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A VISITOR TOURING SOUTH ASIA IN 1500 would have found a land divided into dozens of rival kingdoms – a multi-ethnic tapestry of elites vying for power, prestige and a share of India’s vast resources. A century later, virtually all the northern half of the subcontinent had been brought under the umbrella of one state – the Mughal Empire. The Great or Grand Mughals, as the dynasty’s first six emperors are known, left behind some of the most exquisite architecture in all of Asia, epitomised in the marble magnificence of the Taj Mahal in Agra and the ruins of Akbar’s short-lived capital, Fatehpur Sikri. To some scholars they remain the quintessential Oriental autocrats – their rule marked by ruthless struggles of succession and aggressive military conquests. Others stress the richness of the encounters between the Mughal court and the Sanskrit culture of India. In the popular imagination they were synonymous with incredible wealth, opulent palaces and treasuries brimming with precious stones. In the early 1900s, the German traveller and philosopher Count Hermann Keyserling declared the Great Mughals to be ‘the grandest rulers brought forth by mankind’: ‘They were men of action, refined diplomats, experienced judges of the human psyche, and at the same time aesthetes and dreamers.’ Such a ‘superior human synthesis’ went beyond the attributes of any European king.
Adding substance to the dynasty’s aura is the abundance of written material at the historian’s disposal. The personalised memoirs of emperors were complemented by the writings of court chroniclers who recorded the minutest details of the day-to-day administration of their realms. The rise of the Mughals coincided with the age of European exploration and expansionism. English envoys bearing gifts in exchange for trading rights, Jesuit missionaries seeking converts, French jewellers bargaining for precious stones, Italian doctors offering quack cures for gout and impotency, as well as a miscellany of improbable adventurers left behind candid accounts of individual rulers, their attributes and eccentricities — as well as the splendour of their courts.
MUGHAL VS MONGOL
Outsiders would call the dynasty that Babur founded ‘the Mughals’, using the Persian word for Mongol. Babur preferred to play up his father’s Turkic roots. In the fifteenth century the term ‘Mongol’ carried connotations of barbarism. As Babur would say: ‘Were the Mongols a race of angels, it would still be a vile nation.’
The story of the Mughals begins in 1483, with the birth of Zahir al-Din Babur (d. 1530) in modern-day Uzbekistan. His father, a great-great-great grandson of Tamerlane, was the ruler of Ferghana, a small but exceptionally fertile province to the west of Samarkand, Tamerlane’s old capital and the site of his magnificent tomb. His mother was directly descended from Genghis Khan, the founder of the Mongol Empire. A freak accident that killed his father brought Babur to the throne at the age of just eleven in 1494. A pigeon fancier, Babur’s father had been tending his birds in a dovecote on the outer wall of his palace when the cliff below gave way. As Babur puts it so poetically in his memoirs: ‘Umar Shaikh Mirza flew, with his pigeons and their house, and became a falcon.’
Two years into his reign, he made the first of three attempts to capture Samarkand. His initial bid failed, but he was able to take the city the following year – for a few months. In his absence, Ferghana was conquered by his half-brother, leaving Babur without a kingdom. Destitute, Babur, his mother and a small band of supporters spent the next few years wandering among the mountains and valleys of Central Asia. ‘It passed through my mind that to wander from mountain to mountain, homeless and helpless, has little to recommend it,’ he would later write.
Babur’s memoir, the Baburnama, is a revealing account of these ‘throneless times’, as he called them. Unlike the largely hagiographic ghost-written memoirs of other Mughal rulers, Babur’s is alarmingly frank – ‘both a Caesar and a Cervantes’, as the contemporary Indian novelist Amitav Ghosh describes him. His aim, Babur informs his readers, is ‘that the truth should be reached in every matter, and that every act should be recorded precisely as it occurred’. The Baburnama has been described as ‘among the most enthralling and romantic works of literature of all time’, thanks largely to its candour. It recounts the future Mughal emperor’s sexual shyness with his first wife; his love affair, unconsummated, with a bazaar boy in Andizhan; his pining for the melons of Kabul; and even the colour of his excrement after an attempted poisoning – ‘an extremely black substance like parched bile’.
In 1504, aged twenty-one, Babur gave up his dream of conquering Samarkand and instead set his sights on Kabul. The city’s despotic ruler had just died, leaving his infant son as heir. Kabul was an easy conquest, and his success left Babur in control of several strategic crossroads linking India and Central Asia. A year later, he led his first of five expeditions into India. Initially these were pillaging raids. In 1514, after making one last unsuccessful attempt to conquer Samarkand, he began to look to northern India as territory where Timurid power could be rebuilt. Although he received some support from disaffected Lodi nobles, he found them to be untrustworthy, and on three occasions between 1519 and 1524 ordered his invading forces to turn back. It would not be until 1525 that he prepared to take on Ibrahim Lodi. Commanding a force of just 8000 soldiers, Babur met little resistance as he advanced across the plains of Punjab, where Lodi’s authority had largely collapsed. In April 1526, he reached Panipat, in present-day Haryana. What they lacked in manpower, Babur’s forces made up with the latest military technology – matchlock guns and cannons. He also arranged his forces in a formation not dissimilar to that used by American pioneers taking on Native American tribes in the Wild West. Bullock-drawn wagons were roped together in a circle, creating a formidable barricade behind which his artillery took cover. When Lodi’s forces finally attacked, they were mown down by shotgun pellets. Columns of cavalrymen held in reserve did the rest. It was all over in just a few hours.
