Medieval India: Sultanate, Mughals & the Eighteenth Century — Practice

Question 1

Examine Chola administration with special reference to local self-government.

Accepted Answer

**Sources.** The Chola period is the best-documented in pre-modern Indian history because of 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. An answer should name this, because the picture we have of Chola administration is a function of what this particular source type records.

**Central administration**: a king with grand titles and an ideology of universal sovereignty; a revenue department conducting surveys and assessments; provincial divisions and districts; and a substantial military and **naval** establishment, the latter unusual among Indian states and connected to the overseas expeditions.

**Local self-government**, the feature most examined.

**The three assembly types** must be distinguished. The **ur** is the general assembly of an ordinary village of landholders. The **sabha** is the assembly of a **brahmadeya** — a village granted to brahmanas — and is the body whose procedures the inscriptions describe most fully. The **nagaram** is the assembly of a merchant town.

**The procedure**, from the inscriptions of one locality that describe it in exceptional detail: the settlement divided into wards; qualified residents nominated from each; **qualifications** stated in terms of property held, of learning in the sacred texts, and of age and conduct; **disqualifications** for those who had failed to render accounts of funds previously handled, and for their relatives; selection by **lot** from the nominated names; and appointment to **committees** with defined functions — gardens, tanks, gold, justice — for defined terms.

**Their functions**: revenue collection and remittance; **irrigation management**, including the maintenance of tanks and channels, which is the most consequential function in a region where cultivation depends on tank irrigation; temple administration and the management of endowments; local dispute settlement; and the administration of funds deposited with the assembly.

**How to assess this, which is what the question is testing.** The older reading treated the arrangements as evidence of **village democracy**. The evidence supports something more precise and more interesting: **substantial local administrative autonomy** exercised by **assemblies whose membership was restricted by property and by status**. Landholding was a qualification; the labouring population and those without land in the settlement had no part; and the brahmadeya sabha was by definition an assembly of one varna. It is local self-administration by a landholding elite, and calling it democracy imports a category the inscriptions do not support.

**The nadu**, the intermediate unit, is analytically important: a locality of villages with its own assembly and its own dominant peasant lineages. The Chola state operated substantially **through** these local structures rather than displacing them, which is the basis of the reading describing the Chola polity as **segmentary** — with ritual sovereignty extending far beyond the zone of actual administration, and with real power at the centre confined to a core.

**The temple as an economic institution** must be included in any account of Chola administration: recipient of extensive land grants, employer of large staffs, holder of deposits, lender at interest, and consumer of agricultural produce. This makes the temple a **redistributive centre** linking the state, the landholders and the local economy, and it is why temple inscriptions are the best economic evidence of the period.

**The overseas expeditions** against Sri Lanka and against the maritime power of the Southeast Asian straits are connected to the protection of the **merchant guilds** whose inscriptions are found across the Indian Ocean — exceptional evidence of a pre-modern Indian state acting in support of commercial interests.

**Assessment**: the Chola achievement is a state that combined an **imperial ideology and a naval reach** with administration conducted substantially through **autonomous local bodies** it did not create. Whether that makes it a centralised bureaucratic state or a segmentary one is the standing debate, and the evidence supports a position between them: real administrative institutions at the centre, real autonomy in the localities, and a sovereignty whose ritual claims extended well beyond either.

Question 2

Examine the origin of the Rajputs and the debate on the character of the early medieval polity.

Accepted Answer

**The Rajput question.**

*The evidence*: the clans emerging as ruling lineages in western and central India from about the eighth century are attested in **inscriptions supplying them with genealogies** — connecting them to solar and lunar lines and, distinctively, to a **fire** origin recorded in some traditions.

*The older readings*: **foreign origin**, treating them as descendants of groups that entered India in the preceding centuries; and **unbroken kshatriya descent**, taking the genealogies at face value.

*The reading better supported by the evidence*: the genealogies record a **process of legitimation**. Groups that achieved political power — some of local and pastoral origin, some of already established status — acquired kshatriya standing through genealogies composed by the brahmanas whom they patronised, and consolidated it through ritual, marriage networks and land grants.

*The general point worth stating*, because it transfers: **varna status in this period was an outcome of political success as much as a precondition of it**. The same mechanism explains the incorporation of local and tribal lineages into the kshatriya order elsewhere, and it is why genealogies in inscriptions are evidence for claims rather than for descent.

**The debate on the polity's character.**

*The feudalism thesis*: grants of land and revenue to religious beneficiaries and then to officials in lieu of salary produced a **decentralised order** with a hierarchy of intermediaries between king and cultivator; a **decline of trade**, evidenced by reduced coinage; a **decline of towns**; and a **restriction of peasant mobility**.

*The critique*: the **coinage evidence is ambiguous**, since absence of finds is weak evidence and other media of exchange existed; **trade did not decline uniformly**, with the maritime trade continuing and the peninsular merchant guilds demonstrably active; **urban decline was regional**, with temple towns emerging as a new urban form even where older centres contracted; the grants transferred **revenue rights rather than creating manorial estates**; and the European term imports vassalage, the manor and serfdom, none of which the evidence attests.

*The segmentary state model*: political authority is **ritual over a wide area and actual over a small core**, with subordinate units replicating the centre's structure and acknowledging its ritual primacy without being administered by it. Applied to the Cholas, it accounts for the combination of an imperial ideology with autonomous local assemblies.

*The integrative model*: land grants, temple patronage and the incorporation of local lineages are mechanisms by which **local units were drawn into larger polities** — a process of expansion and incorporation rather than of fragmentation, which reverses the feudalism thesis's direction entirely.

