MODERN SOUTH ASIA

History, Cult~re, Political Economy

SUGATA BOSE
and
AYESHA JALAL

DELHI
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
CALCUTTA CHENNAI MUMBAI
1999
22 MODERN SOUTH ASIA

the twelfi:h century displayed a great deal of dynamism that does

not accord well with stereotypical images of India's changeless Chapter 3
tradition. The very cultural assimilation of influences emanating
from a succession of new arrivals - Aryans, Greeks, Scythians,
Parthians, Shakas and Huns before the eighth century, as well as Pre-Modern Accommodations
Arabs, Persians, Turks, Afghans and Mongols between the eighth
and the twelfth centuries - was a vital and dynamic process. of Difference:
Indigenous tribal groups also played a creative role in processes of
state_formation. PolitiCally, phases of imperial consolidation were The Making ofJndo-Islamic Cultures
followed by periods of decentralization. But even the empires, far
from being centralized despotisms, were typically loosely structured
suzerainties. Economically, instead of dosed and static village com-
t was in the seventh cenrury, 6 IO to be precise, that

I
munities, there was mobility and commercial exchange. For long AD
stretches of rime the subcontinent played a central role in a vase· Muhammad, a Meccan merchant, given to aU.Steretastes and
network of Indian Ocean trade and culture. Socially, there were solirary meditation had a grand vision which led to the found-
unique institutions such as caste; but- contrary to the stereotypes ing of a new world religion in the Arabian peninsula. The first
of hierarchy propagated by scholars trapped in the rigid mould of person to accept Muhammad's message as prophetic ~ev~lati~n
caste - there was much in Indian society that emphasized equality was his wife, Khadija, giving her a position of pre-eminence 1n
as a value and in practice. Buddhism, and afi:erthe eighth century what was to soon become a very large community of the Faithful.
Islam, represented, at least in part, egalitatian challenges, but even The role of women in the constrnction of the community oflslam
within Hinduism the high Brahmanical tradition was more than is quire crucial, but scholars are.only now :urni:°g their ~ttention
counterbalanced bt the popular Shramanik one. There were un- to uncovering that veiled reality. The h1stoncal spotlight has
doubtedly many instances of conflict and even internal coloniza- remained on the spread of the Islamic doctrine through a dramanc
tion. But it was the ability to accommodate, if not assimilate, an expansion of Muslim political power. By the fifi:eenth century
immense diversity within a very broadly and loosely defmed frame- Muslims either ruled or lived in all known corners of the world,
work of unity which has given Indian cultural tradition its durab- presenting one of the grearest challenges to e_arlier_ established
ility and appearance of unbroken continuity. It is to the greatest religions and cultures. But contrary to stereoty~1cald1stort10ns_of
and most challenging of the many creative accommodations forged Islam as a religion of the sword and of Muslims as unbending
in the subcontinent's long history - the fashioning of an Indo- fanatics thriving on hatred and violence against non-believers, the
Islamic social and political universe - that we turn in the next Prophet Muhammad's .teachings allowed for tolerance and as-
chapter. similation of regional and local cultures. One of the mos'. sp_ec-
tacular of these processes of accommodation was the fash1onmg
of an Inda-Islamic cultural tradition in the Sonch Asian subcon-
tinent. Both military conqllesr and religious conversion in the
medieval period need to be understood in historical context.
The first wave of Arab political expansion reached the subcon-
tinent when the Makran coast in north-western India was invaded
in 644, towards the end of the caliphate of Umar. Although this
and a second raid during the reign of Ali (656--61) were repulsed,
 24 MODERN SOUTH ASIA PRE-MODERN ACCOMODATION OF DIFFERENCES 25

