Allahu Akbar: Understanding the Great Mughal in Today's India

The passage highlights something that is often forgotten in accounts of life on the Ridge: the fact that just over half the soldiers, and almost all the vast support staff, were not British, but Indian. It was, all in all, a very odd sort of religious war, where a Muslim Emperor was pushed into rebellion against his Christian oppressors by a mutino

Mirza Mughal’s attempts to act as a co-ordinating Commander-in-Chief had only very limited success.

Humayun also gained from his period in Persia where he was introduced to Persian cultural and military life that not only enabled him to retake Delhi but also contribute to the cultural life of India. His agreement to accept Shi’a Islam as opposed to the Sunni tradition was most likely purely pragmatic in order to secure the help offered by Shah Ta

According to the Mughal historian Khair ud-Din Illahabadi, ‘The Emperor spent years – and fortunes – attempting to destroy the foundations of Maratha power, but this accursed tree could not be pulled up by the roots.’ From Babur to Aurangzeb, the Mughal monarchy of Hindustan had grown ever more powerful, but now there was war among his descendants

We, it is true, have now the same right and the same charter for our dominions that the Mahomedan founders of the house of Delhi had for the sovereignty they claimed over Hindustan [i.e., the right of conquest] but we did not come into India, as they did, at the head of great armies, with the avowed intention of subjugating the country. We crept in

Although a Bahadur Shah Zafar road still survives in Delhi, as indeed do roads named after all the other Great Mughals, for many Indians today, rightly or wrongly, the Mughals are perceived as it suited the British to portray them in the imperial propaganda that they taught in Indian schools after 1857: as sensual, decadent, temple-destroying invad