Medieval India · Topic 12 of 15
Synthesis of Mughal-period administration details, economic and social life, and syncretic culture
The Basics
The Mughal army grew out of the mansabdari system. Every mansabdar holding a sawar rank had to maintain cavalry, horses, elephants and camels. He paid for this from his own salary. The emperor did not need a separate standing army.
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The Mughal nobility was the small, privileged group of mansabdars who ran the empire. It was drawn from several ethnic and religious streams, not one community.
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By Akbar's time the Mughal state had fixed revenue rates through the zabt system. But collecting revenue from thousands of villages needed people who knew the land and the peasants directly. This is where zamindars came in. A zamindar was a hereditary intermediary landholder. He held the right to collect land revenue from a group of villages, called his talluqa or zamindari. In return he kept a share of the revenue, which could go up to 25 percent in some areas.
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Delhi's Sultans, from the thirteenth century, paid their nobles not in cash but by assigning them iqtas, revenue-bearing territories. The noble holding an iqta was called a muqti or wali. He collected the land revenue. He kept part of it as his salary and for military expenses, and sent the rest to the centre. He also had to maintain law and order and lead troops when summoned. Iltutmish (c. 1210 to 1236) organised this system across his empire. He divided it into iqtas under officials called iqtadars. These iqtadars were, as a rule, transferable from one iqta to another. This stopped any noble from turning his iqta into a hereditary possession. Alongside iqta land stood khalisa land, territory kept under the Sultan's own direct control. Its revenue funded the royal household and court, not any noble.
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Below the mansabdars, jagirdars and the imperial treasury fighting over revenue sat the ordinary village, the real source of this wealth. It was organised much as it had been for centuries.
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By the early seventeenth century, India's population stood at roughly 125 million. Cultivable land was plentiful, so peasants could expand cultivation if they had the means.
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By the seventeenth century, India's economy was no longer just a mosaic of self-sufficient villages. Commercialised agriculture in Gujarat, the Coromandel coast and Bengal needed outlets, and a vast network of merchants, carriers and ports had grown up to move goods across the subcontinent and beyond.
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Goods produced across the empire still had to reach markets. Specialised trading groups handled this movement.
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Long before the Mughals, India's coasts already hummed with overseas trade. In the Sultanate period, Cambay in Gujarat was famous for textiles and gold and silver work. Its wealthy merchants, Hindu, Muslim and foreign, lived in fine stone houses amid orchards. On the Malabar coast, Calicut, ruled by the Zamorin, was already a leading pepper port of the Indian Ocean. Arab merchant colonies were well settled there.
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When Sher Shah Suri ruled north India between 1540 and 1545, he found a confusing mix of coins left over from Delhi Sultanate rulers. Iltutmish had issued silver tankas. Alauddin Khalji struck gold dinars after his southern conquests. Muhammad bin Tughlaq had experimented with token currency and issued several varieties of gold and silver coins. This made trade difficult because merchants never knew the true value of a coin.
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By the early sixteenth century, the Portuguese were already trading from Calicut, but they wanted fortified bases, not just trading rights. This desire, combined with the lure of India's spices and textiles, set the next two centuries of European activity in motion.
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By the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the Mughal empire was covered with a dense network of towns, far larger than most contemporary European cities. Travellers left vivid comparisons. Ralph Fitch said Agra and Fatehpur Sikri were bigger than London. Monserrate called Lahore second to none in Europe or Asia. Bernier, writing in the mid-seventeenth century, said Delhi was not less than Paris. He added that Agra was bigger than Delhi. Ahmedabad matched London and its suburbs in size. Patna held a population of about two lakh people, enormous for its time. Burhanpur and Ahmadnagar in the west, Multan in the northwest, and Patna, Rajmahal and Dacca in the east also grew into major towns.
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Paper-making had reached India from Central Asia by the Delhi Sultanate period. By Mughal times, paper was used widely for records and manuscripts. The Mughal administration needed many paper registers. These recorded land revenue and the mansab, the rank assigned to each noble, and the jagir, the land given to a noble to collect revenue instead of a salary. Paper-making stayed a craft industry centred in towns. It saw no major technical improvement under the Mughals.
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Akbar set up royal karkhanas, meaning workshops, for painting.
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Dhrupad is a devotional and spiritual style of classical music whose alap uses Sanskrit syllables drawn from mantras.
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By Akbar's time, the Mughal nobility dominated land revenue and high office. This nobility was mostly Turani, Irani, Rajput and Indian Muslim mansabdars. But a much larger empire needed far more hands than this small elite could supply. A wide, varied middle layer of society filled this gap.
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Mughal society inherited a layered status system from earlier periods. Women's lives depended on class, region and religion, not on one single rule.
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Slavery continued under the Mughals as both a domestic and a military practice.
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Akbar had tried to build bridges between religions through policy. He held debates in his Ibadat Khana, or house of worship, at Fatehpur Sikri, and declared Sulh-i-kul, meaning peace with all. Two generations later, his great-grandson Dara Shikoh carried this spirit forward through scholarship rather than statecraft.
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Abul Fazl was a trusted courtier of Akbar. He is traditionally counted among Akbar's nine noted courtiers, called Navaratnas. He wrote the Akbarnama as an official history of Akbar's reign. The Ain-i-Akbari is its third and final volume. It was completed around 1596-97, at Akbar's court based in Agra and Fatehpur Sikri.
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