Makran was finally subjugated under the first Ummayid caliph

Muawiya (661-80). The eastern frontier of early Islam was reached
when Muhammad bin Qasim conquered Sind in 712. So the
Islamic belief in one God and in Muhammad as the final prophet
struck very early roots in at least one region of north-western India.
From the eighth cennuy onwards Arab traders also settled on the
western coast of India, but they were primarily interested in profit
and did not engage in attempts to bring about any ·large-scale
conversions to Islam. There was no further expansion, political or
economic, by peoples professing Islam until the Turkish and Af-
ghan invasions from the turn of the eleventh century onwards.
Between the seventh and eleventh centuries, in politically decentral-
ized northern India, the high Brahmanic and more popular Shra-
manik traditions continued to coexist, with the latter being more
pervasive. Far from being a dark age, th1s was another period in
Indian history that saw the consolidation of regional kingdoms
presiding over new economic initiatives and cultural achievements.
The T omaras, formerly feudatories of the Pratihara overlords,
founded the city of Delhi in 736. The magnificent architecture
and scctlpture of the Khajuraho temples were executed under the
patronage of the Chandellas in the tenth century.
The great Central Asian scholar Alberuni, who visited India in
, _l 030, wrote: 'The Hindus believe witl1 regard to God that He is
-One, Eternal ... this is what educated people believe about God
... if we now pass from die ideas of the educated people to tliose
of the common people, we must say that they present a great
variety. Some of them are simply abominable, but similar errors
also occur in other religions.' In making this comment Alberuni
was not simply giving a Muslim view but echoing the Hindu elite's
position on monotheism and polytheism. There is·little agreement
among historians of medieval India about the extent to which the
coming of Islam to the subcontinent fomented new processes of
cultural accommodation and assimilation. At one extreme is the
view that there was a dear distinguishing line between Islamic
civilization and the pre-existing corpus of 'Hindu tradition'. This
argument is dented not just by the sheer scale of the conversions 2. Islam in India. The Qurb Minar, Delhi - a 13th century
to Islam among lower-caste Hindus, but also the contiguity of , monument to the Sufi saint Qutbuddin Kaki started by Qurbuddin
peoples belonging to different religious faiths -which meant that Aibak and compleredby Ilrurmish. (Source:Prinr from drawingby
Islam in the subcontinent could not but develop local Indian roots. William Daniell !'J(hibiredat rhe Orienra_l
Annual, 1834, m rhe
On the other hand, recent research on Islam in a variety ofregional pr.ivate collection of Sugata Bose and Ayesha Jalal.)
 26 MODERN SOUTH ASIA
PRE-MODERNACCOMODATIONOF DIFFERENCES 27
set:ings has emphasized variants of an argument about 'syncretism'
which tends to ?bscure the issue of religiously informed identity. on the government in the name of the conqueror. The inhabitants
for examp!e, Ri~ard Eaton's portrayal of Bengali peasants as a· would not suffer it otherwise.'
s!Ilgle undifferentiated mass' with a uniform 'folk culture' neatly Eighth-century Sind was a typical Indian polity in which sov-
erases the proble1;1of difference. With the major historiographical ereignty was shared by different layers of kingly authority. The
challenge conveniently out of the way, a fanciful cultural argument Chachnama,the principal source of our information on the Mus-
can then be erected on quicksand-like material evidence from lim conquest of Sind, elaborates a royal code which demands
Bengal's agrarian frontier. Any historical interpretation of the sensitivity to the fluidity and shifting nature of the real world of
spre~d of'.lsl~min the su~continent needs to be attentive to regional politics. This is. in contrast to Kautilya' s 'classical' and largely
spec1fic1t1es 1n the domams of economy and culture as well as the theoretical text Arthashastra,which advises princes on ways to
great variety of Muslims - Turks, Mongols, Persians, Arabs, · avoid the dilution of absolute and centralized power. The par-
Afghan, and so on - who. came from abroad. Taken together, doning of a fallen enemy, described by the Chachnama,provided
these factors not only explo'de the myth of a monolithic Islamic a quick route to legitimacy by renegotiating a balance between
com":1unity in India but call into question any general model of different hierarchically arranged layers of sovereignty. The Arab
M_ushm convers10ns b~ed on a poor understanding of rather scanty conquest of Sind, instead of representing a sharp disjuncture, can
evidence from one reg10nal economy and culture. What the avail- be seen as a form of adaptation to pre-existing political conditions
able sources do permit is a plausible argument to 'be advanced, to in India.
the effect that not only were creative 1'1.do-Islamicaccommodations Although there were no further military conquests in India from
of differ~nce work~d out at various levels of society and culture but the north-west until the eleventh century, the India trade became
that India, or al-H!Ild, became the metropolitan centre ofan Indian vital to the Islamic world during the eighth and ninth centuries.
ocean world with a distinctive historical identity that stretched from India's export surplus attracted a steady flow of precious bullion
.the Mediterranean to the Indonesian archipelago. and made it the centre of an Indian ocean world-economy, with
,, The emergence of!ndia as the hub of an integrated Indian ocean West Asia and China as its two poles. It was the prosperity in India
economy and culture by the eleventh century preceded the fashion- and the relative decline in West Asia which provided the context
ing of lndo-Islamic accommodations within the subcontinent's for the next wave of Ghaznavid invasions into the subcontinent,
society and polity in the fourteenth century. Early conversions to beginning in 997. The accumulated treasure in the palaces and
Islam were more gradual than sudden, a process carried over a temples of northern India was a prime target of a series of raids
period of time but generally facilitated in regions where a weak (997-1030) by Mahmud of Ghazni into north-western India,
Brahmanical superstructure overlaid a much stronger Buddhistic which, interestingly enough, were· roughly coterminous with and
substratum, as was the case in Sind in the eighth century and in· not too dissimilar from Rajendra Chola's northern campaigns from
Bengal after the eleventh century. While military action undoub- his south Indian base. On one of his raids Mahmud of Ghazni
tedly :o~k place in the conquest of these regions, capitulation and looted and demolished the famous temple at Somnath in Gujarat.
subm1ss1onwere the usual norm, followed by the laying down of The looting raids of this period were motivated less by an iconoclas-
terms of loyalty and dependence. This was in accordance with the tic zeal fired by religion than by more hard-headed economic and
overall themy and practice of conquests in India at the time, and political motives. In Mahmud's case, it was a need to fmance his
explains why wars did not lead to significant political change. In · imperial ambitions in Central Asia that led him to devastate well-
the words of the ninth century merchant-traveller Sulaiman: 'The endowed religious places of worship. ·
Indians sometimes go to war for conquest, but the occasions are It wasa similar combination of economic and political impera-
rare .... When a king.subdues a neighbouring state, he places over tives which led Muhammad Ghuri, a Turk, to invade India a
it a man belonging to the family of the fallen prince, who carries century and a half later, in 1192. His defeat of Prithviraj Chauhan,
a Rajput chieftain, in the strategic battle of T arain in northern
 PRE-MODERNACCOMODATIONOF DIFFERENCES 29
28 MODERN SOUTH ASIA

