As a unit of historical study, South Asia is relatively easy to define in geographical terms. The Indian Ocean surrounds it on three sides, to the east, south, and west, while the apparently insurmountable glaciers of the Himalayas, punctuated only by a small number of major passes like the Khyber and the Bolan, mark its northern limits. The subcontinent thus defined is far from homogenous, of course, being characterized instead by a geographical, linguistic, and ethnic diversity that makes it difficult to generalize across the entire region. One of the pioneers of South Asian geographic studies thus argued that four major geopolitical centers of population and trade have reasserted themselves over the centuries: the Indo-Gangetic plain, Gujarat, the east-central delta of the Krishna and Godavari rivers, and the southern peninsula.1 Despite the existence of these distinctive zones, few scholars would disagree with the conclusion of historian J. F. Richards that “the degrees of similarity in society and culture among all regions in the subcontinent are such that we can reasonably discuss and analyse South Asia as a unit.”2
One of the more important historical processes binding the region together as a meaningful unit of study is precisely its imperial history. State builders from an early period attempted to unify the entire Indian subcontinent under their control, from the Maurya (322–185 bce) and Gupta (240–550) empires to the Delhi Sultanate (1206–1526) and the British Empire (1757–1947). During the early modern era, in particular, several polities vied for supremacy over the region, including the Lōdī Sultanate in the north, Vijayanagara in the south, the Marathas in Maharashtra and the Western Ghats, and the various Rajput princes (from Sanskrit rāja-putra or son of a king) and Ranjit Singh’s ‘Sikh Empire’ in the northwest. The most successful and lasting of these early modern imperial projects, however, was that of the Mughals. Founded in 1526 by Ẓahīr al-Dīn Muḥammad Bābur (1483–1530), a fugitive Timurid prince from Central Asia, the Mughal Empire expanded rapidly to cover most of contemporary India, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. It maintained its rule, at least in name, well into the 1800s (Figure 5.2).
This chapter therefore focuses on the Mughal Empire as the most important, representative, and influential exemplar of South Asian imperial traditions during the early modern period. The longevity of the Timurid dynasty founded by Bābur poses the questions of how the dynastic line of a Central Asian warlord had gained such wide acceptance in South Asian society, and why it remained a powerful source of legitimacy well after the decline of its military might in the eighteenth century. In order to examine these questions, this chapter begins by providing a brief narrative outline of the rise and decline of the Mughal Empire along with its structure and institutions. It will then turn to an examination of the broader context for South Asian notions of kingship and sovereignty and Mughal imperial ideology as it developed during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The chapter will describe the most important Mughal imperial practices, their antecedents and innovations. Finally, it discusses the Mughals’ interactions with the other contemporary empires and concludes with a mention of the legacies left behind by the Mughal Empire.
Mughal Conquests and Imperial Expansion
Bābur, the founder of the Mughal ruling dynasty, was the eldest son of the Timurid ruler of the Fergana Valley in modern Uzbekistan and could boast of being from a particularly distinguished lineage, being a direct descendant both of Tīmūr Lang (1336–1405) on his father’s side and of Chinggis Khan on his mother’s. Although Europeans would refer to the descendants of Tīmūr in India as “Mughals” (from the Persian mughul or “mongol”), this was not the term they adopted for themselves. Instead, the dynasty emphasized its Timurid pedigree and referred to themselves throughout the period of Mughal rule as “the Lineage of the Son-in Law” (Silsilah-yi Guregen or just Gūrkāniyān) in oblique reference to Tīmūr’s status as husband to a Chinggisid princess (Mongol: güregen).3
Although the Timurid princes prided themselves on the military exploits of their great progenitor, they were themselves unable to hold on to the rich lands of Transoxiana that Tīmūr had made the center of his empire. Between 1500 and 1513, the Uzbeks under Muhammad Shaybāni chased the Timurids from virtually all of their former possessions. In 1506, after the death of Ḥusayn Bāyqarā (the Timurid ruler of Herat in Afghanistan), Bābur emerged as the foremost representative of the house of Tīmūr and by 1513 was holding out in the last remaining Timurid stronghold at Kabul. Probably in imitation of his grandfather Abū Sa’īd Mīrzā (1424–69), who had ruled over much of Central Asia, Persia, and Afghanistan, Bābur signaled his imperial pretensions by assuming the title of pādishāh in 1507.4 All his attempts to reconquer Transoxiana from the Uzbeks failed, however, and his position in Kabul remained precarious. Bābur therefore turned his ambitions to South Asia in 1519. His raids into the Punjab and conquest of Lahore by 1523 replenished his army’s coffers and emboldened him to stake a claim to the northern Indian lands that Tīmūr had conquered over a century ago. Bābur demanded his patrimony from the reigning sultan of Delhi and Agra, Ibrāhīm Lōdī. The latter’s refusal to concede resulted in a resort to arms by the two rivals at the Battle of Panipat in 1526. Bābur won a resounding victory and the capture of the accumulated treasure of the Lōdīs funded expeditions deeper into “Hindustan” (the Gangetic Plain).
The following year, Bābur fought another important battle at Khanua in Rajasthan, defeating a grand coalition of Rajput kings headed by the legendary Rāna Sanga of Mewar. In both these battles Bābur used a combination of new military techniques, employing matchlock-men, field guns, and cavalry. In the subsequent years of his rule, he pursued the retreating Afghan and Rajput forces over the fertile Ganga Plain toward Jaunpur and Bihar until his death in December 1530 and the succession of Humāyūn to the Mughal throne. The foundations of the new empire remained weak, however, and the rich provinces of Gujarat and Bengal were only barely pacified. In 1540 Mughal forces collapsed dramatically before Afghan forces led by Shīr Khan Sūrī, who defeated and drove Humāyūn out of Hindustan. After a decade and half long rule of the Sūr dynasty, Humāyūn recaptured the Mughal throne in 1555 thanks to the military assistance of the Safavid emperor Shah Ṭahmāsp. A few months later Akbar became the Mughal emperor after the accidental death of Humāyūn in January 1556.
The imperial conquests of Akbar progressed in three phases, corresponding roughly to the pattern established by earlier migrations and conquests in South Asia.5 During the regency of Bayrām Khan from 1556 to 1560, the young emperor secured control over the main routes passing through Lahore, Delhi, Agra, and Jaunpur that formed the spine of the Mughal Empire in northern India. In the second phase, from 1560 to 1585, Akbar consolidated his hold over Rajputana, in western India, and made inroads westward into Gujarat in 1572–73 and eastward into Bihar and Bengal in 1574–76. Effective control over the greater parts of both these eastern provinces was only achieved, however, toward the last decade of the century. In the third phase, from 1591 to 1601, the Mughals pressed southward into the Deccan. By the end of Akbar’s reign, the Mughals were in firm possession of the fertile Ganga plain, from the lucrative coastal provinces of Gujarat and Bengal to the northwestern frontiers of Kabul and Kandahar and had established tributary relations with the Deccan kingdoms. Akbar had also seized rich booty in the course of his conquests amounting to millions of rupees from Malwa (in central India) and other kingdoms. As the empire expanded, its resource base increased and by 1595–96 the total annual assessed land revenue of the empire stood at more than 100 million rupees.6
Akbar’s successor, Jahāngīr, was less energetic than his father in seeking further wars of conquest, as he was already in secure possession of the major north Indian routes and the richly endowed territories along them. He did, however, provide his successor, Prince Khurram, with opportunities to sharpen his military skills in several minor campaigns against Rajput chieftaincies like the Rāna of Mewar and also into the Deccan. These campaigns enjoyed modest success and Jahāngīr rewarded Khurram for his victories against the Deccani kingdoms of Ahmadnagar and Bijapur by bestowing upon him the appellation (laqab) of “World Shah” (Shāh Jahān). The Deccan plateau, however, remained far from subdued and in 1622 the Mughals suffered a strategic setback in the northwest when the Safavids wrested Kandahar from Mughal control.7
Upon becoming emperor in 1628, Shāh Jahān indicated his intention to renew the imperial glory of his dynasty’s Timurid past by adopting the title of “Second Lord of the Auspicious Conjunction” (Ṣāḥib Qirān-i Sānī).8 In keeping with this title, Shāh Jahān undertook grandiose architectural projects such as the Taj Mahal. More importantly, he sought energetically to extend Mughal control into Central Asia at the expense of his Safavid and Uzbek neighbors. The results were largely disappointing. The Mughal invasion of Balkh and Badakhshan in 1646–47 succeeded initially, but then stalled as the fractious Uzbek chieftains united their forces and looked to Persia for aid. The Mughals regained Kandahar, similarly, only to lose it again to the Safavids in 1648. Between 1649 and 1653, the Mughals laid siege to the Kandahar fortress repeatedly but without avail, at the cost of millions of rupees and thousands of lives. Mughal forces also suffered reverses on the northeastern frontier following an unsuccessful war against the Ahom kings of Assam in 1638. Elsewhere in South Asia, however, Shāh Jahān enjoyed more success. He managed to expel the Portuguese from Bengal, subdued the Rajput chieftains of western India, and secured continuing tribute from the Deccan kingdoms. In each of these cases, however, the Mughals did little more than hold in temporary abeyance the ambitions of these local powers to withheld tribute, enlarge their own military capabilities, and establish autonomous rule.9
The reign of Aurangzeb (r. 1658–1707) that followed is often seen as the last period when the Mughals were still able to overawe their political rivals in South Asia by military means alone. During the first two decades of his reign, Aurangzeb focused military efforts on consolidating and pacifying the northeastern and northwestern frontiers of his empire. Mīr Jumla, the new governor of Bengal, thus managed to keep the Ahom king of Assam at bay for much of the 1660s by experimenting with new forms of amphibious warfare, such as the so-called ghurabs or floating batteries and armed vessels.10 In the northwest, the Mughals bought a respite from the constant Afghan raids on merchant caravans by lavishing subsidies and administrative positions on hostile mountain tribes such as the Yūsafzai, Wazīrī, and Afrīdī. In many such frontier regions, as Jos Gommans writes, “The limits of the empire ... were extremely narrow, and only a few yards left or right of the main road the hukūmat [‘authority’] of the Mughals came to an end and shifted into the yāghistān, the ‘land of sedition.’”11
For Aurangzeb, however, it was the Deccan rather than either Assam or Afghanistan that remained the quintessential yāghistān. From the 1680s onward, he spent the rest of his life seeking to conquer and annex the Shi’ite kingdoms of Bijapur and Golconda, and to contain the rising threat posed by the Marathas. Originating from the modern province of Maharashtra, the Marathas were Hindus belonging to the relatively lowborn Kunbi caste of pastoral agriculturalists. During the seventeenth century, however, they distinguished themselves as light cavalrymen in the service of the various Deccan states and began to emerge as a formidable military power capable of challenging Mughal authority. Under the talented leadership of Śivaji Bhonsle (1630–80), the Marathas carved out a large dominion along the Western Ghats in Maharashtra and Karnataka between Pune and Bijapur. The Marathas caused Aurangzeb considerable embarrassment by repeatedly plundering both Bijapuri and Mughal territory, sacking the port town of Surat, and exacting millions of rupees in ransoms from pilgrim ships bound for Mecca. Unable to defeat the Marathas decisively on the battlefield, the Mughal court sought to co-opt Śivaji by making him a Mughal vassal. The resulting rapprochement was strained and lasted for less than five years before Śivaji returned to raiding Mughal possessions in 1670. His Maratha cavalry sacked Surat for a second time and exacted more than six million rupees in plunder. In order to better counter the Maratha threat and complete the conquest of the Deccan kingdoms, Aurangzeb relocated his entire court apparatus to the south in the 1680s. By 1687, he had annexed both the kingdoms of Bijapur and Golconda, conquests that yielded more than sixty million rupees along with much jewelry, gold, and silver.12 These conquests marked the acme of Mughal territorial expansion, however, and upon Aurangzeb’s death in 1707 Mughal power would steadily decline during the next century.
