The unwavering focus on the Mughal empire by the West, is a curious phenomenon. Is it because they built highly visible monuments like the Taj? Mughals didn’t even reach their zenith until 1680s and were vastly reduced by 1730s.
The Deccan Sultanates and Vijayanagara were more relevant to world history in the 16th Century India. The wonders of Bijapur, Golconda and Hampi would put 16th CE Delhi to shame.
One reason is financial. At its peak the Mughal empire was the largest economy in the world. Estimated to be about 25% of global GDP. That's close to the position US occupies in the modern world.
As someone that’s studied the Mughals quite a bit, but hasn’t studied Indian history more broadly as extensively, here are a few thoughts:
- the monuments are obvious points; the Taj Mahal is probably one of the few buildings that the average Western person has heard of
- there is more of a connection, or appears to be, with other empires that Westerners are more familiar with. For example, the Mughals were functionally descendants of the Mongols (indeed the word itself came from it). They also were roughly contemporaneous with the Ottomans during key historical periods, so their categorization as a “gunpowder empire” along with Iran is a known thing.
The prestige languages of all three of these empires was also highly Persianized, which maybe made them more accessible to the West, which was familiar with the Arabic alphabet and Islamic civilization for a longer period than with India. IIRC a lot of foundational Indian works weren’t really translated from Sanskrit to western languages until the mid 1800s.
That is how I myself started reading more about the Mughals: via being interested in the Ottomans.
- And finally there are a number of unique Mughal figures that have managed to become well-known in the West. Akbar, Shah Jahan, etc. I’m sure there were equally interesting people from other Indian empires but they don’t seem to be talked about as much.
Actually there are many more interesting people in Indian history. From Chandragupta Maurya, Kanishka to even Shivaji and others. Mughals are overglorified if anything and their own primary texts are ignored in this process.
My very personal take (which can be completely wrong) is that few dynasties were comparable to the vastness of Mughals in this particular era. All the Indian princely states were a lot smaller by comparison, in this time period at least. One that stands out to me is The Sikh Empire 1799–1849 that managed to rule much of North India + current day Afghanistan and Pakistan but for a relatively short period of time. The British East India company were a challenging force to beat, some allied with them which stunted their own ambitions, others like the Sikh Empire lost to them eventually.
I have nothing against Mughals, they had a great impact on the subcontinent history esp during 17th century. However the center of gravity was the Indian Ocean Spice trade network which was the South. This is what the Portuguese and various EICs wanted to connect to. We have records of the vast riches of these Deccan cities from these travelers.
> few dynasties were comparable to the vastness of Mughals
The Mauryas perhaps ruled a much larger area than Mughals. Khalji, Tughlaqs, Satvahanas, and Marathas also ruled over vast landscapes, but they are not much known outside India.
The Marathas, the Bengal Subah, Durrani's Afghanistan, the Hyderabad Sultanate, and the Konbaung Empire were contemporaries similar or larger in scope and size than the Sikh Empire.
And this is OP's point.
Most "India History" in the West has an extremely colonial British bias which only concentrated on Delhi and unpartitioned Punjab.
The marathas were much larger and in a lot of ways a lot more interesting than the Mughals for a variety of reasons. The fact that you believe that that Indian princely states were smaller is... Bizarre and ahistoric. England's rule over India only became a sure thing when England defeated the Marathas. Until then it was just piecemeal colonization. The fact that you are discussing the Raj without mention of the Marathas underscores the very concern that was brought up that Indian history is highly editorialized
Part of the reason is that -- in the popular Western imagining -- India really refers to the Gangetic plain. Any book on India mainly attributes Gangetic culture to 'India' whole completely ignoring the south, west, east and north east all of which have unique cultural traits.
As someone of Indian ethnicity, this was extremely confusing to me because when we read about Indian history in books and people would ask me, I would literally have no idea. My particular ethnic group lived along the coast of the western ghats and greatly valued the ocean and seafaring... Almost completely the opposite of the Gangetic peoples. This bias is prevalent everywhere because, despite these individual cultures having enough population to be a country in their own right. They are marginalized by popular history.