**The position to take**: the **grants and their proliferation are a fact of the evidence**; what is disputed is what followed from them. Each model captures something the others miss — the feudalism thesis the multiplication of intermediaries, the segmentary model the gap between ritual and administrative reach, the integrative model the incorporation of local lineages that the Rajput genealogies themselves record. The defensible conclusion is that the consequences were **regionally varied**, so a single characterisation of early medieval India is the wrong form of answer — the same conclusion the eighteenth-century debate reaches, and for the same reason.

Question 3

Compare the Vedanta systems of Shankara, Ramanuja and Madhva, and examine the character of Sufism in India.

Accepted Answer

**The Vedanta systems**, compared on **what each says about the relation between the individual self, the world and the absolute** — which is the frame that makes them comparable rather than three separate summaries.

**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. Liberation is therefore the removal of a misapprehension rather than the attainment of anything, and the path is **knowledge**. *The system's difficulty*, and the ground of the later critiques: the status it assigns to the world, and the subordinate place it leaves for **devotion**, which requires a real distinction between devotee and object that the system denies at the highest level.

**Ramanuja's Vishishtadvaita**: the absolute is qualified by the world and by selves, which are **real and dependent** rather than illusory — the relation being that of a body to the self that animates it. This preserves the world's reality and makes **devotion** meaningful and central, since devotee and object are really distinct while remaining inseparable.

**Madhva's dualism**: the absolute and the individual selves are **distinct**, and the difference is real and permanent. This gives devotion its fullest scope and is the most straightforwardly theistic of the three.

**The pattern worth stating**: the sequence moves from a position **subordinating devotion to knowledge** toward positions making **devotion the primary path** — which parallels exactly the devotional turn occurring simultaneously in popular religion, so the philosophical development and the bhakti movement are the same phenomenon at different levels.

**Sufism in India.**

*What it is*: the mystical tradition within Islam, organised into **orders** with a spiritual lineage traced through a chain of preceptors, a **preceptor-disciple** relationship as its central institution, and a **hospice** as its physical and social centre.

*Its Indian significance, given as mechanisms.*

The **hospice** provided food and shelter and was open to all comers regardless of religion or status, which made it socially significant well beyond its religious function and gave the orders a following among people who were not their disciples.

The emphasis on **inner experience and on love** of the divine rather than on legal observance created **common ground with devotional Hinduism**, and the two traditions' vocabularies of longing and union are recognisably parallel.

The use of **local languages and of music** in devotional practice made the tradition locally rooted rather than an import, and produced a substantial body of vernacular devotional literature.

*The orders' differing attitudes to the state*, which is an examinable distinction: some accepted royal patronage, land grants and offices, and were correspondingly connected to the court; others refused both on principle, holding that association with rulers compromised the spiritual life. The distinction shaped each order's relationship with rulers, its geographical spread and its social base.

**Assessment**: the philosophical and the devotional developments of the period converge on the same movement — from ritual and knowledge toward **devotion as the primary religious relationship** — and Sufism's Indian character was shaped by an environment in which that movement was already under way, which is why the two traditions interacted as much as they did without either being absorbed by the other.

Question 4

Trace the development of the bhakti movement from its Tamil origins and assess its social significance.

Accepted Answer

**The Tamil origins**, which is where any account must begin because it is the earliest fully developed bhakti tradition.

The **Nayanars** devoted to Shiva and the **Alvars** devoted to Vishnu, from about the sixth century, composed hymns in **Tamil** which were later compiled into canons and incorporated into **temple liturgy** — an institutional step that gave the movement permanence.

*Its 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 **wide 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 frequently passed over and which contributed materially to their decline in the region.

**The northward spread and the later movements**, best organised **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, their festivals and their eventual institutional consolidation into sects with property and lineages of teachers.

**The nirguna traditions**, devoted to a **formless absolute**, rejecting image worship, ritual, pilgrimage and the authority of both brahmana and mullah, characteristically composed in **spoken languages** by figures from artisanal and subordinated groups. This strand carries the movement's most explicit critique of **birth-based hierarchy**, and its rhetoric is genuinely radical.

**The Sikh tradition**, founded in this period, distinguished from the other movements by its **institutional development** — a succession of gurus, a scripture compiled in the following century incorporating compositions from devotional figures of several backgrounds, a community kitchen, and a congregation — which is why it survived as a distinct tradition where movements that did not institutionalise were absorbed.

**Regional developments** in Maharashtra, Bengal, Assam, Odisha, Gujarat and the south, each with its own literature, its own social composition and its own relationship with the local political order.

**Sufism's parallel and interaction**: the hospices open to all, the emphasis on love and inner experience, the use of local languages and music, and the recognisably parallel vocabulary of longing and union — with the caution that parallel development and mutual awareness are not the same as syncretic fusion, and the evidence supports the first two more strongly than the third.

**The assessment, which is the question's substance.**

**What the movements did achieve, and it was considerable.**

They **created religious space outside brahmanical mediation** — a direct relationship between devotee and deity requiring neither priest nor Sanskrit nor ritual competence.

They used **spoken languages**, and in doing so produced the **founding literatures of the modern Indian regional languages**. This is the movement's largest and most durable consequence, and it is a cultural transformation of the first order: the literary standing of Hindi, Bengali, Marathi, Punjabi, Gujarati, Assamese, Odia, Kannada and Telugu rests substantially on devotional composition.

They **admitted participants from subordinated groups and women** as composers and as authoritative voices, whose compositions were preserved and transmitted — which is a genuine and traceable change in who could speak with religious authority.

They generated **new forms of religious community** organised around a teacher and a practice rather than around birth.

