G. B. Malleson

“ The accident which deprived Humáyún of his life before the second battle of Pánípat had bestowed upon the young Akbar, then a boy of fourteen, the succession to the empire of Bábar, was, then, in every sense, fortunate for Hindustán. Humáyún, during his long absence, his many years of striving with fortune, had learnt nothing and had forgotten nothing. The boy who succeeded him, and who, although of tender years, had already had as many adventures, had seen as many vicissitudes of fortune, as would fill the life of an ordinary man, was untried. ”

“ The several races recognised that during his reign of forty-nine years India was free from foreign invasion; that he subjugated all adversaries within, some by force of arms, some by means more peaceful, and that he preferred the latter method. 'The whole length and breadth of the land,' wrote Muhammad Amín after his death, 'was firmly and righteously governed. All people of every description and station came to his court, and universal peace being established among all classes, men of every sect dwelt secure under his protection.' Such was Akbar the ruler. ”

“ The dominant religion should not be, as long as he was its interpreter, the religion of the sword. It should carry, on the contrary, a healing influence throughout India; should wipe away reminiscences of persecution, and proclaiming liberty of conscience, should practise the most perfect toleration. When this change had been generally recognised Akbar would then appeal to the princes and peoples of India to acknowledge the suzerainty of the one prince who would protect and yet not persecute. ”

“ In the seventh year of his reign, he being then in the twenty-first year of his life, Akbar abolished the practice, heretofore prevailing, by which the troops of the conqueror were permitted to forcibly sell or keep in slavery the wives, children, and dependants of the conquered. Whatever might be the delinquencies of an enemy, his children and the people belonging to him were, according to the proclamation of the sovereign, to be free to go as they pleased to their own houses, or to the houses of their relatives. No one, great or small, was to be made a slave. ”

“ The very expressions used by the natives of India at the present day show how this thought runs through their imaginations. To them the man in authority, the supreme wielder of power, sits in the place of God. His fiat means to them weal or woe, happiness or misery. On days of ceremony, then, they expect that this all-powerful being shall display the ensigns of royalty, shall surround himself with the pomp and glitter which betoken state. Akbar thoroughly understood this and acted accordingly. ”

“ It is impossible to understand the character of Akbar without referring to them somewhat minutely. Akbar did not suddenly imbibe those principles of toleration and of equal government for all, the enforcement of which marks an important era in the history of India. For the first twenty years of his reign he had to conquer to maintain his power. With the representatives of dispossessed dynasties in Bengal, in Behar, in Orissa, in Western India, including Gujarát and Khándesh, ready to seize an opportunity, to sit still was to invite attack. ”

“ By the rivals whom he had overthrown and by the children of the soil, Bábar was alike regarded as a conqueror, and as nothing more. A man of remarkable ability, who had spent all his life in arms, he was really an adventurer, though a brilliant adventurer, who, soaring above his contemporaries in genius, taught in the rough school of adversity, had beheld from his eyrie at Kábul the distracted condition of fertile Hindustán, and had dashed down upon her plains with a force that was irresistible. ”

“ On all the questions which have affected mankind in all ages, and which affect them still, the questions of religion, of civil polity, of the administration of justice, he had an open mind, absolutely free from prejudice, eager to receive impressions. Born and bred a Muhammadan, he nevertheless consorted freely and on equal terms with the followers of Buddha, of Bráhma, of Zoroaster, and of Jesus. It has been charged against him that in his later years he disliked learned men, and even drove them from his court. ”

“ It was to a great extent upon her advice that he had acted in dealing with Bairám. She had a splendid provision in the palace, and Akbar had provided handsomely for her sons. The eldest of these, however, fired with jealousy at the elevation of men whose equal or superior he considered himself to be, and goaded probably by men of a like nature to his own, assassinated the Prime Minister as he was sitting in his public office; then, trusting to the favour which Akbar had always displayed towards his family and himself, went and stood at the door of the harem. ”

