THE MEMORY–KEEPERS

‘Write down whatever you know of the doings of (Babur) and (Humayun)’. This ordinary phrase sounded innocuous enough and gave no indication of the seismic rumble it actually was. In 1587, having decided to commission a history of his reign, Akbar sent for his beloved aunt, Gulbadan, and asked her to contribute to this history by writing down all her memories of her father and brother. Akbar summoned other memory-keepers too, such as Humayun’s water carrier, Jauhar Aftabchi, and an old soldier from Humayun’s army, Bayazid Bayat, amongst others. ‘His Majesty Jalal al-Din Muhammad Akbar Padshah,’ wrote Bayazid, ‘commanded that any servants of court who had a taste for history should write.’ Akbar had decided, now that he had been Padshah for more than thirty years, it was time to create a history of his rule, his lineage, and his achievements that would reflect in all its splendour a life and destiny sparked by the divine. It was Abu’l Fazl who was entrusted with this monumental task, one which would take a decade to complete, and would involve an army of compilers and assistants across the empire. The accounts of the memory-keepers were intended as source material for Abu’l Fazl to use in his remarkable work of history and it was but a fortuitous accident that Gulbadan then produced a unique and precious work—the first and only record of life in the Mughal harem through the eyes of a Mughal woman.

Gulbadan was sixty-five years old when she began writing her memoir, and had already lived through the reigns of two previous Padshahs—Babur and Humayun. With the philosophical distancing that age and time afforded her, with her own lived experience as a cherished and beloved member of Akbar’s court, and due to a complete absence of any such previous recording to model her writing on, Gulbadan wrote an account that was unlike any other work produced on the subject of Mughal history. Most accounts of kings and empires focused overwhelmingly on the personalities of the emperors and their eminent amirs, as well as the battles, conquests, and territorial expansions that visibly reflected the emperor’s power. In Gulbadan’s account we see these same emperors, but they are backlit by the familial and the domestic, their edges are scuffed by the elucidation of family dramas, loves, hierarchies, and power structures. And Gulbadan is the only chronicler to write candidly and unselfconsciously of the unexpected and influential roles of women. She is the only writer, for example, to record events such as Khanzada Begum’s diplomatic mission to Kamran on Humayun’s behalf, and the moral authority this elderly matriarch wielded in the name of Padshah Babur himself. She writes about the determined wooing of Hamida Banu by Humayun that was equally stoutly resisted by the unimpressed bride for forty days.

Many of the incidents Gulbadan wrote about she would have discussed with Hamida Banu, and she often refers to Hamida Banu’s memories in her writing. So we have the shadowy recording of various women’s voices in this unique document. And in complete contrast to the ossified and sequestered space that Abu’l Fazl would write about in a few years, Gulbadan writes of a harem continuously on the move, of women on horseback, of women journeying and living in tents, and sharing the struggles and the victories of their men. Her tale is replete with the accounts of births while on the move, marriages of temperamental or forthright brides, the detailing of gifts as symbols of a Padshah’s love, and tender remembrance. According to Ruby Lal, through Gulbadan’s writing, ‘we have a lost world of the court in camp brought to life in a way that no other chronicle of the time even approaches’.

Abu’l Fazl, meanwhile, would spend the next few years questioning Akbar’s old family retainers and relatives, to record their memories of Babur, Humayun and, especially, of Akbar himself. ‘I spoke to old and young men of right character’, asserts Abu’l Fazl firmly, after which accounts were drawn up and then read out to the Padshah every day. The Padshah listened closely to these accounts and corrected the mistakes as he saw fit. Abu’l Fazl consulted the records office, farmans issued by Akbar, petitions filed by ministers, in addition to listening to the oral records of trustworthy persons including, notably, those of his own father, and of the emperor himself. The result of this enormous labour of research and compilation would be two gargantuan works—a history of Akbar’s reign and his times, called the Akbarnama in two volumes, and an equally voluminous gazetteer, the Ain-i Akbari, which was a detailed compendium of imperial regulations, as well as information on the geography, social and religious customs, and administration of the land. The Ain-i Akbari was a unique document for its time and would serve as a model for future generations of historians. It would also be used by the British to understand a complex and foreign land. Among its many revelations was a new awareness, as pointed out by M. Athar Ali, of the geography of Hindustan as a peninsula lapped by the sea and crowned by the Himalayas. Abu’l Fazl described the people of the land in prose refreshingly free from the religious limitations of other medieval Muslim historians. ‘The people of this country,’ he wrote, ‘are God-seeking, generous-hearted, friendly to strangers, pleasant-faced, of broad forehead, patrons of learning, lovers of asceticism, inclined to justice, contented, hard-working and efficient, true to salt, truth-seeing and attached to loyalty.’ Despite being irritated by Raja Todar Mal’s idol-worship, Abu’l Fazl wrote of the use of religious figures by Hindus in the following way:

