Watch | Indians, Episode 9: The Mughals and Bernier

The Mughal Empire was founded in 1526 by Babur, who was part of a long line of people – since at least the Indo-Aryans – to have entered and settled in the subcontinent. It grew to become the largest, most opulent empire yet in India. As with most long-lasting, multi-ethnic, and multilingual empires, most Mughal rulers too espoused pragmatic ideals, especially Akbar and Jahangir.

Co-opting elites from diverse groups of Hindus into their administration, they presided over a brilliant fusion of Indo-Persian culture and syncretic creations in art, architecture, literature, music, dance, painting, cuisine, dress, crafts, and more.

In 1658, a French doctor, François Bernier, came to Delhi as a physician to Dara Shikoh, and wrote about the bloody war of royal succession and the first decade of Aurangzeb’s rule. Bernier’s insightful account describes Mughal courtly culture in Delhi, the economic condition of Indians, their science and intellectual life, and Hindu cultural and religious customs.

Scholars routinely critique the Mughal Empire’s record on many fronts, but the Mughals have lately also attracted much cultural vilification, especially from Hindu nationalists. They allege that the Mughals persecuted and forcibly converted Hindus to Islam on a large scale, and indiscriminately desecrated tens of thousands of temples.

Is that true? I’ll explore the evidence behind such allegations – and a lot more – in this episode.

Below is the full transcript of the episode.

Hello and welcome to Indians. I’m Namit Arora.

In the previous episode, we looked at the rise and fall of the Vijayanagar Empire, and the secrets of its wealth and military power that foreign travellers wrote about. As Vijayanagar declined in the 16th century south India, a new power was rising in north India: The Mughal Empire. It would become the largest empire India had ever known—unmatched in its reach and opulence. It would produce an extraordinary fusion of Indo-Persian culture and syncretic creations in art, architecture, literature, music, dance, painting, cuisine, dress, crafts, and more. Emperors like Babur, Humayun, Akbar, Jahangir, Shah Jahan, and Aurangzeb would inspire many a Bollywood epic and, lately, a host of funny Internet memes. But for many Hindu nationalists, this is no laughing matter. They’ve come to despise the Mughals, largely led by their chauvinistic ideology and gross exaggerations about forced religious conversions and temple desecrations.

In this episode, I’ll look at Mughal India, especially during the time of Aurangzeb (1658–1707), perhaps the most controversial of the Mughals. Among other sources, I’ll lean on the amazing account of a French doctor, François Bernier, who spent 12 years in India (1658–69) working with one of Aurangzeb’s ministers in Delhi.

The rise of the Mughal Empire

The Mughal Empire was founded by Babur (1483–1530). His ancestors were Turks and Mongols, and included both Genghis Khan and Tamerlane—a rather distinguished lineage, as these things go. His father had ruled a small kingdom in Uzbekistan, which was part of the Persian cultural zone. Babur was only 11 years old when his father died. For the next two decades, he and his family struggled to keep and expand his father’s kingdom, but without much success. In his 30s, Babur began looking for new territories, and set his sights on the land beyond the Sindhu, also known as Hindustan.

In 1526, Babur challenged Ibrahim Lodi of the Delhi Sultanate. With just 8,000 troops, he defeated Lodi at the battle of Panipat, took over his new capital at Agra, and launched the Mughal Empire. Babur died just four years later, but he left behind a thoughtful memoir of his life, Baburnama, in which he also observed that Hindustan had ‘no good horses, no good dogs, no grapes, musk-melons or first-rate fruits, no ice, no good bread or cooked food in the bazaars, no hot-baths, no colleges, [and] no candles.’

Babur was another in a long line of outsiders, since at least the Indo-Aryans, who had come to settle in India. Others before him include the Scythians, Kushans, Ahiras, Huns, Tibeto-Burmans. From the 12th century, new groups began entering India from the northwest—Turks, Persians, Arabs, Afghans, Uzbeks, and others. In some ways, these newest outsiders resembled the Indo-Aryans, especially in their genetic ancestry and their aggressive, patriarchal ways. Their different cultures and identities would also become fresh sources of both conflict and creativity in the subcontinent.

