The authority of muslim kings in mediaeval South Asia
p. 37-55
Résumés
The study of how acceptance of Muslim rulers may have become a value for the subject population has not yet caught up with the considerable advances made, since 1947, in the study of medieval South Asian political, economic and social history. It is contended here that while royal authority over Muslims was claimed in general by means of a religious symbolism, the claims made for each king were in a patrimonial idiom, and the responses to those claims were in terms of a personal loyalty. Any growth of authority over non-Muslims is attributed to homologies between mainstream Muslim and Hindu traditions of rulership and social order – to homologous notions of terrestrial life as a rite, of man’s moral personality, of social ‘ organicism ’ and hierarchy.
Comment l’acceptation des rois musulmans a-t-elle pu devenir une valeur pour les populations sujettes? Les recherches sur cette question n’ont pas suivi le rythme des travaux sur l’histoire politique, économique et sociale, qui ont fait des progrès considérables depuis 1947. La thèse avancée ici est la suivante. Quand il s’agissait de légitimer l’autorité des rois musulmans en général sur les musulmans, les arguments s’appuyaient sur des symboles religieux; mais les revendications faites pour chaque roi en particulier étaient formulées dans un idiome patrimonial, et les réponses à ces prétentions s’exprimaient en termes de loyauté personnelle. Le développement de l’autorité des rois musulmans sur les non-musulmans s’explique par des homologies entre les traditions dominantes de l’Islam et de l’Hindouisme en matière de pouvoir et d’ordre social; ces deux traditions avaient des notions homologues de la vie terrestre conçue comme un rite, de la personnalité morale de l’homme et de la société conçue comme un tout organique et hiérarchisé.
Texte intégral
1Following the attainment in 1947 by the peoples of continental South Asia of independence from the British and the creation of two successor states to British India, India and Pakistan, there has been a burgeoning of studies on medieval India under Muslim rulers, dramatic in comparison with what went before, when such studies were undertaken by a scattering of British members of the Indian Civil Service, Indian members of the Indian Educational Service, by a few Western missionaries of scholarly bent, and, in the period between the two world wars, by a handful of Indian college and university teachers who had made their way to Europe to gain doctorates. The partition of British India, the creation of a separate state with a Muslim majority was undoubtedly the fuse that set off a series of delayed and, in themselves, small-scale explosions in such studies. Pakistanis felt the need to explain themselves to themselves and to others, and to seek inspiration for the future of Pakistan, in terms of what those they saw as their ancestors had thought and done in South Asia before British rule. Muslims in the Republic of India felt a similar kind of compulsion. Non-Muslims in India, bewildered if not affronted by the fact of partition and by the apparent support for Muslim political separatism by many Indian Muslims, now fellow-citizens, turned to medieval Indian history for instruction. In the West, medieval indo-Muslim studies at the least were borne a little higher and a little further by the general ground-swell in the opportunities for academic employment after the second world war.
2The greatest advances, both in magnitude and in quality have occurred in the study of religion, both Muslim and non-Muslim, and of Mughal politico-economic institutions and Mughal economic history.1 The narrative political history of the Delhi sultanate has been ‘ fattened up ’ by the work of K. S. Lal;2 the work of Iqtidar Husain Siddiqui on the Afghans in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and on Sher Shah, has, properly, made the establishment of Mughal rule less remarkable but more intelligible.3 H. K. Sherwani’s work on sultanates in the Deccan and Tarafdar’s work on medieval Bengal, both rounded accounts of regimes in their cultural setting, contrast with some very old-fashioned narrative accounts of other so-called provincial sultanates.4 Even today however, with all the achievements of the historians at Aligarh and with all the increased understanding of movements of thought and feeling in medieval South Asia under Muslim rule, much of the behaviour of rulers seems to float above the situations and the society in which the rulers are acting and are located: the explanations that historians offer for that behaviour sound thin, sometimes anachronistic, sometimes speculative. Rulers appear to be walking in their sleep, dreaming of a world in which they alone act with effect – until they wake up to find themselves no longer rulers.
3There have been, of course, exceptions. Iqtidar Alam Khan’s reconstruction of Akbar’s early efforts to attract loyal henchmen, Athar Ali’s analysis of the background to the Mughal expedition to Balkh and Badakhshan in 1646, his and Robert C. Hallisey’s account of the conflict between Aurangzeb and the Rathors and Sisodias in the period 1679 to 1681, and M. N. Pearson’s explanation of the obstacles in the way of a ‘ deal ’ between the Maratha Shivaji and the Mughals in the sixteen-sixties spring to mind.5 The combined work of Satish Chandra, Fukuzawa, Kulkarni and John Richards on the Deccan and Maharashtra in the later seventeenth century have provided thick layers of understanding of the Mughal imbroglio in the Deccan in Aurangzeb’s time.6 Nothing quite as intellectually satisfying exists for the period of the Delhi sultanate, but K. A. Nizami’s work on the early period of the Delhi sultanate was a pioneer effort at an integration of ideology of both conquerors and conquered, social structure, religious institutions and political and military history.7
4Both before and after 1947 there have been many accounts of the doings of leaders, rulers and kings in medieval Muslim India. After 1947, more of the backcloth to their actions has indeed been painted in. But the means to understand, in terms intelligible and meaningful to the actors themselves, why, how and within what limits of action and boundaries of people and place, others, followers and subjects should conform their own behaviour to the requirements of leaders, rulers and kings, have only been suggested incidentally in such materials as (for example) Kunwar Muhammad Ashraf’s ‘ Life and Conditions of the People of Hindustan (1200-1550) ’, the writer’s contribution to Sources of Indian Tradition, Muhammad Habib’s and Afsar Salim Khan’s The Political Theory of the Delhi Sultanate, and Athar Abbas Rizvi’s Religious and Intellectual History of the Muslims in Akbar’s Reign. 8 Only in the last few years, beginning with the appearance of John F. Richard’s Kingship and Authority in South Asia (1978), has a handful of historians addressed themselves directly to questions of authority, claims for and recognitions of.9
5Even with the opening up, since 1947, of much new data for historians of medieval India (an opening-up most marked in India with the accessibility of archives in Rajasthan and Hyderabad, for example), obstacles to a critical understanding of royal authority remain considerable. Indeed they are considerable in all societies where only a minority is literate and the means of recording, storing and retrieving information are limited. Legends stamped on coins and inscriptions cut on stone may seem solid evidence for the terms in which an authoritative status is claimed for a ruler, but it is, nevertheless, an assumption that the ruler himself claims a status in those precise terms, if coins and inscriptions are the only evidence available. And of course, coins and inscriptions tell us nothing about how the users and readers responded to the claims made. Wide use of a coin indicates the coin’s authority rather than that of the person in whose name it is issued. Much ambiguity over the nature of the authoritative status being claimed may attend upon the wording of the claim. The fourteenth century Indo-Persian poet-panegyrist Amīr Khusrau claims for the Delhi Sultan (sulṭān) ‘Alā al-Dīn Khaljī that he ‘ agreeable to justice, raised the fallen ‘Abbāsid standards with the banner of his own caliphate ’.10 Is Abū’l Fadl attributing to Sultan ‘Alā al-Dīn the status of universal caliph formerly claimed by the now-ended line of ‘Abbāsid caliphs of Baghdad, or a status analogous to that of the former ‘Abbāsid caliphs but limited in scope to Hindustan, or is he merely eulogising ‘Alā al-Dīn as a powerful ruler? Furthermore, any contention that authoritative behaviour by medieval Indo-Muslim Sultans and others’ responses to that behaviour were in fact as depicted in the literary sources, must face and satisfactorily answer the suggestion that authors often present us with highly-stylised representations of events consciously or unconsciously tending to point morals consonant with the religious and ethical posture and tradition of the authors.11 In one instance, the danger of using a literary stereotype of a good ruler as evidence of popular reaction to a sequence of rulers was not recognised. In his Some Aspects of Religion and Politics in India during the Thirteenth Century, Khaliq Ahmad Nizami justified a statement ‘ the people in general had accepted the new government as it had guaranteed complete freedom in their peaceful pursuits ’12 by reference to a Sanskrit inscription of c. 1280-81 (that is two generations after a sultanate had been established at Delhi) proclaiming Sultan Balban (1266-87) as one ‘ throughout whose contented realm, under his great and good government, from Gaur to Ghazna from the Dravida country and Rameshwaram, everywhere the Earth bears the bounty of sylvan spring ’. The inscription adds later that Balban is ‘ he whose army hastens for its daily bath to the confluence of the Ganges and the ocean in the east and […] in the west to the confluence of the Indus and the sea, through whose ascendancy the courtesans glorying in their brilliant raiment come and go without fear ’. Professor Nizami renders this as, ‘ his armies “secure the peace and security enjoyed by all” In all this (or elsewhere in the lengthy inscription) there is no ‘ people ’, no consent, but courtesans showing off their finery and armies penetrating all over the subcontinent to areas that other evidence suggests Balban’s forces never penetrated.
