Decline of Mughal Empire

Causes
 Aurangzeb’s Religious Policy
• Initially, theories focused on the individual rulers and their policies.
William Irvine and Jadunath Sarkar wrote the first detailed histories
of Later Moghuls.
• They attributed the decline to a deterioration in the characters of
the Emperors and their nobles.
• Sarkar had analyzed the developments of this period in the context
of law and order. He, therefore, held Aurangzeb as the arch culprit.
• According to Sarkar, Aurangzeb was a religious fanatic. He
discriminated against sections of the nobles and officials on the
basis of religion. This led to wide scale resentment among the
nobility. He argued that Aurangzeb's successors and their nobles
were mere shadows of their predecessors and were thus unable to
set right the evils of Aurangeb's legacy.
 Jagirdari Crisis
• Satish Chandra studied the working of certain key institutions of
the Empire. The two institutions he scrutinised were mansabdari
and the jagirdari.
• The nobles in the Mughal Empire were the core state officials. They
were given ranks corresponding to their status in the Mughal
official hierarchy. These ranks were called mansab. Each holder of a
mansab, called mansabdar, was paid in assignments of land revenue
(jagir).
• Availability of the revenues to be assigned and the ability of the
Mughals to collect them thus became two crucial pre-requisites for
an effective working of the system.
• According to Chandra, Mughal decline has to be seen in the
Mughal failure, towards the end of Aurangzeb's reign, to maintain
the system of the mansabdar-jagirdar. As this system went into
disarray, the Empire was bound to collapse
• In his work, Athar Ali highlighted the problems attending
the annexation of the Deccan states, the absorption of the
Marathas and Deccanis into the Mughal nobility, and the
subsequent shortage of jagirs.
• The sudden increase in the number of nobles, caused due
to the expansion of the Empire into the Deccan and
Maratha territory, created a crisis in the functioning of the
jagir system.
• According to Athar Ali, the nobles competed for better
jagirs, which were increasingly becoming rare due to the
influx of nobles from the south.
• The logical consequence was the erosion in the political
structure which was based on jagirdari to a large extent.
 Agrarian Crisis
• Irfan Habib attempted an in-depth analysis of the collapse of the
Empire in his seminal work- The Agrarian System of Mughal India
• According to Habib, the mechanism of collection of revenue that
the Mughals had evolved was inherently flawed. The imperial policy
was to set the revenue at the highest rate possible to secure the
greatest military strength for the Empire. On the other hand, the
nobles tended to squeeze the maximum from their jagirs, even if it
ruined the peasantry and destroyed the revenue paying capacity of
the area.
• Since, the nobles' jaglrs were liable to be transferred frequently,
they did not find it necessary to follow a far-sighted policy of
agricultural development.
• As the burden on the peasantry increased, they were often
deprived of their very means of survival.
• In reaction to this excessive exploitation of the
peasantry, the latter had no option but to protest.
• The forms of rural protest in Medieval India were
varied in nature.
• In many areas the peasants took to flight.
• Entire villages were left deserted due to the large scale
migration of peasants to the towns or other villages.
• Very often the peasants protested against the state by
refusing to pay the revenue and were up in arms
against the Mughals.
• Habib argued that these peasant protests weakened
the political and social fabric of the Empire.
 Indirect Mughal Rule
• According to M.N. Pearson, Mughal rule was indirect.
• It was not state control but local ties and norms which governed
the lives of people.
• It was only for the nobles that the concept of the Mughal Empire
outweighed other "primordial attachments".
• The nobles were bound to the Empire only by patronage, which
depended on the "constant military success" of the Emperor.
• Pearson emphasizes the absence of an impersonalised bureaucracy,
and its not too optimistic consequences for the Mughal state.
• Once Mughal patronage slackened due to the lack of any further
military expansion, and, a shortage of fertile areas to be allotted as
jagirs arose, the "personalised bureaucracy" of the Mugbal Empire
showed signs of distress.
