In Our Time - The Mughal Empire

Episode Date: February 25, 2004

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Mughal Empire which, at its height, stretched from Bengal in the East to Gujarat in the West, and from Lahore in the North to Madras in the South.  It covered the whole of present day northern India, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Bangladesh, and became famous for the Taj Mahal, the Koh-i-Noor and the Peacock Throne.  In 1631 a Dutch naturalist Johannes de Laet published his account of the vast Empire, “the nobles live in indescribable luxury and extravagance, caring only to indulge themselves whilst they can, in every kind of pleasure.  Their greatest magnificence is in their women’s quarters, for they marry three or four wives or sometimes more”.But were they really the opulent despots of European imagination?  If so, how did they maintain such a vast territory?  And to what extent was the success of the British Raj a legacy of their rule? With Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Professor of Indian History and Culture at the University of Oxford; Susan Stronge, Curator in the Asian Department of the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Chandrika Kaul, Lecturer in Imperial History at the University of St Andrews.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk, forward slash Radio 4. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello. At its zenith, the Mughal Empire stretch from Gujarat in the east to Bengal in the west, from Lahore in the north, the madras in the south. It covered the whole of present-day northern India, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Bangladesh.

It became famous for the Taj Mahal, the Kohinur and the peacock throne. In 1631, a Dutch naturalist, Johannes Delight, published his account of the vast empire. Quote, The nobles live in indescribable luxury and extravagance, caring only to indulge themselves whilst they can in every kind of pleasure. Their greatest magnificence is in their women's quarters, for they marry three or four wives, or sometimes more, end quote.

But were they really the opulent despots of European imagination? If so, how did they? they maintain such a vast territory, and to what extent was the success of the British Raj, a legacy of the Mughal rule. With me to discuss the Mughal Empire is Sanjay Subramanya, Professor of Indian History and Culture at Oxford University, Susan Strong, curator in the Asian Department of the Victoria and Albert Museum, and Chandrika Kahl, lecturer in imperial history at St. Andrews University.

Sanjay, the official dates of the empire are from 1526 to 1857, And throughout those 330 years, a single lineage of 19 emperors rule. The first of these was Babur. Can you tell us a little about him? Babur was a descendant of Timur, of Tamer Lane, and of Chingiz Khan. So he actually came from a lineage of two great conquerors. He spent the greater part of his life actually looking for a kingdom and started out from Central Asia, spent a number of years wandering around.

and then eventually came to Kabul, settled in Kabul for a while, and then in 1526 managed to conquer North India from an existing sultanate and lived to rule that sultanate for about three years. So it was a very brief period so far as he was concerned in India. When you say looking for a kingdom, it sounds rather romantic. In fact, the whole thing is rather romantic, a descendant of Genghis Khan and Tammel in the Great coming out of Asia. But he wasn't just what, he must have had an army or something,

I mean, how many men did he take with him? What were the conditions of the time? We're talking about the early 16th century, a period about which we know a lot about our own history. What's going on there? Well, what was going on was that a number of new states were being founded in the area. These other people were making space for themselves, and someone like him didn't have that much margin for maneuver.

So he was in a way sort of pushed further and further south by the fact that other people were competing with him in this kind of enterprise. Now, he at various points in his life, had different sizes of entourage. It must have come down to very small numbers at the lowest points of his career. Can you give us some idea of the numbers? We're talking about a warlord, aren't we? We're talking about a warlord who probably when, at the time that he moved into Kabul, must have had some thousands of people with him, but not much more than that.

And when he moved into North India must have had some tens of thousands of people. And so there he's got to feed them. got to give them places to loot, he's got to give them territory. Indeed. He's got to expand because of his own private army, I presume, pushing him. Yes, that is one reason. But in a way, the problem is one of the heritage, which is that if you have this heavy heritage of being a descendant of... Tamblern and Genghis Ghan. And there are a number of these people around who are usually called Mirzahs at this time. That's the kind of general title that they bear.

many of these people are trying to do this. It's almost like it's just a family business. If you've got Tamblain in Genghis there, you've got to go off and conquer parts of the West, as far west as you can get. Yes, it's a little bit of that. Well, perhaps it's not quite so dissimilar as that to European history in this period.

I mean, if you were, say, Habsburg Prince, you also had ideas of this kind, perhaps through marriage alliances, perhaps through conquest. So it's perhaps not so peculiar an Asian or a South Asian phenomenon. I think it's probably a somewhat more general phenomenon. And wandering princes are not unknown. Charles II spent some part of his life as one.

