The Mughal Empire
Twenty followers joined Akbar's new religion; his empire held a quarter of world GDP
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In fifteen eighty two, the ruler of a subcontinent declared a new religion, debated for seven years by five faiths at his own court.
It attracted fewer than twenty followers, and it died with him.
A century later, that same empire ran close to a quarter of the entire world's economy, more than every state in Europe combined.
The religion nobody joined and the wealth nobody could match came out of the same machine. This is a story about the machine, not the faith.
Scene 1Panipat, April fifteen twenty six
Zahir ud-Din Muhammad Babur has twelve thousand men. Ibrahim Lodi, ruler of the Delhi Sultanate, has more than a hundred thousand, and war elephants.
Babur lines up matchlock guns and field artillery behind carts lashed together with rope. Lodi's army has never faced cannon fire.
The elephants panic and stampede back through their own infantry.
By afternoon, Ibrahim Lodi is dead on the field. Fifty five miles north of Delhi, a new dynasty has just been founded in a single day.
Babur wrote the first autobiography in Islamic literature, and this is what he thought of the country he had just won.
· Baburnama · c. 1528
“Hindustan is a place of little charm. There is no beauty in its people, no graceful social intercourse, no poetic talent or understanding, no etiquette, nobility, or manliness.”
He is not describing an enemy. He is describing his own new capital.
A man who has just won an empire, and does not like the food he is going to be eating for the rest of his life.
Scene 2Fatehpur Sikri, fifteen seventy five to fifteen eighty two
Babur's grandson Akbar takes the throne at thirteen, after his father Humayun dies falling down a library staircase.
By the time Akbar dies at sixty three, the empire runs from Kabul to Bengal, from Kashmir to the Deccan, nearly the whole subcontinent.
He abolishes the tax on non-Muslims in fifteen sixty four. He marries into Rajput royal families and gives their commanders army ranks. At his Hall of Worship he holds formal debates between Jesuits, Hindus, Jains, Zoroastrians and Muslims.
The mansabdari system sits underneath all of it. Every commander gets a rank that fixes both his troops and his revenue, and that rank can be moved anywhere in the empire, so no province ever becomes his alone.
Abu'l-Fazl was Akbar's own court historian, and this is how he recorded the Hall of Worship in the empire's official history.
· Ain-i-Akbari · 1598
“His Majesty's sacred heart is never satisfied with the knowledge of one religion. Full comprehension demands that a faith should be tested by reason and not reason by a faith.”
One third of Akbar's top ranked commanders were Hindu. That is not a debate club. That is who held the army.
That same administrative machine would end up holding a quarter of the world's population together, at its peak. It needed none of them to agree on God.
Scene 3The Mughal court, sixteen sixteen to sixteen fifty eight
An English ambassador named Thomas Roe arrives at the Mughal court around sixteen sixteen, sent to negotiate trade under the emperor Jahangir.
He spends most of his time competing with Portuguese Jesuits for the emperor's attention.
Decades later, Shah Jahan becomes the fifth Mughal emperor. His wife Mumtaz Mahal dies in sixteen thirty one, giving birth to their fourteenth child, and he builds her the Taj Mahal: twenty thousand workers, twenty one years, an estimated thirty two million rupees, worth roughly one billion dollars today.
He also builds the Peacock Throne, set with the Koh-i-Noor diamond and valued at twice the cost of the tomb next to it. In sixteen fifty eight his own son Aurangzeb imprisons him and takes the throne.
This is what Thomas Roe reported home to his king.
· Letters from the Mughal court of Jahangir · c. 1616
“I stood astonished at the prince's wealth. In his throne room he displayed more gems than I had seen in my life.”
An ambassador sent to negotiate trade spent most of his time losing a rivalry with Portuguese Jesuits for the emperor's attention.
What he brought home instead was a description: a court richer than anything he had seen in his own life.
Scene 4The Deccan, sixteen eighty one to seventeen oh seven
A century after Akbar, Aurangzeb rules the largest economy on Earth. By Angus Maddison's estimate, Mughal India produces close to a quarter of the entire world's output in seventeen hundred, more than every state in Europe combined.
