some reflections on the town and country in mughal india

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Some Reflections on the Town and Country in Mughal India Author(s): K. N. Chaudhuri Source: Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 12, No. 1 (1978), pp. 77-96Published by: Cambridge University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/311823Accessed: 15-04-2015 06:53 UTC

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Modern Asian Studies, I2, I (1978), pp. 77-96. Printed in Great Britain.

Some Reflections on the Town and Country in Mughal India

K. N. CHAUDHURI

School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London

THERE can be few aspects of Indian studies more neglected than that of historical geography. Within this larger area of neglect, urban history occupies a special place. The indifference with which Indian historians have approached the urban heritage of the subcontinent is all the more difficult to understand because to contemporary European visitors, the merchants and other travellers, the towns and cities of Mughal India held a profound fascination. From the time of Tome Pires and his highly perceptive Suma Oriental down to the end of the eighteenth century, stories of Indian travels and the accompanying descriptions of Mughal urban life continually entertained the popular literary audience. Not all of them understood or reported accurately what they saw. As the Scottish sea captain and country trader, Alexander Hamilton, who had an unrivalled knowledge of the sea ports and the coastal towns of India, pointed out with some candour, one great misfortune which attended the western travellers in India was their

ignorance of the local languages.1 But the manifest contrast between the physical appearance of the European cities and those of Asia

provoked some considerable and sensitive analysis of the nature of the urban processes in the two continents. Perhaps the most able and

penetrating comments on the Mughal political, economic, and civic order came from the pen of the Dutch merchant, Francisco Pelsaert, and the French physician, Fran5ois Bernier. In his open letter to M. de la Mothe le Vayer written in 1663, Bernier characteristically began with the statement: 'I know that your first inquiries on my return to France will be respecting the capital cities of this Empire. You will be anxious to learn if Delhi and Agra rival Paris in beauty, extent, and number of inhabitants.' He went on to say that in treating of the

This paper was originally read at the Seminar on 'The City in South Asia' organized by the Centre of South Asian Studies, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. I should like to thank the participants of the Seminar for their helpful comments.

1 Alexander Hamilton, A New Account of the East Indies, ed. Sir William Foster, 2 vols (London, 1930), I, 7. First published in Edinburgh in 1727.

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K. N. CHAUDHURI

beauty of these towns, he was sometimes astonished to hear the con-

temptuous manner in which Europeans in the Indies spoke of these and other places. They complained that the buildings were inferior in

beauty to those of the western world, forgetting that different climates

required different styles of architecture. What was useful and proper in Paris, London, or Amsterdam would be quite out of place in Delhi.

According to Bernier, if it were possible for any one of those great capitals to change place with the metropolis of the Indies, it would become necessary to throw down the greater part of the city, and to rebuild it on a totally different plan.2 If we have here the rudiments of an ecological theory of the eastern city, there was practically nothing comparable either on points of information or theoretical analysis in the purely indigenous historical sources. Even Khafi Khan, one of the ablest of the Mughal historians, referred in the most general terms to the numerous towns and cities whose history had such a critical role to

play in his political narrative. Consider the following passage de-

scribing the famous destruction of Sirhind in 1708 by the Sikhs under Banda: 'Sirhind was an opulent town, with wealthy merchants, bankers, and tradesmen, men of money, and gentlemen of every class; and there were especially learned and religious men in great numbers

residing there. No one found the opportunity of saving his life, or wealth, or family.'3 For more than a century Sirhind had been one of the most flourishing towns of the Empire, producing high-quality cotton textiles and containing more than 300 mosques and many dargas and serais. No contemporary civic records of the town, of any nature, commercial, religious, or administrative, are known to have survived to this day.

The urban history of any society can be written from two different points of view. There is first of all the particular approach. Each town or city is treated in terms of-its unique history. Even when such urban centres are grouped together and treated collectively the time scale is

all-important. The factors responsible for their rise and fall, prosperity and depression, remain strictly historical as discrete points on a temporal plane. The second approach is to consider the totality of the political, economic, and social order which sustains the urban localities as viable entities. It is of course a truism that no town or city can exist by itself. The great past debates among urban sociologists on the rural-urban

2 FranCois Bernier, Travels in the Mogul Empire, A.D. I656-1668, ed. A. Constable (London, I891), pp. 239-40.

3 Muhammad Hashim, Khafi Khari, Muntakhabu-l Lubab, translation printed in Sir H. M. Elliot and J. Dowson, The History of India as Told by its own Historians, 8 vols (London, I877), Vol. 7, pp. 414-I5.

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TOWN AND COUNTRY IN MUGHAL INDIA

continuum testify to the theoretical difficulties of working with polar types as approximation to the reality.4 Similar problems also arise from the attempt to create a synthetic construct such as Max Weber's urban

'community' or Sjoberg's 'preindustrial city'. On the basis of a priori reasoning Weber concluded that in order to qualify as a full urban

community a settlement must be characterized by fortifications, markets, judicial courts administering autonomous laws, a related form of association, and at least partial political autonomy.5 Since these urban features were distilled into abstraction from the European historical experience, it naturally follows that the full civic community occurs only in the occident. The criticism of circular argument also

applies to Sjoberg's statement that 'in their structure, or form, preindustrial cities-whether in medieval Europe, traditional China, India, or elsewhere-resemble one another closely and in turn differ

markedly from modern industrial-urban centres'.6 For this statement to be valid one needs a strict definition of what constitutes a modern industrial-urban centre and a method for dealing with the deviations from the pure types. For the historian such problems can be avoided by taking the historical features of urban areas as given and concentrating the analysis on their functional role within a larger social framework.