Akbar the Great

Babur’s grandson, Akbar (1542–1605), would become the greatest of the Mughal Emperors. He wasn’t great for waging wars or amassing territory, though he did that too, as emperors have long done, from Rome to Vijayanagar. Akbar was great because he was curious, fair-minded, and tolerant, and so he belongs with the greatest kings of India. It was Akbar, born in a Rajput fort, who turned the Mughals into an Indian dynasty. He was a practical man; instead of destroying his enemies, he tried to co-opt them into his imperial orbit. He built enduring alliances with many Rajput clans, cementing them through marriages.

Over time, Akbar’s household increasingly became multi-ethnic and multi-religious. Under his reign, freedom of religion was the norm. His Hindu wives passed down their cultural beliefs and values to their children—and to Akbar, who joined their festive celebrations of Holi, Janmashtami, and Diwali. His favourite wife was a Rajput woman, popularly known as Jodha Bai. Known for her beauty and intellect, she is said to have nudged Akbar towards a more secular outlook. She was also the mother of the next Mughal emperor, Jahangir (1569–1627).

Under Akbar, Hindus gained some of the choicest roles in the Mughal administration, military, and court. Think of Man Singh, Todar Mal, Tansen. Or his advisor Birbal, immortalised for his wit and intelligence in the supremely popular folk tales of Akbar and Birbal. At provincial levels too, his administration brought upward mobility to Hindu merchants, revenue collectors, Brahmins, and others—a trend that only increased in later generations.

Akbar even abolished the jizya tax that dated from the Sultanate period. Jizya was exclusively levied on non-Muslims though the Rajputs and all Hindu employees of the State were exempt from it. Somehow, the Brahmins also got themselves exempted from it all along. Jizya was an unfair and resented tax, but it was poorly collected in practice, especially outside urban centres. The Brahmins didn’t pay jizya tax even under Aurangzeb, who reimposed it for 40 years against the wishes of his family and court. And thanks to the narrow solidarities of caste, the Brahmins never seem to have felt the need to protest its imposition on others either.

Akbar in fact presided over a great fusion of Rajput and Mughal cultures and, by extension, the Sanskritic and Persianate worlds. It’s evident in the art, architecture, music, and cuisine of the Mughal era. Think of the arts of kathak, ghazal, khyal gayiki, and miniature painting. Consider the fusion of styles in the Govinda Deva Temple of Vrindavan, built with Akbar’s enthusiastic support, or the sublime Indo-Persian architecture of his short-lived capital, Fatehpur Sikri. Akbar had suffered from dyslexia, and he couldn’t read or write. But he had a sharp memory and maintained a huge library of 24,000 books, staffed by scholars, translators, calligraphers, scribes, as well as readers who read books to him daily.

Akbar is also known for his moving spiritual quest. Though raised a Sunni Muslim, he felt that religious truth transcended any one religion, that it is scattered across religions. To discover it for himself, Akbar sponsored inter-faith debates for which he invited theologians, poets, scholars, and philosophers from many religious traditions, including Muslims, Christians, Hindus, Jains, and Zoroastrians. He explored various ideas. He patronised Chishti saints. He banned cow slaughter. At one time, he even turned vegetarian, adopted the hairstyle of ascetics, began venerating the sun and learned the 1001 Sanskrit names for it.

Akbar eventually created a new syncretic religion in 1582. He called it Din-i Ilahi, or ‘divine religion’. This angered many orthodox clerics of Islam—a good indication that he was trying something good. His new religion was drawn from multiple traditions, and included ideas like the love of God, ahimsa, and even a fire ritual. But not many of his subjects were persuaded, and Din-i Ilahi faded after Akbar’s death in 1605.

Bernier in Shahjahanabad, Delhi

The next Mughal Emperor, Jahangir continued Akbar’s fascination with older Indian religions. He too sponsored inter-faith debates, and often visited a Hindu ascetic called Jadrup, near Ujjain. Jahangir not only favoured freedom of religion, he strictly opposed non-voluntary conversions. Like his father, Jahangir too married an intelligent and beautiful Rajput princess, Jagat Gosain. Their marriage involved dual ceremonies, Hindu and Muslim. How modern was that!

