A Short History of the Mughal Empire (I.B.Tauris Short Histories) Read online

  Over time, the ethnic identity ‘Mughal’ changed. Originally ‘Mughal’ was the Persian term for uncultured (but fierce) Mongols, but it eventually became the most widely used term for Babur’s dynasty in India. While the dynasty featured its Sunni male Central Asian patrilineage, it also included, by marriage, many women with Shi‘i and Hindu ancestries. Further, the imperial clan remained only a tiny proportion even of the imperial elite—the vast bulk of the Empire consisted of many other people and cultures. Over nearly two centuries, this dynasty, and other immigrants and Indians who formed the imperial elite, created a highly sophisticated court culture and a vast military and civil establishment. Both these attracted and employed many South Asians directly or indirectly and also drew acceptance and revenues from most of the rest.

  The Mughal Empire was thus never an indigenous national empire with a uniform elite and a predominantly mono-ethnic army. Rather, the dynasty drew eclectically from a range of cultures and people. Hence, a continued tension remained almost throughout the dynasty’s history about where sovereignty lay. For most of the Empire, all males who were closely related to the current emperor shared his sovereignty, and could potentially themselves emerge as emperor. This explicitly invoked the Mongol and Turkish models of their Central Asian world-conquering ancestors. Most Mughal emperors parceled out some of their authority to sons or brothers, and willed that their surviving sons should divide the Empire after their deaths. But in tension with these Central Asian imperial traditions were the Islamic and Indic concepts that, once enthroned, the incumbent emperor alone held semi-divine (or divine) sovereignty. Each of the first five emperors asserted, in one form or another, that he was the Islamic millennial sovereign.2 Even thereafter, emperors claimed that they alone were destined by God to rule the entire world, or at least the Muslim or South Asian parts of it. Further, various emperors projected themselves as objects of worship, in the mode of Sufi saints and Hindu deities. When Europeans arrived, the dynasty incorporated Christian symbols of divine authority as well, particularly through art.

  The Mughal Empire also remained contingent on forces and events beyond its control. Most printed maps (alas, including in this book) give the impression of the Empire as a two-dimensional static entity, with a uniform internal system of laws and with fixed and policed borders. More suggestively, we should envision the Empire as a dynamic process, with administrative, military and cultural layers, that over time varied in depth and extended and contracted in extent.3 Continuing this metaphor, in some places and time periods, this layering was quite dense, since the imperial administration extended deeply into local society down to the level of individual fields, the military had an effective coercive dominance, and the emperor’s authority prevailed with relatively few serious challenges. Such conditions largely existed, for instance, in most of the territories within the Mughal core provinces from the mid-sixteenth through the late seventeenth centuries.

  But these imperial processes were always uneven. The Empire constantly faced resistance and repeated rebellions, among its core elite and also on its internal and external frontiers. There were occasional and persistent thin spots where imperial armies might overcome local opposition, but imperial administration had little control and Mughal culture had little appeal. There were also gaps, especially in heavily forested areas, even within the Mughal core or in newly conquered provinces. Similarly, the relationships between the Empire and various individuals were also lumpy, even in the Mughal heartland, with some people having thick administrative and ideological bonds to the state, while others very weak ones, or none at all.

  Further, the Empire repeatedly faced fragmentation. Each emperor tried to keep the Empire intact and also protect his sons from each other by proposing ways to divide it internally. At virtually every imperial succession, some claimants sought to split the Empire apart, before the one triumphant successor pulled it together. Over the dynasty’s final century, the imperial process was still widespread but very thin, extending over territories where Mughal sovereignty was recognized only nominally since the imperial center could assert no substantial administrative or military control. Thus, the Mughal Empire was more of a composite and dynamic process than a stable and static system.

  In terms of South Asian history, the Mughal Empire was also distinctive, coming at a transitional time and including a complex combination of external and indigenous personnel as well as cultures. Throughout its history, South Asia has usually remained divided among regionally based states. The Mughal Empire made itself the largest and most powerful state that South Asia had yet seen. But the majority of the Empire’s core officials were always either ethnically diverse immigrants, or descendants of recent immigrants, especially from Central Asia, Iran, or Afghanistan, who valued that external origin as a vital part of their identity. Nonetheless, the Empire also incorporated many local rulers into its military-administrative order. Thus, a minority of the Empire’s high officials were identified, and identified themselves, as Hindus or long-settled Muslims from a particular region within South Asia. For example, for about a century, Hindu royal clans based in north India joined the core imperial cadre, supplying wives and service to successive emperors, yet always held a distinct identity and role there. But before and after that, these clans stood largely apart from the Empire. Especially over the seventeenth century, substantial numbers of men from central India entered imperial service, although most felt alienated there. Thus, the limits of the imperial domain constantly fluctuated.