They one and all believe in the unity of God, and as to the reverence they pay to images of stone and wood and the like which simpletons regard as idolatry, it is not so. The writer of these pages has exhaustively discussed the subject with many enlightened and upright men and it became evident that these images of some chosen souls nearest in approach to the throne of God are fashioned as aids to fix the mind and keep the thoughts from wandering, while the worship of God alone is required as indispensable.

These views, which were also stated by Akbar, were in sharp contrast to Babur’s dismayed recordings of his impression of Hindustan and its people: ‘There is no beauty in its people, no graceful social intercourse, no poetic talent or understanding, no etiquette, nobility or manliness. The arts and crafts have no harmony or symmetry.’

The Ain-i Akbari reflected a determination on the part of the Padshah to delineate every aspect of life in the empire, from the mundane to the mystical. They included regulations for the tents in the farrash khana, instruction about etiquette to be followed in court, donations, education, marriages, the oiling of camels and the branding of horses. It is in just such a chapter that Abu’l Fazl also deals with the ‘vexatious question’ of the many women that Akbar had married, and the consequently unwieldy harem that had to be contained and sequestered. ‘Several chaste women’, we are reminded, guarded over each section of the harem which was further policed by eunuchs, Ahadis, and Rajput guards. The women were decorously involved in various duties and Abu’l Fazl would be careful to never allow any woman a glimpse of individuality. They would all be given titles, their names almost completely forgotten, and would be accorded the most perfunctory of descriptions—‘cupolas of chastity’ and ‘pillars of chastity’ being preferred monikers. Akbar’s wives, especially, would be subjected to a ruthless and complete censorship, reduced to barely acknowledged shadows whose only noteworthy acts were to produce ‘pearls’, Akbar’s children, from their blessed wombs. Interestingly, Abu’l Fazl would hold his own family to this very same rigorous standard, never once referring to a wife, a sister, or a daughter in his own biography. It would fall to Gulbadan’s memoir, forgotten for a long time, to eventually shine a light on the complex geometry of these women’s lives.

Abu’l Fazl’s Akbarnama overshadowed medieval history for centuries with the sobering weight of his learning and conviction to the detriment of all other histories and sources of memory. At the same time, the tone of the Akbarnama was derided for being sycophantic to Akbar, and the Padshah himself was belatedly scolded by Western historians for tolerating such excessive flattery. But to see the Akbarnama as simply an exercise in obsequiousness by an overenthusiastic courtier would be short-sighted, for what Abu’l Fazl intended was far more ambitious, even incendiary. In most histories of the time, in which the ruler was Muslim, genealogies would begin with praises of Allah, and Prophet Muhammad, and then work their way through the various caliphs and sultans, through purely Islamic lineages, to the ruler in question. Abu’l Fazl, instead, after praising Allah, begins with Adam, the original ‘man’, omitting the Prophet and the caliphs altogether. He traces Akbar’s lineage through fifty-two generations, placing the Padshah firmly in the position of the ruler of all humanity, and not just his Muslim subjects.

In addition, as scholars such as A. Azfar Moin and Ruby Lal have shown, Abu’l Fazl used a complex set of symbols to articulate a vision of the Padshah as semi-divine, appearing as he did at the cosmically and spiritually charged advent of the new Islamic millennium to be the temporal as well as spiritual guide to all the peoples of Hindustan, not only Muslims. In his genealogy of Akbar, Abu’l Fazl did not just show Akbar descending from an illustrious line of forefathers as Babur and Humayun had sought to do but instead inversed this equation to demonstrate that it was, on the contrary, Akbar’s luminous destiny that tinged his predecessors with glory. This would explain the episodes of ‘divine effulgence’ that occurred before Akbar’s birth, whether it was Hamida Banu’s mysteriously shining brows, Humayun’s visions, or Jiji Anaga’s lucent dreams. It was in this spirit, argues A. Azfar Moin, that Humayun’s astrological preoccupations and frequent auguries were interpreted as being premonitions of impending greatness. The Akbarnama even has a long digression to include in Akbar’s genealogy the rather obscure Alanqua, a princess of Moghulistan, who was impregnated by a divine light to give birth to three ‘shining sons’. The implication was clear—Akbar was above the limitations of ordinary human forefathers with their pedestrian ambitions and expected frailties. Instead, the Akbarnama described the life of a monarch who demonstrated miraculous powers from infancy. A monarch who commanded rampaging elephants, succumbed to visions, articulated prophesies, and cured people using his holy breath. A monarch, moreover, who did not rule only Muslim subjects. Instead, Abu’l Fazl wrote about a king who used imagery from many faiths while crafting a faultless persona. Through fire worship, the veneration of the sun, mantras and austerities, fasts, and the translation of the sacred works of the Hindus, Akbar became the insaan-e-kamil[1] and peshwa of the spiritual age.

