Akbar's Experiment in Concord

Imagine being handed a vast land where people pray in a dozen different ways, and being told: rule it. Hold it together. Keep the peace among them. It is one of the hardest tasks a ruler can face. In this age, one emperor tried to meet it with an open hand rather than a closed fist.

First, a word of fairness. The Mughal rulers were not one single policy across two centuries. Some leaned toward friendship with their Hindu subjects; some toward strictness and friction. We will meet the harder rulers elsewhere. Here we meet the one whose reign shines as the great experiment in living together. His name was Akbar, and he ruled from 1556 to 1605.

Akbar governed by an idea he gave a name. He called it sulh-i-kul. The words mean peace with all, or universal peace. The idea behind them was simple and bold: the ruler should hold every faith in fair balance, and let none be crushed for the sake of another. It was not only a feeling. Akbar turned it into deeds you can count.^[2]

Here is the first deed. Earlier states had often laid a special tax on those who were not Muslims. It was called the jizya. In 1564, Akbar ended it. He also ended the tax that had been charged to Hindu pilgrims who travelled to their holy places. With one stroke, he lifted a weight that had pressed on his Hindu subjects for a very long time.^[3]

Here is the second. Akbar did not merely tolerate Hindus; he raised them high. He brought Hindu nobles into the very top ranks of his service, the ranked officers called mansabdars. Raja Todar Mal, a Hindu, reformed the whole system of revenue, of how the land was taxed fairly. Raja Man Singh, a Hindu, became one of his greatest generals. Birbal, a Hindu, was a close and trusted companion. These were not small honours given for show. They were real power, held by Hindus, at the heart of a Muslim emperor's court. mansabdar^[2]

Here is the third, and it is dear to a teacher's heart. Akbar wanted to know the wisdom of his Hindu subjects, not just rule over them. So he had their great books carried across the bridge of language. He ordered the Mahabharata translated into Persian, the language of his court. That translation was called the Razmnama, the book of war. He had the Ramayana translated too. The emperor wished the Hindu epics to be read aloud in his own halls.^[1]

And here is the fourth, the most striking of all. Akbar built a hall he called the House of Worship. There, night after night, he gathered learned men of many religions and had them debate the deepest questions before him. Hindu pandits came. Muslim scholars came. So did Jains, and Zoroastrians, and Christian priests from far away. The emperor would sit and listen, late into the night, weighing one faith's answer against another's. Picture that: a ruler who would rather listen to many faiths argue than command them all to be silent.^[1]

Late in his life, Akbar drew a small circle of close followers into an order of his own, a path of ethics and devotion gathered from several faiths. It is remembered as the Din-i-Ilahi. We should be careful and honest here. It was never a mass religion. It never had more than a tiny handful of followers, around a dozen or so. It was the private experiment of an emperor's restless mind, not a faith for the people. So we name it, but we do not make it larger than it was.^[4]

Now, the honest balance. We must not turn Akbar into a flawless saint of tolerance; he was a hard ruler too, as emperors were, and he fought wars and made enemies. And his way was the way of one man in one reign, not the settled law of the whole age. Other rulers, before and after, chose differently. Yet within those limits, what Akbar built was real and rare. For a time, a great empire was governed on the principle that many faiths could share one home. That is worth remembering with care, neither shrunk by suspicion nor blown up into a legend.