Mughal Empire: Emperors, Administration and Decline

The Mughal Empire ruled most of the Indian subcontinent from 1526 to 1857 and is the medieval chapter examiners return to most often. Questions come from four places: the order of the emperors, the battles that decided the throne, the revenue and military machinery, and the books and buildings each reign left behind. This note sets out all four in the order a paper asks them.

Babur and the founding of the empire

Babur, a Timurid prince of Fergana who traced his descent from Timur on his father's side and Chengiz Khan on his mother's, took Kabul in 1504 and turned to India after that. He defeated Ibrahim Lodi, the last Lodi sultan of Delhi, at the First Battle of Panipat in 1526, and his field artillery and the tulughma flanking tactic decided a fight in which he was heavily outnumbered. Three more victories fixed the conquest: Khanwa in 1527 against Rana Sanga of Mewar, Chanderi in 1528 against Medini Rai, and Ghaghra in 1529 against the Afghans of Bihar and Bengal. Babur wrote his memoirs, the Tuzuk-i-Baburi or Baburnama, in Turki. He died at Agra in 1530 and was buried at Kabul.

Humayun and the Sur interruption

Humayun lost the Battle of Chausa in 1539 and the Battle of Kannauj, also called Bilgram, in 1540 to Sher Shah Suri, and spent fifteen years in exile, largely in Persia. Sher Shah ruled from 1540 to 1545 and left an administration the Mughals later borrowed from: the silver rupiya and the copper dam, a rebuilt Grand Trunk Road from Sonargaon to the Indus, a postal service of horse runners, and land revenue fixed by measurement. His tomb stands at Sasaram in Bihar. Humayun recovered Delhi after the Battle of Sirhind in 1555 and died the next year after a fall from his library stairs. His tomb at Delhi, raised by his widow Hamida Banu Begum, is the first great Mughal garden tomb and a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Akbar, 1556 to 1605

Akbar was thirteen at his accession, and his regent Bairam Khan defeated Hemu at the Second Battle of Panipat in 1556. Akbar abolished the pilgrimage tax in 1563 and the jizya in 1564, married into the Kachhwaha house of Amber, and drew Rajput nobles into imperial service. The Mughal army fought Maharana Pratap of Mewar at Haldighati in 1576, with Man Singh commanding the imperial side. Akbar built Fatehpur Sikri from 1571, added the Buland Darwaza after the Gujarat campaign, opened the Ibadat Khana for religious debate in 1575 and proclaimed the Din-i-Ilahi in 1582; his guiding idea was sulh-i-kul, peace with all. His two lasting institutions were the mansabdari system, in which every noble held a zat rank for personal status and a sawar rank for the horsemen he maintained, and the dahsala or zabti settlement of 1580, drawn up by Raja Todar Mal, which fixed revenue from the average produce and prices of ten years. Abul Fazl wrote the Akbarnama, whose third volume is the Ain-i-Akbari, and the court remembered nine luminaries, the navaratnas, among them Todar Mal, Birbal, Tansen and Abul Fazl.

Jahangir to Aurangzeb

Jahangir, who ruled from 1605 to 1627, hung a golden chain of justice at Agra fort, married Nur Jahan in 1611, and received Captain William Hawkins in 1608 and Sir Thomas Roe, the ambassador of James I, in 1615. Painting reached its peak in his reign. Shah Jahan, who ruled from 1628 to 1658, built the Taj Mahal for Mumtaz Mahal with Ustad Ahmad Lahauri as chief architect, moved his capital to Shahjahanabad with the Red Fort and the Jama Masjid, and sat on the jewelled Peacock Throne; his reign is called the golden age of Mughal architecture. Aurangzeb defeated Dara Shukoh at Samugarh in 1658, took the title Alamgir, reimposed the jizya in 1679, fought the Marathas in the Deccan for a quarter of a century, executed Sambhaji in 1689, and died in 1707. He is buried in a plain grave at Khuldabad near Aurangabad.

Administration at a glance

Emperors and their years

Decline and the later Mughals

The empire weakened quickly after 1707. Bahadur Shah I, Jahandar Shah and Farrukhsiyar, who granted the English a trading farman in 1717, followed in quick succession. In the reign of Muhammad Shah, nicknamed Rangila, Nadir Shah of Persia won the Battle of Karnal in 1739, sacked Delhi and carried away the Peacock Throne and the Koh-i-Noor. Ahmad Shah Abdali defeated the Marathas at the Third Battle of Panipat in 1761, when Shah Alam II was the nominal emperor; the same emperor was on the losing side at Buxar in 1764 and granted the East India Company the diwani of Bengal, Bihar and Odisha in 1765. The last emperor, Bahadur Shah Zafar, was proclaimed leader of the revolt of 1857, deposed the same year, exiled to Rangoon and died there in 1862. The causes examiners list are weak later rulers, wars of succession, the cost of the Deccan campaigns, the jagir and revenue crisis, and invasions from the north-west.