideas of Akbar 17]
Ibid., 1, p. 159.
aalbid., IL, pa 229.
Ibid., p. 235.
. Ibid., p. 242.
. Ibid., p. 244,
. Ibid., 1, pp. 158-60.
S.R. Sharma, The Religious Policy of the Mughal Emperors, 2nd
edn, Bombay) 1962, p. 42.
31. A’in-i Akbari, tr. Blochmann, 2nd edn, rev. by Phillott, Royal Asiatic
Society of Bengal, Calcutta, 1939, 1, p. 175.
a2. Ibid., p. 159.
O35 Ibid., pp. 158-60 (Ain-i Rahnamuni).
34. Ibid., p. 174.
355 Ibid., 1, pp. 158-60.
Tuzuk-i Jahangiri, ed. Saiyid Aligarh, 1863-4, p. 29.
. A’in-i Akbari, tr. Blochmann, 2nd edn, revised by Phillot, 1, p. 217.
. Dabistan-i Mazahib, ed. Nazar Ashraf, Calcutta, 1809, 1, p. 314.
. The Apparatus of Empire, New Delhi, 1985.
M. Athar Ali, The Mughal Nobility under Aurangzeb, Bombay,

. Tuzuk, p. 16.
Ay, Akbarnama, 1, p. 527.
43. S.A.A. Rizvi, Religious and Intellectual History of the Muslims in
Akbar’s Reign, (1556-1605), New Delhi, 1975.
44. C.H. Payne, Akbar and the Jesuits, London, 1926, p. 67.
45. S.R. Sharma, The Religious Policy of the Mughal Emperors, p. 46.
46. Khwaja Niamat Ullah, Tarikh-i Khan-i Jahani, ed. Saiyid Muhammad
Imamuddin, Dacca, 1960, pp. 670-1.
47. Ibid, p. 668.
48. Maktubat-i Imam Rabbani, 1, Letter no. 47.
49. Tabagat-i Shah Jahani, f. 451 (AMU Collection, no. 226).
50. Ibid., f. 421.
ile List of Ancient Monuments in Bengal, revised and corrected up to
August 1898. Issued by Government of Bengal: Public Works Department,
Calcutta, 1896, pp. 460-1.
a2: Tazkira-i Pir Hassu Taili, f. 36b, Dept. of History, AMU, Aligarh.
53. This letter is preserved in the Cambridge University Library, King’s
College Collection, MS 194, ff. Sb—8b.
54. There were, of course, exceptions: Akbar’s favourite noble, Shaikh
172 Mughal India
Farid Bukhari, the mir bakhshi, had a great reputation for patronizing
theologians through grants from his jagirs (Farid Bhakkari, Zakhirat-ul
Khawanin, ed. Syed Moinul Haq, Karachi, 1961, 1, pp. 139-41).
55. Badauni, 11, pp. 204-5, 274, 315, 343.
56. A’in-i Akbari, 1, p. 198.
 15

Translations of Sanskrit Works

at Akbar’s Court

The conciuding portion of Abul Fazl’s A’in-i Akbari contains an

extensive account of the thought and customs of India. No previous
effort of this nature and scale was made after that ‘great moment in
World History’ when one of the most outstanding scientists of the
Islamic civilization, Alberuni, set himself to study, expound and
analyse the religion and sciences of India in the eleventh century.
Abul Fazl’s own English translator, Jarrett, tells us how much
Alberuni’s work is superior to Abul Fazl’s. Without contesting the
essence of this judgement one could still argue that (a) while Abul
Fazl has derived and ‘processed’ some material from Alberuni, the
bulk of his information comes from newly tapped independent sources,
and (b) the purpose of the two works is different: Alberuni’s to
elaborate, understand and criticize, Abul Fazl’s to describe and
summarize the Indian sciences. What is important for us is to consider
the first of these two factual statements. If Abul Fazl had sources of
information independent of Alberuni, what were these?
It is clear from Abul Fazl’s account that a considerable part of his
information comes from oral testimony of the learned among the
Brahmans and Jains. We know from Jain accounts that Abul Faz] was
throughout in close touch with them just as he was with the Jesuit
Fathers.
But another part of the information came from fresh material
translated from Sanskrit. The project of translating Sanskrit works at
Akbar’s court has been commented upon by such a large number of
modern scholars that I claim no discovery here.' What I propose doing
here is to go over the Persian evidence for this remarkable endeavour
once again and present it here, throughout in fresh narration and,
hopefully, with a few new additional data.
The first indication of Akbar’s interest in translating Indian works
in reported by Badauni: Khwaja Hasan Marwi had been asked by
Akbar to translate the Singhasan Battisi, but he had left for Kabul in
AH 979/1572, leaving the work incomplete.” When, therefore, Akbar
174 Mughal India
met Badauni at Kanauj in July-August 1574, he desired hiin to translate
the ‘Singhasan Battisi, which consists of 32 tales of Raja Bikramajit
of Malwa’. A learned Brahman was assigned the task of interpreting
the work (in Hindi presumably) for him. Badauni presented the first
sheet of his Persian translation to Akbar ‘the very same day’; but it
took him eight years to complete the translation. When completed
Badauni gave it the title of Nama-i khirad afza, ‘the Wisdom-enhancing
Book’, the title being also a chronogram (AH 989/1581). To Badauni’s
personal gratification a copy of the work was placed in the imperial
library.* While many other manuscripts of the Persian version of this
work are known, none seems to have been definitely identified with
Badauni’s translation.
The effort at translating ancient Indian works received further
impetus with the arrival of Shaikh Bhawan, a Brahman newly
converted to Islam, at Akbar’s court in AH 983/1575—6. Badauni is
again our authority for this first enterprise, namely, the translation of
the Atharva-Veda.
In this year Shaikh Bhawan, who was a Brahman scholar, came from the
countries of Deccan to take service at Court. Having voluntarily obtained
the honour of accepting Islam, he joined the circle of the personal attendants
(khasa-khailan) of His Majesty. His Majesty ordered that the Atharva-
Veda (‘Bed Atharban’), which is the fourth one out of the four celebrated
books of the Indians, and some of whose injunctions are like those of the
Muslim Community, should be explained, and I should render it from the
Indian language into Persian. Since there were many obscurities in the
text, and the interpreter (Shaikh Bhawan) was unable to explain them, and
the intention could not be understood, I reported this to the Emperor.
(Thereupon) first, Shaikh Faizi and then Haji Ibrahim Sirhindi was ordered
to translate it. He did not render it in a satisfactory manner, and no trace of
the work for this reason survives.‘

One reason the translation did not give satisfaction to Akbar was,
perhaps, that with the zeal of a convert, Shaikh Bhawan sought to
give to the Atharva-Veda text meanings which might please his co-
religionists. For Badauni goes on to tell us of the curious ways in
which Bhawan interpreted the text.
One of the many injunctions of that work is this that until they recite a
text that has several /a letters and sounds like the Muslim confession of
faith la ilaha il l’allah (There is no god but God), they could not receive
salvation. Secondly, beef is permitted upon certain conditions. Further
the dead are to be buried, not burnt. Shaikh Bhawan used to come out
victorious in debate with the Brahmans of all India; and out of this
 Translations of Sanskrit Works at Akbar’s Court 175
motive had accepted the True Faith. God be praised.*
On this it is fitting to record a rival, though later, tradition recorded
about 1653 in the Dabistan-i mazahib.
Nain Jot says: I said (to Shaikh Bawan, name so spelt). ‘Translate this
passage.’ When he translated it, its meaning appeared to be wholly contrary
and opposite to the meaning of Ja ilaha il l’allah. More, those conditions
of beef-eating were contrary to the way of the Muslims. Further, the way
of burial was in a different fashion, which is not permitted among the
Muslims. His Majesty and all those present laughed at the Brahman
(convert), and His Majesty said: ‘Look at the Muslims and Hindus, that
during such a long argument, no one asked, what the meaning of this text
is’. He praised me considerably.®

The date when the translation was completed cannot be precisely

established, but Shaikh Ibrahim Sirhindi died in 1583; and so the work
must have been finished before this year.’ It must, therefore, have
been the second known work of translation to be completed, from
Sanskrit into Persian. Owing to the difficulties posed by its archaic
language, its choice was, perhaps, not a fortunate one, being dictated
more by Shaikh Bhawan’s assertiveness, in the beginning, than by
any independent indication of its contents.
Badauni is not fully right in saying that the translation was so
unsatisfactory as to be forgotten. Abul Faz] indeed records in the A ’in-
i Akbari (c. 1591) that among the important works translated upon
Akbar’s orders was ‘the book Atharban, which, according to the beliefs
of these people, is one of the four Divine Books, (and which) was
translated by Haji Ibrahim Sirhindi into Persian’. No manuscript of
this translation is, however, known to exist; so, in the larger range of
time, Badauni has been proved right.
The next major work to be translated was the immensely ee and
rich compilation, the Mahabharata. The work started in AH 990/1582,
and Badauni, again, is our main informant about how it began. Writing
in AH 990/1582, he says:
Collecting together the learned men of India, His Majesty directed that
the book Mahabharata should be translated. For some nights His
Majesty personally (had it) explained to Naqib Khan, who wrote out the
resultant text in Persian. On the third night His Majesty summoned me
and ordered me to translate it in collaboration with Naqib Khan. In three
or four months out of the eighteen chapters (fan) of that stock of useless
fables, at which the world may remain in wonderment, I wrote out two
chapters. And what censures I did not hear (from Akbar), so that the
176 Mughal India
accusations that I am an ‘unlawful earner’ or ‘a turnip eater’ (apparently
expressions used by Akbar) meant as if my destiny from those books
was just this. Destiny is destiny. Thereafter Mulla Shiri and Nagib Khan
completed that section, and one section Sultan Haji Thanesari “Munfarid’
brought to completion. Shaikh Faizi was then appointed to write it in
verse and prose, but he too did not complete more than two chapters
(fan). Again, the said Haji wrote out two sections and rectified the errors
which were committed in the first round, and fitting one part with another,
compiled a hundred fasciculi. The direction was to establish exactitude
in a minute manner so that nothing of the original should be lost. In the
end upon some fault, His Majesty ordered him (Haji Thanesari) to be
dismissed and sent away to Bhakkar, his native city, where he still 1s.
Most of the interpreters and translators are in Hell along with the Korus
and Pandavs, and as for the remaining ones, may God save them, and
mercifully destine them to repent.... His Majesty named the work Razm-
nama (Epic), and had it illustrated and transcribed in many copies, and
the nobles too were ordered to have it transcribed by way of obtaining
blessings. Shaikh Abul Fazl, contrary to the dictates of the commentary
on the Quranic ayat al-kursi that he had composed, wrote a preface of
the length of two quires (juzv) for that work.’

Badauni’s passage ought to be read with the afterword in the British

Museum MS of the Razm-nama of Akbar’s library, transcribed in AH
1007/1598-99, containing chapters (fan) xIv—xviil, i.e. the last
portion.'° The concluding chapter xvi is very short and the afterword
which comes at the end is unfortunately damaged, and some portions
cannot be restored. It tells us that the work was commissioned by
Akbar on Monday, 9 Ramzan (year lost). If the year was AH 990/1582
as stated by Badauni, the date would be 27 September 1582. The
writer of the afterword is Nagib Khan himself (“Naqib Khan, son of
‘Abdul Latif al Hasani’)’.

He translated it from Sanskrit into the Persian language in the space of one
and a half years. Some Brahmans, namely, Rana, Sita, Rani, Madas, Nahar,
Chitrabhoj Sen, and Shaikh Bhawan, who, with His Majesty’s attention,
has become honoured by having accepted Islam, read that book and
explained it to this sinful author in Hindi, and the author wrote it down in
Persian.'!
This has the merit of telling us of the way translation was carried
out, Sanskrit being rendered into Hindi by a set of pundits, and the
Hindi then rendered into Persian. Unfortunately, the afterword is not
dated; but assuming that the translation began in 1582, the work should
have finished in 1584.
 Translations of Sanskrit Works at Akbar’s Court 177
The second is the brief reference in the A’in-i Akbari:
The book Mahabharat, one of the ancient books of Hindustan, was
translated from Hindi into Persian by Naqib Khan, Maulana Abdul Qadir
Badauni, and Shaikh Sultan Thanesari. It comprises some one lakh couplets.
His Majesty named this ancient epic Razm—nama.'”
A little later, the A’in puts the Razm-nama among those works
which were illustrated by Akbar’s painters.'°
The work was certainly complete by 1591, when Akbar sent Prince
Murad a copy of the Razm-nama.'* It seems, however, that portions
went on being read aloud to Akbar, and it was through this that an
embarrassing situation arose for Badauni in 1595. On the occasion of
Nauroz (20 March 1595), Akbar complained to Abul Fazl that Badauni,
whom he had thought to be of mystical bent, was really a ‘fanatical
theologian’ (fagih-i muta ‘assib). He had let his orthodoxy lead him to
insert into the portion of the Razm-nama rendered by him, the concept
of the Day of Judgement, which was alien to the Indians who believed
in transmigration of souls (¢tanasukh). Badauni had much to do to explain
that he had not deviated from the duty of translator and that Indians did
believe that heaven and hell existed as intermediate stages in soul-
transmigrations.'* Many manuscripts of the Razm-nama exist.'®
Abul Faz] says that ‘the same persons (who had translated the Razm-
nama) also rendered into Persian the Ramayana, which is one of the
ancient compilations of India. It contains the detailed narrative of the
life of Ramchandar, and records many unique points of wisdom’.'”
Badauni suggests, however, that he alone was the translator, and that
the work began in AH 992/1584.
At this time, His Majesty ordered me to translate the book Ramayan,
which is older than the Mahabharat. It has 25,000 shloks, and every shlok
is a sentence of 65 letters. It is the tale of Ramchandar, raja of Awadh
(Ayodhya), who is also called Ram, and Hindus worshipped him as an
Incarnation of God.'*
Badauni claims he was able to translate the work in four years; but
there is, perhaps, some error in his counting because he was able to
present his translation to Akbar only in early 1591. We have the
following characteristic passage:
In the month of Jumada 999 (February-March 1591) having translated
the book Ramayan in the space of four years and made a copy of the
whole, I submitted it to His Majesty. Since in the end I had written (the
couplet):
178 Mughal India
We wrote a tale to the Sultan who fulfils (our wishes).
We burnt up our life for him who gives lives.
His Majesty was very pleased, and asked, ‘How many quires (juzv) it
has come to?’ I replied, ‘In the first instance in summary, nearly seventy
quires, then, in the detailed translation, 120 quires’. His Majesty said,
‘Write a preface after the fashion of authors’. Since it had hardly anything
worthwhile and I would have to write a preface without any prefatory
praise of the Prophet (na‘t), I dissimulated. From that black test, as
destructive as my life, I seek refuge with God. (But) copying infidelity is
not infidelity ... .'°
Manuscripts of this translation also survive, one with 176 full-page
paintings (from Akbar’s atelier?) in the Jaipur Palace.” Abul Fazl, indeed,
records that the Ramayana too was illustrated for Akbar’s library.*!
The Yogavasishtha is an appendix to the Ramayana dealing with “all
manners of topics including final release’.” It is possible that Abul Fazl
had this text in mind when he referred to ‘the many unique points of
wisdom’ in connection with the Ramayana.” But otherwise he does
not seem to refer to this text. But manuscripts exist of a translation by
Nizam Panipati, prepared with the help of two pundits, and dedicated
to Prince Salim.” It must, therefore, have been prepared before 1605.
Whether this was received at Akbar’s court is, however, uncertain.
Abul Fazl informs us in the A’in-i Akbari that ‘The Haribans (Hari-
vamsa) which consists of an account of Kishan (Krishna), Mulla Shiri
translated into Persian.’*? We know that Mulla Shiri was a poet of
some repute, though not a scholar, at Akbar’s court.”° But unluckily
no manuscript of this translation appears to have survived.
The work of translation was extended to non-religious literature as
well:
The Lilavati, which from amongst the works from the pen of the learned of
India in Arithmetic (hisab), (my) elder brother Shaikh Abul Faiz Faizi
transferred from a Hindi to a Persian garb; the book Tajik, which on the
science of astronomy is a reliable authority, was translated into Persian by
Muhammad Khan Gujarati, at His Majesty’s instance.”’

The first of these was Bhaskaracharya’s celebrated work Lilavati

on Arithmetic (1150). Faizi’s translation is extant in several manuscript
copies, and two editions (1827, 1854-55) exist. The year (AH 995/
1587) when the translation was completed is given in the preface,
which begins with the praise of Akbar. Faizi also claims in the preface
that Akbar directed him to translate the work.’8
Of the second translated work, the so-called Tajik on astronomy,
 Translations of Sanskrit Works at Akbar’s Court 179
no extant manuscript appears to be recorded. It could be a translation
of the Sanskrit work the astronomer Nilkantha wrote on Jyotish at
Akbar’s court, the Tajikanilkanti in Saka 1509/1587.
Abul Faz] also mentions the translation of Kalhana’s Rajatarangini,
the celebrated history of Kashmir. ‘The History of Kashmir, which
contains the annals of four thousand years of that country Maulana
Shah Muhammad Shahabadi rendered from the language of Kashmir
(sic: Sanskrit) into Persian.’*°
When Badauni in 1595 saved himself from imperial wrath over a
suspected inaccuracy in his translation of the Mahabharata, he had
hoped that he would get a suitable post elsewhere and leave the court
with its heretical ways; but Akbar had other ideas:
His Majesty (in Ramazan 1003/May-—June 1595) told Shaikh Abul Fazl in
my presence, “Although he (Badauni) would also have served well at the
post in Ajmer, yet whenever we give him something to translate, he does
it very well and to our satisfaction. We do not wish that he should be
separated from us.’ Shaikh and others confirmed this. The same day, it was
ordered that of the Hindi annals, which Sultan Zainul Abidin had translated
in past and given the name of Bahr ul Asmar, I should translate the remaining
part and complete it. I was to complete the task in five months, since the
latter portion of that work comprised 60 quires. Soon afterwards I was
called at night to the throne in the Palace, and asked about the stories in
each chapter till dawn. His Majesty said: Since in Part one which Sultan
Zainul Abidin had translated, the Persian is quite unidiomatic, you should
write this out afresh in idiomatic language.*!
Badauni was given 10,000 copper tankas and a horse in reward,
and hoped to finish his task quickly in two or three months.** But he
finished his Tarikh apparently before he finished his translation.
The work is the same as Rajatarangini. It is curious that Badauni
does not refer to the translation by Shah Muhammad Shahabadi at
all. The surviving manuscripts of the Persian Rajatarangini,
defective as they are, do not seem to elucidate the matter.*’ One
possibility is that Shah Muhammad Shahabadi was the translator of
the work under Zainul Abidin, and the work was merely transcribed
for Akbar’s library; in that case a slip on the part of Abul Fazl
must be assumed. The task of a fresh rendering was assigned to
Badauni, after the A’in-i Akbari had been completed so that the
new translation would not be mentioned by Abul Faz! at all.
If Akbar’s effort at translating Sanskrit texts began with one set of
famous tales, the Singhasan Battisi, it ended with another, still more
famous. An early version of the Indian ‘animal tales’, the Panchatantra
180 Mughal India
had received an old Persian garb as early as the sixth century. By 750
it had appeared in Arabic under the tittle Kalila wa Dammna, whence it
dispersed in Europe through a series of translations. In the twelfth
century it was rendered into Persian under the title Anwar-i Suhaili.
This latter work, on Akbar’s wishes, Abul Faz] rendered into simplified
Persian prose as Iyar-i Danish in 1588, becoming a fairly popular
text, with more than one printed edition in the last century.** But it
was borne upon Akbar that the [yar-i danish had, by the natural process
of descent from translations into various languages, diverged greatly
from the Indian Panchatantra, which itself was greatly enriched by
the additions of further stories. So Akbar ordered Mustafa Khaliqdad
Abbasi to make a translation directly from an original copy of
Panchatantra in ‘Hinduv (Sanskrit) in the imperial library. This turned
out to be Purnabhadra’s version, the Panchakhyana, compiled in 1199.
Haqdad’s translation, which is both very idiomatic and literal cannot
be dated very precisely, but his preface shows that it was written after
the composition of [yar-i Danish but before Abul Fazl’s death, that is
between 1588 and 1602, probably c. 1600.*°
I may mention that I exclude Faizi’s Nal Daman from consideration
here because it is not really a translation but a retelling in Persian of
the Indian tale.
When one looks at Akbar’s translation project, one realizes that its
centre-piece is the Mahabharata; and it should therefore be of little
surprise to us that the Vaishnavite facet of Hinduism was more
prominent at Akbar’s court than the Saivite. The Upanishads and
Shankaracharya are not represented. It was left to Akbar’s great
grandson, Dara Shukoh, to add the Upanishads to the Brahmanical
literature available in Persian, through a splendid translation, the Sirr-
i Akbar. The scientific texts translated were rather few, though the
two Sanskrit sets of tales brought into Persian were culturally
important.*? In any case, it would be churlish to stress the limitations
of the extent and coverage of Akbar’s translation project. What stands
out, when, —to use Abul Fazl’s favourite phrase — ‘the veil is lifted’
behind the achievement, is the lofty vision and grandiose design of a
shared, unified intellectual heritage belonging to all mankind.
 Translations of Sanskrit Works at Akbar’s Court 181

NOTES

1. See, esp. Syed Athar Abbas Rizvi, Religious and Intellectual

History of the Muslims in Akbar’s Reign, New Delhi, 1975, pp. 202-22.
2. Abdul Qadir Badauni, Muntakhab al-Tawarikh, ed. Ali Ahmad and
Lees, Bib. Ind., Calcutta, 1864-69, m1, pp. 177-8.
3. Ibid., 1, pp. 183-4. Badauni’s statements in vol. 1, p. 67, suggest that
he carried out a revision in AH 1003/1594-95.
4. Ibid., u, pp. 212-13.
Jy 1000. 1D. 213,
6. Anonymous, Dabistan-i- Mazahib (Bombay edn), p. 265. I have not
been able to identify Nain Jot, apparently a Brahman divine or scholar at
Akbar’s court.
7. Abul Fazl, Akbar-nama, Bib. Ind., Calcutta, 1873-87 edn, 1m, pp.
408-9. ;
8. A’in-i Akbari, ed., Blochmann, Calcutta, 1866-77, 1, pp. 115-16.
9. Muntakhab al-Tawarikh, i, pp. 319-21.
10. British Museum Or. 12076. This MS is illustrated by Akbar’s painters.
The date of transcription is given at the end of Chapter (fan) xvm on f. 136a.
11. British Museum Or. 12,076, f. 138b. It is interesting to find Shaikh
Bhawan reappearing as a translator despite his misadventures with the Atharva-
veda.
12. A’in-i Akbari, 1, p. 115.
13. Ibid., pp. 117-18.
14. See an early version of the Akbarnama, cited by Iqtidar Alam Khan,
‘Akbar’s Personality Traits and World Outlook’, in: Akbar and his India,
ed. Irfan Habib, New Delhi, 1997, p. 89 & n., 95.
15. Muntakhab al-Tawarikh, 1, pp. 398-400.
16. See list in D.N. Marshall, Mughals in India: A Bibliographical
Survey, Bombay, 1967, pp. 18-19.
17. A’in-i Akbari, 1, p. 115.
18. Muntakhab al-Tawarikh, 0, pp. 336-7.
19. Ibid., p. 366.
20. Marshall, Mughals in India, p. 19.
21. A’in-i Akbari, 1, p. 117.
22. A.B. Keith, History of Sanskrit Literature, Oxford, 1920, p. 480.
23. A’in-i Akbari, 1, p. 115.
24. Marshall, Mughals in India, p. 377.
25. A’in-i Akbari, u, p. 116.
26. Nizamuddin Ahmad, Tabagat-i Akbari, ed. B. De, Calcutta, 1931, 11,
pp. 409-1.
27. A’in-i Akbari, 1, p. 116.
28. C.A. Storey, Persian Literature: A Bio-bibliographical Survey,
vol. 11 (1), London, 1972, pp. 4-5. I have read the Preface in a photocopy of
182 Mughal India
a MS in the Rajasthan Oriental Research Institute Library, Tonk (lent to me
by Professor R.S. Sarma).
20. See Marshall, Mughals in India, p. 374.
30. A’in-i Akbari, 1, p. 116.
ae Muntakhab al-Tawarikh, , pp. 401-2.
32; Ibid., p. 402.
D3. Storey, Persian Literature, vol. 11 (3), London, 939, p. 679, where,
however, the year of Badauni’s translation is wrongly given as AH 999/
1590-91.
34. See Marshall, Mughals in India, p. 35.
che See Mustafa Khaliqdad ‘Abbasi, Panchakhyana (Persian
Panchakyana), Persian text, ed. Tara Chand and S.A.H. Abbasi, Aligarh,
1973, a critical edition with a very informative introduction from the editors.
 16
The Religious World of Jahangir

Jahangir in succeeding Akbar has been at a disadvantage. The brilliant

father has so much outshone the son that the latter’s personality and
reign tend to fall under a kind of a rain-shadow despite the
acknowledged charm of Jahangir’s memoirs and his reputation as a
naturalist and patron of the arts. One aspect to which adequate attention
has not been paid is his religious policy. This received only limited
attention in Beni Prasad’s biography of the emperor;' and the chapter
in S.R. Sharma’s work, Religious Policy of the Mughal Emperors
has obviously a case to argue, namely that the Muslim reaction to
Akbar’s liberal policy led Jahangir to make departures from it.
One major argument for a change in Jahangir’s religious policy
has been linked to the accession crisis. It has been said that Jahangir
in order to obtain the throne placated the Muslim nobility by offering,
through Shaikh Farid Bukhari, a leading Indian Muslim noble and the
Mir Bakhshi, to reverse or modify his father’s policy of tolerance and
give up the Din-i Ilahi allegedly established by Akbar.’ This view has
already been contested.* In actual fact there is no contemporary
evidence to this effect, except that of the Jesuit fathers, who reported
that though up to his accession Jahangir ‘had been looked upon almost
as a Christian’, he had now ‘sworn an oath to the Moors to uphold
the law of Mafamede’. As evidence of this they cited three acts: (a)
Orders for cleansing of mosques; (b) restoration of Muslim fasts and
prayers; and (c) the assumption of the title Nuruddin Muhammad
Jahangir, which they interpreted to mean “The Splendour of the Law
of Mafamede, Conqueror of the World’.°
Before we discuss (a) and (b), let us consider (c), for on this
Jahangir himself has written in explicit terms:
It struck me that the work of sovereigns is World-seizing (Jahangiri), I
should style myself Jahangir, and, since my accession took place at the
rising of the (holy) presence of the Great Luminary (the sun) and the
illumination of the world (by its rays), I took the title Nuruddin; and
since I had also heard in the days of my princehood from the Indian
184 Mughal India
sages that after the expiry of the reign of Jalaluddin Akbar Padshah, a
person named Nuruddin would become the manager of the affairs of the
Empire, this too was in my. mind. So I took the style and title of Nuruddin
Jahangir.°
It can be seen that Jahangir here omits the name Muhammad
altogether from the titles and styles of both his father and himself,’
and the two reasons he gives for the title Nuruddin are both
unconnected with Islam. Indeed, the first clearly affirms his respect
for the sun—an important feature of Akbar’s religious beliefs—and
the second exhibits an anxiety to have a title similar in meaning to
his father’s: Nur (light, illumination) to follow Jalal (splendour, glory);
a suggestion, moreover, that he ascribes not to Muslim theologians,
but to ‘Indian sages’, which rather hints at Hindu astrologers and
the like. Jahangir cannot here be accused of having these as his
private reasons, while he let the world at large share the views that
the Jesuit fathers espoused. We know that Jahangir wrote his memoirs
for the public eye. As early as 1613, the author of the Tarikh-i Khan
Jahani wrote that he was abstaining from writing in detail on
Jahangir’s reign, ‘since His Majesty with his own hand has been
recording the events and happenings of His Majesty’s reign by way
of diary’.* Apparently, the earlier portion of the memoirs was already
issued for circulation before 1613. Thus, there was no concealing
of Jahangir’s reasons for adopting the title Nuruddin Jahangir. The
Jesuits were as wrong in seeing in it an assurance to Muslim
theologians as they were in believing that Jahangir had previously
been on the point of becoming Christian.
As for the statements (a) and (b), no orders of the kind mentioned
by the Jesuits at Agra are recorded in his memoirs by Jahangir. These
seem to be mere inferences from two references to mosques in the
Twelve Edicts that Jahangir says he issued after his accession. Edict
2 enjoins that

wherever on the routes there occur cases of theft and robbery, and the
place is at some distance from inhabited sites, let the jagirdars of the
area lay out a serai and mosque and dig a well, so that people settle
there; if the spot is near khalisa territory, let its officers do the same.

According to Edict 3, all property of persons dying intestate was

to be spent ‘on purposes authorized by the Sharia, namely, construction
of mosques and serais, the repair of broken bridges and the excavation
of tanks and wells’.’ Edict 2 is obviously designed to establish
 The Religious World of Jahangir 185
settlements on roads, and the mosque and wells there come as naturally
paired to serais, since serais usually contained within a mosque and a
well. Edict 3 relates only to the use of money on structures of public
use in which mosques were included. Neither orders suggest an
alteration of policy since no one has seriously argued that mosques
were destroyed or their building prohibited under Akbar; indeed, Raja
Man Singh built the great mosque at Raj Mahal in the later years of
Akbar’s reign (1592).'° He must have thought that the act would be
approved at the court.
This much can still be stated in the good fathers’ defence: they
were not alone in the inference that a new dawn had come for Islam.
Ni‘matullah (1613) in a passage on Jahangir’s accession says:
The Prophet’s Law (Shari’at-i Nabawi) which had withered like a red
flower by the winter wind, obtained renewal at the accession of the king
of Islam and mosques, hospices and madrasas which for thirty years
had become the homes of beasts and birds, and from which no calls for
prayer were heard by any one, (became) clean and cleansed, and the
Prophetic call to prayer reached the sky; moreover all directions and
prohibitions and the Rules of Islam as current among the people are
enforced.'!
Shaikh Ahmad Sirhindi had also received a similar impression, but
he was soon undeceived.'*
There was, however, not much reason for any great apprehension
on the part of the Jesuits or expectations on that of the orthodox. In
the course of his account of the very same twelve Edicts, Jahangir
says in respect of Edict 10:
Like my esteemed father I ordered that every year beginning with 18 Rabi
I, which is my birthday, for a period of days equal to the years of my life, no
animals should be slaughtered; and a prohibition of animal slaughter was
likewise made for two days in every week: Thursday, the day of my
accession and sunday which is the day of my father’s birth, and he greatly
esteemed this day for the further reason that it is dedicated to the holy
presence of the Great Luminary (the Sun) and is the first day of the Creation
and so auspicious; and of the days that he had prohibited animal slaughter
this was one.'*
That this order was in fact issued and enforced is well documented.
The copy of its text as sent to suba Gujarat is preserved, from which
it appears that on the days in question hunting and fishing were also
prohibited.'* In his fifth regnal year Jahangir repeated the order,'? and
he was so strict about it that when in 1612 the Id-i Qurban (or Iduz
186 Mughal India
Zuha) occurred on a Thursday, he did not allow the ritual slaughter to
take place on that day, but only on the next.'® He again notes his own
abstention from meat on these days in the twelfth regnal year.'’ In
1626 Pelsaert noted that the order was being enforced, though
‘extremely inconvenient for ordinary people’. He thought, however,
that the order or rather enforcement was secured ‘by bribery’ from
the king or governors.'* This was in obvious conformity with Akbar’s
particular concern about animal killing for purposes of human food, a
concern which repeatedly occurs in his ‘august sayings’ recorded by
Abul Fazl."” .
That Jahangir had not the least intention of disavowing his father’s
religious beliefs and policies is not only indicated by the enthusiastic
way in which he praises them in his memoirs, but also by his public
decision to continue with what is now popularly, but inaccurately,
known as Din-i Ilahi. The passage from his memoirs, which we quote
here, in fact, is a very accurate statement of Akbar’s instructions to
his disciples, as set out in the A’in-i Akbari. *°
I appointed Shaikh Ahmed Lahori, who during the time of my princehood
stood in relation to me as a servant, son of a servant (khanazad) and
disciple, to the office of Mir Adl (officer in charge of justice). The disciples
(muridan) and sincere ones (arbab-i ikhlas) are presented through him;
and the shast [girdle] and shabih [portrait on medallion] were given to
those recommended by him. At the time of the disciples being received
into discipleship (iradat), they are given a few words of instruction by me:
They are not to darken and disturb their time by enmity to any of the
religious communities (millat-a), and with all persons of the various creeds
they should pursue the path of Absolute Peace (suih-i kul). They should
kill no living being with their own hand, nor should they skin anything
except in war and chase:
Do not render lifeless a thing of life,
Except in chase or the field of strife.

The luminaries, which are the reflectors of God’s light, must be shown
respect according to their ranks. At all times and in all circumstances
they must remain aware that God is the real causer and Creator, nay they
should so meditate on him that whether in private or in company their
heart should not for a moment be without thought or attention in respect
of Him:

The lame, the ignorant, the sleepy-looking, the unmannerly;

You (too) should go on looking at Him and calling for Him.
 The Religious World of Jahangir 187
My father had obtained mastery over these truths, and few were the times
when he was free from such thoughts.?!

If Jahangir’s text is compared with the two chapters in the A’in-i

Akbari relating to what Blochmann misreads as Divine Faith,” it will
be found that Jahangir uses exactly the same terminology as Abul
Fazl for the spiritual followers of the emperor, namely, ‘disciples’
(iradat-gazinan/muridan).
As for the grant of shast and shabih, these two were parts of the
ritual of discipleship instituted by Akbar. The shast was a girdle carrying
the shabih or medallion bearing the emperor’s portrait with the formula
Allahu Akbar (God is Great), these being put upon the headgear of
the disciples.” S.H. Hodiwala in his usual thorough fashion has
investigated the matter and pointed out that the so-called ‘portrait
mohurs’ of Jahangir are precisely these medallions.** He draws our
attention to the unique medallion in H. Nelson Wright’s Collection,
bearing the bust of Akbar, with the invocation Allahu Akbar. Yet the
year given is I Regnal Year and 1014 (= Ap 1605-6), which means
that it was made immediately after Jahangir’s accession. On the reverse
is a radiated sun, characteristically symbolic of the respect for the
sun, which Jahangir recognizes as an important component of Akbar’s
religious views inherited by him. Hodiwala holds that this medallion
shows Jahangir’s anxiety to ‘attract the sympathy or enlist the support
of his father’s amirs and other influential members of the Ilahi Faith’ .*°
This does not, however, exclude the fact that Jahangir did sincerely
believe in those principles. Indeed, Hodiwala himself quotes Sir Thomas
Roe, who in 1616 reported that ‘falling upon his father’s concept,
(Jahangir) hath dared to enter farther in ... and hath formed to himself
a New law, mingled of all, which many have accepted’.”° The fact
that he continued to have medallions made, substituting his own portrait
for that of his father, in all later issues, and presenting them to favoured
courtiers (including Roe himself) shows that his acceptance of Akbar’s
religious views was no passing fancy or diplomatic manoeuvre, but a
conviction sincerely held.

I
When two individuals hold similar views, they may yet act differently
in response to similar circumstances. It would, therefore, not be
surprising if Jahangir’s conduct were to depart from what one would
have expected from Akbar in certain situations. There are also the
variations necessarily imposed by contexts and audiences. Jahangir
188 Mughal India
in his memoirs addresses what is largely a Persian-reading Muslim
audience. It is therefore, inescapable that at times he seeks to establish
an identity with them. This comes out very well from the argument
he advances for the coexistence of Hindus and Muslims in his empire,
in the first version of his memoirs:
I ordered that, with this exception (prohibition of forcible sari), they (the
Hindus) may follow whatever is their prescribed custom, and none should
exercise force or compulsion or oppression over another. Since God the
Almighty has made me shadow of God, and just as God’s grace is extended
to all creatures, God’s shadow too must also do the same. It is impossible
to carry out a general slaughter. Five-sixths of the people of Hindustan are
idol-worshipping Hindus. Most of the work of agriculture, cloth-weaving
and crafts is in their hands. If we try to make all of them Muslims that is not
possible except by killing them, which too is impossible. God the Almighty
will judge at the Day of Judgement. What have I to do with the religious
practices of the world.”’
It will be seen that the first portion of this passage is 1m consonance
with the official doctrine under Akbar: the sovereign, as God’s
representative, treats all as equal claimants to his attention, just as
God makes nature’s bounty available to all irrespective of faith. But in
the second part the impracticality of intolerance is stressed as an
argument that may more easily persuade a Muslim audience. It is
interesting, however, that in the standard version of his memoirs,
Jahangir omits this passage altogether.
A similar inclination to appeal to the sentiments of his readers is
clearly discernible in what Jahangir says about Guru Arjan and his
death in 1606:
In Gobindwal, which is on the bank of Beas river, there was a Hindu
named Arjan, who by assuming the garb of a (religious) guide and
instructor (Pir-o Shaikhi) had made a large number of simple Hindus
and even of ignorant and foolish Muslims into followers of his own
ways and practices and had trumpted abroad his position as (religious)
guide and saint (pir-o-wilayat). They called him guru, and from all sides
fools and fraud-believers came to him and expressed their absolute faith
in him. For three or four generations this shop had been kept warm.
Several times it crossed my mind that either this false shop should be
overthrown or he should be brought into the fold of the people of Islam.
(Nothing came of this) until Khusrau passed that way (during his
rebellion). This obscure mannequin determined to wait on him. At the
place, where he resided, Khusrau too set camp. He went and saw him
(Khusrau), conveyed to his ear irrelevant matters and with his finger put
 The Religious World of Jahangir 189
the saffron mark on his forehead which the Hindus call gashqa (i.e. tika)
and consider auspicious. When this incident was reported to my elevated
court, and I very well knew his falsehood, I ordered that he should be
brought to me, and handed over his habitations, houses and children to
Murtaza Khan. Having brought his possessions under confiscation (gaid-
i zabt), I ordered that he be capitally punished.”*

This account of Guru Arjan’s tragic end is inaccurate both with

regard to motive (in so far as the idea of a preconceived object of
furthering Islam and suppressing Sikhism is introduced) and to the
actual circumstances of the punishment.
As for the first, the motive, Shaikh Ahmad Sirhindi wrote a letter
to Shaikh Farid (Murtaza Khan) immediately after receiving the news
of Guru Arjan’s death, in which with much jubilation he says:

At this time, the killing of the accursed kafir of Gobindwal, has been a very
happy event. It is a matter of great defeat of the reprobated Hindus. For
whatever reason he has been killed, and for whatever motive he has been
put to death, the humilitation of kafirs is the very life of Islam.”

Since Murtaza Khan was himself concerned in the enforcement of

the punishment (as stated by Jahangir himself), it is inconceivable
that Shaikh Ahmad would have suggested that the action was taken
on grounds other than religious persecution, had this not been the
case.
There is then the equally contemporary account of the Jesuits
accompanying the Court. They attribute the action against Guru
Arjan solely to the circumstance that when Khusrau was fleeing to
Lahore, ‘the Guru congratulated him and placed his tiara (sic) on his
head’. The Guru was apprehended, and upon the intercession of
‘certain Gentiles’, a fine of ‘a hundred thousand crusadoes’ (Rs
250,000) was imposed on him. For this a ‘wealthy Gentile’ became
his surety. The Guru, however, declined to pay it; failing which the
unnamed surety proceeded to seize his worldly possessions including
furniture and cloths. When this proved insufficient, the Guru was
subjected ‘to every kind of ill-usage’ to force him to produce the
money. ‘At last, the poor man died, overcome by the miseries
imposed upon him by those who had formerly paid him reverence.’
Failing to secure the amount, the surety himself had to face
confiscation of his own possessions and imprisonment, during which
he died.*? Thus there was no order for the execution of Guru Arjan
from Jahangir himself.
190 Mughal India
Nearly fifty years later (1653), the author of the Dabistan-i
Mazahib, who was on very good personal terms with Guru Arjan’s
son and successor Guru Har Gobind, and was otherwise very familiar
with Sikh tradition, describes the event as follows:

For the reason that Arjan Mal had given blessings to Prince Khusrau,
son of His Majesty, who had rebelled against his father, His Majesty
Nuruddin Muhammad Jahangir Padshah ordered that he be called to
account and mulcted. A very large amount was demanded from him. The
Guru was unable to pay it. He was therefore tied up in the desert (in the
environs) of Lahore, and he died from the fierceness of the sun, heat of
summer, and torture by the levy collectors. This happened in 1015 (= ap
1606-7).*"
In essential particulars the account is identical with that of the
Jesuits. It is around the circumstances as detailed in these two
narratives, though independently of these narratives, of course, that
later Sikh traditions developed, which in full richness, are reproduced
by Macauliffe.
These traditions say that it was Guru Arjan’s taking pity on Khusrau
during his flight that enabled his rival Prithia to rouse the Emperor’s
ire against the Guru. When summoned, the Guru justified his action
in assisting Khusrau, and a fine of Rs 200,000 was imposed on him.
The Guru declined to pay the fine, nor would he allow his followers
to pay it. He was therefore placed under the surveillance of his previous
follower Chandu, and was subjected to severe torture by pouring
upon him burning sand, etc. After five days, the Guru passed away
when he was allowed to bathe in the Ravi.**
From all this independent evidence it is surely clear that Jahangir’s
action against Guru Arjan had as its cause political despotism, not
religious persecution, and that Jahangir ordered the imposition of a
heavy fine on Guru Arjan and not his execution. The contrary
statements he himself makes are clearly made with a view to his
audience. This does not absolve him of opportunism; but that is a sin
different from the one he owns himself, trying to win glory for Islam
by force.
One reaches similar conclusions when one reads Jahangir’s passage
on the banishment of Jain monks, though here the basic fault seems
to be a weakness for vainglory.
Jahangir says that in his father’s time the two sects of ‘Hindu
heretics’, the Seorahs (Jain monks), namely, the Tapa and Karthal,
were respectively represented at his father’s court by Balchand and
Mansingh. The latter held himself to be a master of astrology and
 The Religious World of Jahangir 19]
geomancy; so when upon Akbar’s death, Rai Singh Bhurtiya of Bikaner
asked him about Jahangir’s prospects as emperor, Mansingh advised
him that Jahangir would only last for two years. As a result Rai Singh
retired from the capital to his home seat, and only later returned to his
allegiance ‘shame-faced and downcast’. That Rai Singh was a patron
of Jainism, we know otherwise, for there survive two Jaina works
written under his patronage.** Less convincing is Jahangir’s assertion
that he suddenly recalled Mansingh’s offence in 1617 while in Gujarat
and summoned him to court some twelve years after the committing
of the offence. Mansingh in the meantime had been struck with leprosy
and took poison on the journey to Gujarat. So, according to Jahangir,
he met his deserts.
But then he adds:

The seorahs are found in all parts or India, but mostly in Gujarat. Since the
entire commerce, purchase and sale is carried on by the Banyas, the seorahs
(patronized by them) are found here in large numbers. They have built for
them, besides idol-temples, houses for their residence and worship which
are truly homes of mischief. They send their wives and daughters to these
seorahs, and there is little sense of honour and shame in the matter, and
various kinds of mischief and imprudence are committed by them. For this
reason, I ordered that the seorahs be banished, and farmans were sent to
all parts that wherever there be seorahs, they should be expelled from my
empire.**

Jahangir attributes his farman to reports of scandal, and the episode

of Mansingh is not given as the reason of the order, which also does
not distinguish between the two Jain sects. But what he omits to tell
us anywhere is that the farman was actually withdrawn, for which
the evidence is furnished by the Jain work Vijayatilaka Suri Rasa,
written by Darshanavijaya in 1622—-40.*°
In fact, evidence showing that Jahangir was not hostile to the
Jains, and that the order of banishment of the monks, even if not
withdrawn, was never put into effect, is overwhelming. M.S.
Commissariat has already drawn attention to the evidence of the Jain
literature and Mughal farmans bearing on the point as early as 1935.*°
To supplement him there is the Jain literature which Marshall’s
important bibliographical work, Mughals in India lists. It tells us that
as early as Akbar’s reign (1589) there were two Jain monks,
Vinayadeva and Vijayadeva at Jahangir’s (Salim’s) princely court.*’
Bhanuchandra Gani and other Jain monks attended Akbar’s court as
well as Jahangir’s;** Kalyanasagara Suri was granted interviews by
192 Mughal India
Jahangir at his court; a Jain master had a disputed Jain work referred
to him by Jahangir for decision; and a Jain savant, Siddhichandra
Upadhyaya was granted the title of Khush Fahm (Of Good
Understanding) by Jahangir.*! An order survives of Jahangir, prohibiting
animal slaughter in Gujarat during days sacred to the Jains.”
The epigraphic evidence is no less conclusive. The order of ban on
Jain monks was supposed to have been issued in 1617; Yet Jain temple
inscriptions on the sacred Shetrunja hill, dated 1618 and 1626, extol
Jahangir. As many as seven of these, dated Samvat 1675/ap 1618,
begin with references to Surtan Nurdi Jahangir Sawai, and three go
on to mention both Prince Khusrau and the sobai (governor of the
suba or province) Sahiyan Surtan Khurram (Shah Jahan, Sultan
Khurram).*? So far were Jahangir and Khurram from being seen as
hostile by the Jains that Jain records contain ‘faithful portraits of
Jahangir and Khurram’.** This could hardly have been the case had
they been persecutors of the Jains.
Moreover, there is no indication in any other source independent
of Jahangir’s memoirs that any Jain monk actually suffered banishment.
Muhammad Ali Khan’s detailed history of Gujarat, Mirat-i Ahmadi,
makes no reference at all to the event. The English and the Portuguese
too do not seem to have heard of it. Why, then, did Jahangir make the
critical statements about the Jains and boast of having banished their
monks? There seems to be no other explanation than that he thought
that in the eyes of many of his readers this would exalt his status as
powerful Sultan who could suppress an infidel sect, doubly condemned
for heresy and scandal. Facts were, therefore, suitably modified for
the purpose.
How the memoirs omit reference to facts which Jahangir thought
might not appeal to the Muslim reader, though in line with his concept
of Sulh-i Kul, was the conversion of three sons of his brother Daniyal
to Christianity. For this we have eyewitness accounts from Hawkins
and William Finch, the event occuring in July-September 1610 at
Agra and the princes obtaining Portuguese names.*° The princes’
subsequent renunciation of their new faith does not deprive the event
of its uniqueness in the annals of the Mughal dynasty, more so since
it took place which full encouragement from Jahangir. Yet neither the
princes’ conversion to Christianity nor their apostasy from it find
mention in the memoirs. This, again, shows that the memoirs in
themselves, though the basic text for our knowledge about Jahangir’s
views, are not a sufficient source.
 The Religious World of Jahangir 193
iil
It has been our argument that Jahangir’s own religious views were
largely identical with those of Akbar, and his practice tended to
conform to them. Where what he writes in the memoirs suggests a
deviation, this is, in two or three major cases, found to be a partial
misrepresentation of actuality to suit the sentiments of his readers.
Nevertheless, the memoirs contain enough material to show his
continuance of his father’s religious policy, notably in relation to
Hinduism.
In Jahangir’s approach to Hinduism, as in Akbar’s, two elements
should be distinguished: his tolerance of beliefs and practices associated
with it, and his own views about their truth or correctness.
With regard to the first, Jahangir spells out his approach fairly well
in the passage we have already referred to, given in the first version
of his memoirs. Except for forcible sati, the Hindus were to be left
free to follow their beliefs and customs.” The author of the Dabistan-
i Mazahib goes further and tells us that Jahangir even appointed a
judicial authority to deal with disputes among Hindus. Sri Kant of
Kashmir, appointed to this post, says the author, was a scholar of
repute in all the branches of Indian learning (shastra), smriti (law),
kavi (poet), tark (dialectics), vaidya (medicine), jyotish (astrology),
patanjal (breath-control) and vedant (pantheism). “His Majesty
Nuruddin Muhammad Jahangir appointed Sri Kant to the office of
Qazi (judge) of the Hindus so that they might be at ease and be in no
need to seek favour from a Muslim’.*’ In allowing Hindu practices
Jahangir even imposed bans on cow slaughter, which was distinct
from, and in addition to, the prohibition of animal slaughter on certain
days. There was a ban on cow-slaughter (presumably in the Punjab)
which Akbar had imposed. Jahangir continued this for ‘he continued
his father’s ways (suluk) in the world of religion and made no
difference of any degree in that path.’ Shah Jahan, however, rescinded
the ban.** The ban was in force also in parts of Gujarat, for the English
at Surat could not be allowed to buy ‘bullocks and kine’ for meat in
1614 since ‘the king had granted his firman to the Banians for a
mightie summe yearly to save their lives’.*” The ban seems to have
been enforced more strictly in 1622 when Raja Bikramajit was sent
by Shah Jahan to govern Gujarat on his behalf.°° Pietro della Valle
found the ban in force at Cambay in 1623.°!
Jahangir continued and extended Akbar’s practice of gifts and grants
to Brahmans and temples. In his first regnal year (1605-6) while
194 Mughal India
marching against Khusrau, he notes that he gave large amounts of
money to Shaikh Fazlullah and Raja Dhirdhar to distribute among the
fagirs (needy Muslim religious men) and Brahmans.” In 1621, Jahangir
diverged from his way to visit Hardwar, ‘one of the established
important places of worship of the Hindus, where Brahmans and
recluses retire in lonely places to worship God in their own way.’
There he distributed gifts in cash and kind to each of them according
to their deserts. The documents in possession of the Vrindayan
temples of the Chaitanya sect show how Jahangir went on adding to
the grants of both the temples and their votaries. He converted Todar
Mal’s temporary grant of 89 bighas 9 biswas to Madan Mohan temple
into a permanent imperial grant in 1613. He added at least two more
temples to the list of temple-recipients in Akbar’s farman of 1598,
giving ten and fifteen bighas (1613 and 1614). During the period
1612-15, he made at least five new grants to Chaitanya-divines,
aggregating 121 bighas.* It would later be said in criticism of Jahangir
that during his reign a very large number of temples in Banaras
(Varanasi) were erected, some of them incomplete when he died.»
The same policy was reflected in Jahangir’s continuing the same
access of non-muslims to mansabs in the Mughal imperial service.
Out of a total of 172 known holders of high mansabs in 1621, 30 or
17.4 per cent were Rajputs and other Hindus; this was virtually the
same proportion as in 1595 when out of 123 holders of high mansabs,
22 or 17.9 per cent were Hindus.*° This is not, however, the place to
discuss his attitude towards the various factions of the nobility and
particular clans of Rajputs, which changed with altered political
situations.
Jahangir had, however, distinct views on matters of religion, and
these, being largely similar to those of Akbar, did not fit in with popular
Hinduism. Like Akbar he was critical of the theory of incarnation
(hulul) and of image-worship. Describing a discussion with Pandits
(‘Hindu sages’), in conformity with his father’s custom, he argued
that God, who is infinite, cannot be limited to particular space (‘length,
width and depth’), of physical bodies; nor, if His presence is seen as
that of divine light, can it be made specific to just ten bodies
(presumably, Vishnu’s incarnations); nor can this be the exposure of
divine attributes in some frames only, for miraculous powers have
been possessed by men in every religion. The Brahmans responded
that they held them to be divine incarnations so that meditating on
them they could reach God. Jahangir could not, however, agree that
such bodies and images could assist in the devotee’s union with God.*”
 The Religious World of Jahangir 195
These two reservations are reflected in his aversion to the boar avatar
of Vishnu and insistence that the boar-image be thrown out of the
temple built by his favourite noble Rana Shankar at Pushkar.** His
hostility to image worship is reflected also in his uncomplimentary
comments on the temples of Vrindavan which he visited in 1619,
though as we have seen, he had given and confirmed grants to these
very temples.°?
Jahangir’s major area of interest in religion was, clearly, pantheism.
It was this interest which made him seek the company of Mian Mir,
the famous Qadri Sufi and friend of Guru Arjan, and hear from him
‘truths and matters of knowledge of God’; he says charmingly that
Mian Mir was too spiritual a personage to be offered money. On the
other hand, he did not find much satisfaction in an interview with a
purely juridical scholar like Qazi Nasir Burhanpuri.°' To Shaikh Ahmad
Sirhindi, who made great claims for himself in the spiritual path, while
insisting on a close, fanatical enforcement of the Shariat, he was
positively hostile. It is, therefore, by no means surprising that among
Hindu divines, Jahangir should seek first and foremost votaries of the
Vedanta (‘Bedant’), ‘the science of tasawwuf (mysticism).°?
In this search Jahangir came across the man whom he has praised
above all others (except perhaps Akbar) and to whose mode of life he
devotes an enthusiastic description. The man was the ascetic Jadrup
Gosain. Jahangir met him in Ujjain in 1617 on his way to Gujarat,
recalling that Akbar too had greatly commended him.™ On his return
journey (1618) he went and saw him twice (‘without exaggeration to
be in his company is real riches’).°° He met him twice again next year
in Mathura. When Hakim Beg, brother-in-law of Jahangir’s famous
wife, Nur Jahan, while holding the charge of Mathura, ill-treated
Jadrup, Jahangir dismissed him forthwith from service.*”’ It is,
unfortunately, not clear what Jadrup discoursed on besides the general
principles of Vedanta, for Jahangir speaks in general terms of ‘elevated
statements’ received from him and of his ‘high understanding, elevated
nature and sharp capacity of comprehension united with God-given
knowledge’. Jahangir also visited an unnamed sanyasi at Ahmadabad
when he praises highly for enlightenment and grasp of reason, and
knowledge of sufistic matters, according to his own faith.’
Jahangir also seems to have been impressed by yoga, and he speaks
admiringly of sanyasi Moti, who had obtained the art of complete
immovyability by his own volition.” He is also said to have greatly
esteemed Gusain Chitrupa, a yogi ascetic of great ability, devoted to
‘God-worship’.’!
196 Mughal India
As we close this essay, we should stress that Jahangir’s religious
views and his religious policy had other facets too which we have not
discussed or have passed over cursorily, such as his relations with
Muslim divines and with Christians. An inclusion of these would
certainly have given us a more rounded picture. But our object has
been more limited, namely to enquire whether Jahangir altered or
tried to alter the religious approach of his father, as has often been
argued. Our findings have been contrary to this argument. We have
found that there is no indication that he made any pledge of change
upon his accession; that he continued to publicly espouse Akbar’s
policy. His own statements on the two or three occasions where they
seem to suggest modification in this statement, ought to be viewed
with some scepticism owing to the influence of his readership upon
Jahangir as a writer. Finally, that his actual approach to Hindus and
Hinduism was fairly closely in line with that of his father. For all this
Jahangir seems to deserve far more credit than has usually been
assigned to him by historians.

