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Not Just the Tudors
Akbar, the Great Mughal
00:56:52
How did a royal hostage go on to become a ruler known for his vast, multi-ethnic empire?
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- [00:00]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
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- [00:32]
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- [02:19]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Hello, I'm Professor Susannah Lipscomb and welcome to Not Just the Tudors From History. Hit. The podcast in which we explore everything from Anne Boleyn to to the Aztecs, from Holbein to the Huguenots, from Shakespeare to samurais, relieved by regular doses of murder, espionage and witchcraft. Not in other words, just the Tudors, but most definitely also the Tudors. In 1544, a three year old boy was carried across the snow covered mountains from Kandahar and Kabul, a royal hostage of a crumbling empire. His father Humayun had lost everything and the Mughal dynasty, only just established, looked likely to disappear. But that child Akbar would not only survive, but go on to become one of the greatest emperors in world history. Possibly dyslexic, possibly illiterate and raised among warriors, Akbar would defy the odds to forge a vast multi ethnic empire stretching from the Hindu Kush to the south of India, rivaling the wealth and power of the Ottomans and the Safavids. He was a warrior king, but also a philosopher, a religious experimenter and a political visionary. Akbar dismantled entrenched aristocracies, welcomed Hindus and Rajputs into his inner circle, built a court of dazzling diversity, and championed the radical idea of sorely cool or universal peace. Through military conquest, marriage alliances, spiritual debate and sheer charisma, he rewrote the idea of kingship. Joining me today to bring to life the story of Akbar's extraordinary reign, his conquests, contradictions and the world he made is IRO Mukoti, historian and biographer, whose latest book, Akbar the Great Mogul, is one of the first modern full length biographies of the Emperor. I'm Professor Susannah Lipscomb and this is not just the Tudors from history hit. Welcome to the podcast.
- [04:27]
IRO Mukoti
Thank you so much, Professor Lipscomb. I'm entirely delighted to be here with you.
- [04:32]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Please call me Susannah. Now, why have so few modern biographies been written about Akbar? Yes, I mean, you think about the breadth and range of his achievements, it seems extraordinary.
- [04:44]
IRO Mukoti
It does. And especially when you think that he is very much part of our day to day life here in India. We are very familiar with him from the time we are children. You know, his example is given to us. He is one of only two kings in India who has the suffix the great attached to his name. So there was Ashoka the Great and there's Akbar the Great, and all children are taught that. But the dichotomy is that we know a lot about him on a superficial level. So there are a lot of myths which are floating around that, you know, people tell each other, that are popularized even in graphic novels, for children, in TV serials. But a lot of it is not based on fact. It is just myth making. So, for example, we have something called the Akbar Birbal story. So these are the stories which purportedly happened between Akbar and one of his favorite Hindu courtiers, Birbal. And there are many, many stories which show Akbar as a slightly, a bit of a buffoon of a character, you know, slightly risible man whom Birbal constantly sets up and makes fun of. Now, looking into the details of Akbar's life, you can see that that was patently untrue. Nothing like this could ever have happened. It was probably a way for regular citizenry to become familiar with such a great and awesome, awe inspiring sort of figure like Akb. But so it's very interesting that we don't have biographies, but not only about Akbar, many of our historical figures. And I think that comes from the fact that though we are an ancient country, we are a very new Republic, only some 70 odd years. We are slowly coming to terms with our post colonial history, taking apart some of the strands of what has been handed down to us and are only now really coming to terms and beginning to question some of the so called truths that have been handed down to us. And it perhaps not have occurred to too many people to take on a subject such as Akbar and try to reinvent or look at him anew with the fresh, you know, the sort of archives that are coming out today, the historical research which is coming out, perhaps it takes time for a people to have the confidence to look at their great historical figures with fresh eyes.
- [06:59]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
And what is the state of those archives? I mean, what sort of sources do you have when you're going back to the reign of Akbar?
- [07:05]
IRO Mukoti
So what is fantastic about the reign of Akbar is that we are positively overwhelmed with archival documents which can be good and bad. Yes, you know, I am often researching the history of women and that is completely different. You have to positively dig out those few lines sometimes from the archives. But for a man like Akbar, because the Mughals, you know, really brought in the art of writing history. This was an Islamic tradition. They wrote the history of kings, you know. And we have the history of Akbar written by his great friend and hagiographer Abu Al Fazal, who has written almost a daily account of what happened in the empire. So we have Abu Al Fazal's enormous tomes detailing the life of Akbar. We have other more minor histories written around his time. We have something which has been crucial to me, which is a critical account written by a man called Abu Al Qadr Badayuni. And his is a fascinating account because he is this very intelligent theologian, thinker, philosopher, translator. But he is an orthodox Islamic man and he becomes increasingly disillusioned by the way. Akbar is sort of what he sees as flirting with Hinduism and other religions. And he ends up being completely disillusioned by Akbar's court and he writes a covert biography which is hidden by his sons and I think published much later on. But these give us some true insights into what a critical eye may have thought about what was happening around, around Akbar's court. So we have Badayuni's account to sort of balance out Abu Al Fazza's very hagiographical sort of description of the court. And then we have wonderfully for us also the account by Jesuit missionaries who are beginning to come into India at just this time. And they are invited to Akbar's court at Agra. And they are absolutely thrilled because they are convinced that they're going to convert this great Muslim monarch and thereby India will fall at their feet. And so they write really detailed stories, stories about Akbar, you know, and they include details which it would not occur to an Indian biographer to write about, you know, his physical descriptions, the harem, what was happening with the women, what was happening with his sons, the sort of tensions that existed between Akbar and his son. So things that an Indian biographer would not have dared to write about. They do so using all these complementary methods, you can really bring out a very vibrant, you know, life of Akbar. And in addition, we have the great treasure drove, which are Mughal miniatures, the Mughal paintings, because alongside the written biography, we have the images, because Akbar commissioned many images to go alongside the written biographies. So, once again, the artists often include details that Abu Al Fazl would have thought beneath him to include, or perhaps not totally in line with what he was writing. So you have little. Little details about the sort of decorations that people are hanging around, say, the birth chamber when Akbar's wife gives birth to Salim, the first son. You have little details of how the Hindu influence is coming into the Mughal court through these talismanic symbols which are hung at the door of the birth chamber. So it has been a really a great delight for me to have these images alongside all these many written records and these many complementary sources to create something which I hope is captivating for a modern audience.