6The need for further consideration of the problem of Muslim royal authority in medieval South Asia is suggested by the intellectual confusion surrounding the problem where it is touched on by several of the standard histories; by ignoring that there is a problem, many otherwise estimable accounts of Mughal India act as a further stimulus. Some of the confusion has arisen through attempts to use the language used to express one set of realities, the language of one conceptual system, as though it were suited to the expression of another set of realities which needed another conceptual system. Ishtiaq Husain Qureshi’s discussion of ‘ sovereignty ’ and of the relationship between the ruler and Islamic law in his The Administration of the Sultanate of Dehli,13 provides an illustration. Looking, reasonably enough, for the location of some final arbiter in disputes and conflicts between men, he writes, ‘ This Law, shar‘ (Muslim law) was the actual sovereign in Muslim lands: no one was above it, and all were ruled by it ’. Now, to fill out Qureshi’s earlier propositions that the shar‘ is held to be eternal and immutable and to be based on the Qur’ān which is believed by every Muslim to be the Word of God, the Muslim law consists of Divine Commandments expressed in the form of rules or general statements of actions to be performed or to be avoided. But God is not immediately available to say whether, in particular circumstances, those actions which He enjoins have been performed to His requirements, or ignored, as He forbids. Men have in fact to act for Him over the whole range of Divine Commandment. Qureshi himself accepts (p. 42) that law is powerless unless enforced (and, one might add, interpreted) by some agency which of necessity must be a human one. Those interpretative dicta, regarded as having supreme authority (that is, ability to convince of their correctitude, as well as ability to enforce by physical sanctions) are for all practical purposes ‘ sovereign ’ in terms of relationships between man and man. On the other hand any sovereignty or authority such men enjoy, exists not by reason of any personal force they may be able to exercise, but rather is grounded upon the law they interpret and apply. But Qureshi recognises that, in the Muslim society of the Delhi sultanate, those whose interpretations of the shar‘ were accepted as intellectually, morally, religiously compelling – ‘ authoritative ’ – and those who possessed the physical power to coerce, were not identical. After (erroneously) stating that the (Muslim) jurists theoretically recognised the right of the ruler to act as the supreme interpreter of the law, Qureshi states that it was ‘ not open ’ to the ruler to disregard the scholars’ ijmā‘ and that the ruler generally abided by the decisions of the majority (incidentally, a misleading manner of expressing a process of accretion of a preponderant opinion). The ruler, adds Qureshi, was not restricted from ‘ making all civil and political regulations for public welfare ’ (who policed the borderline?). Qureshi appears to have placed the proposition that Muslims have a supreme ‘ authoritative ’ method for settling all the important questions, including disputes between man and man, in life, namely the Islamic law, alongside the proposition that the ruler had the right (i.e. the ‘ authority ’) to make civil and political regulations for public welfare; but then Qureshi does not say who was to decide what was a civil and political matter, and how any decision was to be enforced, against the ruler if needs be. In the absence of a procedure for settling these frontier issues, the Muslim ruler has in effect unlimited arbitrary power: he is by definition, sovereign. But earlier, we were informed that Islamic law was sovereign. Qureshi however is groping towards the realization that supreme power must not be confused with supreme authority – that the absence of enforceable legal constraints on a ruler does not make all that he may do lawful, nor does it make it possible for him to do anything he wishes with impunity. Indeed on p. 49 of The Administration of the Sultanate of Delhi he states that no man can impose his will on a large population without considerable support and that the Delhi Sultan had to rely on the active support of his nobles and had to ensure the co-operation of Muslim theologians and lawyers who had influence with ‘ the Muslim populace ’. In effect, Qureshi is implying that the ruler’s power is related to and shaped by (in ways that have to be discovered from moment to moment) the values that he shares with others. Authority should not be confused with sovereignty.
7A lack of consensus among modern historians on how to describe the social entity over which Muslim rulers exercised power and claimed or enjoyed authority in medieval South Asia may (with the significant exception of Kunwar Muhammad Ashraf) have inhibited the study of Muslim royal authority in the sultanate (pre-Mughal) period. Kings rule kingdoms, but what in pre-Mughal India was a kingdom? Views seem to vary between a kingdom being a number of agitated ant-heaps knocked about by the same strong man, a number of different social orders with different codes of life, a network of personal loyalties, a region or territory with definable limits, even a political community associated in a common purpose. To illustrate, somewhat at random : Muhammad Habib in his introduction to K. A. Nizami’s Some Aspects of Religion and Politics in India in the Thirteenth Century, and Nizami himself in the body of the work, see the Delhi Sultan as exercising dominance over discrete social orders – that embraced by the dharmashāstra, and that acknowledging, for some purposes at least, Islamic law. But Habib acknowledges that the early Turkish rulers were unable to establish their power in the rural areas where there were Hindu chiefs with armies of their own and village headmen able to imprison the sultan of Delhi’s revenue agents, so that revenue could only be realised at the point of the sword.14 Although Muslims in general do not constitute the ‘ ruling class ’, they do organize a social life of their own quite different from that of their Hindu neighbours.15 In the cities however, it would seem that both Muslim and Hindu members of the unprivileged classes are able to share the amenities of urban life, ‘ the working classes joined hands with the new government and helped in building the new cities ’. In his The Muslim Community of the Indo-Pakistan Sub-Continent (610-1947), Ishtiaq Husain Qureshi sees an Indo-Muslim community, capable of supporting, as a community, Muslim rulers, as having come into existence by the fifteenth century.16 In his Administration of the Sultanate of Dehli, Qureshi depicts Hindus and Muslims as participating in one political system for they are all the object of the solicitude of the Delhi Sultan even though they belong to different cultural and legal systems.17 A. B. M. Habibullah sees no ties between the mass of the people and the ruling Muslim dynasty, but he does see the Turkish Sultans’ defence of the gates of ‘ India ’ against the Mongols as entitling the Turks of the Delhi sultanate to the gratitude of the Indian princes.18 K. M. Ashraf sees the Muslim invaders of India at the end of the twelfth century encountering ‘ the ancient Hindu order ’ and almost completely destroying it. ‘ Political and social divisions were levelled; caste was modified; religious tendencies took a new direction and force; and finally, the conception of India as a whole was made possible. ’19 Ashraf does not visualise a territorially-demarcated kingdom as subsisting throughout the period of the Delhi Sultans: the area they dominated varied from reign to reign.
