17 - Conclusion

Summary

From the sixteenth through most of the eighteenth centuries, local Hindu kingship cushioned rural Bengal's multi-cellular society from the penetration of the state and the market. Raja-zamindars reigned over societies that united Brahmins, landholding gentry, and ranked peasantry into configurations approximating the mental templates created by normative Hindu expectations of how society should function. Within zamindaris, partially autonomous rajas preserved ritual cycles, the entitlements of dependents with superior bio-moral status, and the unequal distribution of rental and tax obligations.

The imperial, foreign Mughals and British relied on the authority of local kingship in their efforts to expand territorial control, monetization, and accountancy. In permitting themselves to serve the revenue appropriation and commercial purposes of these visitors to Bengal, the zamindars entered a transformative partnership from which there was no satisfying escape. As the state pushed further into what had once been semi-independent sovereignties, the role and size of the service gentry, financiers, and merchants expanded. Patronage and political favor drew enterprising people out of parochial societies into new patterns of cooperation and rivalry over larger and larger distances. By the early eighteenth century, older ethnic and functional boundaries were losing their clarity. The Mughal government was conferring mansabdari rank on the larger zamindars of Bengal, warrior-bureaucrats were trading, western Indian bankers were instrumental in collecting the land revenue, and Bengali merchants were contracting to bring local merchandise to European trading factories.

As the Mughal government in Bengal in the early eighteenth century gained effective autonomy from Delhi, it forged a new, uneasy alliance with large zamindars who displaced the peripatetic mansabdars as the primary agency of district supervision.