“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 17th 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 17th 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.
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