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The Mogul Empire
Main article: Mogul Empire
India in the 16th century presented a fragmented picture of rulers, both Muslim and Hindu, who lacked concern for their subjects
and who failed to create a common body of laws or institutions. Outside developments also played a role in shaping events. The
circumnavigation of Africa by the Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama in 1498 allowed Europeans to challenge Arab control of the trading routes between Europe
and Asia. In Central Asia and Afghanistan, shifts in power pushed Babur of Ferghana (in present-day Uzbekistan) southward, first to
Kabul and then to India. The dynasty he founded endured for more than three
centuries.
Claiming descent from both Genghis Khan and Timur, Babur combined strength and courage with a love of beauty, and military ability with cultivation. Babur
concentrated on gaining control of northwestern India. He did so in 1526 by defeating the last Lodhi sultan at the First battle of Panipat, a town north of Delhi. Babur then turned to the tasks of persuading his Central Asian followers to stay on in
India and of overcoming other contenders for power, mainly the Rajputs and the Afghans. He succeeded in both tasks but died shortly thereafter in 1530. The Mughal Empire was
one of the largest centralized states in premodern history and was the precursor to the British Indian Empire.
The perennial question of who was the greatest of the six "Great Mughals" receives varying answers in present-day Pakistan and
India. Some favor Babur the pioneer and others his great-grandson, Shah Jahan
(r. 1628-58), builder of the Taj Mahal and other magnificent buildings. The other
two towering figures of the era by general consensus were Akbar (r. 1556-1605) and
Aurangzeb (r. 1658-1707). Both rulers expanded the empire greatly and were able
administrators. However, Akbar was known for his religious tolerance and administrative genius, while Aurangzeb was a pious
Muslim and fierce protector of orthodox Islam in an alien and heterodox environment.
Akbar succeeded his father, Humayun (r. 1530-40 and 1555-56), whose rule was
interrupted by the Afghan Sur
Dynasty, which rebelled against him. It was only just before his death that Humayun was able to regain the empire and leave
it to his son. In restoring and expanding Mughal rule, Akbar based his authority on the ability and loyalty of his followers,
irrespective of their religion. In 1564 the jizya on non-Muslims was abolished, and bans on temple building and Hindu pilgrimages
were lifted.
Akbar's methods of administration reinforced his power against two possible sources of challenge--the Afghan-Turkish
aristocracy and the traditional interpreters of Islamic law, the ulama. He created a
ranked imperial service based on ability rather than birth, whose members were obliged to serve wherever required. They were
remunerated with cash rather than land and were kept away from their inherited estates, thus centralizing the imperial power base
and assuring its supremacy. The military and political functions of the imperial service were separate from those of revenue
collection, which was supervised by the imperial treasury. This system of administration, known as the mansabdari, was based on loyal service and
cash payments and was the backbone of the Mughal Empire; its effectiveness depended on personal loyalty to the emperor and his
ability and willingness to choose, remunerate, and supervise.
Akbar declared himself the final arbiter in all disputes of law derived from the Quran
and the sharia. He backed his religious authority primarily with his authority in the state. In 1580 he also initiated a
syncretic court religion called the Din-i-Ilahi (Divine Faith). In theory, the new faith was compatible with any other, provided that the devotee
was loyal to the emperor. In practice, however, its ritual and content profoundly offended orthodox Muslims. The ulama found
their influence undermined. The concept of Islam as a superior religion with a historic mission in the world appeared to be
compromised. The syncretism of the court and its tolerance of both Hindus and unorthodox Shia sects among Muslims triggered a reaction among Sunni Muslims. In the
fratricidal war of succession that closed the reign of Akbar's grandson Shah Jahan in 1658, the aristocracy supported the austere
military commander Aurangzeb against his learned and eclectic brother Dara Shikoh, whom Aurangzeb defeated in battle and later
had decapitated in 1662.
