Mughal political culture:-

What is political culture

since what authors mean by "political culture" can be demonstrated by their usage and
implicit explanatory frameworks. "Political culture" belongs with those "catch words" that
serve as "deliberately vague conditioning concepts." More than thirty years ago, Pye, one of
political science's modern pioneers on the subject, observed that "the mere term 'political
culture' is capable of evoking quick intuitive understanding, so that people often feel that
without further and explicit definition they can appreciate its meaning and freely use it. Many
new cultural historians employ "political culture" in ways that evade certain classic
considerations of political life, nanely, power, and who exercises it-in other words, who gets
what, why, and how? The new cultural history's mode of political culture tends to repeat
social history's earlier slighting of power and policy dimensions. Many historians studying
political power concentrate on language and the discourses attending social relations and
power.
According to Almond, "Every political system is embedded in a particular pattern of
orientations to political action"; he referred to this pattern as "political culture." He also
suggested that the then popular term, "ideology," be confined to "the systematic and explicit
formulation of a general orientation to politics," leaving political culture to encompass "the
vaguer and more implicit orientations. Wildavsky, He viewed political culture not as an
alternative to rational, economic behavior, but as a kind of "cultural rationality. Merelman
advocated moving beyond cognitive phenomena ("ideologies, beliefs, attitudes, and
opinions") to incorporate "actual behaviour" through attention to the "deep structures"
embodied in particular cultures.

The evolution of political culture in Mughal India between the 16th to 18th century was
marked by a complex interplay of religious, cultural, and political factors. The Mughal
Empire, which ruled over a majority Hindu population, was characterised by a blend of
Perso-Islamic and regional Indian elements. At its peak, the empire was a centralised
organisation with a vast complex of personnel, money, and information dedicated to the
service of the emperor and his nobility.

Legitimacy, Religion and Political Culture:

The Mughals’– could arguably be self-explanatory and self-sufficient, in that the identification
of the Mughals with India is virtually given for the professional historian, the popular image–
and, more importantly, the image of the Mughals constituted in India’s political scenario as
one of several ‘foreign’ Muslim dynasties ruling over India in the mediaeval centuries– leaves
some space open for re-endorsing the identification. The Mughals themselves never had to
face the problem of being ‘foreigners’ ruling over an ‘alien’ land; both these notions are of
posterior, indeed of very recent origins. In an ambience where conquest constituted its own
legitimation, the notions of being alien and foreign would have very doubtful provenance.The
Persian language term, pronounced ‘Mughul’ in Iran and ‘Mughal’ in India, came to acquire a
generic meaning that broadly signified peoples of the Central Asian regions, speaking the
Mongol languages and dialects;The dynasty in India proudly traced its lineage from both
Chingiz and Timur, the former as ancestor of Babur’s mother and the latter as the paternal
progenitor, initially with greater emphasis on Chingiz, later on Timur. Ralph Fitch, one of the
earliest Englishmen to travel to India between 1583 and 1591, merrily refers to the ‘Great
Mogor, which is the King of Agra and Delli’. Edward Terry, his compatriot in India between
1616 and 1619, has a lovely bloomer on it: for him, ‘Mogoll means ‘a circumcised man, and
therefore he is called the Great Mogoll as much as to say: the Chiefe of the Circumcision'.
Thus much of the history of the period visualised it as one of the Muslim state’s endeavours
to spread Islam in India, with state power at its disposal. In reaction to it was the resistance
put up by the Hindus to religious conversion. Most of the evidence for this vision was drawn
from the chronicles, written by courtiers.there was indeed much give-and-take between the
Muslim rulers and the Hindu subjects, especially the subjects drawn from the indigenous
ruling groups into the imperial ruling class, first at the lower end of administration and
gradually at the highest echelons. The first trajectory highlighted continual cultural conflict
between the two religious communities; the second highlighted mutual accommodation.

Ecbar Shaugh [Emperor Akbar]...never denied [his mother] anything but

this, that shee demanded of him, that our Bible might be hanged about an asses necke and
beaten about the towne of Agra, for that the Portugals... tyed [the Quran] about the necke of
a dogge and beat the same dogge about the towne of Ormuz. But Denied her request,
saying that, if it were ill in the Portugals to doe so to the Alcoran, being it became not a King
to requite ill with ill, for that the contempt of any religion was the contempt of God. (Thomas
Coryat, English traveller to India, 1612–17.)

This, in the face of frequent observations that the legitimacy of the Mughal state had
survived long after the state itself lay in a shambles in the first half of the eighteenth century.
The centring of the great rebellion of 1857 around the last Mughal ‘emperor’ Bahadur Shah
Zafar, physically decrepit and surrounded by a territorial and political void, symbolises the
survival of Mughal legitimacy sharply and poignantly, for it cemented bonds between the rival
groups that had all chipped away at the grand imperial structure to begin with.To the extent
that historians explored the nature of the mediaeval state.

