The Mughals, From Panipat to the Taj Mahal: Five Emperors, the Good and the Bad

Agra, June 1658. Inside the red walls of the fort sits the richest man on earth, sixty-six years old and only just out of his sickbed. Outside, his own son’s army has taken the river gate. The water that flows up from the Yamuna has stopped.

The old man is Shah Jahan, fifth Mughal emperor. Downstream, on a bend of the same river, stands the white marble tomb he built for his wife. The son at the gate is Prince Aurangzeb. Within days the gates open, and the emperor becomes a prisoner for the rest of his life.

How did a family that rode in from Kabul with a few thousand men and some cannons come to this? It took 132 years and five emperors. Each did things worth admiring and things worth condemning, and each left his own words, or a courtier’s, to judge him by.

The story starts with a betrayal in Punjab. Daulat Khan Lodi governed Lahore for the Lodi sultan of Delhi, Ibrahim. The two had fallen out, and around 1523, by the Baburnama’s account, Daulat Khan sent his son Dilawar Khan over the passes to Kabul with an offer: come down and take Hindustan. Ibrahim’s own uncle, Alam Khan Lodi, wanted the throne too, and joined the plot.

The man they called on was Zahir-ud-din Muhammad Babur, a Central Asian prince descended from Timur on his father’s side and Genghis Khan on his mother’s. He had lost his homeland, Ferghana, and taken Kabul in 1504. He knew Punjab already: around 1520 his army stormed Saidpur, near Gujranwala, and Guru Nanak, by the Sikh tradition, was among the captives. The Guru’s hymns of grief, the Babarvani, are in the Guru Granth Sahib (see our long read on Guru Nanak).

Daulat Khan soon turned on his guest. In the winter of 1525 Babur cornered him in his fort at Malot, in today’s Hoshiarpur district. Daulat Khan had strapped on two swords to fight him, Babur writes, so he made the old man come out with them hanging from his neck.

Panipat, north of Delhi, 21 April 1526. Babur had about 12,000 men when he crossed the Indus, he says, and was told Sultan Ibrahim had 100,000 and a thousand elephants. Modern estimates are lower, but Babur was badly outnumbered.

So he dug in, with the town on one flank and ditches and felled trees on the other. Across the front, he writes, his men lashed together about 700 carts with rawhide ropes, in the Ottoman manner, leaving gaps for horsemen. Behind them stood matchlock men and his gunners, Ustad Ali Quli and Mustafa, with their cannon.

The sultan’s army charged into the trap. The guns boomed, the elephants panicked, and Babur’s horse archers swept round both flanks and shot into the crowded centre. By midday it was over. Babur’s men counted 15,000 to 16,000 enemy dead, he writes; people in Agra later said 40,000 to 50,000. Ibrahim Lodi lay among them.

At Agra the family of the fallen Raja of Gwalior gave Humayun a great diamond. Some writers think it was the Koh-i-Noor, the stone that later passed to Maharaja Ranjit Singh; nobody can prove it.

Babur’s real rival was Rana Sanga of Mewar, the leading Rajput king of the north. Babur claims the Rana had promised to attack Delhi from the south and then did nothing. Rajput accounts say it was Babur who had courted Sanga. Historians still argue it.

In March 1527 they met at Khanwa, west of Agra. Babur’s men were frightened and outnumbered. So Babur, a lifelong drinker, gave up wine: he had his gold and silver cups smashed and the pieces given to the poor. He framed the fight as a holy war against unbelievers and lifted a tax called the tamgha for Muslims. His men swore on the Quran to fight to the death.

It was not a simple Hindu-against-Muslim war, though. Riding with Rana Sanga were Afghans: Mahmud Lodi, the dead sultan’s brother, and Hasan Khan Mewati, who died on the field. On 16 March 1527 the guns and the carts won again. Babur took the title Ghazi, a holy warrior, and, following his ancestor Timur, had a tower raised from the heads of the dead.

Rana Sanga was carried off the field unconscious. He vowed to fight again, and died in January 1528; Rajput accounts say his own nobles poisoned him to stop another war.

Babur ruled Hindustan for just four years. What sets him apart is his book, the Baburnama: battles, drinking parties, friends and failures, told with startling honesty.

Hindustan is a place of little charm.Babur, Baburnama (W.M. Thackston’s translation)

He missed good horses, grapes, melons and ice, but marvelled at the gold, the craftsmen and the rains, and laid out gardens with running water by the Yamuna.

His end is told by his daughter, Gulbadan Begum, in her own memoir. In 1530 Humayun fell desperately ill. Babur, she writes, walked around his son’s bed, praying that God take his life instead. Humayun recovered. Babur sickened, and died on 26 December 1530. He asked to be buried in Kabul, and he is.

