Sufism, Culture, and Politics: Afghans and Islam in Medieval North India by Raziuddin Aquil

Author:Raziuddin Aquil [Aquil, Raziuddin]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
ISBN: 9780199087846
Publisher: OUP India
Published: 2012-09-24T04:00:00+00:00

ADMINISTRATIVE SET-UP

It was Sher Shah who for the first time essayed seriously and with success to define the territorial limits of the provinces and to establish a uniform system of government.59

Parmatma Saran writes that Sher Shah consolidated his government by making his provincial governors (called iqtadars or muluk-i-tawaif) realise that they were liable to punishment for the least violation of the statutes and that they had no claims to any particular iqta or jagir. Thus under Sher Shah the provinces attained, both territorially and administratively, a definite stage in their evolution which became the substructure of Akbar’s administrative edifice.60 Though Iqtidar Husain Siddiqui dismisses what he calls Saran’s ‘sweeping generalizations’, he himself goes on to state that certain far-reaching changes were set in the administrative system of the wilayat of Sher Shah, and that they served as a model for Akbar when he organized his empire by grouping sarkars into subas.61 Much earlier, William Erskine had suggested that many of Sher Shah’s revenue regulations were retained or renewed by Akbar, and seemed to have been incorporated into Todarmal’s improved system of finance.62 Later, recognizing the ‘exceptional’ aspiration of Sher Shah for large-scale state-building, J.F. Richards notes that during ‘that brief period his energetic administration forecast many of the centralizing measures in revenue assessment and military organization that would be carried to completion by the Mughals’.63

Any discussion on Sher Shah’s administrative set-up must take into account the fact that he ruled the country merely for about five years and that the Surs were shortly afterwards succeeded by the Mughals who were not expected to acknowledge any of his achievements and were in fact ready to decimate anything which portrayed the Afghans in good light. Thus, though the issues concerning the territorial divisions of Sher Shah’s empire and their administrative organizations have been debated by historians for a long time now, lack of sufficient material in the sources prevents us from believing that a very sophisticated ‘system’ or ‘structure’ of administration existed under him. Nor do we actually view the sixteenth century administrative history in terms of a rigid, unchanging structure, including that of the latter half under Akbar with which we are not immediately concerned.64 The chronicles reveal that Sher Shah was constantly making experiments in different regions and at various levels of his dominion. Instead of rejecting his administrative innovations and reforms as ad-hoc arrangements, they need to be studied as part of the historical processes with all their tensions and turbulence. Our aim here is however limited. We shall give a general outline of the various territorial divisions of Sher Shah’s empire and the duties of the officials appointed by him to run the administration.

Sher Shah’s dominion extended from Sonargaon in the east to the Gakkar country in the north-west, the western boundary being formed by a line joining Balnath Jogi on the Jhelum in the north to Khushab nearly a hundred miles south-west, and hence running across the Jhelum along the bank of the Indus down to Bhakkar.

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