Understanding Mughal Administration

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The Mughal empire at its height governed most of the Indian subcontinent, a population probably above a hundred million, and a revenue base that made it one of the wealthiest states on earth. It did so without a standing civil service in the modern sense, without printed records, and with communications no faster than a horse. How it managed this is one of the more interesting administrative questions in world history, and the answer lies in a small number of institutional inventions, most of them consolidated during the reign of Akbar between 1556 and 1605.

The empire was founded when Babur, a Timurid prince displaced from Central Asia, defeated the Sultan of Delhi at Panipat in 1526. His son Humayun lost the territory to the Afghan ruler Sher Shah Suri and regained it only shortly before his death. This interruption mattered administratively, because Sher Shah's short reign produced reforms, including a standardised silver coin and systematic revenue measurement, which the Mughals adopted and extended rather than replaced. The silver rupaya and the copper dam remained the basis of Mughal currency, struck at mints across the empire to a consistent standard, and the reliability of that coinage is one of the underrated foundations of Mughal power.

Mansabs: ranking the entire elite

The central institution was the mansabdari system. Every officer of the empire, whether commanding cavalry, governing a province, running the imperial kitchens or serving as a scholar at court, held a mansab, a numerical rank. From Akbar's time the rank had two components: zat, which determined personal status and salary, and sawar, which specified how many cavalrymen the holder was obliged to maintain and produce for inspection.

Three features made this powerful. First, it was a single hierarchy encompassing military and civil functions, so there was no separate officer class and no separate bureaucracy with independent interests. Second, it was not hereditary. A mansab lapsed on the holder's death, and although sons of prominent nobles were usually granted ranks, they had to be granted afresh, which meant the emperor rather than the family controlled succession to office. Third, the nobility was deliberately mixed. Akbar recruited Turanis from Central Asia, Iranis from Persia, Indian Muslims, Afghans and, significantly, Rajputs and other Hindu chiefs, so that no single ethnic or religious bloc could dominate. Abul Fazl's Ain i Akbari, the administrative gazetteer compiled in the 1590s as part of the official history of the reign, lists the ranks and salaries in detail and remains the single most important source for how the system was supposed to work.

Officers were paid mainly not in cash but in jagirs, assignments of the revenue of specified lands. The jagirdar did not own the land and had no judicial authority over it; he had the right to collect an assessed sum, from which he paid himself and maintained his contingent. Crucially, jagirs were routinely transferred, often every three or four years, which prevented officers from building local power bases. This one design decision is what separates the Mughal system from European feudalism, with which it is often loosely compared.

Revenue, provinces and the paper trail

Land revenue was the empire's lifeblood, and its assessment was worked out under Akbar with the finance minister Raja Todar Mal. The most developed method, zabt, required measuring cultivated land with a standardised rod and a jointed chain, classifying it by how continuously it was cropped, and setting a cash demand per unit area for each crop based on average yields and average prices over the preceding decade. This ten year, or dahsala, settlement was introduced around 1580 in the core provinces. The state's share was substantial, conventionally about a third of the produce. Where measurement was impractical, other methods were used: crop sharing at harvest, or assessment by estimate and precedent. Regional schedules of rates were compiled.

Administration below the centre was territorial. The empire was divided into subas, provinces, each headed by a subadar responsible for order and military command, alongside a provincial diwan responsible for revenue who reported separately to the centre. This deliberate separation of the sword from the purse ran all the way down. Provinces were divided into sarkars and then into parganas. At pargana level the amil or amalguzar collected revenue, the qanungo kept the record of local rates and holdings, and in each village the patwari maintained accounts. The faujdar commanded troops for policing districts, and the kotwal was responsible for order, markets and registration in towns.

Holding this together was an unusually developed information system. Waqia navis and sawanih nigar, news writers and reporters, were posted in provinces and at the courts of subordinate rulers and sent regular despatches to the emperor, often independently of the local governor. Their reports, read at court, gave the centre a check on its own officers. Persian was made the language of administration by an order under Akbar in the early 1580s, which produced a professional scribal class, drawn heavily from Kayastha and Khatri communities, whose Persian literacy became a hereditary skill and who continued to staff administrations under successor states and, later, under the East India Company.

The system depended on intermediaries the histories often understate. Zamindars, hereditary local magnates with their own retainers and claims on the peasantry, collected much of the revenue in practice. The empire did not eliminate them; it registered them, gave them a percentage and used them, while occasionally suppressing those who became troublesome. This is the strongest argument against reading the Mughal state as a centralised absolutism. It was a centre that negotiated continuously with entrenched local power, and its reach varied enormously between the Doab, where measurement and control were real, and forested or hilly regions where they were nominal.

Historians disagree sharply about why it faltered. Irfan Habib's study of the agrarian system, published in 1963, argued that the revenue demand was pushed to a level that impoverished the peasantry and provoked rebellion. Athar Ali emphasised a crisis within the ruling class: as the empire expanded into the Deccan under Aurangzeb, the number of claimants to jagirs outgrew the productive assignments available, so ranks were granted without the land to support them. Later scholars, including Muzaffar Alam and Chris Bayly, shifted the argument, suggesting that what looked like imperial decline after 1707 was partly a redistribution of power to prosperous regional successor states such as Awadh, Bengal and Hyderabad, and to commercial and gentry groups whose fortunes were rising rather than falling. Nobody disputes that imperial authority collapsed; what it meant for the people governed remains genuinely open.

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