Download PDF | The Princes of the Mughal Empire, 1504-1719 by Munis D. Faruqui, Cambridge UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2015.
367 Pages
The Princes of the Mughal Empire, 1504-1719
For roughly two hundred years, the Mughal emperors ruled supreme in northern India. How was it possible that a Muslim, ethnically Turkish, Persian-speaking dynasty established itself in the Indian subcontinent to become one of the largest and most dynamic empires on earth? In this rigorous new interpretation of the period. Munis D. Faruqui explores Mughal state formation through the pivotal role of the Mughal princes. In a challenge to previous scholarship, the book suggests that far from undermining the foundations of empire, the court intrigues and political backbiting that were features of Mughal political life - and that fre¬ quently resulted in rebellions and wars of succession - actually helped spread, deepen, and mobilize Mughal power through an empire-wide network of friends and allies. This engaging book, which trawls a diverse archive of European and Persian sources, takes the reader from the founding of the empire under Babur to its decline in the 1700s. When the princely institution atrophied, so too did the Mughal Empire.
Munis D. Faruqui is an associate professor in the Department of South and Southeast Asian Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. He is a co-editor of two forthcoming volumes: Religious Interactions in Mughal India (forthcoming), and Expanding Frontiers in South Asian and World History: Essays in Honor of John F. Richards (Cambridge University Press, forthcoming).
Acknowledgments
This book has been a long time in the making. It is the outcome of not only my own research and teaching, but the scholarship of others as well. Among the many specialists cited in the bibliography, I am particularly indebted to the prior work of Muzaffar Alam, M. Athar Ali, Karen Barkey, Jos Gommans, Irfan Habib, Farhat Hasan, Iqtidar Alam Khan, Leslie Peirce, James Scott, and Sanjay Subrahmanyam. My greatest intellectual debt, however, is to my late supervisor and friend John F. Richards. I wish he had lived to see this book.
At various stages of this project - while trying to come up with a viable dissertation topic, learning languages, working on grant applications, toiling in the archives in Iran and India, writing my dissertation, thinking about converting my dissertation into a book, and finally writing it and bringing it to publication - I have been the recipient of immeasurable friendship, kindness, and support. Among others. I’d like to thank Marigold Acland, Shabbir Ahmed, Muzaffar and Rizwana Alam, Soheila Amirsoleimani, Hannah Archambault, Natalia Barbera, Richard Barnett, Monika Biradavolu, Craig Borowiak, Ali Boutouta, Una Cadegan, Marybeth Carlson, Kavita Datla, Dick Davis, Penny Edwards, Carl Ernst, Ellen Fleischmann, Teri Fisher, Will Glover, Sally and Bob Goldman, Shireen Habibi, Jonathan Haddad, Shagufta and Imtiaz Hasnain, Brad Hume, the late Mazhar Husain, Nasreen Husain and her family, Ruquia Hussain, Vasant Kaiwar, Emma Kalb, Ayesha Karim, the late Iqbal Ghani Khan and the entire Saman Zaar clan, Matthew Klingle, Brendan LaRocque, Bruce Lawrence, Laura Leming, Martin Lewis, Linda and Theo Majka, Karuna Mantena, Rama Mantena, Monica Mehta, Caroline Merithew, Barbara and Tom Metcalf, Shireen Moosvi, Pinaki Mukherjee, Parviz Nayyeri, James Penney, Fran and Fred Pestello, Patrick Rael, B. Nageswara Rao, Raka Ray, John Remick, Ann Richards, Alex von Rospatt, Milan and Sanjay Shahani, Sarah Shields, Rob Sikorski, Malini Sood, Matthew Specter, Susan Tananbaum, Prakash Upadhyaya, Nilgun Uygun, Rahul Vatsyayan, Karen Wigen, Muhammad Qasim Zaman, the anonymous reviewers of this book, and the students in my Mughal graduate seminars in 2010 and 2011. In a sea of names, there nonetheless are a few people who have done more than anyone else to offer enduring encouragement - Stephen Dale, David Gilmartin, Sunil Kumar, and Cynthia Talbot - and unquestioned friendship - Vasudha Dalmia, Jeff Hadler, and Farina Mir. It will take many, many lives to repay the goodwill of so many people.
This book would have either never been written or taken much longer to complete without generous financial support from many quarters. They include the History Department at Duke University, the Center of International Studies at Duke University, the Oceans Connect Program at Duke University, the American Institute of Indian Studies, the Summer Research Fellowship Program at the University of Dayton, the Center for Asian Studies at the University of Texas-Austin, the American Historical Association, the Committee on Research at the University of California-Berkeley, and the Sidney and Margaret Ancker Distinguished Professorship Research Fund at the University of California-Berkeley. I would like to especially thank Berkeley’s “Family Friendly Edge Policy” for helping me juggle the responsibilities of being a new dad and an assistant professor.
If the ability to undertake historical work depends on access to different archives. I’d like to acknowledge the ease and comfort of working in the National Library (Kolkata), Maulana Azad Library (Aligarh), the Center for Advanced Study Library (Aligarh), the Asiatic Society of Bengal (Kolkata), the National Archives (Delhi), Teen Murti Library (Delhi), and the British Library (London).
Ultimately, this book would not have been possible without the love and support of my sister and parents - Mariam, Erna, and Faseeh Faruqui - and my extended family - Saira and Rohit Shahani and Jennifer, Vasant, and Mark Talwalker. They have waited a long time for this book to be published, yet their enthusiasm, interest, and encourage¬ ment never faltered. My greatest gratitude, however, goes to my wife, Clare Talwalker, and our children Aynaz and Sivan. Although they sacri¬ ficed many a foursome family activity for years, they barely complained. I promise to make it up to them.