Among the dead was Lodi, the only Muslim ruler of Delhi to fall in battle. As was customary, soldiers severed his head and presented it to Babur. Lifting it solemnly, he exclaimed, ‘Honour to your bravery.’ His two most senior amirs shrouded the body in a bolt of brocade, then bathed and buried it where it had fallen. As well as building a mosque to commemorate his victory, Babur laid out a symmetrical garden with interlocking canals and raised walkways reminiscent of a Central Asian oasis – a practice he would replicate in other parts of India.
After his victory Babur rode to Delhi, staying just long enough for the khutba, or Friday prayer, to be read in his name, an act that signified the populace’s tacit acceptance of their new ruler. Next, he marched to the Lodi capital, Agra, where his son Humayun (1508–1556) had captured the family of the raja of the important North Indian state Gwalior. As a token of his acceptance of the new ruling dispensation, the raja presented Humayun with a gift of jewels, including a diamond so large that its worth would provide ‘two and a half days’ food for the whole world’. Babur refused to accept it from his son. Years later Humayun would gift the stone, known as Babur’s diamond, to the ruler of Persia. Anecdotal evidence, based on the stone’s size, suggests that the fabled diamond was the Koh-i-Noor.
Babur took a bleak view of his newly conquered territories, as did his war-weary soldiers, who were pining for the cool mountain passes of Afghanistan. To dissuade them from returning, he asked, ‘Shall we go back to Kabul and remain poverty-stricken? Let no one who supports me say such things henceforth. Let no one who cannot endure and is bound to leave be dissuaded from leaving.’ India, he reminded them, was large and rich – even if it had little else to recommend it.
Babur’s aim of bringing Timurid rule to North India was not without its hurdles, starting with what he described as the ‘remarkable dislike and hostility between [India’s] people and mine’. Moreover, the Mughals were far from being the dominant power in the land. With the eclipse of the Delhi Sultanate, much of northern India was controlled by semi-autonomous Afghan principalities. The successive dynasties of the Delhi Sultanate had all relied on soldiers from Afghanistan and horses from Central Asia, imported by Afghan traders to keep their armies battle-ready. Many of these soldiers had become petty chieftains.
BABUR ON INDIA FROM THE BABURNAMA: ‘There is no beauty in its people, no graceful social intercourse, no poetic talent or understanding, no etiquette, nobility or manlinesss. The arts and crafts have no harmony or symmetry. There are no good horses, no good dogs, no grapes, musk-melons or first-rate fruits, no ice or cold water, no good bread or cooked food in the bazaars, no hot-baths, no colleges, no candles, torches or candlesticks.’
Babur also had to contend with numerous Rajput clans, the strongest of which were the Sisodiyas. In 1527, determined to restore the Rajput empire of Prithviraj Chauhan, the Sisodiya ruler Rana Sanga (1482–1528) assembled a large army, left his stronghold of Mewar and swiftly advanced northward to see off the invader who brought that dream a step closer by obligingly disposing of the Lodis. The morale of Babur’s vastly outnumbered army plunged when an astrologer pointed out that Mars was in an inauspicious position, a sure omen for Timurid defeat. Babur tried to counter the omen by repealing some un-Islamic taxes and vowing to give up drinking wine. Three hundred of his commanders joined him in his pledge, and dozens of jars of the latest vintage brought from Kabul were poured into a specially dug stepwell. Gold and silver wine goblets were broken down and the pieces distributed to the poor. To further boost his soldiers’ morale, he declared a jihad or holy war against the infidel Rajput ruler, and gave himself the title of a ghazi or holy warrior.
The two armies came together at Khanwa, approximately 70 kilometres west of Agra. True to their reputation, the Rajputs fought courageously. Babur repeated the tactics used at Panipat, creating a barricade of wagons behind which troops armed with matchlocks and cannons could pick off the Rajput warriors before his cavalry encircled the enemy forces. The tactic worked. To commemorate his victory, Babur ordered the erection of a pillar of severed heads as a warning to others who might contemplate taking on his forces.
By his mid-forties, Babur’s health had begun to decline. The hardships he had endured in his early life were taking their toll. Hearing that his father was ill and fearing that nobles in the court were intriguing to install one of his uncles on the throne, Humayun returned to Delhi from Badakhshan, only to fall severely ill himself. One legend ascribes Babur walking around his son three times, praying for his recovery. By this rite he transferred Humayun’s illness to himself, and died soon after. The historical record, however, shows that several months passed between this event and Babur’s death. Babur died on 26 December 1530, a mere four years after becoming the first Mughal emperor. His body was laid to rest in one of the parterre gardens he had created in Agra. It was later moved and placed in a grave on a terrace overlooking Kabul, where he used to sit and admire the view. No other structure was allowed so the grave would have full exposure to the snow and the sun.
DEFEAT AND EXILE
Humayun’s succession would follow a pattern laid down by Genghis Khan and Timur. Although he was his father’s chosen heir, his brothers Kamran, Askari and Hindal were entitled to a share of his territories. Each harboured bitterness about not becoming the new Mughal emperor. Kamran, believing he had been short-changed by receiving only Kabul and Kandahar to rule over, was the first to move against his brother by annexing the Punjab. Humayun had no choice but to acquiesce to the new status quo.
A more significant threat to Humayun’s rule came from Bahadur Shah (1505–1537), the ruler of the prosperous maritime state of Gujarat. In 1535, Humayun marched south to confront Bahadur Shah’s army, which was equipped with the latest cannons and employed Portuguese gunners. In a daring night action, Humayun’s forces captured the fort of Champaner and looted Bahadur Shah’s treasury. He then took the capital, Ahmedabad, and the hill fort of Mandu in Malwa, in India’s central west. But instead of consolidating his conquests militarily and administratively, Humayun celebrated by holding magnificent banquets and enjoying royal entertainments. As the English writer Bamber Gascoigne blithely notes: ‘He invariably found the first fruits of victory more appealing than any possible long-term gains and would happily settle down to enjoy for months on end his favourite pastimes of wine, opium (which he took in pellet form with rosewater) and poetry.’
