Medieval India: Sultanate, Mughals & the Eighteenth Century
Weightage: Paper I, Units 13–23 — a little under half the paper, containing two of the four debates worth preparing in full: the nature of the Mughal state and its late-seventeenth-century crisis, and whether the eighteenth century was decline or realignment. Both are questions about whether a single verdict for the subcontinent is possible.
1. Early medieval India, 750–1200
Political developments. The northern plains after the seventh century saw a long contest between three powers — the Gurjara-Pratiharas in the west and centre, the Palas in the east, and the Rashtrakutas of the Deccan — for control of the Ganga-Yamuna region and its symbolic capital. The struggle is conventionally called tripartite, and its significance is less in its outcome than in what it reveals: imperial ambition expressed as the seizure of a symbolic centre rather than as the administration of an integrated territory.
In the peninsula, the Chalukyas of Badami and the Pallavas contested the Deccan and the Tamil country, with the Rashtrakutas succeeding the Chalukyas and the Cholas succeeding the Pallavas as the dominant southern power.
The origin and rise of the Rajputs. The clans that emerge as ruling lineages in western and central India from about this period are attested in inscriptions that supply them with genealogies connecting them to solar, lunar and — distinctively — fire lineages. The historiographical question is what these genealogies represent. The older readings took them as evidence of foreign origin or of unbroken kshatriya descent. The reading better supported by the evidence is that they record a process of legitimation: groups achieving political power — some of local and pastoral origin, some of established status — acquired kshatriya standing through genealogies composed by brahmanas whom they patronised, and through the ritual and marriage networks that followed. The general point worth stating is that varna status in this period was an outcome of political success as much as a precondition of it.
The Cholas, the period's best-documented state and the one on which a question is most likely.
Sources: an exceptionally rich body of temple wall inscriptions, recording land transactions, assembly proceedings, endowments, taxes and disputes in local detail unmatched elsewhere in India before the modern period.
Administration at the centre: a king with grand titles and an ideology of universal sovereignty; a revenue department; provincial divisions and districts; and a substantial military and naval establishment, the latter unusual and connected to the overseas expeditions.
Local self-government, the Chola feature most examined. The inscriptions record village assemblies of several kinds — the ur as the general assembly of a village, the sabha as the assembly of a brahmadeya or brahmana settlement, and the nagaram as the assembly of a merchant town. The inscriptions of one locality describe an elaborate procedure for constituting committees from qualified residents by lot, with stated qualifications of property, learning and conduct, disqualifications for those who had failed to account for funds, and defined terms.
How to assess this: the older reading treated it as evidence of village democracy. The evidence supports something more precise and more interesting — substantial local administrative autonomy in revenue collection, irrigation management, temple administration and dispute settlement, exercised by assemblies whose membership was restricted by property and by status. It is local self-administration by a landholding elite, and calling it democracy imports a category the inscriptions do not support.
The nadu as the intermediate unit — a locality of villages with its own assembly and its own dominant peasant lineages — is analytically important, because the Chola state operated substantially through these local structures rather than displacing them, which is the basis of the reading that describes the Chola polity as segmentary, with ritual sovereignty extending far beyond the zone of actual administration.
The Chola temple as an economic institution: recipient of extensive land grants, employer of large staffs, holder of deposits, lender, and consumer of agricultural produce — which makes the temple a redistributive centre and the temple inscriptions the best economic evidence of the period.
The Chola overseas expeditions against Sri Lanka and against the maritime power of the Southeast Asian straits, connected to the protection of the merchant guilds whose inscriptions are found across the Indian Ocean, and which is exceptional evidence of a pre-modern Indian state acting in support of commercial interests.
Indian feudalism in the early medieval period, continuing the debate begun in the previous chapter. The thesis applied here holds that grants to officials in lieu of salary, the multiplication of intermediaries, the decline of coinage and towns, and the restriction of peasant mobility together produced a feudal order. The critique disputes each element, notes the regional variation, and objects to the imported vocabulary. The alternative models: the segmentary state, with a ritual sovereignty far exceeding the administrative core; and the integrative reading, which treats land grants and temple patronage as mechanisms by which local units were incorporated into larger polities rather than as fragmentation.
Agrarian economy and urban settlements: extension of cultivation into new areas, substantially through grants; the development of irrigation — tanks in the peninsula, wells and canals elsewhere; the growth of temple towns as a characteristic urban form, whose economic basis is the temple's own redistributive activity; and the regional variation in urban fortunes that makes a general statement about decline unsafe.
Trade and commerce: continued maritime trade with West Asia and Southeast Asia; the merchant guilds of the peninsula, whose inscriptions record their organisation, their armed escorts and their overseas presence; and the Arab commercial presence on the western coast, which precedes political contact by centuries.
Society: the proliferation of jatis, and the incorporation of new groups into the varna order — the mechanism by which tribal and local communities were integrated, and simultaneously the mechanism by which their subordination was formalised. The status of the brahmana rose with the grants, and the brahmadeya settlement became a characteristic institution. The position of women in the normative texts became more restricted; the epigraphic evidence shows women as donors and as property-holders, which is the standing corrective to the prescriptive picture.
Science and technology: mathematics and astronomy continuing from the previous period; medical and metallurgical work; and agricultural and irrigation technology attested by the works themselves.
2. Cultural traditions, 750–1200
Philosophy. The three Vedanta positions are examined comparatively, and the useful frame is what each says about the relation between the individual self, the world and the absolute.
