Indian Painting under the Mughals, A.D. 1550 to A.D. 1750 c13.2

c13.2

DURING the period of history that corresponds to the Middle Ages in Europe, India was the prey of foreign invaders; these invaders belonged to certain tribes and races overflowing from Central Asia—Muhammadans conquering the land of the Hindus. Much of the success of these invaders was due to the fact that India was divided up into a number of independent sovereignties, and that its inhabitants were never in complete unity. The various Hindu kingdoms fought hard to keep their dominions intact—their resistance to the Muslim hordes is one of the finest chapters in their history—but their lack of cohesion was the main cause of their downfall. From the seventh century, Arabs and Turks, Afghans and Tartars, Pathans and Mongols, one after the other, sword in hand, swept through the country, massacring its populace, desecrating its shrines, razing its cities to the ground, and carrying off in triumph to adorn their own distant capitals that which they did not destroy. Some of these conquerors, however, did not return to their original homes. Attracted by the fairness of the land of which they found themselves masters, they remained, there in the course of time to build up independent kingdoms on the ruins of those they had devastated. So in time we see India divided up among a number of alien rulers, the country as a whole still largely Hindu, but great tracts of it dominated by Muhammadans from Central Asia. Such was the state of the country in the beginning of the sixteenth century. At that time a power arose in Northern India which absorbed all these independent states, and brought the Indian people under one administration, welding the entire country into one imperial whole. This was the Empire of the Mughals. Founded by Babur in the early years of the sixteenth century, it remained the dominant power in India until the beginning of the eighteenth century, when, after the death of the Emperor Aurangzeb, it began to decay. The pictures painted by the Mughal school of artists illustrate the story of this period of two hundred years, when the Mughal dynasty ruled over one of the greatest empires in the East.