Aspects of state formation in South India
and Southeast Asia, 1500-1650
Sanjay Subrahmanyam
Delhi School of Economics
The paper is broadly divided into two sections. The first section critically
surveys the historiography on the formation and transformation of states,
drawing upon examples, from not only southern India, but from Indonesia as well
as mainland Southeast Asia. The central purpose is to show parallel tendencies
in the two historiographies, and to prepare the ground for a synthesis. We
also note that, at least where the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are
concerned, the two historiographies borrow from the same dictionary of
ideas, without however referring to one another. The critique will focus in
particular on the tendency to create a chronological sequence of state types
by cobbling together borrowings from other contexts: the work of
Europeanists in particular, and of Africanists to a more limited extent.
Correspondingly, we note the failure to develop adequate Asianist models,
or for that matter models that integrally discuss the evolution of state forms
as opposed to mere cyclical fluctuations in them. The second section draws
on documentary material, particularly from the archives of the Dutch and
English East India Companies, to elucidate some elements of a model in the
context of southern India, with a tentative conclusion on how well these fit
the various Southeast Asian cases.
I
Southern India, here defined as a part of the Indian peninsula south of the
Krishna-Tungabhadra, contained within it at least two types of states in the
Acknowledgements: An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Third C.D.L.Y.
Conference, Yogyakarta, held between 22 and 26 September 1986. Thanks are due to several
friends and colleagues for important references and critical comments. In particular, I am
grateful to Vincent Houben and Dhiravat Na Pombejra for references, and to C.A. Bayly and
Sabyasachi Bhattacharya for helping to bring the problem in focus. The usual disclaimers
naturally apply.
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358
period under consideration. There were firstly the relatively large kingdoms,
the Sultanate of Golconda, the Vijayanagar empire, and later kingdoms
such as Udaiyar Mysore, and the Nayaka Kingdoms of Ikkeri, Senji,
Tanjavur and Madurai.
There
were
also the petty coastal
kingdoms in the
south-west comer of the region, often neglected from consideration in such
works as the recent Cambridge Economic History of India, Volume 1. ~ For
much of this period, the Malabar region of south western India (to which we
have just referred) contained three or four principal states, namely
Kolathunad, Kozhikode and Vemad, with the rulers of Cochin coming, to
prominence in the course of the sixteenth century. We wiH begin
with
a consideration of the literature on the larger sized states, which
though
has been rather more prolific in recent times than that on Malabar.
The classic portrayal ot these kingdoms, from the works of K.A.N. Sastri,
N. Venkataramanayya or even W.H. Moreland does not substantially differ
from the picture conventionally drawn of the Mughal Empire to the north.2
The focus is largely on organized and bureaucratic fiscal administration; the
categories within the overall aegis of state comprise tributary chieftain,
revenue assignee, directly taxed cultivator and inam holder, familiar to us as
well from the Mughal literature. A picture is drawn of the ’Hindu’ south
after the battle of Talikota (1565), which is remarkably similar to that of
post-Aurangzeb Mughal India: anarchy, regional breakaway kingdoms, the
foreign invader, and eventually European penetration and political
control.3 Doubtless the ’dark hiatus’ between Pax Vijayanagarica and Pax
Britannica endured longer than the eighteenth century anarchy so commonly to be encountered in the literature where the north is concerned, but
the elements were essentially the same. For northern India, we may note
that despite the recent work of Gordon, Barnett and Bayly, this picture of
the breakdown of order continues to hold sway, propped up by the Aligarh
school.’4
In the case of southern India, however, the reconsideration of the period
by the ’American’ school, amongst whom one may count Stein, Ludden, and
assume
1
See Irfan Habib and Tapan Raychaudhuri eds., The Cambridge Economic History of
I (c. 1200-1750), Cambridge, 1981, especially Chapters II, IV, VII.3, VIII.2,
India, Volume
X.3.
2
For example, K.A. Nilakantha Sastri, A History of South India from pre-historic times to
the Fall of Vijayanagar, Madras, 1955; N. Venkataramanayya, Studies in the History of the
Third Dynasty of Vijayanagar, Madras, 1935; W.H. Moreland, India at the Death of Akbar,
London, 1920.
3
See Sastri, History, pp. 296-305; also the classic account of Colin Mackenzie, ’View of the
Principal Events that Occurred in the Carnatic, from the Dissolution of the Ancient Hindoo
Government in 1564 ...,’ Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, Volume XIII, Part I,
January-June 1844, pp. 421-63.
4
Cf. Stewart Gordon, ’The Slow Conquest: The Administrative Integration of Malwa into
the Maratha Empire, 1720-1760,’ Modern Asian Studies, Volume XI, No. 1, 1977, pp. 1-40;
Richard B. Barnett, North India Between Empires: Awadh, the Mughals and the British,
1720-1801, Berkeley, 1980; C.A. Bayly, Rulers, Townsmen and Bazaars: North Indian Society
in the Age of British Expansion, 1770-1870, Cambridge, 1983.
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359
others,’ has tended to stand the classic picture on its head. The central work,
that of Stein, has concentrated on an earlier period than Vijayanagar, that is
particularly on the phase AD 1000-1200, but nonetheless has brought into
currency the idea that bureaucratic fiscal administration and penetrative
centralised states were all but non-existent in southern India, the states
instead having a ’segmentary’ character, with a tiny core area actually
centrally administered, the rest owing no more than ritual allegiance to
central authority. Stein’s work concentrates largely on the Cola period (c.
850 to 1200), but he goes on to affirm that the Vijayanagar empire was in
continuation of the earlier segmentary state, with the core area
shifted from the Kaveri basin to the Krishna-Tungabhadra duab. We thus
have the somewhat piquant situation in the Cambridge Economic History I,
where north India (we are told) has all the characteristics of a glittering
patrimonial-bureaucratic empire, while once south of the Godavari, state
forms become segmentary, diffuse and decentralised. Caught in the wedge
between these two are states like Bijapur and Golconda, physically and
historically resembling the ’Hindu’ south, but historiographically identified
with Mughal India. Thus the recent authoritative works on Golconda, those
of Sherwani and Richards, (the latter actually identifying himself as an
adherent to the ’ &dquo;Aligarh&dquo; interpretation of institutions’)6 talk of an agrarian
system of Golconda in terms reminiscent of the Habib-Siddiqi conception:
revenue assignments, layers of bureaucracy, the orderly conception of
administration centering around the jam’i-kamil, even raising the familiar
bogey of the revenue-farmer as representative of anarchic tendencies in the
system. Indeed the incongruity of these two strands, that of the bureaucratic
vision of state and that of segmentary diffusion, has been noted by Richards
in a review of Stein. We may note the attempt at reconciliation in the
essence a
following terms:
If we look for a system knit together by local vitality and energy and by
shared cultural values, expressed in the wide dissemination of the sacred
qualities of the monarch-we will find it. If we look for a growing
concentration of state power, noticeable and growing intrusion in the
with or without a ’bureaucracy’-we can possibly find that
countryside
also.I
5
Besides Stein’s chapters in the Cambridge Economic History, I, see his Peasant State and
Society in Medieval South India, Delhi, 1980. For a slightly divergent view, see David Ludden,
Peasant History in South India, Princeton, 1985. Finally, for a recent critique of Stein’s model as
applied to the Chola period, see E. James Heitzman, Gifts of Power: Temples, Politics and
Economy in Medieval South India, unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Pennsylvania,
1985.
6
See H:K. Sherwani, History of the Qutb Shahi Dynasty, New Delhi, 1974; John F.
Richards, Mughal Administration in Golconda, Oxford, 1975, Chs. 1 and 2.
