The Mughal dispensation

The history of the Mughal Empire, especially the period 1526–1750, has until recently been viewed through the prism of Orientalist and colonial perceptions. As late as the 1990s, John Richards described the Mughal state as an ‘intensive, centralizing system which unified the subcontinent’. ¹ However, this conception of ‘an all-powerful Leviathan’ is now regarded as flawed; it is seen as an ‘idealized vision of the British empire, projected backwards into the late sixteenth century’, ² coloured by the ideas of eighteenth-century South Asian intellectuals who saw the end of the empire as a period of anarchy and decline. Today, a more nuanced picture holds centre stage. It is now argued that the Mughal imperium, even during its heyday from 1530–1750, underwent constant evolution – incorporating new regions, and making adjustments to fit in with disparate local conditions. The outcome of this process was that the empire ‘eventually resembled a “patchwork quilt” rather than a “wall-to-wall carpet”’. ³ The implications of this less centralised understanding of the empire mean that it would be quite futile to attempt here a comprehensive analysis of how the state intervened in the religious lives of its subjects, a topic more suited to a monograph.