Aurangzeb reimposes the tax Akbar had abolished a hundred and fifteen years earlier. He orders the temples at Varanasi and Mathura demolished, and in sixteen seventy five he executes the Sikh Guru Tegh Bahadur.
He spends twenty six years fighting to conquer the Deccan. The campaign empties the treasury.
Saqi Mustaid Khan wrote the court chronicle of Aurangzeb's reign, recording the emperor's own orders.
· Maasir-i-Alamgiri · c. 1710
“The king ordered that wherever an idol temple had been demolished, a mosque should be built in its place.”
When Aurangzeb dies in seventeen oh seven, the empire that held a quarter of the world's wealth fractures into rival states within a generation.
Thirty two years later, a Persian king named Nader Shah walks off with the Peacock Throne itself.
Scene 5Bengal, sixteen oh eight to eighteen fifty seven
The East India Company arrives at the Mughal court in sixteen oh eight asking for trade. By seventeen fifty seven it wins Bengal in under a day.
Robert Clive brings three thousand men against the Nawab of Bengal's fifty thousand, and the Nawab's own general, Mir Jafar, switches sides mid battle.
A century later, the last Mughal emperor, Bahadur Shah Zafar, is exiled to Rangoon after an uprising against British rule.
Bahadur Shah Zafar wrote this poem himself, in the British cell where he would die.
· Urdu ghazal, composed in exile in Rangoon · c. 1858-1862
“I came a stranger into the world, and a stranger I depart. My star was unlucky, and my short life has been a harvest of misery.”
He dies in eighteen sixty two.
Five accounts
On what three hundred and thirty one years of this empire actually were, five accounts do not agree, and the argument still shapes Indian policy today.
victorMughal Imperial / Indo-Persian Court
Mughal Imperial court
From inside the court, Akbar's tolerance was never sentiment. It was survival math: an empire cannot last while it alienates the eighty percent of its population that is Hindu.
Abolishing the tax on non-Muslims and marrying into Rajput royal houses turned potential enemies into stakeholders in the empire itself.
The portable rank system kept any single commander, in any single province, from ever building a rival kingdom.
What this court left behind still stands: the Red Fort, Humayun's Tomb and Fatehpur Sikri, all UNESCO World Heritage sites built within a hundred and thirty years of each other, alongside the Taj Mahal itself.
Read the full account
Narrative
Babur's Baburnama, written in Chagatai Turkish, later translated into Persian by his grandson Akbar's court, is the first autobiography in Islamic literature and the first in any Turkic language. It records the founder's own voice: a Central Asian prince who found India hot, charmless, and lacking in good fruit, but who recognized its wealth and strategic position. Babur won Panipat with 12,000 troops against Ibrahim Lodi's 100,000+ by deploying matchlock firearms and field artillery behind a line of carts, the tulughma tactic inherited from Timurid military tradition. The Lodi elephants, never exposed to cannon fire, stampeded into their own lines.
The imperial narrative reaches its apex under Akbar. Abu'l-Fazl's Akbarnama (three volumes, commissioned 1590, completed 1602) presents Akbar as a divinely guided ruler whose administrative genius unified a subcontinent. The Ain-i-Akbari (essentially a statistical survey of the empire) records revenue data for every province, lists the rank and salary of every major mansabdar, and catalogs the imperial household's elephants (101 in the top category), horses (categorized into seven breeds), and kitchen expenses (400 daily cooks producing meals for a court of 5,000).
Akbar's sulh-i-kul (universal peace) was not abstract philosophy. It was administration. The empire could not survive if it systematically alienated the 80% of its population that was Hindu. The abolition of jizya in 1564 removed a financial burden on non-Muslims that had generated resentment for centuries. The Rajput marriage alliances (Akbar married Jodha Bai of Amber in 1562, and by 1580 Rajput commanders held one-third of top mansabdari ranks) converted potential enemies into stakeholders. The Ibadat Khana debates (1575-1582) at Fatehpur Sikri brought Jesuits from Goa, Jain monks, Zoroastrian priests, and Muslim ulema into formal theological disputation. When Akbar declared Din-i-Ilahi in 1582, it attracted fewer than 20 followers, but the declaration itself demonstrated that the emperor claimed religious authority independent of any single tradition.
