Complete biography of Akbar

IN the month of November, 1542, Humayun, son of Babur, and successor to the power which that great soldier had built up in northern India was a fugitive, hunted and harassed, in the parched and arid desert of Sind.

Indolent and pleasure-loving, he had lost in a few years all that his father had won, and Sher Shah, the Afghan, now ruled at Delhi while Humayun depended precariously on the chance hospitality of various chiefs, upon whose mercy lie threw himself.

In that month he was the guest of the friendly Raja of Market he lay in camp with a small body of horsemen some distance from the little walled for­tress, while within it his wife Hamida awaited her confinement. On a night of the full moon she gave birth to a son, and the next morning messengers reached Humayun’s camp with the news. Normally such a day would have been spent in celebrations and the giving of presents, but Humayun was pen­niless. Yet some sort of pretence at ceremony there must be, so he col­lected all the valuables that the camp pos­sessed and solemnly presented them to their rightful owners. Then, seated in his tent, he broke a pod of musk over a plate and distributed the grains among his personal followers. “This is all the present I can afford to make you on the birth of my son, whose fame will I trust one day be expanded over the entire world, as the perfume of the musk now fills this tent.” He named the child Akbar, which means “Great.”

The first years of Akbar’s life afforded lit­tle hope that his father’s wish would be fulfilled; indeed seldom can a child have been born into such a hazardous en­vironment. Within a year he had been sepa­rated from his parents, captured by his uncle, Ankara, while Humayun fled westwards to Persia, and taken to Kandahar where his uncle ruled. Thence he was moved to the court of his other uncle Kamran at Kabul. That neither uncle chose quietly to murder him for fear lie might be a potential rival to their ambitions was a lucky exception to the general practice of those days.

Two years later, in 1545, Humayun, with Persian aid, defeated both his brothers and entered Kabul in triumph, where he ruled for the next nine years. But his position was for long insecure and he had to make frequent expeditions to quell revolts. During one of these Kamran reoccupied Kabul, and it is told how, while Humayun was trying to retake the city, Akbar was held aloft on the ramparts as a target for his father’s artil­lery. If the story is true luck was with him, as it was to be so often, for he escaped unscathed.

Humayun was a man of culture, a lover of art and learning, but for long it appeared as if his son would have none of these things. He was given tutors, but obstinately he refused to learn either to read or write. He seemed happy only when he was with animals. Over wild beasts he developed early, an extraordinary power and there were few, however sav­age, that he could not tame to his will. The life that, during these years in Afghanistan, he chose whenever possible to lead was that of a tamer of beasts rather than of the heir to empire. At the age of twelve there were few signs of the embryo statesman, but perhaps those around him wondered what would happen if some day he chose to exert his abnormal will-power over men as well as over animals. For the moment, however, he was, or seemed, no more than a wild untutored boy.

Humayun had never given up hope of regaining his lost empire, and in 1554 he found his’ opportunity. The Afghans who ruled in his stead at Delhi were quar­relling among themselves; Humayun, ac­companied by Akbar, crossed the Indus in December, recovered the Punjab, and finally re-entered Delhi, which he had left in flight fifteen years ear­lier. He made Akbar governor of the Punjab under the tutelage of Bairam Khan, his ablest and most faithful sup­porter; then, suddenly, a year later he died.

So, at the age of thirteen, Akbar was proclaimed emperor. Emperor of what? It is the question that has faced every man who has aspired to make himself ruler in India, and which was to face Akbar, the greatest of them all, to the day of his death. The answer in January, 1556, was “Of very little.” Two armies still held the field in over­whelming superiority against the Mughals, and behind, in Afghanistan, was open in­surrection. One defeat and Akbar would become, like his father before him, a hunted fugitive. Bairam Khan acted with great resolution and marched at once against the vast Hindu-Afghan army under the command of the Hindu Hemu, which had occupied Agra and Delhi. The armies, small but compact against vast but unwieldy, met on the his­toric field of Panipat, three times the scene of battles decisive in Indian history. Hemu’s army was routed and Hemu himself, blinded and unconscious, was dragged before the young emperor. What followed is uncertain; Akbar was bidden by Bairam Khan to strike off the head of his helpless enemy, but whether, as some say, he obeyed eagerly or whether he shrank in disgust from such a deed will never be known. Hemu, by what­ever means, was killed and with his defeat and death resistance collapsed. Akbar was emperor now in more than name; the Mughal power was foremost in northern India.

