by Michael Wood
The story of Babur’s death has a truly mythic quality. His son Humayun fell ill and the physicians lost all hope of his recovery. Babur was told that in India people sometimes offer their dearest possession to God and pray to Him to accept it as a substitute for the life of their dear one. He readily said that he would do so, and the nobles thought he would offer the Koh-i-noor diamond. But Babur said, ‘I can’t offer God a stone!’ After consulting a mystic, Babur walked three times around the sickbed and offered his own life in exchange for that of his son. Humayun recovered miraculously and Babur grew ill day by day. He died on 26 December 1530.
There were stories that before he died, Babur left Humayun a secret will. The purported document is now lost, but a photograph taken in the 1920s survived in a library in central India. Was it real? If so, it would be crucial testimony in the cultural and political battles now taking place in India. According to the document, Babur, with his dying breath, urged Humayun not to harbour religious prejudice, nor to demolish or damage the places of worship of any faith, for ‘Islam can better be preached by the sword of love and affection, rather than the sword of tyranny and persecution’. It was then, and still is, good advice. Alas, although this is still contested, the will is surely a nineteenth-century forgery. But it points us to the remarkable events that took place in the reign of one of the most extraordinary figures in Indian and world history – Babur’s grandson, Akbar the Great.
AKBAR’S LINE OF LIFE
‘Of course, his horoscope tells you everything.’ The astrologer of the maharaja of Jodhpur shuffles his papers and extracts a beautifully penned chart that he has drawn up at my request for ‘Mr Akbar’. He has even made a phone call to the family in Umarcot in Pakistan, who still live in the old house where Akbar was born, where his mother, the then-pregnant wife of Humayun, had taken refuge after her husband had been driven out of India. The family is still Hindu and retains links with the Jodhpur royal family. In fact, it still has private documents in Sindhi dialect pertaining to Akbar’s birth.
In the 1530s Humayun had been overthrown by Afghans under Shah Sher. He then spent ten years in Iran as an embarrassed guest of the shah, and was still in exile when his son was born in 1542. At that moment there must have seemed little prospect that Babur’s Mughal dynasty would go beyond Humayun; everything pointed to it being a brief and unlamented blip in Indian history. But in the conjunctions and ascendants of their almanacs the astrologers prophesied a great king in Indian history. In fact, there was later some suggestion that the actual date and time of Akbar’s birth – Sunday, 15 October 1542 at 2 a.m. – was adjusted to make it fall on the most auspicious day: but the reading turned out to be spot on.
Indeed, some later said that it was more than the date and time of birth that were changed. Humayun’s wife Haminda Banu Begum had, up until then, given birth only to daughters, and it was said that she swapped babies with the rana of Umarcot’s wife, who gave birth at the same time. Akbar, therefore, was really born a Hindu! To Hindu and Muslim alike, perhaps, that could be the only rational explanation for the course his life would take. Those two religions believe in fate and the influence of the stars, and what followed, was too extraordinary not to have been preceded by omens.
AKBAR WINS HIS KINGDOM
Akbar was proclaimed king at thirteen years of age, after his father Humayun died of his injuries after a fall down the stairs of his library in Delhi. At that moment he was a king without a kingdom. The palace is at Kalanaur, on a delightful country road in the midst of lush green fields east of the river Ravi, just inside today’s border between India and Pakistan, north of Amritsar. Akbar always remembered this moment, and visited the place in later years. The platform and throne dais are still there, in a small walled enclosure by a copse of trees and a cluster of farm buildings.
When I arrive, a group of boys is playing cricket; they’re the same age as the little prince was – like him, full of energy, garrulous, curious and sparky. The difference is that he had grown up with Afghan tribesmen – hard-bitten warriors in Kabul, whose toughness was proverbial, whether then or in the nineteenth century when the British endured their Kabul catastrophe, or now for that matter. Travelling on foot over the Hindu Kush in the 1990s with traders and gunmen from the northern alliance, I had a brief chance to observe such men at first hand: their tolerance of discomfort; their pragmatic, practical streak; their religious sensibility, but dislike of clerical claptrap. In such company Akbar never learnt to read and write. He remained illiterate, playing truant from his teacher, but acquired more practical skills, with an ability to think laterally, to make connections. As his horoscope indicated (so the maharaja’s astrologer said), he had a very unconventional intellectual capacity, a fantastic memory and a brilliant ability to think (as management-speak puts it today) ‘outside the box’. When we see the disasters brought on by lack of flexible and imaginative thinking today, it’s clear that Akbar’s leadership skills surpassed anything displayed by most modern world leaders. Akbar, of course, had been brought up to survive in the real world.
