Today is 15 October 2026. According to the chronology followed by Abul Fazl, Akbar was born at Amarkot on 15 October 1542, at a moment when his father Humayun was a fugitive and virtually without a kingdom. Sixty-three years later, in October 1605, Akbar died at Agra, leaving behind an empire vastly different from the precarious inheritance that had come to him in 1556. October, therefore, provides an appropriate occasion not merely to remember Akbar, but to ask a question which has acquired a certain urgency in our own times: what relevance can a sixteenth-century emperor possibly have for the India of the twenty-first century?
The question matters because Akbar has never remained confined to the sixteenth century. Successive generations have interpreted him according to their own concerns. Colonial historians often represented him as the exceptional ‘tolerant’ Muslim monarch. Indian nationalist historians saw in him an important figure in the growth of political unity and composite culture. Gandhi, Nehru and others invoked him in discussions of India’s plural traditions. In Pakistan, by contrast, certain strands of nationalist historiography viewed him with suspicion precisely because his religious and political policies appeared to dilute an exclusively Islamic conception of sovereignty. While he continued to be invoked positively in India, he was frequently criticised in Pakistan for supposedly having harmed Islam.
More recently, however, Akbar has again become contested in India. Attempts have been made to reduce his significance, question the older image of ‘Akbar the Great’, and increasingly foreground the violence associated with his conquests. This tendency has moved from social media and popular polemics into school textbooks. Recent NCERT revisions describe his reign as a ‘blend of brutality and tolerance’, while the medieval section is prefaced by a discussion of what it calls the ‘darker periods’ of history. The new Class IX textbook, released at the end of September 2026, introduces the seven centuries between approximately 1000 and 1700 through the overarching framework of ‘Resistance and Resilience’, emphasising resistance to external threats while giving considerably less prominence to processes of cooperation and the formation of composite political and cultural traditions.
This makes it all the more necessary to return to the historical Akbar, neither to defend him as a modern secular hero nor to condemn him as an alien invader, but to understand what was distinctive about the political experiment over which he presided.
Akbar Was Not a Modern Secularist
We must begin with a caution. Akbar was neither a democrat nor a constitutional secularist. He was an emperor whose authority ultimately rested upon military power. His empire was hierarchical, its resources came overwhelmingly from the agrarian surplus, and its expansion involved warfare and conquest. To transform him into a modern liberal ruler would be as historically misleading as reducing him to a foreign Muslim conqueror.
His significance lies elsewhere.
Akbar confronted a problem which remains remarkably familiar to us: how does a state govern a population divided by religion, language, ethnicity, caste, region and cultural tradition without requiring all its inhabitants to become alike? His response evolved slowly. It was neither formulated at the beginning of his reign nor implemented according to some predetermined programme. What emerged over several decades was a conception of sovereignty in which the ruler increasingly attempted to place himself above competing sectarian identities.
The concept most closely associated with this development was sulh-i kul, or peace with all. It would be anachronistic simply to translate sulh-i kul as ‘secularism’. Its intellectual genealogy belonged to a very different world. Yet under Akbar and Abul Fazl it acquired an important political meaning. The ruler was not to discriminate among his subjects merely on account of their religious beliefs. Political loyalty and service to the state were increasingly separated from religious affiliation.
In an age when the religion of the ruler could profoundly determine the relationship of subjects to the state, Akbar increasingly sought to unite people across barriers of dogma and showed an unusual willingness to engage seriously with differing religious traditions.
It is here that Akbar begins to acquire significance for twenty-first-century India.
The Ibādat Khāna and the Habit of Enquiry
One of the most fascinating expressions of Akbar’s intellectual development was the Ibādat Khāna at Fathpur Sikri. What began as a space for discussions among Muslim religious scholars gradually expanded into something considerably more ambitious. Sunni and Shi’i scholars were joined by Brahmins, Jain monks, Christian Jesuits, Zoroastrians and representatives of other traditions. The diversity of those invited to participate in these discussions was itself remarkable.
The Ibādat Khāna should certainly not be romanticised. Its discussions could become acrimonious, and the emperor remained the arbiter of proceedings. Nevertheless, the principle underlying the experiment was extraordinary for its time. Difference was to be encountered through conversation rather than simply condemned from a distance.
Perhaps even more important was Akbar’s willingness to question received wisdom. He listened, questioned, doubted and sometimes changed his mind. His religious development cannot adequately be explained through the once-popular notion that he abandoned Islam and created a new religion called the Din-i Ilahi. What emerged was far more complex: an intellectual search in which Islamic, Sufi, Hindu, Jain, Zoroastrian and Christian ideas were encountered and examined.
