Abstract
The controversy about the limited or ‘segmented’ sovereignty in relation to the Mughal Empire seems to have been conducted without any scrutiny of primary documents. The article argues that private documents of the Mathura region show a far greater reach of the Mughal administration in the villages than one would have otherwise supposed.
In the middle of the seventeenth century, the Mughal state was considered an absolute and despotic one by the French traveller Bernier who made this deduction from his presumed facts, namely, the king’s claim to be the owner of the entire soil of the country and the system of continuous transfers of jagirs. 1 After the British conquest it was in the interest of the colonial regime to reassert all the real and presumed claims of its Mughal predecessor to legitimise the extensive authority claimed by itself.
This tendency is reflected in the writings of James Grant and John Shore in the 1780s. 2 The Utilitarian James Mill, historian and spokesman for the English East India Company, on the one hand, censured the Mughal government for being despotic, while, on the other hand, derived the East India Company’s claim to full rent from the Mughal state’s fiscal claim over the entire surplus from agriculture. W.H. Moreland who relied on the original sources, rather than on theoretical pronouncements, draws the same inferences from the latter in his Agrarian System of Moslem India (1929), as well as his earlier work India at the Death of Akbar (1920).
Among Indian historians Ibn Hasan (The Central Structure of the Mughal Empire, 1936) and P. Saran (Provincial Government of the Mughals, 1941) made important contributions to the construction of a thesis in which the Mughal state was held to be a systematised structure with checks and balances within it. In these writings the characterisation of the Mughal Empire as a system of ‘Despotism’ receded far into the background, but the state still retained its crucial role in society. The highly centralised and systematised character of the Mughal empire was asserted by Satish Chandra (Introduction to his Parties and Politics at the Mughal Court, 1959) and M. Athar Ali (Mughal Nobility under Aurangzeb, 1966). Irfan Habib tacitly dissociating himself from Marx’s ‘Asiatic Mode’, still emphasised the centralised nature of the Mughal empire and on the strength of an awesome amount of evidence culled from primary documents besides all kinds of other sources, established the fact that a large share of the surplus was actually extracted by the Mughal state through the land tax. 3
The centralised authority of the Mughal state and its effectiveness thus remained a generally accepted view until the 1980s, when the first salvoes against it were set off by Burton Stein who argued in his introduction to his work on South India
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that all relationships in Indian economy and society cannot be entirely confined to the realm of the land tax and that, in fact, at least in medieval South India, there were such limitations to sovereign power, that one can speak only of a sovereignty composed of segments. In his own words:
In the segmentary state, the parts or segments of which the state is composed are seen as prior to the formal state; these segments are structurally as well as morally coherent units in themselves. Together these parts or segments comprise a state in their recognition of a sacred ruler whose overlordship is of a moral sort and is expressed in an essentially ritual idiom.
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The ‘segmentary state’ is thus not a state in terms of real power, and is only nominally a ‘state’. Stein initially limited his view to South India, recognising that the Mughal state was the ‘best-organised and most powerful of the states of medieval India’. 6 But he subsequently abandoned this concession and argued that all pre-modern Indian polities were essentially segmentary in nature, including the Mughal Empire, and condemned the contrary position of ‘the canonical Mughal historiography of Aligarh’. 7
Stein’s assertion received support from C.A. Bayly’s influential work, Rulers, Townsmen and Bazars: North Indian Society in the Age of British Expansion, 1770–1870, 1983, in spite of the fact that he, unlike Stein, credited the ability of ‘the Mughal state to appropriate in money as much as 40 per cent of the value of total agricultural product’, and had to allow for the consequences that flowed from this fact. 8 And yet he argued that Mughal power rested on local ‘corporate groups’, who happily survived its decline. Frank Perlin in his two essays, written in a style that makes him so difficult to follow, stressed ‘the stubbornness of the intermediary ground’ and identified the locality (vatan) as the basic unit of political power in India, contrary to the view of ‘Mughal-centric’ historians. 9 Andre Wink, in 1986, explicitly upheld Bayly, treated fitna (‘sedition’, ‘rebellion’) as a process by which adjustments were made, in practice, to local autonomy while the claims of full authority of the sovereign remained nominally uncontested. 10 Thus since Mughal authority was already based on compromise and adjustment, its decline was really no decline at all: It is only ‘the powerful dynamic of fitna moving in the opposite direction of universalism and centralism, a dynamic which is misleadingly referred to as the decline of the Empire’. 11 Sanjay Subramanyam and Muzaffar Alam are among the Indian scholars, who have supported the now fairly established cliche that the role of state in Indian History has been overstressed. 12
What follows below is an attempt to assess the reach and depth of the authority of the Mughal state on the basis of papers generated solely for private purposes relating to rights and entitlements in villages where there can be no suspicion that anything other than practical considerations were involved. By the theory of Burton Stein and those in agreement with him, such documents should have dealt only with village headmen and local potentates and should have had little concern with the Mughal administration, at least so far as villages are concerned. We propose in this paper to examine if this is really the case; and, if not, then what are the implications of the evidence. So, first, a few words about the evidence itself.