The physical legacy speaks in stone. Fatehpur Sikri (built 1569-1585, abandoned 1585 due to water scarcity), the Red Fort (1639-1648), Humayun's Tomb (1565-1572, the architectural prototype for the Taj Mahal), and the Taj Mahal itself (1632-1653), all built within 130 years, represent a synthesis of Persian, Central Asian, and Indian architectural traditions that produced some of the most recognizable structures on Earth. Shah Jahan's Peacock Throne, encrusted with the Koh-i-Noor diamond and valued at twice the cost of the Taj Mahal, was looted by Nader Shah of Persia in 1739: a material marker of the empire's decline.
The Indo-Persian court culture generated a literary, musical, and visual tradition that defined high culture across South Asia for three centuries. The Mughal miniature painting school (1560-1800) synthesized Persian composition, Hindu naturalism, and European perspective techniques learned from Jesuit prints. Tansen, the musician at Akbar's court, became the foundational figure of Hindustani classical music. The Persian language served as the administrative and literary lingua franca of a multilingual empire, a function it retained in British Indian courts until 1837, when the East India Company replaced it with English.
Arguments
- Akbar's sulh-i-kul was a pragmatic administrative solution for governing a Hindu-majority empire, not mere idealism
- The mansabdari system prevented feudal fragmentation by making military appointments portable and revocable
- Mughal architecture, art, and literature represent a genuine Indo-Persian synthesis, not foreign imposition
- The empire's decline after Aurangzeb resulted from fiscal overextension in the Deccan, not religious policy alone
Sources
- Baburnama (Memoirs of Babur)
- Akbarnama
- The Mughal Empire (The New Cambridge History of India I.5)
revisionistHindu Nationalist / Hindutva Revisionism
Hindu Nationalist revisionism
This account, running from Savarkar's book in nineteen twenty three onward, treats the Mughal period as an interruption of Hindu civilization, not a chapter in it.
Its evidence is Aurangzeb: the temples torn down at Varanasi and Mathura, the tax reimposed, the Sikh guru executed for refusing forced conversion.
The mosque at Ayodhya, built in the late fifteen twenties, was demolished by a mob of a hundred and fifty thousand people in nineteen ninety two. In twenty nineteen, India's Supreme Court awarded that ground to a Hindu trust, and the Ram Mandir built there opened in twenty twenty four.
The question this account asks is not whether Aurangzeb tore down temples. It is whether three hundred and thirty one years of rule should be read through him.
Read the full account
Narrative
This perspective dominates contemporary Indian political discourse and shapes state policy. Its genealogy runs from V.D. Savarkar's Hindutva: Who Is a Hindu? (1923) through the founding of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS, 1925) to the Bharatiya Janata Party's (BJP) electoral dominance since 2014.
The central argument: the Mughal period was not a chapter in Indian civilization. It was an interruption. India's authentic civilization is Hindu; the Muslim rulers from the Delhi Sultanate through the Mughals were invaders whose legacy must be corrected. Savarkar coined the term "Hindutva" (Hindu-ness) to define Indian identity by three criteria: geographic (born in the land between the Indus and the seas), racial (descended from Vedic ancestors), and cultural (regarding India as both fatherland and holy land). Muslims and Christians, in this framework, have their holy lands elsewhere and therefore cannot be fully Indian.
The evidentiary base centers on Aurangzeb. His demolition of the Kashi Vishwanath temple in Varanasi (1669) and the Keshava Deo temple in Mathura (1670), both sites considered sacred by Hindus for millennia; his reimposition of the jizya (1679); his execution of Sikh Guru Tegh Bahadur (1675) for refusing forced conversion; and his prohibition of Hindu festivals at court are presented as the defining acts of the Mughal period. Akbar's tolerance is either minimized (a tactical concession, not genuine pluralism) or denied (revisionist scholars like P.N. Oak claimed Akbar was secretly Hindu, and that the Taj Mahal was originally a Shiva temple called Tejo Mahalaya).
