A lamp for the dark worl.., p.14
A Lamp for the Dark World, page 14
His exit inaugurated no sudden shower of peace and prosperity, however, but a debauchery of gore. Badauni, who was present at the scene, describes how Adham Khan and Pir Muhammad had ‘troop after troop’ of the defeated brought before them and executed, so that ‘blood flowed river upon river’. Pir Muhammad, true to form, kept up a flow of jesting commentary: ‘[W]hat a plague of a strong neck this victim has, and what a power of blood has poured from it!’ It was, writes Badauni, as if human heads were so many ‘radishes, and cucumbers, and leeks’. Disgusted and horrified by such ‘terror, like that of Judgement day’, Badauni pleaded, through a friend, for it to stop, but Pir Muhammad was unmoved – he’d taken such an abundance of prisoners overnight, where was he to put them except in their graves?8
In the palace of Sarangpur, meanwhile, another kind of slaughter was under way. Baz Bahadur had left instructions that, should he be defeated, his women and dancing girls were to be killed.9 Thus, writes Abul Fazl, many of these ‘fairy-framed’ women were put to the sword; Rupmati, too, had been wounded when the imperial troops came galloping in.
They were led by Adham Khan, keen to lay his hands on Baz Bahadur’s treasures, of which his beloved Rupmati was, of course, the pearl. When the poet-sultan’s muse heard that Adham Khan had arrived, she did not wait, but ‘bravely quaffed [a] cup of deadly poison’ and left this world – thus taking ‘her honour’, notes Abul Fazl approvingly, ‘to the . . . chambers of annihilation’.
Rupmati may have escaped his unwanted attentions, but still a great bounty flowed into Adham Khan’s arms. Not only women whose ‘heart-ravishing charms were sung of in the streets’ but also all manner of ‘rare and exquisite articles . . . and buried treasures’.10 Of this rich loot, Adham Khan sent only some elephants to Akbar.
Did Adham Khan assume that Akbar – younger than Adham and nursed all these years by Adham’s mother – lacked Adham’s worldly appreciation of gold and women, and cared only to play with elephants? Or, less patronizingly, was Adham only abiding by the conventions of conquest and income that Akbar’s father and grandfather lived by? Adham had taken Malwa so he was entitled to its riches.
Back in Agra, Akbar was beginning to realize the great disadvantage of this franchise model of empire-building: his commanders might be expanding his frontiers, but his treasury was empty. Bayazid, an old soldier of Humayun’s, tells the famous story of Akbar’s treasurer unable to find seventeen rupees for the padishah.11 Maham, who eventually gave Akbar the money from her own purse, is sometimes accused of running a corrupt government that led to this pitiful state of affairs. It’s also said that Munim Khan, who couldn’t force Akbar to school, was far too placatory of the Mughal commanders – some of whom, including Ali Quli Shaibani, were none too happy with Bairam’s abrupt removal – and allowed a ‘slackening’ in their remittances.12 In fact, at about the same time as Adham’s victory in Malwa, Ali Quli had won a great battle, too, but not a copper coin of his loot – or even an elephant – had reached Akbar’s court.
The padishah had had enough. With the same burst of temper that sent him galloping on his fiery Hayran, years ago, Akbar went racing from Agra to Sarangpur.
He left in relative secret, ‘without informing the great officers and Eyes of the State’. Munim Khan knew, writes Abul Fazl, but he says nothing about Maham Anaka.
If Akbar didn’t tell her, believing that she might make excuses for her son, Maham found out. She sent ‘swift couriers’ to warn Adham, but Akbar was far swifter. He made it from Agra to Sarangpur, over 500-odd kilometres of ‘ascents and descents’, in just over two weeks.13
This wasn’t the last time that Akbar’s sheer speed befuddled his foe. On 13 May 1561, Adham Khan was riding out of Sarangpur, in all tranquillity.14 As he rode on, however, Adham noticed the soldiers ahead of him behaving oddly. Peering into the distance, he saw them getting off their horses and throwing themselves to the ground. ‘Good God’, wondered Adham Khan, ‘to whom are they paying such reverence?’15 Spurring his horse forward, he was amazed to find Akbar the cause of his army’s mid-march prostrations. Adham Khan got off his horse and kissed Akbar’s saddle in deference. Akbar, too, dismounted, as a way of reassuring Maham’s son. The two men rode back to Sarangpur in apparent amity.
