Even though Tamerlane then turned elsewhere, that event served as one of the bases for the legitimacy of his heirs, the Mughals, to rule India. The Mughals' consciousness of their Central Asian roots and the prominence of Persian and Central Asian culture at their courts are an important chapter in the history of the Silk Road.
The founder of the Mughal dynasty, Babur, was a descendant of both the Mongol Chingisids and the Timurids. Babur had grown up in the Ferghana Valley the eastern part of today's Uzbekistan , briefly held Samarkand, but then been driven out by the invading Uzbeks. He went to Kabul, where eventually he would be buried, and toward the end of his life in finally gained a foothold in India.
The firm establishment of Mughal rule in India was really the work of his grandson, Akbar , arguably the greatest of the Mughal emperors. Under Akbar the empire became one of the wealthiest states of Eurasia. While many of its important trade routes were oceanic, the overland routes to Safavid Persia, Central Asia and even China continued to function much as they had in the early centuries of the Silk Road.
Babur disposed of the ruler, and decided to take over himself. The Empire he founded was a sophisticated civilisation based on religious toleration. It was a mixture of Persian, Mongol and Indian culture. Trade with the rest of the Islamic world, especially Persia and through Persia to Europe, was encouraged. The importance of slavery in the Empire diminished and peace was made with the Hindu kingdoms of Southern India. Babur brought a broad-minded, confident Islam from central Asia.
His first act after conquering Delhi was to forbid the killing of cows because that was offensive to Hindus. Babur may have been descended from brutal conquerors, but he was not a barbarian bent on loot and plunder.
Instead he had great ideas about civilisation, architecture and administration. He even wrote an autobiography, The Babur - Namah. The autobiography is candid, honest and at times even poetic. Babur was followed by his son Humayun who was a bad emperor, a better poet, and a drug addict. He rapidly lost the empire. He did eventually recover the throne but died soon afterwards after breaking his neck falling downstairs.
While Humayan was certainly disastrous as a ruler, his love of poetry and culture heavily influenced his son Akbar, and helped to make the Mughal Empire an artistic power as well as a military one. The third Emperor, Abu Akbar, is regarded as one of the great rulers of all time, regardless of country. Akbar succeeded to the throne at 13, and started to recapture the remaining territory lost from Babur's empire. By the time of his death in he ruled over most of north, central, and western India.
Akbar worked hard to win over the hearts and minds of the Hindu leaders. While this may well have been for political reasons - he married a Hindu princess and is said to have married several thousand wives for political and diplomatic purposes - it was also a part of his philosophy.
Akbar believed that all religions should be tolerated, and that a ruler's duty was to treat all believers equally, whatever their belief. He established a form of delegated government in which the provincial governors were personally responsible to him for the quality of government in their territory.
Akbar's government machine included many Hindus in positions of responsibility - the governed were allowed to take a major part in the governing.
Even though they aptly demonstrated Mughal military strength, these campaigns drained the imperial treasury. As the state became a huge military machine and the nobles and their contingents multiplied almost fourfold, so did the demands for more revenue from the peasantry. Political unification and maintenance of law and order over wide areas encouraged the emergence of large centers of commerce and crafts—such as Lahore, Delhi, Agra, and Ahmadabad—linked by roads and waterways to distant places and ports.
The Mughals were very conscious of their dignity as emperors, and dressed and acted the part. It symbolizes both Mughal artistic achievement and excessive financial expenditures when resources were shrinking. The economic position of peasants and artisans did not improve because the administration failed to produce any lasting change in the existing social structure.
There was no incentive for the revenue officials, whose concerns primarily were personal or familial gain, to generate resources independent of dominant Hindu zamindars and village leaders, whose self-interest and local dominance prevented them from handing over the full amount of revenue to the imperial treasury.
In their ever-greater dependence on land revenue, the Mughals unwittingly nurtured forces that eventually led to the break-up of their empire.
Establishing an elaborate court, with bodyguards, a harem and wearing expensive clothes, more and more tax revenue was needed merely to finance this lavish lifestyle. Meanwhile, the gun-power technology that had given them military superiority, which remained unchallenged within India, could be challenged from the outside by armies with more advanced technology.
It was the greed and complacency of the emperors that resulted in their decline, and eventual demise. The last of the great Mughals was Aurangzeb.
During his fifty-year reign, the empire reached its greatest physical size but also showed the unmistakable signs of decline. The bureaucracy had grown corrupt, and the huge army demonstrated outdated weaponry and tactics.
Aurangzeb restored Mughal military dominance and expanded power southward, at least for a while. A zealous Muslim, Aurangzeb reversed the earlier policies that had helped to maintain good relations with non-Hindus, imposing Islamic law and dealing harshly with Hindus.
