The Role of the Wazir: The Mughal Prime Minister
The wazir was the chief minister of the Mughal emperor and the head of the imperial diwan or finance and general administration. The position was, in theory, the most powerful single office in the empire after the emperor himself, and the wazir was expected to coordinate the work of the other high ministers, to advise the emperor on policy, to supervise the assessment and collection of revenue, and to act as the emperor’s deputy in the routine business of government. In practice, the actual power of the wazir varied greatly from reign to reign, and the office underwent a long decline from the eighteenth century onward as the later Mughals reduced the position to a largely ceremonial role. This page treats the position, the duties, the relationship with the emperor, the most famous holders, the decline, and the symbolic significance. The broader administrative framework is surveyed in the Mughal administration overview, and the bureaucratic apparatus that the wazir supervised is examined in the Mughal bureaucracy page.
The Position
The title of wazir derives from the Arabic root w-z-r, meaning to bear a burden, and the wazir was conceived, in the Perso-Islamic political tradition, as the man who bore the burden of administration on behalf of the sovereign. The institution had a long pre-Mughal history. The Abbasid caliphs had employed wazirs of enormous power, and the Delhi Sultanate had elevated the office to the highest rank in the sultanate’s administrative hierarchy. The Mughal wazir inherited the conventions of both traditions and combined them with the distinctively Timurid-Mughal practice of a personal service nobility organized through the mansabdari system.
The wazir’s formal position in the Mughal court was that of the head of the diwan-i-kul or imperial diwan, the body of high finance and revenue officers. He was the channel through whom the other ministers, the mir bakhshi of the military administration, the sadr-us-sudur of religious affairs, the qazi-ul-quzat of justice, and the mir saman of the household, communicated with the emperor. The wazir was expected to attend the durbar every day, to present the revenue and expenditure accounts to the emperor, and to receive and convey the emperor’s orders on administrative matters. In the reign of Akbar the wazir was also frequently a member of the inner circle of advisers, the jagir aur sazawalat of the kitab khana, and the intimate council of the emperor.
The Duties
The duties of the wazir fell into four broad categories. The first was general administration, including the supervision of the provincial governors, the faujdars of the districts, the qazis of the cities, and the long chain of subordinate officers. The wazir was the chief inspector of the provincial administration, and the ghisibarda or inspection officers who toured the provinces reported to him as well as to the emperor. The second was finance: the supervision of the imperial treasury, the audit of provincial revenue accounts, the management of the jagir assignments of the mansabdari system, and the conduct of the imperial household’s finances. The third was public works: the construction and maintenance of roads, bridges, canals, caravansarais, and imperial buildings. The fourth was the coordination of policy: the framing of proposals to be put before the emperor in diwan or in the inner council, the consultation with senior nobles and ministers, and the implementation of imperial decisions.
The wazir’s authority was, in theory, delegated and revisable. The emperor could at any time issue orders directly to the provincial governors, the bakhshis, the qazis, or the household officers, bypassing the wazir, and the practice of bypassing the wazir became more common in the later reigns. The wazir’s recommendations, even when formally accepted, were subject to the emperor’s review, and the farman by which imperial decisions were conveyed to the provinces was issued in the emperor’s name, not in the wazir’s. The office was thus a high office of delegated authority rather than a constitutional prime-ministership in the modern sense, and the wazir’s effectiveness depended heavily on the personal confidence of the emperor.
The Relationship with the Emperor
The relationship between the wazir and the emperor was the central variable of the office. Under an active and powerful emperor, the wazir was essentially a chief executive. Under a weak, absent, or distracted emperor, the wazir could become the effective ruler of the empire. The reigns of Akbar and Jahangir illustrate the two patterns in turn. Under Akbar, the emperor’s personal attention was so sustained that the wazir was essentially a chief of staff, executing Akbar’s decisions with great effect. Under Jahangir, particularly in the later years of the reign, the wazir was at times the effective centre of government, and the political struggles between the wazir, the mir bakhshi, and the favourites of the emperor constituted a major feature of the reign.
The formal etiquette of the wazir’s relationship with the emperor was elaborate. The wazir approached the emperor only at the appointed hour, addressed him in the third person, and used a vocabulary of deference that explicitly compared the emperor to the deity. The wazir stood, sat, or walked in a prescribed relation to the throne, and the kornish or salutation, the taslim or prostration, and the sar-o-kar or greeting of the day were performed with minute care.
Famous Wazirs
The wazirs of the Mughal period form a roll of remarkable political figures. The earliest and in some ways the most powerful was Bairam Khan, the Turani nobleman who served as regent for the young Akbar from 1556 to 1560 and effectively held the office of wazir and commander-in-chief in combination. Bairam Khan’s fall in 1560, and the subsequent personal assumption of authority by Akbar, set the pattern for the rest of the reign, and Akbar did not appoint a wazir of comparable authority until late in his reign. The appointment of Abu’l Fazl, the principal biographer of Akbar, to the position of wazir in the 1590s marked a high point of intellectual influence in the office, although Abu’l Fazl’s tenure was brief and ended with his assassination in 1602 by the orders of Prince Salim, the future Jahangir.
Under Jahangir, the most important wazirs were Asaf Khan, the brother of Nur Jahan and father of Mumtaz Mahal, and Mahabat Khan. Asaf Khan served as wazir-i-kul from 1611 to 1621, and his tenure coincided with the effective rule of Nur Jahan. Mahabat Khan’s tenure, in the early 1620s, was marked by his dramatic attempt to seize the emperor at the jharokha-i-darshan and by his subsequent eclipse. Under Shah Jahan, the most important wazirs were Sa’dullah Khan, who served from 1645 to 1656, and his successor Mir Jumla II, and their tenure corresponded to the high water-mark of Mughal administrative efficiency.
Under Aurangzeb, the wazirs included Mir Jumla I, Asad Khan, and Qabil Khan. Mir Jumla I was the famous Deccan statesman who served briefly as wazir in 1663 before being sent to the Deccan as governor. Asad Khan served as wazir from 1679 to 1715, an exceptionally long tenure that spanned the last three decades of Aurangzeb’s reign and the early years of the crisis. Qabil Khan succeeded Asad Khan and held the office into the reign of Bahadur Shah. The decline of the office was, in essence, the decline of the empire itself, and the later wazirs were reduced to a small fraction of the authority of their predecessors.
The Decline in the Late Mughal Period
The decline of the wazir’s office in the eighteenth century was a consequence of several trends. The emperor’s effective power contracted as the actual government of the empire passed to the subahdars of the great provinces, the nizam of the Deccan, the nawab of Bengal, the nawab of Awadh, and the nawab wazir of Allahabad. The wazir in Delhi became the chief minister of a much-reduced court, and the imperial diwan had little to supervise. The mansabdari establishment, on which the wazir’s authority had rested, lost coherence as the jagir assignments were diverted to the new provincial centres, and the mansabdars themselves became increasingly hereditary and regional in character.
The office was, however, never formally abolished. The later Mughals down to the rebellion of 1857 continued to appoint wazirs, and the position retained a residual prestige as the formal head of the imperial administration. The successor states of the Mughals, including the nizams of Hyderabad, the nawabs of Awadh and Bengal, and the Nawab Wazirs of various principalities, retained the title in various forms, and the British, when they encountered the Mughal administrative tradition, treated the wazir as the principal Indian counterpart of their own prime minister.
Sources
- M. Athar Ali, Mughal Nobility under Aurangzeb (1966), ch. 2.