An urban paradigm of Mughal India must have as its central point of inquiry the question why do these cities and towns exist and what function do they perform?7 Unlike post-Industrial Revolution cities, there are no compelling technological reasons for the pre-modern urban centres to develop as major areas of economic production. In

many cases Indian towns of course contained a substantial artisan

population and were the seats of many craft industries. But it is in- correct to say that their economic life depended on the concentration of such activities.8 The urban location of craft skills must be explained on grounds other than the constraints of production functions. At the

4 See R. Redfield and M. B. Singer, 'The Cultural Role of Cities', Economic Develop- ment and Cultural Change, Vol. 3 (I954), 53-73; F. Benet, 'Sociology Uncertain: the Ideology of the Rural-Urban Continuum', Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 6, No. I (October I963), I-23; Oscar Lewis, 'Some perspectives on Urbanization with Special Reference to Mexico City', printed in A. Southall (ed.), Urban Anthro- pology: Cross-cultural Studies of Urbanization (London and New York, I973), pp. 125-38.

5 Max Weber, The City, ed. Don Martindale and G. Neuwirth (New York, I958), pp. 80-1.

6 G. Sjoberg, The Preindustrial City (Glencoe, Ill., i960), pp. 4-5. 7 For a theoretical discussion of these points, see H. M. Mayer, 'A Survey of

Urban Geography', printed in P. M. Hauser and L. F. Schnore, (eds), The Study of Urbanization (New York, I965).

8 For the emphasis on the industrial function of Mughal towns, see H. K. Naqvi, Urban Centres and Industries in Upper India 1556-1803 (Bombay, I968), p. I35.

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K. N. CHAUDHURI

other extreme is the view that the Asian city was primarily an administrative, political, and cultural phenomenon. There seems to be a

general consensus among many western observers of the Indian city that it was essentially an expression of national political will, a symbol of legitimacy, and an upholder of what Redfield and Singer call the 'Great Tradition'.9 Commercial and industrial functions are taken to have played only an insignificant role in the formation of such cities, and

Sjoberg goes so far as to say that he could find no instance of significant city-building through commerce alone.10 As a contrasting viewpoint, one might juxtapose the comment made by John Henry Grose when he visited Surat, the great Mughal port, in the middle of the eighteenth century: 'the City on the bank [of the river] is perhaps one of the

greatest instances in the known world, of the power of trade to bring in so little a time wealth, arts, and population to any spot where it can be

brought to settle'.1 A possible explanation for the functional existence of the pre-modern towns may be found in the theory of central places. Originally developed as an analysis of urban locations, the theory of central places has been recently extended to examine the concept of

exchange in human society and early settlements. In a penetrating essay Colin Renfrew makes the suggestion that every civilization, if it is to advance from the condition of isolated and self-contained chiefdoms, must have a permanently functioning central place.12 The emergence of central places is not the same as the origin of urbanization, but the

process provides the necessary condition for it. The key to Renfrew's

argument is the notion that exchange of goods or of information can take place at two levels, that of reciprocity and redistribution. If there are N number of communities which wish to exchange one another's

surplus products, at the reciprocal level there will be a series of trans- N.N.-i.

actions and journeys given by the formula But if there is a 2

system of redistribution located at a central place, the members of the various communities need to perform only a single journey to the latter and their total number will be just N-i. It is obvious that the direct savings on transaction costs are very substantial in case of central places serving as points of redistribution and the external economies at such centres provide a powerful impetus to further growth

9 Redfield and Singer, 'The Cultural Role of Cities', p. 60. 10 Sjoberg, The Preindustrial City, p. 76. 1 John Henry Grose, A Voyage to the East Indies, 2 vols (London, 1772), I, 98.

12 Colin Renfrew, 'Trade as Action at a Distance: Questions of Integration and Communication', printed in J. A. Sabloff and C. C. Lamberg-Karlovsky (eds), Ancient Civilization and Trade (Albuquerque, New Mexico, i975), pp. 3-59.

80




and conglomeration. The corollary of this particular theory of a redistributive central place is the necessity for political order which

provides the security, the storage facilities, and the contractual con- ventions for transactions involving a time delay. These services must be

supported by taxation, and the growth of political power on the part of the central authority may well create the kind of market-less trading cited by Karl Polanyi.13 The emphasis placed by Renfrew on the

exchange mechanism of central places and his characterization of cities as 'communication engines' leads him also to conclude that

population size is a secondary parameter in their functional role.14 It is clear that here we have a powerful analytical tool with which

the typology of the Mughal towns can be identified and defined. But the sceptic might ask to what extent was the economic exchange between the town and country in India of this period a universal

phenomenon. The towns certainly needed to draw their food supplies from the country, but what did the villages get in return? The traffic seems to have been in a decidedly one-way direction. The answer to this obvious paradox lies in realizing that the process of exchange is not always symmetrical as between goods and goods. Commodities can be exchanged for money as a store of wealth, for services, and most

important of all, for political considerations. The buying of protection from violence is as much an act of exchange as any other market transaction. In the Indian context the problem can be looked at from another aspect. The average revenue demand from the central government in the Mughal Empire can be taken as about a third of the total

gross output from agriculture. Even if we assume that the rest of the

economy operated on a simple barter system, the exchange of thirty per cent of the total basic output for areas as large as the Mughal provinces must imply the existence of very widespread marketing facilities which could be provided only in central places. The hypothetical nature of the

questions and answers calls for caution in accepting any single theory on the operation of the Mughal economy, and there are many problems on which our existing knowledge is highly deficient. But there is a need for asking some basic and fundamental questions. For example, it is critical for our analysis of the urban phenomenon to know if the Mughal land revenue demand was paid for in money or in kind. If it was collected in cash, who did the peasants sell their crops to and where was

13 K. Polanyi, 'Marketless Trading in Hammurabi's Time', and 'The Economy as Instituted Process', printed in K. Polanyi, C. M. Arensberg, and H. W. Pearson (eds), Trade and Market in the Early Empires (New York, I957).

