Mughal Quotes

India has always had a strange way with her conquerors. In defeat, she beckons them in, then slowly seduces, assimilates and transforms them.

This great Mughal Emperor [Akbar] was illiterate; he could neither read nor write. However, that had not stopped Akbar from cultivating the acquaintance of the most learned and cultured poets, authors, musicians, and architects of the time - relying solely on his remarkable memory during conversations with them.

But Mehrunnisa did not know then, would never know, by giving her blessings to this marriage she had set into progress a chain of events that would eventually erase her name from history's pages. Or that Arjumand would become the only Mughal woman posterity would easily recognize. Docile, seemingly tractable and troublesome Arjumand would eclipse even Mehrunnisa, cast her in a shadow...because of the monument Khurram would build in Arjumand's memory - the Taj Mahal.

The histories of Islamic fundamentalism and European imperialism have very often been closely, and dangerously, intertwined. In a curious but very concrete way, the fundamentalists of both faiths have needed each other to reinforce each other’s prejudices and hatreds. The venom of one provides the lifeblood of the other.

During Aurangzeb’s rule, which lasted for forty-nine years from 1658 onwards, there were many phases during which Pandits were persecuted. One of his fourteen governors, Iftikhar Khan, who ruled for four years from 1671, was particularly brutal towards the community. It was during his rule that a group of Pandits approached the ninth Sikh Guru, Tegh Bahadur, in Punjab and begged him to save their faith. He told them to return to Kashmir and tell the Mughal rulers that if they could convert him (Tegh Bahadur), all Kashmiri Pandits would accept Islam. This later led to the Guru’s martyrdom, but the Pandits were saved.

The honour of Mughal men was not as irretrievably bound to the sexual chastity of their women.

The battle of Panipat was fought for more than what is usually imagined. It was fought by a people in the far south of India, on behalf of the Mughal Emperor, for the defence of India.

So vast is India, and so uniquely resilient and deeply rooted are her intertwined social and religious institutions, that all foreign intruders are sooner or later either shaken off or absorbed.

For the British after 1857, the Indian Muslim became an almost subhuman creature, to be classified in unembarrassedly racist imperial literature alongside such other despised and subject specimens, such as Irish Catholics or ‘the Wandering Jew’.

At the beginning of the eighteenth century, as the British economic historian Angus Maddison has demonstrated, India’s share of the world economy was 23 per cent, as large as all of Europe put together. (It had been 27 per cent in 1700, when the Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb’s treasury raked in £100 million in tax revenues alone.) By the time the British departed India, it had dropped to just over 3 per cent. The reason was simple: India was governed for the benefit of Britain. Britain’s rise for 200 years was financed by its depredations in India.

It is good to recall that three centuries ago, around the year 1660, two of the greatest monuments of modern history were erected, one in the West and one in the East; St. Paul's Cathedral in London and the Taj Mahal in Agra. Between them, the two symbolize, perhaps better than words can describe, the comparative level of architectural technology, the comparative level of craftsmanship and the comparative level of affluence and sophistication the two cultures had attained at that epoch of history. But about the same time there was also created—and this time only in the West—a third monument, a monument still greater in its eventual import for humanity. This was Newton's Principia, published in 1687. Newton's work had no counterpart in the India of the Mughals.

There is something very wrong with a people who consider that the greatest that would ever be has already been, and that the best they can do is to duplicate the past.

Indeed, the Mughal women will be better educated than most of their contemporaries anywhere in the world.

Because the Mughals did not follow a system of primogeniture, any Mughal prince, sufficiently ambitious and talented, could hope to ascend the throne one day.

The outbreak revealed the surprising degree to which the Mughal court was still regarded across northern India not as some sort of foreign Muslim imposition – as some, especially on the Hindu right wing, look upon the Mughals today – but instead as the principal source of political legitimacy, and therefore the natural centre of resistance against British colonial rule.

Given the somewhat dubious and sectarian reputation of madrasas today, it is worth remembering that many of the most brilliant Hindu thinkers, including, for example, the great reformer Ram Mohan Roy (1772–1833), were the products of madrasa educations.

Whatever may be said about Mountbatten’s tactics or the machinations of Patel, their achievement remains remarkable. Between them, and in less than a year, it may be argued that these two men achieved a larger India, more closely integrated, than had 90 years of the British raj, 180 years of the Mughal Empire, or 130 years of Asoka and the Maurya rulers.

They were pragmatic about women who ‘fell’ to an enemy, unlike their contemporaries, the Rajputs, who invested so heavily in their women’s sexual chastity that death, through sati, was preferred to ‘loss of honour’ to an enemy.

