Curated playlist
18th-century Mughal Empire people
- Rafi ud-DarajatRafi ud-Darajat sat on the Mughal throne for exactly three months and six days. He was nineteen years old when he was placed there, and he would never leave the throne on his own terms. The year was 1719, and the empire he nominally ruled…
- Jahandar ShahJahandar Shah died on the 11th of February 1713, his body paraded through the streets of Delhi in pieces, hanging upside down from two elephants. He had reigned for less than a year. The man who placed him on the Mughal throne had just…
- Shah Jahan IIShah Jahan II ruled the Mughal Empire for exactly one hundred and three days in 1719. His birth name was Mirza Rafi-ud-Daulah, and he was the second son of a prince named Rafi-ush-Shan and a grandson of Emperor Bahadur Shah. He took the…
- Shah Jahan IIIShah Jahan III sat on the Mughal throne for just over a year, from December 1759 to 1760, making his reign one of the briefest in the dynasty's long history. His full name, Mirza Muhi-ul-Millat, was almost better known than his imperial…
- Asaf-ud-DaulaAsaf-ud-Daula, the Nawab wazir of Oudh, built a monument so vast that it took over twenty thousand workers to construct it. But the real story of the Bara Imambara in Lucknow is stranger than a simple building project. During the famine of…
- AurangzebAurangzeb, born on the 3rd of November 1618 in Dahod, ruled the Mughal Empire for nearly half a century and died still fighting at the age of 88. Under his watch, the empire reached its greatest territorial extent, stretching across nearly…
- FarrukhsiyarFarrukhsiyar was born on the 20th of August 1683 in Aurangabad, on the Deccan Plateau, the grandson of one Mughal emperor and great-grandson of another. He died on the 9th of April 1719, blinded and strangled in prison, less than six years…
- Alamgir IIAlamgir II ruled the Mughal Empire from 1754 to 1759, a reign of only five years that ended with a knife in a courtyard. Born on the 6th of June 1699 at Burhanpur, he spent forty years as a prisoner before anyone placed a crown on his…
- Ahmad Shah BahadurAhmad Shah Bahadur was born on the 23rd of December 1725, the son of the Mughal Emperor Muhammad Shah, and he would grow up to become the fourteenth ruler of an empire already unraveling at the seams. He took the throne at twenty-two,…
- Bahadur Shah IBahadur Shah I was born Muhammad Mu'azzam on the 14th of October 1643 in Burhanpur, the second son of a prince who would become the most powerful ruler in the Mughal world. He spent decades in the shadow of his father, Aurangzeb, plotting…
- Shah Alam IIShah Alam II was born Ali Gohar on the 25th of June 1728, inside the Red Fort in Delhi, in the semi-captivity quarters reserved for princes of the royal blood. He was the son of a man who had not yet become emperor, and he grew up in a…
- Muhammad ShahOn the 9th of October 1720, Syed Hussain Ali Khan Barha stood in his encampment at Todabhim when a group of assassins struck. The commander and chief of the Mughal army fell dead that day. Muhammad Shah was only eighteen years old when he…
- Nizam-ul-Mulk, Asaf Jah INizam-ul-Mulk, Asaf Jah I, born Mir Qamar-ud-din Khan on the 11th of August 1671, walked into a dying empire and built something that outlasted it. He entered life in Agra, received his name from the Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb himself, and…
- Sawai Jai SinghSawai Jai Singh II inherited a throne at the age of eleven with barely enough resources to pay for a thousand cavalry. The year was 1699, and the Mughal Empire under Aurangzeb had reduced the Kingdom of Amber to near-penury over the…