Shankara's Advaita: the absolute alone is real; the individual self is identical with it; and the world's apparent plurality is the product of ignorance, which knowledge dispels. The system's difficulty, and the ground of the critiques, is the status it assigns to the world and to devotion.
Ramanuja's Vishishtadvaita: the absolute is qualified by the world and by selves, which are real and dependent rather than illusory — the relation is that of a body to the self that animates it. This preserves the reality of the world and makes devotion meaningful, since devotion requires a real distinction between devotee and object.
Madhva's dualism: the absolute and the individual selves are distinct, and the difference is real and permanent, which gives devotion its fullest scope.
The pattern worth stating: the sequence moves from a position that subordinates devotion to knowledge, toward positions that make devotion the primary path — which parallels the devotional turn happening simultaneously in popular religion.
Religion: the Tamil devotional movement, the earliest of the bhakti traditions in a fully developed form. The Nayanars devoted to Shiva and the Alvars devoted to Vishnu composed hymns in Tamil, which were compiled into canons and incorporated into temple liturgy. The movement's characteristics: composition in the spoken language rather than Sanskrit; an emphasis on personal devotion and emotional intensity over ritual and learning; the participation of composers from a range of social backgrounds, including groups the varna order subordinated, and of women; and a pronounced hostility to the Jaina and Buddhist establishments, which is a feature of the movement frequently passed over and which contributed to their decline in the region.
The spread of bhakti northward and its later regional developments belong to the following period, and the Tamil movement is its earliest sustained form.
Islam's arrival in India, which must be given accurately as a sequence of distinct processes rather than as a single event. Arab traders on the western coast from the early centuries of Islam, settling in port towns and establishing communities under local rulers, which is contact through commerce and precedes any political presence by centuries. The Arab conquest of Sind in the early eighth century, which established Muslim rule in a limited region and had little immediate consequence beyond it. The Ghaznavid raids into the north-west and the plains, which were destructive and did not establish territorial administration in the interior. And the Ghurid conquests at the close of the twelfth century, which do establish territorial rule and lead directly into the Sultanate.
Sufism: the mystical tradition within Islam, organised into orders with a spiritual lineage, a preceptor-disciple relationship, and a hospice as its institutional centre. Its Indian significance: the hospices provided food and shelter and were open to all, which made them socially significant beyond their religious function; the emphasis on inner experience and love rather than on legal observance created common ground with devotional Hinduism; and the use of local languages and music in devotional practice made the tradition locally rooted. The orders that established themselves in India differed in their attitude to the state — some accepting patronage and offices, others refusing both on principle, which is an examinable distinction because it shaped their relationship with rulers.
Literature: Sanskrit poetry, drama and technical literature continuing; the growth of Tamil literature including the devotional canons and the great narrative poems; the emergence of literature in the newly developing regional languages, which is one of the period's most significant long-term developments; Kalhana's twelfth-century chronicle of Kashmir, exceptional in the Sanskrit tradition for its historical purpose, its use of documents and inscriptions, and its critical attitude toward its sources; and Alberuni's eleventh-century study of Indian sciences, philosophy, religion and customs, written after study of Sanskrit sources and constituting the most systematic external account of Indian intellectual life before the modern period.
Art and architecture. Temple architecture develops into its regional styles: the Nagara style of the north, with its curvilinear shikhara over the sanctum and its regional variants; the Dravida style of the south, with its storeyed pyramidal vimana, and later with the enclosure walls and monumental gateways that become the southern temple's dominant visual feature; and the Vesara of the Deccan, combining elements of both. The temple's development is best presented as a movement from the small flat-roofed shrine of the Gupta period to the large complex with subsidiary shrines, halls, tanks, enclosures and gateways — a change that reflects the temple's growth as an economic and social institution rather than only as an aesthetic development.
Sculpture as an integral part of the temple, with regional schools; and painting, surviving principally in manuscript illustration and in the mural traditions of the south.
3. The Delhi Sultanate: establishment and the thirteenth century
Establishment. The Ghurid conquests at the end of the twelfth century established control over the north-western plains, and the assumption of independent authority by a former commander after the Ghurid ruler's death founded a sultanate at Delhi.
The thirteenth century's central problems, given as problems rather than as a dynastic list, because that is how the period is examined.
Consolidating a conquest state: the new rulers held towns and routes, faced a countryside they did not administer directly, and depended on a military elite drawn substantially from outside.
The Mongol threat, which is the single most important external factor of the century and is frequently under-weighted. Repeated Mongol pressure on the north-west forced the Sultanate to maintain a large standing military establishment, drove policy toward the concentration of resources and toward the north-west frontier, and — significantly — brought into India a large influx of displaced scholars, administrators and soldiers from the regions the Mongols had overrun, which shaped the Sultanate's administrative and cultural character.
Factionalism within the ruling elite: the competition between the Turkish military nobility, the ruler's own slaves and appointees, and later entrants; the associated struggle over whether authority derived from the sultan's person or from the nobility's consent; and the succession crises that followed each ruler's death.
The iqta system, the Sultanate's central administrative institution and one that must be described precisely. What it was: an assignment of the revenue of a territory to an officer, in return for which the assignee maintained a specified body of troops and remitted any surplus to the treasury. What it was not: a grant of land in ownership, and not hereditary. Its design logic: it paid a military establishment in an economy where the state could not reliably collect revenue centrally and then disburse cash, by making the assignee both the collector and the recipient. Its risk: an assignee who became entrenched in a territory could convert the assignment into an independent power base — which is why transferability was the system's essential safeguard, and why its later relaxation is treated as a symptom of weakening central authority.