- [10:40]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
I mentioned in my introduction that Akbar's father was Humayun, and of course, his father was Babur. Can you tell us a bit about the Mughals? And particularly, I suppose I'm interested in how important it was to trace their descent from Chinggis Genghis Khan, as he's known in the west, even years after his death.
- [11:04]
IRO Mukoti
So that's a really interesting point. And what is important to remember is that Babur, when he came into India, he was looking for an empire because he had lost his. He was the Prince of Fergana in Central Asia today. And he was not nobody. He was not just somebody who happened to think upon India and thought he might find a rich country to rule. He was the inheritor of a great legacy, which was Timur. So we have Chinggis Khan, of course, but we also have Timur, known as Tamerlane in the West. So Babur was a direct Descendant, I think sixth in line to Timur himself, this great 14th century Central Asian conqueror. And Timur came up in the shadow of Genghis Khan when the charisma of Genghis Khan was still very much alive in Central Asia. And so he never took on the title of Khan, which was Genghis Khan's own title. He took the much more humble Amir and he was known as Aamir Timur, but he married Chinggis ed women. So he married women from the lineage of Chinggis Khan and he was very proud of that. And in fact, the Mughals call themselves because of this connection through the maternal line, they call themselves Gurkani or the in law dynasty, because through the mothers, through the wives, they were connected to the great Chinggis Khan. So both Timur and Chinggis Khan are extremely important to the Mughals. We know this because they keep on referring to Timur especially and they use titles which may seem very odd to a modern reader, but which directly reflect the charisma that Timur held. So someone like Shah Jahan, who is Akbar's grand son, will have this bizarre title called Lord of the Auspicious Conjunction, or Second Lord of the Auspicious Conjunction, which can really seem bizarre to us today. But if we remember that Timur took the title First Lord of the Auspicious Conjunction because he was supposedly born under a happy star when there were two great planets were aligned, the same thing happens during Shah Jahan's birth. And so he is quick to take on this title and try and do, to try and recall this great inheritance. I think perhaps what the west forgets, and even us in India, we don't look at this very closely, is that the Timurids have this particular inheritance in that they are warriors, certainly. But there are many other aspects to their great legacy which are important to the Mughals. So for example, despite the fact that they are semi nomadic, this will continue to be important for the Mughals who are constantly traveling. We may find it bizarre at times that Akbar will suddenly decide he has to leave a city he has just found and go off for years in these tented encampments. It's because the Timurids are semi nomadic, but they also look up to the great cities of Persia, Samarkand, Herat, you know, these storied cities which have a great tradition of literature and culture and art. The Timurid aspire to this as well. And so the Mughals will have both these strands within them which they will try and foster in India. And another Thing which I think makes sense when we start to look at how women are treated, especially under Babur, since we were talking about him, is that under Timur himself and his descendants, the women have a very important role. They are not veiled or simply lightly veiled, because we tend to think of Islamic women as heavily in parda and veiled. And this is very much a Western conception which has, you know, been brought down even unto us. But Timurid women are very lightly veiled, if at all. They have a very light muslin covering on the face when they're out and about. But Timur, Timur's wife herself holds court. She has her own court with men and women attending. She passes orders. She has festive evenings with men and women. They have drinking parties. So she is very much visible within the courtly circle. And we know this because there is Catalan envoy at this time. He goes and visits Timur's court, Rui Gonzalez de Clavio, and he writes an account saying, I was able to see Timur's wife and she's very pale and her hair is very long. And he describes her very, very clearly. And he's clearly taken aback at this, you know, supposedly Islamic woman who is so powerful and is so present in courtly affairs. So this importance of the women is very, very clear in Barber's legacy. He is constantly taking the advice of his mother and his grandmother because his own father dies very young, which is why he finds himself at the. At very young age of 14, looking for a kingdom. So he is very respectful, respectful of these matriarchs. And this will be carried on through the generations of the Timurids. Humayun is the same. He sends his matriarchs on diplomatic missions to talk to his brothers who are fighting with him. And Akbar will do the same with his mother, his aunts. He will have an extraordinary tradition with his aunts and his matriarchs. He commissions, for example, a biography from his aunt Gulbadhan, who is a daughter of Babur. And this is really the. The first biography in the 16th century by a Muslim women from within the Zenana. So an extraordinary document really, you know, which is one of the main sources that I used in a previous book. But it is an invaluable source of history. So this is something, if we look at the Timurid connection, we really come to understand what is happening with the Mughals and their women. And then we can kind of start questioning what happens to them under Akbar, where the women start becoming invisible, you know, what are the dynamics that are happening around this time, which make the women from the time of Babur, where they are fully visible, they are riding on horses, they are going to battle, they are setting up their tents alongside the kings. And suddenly, by the time of Akbar, we don't have their names, we only have titles, and we do not have visual representations at all of women.