There is something particularly relevant here for our own age. We live at a time when technology has enormously increased our capacity to communicate while frequently diminishing our willingness to listen. Social media encourages certainty, instant judgement and outrage. Akbar’s experiment at Fathpur Sikri suggests another intellectual habit: before condemning another person’s beliefs, listen to what that person has to say about them.
The ability to question one’s own certainties is not a weakness of intellectual life. It is one of its greatest strengths.
Translation as an Instrument of Understanding
Akbar’s engagement with India’s diversity did not remain confined to theological discussion. One of the most remarkable intellectual enterprises of his reign was the translation movement associated with the Maktab Khāna. Sanskrit works were translated into Persian, the principal language of Mughal administration and high culture. The Mahabharata became the Razmnama. The Ramayana, Rajatarangini and the story of Nala and Damayanti were among the other works that entered the Persian intellectual world.
This was not merely literary patronage. Translation became an instrument through which one intellectual tradition could become accessible to another.
The significance of this project for India should not be underestimated. Indian civilisation was never produced within hermetically sealed cultural compartments. Sanskrit, Persian, Arabic, Prakrit and numerous regional languages continually encountered one another. Ideas travelled between religious traditions, literary forms borrowed from one another, and artistic vocabularies were repeatedly transformed through contact.
Akbar’s translation project institutionalised this curiosity. Instead of asking which tradition should defeat the other, it asked how one tradition might become intelligible to another.
That remains an important lesson for twenty-first-century India. Civilisations are not weakened when their constituent traditions converse with one another. They are enriched.
Diversity within the Structures of Power
Akbar’s pluralism was not confined to ideas. Its most consequential expression lay in the composition of the Mughal ruling class.
The nobility that developed under him incorporated Turanis, Iranis, Indian Muslims, Rajputs and others. Rajput chiefs were not merely provincial allies who were grudgingly tolerated by the Mughal state. Many entered its highest ranks. Raja Bhagwant Das and Raja Man Singh are obvious examples, while Raja Todar Mal occupied an important position within the administrative establishment.
The diversity was substantial. By around 1580 the mansabdars included Rajputs, Iranis, Indian Muslims and Turanis in significant numbers.
This was certainly not democracy or equality in the modern sense. The Mughal nobility remained an enormously privileged ruling class. Nor should we ignore political calculation. Incorporating different groups strengthened the emperor by preventing any single ethnic or sectarian faction from monopolising power.
Yet political calculation does not diminish the historical importance of the development. Akbar had recognised something fundamental, which should be a lesson to our modern day rulers: a durable state governing a diverse society can not indefinitely remain the possession of a narrow ethnic or religious group.
The question has not entirely disappeared. Does a state visibly belong to the entire diversity of the people whom it governs? Akbar’s answer was necessarily imperial. Modern India’s answer is constitutional. But the underlying political problem bears comparison.
Akbar and the Making of an Indian Empire
Akbar did not create the Indian nation, nor was he the originator of an ‘idea of India’. Such claims would be historically untenable. India possessed geographical, cultural and political conceptions of itself long before the Mughals, while the modern nation-state belongs to a much later historical development.
What happened under Akbar was nevertheless significant. A dynasty of Central Asian origin gradually created an empire whose political and cultural foundations became deeply rooted in the Indian subcontinent.
Akbar remained conscious of his Timurid ancestry throughout his life. Yet the empire over which he ruled became increasingly Indian in its personnel, resources and cultural expressions. Persian remained the principal language of administration, but Sanskrit texts entered Persian. Rajputs entered the imperial nobility. Persianate artistic traditions encountered Indian conventions and produced new forms. Architecture at Agra and Fathpur Sikri similarly brought together architectural traditions with different genealogies.
This is why describing the Mughals simply as ‘foreign invaders’ explains remarkably little about the history that followed their conquest. Babur certainly entered India as a conqueror from Central Asia. But what precisely does the category ‘foreign’ explain about his grandson Akbar, who was born at Amarkot in Sindh, ruled from Agra, Fathpur Sikri and Lahore, obtained his revenues from Indian agriculture, recruited Rajputs and Indian Muslims into his nobility, patronised translations of Sanskrit literature, and created institutions which continued to shape thea subcontinent long after his death?
Conquest may explain how an empire begins. It cannot by itself explain what that empire becomes.
Chittor Cannot Be Forgotten
None of this requires us to sanitise Akbar’s reign. There was violence, sometimes on a terrible scale. His empire expanded through warfare. Gujarat, Bengal, Rajasthan, Kashmir, Sind and parts of the Deccan were incorporated through a combination of military action, negotiation and alliance. Most importantly, the siege of Chittor in 1567–68 and the massacre following its capture cannot be wished away because they disturb the image of the tolerant emperor.
They should disturb it.
