Appearance
6.11 — The Mughals: How They Took India and How They Ruled
Babur's army at Panipat in 1526 numbered perhaps 12,000. Ibrahim Lodi's numbered perhaps 100,000, with a thousand war elephants.
Babur won in a few hours, and the reasons are worth stating precisely because they are the reasons India kept losing (Chapter 6.15).
He had field artillery and matchlocks, and he used them from behind a barricade of carts chained together — a technique he had learned from the Ottomans. He had mounted archers who could manoeuvre in disciplined units, using the tulughma flanking tactic from the steppe. He had one commander. Lodi had a mass of troops under commanders of doubtful loyalty, several of whom had invited Babur in the first place.
And the elephants panicked at the guns and trampled their own line, which happened repeatedly in Indian battles of this period.
Who the Mughals were
Babur was a Timurid prince from the Fergana valley in what is now Uzbekistan — descended from Timur on his father's side and Genghis Khan on his mother's. "Mughal" is the Persian form of "Mongol", and it was not what they called themselves; they called themselves Timurids and they regarded Central Asia as home.
Babur came to India because he had lost everywhere else. He spent his youth failing to hold Samarkand, took Kabul as a consolation, and then looked at India as the available conquest. His memoir, the Baburnama, written in Chagatai Turkish, is one of the most engaging autobiographies ever written by a ruler — candid about his failures, his drinking, his depressions, and his opinion of India, which he disliked. He complained that it had no good horses, no good bread, no grapes or melons, no ice, no baths, no colleges, no candles and no torches, and that its craftsmen were numerous but its landscape charmless. He also, in the same book, describes Indian plants and animals with real attention.
Humayun, his son, lost the empire to the Afghan Sher Shah Suri and spent fifteen years in exile in Persia before recovering it, and died shortly after by falling down his library stairs.
Sher Shah Suri deserves more than a parenthesis, because his five-year reign built much of what Akbar later used. He conducted a systematic land survey, fixed revenue as a proportion of measured produce rather than by guess, issued the silver rupee — the ancestor of the modern currency and the word — reorganised the road system including the Grand Trunk Road with rest houses and wells, and set up a postal relay. Akbar's administration is substantially Sher Shah's, refined.
Akbar
Akbar came to the throne at thirteen in 1556 and ruled until 1605, and he is the reason the empire lasted.
He was almost certainly illiterate. Contemporary accounts and modern scholarship agree he never learned to read, possibly because of a learning difficulty. He had books read aloud to him constantly and assembled one of the great libraries of the world, and he could discuss the texts in detail.
The political settlement
Akbar's central insight was that a small foreign-origin Muslim elite could not govern a vast Hindu-majority subcontinent by force alone, and should not try. What he built instead is the co-option model of Chapter 4.7, applied thoroughly.
Rajput alliances. He married Rajput princesses — the marriage to the Amber princess, mother of his heir Jahangir, is the best known — and, crucially, did not require them to convert. He brought Rajput rulers into the imperial nobility at high rank, gave them commands and governorships, and left them their own territories as hereditary domains.
Rajputs became the empire's most reliable military asset, and Man Singh of Amber commanded Mughal armies from Afghanistan to Bengal. Mewar under Rana Pratap held out, refused the alliance, and fought on — which is why Pratap is remembered as he is, and Chapter 6.15 treats Haldighati.
Abolition of the jizya in 1564, and of the pilgrim tax on Hindus visiting sacred sites. This was a substantial fiscal sacrifice and a deliberate political statement.
Hindus in high office. Todar Mal, a Hindu, was finance minister and the architect of the revenue system. Birbal was a close adviser. By the end of the reign a significant share of the nobility was Hindu, mostly Rajput.
The administration
The mansabdari system is the Mughal state's core institution and it is worth understanding.
Every officer held a mansab — a numerical rank — in two figures: zat, determining personal status and salary, and sawar, the number of cavalry he was required to maintain. Ranks ran from 10 to 5,000 and higher for princes.
Officers were paid either in cash or, more usually, by assignment of the revenue of a territory — a jagir. And the key design feature: jagirs were transferable and not hereditary. An officer was moved every few years, so he could not build a local power base, and on his death his estate reverted to the crown.
This solved the problem that had destroyed earlier Indian states (Chapter 6.8): it kept the nobility dependent on the emperor rather than rooted in land.
It also created two problems that eventually helped destroy the empire. Because a jagir was temporary, its holder had every incentive to extract the maximum from it immediately with no interest in long-term productivity. And the system required a continuous supply of revenue-yielding land to assign — so as the nobility grew, the empire had to keep expanding, or the jagirs got smaller and the nobles got angrier. This is the jagirdari crisis, and Chapter 6.12 shows it arriving.
