While enrolling Rajput warriors into his service, Akbar and his advisers refined and elaborated the decimal military organization they had inherited from Delhi sultanate, Timurid and Mongol traditions. By 1574 a rationalized system had emerged in which all state servants were classified into fixed ranks pegged to specified salaries and duties, and in most cases to specified assignments of land, or jagirs, from whose revenues they were expected to recruit, train and support specified numbers of mounted cavalry. This was new. Whereas appointments and pay under previous regimes had been rather ad hoc, officers were now assigned a numerical rank, or mansab, which could rise or fall according to assessments of the performance of the rank-holder, or mansabdar. The number associated with each rank originally ranged anywhere from ten to 10,000, indicating how many soldiers a given mansabdar was expected to maintain. Soon, however, ranks were expressed in two numbers: the first, zat, was the mansabdar’s personal salary; and the second, sawar, the number of cavalrymen that the mansabdar was expected to recruit, train, pay and command. The system therefore required matching a mansabdar’s rank with a jagir sufficient in size to support his required level of troops. Jagirs were also uninheritable and temporary, as both mansabdars and their land assignments were regularly rotated through the realm every few years.
By maintaining a corps of state servants who were dependent upon and personally loyal to the regime, and by keeping tight control over those servants’ powers and responsibilities, Akbar sought to prevent any one ethnic faction of his nobility from becoming dominant. Afghans, only recently dislodged from power in upper India, were suspect among available fighting groups. So were the Uzbeks, who had driven Babur from Central Asia and had rebelled against Mughal authority early in Abkar’s reign. Even many in his own Timurid lineage had rallied around his younger half-brother Mirza Hakim in Kabul. To counteract these politically destabilizing trends, Akbar wanted his nobles to transcend their particular ethnic identities and to consider themselves as loyal servants of the state. This involved transforming the warrior–aristocratic values of his many retainers, regardless of their ethnic or cultural origins, and redirecting their ideas of honour from personal, lineage or sectarian pride to a more impersonal, imperial pride. The numerically based mansab system was intended to do precisely this, since a mansabdar’s promotion or demotion was in principle based solely on his accomplishments or failures in the imperial service, not on his genealogy or ethnic identity. The effects of such promotions or demotions, moreover, were publicly displayed according to where one stood in the court’s assembly halls, since highly ranked mansabdars were positioned closer to the seated emperor, while lower-ranked officials stood at a greater distance.31 From Akbar’s time on, therefore, we see a certain tension between the ideal of ethnic or lineage pride, extolled in both Persianate and Rajput discourses, and the ideal of a rank-based meritocracy, which was the essense of the mansabdari system.
Further serving to create a cohesive and socially inclusive service corps, the court circulated among its mansabdars a common core of Persian works on ethics and morality. Imperial servants were urged to read, most importantly, the Akhlaq-i Nasiri by the Khurasani political theorist Nasir al-Din Tusi (d. 1274), but also the theology of al-Ghazali (d. 1111), the Sufi poetry of Rumi (d. 1273), and the Kalila wa Dimna, the immensely popular collection of practical wisdom in the accessible form of animal fables. The point of promoting these classics from the Persian literary canon was to construct a model of masculine virtue that could transcend law, caste and religion, thereby providing a moral framework that was independent of the court’s Sunni Muslim clerical establishment.32 The circulation of these texts among Akbar’s multicultural nobility also helped assimilate the ruling elite into the Persianate world.
In the 1560s and 1570s, while consolidating his nobility politically and ideologically, Akbar led or sent armies in all directions on an astonishing string of conquests and annexations across northern India. To the south, he twice sent armies into Malwa. When an invasion launched in 1561 proved inconclusive, a second invasion the following year resulted in that region’s annexation to the nascent empire. In 1564 his forces invaded and annexed the kingdom of Gondwana, a hilly and heavily forested tract to the east of Malwa that was home to herds of wild elephants. This gave Akbar access to plentiful supplies of war-elephants, whose use in his armies reflect the Mughals’ growing reliance on classical Indian military traditions. The 1560s also saw the pacification of Rajasthan, where the emperor’s carrot-and-stick Rajput policy served the geostrategic aim of connecting the still-unconquered maritime world of Gujarat with the agrarian-rich Mughal heartland in upper India. With the important forts of Chittor and Ranthambhor in Mughal hands by 1568, and with most of the rest of Rajasthan under indirect control, Akbar turned his attention to the sultanate of Gujarat.