India paved the way for the establishment of the first Muslim to coastal southern India and stretching across the Bay of Bengal
sultar.iate, with its capital in Delhi, by Qutubuddin Aibak. The to Java and Sumatra.
Delhi Sultanate lasted from 1206 to 1526 under the leadership The state structure constructed by the Delhi sultans was based
of four maJor dynasties - the Mamluks, Khaljis, T ughlaqs and on experiments carried out in :Vest Asi~ but also elaborated on
Lodis.. These Turkish and_ Afghan rulers exercised their sway pre-existing forms in India. 'Yhile upholdmg the s~premacy of the
pnmanly over northern India, but the more powerful sultans, like Islamic sharia, the rulers desisted from imposmg it on a predom-
Alauddin Khalji (1296-:-1316) and Muhammad bin Tughlaq inantly non-Muslim population, whi~h was_allow_edto _retam its
(1325-51), made mcurs10ns mto the Deccan. Southern India in customary and religious laws. A senes of impenal edi~ts co_m-
this perio~ boasted two powe:ful kingdoms - the Hindu king- plementing the sharia underpinned_the day-ro-~ay admm'.s:ranon
dom ofVipyanagar~ founded 111 1336, and the Bahmani kingdom of justice, especially in the domains of cnmmal and c1V1_l law.
founded by a Muslim governor who revolted against the sultan Modelled on Ummayad and Abbasid rule, the mtermeshmg of
m 1345. , religious and secular law was ~ iritrinsi~ fea~ure o~ the pact of
The Turkish, Persian and Afghan invasions of northern India dominance established by Muslim sovereigns m India. It h~d the
from the eleventh century onwards injected the Turko-Persian merit of keeping the ulema (Muslim theologians) at b~y without
content into the formation of an Indo-Islamic culture. The roots straining the legitimacy of Muslim rule am~ng non-believers.
of this variant of the emerging Inda-Islamic accommodations ac- The Delhi Sultanate drew its revenues pnmanly from the land,
tually preceded the establishment of the Delhi Sultanate and can and its many flourishing towns depended to a large ex:ent on_the
be traced to the occupation of the Punjab by the Ghaznavids agrarian surplus. Some of the land revenue was paid directly mto
between 1001 and 1186. Lahore was the first centre of the Per- the state coffers, but most of it was channelled through zqtadarsor
sianized Indo-Islamic culture until Delhi rose to political pre- land-grant holders. The iqta was a non-here~tary prebendal as-
emmence and almost became a replica of the ancient Sassanid court rn
signment of revenue devised especially s~it the imperative of
. of Per~ia. The symbols of sovereignty, which had been wholly paying relatively stable state salaries m ~he highly monetized and
· absent m the far more austere Arab Islam of the preceding centuries, fluctuating economic context :'ft~e Indian ocean world-economf·
became much more ceremonial and ornate. Persian cultural in- Generally, iqtadars and provmcial governors, lmo_wnas muqtzs,
fluence was balanced by a strong Turkish slave element in the · enjoyed a fair amount of autonomy from the Delhi sultan. A frw
composition of the nobility and the ruling classes during the first sultans attempted a greater degree of centralized_control for bnef
century of the Sultanate. Slavery went into decline in India in the spells. Alauddin Khalji, for instance, made drastic changes to ex-
fourteenth century. From the beginning of the fourteenth century isting iqtas with a view to reordering the bonds of loyalty between
the Turkish Mamluks, or slave aristocracy, were steadily replaced the centre and the provincial feripheries.
by a new anstocracy of Indian Muslims and Hindus as well as The southern kingdom o Vijayanagara drew revenues from
foreign immigrant Muslims of high status. So it was in the four- land, but was also closely integrated with the broader eco_nomyand
teenth century that a true Inda-Muslim culture was forged, based civilization of the Indian ocean. Merchants from the Vipyanagara
on Hindu-Muslim alliance-building and reciprocity. While north- domains engaged in profitable trade with both We_stAsia and South
ern India witnessed accommodations with the Turkish-Persian East Asia. The Vijayanagara centre was the repository _ofconsider-
variant of Islam, the Arab imprint continued to be indelible in the able wealth and glory, but, according to Burton _Ste11_1, _,he state
Malabar coast of western India as well as in coastal south India and structure was segmented to provide for a substantial di':11~10~ and
Sri Lanka. So we fmd at least two different variants of the Inda- devolution of powers. After going through a number of vicissitudes
Islamic accommodations in the subcontinent, one straddling the· the Vijayanagara kingdom recovered its_glory under the great :uler
overland belt from Turkey, Persia and northern India to the Dec- Krishnadeva Raya(1509-29), whose reign_sawimpressive achieve-
can, and the other bridging the ocean from the Arabian peninsula . ments in temple architecture and T elegu literature. In addmon to
 30 MODERN SOUTH ASIA
PRE-MODERNACCOMODATIONOf DIFFERENCES 31
in India have sought to underplay this dimension on grounds that
Muslim conversions were more numerous where inequalities with-
in the social structure were not as great as elsewhere. Yet this hardly
invalidates the case for Islam's egalitarian appeal, since it is entirely
logical that societies with a history of valuing equality would be
more amenable to its attractions. The egalitarianism of Islam did
not, however, extend equally to women. Both Muslim and Hindu
women of the tipper social strata were largely restricted in this
period to the private domain and were expected to be in purdah
or behind a veil. One early Delhi sultan of the Mamluk dynasty
- Raziya Sultana - succeeded in becoming the first Muslim
woman ruler in the subcontinent. Acknowledged to have been a
capable ruler, she was assassinated by male rivals.
The Sunni and Shia sectarian division, which had occurred
over differences of opinion on Muhammad's successor to the
Khilafat, was reflected in Indian Muslim society. A great majority
of Indian Muslims were Sunnis. In parts of Sind and southern
Punjab, Multan in particular, Shias had become.influential. But
they seemed to be at a disadva_ntage in northern India during the
00 · period of the Sunni Delhi Sultanate. Yet in a sense the most
0 3. The Feminine Dimensionof Islam.Tomb of BibiJiwandi in Uchh influential of Muslims in India were the Sufis, who represented
Sharif, Punjab, present-dayPakistan.(CourtesyAyeshaJalal.) the mystical branch of Islam - which had achieved prominence
in Persia since the tenth century. Indeed many of the convers10ns
to Islam •after 1290 were carried out by members of the Chishti
:he broad-based sultanates and kingdoms of the north and south, and Suhrawardy orders. The Chishti order made its mark in the
independent sultanates had emerged by the fifteenth century at the environs of Delhi and the Ganga-Yamuna Doab, while the Suh-
extremities of northern India - Kashmir, Bengal and Gujarat - rawardy order developed a strong following in Sind. It was in the
each forging wider contacts of its own. After Timur's attack on Islamic mystical tradition that women played a decisive role. One
Delhi in 1398 even Jaunpur and Malwa emerged as independent of the first mystics of Islam was a woman, the chaste and pure
sultanates. The fifteenth century ought to be seen as a period when lover of God, Rabia, who lived in Basra during the eighth century
there were several regional sultanates, since even Ddhi was reduced and won the admiration of fellow male Sufis. The names of famous
to the status of one of the ;regional sultanates of north India. women Sufis are to be found rhrougbout the Islamic world. In
During the era of the Delhi Sultanate - its expansion and all the Muslim-majority regions of the subcontinent, especially
attrition - northern India developed a distinctive Indo-Islamic Sind and the Punjab, there are shrines of women Sufi saints. So
culture. Society consisted of three broad classes: the nobility, ar- the feminine dimension in Islam, closely associated with spiritual-
tisans and peasants. The n?bility was drawn substantially though ity, played a part in the peaceful spread of Muhammad's message.
not exclusively from Turkish, Afghan, Persian and Arab immig- Evidence of the Sufi role in facilitating Islam's accommodation
rants. The great majority of Muslim artisans and peasants were with its Indian environment can be seen in the very special mystical
converts from lower-caste Hindus to whom Islam's egalitarian appreciation of the femirtine in thefr poetry. ~ile in Persian,
appeal had held an attraction. Some recent works on early Islam and also Arabic, the metaphor of mysncal poetry is predominantly
 32 MODERN SOUTH ASIA PRE-MODER."! ACCOMODAT!ON OF DIFFERENCES 33
male, the imagery is altered in Indian Sufi tradition into a love and Arabic vocabulary, developed into something of a lingua franca
of_the divine in the form of a woman devote~. Drawing upon the only in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
Hmdu traditions, the soul is described as that of a loving woman The cultural fusion on which Indo-Islamic civilization was
seeking union with God, the ultimate Beloved. coming to be based was frowned upon by certain social groups.
There was much in common berween the bhakti strand in Muslim ulema, who often advised the sultans on issues pertaining
popular Hinduism and the Sufi strand oflslam. Both sought union to Islamic law, tended to be culrural exclushists, especially in a
with God through the way of love and revered pirs and gurus as scenario where the majority of the populace were non-believers.
spiritual leaders and mediators. The Sufi Islamic influence gave a The Brahmanical tradition on the Hindu side could be equally
powerful impetus to the bhakti movement in India, strengthening exclusivist when it could not absorb and dominate and, conse-
the Shramanik tradition and promoting a few syncretistic cults. quently, was averse to accommodation. One Nrisinghacharya was
Among the prominent leaders of the bhakti devotional movement reputed to have told a congregation of high-caste Hindus at a
were Kabir (1440-1518) irr northern India, and Chaitanya (1486- Kumbha Mela - a great religious fair held at the confluence of
1533) in Bengal, while the stream led by Guru Nanak (1469-1539) the Ganga and the Jamuna - to adopt kamathabritti or the habit
culminated in the foundation of the new Sikh religious faith in of a tortoise, in other words withdraw into a shell in order to be
Punjab. Both Kabir and Nanak rejected the caste system and sought impervious to Islamic influences. Indeed, if one reads the Dhar-
not so much to integrate Islam and Hinduism as to offer alternative mashastra or Hindu law books of this period, to the exclusion of
views of the Creator. Kabir, when he did not deny the Hindu and other sources, ·one would not even begin to suspect that there
Muslim conceptions of God, sought to _equate them in eclectic were Muslims in India. Not all upper-caste Hindus, of course,

