The Machinery of Government

Tipu Sultan called his state the Sarkar-i-Khudadad — the God-given government. The name was a claim: this was not a Mughal province, not a Wodeyar kingdom administered by a usurper, and not a personal estate. It was a state, with departments, records, salaries, and rules, and it answered to God and to the sultan rather than to any hereditary order.

The practical consequence was a war on intermediaries. Where most Indian states of the period governed through hereditary chiefs, revenue farmers, and holders of land grants who kept a cut of what they collected, Mysore under Tipu Sultan tried to replace all of them with paid officers reporting upward on paper.

Central government was organized into six departments, each headed by a minister and — the distinctive part — each supported by an advisory council of up to four members. Business was transacted by boards rather than by single powerful ministers, which made the departments harder to capture and their heads easier to replace.

The military was under the Mir Miran; revenue under the Mir Asaf; the navy under the Mir Yem; and separate departments handled the treasury, commerce, and ordnance, the last under the Muluk-ut-Tujjar. That commerce and ordnance existed as departments of state at all tells you what kind of government this was: trade and arms manufacture were not licensed to merchants and contractors, they were run by the state directly.

At its greatest extent the kingdom covered some 160,000 square kilometres, divided into 37 provinces (asofis) and 124 taluks.

Each province had a governor (asof) and a deputy. Each taluk was administered by an amildar, responsible above all for assessing and collecting the land revenue. Below them, groups of villages came under a patel, with the shanbhog keeping the accounts. Village headmen were charged with practical duties spelled out in the regulations — maintaining roads, planting and protecting trees, settling local disputes, and keeping order.

Separation of powers. Revenue and policing were deliberately split: the asif handled revenue while the faujdar was responsible for law and order, each reporting separately to the centre. It was a check-and-balance design, intended to stop any provincial officer accumulating both the money and the soldiers.

What most distinguishes this administration is its documents. Tipu Sultan issued detailed written codes — revenue regulations, commercial regulations, a military code — running to hundreds of clauses and prescribing procedure in remarkable detail: how village accounts were to be kept, what a storekeeper owed the treasury, what rate applied to newly broken land, how an official was to be audited.

He drafted and corrected much of the correspondence himself. Orders went out from Srirangapatna in Persian, Kannada, and Marathi — a practical multilingualism reflecting the territory actually governed, whatever the court language happened to be.

Cash, not land. Officials and nobles — ministers, army commanders, courtiers — were paid in cash from the treasury rather than assigned villages or estates. The old practice of granting whole villages and taluks as jagirs to noblemen was stopped. This is the administrative keystone: a paid officer can be transferred, audited, and dismissed, while a jagirdar with hereditary land becomes a rival power.

The design reads as unremarkable to a modern eye — salaried officials, defined departments, written procedure — which is exactly why it is worth comparing with what other governments were actually doing in the 1780s.

France. The French monarchy staffed much of its administration through venality of office: posts were bought, sold, mortgaged, and inherited as private property, with tens of thousands of offices held that way. An official who owns his office cannot easily be dismissed, transferred, or audited — he has paid for the right to profit from it. The crown raised money by creating more offices to sell, which is a way of borrowing against the efficiency of your own government.

The Ottoman Empire and Iran. Both were devolving authority outward rather than concentrating it: the Ottomans through lifetime, heritable tax farms; Iran, after four decades of civil war, through assignments of land and revenue to soldiers and notables. Provincial power in both cases rested on holders who could not simply be replaced.

The Indian successor states. Mughal practice ran on the mansab and the jagir — rank tied to an assignment of revenue — and in the successor states these had hardened into something close to hereditary property. Governing through hereditary chiefs was the norm, not the exception.

Britain. The comparison here needs care. The eighteenth-century British state was riddled with sinecures and patronage — contemporaries called it Old Corruption — but it also ran the excise service, a large salaried, inspected, promotion-by-merit bureaucracy that historians regard as the most effective revenue administration in Europe. That service, not the sinecures, is the thing Mysore's system resembles.

Placed in that company, the Mysorean arrangement is unusual in three specific ways: officials were paid in cash and therefore removable, rather than assigned land or owning their post; business was transacted by boards with advisory councils rather than by individual grandees; and revenue was deliberately separated from policing so that no provincial officer held both the money and the soldiers. That last provision is a recognisably modern anxiety about the concentration of power, written into an eighteenth-century Indian administration.

The regulations survive in quantity; the outcomes are harder to measure, and the state lasted only seventeen years, half of them at war. The best independent test remains Francis Buchanan, who surveyed the conquered country for the East India Company immediately after 1799 — no friend of the dynasty, working for its destroyers — and described a countryside more prosperous and better administered than four wars should have left it.

The system also had a real political cost, and it is worth naming. Centralisation dispossessed the poligars and hereditary holders whose powers it absorbed, and some of them welcomed the British in 1799. A government that removes intermediaries makes enemies of the intermediaries; that is the price of the design, not an argument against it.