When Babur descended south from Transoxiana and founded the Mughal dynasty in Kabul in 1526, he brought with him an extensive inheritance of imperial philosophy from his Timurid family and his home region around Samarkand. These philosophies and practices had stemmed in large part from centuries of refined political thought from the Persian Shahs and their courtiers, whose texts and beliefs had influenced Islamicate law and society from the Mediterranean to the eastern Indian Ocean for centuries. Central Asian Ghaznavid moral and political treatises from around 1000 AD continued to play a huge roll in kingship and imperial practice in South and Central Asia as well, and Babur would have brought a syncretic mixture of these beliefs (along with those from his other ancestral dynasty, the Chinggisid Mongols) to Kabul, and then Agra, when he came. As Babur and his line of successors continued to press into the South Asian continent, they rapidly encountered a number of extent polities in the region which heavily influenced the manner in which they established their empire as a South Asian polity, further diversifying their philosophy of rule to ingrain it in local practices so as to maintain a stable relationship with their newly conquered subjects.
Viewing a brief outline of early Mughal history, it can be difficult to separate new and unique Mughal political philosophy from the vast catalogue of philosophies, ideologies, and practices that the Mughal emperors inherited from across their many regions of contact. This paper will respond the prompt: “to what extent did the early Mughal empire represent a new form of empire? Answer with reference to Mughal precedents in South and Central Asia.” After a discussion of the broad historiography of Mughal imperial practice, this paper will argue that, to the extent the Mughals represented a new form of empire at all, this novelty came from the unprecedented diversity and flexibility of the empire: a diversity that made the Mughals more adaptable and their state more durable than either their settled predecessors in the Delhi and Bengal Sultans, or their nomadic-pastoral ancestors of the world of Turco-Mongol peoples in Central Asia.
Mughal historiography has, not surprisingly, suffered from the lingering effects of the colonial legacy of the British Empire, which simplified Mughal history into a mere shell of non-Europeanness and thus ignored the sheer diversity of philosophies and inheritances that formed the Mughal Empire. British voices dominated the historiography through the colonial period and, at least in Euro-American academia, into the decades after Indian Independence in 1947 as well. One can see this legacy in Indian history academia as well, as not only British historians but also South Asian academics continued viewing Mughal history through a starkly Orientalizing lens.
This Orientalizing from within can be found no more overtly than in the so-called “Aligarh School” of Mughal historiography, named after Aligarh Muslim University in Uttar Pradesh. Historian Sanjay Subrahmanyam, in his article “The Mughal state—Structure or process? Reflections on recent western historiography” (1992), criticizes the Aligarh school for a simplistic and at times rather fetishistic understanding of the Mughal state.[1] Despite the implications of the word “school,” the historians of Aligarh School philosophy had few binding shared beliefs; but the few they did share could be quite problematic. For example, as Subrahmanyam notes, the Aligarh School maintained earlier colonialist arguments that the Mughal empire was “despotic” in character—an Orientalizing word that ignores the complexity of the empire and reduces it to a value judgment, wherein the Mughals are viewed as bad and outmoded because of their supposed despotism.[2]
Subrahmanyam notes a number of defining older voices in Mughal historiography who created a rather one-dimensional picture of the early Mughal state. Douglas Streusand and Stephen Blake particularly give “short shrift” to the reigns of Babur (the first Mughal emperor) and Humayun (Babur’s successor), arguing that the third emperor—Akbar—was the real progenitor of what we now call the Mughal state.[3] As this paper will examine later, and as Subrahmanyam himself notes, this treatment of the early years completely misrepresents Mughal state development and ignores the variety of influences across South and Central Asia that Babur and Humayun brought or internalized to their new empire.
Subrahmanyam also notes but does not get into any deep analysis of the genre-defining historiography of Marshal G. Hodgson’s The Venture of Islam, other than to briefly problematize the latter’s thesis that Mughal success was defined by their early adoption of gunpowder weaponry. Subrahmanyam does not directly address Hodgson’s simplification of the Mughal imperial project in that regard, likely because Hodgson’s work would not fall into the “recent” category; although Hodgson’s work was an important stepping stone in English-speaking historiography of the Islamicate[4] world, and did emphasize interregional relations and influence across that world, his focus on (read: overemphasis and in some cases exaggeration of) the novel arms and military practices of the Mughals leads to a rather deterministic understanding of Mughal politics. The Mughals may have won battles because of military strength, but as this paper will argue, they built and managed their enduring empire on foundations of syncretic Islamicate and South/Central Asian imperial tradition.
