The Mughal Empire

The Mughal Empire was the greatest power of medieval India. Founded in 1526, it grew under a line of able rulers. They united almost the whole subcontinent under a single, well-organised government. The Mughals are remembered for strong administration, a policy of religious tolerance under Akbar, and a golden age of art and architecture. They are among the most heavily tested topics in history.

The empire was founded by Babur, a Central Asian prince descended from Timur and Genghis Khan. In 1526, at the First Battle of Panipat, Babur defeated Ibrahim Lodi, the last sultan of Delhi, and established Mughal rule.

Babur did not come uninvited. Alam Khan, an uncle of Ibrahim Lodi and a pretender to the Delhi throne, conspired with Daulat Khan Lodi, the governor of Punjab, and invited Babur to invade India.

Two common claims about Babur's arrival are wrong. He did not bring gunpowder to India, and he did not introduce the arch and the dome. Both were already known here under the Delhi Sultanate. What his arrival did establish was the Timurid dynasty in India.

A year after Panipat, Babur faced a tougher enemy. At the Battle of Khanua (1527) he defeated Rana Sanga of Mewar and his Rajput confederacy. Many regard Khanua as more decisive than Panipat itself. Rana Sanga was a far more formidable adversary than Ibrahim Lodi, and his defeat ended the Rajput threat to the new empire.

His son Humayun lost the empire to the Afghan ruler Sher Shah Suri. He spent years in exile, but recovered the throne shortly before his death. The empire was then truly consolidated by Humayun's son, Akbar.

Akbar, who ruled from 1556 to 1605, is regarded as the greatest of the Mughals. Coming to the throne as a boy, he grew into a brilliant ruler who expanded the empire across northern and central India.

Akbar is especially remembered for his policy of religious tolerance. He abolished the tax on non-Muslims (the jizya) and married into Rajput families. He included Hindus in high office and held discussions among scholars of all faiths in his Ibadat Khana. He summed up his ideal as sulh-i-kul, or "peace with all". He also founded a new ethical order, the Din-i-Ilahi.

His tolerance extended to scholarship. Akbar ran a programme of translating Sanskrit classics into Persian, the court language. Under this programme, Nizamuddin Panipati translated the Yogavasistha into Persian.

One campaign is a favourite trap. In 1581 Akbar marched towards Afghanistan with a large army. His aim was to suppress the rebellion of his half-brother Mirza Hakim, the ruler of Kabul. It was not an attempt to reclaim Ferghana, the ancestral homeland of his line.

Akbar was followed by his son Jahangir (1605–1627) and then by Shah Jahan (1628–1658). Both rulers pushed Mughal power deeper into the Deccan. The main obstacle there was the Nizam Shahi sultanate of Ahmadnagar, defended for years by the able minister Malik Ambar. In 1636 Shah Jahan finally ended the dynasty: Ahmadnagar was annexed into the Mughal Empire and the last sultan, Husain Shah, was consigned to life imprisonment.

On the north-west frontier Shah Jahan launched the Balkh campaign of 1646. Its motive was limited: to place a friendly ruler in Balkh and Badakhshan, the territories bordering Kabul, so that they would act as a shield for the empire. It was not an attempt to reconquer the ancestral homelands of Samarqand and Farghana. His sons, first Murad and later Aurangzeb, led the expedition, and it ended as a costly failure. A second blow followed at Qandahar, the fortress city guarding the route from Persia and Central Asia into India. The Safavid rulers of Persia took it in 1649. Three Mughal expeditions, two under Aurangzeb and one under Dara Shikoh, failed to recover it. The loss of Qandahar hurt the empire above all as a strategic stronghold, the key to its north-west defence.

When Shah Jahan fell ill in 1657, his four sons fought a war of succession. At the Battle of Dharmat (1658), near Ujjain, Aurangzeb defeated the imperial forces fighting for Dara Shikoh. He then crushed Dara himself at Samugarh, imprisoned Shah Jahan in Agra fort, and took the throne.

The Mughal economy rested on agriculture, but trade and craft production flourished too. On the west coast, Surat in Gujarat was the empire's premier port. It was called Babul Makka, the Gate of Mecca, because pilgrims bound for the Haj sailed from there. Other busy ports included Cambay and Broach.

Commerce had its own vocabulary, and examiners test the exact meanings:

• Aurang: a warehouse, a depot where goods were collected before sale or export. It was not a treasury office.
• Banian: an Indian agent or broker who handled local business for the East India Company.
• Mirasidar: a hereditary landholder in south India, recognised as the designated revenue payer to the state.

