Kings and Chronicles The Mughal Courts� (c. sixteenth- seventeenth centuries)

The Mughals and the empire �

• Mughal derives from Mongol
• They referred to themselves as Timurids, as descendants of the Turkish ruler Timur on the paternal side.
• Babur, the first Mughal ruler, was related to Ghenghiz Khan from his mother’s side.
• During the sixteenth century, Europeans used the term Mughal to describe the Indian rulers of this branch of the family

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• Even the name Mowgli, the young hero of Rudyard Kipling’s Jungle Book, is derived from it
• The founder of the empire, Zahiruddin Babur Central Asian homeland, Farghana, by the warring Uzbeks.
• He first established himself at Kabul and then in 1526 pushed further

• His successor, Nasiruddin Humayun (1530-40, 1555-56) expanded the frontiers of the empire
• lost it to the Afghan leader Sher Shah Sur
• Humayun took refuge in the court of the Safavid ruler of Iran
• In 1555 Humayun defeated the Surs, but died a year later

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• Jalaluddin Akbar (1556-1605) the greatest of all the Mughal emperors, for he not only expanded but also consolidated his empire, making it the largest, strongest and richest kingdom of his time
• Akbar succeeded in extending the frontiers of the empire to the Hindukush mountains
• Akbar had three fairly able successors in Jahangir (1605-27), Shah Jahan (1628-58) and Aurangzeb (1658-1707),
• .

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• During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the institutions of an imperial structure were created. These included effective methods of administration and taxation. The visible centre of Mughal power was the court.
• Court. Here political alliances and relationships were forged, status and hierarchies defined

• After 1707, following the death of Aurangzeb, the power of the dynasty diminished
• Yet symbolically the prestige of the Mughal ruler did not lose its aura. In 1857 the last scion of this dynasty, Bahadur Shah Zafar II, was overthrown by the British

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The Production of Chronicles �

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• Chronicles are an important source for studying the empire and its court.
• projected a vision of an enlightened kingdom to all those who came under its umbrella.
• The histories they wrote focused on events centred on the ruler, his family, the court and nobles, wars and administrative arrangements. Their titles, such as the Akbar Nama, Shahjahan Nama, Alamgir Nama, that is, the story of Akbar, Shah Jahan and Alamgir (a title of the Mughal ruler Aurangzeb)

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From Turkish to Persian�

• Chronicles were written in Persian. ‘
• Their first ruler Babur wrote poetry and his memoirs in TURKISH
• Akbar who consciously set out to make Persian the leading language of the Mughal court.
• Persian was elevated to a language of empire, conferring power and prestige on those who had a command of it

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• It was spoken by the king, the royal household and the elite at court
• A new language, Urdu, sprang from the interaction of Persian with Hindavi
• Akbar Nama were written in Persian
• Babur’s memoirs, were translated from the Turkish into the Persian Babur Nama

The Mahabharata was translated as the Razmnama (Book of Wars)

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The making of manuscripts �

• Manuscripts means handwritten
• The centre of manuscript production was the imperial kitabkhana.
• scriptorium, that is, a place where the emperor’s collection of manuscripts was kept and new manuscripts were produced.

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• Task involved in the creation of manuscript
• Paper makers scribes or calligraphers gilders to illuminate the pages painters to illustrate scenes from the text ,
• bookbinders to gather the individual folios and set them within ornamental covers
• Calligraphy, the art of handwriting, was considered a skill of great importance
• different styles Akbar’s favourite was the nastaliq, a fluid style with long horizontal strokes
• carbon ink (siyahi). Qalam

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• 3. The Painted Image
• The historian Abu’l Fazl described painting as a “magical art”: in his view it had the power to make inanimate objects look as if they possessed life.
• Explain the importance of paintings
• Words of abul fazal (IN BOOKS )
• Drawing the likeness of anything is called taswir
• The production of paintings portraying the emperor, his court and the people who were part of it, was a source of constant tension between rulers and representatives of the Muslim orthodoxy, the ulama. The latter did not fail to invoke the Islamic prohibition of the portrayal of human beings enshrined in the Qur’an as well as the hadis, which described an incident from the life of the Prophet Muhammad
• This was a function that was believed to belong exclusively to God

