Akbar was not yet fourteen, but, precocious even for the East, he was already a student and a thinker as well as an intrepid fighter. He showed whither his meditations were leading him as soon as he took the reins of government into his own hands. There had been great conquerors before him in India, men of his own race and creed—the blood of Timur flowed in his veins—and men of other races and of other creeds. They too had founded dynasties and built up empires, but their dynasties had passed away, their empires had crumbled to pieces. What was the reason? Was it not that they had established their dominion on force alone, and that when force ceased to be vitalised by their own great personalities their dominion, having struck no root in the soil, withered away and perished? Akbar, far ahead of his times, determined to try another and a better way by seeking the welfare of the populations he subdued, by dispensing equal justice to all races and creeds, by courting loyal service from Hindus as well as Mahomedans, by giving them a share on terms of complete equality in the administration of the country, by breaking down the social barriers between them, even those which hedge in the family. He was a soldier, and he knew when and how to use force, but he never used force alone. He subdued the Rajput states, but he won the allegiance of their princes and himself took a consort from among their daughters. With their help he reduced the independent Mahomedan kings of Middle India, from Gujerat in the West to Bengal in the East. He created a homogeneous system of civil administration which our own still in many respects resembles, the revenue system especially, which was based on ancient Hindu custom, having survived with relatively slight modifications to the present day.
Political uniformity had been achieved, at least over a very large area of India. A great stride had been made towards real unity and social fusion. Nevertheless Akbar felt that, so long as the fierce religious exclusivism of Islam on the one hand, and the rigidity of the Hindu caste system on the other, were not fundamentally modified there could be no security for the future against the revival of the old and deep-seated antagonism between the two races and creeds. He was himself learned in Islamic doctrine; he caused some of the Brahmanical sacred books to be translated into Persian—the cultured language of his court—so that he could study them for himself; and he invited Christians and Zoroastrians, as well as Hindus and Mahomedans of different schools of thought, to confer with him and discuss in his presence the relative merits of their religious systems. The deserted palaces of Fatehpur Sikri, which he planned out and built with all his characteristic energy as a royal residence, only about twenty-two miles distant from the imperial city of Agra, still stand in a singularly perfect state of preservation that enables one to reconstruct with exceptional vividness the life of the splendid court over which the greatest of the Moghul Emperors—the contemporary of our own great Queen Elizabeth—presided during perhaps the most characteristic years of his long reign. Within the enceinte of his palace were grouped the chief offices of the State, the Treasury, the Record Office, the Council Chamber, the Audience Hall, some of them monuments of architectural skill and of decorative taste, more often bearing the impress of Hindu than of Mahomedan inspiration. For his first wife, Sultana Rakhina, who was also his first cousin, Akbar built the Jodh Bai palace, whilst over against it, in the beautiful "Golden House," dwelt his Rajput consort, Miriam-uz-Zemani, who bore him the future Emperor Jehanghir. Nor did he forget his favourite friends and counsellors. Upon no building in Fatehpur has such a wealth of exquisite ornamentation been lavished as upon the dainty palace of Raja Birbal, the most learned and illustrious Hindu, who gave his spiritual as well as his political allegiance to Akbar. The Mahomedan brothers Abul Fazl and Faizi, whose conversation, untrammelled by orthodoxy, so largely influenced his religious evolution, had their house close to the great mosque, sacred to the memory of a Mahomedan saint who, according to popular legend, sacrificed the life of his own infant son in order that Akbar's should live. In the great hall of the Ibadat Khaneh, built by him for the purpose, Akbar himself took part in the disputations of learned men of all denominations in search of religious truth. The spirit which inspired Akbar during that period of his life breathes nowhere more deeply than in one of the inscriptions which he chose for the "Gate of Victory," the lofty portal, perhaps the most splendid in India, leading up to the spacious mosque quadrangle: "Jesus, on whom be peace, said: 'The world is a bridge. Pass over it, but build not upon it. The world endures but an hour; spend that hour in devotion.'"