NOTES

1. Beni Prasad, History of Jahangir, 5th edn, Allahabad, 1962, pp.

409-10.
2. 3rd rev. and enlarged edn, Bombay, 1972, pp. 81-103.
3. Beni Prasad, History of Jahangir, p. 409; R.P. Tripathi, Rise and
Fall of the Mughal Empire, Allahabad, 1963, p. 356; M. Yasin, Social
History of Islamic India, Lucknow, 1958, p. 151
4. Irfan Habib, PIHC, 23rd Session Aligarh 1960, Part 1, Calcutta,
1961, pp. 212-3.
5. Relations of Fernao Guerreiro, tr. C.H. Payne, Jahangir and the
Jesuits, London, 1930, p. 3.
6. Tuzuk-i Jahangiri, ed. Saiyid Ahmad, Ghazipur and Aligarh, 1863—
4, pp. 1-2.
7. It is significant that Nurul Haq, a very orthodox writer, in his
Zubdatut Tawarikh, British Library, Or. 1650, f.270b, after describing in
detail the circumstances leading to Jahangir’s accession, says that he
took the tithe Abul Muzaffar Nuruddin Jahangir Padshah Ghazi. In actual
fact Muhammad was a part of the title, as may be seen from Jahangir’s
seals on his farmans; the point is simply that, it had no special significance
on this occasion. It was also a part of Akbar’s imperial style and title.
8. Ni‘matullah, Tarikh-i Khan Jahani, ed. S.M. Imam al-Din, Dacca,
1962, pp. 704—S.
 The Religious World of Jahangir 197
9. Tuzuk-i Jahangiri, p. 4.
10. Ancient Monuments of Bengal, Calcutta, 1986, pp. 460-1. On a
lofty corner minar of the Jama Masjid at Burhanpur, Akbar has left an
inscription dated aH 1009/ap 1600-1 (A. Cunningham in Archaeological
Survey Reports, 1x. p. 117).
11. Tarikh-i Khan Jahani, u, p. 668.
12. Maktubat-i Imam Rabbani, 1, Letter no. 65 (There being more than
four editions, reference to Shaikh Ahmad’s letters is best made by volume
and number of letter). Cf. Irfan Habib, PIHC, (1960), p. 213.
13. Tuzuk-i Jahangiri, p. 4.
14. MS in Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris, Blochet, Suppl. Pers. 482, f.
20a-b.
15. Tuzuk-i-Jahangiri, p. 89.
16. Ibid., p. 91.
17. Ibid., p. 207-8.
18. Franciso Pelsaert, ‘Remonstrantie’, tr. W.H. Moreland and P. Goyl,
Jahangir’s India, p. 49. Such order against animal slaughter should be
distinguished from the ban on cow-slaughter, which was also promulgated
in certain regions.
19. A’in-i Akbari, i, pp. 240-1.
20. Ibid., 1, pp. 158-61. Blochmann’s transl. of this portion (vol. 1, 2nd
edn revised by D.C. Phillott, Calcutta, 1939, pp. 170-6) is very inaccurate
and should not be used. The words ‘Divine faith’ or ‘New Faith’ are
throughout unwarranted by the text.
21. Tuzuk-i Jahangiri, p. 28.
22. A’in-i Akbari, 1, pp. 158-61.
23. Ibid., 1, p. 160, to be read with Badauni, Muntakhabut-Tawarikh,
ed. Ali Ahmad and Lees, Calcutta, 1864-9, 11, p. 338.
24. S.H. Hodiwala, Historical Studies in Mughal Numismatics,
Bombay 1923, reprint 1976, pp. 147-70.
25. Ibid., pp. 152-3.
26. Embassy of Sir Thomas Roe, ed. W. Foster, London, 1926, p. 314;
quoted by Hodiwala, p. 150 n.
27. RizaLibrary, Rampur, MS 175, Tarikh-i Farsi, CAS (History) Library
Transcript, p. 22.
28. Tuzuk-i Jahangiri, p. 34.
29. Maktubat-i Imam Rabbani, 1, Letter no. 193.
30. Jahangir and the Jesuits, pp. 11-12. For the value of crusades,
see ibid., p. 37, where 200,000 crusados = 500,000 rupees.
31. Dabistan-i Mazahib, Bombay edn. p. 187.
32. M.A. Macauliffe, The Sikh Religion, its Gurus, Sacred Writings
and Authors, Oxford, 1909, 1m, pp. 84-100. Macauliffe’s own comments,
say on p. 100, should be distinguished from the facts described in his
sources.
198 Mughal India
33. Jahanvimal Gani’s Shabdabhedaprakashtika, composed in 1598
(Marshall, Mughals in India, Bombay, 1967, p. 235, no. 825) and Hanuman’s
Khandprashasti (Marshall, p. 174, no. 591).
34. Tuzuk-i Jahangiri, p. 217.
35. For the work, see Marshall, p. 130, no. 406. S.R. Sharma, Religious
Policy of the Mughal Emperors, 3rd edn, pp. 88-9, disbelieves this fact
simply because Beni Prasad (History of Jahangir, 5th edn, p. 408) cities no
authority for the statement that the order was withdrawn after some time.
Beni Prasad must have this or some other Jaina work in mind.
36. M.S. Commissariat, Studies in the History of Gujarat, Bombay
1935/photo reprint, Ahmedabad, 1987. Commissariat discusses the matter
again in his History of Gujarat, 1, Bombay, 1957.
37. Manjirishi, Vinayadeva Suri Rasa (Marshall, p. 285, no. 1029).
38. Siddhichandra Upadhaya, Bhanuchandra Charita (Marshall, pp.
449-50, no. 1721 (ii).
39. Udayasagara Suri, Kalyansagaru Charita rasa (Marshall, p. 469,
no. 1804).
40. Karipasagara, Nemivijaya Nirvana rasa, composed 1617 (Marshall,
p. 265, no. 938).
41. Siddhi Chandra Upadhayaya, Vasavadatta Vivarana (Marshall, p.
449, no. 1721, (i).
42. H. Sastri (ed.), Ancient Vijnaptipatras, Baroda, 1942, cited by
Marshall, p. 221, no. 777.
43. G Buhler, ‘The Jaina Inscriptions from Satrumjaya’, Epigraphia
Indica, 1, pp. 34-5, 60-3, 68.
44. Marshall, p. 221, no. 777; S.R. Sharma, p. 89, suggests that Khurram
out of his ‘orthodoxy’ might have been behind the order issued against
the Jain monks.
45. Early Travels in India, ed. W. Foster, London, 1921, pp. 86, 116,
147-8. Finch’s account is the most detailed and circumstantial.
46. CAS in History (Aligarh) transcript of Riza Library, Rampur, MS, p.
pps
47. Dabistan-i Mazahib, Bombay edn, pp. 153-4. The author goes on
to say that this decision was in accordance with Akbar’s Law (Namus-i
Akbari) by which all people, whatever their differences of faith, were to be
extended royal favour and protected in their mode of worship and conduct.
48. Surat Singh, Tazkira Pir Hassu Teli, composed in verse in 1647,
autograph (?) in CAS in History, Aligarh, f. 36b.
49. Downton in Purchas his Pilgrimes, Mclehose ed. tv, Glasgow, 1906,
pp. 219-20.
50. English Factories in India, 1622-23, ed. W. Foster, p. 110.
51. Travels of Pietro della Valle in India, tr. Edward Grey, London,
1892, 1, p. 11.
52. Tuzuk-i Jahangiri, p. 27.
53. Ibid., p. 337.
 The Religious World of Jahangir 199
54. Tarapada Mukherjee and Irfan Habib, ‘The Mughal Administration
and the Temples of Vrindavan during the Reigns of Jahangir and Shah
Jahan’, PIHC, Dharwad 49th session (1988), pp. 288-9.
55. Abdul Hamid Lahori, Padshahnama, Bib. Ind., 1 (a), pp. 451-2.
56. M. Athar Ali, Apparatus of Empire, Oxford, 1985, pp. xx—xxi. The
figures for ‘medium’ mansabs for 1621 are incomplete, but give a better
proportion for Hindus than in 1595. The ‘high’ mansabs here include both
the categories of ‘highest’ and ‘high’ in Apparatus.
57. Tuzuk-i Jahangiri, p. 14. Akbar’s criticism of the divine incarnation
theory is reflected in his ‘august saying’ that in India no one set a claim to
prophethood, because the claim to being God is so much acceptable here.
(A’in-i Akbari, i, p. 236). But he seems to have been more favourable to
the theory of transmigration of souls (tanasukh): ‘The fact that children
fall severely ill points towards tanasukh.’ Jahangir was equally unable to
accept the divinity of Christ (Jahangir and the Jesuits, pp. 58-63).
58. Tuzuk-i-Jahangiri, p. 124.
59. Ibid., p. 279.
60. Ibid., pp. 286-7.
61. Ibid., p. 333. On the circumstances leading to this interview, see a
very interesting account in Shaikh Muhammad Baga ‘Baqa’, Miratu-l
‘Alam, Aligarh MS Abdus Salam Coll. 84/314, f. 225a.
62. Tuzuk-i Jahangiri, pp. 272-3, 308, Cf. Friedmann, Shaikh Ahmad
Sirhindi, Montreal, 1917, pp. 83-4.
63. Tuzuk-i Jahangiri, p. 176. By tasawwuf Jahangir must have more
presisely meant the seeking of communion with God.
64. Ibid., pp. 175-7.
65. Ibid., pp. 250-3.
66. Ibid., pp. 279-81.
67. Shaikh Farid Bhakkari, Zakhirat-ul Khwanin, Aligarh Habib Ganj
Coll. 32/74, ff. 96b-97a.
68. Tuzuk-i Jahangiri, pp. 279-80; on his mastery of Vedanta, see p.
176.
69. Ibid., p. 237.
70. Ibid., pp. 341-2.
71. Dabistan-i Mazahib, Bombay, 1575, pp. 146-7. But this could be
the same as Jadrup (= Chitrarupa), whose mode of life was that of an
ascetic; and Yoga might therefore be used here in a loose sense. For the
identification of Chitrarupa with Jadrup, see Chapter 19).
 hash

The Religious Environment

under Shah Jahan and Aurangzeb

Today we are apt to think—and such thinking is an essential part of

the legacy of the National Movement—that state and religion are two
separate entities; and that the basis of the modern state is the nation,
which is independent of all religions. In the world contemporaneous
with Akbar, such a concept would have seemed strange and utterly
unacceptable. The ‘nation’ existed nowhere though proto-nations were
just emerging into historical light in post-Renaissance Europe. In China,
one may argue, religion did not exist in the form known in the Semitic
and Indo-European worlds; but still, such as it was, it was seen as a
function of the state, a subordinate arm of a polity presided over by
the Son of Heaven. In the rest of the Old World, in theory at least,
religion laid down the functions of the ruler, who could be the Protector
of the Cows and the Brahman, the Commander of the Faithful or the
Defender of the Faith, depending on the religious tradition to which
the ruler happened to be affiliated. It followed from this that the
suppression of religions other than the dominant one and of heresy,
was the basic acceptable reason of existence of the state. Monserrate,
the Jesuit missionary at Akbar’s court, remarked very justly that
rejection of all other religions was the essence of every religion; and,
of course no one who believed in tolerance could be the guardian of
the true faith.
From these beginnings it took Europe a long, tortuous path to
traverse from the time of Reformation in the sixteenth century, when
there were the bitterest of wars of religion, to the French Revolution,
when at last the dogma of supremacy of the Church over the state
was abolished and the Cult of Reason was proclaimed. Even then, the
loosening of the stranglehold of the Church on state was slow in
coming, and the old bastions were the last to fall in the Catholic world,
and in some parts of the Islamic world they have yet to fall. It has
been through this long conflict that the modern secular state has
emerged.
The Mughal Empire did not contribute to the creation of the modern
 The Religious Environment 201
secular state. And yet, if one looks at the world in and about 1600, it
constituted the most interesting exception among the important and
political structures of the world, in that tolerance, rather than
intolerance, was seen by it as its vital function, its basic obligation to
God and Man.
This crucial reversal of the accepted role of the state was the work
of the great Akbar. It either stemmed from, or was the rationalization
of, very strong religious concepts that he came to develop.
On reading the Akbarnama and the A’in-i Akbari, one realizes
immediately that Akbar wished to assert his very strong belief in God;
but his concept of the way God is to be worshipped was independent
of either orthodox Islam or Hinduism. As the ‘Happy Sayings’ set out
in the A’in show, he believed, as did the Sufis, that God is to be
grasped and worshipped by different men according to the limitations
of their knowledge. God was formless (be-surat) and could not be
grasped in any form except by the greatest effort of the mind (chira-
dasti-i khyal). To worship such a one, physical action in prayer (Suri
paristish) was suitable only for the unawakened ones. Otherwise
worship could only be an act of the heart. Elsewhere, Akbar is said to
have held that the real act of God-worship is to have ‘an illuminated
heart that loves Light’ (Raushan-dil-i nur dosti). Akbar, therefore,
deprecated both the image worship of the Hindus and the prayer ritual
of the Muslims. His deprecation of image worship is particularly borne
upon us when the author of the Akbarnama styles Todar Mal a ‘simple
one’ (sada-lauh), because he mourned the loss of the idols he used to
worship; it goes on to call him ‘a blind follower of custom’ and
narrow-minded. For the benefit of this celebrated Minister, Akbar
also sermonized to the effect that no worship of God is superior to
looking after the weak.
The importance Akbar gave to Light might well be due to the fact
that it is formless; and there was, therefore, a natural tendency to
exalt the Sun, the source of Light, as is indicated in the A’in-s chapters,
A’in-i Rahnamuni and A’in-i Iradat Gazinan. Akbar said that ‘the
exalted Sun is a great benefit for rulers; and so they direct words of
praise to it and count it God worship, though the narrow-minded
ones suspect them (of sun worship).’ Akbar obviously had in mind
the Nauroz festivities of the Sassanid tradition, in which the Parsi
worship of Sun and Light had a role. Akbar was thus attempting to
reconcile that ancient royal tradition with his own theory of divine
Light.
The textbooks often present the picture of Shah Jahan as an
202 Mughal India
orthodox Muslim king and indeed Shah Jahan did take some pride in
calling himself a king of Islam. But he continued in all its basic aspects
the tolerant policy of his grandfather Akbar and father Jahangir. In
the thirty years of his reign, from 1628 to 1658, he continued to
appoint and promote Rajputs to high ranks. In 1637, out of a total of
194 known holders of high mansabs, 35 or 18 per cent were Hindus;
this was the same proportion as in 1621. It is not relevant here to
discuss his attitude towards particular clans of the Rajputs which
changed with changing political situations.
Much of the belief that Shah Jahan reversed or modified the
religious policy of his grandfather rests on his order of the sixth
regnal year (1633-4), in which he is said to have ordered the
destruction of temples whose construction had not been completed.
But the documents of that very period from Vrindavan show a
different attitude altogether. Not only were the grants of Madan
Mohan temple and sister-temples renewed during the period, but
some local official’s obstruction to the ringing of the bell at the
Madan Mohan temple was condemned by an imperial farman of 24
November 1634 in the most stringent terms. The worship of the
deity is here described as ‘divine worship’ (‘ibadat-i ilahi), a strange
slip for an emperor of Islam. The grants for the other great temple
of Vrindavan, the Govind-Dev tempie, were not only confirmed, but
the management of the temple itself was handed over to the Amber
rulers. From these particulars it is clear that Shah Jahan never
intended, even in the early years of his reign, any departure from the
traditional policy. It is worth remembering that he also patronized
Hindi poetry, the poet Sundar Kavi Rai being one of his favourite
courtiers.
But beyond this, the period of Shah Jahan reminds one of the time
of Akbar, in that there was once again a movement to bridge the great
gap between Hinduism and Islam and evolve a common language for
both religions.
The most celebrated spokesman of this trend was Prince Dara
Shukoh, the eldest son of Shah Jahan and heir-apparent. Dara Shukoh
had immense interest in religious matters from an early age, and he
was an admirer of the famous Qadri mystic, Miyan Mir and a disciple
of Miyan Mir’s spiritual successor (khalifa) Mulla Shah Badakhshi.
Miyan Mir was known for his extreme friendliness with non-Muslim
religious leaders; and he prescribed respect for all faiths for his
disciples. Dara Shukoh’s interest under his influence extended from
Muslim mysticism to Vedantic philosophy. His study led him to the
 The Religious Environment 203
conclusion that the difference between Islam and Hinduism was merely
verbal (/afzi); and to prove this he wrote a tract called Majmu’-al
Bahrain, the Meeting of two Oceans. In this he gave an exposition of
the Vedantic view of Universe and Truth, giving Sanskrit terms and
explanations of their meanings. To him the Muslim mystics as well as
Hindu saints were haqshanas or discerners of the truth. Though the
book shows Dara’s considerable familiarity with Sanskrit, it is also
clear that he must have derived considerable help from pundits in
preparing the book.
From this small tract, Dara Shukoh went on to attempt a more
ambitious enterprise—a translation into Persian of the Upanishads.
This was completed in 1657 under the title Sirr-i-Akbar, the Great
Secret. Dara translated 52 of the Upanishads with extreme faithfulness.
He was so carried away by the Upanishads that he asserted that these
were ‘the hidden book’ spoken of in the Quran. The modern interest
in the Upanishads in a sense goes back to Dara Shukoh, because it
was his Persian translation of these philosophical texts which first
introduced them to the outside world.
Dara came in touch with the bhakts as well. Chandrabhan Brahman
has left a record of his conversations with Baba Lal, a Vaishnavite
saint, who seems also to have had some links with the Kabir Panth.
The conversations took place in 1653, and relate to sundry questions
on Hindu religious and philosophical concepts.
Unlike Akbar, Dara found no harm in even image worship. Under
every image (but), he said, “Faith (iman) lies hidden.’ He constructed
a stone railing at the temple of Keshav Rai at Mathura.
Dara Shukoh pursued his cause unmindful of the deprecations of
the orthodox. He showed his own scorn for the orthodox in verses
like the following:
Heaven is a place where there is no Mulla,
Where there is no noise and disturbance (ghugha) from the
Mulla!
The prince had a tragic end when, defeated in the war of succession,
he was killed by orders of Aurangzeb in August 1659. Aurangzeb’s
official history accuses him of practising heresy in the name of
mysticism; of seeking the company of Brahmans, jogis and sanyasis;
of considering the Vedas (read Upanishads) to be divine scriptures; of
wearing a ring with Prabhu inscribed on it, and so on. The accusations
were intended to tarnish his reputation. These now look as the best
certificate that Dara could ever hope to have obtained to win him credit
204 Mughal India
and good name in the eyes of right-thinking people.
Dara had a very liberal and upright contemporary in Muhibullah
Ilahabadi, a scholar of great erudition. Muhibullah declared that the
Prophet of Islam was sent as a ‘mercy’ by God to all creatures, and
not to Muslims alone. How could then any sovereign distinguish
between Muslims and non-Muslims? He argued strongly in defence
of the pantheistic views of Ibn-al Arabi, which formed the bedrock
of his own tolerance of the traditions of other religions.
A man of acompletely different background was Sarmad. A Jewish
rabbi in Iran, he became a Muslim and then a complete panthiest. He
came to India as a merchant, but gave up his trade to become a
mystic. His favourite disciple was Abhai Chand, to whom he even
taught Hebrew, and who translated a portion of the Old Testament in
Persian for the author of the Dabistan-i Mazahib.
Abhai Chand wrote:
I obey the Quran; I also have the same faith as the temple
priests.
I am a Jewish rabbi; at the same time I am a kafir as well as
Musalman.
Sarmad and Abhai Chand belonged thus to all faiths, since God
was everything. Sarmad says:
He (God) became stone and wood in both the Kaaba and the
image-temple (but khana);
At one place he became black stone (hijr al aswad) of the
Kaaba; at another a Hindu idol.

Contrary to common belief propagated in even scholarly texts,

Sarmad was not on close terms with Dara Shukoh. Once Dara wrote
to him, but he excused himself from answering the prince’s queries
because of his own ignorance.
Sarmad was arrested at Delhi in the early years of Aurangzeb’s
reign and executed for his scandalous views. The French traveller
Bernier approved of his execution; but the defiant spirit carved its
own niche in the heart of the people of Delhi who still consider him a
shahid, a martyr.
At the intellectual level, a very important creation of Shah Jahan’s
time was the book Dabistan-i Mazahib, the greatest book ever
written in India on comparative religion. Its author was not Mohsin
Fani as is widely believed, but a Parsi, who omits to name himself.
The author is clearly at home in ancient Persian, Arabic and even
 The Religious Environment 205
Sanskrit. He seems deliberately to have trained himself for the task
and travelled widely to collect material on religions and religious
sects. His book, completed some time between 1653 and 1658, sets
out to give an impartial and detailed account of all religions and
religious sects derived from their own books and followers. A long
section on Parsis is followed by a long one on Hindus and the various
sects of India. He devotes a chapter to Judaism and another to
Christianity; both are accurately depicted. At the end there are
descriptions of the various Islamic sects, ending with the beliefs of
the Sufis. The author of the Dabistan-i Mazahib professes to be
doing no more than ‘interpreting’ the various religions for the reader;
but it is obvious that his own sympathies lie with the pantheists and
the liberal and tolerant schools. He seems to regard the various
religions as so many endeavours to find the Universal Truth though
he does not on that account omit to describe their mutual
contradictions and inconsistencies. The author may be expected to
have naturally gravitated towards Dara Shukoh, whom he mentions
once only but not in terms that would suggest that he had obtained
any patronage from that prince.
Shah Jahan’s reign thus saw a considerable flowering of the tolerant
spirit, for which the Mughal State, by its refusal to be censorious of
such thought, if not by more positive support (which too came from
Dara Shukoh, the crown prince), could reasonably claim credit.
How far then can Shah Jahan’s deposition in 1658 be considered a
terminal point for this policy?
The war of succession among Shah Jahan’s sons has been
considered a decisive turning-point by historians who choose to
view the whole history of medieval India as largely a struggle between
two communities, and it has been held that the war was a struggle
between two opposite policies: Dara stood for religious tolerance
and Aurangzeb for Muslim orthodoxy. I have elsewhere argued that
the religious issue was not involved in the war of succession. There
is a very interesting document which was brought to light by
Shyamaldas from the Udaipur records. This is a nishan which
Aurangzeb sent to Rana Raj Singh. It bore the impression of the
palm of Aurangzeb and it is obvious that he attached very great
importance to its contents. Here Aurangzeb makes the following
declaration:
Because the persons of the great kings are shadows of God, the attention
of this elevated class [of kings] who are the pillars of the great court is
devoted to this, that men belonging to various communities and different
206 Mughal India
religions should live in the vale of peace and pass their days in prosperity,
and no one should interfere in the affairs of another. Anyone of this sky-
glorious group [of kings] who resorted to intolerance, became the cause
of dispute and conflict and of harm to the people at large, who were
indeed a trust received from God: In reality [such a king] thereby
endeavoured to devastate the prosperous creations of God and destroy
the foundations of the God-created fabric, which is a habit deserving to
be rejected and cast off. God willing, when the true cause [i.e. Aurangzeb’s
own cause] is successful, and the wishes of the sincerely loyal ones are
fulfilled, the benefits of the revered practices and established regulations
of my great ancestors, who are so much esteemed by the worshipful
ones, will cast lustre on the four-cornered inhabited world.

Would a man who was raising a religious war-cry at the time, have
condemned in such strong terms any attempt at intolerance or religious
discrimination? What is significant is that rather than stress the religious
issue, he was anxious to avoid it by declaring himself on the side of
the established imperial policy.
After his accession Aurangzeb sought to justify the imprisonment
of his father and the execution of his brothers by successes in the
military sphere and a vigorous policy of expansion. It began in 1659
but for reasons that lie outside our present scope of discussion, it
was followed by a spate of rebellions. The Jats rebelled under Gokla
in the mid-1660s, the Satnamis rebelled in 1672; in 1667 the Yusufzais
revolted near Peshawar and in 1672 the Afridis rose. In 1670, Shivaji
again opened war against the Mughals and sacked Surat for the second
time. With all these setbacks, Aurangzeb was clearly in need of new
ex post facto justification for his coup of 1658-59. Consistent with
his orthodox temperament, which he had been developing, the
justification for his unpopular action was provided by an emphasis on
the Islamic character of the empire, and a new religious policy was
inaugurated to create a religious halo around the imperial crown. A
discriminatory policy against the Hindus followed, of which the
imposition of jizya in 1679 was the culminating point. This was coupled
with an attempt to associate the Muslim orthodoxy as closely as
possible with the empire. In the 1670s, the emperor’s attempt to
appeal to Muslim religious divines for support in respect of every
political action even provoked a protest from some of the nobles. In a
letter written to the emperor in the late 1670s, Mahabat Khan expressed
his surprise at the emperor’s policy that had made ‘fowlers into captives
and sparrows into huntsmen’. ‘The experienced and able officers of
the state are deprived of all trust and confidence while full reliance is
 The Religious Environment 207
placed on hypocritical mystics (mashikhan-riya kosh) and empty-
headed scholars (ulmayan-i tahi hosh).’
That Aurangzeb’s policy was wrong-headed was not seen by
Mahabat Khan alone. We know from the Akhbarat as well as Manucci
that the influential princess, Jahan Ara made known her views against
his measures. The imposition of jiziya was opposed by many, and a
representation, ascribed (perhaps wrongly) to Shivaji circulated widely.
But while there cannot be two opinions about the unwisdom of
Aurangzeb’s policy, from the point of view of the Mughal empire
itself certain essential facts may not be overlooked. As I showed in
my book, The Mughal Nobility Under Aurangzeb, Hindus constituted
21.6 per cent of Mughal nobles of the rank of 1000 and above during
1658-79, but 31.6 per cent of such nobles during 1679-1707, his last
phase, where one would have expected the percentage to decline.
The reverse development was, of course, due to the influx of the
Marathas who in 1679-1707 comprised one-sixth of all Mughal nobles
of 1000 zat and above. Whatever the reason, the Hindus’ presence
had increased.
The picture that emerges of Aurangzeb from the Akhbarat is also
not one of a uniformly religious tyrant. He gratefully acknowledges
Rajput valour and loyalty; and, at one place, commends Brahman
officers for their courage generally. At lower levels of administration
the traditional policy often prevailed, without anyone looking over the
shoulder in fear of imperial reprimand. Jhan Chandra has published
many cases of grants to Hindus by Aurangzeb and his officials. I
introduce here a yet unpublished document from Vrindavan.
On 7 February 1704, Mukhtar Khan, Governor of suba Agra issued
a parwana declaring that the Chaitanya gosains had founded Vrindavan
and established pilgrimages in Braj Bhum. Therefore the followers of
the sect under Brajanand deserved a fee of one rupee per annum from
each village in as many as eighteen parganas of Mathura and the
vicinity, half a rupee at each harvest. This fee was to be paid to
Brajanand and was allowed as an impost on account of Kharj Sadir o
warid, expenses on guests and travellers from each village. Thus, in
essence, it was a government levy for the benefit of Brajanand Gosain
and his Vaishnavite followers.
Aurangzeb’s policy was, therefore, a partial aberration and cannot
cloud the immense achievement of the Mughal empire, not only in
applying a practical policy of tolerance but also fashioning a theoretical
justification of it. That justification was itself not sectarian; but, whether
as stated by Abul Faz! in a largely rational framework, or by Dara
208 Mughal India
Shukoh, in an absolutely mystical one, was a firmly religious one.
God was at its centre, and the state, in the shape of the sovereign,
was his vicegerent. Such a state was thus not a secular state; but for
the very reason that the God-State relationship could be set beyond
the frontiers of individual religions, and the State had a divinely-ordained
duty to be tolerant. This is the sum and substance of even Aurangzeb’s
own nishan to Rana Raj Singh.
It is of some interest to speculate whether the theoretical justification
had some inherent weaknesses. So long as successes continued, the
sovereign could be projected as God’s representative without need
for any further props. As successes dried up the need for props
would appear; and a sectarian policy would have its attractions. I
have suggested this as a factor which explains Aurangzeb’s religious
policy though without justifying it.
Whatever its theoretical and practical weaknesses it is possible
that the Mughal view of Indian culture as a composite one and of the
state as a supra-religious state has contributed much to our own ways
of thought. Often it seems to have greater appeal to us than the concept
of a coldly secular state. But it is also possible that political and
economic difficulties now deflect us from the secular path, by making
a religious colouring a better protection for holding on to power. Since
such a situation presently looms before us, should we not learn from
the failure of Aurangzeb?
 18

Sidelights into Ideological and

Religious Attitudes in the Punjab
during the Seventeenth Century

A few years ago the Department of History, Aligarh Muslim University,

acquired from a dealer in Amritsar a unique manuscript entitled Tazkira-
i Pir Hassu Taili (hereafter TPHT). It is a metrical work, comprising
some 7000 verses, all in the same metre, except the chapter headings
which have a separate metre of their own. The manuscript is written
on good paper in excellent hand, carefully revised and corrected, and
has all the marks of an autograph of the author. While the author is
obviously a versifier, rather than a poet (no poet would write 7000
verses in the same metre), he has a scholar’s knowledge of Persian
and his spellings are impeccable.
But the very prosaic character of the work contributes to its real
historical value. It is the work of a minor revenue official of the
Punjab, a Brahman himself; and it is about a Muslim oilman and porter
who became a minor local saint. It not only gives us a glimpse into
the religious stirrings and petty obscurantism that were generated
among the educated and ordinary people at this time, but also furnishes
us with an excellent view of the ethical concept of the Mughal-period
‘petty-bourgeoisie’, the small officials and traders.
Before analysing the interesting historical material contained in this
work, it would be obviously convenient to offer, in a short compass,
some information about the saint, his disciples, and the author and his
family, as we can glean it from this work.
Hassu Taili, ‘Hassu, the oilman’, or to give his proper Arabicized
name Hasan ‘Assar, was born on an unknown date, sometime in the
sixteenth century, at Makhiwal, on the bank of the Chenab. His father
bore the name Shaikh Chandu Taili and his mother, Maili. He had an
elder brother Shaikh Taru; and a sister named Piyari is also mentioned
(TPHT, ff. 68a—b, 89a—b). It may be mentioned in passing that in the
old Punjab, the Tailis or oilmen were a wholly Muslim caste.'
A critical change in Hassu’s life came when he was twelve. His
210 Mughal India
brother gave him twelve rupees to go to a village to buy sesame. On
the way he met one of the (living) ‘nine naths of Gorakhnath’. The
latter recognized in him his sixty-first disciple, the premier of all, who
had spent eighty-two years in severe austerities before his birth in the
Taili’s house (7PHI, ff. 89a—90b). Hassu now embarked on his career
as a saint. He went to Lahore where he worked as a porter (hammal);
ff. 90b, 99a). Subsequently, the saint became a grain merchant, and
opened a grain store at ‘Lohari mandi’ (f. 47b). His devout admirer
paints him as a merchant of a curious type: knowing everything about
future prices, yet buying dear and selling cheap (f. 12a—6). He died at
Lahore in AH 1011/1603 at the alleged age of 120 years (f. 100b).* His
tomb still survives, an object of some veneration; and so too is the
spot remembered where he used to sell his grain.*
Till his death Hassu Taili appears to have remained formally a
Muslim, though he did not follow the five basic observances of Islam.
For this latter, our author has ready explanations: He prayed all the
time, so why should he have prayed in public? Why should he have
paid zakat, or kept daily fasis when he never had anything stored up,
or never broke his fast? Why should he have gone to Hajj, to go round
the Kaaba, when he went round the Kaaba of his heart a hundred
times in one breath (f. 12b). His chief disciple, Shaikh Kamal, used
the term malamatiya to designate his master’s school (f. 102a). This
was apt since the malamatiyas were a group of Muslim Sufis, who in
order not to appear pious, used to avoid all the observable attributes
of piety. Like many Sufis, he ate no meat (f. 36a).
But it is obvious that Hassu Taili’s sights were set farther than the
malamatiyas. While not disowning his Islamic connections, his
freedom from Islamic observances was fully in accord with the claim,
made at least on his behalf by his disciples, that he had similar
connections with non-Muslim sects. We have already seen that he
was supposed to be in the line of the Naths of Gorakhnath (ff. 89a—
90b; see also f. 178a). For the benefit of such followers of his as had
faith in Guru Nanak, he could be held to be an incarnation of Nanak
himself (f. 159a—b).
With these credentials, Pir Hassu Taili could claim allegiance from
men of various sects. In his court all the eighty-four Siddhas were
present; ‘Gorakhnath’s teacher, Tirathnath’ had come as a servant
before the Pir (ff. 69a—b). Or again, the Brahmans could not recite
the eighteen Puranas and four Vedas without his leave, and the jogis
had become his followers. As for Muslims, the Saiyids had given the
reins of their faith into his hands. In short, Muslims and Hindus had
 Ideological and Religious Attitudes in the Punjab vai
all accepted his bondage, and recited his name day and night (TPHI,
ff. 456—46a, 70a—71a, 75a—b). The landed aristocrats, the rais, ranas
and zamindars owed allegiance to Pir Hassu and he was respected by
them (f. 75a).
Quoting such exaggerated claims is relevant here only in so far as
it indicates the diversity of composition of Hassu’s disciples. This
diversity will become still more apparent if we have a look at the
principal disciples that he left behind.
His chief disciple was Shaikh Kamal. His original name was Ayyub
Qureshi (Surat Singh’s explanation of this name is that since Abu
Bakr was know as Siddigq, so Ayyub was Kamal!). He belonged to
Darbela in Sind (ff. 72b—74b). The profession of his father is not
stated, but he had apparently an educated background. Among other
prominent disciples was Shaikh Dula, an indigo merchant; Abdul Karim,
a sweeper; Shaikh Isa and Shaikh Hamid (ff. 23a—b, 24b—25a, 93a-b,
94b, 68a-b,).
Among his Hindu disciples were Asa Karan, Ganpat Das, Ram
Rangi, and Bayagdas ‘Ramayya’ (a title given to him by Hassu), both
the last named being Brahmans; and Chajju Bhagat, a trader (ff. 159a,
44a, 43a—b). A similarly mixed composition is seen in the list of
disciples of Shaikh Kamal: Fateh Muhammad, Hassan Hafiz, Shah
Mir, Haji Muhammad Lohar, Shaikh Husain, Khwaja Sodanand, Kalyan
Mana, Jagga, Bhagwati, Sarichand (ganungo), Nihal Chand, Jethmal
(a goldsmith), Raghunath, Ganesh, Bhakt Gawali Rai, Gopal Brahman,
Nand Rai, Rai Basant, Khwaja Hari Chand, Bayagdas Puri, Girdhar
Pandit, etc (ff. 173-4).
The allegiance of the family of the author, Surat Singh, was to
Shaikh Kamal, and through him to Hassu Taili (ff. 54b, 173-4).
Surat Singh was born at the town of Natesar in the pargana of
Patti Hibatpur (now Patti in District Amritsar). All the men of the
town were merchants and belonged to the Kamboj sect (firga) (of the
Brahman caste?). Surat Singh too belonged to this sect. His father
was Duni Chand, son of Jogidas; and he had an elder brother Khwaja
Ganga Ram. Both Ganga Ram and Surat Singh took to the bureaucratic
profession (ff. 181, 182a; see also ff. 121-2 and 254). Ganga Ram
served as amil of Jahangirpur (ff. 122-3), and subsequently was
appointed as Khan-i Saman in the sarkar of Saf Shikan Khan but
resigned that post (f. 162—b). Later on he was appointed as Khan-i
Saman in the sarkar of Aqil Khan (ff. 163-4). Surat Singh was
appointed as Karkun in Bhatinda and remained there till the time of the
writing of his work (AH 1054-57/1644—47; ff. 155a, 182b).
212 Mughal India
Surat Singh’s interest in Persian poetry was more than casual, for
he refers to a poetical session at Agra where he was present with
some other notable poets of the time—including Chandrabhan Brahman
and Shaida (f. 86b). It was Ganga Ram who was obviously the more
religiously inclined of the two brothers, for he left home and joined
the Bairagis; but he later took allegiance to Shaikh Kamal (7PHI, ff.
54b, 122b—123), and Surat Singh followed suit.
As we have said in the beginning, Surat Singh’s work is of value
not as a great exposition of spiritual experience but as a window into
the mind of a man of his class in seventeenth-century Punjab. Here
was a Brahman, with a mercantile and bureaucratic background, by
his caste familiar with the orthodox creed of his faith, but by his
Persian education familiar equally with the Islamic tradition. He is at
once a supporter of Hindu—Muslim unity and of the separation of the
two traditions. It is quite natural for him to begin with the praise of
God and then of Prophet Muhammad, in terms that any Muslim would
find acceptable. He wants Hindus and Muslims to live together in
amity, but he insists that they should keep to their own customs.
Indeed, he is suspicious of Hindus behaving like Muslims. He praises
Shah Jahan for his justice and the protection extended by him to
Muslims and Hindus alike. That emperor found the Hindus and Muslims
‘mixed’ (makhalut; f. 101a) and not following their own separate
paths. Shah Jahan, however, remedied this by putting them in their
respective ways. In this connection the author himself decries those
Hindus who secretly do the sinful things that Muslims do, while they
put on the tika and sacred thread in public (f. 108b).
There is also no explicit rejection of the caste system, though it
does seem remarkable that a man of Surat Singh’s stamp should,
without any inhibition, state the low castes and lowly professions of
his favourite saint and some of his principal followers. For this, perhaps,
the traditional Indian view that religious men ought to be poor
(popularized in particular by the Nath Jogis to whom Surat Singh
appears attached), and also the general atmosphere created by the
Bhakti and Sufi movements of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries,
ought to be held responsible. However, there is never any suggestion
of interdining among Hassu Taili’s disciples. Thus, in Surat Singh’s
mind there seems to be little wrong in the caste system and its separatist
customs. Here his attitude is quite different from that of Guru Nanak
and his followers who sprang from the same soil.
Surat Singh obviously continues to have many of the customary
inhibitions of the community. Thus he had a great horror of
 Ideological and Religious Attitudes in the Punjab 213
cow-slaughter and applauds Akbar and Jahangir for prohibiting it
(presumably, in the Punjab; TPHI, f. 36b). He thus furnishes us with
a fact not previously known to us. It is difficult to second him in
similarly applauding Hassu Taili’s curse, when an Afghan admirer
served him beef, for this curse is alleged to have brought about a
general famine (ff. 36a—b).
The human sympathies of Surat Singh and his saint are also rather
limited. To him the khalq (creatures of God) to be saved are either
those who owe allegiance to his saint or belong to his class or
community. Thus he records among the miracles of Hassu, one in
which the saint, having accepted a very petty nazar (offering) from a
Hindu banker who had squandered the deposit left with him by a
‘Mughal’, and who expected the Mughal to come any day with a
farman to secure repayment, protected the defalcator by invoking
divine aid in getting the Mughal robbed of that precious document (f.
17). Or, when a corrupt revenue official was expecting dismissal and
punishment, after having shown indifference to Shaikh Kamal, Surat
Singh came forward to help him, once he had offered his allegiance
to that saint, in getting the tell-tale village papers burnt and replaced
with others (f. 22a).
It is also interesting that a number of the miracles of Hassu Taili
are concerned not with feeding and helping the utter destitute, but
assisting nobles and merchants. It is obvious that to Surat Singh,
Hassu Taili appears in the best light when by his prayers, Abdur
Rahim Khan Khanan conquers Sind or succeeds in the Deccan (ff.
13a—b, 14b—15a, 23b—33a, 91b), or Abul Faz] is saved from an illness,
or Akbar and Jahangir are reconciled (ff. 23b—24a, 4la—b, 49b),
etc. A number of other miracles concern merchants—how Hassu
Taili causes one boat of merchants to flounder and saves another
(ff. 43a—b); how, invoked in time he saves a caravan from fire (ff.
22a—b); how, again, he enables Lahore merchants in the Deccan to
earn high profits when they go to him (or rather his apparition)
there (ff. 42a—b, 43a).
His own view of Hassu Taili is not that of an essentially kindly
saint; but kindly now, and fearful in his punishment the next moment.
A kotwal, when asked for a nazar, sends a very petty amount, and so
loses his life (ff. 18b—19a).
The nazar is a very important vehicle of saintly protection. Once
accepted, even the criminal is sure of protection. The nazar has value
as index of the sincerity of the devotee, for the saint himself has no
need of nazar (f. 22a).
214 Mughal India
Besides being of value in itself for telling us of a minor religious
movement in the Punjab, and indicating the ideological outlook to
which it appealed, Surat Singh’s work contains some important
historical information as weli.
For one thing, it shows beyond doubt that Guru Nanak’s religious
status was widely accepted in the Punjab, even by Hindus and Muslims
who were not followers of the contemporary Guru. Surat Singh
describes how Nanak when he died was claimed by men of both
religions; and in order to satisfy them, he left behind two bodies. His
other references to Nanak also show his own deep feeling for him as
a teacher. He refers to his great verses (TPHI,ff. 122a—123a). But it
would be obvious from the foregoing that his own ideas were far too
orthodox: he would prefer the obscurantism of Hassu Taili to the
liberating message of Nanak.
An interesting piece of information in the present work relates to
the prohibition of tobacco. Pir Hassu appeared in a dream to Abdul
Karim to warn him against the use of tobacco (f. 134a). Since tobacco
smoking became common in India during Jahangir’s reign, the ban
on it in the religious sects of the seventeenth century seems to have
come almost spontaneously. The ban came in Sikhism and the
Kabirpanthis and was present in the Satnami sect when it arose in
Narnaul in the middle of the seventeenth century. By the mechanism
of a dream it also percolated among the followers of Hassu Taili. It is
noteworthy that the more orthodox Muslims did not consider tobacco
smoking a religious vice.
The work contains certain details about Mughal administration. I
have already elsewhere referred to the interesting material it contains
about the officials and the mode of procedure in the establishment of
nobles.* From the long passage concerning the revenue collector of
Jahangirpur, it appears that the amin used to check the records of the
amil by a direct examination of the village patwaris’ papers.
Not to be overlooked is a valuable reference to the famine of 1574—
75, so far only dimly mentioned in Persian sources (ff. 36a—b). Known
as the Battisiya (from Samwat 1632), it was very severely felt in the
entire region from Burhanpur and Gujarat to Lahore, Multan and
Kashmir.°
Surat Singh’s work is thus an important historical document. To
the modern reader Surat Singh’s intellectual horizons and human
sympathies may appear rather limited, and his favourite saint and
spiritual guide very sectarian, more concerned with allegiance to
himself than with merit and works. Yet, we ought not to ignore the
 Ideological and Religious Attitudes in the Punjab ZADS
importance of a religious sect so prominently drawing its disciples
from amongst both Hindus and Muslims, and declaring its connection
with ascetic and mystic predecessors in both religions. Our irritation
at the obscurantist elements in Pir Hassu Taili and other ‘saints’ may
be tempered further by consideration of their working-class origins
which they made no attempt to hide.

NOTES

1. Ibbetson, Punjab Castes, Lahore, 1916, p. 324.

2. Latif says that Pir Hassn Taili “died in 1002 AH (aD 1593), four years
after the death of Aurangzeb’. (Latif, Lahore, Lahore, 1892, 202-3). This
last statement of Latif is palpably wrong.
3. Ibid. Latif says his shop ‘still exits in Chowk Jhanda’.
4. See my book, The Mughal Nobility under Aurangzeb, Bombay,
1996, p. 162.
5. These sources refer to a severe famine in Gujarat, but only an
expected drought in northern India, the danger being, however, averted
by timely showers. (Cf. Irfan Habib, Agrarian System of Mughal India,
Bombay, 1963, p. 101 & n).
 1d

Pursuing an Elusive Seeker of

Universal Truth
The Identity and Environment of the Author
otf the Dabistan-i Mazahib

In or soon after An 1063/aD 1653, an anonymous author completed

and issued in Persian a work on the religions of the world called the
Dabistan, now popularly known as Dabistan-i Mazahib' (Dabistan-
i Mazahib, published Ibrahim ibn Nur Muhammad, Bombay, 1292/
1875, hereafter cited as DM). Given its large canvas, the detailed
research it embodied, the number of texts consulted, the number of
votaries of all religions approached for information, and the absolute
impartiality with which all beliefs were presented make the book unique
in all literature of its time.
The book is divided into twelve ta‘lims or chapters on the beliefs
of (1) Parsis, (2) Hindus, (3) Tibetans, (4) Jews, (5) Christians, (6)
Muslims, (7) Sadigis, (8) Monotheists, (9) Raushanyas, (10) Jlahis
(Pure monotheists), (11) Rationalists and (12) Sufis. The account of
each religion or sect is derived, as far as possible, from its own votaries,
often directly by the author himself. The book begins with a very
short, ten-line preface; but at the end the author sums up what his
method of proceeding has been throughout the book:
It is generally spread about that [all people] belong to [one of] five
communities: Hindus, Jews, Magians, Christians and Muslims. Each of
these five sects claims that its Law is superior over all others, and in
support of their Law they bring forth scriptures giving their beliefs. After
the completion of this book it may once again be stated that some excellent
persons have said that among the sects and religions, in the ordinary
persons’ descriptions of faiths and beliefs, there is to be found much
partiality, so that truth has remained concealed, especially (now) that
besides the [five religions], the number of sects has [reputedly] reached
thirty. With this desire [to write impartially] the author engaged himself in
writing this book. In this record of the faiths of one’s ancestors, and the
 Pursuing an Elusive Seeker of Universal Truth oA |
beliefs of the different sects, whatever has been recorded has been received
from the lips of persons possessed of those beliefs and from their own
books. In the account of individuals of all faiths, these are referred to in
the same terms of respect as are extended to them by their disciples and
sincere followers, so that there should be no trace left of intolerance and
partiality. The author has no ambition other than that of fulfilling the office
of interpreter. (DM, p. 327)

The entire text of the work bears out very well the claims made for
lack of bias by the author. Moreover, the author shows a remarkable
capacity for comprehension of diverse, and often complex beliefs,
and lays them out in an orderly fashion, with an eye to the essentials.
So far as possible, he is careful to identify his sources, whether persons
or texts.
The last date and place we have of him in the book are 1063/1652-
3, and Srikakul (modern. Srikakulam, Andhra Pradesh) in the
Qutbshahi kingdom on the borders of Orissa (DM, p. 105). But
whenever and wherever the author issued the book, the work became
popular enough to be preserved in a large number of manuscript
copies.' Under the patronage of W.B. Bayley, it was printed by Nazar
Ashraf in a very accurate edition in movable type at Calcutta in 1809.
A lithographed edition was brought out by Ibrahim bin Nur Muhammad
from Bombay, 1292/1875; and this is the edition I have used. Two
years later Munshi Nawal Kishore published a lithographed edition
from Lucknow.’ Initial ‘Orientalist’ interest in the work was kindled
by its preservation of much information about the Parsis and some
other sects, such as the Raushanyas, of whom little was then known
to the European scholarly world. F. Gladwin translated the section on
the Parsis and published it from Calcutta in 1789; a German version
by E. Dalburg from Wurzburg followed in 1809. The chapter on the
Raushanyas was similarly translated into English by J. Leyden for the
Asiatic Researches, xi, Calcutta.* The whole work was translated into
English by D. Shea and A. Troyer, The Dabistan or School of Manners,
in three volumes (London, 1843). The translation rendered good
service for the time, despite its inaccuracies, some of which were
serious enough.° A Gujarati translation by Mobed Fardunji Murzbanji
was published from Bombay still earlier (1815, with a second edition
in 1845).° The very important subsection on the Sikhs has been edited
and translated by Ganda Singh (Madras, 1942).’
As modern scholarship has come into possession of most of the
older texts used by the author of the Dabistan, its importance as a
source for those religions has undoubtedly receded. Yet, its significance
218 Mughal India
as a primary source for understanding the religious environment of
India at the time of the author, the actual meaning given to older terms
and beliefs by people contemporaneous with the author, the customs
practised, etc. has probably not been fully appreciated. The more one
reads the book, the more one has the sense of a quarry crying to be
worked.
How little has been explored of this book is shown by how little
has been done to explore the identity and life of the author himself.
For long, a false identity was accepted—the identification with Muhsin
Fani of Kashmir, who, according to Lachchmi Narain Shafiq’s Gul-i
Rana, died in 1670.’ There is no basis for this identification; since the
facts given by the author about himself and his work cannot possibly
fit Muhsin Fani.’ There is also the possibility that Muhsin is referred
to in the Dabistan itself as ‘a scholar (fazil), Muhammad Muhsin by
name’ who gave the author information of what he had heard from
Mobad Sarosh (DM, p. 33), whom the author himself had met twice
in Kashmir (pp. 33, 35). There is still less basis for the attribution of
the work to one Muhammad Amin in two late-eighteenth-century
manuscripts. '°
One thing clear from the texts of the Dabistan itself is that the
author had the poetic name or takhallus of “Mobad’. The work, in
fact, begins with five couplets addressed to God, and the poet’s
‘signature’ in the fifth verse reads ‘Mobad’. Mobad’s verses are
also quoted elsewhere in the work, but the introductory verses show
that they were composed with the title of Dabistan in mind (ai nam-
i tu sar-i daftar-i itfal-i dabistan), making it almost certain that the
author was himself the poet quoted. ‘Mobad’ means a Parsi priest
as well as ‘the head of wine-sellers’,'' and so is an apt style for a
poet in Persian to adopt. Rieu, drawing the same inference, points
out that ‘Mobad Shah’ is given as the takhallus of the author in the
subscription of the original manuscript the British Museum of (Add.
25,849), the original having itself been transcribed in 1209/1794—S.
The full name of the author there is stated to be ‘Mir Zulfigar Ali al-
Husaini, with the poetic title of Mobad Shah’.'* But we have a much
earlier testimony to the same effect from Azad Bilgrami, writing in
1762—3, when he refers to ‘the Dabistan, the work of Mirza Zulfigar
with the poetic title of (mutkhallis bi) Mobad’." The addition of
‘Ali al-Husaini’ to the personal name and ‘Shah’ to the poetic title
might then well be later accretions.
The curious fact remains that while, indirectly, the author reveals
his poetic title ‘Mobad’ which, in its turn, suggests, but does not
 Pursuing an Elusive Seeker of Universal Truth 219
prove, some Parsi affinity, he throughout abstains from divulging his
personal name, as well as his religion. And yet the facts he gives
about his own life are numerous enough. On the basis of these, Troyer
in his “Preliminary Discourse’ to the Shea—Troyer translation has
reconstructed the main facts of the author’s life;'* and Rieu too has
given a summary notice of his life.'° Shea’s reconstruction is, however,
full of errors, not least being his confusion between the town of
Gujarat of the Punjab (as carefully indicated by the author of the
Dabistan) and the region of Gujarat.
It has, therefore, seemed desirable to set out in a largely
chronological form, some of the autobiographical data that our author
provides in his work, and see, with an open mind, the picture of the
author which emerges therefrom.
When we construct the author’s life from the numerous
references to himself in the work, his original Parsi background
becomes obvious. The very first recorded event in his life belongs
to 1028/1619, when according to what Mobad Hoshyar told him
later in life, he took him to Balak Nath Tapshri, a yogi of great
powers, who predicted that the author would be a ‘man of God’
(Khuda-shanas; DM, p. 144).'° Clearly, the author was so small at
the time that he could not be expected to remember the event on his
own. We may infer, then, that he was no more than three years old,
and was, therefore, born c. 1616. He was still so young five years
later (1033/1623-—4) that, while being taken from Patna to Agra, he
was carried by Mobad Hoshyar ‘in his arms’ to another yogi, Gosain
Chatrupa (the celebrated Jadrup/Chadrup of Jahangir’s memoirs),
who blessed the author, taught him the surya mantra and asked one
of his disciples, Ganesh Man, to remain with him, instructing him
till he attained his age of majority (DM, p. 147)."”
Here we need to pause a little: In 1619 an infant, he is taken to a
seer who predicts a future for him as a mystic; in 1623-4, the famous
Jadrup makes much of him and assigns a disciple of his to be with
him. We shall see that in 1642—3, when he was still a young man of
less than thirty, Guru Hargobind was to address him as ‘Nanak’.
These references could not possibly have been made because of the
author’s own spiritual attainments. We must rather suppose that he
had been born in a family of high spiritual reputation, perhaps, in the
direct line of descent of the heads of a priestly order. But let us return
to the story of his life.
While recalling his being taken to Chatrupa by Mobad Hoshyar, the
author refers to his earlier account of Mobad Hoshyar. He must then
220 Mughal India
be the highly praised Mobad Hoshyar (J), who was a descendant of
Rustam, and who was born at Surat and died in 1050/1640-1 at Agra
(DM, pp. 32-3).'® He must be distinguished from Mobad Hoshyar
(II), a descendant of the sage Jamasp, whom the author met first of
all in Kashmir in 1036/1626-7 (p. 33), and from another Mobad
Hoshyar (III), son of Khurshid, who was born in Patna and met the
author in Kashmir only in 1049/1639-40 (pp. 36-7). It would seem
that Mobad Hoshyar (I) was a kind of guardian of the author during
the latter’s minority, the author’s own parents being not at all
mentioned. Till 1048/1638—9, he kept company with the author, who
in 1048/1638—9 went with him to see a Parsi priest, with Kochik
Bahram (p. 36).
From 1036/1626 to 1040/1630-—1 the author appears to have
sojourned in Kashmir, where his recorded intellectual or religious
contacts were exclusively with Parsi priests. In 1036/1626—7, as we
have seen, he met the second Mobad Hoshyar, as well as Mobad
Sarosh, son of Kaiwan (DM, p. 34); and in 1040/1630-1, Mobad
Sarosh again (p. 35); Pil Azar, a merchant belonging to the Shidrangi
sect of the Parsis (p. 41); Raham of the Paikari sect, and Andariman,
belonging to the Alari sect, both of whom he met ‘in the house of
Shadosh’ (p. 62); and Shaidab of the Akhshi sect (p. 63)'°. The only
exception is his meeting with Ishar Kar, a yogi in 1036/1627, also in
Kashmir (p. 148).
The remarkable fact is that till 1630—1, when he must have reached
the age of eighteen, he records his coming into any kind of contact
with thirteen religious men (including Shaidosh), of whom ten were
Parsis, and three Hindus. The first recorded encounter with a Muslim
divine occurred only in 1046/1636—7, when, journeying out of Kashmir,
he met Arif Subhani in Bangash-i Bala (upper Kurrun Valley in
Pakistan’s NWFP); and Arif Subhani was a Sufi, who was not tied to
the rites of any one religion (DM, p. 323). His next encounter with a
Muslim was with Mahmud Fal Hasiri in Kashmir in 1047/1637-8, but
Mahmud is merely quoted for a story about a Parsi divine Mahrab, a
disciple of Farshad (pp. 42-3).
The dominance of Pzrsis in the author’s intellectual life continues
in 1048/1638—9. With the guardian of his childhood, Mobad Hoshyar
I, he meets Kochik Bahram at Lahore (DM, p. 36), and also Jawan
Sher of the Parsi Shidabiya sect (p. 63). The author journeyed from
Lahore to Kashmir, in this year in the company of Khaki, a merchant
who belonged to the same sect (pp. 62-3). In Kashmir the same
year he met Ashur Beg Qaramanlu, a Sufi again, who gave him a
 Pursuing an Elusive Seeker of Universal Truth 224
report about his personal experience of the Parsi divine Farzana Bahram
(p. 40).
But it is during these two years that the author for the first time
reports meeting Muslim scholars and divines, free from any Parsi
context. In 1048\1639-40 he meets Mulla Adil Kashghari at Lahore,
the Mulla being the source for a statement on Sunni belief in the
absoluteness of God (DM, p. 211). The next year in Kashmir he met
Mulla Ismail Sufi, a disciple of the mystic Miyan Mir (p. 321). He met
the Vedantic seer Gyani Rina, once in the company of ‘the famous
poet and master of eloquence, Mulla Shaida, the Indian’ (p. 135). He
continued to meet other Hindu divines as well; Sarur Nath Tapashri in
Lahore in 1048/1638-—9 (p. 144), and Srikant in Kashmir the next
year.
In 1050/1640-—1, Mobad Hoshyar I died at Agra, having presumably
left the author’s company (DM, p. 33). From this year inclusive there
is no record of the author meeting any Parsi divine except for one
occasion to be mentioned below. It seems as if from 1640-1 the
author no longer lived among the Parsis, and shifted to a life mainly
among Muslims and Hindus. It is difficult to say that this was either
because he took service with some Mughal officer, of which he makes
no mention; or because of a formal conversion to Islam, of which,
again, there is not the slightest suggestion in his text. It is clear,
however, that not only did he detach himself from his hitherto dominant
Parsi environment, but he also took to extensive travel. In 1050/
1640-1, leaving Kashmir, he visited Gujarat (Punjab) (p. 162) and
the nearby town of Wazirabad (p. 162). He was at Lahore in 1052/
1643-4 (p. 161), staying on there till the next year (pp. 218, 254),
when he travelled to Kiratpur in the Punjab Hills (pp. 147, 190), and,
then, the same year (1053/1644—5), to Kabul (p. 299) onwards to
Meshed in Iran (p. 241) On his way back he visited Multan, in 1054/
1644-5 (p. 231) from where he went to Gujarat (Punjab) in 1055/
1645-6 (p. 152); in the latter year he was also at Peshawar (p. 144).
In 1056/1641-7, he began his journey across India. We find him at
Dunara near Jodhpur (p. 167), on the way to which he had passed
through Merta (p. 167). His object seems to have been Surat, the
great port where he reports himself in the next year (p. 202).”” The
same year (1057/1647) he travelled to Haidarabad (p. 194). From
there he made his way back to Gujarat in the Punjab which, from
his repeated periods of stay there, seems to have become his family
seat after he left Kashmir. He was staying at this place in 1059/1649
where, significantly, he met, for the only reported occasion after
222 Mughal India
1639-0, two Parsis (p. 62).”! But the same year we find him travelling
to Srikakul on the borders of Orissa, the place being then in Qutbshahi
control (p. 125). He fell ill there in 1061/1651 (p. 15), and was still
there in 1063/1652-3, the last year mentioned in the book (p. 105).
Everywhere he seems to have been meeting persons of all religions
and persuasions, giving him information about their beliefs, scriptures
and traditions.
It would seem then that a fundamental change in the author’s life
took place in 1640-1; and one may ask whether this was due to his
desire to write the Dabistan itself. In his text at one place, 1055/
1645-6 is cited as the current year (DM, p. 119). If he had even
begun to write only in that year, the project must have shaped itself
in his mind much earlier, and his travels, which seemingly detached
him from his Parsi family, which probably had now made Gujarat in
the Punjab its seat, might really be attributed to his desire to collect
material for the book from all possible sources.
There is a passage, to which Rieu has drawn attention,” which
may give us the light we are seeking. This passage occurs at the
beginning of Chapter (7alim) I, on Hindus, that immediately follows
Chapter I, devoted to the Parsis. It reads:

Since unstable fortune threw this writer away from the Parsis and cast him
in the company of the devotees (samans) of the idol, and image-worshippers
praying to Vishnu (Bishan), it is necessary that, having gathered together
the minutiae of the beliefs of this (sect), these should be set out after the
[account of the] Parsis. (DM, p. 105)