Amina Okada has on the other hand sought out traces of the state’s legitimacy in Mughal
paintings and Urvashi Dalal in the layout of the city of Shahjahanabad. Ebba Koch too has
touched upon the problem in the context of Mughal art. In a regional context, Richard M.
Eaton has, in his recent work, traced the outlines of the evolution of legitimacy in Bengal
from its conquest by Bakhtiyar Khalji in ad 1204 to the eve of the British era; in some ways
the most imaginative exploration of the question of Mughal state’s legitimacy was
undertaken early in the twentieth century by Francis William Buckler, especially in an
all-too-brief essay, ‘The Oriental Despot’. Buckler looked upon Mughal sovereignty as
‘corporate kingship’ in which all the nobles were ‘members’ rather than servants– a shade of
the concept of ‘court society’ . The value of khila’t, robe of honour, given by rulers to nobles
and a few others, lay in its symbolism of ritually incorporating the recipient into the king’s
body, for the King would actually touch the robe with either his hand or his back before
handing it out. Mughal state drawing sustenance from varied and varying sources of
legitimacy, a legitimacy that is not given and frozen.

The mediaeval court histories understandably focused on events revolving around the ruler,
his family, nobles, wars, administration, etc.; their authors were invariably courtiers. Often the
titles of these chronicles themselves were suggestive: Akbar Nama, Shah Jahan Nama,
Alamgir Nama: the story of Akbar, Shah Jahan, etc., although the story of the person was
also the story of the court and indeed of the empire, for their equivalence in the perception of
the courtier-historians was unambiguous and through the titles and chronicles they wanted
to probe their legitimacy over the area.

the AkbarNama and Ain-i Akbari, in the waning years of the sixteenth century; it marks a
decisive and schematic departure from the predominant historiographical format, as it does
in several other aspects of the construction of an alternative world view. The AkbarNama
opens with the praise of Allah, for sure, and then moves to Adam and traces Akbar’s lineage
from him as his fifty-third generation descendant. Very deliberately it dislocates
historiographical axis from the groove of Islam and seeks to construct an alternative
teleology of universal history– and not merely a world history– in which Akbar, his patron and
idol, would not be contained within the frame of a sect of humanity, i.e. Islam; he is the heir
not to Muhammad and the caliphs, but to Adam himself, the first human being, and thus the
ruler of all humanity. But ‘the waging of wars against kafirs’ (infidels), ‘elimination of kufr
(infidelity) from the land’ at the hands of the ‘armies of Islam’, etc., remained strongly
expressed sentiments by most Mughal rulers, even as they revelled in life’s merriment, so
alien to the chilly puritanism of the zealot. Battles against nonMuslim opponents became
jihads (holy wars) sometimes in, and at others irrespective of a context; prohibition of the
construction of new temples, and, if constructed, their demolition, the demolition too of some
very ancient temples and the construction of mosques in their place, the collection of jizya
from non-Muslims as the price of the freedom to adhere to their own religion in a Muslim
state– all these, and several other acts, implemented with varying measures of coercion,
marked the assertion of conquering power, perceived and projected in an accentuated
Islamic profile of the state.

The eve of the battle of khanwa had tensed up his nerves,And then an astrologer, a Muslim
at that, had forewarned the Mughal of the certainty of impending defeat if he went ahead
with the battle. Babur found hope in the fold of Islam. His battle cry at Khanwa was jihad
against the infidel Rana. victory was won at Kangra Jahangir writes of the conquest in
hyperbolic terms in his memoirs, the Tuzuk-i Jahangiri, and boasts of celebrating it by
demolishing the temple of the Hindu goddess Durga, and constructing a mosque at the site.
All these examples are showing their legitimacy through conquest and Islam.The fact that
these high-ranking Hindu nobles were commissioned to reduce a fort, where victory was
ultimately celebrated by demolishing a Hindu temple and erecting a mosque, lends a degree
of irony to the enterprise, although it was far from unusual. Indeed, one strand of Muslim
thought did emphasise ‘a Hindu wielding the sword of Islam’ as evidence of glorification of
the faith.
But there is contrasting view also as Harbans mukhia mentioned that Niccolao
Manucci–observes Jahangir that of all his subjects, he was kind to everyone except the
Muslims. Indeed, this sentiment is repeated several times over in our sources. Shaikh
Ahmad Sirhindi, a significant and influential theologian of Akbar’s and Jahangir’s time,
lamented the deplorable state of Islam in India. A Persian-language text composed in 1025
H./ad 1614, less than a decade after Akbar’s death, records the written instruction sent by
Akbar to his son Danial, after appointing him Governor of the Deccan and Khandesh in
1601, that ‘he should demolish the Jama mosque at Asir and raise a temple along the
pattern of the Hindus and kafirs on its site’. In a similar vein Jahangir’s grandfather
Humayun, too, had been accused of being anti-Muslim by a Sufi, Shaikh Abd al-Quddus
Ganguhi. Franc ¸ois Bernier, the celebrated French doctor who travelled to India in the
mid-seventeenth century, announced that Jahangir ‘died, as he had lived, destitute of all
religion’. So through the means of religious harmony they were trying to get legitimacy
though it is quite contradictory.

