The Mughal Empire: Three Centuries of Islamic Rule in the Indian Subcontinent

The red-sandstone ramparts, domed pavilions, and chhatris of the Red Fort in Delhi rising against a blue sky, with a flag flying above the gatehouse — The Red Fort at Delhi, the fortified palace from which the Mughal emperors ruled from the mid-seventeenth century. By the last reign the *Encyclopaedia of Islam* records that the emperor's authority did not extend beyond its walls.Photograph: Islamic Heritage Encyclopaedia.

The Mughal Empire ruled most of the Indian subcontinent from 1526 to 1857, and for much of that span was among the wealthiest and most populous states in the world. Founded by Babur, a Timurid prince descended from Timur and Genghis Khan, it reached its greatest territorial extent under Aurangzeb in the late seventeenth century, before contracting over the following century and a half into a nominal sovereignty that the British East India Company finally abolished after the uprising of 1857.

Around 1600, when most of the subcontinent had come within its frontiers, the empire held a population estimated at between 125 and 145 millions, some 85 per cent of it living in villages. Its revenues rested on a land tax assessed village by village and paid out again as assignments to a graded imperial service; its textiles reached markets across the world, and the silver and gold that paid for them flowed inward from Europe, China and Japan. Persian was the language of its administration and much of its literature, and the court patronised a school of painting, a style of building and a tradition of garden design that drew on Timurid, Persian and Indian practice together. The dynasty called itself Timurid; "Mughal", the name that fastened on it in European and later Indian usage, is a Persian corruption of "Mongol".

The Mughal Emperors

#	Emperor	Reign (CE)	Reign (AH)	Note
1	Babur	1526–1530	932–937	Founder; took Delhi and Agra after Panipat
2	Humayun	1530–1540	937–947	Lost Hindustan to Sher Shah Suri
—	Suri interregnum	1540–1555	947–962	Sher Shah Suri and his successors held Delhi
2	Humayun (restored)	1555–1556	962–963	Recovered Delhi and Agra; died within a year
3	Akbar	1556–1605	963–1014	Personal rule from 1564; fifteen provinces at his death
4	Jahangir	1605–1627	1014–1037	Kandahar lost to Safavid Iran in 1622
5	Dawar Bakhsh	1627	1037	Son of Khusraw; raised briefly during the succession
6	Shah Jahan	1628–1658	1037–1068	Deposed by his son; died in confinement in 1666
7	Aurangzeb	1658–1707	1068–1118	Regnal title Alamgir; greatest territorial extent
8	Bahadur Shah I	1707–1712	1118–1124	Also styled Shah Alam I
9	Jahandar Shah	1712–1713	1124	Reigned eleven months; defeated at Samugarh and killed
10	Farrukh-siyar	1713–1719	1124–1131	Raised by the Sayyid brothers of Barha
11	Rafi al-Darajat	1719	1131	Died in the year of his accession
12	Shah Jahan II	1719	1131	Rafi al-Dawla; died in the same year
13	Muhammad Shah	1719–1748	1131–1161	Nadir Shah sacked Delhi in 1739
14	Ahmad Shah Bahadur	1748–1754	1161–1167	Deposed and blinded in 1754
15	Alamgir II	1754–1759	1167–1173
16	Shah Alam II	1759–1806	1173–1221	Blinded at Delhi in 1788; under British protection from 1803
17	Akbar Shah II	1806–1837	1221–1253	Sent Ram Mohan Roy to London in 1827
18	Bahadur Shah Zafar	1837–1858	1253–1274	Deposed and exiled to Rangoon after the 1857 uprising

The table follows C. E. Bosworth's dynastic manual, which the Encyclopaedia of Islam names as its own reference for Mughal chronology, checked against the regnal dates the encyclopaedia gives in its entries on the individual emperors. Three points of counting are worth stating, because lists of the Mughal emperors differ and the reasons are not arbitrary.

Humayun appears twice and is numbered once, his reign being divided by fifteen years of Suri rule. Dawar Bakhsh is included because Bosworth's table has him in the main line, unparenthesised, between Jahangir and Shah Jahan; he is the figure whom Lahori's Padshahnama records as having been set on the throne for a few days by Asaf Khan's party during the succession of 1627, and the Encyclopaedia of Islam's survey likewise records a war of succession "involving Dawar Bakhsh, the son of Khusraw, who was once proclaimed". And a number of further claimants are excluded, because Bosworth marks them as rivals rather than reigning emperors by setting them in parenthesis — a convention confirmed by his parallel tables, where such an entry is labelled in terms as a rival. Those excluded are Kamran in Kandahar (1530–53); Murad Bakhsh, Shah Shuja' and Dara Shikoh during the war of 1657–9; A'zam Shah and Kam Bakhsh in 1707; Azim al-Sha'n in 1712; Niku-siyar and Ibrahim in 1719–20; Shah Jahan III in 1759; and Bidar Bakht, installed at Delhi in 1788.

Origins: The Timurid Inheritance

The dynasty's name is an accident of language. The account at historyofislam.com notes that "Moghul" is a Persian corruption of "Mongol", and that it attached to Babur's house although the family preferred association with Timur, Babur's great-great-grandfather, and called themselves Timurids. The Encyclopaedia of Islam describes Akbar as both a Timurid Turk and a Chaghatay Mongol, which is the genealogy stated precisely.

The subcontinent they entered was rich and politically divided. The same account describes an India that had been a net exporter of goods until the eighteenth century, whose spices, ivory, iron and manufactures were valued across the world, and which ran a surplus inflow of precious metals through the trade of the western coast and the overland routes to China and Tabriz. Much of that wealth collected in Delhi, Lahore, Multan, Surat and Dacca, and those cities were correspondingly attractive to a conqueror. Some invaders took the plunder and left — Timur in 1400, Nadir Shah in 1739 — and others stayed and founded dynasties.

Babur and the Founding, 1526–1530

Fergana, Samarkand, Kabul

Babur was the son of Umar Shaykh, a Timurid prince who held the valley of Fergana. On his father's death in 1494, when Babur was eleven, the usual Timurid scramble for the throne followed; Babur emerged in possession of Fergana and Samarkand. To the east an Uzbek power had risen under Muhammad Shaibani Khan, expanding at the expense of both the Mongols and the Timurids. Shaibani invaded Fergana in 1501, defeated Babur, and occupied Samarkand. Babur spent three years in the hills of Afghanistan and the plains of Khurasan, attempting Samarkand repeatedly and failing each time.

He took Kabul in 1504 and ruled it as a base. The Samarkand claim was never abandoned: historyofislam.com records that as late as 1630 Shah Jahan, Babur's great-grandson, launched an unsuccessful expedition from Agra to recover it.

Panipat, 1526

Delhi was held by Ibrahim Lodi, last of a dynasty that had ruled since the mid-fifteenth century, and the political ground was unsettled: Bengal and the Punjab were in revolt and the Rajputs under Rana Sanga were in arms. An opportunity came when Daulat Khan, governor of the Punjab, sought Babur's help against Ibrahim. Babur's armies were at Lahore in 1525, and the following year he advanced on Delhi.

The disparity in force was extreme. Babur's whole army, drawn from a territory limited to Badakhshan, Kabul and Kandahar, numbered under twelve thousand men by one reckoning and eighteen thousand cavalry by another, against an army Abu'l-Fazl's Akbarnama puts at "nearly 100,000 cavalry and 1,000 war-elephants". Bada'uni's Muntakhab al-Tawarikh records the tactical method that closed the gap: Babur encamped with the town of Panipat at his rear and used a line of gun-carriages chained together, in the Ottoman manner, as a defensive front from which cavalry and infantry could fire and charge — a device managed by his artillerist Ustad Ali Quli, who chained the carriages "in the form of a whip-lash".

