On Spies, Newsreports and Postal Communication In Mughal India

 “Notwithstanding all these formidable numbers, while the Generals and Vocanovices (Waqia Nawis) consult to deceive the Emperor, on whom he depends for a true state of things, it can be never be otherwise but that they must be misrepresented, when the judgment he makes must be by a false perspective.” This is what John Fryer, Officer in the Royal Navy of England, noted about Aurangzeb’s non-success in the Deccan. He believed that despite having sufficient troops stationed in the Deccan, the Emperor was fooled by false information from his news writers.  

The above was just one of many examples to show how the Mughal Emperor relied heavily on his empire’s information and espionage system. So much so, that a number of historians like C.A. Bayly now concede that one plausible reason for the decline of the Mughal Empire in the latter half of the 17^th century could have been that “the Mughals' access to knowledge may in some cases may have decayed more rapidly than their military or financial resources.”

The essay therefore looks to answer certain questions about the information system under the Mughals like; who were the informants, what kind of information was sought, and how was information transmitted. The essay concludes by briefly examining as to what evidence does this provide in the greater debate of the nature of the Mughal state and to what extent can the decay of the information system be held responsible for the decline of the Mughals.

Information or kh-b-r in Arabic literally means “to know”. Initially, the word was used by the companions of Prophet Mohammad to categorize their reports of the Prophet’s words and deeds. Khabar loaned by Persian and then by Urdu came to denote variously: news, information, intelligence, notification, announcement, report, rumour, fame, story, account.

Gathering and transmitting information in the subcontinent was an arduous task. As C.A. Bayly writes “the cultural, linguistic and religious heterogeneity of the country put a premium on accurate intelligence.” Yet it was because of this heterogeneity that information gathering in India was indispensable.  Information was acquired for many reasons; to pre-empt any rebellion or conspiracy against the state, to know where to dispatch the army and against whom, to watch over the proper policing of law and to punish people flouting Islamic religious norms (especially during Aurangzeb’s reign)

Information was not just sought by the State but also elicited by specialist groups like the merchants. C.A. Bayly notes “Merchants had their professional knowledge. While account books had attained a pattern common to most parts of India by the seventeenth century, individual merchant groups and families within them, employed different types of merchant shorthand and argot (mahajani) which cloaked their secrets.”

The need for information was realized in India as far back as the Arthashastra. According to the text, the king should first increase his knowledge of politics or rajniti by training his spies, ‘his eyes and ears’ and then using his own enlightened knowledge or buddhi should work on the collected pool of information. Fuse this with the idea of Islamic record keeping and maintaining records and the office of Akhbar Nawis begins to make sense.  Michael Fisher informs us that “the word Akhabar, a broken plural form of khabar, came to mean variously as 'histories, tales, annals, gazettes, news, relations, advices, chronicles, traditions; a newspaper. The word further has a feminine plural sound akhbarat which came to denote pieces or bodies of information together or such a genre collectively.” The other part of the title, Nawis means writer. Therefore the title taken together meant a newspaper writer. During the reign of Akbar, the akhbar nawis sometimes often referred to as the waqia nawis, maintained a court diary called siyaha-i-huzur or account of the Presence which preserved accurately the official acts and words of the Emperor and the events of his reign. The process of maintaining this diary was tedious. The waqia nawis at the court collected and processed the information collected by the waqia nawis placed in every sub-district throughout the Empire. These men wrote regular reports on the doings of officials and local magnates, on plunderers and malefactors, occasionally on the affairs of merchants. They gathered material from other officials: local judges and the officers commanding in the cities.

The Ain-i-Akbari details the duties and responsibilities of the waqia nawis and also expounds as to how the emperor was keen on every piece of information being recorded precisely and without flaw. Once prepared, the court diary underwent synthesis and scrutiny by distinguished courtiers and then the emperor himself. A copy of the same went to the imperial archives to be used by the court chroniclers, who often referred to these diaries in order to obtain details and precise dates of events.

