Handling Diversity with Absolute Civility: The Global Historical Legacy of Mughal Ṣulḥ-i Kull

Despite many advances in recent scholarship, a good deal of Mughal cultural historiography—not to mention the popular memory of the Mughal era—is still dominated by attention to the patronage and liberal outlooks of two figures, the Emperor Jalal al-Din Muhammad Akbar (r. 1556–1605) and his great-grandson, Prince Dara Shukoh (1615–1659), both of whom are viewed as having been especially, even heroically, tolerant toward the non-Muslims in their midst. However, while both of these men are certainly worthy of the attention they have received, the emphasis on their individual contributions to the Mughal attitude of ‘universal civility’ (ṣulḥ-i kull) has in some ways obscured the broader cultures of everyday tolerance that pervaded Mughal life in the seventeenth century. This article aims to present a preliminary—though far from exhaustive—survey of evidence for this broader and continuing Mughal approach to handling India’s diversity in the post-Akbar period and to try and connect it, via the suggestive comments of several influential European commentators of the early Enlightenment, to the larger connected histories of tolerance in global early modernity.