The Arts and Sciences
One could not possibly hope to adequately summarize all of the extraordinary developments in early modern South Asian literary, artistic, and scientific culture under the Mughals in such a short space, even if this entire chapter were devoted to the subject.
But the main thing for the non-specialist to know is that Mughal patronage was extensive and eclectic in the extreme.In terms of literature, although Babur's native tongue had been Chaghtai Turkish, by Akbar's reign Persian had become the primary language of Mughal literary and political culture, and all the various branches of Persian poetry and prose flourished during this period.[1931] But the Mughals also patronized many literati and intellectuals who wrote in other languages, most notably Sanskrit and various forms of Hindi (including the register of “Hindi” that would eventually come to be called “Urdu”). Regional vernacular literatures in languages like Bengali, Punjabi, and Gujarati also flourished during this period, as did the mystical and devotional literary traditions associated with many of these regional linguistic registers. It was not uncommon, moreover, for literati of this period to work in multiple languages, leading to considerable cross-pollination of styles, idioms, and imagery across linguistic registers, as well as bold experimentation within existing literary traditions. Indeed, as a number of recent scholars have noted, these combined trends converged to produce a notable consciousness of, and value placed on, newness and originality in various Indian literary cultures during this period.
This experimental wave in Mughal literary culture(s) did not mean, however, that the court was uninterested in the classics. Texts from the Persian classical tradition were widely read at the Mughal court (and among the urbane intelligentsia more generally), and lavishly illustrated manuscripts of many of these texts were commissioned not only by the royal family, but also by wealthy and influential members of the nobility.
The court also encouraged a robust culture of translation, most famously with regard to Persian translations of Sanskrit classical texts such as the Mahabharata and Rdmdyana, but also vernacular literary and spiritual texts in Braj Bhasha, Awadhi, and other Indian vernaculars. This interest in translating Indic texts has often been viewed somewhat instrumentally in modern scholarship— i.e., as a form of cultural “outreach,” as it were, to India's Hindu population—but it should be noted that the interest in such ancient wisdom was part of a broader pattern of antiquarianism at the Mughal court, one that also included curiosity about pre-Islamic Persianate traditions, early Islam, the Greco-Hellenic legacy, and even Christian traditions. This antiquarian tendency even extended into disciplines like philology, for instance in treatises like Farhang-i Jahangm (1608), which was explicitly compiled, so the author tells us, in order to recuperate antiquated Persian idioms and usages that were common in the classical canon but had become difficult to comprehend by Mughal times.Also very common at the Mughal court, and in Mughal intellectual culture more broadly, was a keen interest in the study of comparative religions. One sees this in the many well-known dialogues between members of the royal family and various Sufis, bhakti saints, Hindu yogis, Jain monks, Jesuit padres, and other eccentric religious figures, but also in the production of scholarship on comparative religions such as the celebrated courtier Abu al-Fazl's A’in-i Akbari, which included an extensive investigation into the various sects, castes, and religious traditions of India, or the Dabistan-i Mazahib (“School of Religions”), which also examined multiple religious traditions then current in India, including not just multiple forms of Hinduism and Islam, but also Christianity, Judaism, Zoroastrianism, and a number of other heterodox and/or devotional cults. Of course, the most famous example of this tendency in Mughal intellectual culture after Akbar himself is that of Shah Jahan's eldest son Dara Shukoh, who not only patronized translations of major Sanskrit works such as the Upanishads, but also wrote provocative religio- philosophical treatises in his own right, such as Majma‘ al-Bahrayn (“The Meeting of the Two Oceans”), which sought to reconcile the theological and metaphysical principles of the two “oceans” of Hinduism and Islam.[1932]
Though much of this is known to Mughal specialists, many of these aspects of Mughal cultural history have been surprisingly little studied in modern scholarship, and thus, unfortunately, are quite poorly understood among the broader public and in modern South Asian cultural memory more generally.
Of course, in modern times the Mughals are arguably most famous for their extraordinary legacy in the visual arts, especially painting and architecture. But, as scholars like Katherine Butler Brown [now Schofield] have reminded us, they were also keen patrons of music, as was the Mughal nobility more generally. And we would be remiss if we did not note, however briefly, that interest in various theoretical and applied sciences such as astronomy, medicine, botany, veterinary sciences, and philology remained vigorous among Mughal intellectuals throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Indeed, it is seldom acknowledged, but no less true, that Mughal scholarship in some of these disciplines became important source material for the later generations of European colonial administrators and orientalists in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries—an important dimension of modern global intellectual history more generally, the story of which remains fully to be written.