Opening lines of The Great Indian Novel narrated as a modern day MahaBharata. They tell me India is an underdeveloped country. They attend seminars, appear on television, even come to see me, creasing their eight-hundred-rupee suits and clutching their moulded plastic briefcases, to announce in tones of infinite understanding that India has yet to develop. Stuff and nonsense, of course. “These are the kind of fellows who couldn’t tell their kundalini from a decomposing earthworm, and I don’t hesitate to tell them so. I tell them they have no knowledge of history and even less of their own heritage. I tell them that if they would only read the Mahabarata and the Ramayana, study the Golden Ages of the Mauryas and the Guptas and even of those Muslim chaps the Mughals, they would realize that India in not an underdeveloped country but a highly developed country in an advanced stage of decay.” They laugh about me pityingly and shift from one foot to the other, unable to conceal their impatience, and I tell them that, in fact, everything in India in over-developed, particularly the social structure, the bureaucracy, the political process, the financial system, the university network and, for that matter, the women. Cantankerous old man, I them thinking, as they make their several exists

Akbar proposed that ‘all religions are either equally true or equally illusory’.

Love within my being. You lived with me, breath of my breath, Being in my being, nor left my side; But now the wheel of Time has turned And you are gone – no joys abide. You

Those who resent the mutilation of Indian culture by the British Raj inadvertently sanctify the legacies of the Mughal Empire and the conquering sultanate of Delhi.

Today, in a world fatally fractured along religious lines, it seems inconceivable that in the sixteenth century an emperor worked so hard to promote religious harmony and reverence for all faiths.

It was as if this early promiscuous mingling of races and ideas, modes of dress and ways of living, was something that was on no one’s agenda and suited nobody’s version of events. All sides seemed, for different reasons, to be slightly embarrassed by this moment of crossover, which they preferred to pretend had never happened. It is, after all, always easier to see things in black and white.

Her conclusion was that the Mughal state was unusually extractive and appropriated 56.7 per cent of the total produce. Her research focused on five north Indian provinces: Agra, Delhi, Lahore, Allahabad and Avadh. The total

Mummyji, however, is stuck at Mughal-e-Azam. She has raised her daughter to be independent and liberal, because that was the cue she got from others around her. She thinks of the freedom she allows her daughter as a short vacation.

One of his fourteen governors, Iftikhar Khan, who ruled for four years from 1671, was particularly brutal towards the community. It was during his rule that a group of Pandits approached the ninth Sikh Guru, Tegh Bahadur, in Punjab and begged him to save their faith. He told them to return to Kashmir and tell the Mughal rulers that if they could convert him (Tegh Bahadur), all Kashmiri Pandits would accept Islam. This later led to the Guru’s martyrdom, but the Pandits were saved.

With no small amount of trepidation, we walked alone past a colony of black-faced monkeys we’d been told were extremely dangerous. We avoided eye contact and certainly didn’t take pictures. And dearly wished our old Sherpa bag-carrying matey was nearby. We visited Gandhi’s tomb. We saw saris being printed and hand-knotted carpets being fabricated and negotiated a decent price for a small hand-crafted rug of Mughal design that, as long as we keep the certificate of authenticity safe, should appreciated in value. We witnessed poverty beyond poverty, with ‘untouchables’ so poor that they are actually outside the caste system, and who can’t even afford to live in the unsanitary slums described as 'unfit for human habitation.

But in the years to come, as Muslim prestige and learning sank, and Hindu confidence, wealth, education and power increased, Hindus and Muslims would grow gradually apart, as British policies of divide and rule found willing collaborators among the chauvinists of both faiths. The rip in the closely woven fabric of Delhi’s composite culture, opened in 1857, slowly widened into a great gash, and at Partition in 1947 finally broke in two. As the Indian Muslim elite emigrated en masse to Pakistan, the time would soon come when it would be almost impossible to imagine that Hindu sepoys could ever have rallied to the Red Fort and the standard of a Muslim emperor, joining with their Muslim brothers in an attempt to revive the Mughal Empire.

The story of a family where three generations drifted between Christianity and Islam and back again, between suits and salvars, Mughal Hyderabad and Regency London, seemed to raise huge questions: about Britishness and the nature of Empire, about faith, and about personal identity; indeed, about how far all of these mattered, and were fixed and immutable – or how far they were in fact flexible, tractable, negotiable. For once it seemed that the normal steely dualism of Empire – between rulers and ruled, imperialists and subalterns, colonisers and the colonised – had broken down. The easy labels of religion and ethnicity and nationalism, slapped on by generations of historians, turned out, at the very least, to be surprisingly unstable.

Although a Bahadur Shah Zafar road still survives in Delhi, as indeed do roads named after all the other Great Mughals, for many Indians today, rightly or wrongly, the Mughals are still perceived as it suited the British to portray them in the imperial propaganda that they taught in Indian schools after 1857: as sensual, decadent, temple-destroying invaders – something that was forcefully and depressingly demonstrated by the whole episode of the demoliton of the Baburi Masjid at Ayodhya in 1992.

So removed had the British now become from their Indian subjects, and so dismissive were they of Indian opinion, that they had lost all ability to read the omens around them or to analyse their own position with any degree of accuracy. Arrogance and imperial self-confidence had diminished the desire to seek accurate information or gain any real knowledge of the state of the country.

