The MughalsEarly emperors of India

The following is an extract from the travel book A River of Life: Travels through Modern India.

I take a short walk to the nearby Shah Jahan Park, which runs between the Red Fort and the Taj Mahal and affords a 1 km stroll through scenic grounds. I sit in some leafy shade and catch up on some reading, a book on Indian history. Agra, the capital under the Mughal rulers, has a seam of rich history running through it that is beginning to get under my skin. Babur and Humayun, Akbar, Jahangir, Shah Jahan and Aurangzeb: the names had kept coming up since the sites of Delhi, titillating my curiosity with intimations of their extravagant lifestyles, their barbarities, their picaresque exploits. Babur, the founder of the empire, claimed descent from Tamerlane on his father's side, Genghis Khan - some fourteen generations back - on his mother's. Hence the name, Mughal: the Persian word for Mongol. Inspired by Tamerlane's sacking of Delhi in 1398, Babur, after vainly trying to regain Samarkand, turned his attentions to India in 1513 and swiftly conquered areas of the North (although he always regretted not regaining the centre of Mongol power, Samarkand, and saw India as "a country that has few pleasures to recommend it. The people are not handsome. They have no genius, no politeness of manner"). His son, Humayun, lost much of the empire he inherited, and it was his own son, Akbar, to whom history has rightly given the epithet "the Great", who founded the Mughal empire that was to dominate India for the next one hundred years, through the so-called great emperors of Jahangir, Shah Jahan, and Aurangzeb. Every land has an era of adventurers, buccaneers, conquerors, whose histories are fired in the forge of romantic nationalism and rewrought. For India, that age is the age of the Mughals.