However, lying between upper India and Gujarat, and controlling the major trade routes passing between the two regions, was Rajasthan, the hilly, semi-arid tract home to powerful warrior lineages known since Akbar’s day as Rajputs. Despite the occasional successful siege of one of its famous strongholds, neither the slave sultans nor the Khalajis, Tughluqs, Lodis or Surs had been able to subdue these chieftains, much less annex their territories. Nor had any of the sultans of Delhi enlisted into their service Rajasthan’s major warrior lineages, who for centuries had remained Delhi’s obdurate foes. The mutual enmity had continued with Babur’s 1527 defeat of Rana Sanga at Khanua, a debacle still within living memory when Akbar rose to power. In view of this background, Akbar’s signature policy of integrating these lineages into Mughal service was all the more dramatic. This bold break with the past had far-reaching consequences for both Mughals and Rajputs.
Akbar’s Rajput policy, however, did not result from any grand, premeditated strategy. Rather, it began as a response to the internal politics of one of the Rajput lineages, the Kachwaha clan, based in the state of Amber in northern Rajasthan. In 1534 the clan’s head, Puran Mal, died with no adult heir and was succeeded by his younger brother, Bharmal. Puran Mal, however, did have a son who by the early 1560s had come of age and challenged Bharmal’s right to rule Amber. Feeling this pressure from within his own clan, Bharmal approached Akbar for material support, offering in exchange his daughter in marriage. The king agreed to the proposal. In 1562 the Kachwaha chieftain entered Mughal service, with Akbar assuring him of support in maintaining his position in the Kachwaha political order, while his family entered the royal household. Besides his daughter, Bharmal also sent his son Bhagwant Das and his grandson Man Singh (1550–1614) to the court in Agra. For several generations thereafter, the ruling clan continued to give its daughters to the Mughal court, thereby making the chiefs of these clans the uncles, cousins or even fathers-in-law of Mughal emperors. The intimate connection between the two courts had far-reaching results. Not only did Kachwaha rulers quickly rise in rank and stature in the Mughal court, but their position within their own clan was greatly enhanced by Akbar’s confirmation of their political leadership. Akbar’s support also enhanced the position of the Kachwahas as a whole – and hence Amber state – in the hierarchy of Rajasthan’s other Rajput lineages.
Neighbouring clans soon realized the political wisdom of attaching themselves to the expanding Mughal state, a visibly rising star in north Indian politics. Around 1564 the Rathor raja of Merta, in western Rajasthan, submitted to Akbar and gave him his daughter in marriage. Mughal support now gave this lineage, a junior branch of the Rathors of Jodhpur, a political edge over local rivals. The same pattern continued across Rajasthan. In 1569 the Hada Rajputs surrendered the stronghold of Ranthambhor in order to gain Mughal backing for leverage vis-à-vis their own kinsmen in south-eastern Rajasthan. About the same time, the Baghela Rajputs of Bhatta surrendered the fort of Kalinjar to Akbar. The next year the Rathors of Bikaner submitted to Mughal power, as did the Bhatis of Jaisalmar. In 1583 Udai Singh of the Rathor clan of Jodhpur was recognized as the ruler of Marwar, in western Rajasthan, initiating that powerful house’s collaboration with Mughals. Driving these arrangements, though, was not just the incentive of courtly patronage. The clans of Rajasthan well understood that refusal to engage with the Mughals would bring the stick of military confrontation. Alone among the Rajput clans, the Sisodiyas of Mewar in southern Rajasthan, north India’s pre-eminent warrior lineage, obstinately refused to negotiate with the Mughals. In response, Akbar in 1568 led a four-month siege of the Sisodiyas’ principal stronghold of Chittor, which ultimately fell to the Mughals, but only after a spectacular jauhar in which the fort’s defenders, foreseeing their doom, killed their women and gallantly sallied forth to meet their deaths. In all, some 30,000 defenders of the fort were killed, although its ruler, Rana Pratap, managed to escape. For decades, he and the Sisodiya house would continue to resist Mughal domination, whereas nearly every other Rajput lineage had acknowledged Mughal overlordship.
Both sides gained from the partnership. For their part, Rajputs received high-ranking positions in Akbar’s imperial service, which had the effect of transforming what had been parochial, regional clans into elite players empowered to operate on an all-India stage. To gain this new mobility and status, moreover, Rajputs did not have to sacrifice their autonomy within their native lands, as they were free to continue managing their own courts and internal affairs, a major concession. Moreover, whereas the land assignments, or jagirs, of other imperial officers were regularly rotated around the empire, Rajputs were allowed to continue administering their ancestral lands as ‘native’ (watan) jagirs. Mughal support also gave those clans that entered the imperial orbit considerable bargaining strength with local rivals, which is what had induced Bharmal to ally himself with Akbar. Finally, Rajputs were guaranteed religious freedom; there was no pressure on them to convert to Islam. In fact, a warrior ethos common to both the Mughals and the Rajputs superseded religious identities, enabling Muslims to be included as fellow Rajputs within the latter’s scheme of socio-political hierarchy. As the historian Norman Ziegler notes, the category of ‘Muslim’ within a Rajput kin group did not include all Muslims, ‘but only those who were warriors and who possessed sovereignty and power equal to or greater than the Hindu Rajput. The Muslim emperor in particular held a position of high rank and esteem, and the traditions often equate him with Ram, the pre-eminent Ksatriya cultural hero of the Hindu Rajput.’17 In this way, both Muslims and the Mughal imperium could be conceptually assimilated into the Rajput world.
