Nature of the Mughul Government
THE establishment of the Mughul administration, on ideas and principles different from those of the Sultans of Delhi, was mainly the work of Akbar. Of his two predecessors, Babur and Humayun, the former had neither time nor opportunity, and the latter neither inclination nor ability, to elaborate a system of civil government. While gifted with political genius of a high order, Akbar was indebted in certain respects to the Sur example of administrative organisation. The Mughul government was a “combination of Indian and extra-Indian elements.” It was, more correctly speaking, “the Perso-Arabic system in an Indian setting”. It was also essentially military in nature and every officer of the Mughul State had to be enrolled in the army list. It was necessarily a centrallized autarchy, and the king’s power was unlimited. His word was law, and his will none could dispute. He was the supreme authority in the State, the head of the government, the commander of the State forces, the fountain of justice, the chief legislator. He was the Khalifah of God, required to obey the scriptures and Islamic traditions, but in practice, a strong king could act in defiance of sacred law if he so liked. There was nothing like a cabinet of ministers in the modern sense of the term. The ministers could not claim to be consulted as a matter of right; it was entirely a matter of the Emperor’s pleasure to accept their advice or not. Much depended, indeed, on the personality of the Emperor and his ministers. A wise ruler like Shah Jahan wanted invariably to consult a Sa’dullah Khan, while a minister like Husain Khan would have little regard, even open contempt for his crowned puppets.
The first six Mughul rulers of India possessed, however, a strong commonsense, and their autocracy did not, therefore, degenerate into an unbearable tyranny trampling on the rights and customs of the people. Endowed with the spirit of “benevolent despots “, the rulers worked hard for the good of the people in one way or another, especially in the regions round the central capital and the seats of viceregal governments in the provinces. But the State in those days “did not undertake any socialistic work, nor interfered with the lives of the villagers so long as there was not violent crime or defiance of royal authority in the locality”. From one point of view, the enormous power of the Mughul emperors was strictly limited. Their orders could not always be easily enforced in the distant corners of the Empire, not to speak of certain hilly parts of Chota Nagpur and the Santal Parganas, which most probably never acknowledged their sway. When we find almost each and every Emperor issuing orders for the abolition of the same kind of taxes and cesses in the very first year of his reign, we are led to conclude that previous attempts to abolish these had proved ineffectual and inoperative. There are copious references in the records of the English factories in India to show that even in the days of Shah Jahan and Aurangzeb, not to speak of the reigns of their weak successors, the subahdars, the provincial diwans, and the customs officers, occasionally acted contrary to the orders of the central government, mostly out of selfish motives.
The Nobility
Owing to several factors, the Mughul nobility was a heterogeneous body, composed of diverse elements like Turk, Tartar, Persian and Indian, Muslim and Hindu, and could not, therefore, organise itself as a powerful baronial class. Some Europeans also received titles of nobility. In theory, the nobility was not hereditary but purely official in character. A noble had only a life interest in his jagir, which escheated to the crown on his death; and the titles or emoluments could not usually be transmitted from father to son. The effect of the system of escheat was, as Sir J.N. Sarkar has observed, “most harmful”. The nobles led extravagant lives and squandered away all their money in unproductive luxury during their life-time. It also “prevented India from having one of the strongest safeguards of public liberty and checks on royal autocracy, namely, an independent hereditary peerage, whose position and wealth did not depend on the king’s favour in every generation, and who could, therefore, afford to be bold in their criticism of the royal caprice and their opposition to the royal tyranny”
Public Service and Bureaucracy
To maintain the military strength of the Empire, it was necessary for the Mughuls to employ a large number of foreign adventurers. Though Akbar inaugurated the policy of “India for Indians” and threw open official careers to the Hindus, yet the foreign elements predominated in the Mughul public service. The general character of the public services remained unaltered during the reigns of Jahangir and Shah Jahan. But deterioration in their efficiency began during the reign of the former, and became striking during the reign of his son and more so in the reign of Aurangzeb. Thus Prince Akbar wrote to Aurangzeb plainly in 1681: “The clerks and officers of state have taken to the practice of traders, and are buying posts with gold and selling them for shameful considerations. Every one who eats salt destroys the salt-cellar.”
Every officer of the State held a mansab or official appointment of rank and profit, and, as such, was bound theoretically to supply a number of troops for the military service of the State. Thus the mansabdars formed the official nobility of the country, and this system was the “army, the peerage, and the civil administration, all rolled into one”. Akbar classified the office-holders into thirty-three grades, ranging from “commanders of 10″ to commanders of 10,000”. Till the middle of Akbar’s reign, the highest rank an ordinary officer could hold was that of a commander of 5,000; the more exalted grades between commanders of 7,000 and 10,000 were reserved for members of the royal family. But toward the end of his reign this restriction was relaxed, and, under his successors, the officers rose to much higher positions. The mansabdars were directly recruited, promoted, suspended or dismissed by the Emperors. Each grade carried a definite rate of pay, out of which its holder was expected to maintain a quota of horses, elephants, beasts of burden and carts. But the mansabdars rarely fulfilled this condition. Irvine writes that “in spite of mustering and branding we may safely assume that very few mansabdars kept up at full strength even the quota of horsemen for which they received pay”. A mansabdari dignity was not hereditary.
The State Service was not speciallised, and an officer might be entrusted at any moment with an entirely new duty. Akbar’s wonderful capacity for “picking the right man for the right job”, checked the evils of this system, but a deterioration set in later on with the change in the personality of the rulers. The officers of the Mughul government received their salaries in two ways. Either they received them in cash from the State, or occasionally they were granted jagirs for a temporary period. They were not, however, given any ownership over the lands in their jagirs, but were only allowed to collect and enjoy the land revenue, equivalent to the amount of their salaries, from the assigned tracts. “Any excess collected not only involved injustice towards the cultivators; it was a fraud against the State as well.” Jagirs were frequently transferred from one mansabdar to another. The jagir system, however, gave some undue power and independence to the holders of jagirs; and Akbar, like Sher Shah, was justified in trying to remunerate his officers by cash payments, and in converting jagirs into khalsa lands, whenever possible. Whether paid in cash or in jagirs, the Mughul public servants enjoyed, as we know from the Ain-i-Akbari, inordinately high salaries, which attracted most enterprising adventurers from Western and Central Asia. Various evils crept into the Mughul public services after the reign of Aurangzeb, if not earlier.
