Rulers of India: Akbar

by G. B. Malleson

There was one class it was impossible to conciliate: the Muhammadan princes whose families had ruled in India, and who aspired to rule in their turn; who, in Bengal, in Orissa, in Behar, and in many parts of Western India, still exercised authority and maintained large armies. These men, regarding their title as superior to that of Akbar, and not recognising the fact that whilst their predecessors had lived on the surface, Akbar was sending roots down deep into the soil, resisted his pretensions and defied his power. How he tried conciliation with these men, and how their own conduct compelled him to insist on their expulsion, has been told in the last chapter.

I propose now to relate how the broad principles natural to Akbar and confirmed by his association with Faizí and Abulfazl, affected the system of administration introduced by the reforming sovereign. In a previous page of this chapter I have quoted an expression of his own, to the effect that he had, at one time of his reign, forced Bráhmans to embrace Muhammadanism. This must have happened because Akbar states it, but of the forced conversions I have found no record. They must have taken place whilst he was still a minor, and whilst the chief authority was wielded by Bairám. From the moment of his assumption of power, that is, from the day on which he gave the till then all-powerful Bairám Khán permission to proceed to Mekka, he announced his intention, from which he never swerved, to employ Hindus and Muhammadans alike without distinction. In the seventh year of his reign, he being then in the twenty-first year of his life, Akbar abolished the practice, heretofore prevailing, by which the troops of the conqueror were permitted to forcibly sell or keep in slavery the wives, children, and dependants of the conquered. Whatever might be the delinquencies of an enemy, his children and the people belonging to him were, according to the proclamation of the sovereign, to be free to go as they pleased to their own houses, or to the houses of their relatives. No one, great or small, was to be made a slave. 'If the husband pursue an evil course,' argued the liberal-minded prince, 'what fault is it of the wife? And if the father rebel, how can the children be blamed?'

The same generous and far-seeing policy was pursued with unabated vigour in the reform of other abuses. The very next year, the eighth of his reign, the Emperor determined to abolish a tax, which, though extremely productive, inflicted, as he considered, a wrong on the consciences of his Hindu subjects. There are no people in the world more given to pilgrimages than are the Hindus. Their sacred shrines, each with its peculiar saint and its specific virtue, abound in every province of Hindustán. The journeys the pilgrims have to make are often long and tedious, their length being often proportioned to the value of the boon to be acquired. In these pilgrimages the Afghán predecessors of the Mughal had recognised a large and permanent source of revenue, and they had imposed, therefore, a tax on all pilgrims according to the ascertained or reputed means of each.

Abulfazl tells us that this tax was extremely prolific, amounting to millions of rupees annually. But it was felt as a great grievance. In the eyes of the Hindu a pilgrimage was often an inculcated duty, imposed upon him by his religion, or its interpreter, the Bráhman priest. Why, he argued, because he submitted his body to the greatest inconvenience, measuring his own length along the ground, possibly for hundreds of miles, should he be despoiled by the State? The feelings of his Hindu subjects on this subject soon reached the ears of Akbar. It was submitted to him by those who saw in the tax only an easy source of revenue that the making of pilgrimages was a vain superstition which the Hindus would not forego, and therefore the payment being certain and continuous, it would be bad financial policy to abolish the tax. Akbar, admitting that it was a tax on the superstitions of the multitude, and that a Hindu might escape paying it by staying at home, yet argued that as the making of pilgrimages constituted a part of the Hindu religion, and was, in a sense, a Hindu form of rendering homage to the Almighty, it would be wrong to throw the smallest stumbling-block in the way of this manifestation of their submission to that which they regarded as a divine ordinance. He accordingly remitted the tax.

