Empire of the Moghul: Ruler of the World

by Alex Rutherford

  Akbar’s reign was also the time when growing numbers of Europeans – merchants, priests and soldiers of fortune – began making their way to the Moghul court. Father Antonio Monserrate was one of the first Jesuits to visit Akbar’s court and his Commentary on his Journey to the Court of Akbar describes the religious debates in Akbar’s ibadat khana. In 1584, Ralph Fitch was among the first English merchants to reach Hindustan and he describes the wonders of Agra and Fatehpur Sikri in his Memoirs.

  Vivid and personal as many of these accounts are, I also wanted to visit – actually in most cases revisit – the places that were important to Akbar. In Delhi I sat in the walled garden and watched the sun set behind the domed sandstone and marble tomb Akbar built for his father Humayun, with its elegant symmetry and chamfered corners such an obvious forerunner to the luminous Taj Mahal. In Agra, I walked in burning heat up the steep, twisting ramp through gates studded with spikes to repel charges by armoured elephants into the sandstone fortress remodelled by Akbar. It is still encircled by the battlements around which he ran with a man clenched under each arm to show off his strength. Standing on a jharoka balcony I imagined how Akbar must have felt as he showed himself every dawn to the subjects clustering on the sandy riverbanks below.

  Perhaps the greatest pointer to the boundless scope of Akbar’s ambition and confidence is the sandstone city of Fatehpur Sikri near Agra, built and then abandoned by Akbar a few years later. Wander its courtyards, palaces and pavilions and you’re surprised not to see ghosts. Bright blue tiles from Isfahan still glitter on the roof of Akbar’s immense haram above the palace of the winds where Akbar’s women sat to catch the cooling breezes. The marble platform where he sat beneath silken canopies is still there in the centre of the Anup Talao, Akbar’s ‘Peerless Pool’. The hot, dry desert air has preserved the intricate sandstone carvings while in the courtyard of the mosque people still pray at Shaikh Salim Chishti’s domed white marble tomb inlaid with mother of pearl and tie twists of thread to its delicate jali screens as physical expressions of their innermost wishes.

  In Rajasthan, the soaring fortress-palaces of Amber and Jodhpur explain Akbar’s eagerness to make the proud and martial Rajputs his allies, while the ruins of the once great Rajput fortress of Chittorgarh show the consequences of refusing Akbar’s overtures. I climbed up to it from the east – the direction from which Akbar’s armies made their assaults. In a courtyard, a stone marks the place where, knowing that defeat by the Moghuls was inevitable, the Rajput women committed jauhar, hurling themselves into the flames of a great fire rather than fall into Moghul hands. It was a reminder that for all his manifold achievements, religious toleration and advanced, sophisticated view of the world, Akbar lived in and was part of a violent time and that while those who accepted Moghul rule prospered, those who resisted were crushed.

  As with all the books in the Moghul Quintet, the main military, political and personal events described in Ruler of the World all happened. Akbar was indeed crowned on a hastily constructed brick throne after his mother and Bairam Khan concealed the death of his father Humayun to buy time; Adham Khan, Akbar’s milk-brother, did attempt to kill him in the haram; Akbar’s defeat of Hemu and his subsequent military campaigns in Rajasthan, Gujarat, Bengal, Kashmir, Sind and the Deccan all occurred; Akbar’s many marriages and his hundreds of concubines are also based on fact though the names of some of his wives are unknown. Akbar’s life was so rich in incident that I of course omitted some events and condensed or simplified others as well as compressing timescales in a book which covers a fifty-year period. Also because the chronicles cannot tell us everything – their writers would never have dared reveal certain things – I have used the novelist’s freedom to imagine some incidents and of course to attribute motivation.

  However, all the time I have tried to be true to Akbar who, as I wrote the book, became very real to me. I was moved by the dilemma of a man, outwardly so successful and beloved by his subjects, whose relationships with those closest to him often failed. Nearly all the other main characters are real too – Akbar’s mother and aunt Hamida and Gulbadan, his milk-mother Maham Anga and milk-brother Adham Khan, his Persian regent Bairam Khan, his adversaries like Hemu, Shah Daud and Rana Udai Singh, his sons Salim, Murad and Daniyal and the Sufi divine Salim Chishti who predicted their birth, and his grandsons, the Persian Ghiyas Beg and his family, the Jesuit fathers Antonio Monserrate and Francisco Henriquez and the mullahs Shaikh Mubarak and Shaikh Ahmad. A few like Ahmed Khan, Akbar’s khan-i-khanan, and Salim’s confidant Suleiman Beg are composite characters.

  Additional Notes

  Frontispiece

  The quotation from the Akbarnama comes from H. Beveridge’s translation (vol. I, p.631, Calcutta: Asiatic Society 1907-39)

  Chapter 1

  Akbar’s illiteracy is well attested. He may have been dyslexic.

  Humayun died in January 1556. Akbar, who was born on 15 October 1542, was proclaimed emperor on his brick throne in February 1556.

  Timur, a chieftain of the nomadic Barlas Turks, is better known in the west as Tamburlaine, a corruption of ‘Timur the Lame’. Christopher Marlowe’s play portrays him as ‘the scourge of God’.

  Of course Akbar would have used the Muslim lunar calendar, but I have converted dates into the conventional solar, Christian, calendar we use in the west.

