A tarnished Golden Age

Indian history is littered with "golden ages" "" from the Indus Valley to the Mauryas to the Mughals. Historians of the saffron hue might even hark back to the mythical glories of the Mahabharata and the Ramayana.

This Amar Chitra Katha approach has long been the prevailing orthodoxy for history teaching in schools. It has had the effect of leaving Indians, rooted in the imperfections of modern India, in a constant state of nostalgia for the country's so-called past glories. It also often influences the way we present ourselves to the world.

In that sense, the sub-title to Eraly's book, "Life in India's Last Golden Age", does it a disservice. This is not, in fact, a wide-eyed description of the wonder that was Mughal India. Nor does Eraly's fluent and objective account suggest this "" far from it.

Eraly is a former history teacher with an admiring student alumnus. The book, a reissue to coincide with 60 years of Indian independence, certainly displays the touch of a talented educator.

The author goes beyond the standard textbook treatment and provides a thoughtful narrative history of life under the Great Mughals "" the term that loosely refers to the first six emperors of this part-Turkish, part-Mongol dynasty from central Asia.

To be sure, not all of them were that great. The second, the "easy-going bon vivant" Humayun, temporarily lost his kingdom to the Afghan Sher Shah Suri, who displayed a far greater flair for government. The fourth, Jahangir, was able to follow his father Akbar's formidable legacy mostly because of the talent and determination of his principal queen, Nur Jahan.

These Mughals were so labelled because the empire as a politico-military entity endured under them. After Aurangzeb's death in 1707, his prediction "After me, chaos" proved precipitously true.

Neither startling new insights nor breakthroughs in historiography are to be found in this account. It mostly depends on the numerous established sources both local and foreign, such as Niccolao Manucci, an Italian resident of the Mughal Court around Aurangzeb's time, Francois Bernier, the French physician, Abul Fazl, who wrote the official history of Akbar's reign, and Thomas Roe, the English ambassador to Jahangir's court.

The empire was certainly vast "" at its apogee, it was larger than the territory of modern India. But the concept of nationhood was non-existent.

"Whatever the people had congealed into, however, was not a nation or even a family of nations. Though the Mughals had imposed on the subcontinent such political unity as had never before existed ... there was no sense that the subjects of the empire were one people ... There was an Indian empire; there was no Indian nation," Eraly writes.

The seven chapters of the book cover different perspectives of Mughal India "" from the royal lifestyle to economic activity, the political set-up and life of the ordinary man. The interest mostly lies in the minutiae, but the author rarely loses sight of the big picture.

The overall picture that emerges is of the Cecil de Mille magnificence of the Mughal court juxtaposed against grinding poverty, all of it yoked by tenuous feudal ties to the military might of the Mughals.

Eraly's description of life in Mughal India is particularly interesting from the perspective of brash and resurgent India in the 21st century. For one, it is probably lowering to know that the empire suffered many of the same problems "" poverty, inequality and appalling infrastructure (mainly roads in Mughal times). All these were the result of the rank profligacy of the Mughal rulers and their wastefully large government apparatus.

With no vote-bank to pander to, few of the Mughal rulers "" bar Akbar "" displayed even nominal concern.

Eraly writes, for instance, that "Under the height of Mughal splendor under Shah Jahan over a quarter of the gross national product was appropriated by just 655 individuals, while the bulk of the 120-odd million people of India lived on a dead level of poverty."

In his summing up of the Mughal legacy, Eraly makes the point that despite the flowering of culture "" the exquisite miniatures, architecture and literature "" under keen and knowledgable emperors and the introduction of a standardised political and economic system, the Mughal era had no deep-rooted transformative effect on Indian civilisation.

It was a gilded age in which the alloy was thinly applied. "The Mughal golden age was golden only for the elite, and only for the minuscule Mughalised political elite at that," he writes.

His conclusion is open to debate. While he doesn't go as far as historian Niall Ferguson in suggesting that colonialism wasn't half bad for the world, he says, "What saved India from terminal chaos was the establishment of British rule".

British rule brought with it social reforms, contribution to education, investment in infrastructure and genuine political cohesion.

Even if all of this was driven by self-interest, Eraly argues that 200 years of British rule probably benefited India more than 300 years of Mughal. But of course, we can never call the colonial era a Golden Age.

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THE MUGHAL ROAD
LIFE IN INDIA'S LAST GOLDEN AGE

Abraham Eraly
Penguin
Rs 495, xviii+420 pages