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How Mughals drained wealth out of India

There are folks like @ReallySwara who want others to believe that Mughals made India rich. But they are as wrong as one could go.

The drain of wealth out of India by the British is a well known fact that has been meticulously recorded by historians and economists.

However, the drain of wealth originally started with the Islamic invaders who carted off prodigious quantities of wealth to their Arab, Persian, Turkic and Central Asian homelands for a longer period than the British in India.

Muslim invaders also carried away millions of Hindus as slaves and Muslim rulers exported Hindu slaves. India was the world’s leading economy from 1 CE to 1000 CE.

But in the second millennium it lost the top spot to China after the Islamic invaders razed India’s universities, disrupted the economic systems and caused havoc in religious and social life.

Not many realise that from the year 712 CE (when Sindh became the first Indian kingdom to be conquered by a Muslim army) to the middle of the 16th century, India was a part of the Islamic Caliphate. Areas of the country under Muslim occupation were tributaries of Islamic empire.

Incalculable amounts of wealth and numberless slaves were sent annually to the countries that India’s Muslim rulers owed allegiance to.

“This is how the money and resources, extracted from the sweat and toil of non-Muslim subjects of India. used to be siphoned to the treasuries of the Islamic Caliphate in Damascus, Baghdad, Cairo or Tashkent, to the Islamic holy cities of Mecca and Medina, and to the pockets of

the Muslim holy men throughout the Islamic world. At the same time, the infidels of India were being reduced to awful misery,” writes M.A. Khan in ‘Islamic Jihad: A Legacy of Forced Conversion, Imperialism and Slavery’.

To their credit, the Mughals were the first Muslim dynasty in India to declare independence from the Islamic Caliphate.

But this was not because of any love for India (on the contrary the first Mughal emperor Babur hated India so much that he stated his desire to be buried in Kabul after his death).

The Mughals broke free due to two reasons. One, they had become too large and powerful to remain a subsidiary of a distant Caliphate;

secondly, the hedonistic Mughal emperors did not want to send the greater portion of their vast wealth overseas when they could spend it all on themselves – no questions asked.

The quantum of wealth that flowed into the Mughal treasury was enormous. Here’s what the historian Abul Fazl wrote about India’s wealth: “In Iran and Turan, where only one treasurer is appointed, the accounts are in a confused state; but here in India, the amount of the revenues

is so great, and the business so multifarious that 12 treasuries are necessary for storing the money, nine for the different kinds of cash-payments, and three for precious stones, gold, and inlaid jewellery.

The extent of the treasuries is too great to admit of my giving a proper description with other matters before me.”

However, contrary to the claims of leftists, liberals and fraudsters like the Hindu-hating Audrey Truschke, the drain of wealth continued. The sending of tributes had ended but the one-way flow of India’s wealth kept going west in different forms.

“Besides sending revenue and gifts to the caliphal headquarters of Damascus, Baghadad, Cairo or Tashkent from India,

Islam’s holy cities of Mecca and Medina amongst others also received generous donations in money, gifts and presents even in the Mughal period, when the Indian rulers had declared their independence from foreign overlords,” explains M.A. Khan.

Mughals – Drain game

Babur, the founder of the Mughal Empire, in his autobiography Baburnama records the gifts and presents he had sent “in the cause of God” to the holy men of Samarkand, Khurasan, Mecca and Medina.

Shortly after his victory over the last Delhi sultan Ibrahim Lodhi, which gave the Mughals the keys to the imperial treasury at Agra, Babur virtually emptied the treasury through his generosity, which of course extended only to Muslims.

Babur writes in his autobiography Baburnama: “Suitable money gifts were bestowed from the treasury on the whole army, to every tribe there was, Afghan, Hazara, Arab, Balluch etc to each according to its position.

Every trader and student, indeed every man who had come with the army, took ample portion and share of bounteous gift and largess.

And indeed to the whole various train of relations and younger children went masses of red and white (gold and silver), of plenishing (furniture and furnishings), jewels and slaves.”

Many gifts went to Babur’s extended family in his native Uzbekistan, modern Tajikistan, modern Xinjiang in China and Arabia. “Valuable gifts were sent for the various relations in Samarkand, Khurasan, Kashghar and Iraq.

To holy men belonging to Samarkand and Khurasan went offerings vowed to God; so too to Makka and Madina.”

In Afghanistan, where Babur wandered many years during his youth, every single citizen was rewarded. The amount disbursed must have been huge. “We gave one shahrukhi (silver coin) for every soul in the country of Kabul and the valley-side of Varsak

(in Afghanistan), man and woman, bond and free, of age or non-age.” (3)

Presents of jackets and silk dresses of honour, of gold and silver, of household furnishings and various goods were given to those from Andijan, Uzbekistan, and to those who had come from Sukh and Hushlar,

“the places whither we had gone landless and homeless”. Gifts of the same kind were given to the servants of Qurban and Shaikhl and the peasants of Kahmard (in Afghanistan).

It is clear that hearing of Babur’s windfall, multitudes of Central Asians and Afghans had travelled to Delhi to claim cash, material gifts and slaves. Those who couldn’t trudge the vast distance were supplied cash in the comfort of their homes.

According to the Persian historian Firishta, “Babur left himself stripped so bare by his far-flung largesse that he was nick-named Qalandar.”

Haj windfall

Modern India’s secular rulers granted hundreds of crores for Indian Muslims to perform the Haj. This annual ripoff continued for decades. This involved building an entire Haj terminal in Mumbai.

Despite the unconstitutionality – and blatant hypocrisy – of secular governments catering to a purely religious pilgrimage, the appeasement continues. Several Indian states, including Delhi, have spent vast sums to construct Haj houses.

However, all these efforts by Hindu dhimmis pale before the Mughal Haj tours.

During the Mughal era on an average 15,000 pilgrims every year visited Mecca to perform Haj. According to a Mughal official, these pilgrims went on Haj “at great public expense, with gold and goods and rich presents”.

Mughal emperors sponsored the pilgrimage to “stand out as defenders of Islam”

This religious sponsorship began after Akbar conquered Gujarat in 1573 and the Mughal Empire got access to the port of Surat. An imperial edict proclaimed that “the travelling expenses of anybody who might intend to perform the pilgrimage to the Sacred Places should be paid”.

In 1576, a Mughal Haj caravan left Agra with its party of sponsored pilgrims and an enormous donation of Rs 600,000. To understand how large this amount was, the average salary of a chariot driver that year was Rs 3.50 per month and a barber earned Rs 0.50 a month.

In 1577, another Haj caravan left with a double bounty of Rs 500,000 and Rs 100,000 for the Sharif of Mecca, who was a descendant of Prophet Mohammad’s grandson Hasan ibn Ali.

These gargantuan amounts of money caused many poor people from all over the Muslim world to flock to Mecca in 1577-78 to share the alms bonus.

However, with great wealth comes great temptation. In 1582, Akbar discontinued the sponsored pilgrimage because of massive corruption both in Mecca and among his courtiers who were siphoning funds allocated for the Meccans.

Akbar’s great charities didn’t protect him from his own son Jehangir, who poisoned him to death. The new Mughal emperor reinstituted the sponsored tours. In 1622, Rs 200,000 was allocated for Haj

Jehangir writes in his autobiography Tarikh-i-Salim Shahi: “During the reign of my father, the ministers of religion and students of law and literature, to the number of two and three thousand, in the principal cities of the empire, were already allowed pensions from the state;

and to these, in conformity with the regulations established by my father, I directed Miran Sadr Jahan one of the noblest among the Seyeds of Herat, to allot a subsistence corresponding with their situation;