UPSC History The Mughal Empire NCERT Extracts - Kings and Chronicles : The Mughal Courts

 Who were the Mughals?

• The Mughals were descendants of two great lineages of rulers. From their mother's side they were descendants ofGenghis Khan (died 1227), ruler of the Mongol tribes, China and Central Asia. The name Mughal derives from Mongol.
• From their father's side they were the successors of Timur (died 1404).
• However, the Mughals did not like to be called Mughal or Mongol. This was because Genghis Khan's memory was associated with the massacre of innumerable people.
• On the other hand, the Mughals were proud of their Timurid ancestry, not least of all because their great ancestor had captured Delhi in 1398.
• Babur, the first Mughal ruler, was related to Ghenghiz Khan from his mother's side. He spoke Turkish and referred derisively to the Mongols as barbaric hordes.
• The founder of the empire, Zahiruddin Babur, was driven from his Central Asian j homeland, Farghana, by the warring Uzbeks.

From Turkish to Persian

• Mughal court chronicles were written in Persian.
• As the Mughals were Chaghtai Turks by origin, Turkish was heir mother tongue.
• It was Akbar who consciously set out to make Persian the leading language of the Mughal court.
• Cultural and intellectual contacts with Iran, as well as a regular stream of Iranian and Central Asian migrants seeking positions at the Mughal court, might have motivated the emperor to adopt the language.
• Mughal official histories such as the Akbar Nama were written in Persian, others, like Babur's memoirs, were translated from the Turkish into the Persian Babur Nama.
• The Mahabharata was translated as the Razmnama (Book of Wars).

The making of manuscripts

• All books in Mughal India were manuscripts, that is, they were handwritten.
• Calligraphy, the art of handwriting, was considered a skill of great importance.
• It was practised using different styles. Akbar's favourite was the nastaliq, a fluid styte with long horizontal strokes.

The Painted Image

• Painters too were involved in the production of Mughal manuscripts.
• Chronicles narrating the events of a Mughal emperor's reign contained, alongside the written text, images that described an event in visual form.
• The historian Abu'l Fazi described painting as a "magical art", in his view it had the power to make inanimate objects look as if they possessed life.
• The production of paintings portraying the emperor, his court and the people who were part of it, was a source of constant tension between rulers and representatives of the Muslim orthodoxy, the ulama.
• The latter did not fail to invoke the Islamic prohibition of the portrayal of human beings enshrined in the Qur'an as well as the hadis.
• Muslim rulers in many Asian regions during centuries of empire building regularly commissioned artists to paint their portraits and scenes of life in their kingdoms.

The Akbar Nama and the Badshah Nama

• Among the important illustrated Mughal chronicles the Akbar Nama and Badshah Nama (The Chronicle of a King) are the most well known.
• Each manuscript contained an average of 150 full- or double-page paintings of battles, sieges, hunts, building construction, court scenes, etc.
• The author of the Akbar Nama, Abu'l Fazi grew up in the Mughal capital ofAgra.
• He was widely read in Arabic, Persian, Greek philosophy and Sufism.
• Moreover, he was a forceful debater and independent thinker who consistently opposed the views of the conservative ulama.
• Beginning in 1589, Abu'l Fazi worked on the Akbar Nama for thirteen years.
• The Akbar Nama is divided into three books of which the first two are chronicles. The third book is the Ain-i Akbari.
• The first volume contains the history of mankind from Adam to one celestial cycle of Akbar's life (30 years).
• The second volume closes in the fortysixth regnal year (1601) of Akbar.
• The very next year Abu'l Fazi fell victim to a conspiracy hatched by Prince Salim, and was murdered by his accomplice, Bir Singh Bundela.
• A pupil of Abu'l Fazi, Abdul Hamid Lahori is known as the author of the Badshah
• Shah Jahan commissioned him to write a history of his reign modelled on the Akbar Nama.
• The Badshah Nama is this official history in three volumes (daftars) of ten lunar years each.
• Lahori wrote the first and second daftars comprising the first two decades of the emperor's rule (1627-47); these volumes were later revised by Sadullah Khan, Shah Jahan's wazir.
• Infirmities of old age prevented Lahori from proceeding with the third decade which was then chronicled by the historian
• During the colonial period, British administrators began to study Indian history and to create an archive of knowledge about the subcontinent to help them better understand the people and the cultures of the empire they sought to rule.
• The Asiatic Society of Bengal, founded by Sir William Jones in 1784, undertook the editing, printing and translation of many Indian manuscripts.
• Edited versions of the Akbar Nama and Badshah Nama were first published by the I Asiatic Society in the nineteenth century.
• In the early twentieth century the Akbar Nama was translated into English by Henry Beveridge after years of hard labour.

A divine light

• Court chroniclers drew upon many sources to show that the power of the Mughal kings came directly from God.
• One of the legends they narrated was that of the Mongol queen Alanqua, who was impregnated by a ray of sunshine while resting in her tent.    
• The offspring she bore carried this Divine Light and passed it on from generation to generation.
• Abu'l Fazi placed Mughal kingship as the highest station in the hierarchy of objects receiving light emanating from God (farr-i izadi).
• Here he was inspired by a famous Iranian sufi, Shihabuddin Suhrawardi (d. 1191) who first developed this idea.
• According to this idea, there was a hierarchy in which the Divine Light was transmitted to the king who then became the source of spiritual guidance for his subjects.

