As they crossed the Vindhyas and entered the Marathi-speaking western Deccan, Durga Das and Prince Akbar encountered a political culture very different from the Rajput world they had left behind. By the seventeenth century, sovereign territories in Rajasthan were dominated by members of a single Rajput lineage that claimed descent from a common conqueror–ancestor. Land was parcelled out to sardars, who were hereditary leaders of sub-clans and loyal to the clan’s ruler, or raja, who was supposed to be the nearest legitimate descendant in direct male line from the state’s conqueror–ancestor, and the firstborn of his generation. Because all clan members were morally obliged to support the raja in times of war, and because by this time they had absorbed the martial ideology of the kshatriya warrior class, the constituent members of Rajput states could be readily mobilized for collective action, political or military. By ‘Alamgir’s day, moreover, most Rajput states had submitted to the Mughal empire, symbolized by a raja’s acknowledging the emperor’s right to apply a vermilion tika to his forehead – itself a Rajput political ritual – and by attending the Mughal court. The Rajputs’ hierarchically structured polities thus allowed the Mughals access to considerable military manpower, since the submission of any given raja implied that of his entire clan.
The political world of the Marathi-speaking Deccan was very different. Although united since at least the fourteenth century by a common vernacular language and a growing corpus of devotional literature, the mainly agrarian society of the western plateau was fractured politically into parganas, each one comprising twenty to 100 villages. Each pargana was controlled by a deshmukh, who adjudicated disputes, collected revenue and provided local security by maintaining his own retainers and controlling one or more of the hundreds of fortified strongholds that dot the western Deccan’s hilly landscape. However, unlike in Rajput states, where a single clan was displaced spatially across a large territory, and where all sardars swore loyalty to their raja and claimed descent from a common ancestor–warrior, a deshmukh’s political loyalty to anyone beyond his own desh, or land, was contractual, not kin-based, and was directed to whichever sultan or warlord could offer him the best deal. In politically volatile times, deshmukhs of the western Deccan looked more like ‘high-risk rural entrepreneurs and negotiators’ than paid bureaucrats.54 And the mid seventeenth century was an especially volatile time. As the sultanates of the western Deccan were rapidly disintegrating, Maratha deshmukhs formerly tied to those kingdoms had to make risky choices about whom to negotiate with and whose patronage to accept. By 1636 the Nizam Shahi sultanate of Ahmadnagar had already dissolved, its territories divided between the Mughals and the ‘Adil Shahi sultanate of Bijapur. Then, in the 1650s and 1660s, Bijapur itself entered a period of decay from which it never recovered.
Amidst this fragmented political environment a new polity emerged in the Marathi-speaking western plateau. Its founder, the charismatic and politically gifted Maratha chieftain Shivaji Bhonsle (1630–80), repeatedly used courage and savvy to outmanoeuvre his adversaries. His ancestral roots, like those of most deshmukh families, were embedded in the Deccan’s sultanate systems. Shivaji’s grandfather, Maloji, had been in the service of Malik Ambar, the powerful Habshi ex-slave and vazir of the Nizam Shahi sultanate who held off Jahangir’s repeated invasions of the Deccan between 1605 and 1626. Malik Ambar had given land in the western Deccan’s Sholapur and Pune region to Maloji’s son Shahji, who first tried to prop up the collapsing Nizam Shahi sultanate after Malik Ambar’s death, and then briefly entered Shah Jahan’s service as a mansabdar, before finally defecting to Bijapur in 1636. Leaving his wife and young son Shivaji on his ancestral lands near Pune, Shahji led several ‘Adil Shahi military expeditions deep into the southern Deccan, making Bangalore his base. Meanwhile, in 1647 the seventeen-year-old Shivaji used a stratagem to seize the fort of Torna. From the treasure found there he built the fort of Raigarh, from which Bijapur’s forces failed to dislodge him. Throughout the early 1650s, while the state of Bijapur was distracted by war with Golconda and the illness of its sultan, Shivaji quietly recruited ever more deshmukhs and their retainers to his cause. In 1656 he challenged and defeated in battle the powerful deshmukh Chandra Rao More, which gave him access to the Konkan coast. He also acquired more treasure, with which he built another fort, Pratapgarh, in the Western Ghats.
