The Jagirdari Crisis and the Breakdown of the Mughal Revenue Assignment System
The jagirdari crisis was the most fundamental structural problem of the late Mughal empire. From the late seventeenth century onward, the supply of assignable land-revenue tracts failed to keep pace with the rising number of imperial officers entitled to draw income from them, producing a chronic shortage of revenue assignments, the rise of the revenue farmer, and the steady erosion of the imperial centre’s grip on the provincial and local elites. The crisis is examined here as a self-contained phenomenon, with particular attention to the bejagir problem, the ijarah, the transfer of assignments, and the regional revenue arrangements, including those of Satara, that emerged as the system collapsed. The fiscal underpinnings of the system are treated in the broader economic decline of the Mughal Empire and in the treatment of the mansabdari system.
The Logic of the Mansabdari-Jagirdari System
The Mughal state did not pay its officers in cash from a centralised treasury. It paid them, in the main, by assigning to each officer the right to collect the land revenue of a specified area. The assignment was called a jagir, the holder of the assignment was a jagirdar, and the area assigned was typically a mahal or a cluster of mahals producing a defined annual revenue. The fiscal logic of the system is examined in the land revenue administration page, but the essentials must be recalled here. A jagirdar was expected to maintain a body of cavalry, retainers, and administrative staff proportional to the value of his mansab, and to remit a portion of the revenue collected to the imperial treasury after deducting his own emoluments and the costs of administration.
In its mature form under Akbar the Great, the system was based on a careful balance between the size of the imperial service and the supply of revenue-producing land. The genius of the arrangement lay in two technical devices: the deliberate separation of an officer’s home province from his assigned jagir, and the periodic transfer of jagirs from one officer to another. Both devices were designed to prevent the accumulation of durable local power by any single officer, and to ensure that the great mansabdars remained, in effect, imperial servants rather than provincial magnates.
The Growth of Mansabdari Ranks
By the end of the reign of Aurangzeb, the balance had broken down. The number of mansabdars entitled to jagirs had grown significantly over the seventeenth century, partly because of the natural expansion of the imperial service, partly because of the multiplication of ranks and the splitting of higher ranks into sub-grades, and partly because the Deccan campaigns had produced a significant demand for additional military and administrative officers. The conquest of the sultanates of Bijapur (1686) and Golconda (1687) added territory and mansabdars in abundance, but did not add a matching supply of jagirs capable of supporting them. The Deccan-i-fauj and the recently conquered provinces were absorbed on a system of military occupation rather than systematic revenue assessment, and the revenues they produced were rarely sufficient to support the jagirs assigned to them.
The principal measure of the resulting crisis was the bejagir phenomenon. A bejagir was a mansabdar who held a jagir that produced less revenue than the value of his mansab. In the mature system of Akbar, bejagirs had been exceptional and had carried a heavy stigma. By the eighteenth century they had become the rule. The bejagir problem meant that an officer could not be paid at his nominal rank, that he could not be expected to maintain the cavalry and retainers appropriate to his rank, and that he had a powerful incentive to extract additional resources from the cultivators and the local population by whatever means were available. The phenomenon is treated in more detail in the broader economic decline of the Mughal Empire and is a key part of the crisis of the mansabdari system.
The Transfer of Jagirs
The state’s response to the shortage of jagirs was a series of increasingly desperate expedients. The most important of these was the rapid and frequent transfer of jagirs from one officer to another. The transfer, originally designed as a discipline to prevent the rooting of officers in particular provinces, became a fiscal mechanism: by transferring an officer from a productive jagir to a less productive one, the state could redirect the difference between the value of the mansab and the revenue of the new jagir into the imperial treasury. The transfers, however, had the opposite of their intended effect on the system as a whole. A jagirdar who expected to be transferred every two or three years had no incentive to invest in the long-term productivity of his jagir, to maintain irrigation works, or to protect the cultivators from the exactions of his own subordinates. The agrarian productivity of many provinces declined as a direct consequence, and the jagirdars resorted to increasingly oppressive methods of revenue extraction in the short time they held a particular jagir.
