3.3: Gunpowder Empires- Mughals

The Mughal Empire

The last of our three Islamic states of the early-modern era is the Mughal Empire of South Asia. At their peak in the first half of the sixteenth century, the Mughals were perhaps the richest and most powerful regime in the world. Their political origins were discussed in the previous chapter, so here we can again focus on some of the broader social, cultural, and ideological impacts of Mughal imperialism. 

Figure 3.3.1: "Map of the Mughal Empire under Babur (1526-30)," Avantiputra7, is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.

Mughal "India"

To make sense of this, it is first necessary to try to separate out the region we call “India” from the nation of India as it exists today. The fact that the Ottoman Empire was eventually broken up into a series of separate nations while India, with the exception of Pakistan and Bangladesh, became a single nation is more a reflection of the arbitrariness by which nations were formed in the modern age than the existence of some inherent Indian-ness. It is common to present the Indian subcontinent as a more or less fully formed sociocultural zone onto which the Mughal invaders imposed themselves. This view derives from the tendency to understand culture as something fixed and immutable when it is really dynamic and adaptable. Indeed, it is not difficult to make the case that those things we identify as “traditional” characteristics of India and Indians were themselves created through the interactions made possible by the establishment of Mughal rule. In other words, we should not think of the Mughal period as a collision between one coherent ethno-religious community and another, but as a time in which new ethnic, religious, and communal identities were constructed and took on meaning that they did not previously have. Categories and concepts like Hindu, Muslim, or caste acquired new meaning and importance even if they were not entirely inventions of the era. 

In the First Battle of Panipat in 1526, Babur defeated Sultan Ibrahim Lodi of the Delhi Sultanate. This victory laid the foundation for the establishment of Mughal rule in India until 1857. In 1527, Babur defeated the Rajputs led by Rana Sangha in the Battle of Khanwa. This victory gave Babur control over northern India. Figure 3.3.1 is a physical map of the Indian subcontinent and it shows the areas under Babur's control, which extended from Kabul in modern-day Afghanistan to Peshawar in modern-day Pakistan to Delhi and Agra in northern India. Babur established his capital in Agra.

The Indian subcontinent had no single unified civilization prior to the sixteenth century. This supposedly changed in 1526 with a warrior chieftain named Babur’s defeat of the Sultan of Delhi; this has been routinely accepted as the start of the Mughal empire, although the actual imperial structure formed under Babur’s grandson, Akbar, during the seventeenth century. Although the empire was formed through military conquest, one key aspect of the creation of this empire that differed from other surrounding territories was the lack of subjugation and assimilation of the other tribes.  Instead, it offered more equitable opportunities through bureaucracy and local governance, which, in addition to military support, allowed for a more centralized government structure, with satellite local governors to oversee the day-to-day running of the various territories, at least during the seventeenth century. Given the relative peace of this time period, it allowed for more artistry to flourish, as what would be considered the middle and upper classes of society became more conspicuous consumers of this art.  This resulted in more wealth flowing throughout the burgeoning empire and why this period is considered the “golden” age of Indian self-rule, at least before the modern time period of history. 

To think of the Mughal as a group of Central Asian Muslims who conquered a huge territory occupied by Hindus vastly oversimplifies the actual nature of Mughal conquest and rule while falling back on the simple binaries that I critiqued earlier. In contrast to that simplified view it is vital to note that the initial Mughal victories that first established them on the subcontinent in the early sixteenth century came at the expense of an Islamic sultanate that in various forms had dominated North India since the 13th century. Indeed, many of their greatest rivals would come in the form of other Muslim rulers. One of the most famous campaigns of the emperor Akbar (r.1555-1605), for instance, was waged against the Muslim sultan of Gujarat and his great-grandson Aurangzeb (r. 1658-1707), often depicted as a persecutor of Hindus, spent the final quarter century of his life in a mostly failed attempt to conquer the Deccan Plateau of Central India from a variety of Muslim rulers. Conversely, many of the most loyal supporters of the Mughal regime were Hindu elites, including many of Aurangzeb’s top generals. Compared to the Safavid, and even to the Ottoman, Islam was significantly less significant to the nature of Mughal rule. In discussing this issue, Barbara and Thomas Metcalf note that the Mughal regime was, “‘Muslim’ in that they were led by Muslims, patronized (among others) learned and holy Muslim leaders, and justified their existence in Islamic terms. ... The unifying ideology of the regime was that of loyalty, expressed through Persianate cultural forms, not a tribal affiliation (like that of the Ottomans), nor an Islamic or an Islamic sectarian identity (like that of the Safavids).”