Whenever the English see me, they try to determine what kind of story they know me from,’ Ramy said. ‘Either I’m a dirty thieving lascar, or I’m a servant in some nabob’s house. And I realized in Yorkshire that it’s easier if they think I’m a Mughal prince.

I was saddened to find it in such a state- no, no more than saddened, I was shamed. This was where I came from, this was my provenance, and it smacked of lowliness. But as I reacclimatized and my surroundings once again became familiar, it occurred to me that the house had not changed in my absence. I had changed. I was looking about me with the eyes of a foreigner, but that particular type of entitled and unsympathetic American who so annoyed me when I encountered him in the classrooms and workplaces of your country's elite. This realization angered me; staring at my reflection in the speckled glass of bathroom mirror I resolved to exorcise the unwelcome sensibility by which I had become possessed. It was only after so doing that I saw my house properly again, appreciating its enduring grandeur, its unmistakable personality and idiosyncratic charm. Mughal miniatures and ancient carpets graced its reception rooms; an excellent library abutted its veranda. It was far from impoverished; indeed, it was rich with history. I wondered how I could ever have been so ungenerous- and so blind- to have thought otherwise, and I was disturbed by what this implied about myself: that I was a man lacking in substance and hence easily influenced by even a short sojourn in the company of others.

Punch’ being of course an Indian word, arriving in the English language via the Hindustani panch (five), a reference to the number of ingredients for the drink, which traditionally were (according to Hobson Jobson) ‘arrack, sugar, lime-juice, spice and water’.

On another occasion, when a party of two hundred Muslims turned up at the Palace demanding to be allowed to slaughter cows – holy to Hindus – at ‘Id, Zafar told them in a ‘decided and angry tone that the religion of the Musalmen did not depend upon the sacrifice of cows’.

India has always had a strange way with her conquerors. In defeat, she beckons them in, then slowly seduces, assimilates and transforms them. Over the centuries, many powers have defeated Indian armies; but none has ever proved immune to this capacity of the subcontinent to somehow reverse the current of colonisation, and to mould those who attempt to subjugate her. So vast is India, and so uniquely resilient and deeply rooted are her intertwined social and religious institutions, that all foreign intruders are sooner or later either shaken off or absorbed.

The bankers and merchants of Bengal who sustained Siraj ud-Daula’s regime had finally turned against him and united with the disaffected parts of his own military; now they sought to bring in the mercenary troops of the East India Company to help depose him. This was something quite new in Indian history: a group of Indian financiers plotting with an international trading corporation to use its own private security force to overthrow a regime they saw threatening the income they earned from trade.60 This was not part of any imperial masterplan. In fact, the EIC men on the ground were ignoring their strict instructions from London, which were only to repulse French attacks and avoid potentially ruinous wars with their Mughal hosts. But seeing opportunities for personal enrichment as well as political and economic gain for the Company, they dressed up the conspiracy in colours that they knew would appeal to their masters and presented the coup as if it were primarily aimed at excluding the French from Bengal for ever.*

Unlike his studious father, fascinated by the occult, Akbar can never be made to sit and study, preferring by far the company of his racing pigeons, dogs, horses and companions in arms. He never will learn to read and will remain effectively illiterate, the only Mughal padshah to be so, possibly due to his hyperactive nature exacerbated by extreme dyslexia.

Delhi was once a paradise, Where Love held sway and reigned; But its charm lies ravished now And only ruins remain. No

When we don’t have way to express our feelings then at odds in choosing way and every path of life shows gloomy image.

Sorrow is inevitable. Hope is optional.

The world would have become Jannat if Instagram users would have followed 10% of what they propagate in reels and stories.

of the great cities of the world, only Rome, Istanbul and Cairo can even begin to rival Delhi for the sheer volume and density of historic remains.

Most men, however brave, have some anxiety or fear in them.

The Rahimi is one of the largest vessels of any kind to sail the Indian seas.

It is Seems That Sunday is free Day .. But we hv to do LoT's of works .. as compared to other days.. Then why it is Most Worse thing abt Sunday ... To Know tomorrow is Monday :-p

The songbirds chirped her poetry through the cracks of his broken dreams

Every sword that pricked us ignited our loyalty for one another

It is as if the Victorians succeeded in colonising not only India but also, more permanently, our imaginations, to the exclusion of all other images of the Indo – British encounter.

The three great armies of the Mughal world had come together to defeat the Company and expel it from India. When instead it was the Mughals that were defeated, the Company was left the dominant military force in north-east India. Buxar confirmed the Company’s control of Bengal and the coast and opened the way for them to extend their influence far inland to the west.

but we did not come into India, as they did, at the head of great armies, with the avowed intention of subjugating the country. We crept in as humble barterers, whose existence depended on the bounty and favour of the lieutenants of the kings of Delhi; and the ‘generosity’ we have shown was but a small acknowledgement of the favours his ancestors had conferred to our race.

