Akbar

• 1. Introduction

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  Akbar was fourteen years old when Bairam Khan enthroned him on a newly built platform at Kalanaur in Punjab and proclaimed him Shahanshah, the Persian title meaning King of Kings. The platform still stands. The boy who became the third Mughal emperor could neither read nor write, yet he would build a library of over 24,000 volumes and have its books read to him every evening. He reigned from 1556 to 1605, and during those decades the Mughal economy tripled in size and wealth. Born Jalal-ud-Din Muhammad Akbar in 1542, he is remembered as Akbar the Great. How did an illiterate teenager, ruling a precarious realm under a regent, come to control a sweep of territory from the Bay of Bengal to Kandahar? Why did a man who once called the fall of a Rajput fort a victory over infidels later host debates between Jews, Jesuits, and atheists in a hall built for the purpose? And what made him invent a creed of his own, drawn from four faiths at once? The answers run through war, marriage, taxation, and a restless search for the divine.

• 2. A Throne Concealed By Death

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  Humayun, Akbar's father, fled westward into modern-day Sindh after losing to Sher Shah Suri at Chausa in 1539 and Kannauj in 1540. In exile he married the 14-year-old Hamida Banu Begum, daughter of a Persian teacher named Shaikh Ali Akbar Jami. Akbar was born to them the next year, on the 15th of October 1542, at the Rajput fortress of Amarkot, where the local Hindu ruler Rana Prasad had given the fugitives refuge. During Humayun's long exile, the child was raised in Kabul by his paternal uncles Kamran Mirza and Askari Mirza. He learned to hunt, run, and fight. At about nine years old, on his first appointment as governor of Ghazni, he married Hindal's daughter Ruqaiya Sultan Begum, his first wife; the marriage was solemnised in Jalandhar when both were 14. Humayun reconquered Delhi in 1555 with an army partly supplied by his Persian ally Tahmasp I. A few months later he died. Bairam Khan, Akbar's guardian, hid the death to prepare the succession, and Akbar formally succeeded on the 14th of February 1556 in the middle of a war to reclaim the throne. The empire he inherited was held together by a regent ruling on his behalf until he came of age.

• 3. The Gunpowder Empire

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  On the 5th of November 1556, an army led by Bairam Khan defeated Hemu and the Sur forces at the Second Battle of Panipat, fifty miles north of Delhi. Hemu had proclaimed himself a Hindu emperor and expelled the Mughals from the Indo-Gangetic plains. Victory there let Mughal forces occupy Delhi and then Agra, and Akbar made a triumphant entry where he stayed for a month. Akbar's military reach rested on innovation as much as on victory. He reshaped the mansabdari system into a hierarchical scale of military and civil ranks, and paired it with advances in cannons, fortifications, and the use of elephants. He took a personal interest in matchlocks and used them effectively in his conflicts. To secure advanced firearms and artillery he sought help from the Ottomans and from Europeans, especially the Portuguese and Italians. His vizier Abul Fazl once declared that, with the exception of Turkey, there was perhaps no country in which its guns gave more means of securing the government than India. Scholars and historians have used the term gunpowder empire to explain Mughal success, and Akbar's reach would eventually run from the western sea in Sindh and at Surat well astride central India.

• 4. Conquest And Cruelty

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  In 1567 Akbar attacked the Chittor Fort in Mewar, a fortress-capital that lay on the shortest route from Agra to Gujarat. Udai Singh II retreated into the hills, leaving two Rajput warriors, Jaimal and Patta, to defend the place. Chittorgarh fell in February 1568 after a four-month siege, and Akbar proclaimed it the victory of Islam over infidels. In a dispatch issued on the 9th of March 1575 he wrote that with his blood-thirsty sword he had erased the signs of infidelity and destroyed the temples across Hindustan. He had the surviving defenders and 30,000 non-combatants massacred, their heads displayed on towers throughout the region. Gujarat drew Akbar next, with its rich central plain, its textiles, and the busiest seaports of India. He occupied the capital Ahmedabad in 1572 and was proclaimed lawful sovereign, then crossed Rajputana to reach the city again in eleven days, a journey that normally took six weeks. His outnumbered army won a decisive victory on the 2nd of September 1573, after which he slew the rebel leaders and raised a tower from their severed heads. The conquered province yielded more than five million rupees a year to his treasury. Other campaigns reached Malwa, Garha, Bengal, Kashmir, Sindh, Baluchistan, and the Deccan, where he took Asirgarh Fort on the 17th of January 1601.

