Akbar The Great Mughal by Ira Mukhoty
Akbar The Great Mughal by Ira Mukhoty
Akbar The Great Mughal by Ira Mukhoty
Daughters of the Sun: Empresses, Queens and Begums of the Mughal Empire Heroines: Powerful
Indian Women of Myth and History
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THE MUGHALS
Babur (1483–1530): Founder and first Padshah of the Mughal Empire,
Akbar’s grandfather. A direct descendant of Timur.
Bairam Khan (1501–1561): Persian nobleman from the time of Humayun.
Was wakil-e-saltanat and khankhanan during Akbar’s reign. Talented
general who worked tirelessly to protect the empire when Akbar became
Padshah at the age of thirteen. As Akbar began to take more interest in the
running of his empire, he began to chafe under Bairam Khan’s guardianship
and had him dismissed in 1560. He was assassinated en route to Mecca.
Munim Khan (d. 1575): Chaghatai nobleman from the time of Humayun.
Ataliq of Akbar. Influential after the defeat of Bairam Khan, and was made
khankhanan for a while. Defeated Daud Khan Afghan, and later died in
Bengal.
Humayun (1508–1556): Son of Babur, second of the Great Mughals of
India, Akbar’s father. Had to fight his three brothers, Kamran, Askari, and
Hindal, as well as Sher Shah Sur, when he became Padshah of Hindustan.
Lost the empire inherited from Babur, the founder of the Mughal Empire,
and went into exile to Persia. Eventually reclaimed India but died within six
months of returning to power, falling down the stairs of his library.
Bega Begum (1511–1582): Senior wife of Humayun, known as Haji
Begum after she completed the hajj. Remained in Delhi after the death of
Humayun and supervised the building of Humayun’s tomb.
Gulbadan (1523–1603): Daughter of Babur and sister of Humayun.
Accompanied Akbar to Hindustan and lived a long and adventurous life,
performing a women-only hajj that lasted seven years. Greatly loved and
admired by Akbar. Was asked by Akbar to write an account of her brother’s
life. This account was the first one by a Mughal woman and gave an
unprecedented look into the Mughal harem.
Hamida Banu Begum (1527–1604): Persian wife of Humayun and mother
of Akbar. Very influential, especially once Akbar became Padshah at the
age of thirteen. Was given the title Maryam Makani.
Maham Anaga (d. 1562): Akbar’s milk mother, Adham Khan’s mother.
Participated in the fall from power of Bairam Khan. Was considered
effective ‘ruler’ of Hindustan between 1560 and her death in 1562.
Adham Khan (1531–1562): Milk brother of Akbar, son of Maham Anaga.
Resented the curtailing of his powers by Akbar. Was killed on Akbar’s
orders for having murdered Shamsuddin Ataka Khan.
Salima Sultan Begum (1539–1612): Granddaughter of Babur and wife of
Bairam Khan. Akbar married her after Bairam Khan was killed. Influential,
erudite, and a keen collector of books. Greatly respected by her stepson
Salim.
Mirza Muhammad Hakim (1553–1585): Son of Humayun and
Mahchuchak Begum, half-brother of Akbar. Held the appanage of Kabul.
Tried to declare himself the legitimate Timurid heir of Humayun in the
1580s, with the support of the rebellious Uzbeks. Positioned himself as an
orthodox Sunni ruler as opposed to Akbar’s eclectic religious views. Was
defeated by Akbar in 1582 and died of alcoholism in 1585.
Shamsuddin Muhammad Ataka Khan Ghaznavi (d. 1562): Foster father
of Akbar and husband of Jiji Anaga. Held the high post of khankhanan. Part
of the large Ataka Khail. Became powerful after the fall of Bairam Khan.
Was murdered by Adham Khan.
Jiji Anaga (d. 1600): Milk mother of Akbar, mother of Aziz Koka, wife of
Shamsuddin Ataka. Her large and influential family were collectively
known as the Ataka Khail.
Mirza Aziz Koka (1542–1624): Milk brother of Akbar, titled khan azam or
azam khan. Favourite of Akbar’s due to the Padshah’s love for his mother,
Jiji Anaga. An orthodox Muslim man, initially critical of Akbar’s religious
policies. Went to Mecca because he was angry with Akbar but returned
chastised and became a disciple of Akbar’s sulh kul. Survived into
Jahangir’s reign.
Abdur Rahim (1556–1627): Son of Bairam Khan and his Mewati wife.
Distinguished courtier and khankhanan at Akbar’s court, ataliq to Salim,
accomplished poet, and a great patron of poetry and literature. Was sent to
the Deccan on campaigns with Murad, then Daniyal. Akbar gave him the
title ‘Mirza Khan’.
Salim (1569–1627): Akbar’s eldest son, called Shaikhu Baba by his father.
Initially the chosen heir, and favoured by Akbar. Always had the support of
the powerful women of the Mughal harem such as Salima Sultan Begum,
Hamida Banu, and Gulbadan. Gradually started gathering his own coterie of
disaffected noblemen as Akbar began favouring his other sons and
grandsons. Rebelled in 1600 and set up an independent court at Allahabad.
Forgiven by Akbar, he became Padshah Jahangir upon the death of his
father in 1605.
Murad (1570–1599): Akbar’s son. Sent to the Deccan to subdue
Ahmadnagar. Died of alcoholism.
Daniyal (1572–1605): Akbar’s son, died of alcoholism.
Khusrau (1587–1622): Salim and Man Bai’s son. Supported by an alliance
of Aziz Koka and Man Singh to oppose Salim’s claim to the throne.
Khurram (1592–1666): Salim and Jagat Gosain’s son. Akbar’s favourite
grandson. The future Padshah Shah Jahan.
THE RAJPUTS
Raja Bharmal Kachhwaha (1498–1574): Ruler of Amer, father of Harkha
Bai. Arguably changed the fortunes of the Kachhwahas by marrying a
daughter to Akbar. Officer at the Mughal court.
Raja Bhagwant Das (1527–1589): Son of Raja Bharmal. Became a high
mansabdar and was appointed guardian of the harem at the end of his life.
Harkha Bai Kachhwaha (1542–1623): Akbar’s first Rajput wife, mother
of Salim, daughter of Raja Bharmal, and aunt of Raja Man Singh. Brought
Rajput traditions into the Mughal harem. Survived Akbar and was known
by her title Maryam uz Zamani.
Kuar (later Raja) Man Singh (1550–1614): Son of Bhagwant Das. A
favourite of Akbar’s, who called him farzand (son). Became one of the
highest noblemen of the empire, with a mansab of 7,000. Defeated Rana
Pratap at the Battle of Haldighati. Instrumental in subduing Bengal, Orissa,
and Bihar. Great patron of architecture—built the Govardhan Temple in
Mathura and Rohtas Fort in Bihar.
Man Bai (1570–1604): Daughter of Bhagwant Das. Named Shah Begum
after her marriage to Prince Salim. Khusrau’s mother.
COURTIERS
Tansen (1500–1586): Musician from Gwalior who was called to Akbar’s
court. Akbar’s favourite musician, composer of many lyrics in Brajbhasha.
Shaikh Mubarak (1505-1593): Father of Abu’l Fazl and Faizi. A man of
great learning and religiosity. Initially an orthodox theologian, he later
became attracted to Sufism and the ideas of the Mahdavis. Joined Akbar’s
court in 1573 and was instrumental in introducing the Padshah to the ideas
of scholar and philosopher Ibn Arabi, amongst others.
Raja Birbal (1528–1586): Hindu courtier and great favourite of Akbar.
Often distinguished by personal marks of favour by Akbar. A talented poet,
he held the title Kavi Rai. Died during the Yusufzai campaign in 1586, and
was deeply mourned by the Padshah. The only Hindu to become a disciple
of Akbar’s sulh kul.
Abd al-Qadir Badauni (1540–1605): Mughal courtier and orthodox Sunni
Muslim, Badauni was highly disapproving of Akbar’s religious policies and
wrote a covert, critical biography of Akbar’s reign. He was also the most
prolific translator of Akbar’s ateliers, participating in the translation of
various works from Sanskrit to Persian, including the Mahabharat and the
Ramayan.
Abu’l Fazl (1551–1602): Son of Shaikh Mubarak, Abu’l Fazl was a
brilliant scholar educated primarily by his father. He joined Akbar’s court in
1574 and participated in the ibadat khana discussions where he used his
great learning to humiliate the ulema. He wrote the Akbarnama and the Ain-
i Akbari, in which he detailed his ideas, including the Ibn Arabi notion of
the ruler as a perfect man. His influence on Akbar was resented by many,
including by Akbar’s son, Salim, who had him assassinated by Bir Singh
Deo.
Abu’l Faiz (1547–1595): Son of Shaikh Mubarak and elder brother of
Abu’l Fazl. Known by his pen name Faizi. A Persian poet and a scholar, he
became poet laureate of Akbar’s court in 1588, and was appointed tutor to
Akbar’s sons.
Raja Todar Mal (d. 1589): Supremely talented Hindu finance minister.
Brought in many changes to the revenue collection of the state, making it
more efficient and profitable.
Fath Allah Shirazi: A learned Shia scholar from Iran, who first served at
the court of Ali Adil Shah of Bijapur before joining Akbar’s court. An
erudite and knowledgeable man, he was a great favourite of Akbar’s and
was instrumental in introducing financial reforms in revenue collection
alongside Raja Todar Mal. He was named joint wazir along with the raja.
JESUITS
Anthony Monserrate and Rudolf Acquaviva: Part of the First Jesuit
Mission. They tried for many years to convert Akbar to Christianity, and
finally left disappointed. They left behind their observations on Akbar and
the Mughal court and influenced the art of Hindustan.
*Akbar’s courtier and author of the biography of the emperor, the Akbarnama.
†The word Hindustan had been in use in Persia since the third century bce to refer to the land lying
beyond the river Sindh, or Indus (pronounced Hind). The Mughals, therefore, referred to the land
they came to rule as Hindustan (Hind-Stan), as a geographic and ethnic term, not a religious one. In
this book, I have used the word Hindustan since it is the one the Mughals used, rather than India,
used by the ancient Greek (Indike) and Latin (India) writers.
*In Arabic.
*Akbar is regarded by scholars as an Indian ruler despite the Central Asian origins of the Mughal
dynasty because he was born, ruled, and died in the Indian subcontinent.
†Historians are agreed that the Mauryan and Mughal empires were the two largest Indianempires in
the subcontinent. However, it should be noted that it is difficult to calculate their areas since there
were no cartographic boundaries during those periods.
*The terms Turkic, Turk, Turki all refer to the people who spoke various dialects of Turkish (Turki).
The region they occupied ranged from the Oxus River, Central Asia, up to the western frontiers of
China. See Richard Eaton, India in the Persianate Age.
†Land of Islam.
*Indian Muslims.
†A clan of Indian Muslims, considered brave warriors but with a reputation till then of being brusque
and rough-mannered.
‡A courtier at Akbar’s court, he disapproved of Akbar’s religious policies and wrote a covert, critical
account of his reign. He was the most prolific translator of Akbar’s ateliers.
*Slave-boys.
PART 1
*Also known as ‘Timur the lame’ due to an injury to his leg, and as Tamarlane.
*Amir and beg could be compared to the title of ‘lord’, whereas ‘khan’ would have been used only
for a monarch.
*The sharia is Islam’s legal system deriving from the Koran, and the fatwas—the rulings of Islamic
scholars.
*Title for a Timurid prince or nobleman.
*Babur claimed the title of Shah, or Padshah, while his ancestors had not taken a title greater than
amir.
†To Babur’s great chagrin, Ibrahim Lodi’s mother was unmoved by his largesse and tried to have him
poisoned.
*Turki-speaking Timurid–Chaghatai Sunnis.
*Land grant of the revenue of a village or district.
*This figure is considered inflated by other historians including Sanjay Subrahmanyam and Ashok V.
Desai.
*The system whereby the first-born son of a ruler automatically inherited the throne upon the death
of the monarch.
†Sermon delivered from a pulpit by a Muslim preacher during Friday prayers. A new monarch would
have his name recited on the first day after his coronation ceremony.
*At this stage all three brothers opposed Humayun though Hindal, youngest of the siblings, would
soon come over to Humayun’s camp.
*Akbar’s foster father.
†A post equivalent to chief minister.
BRIDE IN THE DESERT
The desperate wanderings that Humayun was forced into through the
betrayals of his brothers and the genius of Sher Shah Sur, however, brought
about a chance encounter that would change the very shape of the Mughal
Empire. In a town in Sind, Humayun met a young woman from a Persian
family, Hamida Banu Begum, and decided to make her his wife.
Hamida Banu was only fourteen years old when she received the
proposal from the much older wandering Padshah. She maintained a
staunch, dignified resistance for forty days, during which Humayun’s
stepmother, Dildar Begum, gently encouraged the young girl to consider the
proposal. Hamida Banu ‘resisted and discussed and disagreed’ but finally it
was settled and Humayun ‘took the astrolabe into his own blessed hand and,
having chosen a propitious hour’, the marriage was celebrated. The bride
was, after all, from the family of Ahmad of Jam, just as Humayun had
envisioned in a dream, and the planets, it seemed, were finally aligned for
glory.
Nevertheless, the immediate future of Humayun’s small party was
decidedly more grim. They wandered the inhospitable lands of Jodhpur and
Jaisalmer, whose local chieftains refused them help, and ‘the country
through which they fled being an entire sandy desert’, we are told by the
medieval historian Ferishta, ‘the troops began to be in the utmost distress
for water. Some ran mad, others fell down dead; nothing was heard but
dreadful screams and lamentations.’ Hamida Banu, now pregnant with her
first child, rode alongside her husband, while their few remaining soldiers
ran beside the horses. Horses were scarce at this point and when Humayun
asked to borrow a horse from one of his noblemen, Tardi Beg, ‘so
ungenerous was this man and so low was royalty fallen, that he refused to
comply with his request’. The historian William Erskine has a more
generous assessment of Tardi Beg who, he believes, ‘was a rough old
soldier, who kept his own men and cattle in order, and resented any attempt
to make him liable for the faults and negligence of others’. But, at last, on a
foetid day in August, the party arrived at a small desert town Umerkot
where the ruler of the town, Rana Prasad, gave them a gracious welcome.
After two months in Umerkot, Humayun rode away under a waxing
moon towards Bhakkar* with the rana, while Hamida Banu was left behind
in the fort with the rest of the harem under the charge of her brother,
Khwaja Muazzam. The most senior woman of the household at this time
was Khanzada Begum, eldest sister of Babur. Three days later, on the full
moon night of 15 October 1542, Hamida Banu delivered a baby boy. ‘The
moon was in Leo,’ wrote Gulbadan, ‘it was of a very good omen that the
birth was in a fixed Sign.’ This brisk account of the birth of the future
Shadow of God was not, however, expansive enough for Abu’l Fazl. In his
chronicle of the Padshah’s life, the Akbarnama, the event is much more
precisely placed within a cosmological framework that concorded with the
radiant destiny of this infant boy. As Hamida Banu laboured to deliver her
child, wrote Abu’l Fazl, the astrologer, Maulana Chand, ‘was perturbed as
the moment was inauspicious. “In a short time, a glorious moment will
arrive, such as does not happen once in a thousand years,”’ he assured the
doubtful women, and urged them to delay the labour. Fortuitously, at that
very moment, a particularly homely-looking midwife walked into the room,
so disgusting Hamida Banu that her labours were arrested. And so it
happened that a commonplace hour was averted and Hamida Banu did
indeed give birth to Akbar at Maulana Chand’s ‘glorious moment’. A
runner was sent to convey the good news to Humayun who, according to
much later accounts from Akbar’s court, ‘fell a’dancing, and from excess of
exultation, revolved with a circular motion’ because he had realized that the
‘horoscope of this Light of Fortune was superior, in several respects and by
sundry degrees, to that of his Majesty, the Lord of Conjunction (Timur)’.
Humayun then broke a pod of musk and distributed it amongst his amirs
saying; ‘This is all the present I can afford to make you on the birth of my
son, whose fame will, I trust, be one day expanded all over the worlds as
the perfume of the musk now fills this apartment.’
In Umerkot, a veritable tribe of women was now appointed to suckle the
infant. Jiji Anaga, wife of Shamsuddin Muhammad of Ghazni, was singled
out for this important and highly coveted task. This was done in gratitude,
for her husband had saved Humayun from drowning at the battle of Kanauj.
These women were to supply not only their life-giving milk but also, it was
believed, some of their virtuous qualities. But Jiji Anaga was not
immediately able to suckle the newborn as she was herself pregnant with
the future Mirza Aziz Koka, Akbar’s milk brother. At least ten additional
women were listed as having suckled Akbar, including one Hindu woman,
Bibi Rupa. In charge of all these women was Maham Anaga, the
superintendent of the milk nurses, who also had with her Adham Khan, her
ten-year-old son. All these women and children would surround Akbar with
fierce love and careful tenderness and many would walk alongside him,
sharing his destiny, far into the future. Some had blazing careers at his court
and one, Jiji Anaga, was so loved by Akbar that at her death, half a century
later, his grief for her would be more extravagant than that for any other
woman save his own mother.
A summons soon arrived from the eager Humayun who had pitched
camp in a large garden in the town of Jun in Sind and, when Akbar was less
than two months old, the Mughal party departed from Umerkot. Hamida
Banu travelled with her baby in a litter, described by a later traveller as a
‘takht revan’, a wooden box with latticed sides, covered with hides and
fixed upon two poles which were carried by mules. The party arrived in Jun
on 20 December 1542, and Humayun’s many hardships must have felt
somewhat diminished when he took his son in his arms for the first time
and kissed him on the forehead. The Mughal party remained in Jun for a
few months, all the while losing supporters who left brazenly in a show of
bad humour or skulked away in secrecy. Even more worrying was news that
Kamran and Askari were jointly planning to conquer Kandahar, at that point
held in Humayun’s name by Hindal. Hindal, most amenable of Humayun’s
brothers, beloved of his sisters, was known to be easily influenced by his
brothers. There was, however, occasion for rejoicing when one of Babur’s
soldiers from the Turkoman Qaraqoyunlu clan, Bairam Khan, came to join
forces with Humayun. The Padshah, it was reported, was ‘much rejoiced by
the arrival of so celebrated a character’. And, indeed, the fortuitous
reappearance of this talented general and shrewd strategist would ensure the
future of the empire. But desperate now for the support of his brothers,
Humayun turned to the one person he believed might still hold some sway
over these recalcitrant siblings, his aunt and eldest kinswoman, Khanzada
Begum. So, at the age of sixty-four, Khanzada Begum bravely made the
journey north through almost a thousand miles of rough terrain, marauders,
and enemies, to reason with her nephews in the name of her brother, the
Padshah Babur.
By this time, the Governor of Sind had grown tired of his unwelcome
guest and, in July 1543, the Mughal cortège headed towards Kandahar. ‘The
people of Hindustan,’ muttered their disenchanted Padshah, ‘have an
extraordinary mode of evincing their fidelity’, as his entourage continued to
be depleted by occasional desertions. When a few months later, he heard
that his brother Askari was galloping towards them with 2,000 soldiers,
Humayun realized that Hindustan was now lost. Instead of heading to
Kandahar, he decided to head for Persia, to seek asylum at the court of Shah
Tahmasp.
Regarding the decision to leave Akbar behind in Hindustan, the
accounts vary in the details. According to Gulbadan, who would have heard
about the events from Hamida Banu herself, the imminent arrival of Askari
precipitated such a frenzy that though Khwaja Muazzam and Bairam Khan
were able to get Hamida Banu onto a horse to follow Humayun, ‘there was
not a chink of time in which to take the emperor Jalal-ud-din Muhammad
Akbar’. According to Jauhar, who was present at the time, it was Humayun
who found it ‘requisite’ to leave the young prince behind. According to
Nizamuddin Ahmad, a court historian of Akbar’s who was not present at
the event, ‘the weather was very hot, so he [Akbar] was left behind’—a
somewhat startling declaration given the lateness of the year and the
proximity to Kandahar. Abu’l Fazl himself sweepingly assured readers that
Humayun would have realized that Akbar was ‘under the protection of
Divine love’. What is certain is that Humayun rode away to Persia with a
very small cortège of some thirty or forty persons, which included only two
women, one of whom was Hamida Banu. It seems surprising, given Akbar’s
tender age, that his mother did not remain with him. The accounts all agree
that Humayun summoned Hamida Banu as soon as he realized he would
have to ride away and she, as a young bride of only sixteen, may not have
felt she had real choice in the matter. But that she may have had conflicted
feelings, maybe even regret, about this decision seems to be reflected in the
fact that she is the only one to have said, via Gulbadan, that there was such
an urgency to leave that it was out of her control that Akbar got left behind.
Akbar had with him the remainder of the Mughal party, including the
milk mothers who would always watch over him with such dedicated
ferocity that they would even endanger their lives to ensure his safety.
Askari arrived at the camp looking for Humayun, but he was told that ‘he
went hunting long ago’. So Askari ordered that the young Akbar be taken to
Kandahar, where he was handed over to the care of Askari’s wife, Sultanam
Begum, who doted on him.
For the next year, he remained in Kandahar, surrounded by his milk
mothers, kokas (milk brothers), and foster fathers. As the young child grew
up realizing he was effectively a hostage of his uncles while his parents
remained untraceable, it was not surprising that as a young man he would
have an unassailable faith in these foster families and would speak of a
‘river of milk’, a precious bond that he would never betray. For many of
these women, Turki was their native language and Akbar would have grown
up hearing this language spoken around him in addition to courtly Persian
and the Arabic of the Koran. Akbar remembered an incident decades later
in which Maham Anaga reminded Askari of a Turki custom in which when
a child first learns to walk, his father strikes the child with his turban,
causing him to fall, thus warding off the evil eye. Askari agreed to perform
this duty in lieu of his absent brother and Akbar reminisced that ‘this
striking and falling, are visibly before me’.
When Kamran heard in the winter of 1544 that Humayun was marching
back towards Kandahar, he understood that the circumstances had
irrevocably changed. Unlike the fugitive Padshah he had hounded out of
Hindustan, this Humayun was now returning at the head of 14,000
horsemen with the blessings of the Shah of Persia himself. Included among
the troops were noblemen of distinguished lineage, outstanding for their
bravery, who would hold high positions later at Akbar’s court such as the
Uzbek chief, Haidar Sultan Shaibani, and his sons, Ali Quli Khan and
Bahadur Khan. It was at this critical juncture that Askari panicked and
when he received his brother Kamran’s demand for Humayun’s children, he
hastily sent Akbar and his half-sister Bakshi Banu on their perilous journey
to Kabul. There they were reunited with the elderly Khanzada Begum, who
wept as she held the cherished boy in her arms and kissed his hands and
feet. ‘They are the very hands and feet of my brother the Emperor Babur,’
sobbed the old woman, who still grieved for her beloved younger brother,
dead fourteen years previously. ‘He is like him altogether.’ Also present in
Kabul were Akbar’s young aunt, Gulbadan, his stepmother, Bega Begum,
who had been sent back by Sher Shah Sur, and several of Babur’s widows.
The children spent a few months in Kabul with Kamran and Akbar
remembered another episode that dated back to this time. A kettledrum had
been gifted to Kamran’s son, Mirza Ibrahim, but the young Akbar wanted it
too. Kamran thought it would be amusing to have the boys wrestle for the
drum, no doubt counting on the strength of his older son to defeat Akbar
and thereby humiliate his nephew, who was becoming an increasingly
unwelcome presence. For there was no stronger reminder of the threat that
Humayun posed than his son, Akbar and Kamran therefore did not look
upon Akbar with favour and was hoping he would be shown his place by
Mirza Ibrahim. To the utter discomfiture of Kamran, on this occasion, the
two-and-a-half-year-old Akbar grabbed his older cousin by the waist, lifted
him up, and threw him to the ground. When Akbar strode around beating
the little kettledrum, to the amusement of his indulgent servants, Kamran, in
a fit of petulance, ordered the child to be weaned immediately. While this
may appear to us to be relatively old for a child to be weaned, it was quite
the custom for children then to be suckled till the age of five. Moreover,
Kamran would have been depriving the motherless Akbar of the comfort of
his milk mothers. What was surprising, however, was the boisterous
strength and confidence of the child Akbar, traits which would survive into
adulthood, much magnified.
As Humayun marched back to reclaim his empire, he first seized
Kandahar where he defeated Askari. Askari would eventually be exiled to
Mecca, where he would die. Hindal, youngest of Humayun’s brothers, came
over to the Padshah’s camp and Humayun finally marched towards Kabul
and Kamran deserted the city. Heralded by drummers, Humayun rode into
the city in November 1544 in the middle of the night and Akbar was finally
reunited with his grateful father. ‘Merely to look at him,’ wrote Gulbadan
about Humayun, ‘eased the sorrow-stricken heart.’ Another woman was
added to the Mughal household when Humayun took a new wife, a woman
named Mah-chuchak Begum, who would bear him four daughters and two
sons over the next ten years. There were also two new additions Humayun
brought back with him from Persia who would alter the artistic landscape of
Hindustan forever.
Shah Tahmasp, though he had enjoyed a robust, libertine adolescence,
had recently gone through a phase of tawba, or repentance. Though still
only in his twenties, a young man with penetrating eyes and a luxurious
auburn beard, he had banned alcohol, gambling, prostitution and, to
Hindustani arts’ eternal gratitude, painting, from his realm. So a short while
after his arrival at Kabul, Humayun was able to send invitations to two
Persian painters, Mir Sayyid Ali and Abd al-Samad, whom Shah Tahmasp
would release from his own ateliers. According to legend, Mir Sayyid Ali
had impressed the Mughal Padshah with the admittedly awe-inspiring skill
of painting a polo match on a grain of rice, complete with goal posts and
four horsemen. As art historian J. M. Rogers describes it, the employment
of two expensive artists by Humayun when he was so reduced in
circumstances, with his empire still only a dream, was a considerable act of
faith and passion.
In the joyful Mughal household, meanwhile, celebrations continued for
days, with prayers, and raucous gatherings, and games, music, and dance.
Humayun sent for Hamida Banu, who had been left behind in Kandahar and
wishing to see if Akbar would recognize his mother instructed all the
women of the harem to dress in a similar manner. The women wore several
layers of woollen robes, cinched loosely at the waist, long, loose sleeves,
and high Turki caps. Akbar was brought in on a servant’s shoulders and
placed on a diwan. Then, to loud shouts and exclamations, the robust and
ruddy little boy rushed into his waiting mother’s grateful arms.
The province of Kabul had been described by Akbar’s grandfather,
Babur, when he had made it his capital in 1504. He described the fortress
citadel as being ‘situated in an exceptionally elevated place with
wonderfully good air. It overlooks the large lake and three meadows…
which when green make a beautiful sight.’ He also wrote of a more dubious
spot in an orchard by a canal where ‘much debauchery is indulged in’. In
1545 the Mughal party may also have seen some of the trees Babur
experimented with—a sour cherry sapling, sugarcane plants, banana trees,
in addition to the local species—apricot, quince, pear, peach, and almond
trees. A place of pilgrimage would have been Babur’s last resting place—a
grave open to the skies in his favourite garden, the Bagh-e-Babur, where he
lies to this day.
A circumcision ceremony was now held for the young prince for which
all the bazaars and halls and gardens were elaborately decorated. The
circumcision ceremony was an important rite of passage for Mughal
princes, signalling the end of their infancy and their inclusion in the public
spectacle of Mughal imperial life. Neighbouring noblemen were invited and
tent halls were set up in gardens under the cold sky, watched by slow-
winged kites. Kabul’s marketplaces and boulevards were all decorated as
well and food and drink were consumed over days of festivities. The
banquet would have included biryan (from a Persian word meaning frying
or roasting), which was a special dish in which the meat of a Dashmandi
sheep would have been cooked with ghee, saffron, cloves, pepper, and
cumin seeds. There would have been various kinds of kebabs and perhaps
even sanbusa (samosa), or qutab as it was called in Turki. There would
almost certainly have been pilau, a Central Asian speciality cooked in oil
from the fatty tails of sheep, as described by a mid-nineteenth century
European traveller:
A few spoonfuls of fat are melted…in a vessel, and as soon as it is
quite hot, the meat, cut up into small pieces, is thrown in. When
these are in part fried, water is poured upon it to the depth of about
three fingers and it is left slowly boiling until the meat is soft;
pepper and thinly sliced carrots are then added, and on top of these
ingredients is put a layer of rice, after it has been freed from its
mucilaginous parts. Some more water is added, and as soon as it has
been absorbed by the rice the fire is lessened, and the pot, well-
closed, is left over the red-hot coals, until the rice, meat, carrots are
thoroughly cooked in the steam. After half an hour the lid is opened,
and the food served in such a way that the different layers lie
separately in the dish, first the rice, floating in fat, then the carrots
and the meat at the top, with which the meal is begun.
Rather than this hearty recipe, the pilau cooked would have been the more
refined Persian variety, developed under the Abbasid caliphs of Baghdad.
Food historian Lizzie Collingham writes that the highly aromatic dish was
cooked using numerous additions: ‘fruit pilaus, turmeric and saffron ones,
chicken pilaus for special occasions; some varied by the addition of onion
and garlic, or with raisin and almonds, and others varied by the color of the
rice’. Since barley and wheat were the crops of Persia, and rice a luxury
from India, this dish grew as a way in which to make this expensive main
ingredient a centrepiece of the meal, not simply a side dish.
The women gathered in the gardens of Bega Begum, Humayun’s first
wife, resilient and outspoken and the most senior of the Mughal women as
Khanzada Begum had recently died, and decorated the place in a ‘new
fashion’ according to Gulbadan, possibly inspired by Hamida Banu’s long
sojourn in Persia. Even the food they now ate may have had a fragrance of
the great banquets Hamida Banu and Humayun had enjoyed in Persia,
where they had been feted with ‘fine sherbets of lemon and rosewater,
cooled with snow…preserves of watermelon, grapes and other fruits, with
white bread’.
The decade that Humayun and Akbar would spend in Kabul was not a
time of arid ‘exile’, which was often the narrative of nineteenth-century
British historians like Mountstuart Elphinstone or H. M. Elliot. It was a
time charmed by bracing creativity in which various subterranean streams
of legitimacy and art were adopted to form the very beginning of Mughal
art and culture. Art historian Laura E. Parodi has shown that the Kabul
years were essential to the development of the Mughal school, and that this
movement began very early in Humayun’s reign. From 1545 onwards,
Humayun established a fully-fledged kitab khana which employed
Khurasani trained artists who, it is now believed, probably worked for
Humayun from an even earlier time, predating his Persian interlude. There
was another artist with Humayun in Kabul, Dust Muhammad of Herat, also
intriguingly known as Dust-e Divana, or Dust the Fool. The chronicler
Bayazid Bayat wrote about Dust Muhammad’s ‘fondness for wine, which
he was unable to give up’ but which he was now able to continue at
Humayun’s more indulgent court.
Amidst the brooding chinar trees and flushed pomegranate blossoms of
Kabul, Dust Muhammad painted a masterpiece of refinement, allegory, and
symbolism now believed to commemorate the feasts around Akbar’s
circumcision. In this extraordinary piece of work, there are rocks in the
shape of an elephant, alluding to Humayun’s dream of Ahmad of Jam, the
Colossal Elephant. There are, unusually, large groups of women, identified
as Hamida Banu, Gulbadan, Bega Begum, Gulbarg Begum, and Maham
Anaga, and there are identifiable caves and rocks that place the event
almost certainly at Khwaja Seh Yaran, outside Kabul. Indeed, in the use of
symbolic accoutrements like headgear, clothes, colours etc., for particular
persons and places, this painting represents one of the very first attempts at
‘portraiture’ in Mughal art. All these elements are clues to the tapestry of
Akbar’s later vision and the importance of the role of Mughal women, but
they are also an acknowledgement, now forgotten, of the enormous debt
Mughal art owed to Humayun.
Though the art continued, peace in Kabul was illusory for Kamran had
not abdicated his claim. For the next few years, the tussle continued, and
during one of Humayun’s absences, Kamran took possession of Kabul and
the Mughal household once again. At one point, when Kabul was being
besieged by Humayun who was preparing for his great guns to be fired at
the fort, in a cold-blooded and dastardly act, Kamran placed the young
prince Akbar upon the battlements. According to the contemporary
chronicler Nizamuddin Ahmad, Maham Anaga threw herself upon the child
and clutched him to her bosom, placing herself between the guns and the
prince. In the end, after months of skirmishing, Kamran was forced to flee
and Humayun took back Kabul. Once peace was re-established, however
cursory, the rituals of Mughal courtly life continued. One of the most
important aspects of the upbringing of a Mughal prince was his education
and this was now undertaken in the case of Akbar. But Akbar would prove
to be a spectacularly indifferent student, giving rise to all manner of
speculations and insinuations for centuries.
♦
The official beginning of a Timurid mirza’s education was the second event
after his circumcision which marked the end of his infancy. A thorough
education allowed a prince to rule wisely and be able to gauge men and
help raise them to their full potential. According to the scholar Munis
Faruqui, ‘a well educated prince combined the best qualities of a man of the
pen…and a man of the sword’. Humayun, an extremely literary man
himself, and fully conversant with the solemnity of the occasion, chose the
propitious hour for beginning this grave task after much consultation with
‘acute astrologers and time-knowing astrolabe-conners’. But when that hour
came around, viz. 20 November 1547, while the teacher Mullazada Mulla
Asamudin Ibrahim was waiting, the ‘scholar of God’s school had attired
himself for sport and had disappeared’. The unfortunate teacher was soon
dismissed on the seemingly whimsical charge of being too fond of pigeon-
flying, though he seems to have instructed his pupil rather too well in this
respect, as kabootar-bazi was a sport that Akbar would enjoy to distraction.
The next teacher assigned to the royal pupil was Maulana Bayazid but he
fared no better than his predecessor and was similarly discharged. After
this, it appears that tutors were not exactly rushing forward to take on the
task because Abu’l Fazl admits that Humayun had to draw lots between
three men and, finally, Maulana Abdul Qadir was chosen. Akbar, however,
was at that time ‘continually giving his attention to that wondrous creature
the camel…He used to observe and contemplate,’ wrote the indulgent Abu’l
Fazl, ‘the strange make and ways of camels, which were the biggest
animals in that region and…made serious reflections on… their endurance
and patience’. Patience would have certainly been required of the camels as
Akbar led them around by a rope, raced them against horses, and fed them
thorns. He also spent many hours watching pigeons fly, running alongside
dogs, hunting deer and, as witnessed by one of his alarmed father’s amirs,
sleeping on the open ground. The impression of the young Akbar at this
stage was of a robust, strong-willed, and easily distracted child filled with
vital, restless energy and exulting in the wildness around him.
As a result of this unfettered, exuberant childhood spent avoiding his
long-suffering tutors and running through the countryside in the raucous
company of his kokas, Aziz, Zain, and Adham, Akbar grew up effectively
illiterate. This was a perplexing reality in a man who would later own a
fortune in manuscripts and who would orchestrate the largest translation
and writing project undertaken at the time. It was certainly not for want of
opportunity, for Aziz Koka, who was brought up alongside Akbar, grew up
to be an erudite, literary, and extremely well-read man. Abu’l Fazl would
explain the inconsistency through a miraculous, divine filter, comparing
Akbar to the Prophet Muhammad, who was also illiterate. Akbar, too,
would encourage parents to keep one of their children in a state of illiteracy,
in imitation of the Prophet. That Akbar was a distracted, volatile child, who
found it difficult to focus on the onerous task of a demanding Mughal
education, is clear but there was one creative skill he was able to acquire,
one that required as much concentration and physical immobility as
learning grammar or history or religious studies, and that was painting.
While he was in Kabul, Akbar learnt to paint from Abd al-Samad, and there
is a rare miniature from the reign of Humayun which depicts this
momentous event, when Akbar is shown presenting a painting he has made
to his father. For this the young boy would have had to sit on his haunches,
one leg folded under his body, his drawing board resting on his raised thigh,
for hours at a time. So it would appear that Akbar was quite capable of
sustained periods of applied work when it came to painting. His illiteracy,
therefore, has been understood by modern scholars as being due to a
dyslexic condition, which would appear to best explain why Akbar was able
to paint and yet, in a court which valued writing and calligraphy so highly,
was unable to write. In the sixteenth century, and at the mystically charged
moment of the second Islamic millennium, this supposed illiteracy would
not be deemed a failing but would be interpreted by Abu’l Fazl as further
proof of the Padshah’s grandeur, of his being quite beyond the limitations of
ordinary mortals.
While Akbar was being initiated, albeit reluctantly, into a more formal
and visible role as a Mughal mirza, life continued in its prosaic, everyday
way in the harem, where he remained the cossetted and adored child of the
women. At the age of six he suffered a bout of toothache, for which Bega
Begum brought a remedy from her stores. Hamida Banu, however, was
immediately vigilant, terrified of poison at a time when royal children’s
lives were extremely threatened. Bega Begum, sympathetic to Hamida
Banu’s fears, first swallowed some of the medicine herself before giving it
to Akbar and so ‘the minds of those present were set at rest…and also my
pain soothed’, remembered Akbar. Indeed, Akbar loved Bega Begum dearly
and admitted later to Abu’l Fazl that ‘the kindness and affection which she
showed to me and my love for her are beyond expression. Everyone who
did not know the real facts [that she was his stepmother], thought that she
was my own mother.’
A certain calm may have prevailed in the harem, but this was not true of
much of the rest of the Mughal court. Humayun had been involved in a
series of deadly skirmishes with Kamran over control of Badakhshan and
Kabul. It was during one such almost desultory raid that Hindal was killed,
long after he had joined Humayun and was fighting for the Padshah. The
harem was inconsolable and Gulbadan wrote about her grief over the death
of this youngest son of Babur with almost unconsoled sorrow, fifty years
later, when she said ‘would to Heaven that merciless sword had touched my
heart and eyes, or Saadat Yar, my son’s, or Khizr Khwaja Khan’s*! Alas! A
hundred regrets! Alas! A thousand times alas!’
With the death of the first of his uncles, Akbar was suddenly catapulted
into the much more incendiary world of Mughal politics at the age of nine.
He inherited all of Hindal’s entourage and his lands around Ghazni and this
appanage was now his to govern entirely. He also inherited a more fragile
and complicated thing, his nine-year-old cousin, Ruqaiya Begum. It was a
Timurid custom for cousins to marry and, at this point, the young cousins
were betrothed to one another. But perhaps Akbar, at this stage immersed in
the world of his kokas, their roughhouse fights, the hunts and the pigeons,
revolted at the idea of having to even consider this girl as a future bride.
Much later in his life, Akbar would work hard to convince his subjects
about the evils of child marriage and his vehemence seems to have arisen
from a bleak and personal space. He would raise the marriageable age of
boys to sixteen and girls to fourteen, and would forbid the marrying of
one’s cousin or close relative: ‘The marriage of a young child is displeasing
to the Almighty,’ he would say, ‘for the object [procreation] which is
intended is still remote, and there is proximate harm.’ Nevertheless, his first
wife would be Ruqaiya Begum who would long outlive Akbar and would
never bear any children herself.
Meanwhile, Hindal’s servants seem not to have been impressed by their
new master’s scholarly skills and his inclination for pigeon racing, for they
complained to Humayun and this most erudite of Padshahs wrote his son a
gentle rebuke, in the form of a poem:
Sit not idle ‘tis not the time for play
‘tis the time for arts and for work.
His precious son’s wilful refusal to learn to read must have worried
Humayun to distraction. This was, after all, the Padshah who so valued
books and manuscripts that he took his library with him to the battlefield.
On one occasion, after his camp was plundered, he first enquired about the
condition of his books. Art historian Kavita Singh writes that upon being
told his library was safe, Humayun sighed and said, ‘God be praised that
things which cannot be replaced are safe. As for other things, they were a
small matter.’ He would have consoled himself, perhaps, with the arrival
from the Safavid court of some extraordinary artists—the gold worker
Wais, the bookbinder Maulana Fakhr and, finally, the painters Mir Sayyid
Ali and Abd al-Samad.
A month after the death of Hindal, in the winter of 1551, Humayun sent
the nine-year-old Akbar with his new entourage to take charge of his lands
in Ghazni. Appointed to help Akbar was an ataliq, or guardian, Khwaja
Jalal al-din Mahmud. If the milk mothers were crucial figures in a Mughal
prince’s life, watching over his physical safety, the ataliqs were equally
important, appointed through various stages of a prince’s childhood and
early manhood. Depending on the age of the prince, these men helped him
navigate the potential minefield of the Mughal nobility. They had to do this,
moreover, while maintaining the delicate and sometimes conflicting balance
between the prince’s best interest and the Padshah’s. According to Faruqui,
the ataliq ‘was ideally a figure of fierce authority, perhaps the most
important such male figure in his life’. Akbar spent most of the next few
months in Ghazni as a provincial governor, while Kamran continued to defy
Humayun, plundering and ravaging the countryside. After living for a while
disguised as a woman in a burqa, and after decades of resistance and
violence, Kamran was finally captured in 1553 by a Gakkhar chieftain and
sent to Humayun.
That Humayun was extremely conflicted over Kamran’s fate is evident
in Gulbadan’s account of the episode. He gathered all the Mughal nobility
and the soldiers together and asked them for their advice. ‘Brotherly custom
has nothing to do with ruling and reigning,’ he was told. ‘If you wish to act
as a brother, abandon the throne.’ In the end, it was decided to blind
Kamran, effectively ending his challenge to rule. ‘Though my head inclines
to your words, my heart does not,’ grieved Humayun, who had tried to
reason with Kamran for many years. Finally the order to blind Kamran was
given but the servants baulked, and ‘disputed among themselves who was
to perform the cruel act’. But the deed was done, at last, and Kamran was
led back to his own camp where the water-bearer Jauhar, ‘seeing the prince
in such pain and distress, could no longer remain with him’. Kamran was
sent to Mecca where he died four years later while his young son, Abu’l
Qasim, was kept a prisoner.
In Kabul, meanwhile, a son was born to Humayun’s new wife, Mah-
chuchak Begum, and he was given the name Muhammad Hakim*. A few
months later Akbar was given a new ataliq, Munim Khan, a Chaghatai
nobleman who had been in Humayun’s service since the time of his
peregrinations in Sind. This was an honour which Munim Khan celebrated
with a great banquet and the distribution of gifts. By 1554 Humayun was
the last of the Timurid mirzas still able to stake a claim to the empire
founded in Hindustan with such blistering haste by Babur. Sher Shah Sur
had died in 1545 and when Humayun heard of the death of his son, Islam
Shah, in November 1554, he must have felt that the stars, cold and
uncaring, were at last turning favourable to him.
*The position of wakil was superior to the other four main offices of the Mughal Empire viz. the
diwan or wazir (chief minister), the mir bakshi (minister of military affairs), the mir saman (minister
of the imperial household including karkhanas, workshops) and the sadr (minister of religious
matters).
*Parganas were sometimes called mahals. A number of parganas together made up the sarkars, or
districts, which were in turn organized within a subah, or governorship.
*A millennial movement, brought about by the end of the first Islamic millennium.
*Some of those men, such as Abdullah Sultanpuri, then became part of Akbar’s ulema.
*Hisar Firoza was an important outpost along the edge of Rajasthan in the northwest.
*A khanqah was the place where a Sufi saint lived and from where he spread his teachings. It was
considered a spiritually holy place.
PART 2
*There is uncertainty about her actual position. Some sources claim she was a queen, others that she
was a favoured dancing girl.
*The members of Jiji Anaga and Shamsuddin Ataka Khan’s family were so large that they were
collectively known as the Ataka Khail, or Ataka clan.
MEN OF THE SWORD AND THE PEN
The rather niggardly amount that Akbar was able to obtain from Maham
Anaga in an emergency was only a minor incident but it was symptomatic
of a much larger and potentially disastrous problem in this fledgling
Mughal Empire—a severely depleted treasury. Land revenue had long been
a source of wealth and income for the monarchs of Hindustan, the wealth of
the rulers depending on their ability to profit from the agrarian productivity
of India, while taxes on trade, manufacture, and other activity were a great
deal less important to the overall revenue, most estimates putting them at
less than 10 per cent of the total earnings. Akbar’s predecessors had usually
contented themselves with seizing the treasures of defeated opponents, as
Babur had done with Ibrahim Lodi after the Battle of Panipat. Commanders
of the victorious party were then appointed an appanage, or iqta, from
which to extract revenue. These iqtas were often managed in a predatory
manner by the commanders, and also had a tendency to become hereditary.
Akbar now took stock of the financial debacle in the empire, which had
arisen due to outdated land revenue information from Sher Shah Sur’s reign
being used to extract taxes. The situation had been further exacerbated by
Bairam Khan’s excessive largesse, as he had handed out huge cash
incentives to bind men to his cause.
In the 1560s unhappy, therefore, with the inaccuracy of these estimates
for tax based on land size, crop yield, and market price, which had
continued from the time of Sher Shah Sur, Akbar directed his men to begin
collecting data on the actual market prices and revenue rates of various
crops in the provinces of Agra, Allahabad, Awadh, Delhi, Lahore, Multan,
and Malwa. The officials were directed to be as fair and accountable as
possible, as described by Abu’l Fazl:
The collector was directed to be the friend of the agriculturist; to
give remissions in order to stimulate cultivation…to grant every
facility to the raiyat [farmer] and never to charge him on more than
the actual area under tillage; to receive the assessment direct from
the cultivator and so avoid intermediaries; to recover arrears without
undue force; and to submit a monthly statement describing the
condition of the people, the state of public security, the range of
market prices and rents, the conditions of the poor and all other
contingencies.
As we have seen, the revenue system was based on the division of the
empire into provinces, or subahs, which were administered by a governor,
later known as the subedar. The governor controlled the largest body of
troops in the area and was responsible for keeping the peace. The subahs
were further divided into sarkars, or districts, which were the real
administrative units of the land, and had a military commander, a faujdar,
assigned to them. The revenue-collecting work in the sarkar was carried out
by the amalguzar* while kotwals were appointed to all provincial capitals
and cities, to maintain order. Some of the lands were owned outright by the
state, and were called khalisa land.
The sarkars were made up of parganas, which grouped together the
smallest measure of land, the village. Northern Hindustan consisted of tens
of thousands of villages, gathered into parganas, from which tax was
historically collected using the zamindars, who controlled revenue
collection in each pargana. The zamindars were almost always Hindus, and
themselves employed a number of cavalrymen and foot retainers,
constituting an important semi-military class. ‘Without the support of Hindu
agrarian magnates and officials,’ writes Iqtidar Alam Khan, ‘it was now
obviously becoming difficult to run a state system.’ Attempts were made to
constrain the autonomy of the zamindars, by making them officers of the
Mughal state. The land revenue was collected not in crops, but in cash, the
copper dam, and this monetized the rural economy.
Because the holders of iqta land had tended to become almost
autonomous, extracting tribute from zamindars or farmers exceeding their
official grants, Akbar would devise a much more efficient and centralized
system in the coming decades for revenue extraction. After more accurate
figures on the productivity of land were gathered, a temporary assignment
of land revenue from a particular territory, known as a jagir, would be
parcelled out to each officer. Later still, as we will see, an integrated
decimal hierarchy for top officer administrators—the mansab (rank) system
—would be created.
The mansabdars were to supervise the collection of the land revenue
and all officers, royal or not, minor or grand, were incorporated into the
same imperial service. There was no distinction between military and civil
affairs and all officers were given a mansab in return for which they were
expected to perform military duty, whether they were a poet, a painter, a
physician, or a philosopher, in addition to carrying out any task the Padshah
demanded of them. In the beginning, all mansabs were given to individual
men only after a personal interview with Akbar and the mir bakshi, chief of
military personnel, who reported directly to the Padshah. In rare instances,
officers would be paid a direct salary, or inam, but in most cases they were
assigned the land revenue of an area. Upon the death of a mansabdar, his
property would return to the khalisa, though some concessions would be
made to the heirs. Thus the cumbersome process of land administration and
revenue collection, from what would become an immense empire over the
next decade, was shifted onto the mansabdars. The system of promotions of
the mansabdars was somewhat arbitrary, and could be in recognition for a
particularly valorous piece of action in battle, or for a well-executed work
of calligraphy.
No longer would mansabdars make a living from bounty captured
during war, but were paid a fixed salary through their jagir appointments.
These yearly salaries were extremely generous, ‘much higher than those
paid to officers of comparable rank in the armies of contemporary powers
like the Safavid or Ottoman Empires’.
Apart from the other duties assigned to them, the mansabdars and their
men and horses provided the bulk of the Mughal army. There were also
ahadis, single men with no military troops, but who nonetheless
demonstrated skill and talent. Akbar kept them nearby, as a body of
personal servants, and they too had to maintain a certain number of horses.
In addition to these cavalrymen were the foot soldiers. They included
porters, runners, guards, gladiators, wrestlers, slaves, bearers, labourers, and
matchlock bearers.
Ever since the sultans of Delhi had brought Islamic law to northern
Hindustan, the monarch was bound to rule as the guardian of Islamic
revelation and the sharia, which was based on Koranic injunctions, and the
hadiths, or traditions, of the Prophet Muhammad. If any new interpretations
of the sharia were required with changing times, these could be addressed
by jurists (mujtahids). This was, in theory at least, applicable to criminal
law for Muslims and Hindus and to civil law for Muslims. Akbar, as khalifa
of the age, was the ultimate authority in the administration of justice,
especially in criminal cases. At court, and as he travelled across the country,
people would approach him for redress, and Akbar took his duties very
seriously, asking to be reminded three times before he would finally
confirm capital punishment. But as access to the Padshah was essentially
limited, qazis, or judges, were appointed to try both civil and criminal cases
throughout the empire.
Sharia made an unequivocal distinction between the Muslim and non-
Muslim peoples of the country. All non-Muslims were tolerated as
dhimmis, or ‘the protected people’, who were subject to the discriminatory
jiziya tax. Two hundred and fifty years before Akbar, Alauddin Khalji had
created the office of the sadr us-sudur, in whom rested the highest authority
in disputes regarding religious laws. A hundred years before that, Iltutmish
had established the office of the shaikh al-Islam to deal with religious
issues, administration, and the delegation of the religious duties of the
rulers. Akbar appointed Shaikh Abd un-Nabi to the important post of sadr
while Shaikh Abdullah Sultanpuri, who had been appointed as the
makhdum ul-mulk and shaikh al-Islam under Humayun, also remained in
office under Akbar. These two men, who enjoyed at this stage an
untouchable prestige as the leaders of the ulema, would be the ones whose
fall would be most spectacular, once Akbar took stock of the reality of
Hindustan and the many faiths and beliefs that surrounded him. In an earlier
age his grandfather Babur had also mused about the people he found in
Hindustan:
Most of the inhabitants of Hindustan are pagans; they call a pagan a
Hindu. Most Hindus believe in the transmigration of souls. All
artisans, wage-earners, and officials are Hindus. In our countries,
dwellers in the wilds (ie, nomads) get tribal names; here the settled
people of the cultivated lands villages get tribal (caste) names.
Again every artisan there follows the trade that has come down to
him from forefather to forefather.
The most populous people, as noted by Babur and then by Akbar, were the
Hindus, among whom a strict caste system existed. For them, justice at the
local level, in the form of councils and panchayats, continued untouched.
Hindu and other non-Muslim communities also offered legal advisers when
one of their community was involved in a case. But there were also
Armenians, Portuguese, Ethiopians, Jews, Christians, Parsees, Sikhs,
Buddhists, and more. Even among the Muslims there were people of many
ethnicities and origins. There were Arabs and Persians settled in the coastal
areas, there were traders in every seaport and there were also the Turks,
Uzbeks, Afghans, and Indian shaikhzadas. Other differences existed
between the Shias of the Deccan and the Sunnis of the North, and then
again there was a great movement of each into the other’s area. In due
course, the Padshah would find novel ways, and use unique symbols and
formulations, to weld all these diverse people and religions into a single
empire.
Shamsuddin Ataka Khan at this point held the highest posts— wakil
and diwan (finance minister). But, ultimately, according to the Timurid
model of sovereignty, all power resided in the emperor himself. All
important assignments remained the prerogative of the emperor and Akbar
would spend a great deal of time and energy learning to judge the true
nature and potential of his men. He would be unswayed by glorious
pedigrees and unmoved by lowly origins. His great skill, honed over years
of careful observation of those around him, would be to spot the unique
talent of each man he encountered and enable the greatest expression of that
talent. For that he would go far beyond the narrow limitations of sharia law
and the charmed circle of Turani noblemen. And fate, too, would play her
capricious part.
*A revenue officer.
A SUFI SHRINE, A RAJPUT PRINCESS, AND A
NOTORIOUS MURDER
On a cold January night in 1562, Akbar and a small group of courtiers were
out hunting in the lands around Agra which bristled with deer, birds,
cheetahs, tigers, and leopards. Near Mandhakur, a village halfway between
Ajmer and Sikri, they came upon a group of singers, probably qawwals,
singing the praises of the Sufi saint Khwaja Muinuddin Chishti,* whose
dargah was in neighbouring Ajmer. The dargah of the thirteenth-century
Sunni mystic was an important pilgrimage site in the sixteenth century,
attracting both commoners and kings. Muhammad bin Tughlaq had paid his
respects here and because the only Brahma temple was in nearby Pushkar,
Muinuddin Chishti’s dargah ‘became a place where Hindus placed their
head and sent nazr every year’, according to Shaikh Jamali Kamboh. So
Akbar would have heard of the miraculous power of the Ajmer shrine and
he decided that he would go there that very night. His courtiers tried to
dissuade him as it was a long and dangerous journey but Akbar refused to
listen. He sent word that Maham Anaga was to bring the harem via Mewat
to join him at Ajmer and the small party left immediately. At the village of
Kilaoli, Akbar was informed that a certain Raja Bharmal, the very same raja
who had stood steadfastly in front of Akbar’s rampaging elephant, now
wished to greet him. ‘The Raja stands out for his great intellect and
courage,’ Akbar was told, ‘and he had constantly striven in allegiance to
this exalted dynasty…’ Raja Bharmal and all the important members of his
clan were presented to Akbar at the town of Sanganer.
In the sixteenth century, the Rajput kingdoms in western India remained
fairly isolated since the defeat of Prithviraj Chauhan by Muhammad Ghori
in 1192. Indeed the entire region, a collection of small, intermittently
warring principalities, was relatively culturally homogeneous with
neighbouring Sind and Gujarat. Oral tradition tells us that major Rajput
clans like the Kachhwahas, Rathores, and Sisodiyas originally came from
outside Rajasthan and took over lands held by ruling tribes like the Bhils
and the Meenas. The need for expansion and consolidation kept the clans
constantly battling each other, and so to provide a cohesive military
structure a system based on kinship (bhai-beta) and clan (gotra) was
developed. Because these repeated, ferocious battles to the death could
sometimes mean the end of several generations of clansmen, polygamous
marriages were introduced to supply a sufficient quantity of men. The
Rajputs unabashedly compared themselves with the native plant richke
(lucerne), a fodder plant for horses, which grows more vigorously the more
it is grazed. Dying extravagantly in battle became something of a Rajput
specialty, extolled by bards and encouraged by wives and mothers. So
resolute was the bravery of these Rajput warriors that neither had the Delhi
Sultanate, nor any of the other rulers of north India, the Khaljis, the Lodis,
or the Surs, been able to subdue these Rajasthani tribes or incorporate their
lands into their empires.
The Kachhwahas of Amer were a small, resolutely insignificant family
plagued by the pedestrian Rajput problem of polygamous households
leading to succession disputes. They were also vulnerable to repeated acts
of territorial expansion by their more powerful Rathore neighbours. Raja
Bharmal was contesting the seat of Amer with Puran Mal, one of his many
brothers, who had usurped the support of the Mughal governor, Mirza
Sharafuddin Hussain. Bharmal, at over fifty years of age, was a patient
strategist and a careful judge of men. He now sought Akbar’s help in
dislodging Puran Mal and in exchange offered him a daughter in marriage,
thereby altering the fate of the province of Amer forever.
The Rajput clans had used marriages as signs of submission to
victorious chiefs for a long time. Apart from Hindu and Rajput rulers,
defeated chieftains had already married daughters to Muslim rulers such as
the Ghoris and the Tughlaqs of Delhi. In more recent times, Rao Maldeo of
Marwar had married a daughter to Sultan Mahmud of Gujarat and another
daughter to Islam Shah Sur. But the Mughal–Rajput alliance that would
arise out of this first, unassuming relationship between Akbar and the
Kachhwahas, making the Rajputs stakeholders in the fortunes of the
Mughal Empire, would lead to conquests and glory that neither side could
have anticipated at the time. Akbar agreed to Raja Bharmal’s proposal and
in return induced Mirza Sharafuddin Hussain to hand over the raja’s
relatives he had kept hostage. Akbar then carried on to Ajmer while the raja
went to Sambhar to arrange for his daughter’s wedding, complete with all
the elaborate Hindu rites. In Ajmer, Akbar met up with the ladies of the
harem, who had been brought there by Maham Anaga, and the Mughal
party arrived for the first time at this ancient site of pilgrimage with its
camphor lamps, murmuring voices, and the staccato claps of qawwali
singers. Akbar then travelled to Sambhar where he stopped for a day and
acquired not just a bride, but the unswerving loyalty of her entire clan.
The bride who left her natal Rajput clan in Amer to enter the unknown
world of the Mughal harem was Harkha Bai.* But the young woman did not
enter unaccompanied into her new world, for she had a veritable cuirass of
brothers and nephews to walk beside her. At Ranthambore, as the Mughal
party proceeded towards Agra, they were greeted once again by Raja
Bharmal and his sons and brothers. There was also present a young boy,
twelve-year-old Man Singh, now released from the isolation that had been
suggested by an astrologer. † Popular legend has it that when Man Singh
greeted Akbar for the first time, the Padshah looked affectionately at the
sprightly but dark-complexioned young boy and jovially said to him, ‘Well,
Man Singh, where were you when God was distributing beauty in heaven?’