Clive and his colleagues had intended to do little more than re-establish British trade on a favourable footing and to ensure the accession of a more friendly Nawab. But what they had in fact done was fatally and permanently to undermine the authority of the Nawabs, bringing chaos to what had been up to that point the most peaceful and profitable part of the old Mughal Empire.

From this point of view, Zafar could certainly be tried as a defeated enemy king; but he had never been a subject, and so could not possibly be called a rebel guilty of treason. Instead, from a legal point of view, a good case could be made that it was the East India Company which was the real rebel, guilty of revolt against a feudal superior to whom it had sworn allegiance for nearly a century.

It is through Gulbadan’s account, and only hers, that we can see Babur as a loving father, a tempestuous family man and a devoted husband. The fiery warrior or the marauding opportunist is for the other biographers.

An economically devastated Bengal became too weak to fight back the famine of 1769–70; it is estimated that 10 million, out of a population of 30 million, died. ‘In fact, British control of India started with a famine in Bengal in 1770 and ended in a famine – again in Bengal – in 1943. Working in the midst of the terrible 1877 famine that he estimated had cost another 10 million lives, Cornelius Walford calculated that in the 120 years of British rule there had been thirty-four famines in India, compared with only seventeen recorded famines in the entire previous two millennia,’ writes Robins. The Mughal response to famine had been good governance: embargo on food export, anti-speculation regulation, tax relief and free kitchens. If any merchant short-changed a peasant during a famine, the punishment was an equivalent weight in flesh from his body. That kept hoarding down.

mounted hordes from the steppes, such as the Scythians, Huns, Mongols, Turks, Magyars, Tatars, Mughals, and Manchus. For two thousand years these warriors deployed meticulously crafted composite bows (made from a glued laminate of wood, tendon, and horn) to run up immense body counts in their sackings and raids. These tribes were responsible for numbers 3, 5, 11, and 15 on the top-twenty-one list, and they take four of the top six slots in the population-adjusted ranking.

The consumption of wine was, thus, like the production of figural painting discussed above, prohibited in legal discourse, but positively valued in non-legal discourse—especially amongst those social and political elites who instituted and secured the structures of the state and the very legal institutions that regulated society. Thus, the Mughal Emperor, Bābur, writes disarmingly in his autobiography about his life-long struggle with the bottle,166 the diplomatic gifts of the

But Khair did not need such proof of her husband's love for her. Over and over again, James had risked everything for her. Most reationshps in life can survive - or not - without being put to any real crucial, fundamental test. It was James's fate for his love to be tested not once, but four times...At each stage he could easily have washed his hands off his teenage lover. Each time he chose to remain true to her. That, not the words of any will, was the evidence she could cling to.

Mohenjo-daro was one of the chief cities of the Indus Valley civilisation, which flourished in the third millennium BC and was destroyed around 1900 BC. None of India’s pre-British rulers – neither the Mauryas, nor the Guptas, nor the Delhi sultans, nor the great Mughals – had given the ruins a second glance. But a British archaeological survey took notice of the site in 1922. A British team then excavated it, and discovered the first great civilisation of India, which no Indian had been aware of.

For instance, detractors trumpet that Aurangzeb destroyed certain temples without acknowledging that he also issued many orders protecting Hindu temples and granted stipends and land to Brahmins. They denounce that he restricted the celebration of Holi without mentioning that he also clamped down on Muharram and Eid festivities. They omit altogether that Aurangzeb consulted with Hindu ascetics on health matters and employed more Hindus in his administration than any prior Mughal ruler by a substantial margin.

This pageantry involved the British not merely exalting the principle of hierarchy in ensuring reverence for their own queen, but extending it to India, honouring ‘native princes’, ennobling others and promoting the invention of ersatz aristocratic tradition so as to legitimize their rule. Thus the British created a court culture that the princes had to follow, and a hierarchy that sought to show the Crown as successors of the Mughal emperor. The elaborately-graded gun salutes, from nine guns to nineteen (and in only five cases, twenty-one)6, depending on the importance, and cooperativeness, of the ruler in question; the regulation of who was and was not a ‘Highness’, and of what kind (the Nizam of Hyderabad went from being His Highness to His Exalted Highness during World War I, mainly because of his vast donation of money to the war effort); the careful lexicon whereby the ‘native chiefs’ (not ‘kings’), came from ‘ruling’, not ‘royal’, families, and their territories were ‘princely states’ not ‘kingdoms’—all these were part of an elaborate system of monarchical illusion-building.

At the beginning of the eighteenth century, as the British economic historian Angus Maddison has demonstrated, India’s share of the world economy was 23  per  cent, as large as all of Europe put together. (It had been 27  per  cent in 1700, when the Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb’s treasury raked in £100 million in tax revenues alone.) By the time the British departed India, it had dropped to just over 3  per  cent. The reason was simple: India was governed for the benefit of Britain. Britain’s rise for 200 years was financed by its depredations in India.

