Mughal dynasty

The Muslim dynasty of Turkic-Mongol origin that ruled the majority of northern India from the early 16th to the mid-18th century, after which it persisted as a much smaller and progressively weaker state until the mid-19th century, is known by the name Mughal or Mogul in Arabic. The Mughal Empire was distinguished by its administrative structure, the extraordinary skills of its emperors who ruled effectively over most of India for more than two centuries, and the fact that its rulers maintained an outstanding record of talent throughout seven generations. The Mughals, who were Muslims, made another attempt to bring Hindus and Muslims together into a single Indian nation.

Bābur, a Chagatai Turkic prince who ruled from 1526 to 1530, established the dynasty. On his father’s side, he was descended from Timur, the Turkic conqueror, and on his mother’s side, he was descended from Chagatai, the second son of the Mongol ruler Genghis Khan. Bābur sought to satiate his desire for conquest in India after being driven out of his ancestral homeland in Central Asia. He defeated Ibrahim Lodi’s Delhi Sultanate army at the First Battle of Panipat in 1526, gaining control of the Punjab from his base in Kabul. He defeated the Afghans of eastern Uttar Pradesh and Bihar in 1529, and in the year prior, he overthrew the Rajput confederacy under Rana Sanga of Mewar. At the time of his passing in 1530, he ruled all of northern India, from the Indus River in the west to Bihar in the east, and from the Himalayas south to Gwalior.

Humāyūn, the son of Bābur, who ruled between 1530–40 and 1555–56, lost control of the empire to Afghan rebels, but Akbar, the son of Humāyūn, who ruled between 1556–1605, defeated the Hindu usurper Hemu at the Second Battle of Panipat (1556), reestablishing his dynasty in Hindustan. Akbar was a very competent monarch and the most powerful of the Mughal emperors. He reestablished and strengthened the Mughal Empire. He conquered all of northern India and a portion of central India by continuous conflict, but he sought to recruit his Hindu subjects into his armies and administration by pursuing conciliatory policies toward them. The main reason why the empire lasted another century and a half was the political, administrative, and military system that he established to rule it. The empire stretched from Afghanistan to the Bay of Bengal, and south to Gujarat and the northern Deccan, at the time of Akbar’s death in 1605.

Jahāngīr, Akbar’s son, ruled from 1605 to 1627 and was a moderately effective monarch because he maintained both his father’s administrative system and his tolerant attitude toward Hinduism. Shah Jahan (reigned 1628–58), his son, was a voracious builder, and during his time, the Taj Mahal and the Great Mosque of Delhi, among other structures, were built. Although his reign represented the height of Mughal culture, his military campaigns brought the empire to the verge of financial collapse. In contrast to the Muslim religious bigotry of his more orthodox successor, Aurangzeb (reigned 1658–1707), Jahāngīr’s rule was tolerant and enlightened.Despite the fact that Aurangzeb annexed the Muslim Deccan kingdoms of Bijapur and Golconda,

expanding the empire to its greatest extent, his political and religious intolerance planted the seeds for its demise. His persecution of the Sikhs of the Punjab turned that sect against Muslim rule and sparked revolts among the Rajputs, Sikhs, and Marathas, while he outlawed Hindus from holding public office and demolished their schools and temples. The farming population was steadily impoverished by the high taxes he imposed, and a gradual fall in the standard of Mughal rule was accompanied by a corresponding economic deterioration. At the time of his death in 1707, Aurangzeb had not been able to put down the Marathas of the Deccan, and his rule was contested across all of his territories.

The empire started to disintegrate during the reign of Muhammad Shah (1719–1748), a process accelerated by dynastic warfare, factional conflicts, and the Iranian conqueror Nādir Shah’s brief but devastating invasion of northern India in 1739. After Muhammad Shah’s death in 1748, the Marathas seized the majority of northern India. The territory of the Mughal Empire was limited to a small region surrounding Delhi, which fell under the dominion of the Marathas (1785) and then the British (1803). After his role in the Indian Mutiny of 1857–58, the British exiled the last Mughal, Bahādur Shah II, who ruled from 1837 to 1857, to Yangon, Myanmar (Rangoon, Burma).