India Through the Ages Part 25

The task of consolidating his empire occupied Akbar for the next two years. It would be idle to attempt to follow him from the Nerbudda to the Indus, from Allahabad to Guzerat. One incident will give an idea of his swiftness, his extraordinary dash and courage.

Returned from a long campaign on the north-western hills against his young brother, Mahomed Hakim, Akbar heard of renewed trouble with the Usbeks in Oude. Though it was then the height of the rainy season, he made a forced march over a flooded country, and arriving at the Ganges at nightfall, swam its swollen stream with his advanced guard, and after lying concealed till daybreak, sounded the attack.

"The enemy, who had pa.s.sed the night in festivity, little supposing the king would attempt to cross the river without his army, could hardly believe their senses when they heard the royal kettledrums."

Needless to say, the rebels, surprised, were defeated, and, as usual, pardoned. This was Akbar's policy. To punish swiftly, then to forgive.

Thus he bound men to him by ties of fear and love. Already he had conceived and carried out the almost inconceivable project of allying himself in honourable and peaceful marriage with the Rajputs. Behari Mull, Rajah of Amber (or Jeypore), had given the king his daughter, while his son Bhagwan-das, and his nephew Man-Singh, were amongst Akbar's most trusted friends, and held high posts in the imperial army. Toleration was beginning to bear fruit; but Chitore, the Sacred City, held out alike against annexation or cajolery. So it could not be allowed to remain a centre of independence, of revolt. It was in A.D. 1568 that Akbar began its siege. Udai-Singh, the Fat King, had fled to the mountains, being but a b.a.s.t.a.r.d Rajput in courage, leaving one Jaimul in charge of the sanctuary of Rajput chivalry.

It was a long business. Once an accident in the mines which Akbar was pushing with the utmost care, brought about disaster, and the siege had practically to be begun again. In the end, it was a chance shot which brought success. Alone, unattended, in darkness, Akbar was in the habit of wandering round his guards at night, marking the work done in the trenches, dreaming over the next day's plans. So occupied in a close-pushed bastion, he saw by the flare of a torch on the rampart of the city some Rajput generals also going their rounds. To s.n.a.t.c.h a matchlock from the sentry and fire was Akbar's quick impulse.

It won him Chitore; for the man who fell, shot through the head, was Jaimul himself. Next morning, Akbar went through scenes which he never forgot. He saw, as his grandfather had done, the great war-sacrifice of the Rajputs; but, unlike Babar, he did not view it contemptuously.

It made an indelible mark upon his soul. The story goes, that two thousand of the Rajput warriors escaped the general slaughter by the "stratagem of binding the hands of their women and children, and marching with them through the imperial troops as if they were a detachment of the besiegers in charge of prisoners."

If this extraordinary tale be true, the explanation of it surely lies in Akbar's admiration; an admiration which led him on his return to Delhi to order two huge stone elephants, formed of immense blocks of red sandstone, to be built at the gateway of his palace. And on the necks of these elephants he placed two gigantic stone figures representing Jaimul and Punnu, the two Rajput generals who had so bravely defended Chitore.

It was during this siege that Akbar's friendship with the poet Faizi commenced. Five years younger than the young king, who was then but six-and-twenty years of age, Faizi, or Abul-faiz, as he is rightly named, was by profession a physician, by temperament an artist in the highest sense. Charmed by his varied talents, fascinated by his goodness, Akbar kept him by his side until he died nineteen years afterwards, when it is recorded that the king wept inconsolably. One thing they had in common--an unusual thing in those days--they were both extraordinarily fond of animals, especially of dogs.

This friendship, bringing about as it did the introduction to Akbar of Abul-faiz's younger brother, Abul-fazl, marks an important change in the king's mental development.

Hitherto he had been strictly orthodox. In a way, he had set aside the problems of life in favour of his self-imposed task; henceforward his mind was to be as keen, as swift to gain spiritual mastery, as his body was to gain the physical mastery of his world. Possibly he may have been led to thought by the death in this year of his twin sons; apparently these were the only children which had as yet been born to him, and at twenty-seven it is time that an Eastern potentate had sons. With him, too, the very idea of empire must have been bound up with that of an heir to empire. So it is no wonder that we find him overwhelmed with joy at the birth, in 1569, of Prince Salim. Yet his sons (he had three of them in Fate's good time) were to be the great tragedy of Akbar's life. Long years afterwards, when the baby Salim, whom he had welcomed verily as a gift from G.o.d, had grown to be a man, a cruel man, who ordered an offender to be flayed alive, Akbar, with a shiver of disgust, asked bitterly "how the son of a man who could not see a dead beast flayed without pain, could be guilty of such barbarity to a human being?"