For their part, the Mughals received regular tribute payments from Rajput houses, in addition to the right to circulate their own coinage in Rajput domains, to regulate succession to Rajput houses, to incorporate Rajput princesses in the Mughal harem, and to enjoy safe passage for merchants and pilgrims passing through Rajasthan to Gujarat. Akbar’s inclusion of Rajput warriors in the Mughal army also served a political purpose. Just as Rajput chiefs such as Bharmal saw Mughal allies as a counterweight to the influence of their own kinsmen, Akbar regarded his Rajput allies as counterweights to Uzbek Turks, a potentially unruly faction in his service that he had inherited from his father. Moreover, from the Mughal perspective, the alliance had pacified Rajasthan after centuries of turbulence, rendering it no longer a breeding ground for revolt, as it had been under the Delhi sultans. The alliance’s ultimate consequence, however, was to fuse Rajput and Mughal cultures and, more generally, the Sanskritic and Persianate worlds, which would be reflected in north Indian architectural and artistic traditions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
In these high-stakes political negotiations, the direction in which women were moved from household to household defined asymmetric power relations between Akbar’s court and Rajput lineages, and also between Rajput clans themselves. Just as higher-ranking Rajput clans received women from the households of minor clans, the incorporation of Rajput women into the imperial harem defined the Mughals as overlords of consenting Rajput houses. Only the Sisodiya clan of Mewar in southern Rajasthan, proudly claiming pre-eminence among Rajput clans, refused to send its women to the Mughal harem, resulting in the siege and mass suicide at Chittor. Because Akbar saw the incorporation of women of prominent royal houses into the Mughal household as a tool of empire-building, the size of his harem grew with that of the empire – contemporary estimates of the number of his wives range from 300 to 5,000.18 This had the effect of swelling the Mughal court into a huge, multi-ethnic and women-centred world, with the Rajput element in the imperial harem steadily gaining in influence relative to that of other ethnicities.
To be sure, the Rajputs and the Mughals did not view these political arrangements in exactly the same way. Consider the surrender of the fort of Ranthambhor by the Hada Rajput chieftain, Surjan, in 1569. A miniature painting in the Akbar-nama, the official chronicle of the emperor’s reign, shows Surjan submissively bowing down to a seated Akbar, guided by a court servant [see Fig. 11]. In the accompanying text the chronicle’s author, Abu’l-fazl, boasts of how easily the fort had fallen, comparing Akbar’s feat with that of ‘Ala al-Din Khalaji, who had captured it in 1301. By contrast, a nearly contemporary Sanskrit biography of Surjan portrays Akbar as having been so pleased with Surjan’s courageous conduct that he offered him three territories in return for this single fort, suggesting that the siege’s outcome had actually been a victory for the Rajput chieftain. This text, the Surjanacarita, also has a different take on Surjan’s subsequent employment with the Mughals. Like other Rajputs who capitulated to Mughal overlordship, he went on to have a successful, prestigious career. After serving as a Mughal governor of Garha in central India, he was given charge of Chunar fort by the Ganges near Benares. He also took part in Akbar’s last campaign against the emperor’s half-brother, Mirza Hakim, and died holding a high rank in Mughal service. Yet the Surjanacarita ignores all this, emphasizing instead the chieftain’s piety and his pilgrimages to important Hindu sites, as though he had transcended his earlier, merely military service for something more worthy.19
Other Rajput houses resolved these asymmetrical relationships by imagining that they, not the Mughals, were the dominant player. As the grandson of Bharmal Kachwaha, Man Singh grew up steeped in the tradition of his clan’s service to the Mughals, entering imperial service in 1572 at just twelve years of age. His career shows how imperial service could expand the political horizons of an otherwise provincial lineage absorbed in inter-clan struggles within Rajasthan. Man Singh led campaigns against Rajput houses that remained outside the Mughal fold, notably the obdurate Sisodiyas and their chieftain Rana Pratap in the Battle of Haldighati (1576). He also fought Afghans in Kabul, led a Mughal army in its capture of the stronghold of Rohtas in Bihar, and another army against Afghan chiefs in Orissa. Through it all, he smoothly navigated between two political and cultural worlds. A eulogistic biography, the Manacharit Raso by Narottam Kavi (c.1600), celebrated his military career under Akbar, proudly listing the many Turkish groups that served under his command, even attributing the empire’s territorial expansion to Man Singh himself, and not to Akbar!20 Similarly, the Persian section of a bilingual inscription gives Akbar fulsome praise, while Man Singh is mentioned as merely having built ‘a strong building’. In the inscription’s Sanskrit section, by contrast, Man Singh is given exalted titles, including ‘king of kings’, while Akbar is not mentioned at all.21
