EMPIRES BUILDERS OF MEDIEVAL INDIA

• It’s hard to understand the history of modern India without the contribution of the Mughals, who, including Akbar, Jahangir, Shah Jahan and Aurangzeb, were all born in undivided India; and were buried here. None of them ever left the country, not even to go on a pilgrimage to Mecca
• It all started with Babur when he defeated Ibrahim Lodi in the First Battle of Panipat in 1526, and went on to capture all of North India in his brief reign of four years
• Babur’s victory was to usher in a prolonged period of political stability for the next nearly 200 years
• His grandson Akbar ruled for almost 50 years, as did Akbar’s great-grandson Aurangzeb, while his son Jahangir and Shah Jahan ruled for over 20 years each, making sure there was consistency in state policy and the development of the empire was unimpeded
• Their influence gradually reduced from 1707 onwards, and the last Mughal, Bahadur Shah Zafar, was only a symbolic leader of the Revolt of 1857
• However, in this symbolism lay a message; common Indians, as evidenced by the sipahis’ uprising, considered Mughals to be their kings; hence the leadership role to Zafar
• This was a throwback to the golden era of the Great Mughals; the latter Mughals, post-1707, had done nothing to earn that kind of trust
•  Aurangzeb’s prolonged battles in the Deccan had enfeebled the state’s finances, and his successors were unable to replenish the treasury
• To augment resources, Aurangzeb had imposed jizyah, a tax solely on non-Muslims, which proved detrimental in the long run
• Once Aurangzeb passed away in 1707, his successors proved incapable of ruling over a huge, unwieldy empire

• A descendant of Timur and Genghis Khan, Babur, who knew Turkish and Persian, started the practice of chronicling the events and noting down his impressions of the landscape and the artists he met
• He thus authored a unique document Baburnama, originally in Turkish which was later translated into Persian
• Not just Baburnama, the Ramayana, the Mahabharata and the Upanishads were also translated during the Mughal era
• The first translations of texts like the Ramayana and Mahabharata in any language from Sanskrit was done under the Mughals. Dara Shukoh translated 25 Upanishads into Persian. He also translated Yogavashishta
• Incidentally, Shukoh, the man who never became the king, was way ahead of the times. Eldest son of Shah Jahan, he was a Sunni Muslim who associated closely with Hindu philosophers and Christian priests
• Shukoh clearly inherited all this from Jalaluddin Akbar, the Emperor who built Ibadat Khana where scholarly debates were held between Brahmins, Christians, Jain, Buddhist and Islamic scholars
• It was a move way ahead of the time when one thinks until then the religion of the Emperor was supposed to be religion of the kingdom
• The modern Ganga-Jamuni tehzeeb stems from that shared feeling, a synthesis of different cultures
• The philosophical discussions during the time of Akbar and his son Jahangir led to intermingling among commoners
• In Mughal India, Hindus and Muslims lived cheek by jowl in the same locality. The respect extended to places of worship
• Often land grants for temples were made by the Mughal emperors; even the much maligned Aurangzeb, who demolished temples, issued grants

• By the end of the reign of Akbar, the population of the Mughal kingdom exceeded that of entire Europe, and the Mughal wealth was unmatched
• Shah Jahan was the first Indian ruler after Ashoka to reach Balkh and Badakshan. There was no mightier empire in the world
• The richness was owed substantially to the Rajputs, who were sharers of power from the time of Akbar, who defeated Rana Pratap in the Battle of Haldighati, and co-opted them in his empire through matrimonial alliances
• Most Mughal rulers after Jahangir were born to Rajput women. As a result, within the family, Hindavi was often the language of communication. Aurangzeb, incidentally, conversed in Hindi and composed in Braj bhasha
• It’s important to remember that during the time of the Mughals, Raskhan wrote of Krishna in Hindi and Balkrishan Brahman in Persian