Empire: World History - 211. A Beautiful World: The Art of Akbar

Episode Date: December 12, 2024

As a dyslexic child, Akbar explored his curiosities about the world through visual wonders, and by having literature read aloud to him. As an adult, his love of art evolved as he became the patron of a multicultural group of calligraphers, painters, poets and more. A now renowned Mughal artistic style developed from his court, with iconic paintings full of bright colours and meticulous details. How did Akbar shape this style? And how was his art and architecture impacted by the religious tolerance he promoted? Listen as William and Anita explore the art and architecture that emerged from Akbar’s court. Twitter: @Empirepoduk Email: [e-mail] Goalhangerpodcasts.com Assistant Producer: Anouska Lewis Producer: Callum Hill Exec Producer: Neil Fearn Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you want access to bonus episodes reading lists for every series of Empire, a chat community. Discounts for all the books mentioned in the week's podcast, add free listening and a weekly newsletter, sign up to Empire Club at www.mptopoduk.com. Welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arden. And me, William Drupal. The reason we may be a little bit out of our breath is because we've been laughing very, very loudly about cows' pep talk. before we came into this. We're very lucky to have, Cal.

No, no, no, it's very good. It was a very acute observation, which is you're talking about pretty things. Just describe them. To paraphrase, basically don't make this episode shit. Because that was our plan. We're very lucky to have a producer like Carl.

Without his sterling advice, who knows how this podcast could end up? So, look, previously, doing the little wave emotion, previously on this podcast, we've been talking about Akbar, the Mughal, emperor who took a template, ripped it up, threw it into the air. Every place the one bit of

confetti landed, he made his empire. And, well, I mean, I sort of described at the end of the last episode that he'd created a hippie commune where peace and love man, just don't be awful, was the credo. On a sort of pan-Indian basis. And now we're going to talk about how he covered it with nice murals and things. Yes, nice murals. And not just, you know, describing the murals. Thank you, Cal. We'll do that. Thanks. Also, the reason that he was able to have such a pretty empire and, you know, where art makes such great strides and music and poetry and things like that is because he attracts these artists from other parts of the world and other parts of India, all come to his court

because it is a hippie commune, so they'll be loved. So, joking apart, what happens at this period extraordinary? There had been a remarkable tradition of painting in ancient India, of which the Ajanta Caves is the most spectacular example, but most of it's lost. And India was not particularly renowned in the early Middle Ages during the period of the Delhi Sultanate for its painting, or particularly, I think, on a global sense, it's architecture. But what you get happening during the reign of Akbar turns that around. And we see some of the greatest paintings and some of the greatest buildings of the age built at this time. And I think part of it always stems from the fact

that Akbar was dyslexic and so was a very visual child. I think this is so interesting that he thought in pictures rather than words from the earliest moment. We talked about that in the previous episode, that he had a phenomenal memory that struck everybody around him and it's because he saw the world not through the pages of a book necessarily. Exactly. And his father, Humayin, who was also very interested in architecture and in art, recognised this. And he talks about her. how Akbar loved painting as a child and how he would practice painting in the imperial studio, tutored by master painters. So Humaan brings these Persian painters from Iran, and it's at that time

that you have them beginning to mix with Gujarati painters, probably the Jain tradition. And you have these two very different worlds meeting for the first time. And you've also got to remember that in Orthodox Islam, there are some. who dislike painting and think it's against Quranic injunctions. And Akbar very early on makes it clear that he has no time for this sort of attitude. He says... Before you quote him, though, explain that a little bit, because, you know, in the Quran... Hadiths, I think, yeah.

You know, to paint the human form or to have the temerity to put yourself up on the same pedestal as God himself, who is the one who created mankind, is one of the worst things that you can do. So Abel-Faisal records the young act. Akbar's response to that sort of attitude. He has Akbar saying, there are many that hate painting, but such men I dislike. It appears to me as if a painter had a quite peculiar means of recognizing God for a painter in sketching anything that has life and in devising its limbs one after another must come to feel that he cannot bestow individuality upon his work and is thus forced to think of God, the giver of life. So this shows his, not only his aesthetic awareness, but also what a kind of individual

thinker he is from when he's a child. While he couldn't read, he loved to have literature read to him, almost like a sort of audiobook. And there were these court performers who specialized in reciting the epics at court when he was a child. And some of these epics are the Indian epics, and some of these epics are the Islamic epics. Some like the Hamzzi. Anana'amah are an Indian version of Islamic epic, which sort of contain a bit of both. So he would have had Ferdazi in his mind, you know, the Persian poet we've talked about previously in our Persian series. I imagine him, sort of young Akbar, lying with his eyes closed with some of the greatest performers

in the land, reciting poetry and stories to him. And he would have imagined all of these things again in pictures. Susan Strong, who we're going to have on this series, has an observation about this. She says it's one of the biggest paradoxes of art history that the prolific. production of illustrated manuscripts was initiated by a man who couldn't read them himself. Very nicely put. Very nicely put. Sue is the curator of the extraordinary show at the Victorian Albert Museum.

