Al Haqeeqa
On your biography of Jahangir, you had said, it was like digging him out of obscurity. When you were writing on Akbar (Akbar of Hindustan: Imperfect and Extraordinary. The Man Behind the Myth), was the challenge reverse?
There’s nothing in the book that will be new to a historian but a huge amount of what I read about Akbar was completely unknown to me. On the one hand, Akbar is this omnipresent figure but, paradoxically, many things about him aren’t so well known. For instance, the fact that the greatest resistance that Akbar ever faced was from his own Central Asian nobility who had accompanied Humayun into Hindustan, was a surprise.
So then what made you write on him?
You cannot really understand the Mughals without getting to grips with the man who actually made the empire. Also, I started this book in 2019 and there was something about the timing of it that focused my attention on Akbar in a different way. I was reading about a man who built an empire and empire building is not necessarily a pretty sight. And besides, in the time that I was trying to write about him, there was a lot of ‘empire building’ going on around me. You had Donald Trump trying to make America great again, more recently, we have Putin trying to restore the Russian empire and we had, right at home, this emerging Hindu rashtra. So that kind of ambition for empire building was all
around. I could not escape it.
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PremiumPremiumPremiumPremiumIn some ways, Akbar is no different from other emperors. So what makes him great?
The ruthlessness he exhibits is not very ‘great’. Second, it’s very common, amongst those who crave power; it’s not exceptional. But gradually, in understanding how he lived and ruled, his greatness did start to reveal itself. It lies in the idea that becomes the bedrock of his rule, which is sulh-i kul, peace for all. Here is a man who spent his boyhood in Kabul, surrounded mostly by Central Asians, mostly by Sunni Muslims, who then, in his 20s and 30s, is expanding an empire stretching from Gujarat to Bengal. His empire and even his own family — in his late twenties, Akbar has a son, Salim, from his first Rajput wife — contain many different ethnicities and faiths. This is a man whose power is growing exponentially but there is this question he’s asking himself: he wants to know what is the just way of exercising his power.
He says ‘true greatness consists in doing the will of God’, but which God? And Akbar seems to conclude that what a king is supposed to do (by following God’s will) is create peace and prosperity and justice for his people and his empire, so why not make that the foundational tenet of your rule, sulh-i kul, and leave God out of it? In a way, it is anticipating the modern, multicultural, secular state and to do that in the 16th century with such clarity is truly remarkable. It’s also remarkable now, at a time when this idea of the One, or this pure type of ethnicity or religion that is supposed to define your nation seems to be growing across the world, and in that sense Akbar is a counter to that. His life speaks as an argument against that.
There are so many accounts of Akbar in popular telling. What were the myths that crumbled as you researched him?
Well, almost everything is a myth! The romance with Jodha — first of all she is not called Jodha, she is called Harkha — there is not even a whisper of it. If there’s one person you had to choose whom Akbar had great affection for, it would be Birbar (not Birbal, as he’s later known). But in terms of Akbar and Birbar’s relationship as it’s told in the stories, while Birbar is reputedly very intelligent and talented, there is no indication of him being this witty courtier always getting the better of Akbar — that is a much later invention. Other ideas that are popularly held are of Rana Pratap being his greatest enemy but if there’s a real threat to Akbar’s throne, it is from the Central Asian nobility. The great rivalry, as I understood it, is between Rana Pratap and Man Singh.
Akbar of Hindustan By Parvati Sharma Juggernaut 456 pages Rs 799 (Source: Amazon.in)
The Mughals had matrimonial alliances with the Rajputs. How scandalous would it have been at that time considering such marriages are inviting the label of love jihad all these centuries later?
It’s hard to say but in the records of Abul Fazl and Badauni, neither of them makes a huge thing about Akbar marrying Harkha Bai. Of course, the marriage is only one aspect of a political alliance that means that many Rajputs are now entering the government and becoming increasingly powerful in it.
It’s soon after this alliance that Akbar, for the first time, abolishes jizya, and it is soon thereafter that there is an Uzbek rebellion against him, and part of the reason for this and later rebellions could be that Abkar is now centralising more authority in himself and demanding more revenue, more accountability from his warlords, but also that the Central Asian nobility are now losing ground to the other kinds of people who are rising in the empire — Rajputs, Indian Muslims, Persians.
Akbar has always been seen as a good Muslim and Aurangzeb as the bad Muslim. Is that too simplistic a reading?
Yes. The good-bad Muslim binary is suspect enough in modern times; to see historical figures through it doesn’t help us understand them at all. Akbar is a complicated person. Sometimes he does things that are terrible, that are not defensible, but at the same time he’s truly extraordinary in terms of what he manages to achieve and how he achieves it, in not just creating this empire but also in laying its administrative and philosophical foundations. The fact is that he once ordered a massacre of civilians after the Siege of Chittorgarh, possibly to proclaim his Muslim credentials to the Central Asian nobility after an Uzbek rebellion, but he is also a man who changes and has the ability to look back at himself. The man who admits that ‘when I was younger I converted people to Islam by force because I thought that was the right thing to do but later I realised I was wrong’ is also the man who allows complete freedom not only to practise but propagate any religion in his realm.
How do you see the increasing efforts to write out the Mughals from our history?
The anti-Mughal discourse is not an attack on the Mughals, they are long dead and don’t care; it’s not an engagement with history, it’s an attack on Muslims in India today. The Mughals are one of the greatest dynasties in the world. Their achievements (and their failures) in all sorts of spheres have been extraordinary. Writing them out of our history is just foolish. It’s like that expression — cutting your nose to spite your face.