Rieu interprets the passage to mean that ‘fortune ... tore him
from his Parsi surroundings ... to make him the associate of Hindu
votaries.’*? This is possible; but, perhaps, the author by ‘unstable
fortune’ (rozgar-i napaydar) does not have any hostile fate in mind,
but only makes a statement of the simple fact that he began with a
Parsi environment, but then later—which was, as we have
established, in or about 1050/1640—1—he left his Parsi family for
long durations, during which he mixed notably with Hindus. The
passage does not necessarily mean that such mixing with Hindus
and detachment from the Parsi environment for this purpose were
against his will.
The solution of the mystery of why the author, indeed, deliberately
took to the life of travel and exploration of religious diversities, as he
now did, may possibly be sought in the posthumous influence of one
 Pursuing an Elusive Seeker of Universal Truth bpRS
man, Azar Kaiwan. The Dabistan gives to Azar Kaiwan precedence
over even Zoroaster in its description of the religion of the Parsis with
which the book begins. The Sipasis, also called Yazdanis, Izidis or
Abadis or Azars (these being among alternative names) are described
as a monotheistic sect different from Zoroastrians, over whom it is
given precedence. To this sect belonged Azar Kaiwan, ‘possessed of
all sciences’ (zul ‘ulum) and ‘the Great Philosopher’ (filsufi azam).
‘He had come from Iran to settle in Patna, where he died in 1027/1617
at the age of 85 years (DM, p. 27). He had numerous disciples,
whom our author describes at length. It would become clear from
reading his detailed account of Kaiwan and his disciples (pp. 26-44),
that the author was affiliated to this sect. It may be recalled that it
was in 1033/1623—4, that he was taken as a child from Patna to Agra,
so that presumably earlier his family had lived at Patna with the
community of Azar Kaiwan’s followers. Mobad Hoshyar I, who
appears virtually as his guardian during his childhood, was himself a
disciple of Azar Kaiwan (pp. 32-3). From the account of the latter’s
life and teachings given by the Dabistan (pp. 26-31), it transpires
that he believed in an absolute monotheism, inclining towards
pantheism, pursued an ascetic life, and avoided animal-killing and
meat eating. A mystic, his opponent was the self (nafs); and he declared
that asking anyone to adopt one’s religion was nothing but an assertion
of nafs. Though his closest disciples were Parsis, he had Muslim
followers too; and his disciples in turn had Muslim, Hindu, Jewish
and Christian followers, whom the author knew, or knew of, by name
and repute.” An affinity was seen particularly with Sufism; and one
of Azar Kaiwan’s disciples, Kochik Bahram (d. 1048/1638-9)
translated the Arabic works of Shihabuddin Magqtul, the famous Sufi,
into Persian. The author himself sums up the views of Azar Kaiwan
and his followers—‘the Abadi Mystics’ SOB Sire-1 Abadiya) as
follows:
When anyone, stranger to their own faith (kesh) becomes acquainted
with the community of this sect, they do not speak ill of him and commend
the path of his religion, and accept whatever he says, omitting nothing
by way of respect and courtesy, on account of their own faith. This is
because they believe that God can be reached through every religion ...
They do not hold it proper to hurt anyone without gain. If someone has
some work with them, whether for salvation or for this world, they do all
they can to be with him and assist him. They abstain from all practices of
intolerance, malice, jealousy and hatred or preference of one community
(millat) over another, and of one religion (kesh) over another. They
224 Mughal India
consider the learned, the mystics, the upright ones and God worshippers
of every religion their friends, and they do not call ordinary people bad,”
nor denounce the worldly ones. They say, of him who does not seek
religion, of what use is denouncing the world to him? Such denunciation
[they say] is the act of the envious. They do not share their secrets with
strangers nor tell others of what someone has told them. (DM, p. 42)’
After reading this in the context of the known facts of the author’s
life, there should remain little doubt that, given the basic position of
Azar Kaiwan’s school or sect that all religions have the capacity to
reach God, and the essential truths are few, the author was driven
to explore the beliefs of all religions to discover how much of these
truths were in fact shared by them.
If this was his objective when ‘Fate’ separated him from his
Parsi environment, it may be assumed that he was by now, at twenty-
five years or so in age, himself a religious man of some status.
Otherwise, the poetic title ‘“Mobad’ could hardly been claimed by
him without an air of presumption. Such status probably explains a
curious sentence in the Dabistan. This occurs in the author’s account
of Sikhism. He had met, he says, Guru Hargobind at Kiratpur in
1052/1642—43; and Guru Hargobind ‘in his letters was pleased to
remember the writer by the title of Nanak, who was the preceptor
of this sect’ (DM, p. 190).?8 Such courtesy could hardly have been
extended to the author unless the Sikh Guru had seen in the latter a
religious divine who held the saine monotheistic principles as the
Sikhs did. In fact, our author does point out that the sect of Sipasis
or Yazdanis, to which, as we have seen he belonged, had the same
outlook of reverence towards the assembled body as the Sikhs had,
for ‘that sect (of Sipasis too) has the belief that when a large number
devote themselves to the doing of a thing, it would certainly get
done’ (DM, p. 192).
There seems little doubt, then, that the author of the Dabistan was
a priest of the Sipasi/Abadi sect of the Parsis. There is much justice in
Rieu’s comment that ‘his description of Islamism is that of a well-
informed outsider, not of a born and bred Muslim’.””? Though one
could argue that this might be because of his anxiety not to identify
himself with any particular religion, including Islam, one would then
not be able to explain why he should have offered such a ‘glowing
account’ (in Rieu’s words) of the Sipasis, or rather, of Azar Kaiwan
and his followers.
 Pursuing an Elusive Seeker of Universal Truth 225
As against this conclusion about the author’s Parsi antecedents,
the personal name of Mirza Zulfiqar assigned to him by Azad Bilgrami
and later scribes of the book can well be urged. It has been reported
that a diwan (collection of verses) of ‘Mobad’ (as poetic title) has
been discovered at Patna, and the personal name of the author given
there is Zulfigar Ardastani. From this fact it has been asserted that he
migrated to India during the reign of Shah Jahan (1628-58), received
instruction in ‘the common syllabus taught by Muslim theologians’,
whereafter ‘he turned to the Zoroastrians and Brahmans in
succession’.*? It will be seen, however, in the light of our collection
of facts of the author’s life in the Dabistan itself, that he was in India
as an infant, as early as 1619 in the reign of Jahangir, and that from
that very time he was in the company of Paris.
If, then, Zulfiqar was really used as a personal name by our author,
such use was probably for convenience only in society where Muslims
were more acceptable than Parsis. In his account of Azar Kaiwan’s
followers, he refers to such a practice as a kind of device adopted for
appearances (suri). Thus, one of Azar Kaiwan’s disciples, Farzana
Bahram, ‘adopted the suri discipleship of Khwaja Jamaluddin Mahmud,
one of the pupils of Mulla Jamaluddin Dawani’ (DM, p. 32). Of four
votaries of the Samradi (Parsi) sect, whom the author met in Kashmir
in 1048/1638-39, he says that all the four ‘also had Muslims names’
(p. 60). A follower of the Parsi Akhshi sect, Shaidao, whom the
author met in Kashmir in 1040/1630-31, ‘was known (publicly) by
the name of Shamsuddin’ (p. 63). Zulfiqar could then well have been
the author’s public name without any actual affiliation to Islam.
One may, finally, note that the extensive knowledge of Persian
literature, and Islamic practices and beliefs that the Dabistan displays,
does not militate in any manner against the author being a Parsi. The
followers of Azar Kaiwan, whom he describes, were uniformly well
versed in Persian and Arabic. They wrote books in Persian: Mobad
Hoshyar I, the author’s guardian, wrote Surud-i Mastan (DM, p.
23); Mobad Sarosh, Jam-i Kaikhusravi (p. 35);°! Kochik Bahram
rendered the Arabic writings of the Shaikh of Ishraq, Shihabuddin
Maqtul into Persian (p. 37);°° and Mobad Hoshyar ibn Khurshid wrote
Watira-i Mobadi (p. 36). Shaidosh on his deathbed went on reciting
two couplets of Hafiz.*
This background explains why the author, encountering a belief or
practice, which to him seems to have a universal value, expresses his
recognition of this fact by an apt quotation out of an exceptionally
large store of Persian poetry, where we have not only great classical
226 Mughal India
poets, like Sa’di, Rumi (‘Maulavi-i Manavi’) and Hafiz, but also more
recent poets like ‘Urfi’ and Faizi, and the author himself. To understand
the author’s religious position, it is necessary to realize that to him not
Islam in its theology, but Persian Sufic poetry in its eminent nobility,
represents the ultimate truth, the same that Azar Kaiwan and his
followers (including the author) also saw in their own version of their
ancient faith.
The question whether the author of the Dabistan was a Parsi or
Muslim can be asked (and answered) in traditional terms: His own
text leaves us in no doubt that he was of Parsi upbringing and did not
convert to Islam. But, in terms that Azar Kaiwan set forth and the
author believed in, the question was, perhaps, irrelevant; Mirza Zulfiqar
‘Mobad’ was a man of God, a seeker of universal truth. That he is so
modest about his own identity is tantalizing for us: what we should
surely not do to trace the identity of a man who has left behind so
wonderful a book, so multi-layered in its truths, and with so many
insights for him who would explore? And yet his indifference to his
own name and identity may be understood if we realize that for
“‘Mobad’, the ‘self? was of no moment when set beside the great
search for the secrets of the spirit in which he had joined. Among its
many vices, there were surely some virtues too in a civilization that
could produce such a man and such a book nearly three hundred and
fifty years ago.

NOTES

1. See D.N. Marshall, Mughals in India, Bombay, 1967, 1, p. 299, for

an incomplete list of the catalogued MSS.
2. Ali Asghar Mustafawi’s edn, Teheran, 1361 Solar/1982 is a mere
offset reprint of this edition, with a rather light-weight introduction added.
3. Marshall reports earlier editions, Teheran, 1260/1844, and Bombay,
1266/1849-50 and 1277/1860-1.
4. Data about translations derived from C. Rieu, Catalogue of the
Persian MSS in the British Museum, London, 1879, p. 142a.
5 Ibid., p. 141b.
6. See Jivanji Jamshedji Modi, ‘A Parsee High Priest (Dastur Azar
Kaiwan, 1529-1614 AC) with his Zoroastrian Disciples in Patna in the 16th
and 17th Century AC’, Journal of the KR Cama Oriental Institute (hereafter
JKRCOID), xx (1932), p. 7 and n.
7. Under the title Nanak Panthis, originally appearing in Journal of
 Pursuing an Elusive Seeker of Universal Truth 220
Indian History, x1x (2). Characteristically, the translator commends the
author of the Dabistan-i Mazahib for giving ‘an impartial account of what
he saw and heard of the Sikhs and their Gurus during his contact with
them’ (p. 3).
8. While rejecting the identification of the author of Dabistan with
Muhsin Fani, J.J. Modi (JKRCO/, xx, pp. 8-11) still falls into the error of
accepting the date of the death of Muhsin Fani as that of our author.
9. As stated, for example, in the title given to the Dabistan in Br.
Mus. MS. Add. 7613 (Rieu, Catalogue of the Persian MSS ..., 1, 143a).
10. Br. Mus. MSS. Add. 16,670 (Ab 1792) and Add. 16,671 (Ap 1797);
Rieu, 1, p. 142b.
11. Ghiyas ul Lughat, s.v. mobad. Muhammad Ghiyasuddin, the author
of this very comprehensive dictionary, completed it in 1242/1826-7.
12. Rieu, Catalogue of the Persian MSS ..., 1, pp. 142a-3a.
13. Maasir ul Kiram, Hyderabad (Dn), 1910, 1, p. 22.
14. Dabistan or School of Manners, tr. D. Shea and A. Troyer, London,
1843, 1, pp. xii—xv.
15. Rieu, 1, pp. 141a—2a.
16. There is no sanction in the Dabistan for Modi’s statement that the
author was born in Persia and then brought to India (JRKCOI, xx, p. 9).
17. For Jahangir’s meetings with Jadrup, see Tuzuk-i Jahangiri, ed.
Saiyid Ahmad, Ghazipur and Aligarh, 1863-4, pp. 175-6, 250-3, 279-81.
His description of Jadrup matches that of Chatrupa in the Dabistan, pp.
146-7; the Dabistan also speaks of the high regard that Jahangir had for
Jadrup.
18. Cf. Modi, JKRCOI, xx, pp. 40-1.
19. This Shaidab, probably for convenience, also bore the name
Shamsuddin.
20. There seems to be no sanction in the Dabistan for Modi’s
suggestion (JKRCOI, xx, pp. 9-10) that he visited Navsari, the famous
Parsi settlement near Surat, and obtained information about Zoroastrianism
from Dastur Birzo Kamdin there.
21. Paikar Pazhoh and Jahan Nur.
22. Rieu, I, p. 142a.
23. Ibid. Rieu is right in contesting the reference to ‘the Shores of
Persia’ in the Shea-Troyer translation, 1, p. 2.
24. For a reconstruction of Azar Kaiwan’s life, mostly based on the
Dabistan, see Modi, JKRCOI, xx, pp. 25-34.
25. Cf. Modi, JKRCOI, xx, pp. 34-51, for information on thirteen
Zoroastrian and ten non-Zoroastrian followers of Azar Kaiwan.
26. I take it that nez here is a mistranscription for bad.
27. Modi, JKRCOI, xx, pp. 56-75, draws up a list of the beliefs of Azar
Kaiwan and his disciples and traces their antecedents; on pp. 75—85 he
compares them with those of earlier Zoroastrian tradition. A very perceptive
and sympathetic treatment will be found in H. Corbin, ‘Azar Kayvan’,
228 Mughal India
Encyclopaedia Iranica, 1, pp. 183-7, where the [shraqi antecedents of the
school are strongly brought out.
28. There is no justification in the text for Ganda Singh’s rendering:
‘Guru Hargobind in his letters to the Chronicler remembered [himself] by
the title of Nanak who is the spiritual head of this sect’ (Nanakpanthis, tr.,
p. 20).
29. Rieu, 1, p. 141b. The editor of the Teheran reprint of DM, editor’s
preface, xvii, justifiably points out that it would have been very difficult
for a Muslim to attribute the original foundations of Mecca and Medina to
Parsi shrines of the Moon (mah) as the author does (pp. 15-16).
30. Nabi Hadi, Dictionary of Indo-Persian Literature, New Delhi, 1995,
pp. 360-1.
31. This work is extant (pub. Sayyid Abdul Fattah ‘urf Mir Ashraf Ali,
Bombay, 1848), but the author gives his own name as Khuda Jui (God-
seeker); this may well be his pen-name (cf. Modi, JKRCOI, xx, pp. 20-1).
32. He was also the author of Azhrang-i Mani (DM, p. 36), which may
be the Shahristan, litho. pub. Bombay, 1851, and described by Modi,
JKRCOI, xx, pp. 21-3.
33. Khurram an roz kazin manzil-i wiran bi-rawam, etc. (‘Happy the
day I leave this desolate stage of journey’), DM, p. 38. The author himself
quotes from an elegy he composed for Shaidosh upon his death in 1040/
1630-1 (p. 39).
 20

Muslims’ Perceptions of Judaism

and Christianity in Medieval India

As is well known, Islam arose in Arabia which, alongside the pagan

communities, had a large number of tribes and groups which professed
Judaism and Christianity. So far as we know, the relations between
the Jews and Christians and their Arab neighbours in pre-Islamic
times were cordial, or were not at any rate adversely affected by
differences of faith. In its self-view Islam represented both a
continuation and a supersession of the two earlier Semitic faiths. The
Jewish Gospel as well as the New Testament had originally represented
divine messages, and so those who followed them were ‘People of
the Book’, to be distinguished from the ‘Infidels’. But the Gospel
texts, the Quran itself had claimed, had suffered from unauthorized
deletions and insertions; and this claim, of course, created a
fundamental point of disagreement between the Muslims, on the one
hand, and the Jews and Christians on the other. Nonetheless, early
Muslims seemed fairly familiar with both the earlier Semitic religions.
Among the learned the familiarity would last longer and be preserved
in areas where Jews and Christians were no longer be encountered.
Alberuni completed his work Kitab-al Hind, c. 1035, in Ghaznavide
Punjab; yet his knowledge of Jewish and Christian precepts and
practices seems considerable. It is possible that some of this
knowledge came from the work of al-lranshahri, a Persian writer in
Arabic, which has not survived.' Alberuni well knew the Jewish
custom of levirate,” and shows familiarity with how the Jews
represented God:
Similar to this [Hindu Om] is the manner in which the Jews write the name
of God, viz. by three Hebrew Yods. In the (Torah) the word is written YHVH
and pronounced Adonai; sometimes they also say Yah. The word Adonai
which they pronounced is not expressed in writing.”

This statement shows that Alberuni had access to the text of the
230 Mughal India
Old Testament, for he refers to both the Jewish and Christian
Testaments being in Hebrew and Syriac. Presumably using Arabic
translations from Syriac, he shows considerable familiarity with the
use of the word ‘Eloah’ in Hebrew used for God as well as a god,
quoting from Gen. vi. 4; Job 1. 6; Exod. vii. 1; and Psalms ixxxu.4
Similarly, he cites ‘the Second Book of Kings’, about the loss of
David’s son borne by Uriah’s wife and God’s promise of another son
to him whom he would ‘adopt as his own son’.° Of the Christian
gospel, Alberuni shows equal if not greater grasp. He argues that,
unlike Arabic, the language of the New Testament has a looser meaning
attached to the words ‘father’ and ‘son’. ‘By the son [of God] they
(the Christians) understand most especially Jesus, but apply it also to
others besides him’. He tellingly quotes the prayer, ‘O our father
which art in Heaven’ (Matt. vi, 9); and Jesus’s promise that he is
going to ‘his father and to their father’ (John xx, 17).° Alberuni
considers the Trinity to be not inconsistent with monotheism, for he
says that the Christians ‘distinguish’ between the Three Persons (the
Trinity) and give them separate names, Father, Son and Holy Ghost,
but unite them into one substance.’ Elsewhere he shows familiarity
with the ranks of the Church, speaking of the bishops, metropolitans,
catholici and patriarchs, and of the lower clergy, namely the presbyter
and deacon.* Presumably, he knew more of the Eastern than of the
Roman Church, for he never mentions the Pope.
Alberuni admired the Christian doctrine of non-violence as enshrined
in the New Testament: ‘to offer to him who has beaten your cheek
the other cheek, also to bless your enemy and pray for him. Upon my
life, this is a noble philosophy.’ But in practice it had been otherwise:
‘ever since Constantine the Victorious became a Christian both sword
and whip have ever been employed, for without them it would be
impossible to rule.’? Alberuni’s admiration for Christ’s message shows
also in a passage in his Preface:
The Messiah expresses himself in the Gospel to this effect: ‘Do not mind
the fury of kings in speaking the truth before them. They only possess
your body, but they have no power over your soul’ (Cf. Matt. x, 18, 19, 28;
Luke, xii, 4). In these words the Messiah orders us to exercise moral
courage.'°

It seems from these passages that, besides reliance on the

translations of the Gospel and al-Iranshahri, Alberuni had some contacts
with the Jewish and Christian communities in Central Asia, although
he nowhere directly refers to them. But soon after him, at least in
 Muslims’ Perceptions of Judaism and Christianity Zo
northern India, the Jews and Christians alike seem to have become
distant entities, only to be heard of in anecdotes or to be mentioned in
hypothetical or rhetorical contexts, though the references themselves
are not unfriendly.
On 9 November 1317, the Sufi saint Shaikh Nizamuddin, while
declining to ask a Hindu to convert to Islam, related this anecdote
about Khwaja Bayazid Bustami, the great Sufi saint:
A Jew had a house near that of Khwaja Bayazid Bustami. When Khwaja
Bayazid died, people asked the Jew, ‘why do you not become a Muslim?’
The Jew replied: “What kind of Muslim should I be? If Islam is what
Bayazid followed, I am not equal to following it; if it is what you follow,
then I am repelled by such Islam!'!

When Nizamuddin himself died, it was claimed in verse that

‘Muslims, Hindus, Christians (“Tarsa’) and Magians crowned their
heads with the dust of the door of his tomb.’"’ This is, surely, rhetoric,
in so far as the Christians and the Magi are concerned. There is no
evidence that there was any community of Christians settled at Delhi
in the fourteenth century.

I
The living relationship with Christianity (if not immediately with Judaism
as well) was re-established with the arrival in strength of the
Portuguese following Vasco da Gama’s voyage terminating at Calicut
in 1498. Not surprisingly, it was now the Catholic version of
Christianity which Muslims in India began mainly to encounter. On
21 June 1578 there arrived at Akbar’s court a Portuguese (firangi),
who was a merchant in Bengal, Prtb tar (?) by name, accompanied
by his wife Fashurna (?), and he introduced to Akbar the practice of
monogamy that the Christian laity had to follow — an imposition, he
said, of the celibate clergy.'? But it was with the arrival of the first
Jesuit mission in 1580 that there was a much livelier appreciation of
Christianity. Unfortunately, Akbar’s adviser and minister Abul Fazl,
who met the mission, has not left his description of Christianity or
even an account of his meeting with the Jesuits in his writings,'* the
gap being filled by ‘Abdul Qadir Badauni, the historian, a critic of
both Akbar and Abul Faz]. Placing the Jesuit arrival a year before the
actual one, he sets forth the picture of Christianity that Akbar’s court
now obtained.
232 Mughal India
There came experienced theologians from Europe (Afranja), whom they
call ‘Padre’ (Padhari). Their absolute legislator (Mujtahid-i Kamil),
who can alter all decrees in view of circumstances of the time, and
kings too cannot defy his authority, is called the ‘Pope’ (Papa). They
brought the Bible (injil) and gave arguments in favour of the Trinity,
and proving the truth of Christianity (nasraniyat), began to spread the
Christian faith (millat-i [sawi). His Majesty instructed Prince Murad to
take some lessons from the Bible, and Shaikh Abul Fazl was appointed
to translate it. In place of the invocation ‘In the name of God’, this
sentence occurred (in the Gospel): ‘O whose name is Jesus Christ
(Zhazhu Kristu)’, i.e. ‘O whose name is Benevolent and Bountiful’.
These accursed people brought in a description of Dajjal (Anti-Christ)
and applied his attributes to our Prophet, peace be on him, the very
opposite of all Dajjals.'°

It may be observed in passing that there must have been much

interest at this time at Akbar’s court in the Pope’s authority to ‘alter
all decrees’ of religion in his capacity as Mujtahid-i Kamil, the legal
‘innovator’ with absolute authority, because a more limited role as
legislator in Islamic matters had been sought for Akbar himself
through the theologians’ declaration (mahzar) of 1579;'° and Abul
Fazl had argued that, had the great jurist Abu Hanifa been alive now,
he would have authored a different system of law.'’ In any case, the
first Jesuit mission ignited some interest at the court in the Bible. It
was obvious that by now there were no Arabic or Persian versions
of the Gospel available, as they apparently were to Alberuni. In a
letter dated 14 April 1582, carried by his envoy Sayyid Muzaffar
Khan to Goa, Akbar wrote (Abul Fazl’s draft) to ‘the scholars of
Europe’ (danayan-i firang), the emperor not only asked for a scholar
to be sent to him to explain the tenets of Christianity, but also went
on to add:
It has reached our august ear that divine books like the Torah, the Gospel
(njil) and the Psalms (Zabur) have been rendered into the Arabic and
Persian languages; if these books, so translated or not, from which general
benefit would follow, are available in that country, these may be sent to us.'®

Unfortunately, our sources do not indicate any tangible

consequences of this curiosity regarding Christianity during the time
of Akbar and Jahangir. References to Christian practices or beliefs
remain casual or incidental. In his book on ethics, Badauni mentions
Christian books on ethics, but gives no title;'? elsewhere, he recalls
from his personal knowledge that Christians and Jews like the Hindus,
not only regard music as permissible, but consider it a part of worship.”°
 Muslims’ Perceptions of Judaism and Christianity 233
This is a little more specific evidence of actual observation of Christian
(and Jewish?) practices, but it hardly denotes penetration.

Il
The lack of interest in Christian theology at the Mughal court, if one
goes by what came to be written in Persian, rather than by Mughal
painting, which in its later phase has distinct traces of Christian
influence both in its themes and in its symbolisms,”!' is surprising.
This indifference was not shared by a man, however, who appears to
have devoted his life to an unbiased collection of data about diverse
religions. For reasons not known, he conceals his name from us in
his book, the Dabistan-i Mazahib (‘School of Religions’
).”? But Azad
Bilgrami gives his name as Mirza Zulfigar with the pen name Mobad;”*
and the latter, indeed, appears in the Dabistan. His autobiographical
details in the book are consistent with his having some Parsi
connections.** The author refers to 1645-6 as the current year at one
place;*° later dates occur in the text, the last traceable date being
1653,”° when he was in the Golkunda kingdom, though most of his
life was spent in various parts within the Mughal Empire.
In the Dabistan-i Mazahib there is a full chapter on Judaism.*’
The author says he had been unable to meet any follower of that
religion; but in 1647 he came to Haidarabad, capital of the Golkunda
kingdom, where he met the famous Muhammad Sa’id ‘Sarmad’.”*
Presumably, from what Sarmad told him, he writes that Sarmad
belonged to
a family of the Jewish learned, of the class whom they call Rabbis
(arbanniyun), after obtaining knowledge of the beliefs of the Rabbis and
reading the Torah, he became a Muslim, and studied the sciences while
attending upon some of the Iranian scholars.

Coming to India, he turned a mystic and attached to himself a

young Hindu boy of Thatta, Abhay Chand, to whom he taught the
Torah, the Psalms and other texts.”’ It was from Sarmad and Abhay
Chand that the author’s information about Judaism came.
The authenticity of this information can fortunately be checked by a
means that Abhay Chand has provided for us through the Dabistan. At
the request of the author he translated “a small portion of the Torah’
from the original Hebrew into Persian, ‘Mobad’ had this translation
closely checked by Sarmad, and then put this ‘story of Adam’ in his
book verbatim.*° The translation runs from the beginning of Genesis to
234 Mughal India
Genesis vi. 8. The accuracy and completeness of the translation is
admirable, every sentence and clause of the Genesis i-vi.8, being present,
the placing of words in the Persian text making it obvious that a literal
translation of the Hebrew was being attempted: thus verbs mostly
precede the subjects, for example guft khuda, instead of khuda guft.
Comparing it with the revised version, one finds the Abhay Chand
translation more convincing at many points. Thus, for example, where
Abhay Chand translates: ‘and God’s wind used to blow over the face
of the water’, the R.V. Gen. i.2 has: ‘and the spirit of God moved
upon the face of the water’. Or again upon Cain’s appeal to God,
‘And God said unto Cain (Qabil), “But whoever killeth Cain shall have
chastisement visited upon him upto seven generations”’ (Abhay
Chand), the corresponding words in R.V. Gen. iv. 15 are: “And the
Lord said unto him: “therefore whosoever slayeth Cain, vengeance
shall be taken from him sevenfold’”’.’ ‘Wind’ for ‘Spirit’, and ‘seven
generations’ for ‘sevenfold”.’ appear clearly to be better choices.
Abhay Chand, a poet in Persian himself,*' naturally uses the Arabicized
forms of biblical names, just as the R.V. uses the English forms. But
all the names of Adam’s descendants with the precise ages assigned
to them, are exactly given without any slip whatsoever.
We should therefore be left in no doubt that Sarmad and Abhay
Chand knew Hebrew, had the Hebrew Gospel (Old Testament) with
them and were closely acquainted with its contents. Sarmad was,
therefore, being truthful when he claimed a Rabbinic past.
The Jewish creed, according to Sarmad, was as follows:

1. God has a physical existence, and resembles man, who is created

in His image; and sometimes He diffuses like rays [throughout
the creation].
2. Inthe Torah and Psalms it is stated that the Soul has an invisible
(lit. light, Jatif) body, existing in the human frame, the body of
the senses.
3. The reward and punishment of the Last Day shall be in this
creation. Suppose a person lives for 120 years: this constitutes
one ‘day’. Upon his death it becomes ‘night’. Then all the
elements of his body scatter; after some 12 years pass, they
assemble again to put life into the same person (Cf. Dan. xii.
2). Another ‘day’ begins — and so the cycle goes on.
4. All elements that exist are found in the human body.
5. The Jews deny the prophethood of Christ and say he was a
liar. The arguments that Christians bring forth based on
 Muslims’ Perceptions of Judaism and Christianity 235
statements in the Torah are futile, since the statements they
quote were made by Isaiah, (/shiya) for himself, not Christ
[cf. Isaiah ix. See also 10 below].
. Abraham was not a Prophet but Wali, the Friend of God [cf. 2
Chron. xx. 7; Rom. iv. 11], which is a higher position than that
of a Prophet.
. In the Torah there is no mention [contrary to the Quran] of the
Pharaoh claiming to be God. He was cruel and oppressed the
Israelites, and disregarded Moses’s admonitions; it was for
this that he was chastised [Cf. Ex. xiv].
. Aaron (Harun) was not a partner in the Prophethood of Moses,
but was his khalifa (spokesman or successor) [cf. Ex. iv. 14—
16; Num. xii, xvii, xviii, xx; Dieut. x. 6].
. David sent Uriah to his death, because he was desirous of his
wife, from whom he begat Solomon [2 Sam. xi, xii; 1 Chron.
iil. 5. There is silence in the Quran on this matter].
10. Christ was not a Prophet. The words ‘They broke my hands,
and legs, and counted my bones’ [cf. Psalms xxxv, 15, 16 and
c], which Christians cite as referring to Christ, were spoken
by David for himself.
. In the Torah it is said that rf the Israelites commit evil deeds,
inevitably Muhammad would come. Sarmad said that although
the name of the Prophet is found in the Torah, it is in a context
which suggests another meaning. Even if it is taken as the
name of the Prophet, it is a warning to Bani Israel not to join
his faith (cf. Ezek, xxxviiil). ‘On this he spoke with much
insistence.’
ia No outsider can enter the religion of the Jews. The
circumcision prescribed by the law of their Prophet applies to
them alone.
t3; A Prophet is to be present and alive at all times to put into
effect the law of the Torah.”

It is obvious that points 5—11 belong to one class, where Sarmad

points out Jewish objections to Christian and Muslim interpretations
of certain passages of the Old Testament or to the Muslim version of
the biblical tradition. He obviously had access to the Hebrew scriptures,
even though as in point 10, he may not have been literally quoting
from the Bible. But the other points in which Sarmad represents Jewish
236 Mughal India
Rabbinic beliefs require a commentary.
On the perception of God, one may not fault Sarmad for inaccuracy.
If ‘God created man in his own image; in the image of God created
He him’ (Gen. i. 27; Abhay Chand has also translated this portion),
then an anthropomorphic conception of God must follow. This has to
be reconciled with the universal presence of God and His absolute
power; and so the formulation of Jewish faith in point No. | seems
unexceptionable. So also the concept of the Soul (point 2).
But point (3) is totally against the Rabbanic theology of the Day of
Judgement. The soul remains suspended after death, until the dead
are aroused on the Day of Judgement. Dan. xii. 2 describes the Day
of Judgement rather than any reawakening by a physical assemblage
of elements of the previous body in this life. Sarmad’s representation
of Judaism seems to encompass the soul’s temporary suspension
(‘sleep’) after death, but not the concept of the Day of Judgement —
a basic idea that has been so strongly inherited by Christianity and
Islam from Judaism. In fact, Sarmad seems to attribute to Judaism
something very akin to the Nugtavi view of coming together of the
scattered elements of the dead physical frames in new bodies with
the same or even merged souls.** One can, therefore, suggest that
either the Jews in Iran had developed a heretical doctrine paralleling
that of the Nugtavis, or that Sarmad being personally impressed by
the latter, was reading into the Jewish creed something which was
not there.
It is significant that Sarmad knew that Judaism was not a
proselytizing religion and had no room for outsiders (point 12). As
for the necessity of the Prophets (point 13), it must be assumed that
Sarmad had in mind the successive generations of biblical Prophets
and the indispensability of their missions at that time; it is difficult to
imagine him saying that the Jews had a Prophet living currently among
them as well.

IV
The Dabistan-i Mazahib has a chapter on Christianity“ immediately
following the one on Judaism. The account is far more self-confident
than the previous one. The author tells us that he met some of the
Christian learned; and that his information was especially derived from
‘a French Padre (Padri-i fransai)), whom the people from Portugal
and Goa, who are in India and the Port of Surat, hold in high regard
and whom the author met at the Port of Surat in 1057/1647’. The
 Muslims’ Perceptions of Judaism and Christianity Zor
chapter is divided into three portions: (1) Christ; (2) beliefs of Christians;
and (3) practices of Christians.
It becomes immediately apparent that the Dabistan’s account is
entirely and genuinely derived from a detailed and accurate Roman
Catholic transmission and is nowhere in the slightest influenced by
the traditional Muslim beliefs about Christians or by the Quranic
narrative as against the biblical one. The account of Christ begins by
giving the date of his birth in terms of the usual Christian calculations
from the Bible (31,909 years from Creation; 2,957 from Noah’s flood;
752 years from the foundation of Rome; and 42 years from the
accession of [Augustus’] Caesar, which suit the traditional date of
the founding of Rome (753 Bc) and the actual date of Augustus’
seizure of power after the death of Julius Caesar (44 Bc). It goes on
to say that the virgin birth of Christ was predicted by Isaiah, the
father of David, in these words: “From Jesse’s seed a branch springs
forth; a flower blooms forth in that branch, within which [flower]
the spirit of God settles. A virgin eats the fruit and bears a son.’*
Perhaps, this is a reference to Isaiah x1.1—2, though the reference to
the virgin does not occur there.*° It goes on to describe the crucifixion
of Christ by consent of Pontius Pilate (‘Filatas’) upon the insistence
of the Jews, though Pilate himself washed his hands off the deed. But
the Jews took the responsibility, which burden they still bear?” — the
standard basis of Christian anti-Semitism. The author goes on to tell
us that three pictures were made of the blood-stained Jesus on the
cross, one kept at the city of Shahin (?) in Portugal, displayed twice
every year; one at Milan in Italy; and another at Rome.** This
information again suggests close familiarity with Catholic pilgrim-
places in Europe, on the part of the author’s informant.
Coming to Christian beliefs, the author puts the first one as belief
in Christ being filius (‘filyus’, carefully spelt letter-by-letter with
vowels written out), that is the Son of God. He then classifies the
basic Christian beliefs into those that relate to the Divinity of Christ,
and those that relate to the person of Christ. He carefully spells out
the word Deus (Diyos) for God, and sets out the belief in him as
Creator, the Giver of Paradise, the Source of Peace, the Father of
Christ. There is also the specific belief in the Holy Spirit (Ruh-i Pak,
the pure Spirit), which, with God and Christ, completes the Trinity.
The second set of beliefs relates to Christ being the Son of God
coming from the womb of Virgin Mary (‘Mariam’) through the Holy
Spirit (ruhu’l quds); to Christ mounting on the cross for the salvation
of humanity, dying and being buried; to Christ’s coming being foretold
238 Mughal India
by the earlier Prophets; to his resurrection and ascension on the third
day of his crucifixion; and to his appearance on the Day of Judgement
to judge ‘the living and the dead’. The Christians believe that the
Trinity really constitutes One; and the Son of God came to die for the
salvation of man. This statement with numbered beliefs*® is obviously
based on the Nicene Creed, as finally framed (the Nicaeno
Constantinopolitan Creed, 381), with some necessary elaborations
and explanations.”
The statement of the central creed is followed by the description
of the four places where the dead souls go to: Hell, Purgatory
(‘Parkatori’/‘Pargatori’); ‘Leno’, for those who die young; and
Paradise. The Christian belief that on the Day on Judgement souls
will unite with their bodies is also noted.*!
The third portion deals with the morals, rituals and practices of the
Christians. It mentions the Sunday sermons and the mass as well as
the confessions (kanfiya) which must be offered once a year. It
mentions the sacraments (‘sakarmaint’), including payment of tithe,
confirmation (‘konfarmashayo’), eucharist (“senokrista’), penitence
(‘panitanshia’), extreme unction (‘astrima onshia’), marriage
(‘matrimonia’), etc.*”
The Pope is also mentioned: ‘The successor of Christ they call
Pope (‘Pap’); and it is settled that he does not lead anyone to error,
since Lord Christ in the Holy Bible has given him some pledges’.**
After further details of Christian beliefs and practices, all on the basis
of Catholic teaching, the author ends by saying that ‘the Bible (New
Testament) in the language of Christ has been rendered into many
languages such as Hebrew, Greek, Latin — which is the language of
the learned of Europe — and Syriac; and all of these they regard as
the Word of God.’*
As already noted, Christianity is portrayed here in its Catholic garb
only, and no hint is offered of the Reformation which had torn
Christianity for well over a century and a quarter. Not only are the
propositions of Protestantism (varied as they were) ignored, but the
very existence of Protestantism side-stepped. Clearly, Mobad’s French
Padre either did not regard Protestants as Christians or did not wish
to confuse matters by referring to their heresies. Apparently too, Mobad
did not meet any Dutch or English merchant or clergyman sufficiently
interested in transmitting his beliefs to him.
In his account of both Judaism and Christianity, Mobad’s clinical
neutrality is striking. Not for him the usual Muslim declamations of
disapproval when one is obliged to quote or describe something against
 Muslims’ Perceptions of Judaism and Christianity 239
the traditions or creed of Islam. This attitude he maintains throughout
his book, especially while reproducing arguments of votaries of one
religion against those of another, as in the long section, ‘Account of
Debate between Religions’.* Here, for instance, he represents the
Christian winning in the debate with the Muslim, over the authenticity
of the Bible. If the Bible has undergone alterations, as the Muslims
allege, then the latter should be able to produce the true text of the
Bible, just as the Christians have the true text of the Old Testament
(‘Torah’) which they share with the Jews, besides having their own
Injil, or New Testament. The Christian similarly succeeded in showing
that Prophet Muhammad’s miracle of breaking the moon in twain
could not have taken place. But the Jews brought arguments to prove
that the virginity of Mary was disputable, and that the crucifixion of
Christ was not predicted in the Psalms of David.*° We have here,
therefore, impartiality of a very high order, for which there can surely
be found few parallels in the Islamic and Christian worlds of the
seventeenth century.

Vv
So far as we can find, the Dabistan-i Mazahib (1553) had no
successor; and surprisingly little intellectual curiosity is diplayed in
the Indo-Muslim literature during the succeeding hundred years in
the religion of the Europeans. Christianity was tolerated but not studied.
It was almost the same story as with European technological
appliances; they were used, but not, but for rare exceptions,
reproduced. There was apparently no perception that Christianity was
a challenging religion, so that Muslims should have need for studying
it in order to controvert it. In other words, they lacked the motive
which led so many Christian missionaries to study Islam and Hinduism.
The indifference exhibited towards Christianity was not then a product
of enmity; it was a product of a belief in coexistence, taking the
Quranic verse, “To you your religion, to me mine’ in the most literal
sense. It is interesting that Bernier (1667) attributes such a notion to
the Brahmans as well: ‘I found it impossible to convince them that the
Christian faith was designed for the whole earth.’*’ With this
comfortable vision, it was possible to look into one’s own faith alone,
and not polemicize with others. It is, then, a disturbing thought that
tolerance could also generate inertia, which, on the other hand,
was such a stranger to the actively proselytizing, intolerant True
Apostolic Church of Rome.
240 Mughal India
NOTES
Alberuni’s India, tr. E.C. Sachau, London, 1910, 1, pp. 6—7.
Ibid., p. 109.
Ibid., p. 1734.
Ibid., pp. 36-8.
Ibid., p. 38.
Ibid.
Ibid., p. 94.
Ibid., 1, p. 15.
SO Ibid.,p. 161.
St
AG
ee
S Ibid., pp. 4-5.
11. Amir Hasan Sijzi, Fawa’idu’l Fawad, ed. M. Latif Malik, Lahore,
1966, p.
12. Mir Khurd, Siyarul Auliya, ed. Chiranji Lal, Delhi, 1985, p. 155. The
work was completed after 1387, but most of the text was written much
earlier.
13. Akbarnama, Bib. Ind. ed., 1, p. 243 to be read with the passage in
the earlier version of the work, B. L. MS. Add. 27, 247, f. 294b.
14. Abul Fazl does, however, refer under the year 1579-80 to the
agitation caused by the Jesuit mission: ‘at this time, the Christian scholars
(filsufan-i Nisara) submitted strong arguments against the worldly learned
of Muslim law at the imperial court; and learned controversy ensued’
(Akbarnama, 1, p. 272).
15. Abdul Qadir Badauni, Muntakhab-ut Tawarikh, Bib. Ind. 1, p. 260.
16. For its text, see Nizamuddin Ahmad, Tabagat-i Akbari, Bib. Ind., 01,
pp. 344-6; Badauni, 1, pp. 271—2. See also M. Athar Ali, ‘Towards an
Interpretation of the Mughal Empire’, JRAS, i, London, 1978 [Chapter 6].
17. Badauni, m1, p. 79.
18. Insha’i Abul Fazl, Nawal Kishore, 1280/1864, pp. 37-9.
19. Nijat’ur Rashid, ed. S. Moinul Haq, Lahore, 1972, pp. 21-2.
20. Ibid., pp. 210-11.
21. Percy Brown, Indian Painting under the Mughals, A.D. 1550 to
A.D. 1750, 1924, pp. 163-79; Ashok Kumar Das, Mughal Painting During
Jahangir’s Time, Calcutta, 1978, pp. 229-50.
22. I have used the edition ed./pub. by Ibrahim bin Nur Muhammad,
Bombay, 1292/1875.
23. Ma’asirul Kiram, 1, Hyderabad Dn, 1910, p. 22.
24. See esp. Dabistan—i Mazahib, p. 147. [See Chapter 19]
25. Ibid., p. 119.
 Muslims’ Perceptions of Judaism and Christianity 241
26. Ibid., p. 153.
27. Ibid., pp. 194-202.
28. Ibid., p. 191.
29. Ibid., pp. 194-5.
30. The text runs from p. 196 to 202, constituting sec. 2 of the chapter
on the Jews.
31. Ibid.,p.195.
32. Ibid., pp. 195-6.
33. A good exposition of the Nugtawi theory is given in the Dabistan-
i Mazahib itself, pp. 343-7.
34. Dabistan-i Mazahib, pp. 202-8.
35. Ibid., p. 202. Isha is the form given to Jesse’s name. Ishas, adds the
Dabistan, was the father of David.
36. ‘And there shall come forth a shoot out of the stock of Jesse, and
a branch out of his roots shall bear fruit; and the spirit of the Lord shall rest
upon him’, etc. (revised version).
37. Dabistan-i Mazahib, pp. 202-3.
38. Ibid., p. 203.
39. Ibid., pp. 203-4.
40. See the translation of the creed in Henry Bettenson, Documents of
the Christian Church, London, 1954, pp. 36-7.
4]|. Dabistan-i Mazahib, p. 204.
42. Ibid., pp. 205-6.
43. Ibid., p. 206.
44. Ibid., p. 208.
45. Ibid., pp. 254-68.
46. Ibid., p. 258.
47. Francois Bernier, Travels in the Mogul Empire, tr. A. Constable,
2nd edn, rev. V.A. Smith, London, 1916, p. 328.
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 ZA

The Religious Issue in the

War of Succession, 1658—59

The war of succession among Shah Jahan’s sons, which shook the
Mughal Empire when it was at its height, by its extremely dramatic
interest, called forth a spate of accounts which by their variety of
detail, described from all points of view and with all degrees of credibility,
almost overwhelm the modern student. Sir Jadunath Sarkar provided
for the first time a coherent description of the war of succession, by
picking out the most reliable accounts and rejecting those based on
hearsay or later tradition. Great as the value of the Sir Jadunath’s work
was, his account suffered from an emphasis on pure description, with
little attempt at analysis. Yet, the war of succession is an event which
perhaps more than any other, stands in need of scientific analysis.
The war of succession has been considered a decisive turning point
by historians who choose to view the whole history of medieval India
as largely a struggle between two communities. Shibli put the weight of
his great authority in favour of this interpretation: The Hindus, benefiting
from the policy of tolerance of Akbar, were getting out of hand and
even persecuting the Muslims. Dara Shukoh was a traitor within the
Islamic political community who sought to open the gates fully to the
Hindus. Aurangzeb, therefore, rallied the Muslims together and fought
essentially for the faith, not for the throne.!
Others who did not share the same partisan feeling for Aurangzeb,
mainly looking at his later policy, and Dara’s intellectual eclecticism,
hastened to accept this interpretation and declared that the war was a
struggle between two opposite policies, those of religious tolerance and
Muslim orthodoxy.’
Recent work on the subject has tended to assume this interpretation
with only minor qualifications. On the one hand, R.P. Tripathi admits it
only to the extent that religion served as a war cry to rally Aurangzeb’s
supporters.
It was also deemed necessary to find out an effective slogan for the war and
the cry that was raised was the defence of the law of Islam from the heresies
of Dara whether Shah Jahan was alive or dead. Should the emperor be still
246 Mughal India
alive, they would free him from the thraldom and tyranny of that idolator!
They arrogated to themselves the honour of being the defenders of Islam.’

On the other hand, the supporters of the old interpretation flourish

in strength, and it has been considerably enlarged and embellished with
facts and theories.’ Proclaimed by so many writers of textbooks’, that
interpretation has already become a set dogma which, it would seem,
nothing can shake.
Yet, those who made such statements do not seem to have troubled
to ask themselves whether Aurangzeb in fact ever raised the slogan of
‘Islam in Danger’ in order to gain the throne. This question, it must be
remembered, is quite different from whether Aurangzeb later on tried
to build an Islamic state or persecuted Hinduism. What we wish to
enquire here is whether a new religious policy was the chief, or at least
the declared, object for which the war of succession was fought.
There is a very interesting document which has come to light from
the Udaipur records. This is a_nishan, or princely order, which
Aurangzeb sent to Rana Raj Singh of Mewar. This bore the impression
of his palm and it is obvious that Aurangzeb attached very great
importance to its contents. Assuring the Rana of his sympathy and
pledging himself to restore the parganas of Mandalgarh, etc. which
Shah Jahan had detached from his territory, Aurangzeb makes the
following declaration:

That loyal one (i.e. the Rana) has become the recipient of thousands of
royal favours. Because the persons of the great kings are shadows of God,
the attention of this elevated class (of Kings) who are the pillars of the
great (i.e. God’s) court, is devoted to this, that men belonging to various
communities and different religions should live in the vale of peace and
pass their days in prosperity, and no one should interfere with the affairs
of another. Any one of this sky-glorious group (i.e. the kings) who resorted
to intolerance, became the cause of dispute and conflict and of harm to the
people at large, who are indeed a trust received from God. In reality, he
(such a king) thereby endeavoured to devastate the prosperous creations
of God and destroy the foundations of God’s fabric, which is a habit
deserving to be rejected and cast off. God willing, when the Truth comes
into its own and the wishes of the sincerely loyal ones are fulfilled (i.e.
when Aurangzeb gains the throne), the benefits of the revered practices
and established regulations of my great ancestors, who are so esteemed
by the worshipful ones, will cast lustre on the four-cornered, inhabited
world.®

What is this but a pledge that the contender for the throne had no
 The Religious Issue in the War of Succession 247
intention to change the religious policy of his predecessors? Would a
man who was raising a religious war cry at the time, have condemned
in such ringing tones any attempt at intolerance or religious
discrimination? Whether Aurangzeb was sincere in making this
declaration is beside the point. What is significant is that rather than
stress the religious issue, he was anxious to avoid it by declaring himself
on the side of the established imperial policy.
It is interesting to note in this connection that Aurangzeb seems to
have underplayed the charge of heresy against Dara Shukoh, before the
battle of Samugarh placed victory decisively in his hands.
It is true that in the preamble to his agreement (ahadnama) with
Murad Bakhsh, Dara Shukoh is denounced as the ‘Prince of Heretics’
(ra’is al-mulahida).’ It is also stated by a historian that prior to his
marching out from Burhanpur, Aurangzeb sought the blessing of Shaikh
Abdul Latif of Burhanpur on the ground that he was going to fight a
heretic. These were, however, formal declarations. Even a partisan of
Aurangzeb like Aqil Khan Razi did not take them seriously: he omits the
preamble to the ahadnama and nowhere through his accounts refers to
Dara’s heresy as a cause of the war. How serious Aurangzeb himself
was in this allegation is revealed by his own reply to a letter he received
from princess Jahan Ara after the battle of Dharmat. This reply contains
his charge sheet against his elder brother. The whole consists merely of
accusations that Dara had throughout tried to thwart or even kill
Aurangzeb. The only possible reference — that is, possible if read
alone — to Dara’s religious views is in the statement that ‘his actions
are always contrary to (the principles) of the Empire, faith and religion
and injurious to the interests of the country and the people.’ Sandwiched
between the ‘Empire’ and ‘country and people’ faith and religion can
only have a formal significance, for a man who violated the interests of
the Empire was supposed ipso facto to have violated the principles of
his faith. That this is really so is shown by the fact that Aurangzeb
proceeds to illustrate his statement only by allegations of a political
nature, chiefly that, by bringing about the withdrawal of Mughal
contingents from the Bijapur campaign in 1657, Dara had harmed the
larger interests of the Empire and exposed Aurangzeb and his troops to
grave danger.’
Manucci purports to give us a letter from Aurangzeb to Murad
calling upon him to join in a campaign against Dara, ‘the infidel and
idolator’ as well as against Shuja ‘a heretic’.'° But this is obviously
a fruit of his imagination for Aurangzeb and Murad were then in
alliance with Shuja, and one of the complaints against Shah Jahan
248 Mughal India
and Dara that Aurangzeb was then raising was that they had sent ‘a
grandson of Parwez’ (Sulaiman Shukoh) to destroy Shuja, his elder
brother.!!
It was only after Samugarh, when special reason had to be given to
abandon the aim stated till then, namely the replacement of Dara in the
counsels of Shah Jahan, that Dara’s heresy was proclaimed to be his
chief and unpardonable ‘crime. It was first brought up in a private
interview with Jahan Ara Begam.’? It is also noteworthy that the official
history of the first decade of Aurangzeb’s reign, the Alamgir Nama of
Muhammad Kazim gives its detailed account of Dara’s heresy not to
explain Aurangzeb’s taking up arms against him, but to justify his
execution.'?
There is also no proof in either the actions of any contenders or in
the behaviour of any section of the nobility, that the war of succession
was regarded as a war between two faiths. Proofs that have till now
been offered can by no means command the confidence of any sober
student of history. I.K. Ghori says, for example, that
It was under this impression that Aurangzeb appealed to the religious sense
of the imperial commanders that they should support him in the struggle
ahead against the heretic Dara. As the rumour of Shah Jahan’s death still
needed confirmation, large scale desertions to Aurangzeb did not take place,
but even then twenty Muslim commanders of the imperial army decided to
disobey the summons and joined hands with him.'*

In support of this statement Ghori has cited Manucci and Sadiq

Khan. The statement 1s made by neither of them, but by Abul Fazl
Mamuri, and he too speaks only of twenty commanders and not of
twenty Muslim commanders.'® The actual facts in this case are these:
On falling ill, Shah Jahan issued, allegedly on the advice of Dara Shukoh,
a number of farmans to the imperial officers serving in the Deccan to
start for the court at once. Mahabat Khan and Satar Sal Hada at once
left for the court along with their contingents.'® But Najabat Khan and
Mir Jumla were sympathetic to Aurangzeb and decided not to leave the
Deccan.'’ Shah Nawaz Khan Safvi, a leading noble of Shah Jahan, was
also in the Deccan when Aurangzeb was making preparations for the
war of succession. He refused to side with Aurangzeb and so was
treacherously arrested.'®
Thus, there is no question of Muslim officers unanimously aligning
themselves with Aurangzeb. On the contrary, a plausible case can be
made out that Aurangzeb succeeded in obtaining support from a very
large number of Rajputs.'” Aurangzeb’s nishans to Rana Raj Singh of
 The Religious Issue in the War of Succession 249
Mewar leave us in no doubt that the head of the most illustrious house
in Rajasthan was in sympathy with Aurangzeb. A bargain had been
struck whereby in return for the Rana’s support, Aurangzeb was to
restore to him the parganas lost by him in 1654. This pledge Aurangzeb
hastened to fulfil as soon as he occupied the throne.” The
correspondence of Mirza Raja Jai Singh reveals him as a secret partisan
of Aurangzeb who sabotaged the whole military effort of Dara Shukoh.
There is no need to enlarge upon this here because Qanungo has
established it beyond any reasonable doubt.! It only remains for us to
quote the rebel Akbar’s taunt made in a letter to his father in 1681:
Perhaps, it has not been brought to your (Aurangzeb’s) notice that Dara
Shukoh was in reality prejudiced against, and hostile to, this race (the Rajputs).
He saw the results of this. If he had made friends with them from the first, he
would not have fared as he did. ...”*

As for the Shias, it is only Bernier and Manucci®®? who make out
Shuja to have been a special favourite with them. Since Manucci had
read Bernier, the latter is probably the sole authority for the statement.
That this should be considered sufficient evidence for postulating a
Shi ‘ite candidate for the throne is surprising — more so, when we find
a historian of R.P. Tripathi’s stature doing so.“ Iranian nobles like Mir
Jumla and Shaista Khan were on the side of Aurangzeb and Shah Nawaz
Khan Safvi on that of Dara. Indeed, Murad Bakhsh himself was popularly
suspected of having Shi‘ite leanings. Where then are the Shias who
are supposed to have sided with Shuja?
The final test for all this theorization is whether the nobles were
actually divided in their loyalties to the contending princes on communal,
racial or any other lines. No such study of the individual nobles has
been so far attempted, although there is sufficient contemporary material
to make an adequate enumeration and classification possible. Mere
reliance on eighteenth-century works like the Ma’asir-ul Umara, or
Tazkirat-ul Umara will give a wholly misleading picture, because they
cover only the barest fraction of the officers involved. I have made lists
of the supporters of Aurangzeb, Dara and Murad before the battle of
Samugarh, as also those of Shuja, from all the available sources which
are accessible to us. These are the Alamgir Nama by Muhammad
Kazim; Alamgir Nama by Hatim Khan; Ma’asir-i Alamgiri by Saqi
Mustaad Khan; Tarikh-i Aurangzeb by Abul Fazl Mamuri; Futuhat-i
Alamgiri by Isar Das Nagar; Wagi‘at- i Alamgiri by Aqil Khan Razi;
Adab-i Alamgiri; Amal-i Salih by Salih Kambu; Tuhfa-Shah Jahani by
Sidhari Lal; Mirat-i Jahan-Numa and Mirat-ul Alam by Bakhtawar Khan;
250 Mughal India
Khulasat-ut Tawarikh by Sujan Rai Bhandari; Tarikh-i Shah Jahani by
Sadiq Khan; Nuskha-i Dilkusha by Bhimsen,; Storia Do Mogor by
Manucci; Travels in the Mughal Empire by Bernier; the Ma’asir-ul
Umara by Shah Nawaz Khan and Tazkirat-ul Umara by Kewal Rai.
On the basis of this study, the following facts emerge:
There were 87 nobles holding the ranks of 1000 zat and above who
are known to have supported Dara Shukoh in the war of succession;
out of these 23 were Iranis, 16 Turanis, | Afghan, 23 other Muslims,
22 Rajputs and 2 Marathas.
Out of 124 nobles holding the ranks of 1000 and above who supported
Aurangzeb, 27 were Iranis, 20 Turanis, 23 other Muslims, 9 Rajputs,
10 Marathas and 2 other Hindus.
Shah Shuja is known to have been supported by ten nobles of 1000
and above, out of whom | was Irani, 3 Turanis, 1 Afghan and 5 other
Muslims.
There were 11 mansabdars of 1000 and above who supported Murad
Bakhsh; out of these there was | Irani, 1 Afghan, 7 other Muslims and
2 Rajputs.
These figures show more conclusively than anything else that all
religious and racial sections in the nobility were divided in their loyalties.
This is quite clear in the case of both Dara and Aurangzeb who had
among their supporters members of all important sections. Twenty-
three Hindu nobles (11 Rajputs, 10 Marathas and 2 other Hindus)
supported Aurangzeb and Murad, as against 24 Hindu nobles (22 Rajputs
and 2 Marathas) backing Dara Shukoh. These figures do not show any
alignment of nobles on merely religious lines. Indeed, if Aurangzeb had
made any statement or committed any action hostile to any community,
this would have been disastrous for his cause, because amidst a generally
apathetic nobility, a big section solidly opposing him could have made
all the difference.
The absence of any anti-Hindu or anti-Rajput bias in Aurangzeb’s
effort to gain the throne may surprise those who concentrate only on
Aurangzeb’s later religious policy, with its temple destruction and jizya
and his war with Marwar and Mewar in 1680. But a careful student of
his reign might look more closely at what immediately followed on the
war of succession. Never since the recall of Man Singh from Bengal in
1606 by Jahanagir had an important governor-ship been conferred on a
Rajput. Aurangzeb made Jai Singh the nominal, as well as the actual
viceroy of the Deccan, perhaps the most important post in the whole
Empire, and Jaswant Singh was twice appointed governor of Gujarat.
Never since the death of Akbar had there been a Hindu diwan (finance
 The Religious Issue in the War of Succession 251
minister) of the Empire. Now Aurangzeb appointed Raja Raghunath to
this post. The well-known Benaras farman” is a testimony to his attempt
to follow his pledge given in the nishan to Rana Raj Singh, which was
to ensure that no one interfered in the religion of another.
It is beyond the scope of this article to examine why and how
Aurangzeb’s policy changed in later days. Nevertheless, one reason
usually advanced for this, namely that it began with the war of succession
in reaction to the increasing Rajput or Hindu penetration of the imperial
services under Shah Jahan, can no longer be held, since in fact there
was no movement against it. And even if there was one, Aurangzeb
had nothing to do with it in 1658-9.