- [16:55]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Okay, I'm going to come back to that to ask you just a little bit more about what predates Akbar's reign. Can we talk a little bit more about Babu and how he establishes a multi ethnic, multicultural state that Akbar will come to emulate, even if he doesn't emulate him when it comes to the women?
- [17:15]
IRO Mukoti
Yes. So Babur is a very interesting figure himself. He has written a biography in Turkey, in the Turkey language, which is so vivid, which is so. I mean, it's an extraordinary biography of a king. He writes all of, you know, he writes about his emotions, he writes about the country he comes to conquer eventually. He's extremely candid and open, you know, and we get a real true sense of, of the man and what he realizes. So he first ends up conquering Kabul. So he's in fact king of Kabul for 20 years. And Kabul becomes part of the Indian Mughal empire. But he wants something greater. Kabul is not enough for his ambitions. And he starts looking at Delhi, he starts looking at Hindustan, at the riches of Hindustan. He, you know, he's very pragmatic about how rich Hindustan is, even though he's quite critical about their lack of streams and their lack of beautiful gardens, you know, which is something he has inherited from Central Asia. When he defeats the king of Delhi, the Lodi king, the famous battle, and then later on a Rajput king, the Sisodias, he realizes that he is vastly outnumbered, even though he can win battles very quickly because of superior firepower and gunpowder. But he knows that in India the kings have huge armies and there's no way he can keep up this sort of, you know, he can found an empire without taking them on board. So he is the one who really begins very pragmatically by introducing these foreign elements into the Mughal army. So he will, you know, forge alliances with local Muslims, Indian Muslims, who then have as soldiers, other Hindus, other Rajputs, an assorted, you know, collection, heterogeneous collection of men and soldiers. So Babur is extremely pragmatic about that. He looks at his numbers and he knows what he can and cannot do. He's also extremely pragmatic about Islam because Timur himself was a Recent convert to Islam. It was not, not something that defined him. He also held on to his pre Islamic Yassa laws, the paganism. Timur himself was very aware that he had to rule over a wide, diverse mix of peoples. And it is something that he then gave on, passed on to all his descendants. And Babur himself is very pragmatic about him. He has the drinking parties, you know, he has these homosocial gatherings of men in which they all drink to excess, you know, not at all what you would expect from a typical Islamic ruler. He uses the language of jihad when it suits him, when he needs to collect his soldiers, when he needs to motivate them for a very big battle. So he will say, this is a jihad, you know, let's carry on and, you know, kill everybody who opposes us. But the minute they are defeated, he again comes to terms. He gives them easy terms. He does not humiliate his defeated foes. And so this is something which Humayun also sees and Akbar very much inherits.
- [20:11]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
So let's talk a bit about that then, because what is the idea of sou il Kul that Akbar is obsessed with?
- [20:20]
IRO Mukoti
Yes, yeah. It is something that I think he worked on almost his entire life. And it is one of the concepts that is really completely misunderstood. I remember reading about it as a child, probably in the school, and sort of assuming that it was a new religion, that he had taken bits and pieces from different parts and created a new religion and his people were forced to follow this new religion. But that really wasn't the case at all. And in fact, if we look at his life, we see that Akbar begins his life and he says this himself in his biography, he says, I really regret my earlier life when I was misguided and I misunderstood things and I forced people to convert so clearly early on in his rule, when he is a young man, you know, in his late teens, carrying out a few battles, there are instances of forced conversions. People are made to convert to Islam. I think one of the main things which happens at this time when he's 20 years old, is that he marries a princess from the region of Amer, which later becomes Jaipur. It's familiar to us as the city of. Of Jaipur. So this king, who was just quite a petty chieftain at this time, he comes to Akbar and offers his eldest daughter in marriage. Akbar marries this Rajput princess and through her, because he does not force her to convert at all. So she comes with her Rajput tradition, she comes with her entourage. So she comes with her singing women, her dancing Women, her masseuse, her cook, her physicians, her priests. And they all enter Agbar Scot and his harem. And he becomes exposed, naturally, through this princess, through many of the Rajput Hindu traditions. And very early on, almost as soon as he is married, he puts an end to the pilgrimage tax. So the pilgrimage tax was imposed on all Hindus visiting important pilgrimage sites around the country, in Mathura, for example, and it's a very important source of revenue. He puts an end to it almost immediately. Then he stops the Jizya, which is also a very important tax imposed on non Muslims. And almost, you know, all Muslim leaders before that were imposing it. It was meant to demarcate the difference between the Muslim population and the non believers. So Akbar puts an end to this. And from now on, we can see that he's beginning to think much more deeply about what these religious beliefs are, because he's in a country where people have very strong religious beliefs of all sorts. It is a diverse country. But what unites people is that they are very religious about their different beliefs. So he starts thinking about this, and he begins to. So he starts in the 1570s. He has a gathering called the. In the Ibadat Khana, which is like a meeting room every Thursday. And he begins first by calling only the Muslim clerics. And he says, let us debate out various ideas. You know, the orthodox ideas, the Sufi ideas, the Shia ideas. Let us try to come to an understanding. And he finds that these men, because these men are just clerics, they're not necessarily philosophically, very intellectually erudite men. So he finds that their arguments really lack in substance. And he's very disappointed by this. So he says, let us start to invite