The armies met on 21 April 1526, which Bada'uni dates 8 Rajab 932. Abu'l-Fazl's account of the result is direct: "Sultan Ibrahim was slain unrecognised and in a corner, and numerous Afghans were the harvest of the royal sword… Near the body of Sultan Ibrahim, there lay on one spot five or six thousand dead. The sun had mounted spear-high when the onset of battle began and at noon there blew the breeze of victory." The Encyclopaedia of Islam records that the Mughal advantage lay in firearms, and historyofislam.com that when the artillery fell among the elephants they turned and trampled the Indian infantry.

Babur occupied Delhi and Agra, then moved east to Jaunpur and Ghazipur.

Khanwa, 1527

The Rajput confederacy remained. The Encyclopaedia of Islam records the victory of Khanwa against the Rajput armies of Rana Sanga of Chitor in 933/1527, and the TDV entry on the dynasty dates it to March 1527, recording that the forces under Rana Sanga took heavy losses and that the engagement consolidated Mughal authority in India. Some local Muslim chieftains fought on the Rajput side.

Resistance in the east continued under Mahmud Lodi, Ibrahim's brother, who escaped Panipat and raised an army in Bengal; it was broken in 1529, and a further victory over the Afghans extended Mughal territory to the edge of Bengal.

Death

The Encyclopaedia of Islam notes one cultural consequence of Babur's own tastes: he was critical of Indian gardens, and brought the concept of the symmetrical Mughal garden to India. He was buried in a large garden tomb.

The TDV entry records that his health began to fail towards 1530, that he summoned the notables of the day and secured their acceptance of his son Humayun's succession, and that he died at Agra on 26 December 1530. He left the Baburnama, his memoir in Chaghatay Turkish.

Humayun: Loss and Recovery, 1530–1556

The Inheritance Divided

Humayun acceded at Agra. He assigned Kabul, Kandahar and the western Punjab to his brother Mirza Kamran, whose ambitions then made the western frontier a standing anxiety. Opposition from the nobles of the old Lodi regime was suppressed, but the ablest of their commanders, Sher Khan — the future Sher Shah Suri — continued his preparations, at one point entering Mughal service, the Encyclopaedia of Islam records, in order to learn more about Mughal organisation.

The eastern Afghans moved first. The TDV entry records that Mahmud Khan Lodi, who had taken refuge in Bengal, advanced west and seized Jaunpur; Humayun recovered the city in 1531 and then besieged Sher Khan's fort of Chunar for some four months.

Gujarat

Humayun's brother-in-law Muhammad Zaman Mirza allied himself with Bahadur Shah of Gujarat, which brought war with that country. The TDV entry records that in 1534, while Humayun was occupied in the east, Bahadur Shah advanced to the neighbourhood of Agra while himself besieging Chitor; Humayun then determined on the Gujarat campaign, routed Bahadur at Mandasor, advanced to the Gulf of Cambay and annexed Gujarat in 1535. The Encyclopaedia of Islam records the capture of both Mandu and Champaner in the same pursuit, and dates the first Mughal occupation of Gujarat to 942/1535–6.

It did not hold. Humayun left the province to his brother Askari and returned to Agra; Askari failed to keep it, and Bahadur Shah attacked Ahmadabad and expelled the Mughals. Malwa could not be retained either. Meanwhile the Mirzas, Humayun's independent-minded Timurid cousins, gave him continual trouble, and his brothers Hindal Mirza and Kamran Mirza rebelled and claimed the throne.

Chausa and Kannauj

Sher Khan had by then occupied Bihar and was extending his influence west along the Ganges, annexing Benares and moving on Gaur, the Bengal capital. Humayun pursued and found that Sher had cut his line of communication.

Two defeats settled it. The TDV entry dates the first to 27 June 1539 at Chausa, where Sher Shah inflicted a heavy and unexpected defeat in a night attack; and the second to 17 May 1540 at Kannauj, after which the Mughals evacuated Agra and Delhi and withdrew to Lahore. The Encyclopaedia of Islam records the flight towards Sind in 947/1540, "where his son Akbar was born".

Fifteen Years of Exile

Hindal and Kamran met Humayun at Lahore and agreed to continue the struggle, but their rivalry and the danger from Sher Shah forced Humayun out of India altogether. The TDV entry records that the Mughals spent some fifteen years attempting to survive in exile; that Humayun took refuge with the Safavids and received the help of Shah Tahmasp; that Hindal died fighting; and that Askari and Kamran went to Mecca for the pilgrimage and died there. Jauhar Aftabchi, who served Humayun through these years, left the memoir of the exile that is the closest witness to it.

The Return, and the Accident

Humayun returned to India in 1555, defeated Sikandar of the Suris, and took Delhi — the Mughals holding Hindustan for a second time. The TDV entry records a detail of some interest for Ottoman–Mughal contact: the Ottoman naval commander Seydi Ali Reis, author of the Mir'at al-Mamalik, was at Delhi at this time and met Humayun.

Within a year Humayun was dead, injured in an accident. He had reigned, in two instalments, for rather less than eleven years in all. The day of his death is given differently by the sources and is discussed in the Historiographical Note.

Akbar and the Making of the Empire, 1556–1605

Panipat, 1556

Akbar was thirteen. The TDV entry records that Humayun's death was concealed for a time on Seydi Ali Reis's advice, and that Akbar reached Delhi twenty days later and ascended the throne on 3 Rabi' II 963, 15 February 1556, as Jalal al-Din Akbar Shah, with his guardian Bayram Khan's support. His authority ran over Kabul, the Punjab, Delhi and Agra, and no further.

The immediate danger was Hemu, formerly minister to Muhammad Adil Sur, who had taken the title Raja Vikramaditya and seized Delhi. His forces were broken at the second battle of Panipat on 5 November 1556, in the engagement fought by Bayram Khan, and the city was recovered. Sikandar Sur surrendered the following year.

Personal Rule from 1564

Bayram Khan was removed from office in October 1560 and sent on the pilgrimage; the TDV entry records that he was killed by Afghans while passing through Patan in Gujarat. The four years that followed were not years of personal rule: the Encyclopaedia of Islam describes authority contested between the women of the household — what its survey of the dynasty calls the "haram party" — and a faction built around Akbar's foster relatives, the atga khayl. Both the Encyclopaedia of Islam and the TDV entry date Akbar's effective personal rule from 1564, after which he moved his court from Delhi to Agra.

The Conquests

The survey in the Encyclopaedia of Islam sets out the sequence. The rebellion at Mandu was crushed by Akbar in person in 971/1564, and an attempt at Afghan independence in Bihar was put down the same year. There were risings by an Uzbek faction at the Delhi court, and more seriously by the Mirzas, who moved from Katehr to Malwa and then to Gujarat, where in the disorder following the collapse of the local sultanate they acquired extensive land. Local rebellions by the Meos of Mewat were suppressed.

Three Rajput strongholds fell — Chitor, Ranthambhor and Kalinjar — after which Akbar founded his new capital at Fatehpur Sikri, where his heir Salim, the future Jahangir, was born. Gujarat was then conquered, the local sultanate having shown itself incapable of protecting the pilgrim traffic to the Hijaz; Akbar established sufficiently good relations with the Portuguese navies to secure it. A rebellion in Bengal brought a campaign that concluded in 984/1576 with the death of Dawud Khan Kararani and the incorporation of the province. Khandesh, the buffer state between Mughal territory and the Deccan, was annexed in 985/1577.

