Question: The eighteenth century represents the Dark Age of Indian history’. In this light discuss the main issues in the recent debate on the polity, economy and society of this period.

Answer: The blancmange rendering of the 18th century as a period of anarchy between the Mughal and British empires has been subjected to cogent criticism in recent years. Admittedly this century witnessed the attenuation of Mughal power, but as new-departures in pre-colonial-historiography emphasize, it would be erroneous to confuse this with a more general political, economic and societal decline. It has been suggested that the political flux of the century signaled not the last gasp of a decaying Mughal body politic but rather the emergence of regional rulers who initiated new cycles of growth and regeneration. By emphasizing the inter-penetration of economic and political change, recent attempts have tried to reconcile evidence of stability and economic vitality in some areas with that of decline in others. Notions of a static social structure are proving untenable in light of new evidence. From a more balanced viewpoint, the legend of the `Black Century’ appears more fictitious than factual. This essay attempts to analyze the main trends in the 18th century economy, society and polity in light of the recent debates in pre-colonial historiography.

The era of the great Mughals is said to have ended with Aurangzeb’s death in 1707: Although the Mughal Empire reached its territorial climax during his reign, Aurangzeb’s military campaigns were a severe financial drain. The outbreak of agrarian revolts led by Marathas, Jats, Sikhs and others and the assertion of autonomy by many provincial governors eroded central authority. Control of the peripheries tended to be replaced by a manipulation of central authority. Control of the peripheries tended to be replaced by a manipulation of central authority by regional and local elites (M.Alam). Meanwhile the mansabdari crisis intensified factional conflict within the nobility, and the withdrawal of financial support by the great banking firms and disruptions of bullion flows from Europe threw the economy into disarray. The tottering Mughal empire was dealt a further blow in 1739 when the Persian Emperor Nadir Shah plundered Delhi. Following in his footsteps, Ahmad Shah Abdali continued to harass Delhi and in 1751-52, Punjab had to be ceded in an ineffectual attempt to buy peace.

These multiple internal and external factors resulted in the rapid diminution of Mughal hegemony during the 18th century. The Mughal emperor did not even directly participate in the Battle of Panipat (1761) in which the Afghans routed the Maratha army. This defeat was a major setback for the Marathas, potential inheritors of India’s imperial mantle, just at a time when the English were beginning to shift from trade to dominion. In 1757 the English East India Company assumed effective political control of Bengal and in 1764 it defeated the combined Mughal and Awadh forces. Subsequently the Emperor was compelled to give the diwani (right to the revenues) of Bengal to the Company, while Awadh was forced into a tributary alliance. The Maratha power was briefly recovered under Mahadji Scindia who became the protector of the Mughal emperor in 1784. The struggle between the Marathas and the British for the succession to Mughal supremacy was finally resolved in 1803 when the British ousted the Marathas and occupied Delhi. Thereafter the British rapidly established their dominance over the heartland of Mughal India by coercing or conquering numerous small states.

The decline of the Mughal Empire is an irrefutable fact, but, to confuse this with a general collapse of political authority, endemic warfare and uncontrollable anarchy is to indulge in naïve history. It is now argued that the British rule was built, not on Indian collapse, but on the emergence of a new order in 18th century India based on stable regional authorities (Marshall). The 18th century saw an increasing devolution of power to lower levels of sovereignty – regional rulers, small potentates and even little rajas of villages.

Mughal successor states assumed three forms, firstly, independent kingdoms where provincial governors had asserted de facto autonomy (Bengal, Awadh, Hyderabad, Arcot). These states were dependent on merchant bankers such as the Jagat Seths of Bengal. Secondly; the warrior states of the Sikhs, Jats and Marathas that were distinguished by their non-Muslim religious-symbolism and adoption of military fiscalism; and lastly compact local kingdoms whose sovereignty had acquired teeth in the 18th century (Rajput states, Telugu speaking warrior clans, Afghan Sultanates). These states resorted to military fiscalism within compact domains, achieving varying degrees of success in extracting revenues from trade and production. It is also important to note that the state was only one of many political formations in pre-colonial India, and a large part of the population subsisted through petty carrying, plunder and pastoralism.

These successor states maintained the outward forms of Mughal rule since the Mughal Emperor continued to be the highest manifestation of sovereignty (C.A. Bayly), but simultaneously developed more effective techniques to extract resources from agriculture and trade. This led to the emergence of new, more centralized state formations that had greater control over resources within their territories. Burton Stein has compared these changes in 18th century South Asian states to military fiscalism in early-modern France.

