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History
What was the language of the Mughal court?
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1 Reply
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The primary language of the Mughal court in India was Persian.
Specifically:
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The Mughal Empire was founded by Babur, who was a Chagatai Turkic ruler from Central Asia. When the Mughals established their rule in India in the early 16th century, they brought the Persian language with them.
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Persian had been the dominant language of administration, high culture, and education in the Delhi Sultanate that preceded the Mughal rule. The Mughals continued this tradition and made Persian the official language of their imperial court.
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Persian was the language used for royal decrees, court chronicles, literary works, and other official documents during the Mughal period. It was also the lingua franca among the Mughal nobility and elites.
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While local Indian languages like Hindi, Bengali, Gujarati, etc. were spoken in different regions, Persian maintained its status as the language of power, prestige, and high culture under the Mughals.
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The widespread use of Persian had a significant influence on the development of the Urdu language as well, which evolved as a blend of Persian, Arabic, and Turkic vocabularies with local Indian dialects.
So in summary, Persian was the dominant court language that facilitated administrative integration and cultural unification across the vast Mughal Empire in the 16th-18th centuries.
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