Dated reign by reign in the entry on Akbar himself, the additions run: Malwa 1562, the Gond kingdom of Garha-Katanga 1564, Chitor 1568, Ranthambhor and Kalinjar 1569, Gujarat 1573, Bengal 1576; then Kashmir 1586, Sind 1591, part of Orissa 1592, Baluchistan and Makran 1594, Kandahar 1595; and in the Deccan, Berar, Khandesh and part of Ahmadnagar between 1595 and 1601. At his death the empire comprised fifteen subas: Kabul with Kashmir, Lahore, Multan with Sind, Delhi, Oudh, Agra, Ajmer, Ahmadabad, Malwa, Allahabad, Bihar, Bengal, Khandesh, Berar, and Ahmadnagar, which the encyclopaedia notes was not fully subjugated.

The Rajput Settlement

In 1562 Raja Bhar Mal of Amber submitted and gave Akbar his daughter in marriage. The TDV entry treats this as the point at which Rajput influence established itself at court, and draws out the consequence: it opened office in the Mughal state to non-Muslims, Rajputs above all, and led to Hindus being employed at court in greater numbers than men of Central Asian origin. The Encyclopaedia of Islam records Akbar's matrimonial alliances with the great Rajput houses as a policy rather than a series of incidents.

The First Jesuit Mission

The Encyclopaedia of Islam dates the arrival of the first Jesuit mission at Agra to 988/1580, and connects it directly with what followed: religious toleration was preached at the Mughal court, largely as a result of the influence of Akbar's ministers Abu'l-Fazl and his brother Faizi.

Jahangir, 1605–1627

Jahangir succeeded on Akbar's death after what the Encyclopaedia of Islam calls a short attempt at independence in his father's lifetime. The TDV entry on the dynasty describes him as the strongest personality of the house after Akbar.

His rule was challenged early by his own son Khusraw; in the punishment of the rebels that followed, the Sikh Guru Arjun, who had sheltered Khusraw, was put to death — an act the Encyclopaedia of Islam records as having provoked lasting enmity between the Sikhs and the Mughal power. A Persian claim to Kandahar drew Jahangir to Kabul for a time; there was renewed conflict with Mewar, where Rana Amar Singh entered into political rivalry with him; and operations in the Deccan were at first largely unsuccessful, the former Habshi slave Malik Ambar recovering Ahmadnagar with guerrilla bands of Maratha soldiers and further Mughal territory being lost. Not until 1030/1621 did Prince Khurram meet with success there. Kandahar fell to Shah Abbas of Persia the following year, and when Khurram was ordered to retake it he went into open rebellion instead; in the resulting confusion Malik Ambar retook the Bidar province. In 1612 Jahangir suppressed a dangerous Afghan rising in Bengal.

The Encyclopaedia of Islam draws a distinction between Jahangir and his father: he was not an active patron of building as Akbar had been, but was a connoisseur of painting, and the survey marks his reign as the high point of both Mughal painting and the Mughal coinage. His memoirs, the Tuzuk-i Jahangiri, reveal him as an enthusiastic traveller and a close observer of the natural world. His wife Nur Jahan held a share in the substance of government that the Iqbal-nama-i Jahangiri describes without reserve, including coin struck in her name and her signature attached jointly to imperial farmans.

European trading contact grew markedly in the reign. The TDV entry records that Portugal, Holland, France and England all developed their Indian commerce in this period, naming the Dutch Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie, the Compagnie Française des Indes Orientales and the English East India Company alongside the established Portuguese presence on the coasts.

Dawar Bakhsh and the Succession of 1627

Jahangir died in November 1627 on the road between Rajauri and Bhimber, coming down from Kashmir, with his son Khurram far off in the Deccan. Lahori's Padshahnama records what Asaf Khan's party then did: they resolved to place on the throne, for a few days, Bulaki — the son of Khusraw, known also as Dawar Bakhsh — set him on horseback with men they trusted, and marched, keeping a day ahead of Nur Jahan, whom they removed from the royal palace.

Shahriyar, Jahangir's youngest surviving son, was near Lahore awaiting events; his forces were routed, he fell back into the fortress, and after his followers came to terms with Asaf Khan he was brought out, confined, and blinded two or three days afterwards. Asaf Khan then wrote to Khurram, whose messenger reached him at Junir on the Deccan frontier. Khurram ascended the throne at Agra on 18 Jumada II 1037, 6 February 1628, with the title Abu'l Muzaffar Shahab al-Din Muhammad Sahib Qiran-i Sani.

Shah Jahan, 1628–1658

Shah Jahan's reign is the one most associated with Mughal building, and the Taj Mahal at Agra was raised over his wife Mumtaz Mahal. The Encyclopaedia of Islam's survey of Mughal architecture treats his reign as a distinct phase of the dynasty's building.

Abroad the reign was active in both directions. Kandahar, lost under Jahangir, came back into Mughal hands without a siege when its Persian commander Ali Mardan Khan transferred his allegiance; the attempt to recover the dynasty's ancestral lands in Turan failed, fifteen months' occupation of Balkh ending in a costly retreat.

The Deccan remained unresolved. Before Aurangzeb's accession the region had been, in the survey's words, ravaged by Shivaji, the Maratha leader who was to become the dynasty's principal antagonist; and Mughal attempts in Central Asia, including the expedition of 1630 towards Samarkand, came to nothing.

The reign ended in a war of succession among his sons. Shah Jahan was deposed in 1658 and died in confinement in 1666.

Aurangzeb Alamgir, 1658–1707

Dara Shikoh and the Turn

The succession war set Shah Jahan's heir-apparent Dara Shikoh against his younger brother Aurangzeb. The Encyclopaedia of Islam's section on religious life treats the outcome as a turning point in the religious history of the dynasty. Dara Shikoh had attempted to follow Akbar's course, seeking to unite the two principal religious traditions of India and reach the majma' al-bahrayn, the confluence of the two oceans, the phrase from Qur'an 18:60 that gave his book its title; in it he leaned on the doctrine of wahdat al-wujud associated with the followers of Ibn Arabi, which appeared to him the Islamic equivalent of the Vedantic advaita, non-duality. The tensions between the brothers led to Dara Shikoh's execution, and the encyclopaedia records that this "brought about a rule of the Mecca-oriented type of Indian Islam for nearly half a century, much to the chagrin of many Sufis, Shi'is and Hindus."

The Deccan Wars

Aurangzeb took the regnal title Alamgir on his formal accession in 1068/1658. Shivaji surrendered to the Mughals in 1076/1666, but the treaty granted him the right to chauth, a quarter of the revenues of the ceded district of Bijapur — and the Marathas then exacted that tribute from whatever region they conquered, so that when those districts later fell to the Mughals their resources were already seriously depleted.

When Aurangzeb moved to Hasan Abdal for two years after 1082/1671 to put down Yusufzai and Afridi Pathan risings, Shivaji continued his campaigns in the Deccan undisturbed and, in the Encyclopaedia of Islam's assessment, "virtually created a nation out of the Marathas", who had formerly been subjects of the Muslim sultanates of Ahmadnagar and Bijapur and who were to become the Mughals' principal challengers.

