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HomePageTurnerBook ExcerptsAkbar’s Rajput wife was Harkha, not Jodha Bai. But chronicles say nothing...

Akbar’s Rajput wife was Harkha, not Jodha Bai. But chronicles say nothing about ‘love’

In ‘Akbar of Hindustan’, Parvati Sharma writes that the fact of a Rajput bride entering the Mughal dynasty is remarkable perhaps only in retrospect.

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It was en route to Ajmer that Akbar met Raja Bihari Mal Kachhwaha again. Five years had passed since the Rajput’s brave showing at Akbar’s court, and the raja’s fortunes had declined in the interim. For all that Bihari Mal may have impressed Akbar, it was a rival of his called Suja who had managed an alliance with Akbar’s brother-in-law, Sharafuddin, who governed this area as independently as Adham had hoped to rule Malwa. Suja, therefore, occupied the Kachhwaha throne, while Bihari Mal ‘had taken refuge in the folds of the hills’, forced to pay Suja tribute and let him keep his son hostage. At the moment, therefore, the raja’s situation ‘was by no means enviable’, as a modern historian writes, ‘but it improved rather unexpectedly . . .’

Seeing that Akbar was travelling through his land, and remembering, perhaps, the padishah’s friendliness from some years ago, Raja Bihari Mal sent him a message, asking for an audience.

Akbar agreed. Not only that. A few days later, when Akbar and the Rajput king met near Bihari Mal’s capital, Amber, Akbar also agreed to give him back his hostage and his throne, and to marry his daughter.

It doesn’t seem to have taken much for the raja to bring Akbar to his side. Abul Fazl implies that the padishah made up his mind when he saw how people fled at his advance through Rajasthan. ‘We have no other intention than to do good to all mankind,’ he had said in dismay. ‘What can be the reason of the flight of those people?’ Clearly, he continued, they were reacting to the ‘oppression they have undergone’. Sharafuddin liked to extract obedience through fear; this was not Akbar’s way.


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Sometime between his gallop to Malwa and this meeting in Amber, Akbar had also ridden a short distance east, towards Ali Quli Shaibani in Jaunpur and all his unsettled dues. Ali Quli, cleverer than Adham, had hurried to meet Akbar on his way and handed over a substantial bounty. Ajmer was Akbar’s third excursion into a commander’s ‘fief ’ in nine months; and it’s possible that the restoration of Bihari Mal and the marriage to his daughter was another sharp signal to his scattered warlords: not only the riches of his realm but also the decisions about its rule were Akbar’s, and Akbar’s alone.

The chroniclers do not underscore the fact of Akbar’s marriage with drumrolls. Abul Fazl, Badauni, Nizamuddin merely describe a ruler adding another ‘honourable lady’ to his harem. Perhaps the fact of a Rajput bride entering the Mughal dynasty is remarkable only in retrospect. Akbar himself wasn’t overly self-conscious about it. The match settled, he rode off to Ajmer and visited the shrine he had set out to see. On his return, he stopped for a day in Sambhar, where Raja Bihari Mal arranged a wedding in a ‘most admirable manner’; then, making sure that Sharafuddin kept Akbar’s promises to the Rajput king, the padishah returned to Agra, galloping some 300 kilometres in less than three days.

In a fascinating essay on the evolution of Rajput loyalties to the Mughal state, Norman P. Ziegler notes that a critical marker of a Rajput’s identity was his ‘saga’: ‘those to whom he gave his daughters and/or from whom he received wives in marriage’. As was the case across the world until very recently, a marriage was not just (or even) an agreement between two people, but an alliance between families and clans – even nations. Thus, writes Ziegler, the ‘term in Marwari (western Rajasthani) for both betrothal and alliance is sagai, a derivative of saga’.

Ziegler goes on to note the Rajput custom of ‘sala katari’ by which a Rajput would expect gifts of land from his sister’s husband. This tradition applied across religions. Ziegler offers an example from the fifteenth century, in which two scions of Jodhpur acquired land by marrying their sister to the Muslim ruler of Nagaur.

Whether it was framed in terms of ‘sala katari’ or not, Akbar’s marriage to a Kachhwaha princess did ensure that it was her father, Bihari Mal, who retained his land, and not his rival, Suja, who had formed a less rewarding alliance with Sharafuddin.


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And what, meanwhile, of Bihari Mal’s daughter, with whom Akbar returned to Agra in February 1562? Often misidentified as Jodha Bai when her name was Harkha, the princess is also frequently miscast as the great love of Akbar’s life. It is likely that Harkha and her husband had much to talk about; they were both intelligent, ambitious people. Indeed, Harkha doesn’t exist only as Akbar’s bride in history; she is known for her formidable trading business, too. It is also likely that she was a great influence on Akbar – along with the several other Rajput princesses the padishah would marry; that she swayed his thoughts on religion, policy, even diet (Badauni complains that Akbar’s Rajput wives made him give up onion and garlic). And, of course, Harkha gave Akbar his first son and eventual heir.

But the chronicles say nothing about love.

It is not necessary, of course, for an emperor to love a wife, but there is something stark about the utter lack of documented romance in Akbar’s life, especially given the amorous tendency in his dynasty. It wasn’t just Humayun who fell madly in love with Hamida, but Babur with Baburi, Jahangir with Nurjahan, Shahjahan with Mumtaz, and even the allegedly ascetic Aurangzeb with a dancing girl called Hira Bai, for whom the strict believer was willing to down a goblet of wine. All that the records contain of Akbar’s feelings for his wives is a lament by the emperor himself. ‘Had I been wise earlier,’ he once said, ‘I would have taken no woman from my own kingdom into my seraglio, for my subjects are to me in the place of children.’

There is a deep sadness in the sentiment, whether he intended it or not; the same sadness that fills his eyes in that painting with the fatherless Abdur Rahim. The young man whose passions overflowed upon the backs of testosterone-fuelled elephants, the nineteen-year-old who jousted with God, could he not – would he not – allow himself to dally awhile in a lover’s arms?

There is no account, then, of Akbar’s feelings for the ‘gentle daughter’ of Amber, nor vice versa; but his intense, rewarding and often tempestuous relationships with her less-than-gentle kin spill over the pages. Best known of these new allies are the princess’s brother Bhagwant Das and his son Man Singh, both of whom accompanied Harkha to Agra. Within months, Bhagwant Das was riding into battle by Akbar’s side. Man Singh, eleven years old at the time, was given a different kind of command, and put in charge of little Abdur Rahim. Such was the bond, it seems, that developed between Man Singh and the boy – both grew up to become Akbar’s trusted conquerors-in-arms – that Abdur Rahim’s children would call Man Singh ‘Dadaji’, grandfather.

Akbar had not just brought home the mother of his eventual heir, he had also planted the seeds of profound transformation in the very nature of his court.

 This excerpt from ‘Akbar of Hindustan’ by Parvati Sharma has been published with permission from Juggernaut Books. 

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