“ It is not easy for a young boy to shake off all at once the influence of a great general under whom he had been placed to learn his trade, and possibly Akbar, though he did not approve many of the acts authorised in his name by his Atálik, did not feel himself strong enough to throw off the yoke. But the removal by the strong hand of men whom Akbar liked, but who had incurred without reason the enmity of Bairám, gradually estranged the heart of the sovereign from his too autocratic minister. ”

“ There never has flourished in India a more generous encourager of the real thing. In this respect the present rulers of India might profit by his example. One of the men whose knowledge of history was the most extensive in that age, and who possessed great talents and a searching mind, was Khán-í-Ázam Mírzá, son of his favourite nurse. For a long time this man held fast to the orthodox profession of faith, ridiculing the 'new religion' of Akbar, and especially ridiculing Faizí and Abulfazl, to whom he applied nicknames expressing his sense of their pretensions. ”

“ They recognised in Akbar the founder of a set of principles such as had never been heard before in India. In his eyes merit was merit, whether evinced by a Hindu prince or by an Uzbek Musalmán. The race and creed of the meritorious man barred neither his employment in high positions nor his rise to honour. Hence, men like Bhagwán Dás, Mán Singh, Todar Mall, and others, found that they enjoyed a consideration under this Muhammadan sovereign far greater and wider-reaching than that which would have accrued to them as independent rulers of their ancestral dominions. ”

“ Thus a faith based on some elementary principles traced itself on the mirror of his heart, and as the result of all the influences which were brought to bear on his Majesty, there grew, gradually as the outline on a stone, the conviction on his heart that there were sensible men in all religions, and abstemious thinkers, and men endowed with miraculous powers, among all nations. If some true knowledge were thus everywhere to be found, why should truth be confined to one religion, or to a creed like Islám, which was comparatively new, and scarcely a thousand years old ”

“ But he had not counted sufficiently on the love of rule indwelling in the hearts of men who have once ruled. He had not been long at Agra, then, before the dispossessed lordlings of the province began to raise forces, and to harass the country. Determined to nip the evil in the bud, Akbar prepared a second expedition to Western India, and despatching his army in advance, set out, one Sunday morning in September, riding on a swift dromedary, to join it. Without drawing rein, he rode seventy miles to Toda, nearly midway between Jaipur and Ajmere. ”

“ Akbar was a very magnificent sovereign. Though simple in his habits, he recognised, as the greatest of British Viceroys recognised after him, that show is a main element in the governing of an Eastern people. It is necessary to strike the eye, to let the subjects see the very majesty of power, the 'pomp and circumstance' attending the being whose nod indicates authority, who is to them the personified concentration on earth of the attributes of the Almighty. ”

“ His reflective mind, therefore, was unwilling from the outset to accept the theory that because he, the conqueror, the ruler, happened to be born a Muhammadan, therefore Muhammadanism was true for all mankind. Gradually his thoughts found words in the utterance: 'Why should I claim to guide men before I myself am guided;' and, as he listened to other doctrines and other creeds, his honest doubts became confirmed, and, noting daily the bitter narrowness of sectarianism, no matter of what form of religion, he became more and more wedded to the principle of toleration for all. ”

“ The Muhammadans were not only conquerors, but conquerors who had spread their religion by the sword. The scorn and contempt with which the more zealous among them regarded the religion of the Hindus and those who professed it may be traced in every page of the writings of Badauní, one of the contemporary historians of the period. Nor was that scorn confined solely to the Hindu religion. It extended to every other form of worship and to every other doctrine save that professed by the followers of Muhammad.
Akbar was born in that creed. ”

“ He still continued to see in him the boy of whom he had been the tutor, whose armies he had led to victory, and whose dominions he was administering. The exercise of power without a check had made the exercise of such power necessary to him, and he continued to wield it with all the self-sufficiency of a singularly determined nature.
Round every young ruler there will be men who will never fail to regard the exercise by another of authority rightly pertaining to him as a grievous wrong to the ruler and to themselves. ”

“ And now, at the close of 1556, the empire won and lost and won again was in the hands of a boy, reared in the school of adversity and trial, one month over fourteen years.1 Pánípat had given him India. Young as he was, he had seen much of affairs. He had been constantly consulted by his father: he had undergone a practical military education under Bairám, the first commander of the day: he had governed the Punjab for over six months. But it was as an administrator as well as a conqueror that he was now about to be tried. ”

