Contrary to the claims of British imperial propagandists or apologists, modernity in India did not commence with the arrival of European merchants or colonial rulers. That story goes back to their Mughal predecessors. The reigns of two Mughal emperors in particular – Akbar and ‘Alamgir – saw distinctive, but very different, harbingers of what people in the twenty-first century might call modernity. Akbar’s reign exhibited a spirit of rational self-control and a nearly obsessive preoccupation with order in all spheres of experience, especially in governance and administration. Abu’l-fazl’s monumental imperial gazetteer, the A’in-i Akbari or ‘Institutes of Akbar’ (c.1595), shows a determined effort to standardize and impose the most minute regulations over nearly everything: the manner of cleaning matchlock firearms, the daily allowance for feeding mules, the wages for imperial glass-cutters, the rearing and care of pigeons, the expenses for the maintenance of different classes of war-horses, etc. Every plot of the empire’s cultivated area was subjected to careful surveys using standard units of measurement. Corruption, while endemic in most large state systems, was minimized by the Mughals’ promoting an ethic of efficiency, while standard monetary units – the silver rupee, the gold muhr and the copper dam – helped regularize the most basic of governmental functions: the collection of revenue. Record-keeping from Akbar’s reign onwards was meticulous, as strict rules were established for maintaining data and auditing accounts. Soldiers under the charge of a mansabdar were listed by name, place of residence, age, race and physical descriptions; war-horses were carefully identified by their types and their distinguishing features – all with a view to promoting military efficiency.53
The imperial court’s endeavour to set the tone for an empire-wide ethos of discipline and rational order is neatly epitomized by a water-clock that Akbar maintained in his palace in Fatehpur Sikri. There, orderlies would strike loud bronze gongs as each quarter-hour had elapsed. ‘These water-clocks’, noted a Jesuit Father then residing at the court:
consist of a brazen vessel filled with water, and a hollow bronze cone of such a size that exactly a quarter of an hour is taken for the water to fill it through a small hole in the bottom. This cone is placed on the top of the vessel filled with water, and the water runs in through the hole in its bottom. When the cone is full, it sinks, and thus shows that a quarter of an hour has elapsed. Everything that goes on in the palace is regulated by this clock.54
The preoccupation with efficient management of time, with discipline and with control suggests an attempt to impose an ethos of rational order on the world. Accompanying this sensibility was a new sort of secularism. Sultanates dating to ninth-century Central Asia had in principle divided a state’s political and religious spheres between the sultan and the caliph respectively. But chronicles going back to the reigns of the Delhi sultans had nonetheless manipulated historical anecdotes to show a deep divine intervention in human affairs. In the writings of prominent Mughal literati from the late sixteenth century onwards, however, human agency was understood as having replaced divine agency. Only the Mughals rationalized their empire by applying this secular outlook to the religious traditions of their subjects.55
Despite such indicators of modernity, however, Akbar immersed himself in the cult of sacred kingship inherited from his Timurid patrimony.56 In this view it was the Mughal emperor, endowed with semi-divine attributes, who conceptually linked the mundane world of everyday life to the spiritual world. Akbar’s messianic identity was reinforced by the atmosphere of anticipation leading up to the close of the first Islamic millennium, which occurred in 1591, the thirty-fifth year of his reign. By that time, the emperor was presenting himself as a charismatic millennial sovereign, as well as the Perfect Man as elaborated in Sufi discourse, reinforced by his association with light, Illuminationist philosophy and Zoroastrian thought. All this meant that, paradoxically, Akbar’s regime exhibited both the premodern sensibility of sacred kingship and the modern sensibility of a rationally ordered universe, as manifested in his court’s culture and administration.