NOTES

1. Maulana Shibli, Aurangzeb Alamgir per ek nazar, Aligarh, 1922, In

English he has been followed by Faruki, Aurangzeb and His Times (see
esp., pp. 28-9, 47-8) and by I.H. Qureshi in A History of Freedom Movement
(being the History of Muslim Struggle of Hind-Pakistan), Karachi, vol. 1,
ao
2. Cf. S. Lane-Poole, Aurangzeb, p. 42: ‘Dara might have been a lesser
Akbar’ and cf. S.R. Sharma, who declares, “when Aurangzeb became the
King of India Muslim theology triumphed in him’ (Religious Policy of the
Mughal Emperors, p. 118).
3. Rise and Fall of the Mughal Empire, p. 482.
4. An example of such effort is to be found in Iftikhar Khan Ghori’s
attempt to substantiate what was only suggested hitherto by various
scholars, that the war of succession was a war not only between Hinduism
and Islam, but also between Shi‘ism and Sunnism. Journal of the Pakistan
Historical Society, m, part 0, pp. 97-119.
5. See, for example, the two text books so widely used: A.L. Srivastava,
Mughal Empire, pp. 320, 323, 334, 339; and S.R. Sharma, Mughal Empire in
India, vol. 1, p. 503.
6. Shyamaldas, Vir Vinod, u, pp. 419-20, note. This great history of
Mewar reproduces in this note the whole text of the nishan; it is followed by
other nishans as well.
7. Adab-i-Alamgiri, f. 84a-85a; printed in Najib Nadvi, Rug ‘at-i Alamgir ,
pp. 264-5. Kamwar; Tazkira-i Salatin-i Chaghtai, MS f. 211b-212b.
8. Mamuri, Tarikh-i Aurangzeb, f. 86b; Khafi Khan, u, p. 11.
9. The whole letter is reproduced in Waqi ‘at-i Alamgiri, ed. Zafar Hasan,
252 Mughal India
Aligarh, 1946, pp. 50-2.
10. Manucci, 1, pp. 247-8.
11. Wagi’at-i Alamgiri, p. 50. It was actually Murad who had accused
Dara of heresy (Ruqu‘at-i Alamgir, p. 372).
12. Futuhat-i Alamgiri, f. 27a. It is to be noted, however, that the earlier
and more reliable Wagi’at-i Alamgiri in its accounts of the same interview
does not put any such statement in the mouth of Aurangzeb.
. Alamgirnama, p. 432.
owies)

14. Journal of the Pakistan Historical Society, vii, part 1, p. 100.

— 5. Tarikh-i Aurangzeb, f. 96a—b.
16. Wagqi‘at-i Alamgiri, pp. 23, 26; Hatim Khan, Alamgirnama, f. 86;
Amal-i Salih, 1, p. 282; Tuhfi Shah Jahani, f. 28; Manucci, 1, p. 251.
17. Hatim Khan, Alamgirnama, f. 9a. Cf. Wagi’at-i Alamgiri, pp. 27-8.
Mir Jumla was arrested with his own consent and his entire contingent,
treasure and property were appropriated by Aurangzeb (Khafi Khan, u, p. 9;
Tuhfa-i Shah Jahani, f. 29a; Manucci, 1, p. 250).
18. Adab, f. 245; Mirat-ul Alam, ff. 107a, 90b; Amal-i Salih, m, pp. 282-
3; Hatim Khan, Alamgirnama, ff. 12a, 15b; Wagi’at-i-Alamgiri, p. 31;
Khulasat-ut Tawarikh, p. 493; Khafi Khan, u, p. 12.
19. This statement questions one of the most cherished assumptions of
the communal interpretation: When the conflict for the throne started, Dara
Shukoh was supported by the Rajputs and others who viewed the rise of
orthodoxy with distaste (A History of the Freedom Movement of Pakistan,
1707-1947, vol.i, p. 23) “he (Dara) ... was friendly to Hindus and popular
with the Rajput aristocracy ... while Aurangzeb was a staunch Sunni and
bitterly hostile to non-Muslims” (A.L. Srivastava, Mughal Empire, p. 320).
20. Vir Vinod, i, p. 426-7.
21. Dara Shukoh, pp. 167-78.
22. Royal Asiatic Society, London, MS 173. I owe this reference to my
friend and colleague, Irfan Habib.
23. Bernier, Travels, p. 8; Manucci, Storia Do Mogor, 1, p. 228.
24. Rise and Fall of the Mughal Empire, p. 479.
25. Hatim Khan, Alamgirnama, MS Br. Add. 26, 233, ff. 7b—8a.
26. Journal of Asiatic Society of Bengal, 1911, p. 689. There are two
grants to Jain religious devotees from this early period which have been
published (Journal of the Pakistan Historical Society, 1957, v, part tv, pp.
252-4).
 py)

Causes of the Rathor

Rebellion of 1679

Aurangzeb’s policy towards the Rajputs, especially his handling of

the question of succession to the gaddi of Marwar after the death of
Jaswant Singh (1678), is clouded by considerable controversy. The
discrepancies in chronicles about events of the Rathor Rebellion of
1679 have long been the despair of historians and we find important
factual gaps in the account given in the monumental History of
Aurangzeb by Sir Jadunath Sarkar. Fortunately, however, we now
have the monthly dispatches of the official news-writer of Ajmer,'
covering precisely this period (1678-80). Written with the object of
providing accurate information to the court, covering the entire
province of Ajmer, which included all the chief Rajput states, it gives
us detailed reports of events, negotiations and other transactions taking
place at the time. This enables us to have a pretty clear picture of
what actually took place during these critical years, the nature of the
policy of Aurangzeb, and the viewpoints of the several sections of the
Rajputs. On the basis of this, we are now able to trace in detail, with
considerable confidence in the reliability of our information (for the
news-writer was not writing for public consumption, but for the
knowledge of the emperor himself), the succession of events
following the death of Jaswant Singh and leading to the rebellion of
1679-80.
When Jaswant Singh died in December 1678, he left no son. At his
death he was also heavily in debt to the imperial treasury.’ Iftikhar
Khan, the governor of Ajmer reported in Ziqad, AH 1089 (January
1679) that the late raja and his forefathers had hoarded a large amount
of cash and treasure in the fort of Siwana.* So a search was made for
the hidden treasure in order to satisfy government claims, but it yielded
nothing.* Then an order was issued in Zilhij (February 1679) that the
entire property belonging to the raja should be escheated.° Earlier,
Kesri Singh Mutasaddi along with Raghunath Singh and other Rajputs
had prepared a list of the entire property belonging to the late raja and
presented it before Iftikhar Khan (Ziqad, January 1679).° Pending his
254 Mughal India
decision about the succession, Aurangzeb declared in the same month
that the whole of Marwar, including the capital, with the exception of
only two parganas, was to be resumed to the khalisa, and royal
officials were deputed to take charge. This aroused the indignation of
the Rathors, who declared that if Jodhpur, the seat of their clan and
the place where the mourning of the dead king was taking place, was
taken into the khalisa, the prestige of the Rathors would be adversely
affected. They came to Iftikhar Khan and represented as follows:
‘During the rule of the Mughal dynasty, no bumi or zamindar has
been turned out of his native place (watan) even on the commission
of any specific fault. The Rathors, who have always been loyal and
faithful, ask simply that they be not subjected to exile.’ They were
prepared to give over the whole of Marwar, but not the ill-fortified
town of Jodhpur.’ Iftikhar Khan suggested to the Rajputs (February
1679) that they should accompany him to the court so that their
demands might be fulfilled. The Rajputs refused. Iftikhar Khan
defended the imperial resumption of Jodhpur to the khalisa on the
ground that according to the rules, watan could not be conferred
upon either a woman or a servant.’ Aurangzeb in the meanwhile had
issued another order designed to placate the deceased raja’s officers.
All of them were to be confirmed in the pattas or assignments granted
to them by Jaswant Singh, these being now formally considered their
jagirs so that against these they would receive corresponding mansabs
from the imperial court.’ Jaswant’s Singh’s officers declined this offer,
possibly (for this is not stated) because they thought it would lead to
the permanent disruption of the Marwar kingdom. When pressed by
Iftikhar Khan, they declared that though they knew they could not
resist the imperial army, they had decided to die rather than submit.!°
The situation was further complicated when, to the relief of Jaswant
Singh’s officers, the news arrived in March or April that the two wives
of Jaswant Singh had given birth to two sons. This meant that they had
now a candidate, in the person of Ajit Singh, one of the posthumous
sons, whom they could present for the Marwar throne.
The Emperor too seems to have accepted the genuineness of the
two sons (one of whom died shortly after birth) without question.
Thus we read in the Ajmer news-letters that the fort of Pokhran had
been conferred on Rawal Amar Singh, but after the birth of Jaswant
Singh’s posthumous sons, the Rawal was informed (Rabi 1 = May
1679) that the grant was being revoked, as sons had been born to
Jaswant Singh, and the Emperor was favourably disposed towards
them."
 Causes of the Rathor Rebellion of 1679 255
But soon after, Aurangzeb conferred the tika on Indar Singh on
the payment of thirty-six lakh rupees as succession fee.'* The
appointment of Indar Singh as Raja of Jodhpur came as a great
surprise to the Rathors. Till now, Aurangzeb had not taken any
decision about the succession to the Marwar throne. It is significant
that before the birth of the two posthumous sons of Jaswant Singh,
his officers could not suggest any name for the incumbent of the
gaddi, which meant, as Iftikhar Khan pointed out, that they were
arguing for the retention of Marwar in the hands of the ‘women and
servants’ of the late raja, a position hardly acceptable in the
circumstances of the time. As for Indar Singh (grandson of Amar
Singh, elder brother of Jaswant Singh), he belonged to a line hostile
to Jaswant Singh and his followers, and his attempt to secure
succession to the Jodhpur gaddi had been opposed by most of the
Rathor leaders.'°
There was another claimant still in the person of Anup Singh, son
of Rao Karan, who had the rank of 2500/2000.'* He had offered
forty-five lakh rupees as succession fee.'? Anup Singh was a blood
relation of Jaswant Singh, but since his relationship to the principal
royal line was remote, his claims were not entertained.'®
When Rani Hadi, the chief queen of Jaswant Singh and other Rajput
leaders heard (Jamada i = June 1679) that the tika had been conferred
on Indar Singh, they sharply protested against it and said it would
have been better if the previous order for including Jodhpur into the
khalisa had been maintained rather than that Jodhpur be handed over
to Indar Singh."
Already in Rabi 1 (April 1679), before Indar Singh had received™
the tika, Tahir Khan, qila’adar of Jodhpur, had suggested to the
Rathors that they could please the emperor by demolishing all the ©
temples within the state and constructing mosques in their place.
The Rajputs, when they heard this, were very indignant. But when
the message was carried to Rani Hadi, Jaswant’s chief queen, who
was inside the fort as the titular leader of the Rathors, she declared
that he (Tahir Khan) could do as he pleased for the good of the
Rathors: ‘If Jodhpur was conferred on the sons of the late Raja, the
Rajputs undertook to demolish all the temples in the state of
Marwar.’'®
That the Rathors’ reaction to Aurangzeb’s decision stemmed solely
from a sense of indignation at the appointment of Indar Singh and not
from any resentment over the larger issues involved in Aurangzeb’s
policy—specially his discriminatory measures against the Hindus—
256 Mughal India
becomes clear from the way the Rathors pressed the case for Ajit.
We have just seen that they declared that they preferred the khalisa or
imperial administration to Indar Singh.
They now proclaimed that if only the tika was given to Ajit Sigh,
they would be more loyal than the king in carrying out Aurangzeb’s
pet projects, the collection of the jizya and the destruction of temples
within Marwar. It may be noted that there is no suggestion anywhere
that Indar Singh had given such a pledge to secure the tika.
Two months later (Jamada 1 = June 1679), when Indar Singh had
been appointed raja, two spokesmen of the Rathors, Ram Bhati and
Sonak Rathor, went to Qazi Hamid of Jodhpur and represented as
follows:
The zamindari of the country of Marwar was the property of Raja Jaswant
Singh and after his death by the law of inheritance the zamindari of the
country devolves on his sons. In the presence of the sons of the late
Jaswant Singh, Indar Singh had no right to succeed. If the watan and the
zamindari was conferred on the sons of the deceased Raja, the Rajputs
undertook to demolish all the temples of Jodhpur and construct mosques
instead. The Rajputs were also prepared to promulgate the law of the
shari‘at and to carry out the orders of the Emperor to whatever effect. We
want to know the law of the shari‘at in this case. The Qazi gave them no
answer and forwarded the case to Qazi Shaikhul-Islam (Chief Qazi at the
Court).!°

Tahir Khan also reported in the same month to the emperor that the
Rajputs were prepared to demolish all the temples within the Jodhpur
state, to promulgate Islam and to offer a bigger peshkash than that
offered by Indar Singh, if the latter’s appointment as the Raja of
Jodhpur was cancelled.”® The imperial wagai‘navis in Jamada 1 (June
1679) reported flatly that ‘the root cause of the Rajput rebellion is
Indar Singh, because he is intensely unpopular in Marwar and no one
likes him. The Rajputs would be agreeable and pleased if Jodhpur is
included in the khalisa permanently.’*!
The next month Ram Bhati and Sonak Rathor again pleaded with
Tahir Khan:
We are prepared to obey the laws of the shariat and the imperial laws.
Why then is Jodhpur not included in the khalisa? The entire Rajput
community is agreeable to it. If Jodhpur is taken into khalisa there can be
no rebellion. The root cause of the entire rebellion is Indar Singh because
he is intensely unpopular in Marwar and no one likes him and none wants
him.”
 Causes of the Rathor Rebellion of 1679 257
When the Rajputs failed to get the appointment of Indar Singh
cancelled, they asked Tahir Khan in Jamada u (July 1679) to leave
Jodhpur because they had decided to oppose Indar Singh and offer
him battle.** Chauhar Mal, the mutasaddi of Indar Singh, could not
enter Jodhpur owing to the opposition of the Rajputs.
This was a prelude to the rebellion. The flight of Ajit from the
court, arranged by Durga Das, followed. Aurangzeb’s acceptance of
a false Ajit as the true one, and his firm refusal to recognize the
genuineness of the real Ajit barred the way to any compromise. The
news-reporter of Ajmer reported a conversation between Sujan Singh
Rathor and Padshah Quli Khan, in which, the former protesting his
loyalty to the emperor asserted the genuineness of the real Ajit and
said that Durga Das, Sonak and other Rathors were fighting only for
the sake of Ajit and they would not otherwise have been able to resist
Raja Indar Singh.”> When this report was presented to Aurangzeb, he
gravely censured the news-reporter for giving credence to such
statements.*°
The Waqai‘Ajmer thus presents us with a mass of new information
which enables us to reinterpret the events leading to the Rajput War.
It seems to me that the basic assumptions postulated by Sir Jadunath
Sarkar to explain the causes of the war cannot be easily accepted in
the light of this information. Sarkar assumes, in the first place, that
though Jaswant Singh had no son, Aurangzeb could have immediately
appointed Indar Singh, ‘a loyal grandee’, and his failure to do so
suggests that he wanted to destroy the Marwar Kingdom.’ But we
have seen that if Indar Singh was not appointed for five months, it
was solely because he was not acceptable to the Rathors, who
throughout expressed their hostility to him in no uncertain terms.
The second assumption put forward by Sarkar is that Aurangzeb
wanted to make Jaswant’s state ‘a quiescent dependency’ or ‘a regular
province of the Empire, for Hindu resistance to the policy of religious
persecution must be deprived of a possible efficient head’.’** But again,
we see that if this was Aurangzeb’s real objective, this could have
been secured best by accepting Ajit. His partisans were ready to
destroy temples and enforce the shari‘at—things for which Indar
Singh never gave his consent. Moreover, Ajit was a baby at the time,
and even if Aurangzeb had seen (mistakenly) the marks of future
greatness in this baby, it was obvious that simply because of his age
Ajit could not, at least for a decade and a half, have become the
‘efficient head’ of any Hindu resistance.
The only plausible support for Sarkar’s argument lies in the delay
258 Mughal India
of five months which Aurangzeb allowed before appointing Indar
Singh. There is, however, a possible explanation which arises from
the Wagai‘Ajmer. The Rathors were opposed to Indar Singh, and
their opposition was fortified by the news that two queens of Jaswant
were pregnant and might well bear sons. But how could it be known
for certain that these would be sons? Aurangzeb might have thought
that in case the children turned out to be daughters—for which there
was, after all, even chance—the whole issue would be simplified,
since the Rathors would no longer have any candidate to pit against
Indar Singh. In case they turned out to be boys, Aurangzeb’s task
would be no less difficult whether he appointed Indar Singh before or
after their birth.
It has also not been appreciated that Aurangzeb might have
preferred Indar Singh to Ajit for quite the opposite reason to what
Sarkar has suggested. There is no reason to believe that Indar Singh
was incompetent. In 1678 he was already holding the rank of 1000/
1000 (700x2—3h) and had served with some distinction in the
Deccan.” It could be urged that Aurangzeb wanted an able officer,
not a baby, to head the Marwar state so that peace and order might be
maintained in that strategic state (it lay astride the main Agra—
Ahmadabad route) and it might continue to supply military contingents
to the Mughal armies. It is also to be remembered that Aurangzeb
was not stepping beyond custom and precedent in overlooking Ajit’s
claim and selecting Indar Singh. Jahangir had asserted this imperial
prerogative in no uncertain terms sixty-five years earlier in the case
of Bikaner.*® Similarly, he had rejected the claims of Man Singh’s
grandson, Maha Singh, to the Amber throne, despite the fact that
Rajput custom had prescribed his succession.*!
In appraising Aurangzeb’s policy towards Marwar, we should
perhaps guard against the assumption made, without much historical
basis, that it was a part of his alleged anti-Rajput policy. Aurangzeb’s
first twenty years showed little signs of hostility towards the Rajputs.
In his first two regnal years, zat ranks amounting to 12,600 making
up 14.16 per cent of the total additions, and sawar ranks amounting
to 11,900 making up 22.04 per cent, were bestowed upon Rajput
officers.” This should be considered in the light of the fact that in
Shah Jahan’s thirtieth regnal year, Rajputs holding zat ranks of 1000
and above held 18.9 per cent of the total zat and 24 per cent of the
sawar mansabs.*?
This shows only a very marginal, in fact, insignificant change in
the position of the Rajputs among mansabdars. Indeed, whereas there
 Causes of the Rathor Rebellion of 1679 259
was no Rajput officer throughout the reign of Shah Jahan holding the
rank of 7000, Jai Singh and Jaswant Singh—the latter, despite his
role at the battle of Dharmat and Khajwah—were promoted by
Aurangzeb to 7000/7000 each.** The representation of the Rajput
mansabdars holding the rank of 1,000 and above during the first twenty
years of Aurangzeb’s 1vign (1658-78) was 14 per cent.** This is not
at par with the proportion of 18 per cent Rajput mansabdars of the
rank of 1000 and above during Shah Jahan’s reign,*° and this may be
held to mark a decline. It should be remembered, however, that this
was a decline generally shared by all the non-Deccani elements.
The rebellion of the Rathors and Sisodias was not really a ‘Rajput
rebellion’, if by that is meant that the majority of the Rajputs were
involved in it. The Kachwahas, the Haras, the Bhatis, the Rathors of
Bikaner, all remained loyal to the Mughals.
Yet, while most of the Rajputs had not so far been alienated by
Aurangzeb’s policy as to rebel against him, the Rajput rebels too were
not completely friendless within the rest of the Mughal nobility. The
very fact that Prince Akbar should have staked his fortune and placed
himself at the head of the rebels shows that he expected some support
from within the nobility. Tahawwur Khan, his main supporter, enjoyed
no mean status. In actual fact, Bahadur Khan Kokaltash, the leading
noble of Aurangzeb at the time, was said to have advised Aurangzeb
that he should recognize Ajit Singh.*’
On the whole, though one must not be dogmatic, it seems that the
origin of the rebellion of 1679 lay in the clan rivalries and disputes
among the Rajputs themselves. As long as the imperial power was
strong it could overrule the claims of one clan or party against another
without danger of rebellion. Jahangir had done it in the case of the
Kachwahas without provoking any armed opposition. Under
Aurangzeb, however, such an assertion of imperial authority was not
quietly accepted, perhaps because the Rathors felt that they could
defy imperial government with some chance of survival, if not
success. For such an attitude on their part, Aurangzeb’s involvement
in the north-west and in the Deccan, and the series of internal
rebellions starting with the Jats, all were perhaps responsible.

NOTES

1. The original copy of the Waqai‘Ajmer is in the Asifiyah Library,

260 Mughal India
Hyderabad. I have used a transcript from the original in the Research
Library, Dept. of History, AMU, Aligarh.
2. Ali Muhammad Khan, Mirat-i-Ahmadi, 1, ed. Nawab Ali, Baroda
1927-8, 1930, 1, p. 277.
3. Wagqai‘Ajmer, p. 74.
4. Ma’asir-i-Alamgiri, p. 172.
5. Waqai Ajmer, pp. 84, 92.
6. Ibid., p. 81.
7. Ibid., pp. 80-3.
8. Ibid., pp. 117-18.
9. Ibid., p. 114.
10. Ibid., p. 116.
11. Ibid., p. 194.
12. Ma’asir-i-Alamgiri, pp. 175-6; Dilkusha, f. 76a; Ma’asir-ul-
Umara, Ul, p. 236.
13. The Rathors represented to Iftikhar Khan that Abdur Rahim should
be sent to Jodhpur as kotwal and an experienced karori should be
appointed at Jodhpur and the tika should not be conferred on Indar Singh
till it was found whether a son was born to the late Raja Jaswant Singh.
(Waqai Ajmer, p. 141).
14. Hadi Kamwar Khan, Jazkiratu-s Salatin-i Chaghala, M.A. Library,
MS Lytton 40/2 (hereafter referred to as Kamwar), f.277b
15. Waqai‘ Ajmer, p. 107.
16. For the detailed biography of Anup Singh, see Vir Vinod, i, pp.
498-500; Ma’asir-ul-Umara, u, pp. 289-91.
17. Wagai‘Ajmer, p. 241.
18. Ibid., p. 167.
19. Ibid., pp. 245-6.
20. Ibid., p. 244.
21. Ibid., p. 270.
22. Ibid., pp. 277-8.
23. Ibid., p. 288.
24. Ibid., p. 280.
25. ibid... p. O55,
26. Ibid., p. 645.
27. History of Aurangzib, vol. i, p. 369.
28. Ibid., p. 368.
29. Selected Documents of Aurangzeb’s Reign, p. 121; Ma’asir-ul-
Umara, i, p. 236; After his appointment as Raja of Jodhpur, Indar Singh
was promoted to the rank of 3000/2000.
 Causes of the Rathor Rebellion of 1679 261
30. Tuzuk, p. 106.
3: Ibid., p. 130.
Oa: See M. Athar Ali, The Mughal Nobility under Aurangzeb, p. 24.
2D, This is based on Waris’s list of mansabdars.
34. For further elucidation of this point, see my article, “The Religious
Issue in the War of Succession 1658-59’ this volume, pp. 238-45.
35. See my book, The Mughal Nobility Under Aurangzeb, p. 35.
36. Ibid., p. 24.
oie Futuhat-i-Alamgiri, f. 75a—b; Ma’asir-i-Alamgiri, p. 168. Tahir
Khan was deprived of his mansab because he did not try to stop Ajit
Singh from entering Jodhpur (Kamwar, f. 266a).
 Z2

Provincial Governors Under

Aurangzeb
An Analysis

The post of the governor of a province in the Mughal Empire was a

very important one. The Empire was divided into a number of subas,
or provinces, each of which had as the head of its administration an
officer known variously as nazim, sahib-i suba, subedar, faujdar-i
suba, etc. Like the two principal ministers at the centre, the diwan
and the mir bakhshi, the provincial governors were generally appointed
from amongst officers holding the highest ranks or mansabs. It can
be said that they formed, at any time, the hard core of the ruling
bureaucracy.
The jurisdiction and powers of the governors have been discussed
often enough’, but, so far as the present writer is aware, no attempt
has been made to examine the nature and tenures of appointments
and the kinds of persons appointed as governors from a study of the
actual appointments in all the provinces. The present chapter is based
on an investigation of such appointments during the entire reign of
Aurangzeb (1658-1707). The period is a long one, and may be
considered sufficiently long to enable us to draw inferences from our
record with some confidence.
As is well known, only the first ten years of Aurangzeb’s reign are
covered by the detailed official chronicle, the Alamgir Nama. For the
remaining period of nearly four decades, we have to obtain our
information from sources which are by no means as easily accessible
or, alternatively, as reliable. I have compiled my own list principally
from the akhbarat, supplementing them from the numerous chronicles,
memoirs and epistolary collections, largely in manuscript. At the risk
of taking up too much space, I have given detailed references to
substantiate my list.
The main table which seeks to give for each province a list of its
governors, with the full duration of their terms of office in terms of
the regnal years of Aurangzeb, is not, by the nature of our sources,
 Provincial Governors Under Aurangzeb 263
complete and without blanks. But it can be claimed that the information
is virtually complete for all the major provinces. It is also possible that
in the case of some of the Deccan provinces, where there is a blank,
it is to be explained by the fact that no governor was appointed, the
province being regarded as part of the superior viceroyalty of the
Deccan. Even so, the limits to which our information extends can be
judged from the fact that out of 1059 possible entries in our table, we
are in fact able to record 853.”
In preparing the tables, certain assumptions have been found
necessary. For example, a distinction has been made between deputies
of princes, who acted as governors on behalf of the princes, who
were formally appointed, and deputies of ordinary governors. The
names of the former have been recorded, while the latter have been
ignored. In analysing the main table again, the princes who governed
through deputies are not treated as governors at all (generally such
princes governed another province directly in person), while the
deputies have been regarded at par with ordinary governors: it being
not possible to consider one province having at any time two
governors.
As stated already, our record shows 853 years during which
provincial governors are known to have held office. The number of
appointments known is 337 and the number of persons serving as
governors is 137. In other words, on an average, each single term of
a governor lasted only a little more than two and a half years, while on
an average again each governor was appointed to about two terms
and to a total of about 6 years and 2 months.
Naturally, in actual fact the range of variations was very great.
There is record of single terms of office as governors extending to
23, 17, 14, and 12 years.’ At the same time, single persons serving as
governors in different provinces, held office for totals of 41, 30, and
25 years.* On the other hand, officers were appointed and dismissed
or transferred within the same year.°
But, on the whole, we can say from the analysis of the table that
the Mughal court did not approve of long terms for governors, and
generally transferred or recalled them after two or three years.
Moreover, it was still rare for high officers to make careers as
governors only: the men once appointed as governors could generally
expect to serve only for one other term. In other words, governorship
was by no means the office which the highest nobles necessarily
enjoyed or which they might treat as the basis or instrument of their
power. These facts are significant for any consideration of the ways
264 Mughal India
in which the Mughal emperors maintained the authority of the central
government.
It is also possible to analyse the duration of the terms of governors,
according to provinces. Table 1 gives the duration of each term
province-wise. It does not seem that any particular policy regarding a

TABLE 1

Duration of Terms of Governors

Province Number Number Average tenure of

of Years for of Actual Governors
which Appointments
Appointment as Governor
are Known

Bengal 51 8 6 years 442 months

Orissa 46 16 2 years 10/2 months
Bihar 51 14 3 years 72 months
Tlahabad 48 18 2 years 7/2 months
Awadh 37 24 1 year 62 months
Agra 46 28 1 year 7/2 months
Delhi 43 10 4 years 3¥2 months
Lahore 49 22 2 years 22 months
Kashmir 51 15 3 years 4%2 months
Kabul 51 10 5 years | month
Multan 40 17 2 years 4 months
Sind 51 15 3 years 4%2 months
Ajmer 38 20 1 year 102 months
Gujarat 51 11 4 years 7/2 months
Malwa 46 17 2 years 8 months
Deccan 40 19 2 years 1 month

province was behind the longer or shorter terms there. It may be

said, in general, that the provinces where conditions were more stable,
like Bengal, Gujarat, Kabul, Delhi, or Kashmir were allowed to have
governors serving for terms longer than elsewhere.
The analysis of the social and personal antecedenis of the individual
governors yields certain interesting results. In the first place, we find
that out of 137 governors, seven were princes, and of the remaining
 Provincial Governors Under Aurangzeb 265
130, 97 were khanazads, that is their fathers or senior relations had
previously been in service. This gives a ratio of 74.6 per cent. It
seems that there was a special preference for khanazads in
appointments as governors, since their ratio in the general ranks of
the nobles was not so high. Out of 141 mansabdars holding 3000 zat
and above during the first part of Aurangzeb’s reign, 1658—78, 86 or
61 per cent were khanazads and among the 486 nobles of 1000 zat or
above, in the same period, only 213 or about 44 per cent are known
to have been khanazads. During the remainder of Aurangzeb’s reign,
of 212 nobles of 3000 and above, only 94 or 44.3 per cent were
khanazads; and of 575 nobles of 1000 and above only 272 or 47 per
cent.° In both the highest ranks and the middle, therefore, the ratio of
the khanazads was about half; but among governors it was three-
fourths.’ The only explanation for this seems to be that the office of
governor was deemed to be of considerable trust and was only
conferred on those nobles who had been in service for, so to speak,
more than a generation.
Another aspect to be considered is the racial and religious
composition of the class of governors. Table 2 gives this composition;
and for comparative purposes, the figures of corresponding categories
among the nobles of 1000 zat and above are also given. A glance at

TABLE 2

Racial and Religious Composition of Governors

Iranis Turanis Afghans Indian Other Rajputs Total

Muslims Muslims and
Hindus

Governors other than Princes 63 29 6 19 9 4 130

% 26.3311122:3 4.6 14.6 6.9 3.0

Mansabdars of 3000 zar and

above, 1658-78 55 25 12 14 7 28 141
% 39.0 17.7 8.5 9.9 4.3 19.8

Mansabdars of 3000 zat and

above, 1679-1707 54 28 14 28 26 62 212
% 259 F134 6.6 13.4 PAS 19.2

this table would show that the predominance of the Iranis in the higher
ranks of the nobility is emphasized still further among the governors.
266 Mughal India
The proportion of Turanis and Indian Muslims corresponds, but the
Rajputs, other Hindus, Afghans and Deccanis generally were not
appointed governors in numbers commensurate with their numerical
strength in the higher nobility. This may have been due to the court’s
hesitation in appointing men who might have zamindari or local interests.
An attempt has been made to discover if any change occurred in
the composition of the governors by tabulating the composition year
by year. Table 3 brings out the fact, already well known, that during
the last years of Aurangzeb’s reign, a very large number of provinces
were given over to princes. Their number, even when the cases where
they governed through deputies are excluded from consideration, was
very large. Of the twenty-three persons known to have held office as
provincial governors in the forty-seventh regnal year, as many as
seven were princes.
The fortunes of the Iranis, despite the anti-Shiite tendencies
sometimes ascribed to Aurangzeb, show a remarkable degree of
constancy. It was only during the last five years that they seem to
lose ground, but this is, perhaps, because of the appointment of
princes. The Turanis almost disappear in the middle years of the reign,
but recover during the last years. This is probably owing to the rising
strength of the Turani group headed by Ghaziuddin Khan Firoz Jang.*
Before concluding this paper, it may be pointed out that the
information contained in the main table about the governors of each
province can also be of interest to students of local or regional history,
for whom it may not be possible to explore the entire range of the
source material. To this extent besides its analytical value, the record
of governors may have value simply as a repository of information. It
may also be considered whether a similar enquiry should be attempted
for the reigns of the other Mughal emperors, so that we should then
form a comparative view and be in a position to assess more precisely
the play of various tendencies over a still longer period of time. It is
hoped that the present paper will have shown that such an enterprise,
though requiring much labour, may not entirely be a fruitless exercise.
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pie Mughal India
TABLE 4

Provincial Governors Under Aurangzeb

For convenience in reproduction, the table has been divided into five
parts, as follows: (a) Bengal, Orissa, Bihar, Ilahabad and Awadh; (b)
Agra, Delhi, Lahore, Kashmir and Kabul; (c) Multan, Sind, Ajmer,
Gujarat and Malwa; (d) Deccan, Bedar, Khandesh, Berar and
Aurangabad; and (e) Bijapur and Golkunda.
The abbreviations used to indicate the racial origin are:

P Prince
I Trani
és Turani
R Rajput
Af Afghan
Ind. Other Indian Muslim
Dec Deccani
I-Dec Irani Deccani
H Hindu
(d) Stands for ‘died in office’
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 Provincial Governors Under Aurangzeb 291

REFERENCES TO TABLE 4

Authorities are given for each term of governorship, indicated by the years
it covered.

BENGAL
Years 2-5 Alamgir Nama, 462, 484, 492, 592, 676, 741, 761,
778; Ma’asir-i Alamgiri, 32, 45; Ma’asir-ul-Umara,
Ill, 530-55.
Alamgir Nama, 848, 855, 882, 919, 941, 958, 1057;
Ma’asir-i-Alamgiri, 45, 159; Ma’asir-ul-Umara, I,
690-707.
Ma’asir-i-Alamgiri, 159, 168; Ma’asir-ul-Umara,
I, 247-53.
21-2 Ma’asir-i-Alamgiri, 161, 168, 171, 180, 181;
Akhbarat, 21 R.Y.
23-31 Ma’asir-i-Alamgiri, 181; Ma’asir-ul-Umara, U,
690-707; Riyazus Salatin, 222-3.
32-40 Ma’asir-i-Alamgiri, 236, 387, 497; Tazkara-i-
Salatin-i-Chaghta, 299b; Akhbarat, 36 R.Y., 38 R.Y.,
39 R.Y., 40 R.Y.; Ma’asir-ul-Umara, I, 295-301.
41-51 Ma’asir-i-Alamgiri, 387, 432, 470; Akhbarat, 47
REY?

ORISSA
Years 2-10 Alamgir Nama, 474, 1050, 1067; Ma’asir-ul-
Umara, I, 872-85; Ma’asir-i-Alamgiri, 62, 90;
Akhbarat, 10 R.Y.
1] Akhbarat, 11 R.Y.; Ma’asir-ul-Umara, I, 493-8.
12 Ma’asir-i-Alamgiri, 90; Akhbarat, 11 R.Y;
Ma’asir-ul-Umara, I, 740-2.
13-14 Akhbarat, 14 R.Y.; Ma’asir-ul-Umara, U, 738-40.
18-19 Ma’asir-i-Alamgiri, 150; Ma’asir-ul-Umara, U,
303-5.
21 Ma’asir-i-Alamgiri, , 161; Akhbarat, 21 R.Y.
22-30 Ma’asir-ul-Umara, 11, 690-707.
31-6 P. Acharya, Two Forgotten Mughal Subedars of
Orissa, PIHC, 1950, pp. 219-21; Tazkara-i-
292 Mughal India
Salatin-i-Chaghta, 294b; Arkan-i-Ma’asir-i-
Taimuriya, 124a.
Akhbarat, 37 R.Y., 38 R.Y.
P. Acharya, Two Forgotten Mughal Subedars of
Orissa, PIHC, 1950, pp. 219-21.
Akhbarat, 43 R.Y.
Akhbarat, 44 R.Y., 46 R.Y.; Dilkusha, 95a.
Ma’ asir-i-Alamgiri, 482-83; Akhbarat, 47 R.Y., 48
R.Y.; Ma’asir-ul-Umara, MW, 751-5.

BIHAR
Years Alamgir Nama, 286, 419, 513, 589, 648, 755, 866,
877; Ma’asir-i-Alamgiri, 37.
Alamgir Nama, 877, 972; Ma’asir-ul-Umara, III,
168, 171.
Ma’asir-i-Alamgiri, 71, 150; Ma’asir-ul-Umara, |,
295, 301.
. Ma’asir-i-Alamgiri, 148; Ma’asir-ul-Umara, 1,
277-8.
Ma’asir-i-Alamgiri, 148, 157; Akhbarat, 20 R.Y.
Ma’asir—i-Alamgiri, 169, Tazkira-i-Salatin-i-
Chaghta, 265a; Ma’asir-ul-Umara, Il, 479-85.
Ma’asir-i-Alamgiri, 226; R.R. Diwakar, Bihar
Through the Ages, 498; Bhim Sen, Nuskha-i-
Dilkusha, 80b.
27-36 Ma’asir-i-Alamgiri, 348; Ma’asir-ul-Umara, I,
453-4; Arkan-i-Ma’asir-i-Taimuriya, 127a; Bihar
Through the Ages, 498-9.
37 Ma’asir-i-Alamgiri, 369-70.
38-45 Akhbarat, 38 R.Y., 39 R.Y., 40 R.Y., 43 R.Y., 44 R.Y.,
45 R.Y.; Ma’asir-i-Alamgiri, 369, 433.
46 Akhbarat, 46 R.Y., 47 R.Y.
47-51 Akhbarat, 47 R.Y.; Ma’asir-i-Alumgiri, 470; Bihar
Through the Ages, 499.

ILAHABAD
Years 1-2 Alamgir Nama, 349, 465, 486.
3-9 Alamgir Nama, 465, 486, 564, 858, 860, 979, 986,
1056; Ma’asir-i-Alamgiri, 58.
 Provincial Governors Under Aurangzeb 293
10-11 Alamgir Nama, 1056; Ma’asir-i-Alamgiri, 82;
Akhbarat, 10 R.Y.
12-15 Akhbarat, 14 R.Y.; Ma’asir-i-Alamgiri, 82, 110;
Ma’asir-ul-Umara, I, 32-7.
16-18 Akhbarat, 19 R.Y.; Ma’asir-i-Alamgiri, 150, 153;
Ma’asir-ul-Umara, I, 593-9.
19-23 Akhbarat, 19 R.Y.; Ma’asir-i-Alamgiri, 150, 153,
181, 187; Ma’asir-ul-Umara, Il, 946-9; Akhbarat,
23R.Y.
27-8 Akhbarat, 28 R.Y.; Ma’asir-i-Alamgiri, 246-7.
29-32 Akhbarat, 30 R.Y.; Ma’asir-i-Alamgiri, 282;
Ma’ asir-ul-Umara, Ul, 449-51.
Ma’asir-i-Alamgiri, 335.
Akhbarat, 34 R.Y.; 36 R.Y.; Ma’asir-i-Alamgiri,
338, 348, 365.
Akhbarat, 37 R.Y., 38 R.Y.; Ma’asir-i-Alamgiri,
365, 387; Ma’asir-ul-Umara, Ill, 949-51.
Akhbarat, 43 R.Y.; Ma’asir-i-Alamgiri, 387.
Akhbarat, 44 R.Y.; Ma’asir-ul-Umara, Ill, 949—
aye
Akhbarat, 46 R.Y.
Ma’asir-i-Alamgiri, 481, 496; Akhbarat, 47 R.Y.,
48 R.Y.; Tazkara-i-Salatin-i-Chaghta, 286b;
Ma’asir-ul-Umara, Ill, 949-51.

AWADH
Years Alamgir Nama, 127, 202.
Ma’asir-ul-Umara, I, 248.
Alamgir Nama, 927; Ma’asir-ul-Umara, U1, 583-—
6
Akhbarat, 19 Rajab, 9 R.Y.; Ma’asir-ul-Umara,
II, 739.
Ma’asir-i-Alamgiri, 104; Ma’asir-ul-Umara, I, 250.
Akhbarat, 13 R.Y.; Ma’asir-i-Alamgiri, 104;
Ma’asir-ul-Umara, I, 297.
Ma’ asir-i-Alamgiri, 143; Akhbarat, 18 R.Y.
Akhbarat, 18 R.Y., 19 R.Y., 2 R.Y.; Ma’asir-i-
Alamgiri, 143.
294 Mughal India
Ma’asir-i-Alamgiri, 171.
Ma’asir-i-Alamgiri, 171.
Tazkara-i-Salatin-i-Chaghta, 289a; Akhbarat, 32
ny
Ma’asir-i-Alamgiri, 335; Ma’asir-ul-Umara, Ill,
950.
Akhbarat, 37 R.Y.
Akhbarat, 38 R.Y., 40 R.Y.; Ma’asir-i-Alamgiri,
369.
Ma’ asir-i-Alamgiri, 397; Akhbarat, 42 R.Y.
Akhbarat, 43 R.Y.; 44 R.Y., 45 R.Y., 46 R.Y., 47 RY.
Akhbarat, 47 R.Y.; Ma’asir-i-Alamgiri, 470.
Ma’asir-i-Alamgiri, 516.
Ma’ asir-i-Alamgiri, 516.

AGRA
Years Alamgir Nama, 226, 229.
Alamgir Nama, 294, 433.
Alamgir Nama, 481, 564, 741, 759, 819.
Akhbarat, 9 R.Y., 12 R.Y., 13 R.Y.; Alamgir Nama,
823, 839, 842, 871, 873, 883, 933, 978; Ma’asir-i-
Alamgiri, 50, 93.
Ma’asir-i-Alamgiri, 112; Akhbarat, 15 R.Y.
Akhbarat, 15 R.Y.; Ma’asir-i-Alamgiri, 118, 120.
Akhbarat, 17 R.Y.; Ma’asir-i-Alamgiri, 132.
Akhbarat, 20 R.Y.; Ma’asir-i-Alamgiri, 158.
Akhbarat, 21 R.Y., 22 R.Y.; Ma’asir-i-Alamgiri,
Akhbarat, 22 R.Y.; Ma’asir-i-Alamgiri; 180;
Ma’asir-ul-Umara, Il, 740-2.
Akhbarat, 24 Rajab, 24 R.Y.
Akhbarat, 25 R.Y.; Ma’asir-ul-Umara, I, 467.
Ma’asir-i-Alamgiri, 246.
28-9 Ma’asir-i-Alamgiri, 246.
30-1 Akhbarat, 30 R.Y.
36-7 Akhbarat, 36 R.Y., 37 R.Y.; Ma’asir-i-Alamgiri,
351, 368.
 Provincial Governors Under Aurangzeb 295
38 Akhbarat, 38 R.Y.; Ma’asir-i-Alamgiri, 368-70.
39 Ma’asir-i-Alamgiri, 372; Akhbarat, 39 R.Y.
40 Akhbarat, 40 R.Y.; Ma’asir-i-Alamgiri, 392.
41-5 Akhbarat, 43 R.Y., 44 R.Y., 45 R.Y.; Ma’asir-i-
Alamgiri, 392.
46-51 Akhbarat, 46 R.Y.; Ma’asir-i-Alamgiri, 460, 498;
Ma’asir-ul-Umara, Il, 655-60.

DELHI
Years Alamgir Nama, 129, 146, 161.
Alamgir Nama, 415, 464.
Alamgir Nama, 839.
Alamgir Nama, 839; Ma’asir-ul-Umara, MI, 740—
2),
Alamgir Nama, 937, 961, 979; Akhbarat, 9 R.Y;;
Ma’ asir-ul- Umara, Il, 30—2.
Ma’asir-i-Alamgiri, 105; Ma’asir-ul-Umara, UI,
30-2.
Akhbarat, 17 R.Y., 18 R.Y.,; Ma’asir-i-Alamgiri,
132, 147; Ma’asir-ul-Umara, I, 740-2
Ma’asir-i-Alamgiri, 195, 383; Akhbarat, 37
R.Y., 38 R.Y., 39 R.Y.; Ma’asir-ul-Umara, I, 821-
3
41-51 Akhbarat, 43 R.Y., 44 R.Y., 45 R.Y., 46 R.Y., 47
R.Y., 48 R.Y.; Ma’asir-i-Alamgiri, 384, 462;
Ma’asir-ul-Umara, U1, 708-9.

LAHORE
Years Alamgir Nama, 215, 229, 341, 419, 473, 574, 608,
615, 631, 661.
Alamgir Nama, 776, 818, 840, 846, 855, 1058,
1065, 1067; Ma’asir-i-Alamgiri, 62-4.
Akhbarat, 13 R.Y.; Alamgir Nama, 1067.
Akhbarat, 15 R.Y.; Ma’asir-ul-Umara, 1, 247-52.
Ma’asir-i-Alamgiri, 150; Ma’asir-ul-Umara, |,
258-68.
Ma’asir-i-Alamgiri, 166, 169, 188.
Akhbarat, 25 R.Y.; Ma’asir-i-Alamgiri, 188.
296 Mughal India
26-30 Ma’asir-i-Alamgiri, 283; Ma’asir-ul-Umara, Ul,
697.
31 Ma’asir-i-Alamgiri, 283.
22 Ma’asir-ul-Umara, Ul, 632.
33 Ma’asir-i-Alamgiri, 338.
34-6 Akhbarat, 34 R.Y., 36 R.Y.; Ma’asir-i-Alamgiri,
338.
37 40 Akhbarat, 38 R.Y., 39 R.Y.,'4 R.Y.; Ma’asir-i-
Alamgiri, 360, 386.
Al Ma’asir-i-Alamgiri, 386.
43-6 Akhbarat, 43 R.Y., 44 R.Y., 45 R.Y., 46 R.Y.; Ma’asir-
i-Alamgiri, 423.
48 Ma’asir-i-Alamgiri, 496.
49-51 Ma’asir-i-Alamgiri, 496, 497, 519.

KASHMIR
Full information on the Mughal governors of Kashmir is given in Tarikh-
i-Kashmir by Narayan Kaul folios unmarked (Aligarh: Subhanullah Collec-
tion No. 954/13). References given below are to authorities other than the
Tarikh-i Kashmir, wherever they supplement or corroborate its information.

Years 1-2 Alamgir Nama, 196, 210, 302, 564.

3 Alamgir Nama, 564, 634; Ma’asir-i-Alamgiri, 38.
4-5 Alamgir Nama, 634, 823, 832.
6-8 Alamgir Nama, 832, 838, 843, 877, 921, 957;
Ma’asir-i-Alamgiri, 52.
Akhbarat, 10 R.Y.; Alamgir Nama, 957, 1064:
Maasir-i-Alamgiri, 63, 83.
Akhbarat, 12 R.Y., 13 R.Y., Ma’asir-i-Alamgiri, 83,
W128
Maasir-i-Alamgiri, 112, 125; Ma’asir-ul-Umara,
Ww.
Mavasir-i-Alamgiri, 151, 163, 165.
Ma’asir-i-Alamgiri, 163, 236; Ma’asir-ul-Umara,
I, 298.
Tarikh-i Azmi, f. 163b.
Tazkara-i-Salatin-i-Chaghta, 273a.
 Provincial Governors Under Aurangzeb 297
3640 Akhbarat, 36 R.Y.; Ma’asir-i-Alamgiri, 386;
Ma’asir-ul-Umara, I, 292.
41-45 Akhbarat, 43 R.Y., 44 R.Y., 45 R.Y.; Ma’asir-i-
Alamgiri, 386, 424, 432.
46-49 Akhbarat, 45 R.Y., 48 R.Y.; Ma’asir-i-Alamgiri,
497, S12,
50-51 Ma’asir-i-Alamgiri, 497; Ma’asir-ul-Umara, I,
246-7.

KABUL
Years 1-3 Alamgir Nama, 129, 194, 219, 229, 302, 341, 397,
419, 442, 454, 485, 564, 624, 634, 661; Ma’asir-i-
Alamgiri, 38.
4-10 Alamgir Nama, 661, 741, 761, 842, 847, 937, 972,
1042, 1044; Ma’asir-i-Alamgiri, 38, 57, 61.
11-12 Ma’ asir-i-Alamgiri, 71, 84, 104.
13-14 Ma’asir-i-Alamgiri, 104; Ma’asir-ul-Umara, Il,
616.
15-16 Ma’asir-i-Alamgiri, 136; Ma’asir-ul-Umara, III,
593.
17-19 Ma’asir-i-Alamgiri, 136, 157.
20-42 Ma’asir-i-Alamgiri, 157, 170, 270, 394; Akhbarat,
39 R.Y., 40 R.Y.
43-51] Ma’asir-i-Alamgiri, 394-95, 482, 497; Akhbarat,
45 R.Y.

MULTAN
Years Alamgir Nama, 210, 214, 217, 428, 485.
Alamgir Nama, 485, 589, 608, 614, 845, 966;
Ma’ asir-i-Alamgiri, 35.
Akhbarat, 10 R.Y.; Alamgir Nama, 1049.
Ma’asir-i-Alamgiri, 74 104, 105; Akhbarat, 13 R.Y.
Akhbarat, 18 R.Y.; Ma’asir-i-Alamgiri, 110, 140.
Ma’asir-i-Alamgiri, 140, Akhbarat, 18 R.Y.
Akhbarat, 19 R.Y., 20 R.Y.; Ma’asir-i-Alamgiri,
£49) 157: : 5
Akhbarat, 21 R.Y., 22 R.Y.; Ma’asir-i-Alamgiri,
166, 173.
298 Mughal India
31-3 Isar Das, Futuhat-i-Alamgiri, 133b; Akhbarat, 32
R.Y.
37 Akhbarat, 37 R.Y.
38-9 Akhbarat, 38 R.Y.; Ma’asir-ul-Umara, I, 697.
40-51 Akhbarat, 40 R.Y.; 43 R.Y., 44 R.Y., 45 R.Y., 47
R.Y., 48 R.Y.; Ma’asir-i-Alamgiri, 432, 470, 497.

SIND
Full information on the Governors of Sind and their periods of office is
given in the Tuhfatul Kiram, III, 96-99, the entire reign of Aurangzeb being
covered. Its information is confirmed in each case where other evidence is
available. References given below are to authorities other than the Tuhfatul
Kiram.

Years 1-2 Alamgir Nama, 217, 282, 290, 485, 623.

3-6 Alamgir Nama, 485, 877.
7-9 Alamgir Nama, 864, 1048.
10-21 Alamgir Nama, 1048; Ma’asir-i-Alamgiri, 173.
22-6 Akhbarat, 22 R.Y.
27-30 Tazkara-i-Salatin-i-Chaghta, 268b.
35-45 Akhbaratw38o Rex, 431 R. Ys 44 RY., 45 RY.;
Ma’asir-i-Alamgiri, 407, 432, 440.
46 Ma’asir-i-Alamgiri, 440.
47-51 Akhbarat, 47 R.Y.; 48 R.Y.; Ma’asir-i-Alamgiri,
470, 497.

AJMER
Years 1-3 Alamgir Nama, 119, 311, 336, 568, 593.
Alamgir Nama, 593.
Alamgir Nama, 1056; Ma’asir-ul-Umara, Il, 121.
Akhbarat, 12 R.Y., 15 R.Y.
Akhbarat, 19 R.Y., 20 R.Y., Ma’asir-i-Alamgiri,
150-151, 158, 165; Tazkara-i-Salatin-i-Chaghta,
262b.
Waqai Ajmer, 116-118; Akhbarat, 22 R.Y.; Ma’asir-
i-Alamgiri, 165, 173.
23 Wagai Ajmer, 633; Ma’asir-i-Alamgiri, 173, 179.
24-6 Ma’asir-i-Alamgiri, 206, 213, 223.
 Provincial Governors Under Aurangzeb 299
31-7 Akhbarat, 32 R.Y., 36 R.Y., 37 R.Y.
38 Akhbarat, 38 R.Y.
29 Akhbarat, 39 RLY.
40-6 Akhbarat, 40 R.Y., 42 R.Y., 43 R-Y., 44 R.Y., 45 R.Y.,
46R.Y.
Ma’asir-i-Alamgiri, 473, 497; Akhbarat, 46 R.Y.,
47 R.Y., 48 R.Y.
Ma’asir-i-Alamgiri, 497; Ma’asir-ul-Umara, I, 300.

GUJARAT
Years Alamgir Nama, 21, 296; Mir’at-i-Ahmadi, I, 241.
Alamgir Nama, 332, 346, 404, 485, 568, 592, 636,
647, 754; Mir’at-i-Ahmadi, I, 244, 253.
Alamgir Nama, 754, 737, 755, 1056; Ma’asir-i-
Alamgiri, 41; Mir’at-i-Ahmadi, I, 253-66.
Alamgir Nama, 1056; Dilkusha, 41a; Mir’at-i-
Ahmadi, 1, 267-76.
Mir’at-i-Ahmadi, 1, 276, 288; Ma’asir-i-Alamgiri,
121, 182, 189, 198, 216, 219.
Mir’at-i-Ahmadi, I, 289-303.
Ma’asir-i-Alamgiri, 219-20, 247; Akhbarat, 25
R.Y.; Mir’at-i-Ahmadi, 1, 303-10.
Mir’ at-i-Ahmadi, 1, 311-45; Ma’asir-i-Alamgiri,
383, 395, 441.
Ma’asir-i-Alamgiri, 397, 442, 473, 512; Mir’at-i-
Ahmadi, I, 346—S6.
Mir’at-i-Ahmadi, 1, 369; Ma’asir-i-Alamgiri, 497,
Se,

Alamgir Nama, 162, 229, 419, 434, 485, 590, 634,

741, 761, 837, 842, 855, 873; Ma’asir-i-Alamgiri,
47, 48.
Alamgir Nama, 873, 880, 1036; Ma’asir-i-Alamgiri,
120; Akhbarat, 13 R.Y., 15 R.Y.
15-19 Akhbarat, 15 R.Y., 19 R.Y.; Ma’asir-i-Alamgiri,
20.15
20-1 Akhbarat, 19 R.Y., 20 R.Y.; Ma’asir-i-Alamgiri,
152.
300 Mughal India
22-4 Akhbarat, 22 R.Y., 25 R.Y.; Ma’asir-i-Alamgiri,
174, 220.
25-7 Akhbarat, 25 R.Y.; Ma’asir-i-Alamgiri, 220, 246.
28 Ma’asir-i-Alamgiri, 246, 261; Akhbarat, 28 R.Y.
29-30 Ma’asir-i-Alamgiri, 273.
31 Tazkira-i-Salatin-i-Chaghta, 289b; Selected
Documents of Aurangzeb’s reign, 173.
37-8 Lindesiana, Diplomatic Correspondence of
Aurangzeb, folios unmarked; Mir’at-i-Aftab Numa,
594; Ma’asir-ul-Umara, 1,810-11.
39-44 Akhbarat, 39 R.Y., 40 R.Y., 42 R.Y., 43 R.Y., 44
R.Y.,; Ma’asir-i-Alamgiri, 442; Ma’asir-ul-Umara,
Ill, 655-60.
45-6 Akhbarat, 45 R.Y., 46 R.Y.,; Ma’asir-i-Alamgiri,
441-2; Ma’asir-ul-Umara, 1, 292-3.
47-9 Inayatullah, Ahkam-i-Alamgiri, 62b; Ma’asir-i-
Alamgiri, 498; Akhbarat, 48 R.Y.
50-1 Ma’asir-i-Alamgiri, 512.

DECCAN
Years 1-2 Alamgir Nama, 219, 338, 416.
3-5 Alamgir Nama, 416, 446, 462, 485, 564, 578, 592,
627, 634, 741, 761; Ma’asir-i-Alamgiri, 32.
6-7 Alamgir Nama, 819, 854, 869, 874, 879; Ma’asir-
i-Alamgiri, 45.
8-9 Alamgir Nama, 903, 904, 907, 913, 919, 924, 970,
971, 988, 1009, 1020, 1022, 1036; Ma’ asir-i-
Alamgiri, 52, 71.
10-14 Alamgir Nama, 1029, 1037; Ma’asir-i-Alamgiri, 60.
15-19 Ma’asir-i-Alamgiri, 124, 161, 169.
20 Ma’asir-i-Alamgiri, 161.
21-2 Ma'asir-i-Alamgiri, 169.
23-6 Ma’asir-i-Alamgiri, 189, 20S.
27 Akhbarat, 27 R.Y.; Ma’asir-i-Alamgiri, 243.
28 Akhbarat, 28 R.Y.
29-31 Akhbarat, 28 R.Y., 30 R.Y.
38 Akhbarat, 38 R.Y.
42 Akhbarat, 42 R.Y.
 Provincial Governors Under Aurangzeb 301
43-5 Akhbarat, 43 R.Y., 44 R.Y., 45 R.Y.; Ma’asir-i-
Alamgiri, 441.
46-8 Ma’ asir-i-Alamgiri, 461, 470, 483; Akhbarat, 46
R.Y.
49 Ma’asir-i-Alamgiri, 496.

