A Lamp for the Dark World, page 43
Such was the animosity against the emperor that not all his critics confined their complaints to paper; some dreamt of more direct action. In 1582, the year that brought about the pitiful end of Abdun Nabi and Makhdum-ul-Mulk, the Jesuit Fathers of the first mission left Akbar’s court. Monserrate writes of this journey that he narrowly escaped being murdered by a soldier who, on learning that ‘the priest was a Christian and had been summoned by the King to teach him Christianity . . . plainly declared that, if he got a chance, he would kill not only the Priest but the King as well’.5
Some five years later, Abul Fazl records a murderous attack on a Shia priest called Mulla Ahmad in Lahore. In December 1587, a ‘hot-headed young [Sunni] man’ called Mirza Fulad Beg Barlas, sick and tired of Mulla Ahmad’s discourses on Shias and Sunnis, waylaid the priest and ‘cut off his arm’. It must have been a dark night: Fulad Beg thought he’d cut off Mulla Ahmad’s head, and left. The priest picked up his arm, went to a doctor, and managed to stay alive long enough to have his assailant arrested. Abul Fazl was part of the investigation and writes that even though ‘leading persons’ (that is, Akbar’s women relatives) petitioned for mercy, Fulad Beg was executed – tied to an elephant’s foot and paraded through the city. Mulla Ahmad died of his wounds a little later.
Badauni tells a more revealing tale. Evidently, Fulad Beg had support against the Shia priest – chronograms for his murder included ‘Bravo! the dagger of Steel’ and ‘Hell-fire Pig’. Badauni witnessed Mulla Ahmad’s death and swears that ‘I saw his face look actually like that of a pig’ as he breathed his last. More to the point, Badauni writes that Akbar sent an official to ask Fulad Beg what had possessed him to attack the priest – was it religious zeal? Fulad Beg replied, ‘If zeal for religion had been my motive, I should have turned my hand against a greater one than he.’ No wonder, with the man voicing such a clear threat to Akbar’s own life, that the emperor ignored his harem’s plea for mercy.
But the anger of such men did not die with them. Centuries later, Jawaharlal Nehru wrote of how the Muslim League ‘kept aloof’ from the fourth-centenary celebrations of Akbar’s birth.
It wasn’t only orthodox Muslim opinion that sided against Akbar, however. The Jesuit Fathers of the third mission, led by Father Xavier, believed that God himself was raining punishments upon the heretical emperor: the death of his son, Murad; then a great fire in Lahore that ravaged the palace – so much so, it was said, that ‘gold, silver, and other metals melted . . . [and] ran down the streets like streams of water’.6
Colonial and nationalist historians might have written with modern detachment of Akbar’s heterodoxy, but picked other quarrels with the emperor, condemning his appetite for power, or accusing him of duplicity. Thus, by 1922, J. S. Hoyland and S. N. Banerjee, writing their introduction to Monserrate’s memoirs and comparing Akbar unfavourably with the Mauryan emperor Ashoka, declared that ‘modern researches’ had undone the idea of Akbar as an ideal ‘philosopher-king’: ‘His character with its mixture of ambition and cunning has now been laid bare.’
Among nationalist historians, Akbar and Ashoka may have been two ‘greats’ who united the diversity of newly independent India, but not all historians of this school were able to fully disguise an instinctive suspicion of the Muslim ruler. R. C. Majumdar damns him by exception – the only good man in a dynasty of kings ‘notorious for their religious bigotry’.7 A. L. Srivastava’s censure is more a slip of the pen. In a biography that credits Akbar with establishing ‘national Indian’ schools of every kind, from music to architecture, Srivastava also describes the emperor, in his youth, as a ‘good, though tolerant, Muslim’ – as if the two qualities contradict each other quite naturally.8
And now, a century later, another troop of adversaries rallies against Akbar, politicians, columnists and makers of memes, leaders and foot soldiers of Hindutva straining to strip Akbar of his usual suffix, ‘the great’, and hand it to a more deserving – or, let us say, more Hindu – king, like Hemu or Rana Pratap.
