The Mughal Empire Research Papers (original) (raw)

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- Medieval Indian History, The Mughal Empire

The Mughal era in India is an important part of the history of India. The period between 1526 A.D to 1857 A.D is well remembered and many works of art and architecture along with miniature paintings, found across the world, bear testimony to the artistic splendour of the times. The Mughals have made a major contribution to India's visual art practices and left behind a plethora of patterns and traditions. This article briefly elucidates the details of two 17 th century tombs from the Mughal era, I'timad-ud-daulah's tomb and Emperor Akbar's tomb at Sikandra, both at Agra in North India. The focus in on the Islamic arabesque and geometric patterns in the designs and the stunning effect it creates for the onlooker who visits the tombs. An attempt has been made to understand some of the motifs and patterns on the monuments while understanding the arabesque and geometric patterns of Islamic art.The evolution of Mughal architectural decoration along with its related concepts are elucidated visa -vis the two tombs at Agra.

- by Soma Ghosh
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- Art History, Mughal India, The Mughal Empire, Mughal Art
- by Mehreen Chida-Razvi
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- Governance, History of Plague, Urbanism, Mughal History
- by Angbin Yasmin
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- Gender History, South Asian Studies, Mughal History, Mughal India

This article evaluates provincial documentary culture in the Deccan (south-central
India) prior to the incorporation of this region into Mughal Hindustan in 1687. It investigates the production and content of ʿarz-o-chehrah (muster rolls), one among
many documentary genres that verified the Mughal soldier and his horse circulating
on the front lines of uncertain conquest. From these materials, a previous generation
of scholars distilled a taxonomy of self-contained “sub-national or ethnic”
or “racial” groups (“Irani,” “Turani,” “Afghan,” “Rajput,” “Deccani,” “Indian Muslim,”
and “Miscellaneous”) that confirmed narratives about the Mughal nobility found in
chronicle histories. However, these modern construals of “ethnicity” remain difficult
to map onto the actual ones found on descriptive rolls nor do they tell us how everyday
interactions between provincial scribes and the soldier-subject transformed these
categories. Social identifications underwent changes when imperial officials, scribes,
and soldiers shared a war front with the armies of the regional, independent Deccan
sultanates. Finer degrees of specificity characterized “northern” soldiers’ labels while
“southern” cavalry were defined through broad, essentialized groupings, reflecting the
changing profiles of cavalry recruitment. By analyzing social identifications, this article
charts the making of a pan-subcontinent system of soldier recruitment wherein
the state-making processes of northern and southern India began to mirror each other,
widening the ways of defining and seeing the ‘Mughal’ soldier. This unique piece of
paper bound two individual creatures, man and horse, whose identities were both
separate and united, into a mutually-dependent relationship. These double portraits
of man and horse functioned as proxies for pay slips and not simply as pre-modern
identification cards. In doing so, they also provide a window into one instance of the
uneven, ambiguous professionalization of mercenary-soldiers taking place across the
early modern world.

- by Subah Dayal
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- Identity and Identification, Ethnicity, Soldiers, The Mughal Empire

This chapter 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 as how the dynastic line of a Central Asian warlord had gained such a wide acceptance in South Asian society, and why did it remain a powerful source of legitimacy well after the decline of its military might in the eighteenth century? In order to analyse these problems, 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 further elaborates the most important Mughal imperial practices, their antecedents and innovations. Finally, it dis...

- by Murari Jha
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- Legitimacy and Authority, Ottoman History, South Asian Studies, South Asia

Hiran Minar is yet another masterpiece of mughal architecture. Unique in design, pattern and setting, the monument adds a glorious chapter to the mughals, their love for building edifices of great strength and grandeur of noble simplicity and elegance. Hiran Minar is a hunting retreat built by Emperor Jahangir to the northwest of Lahore. It was constructed in memory of an antelope named Mansraj that was beloved by the emperor. The memorial tower stands 30 meters high and is 10 meters wide at its base. Around the perimeter are 214 holes that are believed to have been used as supports for the severed heads of animal trophies taken by the emperor.