Pratyay Nath provides an interesting synthesis of these ideas in his book Climate of Conquest: War, Environment, and Empire in Mughal North India (2019).[5] Hodgson and even Subrahmanyam himself fail to point out that, although military technology may have only been a small part of the Mughal Empire’s long-term strength, their broader military and conquest activity was defined both by pre-Mughal Turko-Mongol military mobility in the plains of Central Asia, and also the new and unfamiliar environment of lush and wet northern India. In his introduction, Nath states “the present book offers a fresh interpretation of Mughal state-formation and empire-building by using warfare as the point of entry… I unravel how environmental factors as well as the empire’s ability to accommodate local chieftains within its own imperial project shaped the formation, defense, and expansion of these frontiers.”[6] Accommodation and adaptability mixed with older empire-building traditions are key points of emphasis in Nath’s writing, and will be the defining features of the argument in this paper as well.
A great deal of historiography, including Nath’s work itself, exists on the empires that preceded the Mughals in North India and Central Asia—and the traditions and practices of these empires which the Mughals inherited or coopted in the sixteenth century and onward. In the book Symbols of Authority in Medieval Islam: History, Religion, and Muslim Legitimacy in the Delhi Sultanate (2012), historian Blain Auer examines the many political influences from across the Islamic world that helped construct the imperial practices of the Delhi Sultanate that preceded the Mughals in northern India, and from whom the Mughals inherited a great deal of Islamic political authority and philosophy.[7] Auer says, “when viewed in light of the Islamic world, the sultans of Delhi were situated at a crossroads in time”—a legacy on which the Mughals continued to build.[8] Taking one step further upriver into the lineage of Islamic rulership in South and Central Asia then reveals the origins of the forms of Islamic rule that the Babur and his descendants encountered upon their arrival in India, and also shows precedent for the culture-mixing under the Mughals. Upinder Sing’s article “An Inconvenient Heritage: the Central Asian background of the Delhi Sultans” will allow this paper to trace Mughal imperial practice through Delhi to earlier Turco-Mongol and Persianate forms.[9] Richard M. Eaton’s India in the Persianate Age, will further help this paper take full scope of the mixing-pot of Islamicate political philosophy that linked India, Persia, and Central Asia together since before Mughal times.[10] This paper will examine these three sources together, as well as Asher and Talbot’s India Before Europe and a host of other studies, to paint a three-dimensional picture of the pre-built, but highly flexible, framework with which the Mughals emperors constructed their polity.[11] For the purposes of narrative and a fresh perspective, this paper will begin by analyzing the imperial policy of Akbar, in whose reign most scholars argue the Mughal empire peaked culturally and economically. It will then progress backward in time through the centuries, toward the progenitors of the Islamicate pan-Central and South Asian political philosophy in whose footsteps the Mughal emperors walked.
As Subrahmanyam showed, many scholars of the Mughal Empire have argued that the Mughals only became “Mughal” under Akbar’s reign (r. 1556-1605). Although this argument is fallacious and ignores the Mughals’ variety of inheritances, subsumed in large part as a process beginning with Babur, the point nevertheless stands that Akbar’s reign marked a crucial era for the Mughals. During Akbar’s reign, the Mughal court consolidated its hold over northern India and, for the first time, experienced a stability missing from the tumultuous reigns of Babur and particularly Humayun. For his part, Subrahmanyam does not find any particularly original ideas in imperial administration in Akbar’s reign. Previous historiography has in reality drastically overemphasized the innovation in financial and political administration under Akbar. Historians have pointed to Akbar’s creation of the jagir and mansab systems of political subdivision as a pre-eminent example of that emperor’s originality of empire-building.[12]
In fact, as Subrahmanyam argues, these systems fell more into the category of evolution rather than “revolution” in Islamicate political theory; Akbar drew on the imperial codes of the Lodi dynasty of Delhi (1451-1526), the Chinggisid Mongol administration, and Persian legal traditions rooted in centuries of Central Asian history. Subrahmanyam summarizes the reasons for decentering Akbar effectively: “rather than accept as a postulate that Akbar’s institutions were created sui generis, we might speak of an evolving tool-box of contemporary statecraft, from which a set of institutions were improvised and partly innovated. This would enable us, to start with, to place less of the burden of historical explanation on the ruler’s ‘genius.’”[13] Although Akbar may have been a brilliant ruler, it is dangerously deterministic to locate all the strength of the Mughal Empire in his brilliance; no event or trend in history is ever the product of just one man or even one polity, and the historian has to divine the various causes and systems which fed these trends. Akbar did refine the systems he inherited, to better adapt to his diverse subject population.