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• The Safavid kings of Iran, for example, patronised the finest artists, who were trained in workshops set up at court. The names of painters – such as that of Bihzad – contributed to spreading the cultural fame of the Safavid court far and wide
• Artists from Iran came to india
• Mir Sayyid Ali and Abdus Samad, who were made to accompany Emperor Humayun to Delhi.
• Others migrated in search of opportunities to win patronage and prestige ( y they migrated? How they migrated)

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• A conflict between the emperor and the spokesmen of orthodox Muslim opinion on the question of visual representations of living beings was a source of tension at the Mughal court
• Akbar’s court historian Abu’l Fazl cites the emperor as saying: “There are many that hate painting, but such men I dislike. It appears to me that an artist has a unique way of recognising God when he must come to feel that he cannot bestow life on his work ..
• Q ( who’s words were that)

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4. The Akbar Nama

• Among the important illustrated Mughal chronicles the Akbar Nama and Badshah Nama (The Chronicle of a King)
• The author of the Akbar Nama, Abu’l Fazl grew up in the Mughal capital of Agra
• Beginning in 1589, Abu’l Fazl worked on the Akbar Nama for thirteen years
• The Akbar Nama is divided into three books of which the first two are chronicles. The third book is the Ain-i Akbari.
• The first volume contains the history of mankind from Adam to one celestial cycle of Akbar’s life (30 years). The second volume closes in the fortysixth regnal year (1601) of Akbar.
• A diachronic account traces developments over time, whereas a synchronic account depicts one or several situations at one particular moment or point of time.
• The Akbar Nama was written to provide a detailed description of Akbar’s reign in the traditional diachronic sense of recording politically significant events across time, as well as in the more novel sense of giving a synchronic picture of all aspects of Akbar’s empire – geographic, social, administrative and cultural – without reference to chronology

Badshah Nama

• A pupil of Abu’l Fazl, Abdul Hamid Lahori is known as the author of the Badshah Nama
• The Badshah Nama is this official history in three volumes (daftars) of ten lunar years each.
• Lahori wrote the first and second daftars comprising the first two decades of the emperor’s rule (1627-47); these volumes were later revised by Sadullah Khan, Shah Jahan’s wazir
• In emulation of this, the Nawab of Awadh gifted the illustrated Badshah Nama to King George III in 1799. Since then it has been preserved in the English Royal Collections, now at Windsor Castle.
• The Asiatic Society of Bengal, founded by Sir William Jones in 1784, undertook the editing, printing and translation of many Indian manuscripts.
• In the early twentieth century the Akbar Nama was translated into English by Henry Beveridge
• The transmission of notions of luminosity The origins of Suhrawardi’s philosophy went back to Plato’s Republic, where God is represented by the symbol of the sun.

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The Ideal Kingdom�

A divine light

• Court chroniclers drew upon many sources to show that the power of the Mughal kings came directly from God.
• Abu’l Fazl placed Mughal kingship as the highest station in the hierarchy of objects receiving light emanating from God (farr-i izadi )
• Here he was inspired by a famous Iranian sufi, Shihabuddin Suhrawardi who first developed this idea
• Mughal artists, from the seventeenth century onwards, began to portray emperors wearing the halo, which they saw on European paintings of Christ and the Virgin Mary to symbolise the light of God

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A unifying force�Sulh-i kul �

• Abu’l Fazl describes the ideal of Sulh-i kul (absolute peace) as the cornerstone of enlightened rule. In Sulh-i kul all religions and schools of thought had freedom of expression but on condition that they did not undermine the authority of the state or fight among themselves.
• The ideal of Sulh-i kul was implemented through state policies – the nobility under the Mughals was a composite one comprising Iranis, Turanis, Afghans, Rajputs, Deccanis – all of whom were given positions and awards purely on the basis of their service and loyalty to the king
• Akbar abolished the tax on pilgrimage in 1563 and jizya in 1564 as the two were based on religious discrimination.
• Instructions were sent to officers of the empire to follow the precept of Sulh-i kul in administration.

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Just sovereignty as social contract

• ( who define sovereignity as a social contract)
• Abu’l Fazl defined sovereignty as a social contract: the emperor protects the four essences of his subjects, namely, life (jan), property (mal), honour (namus) and faith (din), and in return demands obedience and a share of resources
• but a human form used to symbolise an abstract quality. Such a mode of personification in art and literature is termed allegory.