-
fashion. He claimed himself to be the child of Allah and also of could become tortoises. Some Rajput princes made alliances with
00 Ram. Nanak went much further in the direction of negating spec- the Sultanate and a few converted to Islam. These Rajput Muslims
ifically Hindu and Muslim ideas of God while drawing on the could not quite aspire to the ashraf(honourable, noble) status of
mystical strands within both. The more resolute negation of the the aristocracy of West Asian origin, but they still enjoyed much
rituals of Hinduism and Islam by Nanak contributed to the emer- higher status than the large numbers of artisans and peasants who
gence of Sikhism as a distinctive and separate religion after his became ajlaf (commoner) Muslims. Islam, in adapting to the
death. Nanalc's teachings were compiled in the Adi Granth and Indian environment, could not, despite its strong egalitarianism,
were disseminated by nine Gurus who came after him. avoid the social imprint of caste. According to one view, the Arab
Most leaders of the bhakti movement preferred to communicate variant of Inda-Islamic culture in the coastal south was less of a
in regional languages, which established the importance of regional hybrid than the fusion which took place in the hinterlands. While
dialects and scripts such as Bengali, Assamese, Oriya, Maithili, it is undeniable that the coastal towns of the Coromandal retained
Gujarati, Rajasthani, Awadhi and Braj (sometimes referred to as more of a purist Arab imprint than the Indo-Islamic culture of
Hinda vi). The devotional songs of the famous woman bhakti continental India, Hindus, Muslims and Christians of the south
preacher Mirabai were composed in Rajasthani but she was in- came to share, as Susan B_aylyhas demonstrated, some common
fluenced by other bhakti composers who developed Awadhi and religious and social idioms. Many southern mosques contained
Braj. Another great woman poet and saint of the fourteenth century Hindu decorative features such as lotus columns, replicating the
was Lal Ded who did much to promote the Kashmiri language Indo-Islamic accommodations in architectural designs in northern
with her simple bur powerful verses. The congruence berween India - where the Turkish-Persian variant of Islam was stronger.
language and region was clearly drawn in India between the four- The fourteenth and fifteenth centuries witnessed both a power-
teenth and fifteenth centuries, even though Persian remained the ful current towards cultural accommodation as well as pockets of
court language of the Sultanate. Urdu {literallythe camp language), stubborn resistanc~ to it. By around 1500 Inda-Islamic cultures,
borrowing liberally from Hindavi syntax and grammar, and Persian with their creativity and ambiguity, accommodations and tensions,
 34 MODERN SOITTH ASIA

had struck deef' root in the subcontinent. It was at this juncture

that a new empire was established in northern India by a ruler of Chapter 4
T urk1sh-Mongol descent. The next chapter turns to this empire,
and to further developments within an Inda-Islamic social and
political universe under its aegis. The MughalEmpire:
State, Economy and Society