Clive determined to add a final political flourish of his own. He decided that a small portion of Shuja’s former dominions around Allahabad and Kora would be turned over to support Shah Alam as an imperial demesne. Vague promises would be made about supporting the Emperor’s long-dreamed-of return to Delhi, while taking in return the offer of financially managing the three rich eastern provinces of the Emperor dominions – Bengal, Bihar and Orissa. This was the granting of what in Mughal legalese was known as the Diwani – the office of economic management of Mughal provinces.

in 1717 the British East India Company effectively brought together financial capital, people with commercial capabilities, and people with military capabilities to force India’s Mughal emperor to trade with them, which was the first step toward the British colonization of India, the fall of the Mughal Empire in the 18th century, and then its complete failure in the 19th century, when the British exiled the emperor and executed his children after the 1857 Indian Rebellion. The British did these things because they had the wealth and power to do them in pursuit of more wealth and power.

So prevalent was the belief among Delhiwallahs that Englishmen were the product of an illicit union between apes and the women of Sri Lanka (or alternatively between ‘apes and hogs’) that the city’s leading theologian, Shah Abdul Aziz, had to issue a fatwa expressing his opinion that such a view had no basis in the Koran or the Hadiths, and that however oddly the firangis might behave, they were none the less Christians and thus People of the Book.15 As long as wine and pork were not served, it was therefore perfectly permissible to mix with them (if one should for any strange reason wish to do so)

In spring that year (1930), by a symbolic act whose significance I myself did not grasp, a march through the stifling heat to the sea with a little band of followers to make illegal salt, Gandhi had aroused the Indian people from the lethargy into which they had long sunk after nearly three centuries of British rule, if you counted the incredible period when they were governed for two hundred years not by a foreign country but by a bizarre band of traders greedy for profit, the honourable members and agents of the East India Company. These hustlers had first came out from England early in the seventeenth century, found the pickings beyond their fondest dreams, and by hook and by crook and by armed might, had stolen the country from the Indians. It was the only instance in history, I believe, of a private commercial enterprise taking over a vast, heavily populated subcontinent, ruling it with an iron hand and exploiting it for private profit. Probably only the British, with their odd assortment of talents, their great entrepreneurial drive, their ingrained feeling of racial superiority, of which Rudyard Kipling would sing so shrilly, their guile in dividing the natives and turning them against one another, and their ruthlessness in putting down all who threatened their rule and their profits, could have done it, and got away with it so long. Perhaps only the Indians, divided as they were after the decay of the Mughal Empire into dozens of quarrelling, warring states, great and small, could have succumbed so easily and so quickly to the aggression of a handful determined merchants, backed by a small handful of British troops in the service of the Company, and remained so long in abject subjection. As Radhakrishnan, the great Hindu philosopher, put it in our own time: "The day India lost her freedom, a great curse fell on her and she became petrified.

The depth to which Indian Muslims had sunk in British eyes is visible in an 1868 production called The People of India, which contains photographs of the different castes and tribes of South Asia ranging from Tibetans and Aboriginals (illustrated with a picture of a naked tribal) to the Doms of Bihar. The image of ‘the Mahomedan’ is illustrated by a picture of an Aligarh labourer who is given the following caption: ‘His features are peculiarly Mahomedan … [and] exemplify in a strong manner the obstinacy, sensuality, ignorance and bigotry of his class. It is hardly possible, perhaps, to conceive features more essentially repulsive.

Alok Rai in his book Hindi Nationalism says that ‘till but a century back, this [Kaithi] script was better known and much more widespread than Nagari’. In the mid-1800s, the schools in the ‘North-west Provinces’ using Devanagari were ‘outnumbered’ by those using the Kaithi and Mahājani scripts. Kaithi had been a writing system developed by the Kayasths, the scribe caste, and it was a script known to both Hindus and Muslims. This is what made it unpopular with the Brahmin lobby when, in British times, a candidate was being sought to replace the Persian script, which the British wanted to phase out as it was a reminder of the Mughal Empire. The Brahmins wanted in its place a script and a variety of Hindi that they would know better than anyone else.

Harriott maintained that Zafar was the evil genius and linchpin behind an international Muslim conspiracy stretching from Constantinople, Mecca and Iran to the walls of the Red Fort. His intent, declared Harriott, was to subvert the British Empire and put the Mughals in its place. Contrary to all the evidence that the Uprising broke out first among the overwhelmingly Hindu sepoys, and that it was high-caste Hindu sepoys who all along formed the bulk of the fighting force; and ignoring all the evident distinctions between the sepoys, the jihadis, the Shia Muslims of Persia and the Sunni court of Delhi, Major Harriott argued that the Mutiny was the product of the convergence of all these conspiring forces around the fanatical Islamic dynastic ambitions of Zafar:

The other approach, taken by survivors of the old Madrasa i-Rahimiyya, was to reject the West in toto and to attempt to return to what they regarded as pure Islamic roots. For this reason, disillusioned pupils of the school of Shah Waliullah, such as Maulana Muhammad Qasim Nanautawi – who in 1857 had briefly established an independent Islamic state north of Meerut at Shamli in the Doab – founded an influential but depressingly narrow-minded Wahhabi-like madrasa at Deoband, 100 miles north of the former Mughal capital. With their backs to the wall, they reacted against what the founders saw as the degenerate and rotten ways of the old Mughal elite. The Deoband madrasa therefore went back to Koranic basics and rigorously stripped out anything Hindu or European from the curriculum.

