Akbar the Great
Akbar ruled the Mughal empire for forty-nine years and governed a Muslim-ruled state on the principle that religion should not determine standing in it. Born in 1542 while his father Humayun was a fugitive in the Rajasthan desert, he came to the throne at thirteen in 1556 and won the second battle of Panipat that year. He was probably dyslexic and never learned to read, and had books read aloud to him continuously; he assembled a library of some twenty-four thousand volumes. He took power from his regent at eighteen and spent decades expanding — Malwa, Gujarat, Bengal, Kashmir, Sindh and much of the Deccan. His method with the Rajputs was to marry into them rather than destroy them. Rajput rulers kept their kingdoms as vassals, and their sons commanded Mughal armies; his wife Mariam-uz-Zamani was a Rajput princess and the mother of his heir. He abolished the jizya on non-Muslims in 1564 and the pilgrim tax before it, ended the enslavement of prisoners' families, and permitted Hindu widows to remarry. He built an administration on the mansabdari system, ranking officers by numerical grade with corresponding obligations, and reformed land revenue under Todar Mal on measured yields. At Fatehpur Sikri he built a hall where he held debates between Muslims, Hindus, Jains, Zoroastrians, Jews and Jesuits, and in 1582 promulgated the Din-i Ilahi, a syncretic imperial cult that attracted almost no followers and outraged the orthodox. He commissioned translations of the Mahabharata and Ramayana into Persian. He died in 1605. His tomb at Sikandra was desecrated by Jats a century later.
- Lived: 1542 CE – 1605 CE
- Nationality: Mughal
- Roles: ruler, military_leader, statesman
