Mughal Empire
The Mughal Empire stretched from the outer fringes of the Indus River Basin in the west to the highlands of present-day Assam and Bangladesh in the east. At its peak it reached northern Afghanistan in the northwest, Kashmir in the north, and the uplands of the Deccan Plateau in the south. This was an early modern empire in South Asia, conventionally said to have been founded in 1526.
A ruler from what is now Uzbekistan, Babur, defeated the sultan of Delhi, Ibrahim Lodi, at the First Battle of Panipat. With that victory he swept down the plains of North India and began a state that would last, in some form, until the British Raj dissolved it after 1857. How did a dynasty of Central Asian outsiders come to rule a subcontinent of many faiths and peoples? What held it together, and what tore it apart?
The answers run through a silver-based tax system, a court of conspicuous wealth, and monuments still admired today. The Taj Mahal has been described as the jewel of Muslim art in India and one of the universally admired masterpieces of the world's heritage. Behind it sits a question of names, beginning with a word that does not quite fit the people it describes.
The word Mughal is the Indo-Persian form of Mongol, yet the dynasty's early followers were Chagatai Turks, not Mongols. The label was applied to them in India by association with the Mongols, and to distinguish them from the Afghan elite who ruled the Delhi Sultanate. In the West, the terms Grand Mughal and Mughal stood for the emperor and, by extension, the whole empire.
Marshall Hodgson held that the dynasty should instead be called Timurid or Indo-Timurid, and the term remains disputed by Indologists. The Mughals themselves used another name for their line, Gurkani, drawn from their descent from the Turco-Mongol conqueror Timur. Timur took the title Gurkan, meaning son-in-law, after marrying a Chinggisid princess.
The closest to an official name for the empire was Hindustan, documented in the Ain-i-Akbari. Administrative records also called it the dominion of Hindustan and the country of Hind. The epitaph of Aurangzeb names it the Sultanate of Al-Hind, and contemporary Chinese chronicles referred to it as Hindustan. Bahadur Shah Zafar, the last to bear the title, identified the realm in Hindustani as the Land of Hind.
Babur was descended from Timur on his father's side and from Genghis Khan on his mother's side, belonging to the Turkicised Barlas tribe of Mongol origin. Ousted from his ancestral domains in Central Asia, he established himself in Kabul and pushed southward into India through the Khyber Pass. His firearms and cannons shattered Ibrahim Lodi's larger army in 1526, and the centre of Mughal power shifted to Agra. A year later, near Agra, his Timurid forces defeated the combined Rajput armies of Rana Sanga of Mewar at the Battle of Khanwa.
Babur reigned only from 1526 to 1530, and his wars left little time to consolidate his gains. The instability showed under his son Humayun, who reigned from 1530 and was forced into exile in Persia by the rebellious Sher Shah Suri. That exile carried a hidden gift. It established diplomatic ties between the Safavid and Mughal courts and seeded the Persian cultural influence of the later restored empire.
Humayun returned in triumph from Persia in 1555 and restored Mughal rule in parts of India. He died in an accident the next year. His son was born Jalal-ud-din Muhammad in the Umarkot Fort, to Humayun and his Persian wife Hamida Banu Begum, and the boy would reshape the empire from its foundations.
Akbar reigned from 1556 to 1605 and first ruled under a regent, Bairam Khan, who helped consolidate the empire. Through warfare he extended its reach in all directions, controlling almost the entire subcontinent north of the Godavari River. He built a highly centralised, bureaucratic government, with four ministries seated beneath the emperor. The finance ministry was headed by a diwan, who typically also served as wazir, or prime minister. The military fell to the mir bakhshi, who ran the mansabdari system, while the sadr as-sudr managed law and religious patronage and the mir saman oversaw the household and public works.
The empire's collective wealth rested on agricultural taxes that Akbar instituted. These amounted to well over half the output of a peasant cultivator and were paid in well-regulated silver currency, drawing peasants and artisans into larger markets. Around 1595, modern historians estimate the state's annual revenues at roughly 99,000,000 rupees. Akbar's land revenue system, called zabt, replaced tribute with a monetary tax based on a uniform currency, and used cadastral surveys to assess land under the plough.