Aurangzeb's reign ushered in the decline of the Mughal Empire. Aurangzeb, who in the latter half of his long rule assumed the title "Alamgir" or
"world-seizer," was known for aggressively expanding the empire's frontiers and for his militant enforcement of orthodox Sunni
Islam. During his reign, the Mughal empire reached its greatest extent, although his policies also led to its dissolution.
Although he was an outstanding general and a rigorous administrator, Mughal fiscal and military standards declined as security
and luxury increased. Land rather than cash became the usual means of remunerating high-ranking officials, and divisive
tendencies in his large empire further undermined central authority.
In 1679 Aurangzeb reimposed the hated jizya on Hindus. Coming after a series of other taxes and also discriminatory measures
favoring Sunni Muslims this action by the "prayermonger " (emperor), incited rebellion among Hindus and others in many parts of
the empire--Jat, Sikh, and Rajput forces in the north and Maratha forces in the Deccan. The
emperor managed to crush the rebellions in the north, but at a high cost to agricultural productivity and to the legitimacy of
Mughal rule. Aurangzeb was compelled to move his headquarters to Daulatabad in the Deccan to mount a costly campaign against
Maratha guerrilla fighters, which lasted twenty-six-years until he died in 1707 at the age
of ninety. Aurangzeb, oppressed by a sense of failure, isolation, and impending doom, lamented that in life he "came alone" and
would "go as a stranger."
In the century- and one-half that followed, effective control by Aurangzeb's successors weakened. Succession to imperial and
even provincial power, which had often become hereditary, was subject to intrigue and force. The mansabdari system gave way to the zamindari system, in which high-ranking officials took on the appearance of hereditary
landed aristocracy with powers of collecting rents. As Delhi's control waned, other contenders for power emerged and clashed,
thus preparing the way for the eventual British takeover.
Vasco da Gama led the first documented European expedition to India, sailing into Calicut on the southwest coast in 1498. In
1510 the Portuguese captured Goa, which became the seat of their activity. Under
Admiral Alfonso de Albuquerque, Portugal successfully challenged Arab power in the Indian Ocean and dominated the sea routes for
a century. Jesuits came to convert, to converse, and to record observations of India.
The Protestant countries of the Netherlands and England, upset by the Portuguese monopoly, formed
private trading companies at the turn of the seventeenth century to challenge the Portuguese.
Mughal officials permitted the new carriers of India's considerable export trade to establish trading posts (factories) in
India. The Dutch East India Company concentrated mainly on the spice trade from present-day Indonesia. Britain's East India
Company carried on trade with India. The French East India Company also set up factories.
During the wars of the 18th century, the factories served not only as
collection and transshipment points for trade but also increasingly as fortified centers of refuge for both foreigners and
Indians. British factories gradually began to apply British law to disputes arising within their jurisdiction. The posts also began to grow in area and population.
Armed company servants were effective protectors of trade. As rival contenders for power called for armed assistance and as
individual European adventurers found permanent homes in India, British and French companies found themselves more and more
involved in local politics in the south and in Bengal. Plots and counterplots climaxed
when British East India Company forces, led by
Robert Clive, decisively defeated the larger but divided forces of Nawab Siraj-ud-Dawlah at Plassey (Pilasi) in Bengal in
1757.
The Marathas
The tale of the Marathas' rise to power and their eventual fall contains all the
elements of a thriller: adventure, intrigue, and romanticism. Maratha chieftains were originally in the service of Bijapur sultans in the western Deccan, which was
under siege by the Mughals. Shivaji Bhonsale (1627-80), a tenacious and fierce fighter recognized as the "father of the Maratha
nation," took advantage of this conflict and carved out his own principality near Pune, which later became the Maratha capital.
Adopting guerrilla tactics, he waylaid caravans in order to sustain and expand his army, which soon had money, arms, and horses.
