In May 1857, a variety of causes inspired diverse north Indians—including sepoys, deposed rulers and landholders, and Muslim and Hindu opponents of Christian British rule—to revolt. Contingents of anti-British fighters, concentrated around reluctant Bahadur Shah, proclaimed his restored Mughal imperial rule and drove the British from Shahjahanabad and much of north India. After four months of bloody fighting, however, Britons and those Indian soldiers who obeyed them recaptured Shahjahanabad and imprisoned Bahadur Shah. Vengeful British officers executed many of his sons and put him on trial for treason against the British. They also forced almost all Indians out of Shahjahanabad, desecrated the Jami’ Mosque, garrisoned and held Christian thanksgiving services in the Red Fort and leveled the surrounding neighborhood to create a clear-fire zone. Further, the British finally ended the Mughal Empire by exiling Bahadur Shah to Burma, where he died in 1862. Yet, many historians and other commentators have highlighted the significance of the Mughal Empire, from its origins until today.
Empty Diwan-i Khas, Shahjahanabad, c. 189027
11
CONTESTED MEANINGS OF THE MUGHAL EMPIRE INTO
THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY
… the Great Mogul …is allowed £120,000 a year … a most heavy charge upon a people living on rice, and deprived of the first necessaries of life …. His authority does not extend beyond the walls of his palace, within which the Royal idiotic race, left to itself, propagates as freely as rabbits … There he sits on his throne, a little shriveled yellow old man, trimmed in a theatrical dress … much like that of the dancing girls of Hindostan. On certain State occasions, the tinsel-covered puppet issues forth …. Strangers have to pay a fee … as to any other saltimbanque [street performer] exhibiting himself in public; while he, in his turn, presents them with turbans, diamonds, etc. [But] the Royal diamonds are … ordinary glass, grossly painted [and] break in the hand like gingerbread.
Karl Marx (1853)1
History writing often reflects the ideological and personal perspectives of the historian and also of the major sources used. More than in any previous state in South Asia, the Mughal Empire’s emperors and officials themselves produced both substantial and often highly contested historical writing and also rich primary sources, including written, artistic, architectural and numismatic. Further, so significant has been the Empire for South Asia, the Islamic world and the West that diverse historians from each have written extensively about it, from its earliest years to the present. Each historian explicitly or implicitly locates the Empire in larger contexts, informed by his or her particular methodology. We can consider the most prominent of these histories, arranged by broad chronological period: the Mughal Empire’s rise; its fragmentation; the British high colonial period; and post-independence India, Pakistan and Bangladesh (all three nations lying within the Empire’s territories).
RISE THROUGH THE LATE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY
Mughal Emperors and their courtiers created extensive representations of their significance in human history. Indeed, they crafted and proclaimed—on paper, in stone and in metal—Mughal sovereignty descending from Chingiz Khan and Timur, with a proven record of conquests and other achievements. Official publicists also embedded the Empire in the cosmologies of their subjects. These historical validations helped convince many diverse Indians to support and serve the Mughal dynasty.
Emperors commissioned and supervised official court historians who produced year-by-year records and narratives. Three emperors personally penned their own detailed memoirs, with varying degrees of candor and objectivity. Even illiterate Emperor Akbar directed anyone from his court or household who had personally known his ancestors to write or dictate a factual account of them. Many contemporary, non-official historians also recorded and analysed imperial events of their time.
