India

by John Keay

  More troops soon joined him – to the relief, no doubt, of the intellectual accountants. They were seriously tested only once, when the Sur ruler of the Panjab was defeated at Sirhind. Otherwise it was a deceptively easy invasion. By August 1555 Humayun had reclaimed Delhi and was happily ‘watering the rose-garden of sovereignty with the stream of justice’ while planning the revival of Sher Shah’s administrative reforms. Agra and adjacent areas were also secured. But their government and that of the Panjab had scarcely been settled when in January 1556 triumph turned to tragedy. A keen astronomer, Humayun tripped when descending from his makeshift observatory on the roof of Sher Shah’s Delhi palace and fell to his death down the stone stairs. He thus, in the words of a less than generous scholar, ‘stumbled out of this life as he had stumbled through it’.22

  Once again Mughal rule was in jeopardy. Akbar was still only thirteen. He was not in Delhi but in the Panjab. And a formidable if unlikely adversary was mobilising to frustrate not only the Mughal succession but the whole Mughal presence.

  Sometimes styling himself ‘Raja Vikramaditya’ in imitation of various Indian heroes, this new adversary was one Hemu, a Hindu of lowly parentage who had surmounted both the strictures of caste and the disadvantages of a wretchedly puny physique to rise from being a saltpetre pedlar in a provincial bazaar to chief minister to one of the principal Sur claimants. Yet more surprisingly for one who could not even ride a horse, he had acquired a reputation for inspired generalship. Twenty-two consecutive battles is Hemu said to have won against assorted adversaries. To this tally he now added a twenty-third when, soon after Humayun’s death, he stormed Delhi and put its Mughal garrison to flight. Not surprisingly even his mainly Afghan, and so Muslim, troops regarded their ‘Shah Hemu’ as an inspirational commander and confidently sallied north to engage the main Mughal force in the Panjab.

  Outnumbered and out-generaled, the Mughal commanders favoured a speedy retreat to Kabul. However Bayram Khan, the young emperor’s guardian and virtual regent, stood firm – a decision which the chance capture of Hemu’s artillery by a Mughal flying column seemed to support. Hemu’s elephants were another matter. According to Abu’l-Fazl, the enemy had assembled a corps of fifteen hundred of the largest and most athletic beasts ever seen. ‘How can the attributes of those rushing mountains be strung on the slender thread of words?’ he asks. Swifter than the fleetest racehorses, they ran so fast ‘that it could not be called running’, while, ‘mountain-like and dragon-mouthed … they ruined lofty buildings by shaking them and sportively uprooted strong trees’.23 In fanciful descriptions of pachyderms, as in panegyric invention, Abu’l-Fazl’s Persian could challenge even the Sanskrit of ancient India’s dynastic scribes.

  At Panipat, the site of Babur’s great victory, the two armies met on 5 November 1556. For once victory looked to be going the way of the elephants. ‘The horses would not face the elephants,’ which ‘shook the left and right divisions’ and ‘dislodged many soldiers of the sublime army’. Hemu, to whose abilities even Abu’l-Fazl bears grudging testimony, commanded operations from a gigantic beast called ‘Hawai’ (‘Windy’, or possibly ‘Rocket’). ‘He made powerful onsets and performed many valorous acts.’ Indeed the Mughals were wavering when ‘suddenly an arrow from the bended bow of divine wrath reached Hemu’s eye and, piercing the socket, came out at the back of his head.’24 Seeing Hemu collapse into his howdah, his troops lost heart. It was now the sublime army, swords flashing and epithets flying, which closed for the kill. Hawai was captured; Hemu, extracted from his howdah and dragged before the young victor, was quickly beheaded. Next day a Mughal army entered Delhi in triumph yet again. Including Timur’s assault, it was third time lucky. Not for another two hundred years would Delhi slip from Mughal rule.

  Akbar’s reign, begun amidst scenes of such dazzling portent, would outshine that of all Indian sovereigns. It helped that it lasted for all of half a century, during which time the emperor’s energy scarcely flagged. It also helped that it was exceptionally well documented. Not even Elizabeth I of England, Akbar’s exact contemporary, was so well served by annalists and artists. Akbar bestrides all accounts of the Great Mughals not just because without him there might not have been a Mughal empire but because without him it would certainly have been a much more obscure and controversial affair. In a manner which only Alexander and Ashoka had perhaps anticipated, Akbar was intensely aware of making history; reputation would vie with advantage at every turn of his reign; like the huntsman that he was, he sniffed the course of events, scenting the immortality which was his prey.

