Akbar the Great: Reign, Policies, and Legacy

Jalal-ud-din Muhammad Akbar (15 October 1542 – 27 October 1605), known as Akbar the Great, was the third Mughal emperor and the architect of the institutional framework within which the empire would function for the next century and a half. He inherited a fragile and contested realm at the age of thirteen, claimed personal authority at fifteen, and over the next half-century transformed a North Indian foothold into a continental dominion extending from Kabul to Bengal and from Kashmir to Ahmednagar. By the end of his reign the Mughal Empire was, by virtually any measure, the wealthiest and most populous state in the Eastern Hemisphere, and the political template Akbar established survived in its essential features until the eighteenth century. The full scope of his achievement is set out on the Mughal Empire overview, and the institutional history of his reign is examined in greater depth across the Mughal administration and Mughal culture pillars.

Birth and Accession

Akbar was born in 1542 in the fortress of Amarkot in Sindh, where his father Humayun had taken refuge after his expulsion from India by the Afghan general Sher Shah Suri. The circumstances of his birth, in a Hindu Rajput fortress during his father’s years of exile, would later be cited as symbolic of the syncretic character of the empire Akbar would build. He was raised in the rough conditions of Humayun’s peripatetic court, with limited formal instruction in the Islamic religious sciences, a deficiency he would later attempt to remedy by surrounding himself with scholars of multiple faiths.

In January 1556, Humayun died after a fall from the stairs of his library in Delhi, and the thirteen-year-old Akbar was proclaimed emperor. The political situation could hardly have been more precarious. The Mughal position in North India had been recovered only in 1555, and the Afghan general Hemu had already defeated a Mughal force and captured Delhi and Agra. Within months of his accession, Akbar would have to face Hemu in open battle.

The Regency of Bairam Khan (1556–1560)

Because Akbar was a minor, real authority in the first years of his reign was exercised by a regency council headed by the Turkmen noble Bairam Khan, who had been Humayun’s closest companion. Bairam Khan was an able general and an efficient administrator, but he was also politically exposed. The young emperor was, in the meantime, being tutored in warfare, in Persian letters, and in the practical arts of command.

The Second Battle of Panipat (1556)

On 5 November 1556, the armies of Akbar and Hemu met on the same plain of Panipat where Babur had triumphed thirty years earlier. The battle, like its predecessor, was decided by a combination of field artillery and disciplined cavalry. Hemu was wounded, captured, and beheaded, and the Mughal position in North India was secured. The political consequences of the engagement were immediate: it confirmed Mughal control of Delhi and Agra, allowed the slow reconquest of the Punjab, and established Akbar in possession of a realm whose territorial extent, if not yet its administrative depth, already exceeded that of Babur. The battle is treated at greater tactical and strategic length on the famous battles of the Mughals and Mughal artillery pages.

In 1560, Akbar formally assumed personal authority and dismissed Bairam Khan from the regency, sending him on pilgrimage to Mecca. The deposed regent was assassinated on the return journey by a Mughal noble whose brother Bairam had earlier executed for conspiracy. Akbar mourned the news and composed a famous eulogy, one of the earliest indications of the literary sensibility that would flourish throughout his reign.

Military Conquests and Territorial Unification

The first three decades of Akbar’s personal rule were dominated by military campaigns that gradually incorporated the major political units of North and Central India into the empire. The conquest of Malwa (1561) and Gondwana (1564) brought the central Indian plateau under Mughal control. The conquest of Rajputana, beginning with the siege of Chittor in 1568 and the fall of Ranthambore in 1569, broke the military power of the principal Rajput kingdoms and incorporated the Rajput aristocracy into the imperial service. The conquest of Gujarat (1572–1573) brought the wealthy port of Cambay and the great commercial city of Ahmedabad under direct Mughal administration, with consequences for the imperial treasury that were immediate and substantial. The campaigns in Bihar, Bengal, and Orissa in the 1570s extended Mughal authority to the borders of Assam.

Administrative Reforms: The Mansabdari System

No institutional innovation of Akbar’s reign proved more durable than the mansabdari system, a comprehensive framework for organizing the military-bureaucratic service of the empire. Mansabdars were ranked on a numerical scale, originally of sixty and later expanded to sixty-six ranks (zat ranks), which determined their salary, the size of the contingent they were required to maintain, and the value of the jagir (land revenue assignment) from which they were paid.

The genius of the system lay in its combination of Central Asian cavalry traditions with the fiscal logic of an Indian agrarian state. Mansabdars were rotated through different jagirs in different provinces to prevent the consolidation of regional power bases, and the assignment of revenue was divorced from the collection of revenue, which remained in the hands of separate officials. The system, with various modifications, would remain the backbone of Mughal military and administrative organization until the eighteenth century.