Note on Transliteration and Translation
All foreign words not commonly used in English have been italicized; a nonitalicized letter “s” indicates the plural form. I have chosen not to use diacritical marks for names of persons or places. But I do use (‘) and (’) for the "ain and hamza respectively. Although I have generally relied on F. Steingass’s Comprehensive Persian English Dictionary when trans¬ literating Persian words and phrases, I have chosen to spell certain combined words differently. For example, instead of u’l, indicating the Arabic definite article al, I have generally chosen ul placed between two hyphens. Elsewhere, I have favored phonetic forms such as “Ghazi-ud-Din,” “Rafi‘-ush-Shan,” and “Shukrullah” instead of “Ghaziu’d-Din,” “Rafi‘u’sh-Shan,” and “Shukru’llah.” I have also made certain exceptions for commonly accepted usages, such as “Mughal” in place of “Mughul,” “Aurangzeb” instead of “Aurang-zib,” and a few others. Finally, although I maintain the English spellings of the printed Persian language editions in my footnotes - hence Ma’asir-ul-Umara is kept as Maasir-ul-Umara (for volume i) and Maasiru-l-Umara (for volumes 2 and 3) and Muhamid Khan as Motamad Khan - I follow the previously mentioned conventions for in-text references. All translations are mine, unless otherwise noted.
Introduction
On December 6, 1992, Hindu nationalists attacked and destroyed the sixteenth-century Babri Mosque. In the lead-up to this event and in its aftermath, India was wracked by terrible violence in which thousands of people were killed or injured. Most of the victims were Muslims. I watched my television screen in shock and horror as the violence unfolded. I recall being especially struck by one news story in which a reporter interviewed Hindu nationalist supporters outside a row of burning shacks while a mob danced around the camera crew shouting this slogan: Babur ki santan, jao Pakistan ya Qabristan! (Descendants of Babur, go to Pakistan or the graveyard!).
At the time, I was at a loss understanding the link between, on the one hand, the Emperor Babur, the early sixteenth-century founder of the Mughal Empire in whose name the Babri Mosque had been constructed in 1528, and, on the other hand, Indian Muslims of the late twentieth century. Although of Indian Muslim descent myself, I knew my family was not descended from Babur or any of his heirs. Indeed, if my family had any connection to the Mughal Empire, it was unknown. Separately, the sug¬ gestion that Indian Muslims were a cancer in the Indian body politic that had to be either expelled to Pakistan or killed prompted me to wonder what horrors the Mughals were thought to have visited upon India to generate such genocidal sentiments almost five centuries later. Indeed, nothing I had read pointed to Mughal policies deliberately aimed at the violent oppression or exploitation of their overwhelmingly Hindu subjects. To the contrary, the popular legacy of the Mughal period, as I understood it, suggested a standout example of Hindu-Muslim cooperation across political, social, and cultural realms. Such thoughts framed my interest in the Mughals when I entered graduate school in the mid-1990s. In the years that have followed, I have long pondered exactly how a Muslim, ethnically Turkish, and Persian-speaking dynasty managed to rule 150 million peo¬ ple, themselves of many linguistic and ethnic backgrounds, and to con¬ stitute one of the largest empires in human history at its height in 1700.^ Certainly brutal and unmitigated violence against the Mughals’ majority Hindu subjects seemed a highly unlikely explanation.
As I discovered, violence (or at least its threat) did play a critical part in constituting Mughal imperial power, but not in ways that might be assumed by modern Hindu nationalists. Rather than religious conflict, one of the central engines driving Mughal state formation was the com¬ petition and occasional bursts of violence that framed political struggles occurring within the Mughal royal family itself. These struggles, which took place against the backdrop of imperial succession politics, not only pitted prince against prince, but also prince against even the emperor (who may have been a father, grandfather, brother, paternal uncle, or cousin). It has been widely suggested that this princely competition weakened the empire. I argue, on the contrary, that - with the attendant construction of independent households, forging of empire-wide networks of friends and allies, disobedience toward and rebellion against the emperor, and wars of succession - princely competition was a central mechanism in the mobi¬ lization of Mughal power. Understanding the dynamic and complicated story of political competition within the Mughal family and its impact on the empire offers fresh insight into the success as well as ultimate failure of the Mughal imperial enterprise. If intervening in popular partisan views of the Mughal Empire is one goal of this book, then a second is to complicate our understanding of the processes of Mughal state formation by telling the story of the princes of the Mughal Empire.
PRINCES IN THE STORY OF MUGHAL STATE FORMATION
Eor more than two centuries, between 1504 (the year the founder of the Mughal Empire, Zahir-ud-Din Muhammad Babur, established himself in Kabul) and 1719 (the first time a prince attained the Mughal throne on the basis of an ordered succession system), the Mughals determinedly refused to institute clearly articulated rules of succession. The Mughals themselves and contemporary imperial historians almost never commented on this fact, although the occasional European traveler noted it. The unspoken rule - deriving from Islamic law and from Turco-Mongol ideas - that every son had an equal share in his father’s patrimony and all males within a ruling group had the right to succeed to the throne simply favored an openended system.
Following the collapse of the Mughal Empire and the onset of British rule, which had its own obsessions about dynastic continuity and longev¬ ity, historians and others began to pay closer attention to the Mughal “failure” to institute a system of primogeniture or some other form of ordered succession. This interest was mostly framed within the context of debates about collapses of Mughal rule, first briefly in the 1540s and then ultimately in the 1710s. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the prevailing wisdom had it that recurrent princely rebellions and wars of succession destabilized the empire and offered no long-term benefits. Against this backdrop, seeming Mughal insistence on an open-ended system of succession was treated as a sign of political conservatism or a trace of backward tribalism, and thus a failure of enlightened rule. The fact that members of the Mughal royal family were known to have maimed and killed one another, or tried to, only added to the emerging consensus that this was a pernicious and dysfunctional system. That consensus, as this book demonstrates, was as narrow and obfuscating as it was simple for its subscribers to embrace. In particular, by casting all intra-familial strife as negative, it masked the key role that princely competition and conflict played in Mughal state formation.