Akbar was not a perfect man, the insan-i-kamil of Abul Fazl’s resplendent prose. His appetite for conquest was, indeed, insatiable, though it is strange to expect anything less from a sixteenth-century monarch.9 He was not above a covert assassination or two; nor above proclaiming his Islamic credentials to Abdullah of Turan while encouraging Muslim clerics in his own court to drink wine.10 For all his reforms of revenue, administration and welfare that so distressed his warlords, for all his controversial experiments with faith, Akbar was not as radical on questions of caste. The emperor is said to have coined the term ‘halalkhor’ (literally, one who eats what is lawful, more broadly, ‘one who earns an honest living’11) for sweepers – that is, Dalits, ‘untouchables’. The name anticipates another, ‘harijan’ (born of God), which the third ‘great’ of Indian history, Mahatma Gandhi, popularized for a while. Both terms carry an air of ineffectual benevolence: neither change in terminology effected a change in the lives of those whom it renamed.12
Akbar was not a perfect man, but he was as great as any man can be, in that he strove for perfection not through power, but through its just exercise. This was what lay at the crux of Akbar’s enquiries into faith. ‘The King was always pondering in his mind which nation has retained the true religion of God; and to this question he constantly gave the most earnest thought’, writes Father Monserrate. The question – How I wish for the coming of some pious man, who will resolve the distractions of my heart! – possessed the emperor, in his solitary meditations, in the gladiatorial combats of the Ibadat Khana, in the perplexing fits that sometimes overtook him.
A less imaginative man might well have remained caught in this imperative, that only one faith can make one empire, but Akbar, striding into storms of ideas and opinions as audaciously as he rode into the monsoon-heavy waters of the Ganga, was not that man. ‘By God’, he once exclaimed when Father Monserrate himself thought he might have gone too far in his criticism of Islam, ‘I am not the man to have my feelings outraged by these things.’ He was, instead, the man to have his intelligence aroused. As men of many faiths argued around him, Akbar stopped looking for the one true belief that would bring peace to all men. Instead, he turned the whole proposition on its head and decided to make that very peace for all, the sulh-i kul, the principle tenet of his rule.
Akbar may not have found one true God, but he had found his way.13
When Akbar took the throne in 1556, writes Stephen Dale, he ‘reigned over, but did not rule, a modest, insecure north Indian state’. It was hardly a few cities – Lahore, Sirhind, Delhi and Agra, and a narrow corridor of land between them. A half-century later, when Akbar died, ‘his conquests and institutional innovations [had] bequeathed to his successors a stable, populous empire, whose wealth dwarfed that of his Safavid and Ottoman contemporaries’.14
The Mughal realm stretched far in space, from Kabul and Kashmir to Burhanpur, from Surat and Sindh to Orissa – and it was the rare foreign court where the wealth and power of the ‘Great Mogor’ was unknown – but it stretched even farther in time. Two and a half centuries after Akbar’s death, in 1857, it was the truncated Mughal court in Delhi that remained the greatest symbolic threat to the British Raj, and today, it is the Mughals, still, who arouse most envy and spleen among votaries of the Hindu Rashtra.
What gave the empire such longevity, such seemingly eternal relevance? Akbar, despite his best efforts, is long gone, along with his dynasty; their appearance in textbooks is being curtailed, the naming of roads after them is contested. But the Akbarnama remains.
As those cries of ‘bravo’ and ‘boo’ rang out, a sympathetic critic came to Abul Fazl and asked him what the point was of writing such a book. ‘Why do you take such pains, and why do you write in such a style? Will one out of thousands come into existence who will read this glorious volume aright, and be instructed by the new magic of its method? From whom do you expect the effectual recognition of the Truth?’ His friend advised the historian to write for a wider market.
As is often the case with writers, Abul Fazl was pleased by the praise but unimpressed by the advice. He was writing for a special audience, for the ‘Unique One of Time’. ‘What have I to do with a crowd?’15
A great deal, as it happens.
It is Abul Fazl whom Harbans Mukhia credits with ‘the construction of “harmony” as the encompassing ideological frame that would remain the keystone of the Mughal state’s legitimacy and its posthumous legacy’. Long after the last Mughal died forlorn in Rangoon, the Akbar and the Mughal empire of Abul Fazl’s book have lived on in the Indian imagination, surviving assaults from every front – not because Abul Fazl valorizes the perfection of one man, but rather because he locates that perfection in the fragile hope of peace for all, a phrase that echoes in the guiding tenet of the Indian dream, once familiar to every Indian schoolchild: unity in diversity.