8Perhaps attention might have been focussed earlier on questions of the authority of Muslim rulers in South Asia had there been greater agreement among historians about what a Muslim ruler did qua ruler. K. M. Ashraf saw the Delhi Sultans as irresistibly tempted to limit their functions to the conquest and consolidation of new territories, to the appropriation of wealth and to its distribution to royal favourites – with the Sultans all the while maintaining a magnificent style of life. Any dispensing of justice to subjects, any attempts to protect the peasantry were merely expedient for the successful collection of taxes; any show of respect for Islam and any patronage of its scholars merely served to enhance the prestige of the Sultan.20 While Nizami would agree that early Turkish Sultans of Delhi devoted themselves to the consolidation of their power and did not ‘ attempt any propagation or exposition of the political ideal of Islam ’ they did work for peace and justice as an ideal of their government.21 Qureshi depicts the Sultans of Delhi as supporting more positively the institutions of Islam, its jurists and judges, while extending just treatment, as a principle, to the non-Muslim population at large. Qureshi also considers the Delhi Sultans to have been active in maintaining public decency and in repressing heterodoxy among Muslims.22 All historians depict the Delhi Sultans as necessarily active in organising the maintenance of their power. Ashraf depicts this activity as patrimonial (he does not use the term), that is as nourishing sentiments of personal loyalty through acts of patronage. Nizami and Qureshi, with some qualifications, see the Sultan as managing a centralised bureaucracy, with provinces of broadly similar internal structure, with powers of the appointment and dismissal of officials at the Sultan’s will. Iqtidar Husain Siddiqui contends that several of the Afghan Sultans of Delhi, including Sher Shah, tried, with some success, to revive earlier bureaucratic styles of power.23 All writers do agree that the Sultans of Delhi did not attempt to prescribe standards of conduct and modes of behaviour for the population at large – custom, the differing religious traditions and codes of conduct prevailed. Indeed, Nizami states that since there was no change (in the thirteenth century) ‘ in the class of intermediaries between the State and the peasant, the Hindu peasant had no occasion to know about the change ’ in the composition of the governing class.24 In other words, the Hindu peasant may not have known there was a Sultan of Delhi.
9With the work of John Richards, Stephen Blake, Richard Barnett and the present writer in the last decade,25 the question of royal authority in the Mughal period has been more directly addressed than for the pre-Mughal period. But even in the magisterial accounts that are now available for the study of Mughal history and institutions, the question is often passed by in silence. Athar Ali in The Mughal Nobility under Aurangzeb writes that the Mughal emperor in theory enjoyed absolute powers but could only govern through his nobles and officers, and that therefore their opinions and interests played a part in the formulation of imperial policies.26 Athar Ali draws attention to the growth of factions within the Mughal nobility. It is evident that Athar Ali is in fact exploring relations of authority and obedience, but does not specifically analyse them. In his classic The Agrarian System of Mughal India, Irfan Habib regards the Mughal empire as successfully uniting a whole sub-continent under a centralized administration. He goes on, ‘ the unity and cohesion of the Mughal governing class found its practical expression in the absolute power of the Emperor27 But unless a human group generates and maintains itself, it surely has no cohesion and unity and if the power of the Emperor is absolute (and Habib in his next sentence states that ‘ the jāgīrdār as an individual member of the governing class had no rights or privileges apart from those received from the Emperor ’) ex hypothesi that power can affect or destroy that cohesion and unity. Throughout his work, Habib refers to some assertions of Mughal power that were not resisted and some that were. Clearly fear of the consequences of disobedience (on which Habib appears largely to rely for explanations of obedience) did not operate all the time. Was this because no unpleasant consequences were feared, or did some other consideration enter the situation? There are problems here. Then again, Tapan Raychaudhury in the first volume of the Cambridge Economic History of India describes the Mughal state as one that was created by and largely existed for acts of conquest. ‘ The empire, held together by force, needed a vast machinery of coercion and hence adequate resource to sustain it ’. ‘ The Mughal state was an insatiable Leviathan. ’28 Although Dr. Raychaudhury allows that the Mughals acknowledged some obligation to protect the peasantry and that they resorted to many experiments and compromises in order to maintain a viable machinery for the extraction and distribution of the agricultural surplus, the impression gained from his account is that while the Mughals may have enjoyed great power indeed, often reaching down to the individual cultivator in the countryside, as a great engine of exploitation the empire could hardly have enjoyed any authority. Yet, as we shall see, in the eighteenth century, those whose actions brought the Mughal Leviathan low sought the Mughal ruler’s certificate of appointment to Mughal office. Something more, it would seem, needs to be said.
10But whatever is said must be controlled, perhaps more tightly than in the past, by the evidence. For medieval India, much, perhaps most, of the evidence which is usable for the study of kingship displays kings’ public image rather than their personal and private thoughts, how others saw their rulers rather than how they saw themselves, what literate, educated men in some personal or institutional relationship with sulṯāns and pādshāhs thought should be the latters’ role in life, in society, indeed in the cosmos. The manner in which such persons depicted their rulers is highly structured and shaped by their education with all the baggage of presuppositions, expectations and language collected in the course of that education. So the literary evidence tends to offer assertions of authority made on behalf of, rather than by, rulers themselves, although Bābur’s and Jahāngīr’s ‘ memoirs ’ fall outside this generalization. One may argue that rulers’ own performances often constitute an assertion of authority, but of course as assertions such performances do not necessarily convey to their witnesses all the meanings they have for the actors. Similar considerations apply for the evidence of responses made to assertions of royal authority, by whomsoever made. Some of the contentions of this article appear therefore less than apodictic to the writer himself: they are, incidentally, based on data for the history of the Sultans of Delhi and of the Mughal emperors only.
11But we can, at feast, offer (with the assistance of J. R. Lucas, The Principles of Politics)29 to define our terminology. The words ‘ influence ’, ‘ power ’ and ‘ authority ’ are used to refer to the detectable different qualities of those social relationships where one person acts by word or deed and another reacts, in situations of dissimilar standpoints, inclinations and interests. I use the word ‘ authority ’ when, as a consequence of some person saying (or otherwise indicating) ‘ Let X happen ’, others think that X ought to happen and that they ought so to act that X does happen; ‘ authority ’ is thus to be distinguished from ‘ power ’ when someone says ‘ Let X happen ’ and it does happen, and from ‘ influence ’ when someone says ‘ Let X happen ’ and others think or say ‘ Let X happen Or to put the matter in Max Weber’s terms, a person, or group of persons (or the established pattern of human conduct by a plurality of individuals that we call an institution) has ‘ authority ’ when his, their or its requirements and instructions are accepted as a principle or maxim of conduct by those to whom such requirements or instructions are addressed. Now daily observation and personal experience suggest that distinctions between ‘ authority ’, ‘ power ’ and ‘ influence ’ are easier to analyse in the abstract than to recognize in practice : most human beings manifest a very mixed performance for which fear, indifference, habit, hopelessness, self-interest, rational calculation is as much responsible as respect, deference and conviction of the rightness in principle of acting in certain ways. One should therefore have less confidence in statements purporting to explain why the ruled responded as they did to the claims to authority made on behalf of rulers, than in statements defining the claims themselves.
