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Mughal Empire | HearLore
Mughal Empire
In the year 1526, a Central Asian ruler named Babur stood at the gates of Delhi with an army that was outnumbered by his enemies, yet he possessed a secret weapon that would change the history of South Asia forever. Babur, a descendant of Timur and Genghis Khan, had been ousted from his ancestral lands in Central Asia and turned his gaze toward India to satisfy his ambitions. He did not rely on the traditional cavalry charges that had defined warfare in the region for centuries. Instead, he utilized matchlock guns and cast cannons provided by the Ottoman Empire, a military aid secured through a diplomatic promise not to attack the Ottomans in return. This technological advantage allowed him to shatter the armies of Ibrahim Lodi, the Sultan of Delhi, at the First Battle of Panipat, despite being at a numerical disadvantage. The victory was decisive, and the center of Mughal power shifted to Agra, marking the birth of an empire that would eventually stretch from the outer fringes of the Indus River Basin to the highlands of Assam. The Mughal state was born in war and sustained by war, becoming one of the three great gunpowder empires of the early modern world alongside the Ottoman and Safavid Empires. Babur's use of firearms and field artillery, including a method for deploying them taught by Ottoman expert Ustad Ali Quli, established a military doctrine that would define the empire for the next two centuries. The empire controlled territory partly through a network of strongholds, from its fortified capitals in Agra, Delhi, and Lahore to the converted and expanded forts of Rajasthan and the Deccan. The emperor's will was frequently enforced in battle, and hundreds of army scouts were an important source of information, ensuring that the Mughal state remained a warrior state until the eighteenth century when warfare ultimately destroyed it.
The Architect of Tolerance
The third emperor, Akbar, born Jalal-ud-din Muhammad in 1542, transformed the Mughal Empire from a military conquest into a stable, centralized state that governed a vast and diverse population. Succeeding to the throne under a regent, Bairam Khan, Akbar extended the empire in all directions, controlling almost the entire Indian subcontinent north of the Godavari River. He created a new ruling elite loyal to him and implemented a modern administration that became the model for future governance. Akbar's most radical innovation was his policy of religious tolerance, which allowed freedom of religion at his court and attempted to resolve socio-political and cultural differences by establishing a new religion, Din-i-Ilahi, with strong characteristics of a ruler cult. He encouraged cultural developments and increased trade with European trading companies, leading to a strong and stable economy. The basis of the empire's collective wealth was agricultural taxes, implemented by Akbar, which amounted to well over half the output of a peasant cultivator. These taxes were paid in a well-regulated silver currency, forcing peasants into market networks where they could obtain the necessary money, while the standardization of imperial currency made the exchange of goods for money easier. Akbar's reign ushered in a golden age of economic expansion, with India producing 24.5% of the world's manufacturing output up until 1750. The Mughal administration emphasized agrarian reform, funding the building of irrigation systems across the empire, which produced much higher crop yields and increased the net revenue base. Under Akbar's rule, the empire's urban population reached 17 million people, a figure larger than the entire urban population in Europe at the time. Cities like Agra, Lahore, and Dhaka boomed, with Dhaka alone housing over one million people. Akbar's legacy was an internally stable state that was in the midst of its golden age, leaving his son an empire that was in the midst of its golden age, but before long signs of political weakness would emerge.
The reign of Shah Jahan, who ruled from 1628 to 1658, ushered in the golden age of Mughal architecture, where the splendour of the court reached its peak. During this period, the Mughal Empire produced some of the most iconic structures in human history, including the Taj Mahal, which has been described as the jewel of Muslim art in India and one of the universally admired masterpieces of the world's heritage. The cost of maintaining the court, however, began to exceed the revenue coming in, as the elite spent more and more money on luxury goods and sumptuous lifestyles. Shah Jahan extended the Mughal Empire to the Deccan by ending the Ahmadnagar Sultanate and forcing the Adil Shahis and Qutb Shahis to pay tribute. The Mughal artistic tradition, mainly expressed in painted miniatures, was eclectic, borrowing from Iranian, Indian, Chinese, and Renaissance European stylistic and thematic elements. Mughal emperors often took in Iranian bookbinders, illustrators, painters, and calligraphers from the Safavid court due to the commonalities of their Timurid styles. Miniatures commissioned by the Mughal emperors initially focused on large projects illustrating books with eventful historical scenes and court life, but later included more single images for albums, with portraits and animal paintings displaying a profound appreciation for the serenity and beauty of the natural world. Emperor Jahangir commissioned brilliant artists such as Ustad Mansur to realistically portray unusual flora and fauna throughout the empire. The literary works ordered by Akbar and Jahangir ranged from epics like the Razmnama, a Persian translation of the Hindu epic the Mahabharata, to historical memoirs or biographies of the dynasty such as the Baburnama and Akbarnama. Richly finished albums, known as muraqqa, were decorated with calligraphy and artistic scenes, mounted onto pages with decorative borders, and bound with covers of stamped and gilded or painted and lacquered leather. The Mughal Empire's cultural contributions included the development of Mughal clothing, jewelry, and fashion, utilizing richly decorated fabrics such as muslin, silk, brocade, and velvet, as well as the development of Hindustani classical music and instruments such as the sitar.