James II spent the end of his life as one. He kept a diary, didn't he, Babur. So we established very early on in the 1520s that this dynasty is going to be remarkable in many ways. And one of the ways it was remarkable, of course, was this artistic legacy. Well, what does his diary tell us about him and the time? Well, it's not precisely an autobiography. It's a sort of an autobiography. Actually, it tells us precisely about this whole question of what it means to be a wandering prince

and what it means to come to this thing at the end of his life. Incidentally, he's not all that happy with what he gets at the end of his life. He never was quite that happy with India. And he, in fact, often talks about how he misses life in the parts of from which he came. He seemed to think actually that Central Asia was a rather better place than India. He came to India as a sort of second choice or a third choice, I think. Susan Strongman, Baba was succeeded by his son, Humanyan. What was the empire that he inherited in 1530? Very, very small. It was a corridor of land from Kabul through Lahore down to Delhi and Agra.

And Humayan actually managed to lose it very quickly because although he consolidated some of the military gains, he seemed to give up at the point where he really needed to be pushing forward. So in the end, he actually was exiled and went to Iran and then moved back to Kabul and eventually got the throne back in 1555. Are we talking about competing kingdoms around here, like provincial states? Again, I just want to get a bit of the geography, the political geography work down here.

It's probably more correct to say that there were centres of power with no fixed borders, so they expanded or contracted according to the ability of the leader of the ruler. So nothing was fixed, and whenever there was a power vacuum, someone would step into it, as indeed the British did later. And so if a stronger leader came up, in this case it was the Afghan Shia Khan, then he was able to push back a weaker person. So Humaim was pushed out to Iran.

The important legacy of that, of course, was that, Umayy and brought back with him to major Iranian painters who then founded a studio which became very important under Humayun San Akbar. And this started off a whole train of painting and calligraphy and illustration which ran through the next 300 years. And this was something which had been, was a preoccupation of Babel and Humayin. Barbo was a calligrapher. Humayun carried around with him extremely valuable illustrated manuscripts.

I mean, he carried them. with him because he had no fixed abode essentially. I'd like to turn to Shandrika a call to talk about his son Akbar. I mean, given that we're talking about great warrior races and all that, Hermione's death was rather, not comical, but he fell down some library steps at night.

And he left a 13-year-old son, Akbar, who inherited the throne, which seems, again, it seems as if this dynasty, which was remarkable for 19 direct descent, is in danger, but not the case. No, and I think he's, Here we need to emphasize the character, the personal qualities that Agba brought to the throne.

I mean, Humayu, as you said, he felt, he was said that he was very inaptly named because Humayu actually means the lucky one. As it turned out, he proved that he sort of tumbled into life and tumbled out of it. But Akbar was having none of that. In the first few years of his reign, he ruled with the help of a region because he was up too young, Baram Khan. and he very early on made, put his mark on the empire.

This was an empire which was built on war, on expansion, on military conquest. And Akbar was an amazing war leader. Right from an very early age, he was known to be a very good archer. He loved horse riding and hunting and all the sort of martial sports. But also I think this was something that came from within. He had a very clear ambition. He knew where he was going with his expansion. And it was said that Akbar, unlike some of his successes, moved.

He did not have a fixed abode. He, like the Mongols and the Timurus, moved his army and his capital with him as he went along. So he established a very clear physical presence in the lands that he was trying to conquer and the armies that he was leading. So there is a sense in which the empire moved with him in a very clear, offensive. And let's not forget that he managed to conquer, not the whole of India, but a large part of India, but he ruled for 50 years. And there were setbacks as well. There were rebellions, some fierce rebellions, particularly in the second half of his reign. And so it wasn't a

sense that he came, he saw, and he conquered. He had to reconquer, reassert throughout his 50, almost 50 years. The sense of which Baba brought the dynasty to India, but Akbar turned it into an empire. He seems to have been, as Susan Tron, to come back to you for a second, he seems to have been an extraordinarily powerful administrator as well. How was his empire administered? What did he lay down? Well, I think it was an extraordinary personality across the board,

but one of the things that he had, the empire was extremely tightly controlled. It was very, very carefully regulated. Every department was properly supervised. And we know this from the history of the rain that was written by Akbar's friend, Abel Fasal, who says, for instance, there were 12 treasuries, three of which were four precious stones, jewellery and gold and silver, and the others were for cash receipts. So everything was so carefully controlled that I think that added considerably to the efficiency of the rain. The feeling that you get is complete grip on every level,

of the government. Sanjay, do you want to come in on that? I think that, you know, you have somebody who's very charismatic, who surrounds himself with people who are often actually quite extraordinary people as well, such as Sheikh Abul Fasal, whom Susan mentioned a little while ago, who is this great ideologue, is Indian-born Muslim who has, you know, pretensions to producing a new political philosophy, which would be appropriate for the empire.

