Who is mughal

With the Shah's help, he was able to return to Kabul, from where he eventually launched a successful attack on Delhi. Humayun regained his former territories after nearly 17 years, but died only months later after falling down the stone steps of his library at night. He was succeeded in by his remarkable year-old son, Akbar. Under the guidance of one of Humayun's close confidants, the aristocratic Iranian Bayram Khan, the young ruler began to expand his territories.

Some independent kingdoms were conquered; other rulers signed treaties and entered imperial service. Over the next 49 years Akbar extended Mughal rule over most of the north of the subcontinent, stretching from Gujarat in the west to Bengal in the east, and from Kabul and Kashmir in the north to the borders of the independent Deccan sultanates in the south. As new kingdoms were conquered, artists and craftsmen from many different regions entered the royal workshops.

They brought their own distinctive styles to the monuments, paintings and artefacts being created for Akbar. The population of the empire was predominantly Hindu, with a significant Muslim minority, and Hindus reached the highest levels of the administrative hierarchy.

Akbar married some of the daughters of Hindu Rajput rulers. In the royal House of Books Ketabkhana , which housed the library as well as being the place where manuscripts were created, Hindustani artists were directed by two Iranian masters formerly in the service of his father, to produce a new style of book painting.

Many of the calligraphers, bookbinders and illuminators who worked with them were also Iranian. Their first major undertaking was the creation of the multiple, illustrated volumes of the Hamzanama , or 'Book of Hamza'. These popular tales of the Muslim hero Hamza and his band of followers fighting against unbelievers, witches and demons, and supernatural or magical forces, were traditionally performed, rather than written down and read.

However, Akbar ordered one of the court's most accomplished prose writers, another Iranian from the large city of Qazvin, to produce a written version that was then copied by calligraphers for this imperial volume. Slightly contradictory contemporary sources record that the tales filled 12 or 14 bound volumes, each with paintings, and that the work took 15 years to complete. The exact years are not specified, but most authorities now agree that they fell between about and Fewer than of these paintings have survived, all of them separated from their bindings which have long disappeared.

Each of the large folios of the Hamzanama is made up of multiple layers. The text is written on paper, burnished and lightly flecked with gold and backed with cotton; the painting is done on cotton which is backed with paper. The layers were then glued together, and originally had borders, of which small remnants now remain.

When in Kashmir, he wandered into a curiosity shop in the capital city of Srinagar, and noticed some large paintings which he immediately bought. Some were rescued from the windows of the shop, where they had been used to block out the winter frosts of the previous season. Their condition, inevitably, is poor: some have been damaged by fire or rain, and the colours on all the pages have faded significantly.

In addition, at some stage in their history, probably in the 19th century, zealots have rubbed out the faces of all the living beings depicted. The paintings now in the MAK are considerably better preserved, and give a better idea of the vibrancy of the original colours.

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 search thus began for survivors who could be called upon to retrospectively throw light upon it. It is considered to be composed of three daftars registers, books , of which the first, completed in , i. He spent a long time interrogating those who had been in the service of the state and veteran members of the imperial family, writing down their testimonies initially in the form of rough drafts and then rendering them in an elegant style. He could at times seek the evidence of up to twenty reliable witnesses to an event, and admits that this multiplicity of sources occasionally posed difficulties.

Helpful material was also obtained from the Records Office which had been set up in the nineteenth regnal year. Although the highly partisan nature of the work has been commented upon by critics ever since its completion, the Akbarnama nevertheless represents a staggering achievement in the art of historical composition, setting a benchmark for entire generations of later writers to emulate.

It is divided into five daftars , dealing with themes as varied as the imperial household and court, state service, arts and crafts, a description of the provinces, Hindu religious beliefs and social customs, eminent Muslim holy men of the past and present, former Indian rulers and grandees in the service of the empire, scholars and poets before closing with a lengthy list of sayings on philosophical, ethical and moral issues attributed to Akbar.

The historian, for instance routinely criticizes the attitude of the ulema and, contrary to what one may expect, does not extol former paragons of Sunni orthodoxy in India or elsewhere in the Islamic world, nor does he display any nostalgia for their rule.

Although his political and military accomplishments do not measure up to those of his predecessor, he was nevertheless a learned man of refined aesthetic sensibilities. The three volumes of this work are devoted respectively to Babur and Humayun, Akbar and Jahangir.

Once again, the work adheres more to the standard format of Mughal official chronicles rather than to the somewhat oral tenor of the earlier Afghan histories.

