EMPIRES RISE AND WANE

      AT THE BEGINNING of the sixteenth century, a century before the story of British India really begins, Sikander Lodi, Sultan of Delhi, was hard at work building the city of Agra – which was to be his alternative capital – and on subduing local rivals. The Governor of the Punjab, nominally his subject, had attained something approaching independence, but had founded no proper state of his own and so the Moslem ruler of Afghanistan, Zahir-ud-din Muhammad (better known as Babur, ‘the Tiger’), could see that ‘the gates of Hind were swinging in the wind’.³¹ Babur was a Turco-Mongol prince, a descendant of the great Timur (Timur-i-Lenk, hence Tamerlane) who had himself invaded India, beating the Delhi sultan at the first battle of Panipat in 1399 and flattening his capital so thoroughly that it took almost a century to recover.

      India was not Babur’s first choice. He had been unable to retain his ancestral princedom of Fereghan, in Central Asia, and had thrice seized Samarkand, losing it each time. He took Kabul in 1504, and in 1525 he crossed the Indus near Attock, defeating Sultan Ibrahim Lodi at the second battle of Panipat on 20 April 1526. Although Babur was badly outnumbered, by perhaps ten to one, he planned his battle carefully, commandeering 700 carts which were lashed together as protection for his matchlock-armed infantry. When Lodi’s cavalry thundered up against the carts they were blown away by a storm of musketry, and Babur’s own cavalry, better disciplined and more manoeuvrable, sliced in against his opponent’s flanks and rear.³² By the end of the day the sultan was dead with at least 15,000 of his followers.

      Taking Delhi did not ensure the Mughal hold on northern India. Babur faced unrest amongst disaffected subordinates, who wanted to return home with their loot, and a serious counter-attack by a Rajput raja. Babur was a natural leader, and appealed to his men’s Islamic faith, declaring that the struggle was a jihad and reaffirming his own orthodoxy by ostentatiously abjuring wine, hitherto a great favourite. He won a major battle at Khanua, north-west of Agra, and when he died in 1530 he ruled a substantial kingdom centred on Agra. His eldest son, Humayan, lost the kingdom to a fresh wave of Afghan invaders, but, with a resilience that his father would have admired, he first retook Afghanistan and then, in 1555, regained Delhi. The following year Humayan was killed when he fell down the stairs of the observatory on the roof of his Delhi palace, and was succeeded by his son Akbar.

      The odds seemed stacked against the new monarch, who was only thirteen and was in any case away in the Punjab. But his guardian, Bayram Khan, counselled against withdrawal to Afghanistan, and the Mughals advanced on an army led by the Hindu minister Hemu, who had assumed the regal title Raja Vikramaditya. The armies met, yet again, at Panipat. Hemu’s men had 1,500 elephants, and he himself commanded from the howdah of the gigantic ‘Hawai’ (meaning ‘Windy’ or, more generously, ‘Rocket’).³³ The Mughals were wavering when Hemu was hit in the eye by an arrow: his army was seized by an unstoppable panic, and Hemu himself was quickly caught and beheaded.

      The third battle of Panipat enabled Akbar to establish what even Babur had never achieved, a secure Mughal empire. He enjoyed several advantages. Unlike his father and grandfather he had been born in India; he had that ‘common touch’ which enabled him to sample the opinion of the ‘dust-stained denizens of the field’; and although he remained a Moslem, he believed in toleration, and happily celebrated the Hindu festivals of Diwali and Dusshera. By the time he died in 1605, Akbar ruled Afghanistan, and the whole of India as far south as Bombay (then just a fishing village) in the west and Cuttack in the east. His great-grandson Aurangzeb extended Mughal authority further south, and by the time of his death in 1707 the empire included even Mysore.

      Under Aurangzeb, however, the empire had begun to tilt out of control. The Hindu Marathas, in the north-western Deccan, had grown increasingly troublesome under their charismatic leader Shivaji. And, just as significant in the long run, but for the moment a religious movement with no military power, were the Sikhs, whose spiritual leader Guru Nanak preached a monotheistic faith which linked all believers regardless of caste. Where Akbar had been tolerant, Aurangzeb was a zealot, and the cracks always inherent in a state based on Moslem rule over a Hindu majority gaped more widely: as the Mughal empire reached its fullest extent, it was increasingly vulnerable to internal dissension and foreign envy.

      Yet some of the institutions of Mughal India were to prove extraordinarily durable, and were to underlie British rule. Despite the lavishness of the court and its conspicuous display of jewels and precious metals, the prosperity of India hinged upon the land and its produce. All cultivatable land was likely to produce a surplus, beyond what the peasants who worked the fields required for their subsistence, which varied according to locality and type of crop. The jagir, or revenue assignment, of a piece of land could be assigned to a nobleman, official or military officer, who became its jagirdar. The zamindar – literally ‘landholder’ but in fact any sort of rural superior – enforced the collection of the surplus in a process which often left the ryot – the peasant farmer – at the bottom of the pyramid, with barely enough to survive on. Although, on the one hand, the stability achieved under the Mughals contributed to increased productivity, with provincial capitals and trading centres growing to encourage markets for luxury goods, on the other the efficiency of the government enabled the empire to sate its enormous appetite more easily by bearing down on the peasants.

      Akbar had been anxious to bring together potentially divergent interest groups, notably the broad mix of Afghans, Turks, and Rajputs who constituted his amirs, or nobility. The mansabari system gave all civil and military officers a rank in a formal hierarchy. They were expected to produce the number of cavalrymen specified by their position in the pecking order, and senior mansabdars had to produce elephants too. While junior officials in the Mughal bureaucracy were salaried, many mansabdars were given jagirs on which to support their retinues, in a system that looked not unlike the feudalism of Europe or Japan. It financed itself by coercion, with troops extracting the financial surplus which made up their pay, and the unlucky ryot toiling for a military establishment which, with its assorted dependants, may have comprised one-quarter of the population.

      Even when the empire was in decline it still retained ‘the barakat or charisma of an imperial title, the gradual emergence of the concept of Timurid royal blood, and the idea of the need for Delhi as a symbolic centre … ’.³⁴ The notion of legitimacy remained important, and many an Afghan chief sought to establish himself in the Mughal nobility, and to ‘live of his own’ with a title and an appropriate jagir; even if he had no intention of serving the emperor in any practical sense. And as the Mughal grip weakened in the eighteenth century, overmighty subjects, such as the Nizam of Hyderabad and the Nawab of Oudh, happily reinforced their own legitimacy by notional deference to an emperor who no longer controlled them.

      Imperial nobility retained its mystique long after the empire itself was pitifully attenuated. In 1800, Lieutenant James Skinner, serving as a mercenary with the Marathas against the Maharaja of Jodhpur, had taken possession of the latter’s camp, and helped himself to ‘two golden idols, with diamond eyes, which I immediately secured in my bosom, for fear they should be discovered’. He also picked up a quaint brass fish. His superior, Colonel Pohlmann, pressed him hard on the question of loot. But it turned out that their employer had no interest in the gold, although Skinner wisely took ‘good care to say nothing about the idols’. The Maratha chief ‘then explained