The Mughal Empire 1526-1707
The subcontinent has a long history of diverse groups of people. For centuries, India had been divided into a dizzying array of small states, principalities, tribes, castes, sects, and ethnolinguistic groups. The commonality among these individual groups was Hindu. After Central Asian warriors, who claimed they were descendants of Chinnggis Khan and Timur with a Turkic culture, led brutal conquests into the subcontinent, Mughal emperors were able to create political unity from1526-1707 out of the fractious states. But division remained.
The Mughal dynasty was comprised of 20 percent Muslims with the remaining 80 percent practicing some form of Hinduism. A major question for the ruling dynasty was how to rule the majority of the people who did not share the same religion or cultural trappings. Emperor Akbar, perhaps the most famous Mughal ruler, reigned from 1556 through 1605. Akbar understood that to rule the Hindu majority he must act deliberately to ensure their obedience. Instead of forcing Hindus to convert to Islam, he embraced them.
Akbar relaxed some of the restrictions placed upon Hindu women. He persuaded merchants to establish special market days for women only so that they would not remain in seclusion in the family compound. He encouraged widowed women to remarry instead of remaining in mourning and isolation for the remainder of their lives as Hindu demanded. The marrying of children was discouraged and women were discouraged from committing sati, an act where women threw themselves upon their husband’s funeral pyre to burn to death.
In attempts to prevent open hostilities between Muslims and Hindus, Akbar demanded a policy of tolerance by restraining some of the militant Islam scholars, ulama, and abolishing a tax on non-Muslims. He encouraged intellectual discussion among many religons by constructing a House of Worship where Muslim, Hindu, Christian, Buddhist, Jewish, Jain, and Zoroastrian representatives could meet. The culture of acceptance created a blended Mughal empire.
As the empire became an amalgamation of religions and cultures, opposition flourished. To many individuals the integration between Hindus and Muslims created an impure version of Islam. Supporting religious festivals, worshiping saints, and sacrificing animals represented impure Islam and had to be rooted out. Many believed that women were the problem since Akbar had relaxed many of the religious laws that had applied to them. The Muslim philosopher Shayk Abmad Sirhindi stated that “because of their utter stupidity women pray to stones and idols and ask for their help” when small pox and other diseases strike. As such, it was the duty of Muslim leaders to impose Islamic law, sharia, upon women and to force non-Muslims from high office within the empire.
The Mughal emperor Aurangzeb began his reign in 1658 and was a champion of Muslim thinking. He overturned Akbar’s policies of acceptance and tolerance and began to impose Islamic supremacy. Instead of discouraging Hindu women from sati, he outright banned it. He suppressed gambling, drinking, dancing, prostitution, and narcotics such as opium which was very popular. To further enforce Islamic law, numerous Hindu temples were destroyed. For Hindus, they could retain their religious practices in private, but they could not avoid the high taxes that Aurangzeb placed upon non-Muslims to pay for his wars of expansion.
Hindus within the Mughal Empire had become impoverished. As non-Muslims within the empire attempted to break free of the strangling Islamic laws, the Mughal Empire became a highly contentious place. After Aurangzeb’s death in 1707, the subcontinent was in a state of chaos. The unity that Akbar had deliberately put in place had vanished under Aurangzeb. With the subcontinent fractured, it was easy for Great Britain to take over the subcontinent in the mid-eighteenth century.