A lamp for the dark worl.., p.31
A Lamp for the Dark World, page 31
On 22 May, four months after the Qaqshals began their revolt and a month after they killed Akbar’s governor, the chiefs of Bengal held a grand assembly, at which they gave themselves titles and land – and a new king. They read the khutba in Mirza Muhammad Hakim’s name.
A terrible ‘Divine wrath’, writes Abul Fazl, descended upon the rebels’ party. A great storm ‘scattered’ their tent, flinging their carpets ‘into the mire’ as the ‘wretches . . . crept away’. For all the loyal indignation of his scribe, however, Akbar may have taken the matter far more in his stride. In fact, he had anticipated it. When news of the rebellion first arrived, the emperor had declared that he would not hurry east to suppress it. The rebels’ ‘audacity . . . is being backed . . . by the ruler of Kabul’, he had said. ‘It is not unlikely that flatterers may bring that light-headed, evil-thinking one into [Hindustan].’ Akbar decided to wait and watch, and he was proven right.
Even now, when he received news of the rebels’ proclamation, Akbar acted in no haste. For all the unrest among sections of his nobility, for all the unhappiness of his critics, Akbar’s talent for conquest and organization had given him a vast and largely stable realm. He was thirty-eight years old and had ruled a quarter-century; no longer the young monarch who galloped after Adham Khan, after Ali Quli and Bahadur, after the Mirzas, a furious whirlwind establishing his authority by sweeping away any affront to it. Now, he could have other men do the job for him.
Three weeks after the mutineers’ assembly, on 9 June 1580, Akbar met Aziz. His milk brother had been in the doghouse for half a decade, ever since he damned Akbar’s reforms in 1575, but there were few men that Akbar could trust more than him. A ‘river of milk’ bound them, as the emperor would say,27 excusing Aziz’s sharp tongue and the fact that he never quite learnt to speak to his old friend as he ought to an emperor. Now, Aziz was restored to great favour: titled Khan Azam – the greatest khan – given command of an imperial army and the highest mansabdari rank, 5000 – and sent to quell the east.
Aziz was not the only man whom Akbar could rely on. His Persian courtiers remained broadly loyal to the emperor.28 Even more so, the Hindustanis (not only Rajputs, but also Todar Mal and Indian Muslims such as the quarrelsome Punjabi Shahbaz Khan, for example), whom Akbar had cultivated over the years, had little sympathy with his disenchanted, disenfranchised Central Asian chiefs, and ‘as a body sided with the King’.29 Aziz was one of three senior commanders, therefore, that Akbar sent east; the other two were Todar Mal and Shahbaz Khan. All were true to their emperor, but all were also men of great pride, with little love lost for each other. As the campaign progressed, the imperial commanders were as much at loggerheads with each other as with the rebels. As Abul Fazl puts it, Shahbaz Khan ‘looked at himself in the mirror, liked what he saw, and fell prey to arrogance’; Aziz was ‘disgusted’ at such preening self-importance; while Todar Mal ‘threw in the towel’.30
Luckily, the rebels were similarly divided. It was one of Sharafuddin’s new-found allies, for example, who finally ended his mutinous career. According to Abul Fazl, Sharafuddin acquired a dangerous rival in Masum Kabuli; both wanted to lead the rebellion and ‘each lay in ambush for the other’. This unproductive state of affairs ended when Masum Kabuli bribed his competitor’s young male love to poison Sharafuddin’s opium.
Many others among the mutineers, if not actively plotting against each other, were far less committed to their cause than the imperial troops seem to have been. Soon after arriving in the east, for example, Todar Mal noticed that his colleague in the finance department, Shah Mansur, was demanding taxes from Bengal even while the rebellion raged. The raja complained to the emperor, who put his over-scrupulous vizier in prison. Promptly, many deserters in Bengal returned to the imperial fold.
Such reneging on the revolution was not taken lightly by the rebel commanders. Abul Fazl describes one of them, called Arab, killing a lapsed mutineer and drinking ‘some of his blood’. And yet, no matter how terrifying these warlords, they had begun to lose their authority. Foremost among them was Baba Khan Qaqshal, the acknowledged leader of the whole enterprise, who had developed a terrible case of gangrene: ‘every day he put two [seers] of flesh into the wound to feed the maggots’,31 while blaming his disgusting fate on his breach of loyalty.
The Bengal rebellion was losing some of its steam, therefore, when, in late December 1580, Akbar’s half-brother Mirza Muhammad Hakim sent two successive contingents, one led by a man considered to be the very ‘sword of his army’, into Hindustan.