Mughal historians often built on long-established Persianate historio-graphical traditions. In particular, they used the genres waqai‘ and tarikh.2 Waqai‘ favored events presented in dated chronological sequence. Authors using the more interpretive tarikh genre accepted that God’s will directed outcomes, but they narrated the deeds of humans on earth, usually with precisely dated events arranged sequentially, like today’s conventional political histories. Distinctively, an imperial tarikh usually begins by invoking Allah, often followed by a political genealogy from the Prophet Muhammad directly (or from important earlier Muslim rulers) via Timur down to the main subject, the current emperor. Some genealogies also incorporated the Mughal dynasty’s descent from the foremother of the Mongols, who was impregnated by divine light. An innovation during Akbar’s reign was to transcend this Islamic framework by identifying him as the culmination of all humanity that began with Adam or Hindu deities.3 Out of respect, deceased Mughal emperors had posthumous names, indicating their continued existence in heaven. Like many European historians of that time, Mughal authors presupposed that history’s purpose was to teach moral lessons from past events. Some historians wrote about events specific to their province or personal experience, but dedicated their narrative to the emperor, evidently intending it to bring their own accomplishments to his august attention.4
So rich was the Empire’s historiographical activity that its own historians often generated contradictory accounts. Most famously, the laudatory account of Emperor Akbar’s reign by his accomplished amanuensis, Abu-al-Fazl, often clashed in fact and analysis with the generally critical account of Akbar by rival courtier, Badauni, in his ‘Secret History’ (not revealed until Akbar was safely dead).5 Most Mughal imperial histories describe every decision and crucial action as done intentionally—or misguidedly—by the all-powerful emperor himself. Hence, these make the Empire appear highly centralized.
The Mughal dynasty sponsored the acquisition and production of manuscripts from many traditions. By commissioning Arabic- and Persian-language collections of fatwas and other Islamic religious texts, emperors located themselves in the lineage of exemplary Muslim rulers. Emperors, especially but not exclusively Akbar, also directed courtiers to translate works from the Sanskrit genres of itihasa (a largely chronological narrative of ‘history,’ mainly the actions on earth of humans, including gods incarnated as humans) and purana (a sequential account ranging over eons, from the origin of the universe through its cosmic cycles of creation and destruction, the lives of deities, down to human dynasties). When Portuguese and later other Europeans reached the imperial court, Akbar directed them to write a biography of Christ in Persian and to help translate parts of the Christian Bible.6 When emperors conquered a region, they collected its local histories. Emperors and princes also patronized works in popular regional languages. Ever eclectic in buttressing their own sovereignty, Mughal emperors incorporated motifs and images from Islamic, Hindu and Christian sacred histories, including through visual arts.
Emperors also valued the imperial library which, in addition to chronicles, contained religious tracts, high literature, ‘mirrors’ [guiding manuals] for princes and courtiers, extensive albums and collections of fine paintings (most with historical or documentary purpose). The imperial court also used architecture, court newsletters, coins and other media to publicize widely the reigning emperor’s titles and ideology. Further, the extensive central and provincial secretariats produced and archived the vast bodies of written records of daily events at court and across the Empire, copies of orders and judicial judgments and receipts of payments to and from the treasury. All these provide primary sources for Mughal historians, and subsequent historians ever since.
Additionally, many imperial subjects, people living adjacent to the Mughal Empire and also foreign visitors produced their own accounts, using a range of historical genres and languages. For example, the fascinating Hindi verse autobiography by Jain jewelry merchant Banarsidas described his life, feelings and relations with Mughal officials and emperors.7 Afghan, Maratha, Rajput, Sikh and other rulers and landholders across north and central India patronized oral and written historical accounts of their sometimes
antagonistic relationship with the Empire, using imperial and also regional genres and concepts of authority.8 The Deccan sultanates and also west and Central Asian visitors generated their own histories that showed their perspectives, often following Persianate genres.9 Other regional accounts reflect their own conceptions of the nature and purpose of history-writing.10
For instance, Rajput rajas had long sponsored their own historians using oral or written narratives in Sanskrit, Rajasthani, Braj Basha and other language traditions. Their goal was to highlight the origin and accomplishments of their patron’s clan. Such Rajput dynastic histories shifted as their authors emulated Mughal imperial histories—highlighting human rather than divine ancestry and their patron’s individual achievements.11 When the patron joined the Empire, his historians incorporated the emperor: the greater the emperor, the greater the Rajput patron who now served him. Elided was the willing or forced provision of Rajput princesses as the emperor’s wives.