Structure and Institutions of the Mughal Empire
The Mughals drew on three major sources of inspiration in creating the structure and institutions of the new empire: (1) the legacy left by the polities the Mughals had displaced, (2) Central Asian and Timurid traditions, and (3) their own ingenuity. Like many other empires, the Mughals found it easiest and most prudent simply to leave in place many of the administrative and military institutions they had inherited from the Delhi Sultanate and the short-lived Sūrī Empire of Shīr Shāh (r. 1540–45). Most of the institutions governing lower level fiscal administration throughout the provinces remained in place, for example, and Akbar retained the tri-metallic currency system that Shīr Shāh had initiated. The Central Asian origins of the Mughals also, however, exercised a strong influence over them, especially during the first decades after the establishment of the new empire.
A good illustration of the manner in which the Mughals creatively adapted existing institutions was their use of the iqṭā‘ system of prebendal grants—a long-standing practice throughout the Islamic world and one that all previous South Asian Muslim rulers had relied upon.13 Like their Ottoman and Safavid neighbors, the Mughals divided their tax revenue into two principal streams. Crown lands (khāliṣa) deposited their taxes directly into the royal treasury. The rest of the state’s lands provided the basis for a complex system of “place-holdings” (jāgīr), according to which the state bestowed a share in its tax revenues and powers on individual “place holders” (jāgīrdār) in exchange for their services.14 The Mughal state allocated four principal types of jāgīrs, depending on the nature of the service provided. High-ranking imperial officials, for example, received what were known as jāgīr tankha in lieu of salary. Grants of mashrūṭ jāgīrs were tied to a particular rank in the military or civil hierarchy and were conditional on the discharge of specific set duties. Grants of inām jāgīrs, by contrast, carried no particular obligations and were not tied to civil or military rank. In practice, the Mughals often used inām jāgīrs to support individual Islamic scholars, holy men, or other meritorious people. The fourth type of grant, known as watan jāgīr, essentially regularized and licensed the power that local chieftains, warlords, and Rajputs already held de facto over their ancestral lands. Unlike normal jāgīrs, which could be cancelled or reassigned at regular intervals, a watan jāgīr was nontransferable and passed automatically to the heir of the current jāgīrdār upon his death.
Another important example of creative adaptation was the hierarchy of roughly thirty-three ranks (mansab) into which the Mughals classified their servitors. Timurid princes could look back to Chinggis Khan for the precedent of establishing a strict and clearly defined system of military ranks, but the Mughals beginning with Akbar went further by consolidating both civil and military officials into a single hierarchical table. All movement up or down the ranks depended on the favor of the emperor. Mansab were ranked depending on two types of gradations: zāt and sawār. While the zāt signified a rank holder’s relative position within the imperial hierarchy, the sawār denoted the number of cavalrymen the officer was expected to maintain. Those mansab holders (mansabdār) who held a rank of not less than 1,000 zāt constituted the “nobility” or grandees of the Mughal Empire. The numeric rank of a mansab also established the emoluments its holder could expect to receive, whether as salary, jāgīr, or a mix of both. Each mansabdār was to use the revenues thus achieved to defray their own expenses and to provision the set number of cavalrymen determined by their sawār rank. Normally, the prime minister or vazīr/dīwān at the court formally assigned jāgīrs for a period of three years before transferring them to another assignee on a rotational basis. The more important mansabdārs often possessed title to collect revenue from jāgīr lands dispersed across the empire and had to rely on assistance from local officials and authority figures (known as zamīndārs or “land holders”) in collecting the revenue they were owed.15 The obvious benefit to the central state of such frequent circulation of jāgīrs was that it prevented officials from sinking roots in any one place and developing their own power base or hereditary claims independent of the state. As long as the imperial center remained powerful, this system worked fairly well. Even at its height, however, the Mughal state permitted some large zamīndārs and certain privileged groups such as prominent scholars, descendants of Sufi saints, former mansabdārs, and aristocratic immigrants from Central Asia to possess the same tax-free jāgīrs for life as madad-i ma’āsh or inām and to pass them on to their children. These hereditary jāgīrs quickly grew in size and allowed their possessors to construct exactly the sort of localized power networks that the system had been designed to prevent.16
According to Athar Ali, the total number of mansab holders (mansabdār) during Shāh Jahān’s and Aurangzeb’s reign did not exceed 8,000 and of these probably no more than 500 were mansabdārs of the highest ranks (with more than 1,000 zāt).17 M. N. Pearson argues that, in practice, these figures meant that roughly 1,000 rank holders of high and medium rank constituted the core of the empire. These were the officials who bore the burden of administering an extensive and diverse geographical area with a population ranging between 70 and 120 million.18 Such a thin layer of administration had to depend on a combination of alliances and coercive authority backed by military force for collecting the land revenue. While the emperor commanded the loyalty of mansabdārs, “for all other subjects of the empire, loyalty went to the social groups to which they belonged, not to the empire or the emperor.” Pearson later modified this position in another essay by admitting that the leaders of the different social groups of the empire were themselves divided between multiple, overlapping loyalties.19 In reality, however, it oversimplifies matters to attempt to distil relations between the state, social elites, and communities into terms of loyalty versus disloyalty.20 More often than not, questions of loyalty to the empire were secondary to personal rivalries, calculations over how best to secure resources, mutual benefit, submission and defiance, alliance and outright rebellion, and so on.
At the center of the Mughal administration, of course, was the emperor and the five most important officials, who worked under his close supervision. The first of these positions was supposed to be that of the “representative” (vakīl) of the reigning emperor. In practice, however, the post was a vestige from the earlier Delhi Sultanate period and by the Mughal period had become a largely honorary position, often granted to an important dignitary who headed the nobility. The most powerful official at court in fact was the vizier (vazīr), who often also held the title and exercised the functions of an exchequer (dīwān).21 Balancing the fiscal power of the vazīr/dīwān was the administrator and chief pay-master of the Mughal military, known as the mīr bakhshī. The mīr bakhshī also made most of the recommendations for appointments to high-ranking imperial mansabs. The affairs of the imperial household came under the care of the mīr sāmān, who acted as both steward and chamberlain to the emperor, while also overseeing the workshops (kārkhānā) that supplied luxury goods and finely crafted arms and armor to the palace and the imperial elite. Another important officer was the ṣadr or “foremost” of the religious establishment, who along with the chief judge (qāḍī) undertook the responsibility of maintaining law and order, the administration of charitable and religious endowments, and the dispensing of justice throughout the empire by appointing civil and judicial officers at the provincial levels.22
The structure of the court was recapitulated at the level of the provinces (ṣūba), each of which had its own governor (ṣūbadār) supported by a dīwān, bakhshī, and ṣadr who were (in theory, at least) subordinate to their superiors in the capital. At the provincial level, the Mughals also sought to prevent abuses and disproportionate concentration of power in the hands of a single official by dividing administrative responsibilities between two officials that were roughly equal in authority. For example, the provincial governor had to deal with the provincial fiscal authority (dīwān), who functioned independent of the former’s control. The resulting system of checks and balances was a key organizational principle that the Mughals instituted at both the central and provincial levels.23
As a land-based and revenue extractive empire, the Mughal state depended on its ability to alienate resources from the peasantry. The success of these efforts, in turn, depended on the ability of the Mughal state to identify and quantify revenue sources accurately. One of the most important achievements of Akbar’s reign was thus to build upon the innovations in tax collection that they had inherited from the Sūrī Empire of Shīr Shāh.24 Akbar’s famous dīwān minister, the Khatri Hindu Todar Mal, was particularly important in establishing a system for accurately determining the actual resources and taxation capacity of different areas within his empire. Using a system known as the “ten years’ settlement” (‘āin-i dahsālā), Akbar attempted to levy a reasonable tax by calculating the average production of a given area over the period of a decade.25 Revenue officials henceforward set the tax burden on peasants only after having obtained data on the revenue rate and local market prices of crops for the preceding ten years in the principal cities of Agra, Allahabad, Oudh, Delhi, Lahore, and Malwa.
Even with these improvements in tax assessment, however, the Mughal state still struggled to realize the revenue that it had claimed for itself from the peasant producers of that wealth. Modern scholars have too often assumed that, as a centralized bureaucratic empire, the Mughals carried away everything over and above the subsistence level from the peasantry.26 In practice, however, few of Akbar’s successors imitated his example and carried out new land revenue assessments. Official cadastral registers quickly became outdated and the central state had increasing difficulties in obtaining exact figures on agricultural production from local officials. Moreover, the administrative mechanisms designed to extract surpluses from the peasantry did not function effectively or uniformly across the empire. In the imperial heartland of Agra, Delhi, and the surrounding provinces, for example, revenue collection was relatively efficient and well administered. However, the same cannot be said of outlying regions such as Bihar and Bengal, or the many pockets of the empire which were under the control of autonomous chieftains.27 Furthermore, as agricultural production increased over the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, increased productivity did not benefit the central state but rather local zamīndārs who were better placed to detect and appropriate surpluses.28 The increased productive capacity and appropriation of resources at the local level thus strengthened exactly those centrifugal forces that sought to establish greater autonomy for themselves within the Mughal Empire.