Also when discussing Mughals the most important elephant in the room is ignored. Their intention to totally Islamise India. But this is more about Indian history being editorialised by few communists and others as they hate the notion of a caste system filled India and prefer the Mughal & British rule in their sanitised version. The historic animosity in different groups exists and persists to this day and is reflected in these perspectives. The atrocities of Mughals are not only glossed over, they are completely whitewashed, especially their demolition of 1000s of temples, subjugation of native population and many other crimes are painted as something normal in their time when reality is much more complicated. This is to not even speak of the over romanticisation of Taj Mahal as something 'Indian' while ignoring numerous other architecture that still survives to this day. When pointed out that many mosques were built on top of temples whose basement still survives to this day that part of history is conveniently ignored.
I think it’s because they were they were the dominant power at the point when westerners began dominating the area. We see a similar fascination with Aztec, Iroquois, etc. westerners (or really all audiences of history) need to sense their presence in the story, even if it’s “just around the corner”.
I think it traces back to Henry Avery and his capture of the Mughal treasure fleet [1]. It inspired an entire oral/print tradition and social zeitgeist in England (and the rest of Europe) which IMO directly led to an entire generation of privateers like Woodes Rogers and tied into the whole golden age of piracy, an endless source of drama for fiction authors.
Even the Mughal focus is superficial in nature. There just aren't many serious historians about Indian history in the West in the same manner that Sinology developed.
South Asia Studies in the West needs its John K Fairbanks, but that will not happen. Most India scholars who are decent end up returning to India where policymaking roles abound.
It was the same with how China Studies was treated in the West until the last 5 years - barely 15 years ago all China was in the western zeitgeist was Mao, the Great Wall, pollution, poverty, and ill-paid migrant workers.
> The Deccan Sultanates and Vijayanagara were more relevant to world history in the 16th Century India
It's not an either/or situation. There were a whole gamut of states all equally important.
Read what I wrote, and reread it again. I don't think you understood what I said.
What I'm positing is that the crux of the issue with the Western crop of South Asia is that it is hagiographic in nature, not quantitative.
My argument is an institutionalist and political economy approach to studying historical and contemporary South Asia solves most of the problem.
This was what John Fairbanks argued back in the 20th century that China studies needed to be quantitative and testable in nature, as he was an Intel officer posted in China during WW2. This was not the mainstream view on China studies and China history in the west until the late 2010s.
That said, anyone with this muscle isn't going to teach history in the West in 2026 unlike those who did something similar for China in the 1980s-2000s who made a new generation of China scholars who returned to China.
There is a new generation of India scholars who specialize in this (a number of whom trained under economists like Arvind Subramanian, Raghuram Rajan, etc) but most of these scholars either return to India to take positions at INIs and are thus not visible to Western academia) or (and this is the more common route) end up in the Policy space as the newer crop of IAS, NITI Aayog staffers, World Bank or IMF staffers, India-specific VC/PE, or India specific think tanks.
Edit: can't reply
> why is the academic work being done in Indian institutions so inaccessible in the US and the rest of the anglosphere
Because they publish in Economics journals and work on Political Economy, not "History".
It's the same with China scholars - the best ones are economists and are quantitative in nature.
Turns out the skills needed to understand the political economy of the Bengal Subah or the incentive structures of coinage reform in Qing China are also useful to craft economic policy for contemporary countries.
Why work in underfunded and frankly low impact history when you can actually affect change (and make good money and a career) in the various applications of Econ.
In your view, why is the academic work being done in Indian institutions so inaccessible in the US and the rest of the anglosphere? Naively, I would have assumed a lot of this work would be conducted in English, or at the very least translated into English for the sake of international conferences, journals, etc.
Wait so these people invaded and took over India? For what reason - Land? Religion? Feuds? And it seems like they were displacing another Islamic colonial power that was already there? Weird to have this article discuss battles but skim over the context.
A flowery description of conquest by the Islamic Mughals. Where is the indignation about the destruction of Hindu temples and idols, as documented in his memoirs, the Baburnama. About his disdain for indigenous religions which laid the foundation for Mughal atrocities continued under his successors?
Imagine a similar description of conquest by, say, the Christian Spaniards in the Americas. The noble conquests of the brave Hernan Cortés, in similarly flowery language. Imagine the shouts of protest against... well, there is no nedd to imagine since those protests are commonplace.
The Islamic conquest and colonisation of the middle- and far-east is one of the more bloody episodes in history rife with all the vices for which western colonisers are constantly blamed. Slavery was and in some places still is commonplace but the same voices which proclaim the vices of the west are silent or point at the virtues of others who were and sometimes still are guilty of the same. Why is that?
