A Teardrop on the Cheek of Time Read online

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  Allah Akbar

  The first six years of young Akbar’s rule were conducted, as his chief chronicler Abul Fazl put it, ‘behind the veil’, firstly under the tutelage of his father’s leading general and then under that of his chief foster-mother or wet-nurse, Maham Anga, and her family.* According to Abul Fazl, when Akbar was born in the Rajasthan desert he had first been put to suckle at his fifteen-year-old mother’s breast, ‘his honeyed lips in contact with the benign breasts, his life was sweetened by the life-giving fluid’. However, and according to Timurid custom, he had then been passed to a series of highborn wet-nurses. Theirs was a coveted position because they acquired great influence and their sons were considered foster-brothers of the royal infant. Akbar had at least ten foster-mothers, rather more than usual, because at the time of his birth Humayun had little other way of rewarding loyal followers.

  Power went to the head of Maham Anga’s son, Adham Khan. In the words of Abul Fazl he became ‘intoxicated by youth and prosperity’ and ‘the cap of his pride was blown away by the wind of arrogance’. He withheld treasure due to the emperor from captured cities and attempted to keep for himself the choicest inhabitants of captured harems. Then, one hot May afternoon in 1562, he coolly walked with his guards into the imperial palace at Agra, where a rival minister was giving public audience. As the minister, the husband of another of Akbar’s wet-nurses, rose to greet him, Adham gestured to one of his henchmen to knife him, which he did. Sword in hand, Adham made for the adjoining harem, where Akbar was asleep, but a eunuch slammed the door shut and bolted it from inside. Nineteen-year-old Akbar, now wide awake, emerged from a side door and rushed towards Adham, yelling, ‘You son of a bitch!’ Adham turned and put his hand on Akbar’s sleeve. Akbar smashed his fist into Adham’s face – Akbar’s chroniclers boasted that it looked as if he had been hit with a mace. Akbar ordered Adham’s still unconscious body to be thrown from the palace wall, which was over thirty feet high. When the first fall failed to kill him, Akbar had him hauled back up by his hair and flung down again, this time headfirst. Thus, in Abul Fazl’s words, ‘his neck was broken and his brains destroyed. Thus the bloodthirsty profligate underwent retribution.’ Akbar had emerged from behind the veil with a vengeance.

  Akbar was personally brave, as shown by his confrontation with Adham. He was also ambitious to extend the boundaries of the empire he had inherited from his father. According to Abul Fazl, he believed ‘a monarch should be ever intent on conquest, otherwise his neighbours rise in arms against him’. Over the years he waged many wars of conquest. Most often dressed in glinting gilded armour, he led his troops from the front. A good and innovative general, he was never defeated in battle. Adept at the surprise attack and hit-and-run raid, he once covered 500 miles in nine days with his mounted troopers to surprise and defeat a much larger force. He contrived pontoons to float elephants and artillery more quickly to the front, had a mortar cast which reputedly needed 1,000 oxen to move it and even rigged up a device to fire fourteen matchlocks simultaneously.

  The first conquests of Akbar’s reign, those of Ajmer, Gwalior and Juanpur, were made on his behalf while he was still behind the veil. Early in his personal rule Akbar defeated some of the leading rajas of the principalities of Rajasthan (Rajputana). The Rajputs, whose name means ‘sons of kings’ and who claimed descent from the sun, moon and fire, were, and are, some of the bravest warriors in the world, with a strict code of honour equivalent to that of the Spartans and a clan spirit to match that of the Scottish Highlands. They were in many ways the knights of Hindu India. Legends and songs are full of their deeds. From the ninth century the Rajputs had gradually risen to power in the northwest of India, where they formed the majority of the ruling dynasties. However, they frequently fought among themselves and their strong tribal rivalries helped Akbar in an initial policy of ‘divide and rule’.

