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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 e

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.

throwup238 5mo ago
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. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capture_of_the_Grand_Mughal_Fleet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capture_of_the_Grand_Mughal_Fl...
alephnerd 5mo ago
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.
- FlyingSnake 5mo ago
  True that. There is no interest in objectively studying history in India. It is just a tool to further the agendas of various parties involved.
  - alephnerd 5mo ago
    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". This is what the best South Asia scholars in America (eg. Subramanian, Varshney, Rajan) do as well. 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.
    - derektank 5mo ago
      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.
catlover76 5mo ago
[dead]
keiferski 5mo ago
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.
- bvan 5mo ago
  As someone interested in coinage, India is fascinating. Coins from the Sultanates and Mughal periods are just beautiful.
  - keiferski 5mo ago
    Great to see a fellow numismatist! Old coins are on my bucket list of stuff to buy once I hit the lottery.
    - bvan 5mo ago
      That’s great. I find the Sultanate coins, for example, are much more refined in terms of style relative to those minted Western Europe around the same time. For example: https://www.numismall.com/collections/bengal-sultanate-1203-1576 https://www.numismall.com/collections/bengal-sultanate-1203-....
sheepscreek 5mo ago
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.
- alephnerd 5mo ago
  The Marathas, the Bengal Subah, Durrani's Afghanistan, the Hyderabad Sultanate, the Konbaung Empire, Mysore, and Thanjvur 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.
- FlyingSnake 5mo ago
  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. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maratha_Empire#/media/File:India1760_1905.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maratha_Empire#/media/File:Ind...
  - ultratalk 5mo ago
    Yeah, the south was one of the most economically prosperous regions in the Indian subcontinent at the time. They were the centres of the spice trade, and a lot of colonial interest began there first. Because of the trade networks, a lot of outside cultural influence was part of the area's history. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all came to the Malabar and Konkan coast just a few decades or tens of decades after they starting gaining traction in the Levant and other Middle-Eastern areas. In fact, Islam's first contact with the Indian subcontinent was on the Malabar coast and near it [0]. Colonial trading posts were set up in cities on the Malabar coast like Kochi [1] first, before they were set up in the North. In fact, after he died, Vasco da Gama was buried in a church in Kochi, Kerala, for many years before his son dug him up and took him back to Portugal [2]. My point is, a lot of stuff happened outside of the Gangetic Plains area, and not much is known about it in contemporary Western historical discourse. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islam_in_India#Early_history_of_Islam_in_India https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islam_in_India#Early_history_o... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_Emmanuel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_Emmanuel [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasco_da_Gama#Death https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasco_da_Gama#Death
oa335 5mo ago
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”.
19f191ty 5mo ago
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.
- unsignedchar 5mo ago
  Yes but both the Maurya and Gupta empires have been estimated to have reached over 30% in their time.
  - tmule 5mo ago
    Estimates for the Maurya and Gupta periods are significantly more speculative than Mughal estimates. We have reasonably good tax and mint records for the Mughals, whereas Maurya/Gupta figures rely heavily on back-calculating from population density. Is this what kids in India are being taught these days?
- chimp_brain 5mo ago
  Mughal empire was collection of many wealthy provinces, which were wealthy even before Mughals. After assuming power most Mughal ruler did nothing but wasted wealth on countless vanity projects, unlike Europeans where rulers still funded exploration and innovation.
  - 19f191ty 5mo ago
    Accurate username
ButlerianJihad 5mo ago
The Mughals are known to me in two ways: even as a child, I heard the moniker “mogul” as a wealthy person who specializes in some industry or service. Most prominent is “Media Mogul” such as Ted Turner. A pundit on television or writing a newspaper article would often apply it. Secondly, cuisine. At least one seminal Indian cookbook I owned had a section devoted to Mughal dishes and explaining how the Empire influenced the culture insofar as what people were permitted to eat, and what foods/ingredients were made available. The Muslim Mughal diet contrasts with the Hindu dishes, and the seafood of the coasts and Goa presents another dimension.
SilverElfin 5mo ago
I’m not an expert on Asian history but I feel like there isn’t a focus on the Mughal empire by the West. This history is just not well known. The way India was covered in school classes (at least in America) was that Britain came into India, colonized the country, oppressed Indians, and then Gandhi resisted without violence, which somehow led to the British leaving, but they split up India on their way out into India + Pakistan. But it seems like India was not ruled by Indians (Hindus?) even before European colonization. Aren’t these previous Mughal rulers and the people before them also colonizers then, if they weren’t indigenous Indians / Hindus? Why aren’t they also discussed that way? When did Indians rule India then - was it in the first millennium? To me, this is all basically outside of the public’s common knowledge and focus in the West.
- chimp_brain 5mo ago
  It's again complex, yes to some extent Mughals were colonisers but they eventually simply wanted to rule. It's not discussed because most history before 11th-13th century was systematically wiped out over centuries. Pakistan and Afghanistan have little to minorities or even the memory of past left, but that's mostly what happens with cultural imperialism. There were Hindus / Bhuddist or Zorastrian in those areas, now there are none. Infact India have more Zorastrians than modern day Iran, many fled to India around 16th Century escaping similar cultural imperialism.
dartharva 5mo ago
They were the last "Big" Empire in the subcontinent before the British Raj. The EIC inherited a lot of Mughal-standard bureaucracy in the territories they took over, despite the territories themselves belonging to Sultanates distinct from the Mughal. The Crown kept the same alive too. Traces of Mughal administrative vocabulary are found to this day in Modern India's legalese.
tmule 5mo ago
[dead]

throwup238 5mo ago

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. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capture_of_the_Grand_Mughal_Fleet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capture_of_the_Grand_Mughal_Fl...

alephnerd 5mo ago

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.

