Where to Deposit the Saint-King’s Body? A History and Comparison of the Funerary Rituals of the Mughal Empire

The Mughals built imperial mausoleums on a scale the world had not seen at least since the Pyramids. Moreover, unlike their early modern Muslim imperial contemporaries, the Safavids and the Ottomans, they did not typically bury their sovereigns within the precincts of a saint shrine or adjacent to an imperial mosque. In this paper, I examine the history of how these funerary practices develop in the Mughal empire and analyze their significance for understanding Mughal imperial identity and religious policy. I argue that these rituals built upon those that had been practiced by the Mughals’ Turko-Mongol (Timurid) predecessors in Iran and Central Asia in the post-Mongol era. This was a time when the saintly nature of the sovereign was emphasized, and a robust ritual program for commemorating the saint-king elaborated across the eastern Islamic world. However, the Mughals of South Asia grew this program in a different direction than their Iranian neighbors, the Safavids, who had also elaborated their saintly genealogy since the beginning of 16th Century. The Safavid kings had been buried in the precinct of Shi’i saint shrines, such those in Mashhad and Ardabil. The Ottomans further west also created elaborate funerary rituals and spaces, but centered them on grand imperial mosques. The main questions I address, then, are why the Mughals kept their funerary rituals independent of the saint-shrine and the mosque and what this tells us about their religious identity and policy?