Fisher notes that the Akhbarat in Akbar’s court was often recorded in two different versions. Of these one was in which “akhbar nawis recorded the formal acts of the ruler and court. In language, forms of address, and content, these akhbarat tended to follow almost exactly the prescription set out by Akbar for the official imperial diary. In this type, there is no explicit intrusion of the voice of the akhbar nawis in the account. Because many of the functions and rituals of the court repeated virtually every day, these akhbarat tend to be very repetitive and formulaic.” While in the other version the writer tended to be reflective and often voiced out his understanding of the events of the court. This was often written by the agents of the nobles or khufia nawis who not only kept a check at the provincial waqia nawis but also copied the daily court proceedings with the date and time of the court session (pahar) under the heading Akhbarat-I Darbar-I Mualla or News from the Exalted Court. Bayly adds to our information stating that “Officials routinely divulged their contents to other literate men, so that the contents of the weekly or even daily news report, fleshed out in private news reports and merchant letters, were the main item of discussion in the morning bazaar.”

The khufia nawis and the waqia nawis stationed at the provinces obtained their information from various sources. The prime source was the religious men and astrologers. Just as the Brahmins were excellent source of information during the time of the Mauryas, during the Mughal times the Sufi saints were very popular and were revered by astute men of the emperor and other nobles who often consulted the Sufis for their problems. They gave counsel to the barren, disturbed and mentally ill but had their pulse on the whole society. So did the astrologers and soothsayers, as Manucci notes “the bazaars swarm with these folk, and by this means they find out all that passes in the houses.”

In a society rife with extended marriage networks, women were not just a source of wealth and political alliances but were a critical source of information too. News reports were read in princely harems; royal ladies were judged by their ability to act as intermediaries in diplomatic maneuvering; the emperors married often, and with care, to maximize intelligence as much as to secure support. Midwives, moving from door to door, helping in childbirth could also have collected and conveyed information.

Apart from the akhbarat, what were also widely circulated were proclamations of rights and duties of the subjects and the ruler. Called variously as mahzars or surathals, these were local memorials attested by the sheikhs, the local office holders or karoris and the respectable merchants or mahajans of the qasbah.

Several agencies for surveillance were also important for both exhortation and information collection. Right from the daroga or the chief police officer to the thanadar or the inspector and the barkandazi or the armed constable elicited information from village watchmen or pasobans and the bantirias or the foresters. The daroga and his corps of officers made extensive use of the informal networks of information run by the local landholders and people going on pilgrimage.

As Ashoka had employed the dhamma mahamattas to oversee that the subjects followed the principles of dhamma, Aurangzeb appointed a Muhtasib for similar purposes. The Muhtasib (literally, censor) was a member of the ulema appointed to, as J.F. Richards notes, “regulate urban markets to prevent disorder and fraud in public. The Muhtasib also enforced Sharia prohibitions against blasphemy, wine-drinking and gambling and other heretical or idolatrous behavior in public.” While there was only one chief Muhtasib, there were other muhtasibs posted in the major towns and cities of the empire.

Yet, it is important to realize that information obtained by surveillance officers were never intended to punish the wrong doers. As Bayly notes “Intelligence was designed to alert the ruler to infractions of moral law and true obedience rather than simply to punish 'crime'. For the latter was really the preserve of the community. The agents of intelligence were also the agents of persuasion and compromise, the men who sought to reassure the populace of the omniscience of the emperor's gaze.”

This protracted system of information was supported by an equally extensive postal communication system. Starting with the system of the dak darogas, the postal system matured with the coming of the harkara system. The dak daroga or the postmaster general openly forwarded official letters and reports alongside private ones, thus, revealing his official status. The harkaras (literally, the do-alls) were, therefore, the secret couriers, or provincial messengers, for oral as well as written reports on events in the provinces or armies. Hence the harkara system strengthened the powers of the networks of dak darogas by lending secrecy to the institution. Apart from the harkaras, who generally transmitted messages on camel back, there was a dense network of the foot runners, often called qasids or pathmars. These runners carried papers rolled up in bamboo containers. This system of foot runners was borrowed from the system of the uluq and dawa under the Delhi Sultanate. As described by Ibn Battuta, the former were horse post and the latter were the foot post. So like the dawa, the qasids also had three stations per mile and were said to be faster than the horse post. Alongwith the harkaras, there was a class of intermediaries whose main job was to track the status of the courier or the harkara. So if the harkaras manually transported the message, the intermediaries generally supervised them and tracked the progress of the message.  

