The Mughal Empire

Chapter 5 8 THE MUGHAL EMPIRE ike the Ottomans, the Mughals carried the dilemma of post-Abbasid L politics outside the Arid Zone and resolved it. Unlike the Ottomans, the Mughals did not expand the frontiers of Muslim political power, ex- cept on some fringes. They established a new polity ruled by an established dynasty in territory that Muslims already ruled. The dynastic setting and the environment—physical, social, and cultural—requires careful explanation in order to make the Mughal success comprehensible. This section describes the multiple contexts in which the Mughal Empire developed and then summarizes the most important characteristics of the Mughal polity. Historians have traditionally identified Babur as the founder of the Mughal Empire and considered his invasion of northern India in 1526 as the beginning of Mughal history. Both the identification and date are mis- leading. Babur’s grandson, Akbar, established the patterns and institutions that defined the Mughal Empire; the prehistory of the empire dates back to Babur’s great-great-grandfather Timur’s invasion of north India in 1398. Because Timur remained in Hindustan (literally, “the land of Hin- dus”; the Persian word for northern India) only a short time and his troops sacked Delhi thoroughly, historians have traditionally treated his incur- sion as a raid rather than an attempt at conquest. Timur, however, did not attempt to establish direct Timurid rule in most of the areas he conquered; 201 202 5 – THE MUGHAL EMPIRE he generally left established dynasties in place or established surrogates of his own. His policy in Hindustan was the same; he apparently left one Khizr Khan as his governor in Delhi. Khizr Khan and his successors remained formally subordinate to the Timurids for more than forty years, probably until after the death of Timur’s youngest son and effective suc- cessor, Shah Rukh, in 1447. Peter Jackson, the leading historian of the Delhi sultanate, asserts that “Shah Rukh’s influence in the subcontinent seems to have been extensive.”1 Timurid prestige existed in the Deccan (roughly the middle third of the Indian subcontinent) as well. Babur was well aware of his ancestor’s exploits and probably of the lasting connection between the Timurids and Indian rulers. He did not describe his invasion of Hindustan as a reassertion of Timurid governance there, but he cer- tainly entered a region in which the image of Timurids as imperial sover- eigns already existed. This emphasis on the Timurid identity of the Mughal dynasty raises the question of nomenclature. Mughal is the Persian word for Mongol, but the Timurids considered themselves Turks. They were known as Mughals in the Indian subcontinent because there the term had come to designate the Turkish-speaking military elite of central Asia. But neither the dynasty that ruled the Mughal Empire nor the followers who helped establish the empire considered themselves Mughals. The dynasty was Timurid; its Turkic followers were Chaghatays, taking their name from the second son of Chingiz Khan. Chaghatay and his descendants had ruled northeastern Iran and much of central Asia; the Turkic nomads of that region took their identity from them. For the purposes of this chapter, the term Mughal refers to the distinctive set of political and military institutions, political symbols and rituals, and cultural forms developed during the reign of Akbar: Mughal could be glossed as Akbari. Akbar’s grandfather, Babur, who brought Timurid sovereignty to the subcontinent, and father, Humayun, were Timurids in the subcontinent, not Mughals. The transition was not instant, especially since Akbar took the throne as an adolescent and Humayun’s chief officer became his regent. Babur, not Akbar, won the great battles with the gunpowder techniques that made the Timurids the greatest power in the subcontinent. But Akbar established the durable political patterns and institutions of the empire. At its greatest extent the Mughal Empire extended from Kabul, Ghazni, and Qandahar in contemporary Afghanistan east beyond Bengal into Assam and south to the Cauvery River. The proclamation of sovereignty MAP 5.1 Mughal Empire 204 5 – THE MUGHAL EMPIRE over that huge region did not, however, imply effective governmental control of all of it. In most of it, the Mughal regime did not interact directly with the general population but collected revenue through local interme- diaries (zamindars); in some mountainous or remote areas, they exerted no authority at all. Jos Gommans explains Mughal political and military geography su- perbly in his Mughal Warfare. The region that became the Mughal Empire included three general types of land: well-watered, intensely cultivated agricultural areas that commonly produced two crops of rice per year; more arid areas that produced wheat and millet with irrigation and were excel- lent pasture lands for horses and camels; and dense, humid forests that produced elephants but little else the Mughals, or any other regime, could use. Political