For the next four years Bairam Khan ruled the country and Akbar’s foster- mother, Maham Anaga, ruled the palace. Akbar seemed content to remain in the background, a cipher emperor. But all the time he was developing, and learning. To the day of his death he remained illiterate, but now he was eager that people should read to him, above all his favourite works-those of the Sufi mystic poets. The choice was signifi­cant, showing the growth of a mind at once highly intelligent and at times despairing of the world as it was. It contrasted strangely with the wild, animal side of his nature, unsubjected as yet to any self-restraint. An incident when he was fifteen illustrates the con­trast. Suddenly violent and self-willed, he demanded one day his favourite horse, vicious and high-mettled, and galloped away alone and furiously into the empty plain that lies around Agra. As suddenly, he dismounted. He fell into a trance and in his own words “com­muned with God.” Presently he awoke to normality, to find himself alone; his horse had galloped away. He waited, uncertain what to do; then he saw in the distance his horse galloping across the plain to him. It was a sign that he must return to the world and find his life’s work therein. The story is Akbar’s; what is important is that he believed in it.

He was learning about people too. Often after night had fallen he would slip out disguised from the palace, to mingle with the crowds in the bazaar, watching their behaviour, particularly the be­haviour of the Hindus. More than any other Mughal ruler he came to realise the point of view of his Hindu subjects. And in the palace he watched the intrigues, the plots and counter-plots of the courtiers who surrounded him, though he gave as yet no sign that he noticed them. Bairam Khan and Maham Anaga regarded him still as a boy; the court’s main fear was lest his reck­less bravery should lead to disaster. He would have two elephants goaded into savagery, then ride one against the other, so that it seemed he must be killed; but no beast was too violent and vicious for him to control. Such was Akbar in 1560.

Court intrigues came to a head in that year. Maham Anaga had grown jealous of the power of Bairam Khan, wishing his place to be held by her own son, Adham Khan. The young Akbar listened to her advice and, moving for safety’s sake to Agra, issued from there a command that Bairam Khan should go on pilgrimage to Mecca. The message that he sent was curt and uncompromising. “I have determined to take the reins of government in my own hands, and it is desirable that you should make the pilgrimage to Mecca, upon which you have been so long intent.” Addressed to one who had served both Akbar and his father so long and on the whole so well, it might have intended deliberately to provoke disobedience. Such was its effect, but Bairam Khan’s rebellion was short-lived. Akbar pardoned him on almost un- heard-of occurrence in those days- but on his way to Mecca the old warrior was murdered. His son, Abdurrahman, was brought to Akbar, protected by him, and became one of his most faithful supporters.

Maham Anaga thought herself tri­umphant; her son would now succeed to the position of first soldier in the land. Akbar seemed to acquiesce in this arrangement, and Adham Khan led an army to subdue the kingdom of Malwa. He succeeded in his task, but he failed to send to Akbar either the booty or the cap­tured women. For the first of many times Akbar acted with unexpected, over­whelming swiftness. Before his foster-brother knew that he had left Agra he appeared in his camp. Taken una­wares Adham Khan begged forgive-ness and on the entreaties of Maham Anaga, received it; but Akbar did not for­give him.

Adham Khan hastened his own doom. His mother grew jealous of a new minister whom Akbar had appointed; Adham Khan stabbed him to death in the palace at Agra. Roused at dead of night from the harem where he was sleep­ing, Akbar confronted the murderer. Adham Khan raised his sword against him, whereupon Akbar struck him sense­less with a single blow on the face. He commanded that he be thrown from the wall of the fort into the moat below. When the servants picked him up from the ground he was not quite dead. Akbar ordered that he be thrown down again and watched while the man who had been his boyhood’s constant com­panion was hurled again to his death. Maham Anaga, prostrated by grief, died six weeks later.

