175

The Mughal Emperors

932–1274/1526–1858

India

Bābur, the founder of the Mughal dynasty, was a Chaghatay Turk of Central Asia, separated from Tīmūr by five generations on his father’s side and from Chingiz Khān on his mother’s. His father ‘Umar Shaykh b. Abī Sa’īd ruled a small Tīmūrid principality in the Central Asian region of Farghāna, but Bābur found that the rising power of the Shïbānid Özbegs (see above, no. 151) made it difficult for him to retain a foothold there after his father’s death. Accordingly, in 910/1514 he moved southwards and occupied Kabul, and very soon afterwards made his first raid into India as far as the Indus. It seems that Bābur only turned to India when his repeated attempts to regain power in his Central Asian homeland had failed, but eventually a discontented faction at the court of the Lōdī Sultans of Delhi (see above, no. 160, 5) invited him to intervene. He defeated Ibrāhīm II Lōdī at the first battle of Pānīpat in 932/1526 and, in the next year, a coalition of Rājput chiefs at Khānwa near Agra. Yet these victories were only a beginning. There was as yet no solid structure of Mughal power, and the strong reaction of the Afghan military leaders in India, led by Shir Shāh Sur (see above, no. 160, 6), caused Bābur‘s son Humāyūn to flee from northern India to Sind, Afghanistan and Persia for fifteen years. Only the weakness of Shir Shāh‘s successors allowed Humāyūn to return in 962/1555 and establish himself in Delhi and Agra.

The fifty-year reign of Akbar the Great now followed. The Mughal hold on northern and central India was made firm: Mālwa and the independent Rājput states, Gujarāt and Khāndesh, were secured, and by 984/1576 Bengal was restored once more to the control of Delhi. The north-western frontier, gateway to India for so many invaders, was secured by the acquisition of Kabul and Kandahar, although the latter town was to be a bone of contention with the rulers of Persia for a long time to come. In the Deccan, the princedoms of the northern tier of the Bahmanid successor-states were either directly annexed or made to acknowledge Akbar’s supremacy, but the military and administrative structures of the Empire were not yet strong enough for full authority to be established all through the Deccan; this was to be the work of Awrangzīb, in whose reign almost all India – with the exceptions of the parts of western India controlled by the Marāt́hās and the southernmost tip of peninsular India – passed under Mughal control. On the diplomatic level, the initially friendly relations with the Safawids were exchanged for an agreement with the Özbeg ‘Abdallāh Khān II (see above no. 153) over the demarcation of the respective territories of the Mughals and the Shïbānids. There was also diplomatic contact with the Ottomans over the common threat to both empires from the Portuguese in the seas around Arabia and the Indian Ocean, but the distance between Delhi and Istanbul was too vast for a Sunnī Grand Alliance to emerge, and no concrete naval or military cooperation proved possible.

Akbar was thus undeniably a great general and stateman, but he is equally interesting as a wide-ranging thinker on religious questions. His syncretistic Dīn-i Ilāhī or Divine Faith, though it was restricted in membership to an élite court circle, shows his deep intellectual curiosity about religions in general. Hindus participated to a greater extent than usual in the administration and direction of the empire. It was under Akbar that the governmental structure of the Mughal empire took shape, and he welded together into a governing class diverse ethnic elements, comprising Turks, Afghans, Persians and Hindus. This class formed the manṣabdārs, holders of official appointments who were obliged to provide a certain number of troops. Official salaries were in part paid by jāgīrs or assignments of the revenues from estates, which were not, however, hereditary like the īqṭd‘s and soyurghals of the Islamic lands west of India. Although the ruler himself had theoretically unbridled secular authority, the early Mughals at least were benevolent rather than tyrannical despots; in any case, the very vastness of the empire made over-centralisation and the extension of the ruler’s autocracy into every corner of it difficult to achieve.

Akbar’s successors Jahāngīr and Shāh Jahān continued the policy of enforcing obedience over outlying parts – over the Rājput rulers of Mēwāŕ, the Shī‘ī sultanates of the Deccan, the Portuguese on the coasts of Bengal – but Shāh Jahān’s ambitions of uniting Central Asia and India in a grand Sunnī empire only ended in failure and loss of prestige (1057/1647). When he abdicated in 1068/1657, a savage succession struggle broke out among his four sons. In the course of this, Awrangzīb twice defeated and then executed his brother Dārā Shikūh, and began a fifty-year reign. An orthodox reaction against the liberal and eclectic attitudes of Akbar and his son, spearheaded by the increasingly influential Naqshbandl Ṣūfī order, had been gathering momentum during the preceding decades. Awrangzīb now espoused in large measure this rigorist programme, attacking lax social and religious practices which had grown up in Muslim India under the all-pervading influence of the surrounding Hindu majority society and attempting a reformation along the lines to be enunciated in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century by such figures as Shāh Walī Allāh of Delhi and Sayyid Aḥmad of Bareilly and his mujāhidīn. In part, Awrangzīb‘s policy was a reaction against the renewed vigour, intellectual and material, of Hinduism; yet he continued to let Hindus form an integral part of the Mughal military and administrative structures. His military efforts were at first directed at strengthening the north-western frontier, where fierce fighting was necessary to exert control over the Pathan tribes. Latterly, he became increasingly concerned with the Deccan; the remaining Shī‘ī sultanates, those of the ‘Ādil Shāhīs and the Quṭb Shāhīs, were extinguished, and the Marāt́hās curbed; yet this last check was only a temporary one, and the high point of Muslim power in the Deccan was never to be reached again.

Awrangzīb‘s death in 1118/1707 began the agonising decline of the Mughals. A series of ephemeral rulers followed, and the longer reign of Muḥammad Shāh did not prevent the outlying provinces of the empire from falling into the hands of such groups as the Marāt́hās, the Jāt́s, the Sikhs and the Rohilla Afghans. Nādir Shah’s invasion of India in 1151–2/1738–9 (see above, no. 149) and the sacking and occupation of Delhi, and the subsequent campaigns of Aḥmad Shāh Abdālī or Durrānī (see below, no. 180, 1), dealt the empire material and moral blows from which it never recovered. On several sides, Hindu fortunes were reviving, and the factor of the British presence was now significant in the interior as well as in the coastlands. While the British were extending their power through Bengal to Oudh (see below, nos 176, 178), Central India and Rājputānā, the Mughals, whose practical authority reached little beyond Delhi, could only look on helplessly. Shāh ‘Ālam II and his successors were British pensioners, and in 1274/1858 the last Mughal was deposed and exiled to Rangoon for complicity in the Sepoy Mutiny.

Justi, 472–5; Lane-Poole, 322–9; Zambaur, 300 and Table U.

EI² ‘Mughals. 1. History, 11. Numismatics’ (J. Burton-Page).

G. P. Taylor, ‘Some dates relating to the Mughal Emperors of India’, JASB, new series, 3 (1907), Numismatic Suppl., 57–64.

W. Irvine, The Later Mughals, I–II, Calcutta 1921–2, ed. and augmented Jadunath Sarkar, Allahabad 1974.

R. C. Majumdar (ed.), The History and Culture of the Indian People. VII. The Mughul Empire, chs 2–3, 5–8, 10.

idem (ed.), VIII. The Maratha Supremacy, Bombay 1977, ch. 5.

Ishwari Prasad, India in the Eighteenth Century, Allahabad 1973.

idem, The Mughal Empire, Allahabad 1974.

J. F. Richards, The New Cambridge History of India, 1.5, The Mughal Empire, Cambridge 1993.