Humayun returned to Agra to confront a new threat. Sher Shah Suri (1486–1545), an insignificant Lodi retainer ruling over a small fiefdom near Varanasi, had emerged as the leader of the Afghan resistance to Mughal rule in eastern India. In 1537, Sher Shah invaded Bengal and besieged the capital, Gaur. Humayun responded by sailing down the Yamuna River and the Ganges in a flotilla accompanied by his brothers Kamran and Hindal, with whom he had temporarily reconciled. But instead of proceeding to Gaur, he spent six futile months attempting to take Sher Shah’s fortress of Chunar. The delay enabled Sher Shah to finally conquer Gaur and loot its treasury, using the proceeds to create one of the largest armies ever seen in northern India. Confident enough to crown himself the sultan, he adopted the title of Sher Shah, or king.
When Humayun learned of Gaur’s fall, he tried to negotiate a power-sharing arrangement with Sher Shah, but they failed to agree on who would rule Bengal. On reaching Gaur, he found it largely abandoned. Once again, the Mughal emperor was diverted from pressing his advantage, this time by Gaur’s ‘fairy faced girls and handsome maids, along with exhilarating gardens and soothing tanks’.
While Humayun was indulging in ‘every kind of luxury’ in his Gaur harem, his half-brother Hindal stormed the Mughal capital, Agra, where he proclaimed himself the emperor. Kamran, meanwhile, returned to the Punjab, but instead of helping Humayun subdue his opponents in northern India, he plotted with Hindal on how to divide up the spoils. Things went from bad to worse when Sher Shah took advantage of the turmoil in the Mughal court to take on Humayun’s forces at Chausa in the monsoon of 1839. Considering him a lost cause, Kamran and Hindal ignored their brother’s appeals for help. Three months of shoring up their respective defences and engaging in faux diplomacy ended in June 1539, when Afghan forces launched a surprise attack that routed Humayun’s army. While retreating across the swollen Ganges, Humayun fell off his horse. He was saved from drowning by of one of his water bearers, who tossed him an inflated goat skin to use as a buoy. The servant would later be rewarded by being made king for a day.
The next encounter between two armies took place near Kanauj on the Gangetic plain. Demoralised and depleted by desertions, the Mughals panicked and fled. ‘It was not a fight, but a rout, for not a man, friend or foe, was even wounded … Not a cannon was fired – not a gun,’ one of Humayun’s generals later complained. Once again, the Mughal emperor was forced to flee, this time crossing the Ganges on an elephant and retreating to Lahore. As far as Sher Shah was concerned, the losses at Panipat had been reversed. After just eleven years on the subcontinent, the Mughals were on their knees.
Humayun’s exile in Lahore was short-lived. After Sher Shah threatened to take the city, he made plans to go to Kabul. But with Kamran in control of the Afghan capital, he had no option but to travel south to Sindh, hoping to regroup his forces and retake his kingdom. While Kamran and Askari remained in Afghanistan, implacably opposed to Humayun, Hindal joined forces with the exiled emperor. In 1541, Humayun married Hamida (1527–1604), the daughter of Hindal’s tutor. A year later, after crossing the Thar Desert at the height of summer and reaching Umarkot in Sindh, she gave birth to a boy named Akbar, who would become the Mughal dynasty’s greatest emperor. Leaving his infant in Kandahar, Humayun pressed on westwards through Afghanistan, finally reaching the city of Herat, held by Shah Tahmasp, the Safavid ruler of Persia. In July 1544, he reached the Tahmasp’s court in Qazvin, in modern-day Iran, where the Shah offered him protection on condition that he and his followers convert to the Shia sect of Islam. The price of protection included the Koh-i-Noor diamond.
In September 1545, using troops and funds supplied by the Shah Tahmasp, Humayun led a combined Mughal–Persian force that seized Kandahar from Askari. Three months later, Kamran was defeated in Kabul. Over the next eight years, Kamran tried unsuccessfully to retake the city four times. On his final attempt he was captured and brought to Humayun, who had him blinded. Kamran is said to have begged with his jailers to be killed. When they refused, he bore the lancing of his eyes stoically. He then requested to make a pilgrimage to Mecca, where he died in 1557.
In Humayun’s absence, Sher Shah proved to be a capable leader governing a realm that was stable, prosperous and well-administered. He reorganised his army, rationalised the system of revenue collection with fixed tax rates on agricultural output and tackled corruption. He upgraded and extended the Grand Trunk Road, entrusting local chiefs with its security. Shade trees were planted, and caravanserais, or rest houses, serving Hindus and Muslims, were spaced a day’s travel apart. He also introduced a standardised silver coin known as the rupiya, which anticipated the currency of modern India and Pakistan. But his plans to set up Afghan colonies in Rajasthan, Malwa and Bundelkhand never eventuated. While he was attempting to take the Rajput fortress of Kalinjar in 1545, an ammunition dump exploded, killing him instantly. Before his death, he had ordered the construction of a mausoleum in Sasaram that was larger than the tomb of any other Muslim ruler in India to date.
The leadership crisis that followed Sher Shah’s death, which saw five rulers come and go in quick succession, emboldened Humayun to retake his dominions. In 1555, his troops defeated the forces of Sher Shah’s son at Sirhind, in the Punjab. By the middle of that year, Delhi had been captured. After a gap of fourteen years, Babur’s monarchy was restored.