14 Renfrew, 'Trade as Action at a Distance', p. I.



K. N. CHAUDHURI

the marketed output consumed ? On the other hand, if the payments were in kind, by what accounting procedure were the physical quantities transformed into exchange claims (i.e. money claims) of the administrative and ruling classes ? It is common knowledge that the locus of political authority in the Mughal Empire lay in towns. But we also know that the faujdar in the district or the provincial subadar did not remunerate his subordinate staff, the military, and personal household retainers from state-controlled produce stocks. The market mechanism

operated freely to feed the town population and to provide for the needs of the state.

The concept of the redistributive central places can be applied to

Mughal urban centres in two basic forms. The first step is to distinguish their qualitative roles such as political and military functions, economic activities, cultural and religious significance, and demographic character. The second task is to arrange them in a functional hierarchy against the dimensions of both space and time. Thus it might be

postulated that the influence of a primate city would extend to the whole area of the Empire and that it would remain stable over a reasonable period of time.15 The next in order is the regional city, followed by the provincial and district towns serving localized areas. It is important to remember that this method of scaling would yield variable hierarchies. For example, a great capital such as Delhi or Agra must be placed in the category of a primate city when ranked by political influence, but its economic role may be no higher than that of a provincial town. Again, as a large concentration of population its internal level of consumption would be correspondingly large and differentiated in quality. All these factors must be taken into account even within ranking by economic role. The larger the size of the matrix more closely would the model correspond to reality. If it were possible to fill in all the elements of such a matrix with historical data the intelligence content of the information must be at a maximum. But at the present state of our knowledge these theoretical remarks should merely point to the future direction of detailed research and analysis.

The argument adopted so far leads to the conclusion that any complex civilization has an in-built political, economic, and social structure that gravitates it towards the formation of multi-functional urban localities. That the Indian society under the Great Mughals had advanced far beyond tribal isolation no one would deny. The pains-

15 On the functional hierarchy of cities, see J. Friedmann, 'Cities in Social Trans- formation', Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 4, No. I November I96I), pp. 86-I03.

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taking listing of cities and qasabas in Ain-i-Akbari marks the contemporary awareness of the distinction between urban and rural. But there was

perhaps a subtle way in which the coming of Islam to the subcontinent and its military subjugation had altered this perceived distinction. The Sanskritic term for the town, nagar, has mainly cultural overtones and is

quite distinct from a rajdhani, the seat of royal power. The Islamic word shahristan, on the other hand, was a place of political and military power, and it was this term that came to be universally used throughout northern India to denote a town or city. The conquest of India by Islam brought with it the special role which urban centres occupied in its political ideology. Von Grunebaum, in speaking of the great period of Arab expansion, has stated that the empire and its culture were carried on the shoulders of the peasants, but dominated by the towns- men: 'The countryside was organized from the town and exploited by princes, burghers and mercenaries. The Islamic East, from the intrusion of the Turks in the ninth century to the fall of Baghdad ([A.D.] I258), is the history of the victory of a predominantly Turkish military land-

owning aristocracy over the landowning but primarily mercantile Arab or Arabizing aristocracy dominant in civil government.'16 A similar analogy could also be applied to the history of India from the thirteenth century to the sixteenth. The Arab garrison towns in common with all expanding empires had a vital function in upholding the political power and influence of the conquerors. To what extent these settlements also coincided with the existing economic central

places is a separate topic of investigation. But in time Islam came to

recognize only the towns as the true repository of the faith.17 The whole

development gave rise to the twin features of Muslim urbanization in its political role. As the sharia made no distinction between one member of the faith and another, between different classes or communities, the inhabitants of towns also enjoyed no special privileges. There was no historical necessity to treat the towns as politically autonomous and

separate from the countryside. At the same time, however, they provided the nodal points through which a conquering ruling elite could assert its power.

In India an additional complexity was created by the refusal of the Hindus to accept mass conversion to Islam. But even here the political assimilation of subjects of other religious beliefs was made possible by the principle of the jizya. While the poll tax legalized the toleration of infidels in the land of true believers, its mitigation or re-imposition

16 G. E. von Grunebaum, Classical Islam; A History 600-1258 (London, I970), p. 99. 17 W. J. Fischel, 'The City in Islam', Middle Eastern Affairs, Vol. 7 (1956), 227-32.

