Mughlai Curry

The book is almost a stage set: each emperor tells his tale, takes his bow. In the backdrop are the stories of powerful women, fratricidal wars, violence, deceit and calumny. The Mughals were descendants of the Mongol warriors Ghenghiz Khan and Timur whose cavalry hordes swept across the Eurasian plains in the 13th and 14th centuries, conquering everything between Beijing and Budapest. Babur’s campaign against the Delhi Sultanate catalysed the foundations of one of the greatest dynasties in the history of South Asia. Eraly captures the endeavour’s grandness and its frailty.

But this is essentially a story of individuals, not processes: it does not aim to be definitive history. Eraly fails, however, to critically examine any of the texts he uses and his epilogue is startlingly reminiscent of other discourses that glorify ancient "Hindu" India and European "modernism" to the exclusion of all others. Employing sweeping generalisations, he concludes that the Mughals were fundamentalist Islamic warmongers who appropriated immense plunder and in whose empire "goodwill was almost totally absent". India under the Mughals did not have either the vitality to sustain its old cultures or to renew itself. In an extraordinary comparison, he argues that Shakespeare and Galileo were contemporaries of Akbar and Jehangir, Newton of Aurangzeb: "Europe was on the up spiral, India on the down spiral." European domination therefore was inevitable.

Much of Eraly’s epilogue is hyperbole. The Mughal state for all its faults was essentially an Indian empire: its plunder remained within the borders of India, unlike that of John Company. Its armies were less rapacious than those of the Portuguese. The empire was not in any real sense a unitary, theocratic state and evolved to meet the exigencies of administration, not religion. Compelling evidence suggests that a vast number of Mansabdars under Aurangzeb were Hindu. By his time, the Empire had overextended itself. The conquest of the Deccan meant that the locus of power and the logistics of control changed. Aurangzeb’s policy of "Islamisation" must be seen in the context of a world of fragile loyalties—an attempt to create a homogeneity of interest out of a chaos of self-serving feudatories. Eraly ignores the vast historiography on this subject.

That said, it is a book that captures the imagination, despite the epilogue. A word of caution to scholars of Indian history—this is not critical analysis. In that Eraly is probably following in the footsteps of Francois Bernier, the 17th century chronicler whom he quotes in his front piece: "I gave the story as I received it; to contradict it is not in my power."