The Mughal Empire: Administration and Culture

Prerequisites: The Delhi Sultanate: Polity, Administration and Culture · Chapter overview

The Hook: A House of Worship for Arguments

The Core Concept

Rulers and turning points

Sher Shah Suri — reforms the Mughals inherited

• Currency: the silver rupiya and copper dam.
• Land revenue: land measured; a schedule of crop rates (ray); the state’s share about one-third; the patta (title deed issued to the peasant) and qabuliyat (the peasant’s acceptance of revenue terms).
• Roads and sarais: rebuilt the great road from Sonargaon (Bengal) to Peshawar — later called the Grand Trunk Road — with sarais (rest-houses) that also served as posts for the news service (dak chowki).
• Administration: sarkars and parganas with officials such as the shiqdar and amin.
• Monuments: Rohtas Fort (now in Pakistan; UNESCO 1997), his tomb at Sasaram (Bihar) set in an artificial lake, and the Qila-i-Kuhna mosque in Delhi’s Purana Qila.

Central administration

Provinces: Akbar organised the empire into subas — 12 in 1580, 15 by the end of his reign. Each had a subedar (governor), a diwan (revenue), a bakhshi (military pay), a sadr and qazi, and a news-writer (waqia-navis). Below came the sarkar (under the faujdar for law and order and the amalguzar for revenue) and the pargana (shiqdar, amil, qanungo), with the muqaddam and patwari in the village.

Mansabdari and jagirdari

• Every officer held a mansab (rank), expressed as two numbers: zat (personal rank and salary) and sawar (number of cavalry to be maintained).
• Mansabdars were paid either in cash (naqdi) or through a jagir — an assignment of revenue from a territory. Jagirs were transferable, so that no noble struck roots in one region.
• Checks on fraud: dagh (branding of horses) and chehra (descriptive roll of troopers).
• In the later seventeenth century, too many mansabdars chased too few productive jagirs — the so-called jagirdari crisis, often cited among the causes of Mughal decline.

Land revenue

Classification of land (Akbar): polaj (cultivated every year), parauti (left fallow for a short while), chachar (fallow for three or four years), banjar (fallow for five years or more).

Akbar’s religious policy

The guiding principle was sulh-i-kul — tolerance and peace among all communities — described by Abul Fazl. The Maktab Khana (translation bureau) rendered the Mahabharata into Persian as the Razmnama, along with the Ramayana and other works.

Architecture

Painting

• Origins: Humayun brought the Persian masters Mir Sayyid Ali and Abdus Samad, who led Akbar’s studio.
• Akbar: the Hamzanama (a large illustrated romance); Indian painters such as Daswanth and Basawan; illustrated histories and translations.
• Jahangir — the high point: naturalism, portraits and studies of birds, animals and flowers — Ustad Mansur (animals and birds), Abul Hasan, Bishandas (portraits); the halo behind the emperor’s head.
• Shah Jahan: more formal and ornamental. Aurangzeb: court patronage declined; painters moved to Rajput courts (Mewar, Bundi, Kishangarh — where Nihal Chand painted the Bani Thani) and the Pahari courts (Basohli, Guler, Kangra).

Literature, language and music

Music: Tansen at Akbar’s court. Aurangzeb ended singing at court, though Persian treatises on Indian music continued to be written in his reign.

Language: Persian was the language of administration; contact between Persian and local speech helped the growth of Urdu.

graph TD
    A[Babur: Panipat 1526] --> B[Humayun]
    B --> C[Sher Shah: rupiya, roads, revenue]
    C --> D[Akbar: mansabdari, zabti, sulh-i-kul]
    D --> E[Jahangir: painting at its height]
    E --> F[Shah Jahan: Taj Mahal, Red Fort]
    F --> G[Aurangzeb: Deccan wars, jizya reimposed]
    G --> H[Later Mughals: decline after 1707]

Memory Anchors

Great Mughals in order: “Big Hungry Animals Just Sleep Afterwards” → Babur, Humayun, Akbar, Jahangir, Shah Jahan, Aurangzeb.

Three Panipats: 1526 Babur vs Ibrahim Lodi · 1556 Akbar (Bairam Khan) vs Hemu · 1761 Ahmad Shah Abdali vs the Marathas.

Land classes by fallow years: “Please Park Cars Behind” → Polaj (0), Parauti (short), Chachar (3–4), Banjar (5+).

Stone of each reign: Akbar — red; Shah Jahan — white; Jahangir — the bridge (pietra dura on white marble at Itimad-ud-Daulah).

For Prelims

For Mains

• Dimensions: centralised bureaucracy (mansabdari, subas); agrarian system and peasant relations; religious policy and composite culture; architecture and painting; language and literature; causes of decline.
• Keywords: sulh-i-kul, mansabdari, zabti, charbagh, pietra dura, Indo-Persian synthesis, jagirdari crisis.
• Value-addition: Dara Shikoh’s Sirr-i-Akbar and Majma-ul-Bahrain as a bridge between traditions; the Taj Mahal, Red Fort, Humayun’s Tomb and Fatehpur Sikri as World Heritage Sites; the Mughal Garden at Rashtrapati Bhavan (renamed Amrit Udyan in January 2023) as a later example of the charbagh idea.

Common Traps

Practice

Prelims

Mains

Quick Revision

Key Takeaways

Related Topics

• Shivaji and the Rise of the Marathas
• The Mughal Empire — quick revision
• The Mughal Empire — practice questions
• Bhakti and Sufi Movements
• Indian Art and Architecture