[1526 – 1757] The Grandeur of the Mughals

Between the years 1526 and 1757, the Indian subcontinent witnessed the rise and slow, dramatic decay of one of the world's most dazzling empires. It began not with a grand procession, but with the thunder of cannon. In 1526, a Central Asian prince named Zahir-ud-din Muhammad Babur, a descendant of both Timur and Genghis Khan, descended from the harsh mountains of Afghanistan onto the fertile plains of northern India. At the First Battle of Panipat, his small, disciplined army of around 15,000 faced a colossal force of over 100,000 men and 1,000 war elephants under Sultan Ibrahim Lodi of Delhi. The battle should have been a slaughter. It was, but not in the way anyone expected. Babur unleashed a new and terrifying form of warfare upon the subcontinent: mobile field artillery and gunpowder matchlocks. The roar of the cannons panicked the Sultan's elephants, which turned and trampled their own troops. By midday, the Sultan was dead, and the Delhi Sultanate was shattered. Babur, the first Mughal emperor, had arrived. Babur’s reign was short, a whirlwind of conquest. His son, Humayun, however, seemed to lack his father's grit and good fortune. His reign was a chaotic series of setbacks, culminating in his exile from India altogether. Yet, the story could have ended there, a mere footnote. But Humayun, with Persian aid, clawed his way back, retaking Delhi in 1555 only to die a few months later in a freak accident, tumbling down his library's stone staircase. He left the fragile, newly re-conquered empire in the hands of his thirteen-year-old son, a boy who could neither read nor write, but who would come to be known as Akbar the Great. Akbar’s half-century reign, from 1556 to 1605, was the forge in which the Mughal Empire was truly shaped. He was a man of immense physical strength and boundless curiosity. On the battlefield, he was a tactical genius, consolidating and expanding his territory across northern and central India. But his true legacy was in governance. He understood that an empire of this diversity could not be ruled by the sword alone. He abolished the Jizya, a discriminatory poll tax on non-Muslims, a move that won him the loyalty of his millions of Hindu subjects. He implemented the sophisticated Mansabdari system, a graded military-civil service that created a loyal bureaucracy based on merit, not heredity. High-ranking Mansabdars were required to maintain a quota of cavalry, ready for imperial service at a moment's notice, ensuring a powerful, centralized army. His capital, Fatehpur Sikri, built and then mysteriously abandoned, stands today as a stone testament to his vision. Its architecture is a sublime fusion of Persian, Turkic, and Indian styles. In his court, he gathered the 'Navaratnas' or Nine Jewels, a group of the era's most brilliant minds. And in his famed 'Ibadat Khana' or House of Worship, he would host theologians from every faith—Muslims, Hindus, Jains, Zoroastrians, and even Jesuit priests from Portuguese Goa—presiding over fierce debates late into the night, seeking a common truth. This quest led him to proclaim his own syncretic faith, the 'Din-i Ilahi' or 'Divine Faith', a blend of Islam, Hinduism, and other beliefs. While it never gained a mass following, it symbolized his radical dream of a unified, tolerant India. If Akbar’s reign was about intellectual and political fusion, his son Jahangir’s reign (1605-1627) was an ode to aesthetics and opulence. A connoisseur of art and a passionate naturalist, Jahangir’s court produced some of the most exquisite miniature paintings the world has ever seen, capturing the texture of a bird’s feather or the subtle emotion on a courtier’s face with breathtaking precision. Life in the court was a pageant of unimaginable luxury. Courtiers draped themselves in gossamer-thin muslin from Bengal and vibrant silks, adorned with jewels from across the known world. But as Jahangir aged, lost in his cups of wine and opium, the real power behind the throne became his brilliant and politically astute wife, Nur Jahan. Her name appeared on coins, and her seal was required on official documents—an unprecedented level of authority for a woman in a patriarchal world. Her influence created its own web of intrigue and succession crises, a drama that played out in the gilded halls of power. This era of aesthetic obsession reached its zenith under Jahangir’s son, Shah Jahan (1628-1658), the master builder. His name is synonymous with one building: the Taj Mahal. More than a tomb, it was a declaration of love and a symbol of imperial power, built for his beloved wife Mumtaz Mahal. For over two decades, more than 20,000 artisans toiled, setting translucent white Makrana marble with a breathtaking inlay of 28 types of precious and semi-precious stones—lapis lazuli from Afghanistan, jade from China, turquoise from Tibet, carnelian from Arabia. The project's cost, estimated to be around 32 million rupees at the time, was astronomical, placing immense strain on the treasury. Shah Jahan’s reign also gave us the magnificent Red Fort in his new capital, Shahjahanabad (today’s Old Delhi), and the stunning Jama Masjid. Life for the nobility was lived on a scale of grandeur difficult to comprehend, a world of perfumed gardens, extravagant feasts, and polo matches, all financed by a vast agricultural tax system that extracted up to half of a peasant’s produce. The empire reached its greatest territorial extent under Shah Jahan’s son, Aurangzeb (1658-1707). After a bloody war of succession against his brothers, Aurangzeb seized the throne. Where his great-grandfather Akbar was a syncretist, Aurangzeb was a pious, orthodox Sunni Muslim. He was a tireless administrator and a brilliant military strategist, but his personal piety would become his empire’s undoing. He saw the lavishness of his predecessors as decadent and un-Islamic. He banned music and art from his court and, most fatefully, he reversed Akbar's policy of tolerance. He re-imposed the Jizya tax on non-Muslims and ordered the destruction of several prominent Hindu temples. These acts alienated vast swathes of his population, sparking rebellions from the Marathas in the Deccan, the Sikhs in the Punjab, and the Rajputs. For the last 26 years of his life, Aurangzeb was a king on horseback, campaigning relentlessly in the Deccan plateau, draining the imperial treasury and his own life force in a series of costly, indecisive wars. When he died in 1707 at the age of 88, he left behind an empire stretched to its breaking point, exhausted and seething with discontent. His death opened the floodgates. A series of weak and ineffectual rulers, the 'Later Mughals', followed. The empire began to fracture. Provincial governors became de facto independent kings. The Marathas carved out a vast confederacy, and foreign powers smelled blood in the water. Persian and Afghan invaders sacked Delhi, carrying away priceless treasures like the Peacock Throne and the Koh-i-Noor diamond. By 1757, at the Battle of Plassey, the Mughal emperor was a mere puppet, his authority non-existent outside his own palace. A new power, the British East India Company, was now the master of India's destiny. The grand, opulent, and complex chapter of the Mughals—an era that gave India its most iconic monument and shaped its culture in countless ways—had come to a close, its splendor fading into memory.