To which, it is believed, Man Singh replied with verve and panache,
‘Shahenshah! I was in my prayer room at that time but I was present to
receive valour and manliness when the almighty in her mercy was
distributing the same.’ Apocryphal or not, the story illustrates the legend of
Akbar and Man Singh’s great bond of loyalty and love which would make
the Rajput one of the greatest noblemen of the Padshah. Man Singh would
travel far from his natal clan into the furthest corners of the Mughal Empire,
the Padshah’s most trusted liegeman.
The large retinue that accompanied Harkha Bai and the Mughal party
included the bride’s brother, Bhagwant Das, her nephew, Man Singh, as
well as a large number of female attendants to perform the various tasks
that Harkha Bai would require: dhai maas (wet nurses), dholans (female
drummers), purohits (priests), nayans (barbers), darjans (tailors), varies
(cooks), and davis (maids), collectively called the zenana amla,
accompanied their princess to her new marital home. For the Rajputs kept
their women in seclusion in a space called the zenana deorhi in which
female staff provided all the services required. As Harkha Bai was carried
along in her sequined palanquin and her brothers and relatives accompanied
her on horseback, this entire microcosm of Rajasthani culture also headed
to Agra, bringing with them their songs, their dances, their food, their
customs, and their tenacious dreams.
♦
After Akbar’s return to Agra in 1562, he set about rapidly consolidating the
empire. From the time of the conquest of Malwa, and for the following
decade, Akbar expanded the size of his dominions at a blistering pace,
driven by a fierce will and a conviction that if he did not subdue his
neighbours, they would rise up against him. Akbar sent Mirza Sharafuddin
Hussain to subdue the province of Merta and Abdullah Khan Uzbek was
appointed to bring the province of Malwa under control where Baz Bahadur
was once again stirring up trouble. Baz Bahadur was expelled once again
and he remained in exile at the courts of various princes till he eventually
submitted eight years later and was given an honourable mansab of 1,000.
Meanwhile, at Agra, the Mughal court was effervescent with the
excitement of hosting a highly eminent guest. Sayyid Beg, the ambassador
of Shah Tahmasp of Persia himself, had arrived to meet with the young
Mughal Padshah and elaborate arrangements were made for him. A large
royal tent was set up in the Padshah’s garden and the noblemen had also
added their own tents, all suitably decorated. The townsfolk would go every
day to the fort to amuse themselves by gawking at the visitors and admiring
the decorations. Rafiuddin Shirazi, the Persian merchant, too decided to try
and see the Padshah and he was standing in a tent with a crowd of
spectators when all of a sudden loud shouts of ‘Badshah Salaamat!’ rang
out. The Padshah had arrived, clearly, ‘but however much left and right I
looked, I did not see anyone who by appearance gave any signs or marks of
royalty’ wrote the puzzled Shirazi. ‘When I looked behind,’ he added, ‘I
saw that a youth of twenty years was leaning on a favourite, with his hand
resting on the other’s shoulder.’ This nonchalant youth, Shirazi realized,
was the emperor of Hindustan but he was astonished to see that no one
prostrated themselves or gave the Padshah any special treatment
whatsoever. Shirazi, taken aback, asked the crowds whether this casualness
was normal in Hindustani courts to which he was told, ‘the etiquette for
courtiers and salutations at this Court is much more elaborate than those of
other rulers: but the King himself is more informal. Often he comes out in
ordinary dress and mixes with his confidants and makes no distinction
between companions and strangers.’ Shirazi ruminated over this strange
explanation but agreed that he had himself seen Akbar flying a kite on the
roof of his palace at Agra. On that occasion, he noted that ‘his head was
bare and he was wearing a lungi. From this I was convinced that His
Majesty was of an open bent of mind and extremely informal.’ A later
Jesuit visitor to Akbar’s court, too, would be astounded by the Padshah’s
accessibility, even after the rules of etiquette had coalesced into something
much more rigid. ‘It is hard to exaggerate how accessible he makes himself
to all who wish audience of him,’ wrote Father Monserrate, the Jesuit, ‘for
he creates an opportunity almost every day for any of the common people
or of the nobles to see him and converse with him; and he endeavours to
show himself pleasant-spoken and affable, rather than severe, toward all
who come to speak with him.’ Jesuit reports from this period give us an
excellent description of the young Padshah. According to them, he was ‘a
fine-looking, broad-shouldered man, but bow-legged, and of a swarthy
complexion. His eyes are large but with narrow openings, like those of a
Tartar or Chinaman. He has a broad, open forehead; and his nose, except for
a slight lump in the centre, is straight. The nostrils are large, and on the left
one there is a small wart. He is in the habit of carrying his head slightly
inclined to the right side. Like the Turks, he shaves his beard; but he wears
a small neatly trimmed moustache.’
These traits that Akbar displayed as a young emperor—his intense
curiosity, his ferocious courage, and his warm approachability with both
commoners and noblemen alike, would run like a thread throughout his
long reign, allowing him to make bonds of friendship with the most
unlikely of allies. But there were shows of unexpected anger, rare but
explosive; one such episode erupted in a particularly spectacular manner,
scorching the very heart of Akbar’s ancient bonds of love—his foster
family.
Ever since Adham Khan had been recalled from Malwa and Ataka
Khan named wakil, violence had simmered under the surface of courtly life
at Agra. Adham Khan, most tempestuous of Akbar’s kokas, considered
himself beyond chastisement because of the young Padshah’s unfailing
courtesy towards members of his foster family. But a reckoning was about
to come for Adham Khan on a blazing day in May.
When Ataka Khan was made wakil he, along with the eunuch Itimad
Khan, set about improving the state’s revenues by increasing the state’s
share in jagirs which had long been in default. Plans were put in place to
improve revenue administration and ‘the royal revenues, which were in the
hands of embezzlers’ were handed over to Itimad Khan. The influence of
Maham Anaga, Munim Khan, and Adham Khan was curtailed and reduced
and this was a new reality that Adham Khan could not tolerate. In the
middle of May 1563, Adham Khan strode into the council hall of the Agra
Fort where the nobility were occupied with state affairs. The men stood up
to greet Akbar’s powerful koka but Adham Khan gestured to his liegeman,
who stabbed Shamsuddin Ataka Khan. As the old man stumbled into the
sun-bleached courtyard, Adham Khan’s men set upon him and murdered
him, while Adham Khan climbed up the stairs towards the inner apartments.
Hearing the shouts and the commotion, Akbar came out from the harem,
tying a lungi around his waist and seizing a sword. When he realized whose
bloodied body was lying in the courtyard below, he was filled with rage:
‘Son of a bitch!’ he cursed Adham Khan. ‘Why have you killed our Ataka?’
Seizing Adham Khan by the hair, Akbar struck him on the face and then
ordered him to be thrown from the top of the stairs. When the first fall left
Adham Khan mangled but still alive, Akbar ordered him brought up and
thrown down again, head first. Akbar then went to Maham Anaga’s quarters
to inform her himself of the fate of her beloved but turbulent son. ‘Adham
killed our Ataka,’ he told Maham Anaga, ‘we have taken revenge on him.’
Controlling her devastation with exceptional courage, Maham was able to
whisper, ‘You did well’. But Akbar did not allow her to visit her son’s
broken and ruined body, perhaps not wishing his old milk mother to know
the terrible violence of Adham Khan’s end. But this woman, who had lived
through all the uncertain dangers of the early days of the Mughal Empire,
was unable to bear the death of her son. Forty days after Adham Khan’s
death, Maham Anaga died, too, in grief and despair. Akbar mourned her
deeply and publicly, accompanying her bier out of Agra and weeping next
to her body, and commissioned a noble tomb for mother and son. The dome
of the tomb is unusually vast and a light breeze blows gently through the
tomb because of an intricate system of ventilation. It lies neglected in the
Mehrauli area of Delhi today, having been repurposed several times by new
conquerors in the following centuries. In a sort of dubious poetic justice for
the ruffianly Adham Khan, though not, it must be said, for his highly
accomplished mother, it has been reclaimed today as the rather louche haunt
of delinquents. Maham Anaga’s exceptional destiny is more clearly seen in
the few miniatures in which she would later be depicted, always close to
Akbar, in her distinctive yellow robes. In time, all the important Mughal
noble families would jostle to be buried near the exalted dargah of
Nizamuddin Auliya, within a short distance of Humayun’s tomb. By
burying Adham Khan near Qutbuddin Bakhtiyar Kaki’s dargah, at the
opposite end of Delhi from Nizamuddin’s dargah, Akbar seemed to send a
silent rebuke to his foster brother for his terrible crime.
Meanwhile, the other great foster family, the family of the murdered
Ataka Khan, had gathered together in a fury, demanding vengeance. The
Ataka Khail had to be shown Adham Khan’s broken body before they could
be dissuaded from taking immediate and bloody retribution. They were still
potentially dangerous at court, however, and to neutralize them temporarily
Akbar sent them away on campaign against the rebellious Sultan Adam
Gakkhar in the Salt Range. Then they returned to their jagirs in the Punjab,
watched carefully by Akbar until such time as he was able to conclusively
decimate their dangerous power.
*In deference to his new allegiance to the Sufi Muinuddin Chishti, Akbar changed his war cry at this
time to Ya Muin, a shortened form of Muinuddin.
*Rai Rayan would have a very distinguished career, and was made Diwan of Bihar, and then of
Kabul, earning the title Raja Bikramjit and a mansab of 5,000.
*A tract formed of the territory of Kota and Bundi.
PART 3
*Central Asian region comprising modern-day Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and parts of Kazakhstan.
*Of the household of Mary.
†Mary of the World.
*Muzaffar Khan Turbati. Akbar later revoked the order.
*The hereditary registrar of landed property in a subdivision of a district.
†A cultivator.
THE FIRANGIS AND THE SALT SEA
If elephants had been one of the major attractions of Malwa and Gondwana
for the Mughals, then in Gujarat it was something much smaller and a great
deal more intangible—indigo dye. This precious and valuable product was
exported in its raw form, and was also used to colour locally produced
textiles—velvet, brocades, and cotton— with the extremely sought after and
distinctive deep blue colour.
It was not only indigo and textiles, which brought wealth to the
province, it was also locally produced high quality weapons (swords,
daggers, bows, and arrows), perfumes, mother of pearl articles, and boats,
which were constructed in Sarkhej, near Ahmedabad. Merchandise was
loaded onto small vessels in the port of Ghogha and sailed down the Gulf of
Khambhat* where it was transferred to large ships off the town of Cambay,
bound for Turkey and Iraq; Gujarati block-printed textiles were exported to
Egypt. With exports bringing in revenue, the sultans were able to import
silver and war horses. All this had been accomplished through the rule of
the sultans of Gujarat, who had secured land routes from the coast to the
rich agricultural hinterlands.
In July 1572, Akbar set off for Gujarat himself, accompanied by some
of the women of the harem and select noblemen. Raja Birbal and a few
other officers were sent to the Punjab to bolster the forces of Husain Quli
Khan, a kinsman of Bairam Khan, while the imperial party proceeded, via
Sanganer, to hunt cheetahs. ‘He was quite taken with cheetah hunting,’
admitted Abu’l Fazl but this lukewarm assessment does not capture the
intense love that the Padshah had for this solitary, elusive animal. He would
eventually have a thousand cheetahs in the imperial stables of which fifty
‘khasa’ (special) ones were kept at the court itself. His very favourite
cheetah, Samand Malik, was carried in a litter, wore a jewelled collar and
was accompanied by its own servants in full livery running alongside the
litter while another servant walked in front, beating a large drum. In
Sanganer, Akbar was so delighted when an imperial cheetah named
Chitranjan leaped across a wide ravine while chasing a deer that it was
immediately promoted to head cheetah, with a drummer marching ahead of
it.
The imperial train then headed for Ajmer, to seek the blessings of the
saint for the Gujarat campaign. One of Akbar’s concubines, who was
heavily pregnant, was left in Ajmer where she soon gave birth to a boy,
Daniyal, named after the shaikh in whose house he was born. When the
child was one month old, Akbar had him sent to Amer, to be looked after by
Raja Bharmal’s wife. Shielded now with the blessings of Khwaja Sahib and
a lustrous son, Akbar sent an advance guard of 10,000 horsemen ahead of
the army and began marching towards Patan. This was the first time that
Akbar had visited the town since the murder of his old ataliq, Bairam Khan.
Even more poignant was the fact that he was accompanied by Bairam
Khan’s son, Abdur Rahim, now sixteen years old. Abdur Rahim was a
precociously intelligent, sensitive, and alert young man who would no
doubt have remembered the terrible day when his father had been murdered
before his very eyes. The Padshah questioned the young man gently about
the terrible tragedy he had witnessed, and perhaps Abdur Rahim
remembered enough to tell the Padshah of the horror of witnessing the
Afghan youth stabbing his father with such fury that the dagger had gone
through him and come out of his back. Akbar promised the young man the
fief of Patan once he came of age and then rode towards Ahmedabad to
relieve Itimad Khan Gujarati, who had been besieged by mutinous Mughal
nobles. But news of the approaching imperial army was enough to chasten
the rebels, who quietly left the city and Ahmedabad was taken without a
fight. The great noblemen of Gujarat, Ikhtiyar ul-Mulk, Itimad Khan
Gujarati, and Shah Turab Abu, among others, now submitted to Akbar. Also
present were some Ethiopians such as Ulugh Khan Habshi,* and Jajar Khan
Habshi, some of whom would become great amirs at Akbar’s court while
others were entrusted with the guarding of the imperial harem. Having
settled the affairs of Ahmedabad and handed over its governorship to Mirza
Aziz Koka,† Akbar marched to the port of Cambay, to see the ocean.
When Akbar turned towards the ocean in Gujarat, it would also have
been to survey the ambitions of the firangis, the Portuguese, who had long
posed a violent threat as they tried to establish a foothold in the area. From
the time in 1502 when Vasco da Gama ‘set alight, and watched burn, a
crowded pilgrim ship’, the Portuguese were rapacious in their interactions
with Muslim traders. A rich and highly developed region, Gujarat and its
coast and traders had been kept safe from the firangis as long as Malik
Ayaz, a Christian from Russia, kept careful vigil over its pewter seas. From
the island of Diu he had built a chain-link barrier across the shallow waters
to prevent access to firangi ships and it was said that ‘during the
government of the Malik, the Firangi was unable to enter the Gujarat ports’.
But Malik Ayaz had died and the Portuguese appetite for the pepper which
had made the fortunes of the Portuguese king, would no longer be denied.
They seized Diu in 1535 and imposed the cartaz, which was a pass issued
by the Portuguese against which they promised protection for Indian trade
ships from plunder at the hands of other Portuguese pirates. This was a
move stoutly resisted by all the traders in the Indian Ocean, as it was
considered humiliating and implied the payment of debilitating taxes, but
the Portuguese were unstoppable. At the time of Akbar’s first encounters
with the Portuguese, they had already established a lucrative trade in
African slaves. Between 1575 and 1595, tens of thousands of Africans were
sent from West Africa to Brazil, to lead lives of abomination and
degradation.
In faraway Naples a different kind of firangi, Rudolf Acquaviva, was
continuing on his exalted and stricken path which was to lead him, however
improbably, to the opulent Mughal court. He had been admitted to the Jesuit
novitiate in Rome where he loved to work in the kitchens and in the
infirmary. While he practised austerities in his bleak cell, he offered his
sacrifices in the hope that he would be sent on a mission to Hindustan
where lost souls were crying out for salvation.
As soon as Akbar arrived in Cambay ‘the merchants of Rum, Syria,
Persia and Turan’ came to pay their respects to the Padshah. Akbar may
have sampled some of the Gujarati food which was peculiar to the region.
Historian Aparna Kapadia has studied the list of foods mentioned in a
fifteenth-century text of the region called the Varnak Samucay. She writes
of a truly bewildering number of courses presented during a meal which
was usually served on a large platter reminiscent of the present-day thali.
The text suggested starting a meal with fresh fruits, dry fruits, and nuts,
followed by a variety of laddus, jalebis, and fried snacks such as dahi vada.
This would be followed by laapsi, a liquid dessert made from wheat, almost
in the way of cleansing the palate, before an avalanche of main courses—
rice dishes, dals, ghees, vegetables, more fried snacks, and breads. Finally,
it was suggested that the sated and presumably incapacitated diner be
served fragrant waters, and betel leaves filled with betelnut, saffron, and
spices.
If there were many merchants from various countries in Cambay then
there were also ‘baniyas’* from Cambay in foreign ports, conducting
business. The Italian traveller Pietro Della Valle wrote about meeting such
merchants in Isfahan, where they regaled him with stories of their home
town, and their religion. They told him about the most observant among the
Indians, who would ‘neither eat nor kill any living thing’. That they ‘esteem
it a good and holy deed to save the life of animals and set them free and
very often they buy at high prices birds that other people are keeping in
cages…so as to save them from death and set them free…’ They told the
Italian about charitable hospitals in Cambay to treat animals and birds, and
of the many cows, ‘very beautiful with their horns decorated with gold and
jewels…’ So evocatively did they speak about their land that Della Valle
finally visited Surat, in 1623, and wrote long letters describing the country.
At Cambay, Akbar was not only able to view the sea but was also able
to assess the port and the trade that took place by sea. The annexation of
Gujarat was to give to the landlocked Mughal Empire its first access to the
sea. There were some fifty or sixty private Portuguese traders as well in
Cambay, engaged in buying Gujarati goods to send to Goa, the rest having
fled upon hearing of the impending arrival of the Mughal army. Cambay
was a prosperous town with fine streets and buildings, and beautiful
structures, whose streets were closed off at night with gates. The town had
large storage tanks for water and a public hospital to take care of sick and
crippled birds of all kinds. Interestingly, a traveller to the region wrote that
the Gujaratis of the area were more concerned with ritual purification and
pollution through eating than locals in other regions of Hindustan. They
dressed in long, thin white gowns and wore red leather shoes, turned up at
the ends. Before leaving Cambay, Akbar would cut taxes on the export and
import of goods passing through the port, and would allow artisans to settle
on the outskirts of the city, measures which would further boost the
economy of Cambay, making it the most important Mughal port in Gujarat.
Akbar then ‘boarded a fast-moving boat and ordered that an assembly
of pleasure and enjoyment be arranged’ and, according to Qandahari,
enjoyed a round of drinks in the briny sea breeze. But, before long,
rebellion was brewing again among the Gujarati noblemen whom Abu’l
Fazl condemned, describing them as ‘evil-conditioned men’ in whom
‘timidity, deceit, and falsehood have been mixed up with a little honesty,
simplicity and humility and made into a paste to which the name of Gujarati
has been given’. This time it was Ibrahim Sultan, a Timurid mirza and
descendant of Timur, who was railing against the control of the Padshah at
Sarnal. Akbar left his two young sons and harem in Cambay and galloped
in the night against the insurgents with a small force of only 200 men that
included his Kachhwaha noblemen.
When they arrived at the Mahi, Akbar and his men plunged into the
river and scrambled up the steep banks on the other side and were told that
Ibrahim Sultan Mirza had run away from Sarnal. His men had remained to
fight, however, and now Akbar’s small band of warriors found their horses
stumbling on the broken ground bristling with thorny bushes and trees.
Seeing his men falter, Akbar spun his horse around to face them and ‘roared
loudly like a lion and called his men…and their courage returned’. For
Akbar there could be no countenancing of defeat or fear and he found in his
Rajput officers an equal and clear gallantry. Man Singh, now twenty-two
years old, begged to be allowed ahead in the coveted vanguard while
Bhagwant Das rode bridle to bridle with the Padshah as they charged and
sliced at the enemy in the narrow ravines and passes. The two men fought
with lance and scimitar as time seemed to stand still amid the panting
horses and the slashing blades and the curving of the sun through the sky,
but finally the enemy was defeated on 23 December 1572. Bhagwant Das
was awarded a banner and kettledrums, the first Hindu officer to obtain
these significant honours. There was a sad loss for the Kachhwahas,
however, in the death of Bhupat, one of Raja Bharmal’s sons, who was
killed in the fierce fighting. Bhupat’s sister, Harkha Bai, waiting with the
harem in Cambay would have been devastated. When the imperial retinue
returned to Agra after the Gujarat campaigns, Akbar would send Harkha
Bai to her natal home in Amer, a consolation for her bereaved parents.
While Akbar was occupied in Gujarat, he was also closely involved in
supervising operations in the eastern reaches of his kingdom. A letter to
Munim Khan written at this time shows the Padshah’s meticulous attention
to detail. In the letter Akbar lists to Munim Khan the artillery and munitions
he is having sent to him from the capital. ‘We have ordered that Rumi Khan
should make ready 500 pieces of Daudi cannons and fifty pieces of Islam
Shahi cannons, with fuses and carriages and send them…’ wrote Akbar.
‘5000 chandra bans and kahak-bans Mazamdarani (a type of rocket made of
an iron tube and bamboo rod, packed with combustible material which was
lit and then directed by hand and launched primarily at horses and
elephants) and 12,000 boats were available at Agra in full preparedness.’
Akbar also urged Munim Khan to be extremely vigilant and to prevent
dereliction of duty amongst the soldiers. Munim Khan himself was
instructed to pay special attention to the royal elephants, and to supervise
their diets personally. The Padshah even listed the names of the elephants
being sent to Munim Khan—these included Dodi, also known as Mal Jamal
Bahadur Shahi, who was the Padshah’s personal elephant.
Akbar’s ability to react instantly to events happening in the different
corners of the empire even as he remained constantly on the move,
depended, as we have seen, on an extensive system of couriers and
informants who relayed information to the Padshah. Qandahari has
described this extremely efficient system:
He [Akbar] is such an expert in espionage that he keeps four
thousand* foot-runners, who in Hindi are called Meurah. They are
on His Majesty’s service day and night so that news and reports
reach regularly everyday from all sides of the world. This class of
men run as fast as lions, so that within ten days news comes from
Bengal, which is at a distance of seven hundred karohs (kos) from
Agra. His Majesty gets all information of good or bad and profit or
loss.
Akbar then turned his attention to the town of Surat where, it was learnt, the
inconstant Ibrahim Sultan Mirza was strengthening the defences of the city.
Akbar besieged Surat in January 1573 and it was here, during the siege, that
he met the Portuguese for the first time. The meeting with the Portuguese
envoy, Antonio de Cabral, was conducted with great bonhomie and Akbar
questioned the Portuguese closely ‘about the wonders of Portugal and the
manners and customs of Europe’. The Padshah was already watching the
distant horizons beyond the heaving ocean to learn what the wide world had
to offer. Akbar was delighted with gifts of Portuguese cloaks and hats and,
according to Qandahari, there were also cartloads of Portuguese wine,
whose ‘scent turned the lions of skies dead-drunk’. But an important
concession was made by the Portuguese when they issued passes to
members of Akbar’s family to go on pilgrimage to Mecca. For it was not
only trade that Surat was vital for, it was also the ‘Gateway to Mecca’, so
called because of the pilgrim ships that set off for the hajj from this port.
The Portuguese authorities were known to harass the hajj ships and Akbar
now needed to ensure that pilgrims would be safe. Extraordinary attention,
it was clarified, had to be paid to the vessel which would be carrying the
imperial family to Mecca. It is very possible that the persons being singled
out in this way were Gulbadan and her party of Mughal women, who would
leave for the hajj in 1575. In return, Akbar gave the Portuguese important
tax concessions and instructed Mughal officials in the area not to harass the
Portuguese merchants.
As the siege of Surat continued, Akbar met with another interesting
local personality, the Parsee priest Dastur Meherji Rana. Akbar questioned
the priest about his religion and traditions and the man, stately in his
spotless white robes and long white beard, made a favourable impression on
the Padshah.
Surat was captured and occupied easily and the imperial train settled
into the city to administer its affairs. One evening when Akbar was
enjoying a round of drinks with a select group of noblemen, some of the
Rajput warriors began regaling the audience with tales of exemplary Rajput
heroism. To settle issues of rivalry, they claimed, a rather unusual method
was followed: someone would be deputed to hold a double-headed spear
steady, and then the two contending Rajput men would charge at the
weapon from either end ‘so that the latter would transfix them and come out
at their backs’. Piqued by talk of this admittedly insane act of physical
prowess, Akbar immediately fixed his own sword in a wall and ‘declared
that if Rajputs were wont to sell their valour in their way, he too could rush
against this sword’. Immediately sobered, the assembly watched in horrified
silence until Man Singh rushed at the sword and flung it away, injuring
Akbar’s hand. The enraged Padshah threw Man Singh upon the ground and
began beating him roundly until one of the courtiers pulled him off. Akbar’s
wound healed, we are told, and he would reserve further feats of bravery for
the battlefield.
Surat, on the banks of the river Tapti, was already a large and
prosperous town. Manuel Godinho, a later traveller and writer, remarked
about the houses of the Muslim noblemen that ‘the best of these houses
from the roadside look like hell but once you enter them, they seem like
paradise, because they are laced all over with gold, with magnificent
paintings on their ceilings…’ The Hindu ‘baniyas’, on the other hand,
‘build their houses more for the benefit of the onlookers from outside rather
than the advantage of those living inside.’ But for all the fine mansions, the
crowded bazaars and the ships lurching on the ocean, Surat, and Gujarat
itself, possessed a mysterious and enigmatic side that would even impact
the court of the Padshah.
The sixteenth century was a time of fizzing fervour in the Islamic
world. A belief began to gain currency that the Prophet would return once
the old millennium was past, as the Mahdi.* The origins of Mahdavi belief
could be traced to Sayyid Muhammad Jaunpuri, a charismatic Chishti Sufi
of extreme piety who came to Ahmedabad in 1497 to preach the heretical
and incandescent message that he was the Mahdi. ‘Proclaim the
manifestation of your Mahdiship,’ he claimed to have heard, ‘and do not
fear the people’. Shaikh Jaunpuri died in 1505 but his followers gathered in
Gujarat and preached the rejection of formalism in Islam and instead
founded communes called dairahs where they spread a message of
devotion, renunciation, and meditation to achieve a perfect and direct vision
of God. Implicit in the Mahdavi message, however, was a much more
dangerous idea. Charged with a fin-de-siecle malaise and an intimation of a
forsaken world, the Mahdavis were driven by a divine mission to
proselytize, to take up jihad, if necessary, and to give a clear direction to the
religious and political elite at a time of impending chaos. This inevitably
brought them into confrontation with the orthodox ulema but in Gujarat
they were remarkably successful, for a time, in converting the Afghan
clans.
The Mahdavi who was to have the most direct impact upon the
Padshah, first through Aziz Koka’s court at Ahmedabad, then in Sikri, was
Shaikh Mustafa Gujarati. Shaikh Mustafa was born in 1525 and gained
notoriety from a young age. Combining the usual Mahdavi charisma with a
formidable intellect, he founded his own dairah near Patan and married into
the family of an important Afghan jagirdar. One of the persons who carried
on a correspondence with Shaikh Mustafa on matters of religion was Shaikh
Mubarak, Abu’l Fazl’s father. But Shaikh Mustafa’s radiating popularity,
combined with his influential Afghan in-laws, made him dangerous to the
Mughals. During Akbar’s conquest of Gujarat, encouraged by the sadr, Abd
un-Nabi, Mustafa’s dairah was plundered and eight members of his family
were executed and his women and children imprisoned. Mustafa was
captured and brought in chains to the court of Mirza Aziz Koka at
Ahmedabad where he was tortured and questioned.
Meanwhile, having settled the affairs of Surat, Akbar set off towards
Agra in April 1573, stopping en route at Ajmer. Harkha Bai was sent to
Amer to be present at the mourning ceremony for her brother Bhupat and
the child Daniyal was brought back into the royal retinue. Now, as the
victorious troops headed towards Sikri, the royal astrologer advised them to
wait three days for the auspicious moment to enter the city. The Hindu
astrologer who bore the title Jyotik Rai was possibly the priest Nilakantha, a
protégé of Raja Todar Mal. Akbar used both Muslim and Hindu astrologers
and Nilakantha was a learned scholar who would write a commentary on
Islamic astrology called the Tajikanilakanthi. While Akbar waited for the
planets to align themselves, Shaikh Salim Chishti and all the great
noblemen of the court came to congratulate him. Shaikh Mubarak, recently
arrived at court, greeted him by saying that Akbar had been accorded
glorious victories so that he may become peshwa of the spiritual world,
words which resonated deeply with Akbar. Finally, on 3 June 1573, a year
after he had left the city, Akbar returned home in triumph.
No sooner had he returned, however, than news reached Akbar that the
uneasy truce in Gujarat had collapsed and that the same rebels had mutinied
again upon his departure. As before, they were led by Ikhtiyar ul-Mulk who
was joined this time by Muhammad Husain Mirza.* The rebels had taken
Broach, Cambay, and Surat and had besieged Mirza Aziz Koka himself in
Ahmedabad. Akbar was furious at this cavalier and incessant questioning of
his authority but there was a further depth to the emotion that would drive
what was to become the most blistering campaign of Akbar’s long life. This
time it was Aziz Koka, childhood companion of his Kabul years, whose life
was in danger. Aziz Koka, who was the only nobleman ever allowed to
share the takht on the imperial elephant, and who galloped alongside the
Padshah inside the raging qumargha circle. And at the harem in Sikri there
was Aziz Koka’s mother, Jiji Anaga, who would have come to Akbar to lay
before him her great grief and her worry. ‘His Majesty,’ wrote Jahangir, ‘in
consequence of the distracted state of Jiji Anaga, the mother of [Aziz
Koka], started for Gujarat with a body of royal troops without delay from
the capital of Fathpur.’ Jahangir, who had witnessed these events as the
four-year-old Salim, realized that it was clearly the faultless love that Akbar
had for his milk mother that now made him act as he did. Indeed, according
to Jahangir, who admittedly had a more circumspect view of Aziz given his
role in the tussle for succession, Mirza Aziz Koka’s meteoric rise at court
was only due to Akbar’s great affection for his mother. Akbar, he wrote in
his memoir, ‘had favoured him from his very infancy because of the service
his mother had rendered…’ Jiji Anaga who was so beloved of Akbar as a
child that the other milk mothers, jealous, accused her of using witchcraft to
lure the infant.
Since the previous expedition to Gujarat had lasted a year, the courtiers
had run out of resources and money. Akbar now disbursed money to
everyone from the royal coffers, for salaries and rewards, and also planned
the operation with the meticulous personal attention which was to become a
decisive factor in all his military campaigns. The Padshah appeared to be
everywhere at once, his loud voice booming through the halls and
courtyards as he hustled his men and shouted out orders to his servants.
Sun-darkened from years of campaigns, Akbar was shadowed with worry
for Aziz and he rapidly sent imperial tents and horses in advance, and
ordered his officers in charge of the diwani to make every effort to react
with promptitude to all demands. Noblemen were chosen for the mission
and escorted to the advance camps the very same day, as was the harem,
accompanied by trusted men such as Raja Bhagwant Das, Kuar Rai Singh
of Bikaner, and Shujat Khan. Akbar was heard assuring everyone that
though they might be leaving ahead of him, he had a premonition that he
would reach Ahmedabad before anyone else.
On 23 August, barely a month after his return to Sikri, Akbar headed
out towards Gujarat again, this time leaving his young sons in the charge of
Raja Bharmal and Raja Todar Mal, amongst others. Accompanied by 3,000
men, all on dromedaries, Akbar mounted a camel called Jummuza and the
men rode out at dusk as the heat rose from the baking earth. The great north
Indian summer heat was a force that had struck terror into the hearts of the
most hardened warriors. The dust storms that accompanied the ferocious
heat had been described by Babur, in an earlier age. ‘It gets up in great
strength every year in the heat…when the rains are near…so strong and
carrying so much dust and earth that you cannot see one another. People
call this wind andhi, the darkener of the sky.’ But for his grandson, Akbar,
the elements themselves would be swept aside.
Akbar first stopped at Ajmer, to pray at Khwaja Sahib’s dargah,
focusing his thoughts and his will on victory. The men rode all night
through the suffocating Rajasthan desert, where the heat was like a furnace
even under the vaulting night skies. On the way they saw a blackbuck and
Akbar declared that if their cheetahs caught the antelope, it meant that
victory was theirs. A cheetah was released and the antelope was caught,
confirming not only Akbar’s unshakeable belief in his own destiny, but his
men’s implacable faith in their Padshah’s quasi-divine powers. The men
covered a staggering 50 miles per night; there were twenty-seven chosen
noblemen with Akbar, amongst them the most trusted and true men of his
empire including Abdur Rahim, Bairam Khan’s son, and Akbar’s kokas,
Saif Khan Koka and Zain Khan Koka. After a few days, Akbar switched to
a horse and ‘like the full moon, traversed an immense distance in the night’.
In nine days, Akbar and his men reached the outskirts of Ahmedabad,
having covered a distance of 800 kilometres on camels and horses with
intimidating speed.
Akbar mounted a favourite white horse, Noor Baize, strapped on his
moulded armour made of Damascus steel, and kept 100 men under his own
command. Fifteen were Hindus and included Raja Birbal, Man Singh
Darbari, Raja Bhagwant Das, Ram Das Kachhwaha, the musician Lal
Kalawant, and four painters, Sanwal Das, Jagannath, Har Das, and Tara
Chand. He then inspected all his noblemen and soldiers, his great amirs
resplendent and fearsome in their armour. Each of the noblemen wore a
cuirass of finely-tempered steel, ‘including a breastplate, backplate, and two
smaller pieces for the sides—all carved and engraved, decorated with
tassels, and held together by leather straps. Underneath was a coat of mail
with mail sleeves. Helmets were carved with visors and nose-guards and a
network of mail which protected the neck.’ Akbar’s helmet was decorated
with delicate gold damascene and had a spike at the top.* The horses too
were similarly armoured ‘front, back, head, and neck with crafted steel
pieces’. At the front of the army was a man holding the imperial alam, † a
lion and a sun against a moss green background. Then with the roll of the
drummers leading the way and the trumpeters sounding their chilling wail,
the Mughal army headed for the Sabarmati River.
On the opposite bank of the river, Muhammad Husain Mirza had come
to enquire about the army that was heading his way.
‘This is the army of the Emperor, which has come from Fatehpur to
exterminate those who have been faithless to their salt,’ responded Subhan
Quli, a Mughal soldier.
‘My spies only fourteen days ago left the Emperor at Fatehpur,’ shouted
back Muhammad Husain Mirza, clearly discomfited. ‘And if it is the
imperial army, where are the imperial elephants?’
‘How could elephants with mountain-like bulk traverse four hundred
karohs with the army in the space of nine days?’ shouted back a scoffing
Subhan Quli.
Muhammad Husain Mirza returned to his camp and readied himself for
battle, doubtless with a premonition of disaster in his heart. The mirzas
were defeated roundly with the Mughal army killing 2,000 of the 20,000-
strong rebel army. Very few Mughal soldiers were killed but one of the few
who died, Saif Khan Kokaltash, had shared an unexpected and tender
destiny with Akbar. When the Padshah was a young boy, he encountered
one of his milk mothers, flustered, coming back from meeting Hamida
Banu Begum. On being questioned, she admitted to Akbar that having
given birth to many daughters, her husband was unhappy and had warned
her, ‘if this time too a daughter comes I shall never cohabit with you again.’
Distressed, the woman had just obtained permission from Hamida Banu to
abort the child she was carrying. ‘If you wish to retain our affection,’ the
young Akbar now told her, ‘you will not touch this matter. God will bestow
upon you a son of a happy star.’ The woman acquiesced and the child she
gave birth to was Saif Khan Kokaltash. Now Saif Khan Kokaltash had died
heroically in a battle that had ended in victory for his Padshah and the
legend of Akbar grew.* He literally appeared to control the destinies of his
men in the palm of his hand—their divine births and their perfect deaths.
His campaigns themselves were touched by an effulgence that appeared
beyond the reach of ordinary mortals. Muhammad Hussain Mirza was
doomed even before the battle started, when he realized that Akbar had
accomplished something that had never been done before, that he had bent
time and space to his will and it was partly this psychological advantage
that had won Akbar the victory before the battle had even been joined. In
Hindustan, kings were wont to wait for the end of the monsoon, for the
cool, short winter, to declare hostilities, in preordained formations. But now
the rules had scattered like dust before the monsoon storms. Now armies
could cross deserts in the middle of the night and abandon war elephants if
they no longer suited their purpose. Now raging rivers and unbreachable
walls were there only to be conquered. As for the Padshah, he was an
implacable, irresistible force who seemed to commune with the spirits and
the fates. ‘This Prince,’ wrote Monserrate, ‘is of a stature and of a type of
countenance well-fitted to his royal dignity, so that one could easily
recognise, even at the first glance, that he is the King…. His eyes so bright
and flashing that they seem like a sea shimmering in the sunlight.’ And
Akbar would demand of his men a similar, unconditional courage, even the
poets, the musicians, the historians, and the philosophers.
After the battle was won at Ahmedabad, Muhammad Hussain Mirza
was captured and brought before Akbar where Raja Birbal asked him,
‘Which of these men captured you?’ The question was asked because a
number of soldiers were crowding around the prisoner, claiming to be the
champion of the moment. Muhammad Hussain Mirza, however, replied
with simple fatalism that ‘the salt of His Majesty has captured me’. Akbar
spoke kindly to his defeated foe and then handed him into the custody of
Rai Singh. There was no such equanimity a moment later, however, when
Akbar saw another group of prisoners. Included in this bedraggled group of
men was the koka of Ibrahim Hussain, one Mard Azmai Shah. This was the
man who had killed Bhupat, Raja Bhagwant Das’ brother, and Akbar’s
flaring rage demanded immediate retribution. He spun around, grabbed a
spear, and flung it at the man, who was immediately set upon by the crowd
of jeering soldiers who slashed him to death.
As he grew older, Akbar would become aware of the need to control his
sudden, unpredictable rages and he would write long letters to his own sons,
advising temperance and patience. But in Gujarat, faced with the man who
had killed one of his closest courtiers, his own brother-in-law, Akbar’s
wrath was beyond reason. A tower of heads was constructed with some
1,000 heads of the fallen enemy, as a warning to all rebels. The heads of
Muhammad Hussain Mirza and Ikhtiyar ul-Mulk* were sent to Agra.
Masaud Husain Mirza, captured alive, would later be brought before Akbar
along with 300 of his followers. They were dragged into court, to the
horror, bemusement, and chilled amusement of the courtiers, bound in
chains with collars around their necks, covered in filth and flies, and
wearing the skins of animals over their bodies and heads—‘the skins of
asses, hogs and dogs’, specified Badauni. Some of them were put to death
and the rest were freed.
The years of warfare required to bring about the decimation of the
empire’s enemies had an effect on the province of Gujarat as well. Ravaged
by years of war, as the huge imperial army swept through the country
repeatedly, the province suffered a catastrophic famine in 1574 of which
contemporary writer Qandahari leaves us a moving account.
During the same year plague and famine visited Gujarat. The rulers
considered these the spoils of battle, caused by filth and rotten
stench. The pestilence continued for five or six months. People had
not witnessed such awful disaster for a long time, they felt utterly
helpless and dreadful. Many people left the province and became
exiles. The intensity of pestilence was such that every day a hundred
cart-loads of dead bodies were taken out of Ahmadabad, which were
thrown into ponds and covered with mud. Those were in addition to
the dead who were carried on biers and bedsteads and were properly
buried. Commodities became so dear that men had to be content
with a single loaf of bread per day… Graves could not be dug for
burials… Ultimately the deadly pestilence spread over the districts
of Pattan, Baroach, Baroda and indeed engulfed the whole of
Gujarat… Provision for horses and camels was nowhere to be had.
So they scraped the bark of trees, crushed it and made it soft by
soaking it in water and fed their cattle on it. Its after effects were
numerous.
Gujarat became a subah of the Mughal Empire and the chief zamindar was
a Brahmin, one Narain Das who, according to Abu’l Fazl, was ‘of such
austere life that he first feeds his cattle with corn and then picks up the
grains from their dung and makes this his food, a sustenance held in much
esteem by the Brahmans. He is regarded as the head of the Rathore tribe
and has a following of 500 horse and 10,000 foot [soldiers].’
The indefatigable Raja Todar Mal was appointed Diwan of Gujarat, to
rejuvenate its shattered economy and finances. Todar Mal ordered a
complete survey of the cultivable land of Gujarat using a uniform method.*
Land was now measured using lengths of bamboo instead of the old method
of using rope. He also perfected the system of classification of lands on the
basis of their actual productive quality and this would result in detailed
survey reports which would form the basis for all future tax calculations. †
From now on this zabt revenue system, based on regular collection of data
on cultivated area, crop prices etc., would be implemented throughout the
empire.
In 1573, after being reunited with Mirza Aziz Koka, Akbar returned to
Sikri in just three weeks, triumphant. In honour of his tremendous Gujarat
victory, the city would be renamed Fathpur Sikri or Fatehpur Sikri (City of
Victory). As the victorious Padshah approached the city, the joy of the
people spilled over like a pomegranate cracked open. The musicians of the
naqqar khana, above the entrance to the city, prepared their drums, cymbals,
and curved and long trumpets. Akbar waited for all his warriors outside the
capital; on 5 October, the Padshah mounted a grey horse and, with a spear
in his hand, directed all his liegemen to ride behind him holding spears or
lances. In the saturated dusk, the victorious Mughal warriors rode into
Fatehpur Sikri where Hamida Banu Begum, the other begums, the three
princes, and all the impatient amirs and soldiery broke into cheers and
cacophonous music and exuberant joy.
*Considered one of Akbar’s best officers, Sadiq Khan was made a high mansab of 5,000 and
appointed Governor of Shahpur.
THE MAN WHO SET THE WORLD ON FIRE
As the Mughal Empire grew dramatically during this period through
Akbar’s extensive military campaigns, the Padshah instituted precise
administrative measures to bring these territories into the Mughal fold.
Hindustan had long been an agricultural economy and, through the
centuries, appropriation of agricultural surplus was the primary means of
revenue generation for the rulers. Under the Tughlaqs, and then under the
Afghan Lodis especially, control over revenues of territory increasingly
became hereditary, leading to a dangerous leavening of power bases, as had
happened with Sulaiman Karrani Afghan and then his son, Daud Khan.
After his return from the Bihar campaign, Akbar brought in a number of
changes in the administration, some of which he had been working on
previously, to centralize power and control the influence of his ever-
widening nobility. It was at this stage that Akbar systematized the
administration of the mansab, or number-rank, for every imperial officer, or
‘man of the sword’. Instead of being given a salary with its attendant
obligations in an arbitrary manner, officers now had a very specific place in
a hierarchy of numerical ranks which determined the salary of the official
and the number of horses that he was expected to maintain in case military
duties arose. Thus, a mansabdar of 500 rank, for example, would have to
maintain a force of 500 horses and he would be assigned a salary which
would allow him to raise that force.* The salary could be given in cash but
was usually in the form of a land revenue assignment, the jagir. The jagirs
were assigned strictly for revenue collection and these were now regularly
transferred. Neither the mansab rank nor the jagir land were hereditary,
thereby encouraging personal loyalty to the Padshah, and not to any
regional grouping or dispensation. While there were other aspects of the
administration—the land-revenue system and the branding of animals—that
were legacies of earlier dynasties, the mansab system was truly unique and,
according to historian M. Athar Ali, ‘an unrivalled device for organizing the
ruling class’. ‘These men were specialists,’ according to historian Stephen
P. Blake, ‘devoting their lives to the arts of war.’ The low ranking
mansabdars, of 20-400, were vital to the Mughal army and filled ‘minor
posts in imperial, princely, or great amiri contingents’. Single cavalrymen
and ahadis were the backbone of the army and received a decent salary of
about 200 rupees a year. ‘Theirs was an honourable profession in Mughal
India,’ writes Blake, ‘and both ahadis and cavalrymen were respectable
men in Muslim society.’ The men holding ranks upto 500 were all called
mansabdars while those from 500 to 2500 were called amirs and those from
2,500 and above were amir-e-azam.
Akbar had already divided his empire into subahs, sarkars, and mahals
and he would now replicate exactly the entire administrative structure of
one subah with another, so that they would be virtually identical from one
end of the empire to the other. Because of the expense involved in
maintaining the designated numbers of horses, elephants, and camels for a
mansabdar, there was a temptation by officers to present animals that might
not actually belong to them and receive pay for the non-existent animals.
Some officers went to remarkable lengths to pass off ‘borrowed’ men and
animals as their own, as described by Badauni:
…Amirs did as they pleased…[putting] most of their own servants
and mounted attendants into soldiers’ clothes, brought them to
musters… Hence…a lot of low tradespeople, weavers and cotton-
cleaners, carpenters, and green-grocers, both Hindu and
Musulman…brought borrowed horses, got them branded, and were
appointed to a command…and when a few days afterwards no trace
was to be found of the imaginary horse and the visionary saddle,
they had to perform their duties on foot.
So Akbar also introduced a system of dagh, or branding of horses, to
prevent corruption in the muster of animals. All mansabdars were now
required to brand their animals and present themselves to Akbar with the
exact number of horses that corresponded to their numerical rank.
The mansabdari system was equally applied to Hindu chieftains, in a
move that co-opted these men into the Mughal Empire and made them
equally invested in its success. Under earlier sultans, Hindu chiefs were
required to raise a peshkash, a payment of tribute, and to supply an army
whenever required. This peshkash was usually raised by the chieftains by
taxing their dependants, and could be debilitating for the peasantry. Now
the chieftains were incorporated into the mansabdari system, being steadily
promoted and gaining more honours as they provided loyal service to the
Padshah, ‘making loyalty more profitable than rebellion’, according to
historian Rima Hooja. The kingdoms of Rajasthan slowly became more
peaceful, as Akbar condemned and discouraged the wars between states for
expansionist purposes. The jagirs that the Rajput chieftains were awarded
usually included the assessed revenue of their ancestral lands, the watan
jagirs, while Akbar maintained the right to confirm each successive ruler in
his domain. This granting of the coronation teeka by the Mughal Padshah
was a powerful symbol, fracturing some of the old clan structures between
the rulers and their clansmen. One of the famous instances of the Padshah
confirming a besieged contender to rule was for his favourite, ‘Mota Raja’
Udai Singh of Marwar. Most of the time, however, Akbar rarely interfered
in the Rajput succession process, the Mughal Empire profiting from the
symbiotic relationship of the chieftains with their clansmen, who could
raise strong armies from among their kinsmen. A great many Rajput
chieftains would not only have exemplary careers, travelling the length and
breadth of Hindustan, and thereby changing the very topography and
culture of their home states, but would forge deep personal bonds of
friendship with Akbar.
The administration of the kingdoms of Rajasthan would be profoundly
influenced by their incorporation into the Mughal Empire. In Marwar, Raja
Udai Singh was assisted in this task by his pradhan, or adviser, one Govind
Das Bhati, ‘who was fully conversant with Akbar’s administrative system’.
The office of diwan was instituted, and it was usually held by a member of
the elite Mutsaddie group, from the Oswal Jain business community, and
the diwan gradually became the most powerful officer of the state. There
were also bakshis, or military commanders, kotwals, and a wakil, who was
the state’s representative at the Mughal court with the force of the Mughal
Padshah behind him.
Another state which was transformed by its alliance with the Mughal
Padshah was Bikaner. Bikaner had been peacefully incorporated into the
empire, and a daughter of Raja Kalyanmal had married Akbar. Kalyanmal’s
son, Kuar Rai Singh, then proved his courage in battle during the Gujarat
wars and when Mughal authority was resisted by Marwar’s Rao Chandrasen
and Mewar’s Rana Pratap, Akbar assigned the administration of Jodhpur to
Rai Singh. During the three years that Jodhpur remained under Rai Singh,
‘various villages were endowed to Brahmans, Charans, and Bhats’. Upon
the death of his father in 1574, Rai Singh was the first ruler of Bikaner to be
given the title Maharaja. So widely and relentlessly did this formidable
warrior travel to maintain order in the empire, from his home state in the
desert to the high plateaus of Kabul and the forests of the Deccan, that it
was said of him that ‘his saddle is his throne’. Another favourite of Akbar’s
was Rai Singh’s brother, Kuar Prithviraj, popularly called Peethal, who was
not only an exceptional warrior, but also a flamboyant poet and scholar, and
would become a beloved and much appreciated member of the Mughal
court. Peethal and the Padshah also became brothers-in-law when two
daughters of the Raja of Jaisalmer, Champa Dey and Nathi Bai, married
Peethal and Akbar respectively.
The incorporation of Bikaner and other Rajasthani regions brought rich
trade routes and market centres into the Mughal Empire. A dizzying variety
of goods were traded through caravans including ‘ivory, copper, dates, gum-
arabic, borax, coconuts, silk, chintzes, muslin, shawls, sandalwood,
camphor, dyes, drugs, spices, dried fruits, cumin seeds, dyed blankets,
potash and salt’. Various transit taxes brought further riches into the
empire’s coffers. In western Rajasthan, merchandise was placed under the
protection of Charan bards who, in courageous imitation of the Rajputs
whose bravery they extolled, were willing to defend these goods to the
death in an act of suicide known as performing chandi. Indeed, the killing
of a Charan who was protecting a caravan was considered as heinous as
killing a Brahmin, ‘with all its post-life connotations of hell-fire and
damnation’.
All these many changes that Akbar was bringing about were all
meticulously recorded, the Padshah’s every pronouncement noted down.
For this, Akbar would have a group of scribes, fourteen in total, who were
in attendance upon the Padshah, two at a time. The scribes had a kalam-
daan (pen box), containing reed pens, an inkwell, sand, etc. At court, they
sat cross-legged on the ground close to the Padshah with their reed pens at
the ready, to note down his every order.
All applications and documents presented to the court, and all orders
and enquiries from the ruler, were written down by the particular
scribe responsible, to be read out in court the following day. No
imperial order could be executed without confirmation from the
scribe that the case had been presented to the ruler as recorded. This
confirmation then had to be recorded in the farman…the correct
transcription of the farmans on the appropriate paper and with the
designated seal could take days, even months.
This elaborate system made impetuous decisions much more difficult to
make, and the scribes, for their part, took care not to accidentally step on
the Padshah’s shadow, a most boorish act.
The writing, sending, and receiving of these royal messages were
elaborate tasks themselves, since it was the sacrosanct word of the Padshah
or his family that was being conveyed. A command from the emperor
himself was called a hukm*, while commands issued by the other members
of the royal family were called nishans. The elaborate ways in which
farmans were folded, the seals, the paper, were all part of the ritual of
authority, meant to convey the imperial presence in absentia.
The farman is folded so that both corners touch, then a paper knot is
tied and then sealed in so that the contents are not visible. The
sealing gum is made from the sap of kunar, bar, pipal and other trees
which, like wax, becomes soft when warmed, but hardens when
cold. After the farman has been sealed, it is placed in a golden
envelope, for His Majesty regards the use of such external signs of
greatness as a service to God.
Nor could the recipient of such an exalted farman irreverently rip it open.
He would have to halt before the messenger at a certain distance, in a
suitably submissive manner, place the document upon his head, prostrate
himself, and then give the messenger an apt reward for his service. A
particular honour was when the Padshah might affix his fingerprint upon
the document, as when he pardoned a Rajput chieftain for some
misbehaviour.
While Akbar was bringing in these profound and long-lasting changes
in Mughal administration, as we have seen, the Mughal forces under
Munim Khan and Todar Mal in Bihar and Bengal had achieved stunning
successes against the Afghan forces of Daud Khan. ‘A tremendous battle
took place,’ wrote Badauni, ‘when the elephants of Daud (all of which were
fed on good grass and were madder than can be imagined) were put into
motion.’ In the Battle of Tukaroi, in southern Midnapur district, the eighty-
year-old Chaghatai warlord, Munim Khan, fought with furious bravery,
lashing out at Gujar Khan Afghan with a whip when he found his sword-
bearer missing, and had to be carried out unconscious from the battlefield
due to his many wounds. Fighting not only the enemy but also the
unfamiliar, swampy terrain, and the faltering resolve of the Mughal troops,
Munim Khan nonetheless rallied his forces and achieved a decisive victory.
Daud Khan submitted, and in a specially constructed ceremonial tent,
formally surrendered to Munim Khan. In an elaborately orchestrated
ceremony Daud Khan, once Sultan of Bengal, untied his sword and set it
aside while Munim Khan presented the Afghan with a Mughal sword, an
embroidered belt, and a cloak purportedly worn by Akbar, thus
‘incorporating’ Daud Khan into the body of the emperor. Wearing the cloak
and the sword, Daud Khan then turned his face to the faraway Mughal
capital at Fatehpur Sikri and prostrated himself.
Despite the freighted symbology of Daud Khan’s surrender, conditions
on the ground in Bengal would remain explosive for decades:
…seizing the capital and possessing the land were two different
matters. While Mun’im Khan and Raja Todar Mal…were in Tanda
reorganizing the revenue administration of the newly conquered
province, thousands of Afghans melted into the forested Bengali
hinterland, where for the next forty years they continued to hold out
against the new regime. There they attracted a host of dissidents,
including Muslim and Hindu zamindars, Portuguese renegades, and
tribal chieftains, all of whom perceived the Chaghatai Turks from
Upper India as foreigners and usurpers.
On a more prosaic note, to achieve victory, bribery had also been resorted
to, bringing many of the Bengal noblemen over to the Mughal cause and
diluting the power of the Bengal army. Raja Todar Mal had advocated the
use of bribes, writing that ‘the method to restrain the faction was to send
money by one who was loyal and smooth-tongued’. Abu’l Fazl noted with
satisfaction that this had ‘quieted the slaves to gold’.
In Fatehpur Sikri his many victories and successes, dreams made reality,
seemed to weigh on Akbar. So much had been obtained, seemingly
effortlessly, in the past few years. Akbar had subdued Rajasthan, Gujarat,
Bihar, and Bengal. He had scattered the Uzbeks, the mirzas, and the
Afghans. He had wrought a huge empire into a cohesive unit. He had three
golden sons, a glittering new capital, and he was only thirty-three years old.
Always supremely confident of his purpose on earth, Akbar now wanted
further confirmation of his divine mission. ‘His Majesty spent whole nights
in praising God,’ wrote Badauni. ‘He continually occupied himself in
pronouncing Ya huwa (O God), and Ya hadi (O Guide) in which he was
well versed.’ Akbar isolated himself from the swirl and skitter of his court
and would spend nights sitting on a stone slab in a quiet cell, gratitude
filling his heart ‘with his head bent over his chest, gathering the bliss of the
early hours of dawn’. According to Badauni, Akbar had learnt that Sultan
Sulaiman Karrani had been in the habit of praying every night in the
company of religious men, and discussing matters of spirituality and
philosophy with them, and so decided to build a separate hall in which to
discuss the many questions that weighed on his soul and troubled his heart.
‘Discourses on philosophy have such a charm for me that they distract me
from all else,’ he was to say later, ‘and I forcibly restrain myself from
listening to them, lest the necessary duties of the hour be neglected.’ Akbar
now ordered the building of an ibadat khana* at the site of the Mahdavi
Abdullah Niyazi Sirhindi’s old quarters ‘consisting of four porticoes with
separate seating arrangements for the nobles, sayyids, theologians (ulema)
and the mystics’. Here Akbar began to hold weekly discussions on
Thursday evenings when incense perfumed the air while the Padshah
waited impatiently to offer gold coins to those who would dazzle with their
arguments and articulate speech.
Also present at the meetings was Abu’l Fazl, now calling himself
‘allami’. ‘He is the man,’ wrote Badauni bitterly, ‘that set the world in
flames.’ But that was much later, after Badauni had been humiliated and
repudiated by Akbar and cast out from the warm glow of the Padshah’s
attention. Of the two young men, it was initially Badauni who was the more
intemperate and argumentative. When the two scholars happened to meet
the orthodox jurist Abdullah Sultanpuri in 1572, it was Badauni who argued
provocatively with him about the supposed heretical nature of a text, while
Abu’l Fazl attempted discreetly to silence him. ‘You have passed through a
great danger,’ Abu’l Fazl chided Badauni after the meeting, ‘but
(fortunately) he did not set himself to persecute you. Had he done so, who
could have saved you?’
For now, however, both men, untethered and wandering, were looking
to be saved from their many demons by this Padshah who promised new
horizons and brighter futures. They were both given a mansab of 20 to
begin with and thus these two old schoolmates were ‘both baked in one
kiln’. Abu’l Fazl, by Badauni’s own admission, ‘worked so strenuously at
the dagh-u-mhali (branding) business that he managed by his intelligence
and time-serving qualities to raise himself to a mansab of 2,000 and the
dignity of a Wazir’. As for Badauni, he would be shackled by something
much more intangible— his own obduracy and a certain fatal stubbornness.
But in 1575, both the men were eager, interested participants in the
discussions at the ibadat khana, proud of their massive erudition and keen to
display their wit and sharply incisive thinking.
The most important members of the ulema at this time were Shaikh Abd
un-Nabi, and Abdullah Sultanpuri. For a long while, the young Padshah had
been especially solicitous and respectful of the older theologian, Abd un-
Nabi. Akbar would visit the sadr, and stand barefoot before him to listen to
his lectures on the traditions of the Prophet. He would bring the sadr his
shoes as an act of devotion and place them before the shaikh’s feet. But
most of these theologians, as pointed out by historian John F. Richards,
‘were neither speculative intellectuals nor serious religious thinkers’. Abd
un-Nabi, in particular, was abrasive and rude. On one occasion, when the
Padshah presented himself on a Friday to listen to the sadr’s lectures, Abd
un-Nabi grew infuriated because Akbar was wearing yellow, considered to
be against the sharia. The sadr furiously rebuked the Padshah and even
threw his staff at him, offending him deeply. The distressed young Padshah
did not react but later went to complain to his mother, Hamida Banu, about
the appalling behaviour of the sadr. Abd un-Nabi also took satisfaction in
humiliating the great amirs of the court. He would sit down after midday
prayers, wash his hands and feet and, while carrying out his ablutions, spit
on the faces and clothes of assembled courtiers, feigning inadvertence.