  While the Empire remained land-based, it became ever more integrated with the burgeoning European-based world system of trade and colonialism, with profound positive and negative consequences. From the sixteenth century onward, various Europeans went to the imperial court seeking favors, but also to attempt to convince the emperor of the superiority of Christian beliefs and European culture. The imperial center selectively adapted aspects of European culture, and employed some Europeans in its service. European imports of bullion, military technology, and new crops and diseases (particularly from the Americas) affected the imperial economy. Mughal emperors sought European protection on the seas and, during the dynasty’s last century, as regents. The British Empire in India in many ways modeled itself on, as well as contrasted itself with, the Mughal Empire. The independent states of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh have all selected national symbols from the Empire. Thus, from the Mughal Empire’s origins down to today, South Asians, Europeans and others have represented it in shifting ways.

  Like all the Tauris Short Histories, this book presents crucial representative events and themes in a chronological historical narrative that incorporates the latest contributions from a range of scholars. My goal as author is to engage a wide array of readers with the Mughal Empire, intending to encourage them to explore more extensively by suggesting more focused studies in areas of their particular interest, especially through the final chapter, reference notes and Bibliography. Discussion of many of the central issues and unresolved questions that fascinate today’s specialists in the field arise in the course of this book. Readers more familiar with academic studies of the Empire will recognize how I have tried to contribute to these ongoing discussions.

  STRUCTURING THE BOOK

  The Mughal Empire encompasses a vast topic: geographically spanning almost the entire Indian subcontinent, chronologically covering over three centuries, and internally including a vast array of people and their complex interactions. To organize all this into a short history, the book explores selected themes within its general narrative. As in the Empire’s own official histories, and also in contemporary elite and popular understanding, the chapters use imperial reigns for periodization. However, the themes of long-term cultural, social and political developments and also of contested innovations and transitions integrate the book as a whole.

  Chapter 1 considers the multiple origins of the Mughal Empire which combined a Central Asian dynasty with Indian people and lands. The founding emper
or, Babur, particularly celebrated his status as descendant and heir to earlier Mongol and Turkman ‘world-conquerors.’ But Babur spent his lifetime frustrated in his efforts to recover his ancestral lands in Central Asia. Further, while Babur described India as a foreign and largely unknown land, he also claimed as his ancestral heritage the lands beyond the Khyber Pass as far as Delhi.

  We turn in Chapter 2 to the complex lands, cultures and people of South Asia. Some environmental and cultural features spanned the subcontinent. But never in history had the entire ecologically, culturally and socially diverse subcontinent ever been brought under a single ruler. Instead, each region had its own ecology, main language and long traditions of political autonomy. Most people followed the various traditions that outsiders have called Hinduism. But a growing number were Muslim, including recent immigrants, their settled descendants and also local converts (by the late eighteenth century, Muslims would total about a third of India’s population). However, most Indian Muslims, including settled Afghans who ruled much of north India, regarded Babur as alien, even if some pragmatically supported him in their intraethnic conflicts.

  Thus, Babur entered a complex and highly contested world in which he was only one of many contenders for power. After Babur successfully invaded in 1526, he conquered much of north India during his four-year imperial reign. But virtually none of the people living in these lands shared the Central Asian ethnic identity of Babur or his main commanders. So, he incorporated relatively few Indians into his inner circle of advisors, even Muslim Indians. His nascent regime never established very deep or enduring bonds with the landholders and people whom his military forces conquered. However, many Indians did serve in his army, administration and household; most people in north India seem to have accepted his overlordship, at least provisionally, rather than openly oppose him.

  Chart 1: Mughal Emperors (with Reign) and Imperial Princes (to 1707)

  The second emperor, Humayun, had a checkered career, as we see in Chapter 3. Still largely dependent on Central Asian commanders, he sought initially to expand the Mughal Empire by conquering down the Ganges into Bengal. But that province remained uncongenial for his closest supporters. Nor did Humayun incorporate very many indigenous people into his court or upper administration. His own brothers repeatedly challenged his authority, trying to divide or take over his empire. Crucially, Indo-Afghans rose up and drove him out. Fifteen years later, briefly before his death, he reconquered much of north India. His final but largely unredeemed vision of the Mughal Empire encompassed the Gangetic plain plus Kabul and the long-lost ancestral lands of Central Asia. Thus, in Part I, the Mughal Empire remained a particularly contingent and fragile process, with little integration between the imperial dynasty and India.

  The next three chapters (grouped into Part II) examine the thickening bonds between the dynasty and increasing numbers of people under its authority in northern India during the half-century-long reign of the third emperor, Akbar. Overcoming familial challengers and the domination of a series of regents, Akbar emerged as a particularly powerful ruler. His regime created distinctly Mughal imperial social, cultural and political institutions that spread and grounded the Empire in India. In particular, he innovated new relationships with local Hindu and Muslim rulers of north India’s strategic regions, including through political marriages, which provided him with subordinate allies and new officials and officers to complement those he inherited. Akbar and his close advisors adapted Persianate cultural, administrative and political institutions that reconstituted the Empire’s military and civil establishments and provincial governance. He also created political and religious ideologies, derived from an array of Islamic and Indic traditions, which bound to him not only his core officials but also many of his Indian subjects throughout his expanding domain. Gradually, many tributary regional rulers and landholders became imperial functionaries, paying systematically assessed revenues and receiving assigned incomes. Growing numbers of people accepted Mughal sovereignty. All these enhanced the Empire’s power to govern and to extract resources from the Indian economy, which was predominantly agriculturally based.

