The Mughal Empire
In 1526 Babur (BAH-bur) (1483-1530), a Muslim descendant of Genghis Khan and Tamerlane, led 12,000 troops from Afghanistan and conquered much of north India to form a new ruling dynasty called the Mughal, a corruption of Mongol. Babur was a learned man, a gifted poet in the Persian language, but he was also an ambitious and powerful man whose new dynasty restored the imperial grandeur of India. Indeed, at the height of their power, the Mughals created one of most magnificent societies in the world. The wealth displayed at the imperial court prompted a French visitor to wonder whether any other monarch possessed more gold, silver, and jewels, and it inspired the English to use the term mogul to mean someone of extreme wealth.
|
Mughal India had few rivals in military strength, government efficiency, economic power, and royal patronage of the arts. The Mughals, like earlier Indian governments, had to manage a highly diverse society. The majority of people shared many traditions and practiced Hinduism, a religion of varied beliefs and customs. However, since the ninth century, a succession of Muslim states had ruled parts of the subcontinent, and perhaps a quarter of the Indian population embraced Islam. Polytheistic Hinduism and monotheistic Islam offered starkly different visions of the cosmic and social order. As a result, Hindus and Muslims often disagreed and competed for influence in Indian society. Yet at the village level, Hindus and Muslims lived side-by-side, sharing many customs of the larger culture.
|
By 1500 Buddhism, which had thrived for centuries, had nearly died out in India, but the majority of people in Tibet and on the island of Sri Lanka (Ceylon) remained Buddhists. Indian society was also fragmented by caste divisions and hundreds of different regional languages, such as Bengali in the northeast and Tamil in the southeast. While proud of their Central Asian origins and influenced by Persian culture, the Mughals adapted to Indian conditions. For example, they used Urdu, a mix of Hindi, Arabic, and Persian written in the Persian script, as their language of administration. Urdu had developed in earlier centuries as a common language among many Indian Muslims
Akbar
Akbar (AK-bahr) (r. 1556-1605), a grandson of Babur, pursued innovative policies and became the most outstanding Mughal ruler. Historians often consider Akbar's India to have been the best-managed state of that era in the world. Akbar, whose name means "Very Great," expanded Babur's empire over all of north India, including Bengal, and deep into south India. In part, this success resulted from his winning the support of various Hindu groups, including some of the Hindu warrior caste, the Rajputs (RAHJ-putz).
|
To ensure stability and defuse opposition, Akbar gave Hindus high positions in the government and removed the extra taxes earlier Muslim rulers in India had imposed on non-Muslims, policies that brought him wide popularity. He also reformed the government and promoted religious toleration and compromise between communities. Peace and prosperity prevailed during Akbar's reign. Akbar earned his reputation as a reformer by having bribery and corruption strictly checked and seeing that the law was justly administered. He tried with only limited success to abolish what he considered the most pernicious social customs, such as sati (burning the wife on the husband's funeral pyre), child marriage, and trial by ordeal, but he did end the enslavement of prisoners of war.
Akbar's India also enjoyed an enlightened criminal code for the era, and all citizens had the right of appeal to the ruler if they believed themselves wrongly convicted of a crime or mistreated in the courts. Akbar presided over a golden age, but many of his successors had less of his tolerance and wisdom.
The Mughals never worked out a stable pattern of succession. Moreover, Muslim rulers in India had many wives and concubines, producing numerous male heirs to the throne who often plotted against their father and each other. Akbar was poisoned by a rebellious son, who then occupied the throne as Jahangir (ja-HAN-gear) ("World Seizer"). Royal Mughal women had considerable power at court, and Jahangir was strongly influenced by his Persian wife, Nur Jahan (nur ja-HAN), who often defied gender roles by joining him on hunting expeditions. Jahangir wrote that he had handed government business over to Nur Jahan, and that he only needed wine and meat to be happy. While Jahangir generally pursued Akbar's wise public policies, his son, Shah Jahan (r. 1628-1658), abandoned the idea of a tolerant India that respected diverse traditions; instead he promoted Islam and destroyed several Hindu temples. He also took extravagant living to new heights, assembling a harem of 5,000 concubines. Sitting on his splendid jewel-encrusted Peacock Throne in Delhi, Shah Jahan doubled the tax bills, and even then his extensive building projects virtually bankrupted the state. Unsuccessful military campaigns in Afghanistan and Central Asia added to the problems. Eventually Shah Jahan was imprison by his ambitious, even more intolerant son, Aurangzeb (ett rang-ZEB) (r. 1658-1707), who greatly expanded the empire to the south but also set in motion the forces that began undermine the Mughal state and its revenues.
|
click to read the article about Shad Jahan and the Taj Mahal ↑
|
The Decline of the Mughals
Eventually the Mughals' endless wars of expansion and extravagant royal spending drained state coffers, reducing their ability to maintain power. Before the eighteenth century, the military strength of the Mughal state had been sufficient to keep Europeans and other enemies at bay. Although the state lacked the naval power to control the nearby oceans, the Mughal army, numbering some 1 million soldiers, was equipped with gunpowder weapons such as muskets and field artillery that rivaled European arms, and it had thousands of elephants to ride into battle and large cavalry units. By the early 1700s, however, the once vaunted Mughal military machine was faltering and the Mughals lacked the money to match European military capabilities.
Furthermore, increasing tax demands on both merchants and peasants impoverished many of them and, combined with growing hatred toward Aurangzeb, sparked increasing opposition to Mughal rule. Aurangzeb's ruthless and intolerant policies alienated both Muslims and non-Muslims who had once supported Mughal rule. A man with a more dogmatic view of Islam and less generous viewpoints than his predecessors toward non-Muslims, Aurangzeb placed higher taxes on non-Muslims and persecuted—sometimes even executed—Hindu and Sikh leaders he saw as a threat to his power. His cruelty toward opponents and toleration of corruption also alienated many pious and tolerant Muslims, one of whom wrote that "bribery is everywhere; mean people have become governors, and the Islamic judge himself is called a thief. May God damn the tyrant! In this world, he is an infidel; in the next, he is in hell"
Revolt undermined Aurangzeb's later years, eventually leading to the dismantling of the Mughal state as regions broke away. To expand his empire and counter threats from other Indian states, Aurangzeb had, at great expense, significantly increased the size of his already huge army, creating logistical problems in supplying the troops just as anti-Mughal forces became bolder. The Marathas (muh-RAH-tuhz), a Hindu group from western India who had long resisted Mughal power, began raiding into the empire in the later 1600s and cutting Mughal supply lines. Some Hindu merchants, disenchanted with Mughal corruption, provided the Marathas with guns. When Safavid Iran conquered much of the Mughal-controlled areas of Afghanistan in the early seventeenth century, Mughal leaders were too busy plotting against each other to respond. Increasingly unable to control their remaining domains, the Mughal rulers were finally defeated in 1761 by Hindu and Sikh insurgents. The decline and demise of the powerful Mughal state left India open to penetration and eventually conquest by Europeans. The anti-Mughal forces could not unite, leaving India fragmented and vulnerable. The division between Muslims and Hindus, a split intensified by the intolerance of later Mughal rulers, played a critical role in the gradual establishment of European domination. After they began annexing parts of India in the 1700s, the English encouraged the Hindu-Muslim division as a way to fragment opposition, but they also had trouble subduing the Sikhs, who dreamed of their own nation. The religious divide greatly affected twentieth-century. South Asia, which became divided into rival Hindu and Muslim nations.
Akbar vs. Aurangzeb
|