Humayun was charming, clever, fond of astrology and opium, and poor at keeping what he had. His danger was an Afghan who had once served Babur: Sher Khan Sur.

At Chausa on the Ganges in 1539, Sher Khan’s men fell on the Mughal camp at dawn. Humayun escaped across the river, the story goes, on a water-carrier’s inflated goatskin. On 17 May 1540, near Kannauj, Sher Shah, as he now called himself, finished the job. In five short years he rebuilt the great road from Bengal to the north-west and minted the silver rupiya that gave the rupee its name.

Humayun wandered through Sindh. At Amarkot, in the desert, a Hindu ruler, Rana Prasad, sheltered his family, and there, on 15 October 1542, his wife Hamida Banu gave birth to Akbar. In Persia Shah Tahmasp helped him, at the price, the chroniclers say, of outward conversion to the Shia faith. Back with Persian troops, he took Kabul, and in 1553 had his rebellious brother Kamran blinded.

On 22 June 1555 he won at Sirhind, in Punjab, and in July he sat on the throne in Delhi again. Six months later, hearing the call to prayer on the stairs of his library, he turned to kneel, caught his foot and fell. He died in January 1556.

The heir was thirteen, and he was in Punjab, chasing Afghans with his guardian, Bairam Khan. At Kalanaur, in today’s Gurdaspur district, on 14 February 1556, Bairam Khan seated Akbar on a brick platform in a garden and proclaimed him emperor. The platform is still there.

It was a crown with little under it. That autumn Hemu, a Hindu from Rewari who had risen from humble beginnings to be chief minister and general of the Afghan Sur king Adil Shah, swept up from the east, took Agra and Delhi, and crowned himself Raja Vikramaditya.

On 5 November 1556 the armies met at Panipat, thirty years after Babur’s battle. Hemu, on his elephant, was winning when a chance arrow struck him in the eye. He fell unconscious in his howdah, and his army, seeing the empty seat, broke and ran.

Hemu was brought before the boy king. Akbar’s court historian, Abu’l Fazl, says Akbar refused to strike a helpless man and Bairam Khan did it. Muhammad Arif Qandhari, writing at the time, says Akbar himself struck the blow on Bairam’s advice and took the title Ghazi. Many historians think the gentler version was polished later. Hemu’s head was sent to Kabul and his body hung at a gate of Delhi.

In 1560, at seventeen or eighteen, Akbar shook off Bairam Khan and began to rule. Within two years he had made the move that shaped the empire. On 6 February 1562, at Sambhar, he married a daughter of Raja Bharmal of Amber, the Kachhwaha house of today’s Jaipur. She became his most honoured wife, known by her title, Mariam-uz-Zamani, and the mother of the next emperor.

Her nephew, Raja Man Singh, became one of the empire’s greatest generals; Raja Todar Mal rebuilt its tax system. In 1563 Akbar abolished the tax on Hindu pilgrims, and in 1564, Abu’l Fazl records, the jizya, the poll tax non-Muslims had paid. Rajput kings kept their thrones and their faith, and served the emperor.

Mewar refused the deal. At Haldighati in 1576 Maharana Pratap fought Akbar’s army, led by Raja Man Singh, and was beaten but never caught; his own vanguard was led by an Afghan, Hakim Khan Sur.

Mewar had already paid for saying no. In October 1567 Akbar besieged Chittorgarh. Rana Udai Singh had left for the hills, leaving the fort to Jaimal Rathore and Patta.

On the night of 22 February 1568, by the Mughal accounts, Akbar shot Jaimal with his own musket as he oversaw repairs to a breach. That night the women of the fort died in jauhar, the fire Rajput women chose over capture. At dawn the men, in saffron, opened the gates and fought until they were killed.

Then came the massacre, of defenders and of peasants who had come in to help. Historians such as Satish Chandra put the dead at about 30,000, most of them not soldiers. Akbar’s victory letter of 9 March 1568 boasted of taking the forts of infidels and having ‘established Islam there’. Later he raised statues of Jaimal and Patta on stone elephants at Agra’s fort: a salute to brave enemies, some historians say; doorkeepers, say others.

Goindwal, on the Beas, in Punjab. Here the third Sikh Guru, Guru Amar Das, had built a centre with a stepwell of 84 steps, the Baoli Sahib, and a rule: whoever came to see the Guru first sat in the pangat, the row on the floor, and ate in the langar with everyone else.

In 1567, by the Sikh tradition’s usual date (some accounts say 1569), the emperor came too. The tradition says Akbar sat on the ground among villagers and ate the plain food of the Guru’s kitchen before meeting him. He offered land for the langar; the Guru declined, saying it must live on what the sangat gives. Some accounts say Akbar then granted land to the Guru’s daughter, Bibi Bhani.