The enthronement at Kalanaur was no more than registration of a claim. Akbar inherited no kingdom. Military leaders who remained loyal after his father’s death held Kabul, Kandahar, part of the Punjab and the city of Delhi. Ranged against him were the Afghan armies fighting for the king Shah Muhammad Adil – the same forces that had ousted his father. Based at the great fort of Chunar on the Jumna below Delhi, their leader Hemu, a Hindu, had a powerful army with 1500 war elephants. Aiming to drive the Mughals out for good, he now seized Delhi. But Akbar staked all on attack, and on 5 November engaged Hemu in battle at Panipat, where Babur had won thirty years earlier. The fighting went against the Mughals, until a chance arrow in Hemu’s eye. He was beheaded by Akbar himself. By the time he was fifteen Akbar had defeated his other enemies and established his rule over ‘Hindustan’. Fortune favours the brave.
SEEKING THE TRUTH OF RELIGION
We cannot, of course, look at all the events of Akbar’s astonishing forty-year reign here: he expanded the empire over Gujarat and Bengal, and ruled Kabul – an empire wider than any since the Mauryans. The young man also showed a great aptitude for government and administration. The greatest problem, though, soon became apparent. As Akbar’s biographer Abul Fazl noted with characteristic bluntness:
The emperor was aware of the fanatical hatred between Hindus and Muslims. But he was convinced this arose out of mutual ignorance. So this enlightened ruler sought to dispel this ignorance by making the books of each religion accessible to the other. In this way he wished to show Hindus that some of their customs and superstitions had no basis in their sacred books, and also convince Muslims that [for example] it was absurd to ascribe a mere 7000 years of existence to the world.
Abul Fazl’s description of fanatical hatred must be taken at face value: deep dissensions had been caused by the high-handed and intolerant ways of many Muslim rulers and nobles, their hostility towards the native religions, their inequitable taxing of non-Muslims, and their forced conversions. The danger Akbar saw was that religion would become, as Salman Rushdie later put it, a ‘poison in India’s blood’. Akbar’s solution was to move towards reconciliation: to abolish the hated tax on Hindus, and then boldly to examine the very basis of religious belief in the different communities, especially their pretensions to universal validity.
The core concept was very simple. Many religions claim a unique vision: some claim absolute truth. But any experience of religion in India was enough to demonstrate that no religion could possibly possess absolute truth. Violence in the name of religion and forcible conversion were intolerable in a civilized society, and not only on moral grounds: in terms of statecraft, religious divisions threatened the stability and fabric of society and undermined a stable empire. ‘Justice and reason should be our guide,’ said Akbar. He had already held discussions with Sunni and Shia scholars, and had been shocked to see how quickly they got angry, contradicted each other and came to b
lows, failing to answer each other’s arguments. Reading between the lines of his biographers, one might well wonder whether he came to doubt the claims of any religion. Indeed, there were those in his entourage who thought he had renounced Islam and become a kaffir (infidel). This is unlikely, but his enquiries no doubt changed his view of what Islam – and religion – should be.
He decided to talk to the representatives of all the religions in his empire: Hindus, Muslims, Christians, Jains, Zoroastrians (Parsees). At Thursday seminars they discussed the basic premise of religious faith. What is good in each? What is bad? They also pondered the simply incredible – such as the biblical and Muslim belief that the universe was created only a few thousand years ago, which Akbar concluded was laughable.