Moreover, though the office of the sadr was that of the highest religious
dignitary in the land, it was attached to other duties, such as the distribution
of royal charities, making the position open to corruption. Even Badauni
admitted that the shaikh had become insufferably arrogant in his habits,
dealing with people in an ’infamous manner’, because of the power he
commanded as sadr towards those who came asking for patronage. As for
Abdullah Sultanpuri, it was discovered that he too was corrupt and avoided
paying the obligatory charitable tax on property by transferring his assets to
his wife’s name every year when the time for tax inspection came around.
Moreover, these two men were ‘at loggerheads with each other, and had
been responsible for the fall of people’s faith in the scholars, past and
present, amounting to a disinclination towards the Religion itself ’.
It was not surprising, therefore, that Akbar found the tenor of the
discussions in the ibadat khana initially very disappointing. ‘A horrid noise
and confusion ensued,’ admitted Badauni, as the ulema started arguing with
one another. Akbar angrily told Badauni to inform him of any ulema ‘who
talks nonsense and cannot behave themselves, and I shall make him leave
the hall’. Badauni whispered to Asaf Khan, sitting next to him, that if he
were to obey the Padshah, most of the ulema would have to leave. Akbar,
who insisted on hearing what Badauni had said, was much amused by this
remark and merrily repeated it to those around him. But the crass
aggression and vicious, low manner of the ulema continued to disappoint
Akbar. On one occasion, Haji Ibrahim of Sirhind declared that the wearing
of red and yellow clothes, usually reserved for women, should be allowed
for everyone, upon which Sayyid Muhammad, the chief qazi (judge), grew
incensed with rage, abused Haji Ibrahim in Akbar’s presence, and ‘called
him an accursed wretch, abused him, and lifted up his stick to strike him’.
One of the very first issues discussed in the ibadat khana was the
number of freeborn women a man was allowed to marry by way of nikah.
When Akbar was told that the Prophet had limited such marriages to four,
he is said to have remarked that ‘in our youth we had not felt bound by this
rule, and whatever number of freeborn women and concubines we wanted
we have collected. What should be done now?’ Furthermore, ‘in justice to
his wives… he wanted to know what remedy the law provided for his case’,
because he had not kept to the legal number permitted. That this was a
matter that troubled Akbar is not surprising. In the convulsion of empire
formation, Akbar had married a large number of women: Timurid princess,
Rajput rajkumaris, Afghan noblewomen and more. From Monserrate’s
estimate of 300 women to Abu’l Fazl’s fulsome description of 5,000
women in the harem, these large numbers were meant to reflect Akbar’s
munificence and splendour. Even a cursory examination of the quarters at
Fatehpur Sikri make these excessive numbers entirely unrealistic and,
moreover, of all the women in the harem, most were not sexually available
to the Padshah. They included his aunts, his stepmothers, his Timurid
relatives, and the retinues that accompanied the wives—their entourage of
childhood friends, singers, cooks, masseuses, tailors etc. Even so, Akbar
had far exceeded the stipulated number of wives permitted by the sharia
when he was using marital connections to stabilize his empire and now
sought to remedy the situation. After much discussion, it was agreed that,
according to the Shia custom of mut’ah* marriage, a man may marry any
number of wives. Shaikh Abd un-Nabi, who seemed to prevaricate upon
this matter, earned Akbar’s sharp displeasure and finally the Padshah
appointed a new qazi, the Shia Qazi Maliki, more amenable to his particular
matrimonial problems, who decreed that Akbar’s mut’ah marriages were
legal.
From these discussions at the ibadat khana it was clear that Akbar was
concerned with the legality of the status of his wives and his own standing
in the eyes of God and in society. There is a sense of Akbar struggling to
right the wrongs committed during the vagaries of his youth and of
accepting his own fallibility. This was quite in contrast to the views of an
orthodox man like Shaikh Ahmad Sirhindi,* for example, who believed that
Islamic laws regarding marriage and concubinage were there expressly to
protect men’s enjoyment of women. The four wives, the instrument of
divorce, the provision for nikah marriage, were primarily to allow men as
many sexual liberties as possible. For Shaikh Sirhindi, women’s views were
quite inconsequential for they were naqis ul-aql, without intellect.
Another theologian whose fall was imminent was Abdullah Sultanpuri,
the makhdum ul-Mulk. When the discussions had started at the ibadat
khana, Akbar had summoned him ‘in order to annoy him’ and pitted him
against the precocious Abu’l Fazl. Sensing the winds of change, and
following the lead of Akbar, who would keep interrupting Abdullah
Sultanpuri, the other courtiers also interjected to ridicule the theologian so
that he soon became, according to Badauni, a living example of the Koranic
warning—‘and some of you shall have life prolonged to a miserable age’.
Badauni also believed that ‘from this day forward the road to opposition
and differences in opinion lay open, and remained so, till Akbar was
appointed Mujtahid of the Empire’. This mood of sharp-edged bonhomie
seems to have extended to the court, too, for Badauni narrates an incident in
which Deb Chand Rajah Manjholah caused great amusement among the
courtiers by jokingly suggesting that Allah had a great respect for cows
since that animal is mentioned in the first chapter of the Koran.†
There were other signs of a change in the texture of the court at
Fatehpur Sikri. Attracted by Akbar’s new capital, its dazzling wealth, and
the climate of religious and cultural experimentation, learned and talented
men from less accommodating regimes in the Muslim world began drifting
to Fatehpur Sikri. Hakim Abul Fath, Hakim Humam, and Hakim Nuruddin
were three brothers who had had to flee the increasingly intolerant rule of
Shah Tahmasp. The shah had seized Gilan and tortured and murdered their
father, who had served as sadr of Gilan. These brothers had acquired
training in medicine from Persia which was, at the time, famous for its
tutor-based model of medical education. The brothers now came to
Fatehpur Sikri where Abu’l Fazl remarked of Hakim Abul Fath that he was
‘specially remarkable for his tact, his knowledge of the world and for his
power to read the lines of forehead’. Even Badauni admitted that his
manners ‘were exceedingly winning’ and that he became an intimate friend
of the Padshah, though he grumbled that this was because ‘he flattered him
openly, adapted himself to every change in the religious ideas of His
Majesty, or even went in advance of them’.
As the philosophical debates continued in the ibadat khana, the men
alternatively exalted and furious, in the haramsara a discussion of a
different sort had been occupying the women for many months, and would
result in a journey that would take a large number of the women very far
from the safe confines of their sandstone city and away from the ‘proper
order’ that Abu’l Fazl yearned for the women of the harem.
*A mansabdar could be paid in cash, or by the assignment of a jagir, in which case he was also a
jagirdar of that land. There was, therefore, a close correlation between jagirdars and mansabdars. If
the mansabdar was paid in cash, then he could not also be called a jagirdar.
*The word hukm is still used today in some states when addressing an erstwhile maharaja.
*The ibadat khana has been located by Syed Ali Nadeem Rezavi as the structure erroneously known
as the Daftarkhana.
*A temporary marriage that unites a man and woman as husband and wife for a limited time.
*An Indian Sunni theologian of the Naqshbandi order. He would later join Akbar’s court as a junior
member, and would become a vocal critic of Akbar’s ‘heretical’ practices.
†The Sura of the Heifer.
THE HARAMSARA AND THE HAJJ
When Abu’l Fazl would write his magisterial biography of Akbar a few
years later, he would strive very hard to justify all the earlier foibles of
Akbar—his transgressions, his vulnerabilities, and his inconsistencies
explained away by an enduring ‘veil’ behind which he hid his true, divinely
inspired nature, to be revealed only after he had thus tested those around
him. And if the Padshah, the army, and the empire had to be ordered and
tabulated, then so did the much more capricious institution of the harem. In
earlier, more capacious, times, the harem was not so separated from the
men, and in Kabul, as testified by Gulbadan, ‘the women were not veiled,
they rode, went on picnics, followed shikar, practiced archery’. It was from
the time that Fatehpur Sikri was built, and Abu’l Fazl conjured up a perfect,
secluded space, that the women of the Mughal Empire became much more
invisible, assigned for the first time to quarters separate and apart. When
they were written about at all, as we have seen, which was only very rarely,
they were now all ‘pillars of chastity’ and ‘cupolas of chastity’. And, yet,
despite the very considerable effort expended by Abu’l Fazl, there were
times when that veil was rent aside, when the shadowy, insubstantial
presence of the Mughal women grew dense and full of purpose. One of the
most extraordinary instances of the women of the Mughal harem stepping
far beyond their designated cloistered space was the royal women’s hajj of
1575.
Royal women had gone on the hajj before, and we have noted Bega
Begum’s journey in the previous decade, but the royal hajj of 1575 differed
in the scale of the enterprise, the number of women involved, and the
elaborate arrangements made for them. According to Abu’l Fazl, Gulbadan
had ‘long ago made a vow to visit the holy places’ and now that the
Portuguese ‘had become submissive and obedient’, performing the hajj
pilgrimage had become a reality. Apart from Gulbadan, the large party
included two daughters of Kamran, Sultanam Begum, the wife of Askari
who had looked after the child Akbar when he had been held hostage by his
uncles, a granddaughter and a stepdaughter of Gulbadan, a widow of Babur,
three dependents of Humayun (about one of whom we know the charming
detail that she ‘sang in the moonlight on the road to Lagham in 1549’) and
Salima Sultan Begum, widow of Bairam Khan and wife of Akbar.
Apart from Salima Sultan Begum, who was the only wife of the
Padshah to be included, these were all senior Mughal women, enormously
respected by Akbar. They carried with them the Timurid legacy of
journeying from the time of Babur and Humayun. It is a testimony to the
respect and influence these women commanded that Akbar allowed them to
make the pilgrimage, for the hajj was a dangerous and unpredictable
journey. There was the risk of piracy, of shipwreck, of abduction, of
drowning, as well as the many dangers of travelling in the Holy Lands
themselves. In fact, this party of women would be delayed for a year at
Surat while the Portuguese prevaricated with the cartaz, they would
flounder off the coast of Aden on the way back, and be marooned for a year
while they waited for a ship to rescue them. They would bring back from
the Holy Lands tales of many exciting adventures, the satisfaction of
bestowing largesse on the devout that was so ostentatious that they were
chastised by the Ottoman authorities themselves, and also the confidence of
pious Muslim women who had completed the hajj. When they returned to
Fatehpur Sikri, they would make the stay of the Jesuit priests untenable.
It is generally believed that the women’s hajj was organized and headed
by Gulbadan, the irrepressible and beloved aunt of Akbar’s who had
endured so many reversals as she followed in the wake of her father and
brother, Padshahs of Hindustan. Akbar, too, was no doubt eager to sponsor
the hajj, a visible and opulent symbol for a Muslim ruler to display. Akbar
‘sent with her [Gulbadan] a large amount of money and goods’ and indeed
he ‘poured into the lap of each the money that they wanted and so made the
burden of their desires light’. He enlarged the pious trust (waqf ), which had
been set up by the last Sultan of Gujarat to send the revenues of a number
of coastal villages as donations to the Holy Lands. Several thousand robes
of honour and enormous sums of money for charity were also sent by Akbar
with the party. Akbar sponsored the building of a hospice in Mecca and
from 1575 onwards would send a hajj caravan under a special Mughal
officer known as the mir hajj every year from Hindustan, rivalling the great
hajj caravans of Egypt and Syria and threatening the very power of the
Ottoman Sultan, whose sole prerogative it was to arrange for these
caravans. ‘A general permission was given to the people’ agreed Badauni,
‘so that at great public expense, with gold and goods and rich presents, the
Emperor sent them on a pilgrimage to Makkah.’ It is possible that as
incendiary talks began in the intimacy of the ibadat khana, Akbar also
wished to reassure his more orthodox populace of his being a true Muslim
monarch. At the same time, Akbar was sending an emissary to Goa armed
with money and gifts, always keen to learn about ‘the curiosities and
rarities’ of different places, with instructions to bring back ‘the wonderful
productions’ that the Portuguese may have brought with them to Goa.
The women, meanwhile, were sent off in a magnificent cavalcade and
orders were sent to ‘the great Amirs, the officers of every territory, the
guardians of the passes, the watchmen of the borders, the river-police, and
the harbour-masters’ to make the journey of this chosen party as smooth as
possible. The only senior Timurid woman not to be included in this party
was Hamida Banu Begum, who remained at Fatehpur Sikri to keep vigil
over her son, the Padshah.
That there was still considerable apprehension about the trouble the
Portuguese might cause for the ladies at Surat can be inferred from the fact
that Qulich Khan, the Governor of Surat, was deputed to attend to them
there. Qulich Khan was familiar with Portuguese dealings and was not
reassured when he reached the port city. Moosvi has examined a farman
which showed that following Qulich Khan’s appraisal, Akbar was
‘unnerved, and wrote to his “Esteemed Mother”…to consider her journey to
Surat as equivalent to hajj and defer the voyage at least for a year. He
openly expressed his fear for a blow to the honour of the Imperial Family,
and his own great pain, if something happened to the party at the hands of
the Portuguese.’ But Gulbadan and the ladies had not come so far on the
journey of their lives to be put off by fear of the loathed ‘firangis’ and a
cartaz was finally obtained.
While the hajj party was at Surat, they would have received sad news of
the death of an old ally of the harem from the days of the early forays into
Hindustan. One of their number, Bibi Saruqad, was now widowed, for
Munim Khan khankhanan had just died, far from his home and his family,
in Bengal. ‘He rendered his account to the guardian of Paradise,’ was
Badauni’s truculent assessment, ‘or to the guardian of Hell (God knows!)’.
After the surrender of Daud Khan, Munim Khan had made the disastrous
decision to shift the seat of the government from Tanda to the ancient city
of Gaur. But the river Ganga had changed her course and now the rushing
river had become a stagnant, maleficent backwater which bred diseases,
like nightmares. ‘The thought of death took hold of everyone,’ wrote Abu’l
Fazl as thousands of Mughal troops and villagers died of disease. ‘Things
came to such a pass that the living were unable to bury the dead,’ agreed
Badauni, ‘and threw them head foremost into the river.’ The elderly warlord
Munim Khan died, too, undone, in the end, not by any flashing sword or
betraying clansman but by the plague, noxious and invisible. According to
historian Eaton, this catastrophic plague occurring right at the beginning of
Mughal inroads into Bengal, ‘contributed to the stereotype, soon accepted
throughout the imperial service, that Bengal was a hostile and foreign land’.
As the Mughal women prepared to board the great hajj ships, the Salimi
and the Ilahi, either built or bought by Akbar in the three years since
Gujarat was taken, Akbar sent Khan Jahan and Raja Todar Mal to Bengal,
to deal with Daud Khan who, with Munim Khan now dead, was once again
flirting with the idea of rebellion. In the lavish rain of the monsoon of 1576,
Daud Khan Afghan was finally defeated. His horse got trapped in the
sliding mud and he was captured. Apparently, Khan Jahan hesitated to
behead him as per imperial orders ‘for he was a very handsome man’. The
deed was done, however, and his head, stuffed and perfumed, was sent to
the emperor while his trunk was gibbeted at Tanda.
Once in the Holy Lands, the Mughal ladies, having travelled far away
from the gaunt topography of their lives at Fatehpur Sikri, were determined
to participate fully in all that this great occasion had to offer. These widows
and daughters of Babur could reclaim those earlier, less constrained, times
when they had wandered in the wake of their peripatetic husbands and
brothers across the country. In the next few years, the women would
participate in the communal aspect of the hajj and would distribute the
extravagant wealth that Akbar had provided for the occasion—six lakh
rupees and many robes of honour as gifts. This wealth was so ostentatious
that it would cause a sharp reaction from the Ottoman authorities. Between
1578 and 1580 five documents were sent from Sultan Murad III, the
Ottoman sultan, to the authorities at Mecca, complaining about the
extended stay of the Mughal ladies and the ‘anti-Sharia’ activities indulged
in by them. They railed against the overcrowding of the Holy Cities due to
the enormous retinues of the ladies and the large number of pilgrims
attracted by their largesse. The sultan further gave instructions to the Sharif
of Mecca to encourage them to leave the Holy Lands as soon as they had
completed the pilgrimages and even prohibited the distribution of the alms
sent by Akbar in the Haram Sharif. It would appear that Gulbadan and her
Mughal party’s largesse, which challenged the Ottoman authorities’
prestige, in addition to the hustling crowds attracted by them, made Sultan
Murad III keen to be rid of the Hindustani pilgrims. The royal ladies would
finally depart from Mecca in 1580, much against their wishes, and return to
Hindustan, bringing back mementos and curiosities, Arab servants, and a
lifetime of memories of ecstatic passions and cacophonous celebrations.
At Fatehpur Sikri, meanwhile, the women of the harem continued their
involvement with more domestic duties in increasingly guarded spaces.
‘Several chaste women have been appointed as darogahs and
superintendents over each section,’ noted Abu’l Fazl primly, about the
women in the harem, who were moreover guarded by ‘sober and active
women, the most trustworthy of them placed about the apartments of his
Majesty’. While the inside of the palaces were guarded by strong women
called the urdubegis,* the outside was guarded by eunuchs; the next outer
perimeter was guarded by Rajputs, and then there were the porters at the
gates and, on all four sides, squads of Ahadis. The women were assigned
salaries, ‘sufficiently liberal, not counting the presents, which his Majesty
most generously bestows’. The salaries ranged from Rs 1,610 per month to
the most senior women to Rs 20 to the servants.
The Rajput women, too, when they married and left their homes, were
given jagirs called hath kharach jagir (personal expenses land) which they
administered directly through their own officers, thus maintaining some
financial independence, vital in a polygamous society. An important
wedding organized at this time was the marriage of Abdur Rahim, eighteen
years old now, to a daughter of Jiji Anaga, Mah Banu Begum. This was an
important alliance for the young nobleman, and it brought him the
considerable influence of the Ataka Khail, and also made him the brother-
in-law of the temperamental but talented and powerful Mirza Aziz Koka.
Akbar now gave Abdur Rahim the title ‘khan’, usually only reserved for
princes of the blood, and henceforth always addressed him as ‘Mirza Khan’.
It was at this time that Aziz Koka, in his long and tumultuous career,
temporarily fell from favour. Akbar’s orders regarding the branding of
animals was resented by the old Central Asian nobility, who saw in this
system of inspection a further curbing of their power. Aziz, it was felt, had
grumbled rather too openly at the branding order. ‘Everything that he knew
about these things,’ wrote Badauni about Aziz’s criticism of branding, ‘he
mentioned with unqualified disapprobation.’ Akbar ‘could not endure this
unpleasant plain-speaking’ and Aziz was removed from his post as
Governor of Gujarat and temporarily confined to his garden quarters in
Agra.
With Aziz Koka and his intemperate criticisms dealt with, Akbar and
the entire city of Fatehpur Sikri got ready to receive a visitor who brought
with him all the nostalgia of the Timurid homeland—Mirza Sulaiman of
Badakhshan*. After a long career spent skirmishing at the edge of the
Hindustani empire in Badakhshan and Kabul, this old warlord from the time
of Babur himself had been brought low by his own grandson who, in fine
Timurid tradition, was planning to assassinate him. Keen to demonstrate
Mughal resplendence to this scion of the Timurids, Akbar organized a
magnificent display of Hindustani splendour. Five hundred elephants were
lined up for 10 miles from the great gates of Fatehpur Sikri, ‘adorned with
European velvet and embroidered fabric from Constantinople’ and ‘with
chains of gold and of silver’. There were also fine, shimmying Arabian and
Persian horses wearing golden saddles and, between every pair of
elephants, there was a cart containing a velvet-eyed cheetah wearing a
collar of gold and sitting on a carpet of embroidered gold. Raja Bhagwant
Das, Governor of Lahore, accompanied the visitor to court and Akbar
himself rode out several miles to greet the mirza. When they came face to
face, Akbar dismounted and walked up to the mirza to embrace him and to
prevent the old man from prostrating himself.
The palaces at Fatehpur Sikri were decorated with rich carpets, golden
vessels, and tents of gold cloth, and when the young princes were presented
to the elderly exiled ruler, Mirza Sulaiman was delighted and took them into
his lap and kissed their cheeks. Old Chaghatai customs were hurriedly
revived to impress the mirza. ‘They spread royal tables in the audience-
hall,’ wrote Badauni, ‘and the officers of high grade gathered the soldiers
together, and took to themselves the trouble of arranging the customary
food.’ Qandahari noted that ‘bejewelled and golden plates, big bowls, made
of Chinaware, sugar pots and countless other delicious dishes were served’.
‘But when the Mirza departed,’ Badauni sniffed contemptuously, ‘all these
[revived customs] departed too.’ Clearly these old Turki–Chaghatai
customs and foods were now present only as a memory, used as potent
symbols when required, and then pragmatically set aside. Akbar’s changing
nobility no longer justified the perfect remembrance of Chaghatai customs.
This was especially so because in 1576 it was not the old Timurid mirzas
who were posing a threat to Akbar but a lone Rajput chieftain who was
preparing to battle the Padshah of Hindustan on a field of gold, and carve
for himself a place in the long and glittering scrolls of Rajput braves.
*The urdubegis were a class of women, often Turki or Abyssinian, robust and trained in the use of
bows and arrows and daggers, to protect the women within the harem and when they travelled
outside the harem.
*It will be recalled that this Timurid cousin had been given the fief of Badakhshan upon the death of
Babur.
THE SAFFRON FIELDS
On a warm spring day in 1576, Akbar brought Kuar Man Singh to Khwaja
Muinuddin Chishti’s tomb at Ajmer and, in the sanctified precinct of the
saint’s grave, surrounded by the murmuring of the praying pilgrims, wisps
of incense, and the charged atmosphere of more than three centuries of
benedictions, presented the young Rajput prince with a robe of honour and
sent him to war. For what was to become one of the most contested battles
between the Mughal Empire and a Rajput king, one whose legacy would
reverberate into the twenty-first century, was in fact fought between two
Rajput leaders and it would be most extravagantly glorified by a British
chronicler and an agent of the British Empire, Colonel James Tod.
By 1576, large swathes of Rajasthan including Amer, Bikaner,
Jaisalmer, and Sirohi, had become part of the Mughal Empire through a mix
of military force and marriage alliances. But Mewar was a land with a
particularly blood-drenched past in which the fires of jauhar had
smouldered on three separate occasions. This was a land of
uncompromising valour in which the honour of the Sisodiya clan was
deeply, violently invested in the chastity of its women. When Rana Pratap
ascended the gaddi of Mewar in 1572 upon the death of his father, Udai
Singh, substantial parts of Mewar, including Chittor and Mandalgarh, were
already part of the Mughal Empire. In fact, Rana Pratap’s half-brother
Jagmal, favourite of their father, Udai Singh, was an honoured jagirdar in
Akbar’s empire. Akbar had also tried on at least three separate occasions to
persuade Rana Pratap to integrate into the empire with honour, sending
Kuar Man Singh, Raja Bhagwant Das, and Raja Todar Mal to parley with
him. According to historian Rima Hooja, during one of these attempts,
Rana Pratap had contemplated compromise. He put on the imperial robe
forwarded to him by Akbar and sent his eldest son Amar along with
Bhagwant Das to wait upon the Padshah. He baulked, however, at the idea
of going in person to the Mughal court and negotiations broke down. For
Rana Pratap there would now be a complete rejection not only of the
Mughal Empire but also of those Rajputs who had ‘polluted’ their pure
blood by marrying daughters to the Mughals. There were also signs that the
rana never did seriously entertain the idea of submission to the Mughals, for
he had done much to strengthen defences in the territories he controlled. He
guarded his southern border rigorously, improved fortifications in the
Aravalli ranges, and ensured amicable relations with the local Bhil tribes.
He also induced the farmers of the fertile plains around Chittor and
Mandalgarh to relocate, leaving the plains barren and desolate: the farmers
were told to settle in inaccessible hilly areas. He ensured his orders were
carried out with ‘unrelenting severity’, according to James Tod. It was said
that when a poor goatherd dared to bring his animals to pasture in the
plains, he was killed, and his body hung up to serve as a warning to others.
According to folklore, Rana Pratap took vows of austerity, to use no gold
and silver dishes, nor sleep in soft beds, until Chittor was won.
In 1576, having subdued some especially resistant opponents like the
mirzas and the Afghans, Akbar finally decided to send an army against the
rana in his stronghold at Gogunda. Appointing the young Man Singh to
head the Mughal army against Rana Pratap was a perfectly poised balancing
act. Akbar not only demonstrated his complete confidence in his
Kachhwaha relatives but gambled wisely that his Rajput troops, who may
have fought with less than total ardour against a greatly respected Rajput
foe, would now be galvanized by a Kachhwaha chieftain. Akbar was also
rewarding Man Singh’s personal qualities of courage, able generalship, and
resourcefulness. Along with Man Singh, Akbar also appointed some
reputed Mughal generals, such as Asaf Khan, the mir bakshi, Ghazi Khan
Badakshi, and Shah Ghazi Khan, to lead the army. That not all the Mughal
courtiers shared Akbar’s foresight and meritocratic pragmatism can be seen
in the reaction of one Naqib Khan, when Badauni begged him to have him
enrolled in the army. ‘If a Hindu had not been the leader of the army,’
Naqib Khan assured Badauni, trying to dissuade him, ‘I should myself have
been the first to have asked permission to join it.’ The presence of the
cerebral Badauni among the Mughal troops was itself surprising. Badauni
had not exactly covered himself with glory up to this point and may have
been trying to redeem himself as he was still in 1576 eager to rise in the
Padshah’s court. He had been sullen about his mansab of 20, had been
unable to carry out his branding duties, and had requested a jagir of land in
lieu of a military rank. Akbar at this stage of his rule, was quite rigid about
mansabdars maintaining the actual number of cavalrymen assigned to them
according to their rank. Badauni would have been obliged to produce the 20
cavalrymen expected of him as a mansabdar of 20. In time, as men were
found unable, or unwilling, to supply the actual number of horses and men,
Akbar would institute the double rank system (sawar and zat). But for
Badauni, at this time, asking for a fixed salary was a mistake as promotions
were much more certain for talented men by rising through the military
ranks, protected from the interference of the clergy. Badauni was
scrambling now to remedy his earlier foolish miscalculations. ‘Why, he has
just been appointed one of the court imams,’ grumbled Akbar when
presented with Badauni’s request, ‘how can he go?’ Finally, Badauni
persuaded Akbar that he wanted to ‘dye his beard in blood’ for the sake of
the Padshah, apparently immune to the irony of fighting jihad under a
Hindu general. On 3 April 1576, the Mughal army of 5,000 chosen men
marched out from Ajmer to Gogunda.
While the Mughal army camped at Mandalgarh for two months,
gathering their forces, Rana Pratap was at Gogunda calculating the Mughal
strength and rallying his men. It is estimated that he had ‘3000 horsemen,
2000 infantry, 100 elephants and 100 miscellaneous men who served as
drummers, trumpeters and pick-men’. The rana’s warriors included Bhil
tribesmen, forest dwellers who grew up stalking prey on silent footsteps and
learning the spiky topography of the Mewar landscape while hunting deer,
wild boars, hyenas, jackals, hares, and bears with their bows and arrows.
The rana moved the bulk of his men to the village of Khamnor, at the
entrance of a narrow, ravine-like pass called Haldighati with shifting sands
the colour of turmeric gold. According to James Tod, ‘above and below, the
Rajputs were posted, and on the cliffs and pinnacles overlooking the field of
battle the faithful aborigines, the Bhils with their natural weapon, the bow
and arrow, and huge stones ready to roll upon the combatant enemy’.
On a blazing day in June, Rana Pratap decided to launch an attack when
he saw the Mughal forces dragging their great artillery guns across the river
Banas, depleted after the relentless summer. In retaliation, Man Singh sent
an advance guard of 900 skirmishers under Syed Hashim Baraha who, it
was said, fought with determined gallantry. The Sayyids of Baraha were a
group that had been traditionally considered somewhat rustic and boorish
but who were courted and greatly valued by Akbar, who gave them the
coveted and honoured position in the Mughal vanguard. Jahangir would
describe them later as ‘the bravest men of their time’. Skirmishers or
shamsherbaz (gladiators), were specialized troops in the Mughal army, elite
infantry companies who fought with ‘a variety of exotic weapons like two-
handed swords, halberds, and massive war clubs’. These men also carried
shields, sometimes so large that they covered the body entirely. The
vanguard of the rana, led by Hakim Sur Pathan, then attacked the Mughal
cavalry led by Raja Jagannath and Asaf Khan. The Mughal horses struggled
on the sharp, broken ground as the armies clashed. Just as Raja Jagannath
was in danger of being killed, the Mughal vanguard arrived, led by Man
Singh on a war elephant. Ever more warriors streamed out of the ravines
and the gullies, with slashing blades and screaming fire.
Rana Pratap’s left wing was led with great courage by Raja Ram Shah
of Gwalior who died that day on the blood-soaked battlefield, flanked by
his three sons, all of whom laid down their lives for the rana. The opposing
right wing of the Mughals was led by Ghazi Khan Badakshi and Rai
Loonkarn along with a number of shaikhzadas from Sikri. As the sun rose
inexorably higher on this churning ochre battlefield, Mughal scimitars and
Persian shamshirs clashed with straight Rajput talwars and broadswords.
The horses whirled and whinnied in their armour, sweat darkening their
heated bodies. The foot soldiers swung their maces and battleaxes and
thrust their katars at each other. Most dangerous of all were the mounted
archers of the Mughals, who were deadly in close combat. They could fire
the composite bow at full gallop or swing a sword or throw a lance and
were ‘arguably the most formidable individual warrior on any battlefield’,
according to Andrew de la Garza. At one point, the Rajputs on the Mughal
side got so hopelessly entangled with the Mewar warriors that Badauni
shouted out to Asaf Khan under the molten sun: ‘How are we in these
circumstances to distinguish between friendly and hostile Rajputs?’ To
which Asaf Khan joyfully yelled back, ‘[T]hey will experience the whiz of
the arrows, be what may. On whichever side they may be killed it will be a
gain to Islam.’
Elephants on both sides also joined the battle, trumpeting loudly and
swinging their sharpened tusks. But there was an even deadlier aspect to the
war elephants of the Mughals. Akbar had understood the need for smaller,
easily portable guns and the most ingenious artillery developed was the
chaturnal, or so-called ‘camel gun’. This was a swivel gun attached by a
harness to the side of a camel or elephant, where it could be operated by a
gunner and fired in any direction. The larger of these weapons could fire
‘lead shots the size of baseballs’ and a contingent of camel gunners, unique
to the Indian battlefield, could create deadly chaos by moving with great
speed to any point on the battlefield. Both sides were pushed beyond
endurance in the merciless summer sun because of which ‘the very brain
boiled in the cranium’. Disarray and confusion began overtaking the
Mughal side. That was when Mihtar Khan, commanding the rear, beat his
war drums and shouted out to the Mughal soldiers that the Padshah himself
was coming so that ‘this shout of his was to a great extent the cause of the
fugitives taking heart again and making a stand’. So galvanizing was the
thought of the Padshah that Man Singh’s Rajput bodyguard rallied once
more around their young leader and Badauni wonderingly noted that ‘a
Hindu wields the sword of Islam’. Exhausted by the relentless sun, and
suddenly demoralized, the rana’s men lost heart and the battle was won for
the Mughals while Rana Pratap, ‘despite fighting very bravely and getting
many wounds’, was persuaded by his men to leave the battlefield. ‘The
Rana turned and fled,’ wrote Badauni rather more curtly, and ‘betook
himself to the high mountains…and there sought to shut himself up as in a
fortress.’
In the blinding sun the Mughals counted their dead, some 120 men,
while another 300 were wounded. Of the Rana’s men, 380 lay dead on the
‘Field of Blood’, the Rati-Talai. The Mughal army encamped at Gogunda,
having first barricaded the streets and dug a protective trench. No effort was
made to pursue or capture the rana, and though the Mughal army was
exhausted, it is generally believed that Man Singh was not keen to further
humiliate or disgrace the rana. He even forbade the ravaging and looting of
the rana’s territory, which would have been standard practice at the time.
The Mughal army lacked for food and grain and was reduced to eating ‘the
flesh of animals and the mango-fruit’, which soon made them ill. Badauni
was sent back to Fatehpur Sikri with the rana’s special elephant, Ram
Prasad, to give an account of the battle to Akbar. When Badauni told the
Padshah the name of the elephant, Akbar announced that, ‘since all this
[success] has been brought about through the Pir, its name henceforth shall
be Pir Prasad’. Akbar was considerably less pleased with Man Singh’s clear
reluctance to capture or kill the rana. While the other great generals like
Ghazi Khan Badakshi, Mihtar Khan, Ali Murad Uzbek, and a few others,
were all summoned to court and honoured, Man Singh and Asaf Khan were
not. Akbar’s irritation was fleeting, however, and Man Singh was received
at court in late September 1576. However, the following year, when
Shahbaz Khan Kamboh was appointed commander of the Mewar
expedition to capture Rana Pratap, ‘he sent back both Bhagwant Das and
Man Singh on the ground that as “they were zamindars there might be delay
in inflicting retribution on that vain disturber [Pratap]”’. Though Man Singh
would go on to have a long and glorious career as a Mughal commander, he
would never be sent to campaign in Rajasthan again.
Rana Pratap would go on to evade successive Mughal efforts to capture
him for more than twenty years. He would lose all his great strongholds
over the next few years and would be reduced to living in the Aravalli hills,
in the village of Chavand, sheltered by the Bhil tribesmen. By maintaining a
ceaseless campaign of guerrilla warfare and ravaging Mughal territories,
Rana Pratap managed to recover some of his Mewar lands though the
fabled fort of Chittor was forever forfeit. The rana’s absolute refusal to
come to terms with Akbar and envision peace with honour can appear
baffling. After all, the rana would not have been interfered with in any way
that would have affected his religion and honour for, as noted by historian
A. L. Srivastava and quoted by Rima Hooja, ‘there was no danger to
Hinduism or the Hindu way of life from Akbar, who respected religious
beliefs and susceptibilities of all classes of people and more specifically
those of his Rajput allies and vassals’. Nor would the rana’s land and people
have suffered. On the contrary, while other Rajput kingdoms like Amer,
Bikaner, and Jaisalmer had prospered through Mughal contact, evolving art
and architecture in new and vibrant ways, Mewar stagnated, its fields
ravaged and despoiled through decades of neglect following the rana’s
scorched earth policy. Perhaps the rana’s actions were determined in his
boyhood itself when, in the gloaming of a Rajasthani evening, as the lamps
were lit and jackals howled in the distance, the Rajput families were told
stories of their ancestors by the Charans—stories of impossible bravery and
incandescent destinies, of purity of blood, and resistance at all costs. When
those ancestors included the indomitable Rana Sangha and Lord Ram
himself, as the Rajput genealogies were reconfigured to include mythical
heroes, then the destinies of the boys were likely preordained. In the end,
perhaps, it was about the very definition of the word honour—who wielded
it and who claimed it.
In an epic poem, written by the Charan poet Durasa Adha called the
Gita Ranaji Pratapasimhaji Ro, the poet praises the rana ‘for preserving the
dharma of the earth and the dharma of ksatriyas… other rulers bowed their
head at the Emperor Akbar’s court; the Rana however refused to hear the
sounds of the kalamam (kalima), he only heard the sounds of the veda-
purana. The heroic warrior refused to worship at a mosque, he only
worshipped at a temple.’ These lines demonstrate the poet’s robust
knowledge of the way in which Mewar patrons viewed themselves.
However, he also wrote poems in praise of Man Singh, and of Akbar
himself.
After Rana Pratap died in 1597 his son, Amar Singh, would survive as a
guerrilla chieftain in the hills before finally surrendering to Khurram,
Jahangir’s son, in 1615. He would be treated with great courtesy by
Jahangir and never made to attend the Mughal court or offer a daughter in
marriage. Both his son, Karan Singh, and grandson, Jagat Singh, would
attend the Mughal court and would consequently lose precedence amongst
the ranas of Mewar for doing so.
As the decades and the centuries passed, this one battle, this lone
Rajput, came to symbolize a great deal of collective nostalgia and yearning,
reflecting a shifting attitude to Mughal rule. In an early chronicle, Amrit
Rai’s Mancarit, written to eulogize Man Singh’s great achievement, the
poet writes that ‘the Rana was defeated in battle, having put his foot on the
shoulder of death’. He celebrates Man Singh’s exemplary military service,
when he took up the paan offered by Akbar, thereby stepping up to the
challenge of fighting for the Padshah.
All became the dependents of our master emperor Akbar Those who
did not touch his feet passed their days in fear.
Amrit Rai does not mention the inconvenient matter of the rana not being
captured by Man Singh, nor the fact that the Kachhwaha chieftain did not
allow the plundering of the rana’s lands, these subtleties of conflicting
loyalties and pragmatic solutions escaping the poet’s recording. But later
narratives were not so understanding of Mughal–Rajput alliances. More
than 200 years later, at the dawn of a new century, and in the service of a
new empire, a young Scotsman and soldier in the East India Company
(EIC) grew enamoured with the stories of Rajput martial valour. Bringing
with him his own notions of European chivalry and feudalism, of knights
fighting the Ottoman Turks, James Tod constructed a history that focused
largely on Mewar, and only on the Rajputs, to the exclusion of all other
Rajasthani peoples. In highly charged language he spoke of Mewar’s
resistance to Mughal power, its ‘settled repugnance…to sully the purity of
its blood’, and castigating all the other clans who had ‘degraded’
themselves. Forgotten was the fact that Rajput clans had long fought each
other, and that women had committed sati and jauhar in the face of
opposing Rajputs, as had happened when the Bhati Rajputs had committed
saka and jauhar when attacked by the Panwar Rajputs. Obliterated was the
memory of the Rajput clans offering daughters to Akbar as a show of fealty,
of the Mughal Padshah taking part in Hindu rituals involved in the
marriages. Now these were recast as brutal acts of coercion, of an emperor
ruthlessly carrying out his desires, subjugating the Rajput peoples to his
violent will.
Meanwhile, in 1576, as Rana Pratap parsed his lonely but immortal
destiny as a Rajput hero, Akbar was seeding the night with light in Fatehpur
Sikri and arming his empire with grace.
A LIGHT DIVINE
When the Great Comet of 1577 shimmered in the night sky over Hindustan
in November of that year, it caused much consternation. Grain would be
expensive, astrologers warned, but far worse was feared, and when news
arrived of the death of Shah Tahmasp of Persia, and the murder of his son
and heir, Ismail, at the hands of his own sister, Pari Khanim, then the extent
of the maleficent influence of the celestial visitor was well understood.
There were those at court who took a more flippant view of the comet and
when a courtier, the Wazir Shah Mansur, ‘took to wearing a long tail to the
back of his turban, they dubbed him “The Star with a Tail”.’
There were a great many unusual arrivals at court in this cosmically
charged year, from strange and exotic places. Badauni described the arrival
of the distinguished Persian Nuqtavi thinker, the Sharif of Amul, a man he
uncharitably claimed had ‘betrayed the filthiness of his disposition’ and had
therefore been dispatched from the Deccan, where he had been ‘set on a
donkey and shown about the city in disgrace’. The Nuqtavis were a
millennial creed who based their knowledge on astrological theories and the
science of alphabetical letters. Blaming the distressingly tolerant nature of
Akbar’s court, which welcomed such heretical thinkers, Badauni noted
bitterly that ‘since Hindustan is a wide place, where there is an open field
for all licentiousness, and no one interferes with another’s business, so that
every one can do just as he please’, the sharif had been able to make his
way to the Mughal court. The sharif was ‘ridiculous in his exterior, ugly in
shape, with his neck stooping forward’, and his deceitful blue eyes betrayed
the falsehood and hypocrisy of his nature, according to Badauni. Jahangir,
too, who wrote about him in his memoir was circumspect about the scholar.
‘During my exalted father’s time,’ wrote Jahangir musingly, ‘he left his
dervish garb of poverty and attained the rank of Amir and commander.’
Akbar, however, enjoyed many animated personal interviews with the
visitor, who explained to the Mughal Padshah the tenets of the Nuqtavis,
even as Akbar continued to offer namaaz five times a day. Hakim Ain ul-
Mulk Shirazi, who had led the delegation to the Deccan, returned with
elephants, other presents, and perhaps some startling news about the Shah
of Bijapur. Ali Adil Shah II had recently brought back Shiism to his state,
turning away from what had become an intolerant Sunni Islamic rule* and
now promoted a simpler, more mystical kingship. He ‘dressed plainly…
forbade the slaughter of animals at his court…held religious discussions
with Hindus, and Muslims as well as Jesuits’.
Refugees from the increasingly repressive regime in Persia also began
arriving at the Mughal court. One family in particular arrived in 1578 with
not a great deal besides their personal talent and ambition. Ghiyas Beg was,
at the time, just another nobleman fallen on hard times but he brought with
him his daughter, the baby Mehr un-Nisa, who would have a remarkable
destiny. She would become the most famous woman of the Mughal Empire
—Noor Jahan. Another party that returned in the course of the year was an
embassy that had been sent to Goa with strict instructions to bring back any
European curiosities and crafts that might be of interest to Akbar. This
resulted in a cacophonous procession returning to Fatehpur Sikri because
the objects deemed curious included some European individuals, some
Indians dressed in European clothes and playing the drums and the clarion,
a man carrying an organ ‘like a great box the size of a man, played by a
European sitting inside’, and other assorted items of interest.
Another most unorthodox event occurred when Akbar, while hunting in
the vicinity of Palam outside Delhi, decided to spend the night in the house
of the headman of the village, one Bhura. Bartoli, the Italian writer and
historiographer, had noted that Akbar was ‘great with the great: lowly with
the lowly’. With his boundless curiosity about human nature, Akbar would
maintain till the end of his life a charismatic ability to communicate with all
kinds of people, and he would take every opportunity to live alongside
them, for a fleeting instance, or for a lifetime, as when he quarried stone,
painted pictures, graded his matchlocks, slept in huts, and talked to his
animal-keepers.
Akbar and the court too were in a state of flux as the Padshah had just
moved the imperial camp to the Punjab. Here, in special consultation with
Raja Todar Mal and Khwaja Shah Mansur, Akbar made a number of
important decisions, one of which concerned the royal mint. Until then, the
various mints had been in the charge of minor officials called chaudhuris.
Now overall control would be delegated to a responsible ‘Master of the
Mint’ and Akbar chose Abd al-Samad, the painter from Shiraz who had
given him his childhood lessons in painting, as the first official to hold this
title. The very same day Akbar gave the order for the striking of square
rupees. The purity of the metal used, the fullness of the weight of the coins,
and the artistic execution of Akbar’s varied coinage was exceptional and
unmatched in the world, far superior to what was being manufactured under
Queen Elizabeth I in England, for example. A great deal of the silver used
in these coins came from the mines of Mexico, plundered by Spain and
taken back to Europe, where merchants in England and the Netherlands
would use it to buy commodities in Hindustan. Between 1586 and 1605, a
staggering 185 metric tons of silver a year from overseas would pour into
the Mughal heartland to become silver rupees. The influx of this silver,
which made it possible to mint the coins, meant that this standard coinage
would soon replace the copper-and-gold billon* and cowrie shells that were
being used as currency in various parts of the country.
On the personal front, Akbar had some minor emotional issues to deal
with because of his great Kayasth minister, Todar Mal. A diligent, sombre,
and brilliant man, Todar Mal was one of the most accomplished examples
of Akbar’s ‘men of the sword and men of the pen’ system, a man who
shone both as a warrior and an administrator. Though ‘unique of the age for
practical wisdom and trustworthiness’, admitted Abu’l Fazl, the raja was ‘at
the head of mortals for superstition and bigotry’. Abu’l Fazl’s disdain is
clear when he notes that the raja would not begin his day before
worshipping his little idols ‘after a thousand fashions’. Now in the turmoil
of moving, those precious idols were lost and the raja was heartbroken,
neither sleeping nor eating in his grief. Whereas Abu’l Fazl was
uncomprehending, speaking of his ‘heartfelt folly’, and calling him a
‘simpleton’, Akbar was a great deal more compassionate, tending to his
friend and hard-working minister and consoling him for his loss till the raja
recovered.
The year had been momentous for Badauni too. At the age of nearly
forty, he had received the thrilling news that he had had a son, ‘a happiness
which I had been long anxiously expecting’. Badauni immediately went to
the emperor and asked him to name the child, which he did, naming him
Abdul Hadi, ‘Hadi being a name which at that time was day and night upon
his lips’. Hadi was, indeed, a common Sufi word and a Shiite term for God
while Badauni was a declared Sunni. One of the imams of the court in fact
urged Badauni not to use the name and ‘commit this folly’, but Badauni did
not follow the advice, showing him to be, at this stage at least, not such a
recalcitrant, orthodox Sunni as it was later believed. Then Badauni asked
for five months leave, ‘on account of certain important affairs, or rather
follies’, and during that time, tragically, Badauni’s son died. Badauni would
hold the emperor responsible for this dreadful calamity and would not
return to court for a whole year. For Akbar, this was an unpardonable lapse
in duty in a courtier and Badauni acknowledged this saying the Padshah
‘took no further notice of me’. From here on, despair in his heart, Badauni
could only watch as his old schoolmate, Abu’l Fazl, climbed inexorably
through the ranks at court while he languished, ignored and ridiculed.
After their sojourn in the Punjab, Akbar and the court returned to
Fatehpur Sikri where Faizi, who had by now been honoured with the title
‘King of Poets’, greeted the Padshah with a charming couplet:
The breeze that cheers the heart comes from Fathpur
For my King returns from a distant journey
In Fatehpur Sikri the ulema seemed not to have anticipated the
undercurrents rippling below the smooth sandstone pathways of the palaces
and courtyards. They had perhaps not understood that for the Timurids, the
Islamic sharia was never as binding a force as it was in other Islamic
kingdoms and that there remained the companionable presence of Chenghiz
Khan’s yassa laws, and their pre-Islamic guiding spirits. The yassa advised
the ruler ‘to consider all sects as one and not to distinguish one from
another’. Shaikh Ahmad Sirhindi raged that ‘every evil that appeared in
those days…was due to the wickedness of these evil ulema who have been
a menace to mankind and to the word of God’. Abd un-Nabi especially,
because of Akbar’s earlier devotion and his own obdurate arrogance, was
about to make a grave error of judgement.
The qazi of Mathura came to the sadr with a complaint one day because
some materials that he had gathered in Mathura for the construction of a
mosque had been forcibly requisitioned by a Brahmin and used to build a
temple. When the qazi had protested, the Brahmin had used offensive
language against Prophet Muhammad. Akbar sent Abu’l Fazl and Birbal to
investigate the matter and they found that the blasphemy had, indeed, been
uttered. With the Brahmin taken into custody, the matter of the punishment
to be given to the offender was debated. ‘The ladies of the imperial harem
busied themselves in interceding for his release,’ we are told, and we can
well imagine Harkha Bai of Kachhwaha, with her clan connection to the
temples of Mathura, using her influence to free the Brahmin. Akbar,
however, would not yet commit to directly opposing Abd un-Nabi, who
wanted to execute the Brahmin, and so the Padshah said ‘punishments for
offences against the holy law are in the hands of you, the ulema: what do
you require of me?’ The sadr then peremptorily ordered the execution of the
priest. Thereupon, pandemonium, we are told by Badauni, ensued both
inside the harem, because of the ladies, and outside the harem, because of
the Hindu courtiers.
So furious and baffled was Akbar by the decision of Abd un-Nabi that
he called for a discussion that very night around the Anuptalao water tank at
Fatehpur Sikri. All the jurists agreed that the Brahmin’s transgression had
not called for such an extreme punishment and that there was an ‘obligation
to safeguard infidel subjects’ by Muslim rulers. Badauni, too, agreed that, in
case of doubt, clemency was to be preferred but then, inexplicably, began to
argue that the sadr, being a very learned man, must have had his reasons to
act as he did. He argued so long that ‘the Emperor’s moustache now bristled
like the whiskers of a tiger’, and all the courtiers present hissed at him to
stop. In the flickering light of the candles, the Padshah’s eyes blazed and he
clenched his fists as his increasingly rare temper suddenly erupted. ‘What
you say is nonsense,’ thundered Akbar at last and Badauni had no further
option but to bow out of the assembly. Badauni, it seems, was hopelessly
shackled by his need to display his erudition and contradict the apparently
acquiescent jurists. ‘From this time onwards,’ wrote Badauni, ‘the fortunes
of Shaikh Abd un-Nabi began to decline’, as, indeed, did those of Badauni
himself.
In the year 1578, Akbar continued to tour the empire and to organize
hunts wherever he went. These hunts, wrote Qandahari, ‘not only created
hysteria in the hearts and minds of his companions, but unleashed a wave of
terror among all beasts and birds of that region’. As we have noted, the
hunts were a supremely effective display of Akbar’s power and were an
opportunity for the Padshah to assess the loyalty of the various chieftains of
the empire. In the summer of 1578 Akbar ordered a qumargha to be
organized in the vicinity of Bhera, in the Punjab. Over a span of ten days
the great nobles of the empire were stationed around the qumargha ring
while the beaters drove in animals and birds from miles around. But just as
all the arrangements were completed, the birds and animals huddled in the
centre, and as Akbar prepared to gallop into the circle of fire, his gleaming
sword thirsty for blood, something completely inexplicable happened. ‘A
divine flash of light was received by His Majesty’ wrote Abu’l Fazl. ‘The
Divine Call had descended on the Emperor which tranced him completely’,
agreed Qandahari. ‘A strange state and strong frenzy came upon the
Emperor,’ added Badauni ‘and an extraordinary change was manifested in
his manner…’ Akbar put down his sword and ordered that not a single finch
be harmed and thousands of animals were released from the qumargha.
From these accounts it would seem that Akbar was overcome by a state of
grace, and for a while was even tempted to abandon the affairs of the world.
Badauni wrote the following couplet to describe this baffling episode:
Take care! For the grace of God comes suddenly,
It comes suddenly, it comes to the minds of the wise
Akbar then sat ‘at the foot of a tree that was then in fruit, he distributed
much gold to the faqirs and poor, and laid the foundation of a lofty building,
and an extensive garden at that place’. He cut off his hair, ‘which was long
and beautiful and entrancing’ and which he had started early in his reign to
wear long because of ‘an inclination towards the sincerely loyal Indians’.
Some of the courtiers present immediately cut off their long hair too. That
there was disquiet and bafflement around this ecstatic episode is clear from
the fact that, soon after, Hamida Banu Begum arrived at the imperial camp
from Fatehpur Sikri. Akbar was delighted and sent Salim and the nobles in
advance to greet her and then he rode out himself and ‘made the reverence
to his visible God (his mother), an act of worship of the true Creator’. The
ceaseless vigilance of the harem and of Hamida Banu over the Padshah was
made clear by this visit which was unusual enough to be noted by both
Abu’l Fazl and Badauni. That Hamida Banu would have been troubled by
news of Akbar laying down his arms, and even his authority, was
understandable. She knew of her son’s steely ambition as well as his restless
spirituality. She would have remembered earlier moments of unease,
beginning at the age of fifteen. She would have come, perhaps, to remind
him of his duty to his people and to his ancestors, and that renunciation was
impossible for a Padshah of Hindustan.
In any case, Akbar returned very soon to the task of ruling his empire,
enquiring into the land grants made to holy men, and dealing with the
various demands on his time. He met with the leading Portuguese merchant
from Bengal, one Pietro Tavers, renamed Partab Tar Feringi by Abu’l Fazl,
and his wife Leorna who were, we are assured, ‘amazed at the laudable
qualities of the sovereign’; because of their ‘good sense and propriety of
conduct’ Akbar, too, was pleased with them. But while affairs of state
continued, Akbar also sent a message to Fatehpur Sikri to fill the Anuptalao
tank to the brim with silver and bronze coins to be distributed to the
deserving and the wise. It would take a full three years to empty the tank of
its coins and, in that time, the tenor of the wise men and the merit of the
deserving would have changed the fabric of Mughal thought forever.
♦
In 1578, a fleet of three vessels set sail from Lisbon, carrying a blessed and
exalted cargo. Travelling in the uneasy company of Christian relics,
including the bones of one Saint Boniface, was a group of missionaries. Of
the fourteen missionaries on the ships one would die of poison at the hands
of the ‘pagan Japanese’, one was decapitated by ‘the natives’ of the island
of Java, and a third man, twenty-eight-year-old Rudolf Acquaviva, landed
in Goa on 13 September, after years of austerity and grief and penance, and
knelt to kiss the Indian soil in joy and gratitude. A year later, a great deal of
commotion was created by the arrival in Goa of an ambassador from a most
unexpected source—the Mughal court. The envoy, Abdullah, carried a letter
from Akbar which read: ‘To the chief Padre, in the name of the Lord. I am
sending Abdullah…with the request that you will send me two learned
Fathers, and the books of the Law, especially the Gospel, that I may know
the Law and its excellence. For I desire to know it…. And the Fathers may
be sure that I shall receive them most courteously, and entertain them most
handsomely. When I have learnt the Law sufficiently to appreciate its
excellence, then may they depart at their pleasure, with an escort and
honoured with abundant rewards.’ These words filled the Jesuits with
almost uncontrollable joy and as for Acquaviva in particular, ‘I should like
to describe the pleasure, nay the inordinate delight’, wrote the Jesuit
Monserrate, ‘with which Rudolf received this commission…as though it
were a direct divine command’. This summons brought within reach a most
precious object—the soul of the Mughal Padshah. The emperor, it was
believed, was ‘weary of the contradictions and absurdity of the Mullahs, the
“Scribes” of Moslem law’ and informed about the Christian faith by Pietro
Tavers, the Portuguese officer now in his employ in Bengal, was eager to
learn more about their religion.
The Jesuits were arriving in Hindustan in the sixteenth century as the
Portuguese crown sought to strengthen their presence in foreign lands.
Papal bulls published by the Catholic Church between 1452 and 1606
‘permitted the King of Portugal the sole right to sail the sea, to conquer the
new lands and extend his dominion at the expense of the Moors and other
pagans’. The King of Portugal thus had monopoly over commerce in these
regions over other European nations with the threat of excommunication
against those who disobeyed. In return, the Portuguese state would
construct churches and supply them with priests and protection and thus the
Portuguese state and the Catholic Church were bound in an uneasy alliance
which had brought the Society of Jesus to the city of Goa.
When Akbar had returned to Fatehpur Sikri after his ecstatic vision of
1578, he had entered into the debates of the ibadat khana with renewed
enthusiasm and energy. But to his desolation and bemusement the debates
between the mullahs and theologians again descended into vile abuse. ‘The
antagonism of the sects reached such a pitch,’ revealed a disappointed
Badauni, ‘that they would call one another fools and heretics.’ The attacks
became personal with Abdullah Sultanpuri accusing Abd un-Nabi of being
undutiful towards his father, as well as afflicted with hemorrhoids, while
Abd un-Nabi’s response was to call him a fool. Severely disappointed with
the arrogance of the theologians, men he had once been in thrall to, Akbar
now put forward before them an articulate, erudite, and driven young man,
who would have burned with the sharp memory of his father’s humiliation
and debasement at the hands of these very men. ‘The Emperor,’ agreed
Badauni, ‘expected to find in Abu’l Fazl a man capable of teaching the
Mullahs a lesson.’ These men had hounded Shaikh Mubarak mercilessly for
twenty years and had even tried to have him executed. In an earlier time
they had succeeded in having Shaikh Alai, a friend of Shaikh Mubarak,
flogged and tortured to death under Islam Shah Sur on charges of being a
Mahdavi. Now Abu’l Fazl, using his wit and his wide erudition, could
expose the ulema for the opinionated, opportunistic, and corrupt men that
they were. However, when he did as expected, Badauni lamented that Abu’l
Fazl indeed ‘took every opportunity of reviling in the most shameful way’
the sadr and the makhdum ul-mulk, Abdullah Sultanpuri, because of which
‘miseries and misfortunes broke in upon the ulema’. When these men were
brought low, Abu’l Fazl was wont to quote the following quatrain, which he
claimed applied to them perfectly:
I have set fire to my barn with my own hands,
As I am the incendiary, how can I complain of my enemy!
No one is my enemy but myself
Woe is me! I have torn my garment with my own hands.
Badauni further mentioned an occasion in which, troubled, he asked Abu’l
Fazl, about his need to argue about the various tenets of Islam: ‘For which
of these notorious heresies have you yourself the greatest inclination?’ To
which Abu’l Fazl smiled and replied nonchalantly, ‘I wish to wander for a
few days in the vale of infidelity for sport.’ Abu’l Fazl then ‘fell boldly into
disputation in religious matters with such imbecile old men as the Sadr, the
Qazi, the Hakim-ul Mulk and Makhdum-ul Mulk, and had not the slightest
hesitation in putting them to shame, at which the Emperor was pleased’. So
roundly humiliated were the theologians that they wrote to Abu’l Fazl
privately, in bafflement: ‘Why are you always falling foul of us?’ Abu’l
Fazl answered flippantly, implying that he was just sensing the winds of
change and following them. And so the theologians, supposedly the highest
upholders of Islamic law, were shown to be mediocre philosophers and base
men. ‘His Majesty was genuinely seeking after the Truth,’ admitted
Badauni but because of these discussions ‘doubts had been planted in his
mind so that within five or six years Islam had all but disappeared.’
