Shahjahanabad

Shahjahanabad

The Sovereign City in Mughal India 1639-1739

By Stephen P. Blake

After reading Shahjahanabad one starts to understand some of the military, economic, and governance problems that contributed to the decline of the Mughal Empire. Take the military for instance. While the individual soldiers practised their skills regularly and were skillful there was almost no concept of a thought out military exercise to the extent that Aurangzeb complained that he had not been taught how to lay a siege. Perhaps this character has been somewhat retained in even the current culture. Individual brilliance in team sports while exhibiting little team cohesion has been the hallmark of quite a few Subcontinental teams.

It is a small book (about 200 pages) that covers a lot of ground with a lot of references. Sometimes one feels that the references could have been discussed more but the purpose of the book is academic in that it is to provide the references while giving an overview and it does it well. There are some small errors that need to be corrected.

The only gripe I have against the author is in calling Bahadurshah Zafar an uninspired poet. The man himself may have been uninspired perhaps but his poetry certainly was not.

There were about a hundred men (The emperor, the great princes and the great amirs) who controlled the power, military and economic, at the center. This pyramid structure is even now true to a large extent. Even in very large countries and even now these powers are shared by a few hundred men.