12The titulature that inscriptions and coins ascribe to the early Muslim chiefs of Delhi depict them as agents of an extra-terrestrial power that has communicated to man. An inscription on the Quṭb Minār in Delhi describes Iltutmish as the shadow of God on earth, a manifestation or epiphany (maẓhar) of the word of God and one who is assisted from heaven.30 On coins, Muslim rulers enjoy titles indicating some status in relation to ‘ din ’ – ‘ the obligations which Allah imposes upon man concerning acts of worship and the spiritual life ’. Mughal rulers have such appelations as ‘ Nūr al-Dīn ’ (Light of Religion – Jahāngīr), ‘ Shihāb al-Dīn ’ (Bright Star of Religion – Shah Jahan) and ‘ Muḥyī al-Dīn ’ (Life-giver of Religion – Aurangzēb). The titulature of some Delhi Sultans suggests that the status to which they lay claim (or are depicted as laying claim) is one they do not owe to those over whom they rule: Fīrūz Shah is described as ‘ deputy of the Commander of the Faithful ’.31
13Historians, scholars and literati writing in Persian, make elaborate statements of the cosmic status of rulers, of their role in serving not the purposes of man as proposed by man but the purposes of God as conveyed to man in revelation and through that body of divine precept and commandment, the Islamic sharī‘a. It must be noticed however, that sometimes these statements refer to the office of kingship and leave it ambiguous whether a particular ruler is fulfilling his proper role. Other authors however praise the ruler under which they live in terms that suggest he is in fact doing so. The early thirteen-century writer Fakhr-i Mudabbir, states that God has created rulers to gather armies and conquer countries in order to protect their peoples from unbelievers and the enemies of religion and to ensure that the people of the world act according to the book of God and the mandates of His holy law. Men should be obedient to the commands of their rulers.32 For Baranī, writing in the thirteen-fifties, an analogical or metaphorical kingship (pādshāhī-i majāz), that is one which operates, at the terrestrial level, in a mode which is, at that lower level, analogous to the mode in which God acts at His higher level, is a khilāfat (successorship) and niyābat (deputyship) to God. Such a kingship exists when the king exercises his God-given characteristics (analogous to those of God in being a combination of the benevolent and the wrathful) in order to exalt the religion of Islam and to make current the mandates of the shar‘. 33
14Some contemporary historians of the Mughal period locate the claims of particular Mughal rulers in a version of ‘ salvation-history ’ or ‘ meta-history ’. ‘Abd al-Hāmid Lāhaurī refers to God as the fashioner of all created things, beyond all man’s capacity even to praise. As gracious bestower of boons, God’s greatest gift to man is the gift of prophets, the greatest of whom is the Prophet Muḥammad ; mankind should also be thankful for the Prophet Muḥammad’s family and Companions and for the first four caliphs or successors of Muḥammad. Now, God has made men His ‘ successors ’ on earth that they should unite in the same person both the greater and the lesser khilāfat: the greater is for the communication of the Divine Wisdom, the lesser is for the stewardship of men in their social and economic association. But after a time the burden of bearing both kinds of burden become too heavy and the greater khilāfat passed to prophets and the lesser khilāfat passed to Sultans and kings. Then the greater khilāfat ceased to be needed as knowledge of divine guidance dispelled the darkness and oppression of unbelief. The burden of providing authoritative understanding of divine guidance passed from the first four Rightly-Guided Caliphs to the scholars, and the functions of the lesser caliphate, now limited to destroying oppression and repressing the neglectful of God, after being exercised by caliphs who were Sultans in all but name, came to reside in Amīr Tīmūr and his successors, currently, for ‘Abd al-Ḥāmid Lāhaurī, Shah Jahān who emits the light of the khilāfat of God and is a source of the secrets of the shadow of God.34 The historian of Aurangzeb’s first ten years as pādshāh, Muḥammad Kāẓim, opens his ‘Alamgīr Nāma by praising God for bestowing success on kings through His ray of rational providence and for placing the diadem of (the office of being) the shadow of God upon the head of he for whom He has wanted superiority among created beings. Muḥammad Kāẓim’s metahistorical prolegomena then proceeds: man’s rational faculty cannot penetrate to the Divine perfections for how can the finite penetrate the infinite. Nevertheless, man can yet proclaim that God is God, so God is not a wholly alien being. He has enabled man to understand that one individual’s actions will not be credited to another. He has ordained prophets to guide men to the worship of God. After Muḥammad the Prophet, divine revelation came to an end, to be followed by the khilāfat of the four Rightly-Guided caliphs. However, the force needed to maintain the ordinances of the shar‘ began to decline in the hands of those caliphs who followed the first four and through the mature wisdom of God, control of man’s affairs passed to sulṭāns until it fell to Amīr Tīmūr. Now, in Muḥammad Kāzim’s time, the perfect manifestation of the abiding khilāfat now residing in sulṭāns and pādshāhs and the reviver of its usages is Aurangzeb ‘Alamgīr.35
15Most Muslim historians of both the Delhi sultanate and of the Mughal empire claim authority for the monarchy as a guardian of Islamic revelation and law; any special powers of religious understanding imputed to them (and that imputation is found in some histories of Shah Jahān and Aurangzīb) are limited to those of a ṣūfī spiritual director (murshid). Akbar’s friend, general and publicist, Abū’l Faḍl, however, claims for Akbar a more esoteric and more wide-ranging religious authority – that of a person with intimate knowledge of the divine realities, not only a spiritual director, but himself a Perfect Man. Indeed, Abū’l Faḍl presents Akbar as a cynosure, indeed a summation of the major spiritual and religious tendencies in the contemporary sixteenth-century Islamic world. But more than that, Abū’l Faḍl depicts Akbar as one who is capable of untying the knots of the religious problems which beset non-Muslims. Abū’l Faḍl does not stress the role of the monarch as guardian and enforcer of Islamic law; other Muslim accounts of Akbar’s reign however represent Muslim scholars as according to Akbar authoritative powers of pronouncing on points of Islamic law where no consensus of the scholars already exists.36
16We should note at this point what is the kind of authority that is being claimed by Indo-Persian authors for the office of king. It is essentially an authority to safeguard the Islamic revelation and to further the supremacy of the Islamic law and to take all necessary steps to those ends, that is steps needed to maintain if not increase the physical ability to serve these ends.37 Authority is not claimed so that the ruler may set other standards of behaviour for men, even if they should wish or empower him to do so. Authority is not claimed (with perhaps the exception of Abū’l Faẓl) so that the ruler may set standards of behaviour for non-Muslims. Once they have been accepted as dhimmīs, as monotheistic adherents of a scriptural monotheism who pay jizya, then, provided that they keep to their place in society as defined in some detail in Islamic law and tradition,38 the ruler may not interfere with them. In his Fatāwa-i Jahāndārī, Baranī agonized over the question of how far a king could act legitimately outside or against the sharī‘a if that appeared to him necessary to the survival of his very power to maintain the peace and order essential for the supremacy of Islam. Baranī would not have a king obliged to act thus forfeit all authority over men, but he warned kings who might mistake the maintenance of their own power for the service of the divine dispensation to beware of the Day of Judgment.39 Other writers would only allow violent resistance to a ruler if he positively attacks Islam, becomes an unbeliever and openly plunders with the sword and violates women.40 Muslim writers place no spatial limits upon the range of a pious Muslim king’s authority. Rulers are seen as cohabiting with other rulers a spatially-undefined, because potentially universal, social area. Although a Muslim may as a matter of fact recognise that he is the subject of a particular Muslim ruler, unless he has acknowledged a personal loyalty to that ruler, providing that the latter has not violated Islam, there is no other reason of principle for the subject Muslim to prefer that particular Muslim ruler to any other. The jurists’ attitude after the extinction of the ‘Abbāsid caliphate by the Mongols in 1258 became ‘ The pious caliphate is dead ! ’ ‘ Long live the pious sultanate, any pious sultanate so long as it is pious! ’
17Thus far the ‘ cosmic ’ grounding of the authority of the office of king would appear to be established: but the authority of the office is not the authority of a particular king. Indo-Muslim writers themselves make that clear distinction. Baranī is insistent that a ruler’s status as a lieutenant and khalīfa of God is conditional upon that ruler following the model practice (sunna) of God. A king who fails to do justice between ‘ the seventy-two communities ’ cannot be called the shadow of God or be considered as exercising rightful (bi-ḥaqq) powers of command.41 Sayyid ‘Alī Hamadānī states that when a ruler pursues the path of justice and righteousness, maintaining the mandates of the sharī‘a and acting to enforce the rules of dīn, then he is the shadow of God and the khalīfa of the Prophet, but when he does none of these things and follows his own passions and desires, then he is the enemy of God and the khalīfa of Satan.42 As has been noted above, there are circumstances when forcible resistance to a wicked ruler is permissible.
18Medieval Indo-Muslim historians offer, or hint at, a number of characteristics that endow a person with authority. Competence, particularly in war, figures prominently.43 Early sources for Muslim rule in India point to the special qualifications of former Turkish slaves from Central Asia.44 (But it is evident that these qualifications were not believed to be compelling for some, since it was claimed for both Iltutmish and Balban that they were descended from the Turanian hero Afrāsiyāb – an interesting indication perhaps of the power of Firdausī’s Shāh Nāma over the imagination of the early Muslim migrants to India in the thirteenth-century. Membership of an existing royal family conferred some authority – but, under the Delhi sultanate, not enough that incompetent members of lineages or whole lineages were not displaced, as in the deposition of four descendents of Iltutmish in the period 1236-1246, the supersession of Balban’s family by the Khaljīs, the supplanting of the Khaljīs by Nāṣir al-Dīn Khusrau Khān. Even in Mughal times, although eventually the dynasty became secure in the authority of the Mughal name, individual members of the Mughal family did not retain their personal authority.