And anyone who is in London or passing through London in the next few months should make a beeline to that because it is one of the greatest assemblages of mogul goodies ever brought together in one place. It's an extraordinary, extraordinary show. So let's just go through some of the areas which Akbar and his court sort of specialised in. Well, the first is something that first brought us together, which is Akbar's love of gemstones. Tell us about that. We talked about this with Coenor, but there was a different taste and hierarchy in the Mughal court for gemstones.

Diamonds were really pretty near the bottom, but right at the top, it would have been spinels and rubies, red stones. Red stones, which captured sort of the setting rays of the sun, or the, you know, you know, as the sun rises, that was the most beautiful, beautiful moment in the day and also the most beautiful stones. And there was no shortage of this. You know, you've got these deep pink spinels from Badakshan, which is in his own back garden, if you like. But you've got the stones, but you need to cut the stones. And to cut the stones, you need to recruit the greatest gem experts across the subcontinent. And they come from both Hindus and Muslims. I mean, even today, Surat in Gujarat is no.

as the diamond cutting centre of Asia. You know, you still have generations who've cut diamonds in Surin. But foreigners were also recruited because, you know, you want the best of the best and you want the money to pay them. So at this point, it's interesting. These talents go backwards and forwards between East and West. There are periods of history when the moguls are ahead of everyone else. But at the beginning of Akbar's reign, I think the Venetians are the greatest stonecutters in the world, along with the Dutch in Amsterdam. And so even the English, were first making their way to the mogul court at this time, have some skills that the moguls don't. So there's two Englishmen we know of in some of the early accounts, William Leeds,

who arrives with a group of English merchants of 584 that includes the writer Ralph Fitch. And they arrive at Fatipur Secre with the letter to Akbar from Queen Elizabeth I. And they bring with them gem experts, one of whom gets recruited into the court. And Abel Faisal is fascinated by this and writes about the incredible. incredible amount of gemstones, which have been gathered at this point. He says the amount of revenues in our empire is so great and the business so multifarious that 12 treasuries are necessary for storing the money, nine for the different kinds of cash payments, and three for precious stones, gold and inlaid jewelry. And the rubies and spinels are divided into 12 classes. There are diamonds,

half the quantity of spinels and rubies, and then there are emeralds of blue carundum, or Safars, which the moguls knew as Yakuts and pearls were kept in a third treasury. So there's this whole world of gemology and gemstones. And as we'll see in a later episode, Shah Jahan, the grandson of Akbar, considers that these stones are being wasted, that they're not being put to active use. They're just being amassed in the treasury. And he comes up with a very ingenious way of using them for state purposes, but that's for a later episode. So we'll come to that later and we'll also tell you sort of stories of Mughal emperors who just ignore all the dancing and music that goes around them because they're too busy looking at piles of jewels. It was a particular fascination of the family.

Absolutely right. Sort of plate full of jewels which arrive with dinner and they're just looking at those rather than eating or talking to anybody who's in their court. And one of the reasons at this time, even though, again, we'll go to Abel Fasol for this because he's a contemporaneous source who sees this happening is that there is a link between these. gemstones and divinity. As we sort of talk about in the Coenore episode, there's a conflation between the Coenore and the Siamantica gem, which is this gem of mythology, which used to belong to the sun god. Well, so all gems are gifts from the gods. And Obofasal says, kings are fond of external splendor because they consider it an image of the divine glory. So being bedecked in all of this bling is not just, you know, to show, look how rich I am, but it is look how close I am to the

divine, you know, look upon me and turn your eyes away because I sparkle so much, and that is the experience you'd have looking into the face of a god. And gemstones are, of course, in this world, related to the production of books, because it's gemstones which are ground up to produce many of the pigments. So, for example, lapis lazuli, where the blue pigment comes from, and the various other mineral paints such as Malachite, which are ground. So next door to the gemstones in Abel-Faisal's scheme is the House of Books. And this is where manuscripts are created, stored, and where calligraphers, artists, book binders, and guilders are employed.

