Rulers of India: Akbar

by G. B. Malleson

Badauní goes on to state that Akbar conferred with Bráhmans and Sumánís, and under their influence accepted the doctrine of the transmigration of souls. There can be no doubt, however, but that the two brothers, Faizí and Abulfazl, like himself born and brought up in the faith of Islám, greatly influenced the direction of his studies on religion. It is necessary to say something regarding two men so illustrious and so influential. They were the sons of a Shaikh of Arab descent, Shaikh Mubárak, whose ancestors settled at Nagar, in Rájpútána. 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. The elder son, Shaikh Faizí, was born near Agra to the vicinity of which the father had migrated in 1547. He was thus five years younger than Akbar. Shortly after that prince had reconquered the North-western Provinces, Shaikh Faizí, then about twenty, began his quiet, unostentatious life of literature and medicine. He soon made a name as a poet. His native generosity, backed by the earnings of his profession as physician, prompted him to many acts of charity, and it became a practice with him to treat the poor for nothing.

In religious matters he, following his father's example, displayed a tendency towards the unfashionable doctrines of the Shiahs. It is related that, on one occasion, when he applied to the Kadr¹ for the grant of a small tract of land, that officer, who was a Sunní, not only refused him but, solely because he was a Shiah, drove him from the hall with contumely and insult. Meanwhile, moved by the report of his great ability, Akbar had summoned Faizí to his camp before Chitor, which place he was besieging. Faizí's enemies, and he had many, especially among the orthodox or Sunní Muhammadans, interpreted this order as a summons to be judged, and they warned the Governor of Agra to see that Faizí did not escape. But Faizí had no thought of escape. He was nevertheless taken to the camp of Akbar as a prisoner. The great prince received him with courtesy, and entranced by his varied talent, shortly afterwards attached him to his court, as teacher in the higher branches of knowledge to the princes, his sons. He was occasionally also employed as ambassador.

¹ Kadr: an officer appointed to examine petitions, and selected on account of his presumed impartiality. Vide Blochmann's Ain-í-Akbarí, p. 268.

His abundant leisure Faizí devoted to poetry. In his thirty-third year he was nominated to an office equivalent to that of Poet Laureate. Seven years later he died, never having lost the favour of Akbar, who delighted in his society and revelled in his conversation. It is said that he composed a hundred and one books. His fine library, consisting of four thousand three hundred choice manuscripts, was embodied in the imperial library.

But if Shaikh Faizí stood high in the favour of Akbar, his brother, Shaikh Abulfazl, the author of the Ain-í-Akbarí, stood still higher. Abulfazl was born near Agra the 14th January, 1551. He too, equally with his brother, profited from the broad and comprehensive teaching of the father. Nor did he fail to notice, and in his mind to resent, the ostracism and more than ostracism, to which his father was subjected on account of the opinions to which the free workings of a capacious mind forced him to incline. The effect on the boy's mind was to inculcate the value of toleration for all beliefs, whilst the pressure of circumstances stimulated him to unusual exertions in his studies. At the age of fifteen he had read works on all branches of those sciences that are based on reason and traditional testimony, and before he was twenty had begun his career as a teacher.

'An incident,' writes the lamented Professor Blochmann, 'is related to shew how extensive even at that time his reading was. A manuscript of the rare work of Içfahání happened to fall into his hands. Unfortunately, however, one half of each page, vertically downwards from top to bottom, was rendered illegible, or was altogether destroyed, by fire. Abulfazl, determined to restore so rare a book, cut away the burnt portions, pasted new paper to each page, and then commenced to restore the missing halves of each line, in which attempt, after many thoughtful perusals, he succeeded. Some time afterwards, a complete copy of the same work turned up, and on comparison it was found that in many places there were indeed different words, and in a few passages new proofs even had been adduced: but on the whole the restored portion presented so many points of extraordinary coincidence, that his friends were not a little astonished at the thoroughness with which Abulfazl had worked himself into the style and mode of thinking of a difficult author.'

A student by nature, Abulfazl for some time gave no favourable response to the invitation sent to him by Akbar to attend the imperial court. But the friendship which, in the manner already described, had grown between his elder brother, Faizí, and the Emperor, prepared the way for the intimacy which Akbar longed for, and when, in the beginning of 1574, Abulfazl was presented as the brother of Faizí, Akbar accorded to him a reception so favourable that he was induced to reconsider his resolve to lead a life 'of proud retirement.' He was then only twenty-three, but he had exhausted the sources of knowledge available in his own country. To use his own words: 'My mind had no rest, and my heart felt itself drawn to the sages of Mongolia or to the hermits on Lebanon; I longed for interviews with the Llámas of Tibet or with the pádris of Portugal, and I would gladly sit with the priests of the Pársís and the learned of the Zend-ávestá. I was sick of the learned of my own land.'

From this period he was attached to the court, and there arose between himself and Akbar one of those pure friendships founded on mutual esteem and mutual sympathy, which form the delight of existence. In the Emperor Abulfazl found the aptest of pupils. Amid the joys of the chase, the cares of governing, the fatigues of war, Akbar had no recreation to be compared to the pleasure of listening to the discussions between his much regarded friend and the bigoted Muhammadan doctors of law and religion who strove to confute him. These discourses constituted a great event in his reign. 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. He was forced to go forward. The experience of the past, and the events daily coming under his notice, alike proved that there must be but one paramount authority in India, if India was to enjoy the blessings of internal peace.

During those twenty years he had had many intervals of leisure which he had employed in discussing with those about him the problem of founding a system of government which should retain by the sympathy of the people all that was being conquered. He had convinced his own mind that the old methods were obsolete; that to hold India by maintaining standing armies in the several provinces, and to take no account of the feelings, the traditions, the longings, the aspirations, of the children of the soil,—of all the races in the world the most inclined to poetry and sentiment, and attached by the strongest ties that can appeal to mankind to the traditions of their fathers—would be impossible.