• 5. Blood And Alliance

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  Raja Bharmal of the small Kacchwaha kingdom of Amer gave his daughter in marriage to Akbar, an early alliance that lifted Bharmal, his son Bhagwant Das, and his grandson Man Singh to high rank in the imperial court. Akbar broke with older custom. Earlier marriages between Hindu princesses and Muslim kings had failed to build stable ties, because the women were lost to their families and never returned. Akbar instead promised the Rajputs who married daughters or sisters to him equal treatment with his Muslim in-laws, barring only that they could not dine or pray with him or take Muslim wives. He did not insist on marriage as a condition for alliance. When he met the Hada leader Surjan Hada, Surjan agreed to ally only if Akbar would not marry any of his daughters; no matrimonial alliance followed, yet Surjan was made a noble and placed in charge of Garh-Katanga. The political effect ran deep. Rajput women in his harem were generally given full religious freedom, and their Hindu relatives formed a significant part of the nobility, voicing the views of commoners at court. Rajput soldiers and generals led Mughal armies in several campaigns, including the conquest of Gujarat in 1572, becoming the strongest allies of the Mughals.

• 6. The Machinery Of Empire

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  A wazir headed the revenue department, a mir bakshi led the military and gathered intelligence, a mir saman managed the imperial household, and a chief qazi oversaw the judiciary along with religious practice. This division of authority grew out of a deliberate habit. After the death of his foster-brother Adham Khan, Akbar spread power across specialised ministerial posts so no single noble could grow too strong. Land revenue was reformed using a system Akbar borrowed from Sher Shah Suri. An earlier decentralised method of annual assessment bred corruption among local officials and was abandoned in 1580. Its replacement, the dahsala or zabti system, set revenue at one-third of the average produce of the previous ten years, paid to the state in cash. Raja Todar Mal set it out in a detailed memorandum submitted in 1582 to 1583, and peasants won remission when floods or drought ruined the harvest. The army ran on the mansabdari ranks, divided into 33 classes. The top three commands, from 7,000 to 10,000 troops, were normally reserved for princes, while ranks between 10 and 5,000 went to other nobles. Each mansabdar supplied cavalry and kept twice as many horses as riders, so mounts could rest and be replaced quickly in war. Horses were regularly inspected, usually only Arabian horses were used, and these mansabdars were the highest paid military service in the world at the time.

• 7. The House Of Worship

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  In 1575 Akbar built a hall called the Ibadat Khana, the House of Worship, at Fatehpur Sikri, and invited theologians, mystics, and learned courtiers to discuss spirituality. The early debates, limited to Muslims, turned acrimonious, with participants shouting at and abusing one another. Upset by this, Akbar opened the hall to people of all religions and to atheists, and the discussions widened even to the validity of the Quran and the nature of God. He sponsored debates among Sunni, Shia, Ismaili, and Sufi Muslims, Parsis, Shaivite and Vaishnava Hindus, Sikhs, Jains, Jews, Jesuits, and Materialists. He was partial to Sufism and proclaimed that the wisdom of Vedanta is the wisdom of Sufism. His attitude had not always been so open. In 1567, on the advice of Shaikh Abdu'n Nabi, he ordered the exhumation of a Shia buried too close to the grave of a Sunni saint. By the early 1570s, under the influence of pantheistic Sufi mysticism, his outlook shifted away from orthodox Islam. The debates were discontinued in 1582, having bred more bitterness than understanding. From them Akbar drew the conviction that all religions held good practices worth combining. The result was Din-i-Ilahi, a creed valuing generosity, forgiveness, abstinence, prudence, wisdom, kindness, and piety, with no sacred scriptures and no priestly hierarchy. To commemorate it he renamed Prayag to Allahabad in 1583. Some modern scholars argue he never founded a new religion at all, and that the theory arose from erroneous translations of Abul Fazl's work by British historians.

• 8. The Man Behind The Crown

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  Akbar reputedly kept thousands of hunting cheetahs during his reign and trained many of them himself. Believed to be dyslexic, he was read to every day and had a remarkable memory, and he personally catalogued much of his library of works in Sanskrit, Urdu, Persian, Greek, Latin, Arabic, and Kashmiri. His son and heir Jahangir filled his memoirs with effusive praise and dozens of anecdotes of his virtues. Jahangir wrote that Akbar was of the hue of wheat, with black eyes and eyebrows and a rather dark complexion. The Catalan Jesuit Antoni de Montserrat, who visited his court, recorded that one could recognise at first glance that he was King, with broad shoulders, a light brown complexion, and eyes so bright they seemed like a sea shimmering in the sunlight. Montserrat noted a mole between his left nostril and upper lip, and a limp in his left leg though he had never been injured there. Akbar was not tall but powerfully built and very agile. Returning from Malwa to Agra at nineteen, he rode alone ahead of his escort and was charged by a tigress with her cubs; he was said to have killed the animal with a single sword blow, and his attendants found him standing quietly beside it. To test his belief that speech arose from hearing, he raised children in isolation, forbidding anyone to speak to them, and observed that they grew up mute. He was succeeded by his son Prince Salim, later known as Jahangir, and by his death in 1605 there were no signs of discontent among his Muslim subjects.