And we get the impression, I think, that, you know, at the time of Humay and there were certainly artists around. But what you have now at this far more organised court of Akbar, and far richer court of Akbar, is a sort of book factory, which has, you know, got a whole professional setup under a series of Persian masters who are training up local Indian painters in techniques. And the result is you're getting two different worlds, the world of Jane Gujarati art, which is very colourful and full of animal pictures and bright primary colours. And then the far more restrained, formal world of Persian art with its geometric ornament,

it's far more restrained use of colour and form. But detailing as well. You associate with Mughal miniature painting in particular. Every expression on every face on the painting is different. Entirely obsessed with detail. So fingernails and the cuticles. I mean, it just gets down to the very finest point of brush. Painted with a squirrel's tail. And my wife, Olivia, is trained in this tradition. She trained in J-Poor 20 years ago. And one of the things they taught her, is the art of catching your squirrel. Really? Has she not caught a squirrel? She has. I've never going to look at her the same way again. So the whole thing is that you're not obviously allowed to kill the squirrel in this tradition,

which is based partly on Jane painting. So you have to bait a trap. It doesn't hurt the squirrel in any way. But you catch the squirrel, then you get a kind of pillow slip, and you have to learn to hold the squirrel with its tail coming out between your two forefingers. and then you're allowed to take one single hair from one squirrel, which you use for doing the finest detail. And the squirrel has to not be hurt and has to be let go,

or else the paintings will die is the law of the painters. Oh, that's amazing. So how many nutkins has she nabbed, that wife of yours? I mean, it can't be easy. That's the sort of question you might have to ask her directly. It's sort of squirrel kidnapper your wife. I had no idea. But the thing is, if you have this capability and you have these factories, for want of a better word,

you have this master and all of these acolytes who are training and working around the clock to learn this technique, you can produce books that haven't been produced before. And Akbar, in particular, has become obsessed with stories. He loves stories. So, you know, in the oral tradition, there are the tales of Hamza who battles with demons and unbelievers. And it's an oral thing that he's grown up with in his ears. but he wants to make it into a picture book. And it is a remarkable achievement.

Talk about the Hamza Nama. So there is a whole world that is still alive in India of what are called picture showmen. And they exist in different traditions. There's some who walk from village to village in Bengal with the stories of the bowels and the stories of Krishna. But there's also Muslim traditions that also still exist in Iran. And the tales of Hamza is one of these. and these picture showmen walk from village to village, they set up a stall, and they show images from, like showing slides, but showing images from the story. But what Akbar has in mind

is not the kind of crude things that village picture showmen will have, but to have a great imperial book of Hamza, which will collect all these stories together. And the Hamza, unlike the Mahabarata, has never had a sort of final and definitive edition. It is emphatically an oral story, and it's a great miscellany of folk tales, legends, religious discourses and sort of far-side yarns, which over time came to gather around the story of the hero, Hamza Ibn Abdul Muttalib, the father-in-law of the prophet. And as befits an epic, the factual backbone of the story, was in Dukor swamped with subplots and digressions involving a sort of narnia cast. Witches and dragons and giants and demons and flying carpets and, you know, all of the stuff of

sort of Arabian Knights plus, Game of Thrones plus. And flying pots. Oh, yes. Flying pots are the equivalent to flying carpets in the Hamsan armour. People jump into magic pots and go shooting around. And above all, you have the handsome, courageous and chivalrous Hamsa and his chaste and beautiful Persian princess lovers. And then there's the kind of Lord Voldemort of the story, the cruel necromancer and archfiend Zamorad Shah, who's called the Lost. And he's shown as a sort of

suave, black-bearded giant with a huge nose and a cruel and malevolent expression in his eyes. Anyway, this project commissioned by Akbar brings together more than a hundred artists to produce 1,400 illustrations. And although it's not sort of intended to do this, to create an atelier large enough to produce this enormous body of work, this is the moment that mogul painting really begins. Because you have to bring together these guys, you actually have to train them up in a formal and organized fashion. And they do it.