Disappointed by the sheer number of contradictory traditions and
decrees held as infallible by the different orthodox Sunni theologians,
Akbar invited proponents of the other sects of Islam, such as the Shias and
the Mahdavis* to the ibadat khana. But here again the men became
irrevocably entrenched in their various beliefs, to the extent of abusing the
others’ cherished holy figures and heroes. Even the Prophet and his
companions were not spared and the discussions once again descended into
recriminations and accusations. In October 1578 Akbar finally decided to
invite scholars and thinkers from outside the Islamic fold to join in the
discussions. ‘Sufi, philosopher, orator, jurist, Sunni, Shia, Brahman, Jati,
Sevra ( Jain monks), Charbak, Nazarene, Jew, Savi, Zoroastrian and others
enjoyed exquisite pleasure,’ wrote Abu’l Fazl, ‘by beholding the calmness
of the assembly… The treasures of secrets were opened out without fear of
hostile seekers after battle.’
An early Christian visitor to the Mughal court was Father Julian Pereira,
who arrived in March 1578 at Akbar’s invitation. Described as ‘a man of
more virtue than learning’ he exposed the errors of Islam during discussions
with the ulema, causing the agitated Akbar to jump up during the talks with
loud shouts of, ‘May God help me!May God help me!’, so annoyed and
upset was the Padshah at the mullahs’ poor defence of Islam. Father Pereira
taught Akbar a few words of Portuguese, one of which was the name of
Jesus, which Akbar then took great pleasure in repeating aloud to himself in
his palace.
It was in this spirit that Akbar’s ambassador, Abdullah, was sent to the
Jesuits in Goa where he was received by a number of Portuguese noblemen.
Dressed in their finest robes and accompanied by a cavalcade of swishing
horses, Abdullah was taken to the tomb of St Francis Xavier, a Catholic
missionary and co-founder of the Society of Jesus, where the Mughal party
removed their shoes respectfully and paid homage. A group of three Jesuits
—Rudolf Acquaviva, the Spaniard Anthony Monserrate, and Henriques, a
Muslim convert ‘of great piety but of very slight learning’, but fluent in
Persian— was appointed to travel to the court of the ‘Great Mogul’. ‘I am
writing to ask your prayers,’ wrote Acquaviva earnestly to his uncle Father
Claude Acquaviva, also a Jesuit. ‘For we need greatly God’s help, as we are
being sent “like men appointed to death,” into the midst of Muhammadans,
whose word is always to be distrusted.’ Nonetheless, Acquaviva reassured
his uncle, ‘we go…filled with a joy such as I have never felt before,
because there is a chance of suffering something for Christ our Lord… And
if we are to shed our blood for love of Him, a thing very possible in such an
expedition, then shall we be truly blessed.’ So with exaltation in their hearts
and a Persian grammar book in their hands, the three Jesuits travelled to
Fatehpur Sikri accompanied by an escort of twelve Mughal horsemen. They
crossed plains ‘covered with cactus, with palms, and banyan trees’. They
travelled past mango trees in blossom, and fields of poppy, and flax, and
noticed the frequent wells and stone tables built for the ease of pilgrims by
Hindu citizens.
Travel, for the Hindu population, was an essential part of life.
Pilgrimages were as much part of the texture of their lives as fasts, vows,
and religious ceremonies. Very often, wealthy men from cities would send
out invitations to their friends to join them on particularly redoubtable
pilgrimages. The highways, though much more secure than earlier, could
still be highly dangerous. Banarsi Das, a trader from Agra, once saved
himself through his quick wit, pretending to be a Brahmin and reciting
Sanskrit slokas and blessing the robbers so that they were either too
ashamed or too fearful to rob the ‘high caste’ traveller. Akbar had begun
making improvements to some of the major roads and highways and one in
particular, the Agra-Ajmer road, was described by Badauni:
A lofty college and high and spacious palaces were built on the road
to Ajmer…. …he ordered a palace to be built at every stage…and a
pillar to be erected and a well sunk at every kos. Ever so many
hundreds of thousands of stags’ horns, which the Emperor had
killed during the course of his life, were placed on these pillars as a
memorial to the world.
While the Jesuits were making their weary journey from Goa, sixty-seven
Jain monks from Gujarat, silent and barefoot, were preparing to leave for
the Mughal court too. Elsewhere, Brahmins were gathering their few
possessions as were Sufi monks, and aberrant, long-haired yogis, all
preparing to head to Fatehpur Sikri because Akbar wanted to meet with the
seekers of the sublime, the speakers of seductive truths. ‘For a long time, it
was the custom that the dull and superficial regarded the heartfelt words of
holy souls as foolishness,’ agreed Abu’l Fazl. ‘They recognized wisdom
nowhere but in the schools and did not know that acquired knowledge is for
the most part stained with doubts and suspicions. Insight is that which
without schooling illuminates the pure temple of the heart.’
This spirit of joyous enquiry was rare for the times. In England, a small
nation of some four million people, Queen Elizabeth I had recently been
excommunicated by the Pope after she had wrested the throne from her
sister, Mary Tudor, who had been wont to burn ‘heretics’ at the stake, and
came to be known as Bloody Mary. Under Elizabeth I, Catholics and Jesuits
were those who were persecuted and Muslims, if they were acknowledged
at all, were always ‘Saracens’, the crusading Arabs. In France, the
Protestant Huguenots were waging war on the Catholics and had desecrated
statues in the Gothic cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris. This was also
Spain’s century of conquest. In vast tracts of the Caribbean and South
America they introduced a plundering mix of religion, disease, rapacity, and
destruction. Meanwhile the three great empires that covered the Dar al-
Islam—the Ottomans, the Safavids and the Mughals—were crucibles of
cultural creativity and cosmopolitan movement. Scholar Jerry Brotton,
writing of an English soldier’s first visit to Morocco at this time observed
that coming from ‘the monoglot world of England and Ireland and its stark
religious divisions between Protestant and Catholic, the multi-confessional
and polyglot world of Marrakesh… with its Berbers, Arabs, Sephardic
Jews, Africans, Moriscos and Christians’ would have come as a great
shock.
In the sixteenth century in Fatehpur Sikri, there was a similar shearing
of ideas and languages and influences between men and women from all
over the Mughal Empire, 100-million strong at its peak,* and boasting thirty
languages and seven religions, and from further still, from the Deccan,
Persia, and from the shores of Christendom. In an equally cosmopolitan
court, a new culture would be wrought which would travel, through its great
courtiers, in syncopated rhythms, vernacular cadences, and jewel-bright
colours, to all corners of the empire.
*Ali Adil Shah’s predecessor, Ibrahim Adil Shah I, a Sunni, became infamous for his particularly
intolerant and cruel rule. He dismissed all his Shia aristocrats and, according to Manu Pillai (see
Rebel Sultans), indulged in a two-month reign of terror, assassinating Hindus and Muslim officials of
rank.
*An alloy of a precious metal with a majority base metal content.
*A millennial sect.
*W. H. Moreland’s estimate; Shireen Moosvi’s estimate is 130-140 million. Historians such as
Sanjay Subrahmanyam and Ashok V. Desai consider this inflated.
PART 4
*Traditional Islamic medicine developed and refined after studying the systems of the ancient Greek
physicians. Largely spread through the efforts of the tenth-century Muslim physician and scholar, Ibn
Sina, more popularly known as Avicenna.
†House of the Deaf.
*The other three were Ghazi Khan, Qazi Jaladuddin Multani, and Sadri Jahan Mufti.
*Which could be understood either as ‘God is Great’ or ‘Akbar is God!’
THE TRUTH IS AN INHABITANT OF EVERY
PLACE
On an ordinary day in February 1580 the inhabitants of Fatehpur Sikri were
startled by a remarkable sight. Accompanied by a Mughal cavalcade, as
well as some Armenian and European traders, were some bizarre-looking
travellers. Crowds lined the streets and gawked openly at these men.
‘Everyone stopped and stared in great surprise and perplexity,’ admitted
Monserrate, ‘wondering who these strange-looking, unarmed men might be,
with their long robes, their curious caps, their shaven faces, and their
tonsured heads.’ Their smooth, pale faces glowed blotchily with sweat in
the warm day and almost more striking was that none of them bore any
weapons. In the Mughal court, every man had a katar (Rajasthani-style
dagger) tucked into his patka, or cummerbund, and a smoothly curved
scimitar hanging at the waist and perhaps a jewelled dagger for good
measure. Even the gentle, otherworldly musician Tansen had a jewelled
sword, and the theologians all had long staffs and rods. These foreign men,
however, were unarmed and unadorned, bearing only their faith, and a
burning desire to proselytize.
The Jesuit priests were hustled away from the boisterous throng and
brought before Akbar, who had been eagerly awaiting their arrival. ‘The
Fathers found the great conqueror,’ we are told by Monserrate, ‘seated
cross-legged on a throne covered with a velvet cushion fringed with gold,
upon a raised platform.’ All around him were his great amirs, splendidly
dressed in silk jamas and crisp turbans studded with glittering jewels. When
they looked up at the Padshah, the Jesuits found that Akbar ‘was almost as
fair as southern Europeans, and…upon his head he wore a turban of Hindu
form, adorned with a fortune of rare gems. His dress consisted of a robe of
cloth of gold, embroidered with leaves and flowers, a great brooch was on
his breast. Instead of Moslem trousers, he wore the Hindu dhoti of the finest
and most delicate silk, falling to his heels, and there gathered in by bangles
covered with pearls…. At his side was a scimitar.’ Around the Padshah
were attendants bearing bows and quivers of arrows, daggers, scimitars, and
muskets, were he to require them, while writers waited quietly, ready to
note down anything of importance. Akbar greeted his visitors with great
warmth, and conversed with them at length, before sending them to their
quarters under the charge of Abu’l Fazl and Hakim Ali Geelani.
The following day the priests presented to Akbar in the diwane-khas the
Royal Polyglot Bible, beautifully bound in seven volumes and containing
illustrations engraved by Flemish artists and recently printed in Antwerp.
Each volume had a phantasmagorical painting in an anatomically accurate
and naturalistic style that would profoundly influence the future course of
Mughal art. Akbar respectfully took off his turban and placed each volume
on his head before kissing it. He then had the books sent to his private room
and, leading Acquaviva by the hand, took the Jesuit to show him the casket
he had had made specially for the holy books.
One can well imagine the great turmoil in Acquaviva’s heart during
these meetings—the culmination of a lifetime of ardent prayers and hopes.
This was a man, twenty-nine years old now, who had spent his life in a self-
imposed ‘rule of silence and solitude, only coming out of his cell for
purposes of religion’. He preferred to wear worn-out garments and shoes
and when going about his work ‘used to take pleasure in singing softly to
(the Virgin Mary’s) honour little extempore songs which he improvised’.
He was also deeply virginal, in effect and in manner, ‘devoted to perpetual
chastity and invoked the aid of the Virgin Mother of God to enable him to
keep this resolution’. This man, trailing faintly around him the musky,
ecclesiastical odour of daily scourgings, of dried blood, of abstinence and
denial, now came into the presence of Akbar, thirty-eight years old, and in
the full splendour of his life and personality. A man ‘sturdy, hearty and
robust…exceedingly well-built and…neither too thin nor too stout’ with
eyes ‘so bright and flashing that they seem like a sea shimmering in the
sunlight’; a man who tamed cheetahs for pleasure and who invoked the love
of God by facing down tigers and riding wild elephants; a monarch who
unselfconsciously led his visitor by the hand in his eagerness, radiating
human warmth, and hospitality while for Acquaviva all physicality was a
reminder of the loathsome weakness of the flesh, to be overcome by pain
and repentance and constant deprivation.
In Akbar’s quarters the air would have been perfumed by the scent of
his favourite ambergris, perhaps, incense burning in gold censers, and
masses of fresh-cut fragrant nargis and champa. There would have been soft
carpets underfoot and beautiful vases and images in every niche in the
walls. About Acquaviva, Monserrate noted that ‘he was of virgin modesty.
For whenever he spoke to the king, he blushed deeply’. No doubt
Acquaviva would have blushed that first evening, too, in the company of
the ‘Great Mogul’, and in the expectation of all that he wished so ardently
to accomplish.
Akbar invited the Jesuits to join in the discussions at the ibadat khana in
the cool evenings, where the different religious groups were placed
separately around the hall and Akbar walked eagerly from one group to the
next, asking questions. One of the first questions discussed was the relative
merits of the Bible versus the Koran. With their ecstatic mission to convert
the Mughal Padshah burning in their hearts, the Jesuits unapologetically
attacked the Koran, ‘stuffed with countless fables full of futility and
extreme frivolity’ while upholding the ‘accuracy and authority of the Holy
Scriptures’. So impassioned and virulent was Acquaviva’s attack that, after
a while, the Muslim theologians fell into a complete, and ominous, silence.
At the end of the evening Akbar called aside Monserrate and Henriques
and, upset at the intemperance of the younger theologian’s attack, asked the
two Jesuits to control the tenor of their colleague’s rhetoric.
The discussions continued for several weeks and while Akbar enjoyed
many of the teachings of the Bible, he was most discomfited by the ideas,
well known to Muslims, of the Holy Trinity, the Virgin birth, and the fact
that Jesus had allowed himself the indignity of death on the cross. Akbar
was extremely disappointed by his own Muslim theologians because they
did not counter the Jesuits with unified arguments, and themselves offered
varied and contradictory positions. At one point, seemingly tired and
disheartened by these recriminatory discussions, Akbar suggested that one
theologian from each party undergo a trial by fire, protected by the
righteousness of their holy book, to test which scripture contained the
Supreme Truth. Unsurprisingly, no one rushed to accept this proposal and
the night ended with loud, conciliatory shouts of ‘Peace be to the King!’
Akbar continued to be unfailingly gracious and kind to his Jesuit guests.
He told them that ‘it was his desire that Christians should live freely in his
empire, and build their churches, as he had heard was the case in Turkey….
He made this declaration with plain signs of great love and kindliness.’ To
the great astonishment of the Jesuits, Akbar once put on Portuguese
costume, a scarlet cloak with gold fastenings, and a Portuguese hat. He
made the three young princes wear similar clothes and spent an evening
listening to madrigals with them. He had the Jesuits shifted from their noisy
quarters in the city to within the palace grounds, sent them food from his
own table, and went to visit their chapel, at Easter, once they had settled in.
When Akbar saw the images of Jesus and Mary, ‘he first, in Muhammadan
fashion, made a profound reverence before it’. Akbar then took off his
turban and shook out his long hair, grown back after the mystic episode of
1577, and, to the delight of the Jesuits, ‘like a Christian… with clasped
hands, bent his knee’. Lastly, he prostrated himself in the manner of Hindus
saying that ‘God deserved the homage of all peoples’. A few days later
Akbar arrived with his three sons and some of his noblemen and they all
respectfully bowed down before the Christian images. Akbar accepted ‘with
the greatest delight’ a painting of the Virgin, brought from Rome. This was
possibly a copy of the Byzantine Virgin, a miraculous painting deemed to
have been painted by St Luke himself, which can be seen today in the
Borghese Chapel in Rome. Akbar appointed Abu’l Fazl, who the Jesuits
decreed was a ‘young man of a keen and capable mind’, to help the priests
learn Persian and he taught Acquaviva the Persian language within three
months. Acquaviva began translating the gospel into Persian and the first
reader of these translated texts was Abu’l Fazl himself, who was delighted
with them. These two men, Acquaviva and Abu’l Fazl, could not have been
more different—one ravaged and skeletal in his austere, bleak robes the
other already plump in the gold-limned, perfumed qaba of an exquisitely
dressed Mughal courtier. One with his single, tenacious, and driven
spirituality and the other with his capacious, adaptable, and inclusive mind.
Akbar seemed to have been most impressed with the priests’ vows of
poverty and chastity, for they refused all the presents and money he tried to
give them. ‘He could well understand,’ said Monserrate, ‘that a man was
especially dear to God who abjured the pleasures of the world, wife,
children and possessions.’ Indeed the question of his many wives appeared
to be a sensitive topic for Akbar, for when Acquaviva, with considerable
lack of tact, informed Akbar that apart from the first wife, ‘the rest are all
courtesans and adulteresses, whom the commandment of God and Christ it
is wickedness to retain’, Akbar replied with uncharacteristic sharpness that
‘these things are in the hand of God, who grants to those who ask plain
paths from which they cannot stray. I myself have no desires’, he continued
evasively and clearly disingenuously, ‘I reckon wives, children, empires, as
of no account’.
Akbar was able to bring up the question of wives with the Jesuits in
another context, when discussing the practice of sati among Hindu women,
when he said:
Since you reckon the reverencing of women as part of your religion,
and allow not more than one wife to a man, it would not be
wonderful if such fidelity and life-sacrifice were found among your
women. The extraordinary thing is that it occurs among those of the
Brahman (Hindu) religion. There are numerous concubines, and
many of them are neglected and unappreciated and spend their days
unfructuously in the privy chamber of chastity, yet in spite of such
bitterness of life they are flaming torches of love and fellowship.
Akbar had, of course, witnessed jauhar himself at Chittor when 300 women
had turned to ashes and he would no doubt have heard more about sati from
the Rajput women in his harem. If his Rajput noblemen were sharing with
him their stories of bravery in battle then Akbar’s Rajput wives would have
had their own tales of exemplary behaviour to amaze him with. For the
Charans did not confine their epic stories only to men. They also had to
instruct Rajput women in their kulreet, the cultural norms which evolved
over centuries to prop up the Rajput system. The implicit support of women
was essential in ensuring that brave sons were raised to become equally
brave husbands whose only destiny was often to embrace death. ‘Oh friend!
By taking a royal umbrella and chavar (ceremonial whisk) one cannot be
called a Rajput nor by inheriting the title of Rajput’, was one popular
Charan refrain. ‘It is only one who sacrifices himself for the benefit of the
country who is a true Rajput’. In this way, the notion of sacrifice above all
else, above personal happiness certainly, was subtly but inexorably passed
on to women from a very young age. During the discussion with the Jesuits,
Akbar was clearly admiring of the love the Hindu women seemed to
demonstrate by performing sati, but Akbar’s ideas on sati were to change
drastically, as he became ever more compassionate and aware of the
impossible and conflicting demands made on the women in this system.
The visiting Jesuit priests the following year were to describe the
abomination of the practice when they witnessed it, to which Akbar
responded that such fortitude could only come from God:
The wretched women are rendered quite insensible by means of
certain drugs, in order that they may feel no pain. For this purpose
opium is used, or a soporific herb named bang…. …sometimes they
are half-drugged: and before they lose their resolution, are hurried to
the pyre with warnings, prayers and promises of eternal fame. On
arriving there they cast themselves into the flames. If they hesitate,
the wretched creatures are driven on to the pyre; and if they try to
leap off again, are held down with poles and hooks.
Akbar was always very sensitive to the predicament of the women around
him, and regularly brought up issues concerning the happiness and safety of
the women in his empire. Having discussed the number of wives permitted
by Islam, Akbar now raised the issue of monogamy in the ibadat khana.
‘Under the principle of attachment to one another, which is the foundation
of the arrangement of the universe,’ he said, ‘it would be eminently
preferable that one should not marry more than one wife in a lifetime.’ In
these discussions Akbar was beginning to demonstrate an awareness, rare
for the times, of the vulnerability of women and the need to protect them in
a society which inevitably favoured men.
The Jesuits were also startled to discover that one of Akbar’s closest
confidantes, Shaikh Mubarak, ‘an exceedingly pious old man who was
devoted to the study of religious commentaries and books of religious
medication’, had but little faith in orthodox Islam. They found that the
shaikh and his two sons ‘openly declared that the Koran contained many
impious, wicked and highly inconsistent passages, and hence they were
convinced that it had not been sent by God’. The priests, added Monserrate,
‘were astonished at this old man’s wisdom, authority and friendliness to
Christianity’. They found others to be just as friendly. Abu’l Fazl even
agreed to help out the Jesuits during the ibadat khana discussions by
listening to their arguments beforehand so that he could then defend their
position before the Muslim theologians more ‘fully and elaborately’ than
they could. Indeed, Monserrate noted that Abu’l Fazl ‘seemed to be inspired
by a divine earnestness, so clearly did he demonstrate how we believe that
God has a Son’ and that the Jesuits themselves were astonished at his
eloquence. One may easily surmise that Abu’l Fazl’s great efforts on behalf
of the Jesuits were primarily to embarrass and humiliate the ulema, due to
his ancient enmity, rather than because of any cherished spiritual beliefs
about Christianity.
As a great sign of Akbar’s trust, young Prince Murad and a few other
boys from the nobility were entrusted to the Jesuits for an education. Murad
was taught to make the sign of the cross and to call upon the name of Jesus
and Mary at the beginning of lessons. The young boy, ten years old at the
time, ‘was an ideal pupil as regards natural ability, good conduct and
intellectual capacity. In all these respects,’ added Monserrate, ‘it would
have been hard to find any Christian youth, let alone a prince, surpassing
him.’ The Jesuits were also delighted by what appeared to be sincere
reverence from both the Hindus and the Muslims in Fatehpur Sikri towards
their religious icons. They owned a statue of the Virgin Mary whose fame
quickly spread through the town and throngs of Muslims and Hindus ‘lifted
their hands to heaven and did reverence before it’. The Jesuits were moved
to note that at least in the field of idol worship, the Muslims and Hindus
were superior to the Protestants of Europe.
The Jesuits at the Mughal court were deadly serious about the mission
they were on. They were in Hindustan for the sole purpose of converting
‘heathens’ and ‘moors’. The early Jesuits were limited by their ignorance of
Hindu and Muslim beliefs, preventing them from going beyond what they
believed was vile superstition. They repeatedly used horrified terms for the
Hindus, referring to their ‘false gods’, their ‘sect of perdition’ and accused
the Prophet Muhammad of the most debased behaviour. From as early as
1550 a great temple in Cochin had been destroyed by the Christians and in
Divar, north of Goa, where many pilgrims came to bathe in a holy river, the
place was desecrated at least once by the Portuguese in 1557 by cutting up a
cow and throwing the pieces into the river. In 1567, Antony de Noronha,
the Viceroy of Goa, ordered the destruction of all temples and idols in
Salsette and one Father Lewis Goes went to tear down a Hindu statue of
‘Manmay’, the Salsette Venus, ‘the centre of a voluptuous and degrading
worship’, with his own hands. Jesuit priests and their converts had
ruthlessly destroyed temples, even while admitting they were ‘highly
honoured by the Hindus who treated them as living beings’. Monserrate
would also be appreciative of the efforts of the Muslims to rid the Hindu
population of idolatry. On their way to Fatehpur Sikri, Monserrate had
written with satisfaction of the numerous destroyed ‘idol temples’ which
littered the countryside. Many of these temples had been destroyed by
earlier Muslim rulers, however, and Monserrate added with dismay that
because of ‘the carelessness of these same Musulmans’ sacrifices have been
allowed ‘to be publicly performed, incense to be offered, oil and perfumes
to be poured out, the ground to be sprinkled with flowers, and wreaths to be
hung up, wherever—either amongst the ruins of these old temples or
elsewhere—any fragment of an idol is to be found’.
In 1580, in Fatehpur Sikri, Acquaviva was both tormented and seduced
by the possibility of converting the great Mughal Padshah. Mistaking
Akbar’s gracious interest and genuine curiosity for a desire to convert to
Christianity, he became increasingly convinced that this was the divine
purpose of his life. He was also deeply frustrated that this mesmerizing
prize always seemed to be beyond his reach. He wrote to Father Claud
about his experience at the court and noted with desolate abhorrence that
the Muslim courtiers constantly glorified the name of Muhammad and
‘bend the knee, prostrate, lift up their hands, give alms, and do all they do’
in the name of the Prophet. And, despite Acquaviva’s very best attempts to
vilify the Prophet Muhammad and denigrate Islam, his fervent desire for
martyrdom remained elusive and he bitterly complained: ‘Will these
Musalmans never martyr us?’ to which the other priests used to reply, ‘the
King is too fond of us; no one dare touch us’.
While the Jesuits’ unrelenting effort would come to naught as far as the
soul of the Padshah was concerned, the greatest influence they were to have
on Akbar and on the Mughal Empire was in the field of art. Akbar was
genuinely delighted with the paintings they gifted him and the images in the
illustrated Bibles. He already owned a few Christian images before the
arrival of the Jesuit mission, which he had proudly pointed out to the
priests. In his dining room were images of Christ, Mary, Moses, and
Prophet Muhammad, and the priests noticed that he showed the image of
the Prophet less reverence than he did to the others. This, though, may have
been wishful thinking as Syed Ali Nadeem Rezavi has described these
paintings to be of Timurid origin. After the Jesuit missions, however,
European art would have a dramatic influence on Mughal paintings.
Because most of the ships leaving Europe set off from Antwerp (which was
a major centre of printing at the time) woodcuts and engravings of the
Albrecht Durer tradition arrived at Fatehpur Sikri, and would heavily
influence the Mughal school. There would be frescoes painted of Christ,
Mary, and the Christian saints in the private chambers of Fatehpur Sikri
and, indeed, in Mughal buildings across the empire. ‘(The Emperor) has
painted images of Christ our Lord and our Lady in various places in the
palace’ wrote a surprised Jesuit, ‘and there are so many saints that…you
would say it was more like the palace of a Christian King than a Moorish
one’. Akbar would show the engravings and European paintings to his
favourite Hindu painters and they would learn European concepts of
volume, perspective, and space in addition to the painting of angels, and of
the holy figures, and use them in ingenious ways. It was probably just as
well that the Jesuit priests did not live to see the use that Akbar made of
their beloved sacred images as, according to Kavita Singh, ‘Mughal
imperial painting would eventually appropriate the tropes of Catholic
devotional art to aggrandize the image of Mughal Emperors’. The lustrous
halos, the taut-skinned cherubs, and the allegorical imagery would be
incorporated into Mughal miniatures, using all available symbology to
glorify the Padshahs of Hindustan.
Paradoxically Badauni, the acerbic critic, was the one who would most
lucidly analyse Akbar’s theological and philosophical bent. ‘From
childhood to manhood and from manhood to his declining years the
Emperor had combined in himself various phases from various religions
and opposite sectarian beliefs and by a peculiar acquisitiveness and a talent
for selection by no means common, had made his own all that can be seen
and read in books.’ As a result, continued Badauni, Akbar believed that
‘there are wise men to be found and ready at hand in all religions, and men
of asceticism and recipients of revelation and workers of miracles among all
nations and that the Truth is an inhabitant of everyplace’.
While Akbar was discussing the finer points of Christian theology with
the Jesuits in the ibadat khana, he was also busy subduing what had become
one of the most serious challenges to his rule. After the audacious mazhar
and the reading of the khutba, there was a gathering momentum of those
who believed that Islam itself was under threat because of Akbar. Far away
in Bengal a disaffected mullah, Qazi Muhammad Yazdi, had denounced
Akbar as an infidel and had issued a fatwa of kufr (disbelief ), calling on all
righteous Muslims to take up arms and to revolt against the Padshah. The
contender for the throne, under whose name they would unite was that long-
forgotten brother, relegated and confined these many years to Babur’s old
capital at Kabul, Mirza Hakim.
ALLAHU AKBAR
While the Jesuit priests were constructing their chapel and translating the
gospel into Persian, another unusual text was being composed at Fatehpur
Sikri. An anonymous Brahmin, at Akbar’s request, had written a Sanskrit
text called the Allopanisad (Allah’s Upanishad). Riffing with
unselfconscious candour on the meaning of the words ‘Akbar’ and ‘Allahu
Akbar’, the text provocatively offered ambiguous interpretations of the
phrases that included the Mughal Padshah’s name. At the same time,
mutinies broke out in Bengal and Bihar, ostensibly as a righteous movement
against the rumours of un-Islamic practices being carried out by the
Padshah at Fatehpur Sikri. But the cause of Islam was just a convenient
rallying point for disgruntled officers, mostly Central Asian Turani
noblemen and some Persians, who were deeply resentful of the measures
taken by Akbar to reduce the rampant corruption and nepotism in his
administration, and to centralize the fiscal system. These measures were
loathed by some noblemen who, in earlier times, had been the favoured
elite backbone of Mughal nobility.
As we have seen, Akbar was constantly trying to tighten the empire’s
revenue and administrative system. Dissatisfied with the way in which land
revenue was being assessed, Akbar had ordered all lands in the central
Indo-Gangetic provinces to revert to the khalisa, the crown lands, in 1575.
For five years, mansabdars were paid in cash from the imperial treasury
while the lands in the newly acquired territories were carefully measured
following Raja Todar Mal’s system, crop yields were noted down, and tax
rates accurately determined. These new figures were added to older
measurements and a new assessment generated. On the basis of the average
prices of crops in the previous ten years, the tax claim was now fixed for
each crop in each region. No longer would tax be calculated on the basis of
seasonal prices and a direct communication between the government and
the ryots had been established. Akbar then reassigned a large amount of the
lands back to mansabdars but retained lands yielding about 25 per cent of
the overall yield for the needs of his own household. Khalisa land was
retained in the most productive areas, providing the emperor with some
fiscal security. In gratitude for his outstanding work of the past ten years,
Raja Todar Mal was made the imperial diwan in 1582.
Now a discontented group of noblemen revolted at attempts to curtail
their power and the dilution of their coterie by the gradual introduction of
Indian Muslims and Rajput noblemen into the mansabdari system. The
Jesuits noted the pragmatic meritocracy of the Mughal court when they said
that ‘men of low birth, upstarts, and (as the Mongols say) “men who have
risen”, together with those of alien birth, are given posts in the royal
household if the King finds them capable and efficient, and are gradually
promoted’. But were these men ever to disappoint the Padshah they were
made to ‘always carry about with them the tools of their original handicraft,
lest in their vulgarity and insolence they ever forget the low station from
which they have sprung’. It was clear, therefore, that while it was the
Padshah’s prerogative to raise men when he discerned talent, it was not
generally tolerated that people try and change their station of their own
accord. ‘Whenever a domestic servant turns to ilm (scholarly business),’
Akbar said, ‘much business would remain unattended’. Superintendents
were therefore warned to be vigilant so that no one wantonly abandoned
their profession.
There was now an equal percentage of Rajput, Indian Muslim, and
Persian noblemen, and just a fraction more Turani noblemen in the Mughal
Empire. By 1580, the total number of Rajput mansabdars numbered 43, out
of 272, while Persians accounted for 47 noblemen, Indian Muslims 44, with
Turani noblemen having the highest number at 67. In addition to feeling
that their clout was waning, the disgruntled noblemen had other reasons to
be discontented. The recent innovation of the dagh, or branding, of horses
that mansabdars were paid to maintain was particularly disliked. The
outrage of the nobility was further stoked by the sadrs, who had been so
unceremoniously ousted from their previously unassailable positions by the
mazhar. Now all the disaffected noblemen of the east responded with
violent enthusiasm to the fatwa issued by Mullah Yazdi. The ever-fractious
Afghans of Bengal joined the Central Asian Qaqshals and the Bihar rebels.
The Mughal Governor of Bengal was killed and Mirza Muhammad Hakim
was recognized as the legitimate ruler of Hindustan. ‘They were not
troubled by the thought,’ railed the historian Vincent Smith, ‘that the man
whom they desired to substitute for their gifted monarch was a drunken sot,
cowardly and irresolute, incapable of governing the empire. It sufficed for
them to know that Muhammad Hakim was reputed to be sound in doctrine.’
Not all Mirza Hakim’s officers were loyal to his cause, however, and
one Mir Abu’l Qasim left Kabul to join Akbar’s service. Since his lands lay
within the Salt Range, he presented the Padshah with a plate and cup made
of salt, to demonstrate his good intentions (namak-halali). He thus earned
not only the Padshah’s favour but also the sobriquet Namkin, or Salty.
Akbar responded to the challenge of the Afghans by sending Raja Todar
Mal to the east but as the rebellion gathered momentum, through April
1580, Akbar finally recalled his long-neglected and rambunctious foster
brother Mirza Aziz Koka. Ever since his truculence over the branding of
horses, Aziz Koka, now titled khan azam and a mansabdar of 5,000, had
been kept far away from the court. A witty, erudite, and orthodox man, Aziz
Koka could never resist the temptation to contradict the Padshah and make
plain his disapproval of all Akbar’s religious innovations. Brought up in the
camaraderie of their youth spent wrestling and camel-racing in Kabul, Aziz
was entirely at ease with Akbar, one of the few amirs to truly ever be so.
With his refined intelligence, and cool elegance, Aziz offered a study in
contrast with Akbar, who was stocky and powerful, and possessed of a
more intuitive understanding and magnetic warmth. ‘Aziz was’, according
to Abu’l Fazl, ‘remarkable for ease of address, intelligence, and his
knowledge of history’. He wrote poetry and was credited with an aphorism
of dubious merit that ‘a man should marry four wives—a Persian woman to
have somebody to talk to; a Khurasani woman for his housework; a Hindu
woman for nursing his children; and a woman from Mawarannahr, to have
someone to whip as a warning for the other three.’ It was through the
determined intercession of the harem (where Jiji Anaga must have made her
feelings clear too) that Akbar heard that Aziz Koka was ‘ashamed and
repentant’ and finally reinstated him.
Mirza Aziz Koka was now sent off to Bengal at the head of a large army
and carrying ‘those black standards, the sign of war to the death, which
Timur the Lame…had been wont to employ in his wars’ as a fluttering
warning to the rebellious forces. But even with the enormous power of the
Mughal force behind him it would be a few years before Bengal and Bihar
were subdued. In 1580, Bihar was finally organized as a separate subah
with 7 sarkars and 199 parganas ‘yielding a revenue of about 22 crore dams
or Rs. 5,547,985’ and Mirza Aziz Koka became the first Subedar of Bihar.
Bengal, however, was another matter. Ever since Munim Khan’s
disastrous attempt to relocate the capital and the ensuing plague and
devastation, Bengal, isolated from the rest of India for centuries, was
viewed with suspicion and fear, a place for renegades, a punishment
posting, leading Abu’l Fazl to dolefully record:
The country of Bengal is a land where owing to the climate’s
favouring the base, the dust of dissension is always rising, from the
wickedness of men families have decayed, and dominions (have
been) ruined. Hence in old writings, it was called Bulghakkhana
(house of turbulence).
Everything in Bengal appeared foreign and provocative to the Mughals
stationed there, from the diet of rice and fish to those used to wheat and
meat, to the deluge and foetid heat of the tropical thunderstorms, to the
main occupation of the locals, fishing, deemed unworthy by the warrior
mansabdars. Something of even Abu’l Fazl’s puzzlement can be understood
through his bizarre description of the region when he writes that the
‘inhabitants are as a race good-looking and addicted to the practice of
magic. Strange stories are told regarding them. It is said that they build
houses, of which the pillars, walls and roofs are made of men…. There
grows a wonderful tree whose branches when cut, exude a sweet liquid
which quenches the drought of those athirst.’ A land of sorcery and danger,
then, but extraordinarily fecund, for Abu’l Fazl also wrote that ‘harvests are
always abundant, measurement is not insisted upon, and revenue demands
are determined by establishment of the crop. His Majesty,’ continues Abu’l
Fazl, ‘in his goodness has confirmed this custom,’ reflecting the ground
reality wherein Mughal occupation at this time remained nominal.
While almost all the zamindars in Bengal were Kayasthas, as the
province increasingly integrated into the Mughal Empire, the Mughal
governors would bring in a host of immigrants from other parts of the
country to help them settle the land:
soldiers recruited from the north, Marwari merchants who
accompanied and helped finance their Mughal patrons, swarms of
petty clerks attached to Mughal officers, and the many artisans who
supplied and equipped the Mughal military establishment.
But most of these changes would finally take shape under a different
governor, Raja Man Singh, at the beginning of the next century. For now,
Abd un-Nabi and Abdullah Sultanpuri, hearing of the khutba in Mirza
Hakim’s name, returned to Hindustan from Mecca despite Akbar’s express
order to the contrary. But the time for indulgence had passed and Akbar had
some of the troublesome mullahs quietly killed—Mullah Muhammad Yazdi
was drowned in a river, as was Qazi Yaqub from Bengal. The hakim ul-
mulk, one of the signatories of the mazhar and a learned and trusted man,
but one who was opposed to Abu’l Fazl and who had named him,
admittedly in a puerile pun, Abu’l Fuzlah (excrement), was sent to Mecca.
Abdullah Sultanpuri died in Gujarat and Qazi Ali was sent to confiscate his
property. ‘Several boxes full of ingots of gold,’ wrote Badauni about the
corrupt theologian, ‘were discovered in his sepulchre where he had caused
them to be buried as corpses.’ All these ingots of gold and Abdullah
Sultanpuri’s precious library were reclaimed by the imperial treasury. Abd
un-Nabi returned to Fatehpur Sikri, though the atmosphere at court was
hostile towards him. He was rude to the Padshah one day and ‘unable to
restrain his passion’, Akbar struck the mullah in the face. ‘Why don’t you
strike with a knife?’ raged the furious mullah in the court where he had
once spat on the amirs in his arrogance and pride. Now there was to be no
quiet submission by the Padshah and Abd un-Nabi was handed over to Raja
Todar Mal and Abu’l Fazl over charges of embezzlement due to a missing
amount of 70,000 rupees that Akbar had given the mullahs for distribution
in charity at Mecca. A short while later the mullah was strangled in his bed,
probably on the order of Abu’l Fazl, who would thereby also have put to
rest the demons of his father’s ancient humiliations at the hands of these
very men, once all-powerful.
Akbar, however, had given clear instructions that all these actions
against the ulema had to be carried out ‘in such a manner that the ladies
should not know of it’. The ulema had the favour of the senior ladies of the
harem and Akbar would not have risked their displeasure, for the harem
was a formidable force when they acted in concert. There is no doubt that
the emperor would have been challenged about decisions and actions which
the women considered questionable. Indeed, Abu’l Fazl admitted that
Akbar had to be very careful of maintaining all the protocol due to the
women of the harem and that he spent three hours in the apartments of the
women every afternoon, tending to their various petitions equitably. These
petitions would often involve the submission of grants for pious women
fallen on hard times, the handing out of presents, promotions for men who
had distinguished themselves with service and ‘possibly listening to
political or military intelligence gathered through networks linked to his
harem’.
The year 1580 also saw the arrival of the beleaguered Kashmir sultan,
Yusuf Shah Chak, at the Mughal court. Akbar had already sent ambassadors
to Kashmir, in 1570 and 1578, to gather information on the state of affairs
in that kingdom and to also, not inconsequently, inform the nobility and
residents of the glory and wealth of the Mughal Empire. The lesson had not
been lost on Yusuf Shah Chak, long used to pragmatically accepting the
symbolic sovereignty of powerful neighbours. He had shown allegiance by
sending princesses as brides for Salim, by reciting the khutba, and striking
coins in the name of the Mughal Padshah. Over time, these placatory
gestures eroded the charisma of the sultan in his own country, encouraging
dissidents and now, in desperation, he had come to the Mughal court for
help. Akbar greeted him warmly, courteously offering him two mistresses,
and Yusuf Shah Chak stayed at the court for almost a year. Eventually,
Yusuf Shah Chak was dissuaded by his noblemen from accepting Mughal
military help and he escaped back to Kashmir. The damage was done,
however, for once Akbar had given refuge to embattled rulers, he would
only ever treat them as vassals. He began to address the sultan as Yusuf
Khan, and not by his title, and the balance of power was forever altered.
After regaining power, Yusuf Shah further alienated the Kashmiri people by
exacting violent revenge upon his opponents, including gouging out their
eyes, and exasperated his own supporters by ‘excessive indulgence in merry
making and gross neglect of state affairs’. Internal dissensions, volatility
and rivalries, long a trait of rulers in this region, now became widespread.
Haidar Chak, a rival warlord, rode over to Lahore and joined the imperial
service under Governor Man Singh. From now on, defectors and soldiers
would supply the Mughals with local intelligence as well as invaluable local
guides and fighters.
If the year 1580 saw Akbar concerned with the furthest eastern frontiers
of his kingdom, then he was simultaneously occupied with his western
frontier and the teal-green seas off Surat and further away still with the
firangi menace that was Portugal. Early in the year, Akbar sent a party with
an uncle of Mirza Aziz Koka ‘to capture the European ports’ with orders ‘to
remove the firangis who were a stumbling block in the way of the pilgrims
to the hijaz’. We have seen how the Portuguese were opposed to both trade
and the hajj in the Indian Ocean, which they further discouraged by the
imposition of the onerous system of cartazes, the plundering of pilgrim
ships, and the harassing of Muslim traders. A statement made during the
1567 Provincial Council under the archbishop of Goa, Gaspar de Leão
Pereira, made these prejudices clear:
Many Muslims and other infidels come to our ports with books of
their sects and their false relics that they bring from the House of
Mecca and other places they hold to be holy, and they pass through
our territories with these things to their own areas. The officials of
the customs houses are ordered that when these books and relics are
seen, they should not be cleared but rather examine them and if they
find them to be such, should burn them.
The Mughals did not operate in isolation in Hindustan, but kept themselves
well informed about happenings in the rest of the world. Akbar was
particularly interested in all major military battles and conquests beyond the
frontiers of his kingdom and a European at court once overheard Akbar and
his men analysing the Battle of the Three Kings, or the Battle of Alcazar al
Kabir, in which the invading Portuguese forces of King Sebastian were
defeated by the Moroccan Sultan of Morocco, Abd al-Malik. This was not
an exercise in simple curiosity, but a way to keep informed about military
technology and tactics, which the Mughals were supremely effective at
adopting and adapting.
The arrival of gunpowder technology had profoundly altered Mughal
battle tactics. The earlier Central Asian battle array, or yasal, was based on a
centre and rear, which served as shock troops that drew in the enemy troops,
accompanied by right and left flanks of mounted warriors who then
encircled the enemy, galloping at high speeds, all the while firing at the
trapped soldiers. Babur had already adopted the ‘camp battle’ technique of
the Ottomans which involved the use of trenches and mobile wagon forts
lashed together to protect the centre. Babur was able to combine two
apparently contradictory elements—a highly mobile Central Asian cavalry
with a more static entrenchment and artillery element and this ‘mobile
fortress combined with a swarm of swift and dangerous horsemen presented
a unique problem for the defending force’.
This combination of gunpowder technology with field fortifications
made Mughal tactics truly devastating. Moreover, gunpowder technology
was not adopted blindly or haphazardly. The Mughals, led by Akbar
himself, were obsessed with guns and their uses and tinkered endlessly with
them. Akbar devised new ways to use this musket and cannon technology in
response to the demands of the empire and the challenges he faced. So, for
example, Akbar devised rockets,* light and easy to transport. Rockets were
found to be particularly effective against enemy animals—horses and
elephants, for their whistling shriek caused pandemonium among them. The
Mughals then devised a special rocket with an in-built whistle to make
better use of this effect and, as pointed out by Andrew de la Garza,
‘rocketry is one instance where the West adopted Indian military
technology’. The Mughals adapted swivel camel guns and elephant guns,
high-performing muskets, lethal field artillery of different sizes all in
addition to the famed horse archer. ‘The resulting method of warfare would
appear alien to Western observers’, used to linear formations and close
order drill:
…but it was in reality a logical response to an extremely hazardous
battlefield environment dominated by fire. It actually demanded a
higher degree of discipline and initiative from the individual soldier
and small unit commander and in many ways anticipated much later
developments in Europe after the introduction of rifle muskets,
breechloaders and even more lethal field artillery.
Meanwhile Akbar’s sudden show of aggression in Surat in 1580 seems to
have been at least partly due to more personal calculations. Though the
Portuguese had indeed proved to be a constant menace, it was the coastal
trading kingdoms of the south who had been most affected. The Mughals,
with their focus directed towards the huge agricultural heartland, were only
minimally inconvenienced. But from the time that Gulbadan and her party
of Mughal women had planned to travel to Mecca, Akbar had been
supremely solicitous of their safety. As we have seen, he had ensured
friendly relations with the Portuguese at Surat in 1573 so that a cartaz was
readily obtained. Despite this, Gulbadan and her party had been delayed for
a year in Surat while the authorities prevaricated and Gulbadan had offered
the Portuguese the town of Baksar to expedite matters. Then in 1577 there
were reports of the Portuguese capturing Gujarati ships returning from
Mecca, at a time when the Mughal women’s party would have been directly
concerned. The royal ladies finally reached Mecca in time to participate in
the pilgrimage of 1577 following which they performed the hajj three more
times. According to Badauni they also undertook many lesser pilgrimages
and visited the important Shia shrines of Karbala, Qum, and Mashhad in
addition to Mecca.
In 1581, once the Mughal ladies were safely back on Hindustani soil,
Akbar inexplicably stopped sending the hajj caravans and the annual alms
to Mecca. For six years Akbar had patronized the sending of a mir hajj, and
hajj ships, and had subsidized all pilgrims at great expense, and now he
forbade pilgrims from going to Mecca altogether. It has been argued that
this was in line with his veering away from orthodox Islamic practices and
while it is true that other practices, such as the Ajmer pilgrimage, were also
discontinued, Akbar was a pragmatic man. If he did not participate in the
Ajmer pilgrimage himself he sent the royal princes in lieu, to keep orthodox
sentiments appeased. The withdrawal of ships and money to Mecca appear
to have been motivated by a personal and sharp sliver of anger at the high-
handedness of the Ottoman authorities and what would have been perceived
as disrespect towards Akbar’s beloved family members. There was certainly
a moment of imperial frisson between the descendant of Suleiman the
Magnificent, and Akbar the Great. So violent now would be Akbar’s
reaction at any perceived slight from the Ottomans that in 1582 he would
put the Ottoman ambassador in chains and send him ‘for a long period to
Lahore’ while the embassy itself ‘vanished in a cloud of smoke’ for a
supposed excess of arrogance.
Gulbadan brought back with her an iron detestation of the Portuguese,
whom she complained about bitterly, and she even tried to encourage the
locals to take back the town of Baksar once she had returned to Surat. This
hatred of the rapacious Portuguese was widespread and ‘the mere name of
Christian or Frank’, noted Monserrate sadly, when returning to Goa in
1582, ‘is horrible and hateful’. There would be no more hajj ships sent by
Akbar, though Jahangir would reinstate this custom and the next ships to be
sent on hajj would be under the patronage of his mother, the Rajput
princess, Harkha Bai, after she had become the queen mother. Reborn as
Maryam uz Zamani she would send 1,700 pilgrims on hajj in 1619. But for
Akbar, Padshah of Hindustan, ruling over an empire with a population five
times that of the Ottoman Empire, there was no longer any need for
Ottoman recognition, for the Mughal name was lustrous enough.*
*Present in India since possibly the fourteenth century, the war rocket was now made of metal
instead of wood or paper, allowing for a larger payload.
*As has been noted earlier, Eaton quotes an observer who, in 1615, estimated the Mughals’ annual
revenue at 120 million silver coins compared to forty-five million for the Ottoman Empire. (See
India in the Persianate Age, p. 371.)
THE SLOW MARCH TO KABUL
In 1581 two brothers, kings both, faced each other across the icy Jhelum
over the fate of Kabul, ancient capital of Babur. Outside the city was Akbar,
thirty-nine years old, leading an imperial army of 50,000 cavalry, 500
elephants, camel corps, and infantry. Facing him was Mirza Hakim, twenty-
eight years old, and self-proclaimed guardian of the luminous Chaghatai–
Timurid legacy of Babur. Mirza Hakim had spent decades cultivating that
legacy, upholding the Turco–Mongol code, and paying ostentatious
reverence to Babur’s tomb in Kabul. According to Munis Faruqui he
‘portrayed himself as a Ghazi with a rough and ready Turkish steppe
identity, staunch Sunni and a bold risk taker like Babur’. Now he made an
audacious appeal to the Central Asian noblemen within the Padshah’s
besieging army at Kabul, urging them to turn on their fellow soldiers, the
‘natives of Hindustan’ (Hindi nazhadan), and to join him instead, the true
heir of Babur. But Akbar’s troops, including ‘Mongols, some Persians,
some Turkmen, Chagatai, Uzbegs, Kandaharis, Baluchis, Pathans, Indians
and Gujaratis, Musulmans and also Hindus’ were unimpressed. Akbar, too,
had spent decades preparing for just such a challenge and had wrought an
empire from a careful balancing act between the various clans in it. Aziz
Koka, having long outlived his milk brother, would tell Jahangir about his
father’s strategy: ‘His Majesty Akbar during the fifty years of his reign
increased the number of Chaghatais and Rajputs among nobles for these
people are not seditious. They know nothing but loyalty.’
Mirza Hakim had finally laid bare his ambitions to challenge his half-
brother the Padshah the previous year in December 1580 when he had
marched into Hindustan and invaded the Punjab, encouraged by the
mutinies in Bengal and Bihar and the rallying of orthodox Islamic elements
to his banner. Akbar had then decided to finally confront his brother’s
claims, born of their shared legacy as Timurid mirzas, and their
unshakeable belief in their right to rule. In February 1581, almost a year
before the brothers would eventually face each other across the Jhelum,
Akbar decided to march to Kabul. But this would not be an intemperate and
blistering campaign. This would be a spectacle on the move, a glorious
cavalcade limned in gold, an unfurling of imperial power across the span of
Hindustan from Akbar’s blended capital at Fatehpur Sikri to the ancient
Timurid stronghold at Kabul.
Before leaving his capital, Akbar made careful and meticulous
arrangements for the administration of the empire, as he expected to be
gone for a long time. Akbar had initially planned to leave Salim, twelve
years old, in Fatehpur Sikri in his stead but ‘the prince begged through
[Hamida Banu] that he might accompany His Majesty’. The young Salim
was at this stage a golden-skinned, delicate-featured boy whose face was
dominated by a strong nose, which it would eventually grow into. Aziz
Koka was placed in charge of Bengal and Qutbuddin Khan was in charge of
Gujarat with a garrison of 10,000. Hamida Banu herself was ‘to be superior
to both of these’ and was in charge of Delhi with a garrison of 12,000
cavalry. Despite Abu’l Fazl’s considerable efforts at rendering the women
‘orderly’ and contained within the walls of the harem, Mughal women
continued to be unexpectedly ‘visible’. As for Akbar’s wives, the senior
Rajput queens, including Harkha Bai, were getting ready to accompany him
on his campaign across the country, along with his two eldest sons, a few of
his older daughters, and the Jesuit Monserrate.
Before leaving the capital, Akbar spent two days outside Fatehpur Sikri
in his ‘immense white pavilion’ with his mother and the Jesuit priests,
organizing the enormous resources and men required for the campaign.
When Akbar finally set off on 8 February 1581, it was not so much an army
on the move as a visible reminder of the wonder that was the wealthiest
empire on earth. Akbar rode in front, followed by his elite fighting corps,
the cavalry, which would swell to 50,000 after a few days march,
resplendent in their armour and their wicked curving swords and bows.
Behind the cavalry followed the 500 royal elephants, also wearing armour
and gold and silver trappings. The royal women followed on female
elephants, in colourful, swaying howdahs, surrounded by 500 white-haired
senior noblemen who drove away any stragglers who should come in the
way of the queens. The elephants were followed by the retinue of the
queens, all on slow-stepping, lurching camels and protected by white
umbrellas. The infantry and camp followers were estimated at four times
the size of the cavalry and other mounted units, bringing the total size of the
Mughal army and retinue to 2.5 lakh people. There was also the great tribe
of animals in attendance—a hundred blindfolded cheetahs on horse-drawn
carts, ears twitching and tails switching, and hawks, their ferocity contained
in their claws clenched around the arm-guards of their keepers. Bringing up
the rear was the treasury, carried on elephants and camels, and the king’s
furniture, all transported by mules, and twenty-eight field guns. This
immense procession, soon so large that it ‘seemed to hide the earth’, and
extending over a breadth of 3 kilometres and ‘filling the woods with a
crowding multitude’, was led, in the front, by a single drummer who laid
down the marching beat. In addition to the staccato of the horses’ hooves,
the occasional fluttering wing, the feral, dense bodies of the moving
elephants, and the subdued shouts of the soldiery, there was always the
sound of the drum beat, far away in front of the emperor, sounding out a
slow, regular rhythm, a long-drawn breath.
By the time the Padshah reached the first halt, the enormous Mughal
tented encampment was already set up. As he dismounted and rushed
towards his imperial tent, powerful shoulders rolling beneath the fine cotton
of his qaba, Akbar was greeted by two long rows of elephants and cavalry,
all the noblemen saluting him as he walked by. The layout of this enormous
mobile city followed an exact pattern, so that within a few days, anyone
walking through would ‘know his way about the bazaars as well as he does
about the streets of his own city’. The crimson imperial tent was laid out on
flat ground, within a large open space, which was covered by carpets; next
to it were the audience hall and the naqqara, covering 1,500 metres in
length. The open space was accessible only to guards, who patrolled it
continuously to ensure the privacy of the women. To the right were the
quarters of Salim and his attendants and to the left, those of Murad. Behind
these tents were the offices and the workshops and, further still, a separate
bazaar set up for the Padshah, the princes, and the elite noblemen with not
just grains, maize, pulses, and provisions but all kinds of merchandise so
that ‘these bazaars seem to belong to some wealthy city instead of to a
camp’. The merchandise was available at cheap rates as Akbar sent runners
ahead to inform merchants of his impending arrival and exempt them from
all taxes and promise them generous rewards on his return from the
campaign. These incentives and promises were crucial, for as historian
Abraham Eraly has pointed out:
The very movement of an army through the land caused damage to
property and unsettled life, so people invariably fled from the
army’s path, like gazelles at the scent of the tiger…. the advance of
a vast horde…was like a locust invasion: they simply ate up
everything on their path or trampled down stranding crops. The
greatest damage was done by camp followers, the rabble that
constituted the bulk of the Mughal host, who stripped whatever they
found on the way.
There were also additional tented structures, some eighteen described by
Qandahari, ‘which have been made of boards of wood, each including an
upper chamber and balcony…that are set up in a suitable and attractive
place. The boards are joined up together by iron rings’. These prefabricated
and movable structures were an innovation of Akbar’s and used an
ingenious system of posts and beams which could be used to instantly
fashion wooden housing. European brocade and velvet furnished the insides
of the tents and on the floors, up to a thousand carpets made it look like ‘a
garden had bloomed’. In the centre of the encampment was a high pole with
an immense lamp known as the akash diyah, used by the camp dwellers to
orient themselves, and was ‘the heart and head of the whole camp’. The
farrash khana, or department of tents, carpets, and materials, contained two
identical sets of equipment so that while the Padshah remained in one
location, a second camp was being prepared in advance at the next stop.
Four days after leaving Fatehpur Sikri the Mughal camp arrived at
Mathura, where Monserrate noted that ‘temples dedicated to Vishnu are to
be found in many places’. These shrines were patronized by many members
of the Mughal elite, and on the report of Raja Birbal, a grant of 100 bighas
had been made to temples in the city. By the time the imperial army was
passing through in 1581, seven temples of Mathura had been granted tax-
free lands. In the course of the year, Hamida Banu was to issue a farman
from Fatehpur Sikri permitting free grazing by the cows and oxen of one
Vithalrai of Govardhan. Outside Mathura was a Hanuman temple with 300
trained monkeys who fought like gladiators with miniature weapons upon
the ringing of a bell, which Monserrate derided as being a venal attempt by
Brahmins to fleece poor and easily beguiled pilgrims.
Each time Akbar departed from the camping ground for another day’s
journey, he was closely followed by officers carrying a ten-foot rod*—these
officials meticulously measured the distance covered. ‘These
measurements,’ wrote Monserrate, ‘are afterwards found very useful in
computing the area of provinces and the distances of places apart, for
purposes of sending envoys and royal edicts, and in emergencies.’ And
indeed one of Akbar’s great achievements was the standardization of
measurement of area. For measuring distances, the kos was used.†
Six days later, the camp reached Delhi, described by Monserrate as
studded with ‘lofty and handsomely decorated residences’ and broad and
imposing streets ‘planted down the middle with beautiful green trees which
cast a grateful shade’. On either side of the fickle Yamuna, which would
one day abandon these glorious buildings, were stately mansions and parks
dense with fruits and flowers. Akbar went to visit Humayun’s tomb and met
his beloved stepmother, Bega Begum, who lived in the Arab Sarai quarters.
When he visited his father’s tomb, Akbar would have had an aching and
visceral reminder of Humayun’s physical presence. The tomb at that time
would have been richly decorated with carpets and tapestries while an
awning would have covered the central shrine itself. Within the chamber of
the tomb would have been Humayun’s Koran, dagger, sword, turban, and
shoes, as if the Padshah had only just left the room. All these priceless
mementos would quietly disappear after the British took back Delhi
following the chaos of the 1857 Uprising.
In Delhi Akbar was shown incriminating letters that proved his
powerful finance minister, Shah Mansur, was colluding with Mirza Hakim.
Shah Mansur had begun his career as an accountant in the Perfume
Department and, as so often happened in Akbar’s meritocratic system,
worked his way up through talent and ambition to become wazir. Though
the veracity of these letters was later doubted, Shah Mansur was a deeply
unpopular man for the brusque, tactless, and over-zealous way in which he
carried out his affairs. Even Todar Mal, Akbar’s exemplary officer,
complained of his high-handedness, talking of his ‘sharp letters…claiming
a good deal of money’. Akbar was therefore constrained to publicly execute
Shah Mansur, though ‘the King’s mournful countenance plainly showed
how much pained he had been by the wretched man’s fate’ and the loss of a
supremely efficient officer.
