As of yet it seems the Mongols and Mughals are quite similar but when I looked closer I found a few differences. The biggest difference between the Mongols and Mughals is that the Mughals were peaceful and set an example of religious harmony between the Muslims and Hindus in contrast the Mongols were conquerors, who came to power primarily through violence and manslaughter, and Kublai Khan, their emperor, vowed to fulfill the wish of his grandfather and conquer all of China.
In conclusion I do not think the Mongols and Mughals should be one. The Mughals have impacted India today by introducing a centralized government, Persian art and culture, and a certain style of architecture example: the Taj Mahal. The Mongols have impacted today by setting the foundation for mail delivery, and effective trading tactics.
The Mongols and Mughals may have some similarities but when I looked closer I found that they have many major differences leading me to realize how different the two empires actually are. Mongols vs. Mongol Notes. Like Like. To answer your question you can never be completely sure about history because non of us were there but we go off the most reliable of information.
That would make Genghis Kahn the great great great great great great great great great great grandfather of Babur. The only major differences, however, were in leadership and power, not to mention how the Mughals changed their rulership. Over time, while indigenous cults drew kings to the countryside for worship, villagers were soon making pilgrimages to royal temples such as the one dedicated to Jagannath in Puri, which became one of the most important pilgrimage sites in Eastern India. Kings such as Anangabhima III early 13 th Century gained considerable fame and legitimation by sponsoring the annual cart festival that involved the direct participation of all the villages in the realm.
As we shall see later, both Hindus and Muslims fought over control of the revenues of this sacred site. Royal power was further enhanced by the practice of granting provincial land to brahmin families who then established Hindu temples in the countryside and also introduced caste hierarchy there.
It was said that King Govinda IV of Rastrakuta gave brahmins villages along with large sums of money. Although these Hindu kingdoms had far less central administration than later Muslim governments, the brahmins became the first Indian bureaucrats and they extended their power beyond their traditional religious duties. Both ritual and military violence continue to be associated with Hindu goddess worship. As recent as early medieval times there are recorded instances of villagers, primarily pregnant women, who offered themselves as sacrifices to the king if he promised to worship their heads.
These early human sacrifices were gradually replaced by animal sacrifices that are still regularly offered to Durga and Kali, primarily in Northeast India and Nepal. Hindu kings in South Asia typically went to war only after offering goats and buffalo to Durga, who, according to Hindu mythology, was a more effective warrior than the male gods. For example, many Hindu soldiers credit Durga for their victory against Kashmiri militants in the Kargil region. According to goddess theology, even the male gods drew their power from the shakti of the goddess.
In addition, this festival was a prime occasion for the king to offer a "communion that bridges the gulf between the folk and the elite. One legend from Orissa suggests instructive parallels to the Hebrew concept of Yahweh the Warrior, where the deity wins the battles rather than human armies.
The soldiers of Khandpara will eat the curd and become unconscious. Holding the sword, I shall kill the soldiers of Khandpara. This is obviously violence sanctioned by religion, but it is not done for the purpose of converting the enemy to the conqueror's religion.
This former rationale in no way excuses the violence done, but it limits violence to the military campaign, and it does not necessarily produce a general policy of religious intolerance and oppression. Let us now return to the first appearance of Muslims in South Asia.
With the discovery of a foot dock at Lotha in Sind, the conjecture that ancient Indians traded with Western Asia is now empirically verified.
Arab traders sailed in Indian waters long before the birth of Muhammad. They established themselves along the southwest coast, best known as the Malabar Coast, and from there they settled in Sri Lanka now 8 percent of the population and finally Malaysia and Indonesia, the latter now the largest Muslim nation in the world. Indian traders had already plied these eastern routes taking Hindu influence as far as North Vietnam. The Buddhist-Hindu empires in Sumatra, Java, Malaysia reached their zenith in the 13 th , and the spread of Islam move eastwards as rulers in Sumatra and Java were converted.
Even so the merchant class remained predominantly Hindu and the island of Bali retains its Hindu culture and religion with amazing grace and integrity.