other religious figures. So he invites the Jesuits, who come and debate about Christianity, which is, you know, astounding in this court if you can think in the 1570s when in Europe you're having the war of religion between Protestants and Catholics. At the same time, these Jesuit missionaries are allowed to say the most grotesque things about Prophet Muhammad, and they say the most insane things, and they insult him, and they talk about their own religion, Catholicism. And then he calls the Parisis, he calls the Jains. He makes this a really wide gathering of spiritual leaders from across different traditions. And this brings him to conclude, in a very astonishing way, really, that every religion has truths to it, that no one religion can claim to have the ultimate truth. And about Islam, he says, how can a religion and a relatively new religion, which has only been around for a few hundred years, whereas others have existed for Thousands, thousands of years. How can this new religion claim to have ascendancy over other religions? And this is absolutely remarkable. And he says either all religions are untrue or all are true and we have to find a common ground. And he says that since every religious person believes that their religion is the right one, it causes strife amongst the population, it causes anger, it causes battles, because. Because each religion wants to prove that they are better than the other. So he decides that the only way to bring about peace is to accept that every religion has something worth preserving. You know, every person must make that effort to overcome a revulsion and understand what the other religion is all about. So this is the spirit of solekul, which is really universal peace, universal understanding, but it is not a passive tolerance. You know, we think of the word tolerance itself somehow denotes almost a negative connotation where you are tolerating another religion. But this is an active process of understanding. So you will make that effort to understand your core religion, you will understand your other neighbors who have other religions, so that there is no more misunderstanding and no more strife between knew and the idea of a religion, never a new religion, you know, never did exist. What it was was a small sort of cult around the figure of the emperor, almost like a Sufi murid, because he was also very fond of the Sufi mystical tradition of Islam. So Akbar sort of presented himself as a Sufi teacher and if you wanted to be a part of that cult, you could. And there were some very, very simple rules to follow, mostly to do with, with abstinence, austerity, living a simple life. And in the end There were only 18 followers of his courtier. So it was more an elite clique of men who swore loyalty to the emperor unto death. But the Sulaykul was much larger or the much larger project and really meant to foster a better understanding between the various religions in India.
- [26:48]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
And you're so right that it is absolutely extraordinary, just remarkable. When we compare him to his European peers, his reign is almost simultaneous to that of Elizabeth I, who is relatively mild. You know, she only has 130 Catholic priests executed. You know, so there's a, there's a sense that this is really quite astonishing and forward thinking. What impact do you think these policies towards religious and cultural diversity had on the stability of Akbar's empire?
- [27:24]
IRO Mukoti
You know, even when, nevermind Elizabeth I find it startling and refreshing even today, if we look at what's happening around the world today, very sadly. Right, so what the effect that he had on the stability of his empire. So while he was around for almost 50 years. He created an empire that was extraordinarily stable, you know, because he had the resources. He himself was a very charismatic and powerful man. He sat in this mansabdari system. This was also a way to demonstrate Sulequil in a very pragmatic way, was to have the administration and the great courtiers include not just Muslim men, but also Rajput men. So this was a very important thing in the propagation of Sulakol and the stability of the empire. So you had many Rajput Hindus, other Indian Muslim courtiers who became part of this mansabdari or hierarchical administrative system. And they were then sent out to all corners of the empire for three or four years. And they would be then rotated in a system which sent them for every three or four years to all parts of the empire where they would then replicate exactly the system of governance based on soleikul. So he was very careful about keeping a balance between the Turki. So this is the Turki original Central Asian component, you know, of his army and his elite men, which then became balanced out by Persian immigrants who came in from neighboring Persia. And the third party, which was very important at this time were the Rajput Indian Hindus. So he kept these three elements constantly in balance. And this really helped create what was a very stable empire at the time. What happens later on is that there is a pushback from the orthodox ulema because what Akbar has done in the 16th century is unheard of. You know, we are astounded even today to hear about the things he did. So for orthodox ulema, the clerics, it is something which is absolutely heinous for a Muslim monarch to promote non believers, to give them an equal footing, to put them on the same pedestal as his Muslim, you know, chieftains. So there is a bit of a pushback after him. So his son Jahangir has to sort of navigate a slightly more difficult environment. And we know that the last of the so called great Mughals, Aurumzeb, has to give in to a much greater extent to the orthodox ulema for the, for the sake of keeping the Mughal empire in its state. But during the reign of Akbar, at least it is a stable empire. And these ideas, even if the, you know, if eventually there is a pushback, these ideas that we are a diverse country, that we can only succeed if we don't try and subjugate any one clan or any one religion, it is something that has come to us in our DNA, I believe into the 20th century at least. Things are changing a little bit. Now the political situation is slightly different, but I think even today it is still very much part of the way we see ourselves. We see ourselves as a collection of many different religions and our constitution is based on this same principle. In a way, it is solekul that was written out in our constitution as well.
