The Mughal Empire ruled much of South Asia from 1526, when Babur, a Timurid prince from the Fergana Valley, defeated Ibrahim Lodi at the First Battle of Panipat, until the British formally dissolved it after the Indian Rebellion of 1857. It reached its greatest extent under Aurangzeb (r. 1658–1707), stretching from Kabul and Kashmir to Assam, Bengal and the Deccan, about 4.0 million km² around 1690 by the estimates on Wikipedia’s list of the largest empires, with about 24 percent of the world’s people in 1700 according to the historian Walter Scheidel. Its emperors ran the state on a land tax paid in silver and kept Persian as the language of government. It matters because so much of it is still in daily use across India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan: the word for a province in Pakistan, the rupee, Urdu, dishes such as biryani, the place where India’s prime minister speaks every 15 August, and a string of city names, some of which have been changed only in the last decade.
Akbar’s Subahs and the Word for a Province in Pakistan
The administrative map is the least visible legacy and one of the most durable. In reforms between 1572 and 1580, Akbar (r. 1556–1605) divided the empire into twelve provinces called subahs: Kabul, Lahore, Multan, Delhi, Agra, Avadh, Illahabad, Bihar, Bengal, Malwa, Ajmer and Gujarat. Each was split into sarkars, or districts, and those into parganas. Conquests in the Deccan added Berar, Khandesh and Ahmadnagar, making fifteen by the end of his reign.
His successors kept redrawing the lines. Jahangir carved Orissa out of Bengal in 1607 and ran seventeen subahs; under Shah Jahan there were 22, including a separate Kashmir taken from Kabul and Thatta (Sindh) taken from Multan. Aurangzeb added Bijapur in 1686 and Golkonda and Sira in 1687, and the list of his subahs still ran to 22, from Kabul and Kashmir to Bijapur and Golkonda.
Many of those names are still on the map as states or regions: Gujarat and Bihar are Indian states, Bengal is divided between India and Bangladesh, Kashmir is a disputed region administered in parts by India, Pakistan and China, and Kabul, Lahore and Multan are major cities of Afghanistan and Pakistan. The vocabulary lasted too. The Marathas adopted the subah system from 1720, and today subah (صوبہ) is the ordinary word for a province of Pakistan in Urdu, Punjabi and Balochi. The governor of a subah was the subahdar, a title that became subedar, an officer rank still used in the Indian and Pakistani armies.
Urdu, the Rupee and Persian Words in Hindustani
Persian at court, Hindustani in the street
The Mughals were of Turko-Mongol origin, but by the end of the 16th century few at court still understood Chagatai Turkic. Persian became the official and courtly language, used, in the historian Muzaffar Alam’s argument, to bind a diverse empire into one Indo-Persian political culture. Its influence on the speech of northern India produced Hindustani, which developed in the imperial capital, Delhi, in the late Mughal era. From Shah Jahan’s reign it was used as a literary language at court, and in the late 18th century it was called Zaban-e-Urdu-e-Mualla, “language of the exalted camp”; ordu means army in the Turkic languages. Persian stayed the language of government until 1837, when Urdu replaced it as an official language of the East India Company across northern India.
Today Urdu is the national language and lingua franca of Pakistan, while Hindi and Urdu remain two standard forms of the same spoken Hindustani, a split explored in our guide to the geography of Hindi and Urdu. Even the name Taj Mahal, meaning “crown palace”, is Urdu built from Arabic and Persian words. The same court culture shaped music: Hindustani classical music and instruments such as the sitar developed in the Mughal period, and the Mughal emperors’ patronage of painting, textiles and poetry set tastes that outlasted their political power.
Sher Shah’s silver rupiya, kept by the Mughals
The rupee is an inheritance the Mughals took over and spread. Sher Shah Suri, founder of the Sur dynasty, whose brief rule in the 1540s interrupted Mughal power, introduced a silver rupiya and a copper dam. When the Mughals returned, they adopted and standardised both. Their coins were never less than 96 percent pure and were not debased until the 1720s, and peasants paid land taxes in this silver currency, taxes that often took over half a cultivator’s output. Modern historians put the state’s annual revenue around 1595 at about 99 million rupees. The name survives in the currencies of India and Pakistan, and the Red Fort appears on the back of India’s current ₹500 note.