The barracks should of course have been torn down years ago, but the Fort’s current proprietors, the Archaeological Survey of India, have lovingly continued the work of decay initiated by the British: white marble pavilions have been allowed to discolour; plasterwork has been left to collapse; the water channels have cracked and grassed over; the fountains are dry. Only the barracks look well maintained.

Finally, on 14 September 1857, the British and their hastily assembled army of Sikh and Pathan levees assaulted and took the city, sacking and looting the Mughal capital, and massacring great swathes of the population. In one muhalla* alone, Kucha Chelan, some 1,400 citizens of Delhi were cut down. ‘The orders went out to shoot every soul,’ recorded Edward Vibart, a nineteen-year-old British officer. It was literally murder…I have seen many bloody and awful sights lately but such a one as I witnessed yesterday I pray I never see again. The women were all spared but their screams, on seeing their husbands and sons butchered, were most painful… Heaven knows I feel no pity, but when some old grey bearded man is brought and shot before your very eyes, hard must be that man’s heart I think who can look on with indifference …

The entire Habsburg landscape was given a deep, even coating of musical interpretation, whether Smetana and Dvorak in Bohemia or Haydn and Schubert in Austria or Bartok and Kodaly in Hungary. As soon as you head south from Hungary or the Carpathians this music stops. And with food, the greedy, complex and extravagant Habsburg world of layered cakes, a mad use of chocolate, subtle soups and fine wines goes off a cliff. This is obviously an enormous subject, ludicrously compressed here, but the very idea of such complex foods trickled down in the west from royal courts, famously with the development of the idea of the 'French restaurant' in the aftermath of the Revolution. Indeed, we all eagerly guzzle a range of court foods - with many Indian and Chinese restaurants in the west also serving essentially court Mughal or Qing banquet foods, albeit in mutilated forms.

Isa looked down the river to the Taj Mahal. It shone harshly in the midday sun, the marble glared back at the sky and it stood isolated and alone. It needed a companion of beauty, but there was none in this world. Isa had thought long about the tomb; it had life, it breathed. He imagined the rise and fall of the stone as it sighed. He realized it was lonely. It was a perfect thing in an imperfect world, and that was an awesome burden.

what young men in our colleges learn through those of Greek and Latin—that is grammar, rhetoric, and logic. After his seven years of study, the young Muhammadan binds his turban upon a head almost as well filled with the things which appertain to these branches of knowledge as the young man raw from Oxford—he will talk as fluently about Socrates and Aristotle, Plato and Hippocrates, Galen and Avicenna; (alias Sokrat, Aristotalis, Alflatun, Bokrat, Jalinus and Bu Ali Sena); and,

One of the reasons for this cataclysmic change of destinies was the inherent weakness of a decaying agricultural empire of the Mughals which after more than two hundred years of rule over vast areas of India, was at its terminal stage and needed a small push to crumble like a house of cards.That push was given by six East India Companies of different European countries which had extracted rights to trade with India from the Mughals but transformed themselves as the arbiters and protectors of several Indian states. In this process they not only became rich but also militarily strong because in the twilight years of the Mughal empire, deteriorating security environment necessitated to arm themselves to protect their economic interests. Because of their inherent superiority as representatives of rising industrial powers, they had access to modern techniques and technology of warfare, which turned out to be the decisive factor in capturing vast territories in India.

Mughals to the importance of sea power. The Mughals had a predominantly continental outlook. Preoccupation with cavalry warfare blinded the Indian rulers to the maritime challenge of the European powers. The Mughals would only take an enemy seriously if he confronted them with large contingents of cavalry. Thus, they neglected the Indian Ocean as the most important element of the total Indian environment. They knew the monsoon would not permit a sustained maritime invasion of India. Thus, a maritime invader would find his supply lines cut in a short time-frame. The European powers, however, never attempted such an invasion. India itself had a huge military manpower pool with a mercenary orientation. It generally flocked to the banner of whichever local ruler paid the best. The European success lay in nativisation. They built up their military contingents in India by drilling local infantry troops who were far less expensive to maintain but in the end proved fatal to the Indian cavalry.

