Akbar’s religious explorations were indeed significant, and ushered in some imperial policies that we might think of today as socially liberal. But they were motivated by pragmatic considerations, and then increasingly by a desire to create a new vision of kingship to legitimate his power. Liberal ideals such as religious freedom or equal treatment were at best afterthoughts, if thoughts at all. What he adopted instead was a new imperial ideology, with himself at its center.
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Jalal al-Din Muhammad Akbar was born far from the comfort and splendor of any imperial palace or intellectual sanctuary, on the sands of the Sindh desert, in the subcontinent’s Northwest. In his early years, he moved about with his father, Humayun, the second Mughal emperor, who had lost control of his kingdom and was in exile. The itinerant Akbar never learned to read—he seems to have been dyslexic—but he developed a phenomenal memory, and those who underestimated the boy’s shrewdness did so at their peril.
With Persian help, his father eventually recaptured his onetime capital, Delhi, from the Pashtun Sur dynasty that had usurped him—only to meet his death by a fall in his library a few months later. Barely a teenager, Akbar was crowned the new ruler in 1556, the beginning of a reign that would last forty-nine years. He immediately faced challenges, and dealt with them decisively. First, he broke with his manipulative foster mother and his regent. As for his foster mother’s overambitious son, Akbar ordered him flung from the harem terrace. When the man didn’t die, it is said Akbar had him hauled back up and pitched him off the terrace himself, to finish the job. Such acts, made iconic through miniature paintings and popular retellings, endowed the emperor with an aura of steely dominance. A Jesuit priest who later came to tutor Akbar’s sons observed, “His expression is tranquil, serene and open, full also of dignity … and when he is angry, of awful majesty.”
The priest, Antonio Monserrate, was fascinated by Akbar’s ability to compensate for his illiteracy. In addition to developing an obsession for record-keeping on every aspect of his reign, Akbar surrounded himself with scholastic teachers of philosophy, history, theology, and religion, sharpening his judgment on others’ whetstones. “He can give his opinion on any question so shrewdly and keenly, that no one who did not know that he is illiterate would suppose him to be anything but very learned and erudite,” Monserrate noted. Akbar also had a commanding physical presence, as his son Jahangir, the future emperor, recalled:
His eyes and eyebrows were black, and his complexion dark rather than fair; he was lion-bodied, with a broad chest, and his hands and arms long. On the left side of his nose he had a fleshy mole, very agreeable in appearance, of the size of half a pea … His august voice was very loud, and in speaking and explaining had a peculiar richness. In his actions and movements he was not like the people of the world.
To secure his rule, Akbar had to weaken the influence of the clerical authorities and of independently powerful Sufi sheikhs. So, in the early years of his reign, he was particularly zealous in demonstrating the authenticity of his faith. He sponsored pilgrims on hajj to Mecca, and made his own three-hundred-kilometer pilgrimage, on foot, from Sikri to Ajmer, the holiest shrine of the Chishti sect.
As important, he had to control the Muslim nobility, an unruly mix of Afghans, Uzbeks, Persians, and local fighters, and to subordinate Hindu warriors who might challenge his power. Toward the latter, he could be unsparing. The young emperor described some of his early battles as jihad, fighting against the infidels. The most destructive encounter was at the siege of Chittorgarh Fort, in what is now the western state of Rajasthan, in 1568. The Rajput Hindu defenders chose mass suicide when the fort was breached, but Akbar went on with his armies to slaughter, some say, more than twenty-five thousand locals. The Rajput kings had not seen ruthlessness of this kind before. Most recognized they could not defeat the man who had unleashed it.
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In 1572, Akbar captured Gujarat, crushing a force of fifteen thousand with a field army one-fifth that size, many of them mounted on camels. To commemorate the victory, he erected the Buland Darwaza, or “Gate of Magnificence.” Placed at the southwest edge of Sikri, it became the ceremonial entrance to the city. Forty meters high, thirty-five meters wide, built from blocks of red and buff sandstone, and decorated with black and white marble, it’s not a structure to argue with. But chiseled across its colossal profile are two delicate calligraphic inscriptions. The first, unsurprisingly, proclaims Akbar’s achievements and victories. The second, though, is striking: written in Persian are the words “Jesus, Son of Mary, says, ‘The world is a bridge; pass over it, but build no house upon it.’”
