A lamp for the dark worl.., p.10
A Lamp for the Dark World, page 10
Tardi Beg had not challenged the ambitious regent so far, and Bairam Khan deferred to the older soldier, calling him toqan, ‘elder brother’26 – but there was little family feeling between the two. Bairam was a Persianized Turk, his clan historically associated with the descendants of Timur. Tardi Beg was a Chagatai, proud of his Mongol lineage, and imagining himself, as Ferishta once wrote of Chagatai chiefs generally, ‘at least equal to [the legendary Persian kings] Keikobad and Keikaoos’. One was a talented general, relatively young, a tactician and diplomat who had stuck by the Mughals since he was sixteen; the other a grizzled nobleman with a keen interest in the health of his treasury, who would well remember how Humayun once ran after him, begging for his loyalty. Finally, Bairam was Shia and Tardi Beg was Sunni. Little wonder, then, if both were looking for ways ‘to ruin one another’.27
Tardi Beg’s retreat from Delhi gave Bairam a perfect opportunity to strike. He did not waste it.
Akbar was out hunting. The boy had prevented Abul Ma’ali’s execution and Bairam was not inclined to take such a chance again. Quickly, as Akbar rode through Sirhind with his sparrowhawks, his regent sent a friendly message to Tardi ‘toqan’, inviting him to his tent. No one knows what they talked about. Perhaps Bairam let the commander reinvigorate himself with old war tales. Perhaps he let him imagine that Bairam sought his advice; that he, too, was anxious to return to his fort in Qandahar. They might even have had an avuncular chat about Akbar and the boy’s uncertain destiny. Whatever it is, Tardi Beg seems to have been at ease, suspecting nothing, when Bairam got up to wash before the evening prayer. This was a signal to his men, who fell as one on Tardi Beg and killed him.
When Akbar returned that evening, Pir Muhammad brought him the news. Bairam had sent an equivocal apology with his deputy: ‘He hoped that [Akbar] would approve of him with the glance of pardon so that other evil-doers might take warning.’28
If Akbar was unhappy or upset by the sudden execution of a familiar face, he said nothing. Besides, Bairam was busy planning a strike on Hemu; Tardi Beg was already old news. Any talk of him would be a distraction from the business at hand – getting Akbar an empire.
Nor was Hemu resting on his laurels. Having heard that the Mughals were planning to retaliate, he sent his artillery ahead to Panipat, and prepared to follow. Bairam, too, had dispatched an army of 10,000 men under Ali Quli Shaibani, an outstanding Uzbek warrior who would soon display his flair for battle. The Mughals weren’t far from Panipat when Hemu’s guns and cannons arrived. Immediately – with the reflexive speed that would become a hallmark of Akbar’s own military strategy – Ali Quli Shaibani raced ahead with a small detachment of men, surprised the commanders guarding the artillery, and took it from them.
Hemu wasn’t dismayed by the setback; instead, he left Delhi ‘with consummate pride and great celerity’.29 The distance from Delhi to Panipat is under 100 kilometres. Famine still held sway over the region, so there would have been little sign of life along the way, the fields untended or even unsowed as Hemu and the ‘black mass of his army’30 marched by. His cavalry alone comprised 30,000 ‘practiced horsemen’,31 Rajput and Afghan, and there were anywhere between 500 (Abul Fazl) and 1500 (Badauni) elephants, wearing bright armour, spears and daggers tied to their trunks, carrying musketeers and archers on their backs.
Never before had many of the Mughals seen these ‘mountain-like and dragon-mouthed’ creatures in such grand array. Abul Fazl’s description catches something of the open-mouthed gasps of awe that may have filled the air as the two armies came face to face on 5 November 1556 upon the battle-weary plains of Panipat. How could a description of these ‘rushing mountains be strung on the slender thread of words’? An elephant could outstrip the fastest Persian horse – indeed, it could lift both horse and rider in its trunk and ‘[fling] them into the air’.