The good feeling didn’t last. Back in the palace, Adham made a belated presentation of ‘things rare and beautiful’, but to little effect. Whether because Adham’s offerings were still too miserly or because they only confirmed the extent to which Adham had defrauded the treasury, Akbar’s ‘soul . . . did not open out towards him’.16
Indeed, no matter what Adham Khan did to win him over, it ‘was not approved of ’. When Adham brought out a change of clothes for his guest to wear after the ‘dusty ride’, Akbar refused. Adham panicked, stumbling ‘in the net of agitation’, asking others to plead his case until, finally, the padishah ‘took compassion on his misery’ and relented.17
That night, Akbar slept on Adham’s roof – a wonderful image, the eighteen-year-old ‘stretched out’18 under the sky on a summer night. Adham didn’t sleep a wink. According to Abul Fazl, he lurked about in the hope that Akbar – having travelled without his women – would be tempted to sneak into Adham’s harem for the night; such gross violation of protocol would allow Adham to attack the padishah. It isn’t clear why Adham might have wanted to kill Akbar, unless he was foolish or enraged enough to imagine that his mother would put him on the Mughal throne in Akbar’s place. The idea seems preposterous, but only Akbar could have proposed it to his historian, so perhaps the padishah did feel threatened that night, having ridden with a small guard into hostile terrain. Perhaps that is precisely why he slept on an open roof, avoiding the potential trap of a closed room. It is far from Abul Fazl, of course, to admit any such fear in his hero. Akbar had travelled a long way. ‘The last thing on his mind was Adham Khan’s gloomy harem’, sniffs the historian.19 The padishah slept.
The next day, Akbar’s own harem arrived, led all the way by Maham Anaka – a woman whose physical strength clearly matched her talent for intrigue. She left later than Akbar yet reached only a day after he did. Maham wasted no time in mending the growing rift between Akbar and Adham, arranging a ‘great entertainment’ and taking her recalcitrant son in hand, so that Adham finally presented all the tribute he should have before – all the treasure, all the musicians, all the women.20
Well . . . not all the women. On 17 May, four days after he had arrived, Akbar left Sarangpur. As was customary, Adham Khan escorted the padishah part of the way, and on the night of their first halt, he had some ‘evil thoughts’. Having plotted with some of his mother’s servants – Maham ruled the imperial harem – Adham managed to filch two ‘special beauties’ from it.21 Akbar discovered the loss and had the women found and returned. He wasn’t allowed to investigate their disappearance, however. A ‘severed head makes no sound’, as Abul Fazl writes: Maham Anaka had them both killed before they could be questioned.
Akbar didn’t ask her what happened. Perhaps he didn’t want to know; he was still behind that veil of his, he ‘had not yet revealed himself’.22 Instead, he continued his journey back home. On the way, he fought and killed a lioness – less daunting a creature, it appears, than Akbar’s formidable nurse.
The sixth year of Akbar’s reign abounds with examples of his growing, sometimes reckless courage. Five years ago, it was a nilgai Akbar had killed on the side of the road; now, a lioness with five cubs stood in his way. Akbar approached her on foot and killed her with one blow. It was in this year, too, that Abul Fazl reveals another of Akbar’s dangerous pleasures: he liked venturing into public, incognito. One night, in Agra, he was wandering through a great crowd, gathered for an urs, a Sufi celebration, when he was recognized. Who knows what might have happened next if Akbar hadn’t thought on his feet. He squinted and contorted his features, edging his way, thus disguised, from the crowd back to the fort.
It wasn’t, however, that Akbar was shy of appearing in public as himself. Once, famously, he rode an enraged elephant through Agra, chasing its rival across a pontoon bridge – built on boats that sank in and out of the water under the weight of the ‘two mountain forms’, while Akbar’s retainers threw themselves into the river, swimming alongside their apparently deranged padishah.
Among those watching in panic was Akbar’s ataka, Shamsuddin. In another reckless act that year, Akbar had decided to accept his foster father’s petition for a promotion, called him to Agra and made him vakil, or deputy, stripping the title from Munim Khan, and also, more importantly, from Maham Anaka, ‘who regarded herself as the [vakil]’.23 Six months had passed since the whole Adham Khan affair, but some suspicion of him and his mother may have lodged itself in Akbar’s head. Maham was ‘displeased at this’, writes Abul Fazl – Munim Khan was still Khan-Khanan, at least; what was Maham supposed to do with herself and her abundant intelligence? Akbar didn’t care. Having put Shamsuddin Ataka in the crosshairs of Maham’s resentment, Akbar also recalled Adham Khan from Malwa, thus bringing all the major players in the factions of his ataka and anaka dangerously close to one another.
