Kings and Chronicles: The Mughal Courts

This is the chapter aspirants most often confuse with "Peasants, Zamindars and the State": one covers how Mughal revenue was assessed and collected on the ground, the other covers how the Mughal state performed, recorded and projected kingship itself. The single most common trap here is a mansabdar's two ranks: zat (personal status and salary) and sawar (the cavalry he had to maintain) are not interchangeable, and a question that swaps their definitions, or credits the wrong author to the wrong chronicle (Abu'l Fazl wrote the Akbar Nama, not the Badshah Nama, that was Abdul Hamid Lahori), is testing whether a candidate actually read the chapter or only memorised its proper nouns.

The Mughal Land Revenue: Zamindars, the Mansabdari System and How Villages Were Taxed note on this site covers jama versus hasil, Akbar's four land classifications, and the zamindar as a service-holder rather than a landowner, in full. This note covers a different angle of the same empire: kingship, the court chronicles that recorded it, the Maktab Khana's translation projects, and the Mughal court's genuine contact with Europe.

Mansabdari and jagirdari as a rank and service hierarchy

Mughal chronicles record every official who served the empire by a single number: his mansab. Every mansabdar (rank-holder) carried two numerical designations that together, not separately, defined his place in the hierarchy. Zat indicated his own personal status and, correspondingly, his salary; sawar indicated the number of cavalrymen he was obliged to maintain for service. A mansabdar with a high zat but low sawar held personal prestige without a matching military obligation, while the two numbers together fixed both his standing at court and what he owed the state in armed men. By the seventeenth century, mansabdars ranked at 1,000 zat or above were classed as nobles (umara, the plural of amir); Chandrabhan Barahman, a Mughal official writing during Shah Jahan's reign, described mansabs in his book Char Chaman (Four Gardens) as ranging from 100 to 7,000 zat, indicating the sheer span the system covered, from a minor officer to the empire's greatest nobles.

Akbar personally designed the mansab system as a direct, personal instrument of control rather than a fixed bureaucratic ladder. Entry required a noble sponsor: an aspirant petitioned through an established noble, who presented a tajwiz (a recommendation) to the emperor; if suitable, a mansab was granted. The mir bakhshi (paymaster general) stood in open court at the emperor's right and formally presented every candidate for appointment or promotion, with the diwan-i ala (finance minister) and sadr-us sudur (who administered charitable land grants and appointed local qazis) completing the central triad. The emperor personally reviewed every change in rank, title and posting for all but the lowest-ranked officers, and bound a select band of nobles to him further as spiritual disciples (murid).

Mansab-holders did the actual work of recruiting, equipping and training the empire's cavalry, the army's main striking arm; their troopers' horses were branded on the flank with an imperial mark (dagh) so the state could verify a mansabdar was genuinely maintaining the sawar strength his rank claimed, a verification mechanism worth remembering as distinct from zat and sawar themselves.

The nobility recruited into this system was deliberately heterogeneous: Mughal writers described the officer corps as a "bouquet of flowers" (guldasta) held together only by loyalty to the emperor, so that no single ethnic or religious faction could grow large enough to challenge the state. Turani and Iranian nobles served from Akbar's earliest years; from 1560, Rajputs (the first being Raja Bharmal Kachhwaha of Amber, to whose daughter Akbar was married) and Indian Muslims (Shaikhzadas) joined in numbers, alongside Hindu castes inclined toward accountancy, Akbar's finance minister Raja Todar Mal, of the Khatri caste, being the best-known example. Iranians gained high office under Jahangir, whose queen Nur Jahan was herself Iranian; Aurangzeb appointed Rajputs to high positions, and Marathas accounted for a sizeable share of officers under him.

Payment for mansab-holders took one of two forms: naqdi, cash from the treasury, or a jagir, an assignment of the right to collect a specified area's revenue in lieu of salary. The Mughal Land Revenue note covers jagir's revenue-assessment mechanics, khalisa land, and how a jagir differed from a zamindar's milkiyat property, in full; the point to hold onto here is that jagir was fundamentally a rank's payment method, tied to and periodically reassigned with a mansabdar's zat and sawar, not a separate land-revenue system. Zamindars sat outside the mansab hierarchy altogether, as local, often hereditary intermediaries the state relied on for revenue collection at the village level rather than as ranked servants of the court.