In a contingent of Arab widows and children were returning from Sri Lanka where their husbands and fathers had lost their lives to disease. They were attacked by pirates off the coast of present day Karachi, and the pirates were protected by Dahar, the Hindu king of the province of Sind.
When Dahar refused to release the women and children, Hajjaj , a viceroy of the Umayyad Empire, sent three expeditions to Sind, the first two being unsuccessful. These military advantages would insure repeated Muslim victories over Hindu armies until the rise of Shivaji, the great Maratha military genius in the 18 th Century. There were also religious advantages: congregational worship before going into battle, impossible in Hindu liturgy, and the concepts of military jihad were incredible morale boosters.
Qasim and his army advanced as far north as the Punjab and was preparing to invade Kashmir when the new Caliph Sulaiman recalled Qasim him to Iraq. Sulaiman hated Hajjaj, who died in , and Qasim was imprisoned and died there under torture. First, the largely Buddhist population of Sind was unhappy with their Hindu rulers and their ethics of nonviolence inclined them to welcome the invaders.
Second, Qasim responded positively to Buddhist and Hindu overtures of surrender and thereby avoided unnecessary bloodshed and destruction. For centuries caste discrimination would haunt Hindus and would motivated tens of thousands of Indians to convert to Islam and Christianity. Qasim made another decision that would prove crucial to the relatively benign way in which Muslims ruled India for the next years. When deciding among the four schools of Islamic law, Qasim chose the Hanafi school, the most liberal of the four in terms of treatment of non-believers.
That meant that they could continue to live under Islamic rule as long as they paid their religious tax jiyah.
Under some Islamic rulers jiyah was not required, and even when it was, collection was not consistently enforced or Hindus simply refused to pay it, sometimes even killing revenue officials. There were later Muslim rulers who were far more orthodox than Qasim, but they nevertheless conceded that Hindus, Jains, and Buddhists be allowed to live as People of the Book.
These sultans and emperors were restrained by the fact that, with very few exceptions, Hanafi clerics were their chief religious advisors, primarily because the Hanafi school had become dominant in Central Asia by the 12 th Century.
At the very most Islamic rule in India was theocentric, but never theocratic. He collected the revenue of the country and the treasury was placed under his seal.
He assisted Muhammad ibn Qasim in all of his undertakings. In one instance Qasim went beyond the letter of Hanafi law by allowing, with the permission of the ulama of Damascus, a Buddhist temple to be rebuilt. Of the four schools only the Hanafi clerics forbade the destruction of temples, but they usually did hold that no new places of infidel worship could be built or repaired. Permission is given them to worship their gods. Nobody must be forbidden and prevented from following his own religion.
These early generous acts would set a precedent for Muslim rule in India that discouraged even the most orthodox Muslim ruler from enforcing stricter religious policies.
As these translations were nearing completion, Akbar gave the order for the history of his reign to be compiled, including an account of his real and mythical antecedents.
The author was Abu'l Fazl, the great polymath of the age, who began his work in and completed most of it by His rigorously researched history drew on the central record office of the empire, a number of memoirs commissioned by the emperor from witnesses to recent events, and the recently-translated memoirs of Babur.
Though always historically accurate, Abu'l Fazl also portrayed Akbar as the ideal monarch within Iranian traditions of kingship, and the perfect man within traditions of mystical Sufism. The third volume of his text, the Ain-e Akbari the Regulations, or Institutes of Akbar , describes the many departments of the royal household, including the Ketabkhana , with a list of the leading artists of the age. Many of their names are inscribed on paintings accompanying an incomplete, unbound manuscript of the Akbarnama that was bought by the South Kensington Museum in These demonstrate that the manuscript was originally intended to be the presentation copy for the emperor.
The text covers the years to and has paintings, all attributed by a contemporary librarian to the artists who painted them. In some cases, a specialist portraitist was given the task of painting the features of the main characters in the scene. In , Akbar embarked on a military campaign to conquer the independent sultanate of Gujarat. The region was extremely wealthy, with sophisticated craft traditions and enormous textile production.
