Fringes Of The Empire

This debate stems from the fact that researches on the subject remained narrow in vision, working within the paradigm of administrative-fiscal history. Here, the class analysis of the empire dominated in which the exploitative character of the centralised Mughal state was emphasised. The exploitation theory was extended to explain imperial decline in the early 18th century. The empire was said to have collapsed due to a general institutional and economic crisis triggered by the inherent class contradictions in its functioning.

If religion and culture remained outside the purview of this historiography, so did the issue of caste, tribe and ethnic groups. The critical shift towards the integration of these important themes in Mughal functioning began quite recently with the works of Muzaffar Alam and Chetan Singh on religion and tribal societies respectively. There is now a rich literature on these and related cultural aspects of the Empire.

The wealth of this volume on the Mughal state lies in its putting together a selection of 18 essays which articulate clearly the shifting trends in the understanding of the Mughal state. The articles are put in context by the editors, in an introduction which is a splendid historiographical survey on Mug-hal researches. It offers a scholarly critique of existing literature and suggests fresh vista of research on the empire. Alam and Subrahmanayam tear apart the received wisdom of the Aligarh University historians, who they say concentrated largely on Mughal fiscal history with their understanding of empire spatially confined to the Delhi-Agra grid and chronologically fixated on Akbar and Aurangzeb. They make a strong case for viewing the empire from the perspective of the regions and moving beyond Akbar and Aurangzeb in tracing the evolution of its institutions and functioning.

The critical interventions in the volume highlighting this rethink include works of Chetan Singh on the tribes of Punjab, Gau-tam Bhadra on frontier uprisings in Mughal India, Muzaffar Alam on Awadh zamindars and J.F. Richards and V. Narayana Rao on banditry in Mughal India.

These authors underline the need to integrate the history of "peripheral" groups and "fringe" societies, located at times beyond the Brahmanical social hierarchy, into an understanding of the empire. They suggest that from the non-Brahmanical "tribal" or "folk" perspective the empire appears far from centralised and streamlined. They argue there is enough evidence at the local level to prove that imperial decline in the early 18th century was caused largely by the regional and cultural assertion in areas of the empire which had never been rigidly knitted to Mughal administration. Thus the period of "decline" was characterised by an economic, social and political reorganisa-tion at the regional level. This new perspective on the empire and its decline lays out suggestive implications for the transition to British rule later in the century.

Through their choice of essays and scholarly introduction, Alam and Subrahman-yam establish a critical conduit between the medieval and early modern political cultures. They thus provide fertile ground for a rethink on many hitherto neglected social and cultural aspects of colonial studies.