He destroyed many Temples. Aurangzeb had the khutbah Friday sermon proclaimed in his own name, not in that of the Ottoman caliph. Aurangzeb defeated the British between and , but their victory over the French at the Battle of Plassey in soon led to their controlling Bengal. From their original base in Serat, the British built forts and trading stations in Calcutta, Madras and Bombay later the three Presidencies.
In , Furrukhsiyar would grant them a firman royal dictate exempting them from customs duties. The treaty of gave them the right to collect taxes on behalf of the emperor the Diwani of Bengal.
This virtually gave them control of the land, since taxation was linked to land ownership. Well before the dissolution of the Mughal Empire in , the British system of District Collectors was firmly established. The District Collector remained the senior regional official throughout British rule. Aurangzeb was involved in a series of protracted wars: against the Pathans in Afghanistan, the sultans of Bijapur and Golkonda in the Deccan, the Marathas in Maharashtra and the Ahoms in Assam.
Peasant uprisings and revolts by local leaders became all too common, as did the conniving of the nobles to preserve their own status at the expense of a steadily weakening empire. The increasing association of his government with Islam further drove a wedge between the ruler and his Hindu subjects. The Mughal Empire experienced dramatic reverses as regional nawabs governors broke away and founded independent kingdoms.
The Mughals had to make peace with Maratha armies, and Persian and Afghan armies invaded Delhi, carrying away many treasures, including the Peacock Throne in , subsequently used by the shahs of Persia Iran. By the mid-nineteenth century, the British were controlling vast tracts of the Mughal Empire and other principalities through a series of treaties and alliances.
Technically, they still ruled as agents of the Mughal Empire, but were in practice exercising complete power. In they denied Nana Sahib leader of the Marathas his titles and pension, while elsewhere they refused to recognize adopted sons as legal heirs , and assumed power themselves.
Between and they took over six states, causing considerable unrest. In March , the British awarded the Rani an annual pension and ordered her to leave the Jhansi fort. Refusing to leave, she organized a volunteer army to oppose the regular Sepoy army of the British East India Company , which had British officers but mainly Indian troops.
In a series of revolts broke out in the Sepoy army, fueled by rumors that the British intended to flood India with Christian missionaries and that pork and beef fat was being used to grease the new Enfield rifle cartridge. On May 10 the sepoys revolted at Meerut. Agra was also taken, and the British residents retreated into the Red Fort.
The Hamzanama paintings demonstrate the beginning of a distinctively Mughal style that would become more refined as Akbar's reign progressed. Parallel trends simultaneously took place in architecture, and in the production of artefacts for the court. The vertical format of the Hamzanama paintings, high-viewpoint and meticulous details of the surface ornamentation of some weapons and textiles, all derive from Iranian conventions, but are combined with a naturalism in the depiction of animals and birds that belong to Hindustani traditions.
Though never realistic, the paintings nevertheless occasionally provide glimpses of contemporary life in even the most fantastic settings, a feature that would endure in Mughal painting. Many of the buildings depicted appear to be of red sandstone, the material used in the construction of Akbar's monuments in the royal cities of Delhi and Agra, and in his new city, Fatehpur Sikri.
The nascent Mughal style continued to evolve over the next decades as the artists were exposed to new influences, or new recruits joined them. Iranian artists sought employment at Akbar's court, bringing with them an enhanced attention to detail and sophisticated use of colour.
They were vastly outnumbered by the calligraphers, craftsmen, architects, poets and scholars who also came from Iran, able to move easily into this Persian-speaking milieu.
In Persian, already the language of the cultivated elite, was officially adopted as the administrative language of the empire. This allowed reports to be collected in the central Record Office of the court from every province, each of which had many local languages. A few years earlier, in , a Translation Bureau Maktabkhana had been established as one of the major court institutions.
It produced Persian translations of key texts, the most important of which were then illustrated. By the late 16th century, few at court were able to understand Turki, the language in which Babur had written. The Persian translation, the Baburnama Book of Babur , introduced to a wide Mughal audience the account of his turbulent life before and after invading Hindustan.
He gave detailed descriptions of the unfamiliar flora and fauna he came across, and recorded in forthright terms how much he disliked many aspects of the land, notably its climate and architecture. He also described many of the new gardens he laid out in the Iranian manner, and the plants he introduced from Central Asia. The translation of Babur's memoirs from Turki to Persian was supervised by one of the great intellectuals of the age, Akbar's friend 'Abd al-Rahim, who also held the highest office in the empire.