Networks of information gathering, spies and informers, were more than useful adjuncts to power and legitimacy and such an efficient, flexible and powerful network of information did strengthen the empire. However, its over-dependence on the loyalty of a few individuals was an inherent weakness of the system. The very flexibility which lent the system strength also weakened it in the long run.

Putting in perspective the gradual decay of the information system of the Mughals in the larger debate of their decline, one can point out various correlations between the two. Firstly, the system in itself was highly vulnerable and concentrated in the hands of a few people who could easily be silenced. The Marathas, who the Empire was fighting during the latter half of the 17^th century, could intercept the imperial messengers and displace the news writers from the networks of small towns.

Secondly, the informants also had their own vested interests. As John Fryer, remarked that “the great nobles and administration live lazily and in pay, during the protracted campaigning. They have an interest in keeping the war spluttering on as do the news writers and literati whose wealth and influence were sustained by war.”

Thirdly, during the reign of Aurangzeb, the kind of information that was sought by the State was of an ideological sort. This distracted the system from its mainstay. So instead of searching for potential rebels and conspiracy hatchers, the informants were now looking for drunkards and heretics.

Fourthly, the Empire in its last leg was plagued by a massive financial crunch. This led to the informants being underpaid, who then became more susceptible to bribery and corruption while the quality of information suffered.

In the larger scheme of things, the extensive network of information system, when at its peak, gives a major fillip to the centralized theory of the Mughal State. It was by keeping a tab on the information from vast areas in the subcontinent that the Mughal State was able to exercise greater control over huge swathes of land. Not just information gathering but also information dissemination through the various akhbarat to the waqia nawis stationed at the provinces, made the power of a strong state felt to its subjects. Moreover, such a wide and extensive system of information, in a subcontinent rife with cultural and social heterogeneity, could have only been backed by a strong, centralized state who could marshal the necessary resources to keep the system running and not by a highly decentralized or segmentary state.

Early Medieval Formation in Western Europe: Crises and Continuities

Völkerwanderung, literally, the movement of people is perhaps not the best word to describe the third century crisis that baffled the Pax Romana. Not only because it doesn’t hint at the bloodshed involved in the migration and the subsequent assimilation of the barbarians but also because it undermines the long term effects of the same which shaped the early medieval society in Europe.  

Located at the fringes of the Roman Empire, the so called barbarians started cutting across the empire from the third century (233 CE) and continued to do so well within the fifth century. Though the migrations may have taken the empire by surprise, this wasn’t the first time that it was dealing with the barbarians. The expanse of the empire necessitated that the areas located at the frontiers be governed by the barbarians. LeGoff tells us that the attitude of the Romans towards the barbarians was ambivalent. While the emperors gave them the status of federates, the traditionalists found them “closer to beasts than men”. Therefore if the relationship between the barbarians and the Romans was workable what drove them to besiege the empire?

Georges Duby blames the cold spell that gripped the area from Siberia to Scandinavia. The Alps experienced a glacial advance causing the forest cover to recede and famines that followed starved the barbarians. That the Pax Romana was ravaged by the hunger of the barbarians is just a tip of the iceberg. What lay deeper were the centrifugal forces in the empire. From the time of Marcus Aurelius (161-180 AD) the focus of the empire had shifted from Italy to other provinces so much so that in the Severan dynasty the emperors were African. This shift was formalized by granting Roman citizenship to all the inhabitants of the empire in 212 AD. Thus the provinces lying on the borders began asserting their independence adding to the misery of the empire.