Shah Jahan (1592– 1666), the next emperor, was born from this union, which made him 75 percent Rajput by ancestry. Shah Jahan would build some of the most spectacular monuments of Mughal India, like the Taj Mahal, Shalimar Gardens, the Red Fort and Jama Masjid. In 1648, he moved his capital from Agra to Shahjahanabad. The British maliciously destroyed large parts of it after 1857. What remains is now in Old Delhi.

In 1658, the last year of Shah Jahan’s rule, a French doctor, François Bernier, came to Delhi to serve as a physician to Dara Shikoh, the eldest son of Shah Jahan. But within months of his arrival came the bloody war of royal succession, in which Aurangzeb eliminated his three brothers and imprisoned his father, Shah Jahan. Bernier described this battle in fair detail. He thought Dara Shikoh was ‘extremely liberal’ and erudite, not the least for translating the Upanishads into Persian. Dara hated Aurangzeb, and called him a ‘Nemazi’ and a ‘Bigot’. But it was Aurangzeb who won.

Bernier witnessed the first decade of Aurangzeb’s rule. He worked for a nobleman, Daneshmand Khan, who had moved to Delhi from Persia, and was the Mughal secretary of state for foreign affairs and grand master of the horse. In Bernier’s letters to people back home, later published as Travels in the Mogul Empire, he warmly referred to Khan as ‘my Agah’ [chief, master], ‘the most learned man of Asia’, ‘whose thirst for knowledge is incessant’, and who voraciously read works on astronomy, geography, anatomy, the materialist philosophy of Gassendi, Descartes, and more. Khan and a few kindred ‘Moguls’ appear to have been a new kind of intellectuals in the subcontinent, with no evident counterparts in Hindu society.

Delhi, according to Bernier

Bernier fell in love with the public architecture of Mughal Delhi and Agra. In terms of beauty, he considered it on par with the best in France, such as the Palais Royale. Delhi had wide streets, he wrote, on which Muslim and Hindu noblemen ride, ‘some on horseback, some on majestic elephants; but the greater part are conveyed on the shoulders of men, in rich Palekys, leaning against a thick cushion of brocade, and chewing their [paan], for the double purpose of sweetening their breath and reddening their lips.’ Chances are that such visuals have a long history in Delhi.

Bernier described the opulence of the emperor and his courtiers, their grand processions, lavish costumes, the audience hall at Red Fort with its peacock throne and rich furnishings of silver, gold brocade, silk and satin. He observed ‘the base and disgusting adulation which is invariably witnessed there’ and ‘the vice of flattery [that] pervades all ranks’. But the common man’s life was very different. ‘In Dehli there is no middle state’, wrote Bernier. ‘A man must either be of the highest rank or live miserably.’ He contrasted this with Paris, where poverty and disparity were not so high.

Bernier saw India as a vast collection of ethnic and religious groups, with no common ‘Indian’ identity. Which makes sense—an ‘Indian’ identity only emerged during the colonial struggle in the 19th century.

In Bernier’s day, the term ‘Mughal’ mainly referred to light-skinned Persianate Muslims with recent ancestry outside the subcontinent. Mughals had higher social status. According to Bernier, they sought out light-skinned Kashmiri women for marriage. Such Muslims dominated the best imperial positions, alongside a few Rajputs and other Hindus. Skin colour had long obsessed Hindus too, so it wasn’t a new concept. Our modern preference for ‘gore-chitte’ [light-skinned] women goes way back to the Indo-Aryans. In a way, Indo-Muslim rule was replacing an earlier lighter-skinned elite with a newer one.

Bernier described the luxurious but cloistered lives of women in the Mughal harem. Only royal men could visit them, so his account was based on what he had heard. Their ‘consumption of fine cloths of gold, and brocades, silks, embroideries, pearls, musk, amber and sweet essences, is greater than can be imagined’, wrote Bernier. Shah Jahan had invited singing and dancing girls in the harem, ‘and amused himself with their antics and follies’, but Aurangzeb didn’t do that. According to Bernier, Aurangzeb was ‘more serious than his father’ and ‘anxious to appear a true Musulman’. Children too lived in the harem. Its walled compound had its own bazaars, kitchens, schools and playgrounds. The women of the harem were guarded by eunuchs. They could only go out in purdah, carried in palkees. It’s fair to say that between the Turko-Persian and Brahminical patriarchies, the goose of Indian women was pretty well cooked!

