Mughal Culture and Arts

Babur, a Central Asian prince, established Mughal rule in northern India in 1526. Before the dynasty’s final collapse after the rebellion of 1857, emperors and other patrons supported buildings, books, gardens and learned work. The best-documented imperial projects joined people trained in South Asia with artists and scholars who moved from Iran and Central Asia. Persian was important at court, while Sanskrit, a classical South Asian language of learning, and regional languages also shaped translation and scholarship. These commissions organized court life, preserved dynastic memory and brought skilled work into new settings.

On this page5 sections

Buildings and their makers

Mughal buildings combined several ways of spanning space. In column-and-beam construction, rows of columns and projecting stone brackets carried horizontal beams over courts and halls. Arches and vaults used shaped masonry to cover wider openings, while domes marked tomb chambers and mosques. Brick or rubble could form a building’s core beneath dressed stone, blocks cut to regular faces, plaster or tile. Masons, carpenters, stonecutters and plasterers solved different parts of a project, from supporting a roof to finishing its surfaces. Inlay workers fitted small pieces of colored stone into a cut surface to make a pattern.

Akbar’s capital at Fatehpur Sikri, near Agra, was built in the 1570s largely in red sandstone. Its courts, audience spaces and pavilions show how columns, brackets and carved screens directed movement and light through a royal complex. Shah Jahan’s Red Fort in Delhi faced the Yamuna River with palace pavilions; a channel called the Nahr-i Bihisht, or “River of Paradise,” carried water through them. Elsewhere, patrons adapted imperial building forms to local materials and traditions, including brick construction in Bengal. A dated provincial example is Khan Mohammad Mridha Mosque in Dhaka, in present-day Bangladesh, built in 1704–05. Its brick walls and terracotta ornament show builders combining northern Indian Mughal forms with Bengal materials and decorative traditions. Terracotta is fired clay; stucco is a plaster finish.

Painting and workshop collaboration

The imperial kitabkhana, or House of Books, joined a royal library to a workshop where manuscripts were planned and made. A calligrapher, a skilled writer of formal script, copied the text; artists designed and painted illustrations; other specialists added illumination and bindings. Akbar’s illustrated Akbarnama, Abu’l Fazl’s history of his reign, preserves red-ink notes naming artists’ roles: tarh was the design, while ‘amal was the execution or coloring. Dividing the work let several specialists contribute to a large commission while following a shared composition.

The huge illustrated Hamzanama, a cycle of adventures about the hero Hamza, was produced for Akbar from about 1562 to 1577. Its pictures were painted on cotton backed with paper, unlike the smaller paper pages common in other books. Under Jahangir, artists also recorded portraits and animals presented at court. The court painter Ustad (master) Mansur’s 1621 painting of a zebra presented to the emperor turned a diplomatic gift into a carefully observed image. Albums later placed paintings alongside calligraphy and borders; around 1630, the painter Murar adapted an earlier composition by replacing its portraits with Shah Jahan and his son Dara Shikoh. Images could thus serve as records, collectable objects and statements about dynastic continuity.

Gardens, terrain and water

A charbagh is a garden arranged around four principal plots, often divided further by paths and water channels. Its plan gave visitors routes through planted ground, while channels supplied beds, trees and pools. Builders had to adjust that geometry to the site: on sloping ground, water could descend through terraces and cascades; elsewhere, it had to be lifted, stored or brought along a canal. Gardeners and water workers continued the work after a patron’s opening ceremony by clearing channels, tending plants and repairing beds.

Shah Jahan’s Shalimar Garden in Lahore, in present-day Pakistan, built in 1641–42, used three terraces descending from south to north, with pools, pavilions and cascades laid out across the site. The sequence made water’s movement part of the garden’s design and organized different spaces for courtly use. In Kashmir, garden builders also worked with steep terrain and mountain water. At the Delhi Red Fort, the Nahr-i Bihisht connected palace rooms to a river-fed channel, showing how garden and residence design could use water together.

Books, translation and historical argument

Mughal books served different purposes. Babur wrote his memoir in Chagatai, a Turkic literary language; a Persian translation completed in 1589 made his account available to court readers in another language. Gulbadan Begum, Humayun’s sister, added family memory to this historical writing in her Humayun-nama. Abu’l Fazl’s Akbarnama narrated Akbar’s reign, while the Ain-i Akbari organized information about the imperial household, offices and provinces. Badauni wrote a competing history that criticized parts of Akbar’s religious and intellectual policy. Reading these works together reveals how historical writing could preserve information and advance distinct arguments about rule.

Translation connected Persian-reading audiences with Sanskrit literature. Akbar’s court produced the Razmnama, a Persian version of the Mahabharata, the long Sanskrit epic about conflict between related royal families. Translators and Sanskrit specialists worked together to explain names, ideas and episodes; illustrated copies then brought the translated story into the manuscript workshop. In another kind of book production, Diyanat Khan commissioned Arabic and Persian works on music in 1662–65. Scribes copied texts as the court moved between cities, and the patron checked some Arabic passages against source manuscripts. Colophons, short notes at the end of a text, recorded where and when copying or checking took place.

Teaching and skilled practice

Abu’l Fazl’s late-sixteenth-century account of Akbar’s preferred lessons for boys begins with learning letters, joining them into words, memorizing prose and verse, and copying a line each day. The teacher was to check handwriting as well as whether a pupil understood word meanings and the previous lesson. Arithmetic, measurement, agriculture, geometry and history also appear in the proposed curriculum. The sequence links literacy with practical and scholarly subjects, including skills useful in administration and land measurement.

Advanced learning depended on teachers and texts. Students preparing for work as qadis, or judges, studied Islamic law with particular scholars; a teacher could grant an ijaza, an authorization to teach a specified text or discipline. Skilled work also relied on guided practice: Abu’l Fazl’s account describes the young painter Daswanth being placed with the senior artist Abd al-Samad for instruction. Court learning and workshop production were different settings, yet both passed expertise through sustained contact with experienced practitioners. After Aurangzeb’s death in 1707, regional courts continued several Mughal literary and artistic conventions on a smaller scale, carrying those practices beyond the strongest period of imperial patronage.