The Mughal chronicles: kings writing their own history

Modern historians labelled the Mughal court's dynastic histories "chronicles", a genre presenting a continuous chronological record of events. Every major one was commissioned by a reigning Mughal emperor and written by a courtier, not an outside observer; the Akbar Nama, Badshah Nama and Alamgir Nama take their titles directly from the ruler whose reign they narrate (Alamgir being one of Aurangzeb's own titles), which tells you plainly how their authors saw the relationship between the empire's history and the emperor's own: the two were treated as synonymous. Chronicles served three purposes at once: they projected a vision of an enlightened kingdom, they conveyed to anyone resisting Mughal authority that resistance was destined to fail, and they guaranteed the ruler an account of his reign for posterity. That triple purpose is why a chronicle cannot be read as a neutral record: it is court-commissioned praise literature first and a source of fact second, the same caution this site applies to a ruler-commissioned inscription like the Allahabad Pillar prashasti.

Language carries a real exam-relevant fact here. The Mughals were Chaghatai Turks by origin, and Turkish was their mother tongue: Babur, the dynasty's first ruler, wrote both poetry and his memoirs in it. Akbar consciously made Persian the Mughal court's leading language, elevating it into the language of empire and administration down to accountants and clerks. Consequently, while chronicles like the Akbar Nama were composed directly in Persian, Babur's own memoirs, originally in Turkish, were translated into Persian as the Babur Nama in 1589.

The Akbar Nama and the Badshah Nama ("the Chronicle of a King") are the two best known of the illustrated Mughal chronicles, and each manuscript contained, on average, some 150 full- or double-page paintings of battles, sieges, hunts and court scenes, carrying as much ideological weight as the text. Abu'l Fazl, who grew up in Agra and was widely read across Arabic, Persian, Greek philosophy and Sufism, wrote the Akbar Nama. A forceful debater who opposed the conservative ulama, he suited Akbar's own project of freeing the state from religious orthodoxy's control, and Akbar made him his court historian, adviser and spokesperson. Abu'l Fazl began the Akbar Nama in 1589 and worked on it for thirteen years, revising his draft against waqai (records of events), official documents, and oral testimony. The finished work has three books: the first two are the chronicle itself, running from a history of mankind traced to Adam through one full celestial cycle of Akbar's own life, the second closing at his forty-sixth regnal year (1601); the third is the Ain-i-Akbari, a survey of the empire's administrative, social and cultural life, not organised by chronology at all. The very next year, 1602, Abu'l Fazl fell victim to a conspiracy hatched by Prince Salim, the future Jahangir, and was murdered by his accomplice, Bir Singh Bundela: Akbar's own heir had his court historian killed.

Abdul Hamid Lahori, a pupil of Abu'l Fazl, wrote the Badshah Nama, Shah Jahan's official history modelled on the Akbar Nama. Planned in three volumes (daftars) of ten lunar years each, Lahori completed the first two, 1627 to 1647, later revised by Sadullah Khan, Shah Jahan's wazir; old age stopped Lahori short of the third decade, which the historian Waris chronicled instead. Others in the dynasty wrote their own: Babur's daughter and Humayun's sister, Gulbadan Begum, wrote the Humayun Nama at Akbar's request, asked to record her memories of Babur and Humayun's era so Abu'l Fazl could draw on them; what she wrote was pointedly not a eulogy, describing the conflicts among Mughal princes and the mediating role elderly women of the family played. Jahangir wrote his own memoirs, the Jahangir Nama, across 1605 to 1622; and Muhammad Kazim compiled the Alamgir Nama, a history of Aurangzeb's first ten years, by 1668.