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IRO Mukoti
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- [31:44]
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- [32:27]
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- [33:06]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
That's fascinating. Can we talk about Akbar's conquests? I mean whether talking about Malwa or talking about Kashmir later and what it tells us about Akbar.
- [33:22]
IRO Mukoti
Yes. So it was very fascinating for me to, you know, imagine the sort of battles that took place in the 16th century under Akbar. And one of the, you know, really epic battles, one that is talked of even today is the battle for Chittor. So in, right in the beginning, saying once Akbar marries these few princesses, so he marries, you know, not just the princess of Amer, but he marries a number of Rajput princesses. The great houses of Rajasthan, like Chittor, like Ranthambore, have refused to submit to him. So he has understood by now what the Rajput personality is like, what their temperament is like. They are warriors who will fight unto the death for what they believe in. They are on the frontier, the northwestern frontiers of India. So they have the been very used to, you know, fighting against invaders. They have always been fighting each other as well. So they are fractious population. He's understood this about them and he has understood that if he can get this great fortress, this great house of Chittor to submit to him in some way, this might be the beginning of the end. And this may be a way for him to incorporate all of Rajasthan, which covers the entire northwestern section of India. So what he does is he tries to give, you know, the Rana of Chittaur many chances to submit to him, to, to come to court. What he has to do is appear at the Mughal court. But the Rana refuses to do this time and again. So finally, Akbar goes with his Veeli, his mighty army. It is a massive army. He takes all his siege weapons and he constructs a huge siege around the fort of Chittor, which is itself on a huge hill and a very awe inspiring fort which, you know, its defenders strongly believe can never be taken. But Akbar spends four months, you know, building this massive siege wall all around it. And he builds siege towers and he digs tunnels so as to bring mines close to the walls of Chittor. You know, sometimes it reminds me of Lord of the Rings, you know, some of those great battle scenes that you have the, these enormous siege forts throwing all those enormous cannonballs. And so this is what he does. He really brings the entire might of the Mughal empire, all its resources. So from the countryside, people keep bringing food and water for the people building the siege wall, whereas the besiegers are of course running out of water and food. And all his great warriors come and present themselves and they build their siege structure. And in the end, Chittor is taken. It is taken at the cost of a lot of life because they will not submit. Now, under Timurid law, Mughal law, usually when you see that the end is near, you Submit. It is not dishonorable to ask for peace, to sue for peace. But the Rajputs are not like this. They are different race altogether. They will never submit at this time where this is the first encounter with the might of the Mughals. So they fight unto the death. Death. And Akbar is so incensed after four months of war, at which he is himself present, that all the people who put up a resistance to the Mughals, upward to the sword, all are killed. It is the first and last time that he does this. It is an extremely bloody battle and he wins Chittor. After this, he decides to go to Ramthambor. But the king of Ramthambor, Rajahada, has seen what has happened at Chittor, and he is much, much less willing to do the same thing. So after two months of siege, he submits to her, to Akbar. He is given a very honorable settlement and he incorporates, you know, he becomes part of the Mughal Empire. And after that, one by one, all the great houses, Jaisalmer and so on and so forth, all of them sort of submit to Akbar, who gives them very honorable terms. He has understood the Rajput mentality. He allows them to keep the land of their birth. So what happens with his other great courtiers, for example, all the Muslim courtiers, they have to be transferred every three or four years. They're not allowed to sink their roots into an area, they're not allowed to create alliances in a region. But the Rajputs, he allows them to keep what is called their watanjagir because they are very tied to the land of their births, so they are allowed to keep that. He gives them a lot of concession, which takes into account the pride they have in their houses, in their tradition. But they do become part of the Mughal Empire. They become courtiers. They are then sent on various battles, they are sent to govern various provinces and regions. And so this battle that he uses, Chittor, you know, he does it once and he really doesn't have to do it on this scale ever again. He uses the threat of war. And what he does really remarkably, very soon after this, he uses a system called the kumarga, or the hunt. It is something which inspires absolute fear and terror in people because it is a ferocious thing. It is something that he takes thousands of soldiers, they build a ring which is dozens of kilometers in diameter. They ring it off over several weeks. Soldiers are posted all around this enormous field, enormous diameter of terrain. Animals are brought into this enormous fenced area. And then for days, the Amirs sort of gallop into this area and they kill animals using the bow, using sometimes their sword, sometimes they bare hands to just pluck, you know, rabbits from the ground. And this demonstration of the absolute power, vitality and ferocity of the Mughal soldiery is enough to quell any ideas of resistance. So whenever the kumarga hunt is taken up and the biographers say the king has gone hunting, what he is really doing is showing the strength of the Mughal empire and telling any rebellious chieftains that you better think twice if this is the sort of war that you want in your land. And it is extremely effective. It is something that he is able to do with a lot of great results. And the last thing that he does, which is part of his temperament, really, is that he never goes by any blueprint. So in India, what tends to happen is that because the summer months are so hot, the kings carry out their wars during the cool winter months. So it is considered uncivilized to begin a war in the middle of the summer heat in India. But Akbar goes completely against that. So when he has to attack Gujarat at one point, for example, he does this by making his army march at night, only at night, so that they go through the summer months, arrive in Gujarat, where the kings are absolutely unaware that this is happening. They have have no idea that summer could be a time where war will be fought. And so Akbar, time and again challenges the notions of what is acceptable. You know, he is someone who is very willing to throw all guidebooks, you know, to the wind and do things his way. And that's a really, really effective way of doing things.