Sher Khan’s 46-metre-tall, three-tiered mausoleum stands in the middle of a lake. Subsequent Mughal emperors would build ever larger and more elaborate tombs to outdo their Afghan adversaries, culminating in the Taj Mahal in Agra.
Humayun hardly had time to savour the fruits of his victory. In January 1556, just six months after recapturing Delhi, he was on the roof of his library in the Purana Qila in Delhi, consulting with his astrologers about the hour they expected Venus to rise. Hearing the call the prayer, he stood up, caught his foot in his robe and fell down a steep set of stairs, injuring his head. He died a few days later, his last words being ‘I accept the divine summons’.
THE GREATEST MUGHAL
Humayun’s son Akbar (1542–1605), only thirteen at the time of his father’s death, was put under the care and mentorship of Bairam Khan (1501–1561), the general who had masterminded Humayun’s re-conquest of India. An exact contemporary of Elizabeth I of England, Akbar would go down in history as the grandest of the Mughal emperors, with some historians elevating him to the status of the greatest of all Indian sovereigns. In The Discovery of India, Nehru credited Akbar’s reign ‘with the cultural amalgamation of Hindu and Muslim in north India’. Under Akbar, ‘the Mughal dynasty became firmly established as India’s own’.
This posthumous portrait of Akbar by the Hindu artist Govardhan (active c. 1596–1645) incorporates the Elizabethan-derived motif of a lion and calf living in peace under the emperor’s benign rule.
Although he is touted as the poster boy of tolerance and moderation, the first years of Akbar’s rule were particularly bloody, even by South Asian standards. Within months of his enthronement, Delhi was attacked by Hemu, a Hindu saltpetre dealer who had risen through the ranks to lead the Suri army. Akbar’s vastly outnumbered forces challenged Hemu’s military machine at Panipat. The late-sixteenth-century poet Padmasagara describes the young ruler as ‘flying at the Sur’s army like the star Canopus headed towards the ocean. Amazingly, he caused those warriors to wither from merely hearing a syllable of his name, and he established immortality for his troops that was like an ocean filled with the taste of victory.’ While fear was a factor, so was luck. The Mughal forces were saved when an arrow struck Hemu in the eye, causing his panic-stricken army to flee. Hemu was captured and brought before Akbar. Bairam allowed the youthful ruler to behead him. He was now a ghazi, a holy warrior.
As Akbar asserted his independence, his relationship with Bairam deteriorated. In 1560, he suggested that his guardian proceed to Mecca on a pilgrimage, and the general had no choice but to comply. He never made it. In January 1561, he was assassinated at Patan, in Gujarat, by an Afghan who bore him a grudge. Two years later Akbar eliminated another rival to the throne, his foster brother Adham Khan, by throwing him over a palace balcony. When he did not die, his mutilated body was brought up and thrown over again, this time killing him.
At the age of nineteen, Akbar ruled over an empire that extended from Lahore in the east to Jaunpur in the west, but troublesome pockets of resistance remained. The need to neutralise challengers to the Mughal ascendancy would be a feature of his more than five-decade-long rule. Akbar’s methods of empire-building differed markedly from his predecessors, especially with the Rajput kingdoms. Rather than engage them in battle, he integrated the Rajput lineages into the Mughal service, treating them as partners in the sovereign power and the wealth of his dominions, while leaving them free to manage their own affairs and administer their ancestral lands. Nor were they required to convert to Islam.
The change in policy came about almost accidentally. In 1561, Bharamal (1548–1574), the ruler of the Kachchwaha clan at Amber, approached Akbar for support to head off a challenge to his princedom. In exchange, Bharamal offered his daughter in marriage. An otherwise insignificant clan suddenly became one of the most important of the Rajput ruling dynasties. Amber’s princesses would become Mughal queens and the mothers of future emperors. Its rulers would enter the Mughal service as generals. Bharamal’s grandson Raja Man Singh led the Mughal army in campaigns against the Afghans and was made the governor of Bengal. Other Rajput lineages followed the Kachchwaha’s example, including the rulers of Jodhpur and Bikaner.
Although Akbar’s support enhanced the status of the Kachchwahas, the pre-eminent Rajput lineage remained the Sisodiyas of Mewar. The clan’s ruler, Udai Singh (1540–1572), was descended from Rana Sanga, and openly despised those Rajput states who gave up their daughters to the Mughal harem. Determined to put the Sisodiyas in their place, Akbar led a massive army to attack Rana Sanga’s stronghold of Chittor in 1567. Bolstered by the forces of two prominent Rajput chiefs, the Mughal emperor’s camp extended some 16 kilometres. The stage was set for a long, drawn-out siege.
Chittor’s fort was stocked with enough food to last several years and had an ample supply of water. But it was not impregnable. The walls were breached after four months, and Akbar was credited with firing the shot that fatally wounded the fort’s commander. Fires were then spotted at several points inside the fort. Believing death preferable to losing their honour, thousands of women committed jauhar, or self-immolation. Akbar then ordered the slaughter of the 30,000 remaining inhabitants. Though they had been beaten for now, the Sisodiyas would continue their resistance throughout the Mughal period.
The defeat of the Sisodiyas left the core areas of the Mughal heartland more or less secure, allowing Akbar to turn his attention to administrative matters. A master policymaker, he implemented a systematic and centralised form of rule that enabled uniformity in the administration of his vast empire. One of Akbar’s most important achievements was the reorganisation of the Mughal army, which had grown sixfold since he had come to power and included soldiers and officers from a range of different ethnic and religious backgrounds. Instead of inheriting their title or ranks, officers were assigned a performance-related numerical rank, or mansab, that ranged from 10 to 10,000, corresponding to the number of soldiers under their command. The system ensured that military forces could be mobilised at short notice.