Akbar first and foremost had to counter the diversity and contention in his multi-ethnic court. This, he accomplished by syncretizing traditions of the peoples represented in the upper echelons of his political elite. In Tamiya Zaman’s article Akbar’s Conquest of Chittor: A Translation of his Fathnama, the author argues that Akbar integrated various political cultures inwardly to his own practices, rather than creating and projecting a new form of rule outwards onto his subjects; in this sense, he subjected himself to previous traditions, rather than subjecting his population to his own traditions.[14] As Zaman notes, Akbar combined Islamic and Hindu Rajput forms of theocratic rule and integrated elites from both traditions to balance each other out at his court, “eventually constructing himself as a ‘Muslim Rajput’ who was portrayed in Rajput bardic traditions as the Hindu god Ram.”[15] Akbar inserted himself into previously established religious beliefs and philosophies, and thus strengthened his legitimacy over a court and population who otherwise had little in common.
But regardless of whether or not Akbar chose to syncretize his imperial practices, the sheer diversity of his empire also forced a syncretism upon him. Certainly, Akbar recruited a variety of peoples to his society for his own gain; in the article “Autocratic Centralism,” John F. Richards notes that “Akbar took pains to recruit his nobility from diverse sources. The Mughal nobility became and remained a heterogeneous body of free men… Rajputs, Afghans, Indian Muslims, Arabs, Persians, Uzbeks, Chaghatais were some of the ethnic groups represented. This flow of new recruits helped to prevent the growth of dissident cliques, and factions within the nobility”[16] It should go without saying that while these various “cliques” may have balanced each other out, they also would have brought competing traditions and mores to the Mughal imperial administration, each drawing on centuries of established political philosophy from their respective regions. Akbar under no circumstances could have completely silenced the individually held beliefs of these people. Muzaffar Alam’s argument in his book The Languages of Political Islam: India 1200-1800 confirm this: Alam shows that when Islamicate civilization expanded, it necessarily integrated “a variety of new social and political ideas… Societies conquered by Islam retained memories of their own past; they valued their old modes of life, social practices, mores and traditions. Islam’s contact with these societies was bound to affect Islam itself.”[17] Although Alam wrote this about earlier Islamicate expansion into Central and South Asia, the point applies equally to the case of the Mughals; precisely because Akbar brought in such a diverse cast of peoples to his lands, the Mughal empire became a syncretic collection of localized, regional, and far-away imperial and religious practices. The Mughal empire was not a house built of new materials; it was a new house built of old stones and timber collected from across Islamicate space and time.
As Subrahmanyam notes, older Mughal historians tend to underemphasize Babur’s imperial designs in the construction of the Mughal state. Mughal imperialism certainly was not new under Akbar; and, although it was not original to Babur either, an analysis of the latter’s state-building sheds light on the connections between the Mughals and their predecessors. After all, Babur was the first Mughal emperor, and he did not create the Mughal state in a void; rather, he necessarily brought in a variety of beliefs from his multi-ethnic Central Asian background. Akbar inherited many systems from Babur; as Subrahmanyam notes, he derived his jagir land-grant system from Babur’s tuyul system of similar character. More significantly, as Richard Eaton argues in India in the Persianate Age, Babur brought with him the complex legacy of Timur’s empire a century before—a legacy which he himself championed.[18]
To this point, it becomes necessary to briefly highlight the interrelatedness of imperial legacy and imperial practice, because these terms naturally appear different. In principle, one could imagine a scenario in which an emperor spoke highly of the legacy of his ancestry without actually governing his empire in the manner of those ancestors. And certainly, Babur did not and could not merely paste Timurid imperial structure directly onto South Asia, as that region’s environment and politics differed from those of Central Asia. However, and in reality, to say that Babur brought his Timurid legacy to South Asia is also to say he brought Timurid state and imperial practices as well—and he understood his project as a recreation of Timur’s state.[19] It cannot be ignored that the founder of the Mughal empire saw his empire not as a “new form,” but rather as a revival of an old construct.
