Between Babur’s arrival in Delhi in 1526 and Akbar’s death in 1605, the Mughal dynasty had become rooted in the heart of north India. In the intervening period, three monarchs consolidated their rule in a great swathe of territory where the regime’s governing institutions and cultural traditions became firmly established. Yet the state that Babur founded differed vastly from the one Akbar left behind. Having captured Ibrahim Lodi’s capital and treasury, Babur did little more than replace the defeated Afghans with his own people, without substantially altering the Lodis’ governing structure. After Babur’s brief reign, his son Humayun was driven from India before he could consolidate his rule. Ironically, it was another Indo-Afghan, the capable Sher Shah Sur (r. 1540–45), who established many of the administrative traditions that Humayun and his son Akbar would then inherit and elaborate. In his long, nearly half-century reign, Akbar put in place the empire’s most enduring ruling institutions, while the dynasty’s character completed its transition from a mobile ruling group steeped in semi-pastoral Central Asian traditions to a sedentary empire based on the economic, political and cultural traditions of agrarian India.
One aspect of this transition was the abandonment, under Akbar, of the theory of co-sovereignty, a Mongol legacy traceable to Genghis Khan (r. 1206–27) and later incorporated into Timurid practice. In that theory, each and every prince sharing the blood of a ruling monarch could in principle lay claim to the empire’s sovereignty in whole or in part. Accordingly, the states launched by both Genghis Khan and Timur were, on the death of a sovereign, liable to territorial division among their lineal heirs. Luckily for him, Babur had no brothers competing for his newly won kingdom in north India. But, following Mongol–Timurid practice, he parcelled out parts of his kingdom to his four sons. Humayun consequently spent years struggling with his three brothers, each of whom claimed a share of their father’s sovereign legacy, if not the whole of it. Similarly, rule over Kabul by Akbar’s younger brother Mirza Hakim was also a remnant of the old Mongol tradition, since Humayun had divided his realm between Hakim in Kabul and Akbar in Hindustan. It was only in 1585, after his younger brother had died, that Akbar reimagined the empire as an indivisible state to be handed down to a single heir, while all princes would be rotated around the empire as high-ranking mansabdars, like other nobles.
This new conception of the Mughal state meant that princes, acutely aware of the winner-take-all nature of any future succession struggle, would devote their entire adult lives to building up enormous households, learning political skills, gaining military experience and establishing allies on an empire-wide basis in preparation for the contest that would inevitably follow a sovereign’s demise. Such a strategy not only guaranteed the empire’s territorial unity and integrity from one sovereign to the next; it also meant that the best-‘networked’ prince would become the new emperor, since in any given pool of contenders the prince winning the empire would probably be the most competent militarily, politically and administratively. On the other hand, the system implied that succession disputes would be more intense and violent, since siblings knew that in the aftermath of such succession struggles the losers would be eliminated, whether by blinding, exile or execution. For the winner, meanwhile, it would be necessary to reintegrate back into the empire’s governing structure the former supporters of losing contenders.75 Much Mughal history from 1585 to the early eighteenth century flowed from this revised notion of the state.
The Mughals’ first seven decades also witnessed the elaboration of a multi-stranded ruling ideology. One strand was the tradition of sacred kingship traceable to Timur, who in his own day was widely seen as the expected messiah, a descendant of ‘Ali, and the Lord of the Conjunction (sahib-i qiran).76 The millennial aspect of the Mughals’ ruling ideology was most pronounced under Akbar between 1581 and 1591, the turn of the first Islamic millennium. Accordingly, he commissioned a chronicle, The Millennial History, which declared him to be the ‘Renewer of the Second Millennium’.77 Belief in astrology and the influence of planets formed another ideological strand, with both Humayun and Akbar matching the colour of their robes with the planet associated with a given day. Like their Delhi sultanate predecessors, the first three Mughals all believed deeply in the spiritual authority of Sufi masters, whom they patronized both in life and in revered memory. Although Babur had brought the Central Asian Naqshbandi tradition with him to north India, he soon turned to patronizing the indigenous Shattari order, as did Humayun. Akbar, for his part, fell under the spell of India’s most important indigenous order, the Chishti, which had been so closely associated with Tughluq imperialism in the fourteenth century. But, unlike any of his royal predecessors in India, Akbar not only patronized Chishti institutions: he went further and projected himself as an enlightened Sufi master for all his subjects, reinforced by his association with the sun and hints of divine illumination.
Another strand of the Mughals’ ruling ideology grew out of Akbar’s political alliance with Rajput chieftains and the incorporation of Rajput women in Akbar’s household. This contained Rajput ideas of rulership, reflected in the jharokha institution and the Rajputs’ aesthetic vision, prominently projected in the architecture of Akbar’s second capital, Fatehpur Sikri. At different points in his career, then, Akbar variously fashioned himself as a Sufi master, a solar and even divine emanation, a renewer of the second Islamic millennium, a Timurid prince and a traditional Indian sovereign. That last element, visible ever since he first began integrating Rajput chieftains into his ruling structure, became more pronounced after 1585 with the death of Mirza Hakim, who had presented himself as a traditional, Central Asian prince very much in the mould of his grandfather, Babur. Entrenched in Kabul, he continued to use the Turco-Mongol legal system and to circulate the Timurid currency, the shahrukhi. Once he disappeared from the scene, however, Akbar felt free to define the empire not only as a unitary state, but as a more forthrightly Indian one. This change is especially clear when one contrasts Babur’s memoir, the Babur-nama, with Abu’l-fazl’s history of Akbar’s reign, the Akbar-nama. Although Babur had dwelt at length on India’s flora and fauna, he showed very little interest in the cultures of India, dismissing its peoples as ‘infidels’. By contrast, Abu’l-fazl characterizes Indians as ‘seekers of God, kindhearted, friendly to strangers, congenial, and pleasant. They are fond of knowledge, inclined toward austerities, committed to justice, content, hardworking, skilled, loyal, honest and trustworthy.’78 In short, the Akbar-nama affirms the empire’s multi-ethnic and multi-religious character, promoting Akbar as a committed guardian of India’s cultural diversity.79
By the time of his death in 1605, Akbar was able to bequeath to his son Salim a consolidated state with well-ordered administrative institutions and a hybridized ruling ideology suited to India’s diverse society. To the south, the five successor states to the Bahmani sultanate (1347–1528) had narrowed to four, and would soon become just three as Akbar’s successors continued to exert pressure on the Deccan. At the same time, successor states to Vijayanagara had emerged in the interior of southern India, while European trading companies began planting commercial enclaves along India’s shores a century after the Portuguese Estado da India established its first coastal toehold in 1500. Whereas India’s north, Deccan and coastal regions had evolved more or less separately prior to 1605, after Akbar they were brought into much tighter relations with each other – a topic to which we now turn.