In this and other unexpected remnants scattered across Sikri are the traces of Akbar’s open-mindedness, at least when off the battlefield. It was a stance unusual for a ruler of his time. Though he was for much of his life fervent and public in his practice of Islam, from early on Akbar grasped the diversity of belief and culture across the lands he ruled.
Akbar’s army, which grew sixfold over the course of twenty-five years, was a reflection of this diversity—and the practical uses to which Akbar put it. His forces eventually included commanders and warriors with different ethnic backgrounds, whom he organized by strict ranks. Titles weren’t inherited. They had to be won and kept by service. But his most successful military innovation was social: the incorporation of Rajput Hindu warriors into Mughal military service.
In return for Mughal support, the granting of land, and respect for their Rajput martial codes of honor and vengeance, many Rajput kings and princes pledged allegiance to the Mughal throne. Their incorporation into the Mughal order rested on the concept of svami-dharma, “service to the overlord.” They recognized Akbar as, in effect, a Muslim Rajput. His offer of an open hand was not exactly one they could refuse—they had also seen him wield an iron fist. The alliance was sealed and sustained across generations by the intermarriage of Mughal elites with Rajput women. Akbar himself led the way by marrying a Jodhpur princess, Jodha Bai, who became Jahangir’s mother. Through such marriages into the Mughal order, Rajput warrior clans and their princes became pillars of imperial rule for the next two centuries.
In another shrewd act of political equipoise, Akbar adopted Persian as the new language of imperial authority. Persian was more culturally supple than either Sanskrit or Arabic (each of which was associated with a distinct religion), and therefore more acceptable to locals. There’s a parallel with the way English later acquired a certain neutrality in relation to the multiplicity of India’s regional languages. Akbar had Persian works read aloud to him, including the Masnavi of the great Persian Sufi Jalal al-Din Rumi, which he listened to every night. It contains lines such as these:
Thou has come to unite
not to separate.
The people of Hind worship in the idiom of Hindi.
The people of Sindh do so in their own.
Akbar was ruling in a period of eclectic belief across the subcontinent. In Europe, the Inquisition was under way, intent on purging the heresies of rival Christian beliefs. Religious intolerance was the natural condition in other parts of the world, too. Yet in large parts of northern India, the messages spread by bhakti devotees such as Kabir (12) and Mirabai (15), by religious leaders such as Guru Nanak (13), and by Sufi saints, were blending elements from multiple religious traditions to create new types of devotion.
While at Sikri, Akbar began his own explorations of this rich religious landscape by what we might call the comparative method. In the Ibadat Khana, he assembled learned religious men to expound their beliefs and philosophies. Initially, the gatherings were restricted to Islamic theologians, but Akbar was apparently bored by their tenuous logic, and by affirmations that seemed merely rote. He brought in Jains, Hindus, Zoroastrians, and Christians to sharpen the debate.
His religious sparring sessions made his policies less doctrinal. But necessity also shaped his ruling style. His expanding realm contained mainly non-Muslim subjects. Mass conversion was impra
cticable, and in any event, Akbar showed no interest in it. Yet he went further. Breaking with injunctions of Islamic rule, he also set aside sharia law. Hindus who had been forcibly converted to Islam were allowed to convert back, and individuals who might otherwise have been regarded as heretics were instead allowed to defend their beliefs.
More materially, in 1579, Akbar abolished the jizya, a graduated property tax on non-Muslims, a policy that endured for a century, until his great-grandson, the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb, reversed it. Ending jizya lifted a real burden on the poor, and promised, at least symbolically, greater equality between the followers of different faiths. That same year, Akbar declared himself the supreme arbiter of religious affairs within his realm, thus wresting power from the clerics and investing himself as khalifa, or “caliph,” of the entire Muslim world, in a direct challenge to the Ottoman sultan.
