A Boy Emperor in a Broken Kingdom
Akbar was born in 1542 at Umarkot in the Sindh desert while his father Humayun was fleeing the empire that Babur, Akbar's grandfather, had founded only a generation earlier. Crowned at thirteen in 1556 after Humayun died falling down his library stairs, the boy inherited little more than a claim. His regent Bairam Khan won the second battle of Panipat that year, defeating the general Hemu and securing Delhi. By 1560 the teenager had pushed his regent aside, and over the following decades he subdued Rajasthan, Gujarat, Bengal, and lands far beyond.
The conquests were often savage. At Chittor in 1568, after a long siege, Akbar's forces massacred the defenders and thousands of noncombatants, and the emperor announced the slaughter in an official letter of victory couched in the language of holy war. His chronicler Abu al-Fazl wrapped such episodes in destiny; the disaffected historian Badauni, writing in secret, recorded a sourer reign. An honest portrait holds both together: the celebrated empire of tolerance was built, first, by relentless and sometimes merciless force.
Peace with All
What distinguishes Akbar is what he did with power once he held it. He married Rajput princesses without demanding conversion, raised Hindus to the highest offices, and in 1564 abolished the jizya, the tax on non-Muslims. His minister Raja Todar Mal built a land-revenue system so sound that later rulers, including the British, borrowed from it. The mansabdari system ranked nobles by military grade and paid them from the treasury, binding Turks, Persians, Afghans, and Rajputs alike to the throne rather than to their clans.
At his red sandstone capital of Fatehpur Sikri, Akbar built the Ibadat Khana, a house of worship where from 1575 he staged debates among Sunni and Shia scholars, Brahmins, Jains, Zoroastrians, and Jesuit priests from Goa. Though he never learned to read, possibly because of dyslexia, he had books read aloud daily and kept a vast library and a famous atelier of painters. From the debates emerged his policy of sulh-i kul, universal peace, and a small discipleship order centered on his own person that scandalized the orthodox.
The Verdict of Four Centuries
Orthodox critics accused Akbar of abandoning Islam; many modern historians answer that his Din-i Ilahi was less a new religion than a court fellowship with a few dozen initiates. His translation bureau rendered the Mahabharata and other Sanskrit works into Persian, aiming to make his subjects intelligible to one another. The empire he left in 1605 may have held a hundred million people and dwarfed the treasuries of Europe. Yet it remained an autocracy resting on peasant taxation, and his son Salim, the future Jahangir, rose in rebellion during his final years.
Akbar died at Agra in October 1605 and lies at Sikandra in a tomb that mixes Hindu and Islamic forms as deliberately as his politics did. His great-grandson Aurangzeb reimposed the jizya, and the argument between their two visions of India has never truly ended. Modern South Asians still invoke Akbar in debates over pluralism, while historians caution against dressing him as a modern liberal. He was an absolute monarch of the sixteenth century who attempted, within those limits, something genuinely rare.