The conquest of the Gangetic valley and beyond, extending the Sultanate's reach eastward and, in the following century, into the Deccan.
4. The fourteenth century
The Khalji period. The dynastic change is conventionally called a revolution because it broke the monopoly of the established Turkish nobility and opened the higher offices more widely, though the extent of the change should not be overstated.
Alauddin Khalji's measures, which are the century's most examined material and which must be given with their purpose rather than as a list.
The context and the purpose: repeated Mongol invasions required a very large standing army; a large army required either high pay or low prices; and the treasury could not sustain high pay. The measures follow from this, and stating the connection is what distinguishes an analytical answer.
Agrarian measures: revenue assessed at a high proportion of produce and taken directly from the cultivator where possible, bypassing intermediaries; measurement as the basis of assessment; the curtailment of the privileges of intermediary rural elites; and additional levies. The purpose was to maximise the state's share and to weaken the rural groups capable of resisting.
Market control, the best-known of the measures. Prices of grain, cloth, horses, slaves and other commodities were fixed; separate markets were established for different classes of goods with officers in charge; grain was procured and stored by the state and released in scarcity; merchants were registered and required to bring stocks to the designated markets; and enforcement was strict. The purpose: to enable a soldier on fixed low pay to maintain himself and his equipment — the horse price control being directly military in intent.
Whether it worked: the contemporary accounts report that prices held during the period, and they also indicate that the system depended on continuous coercive enforcement and did not outlast the reign. The assessment worth writing is that it was a military expedient rather than an economic policy, and it should be evaluated against the objective it actually had.
Other measures: an enlarged standing army with branding of horses and a descriptive roll of soldiers, both designed to prevent fraud in muster; and cash payment to soldiers rather than assignment.
The Tughluq period.
Muhammad bin Tughluq's projects are the classic examination topic, and the useful approach is to identify what each was intended to achieve and why it failed, rather than to catalogue eccentricity.
The transfer of the capital to a Deccan site was intended to give a more central position for an empire that now extended far south, and to secure the administrative centre against the Mongol-threatened north-west. It failed on the logistics of moving an administrative and military establishment over that distance and on the loss of the north's resources and connections, and it was reversed.
The token currency — issuing coins of base metal at the value of silver — was a response to a shortage of silver and had precedents in other economies. It failed because the state could not control counterfeiting, since the coins were not difficult to imitate and the state lacked the means to detect forgeries; the currency was withdrawn and the treasury bore the cost of redemption.
The taxation increase in the doab was intended to raise revenue from the empire's most productive region and coincided with famine, producing flight and revolt; relief measures followed but the damage was done.
The projected Khurasan and Qarachil expeditions, the first abandoned after an army had been raised and paid, the second a costly failure in the hills.
The assessment: the projects were rationally motivated and administratively over-ambitious, attempting outcomes that the available administrative and communications capacity could not deliver. The contemporary chronicler's hostility should be noted when using him as a source, since his account shapes the tradition of eccentricity.
Firuz Tughluq's measures: extensive irrigation works, including canals whose alignments were used long afterwards; the founding of towns; the establishment of a department for charitable payment and for employment; agrarian measures including a fixed and moderate revenue demand and the abolition of some cesses; and the conciliation of the nobility and the religious classes through hereditary assignments and grants. The consequence, which is the analytical point: the concessions purchased stability during the reign and weakened the central authority's control over resources and appointments, making the assignments hereditary and the nobility entrenched — so the reign's peace and the subsequent collapse have the same cause.
Decline of the Sultanate: the succession disputes after Firuz; the invasion of Timur and the sack of Delhi, which destroyed the capital's resources and prestige; and the progressive establishment of independent regional sultanates in Bengal, Jaunpur, Malwa, Gujarat and elsewhere, which is better described as the emergence of regional states than simply as fragmentation.
The foundation of Vijayanagara and the Bahmani kingdom in the Deccan in the mid-fourteenth century, both arising in the context of the Sultanate's Deccan expansion and its subsequent inability to hold the region. Their long rivalry over the intervening territory and the resources of the Raichur doab structures Deccan politics for two centuries.
Bengal and Kashmir as independent regional sultanates with distinct cultural developments, the former notable for patronage of Bengali literature and for a distinctive architecture in brick, the latter for a period of religious accommodation associated with one of its rulers.
5. Society, culture and economy in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries
Rural society and the agrarian structure. The essential distinction is between the cultivator, the village headman and rural elite holding superior rights and a share of the revenue, and the state's assignee. The rural elite's position — variously named in the sources — was the target of Alauddin's measures and the beneficiary of Firuz's, which is why agrarian policy in this period is legible as a contest over the distribution of the surplus between the state and the intermediary.
The Sultanate's agrarian economy: extension of cultivation; the revenue demand as the state's principal resource; the assessment methods of measurement, sharing and estimation; and the monetisation of revenue collection, which required the cultivator to sell produce and therefore linked the village to the market.
The urban economy: substantial urban growth, with Delhi becoming one of the largest cities of the contemporary world; the concentration of demand from a large military and administrative establishment paid in cash, which is the mechanism driving urban craft production; extensive craft production in textiles, metalwork, building and luxury goods; and long-distance trade both overland and maritime.