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Despite the religious accommodations of his reign, Akbar’s attitude to religion and to differing beliefs wasn’t a type of protoliberalism. Our understanding of him has tended to rely on Mughal and Persian chronicles and on contemporary European sources. How interlocutors in this supposed cultural dialogue—for instance, his elite Hindu subjects—may have seen things has only recently become a subject of study, and what the mass of Akbar’s Hindu subjects thought remains largely unexplored. Strikingly, none of the Hindu courtly literature engages with Akbar’s religious policy, and it shows no interest in Akbar’s debates in the Ibadat Khana. What it reveals, instead, are sixteenth-century power equations, which sought to make use of religious divisions, instead of trying to overcome them.
Still, Akbar’s spiritual questing shouldn’t be reduced to politics; there were also other forces driving it. Some think it was the result of a personal crisis brought on by a kind of melancholia, or that he was subject to trances that may have been a mild form of epilepsy. While psychology or physiology may have been a factor, his rule also coincided with a charged moment in the history of Islam as the religion approached its first millennium in 1591. This historical pivot probably lay behind Akbar’s interest in investigating other religious ideas. The approach of the Islamic millennium gave rise to prophecies of every imaginable type, from the coming of the Mahdi, the Islamic redeemer, to changes in dynastic order and in the nature of religion itself.
To prepare for the event, in 1585 Akbar commissioned a mixed group of Sunni and Shia scholars, and some who believed in the Mahdi, to produce for him a “Millennial History,” the Ta’rikh-i-alfi. Consisting of thousands of folio pages, many of them given over to the banal recounting of dates and events, the work gave a central importance to the idea of dialogue. Competition between rival voices and traditions would make possible the discovery of higher truths, which could be used to define and control the era that was about to begin. And it was only the emperor himself, Akbar, who could adjudicate these debates and identify their new insights. His ability to reach such insights supposedly lay in his possession of insaaf, the intellectual capacity for fairness or impartial arbitration. As the preface to the Ta’rikh-i-alfi puts it:
With the help of reason (aql) he has lifted insaaf to glory from its usual abject state … The gates of the safe house of his insaaf are open to the practitioners of all religions. By his just command, wolves are herding sheep. Thanks to his insaaf, infidels are caring for Muslims … He is a friend of meaning and an enemy of chatter. He cares about what is spoken, regardless of who speaks it.
As the day of the millennium approached, and after it had passed, Akbar came to think of himself not merely as a political sovereign, but as the possessor, if not of divine attributes, then of karamat, extraordinary powers to perform supernatural acts.
The architect of this arcane new ideology was Abu’l Fazl, one of the brightest and most loyal of the intellectual stars in Akbar’s court. Abu’l Fazl oversaw the production of the Akbarnama, which is a dazzling exhibition of the art of storytelling, refined flattery, and the symbolic projection of power. Steeped in Timurid ideas of kingship and mysticism, it portrays Akbar as the fount of all light, illuminating the world:
Knowest thou at all who is this world-girdling luminary and radiant spirit? Or whose august advent has bestowed this grace? ’Tis he who, by virtue of his enlightenment and truth, is the world-protecting sovereign of our age—to wit, that Lord of the hosts of sciences, theatre of God’s power, station of infinite bounties, unique of the eternal temple,… bezel of God’s signet-ring,… origin of the canons of world-government, author of universal conquest,… sublime concentration of humanity, heir apparent of the sun …
By the 1580s, Akbar had turned away from public prayer and orthodox Islamic practices. He began to worship the sun, and introduced fire rituals into his court. He was inventing his own system of religious belief: Din-i Ilahi, or “Divine Faith.” Abu’l Fazl described Din-i Ilahi as having “the great advantage of not losing what is good in any one religion, while gaining whatever is better in another”—a combination of elements designed to secure Akbar’s claim to be the universal sovereign.
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For reasons unknown, Akbar abandoned Fatehpur Sikri and the Ibadat Khana and its multiconfessional debates twenty years before he died. He had occupied the city for less than two decades. One theory is that supplying water to the city, perched so high on a stony ridge, became a problem. A more likely reason for its abandonment was Akbar’s changing religious priorities. In particular, he had ceased to worship at Sufi shrines and at mosques.