The pilgrim port of Surat, from where Muslim pilgrims set off from all over the subcontinent to perform the Hajj, was also within its borders.
Victory came to the Mughal forces early in , and Akbar's procession through Surat is depicted in the Akbarnama. Among the crowd on the far right of the painting is a figure in blue clothes and a black hood, with blue eyes — he represents the Europeans that Akbar encountered for the first time, and energetically questioned about their lives, habits and beliefs.
They had come from the Portuguese settlement of Goa, and this encounter would result in Akbar sending a delegation there, to request that a religious delegation be sent to the Mughul court. The first Jesuit mission arrived at the city of Fatehpur in , and installed a chapel inside the house that Akbar had assigned to them. Here, they displayed paintings with Christian subjects that caused a sensation. The emperor brought his leading courtiers to see them, and then sent for his artists.
The impact of this — and of paintings and engravings brought by subsequent Jesuit missions — was soon apparent in Mughal painting. The principles of scientific perspective were not followed, but a sense of depth derived from European art is found in some of the paintings in the Akbarnama.
One of the paintings from the Harivamsa, showing the dramatic combat between the gods Indra and Krishna taking place above a boat sailing past a rocky landscape, is also obviously inspired by European art. Occasionally, a print of the kind brought by the Third Mission led by Father Jerome Xavier in was copied precisely.
Other paintings were created for copies of the translation into Persian of the Life of Christ that had been requested by Akbar, and were written by Xavier in collaboration with a scholar at the Mughal court. The same mingling of widely differing artistic traditions in the art of the book during Akbar's reign was certainly found in objects, though comparatively few have survived.
A jewelled gold spoon exemplifies the uniquely Hindustani goldsmith's technique of kundan which is still widely practised today across the subcontinent to set stones in gold. It is mentioned by Abu'l Fazl in the Ain-e Akbari , but has antecedents that predate the arrival of the Mughuls by centuries. The design of the jewelled decoration is purely Iranian, and relates to contemporary illuminated designs in the art of the book.
The shape is Indian, but the decoration within cusped cartouches an ornate framing motif is based on Iranian designs of the period of Shah Tahmasp reigned — The chiselled details of a tiger attacking an elephant whose rider, or mahout, tries to fight it off on one side of the blade; and the combat between a horse and an elephant directed by their respective riders on the other, relate to similar scenes in paintings done at the end of Akbar's reign.
By this time, specialist craftsmen in the provinces of the empire supplied the court, and exported their wares to Europe. Gujarat was famous for its inlaid wooden boxes and cabinets, and for its artefacts made out of thin pieces of mother of pearl. Their intended market determined the design of the finished piece, and often its form. Therefore, items made for the huge market in Portuguese Goa might include European-style ewers and salvers that, from there, often travelled westwards and were sometimes given European silver or gilt silver mounts.
The rare surviving altar frontal was probably also intended for a Goan patron, but the Mughal-influenced motifs surrounding its central panel of Christian imagery are similar to those on cabinets that were made for the domestic market and must have been produced in quantity.
The designs on the altar frontal also have parallels in Mughal painting from that period, showing how far the influence of court art had spread. By Akbar's death in , Mughal art had brought together disparate influences from Hindustan, Iran and Europe.
New industries such as carpet weaving were firmly established, while existing crafts with antecedents long predating the Mughals thrived by having access to much larger markets and new patrons. Akbar was succeeded by his son Salim, who took the title Jahangir 'World Seizer'. He inherited a stable and immensely wealthy empire, with an efficient administration that ensured cash flowed from every province into the twelve separate treasuries of the royal household.
One treasury was for precious stones, of which there was a vast store, and another held jewelled artefacts including wine cups made of single precious stones and gold thrones. It also held the jewellery that was worn in considerable quantity by the emperor and his family and was exchanged as gifts during the major festivals of the court.