It was more than mere coincidence that the three large Islamic empires of the Ottomans, Safavids, and Mughals emerged and endured during the same two centuries that saw an unprecedented supply of bullion onto the markets of the world from the mines of the Americas and Japan. Did the increased availability of gold and silver contribute to the effectiveness of the Mughal Empire, or did greater financial liquidity, in the long run, encourage fissiparous tendencies within it? In general terms, increased liquidity eased the problems of all large agrarian empires since it facilitated revenue collection and salarying of the bureaucracy and military and brought the hitherto largely inert merchants to the forefront. Depending on the role of money in spurring economic growth, however, monetization had divergent outcomes in different societies. In the Ottoman Empire, for example, the increasing money supply produced rampant inflation and a range of destabilizing effects. In the Mughal Empire, by comparison, inflation was minimal.29 The absence of any significant inflationary trend is often linked to the capacity of the Mughal economy to respond favorably to external demands by expanding its productive capacity. For example, an increased money supply not only aided agricultural expansion in the fertile Gangetic valley and stimulated trade and population growth, it also boosted the production of craft goods—most notably textiles.
The favorable effects of increased money supply encouraged the Mughals to take an unusually active interest in the promotion of trade and commerce, in maintaining a complex tri-metallic currency regime, and in encouraging financial institutions manned by money changers (shroffs) and based on bills of exchange (hundīs). The state and private financial services depended on the well-established hundī networks for transferring money in different parts of the empire. The Mughal Empire was not a mercantilist state along the lines of those found in western Europe, and it differed substantially from the model afforded by late imperial China, which supported a market economy in an agrarian society but harbored reservations about commercial capitalism except for monopolies on salt and foreign trade.30 On the contrary, merchants and “portfolio capitalists” thrived under the commercial opportunities available in the Mughal Empire.
Another group that benefitted from economic growth and increased overseas trade was the zamīndārs and other Mughal officials who had managed to establish themselves as local power figures. As the effectiveness of the Mughal Empire weakened during the early eighteenth century, local political elites increasingly withheld revenue from the state and used it to increase their own military strength. Thus emboldened, local warlords increasingly ignored orders emanating from the Mughal government and began to invest themselves with the trappings of independent authority, all while continuing to pay lip-service to Mughal suzerainty.31 In Bihar, for example, local zamīndārs entered into direct trade contracts with the Dutch East India Company during the early decades of the eighteenth century, allowing the latter to establish warehouses and purchase commodities.32
The extent to which these chieftains already saw themselves as more or less independent of the Mughal court can be gauged from their conclusion of multiple trade treaties with foreign bodies—the various European chartered companies—without so much as invoking the name of their ostensible suzerain, the Mughal emperor. The Bihari zamīndārs, for example, admitted their subordination to the Mughals when dealing directly with the imperial authority, but within the borders of their fiefdoms they thought and behaved like any independent sovereign. European companies such as the East India Company (EIC) thus found ample opportunities for inserting themselves into this process of “regional centralization” pioneered by the zamīndārs and other Mughal rank holders. When the EIC moved into Bengal in the 1760s, for example, it appeared to be acting no differently from other zamīndārs: like other zamīndārs, it diverted trade and tax revenues to fund its private armies and pursued political aggrandizement while remaining formally subordinate to the Mughal throne.
Mughal political and economic dominance began to wither after the death of the last great Mughal, Aurangzeb, in 1707. Paradoxically, however, as the Mughal imperial center weakened, most of the newly autonomous regions and servitors continued to uphold formal Mughal suzerainty.33 In 1765, for example, the EIC formally became tributaries of the Mughal emperor Shāh ‘Ālam. In exchange for a tribute of 2.6 million rupees annually, the EIC became the official revenue collector (dīwān) of the Mughal emperor in the Bengal province (ṣūba)—comprising Bengal, Bihar, and Orissa. The British upheld the fiction of Mughal suzerainty for almost a century, until the great rebellion of 1857 when the sepoy troops of the EIC sought to overthrow company rule in the name of the de jure Mughal emperor Bahādur Shāh II (r. 1837–58). The British, having ruthlessly suppressed the revolt, hurriedly placed “the king of Delhi” on trial in 1858. A British court found the Mughals guilty of “high treason” and carried out sentences that effectively put an end to the dynasty. Bahādur Shāh was deposed and sentenced to live out his days in exile in Rangoon while the other royal princes were executed. With the elimination of the Mughal dynastic line, Queen Victoria assumed direct control over the affairs of India by an act of parliament.34
As the story of the rise and decline of the Mughal Empire outlined above makes clear, the Mughals at their zenith controlled an empire that was one of the largest in the world, both in terms of its economic resources and its population base. Such a congeries of peoples and territories posed difficult administrative challenges, especially as the Mughals sought to act as the chief arbitrators of the many differences arising among their servitors and subjects.35 The Mughals sought to resolve these challenges by drawing creatively on both indigenous South Asian and Central Asian administrative practices, notions of kingship, and sovereignty.
The South Asian Context of Mughal Notions of Kingship and Sovereignty
South Asian traditions of statecraft possessed some notion of empire as a superior class of polity from a relatively early date. The Vedas and Classical Sanskrit epics, for example, contain political terms—mostly derived from the verbal root “to rule” or “to shine” (rāj)—that distinguished between a “petty king” (rājaka), a “king” (rājan), a “great king” (mahārāja), a “supreme king” or “overlord” (adhirāj), and a “paramount/universal ruler” (samrāt). Just as Vedic cosmology imagined the world as a “wheel-like enclosure” (cakravāla) with the cosmic Mount Meru at its center, so the same worldview encouraged Hindus, Jains, and Buddhists alike to expect the emergence of “wheel-turning monarchs” (cakravartin) of superior virtue, who would be victorious in all directions (digvijaya) and use their paramountcy to uphold the moral order of the universe. Vedic and post-Vedic literature even prescribed a specific ritual sacrifice, the rājasūya yajña, to mark and consecrate the ascension of a victorious king to supremacy over all other rulers. In the epic Mahābhārata, for example, the sage Nārada urges King Yudhiṣṭhira to imitate an earlier emperor, Hariścandra, who had been
a mighty king, the sovereign of all the lords of earth, and all the kings on earth always bowed to his behest ... [H]e subjugated the seven continents with the might of his sword, lord of men. After he had conquered the entire world with its mountains, forests, and woods, he offered up, great king, the great Royal Consecration Sacrifice [i.e., the rājasūya].36
In practical terms, however, such “universal rule” need not actually encompass the entire world except in a moral sense. The Arthaśāstra, a monumental work on political economy written by Kauṭilīya in the fourth century bce, defined the true “field of endeavour of the wheel-turning monarch”—his cakravarti-kṣetra—as lying within the more limited space of the subcontinent, “one thousand yojanas in extent” from the Himalayas to the sea.37
The Mauryan and later the Gupta kings strove with varying degrees of success to put such notions into practice by becoming masters of the cakravarti-kṣetra of the subcontinent and assuming grandiose titles such as “great king of kings” (mahārājādhirāj).38 The edicts of the most powerful of the Mauryan emperors, Aśoka, are more modest in that they refer to him as merely the “beloved of the gods” (devānāmpriya). His official promotion of Buddhism and a common code of social ethics (dhammā) across the subcontinent, however, were clearly evocative of a cakravartin seeking to reestablish the cosmic moral order.39 Rather than bringing about political or administrative unification of the entire subcontinent, Aśoka’s digvijaya or world conquest thus took the form of propagating dhammā through edicts carved on rocks and pillars in different parts of the subcontinent. It is generally agreed that the Mauryan state maintained varying degrees of control over its constituent parts, but that the ruler claimed sovereign authority over a number of subordinate kings and allies who agreed to adhere to the norms of dhammā.40
Since universal rulership was grounded in moral qualities and a corpus of Sanskrit literary texts and culture, rather than dynastic bloodline, religion, or de facto control, different South Asian states could—and did—simultaneously claim to be world empires, even as they coexisted with a host of other (ostensibly) subordinate kingdoms. Sheldon Pollock has argued that this tradition of multiple, overlapping universal polities encouraged South Asian states from the Mauryas to the Mughals to accept a “limited and layered sovereignty” and to embrace a “non-ethnic cosmopolitanism” that did not require imperial subjects to identify with a particular religion, administrative center, or ethnicity.41 The resulting “Sanskrit cosmopolitanism” proved highly transportable, allowing rulers as far away as the Philippines and Indonesian archipelago to imagine the lands they ruled through the lenses of Sanskrit literary culture as duplicate cakravarti-kṣetras, each with their own “golden Mount Merus and purifying river Gaṅgās.”42
Beginning in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, however, the incursions of Turkic and Afghan raiders into South Asia initiated a sharp break with the political traditions of the earlier Hindu states. These invaders established a succession of states from the Delhi Sultanate (1206–1526) in the north to the Bahmani Sultanate (1347–1527) in the Deccan that were Muslim ruled and drew their political inspirations predominantly from Mongol, Persian, and Arab sources. The ideas and traditions of the “Sanskrit cosmopolis” would persist into the early modern era, remaining dominant in Hindu and Buddhist polities such as the Vijayanagara (1336–1646) and Eastern Ganga (1078–1434) empires and the various Rajput and Sinhalese kingdoms. Turco-Persianate political culture was clearly, however, in the ascent and had become the dominant paradigm in the largest, richest, and most powerful states of the subcontinent by the arrival of the Mughals. Increasingly, Persian (and, to a much lesser extent, Chaghatai Turkic) replaced Sanskrit as the language of South Asian governance and diplomacy, while Persian literary culture replaced its Sanskrit counterpart as the linguistic vehicle and marker of political power.
It is striking that this transition in South Asia from a “Sanskrit cosmopolis” to a “Persian cosmopolis” occurred not only in Muslim states, but also in non-Muslim ones.43 By the sixteenth century, in other words, Vijayanagaran emperors and Rajput kings were articulating political claims and projecting their rule, quite literally, in a Persian cultural idiom. Visitors to the court of Vijayanagara, for example, encountered Hindu rulers who had adopted elements of Turco-Persianate courtly dress, gave audiences in palaces adorned with Persianate architectural features, and even referred to themselves as “sultan” (suratāḷu) or—more tellingly—“sultan among Hindu kings” (hindū-rāya-suratrāṇa).44 When the Mughals thus began building their empire in the early sixteenth century, they could draw on an unusually rich melange of imperial ideas and practices, contained in a bewildering range of Vedic rituals and Islamic hadiths, Chinggisid laws and Timurid traditions, Sanskrit epics, and Persian mirrors for princes.
