THE AKBARNAMA

Shaikh Abu’l Fazl was the son of one of the most learned men of
the sixteenth century in India, Shaikh Mubārak Nāgauri and the
brother of the poet Faizi.
Abul Fazl was offered a courtier’s position by Akbar in 1574.
Reacting to the invitation, Abul Fazl, tells us in the Akbarnama, that
he went through an inner conflict. It was only on the persuasion of
Shaikh Mubarak that Abul Fazl joined the imperial service. His
learning and rationality impressed Akbar, especially during the
religious discussions and debates in the Ibadatkhana.

For narrative and partly for style , the model text for akbarnama
was SHARAFUDDIN ALI YAZDI’S ZAFARNAMA [ a history of Timur ]

Further prior to the writing of the Akbarnama, a number of accounts

had been written in the preceding period, including Bayazid
Bayat’s Tazkireh-i-Humayun va Akbar and Gulbadan Banu
Begum’s (Babur’s daughter) Ahval-iHumayun Padishah.
These biographies were a response to Akbar’s orders in 1587,
to the ‘servants of the state’ and ‘old members of the Mughal
family’ to pen down their personal memories of Babur and
Humayun.
SOURCES FOR AKBARNAMA
Abu’l-Fażl utilized a broad variety of sources. He himself mentions
in the Preface of the Akbarnamah how he collected information:

● One of the most important ways was the vast archival data
of the imperial records. From the 19th regnal year, Akbar
had established a record office which kept a record of all
events. All the information from this office was available to
Abul Fazl. Information from such records provides the Akbar-
nāma with the kind of detail, especially in matters concerning
the revenue system that is lacking in works by other Indo-
 Persian historians who did not enjoy the same degree of
archival access.
● The Akbar-nāma also pioneered the use of Rajput
chronicles and oral traditions collected from resident
Hindus.
● Also, Abul Fazl says that he himself interviewed old
servants and elderly members of the royal family. He
further collected all the royal orders as well as the petitions
submitted by various ministers to the emperor.
● People from across the empire were asked to write from
memory and send their notes to the Court.

Abul Fazl says that for information on each event, he took the
written testimony of more than 20 people. In case of doubt, he
would refer the matter to Akbar himself.

PURPOSE
Abu’l-Fażl had at least three major aims in writing the Akbar-nāma.

● On one level, he wanted to provide a complete and objective

description of Akbar’s reign, not only in the traditional sense of
recording politically significant events across time (as done in
books one and two), but also in the more novel sense of giving
a synchronic picture of all aspects of Akbar’s Empire—
geographic, social, administrative and cultural—without
reference to chronology (as done in book three, the Āʾīn-e Akbarī).
As such the concluding section of the work, the Āʾīn-e Akbarī,
contains a mine of statistical information on the sixteenth century
that is without parallel in the historiography of India before Abu’l-
Fażl’s time, or even after Abu’l-Fażl’s time until the appearance of
gazetteers in the nineteenth century.