- by Rai Farhatullah
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- Archaeology, Southeast Asian Studies, Architecture, Mughal History
- by Chandan Basu
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- The Mughal Empire

A wealth of Old Hindi texts in the Rajasthani and Brajbhasha dialects survives from the
early modern period, but they remain an underused archive of Mughal history. The
Māncarit (“Biography of Man Singh,” 1585) of Amrit Rai, one of the earliest known examples
of Rajput literature about a Mughal manṣabdār, provides fascinating perspectives on
Mughal power, as seen from the perspective of the court of Man Singh Kachhwaha, one of
the leading regional kings of Akbar’s day. Amrit Rai was as much a poet as an historian,
which makes the Māncarit and the many Rajput texts like it challenging to interpret, but
the possibility of gaining alternative perspectives on Mughal state formation makes such a
hermeneutic enterprise essential.
Bien qu’il existe un riche corpus de textes en vieil hindi (dans les dialectes rajasthani et
brajbhasha) datant de la période de la première modernité, ceux-ci demeurent une archive
sous-exploitée de l’histoire moghole. Le Māncarit (« Biographie de Man Singh », 1585)d’Amrit Rai, un des plus anciens exemples de littérature rajput concernant un manṣabdār
moghol, offre de fascinantes perspectives sur le pouvoir moghol du point de vue de la cour
de Man Singh Kachhwaha, un des principaux royaumes régionaux de l’époque d’Akbar.
Amrit Rai était autant poète qu’historien, ce qui fait de l’interprétation du Māncarit et des
nombreux textes rajputs lui ressemblant une tache épineuse. Parce qu’elle peut permettre
d’accéder à des perspectives alternatives sur la formation de l’État moghol, une telle entreprise
herméneutique est toutefois essentielle.

- by Allison Busch
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- Hindi Literature, The Mughal Empire, Jaipur, Mughal Emperor Akbar

Edited by Dr. Saeid Kordmâfi

This paper looks at a Persian-language documentary form called the mahzar-nama that was widely used in India between the 17 th and 19 th centuries to narrate, represent and record antecedents, entitlements and injuries, with a view to securing legal rights and redressing legal wrongs. Although mahzars were a known documentary form in Islamic law, used by qazis (Islamic judges) in many other parts of the world, in India they took a number of distinctive forms. The specific form of Indian mahzar-namas that this article focusses on was, broadly speaking, a legal document of testimony, narrated in the first person, in a form standardised by predominantly non-Muslim scribes, endorsed in writing by members of the local community and/or the professional or social contacts of person(s) writing the document, and notarised by the seal of a qazi. This specific legal form, however, formed part of a much broader genre of declarative texts, which were also known as mahzars in India. By looking at the legal mahzar-namas together with the other kinds of mahzars, and situating both in relation to Indo-Islamic jurisprudential texts and Persian-language formularies, this article points to a distinctive Indo-Islamic legal culture in contact with the wider Islamic and Persianate worlds of jurisprudence and documentary culture but responsive to the unique socio-political formations of early modern India. In doing so, the article will reflect on the meanings of law, including Islamic law, for South Asians, and trace the evolution of that understanding across the historical transition to colonialism.

- by Nandini Chatterjee
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- Islamic Law, British Empire, Scribes, The Mughal Empire

The penetration of Mughal power into previously
autonomous regional kingdoms produced significant political,
but also literary effects. In this article, I trace the advent of the
Mughal political order to the princely state of Orcha (located in
what is now north-western Madhya Pradesh) through the eyes
of Ke´savd¯as (fl. 1600), the leading poet from that court.
Ke´savd¯as is famous in Hindi literary circles as one of the
progenitors of the Brajbhasha r¯ıti tradition, a constellation of
courtly poetic and intellectual practices that flourished in a
climate of mixed Mughal and sub-imperial patronage. There is a
pronounced tendency to think of Ke´savd¯as’s work (and that of
most r¯ıti poets) as a corpus of baroque, purely decorative poems
largely comprising time-worn erotic and devotional themes.
This preliminary study of Ke´savd¯as’s three historical poems will
help to complicate such an understanding by bringing into our
conceptual purview a fuller range of r¯ıti textual expression.
These lesser known works by one of the foremost r¯ıti poets are
certainly striking for their literary accomplishments, but they
also serve as an invaluable window onto a critical moment in
Orcha history. They constitute the perfect testing ground for the
enterprise of retrieving historical meaning from the literary
sources that were the dominant form of pre-modern Indian
courtly self-expression, and the methodology employed here is
to critically engage both aesthetic and historical perspectives
simultaneously.