Tbf, Babur was equally disdainful about Islam and would wax eloquently about getting drunk on wine and high off opium.
He was just a Chagatai raider who somehow ended up the ruler of a principality.
The actual empire was built by Akbar and Shah Jahan.
Political Islam, Hinduism, and Sikhism only arose in South Asia in 19th century with the collapse of the Mughal, Maratha, and Sikh Empires and early British attempts at mass Christian conversion which led to political religious movements arise in the late 19th century.
I am of Indian Christian stock (which is only relevant because I have no religious or creedal stake in any of these sites) but I have noticed this bias as well. The destruction of classical North Indian temples or religious sites by invading islamists forces is met with indifference in most of the world while similar invasions by Christian forces in the Americas or Africa are properly criticized. We have endless critical scholarship on Columbus and the Spaniards (which there should be), but the moment anyone says anything about the somewhat contemporaneous Islamic conquests in Asia, suddenly you are accused of islamophobia. For example, I have seen people lamenting the destruction of the universities at Nalanda and Taksashila being accused of islamophobia because they point out that Islamic radicalism was the intellectual basis for the burning of these institution.
People should be free to criticize all of these events as they see fit.
in those times religion was a scant sixth in order of reasons and rationalisations for conquest and empire, then as now it was a technological advantage, guns, and the rajputs didn't have them, mobility, the rajputs were agrarian, the mughals were mostly pastoralists and always on the move.
but just so that you know, I have traveled through north west punjub, to muree, and lundi khotal, and there are ruins of stupas and things much much older that litter the landscapes, so to pick one particular starting point is disingenious, or worse.
Abrahamic societies will naturally be sympathetic to the acts of other Abrahamic peoples and antagonistic to pagan and polytheistic cultures, especially if the non-Abrahamic culture rejects the Abrahamic proselytising that purports to "civilise the heathens" as many Indic societies did. To expect anything else under some expectation of fairness or empathy is nothing but childish naïveté.
The ignorance of Western people to think "Abrahamic bad", "Eastern good" is very aggravating. Modern times have given us plenty of violent Bhuddist and Hindu extremism right before our eyes, for example. And it isn't the first time in history for either of those either. No religion ends up being special, because, unfortunately, humans are fundamentally misbegotten.
Not to mention the ignorance in this thread of the basic fact that Muslim empires kept attacking and supplanting each other in South Asia, culminating in the Mughal defeat of another Muslim empire, which is exactly what this article describes. But instead of actually reading it, you'd rather bring naked biases and caricatures to the table.
Is that what you read in my comment? Because that is not what I wrote. People sympathise with those who are similar to them. Europeans sympathise with Ukrainians, Muslims with Palestinians, Abrahamics with other Abrahamics. How you got from that to your "Abrahamic bad", I can't even fathom.
I very much agree with you: its not what westerners want to hear. The fact that you comment got downvoted to dead for no real reason rather proves that.
The Deccan Sultanates and Vijayanagara were more relevant to world history in the 16th Century India. The wonders of Bijapur, Golconda and Hampi would put 16th CE Delhi to shame.
- the monuments are obvious points; the Taj Mahal is probably one of the few buildings that the average Western person has heard of
- there is more of a connection, or appears to be, with other empires that Westerners are more familiar with. For example, the Mughals were functionally descendants of the Mongols (indeed the word itself came from it). They also were roughly contemporaneous with the Ottomans during key historical periods, so their categorization as a “gunpowder empire” along with Iran is a known thing.
The prestige languages of all three of these empires was also highly Persianized, which maybe made them more accessible to the West, which was familiar with the Arabic alphabet and Islamic civilization for a longer period than with India. IIRC a lot of foundational Indian works weren’t really translated from Sanskrit to western languages until the mid 1800s.
That is how I myself started reading more about the Mughals: via being interested in the Ottomans.
- And finally there are a number of unique Mughal figures that have managed to become well-known in the West. Akbar, Shah Jahan, etc. I’m sure there were equally interesting people from other Indian empires but they don’t seem to be talked about as much.
> few dynasties were comparable to the vastness of Mughals
The Mauryas perhaps ruled a much larger area than Mughals. Khalji, Tughlaqs, Satvahanas, and Marathas also ruled over vast landscapes, but they are not much known outside India.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maratha_Empire#/media/File:Ind...