● The second—and perhaps the most deliberate—aim of the Akbar-

nāma was to present Akbar, as the pivot on whom the
Empire’s peace, stability and splendor depended. Abul Fazl
formulated a powerful dynastic ideology in the Akbarnama,
glorifying Akbar as the ‘king of manifestation and reality’, ‘the
living embodiment of the empire’ and the ‘focus for the direct
personal devotion of the imperial nobility’. Abul Fazl highly glorified
Akbar as an ummi (illiterate) glorifying the emperor’s unlettered
status as prophetic and a mark of divinity. All prophets, he
elaborated, were illiterate. Akbar possessed, says Fazl, ‘ilm laduni'
i.e. knowledge directly from God.
To this end Abu’l-Fażl made use of a number of ideological theories.
One was the traditional Iranian political theory postulating a semi-
divine, absolute monarch resplendent in glory and possessing supreme
sovereignty over his people. To this political theory Abu’l-Fażl added a
strong mystical and moral support in the Sufi doctrine of the Perfect
Man (ensān-e kāmel). Formulated by the 13th-century Arab mystic ibn
Arabī and systematized by his followers such as Ṣadr-al-dīn Qūnavī and
ʿAbd-al-Karīm Jīlī, the doctrine of ensān-e kāmel postulated that certain
privileged individuals can embody all the attributes of God. By identifying
Akbar as the Perfect Man and thus endowing him with the force of this
mystical doctrine, Abu’l-Fażl effectively countered the claims of the
ʿulamāʾ to ultimate authority in Mughal India.
Attributing to Akbar the concept of farr, ‘divine glory’, derived from
the ancient Iranian concept of khwarena, the ‘divinely sanctioned
kingship’, Abul Fazl stated that royalty is a light emanating from God
– it is a ray from the sun that illuminates the universe. Invoking
the theory of illumination in the Akbarnama, derived from the
Persian Neoplatonic philosophy of Shihab-ud Din Suhrawardi
Maqtul, which suggests that all life is given existence by the continuous
illumination –from God; that all men possess a divine spark but only the
highest of three grades of men are the true masters of the age:
men such as Suhrawardi himself, Plato and in Abul Fazl’s interpretation,
Akbar; that a chain of dazzling angels reveal God’s illumination to man
and that above these angels was Angel Gabriel identified with the true
spirit of Prophet Muhammad. Fazl averred that a combination of divine
illumination and virtuosity enabled Akbar to achieve sulh-i-kul.
He calls him paziranda-i-farr-i-izidi, a recipient of divine light,
possessor of illumined wisdom, and the reflector of the light received. But
all worldly sovereigns, stipulated Fazl, did not receive such light.
It was only the just and an enlightened ruler who could receive
God’s light and possess the title of Padshah. Akbar was such a
ruler.
The emperor possessed a large and courageous heart, paternal
love and tolerance towards his subjects (pidari), bestowing on
them the title of farzand (son) if the need be to show favour, believed
in God but rejected taqlid (blind fanaticism) and religious differences,
Inspired by Nasir-ud-Din Tusi’s Akhlaq-i-Nasiri, a work of ethics
composed in Persian in 1235, (a book most often read to Akbar), Fazl in
his Akbarnama projects Akbar as the emperor who maintained
harmony among the four classes of mankind:
i)ahl-i qalam (‘men of pen’ or the learned);
ii) ahl-i-saif (‘men of sword’ or warriors), ‘
iii) men of negotiation’ – merchants, traders, tax-collectors and ‘
iv) men of husbandry’ – farmers, agricultural labourers
Presupposing the evil nature of man – corruption, selfishness, greed and
lust – Abul Fazl located the basis of sovereignty in the needs of the social
order and talked of the necessity of a monarch, envisioned as
benevolent, sacred, sublime but despotic all the same, assisted by
four sets of ‘state servants’ – nobles; assistants of victory,
revenue-collectors, in-charge of income and expenditure; companions
of the king or wise learned men in the court; khansama or
household servants – with complete, absolute, autocratic control over
them.
The Akbar Nama traces Akbar’s lineage from Adam as his fifty third
generation descendant. Very deliberately it dislocates the
historiographical axis from the groove of Islam and seeks to construct an
alternative teleology of universal history, in which Akbar was not
contained within the frame of a human religion i.e. Islam; he was the heir
of Adam and thus the ruler of all humanity. There were other existing
notions of the ruler of the universe, such as the Shah-in Shah (King of the
Kings) in pre-IslamicIran and the Chakravartin (King of the four cardinal
directions) in Hindu religio-political ambience, but their vision of
universality coincided with territoriality; for Abul Fazl, the coincidence was
with humanity instead.
Recently, Mukhia has pointed to another extremely important inspiration
that has not been taken note of: the vernacular saint-poet Kabir. Abul
Fazl was aware of Kabir and his work and refers to him as a
muwahhid (Unitarian)
The third—and probably the most significant—aim of the Akbar-
nāma was to define Mughal ideology in imperial rather than in
communal terms. Whereas most Indo-Persian chronicles of the early
Mughal period had interpreted Indian history in terms of the fate of the
Muslim community against a static background of Hindu society and
culture, the Akbar-nāma stressed the imperial interests of a multi-
racial and multi-communal state and saw Mughal history in the
context of the court’s political destiny. The primary theme of the Akbar-
nāma, therefore, was not the conflict of Muslims versus non-Muslims, but
rather that of the imperial state versus tenacious pockets of anti-Mughal
power, such as the hereditary local gentry or zamīndārs.

STRUCTURE AND CONTENT

Abu’l Fazl had visualized the Akbarnama and the Ain-i-Akbari as a single
magnum opus: the separation of the first two daftars (volumes),
Akbarnama from the third daftar, Ain-i-Akbari, referred to as daftar-i-
akhir or jild-i-akhir or the last volume by Fazl, now treated as a separate
book, is the contribution of the later editors and translators of the text.
Akbarnama was intended as five volumes; four of which were to
constitute the narrative, covering a period of 30 years of Akbar’s life,
(Abul Fazl believed that Akbar would live upto 120 years). Ain-i-Akbari
was slotted to be the fifth volume. However, Fazl could write only
three volumes: two daftars of the part on the narrative i.e. the
Akbarnama and the third daftar i.e. Ain-i-Akbari, which included the
khatima (conclusion) to the entire work.

