India: A History. Revised and Updated (58 page)

In this Rama Raja succeeded, if anything, too well. During twenty years of complex intrigue he so provoked the sultanates that they came to fear for their very survival. It is possible that he also outraged their Islamic sensibilities. Ferishta makes this accusation so often that it smacks of pious convention; on the other hand religious sensitivity and sectarian solidarity may well have been heightened at a time when the neighbouring Portuguese were combining the anti-Muslim spirit of the Crusades with the excesses of the Inquisition.

Certainly, and fatally, Rama Raja also overstretched those frayed loyalties on which Vijayanagar’s cohesion depended. This became apparent when in 1564 the four sultans at last patched up their differences and turned on him in concert. To meet this threat he summoned his Nayaks even from as far south as Madurai. Most did respond, but in January 1565 the Vijayanagar forces were catastrophically routed in the battle of Talikota. Rama Raja himself was beheaded, and casualties were colossal. Yet the great city of Vijayanagar, with its seven massive walls and its ingeniously designed gatehouses, might still have been defended. In the event, it was just deserted; Nayaks and Poligars withdrew to their individual territories. The 550 elephant-loads of treasure which they hastily ‘rescued’ from the city could just as well have been pillaged.

The battle had taken place on the banks of the Kistna river, about 120 kilometres north of Vijayanagar. But the victors did not immediately swoop on the city; local scavengers seem to have been the first to gain access. Nor is it self-evident that the Muslims’ intention was to obliterate the place. Despite colourful descriptions of a five-month sack, wholesale slaughter, savage iconoclasm and such remorseless demolition that ‘nothing now remains but a heap of ruins’,
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the impression these ‘ruins’ convey is less of wilful destruction and more of neglect, plus some random treasure-hunting
and much casual pillage of building materials. Temples, the bigot’s prime target, prove to be the least damaged structures; and in many of them the statuary, so invitingly vulnerable, remains miraculously intact. In short the city, like the kingdom, looks to have suffered less from conquering fanatics and more from that deepening internal crisis of authority.

Rid of Vijayanagar’s supervision, Nayaks would continue to rule in many parts of the south just as would the quarrelsome sultans in the Deccan. In the extreme south the Nayaks of Madurai would evade even Mughal rule. Not so the others. Just when ‘Vijayanagar’ (‘City of Victory’ in Sanskrit) was disappearing from the map, a ‘Fatehpur’ (‘City of Victory’ in the Persian of the Mughal court) was being built at Sikri near Agra. Urban triumphalism was passing from the Deccan to the north. Vijayanagar’s collapse did indeed spell the end of the south as a separate political arena. As time would reveal, the real victors of Talikota were not Bijapur and Golconda but the Great Mughals.

ALLAHU-AKBAR

Twenty years earlier, in the summer of 1544 while Sher Shah Sur still ruled in northern India, the Mughal revival had begun near Sultaniyeh in north-western Iran. There Humayun, the fugitive from India, was entertained by Shah Tamasp. The two kings met in a tented city of silken pavilions dripping with pearls and lined with gold-embroidered velvet. Unlike that other ‘Field of the Cloth of Gold’ where Tudor and Valois had lately met, the encounter was beset with religious misgivings. They were resolved when Humayun briefly endorsed the Shi’ite teachings of his host. ‘Fraternal unanimity’ having been established, joint action was agreed and costly presents were exchanged, none more costly than that diamond, now said to be ‘worth the revenue of countries and climes’, which duly passed from Mughal to shah. Indeed its value was reckoned at four times the cost of the hospitality enjoyed by Humayun in Iran, and so may also have been sufficient to defray the military assistance which he now received. With twelve thousand Persian troops plus what remained of his own following, and with a train of Persian courtiers and artists whose influence at the Mughal court would be considerable, Humayun headed east to redeem his empire.

Again he was opposed by his brothers, one of whom still held Kandahar, the other Kabul. It took him eight years just to win back Afghanistan. The delay was not, however, disastrous. In India Sher Shah’s brief but remarkable
reign came to an end in 1545 just as Humayun entered Afghanistan. Sher Shah’s less effective son, Islam Shah Sur, succeeded to the throne but himself died in 1553 whereupon the Sur dominions split into semi-independent provinces while famine and faction undid Sher Shah’s reforms. Like the Lodis on the eve of Babur’s invasion, the Surs on the eve of Humayun’s attack were in terminal confusion.