- [40:21]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
So let's come back to the women then, because I feel like we've got some contradictory information here. So, on the one hand, we see women being more heavily veiled under Akbar and their names disappearing from the register. You've also indicated, though, that his first Rajput wife had a political influence over him. So I'm wondering how much the harem, the women that he marries, and indeed his relatives have on him politically. And also I know that there's some evidence of. Of reforms towards Sati, for example, or, you know, other ways in which he's demonstrating a viewpoint that looks progressive. So can you make sense for me of what's going on?
- [41:06]
IRO Mukoti
Yes, absolutely. It can be very confusing. We know that Akbar has this inheritance of very powerful Timurid matriarchs. You know, we know that Gulbuddin, his aunt, he asks her to write a biography of Humayun Babu. We know that his great aunt, Khanzada Begum has gone on diplomatic missions, he's very respectful of his own mother, Hamida Banubegum. And yet in the biography, the Nabu Al Fazal's biography, we have lost the very names of these women because they're given titles. So what happens around this time, I believe, and scholars have been saying this, is that because he marries Rajput women when he is very young. So this Rajput culture enters the Mughal court. It influences, you know, Akbar himself to a great extent. And the Rajputs, because they are on the northwestern frontier, like I was telling you, and they have a very fractious, volatile environment that they have been, you know, navigating for centuries. They have in fact brought on the system of parda of veiling of their women because they are constantly facing battles and having to lose women to the enemy. So what we have in the Rajput tradition is women who are heavily veiled. They are in partha, they live in an area called the Zenana Dory, which is the haram, which is a cloistered space, because they have to be hidden from the enemy. And when, if the husbands die or the king dies, these women are encouraged to commit sati, which is the process, or johar, which is the process by which they emulate themselves on their husbands funeral pyre. Because according to the Rajput system of honor, you know, the honor of the men is invested in the sexual chastity of their women. So it is intolerable for these women to ever fall to enemy hands. So they must kill themselves and the king dies. So these are the notions of honor, of sort of valorization of women's sexual chastity of the parda. And these ideas come into the Mughal haram from this time. And I think these two system, the elite Muslim system in which women are veiled, even if they are lightly veiled, according to the Timurid system and the Rajput one, where the women again are veiled, again are in a cloistered space. They feed off each other so that elite women, Mughal and Rajput, from now on will be waived. From now on, they will be hidden also, because Abu Al Fazan, the biographer of adwa, along with Akbar, is bringing out this idea of Akbar, a monarch who is not quite like a mortal man. He is a little above and beyond the ordinary. So everything about him, including his harem, has to be above and beyond the sight of mortal men. So even the names of these women are hidden behind titles. Because you no longer a normal mortal like you, and I could not say the name of these women. It should be beyond, you see, the grasp of an ordinary person. So they are hidden behind veils, they are metaphorically and literally hidden behind titles, and we do not see them. No Indian biographer would have the indecency to write about the women, but luckily the Jesuits do and other writers do, and we know how incredibly politically important the harem was. In fact, you know, the notion of the harem, and, you know, I've been writing about it, scholar Rub Bilal has written a lot about it. And we have been writing to sort of, you know, distance ourselves and sort of reconstruct the idea of the harem, which was handed to us by the colonial rulers who themselves inherited it from the Ottomans. So they thought the Indian Mughal harem was like the Ottoman harem, where the women were spending their time, you know, in luxury and beautifying themselves, waiting for the, you know, for one single man to come and, and take his pleasure with them. So this was a very deeply entrenched idea. Instead, what we see when we look at the writings that we have is that the Mughal harem was no different from the Mughal court. These women were very much part of it. So we have a space where the women are living. Yes, it is now a more sequestered space. It is a space which is filled with women. Yes, but these are women all carrying out a job because it is in fact a city in miniature. So you will have a woman, for example, is who. Who is the finance minister who's making a budget of all the expenses that the women are having. There are women who are, you know, religious instructors. There are women who are performing dance and music. There are women who are scholars who are teaching the young girls. So you have a city in miniature, a busy, thriving city in which all the duties are carried out by women. And these are therefore highly educated, literatured women who are doing all these jobs and they are paid a salary. So that's also very interesting. So by one account, that by the 1600s, three and a half million silver coins are spent on the women's salaries in the harem. This is how much money they are earning for their various jobs. And this is money which they own. Unlike British women, for example, English women at this time who don't own their own money and must hand it over to their husbands. These women can do what they want with their money and they do. They carry out trade, they carry out building commissions, you know, all sorts of things. So this is a very busy area where Akbar comes for six hours of the day. Now, when the European writers write about that they say, oh, Akbar spends all his time in the harem cavorting with the women. And you think, okay, a man who has built such an enormous empire, who has done so much, if he is spending half his day in sexual dalliance, how in on earth did he create this empire? What they've misunderstood is that Akbar is spending time yet. Yes, but he is spending time looking over the budget, listening to the news writers, because all the spies come and deliver the news to the women in the harem. And so they are informed of all the goings on in the empire. What are the princes doing? What are the important courtiers doing? Who is making alliances with whom? All this comes to Akbar in the harem, which is the safest place for him. It is where he sleeps, which is a dangerous occupation for a king whom other people are trying to kill. It is where he is, he eats, which is also a dangerous occupation for someone you are trying to poison. So it is a place of safety. It is a place where he can lay down his guard, where he can talk to women whom he admires and whom he respects and who give them his opinions on different matters. So it is really an entirely different space to the one we imagine where the women are just changing their clothes every five minute like TikTokers or something like that. And instead, it is a place of power and eloquence and educated women.