Historians as well as other observers of the Mughal Empire have been pondering the reasons for Mughal success and the nature of Mughal state formation for centuries now. As far back as the seventeenth century, European travelers variously highlighted the Mughals’ “despotic” power, theatricality, and access to economic riches in their efforts to pinpoint the empire’s political vitality. Up to the early nineteenth century, the European public treated the then-collapsed empire mostly with respect¬ ful deference. This was largely a consequence of early British colonialism’s desire to fashion itself as a direct heir to what it viewed as a sophisticated and, on balance, successful exercise in imperial rule. By the late nineteenth century, however, such favorable readings had mostly vanished. The British now saw advantage in treating their own empire as not only stand¬ ing outside Indian history but as representing a complete rupture from India’s past.
This cleavage came to be symbolized as the stark difference between the civilized character of the British Empire as compared to the backwardness of its Indian and, especially, Mughal forerunners. There were two key lines of attack. The first was anchored in the British Raj’s complex administra¬ tive machinery and the other in its post-Enlightenment capacity for reli¬ gious tolerance. Against both markers, the Mughal Empire was judged deficient. Mughal success was dismissed as an outcome of its unrestrained despotism, and its failure attributed to rising “religious intolerance” toward its majority Hindu subjects.
Starting in the early 1900s, waves of Indian nationalist historians began to contest different elements within this colonial historiography. By far the most significant challenge came from successive generations of often Marxist-oriented historians based at Aligarh Muslim University (in the north Indian city of Aligarh). Between the 1940s and the 1980s, the “Aligarh School” developed a powerful counterview of the Mughal Empire. Largely focusing their attention on Mughal administrative insti¬ tutions, these scholars asserted that the Mughal Empire was - not unlike a modern state - a highly centralized, systematized, and stable entity.^ The force of this argument was such that the strength of Mughal administrative institutions now became the starting point for most discussions (and explanations) of imperial successes and failures. Religion was largely dis¬ counted as a factor in the Mughal collapse. By the early 1960s, the Aligarh view of the Mughal Empire was widely accepted within and outside India.
From the 1970s onward, however, debates about the nature of empire in India took on new life thanks to a fresh cluster of historians - many of them based in England. Especially interested in questioning long-held views of the British Empire as a European leviathan, these scholars pointed to the many ways in which the Raj had been built on Indian foundations, depended on active Indian collaboration, and was administratively less forceful than once imagined. These insights soon carried over into a fundamental reassessment of the Mughal Empire by non-Aligarh-based Mughal historians. They questioned the Aligarh School’s exalted view of imperial institutions, arguing that the diffuse and fractured manner in which early modern societies functioned resisted the possibility of strong centralized institutions, not only in India but also in other parts of the early modern world. Furthermore, they questioned the evolutionary assumption that a centralized state is necessarily a modern or better state.
What emerged by the late 1990s was a new perspective, one that considered the Mughal Empire less as a “medieval road-roller,” to quote Sanjay Subrahmanyam, and more as a spider’s web in which strands were strong in some places and weak in others, shedding light on the need to account for regional phenomena caught between the various strands.^ According to this interpretation, the empire hung loosely over Indian society, exerting only a fleeting impact on local societies, local landed elites (zamindars), and everyday life. Unfortunately, these debates (on the one hand, that the Mughals ran a tight administrative ship and, on the other, that their administration was largely ineffectual) had an irresolvable qual¬ ity, and they took on an increasingly rancorous tone as well.'* Thus one historian in the mid 1990s observed that the study of the state in early modern South Asia “has become one of the most controversial issues in contemporary Indian historiography.”’
Against this backdrop, there has been a renewed push to comprehend the sources of Mughal power beyond its administrative, military, and fiscal institutions.*’ Farhat Hasan’s State and Locality in Mughal India is of special note.'' Even though expressing discontent with the fiscal or military prisms through which most studies of the Mughal state are conducted, Hasan is determined to not “de-privilege” the state. State and Locality offers four particularly valuable insights: (i) the Mughal state could not simply command obedience, but had to “manufacture” it by implanting itself within local political, social, and economic networks of power; (ii) besides collecting taxes, the Mughal state also contributed and gar¬ nered support by offering security and playing a key role in redistributing monetary and social resources among the most powerful elements in Indian society; (hi) the Mughal state was continuously being molded and constrained by the society that it ostensibly governed; and (iv) the Mughal state was a dynamic and continuously evolving entity quite unlike the static and stable creation that emerges from Mughal imperial sources or most modern accounts of the empire.^
Whereas Hasan undertook a fine-grained study of the operations of the Mughal state in urban Gujarat, the present book explores his insights as they apply to the empire as a whole. In the 1990s, even before Hasan’s book, early modern historians Muzaffar Alam and Sanjay Subrahmanyam put out a call for scholarship on state formation in South Asia that took on its “evolution over time” and “variation over space.”® Princes of the Mughal Empire wrestles with precisely this challenge. It asks the following: given the empire’s wobbly bases in the localities (to which a scholar such as Hasan aptly points), how did the empire successfully manage relations with so many communities, over so vast an area, for its just under two hundred years of effective rule? Of what was the imperial fabric (or spider’s web) woven, over the many decades before the empire’s collapse into a patchwork of regional successor states? This book demonstrates that such questions can be usefully explored by focusing on how the dynasty’s princes built and sustained their power in the long years leading up to the inevitable succession struggles.
The past century has produced a large number of biographies and article-length treatments of Mughal princes. None of them consider the role that princes may have played in forging Mughal power.As a result, such crucial princely activities as building a household or cultivating networks of support have been almost completely ignored, never mind considered within a broader framework of conversations about Mughal state formation. More generally, other scholars of the Mughal Empire have also overlooked the distinctive role of princes in the life of the empire. And yet, as I will argue, from the day that princes were born, and for the duration of their lives as princes, they were critical actors on the Mughal stage. Their centrality ultimately derived from the competitive political energy that framed Mughal succession struggles over the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Especially after the 1580s and Emperor Akbar’s decision to no longer grant his sons semi-independent territories, the rules of this contest were simple and are best summed up by the terse Persian phrase: ya takht, ya takhta (either throne or funeral bier).^^ And it was indeed to the throne or until their deaths that gener¬ ations of princes scrambled to establish loyal followings, accrue wealth and influence, and build their political power and military strength. They knew that failure to engage would not only mean loss of the Mughal throne but also certain death.
