Indian Mughal Emperor Akbar defeats Bengali army at the Battle of Tukaroi.
The Battle of Tukaroi, also known as the Battle of Bajhaura or the Battle of Mughulmari, was fought between the Mughal Empire and the Bengal Sultanate on 3 March 1575 near the village of Tukaroi in present-day Balasore District of Odisha. It resulted in a Mughal victory and greatly weakened the Bengal Sultanate.
The Mughal Empire, also spelled the Mogul or Moghul Empire, was an early modern Islamic empire in South Asia. For some two centuries, the empire stretched from the outer fringes of the Indus basin in the west, northern Afghanistan in the northwest, and Kashmir in the north Bangladesh in the east, and the uplands of the Deccan Plateau in South India.The empire is conventionally said to have been founded in 1526 by Babur, a warrior chieftain from what is today Uzbekistan, who employed military aid in the form of matchlock guns and cast cannon from the Ottoman Empire, and his superior strategy and cavalry to defeat the Sultan of Delhi, Ibrahim Lodhi, in the First Battle of Panipat, and to sweep down the plains of Upper India, subduing Rajputs and Afghans. The Mughal imperial structure, however, is sometimes dated to 1600, to the rule of Babur's grandson, Akbar. This imperial structure lasted until 1720, until shortly after the death of the last major emperor, Aurangzeb, during whose reign the empire also achieved its maximum geographical extent. The empire lost significant territory to the conquests of the Maratha Empire, absorbed as a puppet state, and this continued during the East India Company rule in India. The empire was formally dissolved by the British Raj after the Indian Rebellion of 1857.
The Mughal empire was created and sustained by military warfare but also established new administrative practices and incorporated diverse ruling elites to produce an efficient, centralised, standardised rule. Akbar, the third Mughal emperor, instituted agricultural taxes which served as the base of the empire's collective wealth. These taxes, amounting to well over half of a peasant cultivator's output, had to be paid in money, and this impelled peasants and artisans to enter market networks so as to obtain it.The relative peace maintained by the empire during much of the 17th century was a factor in India's economic expansion. Burgeoning European presence in the Indian Ocean, and its increasing demand for Indian raw and finished products, created still greater wealth in the Mughal courts. There was more conspicuous consumption among the Mughal elite, resulting in greater patronage of painting, literary forms, textiles, and architecture, especially during the reign of Shah Jahan. Among the Mughal UNESCO World Heritage Sites in South Asia are Agra Fort, Fatehpur Sikri, Red Fort, Humayun's Tomb, Lahore Fort, and the Taj Mahal, which is described as the "jewel of Muslim art in India and one of the universally admired masterpieces of the world's heritage."