Mughal Imperial Ideas and the Articulation of Legitimacy
Hard experiences taught the Mughals early on that military success on the battlefield was ephemeral and that a kingdom won by the sword in a day could be lost just as easily. Bābur had conquered Fergana, Samarqand, Tashkent, and Kabul at various times and lost most of them. He then had conquered much of north India by his brilliant victory over the Lōdī Sultanate at Panipat in 1526, only to have his son Humāyūn lose most of the same territory fourteen years later to Shīr Shāh Sūrī, the rebellious chieftain of Bihar. In their years of exile, both Bābur and Humāyūn would have had time to reflect on the importance of building more lasting foundations for their state than raw military power. What ideas and principles did the Mughals arrive at for guiding their empire, and how did they legitimize their rule?
The first Mughal emperors, Bābur and his son Humāyūn, naturally sought to rule in accordance with their formative experiences at the princely courts of Fergana, Samarqand, Herat, and Kabul and relied on Central Asian traditions and practices to establish their legitimacy. Besides Islam and the Timurid name, they evoked Turco-Mongol ideals of kingship and ostentatiously patronized the Central Asian Naqshbandī Sufi order. Bābur was only secondarily concerned with cultivating South Asian Sufi orders such as the Chishtīs, or representatives of local “Hindustani” elites such as Indian and Afghan Muslims or the Rajputs. The fact that Central Asian immigrants or Tūrānī (primarily Turkic speakers from the Chaghatai Khanate) dominated the highest positions within the imperial service under Bābur further encouraged a tendency to seek to recreate in South Asia the lost world of Timurid Transoxiana. The Mughals would retain many of these Central Asian practices and ideas, such as a deep respect for Chinggisid and Timurid law (tūra-i Chengīzī) and the expectation that power would be shared among the extended imperial family.
Whereas Bābur had seen the subcontinent as little more than a place of exile and a source of resources to be exploited, his son and successor Humāyūn (r. 1530–40 and 1555–56) clearly realized the dangers of this approach and made efforts to broaden his dynasty’s support base by forging alliances with the Rajputs and patronizing Indian Sufi orders such as the Shattārī.45 Such policies were even more in evidence during the long reign of the emperor Akbar (r. 1556–1605), who had experienced directly the disadvantages of his dynasty’s reliance on Turanian support. In 1564, for example, many of Akbar’s elite Chaghatai and Uzbek servitors rebelled and offered the throne to his half-brother, the appanage ruler of Kabul, Mīrzā Ḥākim. An important pretext for the revolt and the three years of bitter internecine strife that ensued was the claim of the rebels that Akbar had become too heterodox in his religion and too “Hindustani” in his policies, whereas Mīrzā Ḥākim remained true to Sunni orthodoxy and respected the more egalitarian Central Asian ways.46 Thereafter, Akbar and his successors sought to counterbalance the Turanian hold on power by elevating Persians, Rajputs, and Indian Muslims to high military and administrative positions. One of the consequences of this policy was increased cooperation between the Mughals and the Rajput chieftains of western India. Akbar married a Rajput princess, and his son Jahāngīr did the same. The latter’s successor, Shāh Jahān, was thus born of Jahāngīr’s marriage to the daughter of the Rajput king Udai Singh of Marwar. Such incorporation of more ethnic groups and local South Asian representatives gave a broader base to the empire, as well as increased scope for the Mughals to defuse future threats by policies of divide and rule.
Mughal efforts to sink roots in South Asia also brought about changes in their self-representation. At first, the dynasty framed its claim to political legitimacy in fairly blunt and unimaginative terms: their illustrious Central Asian ancestor Tīmūr had conquered the Punjab and invaded the Delhi Sultanate in 1398 and therefore Hindustan formed part of the Timurid ancestral patrimony by right of blood and conquest.47 Given the internal rivalries that divided the different branches of the Timurid family, however, such a rationale was incomplete. The Mughals needed to establish that their specific line was the most deserving of Tīmūr’s descendants and the most capable. An example of the dynasty’s attempts to enhance its own image was Humāyūn’s commissioning in 1533 of a history of his reign, the Book of Humāyūn (Humāyūnāma or Qānūn-i Humāyūnī), in order to preserve “the inventions of my auspicious mind and the improvements of my illumined thoughts ... so that in time their light may shine near and far.”48 This work, completed a year later by Persian historian Ghiyās al-Dīn Muḥammad Khwāndamīr (1475–c. 1534?), took pains to underscore the superior qualities and achievements of the emperor over his Timurid kinsmen who, following Inner Asian notions of tanistry, were eager to stake their own claims to a share in sovereign authority.49 The seriousness of the latter problem can be seen from the fact that only a few years later the Mughals temporarily lost their empire to Shīr Shāh, in part because of the reluctance of one of the imperial princes, Mīrzā Kāmrān, to give up his appanage in Kabul and provide military aid to his half-brother Humāyūn at several critical junctures in the war.
While Humāyūn thus made the first serious attempts to formulate a distinctly Mughal imperial culture and ideology, it was Akbar who was primarily responsible for realizing this goal through his lavish patronage of court historians, poets, manuscript painters, and Sufis (particularly of the Chishtī order). Under Akbar and his descendants the imperial court began to produce a rich corpus of works, in a variety of media, that were not only compelling in their beauty but explicitly served Mughal political ends. Akbar, in particular, commissioned the production of a large number of politically motivated literary works, with the Book of Akbar (Akbarnāma)—a history—and the Institutes of Akbar (‘Āin-i Akbarī)—a gazetteer of the Mughal state—being particularly concerned with the ideology of empire. Abu’l Faẓl, Akbar’s erudite historiographer and vazīr, supervised the production of the multivolume Akbarnāma, which sought not only to distinguish the Mughal Empire from its competitors but also to present Akbar as the semidivine “perfect man” (insān-i kāmil) of Sufi theology.50 Abu’l Faẓl presented his master as a universal ruler, albeit one whose claim was based not so much on control of territory as natural headship over the entire human race.51 Abu’l Faẓl thus took pains to trace Akbar’s lineage back to the first human being, Adam, rather than to the Prophet Muhammad or one of the caliphs, thereby emphasizing that the authority of his patron extended beyond the Islamic world to embrace all of mankind. He similarly placed Akbar in a line of descent from the Mongol princess Alan Qo’a, legendary progenitress of the Chinggisids. According to Mongol tradition, one of the descendants of Alan Qo’a, Qachula Ba’atur, had a dream that seven bright stars and one brighter than the rest emanated from his chest. Ba’atur’s father interpreted the dream to mean that the seven stars presaged seven powerful descendants who would achieve primacy over their clansmen and eventually attain a royal crown. The eighth star that shone over the world and produced smaller stars illuminating the universe symbolized an eighth descendant “who would exhibit world wide sovereignty.” The Timurid tradition had been to identify the seven stars with Tīmūr’s forefathers and the eighth with Tīmūr himself. Abu’l Faẓl reinterpreted the story to make Tīmūr into the first star, followed by six celestial Timurid descendants, and finally the eighth star representing the person of Akbar.52 Such universalist aspirations were further reflected in the imperial regnal names of Akbar’s successors: Jahāngīr (“world conqueror”), Shāh Jahān (“world shah”), ‘Ālamgīr (“universal conqueror”), and so on.53
If the literary composition of royal autobiographies, histories, gazetteers, and collections of poetry was thus important to Mughal efforts to present themselves as urbane, successful, and legitimate rulers, it was no less important that the Mughals establish their own ateliers (kitābkhāna) where calligraphers, book binders, and painters could carry out the physical process of producing these texts as prestigious objets d’art. Humāyūn and his half-brother Kāmrān were responsible for setting up the first Mughal ateliers for the production of illuminated manuscripts and miniature paintings in the Persian style. These ateliers flourished under Akbar’s enthusiastic sponsorship and began to evolve a distinctive Mughal style that blended elements of Persian, Indic, and European painting. Patronage of the arts was, in itself, a long-standing Timurid tradition, but the particular tastes of the Mughal court encouraged works that were more distinctly South Asian and innovative in character. Mughal emperors were particularly interested in the production of royal portraits that combined a realism of style with a taste for allegory and often a desire to rewrite history. For example, relations between Jahāngīr and Akbar were very contentious in life (a situation made worse by Jahāngīr’s attempt in 1599 to seize power from his father by force), but upon his accession Jahāngīr commissioned portraits of himself in poses of filial devotion toward Akbar.54 Aside from such overtly political uses, the Mughal emperors also used the arts to advance a cultural program of rapprochement and integration among their diverse subjects. In addition to commissioning the usual classics of Persian literature, history, and Islamic learning, for example, Akbar commissioned the translation into Persian of Sanskrit epics such as the Rāmāyana and the Mahābhārata and even a Hindu religious work, The Lineage of Viṣṇu (Harivaṃśa), complete with rich illustrations of Hindu heroes, gods, and yogis done in Persianate style.