Traditional histories of the Mughal liked to center the issue of tolerance and intolerance by stressing, for instance, the open-minded tolerant attitude of Akbar versus the more conservative and intolerant policies of Aurangzeb. It is not that there were no differences between the two emperors, but that, like with the Ottoman, the notion of toleration is not the best way to understand those differences. Empires are by nature based on violence, domination, and exploitation. Some more so, some less so. Which groups suffer from their actions and which benefit from the largesse of the imperial elite is varied and complex. In the case of the Mughal, there are many instances that appear to suggest increasing religious persecution across the life of the empire. Successive Sikh gurus were captured and executed by Mughal forces, Hindu temples were destroyed under the orders of Aurangzeb, a decades long war was waged against the Hindu Marathas, and the longstanding exemption of Hindus from taxes on non-Muslims was reversed late in the 17th century. Yet all of these instances can just as easily be explained as part of regular imperial politics. Sikh leaders were targeted because they supported the losing side in a Mughal succession crisis. The Hindu temples were destroyed because they were centers of anti-Mughal resistance. The Marathas had once been allies of the Mughal before they began to assert their independence. The restoration of old taxes was a means to provide revenue to pay for Aurangzeb’s many wars against Muslim rivals in central and southern India. None of this is to justify violence, oppression, or exploitation. It does, however, help us understand these events as a matter of practical politics instead of seeing them as evidence of centuries-old religious conflict. This difference is not a minor thing at a time when Hindu nationalists use stories of persecution under the Mughals to justify their own oppression of the Muslim minority in contemporary India. 

The Mughal period should not be seen as a clash between two coherent religious or ethnic communities, one of whom were foreign conquerors and the other conquered natives. Rather the Mughal period was a time in which new imperial structures encouraged many different communities to interact in more intensive ways than ever before. The result of these interactions were varied. As always when humans interact there was a sharing of customs, habits, tastes, and values. As one example, the Bhakti movement, which emphasized devotion to specific gods as a means of salvation, was present in India well before the Mughal conquest yet seems to have been influenced by elements of Islamic doctrine even as it influenced Sufi Islam. In particular, Bhakti poets adopted genres that came out of Persian tradition while Sufi poets seem to have adopted religious ideas and writing styles from Bhakti poets. What emerged from these cultural interactions was not entirely new, since it pulled from much older traditions, but was also not really ancient since it had never existed in that form before. Caste is maybe the best example of this. The notion that Indian social arrangements were determined by one’s membership in a fixed and hierarchically-arranged social group – traditionally named as the Brahmin priests, Kshatriya warriors, Vaishya merchants, and Shudra peasants – was identified by later British imperialists as an ancient and fundamental aspect of Indian society. Recent scholarship, however, suggests that such a social organization had very little impact on the subcontinent until recent centuries. Without getting into the full complexity of the issue, it seems that caste identity only started to be formalized during the Mughal era and only became fixed under British rule. Interestingly, even as Hindu caste identity became more significant under the Mughals, Indian Muslims also seemed to have adopted more formal social categories. Rather than an interruption, therefore, we should understand the Mughal period as a constructive period in which cultures, identities, and traditions emerged, adapted, and changed. This process would continue right up until the rise of British imperialism in India. The British would then interpret the India they observed as the India that had always been. Part of the project of this textbook is to free our sense of the world from the misinterpretations of 19th century imperialists.

Mughal agriculture has been considered incredibly advanced for its time.  However, this is in comparison to European agriculture at the same point, which not only shows a Eurocentric viewpoint, but also doesn’t take into location and geography; sheer landmass with the climate that India occupies makes it a key agricultural state without the comparison.  The fact that the Mughal empire was able to unite the majority of this landmass and its peasantry labor for both domestic and foreign trade and consumption is what shows advancement, along with the use of the seed drill before Western adoption.  In addition, the Mughal empire adopted coins made of both gold and silver, including taking in gold bullion from other outside locations, also showing a strong foreign trade policy. The increase in artistry, showing an amalgamation of Safavid Persian and pre-Mughal Indian technique, also shows a connection between the Mughal empire and its neighbors, even if they weren’t always on the friendliest of terms.

Empires like the Ottoman, Mughal, and Safavid were key drivers of cultural, social, political, and economic change in the early modern world. By connecting millions of people under something like centralized rule, they established much of the foundation upon which the modern world would be built. So in terms of the meaning of “empire,” historians have argued that these three civilizations fall under that definition.  However, others have pointed out that the lack of sheer spread of population and geography that also define “empire,” such as the Ancient Roman empire or contemporary Chinese empires, only allow the Ottomans to retain that definition, while the Safavids and Mughals do not.  It’s up to you, the student, to determine what may or may not apply to these particular civilizations.