The Iron Hand of Aurangzeb
Aurangzeb, who ruled from 1658 to 1707, brought the empire to its greatest territorial extent but also oversaw an increase in the Islamicisation of the Mughal state that would ultimately lead to its decline. He encouraged conversion to Islam, reinstated the jizya on non-Muslims, and compiled the Fatawa 'Alamgiri, a collection of Islamic law. Aurangzeb also ordered the execution of the Sikh guru Tegh Bahadur, leading to the militarisation of the Sikh community. From the imperial perspective, conversion to Islam integrated local elites into the king's vision of a network of shared identity that would join disparate groups throughout the empire in obedience to the Mughal emperor. He led campaigns from 1682 in the Deccan, annexing its remaining Muslim powers of Bijapur and Golconda, though engaged in a prolonged conflict in the region which had a ruinous effect on the empire. The campaigns took a toll on the Mughal treasury, and Aurangzeb's absence led to a severe decline in governance, while stability and economic output in the Mughal Deccan plummeted. Aurangzeb is considered the most controversial Mughal emperor, with some historians arguing his religious conservatism and intolerance undermined the stability of Mughal society, while other historians question this, noting that he financed or patronised the building of non-Muslim institutions, employed significantly more Hindus in his imperial bureaucracy than his predecessors did, and opposed bigotry against Hindus and Shia Muslims. The imperial career of the Mughal house is conventionally reckoned to have ended in 1707 when the emperor Aurangzeb, a fifth-generation descendant of Babur, died. His fifty-year reign began in 1658 with the Mughal state seeming as strong as ever or even stronger. But in Aurangzeb's later years the state was brought to the brink of destruction, over which it toppled within a decade and a half after his death; by 1720 imperial Mughal rule was largely finished and an epoch of two imperial centuries had closed. By the latter date, the essential structure of the centralized state was disintegrated beyond repair.
The Fractured Legacy
After the death of Aurangzeb in 1707, the Mughal dynasty began to sink into chaos and violent feuds. In 1719 alone, four emperors successively ascended the throne, as figureheads under the rule of a brotherhood of nobles belonging to the Indian Muslim caste known as the Sadaat-e-Bara, whose leaders, the Sayyid Brothers, became the de facto sovereigns of the empire. During the reign of Muhammad Shah, who ruled from 1719 to 1748, the empire began to break up, and vast tracts of central India passed from Mughal to Maratha hands. The Indian campaign of Nader Shah, who had previously reestablished Iranian suzerainty over most of West Asia, the Caucasus, and Central Asia, culminated with the Sack of Delhi, shattering the remnants of Mughal power and prestige, and taking off all the accumulated Mughal treasury. The Mughals could no longer finance the huge armies with which they had formerly enforced their rule. Many of the empire's elites now sought to control their affairs and broke away to form independent kingdoms. But lip service continued to be paid to the Mughal Emperor as the highest manifestation of sovereignty. Not only the Muslim gentry, but the Maratha, Hindu, and Sikh leaders took part in ceremonial acknowledgements of the emperor as the sovereign of India. The Mughal Emperor Shah Alam II, who ruled from 1759 to 1806, made futile attempts to reverse the Mughal decline. Delhi was sacked by the Afghans, and when the Third Battle of Panipat was fought between the Maratha Empire and the Afghans in 1761, in which the Afghans were victorious, the emperor had ignominiously taken temporary refuge with the British to the east. In 1771, the Marathas recaptured Delhi from the Rohillas, and in 1784 the Marathas officially became the protectors of the emperor in Delhi, a state of affairs that continued until the Second Anglo-Maratha War. Thereafter, the British East India Company became the protectors of the Mughal dynasty in Delhi. The British East India Company took control of the former Mughal province of Bengal-Bihar in 1793 after it abolished local rule that lasted until 1858, marking the beginning of the British colonial era over the Indian subcontinent. By 1857, a considerable part of former Mughal India was under the East India Company's control.
The Final Curtain
The end of the Mughal Empire came with the Indian Rebellion of 1857, a crushing defeat that led to the deposition of the last Mughal emperor, Bahadur Shah Zafar. Zafar, who ruled from 1837 to 1857, was nominally the leader of the rebellion, but after a crushing defeat, he was deposed by the British East India Company and exiled in 1858 to Rangoon, Burma, where he died in 1862. The rebellion marked the formal dissolution of the empire, which had been reduced to the region in and around Old Delhi by 1760. The causes of the rapid collapse of the Mughal Empire between 1707 and 1720 were numerous, including a succession of short-lived incompetent and weak rulers, and civil wars over the succession, which created political instability at the center. The Mughals appeared virtually unassailable during the 17th century, but once gone, their imperial overstretch became clear, and the situation could not be recovered. In fiscal terms, the throne lost the revenues needed to pay its chief officers, the emirs and their entourages. The emperor lost authority as the widely scattered imperial officers lost confidence in the central authorities and made their deals with local men of influence. The imperial army bogged down in long, futile wars against the more aggressive Marathas, and lost its fighting spirit. Finally, came a series of violent political feuds over control of the throne. After the execution of Emperor Farrukhsiyar in 1719, local Mughal successor states took power in region after region. The seemingly innocuous European trading companies, such as the British East Indies Company, played no real part in the initial decline; they were still racing to get permission from the Mughal rulers to establish trades and factories in India. The Mughal Empire, which had once been a vast territory of some 4 million square kilometers, was reduced to a shadow of its former self, with the British Raj formally dissolving it after the Indian Rebellion of 1857.