Aurangzeb moved to the Deccan in 1093/1682 and spent the remaining twenty-five years of his life in almost continuous warfare there. The Adil Shahi sultanate of Bijapur fell in 1097/1686 and the Qutb Shahi sultanate of Golconda the following year, the whole Deccan becoming a single large suba with its headquarters at Aurangabad.

The Cost

The Encyclopaedia of Islam states the strategic consequence: "the disadvantage of the conquest was that the balance of power was destroyed, for Bijapur and Golconda no longer stood between the Mughals and the Marathas." Forts were recaptured and Hindu kingdoms attacked, but the Mughal armies were becoming exhausted and the financial resources dwindling, and a retreat was made.

The Structure of the State

The Mansabdari Service

All important officials, civil and military alike, were graded as amirs or mansabdars on a military basis, divided into thirty-three classes, with rank and precedence fixed by nominal commands of horse ranging from ten to five thousand. The Encyclopaedia of Islam records that there was evidently some connection between an officer's rank and the number of troops he kept, but that the exact meaning of the paired terms zat and sawar is controversial.

Two features of Akbar's design are drawn out in the survey's section on administration. He took the promotion and appointment of military officers into his own hands, and he abolished the inherited distinction between military and civil service by giving civil officers the rank of mansabdar too, so that both held rank and authority in proportion to the cavalry assigned to them.

The nobility was theoretically the creation of the emperor: he alone could confer, increase, diminish or resume any subject's mansab. But the survey warns against reading it as a meritocracy. The mansabdars were not only public servants but the richest class in the empire and "a closed aristocracy; entrance into this class was not easily available to ordinary subjects, whatever their merits." The decisive factor in appointment was heredity, and the khanazads — sons and descendants of mansabdars — had the best claim of all, though sons did not normally succeed to their fathers' full rank.

Akbar's policy appears to have been to integrate the empire's diverse groups into a single imperial service, often placing officers of different groups under one superior while respecting the distinct character of each. The survey offers a reading of sulh-i kull that belongs here rather than only in the religious history: it was "at least partly motivated by a desire to employ elements of diverse religious beliefs — Sunnis, Shi'is and Hindus — and to prevent sectarian differences among them from interfering with their loyalty to the throne."

The Jagir and its Crisis

Officers were remunerated by assignments of revenue called jagirs. The holder was entitled to collect the authorised revenue, mal-i wajibi, and the claims of the state, huquq-i diwani; no right other than collecting the land revenue and authorised taxes was delegated to him, and he was expected to exercise even that in conformity with imperial regulations. Statements requiring jagirdars to take not more than half the produce occur in the revenue records of Aurangzeb's reign.

A jagirdar employed his own agents: a chief agent or amil, also called shiqdar, assisted by an amin as revenue assessor, a fotadar as treasurer and a karkun as accountant, with the smaller holders combining these roles and often requiring securities from the men who filled them. Revenue farming, ijara, appealed especially to smaller holders. Jahangir instituted altun-tamgha jagirs, held permanently, as a concession to mansabdars who were not themselves zamindars; but these were confined to small localities and bore no comparison with the great watans, the ancestral dominions of the Rajput chiefs.

The system then failed. A crisis arose that a contemporary writer called bi-jagiri, the absence of jagirs: more commanders and officers had to be accommodated on the imperial payrolls than could be found assignments. Influence and money began to count for more in every assignment, and a struggle for jagirs developed among the mansabdars — fought out under Aurangzeb in the form of factional rivalry rather than open violence. Anand Ram Mukhlis records that by the reign of Farrukh-siyar, 1124–30/1713–19, jagir assignment by the court had become a matter of mere paper orders, so that a large number of men granted mansabs never received jagirs at all. The survey's verdict: "Once this happened, all was over not only with the jagir system but with the Mughal Empire as a whole."

Zamindars and Peasants

Beneath the imperial service stood the zamindars, the holders of hereditary right in the land. The survey records that Aurangzeb's reign saw a great increase in the pressure of jagirdar administration upon them as a class, and quotes the Venetian Manucci to the effect that the viceroys and governors were "in a constant state of quarrel with the Hindu princes and zamindars — with some because they wish to seize their lands; with others to force them to pay more revenue than is customary", with "some rebellion of the Rajas and zamindars going on" at most times.

The peasants were the ra'aya or ra'iyyat, whence the Anglo-Indian "ryot". They were a sharply differentiated class: the sources distinguish muqaddams, village headmen, and kalantaran, higher-level men, from the rezari'aya or small peasants, and a farman of Aurangzeb makes a separate category of those so indigent as to depend wholly on credit for seed, cattle and subsistence. Whether they held ownership rights in the land the survey treats as doubtful; since land was not scarce, the authorities were more concerned to keep cultivators attached to the land they worked than to define their title, and there was a considerable migratory population, the paykasht, tilling land away from their home villages. The village was the unit around which peasant society revolved and the real unit of the state's revenue assessment.

Economy and Society

Scale

Estimates of the population of India within its pre-1947 frontiers around 1600, by which date the larger part of it lay inside the Mughal Empire, run from 125 millions — W. H. Moreland's figure as corrected by K. Davis — to 145 millions in Shireen Moosvi's reckoning. Even at the higher figure, the Encyclopaedia of Islam's section on the economy observes, the region held less than a seventh of the population it contains today, implying an average rate of growth of about 0.2 per cent a year. Of that number some 85 per cent lived in villages and about 15 per cent in towns.

The Land and the Village

Forest and pasture covered a very large part of the empire's land surface, and the forests yielded products of real economic importance, from elephants to gumlac; teak was among the best of the timbers. Sericulture, practised in Bengal before the Mughals, expanded considerably as Bengal silk reached the world market, and indigo had a comparably prosperous phase, lasting until chemical substitutes displaced the crop. Horticulture was widely pursued, new grafting techniques producing improved varieties of orange and mango, and the Portuguese introduced the pineapple.

Agriculture was largely a peasant enterprise, certain castes being exclusively peasant ones, with artisans and rural labourers also undertaking petty cultivation. The survey records the effect of caste on the supply of labour without softening it: by excluding those it treated as untouchable from the ranks of landholders proper, the system "provided a large reserve of labour for agricultural operations in return for artificially-depressed wages." The dominant peasants appeared as headmen or councillors, panc, who disposed of the waste land, collected taxes on the state's behalf and ran a village fund; some grew rich enough to pass into the class of zamindars.

Minerals and Crafts

Mughal India produced considerable quantities of good iron, though copper production in Rajasthan appears to have been declining. The diamond mines of the south, in Golconda and Bijapur, were, in the survey's words, celebrated throughout the world; salt was mined in the Salt Range of the western Punjab. Gold, silver and tin mines were no longer worked, so those metals had to be imported, which is why the empire's bullion came in by sea.

Textile production was, in terms of employment, perhaps the largest sector of the economy after agriculture. Cotton cloth, muslin, calico, long cloth and chintz were produced in large variety and found markets the world over. Gujarat specialised in the interweaving of cotton, silk and silver and gold wire, and was the home of the patola device, in which warp and weft are dyed before weaving.

Taxation

The land tax took so large a part of the agricultural surplus that it could reasonably be confused with rent, and two observers of very different kinds drew that conclusion independently: the French traveller François Bernier, who held the king to be the proprietor of the soil, and the Indian jurist Qadi Muhammad A'la, who deemed the tax to be ujra, rent, rather than kharaj. Sixteenth-century documents treat half the produce as a fair amount of tax.