The case of Buddhism is interesting. Buddhism vanished in much of mainland India until the British recovered the story in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, identifying the sites of the Buddha’s life. But, of course, there were regions of the Himalayan foothills – Ladakh, Nepal and Bhutan, for example – that were still Buddhist, as they are today. The religion never vanished from India completely, and it was a comparatively easy matter for Akbar’s advisers to contact Buddhists. His biographer Abul Fazl was aware that Buddhism was an Indian religion that had diffused across the world, and in an interesting parallel with the European Renaissance rediscovery of the classical Greek world, scholars of the Mughal renaissance made some study of Buddhism, which they realized permeated the thought of India. Their impact may not have been great, but Abul Fazl says that Buddhists did come to the debates: that ‘Sramanas’ (Buddhists) as well as ‘Brahmanas’ (Hindu Brahmins) played their part. In India nothing is ever entirely lost.
THE KINGDOM OF LIGHT
These ideas didn’t come out of the blue. Indian mystics in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, some of whom initiated faiths and sects still alive today, had already engaged in thoroughgoing speculations about the unity of religion: Kabir, Dadu, Mirabai and, most famously, the founder of the Sikh faith, Guru Nanak. Kabir, for example, was a Muslim weaver whose name for God was Ram, who preached Muslim and Hindu brotherhood, and denounced all fetishes, in which he included the Hindu sacred thread, the Christian cross and the Muslim Kaaba (the sacred shrine at Mecca). But for Akbar’s elite there were other, more significant influences from Muslim culture. During Akbar’s childhood there had been a flood of Iranian influence into the Mughal court: great scholars and artists who would transform Indian ideas in philosophy, architecture, art and manuscript painting. Akbar, for example, had grown up without the orthodox Muslim dislike of paintings and images. ‘There are many that hate painting,’ he observed, ‘but such men I dislike. It seems to me that if a painter thinks of God, the giver of life, then he will increase knowledge.’ Although there were many influences, it was this Iranian influx, along with native Hindu art and thought, that makes the Mughal synthesis. In Akbar’s day it manifested in eleven of his eighteen key ministers being of Iranian origin, three central Asian and four Indian, two Hindu and two Muslim.
Akbar’s policy of religious tolerance and favour owed much to these Iranians. The greatest civilizations in the Muslim world – the Ottomans, Iranians and Mughals – were all teetering on the edge of Western-style Enlightenment in thought, science and technology. Iranian culture also was in an ideological ferment, of which one fascinating aspect was the rethinking of Islamic philosophy. In his late twenties (from c.1571) Akbar was strongly influenced by these ideas, and particularly by the school of Suhrawardi (d. 1191). In this so-called ‘philosophy of light’ the Koran was not expounded literally – as so widely happened then (and does now) – but in an esoteric and allegorical way, in which, for example, the sun was the symbol of the ‘Light of Lights’ (God). Suhrawardi’s ideas were especially attractive to a pantheistic project. He says he was influenced by a wide range of earlier traditions: that ‘there was a wisdom before Islam’. Empedocles, Pythagoras, Plato, Zoroaster and many others from the pre-Islamic traditions were members of the ‘eternal heaven’ that animated all true sages. This ‘Illuminationist’ project, which is still a living tradition in Iran today, created a great impression at Akbar’s court, with its mysticism of light, which had many points of congruence with Sanskritic tradition: ‘Whoever knows wisdom and is assiduous in praising and revering the Light of Lights, they give him the kingly light and bestow upon him the luminous ray and the lightning flashes of God, clothing him in the robe of authority and state.’
THE CONFERENCES ON RELIGION
In the 1570s Akbar entered his thirties and began to experiment in his own search for spiritual truth. He had been brought up as an orthodox Sunni, and issued persecuting firmans (rulings) against Shiahs as late as 1572. But now he became interested in the Sufi ibn Arabi’s ideas about the ‘unity of being’. The doctrine claimed no rational basis, but was a strong challenge to orthodoxy in its proposal that all that is not part of divine reality is an illusion. This led Akbar to the notion that all religions are equally illusory and should be tolerated in a state that sought real peace. He came to see himself as a specially chosen individual marked out by spiritual qualities, the ‘ruler of the age’, and, crucially, the necessary arbiter of religious law. This is what led Akbar to hold his discussions with the leading men of all religions. By 1580 he was set on pursuing a policy in which not only were all religions tolerated, but all kinds of religious views had equal access to him. The idea horrified some Europeans: the Jesuit Antonio Monserrate, for example, was disgusted: ‘He cared little in that allowing everyone to follow his own religion he was in reality violating all religions.’