19How the authority of particular rulers may have been related to their ethnic characteristics, if indeed it was so related, is often puzzling. The Mughal Bābur himself, and historians writing when Mughal rule was established, saw the Mughals as displacing Afghāns as rulers in northern India. All the extant accounts of the Lodī and Sūr Afghan Sultans of Delhi were written after Afghans had lost Delhi to the Mughals (but had not been replaced completely as rulers in Bihar and Bengal). Members of the Lodī and Sūr lineages claimed to be Delhi Sultans, but this did not prevent other lineages, Niazī, Lohanī and Karranī from laying claim to the position of sulṭān elsewhere. The majority (and the militarily most significant) of the servitors of the Sultans of the time appear to have been Afghans. In India, Afghans do not seem, from the evidence available, to have been organized politically as tribes – leaders appear to have recruited followings from a variety of tribal lineages. However, it does seem that the tradition of having once belonged to tribes from eastern Afghanistan entitled one to preferment. It is as if there were a political endogamous circle embracing those with a certain regional ancestry, which constituted a claim to authority within the (political) endogamous circle, but an authority with a range outside that circle which could only be discovered in day-to-day experience.45
20The idiom of authority, and of the acceptance of authority, that Indo-Persian literature conveys as expressing the realities of daily human behaviour, is the idiom of personal allegiance and loyalty between a grantor and a receiver of favours and of boons. Much data displays Mughal rulers as managing a patriarchal and patrimonial form of domination, that is, creating skeins of authority through personal encounter. John Richards46 highlighted the variety of performances designed to display the Mughal king as one to be served with honour and pride for the servitor – as a person magnificent in presence and in his surroundings, as brave and generous, manly and magnanimous, not indulgent or careless of his own dignity. Not even Mughal success in creating their cadre of manṣabdārs (appointment-holders) with regularized ranks, terms of service, duties and emoluments dulled the sense of a personal relationship between the Mughal emperor as a person and each manṣabdār – a sense kept alive by the ability of manṣabdārs individually to approach their master no matter their status within the manṣabdārī hierarchy. Of course, the personal bond could have several strands – kinship with the ruler through marriage, a sentiment that service to the emperor conferred honour upon oneself as well as, no doubt, a calculation of where one’s interests lay.
21The binding quality of an authoritative personal tie between a superior whom one acknowledges as a master, a superior and a patron and another who accepts the status of servant, inferior and client, is referred to by medieval Indo-Muslim historians in a conceptual language shaped by Islamic religious tradition. As I have noted elsewhere,47 writers employ such terms as ṭughyān, ‘isyān, ma’āṣiya, baghī and fasād, (to be found in the Qurān in the same form or on another measure of the same radical), to refer to wrongful violence against kings or their agents. Indo-Muslims writers use such terms in contexts where the user of force (or the potential user of force) has broken faith, or is represented as having broken faith, with his master. These terms convey a range of meanings of ingratitude towards a benefactor for benefits received, of treachery and of corruption (fasād) associated with an arrogant conceit (baglā). In the Qur’ān such concepts are associated with kufr. The kāfir is one who, having received God’s benevolent gifts, shows no signs of gratitude and even acts rebelliously against his Divine Benefactor. Indo-Muslim writers use Qur’ānic terms denoting treachery in those contexts where they wish to convey that some prior act of consent to accept a ruler as lord has been performed. Perhaps therefore such usages should be seen against the background of Qur’ān VII, 173, where, in primeval time all the seed of Adam is represented as acknowledging Allāh as their Lord. In effect, the authority of a ruler as a person, over particular persons, is represented as a consensual, but not a contractual, authority, since its terms are not specified. The act of prior acknowledgment is a performative act, that is one that, by the mere fact of being performed, creates authority.
22If this is so, then the authority of the king or ruler as a person does not rest on the nature of the values which that ruler will pursue since none are specified. Authority rests upon a one-sided act of acknowledgment. Loyalty to an acknowledged master appears to be a value in itself – at least this hypothesis may help to explain that the clients of contenders for the throne were very often not penalised by the successful contender later. It is by no means certain that in a conflict of loyalties (and therefore of authorities) Indo-Muslim writers would hold loyalty to the king of the day to have priority.48
23The different modes in which Muslim rulers appealed, or were represented as appealing, to Muslim sentiment probably reached different segments of the Muslim population in medieval South Asia. Muslim cultivators, artisans and small traders living away from centres of scholastic Islamic education, might only be aware of the existence of Muslim rulers through coin legends and inscriptions on caravansarai ; members of the Muslim religious classes might be more impressed by claims expressed in histories especially if they were backed up in practice by royal distribution of stipends, revenue-free grants of land and pensions. Muslim immigrants into India and those seeking the royal service were more likely to be impressed by rulers’ public performances of manliness, generosity and magnificence, particularly if those performances were more impressive than those that could be put on by rulers in the Iranian and Central Asian worlds in the period following the Mongol devastations. Further, one should perhaps point to the appeal of Persian poetry in India, its capacity, through oral repetition, to convey to the imaginations of those far outside court-circles, a world of kings and princes, heroes and courtiers, a world extending far beyond India but also embracing India so that the glamour of semi-legendary kingship brushes off on to Muslim kings in India.
24But of course, Muslim kings in India continued to live in a sub-continent where, unlike the ‘ classical ’ lands of Islam, there remained a non-Muslim majority – a majority a sizeable number of whom had arms in their hands. Abū’l Faḍl’s Ā ’īn-i Akbarī states that,49 towards the end of Akbar’s reign, there were approximately 4.4. million armed men in the Mughal-dominated territories that had not been recruited directly by the Mughal ruler or his agents, but by rural notables, zemīndārs, who were predominantly non-Muslim. Not only was the Indian countryside largely non-Muslim in its ethos, but also it was not a disarmed countryside. But as agriculture continued to provide most of the resources which Muslim rulers needed in order to be rulers and to have agents and clients, and as the cost of maintaining a perpetually-active military occupation of the rural areas would have been ‘ uneconomic ’, how was power in those areas to be transmuted into ‘ authority ’? Prima facie, those not reared in Muslim tradition would be unlikely to respond to claims to authority made in an avowedly Muslim idiom. Perhaps this was a situation where action or inaction would, in the old cliché, ‘ speak louder than words ’.
25And certainly Muslims emitted signals that even if, as a result of conquest, individual non-Muslim chiefs, rulers, and their followers might be killed or displaced, Muslims would not tear down the power-structures they encountered in non-Muslim society. Thus, Ḥāmid al-Kūfī’s Chach-Nāma, a rendering in part into Persian of earlier Arab traditions about the Arab conquest of Sind beginning in 711, depicts the Arabs as accepting the submission of a variety of local chiefs in Sind, continuing them in their positions in return for the payment of tribute and revenue. It is significant that this Persian work expressing this tradition was written in 1216-17, the time of the settling of the Ghurid invaders into India.50 Moreover, as Dr. Yohannan Friedmann has pointed out,51 the Chach-Nāma depicts the Arabs as not only confirming Brahmans in their high status in society but also as maintaining the traditional disabilities of certain lowly groups in Sind’s society. A fourteenth-century Indo-Persian history represents the Delhi Sultan, Fīrūz Shah as allowing the general Hindu population of Delhi to pay, at a special rate, jizya to be levied on Brahmans.52 Of course attempts were made, both under the Delhi Sultans and under the Mughals, to limit the ability of local rural notables, of whatever degree of local power and influence, to subtract from the resources claimed by Muslim rulers from the cultivators, but all historians of medieval India depict the success or failure of the attempts as the barometer of sultanate and Mughal authority.