Revenue. Todar Mal's zabt system measured land, classified it by fertility and by cropping pattern, calculated average yields and prices over ten years, and fixed the state's share — usually about a third of the produce — in cash. Assessment was on measured area and known productivity rather than annual guesswork, which made it predictable for the state and, in a good year, tolerable for the cultivator. In a bad year, a cash assessment fixed in advance is brutal, and remissions depended on the local official.
The empire's revenue was enormous. Contemporary estimates and modern reconstructions put Mughal state income far above that of any European state of the period.
The religious experiments
Akbar's religious policy went far beyond tolerance and this is where he becomes genuinely unusual.
The Ibadat Khana, the house of worship, at Fatehpur Sikri, was a hall where he convened debates — initially among Muslim scholars, and then, from 1578, among Sunnis, Shias, Sufis, Hindus, Jains, Zoroastrians, Jews and Jesuit priests from Goa. He questioned all of them and, by the Jesuits' own frustrated accounts, committed to none.
In 1579 he issued a decree making himself the final arbiter in religious disputes among Muslims where the jurists disagreed — a substantial assertion of imperial authority over the clergy.
And in 1582 he promulgated the Din-i-Ilahi, usually translated as the divine faith. What it actually was is often overstated. It was not a mass religion and there was no attempt to convert the population. It was a small elite order of personal discipleship — perhaps a few dozen members — with ethical rules drawing on several traditions and a personal loyalty to the emperor at its centre. It died with him.
The orthodox reaction was real. Some Islamic scholars regarded him as an apostate, and the Naqshbandi Sufi Ahmad Sirhindi led a movement demanding a return to strict orthodoxy — a current that resurfaces under Aurangzeb.
Jahangir and Shah Jahan
Jahangir (1605–1627) continued Akbar's system. His reign is notable for the extraordinary painting produced at his court — he was a serious connoisseur, and Mughal miniature painting reached its peak in naturalism under him, including remarkably accurate bird and animal studies. His wife Nur Jahan exercised real political power, issuing coins in her own name and effectively governing during his periods of illness and addiction, which is exceptional for the period.
The first English embassy arrived in his reign — Sir Thomas Roe, from James I, seeking trading rights, in 1615. Roe's account of being kept waiting and treated as a minor supplicant is worth remembering when reading Chapter 6.16, because the relative standing of the two states in 1615 was not remotely what it became.
Shah Jahan (1628–1658) built. The Taj Mahal, the Red Fort at Delhi, the Jama Masjid, and the city of Shahjahanabad.
The Taj is a genuine masterwork and it is also a data point about the economy. It employed something on the order of twenty thousand workers over two decades, and its cost is variously estimated but was clearly enormous. A state that can build it is extracting a very large surplus from its cultivators, and Chapter 6.12 asks what that surplus was doing to them.
What the empire actually looked like at its height
Population of perhaps 100 to 150 million in the mid-seventeenth century, around a fifth to a quarter of the world's people.
Economy. Estimates by economic historians put India at roughly a quarter of world manufacturing output around 1700. Bengal alone was probably producing more textiles than all of Europe, and Indian cotton cloth was the world's premier manufactured export, worn from Japan to West Africa to England.
The state's role in that economy was mostly extractive rather than developmental. It taxed agriculture heavily, ran some workshops, patronised craft, and did not build the kind of infrastructure or legal apparatus that would later matter (Chapter 9.5).
Cities were large. Agra, Delhi, Lahore and Ahmedabad were among the biggest in the world.
And silver flowed in. The world wanted Indian textiles and had little India wanted in exchange, so it paid in bullion — including a substantial share of the silver mined in the Americas after 1550, which reached India via Europe and the Levant. India was a bullion sink for centuries, and Chapter 6.16 shows what happened when one of its customers decided to fix that problem.
Where this shows up in your life
The rupee, named and standardised by Sher Shah.
The architecture, in every Indian city.
The food. The whole category of Mughlai cuisine — biryani, kebabs, korma, the use of dried fruit and nuts in savoury dishes — is a Persian-Central Asian tradition adapted to Indian ingredients. Chillies, note, arrived from the Americas via the Portuguese during this period (Chapter 4.5), which means the food most people think of as timelessly Indian is a Mughal-era fusion incorporating a New World crop.
The language. Urdu developed as a literary language in this period and after it.
And the administrative vocabulary. Words in daily Indian use — diwan, subedar, tehsil, pargana, zamindar, jagir, daftar, sarkar — are the vocabulary of this state, and the British inherited the categories along with the words. The district and its collector, the core unit of Indian administration today, is a lightly modified Mughal sarkar with a revenue officer at its head.
What the next page covers
The empire reached its greatest extent under Aurangzeb and collapsed within fifty years of his death. Chapter 6.12 writes out the ledger honestly — what the Mughals built and what they destroyed, what Aurangzeb actually did according to the documented record including his own orders, how the temple destruction question stands on the evidence, what the jizya's reimposition meant, what the Deccan wars cost, and why an empire at its largest was already failing. It is the most contested chapter in this Part and it is written to the evidence.