The Babri Masjid dispute crystallizes this narrative. The mosque, built in Ayodhya in 1528-29 (possibly by Babur's general Mir Baqi), stood on a site that Hindus identify as the birthplace of the god Ram. On December 6, 1992, a mob of 150,000 Hindu nationalists, mobilized by BJP leader L.K. Advani's cross-country rath yatra (chariot procession), demolished the mosque with hammers and pickaxes. The demolition triggered riots that killed 2,000 people across India. In November 2019, the Indian Supreme Court ruled that the site belonged to a Hindu trust. The Ram Mandir, constructed on the site, was inaugurated by Prime Minister Modi on January 22, 2024.
The street-level consequences extend beyond temples. BJP-governed states have renamed cities: Allahabad became Prayagraj (2018), Faizabad became Ayodhya (2018), and campaigns to rename Aurangabad and Hyderabad are active. NCERT textbooks revised in 2023 reduced coverage of the Mughal period, removing chapters on Akbar and the Delhi Sultanate. K.K. Muhammad, a former Archaeological Survey of India official, has argued that Hindu temples were systematically destroyed under every Muslim ruler from the Sultanate to the Mughals; he estimates 60,000 temples demolished, though this figure is disputed by other historians.
The Hindutva reading of Mughal history is not merely academic. It is the ideological foundation for laws, urban planning, educational curricula, and electoral strategy in the world's most populous country. The question is not whether Aurangzeb demolished temples (he did) but whether his acts define 331 years of Mughal governance, and whether the appropriate response in the 21st century is to reverse 16th-century demographic changes.
Arguments
- The Mughal period was Islamic occupation of a Hindu civilization, not cosmopolitan synthesis
- Aurangzeb's temple demolitions, jizya reimposition, and persecution define the Mughal legacy
- The Babri Masjid demolition (1992) and Ram Mandir construction (2024) are acts of civilizational restoration
- NCERT textbook revisions and city renamings are correcting centuries of historiographic distortion
Sources
- Hindutva: Who Is a Hindu?
- Hindu Temples: What Happened to Them (Vol. 1 & 2)
- Ayodhya: The Dark Night
victorBritish Colonial / East India Company
British Colonial administration
To the Company that inherited this empire, the takeover was not conquest. It was patience rewarded.
For a century the Company operated at the pleasure of Mughal governors, paying customs and negotiating decrees, waiting for its opening.
James Mill's history, the textbook used to train the Company's own civil servants, described the Mughal period as arbitrary rule and religious bigotry, and cast British administration as rational governance replacing it.
Plassey, in this telling, was not a battle won by guns. It was a realignment, made possible by a general who had already agreed to change sides.
Read the full account
Narrative
The East India Company arrived at the Mughal court as supplicants. In 1608, Captain William Hawkins sailed to Surat seeking trade privileges. Between 1615 and 1619, Sir Thomas Roe served as James I's ambassador to Emperor Jahangir, and spent most of his time competing with Portuguese Jesuits for the emperor's attention. Roe's letters describe a court of staggering wealth: Jahangir's throne room, he reported, contained more gems than he had seen in his entire life. The Company wanted access to Indian textiles (cotton calico, muslin, chintz), which were superior to anything manufactured in Europe. For the next century, the Company operated at the pleasure of Mughal governors, paying customs duties, negotiating firmans (imperial decrees), and maintaining trading posts (factories) at Surat, Madras, and Calcutta.
The colonial narrative that emerged after 1757 reframed this subordination as strategic patience. The Company had not served the Mughals; it had waited for the right moment. James Mill's History of British India (1817), the single most influential English-language text on Indian history for a century, divided Indian civilization into three periods: Hindu, Muslim, and British. The Muslim period (the Sultanate and the Mughals) was characterized as Oriental despotism: arbitrary rule, religious bigotry, administrative corruption, economic stagnation. The British period represented rational governance, rule of law, and material progress. Mill never visited India. He read Persian sources in translation and French travelers' accounts. His history became the textbook for East India Company civil servants trained at Haileybury College.
The Battle of Plassey (June 23, 1757) is the hinge in this narrative. Robert Clive defeated Siraj ud-Daulah, the Nawab of Bengal, with 3,000 troops (of whom 2,100 were Indian sepoys) against the Nawab's 50,000-strong army. The battle lasted less than a day. The decisive factor was not military superiority but political subversion: Mir Jafar, the Nawab's commanding general, had agreed in advance to switch sides in exchange for the throne. After Plassey, the Company installed Mir Jafar as Nawab and extracted the diwani (revenue collection rights) of Bengal in 1765, giving it direct control of the richest province in India without the administrative burden of governance.