Such attempts to integrate elements of pre-Islamic South Asian culture into Mughal life were part of a broader policy of religious tolerance toward the many non-Muslim subjects of the Mughal Empire that became particularly marked from the time of Akbar. Perhaps the best example of Mughal attitudes was Akbar’s decision in 1579 to abolish the poll tax (jizya) that Islamic states had customarily levied on their non-Muslims subjects. This discriminatory tax would remain in abeyance until the reign of Aurangzeb in 1679 when it was restored. Farrukhsiyar briefly banned the jizya once again in the 1710s and his successor finally abolished the tax once and for all in the 1720s.55 Mughal policies of tolerance also meant that, despite the occasional rhetorical statement in Mughal documents and histories about the desirability of destroying the idols and temples of infidelity, in practice Mughal rulers with the notable exception of Aurangzeb left non-Muslim religious sites and clergy in peace. On the contrary, Akbar was known to fund the construction of Hindu and Jain temples, take part in their celebrations, and appear in public wearing the tilaka on his forehead that was usually the mark in Hinduism of a devotee.56
The success of such policies can be gauged from the generally warm response of the Mughals’ non-Muslim subjects. The Jain scholar Padmasāgara, for example, welcomed the establishment of the Mughal Empire, praised the characters of its early emperors, and described the imperial capital as a haven of ecumenical tranquility: “Victorious Padshah Akbar rules in Fatehpur, the best of cities that ... shines with houses of the four Hindu castes, Jain temples, the schools of those engaged in the six philosophies [of Hinduism] and the best palaces that are inhabited by the feet of Sufis, virtuous dervishes and Mughals.”57 Although the Mughals themselves did not generally issue documents in Sanskrit, it is telling that contemporary Sanskrit sources voluntarily echoed official Mughal ideology and referred to the emperor as “pādishāh” (pātiśāha) and “lord of Delhi” (dillīpati), whose court was “luminescent with many kings.”58 The Hindu scholar Vihāri Kṛṣṇadāsa even declared Akbar to be an avatar of Viṣṇu and praised him in Sanskrit verse as a supremely virtuous monarch, a “great ruler of the earth ... born in order to protect cows and Brahmans.”59 Other pandits, in a similar vein, described Akbar as an avatar of Rama.60
Under Akbar and his heirs, the Mughals also began to appropriate a small number of customs and practices of distinctly South Asian and pre-Islamic origin. Akbar thus restored the pre-Islamic custom of holding daily “balcony audiences” (jharokhā darshan), in which the ruler appeared early in the morning at a palace balcony or window for a public audience. As mentioned above, Akbar not only wore a tilaka on his forehead, but also showed favor to members of the court by marking their brows with the same sign—a Hindu gesture of blessing traditionally bestowed by priests and sages on their devotees and disciples. Another old royal Hindu tradition that found its way into Mughal imperial practice was the tulādān, a ceremony in which a king or prince was weighed on astrologically auspicious days (usually once or twice a year) in order that their weight in precious metals or valuable gifts might then be distributed to the poor.61
The very acts, however, that were most pleasing to Akbar’s non-Muslim subjects also caused consternation among pious Muslims, who saw them as signs that Akbar was veering away from orthodox Islam. Several religious scholars openly accused Akbar of heresy and in 1579 the chief justice of Jaunpur issued a fatwa declaring it lawful for Muslims to take up arms against their emperor. Akbar responded by adopting a range of measures meant to bring the religious establishment to heel and establish himself as a benevolently neutral figure who stood above and guided all religions as “master of both faiths” (dūhū dīn ko ṣāḥib). Within the Islamic community itself, Akbar sought to stifle the opposition of the ulema by pressuring a council of prominent religious scholars into releasing a statement (maḥẓar) in 1579 to the effect that the emperor, as a just sovereign, had a special role as arbiter to settle disagreements over the interpretation of Islamic law in his realm. Although often referred to as the “Infallibility Decree,” this statement did not, in fact, declare Akbar to be infallible. It did, however, infer that he was the ultimate authority on Islamic religious matters—hitherto considered the exclusive preserve of the ulema. Through the maḥẓar, Akbar also took upon himself the positive obligation of tolerating the diversity of religious opinions and practices among his subjects, even those he disagreed with. Akbar increasingly identified this spirit of benevolent forbearance and accommodation as a cornerstone of his reign, referring to it as the policy of “peace toward all” (ṣulḥ-i kull).62
Having largely ceased to observe the daily rituals and obligations of Sunni orthodox Islam by then, Akbar took the daring decision in 1582 to found his own religion with himself as its ritual center. Akbar’s new ecumenical “super-faith,” which he modestly dubbed the “Divine Religion” (Dīn-i Ilāhī), canonized exactly his idealized vision of the empire. Both Hindus and Muslims were welcome to join and, as the tenets of the new cult were a pastiche of elements taken from the different major religions of South Asia (primarily Sufism), new “disciples” could simultaneously continue to practice their previous faiths. In many senses, the experiment can be seen as an attempt by Akbar and Abu’l Faẓl to create the sort of intense, personal ties between sovereign and servitors that Sufism had forged between the early Safavids and their Qizilbāsh murīds. Akbar certainly seems to have restricted membership in the Dīn-i Ilāhī almost exclusively to the imperial elite, and in practice there is no evidence that the cult found any adherents beyond the intimate circle of Akbar’s closest friends and servitors. It should be needless to say that both the Muslim and Hindu religious establishments viewed the emperor’s experiment with a mix of horror and bemusement.63
Despite the failure of individual policies such as the reconquest of Central Asia or the Dīn-i Ilāhī, overall the Mughals’ various policies aimed at establishing and buttressing their rule were highly successful. How much so can be gauged from the fact that, in contrast to the tenuous position of the first two Mughal emperors, their seventeenth-century heirs Jahāngīr (r. 1605–28), Shāh Jahān (r. 1628–58), and Aurangzeb (r. 1658–1707) enjoyed widespread popular esteem and legitimacy. This legitimacy would survive the challenges the empire had to confront from a variety of different ethnic groups, chieftains, and warlords and would even persist long after the Mughals had lost the military means to compel it.
Mughal Interactions with Other Empires
We have seen how the Mughals deployed symbolic means and cultural idioms to establish their political legitimacy in South Asia, but how did the Mughals carry out relations with their Central Asian, Persian, and Ottoman neighbors? How did the Mughals reconcile their universalist claims with the existence of equally powerful emperors not very far from their notional borders, which were never really sealed off or settled?
By the early sixteenth century, the Mughals had lost the contest over their Central Asian homeland to the Shaybanid dynasty, who could also boast a more direct connection to the Chinggisid lineage. The Uzbeks ceased to pose any direct threat to their neighbors after the death of ‘Abdullāh Khan in 1598, but they remained strong enough to withstand all efforts by the Mughals to dislodge them from the lands that would become known as “Uzbekistan.” The Mughals nevertheless continued to regard themselves as the rightful rulers of Central Asia and periodically attempted to regain it. A Mughal army thus briefly conquered Badakhshan on the northeastern frontier of Afghanistan in 1646 but was unable to hold onto the region for more than a year. The Mughal official attitude toward the Uzbek khans thus remained a hostile and patronizing one that wavered over whether to treat them as usurpers or merely as wayward provincial governors.64
Mughal relations with Persia, by comparison, were generally marked by cordiality and mutual respect. Formal correspondence between the two rulers was not frequent, but it was regular and correct. After ‘Abbās I had been tardy in sending his congratulations to Jahāngīr upon the latter’s coronation in 1605, for example, the Safavid shah recognized his error and proffered as excuse that urgent matters related to the reconquest of Azerbaijan and Shirvan had made him negligent of his duties elsewhere.65 In their correspondence, both states tactfully avoided the question of whether the Mughals formally recognized Safavid supremacy, as Humāyūn had promised to do in the days when the Mughal had required Safavid military support to regain his throne. Whatever the Safavids thought privately, they implicitly acknowledged the Mughals’ claim to the imperial mantle of Tīmūr and referred to the Mughal seat of power as the “Throne of the Son-in-Law” (Tāj-i Gurgan).
This is not to say that tensions were entirely absent from Safavid-Mughal relations. The initial attitude of goodwill struck up between Jahāngīr and ‘Abbās at the beginning of their reigns, for example, quickly faded as each sought to assert their rival claims to Kabul and Kandahar. The two cities were strategically important to both empires as military outposts and transit points for the caravan trade that connected South Asia with Central and West Asia. Akbar, Jahāngīr, and Shāh Jahān each won and then lost control over this frontier region, until in 1648 Shah ‘Abbās II achieved the decisive victory.66 When Jahāngīr had lost Kandahar to the Safavids in 1622, he sought to make up for his loss of prestige by commissioning the painting of a dream he had had of a meeting with Shah ‘Abbās (Figure 5.1). In the allegorically charged painting that resulted, the two emperors hover over a world map, with Shah ‘Abbās standing at a lower elevation upon a lamb that represents Persia, while Jahāngīr, his feet set firmly on a lion that sprawls over the section of the map depicting Safavid territory, leans down to embrace the shah. The claws of the lion curl menacingly above Kandahar and its eyes gaze fixedly toward Central Asia.67 The painting thus illustrates graphically the long-cherished aspirations of the Mughals to wield effective power over these territories once held by Tīmūr and his descendants. The Safavids, for their part, clearly saw themselves as the senior partner in the relationship and took pride in the fact that the Mughals had adopted their literary culture and clearly recognized the age-old cultural superiority of Persia.68
Compared with the prestigious Chinggisid-Timurid genealogy of the Mughals, the Ottomans were unquestionably of humbler origins. Their guardianship over the Muslim holy places since the 1520s, however, and their assumption of the role of caliph more than compensated for their genealogical deficiencies vis-à-vis the Mughals.69 In practice, Ottoman caliphal claims were inconvenient but they were also of little practical consequence for the Mughals, as they had grounded their political status on other bases. The Mughals blithely sidestepped the question of whether or not to recognize Ottoman claims to the caliphate of all Sunni Muslims by positing the existence of two caliphates. In the mid-1550s, Humāyūn thus seems to have dispatched a letter with the Ottoman admiral Seydi Ali Reis for Sultan Süleyman referring to the latter as the “khalīfa of highest qualities,” while at the same time announcing to the Ottomans that the “throne of khilāfa of the realms of Hind and Sind is once again graced by a monarch whose magnificence is equal to that of Solomon [i.e., of Süleyman].”70 The Ottomans, no doubt taking offense at this presumption, did not acknowledge the letter and sent no congratulatory message upon the accession of Akbar to the Mughal throne. The maḥẓar of 1579 made Akbar’s claim to a parallel caliphate more explicit by lauding him as “caliph of the age” (khilāfat al-zamān).71 Thus, in their imperial rhetoric the Mughals presented themselves as pādishāhs of the world without rivals, although in reality the Safavids and Ottomans were no lesser sovereigns and had equally grandiose self-perceptions.
In the 1570s, Akbar began to project his empire’s influence outside the subcontinent by sponsoring parties of pilgrims, including several members of the imperial family and high-ranking officials, to perform the Hajj in the Ottoman-controlled Holy Cities. The Ottoman court received the news of the arrival in Jeddah of such a large, wealthy, and politically influential Mughal delegation with deep suspicion and orders were sent to the sharif of Mecca that he was not to allow the delegation to prolong their stay nor to win popular esteem by dispensing Mughal largesse to the poor and the ulema. Officially, the Ottomans justified these prohibitions on logistical grounds, claiming—not unreasonably—that such a large party represented a considerable burden on local supplies of food and water. The Ottoman government clearly saw Mughal attempts to distribute rich gifts in Mecca, however, as an attempt to undermine Ottoman prestige at the Holy Places, and this at a time when diplomatic relations between Akbar and Murad were fast deteriorating and when news of Akbar’s heterodox innovations was just starting to reach Istanbul.