Additionally, eight years in Afghanistan meant that Humayun’s son, who had been born during the course of his father’s flight from India, was now emerging from the seclusion of the seraglio. Akbar, or ‘this nursling of Divine light’ as his biographer calls him, was now twelve years old, hyperactive, and endowed, we are told, with ‘a perfect understanding beyond computation’. Such judicious wording was designed to obscure the fact that the young ‘World-Conqueror’ had learned neither to read nor write. He never would; almost certainly he suffered from chronic dyslexia. But as a sportsman and a warrior he showed promise, and as a talisman of future Mughal rule he now accompanied his father on the march into India. In November 1554, continues Abu’l-Fazl, author of the imperial memoir known as the
Akbar-nama
, ‘His Majesty [Humayun] laid firm hold of the strong hand of divine favour, grasped the stout cable of heavenly tidings, and set off with few men – they did not amount to three thousand – but with large help from the armies of Providence, which could not be calculated by intellectual accountants.’
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More troops soon joined him – to the relief, no doubt, of the intellectual accountants. They were seriously tested only once, when the Sur ruler of the Panjab was defeated at Sirhind. Otherwise it was a deceptively easy invasion. By August 1555 Humayun had reclaimed Delhi and was happily ‘watering the rose-garden of sovereignty with the stream of justice’ while planning the revival of Sher Shah’s administrative reforms. Agra and adjacent areas were also secured. But their government and that of the Panjab had scarcely been settled when in January 1556 triumph turned to tragedy. A keen astronomer, Humayun tripped when descending from his makeshift observatory on the roof of Sher Shah’s Delhi palace and fell to his death down the stone stairs. He thus, in the words of a less than generous scholar, ‘stumbled out of this life as he had stumbled through it’.
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Once again Mughal rule was in jeopardy. Akbar was still only thirteen. He was not in Delhi but in the Panjab. And a formidable if unlikely adversary was mobilising to frustrate not only the Mughal succession but the whole Mughal presence.

Sometimes styling himself ‘Raja Vikramaditya’ in imitation of various Indian heroes, this new adversary was one Hemu, a Hindu of lowly
parentage who had surmounted both the strictures of caste and the disadvantages of a wretchedly puny physique to rise from being a saltpetre pedlar in a provincial bazaar to chief minister to one of the principal Sur claimants. Yet more surprisingly for one who could not even ride a horse, he had acquired a reputation for inspired generalship. Twenty-two consecutive battles is Hemu said to have won against assorted adversaries. To this tally he now added a twenty-third when, soon after Humayun’s death, he stormed Delhi and put its Mughal garrison to flight. Not surprisingly even his mainly Afghan, and so Muslim, troops regarded their ‘Shah Hemu’ as an inspirational commander and confidently sallied north to engage the main Mughal force in the Panjab.

Outnumbered and out-generaled, the Mughal commanders favoured a speedy retreat to Kabul. However Bayram Khan, the young emperor’s guardian and virtual regent, stood firm – a decision which the chance capture of Hemu’s artillery by a Mughal flying column seemed to support. Hemu’s elephants were another matter. According to Abu’l-Fazl, the enemy had assembled a corps of fifteen hundred of the largest and most athletic beasts ever seen. ‘How can the attributes of those rushing mountains be strung on the slender thread of words?’ he asks. Swifter than the fleetest racehorses, they ran so fast ‘that it could not be called running’, while, ‘mountain-like and dragon-mouthed … they ruined lofty buildings by shaking them and sportively uprooted strong trees’.
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In fanciful descriptions of pachyderms, as in panegyric invention, Abu’l-Fazl’s Persian could challenge even the Sanskrit of ancient India’s dynastic scribes.

At Panipat, the site of Babur’s great victory, the two armies met on 5 November 1556. For once victory looked to be going the way of the elephants. ‘The horses would not face the elephants,’ which ‘shook the left and right divisions’ and ‘dislodged many soldiers of the sublime army’. Hemu, to whose abilities even Abu’l-Fazl bears grudging testimony, commanded operations from a gigantic beast called ‘Hawai’ (‘Windy’, or possibly ‘Rocket’). ‘He made powerful onsets and performed many valorous acts.’ Indeed the Mughals were wavering when ‘suddenly an arrow from the bended bow of divine wrath reached Hemu’s eye and, piercing the socket, came out at the back of his head.’
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Seeing Hemu collapse into his howdah, his troops lost heart. It was now the sublime army, swords flashing and epithets flying, which closed for the kill. Hawai was captured; Hemu, extracted from his howdah and dragged before the young victor, was quickly beheaded. Next day a Mughal army entered Delhi in triumph yet again. Including Timur’s assault, it was third time lucky. Not for another two hundred years would Delhi slip from Mughal rule.