Land Revenue and the Todar Mal Settlement

Akbar’s revenue reforms, often called the Todar Mal settlement after the finance minister Raja Todar Mal, are the second pillar of his administrative achievement. The system involved the measurement of land, the classification of soils, the estimation of average yields over a ten-year cycle, and the assessment of revenue at a fixed share of the average produce, normally one-third. Cash payment was encouraged but never fully replaced payment in kind. The Ain-i-Akbari of Abu’l Fazl provides a detailed contemporary account of the system.

Religious Policy: Din-i-Ilahi and the Abolition of the Jizya

Akbar’s religious policy is the most contested aspect of his reign. In 1564, after the conquest of Gondwana and the suppression of a recent rebellion, he abolished the jizya, the poll tax traditionally levied on non-Muslim subjects. In the 1570s he established the ibadat khana (house of worship) at Fatehpur Sikri, where scholars of multiple religions, including Hindus, Jains, Zoroastrians, and Christians, were invited to debate matters of theology. In 1582 he promulgated the Din-i-Ilahi, sometimes described as a new religion synthesizing elements of Islam, Hinduism, Zoroastrianism, and Christianity, though most modern scholars regard it as a loose spiritual fraternity centered on the emperor himself rather than a coherent theological system.

The religious policy was bound up with the broader question of the relationship between the imperial center and the empire’s Hindu majority. The Rajput policy in particular involved both military conquest and political accommodation: defeated Rajput rulers were routinely pardoned, married into the imperial family, and incorporated into the mansabdari nobility. The emperor himself took a Rajput princess of the Kachhwaha house of Amber — known in Mughal sources as Mariam-uz-Zamani and popularly (though not contemporaneously) called Jodha Bai — as one of his chief wives, and Rajput rulers became among the most loyal servants of the dynasty.

Art, Architecture, and Cultural Patronage

Akbar was a prolific patron of the arts, and the cultural forms developed under his patronage set the template for the rest of the dynasty. The construction of the new capital at Fatehpur Sikri in the 1570s, with its eclectic assembly of palaces, mosques, audience halls, and the famous panch mahal, represents the architectural synthesis of the period, drawing on Hindu, Islamic, and indigenous regional traditions. The wider architectural achievement of the Mughals is treated on the Mughal architecture pillar.

The Akbarnama and the Ain-i-Akbari

The principal literary monuments of Akbar’s reign are the Akbarnama and its third volume, the Ain-i-Akbari, both written by Abu’l Fazl ibn Mubarak. The Akbarnama is a history of Akbar’s reign composed in florid Persian prose and supplemented with detailed administrative and statistical information in the Ain-i-Akbari, which remains an indispensable source for the social, economic, and institutional history of the period.

Personality and Character

Akbar was reportedly illiterate in the formal sense, never learning to read or write with ease, but he had an extraordinary memory, an inexhaustible curiosity, and a capacity for sustained intellectual debate. He cultivated scholars of every confession and is said to have assembled a remarkable personal library, portions of which are preserved in the museums of the subcontinent. He was physically robust, an enthusiastic player of chaugan (a polo-like game), and a keen hunter, the chase being one of his preferred forms of recreation and political theater.

Legacy

Akbar died on 27 October 1605 at the age of sixty-three, and was buried in a magnificent mausoleum at Sikandra, near Agra, completed by his son Jahangir. His successors inherited an empire that was institutionally coherent, militarily formidable, and culturally vibrant. The institutional framework he established outlasted every Mughal who followed him, and the political vocabulary of the empire, from the mansabdari to the Diwani, was for the most part his creation. The period of personal rule that began with his accession ended only with the death of Aurangzeb in 1707, and even the later Mughals invoked his name as the standard against which their own conduct was measured. For the reign of his immediate successor, see Jahangir; for the dynasty’s trajectory in the seventeenth century, see Shah Jahan and Aurangzeb.

Sources

• Abu’l Fazl, Akbarnama, trans. Henry Beveridge, 3 vols. (Low Price Publications, 1907–39; reprint).
• Abu’l Fazl, Ain-i-Akbari, trans. H. Blochmann, corrected H.S. Jarrett, 3 vols. (1873–1927; reprint Low Price Publications, 1989).
• M. Athar Ali, Mughal Nobility under Aurangzeb (Asia Publishing House, 1966).
• Irfan Habib, The Agrarian System of Mughal India, 1556–1707 (Asia Publishing House, 1963; rev. ed. 1999).