How indeed? Were they really his sons, these hard-drinking, hard-living young princes, who had no thought beyond the princelings of their age?

This resentment, this disgust, however, was not to be for many years.

Meanwhile, Akbar, having built the fort at Agra, that splendid building whose every foundation finds water, whose every stone is fitted to the next and chained to it by iron rings, began on his City of Victory, Fatehpur Sikri.

And wherefore not, since sons had been born to his empire? It was wide by this time, but Guzerat was still independent and had to be brought within the net.

It was in this campaign that Akbar nearly met his end in the narrow cactus lane at Sarsa, when he and the two Rajput chieftains, Bhagwan-das and Man-Singh, fought their way through their enemies, each guarding the other's head.

Akbar's life is full of such reckless bravery, such wonderful escapes; in this, at least, he was true grandson to Babar-of-the-Thousand-Adventures.

It was in the following year that the famous ride from Agra to Ahmedabad in nine days was made; and, after all, somewhat uselessly made, since the emperor was too chivalrous to take his enemy unawares, and, finding him asleep, ordered the royal trumpeters to sound a _reveillee_ before, after giving him plenty of time, the imperial party "charged like a fierce tiger." It is good reading all this, overburdened though the pages of the Akbarnamah-Abul-fazl's great History of his Master--may be with flatteries and digressions.

But it is not in all this that Akbar's glory lies. It is in the far-reaching justice of his legal and administrative reforms, above all, in the reasons he gives for these reforms, that he stands unique amongst all Indian kings. We have, however, still to record his conquest of Bengal (where, it may be noted, he swam his rivers on horseback at the head of every detachment for pursuit, every advance guard), still to tell the tale of the Fat King Udai-Singh's son, Rajah Pertap, before at Fatehpur Sikri, in the twentieth year of his reign, and the thirty-third of his life, we can find pause to consider Akbar's principles and practice. Bengal, then, was added to empire with the usual rapidity. Then arose trouble in Mewar. Udai-Singh was dead, still defying from a distance Akbar's power, still scorning the alliance by marriage which had brought his neighbours revenue and renown; but his son Pertap lived--Pertap, who was to the sixteenth century what Prithvi-Raj had been to the fourteenth; that is to say, the flower of Rajput chivalry, the idol of the men, the darling of the women. He had taken to the hills, he had outraged Akbar's sense of justice, and he must be crushed. The battle of Huldighat decided his fate. Wounded, wearied, he fled on his grey horse "Chytuc" up a narrowing stony ravine, behind him the clatter of another horse swifter than his own; for "Chytuc," his friend, his companion, was wounded, too, and more wearied even than wounded.

"_Ho! nila-ghora-ki-aswar!_"

["Oh! Rider of the grey horse!"]

The cry rang out amid the echoing rocks. What! Was his enemy within call already? "Chytuc" stumbled on, urged by the spur.

"_Ho! nila-ghora-ki-aswar!_"

Nearer and nearer! A cry that must be answered at last. One final stumble, "Chytuc" was down, and Pertap turned to sell life dearly.

Turned to find his brother.

"Thy horse is at its end--take mine," said Sukta, who long years before had gone over to Akbar's side, driven thither by Pertap's pride.

"And thou?"

"I go back whence I came."

Those who had watched the chase from the plains below asked for explanations. They were given.

"Tell the truth," came the calm reply.

Then Sukta told it. Drawing himself up, he said briefly:

"The burden of a kingdom over-weighted my brother. I helped him to carry it."

Needless to say, the excuse was accepted. And to this day the cry, "_Ho! nila-ghora-ki-aswar_," is one of the war-cries of the Rajput.

To return to Akbar, in the twentieth year of his reign. It was just ten years since Faizi had come into his life--Faizi, the first Mahomedan to trouble his head about Hindu literature, Hindu science.

It had opened up a new world to Akbar, and when six years afterwards Abul-fazl entered into the emperor's life also, with his broad, clear, tolerant, critical outlook, and his intense personal belief in the genius of the man he served, it seemed possible to achieve what till then Akbar had almost despaired of achieving. The dream had always been there. In some ways he had gone far towards realising it. He had, early in his reign, abolished the capitation tax on infidels, and the tax on pilgrimages, his reason for the latter being, "that although the tax was undoubtedly on a vain superst.i.tion, yet, as all modes of worship were designed for the One Great Being, it was wrong to throw any obstacle in the way of the devout, and so cut them off from their own mode of intercourse with their Maker."