Akbar’s commitment to religious pluralism was one of the defining features of his reign – something all the more remarkable given that religious intolerance was growing in other parts of the world, including Europe, where the Inquisition was underway. At the age of twenty-one, he abolished pilgrimage taxes and the jizya tax. All subjects of the Mughal Empire, regardless of religion, were now treated equally, at least in theory. Sharia law was set aside. Religious mendicants were granted land to set up monasteries. Hindu temples were rebuilt and repaired. Apostasy was no longer punished by death. Akbar and his courtiers celebrated important Hindu festivals such as Diwali. He also adopted the Hindu custom of having himself weighed against gold, silver, grains and other commodities, and then distributing the result to the destitute and needy.
Like the rulers of the Delhi Sultanate and his Mughal predecessors, Akbar was a follower of Sufi mysticism. Presenting himself as an enlightened Sufi master, he undertook annual pilgrimages, sometimes on foot in the searing summer heat, to the shrine of the founder of the Chishti Sufi tradition in India, Mu’in al-Din Chishti, at Ajmer, in the northwest. He became a disciple of the Sufi saint Salim Chishti, who predicted the birth of his first son, Salim, the future Emperor Jahangir. So grateful was Akbar that he transformed the saint’s village, Sikri, into his new capital, naming it Fatehpur Sikri, and erected one of the most magnificent tombs in India in Salim Chishti’s honour. Fatehpur Sikri was modelled on one of his moveable imperial encampments and became an arena for playing out his vision of imperial rule. Today it stands like a perfectly preserved ghost town.
The Buland Darwaza or the ‘Door of Victory’, was built in 1575 to commemorate Akbar’s victory over Gujarat. It is the main entrance to the Jama Masjid at Fatehpur Sikri.
Inspired by Sufism’s tolerance of other faiths and their pathways to reaching a union with god, Akbar used his residence in Fatehpur Sikri to engage in a systematic study of comparative theology and religion. He built a ‘House of Worship’, where religious debates were held on Thursday evenings. Representatives from all religious communities and sects were encouraged to enrol. Akbar was convinced that all religions, not just Islam, contained some element of truth. When a group of Jesuits visited his court, he went out of his way to please them, dressing in Portuguese clothes, kissing a bible and placing it on his head. The Jesuits found him so accepting of Christianity that they believed they had a convert, before realising that he shared the same fascination with Hinduism, Jainism, Judaism and Zoroastrianism while still observing Muslim prayer times. One of the Jesuits, Father Antonio Monserrate, accompanied Akbar and his army into Afghanistan. While advancing through the Khyber Pass, the emperor restrained an angry mob from stoning the priest to death after he denounced the Prophet.
MONSERRATE ON AKBAR’S LEADERSHIP: ‘It is hard to exaggerate how accessible [Akbar] makes himself to all who wish audience of him. For he creates an opportunity almost every day for any of the common people or of the nobles to see him and converse with him; and he endeavours to show himself pleasant spoken and affable rather than severe toward all who come to speak with him.’
Although he couldn’t read (there is evidence to suggest that he was dyslexic), Akbar amassed a library of 24,000 volumes. He set up a department that translated Hindu epics such as the Mahābhārata and the Rāmāyaṇa, as well as Christian gospels written in Latin, into Persian and had copies made and distributed to libraries throughout his dominions. Sanskrit-speaking astronomers were appointed to his court.
Not everyone approved of Akbar’s religious experimentations. His concept of a Divine Faith (Din-i Ilahi), an eclectic mix of religions with the emperor as its sacred sovereign, led his enemies to accuse him of abjuring Islam. Among those who detested Akbar’s multi-faith enthusiasm was the court chronicler Badauni (1540–1615), who became his fiercest critic. Akbar seems to have taken a morbid enjoyment in assigning him the four-year task of translating the Mahābhārata, which Badauni later described as containing nothing but ‘puerile absurdities’. Badauni criticised Akbar for memorising the 1001 Sanskrit names for the sun, worshipping the heavenly object four times a day and interviewing ‘famed holy men of all sects’. Akbar in turn complained that Badauni was a fanatic: ‘No sword can slice through the jugular vein of his bigotry.’
In 1589, Akbar commissioned his head vizier and court poet, Abu’l-fazl (1551–1602), to ‘write with the pen of sincerity the account of the glorious events of our dominion-increasing victories’. A liberal-minded scholar and gifted historian, Fazl produced two monumental works, the A’in-i Akhari or Constitution of Akbar and the Akbar-nama, or History of Akbar. A combination of gazetteer, almanac, rule book and statistical digest, the A’in-i Akbari, which in English editions runs to 1500 pages, contains information on everything from ‘regulations for oiling camels and injecting oil into their nostrils’ to mathematical methods for calculating the Earth’s size. At 2500 pages, the Akbar-nama is a eulogistic history of his reign that portrays Akbar as a divine mystic with supernatural powers. As Fazl writes: ‘He sought for truth amongst the dust-stained denizens of the field of irreflection and consorted with every sort of wearers of patched garments such as [yogis, renouncers, and Sufi mystics], and other solitary sitters in the dust and insouciant recluses.’