  Akbar’s siege of Chitor in late 1567 and early 1568 marked a high point of Rajput courage but also the virtual end of their independence. The fortress at Chitor tops a rocky sandstone outcrop three-quarters of a mile long, rising sheer from the plains below. To allow his forces to approach the fort, Akbar ordered the construction of large, covered attack corridors, sabats, wide enough for ten horsemen to pass through abreast and built of stone and rubble with wood and hide roofs. Each day musketeers on Chitor’s ramparts shot down hundreds of the labourers constructing these deadly tentacles advancing slowly, sinuously but inexorably up and around the rocks. After months of siege Akbar saw flames and smoke rise suddenly from different areas of the fort. An onlooker explained that the Rajputs saw defeat as inevitable but, before the men sallied out to die in their saffron-yellow wedding robes of martyrdom, their families were making jauhar – ‘the last awful sacrifice which Rajput despair offers the gods’. The fires were those of the funeral pyres on which the Rajput women were throwing themselves.

  After the Rajput warriors had died fighting and in contrast to his usual policy of reconciliation, Akbar ordered a massacre of those remaining alive within Chitor, mostly farmers seeking shelter. Perhaps he did so because Chitor was a long-standing symbol of Rajput power or perhaps he was simply showing future enemies that the greater the resistance the greater would be his retaliation. By 1570 all the major Rajput princes but one, the Rana of Mewar (Udaipur), who retreated into the mountains, had acknowledged Moghul suzerainty.

  Akbar’s next target was the west-coast kingdom of Gujarat. The state was a particularly rich one, benefiting from its position as a major gateway for trade with Arabia and beyond as well as being a departure point for many of the pilgrim ships for Mecca. As the Moghuls often did, Akbar claimed legitimacy for his actions on the flimsy pretext that Gujarat had fleetingly been a part of Humayun’s realm. Akbar also typically took advantage of squabbles among the ruling elite of the state, one faction among whom Akbar claimed had invited him to restore order. Later in life Akbar would disingenuously claim that his conquests ‘did not proceed from self-will and self-indulgence … we had no object except to be kind to mortals and to obliterate the oppressors’. The campaign was a short one and by the end of 1573 Gujarat was safely incorporated into the Moghul realm.

  Even while fighting the Rajputs, Akbar, a Sunni Muslim, had recognized the need to reconcile them and the other Hindu people of his overwhelmingly Hindu new empire to his rule. He did this in a number of ways. Abul Fazl described the first: ‘His Majesty forms matrimonial alliances with princesses of Hindustan and of other countries and secures by these ties of harmony the peace of the world.’ At the age of nineteen, Akbar had married the first of several Rajput princesses, the daughter of the Raja of Amber (Jaipur). Both she and Akbar’s other non-Muslim wives were allowed to practise their religions in the harem. However, Akbar gave none of his daughters in marriage to other rulers and, in fact, from his time it became customary that Moghul princesses should not marry at all, presumably to avoid the creation of further rival dynasties. Akbar also integrated senior Rajputs into his service. Soon, like the Scots in the British imperial armies, they provided a disproportionate number of his generals and of his troops, given special privileges such as mounting guard on imperial palaces or beating drums as they entered the royal citadel.

  Akbar banned the desecration of Hindu temples and when, in 1563, he discovered that his officials were charging Hindu pilgrims a special tax to visit the holy site of Mathura, forty miles from Agra and believed by Hindus to be the birthplace of the god Krishna, he immediately forbade any such pilgrim taxes anywhere in his dominions. In 1564 he went further, much to the discontent of the Islamic mullahs, and abolished the jizya, a poll tax on ‘infidels’, prescribed in the Koran and thus seen by them as an essential part of the Sharia, or ‘straight path’, of Islamic law. Akbar also cleared away a mass of petty, degrading and discriminatory practices such as the bizarre right of Muslim magistrates to spit in the mouth of Hindus who were late in paying their taxes.

  To integrate his expanding empire Akbar in
stituted a series of administrative and land reforms. In so doing he built on measures introduced by Sher Shah, himself a highly competent administrator, and converted a loosely knit military aristocracy into a highly regulated imperial bureaucracy in which anyone of importance was a servant of the state. With the exception of the Rajput principalities and other subordinate states whose rulers acknowledged Moghul suzerainty and paid tribute to the imperial treasury while conducting their internal affairs autonomously, Akbar made all the land in his empire into his own imperial property and divided it into fiefs (or jagirs). He appointed nobles to rule the fiefs on his behalf for a period. In return for taxes collected from their jagirs by government officials, the nobles had to maintain a stated number of troops. Whether they exercised military command or not, he had both nobles and officials graded hierarchically as commanders of a certain number of troops, from ten to 10,000. Even the head of the royal kitchens was ‘a commander of 600’.*

  Akbar also decreed that when his nobles died their property was forfeit to the Crown. Because he could arbitrarily remove nobles from their fief or transfer them to another on the opposite side of the empire as well as control their posthumous estates, Akbar hoped to secure greater loyalty from them and to prevent them establishing rival power bases. Nevertheless, according to the chronicles he suffered 144 rebellions – all unsuccessful – during his reign.

