5 Books on Mughal influence and intermingling

It may be tempting to think of the Mughals as standing apart from empires before and after them, and alien to the land they ruled for centuries. But this is clearly not the case. (Photo by Abhilash Mishra via Pexels)

There’s no lack of books on India between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. Shelves groan with narratives about people, places, and events, political and economic histories, detailed monographs, and cultural studies on art, architecture, music, cuisine and more. This vast library is in itself a testament to the lasting impact of the Mughal empire.

Some of the more interesting volumes deal with themes of influence and intermingling. It may be tempting to think of the Mughals as standing apart from empires before and after them, and alien to the land they ruled for centuries. This is clearly not the case, whether it comes to the Mughals or any other imperial dynasty.

Writing of Sanjay Subrahmanyam’s notion of “connected history”, David Shulman says that this way of looking envisions a world that is “densely textured” and “profoundly interlocking in causal processes”. Many works have, in their own fashion, dealt with these textures and processes.

In Culture of Encounters, for instance, Audrey Truschke illustrates the ways in which the Mughals engaged with Sanskrit texts and ideas and, in turn, how Sanskrit intellectuals participated in this demand for Indian narratives. Among the cross-cultural endeavours she highlights are the translations of the Mahabharata and Ramayana into Persian and the composition of the Akbarnamah.

These encounters offer insights into the relationship between power and culture. They are, writes Truschke, “a dynamic that defined the lives of many early modern Indians no less than it shapes our own”. In a similar vein, Shankar Nair’s Translating Wisdom analyses Sanskrit-to-Persian translations with an emphasis on the Yoga-Vasistha to illustrate how “early modern Muslim and Hindu scholars found the words and the means to put their respective intellectual traditions into a certain conversation with one another”.

If Truschke and Nair look within borders for connections, Richard Eaton looks further afield. His India in the Persianate Age is a magisterial account of the period between 1000 and 1765, with the latter half, naturally, devoted to the Mughals. The Mughal Empire, writes Eaton, was never static: “its history was one of a progressive fusion of two very different worlds”. In this account of encounter between Persian and Sanskrit ways of life, he challenges statist and religious stereotypes, and brings out ongoing contacts with Central Asia and elsewhere.

The spotlight shifts to the nineteenth century in William Dalrymple’s White Mughals, a work of narrative history. The book records the results of intermixing between Britishers and Indians, focusing on the marriage of James Kirkpatrick, then British Resident of Hyderabad, with Khair un-Nissa, great-niece of the region’s diwan. As Dalrymple finds: “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.”

Most recently, there’s Nandini Das’s Courting India, which returns to the formal beginnings of Britain’s entangled history with India and the Mughals. Das recounts the travels and travails of Sir Thomas Roe, who arrived in Surat in 1615 as James I’s first ambassador to the court of Jehangir. The British at that time were minor players in the region, while the Mughals were seen as one of the world's greatest empires.

This, writes Das, was a historical hinge-point. For her, the records reveal that “above all, it stands as a reminder of the complexity that underlies what we may think of, in abstract, binary terms, either as a meeting or as a clash of cultures and nations”.

Quite apart from all of the above, tales of the Mughals have also been transmuted into a uniquely Indian idiom: the vivid panels and characterisation found in the pages of Amar Chitra Katha comic books. There are plenty of titles on offer, including those on Babur, Akbar, and Shah Jahan, as well as tales from the Mughal court involving Birbal and Tansen, among others.

It would be a great pity if these and similar works are dismissed or ignored, especially in our fractious time. As Sanjay Subrahmanyam has written, “a national culture that does not have the confidence to declare that, like all other national cultures, it too is a hybrid, a crossroads, a mixture of elements derived from chance encounters and unforeseen consequences, can only take the path to xenophobia and cultural paranoia.”