In contrast, ‘Alamgir rejected, at least in principle, the cult of sacred kingship inherited from his Timurid predecessors. As prince, Aurangzeb had commanded a large Mughal army sent deep into Central Asia to fulfil his father’s fantasy of conquering the heartland of Timur’s former empire, thereby affirming the emperor’s claim to being the ‘Second Lord of the Conjunction’. But the expedition failed spectacularly, owing mainly to the logistical impossibility of holding territory so far from India. Although this failure did not shake Shah Jahan’s belief in his own sacred status, it was his son who had to trudge through bitter winter snows high in the Hindu Kush Mountains, where 5,000 soldiers under his command froze to death. In the first instance, the debacle contributed to the prince’s growing estrangement from his father. More fundamental was his rejection of the ideology of sacred kingship that had informed his father’s policies, including the Central Asian campaign. Aurangzeb also had to distance himself politically and ideologically from his brother Dara Shukoh, his bitter rival for the Peacock Throne. Lacking military competence or administrative experience, Dara had enthusiastically embraced his father’s potent ideology of sacred kingship, which he mistakenly felt would carry him to power in the 1658–9 War of Succession. Most decisive, however, was Aurangzeb’s conviction, formed already while governor of Gujarat, that the cult of sacred kingship was incapable of countering or absorbing anti-state movements that were millennial in nature.
After winning the throne, therefore, ‘Alamgir endeavoured to replace Dara’s and his ancestors’ cult of sacred kingship with something entirely new in Mughal history. Instead of a state that pivoted on a charismatic, sacred emperor, he tried to establish an impersonal polity governed by the rule of law, for which purpose he gave sweeping powers to the Mughal judiciary and patronized the production of the Fatawa-i ‘Alamgiri, a comprehensive and authoritative legal compendium of Hanifi Sunni Islam that was promulgated throughout the empire. This effort not only marked a radical departure from the past; it also had a decidedly modern ring to it, since such a state would have effectively desacralized a world believed to be charged with spiritual presence and energy.57 But the emperor’s lofty project ultimately failed. For one thing, the sort of judicial state he apparently envisioned could be successfully implemented only by efficient and honest subordinates, and ‘Alamgir was served by all-too-human officials who, like the venal functionaries who collected jizya taxes, were immersed in local politics, petty power struggles, bribery and corruption.
Moreover, any transition from the idea of sacred kingship to the rule of law was too drastic a move to have been accomplished even in ‘Alamgir’s long reign. Most of his subjects yearned for a sovereign who mediated human and sacred realities. In fact, the emperor himself occasionally found it expedient to draw upon the deep reservoir of sacred kingship that was his inheritance, as when he was thought to have calmed a raging river by casting on it pieces of paper on which he had written prayers, or when his troops faced down rebels with banners on which he had personally inscribed prayers and magic symbols. Perceiving such actions as miraculous, ordinary subjects hailed him as a living saint (‘Alamgir, zinda pir). In short, the emperor could not shake off a ruling ideology so deeply entrenched among his dynastic predecessors and his own subjects. Yet he had at least envisioned a break with the sacred kingship of the premodern past, wherein lay the seeds of modern statehood. In this way his efforts prefigured modern movements of political Islam; they would go on to have a profound effect on South Asian modernity.58
In very different ways, then, the long, half-century reigns of both Akbar and ‘Alamgir set India on a path towards modernity well before European colonial rule took hold in South Asia. The former sovereign established principles of efficiency, discipline and rational order at every level of governance, and the latter laid out a vision of a state run by the impersonal rule of law rather than the whims of a sacred sovereign. Yet, for all its rationality, Akbar’s reign remained deeply invested in the premodern mould of the sacred king, and for all his dedication to the principle of a judicial state, ‘Alamgir was let down by his own corrupt officials, and on occasion found it expedient to invoke his inherited status as sacred king.
Still, by the beginning of the eighteenth century critical foundations of modern South Asia had been put in place. Also in place by then, of course, was India’s highly advanced textile-manufacturing sector, which was already clothing much of Europe, Africa and Asia. That sector would soon draw India into ever-tighter economic and political relationships with the rest of the world, and with the rest of world history.