**What they did not achieve, which must be stated as plainly.**

They **did not dismantle the caste order**. The communities formed around them frequently **reproduced social distinctions** internally; several traditions were **absorbed into orthodox institutional forms** within a generation or two, acquiring temples, property, hereditary leadership and the social conservatism that accompanies them; and the radical critique of birth was in most cases a critique of birth's **religious** relevance rather than a programme for altering social arrangements.

The evidence for **durable social change** attributable to the movements is much weaker than the evidence for religious and literary change, and the frequent claim that bhakti was a social reform movement reads a later category backward into it.

**The defensible position**: the bhakti movements' **cultural and linguistic consequences were transformative** and their **social consequences were limited** — and the reason is structural rather than a failure of nerve. A movement offering religious access without institutional power cannot redistribute social position, and the moment it acquires institutional power it acquires the interests that go with it. That is why the traditions with the strongest social critique are those that remained least institutionalised, and why they left the least organisational trace.

Question 5

Trace the development of temple architecture in India and distinguish its regional styles.

Accepted Answer

**The development**, which should be given as a movement driven by the temple's growth as an **institution** rather than as a sequence of styles.

**The beginning**: the small **flat-roofed shrine** of the Gupta period, consisting of a sanctum with a porch, on a plinth — a building large enough to house an image and a priest.

**The elaboration**: the addition of a **superstructure** over the sanctum; then of a hall for worshippers; then of further halls, subsidiary shrines, a circumambulatory passage, a tank, an enclosure wall and gateways.

**The driver of the elaboration** is the point an analytical answer makes: the temple became an **economic and social institution** — recipient of land grants, employer of staff, holder of deposits, lender, centre of festivals and of a settlement — and the architectural growth follows the institutional growth. A building that houses an image needs a sanctum; a building that is a landholding corporation with a resident staff, a treasury, a festival calendar and a dependent town needs everything else.

**The regional styles.**

**Nagara**, of the north. The defining feature is the **curvilinear shikhara** over the sanctum, rising in a continuous curve to a crowning member. The temple stands on a plinth, has no enclosure wall in the earlier phase, and is organised on a single axis with sanctum, vestibule and hall. Its **regional variants** are substantial: the Odishan group with its distinctive vertical shikhara and separate hall; the central Indian group with clustered subsidiary spires massing around the principal one; and the western group with its own decorative and structural conventions.

**Dravida**, of the south. The defining feature is the **storeyed pyramidal vimana** over the sanctum, rising in receding tiers, each articulated with miniature shrine forms, and capped by a domed finial. The temple stands within a **walled enclosure**, and from the later period the **gateway towers** on the enclosure walls grow to exceed the vimana itself in height — which is a change with an institutional explanation, since it reflects the temple's expansion into a complex with a town around it, where the gateway is what the approaching worshipper sees. Pillared halls, corridors and tanks are added within successive enclosures.

**Vesara**, of the Deccan, combining elements of both — the plan and enclosure conventions of one with the superstructure treatment of the other, in a series of regional developments with their own distinctive star-shaped plans and highly worked surfaces in the later phase.

**Rock-cut architecture** as the parallel tradition: from the earlier Buddhist chaitya and vihara, through the great excavated complexes of the western Deccan, to the monolithic temples cut from the living rock — which are architecturally structural temples produced by subtraction rather than construction, and are the tradition's technical extreme.

**Sculpture** as an integral part rather than an addition: the temple's exterior surfaces carry an iconographic programme, and the regional sculptural schools develop with the architectural styles.

**Assessment**: the useful frame for any question here is **plan, superstructure, enclosure and regional attribution**, applied consistently. And the development's driver should be named: the temple's architectural history is the visible record of its **institutional history**, which is why the largest complexes are found where the temple was economically most powerful.

Question 6

Comment on the iqta system. (150 words)

Accepted Answer

**What it was**: an assignment of the **revenue of a defined territory** to an officer, in return for which the assignee maintained a specified body of troops and remitted any surplus over his sanctioned entitlement to the treasury.

**What it was not**, and the distinction carries the answer: it was **not a grant of land in ownership**, and it was **not hereditary**. The assignee acquired a claim on revenue, not a proprietary right in the soil, and the cultivators' and intermediaries' own rights were unaffected by the transfer.

**Its design logic**: the state had to pay a large military establishment in an economy where it could not reliably collect revenue centrally and then disburse cash across the empire. The iqta solved this by making the assignee **both the collector and the recipient**, which eliminated the transmission problem entirely.

**Its risk**: an assignee entrenched in a territory could convert the assignment into an **independent power base**, which is the standing danger of any revenue-assignment system.

**The safeguard**: **transferability**. Frequent reassignment prevented entrenchment, and the maintenance of accounts and periodic scrutiny of the assignee's obligations reinforced it. The later relaxation of transferability, and the making of assignments hereditary under Firuz Tughluq, is therefore treated as a symptom of weakening central authority rather than as an administrative detail.

**Its cost**, which recurs in the Mughal jagir: an assignee expecting transfer has **no interest in the territory's long-term productivity** and every incentive to extract the maximum during his tenure.

Question 7

Examine Alauddin Khalji's administrative and economic measures.

Accepted Answer

**The framing that makes the measures intelligible**, and without which an answer is a list. The measures follow from a **single chain**: repeated **Mongol invasions** required a very large standing army; a large army required either high pay or low prices; the treasury could not sustain high pay; therefore prices had to be controlled and revenue maximised. Stating this connection is what distinguishes an analytical answer, and every measure below should be referred back to it.

**The agrarian measures.**

Revenue assessed at a **high proportion of produce** and taken **directly from the cultivator** where possible, bypassing the intermediary rural elites who had previously collected it and retained a share.