Akbar's reign was shaped by his curiosity regarding religions other than his own Muslim faith on the one hand, and his desire for religious tolerance on the other. Acutely aware of tensions between his Hindu and Muslim subjects, he wanted the major Sanskrit texts to be translated into Persian so that they could be widely read by non-Hindus.
In doing so, the hoped that "those who display hostility may refrain from doing so and may seek after the truth". The Translation Bureau was therefore given the task of producing Persian versions of fundamental texts such as the Ramayana Razmnama, or Book of War and the Harivamsa, considered to be an appendix to the Mahabharata, detailing the life of Krishna.
The translation of the Sanskrit text of the Harivamsa into Persian was finished by about and paintings were added. One imperial copy had its paintings removed in the early s when stray pages appeared on the Western art market.
As these translations were nearing completion, Akbar gave the order for the history of his reign to be compiled, including an account of his real and mythical antecedents. The author was Abu'l Fazl, the great polymath of the age, who began his work in and completed most of it by His rigorously researched history drew on the central record office of the empire, a number of memoirs commissioned by the emperor from witnesses to recent events, and the recently-translated memoirs of Babur.
Though always historically accurate, Abu'l Fazl also portrayed Akbar as the ideal monarch within Iranian traditions of kingship, and the perfect man within traditions of mystical Sufism. The third volume of his text, the Ain-e Akbari the Regulations, or Institutes of Akbar , describes the many departments of the royal household, including the Ketabkhana , with a list of the leading artists of the age.
Many of their names are inscribed on paintings accompanying an incomplete, unbound manuscript of the Akbarnama that was bought by the South Kensington Museum in These demonstrate that the manuscript was originally intended to be the presentation copy for the emperor. The text covers the years to and has paintings, all attributed by a contemporary librarian to the artists who painted them.
In some cases, a specialist portraitist was given the task of painting the features of the main characters in the scene. In , Akbar embarked on a military campaign to conquer the independent sultanate of Gujarat. The region was extremely wealthy, with sophisticated craft traditions and enormous textile production.
The pilgrim port of Surat, from where Muslim pilgrims set off from all over the subcontinent to perform the Hajj, was also within its borders. Victory came to the Mughal forces early in , and Akbar's procession through Surat is depicted in the Akbarnama. Among the crowd on the far right of the painting is a figure in blue clothes and a black hood, with blue eyes — he represents the Europeans that Akbar encountered for the first time, and energetically questioned about their lives, habits and beliefs.
They had come from the Portuguese settlement of Goa, and this encounter would result in Akbar sending a delegation there, to request that a religious delegation be sent to the Mughul court. The first Jesuit mission arrived at the city of Fatehpur in , and installed a chapel inside the house that Akbar had assigned to them. Here, they displayed paintings with Christian subjects that caused a sensation.
The emperor brought his leading courtiers to see them, and then sent for his artists. The impact of this — and of paintings and engravings brought by subsequent Jesuit missions — was soon apparent in Mughal painting. The principles of scientific perspective were not followed, but a sense of depth derived from European art is found in some of the paintings in the Akbarnama. One of the paintings from the Harivamsa, showing the dramatic combat between the gods Indra and Krishna taking place above a boat sailing past a rocky landscape, is also obviously inspired by European art.
Occasionally, a print of the kind brought by the Third Mission led by Father Jerome Xavier in was copied precisely. Other paintings were created for copies of the translation into Persian of the Life of Christ that had been requested by Akbar, and were written by Xavier in collaboration with a scholar at the Mughal court.
The same mingling of widely differing artistic traditions in the art of the book during Akbar's reign was certainly found in objects, though comparatively few have survived. A jewelled gold spoon exemplifies the uniquely Hindustani goldsmith's technique of kundan which is still widely practised today across the subcontinent to set stones in gold. It is mentioned by Abu'l Fazl in the Ain-e Akbari , but has antecedents that predate the arrival of the Mughuls by centuries.
The design of the jewelled decoration is purely Iranian, and relates to contemporary illuminated designs in the art of the book. The shape is Indian, but the decoration within cusped cartouches an ornate framing motif is based on Iranian designs of the period of Shah Tahmasp reigned — The chiselled details of a tiger attacking an elephant whose rider, or mahout, tries to fight it off on one side of the blade; and the combat between a horse and an elephant directed by their respective riders on the other, relate to similar scenes in paintings done at the end of Akbar's reign.
By this time, specialist craftsmen in the provinces of the empire supplied the court, and exported their wares to Europe. Gujarat was famous for its inlaid wooden boxes and cabinets, and for its artefacts made out of thin pieces of mother of pearl.
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