Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
clined rapidly). Mughal is the Arabic and Persian form of Mongol, which was applied to all
foreign Muslims from the north and northwest of India. The Mughal Empire was founded
by Zahir-ud-din-Muhammad Babur, a Chaghtai Turk, born in 1483 in the Fergana valley in
today's Uzbekistan, who spent his early adulthood trying to capture Tamarlane's (Timur's)
old capital of Samarkand. After being decisively defeated by Muhammad Shaybani Khan,
a descendant of Genghis Khan, Babur and his followers headed south and captured Kabul.
It was from Kabul that Babur swept down with his army from the high plateau of Afgh-
anistan into the Punjab. Thus, he was able to begin his conquest of the Indian Subcontinent.
The Mughal or Timurid Empire, which took form under Akbar the Great, Babur's grand-
son, had a nobility composed of Rajputs, Afghans, Arabs, Persians, Uzbeks, and Chaghtai
Turks, as well as of Indian Sunnis, Shiites, and Hindus, not to mention other overlapping
groups; it was an ethnic and religious world that began in southern Russia to the northwest
tural and political trends in the adjoining Middle East.
Kabul and Kandahar were a natural extension of this venerable Delhi-based dynasty,
yet the strongly Hindu area in southern India around present-day Bangalore—India's high-
technology capital—was much less so. Aurangzeb, the “world-seizer,” under whose rule in
the late seventeenth century the Mughal Empire reached the zenith of its expansion, was
an old man in his eighties still fighting Maratha insurgents in India's south and west. He
died in 1707 in his camp on the Deccan plateau, unable to subdue them. The Deccan has, in
Panikkar's words, “always formed the great middle rampart of India,” unable to be subdued
by the peoples of the Gangetic valley. Moreover, the west-to-east flow of rivers in a sub-
continent oriented from north to south has, as Aurangzeb's experience demonstrates, made
it difficult for the north to govern the south until relatively late in history. Put simply: there
are relatively few geographical connecting links between northern and southern India.
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In fact, it was this long-running and intractable insurgency in southern India that sapped
the cohesion and morale of the northern Mughal elite. Aurangzeb's preoccupation with the
great Maratha warriors—to the exclusion of imperial problems elsewhere—made it easi-
er for the Dutch, French, and British East India companies to gain footholds on the coast,
which led eventually to British rule in India.
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To emphasize the point: Aurangzeb's situation was that of Delhi-based rulers going back
hundreds of years, as well as of even older rulers in the subcontinent stretching back to an-
tiquity. That is, the vast region that today encompasses northern India along with Pakistan
and much of Afghanistan was commonly under a single polity, even as sovereignty over
southern India was in doubt. Thus, for Indian elites, to think of not only Pakistan but Afgh-
anistan, too, as part of India's home turf is not only natural but historically justified. The
tomb of Babur is in Kabul, not in Delhi. This does not mean that India has territorial
