3. Give two differences between the kingdoms of Akbar and Shivaji.
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Answer:
Unlike Tipu, Akbar’s military career consisted of victory piled on victory. The Mughal army did not ever lose a major battle that he led. He consolidated the empire he inherited, and expanded it relentlessly. Unlike his ancestor Timur, who was a peerless general but interested only in conquest, Akbar set up an efficient administration based on a transferable cadre of nobles. Most important, he gradually transcended the limitations of his faith to become a truly national ruler. To begin with, he eliminated religious taxes on Hindu pilgrims and peasants. He proceeded to rein in the power of the Muslim clergy. He propounded a theory of kingship based on the principles of sulh-i-kul (universal peace), rah-i-aql (the path of reason), and rawa-i-rozi (maintenance of livelihood). Sulh-i-kul was the first political explication of multiculturalism, calling for cordiality, mutual respect and compromise between subjects of different faiths, with the king as neutral arbiter. Akbar propounded it at a time when Europe was riven by religious conflict following the Protestant revolution inaugurated by Martin Luther precisely 500 years ago.
The path of reason allowed Akbar to set in motion a few key social reforms and suggest others. He outlawed sati, and ended the practice of keeping or selling prisoners as slaves. He frowned on the prohibition of widow remarriage in some communities and on child marriage. He believed daughters deserved a larger share of their father’s property than the Quran prescribe
In recognising the duty of the king to citizens, Akbar envisioned the monarch as part of a bargain or unspoken contract with subjects in which he received legitimacy and tax revenue in return for providing peace and security. Taken as a whole, his ideas strongly parallel the ecumenism, reformist goals, and welfare measures of modern India. The state’s attitude to religious faith, for better or worse, resembles the secularism of Western liberal thought based on atomised individuals far less than it does the society of mutual accommodation conceived by Akbar.
Akbar’s ideas travelled to Europe while he was still in his prime. It would be difficult to claim that kings like Tipu were unaware of them. If somebody like Tipu chose to desecrate shrines, however infrequently, despite this history, we have every right to judge him without recourse to modern ideas, even as we counter right-wingers who exaggerate his cruelty.
My sense is that Tipu Sultan Jayanti is unlikely to be a big vote winner for the Congress. It might even end up being a net loss if the BJP’s hate campaign is effective. I wish the Congress would be less like Tipu and more like Akbar. But all politics today, Left or Right, seems to be identity politics, whether that identity be regional, linguistic, caste-based, or religious. Akbar ticks none of those boxes, and is therefore out in the cold, without a statue or an anniversary celebration to his name.