Shivaji led a series of successful assaults in the 1660s against Mughal strongholds, including the major port of Surat. In 1674 he assumed the title of "Lord of the Universe" at his elaborate coronation, which
signaled his determination to challenge the Mughal forces as well as to reestablish a Hindu kingdom in Maharashtra, the land of
his origin. Shivaji's battle cries were swaraj (translated variously as freedom, self-rule, independence), swadharma (religious
freedom), and goraksha (cow protection). Aurangzeb relentlessly pursued Shivaji's successors between 1681 and 1705 but eventually
retreated to the north as his treasury became depleted and as thousands of lives had been lost either on the battlefield or to
natural calamities. In 1717 a Mughal emissary signed a treaty with the Marathas confirming their claims to rule in the Deccan in
return for acknowledging the fictional Mughal suzerainty and remission of annual taxes. Yet the Marathas soon captured Malwa from Mughal control and later moved east into
Orrisa and Bengal; southern India also came
under their domain. Recognition of their political power finally came when the Mughal emperor invited them to act as auxiliaries
in the internal affairs of the empire and still later to help the emperor in driving the Afghans out of Punjab.
The Marathas, despite their military prowess and leadership, were not equipped to administer the state or to undertake
socioeconomic reform. Pursuing a policy characterized by plunder and indiscriminate raids, they antagonized the peasants. They
were primarily suited for stirring the Maharashtrian regional pride rather than for attracting loyalty to an all-India
confederacy. They were left virtually alone before the invading Afghan forces, headed by Ahmad Shah Abdali (later called Ahmad
Shah Durrani), who routed them on the blood-drenched battlefield at Panipat in 1761. The shock of defeat hastened the break-up of
their loosely knit confederacy into five independent states and extinguished the hope of Maratha dominance in India.
The Sikhs
The Afghan defeat of the Maratha armies accelerated the breakaway of Punjab from
Delhi and helped the founding of Sikh overlordship in the northwest. Rooted in the bhakti movements that developed in the second
century B.C. but swept across North India during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the Sikh religion appealed to the
hard-working peasants. The Sikh khalsa (army of the pure) rose up against the economic and political repressions in Punjab toward
the end of Aurangzeb's rule. Guerrilla fighters took advantage of the political instability created by the Persian and Afghan
onslaught against Delhi, enriching themselves and expanding territorial control. By the 1770s, Sikh hegemony extended from the
Indus in the west to the Yamuna in the east, from Multan in the south to Jammu in the north. But the Sikhs, like the Marathas, were a loose, disunited, and quarrelsome
conglomerate of twelve kin-groups. It took Ranjit Singh (1780-1839), an
individual with modernizing vision and leadership, to achieve supremacy over the other kin-groups and establish his kingdom in
which Sikhs, Hindus, and Muslims lived together in comparative equality and increasing
prosperity. Ranjit Singh employed European officers and introduced strict military discipline into his army before expanding into
Afghanistan, Kashmir, and Ladakh.
The Coming of the Europeans
The quest for wealth and power brought Europeans to Indian shores in 1498 when Vasco da Gama, the Portuguese voyager, arrived
in Calicut (modern Kozhikode, Kerala) on the west coast. In their search for spices and Christian converts, the Portuguese
challenged Arab supremacy in the Indian Ocean, and, with their galleons fitted with
powerful cannons, set up a network of strategic trading posts along the Arabian
Sea and the Persian Gulf. In 1510 the Portuguese took over the enclave
of Goa, which became the center of their commercial and political power in India and which they controlled for nearly four and a
half centuries.
Economic competition among the European nations led to the founding of commercial companies in England (the East India
Company, founded in 1600) and in the Netherlands (Verenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie--the United East India Company, founded in
1602), whose primary aim was to capture the spice trade by breaking the Portuguese monopoly in Asia. Although the Dutch, with a
large supply of capital and support from their government, preempted and ultimately excluded the British from the heartland of
spices in the East Indies (modern-day Indonesia), both companies managed to establish trading "factories" (actually warehouses)
along the Indian coast. The Dutch, for example, used various ports on the Coromandel Coast in South India, especially Pulicat (about twenty kilometers north of Madras), as major sources for slaves for
their plantations in the East Indies and for cotton cloth as early as 1609. (The English, however, established their first
factory at what today is known as Madras only in 1639.) Indian rulers enthusiastically accommodated the newcomers in hopes of
pitting them against the Portuguese. In 1619 Jahangir granted them permission to
trade in his territories at Surat (in Gujarat) on the west coast and Hughli (in West Bengal) in the east. These and other locations on the peninsula became centers of international trade in
spices, cotton, sugar, raw silk, saltpeter, calico, and indigo.