The following year, 1657, Shivaji had his first interaction with Aurangzeb, then the governor of the Mughal Deccan. Recognizing that the Mughal empire, not Bijapur, was the more significant player with which to negotiate, the ambitious Maratha entrepreneur offered his military services to the Mughals if the latter would recognize his rights over the forts he had already seized. Aurangzeb agreed to these proposals, but not to Shivaji’s audacious request for recognition of his control of coastal forts, such as Dabhol, that were still in ‘Adil Shahi hands. Aurangzeb was already wary of the gathering power of this independent Maratha chieftain. By 1659, when all of north India was preoccupied with the War of Succession, Shivaji commanded a cavalry of 7,000 and controlled some forty forts in the mountains and along the Konkan coast. Meanwhile, Bijapur seized this moment of turmoil over Mughal succession to reassert its grip over its western tracts. In September 1659 that sultanate sent one of its leading generals, Afzal Khan, to punish Shivaji. But the upstart chieftain treacherously killed Afzal Khan during a negotiating session between the two men, after which his cavalrymen poured over the plateau and seized many forts, including Panhala, one of Bijapur’s principal strongholds guarding the caravan routes between its capital and the Arabian Sea.55 Shivaji’s power and audacity had reached new heights.
Soon after Aurangzeb had won the throne, he sent his uncle, Shaista Khan, to reassert imperial authority in the Mughal Deccan. But in 1663 Shivaji made a daring night-time raid on the Mughal officer’s camp, during which the khan was wounded and his son was killed. An infuriated ‘Alamgir immediately recalled him. The next year Shivaji brazenly sacked the port of Surat, the Mughals’ principal window on the Arabian Sea. The emperor responded in 1665 by sending his most trusted general, Jai Singh, the Kachhwaha raja of Amber, to the Deccan. After cornering the Maratha chief in his stronghold of Purandar, Jai Singh negotiated an agreement with Shivaji whereby the latter would surrender twenty-three of his thirty-five forts; join Mughal campaigns against Bijapur; give the Mughals a portion of plundered wealth from future conquests of Bijapuri assets; and agree to his son Sambhaji enrolling in Mughal service. Suspecting that the Maratha leader might renege on these provisions, Jai Singh proposed, and ‘Alamgir agreed, that Shivaji and Sambhaji should personally appear at the imperial court in Agra. This set the stage for a bizarre spectacle. Wherever it was held, the Mughal court was carefully regulated with respect to protocol and hierarchy. On 12 May 1666, offended at having to stand in court among officers he considered beneath his stature (even though he held no Mughal rank at all), Shivaji made a public scene by falling to the floor, writhing like a wounded animal, then rising and audibly complaining, even threatening suicide.56 He was immediately hustled out of the audience hall and placed under house arrest, lucky to have escaped with his life for committing such an egregious breach of courtly etiquette. But within several weeks he and his son had managed to escape, probably by bribing guards. Disguised as religious mendicants, they made the long journey back to the Deccan on foot, dodging Mughal patrols.
