The Age of Akbar: Statecraft and Political Ambitions

Philological Encounters, 2020

In the late sixteenth century, the Mughal Emperor Akbar sponsored the translation of more than one dozen Sanskrit texts into Persian, chief among them the Mahābhārata. The epic was retitled the Razmnāma (Book of War) in Persian and rapidly became a seminal work of Mughal imperial culture. Within the Razmnāma, the Mughal translators devoted particular attention to sections on political advice. They rendered book twelve (out of eighteen books), the Śānti Parvan (Book of Peace), into Persian at disproportionate length to the rest of the text and singled out parts of this section to adorn with quotations of Persian poetry. Book twelve also underwent significant transformations in terms of its content as Mughal thinkers reframed the Mahābhārata's views on ethics and sovereignty in light of their own imperial interests. I analyze this section of the Razmnāma in comparison to the original Sanskrit epic and argue that the Mughal translators reformulated parts of the Mahābhārata's political advice in both style and substance in order to speak directly to Emperor Akbar. The type of advice that emerged offers substantial insight into the political values that Mughal elites sought to cultivate through translating a Sanskrit work on kingship.

Sixteenth century Asia represented a heavily contested political landscape with the establishment of the Safavid dynasty in Iran, the Uzbek Khanate at Bukhara and the Mughals in the Indo-Gangetic basin, alongside the existence of the two centuries old Ottoman Sultanate. A meticulous examination of the official correspondence between the respective heads of these states unravels the complex strands of their multilateral interactions. The Mughal response to the allegations by the Uzbeks regarding the heretical acts of Akbar in the final quarter of the sixteenth century, couched in diplomatic language by the ideologue Abū'l Fażl, raises certain problematics that constitute the subject of study here. Why was it necessary for Akbar to portray himself as a good Islamic ruler in order to establish his credibility? What were the politics of drafting missives and selecting envoys? What crucial role did the vocabulary of symbolism perform in negotiating the idea of Islam? Or were these engagements merely a façade beneath which Islam was subverted for political and material purposes? By addressing these questions, this paper attempts to complicate historical understandings of power contests of global significance in this period. It brings out the remarkable scribal skills of Abū'l Fażl that evince the astute diplomat in him. Simultaneously, an inquiry into the volatile relationship between religious ideology and statecraft highlights the tensions and dilem

The World of the Siege: Representations of Early Modern Positional Warfare, eds. Anke Fischer-Kattner and Jamel Ostwald (Brill)), 2019

This chapter looks at Mughal sieges through the lens of literary representation. It focuses on five imperial sieges - ones that the third Mughal emperor Jalaluddin Muhammad Akbar (r. 1556-1605) - led in person in course of his long rule spanning almost half a century. These are the sieges of Mankot (1557), Chitor (1567-68), Ranthambhor (1569), Surat (1572-73), and Patna (1574). The chapter analyses the politics of narrativisation of these sieges in three imperial chronicles - Muhammad Arif Qandahari's Tarikh-i Akbari, Khwaja Nizamuddin Ahmad's Tabaqat-i Akbari, and Abul Fazl's Akbarnama. It traces how exactly these chroniclers used their literary descriptions of these sieges as sites for the construction and memorialisation of the greatness of Akbar as a universal ruler.

Scroll, 2021

The Tarikh-i-Alfi is the first among the great historical manuscripts produced in the Mughal kitabkhana under Akbar. It was followed by the Tarikh-i-Khandan i Timurriya, the Chingiznama, the Baburnamas and the Akbarnamas among other fine illustrated manuscripts of both newly-written and classic historic texts. As the History of a Thousand Years (Alf) the Tarikh recounts the rulers and caliphs of the first millennium of Islam and was meant to be ready in time for 1000 AH. In this article, I discuss the unusual format of the illustrations by studying several surviving pages.

AKBAR THE GREAT MOGUL 1542-1605 BY VINCENT A. SMITH

Columbia University Press, 2022

Any king who learns wisdom and persists in his consecration of the Light of Lights, as we said before, will be given the Great Royal Light (kiyān kharra) and the luminous light (farra). Divine light will bestow upon him the robe of Royal Authority and of majesty. He will become the natural ruler of the world. He will receive aid from the lofty realm of heavens. Whatever he says will be heard in the Heavens. His dream and his personal inspirations will reach perfection.

Open Theology, 2023

Carl Schmitt's well-known declaration that "all significant" modern political concepts are "secularized theological concepts" has sometimes been treated as hyperbole: a metaphorical axe aimed at the frozen sea of legal positivism, a provocation rather than a thesis. In this article, I demonstrate the fecundity of this thesis by applying it to secularism, a concept undeniably central to the Liberal state; crucially, however, I do so in the context of early modern South Asian history and ongoing debates over the secularism of premodern Mughal polity. As I argue, Jalāl ud-Dīn Akbar (1542-1605 CE)a monarch of the Mughal dynasty often cast by South Asian secularists as a precocious emblem of the neutral state was, in fact, an ideal type of Schmittian sovereign, who nonetheless stands equidistant from both Schmitt and his Liberal opponents in his stance toward religious pluralism. The theological correlate to Akbar's "secularism" was an Islamicate theology of religions, which provided a contentful religious justification for religious pluralism, very different from contemporary "post-metaphysical" arguments. The final section of the article takes a critical turn, as I examine Akbar's legendary reputation in the present, my intervention into his "secular" mythos, and the special difficulties involved in applying Schmittian concepts to an early modern, non-Western sacred king.