Those who viewed the Empire from the outside also produced variant images of it. Safavid, Uzbek, Ottoman and other Muslim officials and historians related the Mughal Empire and its origin to their own states, often judging theirs superior. Some Muslim Asian visitors wrote about their travels and adventures within the Empire; their accounts often differed from imperial representations of the same events.12
From early after the foundation of the Empire onward, European Christians—including missionaries, merchants, diplomats and adventurers—compiled extensive accounts of it, either from first- or second-hand evidence. Many European views were informed by Christian Europe’s long and often antagonistic relationships with Muslims in Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean. Hence, in their writings, the Muslim character of the Empire, as well as the Hinduism of most of its subjects, often appeared in critical contrast to Christianity (although some European Catholics and Protestants favored Islam or Indic religions over each other). Missionary accounts especially struggled to refute Islam and deprecate Hinduism, with the goal of converting South Asians and also convincing Christians of their own superiority.13
Another recurrent motif in early European accounts of the Empire was its exoticism, with attractive features like overwhelming wealth in natural and human resources. India appeared a land of fabulous wealth, with vast territories producing spices, grain, and minerals beyond the scale of Europe. Imperial armies of soldiers and artisans dwarfed those of European rulers. Further, the vast majority of Europeans who ventured to the Empire were young men, often perceiving it in hyper-sexual ways: the emperor’s imagined unlimited sexual license and the contradictory fantasy of huge harems of unloved women (and the clever ways that the European author allegedly caught sight of them). Further, the relatively scanty clothing (as judged by Europeans) worn by some Indian women in public produced shock or titillation or both. Europeans also noted alleged abuses of Indian women by Indian men, particularly sati, inspiring varying degrees of wonder, repugnance and horror. In Europe, many playwrights, poets and other writers of fiction or other social commentary created powerful visions of the Empire, often based on a loose reading of European travelers’ accounts.
However, predominant European attitudes toward the Empire became more deprecatory over the seventeenth century, especially as European economic, military and political power rose in relative terms in India and globally. Concepts of Oriental despotism and moral corruption increasingly informed European accounts, especially when these authors used their image of the Mughal Empire to comment on conditions or policies in their contemporary European kingdom. For instance, in the early seventeenth century, Frenchman François Bernier sought to influence his government to cease revenue farming and also royal confiscation of private property, both policies he attributed to the injudicious Mughal Empire.14 Some European writers came from countries with no realistic political ambitions in India, like the early-seventeenth-century Venetian adventurer Niccolao Manucci; such authors often featured their own adventures.15 But English, French and Dutch writers, in particular, often sought information about the Empire for profit and political advantage.16 As these European travelers’ accounts became widely known through print, stereotypes about the Orient proliferated and more European men desired to venture there.17 From the early eighteenth century onward, the historiography produced by the Mughal Empire and by those in and around it broadly shifted due to the Empire’s own fragmentation and the rise of rival powers, both South Asian and European.
THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY THROUGH THE MUGHAL DYNASTY’S END
Increasingly over the eighteenth century, people oriented toward the Mughal court used history and other literature to explain their declining condition and advocate responses to it. An entire genre of Indo-Persian and Hindustani literature, called Shahr ashob (‘urban misfortune’), bemoaned the evident and accelerating decay experienced in Shahjahanabad and other former imperial centers. These authors, often from courtier or service-elite families, savored the past in contrast to the degraded present. However, some who still received incomes from the imperial court and its remnant administration highlighted compensating cultural achievements.18 Leading Muslim theologians, most notably Shah Wali Ullah, attributed contemporary problems in the Mughal Empire (as well as in the Safavid and Uzbek Empires) to deviations from Islam. Such reformers and scholars thus sought a deeper understanding of the moral history of the Muslim community—globally and particularly within the Mughal Empire—in order to recover Islamic strengths through purification.19 More progressively, Syed Ahmad Khan in 1846–7 adopted European-style scientific archaeological methods in order to document systematically, for his fellow Muslims and British employers, the architectural achievements of his fellow Muslims in Delhi.20
Indian authors patronized by a regional successor state recounted its history as it effectively broke away from the Empire, but still nominally belonged to it.21 Some of these Indian historians partly incorporated European historiography to diagnose the causes for British rule’s rapid expansion. Highlighting European military and other technological advances while seeking to preserve their own society’s moral core, they moved their readers toward a synthesis of Indic, Islamic and Christian European cultures.22 Increasingly, Indian historians were directly sponsored by British officials seeking an insider’s knowledge about the rulers and society they confronted and conquered.23
By the late eighteenth century, some Indian writers began to incorporate Europe into Indian history, either from hearsay or based on the author’s personal experience in Europe. As soon as European ships created a direct sea-link with India, travelers from India ventured to Europe. For the first two-and-a-half centuries, those who returned to India brought back only oral reports of European history, geography and society. Following imperial envoy I‘tisam-ud-Din’s 1784 autobiographical travel narrative about Britain, dozens of Indian authors wrote in Persian, Arabic, English, or Hindustani about their personal experiences in Europe.24 Some followed the Persian-language rihla genre of autobiographical travel narrative with inclusion of moral lessons and poetic quotations. Others adapted English-style journalistic genres. Each author chose the language and genre he felt was appropriate for his intended audience, with some writing dissimilar accounts for different readerships.25
Conversely, early British Orientalists, in both India and Britain, studied Persian, Sanskrit and other Indian language texts (and employed Indian scholars to guide and translate for them) with the aim of gaining mastery over the Empire and over Indic and Islamic cultures more broadly. Some Europeans wrote with insights from their own participation in contemporary politics and wars.26 Other Orientalists projected their Euro-centric views onto their representations of India and its history. James Mill—who never visited India—highlighted in his History of British India (1803–18) the disorder of the eighteenth century that compelled British rule.27 This influential work reinforced the pattern that would become institutionalized of partitioning Indian history into the ‘Hindu Ancient,’ ‘Muslim Medieval’ and ‘Bri
tish Modern’ periods. (Even today, leading universities in India teach ‘Medieval History,’ meaning the Mughal Empire and Delhi Sultanate.)
The Emperor and his court, even while confined to Shahjahanabad, remained for many Europeans a fascinating combination of the exotic and the decadent. Numerous European tourists observed the Emperor (women tourists also visited his harem), making gifts of nazr and obtaining khilats as a curious ‘Oriental’ experience, without valuing these rituals’ political significance. Increasingly, however, for British colonial authorities, the worth of the Emperor—as a ‘decadent relic’ contrasting with ‘modernizing’ British rule—declined, while the expense of pensioning him and his family remained high.
In 1853, Karl Marx himself deprecated the Emperor in colorful language for American newspaper readers as an effeminate and decadent parasite, preserved by the British government, thus stifling India’s progress (see epigram).28 More expansively, Marx identified the ‘Asiatic mode of production’ as a stagnant stage needing replacement by capitalism before India could enter world history. Thus, Marx condemned the British for preserving this imperial relic, and also for imperialistically annexing its various provinces into the British Empire.
Many Anglophone historians regarded the expanding British regime as the morally and technologically worthier successor to the Mughal dynasty. Studying the Empire would provide salutary lessons on how the British could build on it, while avoiding its faults. For example, in 1854, William Erskine explained his motivation for studying Mughal history: ‘a nation possessing such an empire as that of the British in India ought to have some ampler record of the transactions of the different dynasties which preceded their own …. The House of Taimur [is] a natural foundation for the modern history of India.’29 During the Empire’s last year and thereafter, a wide range of people appreciated its significance, for a variety of often conflicting reasons.
A Short History of the Mughal Empire (I.B.Tauris Short Histories) Page 25