Within South Asia itself, the Mughals regarded the lesser polities of the subcontinent such as the Marathas, the Rajputs, and Shi’ite kingdoms of the Deccan as either vassals or rebels. The Mughals treated the Marathas, for example, as little more than rebellious zamīndārs and never recognized the rising Maratha Confederacy as political coequals. These rival states, in turn, vacillated over how to position themselves in relation to Mughal claims of suzerainty. Śivaji Bhonsle, for example, posed a fundamental challenge to Mughal supremacy in 1674 by declaring himself “lord of the parasol” (chhatrapati) or sovereign overlord. Śivaji, in reviving a self-consciously Vedic investment ceremony (mahābhiṣeka) and hoary Sanskrit titles, challenged not only Mughal political authority but even the very religio-cultural framework they used to articulate and justify their political claims. Over the course of the eighteenth century, the power of the Marathas waxed at Mughal expense and in several cases Maratha rulers deposed or elevated individual Mughal emperors. Despite this, the Marathas often found it expedient to acknowledge Mughal suzerainty de jure if not de facto. The Rajput kingdoms of western India and the Shi’ite kingdoms of the Deccan followed a similar strategy, paying tribute and formally acknowledging their subordination to the Mughal “peacock throne” while remaining otherwise entirely autonomous. Particularly irksome to the Mughals were the close diplomatic and cultural ties that all three Deccan kingdoms maintained with Persia, and the fact that in the Shi’ite sultanates of Bijapur and Golconda prayers at the Friday sermon (khuṭba) were read out in the name of the Safavid shah rather than that of the Mughal “caliph.”72
Europeans, beginning with the Portuguese, generally recognized Mughal claims to a special political status in South Asia and referred to the emperor as “the Great Mughal” (Magnus Mogol or Mogor), just as the Ottoman and Safavid emperors were known as the “Grand Turk” and “Grand Sophy,” respectively. The Mughals, for their part, tended to classify most European monarchs as kings, rather than emperors of a status comparable with themselves.73 Indeed, Sir Thomas Roe, the first English ambassador to the Mughal court, complained generally of the Mughals’ lack of interest in formal diplomatic relations and more specifically of the refusal of Jahāngīr to “bynde himselfe reciprocally to any Prince vpon termes of Equalety.”74 Otherwise, the Mughals showed little interest in European models of kingship and governance, although they did develop quite a taste for such cultural and technological productions as European paintings, globes, firearms, clocks, and so on, which they worked upon and adapted to their needs.75
References to empire are rife in the textbooks of South Asian history—notwithstanding the lack of any consensus as to what actually constitutes an empire, other than a vague sense of their being expansive polities.76 From the Magadha Empire ca. the sixth century bce to the Maratha and Indo-Afghan empires of the eighteenth century, there is hardly a historical phase of South Asian history without an empire or empires. Despite this ubiquity, “empire” assumed a distinctly negative connotation in South Asia during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as a result of the experience of exploitation at the hands of British colonial authorities. The twenty-first century, however, has seen a new interest in how empires met the challenge of governing territories containing not only geographic diversity but also a multitude of people from different ethnicities, languages, and faiths.77 While imperial repertoires of rule differed between states and evolved over time in response to changing technologies and economies, the ideas and practices of empires could be surprisingly persistent over space and time, as this chapter has tried to demonstrate.
The Mughals, for example, deliberately presented themselves as a continuation of the Timurid and Mongol imperial past. In doing so, they drew on a wide range of South, Central, and West Asian traditions that aspired to universal rule while tolerating religious and ethnic differences. The longevity of the Mughal Empire may be understood precisely in terms of the lessons it thus learned on how to maintain the delicate balance between centralization and the practical imperative to tolerate and engage the ambitions of a wide range of political actors and communities. The Maurya and Gupta empires of the past, for example, provided precedents of states that asserted their suzerainty over many subordinate allies, while allowing these to rule their domains in autonomous fashion. The ancient Indian imperial practice of layered sovereignty found echoes in the system of semiautonomous vassals and chieftains spread across the breadth of the Mughal Empire. Mughal political arrangements resembled not only the South Asian past, but had parallels elsewhere in Southeast Asia where Indic notions of cakravartin kings ruling over imperial “mandalas” or “galactic polities” had also spread.78
Such a broad and encompassing model of rule encouraged the Mughal Empire to embrace a general policy of openness to a wide range of partners so long as they were willing to work within the larger Mughal imperial framework. A good example of this was the relatively unrestricted access and freedom of travel and movement that it extended to foreigners, especially in comparison with other empires such as China. The Mughal realm was a land of opportunities, where Persian administrators and artists, Arab religious scholars and merchants, and Turani and Afghan warriors all found a warm welcome and the chance to carve out a place in the world for themselves. Europeans who came to the subcontinent were received no differently. Foreign merchants needed to arrange for the security of their persons and merchandise by hiring armed escorts, but otherwise the Mughals allowed both Asian and European merchants to move freely about their territory. During the early eighteenth century, for example, the Dutch East India Company created a private fleet of armed barges, manned by European and local soldiers, to protect their commerce on the Ganga between Hugli and Patna.79 By comparison, it would have been unthinkable in the Ming or Qing empires for a European company to form their own private militia on Chinese territory. This openness of the Mughal imperial realm can be seen as a sign of confidence in its strength rather than weakness.
While the success of the Mughal Empire depended on the rulers’ capacity to learn from past imperial ideas and practices, the Mughals left an important legacy for the putative states that emerged in the wake of its decline in the eighteenth century. The Mughal Empire helped shape the history of the English East India Company in many ways through long contact and mutual exchanges since the early seventeenth century. The Company’s embassies to the Mughal court and its dealings with provincial and local authorities imparted significant lessons on how to run an empire, enforce a hierarchy, and secure legitimacy in South Asia. The Company, especially during the early phase of domination in Bengal, observed, reported, and archived the events of both political and commercial nature that unfolded in India since the earlier period, even though their perceptions were often marred by prejudice.80 Eventually as the dīwān of Bengal, the Company would formally become a vassal of the Mughals in the mid-eighteenth century. The later successes of British empire-building in South Asia often depended on adapting and continuing Mughal institutions, from taxes to jurisprudence to the use of intermediaries with the different communities and administrative use of the Persian language. Like so many of the Mughals’ other rebellious zamīndārs, the British would continue to pay lip service to Mughal legitimacy till the middle of the nineteenth century, even as they had already supplanted the Mughals as the supreme arbitrator of differences arising among the various constituents of the empire.
Notes
1F. J. Richards, “Geographical Factors in Indian Archeology,” The Indian Antiquary 62 (1933), 235–43. According to archeologist Dilip K. Chakrabarti, while the geographical scope of Richards’s four regions or “thrusts” may well be accepted, we should be cautious about treating the boundaries between these regions as fixed since in practice they tended to be fluid and shifted over time. See Dilip K. Chakrabarti, Archaeological Geography of the Ganga Plain: The Lower and the Middle Ganga (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2001), p. 19.
2John F. Richards, “Early Modern India and World History,” Journal of World History 8, no. 2 (1997), 197–209 (esp. 204).
3Lisa Balabanlilar, Imperial Identity in the Mughal Empire: Memory and Dynasty in Early Modern South and Central Asia (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2012), pp. 37–8, 47.
4Ram Prasad Tripathi, “The Turko-Mongol Theory of Kingship,” in The Mughal State 1526–1750, ed. Muzaffar Alam and Sanjay Subrahmanyam (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 118–19.
5Murari Kumar Jha, “Migration, Settlement, and State Formation in the Ganga Plain: A Historical Geographic Perspective,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient [hereafter, JESHO] 57, no. 4 (2014), 587–627.
6Shereen Moosvi, The Economy of the Mughal Empire, c.1595: A Statistical Study (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1987), pp. 194–5; John F. Richards, The New Cambridge History of India, Vol.1.5: The Mughal Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 76, 140. For an interesting account of the process of Mughal political expansion and the resentments of Uzbeks and Afghans against Akbar’s growing power, see André Wink, Akbar in the series Makers of the Muslim World (Oxford: Oneworld, 2009), pp. 28–35.
7Jahāngīr, The Tuzūk-i-Jahāngīrī or Memoir of Jahāngīr, trans. Alexander Rogers, ed. Henry Beveridge (Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal, 1968), vol. 1, p. 395; Abraham Eraly, Emperors of the Peacock Throne: The Saga of the Great Mughals (New Delhi: Penguin Books, 2000), p. 261.
8Stephen P. Blake has shown that nine different Mughal emperors claimed this title by manipulating the conjunction astrology as there were twelve different ways to calculate Persian words and phrases. See his Time in Early Modern Islam: Calendar, Ceremony, and Chronology in the Safavid, Mughal, and Ottoman Empire (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 172–3.
9Richards, The Mughal Empire, pp. 127–38; Dirk D. H. A. Kolff, Naukar, Rajput and Sepoy: The Ethnohistory of the Military Labour Market in Hindustan, 1450–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 137–45.
10In the northeastern parts of the Mughal Empire, the humid environment set severe constraints on the effectiveness of Mughal cavalry. The Mughals therefore tried to adapt to local techniques of warfare in Bengal and Assam. On ghurabs (galleasses) and their suitability for the coastal and riverine warfare, see Jos Gommans, Mughal Warfare: Indian Frontiers and High Roads to Empire, 1500–1700 (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), p. 163.
11Jos Gommans, The Rise of the Indo-Afghan Empire c.1710–1780 (Leiden: Brill, 1995), pp. 109–13, quotation on p. 109; see also Richards, The Mughal Empire, pp. 165–71. On Mughal adventures in Assam, see Jagadish Narayan Sarkar, The Life of Mir Jumla: The General of Aurangzeb (Calcutta: Thacker, Spink and Co., 1951), pp. 278–83.
12For a military response to the Maratha problem of the Mughals which weakened the empire irreparably and contributed significantly in its decline, see M. N. Pearson, “Shivaji and the Decline of the Mughal Empire,” The Journal of Asian Studies [hereafter, JAS] 35, no. 2 (1976), 221–35; Richards, The Mughal Empire, pp. 208–42; for the coronation of Śivaji, see Sir Jadunath Sarkar, Shivaji and His Times (New Delhi: Orient Longman, 1973), pp. 201–19.
13André Wink, Al-Hind: The Making of the Indo-Islamic World (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1996), vol. 2, pp. 216–17. For a discussion on iqṭā‘, see Richard M. Eaton, Cambridge History of India, vol. 1.8: A Social History of the Deccan, 1300–1761: Eight Indian Lives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), vol. 1.8, pp. 25–6; Stephen F. Dale, The Muslim Empires of the Ottomans, Safavids, and Mughals (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 100.