The execution of Shah Mansur, so troubling to Akbar, was part of the
vital dispensation of justice which was carried out even while the court was
on the move. The Jesuits had noted Akbar’s great concern with the proper
rule of law and wrote that ‘the King has the most precise regard for right
and justice in the affairs of government’. Cases were usually brought
forward before two judges but ‘by the King’s direction all capital cases, and
all really important civil cases also, are conducted before himself. He is
easily excited to anger, but soon cools down again. By nature moreover he
is kindly and benevolent and is sincerely anxious that guilt should be
punished, without malice indeed, but at the same time without undue
leniency. Hence in cases in which he himself acts as judge the guilty are, by
his own directions, not punished until he has given orders for the third time
that this shall be done.’
From Delhi, the camp set out in a northerly direction, towards the low
mountains and the foothills, so as to always be close to a water source for
the needs of the gigantic army. Sappers were sent ahead to level the roads
over ‘rocks and crags and deep torrent-beds’ under the charge of Akbar’s
best military engineer, Muhammad Qasim Mir Barr.
Two days after leaving Delhi, the caravan reached Sonepat, more
‘famous than many a city on account of the swords, scimitars, daggers,
poniards, and steel points for spears, pikes and javelins, which are skilfully
manufactured here and exported to all parts of the empire’. Iron and steel
were mined from the lower reaches of the Himalayas and brought to the
town, which was populated by many weapons manufacturers for this very
reason.
In Panipat, ‘the inhabitants, especially the women, filled the balconies
and the roofs in their eagerness to see the King’, who must have cut a very
dashing figure on his fine horse, surrounded by all his noblemen. But the
king was not his usual affable self during the early part of this journey.
Seemingly oppressed by Mirza Hakim’s challenge, he was seen frowning,
and anxious, caught up in an internal turmoil that no one could distract him
from.
Monserrate has left a somewhat damning description of Hindustani
towns which, he wrote, were striking from afar but when inspected closely
it was found that ‘the narrowness, aimless crookedness, and ill-planning of
the streets deprive these cities of all beauty’. However the wealthy
inhabitants, he conceded, ‘adorn the roofs and arched ceilings of their
houses with carvings and paintings; plant ornamental gardens in their
courtyards; make tanks and fish-ponds, which are lined with tiles of various
colours; construct artificial springs and fountains, which fling showers of
water far into the air; and lay down promenades paved with brickwork or
marble’. At every halt multitudes gathered to meet the Padshah. They
brought him gifts for vows fulfilled, asked him for spiritual advice, and
brought cups of water. Sick children were produced before the Padshah so
that Akbar could breathe on them and infuse them with his miraculous
healing powers. Abu’l Fazl writes that whenever Akbar set off outside the
capital, he was always petitioned by crowds who ‘ask for lasting bliss, for
an upright heart, for advice how best to act, for strength of the body, for
enlightenment, for the birth of a son, the reunion of friends, a long life,
increase of wealth, elevation in rank, and many other things’.
In the towns and villages along the way, Holi was celebrated with an
ecstatic fervour that the somewhat aghast Monserrate wrote about. ‘During
a space of fifteen days,’ wrote the Jesuit, ‘they are at liberty freely to cast
dust upon themselves and upon whoever passes by. They plaster with mud
their own bodies and those of any persons they may meet. They also squirt
a red dye out of hollow reeds.’
When they reached Thanesar, Akbar along with Abu’l Fazl and Faizi
visited the khanqah of an old and respected Chishti Sufi, Shaikh Jalal al-
din. The elderly shaikh, who used to remain lying down and was only semi-
conscious because of his great age, asked to be lifted upright to honour the
visit of the Padshah, the ‘Caliph of the age’. The three men had a long
conversation on ‘the secrets of Divine Realities and mystical sensibilities’
and then, prompted by Akbar, Abu’l Fazl asked the shaikh a question: ‘You
have spent a long life, and have enjoyed the society of the good. Can you
tell of a cure for melancholy?’ The melancholy that Abu’l Fazl enquired
about may have been that of Akbar himself. The Jesuit priests had also
commented on the Padshah’s tendency to introspection, saying that ‘Akbar
was by temperament melancholy’, attributing it to the ‘falling sickness’, or
epilepsy, and argued that this was the reason Akbar kept himself constantly
busy, occupied, and focused. Akbar, too, once said that ‘when his
understanding is still undeveloped, man is in constant change of mood: at
one time taking joy in festivities, at another sitting disconsolate in the house
of mourning. When his vision is raised to higher things, sorrow and joy
withdraw.’ This tendency to occasional melancholia, and a lingering
malaise, may have contributed to what would become a constant quest for
revelations and spiritual solace. In Thanesar, Akbar had an emotional
discussion with the Sufi shaikh and in the recorded memory of later Chishti
tazkiras,* Akbar was said to have been so impressed with the shaikh that he
even wanted to give up his kingship. The shaikh, however, would have
dissuaded him saying:
First you find a person who can match you and sit (on the throne) in
your place, and then come for this work…remember God. Kingship
does not prevent you from remembering Him.
The Mughal camp continued towards Kumaon, and could now see ‘the
snow-covered Himalaya mountains…gleaming white’, while a cold wind
blew over the fluttering standards of the army. ‘The Hindus who inhabited
Kumaon,’ wrote Monserrate, ‘do not own allegiance to [Akbar] and are
protected by exceedingly thick forests.’ At Kalanaur, where he had been
proclaimed Padshah twenty-five years previously, Akbar stayed in the
gardens which he had had planted all those decades ago. The Mughal camp
slowly passed through plains and glens, fragrant in the cool air, and crossed
rushing streams filled with the flickering movement of fish and lethal
crocodiles. Rivers were crossed either by constructing wooden bridges, or
by lashing boats together with grass ropes and laying branches on them to
make a temporary, bobbing construction. Akbar was insistent about the
army crossing carefully in single file so that no confusion was caused with
‘the cavalry, the infantry, the camels, the baggage-animals, the flocks and
the herds’ crossing together. Monserrate was impressed with Akbar’s
meticulous attention to detail and concern for the soldiery, writing that
‘praise should be given to [Akbar]’s carefulness and foresight in giving
such earnest attention to the safety of his army that he consulted its interests
not only in the matter of water supply and of cheap corn, but also in the
passage of rivers’.
In the evenings, stories were told or religion discussed with the Jesuits
and Brahmin priests. Conspicuous by his absence on this carefully planned
journey was Badauni. Caught up, by his own admission, in a ‘bond of
friendship’ for a youth called ‘Mazhar’ which so distracted him, he was
absent from court for an unforgivable period of a year. Badauni, even
seventeen years after the event, did not regret the illicit passion which
caused him such dereliction of duty. ‘The delight of that taste,’ he bravely
proclaimed, ‘has never left my heart.’ Akbar was considerably less
impressed with his unpredictable scholar. ‘How was he left behind on this
journey?’ the Padshah enquired of Abu’l Fazl angrily, and excuses of ill-
health had to be quickly invented to save Badauni from being struck off
permanently from the royal rolls. Badauni’s dereliction of duty by not
attending to the Padshah was a much more serious crime than it may appear
to be. Personal attendance by courtiers, when Akbar commanded it, was
imperative. Monserrate had described it as a means by which the Padshah
controlled his nobility, who needed to constantly be reminded of their place
in the imperial hierarchy. ‘In order to prevent the great nobles becoming
insolent through the unchallenged enjoyment of power’, wrote Monserrate,
‘the king summons [them] to court…and gives them many imperious
commands, as though they were his slaves—commands, moreover,
obedience to which ill suits their exalted rank and dignity’.
Having crossed Ambala, the army reached Sirhind, a large city built on
a broad plain ‘beautified by many groves of trees and pleasant gardens’.
This was a thriving city where ‘bows, quivers, shoes, greaves and sandals’,
were made and exported to all the cities of the empire. There was a famous
school of medicine in Sirhind, which exported doctors to other parts of the
country. While camped at Sirhind, Akbar received the encouraging news
that Mirza Hakim had fled Hindustan, and was heading away from Lahore,
back towards Kabul. Intensely relieved by Mirza Hakim’s decision, Akbar
went on outings around the city on his favourite two-horse chariot on
which, admitted the Jesuits, he looked very imposing. Mirza Hakim would
be pursued, Akbar decided, and made to fight or to submit, once and for all.
On their long march across the country, the ordinary soldiers and low-
ranking mansabdars kept themselves toned and fit by organizing drills and
games. Since amirs did not routinely conduct training manoeuvres, the men
exercised on their own to stay in fighting shape, with ‘dumb-bells, heavy
sticks of wood, clubs, and chainbows. Daily rehearsal of a coordinated
sequence of movements called kasarat developed agility and quickness. The
men wrestled and engaged in mock fights with heavy sticks and shields,
they jousted at tent-pegs with lances, shot arrows at small targets while at a
full gallop, and trained their horses to stand on their hind legs and jump
forward in a manoeuver designed to attack elephants.’ In their spare time
the soldiers would have played chess, one of the most common pastimes
then.
Near the banks of the Jhelum, Akbar was taken to the top of a steep and
craggy hill, the Balnath Thilla, to visit an ancient hermit, the Balnath. From
the top of the Thilla the snow-capped Himalayas were clearly visible and
far below, at the foot of the hill, the Jhelum sparkled. This extremely
venerable religious site, predating by millennia the coming of Guru
Gorakhnath, was now the most well-known base of the Kanphata yogis of
the country. They derived their name from their custom of splitting the
cartilage of the ear to put huge, distinctive earrings through them. Many
naked ascetics, disciples of the Balnath, came out of their caves to receive
the respectful salutations of the camp followers. They were a sect of sun-
worshippers, according to Monserrate, and saluted the rising sun with ‘the
concerted sound of flutes and conches’. They lived a frugal life, eating
‘only cooked lentils and ghi’. They had a reputation for communicating
with the spirit world and practising magic, exorcism, witchcraft, and some
primitive medicine. The Gorakhnath sect had rejected traditional religious
practices and, like the Bhakts of Kabir, sought an identity that could
‘somehow be both Hindu and Muslim and neither, all at the same time’.
One of their sayings was ‘the Hindu calls on Ram, the Muslim on Khuda,
the yogi calls on the invisible one, in whom there is neither Ram nor
Khuda’. Akbar walked up to the top of the hill and ‘did reverence to the
place and to the prophet with bare feet and loosened hair’.
It was when the Mughal camp finally reached the river Indus, known
locally as the Blue Water, that the army faltered for the first time. ‘Some
were influenced by ignorance,’ grumbled Abu’l Fazl, ‘some by smallness of
intellect, some by dread of a cold country…and a love for India.’ The world
had changed since the time Babur had to plead with his Chaghatai clansmen
to remain in hot and inhospitable Hindustan while they yearned for the
bracing cold of Kabul and its sweet, consoling melons. While the camp
remained by the river for fifty days, Akbar went with Abu’l Fazl to visit the
shrine of the Gorkhatris, near Peshawar, in a cave so deep that ‘there are
nowhere else in the whole world such narrow and dark hermits’ cells as at
this place’. The men had to crawl in darkness through a tortuous cave
system to reach the sacred prayer spot; it was such a daunting and
depressing task that most of the men lost heart and turned back.
When the great army finally reached the outskirts of Kabul, the Padshah
took the fight to his half-brother. An advance guard under young prince
Murad, only eleven years old, led the attack as astrologers had decreed that
his was the brightest star at the time. Akbar followed with a small
contingent while the bulk of the army was left behind with Salim, to
advance slowly.
The attacking force included some of the famous imperial elephants,
Gaj Mangal, Mukut, and Lakshmi Sundar. Each animal carried on its back
four small wooden turrets from which soldiers fired muskets or shot their
arrows simultaneously, a moving menace of fearsome firepower. About the
cavalry, Monserrate noted that ‘the Mongols, Persians, Parthians, Turks,
Sogdians, Bachtrae and Scythians all use the same fighting tactics’. They
were ‘most dangerous when they seem to be flying in headlong riot for,
turning round on their horses, although they are going at full gallop, they
fling their javelins with such deadly aim that they can transfix the eye of an
enemy’. These elite horsemen fought as light cavalry, galloping while
standing almost upright in their stirrups. The Rajputs meanwhile were
employed as heavy cavalry, fighting hand to hand with lance and swords
while firmly seated in the saddle, legs fully extended.
While the mansabdars were sheathed in gleaming armour, the regular
cavalrymen had to content themselves with long quilted coats to absorb the
impact of swords and arrows. On the lower body, they wore cotton trousers
tied with a shawl and folds of quilted cloth to protect their heads in lieu of
helmets. Raja Man Singh, Madhu Singh, Surat Singh, and other elite
noblemen threw themselves into the attack and this was when Mirza Hakim
sent the offer to Akbar’s soldiers, claiming that ‘the Turanis and Persians…
will join us without fighting and the brave Rajputs and gallant Afghans will
end their days…’ Abu’l Fazl was greatly scornful of this tactic, saying that
‘the great deeds of the Rajputs and the Shaikh-zadas of India [were]
unknown to [Mirza Hakim]’. The men disdained Mirza Hakim’s call and
his army was soon routed and Mirza Hakim fled the scene of battle.
After first sending heralds to announce to the ‘merchants, workmen, and
common people’ that they need not fear any reprisals, Akbar marched into
Kabul where he had spent his boyhood in the shade of the chinar trees and
the riotous company of his milk brothers.
While in Kabul, Akbar attended to two particularly galling derelictions
of duty in his officers. The paymaster, who had been sent ahead of Akbar’s
party with 15,000 pieces of gold coins to pay Mirza Murad’s troops’
salaries, had been ambushed and captured by Mirza Hakim’s men. Despite
having enough men to put up a determined resistance, he had allowed
himself to be shamefully captured without inflicting or receiving a single
cut or wound. For this the Padshah ‘upbraided him soundly for his
carelessness and cowardice’. Even more embarrassing was the routing of
Shaikh Jamal Bakhtiyar, a brother-in-law of the Padshah’s, who had also
been ambushed and put to flight. So terrified was the man at the reaction of
the Padshah that he ‘adopted the scanty clothing, bare head and unshod feet
of a dervish’, preferring a life of banishment to the utter humiliation of
Akbar’s fury, for he knew that Akbar was ‘severe [on] breaches of military
discipline’. Both men were, however, eventually forgiven.
After a short stay in Kabul, during which Akbar visited the quiet resting
place of his grandfather at the Bagh-e-Babur, and having easily made his
point, he pragmatically handed over the rule of the city to the mirza’s sister,
Bakht un-Nisa Begum, and returned to Fatehpur Sikri. Monserrate noted
that while on the long journey to Kabul Akbar had had a white tent set up in
the royal enclosure within which he had performed his prayers, on the way
back ‘he pretended not to notice that it was no longer erected’. With Mirza
Hakim, the Timurid prince, neutralized, Akbar could now define a new
identity for the Padshah of Hindustan. No longer would he feel the need to
ostentatiously show himself to be a pious and orthodox Muslim monarch.
Indeed, Akbar seemed released of a burden that had cast a shadow over
the past year of his life and he recovered his earlier lightness of spirit. When
twelve deserters were captured and brought into custody, one of the men
who had been assigned capital punishment begged for a chance to approach
the Padshah. ‘O King,’ he pleaded, ‘order me not to the gibbet, for nature
has bestowed upon me marvellous powers in a certain direction.’ Akbar’s
interest was piqued. ‘[I]n what direction do you thus excel, O miserable
wretch?’ the Padshah asked the harried prisoner. The man claimed he could
sing wonderfully and when asked to demonstrate his skill, proceeded to
croak in a ‘discordant and harsh’ manner so that everyone started
murmuring and laughing. ‘Pardon me this poor performance,’ shouted out
the prisoner, sensing that the Padshah was amused, ‘for these guards of
yours dragged me along so roughly and cruelly, on a hot and dusty road,
and pummelled me so brutally with their fists, that my throat is full of dust,
and my voice so husky that I cannot do myself justice in singing.’ Akbar
was so entertained by the man’s ready wit that he pardoned not just him but
also his fellow traitors.
There was less clemency for villages in the plains across the Khyber
Pass, loyalists of Mirza Hakim who had refused to sell grain and supplies to
the army despite being offered large sums of money. The villagers had fled
their homes as soon as they heard that the great caravan was on its way
back, and watched helplessly from across the river while their villages were
put to the torch.
There were some among Akbar’s party who demanded that Mirza
Hakim be hunted down and executed. Akbar refused to do so, saying,
‘Mirza Hakim is a memorial of the Emperor Humayun though he has acted
ungratefully, I can be no other than forbearing’. Mirza Hakim’s revolt was
to be the last great challenge to Akbar’s right to rule. From here on, the
glory sought would be divine.
*Zinc.
†Medicines, which were expensive and rare.
UNIVERSAL CIVILITY
It had been seven years since the royal ladies’ hajj party had been gone
from Fatehpur Sikri so when they returned to the capital in April 1582, they
were greeted with exuberant and resplendent joy. Gulbadan and her party
had decided to stop en route at Muinuddin Chishti’s dargah for a final
thanksgiving and Salim, favourite of the harem, was sent to Ajmer to
formally welcome the ladies back to Hindustan. Every day after that a
different nobleman of rank was sent to salute the women as they made their
way back to Fatehpur Sikri and when they reached Bharatpur, Akbar
himself rode out to meet his aunt. The Padshah had had the pavements in
Fatehpur Sikri covered with silken shawls and he ‘conducted her himself to
her palace in a gorgeous litter, scattering largesse meanwhile to the crowds’.
As Gulbadan, Salima Sultan, and the other women settled back into the
harem, after their many years away, they would hear from Hamida Banu
and the other ladies of some truly intriguing changes at court. Perhaps the
most provocative of the new visitors they were told about were the Jesuits,
for from this time on, after the return of Gulbadan, the priests began to feel
decidedly unwelcome at the Mughal court.
The Mughal harem had always shown a great solidarity in the causes
they supported from the time of Babur, whether it was protecting the
interests of a favoured prince or undermining the power of a disruptive
regent or arranging marriages. In their distaste for the Jesuits and the
Portuguese, the harem appeared to have been united once again and it was
evident enough to have been recorded by a foreign traveller, Thomas
Coryat, an Englishman at the court of Jahangir. ‘[Akbar] never denyed [his
mother] anything but this,’ said Thomas Coryat, ‘that shee demanded of
him that our Bible might be hanged about an asses necke and beaten about
the towne of Agra, for that the Portugals…tied (the Quran) about the necke
of a dogge and beat the same dog about the towne of Ormuz.’ Hamida
Banu’s fury at the Portuguese’s disrespect of the Koran was understandable
but this once, Akbar refused to do as she suggested for ‘the contempt of any
religion was the contempt of God’.
If the Timurid ladies were horrified at the blasphemous disrespect
shown to the Prophet and Islam, then the Rajput wives would have found
equally intolerable the repeated suggestion by the Jesuits that Akbar
distance himself from all but one wife. ‘[H]is mother, his aunt, and many of
the great lords of the Kingdom who attended him,’ wrote a biographer of
the Jesuits, ‘left no stone unturned to discredit the Fathers and their
teaching.’ It was further noted that ‘his bevy of wives followed their
example; for they realised that all of them, save one only, would be
abandoned if the King became a Christian’. The ladies, who were all dearly
devoted to Salim, perhaps also feared and resented the growing influence
the Jesuits appeared to have on the young prince. Many decades later
Jahangir would recount an incident from this time concerning Acquaviva,
‘whose intimate friend he had been’. He described how he came upon the
priest when he was scourging himself, for Salim had been sleeping close
enough to the Jesuit’s quarters to have been disturbed by the sound of the
thudding whip. When Salim entered Acquaviva’s room, he found a whip ‘so
covered with blood that drops were falling on the floor’ and when
questioned, Acquaviva ‘tried to cover with a laugh what the flush on his
face and the modesty of his eyes plainly betrayed’. Salim was astounded
both by the self-denial and flagellation as well as the modesty of the Jesuit
who tried to hide the bloodied whip but the ladies, it may be supposed,
would have been more leery about this threatening friendship.
In the end the Jesuits were finally undone by Akbar himself who, they
admitted, ‘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’. At the end of one of their last discussions in the ibadat
khana Akbar told the assembled scholars and courtiers:
I perceive that there are varying customs and beliefs of varying
religious paths. For the teachings of the Hindus, the Musalmans, the
Jazdini, the Jews and the Christians are all different. But the
followers of each religion regard the institutions of their own
religion as better that those of any other. Not only so, but they strive
to convert the rest to their own way of belief. If these refuse to be
converted, they not only despise them but also regard them for this
very reason as their enemies. And this causes me to feel many
serious doubts and scruples.
The point about the conversions may have stung the Jesuits and they ‘began
to suspect that he was intending to found a new religion with matter taken
from all the existing systems’. Jahangir also talked about this aspect of his
father in his memoir when he wrote: ‘[T]he professors of various faiths had
room in the broad expanse of his incomparable sway. This was different
from the practice in other realms for in Persia there is room for Shias only
and in Turkey, India (non-Mughal) and Turan there is room for Sunnis
only.’
Dismayed and defeated, the Jesuits decided to leave the Mughal court,
not wishing to give Akbar ‘the pearls of the Gospel to tread and crush under
his feet’. They asked Abu’l Fazl with some mystification why Akbar
desired their presence at the court so passionately when it was clear now he
had no intention of becoming a Christian. ‘The King, having a desire for all
kinds of knowledge, and liking to show his greatness,’ replied Abu’l Fazl
succinctly, ‘[is] delighted to have at his court people of all nations.’ ‘My
father always associated with the learned of every creed and religion’,
agreed Jahangir, ‘especially with Pandits and the learned of India’. As for
Akbar himself, when Acquaviva told him he was planning to leave, he
replied with simple sincerity: ‘I love you, Father, and rejoice to have you
near me; for you have taught me many things which have pleased me more
than all I have learnt from others.’ In a letter to the Jesuit mission in Goa,
Akbar admitted that, ‘the Almighty, through his eternal favours and
perpetual grace, had turned (his) heart in such a way as continuously to
create a craving for God’ while Jahangir wrote about Akbar that he ‘never
for one moment forgot God’.
The pearls that Akbar did collect, despite the Jesuits’ misgivings,
contained multitudes. They could not be constrained within the rigorous
limits of the Jesuit doctrine, for Akbar’s kingdom contained almost limitless
ways of worshipping the divine. It was probably just as well that the Jesuits
had left by the time Akbar was taking part in the ceremonies that Badauni
wrote about with despair. There were masses of people, wrote Badauni,
who ‘stood every morning opposite to the window, near which His Majesty
used to pray to the sun, and declared that they had made vows not to rinse
their mouth, nor to eat and drink, before they had seen the blessed
countenance of the Emperor. And every evening there was a regular Court
assembly of needy Hindus and Musalmans, all sorts of people, men and
women, healthy and sick, a queer gathering and a most terrible crowd. No
sooner had His Majesty finished saying the thousand and one names of the
“Greater Luminary”, and stepped out into the balcony, than the whole
crowd prostrated themselves.’
From these many experiences of God there arose in Akbar a desire for
harmony, as opposed to the conflict and the disharmony of the earlier ibadat
khana discussions. Abu’l Fazl would make it his life’s work to articulate
and expand upon this notion in his biography of Akbar, which he would
begin to write in a few years. ‘As the world’s Lord exercises sway over it
on the principle of sulh kul, universal civility,’ wrote Abu’l Fazl, ‘every
group of people can live in accordance with its own doctrine without
apprehension, and everyone can worship God after his own fashion.’ This
spirit of harmony, present also in the Bhakti and Sufi movements, as well as
the pantheistic philosophy of Ibn Arabi, did not, as historian Harbans
Mukhia has shown, just prescribe a passive ‘tolerance’ of all religions but
was an active ideological state. In his work Abu’l Fazl blames the ‘blowing
of the chill blast of inflexible custom and the low…lamp of wisdom’ for
being the cause of disharmony whereas ‘if the doctrine of an enemy be in
itself good, why should hands be stained in the blood of its professors? And
even were it otherwise, the sufferer from the malady of folly deserves
commiseration, not hostility and the shedding of his blood.’ For Akbar, it
would appear that after all his experiments and his ecstatic visions, he was
beginning to relate to a concept of divinity as described in the teachings of
the Nirguna Bhakti. In a letter to Murad, written in 1591, Akbar told his
son:
Devotion to the Matchless one is beyond the limits of the spoken
word whether in respect of form, material attributes, letter or sound.
Devotion to the Matchless one is also matchless.
The influence of these thoughts in governance, especially through the works
of Tusi and Rumi, which were among Akbar’s favourite texts, has also been
pointed out by scholars. Akbar was particularly fond of Rumi’s Masnavi,
reciting them from memory. One such masnavi, which seemed to reflect
Akbar’s deepest convictions, was:
Thou has come to unite
Not to separate
For the people of Hind, the idiom of Hindi is praiseworthy
For the people of Sind, their own is to be praised.
In a proclamation of the royal code of conduct issued by Akbar to all
officials, there are thoughts which echoed the same sentiments of active
tolerance and compassion:
The best prayer is service to humanity. They should welcome all
with generosity, whether friends, foes, relatives or strangers. In
particular they should be kind to the recluse and seek the company
and advice of the pious.
They should be ever watchful of the conditions of people, the big
and the small (for) chief-ship or ruler-ship means to guard and
protect… And they should not interfere in any person’s religion.
For, wise people in this worldly matter, which is transient—do not
prefer that which harms. How can they then choose the dis-
advantageous way in matters of faith—which pertains to the world
of eternity? If he (the subject) is right, they (state officials) would
oppose the truth (if they interfere); and if they have the truth with
them and he is unwittingly on the wrong side, he is a victim of
ignorance and deserves compassion and help, not interference and
resistance.
The guiding principles reflected in sulh kul were essential for a just ruler of
a plural kingdom. As Iqtidar Alam Khan describes it ‘within this framework
there was no scope for the operation of those provisions of the Sharia which
imposed certain disabilities on the zimmis’. ‘As in the wide expanse of the
Divine compassion there is room for all classes and followers of all creeds,’
wrote Jahangir, ‘so…in his (Akbar’s) dominions…there was room for the
professors of opposite religions, and for beliefs good and bad, and the road
to altercation was closed. Sunnis and Shias met in one mosque and Franks
and Jews in one church, and observed their own forms of worship.’
In practical terms, the spirit of ‘universal civility’ or ‘absolute peace’
was reflected in the very concrete reality that all the ruling clans in Akbar’s
empire were now almost evenly balanced. No single group was in a
dominant position to impose its will on another and even the Turanis, the
largest group, now comprised just 24 per cent of the nobility. Moreover,
some of the Turani and Irani mansabdars commanded units composed
mostly of Rajputs and ‘by the end of Akbar’s reign, Kachhwaha
mansabdars alone commanded more than 26,000 ordinary cavalrymen in
Mughal service’. This diversity and balance within the nobility would
remain the keystone of Mughal politics into the reigns of future emperors. It
would result in the presence of courtiers who were very different from one
another, men like Raja Todar Mal, Husain Khan ‘Tukriya’, Mirza Aziz
Koka, Raja Bhagwant Das, Qulij Khan, and Faizi, with all their
idiosyncrasies and clashing values who were nonetheless respected, loyal,
and cherished members of the Mughal court.
This very personal moral code of conduct born of Akbar’s
understanding of the many faiths and practices which he encountered, led to
a loose collection of guidelines for those who might be keen to follow them,
guidelines based on reason and rationality, and encouraging temperance and
moderation in everyday life. ‘If people really wished it,’ Akbar offered,
‘they might adopt this faith, and his Majesty declared that this religion
ought to be established by choice, and not by violence.’ Scholars M. Athar
Ali and M. Akhtar Ali have shown that by using the terms of the Sufis,
referring to his disciples as murids,* Akbar was aspiring to a position
similar to that of a spiritual guide, but only for a very select band of men.
‘Whoever desires to be enrolled as a disciple,’ specified Abu’l Fazl, ‘finds
great difficulty in his plea being accepted.’ Indeed, this was to be a close
circle of aristocratic men willing to share the Padshah’s spiritual leadership,
and in no way a popular mass movement. When German scholar Heinrich
Blochmann was translating Abu’l Fazl’s works, he mistranslated the phrase
Ain-i Iradat Gazinan (literally—regulations for those privileged to be His
Majesty’s disciples) as ‘Ordinances of the Divine Faith’ and the idea of
Din-i Ilahi and a new religion wrongly captured the popular imagination.
In reality, what took place in Akbar’s time was that a ceremony was
organized in which the ‘disciple’, or murid, took an oath and was given a
special seal that had the phrase ‘Allahu Akbar’ written on it. They were also
given a small image of the Padshah, which they often wore pinned to their
turban. Disciples were encouraged to greet each other with the phrase
‘Allahu Akbar’ to which the other would respond ‘Jalla Jallaluhu’. While
these Arabic salutations were seemingly inoffensive, they also contained the
emperor’s name within them ( Jalal-ud-din Akbar). This audacious and
even irreverent play on words would lead to considerable uneasiness and
angst in those who accused Akbar of conflating his definition of kingship
with that of divinity since the apparent meaning of the phrases ‘God is
Great/May his Glory be ever Glorious’ could also be interpreted as ‘Akbar
is God/May his Glory be ever Glorious’. This idea would be reinforced in
Abu’l Fazl’s Akbarnama, in which he would project Akbar as the Insaan-e
Adil (Perfect Man) and kingship itself as emanating from a Farr-i Izadi
(Divine Light). But for Akbar the essence of sulh kul was an eclectic
collection of rather non-heretical thoughts. Ten virtues were encouraged
(liberality, forbearance from bad actions and controlling of anger with
gentleness, abstinence, freedom from excessive materialism, piety,
devotion, prudence, kindness, attachment to God) of which nine were taken
directly from the Koran. The recommendations for disciples were more in
the manner of moral guidelines and bodily practices, such as giving up meat
on certain days. As for the disciples, only eighteen were ever accounted for,
making this more a collection of like-minded courtiers who were willing to
go along with the Padshah on his religious quest rather than a new religion
for everyone as has been suggested. They included Shaikh Mubarak and his
sons, Abd al-Samad the painter and his son, Muhammad Sharif, and Raja
Birbal.* These members owed a four-fold allegiance to Akbar, the Ikhlas-i-
Chahargana, which was defined by a willingness to sacrifice lives, property,
honour, and religion. Of the eighteen disciples only one, Raja Birbal, was a
Hindu.
The very small number of murids who actually followed this
formulation of the Padshah demonstrates the resistance to these eclectic
ideas even among the great amirs of the court. Shahbaz Khan Kamboh was
an orthodox, devout Sunni, a prickly man, and a competent officer. At
Fatehpur Sikri, he refused to shave his beard as was the custom among
Akbar’s courtiers, nor did he agree to become a disciple of Akbar. On one
occasion, the Padshah was conversing with him one-on-one at the time of
the midday namaaz. Hakim Abu’l Fath, watching from a distance, nudged
Hakim Ali, and wondered aloud if Shahbaz Khan would be able to perform
the namaaz, which was discouraged by Akbar. But while the Padshah tried
to remonstrate with his courtier, Shahbaz Khan hastily laid down his
dupatta and knelt to perform his prayers, while Akbar smacked him on the
head the whole time, asking him to stand up.
When a few years later in 1587 Akbar brought up the subject of
discipleship with another favourite courtier, Kuar Man Singh, the Kuar was
unequivocal and replied with candour: ‘If discipleship means willingness to
sacrifice one’s life, I have already carried my life in my hand, what need is
there of further proof? If, however, the term has another meaning and refers
to faith, I certainly am a Hindu. If you order me to do so, I will become a
Mussalman, but I know not the existence of any other religion than these
two.’ For Kuar Man Singh, if both Hinduism and Islam were recognizable
and acceptable options, the Padshah’s proposed system of allegiance to
what appeared to be a new religious cult was suspect, and Akbar did not
push the matter further.
Another special courtier, Mirza Aziz Koka, was more scathing of
Akbar’s religious innovations. In a letter to the Padshah when he was en
route to Mecca, Aziz Koka wrote about the extraordinary claims his old
childhood companion appeared to be making: ‘There have been rulers who
commanded great power and authority but it never occurred to anyone of
them to advance a claim for Prophet-hood and strive to abrogate the
religion of Muhammad,’ admonished Aziz Koka. As for those who had
chosen to become Akbar’s disciples, he was even more scornful. ‘O my
God, who are the people who claim to become the four friends,’ railed Aziz
Koka. ‘By God and by the dust of the Emperor’s feet, there is none except
Aziz Koka who wants a good name, all others depend on flattery and
passing out time.’ Accusing all the disciples of being vain sycophants, Aziz
Koka added that they ‘have preferred infidels over Muslims and this will
remain imprinted on the pages of the days and nights’. So disgusted was
Aziz Koka at the destabilizing changes at court that he stormed away in a
great sulk, claiming he needed to grow out his beard. He did not return even
after Akbar grew exasperated and chided him saying, ‘You are making all
these delays in coming; evidently the wool of your beard weighs heavily on
you.’
Despite the high bombast of Mirza Aziz Koka’s letter, he would come
to regret these bruising sentiments after his sojourn in Mecca. But that
would be later, and for now, having lit up the night of Fatehpur Sikri with
embers too hot to behold, Akbar set off for a hunt in the Faizabad region.
On the way the Mughal retinue passed the ‘Gung Mahal’, and Akbar
decided to visit it, to see how the children were faring in their hushed
silence. As we have seen earlier, Akbar found that ‘not a sound was emitted
from the silent house nor any speech came out of that place of residence.
They displayed nothing beyond the usual gestures of the dumb. Whatever
his majesty had, in his wisdom, realised some years earlier’, said Badauni,
‘now became clear to the superficial worldly ones, and it became a source
of enlightenment to a large number of people.’ There was no universal
language, Akbar realized, having put the idea to the test.
*The Razmnama, along with other priceless documents, have been sealed by court order and it is
unknown what condition they are now in.
*Keshavdas Misra of Orchha was a pre-eminent Brajbhasha poet. An heir to the Sanskrit tradition, he
is credited by scholars with influencing Braj poetry with classical inflection and is also celebrated as
being a major influence in the efflorescence of poetry in the language.
*A collection of flags and royal insignia.
A SHIRAZI VISITOR FROM THE DECCAN
When the ruler of the Bijapur Sultanate in the Deccan, Ali Adil Shah I, was
murdered in 1580 by ‘two handsome eunuchs who had for a long time
excited his perverse attention’, this not only brought to power an
extraordinary woman as regent, Chand Bibi, but also provided the
necessary impetus for a famous Shirazi intellectual to leave the suddenly
uncongenial court of Bijapur for the much more attractive one at Fatehpur
Sikri. An enormous sum had been spent by Ali Adil Shah I to lure the
scholar Fath Allah Shirazi from Persia to Bijapur where he had rapidly
gained a considerable reputation. ‘All the great Muslim scholars, as well as
Hindu sages,’ writes historian Ali Anooshahr, ‘would attend scholarly
discussions held at his house.’ Now with the death of the Adil Shah, Akbar
sent Abdur Rahim and Abu’l Fath Gilani to receive Fath Allah Shirazi and
he was made joint wazir of the Mughal Empire along with Raja Todar Mal.
The two men together brought about enormous changes in the organization
of the revenue and other administrative departments as they brought in
Persian as the language of administration at all levels, thus making of Akbar
the first Indo-Islamic Padshah of north India to declare Persian as the
official language of administration. An eighteenth-century historian
recorded this measure in the following way:
Earlier in India the government accounts were written in Hindi
according to the Hindu rule. Raja Todar Mal acquired new
regulations from the scribes of Iran and the government offices then
were reorganized as they were there in wilayat (Iran).
Now Persian became the language of government at all levels, and was no
longer simply an elite courtly language. Since a great deal of the
administration was carried out by Hindu communities, these groups learnt
Persian and worked alongside the ‘wilayatis’ as clerks, scribes, and
secretaries. This was only possible because of the upheavals in the madrasa
education system that Akbar had brought about in parallel. This reform was
planned and executed by Fath Allah Shirazi and brought about an
overhauling of madrasa education at all levels, transforming it from just
religious instruction into a more formal and expanded course of education.
At the primary level, students were taught reading, writing, medicine,
history, and accountancy. Children were not required to spend too much
time practising the alphabet but instead began to learn Persian couplets and
moral phrases so that they instinctively learnt the texture and nuance of the
language. At the middle level, ‘secular’ themes like logic, arithmetic,
astronomy, accountancy, and agriculture were introduced which encouraged
a large number of Hindus, Kayasthas, and Khichri especially, to join
madrasas in large numbers, beginning with the village schools, or maktabs,
so as to have a coveted career in the imperial Mughal service. In maktabs,
which children joined at the age of four, Kayastha children were taught
accounting skills and would grow up to serve as land registrars and village
accountants while the more accomplished ones became news writers,
revenue reporters, petition writers, and court readers. The maktab
curriculum included classics from Persian literature such as Sa’di’s Gulistan
and Firdausi’s Shahnama and the Kayastha clans became increasingly
‘Persianized’, even acquiring Persian pen names.
By the middle of the seventeenth century, the departments of
accountancy, draftsmanship, and the office of the revenue minister were
mostly filled by Hindu munshis, and Chandra Bhan ‘Brahman’ would be
rated second only to Abu’l Fazl in his prose and poetry. ‘A man who knows
how to write good prose as well as accountancy is a bright light even
among lights,’ wrote Chandra Bhan in a letter, giving refreshingly timeless
advice to his son about being a Mughal munshi. ‘Besides, a munshi should
be discreet and virtuous.’ Through Persian, Akbar sought to unite the far-
flung inhabitants of his empire, polyphonic and multi-faith, beyond the
divisive binary of religion. This meant that a certain intangible Mughal
essence, the tehzeeb, a refinement of language, manners and morals, spread
outwards from Fatehpur Sikri like a flood tide to the distant corners of the
empire.
Persian intellectuals, thinkers, and poets were drawn to Akbar’s
inclusive court in a steady stream during the 1580s. By the late sixteenth
and early seventeenth century, this would become a deluge. Historian Sunil
Sharma uses the example of a French traveller, Jean Chardin, who described
this situation with sweeping generalizations in 1666, to illustrate an exodus
of talented Persian families from the Iranian plateau towards Hindustan:
…within this last century, a great many Persians, and even entire
Families, have gone and settl’d in the Indies. As they are a
handsomer, wiser and more polite People, beyond all comparison,
than the Mahometan Indians, who are descended from the Tartars, in
the Country of Tamerlane…[they] go willingly where Fortune
invites them, especially into a Country, which is one of the most
plentiful of the World.
A poem written as a caustic challenge to Shah Abbas of Persia
demonstrated the great lure of Hindustan, which was now being called the
Dar al-Aman, the abode of peace:
That in Persia no one comes within sight,
Who is a customer of the commodity of meaning;
In Persia the palate of my soul has become bitter,
Go I ought towards Hindustan;
Like a drop towards the ocean,
I may send my commodity to India.
The visitors to the court may have appreciated playing cards, a game
popular throughout the Mughal Empire, and with Akbar and his men, for
the Padshah had made suitable alterations to the suit of cards to
satisfactorily reflect this new reality of Hindustan. Now each of the twelve
kings was distinct and represented a particular strength or region. So Akbar
played with the suit representing the King of Delhi, shown with the insignia
of royalty such as the umbrella, standard etc. Then there was the King of
Elephants, representing the ruler of Orissa. There was the King of Infantry,
with a nod to the rulers of Bijapur, a King of Forts, Dhanpati, the King of
Wealth, a King of the Fleet, and even a suit called Tipati, in which the ruler
was a Queen. The most lowly was the Padshah-e-Ghulam, whose suit
consisted of servants ‘some of whom sit, some lie on the ground in worship,
some are drunk, others sober etc.’
Besides playing cards, another form of entertainment that grew in
popularity was the habit of reading. In Fatehpur Sikri, booksellers hunkered
down by the roadside, beside piles of diwans of Persian immigrant poets.
The most popular of these poets was Urfi Shirazi, a young poet with a
sharply acerbic wit. Shirazi and the poet laureate of Akbar’s court, Faizi,
had a brittle disregard for each other, testing each other on the jagged edge
of their poetry. Faizi had once taken on the orthographically challenging
task of writing a ‘dot-less’ commentary on the Koran, using only those
Arabic alphabets which did not contain a dot. When Abu’l Fazl told Urfi
that he was writing a preface for the piece, and struggling with the name of
his father, Mubarak, which contained a letter with a dot, Urfi facetiously
suggested the similar word Mumarak, which did not contain a dot but did,
insultingly, mean ‘the indecent one’. Badauni was less appreciative of Urfi,
saying of him that, despite his talents he was ‘also very haughty and
pompous, which caused him to lose favour with people’. He uncharitably
added that ‘he was said to be ugly to boot because of a pockmarked face’.
Badauni also mentions the only Hindu poet of Persian to make it to his list
of accomplished poets, Manohar ‘Tausani’, son of Raja Loonkaran of
Sambhar, and a single female poet, one Nihani of Agra.
Peace reigned through most of this period but one shocking act of
violence deserves mention for it led to a major reform instituted by the
Padshah. It took place in the very heart of the empire—the women’s harem.
In the early dawn of a spring day in 1583 there was a sudden, calamitous
disturbance in the harem quarters of Fatehpur Sikri. Women were wailing
while others tried to comfort them, and at the entrance to the palace, the
Padshah’s bodyguards were in terrible disarray, hastily buckling on armour,
grabbing weapons, and angrily shouting at each other. The Padshah, it
appeared, had jumped onto his horse and had galloped away into the rising
dawn in such catastrophic haste that the ever vigilant eunuchs and guards
had not even had time to react. For terrible news had arrived late at night
that one of his officers, Jaimal, had died en route to Bengal and his wife, the
daughter of Raja Udai Singh of Marwar, affectionately called Mota Raja,
was being forced to commit sati. Her own son and some ‘bold and foolish
persons’ were trying to forcibly drag her onto the flames. Not wishing to
waste a single minute, Akbar had ridden his horse straight to Raja Udai
Singh, rescued the young widow, and imprisoned ‘the misguided ones’ till
they thought better of their actions. This personal encounter with the
horrors of sati radically altered Akbar’s attitude towards the practice. Up
until this time, he had admired the great fortitude of women who committed
sati, accepting it as a sign of their devotion to their husbands, but had not
tried to interfere with the practice as it was staunchly defended by many
Hindus and Rajputs at court, including Raja Bhagwant Das, his brother-in
law. But now Akbar brought in measures which reflected his new
recognition of the injustice it meted out to the women. ‘It is a strange
commentary on the magnanimity of men,’ Akbar said, now scornful of the
men, ‘that they should seek their deliverance through the self sacrifice of
their wives.’
To ensure that women were not forced to commit sati against their will
Akbar appointed officials in every town so that only ‘those who of their
own impulse wished to commit sati might be allowed to do so’. Akbar had
already decreed that ‘Hindu child-widows who had not enjoyed conjugal
relations should not be burnt; but if the Hindus should find this difficult,
they were not to be interfered with.’ It was a fine balance that Akbar tried to
maintain, between his own growing empathy for the plight of the women,
and his awareness of the prickly honour of his Hindu subjects, some of
whom were deeply attached to the practice of sati.
Akbar’s sensitivity to the distressing vulnerability of women resulted in
a number of orders and measures being passed during these years to try and
protect them. He had always abhorred the marriage of children and said
about it that ‘it is particularly distressing under a law where a woman (being
so much younger than her husband) cannot marry again’. Child marriages
were rampant at this time, having been noticed by Ralph Fitch who said that
‘we found marriages great store, both in towns and villages in many places
where we passed, of boys of eight or ten years and girls of five or six years
old…. They do not lie together until they be ten years old.’ Akbar raised the
minimum age for marriage to sixteen years for boys and fourteen for girls,
and instructed the kotwals to establish the ages of the bride and groom
before allowing weddings to take place. Unfortunately, writes Badauni,
‘this greatly filled the pockets of officials such as Kotwal’s men’, as people
began bribing the officials to allow the practice to continue.
Akbar also brought in an order in 1587 permitting widows to remarry,
‘in the manner that the people of India do not prohibit’. He was greatly
saddened by the notion that ‘here in India among the modest, a woman once
married cannot go [again] to anyone else’. That Akbar would find the idea
of widows not being allowed to re-marry puzzling and distressing is
understandable given the Timurids’ pragmatic approach to women’s
chastity. Women who ‘fell’ to enemies in times of war were never blamed
for their predicament, and were taken back with honour by their families
when they were returned. In Akbar’s own family there would have been the
glowing example of Khanzada Begum, twice forcibly married to Uzbek
men who were sworn enemies of Babur, and then received with gratitude
and love at the court of Babur, who gave her the highest title of honour of
the harem, Padshah Begum, in recognition of her sacrifice for her family.
There were many widows, divorced women, and homeless Timurid women
who were all part of the Mughal harem. Babur had sent to all these women
a letter which was both invitation and imploration, offering them a place of
safety in Hindustan after the destruction of the Timurid homeland by the
Uzbeks, but also asking for their help in maintaining the precious Timurid
legacy in this new country. The matriarchs of the Mughal Empire, mothers,
widows, and grandaunts, would continue to be revered figures of authority
and love through the many turbulent generations. This was why, despite the
determined effort to keep the royal women nameless and faceless, Gulbadan
and her sisters in the harem escaped the cloister of Fatehpur Sikri and the
pardeh-giyan were never truly invisible.
Other noteworthy incidents in this period involved two of Akbar’s
favourite people. In faraway Naples, in the summer of 1583, the Duke of
Atri was in a joyous mood. ‘He ordered his household to dress in their
holiday suits of white, and welcomed the news with illuminations, fire-
works, and all the state which he could display.’ The news that he was
celebrating was the long-awaited martyrdom of his fifth son, Rudolf
Acquaviva, at the age of thirty-three. After surviving the Mughal court,
despite his public and profane desecration of the Prophet, Acquaviva found
martyrdom when he was least expecting it, among the ‘heathens’. The
Jesuit, along with four companions, was hacked to death by a mob of
Hindus whom they had been trying to convert, in Salcette, south of Goa.
‘He gladly stretched out his neck,’ averred Monserrate, ‘and offered his
throat to the savages who slew him’. Akbar greeted the news of the death of
his young friend with vivid sorrow: ‘Alas, Father! Did I not tell you not to
go away? But you would not listen to me.’
The artist Daswant, too, would die in 1583, stabbed by his own hand,
overcome by melancholy. But others would take his place, and Akbar’s
taswir khana would create works of beauty whose legacy would long
outlive the mortal painters, many of whom would remain anonymous and
largely forgotten.
OTHER WORSHIPPERS OF GOD
The residents of Fatehpur Sikri had become used to the presence of unusual
visitors at their court but the arrival of sixty-seven Jain monks in a
whispering procession, heralded by drummers and singers in 1583, must
have nonetheless caused a considerable stir. ‘[ Jains monks] wear nothing
on the head and pluck out the hairs of chins and heads, leaving only a tuft,’
wrote a bemused European traveller to Hindustan about the Jains. They
were ‘more European than Indian in colour’, noted the traveller, and tied a
cloth over their mouths. They carried brooms, and swept the ground clean
of ants and other tiny insects as they walked. This silent procession of
austere men included Hiravijaya Suri an orphan and a monk since the age of
thirteen, whom, as we have seen, Akbar had invited to his court. The
distinguished monk brought with him followers from the relatively minor
Tapa Gaccha sect. In the poem Jagadgurukavya, the earliest Sanskrit text
describing the Jain experience at Akbar’s court, Hiravijaya is described as
‘foremost among the dispassionate, best of ascetics, who had the form of
glorious khuda’, which was, as Truschke describes it, a flagrant adoption of
Islamic hierarchy when invoking the Persian name of God (khuda) for
Hiravijaya.
A Jain text, the Hirasaubhagya, written in the early seventeenth
century, described the supposed meeting between the two scholars, Abu’l
Fazl and Hiravijaya. According to Truschke, this text contains a rare,
unabashed description of Islamic beliefs in Sanskrit, which had always
tended to scuff out the presence of Islam in religious discourse. The
conversation between the two men is transcribed in Sanskrit and Abu’l Fazl
begins by describing the tenets of Islam, and asks about the validity of a
creator God, a Heaven and Hell, and resurrection at the end of the world:
O Suri, this was laid out by the ancient prophets in our scriptures—
all Muslims who are deposited on earth as guests of the god of death
will rise at the end of the earth and come before the court of the
Supreme Lord called khuda, just as they come to the court of an
earthly king… O Suri, what is the validity of the Quranic speech: is
it true, like the speech of great-souled people, or is it false like a
flower in the sky?
Hiravijaya refutes this argument with panache, according to this Jain
source, and firmly puts Abu’l Fazl in his place:
He who is free of dirt like a shell, devoid of defects like the sun,
made of flames like fire, and without a body like the god of love is
the Supreme Lord. In what form does he attend court like a living
being that adopts many appearances in his wanderings through
existence? There he sets a person on the path to heaven or hell for
what reason?… let action (karma) alone be recognized as the creator
of the world since otherwise (God) has no purpose.
While the exact tenor of the conversations may be in doubt, the
Hirasaubhagya is a fascinating text for it describes the way in which a
small religious community was able to formulate its relationship with the
ruling Muslim elite, and the many vibrant routes of communication open to
them. Hiravijaya remained in Fatehpur Sikri for three years, holding
philosophical debates and favourably impressing Akbar. After his first
meeting with the monks, which was held in the gardens of Ram Das
Kachhwaha, the Jain texts go on to say that Akbar respectfully bowed down
before Hiravijaya Suri and sent his chariots, horses, and imperial elephants
to accompany the monks to their quarters.
The Brahmins at court eventually became jealous of Hiravijaya’s
influence, grumbled the Jain texts, and sent Raja Ram Das Kachhwaha to
point out to Akbar that the Jains were atheists. ‘Those idiot Jains,’ began
the accusation by an anonymous Brahmin, ‘do not believe that there is a
pure one, without a physical form, changeless, sinless, emancipated from
rebirth, free of emotional agitations, passionless, independent, the slayer of
all sins and the maker of all happiness, namely Paramesvara.’ The charge
was a serious one, for atheism was altogether unacceptable for a Mughal
Padshah. Vijayasena, another Jain monk, responded to the challenge:
The Shaivas worship him as ‘Shiva’ and the Vedantins as ‘Brahma’.
The Buddhists, who are sharp in logic, worship him as ‘Buddha’
and the Mimamsakas as ‘Karma’. Those who ascribe to the Jain
scriptures worship him as ‘Arhat’ and the Naiyayikas as ‘Creator’.
May that Hari, the Lord of the Three Worlds, give you whatever you
desire.
Vijayasena used Jain scriptures to expose the venality of the Brahmins’
accusations and proved to Akbar and his courtiers the similarity of Jain
thought to the Samkhya philosophy of the Brahmins. Through some sharp
verbal calisthenics, the Jains equated the concept of karma to theism and
thereby put the argument to rest. Pleased, Akbar gave Vijayasena the title
Savai Hiravijaya Suri, i.e. a quarter greater than his master Hiravijaya.
‘When the Brahmans were defeated by the Suri,’ gloated the Jains, ‘they
became so emasculated it is amazing the townspeople did not lust after
them as if they were women.’
Jain monks remained at the Mughal court continuously till 1605,
altering forever the significance of this otherwise insubstantial sect.
Siddhichandra’s biography of his master Hiravijaya described the virtues of
Akbar, in which the Mughal Padshah was firmly welcomed into the Jain
worldview:
There is not a single art, not a single branch of knowledge, not a
single act of boldness and strength which was not attempted by
young Akbar…thieves and robbers were conspicuous by their
absence in his empire…
He further compared him to the son of Kaushaliya (i.e. Ram) and wrote that
‘his religious fervour never made him intolerant as is shown by his degree
of regard for all the six systems of philosophy. He took interest in all the
arts and all branches of learning.’
Akbar remained fascinated by the Jain monks till the end of his reign.
The Jain concepts of compassion to all living things would have resonated
deeply with Akbar, especially from this time on, as his attention radiated
outwards to the dispossessed and the uncounted. He extended his powerful
support to this small sect, keeping them safe from attack from other
religious groups that were jealous of their meteoric rise. Following requests
from the Jain monks Akbar issued farmans prohibiting animal slaughter for
twelve days every year, allowed tax exemptions for Jain pilgrims, protected
Jain temples in Gujarat besides awarding further donations and gifts. Abu’l
Fazl, when listing the great seers of Hindustan, allowed that the Jains
‘perceive the mysteries of the external and internal and in their
understanding and the breadth of their views, fully comprehended both
realms of thought’. Akbar also asked Bhanuchandra Suri to teach him the
Suryasahasranama, or the 1,000 names to worship the sun god. In
Bhanuchandra’s commentary, Akbar approached the monk and asked him:
‘Tell me who among good people can teach me this?’ The Jains replied,
‘only one who has subdued all the senses, sleeps on the ground, and
possesses sacred knowledge is qualified in this manner. When he heard this,
the Shah (Akbar) said, “Only you (Bhanuchandra) possess such qualities
here. You alone, venerable one, will teach me this every morning.”’ Akbar
learnt the 1,000 names, we are told, and would stand facing the east, with
folded hands pressed to his forehead, and concentrate his mind on the
effulgence of the rising sun.
Sun worship was a potent symbol for Akbar, as it was venerated by
many people at court and across the country. Hindus worshipped the sun
while reciting the Gayatri Mantra and Raja Birbal himself was a believer in
sun worship. The Parsees, some of the Sufis, the Rajputs at court, Akbar’s
Rajput wives, and the Timurids, would all recognize the power and visible
symbolism of the Padshah venerating the sun.
While Akbar worshipped the sublime light of dawn, along with the
cerebral, philosophical, and austere Jain monks, he also acquainted himself
with more tenebrous ascetics, adept at the mysteries of the night. ‘His
Majesty also called some of the Jogis,’ wrote Badauni, ‘and gave them at
night…interviews.’ Akbar would question the jogis about their methods of
meditation, spiritual practices, postures, alchemical preparations, and
practice of magical powers. On Shivratri, Akbar joined this ferocious,
unfettered group of men in the opaque night and ate and drank with them.
The worship of Bhairava, the most terrible aspect of Shiva, was said to be
‘both intemperate and licentious’. On this bleak and black night, the
Shivlinga was worshipped every third hour with offerings of flowers,
dhatura, ketaki, and bel leaves and it was bathed, in succession, with milk,
curd, ghee and honey, and Gangajal. The jogis predicted the Padshah would
live three or four times as long as ordinary men. ‘Fawning court doctors,’
sneered Badauni, ‘wisely enough, found proofs for the longevity of the
Emperor’. On being told that there were hermits and recluses living in Tibet
and Mongolia, who could live for more than 200 years, Akbar began
practising increasing austerity in his life and habits. He ‘limited the time he
spent in the harem’, wrote Badauni, and ‘curtailed his food and drink, but
especially abstained from meat’. Badauni also wrote that Akbar shaved the
crown of his head, the tenth opening of the body, and let the hairs grow at
the sides to allow his soul to escape freely out of the body at the moment of
death.
Akbar’s interactions with the jogis were scandalous, according to
Badauni, but also path-breaking and resulted in Hindu ascetic practices
having a pronounced and lasting impact on Indo-Islamic culture. Akbar
would have the Yog Vashisht, the dialogue between Rama and the Sadhu
Vashishta, translated into Persian and would commission miniatures of the
jogis of Gorkhatri for the Baburnama. Babur himself had barely mentioned
his visit to the Gorkhatri but his grandson would have the jogis painted with
great realism, showing their distinctive physical features and their particular
dress and habits because of his own first-hand observation of them. The
singanad janeu, the fillets, and the necklace of coloured cloth of the Nath
jogis were all meticulously painted.
In the same spirit of compassion and empathy, Akbar had two
caravanserais built outside the city for the housing and feeding of the poor,
one for Hindus and one for Muslims, called Dharampurah and Khairpurah
respectively. Sarais were built, wrote Abu’l Fazl, ‘so that the poor and
needy of the world might have a home without having to look for it’. Abu’l
Fazl was put in charge of these inns and so many jogis flocked to them that
a third place was built, called Jogipurah. Akbar seemed to have been
genuinely keen to alleviate poverty and suffering, viewing it as the duty of a
king and a virtuous man. ‘It was my object that mendicancy should
disappear from my dominions,’ Akbar claimed. ‘Many persons were
plentifully supplied with means, but through the malady of avarice,’ he
continued sadly, ‘it proved to no avail.’ The rampant ‘malady of avarice’ or
corruption was one that Akbar fought long and hard against. Many of his
measures, such as the branding of horses, were brought in to try and curb
this deeply entrenched habit. Proof of corruption in trusted men could make
him violently angry, as when he discovered that alms sent for distribution to
the Haram Sharif in Mecca were unaccounted for and Shaikh Abdullah
Sultanpuri’s egregious venality had made him hoard gold bars in his house.
This was perhaps why Akbar was so very impressed by the vows of poverty
undertaken by both the Jesuits and the Jains. They never did accept the truly
magnificent gifts and largesse he kept trying to give them and, in the end,
this earned them Akbar’s abiding respect.
Of Akbar’s empathy and care for his poorer subjects the Jesuits have
left a moving account:
Amongst his great nobles he was so predominant that none dared lift
his head too high; but with the humbler classes he was benevolent
and debonair, willingly giving them audience and hearing their
petitions. He was pleased to accept their presents, taking them into
his hands and holding them to his breast (which he never does with
the rich gifts brought to him by his nobles), though often with
prudent dissimulation he pretended not to see them.