One of the most pronounced of the older state forms that Babur brought from his Turco-Mongol homeland was that of nomadism. South Asia may have long been home to settled agricultural states, but Central Asia and the steppe had an equally deep history of nomadic and pastoral state forms. This created a challenge for Babur and his successors, who wanted to maintain their Turkic heritage while also create an empire suitable for the natural and political environs of northern India. In Climate of Conquest, Pratyay Nath summarizes this argument quite well as originally put forward by historian Jos Gommans, who emphasizes the category of “post-nomadism.” Gommans “locates the factors behind Mughal military success in the empire’s sustained ability to import, maintain, and deploy first-grade warhorses. He also points out that the empire was located at the frontier of nomadic and sedentary societies and displayed a remarkable capability to harness the best military and economic resources of both the worlds.”[20] The Mughal empire then was not in fact a singularly South Asian empire, but rather a form of frontier empire between two fundamentally different economic and political global regions. Warhorses—the greatest weapon of prior nomadic empires—allowed Babur and his successors a familiarly distinct advantage over the less-mobile armies of sedentary South Asian states. Furthermore, the empire’s flexibility allowed it to react to challenges with a full “arsenal” of techniques, geographies, and resources spanning its multi-regional bounds. This adaptability can be seen in part in the struggles faced by Babur and particularly Humayun in the first 30 years of the Mughal dynasty, wherein the emperors were constantly under threat from various Indian factions and only survived because they could fall back on their Persian and Central Asian homelands.
Along with the imperial legacy and resources Babur brought to his empire, the first Mughal emperor also encountered imperial legacies and practices that had been developing in northern India for centuries. In 1526, Babur established the Mughal dynasty in the literal and metaphorical ruins of the Lodi dynasty’s sultanate in Delhi. The Lodis only represented the final dynasty of a long and storied Delhi sultanate that had existed since the early 1200s and that experienced its peak under the Tughluqs in the 1300s. As Ali Anooshahr argues in his article The elephant and imperial continuities in North India, 1200–1600CE, the Delhi sultans progressively developed a political philosophy that syncretized Islamic theories of political legitimacy with local Indian symbols; this process, which Anooshahr examines through a case study of the many uses of the elephant under the Delhi Sultans, “lasted over two centuries, when it was twice disrupted by the invasions of Timur (1398) and Babur (1527).”[21] Babur’s conquering of north India was in fact merely a temporary disruption to north Indian political evolution rather than a termination. This makes for an astonishingly simple and yet revolutionary understanding of the Mughals: Babur’s empire may have had a new name and a catalogue of new elites in South Asia, but it fundamentally represented only a “passing of the torch” in an otherwise continuous process of political philosophy and empire-building.
The Mughals inherited and absorbed a variety of local traditions in north India beyond the confines of the Delhi sultanate. Akbar’s cultural and religious “tolerance” of a variety of sects and factions, if it could be considered tolerance at all, was not original to the Mughals but rather had its origin in India in the 1400s. Although the Mughals replaced the prominent Lodi sultans in Delhi, by 1526 northern India had already split into a variety of diverse rival states after the fall of the Tughluqs in the mid-1300s. As noted by Francesca Orsini and Samira Sheikh in After Timur Left: Culture and Circulation in Fifteenth-Century North India, Mewar, Juanpur, Gujarat, Bengal, Malwa, the Bahmanis, and a variety of other smaller states vied with each other for political and cultural dominance in north India in the 1400s.[22] Thus, when the Mughals arrived in South Asia, they encountered not only the Lodis, but a vast patchwork quilt of Islamicate civilizations. It was in these states that India as a mixing-pot of cultures truly began to flourish. In Asher and Blanshard’s words, “the products of the regional kingdoms were more composite in nature, incorporating local cultures with larger Indic and Islamicate ones. Religion too took on new forms in both Muslim and Hindu traditions… Although the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries were a time of political fragmentation and weakness in north India, it was simultaneously an era of considerable cultural innovation.”[23]
The authors exaggerate the weakness of these north Indian states; although India was highly fragmented in this period and some of the states may have been weak and ephemeral, others were powerful players in Indian politics and remained so into the Mughal period: Mewar’s overwhelming military successes against Delhi, for example, created the opening of which Babur took advantage to sweep into the subcontinent from the northwest.[24] Furthermore, as Asher and Blanshard themselves note, the sultanate of Bengal continued its rule well into the years of the Mughal dynasty; Eaton further notes in his The Rise of Islam and the Bengal Frontier, 1204-1700, the Bengali cultural “golden age” continued into the 1530s, and although “the palmy days of independent Bengal were numbered” after this point,[25] Bengal had always retained some level of autonomy from western conquerors, and would continue to be a realm of relatively weak Mughal authority even after Akbar’s conquest of the region in 1575.[26]