What the colonial narrative omits is the extraction that followed. Between 1757 and 1780, the Company drained an estimated 38 million pounds sterling from Bengal. Utsa Patnaik's research estimates total British extraction from India at $45 trillion (2020 values) over the colonial period. The Bengal famine of 1770, which killed an estimated 10 million people (one-third of Bengal's population), occurred under Company revenue management. The Company continued collecting full tax revenue from famine-stricken districts. Edmund Burke, prosecuting Warren Hastings' impeachment in Parliament (1788-1795), called the Company's rule "a system of rapacity, corruption, and cruelty unmatched in the history of mankind", but Hastings was acquitted, and the system continued.
The colonial framing of Mughal "decline" served a specific function: it justified the replacement. If the Mughals were decaying despots, then British rule was not conquest but rescue. This framing persisted in British historiography until the late 20th century. Percival Spear's A History of India Vol. 2 (Penguin, 1965), long the standard English- language reference, describes the post-Aurangzeb period as "the Great Anarchy", a term that implies the British brought order. The extraction of wealth, the destruction of Indian textile manufacturing through tariff manipulation, and the systematic de-industrialization of the subcontinent receive far less attention in this tradition.
Arguments
- Mughal decline created a power vacuum that the Company filled through superior organization and diplomatic skill
- The transition from Mughal to British rule represented progress from despotism to rational administration
- Plassey was not a conquest but a political realignment enabled by Indian intermediaries
- British governance modernized India through railways, law, education, and administrative reform
Sources
- The History of British India
- A History of India, Volume 2
- The Embassy of Sir Thomas Roe to India
vanquishedSubaltern / Peasant
Subaltern and peasant
None of these courts fed themselves. A cultivator under Akbar's own tax system handed over forty to fifty percent of what he grew to the state, and zamindars took another ten to twenty five percent on top of that.
When the Satnami sect rose up in Narnaul in sixteen seventy two with farm tools and homemade weapons, Aurangzeb sent ten thousand troops against their five thousand. The court chronicle records the victory. The Satnamis left no written account of their own.
The workers who built the Taj Mahal over twenty one years, and the laborers who carried its marble from Rajasthan and its jade from Central Asia, are not named anywhere in the record.
Irfan Habib, the historian who reconstructed the empire's own tax records centuries later, put the arithmetic in one line.
“The state demand amounted to one half or more of the gross produce, and the peasant was left with barely enough to survive and to provide seed for the next sowing.”
Read the full account
Narrative
Irfan Habib's The Agrarian System of Mughal India (1963) documented what the court chronicles omit: the empire was built on the backs of cultivators who surrendered 40-50% of their crop value to the state. The zabti system, celebrated in the imperial perspective as administrative rationalization, meant that Mughal tax assessors measured every field, classified every soil type, and fixed extraction rates with a precision that left peasants little margin for drought, flood, or crop failure. When the harvest fell short, the revenue demand did not. Zamindars (revenue intermediaries between the state and the cultivator) took additional cuts, typically 10-25% on top of the state demand. A peasant in Akbar's empire could lose 50-75% of what they grew.
The court chronicles record peasant resistance as disorder. The Jat revolts around Agra and Mathura (1669, 1688) appear in the Maasir-i-Alamgiri as criminal disturbances requiring military suppression. The Satnami uprising of 1672, led by a low-caste religious sect in the Narnaul region of present-day Haryana, fielded an army of 5,000 peasants against Mughal forces. Aurangzeb sent 10,000 troops to crush it. The Satnamis fought with farming implements and homemade weapons. They were annihilated. The court chronicle records the victory; the Satnamis left no written account.
The Sikh military tradition that eventually challenged Mughal authority in Punjab grew partly from peasant grievance. The execution of Guru Tegh Bahadur in 1675 and Guru Gobind Singh's founding of the Khalsa in 1699 militarized a community that drew heavily from Jat cultivator castes. The Maratha Empire, which dismembered Mughal power in the 18th century, began as a movement of Kunbi (peasant-caste) soldiers under Shivaji, who explicitly challenged both Mughal and Brahmanical authority. Shivaji's coronation in 1674 was controversial precisely because he was not a Kshatriya by orthodox reckoning; the ceremony required importing a Brahmin from Varanasi willing to perform the rites.
