A Tale of Two Kings
By Syed Osman Sher
Canada
Arnold Toynbee writes in Mankind and Mother Earth, “Religion is the most important of all human experiences and activities … In most periods of the history of the Indian subcontinent the Indians have felt more concern about religion than about politics and economics”.
We can vouchsafe as the living children of this age how this very element, called religion, when aroused and invoked by the British turned into a ferocious monster and ripped the country into slices in the twentieth century. It did not stop there. In the post-partition period the countries of the Subcontinent continued to be consumed by religious hatred as demonstrated by their occasional engagements in communal and religious riots, sacrilege of mosques, temples and churches, and erecting walls of caste, creed, race and ethnicity around them. It is therefore not surprising to find that in the past the fabric of the rules of the two greatest monarchs of the Subcontinent, Asoka and Akbar, was woven with religion forming a dominant thread.
Three centuries before the great teacher, Jesus of Nazareth, was wandering about in the dust in the sun-bit country of Judea, that the Indo-Pak sub-continent had the good fortune of having a king, Asoka, who did not only rule the land with a humanized style of governance but also propagated to the world the dharma or the Law of Piety, encompassing his ideals of compassion, mercy, charity, truth and goodness, in the style of a preacher by engraving it on rocks from Afghanistan to the southern Deccan for the posterity. In one of his rock edicts he admits: (My ideals are engraved on rocks) “in order that it may endure for a long time and that my sons, grandsons, and great-grandsons may similarly follow me for the welfare of the whole world”.
Asoka had already inherited the greatest empire in Indian history, thanks to the empire-building efforts of his grandfather, Chandragupta, that he expanded it further by conquering Kalinga in Orissa after a fierce battle. The victory at Kalinga proved itself simultaneously a defeat for Ašoka as a traditional worldly king. He renounced further conquests and warfare, and embraced Buddhism , the hallmark of pacifism and non-violence. He was so moved by the slaughter and human sufferings in that war that he ruled afterwards only for the welfare of his subjects. His style of governance became henceforth moral, ethical and humane. He started calling himself as Devanampiya Piyadasi or Beloved of the gods . In the Major Rock Edict XIII he says: “On conquering Kalinga , the Beloved of the gods felt remorse, for, when an independent country is conquered, the slaughter, death and deportation of people is extremely grievous to the Beloved of the gods, and weighs heavily on his mind. What is even more deplorable to the Beloved of the gods, is that those who dwell there, whether brahmanas, šramanas, or those of other sects, or householders …all suffer violence, murder and separation from their loved ones”.
In the Twelfth Rock Edict he expresses his passion for religious tolerance and respect for the faiths of others thus: “On such occasions one should honor another man’s sect, for by doing so one increases the influence of one’s own sect and benefits that of the other man, while, by doing otherwise, one diminishes the influence of one’s own sect and harms the other man’s….therefore concord is to be commended so that men may hear one another’s principles….”
Ašoka's religious philosophy and practice of tolerance would have been incomplete had it not been extended to animal lives. He enshrined it in the First Major Rock Edict as: “Formerly in the kitchens of the Beloved of the gods , the King Piyadasi, many hundreds of thousands of living animals were killed daily for meat. But now, at the time of inscription on dharma, only three animals are killed, two peacocks a day and the deer not invariably. Even these three animals will not be killed in future”.
It is Asoka’s religious piety that has made the historians of the world recognize him as one of the greatest and noblest kings in history. H.G. Wells writes in The Outline of History: Asoka is “one of the greatest monarchs of history, whose dominions extended from Afghanistan to what is now the province of Madras . He is the only military monarch on record who abandoned warfare after victory. He had invaded Kalinga (225 BC), a country along the east coast of Madras, perhaps with some intention of completing the conquest of the tip of the Indian peninsula. The expedition was successful, but he was disgusted by what he saw of the cruelties and horrors of war ... For eight-and-twenty years Asoka worked sanely for the real needs of men. Amidst the tens of thousands of names of monarchs that crowd the columns of history, their majesties and graciousnesses and serenities and royal highnesses and the like, the name of Asoka shines, and shines almost alone, a star. From the Volga to Japan his name is still honored. China , Tibet , and even India , though it has left his doctrine, preserve the tradition of his greatness. More living men cherish his memory today than have ever heard the names of Constantine or Charlemagne.”
