The Religion That Never Was: Din-i-Ilahi and the Making of a Historical Myth

 

A TALE OF TWO SCHOOLCHILDREN

Let me begin with a thought experiment. Picture two children sitting in classrooms, roughly the same age, on either side of the Wagah Border. Both children are opening a history textbook. Both textbooks have a chapter on Akbar. And both — I want you to hold this image in your mind — are learning about something called Din-i-Ilahi.

The Pakistani child reads that Akbar was a misguided emperor who invented a heretical religion, who abandoned the faith of Islam, and who serves as a cautionary tale about what happens when a Muslim ruler loses his moorings.

The Indian child reads that Akbar was a visionary emperor who founded a grand syncretic tradition, who celebrated religious harmony, and who serves as a glorious ancestor-figure prefiguring Indian secularism[i].

Same emperor. Same set of historical events. Completely opposite conclusions.

How is this possible?

That, my friends, is precisely the question this article is designed to answer — not just about those two children and their textbooks, but about the layers of history, politics, memory, nationalism, and identity that have been piled onto a sixteenth-century Mughal emperor for five centuries.

And here is my first provocation for you: What if both those textbooks are wrong? What if the entire category of Din-i-Ilahi — as a religion, as a system, as something Akbar himself named and designed — is itself a historical myth?

 

By the end of this article, I want you to leave not with a simpler picture of Akbar, but with a richer one — one that is more complicated, more fascinating, more historically honest than either the Pakistani cautionary tale or the Indian secular legend. And I want you to see that the story of Din-i-Ilahi is ultimately a story about us — about what we need from history, and what we do to history when we need it too badly.

So let us begin at the most basic level. A question so fundamental that most people never think to ask it.

 

THE PROBLEM OF A NAME — DID AKBAR EVEN COIN THIS TERM?

Here is a fact that will surprise many of you. The term Din-i-Ilahi — the Divine Faith — does not appear as a self-description anywhere in the principal Mughal court chronicles that were written during Akbar's reign.

Read that again slowly. The term that has defined our understanding of Akbar's religious project was not coined by Akbar. It does not appear in the Akbarnama, the official three-volume chronicle of his reign written by his chronicler Abu'l Fazl ibn Mubarak. It does not appear in the Ain-i-Akbari, the extraordinary encyclopedic companion to the Akbarnama. It does not appear in the Tabaqat-i-Akbari of Nizamuddin Ahmad.

Abu'l Fazl, who wrote with more detail about Akbar's religious life than anyone else, consistently refers to the practices and the circle of disciples using two different expressions: sometimes tariqa — which means a path, or way, a term deeply embedded in Sufi vocabulary — and sometimes tauhid-i-Ilahi, which translates as Divine Unitarianism or Divine Monotheism. That is a very different phrase from Din-i-Ilahi.

So, where does the term 'Din-i-Ilahi' actually come from?

The earliest sustained use of the phrase as a reified label — as a fixed name for a thing called Akbar's religion — appears in a seventeenth-century Persian text called the Dabistan-i-Mazahib, which translates as the School of Religions. This is a remarkable work: it is essentially a comparative study of religious traditions, covering Hinduism, Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and several heterodox sects simultaneously. It was composed several decades after Akbar's death — probably between 1640 and 1660 — by an author whose identity remains disputed. Some scholars attribute it to a Zoroastrian named Maubad Shah; others to Zulfiqar Ardistani; others to someone called Mohsin Fani.

Even in the Dabistan, the usage is descriptive and comparative — meaning the author is looking back at something that happened in the past and trying to categorize it alongside other religious systems — rather than the emperor's own self-designation.

The crystallization of Din-i-Ilahi into a fixed historical category — a discrete religion with identifiable doctrines, rituals, and institutional boundaries — was largely the work of nineteenth-century colonial scholarship. British historians, most influentially Vincent Smith, whose Akbar the Great Mogul was published in 1917, shaped the dominant Anglophone narrative of Akbar as a religious innovator of near-Protestant ambition. Smith was writing in the tradition of Victorian liberal historiography that valued religious reform and rational governance, and he saw in Akbar a figure who conveniently mapped onto those values.

This colonial framing was then inherited — selectively appropriated and polemically weaponized — by nationalist historians on all sides of the 1947 partition. The Indian nationalists loved the syncretic Akbar. The Pakistani nationalists hated him. And both were essentially arguing about a category that a British historian had crystallized from a Persian text written decades after the emperor's death.

This is what historians call historiographical archaeology — digging through layers of interpretation to find out what actually happened beneath all the stories people have told about it.

And I want to emphasize this point because it is foundational to everything that follows: unpacking the history of the term Din-i-Ilahi is not a pedantic terminological exercise. It is absolutely essential to understanding what Akbar actually did and why generations have made such radically different things of it. If we accept the label uncritically, we have already loaded the dice.

 

THE WORLD AKBAR INHABITED — CONTEXT IS EVERYTHING

The Complexity of the Mughal Empire

Before we can understand what Akbar did and why, we need to understand the world he was trying to govern. And let me tell you, it was an astonishing world.

Akbar ascended to effective sovereignty in 1556, following the Second Battle of Panipat — won against the Hindu king Hemu by a teenage emperor with the help of his regent Bairam Khan. His empire at its height encompassed roughly 100 million subjects. One hundred million people. In the sixteenth century.

Who were these people? They were Sunni and Shia Muslims, from Kabul to Bengal. They were Hindus of virtually every sect imaginable: Vaishnavas, Shaivites, Shaktas, followers of countless regional devotional traditions. They were Jains — a significant community particularly in Gujarat and Rajasthan, disproportionately powerful in trade and finance. They were Sikhs — a young tradition, institutionally growing rapidly under the Gurus who succeeded Guru Nanak. They were Zoroastrians — the Parsis of Gujarat, ancient refugees from Persia. And there were increasing numbers of Portuguese and other European Christians in coastal trading networks and even inland missions.

Now here is the critical question for any ruler of this empire:

 How do you govern 100 million people of radically different faiths when your legitimacy as a ruler is bound up in the religious identity of only one of those communities?

 

This is the fundamental political problem of the Mughal Empire. Akbar's dynasty was Muslim — Timurid-Mughal, with deep roots in Central Asian Sunni Islam, though also heavily influenced by Safavid Persian Shia culture. His fiscal and military system depended on the cooperation of Hindu Rajput nobility — particularly the great clans of Rajputana. The commercial economy depended significantly on Jain merchants. The administrative bureaucracy was increasingly staffed by Hindus and Muslims alike. The ulama — the Muslim clergy — constituted a powerful interest group with the ability to declare a ruler un-Islamic and thereby legitimate his overthrow.

To govern this complexity required not just military superiority, not just administrative genius — though Akbar had both — but a claim to legitimacy that could transcend any single religious community's exclusive recognition. He needed every community to have a reason to accept his authority, not just the Muslims.