The Mughal horses, as new to Hindustan as their masters, ‘had never seen such terrific forms’, and would run amok at their approach. No wonder that ‘perturbation found its way into the hearts’ of the Mughal men.32 Still, Abdullah the Uzbek was among them, as also Ali Quli Shaibani, and several others who rallied the troops. On the other side, Hemu, bare-headed, shouting war cries, ‘went forth with scowling brow’33 on his elephant, Hawai – airborne. His attack was swift and strong, and threw both left and right wings of the Mughal army ‘into great confusion’.34 Central Asian horsemanship was not to be taken lightly, however. Instead of charging at the elephants, head first, they rode into Hemu’s ranks diagonally, slashing with their swords, aiming to unseat enemy soldiers and trample them under ‘the dagger-hooves of swift, fiery horses’.35
‘Like thunder in April and lions in the thicket’, writes Abul Fazl, the two armies ‘roared and charged each other’.36 A painting of the scene shows a man who has lost his helmet, trying to keep his long, loose hair out of his eyes with one hand and control his horse with the other; his shield flies behind him like an umbrella in a storm. Another man is caught and twisted out of shape in an elephant’s trunk. A white horse’s neck is splattered with blood. ‘You’d say the air was all crimsoned daggers / Their steel had all become solid rubies.’37
Ali Quli Shaibani, in command of the centre, was holding strong, thanks to a large ditch between his men and Hemu’s elephants. His archers fired volley after volley of arrows at the enemy, but nothing, it seems, would make the battle turn their way.
Some 15 kilometres away, Bairam Khan was preparing the reserves, riding through the ranks and delivering ‘promises of favour and anger’.38 It was do or die; there would be no second chances.
Did Akbar know, did he realize that Panipat was his family’s second chance?39 He wasn’t a diligent student, and there is nothing to suggest that he had, as yet, acquired any interest in history, or even his own ancestry. On the other hand, it’s hardly possible that Babur’s great victory of 1526 on this very battlefield wasn’t a familiar story to his grandson. He must have known how Babur had routed Ibrahim Lodi’s army of 100,000 men – even more than Hemu’s – with only 10,000 of his own. But then, Akbar would also have known that Babur had a secret weapon. Gunpowder.40 Thrown into utter confusion by unexpected explosions, Lodi’s army had been routed by noon. Thirty years later, Akbar had no secret weapon. Gunpowder was so commonplace now that Akbar had ordered his chief of artillery to stuff an effigy of Hemu with it and have it blown up, as a way of cheering his troops and, as likely, himself. All he could do, as he put on his armour and rode those last dusty kilometres towards Panipat, was hope for a miracle.
A miracle is what he got.
Hemu had broken two wings of the Mughal army. Now, he watched as Ali Quli Shaibani’s centre unleashed its barrage of arrows across the ditch, and Hemu’s embattled elephants retreated just enough to allow the Mughals to charge. Unfazed, Hemu launched a counter-attack with a platoon of musth elephants that roared and ‘dislodged many . . . soldiers of the sublime army’.41 The Mughal position wasn’t getting any better. Ploughed through by demented elephants, Ali Quli’s cavalry fired desperate arrows into the air.
One of them found its mark.
Hemu the grocer had never learnt to ride a horse. This explains, partly, why he was riding an elephant; though an elephant was also a way for a commander to remain visible, at a height, to his troops. That may be why Hemu wasn’t wearing a helmet – so that his men might recognize him easily, and gain heart from his bare courage. It was a brave but reckless decision. The air was thick with arrows and one struck Hemu in the eye, piercing his skull so that, in Badauni’s graphic description, ‘his brain passed clean out from the cup of his head’.
Ferishta writes that Hemu did not give up despite the mortal blow; that he ‘drew the arrow and with it the eye out of the socket, which he wrapt in his handkerchief . . . [and] continued to fight with unabated courage’. Perhaps that is true; Hemu’s ambition for power was no less than Akbar’s would become. He had even vowed, some say, to convert to Islam if he defeated the Mughals.42 But willpower alone cannot staunch the effects of an arrow through the eye.
Hemu slumped upon his howdah, unconscious.
It is a telling indictment of warfare in general that if the leader of a battle was killed, his army lost all interest in the fight. Thus, when Akbar and Bairam reached Panipat, they did not find a battle to join, but a victory to celebrate. Hemu’s army had disintegrated like chalk to dust; his elephant Hawai, meandering off the battlefield, had been captured, and Hemu was in chains.43
The grocer who became a general, the shopkeeper who dreamt of empire, the champion of over twenty battles who now lay bleeding and breathing his last, was brought before Akbar, a boy who still needed his stirrups shortened to ride a horse. Bairam Khan did not – or could not – see the asymmetry. He, too, had lost his father young and joined Babur’s army when he was sixteen, only two years older than Akbar was now. He told the newly crowned padishah to execute his foe: it would be an act of ‘holy combat’, a blow for empire and for Islam.44
Looking at the man before him, with his horrible wound and his rasping breath, Akbar hesitated. He made excuses.
