Book review: Ira Mukhoty,Akbar the Great Mughal: The Definitive Biography

If there is a person in India’s premodern history about whom there is no dearth of material for the biographer, it is, perhaps, Akbar. With a detailed ‘official’ biography (Abū’l Faẓl’s, Akbarnāma), there are numerous other narratives, memoirs, letters and documents mainly in Persian alongside European accounts (mainly Jesuit sources). Ira Mukhoty has now given us a detailed account of Akbar’s life based on a study (though apparently mainly through translations) of this vast material. She also seems fairly well aware of recent work on Akbar and his times, scattered in books and journals. (The end-notes not being included in the review copy, this is essentially the reviewer’s impression.) Though she has obviously chosen her task from recognition of Akbar as a state-builder, bold thinker and innovator, her account is throughout realistic, not hiding or overlooking his acts of impetuosity and even cruelty. There will always be disagreement over whether she should have given more space to Akbar’s administrative measures, philosophical views or experiments in technology; but, perhaps, she has felt that readers are more likely to be interested in racy narratives, rather than details of administration or modes of thought. By and large, the author has given the reader a valuable detailed biography which keeps rigorously to the limits of historical accuracy. The reviewer has no hesitation in recommending it to all who are interested in a balanced and detailed biography of Akbar.

This does not, of course, mean that there are no areas where one might differ from the author. One area relates to individual facts. Mukhoty is, for instance, sure that Jahāngīr’s mother was ‘Harkha Bai’, the daughter of Bhār Mal, rāja of Amber (and so aunt of the famous Mān Singh). But Jahāngīr himself in a reference to ‘the aunt of his (Mān Singh) who was a wife of my father’ (Tuzuk, ed. Syed Ahmad, p. 7) makes it obvious that she was not his mother. Nor does any reference to Jahāngīr’s mother being a Rajput, let alone a Kachhwaha princess, occur in any of our sources.

Similarly, the maḥẓar (misspelt ‘mazhar’, pp. 227, 241, 246) of 1579 was not even a fatwā (theological opinion), for maḥẓar was the term then used for any statement of fact, usually signed by a number of persons. It did not by any means much exalt Akbar’s religious status, for it restricted his power only to choosing between established theological opinions on any disputed matter. It was thus not a ‘decree’, ‘proclaimed’ by Akbar. Nor was such a document necessary for defying Caliphal claims of the Ottoman Sultan for there is no evidence of anyone in India having recognised the Ottoman Sultan as Caliph until the late nineteenth century (contra Mukhoty’s statement on p. 228).

Other small points: Slave trade, not slavery, was prohibited by Akbar early in his reign (pp. 102–3); the Sayyids of Barha belonged to present-day Muzaffarnagar District, not Sirhind (p. 112); Todar Mal is generally believed to have been a Khatri not Kayasth (p. 212); Jauhar’s memoirs were independently dictated or written by him, not by Akbar’s orders (p. 393); Badauni did not die in 1596 (p. 393), for, in fact, his Tarīkh contains a reference to an event of 1601. On the alleged Anarkali episode (p. 391), the author might have gained from Shireen Moosvi’s paper published in Vol. I (1) of this journal.

While the author has read widely, for the Persian texts she has apparently relied entirely on translations. She has, therefore, lacked access to untranslated texts like Faizi Sirhind’s Akbarnāma, or the letters of Abū’l Fatḥ Gīlānī (vital for Akbar’s march towards Kabul in the crisis year of 1581). Then, there are the vagaries of translators. Jahāngīr says (ed., p. 1): “whether during my childhood (mastī) or adulthood (hoshyārī), I never heard my blessed father address me except as ‘Shaikhū Bābā”. In both translations (Rogers–Beveridge and Thackston), it is Akbar, who is turned into ‘drunk or sober’ while pronouncing his pet name for Jahāngīr! Mukhoty (p. 159) naturally follows the translators, despite the immense unlikelihood of Jahāngīr so referring to his father.

Mukhoty has the knack of keeping the reader’s interest by her racy narrations of small as well as major events in Akbar’s life. Sometimes, the narration goes out of control: Akbar, while departing from Lahore in 1598, and crossing the Sutlej could hardly have proceeded ‘by boat to Delhi’ (p. 414), nor could Prince Salim, a few years later, have ‘sailed away on the Yamuna back to Ajmer’ from the vicinity of Agra (p. 428)! It is hoped such slips would be corrected in the next edition of the work.

In her introduction (p. xxxv), Mukhoty rightly condemns ‘popular narratives of suspect scholarship’ drawn by ‘the infamous notion of one thousand years of oppression of Hindus’. She has furnished us with a work of critical objectivity, which is the real antidote to the current coloured narrations of our past.