14On khāliṣa lands, see Richards, The Mughal Empire, pp. 76–7; for other tax-free land grants, pp. 92–3; Satish Chandra, Parties and Politics at the Mughal Court, 1707–1740 (New Delhi: People’s Publishing House, 1972), pp. xix–xxvii.
15Irfan Habib, “The Mansab System, 1595–1637,” Proceedings of the Indian History Congress 29th Session, Patiala (1967), 221–42; Athar Ali, The Mughal Nobility under Aurangzeb (1966 repr./revised edn, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 11–14.
16For example, toward the end of Jahāngīr’s reign the governor of Bihar, Mīrzā Rustam Safrī, was pensioned off and received an annual sum of 1,20,000 rupees. The eldest son of Safrī, Mīrzā Murād too received an annual pension of 40,000 rupees from Shāh Jahān and settled in Patna. These pensioners certainly developed local roots along with those who received land grants. Jahāngīr and Shāh Jahān lavished land grants as madad-i ma’āsh and presumably also under other titles such as inām, aima, and so on to many notables and grandees in turbulent eastern parts of the empire; see R. R. Diwakar (ed.), Bihar through the Ages (1959 repr., Patna: Government of the State of Bihar, 2001), pp. 491–4. For a reference to Bhojpur chieftain Gajpati holding Bhojpur and Bihiya in jāgīr, see Shahpurshah Hormasji Hodivala, Studies in Indo-Muslim History: A Critical Commentary on Elliot and Dowson’s History of India as Told by Its Own Historians (Bombay: [n.p.], 1939), p. 603. For the history of Ujjainiya Rajput chieftains in general, see also Kolff, Naukar, Rajput and Sepoy, pp. 123–4.
17Ali, The Mughal Nobility under Aurangzeb, pp. 7–9.
18The population estimate is from Ashok V. Desai, “Population and Standard of Living in Akbar’s Time—A Second Look,” Review (Fernand Braudel Centre) 3, no. 3 (1980), 429–62, see esp. 451–7. Other estimates range between 100 and 115 million in 1600.
19Pearson, “Shivaji and the Decline of the Mughal Empire,” quotation on p. 226, italics in original; M. N. Pearson, “Premodern Muslim Political System,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 102, no. 1 (1982), 47–58.
20For example, on how Asad Beg had become a mansabdār, see Muzaffar Alam and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “On the End of the Akbari Dispensation,” in Writing the Mughal World: Studies on Culture and Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), pp. 123–64. For examples of some nomads and rebels being coopted as mansabdārs, see Sunita Zaidi, “The Mughal State and Tribes in Seventeenth Century Sind,” Indian Economic and Social History Review [hereafter, IESHR] 26, no. 3 (1989), 343–62. For the layered relationship between the Mewatis and the imperial Mughals and Rajputs, see Shail Mayaram, “Mughal State Formation: The Mewati Counter-Perspective,” IESHR 34, no. 2 (1997), 169–97. For a cursory sketch of Jain-Mughal relations, see Shalin Jain, “Piety, Laity and Royalty: Jains under the Mughals in the First Half of the Seventeenth Century,” Indian Historical Review [hereafter, IHR] 40, no. 1 (2013), 67–92. For a theoretical discussion on this, see Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper, Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010).
21Akbar, for example, used the title of dīwān or dīwān-i ‘alā instead of vazīr. This he did in order to avoid the Central Asian connotation of the term “vazīr” as an all-powerful official under whom various heads of administration functioned.
22Abū’l-Fazl Allāmī, ‘Āīn-i-Akbarī, trans. H. Blochmann (1927: repr. New Delhi: Oriental Books Reprint Corporation, 1977), vol. 1, pp. 4–7. For the application of the Sharia laws to different communities and the role of qāḍī at local level in Gujarat, see Farhat Hasan, State and Locality in Mughal India: Power Relations in Western India, c. 1572–1730 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 72–6.
23Douglas E. Streusand, The Formation of the Mughal Empire (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 2–39; Stephen P. Blake, “The Patrimonial-Bureaucratic Empire of the Mughals,” JAS 39, no. 1 (1979), 77–94; Raziuddin Aquil, “Salvaging a Fractured Past: Reflections on Norms of Governance and Afghan-Rajput Relations in North India in the Late Fifteenth and Early Sixteenth Centuries,” Studies in History 20, no. 1 (2004), 1–29; Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “The Mughal State—Structure or Process? Reflections on Recent Western Historiography,” IESHR 29, no. 3 (1992), 291–321, see esp. pp. 296–303.
24Muzaffar Alam and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “Introduction,” in The Mughal State 1526–1750, ed. Muzaffar Alam and Sanjay Subrahmanyam (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 19–21; Subrahmanyam, “The Mughal State—Structure or Process?”; Aquil, “Salvaging a Fractured Past.”
25Allāmī, ‘Āīn-i-Akbarī, vol. 2, pp. 94–5.
26For the claim that about half of the total agricultural produce was taken as the land revenue by the Mughals, see Moosvi, The Economy of the Mughal Empire, pp. 106–18; see also Irfan Habib, “Potentialities of Capitalistic Development in the Economy of Mughal India,” Journal of Economic History 29, no. 1 (1969), 32–78, esp. p. 51; Tapan Raychaudhuri, “The State and the Economy: 1) The Mughal Empire,” in The Cambridge Economic History of India, Vol.1: c. 1250–c. 1750, ed. Tapan Raychaudhuri and Irfan Habib (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), vol. 1, pp. 172–213 (esp. p. 173).
27Ratnalekha Ray, “The Bengal Zamindars: Local Magnates and the State before the Permanent Settlement,” IESHR 12, no. 3 (1975), 263–92. For northwestern India, see Chetan Singh, Region and Empire: Punjab in the Seventeenth Century (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1991), pp. 136–53.
28On the local markets and exchange networks sustained on the surplus generated in rural parts, see B. R. Grover, “An Integrated Pattern of Commercial Life in the Rural Society of North India during the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” in Money and the Market in India 1100–1700, ed. Sanjay Subrahmanyam (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1994), pp. 219–55.
29Şevket Pamuk, A Monetary History of the Ottoman Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 16–19; Aziza Hasan, “The Silver Currency Output of the Mughal Empire and Prices in India in the 16th and 17th Centuries,” IESHR 6, no. 1 (1969), 85–116. For a criticism of the price rise thesis of Hasan, see Om Prakash and J. Krishnamurty, “Mughal Silver Currency: A Critique,” IESHR 7, no. 1 (1970), 139–50; for a lack of any trend reflecting price rise in Bengal, see Om Prakash, The Dutch East India Company and the Economy of Bengal, 1630–1720 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), pp. 252–3.
30R. Bin Wong, China Transformed: Historical Change and the Limits of European Experience (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000), p. 147.
31Gyan Prakash, Bonded Histories: Genealogies of Labor Servitude in Colonial India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 88–9. For an excellent study on the Khatri merchant turned zamīndārs in Burdwan, see John R. McLane, Land and Local Kingship in Eighteenth-Century Bengal (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 148–51.
32De Haan, Huysman, Hasselaar, Blom, Durven, Gabry, enz. XI, January 31, 1728, in W. Ph. Coolhaas (ed.), Generale Missiven van Gouverneurs-Generaal in Raden aan Heren XVII der Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie (’s-Gravenhage: Martinus Nijhoff, 1985), vol. 8, p. 163; Murari Kumar Jha, “The Political Economy of the Ganga River: Highway of State Formation in Mughal India,” PhD dissertation, Leiden University, 2013, pp. 254–5.
33Muzaffar Alam, The Crisis of Empire in Mughal North India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1986); André Wink, Land and Sovereignty in India: Agrarian Society and Politics under the Eighteenth-Century Maratha Svarājya (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); see also, the collection of essays in Seema Alavi (ed.), The Eighteenth Century in India: Debates in Indian History and Society (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2002); and J. F. Richards, Kingship and Authority in South Asia (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998).
34F. W. Buckler, “The Political Theory of the Indian Mutiny,” in Legitimacy and Symbols: The South Asian Writings of F.W. Buckler, ed. M. N. Pearson (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1985), pp. 43–73; William Dalrymple, The Last Mughal: The Fall of a Dynasty, Delhi, 1857 (London: Bloomsbury, 2006). See also, essays in Crispin Bates and Gavin Rand (eds), Mutiny at the Margins: New Perspectives on Indian Uprising of 1857 (New Delhi: Sage, 2013), and for a diverse set of opinions in Ainslie T. Embree, 1857 in India: Mutiny or War of Independence? (Boston: D.C. Heath, 1966).
35J. C. Heesterman, The Inner Conflict of Tradition: Essays in Indian Ritual, Kingship and Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), pp. 166–7; see also J. C. Heesterman, “India and the Inner Conflict of Tradition,” Daedalus 102, no. 1 (1973), 97–113 (esp. 103–104). For Akbar’s efforts at balancing different ethnic groups, see Chandra, Parties and Politics, pp. 13–14.
36The Mahābhārata, trans. Johannes A. B. van Buitenen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975), vol. 2/3, p. 53.
37Kauṭilīya, The Kauṭilīya Arthaśāstra (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass), vol. 2, p. 407.
38Radha Kumud Mookerji, Candragupta Maurya and His Times: Madras University Sir William Meyer Lectures, 1940–41 (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1966), p. 73.
39Romila Thapar, “The Mauryan Empire in Early India,” Historical Research 79, no. 205 (2006), 287–305 (esp. 302). Buddhist literature would attribute universal rulership to Aśoka more openly. The Aśokāvadān, for example, believed to have been composed in the second century bce, describes a chance encounter between the Buddha and a boy named Jaya in the city of Rājagriha. The child placed a handful of dirt in the Buddha’s begging bowl with the wish that in a future life “I would become king and, after placing the earth under a single umbrella of sovereignty, I would pay homage to the blessed Buddha.” The Buddha predicted that the boy would indeed return as a righteous cakravartin named Aśoka in the city of Pataliputra. Nayanjot Lahiri, Ashoka in Ancient India (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), chap. 1.
40Gérard Fussman, “Central and Provincial Administration in Ancient India: The Problem of the Mauryan Empire,” IHR 14, nos 1/2 (1987–88), 43–72; Thapar, “The Mauryan Empire”; see also, Monica L. Smith, “Networks, Territories, and the Cartography of Ancient States,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers 95, no. 4 (2005), 831–49.