The material splendor that defines the Mughal period in popular imagination (the Taj Mahal, the Red Fort, the Peacock Throne) was funded by agrarian extraction from the poorest segments of society. The 20,000 workers who built the Taj Mahal over 21 years were not slaves in the formal sense, but they were drawn from artisan and laboring castes whose compensation is unrecorded in the court chronicles. The marble came from Rajasthan, the jasper from Punjab, the jade and crystal from Central Asia, transported by laborers whose names no source preserves. The Ain-i-Akbari catalogs imperial elephants by breed and name. It does not catalog peasants.
The transition from Mughal to British rule changed the identity of the extractor but not the rate of extraction. The East India Company's Permanent Settlement (1793) in Bengal fixed the zamindari system in place, converting revenue intermediaries into landlords with property rights enforceable by British law. Peasants who had at least theoretical access to Mughal courts for grievance redressal now faced a legal system conducted in English. The colonial period's famines (Bengal 1770, Madras 1876-1878, Bengal again 1943) were agrarian crises in which revenue demands continued during crop failure, a pattern the British inherited from the Mughals and intensified.
Ranajit Guha's Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India (1983) argued that peasant consciousness has been systematically excluded from both Mughal and British historiography. The court chronicles record what rulers did. Subaltern Studies, the school Guha founded, asks what the people who carried the empire on their labor thought, feared, and resisted, knowing that the answer is reconstructed from fragmentary evidence, because peasants did not write the histories.
Arguments
- The Mughal state extracted 40-50% of crop value, with zamindars taking additional cuts of 10-25%
- Peasant revolts (Jat, Satnami, Sikh, Maratha) were endemic responses to extraction, not criminal disorder
- The Taj Mahal and court culture were built on agrarian surplus extracted from the poorest population
- British colonialism inherited and intensified the Mughal extraction system, not replaced it
Sources
- The Agrarian System of Mughal India (1556-1707)
- Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India
- An Agrarian History of South Asia (The New Cambridge History of India IV.1)
academicPostcolonial / Revisionist Historiography
Postcolonial historiography
This account, from historians like Audrey Truschke and Muzaffar Alam, rejects the idea that any single ruler can stand for the whole of it.
By Richard Eaton's count, Aurangzeb destroyed roughly fifteen temples over a forty nine year reign, while also granting land and stipends to dozens of Hindu institutions.
The eighteenth century fragmentation that the British account calls anarchy, this account calls decentralization. Regional successor states kept and often improved Mughal administration, and the wealth did not vanish, it redistributed.
The Hindu versus Muslim reading of this whole period, in this account, is not how people at the time organized their own history. It was invented in eighteen seventeen, by an Englishman who never once set foot in India.
Read the full account
Narrative
Audrey Truschke's Aurangzeb: The Man and the Myth (2017) opens with a provocation: the Aurangzeb of Indian political discourse bears little resemblance to the Aurangzeb of the historical record. The emperor who demolished the Kashi Vishwanath temple in 1669 also issued more farmans protecting Hindu temples than destroying them. Richard Eaton's count, based on a systematic survey of the evidence, found that Aurangzeb destroyed approximately 15 temples over his 49-year reign, while granting land and stipends to dozens of Hindu institutions. Eaton's research (2000, 2004) does not deny temple demolitions. It contextualizes them: 17th-century rulers demolished temples and mosques for political reasons (punishing rebellious subjects, asserting sovereignty over conquered territory), not as systematic programs of religious persecution. Hindu rulers, including the Marathas, also demolished religious structures during military campaigns.
The revisionist position does not rehabilitate Aurangzeb. It rejects the premise that any single ruler can stand for 331 years of imperial history. The Mughal period produced Akbar's Ibadat Khana debates and Aurangzeb's jizya reimposition. It produced Dara Shikoh's translation of the Upanishads into Persian (the Sirr-i-Akbar, c. 1657, which Schopenhauer later called "the consolation of my life") and Aurangzeb's execution of Dara Shikoh for apostasy in 1659. It produced the Taj Mahal and the Satnami massacre. Selecting one thread and calling it the Mughal legacy is historiographically indefensible.