Sir Thomas Roe, King James ambassador to India during Jahangir’s reign, also tells the
story of two princes’ conversion to Christianity only to enable Jahangir to demand a
Portuguese wife for himself;The court chronicle of Shah Jahan, the Shah Jahan Nama,
makes a point of describing his forces as the armies of Islam, and repeatedly refers to his
acts as being undertaken for the glorification of Islam. Aurangzeb,Islam moved him
emotionally and he perceived its clearest manifestation in relentless antagonism with kufr.
‘My heart burns with anger when I look at a kafir in prosperity,’ he had exclaimed. The long
historiographical tradition established on a firm footing by Sir Jadu Nath Sarkar, envisioning
Aurangzeb as the indefatigable zealot whose ambition was to turn the Mughal state into an
indubitably Islamic institution,The concern found expression in his general command to
demolish temples of the Hindus and at times erect mosques on their debris. This included
the temples at Kasi (Varanasi) and Mathura and several others.We might set two criteria to
establish the characteristics of a theocracy, Islamic in this case. First, the state, ruling on
behalf of a denominational god, would endeavour to use all its power for the conversion of its
subjects to Islam and would eliminate all traces of non-Islamic presence from its territories; it
would, in other words, constantly engage in transforming the contested land, dar al-harb into
dar alIslam, land of Islam. Second, only the jurisdiction of sharia, Islamic law, would prevail
irrespective of the religious affiliation of any of its subjects, the kind of state that came to be
established in some of the Arab regions, today’s Saudi Arabia, for example.

Historian Abd al-Qadir Badauni also records during Akbar’s reign that in Nagarkot, near
Kangra, on one occasion 200 cows were slaughtered, many Hindus killed and a temple was
demolished by the Muslim soldiers while they were under the command of Raja Birbal, ‘who
fancied himself a saint (pir) among the Hindus’. A while later, Akbar seems to have made
amends for it and sent a golden umbrella to cover the idol. He also allowed the reconversion
of a mosque to a Hindu temple, which had earlier been demolished Jahangir made some
rude remarks about ‘the worthless religion of the Hindus’ when he learnt of the construction
at Ajmer of a temple ‘of great magnificence on which 100,000 rupees had been spent’ by
Rana Shankar, ‘in my kingdom among the great nobles’. It was not the magnificence of the
temple that the Emperor found distasteful; it was the image of a boar– sacred to the Hindus
as one of Vishnu’s avatars and abominable to the Muslims for being filthy and a religious
anathema– that was the cause of his irritation. In a short time by the exertions of his officers,
the demolition of this strong foundation of infidelity was accomplished.’Emperor demolished
‘the chief of these temples’ and converted it into a grand congregational mosque. Indeed,
even while Aurangzeb was exhibiting his religious bigotry by going on a temple demolition
spree, he was also financing the maintenance of several other Hindu temples and
hermitages (maths). Richard Eaton’s careful tabulation, some 80 temples were demolished
between 1192 and 1760 (15 in Aurangzeb’s reign) and he compares this figure with the claim
of 60,000 demolitions, advanced rather nonchalantly by ‘Hindu nationalist’ propagandists,
although even in that camp professional historians are slightly more moderate. There is
some inverse evidence too of the demolition of mosques by the Hindus, and conversion of
these into temples.. Jahangir, on ascending the throne late in 1605, issued 12 edicts; among
them was an admonition to amirs, high nobles, especially in the border areas, against forcing
Islam on any of the subjects of the empire.It also implied the ruler’s disapproval of mass
conversions by his officials: conversions were to reflect discretion rather than zeal of the
state.Of all the Mughal rulers, one could expect Aurangzeb to put energy, conviction and
state power into converting vast masses of infidels in India.

It would thus appear somewhat of an excess to argue that the Muslim state in mediaeval
India carried the burden of eradicating infidelity from the lands it conquered and governed,
that it was the exclusive agency of religious conversion, and use of force by it was the main
instrument of effecting the change.We could thus expect a considerable amount of conflict,
even violence, on the issue and consequently a large body of historical and literary
documentation on both sides of the religious fence, to tell each version of the long-drawn
story. Abul Fazl has, towards the concluding part of the Ain, recorded ‘The Sayings of His
Majesty’. Among them is a repetition of the above confession, now tinged with a sense of
shame: ‘Formerly I used force upon men to conform to my faith and deemed it Islam. As my
knowledge grew, I felt ashamed of my deed. Not being a Muslim myself, it was unfair to
compel others to become such. Conversion to Islam at the hands of the state was projected
as a punishment to those found guilty of some crime or other.There is also testimony to
reverse conversion of Muslims to Hinduism, as well as reconversion of Muslims to their
former Hindu religion, both unthinkable in a state of Islamic orthodoxy. Nevertheless, Islam
had a strong presence in the operative categories of the mediaeval Indian state and was a
significant source of its legitimacy for the greater part of India’s mediaeval centuries.

