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Emperor Extrordinaire: Akbar and Technology

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Emperor Extrordinaire: Akbar and Technology Empty Emperor Extrordinaire: Akbar and Technology

Post by Guest Mon Jul 01, 2013 11:11 pm

There are several sources that establish Akbar's close affinity with technology (Irfan Habib, "Akbar and Technology"). "Akbar had a natural inclination towards industrial crafts," says Habib, "and this was undoubtedly a source of his concern with technological innovation." A foreign traveller writing in 1580 claimed to "have even seen him making ribbons like a lace-maker, and filing, sawing, working very hard." The same traveller records that Akbar had a workshop near his palace for the refined arts such as painting, tapestry-making, carpet-weaving, curtain-making and for the manufacture of arms. In some of them he acquired proficiency, and this fact is mentioned by so many people that it cannot be dismissed for sycophantic exaggeration. "He has so well practised the making of designs that if Mani (the great artist) was alive, he would bite his fingers in astonishment at such design-making and dyeing," exclaimed one writer.

The Ain-i-Akbari, written by Abul Fazl, Akbar's biographer and minister, has a detailed description of the prefabricated and movable wooden structures - a technological innovation in which Akbar had a direct hand - that supplanted tents when Akbar and his entourage moved from place to place. He invented a device that used saltpetre to cool water; he is credited with vast improvement to water wheels through gearing devices (the terraced gardens of Fatehpur Sikri, his capital on a hill, were irrigated by wells from which water was lifted through a network of viaducts, and gearing was crucial to this network); he also put gearing to other applications like cart-mills and gun barrel boring; he experimented with different techniques of ship-building (although it is said that he sailed in a boat in the sea only once). Akbar was also a keen patron of music (Francoise 'Nalini' Delvoye, "The Image of Akbar as a patron of music in Indo-Persian and Vernacular Sources") and an accomplished composer himself, and a patron of the visual arts (Som Prakash Verma, "Painting under Akbar as Narrative Art").

http://www.frontline.in/navigation/?type=static&page=flonnet&rdurl=fl1421/14210730.htm

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