Bairám Regent, 1556-60. Akbar became the Regent for the youthful Akbar, under the honoured title of Khán Bába, equivalent to 'the King's Father.' Brave and skilful as a general, but harsh and overbearing, he raised many enemies; and Akbar, having endured four years of reigns for thraldom, took advantage of a hunting-party to throw off his minister's yoke (1560). The fallen Regent, after a struggle between his loyalty and his resentment, revolted, was defeated, but pardoned. Akbar granted him a liberal pension; and Bairam was in the act of starting on a pilgrimage to Mecca, when he fell beneath the knife of an Afghán assassin, whose father he had slain in battle. himself, 1560. Akbar's work in India. The chief events in the reign of Akbar are summarized below.1 India was seething with discordant elements. The earlier invasions by Túrks, Afgháns, and Mughals had left a powerful Muhammadan population in India under their own chiefs. Akbar reduced these Musalmán States to Provinces of the Delhi Empire. Many of the Hindu kings and Rájput nations had also regained their independence; Akbar brought them into political dependence to his authority. This double task he effected partly by force of arms, but in part also by 1 REIGN of AKBAR, 1556-1605 : 1542. Born at Umarkot in Sind. 1566. Invasion of the Punjab by Akbar's rival brother Hakim, who is 1561-68. Akbar subjugates the Rájput kingdoms to the Mughal Empire. 1572-73. Akbar's campaign in Gujarát, and its re-annexation to the Empire. 1576. Akbar's re-conquest of Bengal; its final annexation to the Mughal Empire. 1581-93. Insurrection in Gujarát. The Province finally subjugated ʼn 1586. Akbar's conquest of Kashmir; its final revolt quelled in 1592. 1599. Second expedition against Ahmadnagar by Akbar in person. Cap 1601. Annexation of Khándesh, and return of Akbar to Northern India. 1605. Akbar's death at Agra. N.B. Such phrases as 'Akbar's conquest' or 'Akbar's campaign' mean the conquest or campaign by Akbar's armies, and do not necessan y imply his personal presence. AKBAR'S HINDU POLICY. 293 Hindus. alliances. He enlisted the Rájput princes by marriage and Conciliaby a sympathetic policy in the support of his throne. He tion of then employed them in high posts, and played off his Hindu generals and Hindu ministers against the Mughal party in Upper India, and against the Afghán faction in Bengal. the On his accession in 1556, he found the Indian Empire confined to the Punjab, and the districts around Agra and Delhi. He quickly extended it at the expense of his nearest Akbar neighbours, namely, the Rájputs. Jaipur was reduced to a extends fief of the Empire; and Akbar cemented his conquest by Empire. marrying the daughter of its Hindu prince. Jodhpur was in like manner overcome; and Akbar married his heir, Salím, who afterwards reigned under the title of Jahangir, to the grand-daughter of the Rájá. The Rájputs of Chittor were overpowered after a long struggle, but disdained to mingle their Reduction high-caste Kshattriyan blood even with that of an Emperor. of Rajputs, They found shelter among the mountains and in the deserts of the Indus, whence they afterwards emerged to recover most of their old dominions, and to found their capital of Udaipur, which they retain to this day. They still boast that alone, among the great Rájput clans, they never gave a daughter in marriage to a Mughal Emperor. 1561-68. Hindus. Mall. Akbar pursued his policy of conciliation towards all the Hindu States. He also took care to provide a career for the lesser EmployHindu nobility. He appointed his Hindu brother-in-law, the ment of son of the Jaipur Rájá, to be Governor of the Punjab. Rájá Mán Singh, also a Hindu relative, did good war-service for Akbar Mán from Kábul to Orissa. He ruled as Akbar's Governor of Singh. Bengal from 1589 to 1604; and again for a short time under Jahángír in 1605-06. Akbar's great finance minister, Rájá Todar Todar Mall, was likewise a Hindu, and carried out the first land settlement and survey of India. Out of 415 mansabdárs, or commanders of horse, 51 were Hindus. Akbar abolished the jaziah, or tax on non-Musalmáns, and placed all his subjects upon a political equality. He had the Sanskrit sacred books and epic poems translated into Persian, and showed a keen interest in the