- [47:54]
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- [48:27]
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- [49:07]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
I just love the idea that the Haram is actually the place he goes to visit, you know, his head of finance and his head of intelligence and that's why he's spending his time there. One thing I wanted to ask you about Akbar's sort of cultural interests. We've talked about his profound interest in other faiths and this idea that if one religion is true, they're all true. He's curious about all sorts of things. I mean, there's this. This fairly awful story to my mind about trying to discover the natural language by raising infants in silence. Tell me a bit more about his other interests in medicine and language and other pursuits.
- [49:45]
IRO Mukoti
Yeah, it's quite extraordinary, actually, you know, so in my book, I have obviously only included a fraction of the examples that Abu Al Fazl, because I think his biography is in six or seven tones, you know, enormous volumes, which it was very laborious to go through, but also pretty fascinating. So he gives many, many such incidents, and you get this idea of a man who just does not accept anything on somebody else's word. He wants to test it out, he wants to experience it, he wants to reason his way around it. So, like you are saying, this experiment that he carries out with small children, horrifying to us in the 21st century, he wants to know if children might have an innate language that comes out of them without hearing different languages around them. And he has them brought up in an entirely silent environment for two years. And of course, they come out dumb because they can't speak anything at all. Another experiment he does which could have had unhappy consequences also for. For the visitors, is that he is told that there are these Greek umami physicians, you know, who can tell you what ails you by looking at your urine. And so Akbar is extremely fascinated by this concept. And he presents a few vials of urine to this visiting Omani doctor, and he slips in the urine of a donkey, and he wants to know whether this physician will be able to tell them apart. And no doubt, had he not been able to do so, there would have been extremely unhappy consequences for him, because something he really hated was charlatans and people trying to deceive us, other people. Luckily, the physician was able to distinguish these different urine samples. What is also fascinating is that he tries to learn all these skills himself, all the men that he sees around him, the painters. He learns painting, he learns how to hew stone. And in one incident which I found very amusing, and which, you know, a European visitor writes about, he actually is able to bleed one of his courtiers. You know, how bleeding a person was meant to be good for them and, you know, generally good for their overall health. And you wonder what the courtier must have thought as the Emperor decided to, you know, take a knife to his arms and make him bleed. But apparently he did it very skillfully. So my idea is that because he was not so, you know, he claims to have been illiterate. You know, he clearly was not illiterate. He could appreciate good writing and poetry and he, you know, he had an amazing memory, so he could quote books himself, but he could not write very well. Possibly he was dyslexic, which resulted in him having a very shaky handwriting. But he used this idea that he was illiterate to say, I will not take anything on anybody's word. I will experience it myself, you know, which I find, you know, some so refreshing and something that, you know. So at one time, you can also see Abu Al Fazar struggling to make sense of what he is doing, even though he has, you know, he does write about it. He says the. The Emperor got distracted looking at a spider spinning its web and seeing how a fly gets caught in it and how the two do battle. You know, so Akbar actually stops everything he's doing and bends over a corner to look at how a fly tries to fight with a spider and how in the end it is unsuccessful. So you get this idea of an immensely curious man, a man for whom everything in his. In his environment is fascinating and he is looking for a reason for science. He actually has a scientific curiosity. He even tries to mate different creatures to see whether they will have a viable offspring. And endless such examples of him trying to experience his world firsthand.
- [53:30]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
As we come to the final years of his reign, they seem to be particularly marked by the success of the expansion to the south. But the discord of his family. Why do Akbar's sons cause him so much trouble?
