In South Asia today, we see Muslim and Hindu cultures as worlds apart, but this was not always the case in the history of the Subcontinent.

Recently, I read a section of the Akbarnama (Tale of Akbar) where both Hindu and Muslim astrologers were asked to cast the Emperor Akbar’s horoscope. Though I did not bat an eyelid at such an occurrence, I was reminded of a comment made by a student in Pakistan five years ago that has stayed with me ever since: “Mughal badshah asal mein mussalmaan nahin thhe, is liay unko Hinduon say koi masla nahin tha.” [The Mughals had no problem with Hindus since they were not really Muslims.]

Neither at the time nor now do I fault my student for this comment. My student was merely echoing a pervasive viewpoint from his social context far removed from my own intellectual world.

Collaboration and intimacy between Hindus and Muslims is a settled issue amongst Mughal historians, even as communalist politics continues to unsettle South Asia today. However, research findings by Mughal historians are often inaccessible to the public, especially in Pakistan, due to limited resources and avenues for history, education and public discourse. To bridge this gap, here is a viewpoint based on evidence and conclusions from decades of research by Mughal historians in North America, Europe and India.

The Mughals were Muslim rulers who saw no contradiction but sought peace and prosperity in collaboration and intimacy with Hindus and other faith communities. The Mughal state was neither secular nor was Islam its sole state religion. The temptation of imposing the categories of modern South Asian states on the pre-modern past should be avoided.

Decades of research by Mughal historians have established collaboration and intimacy between Hindus and Muslims, even as communalist politics unsettles South Asia today

The Mughals identified as Muslims alongside employing, marrying, and engaging those from other faith communities. They sponsored and participated in rituals and festivals we today associate with Hindus, Zoroastrians and other faiths. This political philosophy was called sulh-i kull (peace with all).

As Muslim rulers, why did the Mughals have no problem with Hindus? There are at least three explanations offered across research in Mughal history: 

1) The Mughals became Indian. The first Mughal, Babur, was curious about India’s society and environment, yet nostalgic for his home in Central Asia. Babur particularly longed for Ferghana Valley’s famous peaches, as illustrated by Stephen F. Dale in The Garden of the Eight Paradises. Two generations later, his grandson Akbar was at home in India. He married Hindu Rajput women and made India his emotional world. Akbar requested his court poet Faizi specifically for a story about love in India, leading to the first Persian translation of the Nal Daman, according to historian Muzaffar Alam.

Akbar’s grandson Shah Jahan was three-quarter Rajput by blood. Less than two hundred years later, the last Mughal ruler, Bahadur Shah Zafar II, lamented the loss of his homeland, India, while in exile in Burma in his famous verse: lagta nahin hai dil mera ujrray dayaar mein/Kis ki bani hai ‘aalam-i-na-payedaar mein (My heart has no repose in this isolated valley/ Who has gotten by in a futile world). 

Alongside becoming Indian, the Mughals saw no conflict in being of Central Asian origin and also located themselves within broader Persianate and Islamic realms. Azfar Moin has shown in his 2012 work, The Millennial Sovereign, that Mongol descent was key for Mughal claims to divine kingship at the turn of the Islamic millenium. In a recent book, Persianate Selves, Mana Kia illustrates that scholars at the Mughal court saw themselves as part of a shared Persianate geography, transcending the modern national constructions of Iran, India, Afghanistan and Central Asia. Trade, pilgrimage and knowledge provided continued links between the Mughals, their successor states and the larger Islamic world, as several works by Nile Green attest and the forthcoming works of Rishad Choudhury and Usman Hamid will demonstrate. All four identities — Indian, Central Asian, Persianate and Islamic — were hence claimed by the Mughals, without the contestations we would encounter today.