The point to note is that had 18th century India been reduced to a wasteland, a British empire in India was hardly conceivable. British rule was nurtured by Indian wealth and built on the foundations laid by regional states (P.J. Marshall). The rise of viable regional states may in fact have been a necessary prerequisite for the rise of the British. The military and fiscal needs of regional rulers allowed the British to gain a political foothold as military commanders and bankers. Using this as leverage, the British gradually usurped political dominance and control, taking over the administrative structures created for the regional states and making them work for their own purposes.

Burton Stein argues that a ‘structural contradiction’ in pre-British state formations was between ‘centralizing, militaristic regimes’ and numerous local lordships. The British inserted themselves into these formations not as alien aggressors, but as part of the political system of the subcontinent, but possessing far great resources for conquest than others. The colonial state resolved the contradiction in favour of the centralizing tendency of ‘military, fiscalism’ inherited from previous regimes. Thus the early colonial state lay in a continuum with its predecessors and it even preserved the outward respect for (British) forms and took Indian revenue collectors and bankers into partnership.

Although Stein appeals to the work of Frank Perlin, the latter makes a much more nuanced argument. He points out that the centralisation characteristic of colonial rule had its roots in the earlier period. But in accelerating this process, colonial rule gave it a new, more powerful form deriving from its location in the agency of a conquest state with sources of fiat external to the subcontinent. This produced a fundamental break between early colonial polity and its predecessors, despite the colonial use of “old order institutions and its social underpinnings”. Thus according to Perlin, the state had been fundamentally altered beneath the carapace of old terms and institutions.

In other words the revisionists argue that the early colonial regime may be seen as a logical extension of processes with distinctly indigenous origins. Bayly writes that this new perspective treats the Indian people as subjects of history and not mere objects of colonial rule: Indian responded to this conquering thrust, jot as mere passive victims but as active collaborators in the creation of colonial India. Thus Bayly employs the concept of ‘indigenous origins’ in two senses, firstly to indicate that the pattern of European penetration of the subcontinent was limited and determined by the structure of Indian Commercial society, and secondly, to show that Indian social groups supported the emerging company and the later colonial state.

It is perhaps premature to make unqualified statements on historical trends given the complexity of Indian society, but it appears that the 18th century was more than simply a new map of old social relationships. Although 18th century society exhibited the prevalence of the caste system, patriarchal family system that subordinated-women-and even practices such as purdah and sati, it should be remembered that these were not peculiar to this century alone. The emergence of local and regional regimes and the concomitant redistribution of agricultural labour, capital and investment of political elites gave some groups significant social advancement, particularly the organizations of Indian traders and bankers: lineages of administrative and military personnel and networks of religious organizations. Bayly writes that in the 18th century, firstly the monetization of agrarian relations and the emergence of the free market was modifying old dominance’s based on force or caste rank. Secondly cash-strapped traditional elites were forced to admit men of commerce to a small share of political power of step into the ring as lenders and traders themselves.

Although the political influence of merchant-bankers in the late 18th century regimes is recognized; there is a body of opinion in the tradition of Weber and Marx which argues Trade was ‘merged into an managed by caste bodies’ (D.R. Gadgii), the Indian city was ‘split into self-contained and mutually hostile neighbourhoods’ (R. Fox), the political role of merchants was limited by their dharma and they remained of low social status. Cities, it is alleged, were dominated by patrimonial and bureaucratic elites which precluded the emergence of civic liberties.

This view is countered by Bayly who points out that evidence from parts of India suggests that not only was the economic and political importance of merchants enhanced in the period of successor states, but that corporations of merchants, townsmen and religious specialists had developed an autonomy that even amounted to civic self-government in some cases. Furthermore caste, religion and extended family groups provided the ‘building blocks out of which merchant and urban solidarities were fashioned’. However most trades were multi-caste ventures and merchants needed common institutions that were either based on an interest in the trade on one region or on the particular function performed by merchants at different levels of the trading system. Above all credit-worthiness over-rode caste distinctions in the world of commerce. Bayly asserts that the commercialisation of politics and rise of corporations were by origin intrinsic changes within the economy and culture, though enhanced by the growing presence of the Europeans in India. In essence there were many links that bound merchants together irrespective of caste in all spheres except marriage and formal inter-dining.

Contrary to traditional notions of the absolute separation of state and commercial spheres in pre-colonial India, C. Bayly and S. Subramaniyam have suggested that there were some substantial entrepreneurs who commanded sizeable resources and were able straddle the worlds of commerce and political participation. It is there men who are dubbed the ‘portfolio capitalists’. The authors point out that a portfolio capitalist was not necessarily a merchant, but could be from a military or administrative background. Moreover they admit that these figures exhibit a certain fragility and were eventually swept away with the emergence of a colonial political economy in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. To sum up, the portfolio capitalist view does not seek to establish that merchants as a whole penetrated the state, but to point out that some interpretation of merchants and states cannot be completed ruled out.