W hile unravelling the complex weave of India's pre-

modern history we could hardly not have noticed two
recurring themes. First, the infusion of new peoples
and ideas, sometimes in the form of an invasion from the north-
west, and second, temporal cycles of imperial consolidation and
decentralization. Invasions were not sharp disjunctures, and were
most commonly followed by fresh processes of accommodation,
ass.imilation and cultural fusions. The high points of great imperial
epochs were ofren characterized by political cohesion, social vital-
00
N
ity, economic prosperity and cultural glory. But it was also abun-
dantly clear mat periods of political decentralization were not
necessarily accompanied by social and economic decay. These
general observations drawn from a thematic survey of the long
terµi in Indian history can be investigated more closely with
reference to the Mughal empire which was established in 1526,
enjoyed expansion and consolidation until about 1707, and sur-
vived, even if in drastically attenuated form, until 1857.
Empires in pre-modern India, we have seen, were not based on
rigid centralized domination. This has been established by the most
insightful of recent historical research, and runs counter to the
misperceptions of many nineteenth-century historians and twen-
tieth-century comparative sociologists. Few poliries have been sub-
jected to greater misinterpretation by Western comparativists than
the Mughal empire, which has been seen as a prime example of
'oriental despotism'. Reading backwards from the twentieth-century
experience of European totalitarianism, pre-modern Asian states
were seen to be all-powerful revenue-extracting machines presiding
over passive and pulverized societies lacking not only in dynamism
. but also processes of relatively autonomous social group formation.
 MODERN SOUTH ASIA THE MUGHAL EMPIRE 37
The historiography of the Mughal era has been only recently freeing But there are also passages in the Baburnamamore appreciative
itself from the despotism of oriemalist scholarship. While differences of the ·charms of Hind: ·
remain on the extent of centralization actually achieved, the Mughal The one nice aspect of Hindustan is that it is a large country with lots
empire is beginning to be viewed as a complex, nuanced and loose of gold and money. The weather turns very nice during the monsoon.
form of hegemony over a diverse, differentiated and dynamic eco- Sometimes it rains ten, fifteen, or twenty times a day; torrents are formed
nomy and sociery. in an instant, and water flowsin places that normally have rio water . ...
The founder of the Mughal empire could not have been aware Another nice thing is the unlimited numbers of craftsmen and prac-
of the enduring legacy that he was to leave in India. Having set up titioners _of every trade. For every labour and every product there is an
a small kingdom in Farghana in Central Asia at the turn of the established group who have been practising their craft or professing that
sixteenth centu1y, Zahiruddin Babur was initially more interested trade for generations . ... In Agra alone there were 680 Agra stonemasons
in conquering Samarkand. Afi:erseveral futile attempts to expand at work on my building everyday.
in a northerly direction, B-:1-bur
settled down to rule the environs Before he could expand or consolidate his Indian domain Babur
of Kabul in modern-day Afghanistan. From there he made a raid died suddenly in 1530. His short reign might have been remarkably
into the Punjab, and then in 1526 defeated Ibrahim Lodi, the last uncontroversial Were it not for an accusation that surfaced in the
of the Delhi sultans, in the first battle of Panipat. Babur' s use of late nineteenth century and achieved political prominence in the
Turkish cannon in this battle led some historians to include the late twentieth~ that one of his generals, Mir Baqi, had destroyed
empire he founded in the category of 'gun-powder empires'. It is a Ran, temple to build a mosque in Ayodhya, the Babri Masjid,
now dear that this sort of technological defmition of empires is named after Babur. There is no sixteenth-century evidence that any
neither very accurate nor very appropriate. The Mughals in any temple had been destroyed to construct this particular mosque.
case were more reliant on cavalry in making their conquests, al- The newly founded Turkish dynasty's control over north India
00
w though artillery was also used in an innovative way for selective remained very shaky andtenuous under Babur's son, Humayun.
. purposes. Babur was descended from Timur (the great Turkish An Afghan challenge from eastern India led by Sher Shah Suri
. empire builder in Central Asia) on his father's side, and from forced Humayun to flee the counuy and take refuge in the court
Genghis Khan (the great Mongol war-leader) on his mother's side. of Safavid Iran. Sher Shah (1530--45) brought about an imperial
Contemporaries referred to the empire he founded as the Timurid unification of ~uch of northe_rnIndia and set up an administrati;e
empire. The choice of the term Mughal, derived from Mongol, framework which was to be further developed by Akbar later 111
appears to have been a nineteenth-century preference. Babur was the century. The weakening of the Suri dynasty (1530-55) afrer
not particularly attracted to the heat and dust of the plains of Sher Shah's death enabled Humayun to return in 1555 to reclaim
northern India where he established his political power. In his his Indian patrimony, but he had not been back in Delhi for more
introspective and evocative autobiography, the Baburnama, he than a few months before he took a fatal tumble down his library
expresses a longing to return to the cool valley of Kabul: stairs. On his assumption of the imperial mantle his son Akbar
Hindustan is a country that has few pleasuresto recommend it. The people
(1556--1605) faced an immediate challenge from an Afghan and
are not handsome. They have no idea· of the charms of friendly society,
Rajput Hindu military coalition, which he defeated at the second