However, their point on the cultural innovations of these regional states is well-received. These local states, from Gujarat to Bengal to the Bahmanis, all began practicing balancing the local traditions of their peoples with the worldly traditions of Hinduism and Turco-Mongol Islam. As in the case of the Mughals, this form of political syncretism allowed regional rulers to compound their legitimacy; rulers could claim local ancestry and heritage that strengthened their claims to rule over the local populations, while also drawing on Hindu and pan-Asian Islamic traditions of legitimacy to strengthen their rule in the eyes of other powers and diverse regional elites. The Mughals adopted this strategy with great success: as Asher and Blanshard argue, these “composite” cultures were “a development promoted first in the regional kingdoms and not until much later in the imperial center of north India, during the late-sixteenth century reign of Akbar.”[27] It took the Mughals nearly a half century of instability before they could begin to use these older imperial practices to any effect.
Finally, all of these regional kingdoms inherited in some way the imperial practices of the Delhi sultans, who in turn had inherited older Central-Asia-focused political traditions.[28] Sunil Kumar, in his chapter “An Inconvenient Heritage: The Central Asian Background of the Delhi Sultans” (2014), shows the titular heritage as a critical and often overlooked point of political development in India. Like the Mughals, the Delhi sultans tried to divest their legacy from that of the Mongols because of the latter group’s infamy across the Islamicate world. In turn, the Delhi sultans of the 1300s and 1400s drew in the same Turkic traditions of slave elite and artistic patronage that would later define the imperial practices of the Timurid dynasty. As Kumar argues, “many of the [Delhi] Sultanate’s major political participants had their origins in [Central Asia] and were ethnically or linguistically associated with either the Turkish or the Mongol people dispersed in the huge region” of Central Asia.[29] The Delhi Sultans used these Turco-Mongol recruits to erase local traditions and even many formal Islamic ones, which was a less common practice in the Mughal empire.[30] But like the Mughals, the Delhi sultans attempted to create a Turco-Mongol state in a region not historically dominated by Central Asian elites; and, like the Mughals, this state became uniquely north Indian and continued to develop as a separate but related entity to the Turkic states of Central Asia. As Anooshahr’s argument reveals from earlier in this paper, the Mughals encountered and adopted, and certainly did not reduce, these Delhian Turkic-Islamic traditions that by 1526 had taken deep root in northern India—but that had originated centuries earlier in the Central Asian tradition of the Ghaznavids.[31][32]
At about 4500 words, this paper can still only provide a basic introduction to the various Central and South Asian practices that came to define the Mughal empire in the 16th and 17th centuries. The Mughals drew on a syncretic combination of imperial legacy and practices from lands as disparate as Bengal, Arabia, Persia, and the Central Asian steppe; the strength of this syncretism may have peaked during the Mughal golden age under Akbar, but it was Babur who established the dynasty as a frontier empire that balanced a variety of imperial traditions: nomadic and sedentary, Hindu and Islamic, Turkic and Persian and Indian, to name just a few. Babur and his successors continued adapting their empire to local cultures and politics across India, granting their empire a flexibility and multi-ethnic character that makes it extremely difficult for the historian to characterize the Mughals using any single imperial definition. It was this very adaptability that allowed them to thrive in the unfamiliar environment of India; but as they adapted, they continued to build upon a variety of political philosophies from outside India as well. Babur established himself as the inheritor of Timur, and drew upon his complex Turco-Mongol and Persianate legacy to do so. In the end, the Mughal emperors may have built the largest imperial structure the South Asian continent had ever seen; but they built this structure with raw and processed materials left over by other empires across space and time in Central and South Asia.
Bibliography:
Alam, Muzaffar. The languages of political Islam: India, 1200-1800 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004)
Anooshahr, Ali. “The Elephant and Imperial Continuities in North India, 1200–1600CE.” The Indian Economic & Social History Review 57, no. 2 (April 2020): 139–69
Asher, Catherine B., Cynthia Talbot, and Ella Blanshard. “North India between Empires: History, Society, and Culture, 1350–1550” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006)
Auer, Blain. Symbols of Authority in Medieval Islam: History, Religion, and Muslim Legitimacy in the Delhi Sultanate (London: I.B. Taurus, 2012), 1.