Many of the rulings from this period of Akbar’s reign reflect this deep
empathy, along with a spirit of rationality, questioning all the old traditions
and rituals. There was a determined effort, too, to exercise a pragmatic
tolerance for practices that would have earlier been condemned by the
Padshah. Akbar had been notoriously intransigent, for example, about
sexual crimes. ‘The King has such a hatred of debauchery and adultery,’
wrote Monserrate, ‘that neither influence nor entreaties nor the great
ransom which was offered would induce him to pardon his chief trade
commissioner, who, although he was married, had violently debauched a
well-born Brahman girl. The wretch was by the king’s order remorselessly
strangled.’ Now, however, Akbar tried to regulate prostitution and set up
quarters outside the city, called Shaitanpurah, so that the prostitutes ‘who
had gathered together in the Capital in such swarms as to defy counting or
numbering’ could be regulated. Nonetheless, the limits of the Padshah’s
tolerance may be seen in the order that ‘if a young woman were found
running about the lanes and bazars of the town, and while so doing either
did not veil herself, or allowed herself to become unveiled, or if a woman
was worthless and deceitful and quarrelled with her husband, she was to go
to the quarter of the prostitute and take up the profession’.
The selling of alcohol was also now permitted through the opening of a
wine shop though it was clarified that the wine was for medicinal purposes.
Interestingly, to control boisterous behaviour at the site of the wine shop, a
woman, a porter’s wife, was placed there to supervise wine sales, clearly in
the belief that men would control their behaviour in the presence of a
woman.
Wine had always been drunk, even among the elite. The nobles had
their own suchi khanas, or provisioning establishment, which no doubt
Akbar would have had, too, though Abu’l Fazl was discreetly silent about
this. While Akbar disapproved of his courtiers appearing visibly drunk or
even smelling of alcohol in his darbar, he was much more indulgent outside
the court. When one Shaikh Abdur Rahim, friend of another notorious
drunkard*, from whom ‘he had learned wine-drinking’, and who ‘drank so
hard that he got frequently insane’, accidentally hurt himself during just
such a drunken fit, Akbar himself tended to the wounded man. On another
occasion, it was no less than the sadr, Abd ul-Hai, and the chief qazi, who
took part in a drinking competition during a feast, and Akbar was so
delighted at thus seeing the highest religious and judicial authorities in their
cups that he was moved to quote a line of poetry by Hafiz.
Badauni tells us about specific bans brought in to protect the beliefs of
the Hindus at this time: ‘He prohibited the slaughter of cows, and the eating
of their flesh, because the Hindus devoutly worship them.’ Anyone accused
of cow slaughter or of having killed a peacock was punished by state
authorities, long beards were frowned upon, dogs were allowed into the
harem, and the hajj pilgrimage and five-times-namaaz were deemed
unnecessary. Though an increasing austerity diffused into the Padshah’s
habits he still, nonetheless, appreciated good food. Hakim Humam in
addition to being a doctor, was a calligrapher, scientist, connoisseur of
poetry, and also mir bakawal, master of the kitchen. When he had to absent
himself on missions, Akbar would complain that ‘since Hakim Humam has
gone my food has not the same taste’.
For Badauni, who was now only employed for translations and
completely excluded from the high-voltage discussions with the Jains,
Brahmins and Sufis, it appeared that Akbar only wanted to placate the
Hindus. ‘He acted very differently in the case of Hindus, of whom he could
not get enough,’ wrote Badauni bitterly, ‘for the Hindus, of course, are
indispensable; to them belongs half the army and half the land. Neither the
Hindustanis nor the Moghuls can point to such great lords as the Hindus
have among themselves. But if other than Hindus came and wished to
become disciples at any sacrifice, his Majesty reproved or punished them.
For their honour and zeal he did not care, nor did he notice whether they
fell in with his views or not.’ For Pinheiro, a later Jesuit to Akbar’s court,
the verdict was even more succinct: ‘He adores God, and the Sun, and is a
Hindu, he follows the sect of the Jains.’ As for the Hindus and Brahmins at
court, Akbar fit easily within their capacious pantheon. ‘Cheating, thieving
Brahmans,’ moaned Badauni, ‘collected another set of 1001 names of “his
Majesty the Sun” and told the Emperor that he was an incarnation, like
Ram, Krishna and other infidel kings; and though lord of the world, he had
assumed his shape, in order to play with the people of our planet.’
For the orthodox at court these extraordinary changes would appear to
be provocatively anti-Islam. The orthodox Sunni Shaikh Ahmad Sirhindi,
who was most fond of repeating Prophet Muhammad’s maxim that
‘anything new which is introduced in my religion is condemnable’, would
have found the atmosphere distinctly unpalatable. Rafiuddin Shirazi, the
Iranian visitor, claimed that ‘(Akbar) nursed a grievance against the Holy
Prophet on account of his being the last of the prophets. Otherwise he could
have claimed the position of a prophet for himself without facing
opposition.’ For Badauni, consigned to translating ‘unimaginable
nonsense’, and unable to tolerate the tenor of the discussions at this plural,
questioning court, there was no option but to retire even further from the
warm glow of the Padshah’s presence. On darbar days, he performed the
kornish from a distance and took his place at the door, ‘where the shoes are
left’, mourning for an uncomplicated dawn where the preferred and
cherished children of God were good Muslims. For Abu’l Fazl, meanwhile,
the non-Muslim peoples were simply ‘other worshippers of God’.
*Jamal Bakhtyar, who appeared in court drunk and was sent home.
AKBAR AND BIRBAL
In the next few years, between 1583 and 1586, the trajectory of Akbar’s life
would unexpectedly swerve away from what had been the glowing heart of
his empire for so many years—Fatehpur Sikri and the ibadat khana. There
has been a lot of conjecture about the reason why Akbar left Fatehpur Sikri
at this point. There was the death of Mirza Hakim, for one, which
immediately caused turmoil in the north-west frontier. But there was also
the death of a courtier and a friend who had held a unique place in the
Padshah’s affections—Birbal.
Birbal was one of the first officers to join Akbar’s court, possibly as
early as 1556, when he was twenty-eight years old. A pleasant-faced man,
with a glossy moustache just like the Padshah’s, Birbal’s increasingly
privileged place at court would be reflected by his spreading girth, resulting
in his qaba settling in comfortable, voluminous folds around his form. He
was honoured with the title Raja and a high rank of 2,000 soon after he
joined imperial service. In Birbal the Padshah found a quick and adaptable
mind, a lively intelligence, and an engaging wit and, above all, a complete
and sincere devotion to Akbar himself. Another title that Birbal earned
early on in his career, which gives some indication of the talents he
possessed, that would have attracted the attention of the Padshah, was that
of Kavi Rai, King of Poets. He was a fine poet of Braj, and his poems were
much appreciated at court. He also had a naturally generous nature and all
these traits combined—elegant repartee, largesse, and poetical talent—
made Birbal the ideal Mughal courtier.
In the eleventh century text written in Persia, the Mirror for Princes, the
author gives precise advice for those wishing to sparkle at a Persianate
court. For the close companion, the author clarifies, ‘(y)ou should be a
raconteur, retaining in your memory a large number of anecdotes, jests and
clever witticisms; a boon companion without stories and quips is
imperfectly equipped’.
When Akbar was building his new city at Fatehpur Sikri, he had
ordered ‘the erection of a stone palace for [Birbal]’. So celebrated was the
friendship between the two men that long after the Mughal Empire was
history, a veritable tsunami of anecdotes of the so-called Akbar–Birbal
variety lived on, lampooning the Padshah as a somewhat dim-witted though
well intentioned character, regularly put in his place by Birbal. The scholar
C. M. Naim has shown that while often subversive, these stories also tend
to try and ‘humanize’ Akbar and to transform him into someone who was
accessible and approachable. While there is very little evidence that any of
these anecdotes were based on actual events, there is no doubt that Akbar
enjoyed witty and sharp observations. When the poet Faizi happened to
boast in Akbar’s presence that no one surpassed him in the three Cs—
Chess, Combat, and Composition—the emperor retorted that he had
forgotten a fourth, Conceit. On another occasion, when Shaikh Mubarak
had berated the emperor for being too extravagant, Faizi had tried to make
excuses for his father saying ‘our Shaikh is not much of a courtier’,
whereupon Akbar had teased him saying ‘no, he has left all those fopperies
to you’. That the qualities appreciated by Akbar included a lively intellect
and pleasant, charming manners are evident, yet he also demanded
complete devotion and loyalty. It is inconceivable, therefore, that any
courtier would have been allowed the liberties depicted in the Akbar–Birbal
stories, certainly not from one who had such a long and special career at
court. For though Akbar surrounded himself with movement and clamour
and discussions, he was ‘full also of dignity and when he is angry, of awful
majesty’, according to Monserrate, with an anger that most courtiers would
have been loath to provoke.
A sign of the unique bond that Akbar shared with Birbal was that the
raja was never censured in the thirty years he served at court as a close
confidant of the Padshah. Even his closest courtiers were rebuked or
punished when found lacking, as when Man Singh had not pursued Rana
Pratap after Haldighati. ‘The King’s severity towards errors and
misdemeanours committed by officials in the course of government
business is remarkable’, wrote Monserrate, ‘for he is most stern with
offenders against the public faith.’ Only three men never incurred royal
displeasure in their entire careers: the poet Faizi, the musician Tansen, and
Raja Birbal. ‘By means of conversing with the Emperor and taking
advantage of the idiosyncrasies of his disposition,’ wrote Badauni bitterly,
‘[Birbal] crept day by day more into favour, until he attained to high rank
and was honoured with the distinction of becoming the Emperor’s confidant
and it became a case of thy flesh is my flesh and thy blood my blood.’
An incident in 1583 in Fatehpur Sikri was further demonstration of the
close bond between Akbar and Raja Birbal. During an elephant fight
organized in the grounds of Akbar’s court, one of the elephants, ‘unique for
violence’, suddenly rushed towards Birbal, and seized him with his trunk.
Akbar turned his horse around and galloped towards the elephant, charging
at him, while all around him his soldiers and courtiers shouted out in alarm.
The elephant then turned towards Akbar but, inexplicably, faltered, and
Birbal was saved.
A few months later, the courtiers of Fatehpur Sikri were caught up in a
much more joyous emotion. The young prince Salim, fifteen years old, was
getting ready for his marriage and the prestige of the clan of the
Kachhwahas was about to be burnished to high gold. ‘Since (Man Singh)
was constantly in my father’s house,’ wrote Jahangir later in his memoir, ‘I
myself proposed marriage with his sister’, Rajkumari Man Bai. According
to Abu’l Fazl, it was the Kachhwahas who desired this union as Raja
Bhagwant Das ‘had a daughter whose purity adorned her high extraction
and was endowed with beauty and graces’, and so the Kachhwahas wished
that ‘she should be united to the prince’. As for Badauni, it mattered little
who first proposed the idea since it was all a highly regrettable habit ‘in
accordance with [Akbar’s] established custom’ to ally himself with the
Hindus and raise them up at court.
And so on a cool day in February 1584, as the sun arced through the
sky, the once insignificant town of Amer was about to be lit up with a
magnificence it had never before witnessed. The Padshah of Hindustan,
along with the leading qazis and nobles of the court, for the first time in the
history of the Mughals, brought a baraat to the bride’s home in Raja
Bhagwant Das’s palace. ‘They performed all the ceremonies which are
customary among the Hindus,’ wrote Badauni, ‘such as lighting the fire etc.
and over the litter of the Princess the Emperor ordered gold to be scattered
all the way from that house to the palace.’ Raja Bhagwant Das gave a
splendid dowry for his daughter, who would be renamed Sultan un-Nisa
Begum. He gave ‘several strings of horses, and a hundred elephants, and
boys and girls of Abyssinia, India and Circassia, and all sorts of golden
vessels set with jewels, and jewels, and utensils of gold and silver’. Akbar
himself, it was noted, carried the bridal palanquin part of the way back. Nor
were the noblemen ignored, for they were all gifted ‘Persian, Turkish and
Arabian horses with golden saddles’. And so another Rajput princess from
Amer entered the harem at Fatehpur Sikri, about whom Salim would write
with great affection in his memoir. ‘What shall I write of her goodness and
excellence?’ he wrote. ‘She had a mind to perfection and she was so loyal
to me that she would have sacrificed a thousand sons and brothers for one
hair on my head.’
At the age of fifteen, Salim was growing into a strikingly handsome
youth with a faint moustache and a firm jaw. Like his father, he would
never grow a beard but he would favour a much more luxurious style in
jewels and clothes than Akbar, with elaborately embroidered patkas,
jewelled daggers, and a profusion of ornaments and jewellery. Soon after
his wedding, Akbar granted Salim full adult status in 1585 and the young
prince began assiduously building a corps of noblemen who would be loyal
only to him.
The very first missive from the monarch of England, Queen Elizabeth I,
arrived in Fatehpur Sikri in the course of the year, brought by a delegation
of three English traders representing the ‘merchants of the Levant’ and
headed by one John Newbery, accompanied by Ralph Fitch. Elizabeth I
addressed Akbar as ‘the most invincible and most mightie prince, Lord
Zelabdin Echebar, King of Cambaya’, a sentiment the Mughal Padshah
would have appreciated though it is unlikely he ever received the letter.
Akbar was at the time busy getting an expedition ready to travel to the
Punjab, but he was pleased, nonetheless, to retain the services of a jeweller
in the English party, William Leades, to whom he gave ‘a house, and five
slaves, a horse, and every day six shillings in money’. The Newbery
expedition was the first of many attempts by the English to circumnavigate
the Portuguese monopoly of trade in the area. While these adventurers were
not able to establish any trade links at this time, they produced the first
description of India by an Englishman.
Akbar left Fatehpur Sikri for the Punjab in 1585. When he left, there
was no indication that he would never return, and that the great lively
discussions of the ibadat khana were forever silenced. The senior members
of the harem, including Hamida Banu and Gulbadan, remained in Fatehpur
Sikri during Akbar’s endless absence, expecting the Padshah to return any
day. Nor was there an abandonment of the city itself, as was later suggested,
since many courtiers and harem members remained in the city. Rather, there
was a gradual leeching away of its vitality and exuberance, as the Padshah’s
absence lengthened to years, and then decades. It has also been proposed
that there was a sudden water shortage in the city after a dam broke but
Hakim Abu’l Fath Gilani, who stayed on at Fatehpur Sikri, increasingly
bemused and saddened by Akbar’s absence, never mentioned any lack of
water which he surely would have had that been the reason for the
Padshah’s absence.
Akbar had left Fatehpur Sikri to tend to his fractious border in the
Punjab but on this journey he was also forced to deal with the consequences
of two deaths that affected him deeply. The first was the death of his half-
brother, Mirza Hakim. Late in 1585, Mirza Hakim ‘after much madness…
fell into pains difficult of treatment’ and finally died of alcoholism.
Immediately, the rebellious Kabuli noblemen showed signs of discontent,
requiring Akbar’s attention, for an old nightmare from the time of Babur
himself had resurfaced— the Uzbeks. With Mirza Hakim, a convenient
buffer, now dead, Abdullah Khan Uzbek* began to dream of empires in
Afghanistan and Hindustan. But another death, in early 1586, was much
more personally devastating for Akbar. Zain Khan Koka and Raja Birbal
had been sent on an expedition against the troublesome Pashtun Yusufzais
in the Swat and Bajaur regions but disagreement and mistrust between the
two leaders led to Birbal falling into a trap that the Yusufzais laid for him in
the crumbling defiles of Kabul’s mountains. The Mughals suffered the
worst defeat of Akbar’s reign, in a massacre called the Yusufzai Disaster, in
which more than 8,000 Mughal soldiers, including Birbal, were killed.
It is fitting that the sombre description of the death of this great poet-
warrior of Akbar’s court found a place in one of the most celebrated works
of Brajbhasha of this period, Narottam’s Mancarit, with its fluid mix of
Perso-Arabic words and Persianized Braj a perfect reflection of Birbal’s life
itself:
The emperor was seated in the royal court,
The earth’s Mlecchas and Khans stood around him, as did all the
Raos and Rajas.
Just then a petition from there (the Northwest) was brought to his
attention.
The shah called in his attendant, and asked
what was the matter;
‘Who died, and who was saved? Who has been wounded?’
He (the attendant) said these words, ‘Blessed majesty, all the
imperial forces were lost.
I’ve never seen such a catastrophic manifestation of divine will.’
When this terrible news was announced to Akbar, he was inconsolable. For
two days and two nights he refused any food or water, did not attend to any
state matters, left the bemused ambassador of Turan unattended, and turned
away in grief from the jharoka window. Akbar ‘grieved him exceedingly,
and his heart turned away from everything’, wrote Abu’l Fazl. Hamida
Banu, who had come to the Punjab to meet with her son, had to entreat with
the Padshah, along with his attendants, to resume his activities. The entire
court mourned Birbal and the poet Keshavdas wrote verses in Brajbhasha in
memory of him.
When Birbal passed away there was great rejoicing in
Poverty’s court.
The pakhavaj drums of Evil began to play
The sounds of the conch shells of Grief resounded
The songs of Falsehood, the tambourines of Fear
A concert of all these instruments was heard
The house of Kaliyuga was merry with the pipes of Discord and the
streaming banners of Disgrace.
‘He never experienced such grief at the death of any Amir,’ wrote Badauni,
‘as he did at that of Birbal.’ Akbar seemed tormented by the idea of the
broken, bloody body of his old friend lying unclaimed on the cold, stony
hillsides on which he had died, carrying out his duty to his Padshah unto
death. ‘Alas,’ he said, ‘that they could not bring his body out of the defile,
that it might have been committed to the flames.’ In his grief and his fury
he even wanted to rush to Kabul himself, to find Birbal’s body and to
punish the other officers. He was dissuaded by his courtiers, and comforted
by them with the idea that the light of the sun was enough to purify the
body of his fallen friend. ‘By this heart-rending mishap, the memory of the
pleasures of his lofty company has become very bitter,’ Akbar admitted to
Abu’l Fazl, ‘and this sudden calamity has greatly afflicted my heart…some
obstacles have prevented me from seeing the body with my own eyes so
that I might testify my love and affection for him.’ Rumours circulated for
the rest of the year, and even longer, that Birbal was not dead, that he had
been seen, among jogis and sannyasis, or wandering in his old fief of
Nagarkot. Every time such a rumour reached the court Akbar, painfully
hopeful, sent men to have it investigated. ‘The world is like a mirage,’
Akbar wrote to Abdur Rahim sadly, ‘to beguile thirsty souls… at the end of
this frenzy is simply a mist—a fume.’
A Hindi couplet has been popularly attributed to Akbar, describing his
state of mind:
Deen dekhi sab din, ek na dinho dusah dukh
So ab ham kan din, kachhahun nahin rakhio Birbal
(He saw the poor and gave them all, but never distributed sorrows
Now that he has given even [sorrow] to me, Birbal has kept nothing
for himself )
Something had broken inside the Padshah, and he would never again
contemplate returning to Fatehpur Sikri, because ‘the pleasant palaces of
that city did not engage his heart’, wrote Abu’l Fazl. Akbar kept moving
further and further north, to Kabul and then to Kashmir. Perhaps the palaces
and courtyards of his erstwhile capital were too painful a reminder of a
friend and courtier whose presence and companionship had made bearable
the heavy melancholy that sometimes weighed on Akbar’s soul. The only
Hindu who was so wholly devoted to the Padshah that he staked his most
precious possession on the Padshah’s ‘religion’, his own immortal soul. So
Fatehpur Sikri remained, not abandoned, but bereft. But for the next decade,
as Fatehpur Sikri retracted back into itself, Akbar would discover Paradise
on Earth.
*This was the ruler of Badakhshan and Balkh, not to be confused with Abdullah Khan Uzbek, who
earlier served in the Mughal army and then rebelled.
PART 5
PARADISE ON EARTH
{1585–1598}
~
A RAJPUT IN THE SNOW
Mid-winter in Kashmir was the season of long nights, ice flurries, and
impenetrable high passes. It was a time when men sheltered in the shadows
of the great mountains and dreamt of spring. So when Akbar’s army of
5,000 specially-equipped war horses commanded by Raja Bhagwant Das
and Shah Quli Mehram marched from Attock along the Pakhli Route
through the ravine of Baramullah in December 1585, the forces of the
Sultan of Kashmir, Yusuf Shah Chak, were caught unawares. Even so,
skirmishing between the two armies was vicious, made even more brutal by
the slicing sleet and the lack of provisions. The Kashmir sultan began to
push the Mughal army back but he didn’t press home his advantage. This
was because the years of diplomacy by the Mughals, in which the Kashmir
sultan’s supremacy had been steadily undermined and dissidents supported,
meant that Yusuf Shah Chak’s grip on power had been eroded and he was
willing to make peace as soon as he received a letter from the Rajput
general ominously warning that ‘although this time the royal army was
defeated, next time a force thousand times larger than this would be
dispatched (against you) and it would be difficult for you to save your life.
Therefore,’ continued Bhagwant Das, ‘I suggest to you that it is better for
you to proceed with me to the presence of Emperor Akbar.’ The striking of
coins and the reciting of the khutba would continue in Akbar’s name,
agreed Yusuf Shah, and he also promised to bring his son, Yakub Shah, to
Akbar. It was agreed that Yusuf Shah needed only to accompany Bhagwant
Das to pay obeisance before the Mughal Padshah before returning to
Kashmir.
However, when the Mughal army returned to the imperial court at
Attock, Akbar was in no mood for conciliation and disapproved of the
treaty which Bhagwant Das had negotiated on his own. He had Yusuf Shah
arrested, discomfitting his Rajput general who had brought the Kashmir
sultan into Hindustan upon his honour. Bhagwant Das was so mortified by
what he perceived as a slur that when Akbar appointed him Governor to
Kabul a few months later, he laid down certain conditions regarding the
extent of his authority before he would agree to take up office. This,
recorded Abu’l Fazl, was perceived as a sort of ‘madness’ by Akbar, who
could not countenance any questioning of his decree. Bhagwant Das was
detained, and Mirza Daniyal was appointed Governor of Kabul in his stead.
Perhaps realizing that he had presumed too much upon the Padshah’s
indulgence, Bhagwant Das withdrew his conditions and Akbar reinstated
him as governor. However, Bhagwant Das appears to have been deeply
troubled by what he would have perceived as a public humiliation. On his
way to Kabul, having crossed the Indus, ‘his intellect grew darkened and he
became very giddy’ wrote Abu’l Fazl. He was brought back to the imperial
camp and placed in care where, to the Padshah’s astonishment and alarm,
he tried to kill himself with a dagger. The Padshah sent four of the best
physicians at court—Hakim Hasan, Mahadev, Khangar, and Daulat Khan—
for the raja’s entourage to choose from and finally it was settled that
Mahadev would attend to Bhagwant Das, who slowly recovered.
A second force was sent to Kashmir in June 1586, this time under the
command of Qasim Khan Mir Bahr, aided by Haidar Chak, a dissident from
the Kashmiri royal family, and now a Mughal commander. The army sent to
Kashmir was a massive one, numbering about 50,000 cavalry and up to
100,000 foot soldiers. Conditions on the ground had suddenly become a
great deal more congenial for the Mughals, made so by the violent rule of
Yakub Chak, son of Yusuf Chak, who had taken over the rule of Kashmir
after his father had been arrested. Yakub Chak had aligned with the ulema
and had had the popular Sunni leader, Qazi Musa, executed, causing
considerable disquiet between Shias and the Sunnis. Having emptied the
state coffers fighting the Mughals, Yakub Chak then took to harassing and
plundering the local zamindars. He also closed down important roads,
fearing Mughal incursions, with the result that people could no longer travel
for trade and supplies, leading to resentment and disaffection. As a result, a
large number of the disgruntled Kashmiri elite arrived at the Mughal court,
asking for help, and were received with satisfaction as well as royal robes
and presents by Akbar who had been waiting a long time for just such a
moment. The Kashmiri leadership signed a pact which guaranteed religious
freedom for Kashmiris, their protection against enslavement and
oppression, and the expulsion of those Kashmiri nobles who were deemed
mischievous. Consequently, the army marching to Kashmir were given the
following strict instructions:
They (Mughal forces) were given directions to show consideration
and favour to all people who would come across their way so that
they were not forced to abandon their homes.
Faced with defections and disunity, Yakub Chak was unable to resist the
combined Mughal–Kashmir army, which marched into Srinagar on 7
October 1586.
As for Raja Bhagwant Das, he would never again be asked to campaign
and, from the time of his recovery till his death in 1589, he was put in
charge of the royal harem. For the pragmatic Akbar the extreme action of
Bhagwant Das appeared profoundly mystifying. As the Jesuits had written
of Akbar, ‘He is willing to consult about his affairs, and often takes advice
in private from his friends near his person, but the decision, as it ought,
always rests with the king’. It was perfectly in order for Akbar to reserve
the final decision on the treaty with Kashmir to himself. Moreover, as the
Jesuits had noted, Akbar behaved ‘so sternly towards the nobles who are
under his proud sway that each one of them believes himself to be regarded
not only as a contemptible creature but as the very lowest and meanest of
mankind. For instance, these nobles, if they commit offences, are punished
more severely and relentlessly than the rest of the people, even those of the
meanest degree.’ Given the fact that he censured his generals routinely, it
was natural for him to be surprised by Raja Bhagwant Das’s reaction.
However, there had been several instances when the actions of Rajput men
and women were ascribed to a sort of insanity, a familial malady, by
bemused Mughal chroniclers. For the Rajputs, their word and their honour
as warriors and chiefs were as unalterable as the rising of the sun. Death, as
sung by the Charans, was a far easier alternative to a life without honour.
The Bhagwant Das episode, then, was one where the fine balance between
the Padshah being the final authority on key matters and the Rajput code of
honour was disturbed. However, having exerted his authority, Akbar did
everything he could to take care of his courtier.
By giving Bhagwant Das charge of the imperial household Akbar was
keeping the raja close at hand, where his well-being could be monitored,
while, at the same time giving him one of the highest honours of the land.
Only the most trustworthy officers, who enjoyed the Padshah’s complete
confidence, were ever given this charge, which included control of the royal
bodyguard and the supervision of all provisions and articles required for the
comfort and safety of the harem women. On a more personal note, these last
years at court would have been deeply satisfying ones for a man who had
dedicated his life to the cause of the Mughal Empire. In April 1586,
Bhagwant Das’s daughter gave birth to a child, a girl who was named Shah
Begum, and Akbar called for celebrations which were unprecedented. Abu’l
Fazl tells us that ‘contrary to the usage’, Akbar gathered an assembly to
give thanks for the joyful news of the birth of a daughter. A great feast was
hosted by Hamida Banu, who had come to court for the occasion, and gifts
and money were distributed to all.
That Akbar had specifically ordered grand celebrations for the birth of a
girl child was not surprising. His own daughters were raised with a great
deal of love and preference, which Salim recalled with something akin to
jealousy. ‘Her temperament is greatly inclined to volatility and sharpness,’
wrote Salim about his youngest sister, Aram Banu Begum, born just a few
years before his own daughter. ‘My father loved her so much that he
politely tolerated her acts of rudeness, and in his blessed sight, since he
loved her so much, she did not seem so bad. He often said to me,’ continued
Salim, who had clearly found his sister trying, ‘Baba, for my sake, after I’m
gone, treat this sister of yours, who is, as the Indians say, my ladla…as I do.
Tolerate her coquettishness and overlook her rudeness and impudence.’ Of
another of his sisters, Shakr un-Nisa Begum, born after the birth of Daniyal
in 1572, Salim notes the particular care Akbar took to keep her close to
himself. ‘Since she was brought up in the lap of my exalted father’s care,
she turned out very well,’ wrote Salim, ‘good-natured and innately
compassionate toward all people.’
As his daughters and granddaughters grew up around him Akbar
became increasingly concerned about the plight of girls when they got
married and left their families. Criticizing Muslim laws of inheritance
which allowed for a smaller share of inheritance to a daughter, Akbar
argued that this was inherently faulty, for if a daughter was deemed
‘weaker’, then ‘the weakness of the woman calls for a larger share’, to
ensure her own protection. As for the law which allowed a greater share of
inheritance to fall to nephews in case a deceased person only had daughters,
‘how could this law be justified’, exclaimed Akbar. In this clear and lucid
articulation of his disapproval of Muslim laws of inheritance with regard to
girls, Irfan Habib considers Akbar a pioneer and a unique example of a
sixteenth-century Muslim monarch wanting to safeguard the rights of girls
and women through the reform of laws.
For Bhagwant Das it would have been a moment of great pride and
accomplishment to have the birth of his granddaughter celebrated with all
the extravagance due a Mughal shahzaadi that she was. The following year,
in August 1587, Bhagwant Das’s daughter gave birth to a son whom Akbar
named Sultan Khusrau. Another Rajput rajkumari entered Salim’s
household in June 1586, when one of Akbar’s favourite courtiers, Raja Rai
Singh of Bikaner, married his daughter to the prince. Akbar was very fond
of the Raja of Bikaner, who was not only an indefatigable warrior but also
demonstrated all the ideal traits of a great Mughal courtier. He was a
generous patron to writers and poets and was himself a scholar of Sanskrit,
writing the Rai Singh Mahotsav, on the treatment of diseases, in Sanskrit.
He was a magnanimous and careful ruler, protecting not only those of his
own faith but those of other faiths as well, including the Jains. Like the
other influential courtiers surrounding the Padshah, the raja was a patron of
architecture and built the Junagarh Fort outside Bikaner, in an indigenous
style with traces of Mughal influence. When in 1592 one of Raja Rai
Singh’s daughters was widowed, Akbar rode to comfort the raja and his
daughter, and to plead with the widow not to commit sati, for the sake of
her children. For the Padshah of Hindustan to condole with a courtier in his
own home was a very special honour and a testament to the great affection
Akbar had for the family of Bikaner.
The Marwar Rathores sent a daughter in 1586, Rajkumari Mani Bai
(also known as Jagat Gosain), the daughter of Rao Udai Singh, to be
married to Prince Salim. It was noted that Akbar and the ladies of the harem
went to Udai Singh’s house for the celebration of the marriage. Upon her
marriage to Salim, Akbar gave her the title Taj Bibi though she was
popularly known as Jodh Bai, for her home state of Jodhpur. Udai Singh
was given the title raja, and awarded a mansab of 1,000.
Munis Faruqui has pointed out that from this time onwards, Akbar
recused* himself from further marriage alliances and instead encouraged his
three sons to contract a large number of marriages between them. For royal
marriages were not only a way to ensure heirs but, much more potently, as
demonstrated by Ruby Lal, a way to incorporate a diverse peoples into the
protective embrace of the Mughal Empire. From this time onwards no non-
royal pretender to the Mughal throne would be tolerated but for Akbar’s
sons, gilded with wealth, courtiers and powerful in-laws, the empire was
theirs to claim.
It was from this period, too, for the first time in the history of the
Mughals, that the royal mirzas were kept at court well into adulthood. As
we have seen, Mirza Hakim would be the last Timurid prince to control an
appanage. When Akbar dismantled the appanage system, he had Mirza
Hakim’s young sons, Kaikobad and Afrasiyab, imprisoned in Hindustan.
From now on, the only candidates eligible to aspire to the throne would be
Akbar’s direct descendants. The Padshah would keep his heirs close to the
vortex of imperial power so that he could monitor their activities himself.
Akbar had already accorded his three sons mansabs in 1577, at the ages of
eight, seven, and five respectively, marking their prestige at a young age.
As the three boys grew into young men there was a constant eddying of
noblemen around each one, as the mirzas unfolded their ambitions
according to their personality and talent.
With the powerful Kachhwahas already aligned to him through his wife,
Salim pushed back against Akbar’s tight control by looking further afield
for supporters who would one day buttress his claims to rule. He welcomed
into his household former supporters of Mirza Hakim, whom Akbar did not
tolerate, men like Lala Beg Kabuli and Zamana Beg. He courted members
of the recently displaced Kashmiri royal family, such as Amba Khan
Kashmiri, who would prove to be valuable allies in the years to come.
Salim was also beginning to watch the two men closest to his father, Abu’l
Fazl and Faizi, with a certain degree of flinty and corrosive judgement. The
poet Urfi had been blocked from gaining full-time employment at the
Mughal court by Faizi, and the professional frisson between the two men
soon turned into a deep loathing. In 1589, upon the death of Urfi’s patron,
Hakim Abu’l Fath Gilani, it was Salim who became his patron, along with
Zain Khan Koka and Abdur Rahim. The three men, writes Munis Faruqui,
had a ‘shared dislike of the brothers Shaikh Abu’l Fazl and Faizi, whose
arrogance and abrasiveness’, as well as their jealously guarded proximity to
the emperor ‘had made them notorious and unpopular figures at the
imperial court’.
Besides attempting to chart his own course, Salim also had to cope with
the enormous pressure of being his father’s eldest son. Akbar must have
appeared superhuman to his sons and this pressure was, in all likelihood, a
major contributing factor to Salim becoming addicted to wine and opium at
exactly this stage. ‘One day I mounted to go hunting,’ wrote Salim in his
extremely candid autobiography. ‘Since I overdid it and got exhausted, a
wonderful gunner…said to me, “If you drink a beaker of wine, it will
relieve the exhaustion.” Since I was young and my nature was inclined to
do these things, I ordered Mahmud the water-carrier to go to Hakim Ali’s
house and bring some alcoholic syrup. The physician sent a phial and a half
of yellow-coloured, sweet-tasting wine in a small bottle. I drank it and liked
the feeling I got.’ Salim would come to depend on the feeling of
invincibility that alcohol and opium gave him in the face of a father who
needed nothing other than his own indomitable willpower to meet the
various challenges he faced.
Salim may have been the most prominent Mughal at the time to develop
a dependence on alcohol but he was by no means an exception. Alcohol,
primarily wine, was a part of Mughal life though the pattern of consumption
had changed since Babur’s time. Babur had written frankly of drinking
parties with his men, evenings that began with poetry and ended in drunken
mishaps. But these gatherings were occasional, punctuating a busy,
nomadic lifestyle. Now, as Mughal life became more settled, alcohol
became a more private pastime, often indulged to excess, known to cause
decrepitude and even death. Opium consumption, on the other hand,
seemed to provoke no stigma and appeared to be widely used, even outside
courtly circles as the poorer folk used it to ease the drudgery of their
working day. Alfonso de Albuquerque had already come across the plant in
1513 and, ever the practical merchant, wrote to the Portuguese king to urge
him to cover the fields of Portugal with the plant. Indeed, poppy, indigo,
and sugar were listed by Abu’l Fazl in 1590 as the three products of the
highest value in the land.
Mirza Murad, meanwhile, was married to a daughter of Mirza Aziz
Koka in 1587, thereby securing for himself the support of one of the most
powerful men in the empire. The wedding was celebrated with éclat in the
house of Hamida Banu, and one can imagine the immense satisfaction of
Jiji Anaga, as her granddaughter became one of the princesses of the
empire. The son of a concubine, Murad was described as a quiet and serious
young scholar by the Jesuits. ‘His complexion was dark,’ wrote Salim later
in his memoir about Murad, ‘and he was tall in stature, inclining to be
portly. Gravity was apparent in his manner, and bravery and manliness were
evident from his conduct.’ Mirza Daniyal, on the other hand, was described
as ‘a young man of fine stature’, by Salim. ‘He was very fond of elephants
and horses… He was fond of Indian singing.’ As each prince married the
daughters of eminent men, myriad ambitions and clashing desires whirled
in dense circles around the mirzas, who were like planets around the sun
that was the Padshah, waiting for the inexorable dawn of the next emperor.
Akbar and his sons married women from all the important ethnic groups
in Hindustan except the Afghans, with the largest groups being the Persian,
Turki, and Rajput families. But where the Padshah’s daughters were
concerned, no Mughal princess was married to a Rajput, a non-Muslim
noble, or a shaikhzada. Akbar’s daughters were married to exalted Turki
families or to royal princes. Hypergamy was similarly exercised among the
Rajput clans, with lower status families looking to marry their daughters
into higher status families.
After Akbar, no non-royal groom was ever considered worthy of
marrying a Mughal princess, and as the generations evolved, and cousins
and uncles were routinely killed during increasingly violent succession
struggles, these princesses often remained unmarried, leading to rumours,
fuelled by European accounts, that Mughal emperors preferred to keep their
daughters for their own perverse pleasure. The French adventurer François
Bernier, never one to refrain from the most lurid rumour-mongering, would
primly claim that ‘it is painful to allude to the rumour of his [Shah Jahan’s]
unnatural attachment, the justification of which he rested on the decisions
of the mullahs. According to them, it would have been unjust to deny the
king the privilege of gathering fruit from the tree he himself had planted.’
As for the Rajputs, their links with the Mughal court through marriages
and service ensured a corresponding change in their clans and territories.
Raja Udai Singh, following the Mughal system, introduced the payment of
a peshkash, later known as the hukmnama, owed by noblemen when a jagir
lapsed on the death of its jagirdar. Marwar also saw the introduction of an
extensive communication network at this time, linking the region with the
Mughal Empire. As in other parts of the empire, dak chowkis or post
stations were set up along major roads connecting towns and cities and
allowed for the very rapid transmission of news, commands, and papers.
Monserrate had noted in amazement that the runners along these routes
could cover the same distance as a horseman at full speed. ‘They practise
running in shoes made of lead,’ the Jesuit wrote, ‘or train themselves by
repeatedly lifting their feet and moving their legs till their heels touch their
buttocks. When their leaden shoes are removed, they are seen to be
magnificent runners, by the help of whose swiftness the King can very
rapidly and regularly obtain news or send orders on any matter touching the
peace of his realm.’ Along with fleet-footed runners, there were
caravanserais and wells provided along these highways for the comfort of
travellers.
At this time, in the clan of the Kachhwahas, with Raja Bhagwant Das at
court, it was Kuar Man Singh who would now fly the white pennant of
Amer on distant battlefields, including at Kabul. Having defeated the main
Afghan and Pathan tribes in the area and taken Kabul, tradition has it that
when Man Singh presented their multicoloured flags to Akbar, the Padshah
allowed him the use of these colours as his own, to which Man Singh added
the white of Amer thus creating the Dhoondhari ‘panchranga’ flag.
Besides the Kashmir and Kabul victories, Akbar’s armies were active
on other fronts. Raja Todar Mal, along with a large army, was sent to
subdue the Yusufzai and avenge the unpardonable death of Raja Birbal.
This indefatigable warrior built forts along the mountain passes and
directed his forces to skirmish with the Afghans continuously till they were
defeated. Raja Man Singh was dispatched to deal with the notorious
Raushanias, a tribe of hillmen aiming to liberate Afghanistan from the
Mughals. They were branded heretics, on account of the claims to
prophethood of their leader, Bayazid, and ‘were enslaved and sent to the
markets of Central Asia for sale’. These emphatic actions taken by Akbar
along the Hindu Kush were reason enough for Abdullah Khan Uzbek to
send an ambassador, Sayyid Mir Quraish, to the Mughal court along with a
selection of gifts including ‘chosen steeds, powerful camels and swift
mules; with wild animals and choice furs’. Much more effective a present,
however, was a clutch of nine special pigeons from Turan along with Habib,
a kabootar-baz. While the ambassador was kept waiting for an audience for
many days, Akbar sent for Habib and his winged charges, was delighted
with their exploits and wrote a thrilled letter to Abdur Rahim about the joys
of ishq-baazi.
Sayyid Mir Quraish was kept for many months at the Mughal court, a
virtual prisoner, but one who was extravagantly feted and dined. He was
detained long enough to witness the victories of Man Singh against the
Yusufzai and the victories of Bhagwant Das in Kashmir. He was then taken,
along with the court, to Lahore, where he learned about the annexation of
Kashmir. When he was finally allowed to leave in August 1586, along with
the Hindustani ambassador Hakim Humam, Sayyid Quraish carried a letter
from Akbar to Abdullah Khan which must have caused much rumination
and introspection on the part of the Uzbek. ‘What you have written with a
pen perfumed with brotherhood on the subject of our mutually exerting
ourselves to strengthen the foundations of peace,’ wrote the Hindustani
Padshah, ‘and to purify the fountains of concord, and of making this Hind
Koh the boundary between us, has most fully commended itself to us.’ The
details of the ‘exertions’ that Akbar had made to strengthen his borders
would have been conveyed by the Turani ambassador in worrisome detail.
Abdullah Khan Uzbek was right to be nervous about Akbar’s actions,
for the Mughal Padshah had just pushed the north-west frontier of the
empire from the Indus, where it earlier lay, further than it had ever been.
This vast and porous frontier, from the Oxus to the Beas, had only been
tenuously held by successive Indian rulers. The challenges for a secure
command of the area were daunting.
The Punjab rivers were all fordable except during the season of
inundations. The Indus too was difficult to defend during the winter
and early summer with its long course and broad channels in the
Plains. The Salt Range is really formed of low hills that could be
penetrated at any number of points. To the West of the Indus, the
Sulaiman Range…is pierced by numerous passes open throughout
the year, for another, it was inhabited by Afghan tribes who made
regular garrisoning of all the passes by any outside army impossible.
A truly ‘scientific frontier’ in medieval conditions could be secured
only if an Indian Government held the Hindu Kush mountains.
Now, at last, Akbar had secured the Hindu Kush and though Abdullah Khan
Uzbek had captured Badakhshan and Balkh, he would venture no further.
Akbar also stoutly defended his credentials as an Islamic leader, assuring
the Uzbek that ‘places which from the time of [the] rise of the sun of Islam
till the present day had not been trod by the horse-hoofs of world-
conquering princes and where their swords had never flashed, have become
the dwelling-places and the homes of the faithful’. Akbar realized the
importance of reassuring the Uzbek leader, and not isolating himself among
the celebrated Muslim empires of the world. Aware that scandalous
whispers may have sliced through the Khyber Pass about the unorthodox
texture of the Mughal court, Akbar claimed that ‘the churches and temples
of the infidels and heretics have become mosques and holy shrines for the
master of orthodoxy. God be praised!’ And finally, about the rumours that
may have reached Turan, Akbar pointed out that ‘neither God nor Prophet
has escaped the slanders of men, much less I’. Abdullah Khan Uzbek died
in 1598, effectively bringing to an end the Uzbek menace.
In the decade from 1587 to 1597, Akbar would move first to one end of
the empire, then to the other, in both cases extending the frontiers of
Mughal rule further than they had ever been before. Kashmir, Kandahar,
and the Hindu Kush, were brought firmly within his dominions. Much more
resistant to the Padshah’s will, however, would be his own sons, grown into
men, with ambitions of their own. To keep them safe from each other,
Akbar would separate his sons and his amirs by sending them away from
court, into the different corners of the empire, but despite all the Padshah’s
efforts, most would not return alive.
*Though there are records of a couple more marriages to daughters of minor chieftains.
THE DAR AL-SULTANAT
When Akbar set off from Attock Fort on the Indus in 1586, it was believed
that he was finally returning to the capital at Fatehpur Sikri. Instead, the
Mughal retinue stopped at Lahore and Akbar would remain in the city for a
dozen years, anchoring it forever in the Mughal imagination and bolting it
onto Hindustan’s expansive scaffolding. It would remain a great Mughal
city and the cultural heart of the Punjab till 1748 when it was captured by
the Afghans. Salim, who was travelling to Lahore with his father, would be
particularly enchanted with the city and would live there many years when
he became Padshah. His wife, Noor Jahan, is believed to have said; ‘We
have purchased Lahore with our soul; we have given our life and bought
another Paradise.’ Both Salim and Noor Jahan would be buried in Lahore,
and Noor Jahan’s family, especially, would cleave the city to their legacy
through extensive architectural commissions.
Monserrate, arriving in Lahore in 1582, wrote of a lively and thriving
city, fragrant with perfumes:
This city is second to none, either in Asia or in Europe, with regard
to size, population and wealth. It is crowded with merchants, who
forgather there from all over Asia. In all these respects, it excels
other cities, as also in the huge quantity of every kind of
merchandise which is imported. Moreover there is no art or craft
useful to human life which is not practised there. The population is
so large that men jostle each other in the streets. The citadel alone,
which is built of brickwork laid in cement, has a circumference of
nearly three miles. Within this citadel is a bazaar which is protected
against the sun in summer and the rain in winter by a high-pitched
wooden roof—a design whose clever execution and practical utility
should call for imitation. Perfumes are sold in this bazaar and the
scent in the early morning is most delicious…most of the citizens
are wealthy Brahmans and Hindus of every caste, especially
Kashmiri. These Kashmiri[s] are bakers, eating-house keepers, and
sellers of second-hand rubbish….
Writing magnanimously about the weather and the fruit, Abu’l Fazl
mentioned that ‘musk melons are to be had throughout the whole year’, a
detail that would have delighted Akbar’s grandfather, Babur. ‘When the
season is over, they are imported from Kashmir and from Kabul,
Badakhshan and Turkestan. Snow is brought down every year from the
northern mountains.’ The availability of snow and ice was one of the great
luxuries of the court at Lahore. These were transported from the mountains
north of Lahore, and brought to the capital every day by boats, carriages,
and runners. The most profitable way was to bring down the ice by river, in
boats manned by four oarsmen. When carriages were used, the journey was
accomplished in fourteen stages, with horses changed at each stage. A total
of 50 to 120 kilograms of ice and snow arrived every day, depending on the
season. While noblemen were able to afford ice all the year round, the
lower ranks only bought it in the hot summers.
As the empire had expanded dramatically in the first thirty years of
Akbar’s rule, bringing into the Mughal fold the rich provinces of Gujarat
and Bengal, had gained it access to the sea, which helped it economically.
In the kar khanas that were promoted enthusiastically, ‘Akbar promoted
textile manufacture for foreign markets, building roads that connected
Mughal weavers’ workshops to seaports and abolishing inland tolls and
duties’. The goods were sent to China, Arabia, Abyssinia*, and Europe; the
Europeans were able to pay for the precious silks and cottons with silver
mined in South America and the cities of the empire grew prosperous.
Placed along the major route leading to Central Asia, Lahore was
clearly therefore already a thrumming city by the time Akbar decided to
stop here instead of moving back to Fatehpur Sikri. The Padshah rebuilt the
fort of the city which became known as the Shahi Qila. It included a
rampart with twelve gates, an audience hall, personal living quarters, and a
zenana. It is likely that Akbar’s court miniaturists and artists decorated the
Padshah’s quarters and the zenana. There would, however, be no inferno of
building as there had been in Fatehpur Sikri. No layered palaces, or
inscrutable minars, or intimidating expanses of stone. Akbar’s great
building days were over and it would be royal family members, and the
courtiers of the empire, who would take on the task of architectural
patronage.
‘Throughout Akbar’s reign,’ writes urban studies scholar William
Glover, ‘court nobles were encouraged to build palaces, gardens, and
religious institutions in and around the city, and Lahore grew rapidly both in
extent and population.’ Even outside the walls of Lahore, there were vast
tracts covered in ‘richly designed mosques, tombs, havelis and gardens of
the aristocracy’, though sadly no traces of these buildings remain today.
Within the city walls, bazaars were built along the main roads, highly
specialized according to the commodity sold. Incense and religious books
were sold near the mosques, leather workers supplying book bindings were
located nearby, as also the slipper bazaar. Further away were the cloth and
embroidery bazaars as well as the jewellers, while furthest away were
bazaars dealing in bulk commodities too cumbersome to convey through
the narrow pedestrian streets such as wholesale grain and spices, wool,
pottery, fresh products etc. Future generations of Padshahs and their
families would add to the landscape and by the time Akbar’s grandson,
Shah Jahan, came to power the mythic Shalimar Gardens would be built
and Lahore would become the City of Gardens.
The walled city of Lahore was built by the river Ravi, with the Shahi
Qila overlooking the vast and busy river. There was a bridge of boats
constructed over the river and a steady stream of vessels sailed up and down
the Ravi, ‘constantly carrying an infinity of supplies’. Across from the
Shahi Qila was a huge tented encampment, where merchants from different
countries brought their goods to sell to the people at the court in the city.
There was a small mud island in the middle of the river where, every
morning at dawn, crowds thronged to make their daily darshan of Akbar
following which there would be animal fights arranged on the sandy banks
to amuse the crowds and the Padshah.
If in Lahore Akbar was no longer as enthusiastic a patron of
architecture, his devotion to miniature paintings remained undiminished.
There was a change, nonetheless, in the type of works that the taswir khanas
at Lahore would produce at this time. From the earlier large works that had
been created, the focus would now be on a few volumes of Persian poetry,
produced to a high degree of perfection, known as de luxe manuscripts.
These small but exquisitely finished works, as perfect as a single liquid note
of a nightingale, were produced using the very best artists and the purest
and highest quality products of the land. There were new additions to the
ranks of painters, local men with names like Ibrahim Lahori, Kalu Lahori,
and the talented calligrapher, Muhammad Husayn al-Kashmiri, known as
Zarrin Qalam (Golden Pen). In addition to these newer artists at work in
Akbar’s studios there were some of the most talented painters of the time, at
the peak of their artistic powers. Artists like Miskin, so compassionate in
his paintings of animals that he captured not only their physical exertions
and muscularity but even their inner, desperate fears. And Basawan, who
perfected his art at the Mughal court over more than thirty years, using his
‘psychologically acute… characterizations, painterliness, three-dimensional
treatment of space, and swelling roundness of form’ to create works of
astounding realism and subtlety.
There would have been Manohar Das, too, Basawan’s young son,
around Salim’s age, who would have carefully observed Akbar and all the
formidable courtiers at Lahore, and who would paint tender and vulnerable
images of the ageing Padshah in the following decades. Manohar grew up
observing and adopting each changing nuance in the artistic tenor of the
court, and while not possessing the genius of some of the greatest artists, he
stands out ‘as a humble, painterly artist whose arabesques and drapery
cavort and ripple with released vitality and express the joy he found in his
work’. The art historian John Seyller has argued that Basawan began
promoting Manohar as an artist at around this time. There is a portrait of
Manohar that has survived. It shows a smooth-faced, large-eyed, and
slightly chubby young boy dated to this period believed to be one of only
three self-portraits of sixteenth-century Mughal India. Seyller believes this
was in fact a joint work between father and son, Basawan wishing to
promote the talents of his son, probably not imagining that his son’s fame
would far outshine his at the courts of Jahangir and then Shah Jahan. And
then there were outliers, like Farrukh Husain, a Persian painter at the
Safavid court who left Isfahan to first work at Mirza Hakim’s court at
Kabul. Considered by art historians to be one of the most underrated artists
of Mughal painting, he joined the Mughal court in 1585, when he was
already a mature forty-year-old artist. He was much admired and given the
title Farrukh Beg. At the Mughal court, Farrukh Beg was initially paired up
with the artists Dharmadas and Dhanraj, to work on the Khamsa of Nizami.
However, after this work, it was understood that Farrukh Beg preferred to
work alone and this contemplative, enigmatic, and singular artist was
allowed the quite exceptional privilege from 1586–96, to work on
illustrations on his own. He created works of remarkable sophistication and
delicacy, with a clear penchant for lissom youths and swaying cypresses.
His signature element was to add a large chinar tree somewhere within his
compositions, to add drama, perspective, or symbology.
The de luxe manuscripts created in Lahore were tiny, meant to be held
in the hand and admired closely. They contained only a dozen or so perfect
works of art as opposed to the hundreds of paintings in earlier manuscripts.
The texts were works of beloved poets such as Amir Khusro, Nizami, and
Jami. Unlike the earlier exuberant and rambunctious works meant to be
shared and exclaimed over, these small works were intimate, almost
meditative, meant for the intense and visceral enjoyment of the patron,
usually the Padshah, and his close family. One of the finest examples of de
luxe manuscripts is the Divan-e-Anvari, a tiny work measuring only 5.5
inches by 2.8 inches, with just fifteen images. Anvari was a twelfth-century
poet from Turkmenistan, who is believed to have suffered from gout,
leading to understandably caustic and sharp reams such as the following
qit’a*:
I asked for wine, and you gave me stale vinegar,
Such that, should I drink it, I should rise up at the Resurrection like
pickled meat…
Art historian Kavita Singh points out that these de luxe manuscripts, like
Anvari’s Divan, indulged in ‘conspicuous luxury’ in all aspects of their
making, ‘from the fine, gold-flecked paper and costly pigments used for the
books to the superb calligraphy by master calligraphers, and the exquisite
margins, elaborate illumination, and fine bindings with which they were
decorated’. Historian Annemarie Schimmel adds the awe-inspiring detail
that each figure in the paintings was ‘scarcely larger than an eyelash’, yet
managed to convey, possibly for the first time in Mughal art, a sense of a
breathing space around the people, animals, and landscape. It is believed
that a reason for the dramatic change in style from the earlier large-scale
and boisterous works was the presence at court of Prince Salim, nineteen
years old at the time, and as yet not estranged from his father. Salim who
had begun drinking wine in increasingly immoderate quantities. Soon he
was drinking twenty cups a day, lacking the iron will and self-discipline of
his father. But despite his dissolute ways, Salim would go on to become a
legendary patron and connoisseur of art who claimed to be able to
distinguish at a single glance the distinctive brushwork of different painters.
He even wrote with no false modesty whatsoever that in a work involving
several painters, ‘I can discover which face is the work of each of them. If
any other person has put in the eye and eyebrow of a face, I can perceive
whose work the original face is, and who has painted the eye and eyebrow.’
The images showcased the unfettered brilliance of artists at the peak of
their powers and an empire at its most capacious in terms of wealth and
ambition. The manuscripts were treasured and kept within the imperial
library, to be handled with care and admired by each successive emperor.
These tiny, jewel-bright manuscripts were a new direction for the
Mughal taswir khanas but the translation projects begun at Fatehpur Sikri
also continued in Lahore. The first Persian translation of the other famous
Hindustani epic, the Ramayan, was undertaken at this time. This was the
first illustrated manuscript of the epic. Earlier Rajput versions, if they had
existed, would have been destroyed in the storming of Chittor and Gwalior,
the major centres of art at that time. The Mughals understood the epic to be
about the trials and tribulations of an ideal Indian monarch, Ram. This had
great resonance with Akbar, who rather enjoyed the frequent comparisons
that Brahmins made between Vishnu and the Padshah. Badauni had long
lamented that Brahmins had told Akbar ‘that he had descended to earth, like
Ram, Krishan, and other infidel rulers’. The particular attributes that Akbar
shared with Ram were piquant. ‘He would honor Brahmans,’ wrote
Badauni about what the Brahmins were claiming, ‘protect cows, and justly
rule the earth.’ And, indeed, Akbar, Hamida Banu, Todar Mal, and Abdur
Rahim were all issuing farmans giving land and protection to the temples,
priests, and cows of Mathura at this very time. While the Persian text may
have stayed true to the spirit of the original, the images that accompanied
the Persian Ramayan were reminiscent of sixteenth-century Mughal India.
According to Truschke, in these images, ‘Rama is dressed in Mughal
fashion and has Central Asian facial features, remarkably similar to
portrayals of the Emperor in paintings of the Akbarnama.’ Similarly, in his
Persian-Sanskrit grammar book, the scholar Krishnadasa describes Akbar in
astonishing terms, comparing him with Krishna and marvelling that he
protects cows.
The translated Ramayan proved very popular in courtly circles and
more than two dozen Persian versions of it were created over the next three
centuries. Hamida Banu owned a copy of it, and Rajput rulers, electrified by
these possibilities, responded by creating their own illustrated manuscripts
of the Ramayan. Maharana Jagat Singh of Mewar, Rana Pratap’s great-
grandson, who would submit to Jahangir in 1615, commissioned a truly
stupendous work in the 1640s comprising a staggering 400 paintings of
joyous colour and abandon, many of which were painted by the leading
artist of the time, Sahibuddin, a Mewari Muslim. This Mewar Ramayan is
considered the finest and most complete version of this epic ever
commissioned by a Hindu patron.
As for Badauni, Akbar’s most prolific translator despite all his many
misgivings, though he admitted that the Ramayan was marginally better
than the tales of the Mahabharat, he baulked at writing a preface for it. ‘I
seek refuge in God from that black book,’ he wrote despairingly, ‘which is
as rotten as the book of my life.’ Badauni knew that Akbar would expect
from him a work like the preface of the Mahabharat, which Abu’l Fazl had
written in lyrical and expansive style, praising the knowledge contained in
the Mahabharat and the cross-cultural enterprise undertaken by Akbar.
Unable also to conceive a work in which he would not be allowed to
include praise for the Prophet Muhammad, Badauni demurred.
But now, alongside the eclectic works of translation that were taking
place in Lahore, Akbar decided that his empire was finally secure enough
for him to begin the monumental texts that would anchor his legacy within
the history of Hindustan, the history of Islam, the history of the Timurids,
and the history of mankind itself.
*Ethiopia
*Short poems best suited for epigrams, satires, and light verse.
THE MEMORY–KEEPERS
‘Write down whatever you know of the doings of (Babur) and (Humayun)’.
This ordinary phrase sounded innocuous enough and gave no indication of
the seismic rumble it actually was. In 1587, having decided to commission
a history of his reign, Akbar sent for his beloved aunt, Gulbadan, and asked
her to contribute to this history by writing down all her memories of her
father and brother. Akbar summoned other memory-keepers too, such as
Humayun’s water carrier, Jauhar Aftabchi, and an old soldier from
Humayun’s army, Bayazid Bayat, amongst others. ‘His Majesty Jalal al-Din
Muhammad Akbar Padshah,’ wrote Bayazid, ‘commanded that any servants
of court who had a taste for history should write.’ Akbar had decided, now
that he had been Padshah for more than thirty years, it was time to create a
history of his rule, his lineage, and his achievements that would reflect in all
its splendour a life and destiny sparked by the divine. It was Abu’l Fazl who
was entrusted with this monumental task, one which would take a decade to
complete, and would involve an army of compilers and assistants across the
empire. The accounts of the memory-keepers were intended as source
material for Abu’l Fazl to use in his remarkable work of history and it was
but a fortuitous accident that Gulbadan then produced a unique and precious
work— the first and only record of life in the Mughal harem through the
eyes of a Mughal woman.