The transfers also weakened the loyalty of the mansabdari class to the imperial centre. An officer who was moved from Gujarat to Bengal to the Deccan in rapid succession had little reason to feel a personal attachment to the dynasty, and the court complaints of the late Mughal period are full of the grievances of jagirdars transferred out of productive jagirs into unproductive ones. The more general crisis of the imperial service in the late empire is examined in the Mughal administration overview.
The Rise of the Ijarah
The most important structural response to the bejagir crisis was the rise of the ijarah, or revenue farming. The ijarah was a contract by which the right to collect the revenue of a specified area was let, for a fixed sum, to a contractor, who then retained the difference between the contracted sum and the revenue he could actually extract. The system, in embryonic form, had existed under Akbar and Jahangir as a device for dealing with the revenue of distant or recently conquered territories. By the late seventeenth century, the ijarah had become the standard method of revenue collection across considerable parts of the empire, and the ijaratdar, the revenue farmer, had become a major figure in the local economy.
The political consequences of the rise of the ijarah were major. The revenue farmer had no interest in the long-term productivity of the territory he farmed, and he had every incentive to extract the maximum revenue in the minimum time. The ijaratdars frequently collaborated with the jagirdars in the extraction of revenue, and the distinction between the two became increasingly blurred. The ijaratdar in many regions became a permanent local figure, a proto-landlord whose descendants would emerge in the nineteenth century as the zamindars of the colonial period. The transformation of the agrarian elite in the late Mughal period is one of the major themes of the economic decline of the Mughal Empire.
The Satara and Other Local Arrangements
The regional variation in the late Mughal revenue system was major, and a brief consideration of the Satara arrangement illustrates the general pattern. Satara, in the western Deccan, had been the seat of the Maratha royal house after the death of Shivaji’s son Rajaram, and the Mughal conquest of the region in Aurangzeb’s campaigns had left a complex residue of Maratha and Mughal revenue claims. The Maratha sardeshmukhs and deshmukhs, the traditional local magnates, retained major de facto control of the land, and the Mughal revenue authorities were forced to negotiate arrangements that recognised the local balance of power. Similar arrangements emerged in the Carnatic, in Bengal under Murshid Quli Khan, in Awadh, and in the Punjab.
The Bengal arrangements, in particular, were of major importance. Murshid Quli Khan, the early eighteenth-century Mughal governor of Bengal, conducted a major reorganisation of the revenue system in the province and developed arrangements that depended heavily on the cooperation of the local Hindu and Muslim zamindars. The Bengal arrangement, which has been examined in the broader economic decline of the Mughal Empire, is examples of the local reorganisation of the revenue system in the late Mughal period.
The Connection to the Decline of the Empire
The connection between the jagirdari crisis and the broader decline of the Mughal empire was direct. The crisis produced a fiscal crisis: as more and more mansabdars were paid in assignments that did not produce enough revenue, the imperial treasury was forced to make up the difference from its own resources, and the financial pressure on the centre grew. The crisis produced a political crisis: as the jagirdars were forced to extract increasing amounts from the local population, the alienation of the cultivators grew, and the legitimacy of the imperial order declined. The crisis produced a military crisis: as the jagirdars were unable to maintain the cavalry and retainers appropriate to their mansab, the military effectiveness of the imperial service declined, and the empire became progressively less able to project force against its enemies.
The crisis is connected to the rise of the Marathas, the rise of the Sikhs, the British East India Company’s expansion, and the rebellion of 1857. The broader context of the empire’s later centuries is treated in the Mughal decline overview, the Mughal history overview, and the Mughal administration overview.
Sources
- Muzaffar Alam, The Crisis of Empire in Mughal North India (1986), ch. 3.
- M. Athar Ali, Mughal Nobility under Aurangzeb (1966), ch. 5.