And this is the context in which everything that would later be called Din-i-Ilahi must be understood. It was not born in a philosophical vacuum. It was born in the pressure cooker of imperial politics.

The Timurid Heritage: A Dynasty Already Comfortable with Plurality

It also helps to understand that Akbar came from a dynasty that had never had a simple relationship with Islamic orthodoxy. His grandfather Babur invoked jihad when it was politically convenient but was equally capable of writing poetry celebrating wine — banned in Islam — and of aesthetic admiration for Hindu temples. His father Humayun spent years in exile at the Safavid court of Shah Tahmasp, returning to India with deep Shia cultural influences, even while remaining nominally Sunni.

The Timurid tradition was, in short, a cosmopolitan one. It blended Persianate literary culture, Chaghatai Turkic military identity, and Sunni Islamic legitimacy into something that had always been more complex than simple religious orthodoxy. Akbar was not departing from his dynasty's tradition when he sought religious accommodation — he was in many ways extending it.

 

The Ibadat Khana: Where It All Began

The institutional story of what we call Din-i-Ilahi begins with a building. Around 1575, at his magnificent new capital of Fatehpur Sikri — a city Akbar constructed virtually from scratch on a rocky outcrop in Rajasthan — he built what he called the Ibadat Khana, the House of Worship.

Initially, this was a forum for Muslim theological debate. Akbar would convene scholars — Sunni, Shia, Sufi — and engage them in argument, with himself serving as an unusually active and critical interlocutor. He was not, as later nationalist mythology sometimes implies, a passive beneficent host watching benignly as wise men talked. He argued. He challenged. He pushed back.

Now, I want to introduce you to two of the most important witnesses to these events, because they tell radically different stories.

The first is Abu'l Fazl ibn Mubarak — Akbar's chief chronicler, his intellectual companion, arguably the most important prose writer in Persian of his generation. Abu'l Fazl was an ideologue as much as a historian. He believed in Akbar with the intensity of a disciple who has found his master, and his accounts of the Ibadat Khana debates drip with enthusiasm.

The second is Abd al-Qadir Badauni — and this is the voice I want you to remember, because he is one of the most fascinating figures in all of Mughal historiography. Badauni was a conservative Sunni Muslim scholar who served in Akbar's court and privately detested much of what he witnessed. He wrote his chronicle — the Muntakhab ut-Tawarikh, a three-volume work — entirely in secret. He was so afraid of Akbar's reaction that he never showed it to the emperor during his lifetime.

Why does Badauni matter so much? Because his hostility makes him a less likely candidate for exaggerating in Akbar's favor. When Badauni tells us that something happened, we can be reasonably confident it happened, even if his interpretation of it is colored by his horror. He is the hostile witness who inadvertently confirms the prosecution's basic facts.

And what does Badauni tell us about the Ibadat Khana debates? He writes, with barely concealed horror, that the Muslim scholars became a laughing-stock. Their factionalism, their personal animosities, their inability to agree on basic theological questions, their willingness to insult each other in front of the emperor — all of this, Badauni records, discredited orthodox religious authority in Akbar's eyes.

Imagine being an emperor, watching the men who are supposed to guide you on God's truth spend their time calling each other heretics.

 

It seems to have been a turning point. By the early 1580s, the Ibadat Khana had been opened to non-Muslim participants. Jain monks. Hindu pandits. Zoroastrian priests. And then, dramatically, Jesuit missionaries from the Portuguese mission at Goa.

The Jesuit accounts are among our most valuable sources, because they come from educated, literate outsiders with their own clearly defined perspective. Father Antonio Monserrate — whose Commentarius, written around 1582, is an invaluable first-person account — observed Akbar's intellectual curiosity with a mixture of admiration and frustration. He found the emperor genuinely interested in Christian theology. He hoped for conversion. He noted that Akbar asked penetrating questions about Christology, about the Trinity, about the relationship between Christ and God.

But Akbar would not convert. And Monserrate, to his credit, tried to understand why. He ultimately concluded that it was precisely Akbar's openness — his ability to see value in all religious traditions simultaneously — that made him unreachable for orthodox Christianity. A man who genuinely finds merit in every religion is, from the perspective of a faith that claims exclusive truth, the most difficult kind of person to convert.

The Mahzar of 1579: The Most Misunderstood Document in Mughal History

Before we get to what Akbar actually built as a spiritual practice, I need to explain a document that is crucial and frequently misunderstood. It is called the mahzar — a formal declaration — of 1579.

This document, drafted largely by Abu'l Fazl's father Shaikh Mubarak and signed by the leading Islamic jurists of the empire, declared Akbar to be the Imam-i-Adil — the Just Imam — and granted him the authority to adjudicate disputes among Muslim jurists when they disagreed. In effect, it made the emperor, rather than any cleric or school of jurisprudence, the final authority in matters of religious interpretation within the empire.

 Was this a claim to some kind of Islamic papacy? Was this Akbar declaring himself above the religion?

 

Not quite — and the misreading of this document has caused enormous historiographical confusion. The historian Muzaffar Alam, in his important work The Languages of Political Islam in South Asia, argues compellingly that the mahzar was firmly within the tradition of Sunni political theory regarding the authority of a just ruler. Islamic jurisprudence had long recognized that in cases of genuine scholarly disagreement — what jurists call ikhtilaf — a just ruler could exercise discretion in determining which legal opinion the state would follow. This was not heresy; it was Sunni constitutional theory.

The more immediate political context is also important. The mahzar was issued at a moment when Akbar was dealing with a serious political challenge: his half-brother Mirza Muhammad Hakim, who ruled Kabul, was raising the banner of rebellion, and some elements of the clergy were lending that rebellion a veneer of Islamic legitimacy by questioning Akbar's own religious credentials. The mahzar was partly a preemptive strike — a way of delegitimizing clerical interference in politics by establishing that the emperor, not the scholars, was the final arbiter.

What the mahzar did accomplish, however — whatever its immediate political purpose — was to institutionalize the emperor's religious pre-eminence. It cleared intellectual space for what would follow: the construction of an ideology of sacred kingship by Abu'l Fazl that would reach its full elaboration in the practices we call Din-i-Ilahi.

 

WHAT ACTUALLY WAS 'DIN-I-ILAHI'?  RECONSTRUCTING THE REALITY

Now we come to the heart of the matter. Setting aside the name, setting aside the polemics — what was Akbar actually doing? What were the practices that generated so much controversy, so much celebration, and so much condemnation?

 

The Initiatic Circle: More Sufi Order Than Religion

The practices associated with Akbar's inner religious circle, as described across our primary sources, were far more modest — and far more specific — than the grandiose label 'religion' implies. They centered on a relationship of personal discipleship, called iradat in Persian — a term taken directly from the vocabulary of Sufism — between Akbar and a select group of followers.

The disciple offered a ritualized pledge of loyalty called dastur ul-amal. This pledge involved four levels of devotion: the offering of one's property (mal), one's life (jan), one's honor (namoos), and one's religion (din). The highest initiates pledged all four.