BEDAR (ZAFARABAD)
Years 4-7 Alamgir Nama, 624; Ma’asir-ul-Umara, I, 788.
14 Akhbarat, 14 R.Y.; Ma’asir-ul-Umara, Ul, 622.
15 Akhbarat, 15 R.Y.
20 Akhbarat, 20 R.Y.; Ma’asir-i-Alamgiri, 158.
29 Akhbarat, 29 R.Y.; Ma’asir-i-Alamgiri, 263.
36 Akhbarat, 36 R.Y.
Syl Akhbarat, 37 R.Y.
38 Akhbarat, 38 R.Y.
39-40 Akhbarat, 39 R.Y., 40 R.Y.; Ma’asir-i-Alamgiri,
384, 385.
42-3 Akhbarat, 42 R.Y., 43 R.Y.
44-7 Akhbarat, 44 R.Y., 45 R.Y., 46 R.Y.; Ma’asir-i-
Alamgiri, 432.

KHANDESH (BURHANPUR)
Years 1-2 Alamgir Nama, 129, 196, 219, 233, 439, 440.
7-8 Alamgir Nama, 873, 972; Ma’asir-i-Alamgiri, 49.
9-10 Alamgir Nama, 972, 1027.
11-13 Dilkusha, 40b; Akhbarat, 14 R.Y.; Ma’asir-i-
Alamgiri, 110; Ma’asir-ul-Umara, Il, 32-7.
14 Akhbarat, 14 R.Y.; Ma’asir-i-Alamgiri, 110.
15-20 Akhbarat, 15 R.Y.; Ma’asir-i-Alamgiri, 144;
Ma’asir-ul-Umara, Il, 620-3.
23 Ma’asir-i-Alamgiri, 206.
24 Ma’ asir-i-Alamgiri, 206, 209, 217, 220; Akhbarat,
24R.Y.
25-6 Akhbarat, 25 R.Y.; Ma’asir-i-Alamgiri, 220.
28 Akhbarat, 28 R.Y.
29 Ma’ asir-i-Alamgiri, 262.
36 Akhbarat, 36 R.Y.
302 Mughal India
37-8 Akhbarat, 37 R.Y., 38 R.Y.
39 Akhbarat, 39 R.Y.
40-2 Akhbarat, 40 R.Y., 41 R.Y.
43 Akhbarat, 43 R.Y., Ma’asir-i-Alamgiri, 387, 433.
44 Akhbarat, 44 R.Y.; Ma’asir-i-Alamgiri, 433.
45-6 Akhbarat, 45 R.Y., 46 R.Y.; Ma’asir-i-Alamgiri,
470.
47-8 Akhbarat, 47 R.Y., 48 R.Y.; Ma’asir-i-Alamgiri,
470, 480.
Ma’asir-i-Alamgiri, 496.
Ma’asir-i-Alamgiri, 512.
Dilkusha, 161b.

BERAR
Years Alamgir Nama, 191.
Alamgir Nama, 476.
Alamgir Nama, 1023.
Alamgir Nama, 1032.
Akhbarat, 18 R.Y.; Ma’asir-i-Alamgiri, 144.
Ma’asir-i-Alamgiri, 262.
Akhbarat, 30 R.Y.; Ma’asir-i-Alamgiri, 278, 281.
Ma’asir-i-Alamgiri, 302.
Akhbarat, 36 R.Y.
Akhbarat, 37 R.Y., 38 R.Y., 39 R.Y.
Ma’asir-i-Alamgiri, 390, 396.
Akhbarat, 42 R.Y., 43 R.Y.; Ma’asir-i-Alamgiri,
396.
Akhbarat, 44 R.Y., 45 R.Y.; Ma’asir-i-Alamgiri,
432.
46-51 Akhbarat, 46 R.Y., 47 R.Y.; Ma’asir-i-Alamgiri,
461, 470, 480 483, 493.

AURANGABAD
Years 8-9 Alamgir Nama, 972.
 Provincial Governors Under Aurangzeb 303
BIJAPUR (DAR-UL-ZAFAR)
Years 30 Ma’asir-i-Alamgiri, 282, 299.
31 Ma’asir-i-Alamgiri, 327.
cy) Akhbarat, 32 R.Y.; Ma’asir-i-Alamgiri, 329.
38-40 = Akhbarat, 38 R.Y., 39 R.Y., 40 R.Y.
42-3 Akhbarat, 42 R.Y., 43 R.Y.; Ma’asir-i-Alamgiri,
412.
At Akhbarat, 44 R.Y., 45 R.Y.
45-60 Akhbarat, 46R.Y.,47 R.Y., 48 R.Y., 49 R.Y.; Ma’asir-
i-Alamgiri, 441, 471, 474, 480, 494, 496, 498, 518;
Dilkusha, 157b.
aL Dilkusha, 158a; Ma’asir-i-Alamgiri, 520.

GOLKUNDA
36-7 ~=—Akhbarat, 36 R.Y., 37 RY.
38-9 Akhbarat, 38 R.Y., 39 RY.
40 Akhbarat, 40 R.Y.
42-5 Ma’asir-i-Alamgiri, 439; Akhbarat, 42 R.Y., 43 R.Y.,
45R.Y.
47 Akhbarat, 47 R.Y.
48-9 Ma’asir-i-Alamgiri, 483, 494, 496, 497.

NOTES

1. For the best study of the subject, see P. Saran, Provincial Govern-
ment of the Mughals, (1526-1658), Allahabad, 1941.
2. The reign lasted fifty-one years; so each province carries 51 en-
tries, except for Bijapur and Golkunda, which being annexed later in the
reign, carry 20 and 19 entries respectively.
3. Amir Khan served in Kabul for 23 years; Aqil Khan in Delhi for 17
years; also Shujaat Khan in Gujarat for 17 years. Shaista Khan served in
Bengal for 14 years in a single term. Izzat Khan served in Sind for a con-
tinuous term of 12 years.
4. Ibrahim Khan s/o Ali Mardan Khan served as governor for 41
years in different provinces. Shaista Khan served for 30 years and Bahadur
Khan Koka for 25 years.
304 Mughal India
5. Muhammad Ibrahim Khan Qureshi was appointed in Bihar in the
46th r.y. but was removed in the same year. Muhtashim Khan was ap-
pointed in Ilahabad in the 23rd R.Y., and removed the same year. Dilir Khan
was appointed in Multan in the 18th R.Y. and dismissed in the same year.
Khudaband Khan was appointed to Awadh and dismissed in the 32nd R-Y.
Such instances may be multiplied.
6. See my book, The Mughal Nobility under Aurangzeb, pp. 12, 36.
7. This cannot be owing to any subjective reasons, such as any closer
enquiry into the antecedents of governors. I have used the same list of nobles,
given at the end of my book, to establish the antecedents of governors.
8. For this faction, see S. Chandra, Parties and Politics at the Mughal
Court, 1707-40, Aligarh, 1959, p. 9.
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 24

‘International Law’ or Conventions

Governing Conduct of Relations
between Asian States, Sixteenth
and Seventeenth Centuries

Modern international law has developed out of the conventions governing

the conduct of relations between European states. However, as states
also existed outside Europe, and they had to evolve traditions and norms
in conducting relations with one another, in dealing with one another’s
subjects, and so on, systems of primitive ‘International Law’, both
‘public’ and ‘private’, existed outside of Europe as well. Taking only
the medieval and early modern periods and omitting the Americas, one
could broadly say that two such major systems, outside of Christendom,
can be identified. The first embraced the Islamic states of Asia (including
India) and North Africa; and the second revolved around the Celestial
Empire. The spheres of these systems intersected: notably, the Islamic
with the Christian or European in the Mediterranean (seen especially in
the relations of the Ottoman Empire with European powers). But, in
spite of uniformities in the intersecting systems such as found in the
sixteenth-century Mediterranean by Braudel, the systems by and large
remained isolated, with mutual contacts as mere episodes or, at best,
secondary aspects only.
My purpose is to study the first of these two systems, with special
focus on the Indian Mughal Empire in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries.
A word may be put in about the theory or tradition which the Mughal
Empire had inherited. As is well known, formal Islamic jurisprudence
remains enmeshed in the fiction of the caliph or imam, a single law-
enforcing authority in the entire Muslim community, and does not have
any provisions for a situation in which not one caliph, but various
sultans, are in independent, sovereign control of different parts of the
Daru-l Islam, the Islamic world. As such, relations between sovereign
states, contracts between subjects of various states, law of the high
308 Mughal India
seas, etc., are not known to Islamic law. However, in all these spheres
conventions and practices developed in time under various influences,
among which mercantile custom had also perhaps its due place. These
conventions are often incidentally referred to by historians, when they
condemn particular actions, such as affront to envoys, or use of epithets
or complimentary adjectives in communications, or ill-treatment of
subjects of another ruler. These also figure in litigation, and such
documents of jurists, as fatwas, or interpretations of the law. Though
the formal body of Islamic law might exclude International law, jurists
sitting in judgment in actual disputes had to grapple with cases involving
contracts between subjects of different states, crimes on high seas,
disposal of shipwrecks, and so on. One of the important aspects of
interstate relations was the protection of other sovereigns’ subjects in
one’s state and of one’s own subjects on high seas and in other states.
In the Mughal Empire, the Emperor’s own subjects were entitled to
compensation if they were subjected to robbery within the towns and
on the roads in daylight. This obligation is imposed on the kotwal, head
of town police, and, outside the towns, on the Revenue Collector, in
Abul Fazl’s record of the official regulations of the Mughal Empire, the
A’in-i Akbari, c. 1595.' The official regulations of the reign of Shah
Jahan (1628-58) similarly insisted that ‘if anywhere anything is lost,
the officers having revenue jurisdiction there are obliged to pay
compensation as well as a fine for their negligence.’? Niccolao Manucci
(c. 1700) recognized the prevalence of this regulation, observing that
‘the faujdars have to supervise the roads, and should any merchant or
traveller be robbed in daylight, they are obliged to pay compensation.’*
Now, in extending this entitlement, the Mughal administration made
no distinction between its own subjects and those of other sovereigns.
This becomes clear from the claims it entertained from the English East
India Company’s servants, even though there were no specific formal
provisions for such claims in any special mandates or farmans obtained
by the Company. In 1619, in spite of the fact that the obligation for
paying compensation fell upon a member of ‘the cheefe nobilitie’ within
whose jurisdiction (near Surat) a robbery of the Company’s caravan
occurred, the local qazi, being the ‘notarye publicke’, issued a certificate
of the loss sustained.* In 1650, when a robbery occurred near Agra,
the emperor ordered that either the goods should be recovered, or
compensation be provided by ‘the Governor of the district’, on the
basis of the report of the official ‘news-writers’ (‘vaka novies’ = waqi‘a-
navis), even before the petition on the Company’s behalf was submitted.°
With this principle firmly held applicable to all, subjects or non-
 ‘International Law’ or Conventions 309
subjects, in respect of its own territories, it was natural that the Mughal
emperor would hold that a similar protection had to be extended to his
own subjects on sea by others, who exercised or could be expected to
exercise control over those who perpetrated thefts or piracy overseas.
When the English East India Company’s vessels seized cargo of Indian
merchants plying on the Red Sea trade in 1623, the Mughal authorities
demanded res.itution, and, upon the Company’s failure to do so or to
pay compensation, put the English factors at Surat in prison for seven
months the next year. Ultimately, full restitution was made by the
Company.® For the future they were obliged to agree that ‘if any other
Christian shall offend any man belonging to the Kings port, the English
are not to be questioned for it; but if any English man doe commit any
offence they are answerable for it.’’
At the same time, the Mughal authorities made it clear that their
claim of protection on high seas extended only to the subjects of the
Mughal emperor. When the Turkish merchants similarly plundered by
the English on the high seas, came to Lahore (the then seat of the
Court), ‘throwing their shashes under their feet and trampelling upon
them’, in front of the high officers of the court, they were told by
Khwaja Abul Hasan, the diwan (finance minister), that ‘they wear none
of this King’s people: he had nothing to do with them.’ The argument
was that ‘both parties (the English and the Turks) being strangers and
the act done out of his territories’, the Mughal emperor had nothing to
do with the Turkish merchants’ claims of 85,000 rials-of-eight against
the English, though the Turks had been undoubtedly engaged in the
Indian trade, and were travelling on an Indian ship, when robbed.*
The Mughal authorities reserved the right to stop traffic of their own
subjects with a foreign country. In 1640, Emperor Shah Jahan interdicted
trade with Iran; the original farman has not survived, but the farman
lifting the ban on 16 August 1641 is extant. It shows that the original
order prohibited all export of Indian products to Iran by ‘merchants’;
the rescinding order permitted such exports as well as import of horses
and other cargo.' While the farman does not specify that the prohibition
applied only to the subjects of the Mughals trading with Iran, the report
of the Isfahan factors to the Company referred to ‘the king of India’s
inhibition to his merchants from trading into Persia.’ After the loss of
Qandahar to the Persians in 1648, Emperor Shah Jahan again imposed
‘restraint to his merchants from trading thither (in Persia).’'° This ban
apparently did not again apply to others, so that the English commerce
with Gambroon, carried on from Surat, flourished. Inherent in these
orders was, then, the assumption that while the subjects of the two
310 Mughal India
hostile states could be made the object of traffic-interdiction by one of
them, ‘third parties’ could not be expected to be brought under the ban.
Such a position would be in absolute accordance with international law,
as now propounded, where a sovereign state’s right to trade or not
trade with another state is absolute, but it has no right to impose its
own ban upon neutrals or third parties.
Even more interesting is the absolute absence of any concept of
‘extra-territoriality’. Neither at Gambroon in Persia, nor in the Red Sea
ports, where banya merchants from Gujarat were so numerous, was
there any attempt to create ‘autonomous’ communities, whether under
the patronage of the Mughal emperor, or independently of him.'! There
is similarly no indication that in South-East Asia Indian merchants formed
any self-governing communities. In the 1640s, a document was
submitted to the Surat authorities on behalf of a woman, Fatima, who
claimed that when her father, a merchant of Surat died at Achhi (Achin),
his slave fictitiously declared himself to have married his master’s widow.
The widow having protested, the king (padshah) of Achin imprisoned
the slave, and would have imposed severe punishment on him, if ‘the
merchants’ had not ‘pressed and persuaded’ the widow to withdraw
her complaint, whereafter ‘on the petition of the merchants’, the King
released the slave.'? The event presumably took place in the 1620s or
1630s. It is clear from this that the entire judicial and penal process was
in the hands of the king of Achin. The ‘merchants’, presumably those
from Surat or India, had a locus standi, but only as interested parties.
The assumption throughout is that the offence should have been
adjudicated where it occurred and by the sovereign authority of that
place.
This principle the Mughal authorities applied to their own territory.
Foreigners could claim no extra-territoriality, and must be bound by the
same laws as applied to the subjects of the Mughal emperor. The English
at Ahmadabad learnt early (1622) that they could not claim their cloth
back from one of their washermen, when he lost it through a theft
committed in his house, since the law was that ‘whatsoever in this
country is taken by thieves perforce is to be borne by the owner, in
whose custody soever.’'? They learnt (1619, Burhanpur) also that, if
they claimed disciplinary control over their factors, the latter’s private
debts had to be met by them—‘the law of this country compelling all
principals to make good there respondents acts.’'* This law gave no
end of trouble to the English East India Company, which sought to be
absolved of the responsibility of its factors’ ‘private debts’, a position
which the Mughal authorities consistently rejected. In one of such later
 ‘International Law’ or Conventions eyly!
disputes in the 1660s where the English Company in Bengal was
compelled to meet the claims against a factor recalled by it, it had
further to agree to follow ‘the different custom of this country from all
others’, namely ‘if a merchant cannot recover in what is due on such
bills (of exchange) (from the drawee), that he shall return them to the
person of whom he bought them and receive his money again without
interests)?
The Mughal authorities would not, similarly, permit foreign subjects
to adopt trappings not permitted to their own. On 20 September 1645
the imperial minister, Sa’ dullah Khan, issued a hasbu-l hukm expressing
alarm at the fact that at Surat the English and the Dutch were allowed
to land 200 to 300 armed sailors near the port and their presidents
(‘kaptan’) went about with 200-300 Indian armed retainers in Surat.
The landing of only 20-30 armed sailors at any one time was to be
permitted; and no armed men were to attend the presidents.'°
The Mughal emperor, therefore, neither sought nor conceded ‘extra-
territoriality’, his position being similar in this respect to the Qing Empire
of China, which was forced to accept this doctrine, along with opium,
at the point of the imperialist bayonet in the nineteenth century.'’ In
India the full-scale conquest so early superseded the “extra-territoriality’
phase that it hardly finds mention in textbook accounts of the eighteenth
century. [t must, however, still be asserted that in India too it was a
western imposition and had no indigenous origins.
The Mughal sovereign and his counsellors were conscious that their
empire was a component of a world-wide system of states. It is true
that among these states, they held those situated in the Indian sub-
continent, whether in the southern peninsula or in the Himalayas to be
subordinate states in various degrees of vassalage. They were not
prepared to concede royal titles to any such sovereign. Raja, which the
Mughal emperors conferred upon their own nobility was not deemed a
royal title. The ruler of a large kingdom like Bijapur, the Adil Shah was
only Adil Khan in the eyes of the Mughal chancery, and the Qutb Shah
of Golkunda was Qutbul Mulk to the Mughals. Regular or occasional
exaction of tribute from these rulers was another hallmark of the
relationship.
But outside of India, the Mughal emperors, in spite of assuming
such titles as Gaiti Khadiv, ‘Earth’s Lord’, or Khalifatu’z Zaman,
‘Caliph of the Age’, laid no claim to absolute supremacy over other
states. They dealt as equals with the Safavids of Persia (Shah Abbas I
was a ‘brother’ to Jahangir), the Uzbek Khans and the Ottomans (the
Sultan of Rum). The statement of Thomas Roe that the Mughal emperor
312 Mughal India
‘this overgrowne eliphant (would not) descend to article or bynde him
selfe reciprocally to any prince upon terms of equalety’, was more a
product of his sense of frustration at the Mughal court’s concern for
the interests of the Empire’s own merchants while treating of his demands,
than an accurate statement of the Mughal emperor’s attitude.'*
The realistic attitudeof the Mughal emperors was shown in the
sensible view they took over the question of salutation expected from
envoys of foreign sovereigns. For reasons difficult to understand today,
Europeans of the colonial era tended to see in the Chinese kowtow or
the Indian form of genuflexion (sijda) or deep bow (taslim, salam:
‘placing the hand thrice upon the head, and as often dropping it down
to the ground’), acts of unacceptable humiliation,'? while they did not
attach any stigma of humility to the European ritual of kneeling.
Generally, at the Mughal court, Asian envoys performed the mode of
salutation current at this court, as Bernier witnessed the Uzbek envoys
doing before Aurangzeb, or they observed the form of salutation current
at their own courts, as the Persian envoy was seen doing (1661).”
When the English Ambassador, Sir Thomas Roe, appeared before
Jahangir in 1616, he was ‘freely granted leave ... to use the customs of
my country’: Entering the durbar, he made three successive ‘reverences’
in the European manner.*' When the Dutch envoy performed salam in
the Indian fashion before Aurangzeb, the latter himself desired from
him ‘a salute @ la Frank’.”
The conventions of protection and immunities granted to envoys,
now codified in international law and practice, were also observed,
being the product of long-developed traditions of inter-state intercourse
in Asia. When Sir Thomas Roe arrived at Surat in 1615, his difficulties
with local officials who were not clear about his status were resolved
once a farman arrived from the court which, according to Roe,
‘contayned a command to all governors of provinces or towns to attend
me with sufficient guard and not to meddle with anything that was
mine.’** Similarly, although tobacco-smoking was strictly prohibited in
Iran, Jahangir’s ambassador Khan Alam was expressly allowed by Shah
Abbas I to smoke in public, much to the discomfort of those present.”4
There were two aspects of interstate intercourse in which Mughal
or perhaps Asian practice was different from the European. There were,
first, no permanent representations of one sovereign at the seat of another
in the form of embassies or consulates. An embassy was in the nature
of a temporary mission, often with specific purposes; and the value of
the range of gifts sent with it was an index of the importance that was
attached to it by the sovereign who sent it.”
 ‘International Law’ or Conventions 313
Second, the idea of a ‘treaty’ in the sense of a contractual agreement
signed by the plenipotentiaries of two sovereigns, was largely alien to
the diplomatic practices in Islamic Asia and India. Such interstate
agreements took the form of exchange of letters, or an offer contained
in the letter from one sovereign accepted by the other, as, for example,
Abdullah Khan Uzbek’s offer in a letter of treating the Hindukush as the
boundary, accepted by Akbar through his reply (1596).?° The only
‘treaty’ known from Mughal history seems to be that of Shalimar (1740),
when the victor, Nadir Shah dictated terms to the Mughal emperor in
the latter’s capital.*” This was hardly a ‘treaty’ in any proper sense,
since the Mughal emperor was at the time not a free agent.
It is, therefore not surprising that the Mughal court gave very little
consideration to the idea of a ‘solemn treaty’ between Jahangir and
James I proposed by Roe on the English subjects’ rights and privileges
in India. It was not that the Mughal authorities saw the king of England
as too insignificant to be treated at par with the Mughal emperor. The
entire notion of a treaty itself was foreign to them. What they were
willing to do was to issue imperial rescripts to cover points that they
could agree to; it was for the other party to record and make
arrangements to fulfil its side of the bargain.
Clearly, the Asian version of ‘international law’ deserves more
attention, if we are to understand much of the diplomatic, politica] and
commercial history of the period. Unluckily, interesting as the subject
is, little attention has been paid to it, at least among the historians of
India. The present paper may be seen as an initial step in any enquiry
which can grow almost infinitely in scope, so rich is the evidence.

NOTES

1. A’in-i Akbari, ed. H. Blochmann, Calcutta, 1867-77, 1, p. 284.

2. Rai Chandrabhan Brahman, Char Chaman-i Barhaman, c. 1656,
B. L. Add. 18,863, f. 25a—b.
3. Storia do Mogor, tr. W. Irvine, Indian Texts Series, Government of
India, London, 1907-8, u, p. 451. For a similar duty devolving on the kotwal,
see ibid., II, p. 421.
4. English Factories in India, 1618-21, ed. W. Foster, pp. 81, 89.
5. English Factories in India, 1646-50, ed. pp. 300-1, 302.
6. English Factories in India, 1624-9, pp. vi, 59 (‘The losses may
appear great, but they practically amount merely to a restitution of the
money forced from the natives in 1623’).
314 Mughal India
7. Ibid.,p. 28.
8. Nat. Paris, Blochet; Suppl. Pers. 482, f. 44a—b.
9. English Factories, 1637-41, p. 242 (italics ours).
10. Surat letter to keg 20 March 1650 (English Factories, 1646—
50, pp. 307-8).
11. In Persia, the major descriptions of these merchants are by numerous
European travellers like Pietro della Valle, Chardin and Tavernier and in the
English factory records. A competent modern account of them is yet to be
written, that in Riazu! Islam, Indo-Persian Relations, Teheran, 1970, pp.
171-3, being much too brief. For Gujarati merchants in the Red Sea, there is
a definitive study by Ashin Das Gupta, ‘Gujarati Merchants and the Red
Sea Trade, 1700-1725’, Age of Partnership, ed. B.B. Kling and M.N. Pearson,
Honolulu, 1979, pp. 132-8.
12. Bib. Nationale, Paris: Blochet Sup. Pers. 482, f. 226a—227a.
13. English Factories, 1622-23, pp. 40-41.
14. English Factories, 1618-21, p. 89.
15. English Factories, 1668-69, p. 177.
16. Bib. Nationale, Paris: Blochet Sup. Pers. 482, f. 133a—-b.
17. There is a very good critique of the western view that ‘extra-
territoriality’ was an acceptable institution in the Celestial Empire and Asian
states generally: Yu Shengwa, ‘Vestiges of Colonialist Ideology: An Obstacle
to the Study of the History of Sino-Western Relations’, JHR, ed. V. Jha, xvi
(1-2), pp. 223-44, reprinted from Social Sciences in China, no. 4, Beijing,
1991.
18. From a letter of 21 August 1617 to the English Ambassador at
Constantinople, quoted by W. Foster, The Embassy of Sir Thomas Roe to
India, London, 1926, p. xliii.
19. See Francois Bernier, Travels in the Mogul Empire, AD 1656-1668,
tr. A. Constable, revised by V.A. Smith, London, 1916, pp. 117 (where the
ceremony is described) and 119 (where it is said that it ‘savours of servility’).
20. Ibid., pp. 117, 119, 147-8. Manucci’s account of the Persian
ambassador being forced to bow is quite fanciful (Storia do Mogor, u, p. 50;
cf. Riazul Islam, /ndo-Persian Relations, p. 126 n.)
21. Embassy of Sir Thomas Roe, p. 87. See also p. 214, where Jahangir
told his officers not to insist that Roe should perform ‘size-da’ (sijda).
22. Bernier, Travels in the Mogul Empire, p. 127.
23. Embassy of Sir Thomas Roe, p. 65.
24. Jahangir, Tuzuk-i Jahangiri, ed. Saiyid Ahmad, Ghazipur and Aligarh,
1863-4, p. 183; Riazul Islam, Indo-Persian Relations, p. 75 and n.
25. On the gifts brought by Persian embassies to Jahangir and
Aurangzeb, see Embassy of Sir Thomas Roe, pp. 262-3; Bernier, Travels in
 ‘International Law’ or Conventions ats

the Mogul Empire, pp. 147-8. For the gifts carried by Khan Azam’s embassy
to Persia, see Riazul Islam, Indo-Persian Relations, pp. 74, 233.
26. Abul Fazl, Akbarnama, Bib. Ind., Calcutta, 1873-87, m1, p. 705.
27. Zahiruddin Malik, The Reign of Muhammad Shah, Bombay, 1977, p.
181; Riazul Islam, /ndo-Persian Relations, pp. 150-2.
28. Editor’s introduction to Embassy of Sir Thomas Roe, pp. xxxiii, ff.
 25
Jahangir and the Uzbeks

The north-western frontier of the Indian empire has ranged over a

vast region from beyond the Oxus to as far as the Beas. Under the
Delhi Sultans, it generally lay across one part or another of the Punjab.
Under Sher Shah the Salt Range in north-western Punjab seems to
have formed the border with his newly built fortress of Rohtas, as the
key-point in the defence line. Akbar appears to have extended the
effective frontier up to the Indus with his great fort of Attock guarding
the main ferry across the Indus.'
Given the conditions of medieval warfare, none of the frontiers
maintained by medieval rulers could be described as satisfactory. The
Punjab rivers were all fordable except during the season of inundations.
The Indus too was difficult to defend during the winter and early
summer with its long course and broad channels in the plains. The
Salt Range is really formed of low hills that could be penetrated at any
number of points. To the west of the Indus, the Sulaiman Range,
which the British made their frontier, was not a possible frontier for
any previous Indian government. For one, it is pierced by numerous
passess open throughout the year; for another, it was inhabited by
Afghan tribes who made regular garrisoning of all the passes by any
outside army impossible. A truly ‘scientific frontier’ in medieval
conditions could be secured only if an Indian government held the
Hindukush mountains with Kabul and Qandahar as the two great
fortresses in the rear commanding the only two possible routes from
the north-west into India. It was one of Akbar’s great achievements
that he ultimately set his frontier at the Hindukush, shifting it from the
Indus. It is no accident that the military significance of the Hindukush
was well recognized by writers of the Mughal period.’
Akbar’s empire had in the earlier part of his reign the Indus and not
the Hindukush as its frontier. The Hindukush then separated the splinter
Uzbek kingdom of Balkh and the Timurid kingdom of Badakhshan on
the one hand, and Akbar’s brother, Mirza Hakim’s principality of Kabul,
on the other. But these kingdoms were swept away under the mounting
pressure of the Uzbek and Mughal empires just one and haif decade
befores the end of the century.
 Jahangir and the Uzbeks 317
In 1585 Abdullah Khan Uzbek attacked Badakhshan and conquered
it. The following year (1586) Balkh was annexed by him. On the
other hand, in 1585 Mirza Hakim died and Kabul was henceforth
governed directly by Akbar.t For the moment Akbar seemed to have
even thought of challenging the Uzbek occupation of Balkh and
Badakhshan.
But, whatever their proclaimed or secret ambitions, neither of the
two rulers dared in practice to contest the other’s annexations, and
thus more by accident than design, had to acknowledge the Hindukush
as their boundary. This recognition was made explicitly by Akbar
when he wrote to Abdullah Khan Uzbek that Hindu-Koh (Hindukush)
be fixed as the frontier of the two empires; and it seems that Abdullah
Khan too agreed to this.°

II
In 1598 Abdullah Khan Uzbek died and was succeeded by his son
Abdul Mumin who was killed after a short reign of six months.° Civil
war then broke out in Trans-Oxiana. Shah Abbas, who was waiting
for such an opportunity, occupied Khurasan. The nobles of Bukhara
in frustration offered the throne of Trans-Oxiana to Jan Mohammad
so that law and order could be restored and the safety of the kingdom
ensured. Jan Mohammad refused the offer and his son Din Mohammad
ascended the throne of Trans-Oxiana, who, within a few days of his
accession, died fighting against Shah Abbas in the vicinity of Herat.’
After the death of Din Mohammad, his brother Bagi Mohammad
ascended the throne and inflicted a crushing defeat on the Shah of
Persia.’ Baqi Mohammad Khan was succeeded by his brother, Wali
Mohammad Khan.’ After the accession of Wali Mohammad Khan,
the nobles and the Uzbek leaders cooperated with him as a result of
which stability in the Uzbek kingdom was restored. Wali Mohammad
Khan treated his nephews with the utmost affection and consideration.
He bestowed the province of Samarqand on Imam Quli Khan and the
provinces of Balkh, Andkhud, Sherghan, etc. on Nazr Mohammad
Khan. Wali Mohammad Khan also placed two of his reliable officers
as ataligs (‘guardians with each of his cousins. For a long time Imam
Quli Khan and Nazr Mohammad Khan obeyed their uncle Wali
Mohammad Khan. Subsequently, Imam Quli Khan killed his ataliq and
rebelled. Wali Mohammad Khan was hurt at the behaviour of his
nephew and proceeded towards Samarqand to suppress the revolt.
Imam Quli Khan fled to Balkh and joined his brother Nazr Mohammad
318 Mughal India
Khan who also killed his ataliq and rebelled. Both brothers made a joint
front against Wali Mohammad Khan and wanted to expel him from
Trans-Oxiana.'° As a result of this combination the position of Wali
Mohammad Khan became critical and he fled to Persia. But news of
support from some of the Uzbek chiefs tempted him to return to his
kingdom, and oppose Imam Quli in a battle near Samarqand. Victory
however went to Imam Quli, and Wali Mohammad Khan was captured
and then beheaded at his orders."'
In 1611 Imam Quli Khan was proclaimed as the king (‘Khan’ )of
Bukhara and he assigned Balkh and Badakhshan to his younger brother,
Nazr Mohammad Khan.'? Nazr Mohammad united these two territories
which in the course of time became virtually a separate kingdom.
Henceforth, the Mughals had to deal primarily with this kingdom,
though it continued formally to be a part of the Uzbek Empire.

Il
The disturbed condition of the Uzbek Empire at the time of Jahangir’s
accession in 1605 appears to have led him to dream of reconquering
his ‘ancestral lands’—a project which, he says, was very dear to his
father, Akbar’s heart.'?
It seems that in anticipation of such an opportunity Jahangir adopted
an attitude of coolness towards the Uzbeks, while from the very
beginning of his reign he cultivated relations of friendship with the
Safavid Empire, the traditional enemy of the Uzbeks. Thus, in the
first one and a half decadeof the reign there was virtually no contact
between the Mughal and the Uzbek courts, let alone a formal exchange
of envoys between the two rulers. In fact, at one time Imam Quli
appears to have received reports that Jahangir was contemplating an
expedition to Badakhshan (possibly to synchronize with some Persian
action against the Uzbeks).'4
However, two factors, both following from the increased power
of Shah Abbas of Persia, led to a thawing of this diplomatic ‘freeze’.
From 1614 to 1617 the Uzbeks had been attacking and plundering
parts of the Persian possessions of Khurasan; and both Imam Quli
and Nazr Mohammad cooperated in these aggressive operations. But
an Uzbek reverse near Merv in 1617 was followed by the march of a
very large Persian army to the border of Trans-Oxiana. The Uzbeks
were cowed by this show of force and were compelled to seek peace
with the Shah.'> From now on, in view of the Persian threat to their
dominions, it must have appeared to them expedient to enter into
 Jahangir and the Uzbeks 319
better relations with Jahangir, and to secure their rear from the other
side. On the other hand, despite many exchanges of envoys, presents
and letters between Mughal and Persian emperors, Shah Abbas had
never explicitly abandoned his claim on Qandahar, the bone of
contention between the Safavids and the Mughals. In 1620-1, his
envoy Zanbil Beg actually raised the matter of Qandahar with Jahangir,
and this must have made the Mughal emperor uneasy about Persian
intentions. A natural antidote to the Persian menace was an alliance
with the Uzbeks; and so in Jahangir’s eyes, too, good relations with
the Uzbeks became good policy.
The first step in this direction was taken in 1621 when the mother
of Imam Quli sent to Nur Jahan a formal letter of goodwill along with
some rare products of Central Asia as gifts. Next year Khwaja Nasir
was sent by Nur Jahan with a letter and some presents.'® That this
restoration of diplomatic relations should have taken place in 1621
was quite natural, since Persian preparations for a campaign in the
East had reached an advanced stage and both the Uzbeks and Jahangir
must have been afraid that they were to be the victims of a Persian
attack. An English factor, writing on 18 November 1621, actually
thought that both the Uzbeks and the Mughals were to be attacked by
the Shah."
The serious proportions which the Persian threat assumed for both
the empires in 1622, led to an exchange of full-fledged embassies
between the Uzbek and Mughal emperors. Imam Quli now sent an
envoy with a letter and some presents. Curiously enough, this embassy
is not mentioned in Jahangir’s memoirs or other Mughal chronicles,
and the only information that we have about it comes from the Uzbek
chronicle, Tazkira-i-Mugim Khani.'*
In fact, far from scorning Imam Quli, Jahangir was seeking his
friendship. He now sent an embassy under Saiyed Mir Barkah which
is briefly referred to in the Ma’asir i-Jahangiri.'” The Tazkira-i-Mugim
Khani gives a detailed account of this embassy, although it confounds
Mir Barkah with Hakim Haziq, who was actually sent later by Shah
Jahan as an ambassador to Imam Quli in 1628.7° It tells us that the
envoy came bringing from Jahangir for Imam Quli Khan presents and
gifts worth a full year’s revenue of India. We are told that Imam Quli
was then so annoyed with Jahangir that he neither saw the envoy nor
accepted the presents for six months. When he was finally persuaded
to grant an audience, he did so while hunting and made use of the
occasion to taunt the envoy obliquely about Jahangir’s military
weakness.”! It is difficult to accept all the details of the story as the
320 Mughal India
Uzbek chronicle gives them. But it is quite possible that by this time
Imam Quli might have really lost all interest in an alliance with Jahangir,
so as to view with coolness the latter’s attempt at being friendly. The
Persian seizure of Qandahar near the end of 1622 made it clear that it
was the Mughals against whom Persians military preparations had
been directed. The quick success the Persians attained also showed
up the weakness of the Mughals. Imam Quli must, therefore, have
hesitated to annoy the Persians unnecessarily by accepting any
overtures from Jahangir who was now useless as an ally.

IV
It is a curious lacuna in most modern accounts that the hostilities
which broke out between the Uzbeks and the Mughals almost
immediately after the fall of Qandahar and posed a menace to the
Mughal possession of Kabul for two years, have been ignored. As
a result, Nazr Mohammad’s raid on Kabul in 1628 is considered
the first Uzbek action against the Mughals,*? while in fact it had
been preceded by two invasions during the reign of Jahangir. These
two invasions themselves have generally been ignored in modern
studies.°
It is not difficult to see why the Uzbek attitude towards the Mughals
should have changed with the fall of Qandahar. The Persians by their
campaign against Qaidahar indicated that it was the Mughals, and not
the Uzbeks, against whom their warlike preparations had been directed.
This must have dissipated the Uzbeks’ fear of a Persian invasion. Thus
in 1625 we find Nazr Mohammad sending Nazir Mirza Bashi as
ambassador to the Shah to establish good relations with the Persians.”*
The Mughal loss of Qandahar, followed immediately by Shah
Jahan’s rebellion, made the Mughal position in the north-west extremely
vulnerable. While Shah Jahan’s long-lasting rebellion made it difficult
tor Jahangir to reinforce his army in the Kabul province, the loss of
Qandahar must have weakened the Mughal control over the Hazaras,
who lived in the mountainous regions to the west and south of Kabul
astride the Uzbek—Mughal frontier. All these considerations led to Nazr
Mohammad’s entertaining a sudden ambition to subvert the Mughal
hold south of the Hindukush and, so to speak, share the spoils with
Persia. .
A crucial position in any Uzbek project of subversion was occupied
by the two races settled south of Hindukush, namely the Hazaras and
the Afghans. Of the two, the Hazaras’ territories were geographically
 Jahangir and the Uzbeks 321
closer to the Uzbek frontier, and as a Persian speaking race, but claiming
Mongol descent,” they had obvious affinities with the Uzbeks.
The Hazaras occupied a ‘very extensive area of country, extending
from the borders of Kabul and Ghazni to those of Herat in one direction
and from the vicinity of Kandahar to that of Balkh in the other.’”° All
routes across it were most difficult to use, and were closed for the
larger part of the year.”’
So long as the Mughals held Qandahar, their control over the
Kabul—Ghaznin—Qandahar route depended upon the loyalty of the
Hazaras; and the Mughals generally appear to have maintained some
kind of authority over them.”* With the fall of Qandahar the importance
of the route declined, and so also possibly the traffic out of tolls on
which the friendship of the Hazaras used to be purchased. The most
important Mughal-held town on the edge of the Hazara country was
now Ghaznin, which stood at the point where the Hazaras mingled
with the Afghans who inhabited the country to its east.”? Ghaznin lay
about a hundred miles south-west of Kabul, and was connected with
that city by a fairly passable route, that is the section of the road from
Qandahar to Kabul, which as a whole was remarkable for the easy
passage it provides in a rugged, mountainous land.*°
It appears that the Uzbeks found Kabul quite well defended, and
their first strategic plan was to turn the flank of the Mughal position
by penetrating into the Hazara country and seizing Ghaznin. They
would then have commanded an easy route to Kabul from the south.
In the spring of 1624 the plans of the Uzbeks appear to have
matured, and Yalingtosh, who was the leading commander of Nazr
Mohammad, began to mount pressure upon the Hazara clans encamped
near Ghaznin. The Hazara leaders till now had owed allegiance to the
Mughals. They, therefore, approached Khanazad Khan, who was then
governing Kabul on behalf of his father, Mahabat Khan, and sought
his protection and submitted that failing such protection they would
have no alternative but to submit to Yalingtosh. Thereupon Khanazad
Khan sent a strong force to the succour of the Hazaras. They defeated
the Uzbeks, Yalingtosh’s nephew being killed and the fort of Chatur
demolished. This reverse and the loss of his nephew greatly provoked
Yalingtosh who asked for leave from Nazr Mohammad to raid the
borders of Kabul. In the beginning Nazr Mohammad Khan and his
leading nobles were not agreeable to this dangerous proposal, but
after repeated persuasion Yalingtosh got sought-after permission.
Thereupon Yalingtosh collected a large army consisting of Almans’!
and Uzbeks and marched towards the Mughal frontier. On the other
322 Mughal India
side, Khanazad Khan made his preparations, and hearing of Yalingtosh’s
approach encamped at village Sheer at a distance of two karohs (five
miles) from Ghaznin and arranged his army in battle formation. Khanazad
Khan placed Mubariz Khan Afghan, Ani Rai Singh Dalan and Saiyid
Haji in the vanguard. The Uzbek army encamped at a distance of three
karohs from Ghaznin. The Mughal army was expecting the encounter
the next day but suddenly the Uzbek army appeared and the battle
started. After a sharp engagement in which Khanazad Khan used his
artillery to great effect, the Mughals inflicted a crushing defeat upon
the Uzbeks, and Yalingtosh fled from the battlefield.*”
Pelsaert, the Dutch chronicler, has also given a very detailed account
of this attack, generally confirming Mutamad Khan’s account, which
we have followed above. It is interesting that Pelsaert appears to have
believed that the Uzbeks were intending a direct assault on Kabul, and
Ghaznin was merely on their way. He adds certain other details as
well which are significant.**
This resounding military success of the Mughals might have
deterred any further encroachments of the Uzbeks but for the
continuance of Shah Jahan’s rebellion and the straining of relations
between the Mughal court and Mahabat Khan. Thus, soon after this
battle, Kabul was taken away from Mahabat Khan and given over to
Khwaja Abul Hasan. As a result Khanazad Khan, who was deputizing
for his father, left the province with his troops to take up his charge
of Bengal. Meanwhile, Abul Hasan sent his son Zafar Khan to govern
the province on his behalf.
In the administrative and military dislocation which followed
Khanazad Khan’s recall, the Uzbeks saw an opportunity to try their
hand again. This time they sought the aid of the disaffected elements
from amongst the Afghans. This was a policy which Abdullah Khan
Uzbek had followed four decades earlier to checkmate Akbar,** and
now his successors tried to use it to undermine Mughal rule in Kabul.
Accordingly, Ahdad, a Raushanai leader, who had repeatedly organized
rebellions among the Afghans against Mughal rule, was incited by
Yalingtosh to rise and engage the Mughals, while he himself marched
to the neighbourhood of Ghaznin (1625).
Zafar Khan heard of this fresh attempt of the Uzbeks to subvert
Mughal authority as soon as he reached Kabul. He immediately
advanced against Yalingtosh. Yalingtosh, seeing that the Mughals first
meant to deal with him, made peace with Zafar Khan, abandoning his
ally Ahdad to face the Mughals single-handed. Ahdad thereupon fled
to the Lawagh mountains and sought refuge in a fort there. He was
 Jahangir and the Uzbeks 323
pursued by the Mughals and his fort was stormed. Ahdad was killed
in the fight, and his head was sent to Jahangir.*°

These two successive failures in two years (nineteenth and twentieth

regnal years of Jahangir) seem to have convinced the Uzbek rulers
that there was no chance of penetrating the Mughal defences despite
continuing disturbances in the Mughal Empire. As a result, they reverted
to their earlier attempts to make an alliance with Jahangir, in view of
the increasing might of Persia. Since Jahangir, on his part, could
hardly have entertained any aggressive designs against Central Asia at
this time, there was no reason why he should not respond to these
friendly overtures.
Naturally enough, the first step in this direction was taken by Nazr
Mohammad, who had just been carrying on hostilities against the
Mughals. In the beginning of the twenty-first regnal year of Jahangir,
Nazr Mohammad sent Shah Khwaja as ambassador to the Mughal
court. Shah Khwaja presented a letter of Nazr Mohammad to Jahangir.
The letter contained professions of sincerity and friendship to Jahangir
and was probably intended as an apology for Yalingtosh’s conduct.
Shah Khwaja also presented gifts worth Rs 50,000 on behalf of his
master to Jahangir. Jahangir in return gave Rs 30,000 to Shah Khwaja
as inam.*°
Soon afterwards Imam Quli sent Khwaja Abdur Rahim as his
ambassador with Khwaja Hasan as his deputy. Jahangir received the
ambassador with great honour. He ordered the leading nobles of the
empire to go out to receive the ambassadors. Khwaja Abdur Rahim
was exempted from taslim and kurnish and from all formalities of
court etiquette imposed on ambassadors. At the time of his audience
Jahangir asked him to sit near the imperial throne, which was a very
rare honour. A robe of honour and a jewelled dagger were bestowed
on the ambassador and Rs 50,000 in cash were given to him as inam.*’
Imam Quli in his letter to Jahangir praised the noble descent of Khwaja
Abdur Rahim and also drew the attention of Jahangir to the old
agreement directed against Persia that had been concluded between
Akbar and Abdullah Khan Uzbek. He asserted that since there was an
understanding between Abdullah Khan and Akbar to conquer the road
to the Holy Places (Mecca and Medina) and since, being blessed by
courage, faith and enterprise, they brought their intention to fruition,
324 Mughal India
they were able to conquer the whole of Khurasan and most of Iraq
and ‘Ajam’. Thus even now, the letter continued, the swords and
lances of the soldiers of Turan bore marks of the blood of the braves
of Iran. Imam Quli then referred to his father’s drinking the cup of
martyrdom at the hands of the Persians at the battle of Herat. He was,
therefore, doubly resolved to take up arms against Persia: first, in
order to clear the path to Mecca and, second, to avenge the death of
his father. He professed to believe that Jahangir too wanted to proceed
against Persia in the footsteps of Akbar and that he was only prevented
from doing so by Khurram’s rebellion. Imam Quli attributed Khurram’s
conduct to the rashness of youth and advised Jahangir to forgive
him, while he counselled Khurram to desist from rebellion. In
conclusion, he requested Jahangir to appoint Khurram, after conciliating
him, along with other princes, to lead a campaign to conquer the
route to Mecca, and assured him that he would collaborate with him
in such a venture.**
It is not possible to judge how far this proposal was meant to be
taken seriously; probably it was offered chiefly as a courteous reminder
of the friendly relations subsisting formerly. Jahangir certainly made
no formal commitment, but did his best to show his regard for the
ambassador.
Jahangir died while Abdur Rahim was still at the court. He witnessed
the events that followed, but died soon after Shah Jahan’s accession.
The new einperor ordered a befitting funeral for the Uzbek envoy.*
In the meantime Mughal—Uzbek relations took yet another turn, since
Nazr Mohammad saw an opportunity in the disorder and threat of
civil war after Jahangir’s death to make an inroad into Mughal territory.
This was his well-known, but unsuccessful, attack on Kabul, made
early in 1628.
A study of Jahangir’s relations with the Uzbeks shows a number
of twists and turns. But if we bear in mind the political developments
in the three major powers involved, namely the Mughal Empire, the
Uzbek Empire and Safavid Persia, most of them can be satisfactorily
explained. On the whole, Jahangir appears to have followed a cautious
and defensive policy, and he must be given the credit of keeping
secure the Mughal position on the Hindukush even in the very difficult
years that followed the loss of Qandahar and the rebellion of Shah
Jahan.
 Jahangir and the Uzbeks 325

NOTES

1. The construction of the fort of Attock was completed in 1586.

‘Attock is a town situated on a promontory where two great rivers meet. It
is one of the best fortresses of the Great Mogul, and they do not permit
any stranger to enter it if he does not hold a passport from the king’ (Jean-
Baptiste Tavernier, Travels in India, tr. V. Ball, ed. W. Crooke, London,
1925, 1, p. 76).
2. A’in-i-Akbari, i, p. 192; pp. 4089 (tr.). ‘Qandahar is known as the
gate of Persia’ (Sujan Rai Bhandari, Khulasat-ut-Tawarikh, ed. Z. Hasan,
Delhi, 1918 p. 84). The Hindukush was considered to be the northern
boundary of India (Tarikh-i Alfi, f. 5; typed copy Dept. of History, AMU,
Aligarh); see also Baburnama, tr. A.S. Beveridge, London, 1921. I, p. 204;
Tuzuk, ed. Sayyid Ahmad, Ghazipur and Aligarh, 1863-4, pp. 21—2; Sujan
Rai Bhandari, Khulasat-ut-Tawarikh, p. 88. Cf. Tavernier, 1 , pp. 73-6.
3. Nizamudin Ahmed, Tabagat-i-Akbari, Nawal Kishore (Lucknow),
1875, p. 365; Muhammad Yusuf, Tazkira-i-Mugim Khani, Royal Asiatic
Society MS 160, ff. 27a—b.
4. Akbarnama, i, p. 466.
5. Insha-i-Abul Fazal, Kanpur, 1872, p. 4.
6. Akbarnama, i, pp. 736, 739. Tazkira-i-Mugim Khani, ff. 32a— b.
7. Tuzuk, p. 11; Iskandar Munshi, Alam Arai Abbasi,Tehran, 1313-14
AH., pp. 576, 588-9; Tazkira-i-Mugim Khani, ff. 35a—36b.
8. Tazkira-i-Mugim Khani, ff. 37b, 42a.
9. Tuzuk, p. 11; Alam Arai Abbasi, pp. 576, 588-9; Tazkira-i-Muqgim
Khani, f. 42a.
10. Tuzuk, p. 11; Alam Arai Abbasi, pp. 588—9; Tazkira-i-Mugim Khani,
f. 44a.
11. Igbalnama, Bib. Ind., Calcutta, 1865, 1, pp. 40-1; Alam Arai Abbasi
pp. 591-9; Mirza Tahir Wahid Mir Munshi, Jarikh-Abbas Nama,
Subhanullah Coll, no. 955—3, Azad Library, AMU, Aligarh, ff. 26-7; Tazkira-
i-Muqim Khani, ff. 44a-45a. These accounts differ as to the assistance
Wali Mohammad received from Persia.
12.. Lahori, Badshah Nama, Bib. Ind., Calcutta, 1866-72, 1, pp. 220-1;
Amin Qazvini, Aligarh MS, f. 269a; Alam Arai Abbasi, pp. 588-91; Tazkira-
i-Muqgim Khani, f. 45b.
IS Zul oD Ue
14. Tazkira-i-Mugim Khani, f. 52a.
15. Alam Arai Abbasi, pp. 677-8.
16. Tuzuk, p. 330. Neither of these embassies is referred to in the Uzbek
chronicle, Tazkira-i-Mugim Khani.
17. W. Foster (ed.), The English Factories in India, 1618-1621,
Oxford, 1906, p. 33.
18. Tazkira-i-Mugim Khani, f. 51a.
326 Mughal India
19. Ma’asir-i-Jahangiri (Dept. of History AMU, typed copy), p. 10.
20. Lahori, Badshahnama, 1, pp. 233-6.
21. Tazkira-i-Mugim Khani, ff. 5la—52a.
22. B.P. Saxena, History of Shah Jahan of Dihli, Allahabad, 1958, p.
183; Abdul Rahim, ‘The Mughal Relations with Persia and Central Asia’,
Islamic Culture, vol. 1x, p. 188.
23. For example, neither of the raids is mentioned in Beni Prasad,
History of Jahangir, 5th ed., Allahabad, 1962, or Abdur Rahim, “The Mughal
Relations with Persia and Central Asia’. But see R.P. Tripathi, Rise and
Fall of the Mughal Empire, p. 391, where the first invasion is described,
though with a few inaccuracies.
24. Alam Arai Abbasi, p. 715.
25. A’in-i-Akbari, pub. Nawal Kishor, Lucknow, 1892, 1, p. 192.
26. H.W. Bellow, The Races of Afghanistan, Calcutta, 1880, pp. 113-

27. Holdich, The Gates of India, London, 1910, pp. 216, 515-16.
28. A’in-i-Akbari, i, pp. 190-1.
29. Cf. Baburnama, tr. Beveridge, 1, p. 218.
30. Holdich, The Gates of India, p. 512.
31. A nomadic Turkic tribe, described in detail by Lahori,
Badshahnama, i, pp. 515-16, 618-19.
32. Igbalnama, wi, pp. 207-9; Ma’asir-i-Jahangiri, Lytton no. 56,
AMU, Aligarh ff. 82b-83a; Tuzuk, pp. 386-7; Ma’asir-ul-Umara, 1, p. 740.
33. Pelsaert, A Dutch Chronicle of Mughal India, tr. and ed. by Brij
Narain and S.R. Sharma, Calcutta, 1957, pp. 66-7.
34. Akbarnama, i, pp. 477-8.
35. Igbalnama-—i-Jahangiri, 1, pp. 228-9. Cf. also Kami Shirazi,
Fathnamai-Nur Jahan Begam, Bib. Nat., Paris, MS. Blochet, im, 1874,
Suppl. Pers. Cat. 506; ff. 19a—20a.
36. Igbalnama, i, p. 242; Ma’asir-i-Jahangiri, MS 31, Dept. of History.
AMU Aligarh, p. 8. This embassy from Nazr Mohammad has neither been
mentioned by Beni Prasad in his History ofJahangir nor by Abdur Rahim,
‘The Mughal Relations with Persia and Central Asia’.
37. Iqgbalnama, il, p. 259; Tuzuk, p. 416 (Mohammad Hadi’s
continuation); Ma'asir-i-Jahangiri, MS 31, Dept. of History, AMU, Aligarh,
pp. 10-12.
38. Ma’asir-i-Jahangiri, pp. 10-14. MS 31, Dept. of History, AMU,
Aligarh. (Typed copy of fragment from the 20th R.Y. of Jahangir till the end
of Jahangir’s reign. Copied from the MS of Khuda Baksh Oriental Library,
Patna.)
39. Lahori, Badshahnama, |, p. 193.
 26

The Objectives Behind the

Mughal Expedition into
Balkh and Badakhshan, 1646-47

Shah Jahan’s expedition to Balkh and Badakhshan, marking one of

those very rare events—and it may even have been unique—when
an army from India crossed the Hindukush, has excited widespread
interest among students of history. There are competent modern
accounts of the expedition from the pens of Sir Jadunath Sarkar!
and B.P. Saxena;? and aspects of the diplomatic history have been
dealt with by Abdur Rahim.’ In the present paper an attempt is made
to analyse the Mughal objectives, by considering first the geographical
factors, and, second, the contemporary evidence, some of which
has escaped the notice of modern scholars.
The first question to be asked is whether the Mughals had any
compelling reason, from the point of view of military geography, to
press their frontier beyond the line they already held. In other words,
we should examine whether the replacement of the Hindukush, which
they had been holding for about eighty years, by the Oxus as the
new frontier would have served their security interests any better.
The military significance of the Hindukush was well recognized
by the writers of the Mughal period. Perhaps the description of this
range from a contemporary and a modern writer might suffice to
show how formidable a wall it forms. First, there is the detailed
description by Abul Faz:
The country of Kabul is surrounded on all sides by lofty mountains, so
that the sudden invasion of an enemy is attended with extreme difficulty.
The Hindukush separates Kabul from Badakhshan and Balkh, and seven
routes are employed by the people of Turan in their marches to and fro.
Three are by the Panjshir (valley), the highest of which is over the Khawak
Pass; below this is Tul, and the next lower in succession, Bazarak. The
best of these is Tul, but it is somewhat long as its name implies. The most
direct is over the heights called Haft Bachah (the seven younglings). From
Anderab two roads unite at the foot of the main pass and debouch (on
328 Mughal India
Parwan) by the Haft Bachah. This is extremely arduous. Three other roads
lead by Poran up the Ghorband valley. The nearest route is by the pass of
Yangi-Yuli (the new road) which leads down to Waliyan and Kinjan; another
is Qipchak Pass, also somewhat easy to traverse, and the third is the
Shibertu. In the summer when the rivers rise, it is by this pass that they
descend by the way of Bamian and Talikan, but in the winter the Abdorah
route is chosen, for at this season, all other routes but this are closed.*

Among the modern authorities on the subject, Holdich judges the

Hindukush to be an almost inviolable line of defence, for a defender
who is properly wary of his enemy’s doings: “We may rest content
with the Hindukush barrier as a defensive line which cannot be
violated in the future as it has been in the past by any formidable
force cutting through Badakhshan, without years of preparation and
forewarning.’°
We may now pass on to a consideration of the usefulness of the
Oxus as a military barrier. The river Oxus formed the traditional
boundary between Iran and Turan, that is between the Persian-
speaking and Turkic-speaking people. Despite this traditional political
significance attaching to it, the value of the Oxus as a military barrier
was very limited, and it is not surprising that it has seldom served as
an actual boundary between kingdoms.° However, in its upper
reaches, north of Badakhshan, it was undoubtedly not easy to cross.
In its ‘immense sweep round Badakhshan, flowing north, then west,
and finally south before reaching the neighbourhood of Khulm’, its
volume of water was swelled by the joining of ‘many great affluents
on its right bank’.’
In winter the river used to freeze above Darwaz. The only route
open to the travellers was the bed of the frozen river. This was
extremely difficult in the winter season due to the biting cold of the
glacier-bred winds of the Hindukush. But as it flowed into the plains
near Balkh, it became fordable at many places:

The Oxus, to the North of Balkh, is well known, and the fords and passages
of that river have been reckoned up with fair accuracy. From time immemorial
every horde of Skythic origin, Nagas, Sakas or Jatas must have passed
these fords from the hills and valleys of the Central Asian divide on their
way to India. The Oxus fords have seen men in millions making south for
the valleys of Badakhshan and Golden Gates of Central Asiatic ideal which
lay yet farther south beyond the grim line of Hindukush.*

If, then, it is unlikely that the Mughals could seriously think of

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 Mughal Expedition into Balkh and Badakhshan 329
improving their security by taking their frontier by taking it up to the
Oxus, we may consider whether the territories in between, namely
Balkh and Badakhshan, could attract them.
Of these Balkh was richer and easier of access than Badakhshan.
The city of Balkh is perhaps the oldest town in the basin of the Amu
(Oxus) river. Muslim geographers call it the ‘Mother of towns’. The
plain of Bactria of which Balkh was the capital lies south of the Oxus
river, extending east and west for some two hundred miles parallel to
the river after its debouchment from the mountains of Badakhshan.
The territory of Balkh, outside the district of the capital, was divided
west and east between the two great districts of Jurjan and Turkistan,
the rich irrigation of which rendered it famous.’
Badakhshan lay on the left or south bank of the Oxus, being almost
encircled by the great bend of the river beyond Turkistan. It was and
is, as noted by Istakhri, ‘very populous and fertile, with refreshing
streams and numberless vineyards.’'® The capital in the earlier days
was of the same name as Badakhshan, while the Badakhshan river (or
Gulchah) was known as the Dirgham to the Arabs. The position of
Badakhshan city is no longer known, but its capital in later medieval
times was Faizabad, which still stands. Both the capitals probably
stood in the same valley, ‘seeing the inaccessible nature of most of
the country’.!!
The kingdom of Badakhshan was well protected by nature. If any
army entered the gorges and surmounted the passes of the Badakhshan
ramparts, it was confronted with a new set of military problems. The
narrowness and the isolation of its cultivated valleys, the rough ranges
and the passive hostility of the uplands make it extremely difficult to
keep an army alive during its passage. No human tide had ever migrated
into Badakhshan either from east or from the west. From the east the
kingdom was guarded by the heights of the Pamirs and there is no
evidence of any migration from India.'?
Taking in everything, the territories did not have sufficient revenue-
yielding capacity to justify Mughal designs. According to Lahori the
revenue of the two provinces hardly provided resources enough to
pay one of the grandees of the empire.'* Besides, as we have seen,
Badakhshan consisted of difficult country.
One must, therefore, reject as inadequate any explanations of the
Mughal advance into Balkh and Badakhshan on grounds of military
geography or economic considerations.
We may then consider the Mughal official explanations—for there
was not one, but many.
330 Mughal India
First of all, there was the proclaimed desire on the part of the
Mughal emperors to recover their ancestral lands—Trans-Oxiana in
general, and Badakhshan, which the Timurids had lost only in 1585 in
particular. Jahangir had expressed this ambition in the Tuzuk,'* and
Lahori too makes a point of it.’°
Second, the Mughal court attributed its decision to invade Balkh
and Badakhshan to a desire to punish Nazr Muhammad for the earlier
raids. Nazr Muhammad, the ruler of Balkh and Badakshan, had attacked
Kabul in 1628 and since then the emperor was thinking of punishing
Nazr Muhaminad. The only deterrent to the realization of the wishes
of the king was the fact that the emperor was reluctant to cross
swords with a neighbouring Muslim power.'®
Sa‘dullah Khan too, in a letter to Hasan Lafabeli of Khurasan wrote
that the main cause of the Balkh campaign was the audacity of Nazr
Muhammad. In the beginning of Shah Jahan’s reign, Nazr Muhammad
had the audacity to attack Kabul and plunder the suburbs of the city.
The emperor postponed the punishment of Nazr Muhammad for a
suitable time. When the opportunity arose an army was sent to Balkh
and Badakhshan to punish Nazr Muhammad.'’
But then, third, in obvious contradiction to the second, the Mughals
professed to go into the Uzbek kingdom in order to protect Nazr
Muhammad against his son Abdul Aziz Khan in 1645-6. Together
with this they justified their action by a fourth motive — the desire to
protect the population of Balkh and Badakhshan from the nomadic
tribe of Almans who had raided the territory on behalf of Abdul Aziz
Khan. This remained the standard Mughal explanation even when the
Mughal prince Murad’s armies had virtually driven Nazr Muhammad
out of Balkh.
A few passages may be cited to illustrate how the Mughals quite
seriously put forward this particular view. In a letter to Sultan
Muhammad, the Ottoman emperor, Shah Jahan stated that Nazr
Muhammad had expelled his brother Imam Quli Khan from Balkh and
Badakshan. The people of that area and specially the Uzbeks, had
resented this cruel act of Nazr Muhammad and revolted against him.
Abdul Aziz, the son of Nazr Muhammad had also joined the rebels.
The Almans, taking advantage of the situation, had plundered the
provinces of Balkh and Badakhshan and had harassed the inhabitants
of that area. The Almans in their audacity had demolished places of
worship, desecrated the mosques, burnt copies of the holy Quran
and massacred Saiyids. There was complete lawless-ness and the
Mughal army had been sent to restore law and order there.'®
 Mughal Expedition into Balkh and Badakhshan 331
In a letter written by Sa‘dullah Khan on behalf of Shah Jahan to the
Shah of Persia, it was stated that the Uzbeks, tyrants and sinners that
they were, had created disturbances in Balkh and Badakhshan and
had revolted against their sovereign. They were massacring people
and were desecrating the places of worship. It was obligatory on the
Mughal emperor to defend the life, honour and property of the people
from the tyranny of the Uzbeks. Prince Murad Bakhsh had been deputed
to punish the Uzbeks and to restore law and order in Balkh and
Badakhshan. The prince had occupied Badakhshan in less than a month
and Samarqand and Bukhara would also be conquered.'®
It is in conformity with this official attitude that Lahori says that
the Mughal army was sent to Balkh and Badakhshan to crush the
Uzbeks and to suppress the Almans because they had committed all
sorts of atrocities and there was no law and order. The emperor
wanted that once law and order was restored in Balkh and Badakshan,
the province of Balkh would be handed over to Nazr Muhammad, but
he fled to Persia.”°
We are thus confronted with a medley of motives and reasons put
forward by the Mughals, none of which alone seems to carry
conviction.
One motive which they did not put forward, and has, therefore,
escaped the notice of historians, seems to us, however, to be the
simplest, and is suggested here for the consideration of historians, as
a tentative hypothesis.
From 1611, under the mild policies of Imam Quli, the Uzbek Empire
had disintegrated, though its nominal territorial extent remained very
large. True, the forays Nazr Muhammad had launched at moments of
crisis had been repulsed by the Mughal troops with comparative ease.
But, in 1641 a new development occurred. The Uzbek Empire was
reunited, not only in name but in fact, when Nazr Muhammad replaced
his brother Imam Quli as the Khan of Bukhara. The Mughals followed
with alarm, as the detailed account of Lahori shows,”' the vigorous
attempts of Nazr Muhammad Khan to unify the vast Khanate. Visions
of a second Abdullah Khan must have been resurrected. Under the
new impulse, the Uzbeks even raided the Hazara country that was
under Mughal control.” It was in such a situation that a civil war,
caused by the simmering unrest among Uzbek nobility against Nazr
Muhammad’s despotic measures, broke out in 1645. The powerful
Khan was suddenly in flight. But was his flight really the end of the
rejuvenated Uzbek power? The new rival, Abdul Aziz Khan had proved
successful and measures were needed to be taken to weaken him, or,
332 Mughal India
better still, keep the Uzbek Empire divided by propping up Nazr
Muhammad. If possible, Badakhshan, not very important in itself, but
not to be scorned either, might be secured for the Mughal Empire as
a byproduct of such an enterprise.
If we adopt this view, the Mughal campaign makes sense. Possibly,
the comparatively easy success of Murad in 1646 inflamed Shah
Jahan’s ambitions beyond those suggested above. But the fact that
the two territories were too difficult and too expensive to hold, soon
asserted itself to cool the enthusiasm of the Mughal court.
The compromise that the Mughals sought to achieve pending their
withdrawal, namely the continuation of Nazr Muhammad as the ruler
of Uzbek territories south of the Oxus was, therefore, not as disgraceful
or useless as it is sometimes made out to be. If success is to be
judged by consequences, the point cannot be ignored that no Uzbek
army crossed the Hindukush into Mughal territory after 1647.

