Religious persecution under the Mughals

Overview

Mughal rule in India (1526–1857) included, alongside its architectural and administrative achievements, documented episodes of temple destruction, discriminatory taxation of non-Muslims, forced conversion, and the execution of religious leaders, concentrated especially in the reigns of Jahangir and Aurangzeb. The extent, consistency, and motivation of these actions are debated among historians: some episodes are well attested in Mughal court chronicles themselves, while modern scholarship has questioned whether they reflect a sustained empire-wide anti-Hindu program or more localized, politically motivated actions, often bound up with specific rebellions or contested successions rather than a uniform religious policy applied across two centuries of rule.

Babur and Humayun

Babur's memoir, the Baburnama, records military campaigns following his victory at the First Battle of Panipat (1526) but says comparatively little about religious policy toward temples; the widely circulated claim that Babur personally ordered the demolition of a Ram temple at Ayodhya to build the Babri Masjid rests on later inscriptional and local tradition rather than on the Baburnama itself, and remains disputed among historians. Humayun, Babur's son, spent years in exile at the Safavid Persian court and adopted elements of Shia court culture there, though his brief, unstable reign left little scope for a settled religious policy of any kind.

Akbar

Akbar is generally credited with a policy of religious accommodation — he abolished the jizya (a tax on non-Muslims) in 1564, promoted the pluralist doctrine of sulh-i kul ("peace with all"), married Rajput princesses, and later promulgated the syncretic Din-i Ilahi, a court order rather than a mass religion. His reign nonetheless included the Siege of Chittorgarh (1567–68), undertaken against the Sisodia Rajputs and framed in his own court chronicle, the Akbarnama, as a jihad against "infidels." After the fort fell in February 1568, Akbar's chronicler Abu'l-Fazl records a general massacre of the town's population, with figures on the order of 30,000 killed and women and children enslaved; modern historians treat the precise casualty figures reported in premodern court chronicles, including this one, with caution, since such numbers were often stated for rhetorical effect, though the massacre itself is not in serious dispute.

Jahangir and Guru Arjan Dev

Jahangir's memoir, the Tuzuk-i-Jahangiri, records his own irritation at the growing following of the fifth Sikh Guru, Arjan Dev, and at the Guru's blessing of his rebellious son Khusrau Mirza. Guru Arjan Dev was arrested, fined, and executed at Lahore in 1606 after refusing to pay the fine or alter the text of the Adi Granth as demanded; Sikh tradition holds that he died under torture. The episode is remembered in Sikh history as the first of the Guru martyrdoms and marks the beginning of a more militarized turn in the Sikh community under his son and successor, Guru Hargobind.

Shah Jahan

Shah Jahan's reign, chiefly remembered for the construction of the Taj Mahal and other monuments, also saw orders — recorded in 1633 — for the demolition of newly built Hindu temples in certain provinces, on the grounds that Islamic law did not permit new temple construction, alongside continued, if inconsistently enforced, restrictions on non-Muslim officeholders.

Aurangzeb

Aurangzeb's reign (1658–1707) saw the most extensive and best-documented episodes of religious discrimination. He reimposed the jizya in 1679, more than a century after Akbar had abolished it, and issued orders resulting in the destruction of prominent temples, including the Kashi Vishwanath Temple at Varanasi (1669), over whose site the Gyanvapi Mosque was subsequently built, and the Keshava Deo Temple at Mathura (1670), traditionally identified as Krishna's birthplace. He is also recorded as having ordered the demolition of temples in specific contexts tied to political rebellion or dynastic conquest, notably in newly annexed territory in the Deccan.

Aurangzeb's confrontation with the Sikh community culminated in the execution of the ninth Guru, Tegh Bahadur, at Chandni Chowk in Delhi in 1675, after the Guru, according to Sikh accounts, refused an order to convert to Islam and was executed in defense of the principle of religious freedom, an episode that earned him the posthumous title Hind di Chadar ("Shield of India") in Sikh tradition. Companions executed alongside or around him are also venerated as martyrs in Sikh memory, including Bhai Mati Das, Bhai Sati Das, and Bhai Dayala.

Persecution of Sikhs after Aurangzeb

Sikh–Mughal conflict continued after Aurangzeb's death in 1707. Banda Singh Bahadur, who had led an armed Sikh rebellion in Punjab, was captured and executed at Delhi in 1716 on the orders of the emperor Farrukhsiyar. Zakariya Khan, Mughal governor of Lahore from 1726 to 1745, placed bounties on Sikhs and ordered mass arrests and executions, including that of Bhai Mani Singh, a prominent Sikh scholar and custodian of the Golden Temple, executed in 1734. Sikh martyrology also records the imprisonment and killing of Sikh women and children at Lahore during the governorship of Mu'in-ul-Mulk (Mir Mannu) around 1748–1753, though the specific details of these accounts derive chiefly from Sikh tradition rather than independent Mughal record.

Resistance

Sustained resistance to Mughal authority came from several quarters over the same period: the Rajput states of Rajasthan, the Sikh community under its Gurus and later under Banda Singh Bahadur, and the Marathas under Shivaji and his successors, whose decades-long war against Aurangzeb in the Deccan, from 1681 until his death in 1707, is widely credited by historians with hastening the empire's decline.

Historiography

Popular accounts of Mughal rule, especially since the 19th and 20th centuries, have often framed the dynasty's record toward non-Muslims as one of sustained, empire-wide persecution. Academic historiography presents a more differentiated picture: Richard Eaton's survey of temple desecration across roughly five centuries of Indo-Muslim rule in India identified around 80 confirmed instances, concentrated at moments of conquest or rebellion and typically directed at temples that functioned as symbols of a rival ruler's sovereignty rather than as an indiscriminate campaign against Hindu worship generally — a pattern with precedents, Eaton and others note, in inter-dynastic conflicts among earlier Hindu and Buddhist rulers as well. Other historians, including Audrey Truschke, have offered revisionist readings emphasizing Aurangzeb's continued patronage of some Hindu temples and his employment of Hindu officials alongside his discriminatory measures. Earlier 20th-century historians such as Jadunath Sarkar documented the jizya's reimposition and specific instances of temple destruction as established fact without disputing their occurrence. The subject remains a live point of public and political debate in contemporary India.