**Measurement** of cultivated area as the basis of assessment, replacing estimation, which raised the assessed area and reduced the scope for concealment.

**Curtailment of the privileges of the rural elite** — the abolition of their customary exactions and of their exemption from revenue on their own holdings, which is the measure that made them, in the chronicler's account, unable to sustain their former position.

Additional levies on grazing and dwellings.

**The purpose was double**: to maximise the state's share, and to **weaken the rural groups capable of resisting** or of withholding. The second is a political objective pursued through a fiscal instrument, and it should be named.

**The market control measures**, the best-known and the most examined.

**Prices fixed** for grain, cloth, horses, cattle, slaves and other commodities, at levels stated in the sources.

**Separate markets** established for different classes of goods — grain, manufactured goods, horses and slaves, general merchandise — each under a designated officer.

**Grain procured and stored** by the state from the revenue collected in kind, and released in periods of scarcity, which is the mechanism that made the fixed grain price sustainable rather than merely declared.

**Merchants registered** and required to bring their stocks to the designated markets, with transport arrangements organised for grain.

**Enforcement** through officers, inspectors and reporting, with severe penalties for short weight and for evasion, and with the ruler's own test purchases described in the sources.

**The purpose**: to enable a soldier on **fixed low pay** to maintain himself, his family and his horse and equipment. The **horse price control** is directly military in intent — a cavalry army's principal cost is horses — and noting this is the clearest demonstration that the system was designed around the army.

**The military measures** that complete the design: an enlarged **standing army paid in cash** rather than by assignment, which is a significant departure from the iqta principle and gives the ruler direct control; **branding of horses**, preventing the substitution of inferior animals at muster; and a **descriptive roll** of soldiers, preventing the presentation of hired substitutes. Both anti-fraud devices are administrative innovations of real significance and reappear in the Mughal system.

**Whether it worked.** The contemporary accounts report that **prices held** during the reign, which is the strongest evidence available and comes from a source not otherwise friendly to the ruler. They also indicate that the system depended on **continuous coercive enforcement** and that it **did not outlast the reign**, being abandoned by his successor.

**The assessment worth writing.** The measures should be evaluated against the objective they actually had. As **economic policy** they were unsustainable: administered prices maintained by coercion, with the cultivator bearing the cost through a high revenue demand and a compelled sale, and with no mechanism for adjusting to changed conditions. As a **military expedient** they succeeded — the army was maintained, the Mongol invasions were repelled, and the empire reached its greatest extent under the same ruler.

**The wider significance**: the agrarian measures established **measurement-based assessment and direct dealing with the cultivator** as instruments available to the Indian state, both of which recur in the Mughal revenue system; and the contest between the state and the intermediary rural elite over the distribution of the surplus, which these measures make explicit, is the structural conflict running through medieval Indian agrarian history.

Question 8

Assess the projects of Muhammad bin Tughluq and the measures of Firuz Tughluq.

Accepted Answer

**The approach to Muhammad bin Tughluq**: identify **what each project was intended to achieve and why it failed**, rather than cataloguing eccentricity. Note also that the principal contemporary chronicler is **hostile** to him and that his account shapes the later tradition, so the eccentricity itself is partly a source effect.

**The transfer of the capital** to a Deccan site. *The objective*: a more **central position** for an empire now extending far south, and an administrative centre secured against the Mongol-threatened north-west. *Why it failed*: the **logistics of moving an administrative and military establishment** over that distance, the hardship of the move itself, and the loss of the north's resources, connections and defensive attention. It was reversed, and the double movement compounded the cost.

**The token currency** — issuing coins of base metal at the value of silver. *The objective*: a response to a **shortage of silver**, with precedents in other economies of the period, and a means of expanding the money supply for an expanding state. *Why it failed*: the state **could not control counterfeiting**, because the coins were not technically difficult to imitate and the administration lacked the means to detect forgeries. The currency was withdrawn and the treasury bore the cost of redeeming what had been issued, including the forgeries.

**The taxation increase in the doab**. *The objective*: raising revenue from the empire's **most productive region**. *Why it failed*: it coincided with **famine**, producing flight from the land and revolt. Relief measures followed — agricultural loans and a department to promote cultivation — but the damage to the region and to the state's standing was done.

**The projected expeditions**: the Khurasan expedition abandoned after an army had been raised and paid, and the Qarachil expedition a costly failure in the hills.

**The assessment**: the projects were **rationally motivated and administratively over-ambitious** — each attempted an outcome that the available administrative, fiscal and communications capacity could not deliver, and each was undertaken at full scale without trial. That is a specific and diagnosable failure, and it is more useful than the tradition of eccentricity.

**Firuz Tughluq's measures.**

**Public works**: extensive **irrigation canals**, some of whose alignments were used long afterwards, and which extended cultivation in the region they served; the founding of towns; and the repair of existing works and monuments.

**Welfare and administrative measures**: a department for charitable payment; an employment bureau; and provision for the marriage of poor Muslim women's daughters.

**Agrarian measures**: a **fixed and moderate revenue demand**, and the abolition of a number of cesses declared to be unauthorised — the opposite of Alauddin's approach and with the opposite effect on the rural elite.

**Conciliation of the nobility and the religious classes**: **hereditary assignments** for nobles and for soldiers, grants to religious figures and institutions, and the restoration of privileges his predecessors had curtailed.

**The consequence, which is the analytical point.** The concessions **purchased stability during the reign** — it was long and comparatively peaceful — and they **weakened the central authority's control over resources and appointments**. Making assignments hereditary destroyed the transferability that was the iqta system's essential safeguard; entrenching the nobility removed the ruler's capacity to reallocate; and the moderate demand reduced the revenue available to the centre while strengthening the intermediaries.