At this precise moment, however, the greatest threat to his empire’s stability was Akbar himself, creating a royal commotion on his musth elephant – his bare feet gripping its harness, a metal goad at its head, while crowds gathered, mouths agape. Shamsuddin took off his turban in agitation, pleading for the padishah to get off. Akbar was disgusted. ‘If you don’t stop’, he yelled, ‘I’ll at once throw myself down from the elephant.’24 A painting of the scene shows Shamsuddin standing with hands raised in helpless prayer, as the boats keeping the bridge afloat slide this way and that under the pounding of elephant feet.25
Figures 4.1 and 4.2 Akbar rides the musth elephant Hawai across a pontoon bridge in Agra while his horrified subjects wonder if their padishah has lost his mind. Riding musth elephants was one of Akbar’s passions and became one of his defining traits. He said he did it to gauge God’s will. Attributed to Basawan and Chatr, c. 1590–95. Source: Victoria and Albert Museum, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
Michael H. Fisher defines ‘musth’ rather wittily as ‘seasonally aggressive behavior associated with testosterone surges in the elephant (and perhaps in the rider as well)’. The nineteen-year-old emperor may have needed release for his stores of energy. And he would not be the first human being to become addicted to danger. Years later, however, Akbar would explain what it was that made him ride musth elephants, the more bloodthirsty the better – elephants that had killed their mahouts and trampled bystanders, elephants that no one dared approach – in very different terms. Akbar did it, he said, because he wanted to know if he had ‘taken a step . . . displeasing to God’.
Could he have meant that he was no longer interested in the advice of his retainers, nurses and foster fathers, no matter how loving or loyal? He wanted his opinions from God, and if God did not approve of Akbar’s actions, well then, ‘may that elephant finish us’.26
He ‘sought for truth’, writes Abul Fazl, ‘. . . and consorted with every sort of wearers of patched garments such as jogis, sanyasis and qalandars, and other solitary sitters in the dust’. One day, riding out of Agra on a hunt, Akbar came across some ‘Indian minstrels . . . singing enchanting ditties about the glories’ of their pir, the Sufi saint Khwaja Moinuddin Chishti. Enthralled, Akbar declared he would visit the saint’s tomb in Ajmer. The trip was completely unplanned and even advised against – presumably since many Rajput kingdoms were at war, as much with each other as with the Mughals. But Akbar ‘did not give heed’,27 and who knows, perhaps it was God who nudged him to go, for it was on this trip that Akbar not only formed one of the most fruitful spiritual associations of his life but also agreed to a marriage that would transform the very face of his dynasty.
It was en route to Ajmer that Akbar met Raja Bihari Mal Kachhwaha again. Five years had passed since the Rajput’s brave showing at Akbar’s court, and the raja’s fortunes had declined in the interim. For all that Bihari Mal may have impressed Akbar, it was a rival of his called Suja who had managed an alliance with Akbar’s brother-in-law, Sharafuddin, who governed this area as independently as Adham had hoped to rule Malwa. Suja, therefore, occupied the Kachhwaha throne, while Bihari Mal ‘had taken refuge in the folds of the hills’,28 forced to pay Suja tribute and let him keep his son hostage. At the moment, therefore, the raja’s situation ‘was by no means enviable’, as a modern historian writes, ‘but it improved rather unexpectedly . . .’29
Seeing that Akbar was travelling through his land, and remembering, perhaps, the padishah’s friendliness from some years ago, Raja Bihari Mal sent him a message, asking for an audience.
Akbar agreed. Not only that. A few days later, when Akbar and the Rajput king met near Bihari Mal’s capital, Amber,30 Akbar also agreed to give him back his hostage and his throne and to marry his daughter.
It doesn’t seem to have taken much for the raja to bring Akbar to his side. Abul Fazl implies that the padishah made up his mind when he saw how people fled at his advance through Rajasthan. ‘We have no other intention than to do good to all mankind’, he had said in dismay. ‘What can be the reason of the flight of those people?’ Clearly, he continued, they were reacting to the ‘oppression they have undergone’. Sharafuddin liked to extract obedience through fear; this was not Akbar’s way.
Sometime between his gallop to Malwa and this meeting in Amber, Akbar had also ridden a short distance east, towards Ali Quli Shaibani in Jaunpur and all his unsettled dues. Ali Quli, cleverer than Adham, had hurried to meet Akbar on his way and handed over a substantial bounty. Ajmer was Akbar’s third excursion into a commander’s ‘fief’ in nine months; and it’s possible that the restoration of Bihari Mal and the marriage to his daughter was another sharp signal to his scattered warlords: not only the riches of his realm but also the decisions about its rule were Akbar’s and Akbar’s alone.