Beyond the land the state levied taxes on crafts, on goods in transit, and on exports and imports, grouped together under the term sa'ir. Their full magnitude is difficult to estimate and their burden fell on the consumer, but they do not appear to have been excessively heavy: customs duties, for example, did not exceed 5 per cent by value. The distribution of what was collected shaped the towns as much as the countryside, since a very large part of the tax income passed into the hands of the high nobility — in 1595 the top twenty-five princes and nobles took over 30 per cent of it — whose establishments maintained, directly or indirectly, much of the urban population.

Money, Credit and Commerce

The Mughals took over and maintained a trimetallic currency of great uniformity and purity, inherited from Sher Shah. The silver rupee gradually replaced the copper tanka as the money unit for larger transactions, and the seventeenth century saw a sharp contraction in Mughal copper coinage; the gold mohur remained in use chiefly for hoarding. The influx of silver into India during the sixteenth century did not produce a large rise in prices, because the silver was absorbed as a substitute for copper, but in the following century a moderate inflation appears to have taken place.

Credit was correspondingly developed. Bills of exchange, hundis, were used so extensively that bill-money must be held to have substantially supplemented coin in the major markets, and they could be insured. The sarrafs, bankers who specialised in discounting bills, also took deposits, so that a rudimentary deposit banking existed, with credit-money created by allowing payments through bankers on bankers' books. Interest rates were higher in India than in western Europe, and lower in Gujarat and northern India than in Bengal and the Deccan; they fell distinctly about the middle of the seventeenth century, varying in Gujarat between 0.5 and 0.75 per cent a month.

Commerce was carried on by men of very different scale. At one end were the banjaras, large bands of transporters moving goods in bulk on load-carrying bullocks over enormous distances; at the other, specialised bankers, brokers, dallals, and insurers, some of whom at the ports also owned and operated ships. A theory advanced by J. C. van Leur and Niels Steensgaard held that Asian and Indian commerce was essentially the business of pedlars, so that the Dutch and English companies introduced radically superior commercial technique; the survey finds little justification for it. There were small men — Banarsidas, a minor jewel merchant, left memoirs — but there were also sahs, great merchants with numerous agents, among them Virji Vora of Surat, who kept agents in every important Indian town and in several ports abroad and who often financed the English East India Company himself.

Whether this amounted to a middle class, and so to the potential for capitalist development, has been argued at length. The survey names the participants on both sides — Reisner, W. C. Smith and Iqtidar Alam Khan for the proposition, Irfan Habib against it on the ground that the Mughal urban economy rested heavily on land-tax extraction and could not develop independently, and Karen Leonard applying a "Great Firm" theory to the empire's decline — and declines to settle it: "The debate continues."

Religion in the Mughal State

Kingship and the Perfect Man

The Encyclopaedia of Islam's section on religious life sets out the ideological claim the early emperors made for themselves. The role assumed by Akbar, and to a lesser extent by Jahangir and Shah Jahan, was that of the king as carrier of the farr-i humayun, the ancient Iranian khwarena or luminous power; the ruler, as the survey puts it, is on his admirers' account the insan-i kamil, the Perfect Man of whom Sufism had long been speaking. Under the two successors the emphasis shifted somewhat towards the king as heir to Solomon.

The Din-i Ilahi

Akbar's din-i ilahi is, the survey observes, what most scholars and general readers think of first when Mughal religious life is mentioned — and it records the range of judgements on it without adopting one: it "has been considered by some to be heresy, if not plain apostasy from Islam, while others would rather classify it as a kind of mystical 'secret society' comprising a very limited number of court-related elite." That last characterisation is corroborated from a different direction by the TDV entry on Akbar, which records that its adherents never exceeded twenty in number and that those admitted were chosen by the emperor himself.

The survey is careful to set it in proportion: Akbar, "the prototype of mystical eclecticism", who liked to select what he judged best from the traditions he had encountered in the debates of the ibadat-khana at Fatehpur Sikri, has become for many the quintessential Grand Mughal — but "his attempt at a reconciliation of the major trends inside his vast country was only one in the plethora of Indian religious movements during Mughal times."

The Encyclopaedia of Islam's separate entry on sulh-i kull calls it the central principle in the religious thought of Akbar and his counsellor Abu'l-Fazl, apparently developed under the influence of Ibn Arabi, and explains it as a station recognising diversity and requiring benevolence to all. Among the measures placed under this policy are the abolition of the jizya and of the tax on Hindu pilgrims. The entry also records that sulh-i kull is not heard of after the early years of Jahangir's reign.

One measure of the ilahi project left a physical trace. The Khalili Collections hold silver rupees of Akbar struck to the ilahi reckoning, dated by the Ilahi year of the reign and by the Persian solar month rather than by the Hijri calendar — the new era being counted from his accession. Coin was one of the two classical marks of Islamic sovereignty, and dating it by a reign rather than by the Hijra placed the claim where every holder of a rupee would encounter it.

Orders, Currents and Tensions

The Mughals entered a subcontinent whose Muslim religious life was already various. The survey records a considerable Mahdawi influence: the Mahdi of Jawnpur had died in 911/1505, but his followers became powerful again during the Suri interregnum and apparently continued below the surface, influencing a number of mystically-minded people. From the other direction, Babur brought with him at least a great respect for the Naqshbandi order, and translated Ubayd Allah Ahrar's Risala-yi Walidiyya; a century later it was that same order in India which worked to counteract Akbar's lenient religious policy.

A second tension ran between Sunni and Shi'i groups, and the survey traces it to a specific cause: the constant influx of Persian nobles taking office in the army or at court, particularly after Jahangir's marriage to Nur Jahan. The struggle against the Shi'a was carried on largely by scholars close to the Naqshbandiyya, and continued into the eighteenth century, when the Naqshbandi leader and poet Mazhar Jan-Janan lost his life after ridiculing a Muharram procession.

After Aurangzeb's Accession

The execution of Dara Shikoh closed that line of development. The most considerable muhaddith of the Mughal period, the survey notes, was Abd al-Haqq ibn Sayf al-Din.

Art, Architecture and Letters

Building

Akbar's architectural activity, the survey records, surpassed even that of his predecessors, and the fortress-palace at Fatehpur Sikri is his own foundation. Jahangir built less. Shah Jahan's reign forms a distinct architectural phase, and Ebba Koch, who wrote the survey's section on architecture, has identified a Solomonic imagery in the palaces of that reign — the building answering to the claim the emperors were then making for their own kingship. Even the last emperor's buildings, the survey notes, are of some merit.

Painting

Babur is not known to have employed painters, though his interest in painting is attested, so the survey treats Humayun as, tentatively, the founding patron of the Mughal school. Two episodes of the exile show the interest surviving the loss of the throne: in 949/1542, a fugitive, Humayun called a painter to record a bird, an incident preserved in Jauhar Aftabchi's memoir; and the following year, at the Safavid courts of Sultaniyya and Tabriz, he set about acquiring painters. Mir Sayyid Ali and Khwaja Abd al-Samad entered his service and became, in the survey's account, instrumental in founding the Mughal school of painting at Delhi.

Under Akbar the studio was organised on a scale that the survey documents closely. Mir Sayyid Ali directed it until his departure for Mecca, probably in 979/1571–2, and Abd al-Samad after him; from that point the painters were predominantly Hindu, and the names of Daswanth and Basawan are encountered. As many as sixty painters might work on a large cycle, and a single picture was commonly divided among hands — one painter taking the composition, tarh, another the execution and colouring, amal and rang amizi, and sometimes a third the finishing of the faces, chihra-nami. The major project of the period was a Hamza-nama, produced from about 1562 to 1577 on separate sheets of cloth mounted on card, which eventually comprised some 1,400 pictures.