Muzaffar Alam's The Crisis of Empire in Mughal North India (1986) demonstrated that the empire's 18th-century fragmentation was not "decline" in any simple sense. Regional successor states (the Nawabs of Awadh and Bengal, the Nizam of Hyderabad, the Marathas) often maintained or improved upon Mughal administrative practices. The economy of 18th-century India was not collapsing; it was decentralizing. The GDP did not disappear; it redistributed. The British narrative of "anarchy" was a post-hoc justification for conquest, not a description of reality.
The contemporary debate is not really about the 17th century. It is about whether modern India is a Hindu nation whose Muslim period was an interruption, or a syncretic civilization whose plurality is itself the tradition. Romila Thapar (The Past Before Us, 2013) argues that the communal reading of Indian history (Hindus vs. Muslims, each with a monolithic identity) is itself a colonial invention. James Mill's three-period division (Hindu, Muslim, British) imposed religious identity as the organizing principle of Indian history. Pre-colonial sources do not consistently categorize political events by the religious identity of rulers. The categories we argue about were manufactured in 1817 by a man who never visited India.
The Babri Masjid-Ram Mandir dispute encapsulates the stakes. The 1992 demolition and the 2024 temple inauguration are not arguments about what Babur did in 1528. They are arguments about what India is in the 21st century: whether national identity requires erasing evidence of Muslim rule, or whether the presence of both mosques and temples is itself the evidence of Indian civilization. The historical record cannot resolve this because the question was never really about history. It is about power, identity, and who gets to define the nation.
Arguments
- Aurangzeb demolished ~15 temples while issuing more farmans protecting Hindu institutions (Eaton's count)
- The Hindu-Muslim binary reading of Indian history is a colonial invention (Mill's 1817 periodization)
- 18th-century "decline" was decentralization, not collapse; the British anarchy narrative justified conquest
- The Babri Masjid-Ram Mandir dispute is about 21st-century national identity, not 16th-century events
Sources
- Aurangzeb: The Man and the Myth
- Temple Desecration and Muslim States in Medieval India
- The Crisis of Empire in Mughal North India
- The Past Before Us
- Sirr-i-Akbar (The Great Secret), Persian translation of 50 Upanishads
The turn
Mughal Imperial / Indo-Persian Court
The Imperial account does not mention that Aurangzeb executed his own brothers and imprisoned his father to take the throne it praises.
From the record
The extraction rate on peasants (40-50% of crop value) that funded the court's magnificenceEndemic peasant revolts throughout the empire's historyThe violence of Mughal succession (Aurangzeb executed his brothers and imprisoned his father)The gap between court ideology (sulh-i-kul) and ground-level Hindu-Muslim relationsHindu Nationalist / Hindutva Revisionism
The Hindu Nationalist account does not mention forty nine years of Akbar's rule, or that Aurangzeb issued more orders protecting Hindu temples than destroying them.
From the record
Akbar's 49-year reign of religious tolerance and Hindu-Mughal administrative integrationAurangzeb's extensive patronage of Hindu temples (he issued more farmans protecting temples than demolishing them, per Richard Eaton's count)The Maratha Empire's own record of temple destruction during its military campaignsThe role of Hindu zamindars and Rajput commanders in sustaining Mughal governanceBritish Colonial / East India Company
The Colonial account does not mention the Bengal famine that killed an estimated ten million people under its own revenue management, in the years right after the victory it calls patience rewarded.
From the record
Massive wealth extraction from Bengal after Plassey (estimated £38 million by 1780)The Bengal famine of 1770 (10 million dead) under Company revenue managementDestruction of Indian textile manufacturing through tariff manipulationThe Company's own corruption; Burke called it rapacity unmatched in historyThe Subaltern account does not mention the roads, the currency, and the defense that same extraction paid for.