NOTES

1. History of Aurangzeb, vol. 1, Calcutta, 1912.

2. History of Shah Jahan of Dihli, Allahabad, 1958
3. “The Mughal Relations with Persia and Central Asia’, /slamic
Culture, vol. vit and 1x (1934-35).
4. A’in-i Akbari, i (tr. H.S. Jarrett, rev. J. Sarkar, Calcutta, 1949), p.
405.
5. The Gates of India, London, 1910, pp. 525.
6. See H.A.R. Gibb, Arab Conquest vf Trans-Oxiana, London, 1923.
7. G. Le Strange, The Lands of the Eastern Caliphate, Cambridge,
1936, p. 435.
8. Holdich, The Gates of India, pp. 501-2.
9. Ibid., p. 76.
10. G. Le Strange, The Lands of Eastern Caliphate, p. 435.
11. Ibid.
12. Holdich, The Gates of India, p. 78.
13. Lahori, Badshahnama, Bib. Ind., Calcutta, 1866-72, u1, p. 543.
14. Tuzuk, ed. Sayyid Ahmad Ghazipur and Aligarh, 1863-4, p. 11.
15. Badshahnama, ut, p. 598.
16. Ibid., pp. 598-9.
 Mughal Expedition into Balkh and Badakhshan &|
17. Jamial Insha, compiled by Munshi Bhagchand, B. L. MS Or. 1702, ff.
4b-Sa.
18. Jamial Insha, ff. 143b—148b; Badshahnama, u, p. 436. For the
rebellion of Almans against Nazr Muhammad, see ibid., p. 620. For the
revolt of the Qalmagqs, see ibid., p. 438.
19. Makatib-i ‘Aiyan Umara-i Mughalia, ff. 9-11; Abdul Salam Coll.,
328/98, Maulana Azad Library, AMU, Aligarh. Shah Jahan’s own letter
to Shah Abbas containing similar arguments is to be found in
Badshahnama, i, p. 438.
20. Badshahnama, i, p. 529; see also Sadiq Khan, Shah Jahan Nama,
B.L. MS Or. 174, f. 127a.
21. Ibid., pp. 252-6.
22. Ibid., pp. 295, 401-2.
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THE PASSING OF THE EMPIRE
 27

The Passing of the Empire

The Mughal Case

There have been numerous attempts to explain the fall of the Mughal
Empire; and I truly feel great hesitation in adding myself to the long
list of its exponents. To historians like Irvine and Sarkar, the decline
could be explained in terms of a personal deterioration in the quality
of the kings and their nobles. The harem influence grew—and women,
for some strange unscientific reason, are always supposed to be a
bad influence. The kings and nobles became more luxury-loving,
though no-one has yet established that the Mughals during the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries enjoyed a less luxurious mode of living
than their eighteenth-century successors.!
Sarkar, in his monumental History of Aurangzeb, also elaborated
upon the traditionally recognized factor, namely, Hindu—Muslim
differences; Aurangzeb’s religious policy is thought to have provoked
a Hindu reaction that undid the unity that had been so laboriously built
up by his predecessors.’
Recently, there has been an attempt at a more fundamental
examination. Satish Chandra sought to find the critical factor in the
Mughals’ failure to maintain the mansab and jagir system whose
efficient working was essential for the survival of the Empire as a
centralized polity.? Irfan Habib, on the other hand, has sought to explain
the fall of the Mughal Empire as an effect of the working of this very
system. The jagir transfers led to intensified exploitation; and such
exploitation led to rebellion by zamindars (rural superior right-holders)
and the peasantry.* With all these factors is sometimes compounded
yet another—the rise of ‘nationalities’, subverting and shattering the
unified empire. The thesis, developed by Soviet scholars like Reisner
and maintained by a school of popular Indian Marxist writers, has
received strange corroboration from ‘young and youngish’ American
scholars who have found new regional power groups in the states
that arose during the eighteenth century.”
It is easy to be lost in the welter of these ‘factors’. It is also
perhaps possible to reconcile contradictions by propounding a complex
338 Mughal India
cause—sequence—cause chain and by simply disowning the search for
the single ultimate cause. Such a synthesis is yet to be attempted; I do
not profess any ambition to make the attempt here. I should like simply
to relate the entire text to what I conceive to be the proper context.
In following the scholarly discussions over the break-up of the
Mughal Empire, I have been struck by the fact that the discussions
should have been conducted in such insular terms. The first part of
the eighteenth century did not see the collapse of only the Mughal
Empire: The Safavid Empire also collapsed; the Uzbek Khanate broke
up into fragments; and the Ottoman Empire began its career of slow,
but inexorable decline. Are all these phenomena mere coincidences?
It seems to me straining one’s sense of the plausible to assert that the
same fate overcame all the large empires of the Indic and Islamic
world at precisely the same time, but owing to quite different (and
rather miscellaneous) factors operating in the case of each of them.
Even if the search should ultimately prove futile, one must see whether
it is possible to discover some common factor that caused more or
less stable empires to disintegrate and created conditions in which
new political structures which look large enough on the map, like
Nadir Shah’s empire, the Afghan (Durrani) empire or the Maratha
confederacy, emerged and then almost immediately splintered into
fragments.
There is one remarkable point too, which may serve as the guide-
post in our search. The break-up of the empires distinctly precedes
the impact from the armed attack of the western colonial powers,
notably Britain and Russia. But it precedes the impact with such a
short interval that the question must arise whether the rise of the
West was not in some ways, not yet properly understood, subverting
the polity and society of the East even before Europe actually
confronted the eastern states with its superior military power.
It is a regrettable gap in our study of the economic history of the
Middle East and India, that no general analysis has been attempted of
the changes in the pattern of trade and markets of these countries, as
a result of the new commerce between Europe and Asia. There is a
tendency to belittle the significance of the great commercial
developments of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries for eastern
economies, Owing to the small volume of goods that entered
international, or long-distance, trade at that time. But the real question
is not of volume, but value. In terms of value, long-distance trade
must have accounted for a sizeable portion of the gross product in all
the economics with which we are concerned.
 The Passing of the Empire BoD
The major event between 1500 and 1700 was certainly the rise of
Europe as the centre of world commerce, with its dominance over
the New World and the high seas, and its total monopoly of the Cape
of Good Hope. Recent estimates suggest an increase in the population
of Europe from about 50 million in 1450 to 120 million in 1700,° an
outstanding achievement particularly when we bear in mind the
demographic debacle of the Thirty Years War in Germany and the
slow decline of population in Spain. No similar estimates exist for
Asia. But it would seem that the Indian population remained largely
stable between 1600 and 1800. Moreland’s estimate of 100 million
for 1600 has been properly questioned, and the figure of 150 million
probably is nearer the truth.’ The Census of 1868-72 disclosed a
population of less than 230 million. India thus saw an increase of
barely 66 per cent in 270 years, whereas Europe enhanced its
population by some 240 per cent in a period of 250 years. This contrast
in population growth suggests that a real shift in the economic balance
between Europe and Asia had already occurred by the end of the
seventeenth century.
This shift found its true repercussions in international trade. The
discovery of the Cape of Good Hope was certainly an important event,
and in giving a direct, unhampered route to India, it had important
military consequences in the eighteenth century. But the major
economic change was not represented only by the new route (indeed,
it is likely that the older, Red Sea route remained as important a channel
as the Cape until well after 1700). It was, above all, represented by
the emergence of Europe as the principal market for the luxuries and
craft-manufactures of the world. Economic historians have so far
remained immersed mainly in Europe’s problem of payments, a
preoccupation inherited from the mercantilist controversies of the
period. The other complementary aspects, that is the increase in
demand for the products of the world and the effect of this on other
markets of these products, appear either to have escaped notice or to
have not received the attention due to them.
In other words, we have to consider not only the export of large
quantities of gold and silver (especially the latter) from Europe to the
East, but also the fact that a large part of the luxury manufactures and
high-value products of the East were diverted from their other, hitherto
‘traditional’ markets, and carried to Europe. Unfortunately, owing to
the lack of fuller investigations, and partly to the limitations in our
sources, it is difficult to set this shift in quantitative terms. But wherever
we look in Asia near the end of the seventeenth century, the European
340 Mughal India
demand was exercising its pull, strong or feeble, direct or indirect.
The fact that Iran no longer remained the principal market for a
whole range of Indian commodities (indigo, pepper, chintz), and India
and Iran, together, no longer for a number of Chinese exports (silk,
porcelain), speaks volumes for the relative economic decline of these
countries. This decline, was, however, not only relative; it could not
but be absolute as well. One-third of the Bengal silk was already
exported, through the Dutch and the English, before 1667, and one-
third through Persian and Armenian merchants (much of it presumably
for overland transport to Mediterranean port), and only a third remained
for Indian markets.’ The European, companies obtained a virtual
monopoly of the pepper of the western coast, and they became the
principal buyers of India’s finest chintz, that of Masulipatam. It is not
very likely that production expanded sufficiently to meet the European
demand without reducing the share of the other markets. Indeed, if
the production did expand to some extent, in conditions of stationary
technology, costs and prices must have gone up, relatively to the
general price level.
My suggestion is that these developments caused a serious
disturbance in the economics of the eastern countries, and intensified
the financial difficulties of the ruling classes. The Great Silk Road no
longer carried the great caravans; and this must have distinctly
impoverished Central Asia (the Uzbek Khanate). In India and Iran,
too, the costs of luxury articles rose—and, after all, for members of
the ruling class it was these luxuries that life was all about. The income
previously obtained no longer sufficed. Here was a factor for an
attempt at greater agrarian exploitation; and when that failed, or proved
counter-productive, for reckless factional activities for individual gain,
leading to interminable civil wars. Such conditions would, of course,
spell the end of the great empires.
While, obviously, what I have suggested is replete with speculation,
and requires much detailed investigation for its substantiation, I should
like to consider another important historical factor that emerges from
a consideration of the Europe—Asia relationship. The European imports
of eastern goods were paid for mainly in gold and silver; and these,
especially the latter, came from Latin America in hitherto unprecedented
quantities. But the European demand for these commodities was
generated, not so much by the possession of the specie, as by a
distinct qualitative and quantitative development of craft production,
leading to the enrichment of the entire economy and a notable expansion
of its urban sector. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, towns
 The Passing of the Empire 341
like Lahore or Agra dwarfed the European cities of the period. By
1700, European towns like London and Paris had populations (at over
half a million) exceeding those of all Indian cities, except perhaps
Agra. According to Deane and Cole’s estimate, 13 per cent of the
people of England and Wales were living in towns of 5000 and above,
in 1701.’ This percentage had not been reached in India even by
1901.
This spurt in European urban growth was the first product of the
new science and technology that was generating small advances in a
number of sectors, the cumulative effect of which was phenomenal.
A completely different picture was presented by Asia, especially India.
One need not be a follower of Marx’s theory of the unchangeableness
of traditional Indian society to accept the fact that there was no
conscious spirit of technological innovation (and scientific enquiry)
here and in the Islamic East to match the spirit already motivating a
large part of European society in the seventeenth century. This does
not mean that no mechanical innovation was propagated or spread in
the East during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It has been
shown that such ‘generalization’ did take place.'° But what we are
concerned with is its pace and scope. The pace was certainly slow,
and the scope severely limited. This is manifested, above all, by the
utter absence in the literature of India of any satisfactory descriptions
of even the most important products of Europe’s new technology,
e.g. the clock, the telescope, and the flint-lock.
Whether the source lay in some structural fault of Indian and Islamic
society, which perpetuated the divorce between intellect and manual
labour, or whether it lay in some peculiar inhibition against science in
Islamic (and Hindu) ideology is difficult to decide. The intellectual
aridity is manifest; it causes are obscure.
The aridity is relevant to us because of its economic and political
consequences. If technological growth resulted in urbanization, this
meant that the expansion of towns could provide a safety-value at
times of agrarian crises. Since a similar process did not occur in India
and other countries of the East, this safety-value was missing. As has
been pointed out, the Indian urban population was parasitical, based
upon the expropriation of agrarian surplus.'' A corollary of this is that
if the expropriation of that surplus was affected, the scope of urban
employment also declined. This means that, so long as craft production
did not obtain an independent base, as it did increasingly in Europe
from the sixteenth century, there was no possibility of the absorption
of the shock of an agrarian upheaval. In that sense, the Mughal Empire,
342 Mughal India
in spite of its splendid professional army, was peculiarly vulnerable to
the ill-armed but million-headed zamindar and peasant rebels. '*
Here, another point suggest itself. If there was anything that was
affected most speedily by technological changes throughout the world
it was the army. Artillery-making was the ‘heavy industry’ of the
time. In Europe it attracted the ingenuity of scientists and
mathematicians from the sixteenth century onwards. But, as one moved
eastward from Europe, the pace of its development in each country
would have appeared to be slower and slower. India saw no conscious
attempt to design new artillery weapons; the making of muskets and
guns remained a mere craft, with no touch of science; and accordingly
by 1700 these were almost completely out-dated. The Mughals
continued to rely upon bow and sword-wielding cavalry when its
days were long over. It is, perhaps, this that led to their major debacle
at Karnal in 1739, when they had to face Nadir Shah, who had better
artillery, copied from the Europeans and the Ottomans.’*
To me, then, the failure of the Mughal Empire would seem to
derive essentially from a cultural failure, shared with the entire Islamic
world. It was this failure that tilted the economic balance in favour of
Europe, well before European armies reduced India and other parts
of Asia to colonial possessions, protectorates and spheres of influence.
It was this cultural failure again that deprived the empires of the
capacity to grapple with their agrarian crises. These twin economic
consequences were themselves the causes of the political and military
debacles; but as we have just seen, even military weaknesses flowed
from the intellectual stagnation that seems to have gripped the eastern
world.
Of course, the word stagnation is relative. It is quite possible that
if we were not in the compelling necessity to have to be looking over
our shoulders at what was being thought and written in Europe at the
same time, we might have regarded the Islamic East and India during
the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as fairly productive in the
matter of literature and rational sciences. But while we my admire the
poetry of Hafiz, the rationalism of Abul Fazl, the religious eclecticism
of Dara Shukoh, the astronomical observations of Raja Jai Singh, the
fact remains that of modern science there is hardly a trace. This is so
very clear in the Zij-i Muhammad Shahi (1732), the celebrated work
of Jai Singh. Here the entire theoretical text is virtually borrowed
verbatim from the Zij-i Ulugh-khani, composed nearly 300 years
earlier. Only the tables are changed. Jai Singh is interested in European
astronomical observations, and he refers to them in his preface. But
 The Passing of the Empire 343
Newton might not have lived, so far as he is concerned. Thus the
entire framework of reasoning and thought, and, indeed, the limits
and scope of reflection, remained the same as had been defined by
the great Arabic writers before the twelfth century. The stirrings were
there and were important; but, unluckily, they brought out only ripples,
where a flood, a breakthrough, was needed in order to put men’s
minds into new moulds.

II
The polities that emerged upon the collapse of the Mughal Empire were
of demonstrably two kinds. In one class were the ‘succession states’
like Hyderabad, Bengal and Awadh, which were really fragments of the
Empire, that had to stand upon their own feet as the central government
decayed and became powerless to assist or assert. They inherited more
or less the entire Mughal machinery of administration in a working
order. In the second category were the Maratha confederacy, the Jats,
the Sikhs, and the Afghans. Their origins as polities were independent
of the Mughal Empire, though they might occasionally come to terms
with it, or, indeed, in the case of the first two, even acknowledge the
nominal supremacy of the Mughal emperor. They were clearly the
products of the crisis that we have touched upon. While they might use
certain Mughal administrative institutions for their own purposes, their
mode of government was by and large antithetical to that of the Empire,
and could not be reconciled with it. Mughal professional cavalry could
indeed survive within the Maratha confederacy, but only as Pindaris,
that is as real historical Draculas, who drank up the blood of their new
masters. The entire contradiction is summed up in the protest expressed
by Azad Bilgrami in 1761 that the Maratha leaders, in spite of their
conquests, were not behaving as rulers, but as zamindars.'*
Mysore under Haidar Ali and Tipu Sultan stood outside these two
categories, and was in some ways the most remarkable. On the one
hand, it represented a conscious attempt at implanting Mughal
administrative institutions in an area that had only been nominally a
part of the Mughal Empire. This was most clearly to be seen in the
organization of land-revenue administration, as well as the army
(notably under Haidar Ali). On the other hand, it was the first state in
India to make a beginning towards modernization, first and foremost
in the realm of the army and arms manufacture, but also in commerce,
where the English East India Company’s practices were sought to be
imitated.'°
344 Mughal India
This preliminary classification of eighteenth-century polities is
important, because some writers tend to speak as if, irrespective of
these large differences in their essential natures, we could still find
some common basis for them. The theory that these polities were
reflections of the emergence of ‘regional élites’, or gave opportunities
to certain groups previously enjoying only limited prominence, to
become co-sharers in power, are either statements of the obvious in
sociological terms, or are based upon rather untenable assumptions
about the Mughal Empire.
Thus, if the Mughal Empire broke into certain fragments, with
each fragment an autonomous or independent state, its ruling class
must, of course, ipso factor have been regionalized. No longer could
an officer serving in Awadh be sent to the Deccan in course of time.
But this is an effect, not a cause; and it is an enforced regionalization,
if anything. The case of Bengal that is often cited,'® is rather peculiar.
Here the nazims, or governors, first carried out what in an earlier
period would have appeared as an act of extreme centralization.
Murshid Quli Khan obtained imperial sanction for the conversion of
jagirs into khalisa, and thus secured the withdrawal of all Mughal
jagirdars or commanders from Bengal. Then, because he combined
his office of nazim with that of diwan, or provincial revenue minister,
he henceforth managed the khalisa; and he and his successors remitted
enormous amounts to the Mughal Emperor.'’ By 1740 this practice
ceased. Thus, the Bengal nawabs became masters of the entire revenues
of Bengal without having to share them with the jagirdars, that is
without there being any true remnant of Mughal nobility continuing in
Bengal except for the nazims themselves. For managing the khalisa,
the nawabs recruited revenue-farmers and officials from amongst
the local zamindars and merchant-bankers. This phenomenon has
given rise to much misunderstanding about the emergence of a new
élite. No such emergence is discernible in Hyderabad or in Awadh,
where the jagir system continued to be in vogue.
Information about the merchants’ role in administration is rather
too readily seized upon as evidence of their increased political
participation. In fact, their role in the Mughal Empire was equally
important.'* Quite obviously, the Gujarat merchants in the seventeenth
century exercised a degree of influence at the Mughal court that even
the nagarseths of Bengal in the eighteenth century might have envied.
The Maratha confederacy, as I have said, cannot be grouped with
the succession states for any political analysis. That it was a failure as
an attempt at Empire building is admitted by all serious historians.
 The Passing of the Empire 345
While succeeding so brilliantly in the field, at least until 1761, the
Marathas failed to evolve even those minimum conventions—or
fictions, if you like—that are essential for building an empire. The
slogan of Hindu-pad-Pad-Shahi died an abortive death, possibly
because the Peshwas were not too keen to give undue weight to their
titular sovereign, the raja of Satara. In their attempt to make themselves
independent of their own nominal masters, the Peshwas seemed always
prepared to accept the nominal sovereignty of the Mughal emperor,
so long as the actual gains were theirs. But just as they had reduced
their raja to a titular status, the Peshwas, too, were subsequently to
be reduced to a titular status by Nana Phadhis (Fardnawis). Thus
there was a simple failure to establish even a stable repository of
sovereign power.
The second difficulty faced in the working of the Maratha polity
arose out of the fact that plunder remained an essential element for its
continued functioning. It too often seemed that chauth and
sardeshmukhi, and in lieu thereof, a general devastation of a country,
rather than its direct conquest, constituted the acme of Maratha
ambitions. Thus, when a full-fledged Maratha administration was
established anywhere (and, if Muhammad Ali, author of Mirat-i
Ahmadi, is to be believed, it could on occasion be excellent), the
country had already been so ravaged that the Marathas could only
replenish their resources by extending the range of plunder.
I do not wish to enter into similar details for the Abdali or Durrani
Empire of Afghanistan, which during the latter half of the eighteenth
century came to include the whole of present Pakistan, as well as
Kashmir. But in some essential features, especially the dependence
upon plunder, it exhibited similar aspects.
One might then say that once the limits for plundering activities
were reached, either because of geography, or of opponents, the tide
was bound to turn; and civil war, that is really the plunder of the
internal parts of these states, was thereupon bound to break out. This
can be a plausible explanation of the break-up of both the Maratha
and Afghan systems.
But here I should like to draw attention to another factor that might
have introduced an element of exceptional economic strain precisely
at a time when these states were otherwise vulnerable to centrifugal
tendencies. In 1757 the British won the battle of Plassey and within
seven years they were complete masters of eastern India. This conquest
was not simply a mere political event. It changed the entire complexion
of India’s commerce. The revenues of Bengal and Bihar became the
346 Mughal India
source of ‘investments’ of the English East India Company, and with
these enormous resources, the English changed the entire direction
of the exports of Bengal and Bihar, as well as Coromandel. The exports
soon exceeded £5 million.'!? This complete diversion of commerce
must have resulted in the upsetting of the whole pattern of Indian
commerce. The commercial decline of Gujarat and Agra, which
imported silk and cotton stuffs from Bengal, was inevitable. Similarly,
the overland trade through Afghanistan was bound to suffer. As the
English advanced further inland at the beginning of the nineteenth
century, the decline would become still more marked.
How adversely this economic process affected the political strength
of the Maratha confederacy and the Afghan Empire is obviously
difficult to establish with any degree of confidence. One is struck by
the fact that the sudden collapse of the Afghan Empire, in 1809,
should have followed so soon after the English advance up to Delhi in
1803. Elphinstone, who led a mission to the court of the Afghan ruler
Shah Shuja and who was a witness to the dissolution of his authority,
himself observed the decline of the trade and the abandonment of
commerce by Afghan tribesmen in favour of agriculture.*° The decline
in commerce is thus established: What is still to be proven is its link
with the British conquest on the one hand, and its role as a factor in
the decline of the Afghan Empire. My plea is that both the processes
occur in such sequence that, at least tentatively, the link ought to be
accepted. Perhaps, closer scrutiny of the evidence would some day
put us on surer ground.
Finally, a question about these ‘transition regimes’. Why is it that
when faced directly with British power, they attempted no, or very
little, modernization? The case of Mysore under Haidar Ali and Tippu
remained unique. Maratha sardars, like the Sindhias, would go no
further than having some regiments trained and commanded by
European officers.
What is singular is that at the ideological! level the English influence
should have made such little dent. It is true that information about
western sciences begins to appear in some Persian works; but on
inspection they are all found to have been written at the direction and
wishes of an English official or clergyman. In the main, the Persian
literature continued in its well-established grooves. Indeed, the
eighteenth century saw its maximum progress in India. Checking
through the works listed in C.A. Storey’s monumental Persian
Literature: A Bio-bibliographical Survey, Vol. 1, 1 found that whereas
there were only six Hindu writers who wrote one book each in Persian
 The Passing of the Empire 347
during the seventeenth century, there were during the eighteenth
century no less than thirty-two Hindu writers who wrote as many as
forty-nine books. This is a tribute to the strength of the cultural
tradition bequeathed by the Mughal Empire. But it also partly explains,
I think, why the new culture, coming from Europe, held so little
attraction, and was, therefore, almost wholly ignored by the educated
in India.

Il
The author of Siyar-al Mutakhirin, himself a protégé of the English,
presented in his work an idealized picture of the Mughal administration
which he set before his masters as a model. He was writing in 1781.
The debate that subsequently occurred between Grant, Shore and
Cornwallis, reproduced in the celebrated Fifth Report, shows how to
the new rulers, too, the rights and institutions established under the
Mughal Empire were of abiding interest. Their claim to land-revenue,
in particular, derived from Mughal precedent and practice. It has been
urged that even the Permanent Settlement was not totally exotic and
was rooted in the practice of the Mughal government in Bengal during
the seventeenth century.*! Munro’s Ryotwari system was even more
clearly a development of the Mughal system of zabt assessment that
he found in vogue in areas seized from Mysore. Asiya Siddiqi has
commented on how the British administrators of the Ceded and
Conquered Provinces greatly relied upon Indian land-revenue expertise,
which, as reflected in a work like Diwan-pasand, was simply a survival
of Mughal land-revenue practices.” In so far as the Mughals had
established a uniform system of administration all over the country,
and a single official language (Persian), the English were helped thereby
in creating an administrative machinery that was not too varied in
character to render centralized control difficult, and yet was in some
harmony with existing conditions.”
While saying all this, I should like to refer to a parallel. When the
Spaniards captured the Inca emperor of Peru and stepped into his
shoes, they used the highly centralized structure of the Incas to quickly
establish and extend their rule. But it can hardly be said that the Inca
Empire survived in any form through the Spanish colonization.
Similarly, the entire basis of British rule in India was so different from
that of the Mughal Empire, that one can hardly speak of the former as
being in any sense a continuation of the latter. The conception of the
revenues of the country, as gross profits of the English East India
348 Mughal India
Company, was the basic principle on which English dominion was
founded; and the drain of wealth to England, through public as well
as private channels was the ultimate object to be realized. Thus the
survival of the Mughal Empire was subverted to a new use, and not
employed to resurrect anything resembling the old Empire. That empire
had its own inequities, but these, to be fair to it, were of a different
form and content altogether.

NOTES

1. William Irvine, Later Mughals, ed. Sarkar, 2 vols, and J. Sarkar, Fall
of the Mughal Empire, 4 vols, passim.
2. J. Sarkar, History of Aurangzeb, 11, Calcutta, 1916, 283-364.
3. Satish Chandra, Parties and Politics at the Mughal Court, 1707—
1740, Aligarh, 1959, pp. xliti—xlvii.
4. Irfan Habib, Agrarian System of Mughal India, 1556-1707,
Bombay, 1963, pp. 317-51.
5. Cf. M.N. Pearson in /ESHR, 1x, 114 and n.
6. The estimate for 1850 is that of J. Russell (Fontana Economic
History of Europe, vol. 1, p. 36) and for 1700 that of André Armengaud
(ibid., vol. 3, p. 27).
7. Shireen Moosvi, /ESHR, x, 194.
8. Tavernier, Travels in India, 1640-67, tr. Ball, ed. Crooke, London,
PT:
9. Phyllis Deane and W.A. Cole, British Economic Growth, 1688—
1959, Cambridge, 1962, p. 7.
10. Irfan Habib, Technology and Economy of Mughal India, Devaraj
Chanana Memorial Lectures, 1971 (mimeo).
11. Irfan Habib, Enquiry, NS i (3), 55.
12. On the composition of the Maratha army, see Satish Chandra,
IESHR, x, p. 217 and n. Cf. Irfan Habib, Agrarian System, pp. 346-51.
13. Cf. Irvine, Later Mughals, 1, 352 (Sarkar’s addendum).
14. Azad Bilgrami, Khizana-i Amira, Kanpur, 1871, p. 47.
1S. Mohibbul Hasan Khan, History of Tipu Sultan, Calcutta, 1951, pp.
344-7.
16. Phil Calkins in Journal of Asian Studies, xxix, pp. 799ff.
17. Cf. Z. Malik in JESAR tv, pp. 269-70.
18. Cf. M.N. Pearson in JESHR tx, pp. 118ff.
19. The British imports from ‘East India’ amounted to £5,785,000 in
1797-8 (Deane and Cole, British Economic Growth, p. 87). These imports
included imports from China; but the China trade was itself financed by
exports from Bengal.
 The Passing of the Empire 349
20. Mountstuart Elphinstone, An Account of the Kingdom of Caubul,
London, 1839, 1, pp. 383, 387-8, etc.
21. Irfan Habib, Agrarian System, pp. 175-9.
22. A. Siddiqi, Agrarian Change in a North Indian State, Oxford,
1973, pp. 178-9.
23. See the perceptive remarks of Eric Stokes in Past and Present, no.
58, pp. 144-5, 146-7.
 28

Recent Theories of
Eighteenth-century India

Until recently, historians tended to view the eighteenth century in two

distinct parts, separated by two dates representing two important
battles. One was 1761, the year of the third battle of Panipat, which
signified both the military irrelevance of the Mughal Empire and the
immense setback to the Marathas, who might conceivably have
replaced the Mughals. The other landmark was 1757, the year of the
battle of Plassey, from which the dominance of the English in India
could be conveniently held to begin. Historians concerned with the
history of these three Empires are generally agreed upon this bifurcation
of the eighteenth century. To the historians of the Mughal Empire, the
death of Aurangzeb in 1707 marked the beginning of the decline of
that Empire, which was hastened by Nadir Shah’s sack of Delhi
(1739). Historians concerned with the Marathas could see the
eighteenth century as the Maratha century, but the really great
successes seemed to occur before 1761, after which stagnation and
divisions tended to set in. To the Anglo-Indian historians, 1757 is a
very firm benchmark, setting the triumph of Clive as the first step in
the realization of the manifest destiny of the British in India.
Along with the bifurcation of the eighteenth century, there has
been another view, namely that it was the ‘Dark Century’ of modern
Indian history. I have not seen the actual use of this term by any
historian in so designating that century, but Irfan Habib comes very
close to doing so when he describes it as a period of ‘reckless rapine,
anarchy and foreign conquest’.' This is clearly a combination of V.A.
Smith’s view of Maratha polity as a ‘Robber State’ and the opposite,
nationalist conception of British conquest as the ultimate calamity. In
a sense, Irfan Habib’s brief aside on the eighteenth century would
seem to represent a summary of conventional thinking as it prevailed
during and before 1960s; the decline of the Mughal Empire in the first
half of the eighteenth century marked a setback to the strength of the
Indian political, social and economic structure; this enabled the British
conquest to take place, which eliminated all such elements of internal
 Recent Theories of Eighteenth-century India 351
growth as the previous regime might have contained. It was, therefore
yet another, though perhaps a more profound, version of the simple
textbook bifurcation of the eighteenth century.
The entire conception has been challenged by C.A. Bayly in Rulers,
Townsmen, and Bazars.* \t is not easy to summarize his basic
arguments because of the numerous qualifications he continuously
introduces. But one would not be wrong if one were to say that he
believes that the Mughal Empire, by its fall, in fact, rendered a service
by letting a large number of indigenous groups develop and so enabled
a number of networks—established by local castes and communities
and immigrant groups, together with merchants and moneylenders—
to flourish. British expansion might in the beginning have hurt some
of these groups, but, ultimately, represented a compromise with many
of them. Thus 1757 (Plassey) or 1764 (Buxar) did not constitute a
break: rather, a continuity ought to be discerned.
Bayly’s views deserve detailed examination. He is not alone in
challenging the older theories of the eighteenth century, though others
have not dealt with the issue over such a range. Muzaffar Alam, for
example, has been concerned with the first half of the century;? and
Frank Perlin with Maharashtra.* Satish Chandra’s essay, though
insightful, is brief and concentrates again on Indian polities.° In many
ways, however, these writings represent departures from the older
views, though their authors do not necessarily agree with Bayly. André
Wink is among those who totally accept Bayly’s view of the Empire
and the Marathas.°
At first sight, Muzaffar Alam’s work offers much promise. Here is
the opportunity to study the nature of transformation in the first half
of the eighteenth century in specific terms by appealing to detailed
local evidence from Awadh. The effort is, however, marred by a very
obvious bias in favour of Mughal administration, to an extent that
even the use of the word ‘Crisis’ in the title of his book seems
unwarranted by the text. The empire in its heyday had contributed to
prosperity, and its autonomous segments continued to do so in the
eighteenth century. He speaks as if this last is an incontestable fact:
‘Both the Punjab and Awadh registered unmistakable economic growth
in the seventeenth century. In the early eighteenth century in both
provinces, politics and administration appear to have moved along
similar lines.”’
Muzaffar Alam’s evidence of ‘economic growth’ is extremely
slender. He offers a comparison of jamadami (estimated revenue)
statistics in the A’in-i Akbari with an ‘eighteenth-century revenue
B52 Mughal India
roll’, to establish that it ‘almost doubled’ in the intervening period.*
He admits that the increase seems cancelled by the much greater rise
in prices. Yet, at a later point in his book he insists that ‘the rise in
jama had a bearing on the increase in agricultural production’, which
he now seems to regard as being established by the increase in the
jama, forgetting altogether the increase in prices.
If the evidence for Muzaffar Alam’s basic thesis is so poor, much
of what he describes—and it is in the description of various incidents
culled from sources that his work attracts the reader’s interest—has
no relevance to his conclusion, namely that the first half of the
eighteenth century was a period of progress. Thus the supreme
illogicality of the last sentence of his book:
The growing tendency among the nobles and officials to hold jagirs on a
permanent and quasi-permanent basis, the struggle to convert madad-i
ma’ash (revenue grant) holding into milkiyat (private property), the
emergence of the ta’alluqa, ta’ahhud and ijara contracts as the most
acceptable forms of governinent, and the consensus among the regional
powers to maintain the Mughal imperial symbols to obtain legitimacy and
thus stability and security of their spoils—all indicated the eighteenth
century endeavour to make use of the possibilities for growth within existing
social structures.’

If one were to adopt this line of argument, the Wars of Roses and
the Thirty Years’ War could also be proof of an ‘endeavour to make
use of possibilities for growth’, for every potentate was seeking his
own ‘growth’ in those wars just as in eighteenth-century India.
Frank Perlin’s position on the Mughal Empire is different from
Muzaffar Alam’s, though his argument is not easy to understand. He
tends to discount the influence of the Empire—as a ‘system’—on
Indian society and deplores ‘Mughal and Maratha centric treatments
ot economic history’. He maintains:
It is (rather) necessary to describe those other aspects of society and
state formation which lie beyond and incorporate such system-making
and which arguably contradict the latter, lead to their constant mutation
and compose a space of events, acts and even structured relationships
and consequences which transcends the frontiers within which
contemporary attempts at systematization occurred.!°

Perlin appears to argue that the failures of the Mughals or Marathas

as centralizing systems were not of central significance, in view of
‘the stubbornness of the intermediary ground’, that is the structures
of grass-root political, legal and social institutions and rights. In that
 Recent Theories of Eighteenth-century India 353
sense, there would appear to be no disaster in store for the Indian
economy in the passing of the Mughal Empire.
Perlin thus dismisses all too easily the significance of an imperial
system for the economy, and so seemingly overlooks the implications
of the rent-extracting state. Bayly wrote before Perlin, and he too
tends to avoid giving the Mughal Empire a central place in the picture
of Indian society, say, in 1700. Yet, he acknowledges that the Mughal
Empire ‘was more than a mere umbrella raised over virtually
autonomous local groups’. He observes:
It was more like a grid of imperial towns, roads and markets, which pressed
heavily on society and modified it, though only at certain points. The
system depended on the ability of the Mughal state to appropriate in cash
as much as 40 per cent of the value of the total agricultural product. A
sophisticated money and produce market must have existed to make this
possible, and men who recognised the supremacy of the Emperor must
have had influence in small towns and bazaars.''

Surely, the extraction of rent (40 per cent of the value of produce),
‘grids of imperial towns’ and ‘a sophisticated money and produce
market’ could not be unimportant elements in an economy. And if we
are looking at the scale of commerce and the size of the urban sector
as indicators of economic ‘development’ (especially keeping the
ultimate arrival of capitalism in view), then a decline of the Empire, to
which these elements were tied, could well represent an economic
decline as well.
Indeed, this is supported by Ashin Das Gupta’s finding about the
contraction of the hinterland of Surat during the first half of the
eighteenth century without its displacement by any other port.'”
Bayly’s own position on the Mughal Empire is not very definite.
After admitting that the Empire implied a certain amount of development
of commerce and markets, he does not draw the conclusion that
would seem to be inescapable: such development could be seriously
affected by the decay of the Empire. On the other hand, he speaks as
if the decay released forces, presumably so far suppressed, which
‘benefited and consolidated the intermediate classes of society—
townsmen, traders, service gentry—who commanded the skills of
the market and the pen’.'
This is one of the weak links in Bayly’s argument. The point at
issue is not whether towns remained (or new ones were established
while the old decayed still more) and commerce was conducted and
the bureaucracy functioned at some levels, but whether there was a
354 Mughal India
greater efflorescence of these activities than in the Mughal century
(seventeenth). Bayly offers no such comparison. His narratives of
the emergence of the Bhumihar zamindars in Banaras and further
east, the Rohilas in the middle Doab and trans-Ganga tract
(Rohilkhand), and the Jats and Sikhs, in terms of Hindu and Muslim,
‘indigenous’ and ‘external’, are all very interesting, but they really
lend little weight to his thesis that the Mughal decline reinforced the
position of the urban classes and the bureaucracy.
Once the Hindu/Muslim, indigenous/external categories that Bayly
plays with are disregarded, as least for the moment, and we focus on
the genesis of the new forces stepping into the vacuum created by
the declining fortunes of Mughal power, the zamindari antecedents of
the bulk of these become clear enough. One uses the term zamindar
here in the sense established by Irfan Habib—the hereditary, largely
caste-bound, rural class with control over part of the produce of land
and served by armed retainers.'*
Bayly’s description of the Bhumihar chieftains as zamindars and
Muzaffar Alam’s survey of Awadh and the Punjab in the first half of
the eighteenth century show how the zamindar clans rose in uprising
after uprising. S.P. Gupta, in his recent study, has shown how the
Amber ruler strengthened his position in the first half of the
eighteenth-century in eastern Rajasthan, and thus essentially converted
a zamindari into a local sovereignty.'° Where, as in the case of the
Rohilas, there was an immigrant group, it too tried to sink its roots
into the soil by replacing old zamindars (for instance, Rajputs in
Rohilkhand, with whom the Rohillas came into persistent conflict).'°
The zamindar origins of the Maratha rulers have been investigated
by Satish Chandra."’
One may note that the emergence of zamindar power on the ruins
of the Mughal Empire is implicit in Irfan Habib’s analysis of the crisis
of the Mughal Empire.'* Harbans Mukhia, who seldom finds himself
in agreement with him, has come to the same conclusion:

It is thus that even when the Mughal Empire was collapsing, one gets the
impression that the class of zamindars at various levels was turning out to
be the main beneficiary. It was, in other words, an older form of property
that was re-emerging in strength.'®

Wink concedes the same process, despite his assertive observation

of continuity between the Mughals and the Marathas, when he sees
the Marathas as representing the ‘intermediary gentry or zamindari
stratum’ and the eighteenth century, therefore, as ‘the century of the
 Recent Theories of Eighteenth-century India 595
“gentrification of the Muslim Empire”.”°
Clearly, a reassertion of the zamindars’ power over a large part of
the country could not lead to a restoration of conditions that prevailed
before the Mughal Empire or the Sultanate. It would not be in the
zamindars’ own interest to give up the right to collect the bulk of
agricultural surplus as land revenue once they stepped into the shoes
of the preceding Mughal administration, whether as nominal jagirdars,
revenue contractors, ta’alluqdars or simply usurpers. What happened
now was a great admixture of state rights with hereditary landed
rights, seen pre-eminently in a steady decentralization of political
authority, which was marked as much in Mughal polity in the first
half of the century as in the Maratha polity in the second.
It would be hard to argue that the mutually conflicting small political
units into which India was divided in the eighteenth century were
individually stronger than the Empire they had supplanted. Bayly does
not take up this point at all: what he suggests is that these units were
more strongly based on the soil either because they were composed
of local elite or based on compromises with them, as could be illustrated
by the liberal policy pursued by the surviving Mughal satrapies towards
a wide range of Hindu warriors and administrative groups.*' But, apart
from the fact that the Mughal Empire too had promoted an ‘eclectic
culture’ (witness Akbar and Dara Shukoh),” many of the compromises
that the Mughal satrapies made with the zamindars were signs of
weakness, and not of strength; that a zamindar, in his locality, was
strong is, of course, the reason why he could step into the shoes of
the contracting Mughal authority. It did not mean that the sum of
zamindar-based powers that now arose could be stronger than the
unified Empire they had supplanted.
Yet, because of the very fact that the new political units were
admixtures, continuing all the essential features of the Mughal land-
revenue system, while often combining possession of revenue rights
with private zamindari rights, the fundamental nature of the state as a
rent-extracting institution was preserved. This necessitated that
association of rulers with merchants, which revenue collection on any
large scale must demand. As the potentates’courts on local scale
continued, and large armies were maintained, a large portion of the
agrarian surplus flowed into towns, and much, though not all, of the
urban glory of the past could survive. Faizabad, Farrukhabad and
Lucknow were representative of this urban survival, when Delhi and
Agra were fast declining. While the fact that there was still resilience in
the Indian economy should not be forgotten, it is not easy to understand
356 Mughal India
how any important new elements can be discerned in the economy of
the first half of the eighteenth century, as Bayly’s description would
lead one to infer.”*
There is one further element which tends to be forgotten about the
eighteenth century—the cultural. In an essay on the decline of the
Mughal Empire, I had commented on the cultural failure of the ruling
class in not responding to the European challenge on the plane of
technology and science. The cultural distance between India and Europe
continued to lengthen in the eighteenth century; none of the regimes
seemed capable of even attempts to bridge it. Potentates like Haidar
Ali and Mahadji Sindhia saw the challenge in military terms and tried to
organize modern armies with French assistance; only Tipu went a little
further by trying to develop commerce and production. But none thought
in terms of establishing schools or institutions to absorb western learning
or arranging for translations. In other words, not only did the eighteenth-
century regimes continue with the revenue system of the Mughals,
they also continued with the same ideological apparatus. It is
characteristic that Shah Waliullah (d. 1762), the famous Muslim jurist
and thinker, does not even show that recognition of European learning
and science which was present a hundred and fifty years earlier in Abul
Fazl.*? Unaided by any conscious endeavour, Indian crafts remained
supremely uninfluenced by the proto-industrialization of Europe.”°
Little of substance has thus been presented to justify the view that
there was an internal momentum towards progress or ‘growth’ in the
first half of the eighteenth century. The picture still remains of a
society in decline, despite the possible accusation that one is ‘Mughal-
centric’ in saying so.
The second major point about the eighteenth century is whether
the second half, encompassing British expansion from 1757 to 1807,
can be regarded as a continuum of the first, rather than as part of a
separate period. Essentially, it raises the question whether the British
regime can be regarded, in its initial phase, at any rate, as one which
maintained the traditional institutions and policies of the contemporary
Indian states. There has been a strong belief that the ‘1757
Revolution’ was a compromise between the English East India
Company and the Hindu bankers and merchants to control the nizamat
for mutual profit.*’ This has been built into a theory of the British
conquest as an act of collaboration between the Company and
powerful indigenous groups.”
Bayly finds the thesis ‘cliché-ridden’ but then goes on to express
considerable sympathy with it.?? All this finds an echo in Harbans
 Recent Theories of Eighteenth-century India 357
Mukhia’s observation: “The view that colonial society was the creation
of the colonial state is also being slowly questioned.’*° Mukhia,
probably unconsciously, does us good service by putting the whole
matter in such terms as to make the weakness of the position most
apparent: colonial society was not the product of colonialism, but
rather colonialism was the product of colonial society. How, else,
would the society be ‘colonial’ at all?
From such an extreme statement of the case we may return to
the less radical suggestion that English power was dependent on
compromise and collaboration with certain indigenous groups and
classes. Even this suggestion is hard to accept. There are two
possible kinds of collaboration: (a) where two powers meet on an
equal plane; and (b) where one power is dominant and the other
collaborates because this is the only opportunity for survival or
profit. In history, examples of the first are so rare as to be virtually
absent, while those of the second abound. Clearly, the collaboration
secured by the English from Amin Chand and Nand Kumar was of
the second type; and we know what end they came to: one was
defrauded, the other was hanged. If the Permanent Settlement is
viewed in the light of a political compromise, such a view also
needs reconsideration. Cornwallis argued for it because he thought
that without a deal with the zamindars, agriculture would continue
to decay and the commerce of Bengal would correspondingly
contract, leaving little possibility of further growth of the
Company’s revenues. There was to be no collaboration between
the Company and the zamindars as equals in any sense of the
term. This applies to all other ‘allies’ of the Company as well. The
merchants and bankers, whom the Company graciously allowed
to continue because revenue collection was helped thereby as well
as remittances of funds arranged, found their spheres of activity
far more narrow than under the previous regimes. Overseas trade
was closed to them, and so also much of the trade in muslin, silk,
indigo and saltpetre in eighteenth-century Bengal. Finally, in the
case of Subsidiary Alliances, the collaboration was decidedly one-
sided. Awadh was compelled to pay a ‘massive annual tribute (more
than Rs 50 lakh)’,*! and in 1801, was to lose more than half of its
territory to its protector.
Such weighted ‘collaboration’ could hardly justify one’s designating
the British conquest as a joint Anglo-Indian enterprise. If any other
view is to be dubbed ‘Eurocentric’, as Bayly warns us,” let it be so
dubbed. Colonialism had blue-blooded European ancestry; and it will
358 Mughal India
be wrong to make the ancestry dubious in the interest of international
understanding.
One must remember that the expansion of British power in India
was not simply the expansion of a politically centralizing system, a
mere successor to the Mughal and the Marathas, as a rent extracting
state. It was the expansion of a colonial power, essentially different in
its nature and objectives from all previous regimes. The Upper Gangetic
basin, that is the focus of Bayly’s study, had not, unlike Bengal and
Bihar, come under British control before 1801-7. Yet, already the
effects of the Tribute were manifest in this area. The ‘want of specie’
felt in Upper India after 1770, with disastrous results for long-distance
trade, which Bayly recognizes,** was the direct consequence of the
Tribute, since it stopped all jmports of specie and compelled its export
to China. Bayly absolutely fails to see this connection, and thus fails
to discern the impact of Colonial Tribute even in areas outside formal
British control.
The inherent contradiction in Bayly’s approach is, perhaps, brought
out best by two passages in André Wink’s Land and Sovereignty in
India. In his introduction he acclaims Bayly’s thesis of “the indigenous
component in European expansion’, which brought about ‘a balanced
redistribution of resources rather than any overall significant
corrosion’ .*> His epilogue, however. has a totally different conclusion:
‘the Maratha documentation shows that it was not the “rapacity” of
revenue farmers but rather the impact of the colonial government,
which interfered with the circulation and diffusion of money, credit
and resources.’ If Wink remained unconscious of the implications of
his conclusion, while framing his introduction, his reader is under no
obligation to do the same.
We must therefore harbour much doubt about any theory which
seeks to view eighteenth-century India as a single whole. The
conventional bifurcation, as presented in old text-books, might seem
to have been very formalistic, based on mere dates of battles. But it
was objectively, perhaps, far closer to the realities of the social and
economic history of India than the many recent theories endeavouring
to present us with vistas of continuity and progress in that troubled
century.
 Recent Theories of Eighteenth-century India 359

NOTES

1. Irfan Habib, Agrarian System of Mughal India, Bombay, 1963, p.

391,
2. C.A. Bayly, Rulers, Townsmen, and Bazars: North Indian Society
in the Age of British Expansion, 1770-1870, Cambridge, 1983. Bayly
presents his views on the eighteenth century most conveniently in the
introduction, pp. 1-35.
3. Muzaffar Alam, The Crisis of Empire in Mughal North India:
Awadh and the Punjab, 1707-1748, Delhi, 1986.
4. Frank Perlin, ‘State Formation Re-considered’, Modern Asian
Studies, xix, pt. 3, Cambridge, 1985, pp. 415-80.
5. Satish Chandra. The 18th Century in India: Its Economy and the
Role of the Marathas, the Jats, the Sikhs and the Afghans, Calcutta, 1986,
pp. 1-40.
6. André Wink Land and Sovereignty in India—Agrarian Society
and Polities under the Eighteenth-Century Maratha Soarajya,
Cambridge, 1986.
7. Muzaffar Alam, The Crisis of Empire in Mughal North India, p.
1s
8. Ibid., pp. 103-4. How Muzaffar Alam obtained figures for
‘Moradabad-Bareilly’ from the A’in-i Akbari is not at all clear. No such
sarkar or administrative region existed at that time.
9. Ibid., p. 318 (italics mine).
10. Frank Perlin, Modern Asian Studies. p. 429.
11. Bayly, Rulers, Townsmen, and Bazar, p. 10.
12. Ashin Das Gupta, Indian Merchants and the Decline of Surat,
1700-50, Wiesbaden, 1979, p. 134f.
13. Bayly, Rulers, Townsmen, and Bazar, p. 14-15.
14. Irfan Habib, Agrarian System of Mughal India, ch. v.
15. S.P. Gupta, The Agrarian System of Eastern Rajasthan, 1650-
1750, Delhi, 1986, pp. 1-37.
16. Iqbal Husain, The Rise and Decline of the Ruhela Chieftances,
Delhi, 1994.
17. Satish Chandra, Medieval India: Society, the Jagirdari Crisis and
the Village, Delhi, 1982, pp. 126-38.
18. Irfan Habib, Agrarian System of Mughal India, pp. 334-8.
19. Feudalism and Non-European Societies, ed. T. Byres and H.
Mukhia, London, 1985, p. 275.
20. André Wink, Land and Sovereignty in India, p. 8.
21. Bayly, Rulers, Townsmen, and Bazar, pp. 26-7.
22. M. Athar Ali, ‘The Passing of Empire: The Mughal Case’, this
volume, pp. 324-35. See also M. Athar Ali “Towards an Interpretation of
the Mughal Empire’, this volume, pp. 54-69.
360 Mughal India
23. I cannot trace any particular remark in Bayly, where this is stated,
but the entire trend in his introduction is to describe many developments
in this period as if they were innovations.
24. M. Athar Ali, ‘The Passing of Empire’, this volume, pp. 24-35.
25. Abul Fazl was aware of the European discovery of the New World
(A’in-i Akbari, pub. Nawal Kishore, Lucknow, 1892, vol.1m) and the
achievements of European learning (/nsha-i Abul Fazl, daftar, i); see also
M. Athar Ali ‘Towards an Interpretation of the Mughal Empire’, this volume.
26. See Tapan Raychaudhuri’s remarks in Cambridge Economic
History, vol.u, part 1, ed. Dharma Kumar, Cambridge, 1982, pp. 1-25.
27. K.M. Panikkar, Asia and Western Dominance, New York, 1953, p.
eo
28. Cf. R.E. Robinson in Studies in the Theory of Imperialism, ed. R.
Owen and B. Sutcliffe, London, 1972, p. 120, quoted by Bayly, Rulers,
Townsmen, and Bazar, p. 2.
29. Bayly, ibid., pp. 3-4.
30. Feudalism and Non-European Societies, p. 248, n. 13.
31. Bayly, Rulers, Townsmen, and Bazars, p. 27.
32. The relations between the Company and Awadh have been studied
by Richard B. Barnett, North India Between Empires, Berkeley, 1980, pp.
223--39.
33. Bayly, Rulers, Townsmen, and Bazars, pp. 3-4.
34. Ibid., pp. 65-6.
35. André Wink, Land and Sovereignty in India, p. 4.
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 oY.