**The reign's peace and the subsequent collapse therefore have the same cause**, and stating that connection is the answer's strongest move. The succession disputes after Firuz, the invasion of Timur, and the establishment of independent regional sultanates followed a period in which the state had systematically surrendered the instruments that would have allowed it to respond.

**The comparison** that the pairing invites: Muhammad bin Tughluq attempted to **exceed** the state's administrative capacity and failed; Firuz **accommodated** the interests the state existed to control and succeeded in the short run at the cost of the state's future capacity. Neither found the sustainable middle, which is the century's political problem in a sentence.

Question 9

Examine the economy and technology of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.

Accepted Answer

**The agrarian structure.** The essential distinction is between the **cultivator**, the **village headman and rural elite** holding superior rights and a customary share of the produce, and the **state's assignee** holding the revenue claim. Agrarian policy in this period is legible as a contest over the **distribution of the surplus between the state and the intermediary** — which is why Alauddin's measures targeted the rural elite and Firuz's benefited them, and why an answer should present the two as opposite moves in a single structural conflict.

**The agrarian economy**: extension of cultivation; the revenue demand as the state's principal resource; assessment by **measurement, sharing or estimation** according to region and period; and — the change with the widest consequences — the **monetisation of revenue collection**, which required the cultivator to **sell produce in the market** in order to pay in cash, and thereby linked the village to a commercial network whether or not its inhabitants sought that link.

**The urban economy.** Substantial urban growth, with Delhi becoming one of the largest cities of the contemporary world. **The mechanism** should be named rather than assumed: a large **military and administrative establishment paid in cash** concentrated in the capital and the provincial centres generated demand that drew craft production and provisioning to those centres, so the urban expansion is a consequence of the fiscal system's design.

**Craft production** in textiles, metalwork, building materials and luxury goods; **construction** on a large scale, which is itself a major employer; and long-distance **trade**, overland toward Central and West Asia and maritime through the western and eastern ports.

**Technology**, which is the unit's distinctive content and which must be presented as **economically consequential** rather than as a list of curiosities.

**The spinning wheel**, whose diffusion greatly increased yarn output per worker and therefore the volume of textile production — the single most important technical change for the economy, because textiles were the principal manufacture.

**The treadle loom**, freeing the weaver's hands and raising output.

**Paper**, which transformed **record-keeping and administration**: a revenue system based on measurement, assessment and account requires a cheap writing material, and the growth of documented administration in this period is connected to it.

**The Persian wheel** for lifting irrigation water, whose gearing allowed continuous animal-powered lifting from deeper wells and therefore extended irrigated cultivation where surface water was unavailable.

**The true arch and the dome** in building, which changed what could be built and how quickly, and which is why the period's architecture is structurally distinct from what preceded it.

**Improvements in metallurgy, glass and paper manufacture**, and the diffusion of the **screw** and other mechanical devices.

**The examinable argument**: these are not curiosities but changes affecting **output, administration and construction**, and the case that the period saw significant technological change rests on them. The counter-consideration worth acknowledging is that diffusion was uneven and that some of these techniques were known earlier in some regions, so the period's contribution is substantially one of **wider adoption** rather than invention.

**The social and cultural correlates**: the establishment of the major **Sufi orders** with hospices in Delhi and the provinces; the northward spread of **devotional religion**; and the **Indo-Persian** tradition, with Persian as the language of administration, court and historical writing, producing the chronicles that are our principal narrative sources — court-connected, written for patrons, and requiring the same source criticism as any partisan document.

**Assessment**: the period's economy was shaped by a **cash-demanding state with a large concentrated establishment**, which monetised the countryside and urbanised the political centres; and its technological changes, whatever their origin, were adopted widely enough in this period to raise output in the sectors that mattered most.

Question 10

Examine the polity, economy and culture of the Vijayanagara empire.

Accepted Answer

**Foundation and context.** Vijayanagara and the **Bahmani** kingdom were both founded in the Deccan in the mid-fourteenth century, in the context of the Delhi Sultanate's southern expansion and its subsequent inability to hold the region. Their long rivalry over the intervening territory and the resources of the **Raichur doab** — a fertile tract between two rivers — structures Deccan politics for two centuries and is the reason both states maintained very large military establishments.

**Polity and administration.**

A king with an elaborate court and an ideology of universal sovereignty, with the ruler presented in the inscriptions as the protector of the established order.

**Provincial governors** over large divisions, and beneath them the **nayaka** system — the assignment of territory to military commanders in return for the maintenance of a specified body of troops and the remittance of a portion of the revenue. **The comparison** with the iqta and the jagir is direct and worth making: it is the same solution to the same problem — paying a military establishment from territorial revenue — with the same risk, that the assignee becomes entrenched. In the Vijayanagara case the risk materialised: the nayakas became increasingly autonomous, and after the empire's defeat several established independent principalities that outlasted it.

**Local institutions** continuing beneath the imperial layer, with village and locality assemblies of the kind documented for the Chola period, though the evidence indicates their autonomy declining relative to that period.

**Military organisation**: very large forces including infantry, cavalry and elephants; heavy dependence on **imported horses**, since the peninsula could not breed cavalry mounts, which made control of the western ports through which horses arrived a strategic objective and connects military capacity directly to maritime trade.

**The economy.**

An extensive **agrarian base** with substantial irrigation works — tanks, channels and dams — some of them state-built, which is documented in inscriptions and visible archaeologically around the capital.

**Trade**: control of ports on both coasts; the horse trade as the most strategically important import; textiles, spices and iron as exports; and an active internal commerce with markets and merchant organisations.