Gulbadan was sixty-five years old when she began writing her memoir,
and had already lived through the reigns of two previous Padshahs—Babur
and Humayun. With the philosophical distancing that age and time afforded
her, with her own lived experience as a cherished and beloved member of
Akbar’s court, and due to a complete absence of any such previous
recording to model her writing on, Gulbadan wrote an account that was
unlike any other work produced on the subject of Mughal history. Most
accounts of kings and empires focused overwhelmingly on the personalities
of the emperors and their eminent amirs, as well as the battles, conquests,
and territorial expansions that visibly reflected the emperor’s power. In
Gulbadan’s account we see these same emperors, but they are backlit by the
familial and the domestic, their edges are scuffed by the elucidation of
family dramas, loves, hierarchies, and power structures. And Gulbadan is
the only chronicler to write candidly and unselfconsciously of the
unexpected and influential roles of women. She is the only writer, for
example, to record events such as Khanzada Begum’s diplomatic mission to
Kamran on Humayun’s behalf, and the moral authority this elderly
matriarch wielded in the name of Padshah Babur himself. She writes about
the determined wooing of Hamida Banu by Humayun that was equally
stoutly resisted by the unimpressed bride for forty days.
Many of the incidents Gulbadan wrote about she would have discussed
with Hamida Banu, and she often refers to Hamida Banu’s memories in her
writing. So we have the shadowy recording of various women’s voices in
this unique document. And in complete contrast to the ossified and
sequestered space that Abu’l Fazl would write about in a few years,
Gulbadan writes of a harem continuously on the move, of women on
horseback, of women journeying and living in tents, and sharing the
struggles and the victories of their men. Her tale is replete with the accounts
of births while on the move, marriages of temperamental or forthright
brides, the detailing of gifts as symbols of a Padshah’s love, and tender
remembrance. According to Ruby Lal, through Gulbadan’s writing, ‘we
have a lost world of the court in camp brought to life in a way that no other
chronicle of the time even approaches’.
Abu’l Fazl, meanwhile, would spend the next few years questioning
Akbar’s old family retainers and relatives, to record their memories of
Babur, Humayun and, especially, of Akbar himself. ‘I spoke to old and
young men of right character’, asserts Abu’l Fazl firmly, after which
accounts were drawn up and then read out to the Padshah every day. The
Padshah listened closely to these accounts and corrected the mistakes as he
saw fit. Abu’l Fazl consulted the records office, farmans issued by Akbar,
petitions filed by ministers, in addition to listening to the oral records of
trustworthy persons including, notably, those of his own father, and of the
emperor himself. The result of this enormous labour of research and
compilation would be two gargantuan works—a history of Akbar’s reign
and his times, called the Akbarnama in two volumes, and an equally
voluminous gazetteer, the Ain-i Akbari, which was a detailed compendium
of imperial regulations, as well as information on the geography, social and
religious customs, and administration of the land. The Ain-i Akbari was a
unique document for its time and would serve as a model for future
generations of historians. It would also be used by the British to understand
a complex and foreign land. Among its many revelations was a new
awareness, as pointed out by M. Athar Ali, of the geography of Hindustan
as a peninsula lapped by the sea and crowned by the Himalayas. Abu’l Fazl
described the people of the land in prose refreshingly free from the religious
limitations of other medieval Muslim historians. ‘The people of this
country,’ he wrote, ‘are God-seeking, generous-hearted, friendly to
strangers, pleasant-faced, of broad forehead, patrons of learning, lovers of
asceticism, inclined to justice, contented, hard-working and efficient, true to
salt, truth-seeing and attached to loyalty.’ Despite being irritated by Raja
Todar Mal’s idol-worship, Abu’l Fazl wrote of the use of religious figures
by Hindus in the following way:
They one and all believe in the unity of God, and as to the reverence
they pay to images of stone and wood and the like which simpletons
regard as idolatry, it is not so. The writer of these pages has
exhaustively discussed the subject with many enlightened and
upright men and it became evident that these images of some chosen
souls nearest in approach to the throne of God are fashioned as aids
to fix the mind and keep the thoughts from wandering, while the
worship of God alone is required as indispensable.
These views, which were also stated by Akbar, were in sharp contrast to
Babur’s dismayed recordings of his impression of Hindustan and its people:
‘There is no beauty in its people, no graceful social intercourse, no poetic
talent or understanding, no etiquette, nobility or manliness. The arts and
crafts have no harmony or symmetry.’
The Ain-i Akbari reflected a determination on the part of the Padshah to
delineate every aspect of life in the empire, from the mundane to the
mystical. They included regulations for the tents in the farrash khana,
instruction about etiquette to be followed in court, donations, education,
marriages, the oiling of camels and the branding of horses. It is in just such
a chapter that Abu’l Fazl also deals with the ‘vexatious question’ of the
many women that Akbar had married, and the consequently unwieldy
harem that had to be contained and sequestered. ‘Several chaste women’,
we are reminded, guarded over each section of the harem which was further
policed by eunuchs, Ahadis, and Rajput guards. The women were
decorously involved in various duties and Abu’l Fazl would be careful to
never allow any woman a glimpse of individuality. They would all be given
titles, their names almost completely forgotten, and would be accorded the
most perfunctory of descriptions—‘cupolas of chastity’ and ‘pillars of
chastity’ being preferred monikers. Akbar’s wives, especially, would be
subjected to a ruthless and complete censorship, reduced to barely
acknowledged shadows whose only noteworthy acts were to produce
‘pearls’, Akbar’s children, from their blessed wombs. Interestingly, Abu’l
Fazl would hold his own family to this very same rigorous standard, never
once referring to a wife, a sister, or a daughter in his own biography. It
would fall to Gulbadan’s memoir, forgotten for a long time, to eventually
shine a light on the complex geometry of these women’s lives.
Abu’l Fazl’s Akbarnama overshadowed medieval history for centuries
with the sobering weight of his learning and conviction to the detriment of
all other histories and sources of memory. At the same time, the tone of the
Akbarnama was derided for being sycophantic to Akbar, and the Padshah
himself was belatedly scolded by Western historians for tolerating such
excessive flattery. But to see the Akbarnama as simply an exercise in
obsequiousness by an overenthusiastic courtier would be short-sighted, for
what Abu’l Fazl intended was far more ambitious, even incendiary. In most
histories of the time, in which the ruler was Muslim, genealogies would
begin with praises of Allah, and Prophet Muhammad, and then work their
way through the various caliphs and sultans, through purely Islamic
lineages, to the ruler in question. Abu’l Fazl, instead, after praising Allah,
begins with Adam, the original ‘man’, omitting the Prophet and the caliphs
altogether. He traces Akbar’s lineage through fifty-two generations, placing
the Padshah firmly in the position of the ruler of all humanity, and not just
his Muslim subjects.
In addition, as scholars such as A. Azfar Moin and Ruby Lal have
shown, Abu’l Fazl used a complex set of symbols to articulate a vision of
the Padshah as semi-divine, appearing as he did at the cosmically and
spiritually charged advent of the new Islamic millennium to be the temporal
as well as spiritual guide to all the peoples of Hindustan, not only Muslims.
In his genealogy of Akbar, Abu’l Fazl did not just show Akbar descending
from an illustrious line of forefathers as Babur and Humayun had sought to
do but instead inversed this equation to demonstrate that it was, on the
contrary, Akbar’s luminous destiny that tinged his predecessors with glory.
This would explain the episodes of ‘divine effulgence’ that occurred before
Akbar’s birth, whether it was Hamida Banu’s mysteriously shining brows,
Humayun’s visions, or Jiji Anaga’s lucent dreams. It was in this spirit,
argues A. Azfar Moin, that Humayun’s astrological preoccupations and
frequent auguries were interpreted as being premonitions of impending
greatness. The Akbarnama even has a long digression to include in Akbar’s
genealogy the rather obscure Alanqua, a princess of Moghulistan, who was
impregnated by a divine light to give birth to three ‘shining sons’. The
implication was clear—Akbar was above the limitations of ordinary human
forefathers with their pedestrian ambitions and expected frailties. Instead,
the Akbarnama described the life of a monarch who demonstrated
miraculous powers from infancy. A monarch who commanded rampaging
elephants, succumbed to visions, articulated prophesies, and cured people
using his holy breath. A monarch, moreover, who did not rule only Muslim
subjects. Instead, Abu’l Fazl wrote about a king who used imagery from
many faiths while crafting a faultless persona. Through fire worship, the
veneration of the sun, mantras and austerities, fasts, and the translation of
the sacred works of the Hindus, Akbar became the insaan-e-kamil* and
peshwa of the spiritual age.
Since Abu’l Fazl needed to show that the Padshah was above all
limitations of religion, events described in the Akbarnama were relentless
about showing the Padshah in a positive light. Every occurrence was
interpreted in the light of Akbar’s later immaculate grandeur and all earlier
foibles were explained as a need by Akbar to ‘veil’ his true self and to test
those around him. That Abu’l Fazl was intensely admiring of the Padshah is
evident and he found in Akbar a great monarch worthy of his own
boundless energies and dedication. It is nonetheless tempting to wonder
whether there was not also a splinter of anger in Abu’l Fazl when he poured
all his fierce energy into the Akbarnama into making the Padshah a
Mujtahid of the Age which served to eviscerate and make redundant his
sworn enemies, the ulema.
For all his passionate arguments in favour of reason, or aql, above all
else and above received wisdom, an incident occurred in the 1590s that
showed the truth to be rather more complicated for Abu’l Fazl. The Maasir
ul-Umara* describes an episode in which Salim went to visit Abu’l Fazl in
his home and was astounded to discover forty clerks busily copying the
Koran, a Muslim act of piety. Salim, who was becoming increasingly leery
of Abu’l Fazl’s closeness to Akbar, immediately appropriated clerks and
Koran and presented them to the Padshah. According to the Maasir ul-
Umara, Akbar was thoroughly shaken by this sign of ostentatious piety in
his famously rationalist friend and said, ‘He incites us to other kinds of
things, and then when he goes to the privacy of his home he acts
differently.’ The Iqbal Nama-i-Jahangiri † also recorded Akbar’s
displeasure when Shaikh Mubarak wrote a commentary on the Koran
without alluding to the Padshah himself, which Abu’l Fazl then sent to
various dignitaries. From then on, noted historian Shamsauddaula Shah
Nawaz, there was a slackening of the earlier bond that drew the two men
together. For Shaikh Mubarak and his sons, marked forever by the ulema’s
long-ago persecution, the true nature of their own personal faith would
always remain hidden by their pragmatic adoption and brilliant exposition
of the Padshah’s views.
Whatever Abu’l Fazl’s motivations, he worked unceasingly on the
Akbarnama. The Padshah listened to each page of the text as it was read out
to him, using his prodigious memory to verify facts and occurrences. It was
said that Abu’l Fazl wrote five drafts of the manuscript. Besides
scrutinizing the text, Akbar took an inordinate amount of interest in the
illustrations that accompanied the writing. Between 1590 and 1595,
concurrently with the shaping of the text, miniatures were painted of
various episodes described and it is believed that Akbar was closely
involved in deciding which particular moments in his life were to be
painted. Indeed, in the eyes of some experts, the illustrations are thought to
give us a more accurate reflection of the Padshah’s own view of his life
than Abu’l Fazl’s text.
Forty-nine artists were listed as being part of the project and they
included all the leading masters of the age. These were collaborative works
involving several artists working together and effortlessly using the Persian
vertical use of space, European perspective, and indigenous vibrancy and
luminous colour. A large number of the painters were Hindus of the
agricultural Ahir caste, men with names like Kesu, Madhu, Mukund, Nand,
Narayan, Paras, Shankar, Surdas, Ramdas, and Basawan. This accounts for
the effervescence and dramatic energy of the paintings, a style favoured by
Akbar. The famous Muslim painters of this taswir khana included Miskin,
Mansur, Qutb Chela, and the Persian Farrukh Beg. The great Persian master
Abd al-Samad was not included in this project and had presumably already
retired, after training his two sons, Muhammad Sharif and Bihzad. Abd al-
Samad painted one last painting at this time, a work created purely from
memory, of a great Persian masterpiece by the maestro Bihzad. In a
touching entreaty to his son Muhammad Sharif to never forget his Persian
roots, Abd al-Samad wrote: ‘At the age of eighty-five, when his strength
has gone, his pen has weakened and his eyesight has dimmed, he has agreed
to draw from memory as a memento for this album with every detail for his
wise, witty, and astute son Sharif Khan, who is happy, fortunate, prosperous
and chosen by the memory of the Merciful.’ This painting, called Two
Fighting Camels, is a lovely example of the Persian school, ‘where
technical virtuosity was prized equally with poetic sensibility’, but it was
one which would have been considered passé in Mughal India.
Of the extant 116 paintings detailing the period 1560–77,* the very
choice of the subject matter is instructive. Twenty-seven paintings depict
specific battles, sieges, and engagements, and another twenty-five show
arrests, executions, submissions, and overtures of peace. A further twenty-
two paintings depict scenes of hunting, including five vibrant double-
spreads. Taken together, this group of paintings is an eloquent testimony to
the articulation of power and strength in the sixteenth century: the heaving
scenes of furious battles showing the enormous power of the empire
tempered by the compassionate embracing of the submissive party; the
importance of the qumargha as an instrument of political power; the use of
animals—elephants, tigers, cheetahs—as thinly veiled metaphors for the
conquest and incorporation of dangerous elements into the Mughal Empire.
The elemental energy of these pages point to the incessant and ruthless
game of strength and diplomacy and brinkmanship that Akbar played to
bring him to the point where, in the elusive dawn of Fatehpur Sikri, he
could give thanks to God for allowing him to create the enormous empire of
his dreams.
The remainder of the paintings are those of court scenes, celebrations,
births, and marriages, and a handful of scenes of meditative contemplation,
and unexpected turmoil in Akbar’s life. It is in these paintings that the
artists contribute most viscerally to the document, adding details of court
life that are not mentioned in Abu’l Fazl’s text. Some of these artists would
have had first-hand experience of the scenes described, as painters often
accompanied the Padshah on his journeys. It is in these unexpected and
precious details that a complex and changing court is brought to life. It is a
world of colour, texture, and dynamic complexity with its exquisite details
of a courtier’s brocaded jama or the graceful movement of the sijda
salutation. In these paintings we see women stringing up bunting made of
auspicious mango leaves to celebrate the birth of a child, and the energetic
beating of huge drums and the blowing of trumpets to announce the
victorious arrival of the Padshah. There are also troubling details such as
the degraded and piteous condition of prisoners of war wearing animal
skins over their faces, which Abu’l Fazl glosses over. Startlingly timeless
details are shown, too, like women labourers wearing glass-studded brocade
cloth in a construction scene, just like women continue to do in India today.
The paintings show a court that was always changing, incorporating
different elements from its new courtiers. So from a purely Persian aesthetic
painted by Farrukh Beg in the scene showing a Mughal emissary and the
rebel Bahadur Khan, the court paintings become more exuberant and
dynamic and incorporate Rajput clothes, Rajput courtiers, indigenous
musicians and instruments, and details of courtly life that show a much
more expansive interpretation of the Mughal Empire than that shown in the
accompanying text. In one such example, art historian Geeti Sen has
suggested that in the painting showing the court dancers of Mandu being
presented to Akbar after the defeat of Baz Bahadur, we can see a possible
route for the introduction of the Kathak style of dance into the Mughal court
through these famous dancers from Malwa.
And, finally, there is the alluring possibility that some of the paintings
of well-known amirs and courtiers, and indeed of Akbar himself, are actual
likenesses in the manner of portraits. The art of portraiture in Mughal
painting has usually been attributed to Padshah Jahangir, with his
fascination for psychologically acute images. But Akbar, too, was intensely
and passionately interested in the deep desires that motivated people and a
corresponding need, his whole life, to viscerally understand and ‘read’ the
faces and characters of people. Abu’l Fazl wrote that Akbar had
commissioned an enormous portrait album in which ‘those that have passed
away have received a new life, and those who are still alive have
immortality promised them’. Geeti Sen has proposed that a number of the
paintings of key figures from Akbar’s life including Bahadur Khan, Munim
Khan, Mirza Sulaiman, and Azim Khan, among others, appear to be actual
likenesses. There are even a handful of enigmatic images showing moments
of high emotion—blistering rage, haunting introspection or grateful
celebration in Akbar’s life—which seem to show finely-drawn likenesses of
the Padshah himself, reflecting these different moods. These images are
always the work of one of just six artists, specialists in the painting of
‘chehra’, or the face, and they include the artists Madhu, Kesu, Miskin,
Basawan, and Nanha. These beguiling portraits of this elusive emperor still
mesmerize across five centuries.
*Orchestra.
† Tour guides and local priests today still claim the temple’s superstructure was deliberately
destroyed.
*A tradition of early Hindi literature, associated with the late medieval court.
POISON IN PARADISE
Bhaktamara!
With this sombre Sanskrit word began the recitation of the Bhaktamara-
stotra, a sacred hymn in honour of Adinath Jain, which the scholar and Jain
priest Bhanu Chandra recited, the lilting cadences rippling through the
magnificent Jain temple inside Lahore Fort. In front of Bhanu Chandra
stood Akbar and Salim, head bowed, as they allowed these ancient verses to
calm them, for a cold fear had settled in their hearts. Salim had just had a
baby girl and the astrologers had quite disastrously decided that the
constellation she was born under was harmful for Akbar. ‘Perform whatever
is the purifying rite in the Jain philosophy!’ Akbar had ordered and Bhanu
Chandra had suggested that they perform the Ashtottara-Sata-Snatra, a
ceremony involving 108 baths to be given to the idol of Jina in the temple.
After the completion of the hymn, the monk took some of the holy water
from a gold pot and applied it to the Padshah’s eyes while his harem,
Harkha Bai and his other Hindu wives, bowed before the pot and prayed for
his health.
After his experience with Jain monks at Fatehpur Sikri, Akbar would
continue to nurture the relationship between these priests and the Mughal
court. Bhanu Chandra would stay at court well into the reign of Jahangir,
and many other Jain scholars would continue to sporadically visit the
Mughal court. These encounters, not mentioned in the Persianate texts,
were meticulously recorded in Jain biographies.
While this incident shows the Padshah and his eldest son united in a
common cause, both equally comfortable in seeking benediction from an
unusual place, there is nonetheless a sense of a slow curdling of old,
familiar affection. That danger to the Padshah’s life had been calculated as
coming, even indirectly, from Salim’s family was unfortunate. It would
have increased the prince’s sense of vulnerability and perhaps stoked
Akbar’s paranoia.
Sometime in the year 1590, Akbar fell ill with a stomach upset and
colic, which no remedy seemed able to alleviate. Badauni writes about this
episode, during which ‘in this unconscious state (Akbar) uttered some
words which arose from suspicions of his eldest son, and accused him of
giving him poison’. According to Badauni Akbar then said to Salim:
Shaikhu Baba, since all this Sultanate will devolve on you,why have
you made this attack on me…
To take away my life there was no need of injustice
I would have given it to thee if thou hadst asked me
Akbar even began to suspect the physician Hakim Humam, previously
above suspicion, of having poisoned him. Death by poisoning was an old
fear, one that the Mughal Padshahs would try to guard against with
increasingly elaborate rituals. With Akbar seemingly close to death Salim,
according to Badauni, then appointed some of his close allies to spy on his
brother Murad. When Akbar recovered, the women of the harem and Murad
himself complained to the Padshah about Salim’s offensive behaviour, and
Akbar realized that he could no longer keep his three sons under his
claustrophobic care.
The three princes were young men now, with families of their own, and
powerful connections through marriage. Murad, especially, married to the
daughter of Mirza Aziz Koka, would have been considered a potentially
dangerous threat to Salim. Akbar decided that it was finally time to separate
his sons to try and diffuse the increasing tension of their close proximity.
Murad was appointed Governor of Malwa and given ‘pennant, kettle drum,
martial music, and a royal standard and all the paraphernalia of royalty’. He
was also given ‘a royal sleeveless dress of honour, which is an honour
conferred only on princes’, specified Badauni. Akbar gave him detailed
instructions on how to conduct himself during this first major trial of his
life. He was to be moderate in his behaviour, his food and drink, his sleep,
and his interactions. Leniency and clemency were advised: ‘A frown will
effect with many what in other men requires a sword and dagger’ and ‘if
apologies are made, accept them’. Murad was encouraged to surround
himself with good people, and to listen to their advice. He was to ‘secure
the affection of contented hermits and of the matted-haired and barefooted’
and ‘not lose sight of an old servant’. Murad thus went off in resplendent
state, attended by noblemen and the advice of his father, first to Malwa,
then to Gujarat, and finally to the Deccan. Many ambitious members of the
ruling clans and soldiers joined him, believing him ‘superior to the other
princes in majesty and pomp’.
But twenty years in the presence of the charisma, power, and talent of
his father had not been conducive to fostering humility and wisdom in
Murad, and little by little his supporters grew disenchanted by ‘his bad
conduct in all relations of life, and court and ceremonial, and in his over-
weening pride and arrogance, in which he imitated his illustrious Father,
and which he carried beyond all conception, boasting of being a ripe grape
when he was not yet even an unripe grape…and it became known that all
that transient pomp and circumstance was caused by his ignorance rather
than his knowledge’.
As for Salim, remaining at court in Lahore, Munis Faruqui has shown
that he spent this decade slowly cultivating the friendships that his father
could not tolerate. In addition to Mirza Hakim’s supporters, whom he had
already befriended, he would continue to cultivate men from clans
considered quite unacceptable by Akbar—Afghan men like Shaikh Rukn
ud-din Rohilla and Pir Khan, of the Lodi dynasty; also men from the
Naqshbandi order of Sufis, whom Akbar had marginalized in favour of the
Chishtis. In this manner, Salim not only gradually gathered around him
influential men who owed their allegiance only to the prince but in doing so
undermined his father’s authority.
In other ways, however, Akbar and Salim seemed to share some
common enthusiasms, notably in fostering unconventional religious
practices. In 1590, learning that the Christians were celebrating the Feast of
the Assumption of the Virgin Mary, Akbar decided to hold a similar
celebration in Lahore. He had an elaborate throne made on which he placed
the picture of the Virgin Mary gifted to him by Acquaviva. He then asked
all his courtiers to show their respect to the image and kiss it but the
courtiers, no doubt used to the eccentricities of the court, first demanded
that Salim lead the way. This Salim did ‘at once and very willingly’,
followed by all the courtiers.
The following year, Lahore saw the arrival of the second Jesuit mission
at the Mughal court, Akbar having sent an invitation to the viceroy at Goa.
In his letter to the viceroy Akbar wrote that he wished ‘that they may
dispute with my doctors, and that I by comparing the knowledge and other
qualities displayed on either side, may be able to see the superiority of the
Fathers over my own learned men’.
The Jesuits left a heartfelt account of the difficulties they faced in
making the arduous passage from Cambay to Lahore. The journey, they
wrote, lay ‘mainly through deserts and dry, sandy tracts, where neither
springs nor streams are to be found, but only sand everywhere, which is
often lifted into the air by the wind, so that people are enveloped in it, and
sometimes buried for ever’. Due to the additional dangers of highway
bandits, the common folk and the poor often travelled in large caravans,
which the Jesuits have described:
…they choose a captain to lead and command their troop, which
often contains two or three thousand persons. That which the
Fathers joined consisted of four hundred camels, a hundred carts,
and as many horses, and there were besides many poor folk who
followed the others on foot…. When travelling by night, in order
that the people may not become separated from one another, the
drummers lead the way, beating their drums continuously.
The caravans halted along the way wherever wells were to be found, deep
wells from which water was raised through carts dragged by bullocks. And
so two priests, Father Edouard Leioton and Father Christofle de Vega,
arrived at the Mughal court in 1591, somewhat bedraggled, where the
Padshah greeted them effusively and lodged them within the palace itself.
He urged the Fathers to build a school and promised to send the sons of his
courtiers as well as a son and a grandson of his own to learn Portuguese.
But less exalted and, perhaps, more realistic than Father Acquaviva, these
two Jesuits realized ‘[Akbar] had no intention of making up his mind’ and
returned to Goa, ‘having accomplished nothing of what they had intended’.
Salim’s household was growing at this stage and his young son Khusrau
began his schooling at the age of four. Abu’l Fazl was appointed to ‘teach
him something every day’ while the rest of his education was left to the
charge of Abu’l Fazl’s younger brother, Abu’l Khair. In January 1592, a son
was born to Jagat Gosain, the daughter of Mota Raja. Akbar handed over
his grandchild to the care of his first wife, Ruqaiya Begum. Ruqaiya Begum
had remained childless these many decades after marrying Akbar at the age
of nine following the death of her father, Hindal. In Lahore, an astrologer
had predicted greatness for Jagat Gosain’s as yet unborn son and Ruqaiya
Begum had asked of Akbar the gift of raising a future Padshah. Mirza
Khurram* as he was named, was raised in Ruqaiya Begum’s care who,
Salim later wrote, ‘loved him a thousand times more than if he had been her
own’. Salim also noted that Khurram had the exclusive attention of his
grandfather, the Padshah, and ‘little by little as his years progressed real
potential was noticed in him. He served my exalted father more and better
than any of my sons and my father was very pleased with him and his
service. He always commended him to me. Many times he said “There is no
comparison between him and your other sons. I consider him my true son”.’
Salim may have found it galling that Akbar considered Khurram his true
son, given the increasing disappointment the Padshah expressed in his own
sons.
Khurram would remain in Ruqaiya Begum’s care until Akbar died and
Salim became Padshah Jahangir, when Khurram was thirteen years old. So
while Akbar may have been honouring Ruqaiya Begum by giving her what
she had requested, he was also demonstrating, yet again, the faith he had in
the senior Timurid matriarchs. Hamida Banu, Salima Sultan, Gulbadan, and
Ruqaiya were the ones who were often trusted with the care and education
of the Mughal children. And if many of them were now born of Rajput
mothers, their upbringing was strictly Timurid. It was these women who
surrounded them with the language, the etiquette, the food and the nuances
of culture that they were the guardians of.
All the major celebrations at court, the births and the marriages, were
also supervised by these senior women and it was Hamida Banu, helped by
the other matriarchs, who decided on the giving of gifts, the dances, the
decorations, and all the festivities as they became ever more elaborate. The
women had many occasions to admire and acquire new luxuries and
innovations, for Akbar, intensely curious about every new development,
created occasions for the women of the harem to enjoy these too:
On the third feast-day of every month, His Majesty holds a large
assembly for the purpose of inquiring into the many wonderful
things found in this world. The merchants of the age are eager to
attend, and lay out articles from all countries. The people of His
Majesty’s Harem come, and the women of other men are also
invited, and buying and selling is quite general. His Majesty uses
such days to select any articles which he wishes to buy or to fix the
prices of things, and thus add to his knowledge. His Majesty gives
to such days the name of Khushruz, or the joyful day, as they are a
source of much enjoyment.
♦
The highest-ranking noblemen of the court contributed to increasing the
visible glory of the court and empire. At this time, it was Akbar’s foster
brother, Zain Khan Koka, who begged of Akbar for a visit to his house. As
we have seen, a personal visit by the Padshah was the greatest honour that a
nobleman could hope for and when Akbar agreed to visit him, Zain Khan
Koka arranged for celebrations that matched in extravagance and exquisite
detail the magnitude of this honour. The homes of these elite noblemen
were themselves lavish, with gardens and water tanks and many apartments.
Often built of rubble and mud, they were covered with a white plaster that
was the envy of visiting Europeans. Dutch merchant Francisco Pelsaert has
described this plaster, of unslaked lime mixed with milk, gum and sugar,
applied on the walls with a trowel and polished until the walls shone like
mirrors. As the emperor and his retinue arrived, baskets filled with jewels
were presented as peshkash, in addition to elephants. An entire terrace was
covered with rare and expensive toosh shawls. Instead of water sprinklers,
Zain Khan Koka had the grounds of the courtyard sprayed with a syrup of
milk, sugar, and Yazd roses to settle the dust. Three tanks were dug in front
of the terrace—one filled with rose water from Yazd, one with water
coloured yellow with saffron, the third with argaja, a perfume. A thousand
courtesans were thrown into the tanks so that their fine garments were all
stained different colours.
By the end of the sixteenth century, these mansabdars of the Mughal
Empire were extremely wealthy men. According to one estimate, all the
officers together, some 1,671 persons, controlled 82 per cent of the net
revenue resources of the empire, with the top 25 mansabdars alone
accounting for 30 per cent.* As the noblemen of the Mughal court became
wealthier, they spent increasingly large amounts on charities, endowments,
and patronage, especially in their own parganas. Shaikh Farid Bukhari had
made a list of all the Sayyids of Gujarat and gave them money, met the
wedding expenses of their sons and daughters, provided subsistence to all
the residents of khanqahs and darweshes, † and looked after the widows of
all the men who died in his service. Mir Abul Qasim Arghun devised a
rather novel method for charity in Sind. He would have entire panels of
cloth hung from the branches of trees in the forest and would have herds of
horses, cows, and buffaloes released into them so that poorer folk could
help themselves to what they needed. Ram Das Kachhwaha donated money
to communities of Charans, bards, and courtesans— they could collect from
his cashier, a fixed amount annually.
Not all officers found that the life of a mansabdar suited them, however.
One Husamuddin, son of Ghazi Khan Badakshi, while on campaign with
Abdur Rahim and still a young man, decided that he wanted to become a
fakir and devote his life to the service of Nizamuddin Auliya. Though
Abdur Rahim tried to dissuade him, the young man ‘smeared his body over
with clay and mud and wandered about in the streets and bazaars’. ‡ Akbar
allowed him to resign his post and Husamuddin asked his wife, who was
the sister of Abu’l Fazl, to donate all her jewellery to dervishes.
While Akbar held court in Lahore, he sent Abdur Rahim to settle a
promising region that had not displayed the sort of submission that Akbar
required of his territories. The region of Sind was a rich land, famous for its
cotton and silk cloth, ivory work, wooden furniture, leather, palanquin and
chariot makers, salt-pits, and indigo. It had access to the sea, always an
important consideration as the Portuguese were in possession of Goa. Sind
had been controlled by relatives of the Mughals, the Tarkhans,* who had
even sent a daughter, Sindhi Begum, for Akbar to marry. But the Padshah
had refused the bride, as a clear indication of his disapproval at the way
Sind was being governed. So, in 1590, Abdur Rahim was sent to Sind
where he was able to overcome the stiff resistance of Mirza Jani Beg
Tarkhan, who was then obliged to appear at court and accept his position as
banda-i dargah (servant of the court). He was no longer to consider himself
an independent ruler, Akbar explained to Jani Beg, but a mansabdar of
3,000 of the Mughal court, and was given the subah of Multan in lieu of
Thatta. However, when reports reached Akbar that the entire Arghun clan of
Jani Beg, some 1,000 men, women, and children were boarding boats and
travelling in great distress to Jani Beg’s new subah, the Padshah relented
and reassigned Thatta to the Tarkhans. Akbar also accepted a daughter as
bride for Abdur Rahim’s son, Mirza Irij. Jani Beg, a talented poet who
wrote verses under the pen name of ‘Halimi’, went on to become a
favourite of Akbar’s, who was impressed by ‘his character, religious views,
pleasing manners and practical wisdom’, no doubt helped by the fact that
Jani Beg became a ‘murid’ of Akbar’s.†
But Akbar was altogether less pragmatic when it came to the happiness
of his family. In 1592, when his daughter Shakr un-Nisa fell gravely ill,
Akbar was unable to watch helplessly as death, his one, redoubtable foe,
stalked his beloved daughter. Abu’l Fazl confessed that Akbar suddenly
‘took a dislike to (Lahore)’ and decided to leave for Kashmir. He left in
such haste that he had crossed the river Ravi by the time news arrived that
his daughter had recovered and Akbar agreed to return to Lahore. Kashmir
continued to haunt him, however, and in July 1592, in ‘spite of clouds of
rain and the opposition of men’, Akbar set off once again for the valley of
Kashmir.
*Different sources differ as to the exact number of years, from two to ten years.
THE ROAD TO THE DECCAN
On a summer’s day in 1594, Akbar stood by the banks of the river Ravi
outside Lahore and witnessed a magnificent sight. A thousand men strained
at ropes and pulleys and, finally, a huge ship, more than 90 feet long,
lurched from the banks and into the river to the loud acclamation of all the
onlookers. This ship, an ocean-going vessel, had taken the labour of 240
carpenters and ironsmiths, and had required almost 3,000 planks of wood—
pine and sal—for its construction. After the sarkar of Thatta had become
part of the empire with the annexation of Sind, Akbar decided to make use
of its port, Bandar Lahiri. Since the region lacked good timber forests, the
emperor had had the ingenious idea of building ships in Lahore, which was
close to the Himalayan timber forests, and sailing the ships 650 miles south
through the Indus river systems to Bandar Lahiri and into the ocean. On this
occasion, the ship struggled in the waters of the Ravi, which were not deep
enough for a seaworthy craft. So Akbar then devised the idea of an
enormous barge upon which the next ship was loaded and floated down the
river to the port. Once at the port, the barge was scuttled and the ship
slipped easily into the sea. Through this contraption Akbar anticipated by a
hundred years the ‘camel’ invented in the dockyards of the Netherlands in
1688, which was a submersible barge that floated ships over the shallows.
This ship was to have been the first of a fleet of ocean-worthy ships—but as
the Mughal court moved away from Lahore, these plans did not materialize.
It is often believed that the Mughals had no interest in a navy but the large
river fleet and the extraordinary experiment with this ship from Lahore
show that this was not so.
Akbar’s keen interest in new technology had led to a number of
innovations, as we have seen, especially in gun-making, cannon, and water
contraptions. This fascination was understood by all visitors, who strove to
capture the Padshah’s interest by presenting new, unusual things to him.
When the Raja of Kumaon arrived at Lahore, much to Badauni’s contempt,
for ‘he had never, nor his father or grandfather before him (God’s curse be
on them) seen an Emperor even in imagination’, he brought animals from
his hill country that amazed the Mughal courtiers. He brought a yak and a
musk-deer and rumours flew ‘that there were men in that country who had
wings and feathers and could fly’. The Portuguese viceroy of Ormuz
brought two ostriches, who ‘treated pieces of stone as if they were fruits’.
It was at this time that Akbar created a new genealogical seal, whose
popularity would spread far beyond the Mughal Empire and would later be
copied in the seal of the sultans of Sumatra. This seal was, according to
scholar Annabel Teh Gallop, ‘a masterpiece of imperial symbolism’. A
potent symbol of Mughal power and legitimacy, this ‘orbital’ seal had the
name of the reigning emperor in the middle, surrounded by smaller circles
containing the names of his ancestors up to Timur. The seal was engraved
by the master engraver, Maulana Ali Ahmad ‘Nishani’, who was a friend of
Badauni’s. His engraving skills were the least of his talents, according to
Badauni, who praised his learning in ‘astronomy and natural history’. So
saintly and exceptional was Nishani considered to be that his dies were
carried as talismans by courtiers travelling abroad, to Khurasan and
Transoxiana.
Even as the ostriches and yaks roamed in uneasy proximity with
cheetahs and elephants, Akbar was busy arranging two weddings which
were indirectly a rebuke and a punishment for Salim. Akbar and his eldest
son had been involved in an unspoken imperial tussle over the allegiance of
key mansabdars and allies of the court. As we have seen earlier, Salim had
been actively courting the support of men considered louche and unreliable
by Akbar. Angered by Salim’s jostling for power by nurturing these
dangerous and unworthy friendships, Akbar now retaliated by removing
two significant voices of support for Salim from within the royal harem.
Salim’s sisters, Shakr un-Nisa Begum and Khanum Sultan Begum, were
devoted to their brother and the coterie of women from within the harem
thus exercised a considerable influence in favour of Salim. Now Akbar
married them to Timurid cousins—men with pretensions to independent
power themselves. These ambitious men would never tolerate being vassals
to the prince’s cause and in this way Salim lost the powerful support of his
two sisters.
Akbar added another grain of worry for Salim when he openly began to
favour the prince’s own sons over their father. When Khusrau was seven
years old, and had just begun learning ‘Indian philosophy’ under one Shiv
Dutt Brahman, he was appointed to a rank of 5,000, equal with high-
ranking amirs of the empire such as Raja Man Singh and Mirza Aziz Koka.
Further, Akbar allowed Khusrau to use the financial resources of the
province of Orissa, and appointed the powerful Raja Man Singh as his
ataliq. Salim’s younger son, Khurram, who had been brought up by Ruqaiya
Begum and the Padshah, only ever referred to his father as ‘Shah Bhai’, or
older brother, thereby introducing a worrying degree of equality in their
dynamic. Another grandson, Mirza Rustam, the son of Murad, was said to
listen to the council of neither father nor mother, so ruled was he by his
grandfather. Indeed, the Padshah declared in open court that he ‘loved
grandchildren more than sons’. These developments were a direct challenge
to Salim and his brothers, demonstrating to the heir apparent and to the
royal mirzas that there were other potential candidates to the Mughal
throne.
The 1590s had proved to be a decade of consolidation for the Mughal
Empire. In his fifties, Akbar was at the peak of his powers. After a decade
in Lahore, Kashmir had been incorporated into the empire and the north-
west frontier had been secured through the conquest of Sind and would
cause no further trouble for the rest of the Padshah’s reign. Similarly, the
eastern frontier had been stabilized largely through the heroic efforts of
Raja Man Singh. With Bihar secured to the empire, Raja Man Singh had
turned to the neighbouring state of Orissa in 1590. Orissa had been ruled by
an Afghan family of the Lohani tribe but Raja Man Singh was able to force
Nasir Khan Afghan into submission and 150 elephants were part of the
large tribute offered by the Afghans when they accepted Mughal
supremacy. They also ceded the temple of Lord Jagannath at Puri, a
powerful symbol of the Orissa rulers. The Afghans would offer some
further resistance but would be conclusively beaten by Raja Man Singh in
1592. The last of the rebellions in Gujarat had been crushed as well. Now
with a huge contingent of 1,823 mansabdars, with the capacity to raise
141,000 cavalrymen, the Padshah looked southwards to that most alluring
of places—the Deccan.
In 1527, the Bahmani sultanate had fragmented into the five Deccani
sultanates of Ahmadnagar, Berar, Bijapur, Bidar, and Golconda, making the
region a great deal more politically volatile, as Persian Shias jousted with
Afghan Sunnis and local shaikhzadas for dominance. In addition, there was
Khandesh, with its capital at Burhanpur, a prickly buffer between the
northern territories and the Deccan. When succession struggles began in
Ahmadnagar in 1588, a younger sibling, Burhan Shah, fled to the Mughal
court for assistance. Burhan Shah successfully claimed the Ahmadnagar
throne in 1591 and re-styled himself Sultan Burhan Nizam Shah II but then
resisted all efforts by Mughal ambassadors, including Faizi, to submit to
Akbar, allowing Abu’l Fazl the opportunity of an irritated rant against him:
When Burhan al-Mulk prevailed over Ahmadnagar, he should have
increased his devotion and gratitude, and been an example of
obedience to other rulers in that quarter. The wine of success robbed
him of his sense, and he forgot the varied favours he had received
from the Shahinshah.
Fortuitously for the Mughals, Burhan Shah died in 1595, leading to a
fractious and unstable environment, which Akbar was now ready to exploit.
He directed Mirza Murad to proceed from Gujarat to Ahmadnagar. En route
to Ahmadnagar Murad met some Jesuit priests at Surat, heading in the
opposite direction. This was the third Jesuit mission summoned by Akbar.
The mission included three handpicked Jesuits and was headed by Father
Jerome Xavier, an older man and a grandnephew of Saint Francis, a man of
‘enthusiastic asceticism’ who would spend twenty-three years at the
Mughal court ‘sometimes in favour, sometimes in prison’. There was also
Father Emmanuel Pignero, and a coadjutor* called Benoist Goes who had
‘lived a somewhat dissipated life’ and joined the mission ‘in consequence
of some youthful escapade’.
Murad summoned the Jesuits to his travelling camp where he received
them in impressive state in his grand war tent, reclining on a takht. All his
attendants, wrote the Jesuits, ‘were standing as silent as statues with their
eyes fixed on him’. Murad was gracious and informal with the three men
and asked them ‘if there was snow or ice in Portugal, and whether bears,
hares and other wild animals were to be found there, or birds of the chase,
such as falcons and hawks’. Satisfied with the answers he received, the
twenty-five-year-old mirza insisted the Jesuits accept some money and then
mounted an elephant, from which he jumped onto a much larger one,
‘which seemed like a tower’. He was accompanied by 4,000–5,000
horsemen, 400 elephants, 40 dromedaries, 4,000 bullocks and 15 large
pieces of cannon. ‘He went to this war,’ agreed the Jesuits, ‘with good
courage, and with great hopes of gaining possession of the kingdom of the
Deccan. But as he was as yet inexperienced, and as he allowed himself to
be guided by the young, paying no attention to the counsels of his elders,
his actions were not of the wisest.’ They went on to write that though ‘by
nature mild, kind, liberal and good-tempered’, his entourage of youthful
retainers ‘had corrupted him’, and so ‘his sole pleasure was in the chase, in
love-making and in running hither and thither’.
At the Mughal court, meanwhile, the situation remained turbulent and
precarious between the two remaining princes. It was at this time that
Daniyal was caught up one night in a most mysterious ruckus. Abu’l Fazl
writes about an incident in which due to ‘some carelessness on the part of
the sentinels’, an intruder managed to infiltrate into the royal harem.
Daniyal saw a ‘madman’, threw him to the ground and tussled with the
man, creating a huge uproar which attracted all the female guards, the
‘Circassians, Qalmaqs, Russians and Abyssinians’. Akbar himself rushed
upon the men and ‘thinking that the prince was a stranger’, seized him by
the hair and was about to kill him with his sword when he realized that it
was his own son. The intruder was judged to be a lunatic, and allowed to
leave. This incident leaves many questions unanswered, primarily because
of the near impossibility of a ‘lunatic’ being able to stumble upon the
closely guarded imperial harem. Fifty men carrying torches were assigned
simply to patrol the riverbank, day and night, to ensure no intruder could
scale the fort walls to enter the palace. Moreover, if Daniyal had been in the
harem officially, there would have been no reason for the guards not to
recognize him, and immediately assault him as a stranger, nor for his father
to attack him. Almost immediately following this incident, Daniyal’s
marriage was arranged with the daughter of the powerful courtier, Qulij
Khan, and he was then dispatched to deal with the insufficiently submissive
Burhan Shah.
This incident, during which it would appear that Daniyal had slipped
into the royal harem unannounced, may lie at the heart of the famous
Anarkali myth. The first mention of this possibly fictitious but enormously
popular Anarkali was by the English traveller, William Finch, who came to
Lahore in 1608. He claimed that Anarkali was the mother of Daniyal, and
that Salim had had an improper relationship with her, causing Akbar to have
her walled up alive in a fit of jealousy. The heartbroken Salim, when he
became Padshah Jahangir, continued the story, would then have a tomb built
for Anarkali in Lahore. There were, however, no further accounts of this
story either in the Persian histories, or by foreign travellers over the next
200 years, nor indeed by Jahangir himself in his remarkably frank memoir.
This did not prevent the myth from taking a tenacious hold on the
imagination and enduring through the centuries to the present day.*
From the few glimpses that Abu’l Fazl allows, it appears not impossible
that it was Daniyal who was involved in some indiscretion in the admittedly
large imperial harem, for which Akbar then tried to remove him from the
court. One might even surmise that if Daniyal did, in fact, arrange for a
clandestine meeting in the harem it may even possibly have been with an
influential sister or matriarch to gauge the support he had in an increasingly
unforgiving battle for supremacy between Salim and his siblings. By having
him married to the daughter of the extremely powerful Qulij Khan, Akbar
may even have been bolstering his younger son’s ambitions vis-a-vis Salim.
By the time William Finch arrived at Lahore, Daniyal was long dead and it
was Jahangir, as Prince Salim, that the popular imagination would
remember as having tussled with Padshah Akbar. And, as with all bazaar
gossip and European fantasies, the tussle was presumed to have been over
sexual liaisons and the story was conflated to make of Salim the hero of the
Anarkali saga.
Daniyal, however, was proving very resistant to the idea of marching to
the Deccan. Along with Abdur Rahim, the khankhanan, who had been
assigned to the mission, the men dithered at Sirhind, citing inclement
weather conditions, till Akbar, irritated and impatient, recalled the prince to
court. It was decided, moreover, that with Murad already in the region, it
would perhaps prove impossible to have both the brothers leading the
expedition, exacerbating rivalries.
At the court in Lahore the mood was sombre as Faizi was dying, at the
age of only forty-eight. One night Akbar went to visit the poet and held the
dying man’s head in his lap and tried to revive him. ‘O Shaikh Ji,’ said
Akbar, broken-hearted, ‘I have brought Hakim Ali with me, why do you say
nothing?’ Receiving no answer, Akbar in his despair flung his turban on the
ground but Faizi was beyond the help of the courtly physicians, and even
the prayers of the Padshah, and passed away from complications brought on
by the asthma he had suffered from throughout his life. Badauni’s
cantankerous assessment of his death was that ‘since he had, in despite of
Musalmans, associated and been mixed up with dogs day and night, they
say that at the moment of death they heard him bark like a dog’. These
words, noted down in Badauni’s covertly written account, are all the more
graceless because Faizi had been unfailingly kind to the temperamental
scholar. When Badauni had fallen from Akbar’s favour yet again due to a
prolonged absence from court a few years previously, Faizi had written an
eloquent and sympathetic appeal to the Padshah. ‘He is not avaricious,’
wrote Faizi about Badauni, ‘has a contented mind, is not vacillating, is
truthful, straightforward, respectful, unambitious, humble-spirited, meek,
moderate in his requests and entirely devoid of the dissimulation so
common at court, and entirely faithful and devoted to the Imperial Court.’
About his death, Badauni wrote that Faizi left behind 4,600 ‘valuable
bound books all corrected’, that became part of the Padshah’s collection.
Akbar had them catalogued in three sections— the first section had ‘books
of verse, medicine, astrology and music, the middle place to works on
philosophy, religious mysticism, astronomy and geometry, and the lowest
place to commentaries, the traditions, books on theology and all other
subjects connected with the sacred law’.
Badauni would not long outlive Faizi. He died the following year,
probably in 1596, having completed his memoir in which he wrote of all the
bitterness and misery which had stalked his life, and of the Padshah of
whom he had had such high hopes and who so disappointed Badauni by not
being the great Islamic leader he wanted him to be.
The last year of Badauni’s life would no doubt have been made even
more miserable by the presence of the third Jesuit mission at Lahore. The
Fathers wrote with joy about the sincere affection with which both Akbar
and Salim greeted them, embracing the men when they arrived at court.
Akbar gave them lodgings in a large house close to the riverbank, under the
windows of the palace, and far from the noisy distractions of the town. The
night after their arrival, Akbar summoned the Jesuits and showed them the
various holy images of Christ and the Virgin Mary which earlier missions
had given him. Akbar was holding the paintings, wrote the Jesuits, ‘as
reverently as though he had been a Christian’. Seeing the holy pictures the
Jesuits immediately fell upon their knees following which the little
grandson of the king also knelt down and clasped his hands together. This
was the young Khusrau, and Akbar was greatly pleased by his behaviour
and turned to Salim and said, ‘Look at your son.’ Salim was extremely
cordial with the Jesuits, helping them locate a suitable house within the
royal grounds and showing enthusiasm for their religious activities. On a
particularly sweltering day in summer, he sent the Jesuits a precious box of
snow, as a mark of particular favour.
Akbar lent to the Jesuits the European books that he had acquired over
the years. The books included the works of Pope Sylvester, of Cardinal
Cajetan, the Chronicles of Saint Francis, the History of the Popes, the Laws
of Portugal, the Commentaries of Alfonso Albuquerque, the works of Saint
Ignatius, and a Latin Grammar book. Fragments of European books
travelled extensively through Hindustan at this time, sometimes finding
themselves in unusual surroundings. The Jesuits wrote of a Hindu raja in
1648 who was a proud possessor of a brightly illumined Portuguese book,
which he had fondly hoped contained the secrets of alchemy. When the
Fathers explained that it was a holy book, it caused, not altogether
surprisingly, ‘great disappointment’.
At court, too, Akbar showed the Jesuits exceptional kindness,
sometimes making them share the royal takht with him. They noticed with
pleasure that Akbar sometimes wore a reliquary around his neck, suspended
by a gold chain, which had on ‘one side of it an Agnus Dei, and on the other
an image of our Lady’. The Jesuits described a court which had altered and
become more rigid since the time the bemused Persian merchant Rafiuddin
had struggled to distinguish the young and debonair Padshah from his
clamouring youthful companions many decades earlier. Now the courtiers
and amirs maintained a respectful distance and an attentive posture before
the Padshah; where they stood in court depended on their rank. All officers,
unless specifically exempted, were to be present at court. The greatest
punishment for an amir was to be forbidden attendance at the darbar of the
Padshah. At the darbar, the more elegant among the amirs stood with the
fingertips of the left hand touching their right elbow or vice versa, and they
sometimes also crossed the right foot over the left, with the toes of the right
foot lightly touching the ground. When Muzaffar Hussain Mirza* arrived at
court to surrender Kandahar in 1595, he prostrated himself several times
before the Mughal Padshah before inching his way forward on the carpet
and placing his head at Akbar’s feet. Many of the new measures had been
devised by Akbar in order to curtail his ambitious and wealthy courtiers by
ensuring suitable deference.
The treasures now being offered to Akbar were dazzling. Although
Kandahar was but a small city, it was a wealthy one as it was on the main
trade route between India and Persia. Its fortress would serve as an
excellent frontier base, making the Mughal Empire a truly Asian one.
Muzaffar Hussain Mirza also presented the Padshah a pair of swords,
girdles of gold set in precious stones, a pair of golden vases, a horse with a
saddle set in gold and rubies, 150 more horses, fifty camels and four carpets
‘each of which was worth 2000 crowns’.
At the same time, the Subedar of Bengal sent 300 elephants. This was
no ordinary courtier, but Raja Man Singh himself, who had been transferred
from Bihar to Bengal in 1594. He had recently concluded a successful
expedition against Kedar Rai of Jessore, whose tutelary deity he had seized.
Man Singh had seen the image of Sila Mata in a dream, floating underwater.
He interpreted this omen as a divine order to seize Kedar Rai’s black stone
idol of Sila Mata and build a temple for it. Man Singh would bring back the
idol with him when he returned to Amer in 1608 where he would have it
ceremoniously installed at a small, north-facing temple in Amer palace
where it remains to this day, a symbol of Kachhwaha victory. Thus Man
Singh expertly denied Kedar Rai not only his own natal territory but also
his protective goddess. To ensure that the goddess continued to be
worshipped the way she used to be, and presumably so that she would
transfer her blessings to Man Singh, he brought back ten Brahmin priests
from Jessore to Amer, where they served the goddess with daily blood
sacrifices; descendants of these priests were recorded in Amer till the
twentieth century. This episode explains the significant and rather
surprising Bengali population of Jaipur.
Man Singh shifted the capital of Bengal away from Tanda, site of
Munim Khan’s disastrous and plague-ridden campaign. The new site Man
Singh had chosen was strategically significant. It was the site, long guarded
by the Gaur Sultans, considered the ancient pass to Bengal, today in a city
called Rajmahal, in present day Bihar. It was also the place where Akbar’s
forces had defeated the last Afghan ruler of Bengal, finally anchoring this
site as a Mughal stronghold. When Man Singh first proposed the name
Rajnagar for the site, clearly after himself, Akbar was not convinced and
ordered the city renamed Akbarnagar, showing the limits of even a
powerful mansabdar’s prerogative. Today, only Mughal texts contain the
name Akbarnagar while the populace still refers to the site as Rajmahal, in
stubborn recognition of their charismatic Rajput patron. Man Singh also
built a Mughal Jami mosque in Akbarnagar. Local traditions claim Man
Singh wished to build a temple, but Akbar ordered him to build a mosque
which would better suit the requirements of this distant and troublesome
outpost. If that was the case, then the raja, undaunted, ‘accepted this order
with enthusiasm’ writes Catherine Asher, for it was the largest mosque ever
built by a non-imperial patron.
During the Nauroz festival at the court at Lahore, meanwhile, the amirs
jostled to outdo each other in the extravagance of their presents, with one
courtier giving Akbar a present ‘worth at least 500,000 crowns’.
It was at about this time that Akbar brought in the dual rank of zat and
sawar for mansabdars. Bowing to the reality that the mansabdars never did
keep the complete muster required by their mansab, Akbar allowed for both
the stipulated, as well as a lesser number. The zat rank corresponded to the
personal pay and status of a nobleman, and the sawar rank was the actual
number of horsemen he needed to maintain. So a mansabdar of 5,000 zat
and 2,500 sawar had a rank of 5,000 but was actually only required to
maintain 2,500 horsemen. Only Mughal and Rajput noblemen were allowed
to employ horsemen solely from their own ethnic group. All others were
required to keep mixed contingents. The high-ranked noblemen were paid
generously and men came from across the empire, and from overseas, to try
and obtain the best posts. At the turn of the seventeenth century, according
to French missionary Pierre du Jarric, there were 2,941 mansabdars holding
ranks from 10 to 5,000. Of these, some 150 noblemen held ranks of 2,500
or above, and these were the men, carefully selected for their talent and
skill, who held all the important military and civil posts.
It was at this time that Akbar encouraged the Jesuits to build a church,
though when the Jesuits asked for a written order to the effect, the Padshah
answered with sudden sharpness that he himself was a living document and
so his word was sufficient. According to the astounded Fathers, Akbar had
‘banished the sect of Mahomet from this country; so that in the town of
Lahore there is not now a single mosque’. Every Friday, he ‘has brought
before him forty or fifty boars which are provoked to fight with one
another; and he has their tusks mounted in gold’. Badauni had despaired
that ‘ceasing to consider swine and dogs as unclean, he kept them in the
haram and under the fort’. Akbar had brought in these many innovations in
his spirit of reasoning, attempting to demonstrate the irrationality of blind
beliefs. But to orthodox Muslims, these would have been horrifying and
deeply disturbing trends.
One day in March of 1596, the Jesuits looked across the Ravi from their
riverside residence and were alarmed to see a dishevelled congregation of
yogis on the opposite bank, huddled in groups of ten and twenty to keep
warm in the cold air. They were told that these yogis gathered in this
manner every year, begging for alms. Akbar, his courtiers, and the Jesuits
crossed the Ravi to speak with the yogis, the noblemen in their silks, jewels,
and soft woollen shawls presenting a glittering contrast to the yogis in their
drab rags. After spending a few days in companionable discussions, the
yogis ‘scattered and left as quickly as they had come’.
The Jesuits were thoroughly confounded by what Akbar was, or
considered himself to be. ‘[O]ne does not know for certain what law he
follows. For though he is certainly not a Mahometan, as his actions show
plainly enough, and though he seems to incline more to the superstitions of
the Pagans, Gentiles (Hindus) being more welcome at his court than
Mahometans, he cannot be called an Ethnique (Hindu), for he adores and
recognises the true God, the maker of heaven and earth, and yet, at the same
time, he worships the sun.’ They had noticed, of course, that Akbar began
his day by worshipping the sun, repeating ‘as many as a thousand and fifty
names’ of the sun, using a japmala made of precious stones.
This very personal search of the Padshah’s for a divine truth above all
the sectarian differences that convulsed his empire would perplex the
Jesuits, who saw in this a sign of weakness or, even more worryingly,
delusion. For they noted that ‘it is more or less certain that he has a strong
desire to be looked upon, and esteemed as a God, or some great Prophet’.
Unlike the rigid protocol at court, they said, as had others before them, that
Akbar allowed throngs of lesser folk to approach him, many of whom
believed that the Padshah could perform miracles, ‘healing the sick with the
water with which he washes his feet’. Young women ‘pay vows to him to
get their children cured, or that they may have children. And if these things
come to pass, they bring him offerings as to a saint, which, though they may
be of little worth, are willingly received and highly valued by him.’ The
Jesuits were possibly unaware of the ideas of sacred kingship in which the
ruler was a legitimate source of divine power—in neighbouring Persia,
kings had sought to add heft to their claims by taking on semi-divine and
Sufi-tinged auras.
Perhaps the Jesuits would have found some explanation for Akbar’s
enthusiastic adoption of Christian, Jain, and Hindu practices had they read
his letter of advice to Shah Abbas II of Persia the year before. ‘It must be
considered that the Divine mercy attaches itself to every form of creed,’
wrote Akbar, ‘and supreme exertions must be made to bring oneself into the
ever vernal flower-garden of “peace with all”. …Hence it is fitting that
kings, who are the shadow of Divinity, should not cast away this principle.
For, the Creator has given this sublime order (that of kings) for the
discipline and guardianship of all mankind, so that they may watch over the
honour and reputation of every class.’
The Jesuits of the third mission, like those before them, would be fatally
beguiled by the possibility of the Padshah’s conversion and would remain at
court for decades, into the reign of Jahangir. The Jesuits in the sixteenth
century, like the observers in the twenty-first century, would fail to gauge
the unfathomable depths of Akbar’s faith.
*The lure of the fabled cities beyond the Khyber Pass would remain an enduring Mughal obsession.
*The Sisodiyas of Mewar were the last Rajputs still resisting Mughal authority.