Manuscript production centred on the imperial kitabkhana (a scriptorium, more workshop than storage room): paper makers prepared the folios, scribes copied the text, gilders illuminated the pages, painters illustrated blank spaces left for them, and bookbinders gathered the folios into ornamental covers. Calligraphers and painters earned real social standing and formal titles, while paper makers and bookbinders mostly remained anonymous. The finest calligraphers wrote in nastaliq, Akbar's favoured style. Abu'l Fazl called painting a "magical art", crediting it with the power to make inanimate objects appear alive, and quoted Akbar's own defence of the practice against orthodox objections to depicting living beings: "there are many that hate painting, but such men I dislike."

Both chronicles had long afterlives. The Asiatic Society of Bengal, founded by Sir William Jones in 1784, published edited versions of both in the nineteenth century. Henry Beveridge completed a full English translation of the Akbar Nama only in the early twentieth century; the Badshah Nama has so far only been translated into English in excerpts. Its provenance is striking: in 1799 the Nawab of Awadh gifted an illustrated copy to King George III, and it has been preserved in the English Royal Collections at Windsor Castle since; 1994 conservation work made it possible to exhibit its paintings individually for the first time, in New Delhi, London and Washington in 1997.

Akbar's Maktab Khana: the translation bureau

Akbar's drive to make Persian the language of empire had a second, more deliberate arm beyond elevating it at court: a dedicated bureau, referred to in scholarship as the maktab khana, that translated major Sanskrit texts into Persian. Three works anchor this project in the syllabus: the Mahabharata, translated in full and renamed the Razmnama (Book of Wars); the Ramayana; and the Yoga-vashishta. Academic reconstruction of the Razmnama project dates the core work to the mid-1580s, when all eighteen books of the Mahabharata were rendered into Persian under the supervision of Naqib Khan, a court historian, alongside Mulla Shiri (a poet), Sultan Thanisari (a fiscal administrator) and Abd al-Qadir Badauni (a secretary), separately the author of the Muntakhab-ut Tawarikh, one of the sharper critical sources on Akbar's reign, since (confirmed in NCERT's own extract) Badauni disapproved of his employer's religious policies and did not wish his own book made public in his lifetime. The translation depended on cross-community collaboration: Brahman scholars who could read Sanskrit explained the text orally in Hindi to the Muslim Mughal translators, who rendered that understanding into Persian prose.

Akbar's own motivation was as much practical as pluralist. He treated the Mahabharata as a work of history (tarikh) and a source of kingly advice on bazm o razm, the feast and the fight, rather than purely as a religious scripture requiring theological engagement, evidence worth holding onto against the temptation to over-read the Maktab Khana as a purely devotional gesture of Hindu-Muslim reconciliation rather than statecraft.

Mughal courts and European/colonial exchange

Europe's earliest first-hand knowledge of the Mughal court came directly from Jesuit missionaries, travellers, merchants and diplomats, whose accounts are, in NCERT's own words, the earliest impressions of the Mughal court ever recorded by European writers. Once Portuguese navigators found a direct sea route to India at the end of the fifteenth century, Portuguese merchants built trading stations in India's coastal cities, and the Portuguese crown backed the Society of Jesus's missionary activity as part of the same trade and empire-building project. Akbar, genuinely curious about Christian doctrine, sent his own embassy to Goa inviting Jesuit priests to his court. The first Jesuit mission reached Akbar at Fatehpur Sikri in 1580 and stayed roughly two years; two further missions went to the Mughal court, by then at Lahore, in 1591 and 1595.

Father Antonio Monserrate, a member of that first mission, left a detailed account that pulls in two directions: he described Akbar as strikingly approachable, "it is hard to exaggerate how accessible he makes himself to all who wish audience of him", yet also recorded the harder edge of court hierarchy, noting Akbar summoned even his greatest nobles and issued them "imperious commands, as though they were his slaves." Padre Rudolf Acquaviva led that first mission. The Jesuits stood close to Akbar's throne at public assemblies, accompanied him on campaigns, tutored his children, and were his leisure-hour companions, access that let their accounts corroborate, from an outside vantage point, what the Persian chronicles independently recorded about Mughal court life. This engagement fed directly into the ibadat khana, a house of worship Akbar built at Fatehpur Sikri to host debates between Muslim, Hindu, Jaina, Parsi and Christian scholars, moving his own thinking toward a self-devised, eclectic form of worship centred on light.