When the tutelary deities of Rome failed to provide relief, Christianity bagged imperial assent under Constantine and the empire entered into the era of late antiquity. Stretching roughly from the fourth to the seventh centuries, the period refers to the oxymoronic evolution and disintegration of the empire. The empire was just beginning to absorb the shock of the first wave of invasions that another wave thrashed the shores of Rhine in the fifth century. This wave was bigger and gorier than the one before. Rome was sacked by Alaric, the leader of the Franks, in 410 and Carthage was seized in 439 by the Vandals. This ushered in a new era of acculturation and assimilation between the barbarians and Romans and shaped the early medieval society of Europe which reached its peak under the Carolingian empire in the 8^th century.

While the terms barbarian and Roman sound almost antithetical to each other, the acculturation happened because the barbarians were not the savages they were thought to be. Living on the fringes of a highly evolved empire, they had evolved much. Though accustomed to the culture of fleeing in search of new lands, the Germanic tribes were not nomads. They had halted more often and only extreme external pressures such as climatic changes had made them move once more. It is primarily because of this that they were able to fit themselves into the changing social reality of the empire.

Prior to the coming of the barbarians the empire was experiencing a dip in its population. This was started by two major epidemics which hit the empire in the second and third centuries wiped out nearly one third of the empire’s population. The cold wave called for a decrease in harvests and resulted in famines. Unable to pay taxes, townsfolk fled to the countryside. Thus in the fourth century the Roman state made laws to tie peasants to their lands and prevent them from fleeing. As Chris Wickham states “These laws were part of a general legislative package aimed at ensuring that people essential to the state stayed in their professions, and that their heirs would do so too.” Thus the society of manants developed where the Latin word manere (to remain was the principle). This society thrived on the villa type formations. The fact that place names started having words like ville, (Martinville and Buozonville) indicate the shift.

So to the small barbarian peasant his allod (personal property) was a way to show his superiority over the conquered others. The attachment was intrinsic for him to assert his independence. Moreover the barbarians were in no way egalitarian. Slavery existed among them too. Thus from the third to the fifth centuries the empire had three major social categories: totally alienated slaves, free peasants and the magnates. But from the sixth century onwards the tendency was to create more slaves. Given their heavy dependence on slaves, the Roman economy faced a crisis. With no new wars to replenish them, the tendency was now to create slaves from the small tenant farmers or the colonii. Gradually it turned into bondage in the Middle Ages where the serf was tied to his lord’s manorial estate in perpetuity.

With respect to trade Henry Pirenne’s argument seems plausible. Despite the sack of Carthage which cut off Rome’s supply of grains, on the whole trade did not decline. What happened in essence was that trade which had earlier been monopolized by the Roman state, dissipated into the hands of private merchants, primarily Jews and Syrians residing in the eastern half of the empire. Studies done by Richard Hodges and David Whitehouse in Rome and Carthage indicate that while amphorae carrying wines and oils from the eastern Mediterranean to Rome can be dated well within the fifth century, Carthage’s grain trade to Rome continued under the Vandals whose coinage widely circulated around the Mediterranean till the earlier half of the sixth century.

Unlike the Romans the barbarians did not have a single system of laws. Every man was not subject to a single law valid for all the inhabitants of a territory. One was judged on the basis of the judicial customs of one’s tribe. Hence when the two legal systems were fused together the differences were astonishing. While the rape of a virgin was punished by death for a Roman, a Burgundian was merely fined for it. The confusion caused by such divergent legal systems necessitated the need to codify laws which began in the fifth century.

Though the barbarian influence over the empire was pretty strong, the barbarians were well aware that they were in minority. Post their settlement in the western half of the empire, the barbarians formed only 5% of its whole population. This fear motivated the Merovingian rulers to make those cities as their capitals which had the barbarians in majority. The Merovingians lead by Clovis set up their kingdom in the seventh century. Though the barbarian languages altered the syntax and vocabulary of Latin, it was still made the language of the state.  Their rulers accepted high sounding titles like their Roman counterparts had done in the past. By the time of the Merovingians the villa type formation had disappeared in Gaul and Britain. They were now replaced by fortified hilltop centres. This could also have stemmed from the need of the barbarians to protect their selves from the local Roman populace which clearly outnumbered them. 

