A History of the World (54 page)

This need not confuse us too much. There are useful parallels between the history of Europe from the 1200s to the 1600s, and of India at the same time. After all, the huge peninsula of Europe and the giant wedge of India are two similarly sized tongues jabbing out from the Eurasian landmass. During this half-millennium both suffered a long conflict between a would-be centre and local or regional identities; and then a long struggle between rival religions which prevented either of these subcontinents achieving political unity.

Europe’s would-be centre was the papacy in Rome, working
alongside the Holy Roman Empire and other Catholic monarchies. In India, the would-be centre was Delhi under the Muslim Turkish Khalji and Tughluq dynasties, whose dominance was challenged just as vigorously as Rome’s. Rome faced heretics and Protestant revolt: the Delhi Muslim dynasties were confronted by Hindu kings and rebel peoples of the west, centre and south. The Muslims wrecked many of the glories of Hindu civilization, smashing old temples and art, just as the Protestants destroyed monasteries and Catholic religious art. If the one contained countries as diverse as Scotland, Lithuania, England, Poland and Hungary, the other had Malwa, Orissa, Vijayanagara, Jaunpur and the Rajput states.

In some lights they even looked a little the same: one can certainly compare the elaborate carved stone architecture of India during this period with the cathedrals and castles of European rulers. And India can offer up individuals as idiosyncratic as England’s Henry VIII or a Borgia pope, and just as well remembered. There was the great Muslim ruler from Delhi, Ala-ud-din, with his regiments of elephant-mounted soldiers and his Turkish cavalry, who drove deep into the south, extracting glittering tribute – almost an Aladdin’s cave of the stuff – and who repulsed even the Mongols. There was the poet, intellectual, patron of the arts and mathematician Muhammad Bin Tughluq, sultan of Delhi, whose ferocious treatment of rebels and of those who displeased him became legendary. One such was flayed alive, then his skin was stuffed with rice mixed with his minced flesh and served to his family – behaviour to rival that of the Christian Prince, and warrior, Vlad.

Indian history from the Middle Ages to early-modern times is therefore no more outlandish than European. We find a comparable procession of sieges, marches, dynastic cat-fights and regional rebellions, below which an impoverished peasantry and heavily taxed city traders struggled. What we do not find is any popular breakaway from the rule of kings and princes; there was much Indian philosophy and natural science, but there was no Indian enlightenment, nor (in this period) much political experimentation. Or so we believe. Unfortunately, Indian history outside the Muslim courts is relatively poorly recorded. One modern historian laments: ‘Unenlivened by the gossipy narratives beloved of Muslim writers, the contemporary history of Hindu India has still to be laboriously extrapolated from
the sterile phrasing and optimistic listings favoured by royal panegyrists.’
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Yet Hinduism could not be stamped out, any more by Muslim imams than later by Christian missionaries. Muslim rulers defeated Hindu rulers, but rarely tried to oppress Hinduism itself or any of the other religions. There were individual atrocities galore, but not the cruel mass burnings, forced conversions, torture of heretics or wars of extermination that Europe knew. And unlike its European equivalent, Indian seamanship was largely coastal and based on trade, not war or exploration. There had been warlike fleets, particularly under the Chola dynasty of southern India during the medieval period, when Indian fleets reached China; but not for centuries. On land, too, Indian rulers occasionally mustered armies to push north through Afghanistan towards Persia, or east towards China, but never developed the global ambitions of Portugal, France or Britain, all of whom established early footholds in India.

Indian history really coheres with the rise of the great Mughal empire, at around the same time as the Reformation in Europe and the Spanish arrival in Peru. That starts as an astonishing adventure story in the wilds of central Asia, and ends as a lesson in the dangers of absolute monarchy.

Properly called Zahir-ud-Din Muhammad, but generally known by his nickname ‘Tiger’, or Babur, the founder of the Mughal dynasty was a descendant of both Genghis Khan and Tamerlane. Babur had been born in Uzbekistan in 1483, the same year as Raphael and Martin Luther. The son of a modest local ruler, he won his first major military victory, the capture of Samarkand, when he was just fourteen. Struggling against desertions, revolts and the threat posed by much larger enemies, Babur slowly built up a power base in Afghanistan before descending on northern India with the new weapon of the age, the musket. His armies defeated the Muslim Lodi dynasty, capturing Delhi in 1526, and then overwhelmed the proudly independent Hindu Rajput rulers too. Dying in 1531, he left behind exquisite gardens (not least, the one in Kabul, where he is buried), the first Muslim ruler’s autobiography, a reputation for building pillars out of the heads of his decapitated enemies, and a remarkable dynasty.