Shivaji’s relations with the Mughals having reached an impasse, and with Bijapur weakened further when in 1672 a four-year-old boy succeeded to the throne, the Maratha chieftain resolved not only to declare his independence from both Bijapur and the Mughals, but also to fashion himself as an explicitly Hindu monarch, one of his titles being haindava-dharmoddarakla, ‘protector of the Hindu faith’.57 He would also be a kshatriya king, a warrior king according to India’s ancient scheme of social hierarchy, thereby raising his moral authority above that of his fellow Marathas and the region’s many deshmukh families. But this posed a problem. Shivaji’s public fiasco at ‘Alamgir’s court at Agra was more than a breach of courtly protocol. Rajputs standing in his midst perceived him as distinctly alien. Jaswant Singh, the raja of the Rathor Rajputs of Marwar, dismissed him as ‘a mere bhumia’ (petty landholder).58 To overcome such social barriers, Shivaji arranged for a celebrated Brahmin from Benares, Gagabhat, to come to Maharashtra and authenticate the claim that his family was descended from lapsed Rajputs of the Sisodiya clan who had migrated from Mewar centuries earlier. With that accomplished, in June 1674 he sponsored a lavish and carefully choreographed coronation ceremony at Raigarh, in which he had himself invested with the sacred thread of the twice-born castes, accompanied by elaborate purification rituals, Vedic verses and Brahmanical chants. While Shivaji sat on a golden throne covered with lion and tiger skins, Gagabhat raised the royal umbrella over his head, hailing him Śiva Chhatrapati. The extravagant ceremony, in which thousands of Brahmins were fed and given gifts, cost an estimated five million rupees.59 The new monarch then embarked on military campaigns to the peninsula’s deep south, seizing from Bijapur’s control Vellore and Jinji in the Tamil country. Although his reign lasted only five years, he had established Maratha authority over much of the Konkan coast, the western plateau and parts of south India, bequeathing to his male descendants a new, independent polity.
Such was the changed political environment that ‘Alamgir found upon his return to the Deccan in early 1682, twenty-four years after he had governed the region as a prince. In those earlier days, Bijapur had been under the firm rule of Sultan Muhammad ‘Adil Shah, who commanded the loyalty of most of his client Maratha deshmukhs. But now, the ‘Adil Shahi throne was occupied by a fourteen-year-old sovereign whose court was riven by feuding ethno-political factions, while Maratha deshmukhs formerly loyal to Bijapur had mostly gravitated to the Maratha state’s political orbit. Moreover, the possibility of capturing the rebel Akbar disappeared when the prince, shortly after his father’s arrival in the Deccan, sailed off to Iran, never to return to India. In these circumstances, the emperor endeavoured to mobilize Bijapur and Golconda into joining the Mughals against the Maratha kingdom. But, when his efforts failed owing to those kingdoms’ covert collusion with the Marathas, he instead trained his sights on the two sultanates. Bijapur was the first to fall to the Mughals, which it did in 1686 after an eighteen-month siege. A year later Golconda also fell, thanks to Mughal bribes to the fort’s gatekeepers. The territories of both states were swiftly annexed and parcelled out to Mughal officers as jagirs.
The Maratha state, ruled since 1680 by Shivaji’s first son Sambhaji, now felt the full brunt of Mughal arms. In early 1689 Sambhaji was captured, taken to ‘Alamgir’s camp and brutally executed. In the Maratha capital of Raigarh Shivaji’s second son, Rajaram, was hastily crowned, but the kingdom’s leaders, fearful for the young king’s security with Mughal armies nearby, arranged for his escape to distant Jinji in the Tamil country. Just months later, Raigarh too fell to ‘Alamgir. At this point it seemed that the Maratha state had been crushed. ‘Alamgir had captured all Shivaji’s remaining treasure, his resplendent golden coronation throne, all the government’s records, and the royal horses and elephants. Although Rajaram had eluded their grasp, the Mughals did capture Sambhaji’s nine-year-old son Shahu, whom ‘Alamgir confined in his mobile court, where he was well treated. He would be raised in Persianate Mughal culture but not converted to Islam, to be saved in the emperor’s chess game for future use as a political pawn, albeit a pawn who would ultimately become a king.
