Quiktales

History Articles
Lords of the Auspicious Conjunction:
Turco-Mongol Imperial Identity on the Subcontinent

by Lisa Balabanlilar

Excerpt from The Journal of World History, Volume 18, No. 1

Among the most critical developments in sixteenth-century world history was the emergence of powerful Muslim empires to replace the fragmented tribal alliances and minor sultanates that had remained in the void left by Mongol failure and collapse in the central Islamic lands. These great empires—the Ottoman, Safavid, Uzbek, and Mughal—shared Central Asian Turkic political traditions and a vision of conquest rooted in Mongol aspirations of world empire. Their development of military and political trends, centralized bureaucratic institutions, and vital artistic and cultural expressions would have a powerful lingering global influence.

Contemporary studies of the Mughal dynasty of India have, however, long been dominated by nationalist, sectarian, and ideological agendas that typically present the Mughals as a singularly Indian phenomenon, politically and culturally isolated on the subcontinent. Blaming the Mongol invasions of the thirteenth century C.E., which "first propelled Muslim India on its own separate path, distinct from that taken by the lands west of the Indus,"1 modern scholarship on the Middle East and Islamic Central Asia has long marginalized Indian Islam and assigned to the Mughal emperors of the subcontinent a position on the periphery of the early modern Islamic world.

Although the founder of India's Mughal empire, Zahir al-Din Muhammad Babur (1483–1530), was a Chaghatai-Turkish prince and a direct descendant of both Chinggis Khan and Timur, few scholars acknowledge that Mughal ties to Transoxiana might have substantial relevance to our understanding of the empire. The The New Cambridge History of India disregards the Central Asian legacy of the Mughals, asserting that "the interests and future of all concerned were in India."3 Describing the first two Mughal kings as "immigrants," the dynasty is linked to the preceding nearly thousand years of Muslim colonization in India and the Mughals described as "indisputably Indian ... emerging from the Indian historical experience." Mughal history for many scholars begins with the seventh-century arrival of Muslim armies of conquest and the establishment of "Indo-Muslim rulers—whether of foreign or Indian origin" over most of the subcontinent.

Yet to demand one thousand years of Indo-Muslim continuity is to ignore the particular character of the Mughal empire. The Mughals arrived in India with a set of political, cultural, and aesthetic traditions and understandings that were entirely grounded in the late Timurid milieu in Transoxiana whence they came, and they passionately maintained many of these cultural inheritances in India. Scholars of the Timurids, such as Maria Eva Subtelny, have emphasized the "profound influence" of the Timurid legacy on the Mughal dynasty and have questioned the absence of research which links them to their ancestry in Central Asia. Historians of the Mughals such as Muzaffar Alam and Sanjay Subrahmanyam affirm the "traditionally neglected" Central Asian genealogy of the Mughals, calling it "somewhat puzzling why the Mughal specialists have by and large refused, in the past few decades, to place the state they study in the larger context."

It is time for a radical re-evaluation of the scholarly and intellectual isolation with which the Mughals have traditionally been treated. India's Muslim kingdoms did not, before or after the Mongol invasions, develop apart from the central and hence "normative" Islamic world. More specifically, the Mughal Empire, founded as it was by a Timurid prince from Transoxiana only to become the richest and most populous of all the early modern Islamic empires, cannot be viewed as a uniquely Indian phenomenon. The Mughals must be recognized as the principal inheritors of the Central Asian Turco-Persian legacy of Timur, from whom they were direct descendants: as "true Timurids who enthusiastically embraced Timurid legitimacy and consciously presided over a Timurid renaissance" on the Indian subcontinent.

Read Lisa Balabanlilar's full article, "Lords of the Auspicious Conjunction: Turco-Mongol Imperial Identity on the Subcontinent"

Note: Original annotations were not included in this excerpt.

Quiktales Rating: 3