Shahjahanabad, Allahabad and Aurangabad: Mughal Names on Today’s Map
Mughal cities were large: under Akbar around 1600, up to 17 million people, about 15 percent of the empire’s population, lived in towns, a level of urbanisation Europe did not reach until the 19th century. Many of those cities still carry Mughal names, though several have been officially changed recently.
- Delhi: Shah Jahan moved the capital from Agra and in 1648 completed the walled city of Shahjahanabad, today’s Old Delhi, with the Red Fort at its centre. Agra itself had been renamed Akbarabad in 1629.
- Fatehpur Sikri: Akbar founded it as his capital in 1571, left it in 1585, and it was completely abandoned by 1610. The deserted city, 35.7 km from Agra, is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
- Allahabad (Prayagraj): Akbar visited the river confluence in 1575 and ordered a fort, finished by 1584 and called Ilahabas; the form Allahabad became predominant after his death. The Uttar Pradesh government changed the city’s official name to Prayagraj in October 2018.
- Aurangabad (Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar): founded in 1610 as Khadki by Malik Ambar, an Ethiopian brought to India as a slave who rose to be prime minister of the Ahmadnagar Sultanate, it was renamed Aurangabad in 1653 by Aurangzeb, then Mughal viceroy of the Deccan. In 2023 it was officially renamed Chhatrapati Sambhajinagar; the city had 1,175,116 people at the 2011 census.
- Dhaka: capital of Mughal Bengal for 75 years (1608–39 and 1660–1704), it was named Jahangirnagar after the emperor Jahangir and grew rich on the muslin trade. It is now the capital of Bangladesh.
Delhi has kept one Mughal building at the heart of national life. Shah Jahan began the Red Fort in 1638–39 and finished it on 6 April 1648. On 15 August 1947 Jawaharlal Nehru raised India’s flag above its Lahori Gate, and every prime minister since has raised the flag there on Independence Day and spoken from its ramparts. The fort complex became a World Heritage Site in 2007. The modern capital beside it is covered in our guide to New Delhi.
Biryani, Babur’s Garden in Kabul and Shalimar in Lahore
Mughlai cooking
Mughlai cuisine combined South Asian cooking with Persian and Central Asian methods. The Mughals introduced dishes such as stuffed meat and poultry, leavened bread, pilau and dried fruits, along with braising and marinating meat in yoghurt, and they favoured sweets such as halva and falooda. The court’s recipes were written down, in collections such as the Nuskha-i-Shahjahani (“Shah Jahan’s Recipes”). Biryani was present in Mughal India, though whether it was invented there is debated: the name comes from the Persian biryan, “fried” or “roasted”, and Akbar’s chronicle the Ain-i-Akbari, written in 1589–1596, lists ingredients for both pilau and biryani. Dhaka’s kacchi biryani is one of the descendants still cooked in a former Mughal capital.
The charbagh gardens
Gardens are where the empire began and where it is most visible outside India. Babur laid out a garden in Kabul around 1504, more than two decades before he reached Delhi, and he is buried there. Bagh-e Babur, in the Guzargah area of Kabul, now draws up to a million visitors a year.
Shah Jahan’s Shalimar Gardens in Lahore, built in 1641–1642 as a terraced charbagh (a four-part garden divided by water channels), became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1981 and is one of Pakistan’s most visited sites. In New Delhi, the gardens behind the presidential palace, Rashtrapati Bhavan, which mix Mughal and English landscaping styles, were long called the Mughal Gardens; in January 2023 they were renamed Amrit Udyan, “nectar garden”.
Mughal UNESCO World Heritage Sites in South Asia include Agra Fort, Fatehpur Sikri, the Red Fort, Humayun’s Tomb in Delhi, Lahore Fort, the Shalimar Gardens and the Taj Mahal. The tomb gardens drew the most lasting fame. Shah Jahan commissioned the Taj Mahal in Agra in 1631 for his wife Mumtaz Mahal; the mausoleum was finished in 1648 and the whole complex by 1653, with more than 20,000 workers. A UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1983, it now receives more than five million visitors a year, as our guide to the Taj Mahal describes.
The dynasty itself ended in exile. After Aurangzeb died in 1707 the empire fragmented; by 1760 it had shrunk to the area around Old Delhi, and by the early 19th century the emperor’s authority ran little further than the walled city. In 1857 rebels declared the 81-year-old Bahadur Shah Zafar, also an Urdu poet, Emperor of India. After the rebellion failed, the East India Company exiled him to Rangoon in British Burma, where he died in 1862, while the provinces, coins, words and gardens of his ancestors carried on without him.