History is not improved by protecting admired figures from uncomfortable evidence. But neither is it improved by selecting one episode and making it the interpretative key to an entire reign.
The same Akbar who presided over the violence at Chittor subsequently developed sulh-i kul, abolished discriminatory taxation, widened recruitment into the nobility, participated in discussions with representatives of different religions and sponsored translations of Sanskrit texts. The contradiction is real. The historian’s task is to explain it, not to eliminate one side in order to preserve the other.
Historical personalities do not have to be converted into either saints or villains. Indeed, Akbar becomes considerably more interesting when we cease demanding that he be either.
Recasting Akbar in the New Textbooks
It is against this background that the treatment of Akbar in some recent NCERT textbooks deserves attention.
There is nothing objectionable in principle about revising textbooks. Historical knowledge changes. New research questions older interpretations, and every generation of historians revisits the past. Nor should school textbooks suppress imperial violence merely because earlier textbooks may not have adequately discussed it.
The issue is one of proportion, context and framing.
The new Class VIII Social Science textbook, Exploring Society: India and Beyond, describes Akbar’s reign as a ‘blend of brutality and tolerance’. It devotes attention to the massacre following the conquest of Chittor and discusses violence associated with the Delhi Sultanate and Mughal periods. The history section itself is preceded by a ‘Note on Some Darker Periods in History’. NCERT has stated that its intention is not to blame anyone living today for historical events and has defended the approach as evidence-based and intended to avoid sanitising history.
The textbook does not erase Akbar’s more accommodative policies. It refers to sulh-i kul, interfaith dialogue and the appointment of Hindu officials. It would therefore be inaccurate to suggest that Akbar has simply disappeared from the curriculum.
Something subtler has happened. The framework within which the child encounters him has changed.
This becomes even more apparent in the Class IX textbook released on 29 September 2026. Some seven centuries of medieval Indian history, from approximately 1000 to 1700, are presented through the theme of ‘Resistance and Resilience‘. The emphasis falls upon invasions and the resistance offered by Rajputs, Ahoms, Vijayanagara, Marathas, Sikhs, Jats and others. While the textbook mentions both conflict and cooperation, its treatment focuses upon resistance rather than upon cooperation and the development of composite culture, themes which had occupied an important place in Indian historiography for decades.
Here lies the larger historiographical problem. If seven centuries of Indian history are organised principally around the categories of ‘invaders’ and ‘resistance’, what happens to the immense processes of accommodation, alliance, migration, cultural exchange and institutional transformation that occurred during precisely the same centuries?
Maharana Pratap unquestionably belongs to the history of Akbar’s reign. But so does Raja Man Singh. Haldighati belongs to that history, but so does the incorporation of Rajputs into the Mughal nobility. Chittor belongs to it, but so does sulh-i kul. Military conquest belongs to it, but so do the Ibadat Khana and the Maktab Khana. The sword is part of the historical record, but so is the Razmnama.
To remember one while marginalising the other does not necessarily make history more truthful. It may merely replace one simplification with another.
Who Was the ‘Invader’?
The terminology also raises a larger question. At what point does an invader cease to be an invader?
This is not merely a semantic issue. It lies at the heart of how we understand medieval India. Turks, Afghans and Mughals undoubtedly entered the subcontinent through conquest at different moments. But historical societies do not remain frozen at the moment of conquest. People settle, marry, acquire local interests, establish institutions and become part of the societies they once entered.
If Akbar, born in the subcontinent and ruling an empire whose human and material resources were overwhelmingly Indian, is permanently understood through the origins of his grandfather, then we are employing a conception of belonging which history itself makes difficult to sustain.
More importantly, Akbar’s empire refuses to fit neatly into a binary opposition between ‘Hindu India’ and ‘Muslim invaders’. Rajputs fought Akbar, but Rajputs also commanded his armies. Some resisted Mughal authority while others helped extend it. Hindu zamindars could oppose the Mughal state, while other Hindu elites participated in its administration. Muslims too could rebel against the emperor. Political allegiance did not invariably follow religious identity.
The history of medieval India becomes unintelligible if every political conflict is retrospectively converted into a religious confrontation.
From ‘Akbar the Great’ to ‘Akbar the Brutal’?
There is certainly room to question the older nationalist image of Akbar. Earlier historiography sometimes transformed him into an almost prophetic precursor of modern Indian secularism. That too was an anachronism. Akbar was a man of the sixteenth century and must first be understood within that world.
But historical revision should make our understanding more complex, not simply reverse its moral signs.
Replacing ‘Akbar the Great‘ with ‘Akbar the brutal conqueror‘ does not necessarily bring us any closer to the historical Akbar. Both can become constructions fashioned according to the requirements of the present.