“ Shaikh Mubárak, a man who had studied the religion of his ancestors to the acquiring of a complete knowledge of every phase of it, who possessed an inquiring mind and a comprehensive genius, and who had progressed in thought as he acquired knowledge, gave his children an education which, grafted on minds apt to receive and to retain knowledge, qualified them to shine in any society. ”

“ At ordinary times Akbar was the simple, unaffected, earnest man, ever striving after truth, such as the work he accomplished gives evidence of. That work was the consolidation of an empire, torn by Muhammadan conquerors for more than four centuries, and at the end of that period still unsettled, still unconsolidated. During those four centuries the principles of the Kurán, read in a bigoted and unnatural sense by the Afghán conquerors, had been distorted to rob and plunder the Hindu population. ”

“ Yet, in their schemes, the absence of such a programme had left the empire conquered on the morrow of the Pánípat of 1526, an empire without root in the soil, dependent absolutely on continued military success; liable to be overthrown by the first strong gust; not one whit more stable than the empires of the Ghaznivides, the Ghors, the Khiljis, the Tughlaks, the Saiyids, the Lodís, which had preceded it. That it was not more stable was proved by the ease with which the empire founded by Bábar succumbed, in the succeeding reign, to the attacks of Sher Sháh. ”

“ A parganá is a division of land nearly equalling a barony. A parganadár was called 'lord of a barony.'
The nineteenth year of the reign of Akbar was thus in all respects save one a glorious year for the young empire. Bengal and Behar had been added to North-western, Central, and Western India. Practically, in fact, all India north of the Vindhya range acknowledged the supremacy of the son of Humáyún. The exception to the general prosperity was caused by a terrible famine and pestilence in Western India, the effects of which were most severely felt. ”

“ This conviction of the ephemeral character of the actual rule was increased by the recollection of the ease with which Humáyún had been overthrown. Defeated at Kanauj, he had quitted India leaving not a trace of the thirteen years of Mughal sway, not a single root in the soil.
These were facts which Akbar had recognised. The problem, to his mind, was how to act so as to efface from the minds of princes and people these recollections; to conquer that he might unite ”

“ There is not a religion which has not suffered from the intemperate zeal of its bigoted supporters; and Muhammadanism has suffered at least as much as the others. But the extract proves the extent to which it was possible for the agents of an unusually enlightened prince to tyrannise over and to insult the conquered race in the name of a religion, whose true tenets they perverted by so acting.
Akbar recognised not only the inherent liability to this abuse in the collection of such a tax, but also the vicious character of the tax itself. ”

“ Nine days later Ibráhím Lodí, at the head of an army computed by Bábar to have been a hundred thousand strong, attacked the invader in his intrenched camp. 'The sun had mounted spear-high,' writes Bábar, 'when the onset of the battle began, and the combat lasted till midday, when the enemy were completely broken and routed.' The victory was in all respects decisive. Ibráhím Lodí was killed, bravely fighting, and Hindustán lay at the feet of the victor. That very day Bábar despatched troops to occupy Delhi and Agra. ”

“ With the surrender of this prince, the conquest of Bengal might be regarded as achieved.
Very much elated with the good news received at Cawnpur, Akbar, deeming the campaign in Bengal as virtually terminated, pushed on to Delhi, devoted there a few days to hunting, and then made another journey to Ajmere, hunting as he marched. At Nárnul he received visits from his governors of the Punjab and of Gujarát, and had the satisfaction of learning that everywhere his rule was taking root in the hearts of the people. ”

“ It is not necessary to inquire into the motives of such men. For one reason or another, often doubtless of a selfish, rarely of a pure and disinterested nature, they desire the young and rightful master of the State to be the dispenser of power and patronage. That there was a cluster of such men about Akbar, of men who disliked Bairám, who had been injured by him, who expected from the prince favours which they could not hope to obtain from the minister, is certain. Female influence was also brought to bear on the mind of the sovereign. ”