  Under Akbar, the envisioned extent of the Mughal Empire expanded to encompass the entire subcontinent, which his amanuensis defined as: ‘the four corners of India, which is surrounded on three sides by the ocean.’4 From a series of political capitals—including an entirely new one that Akbar ordered built—he sent out forces to conquer neighboring states in all directions. But Akbar did not substantially push militarily far southward against the still strong sultanates of the Deccan. Thus, by the time of Akbar’s death, the Mughal Empire was well established and extensive, but it still faced instabilities inherent in its structure and environment.

  The next three chapters (included in Part III) survey three distinct periods of imperial expansion and elaboration, respectively under successive emperors: Jahangir, Shah Jahan and ‘Alamgir (popularly known by his princely name, Aurangzeb). Each, while a prince, had impatiently prepared to succeed to his father’s throne, and then survived a bloody contest with his brothers and other male relatives to seize it. Each new emperor and his supporters then built upon the institutions and procedures from Akbar’s long reign, extending and deepening the Empire. Each also developed his own distinctive court culture and ideology. The first two of these emperors, in particular, patronized the Empire’s most elaborate and sophisticated artistic and architectural achievements.

  Each of these three successive regimes also undertook initiatives of conquest across imperial land frontiers, which appeared almost limitlessly extendable. Kabul remained a culturally significant component of the Empire. Beyond that, Qandahar, Badakhshan and the ancestral lands of Central Asia remained part of the self-conception of the Mughal dynasty, but only intermittently under its authority. Kashmir, once conquered, became an administratively integral (if geographically isolated) part of the Empire, and various martial expeditions probed beyond that into Ladakh, nearly to the borderlands of China. To the East, Mughal incursions beyond Bengal into Assam met stiff resistance, blocking substantial imperial expansion in that direction. The greatest imperial efforts were to drive the Mughal Empire south, deeper into the Deccan and toward India’s peninsula tip.

  But as the Empire expanded beyond its heartland in north India, it struggled to stretch imperial ideology and its military and administrative apparatus over a much wider array of Indic cultures, spread across diverse and often challenging environments. The core of the imperial officials and commanders enlarged, but the imperial court only imperfectly amalgamated former enemy commanders and rulers. Governance and control over the entire subcontinent ultimately proved beyond the capacity of the Empire to sustain. Indeed, from the late seventeenth century onward, various groups in the subject population stopped serving Mughal imperial interests, even if they still nominally accepted the sovereignty of the emperor. By the 1707 death of ‘Alamgir—who spent the last quarter century of his reign fighting futilely in the Deccan—many of the Empire’s earlier strengths had dissipated.

  In contrast to these territorial ambitions, an oceanic empire remained only a highly speculative part of the imperial vision. No Mughal emperor made substantial efforts to create a seagoing navy, even as the armed ships of the Ottomans and various Europeans encroached on the Empire’s coasts. Nonetheless, economic, technological and cultural exchanges between the Empire and the rest of the globe proliferated, with diverse unforeseen consequences.

  Chapter 10 begins the book’s final part by tracing the century-and-a-half of imperial fragmentation under a series of weak Mughal emperors, who contrast with the earlier so-called ‘Great Mughals.’ Yet, such was the Mughal dynasty’s cultural power that it remained on the throne, symbolically acknowledged as legal sovereign by many warlords, subjects and invaders, both Asian and European. The book concludes with Chapter 11’s analysis of how Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi and Western historians, commentators and politicians have regarded the Mughal Empire f
rom its origin to the present. Through this volume, readers will find ways to pursue their own special interests and themselves advance our collective understanding of the fascinating Mughal Empire.

  Timeline

  1494 Babur inherits Fergana

  1504–26 Babur rules in Kabul

  1526–30 Babur wins battle of Panipat and successfully invades north India and rules as Mughal Emperor

  1530–40 Humayun’s first reign ends with him driven from India

  1540–45 rule of Sher Shah Suri

  1555–6 Humayun’s reconquest and second reign in India

  1556–1605 Akbar’s reign

  1562 Akbar emerges from regency and begins policy of Rajput marriages

  1566– creation of new land revenue system

  1571–85 Fatehpur-Sikri as new capital

  1574– creation of jagir-mansabdar system

  1579 circulation of the document recognizing Akbar’s religious authority

  1605–27 Jahangir’s reign

  1611– rise of Nur Jahan

  1628–58 Shah Jahan’s reign

  1636 treaty of submission by Golkonda and Bijapur

  1638 opening of the ‘Taj Mahal’

  1639– Shahjahanabad as new capital

  1658–66 Shah Jahan imprisoned

  1658–1707 ‘Alamgir’s reign

  1664, 1670 Shivaji captures Surat

  1686–7 ‘Alamgir defeats Bijapur and Golkonda

  1707–12 Bahadur Shah’s reign

  1713 Jahandar’s reign

  1713–19 Farrukh-siyar’s reign

  1719 Rafi-ud-Darjat’s reign