Paper, Performance, and the State: Social Change and Political Culture in Mughal India By Farhat Hasan

Abstract

‘The Collector of the Revenue should be a friend of the agriculturist. Zeal and truthfulness should be his rule of conduct. He should consider himself the representative of the lord paramount and establish himself where every one may have easy access to him without the intervention of a mediator’.1 ‘This Súbah [of Oudh] is divided into five Sarkárs and thirty-eight parganas. The measured lands are 1 kror, 1 lakh, 71,180 bíghas. Its revenue, 20 krors, 17 lakhs, 58,172 dáms (Rs. 5,043,954-4), of which 85 lakhs, 21,658 dáms (Rs. 213,041-7) are Suyúrghál. The provincial force consists of 7,640 Cavalry, 168,250 Infantry and 59 Elephants’.2 This is the Olympian view of the figure of the revenue collector, a state official, and of the province of Oudh in northern India in the Institutes of Akbar, compiled by Akbar’s vizier Abū al-Fażl. It provides a lofty image of the Mughal empire in which every person, every bīgha of land, and every dām of revenue are accounted for. Compare this with the account provided by a handbill (maḥżarnāma) roughly a hundred years later, ‘in which the petitioners, Ahmad, Muhammad Arif, and Ghiyasuddin’, accuse the family of a qāżī in the town Kantur and the adjoining villages in Oudh of illegally occupying lands that had been in their hereditary possession as a revenue-free grant, with the collusion of the revenue collector, one ‘Nur Muhammad’. ‘When the court sent troopers (sawārs) to settle the matter, the father of the qāzi, Muhammad Sharif, supported by one of his relatives, Taj Mahmud, and the aforesaid karōrī [revenue collector], raised a militia and attacked and harassed the imperial troops. […] The document ends by asking people who were aware of the incident to lend their signatures, and attest to the veracity of the allegations made by the petitioners’ (p. 107). This is a much more contested and ‘everyday’ view of the state, in which the revenue collector and the qāżī are not only making use of their local power to take possession over lands, but also resist the provincial imperial army with a militia of their own. But the handbill also suggests that while ‘the court was unsuccessful in checking the abuse of power by its officials such as this qāżī, local power-holders [like the petitioners] were not without resources of their own—their means of mobilization, protest, and opinion-making—to combat them, and to constrain the state within a shared, if still conflictual, framework of norms of rule’ (p. 107).