Nearly eighteen centuries later the subcontinent finds another great ruler by the name of Akbar. While Asoka drank the wine of religion with a positive feeling of humanism and charity, Akbar made religion one of the focal points of his governance to remove the irritants which it might have created for fellow countrymen.
Akbar was illiterate, and so were the prophets. Therefore, he thought, he also should have at least the qualities of a prophet. If not a representative of God on earth who could give a new religion, he at least could provide a framework of laws and customs based on the good points of various religions. This synergy might have been brought about to him by the circumstances of his birth and upbringing: born to a sunni father and a shia mother when they were on the run in a far away place at Omarkot in Sindh, taking birth in the house of a Hindu prince, nursed by a shrewd woman Maham Anga and tutored by a trusted shia courtier Bayram Khan amidst sufis like Mir Abdul Latif. Thus, what emanated from Akbar's heart was the desire to remove differences among his people, and to unite the believers of different faiths by breaking the traditional barriers among religions. He gave this message of unity through a religion called Din-i-Ilahi (The Religion of God). The message was well taken but not the religion, which did not travel probably beyond the confines of his court. It soon faded as a non-starter.
It was Akbar’s brilliance that he recognized the pluralistic nature of the Indian society. He recognized that a Muslim regime, however strong and brilliant outwardly, cannot survive in India unless it was buttressed by the intrinsic strength of the Hindus. Therefore, he was to become a leader, not of the minority group of Muslims but a leader of all-India stature by treating the indigenous Hindu population as equal to his Muslim subjects. In 1562 Akbar abolished the practice of enslaving prisoners of war and their families, and of forcibly converting them to Islam. If a Hindu had been made a Muslim against his will, he was allowed to go back to his old religion if he wanted to, and, for that matter, anyone could go over to any religion he wanted. In 1563, when he learned at one of his hunting trips near Mathura that Hindus were subjected to a pilgrim tax while traveling to worship at sacred places in India, he abolished the tax immediately. It is unworthy for a worshipper of God, he declared, to levy a due on other worshippers when they wanted to worship Him. In 1564, he abolished the hated jizya tax, a brilliant stroke that won the support of the majority of India’s population.
Not only did he allow the Jesuits to build a church, he issued an order that ‘if any of the infidels chose to build a synagogue, or an idol temple, or a Parsi tower of silence, no one was to hinder him’. He, along with his courtiers, began participating in the celebration of Hindu festivals of Dipavali and Rakhi, and the Zoroastrian festival of Navroz. He even wore the Hindu sacred thread, and made it a point to drink only Ganga water, if possible. He declared cow slaughter an offence, possibly punishable by death. He adopted the Hindu custom by having himself weighed against gold, silver and grains, and giving them as alms to the poor.
In 1579, Akbar issued the Infallibility Decree by which he assumed the power to make the final decision in any matter on which the ulema disagreed. He stopped paying annual subsidies to Mecca and Medina, and substituted the Hejira calendar with his own. On occasions he used mosques as storage places, or even destroyed a few. He simply wanted to demonstrate that Islam was not the supreme religion of the land and that he was daring the authority of the mullas. All this did not go well with the orthodox Muslims, who came to the conclusion that the emperor had abandoned Islam entirely. In the final decade of his reign, the opposition came to a head under the leadership of Shaikh Ahmad Sirhindi and the Mulla of Jaunpur but Akbar managed to suppress them all.
H. G. Wells says in The Outline of History: "Akbar, next perhaps to Asoka, was one of the greatest of Indian monarchs, and one of the few royal figures that approach the stature of great men….His distinctive quality was his openness of mind. He set himself to make every sort of able man in India, whatever his race or religion, available for the public work of Indian life. His instinct was the true statesman’s instinct for synthesis. His empire was to be neither a Moslem nor a Mongol one, nor was it to be Rajput or Aryan, or Dravidian, or Hindu, or high or low caste; it was to be Indian."
He was convinced that his claim to rule should be accepted by dint of reasons, all to be considered equal, and not because of any superior force. It proved so durable that loyalty to the Mughal dynasty became the uniting force in the War of Independence against the British three centuries later in 1857, at a time when the Mughals were kings only in name for the preceding one hundred years.
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