As a first step towards realizing this objective, in 1571 Akbar moved his capital westwards from Agra to the town of Sikri, the residence of a venerable Chishti Sufi, Shaikh Salim, whose prayers entreating divine intervention were believed to have facilitated the birth of Akbar’s first son, named Salim in his honour. From Sikri, the emperor then planned his operations in Gujarat. In 1572 he occupied the regional capital of Ahmedabad, legally annexed the province and returned to his new capital, which he renamed Fatehpur Sikri in commemoration of his victorious Gujarat campaign (Fatehpur means ‘city of victory’). But the following year, when a combination of Afghans, Rajputs and Turks in Gujarat resisted the new arrangement, Akbar raced back to Ahmedabad in an astonishing eleven-day blitz over a distance that normally took caravans several months to traverse, and reconquered the province. Yet the Mughals’ grip on it remained shaky. Although Muzzafar II, the last Gujarat sultan, had been imprisoned in Agra, ten years later he managed to escape and mobilize sufficient support to regain his throne. Only in 1584 did the Mughals finally sweep him away and achieve full authority in Gujarat.
Meanwhile, Akbar had turned his attention towards the equally rich province of Bengal. Ever since Babur’s day numerous Afghan migrants had fled upper India and put down roots in Bengali society. The Bengal sultan Nasir al-Din Nusrat Shah had actively encouraged the build-up of Afghans in Bihar with a view to creating a buffer zone between himself and the new Mughal state. Even more Afghans poured into the delta region during Humayun’s reign, and in 1564 their leader Taj Khan Karrani (r. 1564–5) launched an Indo-Afghan dynasty there. Keenly aware of Akbar’s successes in Rajasthan and Gujarat, Taj Khan’s successor Sultan Sulaiman Karrani (r. 1565–72) prudently adopted a posture of outward submission to the Mughals, even arranging that Akbar’s name be included on his coins and in the sermons of his mosques. But when Sulaiman died in late 1572, his son and successor Daud made no pretence of loyalty to the Mughals, striking coins and having the Friday sermon read in his own name. In response, in 1574 Akbar led a large army down the Ganges valley, routing Afghan defenders at Patna. From there one of his generals, Mun‘im Khan, led an army of 20,000 to the Afghans’ capital of Tanda, which he easily seized and declared ‘liberated’. But while Mun‘im Khan was reorganizing the region’s revenue administration, assisted by his renowned revenue officer Todar Mal, the Afghans melted into Bengal’s heavily forested eastern sector and merged with local society, patronizing Bengali language, architecture and literature.33 It took the Mughals another thirty-six years to root out Indo-Afghan resistance and establish lasting authority there.
Hindering the advance of Mughal authority in Bengal was the disaffection of many officers regarding new regulations that Akbar had instituted. In 1574, aiming to prevent officials from receiving pay for cavalry they were not maintaining, he ordered all mansabdars to brand and present for imperial review the precise number of horses they were required to have according to their numerical rank. He also centralized the empire’s fiscal administration by converting imperial territories into crown lands.34 Such measures naturally provoked resentment among the nobles, and in 1579 rebellious officers plundered the fortress at Tanda, executed the Mughal governor and set up a ‘revolutionary government’ among themselves. For several years, imperial authority in Bengal utterly vanished. Although the regime soon restored order in western Bengal, from 1583 the vast eastern hinterland was dominated by a coalition of twelve chieftains (bara bhuyan) that the Mughals would spend the next decade pursuing. It was ultimately Raja Man Singh – chief of the Rajput Kachwaha lineage – who in 1602 planted Mughal authority in the heart of the eastern delta by establishing Dhaka, hitherto a remote outpost, as his military headquarters. From this point on, the momentum towards the delta’s complete annexation was irreversible.
Contributing to Bengal’s rebellion of 1579–82 was the political emergence of Mirza Hakim, Akbar’s half-brother and independent ruler of Kabul. Officers in Bengal, resentful of the emperor’s new regulations, had rallied around Akbar’s younger brother, and in response the prince, emboldened by this unexpected show of support, marched down to Lahore. Akbar, instead of dealing personally with the Bengal rebellion, in 1581 moved his whole army north to confront his half-brother. One reason for this response was the need to regain control of the vital trade routes leading from Kabul to Delhi and Agra. When Mirza Hakim retreated beyond the Khyber Pass, Akbar pursued him all the way to Kabul. Then, when his sibling fled with his troops to a nearby mountain, the emperor entered the city unopposed and for seven days occupied the throne of his grandfather and father in its ancient citadel. Rather than pursue his treasonous brother any further, a confident Akbar declared his sister Bakht al-Nissa Begum the legal governor of Kabul, in this way asserting de facto sovereignty over the strategic province. When Mirza Hakim died several years later, the emperor simply handed over the region’s administration to some Rajput officers. Like Gujarat and Bengal, Kabul had been annexed.