Since Abu’l Fazl needed to show that the Padshah was above all limitations of religion, events described in the Akbarnama were relentless about showing the Padshah in a positive light. Every occurrence was interpreted in the light of Akbar’s later immaculate grandeur and all earlier foibles were explained as a need by Akbar to ‘veil’ his true self and to test those around him. That Abu’l Fazl was intensely admiring of the Padshah is evident and he found in Akbar a great monarch worthy of his own boundless energies and dedication. It is nonetheless tempting to wonder whether there was not also a splinter of anger in Abu’l Fazl when he poured all his fierce energy into the Akbarnama into making the Padshah a Mujtahid of the Age which served to eviscerate and make redundant his sworn enemies, the ulema.

For all his passionate arguments in favour of reason, or aql, above all else and above received wisdom, an incident occurred in the 1590s that showed the truth to be rather more complicated for Abu’l Fazl. The Maasir ul-Umara[2] describes an episode in which Salim went to visit Abu’l Fazl in his home and was astounded to discover forty clerks busily copying the Koran, a Muslim act of piety. Salim, who was becoming increasingly leery of Abu’l Fazl’s closeness to Akbar, immediately appropriated clerks and Koran and presented them to the Padshah. According to the Maasir ul-Umara, Akbar was thoroughly shaken by this sign of ostentatious piety in his famously rationalist friend and said, ‘He incites us to other kinds of things, and then when he goes to the privacy of his home he acts differently.’ The Iqbal Nama-i-Jahangiri[3] also recorded Akbar’s displeasure when Shaikh Mubarak wrote a commentary on the Koran without alluding to the Padshah himself, which Abu’l Fazl then sent to various dignitaries. From then on, noted historian Shamsauddaula Shah Nawaz, there was a slackening of the earlier bond that drew the two men together. For Shaikh Mubarak and his sons, marked forever by the ulema’s long-ago persecution, the true nature of their own personal faith would always remain hidden by their pragmatic adoption and brilliant exposition of the Padshah’s views.

Whatever Abu’l Fazl’s motivations, he worked unceasingly on the Akbarnama. The Padshah listened to each page of the text as it was read out to him, using his prodigious memory to verify facts and occurrences. It was said that Abu’l Fazl wrote five drafts of the manuscript. Besides scrutinizing the text, Akbar took an inordinate amount of interest in the illustrations that accompanied the writing. Between 1590 and 1595, concurrently with the shaping of the text, miniatures were painted of various episodes described and it is believed that Akbar was closely involved in deciding which particular moments in his life were to be painted. Indeed, in the eyes of some experts, the illustrations are thought to give us a more accurate reflection of the Padshah’s own view of his life than Abu’l Fazl’s text.

Forty-nine artists were listed as being part of the project and they included all the leading masters of the age. These were collaborative works involving several artists working together and effortlessly using the Persian vertical use of space, European perspective, and indigenous vibrancy and luminous colour. A large number of the painters were Hindus of the agricultural Ahir caste, men with names like Kesu, Madhu, Mukund, Nand, Narayan, Paras, Shankar, Surdas, Ramdas, and Basawan. This accounts for the effervescence and dramatic energy of the paintings, a style favoured by Akbar. The famous Muslim painters of this taswir khana included Miskin, Mansur, Qutb Chela, and the Persian Farrukh Beg. The great Persian master Abd al-Samad was not included in this project and had presumably already retired, after training his two sons, Muhammad Sharif and Bihzad. Abd al-Samad painted one last painting at this time, a work created purely from memory, of a great Persian masterpiece by the maestro Bihzad. In a touching entreaty to his son Muhammad Sharif to never forget his Persian roots, Abd al-Samad wrote: ‘At the age of eighty-five, when his strength has gone, his pen has weakened and his eyesight has dimmed, he has agreed to draw from memory as a memento for this album with every detail for his wise, witty, and astute son Sharif Khan, who is happy, fortunate, prosperous and chosen by the memory of the Merciful.’ This painting, called Two Fighting Camels, is a lovely example of the Persian school, ‘where technical virtuosity was prized equally with poetic sensibility’, but it was one which would have been considered passé in Mughal India.

