Emperors of the Peacock Throne

A stirring account of one of the world’s greatest empires

In December 1525, Zahir-ud-din Babur, descended from Chengiz Khan and Timur Lenk, crossed the Indus river into the Punjab with a modest army and some cannon. At Panipat, five months later, he fought the most important battle of his life and routed the mammoth army of Sultan Ibrahim Lodi, the Afghan ruler of Hindustan. Mughal rule in India had begun. It was to continue for over three centuries, shaping India for all time.

In this definitive biography of the great Mughals, Abraham Eraly reclaims the right to set down history as a chronicle of flesh-and-blood people. Bringing to his task the objectivity of a scholar and the high imagination of a master storyteller, he recreates the lives of Babur, the intrepid pioneer; the dreamer Humayun; Akbar, the greatest and most enigmatic of the Mughals; the aesthetes Jehangir and Shah Jahan; and the dour and determined Aurangzeb.

‘‘ ‘It is hard to imagine anyone succeeding more gracefully in producing a balanced overview than Abraham Eraly…An excellent introduction to the first six Mughal emperors . . . a richly readable account of one of the most crucial and misrepresented periods of Indian history’’
William Dalrymple, Sunday Times, London‘Exciting reading’’
Philip Ziegler, The Telegraph, London‘The book marks the return of the narrative in historical writing. Eraly weaves together accounts of the people and politics of the empire and explodes myths about controversial emperors like Babur and Aurangzeb . . . A valuable contribution’’
Outlook‘Consistently readable . . . Eraly’s writing is vigorous, supple and undogmatic’’
Indian Review of Books‘Eraly writes with the ease of a fiction writer [and] succeeds in making all the historical characters come alive’’
The Telegraph, Calcutta