Trace the formulation of the Mughal imperial authority from Akbar to Aurangzeb. Focus on the influence of Persian ideas of kingship in the construction of Mughal royalty.

The Persian ideas that were borrowed.

• Farr-i izadi, the divine effulgence of Sassanian kingship, transmitted through Persian literature, which made the king the recipient of a light from God and therefore accountable to God rather than to the ulama.
• The Circle of Justice, attributed to Ardashir: no kingdom without an army, no army without wealth, no wealth without subjects, and no contented subjects without justice — a theory that makes the king's own interest depend on the welfare of the peasant.
• The just ruler as model, with Nushirwan the Just as the standing exemplar.
• The ethical tradition of Tusi's Akhlaq-i-Nasiri, which supplied the vocabulary of balance among social groups.

Akbar. Abul Fazl in the Akbarnama and Ain-i-Akbari built these into a theory of the padshah as the perfect man, illuminated by divine light and the spiritual guide of all his subjects. Its practical form was sulh-i-kul, peace with all; the mahzar of 1579 making the emperor the arbiter in disputed religious questions; the abolition of jizya and the pilgrim tax; the discipleship order; the mansabdari system which made all nobility a function of imperial rank; and daily jharokha darshan, a distinctly Indian practice, together with tuladan weighing. Sovereignty was thus placed above any single religious community.

Jahangir retained the framework, adding the golden chain of justice at Agra as its visible sign, and pushed the sacral imagery further in his allegorical portraits.

Shah Jahan made it more formal and more explicitly Timurid, expressing the order in architectural symmetry — the Taj Mahal and the Red Fort as statements that the empire was the centre of a balanced universe — while retaining the jharokha.

Aurangzeb reversed the direction. He sought legitimacy in the Sharia rather than in divine light: he commissioned the Fatawa-i-Alamgiri, discontinued jharokha darshan and tuladan as un-Islamic, ended court music and the writing of official histories, and reimposed jizya in 1679.

The consequence. The Perso-Islamic theory had allowed the emperor to stand above every community and therefore to command all of them. Narrowing the basis of legitimacy to religious law narrowed the constituency of the empire at the moment when Maratha, Rajput and Sikh resistance made breadth most necessary.