7
J.F. Richards, Review of Stein, ’Peasant State and Society,’ Journal of Asian Studies,
Volume XLII, No. 4, 1980, p. 1008. The unsatisfactory nature of the two extreme models
described above is also noted in Frank Perlin, ’State Formation Reconsidered,’ Modern Asian
Studies, Volume XIX, (3), 1985, pp. 415-80, especially p. 421.
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360,
But this statement sidesteps the issue, given the extreme nature of the
contentions of the two schools, the one arguing that the state had enormous
coercive powers (we would recall the Aligarh school contention that upto 50
per cent of gross agrarian product was claimed from the cultivator), the
other denying the existence of fiscal linkages between large parts of the
empire and its core. Ironically enough, however, recent writings find Stein,
too, attempting to bridge the yawning gap in the two conceptions. In his
case, the problem arises from the perspective of chronological sequencing.
Bearing in mind the segmentary character of ’classic’ Vijayanagar (c. 13501550), Stein appears faced with the problem of explaining the state structure
in south India
as one
observes it
on
the
eve
of colonial rule, in the late
eighteenth century. The Mysore of Hyder Ali and Tipu Sultan, in Stein’s
view, was an enormously penetrative bureaucratic state--a vision remarkably
similar to the Aligarh view of Mughal India.8 Stein in a recent piece attempts
to explain its emergence by taking recourse to a Europeanist model of
’military fiscalism’ derived from the European Absolutist states of the early
modern
problem of the evolution of Indian states turns
question of cobbling together one Africanist model
with another Europeanist one in chronological sequence.’° An important
-element in this change in the character of south Indian states is perceived to
be the arrival of Europeans, who, by bringing m small-arms as well as
cannon and giving them far wider currency than they had enjoyed before,
cause a change in the nature of warfare, of armies and consequently of fiscal
administration. This process of transformation takes place in spurts: thus, an
initial impetus is given in the period of Krishna Deva Raya (1509-29),
Achyuta R4ya (1529-42) and Sadasiva Raya (1542-76) at Vijayanagar,
followed thereafter by what are seen by Stein as far-reaching changes under
Chikka Deva Raja Udaiyar (1672-1704) at Mysore. The logical culmination
of this process is reached under Hyder and Tipu.
The central point at issue in the discussion of the structure of state in the
case of these larger kingdoms is the nature, bureaucratic or otherwise, of
fiscal administration. Since these states, at least nominally, controlled large
areas of land, the principal source of revenue for the upper nobility and the
period.’ Thus,
out to be no more than
the
a
8
It is worth remarking that when the sources used are administrative manuals, official
diaries and memoirs, the historiography is dominated by images of a powerful state, while when
the sources used are inscriptions, and are generated by local institutions, the image is of diffused
control. For a view of late eighteenth century Mysore similar to Stein’s (but which predates his
writings on the subject) Asok Sen, ’A pre-British Economic Formation in India of the Late
Eighteenth Century: Tipu Sultan’s Mysore,’ in Barun De ed., Perspectives in Social Sciences, 1,
Calcutta, 1979, pp. 46-119.
9
Burton Stein, ’State Formation and Economy Reconsidered,’ Modern Asian Studies,
Volume XIX, (3), 1985, pp. 387-413. Stein cites as his European model seventeenth century
France, as described in Martin Wolfe, The Fiscal System of Renaissance France, New Haven,
1972.
10
The Africanist model taken recourse to in Stein, Peasant State and Society, is that of Aidan
Southall, Alur Society, Cambridge, 1956.
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361
elites in general was agrarian surplus, whatever be the channels of redistribution. However, if these states were, as Stein argues, ‘segmentary,’ it follows
from his understanding of the term that agrarian surplus would not have
flowed from the segment to the core area where the empire was theoretically
centred. Instead, the relationship between periphery and core would remain
ritual rather than fiscal. In sharp contradiction, if indeed these states were
like the Mughal India of Habib, centre and periphery would be linked by
fiscal flows of substantial dimensions. An exception must be made in the
case of the Malabar principalities, where extant literature suggests at least
superficial similarities with Indonesian kingdoms of the period, such as
Aceh, Banten, Makassar (i.e., Gowa-Tallo) and Johor. There are broadly
two strands of interpretation where the Malabar states are concerned. There
are those who, pointing to the fluid boundaries, the existence of military
chieftains owing allegiance to the principal rulers (the Kolathiri, the Samudri
and the Tiruvadis-as also the Cochin raja) characterise the states as
essentially feudal.&dquo; Thus, it is claimed, the petty chiefs who controlled
bands of Nayar warriors were meant to render military service to their
overlords, while otherwise tree to administer their regions of control. Some
historians have even argued the existence of demesne lands, possessed by
the rajas, together with ’manorial’ holdings on the part of the petty kayamals
and naduvazhis. These are seen to be cultivated on occasion by hired labour,
but far more frequently by bonded labour. It is a common assertion that this
system was linked to another feature, the absence of land taxation in the
region,’2 and that hence the resources that rulers had at their disposal were
either commodity taxes, taxes on professions and communities, taxes on
trade, or the produce of demesne lands. In addition, it is suggested that the
rulers themselves participated both in the overland and in the coastal and
overseas trade, gathering a profit thereby. Some historians dispute this
characterisation, stating that taxes on the land and its produce did exist, but
that most of the lands were formally held either by temples or by Namputhiri
brahmins, categories who were in practice freed of such dues. At least one
ingenious explanation has it that peasant proprietors, faced with two
alternatives-either of paying taxes to the state, or of donating land to
temples on the condition that they were retained as occupancy tenantschose the latter as less onerous, rent payments to temples being less than
revenue payments to the sta~e. 13 It is also suggested that as a consequence,
potential for conflict existed between the temples and their trustees on the
one hand, and the rajas and military aristocracies on the other.
As we have noted at the outset, comparisons between the Indian states of
the period, whether the larger or the smaller ones, and the states of
Southeast Asia are rare for the period we are considering. In fact, historians
raja
11
A. Sreedhara Menon, A Survey of Kerala History, Kottayam, 1967, pp. 254-55.
See Menon, A Survey of Kerala History, ibid.; Stephen F. Dale, Islamic Society on the
South Asian Frontier: The Mapillas of Malabar, 1498-1922, Oxford, 1980, pp. 15-17.
13
Elamkulam Kunjan Pillai, Studies in Kerala History, Trivandrum, 1970, pp. 332-58.
12
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362
of this period of pre-colonial history in the two areas tend to ignore the
existence of another potentially useful historiography, from which elements
.
’
and ideas might be drawn, even if a single ’unified theory’ is not generated.
A notable exception in recent times is Stephen F. Dale in his work on
the Mapillas in Malabar. Dealing specifically with the problem of the
reactions of this community to Portuguese intervention in the sphere of
trade in sixteenth century Malabar, Dale refers to the Acehnese case as a
parallel one, and even goes on to state, ’Certain aspects of the history and
political organisation of Kerala are more intelligible when the area is thought
of as one of the Hinduised states of South-East Asia rather than as an
integral part of the south Asian subcontinent,’ arguing that the region has a
’South-East Asian personality.&dquo;’ Yet, little of concrete worth eventually
emerges from this, and as has been shown elsewhere, the Acehnese parallel
has limited utility even in the context of the anti-Portuguese struggle: as it
turns out, the Mapillas’ power eventually comes to be a threat not only to the
Portuguese but to the local Hindu rulers (the Kolathiri and the Samudri),
thus causing shifting alliances within the triad, Mapillas-Estado da indiaMalabar rulers. ’5
Despite the fact that the two fields-the study of the state in late precolonial India and in pre-colonial Southeast Asia-have grown in recent
years almost wholly in isolation from one another, many of the elements in
the earlier discussion of theories of state formation in India would have a
familiar ring to Southeast Asianists. This is for a simple reason: while those
working in the two areas usually do not read, and are almost certainly not
influenced by, one another, they both take recourse to borrowings from a
common ’dictionary’ of paradigms. Thus the segmentary state of Southall,
grafted by Stein onto southern India, is equally to be encountered in Warren’s
The Sulu Zone and Andaya’s The Heritage of Arung Palakka.’6 In the
succeeding paragraphs, I intend to devote attention to one of the more
important and, arguably, more influential statements on pre-colonial state
formation in Southeast Asia, that of Anthony Reid, and here too we shall
note startling similarities to some ideas in the Indian context.
