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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 March 2011
It is nowadays common for Indian history textbooks to treat the various “empires” that successively occupied the stage of Indian history, with their respective “administrations”, as so many successive repetitions with merely different names for offices and institutions that in substance remained the same: namely, the King, the Ministers, the Provinces, the Governors, the Taxes, Landgrants, and so on. But D. D. Kosambi, in his Introduction to the study of Indian history (Bombay, 1975), rightly observed that this repetitive succession cannot be assumed, and that each regime, when subjected to critical study, displays distinct elements that call for its analysis in the context of “relations of production” (as he put it) existing at that time.
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9 This curious fact is not mentioned in the Indian chronicles. But it is the title Dāwar Bakhsh assumes in his farmān of 1627 to Rāja Jai Singh (Bikaner, old serial No. 176, New S.021). This is corroborated by the Tārīkh-i 'ālam ārā-i 'Abbāsī, Tehran ed., A.H. 1314, 750.
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25 e.g. in his 17th regnal year.
26 These data are based (a) on the Ā'īn-i akbarī's list of manṣabdārs; (b) on Irfan Habib's list (unpublished) of manṣabdārs under Jahāngīr, mainly based on the Tuzuk-i Jahāngīrī, and (c) on Wāriṣ, Bādshāhnāma, Ethe, 329, for the list of manṣabdārs in 1656. The racial composition has been established by detailed checking with the biographical information in the chronicles (e.g. Lāhorī) as well as the Zakhirat al-khawānān and the Ma'āṣir al-‘umarā’. (d) and (e) are based on the list of manṣabdārs of Aurangzeb's reign given in my book, The Mughal nobility under Aurangzeb, London, 1966.Google Scholar
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