of frankly mixing together, or of familiar intercourse. They have no genius, b~ttle of Panipat. Akbar, undoubtedly the greatest of the Mughal
no comprehension of mind, no politeness of manner, no kindness or emperors, was an able leader of military campaigns, an astute
fellow-feeling, no ingenuity or mechanical invention in planning or ex- administrator, and a patron of culture. In 1572 he launched a major
ecuting their handicraft works, no skill or knowledge in design or architec- campaign against Gujarat, and the following year made a trium-
ture; they have no horses, no good flesh, no grapes or musk melons, no phant entry into the Gujarati port city of Surat. In 1574 Akbar's
good fruits, no ice or cold water, no good food or bread in their bazaars, army conquered Bengal, which had more often than not been
no baths or colleges, no candles, no torches, not a candlestick independent of Delhi during the period of the Sultanate. The
38 MODERN SOUTH ASIA THE MUGHAL EMPIRE 39
conquests of Gujarat and Bengal gave the Mughals control over emperor, and were paid salaries in cash equivalent to the amount
the agriculturally and commercially richest parts of the subcon- that would be needed for the upkeep of a certain number of
tinent. Among Akbar's other notable military successes were the cavalry. Cash income from jagirs, literally land grants, was desig-
conquesrs of Kabul in 1581, Kashmir in 1586, Orissain 1592, ~d nated for various mansabdars. Mansabs were open to talent, and
Baluchistan in 1595. The tettitorial expanse of the Mughal emprre the jagirs from which mansabdars were paid were not meant to
grew during the reigns of Akbar's successors;Jahangir (1605-27), be heritable. It was only in a later period of crisis that some
Shah Jahan (1627-58), and Aurangzeb (1658-1707). Although mansabdars could not be paid in cash and tended to hold on to
Jahangir managed to lose Kandahar and Shah Jahan sent an abor- hereditary jagirs. Although the mansabdari system was the main
tive expedition to Balkh and Badakshan in Central Asia, all three framework of the Mughal administration, the imperial domains
of Akbar's successors made territorial gains in the Deccan and had tettitorial divisions known as subahsor provinces, ruled by
further south, eventually defeating the powerful kingdoms of subadarsor governors, who usually held high mansabs or ranks.
Bijapur and Golkonda. The Mughal empire reached its territorial Below the level of the subadars there would be jagirdars below
apogee under Aurangzeb in the 1690s. But Aurangzeb' s Deccan the mansabdari rank, as well as zamindars, literally landlords,
adventures were fiercely resisted by the redoubtable Maratha leader ·whose main task was to collect revenue. from the locality.
Shivaji, who refused to be co-opted into the Mughal system. T~e Akbar included several Hindus in the ranks of the highest
economic costs of the Deccan wars made sure that Aurangzeb s mansabdars. For instance, his top-ranking military general was
final successes would turn out to be pyrrhic victories. Raja Mansingh of Amber, a Rajput, and his revenue minister
The expansion and consolidation of the Mughal ~mpire was
roughly coterminous with that of two other great Mushm emprres
- the Safavid empire in Iran and the Ottoman emp1te based m
Turkey but controlling much of West Asia and North '?-frica.
While there wa·s much in common with these three formidable
hnd-based empires, the Mughal empire was different in one
i'mportant respect. In India the Mughals established an empire in
which a majority of the subjects were non-Muslims. Akbar, who
gave shape and form to the Mughal state, was acutely aware of
this demographic fact and devised his policies accordingly. Al-
though most of the nobility in Akbar's court consisted of Turks,
Afghans and Persians, Akbar set about building a network of
alliances with Hindus, especially through the reg10nal Rajput
rulers. The Mughals under Akbar drew the nobility into the tasks
of defending and administering the empire through the mansab-
dari system. Mansab literally means rank, and a mansabd:zrwas
the holder of a rank of anything from IO to 5000 and occas1onally
10,000. Theoretically, mansabdars of various ranks were supposed
to supply the specified number of cavalry to the imperial army
when needed. A mansabdar of ten was, therefore, expected to have
ten men under, his command, and so on. In practice, not all
mansabdars were expected to perform military duties. Civilian 4. TheRajputArm of theMughalEmpire.Gatewayto the palace
administrators were also given ranks or mansabs by the Mughal of Raja Mansingh of Amber. (CourtesySugata Bose.)
 40 MODERN SOUTH ASIA THE MUGHAL EMPIRE 41
was Raja Todar Mal, a Khatri, who supervised a detailed cadastral Influenced initially by his eldest sister Jahanara, who had a deep
survey of the far-flung Mughal territories. Akbar displayed im- understanding of Islamic mysticism, he was later drawn into the
partiality towards his subjects, regardless of religious affiliation, Qadiriyya Sufi order. Better versed in mysticism than in worldly
by abolishing the jizya - a tax imposed on non-believers in matters, Dara Shikoh lost out in a bitter succession struggle to his
Muslim states. He also showed a pragmatic streak and a deter- young~r brother Aurangzeb in 1658. Aurangzeb's reign ~aw a
mination to adapt to the Indian environment by replacing the partial reversal of the politics of allianc~ building ~nd rehg10us
Muslim lunar calendar with the solar calendar, which he thought flexibility under a mounting set of economtc and political pressures.
made more sense in an agricultural country like India. Akbar's The jizya was reimposed, not necessarily for religi?us reasons but
public tolerance and efforts to build a truly Indo-Islamic empire as a means of taxing the commercial wealth of Hmdus and Jams
were matched by his flexibility in private beliefs and practices. within the empire. The switch back from the solar to the lunar
In I 582 he announced his adherence to a new set of beliefs, calendar owed perhaps more to Aurangzeb's ideological rigidity,