Jahangir already had several wives before he married the beautiful and intelligent Mehr un-Nissa in She came from an aristocratic Iranian family, and both her father and brother reached the highest positions in the Mughal hierarchy after the family came to court.
Jahangir gave her the title Nur Jahan Light of the World , and became devoted to the highly educated and dynamic woman who effectively ruled with him.
She was the only Mughal queen to have coins issued in her name. Both were patrons of architecture, though the greatest artistic achievements of the time were to be found in the art of the book, Jahangir's great passion, and in the innovations in some of the materials and techniques used to create objects.
Like his great-grandfather Babur, Jahangir wrote his memoirs which were entitled the Jahangirnama or Tuzuk-e Jahangir. In between accounts of the rituals of court life, political events and family matters like births, marriages and deaths, they reveal that Jahangir inherited a similar fascination for the natural world.
Unlike Babur, Jahangir commissioned his leading artists to paint some of the events, people, birds and animals that he described. He mentions multiple copies being made of the Jahangirnama in but no illustrated intact volume exists.
Nevertheless, at least part of one was definitely finished — a folio depicting the submission of the Rana of Mewar to Jahangir's son Khurram in has a catchword in the lower left of the painting, used in manuscripts to link the painting to the text that follows on the next page.
Another painting was certainly intended for a copy of the Jahangirnama , but ended up in an album created for his son when he became emperor. It demonstrates Jahangir's close interest in the natural world and also provides information not given in his memoirs. In a delegation came to court and presented the emperor with rare and exotic birds and animals. One was an African zebra, an animal Jahangir had never seen before and which seemed like a horse painted with stripes.
He wrote, "One might say the painter of fate, with a strange brush, had left it on the page of the world". He intended it to be sent to Shah 'Abbas of Iran, with whom he regularly exchanged valuable or rare presents, but there is no mention of the name of the artist to whom he gave an order to record the animal's appearance.
However, on the right of the painting, the emperor himself has written in his distinctive spidery hand that it was the work of one his two leading artists, Mansur, and includes details of how and when the zebra came to court. The life of Jahangir and his court was nomadic, with long absences from the major capital cities of Agra and Lahore.
Formal transfers between these two cities involved travelling with a vast tented city to accommodate the women's quarters, the nobility, the servants and camp followers. Two sets of tents were needed so that one could be set up ahead, at the next halting place. A reduced camp travelled across long distances, sometimes being absent from the capitals for years at a time. Jahangir's memoirs make it clear that many artists and craftsmen travelled with him, even if their names or activities are rarely mentioned.
Therefore, when Jahangir left Agra for the city of Ajmer in Rajasthan in , and remained there for almost three years, signed and dated paintings depicting the emperor must have been done in the city. His son also had his own small entourage of artists accompanying him, even when he undertook military campaigns, as Nanha's depiction of the submission of the redoubtable Rana of Mewar reveals, the artist has included himself at work in the painting.
These prolonged absences from the major cities may explain the apparent reduction in the number of artists in royal service — the House of Books that included the huge imperial library must have remained in the palace at Agra, but the leading artists and calligraphers accompanied Jahangir on his travels. In , when he mentions copies of the Jahangirnama being made, and the artist Abu'l Hasan painting a splendid frontispiece for the royal copy, the court was in Ahmadabad, the capital of Gujarat.
This was also the only opportunity that another artist, Bishndas, had to study two minor rulers of Gujarat, Rao Bharah and Jassa Jam, who never travelled out of the province. Portraiture reached an unprecedented level of naturalism under Jahangir, a phenomenon that is usually attributed to the royal artists' exposure to European portraits. Famously, the English ambassador Sir Thomas Roe, who visited Jahangir in Ajmer and then travelled with the court for a time, showed the emperor a miniature by Isaac Oliver.
This was such a treasured possession that Roe was unwilling to give it to Jahangir, but allowed him to borrow it. One of the leading court artists was ordered to make a copy of it, and when Roe was shown the original, accompanied by five identical versions, he had some difficulty in recognising his own.