Religion and Religious Communities in the Mughal Empire

The Mughal dynasty was founded in 1526 and its authority contracted after Aurangzeb’s death in 1707. The East India Company made the emperors its pensioners after taking Delhi in 1803; the British deposed the last emperor after the 1857 uprising. Muslim, Hindu, Jain, Sikh, Christian, Zoroastrian and other communities sustained their own institutions and teachers. Emperors could appoint officials, grant land, tax subjects and regulate public life, but those acts changed across reigns and provinces.

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Muslim institutions and learned authority

Mughal Muslim life included Sunni and Shi‘i scholars, Sufi teachers who guided Islamic mystical and devotional practice, and shrine communities. The imperial sadr oversaw religious and charitable patronage as well as legal appointments. Akbar’s officer Shaykh ʿAbd al-Nabī gained control over charitable grants in 1575–76, when grants required his signature; Akbar later removed him after losing confidence in his administration. This office linked religious learning and institutions to revenue and state authority.

Sufi shrines drew worshippers, visitors and rulers through the memory and teaching of revered saints. At Ajmer Sharif in Rajasthan, Shah Jahan commissioned a marble congregational mosque in 1637. His daughter Jahanara Begum added the Begumi Dalaan, an assembly space beside the tomb, and a marble platform at its entrance. These additions made imperial support visible at a regional pilgrimage center.

Hindu and Jain institutions

Hindu communities maintained temples through worship, service and gifts of land or income. The National Archives of India describes 149 Mathura documents concerning Akbar’s grants of hundreds of bighas, a traditional land-area unit that varied by region, to 35 temples. Mathura is in present-day Uttar Pradesh. Such grants gave temple institutions a material base as well as a relationship with imperial officials. Hindu elites also entered Mughal administration: Akbar appointed Todar Mal prime minister in 1582 and Raja Bhagwant Das governor of Punjab in 1583, while Rajput ruling houses retained their own local authority.

Jain teachers negotiated with emperors over practices that mattered to their communities. In 1583 Akbar invited the Tapā Gaccha monk Hiravijaya Suri and 67 followers to his court. Jain teaching places strong emphasis on ahiṃsā, nonviolence toward living beings. Hiravijaya later obtained an imperial order banning animal slaughter during the Jain festival of paryuṣaṇa; he also petitioned against fishing in a pond near Fatehpur Sikri, near Agra. His successor Vijayasena secured a renewed slaughter ban from Jahangir. Repeated orders show how monks used court access to seek protections whose reach could require renewal.

Akbar’s debates and imperial policy

Akbar’s policies changed the state’s dealings with non-Muslim subjects. Between 1562 and 1564 he abolished the pilgrimage taxes and the jizya, a poll tax on non-Muslims. In 1575–76 he built the ʿIbādat Khāna, or House of Worship, at Fatehpur Sikri for discussion of religious questions. The discussions expanded beyond Muslim scholars to include Hindu, Jain, Parsi and Christian participants. The first Jesuit mission from Portuguese Goa reached the court in 1580.

Akbar’s chief historian Abu’l-Fazl described the governing ideal as ṣulḥ-i kull, or “peace with all,” and linked it to a diverse imperial administration. Akbar’s personal spiritual circle, sometimes called Dīn-i Ilāhī or tawḥīd-i ilāhī in later writing, was a small bond of discipleship around the emperor, not a mass religion replacing the empire’s other communities. Court-sponsored translations also brought Hindu religious texts into Persian: the Mahābhārata, a Sanskrit epic, was rendered as the Razmnāma for readers at court.

Sikh and Christian communities in the empire

Sikh institutions developed under successive Mughal rulers. In 1604 the Sikh spiritual leader Guru Arjan compiled the Adi Granth, the first canonical Sikh scripture. Jahangir ordered his execution in 1606 after interpreting his blessing of Prince Khusrau as support for rebellion.

Jesuit missionaries came to debate and seek converts, while Mughal rulers and artists used the encounter for other purposes. Akbar had the Gospels translated into Persian and permitted churches at Agra, Fatehpur Sikri and Lahore, but did not convert. European prints and Christian images entered the court’s illustrated books. Art historian Gauvin Alexander Bailey suggests that the lack of color in European engravings may have inspired the painter Basawan to use grisaille, a monochrome painting technique, in Mughal painting. Other artists adapted Christian scenes in ivory, jewelry and carved stone. Armenian merchants also built churches and traded in Mughal cities: Agra’s first Armenian church dates to 1562, while Armenian communities later appeared at Surat, Lahore and Bengal ports.

Policies differed under later emperors

Later rulers combined patronage with coercive action in different circumstances. In 1635 Shah Jahan ordered the destruction of a major temple at Orchha, which Richard Eaton places in the context of Raja Jajhar Singh’s open rebellion. Aurangzeb’s court ordered the Vishvanath temple at Banaras destroyed in September 1669, and the Keshava Deva temple at Mathura in early 1670. Eaton relates these actions to local unrest and the temples’ ties to political opponents; the April 1669 order concerned investigation of particular schools and teaching, rather than a blanket instruction to raze every temple.

Aurangzeb reinstated the jizya in 1679 and commissioned the Fatawa-i ʿĀlamgīrī, a collection of legal opinions from the Hanafi school, one of Sunni Islam’s legal traditions. A farman dated 1701 shows one way royal support could be administered in Malwa, a region of central India: Aurangzeb granted Shaikh Lal Muhammad and others a 15-bigha, 5-biswa garden for their maintenance and ordered local revenue officers not to tax it.