The year 1689 marked a turning point for Aurangzeb, for the empire and for India. With the two remaining Deccan sultanates extinguished, their territories annexed and the young Maratha state apparently nipped in the bud, ‘Alamgir could easily have returned to north India as a victorious conqueror and, after an absence of ten years, resumed governing the empire from its historic heartland. He could also have taken with him Shivaji’s magnificent golden throne as a trophy of war, not to mention the substantial treasure he had seized from Golconda. Some of his advisers actually recommended such a course of action. But in a momentous decision, ‘Alamgir rejected such advice. Not only was he determined to complete his subjugation of the Maratha state by seizing Jinji and capturing the fugitive Rajaram; he also coveted the rich lands of southern Karnataka and the Tamil country, long in a state of anarchy since the decline first of Vijayanagara, then of Bijapur. For the next eight years, 1690–98, he would direct the long, laborious operations at Jinji while camped in two sprawling tent cities, first at Galgali by the banks of the Krishna fifty-five kilometres south-west of Bijapur, and then at Machnur by the Bhima River between Sholapur and Pandharpur.
Dominating the Karnatak plain between Arcot and Tiruchirappalli, Jinji is an immense, triangular-shaped stronghold encompassing three steep and well-fortified hills encircled by walls stretching nearly five kilometres in circumference. The challenge of seizing it was given to Zulfiqar Khan, the same general who had brilliantly taken Raigarh. He was joined by the emperor’s youngest and favourite son, Kam Bakhsh. But it was a vexed enterprise. The Mughal army soon became bogged down outside Jinji’s massive walls, while Maratha cavalry sent down from Maharashtra frequently broke the long supply lines carrying funds, war matériel and vital communications from the emperor’s camp. Months passed, followed by years. In 1693, in what appeared a possible restaging of the 1657–9 War of Succession, rumours spread that the emperor was on the verge of death, or had already died. This tempted Kam Bakhsh to patch up a secret settlement with Rajaram and plan a takeover of the imperial army. But the plot was discovered and the prince was sent up to ‘Alamgir’s camp to be disciplined. While four more years passed with no progress at the siege of Jinji, the emperor endeavoured to draw Maratha chiefs away from the moribund Maratha state by offering them hefty mansabs in Mughal service. Many of them agreed; others alternated between Mughal and Maratha service, depending on which side could give them the better deal; still other Maratha families were divided in their loyalties, with different members joining opposing sides.
In late 1697 the Maratha cause revived when dispirited Mughal officers at Jinji, anticipating the need to accommodate the Marathas once the ageing emperor had died, quietly allowed Rajaram to slip out of the fort, which shortly thereafter fell to the Mughals.60 Reaching Maharashtra in early 1698, Rajaram began rebuilding his father’s state, establishing a new capital at Satara and mounting counter-attacks against the Mughals in the northern Deccan. But his efforts would be cut off by an early death, in 1700. Whereas several of his wives nobly committed the ancient rite of sati, hurling their bodies on the burning pyre of the deceased raja, two wives declined to do so, each one hoping that her infant son might succeed Rajaram as king. One of these wives was Tarabai, the proud and strong-willed daughter of Shivaji’s former commander-in-chief, Hambir Rao Mohite [see Fig. 21]. In the early 1690s, when Rajaram was besieged in distant Jinji, Tarabai, still a teenager, had remained in Maharashtra acquiring administrative skills under the tutelage of senior Maratha officials. Now, following Rajaram’s death, she boldly had the sacred thread ceremony performed for her four-year-old son, confirming his ritual status as a kshatriya warrior and revealing her intention to crown him king, with herself as regent. This she did in the remote hill fort of Vishalgarh. On hearing this news the Mughal camp was exultant. ‘Alamgir ordered the beating of drums, and his officers congratulated each other, convinced, records the chronicler Khafi Khan, ‘that it would not be difficult to overcome two young children and a helpless woman. They thought their enemy weak, contemptible, and helpless.’61