Technology: the period sees the diffusion or wider use of a set of techniques whose economic significance is substantial — the spinning wheel, which greatly increased yarn output and therefore textile production; the treadle loom; paper, which transformed record-keeping and administration; the Persian wheel for lifting irrigation water, whose gearing allowed continuous animal-powered lifting; the true arch and dome in building, which changed architecture; and improvements in metallurgy and in the manufacture of paper and glass. The examinable point is that these are not curiosities but changes affecting output and administration, and the argument that the period saw significant technological change rests on them.
Sufi and bhakti movements in this period: the establishment of the major Sufi orders with their hospices in Delhi and the provinces; and the northward spread of devotional religion. Their social significance: both offered religious participation without the mediation of learned elites and in local languages, both attracted followings across social boundaries, and the hospices functioned as centres of charity and refuge. The caution against overstating: neither movement set out to abolish social distinctions, and the evidence for social levelling is much weaker than for religious accessibility.
Amir Khusrau as the period's central literary figure — poet in Persian, associated with the Sufi tradition, credited in later tradition with developments in music and with the use of Hindavi, and valuable to historians for the historical poems and for his descriptions of Indian conditions.
The Indo-Persian tradition: Persian as the language of administration, of the court and of historical writing, producing a substantial body of chronicles which are our principal narrative sources for the period. How to use them: they are court-connected, written for patrons, and shaped by the author's position and religious outlook — the chronicler hostile to Muhammad bin Tughluq being the standing illustration — so they require the same source criticism as any other partisan document.
6. The fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries
Political developments: the regional sultanates of Bengal, Jaunpur, Malwa, Gujarat, Khandesh and Kashmir; the Lodi consolidation at Delhi, and the tension between a ruler asserting monarchical authority and an Afghan nobility with a tradition of treating the ruler as first among equals; the Rajput states, notably Mewar under its ambitious ruler; and the Mughal advent with the defeat of the Lodi ruler and, subsequently, of the Rajput confederacy.
Vijayanagara: its administrative structure with provincial governors and the nayaka system of military assignments; the resources of its agrarian base and its control of the trade in horses through the western ports; its long contest with the Bahmani and successor sultanates; and its defeat by a coalition of Deccan sultanates in the later sixteenth century, after which the city was abandoned. Its economy and society are unusually well described in foreign travellers' accounts, which describe the capital's size, its markets, its irrigation works and its court, and which should be used with the usual caution about visitors' impressions.
The Bahmani kingdom and its division into successor sultanates, whose competition and eventual coalition shaped Deccan politics.
The Portuguese arrival at the end of the fifteenth century, which is the beginning of European penetration and belongs analytically to the next chapter, and which in this period is significant for the attempt to control Indian Ocean trade by force — the cartaz system requiring ships to carry Portuguese passes — and for the establishment of coastal enclaves.
Bhakti and Sufi movements in this period reach their most influential phase, and the useful organisation is by type rather than by name.
The saguna traditions, devoted to a deity with attributes and form — the Krishna and Rama devotional traditions, with their poetry, their temples and their eventual institutional consolidation.
The nirguna traditions, devoted to a formless absolute, rejecting image worship, ritual and the authority of both brahmana and mullah, and characteristically composed in spoken languages by figures from artisanal and subordinated groups. This strand is the most socially radical in its rhetoric, and its critique of birth-based hierarchy is explicit.
The Sikh tradition, founded in this period, with a scripture compiled in the following century incorporating compositions from a range of devotional figures, and with an institutional development — the succession of gurus, the community kitchen, the congregation — that distinguishes it from the movements that did not institutionalise.
Regional developments: the devotional movements in Maharashtra, Bengal, Assam, Odisha and the south, each with its own literature and its own social composition.
How to assess bhakti's social effect, which is the examinable question. The movements created religious space outside brahmanical mediation, used spoken languages, produced a large body of vernacular literature, and admitted participants from groups the varna order subordinated, including women. They did not dismantle the caste order: the communities that formed around them frequently reproduced social distinctions, several traditions were later absorbed into orthodox institutional forms, and the evidence for durable social change is much weaker than for religious and literary change. The defensible position is that the movements' cultural and linguistic consequences were transformative and their social consequences were limited.
Regional cultural specificities: the growth of regional literary traditions in Bengali, Marathi, Hindi dialects, Gujarati, Assamese, Odia, Kannada, Telugu and Malayalam, which is the period's most durable cultural development; provincial architecture, in which the regional sultanates produced distinct styles combining Islamic structural forms with local materials and decorative traditions — the brick architecture of Bengal, the stone architecture of Gujarat and Jaunpur, and the Deccan styles; and the sculpture, painting and music of the courts.
7. Akbar
Conquests and consolidation: the recovery and extension of Mughal territory across northern India, Gujarat, Bengal, Kabul, Kashmir and Sind, and the beginning of the Deccan campaigns.
The mansab system, which must be described accurately because it is the Mughal state's organising institution.
What it was: every officer of the empire held a mansab or rank, expressed in two numbers — the zat, determining personal status and pay, and the sawar, determining the number of cavalry to be maintained. The dual designation separates the officer's own standing from his military obligation, which is what allows civil and military officers to be graded on a single scale.
Its features: ranks were granted, increased and reduced by the emperor, so status derived from the ruler rather than from birth or from land; the obligation was verified by branding of horses and by a descriptive roll; and the system covered the entire imperial service, integrating a nobility of very diverse origins into a single hierarchy.
The jagir system: most mansabdars were paid not in cash but by assignment of the revenue of a territory — a jagir — sufficient to meet their salary and their contingent's cost. The essential features: the assignment was of revenue, not land ownership; it was transferable, with frequent reassignment; and it was not hereditary.