  The importance of good communications, in both senses of the word, to his empire was well understood by Akbar. While the British later used English and railways to rule India, Akbar imposed Persian as the language of the court and built great trunk roads planted with shade-giving trees.† At regular way stations along the improved roads, travellers could rest and imperial messengers change horses or transfer messages. Relays of messengers and horses could thus carry imperial instructions up to 150 miles in twenty-four hours. To remind travellers of imperial power, as well as to reassure them about their safety, at some way stations piles of severed heads showed the fate of robbers and rebels. An English traveller described how the heads were cemented into little towers or turrets ‘in form like a pigeon house, not exceeding 3 or 4 yards in height’.*

  For Akbar, religion was throughout his reign the key both to his rule and to his personal life. When he died, Akbar had more than three hundred wives, many of them dynastic brides. The Koran permitted a man four wives but in one verse seemed to sanction implicitly a kind of second-tier marriage with an unspecified number of women. In the view of both Akbar and of Shia clerics, this provision gave legality to Akbar’s extra marriages. When the Sunni divine who was Akbar’s chief adviser on religious law would not agree, even after lengthy debates, Akbar replaced him with a more compliant Shia. (The parallels with Henry VIII’s rejection, nearly fifty years earlier, of the Catholic faith in favour of his own brand of Christianity, when the Pope would not sanction his divorce from Catherine of Aragon and marriage to Anne Boleyn, are clear.)

  Akbar had seemingly always had a mystical streak. In his late teens he suddenly rode alone into the desert, released his horse and after meditating intensely claimed to have heard a divine voice. Years later, while preparing under a fruit tree for a hunt in the Punjab, ‘a sublime joy took possession of his bodily frame, cognition of God cast its ray’. He was so shaken by the experience that his mother, Hamida, rushed the considerable distance from Agra to care for her son. His inherent spirituality, combined with the political imperative to turn religion into a uniting, rather than a dividing, factor within his empire, led Akbar into ever deeper contemplation of comparative religions. He built what he called the ‘Ibadat Khana’ – ‘the house of worship’ – and invited theologians from all the major faiths to enter and to expound and debate their beliefs.

  When disputing Islamic scholars quickly descended to calling each other ‘fools and heretics’ he issued a decree of infallibility on his own behalf. If Islamic experts disagreed about the interpretation of the Koran, Akbar himself would make the final decision. Even more importantly, the measure stated that when Akbar issued any decree on whatever subject it could not be disputed unless it was demonstrably against the provisions of the Koran. Just as Henry VIII had done in England in 1534, he was making himself the clear temporal head of his faith, constituting a decisive diminution in the power of the mullahs.

  Akbar also introduced a new form of salutation of the imperial presence, prostration, with the forehead touching the ground. This was anathema to the Muslim faithful who believed such salutation should be made only to God. The clerics objected to other more minor innovations of Akbar’s, such as his decision to bathe before rather than after sexual intercourse. In this case, their objection may have been that he was turning sex from an obligation requiring a ritual cleansing in its wake into a pleasure which required anticipatory washings. He also prohibited the slaughter of animals on Sunday, because the day was sacred to the sun. He discouraged the growth of beards, a facial adornment favoured by the strict Muslim, as well as the consumption of garlic and onions. He thought ‘that to remove a piece of skin [circumcision] is not seeking after God’ and therefore decreed that boys should not be circumcised until they were twelve years old, when they should be allowed to decide for themselves whether the operation should go ahead.

  Traveller Peter Mundy’s sketch of a tower of human heads.