**Revenue**: a land tax as the principal resource, with a wide range of additional levies, and with revenue farming in some periods.

**The foreign travellers' accounts**, which are exceptionally important for this state and should be named as a source type: several visitors from Persia and from Europe described the capital's size, its markets, its irrigation works, its court ceremonial and its military reviews. **How to use them**: they are outsiders' impressions, frequently by men attached to embassies or to trade, prone to admiring exaggeration and to misunderstanding institutions observed briefly — and they are also our most vivid evidence, and they corroborate one another and the archaeology on the capital's scale.

**Society and culture.**

A society with the varna order established and with an active process of incorporation of local and forest groups; substantial evidence of women's participation in court life, in literature and in temple patronage.

**Temple architecture** in its late southern form, with the enclosure walls and monumental gateway towers dominating the complex, extensive **pillared halls** with sculpted composite piers, and the temple functioning as a landholding and redistributive institution as in the Chola period.

**Literature** in **Sanskrit, Telugu, Kannada and Tamil**, with royal patronage extended to all four — which is significant evidence that court patronage in the period was not confined to a single classical language and that the regional literatures were already established as objects of prestige.

**The end**: defeat by a **coalition of Deccan sultanates** in the later sixteenth century, after which the capital was abandoned and never reoccupied — which is why the site's archaeology is exceptionally informative, since it was not built over.

**Assessment**: Vijayanagara is best understood as a **military-fiscal state** organised around the maintenance of very large forces from territorial assignment, with the same structural vulnerability as the northern assignment systems, and with a cultural policy of patronage across languages and traditions that is one of its most distinctive features.

Question 11

Examine the mansab, jagir and revenue systems established under Akbar.

Accepted Answer

The three systems are one design and should be presented as connected: the **mansab** grades the service, the **jagir** pays it, and the **revenue system** supplies what the jagir assigns.

**The mansab system.**

*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.

*Why the dual number matters*: it separates the officer's **own standing** from his **military obligation**, which is what allows civil and military officers, and officers with very different functions, to be graded on a **single scale**. That is the system's essential innovation, and it is why it could integrate a nobility of extremely diverse origin — Turani, Irani, Afghan, Indian Muslim, Rajput, and later Maratha and Deccani — into one hierarchy.

*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** of troopers, both anti-fraud devices inherited from the Sultanate; and the system covered the entire imperial service.

*Its political effect*: a nobility whose standing depended wholly on imperial favour, which is the strongest element in the case for calling the Mughal state centralised.

**The jagir system.**

*What it was*: most mansabdars were paid not in cash but by **assignment of the revenue** of a territory — a **jagir** — calculated to yield enough for the officer's salary and his contingent's cost.

*The essential features*, which must be stated exactly: 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 and the Vijayanagara nayaka assignment, and the same danger it was guarding against.

*Its cost, which becomes the empire's structural problem*: an assignee expecting transfer has **no interest in the territory's long-term productivity** and every incentive to extract the maximum during his tenure. The safeguard against political entrenchment is therefore purchased at the price of predatory administration, and there was no way to have one without the other.

*The exception*: **watan jagirs**, held by Rajput and other chiefs over their own home territories, were **hereditary and not transferable** — which is precisely what made the Rajput settlement acceptable to them, and which shows the system's designers understood exactly what transferability cost.

**The revenue system.**

*The method*: assessment based on **measurement** of the cultivated area, using a standardised measure; **classification** of land by continuity of cultivation, distinguishing land cropped every year from land periodically fallow and from land long uncultivated; and rates fixed by reference to **average produce and average prices over a period of years**, expressed in **cash** and compiled into schedules for each locality.

*Its significance*: a **cash demand fixed in advance** gave predictability to both the state and the cultivator, since neither depended on the current year's price; and because the demand was in cash, the cultivator had to **sell in the market**, which deepened monetisation and tied the agrarian economy to commerce.

*Its limits*: measurement-based assessment was applied in the core provinces and not uniformly across the empire, with other methods used elsewhere — which is one of the specific grounds for the layered rather than uniform reading of the state.

**The zamindars**, without whom the system cannot be described. They were **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 did not displace them**: it **incorporated** them, using them to collect revenue, recognising their rights, and attempting to limit their autonomy. This is the point at which the imperial system meets a durable structure of local rights it did not create, and it is the foundation of the layered reading of the state.

**The Rajput policy** completes the design: matrimonial alliances; the admission of Rajput rulers into the **mansabdari at high ranks**; their home territories held as **watan jagirs**; and their employment as 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 — a genuine political innovation and a substantial contribution to the empire's stability, and one whose disturbance in the following century had correspondingly serious consequences.

**Assessment**: the three systems together constitute the most **systematically designed administrative apparatus in Indian history to that point**, and each of its central devices — the graded rank, the transferable assignment, the cash demand on measured land — carries a cost that becomes visible under strain. The jagir's transferability produced short-horizon extraction; the mansab's dependence on imperial favour meant the nobility's loyalty had to be continuously purchased with assignments; and when the nobility grew faster than the assignable revenue, both costs came due at once.

Question 12

Examine Akbar's religious and social policy and the principle of sulh-i-kul.

Accepted Answer

**The measures**, given in sequence because the sequence shows a developing position rather than a single decision.

**Abolition of the pilgrimage tax** on non-Muslims, and subsequently of the **jizya**, the poll tax on non-Muslims — the two fiscal marks of differentiated status, whose removal is the most concrete of the measures.

**Participation of non-Muslims in the higher administration** in significant numbers, with Rajput and other Hindu officers holding high mansabs and major commands, and with a Hindu revenue minister presiding over the assessment system.