What did membership look like? The initiates received a portrait of Akbar — itself a remarkable thing, given Islam's traditional discomfort with figural representation — and a shast, a special ring or token. They wore these openly as marks of distinction. They greeted each other and the emperor with the phrase Allahu Akbar — and here I want you to pause, because this phrase is doing extraordinary double work.

Allahu Akbar conventionally means 'God is Great.' But it also contains the emperor's name: Akbar. The phrase can be read simultaneously as 'God is Great' and 'Akbar is God.' Was this ambiguity accidental? Was it a characteristic Akbaran pun — sophisticated, playful, and deeply disturbing to orthodox Muslims who understood exactly what was implied? Badauni records his horror at hearing this greeting used in court contexts. The response to the greeting was Jalla Jalalahu — May His Glory be Glorified — which was also used in reference to God alone in Islamic tradition.

Let’s pause here. Was this pun uniquely Akbaran? A 15th-century Sufi Shaikh Ahmed Abdul Haqq liked “Haqq” among names and attributes for God. His disciples would say “Haqq” while walking and conducting any social transactions. When confronted with a criticism of such a practice, the Shaikh would justify it Ibne Arabi’s arguments.

Now, let’s go back to Akbar’s circle. Members were expected to avoid meat on certain days — a Jain and Hindu influence that Akbar had absorbed particularly from the Jain monk Hiravijaya Suri, who visited the court in 1582 and made a profound impression. They were expected to worship the sun and fire — Zoroastrian influences mediated through the ancient Iranian heritage of Persianate culture. Badauni's accounts of Akbar prostrating before the sun are among the most vividly horrified passages in his chronicle.

Akbar also introduced a new calendar — the Tarikh-i-Ilahi, a solar calendar that began from his own accession to the throne, replacing the Islamic lunar Hijri calendar for official court purposes. This was a profound symbolic statement: the emperor was repositioning himself as the axis of cosmic time, not merely a ruler who governed within the framework of Islamic sacred history.

But wait — does this sound like a religion to you?

 

Think about what a religion actually requires. A religion needs a theology — a coherent system of beliefs about God, the cosmos, and human beings. A religion needs scripture — texts that encode authoritative teachings. A religion needs some form of priesthood or institution to transmit and preserve those teachings. A religion needs rituals accessible to a community, not just an inner circle. A religion needs the ambition to grow, to include new members, to spread.

Now look at what Akbar's circle had. It had a handful of practices — perhaps a dozen initiates at the inner circle, a few dozen at most in the broader group. Abu'l Fazl's own lists of initiates are strikingly short. It had no scripture. It had no priesthood. It had no mosques, no temples, no places of communal worship. It had no missionaries. It made no attempt at mass conversion. It addressed only the emperor's immediate companions who, in fact, continued practising their original religions.

This is not what religions do. This is not how religions begin, even small ones. What Akbar built was something structurally very different from a religion.

An important piece of evidence against the idea of Tauhid-I-Ilahi as a religion comes from none other than Mansingh, Akbar’s most trusted and celebrated military general. Even five years after the “supposed” initiation of the scheme, when Akbar discusses membership in his inner circle, Mansingh replies, “If Discipleship means willingness to sacrifice one’s life, I have already carried my life in my hand—what need is there for further proof?... If, however, the term has another meaning and refers to faith, I certainly am a Hindu. If you order me to do so, I will become a Musalman, but I know not of the existence of any other religion than these two.”

 

The Sufi Key: Understanding the Real Framework

The framework that makes the most sense of everything we have described is not 'religion' — it is Sufi silsila, the initiatic chain of a Sufi brotherhood.

In a Sufi order, the shaikh or murshid — the spiritual master — accepts murids, disciples, who pledge total devotion and obedience. In return, the master shares his baraka, his spiritual grace, and guides the disciple toward elevated spiritual states. The disciple's surrender to the master is explicitly described in Sufi literature as the surrender of one's property, life, honor, and self — exactly the four levels of the dastur ul-amal in Akbar's circle.

Akbar came from a lineage with deep Sufi connections. The Timurid dynasty maintained close ties with the Naqshbandi order — one of the great Central Asian Sufi brotherhoods. More personally, Akbar was a devoted follower of the Chishti saint Muin ud-Din Chishti of Ajmer, making celebrated pilgrimages to the shrine on foot. The Chishti order had a long tradition of openness to non-Muslim devotional practices — music, poetry, ecstatic worship — that made them the most culturally flexible of the major Indian Sufi brotherhoods.

In the Sufi framework, what Akbar was building was a silsila with himself as the shaikh. He was placing himself at the head of an initiatic chain — and Abu'l Fazl was constructing the philosophical vocabulary to explain why this was not merely plausible but cosmically appropriate.

 

Abu'l Fazl: The Ideological Architect

I have mentioned Abu'l Fazl several times. Now I need to give him the extended attention he deserves, because no understanding of Din-i-Ilahi is complete without understanding that it was as much his creation as Akbar's.

Abu'l Fazl ibn Mubarak was one of the great prose stylists of the Persian language in any century. He was also a sophisticated political philosopher and a man with deeply personal reasons for the ideology he constructed. His father, Shaikh Mubarak, had himself faced accusations of apostasy for his freethinking philosophical positions — positions influenced by the Iranian philosopher Mir Fathullah Shirazi and by the mystical traditions of Ibn Arabi. Growing up in a household that had experienced the violence and terror of clerical persecution made Abu'l Fazl permanently hostile to the institutional ulama.

The prefaces, or dibachas, of both the Akbarnama and the Ain-i-Akbari are not merely literary flourishes. They are extraordinarily dense philosophical texts in which Abu'l Fazl constructs Akbar as two things simultaneously.

First, Akbar as Farr-i-Izadi — the bearer of divine light, a concept derived from Zoroastrian-Persianate traditions of sacred kingship going back to the ancient Iranian concept of khvarenah, the divine glory that descends on righteous kings. This tradition had been flowing through Persian literature for centuries, from the Shahnameh of Ferdowsi through the Timurid court poets, and Abu'l Fazl deploys it to situate Akbar within a framework of cosmic kingship that transcends any single religious tradition.

Second, Akbar as Insan-i-Kamil — the Perfect Man. This is a central concept in the mystical philosophy of Ibn Arabi, the great Andalusian Sufi thinker of the thirteenth century. The Insan-i-Kamil is the spiritually perfected human being who serves as the axis of the cosmos — the point at which the divine and human meet, the mediator between God and creation. Ibn Arabi had reserved this role for the great prophets and saints. Abu'l Fazl claims it for Akbar.

The crucial political implication of Abu'l Fazl's construction is this: if the emperor is the source of religious meaning — the cosmic axis, the bearer of divine light, the Perfect Man — then no cleric, no scholar, no member of the ulama can legitimately claim authority above him. By making Akbar the source rather than the subject of religious authority, Abu'l Fazl achieved something of extraordinary political value: the permanent neutralization of clerical power.