Eaton, Richard. India in the Persianate Age, 1000-1765 (Berkeley: UC Press, 2019)
Eaton, Richard M. The Rise of Islam and the Bengal Frontier, 1204-1760 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993)
Kumar, Sunil. “An Inconvenient Heritage: the Central Asian background of the Delhi Sultans.” in Singh, Upinder and Parul P. Dhar. Asian Encounters (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2014)
Previous essay by student. “To what extent did the Mughals and the Delhi Sultanate rulers participate in a shared political and cultural world?” for LSE HY4A7, 2021.
Nath, Pratyay. Climate of Conquest: War, Environment, and Empire in Mughal North India (Oxford: OUP, 2019)
Orsini, Francesca and Samira Sheikh. After Timur Left: Culture and Circulation in Fifteenth-Century North India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).
Richards, John F. “Autocratic Centralism,” Chapter in The Mughal Empire, 58–78. The New Cambridge History of India. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.
Subrahmanyam, Sanjay. “Reflections on recent western historiography,” The Indian Economic & Social History Review 29, no. 3 (September 1992): 291–321.
Zaman, Tamiya R. “The Mughal Conquest of Chittor: Study of Akbar’s Letter of Victory.” in Khafipour, Hani. The Empires of the Near East and India (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018).
[1] Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “Reflections on recent western historiography,” The Indian Economic & Social History Review 29, no. 3 (September 1992): 291–321.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Ibid, 297.
[4] A term that Hodgson himself coined.
[5] Pratyay Nath, Climate of Conquest: War, Environment, and Empire in Mughal North India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019).
[6] Ibid, xxvi.
[7] Blain Auer, Symbols of Authority in Medieval Islam: History, Religion, and Muslim Legitimacy in the Delhi Sultanate (London: I.B. Taurus, 2012).
[8] Auer, Symbols of Authority in Medieval Islam, 1.
[9] Sunil Kumar, “An Inconvenient Heritage: the Central Asian background of the Delhi Sultans” in Upinder Singh and Parul P. Dhar, Asian Encounters, Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2014
[10] Richard Eaton, India in the Persianate Age (Berkeley: UC Press, 2019).
[11] Catherine B. Asher and Ella Blanshard, “North India between Empires: History, Society, and Culture, 1350–1550,” Chapter in Catherine B. Asher and Cynthia Talbot, India before Europe, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006),
[12] Subrahmanyam, 300-301.
[13] Subrahmanyam, 301.
[14] Tamiya Zaman, “Akbar’s Conquest of Chittor: A Translation of his Fathnama,” 2019.
[15] Zaman, “Akbar’s Conquest of Chittor,” 287.
[16] John F. Richards, “Autocratic Centralism,” Chapter in The Mughal Empire, 58–78. The New Cambridge History of India. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511584060.006.60
[17] Muzaffar Alam, The Languages of Political Islam: India, 1200-1800 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 1.
[18] Eaton, India in the Persianate Age, 196.
[19] Eaton, 196-197
[20] Nath, xxx-xxxi.
[21] Ali Anooshahr, “The Elephant and Imperial Continuities in North India, 1200–1600CE,” in The Indian Economic & Social History Review 57, no. 2 (April 2020), 141-142.
[22] Francesca Orsini and Samira Sheikh, After Timur Left: Culture and Circulation in Fifteenth-Century North India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).
[23] Asher and Blanshard, “North India between Empires,” 84.
[24] Ibid.
[25] Richard M. Eaton, The Rise of Islam and the Bengal Frontier, 1204-1760 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993) 64.
[26] Asher and Blanshard 85.
[27] Ibid.
[28] Ibid.
[29] Sunil Kumar, “An Inconvenient Heritage,” 87
[30] Kumar, 88
[31] Anooshahr, 141-142.
[32] Previous essay by student, “To what extent did the Mughals and the Delhi Sultanate rulers participate in a shared political and cultural world?” for LSE HY4A7, 2021.
Aidan Lilienfeld, for “Islam, Power and Culture in Mughal India” at the London School of Economics, January 2022
Haus Lilienfeld 