Akbar had asserted himself; those who had sought to dominate him had paid dearly for the attempt. At the age of twenty, emerging-in the words of Abul Fazl, his historian and devoted servant “from behind the veil,” he assumed absolute control of his govern­ment, never to let it go. In the previous two years he had displayed ingratitude and an almost barbarous cruelty, but he had also shown unsuspected powers of swift, decisive action which had brought him to a position which at the time of his father’s death had seemed quite beyond his grasp.

To that power of swift action, allied to great physical strength and to bravery that in anyone else would have been wanton recklessness, he owed the unbroken series of military successes that marked his reign. He seemed always to think quicker, act quicker than his opponents. The semi-independent States of central India-even Chitor, the proudest and most stubborn of them all come under his effective control, and Gujarat, bringing an outlet to the sea. Bengal was his, and Gondwana and Orissa. He never knew defeat in battle and only when in his last years, like his successors and as unwisely, he crossed the river Narbada to add the Deccan to his dominions, did he suffer any sort of check. Such achievement alone would have been sufficient to rank him with the great conquerors of India, but it is as great soldier, states­man and religious enquirer combined that Akbar is unique in Indian history, and in the fact that he realized that India must be united by consent as well as by force if his empire was to survive him.

The keystone of his statesmanship was his conciliation of his Hindu subjects. No previous Muslim con­queror had even thought of such a policy, yet Akbar had already, in 1561, married a princess of Amber, a leading Rajput house. Rapidly he pursued his policy. For many years every Hindu had been forced to pay a pilgrim and a poll tax; both these were now swept away. Hindu princes sat in places of honour at the court at Agra; Tan Sen, the great singer of Gwalior, became one of Akbar’s intimates; later, Todar Mai was to reorganise the finances of the empire, and Man Singh was to become Akbar’s most trusted general. Though he ruthlessly crushed those who opposed his desire to conquer, as when the gallant Rajputs of Chitor were massacred because they had resisted so long and so bravely, he nearly always conciliated after he had crushed. He caused statues to be erected in Delhi to Jaimal, Chitor’s chief defender, and to Patta, the young prince who had perished in the siege.

His most perilous and spectacular military exploit in these early years of his power was his famous march to Gujarat. Rebellion had flared up after that province’s conquest in 1572. It was midsummer and the rebels had no thought that Akbar would attempt the 600 miles march from Agra to Ahmeda- bad through the stifling heat of Raj- putana. Within eleven days he was upon them. At once, though out­numbered, he attacked. In his im­petuosity he outdistanced his followers, found himself, a river at his back, almost alone and faced by a large force of rebels. Without hesitation he charged, and, astounded and terrified, his opponents fled. In a few hours the city had capitulated. Henceforth his enemies in battle were to regard him always as more than human.

In the early years of his reign Akbar made Agra his capital. There two sons were born to him and died in in­fancy. He grew to hate the place and to be fearful of having no heir. A Muslim holy man living in the barren neighbourhood of Sikri prophesied for him three further sons. Shortly after­wards his Hindu wife became pregnant. Akbar sent her to Sikri, where his child and heir, Salim, was born in 1569. Akbar, who did nothing in half measures, began to build there at phenomenal cost the city which for fifteen years was to be his capital, the scene of the richest life, the most splendid court, some of the finest architecture of the age. Even today, deserted for 350 years, Fatehpur Sikri, with its ruined red sandstone walls and palaces, remains one of the wonders of the East.

In the royal stables of this city, bigger than the London of that century, were 5,000 elephants; at the court, painters, richly rewarded, evolved that exquisite styli of painting, half Persian, half Hindu in origin, which we know as the Mughal school; within the city walls it is said that 5,000 women inhabited the Zinnia, awaiting Akbar’s pleasure, while young nobles played polo by night with specially illuminated balls. Fatehpur Sikri became the setting for a display of imperial splendour and at times excess that has seldom been rivalled.