• This indeed sounded the death-knell for the Mughal system
 Centre-Region Relationship
• Viewing the Mughal State from the
perspective of the regional literature of the
Mughal suba of Awadh, Muzaffar Alam
suggests that the Mughal Empire signified a
coordinating agency between conflicting
communities and the various indigenous
socio-political systems at different levels.
• Political integration in Mughal India was, up
to a point, inherently flawed.
• The nobles were dependent for their position and power directly on the
Emperor who appointed them. They had no hereditaty estates
• .Their resources were scrutinized and regulated by the Empire. They were
in a way representatives of the Mughal Emperor.
• Yet the nobility also had its tensions. The policy of jagir transfer, by
checking the noble's ambition to build a personal base, was meant to
strengthen the imperial organisation.
• But it inconvenienced the nobles who opposed and resisted its
implementation.
• In many regions of the Mughal Empire it was left unimplemented in the
17th century.
• Alongside the local elites (zamindars) and the nobles, the village and
qasba based madad-i ma'ash holders and a very large numbers of lower
level officials drawn from various regional and local communities, were all
integrated intimately into the framework of the Empire.
• According to Alam, the Mughal decline in the early
18th century has to be seen in the inability of the state
to maintain its policy of checks and balances between
the zamindars, jagirdars, madad-i ma'ash holders and
the local indigenous elements.
• In the early 18th century, there was a thrust 'of the
nobles towards independent political alignments with
the zamindars in order to carve out their own fortunes.
• Alongside there was an attempt between the various
co-sharers of Mughal power (the zamindars, madad-i
ma'ash holders, etc.) to encroach on each other's rights
and territorial jurisdictions.
• He is of the view that the late 17th and early 18th century,
at least in the Awadh and Punjab regions, registered
unmistakable economic growth.
• This is 'in sharp contrast to the more generalised argument
about the early 18th century being in the throes of a
financial crisis that was postulated by Satish Chandra and
others.
• Social groups that had hitherto shared Mughal power and
contributed to the political stability of the Empire, now
began to take advantage of the economic boom in their
regions. Many of them amassed wealth which helped them
to increase their power to encroach on, the rights and
privileges of others.
• The political edifice of the Empire was bound to suffer in
the face of these developments.
 Decline of Punjab Economy
• Chetan Singh’s book Region and Empire takes a new look at the
regional history of the Mughal North India.
• By the late 17th century the silting of the river Indus had adversely
affected the riverine traffic of Punjab. Its most serious implication
was the gradual erosion of the highly commercialised Punjab
economy.
• The political upheavals in contemporary Turkey, fall of Qandahar to
the Shah of Iran and the Mughal attempt to recover it virtually
brought overland traffic to a standstill.
• This development coincided with the Yusufzai uprising (1667) in
North-West Punjab and the Afridi rebellion in 1678.
• Singh argues that these political disturbances had grave social and
economic consequences for Punjab, they disrupted trade and
thereby gradually eroded the economy which was based on a
commercialised agrarian sector.
• The loosening of Punjab's socio-economic structure led
to social unrest in Punjab. However, Singh contends
that since the benefits of trade and commerce had
been unequally distributed in the region, the
discomforts caused by the decline of trade varied in
different areas of the Punjab.
• Thus the areas most closely associated with the Sikh
rebellion were those that were also among the most
commercialised and therefore most easily affected by
economic regression. Thus, he concludes, the social
unrest which eventually led to the dissociation of
Punjab from the Empire was the product of long term
processes.
 Overview
• It is difficult to find a single explanation commonly
applicable to the problems of the Mughal Empire in all its
regions and provinces.
• For similar reasons it is difficult to accept a view of Mughal
decline which applies uniformly to all parts of the Mughal
Empire.
• The Mughal Empire at best represented a consensus of
both the centre and the peripheries. In the eariy 18th
century, it was this consensus which was disturbed.
• Different peripheries that had constituted the Empire
followed their own different paths of developments.
• The eighteenth century regional histories thus indicate the
endeavour to make use of the possibilities for growth
within existing social structures