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132 THEMES IN INDIAN H ISTORY – PART II Source 12 This, then, is how Bernier saw the Mughal Empire – its king was the king of “beggars and barbarians”; A warning for Europe its cities and towns were ruined and contaminated with “ill air”; and its fields, “overspread with bushes” Bernier warned that if and full of “pestilential marishes”. And, all this was European kings followed the because of one reason: crown ownership of land. Mughal model: Curiously, none of the Mughal official documents suggest that the state was the sole owner of land. Their kingdoms would be very far from being well- For instance, Abu’l Fazl, the sixteenth-century cultivated and peopled, official chronicler of Akbar’s reign, describes the land so well built, so rich, so revenue as “remunerations of sovereignty”, a claim polite and flourishing as made by the ruler on his subjects for the protection he provided rather than as rent on land that he we see them. Our kings are otherwise rich and owned. It is possible that European travellers powerful; and we must regarded such claims as rent because land revenue avow that they are much demands were often very high. However, this was better and more royally actually not a rent or even a land tax, but a tax on served. They would soon be kings of deserts and the crop (for more details, see Chapter 8). Bernier’s descriptions influenced Western solitudes, of beggars and theorists from the eighteenth century onwards. The barbarians, such as those French philosopher Montesquieu, for instance, used are whom I have been representing (the Mughals) this account to develop the idea of oriental despotism, … We should find the according to which rulers in Asia (the Orient or the great Cities and the great East) enjoyed absolute authority over their subjects, Burroughs (boroughs) who were kept in conditions of subjugation and rendered uninhabitable poverty, arguing that all land belonged to the king because of ill air, and to and that private property was non-existent. fall to ruine (ruin) without According to this view, everybody, except the emperor any bodies (anybody) taking and his nobles, barely managed to survive. care of repairing them; the hillocks abandon’d, This idea was further developed as the concept of and the fields overspread the Asiatic mode of production by Karl Marx in the with bushes, or fill’d nineteenth century. He argued that in India (and with pestilential marishes other Asian countries), before colonialism, surplus was appropriated by the state. This led to the (marshes), as hath been already intimated. emergence of a society that was composed of a large number of autonomous and (internally) egalitarian village communities. The imperial court presided ➲ How does Bernier depict over these village communities, respecting their a scenario of doom? Once you have read autonomy as long as the flow of surplus was Chapters 8 and 9, return unimpeded. This was regarded as a stagnant system. However, as we will see (Chapter 8), this picture to this description and of rural society was far from true. In fact, during analyse it again. the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, rural society was characterised by considerable social and economic differentiation. At one end of the spectrum were the big zamindars, who enjoyed superior rights in land and, at the other, the “untouchable” landless Reprint 2026-27