Akbar’s brush with Mirza Hakim highlighted the empire’s vulnerability from the north-west. Though unreliable and unpredictable, the emperor’s half-brother had at least provided a buffer between the Uzbeks and the Mughal heartland. But with him gone, Akbar needed to keep a closer watch on the turbulent north-west and the ever-dangerous Uzbeks – once his grandfather’s nemesis, and now his own. So in 1586 he moved his capital for a third time, abandoning Fatehpur Sikri for the historic city of Lahore. Meanwhile, Raja Man Singh was sent to Kabul as governor, and in 1588 the emperor himself made a second trip there. The next year he sent his minister Raja Birbal on a failed mission to suppress the Roshaniyya, a millenarian movement then raging among frontier Afghans of the Yusufzai lineage. In an attempt to subdue the uprising, the Mughals launched still more expeditionary forces from both Kabul and Lahore. They also built and garrisoned forts throughout the frontier region with a view to stabilizing imperial authority there. Further north, in 1585 Akbar sent an army into the valley of Kashmir, whose Shi‘i king was defeated the following year. Three years later Akbar made a state visit to the valley’s capital of Srinagar, formalizing Kashmir’s annexation to the empire. Finally, the emperor turned his attention southwards towards Sind, the land of his birth, which was then governed by Mirza Jani Beg Tarkhan, an independent Timurid prince. In 1586 the Mughal governor of Multan invaded the region without success, but another assault in 1590 succeeded. Several years later the mirza formally submitted to Akbar in Lahore and was made imperial mansabdar of Thatta, the capital of Sind. In short, the Lahore phase of Akbar’s reign, spanning the period from 1586 to 1598, witnessed a significant projection of Mughal power throughout the Indus valley and far into the mountainous zones to the north and north-west. By the end of the century the empire had embraced the entire Indo-Gangetic plain plus Kashmir and eastern Afghanistan.
How can one explain this extraordinary series of victories and annexations? New military technologies and tactics that the Mughals brought to India certainly played a role. Following Central Asian tradition, Akbar’s armies, like those of Babur and Humayun, were built around mounted archers.35 Numbering 12,000 when he came to power, by 1581 his cavalry had swollen to 50,000. Whereas many of these men had been recruited from beyond the Khyber Pass, the Rajput share of ordinary troopers in Mughal service steadily increased. Some Turkish and Iranian nobles commanded units composed mainly of Rajputs and, by the end of Akbar’s reign, Kachwaha mansabdars alone commanded more than 26,000 ordinary cavalrymen in Mughal service.36 Enlisting India’s finest cavalries surely played a part in Akbar’s military successes. Also important was his use of firearms technology and tactics, such as placing field cannon between carts tied together to prevent opposing cavalry from breaking through Mughal lines. Though always secondary to cavalry, war-elephants were also incorporated into his armies. In pitched battles, Mughal forces were deployed in multiple divisions. Mounted archers would open a battle by probing and provoking the enemy, followed by a strategic retreat aimed at drawing the enemy to charge the Mughal centre. Supported by artillery, war-elephants and infantry, the centre would face the enemy directly while the right and left wings of mounted archers swiftly outflanked and surrounded their opponents.
Rather than mounting pitched battles, however, the Mughals often deployed the more subtle tactic of sowing and exploiting internal dissensions within enemy camps.37 In his 1574 campaign in Bengal, the veteran general Mun‘im Khan became bogged down for months in unfamiliar jungle terrain, while his 20,000 troops came close to desertion from lack of interest in fighting so far from upper India. In these circumstances, the commander’s colleague Todar Mal recommended that ‘the method to restrain the faction was to send money by one who was loyal and smooth-tongued’. By such tactics, wrote Akbar’s chronicler Abu’l-fazl, ‘the dust of disturbance [fitna] was laid’, later noting with satisfaction that the chosen approach had ‘quieted the slaves to gold’.38 With a large part of the Bengal sultan’s forces thus bribed over to Mughal service, the Bengal army had been hollowed out from within. Such transfers of manpower were enabled by India’s military labour market, which operated not on the basis of ethnic or political loyalties, primordial or otherwise, but on cash and the highest bidder. Because Akbar had greater access to financial resources than the sultan of Bengal, the scales necessarily tipped to the Mughals’ advantage.
