There is perhaps no more important time to tell the story of the Mughal emperors of India. With the rise of Islamophobia in India and the domination of every level of her politics by the RSS- a once banned right wing Hindu nativist movement – their legacy has been perhaps irredeemably tarnished . The Mughals have now become ghouls in the official Hindu nationalist version of history’. In pop culture the ‘Muslim invaders’ are now cartoonish bogeymen for crowd pleasing Bollywood entertainments.They are imagined the architects of an ancient oppression of Hindus that had broken the Hindu spirit and paved the way for the coming of the Europeans. Under the Modi government, a programme is underway to excise the three hundred year long reign of the Muslim emperors of pre British India from the public consciousness, renaming Mughal monuments, taking their names off streets and even renaming towns founded by them. In 1992, a small part of this dream to rewrite history was physically realised when a number of Hindu fanatics demolished a five hundred year old mosque built by the first Mughal Emperor Babur, on the basis of a discredited theory that the mosque was built on the birthplace of the Hindu God Rama and on the site of a Hindu temple, of whose existence there is of course no actual historical record. The destruction was condemned by UNESCO, and has been likened to an act of cultural desecration, equal to the shelling of the Bamiyan Buddhas by the Taliban. In 2020, the Supreme Court of India nonetheless gave the Modi government permission to ‘re-build’ the Hindu temple over the site of the Mughal mosque. In India, mythological history often trumps factual history. Yet it was not so long ago that the Mughal Empire, despite being Islamic, was almost universally revered throughout the Indian subcontinent
How could it not? It was the first pan-subcontinental empire to appear in the region for almost twenty centuries, ending a dark age that lasted in Northern India at least for almost half a millennium, igniting India’s last golden age. At the height of the empire in the seventeenth century, the ‘Great Mogul’ was the richest man in the world, and presided over the last great flowering of Indian art, music and literature.
Far from being the oppressive, zealous Islamic theocrats of the modern Hindu imagination, the Mughals famously liberal and religiously tolerant court culture was unique not only to the subcontinent but contrary to the spirit of the time itself, a time when Christendom was convulsed in the wars of religion between Protestants and Catholics and heretics and witches were being burned and tortured across Europe.
In contrast, the third Mughal Emperor Akbar, though a Sunni Muslim, celebrated and propagated Hindu culture, ordering translations of the Hindu epics the Ramayana and the Mahabharata from Sanskrit into Persian, introducing them for the first time to the world outside India and to the canon of world literature. In addition to all the major Islamic festivals, the Mughal court celebrated the Hindu festivals of Holi and Diwali. Akbar was deeply interested not only in Hinduism but the other faiths of his kingdom, inviting Buddhist, Parsi, Jain and even Christian scholars to give lectures in his court. Much to the horror of his more orthodox advisors, he abolished all taxes traditionally imposed by Muslim rulers on non-Muslim subjects, decreeing that none of his subjects would be interfered with on account of their religion. As he declared, ‘He is a Man who makes Justice the guide on the path of Inquiry, and takes from every faith what is consonant with Reason’. With a couple of notable exceptions, the tradition was maintained by all his successors.
The Mughal period saw an explosion of Hindi devotional poetry of the Bhakti school – the great Hindu poets of this time, Surdas, Mirabai and Tulsidas, all enjoyed official Imperial patronage. The times also saw the dominance of the most important musical modes of North India classical music, Thumri, Khayal and Qawwali, all born from the fusing of Persian and South Asian musical styles.
The backbone of Mughal power lay in their alliance with the Rajputs, ancient Hindu warrior clans from Northwestern India. One of the most successful partnerships in history, the alliance transformed the Rajputs from minor kings to lords over vast dominions across the subcontinent. Rajput princesses were married into the Imperial family, so that later Emperors could claim legitimacy not only through their Timurid Turkic progenitors but through ancient Hindu bloodlines. The totemic power of the Mughal’s Peacock Throne continued to hold sway over the minds of all Indians well after the Mughal’s power had crumbled and the British seized control in the middle of the eighteenth century.