  ‘Write with the pen of sincerity the account of the glorious events and of our dominion-increasing victories,’25 he told Abu’l-Fazl. Others, painters as well as writers, were similarly bidden, then richly rewarded. Abu’l-Fazl himself wrote not only the Akbar-nama, a year-by-year account of the reign which in the printed English edition runs, with footnotes, to over 2500 pages, but also a compendious almanac and Domesday Book of the empire, the Ain-i-Akbari, which runs to another 1500 pages. In such works, commissioned by the emperor, ‘the pen of sincerity’ writes exclusively with the ink of adulation; Akbar can do no wrong, his enemies are written off as misguided scoundrels, his policies are wholly original, and his success is a foregone conclusion. Yet of all such ‘dominion-increasing victories’ and ‘glorious events’ Abu’l-Fazl speaks with an insight and authority which more critical accounts only substantiate.

  Succeeding so young, Akbar’s first years were necessarily of tutelage. In 1556–60 Bayram Khan, as regent, directed the defeat of Sur rivals in the Panjab, Awadh and Gwalior. A stern if devoted protector, the regent had earlier accompanied Humayun to Iran and was in fact a Shia of Persian tastes, if not birth. This provoked resentment amongst the mainly Sunni nobility and, when Akbar himself tired of his direction, Bayram Khan was first dismissed, then provoked into revolt and killed.

  Those mainly responsible were a new clique centred round Akbar’s erstwhile nurse and her son, Adham Khan. In 1561 the latter commanded an invasion of Malwa where Baz Bahadur, the last and most memorable of its much-restored sultans, had revived the Malwa tradition of Muslim – rajput amity. An outstanding musician and the subject of many popular verses, Baz Bahadur spent his days flitting from palace to palace across the heights of Mandu as he serenaded Rupmati, a rajput princess. This idyll now ended. Baz Bahadur was routed and put to flight, Rupmati poisoned herself rather than submit to Adham Khan’s attentions, and their followers, Muslim as well as Hindu, were callously massacred.

  Akbar took exception not to the massacre but to Adham Khan’s withholding the spoils of victory. A similar infringement by his commanders in Awadh brought the same response: Akbar personally rushed to the scene and secured abject protestations of homage. But although reconciled, in May 1562 Adham Khan again stepped on the royal prerogative when he made a fatal attempt on the life of the chief minister. The emperor was enjoying a siesta nearby at the time. Aroused by the tumult, he ‘became nobly indignant’ and, encountering the miscreant on the palace verandah, ‘struck him such a blow on the face that that wicked monster turned a somersault and fell down insensible’.26 Another account says that he was bowled over like a pigeon. Pigeon-like, he was then trussed and flung headlong from the top of the terrace.

  With this exhibition of ‘sublime justice’ the personal reign of Akbar, now just nineteen, may be said to have begun. He assumed supreme civil and military authority, dispensing with the office of chief minister and thereby eliminating its potential for rivalry, while undertaking swift but vigorous campaigns against his sporadically dissident commanders in the east. Abu’l-Fazl notes that it was also about this time that he began to show an unconventional interest in his subjects and their beliefs. ‘He sought for truth amongst the dust-stained denizens of the field of irreflection and consorted with every sort of wearers of patched garments such as jogis, sanyasis and qalandars, and other solitary sitters in the dust and insouciant recluses.’27

  Somet
imes Akbar slipped from the royal apartments to mingle unrecognised with bazaar folk and villagers. For one to whom the written word had to be read by others these contacts were a means to information and a method of verification. They were also the beginning of a lifelong enquiry into matters spiritual and religious. More obviously they made him uniquely aware of the diversity of his subjects and of the great gulf that separated them from their mainly foreign rulers. Unlike Babur or Humayun, Akbar had been born in India, in fact in an Indian village and under Hindu protection. (The place, now just in Pakistan, was Umarkot, a rajput fort in the great desert of Thar where in 1542 Humayun and his entourage had found temporary shelter during their flight from Sher Shah.) To Akbar Indians were not the uncultured mass of infidels who so horrified Babur; they were his countrymen. And whatever their religion, it was his duty not to oppress them. Discriminatory measures against Hindus, like a tax on pilgrims and the detested jizya, were lifted. He would even make a point of celebrating the Hindu festivals of Divali and Dussehra.