Against the backdrop of a hyper-competitive and open-ended system of succession, royal princes were celebrated and carefully cultivated from the very moment of their birth. Given that every prince was a potential emperor, broad similarities marked their early education, their access to powerful noblemen, and their visibility at the imperial court. Most impor¬ tantly, however, young princes received early and unrelenting exposure to the psychological uncertainty that accompanied an open-ended system of succession. Knowing that their lives ultimately depended on their own achievements, networks of support, and their ability to out-maneuver their male relatives, Mughal princes were trained from early on to be independent minded, tough, and ruthless. These traits would be especially important as they approached adulthood.
There were two signs of a prince’s transition to adult status: the first was his marriage; the second was an official right to share in the empire’s financial resources. Prior to 1585, this latter moment had been marked by the grant of a semi-independent princely territory (often referred to by modern scholars as an appanage^^). After 1585, a prince’s adult status was recognized by the grant of a formal rank (mansab) in the imperial hier¬ archy with concomitant access to income via landholdings (jagirs) that were reshuffled every few years. Adult status led to an explosion in the size of princely households. Some part of the growth was linked to the infusion of large numbers of women and eunuchs who were expected to take care of an emerging domestic establishment. The other key element was the indi¬ viduals with administrative and military skills whose overriding responsi¬ bility was to enable the prince to collect the financial resources promised to him. The search for money consumed an increasing part of an adult prince’s attention. After the 1580s, with the end of princely appanages, that task got much harder as princes and their jagirs were regularly trans¬ ferred around the empire.
If princely households reinforced and extended the imperial bureauc¬ racy’s efforts to improve its administrative mechanisms, they also allowed the prince to act as a military leader in his own right. With his household’s help and resources, a prince could organize imperial campaigns, storm well-guarded forts, and protect convoys carrying tribute or tax payments. Since intra-familial conflict (whether in the form of princely rebellions or wars of succession) was a permanent threat, a princely household was in perpetual readiness to fight other princely households or even the emper¬ or’s imperial establishment.
As might be expected, princes were always on the lookout for important or talented individuals and groups to recruit into their households. Preference was often accorded to men not already linked to competing princes or the emperor. Thus, over the course of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, princely households provided a vital avenue for social mobility in the Mughal Empire. Through them, a wide range of political, ethnic, and class outsiders were first assimilated, acculturated, and socialized within the Mughal system. Following a successful accession, many in the victorious prince’s circle would be inducted into the imperial nobility, a practice that simultaneously replenished the nobility’s ranks and provided a counterweight to holdovers from the previous reign.
Princes never stopped building alliances with notable individuals and groups beyond their households. With the end of fixed territorial appa¬ nages in the 1580s, these efforts took on a more plainly imperial character. Rather than focusing on single or even contiguous territories, princes now had to compete and cultivate friends and allies across the entire expanse of the empire. From the very start of this era, Akbar urged his sons to venture forth and cultivate their influence. Akbar not only connected his young sons with powerful people in and beyond the Mughal court, he also experimented with sending them on temporary and varied assignments.
Under Akbar, too, the empire shifted from an Islam-imbued to a more pluralistic project. As such, after the 1580s, Mughal princes approached each and every group, regardless of religion, as potentially useful in their alliance building efforts. Relentless political competition within the impe¬ rial family ensured that princely efforts rarely lost momentum. They continued to break new ground in their attempts to woo and nurture individuals and groups that had either been frozen out of the Mughal system or disenfranchised by political shifts within it. Simultaneously, since political loyalty and support could never be assumed and was always being contested, princes were constantly renewing earlier claims to friend¬ ship. One crucial impact of such frenetic activity was this: imperial polit¬ ical, social, and monetary resources remained in constant circulation, which created powerful and widespread investment not only in individual princes but also in the dynasty as a whole.
Between Akbar’s and Aurangzeb’s reigns, imperial expansion into new regions was often accompanied or immediately followed by local recruit¬ ment drives by princes in their capacity as governors, generals or even rebels. Inasmuch as administrative and political consolidation in the north¬ ern heartlands was crucial to the construction of the empire, it was the almost unique ability of the Mughals to accommodate and harness the energies of formerly nonsubject and even oppositional groups along the edges of their growing realm that enabled and indicated the empire’s vitality throughout much of the seventeenth century. By understanding these transactions, which often occurred in the context of princely initia¬ tives aimed at winning friends and allies, we may begin to comprehend the empire’s reach even in regions where its administrative institutions were weak or nonexistent. As might be expected, starting with Salim/Jahangir’s accession in 1605 and continuing until Mu‘azzam/Bahadur Shah in 1707, the best “networked” prince inevitably became the next Mughal emperor.
The decision by an emperor to grant a prince full adult status (sometime between the late teen years and the mid-twenties) led to an intensification of efforts to build a powerful household and gather allies around the prince’s person. As one contemporary observer noted, “when these princes once leave the paternal house, they work and scheme to make themselves friends. They write secretly to the Hindu princes and the Mahomedan generals, promising them that when they become king they will raise their allowances ... if any of these princes mounts the throne, he fancies that they will have been faithful to him.”^"^ Adulthood also imposed important limits on the emperor’s capacity to control the actions of his son. Inevitably, emperors found themselves on a collision course with their princes as the latter moved to assert their own political identities and/or sought to protect resources they considered vital to their political future. At this point, we begin to see instances of princely disobedience. An emperor’s ability to respond effectively to these challenges was a sign of his continued political relevance. An inability or unwillingness to assert his authority was liable to be read as a mark of weakness, which could encourage more direct political challenges. Humayun faced precisely this predicament vis-a-vis his refractory brothers. Ultimately, emperors had to strike a fine balance between some oversight of male relatives and undue restraint of their activities. Allowing for some measure of princely dissent and disobedience was a crucial safety valve that prevented the Mughal Empire from being constantly wracked by destructive princely rebellions.
