Understanding the Mughals: there are lessons to be learnt from every king Premium

Historians have profiled the layered reigns of the Mughal kings, from Humayun to Akbar to Aurangzeb, who were men of action, aesthetes and dreamers, and contributed to the idea of the subcontinent

The Humayun’s Tomb. | Photo Credit: Getty Images

The National Council of Educational Research and Training has decided to drop certain chapters on the Mughal Empire from the CBSE Class 12 history textbooks. They include ‘Kings and Chronicles; the Mughal Courts (C. 16th and 17th centuries)’ from the book Themes of Indian History-Part II. This move is said to be an attempt at “syllabus rationalisation” to avoid “overlapping” and “irrelevant” portions.

Why do the Mughals need to be studied? The glory of the Mughal Age has been neatly summed up by Ebba Koch in her recent book, The Planetary King: Humayun Padshah Inventor and Visionary on the Mughal Throne where she writes, “The Mughal dynasty was perhaps one of the most glamorous and charismatic in the history of mankind. It was a driving concern of the first six padshahs to construct their image for posterity and be remembered as great rulers.” Even in the 20th century there were voices that praised the Mughal emperors in the manner of court eulogists.

Reading the ‘Baburnama’

It all began with Zahiruddin Babur. His eye for detail and his fine observation are on display in Baburnamatranslated by Dilip Hiro. Recalling the Battle of Panipat with Ibrahim Lodi, Babur writes, “20April/8Rajab) News came at dawn that the enemy was advancing in fighting array. We at once donned armour, armed and mounted….Our right wing was led by Humayun...Ibrahim was thought to have fled….It was the Afternoon Prayer when Ali Khalifa Barla’s brother-in-law, who had found Ibrahim Lodi’s body in a heap of the dead, brought in his head. That day we appointed Humayun to ride fast and light to Agra….” It was in Agra that Humayun was to lay his hands on the Kohinoor which he offered to Babur soon after, an offer Babur graciously declined.

The reign of Humayun which commenced in 1530 was in turn followed by one of the most vibrant periods in Indian history under Jalaluddin Akbar. The emperor laid emphasis on culture and inter-religion mingling like none other. As Audrey Truschke writes in Culture of Encounters: Sanskrit at the Mughal Court, “In the 1580s, Emperor Akbar ordered the translation of the Sanskrit Mahabharata into Persian. The newly minted Mughal epic called the Razmnamah (Book of War), would prove a seminal work... The Mughals took up the Mahabharata as part of the larger translation movement that Akbar had inaugurated in the 1570s... As a prince, Jahangir commissioned a Persian Yogvashishta, (Vashishta’s Treatise on Yoga), a philosophical work.”

Akbar’s middle ground

There was a reason why Akbar got the Mahabharata translated.

Quoting Abul Fazl, noted author Ira Mukhoty explains in Akbar: The Great Mughal, “He decided to translate the authentic books of different groups into another language so that both groups could have the pleasure of benefitting from the perfect knowledge, thus forgetting their enmity and hostility and seeking divine truth.” This move of Akbar was in consonance with his idea behind setting up Ibadat Khana. As noted by author Manimugdha Sharma in his book Allahu Akbar: Understanding the Great Mughal in Today’s India, “When Akbar returned to Fatehpur Sikri in 1575 from the conquest of Bengal, he carried with him a favourable impression of something that the late Sultan Sulaiman Karrani of Bengal used to do. That, coupled with his own inner churning, was manifested in a building that housed the first nursery of what is today called secularism in India. It was the Ibadat Khana.… The Ibadat Khana became a unique experiment in improving the theological discourse. It was a bid to end conflicts among rival religions by creating a middle ground.”

The Ibadat Khana was constructed around the room of Shaikh Abdullah Niyazi Sirhindi, a disciple of Shaikh Salim Chishti who later became a devotee of Lord Shiva. “That this journey of the Ibadat Khana began from the room of a Sufi who became a follower of Shiva makes it a very interesting beginning,” Sharma writes. The place became a meeting point for not only Islamic scholars but also Brahmins, Christians, Jains, Zoroastrians, Jews, and scholars of other religious denominations for a free and frank exchange of views. Unsurprisingly, the Ramayana, Rajatarangini, and other works were also translated during this period.

Rulers and myths

Then there was Shah Jahan, the man who built the Taj Mahal and the Lal Quila from where the Prime Minister addresses the nation. He was followed by Aurangzeb. He defies easy summarisation. As Truschke writes in Aurangzeb: The Man and The Myth, “He was a man of studied contrasts... Aurangzeb was preoccupied with order — even fretting over the safety of the roads but found no alternative to imprisoning his father. He also sewed prayer caps... He was a connoisseur of music and even fell in love with the musician Hirabai... Aurangzeb was an enigmatic king.” If Akbar has lessons for today’s politics, so does Aurangzeb, albeit for entirely different reasons.

To quote Koch, art historian Stuart Welch, who taught Indian art at Harvard, once said: “What would our lives be without those fascinating Mughals!’” She mentions the globe-trotter and interculturalist Count Herman Keyserling, who was in India in 1911-12, hailing the Mughals as the “grandest rulers brought forth by mankind... they were men of action, refined diplomats, experienced judges of the human psyche and at the same time aesthetes and dreamers.” For this and many other reasons, students should not be deprived of reading up on the Mughals in the subcontinent.