Though normally shrewd in evaluating his adversaries, ‘Alamgir completely misjudged whom he was facing. But not so his adversaries. Prominent Maratha deshmukhs now rallied around the twenty-five-year-old Tarabai, recognizing her as the most likely remnant of Shivaji’s family to salvage the kingdom’s sagging fortunes, despite her gender. The Hindu officer and news writer Bhimsen, then in the Deccan in ‘Alamgir’s service, bluntly stated that Tarabai ‘was a stronger ruler than her husband’, adding that after Rajaram’s death she ‘became all in all and regulated things so well that not a single Maratha leader acted without her order’.62 From nearby Goa, Portuguese officials referred to her as the ‘queen of the Marathas’.63 Even Khafi Khan, whose chronicle of ‘Alamgir’s reign glorifies the emperor, admitted that Tarabai showed great powers of command and government, which she had taken into her own hands. ‘She won the hearts of her officers,’ he wrote, ‘and for all the struggles and schemes, the campaigns and sieges of Aurangzeb up to the end of his reign, the power of the Mahrattas increased day by day.’64
Nor was Tarabai content with merely holding on to Maratha forts. Shortly before his death, her late husband Rajaram had marched out of Maharasthra into Khandesh and Berar, demanding in certain districts a quarter of the regular imperial revenues as protection money against plundering by his troops. Leaving local Mughal garrisons unharmed, Rajaram initiated a form of dual government in such districts, where the Mughals and Marathas effectively shared land revenues. Tarabai, in turn, built on this policy, expanding it geographically and streamlining it administratively. Very soon after Rajaram’s death she boldly sent Maratha armies on military expeditions deep into Mughal domains to the north, well beyond the Deccan. In 1700, even while allowing ‘Alamgir to seize some of her own forts, she dispatched 50,000 troops as far north as the Chanderi region in north-western Madhya Pradesh, nearly 1,000 kilometres from the Maratha headquarters in Satara. In 1702 she sent armies into Mughal Khandesh, Berar and Telangana. The next year she attacked cities in Khandesh and Malwa, and in 1706 her generals struck cities in Gujarat.65 These were not merely raids. As Khafi Khan notes, her plan was to ‘cast the anchor of permanence’ wherever Marathi armies penetrated. This she did by allocating revenue districts among Maratha administrators, establishing Maratha revenue collectors in conquered districts, and encouraging Maratha invaders to settle down in these districts with their families.66 Tarabai’s energetic leadership not only rescued the Maratha state from disintegration. In her northern invasions she sought to extend that state well beyond the Marathi-speaking Deccan. By striking deep into the Mughal heartland, she anticipated policies her Maratha successors would adopt later in the eighteenth century.
Meanwhile, ‘Alamgir’s armies continued to plod from fort to fort across the Deccan, trying to mow down the revived Maratha state one fort at a time. But the two sides were asymmetrically matched. Adapted to fighting pitched battles on the flat north Indian plain, ‘Alamgir’s huge armies lumbered across the plateau with their weighty artillery and heavy cavalry. In 1695 the Mughal camp at Galgali, by the Krishna, measured about fifty kilometres in circumference and contained 60,000 cavalry, 100,000 infantry, 50,000 camels, 3,000 elephants, 250 bazaars and another several hundred thousand servants, merchants and hangers-on.67 Theirs was hardly an agile or mobile fighting machine. After laboriously taking one fort, a Mughal army would move to another, only to have the first one fall to the Marathas again. Their adversaries, by contrast, avoided pitched battles in the open. Taking advantage of their homeland’s hilly terrain, the Marathas used guerrilla tactics that maximized the effectiveness of their swift, light cavalry, luring Mughal units into tight ravines, ambushing Mughal supply caravans and intercepting imperial communications.