Diplomatic contact continued into Jahangir's reign. Thomas Roe, the English envoy of King James I, was presented at Jahangir's court, where protocol required an ambassador to bow deeply or kiss the ground (the Mughal manner) or clasp his hands before his chest (the Persian manner). Roe did neither: he simply bowed European-style, and further unsettled the court by demanding a chair. Gift giving carried real diplomatic weight there, not mere courtesy, and Roe learned this when a ring he presented to the noble Asaf Khan was returned to him, valued at a mere 400 rupees.

The Mughals also maintained active, sometimes tense, relations with their two great Muslim-ruled neighbours. With the Safavids of Iran, the flashpoint was Qandahar, a fortress-town controlling the Hindukush routes into the subcontinent: Akbar reconquered it in 1595, Jahangir's 1613 embassy to Shah Abbas failed to secure it permanently, and a Persian army took it from its Mughal garrison in the winter of 1622. That failed embassy is also the origin of one of the chapter's best-known paintings: Abu'l Hasan's Jahangir's Dream shows Jahangir and Shah Abbas in a friendly embrace, though the two rulers never actually met, Shah Abbas's likeness based on portraits the artist Bishandas made while accompanying that real embassy. With the Ottomans, the relationship centred on pilgrimage and trade rather than territory: keeping merchants and pilgrims free to move through the Hijaz, the part of Ottoman Arabia holding Mecca and Medina. Mughal emperors exported merchandise to the Red Sea ports of Aden and Mokha and distributed the proceeds as charity to shrine-keepers there; when Aurangzeb discovered these funds were being misappropriated, he redirected the same charity to recipients within India instead, reasoning that India "was as much a house of God as Mecca."

Quick revision points

• Mansab = a rank with two numerical parts: zat (personal status and salary) and sawar (cavalry the mansabdar had to maintain in service); 1,000 zat or above ranked as umara (nobles) by the seventeenth century.
• Payment was naqdi (cash) or a jagir (a revenue assignment tied to rank, periodically reassigned); the Mughal Land Revenue note covers jagir's actual assessment mechanics.
• Akbar Nama: written by Abu'l Fazl (1589 to 1602, thirteen years); three books, the third being the Ain-i-Akbari. Abu'l Fazl was murdered in 1602 on Prince Salim's (the future Jahangir's) orders, by Bir Singh Bundela.
• Badshah Nama: Shah Jahan's official history, written by Abdul Hamid Lahori (Abu'l Fazl's pupil), covering 1627 to 1647; the third decade was completed by the historian Waris.
• Both chronicles averaged around 150 illustrated paintings each; production was centred on the imperial kitabkhana.
• Chronicles were court-commissioned praise literature, written by courtiers, not neutral records, the same caution applied to a ruler-commissioned inscription like the Allahabad Pillar prashasti.
• Akbar's Maktab Khana translated Sanskrit works into Persian: the Mahabharata as the Razmnama, the Ramayana, and the Yoga-vashishta, work on the Razmnama supervised by Naqib Khan in the mid-1580s.
• The first Jesuit mission reached Akbar's court at Fatehpur Sikri in 1580; further missions went to Lahore in 1591 and 1595.
• Thomas Roe, King James I's envoy, greeted Jahangir in the European style and demanded a chair, breaking Mughal and Persian court protocol.
• Qandahar was disputed with the Safavids: reconquered by Akbar (1595), a failed 1613 Jahangir embassy tried to keep it, and it was lost to a Persian siege in 1622.

Once the mansab-zat-sawar distinction, the chronicle authors and their fates, the Maktab Khana's actual translated texts, and the Jesuit mission dates are solid, this chapter's PYQ traps mostly resolve themselves.