Person · Mughal emperor · India

Akbar

Date

1556–1605

Function

Authority & administration

Patron dynasty

Mughal

Condition

historical person

Confidence

Established / referenced

Location

27.180, 78.020

Worth knowing

He was illiterate, or close to it, and had books read aloud to him; the imperial library ran to twenty-four thousand volumes. He abolished the jizya in 1564, married into the Rajput houses without requiring conversion, and in 1582 promulgated the din-i ilahi, which attracted perhaps a couple of dozen followers and outlived him by nothing.

About the place

Placed at Agra, the capital he ruled from for most of his reign and where he is buried at Sikandra. His other capital, Fatehpur Sikri, is a separate entry twenty-five miles west.

Connections (21)

• Akbar’s courtRaja Man Singh I

  Man Singh of Amber was among Akbar's most senior commanders — governor of Kabul and then of Bengal, and commander of the Mughal army at Haldighati against a fellow Rajput. The Kachhwaha accommodation with the Mughals was a marriage alliance as well as a military one, and it made Amber rich and eventually made Jaipur possible. The popular nine gems framing is not a contemporary list; the documented court association is.

• PatronageJvālāmukhī, Kangra

  Akbar is said to have come to Jvālāmukhī, tried to have the flames put out by cutting a channel of water over them, failed, and sent a gold umbrella in acknowledgement — which tradition says turned to base metal when he offered it. The story is told at the shrine as an account of the flames, not of Akbar.

• Imperial devotion toMuʿīnuddīn Chishtī

  Akbar walked the three hundred and eighty kilometres from Agra to Ajmer barefoot in 1570 after a son was born, and returned many times. Mughal devotion to a Chishti shrine is the clearest case of an imperial dynasty deriving legitimacy from a religious institution it did not control. Akbar also had the Chishti hermit Salīm at Sikri predict a son, named the boy Salīm, and built an entire imperial capital around the hermitage, which was abandoned within twenty years.

• CampaignAhmad Sirhindi

  Ahmad Sirhindi's letters attack Akbar's religious experiments — the Dīn-i Ilāhī, the abolition of jizya, the scholarly debates at Fatehpur Sīkrī — as a dilution of Islam, and argue for the reassertion of the sharia against Sufi monism. Jahangir imprisoned him at Gwalior for a year and then released him on good terms. The quarrel between imperial syncretism and Naqshbandi reform runs through the next three centuries of South Asian Islam.

• PatronageTansen

  Abu'l-Fazl lists Tansen first among the musicians of Akbar's court and records that the emperor sent for him from Rewa about 1562. The court's patronage is why his rāgas were written down and transmitted while Baiju's were not, and it is also the reason the tradition has spent four centuries arguing about whether a singer who performed for an emperor could be the equal of one who refused. Both positions are argued using stories about the same three men.

• TransmissionBhāskara II

  Akbar had the Līlāvatī translated into Persian by Faizi in 1587, and the Bīja Ganita followed under Shah Jahan. The Mughal translation bureau moved Sanskrit mathematics, the Mahābhārata, the Rāmāyana and the Upanishads into Persian over three reigns, which is how much of this material first reached European readers — through Persian rather than directly from Sanskrit.

• PatronageRaja Todar Mal

  Todar Mal's zabt settlement measured the cultivated land with a standard bigha, classified soils by fertility, averaged a decade of yields and prices and fixed the demand in cash rather than grain — which meant the peasant had to sell in a market and the state had to keep one working. The British kept the system and independent India's northern land records still descend from those surveys, which makes a Khatri accountant of the 1580s the longest-lasting administrator in Indian history.

• PatronageAbu’l-Fazl

  The Ā'īn-i Akbarī lists the revenue of every district, the price of every commodity, the wages of every trade, the ranks of the army, the customs of the provinces and the recipes of the imperial kitchen — an administrative photograph of an empire, written by the emperor's closest friend and probably his ghostwriter. Jahangir had Abu'l-Fazl murdered in 1602 for the influence he had over Akbar, which is the other thing to know about him.

• Imperial administration ofFatehpur Sīkrī

  The Ibādat Khāna debates brought Sunni and Shia scholars, Hindus, Jains, Zoroastrians and Portuguese Jesuits into one room, and Akbar's conclusion — that no tradition had a monopoly — produced the 1579 decree making him the final arbiter in religious disputes and the Dīn-i Ilāhī three years later. The experiment was reversed within two generations and provoked the Naqshbandi reaction that shaped South Asian Islam afterwards.

• Court associationBirbal (Mahesh Das)

  Birbal's real position was mansabdar and a member of the emperor's inner circle, one of very few Hindus in it and one of the few men recorded as speaking freely to Akbar. The story cycle keeps the relationship and discards everything else, which is why it survives: what it preserves is the office, not the biography.

• PatronageŚukasaptati and the Tūtīnāma

  Akbar commissioned an illustrated Tutinama early in his reign, and its roughly two hundred and fifty miniatures by a workshop under Mir Sayyid Ali and Abd al-Samad are the first securely datable body of Mughal painting. The style is visibly Persian masters and Indian painters working out a joint manner on the page, and the book they were doing it on is a Sanskrit parrot's story cycle.

