War in Mughal India

This bibliography extends beyond the conventional limits of Mughal history, geographical and historical, in order to encompass events of great global significance and military interest. It covers all South Asian military history, from 1500 to 1750, not the Mughals exclusively. It thus includes the Portuguese maritime empire as well as the Mughal land empire, and events in the Deccan before the Mughals penetrated there. It begins the history of the Mughal dynasty, the Timurids in South Asia, with Babur’s conquest of Kabul in 1507, and includes his activities and those of his successors beyond the Hindu Kush after that date. Mughal, the Persian word for Mongol, is the inaccurate but standard term for the empire established in South Asia by descendants of Timur (Tamerlane) in the sixteenth century, which survived into the eighteenth century in fact and into the nineteenth century in name. In 1500, no single state dominated South Asia. Ruled by the Lodi Afghan dynasty, the Delhi Sultanate, which had controlled most of the subcontinent 150 years earlier, still held the north central Indo-Gangetic plain. Other Muslim rulers governed major regional principalities in Bengal, Gujarat, and Malwa. Several Hindu Rajput principalities existed in modern Rajasthan. The Bahmani sultanate, which had controlled the Deccan, had fragmented into five principalities by the early sixteenth century. Vijaynagara, ruled by a Hindu dynasty but heavily influenced by Perso-Islamic culture, dominated the south. Babur, a Timurid prince driven from Central Asia by the Shaybani Uzbeks, took Kabul, and made it his base for the conquest of Hindustan (the land of Hindus). He subdued the Delhi Sultanate, but none of the other regional kingdoms, before his death in 1530. His son, Humayun, lost it all in ten years and had only begun to regain it when he died in 1556. Humayun’s son Akbar (r. 1556–1605) became the true founder of the Mughal Empire, extending control over the entire Indo-Gangetic plain and beginning expansion into the Deccan. During his reign, a coalition of the Deccan states defeated Vijaynagara at Talikota in 1565. During the rest of Mughal history, through the reign of Aurangzeb (1658–1707), the Mughals expanded south into the Deccan and east in Bengal, and struggled to hold Qandahar and extend power into Central Asia. Even before the Mughal enterprise began, the first of the European powers, Portugal, had established the first European trading station in South Asia. The European powers played an increasingly significant political and economic role from that point onward.