Sulh-i kul: A unifying force

• Abu'l Fazi describes the ideal of sulh-i kul (absolute peace) as the cornerstone of enlightened rule.
• In sulh-i kul all religions and schools of thought had freedom of expression but on condition that they did not undermine the authority of the state or fight among themselves.
• The ideal of sulh-i kul was implemented through state policies - the nobility under the Mughals was a composite one comprising Iranis, Turanis, Afghans, Rajputs, Deccanis - all of whom were given positions and awards purely on the basis of their service and loyalty to the king.
• Further, Akbar abolished the tax on pilgrimage in 1563 andjizya in 1564 as the two were based on religious discrimination.

Just sovereignty as social contract

• Abu'l Fazi defined sovereignty as a social contract: the emperor protects the four essences of his subjects, namely, life (Jan), property (mal), honour (namus) and faith (din), and in return demands obedience and a share of resources.
• Only just sovereigns were thought to be able to honour the contract with power and Divine guidance.

The transmission of notions of luminosity

• The origins of Suhrawardi "s philosophy went back to Plato's Republic, where God is represented by the symbol of the sun.                                
• Suhrawardi's writings were universally read in the Islamic world. They were studied by Shaikh Mubarak, who transmitted their ideas to his sons, Faizi and Abu'l Fazi, who were trained under him.

Capital cities

• Babur took over the Lodi capital ofAgra, though during the four years of his reign the court was frequently on the move.
• During the 1560s Akbar had the fort ofAgra constructed with red sandstone quarried from the adjoining regions.
• In the 1570s he decided to build a new capital, Fatehpur Sikri.
• One of the reasons prompting this may have been that Sikri was located on the direct road to Ajmer, where the dargah of Shaikh Muinuddin Chishti had become an important pilgrimage centre.
• In 1585 the capital was transferred to Lahore to bring the north-west under greater control and Akbar closely watched the frontier for thirteen years.
• In 1648 the court, army and household moved from Agra to the newly completed imperial capital, Shahjahanabad.

The Mughal Court

• The physical arrangement of the court, focused on the sovereign, mirrored his status as the heart of society. Its centrepiece was therefore the throne, the takht, which gave physical form to the function of the sovereign as axis mundi.
• In court, status was determined by spatial proximity to the king. The place accorded to a courtier by the ruler was a sign of his importance in the eyes of the emperor.
• Social control in court society was exercised through carefully defining in fall detail the forms of address, courtesies and speech which were acceptable in court. The slightest infringement of etiquette was noticed and punished on the spot.
• The forms of salutation to the ruler indicated the person's status in the hierarchy: deeper prostration represented higher status.
• The highest form of submission was sijda or complete prostration.
• Under Shah Jahan these rituals were replaced with chahar taslim and zaminbos (kissing the ground).
• The protocols governing diplomatic envoys at the Mughal court were equally explicit
• An ambassador presented to the Mughal emperor was expected, to offer an acceptable form of greeting either by bowing deeply or kissing the ground, or else to follow the Persian custom of clasping one's hands in front of the chest
• Thomas Roe, the English envoy of James-I, simply bowed before Jahangir according to
• European custom, and farther shocked the court by demanding a chair
• Jharoka darshan was introduced by-Akbar with the objective of broadening Ac acceptance of the imperial authority as part of popular faittt
• The Mughal kings celebrated, three major festivals a year: the solar and lunar birthdays of the monarch and Nauroz, the Iranian New Year on the vernal equinox. On his birthdays, the monarch was weighed against various commodities which wore then distributed in. charity.

Titles and gifts

• Grand titles were adonted bv the Murfial emperors at; the time of coronation or after a victory over an enemy. Mughal coins carried the full title of the emperor with regal protocol.
• The title Asaf Khan for one of the highest ministers originated with Asaf, the legendary minister of the prophet king Sulaiman (Solomon).
• The title Mirza Raja was accorded by Aurangzeb to his two highest-ranking nobles, Jai Singh and Jaswant Singh. Titles could be earned or paid for.
• The lotus blossom set with jewels (padma murassa) was given only in exceptional circumstances.
• In diplomatic relations, gifts were regarded as a sign of honour and respect.
• Ambassadors performed the important function of negotiating treaties and relationships between competing political powers. In such a context gifts had an important symbolic role.

The Imperial Household

• The term "harem" is frequently used to refer to the domestic world of the Mughals. It originates in the Persian word haram, meaning a sacred place,
• The Mughal household consisted of the emperor's wives and concubines, his near and distant relatives and female servants and slaves.
• In the Mughal household a distinction was maintained between wives who came from royal families (begams), and other wives (aghas) who were not of noble birth.
• The concubines (aghacha or the lesser agha) occupied the lowest position in the hierarchy of females intimately related to royalty.
• Apart from wives, numerous male and female slaves populated the Mughal household.
• After Nur Jahan, Mughal queens and princesses began to control significant financial resources. Shah Jahan's daughters Jahanara and Roshanara enjoyed an annual income often equal to that of high imperial mansabdars.
• The bazaar of Chandni Chowk, the throbbing centre of Shahjahanabad, was designed by Jahanara.
• An interesting book giving us a glimpse into the domestic world of the Mughals is the Humayun Nama written by Gulbadan Begum.
• Gulbadan was the daughter of Babur, Humayun's sister and Akbar's aunt.

Jesuits at the Mughal court

• Europe received knowledge of India through the accounts of Jesuit missionaries, travellers, merchants and diplomats. The Jesuit accounts are the earliest impressions of the Mughal court ever recorded by European writers.
• Akbar was curious about Christianity and dispatched an embassy to Goa to invite Jesuit priests. The first Jesuit mission reached the Mughal court at Fatehpur Sikri in 1580 and stayed for about two years.
• The Jesuit accounts corroborate the information given in Persian chronicles about state officials and the general conditions of life in Mughal times.