From the record
Periods of relative peasant prosperity under stable Mughal administrationThe protective functions of the Mughal state (defense against invasion, infrastructure, trade)Internal differentiation among peasants (rich cultivators, tenant farmers, landless laborers)The role of agrarian production in supporting urban culture, trade, and artisan economiesPostcolonial / Revisionist Historiography
And the Postcolonial account, the most careful of the five, still leaves out the suffering those Mughal policies caused people living under them at the time, not four centuries later.
From the record
The genuine suffering caused by specific Mughal policies (jizya, temple demolitions, forced conversions)The political utility of revisionism for Muslim minority communities in contemporary IndiaThe difficulty of applying 21st-century pluralist frameworks to 17th-century rulersPopular Hindu religious sentiment about sacred sites as distinct from elite Hindutva ideology
Close
The dynasty that spent twenty thousand workers and twenty one years on a tomb for one empress buried its own last emperor without a marker, in a cell in Rangoon, in eighteen sixty two.
The record
By the numbers
- Span
- 1556-1605
- Killed
- No single-event toll; First Battle of…
- Displaced
- 158MAt its Aurangzeb-era peak, c. 1700, the Mughal Empire…
- Place
- India
Key figures
- Babur (Zahir ud-Din Muhammad)Founded the Mughal Empire by defeating Ibrahim Lodi at Panipat (1526); wrote the Baburnama, the first autobiography in Islamic literature1483 to 1530
- Akbar (Jalal ud-Din Muhammad)Third Mughal emperor (r. 1556-1605); abolished jizya, created mansabdari system, held interfaith debates at Ibadat Khana, declared Din-i-Ilahi1542 to 1605
- Aurangzeb (Muhi ud-Din Muhammad)Sixth Mughal emperor (r. 1658-1707); expanded empire to maximum extent, reimposed jizya, demolished Hindu temples, executed Guru Tegh Bahadur1618 to 1707
- Shah JahanFifth Mughal emperor (r. 1628-1658); commissioned the Taj Mahal, the Red Fort, and the Peacock Throne; imprisoned by his son Aurangzeb1592 to 1666
- Abu'l-Fazl ibn MubarakAkbar's court historian and ideologue; author of the Akbarnama and Ain-i-Akbari, which documented the empire's administration in granular detail1551 to 1602
- Mumtaz MahalShah Jahan's wife; died in 1631 during birth of her 14th child; the Taj Mahal was built as her mausoleum over 21 years1593 to 1631
- Robert CliveEast India Company officer who won the Battle of Plassey (1757) with 3,000 troops against 50,000+, enabling Company control of Bengal1725 to 1774
- Bahadur Shah ZafarLast Mughal emperor (r. 1837-1857); exiled to Rangoon after the 1857 uprising, died writing Urdu poetry in a British cell1775 to 1862
Primary sources
· Baburnama (translated by Wheeler Thackston) · c. 1528
“Hindustan is a place of little charm. There is no beauty in its people, no graceful social intercourse, no poetic talent or understanding, no etiquette, nobility, or manliness. The arts and crafts have no harmony or symmetry. There are no good horses, meat, grapes, melons, or other fruit. There is no ice, cold water, good food or bread in their bazaars. There are no baths and no madrassas. There are no candles, torches, or candlesticks.”
· Maasir-i-Alamgiri (chronicle of Aurangzeb's reign) · c. 1710
“The king ordered that wherever an idol temple had been demolished, a mosque should be built in its place.”
· Ain-i-Akbari, Book III · 1598
“His Majesty's sacred heart is never satisfied with the knowledge of one religion. Full comprehension demands that a faith should be tested by reason and not reason by a faith.”
· Farmans (imperial decrees) recorded in the Akbarnama · c. 1580s
“Do not demolish or disfigure the places of worship of any community.”
· Urdu ghazal, composed in exile in Rangoon · c. 1858-1862
“I came a stranger into the world, and a stranger I depart. My star was unlucky, and my short life has been a harvest of misery.”
Threads
- The Indian Independence MovementA lawyer in a loincloth walked to the sea to pick up salt, and broke an empire’s monopoly on everything.
- The Partition of IndiaA lawyer who’d never been to India drew the border in five weeks. 15 million crossed it.
- The Cyrus CylinderHe freed the Babylonians, the Jews, and the Egyptians, and put it in writing. 2,500 years before human rights became a legal concept.