However, if Islam was one source of its legitimacy, there were several others besides and
these were constantly expansive. Although the most significant expansion was in the
construction of the ideology of paternalism, a completely new and growing ensemble of
sources of legitimacy began to evolve. The conceptual architecture of this legitimacy was
without doubt the creation of Abul Fazl. His endeavour synthesises elements from the vast
landscape of evolving political practices, conscious and unconscious social ethos, a mosaic
of religious and secular streams and their strands, positing of an alternative reconstitution of
history, and the construction of ‘harmony’ as the encompassing ideological frame that would
remain the keystone of the Mughal state’s legitimacy and its posthumous legacy. it also
carries a slightly belittling overtone set against Islam’s ambition of being a universal religion.
Abul Fazl constructs the theory of sovereignty with several interrelated constituents. The
tracing of Akbar’s descent from Adam instead of Muhammad establishes his universal,
human, in lieu of Islamic, lineage. Strongly embedded in this construction was the
teleological vision in which Akbar’s person and his reign appear as the fulfilment of human
history– an inevitable divine destiny.The divinity of Akbar’s person forms the core of this
notion of sovereignty. The teleology of the mission, too, implies a finality in Akbar’s
appearance for its fulfilment, a notion central to Islam in the context of Muhammad’s
prophethood. Akbar is visualised also as ‘the Perfect Man’ (Insan-i Kamil), a complex
concept primarily developed by the great mystic thinker, Ibn al-Arabi, for his millenary
appearance on earth at God’s command. Muhammad, for Ibn al-Arabi was the exemplary
Perfect Man; Akbar was for Abul Fazl. But contrary to the Islam vs kufr dichotomy, where
perpetual conflict until the eventual subjugation of infidelity to faith was implicated, Abul
Fazl’s emphasis was on universality of the perspective of sovereignty with the establishment
of social harmony as its missionary goal. Akbar’s own measures had been moving his polity
in the direction of ‘universal peace lit. ‘absolute peace’, sulh kul).
In focusing on the divine origin of Akbar, he was, in pursuit of the dichotomy between
universal religiosity and denominational religions, seeking distance from the parameters set
by Islam. The metaphor of light dominates his conceptualization of divinity, and the Sun in
turn dominates the metaphor of light. Divine light permeates Akbar’s very being. It is the light
of the Sun. ‘Nursling of divine light’ (nur parwarda-i izdi) is his favourite phrase for Akbar, at
one place yielding to ‘divine light in human form’. Farr-i Izdi, to be precise, divine light,
traceable to the Sasanid imaging of the King in ancient Iran.Farr has an ambiguous space
for nur, but it also has space for the Sun as the chief source of light, along with fire. There
are innumerable references in our sources to Akbar’s growing devotion to the Sun,
especially in the form in which it is worshipped by the Hindus.The Sun and fire in turn bring
into Farr-i Izdi, divine light, links with several other religio-cultural landscapes: Hindu, where
Sun-worship is a very important feature and fire has a high ritual sanctity; pre-Islamic
Egyptian culture, where the Pharaohs are proclaimed as the children of the Sun, Amun-Ra;
Ancient Mesopotamia, Zoroastrianism, and, not least, paganism. He places repeated
emphasis on Akbar as the spiritual guide of his subjects and the relationship between the Pir
and his disciple, murid, was replicated by the Emperor in the creation of a new order of faith,
the Din-i Ilahi.

The divinity of sovereignty clearly defied any restraints on its power and authority. Of his
several classifications of human beings in different contexts, Abul Fazl divides one of them
into three groups: The noblest souls are those whose loyalty to the king, Akbar, is absolute,
unquestioning and undemanding, a virtue in itself; placed below them are ones whose
display of loyalty is on a par with tangible gain, ‘who made a traffic of their service’. The
worst never show any sign of loyalty. ‘Rebellion’, ‘rebelliousness’ and their synonyms are the
most damning language of abuse in mediaeval court literature; defeating rebels becomes ‘a
cleansing operation’. The history of legitimation of conquest of territories in India’s mediaeval
centuries is not terribly complex. Sultan Mahmud of Ghazni had tactfully combined his love
of plunder with religious zeal. Later rulers did not seek justification of conquest except in
terms of conquest itself. Zia al-Din Barani, historian and theoretician of the state in the
fourteenth century, envisioned both conquest and governance as an exercise of terror by the
king; conquest of territories was a manifestation of the king’s virility. Babur claimed to have
conquered India because ‘it belonged to my ancestor’, a Turk. For Akbar, however, the
reference point of conquest lay in establishing peace, justice, and relieving the subjects of a
territory of the oppression of the existing ruler. ‘Sympathy for and relief of the oppressed are
the attributes of a true king,’ observes Abul Fazl, as he narrates Akbar’s resolve to conquer
Malwa. His arrival there ‘opens the gates of justice and benevolence’. Indeed, God
sometimes deprives some territories of just rulers, as he did in Malwa, so that ‘the truthful
sovereigns’ conquer these. But the running thread in Abul Fazl’s several discussions of
kingship is the composite of ‘a paternal love towards his subjects’, ‘the priceless jewel of
justice’ and fair play, and observance of ‘absolute peace’, sulh kul, without discrimination;
other conditions vary with the context, at times out of step with one another. There is a
grander vision to Abul Fazl’s conception of sovereignty than enumerating a king’s qualities:
The ‘true’ King must understand the ‘spirit of the age’ (mizaj-i zamana, mizaj-i
ruzgar).Universalism and paternalism, then, constitute ‘the spirit of the age’ that manifests
itself in the attributes of the true King.

The diverse elements drawn from varied sources– and not always consciously– are woven
by Abul Fazl into a coherent fabric of the state’s legitimacy that is sustained above all by ‘the
intoxicating wine of harmony’. The repeated emphasis on harmony, and the absence of
discrimination on the basis of religious or sectarian identities,both acknowledges the history
of the state’s practice of discrimination and posits a visionary ideal of its eradication, a vision
that Akbar during his time as Emperor sought to formulate and realise in a large
measure.Mughals often perceived themselves as conquerors of the world, the titles they
gave themselves on accession spoke of this grandiose presumption: Jahangir (capturer of
the world), Shah Jahan (king of the world), Alamgir (same as Jahangir).