Stronger claims about the greater political influence of merchants in the emergent regional states of the 18th century are found in the writings on South Asian mercantilism. According B. Stein and D. Washbrook, in the attempt to increase their control over resources, states became increasingly dependent on merchants to implement mercantilist policies such as revenue-farming and state commercial systems. This in turn led to a thorough penetration of the state by merchant interests, which was reflected in the greater ability of merchant capital to subordinate labour.

Both these views have been critiqued by Prasannan Parthasarthi who has an alternative viewpoint o offer. He argues that the portfolio capitalist view obscures important distinctions between categories of merchants, leading to misinterpretations of their role in the political order. Merchants in 18th century South Asia were involved in three main activities: banking, trading and financing production. On the basis of this distinction, Parthasarthi suggests that the political power of banking interests may have increased in the 18th century successor states, but this did not imply greater power for merchants per se, and more critically for the financiers of production. The disenfranchised merchants and other powerful indigenous social groups who were excluded from the south Indian political order, according to Parthasarthi, were incorporated by the Company who backed them in their conflicts with both producers and centralizing state formations. The financiers of production in their turn became crucial supporters of the Company and its emerging state in South India.

Parthasarthi argues that the aim of South Asian mercantilism and state commercial activities was to increase the power of the state, and in no way enhanced the position of the merchants – rather it excluded them. Parthasarthi believes that this exclusion from political power within the indigenous order, may have led merchants to co-operate with the Company which gave them a political voice. In return the merchants became crucial supporters of the Company state. After 1790 the balance of power shifted away from labour towards merchant capital, as a result of the ‘formidable alliance’ between the Company and the merchants. Thus Parthasarthi argued that it was the rise of the Company state and not South Asian mercantilism that was reflected in the greater ability of merchants to control labour.

From the above discussion it is clear that the notion an inert social structure in pre-colonial India is evidently untenable. The consolidation of a unified merchant class and a locally based service gentry (which Bayly believes was the 18th century progenitor of the past-1860 Indian middle class) was much more than a simple change of personnel within a static society, thought these evolving classes are papered over in conventional political history and the concern with land-rights.

Having discussed the commercialization of state power in pre-colonial India, we may now turn to an analysis of economic conditions in the 18th century. The generally accepted view that the prosperity of the 17th century drifted into penury in the 18th century has been questioned. Muzaffar Alam argues that the first half of the 18th century was a period of continuing economic expansion in parts of northern India. Similarly C.A. Bayly writes that there is evidence of a buoyant economy in certain areas right through the century.

‘Backward’ or even ‘stagnant’ are not very accurate descriptions of the Indian economy in the 18th century whether we look at agriculture, inland trade or even urbanization. The yield per acre of Indian agriculture was quite high and could favourably compare with the average yield of wheat under scientific cultivation in the UK (Raychaudhuri). It is worth noting that the period between 1704 and 1770 was remarkably free of famine. Overall, a favourable land-labour ratio enabled highly mobile peasant and tribal labour to negotiate reasonable terms with controllers of land. While some village notables managed to transform revenue farms into hereditary estates, others felt the pinch from powerful regional states like Tipu’s Mysore, which employed military fiscalism within a territorially compact kingdom to successfully extract resources. Pockets of agricultural decline (often because of inter-state warfare as in Punjab and parts of North India) were more than counterbalanced by wider expanses of growth. On the whole population, production, wages and prices tended to be on a gentle upswing in the 18th century (Jalal and Bose).

Besides a highly productive agriculture, there was a large commercialized sector with a highly sophisticated market and credit structure, manned by a skilful and in instances, very wealthy commercial class. It drew upon a wide range of manufactures and commercial crops to supply a domestic as well as overseas market. India’s textile exports met the cloth requirements in several parts of South-east Asia and the Middle East. That this trade was extremely competitive, being based on very low costs of production, is evident in the imposition of protective tariffs by the British textile industry. Overall the commercialized sector of the Indian economy was expanding in the 17th and 18th centuries, there were signs of market integration and of increasing involvement of agricultural and rural manufacturers with exchange and a money economy, credit had become common in rural India and in some parts the two-way traffic between two and country had assumed significant proportions by the late 18th century. The tendency towards localization of manufacture, its organization on the basis of labour under centralized control, the adoption of the ‘joint-stock’ principle by sections of the commercial class and the entrepreneurial efforts at developing European-style shipping – all these indicated a degree of dynamism and responsiveness to market forces (Raychaudhuri).