After his death, the work was completed by his pupil, Muhammad Waris see the entry on the Badshahnama in this Encyclopaedia. Thus, shortly after coming to power, Shah Jahan decided that each decade of his reign was to be treated as a separate volume since he considered the number ten to be an auspicious one. The newly appointed chronicler Lahori thus had to revise the entire first volume and rewrite it according to lunar reckoning.

However, as more recent studies on Aurangzeb have pointed out, the writing of historical works did not end as such and accounts of the reign continued to be produced by individuals at their own initiative.

The dynamism was now increasingly shifting towards the new political dispensations that emerged following the disintegration of the Mughal empire. Historical works nevertheless continued to be produced both in Delhi and in the lately autonomous regional centres.

Yet others confined themselves to the description of an event of contemporary importance: a military campaign or a foreign invasion. A number of them were predominantly regional histories dealing with happenings in Sind, Punjab, Bengal or Hyderabad. The author, Muhammad Hashim Khafi Khan c. Another often pointed out shortcoming is that the description of the activities of those in power is confined to the events in the public sphere: within court, during military campaigns and in times of outdoor festivities.

The happenings in the private domain, such as their interactions with the members of the zenana, remain strictly out of bounds. As more recent studies have revealed, in the functioning of these regimes, religious considerations often had a secondary role to play as compared to more pragmatic and material ones.

The later bakhars narrative accounts composed as biographies of rulers, genealogies of eminent families or descriptions of momentous battles that emerged in the Maratha domain and the mangalkavyas corpus of narrative poetry often dealing with mythological themes but also serving to eulogize the lineage of patrons and transmitted as per written or oral traditions popular amongst a wide spectrum of social classes in Bengal selectively incorporated stylistic and formulaic features and terminology from the Mughal official histories.

Askari Syed Hasan trans. Haq S. Ltd, New Delhi, p. Jahan's selection of white marble and the overall concept and design of the mausoleum give the building great power and majesty. Jahan brought together fresh ideas in the creation of the Taj. Many of the skilled craftsmen involved in the construction were drawn from the empire.

Many also came from other parts of the Islamic world - calligraphers from Shiraz, finial makers from Samrkand, and stone and flower cutters from Bukhara. As if to confirm it, Jahan had these lines inscribed there: "If there is Paradise on earth, it is here, it is here. Paradise it may have been, but it was a pricey paradise. The money Jahan spent on buildings and on various military projects emptied his treasury and he was forced to raise taxes, which aggravated the people of the empire.

Aurangzeb ruled for nearly 50 years. He came to the throne after imprisoning his father and having his older brother killed. Aurangzeb was a very observant and religious Muslim who ended the policy of religious tolerance followed by earlier emperors. He no longer allowed the Hindu community to live under their own laws and customs, but imposed Sharia law Islamic law over the whole empire.

Thousands of Hindu temples and shrines were torn down and a punitive tax on Hindu subjects was re-imposed. In the last decades of the seventeenth century Aurangzeb invaded the Hindu kingdoms in central and southern India, conquering much territory and taking many slaves.

Under Aurangzeb, the Mughal empire reached the peak of its military power, but the rule was unstable. This was partly because of the hostility that Aurangazeb's intolerance and taxation inspired in the population, but also because the empire had simply become to big to be successfully governed. The Muslim Governer of Hydrabad in southern India rebelled and established a separate Shi'a state; he also reintroduced religious toleration.

The Hindu kingdoms also fought back, often supported by the French and the British, who used them to tighten their grip on the sub-continent.

The great Mughal city of Calcutta came under the control of the east India company in and in the decades that followed Europeans and European - backed by Hindu princes conquered most of the Mughal territory. Aurangzeb's extremism caused Mughal territory and creativity to dry up and the Empire went into decline. The last Mughal Emperor was deposed by the British in Search term:. Read more.

This page is best viewed in an up-to-date web browser with style sheets CSS enabled. While you will be able to view the content of this page in your current browser, you will not be able to get the full visual experience. Please consider upgrading your browser software or enabling style sheets CSS if you are able to do so. This page has been archived and is no longer updated. Find out more about page archiving. Mughal Empire s, s Last updated The Mughals brought many changes to India: Centralised government that brought together many smaller kingdoms Delegated government with respect for human rights Persian art and culture Persian language mixed with Arabic and Hindi to create Urdu Periods of great religious tolerance A style of architecture e.

A later Muslim invasion in devastated the city of Delhi. Under Babur Hinduism was tolerated and new Hindu temples were built with his permission.