Similarly regarding the jizyá, or capitation tax imposed by Muhammadan sovereigns on those of another faith. This tax had been imposed in the early days of the Muhammadan conquest by the Afghán rulers of India. There was no tax which caused so much bitterness of feeling on the part of those who had to pay it: not one which gave so much opportunity to the display and exercise of human tyranny. The reason why the sovereigns before Akbar failed entirely to gain the sympathies of the children of the soil might be gathered from the history of the proceedings connected with this tax alone. 'When the collector of the Diwán,' writes the author of the Tarikh-í-Fíruz Sháhí, 'asks the Hindus to pay the tax, they should pay it with all humility and submission. And if the collector wishes to spit into their mouths, they should open their mouths without the slightest fear of contamination, so that the collector may do so.... The object of such humiliation and spitting into their mouths is to prove the obedience of infidel subjects under protection, and to promote the glory of the Islám, the true religion, and to show contempt for false religions.' That the officials who acted in the manner here described contravened the true spirit of Islám, I need not stop to argue. There is not a religion which has not suffered from the intemperate zeal of its bigoted supporters; and Muhammadanism has suffered at least as much as the others. But the extract proves the extent to which it was possible for the agents of an unusually enlightened prince to tyrannise over and to insult the conquered race in the name of a religion, whose true tenets they perverted by so acting.

Akbar recognised not only the inherent liability to this abuse in the collection of such a tax, but also the vicious character of the tax itself. The very word 'infidel' was hateful to him. 'Who is certain that he is right,' was his constant exclamation. Recognising good in all religions, he would impose no tax on the conscientious faith of any man. Early then, in the ninth year of his reign, and in the twenty-third of his life, three years, be it borne in mind, before he had come under the influence of either of the two illustrious brothers, Faizí and Abulfazl, he, prompted by his own sense of the eternal fitness of things, issued an edict abolishing the jizyá. Thenceforth all were equal in matters of faith before the one Eternal.

The dealings of Akbar with the Hindus were not confined to the abolition of taxes which pressed hardly on their religious opinions. He endeavoured, with as little show of authority as was possible, to remove restrictions which interfered with the well-being and happiness of the people. What he did regarding Satí I have already related. The kindred question of the re-marriage of a widow met with the greatest encouragement from him. He even went further, and issued an edict rendering such re-marriage lawful. In the same spirit he forbade marriages before the age of puberty, a custom deeply rooted amongst the Hindus, and carried on even at the present day, though theoretically condemned by the wisest among them. He prohibited likewise the slaughter of animals for sacrifice, and trials by ordeal. Nor was he less stringent with those of the faith in which he was born. His method with them took the form rather of example, of persuasion, of remonstrance, than a direct order.

He discouraged the excessive practice of prayers, of fasts, of alms, of pilgrimages, but he did not forbid them. These were matters for individual taste, but Akbar knew well that in the majority of instances open professions were merely cloaks for hypocrisy; that there were many ways in which a man's life could be utilised other than by putting on an austere appearance, and making long prayers. The rite of circumcision could not, indeed, be forbidden to the Muhammadans, but Akbar directed that the ceremony should not be performed until the lad had attained the age of twelve. To humour the prejudices of the Hindus, he discouraged the slaughter of kine. On the other hand, he pronounced the killing and partaking of the flesh of swine to be lawful. Dogs had been looked upon by Muhammadans as unclean animals, and the strict Muhammadan of the present day still regards them as such. Akbar declared them to be clean. Wine is prohibited to the Muslim. Akbar encouraged a moderate use of it.

In the later years of his reign (1592) he introduced, to the great annoyance of the bigoted party at his court, the practice of shaving the beard. In a hot country such as India the advantages arising from the use of the razor are too obvious to need discussion. But, although the order was not obligatory, the compliance or non-compliance with the custom became a distinguishing mark at the imperial court. Few things are more repugnant to a devout Musalmán than the shaving of his beard. It was so then, and it is so now. The example set in this respect by the sovereign caused then many murmurs and much secret discontent.

Amongst others of the natural characteristics of Akbar may be mentioned his attachment to his relatives. Of one of these, a foster-brother, who persistently offended him, he said, whilst inflicting upon him the lightest of punishments: 'Between me and Azíz is a river of milk, which I cannot cross.' The spirit of these words animated him in all his actions towards those connected with him. Unless they were irreclaimable, or had steeped their hands in the blood of others, he ever sought to win them back by his gentleness and liberality. He loved forgiving, reinstating, trusting, and though the exercise of these noble qualities led sometimes to his being imposed upon, they told in the long run. He was a good son, a loving husband, and perhaps too affectionate a father.