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K. N. CHAUDHURI

provided the Mughal Emperors at least with a powerful political weapon for curbing the Hindu dissidents.18 Within the towns the Hindus and Muslims occupied mixed or separate quarters according to the internal civic morphology rather than religious or political considerations. Francisco Pelsaert noted at the beginning of the seventeenth

century that the sudden growth of Agra under Akbar and its subse-

quent expansion meant that everyone bought plots of land wherever these were available. As a result Hindus lived mingled with the Muslims and the rich with the poor.19 A much more positive statement comes from the Italian nobleman, Pietro della Valle, who visited Surat in

1623. In describing the inhabitants of the city, della Valle observed that the Hindus appeared to be more numerous than the Muslims, but

'they live all mixt together, and peaceably, because the Gran Moghel, to whom Guzarat is now subject... although he be a Mahometan ... makes no difference in his Dominions between the one sort and the other; and both in his Court, and Armies, and even amongst men of the

highest degree, they are of equal account, and consideration.'20 There is ample evidence to indicate that the close proximity of the two

religious communities in urban locations could have explosive conse-

quences without the exercise of political restraints and the process of assimilation.21 In I7I3 one of the worst cases of communal rioting occurred in a mixed mahalla of Ahmedabad because the Mughal Subadar, Daud Pani, had adjudicated in favour of the Hindus in celebrating the festival of holi in front of Muslim houses.22 Both the Islamic tradition and the religious polarity in the Empire made the

Mughals reluctant to make any kind of political distinction in the

government of the town and country. Beyond the construction of a

mosque in a predominantly Hindu town, which symbolically marked the presence of Islam, the ruling elite had no special duty towards the

autonomy of urban centres.

However, the picture changes dramatically when one looks at the administrative and political map of the Empire. Imperial control in Mughal India depended vitally on the possession of six primate cities:

18 Khafi Khan, in Elliot and Dowson, History of India, VII, 296. 19 Francisco Pelsaert, Jahangir's India: the Remonstrantie of Francisco Pelsaert, ed. W.

H. Moreland and P. Geyl (Cambridge, 1925), p. I. 20 The Travels of Pietro della Valle in India, ed. Edward Grey, 2 vols (London, 1892),

I, 3o. 21 For the social effects of Aurangzeb's edict of I669 ordering the suppression of

Hindu religious practices, see Letter from the Surat Factory to the East India Company, 26 November 1669, India Office Records, London (I.O.R.), Original Correspondence, Vol. 30, No. 3373.

22 Khafi Khan, in Elliot and Dowson, History of India, VII, 454-6.

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Lahore, Delhi-Agra, Patna, Burhanpur, and Ahmedabad. If the north- western frontier is included, Kabul and Kandahar could also be added to the list. Whoever controlled these eight primate cities was the true Padshah of Hindustan. A single dissension or loss was tantamount to the most public display of the weakening power of the reigning Emperor. When a royal prince raised the flag of rebellion the capture of one of these cities was an inevitable part of the military campaign. Equally, the subadar of Patna, Burhanpur and Ahmedabad was often a close relative of the Emperor. At the height of the Mughal imperial power the main function of these primate cities was political; their strategic or

military significance was only secondary. But there was an additional

string of garrison towns, such as Gwalior, Allahabad, Chunar, Auranga- bad, and Junnar, which provided the military sinews of the Empire. The pattern of political conflicts in the subcontinent in this period indicates clearly the key role played by towns and cities. The early life of Babur was characterized by fierce struggles to master Samarkand and Tashkent. As long as Babur remained a wandering warrior en-

camped in high mountain valleys the political basis of his power also remained strictly limited. It was the possession of Kabul which even-

tually provided the real foundation of his later success in the plains of India. The military campaigns of Akbar followed a similar sequence. Of the thirty or so rebellions committed by insubordinate Amirs during the half-century of his reign, twenty-eight took place in towns, and the list includes Agra, Lahore, Kabul, Allahabad, Jaunpur, Patna, and

Ajmer.23 The terrible example which Akbar made of the garrison and the inhabitants of Chitor was intended as a demonstration to the

Rajputs of the Mughal determination to overcome the dangerous resistance at the flank of the Empire. Chitor was perhaps the greatest fortress-town in northern India at the time. Its destruction by Akbar's forces had the same message as did later the conquest of Golconda and the overthrow of Abul Hassan by Aurangzeb.

As seats of imperial power the twin capitals of Agra and Delhi with other satellite primate cities functioned as central places exchanging political information. Access to the Imperial Court by the ambitious Umara was an indispensable condition of advancement. For the Iranian or Turani gentry seeking patronage and lucrative employment the

Mughal capital cities proved unfailingly attractive for more than two centuries. The constant migration of the administrative and military personnel from the periphery of the Empire to the primate cities and

23 See H. K. Naqvi, Urbanization and Urban Centres under the Great Mughals 1556-1707 (Simla, 1972), pp. 175-7.

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K. N. CHA.UDHURI

from the latter to the lesser towns in search of higher financial rewards was both a demographic and a social phenomenon, which had important political consequences for the survival of the Mughal imperial institutions. Even in the days of its decline in the first quarter of the

eighteenth century, the sanction of legitimacy conferred by the imperial sanad was a necessary condition for success in provincial politics. The records of the European trading companies amply confirm this. In 171 the English Council in Surat reported to Bombay that the Governor, Amanat Khan, had recently returned from Delhi after having spent six lakhs of rupees in presents, which secured the continued confirma- tion of his office.24 Two decades later, in the crumbling political world of Gujarat, it was still a matter for comment when a local governor defied the authority of Delhi. On the eve of the famous revolution in Surat in I732, the East India Company's official Broker, Sheth Laldas Vittaldas Parakh, warned the Company of the need to be cautious in

dealing with the existing Governor, Sorab Khan, saying: 'Consider

gentlemen, you have a Governor to deal with who by force of arms has maintened his post in rebellion against his Sovereign, against whom he has shutt his gate in the form of Mustapha Khan, presented with

royal grants for the Government of Surat.'25 The urban concentration of political power was not without its source of weakness. In 1626 Pelsaert could exclaim that Jahangir, whose name implied that he