• OpposedMahārāṇa Pratāp

  Maharana Pratap refused the matrimonial-and-political submission Akbar accepted from most other Rajput houses in the 1570s. Akbar sent four embassies — Jalal Khan, Man Singh of Amber, Bhagwant Das, Todar Mal — asking Pratap to attend court and accept a Mughal rank in return for keeping Mewar; Pratap refused each. The 1576 Haldighati battle, Akbar's attempts to isolate Mewar economically, and Pratap's twenty years of hill-fort recovery were the consequence. The two never met.

• ServedRaja Man Singh I

  Raja Man Singh I of Amber served Akbar as one of the navaratna and his most senior Rajput commander, campaigning in Gujarat, Bihar, Bengal, Orissa, Kabul and the Deccan over four decades. The entry of the Rajput houses into Mughal service — as mansabdars holding their own states intact — runs largely through him. He commanded the Mughal army at Haldighati against Maharana Pratap in 1576 and governed Bengal and Kabul for substantial periods in Akbar's reign.

• ServedAbu'l-Faiz Faizi

  Faizi served Akbar as malik-ush-shu'ara, poet laureate, from 1588 and was the court's chief translator from Sanskrit. He rendered Bhaskara's twelfth-century mathematics into Persian as the Lilavati and the Mahabharata's Nala-Damayanti episode as the Nal-Daman, among other translations. Akbar is recorded as having carried him on his own shoulders when he was dying, and his death in 1595 is one of the few occasions the Akbarnama records the emperor weeping.

• ServedAbdur Rahim Khan-i-Khanan

  Abdur Rahim Khan-i-Khanan served Akbar and later Jahangir as commander-in-chief, governor of Gujarat and of the Deccan, and as one of the navaratna from Akbar's inner circle. He translated Babur's Chagatai memoirs into Persian as the Baburnama, and wrote couplets in Braj and Awadhi that are still learned by heart across north India. His dohas are Vaishnava in idiom and are quoted as freely as Kabir's or Tulsidas's, which makes the Mughal commander-in-chief a canonical Hindi poet.

• Founded underAkbar's Church (Church of the Holy Name), Agra

  Akbar's Church was built in 1599 on the land Akbar had granted to the third Portuguese Jesuit mission under Jerome Xavier (nephew of Francis Xavier) at Agra near the Agra Fort. Akbar's three successive invitations of Jesuit missions to his court — Rodolfo Acquaviva in 1580, Edward Leitão in 1591 and Jerome Xavier in 1595 — were part of the religious disputations he staged at the Ibadat Khana at Fatehpur Sikri and the Agra court; the church grant was the material anchor of the mission's permanent Agra presence.

• Married toMariam-uz-Zamani (Harkha Bai)

  Mariam-uz-Zamani (Harkha Bai), Kachhwaha Rajput princess of Amber and daughter of Raja Bharmal, married Akbar on 6 February 1562 at Sambhar as part of the Rajput-Mughal matrimonial alliance that gave Akbar the Rajput houses' military support. She became the senior Hindu wife of the emperor and the mother of his heir Prince Salim, who succeeded as Jahangir. She retained Hindu practice at court and ran the only Hindu temple inside the Mughal palace at Fatehpur Sikri.

• Buried atAkbar's Tomb, Sikandra

  Akbar is buried at Sikandra in the five-tiered pyramidal tomb he himself began in 1600 and his son Jahangir completed in 1613 — a mausoleum that breaks with Humayun's charbagh plan to introduce an open-topped structure in which the sarcophagus lies visible to the sky, reflecting Akbar's religious syncretism. The sarcophagus was damaged by the 1764 Jat raid and recovered. Mariam-uz-Zamani's tomb stands within the same complex.

• Crowned atTakht-i-Akbari, Kalanaur

  Akbar was proclaimed Mughal emperor on the brick-and-stone Takht-i-Akbari platform at Kalanaur on 14 February 1556, two weeks after his father Humayun died of a fall at the Delhi library stairs. He was thirteen years old; the regent Bairam Khan ran the empire for the next four years. Kalanaur is the only Mughal coronation site anywhere in India — Babur was crowned at Kabul, Humayun at Agra, every emperor after Akbar at Delhi or Lahore.

• Court associationShamsher Khan's Tomb, Batala

  Shamsher Khan was Akbar’s foster-brother (kokaltash) and his Mughal faujdar of Batala until his death in 1589. His octagonal domed tomb at Batala was built the same year with imperial patronage; the plan with four corner chhatris follows the late Akbari transition style that is also seen in Humayun’s Tomb and the sixteenth-century Sayyid-Lodi mausolea at Delhi.

• Court associationPachīsī / Ludo

  Akbar is the emperor the game is remembered with. Louis Rousselet, writing in 1876, said Akbar played pachisi on a court laid out in red and white squares, with sixteen young slaves from the harem in the players’ colours as the pieces, and that such courts could still be seen at Agra and Allahabad. Whether or not he played it quite like that, Mughal boards of this kind are, in Irving Finkel’s judgement, the earliest secure evidence for the game in India.

On these journeys

• Akbar's court circle

Sources

Wikipedia, “Akbar”. Abu'l-Fazl, Akbarnāma and Āʾīn-i Akbarī, trans. Blochmann and Jarrett; Badauni, Muntakhab al-Tavārīkh, for the hostile view; Iqtidar Alam Khan on the reign's administration.

• Wikipedia — Akbar