Scholars including Aziz Ahmad and, more recently, Sanjay Subrahmanyam and Muzaffar Alam, have rightly emphasized that what we call Din-i-Ilahi cannot be separated from this ideological project. It was as much a political theory as a spiritual practice — perhaps more so.

 

The Illuminationist Philosophy: The Intellectual Glue

The philosophical tradition that provided the intellectual scaffolding for all of this was ishraqiyya — Illuminationist philosophy, derived primarily from the twelfth-century Iranian philosopher Shihab al-Din Suhrawardi, who constructed an elaborate metaphysics of light in which divine illumination descends through hierarchical levels of being, accessible to those who purify themselves sufficiently to receive it. This tradition was deeply embedded in Persian literary and court culture, and it gave Abu'l Fazl a ready-made vocabulary for describing Akbar as a being of exceptional spiritual luminosity.

The principle of sulh-i-kull — universal peace, or peace with all — that Abu'l Fazl articulates in the Ain-i-Akbari is the political expression of this philosophy. It is not a statement of relativism or the idea that all religions are equally true. Rather, it is a claim that a spiritually enlightened ruler can perceive the underlying unity of truth that appears, in its various partial manifestations, as the different world religions. This is a hierarchical idea — it places the emperor above all religions, as the one who sees what ordinary believers cannot — not an egalitarian one.

 

HOW DID CONTEMPORARIES ACTUALLY REACT?

Now that we have established what Akbar's religious circle actually was, let us ask a question that is absolutely essential to honest history:

 How did the people who actually lived through this — Muslims, Hindus, Jains, Sikhs, Christians — actually respond to what Akbar was doing?

 

The answer is far more nuanced than both the celebratory and the condemnatory traditions of later history suggest.

 

Muslim Responses: Not a Monolith

Let me begin with Muslim responses, because this is where the most significant controversy has been generated. The first thing to say is that Muslim reactions were neither monolithic nor primarily characterized by the outrage that later historiography implies.

Badauni's chronicle — the source most frequently cited by those who want to emphasize Muslim horror at Akbar's practices — is invaluable but must be read with caution. Badauni was personally conservative, deeply invested in Sunni orthodoxy, and in a state of barely suppressed fury for much of his career at court. He was also engaged in fierce personal rivalry with Abu'l Fazl, whom he despised. His chronicle is the account of a deeply unhappy insider who felt that everything he valued was being undermined. That does not make him wrong — but it does mean we cannot take his horror as representative of all Muslim opinion at court.

Consider, by contrast, Abdur Rahim Khan-i-Khanan — one of the most powerful and celebrated nobles in Akbar's empire, commander of vast armies, son of Bairam Khan. Khan-i-Khanan was a devout Muslim. He was also a patron of multiple literary traditions, and he composed some of the most beautiful devotional poetry in Braj Bhasha — the Hindi dialect closely associated with Vaishnava Hindu worship. He remained in Akbar's service without any recorded crisis of conscience over the emperor's religious experiments.

The court's multi-layered religious culture accommodated a wide range of Muslim practice rather than demanding adherence to Akbar's personal spiritual path. The initiates of the tauhid-i-Ilahi were a tiny inner circle — a few dozen at most — not the emperor's entire Muslim population. The vast majority of Muslims at court continued to pray, fast, and observe Islamic practice without being required to join Akbar's spiritual circle.

Significant external Muslim criticism came from two sources. The Ottoman scholar Mustafa Ali, writing around 1599, expressed concern about Akbar's innovations — but within a framework of diplomatic counsel, not religious condemnation. The Uzbek ruler Abdullah Khan II was more hostile, but his hostility was at least as much geopolitical as theological: he was looking for a pretext to delegitimize a rival, and Akbar's alleged irreligion served that purpose.

The most significant internal Muslim critique came not from within Akbar's reign but from slightly after it. Shaikh Ahmad Sirhindi — the Naqshbandi mystic often called Mujaddid Alf-i-Sani, the Renovator of the Second Millennium — wrote letters of deep alarm about the erosion of the Shari'a and the elevation of non-Islamic practices at court. But here is a crucial historical point that is often missed: Sirhindi's major writings were directed primarily at the court of Jahangir, Akbar's successor, not at Akbar himself. His critique was of a broader court culture that he found religiously permissive — not a specific condemnation of Din-i-Ilahi as a named institution.

 

Hindu Responses: Engagement Without Submission

The Hindu response to Akbar's religious experiments is complicated by a fundamental source problem: we have almost no Hindu-authored texts that engage directly with what we call Din-i-Ilahi. The Mughal court generated Persian chronicles. It did not, generally speaking, generate Sanskrit or vernacular commentaries on the emperor's spiritual innovations.

What we can reconstruct comes from indirect evidence. The Rajput nobles who entered matrimonial alliance with the Mughals — the Kachhawa clan of Amber most prominently — operated within the court with apparent ease. Man Singh, Akbar's most celebrated general, was a devout Vaishnava Hindu who simultaneously commanded Mughal armies across the subcontinent. His women were among Akbar's wives. He seems to have experienced no existential contradiction in this dual loyalty.

The Jain contribution to Akbar's religious thought is among the most well-documented of all the non-Muslim inputs. The monk Hiravijaya Suri visited the court in 1582 and had an extended series of conversations with Akbar that the Jain source — the Hiravijaya Suri Rasa by Jinasundara Suri — records with evident pride. The discussions led to tangible policy outcomes: Akbar issued orders restricting animal slaughter during the Jain festival of Paryushana, banned the caging of birds at certain times, and showed intense interest in the Jain doctrine of anekantavada — the many-sidedness of truth — a philosophical principle stating that any statement about reality is necessarily partial and perspectival. One wonders if this principle resonated with an emperor who was himself trying to hold multiple religious truths in suspension simultaneously.

The bhakti movement — the great devotional revolution transforming Hindu religiosity across northern India — provides important comparative context. The nirguna tradition of Kabir, which emphasized a formless divine accessible through direct personal experience rather than ritual or caste, resonated in certain ways with the spiritualized monotheism of Akbar's circle. The great Vaishnava poet Tulsidas composed his Ramcharitmanas — the beloved retelling of the Ramayana in Hindi — during Akbar's reign. Some scholars have read Tulsidas as offering an implicit cultural resistance to Mughal hegemony, but Philip Lutgendorf's careful study of that text demonstrates that Tulsidas was operating in a religious register largely independent of the imperial court, neither submissive to it nor in active dialogue with it.

 

The Sikh Encounter: Respect Without Convergence

The relationship between Akbar and the nascent Sikh community is historically documented and genuinely significant — though it is often romanticized in ways that obscure its actual character.

It is recorded that Akbar visited the third Sikh Guru, Guru Amar Das, at Goindval, probably around 1567. The encounter is remembered warmly in Sikh tradition. Akbar is said to have tasted langar — the Sikh community kitchen that serves food to all without distinction of caste, wealth, or religion — and to have been impressed by its egalitarian spirit. This is entirely plausible: langar embodies principles that resonated with Akbar's own inclusive instincts.