No Mughal chronicle we found records the meal. But it fits what came after: in 1598 Akbar visited Guru Arjan Dev and, at his request, cut the land tax on Punjab’s hard-pressed farmers.

In 1569 a son, Salim, was born to Akbar after the Sufi Shaikh Salim Chishti of Sikri had prayed for one. At Sikri Akbar built a new red sandstone capital, Fatehpur Sikri, and there, in 1575, a hall called the Ibadat Khana, the House of Worship.

At first it was for Muslim scholars, who, by Badauni’s telling, shouted and insulted each other before the emperor. So Akbar widened the circle: Hindu pandits, Jain monks, Zoroastrian priests and, from 1580, Jesuits from Goa, Rodolfo Acquaviva and Antoni de Montserrat, who hoped to convert him. They failed.

In 1579 the leading ulema signed a decree, the mahzar, letting Akbar decide between disputing scholars; in 1581 clerics in Bengal and Bihar declared him an unbeliever and backed a revolt. The idea taking shape had a name: sulh-i kul, peace with all. Akbar had the Mahabharata and the Ramayana put into Persian.

Around 1582 came the Din-i Ilahi, the ‘divine unity’. Abu’l Fazl, Akbar’s admiring historian, presents a spiritual path. Abd al-Qadir Badauni, a strict Sunni at court, presents an emperor turning his back on Islam, in a history he kept hidden until Akbar was dead. Only about nineteen members are known by name; Birbal was one.

The boy born after the Sufi’s prayer did not wait patiently. From 1600 Prince Salim was in open revolt, holding court at Allahabad. In August 1602 Abu’l Fazl, riding to Agra, was ambushed near Narwar and killed by the men of Bir Singh Deo Bundela. Salim had arranged it; his own memoir does not hide it. Akbar, the chroniclers say, wept.

Father and son made up. Akbar died on 27 October 1605, and Salim became emperor as Jahangir, ‘world-seizer’. His memoir, the Jahangirnama, is as frank as Babur’s. He hung a chain of gold, thirty gaz long with sixty bells, from the fort at Agra, he writes, so anyone denied justice could ring for the emperor. He banned the making and sale of wine, and admits he himself drank up to twenty cups a day.

Within six months his eldest son, Khusrau, rebelled and fled to Punjab. Jahangir had the prince’s followers impaled along the road and Khusrau led past them. In the same weeks he ordered the execution of Guru Arjan Dev in Lahore, and wrote down why; our long read on Guru Arjan and 1606 tells it in full. Later he held the sixth Guru, Guru Hargobind, at Gwalior Fort, and then let him go.

He loved nature and painting; his artist Mansur painted birds and flowers with a naturalist’s eye. English traders had reached Surat in 1608, and in 1615 King James I sent an ambassador, Sir Thomas Roe, whose diary of the court is still read. Jahangir’s memoir never mentions him.

I can discover which face is the work of each of them.Jahangir, on his court painters, in his memoir

In May 1611 Jahangir married a widow of 34, Mehr-un-Nissa, born in Kandahar to a Persian family; her first husband, Sher Afgan, had been killed in 1607. He called her Nur Jahan, light of the world.

No Mughal woman before or after held such power. Coins were struck in her name, and orders went out under her seal. Her father and brother, Itimad-ud-Daulah and Asaf Khan, rose to the top of the court. She shot four tigers with six shots from an elephant’s howdah, Jahangir proudly records. As his health failed from drink and opium, she ran much of the empire.

In 1626 the general Mahabat Khan seized the emperor in a camp on the Jhelum. Nur Jahan led the counterattack from the back of an elephant; it failed, but she later freed Jahangir by her wits. He died in October 1627 and was buried at Shahdara, outside Lahore. She lived on quietly in Lahore and was buried nearby in 1645.

On the grave of this poor stranger, let there be neither lamp nor rose.Lines attributed to Nur Jahan, on her tomb in Lahore

Jahangir’s third son, Prince Khurram, was a brilliant soldier. In 1622 the blinded Khusrau died in his custody, officially of colic. That year Khurram rebelled against his father, and fought him for four years before begging pardon.

When Jahangir died, Asaf Khan, Nur Jahan’s brother, held the court for Khurram. In January 1628, before he reached Agra, Khurram’s rivals were put to death: his brother Shahryar and his nephews and cousins among them. On 14 February 1628 he was crowned as Shah Jahan, ‘king of the world’.

His wife was Asaf Khan’s daughter, Arjumand Banu Begum, married in 1612 and given the title Mumtaz Mahal. She went with him everywhere, even on campaign, and bore him fourteen children. In 1632 his forces destroyed the Portuguese settlement at Hooghly in Bengal, and he ordered that newly built Hindu temples be pulled down; his court historian, Abdul Hamid Lahori, records 76 demolished in the district of Benares. In Punjab, in 1634, a Mughal force fought Guru Hargobind’s Sikhs near Amritsar and lost.