Why transferability mattered: it prevented the assignee from developing an independent territorial base, which is the same design logic as the Sultanate's iqta. Its cost, which becomes the empire's structural problem: an assignee who expects to be transferred has no interest in the long-term productivity of the territory and every incentive to extract the maximum during his tenure.
The revenue system: assessment based on measurement of cultivated area, classification of land by continuity of cultivation, and rates fixed by reference to average produce and prices over a period, expressed in cash — the system associated with Akbar's revenue minister. Its significance: a cash demand fixed in advance gave predictability to state and cultivator alike and required the cultivator to sell in the market, which deepened monetisation.
The zamindars: hereditary holders of superior rights in land, entitled to a share of the produce, with their own armed retainers and local authority. The Mughal state's relationship with them is central to the debate on the state's nature: the empire did not displace them but incorporated them, using them to collect revenue and recognising their rights, while attempting to limit their autonomy.
Rajput policy: matrimonial alliances; the admission of Rajput rulers into the mansabdari at high ranks, with their own territories held as watan jagirs which were hereditary and not transferable; and the employment of Rajput commanders in major campaigns. Its significance: it converted a set of independent and hostile states into a component of the imperial nobility while allowing them to retain their home territories, which is a genuine political innovation and a substantial contribution to the empire's stability.
Religious and social outlook: the abolition of the pilgrimage tax and of the jizya; participation of non-Muslims in the higher administration in significant numbers; the discussions in the house of worship, subsequently opened to representatives of several traditions; the decree of the late 1570s concerning the emperor's authority in disputed religious questions; the din-i-ilahi as a small personal order of disciples rather than a religion; and the doctrine of sulh-i-kul — universal peace or absolute tolerance — as the governing principle.
How to assess sulh-i-kul: it should be presented as a political and ideological principle for ruling a religiously plural empire as much as a personal conviction. Its practical content was the removal of discriminatory levies, the opening of office irrespective of religion, and the assertion of a sovereignty standing above sectarian claims — and its effect on the empire's stability is the strongest argument for treating it as statecraft rather than as personal eccentricity.
Court patronage of art and technology: the atelier producing manuscript illustration in a style synthesising Persian, indigenous and, in the treatment of perspective and portraiture, European elements; the translation bureau rendering Sanskrit works into Persian; architecture combining Persian and Indian forms in the capital complex; music; and interest in mechanical and military technology.
8. The Mughal empire in the seventeenth century
Administrative continuity and change under Jahangir, Shahjahan and Aurangzeb: the mansab and jagir systems continuing with modifications, including devices for adjusting the gap between the nominal and actual obligation of a rank; the expansion of the empire, particularly into the Deccan; and the growth of the nobility relative to the assignable revenue, which is the source of the crisis discussed below.
The empire and the zamindars: the relationship is one of negotiated incorporation — the state recognised zamindari rights and used zamindars for collection, and zamindars resisted when the demand rose or their rights were curtailed. Zamindar-led revolts are a recurring feature and are analytically important, because they indicate the limits of imperial authority in the countryside.
Religious policies: Jahangir and Shahjahan continued the broad framework with variations, including some restrictions under Shahjahan; Aurangzeb's policies included the reimposition of the jizya, restrictions on new temple construction with the destruction of some existing temples in particular political contexts, and a general assertion of orthodox observance at court.
How to handle Aurangzeb, which requires care because the topic is contested and frequently written badly. What the evidence supports: the reimposition of jizya and the temple measures are attested, and they represent a real change of policy. What complicates the simple picture: the proportion of Hindu, and specifically Rajput and Maratha, officers in the nobility rose during his reign to its highest level in Mughal history; grants to temples and to non-Muslim religious figures continued; and the temple destructions correlate substantially with political disaffection in the localities concerned. The defensible position: religious policy changed in a more orthodox direction and was one factor among several in the empire's difficulties, and explanations of the crisis resting on religious policy alone cannot account for revolts by Muslim nobles and zamindars or for the fiscal and administrative problems that were independent of it.
The nature of the Mughal state, the third of the four debates to prepare in full.
The centralised bureaucratic reading: a systematically organised state with a uniform revenue system, a graded service, a documented administration, and a nobility wholly dependent on the emperor, extracting a large share of the agrarian surplus and concentrating it at the centre.
The revisions: that the empire operated through intermediaries — zamindars, local chiefs, tributary rulers — over most of its territory, so its administration was layered rather than uniform; that regional and local power structures persisted beneath the imperial layer and reasserted themselves when it weakened; that the empire's authority was substantially ideological and ritual, expressed through the court, the honours system and the emperor's person; and that the picture of uniformity derives partly from reading normative administrative manuals as descriptions — which is the same methodological point as in the Mauryan debate.
The defensible position: the Mughal empire was more systematically administered than any Indian state before it and less uniformly than the centralised model implies, with an imperial layer resting on and negotiating with a durable structure of local rights.
The late-seventeenth-century crisis and the revolts. The explanations advanced, which should be given as competing accounts rather than as a list of causes.
The jagirdari crisis: the number of mansabdars grew, particularly with the incorporation of Deccan nobles, while the assignable revenue did not grow proportionately; the gap between the nominal revenue of a jagir and its actual yield widened; officers waited for assignments and, when assigned, faced shortfalls; and the pressure was transmitted downward as increased extraction. This is a structural explanation and is the strongest single account.