The trouble with dynasties, however, is that they produce weaker
members as well as stronger ones. Babur’s son lost the empire and then regained it, but it was his grandson, Akbar the Great, who really expanded Mughal rule. Akbar, roughly contemporaneous with Elizabeth I, the first Tokugawas and Ivan the Terrible, would rule for half a century. His military victories, featuring mass elephant attacks and cannon, increased the size of his empire to about a hundred million souls, compared with around five million English and the forty million Europeans of the time.

These victories were often hideously bloody, as bad as anything Ashoka had perpetrated. At the siege of Chittor, a Hindu Rajput fortress, in 1567–8, the soldiers chose the traditional death of a suicide charge, while their women and children burned themselves to death rather than be captured alive. Yet thirty thousand civilians survived for long enough for Akbar’s forces to massacre them. Akbar, though, is like Ashoka in that he has been remembered more for his peaceful qualities than for his military savagery.

Akbar was a less extreme case than Ashoka. He maintained a vast army, sustained by heavy taxes on the peasantry, but he also created an efficient and relatively fair imperial bureaucracy and was notably open-minded about religion. After founding a new capital city, Fatehpur Sikri, combining gorgeous Islamic, Indian and Persian architectural styles, Akbar had religious rivals take part in open debates with one another, as he sat and listened. The mingling of columns and arches of different styles was echoed by a mingling of world views, as Muslim Sunnis and Shia, Sufis and Hindus, Jains and Sikhs, and even Portuguese Christians, exchanged their ideas about the nature of God. Akbar seems not to have intended himself to convert to any new faith, but instead wanted to bind the faiths together into something fresh, and suitable for his multi-faith empire. In the end this ‘something’ may have amounted to little more than loyal and pious admiration for Akbar himself. Like the new capital city – short of water, too near to rebel kingdoms – it did not survive, except as the long-remembered possibility of a more tolerant Indian politics.

Akbar was succeeded by his son, Jahangir. This short statement must be followed by an admission: the Mughal habit of sons revolting against fathers and sons fighting sons creates a story too complicated to be related here. The Mughals were as bad as Plantagenets or Ottomans. Suffice it to say that Jahangir, another religiously tolerant
man and a great patron of art and architecture, was also an alcoholic, and he ruled jointly with his far sharper wife, who had coins minted in her name. Jahangir was, in due course, ousted by one of his sons, who also disposed of his brothers; he then reigned from 1628 to 1658 as Shah Jahan.

Shah Jahan will always be remembered. He left behind him the most successful architectural emblem in world history. His wife, Mumtaz Mahal, died giving birth to their fourteenth child. Her death drove him in his grief to commission the greatest building India has ever seen, the Taj Mahal. Floating in the dawn, or at dusk, outside the city of Agra, its luminous beauty checkmates the clichéd reproductions in restaurants and advertisements around the world, trumping even the smoky, sprawling industrial town that now encircles it. This fundamentally simple monument to married love is also evidence of the extravagance of scale the Mughal dynasty could then deploy. Shah Jahan’s marblemania materialized in the form of beautiful buildings across much of Delhi, Agra and other cities, astonishing contemporary observers.

This was one of the things eighteenth-century absolutism was good at, too. But is it reasonable to bracket together the Mughals in India and the contemporary European rulers under that word ‘absolutism’? Mughal rule had very different religious and philosophical roots from the European or Russian monarchies; nor was there a parallel Indian Enlightenment, despite the religious experimentation of Akbar. Yet the Mughals saw themselves as centralizers and modernizers, bringing a new coherence to the subcontinent. The earlier Mughals were intellectually open and curious. Furthermore, educated Europeans of the time, particularly French observers, were keenly aware of the Mughals as a parallel dynasty from whom lessons might usefully be learned. As at St Petersburg or Versailles, Mughal power mobilized huge manpower and resources to create epics in stone, designed to awe.

