It was as much the court intrigues as also the defiance of the provincial powers that hastened the decline of the Mughals in the 18th century. Comment.

Answer:

The Mughal collapse in the eighteenth century was hastened both by factional intrigue at the imperial court and by the assertion of autonomy in the provinces. The two processes reinforced one another, though modern scholarship insists that deeper structural causes underlay them both.

Court intrigues and factionalism

• After Aurangzeb's death in 1707 a series of wars of succession weakened the throne.
• The Sayyid Brothers, styled kingmakers, raised and deposed emperors at will.
• The nobility split into Turani, Irani, Afghan and Hindustani factions competing for jagirs and office.
• Weak rulers such as Jahandar Shah and Muhammad Shah became puppets of these groups.
• Between 1707 and 1719 alone the empire saw a rapid succession of emperors.

Defiance of the provincial powers

• Governors made their provinces hereditary in fact while professing formal allegiance.
• Murshid Quli Khan in Bengal, Saadat Khan in Awadh and Nizam-ul-Mulk in the Deccan founded autonomous states.
• Revenue increasingly stayed in the provinces instead of reaching the centre.
• The Marathas expanded northward, extracting chauth and sardeshmukhi.
• Rajputs, Sikhs and Jats asserted independence in their own regions.

Structural and external causes

• The jagirdari crisis, analysed by Satish Chandra, left too many nobles chasing too few assignments.
• Aurangzeb's long Deccan wars drained the treasury and overstretched the administration.
• Agrarian discontent and a heavy revenue demand produced widespread zamindar revolts.
• The invasions of Nadir Shah in 1739 and Ahmad Shah Abdali shattered the remaining prestige.

How the causes interacted

• Factional strife at court paralysed any effective response to provincial defiance.
• Provincial autonomy in turn starved the centre of the revenue needed to reassert control.
• Nobles cultivated provincial bases as insurance against defeat in court faction.
• Muzaffar Alam and C.A. Bayly stress that regional powers were rising, not merely the centre decaying.

The wider verdict

• Jadunath Sarkar emphasised Aurangzeb's religious policy as a cause of alienation.
• Satish Chandra located the crisis in the working of the jagirdari system itself.
• Athar Ali pointed to the shortage of jagirs after the Deccan conquests.
• The British ultimately built their power on the regional states, not on Delhi.
• Decline at the centre thus coincided with vitality in the regions.

The comment is thus well-founded, for court intrigue and provincial defiance were indeed the immediate agents of Mughal decline, each aggravating the other. Yet, as recent historiography emphasises, both were symptoms of a deeper crisis of the jagirdari system and of a shift of wealth and power from the imperial centre to the regions.