The barbarians feasted on the decay of the Roman Empire, preserving some traditions and discarding others. Yet, for Christianity as a religion and the Church as an institution this period of chaos and continuity was a win-win situation. Christianity’s biggest challenge was Paganism which was still deeply entrenched in the barbarians. So the church decided to use the imperial authority, its strongest weapon, to defeat its rival. To begin with Paganism was relegated to private sphere with Christianity gaining imperial assent under Constantine. In the fifth century Justinian enforced baptism through confiscation and at times execution.

However, the most novel innovation of the Church was to convert Pagan festivals into Christian festivals. Pagan festivals like Lent, Easter, Pentecost were festivals which involved feasting and merrymaking. The Church turned these into days of penance. Sunday, the day of the Sabbath was made as the day of complete rest when everything from farming to sexual intercourse was forbidden. The performance of these activities on a Sunday, it was believed, would end up producing bad crops and demon babies. Next up Christianity pressurized the Merovingians to codify their laws in accordance with Christian practices which lead to strengthening of sexual taboos and piety through penance.

The Church was no one’s ally. It changed with the change of time. It always kept its interests first. It demanded grants, revenues and exemptions. The Church affected production by draining it away so much so that in eighth century the papal estate at Capracorum supplied staples that imperial Rome had obtained from all over Mediterranean!  

In these times of confusion the Church assumed various roles. To their religious role they added a political one of negotiating with the barbarians, an economic role of distributing foodstuffs and alms and a social role of protecting the poor against the rich.

The western half of the empire was in shambles when the Carolingian empire under Pippin forged unity by conquering three directions to the South-East in Italy, South-West in Spain and East in Germany. The motive was two pronged conquest and convert. Christianity travelled with the Carolingian empire. LeGoff goes as far as to state that “the re-establishment of the empire in the west seems in fact to have been an idea of pope’s” The Carolingian Empire had the papal consent with the anointment of Pippin with holy oils. The Empire in essence was a Christian one where the Pope was the religious head of the Carolingians and the Emperor was the political head. It was an intricate nexus of politics and religion where the Pope needed political liaisoning to shore up the papal office and vice versa.

Apart from its close connections with Christianity the Carolingian Empire also gained legitimization through benefices which were landowning rights given to the aristocrats of the areas bought under the Empire. There was a ritual of gift giving to the aristocracy which brought the empire loyalty. Justice was dispensed according to the written word. Governance was done through the assembly which was a congregation of lay and ecclesiastical officers. Capitualaries were ordinances issued on aspects like administration of royal estates and educational reforms. To supervise the same a class off officers, missi dominici, was established. These officers were counts, dukes and marquises which formed an important place in the sub-in-feudation of land in the Middle Ages.  Capitualary of 789 was issued as models for moral behaviour of the clergy. This was followed by the oath where an oath of loyalty to the king was sworn on holy relics. It is here that the oath came into existence and forged the bond between the lord and the vassal in the Middle Ages.

In conclusion, the crises mixed with the continuities and converged under the Carolingian Empire. Yet, it is important to ask to what extent was the crisis responsible for the disintegration of the Pax Romana and the formation of the early medieval society. It wouldn’t be an overstatement if one was to say that the Roman Empire was already decaying when the barbarians came knocking on its doors. Roman society in its essence was a violent society. The sadistic pleasure of watching the gladiatorial wars was very dear to the Romans. Their laws were stringent and their omission called for gory punishments. Moreover the empire had begun to crumble under its own weight much before the third century. The expanse was too vast to be managed effectively which lead to unguarded fringes. These became the breeding grounds for rebellion and barbarianism. The empire’s heavy dependence on slaves crippled it when they became scarce in times of peace. All this has led to a decline in the state driven trade which the empire had thrived on for centuries. Thus the economic sluggishness had set in the empire as early as the second century and people had begun to depopulate cities for villages. All that the barbarian invasions did was fast track the changes which were already underway. The Pax Romana which ruled the seas and roads alike and gave birth to poets like Virgil and Homer died a rather gory and painful death. The void which it left was filled up by the sermon giving Church which ruled most of medieval Europe selling indulgences to sinners and promising them a better afterlife!