The machine extended below the centre into mirrored layers. The empire was divided into provinces called subahs, each under a subadar, then into sarkars, and finally into parganas, the basic administrative unit, each with a Muslim judge and a tax collector. These divisions were never static. Territories were rearranged for control and to extend cultivation, and the state recorded detailed revenue statistics rather than drawing maps. Akbar also opened his court to freedom of religion and founded a new faith, Din-i-Ilahi, carrying strong characteristics of a ruler cult.
Jahangir, born Salim and reigning from 1605, was named after the Sufi saint Salim Chishti. He was addicted to opium, neglected the affairs of the state, and came under the influence of rival court cliques. Unlike his father, he courted the Islamic religious establishment, granting far more madad-i-ma'ash, the tax-free land revenue grants given to the religiously learned, than Akbar had. He also clashed with non-Muslim leaders, and the execution of the Sikh guru Arjan became the first of many conflicts between the empire and the Sikh community.
Shah Jahan, who reigned from 1628, was born to Jahangir and his wife Jagat Gosain, and his court reached a peak of splendour. The cost of maintaining it began to exceed the revenue coming in. The struggle for his succession turned on faith. His liberal eldest son Dara Shikoh, who championed a syncretistic Hindu-Muslim culture in the spirit of Akbar, became regent in 1658 during his father's illness. With the support of the Islamic orthodoxy, a younger son, Aurangzeb, seized the throne, defeated Dara in 1659, and had him executed.
Aurangzeb kept Shah Jahan imprisoned until he died in 1666, and oversaw an increase in the Islamicisation of the state. He reinstated the jizya on non-Muslims, compiled the Fatawa Alamgiri, a collection of Islamic law, and ordered the execution of the Sikh guru Tegh Bahadur, which led to the militarisation of the Sikh community. Yet he remains the most controversial Mughal emperor. Some historians note that he patronised non-Muslim institutions, employed far more Hindus in his bureaucracy than his predecessors, and opposed bigotry against Hindus and Shia Muslims.
In 1719 alone, four emperors successively ascended the throne, figureheads under a brotherhood of nobles known as the Sadaat-e-Bara, whose leaders, the Sayyid Brothers, became the de facto sovereigns. This followed the death in 1712 of Bahadur Shah I, Aurangzeb's son, who had repealed his father's religious policies before the dynasty sank into chaos and violent feuds. Historians count a succession of weak rulers, civil wars over succession, and the loss of revenue needed to pay the emirs and their entourages among the causes of a rapid collapse between 1707 and 1720.
During the reign of Muhammad Shah, from 1719 to 1748, vast tracts of central India passed from Mughal to Maratha hands. The Indian campaign of Nader Shah, who had reestablished Iranian suzerainty over much of West Asia, culminated in the Sack of Delhi and the seizure of the accumulated Mughal treasury. The empire could no longer finance the armies that had enforced its rule. Even so, lip service continued. Maratha, Hindu, and Sikh leaders alike took part in ceremonial acknowledgements of the emperor as sovereign of India.
Shah Alam II, ruling from 1759, made futile attempts to reverse the decline. When the Third Battle of Panipat was fought in 1761 between the Marathas and the Afghans under Ahmad Shah Durrani, the Afghans won, and the emperor had taken temporary refuge with the British to the east. The British East India Company became the protectors of the dynasty, and took control of Bengal-Bihar in 1793. After the Indian Rebellion of 1857, which he nominally led, the last emperor, Bahadur Shah Zafar, was deposed and exiled in 1858 to Rangoon, Burma.
India was producing about a quarter of the world's manufacturing output up until 1750, and its economy has been described as a form of proto-industrialisation, like that of 18th-century Western Europe before the Industrial Revolution. The Mughals built an extensive road network through a public works department and standardised the rupee in silver and the dam in copper, currencies first introduced by Sher Shah Suri. Their coins held high purity, never dropping below 96 percent and without debasement until the 1720s, minted largely from imported bullion drawn in by a strong export economy.
The largest industry was textile manufacturing, especially cotton, which carried a 25 percent share of the global textile trade in the early 18th century. Its most important centre was the Bengal province, particularly around its capital city of Dhaka. European fashion grew increasingly dependent on Mughal Indian textiles and silks, alongside demand for spices, indigo, and saltpetre for munitions. Indian agriculture advanced too. The seed drill was in common use among peasants before its adoption in Europe, and geared sugar rolling mills first appeared here by the 17th century.