  Chapter 2

  The battle of Panipat against Hemu took place in November 1556.

  Chapter 3

  Bairam Khan was dismissed in 1560.

  Chapter 4

  Bairam Khan was killed in early 1561.

  Chapter 5

  Adham Khan killed Atga Khan and attempted to kill Akbar in May 1562. Maham Anga died soon afterwards, it is said from grief. Akbar provided the money for a handsome tomb for them. It still stands at Mehrauli, south of Delhi near the Qtab Minar.

  Chapter 7

  The Chittorgarh campaign took place in 1567-8.

  Chapter 8

  Although Akbar certainly married a Rajput princess of Amber (Jaipur) she was not his first wife and the chroniclers are not entirely clear on her name and give no details of the nature of her relationship with Akbar other than that she was Salim’s mother. Their relationship has been fictionalised in various ways in films and novels. It is my own thought that she might have been hostile to Akbar because of his subjection of the Rajputs.

  Chapter 9

  Akbar visited Shaikh Salim Chishti in 1568 and Salim was born on 30 August 1569. The word sufi means ‘those who wear rough woollen garments’ and derives from the Arabic word for wool – suf. Sufi mystics adopted such garb as a symbol of aestheticism and poverty.

  Chapter 10

  Abul Fazl was born in January 1551 and entered Akbar’s service in 1574.

  Akbar’s use of ‘tens’ in designating his officials as commanders of a certain number of troops was based on zero, an Indian invention. It was brought to Europe via the Middle East. Hence what we know as Arabic numerals are really Indian numerals.

  Europeans wrote of how Akbar ordered sections of buildings to be prefabricated and himself laboured in the quarries cuting sandstone.

  The uses of individual buildings at Fatehpur Sikri are not recorded by Abul Fazl or any other chroniclers in detail and are a fertile subject of debate among architectural historians, despite the certainty with which guides speak of them.

  Chapter 11

  The Gujarat campaign was in 1572.

  Chapter 12

  The Patna campaign and the invasion of Bengal began in 1574. Shah Daud’s death was in 1576.

  Chapter 13

  Murad was born in June 1570, Daniyal in September 1572.

  The distinction between Shia and Sunni derived from the first century of Islam and originally related to who was Muhammad’s legitimate successor and whether the office should be an elected one or restricted, as the Shias claimed, to the descendants of the prophet through his cousin and son-in-law, Ali. ‘Shia’ is the word for ‘party’ and comes from
the phrase ‘the party of Ali’. ‘Sunni’ means ‘those who follow the custom – sunna – of Muhammad’. By the sixteenth century further differences had grown between the two sects, such as the nature of required daily prayer.

  The first Jesuit mission including Father Monserrate, a Spaniard, arrived at Akbar’s court in 1580.

  Chapter 14

  Chronicles record the story of Ghiyas Beg’s hazardous journey during which in 1577 Mehrunissa was born.

  Chapter 16

  John Newberry arrived in India with Ralph Fitch in 1584.

  Some commentators have suggested that Akbar’s trances, of which this was by no means the only one, were because, like Julius Caesar, he suffered from epilepsy.

  Chapter 18

  Many reasons have been advanced for the abandonment of Fatehpur Sikri. Lack of water is one. Another is the distance from the Jumna, a main transport artery at the time. Yet another is that Akbar moved his capital to Lahore simply to be nearer the front lines of his campaigns.

  The invasion of Kashmir was in 1586.

  Chapter 19

  The campaign in Sind was from 1588-91.

  Salim married Man Bai in 1585.

  Khusrau was born in August 1587.

  Chapter 21

  Khurram was born on 5 January 1592 in Lahore. Parvez was born in 1589. Abul Fazl wrote in the Akbarnama that Akbar ‘loved grandsons more than sons’. Akbar did indeed take Khurram into his own household, placing him with one of his wives, Rukhiya.

  Chapter 22

  The Kandahar campaign culminated in the city’s fall in May 1595.

  Chapter 23

  The story of Salim’s seduction of Akbar’s concubine Anarkali was first mentioned by another English merchant William Finch who visited Hindustan between 1608 and 1611 and claimed while in Lahore to have seen a sumptuous tomb erected for Anarkali by Salim after he became emperor. Though there is no other contemporary evidence for this tragic romance, the story of Anarkali was clearly part of the oral tradition and was taken up by later Moghul writers. It is my own invention that she was Venetian.

  Chapter 26

  Salim indeed turned to wine, spirits and opium. His hands shook so badly he couldn’t hold a glass and court physicians gave him six months to live unless he reformed.

  Chapter 27

  Salim left for Allahabad in July 1600. In his own memoirs the Jahangirnama, Salim describes Abul Fazl as ‘no friend of mine’ and admitted responsibility for his killing.

  Murad died of drink in May 1599.

  Salim returned to Agra in April 1603.

  Chapter 28

  Hamida died in August 1604 and Daniyal in March 1605.

  Chapter 29

  The western philosopher spoken of by Akbar is Sophocles.

  Akbar died on 15 October 1605. According to the western calendar it was his sixty-third birthday. Intriguingly one of his most famous contemporaries William Shakespeare also died on his own birthday, 23 April 1616, at the age of fifty-two.