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Political Participation in Mughal India

The eighteenth century has become very much of a growth stock in Indian historiography. During the last decade several young (or youngish) scholars, mostly American, have produced fundamental reinterpretations of particular areas of India. The sum of their work amounts to a new view of what happened between the collapse of the Mughal Empire and the British takeover. Basically, these scholars find new political systems, with net participants, emerging from the ashes of the Mughal Empire. This article will argue that the perception that these were new systems and new participants is derived from a faulty view of the nature of politics and political participation in Mughal India. Locally powerful people did not suddenly emerge into a political role as Delhi’s authority weakened in the early eighteenth century. The traditional view of developments between about 1710 and 1750 in India was that this was a time of anarchy and barbarism. Providentially, however, the British were waiting in the wings, and finally stepped in to restore (our, in the view of SOB1C writers, to create) orderly government and the due process of law.1 The most mellifluous statement of this theme is quoted in Thompson and Garratt’s Rise and Fulfilment of British Rule in India, and not surprisingly is from the pen of Winston Cnurchill. They use the following quotation as a motto for their Book II, &dquo;Foundation of the Indian Empire : Clive to Warren Hastings:&dquo;