**The house of worship**, established for religious discussion, initially among Muslim divines and subsequently opened to representatives of other traditions — Hindu, Jaina, Zoroastrian, Christian — with the debates recorded, hostilely, by an orthodox contemporary.

**The decree of the late 1570s**, concerning the emperor's authority to determine between conflicting juristic opinions in the interest of the realm, which asserted a **sovereign competence in disputed religious questions**. Its significance is constitutional rather than theological: it places the ruler above the competing claims of religious authorities rather than making him a religious authority.

**The din-i-ilahi**, which must be described accurately because it is routinely misrepresented: a **small personal order of disciples** bound to the emperor by an oath of devotion, numbering a few dozen, with no scripture, no clergy, no congregation and no attempt at propagation. It was not a religion and it did not survive him, and describing it as a new faith Akbar founded is an error.

**Social measures**: restrictions on child marriage and on the compulsion of widows, permission for widow remarriage, and disapproval of self-immolation by widows where it was not voluntary — measures of limited practical reach whose significance is that a Mughal emperor considered such matters within the state's competence.

**Sulh-i-kul**, and how to assess it.

*What it means*: universal peace or absolute tolerance — the principle that the sovereign stands **above sectarian claims** and rules all subjects on the same footing, and that the state has no interest in adjudicating between religions.

*How to present it*: as a **political and ideological principle for ruling a religiously plural empire** as much as a personal conviction. This is not a cynical reading; it is the reading the evidence best supports and it is the more interesting claim.

*Its practical content*: the removal of **discriminatory levies**; the opening of **office irrespective of religion**; the assertion of a sovereignty standing above religious authorities; and patronage extended across traditions, including the **translation bureau** rendering Sanskrit works into Persian, which is the intellectual expression of the same policy.

*The argument for treating it as statecraft*: the empire's Muslim population was a small minority, its most formidable potential opponents were Rajput states, and the alternative policy — differentiated status enforced fiscally — had demonstrably produced resistance. A sovereignty claiming to stand above the religious division was the arrangement most likely to secure the cooperation of the groups the empire needed, and the **stability of Akbar's reign and the loyalty of the Rajput nobility** are the strongest evidence that it worked.

*The counter-consideration to acknowledge*: the policy attracted orthodox hostility during his reign and afterwards, and its partial reversal in the following century indicates that it depended on the ruler rather than being institutionalised — which is a real limitation and connects directly to the later crisis.

**Court patronage**, as the cultural expression of the same outlook: the **atelier** producing manuscript illustration in a style synthesising Persian, indigenous and European elements; the translation bureau; **architecture** combining Persian and Indian forms in the capital complex, using indigenous trabeate construction and local decorative traditions alongside imported ones; music; and an interest in mechanical and military technology.

**Assessment**: Akbar's religious policy is best understood as the construction of an **imperial ideology adequate to a plural empire**, in which sovereignty derives from the ruler's position above the communities rather than from any one of them. Its achievement was the integration of the empire's most important non-Muslim elites into the imperial system; its weakness was that it rested on the emperor's person and was therefore reversible, which the following century demonstrated.

Question 13

Examine the nature of the Mughal state and the causes of the crisis of the late seventeenth century.

Accepted Answer

**Framing.** The two halves 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 addressing the second.

**The centralised reading.** 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.

**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, preventing 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, tributary rulers — over most of its territory, so administration was **layered rather than uniform**: the imperial layer collected from and negotiated with a durable structure of local rights 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 — a point the centralised reading cannot easily accommodate.

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, and worth naming as such.

**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. A 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 the period's 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 revenue heartland for a generation, and adding a large nobility to be provided for without adding proportionate revenue.

**Religious policy** was a real change and is an insufficient explanation. The **reimposition of jizya** and the temple measures are attested and represent a genuine departure. 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, much of the factional paralysis and several of the revolts 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 is a breach of Akbar's settlement; and the **Maratha movement is a state-building enterprise** with its own administration, revenue system based on measurement, standing army paid in cash, and the fiscal claims of chauth and sardeshmukhi levied on territories outside its direct control — 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 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.

Question 14

Examine the economy and society of India in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Accepted Answer

**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 into new areas; and irrigation by wells, tanks and canals with regional variation. The **cash revenue demand** compelled market sale and therefore encouraged cash cropping where conditions allowed, which is the link between the fiscal system and the crop pattern.

**Craft production**: **textiles** as the dominant manufacture and the principal export, with regional specialisations in cotton and silk and with dyeing and printing techniques whose quality had no European equivalent; shipbuilding; metalwork; and building. **The organisation of production** was in **household units**, with merchant capital advancing money and raw material to weavers against delivery — a putting-out arrangement whose extent is examinable and disputed, since it indicates the degree to which merchant capital had penetrated production.

**Internal trade** along river and road routes, in grain, textiles, salt and other bulk goods, supported by a substantial merchant and transport apparatus and by the demand of a large urban and military population paid in cash.

**Maritime trade**: Indian merchants and shipping long established in the Indian Ocean, exporting **textiles** to Southeast Asia, West Asia and East Africa and importing spices, horses and bullion.

**European penetration**: the **Portuguese** first, attempting to control the trade by **force** through the requirement that ships carry passes and through fortified enclaves; then the **Dutch and English companies**, which entered as traders, established factories, and increasingly participated in the **intra-Asian carrying trade** as well as in the export to Europe.

**The single most significant economic fact about the European trade** in this period: Europe had **little that India wanted**, so the trade was substantially settled in **bullion**, which flowed into India in large quantities. This is the reverse of the relationship that develops in the following century, and stating the contrast is what makes the point analytical.