The decision by princes to rebel was always a difficult one. A rebellion taxed both the loyalty of supporters and household resources. Worse yet, a prince could lose his life in the course of a rebellion or suffer physical mutilation and permanent imprisonment as punishment. A prince who rebelled was thus a prince who believed he had no other choice. All princely rebellions point to the despair that fueled them. Prince Akbar’s letter to his father Aurangzeb following the onset of his rebellion in i68i provides an excellent example of a grievance that might drive a prince over the edge. It also offers the clearest and most poignant reflection on Mughal succession in our available sources. After the requisite opening salutations, Akbar writes:
The duty of a father is to bring up, educate, and guard the health and life of his son. Praise be to God, [that] up till now I have left no stone unturned in service and obedience, but how can I enumerate the favors of your Majesty?... it is brought to the notice [of Aurangzeb] that to help and side with the youngest son is the foremost duty of a revered father always and everywhere, but your Majesty, leaving aside the love of all the other sons, has bestowed the title of ‘Shah’ upon the eldest son [i.e., Mu‘azzam] and declared him the heir-apparent. How can this action be justified? Every son has got an equal right in his father’s property. Which religion permits preference of one over the others?'^
Here, Prince Akbar suggests that all princes had equal rights to the empire, and that an emperor ought to honor those rights by not favoring any particular son. Or, if he did favor a son, it should be the youngest or weakest one, in the spirit of egalitarianism. In the post-1580 imagination of a single empire wherein rulership demanded that every royal prince must fight, the ethics of impartiality was of great importance. When this principle was viewed as repeatedly flouted, a prince was more than likely to rebel.
Princely rebellions were deeply unsettling affairs for the empire. Beyond highlighting the brittleness of the political order, they fundamentally ques¬ tioned an emperor’s right to rule. The system was unforgiving, and aging or ill emperors were especially vulnerable to challenges. As every emperor from Akbar to Aurangzeb could attest, there was no question of resting on past laurels. Turning back a princely challenge meant passing a crucial test of continuing imperial and political relevance. Success demanded that an embattled emperor unsheathe the full panoply of weapons at his disposal. Through active military operations, attempts to root out enemies within the Mughal establishment, initiatives aimed at winning over influential individuals and groups, and efforts to consolidate or strengthen the admin¬ istrative machinery of the state, the emperor’s counteroffensive benefited long-term Mughal dynastic authority. Given that these efforts usually followed similar initiatives undertaken by rebellious princes, these com¬ plementary processes inadvertently helped entrench Mughal power across northern and central India. Besides drawing new groups into the ambit of Mughal politics, princely rebellions and the subsequent imperial response often tied formerly peripheral areas more closely to the imperial center. The intensification of Mughal control over Awadh and Bengal after the respective rebellions of Salim (in the early i6oos) and Khurram (a gener¬ ation later) corroborates this assertion. No matter the outcome of a partic¬ ular conflict between father and son, I argue, rebellions ultimately served to reinforce the foundations of dynastic power and authority.
If princely rebellions offered an important avenue for Mughal state formation, the wars of succession that followed the incapacitation or death of an emperor had similar effects as princes mobilized every con¬ ceivable political, military, and economic resource in their quest to be the next emperor. This book argues, however, that a competitive system of succession - especially when actual moments of struggle were well spaced and involved only a limited number of contenders - had other important consequences as well. These included forcing princes to articulate a vision of who they were and what they might bring to the empire as emperor. This proved especially true after the 1580s when princes were expected to compete against one another to rule a now indivisible empire. Invariably, the run-up to and the actual moment of a succession struggle was a fearful time for almost everyone, from the princes down to common individuals with no real stake in the outcome. But something concrete resulted from this period of apprehension, since it forged a bond that simultaneously refocused attention on the dynasty and confirmed its authority to rule.
Judging from the Mughal example, an open-ended system of succession required that certain broad conditions be in place. The first was the need to limit the number of princely contenders in any given generation. Toward this end, the Mughals moved over the course of the sixteenth century to curtail the right of males from collateral branches to lay claim to the imperial throne. As wars of succession became the primary mode for deciding the next emperor, the extermination of failed princely contenders also became a political necessity. There could be no second acts, lest these draw attention, energy, and resources away from the next and rising generation of princes. And yet, although defeated contenders for the throne were themselves destroyed, the Mughals generally refused to seek revenge against the myriad supporters and diverse networks that had fought for a defeated prince. Instead, new reigns were marked not only by the induction into the imperial hierarchy of large numbers of a victo¬ rious prince’s supporters but also by efforts to forgive and sometimes accommodate the aspirations of the vanquished. In the end, even as anew emperor settled into his job, the next generation of princes was gearing up to renew the cycle of princely competition.
Although this book’s main focus is the central role played by princes in Mughal state formation and Mughal imperial success, it also relates the story of the decline of the princely institution along with that of the dynasty’s political effectiveness. Scholars of Mughal India agree that the empire began to show signs of weakness in the last decades of the seventeenth century. They disagree, however, about the reasons behind that weakness. Of the many explanations offered, we can list here the most significant: nonstop and essentially fruitless campaigning in the Deccan from the 1680s onward ground down the dynasty’s military morale and administrative efficiency;^^ imperial attempts to extract additional reve¬ nues from previously lightly taxed frontier zones prompted tribal incur¬ sions that an overstretched empire could not crush; growing regional prosperity encouraged regional and local elites to obstruct financial trans¬ fers to the Mughal state and to manipulate the central authorities for their own purposes;^^ intellectual malaise vis-a-vis important scientific and technological developments in the West discouraged self-strengthening efforts;^^ Mughal pecuniary rapaciousness prompted peasant rebellions that ultimately consumed the empire;^” and Emperor Aurangzeb’s reli¬ gious intolerance toward the Hindu majority caused an anti-Mughal back¬ lash.Without discounting the likelihood that multiple factors combined to undermine the Mughals’ capacity to rule, I propose that the gradual sclerosis of the princely institution also had a devastating impact.