And you see mogul art being born as you look through the pages of this book. Some of the pages are in the V&A at the moment and on display. So if you are in London or partially do not miss your chance to see the Hamsanaama pages. And for those of you who aren't able to do that, just to give you an idea of what these pictures are like, they are not sort of, you know, your children's storybook pictures. They are involved and intricate. And they have casts of hundreds sometimes in them. So I'm just looking at a couple now.

There's a beautiful one, the spy Zunbour bringing Mahia to the city of Tawarik. And it's got a woman with a flowing headscarf. You can see all the folds in her headscarf on top of the. a donkey, not the only donkey in the picture. There are three donkeys in the picture. But it's what's going on incidentally around her. It's about her coming to the city. But there are paniers of fruit. There are people in windows gossiping with each other. The colors, I mean, you say they're muted, but they are beautiful and bright and vivid. You know, this emerald color on the roof shingles of a house. You've got the intricate mosaics on a onion dome in front.

You've got someone just looking up, someone just gazing out of the window, having a little daydream. and people who are not involved in the story at all, but who are in the picture itself. So you can understand that somebody who maybe is illiterate or dyslexic could see, look, I can understand this story. I'm in a world. I'm inhabiting a world. Also, you know, the Hamzan Amah does a very good job of doing water. You know, so you've got these rippling scenes of rippling water and people who are half in and half out.

And you can see that painting is making enormous strides during this period. You've got land, sea, sky, all being dealt with in a beautiful textured and new way of doing paintings. And it causes a great stir at the time. You have accounts from Akbar's court of the progress of this project. Everyone's looking and watching and waiting for the new images to come out so they can hear their favourite episodes of the story. And we have one chronicler from the time.

It's called Mir Allah al-Dala. He says, verily, it is a book, the likes of which, no. connoisseur has seen since the azure sheets of the heavens were decorated with brilliant stars. Nor has the Hand of Destiny inscribed such a book on the tablet of the imagination, since the disks of the celestial sphere gained glamour with the appearance of the moon and the sun. And that's very much the kind of high fluton's court tone, by the way. This is the writing in Akbar's court is all of that sort of very high persianate nature. and no one has mastered it more than Akbar's hagiographer Abel-Faisal,

who actually records extensive details by individual artists and is especially proud of the way that the Persian masters of Italy had to train up ordinary Indians. And this is how he puts it, so that novices have become masters. And one of these is a guy called Daswanta. We learn a great deal about him. He was the son of a palanquin bearer who is in the service of the court.

So in ordinary, you know, like a porter. He's from the lowest ranks of the court. But urged by natural desire, he used to draw images and designs on the walls. One day, the far-reaching glance of His Majesty Akbar fell on those things, and its penetrating manner discern the spirit of a master working in them. Consequently, his master entrusted Daswanta to the master of their telly, and in just a short time, he became matchless in his skills. There was, however, a sad ending to this prodigy. Insanity shrouded the brilliance. of his mind and he died as suicide. Is that wonderful, that story though?

The idea of this guy being picked up and becoming a master. Picked up in the middle, you know, that some may find him to be a madman who's just scratching and scrawling away, but somebody sees the genius. I mean, he's one of so many artists who worked on the Hamsanaama, and in total, Uckbukk commissions no fewer than 1,400 huge illustrations for the Hamsanama. And this is the single largest commission in all Mughal history. It is an enormous undertaking. When you look at the Hamsana'ama, even today, because you're an art connoisseur, what do you see when you look at these paintings?

Funny enough, there was an exhibition just of the Humsan Amma at the V&A about 20 years ago. And I think that was the first time I ever wrote an art historical review in The Guardian 20 or 25 years ago. It was of the Hamsan Amar. And I've got my review in front of me. Oh, have you? Oh, right. What did you say? And I said, some of the illustrations are very Persian in style,

flat linear forms remarkable for their precise angular geometric perfection. Other pages are pure Indian in spirit. There are Indian clothes and Indian gestures, the palette is brighter and more dramatic than is common in Persian art. And there is a love of the natural world that is very specific to the subcontinent. The playful elephants that charge across the canvases of the Hamzanama seem to have arrived straight off the walls of Hindu rock sculpture Mahabalipuram. But already the canvases of the Hamzanaama, you can see.