The first book covers history of mankind from Adam to the first 17
years of Akbar’s rule.
The first volume of the Akbarnama that focuses on establishing the
dynastic and political legitimacy of Akbar purports to write the ‘history of
mankind’, beginning with the praise of Allah and without
mentioning Prophet Muhammad and the four Caliphs, moves on to
Adam, the first man; Akbar’s birth; his horoscope, delineated
cautiously in the various Greek, Persian, Ilkhanid, Indian astrological
traditions and his ancestors. Fazl traces Mughal ancestry back through
Timur and Chingez Khan to the mythical Mongol Queen, Alanquwa,
impregnated by divine light, whose children, one of whom an ancestor
of Chingiz Khan’s nine generations before, was also the progenitor of the
Mughals. Her day of conception, says Abu’l Fazl was aghaz-i-zuhur or
‘the beginning of the manifestation of his Majesty (Akbar)’.
Through this volume of Akbarnama that ends with the seventeenth year
of Akbar’s reign, Fazl makes a profound departure from Islamic
historiography by disengaging not only tarikh (history) from its Islamic
lineage but also Akbar’s political heritage from its Islamic bonds, and
projects Akbar as the 53rd generation descendant of the first
human being (Adam), claiming that Akbar was the ruler of all humanity
and not a ‘Muslim’ ruler.
It presents Akbar’s horoscope and the Indian and Greek astrological
theories upon which it is based, followed by a list of famous personalities
of world history beginning with Adam and proceeding through the Timurid
line to Akbar himself. After a detailed history of Akbar’s father Humāyūn,
the Akbar-nāma gives a year-by-year account of Akbar’s reign from
his accession in 1556 to the 17th year of his reign, 1572.
The second book continues the chronicle from 1572 to the 46th regnal
year,1602.
The narrative of the second daftar ends abruptly in the 46th regnal year
of Akbar with Abu’l Fazl’s assassination. After Abul Fazl’s death in the 47 th
regnal year, the Akbarnamah was continued by Muhibb Ali Khan (This
part was probably written in Shah Jahan’s time, and is now known as the
SUPPLEMENT).
The Akbarnamah treats each ruler’s reign as a unit, until it comes to
Akbar. From his rule onwards, each year is treated as a separate unit.
The third book of the Akbar-nāma, called the Āʾīn-i Akbarī, is virtually a
separate work, as it is not in the narrative style of the earlier books and
presents a detailed description of Akbar’s India. It is in the form of a
gazetteer. Abul Fazl had finished it by the 42nd regnal year itself
(1598), with a minor addition of the conquest of Berar made in 1599. In
its chapter on economy, Fazl first describes the ‘natural state of mankind’
in which no protection to ‘property, life, honour and religion’ was
forthcoming, thus invoking the principles of Social Contract and a
rational theory of kingship, much before Thomas Hobbes. The divine
mandate to rule was based on a contract between the king and his
subjects in which he protected their life, property, honour and faith and
they accepted his rule with obedience.
The Āʾīn-e Akbarī is divided into five sections:
The first treats the divine source of the Emperor’s royalty, the
management of the imperial household, the treasury, and minting
procedures; the stables etc
The second gives regulations for the Empire’s military (manṣabdārī)
system; it also contains sections on suyurghal, on marriage and
education. A list of mansabdars from 200 to 10,000 rank is also given.
The third sets forth guidelines for the Empire’s civil administration,
especially the local, provincial, and central revenue systems, and the
revenue settlements according to various crops and regions of North
India; It mentions the 20 different calendar eras that existed in the world
at the time. There is also a section on the Dahsala here.
The fourth (Ahwal i Hindustan) gives a geographic and ethnographic
description of Mughal India, including a discussion of Hindu philosophy
and social organization. However this is not a well researched section.
Abul Fazl probably copied most of the information here from different
sources. One of his sources seems to have been Visvanath Kaviraj’s
book- Sahitya Darpan
The fifth book (Guftar i dilawez i shahanshahi) contains various
sayings of Akbar as collected by Abul Fazl as well as his brief biodata. The
style of the Akbar-nāma, self-consciously flowery and often bombastic,
was considered the height of historical prose writing in Abu’l-Fażl’s own
day, and was imitated for generations after him.

CONCLUSION
According to Irfan Habib, Abu’lFazl’s assertion of the supremacy of
‘reason’ over ‘tradition’ can be traced to the Post-Enlightenment
‘rationality’, imbibed from his immense store of knowledge of ancient
Greece as well as the knowledge of the ‘New World’ (‘ālam-inau). But
Habib is greatly astonished to see, at on one hand Abu’lFazl’s
assertion of reason and on the other constant use of ‘mystic
theories’in creating his theory of sovereignty.
According to Mukhia, this problem arises from misunderstanding Abu’l
Fazl’s version of reason, which he never visualized in a dichotomous
relationship with ‘mystic theories’ whether of state or of knowledge.