Although the old commercial centres of Surat, Maslipatnam and Dhaka decline, colonial port cities like Bombay, Calcutta and Madras arose in their place. Similarly the decline of Mughal capitals, Delhi and Agra, was compensated by the rise of regional capitals, including Lucknow, Hyderabad, various Maratha cities, and Seringapatam. Thus Jalal and Bose argue that the level of urbanization was clearly higher in 1800 than a century before. Despite Maratha raids and Alivardi’s extortions, the real decline in Bengal’s economy, according to Raychaudhuri, was a post-Plassey and even post-1813 phenomenon. Sushil Chaudhuri argues that Bengal provides a classic model of how a country slipped from prosperity under indigenous rule to decline under alien domination.

Chaudhuri writes that the thesis of political disorder and economic crisis in pro-Plassey Bengal is untenable. Bengal prospered under the stable Nawabi regime, despite the general breakdown of law and order that engulfed most parts of the erstwhile Mughal Empire in the early 18th century. Even in the mid-18th century cotton textiles, silk and sugar industries remained vigorous. Chaudhuri argues that it was this very prosperity, not its decline or political instability that made its conquest so lucrative to the Europeans. After the conquest, the British became the virtual rulers of Bengal. The traditional trade of Asian merchants was eliminated as were traditional industries ruined by the Company’s exploitation, and the pre-Plassey prosperity of Bengal evaporated in the face of ruthless exploitation and impoverishment of the province under the aegis of the Company and its servants.

On the whole the Indian economy in the 18th century remained a traditional agrarian one with dominant subsistence sectors coexisting and partly interacting with a complex and sophisticated world of commerce, manufactures and credit (Baychaudhuri). India’s economic situation was not comparable to Western Europe on the eve of the Industrial Revolution: an agricultural revolution was absent while her technology had been stagnant for centuries. Moreover merchant control over production was quite limited by contemporary European standards. On the whole it is unlikely that a spontaneous movement towards industrialisation existed in mid-18th century India. However as Sushil Chaudhuri’s penetrating analysis of Bengal reveals, the Indian economy was still better-off compared to the pronounced economic backwardness under British domination. Once the British had entrenched themselves, Indian intermediary capital was quickly reduced to an inferior position. The British now resorted to a form of ‘conquistador imperialism’ (Jalal and Bose) which was a major causal factor of early 19th century economic stagnation.

Finally in the sphere of culture, India in the 18th retained its cultural vitality despite the fading of Mughal grandeur. The tendency was towards greater richness of religious and cultural traditions rather than homogeneity’ (Bayly). Devotional cults remained popular among the Hindus and Muslims and were patronised by regional rulers. For instance the Marathas supported the old shrine of Sheikh Muinuddin Chisti at Ajmer important innovations took place within the high traditions of Hinduism and Islam. The rationalistic branch of Shia jurisprudence achieved a high level of sophistry at Awadh. The migration of southern Brahmins to Benaras infused new life into the Hindu philosophy of the North-South Indian classical music took shape in the courts of the Carnatic in the 18th century. The Kangra, Bundi and various Rajput schools of painting represented a fresh departure from Mughal miniature painting. Though sectarian conflicts were not entirely absent, the 18th century was distinguished more by amity than animosity (Jalal and Bose).

The literary life of this period was distinguished by the spread of Urdu language and revival of Malayalam literature. 18th century Kerala witnessed the development of Kathakali literature, drama and dance. Kunchan Nambiar the poet-laureate of Kerala, and Dayaram one of the great lyricists of Gujarat, lived at this time. Tayaumanavar was one of the best exponents of sittar poetry in Tamil. In Assam, literature developed under the patronage of the Ahom kings. Warris Shah composed ‘Heer Ranjha’, the famous romantic epic in Punjabi. Shah Abdul Latif, Sachal and Sami were the great Sindhi poets of the age.

To conclude then, from the issues discussed above, it is evident that the predominant 19th century view of the 18th century as a period of political anarchy, economic decline and social decay, between the Mughal and British empires, is in dire need of revision. Recent research and fresh evidence have helped to dissolve some of the hardiest perennials of pre-colonial historiography with respect tot he ‘Dark Age’ of Indian history. As Ayesha Jalal and Sugata Bose point out: “From a balanced angle of vision the 18th century does not appear any more as a dark valley in the shadow of towering empire. What emerges is a mixed scenario of shadow and light, with high points and low points, continuity as well as change”.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

  • Bayly, C.A. – Rulers, Townsmen and Bazars: North Indian Society in the Age of British Expansion, 1770-1870.
  • Bose, S. and Jalal, A. – Modern South Asia : History, Culture, Political Economy
  • Chaudhury, S. – From Prosperity to Decline, Eighteenth Century Bengal
  • Marshall, P.J. – The Eighteenth Century
  • Raychaudhuri, T. – The Mid-Eighteenth Century Background (in CEHI)
  • Stein, S. and Subramanyam, S. (ed.) – Institutions and Economic Change in South Asia.
  • Subramanyam, S. – Merchants, Markets and the Colonial State in Early Modern India