power came from control of the revenue from the densely cultivated areas and from the animals and soldiers of the arid areas. The Arid Zone, which covers much of North Africa and Southwest Asia, ex- tends south and east into the Indian subcontinent, from the Indus Valley to the head of the Ganges delta and south through the central part of the peninsula. In Gommans’s words, “Mughal expansion was most successful in Arid India and in those parts of Monsoon India that were accessible by riverboats.”2 The swamps and forests of eastern Bengal, Assam, and Gond- wana formed natural frontiers. Where arid territories formed the bound- aries, they did so because the Mughals could not obtain any benefit by crossing them. The Mughal unification of the subcontinent consists, in Gommans’s view, of a series of “nuclear zones of power” that had the de- sired combination of agricultural surpluses, extensive grazing lands, and access to major trade routes. Most accounts of the cultural geography of the subcontinent before, during, and after the Mughal period emphasize the divide between Hindu and Muslim far more than any other factor, if not to the exclusion of all other factors. The religious divide separates polities and cultures and gener- ates constant conflict, in which the Hindus steadily lose. The South Indian kingdom of Vijaynagar appears “a Hindu bulwark against Muhammadan conquests”; its fall to a coalition of Muslim regional kingdoms at the Bat- tle of Talikota in 1565 is the final collapse of Hindu power at the hands of the aggressive and expansionist Muslims.3 The current generation of historians, notably Richard Eaton and Phillip Waggoner, has exploded this image. By the time the Mughals came upon the scene, an Indo-Iranian political culture already dominated the subcontinent, encompassing the The Mughal Empire 205 principalities of both Hindu and Muslim rulers. Hindu officers shifted al- legiances between Muslim and Hindu rulers; it was possible to build a mosque in honor of a Hindu ruler. The ruler of Vijaynagar called himself “sultan among Hindu kings.” Sufism and popular Hinduism intertwined, with some Sufi teachers accepting Hindu students and some Muslim adepts studying under Hindu gurus. Mystic literature also united Muslim and Hindu elements, and, as elsewhere in the Islamic world, folk Sufi practices incorporated indigenous elements. Not all Muslims accepted this tolerance and syncretism, but their objections did not prevent or termi- nate it. The tension between the two approaches to the Hindu environment was a lasting feature of Islamic culture in South Asia. The conquests of Muhammad ibn Tughluq (r. 1324–1351) created the space in which the Indo-Iranian culture flourished. Muslim rulers had dominated the Indo-Gangetic plain since the end of the twelfth century. Expansion into the Deccan had begun under Ala al-Din Khalji (1296– 1316). Muhammad ibn Tughluq extended his rule over virtually the en- tire subcontinent, but extremely briefly. His effort to solidify his control of the Deccan and South India by creating a second capital city at Daulatabad failed. By the end of his reign, the Bahmani sultanate and the kingdom of Vijaynagar had taken control of the Deccan and most of the south. The ability of the Mughals to conquer most of the subcontinent did not distinguish them from their predecessors. The ability to establish a lasting polity encompassing most of South Asia did. Historians have categorized the Mughal polity in three ways. Most historians of the colonial era and the most influential group of postcolonial historians, the quasi-Marxist Aligarh School, have described the empire as a highly centralized bureaucratic despotism with an unquenchable drive to increase revenue. Tapan Raychaudhuri describes the Mughal state as “an insatiable Leviathan . [with an] unlimited appetite for resources.” 4 In perhaps the most definitive statement of that position in an article ad- dressing its critics, M. Athar Ali states, “The picture of the Mughal Em- pire in its classic phase, as a centralized polity, geared to systematization and the creation of an all imperial bureaucracy . still remain[s] un- shaken.”5 Steven Blake developed the concept of the Mughal Empire as a “patrimonial-bureaucratic state,” occupying a middle ground between tra- ditional patrimonial monarchies, ruled essentially as family possessions and modern bureaucracies.6 J. F. Richards supports this position in the most important book on the Mughals, his volume of the New Cambridge 206 5 – THE MUGHAL EMPIRE History of India. All of these conceptions focus on the central government and, to a lesser degree, the imperial ideology of the Mughals. Farhat Hasan, I, and others, looking to the provinces as well as the center, come to differ- ent conclusions. The rhetoric of the central government, in words and rituals, articulated the image and intent of centralization and bureaucratization in accord with the Irano-Islamic tradition of statecraft.

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