Then he had absolutely forbidden the slavery of prisoners of war; and having observed, both during his many campaigns and his still more numerous hunting expeditions, that the greater portion of the land he traversed remained uncultivated, he had set himself, alone, unaided--for his courtiers were content with conventionalities--to find out the cause. The land was rich, the cultivators were industrious; the reason must lie in something which made cultivation unprofitable. What was it? An excessive land-tax? He instantly started experimental farms, which convinced him that this, and nothing else, was the cause of the land lying idle. But on all sides he met with opposition. Convinced himself that the old methods were obsolete, he had almost given up the task of reform in despair, when he met Abul-fazl. In religious matters, too, he had gone far beyond his age.

The intolerance the bigotry of those around him shocked his innate sense of justice. Here again Abul-fazl was a tower of strength, and, inch by inch, yard by yard, his support enabled the king to fight for his final position, until in 1577, after endless discussions in the House-of-Argument (which he had had built for the purpose, and where, night after night, he sate listening while doctors of the law, Brahmans, Jews, Jesuits, Sufis--G.o.d only knows what sects and creeds--discussed truth from their varying standpoints), he took the law into his own hands and practically forced the learned Ulemas to put their signatures to a doc.u.ment which proclaimed him Head-of-the-Church, the spiritual as well as the temporal guide of his subjects. The reason he gave for desiring this decision was, that as kings were answerable to G.o.d for their subjects, any division of authority in dealing with them was inexpedient.

So in 1579 he mounted the pulpit in his Great Mosque at Fatehpur Sikri, and read the Kutbah prayer in his own name in these words, written for the occasion by the poet Faizi:--

"Lo! from Almighty G.o.d I take my kingship, Before His throne I bow and take my judgeship, Take Strength from Strength, and Wisdom from His Wiseness, Right from the Right, and Justice from His Justice.

Praising the King, I praise G.o.d near and far-- Great is His Power! Allah-hu-Akbar!"

They were not unworthy words; and they were, as Sir William Hunter well calls them, the Magna Charter of Akbar's reign. He was now free to realise all his long-cherished dreams of universal tolerance and absolute unity. In future, no distinctions of race and creed were held cogent. The judicial system was reorganised and the magistracy made to understand that the question of religion was no longer to enter into their work.

The whole revenue administration was altered, and it remains to this day practically as Akbar left it. In this, as in finance and currency, he was ably aided by Todar-Mull, a Hindu of exceptional ability and tried integrity.

But Akbar was fortunate in his friends. In addition to Faizi, who appears to have satisfied his philosophic instincts, and Abul-fazl, to whose clear eyes he always turned when in doubt, he had a third intimate companion who, in many ways, stood closest to him of the three.

This was Rajah Birbal, who began life as a minstrel. His pure intellectuality, his quaint humour and cynical outlook on life, seem to have given Akbar the nerve tonic, which, dreamer as he was at times, he seems to have needed; for like all really great men, the emperor was almost feminine in sensitiveness.

It is difficult to decide what his own personal creed was. That which he promulgated as the Divine Faith is a somewhat nebulous Deism. That which is credited to him in the following words is poetically mystical:--

"In every Temple they seek Thee, in every Language they praise Thee.

Each Religion says that it holds Thee, the One. But it is Thou whom I seek from temple to temple; for Heresy and Orthodoxy stand not behind the Screen of thy Truth. Heresy to the Heretic, Orthodoxy to the Orthodox; but only the dust of the Rose Petal remains to the seller of perfume."

Behind all this there lies the conviction so strongly expressed that "not one step can be made without the torch of truth," that "to be beneficial to the soul, belief must be the outcome of clear judgment."

But the chronicle of the remainder of his reign claims us.

In 1584 he outraged the orthodox by choosing a Rajputni Jodh-Bai, the daughter of Rajah Bhagwan-das, as the first wife of his son and heir, Prince Salim.

He himself had left such things as marriage behind him, and, though still in the prime of years, led the life of an ascetic. Five hours sleep sufficed for him; he ate but sparingly once a day; wine and women he appears to have forgotten. There is a saying attributed to him of his regret that he had not earlier recognised all women as sisters. Certainly for the last five-and-twenty years of his life he had nothing in this respect wherewith to reproach himself. Wider interests absorbed him. Child-marriages had to be discountenanced, abolished by a sweep of the pen; education placed on a firmer, better basis. It seemed to him, as it seems to many of us to-day, that an unconscionable time was spent in teaching very little, and, hey presto! another sweep of the pen, and school-time was diminished by one-half. There is nothing so dynamic as a good despotism!

All this was crowded, literally crammed into a few peaceful years at Fatehpur Sikri, and then suddenly he left his City of Victory, the city that was bound up with his hope of personal empire, the city he had built to commemorate the birth of his heir and removed his capital, not to Delhi, but to the far north--to Lah.o.r.e.