Akbarnama

• 1. Introduction

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  The Akbarnama is not just a history book. It is the official record of an empire, commissioned by the emperor himself, written by one of his closest allies, and illustrated by no fewer than forty-nine different artists working at the peak of their craft. The man who ordered it, Akbar, was the third Mughal Emperor. The man who wrote it, Abul Fazl, was one of the Nine Jewels of Akbar's royal court. Together, they produced something that took seven years to complete and survives today in lavishly illustrated manuscripts scattered across the world's great collections.

  What drove an emperor to commission his own chronicle? What did Abul Fazl choose to record, and what did he choose to explain? And how did a single volume end up in a South Kensington museum, purchased in 1896 from a widow whose husband had once served as Commissioner of Oudh? These are the threads this documentary will follow.

• 2. Abul Fazl and the Court

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  Abul Fazl held one of the most coveted positions in the Mughal world. As one of the Nine Jewels, the Navaratnas, of Akbar's royal court, he served as both court historian and biographer to the emperor. The Akbarnama was his defining work. He states plainly in the book that it took seven years to complete.

  The text was written in Persian, the literary language of the Mughals. It was not written in isolation but stood in conversation with an earlier work: the Baburnama, the personal memoir of Akbar's grandfather, Babur, who founded the Mughal dynasty. Where the Baburnama was intimate and personal, the Akbarnama was official and comprehensive. The court expected nothing less.

  Abul Fazl's ambition is most visible in the third volume, the Ain-i-Akbari, where he writes in his own words: "It has long been the ambitious desire of my heart to pass in review to some extent, the general conditions of this vast country, and to record the opinions professed by the majority of the learned among the Hindus." He then adds an honest confession: he was not sure whether his motive was love of his native land or exactness of historical research. That ambivalence, preserved verbatim, tells us something about the man behind the chronicle.

• 3. Forty-Nine Artists

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  The original manuscripts were not simply texts. They were visual objects, containing many miniature paintings that illustrated the words on the page. These paintings are thought to have been produced between around 1592 and 1594, representing the finest work of the Mughal school of painting.

  At least forty-nine different artists contributed to the illustrations. They came from Akbar's imperial workshop, and the masters among them pushed the tradition forward. One name stands out in the source: Basawan. His use of portraiture in the illustrations was identified as an innovation in Indian art. In a workshop of dozens, that kind of individual distinction was notable.

  The Victoria and Albert Akbarnama, which eventually made its way to London, contains 116 miniature paintings. Soon after the museum acquired the volume, those paintings and an illuminated frontispiece were removed from the binding and mounted separately for display. What had been a unified illustrated manuscript became a gallery of individual images.

• 4. Birth, Succession, and War

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  The first volume of the Akbarnama covers territory that stretches back well before Akbar's own lifetime. It traces the history of Timur's family, the reigns of Babur and Humayun, and the Suri sultans of Delhi. At its center, though, is the story of Akbar's birth.

  Abul Fazl describes how Humayun, the second Mughal emperor, prayed at the Ka'ba for a successor to the empire. After that prayer, Maryam Makani began to show signs of her pregnancy with Akbar: a shining forehead that others read as a mirror on her face, and a warmth that entered her when light fell on her. She understood that light as God's blessing on herself and her unborn child. Nine months later, while Humayun was away, Maryam gave birth to Akbar under what the chronicle calls an auspicious star, and the birth was met with great celebration.

  The second volume picks up Akbar's reign and carries it forward to 1602. It records how Bairam Khan and Akbar won the battle of Panipat against Hemu, described in the source as an Indian warrior. That victory was formative for the empire, and the Akbarnama preserves the account in detail.

• 5. The Ain-i-Akbari

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  The third volume, the Ain-i-Akbari, stands apart from the first two. While they chronicle events, this volume describes a system: the administrative structure of the Mughal Empire, the household, the army, the revenues, and the geography of the empire. It is famous for the range of its statistical detail, recording things as varied as crop yields, prices, wages, and revenues.

  Abul Fazl also uses this volume to explain Hindu philosophical traditions to a Mughal readership. He covers the six major Hindu schools of thought, as well as the beliefs of the Jains, Buddhists, and Nastikas. He gives accounts of Indian geography, cosmography, and aesthetic thought. Most of this information came from Sanskrit texts, but Abul Fazl admitted openly that he did not know Sanskrit. He is thought to have accessed it through intermediaries, likely Jains who held favor at Akbar's court.

  His approach to explaining Hinduism was deliberately comparative. He tried to relate Hindu concepts to things that Muslim readers could recognize. On the question of idolatry, which orthodox Muslims viewed as one of the gravest sins, he argued that the symbols and images Hindus carry are not idols but serve to keep the mind from wandering, and that only serving and worshipping God is ultimately required. On karma, he wrote: "This is a system of knowledge of an amazing and extraordinary character, in which the learned of Hindustan concur without dissenting opinion." He then organized the effects of karma into four kinds, covering class, disease, fertility, and material fortune. The Ain-i-Akbari is currently housed in the Hazarduari Palace in West Bengal.

• 6. From Jahangir to London

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  After Akbar died in 1605, the manuscript did not leave the imperial family. It passed into the library of his son Jahangir, and later to Shah Jahan. For generations it remained a dynastic possession.

  The path to London was more oblique. The volume that became the Victoria and Albert Akbarnama was acquired by a man whose career in Oudh ended between 1858 and 1862, when he served as Commissioner of that region. Upon his retirement, he acquired the manuscript. After his death, it was his widow, Mrs Frances Clarke, who sold it to the South Kensington Museum in 1896. The South Kensington Museum is now known as the Victoria and Albert Museum.

• 7. Faizi Sirhindi's Rival Account

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  Abul Fazl's Akbarnama was not the only chronicle to carry that name. Shaikh Illahdad Faiz Sirhindi wrote a separate biography of Akbar, though the source is candid about its limitations: it draws heavily from the Tabaqat-i-Akbari of Khwaja Nizam-ud-Din Ahmad and from Abul Fazl's more famous work. The original contributions amount to a few verses and some interesting stories.

  Very little is known about Faizi Sirhindi himself. His father, Mulla Ali Sher Sirhindi, was a scholar, and Khwaja Nizam-ud-Din Ahmad, whose Tabaqat-i-Akbari Faizi Sirhindi drew upon, had been his father's student. Faizi Sirhindi lived in the Sirhind sarkar of Delhi Subah and held a madad-i-ma'ash, a state land grant for maintenance. He began writing his Akbarnama at the age of 36 and, like Abul Fazl's version, brought the account to a close in 1602.

  His most significant independent work was a dictionary called the Madar-ul-Afazil, completed in 1592. His Akbarnama does offer something the more famous chronicle does not: additional detail on the services of his patron, Shaikh Farid Bokhari, who held the post of Bakhshi-ul-Mulk, and valuable information about the siege and capture of Asirgarh.