Chapter 5 India 171tively illustrated events from the Mahabharata, Ramayana, and Harivamsa,
which Akbar had translated for the Muslim elite. He sat for his own portraits
and also had all his noblemen sit for theirs, so that paintings of the emperor
holding darbar (court) are filled with faces that really sat before the emperor.
But the Akbarnama is the masterpiece, a work in 12 volumes with 1,400 illustra-
tions, which took 15 years to complete (Welch 1978:40). These remarkably
detailed paintings are all the more amazing for being miniatures. The scene of
Akbar and the two elephants was only 13" by 8". They were painted in opaque
watercolor with brushes made of a few hairs plucked from kittens or baby
squirrels, which fit on the fingertip of the artist. The glint of sunlight burnishing
a North Indian scene was accomplished with pounded gold mixed with a little
silver or copper.
Akbar was the greatest of the “Great Mughals,” a line of brilliant, long-
lived, cultured, often enlightened, and frequently cruel rulers whose zenith
were the four men, Akbar, Jahangir, Shah Jahan, and Aurangzeb, whose four
reigns spanned the years from 1556 to 1707. Later Mughals continued to
patronize the arts, but it was the “Great Mughals” whose patronage was
responsible for the most significant examples of Indo-Islamic architecture such
as the Taj Mahal, commissioned by the “Engineer Shah”—Shah Jahan—for
his favorite wife, Mumtaz Mahal.
After the “Four Great Mughals,” weaker rulers followed in the eighteenth
century as the British were maneuvering into India to trade. The “Last
Mughal,” Bahadur Shah Zafar, died in exile in Burma in 1862.
British Colonial Period (Eighteenth to Twentieth Centuries)
On December 31, 1600, Queen Elizabeth I granted a royal charter to the East
India Company, a group of 215 London merchants who put up shares to form
one of the first joint stock companies in the world. (The Dutch had organized one
the year before.) The company was given a monopoly on trade to the East, espe-
cially India, China, and Indonesia, where the Dutch dominated the lucrative
spice trade. Eleven years later, an English representative, Sir Thomas Roe, was
in the Mughal court of Emperor Jahangir, petitioning for a monopoly on trade
in India with promises of rare goods from Europe in return for permission to
build factories (i.e., warehouses and trade centers) in various strategic spots in
India. Over the next century and a half, the East India Company expanded its
factories in India and squeezed out its European competitors, the Dutch, Portu-
guese, and French.
Increasingly powerful in India, the Company became a de facto political
entity, supported by their own private army and with forts in Bombay, Madras,
and Calcutta, competing with the many Indian princes as the Mughals slowly
lost control of their empire. The Company was nicknamed “John Company
Raj,” governing large sections in the vicinity of their forts and competing polit-
ically and militarily with local princes. In two major battles in 1757 and 1764,
the Company under Robert Clive defeated the Mughal Emperor Shah Alam II