But then legitimacy is not quite legitimate unless it is so perceived by the eyes of the
subjects. Is there a way of locating the subjects’ response to the elaborate construction of
legitimacy? Mediaeval societies did not record subjects’ voices as carefully as they did the
rulers’, and the handicap of this silence is therefore severe. We do however have some
suggestive genres of evidence which enable us to faintly hear those ignored voices: popular
religious literature, folktales and bazaar gossip. In popular religious literature, the Bhakti
literature, already briefly encountered above, known for its emphasis on each one’s personal
devotion to God, who too is personalised, kingship is socialised by visualising God in the
king’s image: powerful but kind. This is also a literature of protest against social inequities
such as caste, and oppression unleashed by state’s officials, usually petty ones in the
village.
second half of the sixteenth century, contemporaneously with Akbar’s reign, utopia was
projected onto the mythical past when the legendary Ram suffered great privation in order to
conform to the call of social obligations, and in the end establish his kingdom, Ram rajya,
where each one would equally adhere to his/her status obligations. In Rajasthani literature
he is celebrated as the incarnation of Ram and Krishna, Hindu mythological gods, and also
referred to as Lakshmana, Ram’s brother, and Arjuna, a central figure in the Hindu epic, the
Mahabharata. Narottam, a mediaeval Rajasthani poet, cannot stop admiring him as an
incarnation of Partha, Arjuna, and even places him in the age gone by, the dwapar age, that
preceded the current age in the four-age cyclic rhythm of the Hindu concept of yuga. The
poet declares that Akbar ‘loves the Hindus and has a feeling of alienation towards the Turks
(Muslims); he does not feel close to them’. He concludes with vehemence that ‘Akbar’s is a
Hindu Raj.Two alternative world views seem to be in contest here: the court histories
portrayed the emperor, the royal family and high nobles as governed by perfect decorum and
correctness, even if at times it was infringed and earned severe punishment. This image
created a very long distance between the elites and the subjects, who were thus implicitly
characterised as ordinary, even stupid, and unfamiliar with the finesse of high culture. Folk
tales and bazaar gossip, on the other hand, inverted the imagery and revelled in the
stupidities and scandals of the elites. The chroniclers’ superhuman figures thus get
humanised in the bazaar and the village chaupal, and the distance between the stereotypes
of human beings at the court and the village minimised. ‘As human beings they are also like
us, even though they be the rulers and we the subjects,’ the chaupal and the bazaar seemed
to be saying.

Folklore and the Mughal Court Culture:

In any epoch the ruling ideology is the ideology of the ruling class. Karl Marx

As we enter this arena, a fascinating paradox stares at us: in some important ways the court
and its culture stood in splendid isolation from the rest of society, though supported by it,
somewhat like a film of oil on water; and in some very profound ways, the two merged with
each other and became inseparable. By the time of the Mughals’ arrival, India had been
familiar with the use of the Persian language for anywhere between three and five centuries.
Familiarity began with the great patron of Persian letters Sultan Mahmud of Ghazni, at the
level of state, and with the great Sufi saint Shaikh Muin al-Din Chishti, at the popular level.
As the language of court and administration in India, Persian had had a run of more than
three centuries when the Mughal empire was established in 1526. Yet, even at the end of the
sixteenth century, after a long duration and close acquaintance with it, to a large extent the
Persian language and the court culture it encompassed remained an alien presence. For
one, Persian was no one’s mother tongue. For the Mughals, Turkish, spoken in and around
Uzbekistan, was the mother language. For most nobles, except those of Iranian descent,
Persian was at best their second language. The Persian language expertise that developed
in India was mainly as the language of administration, much as was the case with English in
India under the British rule, Historians, barring Abul Fazl, wrote with a sort of mental
translation of their formulations from the native Hindawi (mediaeval Hindi of north India) into
Persian, with some queer phrases that made sense only to one at home with the Hindustani
idiom. On one hand this process of adoption, adaptation and appropriation diminished the
distance between the alien language and the Indian cultural ambience at the elite planes; on
the other, the repetitiveness of the format and the imitation of the Iranian historiographical
tradition, with its limited range and scope, still pointed to the alien character of the language
and its culture. Its ‘alien-ness’ was not confined to the Hindus; it extended to the Mughals
themselves, to the Indian Muslims and, to a smaller extent, the Afghans.

.Folklore here is understood as a phenomenon that pre-dates as well as survives the

formation of religious identities. Thus, folklore is not identifiable as Hindu or Muslim or
Christian. Its regional and sub-regional identities are slightly more discernible,although even
here the boundaries are eminently porous.Transference is mediated through miracles and
magic, central to all forms of folklore.