‘I have already torn him to pieces’, he said. ‘One day in Kabul I was practicing drawing . . . I drew a picture of a person with disjointed limbs.’ When someone asked him what he was trying to draw, he said, ‘It’s a picture of Hemu.’45
It is impossible that Akbar had heard of Hemu until a few months before the man himself was brought before him. For Abul Fazl, this is, of course, the miracle of the drawing. There are other ways to look at it, too. A child drawing cartoonish scenes of graphic violence, as another might play with dolls by tearing their limbs apart. A boy inspired by stories of his father’s enemies in a faraway land, mangling one of them on paper: I’ll beat him, I’ll kill him. A man, a little embarrassed by his adolescent inhibitions over spilling human blood, camouflaging the fact in stories.
A cacophony of voices rose to support Bairam’s suggestion. Akbar must kill the enemy! Abul Fazl writes that the more they ‘pressed him’ to do it, the more Akbar resisted. Ferishta says that the boy compromised by touching Hemu with his sword. Some later historians, from Vincent A. Smith to Harbans Mukhia, believe that Akbar did, in fact, use his sword more forcefully. Whether this is true, that Akbar took his first human life in Panipat, or whether, as is more generally believed, it was Bairam who finally swung his own sword in an impatient arc and cut off Hemu’s head, the fact is that Akbar’s official history overflows with regret for Hemu’s death. ‘Would that [the emperor] had come out of his veil’, writes Abul Fazl; would that Akbar had forbidden Hemu’s execution and inducted him into his own service instead. A man of such ‘lofty spirit’ under Akbar’s patronage, ‘what works might he not have performed?’
Thus, at any rate, the Second Battle of Panipat was won, but Hemu was hardly the only challenge that Akbar and Bairam faced during these first months of what was, in effect, their joint reign. Back in Badakhshan, Sulaiman – seniormost in the family after his cousin Humayun’s death – had taken over neighbouring fiefs while their holders were in Hindustan,46 and besieged Kabul, where he was held at bay by Munim Khan for several months until Sulaiman retreated in September 1556, only weeks before Tardi Beg lost Delhi. The intrepid Ali Quli Shaibani’s brother, Bahadur Khan, had made a move on Qandahar, forcing its Mughal governor to seek Persian help. As is only too likely to happen when flies invite spiders home, Qandahar surrendered, some months later, not to Bahadur but to the mighty Shah Tahmasp, chafing, no doubt, ever since Humayun swiped the city from under his nose. Closer home, a former governor of Sher Shah Suri’s, Hajji Khan, had commandeered Narnaul, south-west of Delhi, and marched upon Alwar.
It was in pursuit of Hajji Khan that Pir Muhammad, Bairam’s deputy, now set off. En route, he found Hemu’s wife, fleeing with ‘elephants laden with gold’.47 The widow who might have been queen managed to escape, but her elephants and riches fell to the Mughals, the neighbouring villagers, and the ground – there was so much gold that they were picking it up by the shield-full, writes Badauni; years later, lucky travellers might still find ‘gold coins and ingots’ along the way.
Understandably, the loot delayed Pir Muhammad, and Hajji Khan had long escaped when the Mughal army reached Alwar. Pir Muhammad had, in any case, found himself a more tempting and remunerative target: he rode on to Deoti, where the rest of Hemu’s baggage train was camped. More bounty fell to the Mughals, and also, more tragically, Hemu’s eighty-year-old father. Pir Muhammad offered him his life in return for converting to Islam, but after eight decades of having ‘worshipped my God according to [my own] religion’ the old man was not inclined to change. ‘Why should I change it at this time’, he said, ‘and . . . merely from fear of my life, and without understanding it come into your way of worship?’48
Pir Muhammad was not a man to be diverted by theological debate. Hemu’s father was killed.
Hajji Khan, meanwhile, arrived in Ajmer, and took it.
The story of Hajji Khan is one of hundreds of digressions that flow like rivulets from the long-flowing river that is Akbar’s life. Not every stream is worth paddling into, and Hajji Khan, though evidently an able commander, might have been safely ignored if his story did not introduce a far more significant character into Akbar’s world.