History in Indo-Muslim Tradition

It is often said, though inaccurately, that history came with the Muslims
to India. The existence of dynastic annals is attested in the epigraphic
prasastis from the fourth century, and Bana’s Harshacharita of the
first half of the seventh century and Kalhana’s Rajatarangini (twelfth
century) represent important landmarks of the pre-Islamic historical
tradition. But so far as we can judge, this tradition existing mainly in
Sanskrit did not exercise any traceable influence on the Muslims’
pursuit of tarikh in India, such as, let us say, the Shahnamah tradition
exercised on Perso-Muslim historiography.
The Islamic phase of history-writing in India began with a
remarkable Arabic work of unknown title and authorship, its Persian
translation made, c. 613/1216—17, by Ali bin Hamid Kufi, now known
as the Chachnama. The work consists essentially of two parts, an
account of the Brahman dynasty of Sind preceding the Arab conquest,
and a narrative of the Arab conquest 710-14. The former part is
seemingly a translation of a local dynastic chronicle, and the latter
and larger portion, a collection of narratives of the nature of those
contained in Tabari’s great history with the Arab and tribal biases of
individual narrators being fairly well manifest. Except for one
interpolation, at the end, the original Arabic text seems to have been
completed during the ninth century, though some material may indeed
be much earlier.
Indo-Persian historiography proper begins with Hasan Nizami’s
very ornate work, Tajal Ma’athir, completed 1217, dealing with the
first two Sultans of Delhi. But the first major work is Minhaj bin Siraj
Jjuzdjani’s Tabagat-i Nasiri, completed 1259, a history of Islamic
dynasties, but very rich on the Ghorid dynasty, the early Sultans of
India and their nobles and on the contemporary Mongol empire, for
which too it constitutes a valuable contemporary record.
A series of historical works by the poet Amir Khusrau, (d. 1325),
namely the Qiran al Sa’dain (1289), Miftah al Futuh (1291), Khazain
al Futuh (1311-12), Duwal Rani Khadir Khan (1316), Nuh-sipihr
(1318) and Tughlugnama (1320) give rather uneven glimpses into the
history of the period, especially of the Khalji dynasty (1290-1320).
364 Mughal India
Despite their contemporariness to the events they describe, the poet’s
proneness to verse, stylistic digressions, words with double meanings
and complicated rhetoric deprive his works of much substance, and
flattery overshadows insights and truth.
A totally different kind of work, and, perhaps, one entitled to be
treated as a true history under any definition of it is Ziya Barani’s
Tarikh-i Firuz Shahi, completed 1357, treating of the history of the
Delhi Sultanate from Balban’s accession in 1265 to Firuz Tughluq’s
early years. Barani has a definite theory of history, in which the Sultan’s
natural urge to aggrandize is seen as a threat to the stability of the
nobility, which in his view, must be based on respect for station
according to birth. Barani is masterly in his sketches of character,
brilliant in his insights on complicated economic situations and
administrative measures. His fluent and trenchant style, unaffected
by any attempt at ornateness, makes him one of the great Indian
masters of Persian prose.
Compared to Barani, the other two histories of the Delhi Sultans,
Isami’s versified Futuh-al Salatin (1349-50) and Yahya Sirhindi’s
Tarikh-i Mubarak Shahi (1434) are prosaic works, though furnishing
us with much information derived independently of Barani. Shams
Siraj Afif has left us a history of Firuz Shah (r. 1351-1388), written
after Timur’s invasion (1398)), which manages to be factual (though
somewhat weak in dates) despite much rhetoric.
The fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries saw the production of a
few histories of provincial dynasties, such as the anonymous Tarikh-i
Muczaffar Shahi (1484) and Zamima-i Ma’athir-i Mahmud Shahi (1511))
relating to Gujarat and Shihab Hakim’s Ma’athir-i Mahmud Shahi
(completed before 1500), relating to Malwa. Rather surprisingly, no
history of the two Afghan dynasties, the Lodis (1450-1526) and the
Surs (1540-1556) was written during the period of their rule. Of the
Lodis, there is the later Waqi’at-i Mushtaqi, by Rizq Allah ‘Mushtaqi’,
(d. 1581), a work of an anecdotal character but the main source for
later accounts of the Lodis; and for the Surs, Abbas Sarwani’s Tuhfa-
i Akbarshahi (written after 1579) remains the main source.
The establishment of the Mughal dynasty, with Babur’s victory at
Panipat (1526), inaugurated a new era in history writing. Babur (d.
1530) continued the writing of his Turki memoirs in India, so that he
has given us a fascinating account of India and a frank description of
the events of a large part of his reign of four years in India. These
memoirs were translated into Persian with commendable accuracy
by Abdur Rahim Khan-i Khanan (1589-90).
 History in Indo-Muslim Tradition 365
With Yazdi’s Zafarnama setting the model for Timurid history
writing, the greatest historical work which took it for its model but
undoubtedly went much beyond it is Abul Fazl’s Akbarnama, first
text completed in 1004/1596. This official history of Babur, Humayun
and Akbar not only used a large amount of archival material, but also
a number of especially commissioned memoirs among which only
few survive, such as those of Gulbadan Begam and Bayazid Bayat as
well as historical narratives especially sponsored to provide material,
of which Abbas Sarwani’s work mentioned above is one. Abul Faz!
has a much larger vision of history than mere annals, and he therefore
appended to his narrative history, what came to be considered a separate
work, the A’in-i Akbari containing massive fiscal, financial and social
data, a detailed provincial gazetteer and a cultural history of India.
The work provides a fairly firm baseline for a quantitative history of
India. It is also remarkable in being without any religious bias and in
treating Indian culture as a composite one to which both Hindu and
Muslim traditions have contributed.
Akbar’s reign saw the production of the first general history of
India, Nizam al-Din Ahmad’s Tabaqat-i Akbari (1593-94). Especially
notable was his endeavour to reconstruct the history of provincial
dynasties as part of the political history of India. He was followed by
Qasim Hindu-Shah ‘Firishta’, who in his Gulshan-i [brahimi (1015/
1606-7) gave a still more detailed history of the country, and showed
considerable critical sense in using his sources. Abd al-Qadir Badauni
completed his Muntakhab al-Tawarikh in 1595-96, another history
of India which draws much of its information from Nizam al-Din’s
work. But he concentrates on Akbar’s reign, of whose events he
gives a trenchantly critical interpretation from an orthodox Muslim
point of view. His biographical sketches of scholars and other celebrities
in his concluding portion forms a special feature of his work.
Jahangir (r. 1605-1627) followed Babur in writing his memoirs.
These are in Persian and appear to have begun to be written like a
diary soon after his accession to continue up to 1624. Jahangir writes
in simple but literary prose with a surprising degree of frankness; and
his deep interest in art and in natural history as well as the life of
ordinary people particularly enlivens his memoirs for the modern reader.
With Shah Jahan (r. 1628-1658) begins another series of official
histories. First, Muhammad Amin Qazwini was commissioned to write
the Padshahnama, based on official records. His account covered
the first ten years of Shah Jahan’s reign. A shift from the solar to
lunar calendar for dating events, and perhaps other reasons, led Shah
366 Mughal India
Jahan to commission Abdul Hamid Lahauri to write the history of
these ten years afresh. Lahauri ultimately produced a very detailed
account of the twenty years (lunar) of Shah Jahan’s reign under the
title Padshahnama. The account of the third decade was prepared, as
a continuation by his pupil Muhammad Waris. Aurangzeb (r. 1659—
1707) had the history of the first ten years of his reign, entitled the
Alamgir Nama, written by Muhammad Kazim. All these official
histories have some features in common. They are accurate as to
dates and details, for which official records are their main source;
they pay much attention to geography; and their authors are anxious
to convey to the reader the imperial view, whether in commendation
or criticism of individuals or on assessment of causes and
consequences of various events. Their model is Abul Fazl, for the
narration of events, though they obviously do not share his views on
religion (now no longer official), nor his very large vision of history
that had embraced, as we have seen, the full range of economic and
cultural life.
Since Aurangzeb did not allow any further official history to be
written after 1668, the era of private histories began. The most notable
was Abul Faz! Mamuri’s untitled history, which was almost entirely
incorporated in Khafi Khan’s well-known Muntakhab al-Lubab (1731),
a general history of India. Mamurt’s critical approach was shared by
Bhim Sen, a Hindu officer, whose Nuskha-i Dilkusha (1709) is a
combination of history and memoirs, written with much candour and
insight (e.g. his discussion of the agrarian roots of the Maratha
uprising). Saqi Mustaid Khan’s Ma’athir-i Alamgiri (1710-11) is
designed to provide an ostensibly official history of Aurangzeb’s reign,
and therefore follows the style of such histories, but is much briefer.
Aurangzeb’s reign is also marked by the appearance of Hindu historians
writing in Persian: besides Bhim Sen, we have Isardas Nagar and
Sujan Rai Bhandari.
Historical works in Persian became still more numerous in the
eighteenth century. Khafi Khan’s history has already been mentioned.
An anonymous work, Tarikh-i Shivaji, written before 1777,
consciously presents the Maratha point of view on Shivaji, which is
based on a Marathi narration or bakhar.
Perhaps the most interesting historical work of this late phase is
Ghulam Husain Khan Tabatabai’s Siyar al-Mutakhirin (completed
1781), covering the period from 1707 in great detail. Its close account
of the English East India Company’s conquests and government, and
strong criticism of the practices of that government have assured it
 History in Indo-Muslim Tradition 367
of a large readership, especially through Hajji Mustafa’s celebrated
translation (1789). It belongs partly to the genre of works produced
under Englishmen’s patronage, such as Ghulam Ali Khan’s Jmad al
Sa’adat (completed 1808), relating to Awadh, and Lachhmi Narayan
‘Shafiq’s’ Bisat al Ghanaim (1799), a history of the Marathas down
to 1761.
Modern historiography began to exercise its influence in the
nineteenth century. Sayyid Ahmad Khan wrote the Athar al Sanadid
in Urdu in 1847 on the buildings of Delhi; and his young friend
Zakaullah produced the first history of India in Urdu containing results
of modern research and first published in 1898.
A discipline which followed a tradition distinct from history was
that of biography. The biographical notices of twenty-five slave-officers
of Sultan [tutmish (maluk-i Shamsi) that Minhaj Siraj gave in the
Tabagat-i Nasiri find no sequel in historical works of the succeeding
generations. But with the Mughals a new tradition of bureaucratic
biography began: on Abdur Rahim Khan-i Khanan was written a long
biographical work, the Ma’athir-i Rahimi by Abd al-Baqi Nahavandi
in 1616; and Ni’ matallah included in his Tarikh-i Khan Jahani (1613),
a full biography of his patron, Khan-i Jahan Lodi, another officer of
Jahangir. The pioneering step towards compiling a comprehensive
biographical dictionary of the Mughal nobility was taken by Shaikh
Farid Bhakkari in his Zakhirat al Khawanin (1060/1650), the result
of extensive reading and collection of oral information. Much of his
work was incorporated, along with other massive data independently
collected from other histories, epistolary collections and records, in
the Ma’athir al Umara of Shah Nawaz Khan, Azad Bilgrami and Abd
al-Haiy (finally completed, 1780), which contains over 730 biographies.
A much smaller work of a similar kind, but earlier, was Kewal Ram’s
Tazkirat al-Umara, 1727-28.
The biographical literature on religious divines begins with Mir
Khurd’s Siyar al-Auliya (completed before 1387), a fairly detailed
and reliable narrative of the lives of the Indian Chishti saints from
Muin al-Din Chishti (d. 1236) onwards. A subsequent work on fourteen
Chishti saints, the Siyar al-Arifin of Shaikh Jamali (d. 1536), is less
reliable but obtained considerable popularity. With Abd al-Haqq’s
Akhbar al-Akhyar (1£91) began the tradition of compilation of
biographical dictionaries of Indian saints without distinction of mystic
affiliation. Ghausi Shattari’s Gulzar-i Abrar (1613) is a similar but
much more comprehensive work, beginning with saints of the thirteenth
century, and is undoubtedly the result of great care and industry.
368 Mughal India
Sadid al-Din Aufi’s Lubab al-Albab, with biographical notices of
some three hundred poets, technically belongs to India since it was
written (1221-22) under Qubacha, the ruler of Sind. But the first
major work of this genre was Ala al-Daula Kami’s Nafais al-Ma’athir
(begun 1565-66), written under Akbar, giving notices of some 350
poets, all of his own century (sixteenth). Subsequent biographical
dictionaries of poets include Sher Khan Lodi’s Mirat al Khayal (1690—
91), Brindabandas’s Safina-i Khwushgu (1734-35), Azad Bilgrami’s
Sarw-i Azad (1752-53) and Lutf Ali Beg’s Atishkada (begun 1760-
61). They are poetry selections as well, since each biographical notice
is invariably followed by the author’s selection of verses from that
poet. It was partly by reliance on such biographical dictionaries of
poets, besides the information personally collected, that the Ab-i Hayat
by Muhammad Husain Azad came to be written (1880), combining
the biographical dictionary form with a truly historical treatment of
the Urdu language and literature.
Among the more general biographical dictionaries covering scholars,
mystics, theologians and poets, possibly the most noteworthy is that
by Muhammad Sadiq, the Tabagqat-i Shahjahani (1637), containing
the lives of some 871 celebrities. A different kind of work is Mirza
Muhammad’s Tarikh-i Muhammadi (completed 1776) giving obituary
notices of prominent men in chronological sequence, according to
the years of their death.
With the introduction of the results of modern Indological/Orientalist
research in Indian historiography, it becomes very difficult to demarcate
the Indo-Muslim stream from the general stream of South Asian
historiography. Two trends may, however, be identified: the Indian
nationalist, which emphasized the Muslim contribution to a composite
Indian culture, and the separatist, which insisted on the study of Muslim
community as an independent political, social and cultural entity. The
nationalist point of view found early expression in Mohammad Habib’s
Mahmud of Ghaznin (1924), a critical tract on that conqueror, and in
Tara Chand’s Influence of Islam on Indian Culture (1922). The most
comprehensive statement of the nationalist viewpoint perhaps occurs
in M. Mujeeb’s Indian Muslims (1967). The opposite school came to
be represented particularly in the writings of Ishtiaq Husain Qureshi,
especially in his The Muslim Community of the Indo-Pakistan
Subcontinent 610-1947. The debate continues at various levels of
historical writing in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, with the Aligarh
School of historians making its own contribution.
 History in Indo-Muslim Tradition 369
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

The major work on Indo-Islamic historical works remains H.H. Elliot and J.
Dowson, History of India as Told by its Own Historians, 8 vols, London,
1867-77. The sources in Persian are surveyed in C.A. Storey, Persian
Literature-A Bio-bibliographical Survey, 1, Parts 1 (London, 1927-39) and
u (London, 1953). Other relevant works include Peter Hardy, Historians of
Medieval India, London, 1960; Mohibbul Hasan (ed.), Historians of
Medieval India, Meerut, 1983; Harbans Mukhia, Historians and
Historiography During the Reign of Akbar, New Delhi, 1976. See also
M. Athar Ali, ‘The Use of Sources in Mughal Historiography’, this volume,
pp. 355-72.
 30

The Use of Sources in

Mughal Historiography

India during the period of the Mughal dynasty (sixteenth-eighteenth

centuries) is exceptionally well illuminated by a large body of historical
literature, mainly in Persian. This literature followed the traditions of
classical Persian historiography, the models of which like Yazdi’s
Zafarnama (a history of Timur) and Mir Khwand’s Rauzatu’s Safa (a
history of the world), both written in the fifteenth century, were widely
read in India. By its very volume, if nothing else, Mughal historiography
has, however, to be studied and assessed separately. It may be recalled
that when C.A. Storey made his great survey of Persian historical
literature, works written on Indian history accounted for a major part
of it providing 475 items, by authors (nos 612—1087), as against 299
(nos 312-611) concerned with Persia, Central Asia and countries
other than India.' And among the works written in India those written
in Mughal times again account for the overwhelmingly larger part.
Indo-Mughal historical literature is not only large, but also varied:
histories of India, dynastic and regional histories, memoirs,
biographies, biographical dictionaries, historical gazetteers, collections
of historical letters and administrative documents are all well
represented.” What we are concerned with here is how their authors
acquired their information, from what kinds of sources and with what
exercises of the critical faculty. In turn this may help us to assess the
accuracy of the information that comes tuo us from such a large body
of professedly historical writing. We can, of course, treat only of a
few of these works, by way of illustration, so that some tentative
conclusions may be hazarded.

I
It may be useful to proceed from the most secondary (or general) to
the more primary or detailed works. In dealing with the secondary
works, one must recognize the tendency in many of them of
incorporating earlier texts, often without acknowledgement, which
 The Use of Sources in Mughal Historiography 371
today would be regarded as gross plagiarism, but which enabled the
author then to transmit to his reader a more authoritative narrative of
an earlier period than he could himself presumably construct.
A very notable example of this is offered by Khafi Khan, author of
the well-known history of the Mughal dynasty, the Muntakhabu’l
Lubab, completed in 1731. He seems to have come across a little-
known work, the Shahjahan-Nama of Sadiq Khan, containing a history
of Shah Jahan’s reign (1627-58) and its continuation by Abul Fazl
Mamuri containing an account of Aurangzeb’s reign (1659-1707).
The work has survived independently (British Library MS Or. 174) as
well as with its continuation (British Library Or. 1671, and Raza Library,
Rampur). Both authors gave numerous personal details, some so
patently fictitious that one is led to think that the authors have adopted
pseudonyms. Now Khafi Khan, perhaps knowing of this fact, bodily
incorporated these two works into his book, personal details and all,
to form his chapters on Shah Jahan and Aurangzeb. British Library
MSS Add. 6573 and 6574, appear to represent the first phase of this
incorporation. Subsequently, while revising the text for his final version,
contained in most MSS of his work as well as in the printed edition,’
Khafi Khan weeded out many (but not all) of the plagiarized writers’
personal details, changed the wordings, made condensations, altered
opinions and substantially added to the narrative of the later years of
Aurangzeb’s reign. If Sadiq Khan’s work and Abul Faz] Mamuri’s
continuation had not survived, one would have always wondered about
the sources of Khafi Khan’s information for the reigns of Shah Jahan
and Aurangzeb, since with an obvious lack of ethics, Khafi Khan
conceals from his reader the text from which he has borrowed
wholesale.
Yet this lapse was not universal. The first history of India (as
claimed by the author himself) now known is the Tabagat-i Akbari,
written in 1594, by one of Akbar’s best educated officers, Nizamuddin
Ahmad Bakhshi. In his preface, Nizamuddin lists twenty-nine works
(virtually all surviving) from which he has drawn his information.*
How Nizamuddin Ahmad uses his sources may be seen from his
account of Ghiyasuddin Tughluq’s death in 1324.° First he gives the
account as he had found in his main source, Zia Barani’s Tarikh-i
Firuz Shahi® (completed in 1357). The Sultan was returning from
Bengal and was to be received at Afghanpur about three kurohs (about
six miles) from Tughlugabad (Delhi), where a pavilion had been rapidly
constructed for the purpose of his reception by his son, Ulugh Khan
(Muhammad Tughluq), coming from the south. After they met and a
Bi2 Mughal India
meal had been taken, most nobles came out to wash their hands. At
that time suddenly the roof fell, and the Sultan, who was sitting beneath
it, was killed. Nizamuddin omits Barani’s reference to this having
been caused by lightning, perhaps because he thought the words ‘sky-
sent thunderbolt of fate’. to be mere rhetoric. For the cause of the fall
of the roof he shifts to another source (‘some histories’), which
happens to be Isami’s Futuh us Salatin (completed, 1351), which he
lists in his Preface as a source along with Barani’s Tarikh. Isami, who
was hostile to Muhammad Tughluq, says the roof fell because the
Sultan ordered elephants to be driven at speed in front of the pavilion,
whereupon the newly constructed structure collapsed and a pillar fell
upon the Sultan killing him.’ Nizamuddin takes this to be the true
cause of the accident, but then he adds a comment, showing that he
is not satisfied that the death was purely accidental:
From the discerning ones it would not be hidden that it was not at all
necessary to construct the pavilion. One is led to suspect that Ulugh
Khan conspired to kill his father. It seems that the author of the Tarikh-i
Firuz Shahi (Zia Baran1), writing in the reign of Sultan Firuz, who had great
attachment to Sultan Muhammad Tughlugq, did not write (the truth) out of
regard for him.*

Here then, is a criticism of his source as well as an explanation why

the source has departed from the truth. It is all the more remarkable
since Isami does not explicitly make Muhammad Tughlug the murderer.
The same incident is also examined by the next important author
of a history of India, Qasim Hindu-Shah Firishta, who completed his
history, the Gulshan-i Ibrahimi (Tarikh-i Firishta) in 1606-7, then
revised it in 1609-10. His history is remarkable because he uses the
Mahabharata (in Persian translation) to attempt a reconstruction of
pre-Islamic Indian history. All in all, he lisis in Preface some thirty-
two texts (a list which is, indeed, not exhaustive), which he had used
for writing his history.” These included Nizamuddin Ahmad’s history.
Firishta, describing Ghiyasuddin Tughluq’s death, says he perished
under the falling roof with five other persons and then adds:
In some histories it is written that the pavilion was newly built and collapsed
because of the fast tread of the elephants, Some historians have stated
that there was no need to construct such a building, so that one is led to
suspect that Ulugh Khan conspired to kill his father, and that Zia Barani,
who lived in the time of Firuz Shah, who had great attachment to Sultan
Muhammad (Tughluq), did not write the truth out of regard for him. But it
would noi be concealed from the discerning ones that this story does not
stand to reason. For Ulugh Khan was present at the meal along with his
 The Use of Sources in Mughal Historiography 373
father. How would he have the miraculous power to make the roof fall the
moment he himself came out? More colourful still is the story given by
Sadr Jahan Gujarati in his Tarikh that Ulugh Khan had erected the building
by magic. When the magic was broken, the roof fell! Haji Muhammad
Qandahari in his Tarikh writes that when the Sultan was washing his
hands, lightning fell from the sky and piercing the roof struck his head.
This story seems to be nearest the truth. But God knows best!!°

It is obvious that Firishta had, first, the text of Nizamuddin Ahmad

before him, relying on his reading of both Barani and Isami (whether
Firishta had access to the latter is not clear: his work is not listed in
his Preface). He then weighs Nizamuddin Ahmad’s theory and finds
it implausible. And when he turns to Sadr Jahan’s version,'' he
absolutely rejects magic as an explanation. He accepts Muhammad
Qandahari’s attribution of the accident to lightning, which, of course,
is not his, but the contemporary historian Barani’s version (overlooked
by Nizamuddin Ahmad).
These two standard authors’ treatment of sources for one incident
brings out both the strength and weakness of Mughal historiography.
Its strength was that it was eminently rational. In his scepticism over
the death being accidental, Nizamuddin Ahmad points to the irrationality
of the pavilion being constructed. In his rejection of the conspiracy
theory, Firishta raises the question of the technical impossibility of so
setting up a structure that it should collapse at the precise time desired.
The weaknesses in both historians’ treatment are also obvious.
Nizamuddin Ahmad speaks vaguely of ‘histories’ when he means
Isami’s Futuh-us Salatin, a work written twenty-six years after the
incident. He fails to highlight the fact that its account is virtually
contemporaneous. Firishta shows much sloppiness in ignoring the
contemporary Zia Barani’s reference to ‘lightning’, though he was
closely familiar with Barani’s History and censures him a few pages
later for omitting the account of Tarmashirin’s raid.'* In rejecting one
source for another he does not at all consider which source is early:
for Qazi Muhammad Qandahari, of whose copying of Barani Firishta
is not aware, was writing much later, though, since his work is not
extant, his exact date of writing is not known.

Il
Hitherto we have considered the treatment only of historical works as
sources. For the more general works, the source-material of the
historian would naturally be confined to such texts. But for pioneer
374 Mughal India
writers of detailed works, concerned with the history of a region or
of a single recent reign, it would not be possible to depend only on
other secondary works. The historian would then certainly need to
use primary documents or archival sources.
In the Mughal period it was quite customary to collect the
documents, including letters, of a historical nature. This was done
partly with a view to studying the style of such documents, so as to
train the reader in insha, or the science of drafting, and partly with a
view to satisfying the interest of those who were historically inclined.
A major collection of this genre was made by Abul Qasim Khan
Namkin under the title of Munshat-i namkin in 1594, containing an
exceptionally large number of diplomatic and political letters, farmans
(imperial orders) and administrative documents. '* A smaller collection
of documents and letters drafted by Akbar’s minister and court-
historian Abul Faz] was made in 1606—7.'4 The reign of Aurangzeb is
marked by a number of important collections, such as those of his
own letters, notably, the Adab-i Alamgiri compiled by Muhammad
Sadiq!> and Kalimat-i Tayyabat, collected by Inayatullah Khan.'° In
the 1680s Malikzada collected a large number of documents, diplomatic
and historical, in the Nigarnama-i Munshi.'’ It is not possible to list
many other such collections that exist in MS. Suffice it to mention
the anonymous collection of documents relating to all sorts of matters,
administrative, commercial, agrarian, private, judicial, mainly of Surat
and its environs of the period c. 1590-1647/48, made by a person
who was presumably a local Mughal official,'® and the collection of
letters of a local revenue official of Haryana made into part of a book
by the author, Balkrishan Brahman, in the early 1660s.'°
The actual use of such documents for historical purposes by Mughal
writers is fairly common. One can cite as an illustration, the history of
the Mughal suba of Gujarat, the Mirat-i Ahmadi, written by Ali
Muhammad Khan in 1759-60. He says that he reconstructed the history
of the province by using the detailed official histories of successive
reigns, by drawing upon the memory of older people, and since 1708—
9, upon his own observations. He states that upon his own appointment
as diwan (finance officer) of Gujarat (by now a largely nominal post),
he came into possession of the depleted archives of the office, and in
1748, with his assistant Mitha Lal Kayasth, he began to compile a
comprehensive record of the resources and revenues of Gujarat which
presumably forms the Supplement of his History.”°
What is of great interest from our point of view is that Ali
Muhammad Khan intersperses his narrative by copying into it in strict
 The Use of Sources in Mughal Historiography 375
chronological order numerous documents, notably farmans containing
fiscal and other regulations, most of which, not being found in any
other known collection, must have been collected by him from other
persons. After copying a farman issued by Aurangzeb to Muhammad
Hashim, “diwan’ of Gujarat, he mourns the fact that ‘despite imperial
instructions accompanying such Imperial farmans that whenever the
office of diwan was transferred to another person, the farmans, which
contain the basic administrative regulations should be transferred to
the new appointee, with receipt taken, yet owing to certain
circumstances and the ensuing disarray, these farmans are no longer
in the (diwan’s) office.’*' It is, therefore, considerably to Ali
Muhammad Khan’s credit that he should have obtained and reproduced
so many official documents, with their rich information on the agrarian
and commercial conditions of Gujarat. Where he has not, presumably
for reasons of space, been able to reproduce documents, he summarizes
their import and describes their context fairly competently.” Generally
speaking, Ali Muhammad Khan is successful in reproducing
documents accurately, despite the damaged state or bad transcription
of some of the papers or copies he had at hand, which he laments.**
But he seldom offers any helpful commentaries on many of the terms
used or clarifies obscurities. And, generally, while conscientious in
setting each document within his narrative by its date, he seldom
allows himself the leisure to speculate on its cause or consequence
or the effectiveness of implementation.
It is much to the credit of Mughal-period compilers of documents
and of historians, like Ali Muhammad Khan, who reproduce them,
that, except for copyists’ errors, the reproductions are faithful. Such
faithful reproductions might have been encouraged by the system in
the Mughal Empire, where the copy of a document to be usable in
litigation or representation had to have the attestation with the seal of
the gazi, or local judge. The only case where the reproduced text
diverges substantially from the original is the reproduction of the
imperial farman of Shah Jahan of February 1632 sent to be inscribed
on the Srinagar congregational mosque. The text, as reproduced by
the official historian, Amin Qazwini in the Padshahnama, when
compared with the actual inscription turns out to be a heavily ‘sanitized’
version, toning down the censure of the preceding governor.” But in
fairness it may be said that Amin Qazwini does not explicitly claim to
reproduce the farman and does not, for example, have the first person
plural which the text of the farman, if exactly reproduced, would
have required.”
376 Mughal India
For most official histories, the basic documentation was provided
by waqai or reports of the proceedings at the court and events in the
provinces, the letters sent by the Waqai Navis posted in the provinces,
to the central minister, designated bakhshi ul mamalik, who presented
these to the emperor. When Sagi Musta‘id Khan was offered the task
of writing a surrogate official history for the reign of Aurangzeb (after
the tenth regnal year, till which the reign had already been covered by
the officially compiled Alamgirnama), he argued that ‘if the sheets of
the news-letters (waqai) of the court and the provinces be collected,
then the work of the composition may be accomplished with ease’ .*°
The wagqai prepared in the Deccan provinces have been preserved in
the archives at Hyderabad, and a selection of them for the period
1660-71 has been published.*’ The waqai of the suba of Ajmer for
over two years, 1678-80 have also come down to us.** Unfortunately,
the archives of the Mughal central government have not survived,
and the waqai of the imperial court are not extant, although their
nature can be established from both the provincial waqai and the
akhbarat from the imperial court (for which see below).
It is manifest that the official histories, beginning with Abul Fazl’s
Akbarnama (to whose use of sources, a separate section will be here
devoted), the Padshahnamas of Amin Qazwini, Abdul Hamid Lahori,
and Waris, and the Alamgir Nama of Muhammad Kazim, all drew
their chronology and information on court movements, appointments,
conferments of ranks and titles, major events of the campaigns, etc.
from the waqai of the court and the provinces.” It is also likely that
Jahangir’s celebrated memoirs were also written with the waqai kept
in front of the imperial diarist.*° All these texts often begin individual
passages with the words az waqai, which can be rendered either as
‘from the waqai’ or as ‘among the reported events’.
Non-official historians could have had access to a species of reports
called akhbarat, which are often confused with the waqai. The
akhbarat were not really records of the Mughal government proper,
but news-reports sent by nobles and high officers’ agents (wakils))
at the imperial court and at governors’ headquarters in the provinces.
The wakils were allowed to be present at the court or headquarters
and to witness the proceedings, hear the waqai and petitions being
read out and the orders issued by the emperor or governor thereon.
When sent by wakils posted at the court these were known as
Akhbarat-i Darbar-i Mu’alla. A \arge collection of the akhbarat sent
by the wakils of the rulers of Amber from the beginning of Aurangzeb’s
reign have survived, reposing partly in the library of the Royal Asiatic
 The Use of Sources in Mughal Historiography 377
Society, London (James Tod having removed these from the archives
of Jaipur), and partly in the Rajasthan State Archives. A selection
from these has been published.*! The akhbars sent from the Mughal
court in the eighteenth century by Maratha wakils have been preserved
at Pune and partly published. Stray akhbarat are also widely found.
Apparently, these were also passed on to non-officials such as
bankers, merchants, etc. Thus, in 1717 the English East India Company
appointed ‘Mittersein’ (Mitra Sen) as its ‘vakile at the kings Durbar’,
but without divulging his position, ‘his business being to transmit the
Durbar news’ twice every month along with the ‘wackas’ (waqai) to
Bengal.*? Akhbarat from the court are copied wholesale into Itimad
Ali Khan’s diary, the Mirat ul Haqaiq, carried on till 1139/1727, and
kept mainly at Surat.** Since he was a retired official, these were
presumably obtained from local bankers (sarrafa) whose messengers
regularly arrived from Delhi, and who needed to have such akhbarat
for their business purposes.
It is important to remember that unlike the waqai, the akhbarat
were not properly official documents. They recorded the proceedings
(including reports given and orders issued) at the court, as the wakil
heard and recorded at the time.** These sometimes contain errors,
e.g. of spellings of names or titles or discrepancies in numbers of
ranks which would be inconceivable in the official waqai. Stl, in
most cases of unofficial historians who offer us day-to-day details of
the happenings at the court, e.g. Hadi Kamwar Khan in his account of
events after Aurangzeb’s death (1707) to 1724 in the early part of
Muhammad Shah’s reign,*° it is not always clear whether the author
has direct access to the waqai (or sawanih), or whether he is
mentioning their contents as they were presented at the court and
recorded in the akhbarat.

I
Much stress is currently being laid on ‘oral history’. It is, of course,
worth recalling that much of the history that has come down to us
through the pages of Mughal-period writers was not simply built up
from written records, but was based on the writers’ own memory of
events of which they were witness or on mere hearsay. By their very
nature narratives so constructed would span a wide range of degrees
of reliability.
First of all, we have the memoirs of a man who was barely literate,
and so unable himself to use any records at all. This was Mehtar
378 Mughal India
Jauhar Aftabchi, an attendant of the Mughal emperors Humayun
(reigned, 1530-56) and Akbar. He seems to have written or dictated
his memoirs soon after Humayun’s death (1556), since to him the
capital was still Delhi, and the later rebel, Abul-Maali is still spoken of
in sympathetic terms.*° He says in his preface that he began to write
in 1587 for presentation to Akbar; but this must refer to his handing
over the manuscript to Ilahdad Faizi Sirhindi, who was himself to
write a history of Akbar’s reign. Faizi Sirhindi was asked to ‘rewrite
the manuscript in the manner of histories and in proper style’.*” Faizi
Sirhindi presented his polished version of Jauhar’s memoirs (Tarikh-
i Humayun) to Akbar on the night of 18 June 1590. The emperor
asked immediately: ‘Jauhar does not know how to write; how have
you prepared his memoirs?’**
Faizi Sirhindi’s version, when compared to Jauhar’s artless original,
shows how ‘oral history’ can lose much of its charm and truth when
handled by a ‘professional’. Sirhindi edited out many of the lively and
informal pieces of information found in the original, especially in the
report of Akbar’s birth. Inaccuracies too were introduced: Jauhar in
his original had spoken of the people of Panjhir who were like the
Siyah-posh Kafirs; now they became the Siyah-posh Kafirs
themselves.*” Yet, it was not the original semi-colloquial version of
Jauhar, but Faizi Sirhindi’s polished and sanitized text, which was
more widely read and, presumably, used. The King’s College MS
shows by its fly-leaf endorsements that it went into the libraries
successively of Akbar’s aunt, Gulbadan Begum, Jahangir, Shah Jahan
and Dara Shukoh between 1603 and 1651.
Unlettered, Jauhar had relied mainly on his memory, which must
have been fresh enough at the time he first dictated his memoirs. But
with the more educated memoir-writers, memory and reading of record
went together. Babur (reigned 1526-30) seems to have kept a diary in
later years on which his celebrated autobiography was constructed;
the earlier portion with all its details (but few dates) was purely based
on memory.”
Jahangir (reigned 1605-27) did not aim at full autobiography, but a
continuous narrative of his reign. He thus obviously used the waqai
and other documents and secretarial resources of the court to write
successive parts of his memoirs, which always possess the quality of
close contemporaniety.*' Fasciculi of these memoirs seem to have
been distributed among officers, from time to time. Ni‘matullah,
writing the biography of his patron, Khan-i Jahan Lodi, as early as
February 1613, was able to use as a source ‘the history called
 The Use of Sources in Mughal Historiography 379
Jahangirnama, which His Majesty had been writing as diary
(roznamcha)’ .* Upon completion of twelve years of his reign, Jahangir
had volumes of copies prepared for distribution, as he himself says.**
Jahangir’s memoirs, because of the access they give us to many
facts which could never have been put in the wagqai or akhbarat, such
as Jahangir’s relations with individual nobles, and to his own private
ambitions, opinions, beliefs and judgement, are a unique document.
As Ni‘matullah shows, they became, while they were in the process
of writing, a source for contemporary historians. They, therefore,
called for rival accounts of Jahangir’s reign, more suited to the point
of view of his son and successor Shah Jahan (reigned 1629-58),
whose conduct Jahangir had heavily criticized. Thus Mu‘tamad Khan,
to whom Jahangir had dictated his memoirs in his later years, wrote a
separate history of Jahangir, which also became the third volume of
his historical work [qgbalnama-i Jahangiri.“ Even more than Mutamad
Khan’s work, Kamgar Husaini’s Maasir-i Jahangiri, completed in
1630, is little more than a shorter version of Jahangir’s memoirs with
the addition of some facts and omissions of others, designed to produce
an effect hostile to Jahangir’s influential queen, Nur Jahan, and
favourable to Shah Jahan.** Thus, through these summaries Jahangir’s
memoirs became the quarry for facts of other “secondary’ historians,
e.g. Muhammad Yusuf Ataki, who wrote his Muntakhab-ut Tawarikh
in 1646-47.*°
A contrary process, where an existing “secondary” history is heavily
added to from memory and current observation is offered by Abdul
Qadir Badauni. What Badauni did for his history of Akbar’s reign
(forming the second volume of his Muntakhab-ut Tawarikh) was to
take volume two of his friend Shaikh Nizamuddin Ahmad’s Tabaqat-
i Akbari, containing a year-by-year account of Akbar, summarize or
rewrite it and add heavily what he had himself, as a scholar with
influential friends and patrons and subsequently as a courtier, observed
or heard, providing a parallel, heavily critical and even (at times)
scandalous version to the detriment of the reputation and integrity of
Akbar and other notables.*’ He admits that for the last two years
covered by his history, he did not have the benefit of Nizamuddin
Ahmad’s history, which had closed in 1594, its author having died
then. He confesses that he had been compelled to offer ‘more summary
annals’ thereafter.** He makes up for it, however, by a more richly
gossipy account of what was happening at Akbar’s court at Lahore,
and of what heresies he himself as an orthodox theologian was being
compelled to witness. Similarly, for his third volume, Badauni seems
380 Mughal India
to have relied heavily on the biographical dictionary of contemporary
scholars and poets, the Nafaisul Ma’asir of Alaud Daula,” and then
to have added massively from his own knowledge of many of the
persons included in the collection of biographies, while adding notices
of others not included there, especially mentioning incidents of which
he was witness or of which he had heard.
Badauni’s work, by so enriching and embellishing the dull annals
from which he drew his skeleton of facts, became the favourite source
for all historians looking for lively or critical versions of the liberal
religious environment at Akbar’s court. The first author who actually
cites him is ‘Mobad’, who wrote in 1653 his great work on the various
religions of the world, the Dabistan-i Mazahib. Badauni’s influence
in constructing a hostile portrayal of Akbar does not, however, seem
to have been strongly felt in the seventeenth century; it seems to have
grown later with time, attaining its height not in Mughal historiography,
but in its Anglo-Indian successor.*!

IV
In visualizing the way historians sought to reconstruct the past in
Mughal India, there is no better illustration than the fashion in which
Akbar’s counsellor Abul Fazl prepared his history of the Mughal
dynasty, but principally of Akbar’s reign. Its third daftar or volume,
comprising the A’in-i Akbari, treated as a separate work, was to deal
with Akbar’s administration and empire and the culture and cultural
history of India.*? Abul Faz] was directed by Akbar to prepare such a
history in 1589, and he says he took seven years over it, closing the
work in 1596, but then continuing to work on the A’in-i Akbari till
1599, and carrying on the Akbarnama narrative to 1600.°*
In the conclusion appended to the A’in-i Akbari, but which actually
is the conclusion to the entire work, Abul Fazl describes how he
collected material for his work:
In many of these occurrences I bore a personal share, and I had a perfect
knowledge of the undercurrents and secrets of state, to say nothing of the
ordinary drift of public affairs. And since the insinuation of rumour had
prejudiced me, and I was not sure of my own memory, I made various
enquiries of the principal officers of state, and of the grandees and well
informed dignitaries, and not content with numerous oral statements, I
asked permission to put them into writing, and for each event T took the
written testimony of more than twenty intelligent and cautious persons.“

One may smile at the author’s boast that for each event he had so
 The Use of Sources in Mughal Historiography 381
many recorded testimonies. But we know for a fact that memories of
persons who were expected to know of events of the earlier period
(Akbar’s early years of life and reign) were especially tapped. Thus,
Bayazid Biyat, an old officer now employed as Superintendent of the
imperial kitchen, tells us in the preface of his memoirs:
His Glorious Majesty Jalaluddin Muhammad Akbar Padshah ordered that
whoever from amongst the Imperial servants has the capacity of recording
history should do so. Especially they should record any thing that they
remember from the times of His late Majesty Humayun Padshah, and
complete it, dedicating it in Our name. This order was delivered to this
humble Bayazid Biyat by His Highness the exalted Shaikh Abul Fazl, son
of Shaikh Mubarak. At the time I was Kolbegi I spoke and the scribe of the
Shaikh (Abul Fazl) wrote it down, while I was also deciding upon the
affairs of the kitchen, though I had not the capacity to write, nor did I have
any written record. Matters of AH 949 (AD 1542-3) that had taken place
at Zankan in His Majesty Humayun’s camp are now written down in the
city of Lahore in AH 999 (AD 1590-1). Since my youth had gone and old
age had come, my memory is not very strong. If I have made slips, let the
reader overlook them.°°
A far better-known text of personal memoirs (but unfortunately
extant only in fragment) similarly written on Akbar’s orders for Abul
Fazl’s work, is that by Akbar’s aunt, Gulbadan Begum.’ Both these
sources were used by Abul Fazl, since many events mentioned there
also occur in his work. It is less certain whether Abbas Khan Sarwani’s
Tuhfa-i Akbarshahi, written at Akbar’s orders to provide a history of
the Sur usurpers (1540-56), was written for Abul Fazl, or earlier.** It
does seem, however, that he did put it to some use. As for Mihtar
Jauhar’s memoirs, prepared independently, it is not clear if Abul Fazl
was able to use the original or the polished version that had been
presented to Akbar in 1590; but it seems that he did use one of them
as a source for at least one event identified by Mukhia.”
Abul Fazl in his Preface to the Akbarnama speaks of the large
amount of archival and documentary material used by him. Akbar
had established his system of waqai or news reporting and recording
in 1574, and thus from that time at least, Abul Faz] would have had
the benefit of access to a rigorously chronological record of events at
the court itself, as he himself notes.°' He also collected texts of all the
orders which Akbar had issued since his accession. Abul Fazl seems,
indeed, to have prepared first a text which closely followed the waqai,
and, therefore, had much more numerous dates than in the final
version. Fragments of this first or earlier draft have survived in a MS
382 Mughal India
in the British Library, which also contains fragments of the final version
and of the A’in-i Akbari.® This version contains full texts of such
documents as Todar Mal’s memorandum on revenue administration
and Akbar’s orders thereon (1582), Sharif Sarmadi’s report on Man
Singh’s campaign in Orissa (1590), and Prince Murad’s queries and
Akbar’s replies on administrative and other matters (1591). The
final version omits the latter two documents, and offers a polished
summary of Todar Mal’s memorandum.” The archival base is still
stronger in the A’in-i Akbari, whose provincial and local statistics,
revenue and financial data, information or regulations of various
departments, rates of prices and wages must have been drawn from
a very large number of official sources and collected and screened by
a veritable secretariat.
In his conclusion Abul Faz] emphasizes a problem every historian
faced with a multiplicity of sources has to confront and resolve:
The flagrantly contradictory statements of eye-witnesses had reached my
ears and amazed me, and my difficulties increased. Here was an event
distant, the functionaries of (the office of) Waga’i and Sawanih present,
the Sovereign testing me, and I with my eyes open observing these
manifold discrepancies! ... By deep reflection and a careful scrutiny, taking
up the principal points in which there was a general agreement, my
satisfaction increased, and where the narrators differed from each other I
based my presentation of facts on a footing of discriminate investigation
of exact and cautious statements, and this somewhat set my mind at ease.
Where an event had contrary accounts from equally credible persons, or
anything reached me opposed to my own view of the question, I submitted
it to His Majesty and freed myself from responsibility.

Abul Fazl says he prepared five successive drafts, to improve each

stylistically. A comparison with the earlier version, as contained in
British Library Add. 27, 247, shows that in this process there was
much loss of detail and of the touch of original source material.
Apparently, as the re-drafting progressed, the differences in original
testimonies were also set aside in favour of either the consensus
approach, or of a decision adopted by Abul Fazl himself or obtained
from his sovereign. One can only regret this gradual ‘alienation’ from
the original sources (which Abul Faz! does not usually even deign to
quote or acknowledge by name), which prevents us now from
checking whether Abul Fazl’s choice among divergent reports was
reasonable or biased.
Despite these weaknesses, Abul Fazl’s work still constituted a model
for Mughal historiography, both in its insistence upon accurate record
 The Use of Sources in Mughal Historiography 383
based on archival and other sources, and in its broad vision of history
which encompassed annals, biography, polity, administration,
economic life and culture. At these levels, it was a model which official
and quasi-official historians of the next century constantly sought to
imitate though it was never even remotely approached by them.
Our exploration of source-use in the works of Mughal historians
shows that they attached considerable importance to primary
documents and eyewitness accounts in order to reconstruct history.
This was apparent in their wide use of official news reports and
memoirs. Where they were concerned with distant events, they had
certain canons of source-criticism to apply, namely rationality and
plausibility, as we can see in the treatment of the issue of the death of
a Sultan of Delhi in 1325. Confronted with multiple versions of the
same event, they like Abul Fazl invoked the doctrine of inherent
probability. All these were important achievements; and one regrets
only that these canons were not systematized in even a single
theoretical text written during the Mughal period.
Yet, with all its achievements, Mughal historiography is not a
direct ancestor of modern Indian historiography, for the simple reason
that it did not sufficiently develop criticism of documents nor truly
antiquarian interests. There is nothing like the Renaissance exposure
of the Donation of Constantine; nor like the West European pursuit
of Roman coins and inscriptions from the sixteenth century onwards.
In fact, it is strange that with such profusion of inscriptions, even
in the Persian language in which the Mughal historians wrote, and
of coins of all periods, the Mughal historians hardly ever turned to
them to establish or corroborate any fact. Thus, though nineteenth-
century India inherited a fairly high order of narrative history dating
from the thirteenth century, the earlier historical tradition had no
capacity for reconstructing ancient Indian history, where epigraphy
and numismatics had to play a crucial role. It was, therefore,
European historical science, applied and adapted in India in the
nineteenth century, with which modern Indian historiography really
came into being.

NOTES

1. C.A. Storey, Literature—A Bio-bibliograpical Survey, section 11,

fasciculi 1-3 (London, 1935, 1936, 1939). Nos 101-311 cover General History
384 Mughal India
and the history of the Prophet and the Pious Caliphs and Jmams. Of these
too, many works were written in India. From these items biographical
literature is excluded, which Storey catalogued in a separate volume,
coming after section m1, fasciculus 3, as part 11 of volume 1 (London, 1953).
2. For a fairly comprehensive survey of Persian and other literature
of Mughal India, in which such works are listed, see D.N. Marshall,
Mughals in India: A Bibliographical Survey, I: Manuscripts (but
including works now printed), Bombay, 1967.
3. Kafi Khan, Muntakhabu’! LubaZ b, u, ed. K.D. Ahmad (Calcutta,
1860-74).
4. Nizamuddin Ahmad, TabagaZ t-i-Akbari, Lucknow, 1875, p. 3.
5. Ibid., pp. 98-9.
6. Barani, Tarikh-i Firuzshahi, ed. Saiyid Ahmad Khan, W.N. Lees
and Kabir al Din (Calcutta, 1862), pp. 452-3.
7. Isami, Futuhn’s Salatin, ed. A.S. Usha, Madras, 1948, pp. 418-20.
8. Tabagat-i Akbari, 1. p. 99.
9. Tarikhi-i-Firishta, Lucknow,
1281/1864—65,1, pp. 4-5.
10. Ibid., p. 132.
11. Sadr Jahan began writing his History in 1497. The statement quoted
by Firishta occurs in the Zarikh-i Sadr-i Jahan (account of the Sultans of
Delhi), ed. Iqtidar Husain Siddiqi, Aligarh, 1988, p. 54.
12. Tarikh-i Firishta, 1, p. 134.
13. As yet unpublished, see Aligarh Muslim University Library MS
Lytton Farsiya 3-26, 27 (2 vols).
14. Maktubat-i Allami or Insha-i Abdul Faz! (Lucknow, 1262/1864)
and several other edns.
15. Adab-i-Alamgiri, ed. Abdul Ghafur Chaudhuri, 2 vols (Lahore,
1971).
16. Pub. as Rugat-i Alamgiri (Lucknow, 1260/1844): numerous MSS.
17. Nigarnam-i-Munshi, Lucknow, 1882.
18. MS Bib. Nat., Paris: Blochet Suppl. Pers. 482.
19. MS British Library, Add. 16,859, ff. 270-109b, 122b—127a.
20. Mirat-i-Ahmadi, ed. Nawab Ali, I Baroda, 1928, pp. 8-13. The
same editor published vol. 1, Baroda, 1927, and Supplement, Baroda, 1930.
21. Mirat-i Ahmadi, 1, p. 272.
22. See, for example, orders issued in respect of coining lighter copper
coins (dams), Mirat-i Ahmadi, 1. pp. 265, 267, 288.
23:eibid;, pp. 2726283.
24. For Amin Qazwini’s text, see Aligarh CAS in History Library
transcript, pp. 509-10. For the text of the actual inscription as found on the
 The Use of Sources in Mughal Historiography 385
mosque, see Pir Ghulam Hasan Khoyhami, Tarikh-i Hasan, Srinagar, n.d., 1
pp. 500-1.
25. These versions are studied by Shireen Moosvi, ‘Administering
Kashmir, an Imperial Edict of Shahjahan’, Aligarh Journal of Oriental
Studies, i (2), 1986, pp. 141-52.
26. Saqi Mustaid Khan, Ma’asir-i Alamgiri, ed. Agha Ahmad Ali,
Calcutta, 1871, p. 69.
27. Selected Waqai of the Deccan (1660-1671, A.D., ed. Yusuf Husain,
Central Record Office, Hyderabad Govt. (now AP State Archives),
Hyderabad, 1953.
28. A.P. State Archives MS (Asafiya, Fan-i Tarikh 2242), transcript,
Aligarh CAS in History Library, nos 15-16.
29. Of these histories the following have been published: Abul Fazl,
Akbarnama, Calcutta, 1873-87; Lahori, Padshahnama, Calcutta, 1866—
72; Kazim, Alamgirnama, Calcutta, 1865-73.
30. Jahangirnama (Tuzuk-i Jahangiri), ed. Syed Ahmad, Ghazipur
and Aligarh, 1863-4.
31. GH. Khare and GT. Kulkarni, (eds.), Aurangzebachya Darbarache
Akhbar (Persian texts with Marathi calendars), Pune, 1973.
32. C.R. Wilson, (ed.), The Early Annals of the English in Bengal, 1
(2): The Surman Embassy (1911, 1963), pp. 282-3.
33. MS Oxford, Bodleian 257 (Fraser 124), ff. 129a—489b, which largely
comprises material from akhbarat from Delhi, given under separate entries
for each day.
34. Cf. S.R. Sharma, A Bibliography of Mughal India (1526-1707
A.D.), Bombay, n.d., pp. 9-10.
35. Tazkirat-us Salatin-i Chaghta, ed. Muzaffar Alam, Bombay, 1980.
Cf. the editor’s remarks in the English introduction, pp. 5—7 for this author’s
sources.
36. British Library, Add. 16, 711, ff. 14a, 145b—146a.
37. Khatima (Epilogue) of Faizi Sirhindis’s recension of Jauhar
Aftabchi’s memoirs, King’s College, Cambridge MS 84, ff. 134a—b. India
Office MS Ethe 222 (I.0. 788) is also a copy of this recension.
38. Faizi Sirhindi, Akbarnama, Br. Lib. Or., 169, ff. 194b—-195a.
39. King’s College, Cambridge, MS 84 ff. 55b, 88b.
40. ‘The book might be described as consisting of annals and a diary
which once met within what is now the gap 1508-19 (914-925 A.H.)’, A.S.
Beveridge in the preface to her translation, Baburnama (London, 1921), p.
XXXIil.
41. Jahangirnama, ed. Syed Ahmad, Ghazipur and Aligarh, 1863-64.
42. Tarikh-i Khan Jahan Lodi, ed. S.M. Imamal Din, Dacca, 1960, 11,
pp. 704-5.
386 Mughal India
43. See account of the thirteenth regnal year in Jahangirnama, p. 239.
Cf. Elliot and Dowson, The History of India as told by its Own Historians,
London, 1866-77, vi, pp. 278-9.
44. The separate history was published as Jahangirnama, Lucknow,
1898. The Igbalnama, a history of the Mughal dynasty till Jahangir’s -
accession (1605), was written earlier in Jahangir’s reign in the fifteenth
regnal year (1620) (Nawal Kishore edn, Lucknow, 1870, p. 479), in two vols.
The history of Jahangir came to be treated as its third volume, and was
published as such in the Nawal Kishore edition of the whole work
(Lucknow, 1870), and in the Bib. Ind. edn of this volume only (Calcutta,
1865).
45. Maasir-i-Jahangiri, ed. Azra Alavi, Bombay, 1978.
46. Br. Lib. Add. 16,695, ff. 211b—245b, contains Ataki’s account of
Jahangir’s reign.
47. The standard editions of the two works are: Badauni, Muntakhab-
ut Tawarikh, ed. Ali Ahmad and Lees, 3 vols, Calcutta, 1864-9; Nizamuddin
Ahmad, Tabagat-i Akbari, 3 vols, ed. B. De (vol. iii partly ed. M. Hidayat
Husain), Calcutta, 1913-35. In his work Nijatur Rashid, ed. S. Moinul Haq,
Lahore, 1972, p. 82, Badauni himself modestly styles his Muntakhab-ut
Tawarikh, ‘a summary’ of ‘the late’ Nizamuddin Ahmad’s history.
48. Muntakhab-ut Tawarikh, i, p. 389.
49. MS Aligarh Muslim University Library, Subhanullah Coll. Suppl.
Farsiya 920/45. For a few of Badauni’s references to this work, see
Muntakhab-ut Tawarikh, m, pp. 76-7, 97, 323.
50. Dabistan-i Mazahib, Bombay, 1292/1875, p. 266.
51. Thus H. Blochmann allowed it to influence heavily his translation
of the chapters on Akbar’s religious views in Abul Fazl’s A’in-i Akbari.
Not satisfied by rendering, for example, A’in-i iradat gazinam (Rules for
Spiritual Disciples) as Ordinances of Divine Faith, Blochmann proceeds to
insert the translation of a whole series of passages from Badauni. See
A’in-i Akbari, tr. H. Blochmann (orig. pub., Calcutta, 1864-73), rev. D.C.
Phillott, Calcutta, 1927, p. 175 (Ordinances of Divine Faith), 177—218 (extracts
from Badauni). By and large, Mughal historians even in the eighteenth
century, e.g. Khafi Khan in Muntakhab-ul Lubab, vol. 1, remained great
admirers of Akbar and his achievements, ignoring his religious heresies.
52. The standard editions of the two works are: Akbarnama, ed. Ahmad
Ali, 3 vols, Calcutta, 1873-87; A’in-i Akbari, ed. H. Blochmann, Calcutta,
1867-77.
53. These dates are best discussed in Shireen Moosvi, Economy of
the Mughal Empire, Delhi, 1987, pp. 5-8.
54. A’in-i Akbari, m, tr. H.S. Jarrett, rev. Jadunath Sarkar, Calcutta,
1948, p. 472 (translation modified after checking with text ed. H. Blochmann,
op. cit. , p. 255); see also Akbarnama, 1, p. 9 (Abul Fazl’s preface).
 The Use of Sources in Mughal Historiography 387
55, I assume nadanist (did not understand) is a misreading here for
nadasht.
56. Tazkira-i Humayun wa Akbar, ed. M. Hidayat Husain, Calcutta,
1941, pp. I-2.
a Humayun Nama, ed. and tr. A.S. Beveridge, London, 1902, from
the only known MS, in Br. Lib.
58. India Office Library, Ethe 219 (1.0. 218) seems to be the best MS
copy of this work.
Bes Harbans Mukhia, Historians and Historiography during the Reign
of Akbar, New Delhi, 1976, pp. 68-9.
60. Akbarnama, i, p. 118.
. Akbarnama, 1, pp. 9-10.
Ibid., 1, p. 10.
. Br. Lib. Add. 27, 247.
Add. 27, 247, ff. 33 1b—332b; 400a—401b; 401b—404b.
. Akbarnama, i, pp. 381-3.
66. A’in-i Akbari, w, tr. Jarrett, rev. Sarkar, pp. 472-3: translation
substantially corrected after checking with text, 1, p. 255.
 Sih

The Correspondence of Aurangzeb

and its Historical Significance

This chapter attempts to discuss the nature of information contained

in various collections of the letters of Aurangzeb and their historical
significance.
Chronologically, the first place among the collections of Aurangzeb’s
correspondence belongs to the Insha-i Zubdatul Araiz. It was discovered
by Professor S. Nurul Hasan, who possesses a unique manuscript of
it. The collection contains letters written by Aurangzeb to Shah Jahan
and some important nobles, relating to the Qandahar campaign of 1652.
The most important of all collections, and in chronological order
the second, is that collected by Shaikh Abul Fath Qabil Khan Thattaw1
and Muhammad Sadiq, under the title Adab-i Alamgiri. These include
the letters of Prince Akbar as well and the collection was given its
final form by Muhammad Sadiq, 1115 /1703-4. Out of this collection
the letters written by Aurangzeb to Shah Jahan, Jahan Ara and the
princes have been published in the Ruga’at-i ‘Alamgiri edited by
Sayyid Najib Ashraf Nadvi.
The Adab-i Alamgiri was collected and edited by Muhammad Sadiq
of Ambala (then a town under Sirhind) of Hanafi persuasion. He says
in his preface that he came across the papers of Munshi al-Mumalik
Shaikh Abul Fath (later raised to the title of Qabil Khan), comprising
letters written by Aurangzeb before his accession, to Shah Jahan
(and princes), ministers, nobles and religious men, hasbul amrs written
by Abul Fath which are in the form of arzadashts or letters from
himself, but containing Aurangzeb’s instructions, to princes, and,
finally, Abul Fath’s own letters. These Sadiq collected and added,
confessedly from his own pen, but derived in fact entirely from the
Amal-i Salih and Alamgir Nama, an account of the war of succession,
ending with the death of Dara Shukoh. He then gives letters written
by Aurangzeb to Shah Jahan during his captivity, but makes no
reference to these in the preface. Lastly he gives letters written by
prince Akbar to Aurangzeb and other princes and his nishans to various
nobles written or drafted by Muhammad Sadiq himself while in the
 The Correspondence of Aurangzeb 389
service of that prince. They belong mostly to the short period of the
Rajput War. The date of the collection is given in a chronogram at the
end of the preface yielding 1115/1703—-4.
The Adab-i Alamgiri is an extremely valuable source, in particular
for the period of Aurangzeb’s second viceroyalty of the Deccan. It
contains very important material on the system of jagir assignment,
mansabdari regulations, general and incidental references to the agrarian
situation, etc. It also contains very useful information regarding the
Deccan problem and the arguments advanced by Prince Aurangzeb
to adopt a forward policy towards the states of the Deccan. There
are also some interesting data on the financial crisis with which the
Mughal nobles posted in the Deccan were faced; and a discussion on
the problem of supporting the Deccan war through the resources of
the occupied Deccan only.
Apart from the above two coilections, all the others contain letters
belonging to the last twenty years of Aurangzeb’s life. The first of
these is the Raqaim-i Karaim, containing Aurangzeb’s letters to Mir
Abul Karim, Amir Khan, governor of Kabul. The Ragaim-i Karaim is
a collection of Aurangzeb’s letters mostly addressed to Amir Khan
arranged by his son Saiyid Ashraf Khan, Mir Muhammad Husaini,
who adds a short preface at the beginning. There seems to have been
a basic text of the original compilation to which later transcribers
added further as other conies of letters or supposed letters of Aurangzeb
came into their hands.
The Raqgaim-i Karaim contains some useful information, having
some bearing on the administration of the Mughal Empire and forms
of court etiquette.
Kalimat-i Taiyabat, or Notes for letters, to be drafted on behalf of
Aurangzeb were collected by Inayatullah Khan, and arranged by him
in 1131/1722. Inayatullah states in his preface that owing to the
kindness of Aurangzeb he had reached a position where he enjoyed
personal contact with the emperor.
As explained by Inayatullah himself, the present work is a collection
of notes written by Aurangzeb to form the basis for orders and formal
letters to be drafted by Inayatullah. They are, therefore, by their very
nature obscure and the compiler has not helped us by omitting all
headings and dates, thus retaining the original kalimat in an almost
undisturbed form. From references to the events and doings of the
officers found in the kalimat, they can all be said, with some
confidence, to belong to the last decade of Aurangzeb’s reign. On the
whole, they are a valuable source for the study of administrative forms
390 Mughal India
and methods of the period, but almost entirely fail to provide any
important material and sidelights on the political and administrative
system of the day.
Inayatullah Khan also compiled another collection, the Ahkam-i
Alamgiri. Of all the collections of Aurangzeb’s letters in the later
years of his reign, this is by far the most important historically and is
as authentic as, if not more than, the Kalimat-i Taiyabat and the
Ragaim-i Karaim. The author of the Mirat-i Ahmadi explicitly
acknowledges his indebtedness to this collection in writing his account
of the events in Gujarat during Aurangzeb’s last few years. This is
amply confirmed by the most perfunctory reading of his account, in
which he makes references to or quotes words and sentences from a
number of hasbul hukms embodied in the present collection.
The letters in the Ahkam-i Alamgiri were almost all written in the
last two or three years of Aurangzeb’s life. All the dates in the letters
and references to current events, without exception, belong to this
period. Thus Aurangzeb writes to Bidar Bakht that since his departure
from Ajmer he had spent twenty-five years waging the holy war in
the Dakhin. The events in Gujarat covered by the letters are chiefly
the defeat of Hamduddin Khan, diwan of the province, at the hands of
the Marrathas, which took place late in AH 1706, besides the events
that followed it and a conflict with the Dutch at Surat and the release
of Fakhrul Islam and Shaikhul Islam from their ship in 1707. C.A.
Storey is mistaken in implying that there is any portion in common
between this collection and the Ahkam-i Alamgiri translated by Sarkar
as Anecdotes of Aurangzeb. There is no connection between the two
works at all.
The letters are classified according to the persons they were-
addressed to, and though a few headings are missing, the arrangement
is generally consistent and free from that anarchical confusion found
in some other collections of the emperor’s letters. It is, therefore,
much easier to handle the information contained in this collection.
The Dastural Amal-i Agahi is a collection of Aurangzeb’s letters,
collected, as stated in the preface, at the desire of Raja Aya Mal in
1156/1746, the twenty-ninth regnal year of Muhammad Shah. Many
of the letters of this collection are to be found in the Ramz o-Isharahai
Alamgiri,' also compiled at Ayahmal’s desire four years earlier and in
the popular collection of the Raga ‘at-i Alamgir (Kanpur edn. AH 1267),
while at least some of its letters are taken directly or indirectly from
the Raqaim-i Karaim. The letters of Aurangzeb to Shah Jahan at the
beginning are identical with those preserved in the Adab-i Alamgiri,
 The Correspondence of Aurangzeb 391
and were probably taken from that work. Not at all to be despised,
finally, is the so-called bazar collection of Aurangzeb’s letters, printed
under the title Ruga’at-i Alamgiri.
This is, or perhaps, was till recently, the most common collection
of Aurangzeb’s letters. In its final arrangement it may not, however,
be a very old one and this probably explains the paucity of its manuscript
copies in the major libraries. Indeed, the larger part of it is taken
bodily from the Ramz-o-Isharaha-i Alamgiri, compiled in AH 1152 at
Ayamal’s desire. In its later portion it adds a number of letters taken
from the Ragaim-i Karaim. It omits the alleged last letter of Dara
Shukoh and the will of Aurangzeb.
The subject matter of the contents is generally similar to that of the
Kalimat-i Taiyabat and Raqaim-i Karaim. They all seem to have been
written in the last two decades, mostly in the last one, of his reign.
There exists in English translation a collection, whose Persian
original has not been traced. This translation bears the title, Letters of
the Emperor Aurangzeb to his sons, grandsons, his ministers and
principal nobles, to which is prefixed his will, translated by Joseph
Earles, Calcutta, 1788. The will is obviously fabricated, though it is
probably the one included in the Ramz-o-Isharaha-i Alamgiri. The
translation itself does not reveal any document of singular value. Many,
if not most of what are presumably the originals are found in the
better known and more authentic collections.
There can be no doubt that the correspondence of Aurangzeb is
extremely useful from the point of the view of reconstructing the
narrative and administrative history of the period. At some points it is
more reliable than the contemporary chronicles. Aurangzeb has
narrated the events of these letters as he saw them and comments
freely problems with which he was faced. If all these letters are properly
classified, annotated, edited and calendared, a great service would
surely be rendered to the cause of Medieval Indian History.

