Akbar's Reign and Religious Tolerance
Akbar acceded to the Mughal throne in 1556 at thirteen, after his father Humayun died falling down his library stairs, and ruled for forty-nine years. His inheritance was a claim rather than an empire — Humayun had recovered Delhi only months before. The regent Bairam Khan won the second battle of Panipat against Hemu that November, and Akbar removed him four years later and governed himself. He expanded relentlessly: Malwa, Gujarat, Bengal, Kashmir, Sindh and much of the Deccan, with Rajputana subdued by a mixture of siege and marriage. Chittor was stormed in 1568 with a massacre of some thirty thousand. What distinguishes him is how he held it. He married Rajput princesses without requiring their conversion, took their fathers and brothers into the highest ranks of the army and administration, abolished the pilgrim tax in 1563 and the jizya on non-Muslims in 1564, and made the Mughal state something Hindus had a stake in. He created the mansabdari system, ranking every officer numerically with an obligation to supply cavalry, which made the nobility a salaried service rather than a landed aristocracy, and Todar Mal's revenue settlement assessed land tax on measured productivity. He was illiterate, probably dyslexic, and had books read to him nightly; his library ran to twenty-four thousand volumes. He built Fatehpur Sikri, held debates there among Muslims, Hindus, Jains, Zoroastrians and Jesuits, and proclaimed a syncretic court cult, the Din-i Ilahi, which attracted a few dozen followers. He died in 1605. The cult died with him and the tolerance survived a further two generations. Aurangzeb reimposed the jizya in 1679, and the empire began coming apart within his own lifetime. Akbar's settlement is still cited in Indian arguments about what the state owes its minorities.
- Year: 1556 CE
- Category: Governance