It was the scene also of Akbar’s greatest experiment-the founding of a new religion. He had favoured the Hindus; as the years advanced he came to a hatred of the fanatically orthodox Muslims who aspired to a monopoly of re­ligion. His inquiring, semi-mystic mind revolted against their absolute acceptance of the words of the Koran, and he saw them as the real obstacle in the way of the unification of his empire. Also, and less worthily, he wanted to be its religious as will as secular head.

In 1575 he started religious discus­sions between the various Muslim sects, at which he was the audience. Each speaker drove him further from the religion of his fathers. He preferred what the Hindus taught; it approached nearer to his own secret mysticism; but for a while he preferred to any other doctrine the exciting new creed of Christianity, brought to him by Portu­guese missionaries from Goa. In 1577 the Jesuit Father, Pereira, visited the Mughal court and in 1580 there arrived the first formal mission, led by Aquaviva and Monserrati. Meanwhile Akbar had had himself proclaimed Imam-i-Adil (spiritual head of the empire) and had passed laws forbidding the building of new mosques and the appointment of new Muslim judges. He thereby jeopardised the loyalty of strict Muslims.

For a time it seemed that he would make Christianity his religion. Christian worship was encouraged at Fatehpur Sikri; the Jesuit Fathers were offered riches and honours-which they de­clined-and Murad, Akbar’s second son, was given instruction in the Christian faith. The Fathers themselves thought that they were gaining a convert. But Christianity seemed to Akbar, on closer acquaintance, as intolerant of other faiths as Islam; it was dogmatic, and his mind revolted from dogma of every kind; moreover, it demanded from him a spirit of humility and obedience which he was not in the least prepared to give. The Fathers insisted that he should give up the excesses of his daily life, and on occasions he was himself revolted by them. In the middle of an enormous hunt, when the beasts had been driven in by beaters from a radius of 40 miles, he suddenly ordered the hunt to cease, letting all the animals go free and un­harmed. But he was not prepared to forego his pleasures at the command of others, pleasures that were as much a part of him as his occasional mystical experiences.

So he rejected Christianity, as he did every other established religion, though he encouraged the Jesuits to remain. Dissatisfied with them all, he invented a religion of his own, which he called the Din Ilahi.

Its principles, never very clear, seemed to derive mainly from Hinduism. There was to be one impersonal God, the sun, stars and fire being his manifestations. The objects of all men were to be the conquest of evil and the practice of virtue. In practice it became almost at once a glorification, then a deification of Akbar himself. It survived until Akbar’s death, but it survived only through the personality of its founder. Its active supporters numbered only a handful- Abul Fazl and his brother Faizi, Hindus close to the throne like Raja Birbal and Todar Mai, and, unwillingly, Abdur- rahmin and Man Singh-its opponents were many and bitter. It provoked serious rebellions in Bengal and Afghan­istan, which it took all Akbar’s military genius to quell, and opposition to it rallied its opponents round Salim, the heir to the throne. It was in fact a failure, but it was a magnificent failure, the mistake of a great man who had overreached himself.

Religion was not Akbar’s sole pre­occupation during these brilliant middle years at Fatehpur Sikri. He did much to improve and stabilise the administra­tion of his empire. Unafraid to surround himself with able men as his ministers, he went far towards abolishing the corrupt feudal Jagirdar system. Taxa­tion was no longer farmed out, communi­cations became safer, and later, by giving full rein to the genius of Todar Mai, he allowed the evolution of a system of taxation that was copied centuries later by the British. Judged by the standards of the day, Akbar’s administration was a marvel of en­lightened government. There were hideous poverty and wretchedness, but there was a measure of justice and en­lightenment, as in Akbar’s ban on the burning of widows.