2) Religious difference with Hindus was not a political faultline for the Mughals or preceding Muslim rulers. The Mughals did not view Hindus as their political rivals by virtue of their religion. Mughal rule was characterised by long-lasting curiosity and respect for Indian knowledge systems, alongside collaborative governance with Hindus and other faith communities. On many occasions, the lines of difference were even blurred, as we shall see below. Books in recent years by Audrey Truschke and Rajeev Kinra convincingly show that both Sanskrit knowledge and Brahmin bureaucrats had a high status at the Mughal court. Akbar’s finance minister, Raja Todar Mal, was valued for bringing the best practices of the Rajputs to shape Mughal economic policies.

Aurangzeb’s conflict with Rajput nobles was not religiously motivated, as M. Athar Ali successfully demonstrates in his 1966 book The Mughal Nobility Under Aurangzeb. Rather, Aurangzeb redistributed administrative assignments from the Rajputs to a rising local nobility in the Deccan in order to consolidate his political power. Munis D. Faruqui shows in his 2012 book The Princes of the Mughal Empire 1504–1719 that, for Mughal princes, strengthening local alliances through collaboration and marriage proved to be a make-or-break factor as they contended for the Mughal throne. 

Historians have also successfully challenged the notion that mediaeval Muslim conquests of India occurred to wipe out infidels. In A Book of Conquest, Mannan Ahmed Asif argues that the arrival of Muhammad bin Qasim did not obliterate local practices but rather Islamic and Indic political ethics converged in mediaeval Sindh. Earlier, Romila Thapar demonstrates that the looting of Hindu temples was a financially-motivated practice of mediaeval warfare amongst Hindus and Muslims, often to pay mercenary soldiers from temple treasuries. The looting of the Somnath temple by Mahmud of Ghazni in 1026 was, by no means, an exceptional act of violence by a Muslim invader.

3) Islam in Mughal and mediaeval India took many shapes in conversation and contact with a range of local beliefs and practices. Several historians have written about inter-religious and inter-sectarian exchange under the Mughals and in earlier periods. Historian Supriya Gandhi has shown in The Emperor Who Never Was that Dara Shikoh’s political philosophy and personal spirituality were constituted by both Sufi and Vedantic ideas. This was part of a longer tradition of dialogue on philosophical and ethical concerns, between different faith communities at the Mughal court as the work of Corinne Lefevre on the Majalis-i Jahangiri illustrates.

Similarly, there is emerging evidence of Shia and Sunni intellectual collaboration alongside theological debate in Mughal India, as well as interconnections between Sufism and Islamic law. In An Indian Economic & Social History Review, Ali Anooshahr has recently shown that a steady stream of Shia and Sunni scholars from Iran and Central Asia arrived at Mughal and regional courts. A notable example is Mir Fathullah Shirazi, who developed military cannons and contributed to astronomy, law and financial administration. In his forthcoming work, Daniel Jacobius Morgan shows the interconnection between Shariah-minded legalism and Sufi mysticism, through the works of Shah Waliullah’s family.

Moving beyond the Mughal context, in Monsoon Islam, Sebastian Prange illuminates how mediaeval Muslim communities on the Malabar Coast forged varying traditions from other regions in South Asia, based on trade and the environment. In a study from an even earlier period, Finbarr B. Flood illustrates, through changes in architecture, objects and coins, that mediaeval Muslim cultures in South Asia assumed distinct forms based on encounters with regional Hindu and Buddhist practices.

Decades of research on Mughal and mediaeval history disprove an increasingly pervasive viewpoint of cultural incompatibility and religious difference amongst Muslims and Hindus. This misperception was initially perpetuated by colonial policies and solidified by South Asia’s many partitions.

Unfortunately, this misperception has been further strengthened by anti-Muslim sentiments and policies across the border in Modi’s India. Perhaps, the next time nationalists attempt to halt the construction of a Hindu temple in Pakistan or Muslims are maligned and killed for beef consumption and temples are constructed on razed mosque sites in India, we can turn to our shared Mughal past as an alternative model for Muslim-Hindu relations.

Mariam Sabri is a PhD Candidate at the University of California Berkeley, specialising in Mughal history and the history of science

Published in Dawn, EOS, August 23rd, 2020