Once an adversary’s army was prepared to surrender, Akbar conformed to the classical Indian practice of not annihilating his adversary but of honourably including him in the imperial orbit. Accordingly, when Sultan Daud Khan Karrani of Bengal realized the futility of continued opposition, he appeared before Mun‘im Khan in April 1575 and partook of a formal ‘banquet of reconciliation’, as Abu’l-fazl called it. Displaying warm affection, the Mughal general advanced to the edge of a carpet laid out in a ceremonial tent specially arranged for the occasion. There he greeted the defeated king. Daud ungirded his sword and set it aside. Mun‘im Khan then presented the Afghan with a Mughal sword, an embroidered belt and a cloak. Whether or not Akbar had actually worn the cloak, by donning it Daud Khan had become symbolically incorporated into the body of the emperor, a political rite the Bengali ruler would have well understood since his predecessors on the Bengal throne had followed the same practice.39 Adorned with Mughal regalia, Daud then turned in the direction of Akbar’s capital in Fatehpur Sikri and solemnly prostrated himself.40
A more interesting question is how the common people of defeated states accepted imperial rule. Well before the advent of the Mughal age, Indian bards, poets and chroniclers had prepared the ideological ground for the acceptance of an imperial overlord such as Akbar. In the fourteenth century, Indians referred to the Tughluq sultans using variations of the Sanskrit sarvabhauma, or ‘universal ruler’.41 From about the same time a hybridized Persianate and Indic notion of universal kingship became widely known and accepted among the masses, as political and proto-historical works that included warrior tales and retellings of epic stories began to appear in vernacular languages.42 In the early fifteenth century the poet Vidyapati, writing in an early vernacular tongue of eastern India, compared the court of Sultan Ibrahim Sharqi (r. 1401–40) in Jaunpur with heaven, imagining his court as existing above the whole universe, and the king (Persian: padshah) as supreme, with none but God (Sanskrit: karatara) above him.43 Vidyapati further wrote of chieftains (rajaputa) from such diverse and far-flung regions as Andhra, Bengal, Orissa and even the Tamil south all coming to Jaunpur and submitting to the overlord, Sultan Ibrahim, in their own languages. The poet here articulated in vernacular speech the essence of universal empire, an idea into which Akbar would insert himself more than a century later.
In addition to the formal submission by defeated rulers and the general population’s acceptance of the ideology of overlordship, the expansion of Mughal power entailed political negotiations and compromises at the local, grass-roots level.44 Across all India, Akbar’s success lay not so much in his superior use of military force as in how his officers co-opted political agents, intervened and mediated in local conflicts, and generated credit among conquered populations. Even as major political actors such as Todar Mal or Mun‘im Khan were cutting deals at the level of high politics, low-ranking imperial servants on the leading edge of the empire’s expanding frontier deepened the roots of Mughal authority by sharing the perquisites of sovereignty with local power holders. In Gujarat, for example, while appointing their own local judges (qazi), police commissioners (kotwal) and revenue functionaries (mutassadi), the Mughals also recruited petty officers from among the existing service gentry of scribal Brahmins. Proficient in both Persian and Gujarati, these Brahmins kept records of goods and merchants coming to the customs houses in bilingual registers. By helping the Mughals realize taxes and by advancing loans to Mughal officials, local merchants – together with the scribal Brahmins – implicitly co-shared Mughal authority with the imperial court.45
Indeed, soon after Akbar’s conquest of Gujarat, the Mughals began to grant revenue-collection rights to local parties, especially local gentry and merchants, including them in the imperial system by giving them emblems, honours and insignia such as elephants, horses, royal robes and turbans.46 Both ritually and practically, then, local actors became empowered. But such empowerment created a certain paradox, since each new perquisite granted to some local notable meant that one more tiny chip of imperial sovereignty had been effectively transferred from the centre to the periphery.47 This fact must inform our understanding of the growth of Mughal power. The Mughal empire was not a Leviathan state, and its extraordinary expansion in Akbar’s reign was anything but the relentless advance of a mighty juggernaut that simply rolled over and crushed its opponents. Although the Mughals propagated such a notion in their official chronicles, their courtly ceremonies and their imposing architecture, power was in reality distributed across the entire social body, becoming progressively more diffused as the state incorporated ever more territory.