Reid’s basic general statement is developed at length in various places,
both by him and by others in specific contexts.&dquo; In his study referred to
above, as well as in the others, the examples chosen by Reid are essentially
of the Islamic Sultanates--Aceh, Banten, Makassar, occasionally Mataram,
but also sprinkled with references to other states, notably Ayutthaya and
14
Dale, Islamic Society, pp. 11, 56.
15
This is discussed atgreater length in Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Trade and the Regional
c. 1550 to 1650, thesis under submission to the University of Delhi,
1986, Ch. IV.
16
See James F. Warren, The Sulu Zone, 1768-1898: The Dynamics of External Trade,
Slavery and Ethnicity in the Transformation of a Southeast Asian Maritime State, Singapore,
1981, and Leonard Y. Andaya, The Heritage of Arung Palakka: A History of South Sulawesi
(Celebes) in the Seventeenth Century, The Hague, 1981, pp. 13-15.
17
Anthony Reid, ’Trade and State Power in 16th and 17th Century Southeast Asia,’
Proceedings, Seventh IAHA Conference, Bangkok, 1977.
Economy of South India,
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363
Burma. His central argument (simplified somewhat) appears as follows. The
arrival of the Europeans m Asia in numbers dates from the early sixteenth
century, following on the discovery of the Cape Route. Two major effects of
this event make themselves felt on the Southeast Asian kingdoms of the
period. On the one hand the growth of trade on an autonomous basis,
coupled with the import of bullion promotes far-reaching but unspecified
economic changes. This increase in trade is seen principally as that on the
great north-west/south-east axis of Asian trade, or what Michael Pearson
felicitously terms the ’Glamour Route’. On the other hand, the spread of
small-arms and cannon under the aegis of European .expansion (which
though they may have existed in pre-1500 Asia are seen as gaining wide
currency only now), occurs together with the use of European mercenaries,
and elite troops trained by such Europeans. This military role was not
restricted to the Portuguese, of course, for the Acehnese link with Ottoman
Turkey became well-established in the course of the sixteenth century,
serving as a conduit for many of these imported elements. The result,
following Reid, was a form of Asian ‘Absolutism,’ represented by such cases
as Iskandar Muda in Aceh, and Prasat Thong in Ayutthaya.
In other writings, Reid develops the idea in greater detail, arguing that
state formation crucially hinged on the external sector, since the state drew
its revenue essentially from trade, and the crucial elements of changebullion, arms, technology of warfare and mercenaries-all came from this
direction; it is never clearly specified however by what means these elements
acted on the structure of state. Thus, the decline of Aceh is traced to the
post-1640 period, when the Dutch East India Company (following the
capture of Melaka from the Portuguese in 1641) greatly constrained trade to
the port. At the same time, the balance of power between powerful orangkaya
(a class of urban-based nobility) and the ’Absolutist’ monarchy shifted
decisively in favour of the former, a fact reflected in the installation of a
Sultana at the death of Iskandar Thani. 11 This fits in very well of course with
Andaya’s portrayal of the rise of Johor from 1641 on, when trade was
effectively diverted from Aceh to Johor, so that the latter’s ’increased
revenue from a prosperous trade made possible Johor’s proud and selfassured activities in these years. The wealth from international trade served
to enhance the prestige of Johor leaders and strengthened the traditional
forces which assured the well-being of the kingdom.’’9
Reid’s thesis has been closely applied to the Burma of the period as well,
in recent writings by Victor B. Lieberman.&dquo; Once again, the same elements
are invoked: the growth of trade on the major axis of the intra-Asian
18
A. Reid, ’Trade and the Problem of Royal Power in Aceh: Three Stages, c. 1550-1700,’ in
A. Reid and L. Castles eds., Pre-Colonial State Systems,in South-East Asia, Kuala Lumpur,
1975, pp. 45-55.
19
L.Y. Andaya, The Kingdom of Johor, 1641-1728: A Study of Economic and Political
Developments in the Straits of Malacca, Ph.D. thesis, Cornell University, 1971, pp. 36-37.
See Victor B. Lieberman, ’Europeans, Trade and th e Unification of Burma, c. 15401620,’ Oriens Extremus, Vol. XXVII, (2), 1980, pp. 203-26; Lieberman, Burmese Administrative
Cycles: Anarchy and Conquest, c. 1580-1760, Princeton, 1984.
20
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364
network, the inflow of bullion, the import of small-arms, cannon and
mercenaries. Thus, Lieberman presents a vision of Burma under the First
in which all the familiar elements come
which
however remains undeveloped-of
together, adding
conflict between military aristocracy and Buddhist religious elite over the
control of agrarian resources. The spectre of Asian Absolutism is thus seen
to loom large in a diversity of contexts: Banten, Aceh, Burma and southern
India as well. The logic of the change is seen to lead to different solutions in
different cases. Reid has it that in Aceh absolutist tendencies eventually
collapse, leading to the diffusion of power in the hands of autonomous
’feudal’ uleebalang (or landed chieftains). Another possibility is of the
formation of an absolutist polity which turns thalassophobic, illustrated by
Reid with Mataram and Lieberman using the instance of the Restored
Taung-ngu Dynasty in seventeenth century Burma. Alternatively, military
fiscalism could reach its full flower as in the case of Tipu and Hyder’s Mysore
as characterised by Stein. Thus, while the colonial power in India is able to
build on recently improvised structures of fiscal administration in Southern
India (thus proving that ’continuity’ again triumphs), in the Indonesian case
what is left at the eve of colonial rule are either weak former trading kingdoms,
or the more massive and (presumably) sluggish agrarian states of Schrieke
and van Leur.11
Both the Indian and the Southeast Asian historiographies are characterised
above all by the use of unchanging oppositions in characterising the transformation of states. In the Indian case, the classic work of W.H. Moreland
and subsequently Irfan Habib sees states as torn between two tendencies,
the one leading to centralization the other to decentralisation.22 The central
issue is agrarian surplus, since the states that are discussed by these authors
are thought to be essentially concerned with this aspect of activity. Ideally,
these states should have evolved bureaucratised systems for the collection of
land revenue, and indeed to Moreland this ideal is achieved under Pax
Britannica. However, unable to do so, the major states of the Indian
heartland adopt a system by which a proportion of fiscal rights is given out in
assignment to an aristocracy. This is thought to be the root of the problem of
instability in states, for when the aristocracy is given long-term fiscal rights
(e. g. , the iqta) it acquires local roots, and comes to represent a threat to
central power. if, however, the fiscal rights are temporary, as indeed they
were in the Mughal Empire, the assignee supposedly has a tendency to
oppress the peasants by extracting as much as possible in the short run. This
Taung-ngu Dynasty (c. 1530-1600)
a
further
one
21
It is in fact curious that the evidence base of Reid’s theories (in particular in reference to
extend little further than the sources cited in B.J. Schrieke, Indonesian Sociological
Studies, Volume I, The Hague 1955, pp. 37-82. In substance too, the argument has been
advanced little, although the canvas has been extended.