26The asservations in Indo-Persian that Muslim rulers in India should and did levy jizya upon Hindus (in accordance with Ḥanafī fiqh)53 might be thought to represent a potential or an actual situation most discouraging to the growth of Muslim rulers’ authority over non-Mulims. Professor Nizami and I have expressed doubts whether, for most of the period (Aurangzeb’s reign from 1679 onwards is to be excepted), jizya was levied as a separate and discriminatory tax.54 But if it was, that would not necessarily offend inherited Hindu tradition. The Arthashāstra recommends that the defeated in war should be prepared to surrender their goods in return for a guarantee of physical safety.55
27General Muslim modes of conducting war and diplomacy in India did not constitute an insurmontable barrier to honourable relationships between Muslim kings and Hindu chiefs and warriors. The Arthashāstra sees the ‘ political arena ’ as territorially imprecise, perhaps extending to the whole of the sub-continent in which a number of rival kings would be in competition, in principle for universal kingship. Neutrals and enemies would be won over by various techniques – generous dealing, devious diplomacy and dirty tricks at first, and then, only if these failed, would there be resort to force. Even then, kings should bear in mind that there are various forms of conquest, righteous, where the victor is satisfied with the submission of the conquered, greedy, where the victor seizes the vanquished’s goods and demonical, where the victor seizes land, goods, wives and takes the life of the defeated foe.56 Muslim conquest in India was usually within the first two categories. Tribute-paying chiefs were allowed to survive, defeated Rajput chiefs were received by the Mughals with honour and confirmed in their ‘ home-territories ’, Rajput chiefs were given general powers as military commanders and as administrators over Muslim and non-Muslim alike. Akbar’s capture of Asīrgarh in January 1601, and Aurangzeb’s capture of Maratha hill-forts with the use of bribery, as well as the willingness in the Mughal campaigns in the Deccan from the beginning of the seventeenth-century, to sound out the possibilities of a deal with the enemies’ followers, are all consonant with Indian tradition. Not that these ploys were features of the Mughal period only. Fakhr-i Mudabbir’s Adāb al-Ḥarb, written in the late twelve-twenties recommends diplomacy before war and Baranī’s Ta’rīkh-i Fīrūz Shāhī represents Sultan ‘Alā al-Dīn Khaljī as advising his general Malik Kāfūr to settle with Hindu kings for booty in preference to a fight to the finish. In the Fatāwa-i Jahāndārī the inadvisability of all-out war is also stressed.57
28Muslim rulers did not disturb traditional Indian conceptions of ownership of resources from land. Islamic law as worked out by Muslim jurists outside South Asia before Muslim conquests in South Asia was in the traditions of Roman law in conceiving ownership as the possession of exclusive rights of use, disposal and bequeathal of a thing, or if that thing was owned jointed, of a definable portion of it. As Professor Derrett has demonstrated,58 for Hindu jurists, a ‘ thing ’ could be subject to multiple co-extensive and coeval claims of different strength and character, claims which qualified all other claims. The ruler’s interest in land was usufructary – the enjoyment of its produce, but an enjoyment to be shared with others, the cultivator, perhaps the brotherhood to which the latter belonged, the local chief and so forth. The ruler was, in effect, a lord over land rather than a landlord or a landowner. His power was indeed a necessary pre-condition of the secure enjoyment of any claims to the produce of the soil – a theme to be found in Abū’l Faẓl’s Ā’īn-i Akbarī. 59 Muslim rulers did not depart brusquely from these traditions; they asserted the superiority of their own claims to a proportion of landed produce over those of others without abolishing those claims. Indeed there was much subtle adjustment of coeval claims in periods when the military power of the ruler was weak. No doubt under Akbar, Jahāngīr, Shah Jahan and Aurangzeb the Mughal revenue system wrought some major distribution of local power and influence by its conferment of revenue-collecting privileges and its extension of market forces over more of rural India by demanding payment of land revenue in cash, but it left rural India still a jostle of competing interests over which authority could be gained by an astute distribution of favours.
29The outward life-style of Muslim kings in India was in a traditional Indian idiom: the building of new royal palaces for old, the collection of large harems, the use of elephants, canopies, the scattering of money and jewels, the weighing of the monarch, the organization of large-scale hunting expeditions.60 Other royal practices in an Indian idiom were the taking of horoscopes and consultation with astrologers to decide the auspicious time for new undertakings. Muslim rulers consulted both Muslim and Brahman astrologers.
30As is well known, Akbar made it easier for some segments of Hindu society to ‘ feel at home ’ in court circles – his sponsorship of translations from the Mahabhārata and Rāmāyaṇa into Persian and his conduct of religious discussions in the ‘Ibādat Khāna at which members of the principal faith-groups were able to argue on an equal footing. By taking wives (who were not compelled to become Muslim) from honourable Rajput lineages, Akbar and his successors were able to draw on the authority that belonged to senior kin.
31Norman Ziegler has pointed out in his seminal ‘ Notes on Rajput Loyalties During the Mughal Period ’61 that in effect the Mughals and their servants who were of high warrior status were accepted into the Rajput jātī or caste and that Rājput tradition often equated him with Rāmā ‘ the pre-eminent cultural hero of the Hindu Rajput ’. Other Hindu social groups, notably the Kāyasthas or penmen who served the Mughals principally in the revenue, accounting and military recruiting offices, were able to see the Mughal ruler as integrated into their world-view also. Bhimsen, an inspector and auditor in the imperial muster-master’s department under Aurangzeb before becoming deputy to a Hindu commander in the Mughal service was able to regard himself as a true servant of God and His agent the Emperor and a limb, albeit a minor limb of the body that was the empire.62
32Bhimsen’s invocation in the Ta’rīkh-i Dilkushā of God as the creator of the human heart which gives orders to the other parts and limbs of the human body, and then Bhimsen’s following this with a reference to God’s kindness in the Kalyug in making it possible for the Mughal emperor to direct analogous meaningful and purposeful human activity to foster peace and prosperity, point to some sharing between Muslims and Hindus whose co-operation is valuable to Muslim kings, of broad assumptions that human society and cosmic reality are linked in one chain of being. Both the Hindu and the Muslim ‘ worlds ’ see the terrestrial world as a place where man should perform rites to prepare him to enter another order of being, a place where man fulfils a nature the essence of which is to be discovered in authoritative scripture and tradition.
33Despite the stress on authoritative personal relations in Muslim tradition and on rivalry between independent kings in, say, the Arthashāstra, both stresses implying that there is a proper place for political activity as a rallying of wills to pursue different ends, neither Muslim nor Hindu tradition sees society as rightfully a competitive political market. The wholly unoriginal anonymous, Tahdhīb al-Akhlāq of Aurangzeb’s time, holds that man’s unique quality is his comprehension that God has created this world and a genus therein, man, with a yearning for, and a capacity for perfection, a perfection revealed to him through God’s Messengers. Man is not on earth to seek his own pleasure and advantage. God has placed him in society, with its occupational specializations and mutually advantageous exchange of goods and services, so that he may pursue in security his course of steady moral maturation.63 God has created man with a basic nature and propensity to seek and to return to God. Man, in the tradition represented by the Tahdhīb al-Akhlāq, can only fulfil his nature by achieving a hierarchical harmony between his different (divinely endowed) faculties, with the rational faculty seeing that the spirited and the appetitive faculties do not exceed their proper bounds. There are homologies with the picture of man in the Bhāgavad Gīta. 64 There man is seen as a multidimensional being at whose centre is a timeless monad the jīva, ‘a minute part of the God Krishna ’, attached to a psycho-somatic organism possessing an individual soul, an ego, a discursive intellect and senses. The degree of man’s success in placing these faculties in their right hierarchical order will be expressed in his karma, the stock of deeds that will affect man’s future transmigrations and his cosmic status. If reborn as a man, his karma will determine into which varṉa, each with its own code for conduct or dharma, he will be born. Each code for conduct is excellent in its way, its virtues complementing those of other dharmas in a hierarchical order – the virtue of self-restraint in a Brahman, of bravery in a ksatriya, of service in a shūdra (for example). Each should perform its own duty and not attempt that of another, the duty imposed upon one by one’s karma or accumulated moral endowment. For both Muslim and Hindu traditions, man’s activity in society should be shaped by his moral endowment – for Muslims, one created by God, for followers of central Hindu traditions, one created by past deeds. One may modify one’s moral inheritance, but one should not seek to perform a function in society completely beyond the limits of that inheritance.