Indeed, there is an intriguing comparison with Pakistan. Some Pakistani textbooks have traditionally treated Akbar negatively for almost exactly the opposite reason. He has been accused there of compromising Islam through his religious experiments, his accommodation of non-Muslims and what is represented as the Din-i Ilahi. Some of these textbook claims go well beyond what the primary evidence can sustain.
The irony is difficult to miss. One kind of identity-based history can distrust Akbar because he supposedly compromised Muslim identity; another can distrust him because he remains associated with Muslim rule in India.
Perhaps that tells us something about why Akbar continues to matter.
He is inconvenient to historical narratives constructed around permanently separated religious communities because his reign demonstrates how frequently those boundaries were crossed. His empire was created through conquest, certainly, but also through negotiation, accommodation, intermarriage, collaboration and cultural exchange. It cannot adequately be understood by imagining Hindus and Muslims as two self-contained political blocs confronting one another across the centuries.
The Right to Be Different
Perhaps this is where Akbar speaks most clearly to twenty-first-century India.
The great challenge confronting any plural society is not merely to permit different communities to exist. It is to create a political culture in which difference does not diminish one’s relationship with the state.
Akbar could never have expressed this principle in the language of citizenship, fundamental rights or constitutional equality. Those concepts belong to another historical age. His political order rested upon imperial sovereignty; modern India rests upon popular sovereignty expressed through a democratic Constitution. The distinction is fundamental.
Yet there is an unmistakable historical resonance. Sulh-i kul can be compared with the modern constitutional promise of equality and freedom of religion. The two should not be equated, but they can certainly be placed in conversation.
Akbar’s solution was imperial; ours is constitutional.
His experiment ultimately depended upon the personality and authority of an emperor. Ours is supposed to depend upon rights, institutions and laws. Yet both confront an enduring reality of Indian history: India is irreducibly plural.
This is why Akbar’s relevance does not lie in providing twenty-first-century India with a political programme. The sixteenth century cannot provide ready-made answers to the problems of the twenty-first. His importance lies instead in the questions his reign continues to raise.
Can political unity exist without cultural uniformity? Can deeply held religious convictions coexist with respect for the convictions of others? Can a state govern people of different faiths without identifying itself exclusively with one of them? Can knowledge travel across religious and linguistic boundaries? Can difference be regarded as a resource rather than a threat? Can we possess strong convictions while retaining enough intellectual humility to listen to those who disagree with us?
Akbar confronted versions of these questions more than four centuries ago.
Why Akbar Still Matters
October, then, should be more than an occasion for remembering the dates of an emperor’s birth and death. Akbar’s military victories belong to the sixteenth century. His empire eventually disappeared. The mansabdars, jagirs, imperial camps and court ceremonials belong to a political world which cannot return.
But the problem that confronted Akbar has not disappeared. How are many peoples, many languages, many religions and many memories to inhabit the same political space?
His answer, gradually formulated and never perfectly realised, was sulh-i kul.
Modern India has given itself another answer through democracy, citizenship, fundamental rights and the Constitution. The two belong to entirely different historical worlds, but across more than four centuries there remains a fascinating conversation between them.
Perhaps this also explains why Akbar’s memory has once again become contested. Debates over Akbar are rarely only about a Mughal emperor who died in 1605. They are also debates about how we imagine India’s past and, through that past, how we understand India itself.
Was medieval India essentially a battlefield between indigenous peoples and foreign invaders? Or was it also a world in which conquest was followed by settlement, conflict by accommodation, and encounter by the creation of new political, linguistic, artistic and cultural forms?
A historian need not choose between these realities. Both existed. There was conquest and there was accommodation. There was Chittor and there was sulh-i kul. There was Haldighati and there was Man Singh. There was imperial violence and there was the Ibadat Khana. There were battles for territory, but there was also the translation of the Mahabharata into Persian.
The historian’s responsibility is to explain how all these could belong to the same historical world.
That is why attempts to diminish Akbar may, paradoxically, make him more relevant. The more our past is represented as a history of permanently antagonistic communities, the more important it becomes to recover those historical moments which refuse to fit that division. The more medieval history is reduced to a story of ‘us’ and ‘them’, the more inconvenient becomes the evidence of a political order in which those categories continually overlapped.
Akbar need not be made into a modern secularist to recognise the significance of what he attempted. Nor need the violence of his empire be concealed in order to appreciate the originality of sulh-i kul. His achievement becomes more meaningful when placed within all the contradictions of his age.
Akbar belongs neither to the Hindus nor to the Muslims of modern India. He cannot legitimately be appropriated exclusively by one or rejected as belonging exclusively to the other. He belongs to the complicated, frequently violent, remarkably creative and deeply intertwined history of India.
And that, perhaps, is why Jalaluddin Muhammad Akbar remains so relevant even after 421 years after his death.
