The historian and award-winning author of City of Djinns, White Mughals, and The Last Mughal, William Dalrymple, on history, religion and the value of tolerance.

By Joseph Jones

William Dalrymple is a renowned expert on the Mughal Empire. One of his most recent books, The Last Mughal, covers the fall of the dynasty and the sack of the city of Delhi following the Indian Mutiny in 1857. Expat Living caught up with him at the Asian Civilisations Museum, where he was in town to deliver a talk in conjunction with the museum’s Treasury of the World exhibition.

Although looking a little jetlagged, the Scottish author, now living on a farm outside of Delhi with his wife and family, orders a beer and launches with practiced ease into a discussion of his area of expertise: the Mughals.

For Dalrymple, this is a period deserving of notice. “The Mughal Empire controlled more of the South Asian landmass than any other empire in history, including the British. The Mughals not only controlled three-quarters of modern India, they also controlled all of modern Pakistan and Bangladesh, most of Afghanistan, and slivers of Iran and Uzbekistan.” Along with China’s Ming dynasty, this vast empire was, during much of the 16th and 17th centuries, the the largest and richest in the world.

As Dalrymple says, Europeans arrived on India’s southeast coast, “not as great imperial conquerors, but as impoverished people from the uncivilised north, trying to get in on the act of the richest empire in the world.” India’s wealth allowed the Mughals to build, what Dalrymple describes as, “an artistically and aesthetically super-refined model with its gardens, jewels, and golden domes.” The Mughal Empire was “a major hub of civilisation, in terms of architecture, fine arts, jewellery, and literature. It provided a model for the entire region.”

History is rarely viewed in a vacuum and the Mughals’ legacy is debated to this day. Dalrymple refutes the perception, put forward by the politically resurgent forces of Hindu nationalism, of the Mughals as alien suppressive Muslim overlords. “The Mughals conquered a country that had already been ruled by a variety of Muslim dynasties from the previous 400 years. It wasn’t a question of them coming in and smashing up Hindu temples, which is sometimes the reductionist Hindu nationalist version.” Instead, this melding of Indo-Islamic culture, which had begun under the previous sultans and Islamic rulers, reached its renaissance under the greatest of the Mughal emperors: Akbar.

At a time when Europe was engulfed in religious schism and conflict, when Catholics were being hung, drawn and quartered in London, when the Italian astronomer and mathematician Giordano Bruno was being burnt at the stake for heresy in Rome, and when, in Spain and Portugal, the Inquisition was determining how far scientists could probe while Jews were being persecuted and Muslims expelled, Akbar called to his court representatives of all the subcontinent’s religions. Himalayan Buddhist llamas, Jains and Parsis, Sufi and Shia Muslim imams, Jesuit priests from Goa, and Hindus from different castes, gathered together for what Dalrymple describes as “the world’s first interfaith conference.”

Akbar’s purpose in bringing together these religious and spiritual leaders was to establish what the different faiths could agree on by using, in the emperor’s own words, “the firm ground of reason rather than the marshy ground of tradition." "At a moment when Europe is still locked in bigotry and prejudice,” says Dalrymple, you have a scientific questioning and openness by an Indian Muslim ruler that is hard to parallel.”

While the Inquisition were water-boarding prisoners, the Mughals had established, in Akbar’s own words, that ‘No man should be persecuted on grounds of faith and every man should be allowed to use reason to decide what he wishes to believe.’” Dalrymple contenss that “this extraordinarily broadminded belief  was an intellectual underpinning for all the glitter of Mughal rule.”

In his book, The Last Mughal, Dalrymple paints the picture of the city of Delhi in 1857 before the Indian Uprising and the destruction both of the city and the dynasty, as a cultural renaissance, where poetry, art and song enjoyed a final flowering under the Muslim rule of the last of the Mughals. “Islamic civilisation shone most brilliantly when it was interwoven with other cultures.” A case of homogeneity breeding sterility evident in other civilisations, too: “Look at what happened to British cookery after the war,” he says with a laugh. 

Dalrymple believes that ultimately it was the suppression of religious and social tolerance within the empire that led to its decline and fall. The imposition of high taxes on non-Muslims, the destruction of temples, and the effective dissolution, by the sixth emperor, Aurangzeb, of the previous social contract that had existed with the Hindu majority led to social unrest and increased conflict with subordinate Hindu rulers that stretched the empire to breaking point.

The success of a tolerant form of rule and the failure of authoritarianism is a lesson from history that many governments would do well to heed.

Go here to read Expat Living's review of the exhibition Treasury of the World: Jewelled Arts of India in the Age of the Mughals.