English company agents became familiar with Indian customs and languages, including Persian, the unifying official language under the Mughals. In many ways, the English agents of that period lived
like Indians, intermarried willingly, and a large number of them never returned to their home country. The knowledge of India
thus acquired and the mutual ties forged with Indian trading groups gave the English a competitive edge over other Europeans. The
French commercial interest--Compagnie des Indes Orientales (East India Company, founded in 1664)--came late, but the French also
established themselves in India, emulating the precedents set by their competitors as they founded their enclave at Pondicherry
(Puduchcheri) on the Coramandel Coast.
In 1717 the Mughal emperor, Farrukh-siyar (r. 1713-19), gave the British--who by then had already established themselves in the south and
the west--a grant of thirty-eight villages near Calcutta, acknowledging their importance to the continuity of international trade
in the Bengal economy. As did the Dutch and the French, the British brought silver bullion and copper to pay for transactions,
helping the smooth functioning of the Mughal revenue system and increasing the benefits to local artisans and traders. The
fortified warehouses of the British brought extraterritorial status, which enabled them to administer their own civil and
criminal laws and offered numerous employment opportunities as well as asylum to foreigners and Indians. The British factories
successfully competed with their rivals as their size and population grew. The original clusters of fishing villages (Madras and
Calcutta) or series of islands (Bombay) became headquarters of the British administrative zones, or presidencies as they
generally came to be known. The factories and their immediate environs, known as the White-town, represented the actual and
symbolic preeminence of the British--in terms of their political power--as well as their cultural values and social practices;
meanwhile, their Indian collaborators lived in the Black-town, separated from the factories by several kilometers.
The British company employed sepoys--European-trained and European-led Indian soldiers--to protect its trade, but local rulers
sought their services to settle scores in regional power struggles. South India witnessed the first open confrontation between
the British and the French, whose forces were led by Robert Clive and François Dupleix, respectively. Both companies desired to
place their own candidate as the nawab, or ruler, of Arcot, the area around Madras. At the end of a protracted struggle between
1744 and 1763, when the Peace of Paris was signed, the British gained an upper hand over the French and installed their man in
power, supporting him further with arms and lending large sums as well. The French and the British also backed different factions
in the succession struggle for Mughal viceroyalty in Bengal, but Clive intervened successfully and defeated Nawab Siraj-ud-daula
in the Battle of Plassey (Palashi, about 150 kilometers north of Calcutta) in 1757. Clive found help from a combination of vested
interests that opposed the existing nawab: disgruntled soldiers, landholders, and influential merchants whose commercial profits
were closely linked to British fortunes.
Later, Clive defeated the Mughal forces at Buxar (Baksar, west of Patna in Bihar) in 1765, and the Mughal emperor (Shah Alam, r. 1759-1806) conferred on the company administrative rights over Bengal, Bihar, and Orissa, a region
of roughly 25 million people with an annual revenue of 40 million rupees (for current value of the rupee). The imperial grant
virtually established the company as a sovereign power, and Clive became the first British governor of Bengal.
Besides the presence of the Portuguese, Dutch, British, and French, there were two lesser but noteworthy colonial groups.
Danish entrepreneurs established themselves at several ports on the Malabar and
Coromandel coasts, in the vicinity of Calcutta and inland at Patna between 1695 and 1740. Austrian enterprises were set up in the
1720s on the vicinity of Surat in modern-day southeastern Gujarat. As with the other non-British enterprises, the Danish and
Austrian enclaves were taken over by the British between 1765 and 1815.
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