Genghis Khan, and so the Mongol or Mughal appellation stuck. In 1526 Babur’s army crushed his Muslim rival’s forces at Panipat, only fifty miles from Delhi, scattering his enemy’s elephants with artillery. A year later he defeated the proud Hindu Rajput princes. The empire of Babur and his successors, Akbar, Shah Jahan (builder of the Taj Mahal), and Aurangzeb, would possess more territory, wealth, and splendor than any kingdom India had ever seen—except with Muslims instead of Hindus in charge.
The two religions could not have been more different. Islam preached the existence of one God, Allah, instead of the pantheon of gods and goddesses of the Hindus. It preached the brotherhood of all believers, instead of the hierarchic inequalities and inequities of caste. And it condemned all religious imagery, like Hindu temple carvings and the statues surrounding Buddhist shrines, as blasphemous idolatry. Islamic zealots destroyed thousands of Hindu sites or converted them into mosques. Buddhist sites were virtually obliterated. 26 The complexity of Hindu caste law and dietary ritual also made little sense to Muslims, who butchered and ate the Brahmin cows that Hindus treated as sacrosanct.
But under the Mughals, both Hindus and Muslims in India found a modus vivendi, if not exactly common ground. Babur and Akbar patronized Hindu artists and builders. High-caste Hindus served as administrators and tax collectors for their empire, and Hindu generals and soldiers became the core of their army. In turn, Muslims became a permanent part of the social landscape of India, making up almost one-quarter of the population in the Punjab, Sind, and Baluchistan to the west and in Bengal to the east—although only 14 percent in Gandhi’s home province of Gujarat and less than a tenth in the center and south of India were Muslims. 27
Some Hindu princelings, especially among the Marathas and the Rajputs, never submitted to Muslim rule. Fierce insurgencies raged back and forth across the Hindu heartland of central India for more than a century. Babur’s great-grandson Aurangzeb was engaged in crushing one in 1690, when the East India Company made its first appearance in Calcutta.
To the Mughals, the English, like other Europeans in India, seemed only a minor distraction. They were too few in number and too paltry in wealth and power to worry about, especially since Babur’s successors had their hands full keeping their empire together and dealing with outside intruders from Afghanistan and Persia. When Bahadur Shah I died in 1712, no Indian could have imagined that these uncouth and (from a religious point of view) unclean Europeans or feringhi would soon hold the balance of power in the subcontinent.
They gained it precisely because they offered the two things everyone needed in the dog-eat-dog world of late Mughal politics: guns and soldiers. Mughal official and Hindu insurgent alike saw the French, the British, and their sepoy regiments as allies of convenience for their own power grabs. It was the Maratha chieftain Morari Rao who chose to back Clive at Arcot against a hated Muslim rival, and it was the emperor’s renegade viceroy in Bengal, Siraj-ad-Daula, who mobilized his army in support of the French until Clive’s victory at Plassey stripped him of power.
Some fought hard against the seemingly inexorable British conquest, just as they had against the Mughals. Haidar Ali was a Muslim adventurer, unable to read or write, who carved out a territory for himself around Mysore in southern India. He and his son Tipu Sahib fought bravely against the British for nearly three decades until Tipu finally succumbed to Lord Wellesley’s sepoys and British infantry at the siege of Seringapatam in 1799.
Similarly, the proud Marathas were a warrior caste who had converted to Hinduism after settling in India from central Asia many centuries before. They seized the opportunity of collapsing Mughal rule to make their own bid for control of
The two religions could not have been more different. Islam preached the existence of one God, Allah, instead of the pantheon of gods and goddesses of the Hindus. It preached the brotherhood of all believers, instead of the hierarchic inequalities and inequities of caste. And it condemned all religious imagery, like Hindu temple carvings and the statues surrounding Buddhist shrines, as blasphemous idolatry. Islamic zealots destroyed thousands of Hindu sites or converted them into mosques. Buddhist sites were virtually obliterated. 26 The complexity of Hindu caste law and dietary ritual also made little sense to Muslims, who butchered and ate the Brahmin cows that Hindus treated as sacrosanct.
But under the Mughals, both Hindus and Muslims in India found a modus vivendi, if not exactly common ground. Babur and Akbar patronized Hindu artists and builders. High-caste Hindus served as administrators and tax collectors for their empire, and Hindu generals and soldiers became the core of their army. In turn, Muslims became a permanent part of the social landscape of India, making up almost one-quarter of the population in the Punjab, Sind, and Baluchistan to the west and in Bengal to the east—although only 14 percent in Gandhi’s home province of Gujarat and less than a tenth in the center and south of India were Muslims. 27
Some Hindu princelings, especially among the Marathas and the Rajputs, never submitted to Muslim rule. Fierce insurgencies raged back and forth across the Hindu heartland of central India for more than a century. Babur’s great-grandson Aurangzeb was engaged in crushing one in 1690, when the East India Company made its first appearance in Calcutta.
To the Mughals, the English, like other Europeans in India, seemed only a minor distraction. They were too few in number and too paltry in wealth and power to worry about, especially since Babur’s successors had their hands full keeping their empire together and dealing with outside intruders from Afghanistan and Persia. When Bahadur Shah I died in 1712, no Indian could have imagined that these uncouth and (from a religious point of view) unclean Europeans or feringhi would soon hold the balance of power in the subcontinent.
They gained it precisely because they offered the two things everyone needed in the dog-eat-dog world of late Mughal politics: guns and soldiers. Mughal official and Hindu insurgent alike saw the French, the British, and their sepoy regiments as allies of convenience for their own power grabs. It was the Maratha chieftain Morari Rao who chose to back Clive at Arcot against a hated Muslim rival, and it was the emperor’s renegade viceroy in Bengal, Siraj-ad-Daula, who mobilized his army in support of the French until Clive’s victory at Plassey stripped him of power.
Some fought hard against the seemingly inexorable British conquest, just as they had against the Mughals. Haidar Ali was a Muslim adventurer, unable to read or write, who carved out a territory for himself around Mysore in southern India. He and his son Tipu Sahib fought bravely against the British for nearly three decades until Tipu finally succumbed to Lord Wellesley’s sepoys and British infantry at the siege of Seringapatam in 1799.
Similarly, the proud Marathas were a warrior caste who had converted to Hinduism after settling in India from central Asia many centuries before. They seized the opportunity of collapsing Mughal rule to make their own bid for control of
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