41Sheldon Pollock, “Empire and Imitation,” in Lessons of Empire, ed. Craig Calhoun, Frederick Cooper, and Kevin Moore (New York: New Press, 2006), pp. 175–88 (esp. p. 184).
42Sheldon Pollock, The Language of the Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit, Culture, and Power in Premodern India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), p. 572.
43See Richard Eaton, “The Persian Cosmopolis (900–1900) and the Sanskrit Cosmopolis (400–1400),” in The Persianate World: Towards a Conceptual Framework, ed. Abbas Amanat (forthcoming).
44Phillip Wagoner, “‘Sultan among Hindu Kings’: Dress, Titles, and the Islamicization of Hindu Culture at Vijayanagara,” JAS 55, no. 4 (1996), 851–80 (esp. 853).
45A. Azfar Moin, The Millennial Sovereign: Sacred Kingship and Sainthood in Islam (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), p. 105.
46Munis D. Faruqui, The Princes of the Mughal Empire, 1504–1719 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp. 136–43; see also Munis D. Faruqui, “The Forgotten Prince: Mirza Hakim and the Formation of the Mughal Empire in India,” JESHO 48, no. 4 (2005), 487–523.
47Bābur, The Baburnama: Memoir of Babur, Prince and Emperor, trans. and ed. Wheeler M. Thackston (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 276–9.
48Ghiyās al-Dīn Muḥammad Khwāndmīr, Qānūn-i-Humāyūnī (also Known as Humāyūn Nāmā) of Khwāndmīr: A Work on the Rules and Ordinances Established by the Emperor Humāyūn and on some Buildings Erected by his Order, trans. Baini Prasad (1940; repr. Calcutta: Royal Asiatic Society of Bengal, 1996), pp. 17–18.
49Ibid., pp. 22–36.
50Abul Fazl, The Akbarnāmā of Abu-l-Fazl, trans. H. Beveridge (1907; repr. Delhi: Rare Books, 1972), vol. 1, p. 15, note 3.
51Harbans Mukhia, The Mughals of India (Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), pp. 17, 42.
52Abul Fazl, The Akbarnāmā, vol. 1, p. 205.
53This paragraph relies mostly on Balabanlilar, Imperial Identity, pp. 54–5, and the quotation is from p. 48. For the symbolic dominance of the world by means of allegorical use of cartography and globe by the Mughal rulers especially Jahāngīr and Shāh Jahān, see Ebba Koch, “The Symbolic Possession of the World: European Cartography in Mughal Allegory and History Painting,” JESHO 55, nos 2/3 (2012), 547–80.
54See, for example, the portrait of Jahāngīr and Akbar by Abu’l Ḥasan Nādir al-Zamān, ca. 1614. Musée Guimet, Paris.
55Chandra, Medieval India, p. 168; Abraham Eraly, The Mughal World: Life in India’s Last Golden Age (New Delhi: Penguin Books, 2007), p. 227. In 1562, Akbar had remitted the pilgrim tax on Hindu pilgrimages; two years later, he abolished jizya, only to reimpose it briefly in 1575–76, and finally abolished it in 1579. Such wavering suggests that Akbar was cautiously weighing the political implications of such a measure in light of the Sunni orthodox opposition.
56Ian Copland et al., A History of State and Religion in India (London and New York: Routledge, 2012), chaps 6 and 7 (esp. pp. 118, 134).
57From Padmasāgara’s Jagadgurukāvya. Translation here is from: Audrey Trutschke, “Setting the Record Wrong: A Sanskrit Vision of Mughal Conquests,” South Asian History and Culture 3, no. 3 (2012), 372–96 (esp. 379).
58Audrey Truschke, “Contested History: Brahmanical Memories of Relations with the Mughals,” JESHO 58, no. 4 (2015), 419–52 (esp. 438, 441).
59Audrey Truschke, “Defining the Other: An Intellectual History of Sanskrit Lexicons and Grammars of Persian,” Journal of Indian Philosophy 40 (2012), 635–68 (esp. 649).
60A. Azfar Moin, “Peering through the Cracks in the Baburnama: The Textured Lives of Mughal Sovereigns,” IESHR 49, no. 4 (2012), 493–526; see also, Moin, The Millennial Sovereign, pp. 167–8.
61F. W. Buckler, “A New Interpretation of Akbar’s ‘Infallibility Decree’ of 1579,” in Legitimacy and Symbols: The South Asian Writings of F.W. Buckler, ed. M. N. Pearson (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1985), pp. 131–48; Moin, The Millennial Sovereign, pp. 219–23; Muzaffar Alam, The Languages of Political Islam in India, c. 1200–1800 (Ranikhet: Permanent Black, 2008), pp. 138–40.
62This conception of universal concord or social equilibrium had its origins in the political treatises (akhlāq) of Persia and Central Asia. Catherine B. Asher and Cynthia Talbot, India before Europe (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 130; Alam, The Languages of Political Islam, pp. 61–9.
63Makhanlal Roychoudhury, The Dīn-i Ilāhī or the Religion of Akbar (Calcutta: University of Calcutta Press, 1941), pp. 276–309.
64Shāh Jahān, The Shah Jahan Nama of Inayat Khan: An Abridged History of the Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan, Compiled by His Royal Librarian, ed. W. E. Begley and Z. A. Desai (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1990), pp. 257, 268.
65Jahāngīr, The Tuzūk-i-Jahāngīrī or Memoir of Jahāngīr, trans. Alexander Rogers, ed. Henry Beveridge (Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal, 1968), vol. 1, p. 195.
66Muzaffar Alam, “Trade, State Policy and Regional Change: Aspects of Mughal-Uzbek Commercial Relations, c. 1550–1750,” JESHO 37, no. 3 (1994), 203, 214–15; see also, Paul E. Schellinger and Robert M. Salkin (eds), International Dictionary of Historical Places (Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers, 1996), vol. 5, pp. 439–42.
67Sumathi Ramaswamy, “Conceit of the Globe in Mughal Visual Practice,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 49, no. 4 (2007), 751–82 (esp. 754–5); Koch, “The Symbolic Possession of the World,” 557–9.
68Richards, The Mughal Empire, p. 111.
69For example, the Ottoman bureaucrat and historian Mustafa Ali (1541–1600) tried to link the Ottomans with the Chinggisid-Timurid line of world conquerors. See Balabanlilar, Imperial Identity, pp. 39–40.
70Quoted by N. R. Farooqi, “Six Ottoman Documents on Mughal-Ottoman Relations during the Reign of Akbar,” Journal of Islamic Studies 7, no. 1 (1996), 32–48 (esp. 32–3). In a diplomatic correspondence between the Mughal and Ottoman viziers, the Mughal minister (after boasting of the territorial possessions of the Mughal emperor) complained to Mustafa Paşa that “the (Ottoman) secretaries were ignorant in what manner such a power should be addressed, and what regard should be paid to such as state.” Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall, Memoir on the Diplomatic Relations between the Courts of Dehli and Constantinople in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (London: Printer to the Royal Asiatic Society, 1830), p. 21.
71For the view that in using the title of caliph of the age, the emperor Akbar “not only maintained Mughal independence of the Ottoman Sultān, but also challenged his right to the title of Khalīfah,” see Buckler, “A New Interpretation,” pp. 146–7. For a counter perspective that since the Timurids had never accepted the outside authority of any caliph, therefore Akbar’s act does not imply opposition to the Ottomans, see Satish Chandra, Medieval India: From Sultanate to the Mughals (New Delhi: Har-Anand Publications, 2005), p. 172.
72Muzaffar Alam and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Writing the Mughal World: Studies in Culture and Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), pp. 178–9; Radhey Shyam, The Kingdom of Ahmadnagar (Delhi: Motilala Banarsidass, 1966), pp. 83–4.
73An interesting exception is the Adab al-Salṭanat, a text from 1609 on “The Duties of Kingship,” which explicitly refers to the Habsburg monarch Philip II as “emperor of Spain” (bādshāh-i ispāniyya)—but then the author of this text was a Jesuit, Jerónimo Xavier. C. Lefèvre, “Europe-Mughal India-Muslim Asia,” in Structures on the Move: Technologies of Governance in Transcultural Encounter, ed. Antje Flüchter and Susan Richter (Berlin and London: Springer, 2012), p. 135.
74Thomas Roe, The Embassy of Sir Thomas Roe to the Court of the Great Mogul, 1615–1619, as Narrated in his Journal and Correspondence, ed. William Foster (London: Hakluyt Society, 1899), p. xxviii.
75Alam and Subrahmanyam, Writing the Mughal World, pp. 309–10.
76Pollock, “Empire and Imitation,” p. 177.
77Burbank and Cooper, Empires in World History, pp. 1–22.
78For discussion of these terms, see the chapters in this volume by Bruce Lockhart and Sher Banu A. L. Khan. Also, Stanley Jeyaraja Tambiah, “The Galactic Polity in Southeast Asia,” HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 3, no. 3 (2013), 503–34 (esp. 513–14). On applying the “galactic polity” model to the Mughal Empire, see: Stanley J. Tambiah, “What Did Bernier Actually Say? Profiling the Mughal Empire,” Contributions to Indian Sociology 32, no. 2 (1998), 361–86.
79J. van Goor (ed.), Generale Missiven van Gouverneurs-Generaal en Raden aan Heren XVII der Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie, 1729–1737 (’s-Gravenhage: Nijhoff, 1988), vol. 9, p. 380; Nationaal Archief (NA), Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie (VOC), Inventaris Nummer (Inv. Nr.) 8777, From Hugli to Batavia 30.11.1734, “Instructie voor den vaandrig Jan van Ingen vertrekkende althans, met een Corps militaire voor aff na Pattena,…” signed by J. A. Sigterman [spelt differently] at Hulgi on 21.07.1734, pp. 679–89 (esp. p. 687); NA, VOC, Inv. Nr. 8777, From Hugli to Batavia 30.11.1734, “Instructie voor den manhaften Capitain Luijtenant Jan Geldsak,….” signed by J. A. Sichterman etc. at Hugli on 10.09.1734, see, pp. 744–6.
80Robert Travers, Ideology and Empire in Eighteenth-Century India: The British in Bengal (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 7–9; Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “Frank Submissions: The Company and the Mughals between Sir Thomas Roe and Sir William Norris,” in World of the East India Company, ed. H. V. Bowen, Margarette Lincoln, and Nigel Rigby (Rochester, NY: The Boydell Press in association with the National Maritime Museum and the University of Leicester, 2002), pp. 69–96.