In 1630 the rains failed in the Deccan and Gujarat, and failed again the next year. The court was in the Deccan, at Burhanpur, waging war on the sultanate of Ahmadnagar. Grain carts coming from Malwa were taken to feed the emperor’s army.

Peter Mundy, an English merchant travelling from Surat to Agra in those months, saw people dying along the roads and bodies blocking the way. Lahori, in Shah Jahan’s official history, did not look away either.

Life was offered for a loaf, but none would buy.Abdul Hamid Lahori, Padshahnama (Elliot and Dowson’s translation)

He wrote of dog meat sold as goat and the bones of the dead ground into flour. Shah Jahan opened free kitchens in Burhanpur, Ahmedabad and Surat and remitted about an eleventh of the land revenue; it barely touched the disaster. Estimates of the dead run from about two million to more than seven million.

In the middle of it, on 17 June 1631 at Burhanpur, Mumtaz Mahal died after giving birth to their fourteenth child. She was 38.

Her body was carried to Agra. For the tomb Shah Jahan chose a bend of the river where a mansion of Raja Man Singh stood, by then owned by Raja Jai Singh of Amber, who was given houses in the city in exchange. Work began in 1632.

The chief architect, by most accounts, was Ustad Ahmad Lahori; the marble came from Makrana in Rajasthan. The tomb was finished in the 1640s and the complex in about 1653. More than 20,000 workers built it, a figure that goes back to the French jewel merchant Jean-Baptiste Tavernier.

What did it cost? The figure usually credited to Lahori is about 50 lakh rupees; later estimates, quoted by Agra’s district administration, run to 3.2 crore. For scale, Lahori put the cost of the Peacock Throne, finished in 1635 after seven years, at 100 lakh.

Foreign visitors ran out of words. The Peacock Throne was crusted with rubies, emeralds and pearls; François Bernier, a French doctor at the court, valued it at four crore rupees. Silver poured in from the Americas to pay for Indian cotton, indigo and spices, and the Mughal rupee stayed almost pure silver.

You will often read that the Mughals ran a quarter of the world’s economy. The economic historian Angus Maddison did put India’s share of world output at about 24 per cent in 1700. But India held a huge share of the world’s people, and his income per head for India was little more than half of Western Europe’s. Stephen Broadberry and colleagues reckon it was about 60 per cent of Britain’s in 1600, and falling behind.

The money came from the land. Shireen Moosvi puts the state’s claim in Akbar’s time at about a third of the harvest; Burton Stein argued that official and unofficial demands took well over half. Irfan Habib found the revenue demand pushed peasants towards bare subsistence, and many fled their villages. A Dutch merchant at Agra in the 1620s, Francisco Pelsaert, called ordinary people’s lives ‘the dwelling-place of bitter woe’.

In September 1657 Shah Jahan fell gravely ill in Delhi. He had four grown sons, each governing a corner of the empire, and the Mughals had no rule of succession except the sword.

Aurangzeb and Murad joined forces. In April 1658, at Dharmat near Ujjain, they beat the imperial army under Raja Jaswant Singh of Marwar. On 29 May, at Samugarh near Agra, they met Dara. Bernier wrote that Dara got down from his elephant mid-battle; his men, seeing the empty howdah, thought him dead and fled. It was Hemu’s Panipat again.

Then came the siege of Agra Fort and the water cut off at the river. In June 1658 Shah Jahan gave in. Soon after, Aurangzeb invited Murad to a feast, and his brother woke up a prisoner. On 31 July 1658, in a garden outside Delhi, Aurangzeb crowned himself emperor.

Dara fled through Punjab towards Lahore. Sikh tradition remembers him at the Beas: Guru Har Rai, whose herbs from his garden at Kiratpur had once cured the prince, met him there, and the Guru’s Sikhs held the ferries to slow the pursuit. Dara was caught a year later and put to death in August 1659, declared an apostate. That, and Aurangzeb’s long reign, is another story.

Strip away the slogans and the record of these five emperors is neither the golden age of one telling nor the dark age of another. They wrote, or had written, an astonishing amount about themselves, and are judged most harshly by their own pages.

Babur won with guns and raised towers of heads. Akbar ordered the massacre at Chittor, and, by the Sikh tradition, sat on the floor at Goindwal; he listened to Jesuits, Jains and pandits in his House of Worship. Jahangir hung a chain of justice and ordered the death of Guru Arjan. Shah Jahan built the most beautiful tomb on earth while millions starved in the Deccan, and ended his days as his son’s prisoner, within sight of it.

The marble, the miniatures and the music are real. So are the peasants who paid for them, and the people killed at Chittor and Panipat. Remembering one without the other is not history.