During the latter part of his reign, Akbar could be found mingling with Hindu holy men who ‘employ themselves in various follies and extravagances, in contemplations, gestures, addresses, abstractions and reveries, and in alchemy, fascination and magic’. His obsession with understanding human nature prompted him to order a Kaspar Hauserian experiment where dozens of infants were moved to a special house; no one was allowed to talk to them in the belief that as they grew older the natural language of humankind would be revealed. The infants were also watched to see ‘what religion and sect [they] would incline to and above all what creed they would repeat’. When Akbar visited the house in 1582, four years after the children were placed there, he heard ‘no cry … no talisman of speech, and nothing came out except the noise of the dumb’.
The final years of Akbar’s life were marred by tragedy. All three of his legitimate sons were alcoholics, and he would outlive two of them. In his thirties and impatient to inherit the throne, his eldest son, Salim (1569–1627), launched an abortive uprising against his father in 1600. Two years later, he had coins forged in his name as emperor and ordered the killing of Fazl. Father and son reconciled, but only after the intervention of Akbar’s wife. Salim was designated the heir apparent, but instead of preparing himself for the duties he indulged in the excessive consumption of opium and wine. ‘[Akbar] had achieved more than he could possibly have hoped, only to find his successes undermined by the irony that none of the sons seemed able or worthy to inherit what he had established,’ writes Bamber Gascoigne.
THE WORLD’S RICHEST EMPIRE
On ascending the throne after his father’s death in 1605, Salim took the name Jahangir, or ‘Seizer of the World’. While global domination was a pipe dream, the empire he inherited was the richest and most extensive in the world at the time. It stretched over most of northern India and what is now Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan. Its population of 100 million was five times that of the Ottoman Empire at its height, and it produced about a quarter of the world’s manufactures including textiles, spices, sugar and weaponry.
Jahangir is often portrayed as lazy and languorous. Although his opium and alcohol addictions would incapacitate him in his later years, he was in fact an enlightened and tolerant ruler who followed and tried to improve on many of his father’s policies. The Indian art historian Ashok Kumar Das describes Jahangir as an ‘aesthete’. ‘He was an aristocrat with the eye of a naturalist, the vision of a poet, the taste of a connoisseur and the philosophy of an epicurean.’ Like Babur, he left a detailed memoir, the Jahangirnama, that reflects his fascination with the natural world (he could name every bird in northern India) and his patronage of the arts. Henry Beveridge, the nineteenth-century translator of Jahangir’s memoirs declared that the emperor would have been a ‘better and happier man’ as the ‘head of a Natural History Museum’.
Among the thousands of paintings he commissioned is an image of the now extinct Mauritian dodo. The painting by the court artist Ustad Mansur is the world’s only accurate depiction of the bird drawn from a living specimen. His memoir also contains detailed observations of the breeding habits of the sarus crane and the outcome of an experiment in which a lion was dissected to find the physical origin of what made it so brave. When his favourite courtier, Inayat Khan, was dying from opium addiction, he ordered that he be drawn and painted. A Jaina monk who lived in Jahangir’s court, Upadhyaya Bhanucandra Gani, poignantly captured the decadence of the time:
A painting depicting the dodo ascribed to Ustad Mansur dated to the period 1628–1633. The flightless bird was probably brought to Jahangir’s court via Portuguese-controlled Goa.
Jahangir enjoyed and amused himself as Indra does in heaven – sometimes residing in wonderful rest-houses, sometimes on the banks of the Indus, sometimes on pleasure-mounts, sometimes in mansions of variegated colours, sometimes revelling in the exquisite performance of the best female dancers, sometimes listening to the soft music of beautiful damsels, and sometimes attending to dramatic performances.
Among the numerous European visitors to Jahangir’s court was Sir Thomas Roe (1581–1644), who arrived in 1615 with letters and gifts from James I to secure a trading agreement for the East India Company. Of all the gifts that Roe bestowed, those Jahangir prized most were English paintings and miniatures, which he ordered his artists to copy. Roe spent three years in India, leaving behind a detailed account of, among other things, the emperor’s court as it moved from camp to camp during Jahangir’s periodic tours of his empire. More than a thousand elephants, camels and bullocks were required to transport the royal tents alone. Roe calculated that when the camp halted for the night, it covered an area 32 kilometres in circumference and equal in greatness to any town in Europe.
Roe was not the first trader to go to the Mughal court. A multitude of trading communities, ranging from the Jewish and al-Karimi networks in Mamluk, Egypt, to the Rasulids of Yemen, as well as the Portuguese, had by the sixteenth century established deep commercial networks with India, trading mainly in spices such as pepper and cardamon from Kerala. Pepper bought in the markets of Cochin could get eight times the price in Lisbon. Demand from the Persian and Ottoman empires and Ming China led to significant increases in pepper output from the early 1500s onwards. Payment in gold, silver, ivory, copper and slaves flowed into the coffers of Indian merchants. Under Akbar and Jahangir, foreign craftsmen, including Europeans, were encouraged to settle in India and teach weavers improved techniques of cloth-making, at times introducing Iranian, European and Chinese patterns into Indian ones.
Like his father, Jahangir sought out intellectuals and teachers from a range of religions at his court and read texts translated from Sanskrit. Pictures and statues of the Madonna decorated his palaces. Though he remained a devout Muslim, he had a secular outlook. ‘All sorts of religions are wellcome and free, for the king is of none,’ noted Roe. The exception was Hindu yogis: though they too were tolerated, he described them as lacking ‘all religious knowledge’ and perceived in their ideas ‘only darkness of spirit’.