these two worlds beginning to fuse, you can hear the soft ripping of Gossamer as holy Mughal images emerge fully formed from the chrysalis of Akbal's atelier. That's not bad for a 25-year-old, is it? That is, that is not bad at all. You, I'm rather pleased with that. What was actually going to say? Progeny. No, prodigy. You, not progeny. You, and then you pause. And I know, no, you were very, very clever. I don't know. Words are failing me. It is beautifully written. The Hamzan Am is not the only thing that's being produced. You have other books that are being produced in the House of Books. But more than that, you have a style that is being produced in the House of Books, a style that is going to be known as the Mughal style. And all who

come after will follow and try and imitate. But none will be as generous in their commissioning and give such importance to art as Akbar. Well, let's take a break there, because painting is one thing, gemstones are one thing, but what about the really big stuff? Let's talk about the stuff that still remains that if you are a tourist, you will go and see if you go to India. The architecture. Welcome back. So we were talking about gemstones. We were talking about paintings.

We were talking about books. But the stuff that the Mughal Empire is, I don't know, perhaps largely known as, is for the architecture that was a particular Mughal style. How does a little bit about that and how that style emerges? Well, you can see the different eras of act. reign in the different places he rules from. Basically, he starts in Agra. Agra Fort has begun by Akbar. And I think the external walls are largely Akbar's work even today. Then he goes and builds this extraordinary city in Fatipur-Sikri. And that's what we're going to be talking about most of the

rest of this episode. Because Fatipo-Sikri is Akbar's great experiment, not only in philosophy, but also reflecting that philosophy in art and architecture. And finally, you see the end of his reign. He moves up, remember we talked at the end of last time about how he conquers Kashmir, the focus of his reign begins to move more north and westwards towards Afghanistan than Kashmir. So he moves to Lahore for the final part of his reign. And in the Lahore Fort, you can see other Akbari buildings. But the one that is completely intact and entirely from Akbar's reign, and the place where, in a sense, you can get an idea of what it must have been like to have been around at this time is Fatipur's secrets.

Life's about an hour outside Agra, which itself is about three hours' drive these days south of Delhi. And it's this city built around the Sufi shrine where Akbar's favourite Sufi holy man predicted correctly the birth of Akbar's son, Salim, who will become the next emperor, Jahangir. And the Sufi shrine still remains there at the top of the hill with the family. is still intact inside it. And this family have seen their remote hilltop become the centre of the empire. Then, when the water ran out and political necessity meant Akbar had to go off to Lahore just as quickly the site is deserted. And although it continues up until the 18th century, 90% of what you see at Fatipo Secre was built during Akbar's reign. There's a beautiful observation made by Bamberg Ascoyne, who's written a wonderful book about the moguls. And he says,

you know, what strikes you most about Fatheropo Sikri is that they appear to be wooden houses but created of stone, meaning the intricacy of the carvings, things like Jali work, which would have been screens of wood, like a lace work, almost a lattice work, so fine and so precise that you can imagine woodworkers, you know, master carpenters carving are now being carved and chiseled out of stone, but with such fine detailing, that's the thing about this. And I think that's what he means by this. It's a spiritual sort of wound up in all of this because with the gemstones and everything else, there is a divinity thing at work there. Is that the same in the architecture? So what he's trying to do in the architecture, and again, scholars sort of dispute this and there are articles written in both directions. But what he seems to be doing is just like you've seen in his military policy, he's brought the Raj puts in alongside the Mughals, just like he's created in the centre of Atipo Sikri, this house of religion where the different proponents of Islam and.

Hinduism and Jainism and Zoroastrianism can all put their case. So in the architecture, you seem to have consciously a mixture of the Muslim traditions of Central Asia, where the moguls are from, the extraordinary architecture of places like Samakhan and so on, mixed with particularly the Gujarati forms, because remember he's just conquered Gujarat. And apparently Akbar was particularly taken with the extraordinary Indo-Islamic architecture developed by the sultans of Ahmedabad and Gujarat. And so you see this in the architecture of Fatibu Sik, as if he's trying to translate his spiritual ideas into stone, consciously combining Hindu and Muslim elements in this sort of highly syncretic fusion style, mixing the arch and dome of Islam

with the Jali screens and Chaja-Eves and Chathris of Hinduism. I mean, we should explain. That may not mean much to everybody, but Chathri Pavilion's It's very much present in Hindu scripture, you know, where a chatari is like a parasol or an umbrella. And around temples, you see that motif coming up again and again, these ornately carved parasol's umbrellas, which are over the statues of the gods or over the lintels when you enter. And these things all become amalgamated and live really happily together in the architecture of Akbar. And what's lovely about this is that because this was very public, we've got many distra. of this city coming up, particularly from the Portuguese travel writers. And they record the speed at which this city prospers, trade blossoms, and merchants appearing from all over Asia,