Guru Arjan Dev, the fifth Sikh Guru, secured land grants during Akbar's reign that helped fund the construction of Harmandir Sahib at Amritsar — what we know today as the Golden Temple. The relationship between the Mughal state and the Sikh sangat during this period was one of considerable warmth.

But here is what I want you to notice: there is no evidence that the Sikh Gurus regarded Akbar's personal spiritual circle with religious interest or theological affinity. The Guru Granth Sahib — compiled by Guru Arjan Dev and ceremonially installed in Harmandir Sahib in 1604, the year before Akbar's death — contains compositions that reject both Hindu ritualism and Muslim orthodoxy in favor of direct, unmediated devotion to the Waheguru. This stance has surface resonances with certain aspects of Akbar's tauhid-i-Ilahi — both emphasize direct devotion over institutional mediation — but the Sikh tradition was institutionally entirely independent of Akbar's circle, theologically rooted in the revelations of the Gurus rather than in the emperor's personal spiritual authority.

The relationship between Akbar and the Sikhs was, in short, one of political accommodation and mutual respect — not religious convergence. The Sikh Gurus were not disciples of Akbar. They were leaders of a separate and sovereign spiritual community who found in Akbar a ruler wise enough to give them space.

 

The Jesuit Mirror: An Outsider's Clarity

I want to return briefly to the Jesuit accounts, because they offer something uniquely valuable: the perspective of educated outsiders with absolutely no stake in Indian religious politics.

Father Monserrate's frustration with Akbar is, in retrospect, deeply illuminating. He could not understand why a man so intellectually curious about Christianity would not simply convert. His conclusion — that Akbar's openness was itself the obstacle — gets at something profound about the emperor's religious stance. Akbar was not an agnostic or a skeptic. He seems to have been genuinely, intensely religious. But his religiosity was oriented toward what lay behind and beneath the specific claims of any particular tradition — toward divine unity experienced through multiple paths simultaneously.

From the Jesuit perspective, this was precisely the problem. Christianity, like Islam, is a faith that makes exclusive truth claims. A man who finds merit in all religions is not a man who has found the true one. And so the Jesuits left Fatehpur Sikri and Lahore — where Akbar moved his court in later years — without the conversion they had hoped for, but with accounts that remain among the most vivid descriptions of Akbar's religious personality that we possess.

 

The Zoroastrian Dimension: The Sun and the Sacred Fire

The Zoroastrian influence on Akbar is an understudied dimension of this story that deserves more attention than it typically receives. A delegation of Zoroastrian priests — mobads — was brought to court around 1578 from Navsari in Gujarat, one of the great centers of Parsi scholarship and religious learning in India. They introduced Akbar to Zoroastrian philosophy: the veneration of the sacred fire, the worship of the sun as the supreme manifestation of Ahura Mazda, and the ethical framework of the Gathas, the ancient hymns attributed to Zarathustra.

Their influence is directly visible in the practices of the court. Akbar maintained a perpetual sacred flame in the palace. He performed what looked like sun-worship — a practice that Badauni found almost impossible to describe in his chronicle without resorting to expressions of undisguised horror. And the Tarikh-i-Ilahi solar calendar was itself a Zoroastrian-inflected symbolic statement about the emperor's relationship to cosmic order.

It is worth remembering that for the Persian literary tradition that Akbar inhabited, Zoroastrian elements were not entirely foreign. The great national epic of Persian literature, the Shahnameh, is suffused with pre-Islamic Iranian mythology and Zoroastrian symbolism. For Persianate court culture, these were not alien intrusions — they were part of the civilizational inheritance.

 

1947 AND THE POLITICS OF AKBAR'S MEMORY

We now come to the part of this story that I suspect is most personally resonant for many of you. Because the question of what Din-i-Ilahi meant did not end with Akbar's death in 1605. It was reborn — and transformed beyond recognition — with the partition of British India in August 1947.

Partition did not just divide a subcontinent. It divided a history.

 

Three nation-states emerged from 1947: India, Pakistan, and — after 1971 — Bangladesh. Each of them needed a history that justified their existence. Each of them looked at the Mughal past and found what they needed. And Akbar — specifically, what people called Din-i-Ilahi — became one of the most contested battlegrounds of this historical revision.

 

India: Akbar as the Secular Prophet

Independent India faced a profound challenge of self-definition. The founding ideology of the Indian National Congress had been one of multi-religious unity — the insistence that Hindus and Muslims, Sikhs and Christians, could all be Indians together. The horror of partition — the largest mass migration in human history, accompanied by catastrophic communal violence — made this ideology simultaneously more necessary and more difficult to sustain.

The Nehruvian vision of Indian secularism required historical anchors. It needed to demonstrate that religious coexistence was not a Western imposition or a naive ideal, but something rooted in India's own deepest traditions. It needed to show that Hindu-Muslim unity had worked — had genuinely existed — at some point in the past. And Akbar became the preeminent Mughal avatar of this vision.

Jawaharlal Nehru's The Discovery of India, though written in prison during the colonial period and published in 1946, was enormously influential in establishing Akbar as a symbol of composite culture — what Hindi would later call ganga-jamuni tehzeeb, the culture of the confluence. Nehru's Akbar is a visionary statesman who anticipated the modern Indian ideal of secular democracy — which is, of course, a magnificent anachronism, but historically useful anachronisms have long lives.

This reading was elaborated and academically buttressed by historians associated with the secular-nationalist tradition. Irfan Habib — perhaps the greatest Mughal economic historian of the twentieth century, whose Agrarian System of the Mughal Empire remains foundational — situated Akbar's religious policy within a framework of rational state-building consistent with materialist historiography. Satish Chandra's textbooks, which formed the basis of secondary education for generations of Indian students, presented Din-i-Ilahi as an expression of Akbar's sincere commitment to religious harmony, hedged with appropriate academic qualification but essentially celebratory.

The Indian nationalist appropriation of Akbar found its most culturally powerful expression not in academic history but in popular culture. The Akbar-Birbal folklore tradition — the vast, beloved cycle of stories celebrating the wisdom of Akbar's Hindu minister Birbal — performed an extraordinary cultural function. These stories imagined Hindu-Muslim friendship as natural, joyful, and mutually enriching. They placed an emperor and a Brahmin in a relationship of genuine intellectual partnership and warm affection. They taught generations of Indian children that there was nothing inherently contradictory about a Muslim emperor and a Hindu wit being the best of companions.

But was this nationalist Akbar without costs?

 

Absolutely not. And here the critique must be honest, even for those of us who are sympathetic to the secular-nationalist project.

