THE BRITISH RAJ, 1857–1947
In 1857, many north Indians rose up against the British, with the Mughal Emperor as the most visible focal point for collective action. The bloody conflict nearly drove the British from Hindustan and was punctuated by brutal massacres by all sides, deeply affecting British and Indian accounts of each other. Long known by its British description as the ‘Sepoy Mutiny,’ instead some early twentieth-century Indian nationalists demanded it be called ‘The First War for Indian Independence.’30 Significantly, while these events terminated the Mughal dynasty, they also reinforced the Empire’s powerful cultural significance. Given the Empire’s extent and complexity, and the vast available evidence about it, diverse people have subsequently interpreted and represented the Empire according to their own understandings and interests.
During 1857 and soon thereafter, most Britons rallied together and envisioned the Emperor at the center of dark conspiracies. They wondered how a man they had dismissed as a decrepit octogenarian had been so inspiring to his allegedly frenzied followers. Many Britons concluded that analysis of the history of his Empire would reveal the deep Indian racial fanaticism and cultural need for Oriental despotism. This interpretation of Mughal history seemed to show that only the imperial state was active and the ruled society eternally stagnant. Hence many Britons believed that the British ‘Raj’ (which replaced the East India Company in 1858) should rule but its Indian subjects remain passive.
British colonial officials studied and adapted Mughal imperial protocols for many pompous ceremonies, especially when dealing with the hundreds of remaining ‘feudal’ Indian princes under British indirect rule. For instance, in 1877, Victoria proclaimed herself Qaisar-i Hind (‘Caesar/Empress of India’)—although she was still only Queen in the United Kingdom where emperors were considered archaic.31 Her Viceroy in India staged an elaborate Mughal-British-style imperial coronation, as did some of her successors who travelled to India. The British intentionally created their imperial capital, New Delhi (built 1911–31), adjacent to Mughal Shahjahanabad. Thus, many Britons saw themselves as the Mughal Empire’s more modern heir.
Further, the 1857 anti-British movement that centered on the Emperor mobilized Muslims and Hindus together. Hence, the British Raj determined to prevent the recurrence of such collective action through ‘divide and rule’ policies, especially protecting the Muslim minority against the Hindu majority. These British policies deepened with the emergence of Indian nationalism whose leaders were predominantly middle-class but high-caste Hindus.
Various British colonial officials devoted themselves to translating original Mughal sources into English and publishing them, thus making their implicit lessons for the British Empire more widely available, with a teleology toward the British Raj.32 Prominent is Elliot’s massive, eight-volume collection of excerpted translations from Persian texts, The History of India as Told by Its Own Historians.33 Over half of the volumes are dedicated to the Mughal period, with the selections emphasizing the Empire’s Islamic identity and highlighting endemic Muslim versus Hindu conflicts. Such works tried to make the British Raj seem necessary in order to limit religious violence. But these British scholar-officials largely presented these sources without considering their production conventions and authorial goals. This Positivist approach reflected Rankian historical methodology: ‘giving a faithful statement of facts, to let them speak for themselves,’ according to Erskine in his biography of Babur and Humayun.34 Other European scholars, including Karl Marx and Max Weber, drew upon such work to incorporate this image of Mughal India in their universalist models.
Especially from the late nineteenth century onward, Indian nationalists increasingly recognized that writing Indian history should not be an exclusively British enterprise. Hence, growing numbers of Indian scholars committed themselves to researching and writing their own pre-colonial history, with the Mughal Empire as a major subject. Some sought to understand why the Empire had weakened and succumbed to British colonialism. This approach often highlights disorders and communal antagonisms from ‘Alamgir onward. Especially influential was Sir Jadunath Sarkar who used extensive primary sources to develop his own analysis of the Empire, especially during its final stages, with the rise of the Hindu Maratha confederacy.