NOTE

1. I owe this information to Dr Irfan Habib.

 Index

Abbas Sarwani 365, 381 Afghan Empire, Afghans 33, 60, 70, 250,
Abbasid caliphate, Abbasids (AD 750— 320-2, 338, 343, 345, 364
847) 8-9, 13, 16, 63, 121, 132 collapse (1809) 346
Abd al-Haiy 367 governors under Aurangzeb 266
Abd al-Haqq 26, 367 Afghanistan 112, 113
Abd-al Baqi Nahavandi 367 African tribal society 85
Abdur Rahim Khan-i Khanan 213, 364, Afridis 206
367 Age of Discovery 69
Abdul Aziz Khan 330 Agra
Abdul Hamid Lahauri 366 ~ commercial decline 346, 355
Abdul Hamid Multani, Qazi 52 agrarian economy, society, agriculture
Abdul Karim 211 5, 52, 53, 71, 74-5, 77-80, 83, 84,
Abdul Latif 158 85, 87, 100, 188, 340
Abdul Mumin 317 production 75, 79-80, 90
Abdullah Khan Uzbek 313, 317, 322- surplus 65, 355
8 taxation 24
Abdullah Sultanpuri, Mulla 159 Ahadis 223, 224
Abhay Chand 204, 233-4, 236 ahadnama 247
Abraham 6 Ahdad 322-3
absolutism 103 Ahkam-i Alamgiri 390
Abu Bakr 7 Ahmad Thattawi 166
Abu Hanifa 21, 232 Ahmad, son of Ayaz 32, 34
Abu Raihan al-Biruni 110, see Alberuni Ahmedabad 310
Abul Faz! 60-1, 62-3, 64, 69-70, 124— aimma 76
6. 2 Aw 0s Voile, 159. LOO: Ainul Mulk Multani 32, 53
161, 162, 163, 164, 165, 166, 167, Ainul Mulk Mahru 32
TOOMTCOM UST. 20725 252. 508: Ajit Singh 254, 256-9
327, 342, 365, 380-3 Ajmer 376
A ‘in-i Akbari, (c.1595) 50, 63, 114, 124, Ajodhan 21, 52, 53
158, 160-2, 173, 175, 177, 178, 179, Akbar 26, 52, 63, 65, 70, 73n7', 77-8,
187, 201, 308, 351, 365, 380, 382 88, 95, 173, 175-80, 183, 188, 191,
Akbarnama 62, 152-3, 160, 201, 365, JAZ 0231, 23252450249 22594316,
380, 381 and the perception of In- 323-4, 355, 368, 378-82
dia 109-16 attitude towards women 138-9
Abul Qasim Khan Namkin 374 Christianity under 233
Abul-Maali 378 coinage under 67
Acquaviva’s Jesuit mission 161 conformity with animal killing 187
Adham Khan 112 death 250
Adil Kashghari, Mulla 221 Hindu queens 150
Adil Shah, king of Bijapur 311 humanistic concerns 139
 Index 393

invasions 151-4 11, 363

justice system 125, 136 Nuh Sipihr (1318) 20
land revenue administration 60—2 amiran-i sada 3\
and the perception of India 109-16 Amroha 33, 34
prohibition of slave trade 140 Amu (Oxus) river 316, 327, 328, 329
promotion of nationalism and social anachronism 164
reforms 116 anarchy 125
religious policy 64, 78, 125-6, 149— Anatolia
50, 155, 158-70, 184-5, 193-6, peasant uprising 100
200-3, 232, 245 Andariman 220
ritual of discipleship 188 Andkhud 317
spiritual vision 154-5 Ani Rai Singh Dalan 322
translations in Sanskrit works 173-— animal slaughter 186, 192, 193, 223
80 Anup Singh 255
Akbar, Prince 259, 388 Aqil Khan Razi 247
akhbarat 207, 262, 376-7, 379 Arabia 7, 229
Akhshi sect 220, 225 Arabian Peninsula 96, 119
Ala al-Daula Kami 368 Arabic 9, 132
Alai nobility 32 Arabic—Persian tradition 109
Alam Muzaffar 351-2, 354 Arabs 4-9, 12, 13, 15, 97, 111, 132
Alavi sect 220 tribal traditions 120-1
Alau Daula Arakanese 20
Nafaisul Ma’asir 380 Aravalli ridge 45
Alauddin Khalji (1296-1316) 19, 20, Arghun kingdom 52
32, 39-42, 49, 50, 60, 117n'’, 123, Arif Qandhari 152, 154
124 Arif Subhani 220
AlBeruni 10, 17, 18, 24, 110-11, 115, aristocracy 8, 124
173, 2805252 Arjan, Guru (d. 1606) 25, 188-90, 195
Kitabul-i Hind 18, 229 Arjunadeva, Chaulukya king 20
al-Ghazali 70 artillery, role 69, 342
Ali bin Hamid Kufi 363 Asa Karan 211
Ali Muhammad Khan 375 Asaf Khan 153
Ali Shah, a Khalji kinsman 32 asceticism 114
Aligarh 87 Asharite theology 16
al-Iranshahri 229, 230 Ashur Beg Qaramanlu 220
Almans 330 astronomy 178
Altai mountains 10 Atharva-Veda 174
Amar Das, Guru 26 Attock fort 316
Amar Singh Rawal 254 Aurangzeb (r.1659-1707) 66, 67, 88,
Amber 354, 376 203-4, 24455, 248, 249,251, 254,
Amin Chand 357 256) 2D e259. LD, S00.) Lion
Amir Hasan Sijzi 21-2, 40 376, 377, 390
Amir Khan, governor of Kabul 389 administrative system 262
Amir Khusrau (d. 1325) 22, 23, 41, 110— civil war of succession 248-51,
394 Index

254-6 Balban (1266-86) 23, 39, 49-50, 123,

conflict with Dutch at Surat 390 364
death 350, 377 Balchand 190
letters, historical significance 388— Balkans 98
91 Balkh, Uzbek kingdom 316-18
Marwar throne, succession 255, 258 Mughal expedition 327-32
policy of expansion 206 Baluch chiefs 153
policy towards Rajputs 253, 255— Bana
8 Harshacharita 363
provincial governors, under 262-6 Baqi Mohammad Khan 317
religious policy 63, 78, 126, 200-8, Barani, Ziauddin 20, 31-4, 40-3, 52,
246-7, 250, 337 60, 122-4, 126, 372, 373
religious war 247 Tarikh-i Firuz Shahi 52, 60, 122,
Avicenna 10 124, 364, 371-2
Awadh 19, 34, 343 Bari Doab 49, 52
economic growth 351, 354 Battisiya famine 214
revenue to East India Company 357 Bayazid Bayat 365
Aya Mal 390 Bayly, C.A. 351, 353-4, 355-6, 357,
Ayyub Qureshi 210-13 358
Azad Bilgrami 217, 225, 233, 343, 367 Beas 189, 316
Sarw-i Azad 368 beef-eating 175
Azar Kaiwan 223-6 beliefs and customs 112-16
Aziz Khummar 33-4 Bengal 343
agrarian regime 74
Baba Lal 203 agriculture production 79
Babur (d. 1530) 72n?, 364-5, 378 governor under Aurangzeb 264
Bactria 330 merchant’s role in administration
Badakhshan 154 344
Mughal expedition 327-32 revenue to East India Company
Timurid kingdom 316-18 345-6
Badaun 34 silk 340
Badauni, Abdul Qadir 111-12, 130, Bentinck, Lord William 83, 88
149, 152, 158, 159, 163, 166-8, Bernier, Francois 82, 83, 98-101, 239,
173-7, 179, 231, 232, 379-80 312
Muntakha-ut Tawarikh 159, 365, Bet-Jalandhar Doab 49
379 Bhakkar 176
Bahadur Khan Kokaltash 259 Bhakti movement 212
Bahar-i Ajam 52 Bhanuchandra Gani 191
Bahram Aiba Kishlu Khan 32 Bharan (Sharan) governor of Gulbarga
Bahauddin Zakariya 53 19, 34
Bairagis 212 Bhaskaracharya 178
Balaghat 89 Bhatinda 49, 53
Balak Nath Tapshri 219 Bhatis 259
Balazuri 13 Bhera 151, 153, 154
 Index 305

Bhim Sen 366 Celestial Empire, see China

Bhumihar zamindars 354 Central Asia (Uzbeks) 61, 65, 69, 94—
Bhuwa, son of Khawas Khan 24 6a0083 110-331
Bidar Bakht 390 decline 338
Bihar Khans 311
revenue to East India Company centralization 8, 87, 88, 89
345-6 Chachnama 9, 12, 14, 15, 52, 363
Bijapur 247, 311 Chaghatai hordes 39
Bikaner 258 Chaitanya sect 195, 207
Bikramjit, Raja of Malwa 174, 193 Chandalas 13, 14, 17
bilingual coinage 18 Chandrabhan Brahman 203, 212
Birbal 149 Chandu 190
Bodh Gaya 20 Chardin 100
brahmadeya 74 Chatrupa, see Jadrup Gosain
Brahmanabad 14—5 Chatur fort 321
Brahmans, brahmanical culture 12, 14, Chauhar Mal 257
17, 20, 111-2, 173-6, 193, 195, 225, chauth 345
239 Chenab 52, 151
restrictions 9 Chengiz Khan 62
Brajanand 207 Chetan Singh 89
Brindabandas chiefs 73n?!
Safina-i Khwushgu 368 China, Chinese 18, 111, 113, 307
British conquest, British Empire 79, 86, religion 200
109, 350-1, 356-8 Chitrupa, Gusain. See Jadrup Gosain
Buddhism, Buddhists 10, 13, 25 Chittor, fall of 159
Bughra Khan 34 Christendom 307
Bukhara 317-18 Christianity, Christians 6, 10, 69, 99,
bureaucracy 34, 75, 89,91, 102-3, 124 130-1, 183, 184, 196, 205, 216
Buxar battle 351 Muslims’ perception in medieval
Byzantine empire 8, 97, 121, 132, 130 India 229-40
Byzantium 6, 120 Church and state 200
civil law 5
Caesar, Julius 237 civil wars 340, 345
Caliphate, Caliphs see khilafat civilization, arrival in India 18
Caliphate, Caliphs climatology 53
Cambay 193 Clive, Lord Robert 350
Cape of Good Hope 339 cloth-printing 24
capitalism 77, 94, 353 coinage system 19, 67-8
caravan trade 6 colonial powers, colonialism 338, 342,
Carpmthian heretics 38 357-8
cash nexus 79 commerce 90
caste and community 71 and religion, 6
caste system 75, 85, 101, 212, 354 commercialization 86
Caucasus mountains 42 communal fraternity 22
396 Index

communications 88 governor under Aurangzeb 263

community life 90 Mughal empire 67
Constantinople 65, 98 decentralization 86, 355
‘continuity thesis’ 86 decimal system 61
converts 165 Delhi Sultanate, Sultans 43, 49, 52, 54,
Cornwallis, Lord 79, 347, 357 60-1, 124, 364
court culture 64 despotism 16, 60, 61, 123-4
cow-slaughter 168, 213 Dhanna Jat 25
craft production 340 Dhar (Malwa) 33, 89
cross-cultural fertilization 9 Dhara, naib wazir of Deogir 19
cultural, culture 19, 70, 74 Dharmat, battle of 247, 259
co-existence 115 Dhirdhar, Raja 195
and economic changes 25 Dihli-i Kuhna 38
efflorescence 24, 26 dihgans 9, \4
failure 342, 356 Dilawar Khan (Ibrahim Khan) Kakar
and social institutions 111 89
tradition 15 Din Mohammad 317
unity 110, 113 Din-i Ilahi 163, 183, 186
customary and religious laws 90 Dipalpur 49, 50
discipleship (iradat) 186, 187
Dabistan-i Mazahib 64, 164, 175, 190, distributive problems 129
193, 204-5, 216-26, 233, 236-7, divine grace 7
239, 380 intentions 21
dagh (horse branding) 61 Light theory 201
Dahar 14-15 divinity 113
Dakhin, Dakhinis 66 duality 18
holy war 390 duaspa sihaspa rank 62
Damascus 121 Durga Das 257
Danishmand Khan 69 Dutch 311, 340
Daniyal 193
Dara Shukoh 64, 66, 70, 180, 202—S, economy 5, 10, 24, 78-9, 82, 83, 87,
207-8, 245, 247, 248, 249, 250, 355, 90, 338, 340-1, 350, 351-3
378 Egypt 98
religious eclecticism 342 Elphinstone 346
Dargah Nizamudin 39 English East India Company 79, 80, 88,
Darshanavijay’s Vijayatilaka Suri Rasa 308-11, 343, 346-8, 356-7, 376
(1622-40) 191 English merchants 340
Daru-l Islam 307 ethnicity 85
Darul-Khilafa 41 Euphrates 4]
Dastural Amal-i Agahi 390 Europe, European 69, 103, 342
Daulatabad 43 and Asia, commerce 338, 340
Dawar Baksh 61 development 342
Day of Judgement 236, 239 landlord 82
Deccan learning and science 356
 Index 39F

population 339, 341 Ghayaspur 39, 42, 46n'*

post-Reformation state 86, 90 Ghazi Beg Tarkhan 89
post-Renaissance 200 Ghazi Malik 49, 50
superiority 99 Ghaziuddin Khan Firoz Jang 265
urban growth 341 Ghaznavid empire 16
Ghaznavides 49, 229
Faizabad 355 Ghaznin 321-2
Fakhrul Islam 390 Ghorians, Ghorids 11, 38, 49, 110-11,
Farid 29n%* 363
farmans 374, 375 Ghulam Ali Khan
Farrukhabad 355 Imad al Sa‘adat 367
Farshad 220 Ghulam Husain Khan Tabatabai 366
Farzana Bahram 221, 225 Ghuram 53
Fatawa-i Jahandari 122-3 Ghiyasuddin Balban 39
Fatehpur Sikri 149, 154-5 Ghiyasuddin Tughlag (1320-25) 31-2,
Fathnama-i Chittor 159 42-3, 371, 372
Fatima 310 Gobi desert 95
fatwas 308 Gobindwal 188
faujdari 89 God
Fayy ibn Ammar, Arab Governor 13 absoluteness 221
feudalism 5, 15, 84, 85 and state relationship 208
fidelity 131 Gohana
Firangis 69 Akbar’s invasion 151
Firdausi 13, 121 Gokla 206
Firishta, Qasim Hindu-Shah 112 Goraknath 210
Gulshan-i Ibrahimi 112, 365, 372 Great Silk Road 340
Firoz Shah Tughlaq (1351-88) 20, 24, Greece, Greek 115
31, 35, 38, 44, 45, 53, 364 philosophy and science 16, 18
Firozabad 45, 44 Gujarat 34, 390
fiscal system 102, 122 commercial decline 346
fitna (sedition) 87 governor under Aurangzeb 264
French Revolution (1789) 129, 200 Hindus 22
merchant’s role in administration 344
da Gama, Vasco 231 Gulbadan Begum 365, 378, 381
Gambroon, English commerce 309-10 Gulchand 50
Ganesh Man 220 Gyani Rina 221
Ganga 37, 44
Ganga Ram 212-13 Habib, Irfan 84, 85, 87, 101, 337, 350,
generalization 341 354
genuflexion (sijda) 312 Hadi Kamwar Khan 377
Germany, hadis 119, 120
Thirty Years War 339, 352 Hafiz 225-6, 342
Ghausi Shattari Haidar Ali 343, 346, 356
Gulzar-i Abrar 367 Hajjaj ibn Yusuf 9, 132
398 Index

Hakim Beg 195 25) 25 le 2p

Hakim Haziq 319 governor under Aurangzeb 266
Halajun 50 and Muslims, relations/coexistence/
Hamida Banu Mariyam Zamani, differences 188, 212, 337
mother of Akbar 154 ruling class 98
Hamidullah 4 Sultanate 20
Hammira (Amir Mahmud) 17 Hisar Firuza 53-4
Hanafite School 10, 388 Hobbes 124, 126
Hansi 53 hostility 116
Har Gobind, Guru 191 Humanyun 116, 365, 378, 381
Haras 259 Humanyun’s Tomb 45
harem influence 337 Hyderabad 343
Hargobind, Guru 221, 224
Haribans (Harivamsa) 178 Ibn al-Arabi 149
Harsha, King of Kashmir (AD 1101) Ibn Batuta 31, 33, 38, 41, 43, 53
14 Ibn Hasan 61
Hasan ‘Assar (Hassu Taili) 209-15 Ibn-al Arabi 205
Hasan Lafabeli of Khurasan 330 Ibrahim Sirhindi, Haji 174
Hasan Nizami 363 ideological liberalism 34
hasbul hukums 390 Id-i Qurban (Iduz Zuha) 185-6
Hauz-i Khas (Hauz-i Alai) 41, 43, 44, identities, conflicting 12
45 idol worship 114, 188, 195, 201, 203
Hauz-i Sultani (Hauz-i Shamsi) 38, 41— Iftikhar Khan 253-5
2, 44 Tlahadad Faizi Sirhindi 378
Hazara Gujaran 50 Yahi Faith 187
Hazara Qarlugh 50 Ilahis 216
Hazaras 50, 320-1, 332 Iltutmish (1210-36) 19, 38, 41, 50, 367
hegemony 132 image worship, see idol worship
Hellenized Syrian Arabs (Shamis) 132 Imam Quli Khan 317—20, 323-4, 330-1
Hellenic thought 9 imam 95, 120, 159
Herat 317, 324 imperialism 74, 109, 120
hereditary potentates 76 Inayatullah Khan 388-90
hereditary rulers 131 Kalimat-i Tayyabat 374
heterogeneity 35, 71 Inca of Peru 347
Hijaz 6 Indar Singh, Raja of Jodhpur 255-8
Himavant 110 India and Europe, cultural distance
Hindawi 23 356
Hindukush (Hindu-Koh) range 313, Indian Statutory (Simon) Commission
316, 320, 324, 327-8 109 ;
Hindus, Hinduism 3, 17—22, 25-6, 34, indigenous clans 66
50, 110-14, 123, 130, 153, 160-2, individual right 5
164, 169, 175, 180, 189, 193, 195, Indo-Muslim tradition 112
196, 201-3, 205, 207, 210, 214-15, Indraprastha 39
216, 220, 221, 222, 231-2, 245-6, Indri, Kishan Bazaran 34
 Index 399

Indus 52, 110, 154, 316 religious policy 183-96

inequalities 128 and Uzbeks 316-24
injustice 101 Jahangirnama 379
intellectual development 18 Jahanpanah 43
intellectual renaissance 16 Jahilliya 5
intellectual stagnation 342 Jai Singh, Raja 72n*, 250, 259
intercultural communication 18 Zij-i Muhammad Shahi (1732) 342
intermediate classes 352 Jai Singh, Mirza Raja 249
international culture 4 Jains 20 150, 173, 190, 191-2
iqta (transferable revenue) 10, 16, 23, Jaisiya, son of Dahar, hero-worship 14
49, 52, 62, 97 122, 164 Jalal, Afghan qazi 33
Iran, Iranians 14, 16, 65, 96, 97, 110, Jalaluddin Khalji (1290-96) 19, 39, 123
250 Jama Majid 38
Iraqite Arabs and mawwali, coalition 9 Jamadami (estimated revenue) 62,
Isaiah 238 351-2
Isami 17, 19, 31, 43, 364 Jamaluddin Dawani, Mulla 225
Futuh-us Salatin 372, 373 Jamasp 220
Ishar Kar 220 Jambu-dvipa 110
slain 554,550. 7,11. 135 16,18,23;, 70) James I 126, 313
95, 126, 130, 184, 185, 188, 189, 201 Jam‘at Khana 39
conversions to 8-10, 21, 34, 119, Jan Mohammad 317
175-6 Jaswant Singh 250, 253-5, 256, 259
and Hinduism, differences 203 Jats 9, 13, 71, 206, 259, 343, 354
ideology, against science 341 Javedan 130
jurisprudence 307 Jawan Sher 220
Islam Shah 61 Jech 49
Isma‘il, founder of Safavid dynasty 96 Jesuits 173, 183, 184, 185, 189-90
Ismail Sufi, Mulla 221 Jesus 230
istihgaq (deserts) 122 Jews 7, 130, 131, 216, 237
Itimad Ali Khan 377 Jharokha darshan 64, 164
Tyar-i-Danish 180 Jizya 159, 207, 250, 256
Izidis 223 Jodhpur
Rathor rebellion 254
Jadrup Gosain 195, 219 jogis 21
jagir system, jagirdars 62, 77, 82, 86, Judaism 6, 205
88, 99-100, 184, 337, 344, 352, 355, justice 65, 114, 162
389
Jahan Ara Begam 207, 247-8, 388 Ka‘bah 6
Jahangir (r. 1605-1627) 62, 89, 125, Kabir 26
154, 164, 166, 167-8, 214, 215, 258, Kabirpanthis 214
312-13, 318-20, 323, 330, 365, Kabul 89, 264, 316, 317
375, 378-9 raid by Nazr Mohammad 320
Christianity under 232 Kachwahas 259
death 324 Kaithal 53
400 Index

Kalhana Khusrau, Prince 188-92, 194

Rajatarangini 14, 17-18, 179, 363 Khuts 20
Kalimat-i Taiyabat 389-9} Khwaja Abdur Rahim 323-4, 327
Kaliwa wa Dimna 130 Khwaja Abul Hasan 322-3
Kalyanasagara Suri 191 Khwaja Hasan Marwi 174
Kamboj sect 211 Khwaja Jahan, see Ahmad, son of Ayaz
Kannu 32-3 Khwaja Jamaluddin Mahmud 225
Karnal Khwaja Muin Khan, deputy governor
Mughals major debacle 1739, 342 of Lahore 89
Karthal 190 Khwaja Nasir 319
Kashmir Kilokhari 39-42, 45
governor under Aurangzeb 264 kingship and nobility 60
Kaushak-i Sabz 41 Kishan, market man of Idri 19
Kaushak-i Shikar 45 Kochick Bahram 220, 223, 225
Kesri Singh Mutasaddi 253 Koil (Aligarh) 89
Kewal Ram Kokhars 49-50
Tazkirat al-Umara 367 Kshatriyas 22
Khadija, Prophet’s wife 131 Kumbha, Rana 20
Khafi Khan
Muntakhab al-Lulab 366, 371 labour, hereditary division 101-2
Khajwah, battle 259 Lachhmi Narayan Shafig 367
Khalifa(s) 119, 128 Lahore 53, 54, 89
khalisa 61, 99-100, 184, 254-5, 344 Ghaznavid kingdom 49
Khaljis (1290-1320), 32, 60, 64, 124, Mongol raid (1241) 50
363 Muslim merchants 22
Khan Alam 312 Turkish merchants 309
Khan, Iqtidar Alam 155, 16 laissez-faire 82
Khan Jahan Lodi 167, 367, 379 Lal Kot 38
Khan Muhammad, son of Balban 50 Lama-—Buddhism 5
Khanate 100 land grants 66
Khanazad Khan 321-2 landowning aristocracy 103
khanazads 265 land-revenue/tax 60—2, 75, 78-9, 82,
kharaj (land-tax) 9, 10, 65, 97, 122 SOF TOL. 3436355
Kharj sadir 0 warid 207 Lashkar Khan, subedar of Multan 89
Khwaja Bayazid Bustami 231 Lat 6
Khilafat (caliphate) 4, 8, 16, 95,97, 120, law, legal system 63, 88, 232, 245
122-3 of inheritance 256
Khudawandzada 33 Levant 6
khudkasht (resident cultivators) 76 Lilavati 178
Khurasan 317-18, 324 Lodis (1450-1526) 36, 60, 74
Khurram 324 Lucknow 355
Khurshid 220 Lutf Ali Beg 368
Khusrau Khan 32
Khusrau Malik 49 Ma‘dan-i Shaifa Sikandar Shahi 24
 Index 401

Ma’asir i-Jahangiri 319 Marzban-nama 130

madad-i ma‘ash 76 Marzbans 9
Madrasa-i Muizzi 38 masonary 24
Madina 7 Masulipatnam 340
madrasas 169, 186 Maulana Shah Muhammad Shahabadi
magnetic compass 24 180
Maha Singh (grandson of Man Singh) Mauryan Empire, Mauryas 23, 59, 84,
258 88
Mahabat Khan 206-7, 248, 321-2 Mawardi (AD 972-1058) 121
Mahabharata 175, 177, 179, 180, 372 Mazdak &
Mahadji Scindia 356 Mecca 6, 96, 168, 323-4
Mahalwari Settlements 80 Medieval Islam 10
Mahdavi Movement 70 Medina 119
Mahfuza, town 15 Mediterranean and India, trade 6
Mahmud of Ghaznin, (999-1030), first Mehtar Jauhar Aftabchi 378
Sultan of Islam 10, 16-8, 121 Meos 38
Mahmud Fal Hasiri 220 merchant’s role in administration 34
Mahrab 220 Merv 318
Mahzar 125 metrology 19
Mal Bhatti, Rana, chief of Abohar 50 Mian Mir 195
Malamatiyas 2\1 Middle Ages 76
Malikuttujjar 52 Middle East, economic history 338
Malwa see Dhar Mihtar Jauhar 381
Man Singh 168, 185, 190, 251, 258, 382 military system 16
Manat 6 Mill, James 75, 82
Mandavi Darwaza 41 Minhaj bin Siraj Jjuzjani; Tabagat-i
mansab 61-2, 66, 69, 88, 77, 99, 202, Nasiri 363, 367
254, 262-6, 337 Minhaj Siraj 19
mansabdars 153, 194, 258-9, 265, 389 Mir Abdul Karim 389
Manucci, Niccalao 308 Mir Bakhshi 183
Manusmriti 13 Mir Jumla 248-9
Maqpbul see Kannu Mir Khurd; Siyar al-Auliya 367
Marathas 66, 70, 78, 250, 345. 350-1, Mir Khwand; Rauzattu’s Safa 370
352, 354—5, 358 Mir Muhammad Husaini 389
confederacy 338, 343, 344, 346 mirasdar 77
market relations, effect on agriculture Mirat-i Ahmadi 390
79 Mirza Aziz Koka 61, 155, 168
Marwatr Mirza Faulad 165
Aurangzeb’s policy 257-9 Mirza Hakim, brother of Akbar 150,
destruction of temples 256 151, 153, 154, 316; death 317
Rathor rebellion 254 Mirza Muhammad 368
succession 255 Mirza Yusuf Khan 153
Marx, Karl 10, 74, 77, 84, 94, 101-2, Mirza Zulfigar, see Zulfigar Ardastani
341 Miyan Mir 202, 221
402 Index

mlechha 23 iS
Mobad Hoshyar 219-21, 223, 225, 233, Muhammad Husain Azad; Ab-i Hayat
238-39; Dabistan-i Mazahib 64, 368
164, 175, 190, 193, 204-5, 216-26, Muhammad ibn Qasim, conqueror of
233, 236-7, 239, 380 Sind 9
Mobad Hoshyar III, son of Khurshid Muhammad Kazim
220, 225 Alamgir Nama 248, 249, 262, 366,
Mobad Sarosh, son of Azar Kaiwan 376, 388
DN Tt220F225 Muhammad Khan Gujarati 178
modernity 71 Muhammad Qandahari 373
modernization 346 Muhammad Sadiq
Mohammad A‘ia, Qazi 75, 76 Adab-i Alamgiri 374, 388-9, 390
Mohammad Ibn Qasim (d. 714), 16 Tabagat-i Shah Jahani (1636-37)
Muhsin Fani 204 167, 368
monarchy 123 Muhammad Shah 377, 390
monetization 79, 88 Muhammad Tughlag (1325-51) 19, 20,
money circulation 79 31,32, 33.4345 438=42 501 Lit 28,
Mongol raids 39-40 124, 371-2; religious policy 64
Mongol Khans 95 Muhammad Waris 366
Mongols 4, 10, 33, 40, 49, 61, 96, 97. Muhammad Yusuf Ataki 379
111 Muhammadan history 19
monotheism, monotheists (muwahhid) Muhibullah IHahabadi 204
25, 26, 216, 223-4, 230 Muin al-Din Chishti (d. 1236) 367
Monserrate, Jesuit missionary at Muizzuddin bin Sam of Ghor (the
Akbar’s court 200 Shihabuddin Ghori) 18, 38
Moors 184 Muizzuddin Kaiqubad 19, 39
Moreland, W.H. 31, 61, 76, 83, 90, 339 Muizzuddin of Ghor 38, 49-50
Mori 40 Mujeeb, M.; Indian Muslims 368
Mu‘awiya (AD 661-80) 121 mujtahid (interpreter of law) 159-60
Mu‘tamad Khan; /qbalnama-i Mukhtar Khan 207
Jahangiri 379 Mulla Shiri 179
Mubariz Khan Afghan 322 Mullah Nasir of Burhanpur 70
Mughal empire 54, 66-7, 70-1, 77, 82, Multan 34, 49, 52-4, 89
84-90, 94, 95, 96, 98-100, 124, 128, Munro, Thomas 75, 347
307-8, 341, 347, 350-5, 370 Munshi al-Mumalik 388
collapse/decline 78, 343, 353, 356 mugaddams 20
documentation88-90 Muaqbil 34
polity 60, 61, 69-70, 83, 84-6 mugtis 34, 65
Mughalpur 39 Murad Bakhsh 247, 249
Mughals 94, 95, 96, 352, 354, 356, 358 Murshid Quli Khan (1655-8) 62, 89,
Muhammad Ali Khan 193: 344
Muhammad Amin Qazwini; Murtaza Khan see Shaikh Farid
Padshahnama 365, 376 Muslim 7, 19, 21
Muhammad Hashim, diwan of Gujarat and non-Muslims, political alliance
 Index 403

64 Nilkantha 179
influence of earlier culture 24 Nizam Panipat 178
law, see shariat Nizam-al-Mulk Tusi 62, 121
nobility 183 nizamat 356
ruling class 98 Nizamuddin Ahmad Bakshi 112, 372-
Mustata, Hajji 366 3, 379
Mustafa Khaliqdad Abbasi 180 Tabagqat-i Akbari 112, 159, 365, 371
Mutamad Khan 322 nobility, indigenous and foreign 31
Muzar 132 nomads, nomadic tribes 6, 13
Muzarites 8 and civilization, conflict 95—7
mysticism 16, 149, 154 non-Arab Muslims, converts
(mawwall) 8, 14, 120, 132
Nadir Shah 313, 338, 342, 350 non-violence 230
nagarseths 344 Nuh Siphir 110
Nairs 75 Nur Jahan 195, 319, 379
Najaba 34 Nuruddddin Muhammad see Jahangir
Najabat Khan Mirza Shuja 89 Nuruddin Firuz, of Hormuz 20
Namdev 25 Nusrat Khan 34
Nana Phadhis (Fardnawis) 345
Nanak, Guru 23, 26, 210, 212, 214 obscurantism 211, 214-15
Nand Kumar 357 Ogetai 39
nankar (tax) 76 Old Testament 6, 230, 235, 239
Naqib Khan 175, 176, 177 Old World 67, 95, 200
Nasir Burhanpuri, Qazi 195 Oriental states, monarchies 4, 82, 98—
Nasiruddin Mahmud, Sultan 19, 33 9, 102
Nath Jogis 210, 212 Despotism 83, 84, 85, 101
National Movement 109, 260 orthodox (ash’arite) theology, ortho-
nationalism 74, 116, 163 doxy 9, 10, 16, 21, 64, 120, 121,
nationhood 71 160, 162, 205, 206, 245
Naurang Khan 153 Ottoman empire, Ottomans (West Asia)
Naushervan 17 61. 63, 69, 94, 95, 96, 98-102, 307,
nawabs 344 311, 338, 342
nazar 213 overseas trade 357
nazims 344
Nazir Mirza Bashi 320 pagan communities, pagan beliefs 7,
Nazr (Nadir) Mohammad Khan, ruler LS 1ke229
of Balkh and Badakhshan 100, 317— Paikari sect 220
8, 32021), 323, 324, 330 Pakpatan (Patan) 54
New Testament (Bible) 229-30, 239 Akbar’s visit 151, 152
New World 67, 79, 339 Palam Baoli inscriptions 23, 52
Ni‘amatullah 185, 378-9 paltis, see khudkasht (resident cultiva-
Tarikh-i Khan Jahani 166, 184, 367 tors)
Nicene Creed 238 Panchatantra 111, 180
Nile 41, 96 Panipat
404 Index

Battle (1526) 69, 364 population growth 78, 339

(1761) 350 Portuguese 231
Panjhir 378 Price Revolution 69
pantheism 161-2, 195 Prithia 190
paper 24 Prithvi Raj 37
Parsis 10, 216-17, 222-7 private debt 310
worship of Sun and Light 161 private property 5, 82, 99-101
Parwez (Sulaiman Shukoh) 248 production relation 59, 84
pastoralists 5, 7 property laws, relationships 77, 99
patriotism 113-4 Prophet Muhammad (d. 632) 4, 5, 7,
Pax Mongolica 4 10, 95, 96, 109-20, 123, 130-1
peasants, peasantry 7, 75, 85 Prophet’s Law (Shari‘at-i Nawabi)
oppression 10 185
over-exploitation 82 public works 84
pauperization 78 Punjab 89, 316
rebels 342 agrarian regime 74
social organization 75 Akbar’s invasion 151
Pelsaert 322 economic growth 35, 354
penal system 123 Ghaznavids 229
pepper 340 occupied by Ghorians 49
Permanent Settlement 80, 347, 357 Puranas 211
Persian, Persia 24, 111, 115, 120, 130, purity and pollution 25
324 Purnabhadra 181
merchants 340
and Turks, conflict 121] Qandahar (Kandahar) 89, 316, 320-1,
Peshawar 324
revolt by Yusufzais 206 Aurangzeb’s campaign (1652) 388
Peshwas 345 lost to Persians (1648) 309
Pil Azar 220 Qara Khitai 97
Pindaris 343 Qaramita (Carmathians) 49
Pira Malli 34 Qarlugh, a Tukish clan 50
Plassey, battle (1757) 345, 350, 351 qazis 95, 170
Pokhran (fort) 254 Qila Rai Pithora 37
political, politics 3, 16, 24, 59, 77-79, Qing Empire, China 311
86, 95, 119, 128, 155, 351 Qubacha, ruler of Sind 52, 368
breakdown 78 Quli Khan 257
despotism 190 Qulij Khan 89
and military domination 69 Ouran Now 0N95,196; INO RIS Ie 203,
sovereignty and theological law, re- 229
lation 159 Quraysh 6, 7-8, 13, 96, 120, 131
polity 59-60, 67, 70-1, 83-5, 87, 90, Qurayshite supremacy 132
98, 121, 131-2, 337 Qureshi, Ishtaq Hussain 25, 368
Pontius Pilate (‘Filatas’) 237 Qutb Delhi 41—?
Pope 238 Qutb Minar 38, 39, 42
 Index 405

Qutb Shah (of Golkunda) 31 | 216, 218, 220

Qutbshahi kingdom 217, 222 comparative religion 70
Qutbuddin Aibak 38 multiplicity 170
Qutbuddin Mubarak Khalji (1316-20) issue in the war of succession 245—
2ONS3 51
Qutbul Mulk 311 policy of tolerance (Sulh-i Kul) 78,
Qutlugh Khan, the viceroy of the 155
Deccan 32 _ rationalization 155
Qutlugh Khwaja 40 renaissance 383
revenue farming (ijara) 86
Rabbinic belief 234, 236 revenue system 355-6
Rachna 49, 52 Revisionist approaches 70, 88-90
Raghunath Singh, Raja 250, 252 Rizq Allah Mushtaqi 364
Rai Kalu 50 Roe, Sir Thomas 187, 311-3
Rais 211 Rohilas 354
Raj Singh, Rana of Mewar 63, 126, 205, Rohtas fort 316
208, 246, 248-9, 251 Roman Church 230
Rajab 50 Roman empire 6
Razm-nama \76, 177 Roman law 131
Rajputs 64, 69, 75, 98, 149, 160, 194, ruling classes 8, 10, 65, 77, 83, 85, 98,
202, 248, 250-1, 253-4, 255, 256- 101
) Rumi 226
governors under Aurangzeb 266 rural aristocracy 65
Ram Bhati 256 rural class 79
Ramayan 177-8 rural surplus 90
Ranas 211 Rustam 220
Ranjit Singh 89 Ryotwari system 80, 347
Ragqaim-i Karaim 389, 390, 39}
Ratan, governor of Siwistan (Sind) 19, Sa’di 226
34 Sa’dullah Khan 30n*, 311, 331
Rathor rebellion (1679) 253-9 Sadid al-Din Aufi 367
rationalism, rationality 70, 116, 216, Sadiq Khan, author of Shahjahan-
342 Nama 371
Raushanyas 217 Sadiqis 216
Ravi 52, 151, 190 Safavids (Iran), Safavid empire 61, 63,
Rawls, John 129 65, 69, 94, 95, 102, 311, 318, 324
reason (‘aq/) 113, 162, 200 collapse 338
Red Sea 5, 96, 310, 339 and Mughals 319
Reformation 200 Sahaj Rai 50
regional differences 62 Sahara desert 96
regional economy 86 Said Khan Bahadur, Subedar of Lahore
regionalization 86, 90, 344 89
religion, religious issues beliefs 6, 63, Saiyed Mir Barkah 319
64, 85, 112, 116, 119, 130, 164, 186, Saiyid Ashraf Khan, son of Amir Khan
406 Index

389 390
Saiyid Haji 322 expedition to Balkh and
Saiyyids, 7, 210 Badakhshan 327, 331-2
Sakina Banu 154 religious policy 202-9
Salim see Jahangir war of succession among sons 245—
Salimgarh 45 51
Salt Range (Koh-i Jud), Punjab 49-50, Shah Khwaja 323
152 GLO Shah Nawaz Khan Safvi 248-9, 367
Samana 49, 53 Shah of Persia 317
Samanids 95 Shah Rukh Mirza 154
Samargand 317-18 Shah Shuja 247-50, 346
Samradi sect 226 Shah Tahmasp 163
Samugarh, battle 247-9 Shahi and Kashmir ruler 17
Sanskrit 19, 22, 23, 110-11 Shahjahanabad 45
Saqi Musta’id Khan 366, 376 Shahnama 121, 363
Sara-i ‘Al 41 Shahr-i Nau 42
Saran 61, 83 Shahu 50
sardeshmukhi 345 Shaida 212, 221, 225
Sarmad, Muhammad Sa’id 204, 234-7 Shaikh Abdul Latif 247
Sarsuti (Sirsa) 53 Shaikh Abul Faiz Faizi 174, 176, 178,
Sassanid empire 8, 9, 14, 120, 121, 132, 180
161, 203 Shaikh Abul Fath Qabil Khan
Satar Sal Hada 248 Thattawi 388
sati 112, 113, 188, 193 Shaikh Ahmad Sirhindi 70, 167, 185,
Satnami 206, 214 180, 196
Satpula 43 Shaikh Ahmed Lahori 186
Sayyid Ahmad Khan 45 Shaikh Bhawan 174—5, 176
Athar al Sanadid 367 Shaikh Dula 21!
Sayyid Muzaffar Khan 233 Shaikh Farid Bhakkari
science and learning, stagnation 11 Zakhirat al Khawanin 367
sectarian quarrels 8 Shaikh Farid Bukhari 183, 184
secularism 20, 64, 209 Shaikh Faiid (Murtaza Khan) 189, 198
segmentary state 85 Shaikh Fariduddin Ganj-i Shakar 53
Seljugs, see Siljuqid empire Shaikh Fazlullah 195
semi-pastoral economy 10 Shaikh Hamid 21i
semitic religions 230 Shaikh Ibrahim Sirhindi 175
Seorahs (Jain monks) 191 Shaikh Jamali
Shaban 6, 132 Siyar al-Arfin 367
Shah Abbas I (1587-1629) 65, 311, Shaikh Kamal see Ayyub Qureshi
312, 317-19 Shaikh Mubarak 125, 381
Shah Badakhshi, Mulla 203 Shaikh Nizam 152
Shah Jahan (7.1628-58) 62, 65, 66, 192, Shaikh Nizamuddin Ahmad of Delhi
212, 225,.25993098319220, 324, 21, 29n**, 32, 39,40, 42, 46n'3, 152,
330, 365-6, 371, 375, 378-9, 388, Del
 Index 407

Tabagat-i Akbari 379 Singhasan Battisi 112, 173, 174, 180

Shaikh Tajuddin 149 Sipasis 223, 224
Shaikh Zakariya Ajodhani Dehlawi 149 Sirhind 54
Shaikh Zaman Panipati 149 Siri 40, 41, 42, 43
Shaikhul-Islam Qazi 256, 390 Sisodias 259
Shaista Khan 249 Siwana 253
Shalimar 313 Siwistan see Sind
Shami Talab 38 Siyah-posh Kafirs 378
Shams Siraj Afif 364 Siyasatnama 62, 121
Shamsuddin 225 slaves, slavery 5, 16, 17, 53, 83, 131-2
Shankaracharya 180 condemned by Akbar 113
Sharia 184 social classes 86
shariat (Muslim law) 21, 94-5, 122-4, social contract theory 124, 126-8
126,128, 1195,-2565.25,7 social hierarchy, inequality 5, 130-2
Sharif Sarmadi 382 social institutions 24, 85, 90, 129
Shaykhs, tribe chiefs 7 social reforms 116
Sher Khan Lodi social relationship, system 63, 74-5, 84,
Mirat al Khayal 368 99
Sher Shah Suri 45, 60-1, 67, 316 Sonak Rathor 256-7
Sherghan 317 soul, transmigration 113, 178
Shias, Shiaism 94, 165-8, 169 South-East Asia 310
Shidrangi sect 220 sovereignty 61—3, 67, 70, 75, 82-3, 87,
Shihab Hakim 90, 94, 119-20, 122-6, 345, 354
Ma‘atathir-i Muhammad Shahi Spain, Spaniards 15, 347
364 population decline 339
Shihabuddin Maqtul 223, 225 spinning-wheel 24
Shihabuddin of Ghore (d. 1206) 16 Sri Kant 193
Shivaji 206, 207, 366 state 90
Shore, Sir John 79, 347 concept 84
Siddhas 210 formation 87
Siddichandra Upadhyaya 192 and peasantry 85
Siddiqi, Asiya, 347 power 88
Sidhnai 52 property 97-8
siege mentality 87 and religion 201
Sikhism, Sikhs 49, 70, 190-1, 214, 224, statesmanship 78
343, 354 subaltern classes 77
Siljuqid Empire, Siljugids 10, 96, 97, Subsidiary Alliance 357
121 Sufis, Sufism 9, 21, 152, 161, 195, 201,
Simon, Lord 109 205, 210, 212, 216, 220
Sind 34, 89 Suhrawardi 53
Arab conquest (710-14), rulers 12— Sujan Singh Rathor 257
3, lesl6s529363 Sulaiman Range 316
Brahman dynasty 363 Sulh-i Kul 116, 126, 192
Sindhias 346 sultan 24, 121, 123
408 Index

Sultan Muhammad, Ottoman emperor 24, 59, 341-2

33il temples, desecration of 17
Sultan Murad 152 Thakkura Pheru 19
Sultanate 19 Thakkuras (Thakurs) 14
development as a form of state 122 Thanesari, Sultan Haji 167, 176
internal conflicts 31 Thar Desert 53
and shariat 123 Thatta 52, 89
Sun and Light worship 201 Tibetans 216
Sunder Kavi Rai 202 Tienan Shan range 95
Sunna 120 timar (military fief) 100
Sunnis 94, 159, 221 Timur 53-4, 62, 72n*, 95, 364
orthodoxy 166 Timurid empire, Timurids 61, 154, 330
and Shia conflict 165 Tipu Sultan 343, 346, 356
Surat 310-2, 353 tobacco, prohibition 214, 312
English factors 309 Todar Mal 161, 201, 382
war against Mughals 206 trade and industry 101, 338; see also
Surat Singh 211-14 economy
Surs, Sur regime (1540-1556) 36, 60— traditionalism (faglid) 113, 116
1, 68 Trans-Oxiana 318; civil war 317
Surtan Nurdi Jahangir Sawai 192 tribal chiefs (shaykhs and saiyids) 119,
Surud-i Mastan 225 131
Sutley 49, 52, 53 Trilochanpala 17
symbolism 233 Trinity 230, 238
Syria, Syrians 8, 13-4, 98 Truth 246
systematization 61—2, 85, 87, 88, 91 Tudor monarchy 95
Tunga 17-18
ta’allugqdars 355 Turanis, Turan 324, 250; governors
Tabarhinda, see Bhatinda under Aurangzeb 266
Tabari 8, 121 Turkey 82
Tahawwur Khan 259 Turkish and Mongol tradition 60, 96
Tahir Khan 255, 256, 257 Turkoman nomads 96
Tailis 210 Turks 26, 111
Tajik \79 Turushkas 17
Takla Makan desert 95 tuyul 100
talab, salary 62
Tapa 190 Uchh 52
Tara Chand 368 Ulugh Khan, see Muhammad Tughlaq
Targhi’s invasion 40 ‘Umar 7, 130
Tarikh-i Alam Ara-i Abbasi 65 “Umar I 10
Tarmashirin 33, 373 umma 7-8, 131
tasawwuf 16 Ummayyad caliphate (660-750),
tax, taxation 9, 10, 13, 75, 76, 82, 83, Ummayyads 8, 13, 27n’, 132
97-8, 102, 122 ummi 13
technological innovation, technology unity in diversity 77, 109, 115
 Index 409

Unity of God 25 workmanship 21

Universal Truth 205
untouchables, oppression 25 Yalingtosh 321-2
Upanishads 181, 203 Yamuna 37, 38-9, 42, 45, 53
urbanization, urban sector 5, 10, 84, 96, Yayha Sirhindi 364
340-1, 353; decline 24; economy Yazdanis 223, 224
24, 103 Yazdi, Muhammad 40, 52, 152, 365,
Urfi, Persian poet at Akbar’s court 26 370
ushr \0, 97 Yemen, Yemenites 5, 6, 8
Uzbek Khanate, see Central Asia Yogavasishtha \79
Uzbek Tughril Khan 19 yogis (jogis) 21-2, 64
Yogiswara, Pandita 22
Vedanta 195 Yusufzais 206
Vedas 203, 210
Vijayadeva 191 zabt system 60, 62, 347
Vijaynagar empire 74, 98 Zafar Khan 32, 322
village community 84, 101-2 Zainul Abidin 179
village headmen (mugaddams) 76-7 zamindars (bhumiyas, wanthyas) 65,
Vinayadeva 191 Td, 16, Tals 80y 84, 86, 88:90; 211,
vizier 121 250, 266, 337, 342-3, 354=5, 357:
classification 85
Wali Mohammad Khan 317-18 Zanbil Beg 319
Walilullah, Shah (1704-62) 126-8, Zij-i Ulugh-khani 342
356 Zoroastrians 130, 223, 225
wagai 379, 381-2 Zulfigqar Ardastani 217, 225, 226, 234
war techniques 16
Warangal32
wars of succession 66, 206, 245-51
watan 87
Weber, Max 74
Wink, Andre 351, 358
women 131, 337
working class 215
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i.
 OXFORD INDIA PAPERBACKS
MUGHAL INDIA
- M. Athar Ali

This collection brings together for the first time seminal writings of one of
the fofemost historians of medieval India. From the realm of ideas and
religion to polity, administration, society, and culture—it explores a wide
range of themes related to the Mughal period. Reflecting a fine blend of
interpretative and detailed research, the essays are united by Ali’s consistent
approach and proximity to the Persian source material. The book also
includes a critique of ‘revisionist’ approaches in the study of the Mughal
polity, and a section on sources. This volume will be indispensable for
teachers, students, and scholars of Mughal India.

M. Athar Ali was Professor, Aligarh Muslim University and

University Grants Commission National Professor.
Irfan Habib is Professor Emeritus, History, Aligarh Muslim University.

‘It is a tribute to Athar Ali’s choice of themes, clarity of thought, and

fluent prose that the reader gets here a large amount of information...
in such lucidly analysed form...’
—lIrfan Habib, from the Preface
6
...Athar was no apologist of any cause, not even of the Mughal empire. The
present volume is a tribute to his historical acumen and analytical depth...’
—Sushil Chaudhuri, The Statesman
= ae fa
‘Ali’s writings...always came as
10 Book Review

we % ma

Oko 783-BAC. -691

Cover illustration: Leaf mounted as an album page; Opaque watercolour and gold on
paper; Mughal, Jahangir period; c.1610. Courtesy: National Museum, New Delhi

OXFORD
UNIVERSITY PRESS TT
ISBN OL9569b61-1

0195°696615
www.oup.com