Starting in the mid-i68os, the princely institution came under increas¬ ing stress. Some of this was due to Aurangzeb’s willingness to sharpen political competition between different generations of princes as well as between princes and a small cluster of nonroyal nobles. Other factors urther exacerbated the downward slide of princely power, but they had less to do with Aurangzeb’s machinations and more with the structural troubles of the empire as a whole. With access to promised financial resources becoming more difficult after the i68os - largely because of a breakdown of law and order across the empire - princes increasingly found that they could not pay for their massive and complex households. As they tried to retrench, princes were forced to turn to Aurangzeb for help. He reacted sympathetically, perhaps seeing an opportunity to exert greater oversight over his growing number of heirs. Among his most consequential gestures of support was the transfer of large numbers of imperial officials into princely households, but this influx came at great cost to the cohesion and discipline of those households. As the capacity of princes to sustain large and independent households and alliances as well as to rebel against the emperor faded, so too did a crucial force in the dynasty’s political control of the empire.
SUCCESSION IN CONTEMPORANEOUS ISLAMIC EMPIRES
Although Princes of the Mughal Empire is not intended to be a compara¬ tive work, it is interesting to consider briefly the political trajectories of princes in two of the other great Islamic empires of the early modern period, namely the Ottoman and Safavid Empires, to see how distinct their experiences were from those of the Mughal Prince. Let us look at the Ottomans first.
As in the earliest period of the Mughal dynasty, princely brothers assisted the first Ottoman rulers as governors and military commanders. Following the reign of the third Ottoman ruler Murad I (r. 1362-89), however, and until the early 1600s, Ottoman succession was narrowed to the direct heirs of a reigning emperor. The throne also passed to whichever prince could defeat and kill his competitors inside the Ottoman royal family.Codifying these practices was an imperial decree issued by the ruler Mehmed II (r. 1444-6,1451-81) that simply stated: “For the welfare of the state, the one of my sons to whom God grants the sultanate may lawfully put his brothers to death. A majority of the ‘ulama’ consider this permissible.”^^ The Mughal system, as noted earlier, was never thus codified.
From the mid-seventeenth century onward, the Ottomans gradually moved to control princely competition. At first, this meant preventing all but the oldest son from taking up a provincial assignment during their father’s reign. After 1600, even the most senior prince was confined to the imperial court, thereby severely curtailing most opportunities to build independent political, economic, or social networks of power beyond the emperor’s gaze.^’ This transition dovetailed with another key develop¬ ment: the Ottomans abandoned the concept of father-to-son succession in favor of a system based on agnatic seniority. With this, the Ottomans put an end to intra-princely competition and the need for dynastic fratricide since brothers automatically succeeded one another. Such a dramatic shift away from a competitive and open-ended system of succession was echoed in the Safavid Empire around the same time.
Isma‘il I founded the Safavid dynasty in 1501. Like the Ottoman Empire, its early succession practices reflected Turco-Mongol-inspired ideas that vested imperial sovereignty in all male members of the royal clan or family. Succession-related struggles thus consumed the Safavid family, with princely revolts occurring, some princes being killed or mur¬ dered, and others exiled. Not until ‘Abbas I (r. 1588-1629), thought of as the greatest Safavid ruler, do we see a revamping of the dynasty’s succes¬ sion practices. Starting in the 1590s, ‘Abbas I moved to dramatically curtail the freedom of his heirs. Like his Ottoman counterparts, ‘Abbas confined his sons to the imperial court. According to Roger Savory, he also “went to extraordinary lengths to segregate his sons from political and military leaders in the state and his morbid suspiciousness caused him to lend too ready an ear to informers.”^*’ He thus killed or blinded three of his five adult sons (in 1615, 1621, and 1627). When he died, in a remarkable sea change from previous handovers, his eighteen-year-old grandson Sam Mirza (Safi I, r. 1629-42) ascended to the Safavid throne without a fight. Over the rest of the seventeenth century, the empire not only settled into a system of designated succession, but also a pattern of keeping princes imprisoned for the duration of their lives.
In trying to explain shifting Ottoman and Safavid succession practices, earlier generations of historians often focused on the psychological makeup of individual emperors.Although not entirely discounting the personal in their respective works, Leslie Peirce, Kathryn Babayan, and Stephen Dale remind us of the value of looking for broader answers.By highlighting shifting claims to political legitimacy in the sixteenth century, they offer crucial insights into why both the Ottoman and the Safavid Empires discarded open-ended systems of succession that were character¬ ized by free-roaming princes who fought one another to attain the throne.
The Ottomans and Safavids synthesized diverse political traditions to legitimize their rule, but one legitimizing principle that stands out in the early phases of both dynasties was the claim that their rulers were ghazis, Islamic warriors who fought against religious enemies. As Peirce notes, ghaza (the pursuit of religiously sanctioned warfare) was “an ideology that fit a frontier state of nomadic origin; it was an Islamic caique that suited a tribal society given to raiding and seeking booty, yet it provided a moral code and Islamic legal justification that could rally other elements in what was rapidly becoming an increasingly complex society.Yet ultimately, the imperatives driving ghaza became difficult to reconcile with the emerging desire for settled imperial rule and a balance of military power that, especially in the case of the Ottomans in the Balkans, was slowly shifting against them.
For both the Ottomans and the Safavids, moves away from the ghaza ideal led to a new focus on the personal piety of the monarchs along with their guardianship and patronage of Sunni (in the case of the Ottomans) or Shihte (for the Safavids) law, religious personnel, and institutions. With a different ideological sanction in place, it became possible for sixteenthcentury polemicists such as the Ottoman Lutfi Pasha to argue that princes simply inherited the right to rule versus having to forge it through battle and conquest.^° As the need for forceful and militaristic kings ebbed with mili¬ tary retrenchment, so too did Ottoman and Safavid willingness to afford princes the administrative or military experience necessary to maintain expansionist ambitions. Both the Ottomans and Safavids filled the political vacuum left by the removal of princes by empowering small constellations of nobles who were generally either ethnic or religious outsiders.