FRONTIER LANDS
At the age of nearly sixty, Akbar was still a force of nature, the wounds
from a lifetime of battles soldered together by his iron will and robust
health. To his sons and his soldiers he appeared indestructible, for no sign
of weakness was ever allowed to show. The army that Akbar rode in front
of was just as formidable as the Padshah. It would have included hundreds
of camel guns and many thousand rockets, in addition to conventional
artillery, muskets, and archers. ‘The lumbering siege trains of the
stereotypical “Gunpowder Empire,” tethered to a few gigantic cannon, were
nowhere in evidence.’ Despite the rough and unknown nature of the
countryside as they marched to the Deccan, the Mughal army was able to
move huge numbers of soldiers almost seamlessly across the country
because of the extensive and detailed organization of its supplies and
equipment. An additional tax was levied on all agricultural holdings, the
proceeds of which were used to stock thanas* throughout the empire. These
could be mobilized in times of famine but, more often, were used to supply
rations for the travelling army. Manufactured goods required for the army,
such as weapons and ammunitions, were made in kar khanas. A great deal
of the provisions were carried with the army, organized by the mir bakawal.
In addition, ready cash was carried to pay for all supplies that would need to
be bought along the way. Armies were accompanied by merchants, who
sold commodities, and bankers, like the Marwaris in Bengal, who
sometimes advanced money to the governor of campaigns to be able to
finance the battles. The existence of immense mobile encampments meant
that the troops did not have to forage, plunder, or requisition quarters in
villages along the way, the entire army being provided for and moving en
bloc.
The size of the army was meant to serve as a deterrent to all those who
contemplated resistance. The sharp end of the fighting was being carried
out by Daniyal, and his substantial but smaller forces. Having subdued
Ahmadnagar, the prince travelled first through Khandesh, and arrived at the
capital, Burhanpur, where there were ominous signs that the Raja of
Burhanpur, Bahadur Shah, supposedly an ally of the Mughals, was not in a
sufficiently conciliatory frame of mind. Bahadur Shah did not send a
message of condolence to the Mughal prince on the death of his brother, as
would have been expected, nor did he come down from his imposing
fortress at Asirgarh to receive Daniyal. Unimpressed with this behaviour,
Daniyal proposed attacking Bahadur Shah immediately but Akbar, waiting
with the bulk of the imperial forces at Ujjain, forbade him from doing so
and decided to march to Burhanpur himself.
The erosion of Bahadur Shah’s amity towards the Mughals had occurred
because of the tragic fate of his father, Raja Ali Khan of Khandesh. With his
small kingdom of Khandesh surrounded by powerful neighbours such as
Gujarat, Malwa, Ahmadnagar and then, the Mughals, Ali Khan had had to
play a dangerous and constantly evolving game of brinkmanship between
these various parties. Torn between his allegiance to the Deccani cause, and
the pragmatic reality of Mughal might, the raja finally decided to help the
Mughals during one of their battles against Chand Sultan and died fighting
for the Mughals. Unfortunately for Khandesh, though, the Mughals were
unaware of the raja’s sacrifice. As his body lay unclaimed on the sodden
battlefield, the Mughals decided that his sudden disappearance signalled
traitorous abdication to the Deccani faction, and plundered and looted his
camp and possessions. When his body was discovered among the fallen,
‘the evil-thoughted and the foolish talkers were ashamed’, scolded Abu’l
Fazl. The Mughals restored the raja’s banners and kettledrums hurriedly and
buried his body with full honours in Burhanpur. But the damage had been
done and the raja’s son, Bahadur Shah, now seethed at the idea of
submission to Akbar.
News of Bahadur Shah’s defiance had been conveyed to Akbar through
Abu’l Fazl, whom the Padshah had summoned to Ujjain from Ahmadnagar.
Pleased to see his old friend after an unusually long absence, Akbar raised
Abu’l Fazl to a mansab of 5,000 so that this loyal but often maligned and
criticized courtier could write with satisfaction of his critics that ‘many sate
down in the blackness of envy’.
Akbar, Abu’l Fazl, and the Mughal travelling camp now left Ujjain, and
made their way south, cutting a path through the hills of the Satpura range.
The accompanying Jesuit priests struggled to maintain their routine of
prayers in this ‘confusion worse than Babylon’ but thanks to a ‘portable
church’, they reassured their readers of being able to celebrate mass
satisfactorily while on the road. When they reached Burhanpur, Akbar sent
a succession of emissaries to Bahadur Shah to convince him of the wisdom
in submitting to the Padshah. But Bahadur Shah sent unsatisfactory gifts of
‘four inferior elephants’ and did not come from the Asirgarh fortress in
person to pay obeisance.
Abu’l Fazl was sent out to guard the frontiers of Khandesh by setting up
military posts throughout the kingdom. Soon all of Khandesh, apart from
the fort of Asirgarh, was Mughal territory. Abu’l Fazl was accompanied in
his campaign by his son, Abdur Rahman, and his brother, Abu’l Barkat.
During his Deccan campaigns, Abu’l Fazl seemed to grow into the full
extent of his expansive, generous, and surprisingly worldly nature. It had
always been his habit, on the day of the Islamic new year, to make a
detailed inventory of his household items and to give away all his clothes to
his servants, apart from his payjamas which he had burnt in his presence.
Now, in the Deccan, ‘his arrangements and establishments’, wrote the
author of the Maasir ul-Umara, ‘were beyond anything that could be
imagined’. He had a large tent pitched in which was a divan for the shaikh,
and every day 1,000 plates of food were cooked and distributed among the
officers. Outside the tent was a canopy, within which khichdi was cooked
all day long for any soldier or hungry person who presented themselves.
Abu’l Fazl himself, we are told, ‘had a wonderful appetite’, with an
impressive daily intake of almost 20 kilograms of food, not including water
and broth. His son, Abdur Rahman, waited upon his father while he ate,
while the superintendent of his kitchen stood by. Whichever dish Abu’l Fazl
served himself from a second time would be cooked again the following
day. If any dish was not to his liking, he wordlessly passed it along to
Abdur Rahman, who would then taste it and upbraid the cook accordingly.
While Abu’l Fazl’s arrangements were particularly grand, they were not
exceptional. All the prominent Mughal mansabdars prided themselves on
their establishments when they were travelling to war. Islam Khan Chishti,
a foster brother of Salim and Subedar of Bengal, kept an austere diet of
millet, vegetables, spinach, and dry rice, but ordered for his soldiers the
preparation of 1,000 trays of the best quality food daily. Many employed a
variety of cooks—Persian, Turani, Kashmiri, and European, with Brahmins
employed to cook separately for the Hindu soldiers. Foot soldiers, naturally,
often made do with a drastically simpler diet, as noted by a later traveller:
The horseman as well as the infantry soldier supports himself with a
little flour kneaded with water and black sugar, of which they make
small balls, and in the evening…they make khichari, which consists
of rice cooked with grain…in water with a little salt.
While Akbar remained at the Mughal stronghold of Burhanpur 20
kilometres away, Abu’l Fazl prepared to besiege Bahadur Shah at Asirgarh
Fort. This fort was Bahadur Shah’s ‘chief stronghold’, wrote the Jesuits,
‘which on account of its site, and as possessing every other feature that
could render a fortress strong, appeared to be impregnable, being placed on
a high mountain five leagues in circuit and surrounded by three concentric
lines of fortifications…. Besides water from a living well, there was within
the fort sufficient wood, vegetables and other provisions to support for
many years the 70,000 soldiers who defended it. It was fortified with 3,000
pieces of artillery, most of which were so large that the noise of their
discharge was like terrific thunder.’ Safe in the embrace of this forbidding
fortress, Bahadur Shah girded himself for war.
In the early stages of the siege of Asirgarh, Akbar suffered a debilitating
loss, away from the battlefield. Jiji Anaga, who had travelled with the army,
as had the rest of the harem, ‘died after much suffering’ and Akbar was
inconsolable. He shaved his head and his moustache in a sign of grief, the
first time in his life he was recorded as doing so. Though he expressly
forbade it, all his servants followed their Padshah, united in their grief for
one of the grand old ladies of the harem who had followed every step of
Akbar’s turbulent life with selfless love. Even ‘while old’, agreed Abu’l
Fazl, ‘she had a youthful mind. She was very well-disposed, and gracious of
heart.’ Akbar carried her bier on his shoulders for part of the way to her
temporary grave. Jiji Anaga would later be buried next to her husband in a
jewel-like tomb called Ataka Khan’s tomb near Nizamuddin Auliya’s
dargah, as Delhi became crowded with the ghosts of the matriarchs of the
Mughal Empire. Even today Delhi sparkles with the memory of the singular
destiny of Jiji Anaga’s family. There is her daughter Mah Banu’s tomb,
known today as Abdur Rahim’s tomb; there is Ataka Khan and Jiji Anaga’s
tomb, and there is her son Mirza Aziz Koka’s Chausath Khamba, all within
1 kilometre of each other with at their spinning heart the holy presence of
Nizamuddin Auliya’s dargah.
Mirza Aziz Koka and Shaikh Farid joined Abu’l Fazl in the attack on
Asirgarh Fort. Almost immediately, a number of officials from within the
fort quietly defected. In May 1600, Bahadur Shah pretended to sue for
peace by sending to the Mughal camp his mother and young son, along with
sixty elephants and the offer of a bride for Khusrau. But these offers were
understood by Akbar for what they were—delaying tactics while the
garrison wore down the Mughal forces by attrition. Instead, Akbar
countered with a diplomatic move, summoning an officer from Agra who
was also the grandson of Raja Ali Khan. In the presence of this member of
the Khandesh royal family, a number of the Deccani officers capitulated.
The resistance of Asirgarh, however, stuttered wearily along. As the
neighbouring forts fell, Ahmadnagar and Maligarh amongst others,
survivors crowded into Asirgarh, until it was crammed with about 34,000
people. The overstretched resources of the fort began to crumble and
eventually led to an epidemic within the fort, eroding even further the
morale of the defending garrison. Asirgarh Fort was already packed with
royal prisoners, for it was the custom to imprison all other pretenders to the
throne apart from the reigning monarch, and seven princes of the Faruqui
dynasty were imprisoned at the time. Bribery was resorted to on both sides,
to undermine the strength of the resistance, and to convince vacillating
parties to desert. By this stage of empire formation, diplomacy, bribery, and
intimidation were commonly resorted to because the Mughal military
capability was so formidable that those ranged against it often preferred to
avoid war. Bahadur Shah was a notable exception.
At one point, Akbar decided to use siege guns, but very few had been
brought along with the Mughal army since it had not been thought likely
that Bahadur Shah would refuse to submit. The details of the final fall of
Asirgarh remain obscure, as there were contradictory reports written by the
Jesuits and the Muslim chroniclers. Bahadur Shah, demoralized by the
conditions within the fort and uncertain of the loyalty of his officers, finally
submitted to Akbar in December 1600 and agreed to appear before him,
accompanied by the Ethiopian officer, Muqarrib Khan. Akbar accepted this
surrender and effectively placed Bahadur Shah under arrest, and then asked
him to write a letter to the garrison, which was still holding out under the
leadership of Muqarrib Khan’s father, Yaqut Khan. But Yaqut Khan,
valorous till the end, was furious with his son for having brought such a
letter to the fort. Unable to bear the humiliation of his father’s
disappointment, Muqarrib Khan committed suicide. The elderly Yaqut
Khan then tried to hustle one of the Faruqui princes in the fort into taking
up the leadership of Asirgarh but with the tents of the mighty Mughal
travelling camp snapping in the wind on the scorched battlefield outside the
fort, the princes demurred. Disgusted by how low nobility had fallen, Yaqut
Khan decided that such a faithless world was not for him. He retired to his
haveli within the fort to bathe, pray in his mosque, and prepare his shroud.
Having set his worldly affairs in order, Yaqut Khan swallowed a large
quantity of opium and lay down to die.
In January 1601, after a debilitating siege of ten months, the keys of the
fort were finally handed over to Akbar, and Bahadur Shah was imprisoned
and sent with his family to Gwalior Fort, to join the young Nizam Shah of
Ahmadnagar while all the other officers and soldiers were pardoned.
Daniyal was received at Ahmadnagar in April 1601 and was given the
kingdom of Khandesh, which was renamed Dandesh in his honour. The
Deccan plateau would become the base for the subsequent thrust of the
Mughals into the south. But that would be a task for Akbar’s descendants,
for the Padshah himself had more pressing and personal problems to attend
to. The enemy, it transpired, had been nurtured in the very heart of the
empire. Away in the north, in the city of Allahabad, Shaikhu Baba had
pronounced himself Shah Salim, an incendiary and most traitorous claim.
*Supply depots.
THE ART OF REBELLION
When Akbar had directed Salim to proceed to Mewar at the time of the
imperial campaigns in the Deccan, his eldest son did not do as he was
ordered. He remained instead at Ajmer where ‘from self-indulgence, wine
drinking and bad company’ he prevaricated and contemplated his future
course of action. The prince was now in his thirties and was beginning to
slide away from his youthful good looks. As he gave in to all kinds of
indulgences, in food, in wine, and in opium, his square chin would sag into
jowly folds, and his gorgeously patterned silk robes would stretch
alarmingly over his increasing girth. His body wasn’t the only thing about
him that had languished, so had his certitude of becoming Padshah. Most
worrying was the fact that his growing sons were being openly favoured by
Akbar. The teenaged Khusrau, now a high mansab of 10,000, was further
bolstered by the support of the powerful courtiers Mirza Aziz Koka and
Raja Man Singh, through ties of marriage and blood.* With Akbar showing
no signs of slowing down, Salim must have despaired of ever ruling
Hindustan.
Munis Faruqui has pointed out that Ajmer, right in the centre of the
Mughal Empire, was an important city geographically, straddling major
trade routes and commanding access to ‘both seasonal military labour and
the riches of a thriving pastoral economy, especially horses and camels’.
However, Ajmer’s significance radiated well beyond its location and
economic heft. In choosing to make his stand there, Salim must have
recalled the legends of the fervour and joy surrounding his own birth,
mediated by Shaikh Salim himself, and celebrated with joy and gratitude by
Akbar. Ajmer, which for the entire duration of Salim’s boyhood, had been
the sacred destination of Akbar’s yearly pilgrimages.
Having decided to revolt in the middle of the year 1600, with Akbar and
the army far away in the Deccan, Salim made an unconvincing attempt to
march upon the treasury at Agra. When he crossed the Yamuna and reached
the outskirts of Agra, Hamida Banu, who was in Fatehpur Sikri, heard of
her beloved grandson’s erratic and suspicious behaviour. Determined to
confront him, and bring him to his senses, the old lady rode out of Fatehpur
Sikri to meet Salim. The prince, unable to bear her questioning gaze,
hurriedly sailed away on the Yamuna back to Ajmer while Hamida Banu,
heartbroken, returned to the city. Akbar had also sent instructions to his
officers at Agra to guard the city against the prince and its massive gates
had been slammed shut, its stone walls bristling with heavily armed
soldiers.
Salim now made the decision to proceed to Allahabad where ‘he seized
people’s fiefs, took possession of the Bihar treasury…and gave himself the
title of emperor’. For the next four years, from 1600–1604, Salim set
himself up almost as an independent ruler in Allahabad with a parallel
court, having the khutba read in his name, appointing officers, distributing
titles, and giving himself the appellation ‘Shah’. The city that Salim had
chosen as his refuge was no ordinary one. Built at the Triveni Sangam, the
holy confluence of the Ganga, Yamuna, and Saraswati, this was a most
sacred place. It was the favoured destination of those who were at the
opposite end of the spectrum from the jewelled and mannered officers of
Salim’s court—the sadhus and yogis of Hindustan.
At first, Akbar did not appear unduly perturbed by this denouement,
preferring to send the officer and painter Muhammad Sharif to reason with
the prince. But Muhammad Sharif, the son of the painter Abd al-Samad,
had grown up with Salim in Lahore. The two young boys had haunted
Akbar’s ateliers, equally enchanted by the magic of the crystal colours and
the exquisite and supple forms bleeding life into the folios. In Allahabad,
therefore, Salim quickly convinced Muhammad Sharif to join his own
fledgling court. For Salim, this would have been a further act of conscious
provocation and rebellion as Muhammad Sharif was no ordinary artist and
officer. He was the son of the founder of Akbar’s taswir khana—one of the
two men to have trained all the future artists of Hindustan. With his
impeccable Persian lineage, and his father’s association with Humayun,
Muhammad Sharif added heft to Salim’s claim to Timurid rule.
♦
A digression would be in order here to deepen our understanding of Salim,
the man who would eventually succeed Akbar as the Padshah Jahangir.
Overshadowed by Akbar, he has come across as a rather unprepossessing
figure and the only area in which he rivalled and even outdid his father was,
as we have noted briefly, in the patronizing of artists and creation of art. In
his entourage Salim already had a number of artists including the Persian
Aqa Riza but also some of the younger Mughal artists, the sons and
nephews of some of the grandmasters of Akbar’s court such as Manohar,
the son of one of Akbar’s favourite artists Basawan, and Govardhan, the son
of Bhavani Das. There were also Mansur, Nadira Banu, Mirza Ghulam,
Nanha, Bishen Das, and Quli, as also the calligrapher Mir Abdullah, and the
illuminator, Lutfullah. Indeed, the most successful aspect of Salim’s
rebellion was possibly the wordless challenge he extended to his father
through the luminous works of arts created at Allahabad.
One of the very first paintings created at Salim’s court was eloquent in
its symbolism. Created by Manohar and Mansur, this striking work, called
‘Prince Salim Enthroned’, showed no diffidence whatsoever in plainly
painting the prince as a powerful monarch. It was painted in a style that
self-consciously distanced itself from Akbar’s court’s Hindustani melange
of vibrancy, dynamism, and colour. Moreover, whereas Akbar was always
painted in the midst of historical moments teeming with animals and
people, in this portrait Salim is conspicuously, and grandiosely, alone upon
an elaborate throne. The painting itself is in a ‘deliberately flat, ornamental,
Persianate style’ completely at odds with Akbar’s Hindustani style, and art
historian Milo Beach has pointed out that it also anticipates a number of
spectacular portrait series painted after Salim had become Jahangir. This
was an altogether different idea of kingship than that embraced by Akbar’s
paintings. In the Akbarnama paintings, the figure of Akbar is no doubt
surrounded by a respectful space but the Padshah is always swept up and
surrounded by other actors. Moreover, the painters of the Akbarnama gave
as much tender attention to a dying animal’s fear or a submissive courtier’s
contrition as to the Padshah himself. Salim, however, is remote,
untouchable, and unfathomable, his majesty is distancing and awe-
inspiring. Ironically, with his long, straight nose, his square jaw, and his
almond-shaped eyes, it is Salim who is shown, almost inadvertently, as the
unmistakable result of a Timurid–Hindustani alliance.
The apparatus of kingship in the image ‘Prince Salim Enthroned’ is
unmistakable. About the massive and intricately carved coronation throne,
Kavita Singh writes that Salim ‘was likely to have been delighted by this
elaborate and outsize royal seat whose gold and lapis lazuli ornamentation
perhaps mimicked on paper the materials that may have adorned the rebel
prince’s actual bejeweled throne’. There were minute and potent symbols in
the image, ‘the lion victorious in hunt, the mythical simurgh, and the falcon
that soars close to the sun, all indicating the greatness of the occupant’.
Understatement, for Salim, was not an option. If the image was eloquent
enough then the verses surrounding the painting made their intent even
more undeniable:
In the time of the lion-capturing prince… In a year when the
treasure-bestowing prince rode his steed out to chastise the Rana
(the artist) Manohar, who with a stroke of his princely-approved pen
would cause sperm to take shape in the womb, drew a likeness of a
king as glorious as Jamshid. Mansur’s brush worked on it (also).
Now…without error seek the year from (the words) ‘likeness of the
emperor’.
The chronogram* from the painting dates it to 1601, a time when this
‘Emperor’ was definitely de trop, for the kingdom already had a Padshah,
and Salim’s claim was therefore treasonous.
Salim’s pointed patronage of the Persianate style at the time of his
rebellion can be seen in a work of prodigious scope and imagination—the
Muraqqa-e Gulshan, or the Gulshan Album. † Kavita Singh has described
the album as ‘primarily an archival project that was designed to bring
together rare and precious works on paper, including calligraphy, paintings,
drawings and engravings’. These works had probably been accumulated in
the imperial library through generations of Timurid rulers, as individual
folios and documents. Salim began collecting these documents from the
time he was at Akbar’s court, many of them dating from the time of
Humayun and before, thus allowing the prince to reach back in time and
claim a legacy that bypassed his father’s. At the atelier in Allahabad these
folios were not just randomly put together but carefully and imaginatively
assembled to demonstrate historicity, story-telling, inventiveness, and craft,
much in the manner of a modern-day museum curator. Since these pages of
calligraphy and paintings were of different sizes, the folios in the album had
to be large, and so the empty spaces in the margins around the works were
filled with images drawn by the painters of Salim’s nascent studio. The
paintings in the margins of this album are marvellous worlds within worlds.
In them, birds tumble through the sepia pages, flowers bloom, men and
women toil and labour at various tasks, muscles straining, faces grimacing,
giving us a unique insight into everyday life in the seventeenth century.
There are noblemen and courtiers, fantastical animals and domesticated
ones, jostling and heaving with vitality. And all the pages are limned with
gold, giving the album its original name, the Muraqqa-e-Zarr-Negar, the
Album of Golden Beauty.
That Salim was using Persianate aesthetics primarily to oppose Akbar’s
own sensibility is clear from the fact that after he became emperor, he
unceremoniously put aside both the style and the painter Aqa Riza. While
Aqa Riza continued to work on the Gulshan Album, it was his son, the
young Abu’l Hasan, who would become one of Salim’s favourites. There is
a portrait of Abu’l Hasan by Daulat, which depicts him as an intense young
painter, hunched inches away from his drawing board, frowning in
complete absorption. The young Abu’l Hasan quickly mastered European
techniques, using a style unprecedented in Mughal India, according to Milo
Beach. This incorporation of European techniques into Mughal art was
what would fascinate Salim once he became Padshah Jahangir. He quickly
lost interest in the flat Persianate style and enthusiastically began
patronizing artists such as Abu’l Hasan. About this young artist Jahangir
would write in his memoirs that ‘[Abu’l Hasan’s] work is beyond
comparison in any way to his father’s. They cannot even be mentioned in
the same breath… He is truly a rarity of the age.’
Despite his intense and life-long interest in paintings, Salim would
maintain all his life a froideur towards the great art produced at Akbar’s
court, perhaps as a silent admission that art was the only field in which he
considered himself equal to his illustrious father. As pointed out by
historian John Seyller, when Salim inherited his father’s enormous imperial
library, he made numerous notes on the margins of books praising the
calligraphy or the art but he never once singled out any work from Akbar’s
ateliers, despite the presence of hundreds of such paintings.*
In understanding the way in which Salim manipulated artistic
techniques to suit his political purposes, it becomes clear that the evolution
of Mughal art did not follow a simple, linear pattern from Persian
stylization to European naturalism. Scholars had earlier viewed this as a
criticism of Mughal art, and cavilled about its inability to truly ‘master’
European techniques and remaining somewhat naïve in its use. Instead, art
historians like Kavita Singh have shown that Mughal artists and patrons had
a much more nuanced and flexible relationship to art styles and techniques,
using different forms with virtuosity and creativity as it suited them,
unhindered by a European notion of a unified style over time. ‘Stylistic
hybridity,’ writes Singh, ‘was a pervasive device in Indian painting and was
the result of a conscious, willful, and self-reflexive choice.’ Indeed, painters
could, and did, use a variety of styles even within a single painting.
The scale and nascent ambition of the works undertaken by Salim’s
taswir khana at Allahabad are an indication of the changes that occurred in
this city during the five years of the prince’s rebellion. He introduced
courtly culture into the region, and extended the influence of the Mughal
Empire by bringing the area between Patna in the east and Kannauj in the
west firmly within his power. Salim’s court became a haven for officers
who were disaffected with service within either Akbar’s court, or Daniyal’s,
and talented men such as Abu’l Hasan Mashhadi and Khan Jahan Lodi
joined the prince’s entourage. As Munis Faruqui has explained it, princely
rebellion and competition brought about after ending the appanage system
thus actually helped in consolidating Mughal influence. It made the princes
work harder at forming lasting alliances and helped spread Mughal culture
into sub-imperial regions. The impact may have created minor tremors from
time to time but made the Mughal Empire stronger and more dynamic, for
in the end, whether it was Salim or Akbar who emerged victorious, it was
always going to be Mughal power that benefitted.
As news of Salim’s rebellion grew more insistent Akbar decided,
somewhat reluctantly, to return to his capital. The Mughal army left the
Deccan in April 1601 but, outside Ujjain, Akbar made a detour to visit a
hermit who had begun to gather a potent reputation for asceticism and
wisdom. This was the hermit referred to by Jahangir in his memoirs as
Jadrup, identified by Moosvi as one Chitrarupa, a Nagar Brahmin from
Gujarat. According to the detailed description left by Jahangir, Chitrarupa
lived in a tiny pit dug out of a hill, where he lived in complete darkness and
solitude. ‘He spends his time alone in that dark narrow hole,’ wrote
Jahangir admiringly. ‘In winter and cold weather, although he is absolutely
naked and has no clothing except a piece of rag with which he covers
himself in front and behind, he never lights a fire.’ Chitrarupa only left his
cave to bathe in a river and to go once a day to a chosen Brahmin’s house in
Ujjain where he contented himself with eating five morsels of food, which
he swallowed hurriedly so as to derive no enjoyment from it. Of his
philosophy, Jahangir wrote that he ‘had excellently mastered the science of
(Vedanta), which is the science of tasawwuf ’, through which statement
Jahangir shows that he regarded Muslim mysticism as a pantheistic doctrine
similar to Vedanta. About Akbar’s visit in 1601, Jahangir wrote that ‘he
often mentioned it with fondness’. Akbar finally reached Fatehpur Sikri in
August 1601 where he spent eleven days in the company of his mother and
Salima Sultan Begum before moving to Agra.
Akbar was accompanied back to Agra by the two Jesuit priests, Xavier
and Pignero, who began immediately and persistently petitioning the
Padshah for a written farman stating that he allowed his subjects the
freedom to convert to Christianity. When the Jesuits presented themselves
to Akbar in the palace at Agra, they found the Padshah surrounded by some
150 dishes full of gold pieces, which he had had made. Having examined
the coins, he had them tied up in bags and deposited in the treasury. Agra
Fort and all its elites were now sparkling with the lustre of what would
become a Mughal obsession—precious stones. The royal kar khanas now
included a bustling jewellery department, and unusual and beautiful stones
from all corners of the empire were sent to Agra where they would be cut,
polished, and mounted and sent to court where they were used for
adornment. The Padshah and his courtiers wore them as turban decorations,
necklaces, earrings, armbands, bracelets, rings and to decorate the hilt of
swords and patkas. Akbar gave them as gifts to favoured courtiers, and to
his wives, and distributed them to the poor on the occasion of his tuladan or
that of his sons’. The stones were found everywhere…
on royal thrones encrusted with rubies, emeralds, and diamonds; on
the walls and ceilings of the imperial buildings, which gleam with
inlaid jade, amethyst, turquoise and mother of pearl.
The Jesuits brought with them presents which were quite as valuable in
Akbar’s eyes: two paintings, one a portrait of Albuquerque, and the other of
the Portuguese Viceroy, Ayres de Saldagna, which the Padshah was very
pleased with. Akbar listened to the Jesuits’ request and granted their wish
for a written farman and ‘for some days little else was talked of at the court’
wrote the Jesuits, ‘for never before had such a dispensation been granted in
a (Muslim) country’. The most vociferous voice of opposition was that of
Mirza Aziz Koka and uneasy rumours slipped along the corridors of the
palace to the effect that Akbar was no longer a practising Muslim.
The Padshah asked the priests to translate into Persian the story of the
life of Christ, which Pignero was able to do. Called the Mirat al-Quds (The
Mirror of Purity), the book was full of the miracles and teachings of Christ,
which Akbar enjoyed listening to. It was Mirza Aziz Koka who was usually
asked to read the book aloud to the Padshah, and the mirza, despite his
opposition to the farman, was so pleased with the book that he asked the
priests for a copy for himself. Some of the other Muslim courtiers were
more cynical, and scoffed that Christ’s miracles were due to his excellent
skills as a physician, rather than his miraculous powers. But what caused
the greatest interest at court, and in the city, was a painting, a copy of the
‘miraculous’ Virgin of Santa Maria del Popolo, said to have been painted by
the evangelist St Luke.
The Jesuits had obtained this image two years previously but had dared
not exhibit it earlier because they were altogether too aware of the
Padshah’s voracious appetite for European paintings, and feared he would
requisition it. Now, in January 1601, they exhibited their precious painting,
more than 5 feet tall, in their makeshift chapel and the effect it had on the
city was electrifying. People left their shops and their work to rush to the
chapel and by the evening there was a jostling throng of more than 2,000 in
the streets outside the chapel. With a fine flair for the dramatic, the Jesuits
placed the image on the altar between two tall lighted candles and covered
it with two veils. When the people saw the painting of a pale, moon-faced,
melancholic Virgin pointing towards the child Jesus, who stared directly out
of it, they were affected, said the Jesuits, ‘in a manner that was wholly
miraculous’. By the third day, the mullahs and the noblemen were rushing
to see the image as well. This set off a deluge of people clamouring to view
the image, ‘people of every sort and quality’, and those who would have
‘deemed it discreditable to enter a Christian church’ so that soon daily
attendance had exceeded 10,000. It was not long, naturally, before Akbar
heard about the image and asked for it to be brought to the palace. This the
Jesuits did in the middle of the night, so as not to cause any commotion.
They carried the image, draped and veiled as before, and presented it to the
Padshah in his private quarters. Akbar came down from his throne and
bowed low to the image, calling forward all his noblemen to approach the
painting too. The Padshah told the Jesuits pointedly that his father,
Humayun, would have greatly appreciated such an image if it had been
presented to him but the Jesuits feigned sudden deafness and turned the
conversation to other matters. Nonetheless, the Jesuits agreed to leave the
painting in the palace overnight so that Akbar might show it to his wives
and daughters, while telling them about the story of the Virgin Mary. All the
ladies, Hindu and Muslim, came to see the image in the morning and were
similarly pleased with it. On another occasion, Akbar asked for the image
because the elderly Hamida Banu had asked to see it too. Akbar carried it in
his arms into her quarters himself, and called for his wives and children to
see it again.
Finally, having understood perhaps that the Jesuits would not relinquish
the image to him, Akbar asked to borrow the painting so his artists could
study it. He called for all the best artists in the city, placed the image in a
well-lit position, and commanded his painters to make copies of it. As many
Hindu and Muslim courtiers were in attendance, the Jesuits seized the
opportunity to talk to them all day about the mysteries of their faith.
Though the courtiers usually regarded ‘with great contempt’ all that related
to Christianity, this time, wrote the Jesuits, the Muslims were ‘willing
listeners… and seemed to be pleased at what they heard’. Perhaps what the
Muslim noblemen were best pleased at was that the Jesuits could now speak
perfectly in Persian. Having struggled for many years with the language
barrier, Father Xavier was now fluent in Persian, having spent years
learning the language. Akbar had urged one of the Jesuits years ago to learn
Persian, and advised them that a mastery of the language would ‘loose a
great knot that now held him bound’. By 1601 Xavier was fluent enough
‘that the Persians themselves take pleasure in hearing him talk and all but
admire the propriety of his vocabulary and the choiceness of his diction’.
They were also much pleased with the particular accent he imparted to
Persian words.
After the Padshah had kept the painting a few days, the Jesuits were
obliged to part with their beloved painting twice more, to men of the
highest standing in the land, one of whom was Mirza Aziz Koka. Aziz
petitioned the Jesuits for the image so that his wives and daughters and
daughters-in-law would have a chance to see the blessed Virgin and so these
women, who had journeyed all the way to Mecca, were now able to gaze
upon a holy Christian icon. This supremely urbane and cultured courtier
then returned the painting, and sent his highest officer to the thoroughly
unsettled Jesuits ‘to assure them that his services were at all times at their
disposal’. He offered to pay the Jesuits whatever sum they asked for to buy
the painting, even going so far as to express an interest in ‘the mystery of
this Lady’. Aziz’s acute interest in European books and paintings despite
his scathing religious indictment of their faith should have given the Jesuits
a premonition about the ultimately doomed nature of their evangelical
quest. In the multi-cultural Mughal court art, no matter the imagery, reigned
supreme.
As for the image itself, it was yet again in the field of art that it would
have the most palpable and long-lasting effect. The naturalism and sense of
perspective that Mughal artists studied through European paintings in
Akbar’s, and then later in Jahangir’s court, would be adapted by them in
innovative and creative ways. The ‘harvest of heathens’ that the Jesuits had
fondly dreamed of in Hindustan would remain, at least in the Mughal
courts, only a mirage. ‘In the conversion of souls,’ admitted the Jesuits
ruefully, ‘there was not so much progress in this land of the (Muslims) who
are hard as diamonds to work upon, as in other lands where this sect has not
taken root.’ It might have helped if the Jesuits, with their obdurate and
almost fanatical hatred of other religions, had been able to look within
themselves for reasons for their failure. When the diplomatic son of
Muzaffar Hussain Mirza of Badakhshan conversationally asked them what
they thought of Prophet Muhammad, ‘the Father told him that we regard
him as one of the greatest imposters that ever entered the world’.
Over the next few months, missives fizzed between Agra and
Allahabad, as Akbar tried to reason with his son and understand the cause
of his dissatisfaction. In March 1602, Salim intimated that he wanted to
visit his father but Akbar decided that his petition ‘did not possess the glory
of sincerity’ and refused his son’s request. Ominously, news reached the
capital that Salim was headed towards Agra at the head of 30,000 horses,
1,000 elephants, and 2,000 boats. This was no longer an entourage, but an
army. By the time Salim had reached Etawah, 100 kilometres from Agra,
Akbar sent him an ice-cold message. The prince was either to present
himself unattended to his father, else ‘his peace and prosperity lay in
returning to Allahabad’. Unable to countenance disobeying a direct order
from the Padshah, Salim turned around.
One who was assiduously written out of the records was Harkha Bai. It
is impossible to know what this Rajput queen felt about this relentless battle
between her husband, the Padshah, and her son, Salim, since both Persian
and Rajput records are silent on this matter. And the records would remain
silent until the time her son became emperor. Up until 1605 she remains
elusive, like a half-forgotten dream. But the story of a Mughal Padshah and
a Rajput rani proved irresistible to the twentieth century, however, and it
was mythologized in the famous Jodha–Akbar movie of 2008, the legend
proving a great deal more enduring than gritty reality.
From Allahabad Salim then continued his attempts to reconcile with his
father, exploring the idea of presenting himself at court. But Akbar
remained unconvinced of the sincerity of the prince and decided to send for
someone whose counsel and loyalty was beyond reproach. Abu’l Fazl was
given orders to proceed to the court at Agra immediately, leaving his
soldiers with his son in the Deccan. Responding to the Padshah’s summons,
Abu’l Fazl began to make his journey north with a small retinue but his
path, from the Deccan to Agra, was to lead him through Bundelkhand, the
territory of a certain ‘highway robber’ who had been waiting for ten years
to challenge the cards that fate had dealt him.
*Steel bows were an Indian invention—less flexible than the composite bow, but more durable, and
not prone to warping and splitting in India’s hot and humid climate.
*This also, not inconsequentially, led to England being released from Papal edicts forbidding trade
with Muslim nations.
†The East India Company was founded in 1599.
DEATH OF AN EMPEROR
In 1605, the Mughal court at Agra found itself with an excess of pretenders
to one of the richest empires in history. The Mughal Empire was now
greater in size than any previous Indian kingdom bar the Mauryan Empire
of nearly two millennia previously, far larger than any contemporary
European kingdom, and was rivalled only by China. It included much of
modern-day Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, including the cities of
Kandahar, Kabul, and Dhaka. It contained Kashmir and southern Kumaon,
and stretched upto Bengal, along the line of the Himalayas. In the Deccan,
Khandesh and Ahmadnagar were part of the empire and Berar was about to
be incorporated too. Up to a million people lived within it. A hundred
metric tons of silver flowed every year into the empire, brought in by
Europeans buying manufactured goods and natural resources from
Hindustan, which accounted for about a quarter of all global manufacturing.
The Mughal emperor, with an annual income estimated at 100 million
pounds* was by far the richest ruler in the world. An army of 300,000 men
defended the empire’s frontiers while an additional four million infantry
could be mobilized when required. This glittering empire, moreover, had
been carefully reconfigured as an indivisible entity, to be inherited by a
single, chosen heir. No longer would brothers be equal co-rulers, with lands
of their own. This was now an empire worth fighting and dying for.
With Daniyal dying in March 1605, Akbar had only one living son
remaining but, importantly, he had two grandsons. Akbar had always
favoured Salim’s younger son, Khurram, finding in him an heir true to his
own talents and ambition. In this the Padshah showed himself an excellent
judge of character, as Khurram would go on to become Shah Jahan, most
magnificent of all the Mughals of Hindustan. But in 1605, it was eighteen-
year-old Khusrau who was a legitimate contender for the throne, an
alternative for those who had serious doubts about the temperamental,
cruel, and volatile Salim.
With his own father still living, Khusrau’s pretensions to rule should
never have been a possibility at all. Tall and elegant like his father, but with
his Rajput mother’s large eyes and pleasantly regular features, Khusrau’s
challenge was suddenly made alarming for Salim by the support of two
powerful noblemen. Mirza Aziz Koka, Khusrau’s father-in-law, was already
present at court, long rehabilitated since his wanderings in Mecca. Now, in
August 1605, Raja Man Singh arrived at court from his subah in Bengal and
Akbar raised his mansab to 7,000, previously reserved only for princes of
the royal blood. For a while, Man Singh was the highest mansabdar of the
land, Hindu or Muslim. His grandson Maha Singh had also been raised to a
mansab of 2,000. Man Singh was the maternal uncle of Khusrau and now
the prince had the backing of the two most powerful and influential
noblemen of the empire. The fifty-five-year-old Man Singh, barrel-shaped
and eternal like the forbidding stone fortresses he liked to build, had earned
for himself something of a fearsome reputation. All the mansabdars of the
empire used amils, officers who were appointed to collect revenue on their
behalf from their jagirs. Man Singh, it was said, almost never had to remove
or transfer an amil but if anyone happened to complain about one of his
officers, the ‘poor fellow’s house was given to plunder and taken over and
with his neck tied he was thrown over the Rohtas Kalan fort. The transfer of
the amils was the termination of their life and wealth.’
Even though the raja had spent decades away from the court, his
informers would have kept him updated about the unravelling relationship
between Akbar and Salim, and he would have been confident of the
Padshah’s support for Khusrau as his heir. The raja now tried to have Salim
removed from the court by suggesting to Akbar that he be appointed to take
over as Subedar of Bengal. But Salim, long accustomed to playing these
deadly games at court, refused to move and leave the field open for
Khusrau.
These simmering tensions were suddenly exposed in all their raw
violence, aberrantly, during an elephant fight. Akbar had arranged for a
fight between Chanchal, Ibrahim Adil Shah II’s elephant newly arrived
from the Deccan, and Giranbar, Salim’s elephant. Salim and Khusrau were
watching the fight seated on their horses while Akbar was looking down
from the jharoka window, young Khurram seated next to him. While the
two animals were crashing into each other and raising fine yellow dust, the
servants of Salim and Khusrau got into a bitter fight, and ‘both overstepped
the bounds of courtesy’. A group of Salim’s unruly servants threw stones at
the imperial elephant-keepers, striking one of them on the forehead and
wounding him. Akbar was furious at the behaviour of his heirs, no doubt
exacerbated by the thought that they were now openly and shamelessly
fighting for the throne while he himself was still very much alive. He sent
Khurram down from the fort with a message for Salim: ‘Shah Baba (Akbar)
says this elephant bout is yours. What is the reason for violence and
immoderation?’ Salim pleaded ignorance in the matter and the elephants
were finally cooled down by driving them into the placid waters of the
Yamuna. The insolence of Salim and his servants’ behaviour seemed to
deeply wound the Padshah.
At the age of sixty-three, Akbar’s iron will and his grasp on the affairs
of state were finally slackening after almost half a century of rule, his
indefatigable and elemental strength suddenly undone. Miniatures depicting
him at this time show that his hair had turned white, his expression
melancholic, almost resigned. In October of the year, as the summer heat
finally resolved itself into a golden light, and the champa trees flowered in
the gardens, Akbar fell ill with a stomach complaint. He called his
physician, Hakim Ali Gilani, and the hakim, not unwisely, told the Padshah
to fast for a day before trying any medicines. The next day, a simple broth
without ghee was advised but Akbar felt very weak and retired to the
zenana quarters. Khurram tended to his grandfather tirelessly for the entire
length of his illness. For ten days no treatment was attempted as the
physicians argued among themselves about the best possible remedy to
administer to their exalted patient. Weak and debilitated, Akbar continued
to present himself for darshan at the jharoka window, as the nobility and
townsfolk struggled to think the unthinkable—that the Padshah might be
coming to the end of his days. Akbar continued to issue orders by dictating
hukms to his writers but, after ten days, a fever began to rage in the
Padshah’s weakened body. As the physicians decided on who should treat
the emperor, probably terrified of doing more harm than good at this critical
stage, Akbar favoured Hakim Ali. ‘We have trusted our person to Hakim
Ali,’ he said. ‘Let him do what he thinks right.’
In the midst of this maelstrom of suspicion and distrust, the thirteen-
year-old Khurram demonstrated an unshakeable resolve, remarkable in
someone so young. Khurram was, at this age, a smooth-faced boy with his
father’s long, straight nose and the large eyes and arched eyebrows of
Rajput miniatures. ‘Prince Khurram stood his ground in the midst of
enemies and malevolents,’ wrote an admiring Salim, ‘and refused to leave
his grandfather. Although his mother sent numerous messages telling him
that it was not prudent to remain where he was in such a time of turmoil and
unrest, he remained firm and refused to leave.’ It is easy to imagine Jagat
Gosain’s concern for the well-being of her son. She had been separated
from him all his life, as he had been entrusted to Ruqaiya Begum. Now, as
the possibility of reclaiming him became a reality at last, his life appeared
to be in danger. Rumours of poisonings and assassinations spread among
the courtiers and the townsfolk, and people began distancing themselves
from the dying Padshah. Khurram was commanded to present himself
before his parents, which he did, but then told them ‘as long as there is a
breath of life left in my grandfather, there is no possibility of my being
separated from him’.
Raja Man Singh, meanwhile, continued in his efforts to eliminate Salim
as a contender for the throne. He tried to have the prince arrested when
Salim came by boat to Agra Fort but, alerted, Salim was able to evade his
would-be captors and sailed back down the Yamuna to his haveli. The raja
then gathered the powerful noblemen at court within one of the halls of the
palace and made an impassioned speech asking them to support Khusrau
against his violent and unpredictable father. But the other nobles demurred,
led by Sayyid Khan Baraha, who had long been a supporter of Salim, and
Shaikh Farid, the mir bakshi. They said, among other things, ‘that to give
the throne to a son during the lifetime of his father was not in keeping with
tradition, particularly the canons and customs of the Chagtai clan from
which the Mughal royal family was descended’.
Day by day Akbar’s health continued to fail. Hakim Ali’s medicines
worsened his condition and the Padshah was finally unable to rise from his
bed, even to attend the daily darshan. It was at this stage that the Jesuits
went to see Akbar, hoping for a deathbed renunciation of all his religious
wrongs and a final acceptance of Christianity. As they entered his chambers
they were convinced that they would find the emperor moribund, penitent,
keen to make his peace with Jesus Christ and embrace the Lord. ‘But they
found him,’ they wrote in amazement, ‘amongst his captains, and in so
cheerful and merry a mood, that they deemed the time unsuitable for
speaking to him of the end of his life, and decided to await another
opportunity. They came away, fully persuaded that he was making good
progress, and that rumour, as ordinarily happens when kings are sick, had
exaggerated the seriousness of his malady.’
But the emperor was dying and it was only his supreme will that
enabled him to engage with his men and his courtiers as he lay on his
sickbed. Man Singh in desperation now attempted to seize the treasury of
Agra but Ram Das Kachhwaha had posted his Rajput soldiers to defend it,
and once again Man Singh was foiled. The raja accepted that he had failed
in his mission to secure the throne for Khusrau and prepared his boats to
sail away from Agra to Bengal the following morning, along with his
nephew.
All this while, Salim had been shut up in his quarters outside the fort,
paralysed by fear and uncertainty. He debated the idea of meeting his father,
although he was certain that he would be accused of poisoning him. He was
enraged by reports of the attempt to place Khusrau on the throne, and
suspected everyone around him of treachery and malice. Finally, triumphant
news arrived in Salim’s quarters of the decision of the nobles. Shaikh Farid
soon arrived, along with the Sayyids of Baraha, and many other courtiers to
assure the prince of their support. All they asked of Salim, according to
possibly suspect reports by the Jesuits, was that he be a true guardian of
Islam, and that he not punish his sons or those who had supported them, and
this the prince agreed to do. As news spread of this momentous decision,
people streamed into Salim’s house, eager to align themselves to his
ascending star. A crestfallen and abashed Mirza Aziz Koka too appeared,
late in the evening, greatly ashamed, but Salim was magnanimous with him
now that the Mughal throne was finally within reach. Assured of the safety
of his nephew, Man Singh, too, would bring Khusrau back to his father.
The next day, Salim presented himself at last to his dying father. Akbar
opened his eyes and gestured for Salim to be given the imperial turban,
robes, and dagger. Salim then performed the sijda, prostrating himself on
the floor one last time to lay his head at his father’s feet. Seeing that his
father was quite beyond speech, Salim hustled his son Khurram out of Agra
Fort and took him back with him to his own palace.
In the waning day of Tuesday, 26 October, with the premonition of
winter in the cooling air, the world shrank around Padshah Akbar. All his
great noblemen had died, or had left him, sensing the dawn of a new age.
Some had quit brazenly, others had melted quietly away, all of them
distancing themselves from the aura of death. It was the turn of Hakim Ali
to desert, fearing the wrath of the harem and he hurried to join Shaikh
Farid. Akbar’s great taswir khanas were still, the artists dispersed. Some
would join the next emperor but many would be dismissed, left to peddle
their wares in the bazaars and markets of the kingdom. Some would join the
households of the great amirs of the empire like Abdur Rahim, Aziz Koka,
Bahadur Khan Uzbek, and also Raja Man Singh, Raja Bir Singh Budela,
Rao Surjan Singh Hara of Bundi, Rana Amar Singh of Udaipur as well as
the rulers of Jaisalmer, Jodhpur, and Bikaner. According to art historian
Asok Kumar Das, ‘these rulers constructed new palaces in their respective
capitals, borrowing heavily from Mughal architectural features, like
elaborate murals on the inner walls of chambers and halls and decorations
on the dados, facades and chhajas. Traces of these are still visible in the
forts and palaces of Amer, Orchha, Datia and Bundi and on the garden
pavilion of Bairat and in some havelis in Rajasthan, Haryana, Punjab and
Madhya Pradesh.’ Akbar had dreamed of a new Hindustani identity,
merging local painting idioms with a Persian one. This luminous Mughal
identity would slowly sweep back into the provincial courts, brightening up
local styles like a comet trail of light.
As the Padshah began to slip away, the last of the imperial workshops
grew quiet, and the noise of construction ceased. Only the animals
remained: the lumbering elephants, the watchful cheetahs, and the loving
dogs. The harem remained, too, and a small coterie of attendants, faithful to
the last. The Jesuits had again tried one last time to visit with the Padshah
but had been turned away by the noblemen guarding the fort. The Jesuits
maintained that the attendants were trying to remind the dying emperor of
the need to utter Prophet Muhammad’s name, but that he had made no sign
of assent, though Akbar tried to whisper the name of God. What they may
have been doing, however, was quietly muttering the kalima. ‘In the end,’
wrote the Jesuits, for fear of the Padshah ‘neither [Muslims] nor [Hindus]
nor Christians would claim him as theirs, so that he had the prayers of
none.’
At the other end of the city, in Salim’s palace, there was a great clamour.
The raucous crowds of men were loud in their congratulations and frenzied
in their attempts to carve out a place for themselves in the new order. The
drummers began a deafening, frenetic beat but Salim quickly silenced them,
so as not to disturb the peace of his father’s last night with such obscene
joy. The world knew the Padshah had died when a long, aching lamentation
spilled out from the women’s quarters in the middle of the watchful night.
Akbar had died and there was now a new emperor, Padshah Nuruddin
Muhammad Jahangir.
*He balanced these favours by having life-size statues of Amar Singh and his son Karan Singh on
horseback placed below the jharoka window at Agra, a sign of submission.
* Ashoka famously propounded his philosophy of Dhamma through a series of edicts inscribed on
rock surfaces. Among other things, these edicts advocated non-violence, respect towards elders, and
tolerance amongst sects.
*A sixteenth-century Sufi shaikh of the Shattari order in Gwalior.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Writing is a contrary thing. It is at once a deeply solitary activity but also,
especially in the case of narrative history, profoundly connected to existing
scholarship and the help of generous experts in the field. Giants in the field
of history have written about various aspects of the Mughal Empire and this
book could never have been written without relying on their work—these
are all included in the bibliography for interested readers.
Many other people have helped me, in ways little and large. They have
shared insights and recipes, offered solutions, encouragement, and
sustenance of all sorts.
My grateful thanks to Mini Menon, Professor Mubarak Ali, Professor
Giles Tillotson, Aparna Andhare, Arpana Bhargava, Professor Catherine
Asher, Paul Abraham, Colleen Taylor Sen, Professor Ruby Lal, Manu S.
Pillai, Zareen Bukhari, Professor Harbans Mukhia, Lavneet Gyani, Dr
Karni Jasol and Dr Mahendra Singh Tanwar from the Mehrangarh Museum,
Jodhpur, Karamjeet Malhotra, Rachna and David Davidar, Ayesha Mago,
Caroline and Ashwin Juneja, Anjuli Bhargava, Air Marshal Brijesh Dhar
Jayal and Mrs Manju Jayal, Rathin and Juhi Mathur, and Mandira Mohan.
All the recipes in this book are dedicated to Marryam Reshii, writer and
food blogger, who hoped for a book that she could ‘sink her teeth into’. She
offered encouragement and warm support to a perfect stranger, for which I
am enormously grateful.
Special thanks to Rana Safvi, writer, blogger, and all-round repository
of Delhi’s unique culture. She is the embodiment of the Ganga-Jamuni
tehzeeb and has been a most generous friend and mentor.
To Kavita Singh, art historian and professor at JNU, heartfelt thanks.
She has shown patience and generosity to a persistent and pesky stranger,
above and beyond the call of duty. I am truly grateful to the insights and
tips she has shared unstintingly with me.
Huge thanks to the entire team at Aleph Book Company, who have been
caught up in producing this rambling monster of a book. Thanks to Pujitha
Krishnan, Simar Puneet, Isha Banerji, Aienla Ozukum, Bena Sareen, and
Vasundhara Raj Baigra.
Any responsibility for errors of fact or interpretation remain mine alone.
Thanks to my daughters, Yashoda and Devaki, who make everything
worthwhile.
And, to Mohit, for a lifetime of love and encouragement, thank you.
IMAGE CREDITS
Page i: Akbar hunting deer by Manohar, opaque watercolour and gold on
paper, c. 1586–89. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.
Page iii: The central pillar in diwan-e-Khas at Fatehpur Sikri. Courtesy the
author.
Page vi: Akbar visits the tomb of Khwaja Muinuddin Chishti at Ajmer, c.
1562. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.
Page xx: Akbar mounted on Hawai, pursuing Ranbagh across a bridge of
boats over the Yamuna, composed by Basawan and painted by Chitra. ca.
1590–95. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.
Page 1: The Prince and His Regents
Akbar riding his favourite elephant, detail, 1609–10, opaque watercolour
and gold on paper © Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Museum für Islamische
Kunst / Christian Krug.
Page 61: The Young Padshah
Adham Khan pays homage to Akbar at Sarangpur, 1561, by Khem Karan.
Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.
Page 125: The World is a Bridge
Tent Encampment, 1580–95. Opaque watercolor and gold on paper,
Courtesy Brooklyn Museum, Gift of the Ernest Erickson Foundation, Inc.
Page 223: The Year of the Lion
Folio from the Persian Ramayan. From The David Collection, Copenhagen,
Denmark.
Page 321: Paradise on Earth
Abu’l Fazl presenting the Akbarnama to Akbar. Courtesy Wikimedia
Commons.
Page 411: Crouching Lion, Rising Sun
Akbar in Jahangir in Apotheosis, folio from the St Petersburg Album, about
1640, attributed to Bichitr. Opaque watercolor, ink, and gold on paper.
Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.
COLOUR INSERTS
Genghis Khan by an anonymous court painter. Courtesy Wikimedia
Commons.
Timur feasts in the gardens of Samarkand. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.
Padshah Babur. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.
Shaibani Khan Uzbek. Courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
Allegory of celebrations around Akbar’s circumcision ceremony at the
Sacred Spring of Khwaja Seh Yaran near Kabul by Dust Muhammad, c.
1546. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.
Young Prince Akbar and noblemen hawking—by Abd al-Samad. Opaque
watercolour and ink on paper. Courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art, New
York.
Prince Akbar presenting a painting to his father, Humayun, by Abd al-
Samad. c. 1550–56, Golestan Palace Library, Tehran. Courtesy Wikimedia
Commons.
Bairam Khan’s widow, Salima Sultan Begum, and his son, Abdur Rahim,
being taken to the Mughal court. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.
Tansen Gwaliyari, c. 1585–90, National Museum, New Delhi.
Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.
Akbar mounted on Hawai, pursuing Ranbagh across a bridge of boats over
the Yamuna River, composed by Basawan and painted by Chitra. ca. 1590–
95. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.
Akbar hunts in the neighbourhood of Agra using tame cheetahs by
Basawan. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.
Tent Encampment, 1580–95. Opaque watercolor and gold on paper,
Courtesy Brooklyn Museum, Gift of the Ernest Erickson Foundation, Inc.
An attempt on Akbar’s life at the Khair un-Manazil, Delhi, in 1564.
Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.
Ataka Khan’s mausoleum in Delhi. Courtesy the author.
The dancers from Mandu presented to Akbar after the defeat of Baz
Bahadur. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.
Folio from the Tutinama. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.
Umayya frees Umar, who has been imprisoned by Iraj, c. 1557–77, from the
Hamzanama. Courtesy Museum of Applied Arts, Vienna.
The siege of Chittor. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.
The qumargha or ring hunt. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.
Akbar’s sword. Courtesy Xenophon/Creative Commons.
Weaponry from the Ain-i Akbari. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.
Akbar’s personal moulded armour made of Damascus steel. Courtesy the
Trustees of the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya, Mumbai.
Elephant armour. Courtesy Gilgamesh/Creative Commons.
Detail from the Battle of Sarnal. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.
The diwan-e-khas building at Fatehpur Sikri. Courtesy the author.
Akbar visits the tomb of Khwaja Muinuddin Chishti at Ajmer, c. 1562.
Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.
Birth of Akbar’s first son, Salim. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.
Akbar receiving his sons at Fatehpur Sikri after the Gujarat campaign.
Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.
Detail from the battle scene with boats on the Ganga, 1565. Courtesy
Wikimedia Commons.
Akbar holds a religious assembly at Fatehpur Sikri. Courtesy Wikimedia
Commons.
Coins from Akbar’s empire. Courtesy Sarmaya India.
The Battle of Haldighati. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.
Folio from the Mewar Ramayan, c. 1650s. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.
Akbar in disguise visits Swami Haridas with Tansen, Kishangarh,
Rajasthan, 1760. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.
Folio from the Razmnana, the Mahabharat in Persian. Courtesy Wikimedia
Commons.
Heavenly Joys come to Earth—attributed to Khem Karan. Courtesy
Wikimedia Commons.
Folio from the Persian translation of the Ramayan. Courtesy Wikimedia
Commons.
The young artist Abu’l Hasan. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.
A portrait of Manohar. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.
Farrukh Beg, self-portrait. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.
Folio from the Baburnama. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.
Abu’l Fazl presenting the Akbarnama to Akbar. Courtesy Wikimedia
Babur crossing the River Son. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.
Chand Sultan playing polo. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.
Bir Singh Deo of Orchha. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.
Prince with a hawk. Courtesy Los Angeles Museum of Art.
Daniyal, Akbar’s son. Courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Murad, Akbar’s son. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.
Folio from the Gulshan Album, Golestan Palace Library, Tehran.
Nath Yogis, painted at Salim’s rebellious court at Allahabad in 1600.
Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.
Art at Salim’s rebel court showing European influence. Courtesy
Wikimedia Commons.
The western gateway to Akbar’s tomb at Sikandra. Courtesy Swapnil
Saxena.
Akbar with a lion and a calf by Govardhan, c. 1630. Courtesy Metropolitan
Museum of Art, New York.
Prince Salim, the future Jahangir, enthroned. Courtesy Wikimedia
Commons.
NOTES
INTRODUCTION
xxv Mirak howled in terror at the endless night: H. Beveridge (trans.), The Akbarnama of
Abu-L-Fazl, Vol. 1, Calcutta: Royal Asiatic Society, 1907, 2000 (repr.), p. 454.
xxv ‘lights of joy,’ we are assured, ‘showed themselves in his cheeks’: Ibid.
xxv beheld the ‘lustrous forehead’: Ibid., p. 203.
xxvii Akbar’s illiteracy may have stemmed from dyslexia: Ellen Smart, ‘Akbar, Illiterate
Genius’, Kalādarśana: American Studies in the Art of India, edited by Joanna G.
Williams, New Delhi: Oxford & IBH Publishing Co, 1981.
xxviii ‘one observer estimated the Mughals’ annual revenue at 120 million silver coins’:
Richard M. Eaton, India in the Persianate Age: 1000-1765, London: Allen Lane, 2019,
p. 371.