So you have that. But there's also something else which, as an economic historian, I would actually want to emphasize, which is that you also have to bear in mind the second half of the 16th century is a very interesting moment in terms of the way in which the world economy is developing. It's a moment when, you know, there's a big expansion going on. It's the moment when, you know, the big South American mines, silver mines are coming online. And part of the consolidation of the Mughal Empire under Agba is also the stabilization of the monetary system, which is large, silver-based, not exclusively so. And for that to be possible, you actually need to have these connections by which

South America gets connected to Europe. Europe gets connected to India. And the silver is flowing in from the distant Bolivian mine of Potosi into the coffers of the Mughal Empire. So there is a set of circumstances as well which determine, you know, that there are possibilities which somebody like Agburt can pick upon.

But just a moment, China I want to go back to Susan for a second. Illiterate there may have been and perhaps dyslexic, we don't know. He did establish the most extraordinary culture at the court. I mean, he set in train this book on one mythical figure, Amir Hamza, is that how I pronounce it, with 1,400 separate illustrations he took 15 years to do.

And so can you give us some idea of the court briefly, Susan, because we have lots of European saying opulent, exotic, extraordinary, fabulous. Can we do a little bit better than that? Well, it depends where the court was, I mean, Akbar, for instance, built an entire new city at Fatipu, Cicri, which still stands today. I mean, there's a lot of the buildings are still left. So you have a court which has buildings which are very beautifully carved. They're made of red sandstone on a plane overlooking, on a, sorry, escarpment overlooking a plane.

And within this place, there would be carpet weavers, artists, goldsmiths, and the whole court environment would be covered in, beautiful textiles, woven gold fabrics and so on. And into this environment came people like the Portuguese from Goa who would sell gemstones because Goa at the time was the centre of the eastern gem trade. It had no customs, it had no duties, it was a very free trade environment. I mean, Sanchez told us very graphically about a wonderful notion of silver sweeping up from Bolivia into Europe and then going on to India

and the diamond mines in India. Are they reaching out to the east as well? Is this flow going right through? Is it sort of like a wonderful sort of terrestrial tide, rippling across the planet? Indeed. I mean, it's going across in two senses because the Mughal Empire is connected to Southeast Asia.

It's connected so much so that one of the major Southeast Asian kingdoms of the period, which is the North Sumatran Sultanate of Ache, actually in the early 17th century, draws upon the Mughals explicitly as a model. And there's a kind of a texture. written there, which says quite explicitly that, you know, the Mughals are the kinds of monarchs that we wish to be, of course, it's on a much smaller scale, but even so. Chandrika, you wanted to come here.

Well, really, peaking up from both by Sanger and Susan sort of left off, I think it's important to also try and analyze where Agba's strengths lay. I think he managed to solve two problems that beset, you know, say the tutors as well. One was the problem of the nobility. and the other was a problem of how to deal with religious diversity in India. And I think if I were to pick up on the religious diversity aspect first, Susan mentioned Fatei... Well, going to just laid up.

They're Muslims, aren't they? The Mughals are Muslims. Yes. And a great number of Hindus and Sikhs and Buddhists and some Christians already quite early on. Certainly, Abu's reign Jesuits were at his court. I think Akbar both politically as well as personally was very clear that he wasn't going to use Islam as a weapon of state. So he disassociated the state from Islam. The state did not favor Islam or Muslims over non-Muslims. He abolished, for instance, the poll tax, the Jazea on non-Muslims.