Like the Ottomans and the Safavids, the Mughals drew on multiple and sometimes overlapping traditions - Turco-Mongol, Islamic-Prophetic, Islamic-mystical, secular-Persian - to fashion an ideology of dynastic legitimacy.^^ In their absorption of Turco-Mongol ideals, special attention was paid to the notion of the empire as primarily legitimated through warfare and conquest.^^ Although the Mughals only sporadically con¬ cerned themselves with the notion of ghaza - and how could they when the vast majority of their subjects were non-Muslims and their enemies primarily Muslim? - they actively subscribed to the nonsectarian idea that they had a divine mandate for universal dominionT** This view was articu¬ lated in everything from the reign names of emperors Jahangir (World Conqueror), Shah Jahan (Ruler of the World), and Aurangzeb (whose regnal title was ‘Alamgir or Universe Conqueror) to the occasional deploy¬ ment of visual markers such as world globes in imperial portraits^’
Most significantly, this mandate manifested itself in a commitment to imperial expansion. Indeed, it was a rare year in the sixteenth and seven¬ teenth centuries when the Mughals did not field an imperial army to chisel away at the internal or external frontiers of their empire. Until the early eighteenth century, the Mughal army was virtually invincible, and the dynasty faced no significant enemies either in South Asia or on its external frontiers. Against this backdrop of military strength and continued expan¬ sionism, no one questioned a system that nurtured active princes who could bring substantial political, military, and administrative experience to bear as emperors.
Arguably, Mughal tolerance for obstreperous princes, tumultuous rebellions, and succession struggles did not come only from the ideology and practical considerations of military expansion; rapidly rising wealth and economic expansion across seventeenth-century South Asia also accommodated it. In contrast to the seventeenth-century Ottoman and Safavid Empires, the Mughal Empire continued to experience rapid economic growth thanks to an ever-increasing influx of New World silver, India’s centrality as the workshop of the early modern world economy, and a dramatic commercial revolution. Among other things, this economic expansion was expressed in the increasing availability of credit; rising importance of long-distance trade; increasing manufacture of such highvalue products as cotton and linen textiles, refined sugar, and indigo; and the expansion of agriculture and urbanization.^*’ These developments simultaneously presented opportunities and challenges for the Mughals.
In terms of opportunities, increasing wealth obviously held out the promise of constructing a larger and more complex state. On the down¬ side, it also threatened to create new power nodes - represented, for example, by rising merchants and religious or landed elites - whose legiti¬ macy did not necessarily rely on an already existing political order. The greatest challenge for the Mughals thus lay in either harnessing or crushing these potentially destabilizing forces in the fulfillment of their own imperial aspirations.
Inasmuch as the Mughal dynasty, like its Middle Eastern counterparts, depended on political and administrative mechanisms to realize its ambi¬ tions, India’s sheer wealth, geographic size, and social diversity presented even greater challenges. This is another area in which the Mughal experi¬ ence is distinct from that of the Ottomans or Safavids, and in which the efforts of generations of Mughal princes to build their own power come into play. As long as the princes’ capacity to build alliances and tie rising groups to the dynasty exceeded the cost of challenges posed by their political ambitions, the Mughal system never had any reason to waver in its commitment to free-roaming princes or the notion that the empire belonged to whoever could wrest it for himself. Nowhere is this better expressed than in Emperor Jahangir’s great bewilderment - “This was astonishing news!” - upon hearing that ‘Abbas I of the Safavid dynasty had murdered his oldest son. The subject troubled Jahangir so much that he returned to it fifteen months later, in 1616, in a conversation with a visiting Safavid ambassador. Implicit in Jahangir’s memoirs is the sense that ‘Abbas had acted improperly in protecting his imperial authority so fiercely against what Jahangir saw as the acceptable and perhaps necessary give-and-take of intra-familial competition.^^ The Mughal “failure” to institute ordered rules of succession until the dynasty’s collapse was immi¬ nent in the late 1710s seems to have been based on an unstated under¬ standing that an open-ended mode of succession had served its imperial aspirations best in the vibrant political, economic, and social environment of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century South Asia. It follows that the moment princes failed to act as hinges between the dynasty and society, they lost their place in the political life of the empire.
SOURCES AND STRUCTURE
In this book, I have combined a longitudinal with a chronological organ¬ ization. With the former, I identify key themes in the story of the princely institution: the creation of princely households; the ceaseless efforts to cultivate networks of friends and allies; the inevitable princely disobedi¬ ence and occasional rebellion; and, finally, wars of succession. With the latter, I identify three main periods in the history of the princely institution: the early period (1504-56), the high period (1556-1680S), and the late period (1680S-1707). Following this introductory chapter, a prologue traces the shifts in Mughal succession practices in each of these periods. Whereas two of the remaining six chapters focus on the early and late periods respectively, between them are four chapters that examine princely households, alliance building, rebellion, and succession during the high period of Mughal rule. I thus demonstrate that in the thriving middle years of the empire, the princely institution too was at its zenith.
Chapter i, the Prologue, undertakes a detailed discussion of Mughal succession practices between the early sixteenth century and the end of Emperor Aurangzeb’s reign in 1707. Whereas Central Asian norms, such as allowing any male from the extended Mughal family to compete for political power, largely dominated before 1556, Emperor Akbar (r. 1556-1605) conclusively excluded all but those in his direct line from vying for the throne. Akbar also ended the practice of granting appanages to adult princes. Although subsequent rulers including Jahangir and Shah Jahan attempted moves toward a system of quasidesignated succession, their efforts failed. Aurangzeb’s reign witnessed an increasingly crowded princely arena that created fundamental prob¬ lems for an open-ended system of succession. Highlighting these and other subtleties of the Mughal system of succession, this chapter lays the foundation for the rest of the book.
