Akbar was the hero India should really celebrate

by Guest Wed Nov 01, 2017 2:34 pm

When one attempts to locate statues of the Mughal emperor Akbar through a Google search, one is offered images of sculptures of monarchs such as Edward VII, Hemu, Krishnadevaraya, Shivaji, Rani Durgavati, Rana Pratap and Raja Bhoja, but none of Akbar. Google’s response hints at what one might already suspect from experience, which is that no statue of India’s greatest ruler exists anywhere in the land....

Akbar’s military career consisted of victory piled on victory. The Mughal army did not ever lose a major battle that he led. He consolidated the empire he inherited, and expanded it relentlessly. Unlike his ancestor Timur, who was a peerless general but interested only in conquest, Akbar set up an efficient administration based on a transferable cadre of nobles. Most important, he gradually transcended the limitations of his faith to become a truly national ruler. To begin with, he eliminated religious taxes on Hindu pilgrims and peasants. He proceeded to rein in the power of the Muslim clergy. He propounded a theory of kingship based on the principles of sulh-i-kul (universal peace), rah-i-aql (the path of reason), and rawa-i-rozi (maintenance of livelihood). Sulh-i-kul was the first political explication of multiculturalism, calling for cordiality, mutual respect and compromise between subjects of different faiths, with the king as neutral arbiter. Akbar propounded it at a time when Europe was riven by religious conflict following the Protestant revolution inaugurated by Martin Luther precisely 500 years ago.

The path of reason allowed Akbar to set in motion a few key social reforms and suggest others. He outlawed sati, and ended the practice of keeping or selling prisoners as slaves. He frowned on the prohibition of widow remarriage in some communities and on child marriage. He believed daughters deserved a larger share of their father’s property than the Quran prescribed.

In recognising the duty of the king to citizens, Akbar envisioned the monarch as part of a bargain or unspoken contract with subjects in which he received legitimacy and tax revenue in return for providing peace and security. Taken as a whole, his ideas strongly parallel the ecumenism, reformist goals, and welfare measures of modern India. The state’s attitude to religious faith, for better or worse, resembles the secularism of Western liberal thought based on atomised individuals far less than it does the society of mutual accommodation conceived by Akbar.

Akbar’s ideas travelled to Europe while he was still in his prime....all politics today, Left or Right, seems to be identity politics, whether that identity be regional, linguistic, caste-based, or religious. Akbar ticks none of those boxes, and is therefore out in the cold, without a statue or an anniversary celebration to his name.

https://scroll.in/article/855307/why-do-indians-celebrate-rulers-like-tipu-and-shivaji-but-not-the-greatest-of-them-all-akbar

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the writer forgot to mention Akbar's abolishment of the jaziya tax, the special tax on non-muslims, which was a symbol of fiscal discrimination.