- by Allison Busch
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- Hindi Literature, The Mughal Empire, Early Modern India, Brajbhasha

Akbar is symbolized as an emperor of progress and liberalism, and as the propagator of a composite culture. His reign is seen as a ‘Golden Age’, due to to the cultural commingling of the Hindu and Muslim populations. On the other hand, it is asserted that during the reign of his successors – Jahangir, Shah jahan and Aurangzeb, there was a gradual reversal of Akbar’s liberal religious policies toward non-Muslims. The liberal character of the state instituted by Akbar was maintained in the first half of the 17th century. At the outset of Jahangir’s reign, there was an exception in orthodox circles, that Akbar’s policy of Sulh-i-Khul and religious eclecticism would be abandoned and the supremacy of the sharia would be restored.
The essay answers with the question that whether Jahangir's reign challenge the existing different cultural communities in his empire? was he secular like his Father?

- by Ann M. James
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- The Mughal Empire, Mughal Emperor Jahangir

The court histories of Shah Jahan state without ambiguity that he was responsible for the construction of his father’s tomb in Shahdara, Lahore. This chapter challenges the historical record through an examination of the imperfections present at Jahangir’s mausoleum complex, arguing that their presence would be inconceivable if Shah Jahan, who considered the perfection of his architectural commissions as reflective of the perfection of his rule, was the patron. Rather, such construction and decorative anomalies at the site can be attributed to the patronage of Jahangir’s queen, Nur Jahan. Through this discussion the importance of architecture as a medium through which the Mughal royals sought to perpetuate their individual legacies becomes clear, as despite the finished mausoleum and its associated complex being neither perfect nor a recognisable part of Shah Jahan’s imperial architectural oeuvre, he appropriated responsibility for its construction in his court histories.

- by Mehreen Chida-Razvi
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- Architecture, Architectural History, Islamic Art, Mughal History

The Mughal Empire was one of the largest centralized state in the pre-modern world and this volume traces the history of this magnificent empire from its creation in the early 16 th century to the mid-18 th century. Interestingly, the book weaves the history of empire through different focal points which were not quite conventional to the process of history writing and which resulted in whole new spectrum of themes and some very innovative endeavors. The new entry points through which the book revolves are-sources of Mughal state's legitimacy , the evolution and meaning of court etiquette , the world of the imperial Mughal family and the interaction between folklore and court culture. It can be perceived that there is a constant attempt to co-relate the dynasty's inner world with popular perception. Harbans Mukhiya for writing this book, assiduously looked into the official documents, painting, travel accounts, court chronicles and this was the first time a historian used bazar gossips and folklores for premising a historical argument.

- by Gunieve Jaswal
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- History, Book Reviews, Medieval Indian History, Undergraduate

This chapter 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.

- by Naveen Kanalu
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- Islamic Law, History of Economic Thought, Urban History, South Asian Studies

Since Richard Ettinghausen’s discussion of Jahangir Preferring a Sufi Shaykh to Kings in 1961, the portrait of a turbaned figure placed between the Sufi Shaykh Ahmed and King James I has been identified as an Ottoman sultan. Through subjecting the figure’s costume, pose and headgear to a detailed analysis, examining existing Mughal portraits that are indisputably of Ottoman sultans, and exploring contemporary Ottoman and European representations of Ottoman costume, it will be shown that it is in fact highly unlikely that a Sultan stands before the Padshah.

- by Mehreen Chida-Razvi
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- Ottoman Studies, Costume and Identity, Islamic Art, Mughal History

Traditional explanations of the “rise of the West” have located the sources of Western supremacy in structural or long-term developmental factors internal to Europe. By contrast, revisionist accounts have emphasized the conjunctural and contingent aspects of Europe’s ascendancy, while highlighting intersocietal conditions that shaped this trajectory to global dominance. While sharing the revisionist focus on the non-Western sources of European development, we challenge their conjunctural explanation, which denies differences between “West” and “East” and within Europe. We do so by deploying the idea of uneven and combined development (UCD), which redresses the shortcomings found on both sides of the debate: the traditional Eurocentric focus on the structural and immanent characteristics of European development and the revisionists’ emphasis on contingency and the homogeneity of Eurasian societies. UCD resolves these problems by integrating structural and contingent factors into a unified explanation: unevenness makes sense of the sociological differences that revisionists miss, while combination captures the aleatory processes of interactive and multilinear development overlooked by Eurocentric approaches. From
this perspective, the article examines the sociologically generative interactions between European and Asian societies’ development over the longue durée and traces how the breakdown of feudalism and the rise of capitalism in Europe were fundamentally rooted in and conditioned by extra-European structures and agents. This then sets up our conjunctural analysis of a central yet underappreciated factor explaining Europe rise to global dominance: the disintegration of the Mughal Empire and Britain’s colonization of India.