He allowed non-Muslims to build temples, to they didn't have to pay a pilgrimage tax. But most importantly, I think he led from the front. He established a new religion called Dene E. Elahi, which really was his way of trying to say that I'm a tolerant monarch and I'm picking up the best from all different religions. And this is where the state stands. It doesn't favour one or the other. Now, this doesn't mean that he was a bad Muslim. I don't think he ever claimed that. But I think he's giving the lead from the front. And therefore, creating loyalty. He took on Hindu wives and so on. He took on Hindu wives. He married a Rajput, princess who indeed gave him the air, the heir to the throne, was the son.

of the Rashput Princess of Amir. So I think he made very clear, both politically and personally, that religion was going to be a neutral factor in the way he was going to rule. Do you want to follow that up, Sonia? Well, because it isn't all wonderful, is it about religion? No, it isn't all wonderful. Akbar is a remarkable person, but we're going through his sons and grandsons, and we get to some fairly intolerant persons,

not too far in many generations on. Yes, but, I mean, I think that, first of all, the problem is that you're dealing with a 50-year, long rain, as we were just reminded. And in that 50-year-long rain, there were a number of twists and turns. So that often what is remembered about Akbar is perhaps the last 20 years, roughly, from the 1880s onwards, where a number of the elements that Chandrika has just been describing come into place.

But before that, actually, there were a number of points of inflection, hesitation, and so on. There are moments when Akbar moves fairly close to Shiism. There are moments when he is actually influenced by what are considered to be a heterodox group of very fringe Muslims from Iran called the Noctawiz. And there is a moment when he then found this rather curious order. I'm not entirely certain it's a religion. It's actually some kind of a sectarian order which is meant to bind people in ties of loyalty to him. without actually they're having to give up being Muslims or whatever it is. If we don't, we're not careful.

We're going to spend the whole program talking about Akbar, and maybe that's what we should have done. But never mind. I just want to say a little bit more. Can you give us, Susan, can you give us some idea of the intellectual internal life of the court? The idea is the philosophy. Well, I think if you look at the end of the 16th century, which is very much characterized by Akbar's personality,

you see an immense interest in other cultures, in other religions. and a great desire to explain different philosophies to different groups who don't understand them. And in artistic terms, this comes out because Akbar commissions translations into Persian, the cultural language of the court, of texts, for instance, in Sanskrit, so that the Muslims of the court

who may not know much about Hinduism can understand it. Whenever an Englishman or a European or Portuguese comes to court, they are quizzed about the ideas that they're bringing with them. And that follows through into artistic techniques and all sorts of things. It's a profound curiosity. Just briefly, what are the, what is the Mughal Court thinking about the Europeans with our ideas, and what the Europeans are thinking about the Mughal Court?

Are they suspicious of each other? Do they say, oh, that's like us, or, oh, they're not where we are. What's the interplay there? You would guess that they looked at each other as equally exotic creatures. You know, when somebody walks into the court wearing a, and a Jacobian hat with a feathers sticking out of it a lace rough and a pearl earring. He must have been an object of some curiosity, you would think.

And equally, when Sir Thomas Rowe, the first English ambassador to the court arrives, he sees the very structured life of the court as akin to a theatre performance. So he sees the Jahangir as the player king in the theatre. So there's very much a sense... Jahangir being Akbar's son. There's very much a sense.

of at that time, for instance, between the English and the moguls of different worlds, they don't understand each other at all, I would say. There's also a profound lack of understanding of Islam, I think, when they turn up and see these religions, the European see them as completely heathen, and you have characters like Thomas Corriatt who walked to India to be able to see an elephant going into the court and denouncing the Prophet Muhammad as the Antichrist. I mean, it's just a complete lack of understanding of sense.

which you find in some observers, not in others. Can we talk a little, Chandrika, about the ideas of moniker, the ideas of rule, which became sort of centres, I understand it, for ideas about governance and the way society should develop? Can we talk about that at the time of the late 60th, the 17th century? Right. Well, I think it's quite noticeable that from the second half of Akbar's reign, people like Abul Fasel and his brother, the poet Fézi,

had a very conscious way of actually constructing sovereignty, which was based on the idea that Agbar and his successors derived their right to rule from God. So there was a religious, well, a sanction that transcended the human beings. So Agbar was not just an ordinary man. He was the perfect man, the universal man. But I think there was also a sense in which the Mughals themselves, created their own destiny in the sense that they organized and managed to conquer vast swades

and therefore their right to rule was derived from their might, from their sheer success. And this argument can be turned on its head when we look at the decline of the Mughal Emperor or the Mughal Empire, when we can see that to a great extent this was a war state. so an emperor derives his justification to rule from the success that he could claim in the battlefield. So there is a sense in which a combination of both as divine, as well as a very practical sense in which their sovereignty was based on force and a divine well. Can we talk a bit more, Susan, now, about the cultural development, to take it over the next couple of centuries,

the great buildings that we know about, the Taj Mahal and so forth, the jewelry, the diamonds, the miniatures. This was a driven tradition, wasn't it? They took it on themselves to develop their architecture. Can you just tell us about what? And then European influences came in, as we know, with the Taj Mahal and so on. Well, there are all sorts of different levels. It was very complex culture, very complex society.