For Akbar’s inner circle, though, these theories offered a dazzling imperial symbolism: ‘Kingship is a light emanating from God and a ray from the sun, the illuminator of the universe, the embodiment of the book of perfection, the receptacle of all virtues. In modern parlance we call it farr-i-izidi, the divine light; the ancients called it kaihan-khurira, the light that illuminates the world …’ When Akbar’s son Jahangir recalled his father’s beliefs he enjoined his own court circle to ‘honour the luminaries [sun and moon], the manifesters of God’s light’. It was, needless to say, a long way from orthodox Islam; but its ancient Iranian roots made it close to Hindu belief and ritual, which begins every day with the gyatri mantra to the rising sun. Akbar would even travel to the Hindu sacred site of Prayag (which owes its present name of Allahabad to him) to do dawn puja at the sacred confluence of the Ganges and Jumna, the place of creation in Hindu myth. In all this Akbar went about as far as a ruler of East or West could possibly go in the sixteenth century in matters of religion. Indeed, one suspects it would be too far for any political or religious leader today.
THE RULE OF REASON
Although we think of the Mughals as the quintessential Indian culture, it is important to remember that they didn’t rule all India, even though in the pages of Abul Fazl they had a vision of all India. Many parts of the subcontinent were not under their control, and there were many acts of resistance to them from the mid-sixteenth century onwards. This state of war is the wider context of Akbar’s religious reforms. ‘A conqueror should never stop,’ he said: and, as good as his word, he campaigned until the year before he died. So his religious ideas, his planned syncretism was not a personal whim (as some British imperial historians sneered). It should be compared with his land tax reforms, his reorganization of the civil service, and his idea that Muslims and Hindus should be made equal before the law – an idea that has not quite yet been achieved even in independent India. These parallels with his administrative reforms suggest that his religious ideas were rationally conceived and justified in a similar way to the ideas of the Enlightenment in Europe. No Renaissance ruler in Europe, not even the brilliant Elizabeth I, tried so consistently as Akbar to bring in the rule of reason. And one has to say, given the extraordinary resurgence of religious fundamentalism in our own supposedly more enlightened age, it is an idea whose time has yet to come.
/> ENGLISH OVERTURES TO AKBAR
A fascinating footnote to Akbar’s story is the 1585 embassy from Elizabeth I, the beginning of the British relationship with India. Her ambassador, a merchant called Ralph Fitch arrived with a personal letter to Akbar from ‘Elizabeth by the Grace of God Defender of the Faith to the most invincible and most mighty prince Zelabdin Echebar King of Cambaya’.
Her letter continues in a most interesting way, which reads slightly differently from mere conventional flattery, suggesting that Elizabeth’s court had already received some account of Akbar from traders to India: ‘The singular report that is of your imperial majesty’s humanity has reached these uttermost parts of the world …’ She was right to speak of his humanity: that is what makes him so attractive a character, one of the most engaging in history, despite all his flaws, and one of the greatest rulers of his age. Elizabeth goes on to talk of the English love of travel: living on a small island, ‘the affection which our subjects have to visit the most distant parts of the world …’ which has led to her knocking on his door ‘with a courteous and honest boldness’ in the hope of ‘mutual and friendly traffic of merchandise on both sides’. As it happened, Akbar was preparing an important military expedition and was too busy to meet the English – especially a mere merchant rather than a royal ambassador. He ruled over 100 million people, whereas the England of Elizabeth, with a population of 3 million, was the equivalent of a small principality in the Deccan … That, perhaps, is a measure of the time. In his nearly fifty-year reign Akbar established India as one of the great powers. England then lay on the very fringe of the world, as Elizabeth notes in her letter. But fate and history, of course, would combine to bring India and Britain together in a way that neither Akbar nor Elizabeth could have imagined in their wildest dreams.