The pattern of Mughal–Rajput mutual accommodation is also seen in Man Singh’s religious patronage. As one of the most popular avatars of Vishnu, Krishna had been an important object of devotional traditions in Bengal, owing especially to the exertions of the charismatic Bengali saint and ecstatic mystic Chaitanya (d. 1533). Already in the 1530s itinerant religious mendicants from Bengal had established places of Krishna worship in Braj, a region located along the Jamuna valley in the western part of modern Uttar Pradesh, closely identified with the life of Krishna. After inheriting the leadership of the Kachwaha lineage upon the death of his father, to whom Akbar had granted land in Braj, Man Singh patronized the construction of a major monument in this region, the Govinda Deva Temple in Vrindavan.22 Dedicated to Krishna and completed in 1590, this was the largest Hindu structure built in north India since the thirteenth century. Its long barrel vault, dome, squinches, cross-vaulting and intersecting arcuated corridors not only employ distinctly Persian architectural features, but create a sense of open space not previously seen in Mughal architecture [see Fig. 12].23 While demonstrating Man Singh’s participation in the Persianate world and the Mughal imperium, the Govinda Deva Temple also points to Akbar’s desire to associate the empire with Vaishnava Hinduism, as the sultanates of Kashmir, Bengal and Gujarat had earlier done (see Chapter Three).24 At the same time, by patronizing the construction of this temple, Man Singh was acting like a traditional Hindu king, even though he had no administrative or juridical authority in Vrindavan, since both taxation and justice were handled by local Mughal officials.25
Man Singh behaved similarly in his manner of conquering territories and communicating those conquests to his home constituents. In 1594 Akbar appointed him governor of Bengal, where he was charged with subduing Afghan and native chiefs. One of these, Kedar Rai, was the Hindu chief of Bhushana in the eastern delta, whose tutelary deity was the goddess Shila Mata. Upon defeating this chief in 1596, Man Singh seized the deity’s image and later installed it inside his own kingdom’s Amber fort. No break in ritual had occurred, since the Brahmin priests who had officiated at the temple in Bengal were brought to Rajasthan to continue performing these duties. But politically, Kedar Rai was left with neither sovereign domain nor protective goddess, whereas Man Singh had practically replaced Kedar Rai as the deity’s new sovereign patron.26
If the character of the Mughal state had been transformed by Akbar’s Rajput policy, the meaning of ‘Rajput’ was also consolidated at this time. Lineages in Rajasthan that had traditionally identified themselves as kshatriya (warriors) began calling themselves Rajputs only in the sixteenth century.27 Although few written accounts of the Rajput past survive from the period before Akbar’s reign, from the mid sixteenth century on, just when Akbar was engaging intensely with Rajasthan’s warrior lineages, a number of such narratives appeared in Sanskrit and in dialects of early Hindavi. Since the Mughals had brought from the Persianate world a keen sense of genealogy and the purity of blood as a mark of one’s cultural identity, a clan’s partnership with Akbar intensified a preoccupation with its own genealogy and purity of descent.28 But Rajputs were not just responding to the Mughals’ tradition of history-writing or genealogy-keeping. There were also practical considerations. Since only the Mughals could confirm legitimate succession to Rajput kingship, those clans needed detailed genealogies stating their origins and their exact lines of descent. Rajput rulers therefore patronized poets, bards and genealogists who compiled geneaologies and poems celebrating the heroic deeds of a clan’s collective past. This had the effect not only of sharpening the boundaries between Rajput clans, but also – because there were fierce struggles with other peoples in the region – of shaping the identity of Rajputs as against non-Rajputs. Rajput lineages now closed ranks into sharply defined social units.29
Moreover, at this time the ideology of martyrdom, sacrifice and honour – an ethos present in north-west India since at least the thirteenth century – became securely associated with ‘Rajput’. This indicated a final stage in the term’s evolution from at least the eleventh century, when it simply referred to a military position open to persons of any caste or religion. Catalysing this later understanding was an early Hindavi text dating to the 1590s, the Prithviraj Raso. This widely read work celebrated the career of the Chauhan king Prithviraj III, whose army famously engaged that of Muhammad Ghuri at the Battle of Tarain in 1192. The Raso transformed the actual loser of that battle, Prithviraj, into a larger-than-life hero. More importantly, it anachronistically identified each of Prithviraj’s subordinate officers as ancestors of the leading Rajput clans of Akbar’s day, while also characterizing those officers as embodying the essence of chivalry, courage and martial prowess. In this way, the text effectively collapsed three distinct time periods into one: the ancient epic past of the Mahabharata, with its kshatriya heroes; the late twelfth century, when Prithviraj fought Muhammad Ghuri; and the late-sixteenth-century world of the Mughal court, with which Rajput lineages were then closely engaged. Precisely because it encompassed such a large number of warrior lineages and offered them a shared history, the Raso contributed to the consolidation of an aristocratic Rajput identity, beginning in the late sixteenth century.30