One of the things that was very important was the possessions, the imperial possessions. So anything which had belonged to a predecessor was highly valued. And as each emperor died, the next emperor would take over the library and very often would write, apart from Macbara, of course, who couldn't write, but would write his own comments on the manuscripts,

the valuations, even little comments on who'd painted a particular miniature and so on. And then you have a trend where architecture became very much more important because the court stopped moving round so constantly. And Shah Jahan in particular added hugely to the fortified cities of Lahore, Agra, Delhi, and made a new city within Delhi, filled with these wonderful...

The red fort. Yeah, filled with these wonderful white marble buildings inlaid with semi-precious stones. And further embellished the court setting by adding, for instance, the famed peacock throne that you mentioned, which at the time was actually called the jeweled throne, which was commissioned on his accession in 1628, and took seven years to make and was studied with the greatest stones in his true. treasury, which was a treasury again that had been built up and added to over the preceding generations. There is very much this idea of an empire also where there's a kind of a cult of

display. The monarch displays himself. The monarch is painted displaying himself. And this is quite an important part of the sort of rituals of sovereignty, which actually gets stabilized under Akbar. And then it's only at the, you know, you then have these two other monarchs whom we have been talking about Jahangir Akbar's son, Shah Jahan, Agbar's grandson, who builds Delhi and the Taj Mahal most famously. And then towards the end of the 17th century, you have Agbar's great grandson, Orang Zab, who starts calling some of these rituals into question. But even there, you can see that he's not able to really affect such a revolutionary transformation in them. Are we talking, Tanya, at a time of when the empire reached Zenith, it is overstretched.

and with the Europeans coming in, Portuguese one side, British, the other and so on, then it's in most danger. Do we see the decline then when it is its biggest? Well, yes, and some would argue that, you know, to talk about the decline of the Mughal Empire after the death of Orangzeb would be wrong. One can see the seeds of decline being sown. What does we're talking about here? Well, Orang Zab 1707 is when Orang Zab died.

And, you know, common history sort of talk about the deal. declined post-17-07. But I think it's important to reconsider the fact that Orangzeb's sort of deacon obsession, the idea that he really wanted to move down south and managed to get the entire Indian subcontinent under Mughal Rood really sowed the seeds of a great deal of unrest. Because he was away for so long in the south, the centre in Delhi, sort of the rise of faction of the centre, created instability. But there were also other factors. which led to the decline, I think, of the Mughals, including, I think, the rise of regional centres of powers,

the Marathas, the Rajboots. The English and the European presence, I think there are several aspects to this. To one extent, I think the English East India Company in particular filled the vacuum left by this slowly tottering empire. But they also used the fiscal military system that the Mughals had spent so long building up to further stabilise their own.

position in India. And finally, when Disraeli crowned Victoria, Empress of India, he was laying claim to this idea of Victoria being the last Mughal in a way, this idea of impression, perception of power, of rule of sovereignty, deriving, as it were, from the Mughals. So the East India Company actually built up its power through that. From what I've read, it seems that the Rajh took over a great deal of the administrative structures set up by the Mughals,

principally in the way they ran, divided the tax collecting from the political, and the very, very small number of people that the Mughals had employed to run this massive empire comparatively small, but had run it so, well, over 3, 130 years up and down, but it was a long time. Now, is that true?

Did the Reich take over a lot of the structures that were there, Sancho? Yes, they pick and choose. They take elements from the Mughals, but then there are also elements, they don't pick up. Again, they spend a certain time initially thinking that they should use Persian as the language of rule.

Then, as we know, in the 19th century, they eventually abandoned that, thanks to McCauley and others, and think that they should impose English as the language of rule. I think contemporaries use the rhetoric of the English taking over where the Mughal Empire left off to very good use, I think, and that is undeniable. Contemporaries at the time. I mean, they, they, there are some.

certainly felt and argued that they were the residary legacies of the Mughal Empire. Well, thank you all very much indeed. I enjoyed that. I'm sure our listeners did too. And next week I'll be discussing the neurobiology of dreams. There you go. Thank you for listening. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast. You can find hundreds of other programs about history, science and philosophy at BBC.com.com.uk forward slash radio four. Oh.