The celebration of Akbar as the syncretic hero implicitly required the construction of an antithesis — a 'bad Mughal' against whom Akbar's virtues could shine more brightly. That antithesis was Aurangzeb, Akbar's great-grandson, who ruled from 1658 to 1707 and whose reign was characterized by a stricter Islamic orthodoxy. The binary of Akbar-the-good versus Aurangzeb-the-bad became so embedded in Indian nationalist historiography that it seriously distorted the historical record on both sides — constructing an implausibly perfect Akbar and an implausibly villainous Aurangzeb. Audrey Truschke's recent biography of Aurangzeb is a necessary corrective to the Indian nationalist tradition's treatment of that emperor.

More fundamentally, the reading of Din-i-Ilahi as proto-secularism was itself a form of historical distortion. Akbar had no concept of the secular state. He did not believe in the separation of religion and politics. He was not working from a philosophical commitment to the principles of religious liberty that would later be enshrined in the Indian Constitution. He was an emperor who made pragmatic decisions about religious inclusion because those decisions served his imperial interests — and who surrounded those decisions with an ideology of sacred kingship that placed him above all religions rather than outside them. That is a very different thing from secularism.

 

Pakistan: Akbar as the Cautionary Tale

Now let us cross the border. And I want to ask you, those of you who were educated in Pakistan or familiar with Pakistani textbooks, to think about what you were taught.

The Pakistani nationalist construction of history required precisely the opposite move from India's. The founding ideology of Pakistan rested on the two-nation theory — the argument that Hindus and Muslims constituted separate civilizational entities whose political interests could not be adequately represented in a single democratic state. Within this ideological framework, Akbar's religious syncretism was not an achievement to be celebrated. It was a deviation to be lamented — evidence of what happens when a Muslim ruler loses clarity about his identity and begins accommodating Hindu influences.

Pakistani textbooks, particularly those produced after the 1971 war and especially during the Zia ul-Haq period from 1977 to 1988, presented Akbar in explicitly negative terms. Din-i-Ilahi was taught as apostasy — an emperor who invented a self-serving cult that contradicted the basic principles of Islamic faith. Aurangzeb was correspondingly elevated: his reimposition of the jizya, his demolition of certain temples, his stricter enforcement of Islamic legal codes — all of this, which Indian nationalist history condemned as religious bigotry, Pakistani nationalist history celebrated as principled Islamic governance.

The scholar K.K. Aziz conducted a devastating study of this phenomenon. His book The Murder of History, published in 1993, examined Pakistani textbooks in exhaustive detail and documented how they systematically distorted Mughal history — fabricating quotes, misrepresenting events, constructing a teleological narrative in which Islamic purity was constantly threatened by Hindu influence, with Akbar serving as the prime exhibit of Muslim vulnerability to syncretic contamination.

Aziz's title — 'The Murder of History' — is perhaps the most apposite phrase in the entire historiographical literature on this subject. It captures exactly what happens when political ideology is permitted to override historical evidence: the past is not merely misinterpreted, it is actively killed, replaced by a mythological substitute that serves present needs.

But here I must add a crucial nuance, because the Pakistani intellectual tradition is not monolithic. Scholars like Mubarak Ali have written critically within Pakistan about how political ideology has shaped Mughal historiography, arguing against the crude textbook narrative. And the poet-philosopher Muhammad Iqbal — one of the intellectual fathers of the idea of Pakistan — had a complex and ambivalent relationship with Mughal history that does not fit the simple textbook condemnation.

Iqbal admired certain aspects of Mughal cultural achievement. His engagement with Persian poetry, with Rumi, with the Timurid aesthetic tradition — all of this represents a relationship with the Persianate past that the later Pakistani state found inconvenient. The Iqbal of the poetry is a richer, more ambivalent figure than the Iqbal of the Pakistan Resolution, and his relationship to Akbar's cultural legacy is correspondingly complex.

There is a tragic irony here that Pakistani intellectual history has not fully reckoned with: a state founded partly on Iqbal's vision proceeded to destroy exactly the kind of syncretic cultural richness that Iqbal's poetry celebrated.

 

Bangladesh: A Third Way?

Bangladesh occupies a unique and insufficiently studied position in this historiographical story. The Bengali Muslim identity that crystallized through the Language Movement of 1952 and came to full political expression in the Liberation War of 1971 was premised on a crucial insight: that linguistic and cultural identity could be prior to religious identity, that being Bengali mattered more — or at least differently — than being Muslim in the Pakistani sense.

This does not mean that Bangladesh is secular in the Indian sense, or that Bengali Muslim identity is not genuinely Muslim. But it does mean that the Bangladeshi relationship to Mughal history is mediated by a set of concerns quite different from either the Indian secular-nationalist or the Pakistani Islamic-nationalist framework.

In Bangladeshi historical discourse, Akbar appears primarily within the larger framework of Mughal administration in Bengal — a framework that emphasizes the Mughal state's relationship with local zamindars, with the vast riverine geography of Bengal, with the syncretic folk traditions of the region. The question of whether Din-i-Ilahi was a religion or a political theory is less urgent in Dhaka than the question of how the Mughal state administered what is now Bangladesh and what legacies that administration left in Bengali culture.

The Bengali historian Ramesh Chandra Majumdar — writing within an Indian nationalist framework but with characteristic independence of mind — offered a critique of Akbar that differed from the Nehruvian hagiography: he saw Akbar's Hindu-Muslim synthesis as ultimately superficial and insufficiently transformative of underlying social structures. This Bengali critical tradition, which valued rigor over nationalist mythology, has arguably served Bangladesh's historians better than the simpler narratives available on either side of the partition.

 

The Hindu Nationalist Response: A Fourth Reading

For completeness, I must mention a fourth interpretive tradition that has grown in influence in India, particularly since the 1980s: the Hindu nationalist, or Hindutva, reading of Akbar.

For the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and allied organizations, Akbar's marriages to Rajput women, his reception of Hindu cultural practices at court, and Din-i-Ilahi itself are interpreted in a strikingly different way from the secular nationalist tradition. Rather than celebrating Akbar as a syncretic visionary, Hindutva historiography tends to read his accommodation of Hindu practices as evidence of Hindu civilization's irresistible cultural gravity — even the most powerful Muslim emperors, this argument runs, were ultimately drawn toward Hindu truth.

Din-i-Ilahi, in this reading, proves not that Islam and Hinduism can coexist on equal terms, but that Hindu civilization inevitably assimilates those who come in contact with it. This is as historically untenable as the secular-nationalist reading, but it serves a different political purpose: it positions Hinduism as civilizationally dominant rather than merely co-equal.

What all four of these readings — Indian secular, Pakistani Islamic, Bangladeshi cultural-nationalist, and Hindu nationalist — share is this: they are all using Akbar as a mirror. They are all projecting contemporary political anxieties backward onto a sixteenth-century emperor. And they are all, to varying degrees, distorting the historical record in the process.

 

WHAT DO MODERN HISTORIANS ACTUALLY THINK?

After everything we have been through — the colonial construction of the term, the Mughal court's actual practices, the diverse contemporary reactions, the post-partition nationalist distortions — where does the scholarly consensus stand today?

Let me walk you through the major revisionist interventions of the past three decades, because they represent some of the most important advances in South Asian historiography.