The subjects follow the emperor's own interests. Translations of the Hindu epics were illustrated — the Razm-nama, the Harivamsa, the Ramayana — alongside an Islamic history, the Tarikh-i alfi, and a sustained attention to the dynasty's own past in the Chingiz-nama, the Tarikh-i Khandan-i Timuriyya, the Baburnama and the Akbarnama. Fine copies of the Persian classics came to predominate in the 1590s at Lahore. Several of the Akbar-period manuscripts carry dates in the Ilahi era rather than the Hijri. Under Jahangir, the survey records, Mughal painting reached its highest point, and it marks the Mughal period as a whole as the high point of the Indian painting tradition.

Carpets and Textiles

The traditional floor-covering of India was the woven cotton dari, or the light painted and dyed cotton floorspread. Pile carpets were at first imported, mainly from Persia, as sajjada for prayer, and passed only gradually into secular use in emulation of Persian noble households. The survey quotes Abu'l-Fazl's Ain-i Akbari for the change, and the passage presents it as deliberate policy: "His Majesty has caused carpets to be made of wonderful varieties and charming textures; he has appointed experienced workmen who have produced many masterpieces… All kinds of carpet weavers have settled here, and drive a flourishing trade. They are found in every town, especially in Agrah, Fathpur and Lahor." Early Mughal carpets were close in style to those of eastern Persia, though the warp was usually cotton rather than wool; by the nineteenth century the craft had become a commercial industry.

Textiles were older and more famous than carpets. India's particular renown lay in fine muslins, in richly coloured painted and dyed cloths, kalamkari, and in fabrics ornamented with gold, and the records of the first European travellers and traders confirm a flourishing export to Persia and the Levant. Each separate art was reserved within its own caste communities, which transmitted inherited experience across generations; the tools were very simple, and the craftsman relied on his understanding of his materials and the dexterity of his hands. The survey notes a reason why rare pieces of exceptional quality survive at all: such a textile was given as a khil'a, a robe of honour, and was therefore kept.

Letters

In letters, the nineteenth century saw the rise of Urdu poetry at the Delhi court, with the last emperor himself writing under the pen-name Zafar, and the survey names Dard, Zauq, Ghalib and Mu'min among the poets of the period.

External Relations

The survey's section on external relations opens by placing the empire in its world. The Mughal Empire, the Safavid monarchy and the long-established Ottoman Empire were the three leading Muslim powers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The Uzbeks of Central Asia were a fourth power, competing with the Safavids for Khurasan and Balkh, seeking Ottoman support for that purpose and sometimes Mughal support as well — though when it suited them they would threaten the marches of the Mughal province of Kabul and play the Safavid game against Mughal interests.

Persia and the Question of Kandahar

Mughal relations with Safavid Persia had enough in common in faith, culture and territorial interest to allow long periods of peace, but the standing territorial issue between them was the control of Kandahar, which changed hands repeatedly across the period. The survey's explanation of why both powers cared so much is that the motives were prestige and strategy together: whoever held the fortress could deal more effectively with the Uzbeks.

The relationship began in Humayun's extremity. His first mission to Persia was sent while he was in flight from India after the defeats of 946/1539 and 947/1540, and when his brother Kamran threatened to take him he sought refuge with Shah Tahmasp on Bayram Khan's advice. Two things came of the year he spent there. The Shah's unexpectedly extensive military help made it possible to recover Kandahar, which became the stepping stone to Kabul and afterwards to Delhi; and Humayun's own sensibility in art and calligraphy impressed the Persians, which is how the Persian painters who founded the Mughal school came into his service. Having promised the fort to Tahmasp, Humayun handed it to a Persian commander — then, left without shelter, reoccupied it and sent an explanation, which the Shah accepted with good grace.

Akbar waited. The survey records a fourteen-year vigil over Kandahar, resolved in 1007/1598–9 when the sudden collapse of Uzbek power — Abd Allah Khan Uzbek and his son Abd al-Mu'min Khan dying in the same year — left the Persian governors of the fort without hope of support from distant Qazvin; they handed it to Akbar's men and took high mansabs in Mughal service for themselves. Only once he was certain of the fortress did Akbar send his first full embassy to Persia, the first in more than four decades. Shah Abbas I, who at that stage preferred a Mughal Kandahar to an Uzbek one, made much of it; but when Akbar's next envoy, the man of letters Mir Ma'sum, arrived, the Shah kept him waiting long for an audience and sent no return embassy — a studied expression of displeasure at the continued occupation.

Jahangir's reign opened with a carefully planned Persian attack on Kandahar under the governor of Herat in 1014/1606, launched in the hope of profiting from the change of ruler and disowned by Shah Abbas when it failed. Shah Jahan, by contrast, pursued three connected aims, as the survey summarises them: to recover Kandahar, to re-establish his house in its ancestral lands in Turan, and to assert suzerainty over the Deccan kingdoms and break their alliance with Persia. He got Kandahar by negotiation rather than siege — the Persian commander Ali Mardan Khan, summoned to a court he expected would kill him, let the Mughal commanders take over and received high rank in Mughal service — and he failed in Turan, where fifteen months' occupation of Balkh ended in a costly retreat.

Under Aurangzeb the relationship broke. He was anxious for recognition, having come to the throne through a contested succession, and received Shah Abbas II's embassy under Budaq Beg with marked warmth; the Shah so enjoyed the gift of pan, betel leaf, that he ordered arrangements for its regular supply to Isfahan. The return embassy was well received at first and then insulted: the ambassador Tarbiyat Khan was curtly dismissed and handed an insulting letter addressed to Aurangzeb, and the Shah threatened invasion and marched out of his capital before dying in Khurasan. The survey does not pretend to explain the reversal, offering a diplomatic blunder, the Shah's temper, or a turn to sectarian feeling as possibilities. Relations were not resumed for the rest of Aurangzeb's reign.

Afterwards they were, in the survey's phrase, "spasmodic and inconsequential", and it was Kandahar again that briefly animated them. In 1121/1709 Mir Ways, the Ghilzai Afghan chief of Kandahar, threw off Safavid authority, declared for India and asked Bahadur Shah I for support. The emperor appointed him Mughal governor and gave him the title Ali Mardan Khan — and, judging that a loose Kandahar was dangerous to Delhi as well as to Isfahan, sent secret advice to the Safavid Sultan Husayn at the same time.

The Ottomans

Ottoman interest in the Indian Ocean expanded under Selim I and Süleyman the Magnificent, and was then cut short by the arrival of Portuguese naval power in the same waters. The clearest Ottoman–Mughal contact of the period came out of that contest: the admiral Sidi Ali Reis was detailed to help the Muslim kingdom of Gujarat against the Portuguese, was defeated at sea, and decided to return home overland, reaching Delhi, where Humayun received him with a grand reception. Humayun's fatal accident occurred during his stay. The royal letter the admiral carried away was, in the survey's view, drafted while Humayun was alive — its reference to a re-establishment on the throne shows as much — but issued in Akbar's name; addressed to Süleyman, it appears to have drawn no response.

Akbar's long reign was, in the survey's words, barren in regard to the Ottomans, who are reported to have been suspicious of his role in matters touching their regional interests in the East. Jahangir, absorbed in his friendship with Shah Abbas, paid little attention to an Ottoman embassy that reached his court early in the reign, on account of its uncertain status. Shah Jahan was the first Mughal emperor to send a fully fledged embassy to the Ottoman court, wanting a Sunni front against a hostile Safavid Persia; the letter he sent was couched in a mood of self-exaltation, and the nama-yi humayun brought back by the Ottoman envoy Arslan Agha annoyed him in turn for its lack of proper form.

