ABSTRACT
In the previous chapter we have argued that the working of the economy and the expansion of the empire helped to produce zamindars and the local ruling systems with which they interacted. In this chapter we shall seek to show that this system, which was a direct product of Mughal devolution in Hyderabad-in the Deccan-as well as south India and Bengal-developed into regional states. One of our main goals in this chapter is to illustrate how military fiscalism develops both in a local, Indian environment and in one created by the English East India Company. In the same way as we saw the migration and conquests of the Marathas
moving out of their original heartland of Maharashtra into central India and into north India in the last chapter, here we will find a reverse movement of many groups down into the Deccan and the Carnatic from north India, on the one hand, and to Bengal, on the other. We will look at one of these movements, which came to form itself around a state originally focused on Aurangabad in the western Deccan to one that encompassed an area that included a city called Hyderabad in the east and later a state that took shape in the Carnatic around a town called Arcot in the Tamil country in the far south. From the point of view of those in north India, the Deccan itself was
almost a foreign land. Yet the story of the movement of groups and individuals, first to the Deccan, and then to the Carnatic on the southeast coast of south India, to serve and sustain regimes militarily as well as intellectually is one of the great untold stories of eighteenth-century India. Already between 1720 and 1722, Nizam-ul-mulk, the founder of Hyder-
abad in 1724, was the Mughal subahdar of the Deccan. During this time he resisted the demands of the Maratha Peshwa Baji Rao and Shahu for the chauth and sardeshmukhi from the subahdar of the Deccan-fictive claims employed by the Marathas-which amounted to 35% of the tax under the Mughals. At this time and later, Nizam-ul-mulk was, however, successful in having various members of his family appointed to a number of different positions. He also educated himself about the political economy of the Deccan. At this time, the Marathas and Nizam-ul-mulk were competing over the western Deccan-that is to say, not the area where Hyderabad was finally
to take shape in the eastern Deccan, but in Maharashtra itself. There, it was in the Maratha heartland during these years that tax collectors of both the Marathas and the Mughals collected taxes from the same villages. In 1723, Nizam-ul-mulk left Delhi and (more or less) the Mughal system and had to fight a Mughal army with, interestingly enough, help from the Marathas, down in the middle of Maharashtra in order to be able to establish himself. However, this also meant that the Nizam and the Marathas had become competitors both in the western Deccan as well as in the Karnatak or Mysore, the tableland farther to the south. In 1728, this competition expressed itself in raids by Baji Rao, Shinde and Holkar on the Nizam’s lands in Khandesh (the Tapti river valley in northern Maharashtra), and finally cornered the Nizam at a battle site named Palkhed near the Nizam’s capital at Aurangabad in western Maharashtra. On March 6 of that year, the Maratha army forced the Nizam to come to terms with them. By this battle and the accompanying treaty the Nizam agreed to pay the arrears of chauth and sardeshmukhi set forth in the 1719 treaty and allow the Maratha tax collectors that he had previously driven out back into the Khandesh. In 1738, the Nizam (as the subahdar of the Deccan) with discussions with Muhammad Shah, the Mughal emperor, granted the Marathas the territory called Malwa-an area that was effectively Maratha in any case-and the area to the east of Malwa between the two rivers Chambal and the Narbada. Nizam-ul-mulk once wrote that he had won over the Marathas since they
were the landholders or zamindars of the country. Even Aurangzeb commented that Nizam-ul-mulk-later called the Nizam-could not conquer them. In this case, Nizam-ul-mulk used some of the same strategies that the Mughals themselves had used. This system that we can call fitna, as we noted in the previous chapter, was a series of strategies that were not based expressly on the expansion of military power per se, but employed alliances and a variety of other tactics deployed to win supporters-such as giving gifts, conciliation and winning over an enemy’s local supporters. Force was used only as a final alternative. In course of time, the Nizam used some of these same tactics also with respect to all the other ethnic groups by which he was confronted in setting up the new state in the Deccan. Nizam-ul-mulk found that his good relations with the Marathas bore excellent results in the increasing agricultural vitality of Khandesh, a valley at the northernmost part of Maharashtra, visited by years and years of devastation through warfare, but during the 1730s still in the hands of the Nizam. In 1738, as we recall, the Nizam was forced to abandon his rights to most of the western Deccan to the Marathas and moved first to Delhi to aid the Mughals against the invasion of Nadir Shah from Persia, and then, two years later, back to Hyderabad. It was during the late 1730s that a number of Maratha zamindars and
Marathi-speaking tax officials with valuable scribal skills (mostly Karhade or Deshastha (Shenvi) Brahmans) came to work for the Nizam in the Aurangabad, Khandesh and Bijapur areas. Some came to work for the Hindu kingdom in Mysore, farther south. Many Marathi-speaking Brahmans would
later come to have an important role in the Nizam’s administration in Hyderabad itself. Many Maratha soldiers also came over to the Nizam’s service, including some commanders who brought their troops with them. These the Nizam used to deal with resistance from locally settled Afghans, groups of Telugus and a tribal group called the Berads. During the late 1720s, the Nizam had been able to incorporate the Afghans and many of the Telugus who had contested the space with violence. One of the most outstanding qualities of Nizam-ul-mulk’s state was its
cultural geographical position somewhere between the Mughal north and the so-called Dravidian south. Therefore, we have to understand how the fiction of dependence on the Mughals was sustained at the same time when more and more connections were being made with local ethnic groups in the Deccan. This fictive dependence we can call a vertical link that was undertaken and maintained by Nizam-ul-mulk at a moment and under conditions when it effectively undermined Mughal power, when Nizam-ul-mulk was extricating himself from Mughal potential demands. Therefore, this was a way to establish the legitimacy of Nizam-ul-mulk’s state while at the same time retaining its independence. One of the ways to express Nizam-ul-mulk’s independence was to establish
a regime in the Carnatic on India’s southeast coast. There, in 1742, the Vellore fort commander murdered the son of Dost Ali Khan, from a local Navaiyat dynasty. In 1743, Nizam-ul-mulk marched into Arcot with a force of 280,000 men, where he appointed Anwaruddin Khan (c.1672-1749) as the Nawab of Arcot, who founded a new Walahjah dynasty. Anwaruddin and later his son, Muhammad Ali, were seeking to take on the shape of the religio-political system of the Tamil south, where sacred elements were concentrations of power immanent in certain objects or places. Chanda Sahib, from the competing Navaiyat dynasty, had begun to carve
out a kingdom for himself in the 1730s. In 1734, he deposed the ruling Nayaka Rani Minakshi (1732-36), a queen in Tiruchirapalli, or Tiruchi, styled Trichinopoly by the British. Tiruchi was the site where sacred forces inhered in the saint tomb or dargah of Nathar Wali, a Muslim mystic, a tomb that had for many years been thought to be the repository of very great barakat or “blessings.” Devotees of the saint came from a wide variety of social classes, Muslims and Hindus. Moreover, Nathar Wali himself is often said to have been the person who brought Islam to the Tamil south. Between then and 1741, when he was carried off to Satara in Maharashtra
by an invading Maratha force from Satara, Chanda Sahib claimed to be the Nawab of Arcot. In 1749, through the diplomacy of Dupleix, the French governor of Pondicherry, the Marathas in Satara freed Chanda Sahib. Muzzafar Jang-contender for the throne of Hyderabad-then helped sustain Chanda. Nasir Jang, the other Hyderabad contender, supported Anwaruddin at the battle of Ambur in that year. Both armies had big Western-trained components but Anwaruddin was nonetheless killed in the conflict. Chanda momentarily became the Nawab of Arcot, assisted by the French.
