Abstract: Contemporary studies of the Mughal dynasty in India have long been dominated by nationalist, sectarian and ideological agendas which typically present the empire of the Mughals as an exclusively Indian phenomenon, politically and culturally isolated on the subcontinent. Cross disciplinary scholarship on the Middle East and Islamic Central Asia assigns to the Mughals a position on the periphery. Omitting reference to a Central Asian legacy, scholars instead link the Mughals to the preceding nearly one thousand years of Muslim colonization in India. This study radically re-evaluates the scholarly and intellectual isolation with which the Mughals have traditionally been treated and argues that the Mughals must be recognized as the primary inheritors of the Central Asian Turco-Persian legacy of their ancestor Timur (known in the West as Tamerlane). Driven from their homeland in Central Asia, the Timurid refugee community, newly settled in South Asia, meticulously maintained and asserted the universally recognized charisma of their imperial lineage and inherited cultural personality. The imperial success of the Mughals lay in their ability to identify and reproduce in the Indian context potent symbols of Islamic and Timurid legitimacy which allowed them to affirm their imperial role and develop a meaningful dynastic identity on the subcontinent. Specific institutions and traditions of the Turco-Mongol Timurids: succession patterns, interpretations of Islamic law, the facilitation of migrating Sufi orders, the role of women and Persianate literary culture, can be identified and traced from the centers of Timurid culture in Transoxiana to India, where they were manipulated and adopted by Timur's descendants. The shaping and defining of the imperial identity of the Mughals in India, through the conscious manipulation of the Central Asian legacy of Timur can be seen as a case study of the movement and migration of symbols of legitimacy and the reproduction of identity by a refugee community in permanent exile.