The story of Jahan Ara’s garments catching fire and the body being seared is told in several
accounts. The Emperor ‘first sought spiritual remedies and sought recovery for her through
the blessed prayers of pious saints and by throwing open the doors of charity’.Miracles are
attributed to living or dead saints and boons are retrieved from them through devotion by
performing difficult tasks,Beginning with Babur, almost all Mughal rulers and their nobles
engaged in the circumambulation of the tombs of saints. They had much in common with the
huge crowds of people who thronged the tombs in search of wish-fulfilment local legends
centred on almost all Sufi saints credit them with the performance of some miracle or the
other, and in the whole of south Asia this continues to be the rationale of their popularity to
this day, centuries after their burial. But it was not saints alone who could be the medium of
the transference of divine benediction. Sometimes the Emperors themselves could be
invested with these virtues and their transference was sought by the subjects. Jharokha
darshan, beginning one’s day with the glimpse of His Majesty’s profile in a window, was
premised upon the same principle. A whole darshaniya sect, which began the day with a
glimpse, darshan– a term imbued with strong religious overtones– developed from the time
of Akbar onwards.Manucci again tells us the story of the transference of the fertility of a tree
to the womb of a barren woman.There are several other forms of transference practised. If
transference is central to the working of folklore, it has an equal place in the functioning of
the imperial court culture.In that scenario, in the absence of highly perfected institutionalised
governance, all power, glory and authority must rest symbolically in one person, the
monarch, and it was through the transference of these by the monarch to his nobles and
functionaries that the system found its operative modalities. Within the parameters of this
loose structure, both the notion of absolute power of the monarch and implicitly shared
sovereignty found space. Khila’t, robe of honour, was the epitome of transference. Giving
away robes of honour was a daily routine in court.

Elaborate rituals were enacted while giving and receiving the robes. The most highly prized
one was from His Majesty’s own cupboard, one that he had actually worn, even if just once.
For such a robe imbibed wholesome attributes of His Majesty’s person, now being passed
on to the receiver.He in turn was to perform rituals of kurnish and taslim, as if the robe
actually carried His Majesty’s presence to him. While the robe was the most visible form of
honouring, there were other forms as well. A headgear (sarpech), the more cherished being
one off His Majesty’s head, sometimes as part of the ensemble of the robe, called sar o pa
(head-to-foot, though literally it should mean ‘head and foot’), and at others by itself, was an
equally coveted piece of largesse received from the King. A horse, or a portrait of the King,
even a letter signed or unsigned by him, could substitute for the robe. These gifts were
subject to some strict regulations. The grant of headgear was confined to the highest amirs
alone, those above the mansab of 4,000, although on occasion, as a very special favour
shown by the Emperor.A distinguished service of a military or non-military nature was not the
only reason for the award of a khila’t; even a message of condolence could be wrapped in it.

The robe of honour apart, another almost daily court routine was the grant of mansabs, new
or higher, to state functionaries. If transfer of His Majesty’s personal glory was the central
feature of the symbolism of the robe of honour, the grant of mansab carried to the grantee an
authorised portion of the King’s authority and power.While the mansabdar imbibed the part
of King’s authority assigned to him, he was never its autonomous possessor; he was indeed
forever subject to dismissal, demotion (or promotion) at the King’s will. Even his property,
acquired in the process of functioning as mansabdar, reverted upon his death to the King;
his family and progeny could demand no share of it as a matter of right.he frequent transfer
of mansabdars from one part of the empire to another, left many a European visitor to
Mughal India aghast, for both these stood in stark contrast to the characteristics of feudal
property back home. For Srinivas, some individuals, owing to their status at birth, are
permanently imbued with certain superior qualities (purity) and others permanently with
inferior qualities (impurity). It is possible however to transfer, very transiently, a part of the
qualities of one to the other on special occasions, without altering the status of either; nor
are the temporarily transferred qualities inheritable by the recipient; indeed, the transfer is
forever tentative and subject to resumption. In some ways these cultural codes, guidelines of
life at society’s ground level, were being enacted at the imperial court..There were other
forms of perhaps more direct borrowing from folklore by the court: the practice of omens and
auguries, important elements of magic, and employed as diagnostic indices in
folklore.Indeed Akbar, of all the Mughal Emperors, himself became the embodiment of many
miraculous powers. Most evidence of such powers comes understandably from Abul Fazl,
but not from him alone. He could bring down rain through prayers when there was drought;
his breath on a mirror, thrown into fire, stopped rain when there was excess of it. He could
very politely tell rain to refrain from spoiling a banquet in his palace; the rain poured all
around but skirted the palace. His breath had ‘Messiah’s qualities’, which cured ailments of
human beings and animals.A bullet fired at a man touched his clothes and went cold (sard
shuda bud) because of his physical proximity to His Majesty. Another pierced a soldier’s
clothes but went cold on touching his sweat; he too was standing close to the King.Manucci
also observes that several stories of Emperor Aurangzeb’s humility, kindness and saintliness
were in circulation, and that a belief had gained currency that he could make himself invisible
whenever he chose to and go to Mecca to confer with Muhammad.By and by the festival had
travelled up the social scale and had reached the imperial level, where playing of Holi
became part of the festivities at the imperial court, along with Dussehra and Diwali. At large
in society too, Holi, Dussehra and Diwali were celebrated by Hindus and Muslims alike by
the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Ghulam Ahmad Tabtabai, author of the
three-volume Seir al-Mutakhireen, written in the 1780s, notes that the Muslims celebrate Holi
as much as the Hindus, and Mirza Qateel observes that except for the Afghans and the
fanatics among Muslims, everyone plays Holi and celebrates Diwali.By the eighteenth
century the lyrics had arrived at the imperial court, and the later Mughal Emperor Shah Alam
II has left behind some choice verses in this genre in the Hindi language, as he has
compositions in celebration of Holi.If the travel of folkloric principles and practices to the
imperial court was one facet of the cultural movement, traffic in the opposite direction was
equally dense.all owe their origin to Mughal court culture and have devolved downwards to
become part of everyday Indian culture. Indeed, the eighteenth century in Indian history is
witness to a particularly dynamic cultural flux, with the perceived distance between
hidebound elite norms and exuberant popular culture crumbling, and a hyperactive common
cultural space emerging as the defining feature at both ends. ‘Ends’ in fact seem to have
dissolved their margins. Much of it marks India’s daily life today, even as twenty-first century
technology is rapidly reshaping life’s patterns.

