ONE SUCH CONSEQUENCE was that the Bengal Subaah was quickly en route to becoming an independent kingdom. While Murshid Quli continued to send money annually to Delhi, the Mughal dynasty was embroiled in its own implosion.
Thus, in a sense, Murshid now was really a free man, free to run his writ as he pleased. Now he gave full rein to the very talent that had attracted Aurangzeb to him: his uncanny ability to generate and multiply revenue.
His first move was to destroy the existing order and impose his own.
Here’s a birds’ eye view of the existing order. The whole Bengal Subah was parcelled out to the Mughal officialdom as jagirs. Each official was thus a jahgirdar or zamindar. The revenue from his jagir was his only salary. And so, he had no incentive to deposit even a single paisa of the revenue that his jagir generated into the Mughal treasury. On the contrary, it was a fertile arrangement that enabled him extort as much as he could and then some more.
Which left the imperial exchequer with the only alternative source of revenue: customs duty. This in turn, proved to be another fecund cash cow for the jahgirdars and zamindars. They imposed arbitrary customs duty on the European traders who conducted business in Bengal alone to the tune of several millions. The substantial repository of travelogues, personal diaries, memoirs and official correspondence left behind by the Dutch, British, French and the Portuguese reveal precise details of these corrupt, indolent and degenerate zamindars and jahgirdars.
In many cases, the hereditary Zamindari system predated the Mughal rule. Acharya Jadunath Sarkar offers a glimpse into its original working.
…the State used to get its dues from the land in the lump, from the old landed proprietors of Bengal, called zamindars. Some of them were decayed scions of old Hindu ruling houses, but most were the descendants of the hereditary local officials and barons of the old Hindu and Muslim dynasties of the days before the coming of Mughal sovereignty. Like all aristocracies, these men had now fallen into indolence, negligence, and improvidence, and the State could have no certainty of collection or regularity of income from the land if the old zamindftrs continued in charge of it. The direct collection of land-rent from the actual cultivators by State officials…was impossible in Bengal.
Murshid Quli Khan decided to smash this system. Overnight, he abolished the jagirs and converted them into khālsas or Crownlands. The jahgirdars were replaced by Crown collectors, i.e., revenue officials who collected land tax. Murshid Quli transferred these hereditary zamindars and jahgirdars to remote parts of Odisha where they could cause no trouble.
In a second move, Quli appointed contractors to collect land revenue. This was known as the Ijāra system. These contractors were known as Ijāra-dārs. By doing this, Murshid Quli had unwittingly replaced an old aristocracy with a new one, which would become equally corrupt and vile as we shall see.
The Ijāra system worked as follows. Murshid Quli Khan took a security bond from each Ijāra-dār. The bond was officially called Māl Zāmini. After the contractor deposited land revenue with him, he cancelled out the bond and allowed the Ijāra-dār to keep a percentage of the revenue collection.
The new arrangement worked wonders because the contractors had a personal, vested interest in maximising their revenue collection. The higher their collection, the greater their own cut. In no time, Murshid’s coffers exploded with untold wealth, and the Ijāra-dārs had now become the new landed gentry. Once again, the Acharya describes its consequences.
Many of the older zamindars remained, but under the thumbs of these new Ijāra-dārs, and in time they were crushed out of existence. In the second or third generation, these contractors came to be called zamindars and many of them were dignified with the title of Rajas and Maharajas, though not of princely birth, but merely glorified civil servants paid by a percentage on their collections.
The radical impact of the Ijāra system outlasted Quli by more than 75 years. In 1793, the British plunderer Cornwallis passed the notorious Permanent Settlement, which in a way eternalised the Ijāra by dressing it up in British clothing. It came to be called by the familiar term in the Indian tongue: the Zamindari System. This Zamindari system was exploited to the hilt both by the Bengali and Hindi cinema industries, especially by Marxist writers and directors. The depictions of the heartless Zamindar and the oppressive moneylending Lala owe their origins to Murshid Quli Khan.
A prime reason for the spectacular success of the Ijāra system was a decision that Quli took after becoming the Bengal Subahdaar. It was his deliberate preference for appointing Hindus as contractors. This decision had a twofold reason.
The first is narrated by Salimullah, author of the Tarikh-i-Bangala (History of Bengal) and a late contemporary of Murshid Quli Khan.
Murshid Quli Khan employed none but Bengali Hindus in the collection of the revenues, because they were most easily compelled by punishment to discover their malpractices; and nothing was to be apprehended from their pusillanimity.
This characterisation of the Bengali Hindu community back then is most certainly unflattering. But it also reveals the sorry plight Hindus had been reduced to under sustained Islamic rule.
The second reason is more straightforward. Murshid Quli Khan did not trust members of his own community with pecuniary honesty. Ever since he arrived in Bengal as its Diwan, he had witnessed how Muslim officials had wantonly embezzled revenue meant for the imperial treasury. In fact, he frequently received letters related to this official theft from Aurangzeb himself. Here’s a sample letter quoted by Jadunath Sarkar:
In the letters of Aurangzeb…we find the names of some of the Muslim collectors who had embezzled Government revenue…Md. Khalil, Md. Roza…Mukarramat Khan…Murshid Quli wrote to the Emperor… “The mahals which I had entrusted to certain officers for meeting the pay of the troops…have been usurped by them… The local officials of Bengal wish to peculate the money assigned for the payment of those whose salary is due from the State.”
Quli’s appointment of Hindu revenue contractors opens another new historical chapter, whose vestiges lasted well into the early twentieth century.
To be continued
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