The Mughal effort was plagued by other, internal problems. As ‘Alamgir approached his ninetieth year of age and his fiftieth year as emperor, many of his veteran generals were dying, leaving him with flattering upstarts much too intimidated by the stubborn octogenarian to dare suggest a change of policy. Petty quarrels and jealousies within his corps of commanders further reduced the Mughals’ effectiveness. In this dismal situation ‘Alamgir did what came naturally to him: instead of leaving field command to his generals, from 1699 to 1705 he personally oversaw many siege operations. Like the Fool in Shakespeare’s King Lear, who witnessed his aged lord rage on a barren heath and descend into madness, ‘Alamgir’s advisers seem to have understood the futility of it all. Bhimsen wrote, ‘Emperor Alamgir who is not in want of anything, has been seized with such a longing and passion for taking forts that he personally runs about panting for some heaps of stone [hill forts].’68
It was while conducting one of his siege operations – fruitlessly ‘panting for some heaps of stone’ – that the emperor, a lifelong workaholic, was finally forced to abandon active military campaigning. In early 1706, in the grip of a severe illness, he was loaded on to a palanquin and carried to the ancient fort of Ahmadnagar, which he declared his ‘journey’s end’. He died there the following year. Characteristically, he rejected the idea of a grand, ostentatious tomb of the sort that towered over the graves of all his Mughal ancestors save Babur. Instead, he arranged to be buried in a simple grave open to the sky in Khuldabad, a saintly graveyard near Daulatabad. In this final statement, spoken through the medium of architecture, the austere monarch asserted both his personal piety and his lifelong resolve to fashion a legitimacy – and now a legacy – firmly opposed to that of his father. If Shah Jahan had cultivated the aura of a resplendent king, notes one historian, ‘Alamgir cultivated one of a renunciate king69– a contrast captured for ever in his father’s Taj Mahal and in his own humble grave site.
In some ways ‘Alamgir’s career eerily echoed that of Sultan Muhammad bin Tughluq. A little more than three centuries before Prince Aurangzeb waged successful campaigns in the Deccan, adding new territories to the Mughal empire, Prince Ulugh Khan had led prolonged campaigns in the plateau, successfully adding large tracts of territory to the Delhi sultanate. In 1325 he returned to Delhi and promptly usurped the throne from his father, becoming Sultan Muhammad bin Tughluq. In 1658 Prince Aurangzeb would follow the same path to supreme power. And just as Muhammad bin Tughluq returned to the peninsula towards the end of his reign, never again to see Delhi and destined to spend his last years doggedly trudging from camp to camp, taking personal command of day-to-day military operations while pursuing rebels who ever eluded his grasp, ‘Alamgir suffered the same fate. Both men died in the field, far from Delhi. And for both men, prolonged absence from Delhi where day-to-day administration lacked their personal supervision, combined with the drain on the state’s treasury owing to costly wars waged far to the south, placed severe stresses on the fiscal and ultimately political stability of their respective empires. As Mark Twain reputedly said: ‘History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.’
‘ONE POMEGRANATE TO SERVE A HUNDRED SICK MEN’
The last fifteen years of ‘Alamgir’s reign had seen a bidding war between the emperor and Maratha leaders to court and win the service of powerful deshmukhs. Whereas the Marathas could appeal to the legacy of Shivaji or loyalty to the land and culture of Maharashtra, ‘Alamgir offered the prestige that came with serving an India-wide empire, and, especially, a high rank in imperial service. For each new mansab rank, officials in the Mughal revenue bureaucracy had to find, somewhere in the empire, one or more jagirs whose revenue matched a mansabdar’s assigned pay. As long as the empire kept acquiring more taxable territory through conquest, there was always land to be made available for assignment as jagirs. This additional land could then be granted either to mansabdars who had been promoted to higher mansabs or to people newly recruited into the nobility.