Once again, Akbar kept his cool; though Abul Fazl, in his aggravation, can hardly control his metaphors. What could Hakim be thinking? ‘Little did he know that a trickle of water is useless against a raging fire, and scratching is not an effective treatment against chronic haemorrhoids.’32 Indeed, Akbar’s men in Punjab – led by yet another of his most trusted generals, Man Singh – made quick work of Hakim’s troops. His crack swordsman was wounded and died.
Then, in January 1581, exactly one year after the Qaqshals mutinied, news arrived that Mirza Hakim had ridden into Hindustan himself. Until now, Akbar had insisted he wouldn’t make hasty decisions about Hakim’s incursions. ‘A son can be acquired’, he would say, ‘but how can a brother be obtained?’33
By crossing the Indus, however, his brother had crossed a line that Akbar could not ignore. Two weeks later, on 6 February 1581, Akbar rode out of Fatehpur to war, as his father had done so often before, against his own.
Chapter 12
Brotherhood of Man
‘He also had this bad habit: while one of his questions was being answered, he would suddenly, and before there had been time to deal with it, ask another. He had not the patience to hear one explanation at a time but in his eagerness for knowledge, tried to learn everything at once, like a hungry man trying to swallow his food at a single gulp.’
– The Jesuit Fathers, Akbar and the Jesuits
That Humayun’s brothers loom as large in history as the padishah himself while Akbar’s brother is entirely forgotten says as much about the two emperors as it does about how history is written. As Munis Faruqui points out in his aptly titled essay, ‘The Forgotten Prince’, three currents of historiography have come together to sink Muhammad Hakim in the dull waters of obscurity.
First, there was Akbar’s propaganda, via Abul Fazl, characterizing his half-brother as a ‘dim-witted, self-serving, and cowardly but obdurate political gadfly’; followed by colonial writings in which Hakim appears as a ‘narrow-minded Muslim bigot . . . a foil against which to better appreciate Akbar’s tolerance’; and finally, the unfortunate mirza’s ‘multiple identities as a Kabul-based, orthodox-Muslim, Persian-speaking, ethnic-Turk’ made of him an ungainly square peg in the round hole of nationalist narratives written in the twentieth century.1
And yet, as Faruqui demonstrates, Hakim posed a serious challenge to Akbar while he lived, and did so far more cleverly than he is given credit for. In brief, while Akbar embodied the ideal man become all-powerful emperor, exercising his God-given right to rule for the betterment of his people, Hakim adopted the persona of the adventurer – and not of just any adventurer but of the most adventurous man in the two brothers’ family, their grandfather Babur.
‘Like Babur’, writes Faruqui, Hakim, ‘actively embraced a rough-and-ready Turkish-steppe identity’. In equal parts ghazi, Islamic warrior, and avid gardener; as much a ‘bold risk-taker’ (marching upon Lahore in the 1560s while on the run from Sulaiman and Haram) as a generous companion, ‘carousing with friends . . . in the hills above Kabul’. The most critical play in this competition of personas between Akbar and Hakim, however, was how ‘the Mirza emulated Babur in his patronage of the Naqshbandi sufi tariqah’.
After his mother was murdered, when Hakim was still a child, the prince had grown increasingly close to Khwaja Hasan Naqshbandi, and through him to his highly orthodox Sufi order, which not only served to give Hakim’s Kabul a clear identity as ‘a bastion of Naqshbandi and orthodox-Sunni Islam’ but also bolstered the prince economically and politically – with its extensive landholdings, for example, or by providing a basis for alliance between Hakim and the increasingly powerful Uzbek ruler to his north, Abdullah Khan of Turan, also a follower of the Naqshbandis.
Given this context, Akbar’s embrace of the Chishtis takes on a whole new dimension. The Chishtis, as Faruqui points out, ‘were a quintessentially Indian Sufi order with few or no ties to either Afghanistan or Central Asia’ – but a definite and popular presence in Punjab ‘where Akbar needed all the support he could get to checkmate Mirza Hakim’s longstanding territorial claims’.2 How consciously or not such decisions were made is difficult to say, of course. It is possible that the Naqshbandi order appealed emotionally to Hakim as much as it did strategically – he was an orphaned child, after all, when Khwaja Hasan first came to him. The Chishtis’ ‘eclectic and accommodating religious and spiritual practices’, meanwhile, would certainly have struck a chord with Akbar’s own curious and inventive soul.