  It was also at this time, 1562, that Akbar married the daughter of the Kacchwaha rajput raja of Amber (near Jaipur, which city later Kacchwahas would build, thus becoming the maharajas of Jaipur). The marriage was partly a reward for the family’s loyalty to Humayun and partly a way of securing that loyalty to Akbar and his heirs. Additionally the raja, his son and his grandson were all inducted into the Mughal hierarchy as amirs (nobles), who in return for the retention of their ancestral lands, their Hindu beliefs and clan standing, would swear allegiance to the emperor and provide specified numbers of cavalry for service in the imperial forces. Both Bhagwant Das, the raja’s son, and Man Singh, his grandson, eventually became amongst the most trusted of Akbar’s lieutenants. In fact this formula, with or without a royal marriage, worked so well that it was steadily extended to numerous other rajput chiefs.

  Rajasthan, so long a thicket of opposition combining the prickliest resistance with the least fruitful rewards, was thus incorporated piecemeal within the imperial system which itself became much more broad-based. In 1555 the Mughal nobility, or omrah, had numbered fifty-one, nearly all of them non-Indian Muslims (Turks, Afghans, Uzbeks, Persians). By 1580 the number had increased to 222, of whom nearly half were Indian, including forty-three rajputs. All benefited from this arrangement: the Mughals secured the services of a respected elite plus their warlike followers, while the rajputs gained access to high rank and wealth within a pan-Indian empire.

  Not all rajput chiefs saw it that way. Some required the rougher persuasion of conquest while Udai Singh, the Sesodia Rana of Mewar, remained unpersuaded even in defeat. As a successor of Rana Sangha, Babur’s opponent at Khanua, and as the scion of the most senior rajput clan, Udai Singh was an obvious focus for dissent. He had already afforded sanctuary to Baz Bahadur, the love-lorn fugitive of Malwa, and he was openly critical of the Kacchwahas’ submission. The final straw came when Udai Singh’s son, a hostage at the Mughal court, suddenly fled south. In 1567 Akbar himself marched south and, perhaps looking for a triumph to rival that just achieved by the Deccan sultans over Vijayanagar, personally set about the siege of Chitor.

  The great Sesodia stronghold, although not the most inaccessible of hill forts, was difficult to approach and had tried the ingenuity of such redoubtable commanders as Ala-ud-din Khalji and Sher Shah. For Akbar, as operations dragged on into 1568, the investment of Chitor became much more than a punitive siege. It was like a rite of passage, or a Herculean labour in which izzat (honour) was closely engaged. Udai Singh and his son had long since fled to sanctuary in the hills – an action so out of character for a rajput, let alone a Sesodia, that in Colonel Tod it would induce an apoplexy of indignation (‘well had it been for Mewar … had the annals never recorded the name of Oody Singh in the catalogue of her princes’28). Akbar pressed the siege regardless of his enemy’s absence. It became one of the great set-pieces of the age, avidly followed, gloriously recorded and in the end bloodily concluded. With flames engulfing their womenfolk, the defenders sallied forth in another suicidal jauhar. It was followed by Akbar’s gratuitous massacre of some twenty thousand non-combatants.

  Chitor was never reoccupied. Like Vijayanagar it remains much as the sixteenth century left it. But, about a hundred kilometres to the west, in a less conspicuous setting where the Sesodias had already created a lake, Udai Singh founded a smiling new capital. He died in 1572 but in his honour the place was named Udaipur and from there the house of Mewar would continue to defy the might of the Mughals and to delight connoisseurs of rajput romance.