In 1547, a decade earlier, the raja of the Kachhwaha Rajputs had died, leaving behind two embattled sons, Bihari Mal – or Bharmal – and Askaran. It was Hajji Khan, governor of the region, who negotiated a compromise and divided the land between them. The fall of the Suris and Humayun’s return brought about a predictable slide in Hajji Khan’s fortunes; he lost his territories. When Humayun died, the khan lost no time in winning back his land. Thus it was that Hajji Khan besieged a Mughal commander called Majnun Khan Qaqshal in Narnaul, with Bihari Mal by his side.
It was a tricky situation for the Rajput king, having to choose between a once-powerful Afghan governor and a rising Mughal star, but he managed to keep his bridges intact long enough to pick the right side.49 Bihari Mal negotiated Majnun Khan Qaqshal’s surrender, sending him back to court safe and sound, and, when Hajji Khan fled to Ajmer, his Rajput ally returned Narnaul to the Mughals, too.
Thus, Bihari Mal gained the Mughals’ gratitude without arousing Hajji Khan’s enmity, and when Akbar arrived in Delhi from Panipat, the Kachhwaha chief was among the elite invited to meet and congratulate him.
Some days later, having established diplomatic relations with the young padishah, the raja and his kin came to take their leave. Akbar was riding a musth elephant, ‘rushing in every direction’,50 and causing havoc, presumably, while Bairam tried to hold court on his behalf. As the chaos increased and people fled, the elephant turned upon the Rajputs – who, unlike the rest of the court, remained in place. Akbar was impressed – the first of many times that he would be impressed by Rajput courage – impressed enough, in fact, to ask to know more about the raja. He did not know that he was enquiring after his future father-in-law, nor how their lives would intertwine until their very blood was one.
Five years would pass, however, before the two met again; five years in which Akbar would leave his childhood behind.
Akbar’s inattention in court on the day the Rajputs were leaving – his active disruption of it, in fact – was clearly not uncommon. Abul Fazl expends a great deal of his ink, at this point, on expanding metaphors of the veil – here equivalent to the proverbial bushel under which Akbar was hiding his light. It was the veil, therefore, that stopped Akbar from halting Hemu’s execution. At other times, he was living ‘within the veil of indifference’, ‘clad . . . in a garb of estrangement’, or ‘pretended not to notice’ – all this apparent distraction a guise to ‘test the powerful . . . under the veil of inattention’.
As always with Abul Fazl, there is a great deal of myth-making in the metaphor. The veil carried many political connotations. For one, as Azfar Moin writes, ‘The veiling of the face . . . was a mark of the awaited savior who had yet to manifest his true nature.’51 It might also hint at a person, particularly a ruler, being a representative of God – conceived as pure light in Islamic theology. Thus, Harbans Mukhia tells of how the thirteenth-century Sultan Balban, having declared himself God’s shadow, appeared in court with his face literally veiled, ‘lest even the shadow of the powerful light blind an onlooker’.
On the other hand, Abul Fazl’s enthusiasm for myth-making is matched by an equally fierce commitment to creating an accurate historical record. He wasn’t making it up: Akbar was distracted, but that doesn’t mean that Akbar wasn’t paying attention.
Glimpses of his childhood in Kabul – the complaints to Humayun, the rapid turnover of tutors, the obsession with animals – suggest a kind of wilful energy, a mind too busy with its own delights to have time for duty. It was this very Akbar, however, who would grow into a man of remarkable intelligence, with a fine memory, endless curiosity and love of detail. These qualities must have existed in him, if in germinating form, when he was a boy, and it is entirely possible that Akbar was watching and learning, observing and absorbing far more than he let on.
What would such a boy do when a sudden load of responsibility fell upon him, when it was in his name that battles were fought and men were killed? In the second year of his reign, Akbar did what unhappy children often dream of doing: he ran away from home.
The signs of stress had been showing. The only real order Akbar gave in his first year as padishah was to call for the harem. It was an ‘imperial command driven by great yearning’, writes Abul Fazl.52 Bereaved, enthroned and overwhelmed, it is little wonder if Akbar was missing his mother. But the women were delayed; first, by Sulaiman’s siege of Kabul, ably defused by Munim Khan; then by Hemu’s challenge. It was only in the spring of 1557, a year after Akbar had called for them, that the harem arrived in Hindustan.