On their part, many Muslim nationalists followed Sir Syed Ahmad Khan in emphasizing Muslims as a community loyal to the British but separate from Hindus (this developed into the ‘two nation’ model). In 1877, he founded the Muhammadan-Anglo Oriental College at Aligarh (now Aligarh Muslim University) to advance his Muslim community through Anglicization and also preservation of its distinctive history in South Asia. Aligarh scholars collected and analysed Persian-language sources that demonstrated how the Mughal Empire functioned. Some argued the imperial core was strong when unified but weak when factionalized, with lessons for the current Muslim community.35
Liberal-nationalist Indian historians also studied the Empire for its contemporary implications. Many studied in Britain and shared British presuppositions, but reversed the valance—their teleology led to the Indian nation. Among the most widely read and influential was Jawaharlal Nehru (independent India’s first prime minister, 1947–64) but professional historians also had important voices in public discourse by providing a congenial model of the Empire as a centralized Indian state with a composite Indian culture.36 Many highlighted Akbar’s Indian synthesis as admirably secularist—contrasted with ‘Alamgir’s religious divisiveness—but regarded the Empire as feudal, hence an obstacle to India’s national reunification.
Contrasting representations of the Empire aided Muslim nationalists. They argued that heretic Akbar—by adopting Hindu customs—created fatal weakness in the Empire by divorcing it from Islam, which ‘Alamgir’s later countermeasures could not fully reverse. Hence, these historians and politicians advocated restored rule by the Muslim community, temporarily lost by the Empire’s collapse, in the separate nation of Pakistan, created through Partition in 1947.
POST-INDEPENDENCE
The extensive violence of the Partition of Pakistan from India in 1947 reinforced and reconfigured various approaches to Mughal imperial history. During Partition, millions died and more than 10 million became refugees—most Hindus and Sikhs fleeing Pakistan and many Muslims fleeing India. Prominent issues that emerged after independence include how distinctively Muslim or else Indian the Empire was and how the perspectives of all who comprised it could be recovered.
The prime ideological claims for the creation of Pakistan were the historically distinct identity of the Muslim community and its long dominance in the subcontinent. Hence, many Pakistani scholarly and popular histories and government-sponsored textbooks present their nation as the successor to the Sunni Muslim-ruled Mughal Empire: the eastern bastion of Islamic states that extended west across north Africa.37 Further, Christians and Hindus had worked to bring down that Muslim Empire, with lessons for today’s Pakistan. The counterpart for Bangladesh—formerly East Pakistan before its 1971 secession—was de facto independent Mughal Bengal that also succumbed to treacherous British imperialism in the late eighteenth century.38
In India, the Mughal Empire remains the subject of extensive popular debate and also scholarly research from a number of perspectives. The politically motivated Hindutva (‘Hindu-ness’) movement—led by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and its cultural wing, the Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP)—regards undivided India as the Hindu homeland, with Mughal invaders as predatory and oppressive foreigners. Hindutva slogans characterize all Muslims in India today as alien ‘sons of Babur,’ regardless of their actual ancestry. In Ayodhya, multiple VHP assaults finally managed in 1992 to destroy the ‘Baburi mosque’ (erected in 1527 on the alleged site of the birthplace of divine Lord Ram). In contrast, Maratha Emperor Shivaji appears as a champion of Hindu-based Indian nationalism who fought off Mughal imperialism. During periods when the RSS-supported Bharatiya Janata Party has been in office, its administration has revised g
overnment-approved textbooks and other official histories to advance its representation of the Mughal Empire.
Indian prime ministers celiver the Independence Day address to the nation from the Lahore Gate of Shahjahanabad’s Red Fort
In contrast, secularist Indian politicians and cultural leaders have worked to incorporate the Mughal Empire as a vital part of the nation’s history. During the first decades after independence, progressive cultural critics who sought an indigenous (but not a Hindu-revivalist) line for the new nation drew on Mughal art and architecture to provide the spirit, but not exact models or motifs, for ‘modern’ India.39 Jawaharlal Nehru began the tradition of the Prime Minister delivering the annual Independence Day address from the ramparts of Shahjahanabad’s Red Fort. Other Mughal-built forts, tombs, mosques and other structures still stand as integral parts of life across the Indian nation.40 The Archaeological Survey of India, Indian National Archive and National Museum all professionally preserve materials from the Empire as India’s heritage.
