A Short History of the Mughal Empire

Michael Fisher

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780857729767
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: History of Architecture

The Mughal Empire dominated India politically, culturally, socially, economically and environmentally, from its foundation by Babur, a Central Asian adventurer, in 1526 to the final trial and exile of the last emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar at the hands of the British in 1858. Throughout the empire's three centuries of rise, preeminence and decline, it remained a dynamic and complex entity within and against which diverse peoples and interests conflicted.The empire's significance continues to be controversial among scholars and politicians with fresh and exciting new insights, theories and interpretations being put forward in recent years. This book engages students and general readers with a clear, lively and informed narrative of the core political events, the struggles and interactions of key individuals, groups and cultures, and of the contending historiographical arguments surrounding the Mughal Empire.

Part I

The Central Asian and Indian Origins of the Mughal Empire, 1526–40, 1555–6

1

BABUR UNTIL HIS CONQUEST OF NORTH INDIA IN 1526

Once you cross the Indus, the land, water, trees, stones, people, tribes, manners, and customs are all of the Hindustani fashion.

Babur¹

In 1519, Babur, a Central Asian martial adventurer and current ruler of Kabul, raided India and imperiously demanded the submission of young Sultan Ibrahim of Delhi. Sultan Ibrahim’s Lodi Afghan clan had for generations been settled in north India and had fought its way to rule. In anticipation, Babur named his new-born son Hindal (‘Conquest of India’). Babur based his pretentious claim on the brief conquest of Delhi by his Turkish ancestor, Timur, more than a century earlier. But few Indians had any awareness of Babur and most who distantly remembered Timur’s devastating predatory raid, culminating in the general massacre of Delhi’s population, dreaded his memory.

Neither Babur’s ultimatum nor his gift of a hawk nor his relatively small marauding war band convinced Sultan Ibrahim to surrender north India (then called Hindustan). Indeed, Ibrahim’s governor in Lahore contemptuously detained and then rejected Babur’s envoy without even conveying him to the Sultan or replying. Babur recorded his frustration: ‘These Hindustan people, especially the Afghans, are amazingly devoid of sense and wisdom and far off the path of tactics and strategy. Neither were they able to come out and make a stand like an enemy nor did they know how to adhere to the path of amity.’² Nonetheless, seven years later, in 1526, Babur again invaded Hindustan, slaughtered Sultan Ibrahim’s much larger (but disunited) army and seized the vast royal treasuries in Delhi and Agra—suddenly linking his family with people living in those regions, thus creating the Mughal Empire.

Map 1: Babur’s World to 1526

CHINGIZID AND TIMURID ORIGINS

Zahir-ud-Din Muhammad Babur (1483–1530) lived most of his life as a would-be emperor striving to reconquer lands he believed had been unjustly seized from his Timurid lineage by rebels (including by rival Timurids). In 1494, 11-year-old Babur inherited tenuous rule over the agriculturally prosperous mountain-fringed Fergana valley (about 130,000 square kilometers) in Mawarannahr (‘the land between the rivers’ Amu Darya and Syr Darya, known to Europeans as Transoxiana).³ But he soon lost this patrimony and spent most of his youth capturing and then quickly losing cities in the region. His more lasting inheritance was his imperial ancestry from the revered founders of vast empires: the Mongol ‘world conqueror’ Chingiz Khan (1162–1227) and the Turkish ‘world conqueror’ Timur/Tamerlane (1336–1405).

Chingiz Khan had unified hitherto contending martial Mongol clans. He then enrolled defeated Turkish and other ethnic groups into his armed host that conquered territories stretching from China to Eastern Europe. As his legacy, Chingiz Khan divided his assorted followers among his four male heirs. His second official son, Chaghatai, inherited most of the Turks in Mawarannahr—their language becoming known as Chaghatai Turki. Babur descended in his mother’s line from Chaghatai himself and in his father’s line from Turks allotted to Chaghatai.

In Babur’s day, many Mongols continued to migrate as pastoral nomads around the Central Asian steppe, largely adhering to their traditional Shamanist-Buddhist religious practices. But those Mongols who settled in the urban trading and agricultural economies of Mawarannahr tended to follow Islam. All Mongols valued Chingiz Khan’s Yasa and Tura (collected moral maxims, rules and customs), as did Babur. But he also regarded most of his contemporary Mongols as uncultured and fierce but unreliable warriors, with a strong penchant for predatory looting of foe and friend.