grasped the whole world, was no more than the king of the plains or the

open roads. For rebellious chiefs, thieves and robbers did not hesitate to pillage up to the very gate of Ahmedabad, Burhanpur, Agra, Delhi, and Lahore.26 It is interesting to compare the Dutchman's comment with the accession farman of Jahangir which reads in its

preamble, 'In as much as thieves and robbers carry off people's goods in isolated places, it is ordered that new qasabas should be populated, and the jaghirdars are directed, wherever they find considerable areas of waste and uninhabited land, to arrange to provide masjids, dharmasa- las and water-tanks so as to populate these areas.'27 Foundation of new

townships was typically seen as an answer to lawlessness. If the political role of the main primate cities identified so far was

unambiguous, their economic ranking was no less evident. With the

exception of Delhi, which was in a special class, all the others were 24 Letter from Bombay to the Court of Directors, 26 April I 7 0, I.O.R., Abstract of

Letters Received from Bombay, Vol. 449, para. I4, p. I43. 25 I.O.R., Bombay Public Proceedings, 29 November 1723, Vol. 5. 26 Pelsaert, The Remonstrantie, pp. 58-9. 27 Ali Muhammad Khan, Mirat-i-Ahmadi, quoted by M. S. Commissariat, A

History of Gujarat (Bombay, 1957), p. 43.

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important centres of trade, banking, industrial handicrafts, and

agricultural processing. To see this we have only to follow the commercial listings prepared by Pelsaert or trace the itinerary of Jean Baptiste Tavernier. In Pelsaert's time horizon the golden age of Mughal cities

always seemed to have been in the past, and his description of Agra was no exception. The trade of the city was at its peak during the time of Akbar and at the beginning of the present reign, when Jahangir still had a vigorous intellect. Its volume had declined since then because of bad administration and oppression by the successive governors. Pelsaert concluded with the remark: 'The survival of a certain amount of commerce is due to the situation of the city at the junction of all roads from distant countries. All goods must pass this way, as from

Gujarat, Tatta (or Sind); from Kabul, Kandahar, or Multan, to the

Deccan; from the Deccan or Burhanpur to those places, or to Lahore; and from Bengal and the whole east country; there are no practical alternative routes, and the roads carry indescribable quantities of

merchandise, especially cotton goods.'28 There seems to be a certain contradiction between the last statement and the alleged commercial decline of Agra. However, if the goods merely passed through the city without breaking bulk, Pelsaert would have been right in saying that the consumption level and the off-take of the traded commodities had fallen in the ex-capital, owing to the long absences of the Emperor. But the passage highlights the redistributive function of Agra and the

importance of nodality. Favourable location and the convergence of

long-distance trade routes were absolutely necessary for any Indian town or city to advance to the top of our functional hierarchy. Popu- lation size and the presence of a consumption-prone ruling elite might contribute to its economic development but are not sufficient by themselves as explanations. The gradual erosion during the first half of the seventeenth century in Lahore's status as a premier trading city in the long-distance caravan trade of the Middle East and the Mediter- ranean might be taken as an illustration. Before the arrival of the

English and Dutch trading companies in Surat and Agra, Lahore was the chief market for indigo rather than Agra and Biana, and the Armenian and Aleppo merchants had a large and highly profitable trade. The caravans from the eastern Mediterranean travelling through Isfahan and Kandahar stopped at Lahore to meet those which arrived there from other parts of India. But the diversion of the indigo trade

greatly undermined Lahore's prosperity because of the inability of the caravan traders to compete on points of transport costs. However, in the

28 Pelsaert, Remonstrantie, pp. 5-6.

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K. N. CHAUDHURI

second decade of the century Lahore still had a brisk trade in fine cotton

goods, the famous chintz products of Golconda and Masulipatam, which were exported in large quantities to Central Asia and Persia. The

large Hindu Khattri merchants carried on business on what was left of their old profits, and the frequent visits ofJahangir to the city gave it a renewed air of splendour.29 But by the time Tavernier visited the place large parts of the town were falling into ruins. The silting up of the Indus around Tatta had affected the trade of Multan, which in its turn caused many merchants to stay away from Lahore.30

It is evident that the prevailing emphasis on the administrative and

political function of the Indian towns rests on a confusion between their origin and foundations and subsequent development. No urban centre in any part of the world is able to survive without political authority and legal order. An examination of the main urban localities in Mughal India during the period from 1550 to I750 (about 250 in

number) would lead to the conclusion that a great many of them were founded on the initiative of local political rulers, where they were not

already the seats of existing kingdoms. But the unresolved question remains as to what caused the founders to select a particular site. Is it a

possible conjecture that these were already serving as some sort of central place as defined by Renfrew? Three of the greatest sea ports and commercial cities in India, Surat, Masulipatam, and Hugli, had little

political significance and their prosperity lasted long enough to qualify them as economic primate cities. What explanations can we offer for the success and survival of these places ? In the case of Surat, favourable

geographical location, access to rich markets, and the presence of an active entrepreneurial class must head the list. On the landward side caravan routes from the north, east, and the south converged on the

city. It was the hub from which sea-lanes radiated to all the famous

ports of the Indian Ocean and beyond. Described as bandar-i-mubarak in the early coins of Aurangzeb, Surat had a special role for the pious Muslim: it was the gateway to Mecca. All contemporary European accounts of India agree that as a commercial metropolis Surat had no serious rival on the western seaboard of India. The English author of a memorandum on 'country trade' wrote from Fort St George in 1965: 'Surat, the most ancient Presidency and Emporium of the Northern parts of India, is a City extraordinary well scituated for Trade, not improperly termed the Mogull's Chamber, and seaport to Agra,

29 Ibid., p. 30. 30 Jean Baptiste Tavernier, Travels in India, ed. V. Ball and W. Crooke, 2 vols

(London, I925), I, 9I.