Beyond the Three Empires

The court's reach was wider than its wars. Akbar kept in touch with Kashghar, was eager for information about the political situation in China and in Europe, and maintained regular diplomatic contact with the Sharifs of Mecca; he also received regular reports on men of learning in Persia from agents assigned to the purpose. The same could be said, the survey notes, with varying emphasis, of the emperors down to Aurangzeb. The TDV entry records that Akbar established good relations with the Ottomans, the Safavids and the Uzbeks alike.

Trade and the European Companies

In the regions of the empire that were at peace, commerce was active and, for the period, highly organised. Funds were ordinarily transmitted by bills of exchange negotiable in all the principal towns and in some centres outside the empire. Merchants were disinclined to hold large stocks of goods and preferred to put their funds out at interest, commonly 10 or 12 per cent in commercial transactions and much higher where the risk was great.

The European companies arrived into that system rather than creating it, and the dates are worth setting out because the last of them matters to the end of the story.

The Portuguese were established on the coasts first, and their naval power had already displaced Ottoman influence in the Indian Ocean.
The English East India Company was incorporated by royal charter in 1600. Its factory at Surat was set up against strenuous Portuguese opposition and its position secured by a grant from Jahangir in 1618. Surat was replaced by Bombay as its principal settlement on the west coast, acquired from the Portuguese in 1661 as part of the dowry brought by Charles II's wife, Catherine of Braganza. The survey draws the symmetry out: the Company's fortunes "were to be exactly coeval with the Mughal dynasty, for in 1858, after the Indian Mutiny, the Company lost its charter and was legally dissolved."
The Dutch merged their separate ventures in 1602 into the United East India Company, the Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie, which had a factory at Surat from 1617. Through the first two-thirds of the seventeenth century the Dutch struck heavily at the Portuguese Estado da India, blockading Goa and taking Colombo in 1656 and Cochin in 1663. In the eighteenth century they were gradually excluded from India by the British and concentrated on the East Indies; the Company was dissolved in 1800.
The French Compagnie des Indes Orientales was founded by Colbert in 1664 and opened its factory at Pondicherry in 1674, operating on a smaller scale than the British and Dutch until its reorganisation in 1721 and 1725.
Smaller companies were founded by Denmark, Sweden and Ostend, with a Danish factory at Tranquebar on the south-eastern coast from 1620.

Two consequences of this trade are recorded in the survey. The first is monetary: western Europe could not supply what India most wanted to buy, so the companies organised themselves to direct streams of gold and silver to India from the countries that would part with them — gold from China, and silver and later gold from Japan. The seaports serving the empire were drawn into a complex but efficient organisation that took what they had to sell, supplied what they wanted to buy, and so far as possible satisfied the demand for precious metals — a demand that existed because India no longer worked gold and silver mines of its own.

The second is political, and the survey states it directly. Until the Treaty of Paris of 1763 confined French trade to five ports, the British and French companies and the state apparatuses behind them were rivals for political control, and their involvement in local dynastic conflicts "was to be a factor in the loosening of Mughal control over the provinces and the final enfeeblement of the Empire during the 18th century."

Inland transport was necessarily less efficient than the sea routes. The Indus, the Ganges, the Jumna and the waterways of Bengal carried much traffic, but the bulk of the empire depended on unmetalled tracks, sometimes marked by lines of trees, with halting places that were generally walled or otherwise defended against robbers and usually furnished with supplies. Goods moved by cart and pack animal, generally oxen and in some places camels; passengers travelled on horseback, in palanquins, or in carts drawn by fast oxen. There were excellent arrangements for the rapid transit of letters, but these were for official use and not ordinarily available to private persons, who hired messengers as required or, in a few cases, clubbed together to send them periodically.

Decline, 1707–1803

The Puppet Emperors

Bahadur Shah I reigned five years. The survey's summary of what followed is that Jahandar Shah, Farrukh-siyar, Rafi al-Darajat and Rafi al-Dawla were "all puppets in the strong hands of local kingmakers" — the Sayyid brothers of Barha — "whose reigns were counted in months rather than years", until the Sayyids produced Muhammad Shah in 1131/1719.

The Provinces Break Away

Through lack of confidence in the monarchy, and still less in the Sayyids, provincial governors were able to assume independence more or less at will. The survey traces the process:

Hyderabad. Qamar al-Din Chin Qilich Khan, titled Nizam al-Din, made himself independent in the Deccan with Hyderabad as his headquarters after defeating his own deputy at the battle of Shakarkhelda. All Delhi could do was conciliate him with the title Asaf Jah, borne thereafter by his descendants, the Nizams of Hyderabad.
Malwa and the Marathas. He supported the Marathas and the new Peshwa, Baji Rao, becoming governor of Malwa, from which he harried the Mughals with demands for fresh territory and tribute.
Bharatpur. The Jats grew powerful around Delhi and Agra, and the Sayyids made a separate treaty with them.
Awadh. The nawwabs, while nominally acknowledging Mughal authority, became virtually independent from the time of Sa'adat Khan — later titled Burhan al-Mulk — in 1134/1722; the mahi-maratib conferred on him became the badge of the office. His successor, titled Safdar Jang, wielded the real political power in the empire.
Rohilkhand. A former imperial officer, Ali Muhammad Khan, was practically independent in Katehr, his following swelled by Afghans taking refuge from Nadir Shah's depredations.

Nadir Shah, 1739

The Persian invasion was the heaviest single blow. The Encyclopaedia of Islam records that Nadir Shah sacked Delhi in 1151–2/1739 and carried off the imperial thrones, citing the eyewitness account in Tihrani's Nadir-nama, which records seventeen thrones among the spoils — Shah Jahan's Peacock Throne among them. The survey records the loss of Kabul and the trans-Indus territories to him, and that the emperor Muhammad Shah had to cede all the provinces north and west of the Indus. Later emperors are recorded as having had less costly replicas of the Peacock Throne made, because the ceremony still required a throne.

Bengal and the Company, 1756–1765

Bengal was the richest of the provinces that had drifted out of Delhi's control, and it was in Bengal that the East India Company turned from a trading power into a governing one.

Alivardi Khan, who had held the province, died on 9 April 1756 and was succeeded by his grandson Siraj-ud-Daulah, whom the Encyclopaedia of Islam describes as the last Mughal governor of Bengal. He took Calcutta from the English in June 1756 and renamed it Alinagar. The recovery was swift and decisive: Clive's victory at Plassey on 23 June 1757 established, in the encyclopaedia's words, the supremacy of the British in that part of India, and from that year the English were the virtual masters of Bengal, the old fort abandoned and the building of the present Fort William begun.

What Plassey began, Buxar completed. On 23 October 1764 the forces of Mir Qasim, by then the former nawab of Bengal, and of Shuja al-Dawla, the nawab-wazir of Awadh, were defeated by Major Hector Munro; the encyclopaedia's judgement is that this victory "completed the work of Plassey. Henceforward the English were the unchallenged rulers of Bengal. It also placed Awadh at the disposal of the English Company."

The form the new authority took is the point at which the empire's later history becomes a legal fiction. The Company exercised the diwani, the revenue administration, on behalf of a titular Mughal sovereign, and Persian continued as the language of its business. The emperor remained the source of legitimacy for a government he did not direct — which is the condition in which Shah Alam II and his successors were to reign.