  Akbar debated with Hindus, had their epics translated, attended their festivals and appeared with their red tilak mark on his forehead. A disgusted Muslim complained that Akbar had been persuaded ‘to venerate fire, water, stones and trees and all natural objects, even down to cows and their dung’. Akbar prostrated himself before the sun in the manner of the Parsees or other Zoroastrians. Jains convinced him of the benefits of vegetarianism. He saw merit in Taoism, Buddhism and Confucianism. Sikhs found him ‘an attentive listener’.

  In 1579 Akbar summoned Jesuits from the Portuguese colony of Goa on the southwest coast of India. He treated the priests with much courtesy and they reported that he received four volumes of the Bible ‘with great reverence’, kissing each in turn and placing it ‘on his head which amongst these people signifies honour and respect’. He even removed his turban when entering the priests’ small chapel and was sometimes persuaded to wear a crucifix and hang one over his bed. Although the priests remained hopeful for over two years that he would emulate Constantine and bring an empire to Christianity, he never did.

  To Akbar, Christianity was one faith among many from the four quarters of the globe, each containing elements of truth. Instead of embracing any, Akbar inaugurated a new religion – known as Din Ilahi, ‘The Divine Faith’ – that would unite his people without compelling them to forgo their original beliefs. His was a loosely defined faith in which the principles of reincarnation and karma were accepted and forgiveness, toleration and kindness towards all living things were encouraged. Ten vices and ten virtues were enumerated. The sun was worshipped as the body of the divinity, and unification with God was the ultimate aim. Because ‘the divine will manifests itself in the intuition of kings’, Akbar himself was the only conduit between the divine and humanity, but was never clear as to whether he was claiming any divine status for himself. He changed his coinage by inscribing on it the words ‘Allah Akbar’ rather than, as previously, just his name. Throughout the Muslim world the phrase means ‘God is akbar’ – ‘great’ – but it could also be interpreted ‘Akbar is God’.

  Although expediency brought many of Akbar’s leading nobles into his faith, he did not make it a proselytizing religion; consequently, it never achieved a wide following and faded away on Akbar’s death. However, the very existence of the religious debates and Akbar’s lifelong religious tolerance had promoted a greater sense of inclusion among his subjects whichever of the contending religions of his empire they adhered to.

  Despite his many wives, by the time Akbar was in his mid-twenties he had not yet fathered a living heir and began to consult holy men. Hearing of one such, a Sufi or Muslim mystic named Shaikh Salim Chis
hti, dwelling in the small town of Sikri twenty-three miles west of Agra, he visited him.* The shaikh consoled Akbar that he would have three sons. Soon afterwards Akbar’s principal wife, the daughter of the Rajput Raja of Amber, became pregnant. Akbar sent her to live with the shaikh to bring good fortune upon her pregnancy. On 30 August 1569 she gave birth at Sikri to a son named Salim by Akbar after the mystic but to be known as Jahangir when he became emperor. Two other sons, Murad and Daniyal, born to different mothers, followed within the next three years, one born at Sikri and the other at another Chishti shrine.

  To honour his adviser and to capitalize on the good fortune that had come to him from Sikri, Akbar decided to move his capital from Agra to a new city to be built there. Later he would embellish Sikri’s name with the prefix ‘Fatehpur’, meaning ‘city of victory’, to commemorate the success of his military campaigns in Gujarat. Fatehpur Sikri was not, however, the first major building project of Akbar’s reign – that was the tomb of his father Humayun. The vast garden complex was built to the southeast of Delhi and, even to the inexpert eye, is a clear forerunner of the Taj Mahal. Constructed to a symmetrical plan the mausoleum sits on a square twenty-two-foot-high arched plinth of red sandstone in a large walled garden. The tomb is faced with sandstone inset with intricate white marble designs and is topped by a broad white marble dome sitting over an iwan, or recessed entrance arch. Unlike most Moghul buildings, the tomb can be connected with known architects, Sayyid Muhammad and his father Mirak Sayyid Ghiyas. Both were of Persian descent and the tomb is mainly of Persian design, with its arched portals and octagonal burial chamber. It does, however, contain indigenous elements such as the twenty-foot-high bulbous brass finial surmounting the dome, the six-pointed star – an important Hindu cosmological symbol representing spirit and matter held in balance – on the walls over the arches and the chattris on the roofs of each of the main parts of the building. (The word chattri means ‘umbrella’ but in architecture denotes domed and pillared open kiosks.)