22
W.H. Moreland, The Agrarian System of Moslem India, Cambridge, 1929; I. Habib,
’Potentialities of Capitalistic Development in the Economy of Mughal India,’ The Journal of
Economic History, Volume XXIX, (1), 1969, pp. 32-78. The vision of a cyclical movement
about a static mean is particularly conspicuous on p. 50.
Java)
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365
in turn is
thought to lead to unrest and the disintegration of the large state.
revenue assignment, these writings generate cycles of
state formation and disintegration, perhaps accompanied by cycles of peasant
unrest, but this leads to no unidirectional change; it is a fluctuation about a
Thus, through the
static mean.
I should stress that Wink’s recent writings on state formation and fitna
represent no more than a variation on this theme; as in Mark Elvin’s
discussion on China, he appears to argue that the expansion of states is based
on compromises on the margin, that these compromises lead to the prosperity
of the local elites with whom such arrangements are made, and that prosperity
as much as misery is a recipe for rebellion.z3
In the Indonesian case, the dominant theme while discussing state formation is, similarly, cyclical. It can in fact be traced back to Schrieke, and has
subsequently been reiterated by van Leur, Burger, and more recently Reid. 21
In sum, a central dichotomy is thrown up: between the trading state and the
inland, ’massive,’ and ’hydraulic’ state, the latter being thalassophobic to a
greater or lesser degree. Trading states include Srivijaya, Melaka, Demak
and the sixteenth century north Javanese states, and sixteenth and
seventeenth century Aceh, Banten and Makassar. The agrarian stales with
which they are engaged in a mortal struggle are-in the Javanese case-first
Majapahit, later Pajang, and finally Mataram. Thus, if one follows Burger,
there existed no threat to the Mataram state other than that from the north
Javanese trading states; hence, they had to be crushed. In sum, according to
orthodoxy, in Indonesia state formation can be encapsulated more or less as
a cyclical process, with agrarian and trading states alternately in the
ascendant. Once again the alternation leads to no cumulative process; thus
Schrieke’s assertion that ’the structure of the Java of around 1700 was not
appreciably different from that of the Java of around 700.’ It is only in the
late seventeenth century that the power of trading states is crushed once and
for all, leading to growing thalassophobia and isolation in Java.
Once one accepts a theory of either this sort, or the segmentary state
construct of Stein et al. , which clearly contains within it no tensions (not even
cyclical ones) historical change and the evolution of state forms naturally
become dependent on the importation of deus ex machina. Here, the
European presence in Asia proves to be a boon to the historian, for now
23
André Wink, ’Sovereignity and Universal Dominion in South Asia,’ The Indian Economic
and Social History Review, Volume XXI, (3), 1984, pp. 265-92. Compare this to the more
general discussion on the formation and dissolution of empires in Mark Elvin, The Pattern of the
Chinese Past, Stanford, 1973, pp. 17-22.
24
Schrieke, Indonesian Sociological Studies, 1, pp. 80-82; J.C. van Leur, Indonesian Trade
and Society, The Hague, 1955, pp. 172-75, passim; D.H. Burger, Sociologisch-Economische
Geschiedenis van Indonesia, Deel 1, reprint, The Hague, 1975, pp. 27-30. Burger has incidentally
been criticised for not adequately emphasising another element of tension, that between
secular and religious elite—cf. Harry J. Benda, ’The Structure of Southeast Asian History:
Some Preliminary Observations,’ Journal of South-East Asian History, Volume III, (1), 1962,
pp. 106-38.
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366
timelessness or cyclical time can be replaced by linear, orderly progressions.
This, then, might be thought of as the logic behind a much-discussed
historiographical construct: the Vasco da Gama epoch. In its most recent
version, it is not the dominance over maritime over terrestrial factors that is
stressed, so much as the convenient arrival of an outside force to liberate
Asian state formation from sterile cyclical revolutions.25
II
The foregoing discussion has been essentially negative in character, pointing
to weaknesses in existing constructs but arguably adding little of a positive
nature to our understanding of the formation and transformation of state
structures. In this section, some elements of an argument will be put forward,
essentially concerned with the dynamic of state formation. The focus here is
a grey area or middle ground that exists between state and ’civil’ society in
the period, where one can locate intermediary elements. Put simply, points
of view on the relationship between the pre-colonial state and its society can
.
be divided into two strands. First, there are those who continue to see the
state as ephemeral, and essentially divorced from society in general. Thus,
changes in the state actually take the form of ’palace coups,’ or the substitution by conquest of one elite by another. At any rate, these changes at the
top of the pyramid are thought to have little relevance for society in general.
On the other hand, we have the alternative viewpoint, a step removed from
that summarised above. Here, state and society are seen as meeting, but this is
an encounter wholly predicated on the initiative of the state; the terminology,
which centres around the ’penetration’ of society by state, thus speaks for
itself. The state can, thus, by fiscal or other intervention, affect society. It
can never, in this vision, be affected by society. Criticising the first of the two
viewpoints outlined above, Jan Breman has noted that ’according to this
conceptualisation, the social order had a dual character: on the one hand a
fragile and vulnerable macro-part which regularly faded away, and, on the
other, a solid eternal base.’ He compares the two to ’separate circuits of
which the contact zone remained vague and indistinct.’z6 It is precisely this
’contact zone’ or middle ground that we will focus on here, seeing it as an
arena not only of initiatives from above (’state penetration’), but of
engagement from below. It is argued that where the larger south Indian
states in the period were concerned, the most significant developments
occurred precisely in this middle ground. However, to discuss the middle
25
The question of whether the post-1500 period indeed constitutes a new epoch (as is
assumed in pro st standard accounts of Southeast Asia) has been debated in the pages of the
Journal of South-East Asian History in the early 1960s. See, for example, (besides Benda’s
paper cited above) John R.W. Smail, ’On the Possibility of an Autonomous History of Modem
Southeast Asia,’ Journal of Southeast Asian History, Vol. II, (2), 1961, pp. 72-102, in fact a
response to an earlier article by John Bastin.
26
See Jan Breman, ’The Village on Java and the Early Colonial State,’ The Journal of
Peasant Studies, Volume IX, (4), July 1982, pp. 189-240, especially pp. 191-93.
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367
ground
at a level of
generality means little.
institutions of the ’contact zone’. Here
It is of essence to focus on the
focus specifically on one of
we
these-namely revenue-farming.
As Bayly has noted, this institution is one that characterises many
economies in the late pre-colonial period outside Europe, and is also an area
that has witnessed a resurgence of recent interest in the historiography.2’
Revenue-farming as an institution existed in fifteenth and sixteenth century
Vijayanagar, but appears to have been largely confined to the farming of
customs in
ports, and of other levies such
as
octroi. Thus, in the two most
important ports of the empire circa 1500, namely Bhatkal and Pulicat, the
person referred to as the ’governor’ of the port is interchangeably referred to
in Portuguese documents as a rendeiro (or rentier). Revenue-farming of
agrarian taxes was little known, and while Stein has noted forms of fiscal
arrangements termed kattu-kodugai and dasavanda, which he terms ’rural
developmental tenures, ’28 it is not clear that these were widespread. The
mentioned above enabled entrepreneurs to undertake the clearing
and colonisation of scrub or wasteland, with the state agreeing to either fully
or partially remit revenue dues for a period, so that the entrepreneur would
gain in the process.