An index of the vast wealth Akbar had accumulated is that he could build a city such as this and then forsake it without suffering major economic loss. He moved his capital to the stronger fortifications of nearby Agra, and his empire continued to grow. The massive treasury he accumulated allowed his descendants (especially Jahangir and Shah Jahan, who built the Taj Mahal) to become the Medicis of India: exalted patrons of art and architecture and connoisseurs of utmost taste.
Akbar continues to be a historical anchor for Indian liberals, who are particularly drawn to his inquisitive intellectual style in matters of faith, and who overlook the idiosyncratic religious dimensions of his imperial vision. But even if there’s more hope than history in the view that he was some kind of secular precursor, he still stands out in the global context of his times—questioning, doubting, and reinventing faith in an age when many rulers stayed steadfast in their beliefs.
17
MALIK AMBAR
The Dark-Fated One
1548–1626
Years ago, I managed to get tickets to the first cricket Test match to be played in the city of Ahmedabad in Gujarat. Opposing the Indian team was a West Indian eleven that included the peerless Viv Richards. The excitement as the crowds streamed to the new test ground was manic, joyful, but I left the match remembering neither the score nor individual performances. The reactions of the Ahmedabad spectators, though, I won’t forget. As the West Indians took to the field, loud monkey whoops filled the air, and bananas came raining down from the stands. The pelted players, probably the greatest West Indian team in history, stood there in their flannels, stunned.
Indians’ particular contempt for people of African descent—a racism shared even by Mohandas Gandhi (38), as evident in his South African years—doesn’t get talked about much, which is surely one reason little has changed in the thirty-odd years since I watched that troubling match. It’s telling that a word still widely used in Hindi to refer to black Africans is habshi—shorthand in common usage for a dark-skinned slave.
The word habshi, derived from Arabic and Persian terms for an Abyssinian, has a long history in India, one that’s not often remembered today in the nation, or beyond. The standard image of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century slavery is of ships moving west from Africa, their shackled human cargo destined to feed the New World’s demand for mass labor on cotton and tobacco plantations. Yet the slave economy was a genuinely global one, stretching from Africa to East Asia. Slaves were also sent eastward across the I
ndian Ocean, to bolster the public and private militias of the Deccan Plateau of southern India.
One of these slaves, whose story is rarely told, rose to become a power broker, even a kingmaker, in the Deccan. A persistent tormentor and nemesis of the vast Mughal Empire to the north, he helped set the contours of power in the subcontinent in the century before the dawn of the colonial era. His name was Malik Ambar.
In an early, unsettling seventeenth-century miniature painting of Malik Ambar, his severed head is impaled on a spear. A short distance away, a Mughal archer, balanced on a globe and dressed in a wine-colored robe, jeweled belt, and white slippers, takes careful aim at the African’s face. To Richard Eaton, a professor at the University of Arizona and a scholar of Deccan history, “it’s a remarkable painting filled with symbolism. Around Malik Ambar you have owls—live owls and dead owls—associating him with darkness and rebellion.”
Malik Ambar was born in the mid-1500s. His given name was Chapu. He was probably a pagan, and he was sold into slavery—possibly by his own impoverished parents—while very young. The interests that conspired to send the boy born Chapu to India were rooted in trade, a story that also has cotton at its heart. The flow of slaves “was driven largely by the demand for Indian textiles on the part of the Ethiopian kingdom,” Richard Eaton explains, “so on one side—the western, African side—you have demand for Indian textiles. And on the eastern side you have an equal demand for military slavery.”
The trade in African slave warriors flourished in places riven by political instability, places with enmities between, and within, clans—places, in other words, much like the sixteenth-century Deccan. The Deccan Plateau covers much of central southern India, and with its western ports and rich hinterlands, it was a global crossroads. With the flow of incomers came native resentments. But the habshis were detached both from their own families and from the tangled knots of local alliances and feuds. That estrangement made them valuable tools to their masters. Recognizing that they would never return home to Africa, they had little choice but to throw in their lot with their owners.
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