and the caravansarise is so full that the Portuguese fathers are complaining about the noise. But they also are invited to these religious discussion groups that we talked about in the last series. And there's actually a particular room which is created for this. This is the Duane House, it's called. the special hall of audience. And it's a very, very odd room indeed. In the center of the room, there's this decorated pillar, which rests on a round platform, and from it four walkways branch out to the corners of the building, where there are four smaller platforms. And what scholars think is that Atbar would have sat in, presumably silken cushions, in the centre, on this main pillar, as holy men of the different traditions would kneel at the ends of each of these walkways, debating their beliefs.

And Amati Asen, for example, wrote a famous essay, which he says, this is the origin of India's tradition of diversity as something recognized by the state. He sees the way that the Indian state has always recognized all these different religions as valid and celebrates the holy days of each one. as coming partly from this source. But the biggest surprise, have you ever walked up those steps of Fatapur-Sikri into the Boulan Darwaza? Are you still allowed to do it? I did it when I was very, very young. You can, yeah.

I think there was a stampede coming down one time and then they stopped people doing it. But I have, I have done it, yeah. Well, for those that haven't been there, at the top of the hill, there is the great mosque. And the single largest, most prominent part of the mosque is the gateway, called the Boulan Darwaza. And it's at the top of a very, very steep flight of steps. And I remember going there as a kid aged 18, or my very first visit to India.

It was in February, I think probably, and it was a bit foggy. And I had my guidebook with me. And the guidebook told me about the inscription over the gateway. Now this is a gateway into a mosque, but what does it say over it? It says, Jesus, son of Mary, on whom be peace, said, The world is a bridge.

Pass over it, but build no houses upon it. He who hopes for a day may hope for eternity, but the world endures but an hour. Spend it in prayer, for the rest is unseen. Now that's a whole bag of extraordinary things when you've come. As an 18-year-old, I mean, when you saw a Christian, inscription on a Muslim monument? I mean, what went through your head? I mean, what did you make of that? Well, I was very muddled as you would be, not least, because the Christian inscription,

the allegedly Christian inscription mentioning Jesus, of course, doesn't actually appear in the Bible. And what is fascinating is that this is one of these sayings of Jesus that exist in the Islamic tradition, but which have been lost in the Christian tradition. And I think the earliest commentators thought this was just sort of, you know, folk tales or something which had no relevance to Christianity. But since then, when archaeologists have been digging in the oxyrinicus papari in Egypt and finding early Christian sources, many of these Muslim sayings of Jesus, including that one, about the world being a bridge, turn out to be there in early Christian versions of the sayings of Jesus. And yet they've survived in the Islamic tradition.

But not in the Christian world at all. Is that extraordinary? Irony. And so there are these sayings in the Islamic tradition, which preserve early Christian texts lost in the Christian tradition. And one of those is carved by Akbar over the Bulanda waza. And I remember when I first came across this, it just blew my mind. There's this whole world of stuff.

I mean, I'll give you another one. There's one of the early sayings of Jesus, which is in the early Christian tradition and then preserved in the Muslim sayings of Jesus, here is one. Jesus was a constant traveller of the land, never abiding in a house or a village. His clothing consisted of a cloak made of coarse hair or camel stub. Whenever night fell, his lamp was the moonlight, his shade the blackness of night, his bed, the earth, his pillow a stone, his food the plants of the fields. So these sort of little fragments that, you know, were there and are now lost, and just act by the world.

goes and puts it over the main gate. I mean, how spectacular and weird is that? And also, I mean, it's sort of the thing that appeals to him as well. You know, we've said it before at the beginning of his reign, you know, although he has everything. He has everything. Gemstones, you know, up the wazoo. But he is attracted by this idea of the travelling mendicant or asceticism. You know, he's not the one who gets getting drunk in the court and he doesn't like it when those around him are doing the same thing. So it is an aspirational thing. And, you know, Jesus being sort of the patron saint of going with. if you like, humility, asceticism. You know, you can see why that appeals to him. And this is done at a time, remember, and we mentioned this in the last episode when we were talking about the Jesuits turning up at Vatapal Seekri. This is at a time when Akbar is showing great interest in Christianity. He's got the Jesuits at the court coming from Goa, and he nominates three particular Hindu artists to paint Christian subjects. They're called Kesudas, Basawen and his son Manohar. And these three Hindu artists specialise in Christian art for a Muslim ruler. It's all fantastically mixed up.