The early period, from the time of Babur’s conquest of Kabul in 1504 to the end of Humayun’s reign in 15 56 is the focus of Chapter 2. Here I show how the early Central Asian-inspired corporate-style clan dynasty invested power across the entire Mughal family. As the aspiration to empire emerged, and as clan gave way to more imperial conceits, the semi¬ independent princely appanages became an increasingly intolerable threat. As this chapter demonstrates, we see early traces of this shift under Emperor Humayun, who sought to articulate a language of obedience and showed diminishing tolerance for challenges from other royals, includ¬ ing his brothers. The conflict between Humayun and his brother Mirza Kamran sets up the transition to a reconstituted princely institution under Akbar.
Chapter 3 is focused on the theme of the princely household as it functioned at its zenith. It describes a Mughal prince’s earliest relation¬ ships, his coming-of-age rituals, and his never-ending efforts (and their impact on the empire) to build and fund a powerful household. Most examples are drawn from the period between 1585 and the 1680s. I argue that households often became microcosms of the empire’s diversity and a place in which generations of successful imperial officials and nobles were first exposed to imperial norms and to a Persian-based and Islamicate milieu. This chapter also discusses the invaluable administrative and polit¬ ical experience Mughal princes garnered through managing their households.
Chapter 4 moves beyond household relationships to consider wider ties cultivated by princes with the empire’s powerful political, economic, and social actors. Although often less intimate and less reliable than household relationships, they nonetheless were crucial not only for a prince’s ambi¬ tion to succeed to the throne but also for the dynasty’s ability to draw upwardly mobile regional leaders and groups under its authority. As a consequence of Akbar’s decision to discontinue the institution of princely appanages after the 1580s, princes had to look to the entire expanse of the empire to build their networks of support. This chapter demonstrates that between the early seventeenth century and the first decade of the eighteenth century, the best-networked prince always won the throne.
Princely efforts to build strong households and alliances invariably led to tensions with one another and with the emperor. Chapter 5 explores nonviolent princely dissent and also violent princely rebellions. Every Mughal emperor, barring the founder Babur, had to contend with one or more rebellions over the course of his reign. Although historians have generally viewed rebellions as a scourge that distracted and weakened the empire, this chapter argues how they in fact extended a Mughalcentered political culture and deepened Mughal power.
Chapter 6 explores the succession struggle that marked every transition of Mughal power after Akbar’s reign. It details a prince’s preparations gathering men, material, and intelligence and preemptively killing rivals and then describes how newly crowned emperors labored ex post facto to assert the inevitability of their success. New emperors made grand gestures of forgiveness, displaying benevolence toward supporters of a defeated princely opponent, but their newly ennobled courtiers were largely drawn from the ranks of what used to be their own princely retainers. In this manner, the Mughal nobility was infused with fresh blood every few decades, evidencing an incorporative dynamism that, in good times, char¬ acterized the success of the empire as a whole.
The seventh chapter focuses on the last decades of Emperor Aurangzeb’s reign (between the 1680s and 1707) and argues that the princely institution began to weaken during this period. One of the greatest difficulties for princes was a growing financial crisis that undermined their capacity to staff their households. The effect on discipline, cohesion, and strength was devastating. An unprecedented number of royal competitors together with the rise of a powerful cadre of nobles who no longer felt compelled to support one or another prince added to princely woes. These developments had disastrous consequences for the power of the Mughal Prince as well as for the dynasty as a whole.
The Conclusion focuses on what transpired between Aurangzeb’s death in 1707 and the final move away from a competitive system of succession in 1719. The phenomena outlined in the previous chapter - weakened princely households and the inability of princes to form alliances on profit¬ able terms with the most powerful elements in the empire - made for a new political environment. The book concludes by considering how postMughal successor states and elites came to fill the vacuum left by the eclipse of the Mughal prince.
Princes of the Mughal Empire encompasses eight generations of Mughal royals, beginning with Humayun and his brothers and ending with the great-grandsons of Aurangzeb. All counted, this book directly refers to an often bewildering cast of forty-one princes. Most are brothers or sons of an emperor; in a much smaller number of cases, they are nephews or more distant relatives of an emperor. Far from telling the full stories of each, however, the primary focus is on the lives of about a dozen of the most critical (and often better documented) players. To aid the reader and avoid confusion, I provide a genealogical tree indicating the emperors and their regnal dates, pre- and post-accession names (if these changed), and the death dates of all other princes. To further assist the reader, I have compiled a timeline of key events between 1504 and 1719.
This study has drawn on an extensive archive. It includes European traveler accounts as well as the records of the English East India Company. However, the book is primarily based on Persian sources from the Mughal period, both published and archival, including officially sanctioned court chronicles, privately written historical accounts, imperial memoirs, admin¬ istrative documents, biographical dictionaries written by imperial noblemen and religious scholars, collections of imperial and noble correspondence, Sufi hagiographies, and local and regional histories. By far the most valuable archival resource, however, has been a massive and thus far underutilized collection called the Akhbarat-i Darbar-i Mu'alla (News Bulletins of the Exalted Court).Without access to this collection - thousands of daily reports of the Mughal court - I could have never come to grips with the breadth of difficulties buffeting the princely institution at the end of the seventeenth and the beginning of the eighteenth centuries. Nor could I have offered an intimate portrait of the social life of a prince and his household.
In September 2010, the Allahabad High Court in northern India ruled that both Hindus and Muslims would henceforward share the contested site on which the demolished Babri Mosque once stood. Hundreds of thousands of Indian troops and police were deployed in several towns and cities across the country in anticipation of violence from one side or the other. Thankfully, it did not occur. This is undoubtedly not the final judgment on who has a right to the site or what can be built on it. This episode none¬ theless reminds us that across South Asia, history remains a lived experi¬ ence. Nowhere is this more so than in people’s various and tortured relationship to the region’s Mughal past. If this book can offer new ways to appreciate Mughal imperial success beyond an impoverished boilerplate history of the Mughal/Muslim as “foreigner,” “outsider,” and “despoiler,” it will have been well worth my efforts.
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