It was at Fatehpur that Akbar sought to set the seal upon his conquests in peace and in war by evolving from a comparative study of all the religions of his empire some permanent remedy for the profound denominational and racial discords by which, unless he could heal them, he foresaw that his life's work would assuredly some day be wrecked. Did he despair of any remedy unless he took the spiritual law, as he had already taken the civil law, into his own hands? Or was even as noble a mind as his not proof against the overweening hubris to which a despotic genius has so often succumbed? One momentous evening, in the Hall of Disputations, he caused, or allowed, his devoted friend and confidant, Abul Fazl, to proclaim the Emperor's infallibility in the domain of faith. From claiming the right to explain away the Koran, which is the corner-stone of Islam, its alpha and omega, to repudiating it altogether, there was but a short step. Akbar very soon took it. He promulgated a new religion, which he called the Din-i-Ilahi, and a new profession of faith, which, instead of the old Islamic formula, "There is no God but God, and Mahomed is his prophet," proclaimed indeed in the same words the unity of God, but declared Akbar to be the one Viceregent of God. The new religion, theistic in doctrine, not only borrowed its prayers chiefly from the Parsees and its ritual from the Hindus, but practically abolished all Mahomedan observances. The orthodox Mahomedans naturally held up their hands in horror, and many preferred honourable exile to conformity. But the awe which Akbar inspired, and perhaps the acknowledged elevation of his motives, generally compelled at least outward acceptance during his lifetime. His Mahomedan subjects had, moreover, to admit that his desire to conciliate Hinduism did not blind him to its most perverse features. Whilst he abolished the capitation tax on Hindus and the tax upon Hindu pilgrims, he forbade infant marriages and, short of absolute prohibition, did all he could to discountenance the self-immolation of Hindu widows. To the Brahmans especially his condemnation, both implied and explicit, of the caste system was a constant stone of offence.
Great as was his genius and admirable as were many of his institutions, Akbar, to use a homely phrase, fell between two stools to the ground. He himself ceased to be a Mahomedan without becoming a Hindu, whilst the great bulk at least of his subjects still remained at bottom Mahomedans and Hindus as before. Neither community was ripe for an eclectic creed based only upon sweet reasonableness and lofty ethical conceptions. His son and successor, Jehanghir, at once reverted to Mahomedan orthodoxy, but the reaction only became militant when Aurungzeb succeeded Shah Jehan. The profound incompatibility between Islam and Hinduism reasserted itself in him with a bitterness which the growing menace of the rising power of the Hindu Mahrattas probably helped to intensify. The reimposition of the poll-tax on the Hindus destroyed the last vestige of the great work of conciliation to which Akbar had vainly applied all his brilliant energies. Like Fatehpur Sikri itself, which for lack of water he had been compelled to abandon within fifteen years of its construction, it was a magnificent failure, and it was perhaps bound in his time to be a failure.
Aurungzeb was the first of the Moghuls to reside in the Mahomedan atmosphere of Delhi throughout his long reign. But, begun in usurpation at the cost of his own father, it ended in misery and gloom. His sons had revolted against him, his sombre fanaticism had estranged from him the Rajput princes of whom Akbar had made the pillars of the Moghul throne, and though he had reduced to subjection the last of the independent Mahomedan kingdoms of India, he had exhausted his vast military resources in long and fruitless endeavours to arrest the growth of the new Mahratta power, to which Shivaji had not unsuccessfully attempted to rally the spiritual forces of disaffected Hinduism. In the incapable hands of Aurungzeb's successors, whilst the Delhi palace became a hotbed of squalid and often sanguinary intrigue, disintegration proceeded with startling rapidity. Revolt followed revolt within, and the era of external invasions was reopened. Nadir Shah swept down from Persia and, after two months' carnage and plunder, carried off from Delhi booty to the value of thirty-two millions, including the famous Peacock Throne. Then the Afghans again broke through the northern passes. Six times in the course of fourteen years did Ahmed Shah Durani carry fire and sword through Northern India. One service, however, the Afghan rendered. From the Deccan, where a great Mahratta confederacy had grown up under the Poona Peishwa, the Mahrattas slowly but surely closed in upon Delhi. Another great battle was fought at Panipat between the Afghan invaders from the North and the flower of the Mahratta army. The Mahrattas endured a crushing defeat, which, together with treachery within their own ranks, broke up the confederacy and prepared the downfall of their military power, which British arms were to complete.
For whilst the Moghul Empire was rapidly breaking up, the oversea penetration of India by the ocean route, which the Portuguese had been the first to open up at the beginning of the sixteenth century, was progressing apace. Of all those who had followed in the wake of the Portuguese—Dutch and Danes and Spaniards and French and British—the British alone had come to stay. After Panipat the wretched emperor, Shah Alam II., actually took refuge at Allahabad under British protection, and stayed there for some years as a pensioner of the East India Company, already a power in the land. Well for him had he remained there, for he returned to Delhi only to be buffeted, first by one faction and then by another. Ghulam Kadir, the Rohilla, blinded him in the very Hall of Audience which bears the famous inscription, "If a paradise there be on earth, it is here, it is here, it is here"; and when the Mahrattas rescued him he merely exchanged jailers. He was already an old man, decrepit and sightless, when in 1803, in the same Hall of Audience, he welcomed his deliverer in Lord Lake, who had routed the Mahratta forces, almost within sight of his palace, between Humayun's tomb and the river Jumna. Then, perhaps for the first time in her history, India knew peace; for though two more descendants of the Moghul Emperors were still suffered to retain at Delhi the insignia of royalty, Mahomedan domination was over and her destinies had passed into the strong keeping of the British, who have sought to fulfil, on different and sounder lines, the purpose which had inspired the noblest of Akbar's dreams.