The agrarian crisis: the demand rising to a level that left the cultivator little margin, provoking flight, resistance and revolt, with the zamindars frequently leading it. The connection to the jagirdari crisis is direct — a jagirdar facing a shortfall extracts harder.
The Deccan campaigns: prolonged warfare consuming resources, absorbing the emperor and the court for decades, and adding a large nobility to be provided for without adding proportionate revenue.
Religious policy as an aggravating factor rather than a sufficient cause, for the reasons given above.
The revolts — Jat, Satnami, Sikh, Rajput and Maratha — differ in character and should not be assimilated to one another: some are agrarian and zamindar-led, some are religious communities in confrontation with the state, and the Maratha movement is a state-building enterprise.
The Ahom kingdom in the Brahmaputra valley, which resisted repeated Mughal attempts at conquest, notable for its administrative organisation based on a system of obligatory service and for its own chronicle tradition, which is an unusual indigenous historical source.
Shivaji and the early Maratha kingdom. The rise: from a base in the western hills, using fort warfare and mobility against larger conventional forces, against the Bijapur sultanate and then against the Mughals. The administration: a council of ministers; a revenue system based on measurement and a fixed share; a standing army paid in cash rather than by assignment, which is a significant departure and is the basis of the claim that the early Maratha state was more centralised than its neighbours; forts as the administrative and military backbone; and the levies of chauth and sardeshmukhi claimed from territories outside direct control, which are the fiscal instrument of Maratha expansion. The coronation as an assertion of independent sovereignty with the ritual apparatus that claim required.
9. Economy and society in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries
Agricultural production: a wide range of crops with substantial regional specialisation; cash crops including cotton, indigo, sugarcane and, from the seventeenth century, tobacco and maize introduced from the Americas; extension of cultivation; and irrigation by wells, tanks and canals with regional variation.
Craft production: textiles as the dominant manufacture and the principal export, with regional specialisations in cotton and silk, and with dyeing and printing techniques of high quality; shipbuilding; metalwork; and the organisation of production in household units, with merchant capital advancing money and materials to weavers — a putting-out arrangement whose extent is examinable and disputed.
Trade. Internal trade along river and road routes, in grain, textiles, salt and other bulk goods, supported by a substantial merchant and transport apparatus. Maritime trade in the Indian Ocean, with Indian merchants and shipping long established, exporting textiles to Southeast Asia, West Asia and East Africa. European penetration: the Portuguese first, attempting to control the trade by force; then the Dutch and English companies, which entered as traders, established factories, and increasingly participated in the intra-Asian trade as well as in the export to Europe. The significant economic fact is that Europe had little that India wanted, so the trade was substantially settled in bullion, which flowed into India in large quantities.
Indian mercantile classes: substantial merchant communities with regional specialisations; banking and credit including the hundi, a bill of exchange that permitted the transfer of funds across long distances without moving specie and which is evidence of a sophisticated commercial infrastructure; insurance; and brokerage.
Transport and currency: bullock caravans and river transport; the silver rupee as the standard coin with a stable weight over a long period, together with copper and gold, and a monetised revenue system that circulated coin widely.
Society. The village community: a settlement with its own artisans and servants, internally stratified between those with rights in land and those without, and connected to the market by the cash revenue demand — the older picture of a self-sufficient, unchanging village republic is not supported and should be rejected explicitly. The ruling classes: the mansabdari nobility, of diverse origin, held together by imperial service and by conspicuous consumption, and structurally unable to accumulate across generations because jagirs were not hereditary and estates escheated. The zamindars as the durable rural elite. Town dwellers: merchants, artisans, service groups, and the large populations attached to the court and the military. The position of women: restrictive norms in the prescriptive literature and among the elite, with property rights principally through dower and gift; and evidence of women as patrons, builders and, in the imperial household, as holders of substantial revenue assignments and participants in trade — which is the standing corrective.
10. Culture in the Mughal empire
Persian histories and literature: an exceptional body of court chronicles and administrative compilations, which are our principal narrative and statistical sources and which are court-produced and therefore partisan; biography and memoir, including an emperor's own memoirs; and poetry, with the development of a distinctive Indo-Persian style.
Hindi and religious literature: the great devotional works in Hindi dialects, including the retelling of the Rama story that becomes the most widely read text in north India; devotional poetry in Braj; and religious and sectarian literature across the regional languages. The Sikh scripture compiled in this period, incorporating compositions from devotional figures of several backgrounds.
Mughal architecture: the synthesis of Persian and Central Asian forms — the arch, the dome, the charbagh garden plan — with Indian materials, techniques and decorative traditions. The development: the early monumental tomb introducing the garden-tomb form; Akbar's capital complex in red sandstone with extensive trabeate construction and indigenous forms; the shift under Shahjahan to white marble with pietra dura inlay, cusped arches and bulbous domes, of which the riverside tomb is the culminating example; and the mosques and palace complexes of the period.
Mughal painting: developing in the imperial atelier from a Persian base with indigenous and European influences; its subjects moving from manuscript illustration under Akbar to portraiture, natural history studies and allegory under Jahangir, whose personal interest is attested and whose reign is the school's technical peak; and its later dispersal to provincial and regional courts.
Provincial architecture and painting: the regional styles of the sultanates and later of the successor states; and the regional painting schools — the Deccani schools with their distinct palette and treatment, the Rajput and Pahari schools with their devotional and literary subjects — which develop partly through the dispersal of artists from the imperial atelier.