literature and religion of his Hindu subjects. He respected their laws, but he put down their in- Reform of human rites. He forbade trial by ordeal, animal sacrifices, customs. and child marriages before the age of puberty. He legalized the re-marriage of Hindu widows, but he failed to abolish widow-burning on the husband's funeral pile, although he took steps to ensure that the act should be a voluntary one. Akbar thus incorporated his Hindu subjects into the Hindu Indian Muhammadan States Akbar. effective machinery of his Empire. With their aid he reduced the independent Muhammadan kings of Northern India. He subjugated the Musalmán potentates from the Punjab to reduced by Behar. After a struggle, he wrested Bengal from its Afghán princes of the house of Sher Shah, who had ruled it froma 1539 to 1576. From the latter date, Bengal remained during two centuries a Province of the Mughal Empire, under governors appointed from Delhi (1576-1765). In 1765 it passed by an imperial grant to the British. Orissa, on the Bengal seaboard, submitted to Akbar's armies under his Hindu general, Todar Mall, in 1574. On the opposite coast of India, Gujarát was reconquered from its Muhammadan king in 1572-73, although not finally subjugated until 1593. Málwá had been reduced in 1570-72. Kashmir was conquered in 1586, and its last revolt quelled in 1592. Sind was also annexed in 1591-92; and by the recovery of Kandahar in 1594, Akbar had extended the Mughal Empire from the heart of Afghánistán across all India north of the Vindhyas to Orissa and Sind. The magnificent circumference of Mughal conquest in Northern India and Afghánistán was thus complete. Capital Akbar also removed the seat of the Mughal government changed from Delhi from Delhi to Agra, and founded Fatehpur Sikri to be the future capital of the Empire. From this latter project he was, however, dissuaded, by the superior position of Agra on the great water-way of the Jumna. In 1566 he built the Agra fort, whose red sandstone battlements majestically overhang the river to this day. to Agra. Akbar's efforts in Southern India. Only annexed Khandesh. His efforts to establish the Mughal Empire in Southern India were less successful. Those efforts began in 1586, but during the first twelve years were frustrated by the valour and statesmanship of Chánd Bíbí, the queen - regent of Ahmadnagar. This celebrated lady skilfully united the Abyssinian and the Persian factions in the Deccan, and strengthened herself by an alliance with Bijápur and other Muhammadan States of the south. In 1599, Akbar led his armies in person against the princess; but, notwithstanding her assassination by her mutinous troops, Ahmadnagar was not reduced till the reign of Shah Jahan, in 1637. Akbar subjugated Khandesh; and with this somewhat precarious annexation, his conquests in the Deccan ceased. He returned to Northern India, perhaps feeling that the conquest of the south was beyond the strength of his young Empire. His last years were rendered miserable by the intrigues of his family, and by the misconduct of his 1 Professing the hostile Sunní and Shiah creeds. AKBAR'S NEW RELIGION. 295 beloved son, Prince Salím, afterwards Jahángír. In 1605 he His death. died, and was buried in the noble mausoleum at Sikandra, whose mingled architecture of Buddhist design and Arabesque tracery bear witness to the composite faith of the founder of the Mughal Empire. In 1873, the British Viceroy, Lord Northbrook, presented a cloth of honour to cover the plain. marble slab beneath which Akbar lies. Akbar's conciliation of the Hindus, and his interest in their literature and religion, made him many enemies among the pious Musalmáns. His favourite wife was a Rájput princess; another of his wives is said to have been a Christian; and he ordered his son Prince Murád, when a child, to take lessons in Christianity. On Fridays (the Sabbath of Islám) he loved to Akbar's collect professors of many religions around him. He listened religious principles. impartially to the arguments of the Bráhman and the Musalmán, the Pársí, the ancient fire-worshipper, the Jew, the Jesuit, and the sceptic philosopher. The history of his life, the Akbar-námah, records such a conference, in which the Christian priest Redif disputed with a body of Muhammadan mullás before