Mughal Administration, Mansabdari, Land Revenue and Economy

The Mughal theory of kingship

The Mughals saw the emperor as a figure above all religious and social groups. Abul Fazl, in the Akbarnama, described kingship as a divine light (farr-i-izadi) passed from God to the king, which made him the guardian of all his subjects irrespective of faith. This idea supported sulh-i-kul. The emperor was the source of all authority: he appointed nobles, commanded the army, was the highest court of appeal and owned, in theory, the right to revenue from all land.

Court rituals such as jharokha darshan (the emperor appearing at a balcony each morning), kornish and taslim (forms of salutation) and sijda (prostration, later dropped by Shah Jahan for Muslims) reinforced this status.

Central administration

Waqia-navis (news writers) and khufia-navis (secret writers) kept the emperor informed.

Provincial and local administration

Akbar divided the empire into subas (provinces) – 12 at first, rising to 15 by the end of his reign and about 20–21 under Aurangzeb.

• Subedar (sipahsalar) – governor; military and general administration.
• Diwan – revenue; reported directly to the central diwan, which created a check and balance against the subedar.
• Bakhshi, sadr, qazi, kotwal (city police and municipal head) and waqia-navis at the provincial level.

Below the suba:

• Sarkar (district) under the faujdar (law and order) and amalguzar (revenue);
• Pargana under the shiqdar (order), amil (revenue), qanungo (land records) and chaudhari;
• Village under the muqaddam (headman) and patwari (accountant).

The mansabdari system

Akbar's mansabdari system (introduced around 1573–1577) was the backbone of Mughal administration. Every officer – civil or military – held a mansab (rank). There was no separate civil and military service.

• Zat – the personal rank, fixing status and personal salary.
• Sawar – the number of cavalrymen the officer had to maintain.
• Ranks ranged from 10 to 10,000 (later raised for princes); mansabs above 5,000 were usually reserved for princes and very senior nobles.
• Mansabdars were classified by the ratio of zat to sawar into three classes.
• Payment was either in cash (naqdi) or by assignment of revenue from a territory, called a jagir. Jagirs were transferable (usually every few years) to prevent officers from building local power. Watan jagirs – hereditary lands of Rajput chiefs – were an exception.
• Dagh (branding) and chehra (descriptive roll) checked fraud; Akbar revived Alauddin's methods.
• Jahangir introduced the du-aspa sih-aspa rank (a portion of troopers had to maintain two or three horses), and Shah Jahan introduced the month scale (pay for fewer months to adjust for low jagir yields).

Strengths: a centralised, merit-based nobility from diverse backgrounds (Turanis, Iranis, Afghans, Rajputs, Indian Muslims, and later Marathas), loyal to the emperor.

Weaknesses (and the "jagirdari crisis"): by Aurangzeb's time, the number of mansabdars grew faster than the available jagirs (be-jagiri), especially after admitting many Deccani and Maratha nobles. Jagirdars, fearing transfer, squeezed peasants. Historians like Satish Chandra and Irfan Habib link this crisis to the empire's decline.

Land revenue: the zabt (dahsala) system

Akbar's finance minister Raja Todar Mal developed the zabt system, also called dahsala or bandobast arazi, introduced in 1580:

1. Land was measured using a bamboo jarib joined with iron rings (more accurate than the rope).
2. Land was classified by continuity of cultivation:

• Polaj – cultivated every year;
• Parauti – left fallow for a year or two;
• Chachar – fallow for three to four years;
• Banjar – uncultivated for five years or more.

1. The average produce of the previous ten years (dahsala) was calculated for each crop, and the state's share was fixed at one-third.
2. The share was converted into cash using average prices.

This was applied in the core provinces (Lahore to Allahabad, Malwa, Gujarat). Other methods continued elsewhere:

• Batai / ghallabakhshi – crop sharing (division of the harvest, at the threshing floor or by standing crop);
• Kankut – estimation of the crop;
• Nasaq – assessment based on past records (common in Bengal).

Zamindars – hereditary local rights-holders – collected revenue and received a share (nankar), forming a powerful intermediary class.

Mughal economy

• Agriculture: two harvests (kharif and rabi); cash crops (jins-i-kamil – "perfect crops") like cotton, sugarcane, indigo and opium were encouraged. New crops arrived from the Americas via the Portuguese: tobacco, maize, chillies, potatoes, pineapple, papaya, groundnut. Tobacco was briefly banned by Jahangir.
• Industry: India was the world's leading producer of cotton textiles (Bengal muslin, Gujarat calicoes, Coromandel chintz), silk, indigo, saltpetre and sugar. Royal karkhanas produced luxury goods.
• Trade: Surat was the chief port ("gate of Mecca"); Masulipatnam, Hooghly, Lahiri Bandar were others. Indian merchants like Virji Vora of Surat and Mulla Abdul Ghafur were among the richest in the world. Bills of exchange (hundi) and insurance (bima) were used. India had a large trade surplus, paid in silver from the Americas through European traders.
• Coinage: silver rupiya, gold mohur and copper dam, of high purity and uniform standard.
• Cities: Agra, Delhi, Lahore, Fatehpur Sikri, Dhaka, Patna, Ahmedabad and Surat were large cities; European travellers compared Agra and Delhi with London and Paris.

Foreign travellers' accounts: François Bernier (French physician, Shah Jahan and Aurangzeb – argued, wrongly, that there was no private property in land), Jean-Baptiste Tavernier (jeweller), Niccolao Manucci (Italian), Peter Mundy and Ralph Fitch.

Mains practice question

Q. "The mansabdari system was both the strength and the weakness of the Mughal empire." Analyse. (150 words)

Framework: features (zat/sawar, transferable jagirs, cash and jagir pay, dagh); strengths (centralised loyalty, diverse nobility, military readiness); weaknesses (financial strain, jagirdari crisis, exploitation of peasants, factionalism); conclusion linking to decline after 1707.

Quick self-test

1. What did the sawar rank indicate? *(Number of cavalrymen to be maintained)*
2. What is polaj land? *(Land cultivated every year)*
3. Who devised the zabt system? *(Raja Todar Mal)*
4. Which officer checked the subedar's financial power? *(Provincial diwan)*
5. Which French traveller claimed there was no private property in land? *(Bernier)*

Decline of the Mughal empire after 1707

The empire broke up within fifty years of Aurangzeb's death. Historians offer several explanations, often grouped into two schools:

• "Imperial-centred" view (Jadunath Sarkar and others): Aurangzeb's religious policy alienated Rajputs, Sikhs, Jats and Marathas; his long Deccan wars drained the treasury; and weak successors could not hold the empire.
• "Structural / regional" view (Satish Chandra, Irfan Habib, Muzaffar Alam, C.A. Bayly): the jagirdari crisis and pressure on peasants caused agrarian revolts; at the same time, provinces such as Bengal, Awadh and Hyderabad grew prosperous and their governors built regional states that kept Mughal forms. In this view, the eighteenth century was not just a time of collapse but of regional growth.

Other factors: wars of succession (no rule of primogeniture), factional fighting among Turani, Irani and Hindustani nobles (the Sayyid brothers were "king-makers" from 1713 to 1720), Nadir Shah's invasion (1739) – which took away the Peacock Throne and the Koh-i-Noor – and Ahmad Shah Abdali's raids, and finally the rise of the English East India Company.

Key terms glossary

• Mansab / mansabdar: rank / rank-holder.
• Jagir / jagirdar: revenue assignment / its holder.
• Khalisa: crown land.
• Zamindar, nankar: hereditary local rights-holder and his share.
• Jarib: measuring rod or chain.
• Karkhana: royal workshop.