The fact of the matter is also, however, that in many public aspects of their lives, the brothers played out a public rivalry. Thus, if Hakim adopted Babur, then Akbar exerted his claim on their father, Humayun. Humayun’s beautiful tomb, which remains a landmark in Delhi, was built for exactly that purpose: to indicate ‘the new center of an imperial Mughal geography now in Hindustan and under Akbar’s control’. Akbar didn’t just build the tomb. As Faruqui notes, the emperor made several ‘highly publicized visits to [it] . . . between the 1560s and early 1580s’ – between the Uzbek and Bengal revolts that is – and ‘each of these visits . . . occurred against a backdrop of heightened tensions or actual strife with the Mirza [Hakim]’. Hakim, meanwhile, played his politics in a different coin, quite literally: he banned Akbar’s currency from Kabul in favour of the traditional ‘shahrukhi’ coinage used by Babur and Humayun, as a way of contrasting his own ‘loyalty to Central Asian political traditions with Akbar’s neglect’. During and after the Uzbek disturbances in the 1560s, writes Faruqui, Hakim offered Kabul as ‘a safe haven for Akbar’s enemies’, positioning himself as the protector of defeated refugees returning home, and also as a king in the style they remembered with such nostalgia, not an absolute monarch but ‘a primus inter pares – or first among equals’.
Akbar – ‘the greater’ – had never had much use for this old model. Thus, when the emperor marched out of Fatehpur in February to teach Hakim a lesson, he had seven groups of high-ranking mansabdars – or amirs – leading the various battalions of his army. This was to symbolize and sustain a protocol that Akbar had invented soon after he promulgated his mansabdari reforms in 1575. By the emperor’s orders, seven groups of amirs were assigned seven watches – each group to guard the emperor for a full twenty-four hours once a week. For anyone watching to see if their stubborn emperor was having second thoughts about his style of rule for fear of Hakim’s appeal to the outraged warlords in the east, the message was clear. Akbar’s nobility stood in his service; they should not dream of stepping into his shoes.
A year had passed since news of the Bengal insurrection reached his court, and although Akbar had spared neither resources nor men in crushing the rebellion, he had shown no sign of undoing the policies and actions that led to it: the consolidation of political and financial power in the emperor’s hands, the expansion of his social, moral, even religious authority, and the increasing diversity of his court and his beliefs. In fact, news of Bengal had arrived in the very month that a much-anticipated set of fresh debaters reached Akbar’s controversial Ibadat Khana. These were three Jesuit priests – a sensitive, self-flagellating Rudolf Aquaviva, his mind inclined towards martyrdom; the more genial Antonio Monserrate, who later wrote an account of their journey; and Francis Henriquez, a Persian convert and interpreter for his colleagues. The three men travelled from Goa to the Mughal court at Akbar’s express invitation, with a clear mission: to convert the emperor to Christianity.
They had some reason to believe they might succeed. ‘Royal converts were not unknown in the Indies’, writes a colonial historian. Kings in the Maldives and Sri Lanka had become Christian, ‘and a near relation of the King of Bijapur had been baptized at Goa shortly after Father Rudolf’s arrival from Europe’.3 The Fathers made the long and difficult journey to Fatehpur in optimism, therefore, as Monserrate describes it, even if they were occasionally downcast to observe the ‘wild and savage cries’ of Muharram, or the no less ‘degraded’ celebrations of Holi. As they travelled along the western coast, from Goa to Gujarat, ever north via the forested inclines of the Satpuras, across the clear waters of the Narmada (‘the fish and turtles, and even the smallest pebbles, can be counted’) and past the royal ruins of Mandu, the priests shook their heads at the ‘carelessness’ of the Muslim rulers of these lands, who may have destroyed some temples, but ‘allowed sacrifices to be publicly performed, incense to be offered, oil and perfumes to be poured out, the ground to be sprinkled with flowers, and wreaths to be hung up, wherever . . . any fragment of an idol is to be found’. Worse, many of the temples were now replaced by the shrines of equally ‘wicked and worthless Musalmans’.4 The Fathers couldn’t help having a little weep at this state of affairs, but cheered up in Gwalior, where they took the city’s famous Jain statues, carved on the walls below the Gwalior fort, for Jesus Christ and his disciples. Indeed, wrote Father Monserrate, he knew for a fact that ‘three hundred years ago this district [Gwalior] was inhabited by Christians, who were, alas, defeated in various battles by the Musalmans, and so effectively crushed that all memory of Christianity has perished from the minds of men’.