Kingdom, Household and Body History, Gender and Imperial Service under Akbar
ROSALIND O'HANLON

Historians of Mughal administration such as M. Athar Ali have explored the ways in which
the systematisation of mansab grants and appointments to offices under Akbar provided a
common framework within which imperial servants from different backgrounds could seek
advancement.lier.5 S.A.A. Rizvi and Peter Hardy have focussed on the role of Abu'l Fazl in
helping to project, through the massive illuminated history of his Akbar-Ndma, a new and
more inclusive style of rulership for Akbar, which drew on sufi and mediaeval ishraqi theories
of the divine illumination of kingship.6 This presented Akbar as insan-i kamil, 'the perfect
man', whose inner virtues of justice, self-control and renunciation of worldly attachments
enabled him to attain the divine blessing of sulh-i kul, an attitude of universal concord and
toleration. These offered a source of norms and values particularly appropriate to a political
culture where the need was to build harmony and cohesion within a very diverse body of
imperial servant, gement.
Humoural theories of bodily health extended to the wellbeing of the kingdom and the role of
the king as its chief physician, whose task was to bring about equilibrium and harmony
between its constituent members, each according to their natures. These natures
corresponded to each of the four elements. Warriors were fiery by nature, scholars
phlegmatic and watery; merchants were like air, in that they were essential to the
maintenance of daily life, and peasants corresponded to the Earth. These approaches have
offered a range of insights into the composite qualities of Mughal political culture. The
purpose of this paper is to suggest that the perspectives of gender and the body may also
have much to offer in this field. Contemporary histories are replete with information about the
sexual disciplining of imperial servants, regulations concerning marriage, norms for male
bodily comportment and ceremonial purification and conflicts over the acceptability of homo
sexual love.I want to argue, drew on a careful selection of akhlaqi themes to construct a
socially inclusive model of masculine virtue which transcended law and religion, caste and
region. This model emphasised both the natural inner purity of the male body, and the
possibilities for moral and human perfection in all three of the homologous worlds that men
inhabited as governors: the individual body, the household and the kingdom. Combined with
some key borrowings from sufi and from Sanskrit textual traditions, these themes were
politically important in three different ways. First, they helped establish a moral framework for
imperial service and for Akbar's own authority that did not seem to depend on religious
sanction by Sunni orthodox leaders at court. Second, they provided a powerful means of
cementing men to the imperial service that was not only ideological in nature but bodily and
physical in very immediate ways. By this appropriation of an eclectic range of norms for ideal
manhood, Akbar and the court reformers. were able to present imperial service as the
best-indeed the only medium for their realisation. Only through imperial service could a man
fully develop his highest virtues as a man.s. Third, these invocations of male bodily purity
and of men's rightful authority as virtuous husbands and rulers of households may have had
a wider and more deliberately political intent. akhlaq digests have been explored for their
significance as important intellectual bases for longer term Indo-Muslim traditions of thinking
about ethical govern ment.Thus the first discourse in Tfisi's work deals with tahzib-i akhlaq,
'the correction of dispositions': all of these different aspects of the individual's moral and
bodily regulation: with the cultivation of particular inner virtues of wisdom, courage,
temperance and equity, and the development of outer physical qualities of hardiness and
strength.' The second, tadbir-i manazil, 'regulation of households' treats men as governors of
households.' The third, siyasat-i-mudun, 'the government of cities', deals with the wider
realm of state organisation.

at Akbar's court. As Muzaffar Alam has noted, these digests entered Mughal political culture
in a variety of versions and recensions, but Tfisi's Akhlaq-i Ndsirf was preferred as most
authoritative. It is mentioned again as prescribed reading in Akbar's instructions about
personal conduct and duties of work circulated in March 1594 to different classes of imperial
officals. es. The key to unlocking man's potential for virtue lay essentially in the proper
government of these communities, the ordering of the base by the nobler elements, such as
to bring each into harmony and equilibrium. Thus Tfisi presented man's inner being as
composed of three differing elements: the rational faculty or angelic soul, nafs-i malakf, the
source of thought and judgement, which was located in the brain, seat of reflection and
reason; the irascible faculty or savage soul, nafs-i sabu'f, the source of anger, bravery and
drive for dominance, and located in the heart, source of all innate heat in the body; and the
appetitive faculty or bestial soul, nafs-i bahzmf, the source of lust, hunger and desire for
sensual gratification, and seated in the liver, the body's organ of nutrition and circulation.20
When the second and third were brought into equilibrium under the proper government of
the rational faculty, the two produced virtues according to their natures, of courage and
temperance respectively.The man who achieved this state of perfect self-realisation was a
complete and absolute man, insanz-yf tamm-i mutlaq whose invariable accompaniment was
the quality of sulh-i kull, universal Concord.

