Heritage · Legacy
Muhammad Akbar Legacy
Third Mughal emperor (reigned 1556–1605) who expanded the empire by conquest and pursued sulh-i-kul, abolishing the jizya and founding the Din-i Ilahi.Written to last.
By Confinity Heritage Editorial · Updated 2026-07-31 · 6-minute readQuiet tools, kept out of the way.
Abu'l-Fath Jalal-ud-din Muhammad Akbar (1542–1605) was the third Mughal emperor of India, ruling from 1556 until his death in 1605. He inherited a fragile throne at the age of thirteen and built it into the dominant power of the subcontinent, joining relentless military conquest to a program of religious accommodation that was unusual for a ruler of his era. His policy of sulh-i-kul, meaning peace with all, reshaped how the Mughal state governed a population that was overwhelmingly non-Muslim.
Akbar was born on 15 October 1542 at Amarkot, a Rajput-held fortress in Sindh (present-day Umerkot, Pakistan), while his father, the emperor Humayun, was a fugitive (Britannica). Humayun had lost northern India to Sher Shah Suri, and the family spent Akbar's early years in exile. Humayun took refuge at the Safavid court in Persia, while the young Akbar was raised mostly in Afghanistan, at Kandahar and Kabul, under the guardianship of his uncles. His mother was Hamida Banu Begum, the daughter of a scholar of Persian descent.
Akbar received no formal schooling and never learned to read, yet contemporaries recorded a sharp memory and restless curiosity; he absorbed learning by having texts read aloud and by debating scholars. When Humayun died from a fall in 1556, only months after recovering Delhi, Akbar succeeded him and was crowned at Kalanaur in Punjab under the regent Bairam Khan.
That authority was tested at once. In November 1556 the Mughal army defeated the Hindu general Hemu at the Second Battle of Panipat, securing the throne (Wikipedia). Akbar dismissed Bairam Khan in 1560 and took direct control of the government.
Akbar expanded the empire through decades of campaigning, and that expansion was often brutal. He absorbed Rajput and regional states, taking Chittorgarh in 1568 after a four-month siege that ended with the massacre of roughly 30,000 of the fort's defenders and inhabitants (Wikipedia). Gujarat fell in 1573 and Bengal by 1576, followed by Kabul, Kashmir, Sindh, and campaigns into the Deccan. To govern this territory he built the mansabdari system, a graded hierarchy of officers who held numbered ranks and supplied set numbers of cavalry.
Administration was rebuilt alongside conquest. With his finance minister Raja Todar Mal, Akbar introduced a land-revenue system that assessed tax on measured yields, which steadied state income and eased pressure on cultivators. He standardised weights and measures and promoted trade across the empire.
His religious policy set him apart from earlier Muslim rulers of India. In 1563 he ended the tax on Hindu pilgrims, and in 1564 he abolished the jizya, the tax levied on non-Muslims (Britannica). He appointed Hindus, including Rajputs, to senior military and civil posts and cemented alliances through marriage to Rajput princesses. At his capital of Fatehpur Sikri, founded in 1569, he hosted debates among Muslims, Hindus, Jains, Zoroastrians, and Jesuit Christians. In 1582 he promoted the Din-i Ilahi, a small ethical order centred on the emperor that drew from several traditions; it attracted few followers and did not outlast him.
Akbar's reign is generally treated as the height of the Mughal Empire. The administrative and revenue structures he created outlived him and framed the rule of his successors, Jahangir and Shah Jahan. His patronage produced a distinctive school of Mughal painting and major building works, including Agra Fort and the complex at Fatehpur Sikri (Encyclopedia.com).
His idea of sulh-i-kul, that the state should sit above sectarian division, remains the most discussed part of his record. Later rulers and modern writers have read it as an early model of pluralist government, though historians also note that his tolerance operated within, and served, an expanding military empire. Akbar died in 1605 at Agra and was buried at Sikandra nearby; his son Salim succeeded him as Jahangir.
Akbar's own record of himself was unusually deliberate. He was illiterate, probably dyslexic, and had books read to him; and he commissioned Abu'l-Fazl to write the Akbarnama, an official history in three volumes, the third of which, the Ain-i-Akbari, is an administrative survey of the empire so detailed that historians still use it as a source for prices, salaries and provincial revenue. He built the record he wanted to be judged on.
His religious policy is what the argument is about. He abolished the jizya, married Rajput princesses, held debates between Muslims, Hindus, Jains, Zoroastrians and Jesuits in the Ibadat Khana at Fatehpur Sikri, and formulated sulh-i-kul, universal peace, and the Din-i Ilahi, which had almost no followers and outlived him barely at all.
His tomb at Sikandra was raided in 1688 by Jat rebels under Rajaram, who looted it; later accounts say the remains were dragged out and burned, and the details are disputed.
In modern India he is a live political question rather than a historical one. He is invoked as evidence of a pluralist past, and attacked as a foreign conqueror, and roads and cities carrying Mughal names have been renamed. Which is its own demonstration that a legacy is not a fixed thing.
His record holds two things in tension: the ruler who ordered the storming of Chittorgarh and the one who abolished a discriminatory tax and seated rival faiths at the same table. Keeping that full picture, the reforms and the conquests together, is the point of an honest memorial. We keep Akbar so the question he forced open, how a diverse society should be governed, stays available to the people who inherit it.
Early life
Reign and religious policy
Legacy
A memory still being fought over
What the record holds
References and resources
Timeline
- 1542Born at Amarkot during Humayun's exile
- 1556Succeeds Humayun at thirteen; wins the Second Battle of Panipat
- 1560Dismisses the regent Bairam Khan and takes full power
- 1564Abolishes the jizya tax on non-Muslims
- 1568Storms Chittorgarh; garrison and inhabitants massacred
- 1582Promotes the Din-i Ilahi
- 1605Dies at Agra; succeeded by his son Jahangir