Produced by Ron Swanson
_RULERS OF INDIA_
EDITED BY
SIR WILLIAM WILSON HUNTER, K.C.S.I., C.I.E.
M.A. (OXFORD): LL.D. (CAMBRIDGE)
AKBAR
_London_
HENRY FROWDE
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS WAREHOUSE
AMEN CORNER, E.C.
[_All rights reserved_]
[Illustration: MAP OF THE INDIAN EMPIRE]
RULERS OF INDIA
AKBAR
BY COLONEL G. B. MALLESON, C.S.I.
OXFORD
AT THE CLARENDON PRESS: 1890
CONTENTS
CHAP. PAGES
I. THE ARGUMENT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5-11
II. THE FAMILY AND EARLY DAYS OF BABAR . . . . . . . . . . 12-16
III. BABAR CONQUERS KABUL . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17-25
IV. BABAR'S INVASIONS OF INDIA . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26-34
V. THE POSITION OF BABAR IN HINDUSTAN . . . . . . . . . . 35-49
VI. HUMAYUN AND THE EARLY DAYS OF AKBAR . . . . . . . . . 50-59
VII. HUMAYUN INVADES INDIA. HIS DEATH . . . . . . . . . . . 60-64
VIII. AKBAR'S FIGHT FOR HIS FATHER'S THRONE . . . . . . . . 65-71
IX. GENERAL CONDITION OF INDIA IN THE MIDDLE OF THE
SIXTEENTH CENTURY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72-80
X. THE TUTELAGE UNDER BAIRAM KHAN . . . . . . . . . . . . 81-90
XI. CHRONICLE OF THE REIGN . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91-145
XII. THE PRINCIPLES AND INTERNAL ADMINISTRATION OF AKBAR . 146-200
INDEX . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 201-204
_NOTE_
The orthography of proper names follows the system adopted by the
Indian Government for the _Imperial Gazetteer of India_. That system,
while adhering to the popular spelling of very well-known places,
such as Punjab, Lucknow, etc., employs in all other cases the vowels
with the following uniform sounds:--
_a_, as in wom_a_n: _a_, as in l_a_nd: _i_, as in pol_i_ce: _i_, as
in intr_i_gue: _o_, as in c_o_ld: _u_, as in b_u_ll: _u_, as in
s_u_re.
{5}
THE EMPEROR AKBAR
CHAPTER I
THE ARGUMENT
I crave the indulgence of the reader whilst I explain as briefly as
possible the plan upon which I have written this short life of the
great sovereign who firmly established the Mughal dynasty in
India.[1]
[Footnote 1: For the purposes of this sketch I have referred to the
following authorities: _Memoirs of Babar_, written by himself, and
translated by Leyden and Erskine; Erskine's _Babar and Humayun_; _The
Ain-i-Akbari_ (Blochmann's translation); _The History of India, as
told by its own Historians_, edited from the posthumous papers of Sir
H. M. Elliot, K.C.B., by Professor Dowson; Dow's _Ferishta_;
Elphinstone's _History of India_; Tod's _Annals of Rajast'han_, and
various other works.]
The original conception of such an empire was not Akbar's own. His
grandfather, Babar, had conquered a great portion of India, but
during the five years which elapsed between the conquest and his
death, Babar enjoyed but few opportunities of donning the robe of the
administrator. By the rivals whom he had overthrown and by the
children of the soil, Babar was alike regarded as a conqueror, and as
nothing more. A man of remarkable ability, who had spent all his life
in arms, he was really an adventurer, though a brilliant adventurer,
who, soaring above his contemporaries in genius, taught in the rough
school of adversity, had beheld from his eyrie at Kabul the
distracted condition {6} of fertile Hindustan, and had dashed down
upon her plains with a force that was irresistible. Such was Babar, a
man greatly in advance of his age, generous, affectionate, lofty in
his views, yet, in his connection with Hindustan, but little more
than a conqueror. He had no time to think of any other system of
administration than the system with which he had been familiar all
his life, and which had been the system introduced by his Afghan
predecessors into India, the system of governing by means of large
camps, each commanded by a general devoted to himself, and each
occupying a central position in a province. It is a question whether
the central idea of Babar's policy was not the creation of an empire
in Central Asia rather than of an empire in India.
Into this system the welfare of the children of the soil did not
enter. Possibly, if Babar had lived, and had lived in the enjoyment
of his great abilities, he might have come to see, as his grandson
saw, that such a system was practically unsound; that it was wanting
in the great principle of cohesion, of uniting the interests of the
conquering and the conquered; that it secured no attachment, and
conciliated no prejudices; that it remained, without roots, exposed
to all the storms of fortune. We, who know Babar by his memoirs, in
which he unfolds the secrets of his heart, confesses all his faults,
and details all his ambitions, may think that he might have done this
if he had had the opportunity. But the opportunity was denied to him.
The time between the first battle of Panipat, which gave him {7} the
north-western provinces of India, and his death, was too short to
allow him to think of much more than the securing of his conquests,
and the adding to them of additional provinces. He entered India a
conqueror. He remained a conqueror, and nothing more, during the five
years he ruled at Agra.