The chroniclers do not underscore the fact of Akbar’s marriage with drumrolls. Abul Fazl, Badauni and Nizamuddin merely describe a ruler adding another ‘honourable lady’31 to his harem. Perhaps the fact of a Rajput bride entering the Mughal dynasty is remarkable only in retrospect. Akbar himself wasn’t overly self-conscious about it. The match settled, he rode off to Ajmer and visited the shrine he had set out to see. On his return, he stopped for a day in Sambhar, where Raja Bihari Mal arranged a wedding in a ‘most admirable manner’;32 then, making sure that Sharafuddin kept Akbar’s promises to the Rajput king, the padishah returned to Agra, galloping some 300 kilometres in less than three days.
In a fascinating essay on the evolution of Rajput loyalties to the Mughal state, Norman P. Ziegler notes that a critical marker of a Rajput’s identity was his ‘saga’: ‘those to whom he gave his daughters and/or from whom he received wives in marriage’. As was the case across the world until very recently, a marriage was not just (or even) an agreement between two people, but an alliance between families and clans – even nations. Thus, writes Ziegler, the ‘term in Marwari (western Rajasthani) for both betrothal and alliance is sagai, a derivative of saga’.
Ziegler goes on to note the Rajput custom of ‘sala katari’ by which a Rajput would expect gifts of land from his sister’s husband. This tradition applied across religions. Ziegler offers an example from the fifteenth century, in which two scions of Jodhpur acquired land by marrying their sister to the Muslim ruler of Nagaur.33
Whether it was framed in terms of ‘sala katari’ or not, Akbar’s marriage to a Kachhwaha princess did ensure that it was her father, Bihari Mal, who retained his land, and not his rival, Suja, who had formed a less rewarding alliance with Sharafuddin.
And what, meanwhile, of Bihari Mal’s daughter, with whom Akbar returned to Agra in February 1562? Often misidentified as Jodha Bai when her name was Harkha, the princess is also frequently miscast as the great love of Akbar’s life. It is likely that Harkha and her husband had much to talk about; they were both intelligent, ambitious people. Indeed, Harkha doesn’t exist only as Akbar’s bride in history; she is known for her formidable trading business, too. It is also likely that she was a great influence on Akbar – along with the several other Rajput princesses the padishah would marry; that she swayed his thoughts on religion, policy and even diet (Badauni complains that Akbar’s Rajput wives made him give up onion and garlic). And, of course, Harkha gave Akbar his first son and eventual heir.
But the chronicles say nothing about love.
It is not necessary, of course, for an emperor to love a wife, but there is something stark about the utter lack of documented romance in Akbar’s life, especially given the amorous tendency in his dynasty. It wasn’t just Humayun who fell madly in love with Hamida, but Babur with Baburi, Jahangir with Nurjahan, Shahjahan with Mumtaz and even the allegedly ascetic Aurangzeb with a dancing girl called Hira Bai, for whom the strict believer was willing to down a goblet of wine. All that the records contain of Akbar’s feelings for his wives is a lament by the emperor himself. ‘Had I been wise earlier’, he once said, ‘I would have taken no woman from my own kingdom into my seraglio, for my subjects are to me in the place of children.’34
There is a deep sadness in the sentiment, whether he intended it or not; the same sadness that fills his eyes in that painting with the fatherless Abdur Rahim. The young man whose passions overflowed upon the backs of testosterone-fuelled elephants, the nineteen-year-old who jousted with God, could he not – would he not – allow himself to dally awhile in a lover’s arms?
There is no account, then, of Akbar’s feelings for the ‘gentle daughter’35 of Amber, nor vice versa, but his intense, rewarding and often tempestuous relationships with her less-than-gentle kin spill over the pages. Best known of these new allies are the princess’s brother Bhagwant Das and his son Man Singh, both of whom accompanied Harkha to Agra. Within months, Bhagwant Das was riding into battle by Akbar’s side. Man Singh, eleven years old at the time, was given a different kind of command and put in charge of little Abdur Rahim. Such was the bond, it seems, that developed between Man Singh and the boy – both grew up to become Akbar’s trusted conquerors-in-arms – that Abdur Rahim’s children would call Man Singh ‘Dadaji’, grandfather.36