Until the end of his career, Babur recruited Mongol followers as highly mobile and ruthlessly effective light cavalry, best posted in battle as the flanking wings of his main force. In the sweeping tulughma maneuver, these wings enveloped the enemy and drove its rear inward, while plundering its encampment. This maneuver would prove decisive in Babur’s crucial battle of 1526 that won him north India. Yet, Babur also grimly recounted in his autobiography how his Mongol followers repeatedly rejected his discipline, betrayed his trust, and, when one of his recurrent defeats appeared imminent, looted his supplies and dead and wounded followers. Babur wrote: ‘Havoc and destruction have always emanated from the [Mongol] nation. Up to the present date they have rebelled against me five times—not from any particular impropriety on my part, for they have often done the same with their own khans [chiefs].’⁴

Babur even more closely traced his direct male descent from Timur, a Turk. Indeed, Babur devoted his life to emulating Timur’s values and practices. Babur’s dynasty would for centuries consider themselves Timurids. Timur, a brilliant field commander, had risen from relatively humble beginnings to make himself ruler of much of Central Asia, Kabul and its environs, eastern Iran and (briefly) north India as far as Delhi (youthful Babur heard of Timur’s rich Delhi spoils from an aged woman villager). Timur and his largely Turkish warriors terrorized those who opposed him by sacking their cities, enslaving their men, women and children, and building towers of the skulls of those defeated in battle or executed as captives. To stabilize his regime, Timur recruited expert Irani bureaucrats who implemented the sophisticated administrative apparatus developed by Persian empires. Further, Timur married a Chingizid Mongol princess, thereby boasting the honorific gurgan (‘son-in-law’) of Chingiz Khan.

Among both Mongols and Turks, high-born women conveyed the prestige of their male ancestors to their husbands and sons. In elite households, women formed their own sphere, overlapping that of their menfolk. This women’s society contained hierarchies among co-wives of different statuses, their young male and unmarried female children, poor relations and servants. While customarily not able to move as openly in the public arena as their husbands, these high-ranking wives linked their natal and their husband’s families, often negotiating additional political marriage alliances. Since widows were not stigmatized and divorce and remarriage were generally acceptable in Islam and in Central Asian custom, a woman was potentially able to remain politically active over her lifetime, sometimes acting for a sequence of husbands and her sons by several of them.

Perceptive men followed the advice of the most astute of their senior womenfolk. Babur himself noted: ‘For tactics and strategy, there were few women like my [widowed Mongol maternal] grandmother, Esän Dawlat Begim. She was intelligent and a good planner. Most affairs were settled with her counsel.’⁵ But Babur in his memoir only occasionally mentioned his many wives or their actions, advice, or personal relationships with him. In contrast, one of Babur’s daughters, Gulbadan (‘Rose-Bodied’) Begum, wrote a history of their family that reveals the substantial influence and agency of those elite women, their cultural values and opportunities, as well as the social constraints on them.⁶ These women conveyed their domestic customs and beliefs to the female and male children they raised. Nevertheless, the formal outer worlds of politics and religion tended to be dominated by their husbands and sons.

Timur and most other Turks were relatively recent converts to Islam. They retained many pre-Islamic Central Asian traditions and also adapted many of the values and customs of Muslims coming from Iran and Arabia. As Babur’s autobiography repeatedly reveals, they believed all of life was a moral struggle in which good actions, words and thoughts receive rewards and immoral ones punishment, unless expiated. Allah was graciously forgiving to sinning Muslims who resubmitted to Him—even after they broke their previous vows for previous pardons. Effective warlords and rulers, including Babur and his descendants, humbly emulated Allah in this.

Many elite Turks gave patronage to the ‘ulama—Islamic scholars. In this region, most Muslims were Sunni and followed the Hanafi school of interpretation of Sharia (Islamic law) which was relatively less strict than some other Sunni legal schools. Timur and Babur admired the personal constraint and piety of the ‘ulama, although, as life-long warriors, they themselves did not always adhere to that model of behavior. Additionally, however, both rulers also interacted comfortably with non-Muslims and with people practicing a range of traditions that many strict ‘ulama regarded as outside of orthodox Islam.

Like many other Turks and other Central Asian Muslims, Timur and Babur revered Sufi holy men who sought direct experience of the Divine, but also often engaged actively in affairs of this world. In particular, the Naqshbandi Sufi order had gained much spiritual, economic and political power in the region. Charismatic Naqshbandi pirs (saintly men, living or dead) guided their followers, among them both Timur and Babur, including by mystically prophesizing through dreams and visions. At several critical times, the late Naqshbandi pir Khwaja ‘Ubaidullah Ahrar (d. 1490) appeared to Babur, accurately promising battlefield victory or rescue from threatening death. Babur and other devotees donated land and livestock to these Sufi orders, which pirs then used to reward their followers and intervene politically. In exchange, pirs provided advice to rulers and teachers for their sons. Further, men and women of these spiritual aristocrats intermarried with elite Turkish families, including Babur’s.