In 1611, Jahangir married Mihru n-Nisa (1577–1645), the widow of one of his lieutenants. Though only thirty-four, she quickly rose to dominate her husband’s court, taking on the title Nur Mahal (Light of the Palace) and then Nur Jahan (Light of the World). Coins were struck in her name – the first time a woman had been honoured in this way in Islamic India. No public business was carried out unless it was referred to her. ‘She governs him and winds him up at her pleasure,’ noted Roe of her relations with her husband. She was also an excellent shot, killing four tigers by firing just six bullets from a curtained-off howdah (seat) atop an elephant in a single day. She dictated orders, issued proclamations and appointed members of her family to senior court positions. Her insistence that visitors bring her gifts fostered a level of corruption never seen before in the Mughal Empire.
One of those who earned Nur Jahan’s favour was Khurram (1592–1666), Jahangir’s son by an earlier marriage. Khurram’s ascendancy was partly due to his success in subduing the Sisodiyas. Following Akbar’s assault on Chittor, the Sisodiya leader Rana Pratap (1540–1597) had led a protracted guerrilla campaign against the Mughals. During his first military assignment in 1614, Khurram took on Pratap’s successor, Amar Singh (1559–1620). Facing defeat against a much stronger Mughal army, Singh sued for peace. A year later, the two sides concluded an agreement that exempted the Sisodiyas from entering into marital relations with the Mughals or sending representatives to their court. It also allowed them to administer their own territory and returned to their possession Chittor’s fort.
A triumphant Khurram became Jahangir’s chosen successor, but his increasingly rebellious behaviour drove his father to rename him bidalwat (wretched). Nur Jahan, who had taken advantage of her husband’s drug-addled behaviour and deteriorating health to become the de facto ruler of the empire, also turned against Khurram and began favouring one of Jahangir’s younger sons, Shahryar. To get Khurram out of the way, she persuaded Jahangir to send him to Burhanpur to secure the southern flank of the Mughal Empire from remnants of the Delhi Sultanate, no doubt in the hope that he would not survive the campaign.
Jahangir’s death on 28 October 1627 set off an all-too-familiar succession scenario as Nur Jahan tried to seize the chance of putting a sickly Shahryar (he was suffering from a form of leprosy) on the throne, but her plans were thwarted by Asaf Khan, a general in Jahangir’s army loyal to Khurram who put her under house arrest. Khurram was still in South India, a three-month march from Agra, when news of his father’s death reached him. Twelve days after entering the city on 24 January 1628, on a date chosen by astrologers as auspicious, he was crowned the new emperor as Shah Jahan or ‘King of the World’. One of his first acts was to order the execution of Shahryar and his supporters. Nur Jahan was exiled to Lahore, where she died in 1645.
Born of a Rajput mother, Shah Jahan had more Indian than Mughal blood, but never forgot his Islamic roots. He took a more orthodox approach to matters of religion and state than his father. The practice of prostration before the sovereign, considered un-Islamic, was banned. Patronage of the annual Hajj pilgrimage was reinstated, and the policy of allowing the building and repair of non-Muslim places of worship was stopped. The presence of Jesuit missionaries at his court, however, was tolerated and, like Akbar, he employed Hindus to command his armies.
Pursuing an aggressive military strategy, Shah Jahan added parts of eastern India, Sindh and the northwestern frontier with Afghanistan to the empire. Treaties were also signed with two major kingdoms in the Deccan, the Adil Shahs of Bijapur and the Qutb Shahs of Golconda. His attempts to retake Timurid territories in northern Afghanistan and Central Asia were less successful. The real significance of these wars was the outcome they had on the fortunes of the two sons who would later vie to replace him – Dara Shukoh and Aurangzeb.
Always accompanying Shah Jahan on his military campaigns was his favourite wife, Mumtaz Mahal (1593–1631). The other wives in his harem did not command ‘one-thousandth part of the affection’ that he did for her, noted the contemporary writer Inayat Khan. Mumtaz Mahal was consulted on all matters of state and her royal seal was affixed to official documents. When in 1631 she died in a thirty-hour labour, giving birth to her fourteenth child, Shah Jahan was so distraught that he did not appear in public for a week. ‘From constant weeping he was forced to use spectacles; and his august beard and moustache, which had only a few white hairs in them before, became in a few days from intense sorrow more than one-third white,’ Inayat Khan recorded.
Mumtaz was buried in a garden by the banks of the Tapti River in the city of Burhanpur, where she’d died. Six months later, her body was taken to Agra and reburied on the banks of the Yamuna. On the site of her tomb would rise the greatest of all the Mughal monuments in India: the Taj Mahal. Clad in white marble, much of it inlaid with semi-precious stones, the building would become, in the words of Shah Jahan’s court historian Qazwini, ‘a masterpiece for ages to come’ and ‘provide for the amazement of all humanity’.
Seeing the Taj Mahal just after its completion in 1648, the French physician Francois Bernier was adamant that it was much more deserving to be counted as one of the wonders of the world ‘than those unshapen masses’, the pyramids of Egypt.
Of all the succession struggles that beset the Great Mughals, that of Shah Jahan’s four sons was the grisliest. In April 1657, the emperor fell ill when he returned to Delhi from his summer holiday. The Venetian traveller and quack doctor Niccolao Manucci attributed his illness to the overuse of aphrodisiacs, ‘for being an old man … he wanted still to enjoy himself like a youth’. Shah Jahan recovered, but not before rumours of his imminent demise swept through his empire. Prior to returning to Delhi, he had designated Dara Shukoh (1615–1659), his eldest and favourite son, as his successor. Like Akbar, Dara Shukoh was a Renaissance man, who once commented that ‘the essential nature of Hinduism was identical with that of Islam’. The fatal flaw in Shah Jahan’s succession plan was his failure to disarm the other princes coveting the throne: Shuja, Aurangzeb and Murad.