Bernier on India’s economic realities

Bernier noted that some parts of India were relatively affluent. Fertile Bengal, for instance, produced ample rice, corn, silks, cotton, and indigo. Its handloom workers manufactured silk and cotton textiles, carpets, embroideries and brocades, often for export overseas. But most regions were not so lucky.

All land belonged to the crown, wrote Bernier. People could not legally own, buy or sell land, though they could use it as long as they paid their preset revenue to the king. This had been the case at least since Mauryan times. Bernier compared this with the private property regime that many European states had recently evolved. He considers this a major reason why Europeans had grown richer. Because Indians could lose their land to the whims of power, they had less incentive to invest in it. This not only reduced their income, Bernier argued, it also depressed tax revenues for the king, and encouraged people to hide their surpluses in gold. Formal property rights in India would arise only in the British colonial era.

What made things even worse, wrote Bernier, is that provincial governors and tax collectors exercised their authority over the peasantry in oppressive ways. This feudal system of non-hereditary land tenure was pan-Indian, and it dated from the Gupta period. Bernier blamed this ‘miserable system of government’, combining despotic power with lack of private property, for why Indians were worse off than Europeans, and why ‘most towns in Hindoustan are made up of earth, mud, and other wretched materials’.

Some scholars find Bernier’s account too bleak and oversimplified, but it does reveal a powerful, extractive bureaucracy concentrating riches at the top, sustaining a huge army, and funding the lavish lives of the aristocrats. As we saw in the previous episode, this was also true in Vijayanagar. Bernier’s portrait of the extreme disparities in India agrees with other testimonies, like that of the pre-Mughal Russian traveller, Afanasy Nikitin: ‘Those in the countryside are very miserable, whilst the nobles are extremely opulent and delight in luxury.’

Such testimonies refute the sone ki chidiya (‘golden bird’) metaphor about pre-colonial India, which suggests that India was a disproportionately rich country in medieval times. But that’s not true. Some popular historians say, correctly, that in 1700, India’s share of the global GDP was around 24 percent. They don’t also say that its share of the world population was around 27 percent. Which placed India’s per capita income below the global average.

It seems that too many of the inflated claims about India’s pre-colonial riches are based on foreign travellers’ accounts of wealthy elites—even as the commoners were no better off than in other parts of the world. And how could they be? For thousands of years, most people in the world had lived off labour intensive farming, pastoralism, hunting, gathering, or small trades, producing similar standards of living. Indian and Chinese per capita incomes did not change much until the mid-20th century, but European incomes surged earlier, driven by their colonial projects and their scientific and industrial revolutions.

Bernier on Hindu customs and superstitions

Bernier was a man of the early Enlightenment and a big believer in science and reason. He saw himself as part of a more ‘advanced’ civilization, both in terms of its scientific knowledge and its social and political thought. What he couldn’t have seen is that his civilization had embarked on a path that would lead all humanity to the edge of our catastrophic climate change and sixth mass extinction. But that story, another time.

It seems Bernier was not impressed by the state of Indian science or medicine. The Hindus ‘understand nothing of anatomy,’ he wrote, because ‘they never open the body either of man or beast’. To explain the details of blood circulation that William Harvey had recently discovered, Bernier cut open living goats and sheep before his horrified hosts.

What bothered him the most were superstitions that caused injury and death. He was revolted by the Rath Yatra (car) festival at the Jagannath Temple in Puri, where some ‘fanatics’ died by throwing themselves under the wheels of a giant wooden chariot. Bernier saw Brahmins as promoting such customs to ensure their own livelihood. He criticised ‘lustful priests’ who deceived and possessed young girls dedicated to serve the gods of Jagannath Temple. He wrote, ‘The Great Mogol [Aurangzeb] … permits these ancient and superstitious practices; not wishing, or not daring, to disturb the Gentiles [Hindus] in the free exercises of their religion.’