In addition to more conventional Islamic practices, Babur and many other Central Asians sought to discern divine mysteries and future events through guidance from portents, astrology, auspicious coincidences, people’s names, the numeric value of phrases and cryptic dreams. They consulted soothsayers who were expert interpreters of these and other signs of divine will to which the lives of humans remained inescapably subject. Both Timur and Babur lived precarious lives in which every battle involved uncertainty and high risk of death, so they frequently sought super-human interventions to protect or assist them and provide insights into their future.

While conquering and ruling by force, Timur also demonstrated his aesthetic taste and developed his court culture. Timur adorned his illustrious capital, Samarkand, with magnificent mosque architecture and also lush gardens in which the peripatetic conqueror pitched his tents. Timur attracted to his court (and sometimes seized) artists, entertainers, historians and poets of the Persian language as well as his native Turki. These courtiers celebrated martial triumphs, pleasurable arts and personal refinement as they vied for Timur’s lavish patronage while trying to avoid his wrath, often fatal. He thus set standards against which later Turkish rulers, including Babur, would measure themselves and each other. Babur, in the course of his tumultuous life, thrice conquered and lost Timur’s Samarkand and, at the time of his death, was considering leaving India to recapture Samarkand as the culmination of his achievements.

BABUR’S YOUTH AMONG RIVAL TIMURIDS, MONGOLS, UZBEKS, AND SAFAVIDS

Babur was not alone in claiming Timur’s legacy of imperium. Central Asian tradition decreed collective sovereignty for all a ruler’s recognized male descendants—rather than primogeniture where only one son, usually the eldest, inherited all. Most Central Asian rulers had multiple wives and concubines, each having a different social status and place in his affections; each of their many sons had a different rank depending on his mother’s position, his relative age and accomplishments and his personal relations with his parents. Turkish rulers during their lifetime customarily assigned territories to their main sons as appanages: lands they governed and taxed to support their own courts and armies which served their father. Typically, each son sought to prove himself worthy of rule during his father’s lifetime through martial feats and by building a strong following. Subsequent to (or even before) his father’s death, each heir sought to expand his own inheritance by defeating his full and half-brothers, uncles and male cousins. Like other ambitious Timurids, Babur’s life-long—but unfulfilled—ambition was to reconquer all of Timur’s lands.

Babur’s father, ‘Umar Shaikh Mirza (d. 1494), had inherited precarious power over Fergana. Ruling a small patrimonial state, he spent much of his short and tumultuous life battling bellicose brothers and other male relatives, with the most prestigious and prosperous prize being nearby Samarkand. ‘Umar Shaikh died suddenly in the collapse of his pigeon loft, just as he was facing dual invasions by his own elder brother and by Mongol relatives of his main wife, a Chingizid princess, Qutluq Nigar Khanum (d. 1505), who had borne Babur.

Only misfortunes among his invading relatives enabled youthful Babur to rally his father’s followers, secure support from his two younger half-brothers, and thus temporarily retain his patrimony of Fergana. As Babur recalled, Fergana was only ‘a smallish province,’ however ‘grain and fruit [were] plentiful.’⁷ Although he was born there, he had no special links to the local cultivators, artisans and merchants who paid him revenues (roughly estimated rather than finely calculated). Babur valued Fergana primarily as a source of funds for his expansive ambitions, writing: ‘The income of Fergana Province, if justly managed, will maintain three to four thousand [soldiers].’⁸ These soldiers were mostly not from Fergana but rather men he hired with its revenues.

Throughout Babur’s life, he never had a national or territorially based army. Rather, he amalgamated personal followers of various ethnicities, including former enemies and rivals who temporarily submitted to his leadership (this pattern would endure throughout the Mughal Empire). Babur’s promises of military success and predatory plunder attracted to his banner a host of adventurous warriors and other independent warlords; but any setbacks or inability to reward generously meant these forces would melt away or turn against him. Such failures marked his entire youth, reducing him occasionally to only a few followers or even to life as a solitary refugee. But he pragmatically persisted: ‘When one has pretensions to rule and desire for conquest, one cannot sit back and just watch if events don’t go right once or twice.’⁹ He self-identified as a royal warrior, bu...

Table of contents

• Author Bibliography
• A Short History of …
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Charts, Maps and Illustrations
• Note on Transliteration and Names
• Introduction: The Mughal Empire’s Dynamic Composition in Time and Space
• Timeline
• Part I: The Central Asian and Indian Origins of the Mughal Empire, 1526–40, 1555–6
• Part II: Establishment of the Mughal Empire under Emperor Akbar, 1556–1605
• Part III: The Mughal Empire Established, 1605–1707
• Part IV: The Fragmentation and Memory of the Mughal Empire, 1707–the Present
• Notes
• Bibliography