Mughal History as a window to Modern India

March 22, 2025·1 hr 3 min·4 clips

Akbar ordered the Mahabharata translated into Persian so his Muslim courtiers could understand Hindus — and it was the first time the epic had ever been illustrated.

1. The India Briefing hosts Mukulika Banerjee (London) and Pragya Tiwari (New Delhi) interview historian Ira Mukherjee about the V&A's 'The Great Mughals' exhibition, which covers the Mughal golden age from approximately 1560 to 1660. 2. Ira Mukherjee is the author of 'The Daughters of the Sun: Empresses, Queens and Begums of the Mughal Empire,' a biography of Akbar, and 'The Lion and the Lily' about the Nawabs and Begums of Awadh. 3. The episode's central argument is that the Mughals are consistently misread through binary lenses — as purely Islamic rulers, as oppressors of women, as Mongol conquerors — and that the V&A exhibition's objects complicate all three of these framings. 4. Mukherjee explains that 'Mughal' is a European corruption of 'Mongol'; the dynasty called itself Gurkhani (the in-law dynasty) because Timur married into the Chinggisid line for legitimacy, a practice his Mughal descendants continued. 5. The Mughal Empire was established by Babur in 1526 and lasted until the British exiled the last emperor in 1857; the six so-called 'Great Mughals' span 1526 to Aurangzeb's death in 1707. 6. At the Mughal peak, the empire comprised 100 to 140 million people; England in the same period, under Elizabeth I — an exact contemporary of Akbar — had approximately 3 million people and was embroiled in Catholic-Protestant religious wars. 7. A jade wine tankard belonging to Ulug Beg, Timur's son, is displayed in the exhibition; Mukherjee explains it was believed to crack if poison was poured into it, making it both a pleasure object and a survival tool — though Ulug Beg was eventually decapitated by his own son, untested. 8. The tankard carries inscriptions showing it was later owned by Jahangir (acquired 1611) and then given to Shah Jahan, tracing the Timurid inheritance across generations and demonstrating that wine-drinking was a continuous dynastic tradition, not an aberration. 9. Mukherjee argues that the Mughal treatment of women was heavily distorted by British colonial historians, who projected Victorian ideals of female seclusion onto a dynasty whose Timurid predecessors placed their queens visibly in mixed court settings — as recorded by the Spanish ambassador to Timur's court. 10. Feminist historian Ruby Lal's research has enabled individual identification of the women depicted in the Akbar Nama folio at the exhibition, including Hamida Banu Begum (Akbar's mother), Gulbadan Begum (Babur's daughter), Maham Anga (Akbar's influential foster mother), and Bega Begum (overseer of Humayun's Tomb). 11. Jahanara Begum, daughter of Shah Jahan and Mumtaz Mahal, wrote a biography of her Sufi experiences — a unique document in the Islamic world, written from within the zenana, still untranslated into English, with a translation by Professor Sunil Sharma expected soon. 12. Noor Jahan, wife of Jahangir, had her own gold mohurs (coins) struck with her face and name, an imperial prerogative she claimed for herself — some of these coins are displayed in the exhibition. 13. A painting in the exhibition is signed by Safina Banu Begum, indicating that elite Mughal women were trained in painting and contributed to the royal atelier. 14. Akbar was technically illiterate — possibly dyslexic — and instead of reading, employed professional oral storytellers called Qissa Khwan who recited entire texts from memory; the Hamza Nama, a 1,400-image illustrated manuscript taking 15 years to complete, grew from his desire to have images accompany those recitations. 15. The Hamza Nama brought together Persian master painters (who came with Humayun from exile in Persia) and approximately 100 Hindu Gujarati and Rajput artists, creating the first blended Mughal-Hindustani visual tradition — evident in the combination of Persian perspective with Indian color, exuberance, birds, and animals. 16. Akbar commissioned the first Persian translation of the Mahabharata (the Razm Nama, or Book of War) in the 1580s, reasoning that religious conflict stems from misunderstanding; for the first time, the epic was also illustrated, with Ram and Lakshman depicted in Mughal court dress. 17. Jahangir's court paintings, unlike Akbar's densely populated narrative folios, became sparse and allegorical — designed for an elite audience able to decode symbols including a decapitated enemy's head, an owl, cherubs from Jesuit-imported European paintings, and a chain of justice, all in a single image. 18. Shah Jahan's self-portrait as King of the World, painted by his Hindu court painter Pichitra, shows a lion and sheep standing peacefully together beside a globe — imagery that Mukherjee notes combines Mughal sovereignty claims with Elizabethan iconography absorbed through European contact. 19. The episode will appeal most to listeners interested in Indian history, Mughal art, South Asian feminism, or the relationship between empire and visual culture. 20. Listeners looking for a general India-politics briefing or who have no prior interest in art history or the Mughal period will find the level of detail demanding.

As heard by us

Mughal art, storytelling, and court culture are used to show why the past still feels present.

This episode uses the V&A's Great Mughals exhibition as a way into a larger point: Mughal court culture is not sealed off in the past, and it still shapes how India talks about medieval history and the present. Ira Mukhoti fits that frame well.

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Why you'd press play

You want Mughal history tied to modern India without losing the courtly texture.

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