According to Ommaney, prior to their departure Zinat Mahal had been squabbling loudly with Jawan Bakht after the latter had fallen in love with one of his father’s harem women. He also began using the family’s now scarce financial resources to bribe the guards to bring him bottles of porter: ‘What an instance of the state of morals and domestic economy of Ex-Royalty,’ wrote a disapproving Ommaney to Saunders. ‘Mother and son at enmity, the son trying to form a connection with his father’s concubine, and setting at nought the precepts of his religion, buying from, and drinking, the liquor of an infidel.

The Colonel looked at this strange fashion and asked in broken Urdu, ‘Well? You Muslim?’ ‘Half,’ said Ghalib. ‘What does that mean?’ asked the Colonel. ‘I drink wine,’ said Ghalib, ‘but I don’t eat pork.’ The Colonel laughed, and Ghalib then showed him the letter which he had received from the Minister for India [sic] in acknowledgement of the ode to Her Majesty the Queen which Ghalib has sent. The Colonel said, ‘After the victory of government forces why did you not present yourself at the Ridge?’ Ghalib replied, ‘My rank required that I should have four palanquin bearers, but all four of them ran away and left me, so I could not come.

Elephanta caves, Mumbai-- I entered a world made of shadows and sudden brightness. The play of the light, the vastness of the space and its irregular form, the figures carved on the walls: all of it gave the place a sacred character, sacred in the deepest meaning of the word. In the shadows were the powerful reliefs and statues, many of them mutilated by the fanaticism of the Portuguese and the Muslims, but all of them majestic, solid, made of a solar material. Corporeal beauty, turned into living stone. Divinities of the earth, sexual incarnations of the most abstract thought, gods that were simultaneously intellectual and carnal, terrible and peaceful. ............................................................................ Gothic architecture is the music turned to stone; one could say that Hindu architecture is sculpted dance. The Absolute, the principle in whose matrix all contradictions dissolve (Brahma), is “neither this nor this nor this.” It is the way in which the great temples at Ellora, Ajanta, Karli, and other sites were built, carved out of mountains. In Islamic architecture, nothing is sculptural—exactly the opposite of the Hindu. The Red Fort, on the bank of the wide Jamuna River, is as powerful as a fort and as graceful as a palace. It is difficult to think of another tower that combines the height, solidity, and slender elegance of the Qutab Minar. The reddish stone, contrasting with the transparency of the air and the blue of the sky, gives the monument a vertical dynamism, like a huge rocket aimed at the stars. The mausoleum is like a poem made not of words but of trees, pools, avenues of sand and flowers: strict meters that cross and recross in angles that are obvious but no less surprising rhymes. Everything has been transformed into a construction made of cubes, hemispheres, and arcs: the universe reduced to its essential geometric elements. The abolition of time turned into space, space turned into a collection of shapes that are simultaneously solid and light, creations of another space, made of air. There is nothing terrifying in these tombs: they give the sensation of infinity and pacify the soul. The simplicity and harmony of their forms satisfy one of the most profound necessities of the spirit: the longing for order, the love of proportion. At the same time they arouse our fantasies. These monuments and gardens incite us to dream and to fly. They are magic carpets. Compare Ellora with the Taj Mahal, or the frescoes of Ajanta with Mughal miniatures. These are not distinct artistic styles, but rather two different visions of the world.

grubby contemporaries in the West, stumbling around in their codpieces, the silk-clad Mughals, dripping in jewels, were the living embodiment of wealth and power – a meaning that has remained impregnated in the word ‘mogul

Jahangir was, after all, an enormously sensitive, curious and intelligent man: observant of the world around him and a keen collector of its curiosities, from Venetian swords and globes to Safavid silks, jade pebbles and even narwhal teeth. A proud inheritor of the Indo-Mughal tradition of aesthetics and knowledge, as well as maintaining the Empire and commissioning great works of art, he took an

The English state coach was also admired, but Jahangir had the slightly tatty Tudor interior trim immediately upgraded with Mughal cloth of gold and then again showed off the skills of the Mughal kar-khana by having the entire coach perfectly copied, in little over a week, so his

EIC gradually drawn into the Mughal nexus. Over the next 200 years it would slowly learn to operate skilfully within the Mughal system and to do so in the Mughal idiom, with its officials learning good Persian, the correct court etiquette, the art of bribing the right officials and, in time, outmanoeuvring all their rivals – Portuguese, Dutch and French – for imperial

Bihar] and of no inconsiderable weight at the Mughal court, it was natural to determine on him as the properest person to settle the affairs of that government. Accordingly, when the new Nawab returned my visit this morning, I recommended him to consult Jagat Seth on all occasions, which he readily assented to.’84

Badāūnī unhappily attests that Brahmans introduced Sanskrit works that predicted Akbar’s rise to power as Vishnu’s avatar: Cheating imposter Brahmans . . . told [the king] repeatedly that he had descended to earth, like Ram, Krishan, and other infidel rulers, who, although lords of the world, had taken on human form to act on earth. For the sake of flattery, they presented Sanskrit poetry [shir-hā-yi hindi] allegedly uttered by tongues of sages that predicted a world-conquering padshah would arise in India. He would honor Brahmans, protect cows, and justly rule the earth. They wrote such nonsense on old papers and presented it to [the emperor]. He believed every word.65

The false biologism of white racial supremacy has been discredited, but most westerners are quite happy to abide by what seems to be a value-neutral distinction between ‘white people’ and ‘people of colour’. Consequently, we assume that any Englishman who becomes a ‘Mughal’ must be still, at his core, ‘white’, as if this is the one fundamental truth of his body that trumps its other attributes, including the unexpected changes it may have undergone in India.