His son, Humayun, was not qualified by nature to perform the task
which Babar had been obliged to neglect. His character, flighty and
unstable, and his abilities, wanting in the constructive faculty,
alike unfitted him for the duty. He ruled eight years in India
without contributing a single stone to the foundation of an empire
that was to remain. When, at the end of that period, his empire fell,
as had fallen the kingdoms of his Afghan predecessors, and from the
same cause, the absence of any roots in the soil, the result of a
single defeat in the field, he lost at one blow all that Babar had
gained south of the Indus. India disappeared, apparently for ever,
from the grasp of the Mughal.
The son of Babar had succumbed to an abler general, and that abler
general had at once completely supplanted him. Fortunately for the
Mughal, more fortunately still for the people of India, that abler
general, though a man of great ability, had inherited views not
differing in any one degree from those of the Afghan chiefs who had
preceded him in the art of establishing a dynasty. The conciliation
of the millions of Hindustan did not enter into his system. He, too,
was content to govern by camps {8} located in the districts he had
conquered. The consequence was that when he died other men rose to
compete for the empire. The confusion rose in the course of a few
years to such a height, that in 1554, just fourteen years after he
had fled from the field of Kanauj, Humayun recrossed the Indus, and
recovered Northern India. He was still young, but still as incapable
of founding a stable empire as when he succeeded his father.
He left behind him writings which prove that, had his life been
spared, he would still have tried to govern on the old plan which had
broken in the hands of so many conquerors who had gone before him,
and in his own. Just before his death he drew up a system for the
administration of India. It was the old system of separate camps in a
fixed centre, each independent of the other, but all supervised by
the Emperor. It was an excellent plan, doubtless, for securing
conquered provinces, but it was absolutely deficient in any scheme
for welding the several provinces and their people into one
harmonious whole.
The accident which deprived Humayun of his life before the second
battle of Panipat had bestowed upon the young Akbar, then a boy of
fourteen, the succession to the empire of Babar, was, then, in every
sense, fortunate for Hindustan. Humayun, during his long absence, his
many years of striving with fortune, had learnt nothing and had
forgotten nothing. The boy who succeeded him, and who, although of
{9} tender years, had already had as many adventures, had seen as
many vicissitudes of fortune, as would fill the life of an ordinary
man, was untried. He had indeed by his side a man who was esteemed
the greatest general of that period, but whose mode of governing had
been formed in the rough school of the father of his pupil. This boy,
however, possessed, amid other great talents, the genius of
construction. During the few years that he allowed his famous general
to govern in his name, he pondered deeply over the causes which had
rendered evanescent all the preceding dynasties, which had prevented
them from taking root in the soil. When he had matured his plans, he
took the government into his own hands, and founded a dynasty which
flourished so long as it adhered to his system, and which began to
decay only when it departed from one of its main principles, the
principle of toleration and conciliation.
I trust that in the preceding summary I have made it clear to the
reader that whilst, in a certain sense, Babar was the founder of the
Mughal dynasty in India, he transmitted to his successor only the
idea of the mere conqueror. Certainly Humayun inherited only that
idea, and associating it with no other, lost what his father had won.
It is true that he ultimately regained a portion of it, but still as
a mere conqueror. It was the grandson who struck into the soil the
roots which took a firm hold of it, sprung up, and bore rich and
abundant fruit in the happiness and contentment of the conquered
races.
{10} This is the argument to the development of which I have devoted
the following pages. The book seems to me naturally to divide itself
into three parts. To Babar, as the developer of the idea of the
invasion and conquest of India, I have devoted the first part. He was
a remarkable man, and he would have been remarkable in any age. When
he died, at the early age of forty-eight, he left behind him a record
which may be read with interest and profit even at the close of this
nineteenth century. It has seemed to me the more necessary to devote
a considerable space to him inasmuch as the reader will not fail to
discern, in the actions of the grandson, the spirit and energy and
innate nobility of character of the grandfather. Of Humayun, whose
life properly belongs to the first part, I have written as much only
as seemed to me necessary to illustrate the cause of his fall, and to
describe the early days of the hero of the book, who was born in
Sind, during the father's flight from India.
The remaining two-thirds of the book have been given to Akbar. But,
here again, I have subdivided the subject. In the first of the
two-thirds, I have narrated, from the pages and on the authority of
contemporary Muhammadan historians, the political events of the
reign. In the last chapter I have endeavoured to paint the man. From
the basis of the records of the Ain-i-Akbari and other works I have
tried to show what he was as an administrator, as an organiser, as
the promulgator of a system which {11} we English have to a great
extent inherited, as a conciliator of differences which had lasted
through five hundred years, of prejudices which had lived for all
time. I have described him as a husband, as a father, as a man, who,
despite of a religious education abounding in the inculcation of
hostility to all who differed from him, gave his intellect the freest
course, and based his conduct on the teachings of his intellect. This
chapter, I am free to confess, constitutes the most interesting
portion of the book. For the sake of it, I must ask the reader to
pardon me for inflicting upon him that which precedes it.
{12}