34Hindus, such as Bhimsen, who participated in Indo-Persian culture, had access to a Muslim version of an organic, hierarchical society of complementary elements or groups in Abū’l Faḍi’s introduction to the Ā ’īn-i Akbarī. There the king is depicted as physician to a social body whose health and equilibrium is to be maintained by appropriate adjustment of ranks and degrees. There are four groups composing that social body, to be likened to the four elements of which the cosmos is composed – fire, air, water and earth. The four groups are: warriors, merchants and artisans, penmen and cultivators. The indispensable ruler is he who keeps each group in its place and who sets himself to making the world flourish through his knowledge of affairs and of the real worth of people. Abū’l Fadl makes no mention of any differences of religious community within the social body. The scope of the action of the ruler would appear to be universal. Indeed, later in the A ’īn-i Akbarī, Abū’l-Faḍl praises Akbar as one who will ensure that social unity on earth will be a witness to the unity of the universe.
35In the final analysis, the authority of the king should rest upon his potentiality as universal ruler. Yet his personal authority is represented as deriving from personal acknowledgments of superiority and of the obligation of loyalty, by individuals who in fact participate in a politically competitive market. The literature does not convey that aides, servants and clients acknowledge the authority of a king, master or patron on condition that he tries to become a universal ruler – or even that he will introduce the rule of the sharī‘a or of dharma. Yet, not only is that what he should do, but also there is no other end short of universal rulership and justice, and the reign of sharī‘a or dharma, that entitles him to authority over men who have not personally acknowledged his authority. The end of the competition between kings for the conduct of which the Arthashāstra makes many ‘ political ’ recommendations, is the abolition of politics, since all conflicts of interest will disappear when dharma reigns. But if politics disappear in an order of universal harmony, so will relations of authority between rulers and ruled too disappear, for the conflicts of interest that necessitate authoritative relationships will disappear as all conform their thoughts and their actions to dharma. Similar comments may be made in relation to Muslim tradition. In the centuries before the establishment of the Delhi sultanate, Muslim scholars had formulated a universal caliphate as the ideal temporal order in which the Muslim Holy Law would reign. When actual physical power passed to regional ‘ war-lords their status (as we have seen for South Asia) was legitimated on condition that they served universal Islamic aspirations. In effect, Muslim scholars were institutionalizing actual competition and violence in the name of the ideal of universal peace and harmony. Rulers enjoy authority not for what they do, but for what they might do.
36The hold of ideals of universal harmony, of organic unity within a hierarchical order and of authority for potentially-universal kings seems to have been greatest in eighteenth-century India. At the same time as the Marathas were taking over control of Mughal territories, their leaders were accepting such formal titles from the Mughals as nā’ib, ṣūbadār or deputy governor in Malwa (1741) and wakīl-i muṭlaq, agent with full powers at Delhi (1784). But more than that: as late as the seventeen-fifties, in private correspondence Maratha chiefs referred to the Mughal pādshāh as ‘ lord of the earth ’65 at the same time as the Mughal ruler himself was effectively a minor chief in Delhi. At that point, when all conflict, all politics had been submerged in the stable stillness of a motionless immensity of all-embracing but impotent universal lordhip, Mughal authority had become most truly Indian.
Bibliographie
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Bibliography
(Some works have been cited in the footnotes only to illustrate the work done since 1947 on medieval South Asia. They have been omitted here).
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Hardy, P., (1985), ‘ Abu’l Fazl’s Portrait of the Perfect Padshah: a political philosophy for Mughal India – or a personal puff for a pal? ’ in Christian W. Troll (ed.), Islam in India: studies and commentaries, vol. II. Delhi, Vikas.
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Notes de bas de page
1 Annemarie Schimmel, Islam in the Indian Subcontinent, (Leiden 1980), contains a full review of religious studies; The Cambridge Economic History of India, vol. I, (Cambridge 1982), has a comprehensive bibliography.
2 K. S. Lal, History of the Khaljis (Allahabad 1950); The Twilight of the Sultanate (London 1963).
3 Iqtidar Husain Siddiqui, Some Aspects of Afghan Despotism in India (Aligarh 1969) ; History of Sher Shah Sur (Aligarh 1971); Mughal Relations with the Indian Ruling Elite (New Delhi 1983).
4 H. K. Sherwani, History of the Qutb Shahi Dynasty (Delhi 1974) ; Momtazur Rahman Tarafdar, Husain Shahi Bengal 1494-1538 A. D. (Dacca 1965).
5 Iqtidar Alam khan, ‘ The Nobility under Akbar and the Development of his Religious Policy 1560-80’, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society (1968), pp. 29-36; M. Athar Ali, ‘ The Objectives behind the Mughal Expedition into Balkh and Badakhshan 1646-47 ’, Proceedings of the Indian History Congress at Patiala 1967, pp. 162-8; M. N. Pearson, ‘ Shivaji and the Decline of the Mughal Empire ’, Journal of Asian Studies, XXXV (1976) 2, February, pp. 221-35; M. Athar Ali, ‘ Rathor Rebellion ’, Proceedings of the Indian History Congress at Aligarh (1960), pp. 28-33. Robert Charles Hallissey, The Rajput Rebellion against Aurangzib (Columbia and London 1977).
6 Satish Chandra, ‘ Social Background to the Rise of the Maratha Movement during the 17th century in India ’, The Indian Economic and Social History Review, (September 1973), pp. 209-17; Hiroshi Fukuzawa, ‘ A Study of the Local Administration of the Adilshahi Sultanate (A. D. 1489-1686) Hitotsubashi Journal of Economics (June 1963), pp. 37-67; A. R. Kulkarni, Maharashtra in the age of Shivaji, (Poona 1969); J. F. RIchards, Mughal Administration in Golconda, (Oxford 1975).
7 Khaliq Ahmad Nizami, Some Aspects of Religion and Politics in India during the Thirteenth Century (Aligarh 1961).
8 Kunwar Muhammad Ashraf, ‘ Life and Conditions of the People of Hindustan (1200-1500 A. D.) – mainly based on Islamic Sources ’, Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal. Letters, I (1935), pp. 103-359. P. Hardy, Islam in Medieval India; The Muslim Ruler in India in: Sources of Indian Tradition, ed. Wm. Theodore De Bary (New York 1958), pp. 463-508; Mohammad Habib and Afsar Umar Salim Khan, The Political Theory of the Delhi Sultanate (Allahabad 1960?); Saiyid Athar Abbas Rizvi, Religious and Intellectual History of the Muslims in Akbar’s Reign (New Delhi 1975).
9 J. F. RICHARDS (ed.), Kingship and Authority in South Asia (Madison, Wisconsin, 1978).
10 Amīr Khusrau, Khazā’ in al-Futūḥ, ed. Muhammad Wahid Mirza (Calcutta 1953) p. 6.
11 P. Hardy, Historians of Medieval India, London, 1960; idem, ‘ Didactic Historical Writing in Indian Islam: Ziya al-din Barani’s Treatment of the Reign of Sultan Muhammad Tughluq (1234- 1351) ’ in Islam in Asia, vol. I South Asia, ed. Yohannan Friedmann (Jerusalem 1984), pp. 37-59.
12 Some Aspects, p. 91: the inscription is translated in full in G. Yazdani, ‘ The Inscriptions of the Turk Sultans of Delhi ’ (etc.) Epigraphia Indo-Moslemica 1913-14, pp. 35-45.
13 Ishtiaq Husain Qureshi, The Administration of the Sultanate of Dehli (Lahore 1942) pp. 41, 42-3.
14 Some Aspects of Religion and Politics, p. xx.
15 Some Aspects of Religion and Politics, p. xiii.
16 Ishtiaq Husain Qureshi, The Muslim Community of the Indo-Pakistan Subcontinent (610-1947) (The Hague 1962) pp. 88-9.
17 Administration of the Sultanate of Dehli, pp. 206-14.
18 A. B. M. Habibullah, The Foundation of Muslim Rule in India (Lahore 1945) pp. 312, 314.
19 ‘ Life and Conditions of the People of Hindustan ’, p. 107.
20 ‘ Life and Conditions ’, pp. 134-5, 146.