**Indian mercantile classes**: substantial merchant communities with regional specialisations and long-distance networks; **banking and credit**, including the **hundi**, a bill of exchange permitting the transfer of funds across long distances without moving specie — evidence of a commercial infrastructure of real sophistication; insurance; and brokerage, with the broker as the essential intermediary between European factors and Indian producers.

**Transport and currency**: bullock caravans and river transport; and the **silver rupee** as the standard coin, with a weight standard maintained over a long period, together with copper and gold — a trimetallic currency serving transactions at very different scales, sustained by a monetised revenue system that circulated coin widely.

**Society.**

**The village community**: a settlement with its own artisans and servants remunerated by customary shares, **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 cash demand alone refutes it, since a village that must sell to pay is not self-sufficient.

**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 an officer's estate escheated to the crown at death. This is a significant economic fact: it channelled noble income into consumption and building rather than into productive investment, and it is one of the answers offered to the question why commercial wealth did not transform the economy.

**The zamindars** as the durable rural elite, hereditary where the nobility was not.

**Town dwellers**: merchants, artisans, service groups, and the large populations attached to the court and the military establishment.

**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 — holders of substantial revenue assignments and participants in trade**, which is the standing corrective to the prescriptive picture.

**Assessment**: the economy was **large, commercialised and monetised**, with a sophisticated credit system and a manufacturing sector that dominated world textile markets — and its surplus was concentrated in a nobility structurally prevented from accumulating it. Why that combination did not produce the transformations occurring contemporaneously elsewhere is one of the standing questions of Indian economic history, and it should be presented as open rather than answered.

Question 15

"The eighteenth century was a period of decline." Critically examine.

Accepted Answer

**Framing.** The proposition is the older orthodoxy and it is neither simply right nor simply wrong. The examination should establish what did collapse, what did not, and why a single verdict for the subcontinent is the wrong form of answer.

**What the decline reading asserts**: Mughal collapse; political fragmentation; endemic warfare and disorder; economic disruption; and a **vacuum** into which the English company moved almost by default.

**Where it derives from**: a narrative constructed substantially from the **imperial centre's perspective** — the Persian chronicles lamenting the empire's condition — and from the accounts of those who described the period **in order to justify what followed**, since a preceding anarchy is the standard justification for a conquest.

**What is genuinely true in it.**

The **imperial centre did collapse**, and the collapse was real and consequential. Its causes were structural: the **jagirdari crisis**, with nobles outgrowing assignable revenue; the **agrarian crisis** of over-extraction and resistance; the **wars of succession** after each reign; **factional politics** organised into groups whose competition paralysed the centre; the erosion of imperial control over **provincial governors**, who became hereditary; and the **invasions** of the eighteenth century, which removed the treasury, destroyed the capital's resources and demonstrated the empire's incapacity.

Warfare was real in the regions contested between expanding powers, and its costs to the populations concerned were real.

**What the realignment reading establishes.**

**The successor states were functioning polities, not fragments of a collapse.** **Hyderabad**, founded by a Mughal governor who established hereditary autonomy while maintaining the forms of allegiance. **Bengal**, similarly established, with a working revenue administration, a prosperous commercial economy and substantial trade with the European companies. **Awadh**, 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 direct state involvement in commerce. **The Punjab**, where a Sikh state emerged at the end of the century.

**They inherited and continued Mughal administrative practice** — assessment methods, record-keeping, the vocabulary of office — which is why they worked rather than improvised.

**Several regional economies expanded.** Commercial groups, **bankers and revenue farmers** prospered, financing states and trade; textile production for export continued and in places grew; and the banking houses of the period operated at a scale that made them indispensable to the states they served.

**Culture was vigorous**: the successor courts were active patrons, the **regional painting schools** reached their height partly through the dispersal of artists from the imperial atelier, and regional literary production continued strongly.

**The Maratha case**, which cuts both ways and should be used carefully. Maratha expansion under the Peshwas extended authority over a wide territory — but substantially through the collection of **chauth and sardeshmukhi**, which were **fiscal claims rather than administration**. That distinction is analytically crucial: it made Maratha power **extensive and shallow**, effective at extracting revenue and ineffective at governing, and it explains both the rapidity of the expansion and the growing autonomy of the great chiefs whose territories became independent principalities.

**The third battle of Panipat** in 1761 did not end Maratha power, which recovered within a decade. What it destroyed was the prospect of a **Maratha imperial settlement in the north**, removing 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.

**What the successor states shared as a weakness**, since the realignment reading must explain the outcome: **military capacity relative to a European-trained force**, and an **inability to combine**. Several of them adopted European-trained infantry and artillery, and did so too late and in competition with one another rather than in concert.

**The disagreement's basis**, which is the answer's methodological core. The two readings differ in **the level of analysis and the evidence used**: imperial chronicles and the centre's perspective on one side; **regional revenue records, commercial documents and local studies** on the other. They are not describing different centuries; they are describing different objects, and each is largely correct about its own.

**Assessment.** The proposition should be **rejected in its general form and accepted in a specific one**. The **imperial centre declined and collapsed** — that is established and important. The **consequences varied enormously by region**: some areas experienced sustained warfare and disruption, others commercial expansion and effective administration, and the same decade looks different in Bengal, in the Deccan and in the doab.

**A single verdict for the subcontinent is therefore the wrong form of answer**, and the strongest position available is to say so with the regional evidence to support it. What the century actually represents is a **redistribution of political and economic power from the imperial centre to the regions** — with the decisive consequence that the power which eventually succeeded to the whole was not one of the successor states but a trading company that had learned to operate among them.

Practice — Medieval India: Sultanate, Mughals & the Eighteenth Century

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