FlyingSnake 5mo ago
True that. There is no interest in objectively studying history in India. It is just a tool to further the agendas of various parties involved.
- alephnerd 5mo ago
  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". This is what the best South Asia scholars in America (eg. Subramanian, Varshney, Rajan) do as well. 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.
  - derektank 5mo ago
    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.

catlover76 5mo ago

[dead]

keiferski 5mo ago

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.

bvan 5mo ago
As someone interested in coinage, India is fascinating. Coins from the Sultanates and Mughal periods are just beautiful.
- keiferski 5mo ago
  Great to see a fellow numismatist! Old coins are on my bucket list of stuff to buy once I hit the lottery.
  - bvan 5mo ago
    That’s great. I find the Sultanate coins, for example, are much more refined in terms of style relative to those minted Western Europe around the same time. For example: https://www.numismall.com/collections/bengal-sultanate-1203-1576 https://www.numismall.com/collections/bengal-sultanate-1203-....

sheepscreek 5mo ago

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.

alephnerd 5mo ago
The Marathas, the Bengal Subah, Durrani's Afghanistan, the Hyderabad Sultanate, the Konbaung Empire, Mysore, and Thanjvur 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.
FlyingSnake 5mo ago
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. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maratha_Empire#/media/File:India1760_1905.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maratha_Empire#/media/File:Ind...
- ultratalk 5mo ago
  Yeah, the south was one of the most economically prosperous regions in the Indian subcontinent at the time. They were the centres of the spice trade, and a lot of colonial interest began there first. Because of the trade networks, a lot of outside cultural influence was part of the area's history. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all came to the Malabar and Konkan coast just a few decades or tens of decades after they starting gaining traction in the Levant and other Middle-Eastern areas. In fact, Islam's first contact with the Indian subcontinent was on the Malabar coast and near it [0]. Colonial trading posts were set up in cities on the Malabar coast like Kochi [1] first, before they were set up in the North. In fact, after he died, Vasco da Gama was buried in a church in Kochi, Kerala, for many years before his son dug him up and took him back to Portugal [2]. My point is, a lot of stuff happened outside of the Gangetic Plains area, and not much is known about it in contemporary Western historical discourse. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islam_in_India#Early_history_of_Islam_in_India https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islam_in_India#Early_history_o... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_Emmanuel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_Emmanuel [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasco_da_Gama#Death https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vasco_da_Gama#Death

oa335 5mo ago

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”.

19f191ty 5mo ago

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.

unsignedchar 5mo ago
Yes but both the Maurya and Gupta empires have been estimated to have reached over 30% in their time.
- tmule 5mo ago
  Estimates for the Maurya and Gupta periods are significantly more speculative than Mughal estimates. We have reasonably good tax and mint records for the Mughals, whereas Maurya/Gupta figures rely heavily on back-calculating from population density. Is this what kids in India are being taught these days?
chimp_brain 5mo ago
Mughal empire was collection of many wealthy provinces, which were wealthy even before Mughals. After assuming power most Mughal ruler did nothing but wasted wealth on countless vanity projects, unlike Europeans where rulers still funded exploration and innovation.
- 19f191ty 5mo ago
  Accurate username

ButlerianJihad 5mo ago

The Mughals are known to me in two ways: even as a child, I heard the moniker “mogul” as a wealthy person who specializes in some industry or service. Most prominent is “Media Mogul” such as Ted Turner. A pundit on television or writing a newspaper article would often apply it. Secondly, cuisine. At least one seminal Indian cookbook I owned had a section devoted to Mughal dishes and explaining how the Empire influenced the culture insofar as what people were permitted to eat, and what foods/ingredients were made available. The Muslim Mughal diet contrasts with the Hindu dishes, and the seafood of the coasts and Goa presents another dimension.

SilverElfin 5mo ago

I’m not an expert on Asian history but I feel like there isn’t a focus on the Mughal empire by the West. This history is just not well known. The way India was covered in school classes (at least in America) was that Britain came into India, colonized the country, oppressed Indians, and then Gandhi resisted without violence, which somehow led to the British leaving, but they split up India on their way out into India + Pakistan. But it seems like India was not ruled by Indians (Hindus?) even before European colonization. Aren’t these previous Mughal rulers and the people before them also colonizers then, if they weren’t indigenous Indians / Hindus? Why aren’t they also discussed that way? When did Indians rule India then - was it in the first millennium? To me, this is all basically outside of the public’s common knowledge and focus in the West.

chimp_brain 5mo ago
It's again complex, yes to some extent Mughals were colonisers but they eventually simply wanted to rule. It's not discussed because most history before 11th-13th century was systematically wiped out over centuries. Pakistan and Afghanistan have little to minorities or even the memory of past left, but that's mostly what happens with cultural imperialism. There were Hindus / Bhuddist or Zorastrian in those areas, now there are none. Infact India have more Zorastrians than modern day Iran, many fled to India around 16th Century escaping similar cultural imperialism.

dartharva 5mo ago

They were the last "Big" Empire in the subcontinent before the British Raj. The EIC inherited a lot of Mughal-standard bureaucracy in the territories they took over, despite the territories themselves belonging to Sultanates distinct from the Mughal. The Crown kept the same alive too. Traces of Mughal administrative vocabulary are found to this day in Modern India's legalese.

tmule 5mo ago

[dead]