The Mughals built one of the best-organised governments of their time. Its core was the mansabdari system:

• Every noble was given a rank, or mansab, fixing his status, pay and the number of troops he had to maintain.
• In return, many were assigned a jagir (the revenue of an area) instead of a cash salary.

Land revenue was the empire's main income. Akbar's finance minister Todar Mal carried out a careful survey and reform of land revenue (the zabt system), making the demand fair and predictable.

The empire was divided into provinces (subas), each under a governor. Below the suba the units descended in a fixed order:

• Suba: a province, the largest unit.
• Sarkar: a district; several sarkars made up a suba.
• Pargana: a group of villages, the smallest unit; several parganas made up a sarkar.

In ascending order of size, therefore: pargana, then sarkar, then suba.

Akbar bound the mansabdari army to strict rules:

• Horse quota: every cavalryman had to keep two horses. A mansabdar with ten cavalrymen therefore maintained twenty horses. Horses needed rest while on the march, and replacements were necessary in times of war.
• Dagh: every horse was branded with the imperial mark. Branding stopped a noble from showing the same horse, or a borrowed one, at successive musters.
• Chehra: a descriptive roll of each soldier was kept for the same reason.

Beside the mansabdars' contingents stood the Ahadis, elite "gentleman troopers". They offered their services singly and did not attach themselves to any chief. The emperor was their immediate commander, and they drew much higher pay than ordinary troopers.

Akbar reorganised the central government around a few great ministers, each with a distinct charge:

• Diwan (Wazir): headed the revenue and finance department.
• Mir Bakshi: headed the military department. He handled recruitment, pay, the branding of horses and the muster rolls of soldiers.
• Mir Saman: in charge of the imperial household and the court workshops (karkhanas).
• Sadr-us-Sudur: in charge of religious affairs and charitable grants.

The Mughal court was a great patron of building, painting and letters. The court language was Persian, and it was written in Nastaliq, an elegant calligraphic style of the Persian script that was prized in manuscripts and inscriptions across medieval India. The empire also kept official chroniclers. Abdul Hamid Lahori was the official historian of Shah Jahan's reign and wrote the Padshahnama, the authoritative record of that emperor's rule.

Building materials are a favourite testing point. Akbar built his capital at Fatehpur Sikri almost entirely in red sandstone. The Buland Darwaza, the towering gateway he raised to mark his victory over Gujarat, and the Khankah (the hospice of the Sufi saint Salim Chishti) are both red sandstone, not white marble. White marble at Sikri appears only in the small tomb of Salim Chishti. Shah Jahan later made white marble the signature of his buildings, above all the Taj Mahal. By contrast, the Bara Imambara and Rumi Darwaza in Lucknow are later, non-Mughal works of the Nawabs of Awadh, built of brick and lime plaster rather than sandstone or marble.

The empire reached its greatest extent under Aurangzeb, but his long wars in the Deccan and his less tolerant policies strained it. After his death in 1707 the empire declined rapidly because of:

• A series of weak later rulers.
• Costly wars and rebellions that drained the treasury.
• The rise of regional powers such as the Marathas, and the breaking away of provinces.
• Finally, invasions and the growing power of the East India Company.

The most formidable of these regional powers was the Maratha state founded by Shivaji (1630–1680). The Maratha challenge outlasted Aurangzeb's long Deccan wars and grew into the strongest Indian power of the eighteenth century. By the eighteenth century the Mughal emperor ruled little beyond Delhi, though the dynasty survived in name until 1857.

The fall of the later Mughals can be tracked through a few tested names:

• Jahandar Shah: his brief reign ended in 1713, when he was defeated at Agra by his nephew Farrukh Siyar and later killed.
• Nadir Shah: the Persian invader captured and sacked Delhi in 1739, carrying off the Peacock Throne.
• Third Battle of Panipat (1761): fought between Ahmad Shah Abdali of Afghanistan and the Marathas, who were crushed. Ibrahim Lodi belongs to the First Battle of Panipat (1526), not the Third.

The English rose as the empire sank. The East India Company had received its royal charter in 1600. At the Battle of Plassey (1757) its forces defeated Siraj-ud-daulah, the Nawab of Bengal, after his commander Mir Jafar conspired with the English against him. In the south, Tipu Sultan of Mysore was killed in 1799 in the Fourth Anglo-Mysore War, not the Third.