- [53:51]
IRO Mukoti
Yes. So, you know, Akbar has actually instituted a huge change in the very idea of kingship. So before him, the Timurids, including Babur and Humayun, have a system of appanage. So it is a system where all the sons are given a section of land when they're very young, 12 or 13, to rule over, and they are given guardians, they're given soldiers, they're given a revenue from that land and they can manage those lands as they see fit. Umayu and his brothers, he has three brothers, all four brothers are given by Babur, different provinces in India to govern. So it is not a system where one son inherits everything thing. Akbar decides to change this because now the Mughal empire is way too vast to be, you know, sort of sectioned. Off into different people. So what happens? Whereas he was sent as a 12 or 13 year old to, to, to rule at that age and so was Babur, so was Humayu and his brothers. But Akbar's sons are not given this. They are kept at court. So they are kept at court and they are given a huge entourage. So they are given an atalik, who is, is like a senior man, a sort of a guardian. They are given milk mothers when they're very small, they're given a guardian, they are given a set of courtiers, they start cultivating alliances. But all this is happening at the court. So you have these three sons, perhaps three surviving sons who are becoming older, who are getting married, who have these huge entourages which are getting increasingly powerful but they have no place to exercise their, this power. They had no place to carry out this ambition that they have as princes, as Mughal princes. And Akbar keeps them at court for so long that by then they are late 20s, early 30s, they are men with families of their own. And naturally, because here's another thing, the Timurids do not have a system of primogeniture like you have in England. So it is not automatically the eldest who will inherit the throne. It is whoever wants it the most, whoever is the most capable. So these princes with their now huge entourages, their very powerful allies through marriage, have all of this happening at the court, at the Mughal court. And all that they have is each other to play out their ambitions against and increasingly their father who is now getting older. So this creates an extremely tense environment at the court. And by, by the time Akbar realizes this and sends out his sons into the Deccan, into Malwa, into, and he tries to send Salim to Kandahar, he refuses. It is way too late. You know, they already have a lot of tensions. Salim is now two grown sons, Khusra and Khurram, who themselves are now contenders. And in fact Akbar prefers his grandsons because he find that Salim, like any fellow firstborn son, opposes a lot of his rulings. And Akbar is a man who does not like to be opposed. So this creates a lot of tension but it is the automatic consequence of having these very powerful princes close at court and not giving them sufficient lands and territories to govern in their own name and keeping that question mark over their heads about who might come to the throne. So as Akbar gets older, everyone starts, starts jostling, they start creating alliances with their in laws, they start very importantly parlaying with the women. And the women have Saleem's back and I think we can't overestimate how important that is, because it is them who go to Akbar. When Salim really has committed heinous acts against his father, against his father's courtiers, it is the women, the senior women, who plead with him to forgive Salim, who later becomes Emperor Jahangir. And. And so Zenana, again the harem, once again so important when they allied together behind one single man. But that is essentially the reason why there is so much tension in the last years of Adgar's reign.
- [57:52]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Well, to end then, in this book, you offer a deeply humanized portrait of Akbar. You emphasize his personal growth, his commitment to inclusivity. And I wondered if you could tell me how you think this approach challenges the earlier narratives about him, particularly those that were shaped by colonial era historians or nationalist frameworks.
- [58:18]
IRO Mukoti
Yes. You know, I thought it was very important for a 21st century audience to have a person like Akbar presented to them as he was, with all his frailties and vulnerabilities as well as his chance. Because, you know, as you were rightly saying, he has been painted to us, really. In fact, the Mughals have been presented to us in binary terms. So we have Aurangzeb, for example, who is the bad Muslim and Akbar is the good one, you know, but I think it is. So this is of course part of the nationalist discourse as well. You know, when we got our independence and we chose which aspects of history to highlight, they could, but, you know, by force only be certain things that were concentrated on. So Akbar was one who was chosen, and so he was presented to us in a certain way. But I feel that his accomplishments are so much more awe inspiring and so much more, you know, they can be a motivation for us even today if we understand the challenges he faced in overcoming his own, you know, vulnerabilities, his own failures. And he talks about, for example, his bad temper. He says, I really have struggled in this instance to control my temper. And to his credit, Abu Al Fazl will give incidences where Akbar gets furiously angry over something that doesn't seem that important. You know, for example, against Salim at one point. But more in his early, the early part of his reign, he commits some acts of violence against some important courtiers, which he regrets very much later on. And we see him trying to do something about that. And I feel that the, that, you know, that can be inspired today because we all have moments when we struggle with our own weaknesses and vulnerabilities. There are moments where Akbar oftentimes is so overcome by emotion, which I Find, you know, so poignant to think of the great, you know, Mughal monarch, the most mighty empire at that time, sitting and crying over something, you know, a very beautiful poem or an animal who has died or his favorite milk mother who has died. He grieves so much for a milk mother. And I feel that I can relate to that, you know, so for today, I feel all the history that I write, I really think it makes so much more sense and it doesn't demean these people in any way. I'm often asked that, you know, I present the men alongside their women, which I feel we need to do more in our histories. Does it make them less manly? And I really feel that that is not the case. It, in fact, it makes them greater, if anything, to show that they counted on women. They, you know, matriarchs that they depended on. They had wives that they loved above the others. They had little daughters whom, this is another thing, you know, we haven't had the time to talk about. But he made a great effort and in Hindustan, where this was not common, to celebrate the births of his daughters on the same scale as the boys. And just that one thing till today is so important because otherwise today we see in India that women from the time of their birth, you know, do not have it as easy as the boys. And they are, you know, there's prejudice against girl children. But to see a 16th century monarch who celebrated the birth of his daughters with so much joy and extravagance, I think is inspiring for us today.
- [61:38]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Absolutely. Well, you have given us a flavour of your wonderful work on Akbar and thank you so much for introducing him to us in such vivid terms. It's been an absolute pleasure. Thank you so much.
- [61:52]
IRO Mukoti
Thank you so much, Monsanto.
- [61:56]
Professor Susannah Lipscomb
Thank you for listening to this episode of Not Just the Tudors from History Hit. Thank you also to my researcher, Max Wintool, my producer Rob Weinberg, and to Amy Haddo, who edited this episode. We are always eager to hear from you, including receiving your brilliant ideas for subjects we can cover. So do drop us a line@notjusthetorshistorykit.com and I look forward to to joining you again for another episode. Next time on Not Just the Tutors from History. Hit.
- [62:32]
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