Trans Stellar Journals, 2021

History is an intricate interpretation and scrutiny of bygone occurrences. As mankind has progressed and evolved, this led to the birth of a functioning community, a society. To understand humanity, the determining factor would be to fathom the characteristics and functioning of society. Various historians have written their experiences about the society that they resided in. One such account is that of Father Monserrate, who wrote during the reign of Akbar, one of the most prominent Mughal emperors. He was very enthusiastic to learn about various religions in his reign. Father Monserrate's commentary was a first-hand experience and so it became a primary source to understand and study the society as well as the Jesuit order during Akbar's reign. The objective of the research paper is to provide an objective view of how war, religion and justice influenced society during Akbar's reign. Various religious sites, rituals, and practices are explored in detail in these journals. These are mapped with modern practices for better identification in this paper. Similarly, we also analyse the broad spectrum of encounters and occurrences that the author came across as a Jesuit missionary at court. The nature of war in the Mughal era is explored in detail through Akbar's war with his brother Mirza Hakim. The Jesuit mission's frequent public religious debates with Akbar and his court also provide insights into questions about society, cultural diversity, and varied perceptions related to religion and social order in the Mughal empire by taking references from Father Monserrate's accounts. All this is laid out in this paper through the use of travel literature and literary analysis.

Al-Jami'ah: Journal of Islamic Studies, 2016

This study seeks to expand the horizon of existing literatures on the dialectic of religion, legal culture and local dynamics by comparing two great Muslim rulers in two different parts of the world in the first Islamic millennium: Mughal Emperor Akbar and Mataram's Sultan Agung. It specifically aims to analyze historical accounts on the dynamic relations between Islamic norms and local culture with corresponding results of distinctive ways of ruling by these two great rulers. While both rulers Akbar and Sultan Agung shared similar concerns in political imagination, their difference was particularly shown in the representation of religion in the courts' political and legal culture, with the latter was heavily determined by different challenges they faced during their rule. This paper argues that a comparative overview of these two great figures, who ruled in different parts of the world and at rather successive periods, would be beneficial for the studies of religion-culture relations in flagging the 1 This article is an elaboration of our previous research on "Dialectic of Religion and Culture: A Comparison of Emperor Akbar's Spiritualism Din-i-Ilahi and Sultan Agung's Manunggaling Kawula Gusti that we conducted with Prof.

2019

This paper aims to look into the policy stratagems of two ‘greats’ in the pantheon of distinguished Indian rulers – Ashoka and Akbar, which were ‘Dhamma’ and ‘Sulh-i-Kul’, respectively. When we think of negotiations and coalitions, most of the times, we tend to ignore their manifestations in history, and, even then – give little weightage to the events, negotiations and policies which happened in the ‘Eastern’ realm. ‘Dhamma’ and ‘Sulh-i-Kul’ were devised, innovatively, to bind the diverse pluralities in harmony and generate order. These novel policies would be discussed under the lenses of – ancient Indian board strategy game of Chess and the existing theoretical frameworks of – negotiation-analysis and coalition-building, leading to a concluding denouement which would highlight their relevance for the policymakers in the modern world.

Abu'l-Fath Jalal ud-din Muhammad Akbar, popularly known as Akbar I literally "the great"; 15 October 1542]– 27 October 1605) and later Akbar the Great (Urdu: Akbar-e-Azam; literally "Great the Great") was Mughal Emperor from 1556 until his death. He was the third and one of the greatest rulers of the Mughal Dynasty in India. Akbar succeeded his father,Humayun, under a regent, Bairam Khan, who helped the young emperor expand and consolidate Mughal domains in India. A strong personality and a successful general, Akbar gradually enlarged the Mughal Empire to include nearly all of the IndianSubcontinentnorth of the Godavari river. His power and influence, however, extended over the entire country because of Mughal military, political, cultural, and economic dominance. To unify the vast Mughal state, Akbar established a centralised system of administration throughout his empire and adopted a policy of conciliating conquered rulers through marriage and diplomacy. In order to preserve peace and order in a religiously and culturally diverse empire, he adopted policies that won him the support of his non-Muslim subjects. Eschewing tribal bonds and Islamic state identity, Akbar strived to unite far-flung lands of his realm through loyalty, expressed through a Persianised culture, to himself as an emperor who had near-divine status.

The Historical Journal

Since 2001, the geo-strategic priorities of the ‘War on Terror’ have prompted renewed attention to the historically significant region of Waziristan. Ironically, given the apparent failure of British attempts to pacify the region in the century after 1849, Waziristan’s colonial history has been picked over by policy-makers, commentators, and scholars for lessons which might be applied to current projects of state-building and counter-insurgency. Unabashedly instrumentalist, these works have reproduced the reductive stereotypes of the colonial sources and helped to entrench partial understandings of the frontier which obscure the dynamic and contingent nature of imperial state-building. This article offers an alternate frame for writing the history of the colonial frontier by re-examining how British officials attempted to constitute colonial authority through their engagements with one of the region’s most powerful groups: the Mahsud Wazirs. Challenging historiographical emphases on...