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Lahore, Burhanpur, Ahmedabad, and other inland marts. It can both take off and furnish a cargo for any part in India whatsoever ... The Moors drive a great trade from hence to Persia, Bussora, Aden, Mocha, and Judda where they dispose of those goods which from thence are carried throughout the Grand Segnior's Dominions.'31 Surat's trade to the Red Sea, Bengal, South East Asia, and China sustained its civic wealth for a century and a half, and the skill of its commercial population was a frequent topic of comment among European merchants and travellers.32 At the beginning of the eighteenth century, Alexander Hamilton estimated the city's population as 200,000 with many rich citizens. Among the banyans who formed the most numerous community in town were 'merchants, brokers, or pen-men as accountants, collectors, and surveyors.'33

As Bombay's long struggle to supplant its rich northern neighbour demonstrated, it was not easy to displace a city of such economic

strength. The eclipse of Surat from its position of overwhelming commercial superiority in western India during the eighteenth century was no doubt a gradual process. Even English shipowners, who were to

emerge as the most dominant group in the carrying trade of the Indian Ocean, for a long time preferred to discharge their cargo at Surat rather than in the East India Company's settlement in Bombay. In

I747 when the personal guards of the Surat Governor caused a riot in town, the English Council pointed out to the authorities that a city like Surat which lived by trade could not afford such lawlessness.34 A year later the Council took note of the fact that if the English did take part in the local politics, it was 'to save from Ruin so great a City as Surat.'35

Apart from internal political weakness which periodically paralysed the

city's commercial life, there were other factors also working against the

long-term interest of Surat in the middle decades of the eighteenth century. Political instability in Persia and the contraction of the Red Sea markets contributed their share to the decline. The transit trade from northern India was always a vital life-line to its prosperity. A document on the internal trade of the Mughal Empire dating from I66I records that the cotton piece-goods annually exported by the Armenian and Mughal merchants to Persia through Surat came from as far as Benares and Patna, and that their value was no less than a

31 British Museum, Additional Manuscript 34,I23, p. 40. 32 Grose, Voyage to the East Indies, I, 105-6. 33 Hamilton, New Account of the East Indies, I, 89-90. 34 I.O.R., Factory Records Surat, I I January I747, Vol. 3I, p. 50. 35 Ibid., 24 February 1748, Vol. 32, p. I39.

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million rupees.36 But in the second quarter of the eighteenth century, Maratha expansion in Gujarat and the north brought a renewal of

military operations which adversely affected the caravan trade. The most notable victim was the great industrial city of Ahmedabad which, as the provincial capital, was the first target of a military and political struggle. When the city fell to the combined forces of the Marathas and the Imperial viceroy, Momin Khan, in I737 after a long siege and much suffering, John Lambton, the Chief of the English Factory in Surat, recorded in the official diary that the news of the capture of Ahmedabad 'gives great hopes to the merchants of this Place that it's trade will be revived and run in its wonted channel.'37 If it is an over-

simplification to say that the commercial towns of Mughal India were a case of 'trade following the flag', it is nevertheless true that political skills were essential to preserve their economic interests. Perhaps the most eloquent testimony comes from the deed signed by all the mahajans of Ahmedabad in I725, when the city faced imminent attack by the Marathas. In recognition of his services for saving the city from plunder the merchants agreed to pay to Nagarsheth Khusalchandji and his descendants in perpetuity four annas in every hundred rupees' worth of

goods sold in the city.38 The functional distinctiveness of the economic primate cities was to be

found in their capacity to offer a wide variety of commercial services. From a spatial point these centres were able to handle goods which travelled over long distances. The cost indivisibility of transport arrangements and the near-certainty of finding markets, made it

possible for merchants to move both high-valued and low-valued

goods. There was generally an inverse relationship between value and bulk which with given transport costs and constant margin of profits would have determined completely the distance scales for each category of traded goods. But with wooden sailing ships or large boats it was

necessary to lade both rich and fine goods as well as bulky and heavy cargo. One provided high financial rewards, while the other ballasted the ships. The position was not so fortunate with land carriage. But here also the practice of travelling in large caravans-which was a necessity- with attendant fixed overhead costs brought opportunities for mixing the commodities. If the theory of central place exchange is accepted for Mughal India, it can be seen that below the level of primate cities there would be other lesser towns which performed similar services but for

36 B.M., Additional Manuscript 34,123, p. 98. 37I.O.R., Factory Records Surat, 30 May 1737, Vol. 2I. 38 For a facsimile copy of the deed, see Commisariat, History of Gujarat, p. 423.

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smaller areas. The hinterland of Surat was in a sense the whole of India, but for a town like Broach or Baroda it was probably no bigger than Gujarat. A careful spatial analysis of the exchange mechanism as centred on towns should yield new insight into the distribution of economic and political power in the subcontinent.

It was suggested that the location of industries in pre-modern towns was independent of technological considerations. An examination of the

dispersion pattern of textile weaving in India during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries reveals many regional variations.39 In western and northern India large concentrations of textile workers were to be found in urban areas producing for the export and interregional markets. In the south and in Bengal the industry was scattered throughout the country. It is impossible to offer any single explanation for these differences. The availability of water-transport in Bengal made it

cheaper and easier for the cloth traders to collect their supplies from the rural weavers. In northern India, on the other hand, the existence of roads and heavy wheeled carriage made the towns natural points of

exchange, and their internal population generated a steady demand for the products of artisans. In both the cases the presence of commercial intermediaries was essential to distribution and to establishing an

equilibrium between supply and demand. As traders and merchants can only operate from fixed locations, above the level of peddling, the redistributive function of towns took precedence over their industrial role.