And this is OP's point.
Most "India History" in the West has an extremely colonial British bias which only concentrated on Delhi and unpartitioned Punjab.
Part of the reason is that -- in the popular Western imagining -- India really refers to the Gangetic plain. Any book on India mainly attributes Gangetic culture to 'India' whole completely ignoring the south, west, east and north east all of which have unique cultural traits.
As someone of Indian ethnicity, this was extremely confusing to me because when we read about Indian history in books and people would ask me, I would literally have no idea. My particular ethnic group lived along the coast of the western ghats and greatly valued the ocean and seafaring... Almost completely the opposite of the Gangetic peoples. This bias is prevalent everywhere because, despite these individual cultures having enough population to be a country in their own right. They are marginalized by popular history.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capture_of_the_Grand_Mughal_Fl...
South Asia Studies in the West needs its John K Fairbanks, but that will not happen. Most India scholars who are decent end up returning to India where policymaking roles abound.
It was the same with how China Studies was treated in the West until the last 5 years - barely 15 years ago all China was in the western zeitgeist was Mao, the Great Wall, pollution, poverty, and ill-paid migrant workers.
> The Deccan Sultanates and Vijayanagara were more relevant to world history in the 16th Century India
It's not an either/or situation. There were a whole gamut of states all equally important.
What I'm positing is that the crux of the issue with the Western crop of South Asia is that it is hagiographic in nature, not quantitative.
My argument is an institutionalist and political economy approach to studying historical and contemporary South Asia solves most of the problem.
This was what John Fairbanks argued back in the 20th century that China studies needed to be quantitative and testable in nature, as he was an Intel officer posted in China during WW2. This was not the mainstream view on China studies and China history in the west until the late 2010s.
That said, anyone with this muscle isn't going to teach history in the West in 2026 unlike those who did something similar for China in the 1980s-2000s who made a new generation of China scholars who returned to China.
There is a new generation of India scholars who specialize in this (a number of whom trained under economists like Arvind Subramanian, Raghuram Rajan, etc) but most of these scholars either return to India to take positions at INIs and are thus not visible to Western academia) or (and this is the more common route) end up in the Policy space as the newer crop of IAS, NITI Aayog staffers, World Bank or IMF staffers, India-specific VC/PE, or India specific think tanks.
Edit: can't reply
> why is the academic work being done in Indian institutions so inaccessible in the US and the rest of the anglosphere
Because they publish in Economics journals and work on Political Economy, not "History".
It's the same with China scholars - the best ones are economists and are quantitative in nature.
Turns out the skills needed to understand the political economy of the Bengal Subah or the incentive structures of coinage reform in Qing China are also useful to craft economic policy for contemporary countries.
Why work in underfunded and frankly low impact history when you can actually affect change (and make good money and a career) in the various applications of Econ.
Read that and you’ll get the context.
Imagine a similar description of conquest by, say, the Christian Spaniards in the Americas. The noble conquests of the brave Hernan Cortés, in similarly flowery language. Imagine the shouts of protest against... well, there is no nedd to imagine since those protests are commonplace.
The Islamic conquest and colonisation of the middle- and far-east is one of the more bloody episodes in history rife with all the vices for which western colonisers are constantly blamed. Slavery was and in some places still is commonplace but the same voices which proclaim the vices of the west are silent or point at the virtues of others who were and sometimes still are guilty of the same. Why is that?
He was just a Chagatai raider who somehow ended up the ruler of a principality.
The actual empire was built by Akbar and Shah Jahan.
Political Islam, Hinduism, and Sikhism only arose in South Asia in 19th century with the collapse of the Mughal, Maratha, and Sikh Empires and early British attempts at mass Christian conversion which led to political religious movements arise in the late 19th century.
People should be free to criticize all of these events as they see fit.
Not to mention the ignorance in this thread of the basic fact that Muslim empires kept attacking and supplanting each other in South Asia, culminating in the Mughal defeat of another Muslim empire, which is exactly what this article describes. But instead of actually reading it, you'd rather bring naked biases and caricatures to the table.
Is that what you read in my comment? Because that is not what I wrote. People sympathise with those who are similar to them. Europeans sympathise with Ukrainians, Muslims with Palestinians, Abrahamics with other Abrahamics. How you got from that to your "Abrahamic bad", I can't even fathom.