Music: the elaboration of the classical tradition at the Mughal and regional courts; the systematisation of ragas; and the interaction of Persian and Indian musical practice.
Science and technology: astronomy and mathematics continuing in both Sanskrit and Persian traditions with some interaction; medicine in both the Ayurvedic and Unani traditions; military technology including firearms and artillery, whose adoption is one of the period's significant changes; and the technologies of textile production, metallurgy and building. The historiographical question worth noting is why the scientific and technological advances of the period did not produce the transformations occurring contemporaneously in parts of Europe — a question with no settled answer and one that should be presented as open.
11. The eighteenth century
The decline of the Mughal empire: the explanations, given as competing accounts.
Structural and economic: the jagirdari crisis — nobles outgrowing assignable revenue — and the agrarian crisis of over-extraction and resistance, treated above.
Political: the wars of succession that followed each reign; the factional politics of the nobility, organised into groups whose competition paralysed the centre; the erosion of imperial control over provincial governors, who became hereditary; and the loss of the emperor's capacity to transfer or dismiss.
Military: the exhaustion of the Deccan campaigns; the invasions of the eighteenth century, which removed the treasury, destroyed the capital's resources and demonstrated the empire's incapacity; and the failure to keep pace with military change.
Personal and religious: weak successors, and Aurangzeb's religious policy as an aggravating factor whose weight should not be overstated for the reasons given earlier.
The regional principalities, and how to characterise them. Hyderabad, founded by a Mughal governor who established hereditary autonomy while maintaining the forms of allegiance. Bengal, similarly established, with a functioning revenue administration, a prosperous commercial economy, and a substantial trade with the European companies. Awadh, likewise, with revenue farming and an accommodation with local zamindars. Mysore under a new dynasty, which built a state with a reformed revenue system, a modernised army and state involvement in commerce. The Punjab, where a Sikh state emerged at the end of the century.
The essential analytical point about the successor states: they were not fragments of a collapse but functioning states — they inherited Mughal administrative practice, maintained revenue systems, and in several cases presided over commercial expansion. Their common weakness was in military capacity relative to a European-trained force and in their inability to combine.
Maratha ascendancy. The expansion under the Peshwas from the western base into Malwa, Gujarat and northward, exercising authority over a wide territory through the collection of chauth and sardeshmukhi and through subordinate chiefs. The Maratha fiscal and financial system: revenue assessment in the home territories; the levies claimed from territories outside direct control, which were a fiscal claim rather than administration — a crucial distinction, because it made Maratha power extensive and shallow; the role of bankers and revenue farmers in financing campaigns; and the growing autonomy of the great chiefs, whose territories became effectively independent principalities.
The emergence of Afghan power and the invasions of the mid-century, culminating in the third battle of Panipat in 1761, where the Maratha army was defeated. Its significance: it did not end Maratha power, which recovered within a decade, but it destroyed the prospect of a Maratha imperial settlement in the north and removed the only Indian power positioned to succeed the Mughals across the subcontinent — which left a genuine vacuum in northern politics at exactly the point when the English company was consolidating in Bengal.
The state of politics, economy and culture on the eve of the British conquest. Politically: multiple regional states with functioning administrations, competing rather than combining, and increasingly using European-trained infantry and artillery. Economically: substantial commercial activity, with textile production for export continuing, banking houses of considerable scale financing states and trade, and regional variation between prospering and disrupted areas. Culturally: vigorous regional literary and artistic production, with the successor courts as patrons and with the regional painting schools at their height.
The debate on the eighteenth century, the fourth of the four to prepare in full.
The decline reading: Mughal collapse, political fragmentation, warfare and disorder, economic disruption, and a vacuum into which the English company moved — a narrative constructed substantially from the imperial centre's perspective and from the accounts of those who described the period in order to justify what followed.
The realignment reading: the successor states were viable polities with functioning revenue systems; several regional economies expanded, with commercial groups, bankers and revenue farmers prospering; and the period represents a redistribution of political and economic power from the imperial centre to the regions rather than a general collapse.
The disagreement's basis is a difference in the level of analysis and the evidence used — imperial chronicles and the centre's perspective against regional revenue records, commercial documents and local studies.
The defensible position: both are partly right. The imperial centre did collapse, and that collapse was real and consequential. The consequences varied enormously by region, with some areas experiencing warfare and disruption and others commercial expansion. A single verdict for the subcontinent is therefore the wrong form of answer, and saying so — with the regional evidence to support it — is the strongest position available.
12. Worked answer — a 20-mark question
Question: Examine the nature of the Mughal state and the causes of the crisis of the late seventeenth century. (20 marks)
Framing. The two halves of the question are connected: the crisis is explained differently depending on what the state is taken to have been, so the answer must settle the first before it can address the second.
The nature of the state: the centralised reading. The empire is described as a systematically administered state with a uniform revenue system based on measurement, classification and cash rates; a graded service in which every officer held a rank conferred by the emperor; an extensively documented administration; and a nobility of diverse origins wholly dependent on imperial favour for rank, assignment and status. On this reading the state extracted a very large share of the agrarian surplus and concentrated it at the centre, and its administrative apparatus was more developed than that of any previous Indian state.
What supports it. The mansab system did integrate a heterogeneous nobility into a single hierarchy whose grades the emperor controlled. The jagir was transferable and non-hereditary, which prevented territorial entrenchment. The revenue system did operate on measurement and cash assessment over a large area. And the documentation is real: the administrative compilations of the period are unmatched in earlier Indian history.