It is important to keep in mind that our suggested functional hierar-

chy of Indian cities has a temporal as well as spatial dimension. The economic fortunes of particular towns constantly fluctuated. As Pelsaert observed with some perspicuity, the volume of goods imported, trans-

ported, and sold in the country differed from year to year; a good harvest would create a demand from every village, while civil wars were ruinous to trade and merchants were afraid to invest their capital.40 Babur not only castigated the towns of Hindustan for their lack of charm, but also mentioned the rapidity with which they were constructed and depopulated.41 Even Surat had a large floating population. When the ships were preparing to depart for the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf from January to March the town was so full of people that

39 K. N. Chaudhuri, 'The Structure of Indian Textile Industry in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries', The Indian Economic and Social History Review, Vol. 9 (1974), pp. 127-82.

40 Pelsaert, Remonstrantie, p. 44. 41 Babur-Nama, tr. A. S. Beveridge, new edn (Delhi, 1970) pp. 487-8.

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K. N. CHAUDHURI

lodgings were hard to find and the three suburbs were all overflowing.42 A long tradition of internal migration, an essential safety-valve to

political instability and natural calamities, made for the volatile

demographic features of both town and country in Mughal India. In the second quarter of the eighteenth century, Surat became a substantial industrial centre because of the influx of skilled workmen and artisans from Ahmedabad.43 During the same period in southern India, textile weaving suburbs sprang up in numerous towns where the local rulers made special provision for the settlement of weavers fleeing from disturbed and famine-stricken areas.44 In years of severe harvest failures and grain shortages, it was common for the starving populace to seek relief in towns. In I660 the streets and bazars of Delhi were choked with poor helpless people who had come to the capital in the

hope of escaping from famine which scarred the rural areas during that year.45

The catastrophic nature of these events makes it easier for us to note the temporary movements of population to and from towns than to derive any positive estimate of the permanent elements of Mughal urban demography. Information on the size of town populations is almost universally lacking. Even Bernier, who specifically referred to the population of Delhi, did not venture beyond saying that it was much less than that of Paris.46 From European travel accounts we can

identify the larger cities from lesser towns and we know that the

average housing density was fairly high. The gross overcrowding of the

present-day Indian towns was probably absent, though not the charac- teristic mixture of better-class houses with wretched mud and bamboo huts. There were so many of these even in Delhi that Bernier often

thought of the imperial capital as a collection of villages or a military encampment.47 The reader who follows through Tavernier's journeys from Surat to Agra and down to Bengal is struck by the monotonous

repetition of similar epithets applied to one town after another through which he travelled. Sironj was a large town with a population mainly composed of merchants and artisans who lived there from generation to

generation. This is why it contained some houses of stone and brick.

Burhanpur was also large, but it was much ruined and the houses were for the most part covered with thatch. In Patna, which measured at

42 Indian Travels of Thevenot and Careri, ed. S. Sen (New Delhi, 1949), p. 2I. 43 I.O.R., Factory Records Surat, 27 September I742, Vol. 27, pp. 27-30. 4 Letter from Madras to the Court of Directors, 13 January 1736, Records of Fort

St. George, Despatches to England 1736-1740, paras 29-30, pp. 2-3. 5 Khafi Khan, in Elliot and Dowson, History of India, VII, 263-4.

46 Bernier, Travels in the Mogul Empire, pp. 281-2. 47 Ibid., p. 246.

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least two coss (5 miles) in length, the houses were no better than in the

majority of the other towns of India and they were nearly all roofed with thatch or bamboo. The approaches to Dacca were completely marred

by unsightly settlements of carpenters and boatbuilders. Only Benares was singled out for special praise. It was not only large and well built, but the majority of the houses were of brick and cut stone and higher than anywhere else.48 The mixed appearance of Mughal towns, to which Tavernier and other contemporary travellers from Europe direct our attention, certainly reflected great disparities in income distribution and cultural traditions. But we have to distinguish between the various features of a town before we can analyse the way in which its character changed or the process through which it prospered and declined. These features may be geographical, as, for example, Fernand Braudel's suggestion of slow-changing elements or semi-permanent elements; they may also be economic, political, and social.49 Towns which were constructed on permanent lines and built with durable materials were the ones that could change their character from one

typology to another, i.e. from commercial to banking, or administrative and political to industrial, more successfully than smaller towns con-

taining less durable houses or public buildings. The fluidity of Indian

political tradition was reflected in the flimsily-built dwellings. Was the

economy of the towns correspondingly impermanent? Here again we should separate those towns which had permanent markets for their products and services from those which did not.

When Babur came to northern India he rightly lamented Hindustan's lack or running water and gardens. Anyone who has seen the spring blossoms in the courtyard of Madrese Mader-e Shah at Isfahan or the

great sycamores in the garden of Chihil Sutun will understand the

feelings of home sickness which a largely Persianized Mughal aristo-

cracy must have felt in this hospitable but culturally alien land. Even

Europeans travelling from India to Persia noted the difference. In 1677 John Fryer wrote in his diary, as he landed in Bandar Abbas after

having come from Surat, 'So strange an alteration in Three hundred

Leagues as passes admiration! for whereas we left a Sullen, Melancholy, Sunburnt Nation; an Open, Jovial, and a Clear Complexioned Race of Mankind is offered in exchange.'50 But this very contrast was responsible for creating the great driving force behind the cultural tradition of

48 Tavernier, Travels in India, pp. 42, 46, 96, 100, 105. 49 F. Braudel, 'Histoire et sciences sociales: La longue duree', Annales, Economies,

Societes, Civilisations, Vol. 13, No 4 (I958), 725-53. 50 John Fryer, A New Account of East India and Persia Being Nine Years' Travels

1672-1681, ed. W. Crooke, 3 vols (London, I909-15), II, I59.