However, by the early years of the seventeenth century, the literature
emphasises that much of the coastal Tamilnadu and Andhra regions was
held in revenue-farm. In fact, this phenomenon seems to have advanced in
the course of the first half of the seventeenth century; for example, the
Pulicat region, which was under the direct fiscal control of the Chandragiri
raja in 1605 is later seen to be farmed out. The opus classicus on south Indian
revenue-farming is Moreland’s From Akbar to Aurangzeb, subsequently
lent weight by Raychaudhuri’s work on the region.29 Moreland sees the
fiscal system as arbitrary, cruel and rapacious, with no redeeming features
whatsoever. This view is clearly of a piece with his work on northern India,
and indeed subsequent writings on Mughal India argue that Mughal decline
was essentially a consequence of the rise of ijaradari (revenue-farming) in
the late seventeenth century, leading to widespread rebellions in an irate
and long-suffering jacquerie. 30
tenures
27
C.A. Bayly, ’States and Empires, 1760-1830,’ paper presented to the Cambridge Overseas
History Seminar, 1985.
28
On the Pulicat ’rendeiro,’
see
Arquivo Nacional da
Torre do Tombo, Lisbon
(henceforth
ANTT), Corpo Cronológico, 1/77/26,’Parecer de Jorge Cabral....’On the ’rural developmental
tenures,’ Stein, Peasant State and Society, op. cit., pp. 426-27.
29
W.H. Moreland, From Akbar to Aurangzeb: A Study in Indian Economic History, London,
1923, especially pp. 239-45; T. Raychaudhuri, Jan Company in Coromandel, 1605-1690: A Study in
the Interrelations of European Commerce and Traditional Economies, The Hague, 1962.
30
This view is clearly articulated in Irfan Habib, The Agrarian System of Mughal India,
1565-1707, Bombay, 1963, and N.A. Siddiqi, Land Revenue Administration Under the Mughals
1700-1750, Bombay, 1970. It continues to be maintained in Habib’s chapters in the Cambridge
Economic History. For the most recent reiteration of the view, see Irfan Habib, ’Classifying
Pre-Colonial India,’ in T.J. Byres and H. Mukhia, eds., Feudalism and Non-European Societies,
London, 1985, pp. 44-53.
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368,
J.F. Richards’s writings on Golconda (where revenue-farming obtained
much as in the ’Hindu’ south) begin by taking up much the same position.
He notes the existence of two levels of revenue farmers: the sar samatus,
who controlled relatively large territorial expanses, and the hawaldars, who
farmed smaller parcels below them. He begins by describing the system as
one run by ’desperate men, driven by fear on the one hand, and by possibilities
of great profits on the other, [who] applied severe measures to the taxpayers under their jurisdiction.’ However, he goes on to note in puzzlement
that this system did not ’halt or appreciably slow agricultural production.’3’
Striving to reconcile the elements of the paradox, he concludes that there
were three reasons why the system did not collapse: the existence of bureaucratic systems of assessment if not collection, the existence of inam (taxfree) lands, and ’the strength of local rural society throughout the kingdom.’
A rather different perspective emerges from examining the actual careers
and activities of some of the revenue-farmers. We shall briefly devote space
to two such cases, one in Golconda and the other in the Senji-Vellur region.
But before proceeding to these, we may note that the term ’revenue-farmer’
could conceal a multitude of actual arrangements. Putting aside the problem
of a hierarchy of such persons for the moment, we may note that two
features could vary: length of tenure and degree of supervision. To modify
Wink’s analysis of Maratha revenue-farming somewhat, with these two
measured on the two axes, one could construct a notional ’box’. 32 At one
comer, one would find permanent and wholly unsupervised fiscal intermediaries, who would approximate the tributary rajas of such places as
Srikakulam or Nuzvid in the Golconda Sultanate. Then there might be
revenue-farmers who held farms for short periods but who were extensively
supervised, or farmers who approximated bureaucratic arrangements, with
long supervised tenures. Finally, we have near one corner of the box, the
classic Bernieresque revenue-farmer, with a short tenure and wholly
unsupervised. This figure is rendered still more extreme when he purchases
the right to collect revenue in public auction. Yet in general, all these shades
and possibilities would be characterised by a single feature: they contract in
advance to pay a sum of revenue defined in money terms to the higher
as
authority.
Where
can one
place the revenue-farmers of southern India in the space
defined? In the case of Golconda, we will note that the sar samatus’ posts
were in fact not auctioned freely in public but circulated amongst a limited
set of Persian Sayyids, occasionally passing to a Habshi of note.33 Further,
we observe that from some of the more important posts (sar samatu of the
Masulipatnam region for example), it was but a short step to becoming
so
31
32
Richards, Mughal Administration, pp. 22-26, passim.
André Wink, ’Maratha
1983, pp. 591-628.
Revenue-Farming,’
33
Cf. Jagadish Narayan Sarkar, The
New Delhi, 1979, pp. 5-19.
Modern Asian Studies. Volume XVII,
Life of Mir Jumla,
the General
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(4),
of Aurangzeb, reprint,
369
Sar-i-Khail
or even Mir Jumla. Besides the well known example of
Muhammad Sayyid Ardestani, we have those of Mulla Muhammad Taqi
Taqrishi, and Mansur Khan Habshi, which demonstrate that from the
viewpoint of career advancement, such posts-though termed ’revenue
farms’-were not free of ’career’ connotations. 34 The lowest level of posts,of hawaldars-were largely the province of Niyogi Brahmins. Though these
were, in principle, held on an annual basis, there are examples of hawaldars
who continued for over a decade in a position.35 Further south, in the regions
controlled in the early seventeenth century by the Chandragiri raja (the
titular Vijayanagar Raya) and by the Nayakas of Senji and Tanjavur, we
once again find the existence of revenue-farming, the farmers here beingamong others-Komattis, Beri Chettis, and Balija Naidus. I have elsewhere
traced in detail the instance of a family of Balija Naidus, closely associated
with the Dutch and English Companies in the period 1610-60, and of
pre-eminent importance in the region. The enterprise, conducted in the
main by two brothers, Achyutappa and Chinanna, but also by rival factions
of the family, had interests in overland trade, overseas shipping, and revenue
farming, besides having a military dimension to their activities. 36 In particular
Chinanna, who maintained a lavish lifestyle, with numerous concubines, a
house at Devanampattinam fortified and armed with Dutch cannon, and a
large stable of horses and elephants, clearly nurtured ambitions, both in the
context of court politics at Senji, and in the wider political arena of northern
Tamil&dquo;1adu and southern Andhra. ~7
The characteristic feature of activities of such men as these, as well of
many of the sar samatus and hawaldars mentioned earlier, is the diversity of
activities in which they involve themselves. The involvement was by no
means marginal; revenue-farms were frequently in the 30,000 to 50,000
pagoda range, while the operation of over a thousand tons of shipping was
by no means a small enterprise in the context of the period. For example,
in the case of Chinanna and Achyutappa, we know that each owned a fleet of
four to five ships, using which they traded from Pulicat and Devanampattinam
to Bengal, Arakan, Pegu, Tenasserim, the Malay Peninsula ports and
Ceylon. In the case of Mir Kamal-al-din Haji Jamal, a prominent Persian of
Golconda, we are aware of his activities in a period from 1608 to 1636, as an
34
This is discussed at greater length in Sanjay Subrahmanyam, ’Persians, Pilgrims and
Portuguese: The Travails of Masulipatnam Shipping in the Western Indian Ocean, 1590-1665,’
in G. Bouchon and P.-Y. Manguin eds., Vfodern Asian Studies, Special Number, forthcoming.
These included the redoubtable Sidappa (also known as Busbal Rao), first encountered by
35
the Dutch in about 1608, who continued to govern Masulipatnam until about 1620.