A large corpus of private papers relating to the affairs of, and originally possessed by, the priests of the Chaitanya sect at Vrindaban, most of them in Persian, some in Braj and some bilingual, are preserved at various repositories, namely, the Vrindaban Research Institute (these are from Madan Mohun and Radha Damodar temples); Govind Dev temple (Vrindaban and Jaipur); Radhakund Temple; Gopinath temple, Jaipur; strong room of Mathura District court; and the National Archives of India. The photographs of these (except those of NAI) were passed on by the late Dr Tarapad Mukherjee to Professor Irfan Habib (with whom he coauthored three papers). 13 Irfan Habib deciphered and transcribed all the Persian documents (including those in NAI), while Professor J.C. Wright made available to him his roman transcriptions and English translations of the Braj documents. 14 This valuable collection has been arranged and numbered in chronological order. I am most grateful to Professor Irfan Habib for giving me access to it.
This impeccably private collection of hundreds of primary documents concerned with the Mughal officials at some level, dating from 1537–38 to 1757–58 and so carefully preserved by the Chaitanya priests in Braj Bhum, in itself is perhaps good testimony to the reality and extent of the Mughal official control over the rural localities. Such extensive documentation would not have been maintained and preserved, unless the priests were convinced that they would be needed for presentation to Persian-reading officials. Braj Bhum, with its centre at Mathura was doubtless in the proximity of Delhi and Agra, the two capital cities of the Mughal Empire. But this was not always the case. From 1586 to 1598 Lahore was the seat of the Imperial court, while from 1681 to 1707 the emperor was away from Northern India. There was no apparent change in the local administration when the seat of central authority moved away to such a distance from the region. This also suggests a reconsideration of the issue of centre versus periphery, which has been introduced in discussions about pre-colonial states.
To return to our documents. They are mainly of two kinds (1) orders of the Mughal administration; and (2) private transactions, such as sale deeds, wills, gifts, petitions and complaints to officials, statements open to public endorsement (ma°zars), etc., from these, I have selected only the documents pertaining to villages of Dosaich (leter Vrindaban) and Arith (later Radhakund). An interesting feature is the practice of land sale deeds in villages to be separately written in two languages: Braj for local use (apparently to be read out to the peasant sellers) and in Persian, often prepared for the qåz[ð’s certification and obviously for presentation to officials in case of need. For instance, we have a sale deed of 1545 in Braj where certain inhabitants of the village (gråmvåsð) in the presence of the panch are represented as selling land southeast of Arith to Gosåin Raghunåth for ₹ 30 (Doc.10, Wright, 1). This could have been read out to the sellers and witnesses. But then it was rendered into Persian and the Persian document was verified by Qåz[ð Badruddðn with his seal, on 13 October 1546, as is evident from another copy of it, verified by Qåz[ð Zainul ‘Åbidðn in 1727–28, the year given on his seal (Doc.12). Another sale deed is of 1548, where again the village inhabitants sold another piece of land in the same village (Arith) to Raghunåth for Rs 20 and 4 pieces of cloth (pachora) (Doc.13; Wright, 1A). It too was rendered in Persian, the latter version verified by the qåz[ð (seal now half torn) on 30 August 1578 (Doc.30). The qåz[ð’s seals were affixed on these documents either on the strength of a previous copy (mut]åbiq bil manqøl shud) (Doc.13) or on the oral acknowledgement (bå iqrår) of the parties concerned (Doc.24).