The Marathas, the British, and 1788

Shah Alam II came under the control of Sindhia, and under British protection between 1765 and 1771. In 1788 a Rohilla attacked Delhi and blinded the emperor — the Encyclopaedia of Islam names him Ghulam Khan in the dynastic survey and Ghulam Qadir Rohilla elsewhere, dating the capture of Delhi and the blinding of Shah Alam II to 1203/1788. The near-contemporary Waqi'at-i Azfari, the memoir of a Mughal prince completed at Madras in 1221/1806, is described by the encyclopaedia as a valuable historical sketch of Ghulam Qadir's rise.

Shah Alam came again under British protection in 1803, when the Maratha army was defeated by Lord Lake — an event, the survey notes, commemorated in the Mughal coinage.

The Last Emperors and 1857

Of the final century the Encyclopaedia of Islam records that Shah Alam II, Akbar Shah II and Bahadur Shah II, deposed in 1857, "were no more than titular figures, for the Mughal empire had long ceased to exist and the last emperor's authority did not extend beyond the Red Fort in Delhi."

The court's remaining assets were ceremonial and literary. Dalrymple's history of the last reigns records the steady removal of what remained: a British official's conclusion that the best policy was to let the emperor sink into insignificance rather than uphold his dignity; the removal of the emperor's name from East India Company rupees, which touched one of the two classical marks of Islamic sovereignty; a Governor General who visited Delhi and did not pay a courtesy call; and by 1850 a prohibition on any British subject accepting titles from the Mughal, the practice dismissed as a solemn farce.

Bahadur Shah Zafar was deposed after the uprising of 1857, tried, and exiled to Rangoon, where he died in 1862. With him the dynasty ended, 331 years after Panipat.

Historiographical Note

The contemporary sources are fuller for the early reigns than for the late ones. Akbar's reign is documented by two contemporaries who reached opposite conclusions — Abu'l-Fazl's official Akbarnama and Bada'uni's privately written Muntakhab al-Tawarikh — and Jahangir left a memoir of his own. For the eighteenth century the chronicle tradition thins, and the surviving narrative rests more heavily on modern scholarship working from administrative and revenue records.

The day of Humayun's death is given differently. The Encyclopaedia of Islam gives 24 January 1556; the TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi gives 28 January 1556. Both place it in January 1556 and both agree that the death was concealed for a period and that Akbar acceded in February. This article says January 1556 and does not assert a day, because the approved sources do not agree on one.

The end of Humayun's first reign is given differently. The Encyclopaedia of Islam gives 937–47/1530–40 in one place and 937–50/1530–43 in another. The earlier date marks the loss of Agra and Delhi after Kannauj, which both the TDV entry and Bosworth's table support, and is the one used here; the later appears to run to his final departure from India.

The end of Shah Jahan's reign is given differently. The Encyclopaedia of Islam gives 1068/1657 in one entry and 1068/1658 in another. The earlier reflects the collapse of his authority during his illness, the later his formal deposition. The table gives 1658.

One statement in the approved sources is not followed. The Encyclopaedia of Islam's dynastic survey describes Sir Thomas Roe as ambassador from Elizabeth I of England. Roe's embassy to Jahangir fell in the years after 1615, and Elizabeth died in 1603. The TDV entry and the Jahangir entry describe him simply as the ambassador of the King of England, which is what this article says.

Lists of the Mughal emperors differ, and the table above explains its own basis. The principal question is whether to count the ephemeral and contested occupants of the throne. This article follows Bosworth in distinguishing reigning emperors from rivals, which admits Dawar Bakhsh and excludes Shah Jahan III, Bidar Bakht, Niku-siyar and the claimants of the succession wars. A list that counted them all would run to more than twenty names; a list that excluded Dawar Bakhsh would run to seventeen.

The name "Mughal" is not what the dynasty called itself. It is a Persian corruption of "Mongol"; the family preferred the Timurid association, and this article uses "Mughal" as the term established in English usage rather than as the dynasty's own.

References and Further Reading

Primary Islamic Sources

Abu'l-Fazl Allami, Akbarnama.
Abd al-Qadir Bada'uni, Muntakhab al-Tawarikh.
Abdul Hamid Lahori, Padshahnama.
Jauhar Aftabchi, Tazkirat al-Waqi'at, the memoir of Humayun's exile.
H. M. Elliot and John Dowson (eds.), The History of India as Told by Its Own Historians: The Muhammadan Period, vol. 6 — the volume collecting extracts from the Tuzuk-i Jahangiri, the Iqbal-nama-i Jahangiri and the Intikhab-i Jahangir-Shahi, which are the form in which those three chronicles were read for this article. London: Trubner, 1875; consulted at archive.org, item dli.csl.5507.
Qur'an 18:60, the verse giving Dara Shikoh's Majma' al-Bahrayn its title; text and translation at quran.com/18/60.

Classical Islamic Sources

The three works below are quoted or described in this article as they are cited in the Encyclopaedia of Islam's survey of the dynasty, and were not consulted directly. They are listed so that a reader can follow the chain of attribution rather than to imply a use that was not made of them.

Abu'l-Fazl Allami, Ain-i Akbari — the passage on the establishment of carpet weaving under Akbar, quoted in the survey's section on carpets and textiles from the Blochmann and Jarrett translation.
Tihrani, Nadir-nama — the eyewitness account of Nadir Shah's sack of Delhi and the seventeen thrones carried off, cited in the survey.
Waqi'at-i Azfari — the memoir of a Mughal prince, completed at Madras in 1221/1806, described in the survey as a valuable historical sketch of Ghulam Qadir's rise.

Academic and Scholarly Sources

'Mughals', The Encyclopaedia of Islam, vol. 7 — the nine-part survey, including 1. History by J. Burton-Page, 3. Administrative and social organisation by M. Athar Ali, 4. Economy and internal commerce by Shireen Moosvi, 5. Commerce and European trade connections by W. H. Moreland and C. E. Bosworth, and 7. Architecture by Ebba M. Koch.
C. Collin Davies, 'Akbar, Abu'l-Fath Djalal al-Din Muhammad', The Encyclopaedia of Islam, vol. 1.
A. S. Bazmee Ansari, 'Djahangir', The Encyclopaedia of Islam, vol. 2.
'Sulh-i kull', The Encyclopaedia of Islam, vol. 9; 'Ibadat Khana' and 'Ilahi Era', vol. 12 (Supplement).
'Alivardi Khan', 'Baksar', The Encyclopaedia of Islam, vol. 1; 'Calcutta', vol. 2; 'Urdu', vol. 10 — for Plassey, Buxar and the Company's exercise of the diwani.
C. E. Bosworth, The New Islamic Dynasties: A Chronological and Genealogical Manual. Edinburgh, 1996 — the Mughal table, authorised by the owner as a source on 12 October 2026 and consulted in the open 1996 dynastic tables at archive.org, item bosworth-1996-dynastic-tables-03.
Enver Konukcu, 'Baburluler', 'Ekber Sah' and 'Cihangir', TDV Islam Ansiklopedisi, islamansiklopedisi.org.tr.
William Dalrymple, The Last Mughal: The Fall of a Dynasty, Delhi, 1857.
Nazeer Ahmed, 'Babur in Delhi' and 'Akbar, the Great Moghul', historyofislam.com.
The Khalili Collections, Mughal coinage of the ilahi type, khalilicollections.org.