Another custom that bothered Bernier was the ‘melancholy fact’ of sati, mostly practised among the upper-caste warrior elite. He was certain that fewer widows would follow it, if given the choice ‘by the merciless Brahmens’ but instead, the women were often physically forced into it. Bernier observed that any widow who managed to ‘avoid the impending sacrifice, cannot hope to pass her days in happiness, or to be treated with respect or affection . . . she is ever afterwards exposed to the ill-treatment of her low and vulgar protectors’.

The Mughals under Aurangzeb, wrote Bernier, do not interfere with ‘the idolatrous population … in the free exercise of its religion’, but they try to discourage sati by other means, as in requiring permission for it from the local governor. At that time, they try to dissuade the widow and others involved. This often works, but not ‘in the territories of the [Rajput] Rajas, where no [Muslim] governors are appointed.’ The fact is that sati was more common in autonomous Hindu kingdoms, such as of the Rajputs and earlier of Vijayanagar, and it declined in areas that came under direct Mughal rule. It’s also true that in non-elite groups, sati was largely absent, where widows could even remarry.

Bernier had his limitations. He didn’t seem to read any Indian languages. He had his blindspots of comprehension and creed. But he also had a humanistic ethos and was often very clear-eyed. In his insightful account, Indians seem to be mired in feudal and social inequities, ignorance and superstition—and, in hindsight, utterly ill-prepared against the advancing might of European science and technology, mercantilism, scholarship, and militarised nation-states.

Some myths about the Mughals

Like all empires, the Mughals, too, have a mixed record and deserve criticism on many fronts. They too represented an extractive and exploitative imperial order. While they did build roads, provide a unified market, and a stable, common currency, they also fought too many wars of expansion, often in pursuit of personal glory and vanity. They spent on high culture and big monuments, but not so much on public welfare or education. They greatly expanded cultivation to increase land revenue, but it often came at the expense of the environment.

As with most long-lasting, multi-ethnic, and multilingual empires, the Mughal rulers were also pragmatic, not narrowly ideological—except for Aurangzeb. His follies caused sectarian strife and peasant revolts, which contributed to the decline of the Mughal Empire.

These are (arguably) fair criticisms, but the Mughals have also attracted a lot of unfair cultural criticism, especially from Hindu nationalists. They allege that most Mughals forcibly converted Hindus to Islam on a large scale, and indiscriminately desecrated tens of thousands of temples. These allegations have been turbocharged in our age of social media and WhatsApp university. Are they true?

What about forced conversions?

Bernier did not mention any religious persecution of ‘the Gentiles’, nor forced conversions, likely because he didn’t see any. To the extent they happened, they remained exceedingly rare. The thing is that forced conversions rarely succeed; people just revert to their old faiths when the tyrant is gone. The vast majority of conversions (in India) happened voluntarily. Most converts were lower-caste Hindus drawn to something in Islam, which likely included its promise of spiritual equality among all believers. Perhaps they also saw many mundane benefits of embracing the rulers’ faith and culture, such as better education, social mobility, and job prospects. Sufi shaikhs played a role too. The Chishti saint, Khwaja Moinuddin, was popularly called ‘Gharib Nawaz’, or comforter of the poor. The Chishti order fed people in an open kitchen, or langar, a practice that was institutionalised in Sikhism but never cut any ice with the Brahmins.

If you believe that the pressure to convert was high, think of all the caste Hindu allies of the Mughals, who were Rajputs, Marathas, Kayasthas, Brahmins. They did not convert, even though they were the closest to the Mughals. Interfaith marriages required no conversion, even by the emperors themselves. So, what pressure are we talking about? In the early 18th century, after 500 years of Indo-Muslim rule, converts formed hardly 10–12% of the subcontinental population. They were even fewer in the Mughal heartland in north-central India.