The fifteen years in the “rose-red city” marked the zenith of Akbar’s glory. He lives for us in numerous paintings by Mughal artists of his day, and in the writings of his contemporaries. Almost fair in complexion, burly but not tall, he had small regular features, intensely mobile, a flashing eye, a head carried slightly on one side. The key­note to his temperament was energy that on occasions exploded into unbridled excess of violence. It has been said of I him that “in whatever assemblage of men, he is recognisably the king.” Whether giving audience, gorgeously arrayed, to his nobles or appearing, as he did every day, before the common people, his was an overmastering per­sonality, incalculable but great.

Incalculably he deserted Fatehpur Sikri and made Agra once again his capital. There he was to retain his power and much of his prestige, but his glory was to be dimmed. Success, it is true, still attended him, and Sind and Kashmir were added to his empire, but Muslim discontent grew steadily, as did the disloyalty of Salim. Akbar, like his descendants after him, suffered cruelly from the behaviour of his sons. Murad died from delirium tremens; Daniyal, for long the favourite, became a worthless degenerate; Salim, moody, uncouth, and bitterly jealous of his father, became an open rebel.

By 1593 India north of the river Narbada was Akbar’s; there remained only the Deccan to conquer. In that year Akbar demanded from the ruler of Ahmednagar acknowledgment of his paramountcy, and on the latter’s refusal sent his armies southwards to enforce his demands. It was three years before they achieved any success, and though Ahmednagar then ceded the province of Berar no conclusive victory was achieved. In 1599 Murad, joint com­mander in the Deccan, died, and Akbar, who had hitherto remained at Agra, took command in person. As always his presence brought victory. The great fort of Asirgarh was taken amid scenes of horrible cruelty and Ahmed­nagar itself, gallantly defended by the Princess Chand Bibi, fell in 1600.

But if his presence brought victory, his absence from Agra brought open rebellion by Salim, who proclaimed him­self emperor at Allahabad. Akbar left Abul Fazl in command in the Deccan and returning northwards fore­stalled Salim’s march on Agra. There fol­lowed a stunning blow; Abul Fazl, return­ing north, was ambushed and murdered at Salim’s instigation and his head brought in triumph to Allahabad. In all Akbar’s triumphs and schemes Abul Fazl had been nearest to him of all, his most staunch and unwavering supporter, his dearest and constant friend. Akbar raged against Salim, but either he could not or he would not advance against him. There followed negotia­tions, at the end of which father and son were officially reconciled, but Salim still plotted while a party at court was planning to supplant Salim by his son, Khusru. Finally Akbar, hearing news of a new plot, commanded his son, to come before him; Salim refused and Akbar marched against him. In vain his mother, the aged Hamida Begum, pleaded for her grandson, but less vainly, while Akbar was marching, did she die. Akbar turned back to mourn her (according to Hindu fashion, by shaving his head) at Agra. There he heard also that his third son, Daniyal, was dead.

How could he march against his only surviving son? He relented and Salim was persuaded to submit; but at their meeting Akbar’s pent-up rage and resentment overcame him and he struck him, cursing him, across the face. Salim, cowed before him, was put under arrest, but in a few days Akbar’s rage turned to forgiveness. Salim was pardoned and went free, though not yet assured of the succession to the imperial throne. He had not, however, long to wait. Men who live violently, vividly and emotionally often die suddenly. Akbar was taken ill with dysentery in 1605; the tragedies of the previous years may have hastened his end. In October it became known that he was dying. Some of his last visitors were Jesuit Fathers, still welcome at his court; but he was not to be converted. Finally Salim was summoned. When he reached the sick bed, Akbar could no longer speak, but he made signs that Salim should clothe himself in the imperial turban and gird on the sword of Humayun. The succession was assured. Then after a while, on October 27, he died.

But his empire lived on after him, to be destroyed only by the mad bigotry of his great-grandson, Aurangzeb. The wonder of his age, he does not diminish in stature with the passage of time. Part mystic, part man of action, gentle and cruel, tolerant and self-willed, ascetic and voluptuary, he astonishes us today by the complexity, but still more by the intense force of his character. The hope expressed by his father, that his fame would spread through all the world, has been fulfilled. The child born in poverty and flight in the desert of Sind became Akbar the Great Mughal, one of the great men of the world