Many, many years later, in the first great uprising against British Rule in 1857, the mostly Hindu and high caste Brahmin soldiers of the British armies in Bengal and Bihar turned on and massacred their white British commanding officers. After this act, they did not flock to the standard of any of the Hindu leaders that had raised their banners against the British. For them it was a very self-evident truth that if there must be one king to rule over them all, it could be none other than the khalifa, the Padishah Bahadur Shah Zafar II, the last of the Mughals, the Shadow of God upon Earth and the Refuge of Islam, King of Kings, Sultan son of Sultan.
The decision of the mutinous Hindu soldiers in 1857 to proclaim the Muslim Bahadur Shah Zafar their emperor surprised the British, assuming as they did mutual Hindu Muslim hostility which was in fact alien to the syncretic culture of the time. They had also quite reasonably long since written off the Mughal dynasty as a credible power in Indian politics. They had personally defeated the last Mughal army assembled against them almost a century ago. Zafar was king only of the city of Delhi, and that too in name only, for the septuagenarian poet and famed Sufi mystic was little more than a glorified pensioner of the East India company, under constant watch from his English ‘protectors’.
The British therefore were unable explain why the generals Tatya Tope and Nana Sahib, whose Hindu Maratha ancestors had been the hereditary adversaries of the Mughals, or the Nawab of Avadh, whose own ancestors had been in rebellion against the Mughals for a hundred years, were suddenly uniting under the ancient Imperial Gurkani banner and the old horsetail standards and proclaiming the restoration of the Mughal Empire. Darymple quotes the memoirs of a surprised British collector in Mathura in 1857, who records the excited chatter of the rebels that had held him hostage, contemplating the Ancient Order that would be restored once they destroyed the power of the hated Angrezi:
They speculated as to who would be Grand Chamberlain, which of the chiefs of Rajpootana would guard the different gates, and who were the fifty-two Rajahs who would assemble to put the Emperor on the throne. As I listened I realised as I never had done before the deep impression that the splendour of the Ancient Court had made on the popular imagination, how dear to them were the traditions and how faithfully, all unknown to us, they had preserved them. There was something weird in the Mogul Empire thus starting into a sort of phantom life after the slumber of a hundred years
The British would not underestimate the glamour of the Mughal name again. The 1857 rebellion was eventually brutally suppressed and Delhi was sacked by British forces. The elimination of the ‘House of Timur’ was a political priority. Sixteen of the sons of Bahadur Shah Zafar II were executed, the eldest three among them made to strip naked before being shot in front of their families. Zafar himself was sent into exile in Rangoon. When he died there, the man whose direct ancestors built the Taj Mahal was buried in an unmarked grave. The British officer responsible proudly reported to his superiors that ‘no vestige will remain to distinguish where the last Mughal rests.’
‘We have smashed the wine cup and the flask,
What is it now to us
If all the rain that falls from heaven
Should turn to Rose Red wine?
-Former court poet Mirza Ghalib, in 1857
It seems that under assault from Modi, the once Great Mughals must face a second death, where even their memory must be buried and forgotten. Yet their legacy is deeply intertwined with modern India, and it will not be an easy forgetting. The Mughal empire’s administrative infrastructure forms the very bones of modern India. The Mughal Grand Trunk Roads still criss cross her breast. The pidgin language that emerged from its multiethnic military camps, Hindustani, the precursor to both modern Hindi and Urdu, remains the common inheritance of Sotuh Asian Hindus and Muslims, the tongue of her poetry and her dreams. Even the word Hindu is a Persian word. Hindu fanatics talk of an undivided India covering all of modern India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan. that existed in mythological times and must be reclaimed from our Muslim neighbours. Yet the closest India came to that was under the Mughals. If India is possible at all, it is because of a shared history created by them.
This history begins with a single man and impossibly humble beginnings. He is a refugee from Ferghana, a kingdom of the Silk Road, now in Uzbekistan. His name is Zahiruddin Muhammad, but in his own language he is nicknamed Babur, whuch meansTiger. Penniless, he is armed with nothing more than an awesome bloodline, the blood of bothTimur (‘Tamerlane’) and of Genghis Khan. In my next blog, I shall tell his story.