36
For a brief discussion of the family, see Joseph J. Brennig, ’Chief Merchants and the
European Enclaves of Seventeenth Century Coromandel,’ Modern Asian Studies, Volume XI,
(3), 1977, pp. 321-40.
37
For references, see Algemeen Rijksarchief (henceforth AR
), The Hague, Overgekomen
Brieven en Papieren (henceforth OB), VOC. 1127, fl. 227; VOC. 1130, fls. 978, 1049; VOC.
1133, fls. 433-36, 464-65; VOC. 1135, fls. 278v-79; VOC. 1138, fls. 435, 447; VOC. 1147, fls.
541, 571; VOC. 1172, fls. 523-24.
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370
overland trader to Bijapur and Surat, and as a prominent shipowner and
trader to Aceh, Pegu the Malay Peninsula ports, Makassar as well as Mocha
and Bandar Abbas. On occasion he is to be encountered as sar samatu over
the Narsapur region, north of Masulipatnam.38 Most curious of all is his
relationship with Sultan Abdullah Qutb Shah of Golconda, since on occasion
a ship is referred to indifferently as that of the Sultan and that of Mir
Kamal-al-din; we know too ~of correspondence between the Qutb Shahi
court and that of Isfahan to secure privileges for his ship Mansuri, destined
for Bandar Abbas from Masulipatnam in 1632. 31
The activities of such magnates as these, as well as pettier operators
such as Sidappa, hawaldar of Masulipatnam and later Nizamapatnam,
could be used to illustrate various points of possible interest. One purpose might be to show that the Pearson-Das Gupta characterisation of a
disjunction between the ’great tradition’ of landbound activity and the
’little tradition’ of the sea does not hold for at least a good proportion of
the Indian subcontinent.4° What we wish to argue here, however, is only
partly related to this; the point to be made is that even in states whose
logic was essentially agrarian-whether Golconda or the Nayaka kingdoms-an important figure in the seventeenth century was the ’portfolio
capitalist’: an entrepreneur who held a notional portfolio of investments
in different activities.
I would argue too that the categories mooted by Bayly in a recent paperof military fiscal elites, merchant-trader-usurers, landlord elites/local
magnates, and village entrepreneurs--cannot adequately accommodate this
type of figure, unless thrust willy-nilly into the category of ’military-fiscal
elite’.4’ Such a definition does not fit the Persian Sayyids of Golconda,
adequate though it may be for the Mughal mansabdar. In addition, it should
be noted that such a category of person-the portfolio capitalist-is not to
be encountered in all of southern India. Certainly, an examination of
evidence for the south-west coast does not throw up corresponding images.
Even the extraordinary career of Samuel Castiel, regedor mor of the Cochin
raja in the 1630s, eventually assassinated by Portuguese casados of that town
from fear of his growing power, does not lend itself to parallels.42 However,
AR,
38
See OB,
VOC. 1087, fl. 207; VOC. 1094, fl. 99v; VOC. 1095, fls. 71v-72,
passim.
AR, OB, VOC. 1109, fl. 283; W. Foster ed., The English Factories in India, 13
39
Volumes, Oxford, 1906-27, EFI ],
1634-36 pp. 137-38, 187-88, 195-96, passim.
[
40
For this position, see M.N. Pearson, Merchants and Rulers in Gujarat: The Response
to the Portuguese in the Sixteenth Century, Berkeley/London, 1976; Ashin Das Gupta,
Indian Merchants and the Decline of Surat, 1700-1750, Wiesbaden, 1979. For support from
an unexpected source, Denys Lombard, ’Questions on the Contact between Europeans
and Asian Societies,’ in L. Blussé and F. Gaastra eds., Companies and Trade, Leiden,
1981,pp.179-87.
C. A. Bayly, ’States and Empires.
41
On Samuel Castiel, see ANTT, Documentos Remetidos de Índia, Livro 50, fl. 110v; Livro
56, fls. 27, 212-12v.
42
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371
much of the rest of southern India abounds in such examples, from Akkanna
and Madanna in Golconda to Periathambi Marikkar in the RamnadTirunelveli region.4’
The question of why such a development occurred in this area and period
cannot be satisfactorily answered in a short space. To indicate some elements
of an answer, I would begin by pointing to the social flux that characterises
the region from the mid-fourteenth century on, accompanying the migratory
movement on a north to south axis from the Telugu to the Tamil regions.
This eventually led to a redefinition of the class structure in many areas, as is
evidenced by the important, though often misunderstood, idangai-valangai
conflicts of the period.&dquo; To these vertical and horizontal tensions were
added in Golconda the influx of new elite elements, particularly Persians, as
also Abyssinian Muslims in limited numbers. At a broad level, it may be
argued that any explication of the institution of revenue-farming (and
concomitantly in the case at hand the emergence of the ’portfolio capitalism’)
must address three questions: first, of why the institution arose, second, of
what its long-term effects on the system were, and third, of what the place of
the revenue-farmer in the polity and power structure in fact was. To turn to
each of these briefly in turn, one may hypothesise that the rise of revenue-
farming represents an attempt by the state or revenue assignment holders to
stabilise income, and as such can be seen as a characteristic response to crisis.
We may note that in each of the instances that are before us, the states are
typically under external threat (Golconda from the Mughal Empire, and the
Chandragiri Kingdom from the Deccan Sultanates). Similarly, another state
structure which resorts extensively to the farming of revenue in the
seventeenth century-the Portuguese Estado da India-also does so under
external threat. In this scenario, the revenue-farmer reaps the benefit of
fluctuations in the revenue he collects, while the state obtains a stable
income to meet its military and tributary needs. Thus, the interests of both
entities
are met.
Turning to the second question, that of the long-term effects of revenuefarming on the agrarian system, we have noted that-contrary to dogmarevenue-farming in seventeenth century southern India is accompanied by
quite considerable expansion in both the agrarian and manufacturing
economies of the region.45 This coexistence of revenue-farming and
43
On Akkanna and Madanna, see Joseph J. Brennig, The Textile Trade of 17th Century
Northern Coromandel: A Study of a Pre-Modern Asian Export Industry, unpublished Ph.D.
thesis, University of Wisconsin, Madison, 1975, pp. 178-191; also see S. Arasaratnam, ’A Note
on Periathamby Marikkar—A Seventeenth Century Commercial Magnate,’ Tamil Culture,
Volume X, (1), 1964, pp. 1-7.
44
For a discussion of the nature of upward mobility in southern Indian society under
Vijayanagar, see Vijaya Ramaswamy, ’Artisans in Vijayanagar Society,’ The Indian Economic
and Social History Review, Vol. XXII, (4), 1985, pp. 417-44.
45
On the continuing expansion and prosperity of the economy of the seventeenth century
Coromandel plain, see Richards, Mughal Administration, pp. 22-26; also Burton Stein, ’The
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372
economic expansion is characterised by some almost as a paradox, but is in
fact quite easily understood. The activities of the entrepreneurs whom we
have termed ’portfolio capitalists,’ far from ruining the agrarian system, or
causing widespread peasant wars, did in fact contribute in large measure to
agrarian expansion, and we may broadly regard their role as parallel to that
of entrepreneurial elements in the vision of the later Physiocratic writers
such as Turgot. Characteristically, they appeared in situations that were
propititious for the expansion of agriculture on the extensive margin, and
channeled resources gathered from other contexts into agriculture, while
simultaneously using the returns from agrarian entrepreneurship to further
their trade in both agricultural produce and manufactures. To explain why
their activities did not bring about an economic collapse, we would do well to
remember that these were by no means the fly-by-night operators of myth;
they could not have been, if they were to have adequate information on the
fiscal capacity of the local economy.