During the nine years that followed Shah Jahan’s near-death experience, it was Aurangzeb (1618–1707) who would vie for power most vigorously. Austere in his personal behaviour and religiously orthodox, he despised his older brother and everything he stood for. Dara Shukoh, he complained, had won his father’s favour by ‘flattery, smoothness of tongue and much laughing’. While Shukoh was in Afghanistan making an unsuccessful attempt to seize Kandahar, Aurangzeb took Agra in 1658 and imprisoned Shah Jahan in the Red Fort. On his return to India, Shukoh was betrayed by one of his generals, captured and brought back to Delhi, where he was paraded through the city on a grubby elephant and in chains. ‘Everywhere,’ says the French doctor François Bernier, ‘I observed the people weeping and lamenting the fate of Dara in the most touching language: men, women, and children wailing as if some mighty calamity had happened to themselves.’ After being charged with apostasy, he was sentenced to death and beheaded.
On being proclaimed emperor in May 1659, Aurangzeb took as his title Alamgir, or ‘World Compeller’, the Persian word engraved on the sword his captive father had given him. Aurangzeb’s reputation as a religious conservative is well entrenched in India today. His almost-fifty-year reign would mark the end of Mughal ties to the Sanskrit cultural world. As Bamber Gascoigne writes, ‘Akbar [had] disrupted the Muslim community by recognising that India was not an Islamic country: Aurangzeb disrupted India by behaving as if it were.’ He spent months memorising the Koran and would lay down his carpet and recite his evening prayers even in the midst of battle. ‘Aurangzeb was, first and last, a stern Puritan,’ one of his earliest biographers, Stanley Lane-Poole, noted. ‘Nothing in life – neither throne, nor love, nor ease – weighed for an instant in his mind against his fealty to the principles of Islam.’
A painting attributed to the Mughal court artist Bichitr depicting Emperor Aurangzeb seated on a golden throne in his durbar, c. 1660.
Scholars such as Audrey Truschke and Katherine Schofield have since challenged this view of his religious zealotry. The long-held notion that he banned music because it was un-Islamic was just one of the many myths that have now been discounted on closer historical scrutiny. Despite his adherence to orthodox Islam, he moved cautiously against Hindus in the first decade of his reign. His sons and nobles continued to celebrate Hindu religious holidays, patronise poets and enjoy music and wine. That changed in 1669, when he ordered the governors of all provinces under Mughal rule to destroy Hindu temples, following up the decree a few years later with another that banned Hindus from higher office. However, these orders were never carried out systematically, and temple demolitions were confined to a few areas around northern India.
In 1679, he reinstated the jizya tax on non-Muslims that Akbar had abolished 115 years earlier. Soon after the decree was issued, an earthquake struck Delhi. Believing it to be an omen, the city’s mullahs entreated the emperor to reconsider his actions. Aurangzeb refused, saying that the trembling of the earth was ‘the result of the joy it felt at the course I was adopting’. So entrenched was Hinduism that wiping it out completely was far beyond the capacity of any ruler. As Manucci observed, even destroyed temples were ‘venerated by the Hindus and visited for the offering of alms’. Those that remained were thronged with worshippers.
During his reign, Aurangzeb would expand the Mughal Empire to its greatest extent. But his campaign of conquest came at considerable expense. The military and administrative resources of the empire were spread thin and discipline was breaking down. When Sir William Norris, trade representative of King William III, visited Aurangzeb a few years before his death, he reported that his soldiers had not been paid and his courtiers could be bribed for a bottle of wine. ‘All administration has disappeared,’ wrote one eyewitness. ‘The realm is desolated, nobody gets justice, they have been utterly ruined.’
Adding to this parlous state was the fact that Aurangzeb’s most formidable foes, the Marathas in the Deccan and the Sikhs in the Punjab, were unvanquished. Under Śivaji, the various Maratha tribes were united into an effective military force that used a network of impregnable forts along the Western Ghats to launch punishing guerrilla raids on Aurangzeb’s forces; these are still glorified today. The emperor had alienated the Sikhs by condemning the ninth guru, Tegh Bahadur, for blasphemy and executing him. Since its founding in the late fifteenth century, Sikhism had become a movement for religious and social reform, as well as a formidable military force. Aurangzeb was particularly infuriated by the large number of Muslims converting to the faith. The assassination of Gobind Singh, the tenth and last guru, by Aurangzeb’s successor, Bahadur Shah, in 1708 unleashed a series of wars that would undermine the remnants of the Mughal Empire for a century to come.
After drawn-out sieges, Aurangzeb conquered the key Shia Muslim states of Bijapur and Golconda, bringing most of the Indian subcontinent under his control.
Determined not to repeat the chaos that surrounded his own ascension to the throne, Aurangzeb had tried in vain to lay the groundwork for an orderly transfer of power. Fearing that they would rebel against him, he imprisoned three of his five sons for petty crimes such as embezzlement. Another was dispatched to a post at a far-flung corner of the empire. But in the end it all came to nought. The death of the last great Mughal on 3 March 1707 touched off a debilitating fratricidal struggle that saw son conspire against son, puppet against pretender, often with murderous consequences. In the course of a dozen years, no fewer than seventeen aspirants would jockey for the throne. Aurangzeb’s death also opened the way for new players to enter this eighteenth-century great game for the control of the Indian subcontinent and its vast wealth. No longer would wars be fought solely between Hindu and Muslim armies. Britain and France, once content to send emissaries such as Roe and Norris bearing gifts to win favours from local rulers, were about to become full-blown rivals for trade and territory.