The Mughals were, however, symbols – even in Europe – for monarchical extravagance. And despite the steady spread of their imperial domains, the power of their armies and the opulence of their court, they were beginning to show that dynasties must also age. The insolent exuberance of Babur had been followed by the youthful intellectual curiosity of Akbar, then the decline of Jahangir and now Shah
Jahan’s expensive addiction to huge construction projects. Just as modern corporations who build spectacular new headquarters with fountains and statues outside them are often said to be heading for failure, for all its beauty, was the Taj Mahal the beginning of a decline? And was there something built into the structure of absolutism that made such decline inevitable?

People wondered, even at the time. Comparisons sprang readily to mind because the Mughal dynasty peaked just as Europe’s age of absolutism started. The Taj Mahal was completed in 1648. Louis XIV’s architects began the great expansion of Versailles a dozen years later. Peter the Great became sole ruler of Russia at the moment the Mughal empire reached its greatest extent. And the reign of the last really substantial Mughal emperor, Aurangzeb, coincided with the arrival of Frederick I as king of Prussia and with the beginning of Spain’s Bourbon dynasty. François Bernier, who became Aurangzeb’s personal doctor, wrote to Louis’s minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert about the astonishing wealth and luxury of the Mughal court, but warned that the system of never-ending taxes and imposts on the Indian peasantry reduced them to effective slavery, and made it hard to improve the land: people who had no stake in the future had no motivation to repair ditches or work harder.
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Aurangzeb had started in the usual way, with the murder of a brother after a war of succession and the incarceration of his father. Europeans were agog: the English poet John Dryden wrote a play about ‘Aureng-zebe’ in 1675, making a hero of the pious Muslim. But the real Aurangzeb would ruin the Mughals. His empire would reach almost all of the Indian subcontinent. It had some of the virtues of absolutist rule – a single legal system, well maintained roads and strong fortresses, standard weights and measures, relatively efficient tax collection, growing trade (not least with the Europeans) and a big standing army, and it kept records. But it became increasingly oppressive.

Aurangzeb had turned his back on the tolerant attitude of earlier Mughals, including his father and his butchered brother. He instituted Islamic bans on alcohol, on dancing and on the writing of history. He sacked the court artists whose delicate miniatures were one of the glories of Indian culture. He created a system of censors and allowed his troops to desecrate or destroy Hindu temples. In a famous though
disputed scene, his court musicians, wailing and weeping, conducted a huge burial service with twenty biers: when Aurangzeb asked what was happening, they replied that since he had killed music, they were ‘burying music’. He hoped they buried her deep, he replied.

Like other autocrats, he needed ever greater resources to supply his armies and his bureaucracy, but he failed to achieve the economic growth of more open and outward-looking states. He set out to conquer new territories in the Deccan plain and the Indian south: his most famous conquest was of the world’s greatest diamond mine at Golkonda, which produced the Koh-i-Noor, the ‘French Blue’ sported by Louis XIV himself (it reappeared in modern times as the Hope Diamond), and many others. The mine was protected by an eight-mile wall around a granite hill. The attack, in 1687, was long and bloody, but eventually made Aurangzeb the world’s richest ruler. He was also one of the world’s healthiest rulers, perhaps due to his austere religious ways. He would reign until 1707, dying at eighty-eight while still leading his apparently perennial campaign to subdue all of India.

Eventually, he ruled almost a quarter of the world’s people. Yet this long war now seems a great folly, costing far more than Shah Jahan’s building mania had. By bleeding the Mughal state dry it would lead to the rise of British India, a consequence Aurangzeb could not have begun to imagine. His greatest enemy was the Hindu Maratha state based in the hilly Western Ghats and along the coast, which at the time was ferociously led by a military genius called Shivaji, who became a hero to Hindus, and the subject of many tall tales as he led his irregular forces in bold raids. From 1681 to 1707, the Marathas and the Mughals fought a war whose only equivalent in Europe was the long wars of the This, That and the Other Succession. Throughout that twenty-six-year campaign the aged Aurangzeb travelled with a movable capital, a tent city allegedly thirty miles around, with half a million followers and thirty thousand elephants, stripping the land of its produce as they went and helping to spread disease.