In Jaunpur, young Banarasidas, budding poet, fell unconscious when he heard that Akbar had died. He was sitting on a staircase when ‘The news struck him like a blow upon the heart’. Banarasi fainted and fell; ‘He cracked his head and began bleeding profusely. / The word “God” slipped from his mouth.’16 His parents were frantic, Banarasi’s mother ran to put burnt cloth to his wound. Outside, meanwhile, the whole city was experiencing Banarasi’s shock and his parents’ panic. ‘The people, bereft of their emperor, felt orphaned and helpless’, the jeweller’s son wrote later. ‘The townsfolk were afraid, / Their hearts troubled, their faces pale with fear.’
Riots broke out and the town shut down. Worried about robberies and insurrections, people locked up their houses and shops, buried their fine clothes and jewels, accounting books and cash. Men put on rough blankets, ‘The women too began to dress plainly.’
As it happens, there was no need to fear. ‘No thieves or robbers were to be seen anywhere, / People were needlessly afraid.’ Peace returned; ‘A letter came from Agra saying that all was well’ – announcing Salim’s accession.
So often while Akbar lived – when he had his epileptic epiphany in Punjab, when he got off his horse during a polo match – rumours of his death or ill health had led to immediate revolts in the more restless pockets of his empire. And yet, so strong was the scaffolding on which Akbar had built his realm that when the emperor did die, his own mighty death did not shake it.
One man, however, was shaken to the core. Banarasi recovered from his wound. Like the rest of Jaunpur, he breathed in relief as the letter announcing Salim’s peaceful succession ‘was read from house to house’. But later on, sitting alone on his terrace, Banarasi had other thoughts.
The seventeen-year-old Jain of eclectic faith had only recently been disappointed by his purchase of a mantra meant to bring gold to his door. Soon after, he had taken to worshipping Shiva. But now he asked himself why: ‘When I swooned and fell, / Shiva did not help me then.’ Banarasi stopped his daily puja to the Lord.
Abul Fazl might have liked the story, and Akbar too: that his death bred doubt in his young subject. Perhaps, they might have said, Akbar’s soul did escape into the world through that patch on his skull. Perhaps his famously, notoriously, adventurous spirit found its way to Jaunpur, flew up to the pensive poet on his roof and whispered in his ear: Question. Doubt. Scandalize.
Notes
Cast of Characters
1. ‘Mirza’ came to mean ‘prince’ or ‘young nobleman’. At this time, however, it was used to identify descendants of Timur. Everyone from Babur to Humayun and his brothers, from Akbar to all his cousins spread far and wide across Central Asia and spilling into Afghanistan, Persia, China and Hindustan would be ‘mirzas’.
2. Anaka means ‘foster mother’.
3. Ataka means ‘foster father’.
4. Koka means ‘milk brother’.
Chapter 1
1. Unless otherwise specified, all quotations from the Akbarnama are from the translation by Henry Beveridge: Abu’l Fazl, The Akbarnama of Abu’l Fazl (completed by Inayatullah), trans. Henry Beveridge, vols 1, 2 and 3 (first published 1902–1939; Low Price Publications, 2017).
2. Occasionally, as here, I have quoted from a more recent translation of the Akbarnama by W. M. Thackston: Abu’l Fazl, The History of Akbar, trans. W. M. Thackston, vols 1–6 (Murty Classical Library of India, Harvard University Press, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020). This phrase appears in volume 5.
3. In the dismissive words of Akbar’s court historian, Abul Fazl.
4. ‘Mirza’ would come to mean ‘prince’ or young nobleman. Thus, for example, a Rajput heir to Amber is referred to as Mirza Raja Jai Singh in Jahangir’s time. At this time, however – and thus in this book – ‘mirza’ denotes a descendant of Timur.
5. Haider Mirza Doghlat, ‘Tarikh-i Rashidi’, in The History of India, As Told by Its Own Historians, trans. H. M. Elliot, vol. 5 (Trübner and Co., 1873). This translation is of extracts from Haider’s history. I have also consulted a translation of the full work by E. Denison Ross.
6. Sometime between October 1507, when Babur made an unsuccessful attempt to conquer Hindustan, and March 1508, when Babur’s first son, Humayun, was born, Babur declared himself ‘padishah’, or emperor, thus distinguishing himself from the profusion of mirzas – Timurid relatives and rivals – in Central Asia and its outskirts. The title was rather more optimistic than true, both in Babur’s case and even more so in that of his luckless son, Humayun, but it stuck through the generations and fulfilled its promise in Akbar.
7. Among the deserters were Muhammad Sultan Mirza, to whom Babur had given Kannauj in fief, along with his sons Ulugh Mirza and Shah Mirza. This was not the first time that these Mirzas and their descendants betrayed Babur’s family, and it would not be the last.