Much scholarly research and writing on the Empire has emerged from India’s leading universities. Among them, Aligarh Muslim University’s Centre of Advanced Study in History has produced many justly influential historians with mastery of Persian sources, most prominently Irfan Habib.41 Often Aligarh-trained scholars use Marxist-influenced analysis that features economics rather than religious identity. For example, class struggle between overburdened peasants and the oppressive imperial administration plus declines in agricultural productivity feature as prime causes of Mughal weakness. Scholars who draw primarily on Persian-language texts and documents produced by the imperial court tend to highlight the agency of the Mughal center and its institutions and ideologies.
Other important scholars in South Asia and internationally have also contributed to ongoing research and analysis about the Empire using a range of primary sources and historiographical approaches and methodologies, often stressing different factors or disagreeing over interpretation.42 Economic historians highlight issues ranging from local market price trends to larger global trade and flows of bullion. Art and architecture historians read the paintings, buildings and ornamentation commissioned by various emperors, courtiers, noblewomen and others to decipher the influences and goals of patron and producer. Some scholars use Persian-language sources to reveal continued trade, cultural and migration links with other Asian Muslim empires, especially the Uzbeks and Safavids; this helps explain why Mughal emperors welcomed Turani immigrants and their descendants as a substantial proportion of mansabdars and continued to launch costly (and futile) military expeditions to recover their dynastic homeland. Similarly, diplomatic and military rivalry with the Safavids continued as long as both dynasties could sustain it, while Irani immigrants were always a major component among the high mansabdars.
Many social and cultural scholars concentrate on the people and ideologies interacting within the Empire. Some highlight how the uneven assimilation of indigenous Indians determined the Empire’s trajectory: Rajputs and a few other elite, high-caste Hindus were initially amalgamated into the inner core; however, few lower-caste Hindus or lower-class Muslims were ever incorporated, and many Deccanis remained alienated.43 Other scholars feature the Empire’s periodic anti-Hindu discriminatory policies.44 In contrast, yet other historians emphasize the Empire as Indian, including through imperial Rajput marriages, evolving court rituals and imperial ideologies, and the vast number of Indians who entered the imperial household, administration and army.45 Moving below the conventional focus on emperors and mansabdars, the vital roles of Indian scribes and merchants become visible and the Empire appears more porous, as various people and ideas flowed into and out of it.46
Drawing on provincial or local sources, including those in regional languages, produces more decentralized models of the Empire. Scholars concentrating at these levels show the Empire as an arena for pragmatic compromises and collaborations among lower-level officials and local magnates, merchants and other power-holders.47 From this perspective, localities collectively composed the Mughal state, but they also existed outside it, with their own on-going histories. Some scholars especially analyse popular oral and vernacular accounts to focus on those whom the Empire ruled, featuring their agency and perspectives.48 While the influential Subaltern Studies school of neo-Marxist Gramscian interpretation overwhelmingly concentrates on the British colonial period, Gautam Bhadra has shown how to recover popular perspectives through reading imperial texts against the grain.49 Cultural historians have deconstructed even elite texts to recover the texts’ own histories, considering how and why each was produced, the presuppositions inherent in its genre, what its author could or could not express, and how it was consumed by being acquired, preserved, and read silently or aloud—alone or in communal settings.50
Scholars working on the British colonial period tend to regard the Empire retrospectively. They show how most parts of the world began connecting into increasingly integrated economic, political and cultural networks from the arrival of Vasco da Gama in 1498 (predating Babur) onward. Various scholars concentrating on British colonialism find different degrees of continuity and change from the Mughal Empire, with the eighteenth century as the time of major transitions as diverse Indians reoriented from the Empire toward the incoming Europeans.51 Further, comparative perspectives raise questions about the ‘modernity’ of Mughal Empire (versus its contemporary states in Europe and Asia) and also about why European and Asian economies underwent dramatically diverging developments.52
Significantly, scholars have increasingly come together globally to form discourse communities, exchanging ideas and engaging in debates over shared engagement with Mughal history. Especially since World War II, U.S.-based scholars have increasingly participated, in part initiated by people who served in India and in part by growing awareness of the economic, political and cultural significance of South Asia on the world stage.53 A substantial number of leading scholars from South Asia have moved to universities in Europe or America. The rich and extensive source material available from and about the Empire has attracted international scholars who specialize in the exciting new fields of environmental, gender, cultural, new military, technological and world history. New insights from all these fields are continuing to revise and deepen our understanding of what the Mughal Empire meant and currently means.