21 Some Aspects of Religion and Politics, pp. 90-2.
22 Administration of the Sultanate of Dehli, pp. 155-9.
23 Some Aspects of Afghan Despotism in India, pp. 35-6, 80-1, 136 ff.
24 Some Aspects of Religion and Politics, pp. 324-5.
25 J. F. Richards, ‘ The Formulation of Imperial Authority under Akbar and Jahangir ’, Kingship and Authority in South Asia, pp. 252-85; idem, ‘ Norms of Comportment among Imperial Mughal Officers ’ in Moral Conduct and Authority: the place of Adab in South Asian Islam (Berkeley 1984), pp. 255-89 Stephen P. Blake, ‘ The Patrimonial Bureaucratic Empire of the Mughals ’, Journal of Asian Studies, XXXIX (1979, 1), pp. 77-94; Richard B. Barnett, North India between Empires (Berkeley 1980); P. Hardy, ‘ Abu’l Fazl’s Portrait of the Perfect Padshah: a Political Philosophy for Mughal India – or a personal puff for a pal? ’, in Islam in India: studies and commentaries, ed. Christian W. Troll, vol. II (Delhi 1985): idem, ‘ Weber and the Patrimonial Empire in Islam: the Mughal Case ’, in Max Webers Sicht des Islam: Interpretation und Kritik, ed. Wolfgang Schluchter, Frankfurt (forthcoming).
26 M. Athar Ali, The Mughal Nobility under Aurangzeb (Bombay, 1966) p. 95.
27 Irfan Habib, The Agrarian System of Mughal India (1556-1707), (London 1963), p. 319.
28 Tapan Raychaudhuri and Irfan Habib (ed.), The Cambridge Economic History of India, vol. I, c. 1200-c. 1750, (Cambridge 1982), pp. 172, 173.
29 J. R. Lucas, The Principles of Politics (Oxford 1966), pp. 16, 17, 366-7.
30 J. Horovitz, ‘ The Inscriptions of Muhammad ibn Sam, Qutbuddin Aibeg and Iltutmish ’, Epigraphia Indo-Moslemica, 1911-12, p. 26.
31 ‘Abd-Āllah b. Mahrū, Inshā-i Mahrū (Aligarh 1958 (?)), p. 21.
32 Muḥammad ibn Manṣūr ibn Sa‘īd (Fakhr-i Mudabbir), Ādāb al-Ḥarb wa al-Shujā‘at, ed. Aḥmad Suhayli Khwānsārī, Tihran, 1346 shamsi, p. 4.
33 Ziyā al-dīn Baranī, Fatāwa-yi Jahāndārī, ed. Afsar Salim khan (Lahore 1972), pp. 272, 274.
34 ‘Abd al-Hāmid Lāhaurī, Bādshāh Nāma, vol. I, (Calcutta 1867 ed.), pp. 1-7.
35 Muḥammad Kāẓim, ‘Alamgir-Nama (Calcutta 1868 ed.), pp. 1-9.
36 For example, ‘Abd al-Qādir Badā’ūnī, Muntakhab al-Tawārikh (Calcutta 1865 ed.), vol. II, pp. 271-2.
37 Baranī, Fatāwai Jahāndārī (Lahore 1972 ed.), pp. 142-3.
38 For example, Sayyid ‘Alī Hamadani, Dhakhīrat al-Mulūk, ed. Sayyid Mahmud Anwari, Tabriz, 1358 shamsi, pp. 285-7.
39 Fatāwa-i Jahāndārī, p. 271.
40 See: P. Hardy, ‘ Force and Violence in Indo-Persian Writing on History and Government in Medieval South Asia ’ in: Islamic Society and Culture: Essays in Honour of Professor Aziz Ahmad, ed. Milton Israel and N. K. Wagle (Delhi 1983), pp. 171-2.
41 Fatāwa-i Jahāndārī, p. 133.
42 Dhakhīrat al-Mulūk, p. 250.
43 For example, Ẓiyā al-dīn Baranī, Ta’rīkh-i Fīrūz Shāhī (Calcutta 1862), pp. 422-3.
44 Fakhr-i Mudabbir, Shajārat al-Ansāb, published as Ta’rikh-i Fakhru’d-din Mubarakshah, edited E. Denison Ross (London 1927), pp. 35-7, 48-51.
45 Iqtidar Husain Siddiqui, ‘ The Afghans and their emergence in India as ruling elite during the Delhi sultanate period ’, Central Asiatic Journal, XXVI (1982) 3-4, 241-261 and, idem, Mughal Relations with the Indian Ruling Elite (Delhi 1983), pp. 3-68 passim are valuable in suggesting the patrimonial rather than the tribal nature of Afghan influence in India.
46 J. F. Richards, ‘ The Formulation of Imperial Authority under Akbar and Jahangir ’, in Kingship and Authority in South Asia, pp. 252-85.
47 P. Hardy, ‘ Force and Violence ’, pp. 182-3.
48 P. Hardy, ‘ Force and Violence ’, pp. 191-2.
49 Abū’l Faql, Ā’īn-i Akbarī, vol. I, (Calcutta 1872), p. 175.
50 Ḥamid al-Kūfī, Chach Nāma, Hyderabad, Deccan 1939, pp. 47, 123-4, 135-6; see also, P. Hardy, ‘ Is the Chach Nama intelligible to the historian as political theory? ’, in Sind Through the Centuries, ed. Hamida Khuhro (Karachi 1981), pp. 111-117; Johannan FRIEDMANN, ‘ The Origins and Significance of the Chach-Nama ’, in Islam in Asia, vol. I, South Asia, ed. Yohannan Friedmann (Jerusalem 1984), pp. 23-37.
51 ‘ The Origins and Significance of the Chach Nama ’, pp. 31-4.
52 Shams al-dīn Sirāj ‘Afīf, Ta’rīkh-i Fīrūz Shāhī (Calcutta 1891), pp. 382-4.
53 Ibn Qayyim al-Jauziyya, Aḥkām ahi al-dhimma, vol. I, Damascus, 1961, p. 17 (cited in Johannan Friedmann ‘ The Temple of Multan: a note on early Muslim attitudes to idolatry ’, Israel Oriental Studies, II (1972), p. 182).
54 Nizami, Some Aspects, pp. 313-15; P. hardy, Encyclopaedia of Islam: new edition, II, p. 566 – s.v. Djizya iii. – India.
55 The Kautilīya Arthashāstra, part II, an English translation with Critical and Explanatory Notes, by R. P. Kangle (Second ed. Bombay 1972), p. 462.
56 The Kautilīya Arthashāstra, p. 460.
57 Fakhr-i Mudabbir, Adāb al-Ḥarb, pp. 143-161 passim, p. 164, 421-2; Baranī, Ta’rīkh-i Fīrūz Shāhī, p. 327, idem, Fatāwa-i Jahāndārī. pp, 249-54.
58 J. Duncan M. Derrett, ‘ The Development of the Concept of Property in India c. A. D. 800- 1800 ’. Zeitschrift für vergleichende Rechtswissenschaft, Band 64, 1962, pp. 20, 93-5.
59 A’īn-i Akbarī, vol. I, p. 290.
60 Ashraf, ‘ Life and Conditions of the People of Hindustan ’, pp. 167, 285-91.
61 Norman P. Ziegler, ‘ Some Notes on Rajput Loyalties during the Mughal Period ’, in Kingship and Authority in South Asia, p. 235.
62 J. F. Richards, ‘ Norms of Comportment among Imperial Mughal Officers ’ in: Moral Conduct and Authority: the place of Adab in South Asian Islam, ed. Barbara Daly Metcalf, pp. 276-7.
63 Anon. Tahdhīb al-Akhlāq, India Office Library, Delhi Persian ms. no. 909, fols. 88b, 92b.
64 The Bhagavad Gita: with a commentary based on the original sources, by R. C. Zaehner (Oxford (paperback) 1979), pp. 11-12, 15-17, 21-23.
65 André Wink, Land and Sovereignty in India under the Eighteenth-Century Maratha Svarajya, Doctor of Letters thesis (Leiden University 1984), pp. 34-35. I acknowledge a great debt to Dr. Wink for much of the argument of these last two paragraphs.
Auteur
-
Peter Hardy
Reader Emeritus, SOAS / Londres
Le texte seul est utilisable sous licence Licence OpenEdition Books. Les autres éléments (illustrations, fichiers annexes importés) sont « Tous droits réservés », sauf mention contraire.
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