Well, Akbar was an expansionist through and through but not quite as barbaric as the rest of the Islamic invaders. His tolerant, even to a certain extent enlightened, religious and cultural policies won him allies among the Hindu rulers who, disunited and self-interested as they were like Raja Man Singh, extended their help to build his empire in a terrible act of short-sighted unpatriotic cooperation which set the seal on the possible movement for independence from Islamic dominance in India, especially, when the re-emerging Mughal power was yet in its nascent state.
Akbar may have been motivated initially by military aspirations, for sure, in his pursuit of a liberal policy towards the Hindus, for he was perspicacious enough to comprehend the impossibility of ruling North India without Rajput help, but later he caught on the air of Hindustan and his absorbing spirit unfolded in its spiritual evolution to appreciate the limited nature of the Islam he had been born into and the universal spirit of the Sanatan Dharma that was at the heart of the Indian ethos. His consequent assemblage of the brightest minds of the age in his court which included the likes of Abul Fazal, Faizi, Todar Mal, Man Singh, Birbal, Tansen and the like, his passion for listening to the diverse discourses of religious teachers from across the spectrum and his late attempt to synthesise the message he had absorbed into a religion of his own which he had hoped would harmonise his subjects belonging to all religious denominations, all these were surely pointers to the fact that he was an exception to the generality of the brutal Muslim rulers who had wielded power over North India till then. That Akbar was way more tolerant than other Muslim rulers and did not resort either to the forced conversion of Hindus to Islam, the destruction of temples, the levying of the jizya and other measures of persecution, surely places him on a pedestal far above other Muslim rulers but it does not detract from the fact that he was merciless in conquest and often resorted to the massacre of innocent civilians by the tens of thousands as in the case of his siege of Chittor.
So, overall it is a mixed picture that emerges of this Mughal emperor as opposed to the Rajput great who led an ascetic's life right through as he refused to bow down to alien tyranny over his motherland and vowed to protect her freedom in the teeth of severest opposition on all sides, a vow which he kept lifelong and, barring Chittor which he failed to deliver from Mughal thraldom, recovered all his lost territory while subsisting on grass for meals and the soil of his motherland for bed. In terms of sublimity of sacrifice and suffering, patriotism and perseverance, high idealism and inspiration, the Maharana outshines the Mughal by far and lives on luminous in the annals of the history of our motherland, largely forgotten, though, by us, for we are a crass collection of confused citizens with neither intelligence nor inspiration to guide us in our historical discernment and, hence, incapable of sound judgement on personality perspectives.
I rest my case here hoping to see you serious enough to read beyond surface literature in your bid to glean information enough to arrive at better judgement about these seminal personalities in the future.
Written by Sugata Bose
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