 

Muzaffar Alam and the Islamic Political Tradition

Muzaffar Alam's work — particularly his The Languages of Political Islam in South Asia — has been essential in repositioning our understanding of Akbar's religious policy within, rather than against, the Islamic political tradition. Alam demonstrates that what Akbar did was not as radical a departure from Islamicate governance as either his admirers or his critics have claimed.

The subordination of clerical authority to royal sovereignty was not an invention of Akbar's — it was a recurrent theme in Sunni political thought, particularly in the tradition associated with scholars like al-Mawardi, who argued that the just ruler could exercise considerable discretion in managing the intersection of politics and religion. Akbar's mahzar of 1579, rather than being a revolutionary breach, was an unusually explicit articulation of an authority that Sunni theory had always granted to the imam, the just ruler.

This does not mean that Akbar's practices were uncontroversial — they clearly were, and the controversy was real. But it does mean that placing them within an entirely alien category — 'not Islamic,' 'a new religion,' 'apostasy' — misrepresents both the complexity of Islamic political thought and the nature of what Akbar was actually doing.

 

Sanjay Subrahmanyam and the Connected Early Modern World

Sanjay Subrahmanyam's work on connected history — the idea that we cannot understand individual regions in isolation from global currents of the early modern period — offers a beautiful and underutilized lens for understanding Akbar.

Consider this: the sixteenth century was an age of intense religious experimentation and reformation across the entire connected world. The Ottoman Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent was constructing novel relationships between Islamic sovereignty and legal plurality in Istanbul. Philip II of Spain was managing the impossible contradictions of a Catholic empire that included Moriscos, conversos, Protestants in the Netherlands, and indigenous peoples in the Americas. The Safavid Shahs were imposing Shia Islam on a largely Sunni Persian population with enormous violence. And in Wittenberg and Geneva and Rome, the great convulsions of the Protestant Reformation and the Catholic Counter-Reformation were reshaping European religious life permanently.

Akbar was not alone in his century in grappling with the relationship between sovereignty and religious plurality. He was one of a generation of rulers across the connected world who faced, each in their own way, the question of how to govern religiously diverse populations with stable authority. Seen in this global context, Akbar's experiments appear less eccentric and more intelligible — a sophisticated South Asian response to a challenge that every great early modern empire faced.

 

Shahab Ahmad and the Balkans-to-Bengal Complex

The philosopher Shahab Ahmad, in his posthumously published What Is Islam? The Importance of Being Islamic, offers what I consider the most philosophically sophisticated framework for understanding Akbar's cultural context. Ahmad argues that the religious culture of what he calls the 'Balkans-to-Bengal complex' — the broad arc of the Islamicate world from southeastern Europe to South Asia — was characterized by a tremendous range of meaning-making practices, most of which operated on registers entirely different from the normative-legal Islam of the ulama.

Within this framework, Persianate court culture — its poetry, its painting, its music, its philosophical mysticism — was not a deviation from Islam but a central and constitutive expression of it. The courtly culture that produced Akbar's religious experiments was not marginal to Islamic civilization in the early modern period; it was in many respects its most brilliant manifestation. Akbar's practices, seen through Ahmad's lens, appear unusual in degree but not entirely foreign in kind.

 

Audrey Truschke and the Sanskrit Dimension

Audrey Truschke's Culture of Encounters: Sanskrit at the Mughal Court provides another essential dimension. By examining Sanskrit texts produced for and in dialogue with the Mughal court — translations of Persian texts into Sanskrit, Sanskrit panegyrics for Mughal emperors, the work of Brahmin scholars who participated in Mughal patronage networks — Truschke demonstrates that the cultural exchange was genuine, bidirectional, and intellectually serious.

Brahmin scholars were not merely humoring a Muslim emperor. They were engaging, translating, adapting, and sometimes subtly subverting the Mughal cultural enterprise. And the Mughal court was not merely tolerating Hindu culture — it was genuinely curious about it, funding its translation and preservation. This picture of genuine intellectual exchange is more nuanced and more interesting than either the nationalist narrative of imposed Muslim culture or the Hindu nationalist narrative of irresistible Hindu assimilation.

 

John Richards and the Pragmatic Synthesis

John F. Richards's The Mughal Empire in the Cambridge History series provides the most balanced general synthesis for the general reader. Richards presents Akbar's religious policy as pragmatic imperial strategy rather than either sincere spiritual innovation or cynical political manipulation. This is a nuanced position that refuses the binary of 'genuine believer' versus 'cynical politician.'

The truth is that Akbar was probably both. His intellectual curiosity about religious questions seems to have been genuine — the breadth of his reading, his engagement in debate, his evident emotional response to religious beauty across traditions, all suggest authentic spiritual searching. At the same time, the institutional forms that searching took — the mahzar, the Tarikh-i-Ilahi, the discipleship circle — served obvious political purposes. These two things are not contradictory. History is full of rulers whose genuine personal convictions conveniently aligned with their political interests.

 

THE DIMENSIONS WE HAVEN'T TALKED ABOUT

The Women of the Zenana: A Silence in the Sources

Here I want to point to one of the most significant silences in the entire literature on Din-i-Ilahi — a silence that tells its own story about whose experiences historians have prioritized.

Akbar had a large zenana — the harem, the women's quarters of the Mughal palace — that included wives and concubines of diverse religious backgrounds: Rajput Hindu women, Muslim women, reportedly at least one Christian. These women lived at the center of the Mughal court. Their children would become emperors. Their daily lives intersected constantly with the religious experiments being conducted around them.

What did they think? Did they participate in the practices of tauhid-i-Ilahi? Did they resist? Did they maintain their own religious practices — Hindu puja, Muslim salah, Christian prayer — privately in the zenana while the emperor conducted his syncretic experiments publicly?

We largely do not know, because the chronicles were written by men, for men, about men. The women of the zenana appear in the sources primarily as objects of alliance politics, as mothers of important children, as occasional subjects of charitable acts. Their inner religious lives are almost completely invisible.

Ruby Lal's Domesticity and Power in the Early Mughal World opens this question with intelligence and care. But as Lal herself acknowledges, the sources do not permit us to answer it fully. The silence is itself a historical fact — evidence of what the male gaze of Mughal court literature systematically excluded.

 

The Political Economy of Religious Pluralism

A dimension frequently underemphasized in the religious history of Din-i-Ilahi is its relationship to Akbar's fiscal and administrative reforms. Let me make this connection explicit.

When Akbar abolished the jizya — the poll tax on non-Muslim subjects — in 1564, this was not simply an act of religious tolerance. It was a fiscal decision of enormous consequence. The jizya had provided a significant stream of revenue. Abolishing it meant that Akbar was forgoing that revenue — a statement that he was willing to bear a real economic cost for the sake of religious inclusion. Conversely, it was also a powerful symbolic statement to the Hindu majority population that their emperor valued their participation in the imperial project sufficiently to remove a marker of their second-class status.