drawing on elements from the mystical strains in both Islam and even though he did not make this change until some twenty years
Hinduism and deeply influenced by Zorastrianism, which he into his reign. Yet even at the end of Aurangzeb' s supp?sedly
called Din-e-Ilahi or the Divine Faith. He did not, however, try puritanical reign nearly a quarter of the mansabdars were Hmdus.
to impose Din-e-Ilahi as a state religion. An amalgamation of Aurangzeb's doctrinal rigidity does not appear to ha_vepervaded
diverse beliefs, it was in effect a cult centred on the emperor's the female quarters of the royal palace. One of hrs daughters
personality and, even in its heyday, had only eighteen followers thought better of the mystical dimensions of Islam and became a
at the royal court. Thelbadatkhana or place of worship in Akbar's
red sandstone capital at Fatehpur Sikri became the venue for free
00
and lively theological and philosophical debates attended by Mus-
c.n lims, Hindus, Zoroastrians, Jains, Jesuit Christians and Jews. His
.policies of publ~c tolerance and private ecclectism were continued
by his son and grandson, Jahangir and Shah Jahan. Indeed the
mother of Jahangir was a Hindu Rajput princess, Jodhabai.
The breadth of Akbar's outlook was frowned upon by some
sections of the ulema. But during Akbar's reign the supremacy of
temporal over religious authority was dearly maintained. Some
ulema attempted to persecute Akbar's famous freethinking friend
and courtier Abu! Faz! and found themselves behind prison bars.
The most prominent orthodox critic of Mughal religious accom-
modations in the early seventeenth century was Shaikh Ahmad
Sirhindi (1564-1624), who was the leading light of the Naqsh-
bandi order and looked forward to a rejuvenation of the original
purity of Islam at the iurn of its second millennium. Sirhindi
rejoiced at the death of Akbar, in whose reign 'the sun of guidance
was hidden behind the veil of error', and was imprisoned by Akbar's
son and successor Jahangir.
The followers ofSirhindi were fiercelyopposed to the innovative
mystical blendings ofUpanishadic philosophy and Sufism of which
Dara Shikoh, the eldest son of Shah Jahan, was a major proponent. 5. Mugha!Memory.Jahangir's Tomb, Lahore. (Courtesy AyeshaJalal.)
42 MODERN SOUTH ASIA THE MUGHAL EMPIRE 43
patron ofSufic activities, gifting an entire complex of buildings in receiving only the fmal, albeit substantial, cut. Despite the elaborate
Delhi to the famous eighteenth-century mystical poet Mir Oard. details about revenue administration laid out in Abu Faz!'s manual
The early views of Mughal despotism emphasized material fac- Ain-e-Akbari (compiled circa1590s), many prosperous parts of the
tors as much as ideological ones. The Mughal state was said to empire were never rigorously surveyed. There is a palpable lack of
extract huge amounts of revenue from the agrarian sector. The statistical data at the all-India level between the late sixteenth and
proportion most commonly mentioned by generations of eco- nineteenth century, but recent studies of particular regions have
nomic historians until very recently was forty per cent, or the entire shown that the seventeenth century was a period of vibrant agricul-
moveable surplus. There can be little doubt that, as in other tural growth which would hardly have been possible if a centralized
contemporaiy agrarian empires, the revenue demand on the peas- state had been draining away most of the local resources. The
antry was high, perhaps as much as a third of the product. But picture of an emaciated and oppressed peasantry, mercilessly ex-
recent research suggests that the Mughals did not deploy a central- ploited by the emperor and his nobility, is being seriously altered
ized bureaucratic adn1inistr,ationas an engine to pump out revenues in the light of new interpretations of the evidence. The agrarian
from villages.The Mughal state typically entered into accommoda- revolts that began to undermine the power of the Mughal empire
tions with the dan power of zamindars in the countryside, not only from the later years of Aurangzeb's reign were not typically promp-
in the peripheral regions but also in the environs of the capital. ted by absolute poverty, but paradoxically occurred in regions
The agrarian surplus was distributed among various layers of appro- which had enjoyed relative prosperity under Mughal auspices and
priators, with the imperial household and the mansabdari nobility were now miri.ded to preserve their gains.
Primarily an agrarian empire, the Mughal state was also linked
to long-distance overland and oceanic trade. From the mid seven-
teenth century onwards the empire became more heavily engaged
with the international economy and may have turned more mer-
cantilist in character, relying for its economic viability as much
on textile exports as on land revenues. The Mughals, however,
unlike the Ottomans, did not possess a navy which enabled Euro-
pean powers to command the sea-lanes of the Indian ocean. Even
before the establishment of the Mughal empire the Portuguese,
led by V asco da Gama, had landed on the south-western coast of
India in 1498 and, by 1510, had set up a major settlement in
Goa. But the Portuguese never came close to achieving their
professed aim of establishing a monopoly over sea trade in the
Indian ocean. Arab and Gujarati merchants in particular were
resourceful ellough to meet the Portuguese economic challenge.
In the latter half of the sixteenth century, hailed by some Western
writers as the Portuguese century, the trading outpost of Goa was
economically less important than the Mughal port city of Surat.
The Ottoman navy made certain that the Portuguese, even at the
height of their power, were never able to close the Red Sea to
Turkish, Persian, Arab and Indian trade. The Portuguese presence
6. Mughal Piety.The BadshahiMosque, Lahore,built and influence was limited to a few Indian coastal enclaves. As
under the patronage of Aurangzeb.(CourtesyAyeshaJalal.) Ashin Dasgupta has argued, 'after the first violent overture' the
 l