8. The Akbarnama of Abu’l Fazl, vol. 1.
9. Jouher, The Tezkereh al Vakiat, or Private Memoirs of Moghul Emperor Humayun by Jouher, trans. Major Charles Stewart (Oriental Translation Fund, 1832).
10. Ibid.
11. The horse was borrowed from Tardi Beg, of whom – and of whose horses – more follows.
12. Gulbadan, Humayun’s sister, relates this exchange in her memoir of her brother’s tumultuous reign, the Humayun-nama. In it, and not surprisingly, Hindal emerges as the author’s clear favourite. Gulbadan Begum, The History of Humayun (Humayun-nama), trans. Annette S. Beveridge (The Asiatic Society, 1902).
13. The Akbarnama of Abu’l Fazl, vol. 1. Jouher writes that it was Askari who struck Yadgar Nasir with his whip first.
14. Haider Mirza Doghlat, ‘Tarikh-i Rashidi’, trans. H.M. Elliot.
15. It may be that Kamran’s disinclination to fight on his brother’s behalf was at least partly the result of a famous episode from Humayun’s life: that of the water carrier whom he made king. Kannauj was the site of Humayun’s second defeat at Sher Shah’s hands; the first was at Chausa, once again upon the banks of the Ganga. Much of Humayun’s camp – including some of his harem – had been swept into the river by Sher Shah’s advance; one of his daughters drowned, one of his wives was taken prisoner, and Humayun himself only escaped with the help of a water carrier and his buoyant canteens. As a reward, Humayun declared he would seat the man upon his own throne for a day – a flamboyant and eccentric gesture that deserves its pride of place in popular tellings of Humayun’s life and character. At the time, however, and particularly since Sher Shah’s advance upon the capital wasn’t slowing down, it must have appeared like criminal negligence. ‘Gifts and favours of some other kind ought to be the servant’s reward’, wrote Kamran to his brother, plainly irritated. ‘What propriety is there in setting him on the throne? At a time when Shir Khan is near, what kind of affair is this to engage your Majesty?’ (Gulbadan Begum, The History of Humayun). Soon after, Humayun left to battle Sher Shah in Kannauj, and a disgusted Kamran packed up and left for Lahore.
16. Haider minced no words in his rebuke, by his own account:
Formerly, when matters could have been arranged with ease, you put obstacles in the way, by your want of constancy and of purpose. At present it is impossible to achieve anything, without encountering untold difficulties.
I will now lay before you what seems to me your wisest course. It involves great hardships, but it is you who has made hard what was once so easy.
He then proceeded to propose his own conquest of Kashmir. See Mirza Muhammad Haider Dughlat, The Tarikh-i-Rashidi: A History of the Moghuls of Central Asia, trans. E. Denison Ross, ed. N. Elias (Sampson. Low, Marston & Co., 1895).
17. Ibid.
18. Abu’l Fazl, The History of Akbar, vol. 1, trans. W. M. Thackston.
19. Gulbadan notes here a bit of historical revisionism from within the harem. Humayun’s future wife, Hamida Banu Begum, held that the emperor wrote these lines for his brother, Kamran. It is Gulbadan, however, who was at the scene, not Hamida; in the words of her translator, Annette Beveridge, ‘Gulbadan puts the difference of opinion gently but does not surrender, and leaves her readers to draw their own inferences.’
20. Gulbadan tells this story; I have changed its words somewhat, but kept its meaning. Shaikh Ahmad of Jam (1048–1141) was a celebrated Sufi buried in Torbat-e Jam, Iran. Humayun’s mother, Maham, was descended from him, and Humayun’s vision was somewhat tautological, therefore. Any child of Humayun’s would be of the Persian philosopher’s blood.
21. She was named Bakshi Banu.
22. And most of Lahore with them, it seems. Annette Beveridge writes that 200,000 men and women are said to have fled the city at news of Sher Shah’s approach. See Gulbadan Begum, The History of Humayun.
23. The courtier is quoted in Ali Anooshahr, ‘The King Who Would Be Man: The Gender Roles of the Warrior King in Early Mughal History’, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, vol. 18, no. 3, 2008.
24. Nizamuddin Ahmad, ‘Tabakat-i Akbari’, in The History of India, As Told by Its Own Historians, trans. H. M. Elliot, vol. 5 (Trübner and Co., 1873).