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94 K. N. CHAUDHURI

Islamic India, which again was almost entirely urban-based. It had a

negative and positive side. The negative aspect is to be found in the fact that today with the exception of Mathura and Benares all vestiges of Hindu urbanism have disappeared from northern India. The positive features were the encouragement of Islamic learning, religious insti-

tutions, and, above all, the magnificent architectural heritage. All Islamic rulers of India were prodigious builders and the Mughals especially so. Babur's occupation of Agra was followed by the immedi- ate measurement of land on the bank of theJumna for the construction of a chahar bagh. The Iranian gardens of Agra, he noted with pride, made people call it the Kabul of India. The urge to build was not confined to the Emperors alone. The entire Umara class was infected

by it, and the reasons with which they justified the competitive building of magnificent gardens, houses, and tombs appeared to the cautious and rational instincts of Pelsaert as most vain and trivial. But he admitted that the existence of these aristocratic buildings and gardens and their

exquisite beauty enhanced the civic attractions of Agra.51 The architectural expressions of Islam in India were typically centred on the

mosque, adjoining markets, the great public square, and the palace. Passing through Gwalior in 1665, Tavernier recorded that the people of the town had built a magnificent tomb for the murdered prince, Murad Bakhsh, in a mosque with a great court in front and surrounded

by vaults in which were shops. For it was the custom in India 'when

they build a public edifice, to surround it with a large market-place, with an endowment for the poor, to whom they give alms daily, and who pray to God for him who has caused the work to be done.'52

The two most notable examples of this integration of the masjid-i-jami, the royal palace, and the bazar were Fatehpur Sikri and Shahjahana- bad. They differed profoundly in architectural style and spirit but the common concepts of Islamic city-building were preserved in both. In Delhi the great square flanked on one side by the Red Fort and on the other by Jumma Masjid was the meeting-place of the main streets

containing the bazars. These were arcaded at the front with warehouses at the back, which served as shops. Merchants and traders lived in houses built over the warehouses, and Bernier thought that they looked handsome enough from the street and were tolerably spacious inside. But the great defect of the bazars of Delhi was their failure to display the goods properly. Most of the costly wares were kept out of sight in the warehouses and for one shop making any show of fine and beautiful

51 Pelsaert, Remonstrantie, p. 5. 52 Tavernier, Travels in India, I, 52.




cloths, silks, and brocaded fabrics, there were twenty-five where nothing was to be seen but pots of oil or ghi, piles of baskets filled with rice, wheat, millet, and endless variety of other grains and pulses.53 It was only the fruit markets of Delhi which could claim any credit for a proper display. Bernier's description of the public appearance of the Mughal capital in this respect contrasts unfavourably with the famous qaisariyya of Isfahan. When Fryer visited these vaulted and galleried streets which also converged on the public square, the maidan-i-shah, he was so struck by their fine aspect that he thought that the European bourses were only mediocre buildings compared to the bazars of Isfahan. His admiration was heightened on the discovery that the cloth market contained a greater variety and quantity of English broadcloth than Blackwell-Hall itself.54

The contrast between the classical cities of Iran and those of Mughal India must surely be ascribed to the difference between a homogeneous culture and a heterogeneous one, between an indigenous style and a transplanted version. But the essentially Islamic character of the north Indian towns cannot be questioned. In the south and in parts of western India the Hindu influence and ideas were of course still strong. Much depended on the tradition fostered by the political rulers. At the height of its power the reputation of Hyderabad, the capital of the Qutb Shahi dynasty, was greater than that of any Mughal city. Its great public buildings, gardens, and caravanserais were famous throughout India. The subtle influence of Islam in its architectural manifestation did not remain confined to Muslim towns alone. The lake palace in Udaipur built in the early eighteenth century has the classic outlines of Shahjahan's pavilions in Ajmer. Its interior gardens, of ravishing beauty and elegance, were designed on the pattern of Mughal gardens softened by Rajasthani sensibilities. The list could be extended. The pre-modern cities and towns of India were the products of the prevailing forms of technology and social institutions. Their economic existence depended on the ability of the countryside to produce a surplus and the way in which the latter was distributed. But there was an organic bond, an ecological balance between the rural and the urban. Our understanding of the working of the urban economy and society depends on the ability to decipher the inner nature of this relationship.

There is one final problem which has not been explicitly touched upon in this essay. It is the question of the factors that led to the rise and fall of

53 Bernier, Travels in the Mogul Empire, pp. 248-9. 54 Fryer, New Account of East India, II, 241, 249-50.

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Indian towns and cities. While general causes of urban growth or relative decline are very difficult to isolate, a systematic inquiry addressed to this problem alone might succeed in at least suggesting the possible range of explanations. The central idea behind this paper is the complementarity of economic nodality and political attributes which was as much a feature of Indian towns as it was of urban areas in other parts of the world. Conditions affecting these two vital com-

ponents of civic life might explain at the same time why historically certain towns of Mughal India rose to prominence while others declined.



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