Similarly, the consolidation of Rajput alliance through marriage and military partnership was simultaneously religious accommodation and geopolitical strategy of the highest order. The Rajput clans controlled strategic territories across Rajputana that would have been enormously expensive to conquer and hold by force. Turning them into allies through marriage and the sharing of military glory was not charity — it was among the most brilliant political investments of Akbar's reign.

Din-i-Ilahi, understood within this framework, was one component of a broader political economy of religious pluralism — not merely an expression of personal piety, but a dimension of state policy that had concrete material consequences. This reading does not diminish Akbar's achievement; if anything, it makes it more impressive. A religious tolerance that costs nothing is easy. A religious tolerance that requires fiscal sacrifice, military alliance, and the alienation of one's orthodox clergy is another thing entirely.

 

The Final Question: Was Akbar a Muslim?

I cannot close this lecture without addressing the question that haunts all of this discussion. It was asked by sixteenth-century critics. It was asked in Pakistani textbooks. It is still asked today.

Did Akbar's religious experiments constitute apostasy from Islam? Was he, by the end of his life, still a Muslim?

 

This question has no historically satisfying answer, and I want to explain precisely why.

The question imposes a rigid categorical boundary — you are either Muslim or not Muslim — that was itself contested and historically constructed in Akbar's own time. The boundary between acceptable Islamic heterodoxy and actual apostasy has been disputed among Muslim scholars for as long as Islam has existed. Different legal schools draw that boundary differently. Different Sufi traditions extend it in different directions. The great controversies over Ibn Arabi's orthodoxy, over the execution of al-Hallaj, over the permissibility of music and dance in worship — all of these debates demonstrate that 'Muslim' has never been a simple, uncontested category with clear and universally agreed boundaries.

What we can say historically is this: Akbar never publicly renounced Islam. He continued to have the khutba — the Friday sermon — read in his name throughout his reign, which is one of the key markers of Islamic sovereignty. He was buried according to Islamic rites. He called himself, in certain contexts, Amir ul-Momineen — the Commander of the Faithful, a title with deep Islamic constitutional significance.

At the same time, he systematically subordinated clerical Islam's institutional authority to imperial sovereignty. He denied the finality of religious authority as the exclusive source of religious truth. He adopted practices drawn from Zoroastrianism, Jainism, and Hinduism that orthodox Muslim opinion found deeply troubling. He constructed an ideology of sacred kingship that drew on multiple religious traditions simultaneously.

Whether this constitutes apostasy is a theological question, not a historical one. The historian's job is not to pass judgment on whether Akbar was a good Muslim. The historian's job is to describe, as accurately as possible, what he believed and did, and to explain why his contemporaries and successors have found that legacy so profoundly, persistently, and irresolvably contested.

The answer to that last question — why the contest is so persistent — is what this entire article has been about.

 

CONCLUSION: THE MIRROR AND THE EMPEROR

Din-i-Ilahi, it turns out, tells us as much about us as it does about Akbar.

 

Let me bring everything together.

Akbar did not coin the term Din-i-Ilahi. It was applied to his practices after his death, solidified by colonial scholarship, and then weaponized by nationalist historiography on multiple sides of the partition divide.

The practices actually associated with Akbar's inner circle were not a religion in any meaningful sociological sense. They were a Sufi initiatic framework — a discipleship circle with Akbar at the center — elaborated into an ideology of sacred kingship by his chief intellectual Abu'l Fazl. They had no scripture, no priesthood, no institutional structure, no missionary ambition, and no more than a few dozen initiates at their height.

Contemporary reactions were far more diverse and nuanced than later polemics suggest. Many Muslims accommodated the practices or ignored them. Hindus, Jains, and Sikhs engaged with Akbar on their own terms without submitting to his spiritual authority. The Jesuits admired him and could not convert him. The Zoroastrians contributed their fire and their philosophy and went home.

After 1947, Din-i-Ilahi became a battlefield of identity politics. India celebrated it as proto-secularism. Pakistan condemned it as apostasy. Bangladesh approached it with relative indifference, more interested in Bengali cultural particularity than in imperial court religion. Hindu nationalists appropriated it as evidence of Hindu civilizational gravity. All of these readings were distortions — some more egregious than others, but none of them innocent.

Modern historiography — the work of Muzaffar Alam, Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Shahab Ahmad, Audrey Truschke, Richard Eaton, and others — has done the patient, difficult work of recovering the historical Akbar from beneath these accumulated layers of political myth. The picture that emerges is, I would argue, more interesting than any of the myths.

Akbar was an emperor of remarkable intellectual curiosity who used religious ideas both instrumentally and sincerely. He built one of the early modern world's most sophisticated plural polities — not out of an ideological commitment to pluralism as an abstract principle, but out of the practical necessities of ruling the Indian subcontinent with its staggering diversity. He collaborated with a brilliant, personally invested ideologue to construct a philosophical and aesthetic vocabulary of sacred kingship that has no precise parallel in world history.

And then he died. And the practices we call Din-i-Ilahi dissolved almost immediately. Jahangir notes their cessation. Shah Jahan does not mention them. Aurangzeb had no use for them. There were no successors, no institutions, no texts, no community to carry forward what Akbar had begun.

This evaporation is itself the most important historical fact about Din-i-Ilahi. It confirms that it was not a religion. It was a court phenomenon — the spiritual expression of one emperor's personal quest, institutionalized through the mechanisms of imperial patronage, elaborated into an ideology of sovereignty by his most gifted intellectual, and sustained by the force of that emperor's personality. When the personality was gone, the institution dissolved.

What endured was not the institution but the memory — and the memory has been more powerful, and more politically consequential, than the institution ever was.

Every generation has found in Akbar's religious experiments a mirror for its own preoccupations. Colonial historians saw a rationalist reformer. Indian secularists saw a proto-secular statesman. Pakistani Islamists saw a cautionary apostate. Hindu nationalists saw a Hindu at heart. Sufi scholars saw a great master. Jain intellectuals saw a vegetarian king.

The mirror keeps changing. The emperor does not.

Our task — as historians, as citizens, as inheritors of this complex and beautiful and violent history — is to put down the mirror long enough to look at the emperor himself. To read the chronicles with their contradictions and their silences. To hear Badauni's horror and Abu'l Fazl's rapture and Monserrate's frustration and Hiravijaya Suri's pride simultaneously. To resist the temptation to simplify what was irreducibly complex.

Because the historical Akbar, messy and contradictory and politically calculating and genuinely curious and spiritually searching and imperially pragmatic all at once — that Akbar is far more worth knowing than any of the mythological substitutes that have been offered in his place.

He does not belong to India. He does not belong to Pakistan. He does not belong to the Sunni ulama or to the Hindu nationalists or to the secular democrats. He belongs to history — and history, unlike nationalism, has room for all his contradictions.

 

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[i] Recently, Indian extremists have called for erasing chapters on Mughal history from textbooks. We’ll also talk about this on some other day.