The revisions. The empire operated through intermediaries — zamindars with hereditary superior rights, local chiefs, and tributary rulers holding their home territories — over most of its territory, so the administration was layered rather than uniform: the imperial layer collected from and negotiated with a durable structure of local rights that it had not created and did not displace. Regional and local power structures persisted beneath it and reasserted themselves as it weakened, which is why the eighteenth century produced functioning regional states rather than anarchy. The empire's authority was substantially ideological and ritual, expressed through the court, the honours system and the emperor's person, which is why loss of the emperor's prestige had effects disproportionate to any administrative change. And the picture of uniformity derives partly from reading normative administrative compilations as descriptions of practice — the same methodological error as reading the Arthashastra as a Mauryan record.
The position on the first half: the Mughal empire was more systematically administered than any Indian state before it and less uniformly than the centralised model implies — an imperial layer resting on and negotiating with local rights it recognised because it could not replace them.
The crisis, explained from that account.
The jagirdari crisis is the strongest single explanation and follows directly from the state's structure. The nobility grew, particularly with the incorporation of Deccan nobles after the southern conquests; the assignable revenue did not grow proportionately; the gap between a jagir's nominal revenue and its actual yield widened; officers waited for assignments and, when assigned, found the yield insufficient for their obligations. The system's design made this fatal rather than merely inconvenient: because jagirs were transferable and short-term, a jagirdar facing a shortfall had no interest in the territory's long-term productivity and every incentive to extract the maximum during his tenure.
The agrarian crisis follows from it. The demand rising to a level leaving the cultivator little margin provoked flight, concealment and resistance, with zamindars frequently leading it, since their own share was squeezed from above. Zamindar-led revolt is the characteristic form of eighteenth-century disorder and it indicates the limits of imperial authority in the countryside.
The Deccan campaigns aggravated both: decades of warfare consuming resources, absorbing the emperor and the court far from the empire's revenue heartland, and adding a large nobility to be provided for without a proportionate addition to assignable revenue.
Religious policy was a real change and is an insufficient explanation. The reimposition of jizya and the temple measures are attested. Against a religious explanation of the crisis: the proportion of Hindu, and specifically Rajput and Maratha, officers in the nobility rose during Aurangzeb's reign to the highest level in Mughal history; grants to non-Muslim religious institutions continued; the temple measures correlate substantially with political disaffection in the localities concerned; and, decisively, several of the revolts and much of the factional paralysis involved Muslim nobles and zamindars, which a religious explanation cannot accommodate.
The revolts should be distinguished rather than assimilated: the Jat and Satnami movements are agrarian and locally led; the Sikh confrontation is a religious community in conflict with the state; the Rajput dispute arises from a succession intervention; and the Maratha movement is a state-building enterprise with its own administration, revenue system and fiscal claims, which is a different order of phenomenon from a revolt.
Assessment. The crisis is best explained as the structural failure of the jagir system under expansion, transmitted downward as agrarian pressure and upward as factional competition for a shrinking pool of assignments, with the Deccan wars as the accelerant and religious policy as an aggravating factor of secondary weight.
The connection to the first half of the question is the answer's point. A genuinely centralised bureaucratic state would have had instruments to manage the mismatch — it could have reassessed, retrenched, or reallocated. The Mughal state could not, because its nobility's loyalty was purchased with assignments and its revenue rested on intermediaries whose cooperation depended on their own share being preserved. The crisis is therefore not an accident of one reign but the failure mode built into the state's actual structure, which is why the layered account explains it better than the centralised one.
Common traps
- Describing Chola local assemblies as village democracy, when membership was restricted by property and status.
- Listing Alauddin's market measures without their military purpose, which is what makes them intelligible.
- Presenting Muhammad bin Tughluq's projects as eccentricity rather than as rational objectives defeated by administrative capacity — and using his hostile chronicler uncritically.
- Treating the iqta or the jagir as a grant of land; both are assignments of revenue, and the distinction is the whole point.
- Writing on Aurangzeb without the countervailing evidence on the composition of the nobility, or writing an apologia that ignores the attested policy change.
- Explaining the Mughal crisis by religious policy alone, which cannot account for revolts by Muslim nobles.
- Presenting the eighteenth century as uniform decline, or as uniform prosperity — both are refuted by the regional evidence.
- Describing the village community as self-sufficient and unchanging, which the cash revenue demand alone refutes.
Memory aids
- Chola assemblies: ur, sabha, nagaram — local autonomy by a landholding elite, not democracy.
- Iqta and jagir: revenue assignment, transferable, non-hereditary — and transferability is the safeguard whose cost is short-horizon extraction.
- Alauddin's chain: Mongol threat, large army, low pay, price control.
- Mansab: zat for status and pay, sawar for cavalry obligation.
- Sulh-i-kul: statecraft for a plural empire, not personal eccentricity.
- Mughal state: an imperial layer on durable local rights.
- The crisis: nobles grew, assignable revenue did not.
- Eighteenth century: centre collapsed, regions diverged — one verdict is the wrong form.
Exam protocol
- State the purpose of an administrative measure before describing it.
- Distinguish assignment of revenue from grant of land in every Sultanate and Mughal answer.
- On the Mughal state, give the centralised reading, the layered revision, and the position, before turning to the crisis.
- On Aurangzeb, give the attested policy change and the countervailing evidence.
- On the eighteenth century, refuse the single verdict and support the refusal with regional evidence.
- Name the chronicler's position when relying on a Persian narrative source.
- Close with a position and its reason in a single sentence.