What is wonderful is that they are so successful, these Hindu painting masters, that the images that they are creating, these Christian images, begin to be sought after by the Portuguese in the Portuguese court back at home. So you've got sort of a Christian country saying, you know what? Art is really pretty good. Can we import some of that? So you can see that, what do we call it, soft power these days, but they have a fondness for Upbres Court because it is elevated and it is providing beauty and Christianity that is then being imported back to Europe. But what's also fascinating is that you get some of the images which they're not just adapting the Jesuits models. They're not just copying the Jesuit models. They are trying to make it

closer to the version of Christ that appears in the Quran. So there's a 16th century illuminated manuscript now in the British Library, which contains a picture of what looks at first sight, like a traditional nativity scene. In the middle is Mary, holding the Christ's child, and his arms are lovingly wrapped around his mother's neck. In the foreground, hovering nervously, are the three wise men ready to offer their gifts. And, you know, so far, so conventional, but look a little closer. And you begin to notice some strange anomalies because the wise men are dressed as Jesuits. Mary is leaning back against the bolster of a musnod, one of those low Indian thrones. And she's attended by Mughal serving girls wearing saris and dew fattas.

Tremendous, isn't it? And this is the best bit. The Christchurchase mother are sitting under a palm tree outside the gate of a Haveli, a courtyard house, all strictly in keeping with the convention in Islamic law, which maintains that Jesus was born not in a stable, but in an oasis beneath a palm tree, whose branches bend down so that the virgin could pluck the fruit during her labour. So what they're doing is they're taking a Portuguese model of the nativity, and they're altering it slightly to fit the Quranic version of the nativity. And so all these subtle sort of flows of ideas and art and theology.

But it's like an international flow of idea. I mean, it's sort of penetrating into Europe, you know, the flow back and forth is extraordinary. You can maybe sort of understand that, you know, doing it pan Asia or across India, that makes sense. But across the water, right deep into the heart of Christian Portugal, that's something very interesting going on there. And the final thing in this picture, just to finish off, is that the, In the Quranic version of the Nativity, the Christ child, still in his swaddling clothes, sits up and addresses Mary's family with the words, I am the servant of God. He has given me the O'Gosal and ordained me a prophet. His blessing is upon me wherever I go, and he has commanded me to be steadfast in prayer and to give arms to the poor as long as I lived.

It's a chatty baby. It was a chatty baby, exactly. Precocious, that was the P-word I was trying to find for you. A precocious baby, like you were a precocious, 25-year-old, right. And one scholar who's been studying all this, and particularly the work of Manohar, who's this Mughal artist who always specializes, not just in Christian subjects, but particularly in images of the Virgin. And it's been suggested, and again, you know, you can't prove this, that he was making some very particular theological points about the parallels between

the cult of Mary, the mother of God and that of the Hindu Devi or the mother goddess. Well, we talked about, you know, how Dürga prayers do mention Akbar because he was said to be taken. How interesting. So it's going round and round and round, and round. All these different worlds colliding and influencing each other and so on. Just tell me something, though, of the Akbar Nama. We talked about the Hamza Nama, which is the book of Hamza and the stories of Hamza, you know, the flying pots, not flying carpets as they before, and the dragons and the monsters. But then Akbar Nama will be the story of Akbar. And does that happen during his lifetime? Does he supervise it? are the kind of pictures that go with it? So, yes, it does begin in his lifetime. It's Abel Faisal's work. Abel Faisal is eventually assassinated. We'll come to that in a later episode. And almost immediately after the death of Abel Faisal, during the reign of Atbar, you begin to get illustrations of this.

So you're having contemporary illustrations of contemporary history going on, which is, you know, an extraordinary development. But the other thing that's happening, and this I think is very important for India today, and we need to emphasize this in the political climate of the present, is that during the reign of Akbar, Hindu temples are springing up all over, and particularly in Brage, which is the area around Fatapur-Sikri, which is connected with the cult of Krishna, it's the site of Rendavan and all the places associated with Krishna and myth, Mount Govaden, which he lifts up and uses an umbrella to shelter the cowherds and so on. But you also find, members of his court building enormous temples in Varanasi and a lot of buildings and in Puri I think

in Arisa. So a lot of the buildings which people associate very much with the Hindu world are built not directly by the emperor himself but by his courtiers like Todomal in Varanasi and by Mancing in Rundavan. And this is something my son Sam is obsessed with. I told you last time he's just done this substack called the Travels of Samwise with a long essay absolutely on this subject about how the reign of Akbar led to the largest building program of Hindu temples at any point since the 13th century. Something's completely forgotten in contemporary India where the moguls are always associated with temple destruction. And it's certainly true that at the end you've got Orang Zeb destroying many of the temples built actually during the reign of Agba.