- by Audrey Truschke
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- History, Medieval History, Early Modern History, Religion and Politics

At the turn of the seventeenth century the Mughal emperors entered the stage of `international’ collecting. The interests and strategies of Jahangir (r. 1605-27) show amazing analogies with those of contemporary European rulers and Shah Jahan's throne at Delhi (1648) displays Florentine pietra -dura tablets in a highly visible and ideologically charged permanent exhibition at the Mughal court.

- by Ebba Koch
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- Art History, Art Theory, History of Collecting, Transcultural Studies

Creation of cults in the public sphere has been a common phenomenon since ages in historical past transcending over various polity. The paper makes a serious attempt to analyze the construction of the personality cult under Emperor Akbar, primarily by his aide Abul Fazl in his stupendous work - Akbarnama. This construction as we shall argue was totally set up in the premise of divinity and religion. Was this the initiation of the intermixing of politics and religion in otherwise secular political traditions of India or was it another way either.

- by Bhavyansh S Mewar
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- Medieval History, Islamic Studies, Indian History, The Mughal Empire
- by Shankar Nair
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- Hinduism, Comparative Religion, Indian Philosophy, Arabic

At the court of Akbar, several Sanskrit texts were rendered into Persian; these included the epics Mahāb-hārata and Rāmāyaṇa, collections of fables and legends like the Pañcatantra, the Siṃhāsana-dvātriṃśikā and the Kathāsaritsāgara, and the historical work Rājataraṅgiṇī. Besides these, a Sanskrit mathematical text, the Līlāvatī of Bhāskarācārya was also translated into Persian by Akbar's Poet Laureate Faiẓī. While the Persian translations of the Mahābhārata and others have been critically examined in modern times, the Persian version of the Līlāvatī did not receive any scholarly attention, except in two minor cases. In 1816, John Taylor, in the preface to his translation of the Līlāvatī from the Sanskrit, opined that Faiẓī's Persian version omits certain sections of the Līlāvatī. In 1952, H. J. J. Winter and Arshad Mirza discussed a small fragment of the Persian version and translated 10 verses from it into English. Therefore, in this paper, an attempt is made for the first time to compare the Persian version with the Sanskrit original and to critically analyse the structure and style of the Persian version.

- by Liza Oliver and +1
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- Globalization, Early Modern History, Textiles, Slavery

It is difficult to disentangle religion from politics in the troubled history of intercommunal relationships in Punjab. This entanglement is most apparent in the Sikh call for statehood and identity. This dissertation seeks to identify the processes by which religion became ethnonationalism in the Sikh context. It argues that the call for self-determination and statehood, sometimes expressed by the idea of ‘Khalistan’ is rooted in religion but expressed as a political aspiration shaped by the context of the rise of Hindu nationalism through Hindutva politics. Punjab has a long history of rule by external powers, most notably the Mughal Empire and the British Raj. The Sikh community experienced both flourishing and oppression at different points in these Empires, but this dissertation argues that the last act of the British Empire; namely, Partition; was catastrophic for the identity of the Sikh community. It argues that the rise of Hindu nationalism post-Partition, though an understandable reaction to Colonialism, has had significant negative consequences for the Sikh community; a minority in India, which now finds itself in many ways disenfranchised in what is left of its homeland. These and associated events have combined to generate the shift from the apolitical religious practice of the past to identity politics and ethnonationalism for contemporary Punjabi Sikhs.

- by Vishal Sangu
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- Sikhism, Sikh Studies, Sikh diaspora, Religious Studies
- by James Wescoat
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- Mughal History, Mughal Architecture, Mughal India, The Mughal Empire
- by Faraz Anjum
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- South Asian Studies, South Asia, Mughal History, Islamic Studies

Most of the historical observations of the Mughal court during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were written by court historians, scribes, and literati. A few texts were composed by Muslim travelers who left important accounts of Mughal political, economic and social life. This article will examine two of those chronicles. The first, composed by Ottoman Admiral Seydi Ali Reis, Mir’âtü’l-Memâlik (The Mirror of Countries) describes the life of the Mughal court in mid-sixteenth century. The second, written by Mutribi al-Asamm al-Samarqandi (also known as Mutribi Samarqandi), a subject of the Ashtarhanid Dynasty of Bukhara, describes the court of Jahangir in the early seventeenth century. Although both Seydi Ali Reis and Mutribi Samarqandi shared a similar background being elite Turkish-speakers with high levels of education who identified as Sunni Muslim they had strikingly different experiences. This article shows that a comparison of these two chronicles hints at how court rituals, manners, and administrative policy in Mughal India changed during over seventy years. However, in order to understand the transformation of the Mughal court, we must also look into the lives of the narrators: what brought them to the Mughal Empire, what effect they had at the court, and what ideas they carried back with them to their home countries.