In the 1680s, ‘Alamgir had induced many powerful nobles of Bijapur and Golconda to abandon those sultanates by offering them high mansabs in Mughal service. By 1691 such nobles comprised fully 160 out of the total of 575 Mughal officers holding mansabs of 1000 zat or higher. That amounted to 28 per cent of the empire’s upper nobility.70 Initially, these men were given jagirs in the Deccan itself, but this proved inadequate since the expected revenue for the region had been inflated far beyond its actual capacity. Moreover, the land itself had been ravaged by decades of warfare, as armies devoured the harvest of fields like swarms of locusts. Nor had newly conquered lands in the Karnatak, or the southern Deccan, yet been brought under Mughal control. As a result, it became increasingly necessary to accommodate newly recruited Deccani nobles by assigning them wealth-producing jagirs in north India. But this created further problems. Because the imperial domain had not been expanding in north India since ‘Alamgir had permanently moved to the Deccan, there were few fresh jagirs to distribute to these new nobles. The only practical solution was to reduce or revoke altogether jagirs held by the empire’s old, established nobility. However, any policy that effectively disenfranchised older sections of the nobility to accommodate new nobles amounted to ‘robbing Peter to pay Paul’. In short, there was insufficient unclaimed land to meet the growing demand for jagirs owing to the recruitment of new nobles. Or, as the emperor repeatedly, and poetically, wrote on the registers of those claiming new salaries, ‘There is only one pomegranate to serve a hundred sick men [yek anar, sad bimar].’71
This situation worsened after Bijapur and Golconda had been conquered and, after 1689, when ‘Alamgir began recruiting Marathas by promising them lucrative mansabs as inducements for enlisting in Mughal service. Here again the policy met with success, but only in a narrow sense. In the final twenty-five years of his reign, Marathas comprised 17 per cent of the empire’s upper nobility, actually exceeding the Rajputs, who constituted 12.6 per cent.72 But the influx of these men created problems. First, their loyalty was unreliable. ‘Alamgir evidently thought he could deal with Marathas just as Mughal emperors since Akbar had dealt with Rajputs. But, in contrast to the Rajputs, the submission of a Maratha chieftain did not imply that of his entire clan. Furthermore, a deep cultural divide separated north India’s Persianized martial classes from the warrior elites of the Deccan, most prominently Telugu nayakas and Maratha deshmukhs. This was not a religious issue. Many Rajputs disparaged Maratha chiefs, just as Jaswant Singh had dismissed them as ‘mere bhumias’.
The greater problem with ‘Alamgir’s policy, however, was structural. To pay for the Deccan wars, ‘Alamgir classified much of the Deccan’s conquered territory as crown land (khalisa), whose revenues went directly to the treasury and not to mansabdars in the form of jagirs. In north India, fewer jagirs were available because so many of them had already been given to Deccanis. All this placed severe strain on the military and fiscal systems and, ultimately, the political system. As jagirs became increasingly scarce, it grew more difficult to sustain the established practice of regularly transferring mansabdars every three or four years. Once a mansabdar received his transfer notice, he might have to wait four or five years before the revenue bureaucracy could find another jagir for him, which meant four or five years without a revenue stream with which to pay his troops.73 To expedite the transfer process, wealthier and more established mansabdars could employ agents to lobby bureaucrats on their behalf, or simply resort to bribing such functionaries. But mansabdars who lacked the means to hire agents or bribe officials were left with nothing. In this way corruption crept into an administrative machine that had operated relatively smoothly ever since Akbar’s day. The emperor was well aware of this problem: late in his reign he took the radical step of banning altogether the recruitment of new mansabdars.
But by then it was too late. Although the system did not totally collapse in ‘Alamgir’s reign, all the factors leading to such an outcome were firmly in place. Ultimately, established nobles would simply ignore orders for the transfer of their jagirs, since they knew very well that, if they relinquished their hold on their existing jagirs, new ones might never be assigned to them. Within a decade of the emperor’s death, orders of jagir transfers had become mere sheets of paper, as rulers far less disciplined than ‘Alamgir continued granting mansabs with no corresponding jagir to pay for the rank.74 In short, the entire fiscal–political structure was approaching collapse.