44 MODERN SOUTH ASIA THE MUGHAL EMPIRE 45

Portuguese in the sixteenth century 'settled within the structure Islamicsharia, allowed the Mughal rulers and officials considerable
and were, in a way, swallowed by it.' The English, who succeeded room for administrative innovation. Muslim law officers, such as
the Portuguese as the leading European traders in India in the qazis and muftis, enforced the Islamic sharia, less as a rigid legal
seventeenth century, were also supplicants of the Mughals and code and more as a set of moral injunctions to be invoked in the
simply sought i:ermission from the emperor to carry on quiet light of circumstances. The goal was to assure the result of equity
trade. The English East India Company, founded in 1600, first and justice rather tban strictly apply the letter of the law. While
obtained permission_to trade in India from Jahangir in 1619. But brought under the purview of the Mughal system of criminal law
the1r polmcal and military power remained limited to a few factory in certain parts of India, non-Muslims had recourse to their own
forts m coastal areas. The English and also the Dutch in the cUstomaryand religious law in matters to do with marriage and
sev~meenth century worked, according to Dasgupta, 'within the inheritance.
md1genous structure' and were 'one more strand in the weave of Although the Mughal empire on the whole made no distinctive
the [Indian] ocean's trade'. The sixteenth and seventeenth cen- contributio.n to improving gender relations, it is important to note
turies have been characterized by Blair B. Kling and M.N. Pearson the very considerable influence which the women of the zenana
as •~ age of partnership' between Europeans and Asians, while could exercise upon the royal throne. The close interplay between
Saniay Subrahmanyam, in his work on southern India has dubbed the private and the public domain became particularly pronounced
it 'an age of contained conflict'. ' once Akbar began contracting marriages with Hindu Rajput prin-
To Indian merchants the Mughal state allowed a certain measure cesses. Jahangir's religious tolerance can be traced to his rearing
of autonomy in important trading towns and cities. At the same under the.direction of his Hindu mother,Jodhabai, while his highly
time, the Mughals were not directly dependent for their state refmed artistic tastesare at least partly attributable to his wife, Nur
finance_son the services of these merchant groups. The empire Jahan, wHo established herself as a formidable member of the royal
could simply accrue benefits from the credit and insurance facilities household, enjoying strong political influence over the emperor.
provided by bankers and traders which linked processes of inland Mumtaz Mahal, sadly, was not a historical agent in Nur Jahan's
trade and urbanization to wider networks of the Indian ocean league. She had to die trying to bear Shah J ahan' s fifteenth child
econ?my. Ban~ers an~ merchants helped achieve a degree of eco- and her death became the inspiration behind the emperor's patron-
nomic mtegranon w~1ch matched the political integration sought age of the Taj Mahal, one of the fmest architectural forms ever
by the M;1ghal emp1re. Smee European traders were primarily constructed in the world. Shah Jahan's eldest daughter Jahanara
mterested m Asian goods, especially Indian textiles, to sell in Euro- established herself as a scholar of Islamic mysticism, winning ac-
pean markets, the Mughal domains received large inflows of pre- colades from her Sufi mentor Molla Shah. The women of the
cious metals, particularly silver. Mughal India was, therefore, a Mughal household were of course hardly representative of the
great metropolitan magnet of wealth in the context of sixteenth- typical Indian woman, Hindu or Muslim. But there can be no
and seve?teenth-ce:'1tury international trade. Mughal power, fur denying their role in the malring of the majesty that was the Mughal
from having d~Ronc roots, rested on arrangements based on a large enipire.
measure of polmcal and economic flexibility. Both the grandeur and the syncretism of the Mughal empire
In their_administration of justice the Mughals followed the pat- were reflected in ;he very considerable cultural achievements over
tern established by the Delhi sultans. Given the limited scope of the which they presided. Persian was the court language of this
sharia, especial!yin providing for effective and speedy public justice, Turkish dynasty. But at a more popular level Urdu became the
Mu'.li~ s_overe1gns_everi;where had set up mechanisms to strengthen language of Indo-Islamic culture in northern India, especially in
the JUd1aal adm1rustrat1on.Anxious to preserve law and order, the the seventeenth century. Regional vernaculars continued to flour-
Mu!s1:alscreated a·parallel system of courts alongside the specifically ish in the provinces outside the Mughal heartland. Some of the
IslamICones. Impenal edicts, or qanun-e-shahi, supplementing the fmest literary and artistic achievements of the Mughals were their
 46 MODERN SOUTH ASIA THE MUGHAL EMPiRE 47
illustrated manuscripts. The autobiographies and chronicles of the Mughal sovereigntywas not wholly undermined until the British
Mughal emperors were written in flowing Persian, and were bril- tried the last of the Mughal emperors, Bahadur Shah Zafar, in the
liant examples of calligraphy and visual illustration. Among the Red Fort afier the 1857 mutiny 0rebellion. Bahadur Shah was sen-
more famous of these manuscripts is Abu! Fazl's history of Akbar's
reign, the Akbarnama, and Abdul Hamid Lahori' s Padshahnama.
Mughal scribes and artists not only chose Islamic subjects but also
I tenced to deportation for life and died in exile in Burma, while a
British military officer exterminated the Mughal imperial line. It
would be clear to the populace that British sovereignty in India had
illustrated the famous Hindu epics, the Ramayanaand the Maha- been undermined when, afier another trial at the Red Fort in 1945,
bharata. Humayun had brought back with him from Persia two the British were unable to carry out their life sentence on three
leading painters of the Safavid court, Mir Sayyid Ali and Abdus Hindu, Muslim and Sikh rebels in the face of intense public pres-
Samad. They were joined in Akbar's royal studio by talented sure. To this day Indian prime ministers make a ritual of addressing
Hindus. Together they created a new Inda-Persian style of paint- the nation on independence day from the ramparts of the Red Fort,
ing, lighter and more colourful than the formal ornamentation of even if by now they are no more than mere shadows of even the
the pure Persian. In music the basic grammar of north Indian lesser Mughals.
classical music with its thirty-six raga and ragini was composed
under Mugha1 patronage. The most famous of music composers
of this era was Tan Sen, one of the 'nine gems' at Akbar's court.
Legend has it that Tan Sen could bring on torrential monsoon
rains by his rendition of Raga Meghamalhar. A distinctive style
of vocal music, dhrupad,was developed during Shah'Jahan's reign.
The most famous treatise on the ragas, the Raga Darpana, was
oc written in I 666 by Faqir Allah during the reign of Aurangzeb -
co the emperor being, ironically, a man not particularly fond of
1nus1c.
Yet the greatest and most lasting cultural achievements of the
Mughals were made in the field of architecture. The buildings in
Akbar's capital Fatehpur Sikri were based on a fusion of classical
Islamic and Rajput styles. The bu/and darwaza, or great gateway,
with its imposing arch had a strong West Asian influence, while
the balconies were adorned with Rajput decorative arts. The great-
est of the Mughal builders, of course, was Shah Jahan, justly
famous for having built the exquisite marble monument in mem~
ory of his wife, Mumtaz Mahal, in Agra. But he would have been
remembered as a great builder even if he had not built the Taj
Mahal. In Delhi, Shah J ahan constructed a magnificent capital.
The towering mosque called the Jama Masjid in old Delhi com-
manded the inhabitants of the capital and continues to be a focal
point of Muslim religion and culture in India. The centrepiece
of the new capital, Shahjahanabad, was the famous Lal Qila or
rhe Red Fort, which came to be recognized as the most important
I,
symbol of sovereignty in India. Ii