Also remember that the Indo-Muslim period saw a great flowering of the Hindu Bhakti tradition in north India, through figures like Chaitanya, Tukaram, Kabir, Ravidas, Nanak, Mirabai, Eknath, Tulsidas and many others. The Ram Katha and Ram Lila traditions emerged and flourished in this period. I think all of this refutes the theory that the Mughals persecuted and forcibly converted large numbers of Hindus. Or, as a judge might say: case dismissed!

What about temple desecrations?

As for temple desecrations or destructions, they did happen. In the centuries before Indo-Muslim rule, Hindu kings had done it too, though its frequency increased under Indo-Muslims. But this frequency was far below the absurd numbers claimed by Hindu nationalists. They’re based on cherry-picked details, especially from Indo-Muslim court chronicles, which, as you’d expect, greatly inflate their patron’s military, sexual, and religious exploits. Academic historians have investigated deeper for more rigorous evidence. According to historian Richard Eaton, the verifiable cases of temple desecrations are less than a hundred, over more than five centuries. The Mughals, by and large, treated temples in their domain as state property and protected ‘both the physical structures and their Brahmin functionaries’. The Brahmins continued to live tax free, as they had done since Ashoka. Aurangzeb himself funded many temples with land and money, even as he destroyed some others. How can we explain this apparent contradiction? Scholars have looked at the evidence and identified important patterns behind temple desecrations.

It’s worth remembering that Hindu kings derived their divine right to rule from specific lineages—like chandravanshis and suryavanshis among the Rajputs. And they patronised state temples dedicated to specific deities. These were the types of temples that Indo-Muslim rulers usually targeted. They were politically salient for their association with rival Hindu kings. Desecrating them damaged their rival’s prestige and legitimacy to rule.

Now, it would be foolish to argue that every single temple desecration under the Mughals had purely political motives. No, sometimes, religious motives mattered too, especially with Aurangzeb, a puritanical man. But the primary motivation for temple desecrations was political, not religious. Besides, how long could a ruler act out of openly sectarian motives? Remember that the Mughals had lots of Rajput and Maratha allies, Hindu administrators and soldiers, whose numbers had steadily increased and become the highest under Aurangzeb. This had a chilling effect on any religious adventurism.

There are additional complexities. In medieval times, ‘the Hindus’ were deeply fragmented. Hinduism simply wasn’t organised enough to be targeted as a whole. People identified not with a common religion but with particular sects, gods, and rituals. They may not have seen a royal temple’s desecration as an attack on their own faith. Many of the subjects were likely not even allowed to enter a royal temple; would they have been hurt by its desecration? Often, desecrations would have hurt just an urban microcosm close to the rival king. In short, temple desecrations were less about ‘attacking Hinduism’, more about political gains.

One can only hope that such arguments at least become kabab mein haddi—or bones in the ideological kabab of Hindu nationalism.

A new hegemonic narrative

Having said all that, it’s true that Brahminical Hinduism received less patronage under the Deccan Sultanates and the Mughals, compared to, say, in Vijayanagar. Under the Indo-Muslims, Hindus had to share the royal patronage once again, as they did under Ashoka and Harsha. A similar reduction in leadership roles also occurred for Hindus under most Indo-Muslim regimes.

But what’s also true is that this mainly impacted one section of the urban upper-caste Hindus. It’s important to recognize that the losses suffered by this small minority cannot be conflated with the experience of the vast majority—including shudras, outcastes, and tribal groups. Most other people either happily continued with their own religious traditions, converted to Islam, or adopted syncretic religious forms, like the ultra popular devotional movements of Bhakti and Sufism, which relied on vernacular tongues, and captivating dance and musical expressions.

As always, in the grand march of history, continuity, disruption, and renewal were all in play. History is not as black-and-white as Hindu nationalists today—led by upper-caste Hindus!—so often think it is. The narrative manufactured by this hegemonic, yet culturally-insecure minority is neither truthful, nor does it represent the diverse experiences of Hindus and other groups under the Mughals.

That’s a lot to digest! I’ll say more about our love-hate relationship with the Mughals in the next episode, with specific examples from the history of Varanasi, one of the oldest living cities in the world. From its antiquity as Kashi to its life under the Mughals and beyond, I’ll explore why Varanasi lies so much at the heart of our Indian civilization. See you next time!