an assembly of the doctors of all religions, and is given the best of the argument. Starting from the broad ground of general toleration, Akbar was gradually led on by the stimulant of cosmopolitan discussion to question the truth of his inherited beliefs. faith. The counsels of his friend Abul Fazl,1 coinciding with that sense of superhuman omnipotence which is bred of despotic power, led him at last to promulgate a new State religion,' the His new Divine Faith,' based upon natural theology, and comprising the best practices of all known creeds. Of this eclectic creed Akbar himself was the prophet, or rather the head of the Church. Every morning he worshipped in public the sun, as the representative of the divine soul which animates the universe, while he was himself worshipped by the ignorant multitude. Divine It is doubtful how far he encouraged this popular adoration, but he certainly allowed his disciples to prostrate themselves before him in private. The stricter Muhammadans accused him, therefore, of accepting a homage permitted only to God.2 1 Abul Fazl is accused, by the unanimous voice of the Muhammadan historians, of leading away Akbar's religious sympathies from Islám. See the valuable biography of Shaikh Abul Fazl-i-'Allámí, prefixed to Blochmann's Ain-i-Akbarí, p. xxix., etc. * Akbar's perversion from Islám has formed the subject of much learned censure by Mullá 'Abdul Kádir Badáúní and other Musalmán writers. The question is exhaustively dealt with by Blochmann in a Note' of 46 pages: Ain-í-Akbarí, pp. 167–213. See also Sir Henry Elliot's Persian Historians, vol. v. pp. 477 et seq. honours to Akbar. Akbar's tion of the Empire. Army reforms. Akbar not only subdued all India to the north of the organiza Vindhya Mountains, he also organized it into an Empire. He partitioned it into Provinces, over each of which he placed a Governor, or Viceroy, with full civil and military control. This control was divided into three departments-the military, the judicial, including the police, and the revenue. With a view to preventing mutinies of the troops, or assertions of independence by their leaders, he reorganized the army on a new basis. He substituted, as far as possible, money payments to the soldiers, for the old system of grants of land (jágírs) to the generals. Where this change could not be carried out, he brought the holders of the old military fiefs under the control of the central authority at Delhi. He further checked the independence of his provincial generals by a sort of feudal organization, in which the Hindu tributary princes took their place side by side with the Mughal nobles. Akbar's system of justice, The judicial administration was presided over by a lord justice (Mir-i-adl) at the capital, aided by Kázis or law-officers in the principal towns. The police in the cities were under a superintendent or kotwál, who was also a magistrate. In country districts where police existed at all, they were left to the management of the landholders or revenue officers. But throughout rural India, no regular police force can be said to have existed for the protection of person and property until and police. after the establishment of British rule. The Hindu village had its hereditary watchman, who in many parts of the country was taken from the predatory castes, and as often leagued with the robbers as opposed them. The landholders and revenue-officers had each their own set of myrmidons who plundered the peasantry in their names. Akbar's revenue system. Akbar's revenue system was based on the ancient Hindu customs, and survives to this day. He first executed a survey to measure the land. His officers then found out the produce of each acre of land, and settled the Government share, amounting to one-third of the gross produce. Finally, they fixed the rates at which this share of the crop might be commuted into a money payment. These processes, known as the land settlement, were at first repeated every year. But to save the peasant from the extortions and vexations incident to an annual inquiry, Akbar's land settlement was afterwards made for ten years. His officers strictly enforced the payment of a third of the whole produce, and Akbar's land revenue from Northern India exceeded what the British take at the present day. |