Akbar

Akbar, born Jalal-ud-din Muhammad, was the third emperor of the Mughal dynasty, ruling from 1556 to 1605. Over a reign of nearly fifty years he expanded Mughal control across most of the Indian subcontinent, restructured its administration and revenue system, and pursued a religious policy markedly more accommodating of the empire's non-Muslim majority than that of his predecessors, developments that together shaped the character of Mughal rule for more than a century after his death.

Early Life and Accession

Akbar was born on October 15, 1542, in Umerkot in Sindh, while his father, the emperor Humayun, was in exile after losing the Mughal throne to the Afghan ruler Sher Shah Suri. He spent much of his childhood in similarly unsettled circumstances, and by his own later account never learned to read or write fluently, though he became known for an exceptional memory and a taste for having texts read aloud to him. Humayun recovered Delhi in 1555 with the support of his general Bairam Khan but died the following year after a fall, leaving the throne to the thirteen-year-old Akbar, who was crowned under Bairam Khan's regency. The new regime's hold on power was immediately tested: Hemu, a Hindu general who had seized Delhi and Agra amid the confusion following Humayun's death, was defeated by Bairam Khan's forces at the Second Battle of Panipat in November 1556, securing the throne for Akbar. Bairam Khan continued to govern in Akbar's name until 1560, when Akbar, then eighteen, asserted direct control and dismissed him; Bairam Khan was assassinated the following year while travelling to Mecca.

Military Consolidation of the Empire

Akbar proved an active and largely successful military campaigner over the following decades. Malwa fell to Mughal forces in 1561, and the central Indian kingdom of Gondwana, ruled by the regent queen Rani Durgavati, was conquered in 1564 after Durgavati's death in battle. The Rajput fortress of Chittorgarh was besieged from 1567 and fell in February 1568; according to Abul Fazl's Akbarnama, after the defending Rajput women committed jauhar (mass self-immolation) and the remaining garrison made a final sortie, Akbar ordered the killing of the surviving defenders and non-combatants, a massacre the chronicle numbers at around 30,000. Ranthambore fell in 1569, and Gujarat was brought under Mughal control in 1572–73, followed by Bengal in 1574–76. In 1576, a Mughal force under the Rajput general Man Singh I of Amber defeated the Mewar ruler Rana Pratap Singh at the Battle of Haldighati; despite the defeat, Rana Pratap escaped and continued to resist Mughal authority from the hill country of Mewar for the rest of his life, never formally submitting. Akbar's later campaigns brought Kabul, Kashmir, Sindh, and Orissa under Mughal rule, and in the 1590s Mughal forces began the empire's long involvement in the Deccan, capturing the Ahmadnagar fort in 1600 despite a determined defense led by the regent Chand Bibi, and taking Asirgarh, Akbar's last conquest, in 1601.

Administration and Economy

Akbar's most durable achievements lay in administration. He organized the Mughal nobility and military through the Mansabdari system, which assigned officials numerical ranks (mansabs) determining their salary, military obligations, and status, creating a unified service structure that bound together Mughals, Rajputs, and other groups within a single imperial hierarchy. On the revenue side, his finance minister Raja Todar Mal developed the Zabt, or Dahsala, system, which assessed land revenue based on a ten-year average of crop yields and prices measured for each locality, replacing more arbitrary and often abusive earlier assessment methods and providing the treasury with a more predictable and equitable revenue base.

Religious Policy

Akbar's early reign followed the conventional religious framework of Muslim rule in India, including the jizya tax on non-Muslim subjects, but his policy shifted markedly from the 1560s onward. He abolished the jizya in 1564 and, in 1575, built the Ibadat Khana ("House of Worship") at his new capital of Fatehpur Sikri, initially for debate among Muslim scholars and later opened to Hindu, Jain, Zoroastrian, and Jesuit Christian participants, whom he invited from the Portuguese colony at Goa. These exchanges fed into his promulgation, in 1582, of the Din-i-Ilahi, a court order combining elements drawn from several of the religious traditions he had encountered; it never became a mass following and was confined largely to select courtiers. The policy shift provoked considerable opposition from orthodox religious scholars, including a rebellion in the eastern provinces in the 1580s partly fueled by clerical discontent, but Akbar did not reverse course. He described the underlying philosophy of his approach as Sulh-i-Kul, or universal peace, a principle of accommodation among the empire's different religious communities that guided appointments and policy for the rest of his reign. He also pursued marriage alliances with Rajput ruling houses rather than pure conquest, beginning with his marriage in 1562 to a princess of Amber, the daughter of Raja Bharmal, later known as Mariam-uz-Zamani, whose son succeeded Akbar as the emperor Jahangir; further marriages followed with the ruling families of Jaisalmer and Bikaner, and Rajput nobles such as Man Singh I subsequently held senior positions in the Mughal military and administration.

Cultural Patronage

Akbar's court became a major center of literary and artistic production. His minister and biographer Abul Fazl composed the Akbarnama, an official chronicle of the reign, and its companion volume the Ain-i-Akbari, a detailed administrative gazetteer of the empire; both remain primary sources for the period, though as court compositions they present a generally favorable view of Akbar that historians read alongside more critical contemporary accounts, notably the chronicler Abd al-Qadir Badayuni's Muntakhab-ut-Tawarikh, which condemns Akbar's religious innovations from an orthodox standpoint. Akbar sponsored translations of the Mahabharata and Ramayana into Persian, patronized a distinctive Mughal school of manuscript painting, and commissioned major architectural projects, including the new capital city of Fatehpur Sikri, built from 1571 and largely abandoned by the 1580s, traditionally attributed to water shortages, along with the Buland Darwaza gateway there and his own tomb complex at Sikandra, near Agra. His court also received several Jesuit missions sent from the Portuguese colony at Goa, beginning in 1580, whose members took part in the Ibadat Khana debates and whose accounts provide an outside European perspective on the court, even though their hope of converting Akbar to Christianity went unrealized.

Death and Succession

Akbar's final years were marked by growing tension with his eldest surviving son, Prince Salim, who chafed at the long wait for the throne and, around 1600, set up a rival court at Allahabad in open defiance of his father. In 1602, on Salim's orders, the prince's agents assassinated Abul Fazl, Akbar's close advisor and chronicler, as he returned from the Deccan, an act that hardened the rift between father and son even as the two were eventually reconciled. Akbar died at Agra on October 27, 1605, reportedly after an attack of dysentery, and was succeeded by Salim, who took the regnal name Jahangir. His reign is remembered as one in which Mughal India expanded to its greatest territorial reach up to that point and developed administrative and religious institutions that subsequent emperors, with varying degrees of continuity, inherited and adapted.