Akbar the Great

The third Mughal emperor of India, 1556–1605. He expanded the empire, followed a policy of universal tolerance, and founded the controversial Din-i Ilahi. ¹

Akbar (Abu l-Fath Jalal al-Din Muhammad) was born on 15 October 1542 at Umarkot in Sind, while his father Humayun, driven out by the Afghan usurper Shir Shah Sur, was escaping to Persia. He was a grandson of Babur, so that he was both a Timurid Turk and a Chaghatay Mongol; his mother, Hamida Banu, was a Persian. After thirteen years of exile Humayun, taking advantage of the decline of Sur power, tried to reconquer India, but little had been achieved before his death on 24 January 1556. The article's judgement is that there was no Mughal empire before Akbar, only an attempt to create one. ²

In his early struggles Akbar owed much to his guardian and regent, Bayram Khan. Among his rivals, the most dangerous after the Sur claimants was the Hindu minister Hemu, who had taken the title Raja Vikramaditya; Hemu's forces were routed at Panipat on 5 November 1556. In 1557 Sikandar Shah Sur surrendered. In 1560 Bayram Khan fell from power, and Akbar then remained for some time under the harmful influence of the women of the harem and of a faction led by his foster relatives, the atga khayl of the contemporary Muslim historians. His personal rule is therefore dated from after 1560. ²

His conquests came in stages. By 1561 his kingdom comprised the Punjab and Multan, the Ganges and Jumna basin between Panipat and Allahabad, the country between the Gumti and the Himalayan foothills, Gwalior and Ajmer; Kabul was held by his half-brother Muhammad Hakim, and Kandahar belonged to Persia. Gujarat and Khandesh, the five Deccani sultanates (Berar, Bidar, Ahmadnagar, Bijapur and Golconda) and the Hindu empire of Vijayanagara lay outside his dominions, while Kashmir, Rajputana and Gondwana were under independent chiefs and rajas, and Bihar and Bengal acknowledged an Afghan ruler, Sulayman Kararani. Between 1562 and 1576 he added Malwa (1562), the Gond kingdom of Garha-Katanga in Gondwana (1564), Chitor (1568), Ranthambhor and Kalinjar in Bundelkhand (1569), and Gujarat (1573); the annexation of Bengal in 1576 made him master of northern India except lower Sind. Later additions were Kashmir (1586), Sind (1591), part of Orissa (1592), Baluchistan and Makran (1594) and Kandahar (1595). His Deccan campaigns brought Berar, Khandesh and part of Ahmadnagar under him between 1595 and 1601. At his death in 1605 the empire had fifteen subas (provinces). ²

Akbar was more than a conqueror; the article credits him with a genius for administration. His ideas drew on the Sur Afghans and the sultans of Delhi, and the chief lesson he took from them was the danger of an unchecked wazirate. In 1564 the central government was reorganized: the financial functions of the wakil-i mutlak passed to the diwan or wazir, and the office of wakil was eclipsed and often left vacant. The other chief central officers were the mir bakhshi, who ran military administration (transport, and the pay of troops on active service, though the diwan normally paid them), the mir saman, who ran the buyutat department and the imperial workshops, and the sadr al-sudur, the chief kadi and head of the judiciary. The sadr al-sudur had great powers early in the reign, and the article notes that it is incorrect to say Akbar abolished the office in 1581; six provincial sadrs were appointed, but the office continued with its former powers reduced. Officials were graded as amirs or mansabdars in 33 classes, with rank set by nominal commands of horse, although the exact meaning of the terms dhat and suwar is disputed. Provinces (subas) were divided into sarkars and then parganas or mahals, the lowest fiscal unit. Governors served short terms, and the diwan and faujdar of a province were appointed by the centre; a system of espionage run by the waqia nawis and other officials reported back to the court. ²

Akbar's revenue policy came out of three experiments, each assessing land on the area sown, with rates varying by crop. The first two failed. A stable system was introduced in the 24th regnal year (1579–80), known as dah sala because assessment rested on the average of the previous ten years. The peasant paid one-third of the gross produce to the state. It was enforced only in the six central provinces that formed the original core of the empire. ²

His religious policy was shaped mainly by political and dynastic considerations. His policy of sulh-i kull (universal toleration), his abolition of the jizya and of the tax on Hindu pilgrims were aimed at securing the loyalty of his Hindu subjects, who formed the bulk of the population, and expressed a view of the state as supreme politically, economically and financially. He curbed the power of the ulama through the Infallibility Decree of 1579, which recognized him as the chief authority in the realm on religious matters. Although he was illiterate, he took a real interest in comparative religion and built the Ibadat-khana (House of Worship), where learned men of all religions met to discuss theology. These discussions convinced him that there was good in all religions, and he promulgated a new eclectic faith, the Din-i Ilahi, which he hoped in vain would be acceptable to his subjects. The decline of the empire is linked by the article to his successors' reversal of his policy of conciliation and their gradual departure from its main principles. ²

Bibliography cited by the article includes Abu l-Fadl 'Allami's A'in-i Akbari and Akbar-nama; 'Abd al-Qadir Badauni's Muntakhab al-Tawarikh; Graf vor Noer's Kaiser Akbar; V. A. Smith's Akbar the Great Mogul; the Cambridge History of India, vol. iv; W. H. Moreland's India at the Death of Akbar; and C. H. Payne's Akbar and the Jesuits. ³