Bengal stood at the heart of this wealth. Historian C. A. Bayly wrote that it was probably the empire's wealthiest province, prosperous from its Mughal takeover in 1590 until the British East India Company seized control in 1757. Its shipbuilding output during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries has been estimated by Indrajit Ray at 223,250 tons annually, against 23,061 tons from nineteen North American colonies between 1769 and 1771. In 1717, Murshid Quli Khan became the first Nawab of Bengal, and the province gained de facto independence.
Under Akbar's reign in 1600, the Mughal Empire's urban population reached up to 17 million people, about 15 percent of the total, a higher degree of urbanisation than contemporary Europe. The historian Nizamuddin Ahmad reported 120 large cities and 3,200 townships. Dhaka held over a million people, Agra up to 800,000, Lahore up to 700,000, and Delhi over 600,000. Tim Dyson has criticised such figures as exaggerations, putting urbanisation below 9 percent.
The court's wealth flowed into art. Jahangir commissioned brilliant artists such as Ustad Mansur to realistically portray unusual flora and fauna, while painters borrowed from Iranian, Indian, Chinese, and Renaissance European elements. Akbar and Jahangir ordered illustrated works ranging from the Razmnama, a Persian translation of the Mahabharata, to dynastic memoirs like the Baburnama and Akbarnama. Aurangzeb was never an enthusiastic patron of painting, largely for religious reasons, and probably commissioned no more after about 1668. The Persian language, meanwhile, reached nearly the status of a first language for many in Mughal India, and the Hindustani language developed in the capital of Delhi in the late Mughal era.
The most lasting legacy is stone. Mughal architecture is distinguished by bulbous domes, ogive arches, polished façades, and the use of hard red sandstone and marble. The Taj Mahal draws 7 to 8 million unique visitors a year, and its UNESCO World Heritage company includes Agra Fort, Fatehpur Sikri, Red Fort, Humayun's Tomb, Lahore Fort, and the Shalamar Gardens. Among the smaller marvels was a craft once thought impossible. The lost-wax cast, hollow, seamless celestial globe was invented in Kashmir by Ali Kashmiri ibn Luqman in 1589 to 1590, and twenty more were later produced in Lahore and Kashmir.
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Common questions
When was the Mughal Empire founded and when did it end?
The Mughal Empire was conventionally founded in 1526 by Babur, who defeated Ibrahim Lodi at the First Battle of Panipat. It was formally dissolved by the British Raj after the Indian Rebellion of 1857, when the last emperor, Bahadur Shah Zafar, was deposed and exiled in 1858 to Rangoon, Burma.
Why is the Mughal Empire called Mughal if its rulers were not Mongols?
Mughal is the Indo-Persian form of Mongol, but the dynasty's early followers were Chagatai Turks, not Mongols. The term was applied in India by association with the Mongols and to distinguish them from the Afghan elite who ruled the Delhi Sultanate. The Mughals themselves called their dynasty Gurkani, after their descent from Timur.
Who was Akbar and what did he do for the Mughal Empire?
Akbar was the third Mughal emperor, reigning from 1556 to 1605, and he built the empire's highly centralised bureaucratic government. He instituted the agricultural taxes that formed the base of Mughal wealth, created the zabt land revenue system, and founded a new religion called Din-i-Ilahi while allowing freedom of religion at his court.
Who built the Taj Mahal in the Mughal Empire?
The Taj Mahal was built during the reign of Shah Jahan, who reigned from 1628 and ushered in the golden age of Mughal architecture. It is a UNESCO World Heritage Site described as the jewel of Muslim art in India, and it draws 7 to 8 million unique visitors a year.
Why did the Mughal Empire decline?
Historians cite a succession of weak rulers, civil wars over succession, and the loss of revenue needed to pay the emirs and their entourages as causes of a rapid collapse between 1707 and 1720. The Sack of Delhi by Nader Shah stripped the treasury, and the empire could no longer finance the armies that had enforced its rule.
How large was the Mughal Empire's economy?
India was producing about a quarter of the world's manufacturing output up until 1750, and the Mughal economy has been described as a form of proto-industrialisation. Textile manufacturing was the largest industry, with cotton holding a 25 percent share of the global textile trade in the early 18th century, centred on the Bengal province around Dhaka.
Who were the most important Mughal emperors?
The major Mughal emperors were Babur, who founded the empire in 1526, his son Humayun, and Akbar, who built its administration. They were followed by Jahangir, Shah Jahan, who built the Taj Mahal, and Aurangzeb, who brought the empire to its greatest territorial extent before its decline.
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