The jågðrdår or his officials also verified a document (No. 109 = NAI 2691) in Persian which is a certificate from a local official (seal torn) that some named peasants (muzåri‘ån) of village Gopa (adjacent to vill. Dosaich, later a part of Vrindavan) sold three bðghas 6 biswas of land for Rs 40¾ to Gosåin Haridås on 17 January 1611, during the term of charge of I‘tibår
It is clear from these few examples out of a large number of sale deeds pertaining to land that the priests of the Chaitanya sect of Vrindaban got their documents drawn up and authenticated by the qåz[ð, the judicial agent of the state, since they believed that the Mughal administration could enforce their claims in the villages if disputes occurred. Perhaps it was with this safeguard in their hands that the muqaddams of village Arith, namely, Bari, Chandarsen and others were compelled to cancel the sales they had made out of land above the tank (kund) and kunj (cottage), previously purchased from their ancestors by the Gosåins Røp and Sanåtan, the cancelled sale having been made to Khammånand Brahman of Mathura for Rs 20.
The next year (1 June 1641), we find the headmen of village Arith, confessing their fault in having sold to the same Khamånand, the Brahman of Mathura, land that their ancestors had already sold to Kishandås Gosåin’s predecessors (‘Røp and Sanåtan’). They now declared afresh the later sale null and void. This statement (No. 164) was obviously for the eyes of Mughal officials, for not only was it drawn up in Persian but bears three Persian seals, obviously of individuals of some weight in the locality.
It is clear that this cancellation was secured by the Gosåin only because of the possibility of state intervention. This is established by the fact that the headmen’s certificate of cancellation is in Persian, including their pledge that they would not re-sell the land again: The document bears the qåz[ð’s seal besides seals in Persian and signatures of the witnesses (Doc.164). It is clear that this document was meant for the eyes of Mughal officials, who would have otherwise held the headmen to account.
The same village Arith, quite distant from the town of Mathura and only an unpretentious village in the seventeenth century, shows through the documents relating to it, how it was, even in relatively mundane matters of life, subject to control by Mughal officials. In the sixteenth century, the headmen of this village had sold land to Jðv Gosåin according to a series of Persian documents, which have been preserved (Nos. 12, 28–33, 36–37, 38A-40). In this land, Jðv and his successors dug two tanks, Rådhakund and Kishankund. In August–September 1640 a Mughal official (‘…Murtaza’ on his seal) issued a parwåna (No. 163) saying that no singhåras should be planted in that tank (presumably Kishankund), as such a practice was a fresh innovation (bid‘at). Obviously, this order was issued at the instance of Gosåin Kishandås, who believed the intrusion of the singhåra cultivation could only be stopped by local officials’ intervention.
On 6 May 1642 the same headmen committed themselves to another statement (No. 166), written out in both Persian and Braj that if they cultivated any land through which water used to drain into Radhakund, they would be held guilty before an official, Mirzå—. However, Kishandås Gosåin complained that the headmen were now cutting trees in that land and stopping the flow of water into the tank. This led to an order by Sayyid Lut]fullåh, apparently then the jågðrdår, to his local revenue-collector (shiqqdår), Sukhdev, to stop such interference (No. 177). Seemingly on the shiqqdår’s intervention, the same headmen now submitted an ‘arz[ (petition) to the shiqqdår (°ukømat-panåh Sukhdev) that they would not till the land through which the nullah flowed into Rådhåkund, nor cut down trees there. Otherwise, they would be held guilty before the nawwåb, that is, jågðrdår, himself. This is dated 10 November 1645 (No. 178).
Obviously matters were settled to the satisfaction of the Gosåin by official intervention, and the secured tank flourished. But early in Mu°ammad Shåh’s reign, the administration had to intervene again. Chronologically arranged, the documents have this story to tell: On 23 July 1720 an unnamed superior officer wrote to Badan Singh (the father of the famous Søraj Mal), then in Mughal service and apparently the jågðrdår, of the complaint of Gopirawan Goså’in that Natho Ram, a Brahman (of Mathura) was trying to seize his kunj (cottage) in Rådhakund (Arith), and asked that he be prevented from doing so (No. 349). On 7 August, Sayyid
The fact is that much of the current discussions on the extent of the authority of the Mughal state has been conducted almost without any detailed scrutiny of the primary documents. Whether that administration was idealistic or efficient or honest is doubtful; but it is clear from the Braj Bhum documents that from its own side, nothing in the rural localities was to be treated as outside its jurisdiction and control. If there was any limitation to its sovereignty, that limitation does not appear at least from the evidence this extensive archival treasure has offered to us.