  Meanwhile Akbar was also founding a new capital. Hitherto the court had been based at Agra where, lining the right bank of the Jamuna, the walls of the great Red Fort had been completed by 1562. Other fortified complexes at Lahore, Allahabad and Ajmer were underway. Together with Agra, they framed the core of Mughal empire in northern India.29 Ajmer, now the seat of the Mughal governor for Rajasthan, had once been the capital of Prithviraj Chahamana and contained the shrine of his contemporary, the Sufi saint Muin-ud-din Chishti. To this Chishti centre Akbar made a pilgrimage by way of thanksgiving for his success at Chitor. He then sought the intercession of a living member of the Chishti community, Shaikh Salim Chishti of Sikri near Agra. For the emperor, now twenty-six, was concerned for the succession. Although not for want of brides, he was still without an heir; reassurance was needed and the shaikh obliged, correctly foretelling three sons. Akbar’s rajput bride gave birth to the first while she was lying-in at Sikri in 1569. The child was therefore named Salim (but later Jahangir) after the shaikh, the shaikh was heaped with honours, and Sikri – renamed Fatehpur Sikri – was deemed propitiously perfect as the site for a new capital.

  Its construction, Akbar’s wildest extravagance and his weirdest folly, began in 1571, the same year in which the great tomb of his father was completed in Delhi. Both are regarded as classics of Mughal architecture, being artfully staged compositions, mostly in a rose-to-ruddy sandstone, of monumental scale and majestic outline. Yet they could hardly be less alike in inspiration. Humayun’s tomb was designed by a Persian architect, who had previously worked in Bukhara. The great white-marble dome, quite unlike anything previously built in the subcontinent (although the Taj would soon make it an Indian cliché), swells from a short ‘neck’ into the billowing, bulbous hemisphere typical of Timurid Samarkand and Safavid Iran. For Humayun, the Mughal emperor most closely associated with Persia, it was wholly suitable.

  For an emperor more interested in India, Fatehpur Sikri provided an equivalent opportunity. The mosque and its Buland (‘Lofty’) gateway apart, Akbar’s palatial complex in the middle of nowhere betrays some extravagant Persian planning but in its detail reads more like a textbook of existing Indian styles and motifs. Some had been anticipated in rajput creations like the palace of Man Singh Tomar at Gwalior. But more derive from Hindu and Jain temple architecture, especially that of Gujarat. Indeed Gujarat, won and lost by Humayun, was being reconquered and reincorporated into the Mughal empire even as the city was being built.

  In an architectural setting of such blatant eclecticism Akbar’s curiosity about his subjects and their beliefs also became markedly eclectic. From patronising a few Hindu practices he launched into a thorough investigation of the whole gamut of existing religions. At Fatehpur Sikri he installed a veritable bazaar of disputing divines and presided over their heated debates with something of the relish he usually reserved for elephant fights. To the Quranic arguments of Sunni, Shia and Ismaili were added the more mystical and populist appeals of numerous Sufi orders, the bhakti fervour of Saiva and Vaishnava devotees, the fastidious logic of naked Jains, and the varied insights of numerous wandering ascetics, saints and other ‘insouciant recluses’.

  Also welcome were representatives of several assertive new creeds. These included disciples of Kabir, the late-fifteenth-century poet and reformer, and probably those of Guru Nanak, the early-sixteenth-century founder of the Sikh faith. Kabir had spent most of his life in the vi
cinity of Varanasi, where he redirected the popular fervour of bhakti and Sufi devotionalism towards a supreme transcendental godhead which subsumed both Allah of Islam and brahman of Hinduism. Similar ideas of Hindu – Muslim accommodation and syncretism were explored by Guru Nanak as he travelled widely in India before eventually returning to his native Panjab, where he had once served as an accountant in the household of Daulat Khan Lodi, the two-sworded ‘blockhead’ who had opposed Babur’s progress in 1526.

  Like Kabir, Guru Nanak insisted on the unity of the godhead and on the equality of all believers regardless of community or caste. Ulema and brahmans alike were seen as conspiring to divide and appropriate an indivisible, infinite and unknowable God just as they divided His followers into Muslims and Hindus, Shia and Sunni, Vaishnava and Shaiva. By concentrating on this transcendent deity, on his Name and on his Word as revealed to the Guru, and by a neo-Buddhist attention to righteous conduct and truth, men might achieve the divine grace to overcome karma and attain salvation. Many from the trading and cultivating classes of the Panjab were drawn to this creed and formed a brotherhood (panth) under the nine Gurus who succeeded Nanak. To the third of these, Guru Amar Das, Akbar is said to have given the land at Amritsar on which the Sikh’s Golden Temple would eventually be built. But as yet the panth remained a purely religious and social movement with no political or military dimension.