The Fathers hoped to revive that past glory, and their confidence was bolstered when they met another priest, Francis Julian Pereira, in Fatehpur. Pereira told them that Akbar was on the very brink of conversion, that he believed in Christ’s miracles, that he had paintings of Christ, Mary and Moses, alongside Muhammad, in his dining hall.5 It only needed one last little nudge for the world’s most powerful monarch to join the Fathers’, and their nation’s, faith.
What a coup that would have been! But Pereira was wrong, and the Fathers failed – as did the two missions that followed in their wake. What they did succeed in doing, however, and with Akbar’s active encouragement, was to rankle his conservative courtiers and ulema more than ever before.
The best-known example of the Jesuits in furious debate with Muslim theologians is the ‘Fire Test’, recounted by several chroniclers of the time, from Badauni to Father Monserrate himself.
Each tells it in his own way. In Badauni’s version, it began when one Shaikh Qutubuddin, brought to court at Akbar’s orders and set to debate the Jesuits, invited them to undertake a trial by fire with him. ‘The Shaikh pulled one of the Christian priests by the coat, and said to him, “Come on, in the name of God!”’ Whichever of them practised the true faith would escape the flames unscathed. The priests were too scared to accept, writes Badauni, and the shaikh was soon after exiled to Sindh.6
Abul Fazl, on the other hand, writes that it was Padre Rudolf, a ‘Nazarene [sage] . . . singular for his understanding and ability’, who dared the ‘untruthful bigots’ that he was debating to walk into a roaring fire with him, each holding their holy books, leaving the rest to God. ‘The liverless and black-hearted fellows wavered’, Abul Fazl concludes mercilessly, ‘and in reply to the challenge had recourse to . . . wrangling’.7
Finally, there is Monserrate’s version. According to this, the most detailed of the three tellings, the Fathers had launched a full-scale attack on the ‘haughty pride’ of the Prophet Muhammad. At this, the Muslims proposed a trial by fire; a proposal that Akbar seconded with some enthusiasm – he ‘urged the same course upon the priests’ – but the Jesuits refused. Annoyed, Akbar got up and left.
Monserrate is quick to add that they did not refuse from cowardice. On the contrary, Rudolf ‘eagerly sought’ any opportunity to martyr himself.8 It wasn’t that he didn’t want to enter the fire, it’s just that ‘he was in doubt as to its rightness at present’.
Soon after, in a private conference with a clearly disappointed emperor, Rudolf gathered his wits and declared that he and his companions would gladly enter ‘not one but a thousand pyres’ – and they didn’t even care if they burned alive in them. Why just fire, he went on, carried away by his own eloquence, ‘Trusting in divine aid, we have no fear of elephants, lions, panthers, leopards, precipices, crosses, stripes, and all manner of tortures.’ Let the flames be lit!
But then, Rudolf introduced a caveat into the matter. He would gladly walk into fire and burn – or not – but he would not admit it as a test. They were all three sinners, he said, of himself and his colleagues; how could they presume that God wanted to save them? Besides, when even Christ had refused to trouble God for miracles, how dare the Fathers?
At this, Akbar replied that he hadn’t invited the Fathers all this way from Goa just to roast them alive. All he wanted, he said, was to enlist them in tricking a ‘religious preceptor’ (possibly the Shaikh Qutubuddin of Badauni’s story). Rudolf refused, declaring primly that, as priests, they were neither allowed to ‘kill a man . . . [nor] make any attempts to bring about a man’s execution’.
Akbar insisted: ‘I do not wish you to undergo the ordeal; I only desire that you should say you will’.
But no. ‘We cannot do even that, O King.’
What if Akbar made the challenge on the Fathers’ behalf? They need not implicate themselves in a lie, only remain silent through it. But again, Rudolf refused, declaring he would announce his dissent loudly should Akbar do any such thing.
Thus, it appears, Akbar’s fire fizzled out under the wet blanket of the padre’s piety, but the stories remain, and they cast a most revealing light upon the emperor. Azfar Moin, who analyses these three narratives of the Fire Test in some detail, suggests that Akbar’s alleged enthusiasm for the trial reveals, or underlines, two core facets of the emperor’s personality: ‘[his] fondness for “hands on” knowledge and [for] public spectacle’. Just as he enjoyed the battle of the sanyasis, long ago, on the banks of the lake in Kurukshetra, so, now, he delighted in the equally gladiatorial combat between ‘learned men of all stripes . . . [competing] with each other in an arena specially built for this purpose’.9