But throughout all those centuries of Mahomedan domination the enduring power of Hinduism had bent without ever breaking to the storm, even in Northern India, where it was exposed to the full blast of successive tempests. Many of its branches withered or were ruthlessly lopped off, but its roots were too firmly and too deeply embedded in the soil to be fatally injured. It continued indeed to throw off fresh shoots. The same process of adaptation, assimilation, and absorption, which had been going on for centuries before the Mahomedan conquest, without ever being permanently or even very deeply affected by the vicissitudes of Indian political history, went on throughout all the centuries of Mahomedan domination. Whilst millions of Hindus were, it is true, being forcibly converted to Islam, Hinduism, making good its losses to a great extent by the complete elimination of Buddhism, and by permeating the Dravidian races of Southern India, continued its own social and religious evolution. It was, in fact, after the tide of Mahomedan conquest had set in that Hindu theology put on fresh forms of interpretation. The rivalry between the cults of Shiva and of Vishnu became more acute, and many of the Dharmashastras and Puranas were recast and elaborated by Shivaite and Vishnuite writers respectively in the form in which we now know them, thus affording contemporary and graphic pictures of the persistency of Hindu life and manners after India had lost all political independence. It was then, too, that Krishna rose to be perhaps the most popular of Hindu gods, and the divine love, of which he was at first the personification, was to a great extent lost sight of in favour of his human amours, whilst the works known as the Tantras, deriving in their origin from the ancient ideas of sexual dualism immanent in some of the Vedic deities, developed the customary homage paid to the consorts of the great gods into the Sakti worship of the female principle, often with ritual observances either obscene or sanguinary or both. Possibly as a result of closer contact with primitive Dravidian religions, or of such wild lawlessness as followed the barbarous devastation wrought by Timur, the blood even of human victims flowed more freely before the altars of the Mahamatri, the great goddesses personified in Kali and Durga. The worship of the gods assumed a more terrific and orgiastic character. Sati was more frequently practised. Many of the most splendid and, at the present day, most famous temples—amongst others that of Jaganath at Puri—were founded during that period. The custom, in itself very ancient, of religious pilgrimages to celebrated shrines and to the banks and sources of specially sacred rivers, was consecrated in elaborate manuals which became text-books of ritual as well as of religious geography. Much of what might be regarded as the degeneration of Hinduism from its earlier and more spiritual forms into gross idolatry and licentiousness, may well have been in itself a reaction against the iconoclastic monotheism of the politically triumphant Mahomedans. Caste, which was as foreign to Islam as to Christianity, but nevertheless retained its hold upon Indian converts to Islam as it has also in later times upon Indian converts to the Christian creeds, tended to harden still further; for caste has ever been the keystone of Hinduism, and, as Mahomedan power gradually waned, Hinduism reasserted itself in a spirit of both religious and national rebellion against Mahomedan domination.
The most permanent, or at least the most signal, mark which Mahomedan ascendancy has left upon Hinduism has been to accentuate the inferiority of woman by her close confinement—of which there are few traces in earlier times—within the zenana, possibly in the first instance a precautionary measure for her protection against the lust of the Mahomedan conquerors. Her seclusion still constitutes one of the greatest obstacles to Indian social and religious reform. For, as custom requires an Indian girl to be shut up in the zenana at the very age when her education, except in quite elementary schools, should commence, the women of India, even in the classes in which the men of India have been drawn into the orbit by Western education, have until recently remained and still for the most part remain untouched by it, and their innate conservatism clings to social traditions and religious superstitions of which their male belongings have already been taught to recognise the evils. In this respect Mahomedan domination has helped to strengthen the forces of resistance inherent to Hinduism.
On the other hand, Mahomedan domination has left behind it a deep line of religious cleavage, deepest in the north, which was the seat of Mahomedan power, but extending to almost every part of India. Sixty-six millions of Indians out of three hundred millions are still Mahomedans, and though time has in a large measure effaced the racial differences between the original Mahomedan conquerors and the indigenous populations converted to their creed, the religious antagonism between Islam and Hinduism, though occasionally and temporarily sunk in a sense of common hostility to alien rulers who are neither Mahomedans nor Hindus, is still one of the most potent factors not only in the social but in the political life of India, both indelibly moulded from times immemorial by the supreme force of religion. We have a pale reflection of that sort of antagonism at our own doors in the bitterness between Protestants and Roman Catholics in Ulster. All over India, Mahomedans and Hindus alike remember the centuries of Mahomedan domination, the latter with the bitterness bred of the long oppression that struck down their gods and mutilated their shrines, the former with the unquenched pride and unquenchable hope of a fierce faith which will yet, they believe, make the whole world subject to Allah, the one God, and Mahomed, his one Prophet.