And also reintroducing the jizzi attacks and doing, you know, sort of undoing all of that tolerance and plurality that Agba had created. But while the Orangzeb's atrocities and destruction is now something that everyone in India remembers as the biggest effect. That is what the Mughals were. That's what the Mughals were. All this mixed up stuff with Jesuits and pictures of the Nativity and mixing up the Davy and Mary and sayings of Jesus and sun worship, this incredible jumble of sort of ideas

and religious worlds that are coming together, both in art and in thought during Akbar's time, somehow that's got lost very much in the wash. And I think it's really important to remind people. Do kids get to read about this anymore in India? Will they grow up on Akbar Birabwebh stories today, the kids who are being born in India? I think Akbar and Birbal is still very much around. But certainly, I mean, the very week that we're recording this, there's been a whole massive police firing, as they call it in the newspapers, at Sambal, which is a Babur-period mosque, which has now claims that there was a temple underneath it. There's other stuff going on at Admir, where there's one of the very oldest Dargas or Sufi shrines in India. And all this, of course, gets stirred up for political purposes and ceases to be about history. There's a hashtag trending on Twitter X, which is, you know, sort of eyes on the mosques, because it's sort of, you know, there's a fear that this is the start of a domino effect of tumbling mosques, which may have been built on the remnants of temples. And if you ask people, did you know that the Welsa period of Mogul rule under Akbar, when he is issuing land grants, which allows all his most senior ministers like Todomala Man Singh to build the largest temples. built in India for a thousand years, no one knows this stuff. And so I hope that some of this

makes it out into a wider audience, because I think it's so interesting. And it, you know, it's very important to understand the grey areas of history. People and dynasties are not... Well, both things can be true. Both things can be true. You can have an Akbar, who is pluralistic and builds temples, and you can, of course, have an orings up who tears them down and terrorises, you know, the infidel in India. I was very much reminded of this complexity last weekend when I was walking around with my San Sam around Amar, the old city of Japur. And there you see all these different temples built by the Kachawa dynasty. And you see a number of things.

First of all, you see the fact that the scale of the temples and their style completely are changed once the Kachawas begin to associate themselves with the Mughals. They've got far more money. They are rich. and they're building on a far bigger scale, but also, you know, they're building temples that look like Akbar's palaces at Fatipur Secre. There's a gorgeous temple in Amer that I visited last weekend that's built by Man Singh in memory of his son, Jaggart. And then just 300 yards further on, there is a step well and a beautiful temple built in a slightly different style from slightly later from the period of Jai Singh I Singh the first, who was

Orangzeb's general in the Deccan. So it's built with the proceeds of Orangzeb's war. So you've got a Hindu temple and a stepwell built by a Jaipur ruler from the proceeds of his war with Orangzeb. And all this stuff is complex. You know, you've got a Rajput fighting for the cursed Orangzeb and building temples with the proceeds. So I think we've all got to understand the nuance of this history far more. People are not demons and angels Asaras and Devas, humans are full of grey areas. And the history of the Rajputs and the Mughals is highly complex and needs to be understood better. Well, we're coming to the end of our time together. But I just wanted to talk about one piece of art, which actually has Agba as the main character.

And it's a really rare thing. It's a drawing. It looks like a charcoal drawing of Agba. So none of the grandeur of the miniatures with Lapis lazuli. But it shows a man who looks weary and he's looking down. And pensive, isn't it? Yeah, pensive and tired and sad, actually, of anything, I think looking sad. Looking down at the ground, not meeting the painters or the sketches gaze,

looking entirely human, vulnerable and sad. I think sad is the word. Join us for the next episode where we find out where the source of that sadness may be. It may not surprise you because it is a mobile family that it's their bloody kids. She said with feeling. It's got a cold. It's got crusty nostrils. Anyway, join us for the next episode of Empire.

Until we meet again, it's goodbye from me, Anita Arnand. And goodbye from me, William Duremple.