Abstract
The Oxford in India Readings: Debates in Indian History and Society series has been doing valuable work in compiling important and useful essays published in various journals and excerpts from books related to a particular theme in a single volume. Influential essays published over a long time are thus made easily accessible to the academia. Meena Bhargava has added a good introduction with a rich bibliography, which would help researchers with more references for further discussions on this theme which could not be included in this volume. She has also tried to help the readers with her insight into the intellectual origins of the thesis of Moreland, Habib and Ishwari Prasad into James Mill’s compartmentalisation of the history of India into three different periods, Hindu, Muslim and British. While the Hindu and the Muslim periods could not evince any trace of science, rationality and enlightenment, the British period was said to have ushered a new dawn for India. This argument had been carried forward by Karl Marx in his various essays related to India. William Irvine and Sir Jadunath were the direct heirs of Mill’s way of thinking with its attempt to fix paint the Hindus and the Muslims as tied in a perpetual rivalry with each other, which could be relieved only with the advent of British rule. Irvine and Jadunath attributed the responsibility for the downfall to the Emperor Aurangzeb’s zeal for the spread of Islam, sometimes against the wishes of his subjects. His departure from Akbar’s wise alliance with Hindu martial tribes rubbed the Rajputs, Marathas, Jats and Bundelas on the wrong side and hastened the collapse of the massive structure of the Empire, which had struck roots on their support. The Marxist historians in a sense continued to bear the burden of the utilitarian thesis of Mill and Macaulay for India. Bhargava has shown how the seventeenth century French traveller Bernier’s own commitment to interests in land continued to colour his vision of the evils of the mansabdari system and the lack of permanent connection of jagirdars with land leading to over-exploitation and exhaustion of land. Moreland and Irfan Habib picked up the same arguments and the Aligarh historians continued to explicate this thesis in its various ramifications. Satish Chandra showed how demand from land grew without a corresponding investment in technological improvement. The hiatus between the enhanced aspirations of the nobility and the dwindling returns from land could have been bridged by new technological breakthroughs, which never came. The jagirdari crisis thus led to over-exploitation of land, increasing burden on the producers and consequent restlessness and resentment among the peasantry, taking the jagirdari crisis to new heights. Attempts to scale down grants of jagirs to shorter periods of 3 months, 6 months, etc., further added to the proneness of mansabdars to make the most of their jagirs while they lasted. The peasantry thus groaned further and became fodder for numerous uprising among Jats, Sikhs, Bundelas and Marathas. Aurangzeb’s inadroit quest to root out the Marathas through prolonged warfare in the Deccan, overgenerous distributions of high ranks (zat and sawar) to those engaged in the south to the exclusion of those left in the north intensified group rivalry among the nobles to the detriment of the interests of the imperial administration. The nobility became engaged in a suicidal rivalry among themselves to the utter neglect of the welfare of their charge. That is how the Empire slid down from one crisis to another. Karen Leonard added a new dimension to this discussion by adding that the banking moneylenders and bankers were also not able to loan the required amount for supporting the structure of the central government as they themselves failed to gather enough resources from the revenue contracts in their charge. This was an inevitable fall out of the exhaustion of land and resembled the collapse of a Great Firm.
Bhargava has also discussed the recent attempts to take a fresh look at this period and break the myth of ‘the black century’. Philip Calkins set the trend of questioning this myth with his research works into the rise of an autonomous political entity in Bengal, replicating the Mughal Empire in all its glorious aspects at a micro-level. Christopher Bayly carried forward this continuity thesis to include northern India. Chetan Singh focused on Punjab in the seventeenth century, while Muzaffar Alam compared Punjab and Awadh in the eighteenth century. Sanjay Subrahmanyam showed how new trade networks developed and new techniques of business accounts among trading castes came into vogue. Bayly wrote of the emergence of a new class of ‘portfolio capitalists’ who took advantage of the importance of their political office to promote their business ventures.
These dispersions of resources from the core region to peripheral areas and the emergence of regional structures, however, were swept up by the advent of the Europeans with their superior naval techniques and armaments and the Mughal Empire was buried in the grave of history. Athar Ali charted out a new path trying the view this not merely as the decline of one great empire but as a crisis of oriental civilisation as a whole, ‘a cultural failure’ where the orient failed to develop the strength to protect itself before the onslaught of the West in all its aggressive aspects. The decline of the Mughals was thus not just the decay of a dynasty. It was the end of an era of the autonomous development of the East and beginning of its harnessing to the juggernaut of imperialism for the benefit of the colonial power. From that sprang up the other debate about the characterisation of the period as ‘late pre-colonial’ or ‘early modern’ with the inescapable associations of the ‘modern’ with European, ushering into a fresh set of squabbles. Bhargava’s collection is a good introduction to all the ongoing debates on the implications of these points and counterpoints.