The essay elaborates on the manuscript tradition of transmission, commentary, and glossing of fiqh or "Islamic jurisprudence" texts in medieval and early-modern juridical culture from the Indian sub-continent. Premodern Muslim jurists composed doctrinal treatises primarily in Arabic, the shared theological language of the 'ulamā' or "learned scholars". However, in the Indian context, Persian too had acquired the status of a language of Islamic law. From the fourteenth century, fatāwā compilations were made in Persian. By seventeenth-century Mughal rule in northern India, sharḥ or "commentary" and ḥāshiya or "super-commentary" in Persian were deployed as a mechanism for pedagogical transmission. Analyzing two extant Persian manuscripts pertaining to the Ḥanafī madhhab or "school" of juridical thought, Fatāwā-i fīrūzshāhī (fourteenth century) and 'Abd al-Ḥaqq Sajādil Sirhindī's Sharḥ-i hidāya (seventeenth century), the essay appraises the nature of textual and manuscript practices involved in generating Islamic juridical norms and practices. Examining philological and textual features exhibited internal to these two texts, I argue that fiqh doctrinal writing in the age of post-classical Islamic sciences (twelfth to eighteenth Centuries) had become "hybrid" in style. Rather than indicating tendencies towards a phase of "decline" due to "orthodox" adherence to tradition, such texts of legal genre portray a complex culture of Islamic law-making in the premodern period.

- by Naveen Kanalu
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- Islamic Law, South Asian History, Mughal History, The Mughal Empire

This paper looks at a Persian-language documentary form called themahzar-namathat was widely used in India between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries to narrate, represent, and record antecedents, entitlements, and injuries with a view to securing legal rights and redressing legal wrongs.Mahzarswere a known documentary form in Islamic law and used byqazis(Islamic judges) in many other parts of the world, but in India they took a number of distinctive forms. The specific form of Indianmahzar-namasthat I focus on here was, broadly speaking, a legal document of testimony, narrated in the first person, in a form standardized by predominantly non-Muslim scribes, endorsed in writing by the author's fellow community members and/or professional or social contacts, and notarized by aqazi's seal. This specific legal form was part of a much broader genre of declarative texts that were also known asmahzarsin India. I examine the legalmahzar-namastogether with the other kinds ofmah...

- by Nandini Chatterjee
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- Islamic Law, Anthropology, British Empire, Scribes
- by Shinsaku Kato
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- Dutch East India Company, The Mughal Empire
- by Satoshi Ogura and +1
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- Mughal History, Mughal India, The Mughal Empire, Indo-Persian Cultural History

Akbar the Great (1542-1605) and Christianity. Between religion and politics The second half of the 16 th century, during the reign of India's third, and widely regarded as the greatest, ruler of the Mughal dynasty, Jalāl ud-Dīn Muḥammad Akbar, was also the time when the Europeans were becoming increasingly present on the Indian Subcontinent. Especially active among them were the Portuguese-both in the political and economic sense as well as in the cultural and the religious dimension. After reaching India with the expedition of Vasco da Gama in 1498, the Portuguese very quickly-already in 1505-started their expansion on the Western cost of the Subcontinent and throughout the next thirty years conquered the territories of Goa (where they established a powerful trading post and which also became the seat of the viceroy and council appointed by the Portuguese king in Lisbon), and Diu. From 1558 the Portuguese forces occupied also Daman, which was an important port on the Cambay Gulf, and thus created a great problem for the Mughals, especially after the annexation of the rich and prosperous province of Gujarat into the Mughal Empire in 1572. The Portuguese naval dominance over the Arabian Sea caused that no Indian ship could sail without the so-called cartaz or special pass for safe conducts. For Indian Muslims this situation was especially oppressive since the ports of the Western coast were the point of embarkation for pilgrims going to Mecca. 1 The conflicts (also the armed ones) between the Mughal authorities of the province and the Portuguese happened during the whole of the Akbar's reign.

- by Agnieszka Kuczkiewicz-Fraś
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- History, History of India, South Asian Studies, South Asia