reflecting Akbar's role not only as divine king, moral exemplar and dispenser of justice, but
as a ruler profoundly attuned to the subtle ecological balance of the land and its people.
Nizami rightly suggests that Akbar's command of the animal as well as the human and the
spiritual worlds completed the circle of his authority. Abu'l Fazl makes it clear that it is a
combination of divine illumination and inner attributes which enable a virtuous king such as
Akbar to achieve the state of sulh-i kul, to extend the right kind of paternal tolerance and
conciliation towards his subjects. While some rulers thought the detail of administration
beneath them, Akbar knew better, supervising every department and keeping a constant
watch on all of the little offices and workshops in the imperial household, each one of which
was like a city in itself.As a form of paternal supervision of the whole kingdom, testing its
men and discovering its secrets, hunting was itself a means of divine worship.49 It was also
in hunting, as we have seen, that the emperor appeared in closest communion with the north
Indian landscape. At one moment Akbar's surrogates, elephants were at other times
instruments for another kind of self-expression.

the code for imperial service was not simply one of loyalty to the emperor, but of constant
striving for the qualities that both developed a man's highest nature as a man, and made him
fit for the ultimate form of worship: imperial service. As Alam has noted, this manual of
practical and moral instruction clearly owes much to the spirit of the akhlaqz tracts. Imperial
servants were urged to read Tiasi's work, portions of the work of the medieval theologian
Ghazali, the sufic poetry of Rumi and the moral fables of Kalila Damna. They should
exercise moderation in all things, maintain constant vigilance, should consult, should know
when to punish and when to be lenient; should hunt for military exercise; should exercise
close supervision of the towns and neighbourhoods under their authority, and should take
steps against wine-drinking except where it was for medical purposes and for intellectual
stimulation.lished. This was to realise within themselves the four cardinal virtues of hikmat,
prudence or wisdom; shajd'at, courage; 'iffat, temperance or chastity; and 'addlat, justice or
equity, virtues that were produced when the three different elements of akhlaqi tradition-the
rational, the savage and the appetitive were mixed and blended together in proper
equilibrium.In the description of particular offices, there is the same emphasis on inner
qualities and self-control. Thus a provincial viceroy should be a manprudent, careful and
discreet, controlling alike his impulses to wrath and levity, carefully selecting honest and
truthful servants, sleeping and eating in moderation, and schooling himself in works of
philosophy when the duties of his office allowed.

The regulations for disciples described above formed a part of Akbar's wider attempt to use
marriage, sexual and bodily regulation in the effort to disseminate the norm of the devoted
and self-controlled imperial servant.the market.68 These emphases were not, of course,
unique to the Sultanate, but formed an important theme in the Timurid cultural inheritance
that Babur and his successors claimed as the basis of their legitimacy and prestige.69
Timur's own regulations, bequeathed to his successors for the conduct of government and
preservation of his kingdom, emphasised that strong kingdoms were based in morality and
religion as well as equity and good understanding of the subjects and set out the forms of
judgement to be passed on subjects guilty of crimes such as assault, adultery and
wine-drinking. In many ways, however, the moral regulation developed at the Mughal court
was different. It was not simply prohibitive or repressive, although elements of it were. Its
purpose rather was creative: to promote a new set of norms for elite male virtue which
emphasized the rights and authority of imperial servants and disciples as husbands, fathers
and rulers of households.His concern with the marriages of his servants was rather different:
aimed at promoting a particular model of ideal marriage, in which mature men could realise
the ethic of imperial service, women enjoy peace and companionship and homes fructify with
children and sons to worship God. Akbar thus emerged as guardian of these values of ideal
marriage.Akbar also sought to regulate the extra-marital pleasures of his servants: to curb
and control sexual activity not channelled into the controls of marriage and used to fructify a
man's home with progeny, with sons who would worship God, but rather than allowed to flow
freely as mere unrestrained lust.On the one hand, as we have seen above, he projected
marriage as a spiritual union of equals. On the other hand, a woman's role within marriage
was an ideal of womanly modesty, deference and obedience to her husband. Here, of
course, there was not too great a distance to travel between akhlaq norms and those of
many segments of respectable north Indian society. Badauni recorded that any young
woman found in the bazaars and streets not properly veiled, or wives who behaved badly
and quarrelled with their husbands were banished to the prostitutes' quarter.97 Sexual
activity for women should be strictly for the purposes of creation, such that older women
should no longer wish for a husband. Akbar also made very public efforts to restrain and
punish male homosexual love amongst prominent nobles of the empire. Here again, it may
be possible to see these constructions of elite male bodily virtue and power employed to
identify the court and the imperial service more firmly with the indigenous heterosexual idiom
of north India, against the degenerate practices of outsiders. Various kinds of homosexual
love were, of course, a familiar part of north Indian courtly society. This essay has focussed
on the manipulation of bodily and gender identity, presented through official histories, as an
important and neglected part of Mughal imperial strategy under Akbar Nevertheless, it does
seem significant for a range of issues that normative masculinity should feature so strongly
in early Mughal efforts to construct an elite imperial service. For Mughal historians, these
strategies may yield new insights both into the early cohesion of that service, and the sense
of strain and detachment that John Richards and others detect in the experience of imperial
servants from the later seventeenth century.