Even today, as the world moves around these spaces oblivious to them, their stories continue to unfold, dancing and singing for anyone willing to listen. In these performances, Valmiki discourses with Jesus Christ, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto meets Qutb al-Din Aibak, nationalists participate in historic Mughal wars, Mughal princesses witness the heralding of a neo-liberal model of development, Bulleh Shah dances with Bhagat Singh.

A significant proportion of humanity’s cultural achievements owe their existence to the exploitation of conquered populations. The profits and prosperity brought by Roman imperialism provided Cicero, Seneca and St Augustine with the leisure and wherewithal to think and write; the Taj Mahal could not have been built without the wealth accumulated by Mughal exploitation of their Indian subjects; and the Habsburg Empire’s profits from its rule over its Slavic, Hungarian and Romanian-speaking provinces paid Haydn’s salaries and Mozart’s commissions.

Any travellers worth their salt know that even the strangest and newest of worlds are never entirely new.

All [the inhabitants of this land] believe in the unity of God. As for the honor they show to images made of stone, wood, and other things that idiots consider idol worship, it is not so. The writer of this felicitous book has sat conversing with many wise and righteous men, and it is clear that they fashion images of some who have approached the court of the Purified One as aids to prevent the mind from wandering and render worship of God indispensable. In all their practices and customs, they seek favor from the world-illuminating sun and count the holy essence of incomparable God as higher than action.75

Humayun though

He was one of the founding members and the vice-president of the Indian Home Rule Society of Shyamji and had formed a Paris Indian Society in 1905, along with another revolutionary luminary, Madame Bhikaji Rustom Cama. Three fellowships of Rs 2000 each were offered in the name of Indian heroes—Maharana Rana Pratap of Mewar, Shivaji Maharaj and Mughal Emperor Akbar.

Wealth is not the only, nor the most valuable commodity, which Britain might import from India.80

The Mughals elevated art and architecture to new heights, creating a visual legacy that continues to inspire.

​The system, as it exists today, is thought to be the result of developments during the collapse of the Mughal era and the British colonial regime in India.

Other states also reoriented their telling of regional and national history. In Maharashtra, in the rewriting of history textbooks, a drastic cut was made in the book for class 7: the chapter on the Mughal Empire under Akbar was cut down to three lines.78 Uttar Pradesh simply deleted the Mughal Empire from some of its history textbooks,79 while the University of Delhi drastically reduced the study of this period in its history curriculum.80 In the syllabus of Nagpur University, a chapter that discussed the roles of the RSS, the Hindu Mahasabha, and the Muslim League in the making of communalism has been replaced by another one titled “Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) Role in Nation Building.”81 Alongside official examinations in Uttar Pradesh, the Sangh Parivar organized a test of general culture open to all schools in the state. According to the brochure designed to help students prepare for this test, which Amit Shah released in Lucknow in August 2017, India was a Hindu Rashtra, and Swami Vivekananda had defended Hindutva in Chicago in 1893.82 In Karnataka, after canceling Tipu Sultan Jayanti, the festival that the state used to organize to celebrate the birth of this eighteenth-century Muslim ruler, the BJP government also dropped the chapter dealing with this historical figure from the class 7 textbook in 2019.83 This decision was made in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic that had led the government of India to ask all states to reduce syllabi for students in classes 1 through 10 by 30 percent, in light of the learning challenges brought about by the lockdown.84 The decision of the Karnataka government, in fact, fit in with a larger picture. Under cover of the pandemic, the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE), India’s largest education board, decided that all over India “government-run schools no longer have to teach chapters on democratic rights, secularism, federalism, and citizenship, among other topics.”85 To foster assimilation of knowledge that amounted to propaganda, final exams have increasingly focused on the heroic deeds of Hindu icons and reforms initiated by the Modi government, even on the person of the prime minister.

The Mughal Empire died out around 1750,” said the Major, his exasperation overcoming his politeness. “So you see it doesn’t go at all.” “Well, it’s all the same thing,” said Daisy. “It’s all India, isn’t it?

It is obvious that this ratio was considered special for a very long time. So when the seventeenth-century Mughal emperor Aurangzeb wanted to praise his vassal Maharaja Jai Singh, he called him ‘Sawai’ (meaning that he was worth a quarter more than any other man).