This brings us in turn to the third question, of the place of these elements
in the political power structures that obtained in the period. In this context,
it is often forgotten that such collectors were embedded within the system,
and usually had to function by making use of pre-existent intermediary
structures and channels. Equally, the fact that in southern India in the
period, no single group had the monopoly of the use of force is often
forgotten. As revenue-farming documents from the Godavari delta region
in the late seventeenth century show, the revenue-farmer operated within
constraints set by custom, power, information, and the fact that-in order to
survive-he had to strike a balance between those above and those below
him in the fiscal hierarchy. 46
In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, some parallel situations
certainly arose in Southeast Asia. At least one of these still awaits adequate
analysis, and this is the crisis among elites in seventeenth century Ayutthaya,
with the rise of Persian ’portfolio capitalists’ of a sort similar to the ones we
have just discussed.47 But elsewhere, in Indonesia, the emphasis in the
orthodox literature appears to be far more on a single dimension of activity.
States and their elite structures are seen as either purely mercantile, or
wholly agrarian. 48 It is worth investigating whether here too a middle ground
existed, populated by individuals who are not easily classifiable into
State and the Economy: The South,’ in Cambridge
203-213, especially pp. 211-13.
Economic
46
History of India,
Vol. I, pp.
For the details of the revenue-farming arrangements, see inter alia AR, OB, VOC. 1511,
fls. 958-v, 959-v, 1144-46v, 1149-53, passim, dealing with the villages of Palakollu, Konteru,
Golepallem and Gondewaram in the Godavari delta region.
47
For an interesting discussion of the Persians of Siam, see Jean Aubin, ’Les Persans au Siam
sous le règne de
Narai [1656-88],’ Mare Luso-Indicum, IV, Paris, 1980, pp. 95-126.
48
See, for example, Burger, Sociologisch-Economische Geschiedenis, op. cit. , pp. 8-9,
26-27, passim; Anthony Reid, ’Trade and State Power,’ op. cit.
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373
convenient
categories such as ’merchants,’ or ’agrarian/feudal elite’. An
examination of recent literature on Indonesia does lend prima facie support
to such a view. For example, the Chinese entrepreneurs in seventeenth
century west Java, some of whose careers have been traced by Leonard
Blusse, operated not merely as traders and brokers, but also helped develop
agricultural production in the ’Bataviaasch Omnelanden’ (the hinterland to
the interior of Jakarta).49 The career of a person such as Su Ming-Kang (or
Bencon) thus carries startling parallels to that of a Kamal-al-din or Chinanna,
even if he operated in the context of a European ’city state’ rather than a
purely Asian polity. Further, one could point to the career of Su MingKang’s father-in-law, Intje Muda, who is to be encountered as Shahbandar
at Japara, and earlier Jaratan, as a trader in rice in the ports of north Java, and
with a familial trading network extending not merely to Banten and Jakarta,
but the Sumatran West Coast as well.10 Other examples that come to mind
from the early seventeenth century include the Chinese ’Sim Suan’ of
Banten, and another member of the same community, known to the Dutch
as Lim Lakko, who was closely associated with the Sultan of Banten. And
finally, we have the case of the well-known Chinese Muslim, Kechil Japon of
Jambi, who was referred to as Orangkaya Sirre Lela, and recognised as a
member of the Jambi aristocracy.
Evidence for the sixteenth century is somewhat more sketchy, but_here
too one encounters instances such as Pati Yusuf of Gresik, who not merely
dominated the spice trade from the Moluccas to pre-Portuguese Melaka, but
is described as an owner of ’landed property’ in the rice-exporting area of
northern Java, suggesting that the worlds of ’commerciall~ apathetic’
agrarian elite and trader were not quite so disjunct as might have been
thought. I In the case of Aceh once again, recent work by Takeshi Ito casts
doubt on the conventional characterisation of the Sultanate as solely
supported by mercantile revenues. In fact, from the late sixteenth century
on, the collection of agrarian tributes from Pasai, Pidie and other areas such
as Aru (on the Sumatran east coast) formed an important part of the state’s
activities. 52 How these tributes were collected, what the intermediary
49
L. Blussé, ’Batavia, 1619-1740: The Rise and Fall of a Chinese Colonial Town,’
Journal of
South East Asian Studies, Volume XII, (1), 1981, pp. 159-78.
50
On Intje Muda, Sim Suan, Lim Lakko etc. (all of which may be presumed to be distorted
Dutch versions of Chinese and Malay names), see M.A.P. Meilink-Roelofsz., Asian Trade and
European Influence in the Indonesian Archipelago Between 1500 and About 1630, The Hague,
1962, pp. 259-60,283-90.
51
The
case
of Pati Yusuf of Gresik is discussed in Meilink-Roelofsz., ibid., pp. 108-10,
passim. For a comment, also see D.K. Bassett, ’European Influence in South-East Asia,
1500-1630,’ Journal of South-East Asian History, Vol. IV, (2), 1963, pp. 173-209, especially
pp. 182-85. Bassett, like almost all historians of Southeast Asia in the period, sees the
dichotomy of a trading elite, clinging limpet-like to the coast, and a ’commercially apathetic’
inland elite as ’trenchant and sound’.
52
See Takeshi Ito, ’A Note on Some Aspects of the Trade of Aceh in the 17th
Nampo-Bunka (Tenri Bulletin of South Asian Studies), No. 9, 1982, pp. 33-60.
Downloaded from ier.sagepub.com at UCLA on January 10, 2016
Century,’
374
structures used were, and whether the
orangkaya of Aceh-hitherto seen as
link
state
not only to the exchange economy
purely trading elite-helped
but to the production economy, all these remain unanswered questions.
At the other end of the spectrum, the important seventeenth century
Javanese state of Mataram-hitherto viewed as dominated by an agrarian
(or ’feudal’) elite, pathologically opposed to maritime trade and trading
groups-clearly sheltered an elite that also participated in activities of a
mercantile character. One is somewhat sceptical, in the view of the slender
evidence base, of whether this state was so powerful as to wholly extinguish
Javanese maritime trade, as well as to successfully centralise at a single port
(Japara) all of the commerce in rice. The literature too remains somewhat
vague on the modalities of this ’administered trade,’ since in effect the bupati
lords of coastal territories such as Kendal and Tegal seem to have been left
the responsibility of ensuring compliance. 53 Certainly, in the Indian case,
the difficulties of policing a vast coastline rendered such an enterprise
(though attempted on more than one occasion in the seventeenth century)
futile in even the medium term.54 Where Mataram itself is concerned, the
writings of S. Moertono and Onghokham provide an important counterpoint
to the point of perspective represented by Schrieke, Burger and Reid.55
They suggest that once outside the negara-agung or core region of the
Mataram Sultanate, the state tended to be structured in a relatively loose
manner, reminiscent of the multiplicity of hierarchies that obtained, for
example, in sixteenth and seventeenth century south Indian states such as
Vijayanagar or Golconda. Thus, in the outlying territories (or mancanegara),
of south-eastern Java, the bupatis represented important foci of power, and
although they ruled in theory ’at the Sultan’s pleasure,’ they were in fact able
to command considerable economic and military resources on their own
account. Yet, this was not the simple structure of the ’segmentary’ state, for
subtle gradations existed in the extent of control exercised by the Sultan’s
Kraton over specific local lords, thus once again providing informative
parallels with the Indian situation. Two interesting issues to be raised in this
context then are the following: First, moving away from the notion of a
mythical, all-powerful absolutist bureaucracy, one must address the question
of how the commercial economy (and more particularly the trade in rice) can
a
53
The evidence of the ’vanishing’ of Javanese mantime trade in the late seventeenth century,
belief that permeates the historiography from Schrieke and van Leur, through MeilinkRoelofsz., to Reid, is a single reference in the Batavia Dagh-Register of 1677. See DaghRegister gehouden int Casteel Batavia, Anno 1677, p. 436, cited in Schrieke, Indonesian
Sociological Studies, I, pp. 78-79. On Chinese dominance at Japara, see Meilink-Roelofsz.,
Asian Trade, op. cit. , 286-90.