Of the extant 116 paintings detailing the period 1560–77[4], the very choice of the subject matter is instructive. Twenty-seven paintings depict specific battles, sieges, and engagements, and another twenty-five show arrests, executions, submissions, and overtures of peace. A further twenty-two paintings depict scenes of hunting, including five vibrant double-spreads. Taken together, this group of paintings is an eloquent testimony to the articulation of power and strength in the sixteenth century: the heaving scenes of furious battles showing the enormous power of the empire tempered by the compassionate embracing of the submissive party; the importance of the qumargha as an instrument of political power; the use of animals—elephants, tigers, cheetahs—as thinly veiled metaphors for the conquest and incorporation of dangerous elements into the Mughal Empire. The elemental energy of these pages point to the incessant and ruthless game of strength and diplomacy and brinkmanship that Akbar played to bring him to the point where, in the elusive dawn of Fatehpur Sikri, he could give thanks to God for allowing him to create the enormous empire of his dreams.

The remainder of the paintings are those of court scenes, celebrations, births, and marriages, and a handful of scenes of meditative contemplation, and unexpected turmoil in Akbar’s life. It is in these paintings that the artists contribute most viscerally to the document, adding details of court life that are not mentioned in Abu’l Fazl’s text. Some of these artists would have had first-hand experience of the scenes described, as painters often accompanied the Padshah on his journeys. It is in these unexpected and precious details that a complex and changing court is brought to life. It is a world of colour, texture, and dynamic complexity with its exquisite details of a courtier’s brocaded jama or the graceful movement of the sijda salutation. In these paintings we see women stringing up bunting made of auspicious mango leaves to celebrate the birth of a child, and the energetic beating of huge drums and the blowing of trumpets to announce the victorious arrival of the Padshah. There are also troubling details such as the degraded and piteous condition of prisoners of war wearing animal skins over their faces, which Abu’l Fazl glosses over. Startlingly timeless details are shown, too, like women labourers wearing glass-studded brocade cloth in a construction scene, just like women continue to do in India today.

The paintings show a court that was always changing, incorporating different elements from its new courtiers. So from a purely Persian aesthetic painted by Farrukh Beg in the scene showing a Mughal emissary and the rebel Bahadur Khan, the court paintings become more exuberant and dynamic and incorporate Rajput clothes, Rajput courtiers, indigenous musicians and instruments, and details of courtly life that show a much more expansive interpretation of the Mughal Empire than that shown in the accompanying text. In one such example, art historian Geeti Sen has suggested that in the painting showing the court dancers of Mandu being presented to Akbar after the defeat of Baz Bahadur, we can see a possible route for the introduction of the Kathak style of dance into the Mughal court through these famous dancers from Malwa.

And, finally, there is the alluring possibility that some of the paintings of well-known amirs and courtiers, and indeed of Akbar himself, are actual likenesses in the manner of portraits. The art of portraiture in Mughal painting has usually been attributed to Padshah Jahangir, with his fascination for psychologically acute images. But Akbar, too, was intensely and passionately interested in the deep desires that motivated people and a corresponding need, his whole life, to viscerally understand and ‘read’ the faces and characters of people. Abu’l Fazl wrote that Akbar had commissioned an enormous portrait album in which ‘those that have passed away have received a new life, and those who are still alive have immortality promised them’. Geeti Sen has proposed that a number of the paintings of key figures from Akbar’s life including Bahadur Khan, Munim Khan, Mirza Sulaiman, and Azim Khan, among others, appear to be actual likenesses. There are even a handful of enigmatic images showing moments of high emotion—blistering rage, haunting introspection or grateful celebration in Akbar’s life—which seem to show finely-drawn likenesses of the Padshah himself, reflecting these different moods. These images are always the work of one of just six artists, specialists in the painting of ‘chehra’, or the face, and they include the artists Madhu, Kesu, Miskin, Basawan, and Nanha. These beguiling portraits of this elusive emperor still mesmerize across five centuries.

[1] The Perfect Man.

[2] Eighteenth-century Persian biography by Shamsuddaula Shah Nawaz Khan of important Mughal notables.

[3] A seventeenth-century account by Mutamad Khan of the history of the Timurid dynasty until the accession of Shah Jahan.

[4] The miniatures of the second volume of the Akbarnama are lost.

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AKBAR: The Great Mughal by Ira Mukhoty is the defintitive biography of one of the greatest rulers in history.

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