Specialist historians will recognize how this book has benefited from a vast range of contributions from a variety of approaches. The reference notes and bibliography will indicate how readers can explore specific topics in far more depth than an introductory survey like this could include. This dynamic field of history will continue to be enriched by new approaches and further new innovative historical research. Ideally, readers of this Short History will be intrigued and contribute their own studies of the Mughal Empire.
Notes
Introduction: The Mughal Empire’s Dynamic Composition in Time and Space
1 Maddison: Contours, Appendix I-A.
2 Moin: Millennial.
3 Subrahmanyam: ‘Mughal.’
4 Abu’l-Fazl: Makatabat, letter (3 September 1586), p. 33.
Chapter 1: Babur until His Conquest of North India in 1526
1 Babur: Baburnama, p. 332.
2 Ibid., p. 279.
3 For biographies, see Anooshahr: ‘Author’; Dale: Garden; Erskine: History; Mohibbul Hasan: Babur; Moin: Millennial, ‘Peering’; Williams: Empire.
4 Babur: Baburnama, p. 102.
5 Ibid., p. 59.
6 See: Balabanlilar: ‘Begims’; Gulbadan: History; Lal: Domesticity, ‘Historicizing.’
7 Babur: Baburnama, p. 35.
8 Ibid., p. 39.
9 Ibid., p. 93.
10 Dale: ‘Poetry.’
11 Babur: Baburnama, p. 138.
12 Ibid., pp. 169, 180.
13 Ibid., p. 414.
14 Ibid., pp. 62, 414; Gulbadan: History, p. 89.
15 Babur: Baburnama, pp. 54, 239, 257, 263; Gulbad
an: History, pp. 90, 276.
16 Babur: Baburnama, p. 273; Gulbadan: History, pp. 9, 266–7.
17 Gulbadan: History, p. 97.
18 Babur: Baburnama, p. 302.
19 Streusand: Islamic.
20 Babur: Baburnama, p. 372.
21 Ibid., p. 186.
22 Ibid., p. 329.
23 Ibid., p. 320.
24 Ibid., p. 324.
25 Ibid., pp. 314, 323.
26 Ibid., p. 322.
27 Ibid., p. 327.
28 Ibid., p. 328.
29 Ibid., p. 353; Gulbadan: History, pp. 95–6.
30 Satyal: Mughal, p. 50.
31 Babur: Baburnama, pp. 353–4.
Chapter 2: Indians and Emperor Babur Create the Mughal Empire, 1526–30
1 Jahangir: Tuzuk, vol. 2, p. 141.
2 Talbot: ‘Becoming.’
3 Oberoi: Construction, p. 174.
4 Chetan Singh: ‘Forests.’
5 Babur: Baburnama, p. 334.
6 Ibid., pp. 373–80, 383; Williams: Empire, p. 152.
7 Babur: Baburnama, pp. 387, 397; Dale: Garden, p. 351.
8 Anooshahr: ‘King.’
9 Jahangir: Tuzuk, vol. 1, p. 55.
10 Babur: Baburnama, pp. 363, 372.
11 Ibid., pp. 395, 397.
12 Ibid., p. 396.
13 Ibid., p. 409.
14 Eaton: ‘Kiss.’
15 Babur: Baburnama, pp. 410, 425; Dale and Paynd: ‘Ahrari’; Foltz: ‘Central’; Moin: ‘Peering.’
16 Asher: Architecture, p. 37; Babur: Baburnama, pp. 359–60, 416–18; Dale: Garden, pp. 426–7.
17 Babur: Baburnama, p. 351.
18 Dale: ‘Steppe,’ p. 49.
19 Dale: Garden, pp. 426–7, 431.
20 Babur: Baburnama, p. 351.
21 Masson: Narrative, vol. 2, p. 238.
Chapter 3: Emperor Humayun and Indians, 1530–40, 1555–6
A Short History of the Mughal Empire (I.B.Tauris Short Histories) Page 26