Akbar’s reign, begun amidst scenes of such dazzling portent, would outshine that of all Indian sovereigns. It helped that it lasted for all of half a century, during which time the emperor’s energy scarcely flagged. It also helped that it was exceptionally well documented. Not even Elizabeth I of England, Akbar’s exact contemporary, was so well served by annalists and artists. Akbar bestrides all accounts of the Great Mughals not just because without him there might not have been a Mughal empire but because without him it would certainly have been a much more obscure and controversial affair. In a manner which only Alexander and Ashoka had perhaps anticipated, Akbar was intensely aware of making history; reputation would vie with advantage at every turn of his reign; like the huntsman that he was, he sniffed the course of events, scenting the immortality which was his prey.

‘Write with the pen of sincerity the account of the glorious events and of our dominion-increasing victories,’
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he told Abu’l-Fazl. Others, painters as well as writers, were similarly bidden, then richly rewarded. Abu’l-Fazl himself wrote not only the
Akbar-nama
, a year-by-year account of the reign which in the printed English edition runs, with footnotes, to over 2500 pages, but also a compendious almanac and Domesday Book of the empire, the
Ain-i-Akbari
, which runs to another 1500 pages. In such works, commissioned by the emperor, ‘the pen of sincerity’ writes exclusively with the ink of adulation; Akbar can do no wrong, his enemies are written off as misguided scoundrels, his policies are wholly original, and his success is a foregone conclusion. Yet of all such ‘dominion-increasing victories’ and ‘glorious events’ Abu’l-Fazl speaks with an insight and authority which more critical accounts only substantiate.

Succeeding so young, Akbar’s first years were necessarily of tutelage. In 1556–60 Bayram Khan, as regent, directed the defeat of Sur rivals in the Panjab, Awadh and Gwalior. A stern if devoted protector, the regent had earlier accompanied Humayun to Iran and was in fact a Shia of Persian tastes, if not birth. This provoked resentment amongst the mainly Sunni nobility and, when Akbar himself tired of his direction, Bayram Khan was first dismissed, then provoked into revolt and killed.

Those mainly responsible were a new clique centred round Akbar’s erstwhile nurse and her son, Adham Khan. In 1561 the latter commanded an invasion of Malwa where Baz Bahadur, the last and most memorable of its much-restored sultans, had revived the Malwa tradition of Muslim–rajput amity. An outstanding musician and the subject of many popular verses, Baz Bahadur spent his days flitting from palace to palace across the heights of Mandu as he serenaded Rupmati, a rajput princess. This idyll
now ended. Baz Bahadur was routed and put to flight, Rupmati poisoned herself rather than submit to Adham Khan’s attentions, and their followers, Muslim as well as Hindu, were callously massacred.

Akbar took exception not to the massacre but to Adham Khan’s with-holding the spoils of victory. A similar infringement by his commanders in Awadh brought the same response: Akbar personally rushed to the scene and secured abject protestations of homage. But although reconciled, in May 1562 Adham Khan again stepped on the royal prerogative when he made a fatal attempt on the life of the chief minister. The emperor was enjoying a siesta nearby at the time. Aroused by the tumult, he ‘became nobly indignant’ and, encountering the miscreant on the palace verandah, ‘struck him such a blow on the face that that wicked monster turned a somersault and fell down insensible’.
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Another account says that he was bowled over like a pigeon. Pigeon-like, he was then trussed and flung headlong from the top of the terrace.

With this exhibition of ‘sublime justice’ the personal reign of Akbar, now just nineteen, may be said to have begun. He assumed supreme civil and military authority, dispensing with the office of chief minister and thereby eliminating its potential for rivalry, while undertaking swift but vigorous campaigns against his sporadically dissident commanders in the east. Abu’l-Fazl notes that it was also about this time that he began to show an unconventional interest in his subjects and their beliefs. ‘He sought for truth amongst the dust-stained denizens of the field of irreflection and consorted with every sort of wearers of patched garments such as
jogis
,
sanyasis
and
qalandars
, and other solitary sitters in the dust and insouciant recluses.’
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