54
See, for example, ANTT, Documentos Remetidos da Índia, Livro 22, fls. 86v-87.
55
See Soemarsaid Moertono, State and Statecraft in Old Java: A Study of the Later Mataram
Period, 16th to 19th Centuries, Ithaca, Cornell Modern Indonesia Project, Monograph No. 43;
Onghokham, ’The Inscrutable and the Paranoid: An Investigation into the Sources of the
Brotodiningrat Affair,’ in Ruth T. McVey ed., Southeast Asian Transitions: Approaches
through Social History (Yale Southeast Asia Studies: 8), New Haven, 1978, pp. 112-57.
a
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be related
to the
economic and
political configurations
that
one
observes.
Second, one’s attention returns willy-nilly to the middle ground, in particular
the twilight zone between priyayi elite and wong-cilik (or commoners); this
middle ground was occupied by entrepreneurs whom Onghokham terms
jago, who looked both to those below and those above in a characteristically
janus-faced role. One notes too that this middle ground was where vertical
social mobility manifested itself, for we are informed that ’the precolonial
system, despite its emphasis on rank, allowed social mobility,’ and it is here
that one might encounter those who aspired (through the so-called magang
system) to enter the elite.56
In the Indian context, the continuities between the developments traced
above and the relations between state and society in the eighteenth century
certainly represent an interesting line to be developed. Thus, the ’magnate’
families observed by Perlin in the early eighteenth century Maharashtra can
logically be sited in the context of developments beginning at least a century
earlier, 51 while the place of parallel figures in other regimes of the eighteenth
century (notably Udaiyar Mysore and the Nawabi of Arcot) would bear
investigation too. In the case of late eighteenth century Java, one notes in
the recent study by Peter Carey a focus on precisely this ’middle ground,’ in
the use of Demang (provincial tax-farmers) by appanage holders to collect
revenue from the local tax-collectors (Beken. Eventually, we observe too
the introduction of a ’trading group’ into the system, with the involvement of
Chinese tax-farmers. 58
III
To
sum
up then,
a
central
problem while approaching the
process of state
formation in both south India and Southeast Asia is the dependence of the
historiography on received models and mechanisms. Historians of an earlier
generation were able to sweep many substantial issues under the carpet by
using such terms (borrowed from Europeanists) as ’feudalism’. This particular
characterisation has fallen into disuse of late, even though it is revived from
time to time in such guises as ’semi-feudalism’ and ‘proto-feudalism’.59 More
recent times have witnessed an attempt to superimpose the categories
developed by Africanists in the discussion of the state on India and
Southeast Asia. Yet, of late, some of the protagonists of such a view find
118-19.
Frank Perlin, ’Of White Whale and Countrymen in the Eighteenth-Century Maratha
Deccan: Extended Class Relations, Rights and the Problem of Rural Autonomy Under the Old
Journal of Peasant Studies, V, (2), 1978, pp. 172-237.
Regime,’
Volume
58
See Peter Carey, ’Waiting for the "Just King": The Agrarian World of South-Central Java
from Giyanti [1755] to the Java War [1825-30],’
Modern Asian Studies, Volume XX, (1), 1986.
59
For continuing instances of the ’feudal’ characterisation, see N. Karashima, South Indian
History and Society: Studies from Inscriptions, AD. 850 to 1800, Delhi 1984, pp. xxx-xxxi,
passim; while ’proto-feudal’ is used by M.G.S. Narayanan in his review of the same, The Indian
Economic and Social History Review, Volume XXII, (1), 1985, pp. 95-101.
56
ibid.,
Onghokham, pp.
57
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376
themselves falling back on early modem Europe for their categories, so that
recourse is taken to the rise of international trade and a ’military revolution’
to explain state formation in the South and Southeast Asia of the sixteenth to
eighteenth centuries. There are really two problems with these theories,
besides the fact that they reduce the history of Asia to an almost complete
dependence on borrowed concepts. In the first place, writings on the
European ’military revolution’ of the sixteenth and seventeenth century
seldom place military technology as prime mover, causing state penetration
to grow. Rather, the growing centralisation of resources is usually seen as a
precondition for changes in modes of warfare.6° Equally, theories giving
pride of place to the dissolving and transforming effects of trade on state are
increasingly under fire. The second problem, at least in the case of south
India, is that there is no unequivocal evidence of a ’military revolution’ in the
period. While the introduction of cannon, harquebus, and (in the eighteenth
century) flintlock did occur, the focus remained on light cavalry and irregular
infantry levies. A careful investigation of Dutch and Portuguese sources also
lends little weight to the hypotheses that the size of armies increased, that
disciplined, centrally maintained infantry came to dominate cavalry, or that
in general the effects of war on society increased dramatically.6’
Rather than take recourse to these hastily ’grafted’ theories of state
formation, and subsequently seek evidence that might be interpreted in
their support, this paper has sought instead to focus on the middle ground
between state and society. The context, in the case of southern India, is of an
agrarian and manufacturing economy expanding with fair rapidity upto the
last quarter of the seventeenth century, and in fits and starts thereafter. To
accommodate and benefit from such an expansion, state structures had to be
modified, giving increasing place to a class of persons whom we have here
termed ’portfolio capitalists’. It is in the exploration of the relations between
this set of persons and other groups, the Nayakas and rajas, the palaiyakaras,
ubiquitous in the dry lands, merchant-trader-usurers, the mirasidar landlords
of the prosperous wet regions, that one can eventually comprehend how the
character of the states of the region evolved over time. Where Indonesia in
60
For a discussion, see Geoffrey Parker, ’The "Military Revolution" 1560—1660—A myth?,’
Journal of Modern History, Volume 48, (2), 1976, pp. 195-214. An attempt to portray
autonomous changes in military technology as the prime mover behind European state formation
in the sixteenth and seventeenth century is that of Richard L. Bean, ’War and the Birth of the
Nation State,’ The Journal of Economic History, Volume XXXIII, (1), 1973, pp. 203-21, which
is criticised by Parker (above) and by David R. Ringrose and Richard Roehl in The Journal of
Economic History, XXXIII, (1), pp. 222-31.
61
These questions are discussed at greater length in Sanjay Subrahmanyam, ’Firearms,
Warfare and Fiscal Structure: A Note on South India in the 16th and 17th centuries,’ (unpublished
paper). The discussion is largely based on the Dutch records, AR, OB, VOC. 1056 to VOC.
1172 (particularly the ’Dagh-Registers’ for Masulipatnam and Pulicat, on the wars of the
Coromandel plain in the early seventeenth century), and such Portuguese records as Biblioteca
Nacional, Lisbon, Fundo Geral, Códice 178, fls. 49v-51v; Fundo Geral, Códice 4179. For a
study of the structure of the army of an Indian state in the seventeenth and eighteenth century,
which supports this view, see S.N. Sen, The Military System of the Marathas, Delhi, 1958.
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377
the period is concerned, the ohservations in the paper represent little more
than an outsider’s first attempt at synthesis. If the central notion informing
this paper-that important parallels between state formation in parts of
India and Indonesia in the late pre-colonial period exist and are worth
exploring, particularly in the exploration of the middle ground between
’state’ and ’society’-finds some acceptance, its purpose would have been
accomplished.
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