IN A LIMITED SENSE, the risorgimento of the Hindu society in Bengal under Murshid Quli Khan was the inevitable consequence of several historical forces that climaxed in 1717 CE.
Because Aurangzeb had made Islamic bigotry as a conscious state policy, he snuffed out Hindus from all positions in his administration and bureaucracy. The Muslim officials who replaced them quickly grapsed two realities. The first was the fact that they owed their high position because they were Muslims. The second, that they could pretty much impose their whim in their territories as long as they kept Aurangzeb happy.
This led to the eventual rise of a phenomenon that French merchants at Hooghly memorably described as “the double set of leeches that kept on sucking the people.”
The first leech comprised the temporary Governors sent to Bengal by direct orders from Aurangzeb. Because these Governors knew that they could be transferred at any time, they began raking in as much as possible from the day they landed in Bengal. Here are some names and numbers.
In 1663, Aurangzeb appointed his uncle Shaista Khan as the Subahdaar of Bengal. It was a punishment posting after his humiliating defeat at the hands of Chhatrapati Shivaji. In a span of 18 years, Shaista Khan coolly pocketed nine crores of taxpayer money.
Another short-lived Bengal Subahdaar, Khan Jahan Bahadur Khan, extorted a whopping two crores in just one year.
And then we have the aforementioned Muhammad Azim-ud-din (or Azim-us-Shan), the absentee Bengal Subahdaar who extorted eight crores in nine years.
The second leech was the Diwan who tried to collect as much revenue as he could and deposit it to the Mughal treasury under the preying and dangerous eyes of the Subahdaar. We’ve already narrated the story of the incessant battles that Diwan Murshid Quli Khan had to wage against his own Subahdaar, Azim-us-Shan.
As always, it was the ordinary citizens of Bengal who bore the brunt of this economic tyranny inflicted by the double set of leeches. A French merchant from Chandranagar writes that this bleeding “made the province depopulated, silver scarce, and trade difficult.”
MURSHID QULI KHAN’S sweeping Ijāra regime not only extinguished the age-old jahgirdari system but also monopolised revenue collection. All the money now went directly to Quli.
In the same year that he was appointed as the Subahdaar of Bengal, Murshid Quli Khan awarded himself the pompous title of Nawab Jaafar Khan Bahadur Nasiri. This is how Bengal got its first ever Nawab in 1717 CE.
From now on, the European traders and the people of Bengal had only leech to suck them. It was a wildly innovative and ruthless leech at that. Murshid Quli Khan combined in himself the worst of several dark arts: of financially entangling his contractors to the point of slavery; of casual ruthlessness in revenue collection and of squeezing farmers to the last drop of their blood.
The aforementioned Salimullah gives us a graphic description of Murshid Quli’s new tax regime.
In order to make a full investigation of the value of the lands, he placed the principal zamindars in close confinement, and gave the collection into the hands of expert amils or collectors… He also ordered the whole of the lands to be remeasured; and having ascertained the quantity of fallow and waste ground belonging to every village, he caused a considerable quantity of it to be brought into cultivation; the collectors were authorized to make money advances (taqavi) to the poorer husbandmen for purchasing stock and seed-grain. When he had thus entirely dispossessed the zamindars of all interference in the collection, he assigned to them a subsistence allowance called nankar land, to which was added the privilege of hunting, cutting wood in the forests (bankar) and of fishing in the lakes and rivers (jal-kar). After some years, his agents…by other kinds of exaction, he raised the surplus revenue of the province from one crore and thirty lakhs of rupees to one crore and fifty lakhs… he had made a careful cadastral survey, by which he gained accurate information about the total areas under the heads cultivated, fallow, and barren, and also prepared a comparative estimate of the past and present revenue yield of every rural unit.
If this wasn’t enough, Quli also stripped down revenue collection expenses to the bare minimum. He divested a substantial number of his standing army and transformed soldiers into tax collectors. This is akin to converting decorated military officers into IRS staff. Murshid Quli Khan was the ultimate micro-manager.
The ancien regime in Bengal was naturally outraged at this rampaging upstart who was also a self-styled Nawab. And so, this power-deprived Zamindari elite wrote furious letters to Delhi seeking Quli’s removal. The Mughal Sultan in turn, wrote to Quli seeking an explanation.
The Emperor has learnt from an outside source that you are distributing the paraganas of crownland in Ijara…so that the cultivation of the paraganas has almost reached the point of desolation…
Murshid Quli coolly rebuffed the warning, justifying his new system on the ground that the one crore-plus annual tribute that he was paying Delhi was the result of precisely these financial reforms. He also said that contrary to what his detractors had complained, the cultivators were actually happy with him. That silenced the Sultan who had long ago realised the limits of his own power against Murshid Quli. Jadunath Sarkar puts this situation in perspective.
The faineant Emperors in far-off Delhi were too much entangled in palace intrigues and revolutions to have the power, even if they had the wish, to actively interfere in the administration of Bengal; they left everything to the subahdaar so long as the annual surplus revenue of the province (one kror and some lakhs of rupees) was regularly paid to them.
But in his reply, Murshid Quli Khan had conveniently omitted mentioning the most crucial and practical methods that ensured the success of his so-called reforms. That doesn’t make for easy reading.
It will be narrated in the next episode.
To be continued
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